'11 
 
BC!3U»£»^3 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF THE 
 
 University of California. 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Class 
 
 A 
 
Vr, 
 
 t Y V 
 
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
MR, WELLS has also wntten 
 
 The following Novels : 
 
 TONO BUNGAY 
 LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM 
 KIPPS MR. POLLY 
 
 and ANN VERONICA 
 
 Numerous short stories to be published 
 presently in a single volume under 
 the title 
 
 THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND 
 
 The following fantastic Romances : 
 
 THE TIME MACHINE 
 THE WONDERFUL VISIT 
 THE INVISIBLE MAN 
 THE WAR OF THE WORLDS 
 THE SEA LADY 
 
 IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET 
 THE SLEEPER AWAKES 
 THE FOOD OF THE GODS 
 THE WAR IN THE AIR 
 THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON 
 and THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU 
 
 And a series of books upon social and 
 political questions of which 
 
 A MODERN UTOPIA 
 FIRST AND LAST THINGS (rELIGIOn) 
 NEW WORLDS FOR OLD 
 THE FUTURE IN AMERICA 
 and ANTICIPATIONS 
 
 are the chief. 
 
:: THE NEW :: 
 
 MACHIAVELLI 
 
 BY 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 "A closer examination . . . shows that Abclard was a 
 Nominalist under a new name." 
 
 G. H. Lewis, Hist. Philos, 
 
 "It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender- 
 minded and tough-minded people . . . do both exist." 
 
 William James, Pragmatism. 
 
 JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD 
 VIGO STREET LONDON W. MCMXI 
 
WTLLTAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BKCCLE3. 
 
 Add to Libt 
 
4 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK THE FIEST 
 THE MAKING OF A MAN 
 
 CHAPTER PACK 
 
 I. Concerning a Book that was never Written . 3 
 
 II. Bromstead and my Father 13 
 
 III. Scholastic 49 
 
 IV. Adolescence 93 
 
 BOOK THE SECOND 
 
 MAEGAKET 
 
 I. Margaret in Staffordshire 161 
 
 II. Margaret in London 198 
 
 III. Margaret in Venice 241 
 
 IV. The House in Westminster 250 
 
 BOOK THE THIRD 
 
 THE HEART OF BOLITICS 
 
 I. The Riddle for the Statesman .... 289 
 
 II. Seeking Associates 334 
 
 III. Secession 379 
 
 IV. The Besetting of Sex 398 
 
 BOOK THE FOURTH 
 
 ISABEL 
 
 I. LovB and Success 419 
 
 II. The Impossible Position 451 
 
 III. The Breaking Point 483 
 
 596 
 
THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
BOOK THE FIRST 
 THE MAKING OF A MAN 
 
THE 
 
 NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 CHArXER THE FIRST 
 
 Concerning a Book that was never 
 Written 
 
 §1 
 Since I came to this place I have been very i-estless, 
 wasting my energies in the futile beginning of ill-con- 
 ceived books. One does not settle down very readily 
 at two and forty to a new way of living, and I have 
 found myself with the teeming interests of the life I 
 have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless 
 bees in my head. My mind has been full of confused 
 protests and justifications. In any case I should have 
 found difficulties enough in expressing the complex 
 thing I have to tell, but it has added greatly to my 
 trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain 
 Niccolo INIachiavelli chanced to fall out of ]-)olitics at 
 very nmch the age I have reached, and wrote a book 
 to engage the restlessness of his miud, very much as I 
 have wanted to do. He wrote about tlio relation of 
 the gr.'d constructive spirit 'ii politics to iu.lividual 
 
 3 u ^ 
 
4 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement 
 lies like a deep rut in the road of my intention. It 
 has taken me far astray. It is a matter of many weeks 
 now — diversified indeed by some long drives into the 
 mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa 
 across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley 
 — since I began a laboured and futile imitation of " The 
 Prince." I sat up late last night with the jumbled 
 accumulation ; and at last made a little fire of olive 
 twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet — to begin again 
 clear this morning. 
 
 But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, 
 not excepting those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, 
 and it seems to me, now that I have released myself 
 altogether from his literary precedent, that he still has 
 his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim 
 kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, 
 in partial intimation of the matter of my story. He 
 takes me with sympathy not only by reason of the 
 dream he pursued and the humanity of his politics, but 
 by the mixture of his nature. His vices come in, 
 essential to my issue. He is dead and gone, all his 
 immediate correlations to party and faction have faded 
 to insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his 
 broad method and conceptions, and upon the other his 
 intimate living personality, exposed down to its salacious 
 corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be 
 exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, 
 of the subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive 
 passion and desire against too abstract a dream of 
 statesmanship. But things that seemed to lie very 
 far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to 
 one another ; it is no simple story of white passions 
 struggling against the red that I have to tell. 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK 5 
 
 The statc-makiiig dream is a very old dream indeed 
 in the world's history. It plays too small a part in 
 novels. Plato and Confucius are but the highest of a 
 great host of minds that have had a kindred aspiration, 
 have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, 
 finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more power- 
 ful and peoples made rich and multitudinous by their 
 efforts, they thought in terms of harbours and shining 
 navies, great roads engineered marvellously, jungles 
 cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle 
 and diseases and dirt and misery ; the ending of con- 
 fusions that waste human possibilities ; they thought 
 of these things with passion and desire as other men 
 think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. 
 Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered by 
 this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every 
 one who reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, 
 some sort of answering response. But in every one 
 it presents itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed 
 up with other, more intimate things. 
 
 It was so with ]\Iachiavelli. I picture him at San 
 Casciano as he lived in retirement upon his property 
 after the fall of the Republic, perhaps with a twinge of 
 the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking 
 in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dream- 
 ing. Then it was " The Prince "' was written. All day 
 he went about his personal affairs, saw homely neigh- 
 bours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday 
 passions. He would sit in the shop of Donato del 
 Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company, or 
 pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full 
 of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned home 
 and went to his study. At the entrance, he says, he 
 pulled off his peasant clothes covered with the dust and 
 
6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put on his 
 " noble court dress," closed the door on the world of 
 toiling and getting, private loving, private hating and 
 })ersonal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment 
 to those wider dreams. 
 
 I like to think of him so, with brown books before 
 him lit by the light of candles in silver candlesticks, or 
 heading some new chapter of " The Prince,'' with a 
 grey quill in his clean fine hand. 
 
 So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and 
 none the less because of his animal humour, his queer 
 indecent side, and because of such lapses into utter 
 meanness as that which made him sound the note of 
 the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," 
 reminding His Magnificence very urgently, as if it were 
 the gist of his matter, of the continued malignity of 
 fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him. 
 They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to 
 Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and 
 whose correspondence with Dionj^sius of Syracuse has 
 perished ; or to Confucius who travelled China in search 
 of a Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indigni- 
 ties now lost in the mists of ages. They have achieved 
 the apotheosis of individual fargetfulness, and 'Plato 
 has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust 
 of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled 
 with his tradition. They have passed into the world 
 of the ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with 
 their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and less 
 popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother 
 — and at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly 
 dreaming writer at the desk. 
 
 That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is 
 protagonist in my story. But as I re-read " The Prince " 
 
CONCEllNING A BOOK 7 
 
 and thouo-ht out the manner of my now abandoned 
 project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of 
 liuman thought one calls by way of embodiment the 
 French Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach 
 to such a question. Machiavclli, like Phito and 
 Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades 
 before him, saw only one method by which a thinking 
 man, himself not powerful, might do the work of state- 
 building, and that was by seizing the imagination of 
 a Prince. Directly these men turned their thouglits 
 towards realization, their attitudes became — what sliall 
 I call it? — secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had some 
 little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, 
 whether it was Caesar Borgia or Giuliano or Lorenzo, 
 but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the 
 differences of our own time I searched my mind for the 
 modern ec[uivalent of a Prince. At various times I 
 redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of AVales, 
 to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain 
 newspaper proprietor who was once my schoolfellow at 
 City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. Rockefeller — all of them 
 men in their several ways and circumstances and possi- 
 bilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its 
 own accord towards irony because — because, although 
 at first I did not realize it, I myself am just as free to 
 be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old sort of 
 Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the 
 world. The commonweal is one man's absolute estate 
 and responsibility no more. In Machiavelli's time it 
 was indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair. But 
 the days of the Prince who planned and directed and 
 was the source and centre of all power are ended. We 
 are in a condition of affairs infinitely more complex, in 
 which every prince and statesman is something of a 
 
8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 servant and every intelligent human being something of 
 a Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any 
 more in this world for secretarial hopes. 
 
 In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, 
 in a sense wonderful how it has increased. I sit here, 
 an unarmed discredited man, at a small writing-table 
 in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no 
 human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate 
 self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits 
 except by theft and crime. No King, no council, can 
 seize and torture me ; no Church, no nation silence me. 
 Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have 
 vanished. But that is not because power has diminished, 
 but because it has increased and become multitudinous, 
 because it has dispersed itself and specialized. It is no 
 longer a negative power we have, but positive; we 
 cannot prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond 
 all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who 
 might, if they had the will for it, achieve stupendous 
 things. 
 
 The things that might be done to-day ! The things 
 indeed that are being done ! It is the latter that give 
 one so vast a sense of the former. When I think of the 
 progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine 
 and sanitation during the last century, when I measure 
 the increase in general education and average efficiency, 
 the power now available for human service, the merely 
 physical increment, and compare it with anything that 
 has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think 
 of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and 
 uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, 
 educators, writers and organizers has achieved this de- 
 velopment of human possibilities, achieved it in spite 
 of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK 9 
 
 and the passionate resistance of the active dull, my 
 inia<^ination f]jro\vs giddy with dazzling intimations 
 of the human splendours the justly organized state 
 may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant 
 the heights that may be scaled, the splendid enter- 
 prises made possible. . . . 
 
 But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a 
 book that catches at thousands of readers for the eye 
 of a Prince diffused. It is the old appeal indeed for 
 the unification of human effort, the ending of confusions, 
 but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered 
 lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellow- 
 ship about him. The last written dedication of all those 
 I burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the 
 socially constructive passion — in any man. . . . 
 
 There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind 
 between my world and Machiavelli's. We are dis- 
 covering women. It is as if they had come across a 
 vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of the 
 statesman. 
 
 §2 
 
 In ]\Iachiavelli''s outlook the interest of womanhood 
 was in a region of life almost infinitely remote from his 
 statecraft. They were the vehicle of children, but only 
 Imperial Rome and the new world of to-day have ever 
 had an inkling of the significance that might give them 
 in the state. They did their work, he thought, as the 
 ploughed earth bears its crops. Apart from their 
 function of fertility they gave a humorous twist to 
 life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the 
 liours of Princes. He left the thought of women out- 
 side with his other dusty things when he went into his 
 
lo THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 study to write, dismissed them from his mind. Bat our 
 modern world is burthened with its sense of the immense, 
 now half articulate, significance of women. They stand 
 now, as it were, close beside the silver candlesticks, 
 speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen 
 and turns to discuss his writing with them. 
 
 It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing 
 collectively portentous that I have to mingle with my 
 statecraft if my picture is to be true, which has turned 
 me at length from a treatise to the telling of my own 
 story. In my life I have paralleled very closely the 
 slow realizations that are going on in the world about 
 me. I began life ignoring women, they came to me at 
 first perplexing and dishonouring ; only very slowly 
 and very late in my life and after misadventure, did I 
 gauge the power and beauty of the love of man and 
 woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifi- 
 able vision of the ordered world. Love has brought 
 me to disaster, because my career had been planned 
 regardless of its possibility and value. But Machiavelli, 
 it seems to me, when he went into his study, left not 
 only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected 
 soul. . . • 
 
 Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take 
 this analogy one step further, I too am an exile. 
 Office and leading are closed to me. The political 
 career that promised so much for me is shattered and 
 ended for ever. 
 
 I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under 
 the branches of a stone pine ; I see wide and far across 
 a purple valley whose sides are terraced and set with 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK ii 
 
 houses of pink and ivory, the Gulf of Ijguria ^Icam- 
 in<>- sapphire l)lue, and cloud-like baseless mounhiins 
 hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly 
 steam-ships heaving on the grey rollers of the English 
 Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall 
 as if I were back there the busy exit from Charing 
 Cross, the cross and the money-changers' oflices, the y 
 splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going ^y 
 perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the 
 urgency and eventfulness of that great rain-swept heart 
 of the modern world. 
 
 It is dillicult to think we have left that — for many 
 years if not for ever. In thought I walk once more in 
 Palace Yard and hear the clink and clatter of hansoms 
 and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vivid 
 recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit 
 again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms 
 like cellars below the House — dinners that ended with 
 shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarming and 
 excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that 
 was for me the opening opportunity. I see the 
 stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, 
 constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud 
 shouting. . . . 
 
 It is over now for me and vanished. That oppor- 
 tunity will come no more. Very probably you have 
 heard already some crude inaccurate version of our 
 story and why I did not take office, and have formed 
 your partial judgment on me. And so it is I sit 
 now at my stone table, half out of life already, in a 
 warm, large, shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight 
 and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to 
 distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his 
 exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt 
 
12 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 and felt during the career that has ended now in my 
 divorce. 
 
 I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I 
 had the mind of my party. I do not know where I 
 might not have ended, bat for this red blaze that came 
 out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for 
 even 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 Bromstead and my Father 
 
 § 1 
 
 I DREAMT first of statcs and cities and political things 
 when I was a little boy in knickerbockers. 
 
 When I think of how such things began in my 
 mind, there comes back to me the memory of an 
 enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven 
 and its floor covered irregularly with patched and 
 defective oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a 
 *' surround '' as they call it, of dark stained wood. 
 Here and there against the wall are trunks and boxes. 
 There are cupboards on either side of the fireplace and 
 bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall 
 and rather tattered is a large yellow- varnished geological 
 map of the South of England. Over the mantel is a 
 huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil 
 bones, and above that hangs the portrait of a brainy 
 gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of 
 intricate detail and much vigour of colouring. It is 
 the floor I think of chiefly ; over the oilcloth of which, 
 assumed to be land, spread towns and villages and 
 forts of wooden bricks ; there are steep square hills 
 (geologically, volumes of Orr's Cyclopaedia of the 
 
 13 
 
14 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Sciences) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the 
 bare brown surround were the water channels and open 
 sea of that continent of mine. 
 
 I still remember with infinite gratitude the great- 
 uncle to whom I owe my bricks. He must have been 
 one of those rare adults who have not forgotten the 
 chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous 
 west of England builder ; including my father he had 
 three nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of 
 bricks to be made by an out-of-work carpenter, not the 
 insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand, but a 
 really adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and 
 shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two 
 and a half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks 
 to correspond. There were hundreds of them, many 
 hundreds. I could build six towers as high as myself 
 with them, and there seemed quite enough for every 
 engineering project I could undertake. I could build 
 whole towns with streets of houses and churches and 
 citadels ; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and 
 make causeways over the crumpled spaces (which I 
 feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of whole bricks 
 it was possible to construct ships to push over the high 
 seas to the remotest port in the room. And a dis- 
 ciplined population, that rose at last by sedulous 
 begging on birthdays and all convenient occasions to 
 well over two hundi'ed, of lead sailors and soldiers, 
 horse, foot and artillery, inhabited this world. 
 
 Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers 
 by those who write about toys. The praises of the 
 toy theatre have been a common theme for essayists, 
 the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting 
 out of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, 
 the stink and glory of the performance and the final 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 15 
 
 conflagration. I had such a theatre once, but I never 
 loved it nor hoped for much from it ; my bricks and 
 soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an in- 
 cessant variety of "interests. There was the mystery 
 and charm of the complicated buildings one could 
 make, with long passages and steps and windows 
 through which one peeped into their intricacies, and 
 by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways 
 in them, and send marbles rolling from top to base 
 and thence out into the hold of a waiting ship. Then 
 there were the fortresses and gun emplacements and 
 covered ways in which one''s soldiers went. And there 
 was commerce ; the shops and markets and store-rooms 
 full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and 
 suchlike provender from the garden ; such stuff one 
 stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in 
 sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent 
 off by waggons along the great military road to the 
 beleagured fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the 
 worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were 
 battles on the way. 
 
 That great road is still clear in my memory. I was 
 given, I forget by what benefactor, certain particularly 
 fierce red Indians of lead — I have never seen such 
 soldiers since — and for these my father helped me to 
 make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a 
 hitherto desolate country under the frowning nail- 
 studded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then I conquered 
 them and garrisoned their land. (Alas ! they died, no 
 doubt through contact with civilizj^tion — one mv mother 
 trod on — and their land became a wilderness again and 
 was ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast 
 proportions.) And out towards the coal-scuttle was 
 a region near the impassable thickets of the ragged 
 
1 6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus brandishing 
 spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks 
 concealiii^j the most devious and enchanting: caves and 
 several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these 
 rocks a number of survivors from a Noah's Ark made 
 a various, dangerous, albeit frequently invalid and 
 crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the un- 
 cultivated wildness of this region further by trees of 
 privet-twigs from the garden hedge and box from the 
 garden borders. By these territories went my Imperial 
 Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in 
 the oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills — 
 one tunnel was three volumes long — defended as occa- 
 sion required by camps of paper tents or brick block- 
 houses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered 
 ascent to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian 
 reservation. 
 
 My games upon the floor must have spread over 
 several years and developed from small beginnings, 
 incorporating now this suggestion and now that. They 
 stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I 
 played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the 
 retrospect far more significantly than they did at the 
 time. I played them in bursts, and then forgot them 
 for long periods; through the spring and summer I 
 was mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught 
 me early. And in the retrospect I see them all not 
 only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened 
 and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem 
 to remember, came and went ; one or two clock-work 
 boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, would do 
 nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a 
 detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all 
 over, given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what 
 
BROiMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 17 
 
 one ini\i;ht expect from an <iunt, that I used as Nero 
 used his Christians to ornament my j)ubHc ])uil(lin^s ; 
 and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and 
 therewith blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by 
 means of a brass cannon in the garden. 
 
 I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and 
 detailed in my memory now than many of the owners 
 of the skirts and legs and boots that Avent gingerly 
 across its territories. Occasionally, alas ! they stooped 
 to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the 
 slow growth of whole days of civilized development. 
 I still remember the hatred and disgust of these 
 catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did 
 I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, 
 ])lucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from 
 ships, jumbling them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily 
 so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping 
 the splendid curves of the Imperial Road into heaps 
 of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into 
 the fire. 
 
 "Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic 
 calamity would say, "you ought to have put them 
 away last night. No ! I can't wait until you've sailed 
 them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do 
 It I will." 
 
 And in no time all my continents and lands were 
 swirling water and swiping strokes of house-flannel. 
 
 That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my 
 mother too, dear lady, was something of a terror to 
 this microcosm. She wore spring-sided boots, a kind 
 of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with 
 dull boches and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces 
 that were very destructive to the more hazardous 
 viaducts of the Imperial lload. l^lie was always, I 
 
 c 
 
1 8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 seem to remember, fetching me ; fetching me for a meal, 
 fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity ! fetch- 
 ing me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed 
 to understand anything whatever of the political 
 systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade 
 all toys on Sundays except the bricks for church- 
 building and the soldiers for church parade, or a 
 Scriptural use of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed 
 up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really 
 did not know whether a thing was a church or not 
 unless it positively bristled with cannon, and many a 
 Sunday afternoon have I played Chicago (with the fear 
 of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it 
 was a new sort of ark rather elaborately done. 
 
 Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my 
 father's description of the pig slaughterings in that 
 city and certain pictures I had seen. You made your 
 beasts — which were all the ark lot really, provisionally 
 conceived as pigs — go up elaborate approaches to a 
 central pen, from which they went down a cardbo&rd 
 slide four at a time and dropped most satisfyingly 
 down a brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep 
 steps to where a head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung 
 a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin 
 hooks along a wire to a second slaughterman with a 
 chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember 
 rightly, converted them into Army sausage by means 
 of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock. 
 
 My mother did not understand my games, but my 
 father did. He wore bright-coloured socks and carpet 
 slippers when he was indoors — my mother disliked 
 boots in the house — and he would sit down on my 
 little chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with 
 admirable understanding and sympathy. 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 19 
 
 It was he p^avc mc most of my toys and, I more than 
 suspect, most of my ideas. " Here's some corrufrated 
 iron," he would say, "suitable for roofs and fencing,"' 
 and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that 
 is used for packing medicine bottles. Or, " Dick, do 
 vou see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road ? — won't 
 do for yoMr cattle ranch." And I would find a ])right 
 new lead tiger like a special creation at large in the 
 world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much 
 elaborate eflbrt to get him safely housed in the city 
 menagerie beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed 
 now, and his key lost and the heart and spring gone 
 out of him. 
 
 And to the various irregular reading of my father 
 I owe the inestimable blessing of never having a boy's 
 book in my boyhood except those of Jules Verne. But 
 my father used to get books for himself and me from 
 the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mavne 
 lleid and illustrated histories; one of the liusso- 
 Turkish war and one of Napier's expedition to 
 Abyssinia I read from end to end ; Stanley and 
 Livingstone^ lives of Wellington, Napoleon and Gari- 
 baldi, and back volumes of Punchy from which I 
 derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics 
 it has taken vears of adult reflection to correct. And 
 at home permanently we had Wood's Natural History^ 
 a brand-new illustrated Green's Histoi'y of the English 
 People^ Irving's Companions of Columbwf, a great num- 
 ber of unbound parts of some geographical work, a 
 ^'oynrrc round the World I think it was called, with 
 pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's AVw Tistaincnt 
 witli a map of Palestine, and a variety of other 
 informing books bought at sales. There was a 
 Sowerby's Botany also, with thousands of carefully 
 
20 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two 
 other important works in the sitting-room. I was 
 allowed to turn these over and even lie on the 
 floor with them on Sundays and other occasions of 
 exceptional cleanliness. 
 
 And in the attic I found one day a very old 
 forgotten map after the fashion of a birdVeye view, 
 representing the Crimea, that fascinated me and kept 
 me for hours navigating its waters with a pin. 
 
 ?2 
 
 IVIy father was a lank-limbed man in easy shabby 
 tweed clothes and with his hands in his trouser 
 pockets. He was a science teacher, taking a number 
 of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Ivent under 
 the old Science and Art Department, and " visiting " 
 various schools ; and our resources w^ere eked out by 
 my mother's income of nearly a hundred pounds a 
 year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three 
 palatial but structurally unsound stucco houses near 
 Bromstead Station. 
 
 They were big clumsy residences in the earliest 
 Victorian style, interminably high and with deep 
 damp basements and downstairs coal-cellars and 
 kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively 
 devoted to the discomfort of the servant class. If 
 so, he had overreached himself and defeated his end, 
 for no servant would stay in them unless for 
 exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance of in- 
 efficiency or exceptional freedom in repartee. Every 
 storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet 
 
BllOMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 21 
 
 hii;h (which would have been cool and pleasant in 
 a hot climale), and the stairs went steeply nj), to end 
 at last in attics too inaccessible for occu})ation. The 
 ceiiin<^s had vast plaster cornices of classical design, 
 fragments of which would sometimes fall unexpectedly, 
 and the wall-papers were bold and gigantic in pattern 
 and much variegated by damp and ill-mended rents. 
 
 As my ft\ther was quite unable to let more than 
 one of these houses at a time, and that for the most 
 part to eccentric and undesirable tenants, he thought 
 it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote 
 the rent he received from the let one, when it was 
 let, to the incessant necessary repairing of all three. 
 He also did some of the repairing himself and, smoking 
 a bull-dog pipe the "svhile, which my mother would not 
 allow him to do in the house, he cultivated vegetables 
 in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful 
 manner in the unoccupied gardens. The three houses 
 faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was 
 covered by a grape-vine that yielded, I remember, small 
 green grapes for pies in the spring, and imperfectly 
 ripe black grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes 
 of dessert. That grape-vine played an important part 
 in my life, for my father broke his neck while he wiis 
 pruning it, when I was thirteen. 
 
 ]\Iy father was what is called a man of ideas, but 
 they were not always good ideas. My grandfather had 
 been a private schoolmaster and one of the founders of 
 the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted 
 him in his school until increasing competition and 
 diminishing attendances had made it evident that the 
 days of small })rivate schools kept by uncpialified persons 
 were numbered. Thereupon my father had roused him- 
 self and had (qualified as a science teacher under the 
 
22 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Science and Art Department, which in those days had 
 charge of the scientific and artistic education of the 
 mass of the Enghsh population, and had thrown him- 
 self into science teachino; and the earnino; of jrovern- 
 ment grants therefor with great if transitory zeal and 
 success. 
 
 I do not remember anything of my father's earlier 
 and more energetic time. I was the child of my 
 parents' middle years ; they married when my father 
 was thirty-five and my mother past forty, and I saw 
 only the last decadent phase of his educational career. 
 
 The Science and Art Department has vanished 
 altogether from the world, and people are forgetting it 
 now with the utmost readiness and generosity. Part 
 of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or 
 less completely digested into the Board of Education. 
 . . . The world does move on, even in its government. 
 It is wonderful how many of the clumsy and limited 
 governing bodies of my youth and early manhood have 
 given place now to more scientific and efficient machinery. 
 When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, 
 was ruled by a strange body called a Local Board — it 
 was the Age of Boards — and I still remember indis- 
 tinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast- table over 
 the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastat- 
 ing control of a Metropolitan Board of Works. Then 
 there were also School Boards ; I was already practically 
 in politics before the London School Board was absorbed 
 by the spreading tentacles of the London County 
 Council. 
 
 It gives a measure of the newness of our modern 
 ideas of the State to remember that the very beginnings 
 of public education lie within my father's lifetime, and 
 that many most intelligent and patriotic people were 
 
BRO.MSTEAD AND MY FATHER 23 
 
 .shocked beyond measure at the State doiii^ anvlhiiif; 
 of the sort. W'lien he was horn, totally illiterate 
 people who could neither read a book nor write more 
 than perhaps a clumsy si<;nature, were to ])e found 
 everywhere in England ; and great masses of the popu- 
 lation were getting no instruction at all. Only a few 
 schools nourished upon the patronage of exceptional 
 parents ; all over the country the old endowed grammar 
 schools were to be found sinking and dwindling ; many 
 of them had closed altogether. In the new great 
 centres of population multitudes of children were 
 sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched, 
 and the under-C(]uipj)cd and under-stalled National and 
 British schools, supported by voluntary contributions 
 and sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight against 
 this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs 
 clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense 
 amount of indilFerence and prejudice to be overcome 
 before any remedies were possible. Perhaps some day 
 some industrious and lucid historian will disentangle all 
 the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the com- 
 mercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism, 
 humanitarian enthusiasm, out of which our present 
 educational organization arose. I have long since 
 come to believe it necessary that all new social insti- 
 tutions should be born in confusion, and that at first 
 they should present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. 
 The distrust of government in the Victorian days was 
 far too great, and the general intelligence far too low, 
 to permit the State to go about the new business it was 
 taking up in a business-like way, to train teachers, build 
 and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and pro- 
 vide properly written school-books. These things it 
 was felt must be provided by individual and local effort, 
 
24 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and since it was manifest that it was individual and 
 local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly 
 afrrced to stimulate theui by money payments. The 
 State set up a machinery of examination both in 
 Science and Art and for the elementary schools ; and 
 payments, known technically as grants, were made in 
 accordance with the examination results attained, to 
 such schools as Providence might see fit to send into 
 the world. In this way it was felt the Demand would 
 be established that would, according to the beliefs of 
 that time, inevitably ensure the Supply. An industry 
 of "Grant earning" was created, and this would give 
 education as a necessary by-product. 
 
 In the end this belief was found to need qualification, 
 but Grant-earning was still in full activity when I was 
 a small boy. So far as the Science and Art Department 
 and my father are concerned, the task of examination 
 was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most part 
 quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they also 
 were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it 
 was feared that injustice might be done. Year after year 
 these eminent persons set questions and employed sub- 
 ordinates to read and mark the increasing thousands of 
 answers that ensued, and having no doubt the national 
 ideal of fairness well developed in their minds, they 
 were careful each year to re-read the preceding papers 
 before composing the current one, in order to see what 
 it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course 
 of a few years the recurrence and permutation of ques- 
 tions became almost calculable, and since the practical 
 object of the teaching was to teach people not science, 
 but how to write answers to these questions, the industry 
 of Grant-earning assumed a form easily distinguished 
 from any kind of genuine education whatever. 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 25 
 
 Other remarkable compromises had also to be made 
 with the spirit of the age. The imrortunate conflict 
 between Religion and Science prevalent at this time was 
 mitigated, it' I remember rightly, by making graduates 
 in arts and priests in the established church Science 
 Teachers ex officio, and leaving local and private enter- 
 prise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, 
 according to the conceptions of efliciency prevalent in 
 the district. Private enterprise made a particularly 
 good thing of the books. A number of competing 
 firms of publishers sprang into existence specializing 
 in Science and Art Department work ; they set them- 
 selves to produce text-books that should supply exactly 
 the quantity and cjuality of knowledge necessary for 
 every stage of each of five and twenty subjects into 
 which desirable science was divided, and copies and 
 models and instructions that should give precisely the 
 method and gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. 
 Every section of each book was written in the idiom 
 found to be most satisfactory to the examiners, and 
 test questions extracted from papers set in former years 
 were appended to every chapter. By means of these 
 last the teacher was able to train his class to the very 
 highest level of grant-earning efUciency, and very 
 naturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. 
 First he posed his pupils with questions and then 
 dictated model replies. 
 
 That was my father''s method of instruction. I 
 attended his classes as an elementary grant-earner from 
 the age of ten until his death, and it is so I remem- 
 ber him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a 
 yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible formuhe 
 to the industriously scribbling cl^tss sitting in rows of 
 desks before liim. Occasionally he would slide to his 
 
26 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw on 
 that very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a 
 diagram for the class to copy in coloured pencils, and 
 sometimes he would display a specimen or arrange an 
 experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute 
 in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount 
 of apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this 
 and subject that by the Science and Art Department, 
 and this my father would supplement with maps and 
 diaixrams and drawin^^s of his own. 
 
 But he never really did experiments, except that in 
 the class in systematic botany he sometimes made us tease 
 common flowers to pieces. He did not do experiments 
 if he could possibly help it, because in the first place 
 they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and 
 good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second 
 they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt 
 to endanger the apparatus of the Institute and even 
 the lives of his students. Then thirdly, real experi- 
 ments involved washing up. And moreover they 
 always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the 
 too observant learner very seriously and opened 
 demoralizing controversies. Quite early in life I 
 acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific 
 perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is 
 fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I 
 knew, for example, that in science, whether it be 
 subject XII., Organic Chemistry, or subject XVIL, 
 Animal Physiology, when you blow into a glass of lime 
 water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue 
 to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow 
 into the stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are 
 crimson in the face and painful under the ears, and it 
 never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew, too, that 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATIIEll 27 
 
 in science if you put potassium chlorate into a retort 
 and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaf^cd 
 and may be collected over water, whereas in real life 
 if you do anything of the sort the vessel cracks with a 
 loud report, the potassium chlorate descends sizzling 
 upon the flame, the experimenter says " Oh ! Damn ! " 
 with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady 
 student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room. 
 
 Science is the organized concjuest of Nature, and I 
 can (piite understand that ancient libertine refusing to 
 cooperate in her own undoing. And I can (|uite 
 imderstand, too, my father''s preference for what he 
 called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an 
 arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with 
 nothing whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen 
 burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminous 
 description of just what you did put in it when you 
 were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond illus- 
 tration, and j ust exactly what ought anyhow to happen 
 when you did. He had considerable powers of vivid 
 expression, so that in this way he could make us see 
 all he described. The class, freed from any unpleasant 
 nervous tension, could draw this still life without 
 flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, 
 then my father would produce a simplified version on 
 the blackboard to be copied instead. And he would 
 also write on the blackboard any exceptionally difficult 
 but grant-earning words, such as " empyreumatic " or 
 " botryoidal." 
 
 Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I 
 remember once sticking up my hand and asking him 
 in the full flow of description, '' I'lease, sir, what is 
 llocculent ? '^ 
 
 "The precipitate is." 
 
23 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Yes, sir, but what docs it mean ? " 
 
 " Oh ! flocculent ! " said my father, " flocculent ! 
 
 Why "he extended his hand and arm and twiddled 
 
 his fingers for a second in the air. " Like that," he 
 said. 
 
 I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused 
 for a moment after giving it. " As in a flock bed, you 
 know," he added and resumed his discourse. 
 
 §3 
 
 l\Iy father, I am afraid, carried a natural incom- 
 petence in practical affairs to an exceptionally high 
 level. He combined practical incompetence, practical 
 enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine temperament, in 
 a manner that I have never seen paralleled in any 
 human being. He was always trying to do new things 
 in the briskest manner, under the suggestion of books 
 or papers or his own spontaneous imagination, and as 
 he had never been trained to do anything whatever in 
 his life properly, his futilities were extensive and 
 thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes 
 for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possi- 
 bilities ; the peculiar pungency of the manure he got, 
 in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred 
 my olfactory memories for a lifetime. The intensive 
 culture phase is very clear in my memory ; it came 
 near the end of his career and when I w^as between 
 eleven and twelve. I was mobilized to gather cater- 
 pillars on several occasions, and assisted in nocturnal 
 raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that wrecked my 
 preparation work for school next day. My father dug 
 up both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 29 
 
 immense viproiir nltcrnatinc^ with periods of paralyziiifr 
 distaste for the n^ardcii. And for weeks he talked 
 about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal. 
 
 A garden, even when it is not exasperated hy 
 intensive methods, is a thing as exacting as a baby, 
 its moods have to be watched ; it docs not wait upon 
 the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own. 
 Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to 
 trouble mankind ; it makes a garden touchy and 
 hysterical, a drugged and demoralized and over- 
 irritated garden. i\Iy father got at cross purposes with 
 our two patches at an early stage. Kverything grew 
 wrong from first to last, and if my father's manures 
 intensified nothing else, they certainly intensified the 
 Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night 
 before they were three inches high, the beans bore 
 nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a 
 spraying of the potatoes was to develop a penchant in 
 the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were 
 damaged by the catapulting of boys going down the 
 lane at the back, and all our cucumbers were mysteri- 
 ously embittered. That lane with its occasional passers- 
 by did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my 
 father always stopped work and went indoors if any one 
 watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a 
 troublesome spirit of inquiry in hardy natures. 
 
 In digging his rows and shaping his patches he 
 neglected, the guiding string and trusted to his eye 
 altogether too much, and the consequent obliciuity and 
 the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, 
 and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began 
 and never ilnished by which everything was to ])e 
 watered at once by means of pieces of gutter from the 
 roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and 
 
30 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the 
 abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely 
 either by axe or fire, combined to give the gardens under 
 intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly 
 appearance. He took steps towards the diversion of 
 our house drain under the influence of the Sewage 
 Utilization Society ; but happily he stopped in time. 
 He hardly completed any of the operations he began ; 
 something else became more urgent or simply he tired ; 
 a considerable area of the Number 2 territory was never 
 even dug up. 
 
 In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. 
 Never was a man less horticulturally-minded. The 
 clamour of these vegetables he had launched into the 
 world for his service and assistance, wore out his 
 patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest 
 of men after a day or so of disregard, talking to me 
 of history perhaps or social organization, or sum- 
 marizing some book he had read. He talked to me of 
 anything that interested him, regardless of my limita- 
 tions. Then he would begin to note the growth of 
 the weeds. " This won't do,"** he would say and pull 
 up a handful. 
 
 More weeding would follow and the talk would 
 become fragmentary. His hands would become earthy, 
 his nails black, weeds would snap off in his careless grip, 
 leaving the roots behind. The world would darken. He 
 would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. 
 " Curse these weeds ! " he would say from his heart. 
 His discourse was at an end. . . . 
 
 I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected 
 charges into the tranquillity of the house, his hands 
 and clothes intensively enriched. He would come in 
 like a whirlwind. " This damned stuff all over me 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 31 
 
 and the Aijjricultural Chemistry Class at six ! liah ! 
 Aaaaaah /" 
 
 i\Iy mother would never learn not to attempt to 
 break him of swearing on such occasions. She would 
 remain standing a little stiffly in the scullery refusing 
 to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought. 
 
 "If you sav such things " 
 
 He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. 
 "The towel ! '^ he would cry, flicking suds from his 
 fingers in every direction ; " the towel ! Fll let the 
 blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel ! 
 Ill give up everything, I tell you — everything ! " . . . 
 
 At last with the failure of the lettuces came the 
 breaking point. I was in the little arbour learning 
 Latin irregular verbs when it happened. I can see him 
 still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain, 
 shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the 
 world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable 
 mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up 
 with bast only a week or so before, and now half were 
 rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. 
 He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great 
 wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, " Take 
 that!" 
 
 The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive 
 salad. It was a fantastic massacre. It was the IVench 
 Revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive over- 
 throw of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he 
 had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for 
 other prey ; he kicked holes in two of our noblest 
 marrows, llicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, 
 and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the 
 cucumber frame. Something of the awe of that 
 moment returns to me as I write of it. 
 
32 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an 
 expression of beneficent happiness, " Fve done with 
 gardening. Let"'s go for a walk like reasonable beings. 
 I've had enough of this" — his face was convulsed for 
 an instant with bitter resentment — "Pandering to 
 cabbages." 
 
 §4 
 
 That afternoon"'s walk sticks in my memory for many 
 reasons. One is that we went further than I had ever 
 been before ; far beyond Keston and nearly to Seven- 
 oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and 
 the other is that my father as he went along talked 
 about himself, not so much to me as to himself, and 
 about life and what he had done with it. He mono- 
 logued so that at times he produced an effect of weird 
 world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that 
 time inot understanding many things that afterwards 
 became plain to me. It is only in recent years that I 
 have discovered the pathos of that monologue ; how 
 friendless my father was and uncompanioned in his 
 thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have 
 felt for the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who 
 trotted by his side. 
 
 " Fm no gardener," he said, '' I'm no anything. 
 Why the devil did I start gardening ? 
 
 " I suppose man was created to mind a garden. . . . 
 But the Fall let us out of that ! What was / created 
 for ? God ! what was / created for ? . . . 
 
 " Slaves to matter ! Minding inanimate things ! 
 It doesn't suit me, you know. Fve got no hands and 
 no patience. Fve mucked about with life. IMucked about 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 7,3 
 
 with life." He suddenly addressed himself to me, and 
 for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered. 
 " Whatever you do, ])oy, whatever you do, make a Plan. 
 Make a good Plan and stick to it. Find out what life 
 is ahout — / never have — and set yourself to do — what- 
 ever you ou<j;ht to do. I admit it's a puzzle. . . . 
 
 " Those damned houses have been the curse of my 
 life. Stucco white elephants ! Beastly cracked stucco 
 with stains of green — black and green. Conferva 
 and soot. . . . Property, they are ! . . . Beware of 
 Things, Dick, beware of Things ! Before you know 
 where you are you are waiting on them and minding 
 them. They'll eat your life up. Eat up your hours 
 and your blood and energy ! When those houses came 
 to me, I ought to have sold them — or Hcd the country. 
 I ought to have cleared out. Sarcophagi — eaters of 
 men ! Oh ! the hours and days of work, the nights of 
 anxiety those vile houses have cost me ! The paintinfT » 
 It worked up my arms ; it got all over me. I stank of it. 
 It made me ill. It isn't livinjr — it's mindinir. . . . 
 
 " Property's the curse of life. Property ! Ugh ! 
 Look at this country all cut up into silly Httle parallelo- 
 grams, look at all those villas we passed just now and 
 those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the 
 hedge ! Somebody's minding every bit of it like a doo- 
 tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about 
 it. Bothering ! Yapping at every passer-by. Look at 
 that notice-board ! One rotten worried little beast 
 wants to keep us other rotten little beasts off Aw patch, 
 — God knows why ! Look at the weeds in it. Look 
 at the mended fence ! . . . There's no property worth 
 having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. 
 All these things. Human souls buried under a cartload 
 of blithering rubbish. . . . 
 
 D 
 
34 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 "Fm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagina- 
 tion, a sort of go. I ought to have made a better thing 
 of life. 
 
 " Fin sure I could have done things. Only the old 
 people pulled my leg. They started me wrong. They 
 never started me at all. I only began to find out what 
 life was like when I was nearly forty. 
 
 " If rd gone to a university ; if Fd had any sort of 
 sound training, if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard 
 places that came easiest. . . . 
 
 " Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world 
 we live in, Dick ; it's a cascade of accidents ; it's a chaos 
 exasperated by policemen ! You be warned in time, 
 Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to 
 show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way 
 till you make one. Get education, get a good education. 
 Fight your way to the top. It's your only chance. 
 I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and 
 property minding. There isn't a neighbour in Brom- 
 stead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. 
 You and I are the brainy unstable kind, top-side or 
 nothing. And if ever those blithering houses come to 
 you — don't have 'em. Give them away ! Dynamite 
 'em — and off! Live, Dick ! I'll get rid of them for 
 you if I can, Dick, but remember what I say." . . . 
 
 So it was my father discoursed, if not in those 
 particular words, yet exactly in that manner, as he 
 slouched along the southward road, with resentful eyes 
 becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out 
 clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of Brom- 
 stead as we passed along them. That afternoon he 
 hated Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He 
 had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have 
 the clearest impression of him in his garden-stained 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 35 
 
 tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of his head 
 and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and 
 sometimes in his rrcsticulatinfr hand, as he became 
 diverted by liis talk from his original exasperation. . . . 
 
 This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in 
 mv memory with many other afternoons ; all sorts of 
 things my father said and did at different times have 
 got themselves referred to it ; it filled me at the time 
 with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship, and it 
 has become the symbol now for all our intercourse 
 together. If I didn't understand the things he said, I 
 did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad 
 ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it ; 
 he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained 
 fundamental in my mind ; one a sense of the extraor- 
 dinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the 
 human life that went on all about us ; and the other of 
 a great ideal of order and economy which he called 
 variously Science and Civilization, and which, though I >/ 
 do not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose 
 many people nowadays would identify with Socialism, — 
 as the Fabians expound it. 
 
 He was not very definite about this Science, you 
 must understand, but he seemed always to be waving 
 his hand towards it, — ^^just as his contemporary Tenny- 
 son seems always to be doing — he belonged to his age, 
 and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited 
 beliefs of his time ; he led me to infer rather than 
 actually told me that this Science was coming, a spirit 
 of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning 
 and travailing in muddle for the want of it. . . • 
 
36 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 5 5 
 
 When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it 
 inseparably bound up with the disorders of my father's 
 gardening, and the odd patchings and paintings that 
 disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that. 
 
 Let me try and give something of the quality of 
 Bromstead and something of its history. It is the 
 quality and history of a thousand places round and 
 about London, and round and about the other great 
 centres of population in the world. Indeed it is in a 
 measure the quality of the whole of this modern world 
 from which we who have the statesman's passion 
 struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving, order. 
 
 First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred 
 and fifty years ago, as a narrow irregular little street 
 of thatched houses strung out on the London and 
 Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social 
 order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of 
 its own. At that time its population numbered a 
 little under two thousand people, mostly engaged in 
 agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. 
 There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, 
 a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer), a 
 veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious 
 inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant 
 gentlemen's seats, whose owners went frequently to 
 London town in their coaches along the very tolerable 
 high-road. The church ,was big enough to hold the 
 whole population, were people minded to go to church, 
 and indeed a large proportion did go, and all who 
 married were married in it, and everybody, to begin 
 with, was christened at its font and buried at last in 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER n 
 
 its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody 
 ill the {)lace. It was, in fact, a definite place and 
 a real human coniniunity in those days. There was a 
 ple:\sant old market-house in the middle of the town 
 with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which 
 much cheerful merry-making and homely intoxication 
 occurred ; there was a pack of hounds which liunted 
 within five miles of London Bridge, and the local gentry 
 would occasionally enliven the ])lace with valiant 
 cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the 
 vast excitement of the entire population. It was very 
 much the same sort of place that it had been for three 
 or four centuries. A Bromstead Kip van "Winkle from 
 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the 
 old houses still as he had known them, the same trades 
 a little improved and differentiated one from the other, 
 the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns 
 not very much altered, the ancient familiar market- 
 house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have 
 struck him as the most remarkable difference, next 
 perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments 
 instead of brasses and the protestant severity of the 
 communion-table in the parish church, — both from the 
 material point of view very little things. A Rip van 
 Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely 
 greater changes ; fewer clergy, more people, and par- 
 ticularly more people of the middling sort ; the glass 
 in the windows of many of the houses, the stylish 
 chimneys springing up everywhere would have im- 
 pressed him, and suchlike details. The place would 
 liave had the same boundaries, the same broad essential 
 features, would have been still itself in the way that 
 a man is still himself after he has " filled out"" a little 
 and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes. 
 
38 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 But after 1750 something got hold of the world, 
 something that was destined to alter the scale of every 
 human affair. 
 
 That something was machinery and a vague 
 energetic disposition to improve material things. In 
 another part of England ingenious people were begin- 
 ning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing 
 metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that 
 had hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or 
 preparation, increment involving countless possibilities 
 of further increment was coming to the strength of 
 horses and men. " Power," all unsuspected, was flowing 
 like a drug into the veins of the social body. 
 
 Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of 
 power, and nobody had calculated its probable con- 
 sequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently, people 
 found themselves doing things that would have amazed 
 their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled 
 vehicles much more easily and cheaply than they had 
 ever done before, to make-up roads and move things 
 about that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for 
 locomotion, to join w^oodwork with iron nails instead 
 of wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical 
 possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on 
 a larger scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and 
 systematic way, to bring back commodities from over- 
 seas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods 
 in bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture, iron 
 appliances replaced wooden, breeding of stock became 
 systematic, paper-making and printing increased and 
 cheapened. Roofs of slate and tile appeared amidst 
 and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead 
 thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was 
 extensively enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined 
 
lUlOMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 39 
 
 horse-tnick to Dover, only pc'issablc by adventurous 
 coaches in drv weather, became the Dover iload, and 
 was presently the route first of one and then of several 
 daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be 
 too tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new 
 road cut ofi* its worst contortions, llesidcntial villas 
 appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who 
 esteemed the place healthy, and by others of a strange 
 new unoccupied class of people who had money invested 
 in joint-stock enterprises. First one and then several 
 boys'* boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from 
 London, — my grandfather's was one of these. London, 
 twelve miles to the north-west, was making itself felt 
 more and more. 
 
 But this was only the beginning of the growth 
 period, the first trickle of the coming flood of mechani- 
 cal power. Away in the north they were casting iron 
 in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the 
 production of steel on a large scale, applying power in 
 factories. Bromstead had almost doubled in size again 
 long before the railway came ; there was hardly any 
 thatch left in the High Street, but instead were houses 
 with handsome brass-knockered front doors and several 
 windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of s(juare glass 
 panes, and the j)lace was lighted publicly now by oil 
 lamps — previously only one flickering lamp outside 
 each of the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal 
 darkness. And there was talk, it long remained talk, — 
 of gas. The gasworks came in IS^-i, and about that 
 date my father's three houses niu.^t have been built 
 convenient for the London ]{oad. They mark nearly 
 the beginning of the real suburban tjuality ; they were 
 let at first to City people still engaged in business. 
 
 And then hard on the gasworks had come the 
 
40 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 railway and cheap coal ; there was a wild outbreak of 
 brickfields upon the claylands to the east, and the 
 Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural 
 placidities that had formerly come to the very borders 
 of the High Street were broken up north, west and 
 south by new roads. This enterprising person and 
 then that began to "run up" houses, irrespective of 
 every other enterprising person who was doing the 
 same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and 
 with much hesitation and penny-wise economy in- 
 augurated drainage works. Rates became a common 
 topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several 
 chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white 
 new church in commercial Gothic upon the common, 
 and another of red brick in the residential district out 
 beyond the brickfields towards Chessington. 
 
 The population doubled again and doubled again, 
 and became particularly teeming in the prolific " work- 
 ing-class " district about the deep-rutted, muddy, coal- 
 blackened roads between the gasworks, Blodgetfs 
 laundries, and the railway goods-yard. Weekly pro- 
 perties, that is to say small houses built by small 
 property owners and let by the week, sprang up also in 
 the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up the 
 London Road. A single national school in an incon- 
 venient situation set itself inadequately to collect sub- 
 scriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy 
 offspring of this dingy new population to read. The 
 villages of Beckington, which used to be three miles to 
 to the west, and Blamley four miles to the east of 
 Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions and 
 proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of 
 locality or community had gone from these places long 
 before I was born ; hardly any one knew any one ; there 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATIIEU 41 
 
 was no general meeting-place any more, the old fairs 
 were just connnon nuisances haunted by gypsies, van 
 showmen, Cheap Jacks and lA)ndon roughs, the churches 
 were incapable of a (juarter of the poj)ulation. One or 
 two local papers of shameless veniality reported the 
 proceedings of the local Iknch and the local Board, 
 compelled tradesmen who were interested in these 
 aflairs to advertise, used the epithet " IJromstedian '" as 
 one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in 
 the general mind a weak tradition of some local (piality 
 that embraced us all. Then the parish graveyard filled 
 up and became a scandal, and an ambitious area with 
 an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstcad 
 Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably high- 
 minded and sorrowful varieties of conifer. A stone- 
 mason took one of tlie earlier villas with a front garden 
 at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supply 
 of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in stone, 
 marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to com- 
 memorate in elaborate detail the entire population of 
 Bromstead as one found it in 1750. 
 
 The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of 
 five or six ; I was in the full tide of building and growth 
 from the first; the second railway with its station at 
 Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I 
 was ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of 
 digging and wheeling, of woods invaded bv building, 
 roads gashed open and littered with iron pipes amidst 
 a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling 
 away deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down 
 and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and builders' 
 sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drain- 
 pipes. Big trees, and especially elms, cleared of under- 
 growth and left standing amid such thing;^, acc[uired 
 
42 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 a peculiar tattered diiiginess rather in the quality of 
 needy widow women who have seen happier days. 
 
 The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a 
 beautiful stream. It came into my world out of a 
 mysterious Beyond, out of a garden, splashing brightly 
 down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. 
 (Above the weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes 
 growing in splendid clumps, and beyond that, pampas 
 grass, yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock, and 
 blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at 
 the foot of this initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely 
 fashion beside a footpath, — there were two pretty 
 thatched cottages on the left, and here were ducks, 
 and there were willows on the right, — and so came 
 to where great trees grew on high banks on either 
 hand and bowed closer, and at last met overhead. 
 This part was difficult to reach because of an old 
 fence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern 
 of greenery by wading. Either I have actually seen 
 kingfishers there, or my father has described them 
 so accurately to me that he inserted them into my 
 memory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of 
 that overhung part I never penetrated at all, but 
 followed the field path with my mother and met the 
 stream again, where be}ond there were flat meadows, 
 Roper"'s meadows. The Llavensbrook went meandering 
 across the middle of these, now between steep banks, 
 and now with wide shallows at the bends where the 
 cattle waded and drank. Yellow and purple loose- 
 strife and ordinary ru.shes grew in clumps along the 
 bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasions 
 of rapture one might see a rat cleaning his. whiskers 
 at the water's edge. I'he deep places were rich with 
 tangled weeds, and ^ in them fishes lurked — to me 
 
BllOMSTEAD AND JMY FATHER 43 
 
 they were big fishes — water-boatmen and water-beetles 
 traversed the cahn surface of these still deeps ; in 
 one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in 
 the shoaly places hovering Heets of small fry basked 
 in the sunshine — to vanish in a flash at one"'s shadow. 
 In one place, too, were Rapids, where the stream woke 
 with a start from a dreamless brooding into foaming 
 ])anic and babbled and hastened. AVell do I remember 
 that half-mile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades 
 have their reference to it for me. And after I was 
 eleven, and before we left Bromstead, all the delight 
 and beauty of it was destroyed. 
 
 The volume of its water decreased abruptly — I 
 suppose the new drainage works that linked us up with 
 lieckington, and made me first ac(|uainted with the 
 geological quality of the London clay, had to do with 
 that — until only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. 
 That at first did not strike me as a misfortune. An 
 adventurous small boy might walk dryshod in places 
 hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the 
 pegs, the planks and carts and devastation. Uoj)er''s 
 meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to 
 be slashed out into parallelograms of untidy road, and 
 built upon with rows of working-class cottages. The 
 roads came, — horribly ; the houses followed. They 
 seemed to arise in the night. People moved into them 
 as soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their 
 young wives, and already in a year some of these raw 
 houses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with 
 windows broken and woodwork warping and rotting. 
 The llavensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty 
 cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a river 
 only when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with 
 an inky flood of surface water. . . • 
 
44 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 That indeed was my most striking perception in 
 the growth of Bronistead. The Ravensbrook had 
 been important to my imaginative life ; that way had 
 always been my first choice in all my walks with my 
 mother, and its rapid swamping by the new urban 
 growth made it indicative of all the other things 
 that had happened just before my time, or were still, 
 at a less dramatic pace, happening. I realized that 
 building was the enemy. I began to understand why 
 in every direction out of Bromstead one walked past 
 scaffold-poles into litter, why fragments of broken 
 brick and cinder mingled in every path, and the 
 significance of the universal notice-boards, either 
 white and new or a year old and torn and battered, 
 promising sites, proffering houses to be sold or let, 
 abusing and intimidating passers-by for fancied 
 trespass, and protecting rights of way. 
 
 It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood 
 at this time and what I have since come to understand, 
 but it seems to me that even in those childish days I 
 was acutely aware of an invading and growing disorder. 
 The serene rhythms of the old-established agriculture, 
 I see now, were everywhere being replaced by cultiva- 
 tion under notice and snatch crops ; hedges ceased to 
 be repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings 
 or chunks of corrugated iron ; more and more hoard- 
 ings sprang up, and contributed more and more to the 
 nomad tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew before 
 the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts 
 of Bromstead were a maze of exploitation roads that 
 led nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with 
 nails (I don't remember barbed wire in those days ; 
 I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until later), 
 and in trespass boards that used vehement language. 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 45 
 
 Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. 
 Cheap glass, cliea]) tin, abundant fuel, and a free 
 untaxed Press had rushed upon a world (juite un- 
 prepared to dispose of these blessings when the fulness 
 of enjoyment was past. 
 
 I suppose one might have persuaded oneself tliat 
 all this was but the replacement of an ancient tran- 
 quillity, or at least an ancient balance, by a new 
 order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's 
 intimations, it was manifestly no order at all. It 
 was a multitude of incoordinated fresh starts, each 
 more sweeping and destructive than the last, and 
 none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and 
 satisfactory completion. Each left a legacy of pro- 
 ducts, houses, humanity, or what not, in its wake. It 
 was a sort of progress that had bolted ; it was change 
 out of hand, and going at an unprecedented pace 
 nowhere in particular. 
 
 No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a 
 new era ; it was a hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic 
 experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind. 
 I suppose it was necessary ; I suppose all things are 
 necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline 
 themselves to learn and plan, they must first see in a 
 hundred convincing forms the folly and muddle that 
 come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods. 
 The nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, 
 some of them very impressive demonstrations, of the 
 powers that have come to mankind ; but of permanent 
 achievement what will our descendants cherish ? It 
 is hard to estimate what grains of precious metal mav 
 not be found in a mud torrent of human production 
 on so large a scale, but will any one, a hundred years 
 from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians 
 
46 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 built, travel by their roads or railways, value the 
 furnishings they made to live among or esteem, except 
 for curious or historical reasons, their prevalent art 
 and the clipped and limited literature that satisfied 
 their souls ? 
 
 That age which bore me was indeed a world full 
 of restricted and undisciplined people, overtaken by 
 power, by possessions and great new freedoms, and 
 unable to make any civilized use of them whatever; 
 stricken now by this idea and now by that, tempted 
 first by one possession and then another to ill- 
 considered attempts; it was my father's exploitation 
 of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. The whole 
 of Bromstead as I remember it, and as I saw it last — 
 it is a year ago now — is a dull useless boiling-up of 
 human activities, an immense clustering of futilities. 
 It is as unfinished as ever; the builders'" roads still 
 run out and end in mid-field in their old fashion ; 
 the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless 
 contradiction, if anything intensified. Pretentious 
 villas jostle slums, and public-house and tin tabernacle 
 glower at one another across the cat-haunted lot that 
 intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly 
 a slum ; back doors and sculleries gape towards the 
 railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing 
 unashamed ; and there seem to be more boards by 
 the railway every time I pass, advertising pills and 
 pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike solicitudes 
 of a people with no natural health or appetite left in 
 them. . . . 
 
 Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure 
 nor waste wasted if it sweeps away illusion and lights 
 the road to a plan. 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 47 
 
 §(5 
 
 Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic 
 aims, these fijive the quality of all my liromstead 
 memories. The crowning one of thoni all rises to 
 desolatin<]j tragedy. I remember now the wan spring 
 sunshine of that Sunday morning, the stiff' feeling of 
 best clothes and aggressive cleanliness and formality, 
 when I and my mother returned from church to find 
 my father dead. He had been pruning the grape 
 vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to 
 reach the sill of the third-Hoor windows — at house- 
 painting times he had borrowed one from the plumljcr 
 who mixed his paint — and he had in his own happy- 
 go-lucky way contrived a combination of the garden 
 fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table that served 
 all sorts of odd purposes in an outhouse. He had 
 stayed up this arrangement by means of the garden 
 roller, and the roller had at the critical moment — rolled. 
 He was lying close by the garden door with his head, 
 queerly bent back against a broken and twisted rain- 
 water pipe, an expression of pacific contentment on his 
 face, a bamboo curtain-rod with a table-knife tied to 
 the end of it, still grip})ed in his hand. We had been 
 ra})ping for some time at the front door unable to make 
 him hear, and then we came round by the door in tlie 
 side trellis into the garden and so discovered him. 
 
 " Arthur ! ""' I remember my mother crying with the 
 strangest break in her voice, " A\'hat are you doing 
 there? Arthur! And — Su/uhif//^' 
 
 I was coming behind her, nuising remotely, when 
 the quality of her voice roused me. She stood as if she 
 could not go near him. He had always puzzled her so, 
 
48 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 he and his Wcays, and this seemed only another enigma. 
 Then the truth dawned on her ; she shrieked as if afraid 
 of him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door 
 and stopped and clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, 
 leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for feeling, 
 at the carelessly flung limbs. 
 
 The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. 
 " Mother ! " I cried, pale to the depths of my spirit, 
 ''is he dead f' 
 
 I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold 
 fruit pie that glorified our Sunday dinner-table, and 
 how I might perhaps get into the tree at the end of the 
 garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense fact 
 had come down like a curtain and blotted out all my 
 childish world. My father was lying dead before my 
 eyes. ... I perceived that my mother was helpless 
 and that things must be done. 
 
 " Mother ! " I said, " we must get Doctor Beaselej,— 
 and carry him indoors." 
 
CITArTER THE THIRD 
 
 Scholastic 
 
 §1 
 
 ]\Iy formal education began in a sinall preparatory 
 school in Bronistead. I went there as a clay boy. Tlie 
 charfre for my instruction was mainly set off by the 
 periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered 
 fossils to lecture to us upon geology. I was one of 
 those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school 
 work, I had a good memory, versatile interests and a 
 considerable appetite for commendation, and when I 
 was barely twelve I got a scholarship at the City 
 IVIerchants School and was entrusted with a scholar's 
 railway season ticket to Victoria. After my father's 
 death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle 
 in tweeds from Staffordshire, Uncle ]Minter, my mother's 
 sister''s husband, with a remarkable accent and remark- 
 able vowel sounds, who had plunged into the Uromstead 
 home once or twice for the night but who was otherwise 
 unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three 
 gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the pro- 
 ceeds and my father's life insurance money, and got us 
 into a small villa at Penj^e within sifiht of that innnense 
 fajade of glass and iron, the Crystal Talacc. Then he 
 
 <9 K 
 
50 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 retired in a mood of good-natured contempt to his 
 native habitat again. We stayed at Penge until my 
 mother's death. 
 
 School became a large part of the world to me, 
 absorbing my time and interest, and I never acquired 
 that detailed and intimate knowledge of Penge and the 
 hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and 
 outskirts of Bromstead. 
 
 It was a district of very much the same character, 
 but it was more completely urbanized and nearer to 
 the centre of things ; there were the same unfinished 
 roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and 
 trees, the same butcher's horse grazing under a 
 builder's notice-board, the same incidental lapses into 
 slum. The Crystal Palace grounds cut off a large part 
 of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences 
 and forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to 
 the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety 
 of gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away 
 of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see them 
 better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wimbledon, 
 West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me the 
 interminable extent of London's residential suburbs ; 
 mile after mile one went, between houses, villas, rows 
 of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over 
 railway bridges. I have forgotten the detailed local 
 characteristics — if there were any — of much of that 
 region altogether. I was only there two years, and 
 half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after 
 dark. But with Penge I associate my first realizations 
 of the wonder and beauty of twilight and night, the 
 effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the mystery 
 of blue haze-veiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops 
 by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of 
 
SCHOLASTIC 51 
 
 railway trains and railway si r^nals lit up in the darkness. 
 My first rambles in the evenin*^ occurred at Penf^e, — I 
 was becoininii; a bii:; and independent-spirited boy — and 
 I be£jan my experience of sniokincj during these twilight 
 prowls with the threepenny packets of American 
 cigarettes then just appearing in the world. 
 
 My life centred upon the City Merchants School. 
 Usually I caught the eight eighteen for Victoria, I had 
 a midday meal and tea; four nights a week I staved 
 for preparation, and often I was not back home again 
 until within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half- 
 holidays at school in order to play cricket and football. 
 This, and a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous 
 reading which was fostered by the Penge Middleton 
 Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topo- 
 graphy. On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. 
 Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to 
 walk out alone cm the Sabbath afternoon — she herself 
 slumbered — so that I wrote or read at home. I must 
 confess I was at home as little as I could contrive. 
 
 Home, after my father's death, had become a very 
 quiet and uneventful place indeed. My mother had 
 either an unimaginative temperament or her mind was 
 greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and 
 I remember her talking to me but little, and that 
 usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had 
 developed my own view about low-Church theology long 
 before my father's death, and my meditation upon that 
 event had finished my secret estrangement from my 
 mother's faith, ^fy reason would not permit even a 
 remote chance of his being in hell, he was so manifestly 
 not evil, and this religion wouki not permit him a 
 remote chance of being out of it. AV'hen I was a litth; 
 boy my mother had taught me to read and write and 
 
52 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 pmy and had done many things for me, indeed she 
 persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes 
 until I rebelled against these things as indignities. 
 But our minds parted very soon. She never began to 
 understand the mental processes of my play, she never 
 interested herself in my school life and work, she could 
 not understand things I said ; and she came, I think, 
 quite insensibly to regard me with something of the 
 same hopeless perplexity she had felt towards my 
 father. 
 
 Him she must have wedded under considerable 
 delusions. I do not think he deceived her, indeed, nor 
 do I suspect him of mercenariness in their union ; but 
 no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half 
 ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most 
 wooing, and presented himself as a very brisk and 
 orthodox young man. I wonder why nearly all love- 
 makino; has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have 
 disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after 
 another of his careless, sceptical, experimental tempera- 
 ment appear. Her mind was fixed and definite, she 
 embodied all that confidence in church and decorum 
 and the assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic 
 of the large mass of the English people — for after all, 
 the rather low-Church section was the largest single 
 mass — in early Victorian times. She had dreams, I 
 suspect, of going to church with him side by side ; she 
 in a little poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all 
 mauve and magenta and starched under a little lace- 
 trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top 
 trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like 
 the Prince Consort, — white angels almost visibly rain- 
 ing benedictions on their amiable progress. Perhaps 
 she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies and an 
 
SCHOLASTIC 53 
 
 interestinp;lv pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) 
 little girl or boy or so, also angcl-hauntcd. And I 
 think, too, she must have seen herself ruling a seemly 
 "home of taste,"" with a vivarium in the conservatory 
 that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, making 
 preserves in the kitchen. ]\Iy father's science-teaching, 
 his diagi-ams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures 
 of prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his 
 disposition towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, 
 his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic read- 
 ing fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly 
 ■with her rather unintelligent anticipations. His wild 
 moments of violent temper when he would swear and 
 smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed 
 like sunnner thunder, must have been starkly dreadful 
 to her. She was constitutionally inadaptable, and 
 certainly made no attempt to understand or tolerate 
 these outbreaks. She tried them by her standards, and 
 bv her standards thcv were wrong. Her standards hid 
 him from her. The blazing things he said rankled in 
 her mind unforiiettablv. 
 
 As I remember them together they chafed con- 
 stantly. Her attitude to nearly all his moods and all 
 his enterprises was a sceptical disapproval. She treated 
 him as something that belonged to me and not to her. 
 " Vuur father," she used to call him, as though I had got 
 him for her. 
 
 She had married late and she had, I think, become 
 mentally self-subsisting before her marriage. Even in 
 those Heme Hill davs I used to wonder what was going 
 on in her mind, and I find that old speculative curiosity 
 return as I write this. She took a considerable interest 
 in the house-work that our generally servantless con- 
 dition put upon her — she used to Lave a charwoman in 
 
54 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 two or three times a week — but she did not do it with 
 any great skill. She covered most of our furniture with 
 flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and 
 without very much judgment. The Penge house, as it 
 contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was crowded 
 with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind 
 Avith the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used 
 very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces. My 
 mother had an equal dread of " blacks " by day and the 
 " night air," so that our brightly clean windows were 
 rarely open. 
 
 She took a morning paper, and she would open it 
 and glance at the headlines, but she did not read it 
 until the afternoon and then, I think, she was interested 
 only in the more violent crimes, and in railway and 
 mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the 
 Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my 
 father's, and I do not think she opened any of them. 
 She had one or two volumes that dated from her own 
 youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in them ; 
 there was j\liss Strickland's Queens of England^ a book I 
 remember with particular animosity, and Queechy and 
 the Wide Wide World. She made these books of hers 
 into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of 
 calico and figured muslin. To me in these habiliments 
 they seemed not so much books as confederated old 
 ladies. 
 
 My mother was also very punctual with her 
 religious duties, and rejoiced to watch me in the choir. 
 
 On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the 
 other side of the table at which I sat, head on hand 
 reading, and she would be darning stockings or socks 
 or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy 
 comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive 
 
SCHOLASTIC 55 
 
 way I think she foiiiul these among her happy times. 
 On such occasions she was wont to put her work clown 
 on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing 
 that would last for long intervals and rouse my 
 curiosity. For like most young people I could not 
 imagine mental stixtes without definite forms. 
 
 She carried on a correspondence with a numher of 
 cousins and friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian 
 hand and dealing mainly with births, marriages and 
 deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and the 
 distresses of bankruptcy. 
 
 And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate 
 life of her own that I suspected nothing of at the time, 
 that only |^now becomes credible to me. She kept a 
 diary that is still in my possession, a diary of frag- 
 mentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket 
 books. She put down the texts of the sermons she 
 heard, and queer stiff little comments on casual 
 visitors, — " Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk 
 about games and such frivolities and croquay, A. de- 
 lighted and very attentive.'''' Such little human entries 
 abound. She had an odd way of never writing a 
 name, only an initial ; my father is always "A.," and 
 I am always *' D."" It is manifest she followed the 
 domestic events in the life of the Princess of AVales, 
 who is now Queen iVIother, with peculiar interest and 
 sympathy. *' Pray G. all may be well,'' she writes in 
 one such crisis. 
 
 But there are things about myself that I still find 
 too poignant to tell easily, certain painful and clumsy 
 circumstances of my birth in very great detail, the 
 distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I find 
 
 such things as this : " Heard D. s .'' The " s '' is 
 
 evidently ** swear '' — " G. bless and keep my boy from 
 
56 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 evil."" And again, with the thin handwriting shaken 
 by distress : *' D. would not go to church, and hardened 
 his heart and said wicked infidel things, much dis- 
 respect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome ! ! ! 
 That men should set up to be wiser than their 
 maker ! ! ! " Then trebly underlined : " / fear Im 
 Jailiers teaching.'''' Dreadful little tangle of mis- 
 apprehensions and false judgments ! More comforting 
 for me to read, " D. very kind and good. He grows 
 more thoughtful every day." I suspect myself of 
 forgotten hypocrisies. 
 
 At just one point my mother's papers seem to 
 dip deeper. I think the death of my father must 
 have stirred her for the first time for many years to 
 think for herself. Even she could not go on living 
 in any peace at all, believing that he had indeed 
 been flung headlong into hell. Of this gnawing 
 solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her 
 diary also she could find no phrases. But on a 
 loose half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find 
 this passage that follows, written very carefully. I do 
 not know whose lines they are nor how she came upon 
 them. They run : — 
 
 " And if there be no meeting past the graye ; 
 If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest. 
 Be not afraid, ye waiting hearts that weep, 
 For God still giveth His beloved sleep, 
 And if an endless sleep He wills, so best." 
 
 That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. 
 I could even wonder if my mother really grasped 
 the import of what she had copied out. It affected 
 me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned 
 and joined in a whispered conversation. It set me 
 thinking how far a mind in its general effect quite 
 
SCHOLASTIC 57 
 
 hopelessly limited, mi^ht ranf;e. After that I went 
 throuL^li all her diaries, trying to find somethini; 
 more than a conventional term of tenderness for my 
 father. Ikit I found nothinii;. And yet somehow 
 there <^rew upon me the reaHzation that there had 
 been love. . . . Her love for me, on the other hand, 
 was abundantly expressed. 
 
 I knew nothini:^ of tliat secret life of fceliuf; at 
 the time; such exj)ression as it found was all beyond 
 my schoolboy range. I did not know when I j)leased 
 her and I did not know when I distressed her. 
 Chiefly I Mas aware of my mother as rather dull 
 company, as a mind thorny with irrational conclusions 
 and incapable of explication, as one believing (juite 
 wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I 
 suppose it had to be ; life was coming to me in new 
 forms and with new requirements. It was essential 
 to our situation that we should fail to understand. 
 After this space of years I have come to realizations 
 and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, 
 I can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her 
 as a loving and feeling and desiring and muddle- 
 headed person. There are times when I would have 
 her alive again, if only that I might be kind to her 
 for a little while and give her some return for the 
 narrow intense affection, the tender desires, she 
 evidently lavished so abundantly on me. 13ut then 
 again I ask how I could make that return ? And I 
 realize the futility of such dreaming. Her demand 
 wa:5 rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie. 
 
 So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, 
 lies in my memory as I saw her laiit, fixed, still, 
 infinitely intimate, infinitely remote. . . . 
 
 ^ly own case with my mother, however, does not 
 
58 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 awaken the same regret I feel when I think of how 
 she misjudged and irked my father, and turned his 
 weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I 
 wish I could look back without that little twinge 
 to two people who were both in their different quality 
 so good. But goodness that is naiTOw is a pedestrian 
 and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father 
 seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that 
 have come to me personally, one of those things 
 that nothing can transfigure, that remain sorrowful, 
 that I cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I 
 remember him he was indeed the most lovable of 
 weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been 
 trained in a hard and narrow system that made 
 evil out of many things not in the least evil, and 
 inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their 
 estrangement followed from that. 
 
 These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous 
 toll of human love and happiness, and not only that, 
 but what we Machiavellians must needs consider, they 
 make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose 
 I am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality 
 go, but I hate more and more, as I grow older, the 
 shadow of intolerance cast by religious organizations. 
 All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance, 
 by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. 
 Mahometanism, with its fierce proselytism, has, I 
 suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but 
 most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a 
 degree beyond any of the anterior paganisms, with 
 this same hateful quality. It is their exclusive 
 claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition 
 that inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided 
 God and be the one and only gateway to salvation. 
 
SCHOLASTIC 59 
 
 Deprecation of all outside the household of faith, 
 an or«;anized undervaluation of heretical goodness and 
 lovableness, follows necessarily. Every })etty difi'erence 
 is exa<;gerated to the quality of a saving grace or a 
 damning defect. Elaborate ])recautions are taken to 
 shield the belicver^s mind against broad or amiable 
 suiJirestions ; the faithful are deterred by dark allusions, 
 by sinister warnings, from books, from theatres, from 
 worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments 
 that mingle human sympathy. Eor only by isolating 
 its flock can the organization survive. 
 
 Every month there came to my mother a little maga- 
 zine called, if I remember rightly, the Home Church- 
 man, with the combined authority of print and clerical 
 conunendation. It was the most evil thing that ever 
 came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet 
 with one woodcut illustration on the front page of each 
 number; now the uninviting visage of some exponent 
 of the real and only doctrine and attitudes, now some 
 coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of 
 God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in the 
 Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was ! A score of 
 vices that shun the policeman have nothing of its 
 subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the 
 natural kindliness of men. The contents were all 
 admirably adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their 
 force of sustained suggestion was tremendous. There 
 would be dreadful intimations of the swift retribution 
 that fell upon individuals for Sablmth-breakiug, and 
 upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism, or 
 treating Iloman Catholics as tolerable human beings ; 
 there would be great rejoicings over the convei^sion of 
 alleged Jews, and terrible descriptions of the death- 
 beds of prominent inlidels with boldly invented last 
 
60 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 words, — the most unscrupulous lying ; there would be 
 the appalHngly edifying careers of " early piety " 
 lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals 
 who traced their final ruin unerringly to early laxities 
 of the kind that leads people to give up subscribing to 
 the Home Churchman. 
 
 Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump 
 in our mutual love. My mother used to read the 
 thing and become depressed and anxious for my 
 spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent 
 pestering. . , • 
 
 §2 
 
 A few years ago I met the editor of this same Home 
 Churchman. It was at one of the weekly dinners of 
 that Fleet Street dining club, the Blackfriars. 
 
 I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and 
 surveyed the man with interest. No doubt he was only 
 a successor of the purveyor of discords who darkened 
 my boyhood. It w^as amazing to find an influence 
 so terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. 
 He was seated some way down a table at right angles 
 to the one at which I sat, a man of mean appearance 
 with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose, a 
 heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking 
 out between the wings of his collar. He ate with con- 
 siderable appetite and unconcealed relish, and 'as his 
 jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the mous- 
 tache wave like reeds in the swell of a steamer. It 
 gave him a conscientious look. After dinner he a 
 little forced himself upon me. At that time, though 
 the shadow of my scandal was already upon me, I still 
 
SCHOLASTIC 6i 
 
 seemed to be shapini:^ for great successes, and he was 
 glad to be in conversation with me and anxious to 
 intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to 
 make him talk of the Home Churchman and the kindred 
 publications he ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of 
 his job so far as I was concerned. 
 
 *'One wants," he said, pitching himself as he sup- 
 posed in my key, "to put constructive ideas into our 
 readers, but they are narrow, you know, very narrow. 
 Very.'' He made his moustache and lips express 
 judicious regret. " One has to consider them carefully, 
 one has to respect their attitudes. One dare not go 
 too far with them. One has to feel one's way." 
 
 He chummed and the moustache bristled. 
 
 A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. 
 I gathered there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three 
 boys to be fed and clothed and educated. . . , 
 
 I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine 
 afterwards, and it seemed much the same sort of thin"" 
 that had worried my mother in my boyhood. There 
 was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton- 
 chop whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, 
 it seemed, were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully 
 upset about the Sunday opening of museums and the 
 falling birth-rate, and as touchy and vindictive as ever. 
 There were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter 
 damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious 
 damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile 
 of Holboni Viaduct, and a foul-mouthed attack on 
 poor little Wilkins the novelist — who was being baited 
 by the moralists at that time for making one of his 
 women characters, not being in holy wedlock, desire a 
 baby and say so. . . . 
 
 The broadening of human thought is a slow and 
 
62 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 complex process. We do go on, we do get on. But 
 when one thinks that people are living and dying now, 
 quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, 
 vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another 
 in the close darknesses of these narrow cults — Oh God ! 
 one wants a gale out of Heaven, one wants a great 
 wind from the sea I 
 
 §3 
 
 While I lived at Penge two little things happened 
 to me, trivial in themselves and yet in their quality 
 profoundly significant. They had this in common, that 
 they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly taking 
 for granted and let me see through it into realities — 
 realities I had indeed known about before but never 
 realized. Each of these experiences left me with a 
 sense of shock, with all the values in my life perplex- 
 ingly altered, attempting readjustment. One of these 
 disturbino; and illuminatino- events was that I was 
 robbed of a new pocket-knife, and the other that I fell 
 in love. It was altogether surprising to me to be 
 robbed. You see, as an only child I had always been 
 fairly well looked after and protected, and the result 
 was an amazing confidence in the practical goodness of 
 the people one met in the world. I knew there were 
 robbers in the world, just as I knew there were tigers ; 
 that I was ever likely to meet robber or tiger face to 
 face seemed equally impossible. 
 
 The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly 
 one with all sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a 
 thing for getting a stone out of the hoof of a horse, 
 and a corkscrew ; it had cost me a carefully accumulated 
 
SCHOLASTIC 63 
 
 half-crown, aiul amounted indeed to a new experience 
 in knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then 
 one iifternoon I dropped it throu(;h a hole in my pocket 
 on a footpath crossini^ a field between Penge and 
 Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without 
 at the time appreciatin<» what had happened, then 
 later, before I got home, when my hand wandered into 
 my ])ocket to embrace the still dear new j)ossessi()n I 
 found it gone, and instantly that memory of something 
 hitting the ground swam up into consciousness. I 
 went back and commenced a search. Almost imme- 
 diately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of 
 four or five extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted 
 sizes and slouching carriage who were coming from the 
 Anerley direction. 
 
 " Lost any think, ]Matey ? " said he. 
 
 I explained. 
 
 "'E's dropped 'is knife,'" said my interlocutor, and 
 joined in the search. 
 
 " What sort of 'andle was it, ^latey ? " said a small 
 white-faced sniffing boy in a big bowler hat. 
 
 I supplied the information. His sharp little face 
 scrutinized the ground about us. 
 
 " Got it," he said, and pounced. 
 
 "Give it 'ere,'' said the big boy hoarsely, and 
 secured it. 
 
 I walked towards him serenely confident that he 
 would hand it over to me, and that all was for the best 
 in the best of all possible worlds. 
 
 "No bloomin" fear! " he said, regarding me obliquely, 
 " Oo said it was your knife ? " 
 
 Remarkable doubts assailed me. "Of course it's 
 my knife," I said. The other boys gathered round 
 me. 
 
64 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Tliis ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat 
 casually. 
 
 " I dropped it just now." 
 
 " Findings keepings, / believe,'' said the big boy, 
 
 " Nonsense," I said. " Give me my knife." 
 
 " '0\v many blades it got ? " 
 
 "Three." 
 
 " And what sort of 'andle ? " 
 
 " Bone." 
 
 " Got a corkscrew like ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Ah ! This ain't your knife no'ow. See ? " 
 
 He made no offer to show it me. My breath went. 
 
 " Look here ! " I said. " I saw that kid pick it up. 
 It is my knife." 
 
 " Rot ! " said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately 
 put my knife into his trouser pocket. 
 
 I braced my soul for battle. All civilization was 
 behind me, but I doubt if it kept the colour in my 
 face. I buttoned my jacket and clenched my fists and 
 advanced on my antagonist — he had, I suppose, the 
 advantage of two years of age and three inches of 
 height. " Hand over that knife," I said. 
 
 Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me 
 with extraordinary vigour and swiftness from behind, 
 had an arm round my neck and a knee in my back 
 before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so 
 got me down. " I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing 
 little ruffian. My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, 
 and as I struck out and hit something like sacking, 
 some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to 
 be at me at the same time. Then I rolled over and 
 sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, 
 footballing my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst 
 
SCHOLASTIC 65 
 
 tlu ni. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation 
 and pursued them. 
 
 lUit I did not overtake tliem. \Vq are beincrs of 
 mixed composition, and I doubt if mine was a single- 
 minded pursuit. I knew that honour recpiired me to 
 j)ursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just 
 been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and 
 dirty little antagonist of disagreeable odour and in- 
 credible and incalculable unscrupulousness, kneeling on 
 me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course 
 to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching: him 
 would necessarily involve that. They kicked my cap 
 into the ditch at the end of the field, and made off com- 
 pactly along a cinder lane while I turned aside to recover 
 my dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the tlust out 
 of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my knees and 
 readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this 
 startling occurrence in my mind. 
 
 I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of 
 complaining at a police station, but some bovish in- 
 stinct against informing prevented that. No doubt I 
 entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous 
 reprisals. Ami I was acutely enraged whenever I 
 thought of my knife. The thing indeed rankled in my 
 mind for weeks and weeks, and altered all the flavour of 
 my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the 
 simple brute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our 
 civilization. A certain kindly complacency of attitude 
 towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever. 
 
 § 4 
 
 But the other experience was still more cardinal. 
 It was the first clear intimation of a new motif in life, 
 
 F 
 
66 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the sex motif, that was to rise and increase and accumu- 
 late power and enrichment and interweave with and at 
 last dominate all my life. 
 
 It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It 
 is inseparably connected in my mind with the dusk of 
 w^arm September evenings. I never met the girl I 
 loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It 
 was some insignificant name. 
 
 Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it 
 shining darkly like some deep-coloured gem in the 
 common setting of my memories. It came as some- 
 thing new and strange, something that did not join on 
 to anything else in my life or connect with any of my 
 thou£rhts or beliefs or habits; it was a Avonder, a 
 mvsterv, a discovery about myself, a discovery about 
 the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling 
 lose that isolation and spread itself out to illuminate 
 and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision 
 of life. 
 
 It was in that phase of an urban youth's develop- 
 ment, the phase of the cheap cigarette, that this thing 
 happened. One evening I came by chance on a number 
 of young people promenading by the light of a row of 
 shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of 
 a glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their 
 strolling number. These twilight parades of young 
 people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are 
 one of the odd social developments of the great suburban 
 growths — unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings 
 of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades — the 
 shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks 
 and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend 
 their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon 
 hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or 
 
SCHOLASTIC 67 
 
 cigarettes, and come vnliantly into the vapjue traiis- 
 flguiiii;^ niin<;ling of «;aslii;ht and evening, to walk iij) 
 and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make 
 friends. It is a (jueer instinctive revolt from the narrow 
 limited friendless homes in which so many find them- 
 selves, a going out towards something, romance if you 
 will, bcautv, that has suddenly become a need — a need 
 that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They 
 promenade. 
 
 Vulgar ! — it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the 
 moth abroad in the evening and lights the body of the 
 glow-worm in the night. I made my way through 
 the throng, a little contemptuously as ])ecame a public 
 schoolbov, my hands in my pockets — none of your 
 cheap canes for me ! — and very careful of the lie of my 
 cigarette upon my lips. And two girls passed me, one 
 a little taller than the other, with dim warm-tinted faces 
 under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes like pools 
 reflecting stars. 
 
 I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at 
 me over her shoulder — I could draw you now the pose 
 of her cheek and neck and shoulder — and instantly I was 
 as passionately in love with the girl as I have ever been 
 before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. 
 I turned about and followed them, I flung away my 
 cigarette ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and 
 spoke to them. 
 
 The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my 
 face. What I said and what she saitl I cannot remem- 
 ber, but I have little doubt it was something absolutely 
 vapid. It really did not matter ; the thing Wiis wc had 
 met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must: feel 
 when suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it 
 in tremulous amazement upon its mate. 
 
68 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We met, covered from each other, with all the nets 
 of civilization keeping us apart. AVe walked side by 
 side. 
 
 It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met 
 four or five times altogether, and always with her nearly 
 silent elder sister on the other side of her. We walked 
 on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively caress- 
 ing each other's hands, we went away from the glare 
 of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there 
 we whispered instead of talking and looked closely into 
 one another's warm and shaded face. "Dear," I 
 whispered very daringly, and she answered, " Dear ! " 
 We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that 
 quality of intimacy and more. We w^anted each other 
 as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again 
 the scent of flowers. 
 
 And that is all there was between us. The events 
 are nothing, the thing that matters is the way in which 
 this experience stabbed through the common stuff of 
 life and left it pierced, w4th a light, with a huge new 
 interest shining through the rent. 
 
 When I think of it I can recall even now the warm 
 mystery of her face, her lips a little apart, lips that I 
 never kissed, her soft shadowed throat, and I feel again 
 the sensuous stir of her proximity. . . . 
 
 These two girls never told me their surname nor let 
 me approach their house. They made me leave them 
 at the corner of a road of small houses near Penge 
 Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, 
 they vanished and came to the meeting-place no more, 
 they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the 
 night, and left me possessed by an intolerable want. . . . 
 
 The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. 
 I could not do my work and I could not rest at home. 
 
SCHOLASTIC 69 
 
 Night after night I promenaded up and down that 
 Monkeys' Tiirade full of an unappeasable desire, with a 
 thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to 
 have none on. I went backwards and forwards on the 
 way to the vanishing place, and at last explored the for- 
 bidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never 
 saw her again, except that later she came to me, my 
 symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How my blood was 
 stirred ! I lay awake of nights whispering in the 
 darkness for her. I prayed for her. 
 
 Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last 
 vestiires of me when her first real kiss came to her, 
 ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen to my imagination 
 and a texture to all my desires until I became a man. 
 
 I generalized her at last. I suddenly discovered 
 that poetry was about her and that she was the key to 
 all that had hitherto seemed nonsense about love. I 
 took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not 
 possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put 
 the book aside. . . . 
 
 I hesitate and adtl here one other confession. I 
 want to tell this thing because it seems to me we are 
 altogether too restrained and secretive about such 
 matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us 
 darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night. 
 
 One day during my Cambridge days — it nuist have 
 been in my first year before I knew Ilatherleigh — I saw 
 in a print-shop window near the Strand an engraving 
 of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its 
 dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare- 
 shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, 
 smiling faintly. I looked at it, went my wav, then 
 turned back and bouiiht it. I felt I must have it. 
 The odd thing is that I was more than a little shame- 
 
70 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 faced about it. I did not have it framed and hung in 
 my room open to the criticism of my friends, but I 
 kept it in the drawer of my writing-table. And I kept 
 that drawer locked for a year. It speedily merged 
 with and became identified with the dark girl of Penge. 
 That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often 
 when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be 
 reading, I was sitting with it before me. 
 
 Obeying some instinct, I kept the thing very secret 
 indeed. For a time nobody suspected what was locked 
 in my drawer nor what was locked in me. I seemed 
 as sexless as my world required. 
 
 §5 
 
 These things stabbed through my life, intimations 
 of things above and below and before me. They had 
 an air of being no more than incidents, interruptions. 
 
 The broad substance of my existence at this time 
 was the City Merchants School. Home was a place 
 where I slept and read, and the mooning explorations 
 of the south-eastern postal district which occupied the 
 restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere 
 interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and 
 distant spaces between the woven threads of a school- 
 boy's career. School life began for me every morning 
 at Heme Hill, for there I was joined by three or four 
 other boys and the rest of the way we went together. 
 Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our morn- 
 ing's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of 
 rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's 
 London have passed and left them, and I have revived 
 the impression of them again and again in recent years 
 
SCHOLASTIC 71 
 
 as 1 have clattered dinnerwarJ in a hansom or huimncd 
 alon<i: in a motor cab to some en<;a<rement. The main 
 gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient 
 well-proportioned kindliness upon St Margaret's Close. 
 There are imposing new science laboratories in Chambers 
 Street indeed, but the old playing fields are unaltered 
 except for the big electric trams that go droning and 
 spitting blue flashes along the western boundary. I 
 know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not 
 been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since 
 I went up to Cambridge. 
 
 I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, 
 for I had a mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have 
 grown mentally to man's estate and developed a more 
 and more comprehensive view of our national process 
 and our national needs, I am more and more struck by 
 the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their 
 aimless disconnectedness from the constructive forces in 
 the conmiunity. I suppose if we are to view the public 
 school as anything more than an institution that has 
 just chanced to happen, we must treat it as having 
 a definite function towards the general scheme of the 
 nation, as beiiiix in a sense desirrned to take the crude 
 young male of the more or less responsible class, to 
 correct his harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give 
 him a grasp of the contemporary developments he will 
 presently be called upon to influence and control, and 
 send him on to the university to be made a leading 
 and ruling social man. It is easy enough to car}) at 
 schoolmasters and set up for an Educational Ueformer, 
 I know, but still it is impossible not to feel how 
 infinitely more effectually — given certain impossibilities 
 perhaps — the job might be done. 
 
 ^ly memory of school luis indeed no hint whatever 
 
72 THE NEW MACHIAVELLT 
 
 of that quality of elucidation it seems reasonable to 
 demand from it. Here all about me was London, a 
 vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, 
 that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that 
 stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry ; 
 and my school not only offered no key to it, but had 
 practically no comment to make upon it at all. We 
 were within three miles of AVestminster and Charing 
 Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were 
 all within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were 
 going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed 
 with election placards, now the Salvation Army and now 
 the unemployed came trailing in procession through the 
 winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside 
 news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of 
 amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject 
 squalor and poverty, imperial splendour and luxury, 
 Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the slums 
 of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling coster- 
 mongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames 
 — such was the background of our days. We went 
 across St. IMargaret's Close and through the school gate 
 into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things. 
 We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was 
 necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for 
 the rest played games. We dipped down into some- 
 thing clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn 
 and for all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little 
 feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by Inigo 
 Jones. 
 
 Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of 
 instruction, Latin and Greek. We were taught very 
 badly because the men who taught us did not habitually 
 use either of these languages, nobody uses them any 
 
SCHOLASTIC T-:, 
 
 more now except pcihaps for the I^atin of a few 
 Ijevantine iiionastcriL's. At the utmost our men read 
 them. \Ve were taught these lan«;uagcs because lon^^ 
 ago Latin had been the hmguage of civihzation ; the 
 one way of escape from the narrow and locahzed life 
 had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards 
 Greek had come in as the vehicle of a Hood of new and 
 amaziuf; ideas. Once these two lani^uai^cs had been the 
 sole means of initiation to the detached criticism and 
 partial comprehension of the world. I can imagine the 
 iierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper, 
 teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a })ro- 
 gressive Chinaman miglit teach English to the boys of 
 Pekin, clumsily, impatiently, with rod and harsh 
 urgency, but sincerely, patriotically, because they felt 
 that, behind it lay revelations, the irresistible stimulus 
 to a new phase of history. That was long ago. A new 
 great world, a vaster Lnperialism had arisen about the 
 school, had assimilated all these amazing and incredible 
 ideas, had gone on to new and yet more amazing 
 developments of its own. IJut the City INIerchants 
 School still made the substance of its teachinjr Latin 
 and Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, 
 sowed in a dream amidst the harvestinir. 
 
 There is no fierceness left in the teachin": now. Just 
 after I went up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a 
 review article in defence of our curriculum. In this, 
 among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was 
 impossible to write good English without an illumi- 
 nating knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an 
 infinitive and failed to button up a sentence in saving 
 so. His main argument conceded every objection a 
 reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' 
 curriculum. He admitted that translation had now 
 
74 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 placed all the wisdom of the past at a common man'^s 
 disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained in 
 which modern work had not long since passed beyond 
 the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any utility. 
 But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these 
 grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction 
 possessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthen- 
 ing and orderly discipline for the mind. 
 
 He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, 
 himself a Senior Classic ! 
 
 Yet in a dim confused way I think he was making 
 out a case. In schools as he knew them, and with the 
 sort of assistant available, the sort of assistant who has 
 been trained entirely on the old lines, he could see 
 no other teaching so effectual in developing attention, 
 restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet 
 systematic adjustment. And that w^as as far as his 
 imagination could go. 
 
 It is infinitely easier to begin organized human 
 affairs tlian end them ; the curriculum and the 
 social organization of the English public school are 
 the crowning instances of that. They go on because 
 they have begun. Schools are not only immortal 
 institutions but reproductive ones. Our founder, 
 Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am sure, of Gates'* 
 pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have 
 dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools 
 and university colleges sprang into existence correlated, 
 the scholars went on to the universities and came back 
 to teach the schools, to teach as they themselves had 
 been taught, before they had ever made any real use 
 of the teaching ; the crowd of boys herded together, a 
 crowd perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, 
 adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed 
 
SCHOLASTIC 75 
 
 institutions. In a century, by its very success, this 
 revolutionary innovation of Ucnascunce public schools 
 had become an immense tradition woven closely into 
 the fabric of the national life. Intelliijent and 
 powerful people ceased to talk Latin or read Greek, 
 they had <;ot what was wanted, but that only left 
 the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. 
 Since most men of any importance or influence in the 
 country had been through the mill, it was naturally a 
 little diflicult to persuade them that it was not (juite 
 the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man could 
 devise. And, moreover, they did not want their 
 children made stranrre to them. There was all the 
 machinery and all the men needed to teach the old 
 subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic 
 mif^ht propose. Such science instruction as my father 
 gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the 
 classical grind. It was certainly an altogether inferior 
 instrument at that time. 
 
 So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study 
 of dead lan<iua<xes for seven lon<? years. It was the 
 strangest of detachments. AVe would sit under the 
 desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who 
 had fallffii into an enchanted pit, and he would do 
 his considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, 
 let us say, a Greek play. If we flagged he would 
 lash himself to revive us. lie would walk about the 
 class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar, and 
 asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it 
 was not " ^''/oWoz/5.''' The very sight of Greek letters 
 brings back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed 
 (|uality of our class-room, the banging of books, 
 Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca 
 gown, his deep unmusical intonations and the wide 
 
76 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 striding of his creaking boots. Glorious ! And being 
 plastic human beings we would consent that it was 
 glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering 
 reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times 
 responded freely. We all accepted from him un- 
 questioningly that these melodies, these strange sounds, 
 exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the 
 Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and 
 recovery, the stabbing lights, the heights and broad 
 distances of our English tongue. That indeed was the 
 chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek 
 and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every beauty 
 that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons. 
 
 And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors 
 who understood it best ? We visualized dimly through 
 that dust and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle 
 of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out pro- 
 tagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the 
 telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable 
 incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relent- 
 less Law we did not believe in for a moment, that no 
 modern western European can believe in. We thought 
 of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and costumes 
 of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had 
 come as yet to touch these things to life again. It was 
 like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost 
 that crumbled and condensed into a gritty dust of 
 construins: as one looked at it. 
 
 Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all 
 flavoured with the leathery stuffiness of time-worn 
 Big Hall. . . . 
 
 And then out one would come through our grey 
 old gate into the evening light and the spectacle of 
 London hurrying like a cataract, London in black 
 
SCHOLASTIC 77 
 
 and brown and blue and p^lcaminjr silver, roaring like 
 the very loom of Time. \Ve came out into the new 
 world no teacher has vet had the ijower and courai^e 
 to grasp and expound. Life and death sang all about 
 one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy 
 as never Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable 
 procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, 
 bearing countless people we knew not whence, we 
 knew not whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers 
 jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and hoarding 
 caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window 
 and street miu'rled with the warm frlow of the declinin^C 
 
 o n o 
 
 day under the softly flushing London skies ; the ever- 
 changing placards, the shouting news-vendors, told of 
 a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe. One did 
 not realize what had happened to us, but the voice of 
 Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his 
 minute, remote gesticulations. . . . 
 
 That submerged and isolated curriculum did not 
 even join on to living interests where it might have 
 done so. We were left absolutely to the hints of 
 the newspa})ers, to casual political speeches, to the 
 cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of 
 some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever 
 about the huge swirling world process in which we 
 found ourselves. I always look back with particular 
 exasperation to the cessation of our modern history 
 at the year 1815. There it pulled u{) abruptly, as 
 though it had come upon something indelicate. . . . 
 
 But after all, what would Topham or Flack have 
 made of the huge adjustments of the nineteenth 
 century? Flack was the chief cricketer on the staff; 
 he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the 
 place of this or that county in the struggle for the 
 
78 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 championship is a matter of supreme importance to 
 boys. He obliged us to affect a passionate interest in 
 the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural 
 enthusiasms. What a fuss there would be when 
 some well-trained boy, panting as if from IMarathon, 
 appeared with an evening paper ! " I say, you chaps, 
 Middlesex all out for a hundred and five ! '' 
 
 Under Flack"'s pressure I became, I confess, a cricket 
 humbug of the first class. I applied myself industriously 
 year by year to mastering scores and averages ; I pre- 
 tended that Lords and the Oval were the places nearest 
 Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through 
 a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted 
 Surrey for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we 
 were by some five hundred yards or so in Kent. It did 
 quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight 
 and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to 
 bowl Flack out. He was a bat in the Corinthian style, 
 rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a low 
 shooter or an unexpected Yorker, but usually he was 
 caught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl 
 him before he got caught. He loved to lift a ball to 
 leg. After one had clean bowled him at the practice 
 nets one deliberately gave him a ball to leg just to make 
 him feel nice again. 
 
 Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of 
 leg hits. He has been observed, going across the Park 
 on his w^ay to his highly respectable club in Piccadilly, 
 to break from profound musings into a strange brief 
 dance that ended with an imaginary swipe with his 
 umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham 
 Palace. The hit accomplished. Flack resumed his way. 
 
 Inadequately instructed foreigners would pass him 
 in terror, needlessly alert. 
 
SCHOLASTIC 79 
 
 These schoolmasters move throii<;h my memory as 
 always a little distant and more than a little incom- 
 prehensible. Except when they wore flannels, I saw them 
 almost always in old college caps and t^owns, a uniform 
 M'hich greatly increased their detachment from the world 
 of actual men. Gates, the Head, was a lean loosc-lindjcd 
 man, rather stupid I discovered when I leached the 
 Sixth and came into contact with him, but honest, simple 
 and very eager to be liberal-minded. He was bald, 
 with an almost conical baldness, with a grizzled pointed 
 beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a 
 Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an expression 
 of puzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable 
 opinions. He made a tall dignified figure in his gown. 
 In mv junior days he spoke to me only three or four 
 times, and then he annoyed me by giving me a wrong 
 surname ; it was a sore point because I was an outsider 
 and not one of the old school families, the Shoesmiths, 
 the Naylors, the Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises 
 and suchlike, who came generation after generation. I 
 recall him most vividly against the background of faded 
 brown book -backs in the old library in which we less 
 destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light 
 from the stained-jxlass window fallinic in coloured 
 patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of 
 having no colour of liis own. He had a habit of 
 scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he 
 used to come and consult us about things and in- 
 variably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was 
 "maintaining: the traditions of the school." 
 
 He had indeed an effect, not of a man directing a 
 
8o THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 school, but of a man captured and directed by a school. 
 Dead and gone Elizabethans had begotten a monster 
 that could carry him about in its mouth. 
 
 Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little 
 stirred by a Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did 
 at times display a disposition towards developments. 
 City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian 
 spirits were carping in the Pall Mall Gazette and 
 elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and 
 particularly at our want of German. Moreover, four 
 classes still worked together with much clashing and 
 uproar in the old Big Hall that had once held in a 
 common tumult the entire school. Gates used to come 
 and talk to us older fellows about these things. 
 
 " I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. 
 "But we ought to get in some German, you know, — 
 for those who like it. The army men will be wanting 
 it some of these days." 
 
 He referred to the organization of regular evening 
 preparation for the lower boys in Big Hall as a " revolu- 
 tionary change," but he achieved it, and he declared 
 he began the replacement of the hacked wooden tables, 
 at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by 
 sloping desks with safety inkpots and scientifically 
 adjustable seats, " with grave misgivings." And though 
 he never birched a boy in his life, and was, I am con- 
 vinced, morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained 
 the block and birch in the school through all his term 
 of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in 
 temperate approval of corporal chastisement, comparing 
 it, dear soul ! to the power of the sword. . . . 
 
 I wish I could, in some measure and without tedious- 
 ness, convey the effect of his discourses to General 
 Assembly in Big Hall. But that is like trying to draw 
 
SCHOLASTIC 8i 
 
 the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to complete 
 illciiibilitv. His tall fine fiirurc stood lii^h on the dais, 
 his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his 
 hazardous way through sentences that dragged incon- 
 clusive tails and dropped redundant prepositions. 
 Anil he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that 
 what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole 
 best avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening 
 notes and even with short arresting gestures of the 
 right arm and hand, to stir and exhort us towards 
 goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, 
 goodness in general and nothing in particular, which 
 the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional 
 years. 
 
 § 1 
 
 The school never quite got hold of me. Tartly I 
 think that was because I was a day-boy and so freer 
 than most of the boys, partly because of a tempera- 
 mental disposition to see things in mv own way and 
 have my private dreams, partly because I was a little 
 antagonized by the family traditions that ran through 
 the school. I was made to feel at first that I was a 
 rank outsider, and I never ([uite forgot it. I suflered 
 very little bullying, and I never had a fight — in all my 
 time there were only three fights — but I followed my 
 own curiosities. I was already a very keen theologian 
 and politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely 
 interested in motlern warfare. I read the morninir 
 papers in the Reading Room during the midday recess, 
 never missed the illustrated weeklies, and often when I 
 could afTbrd it I bought a Pall Mall Gazette on my 
 way home. 
 
 O 
 
82 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I do not think that I was very exceptional in that ; 
 most intelligent boys, I believe, want naturally to be 
 men, and are keenly interested in men''s affixirs. There 
 is not the universal passion for a magnified puerility 
 among them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a 
 voracious reader of everything but boy''s books — which 
 I detested — and fiction. I read histories, travel, popular 
 science and controversy with particular zest, and I 
 loved maps. School work and school games were quite 
 subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a 
 passable figure at games, and I do not think I was 
 abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, 
 to the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic 
 cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified 
 Georgian extensions ; the contrast of the old quiet, 
 that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere, 
 with the rushing and impending London all about it, 
 was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things 
 were certainly not the living and central interests of 
 my life. 
 
 I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain 
 extent — from the masters even more than from the 
 boys. Indeed, I only let myself go freely with one boy, 
 Britten, my especial chum, the son of the Agent- 
 General for East Australia. We two discovered in a 
 chance conversation a propos of a map in the library 
 that we were both of us curious why there were IMalays 
 in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from 
 the East Indies before steamships were available. 
 Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at 
 all in the school who knew or cared a rap about the 
 Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. 
 But Britten had come up through the Suez Canal, and 
 his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It 
 
SCHOLASTIC 83 
 
 i^^ave liiin a startling quality of li\iiiL,^ knowledge. 
 J'rom those pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment 
 ot" religions, and from that, by a sudden plunge, to 
 entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions concerning 
 Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School Assembly. 
 \Ve became congenial intimates from that hour. 
 
 The discovery of Britten happened to me when we 
 were both in the Lower Fifth. Previously there had 
 been a watertight compartment between the books I 
 read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and 
 human intercourse on the other. Now I really began 
 mv hiirher education, and aired and examined and 
 developed in conversation the doubts, the ideas, the 
 interpretations that had been forming in my mind. 
 As we were both day-boys with a good deal of control 
 over our time, we organized walks and expeditions 
 together, and my habit of solitary and rather vague 
 prowling gave way to much more definite joint enter- 
 prises. I went several times to his house — he was the 
 youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a 
 medical student and let us assist at the dissection of 
 a cat — and once or twice in vacation time he came to 
 Penge, and we went with parcels of provisions to do 
 a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the 
 Crystal Palace, ending with the fireworks at close 
 (juartcrs. AVe went in a river steamboat down to 
 (ireenwich, and fired by that made an excursion to 
 Margate and back ; we explored London docks and 
 Hethnal Green ]\Inseum, Petticoat Lane and all sorts 
 of out-of-the-way places together. 
 
 We confessed shvlv to one another a connnon secret 
 vice, " Phantom warfare."" AVhen we walked alone, 
 especially in the country, we had both developed the 
 same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us 
 
84 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 as we walked. As we went along we Avere generals, and 
 our attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and 
 gathering behind hedges, cresting ridges, occupying 
 copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house to 
 house. The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed 
 in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had 
 created to check a victorious invader coming out of 
 Surrey. For him West Kensington was chiefly im- 
 portant as the scene of a desperate and successful last 
 stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized the 
 Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a 
 royalist army — reinforced by Germans — advancing for 
 reasons best known to themselves by way of Harrow 
 and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary game, as we 
 found when we tried to play it together. We made a 
 success of that only once. All the way down to Mar- 
 gate we schemed defences and assailed and fought them 
 as we came back against the sunset. Afterwards we 
 recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large-scale 
 map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan 
 cut out of paper. 
 
 A subsequent revival of these imaginings was 
 brought about by Britten's luck in getting, through a 
 friend of his father's, admission for us both to the 
 spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in 
 Caxton Hall. We developed a war game of our own 
 at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead 
 soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard 
 and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly 
 elaborated set of rules. For some months that occupied 
 an immense proportion of our leisure. Some of our 
 battles lasted several days. We kept the game a pro- 
 found secret from the other fellows. They would not 
 have understood. 
 
SCnOLASTTC 85 
 
 And we also bc£;an, it was certainly before we were 
 sixteen, to write, for the sake of wrilinL;. We liked 
 writini^. A\'e liad discovered Lamb and the best of the 
 middle articles in such weeklies as the Stitiinhu/ G(izctti\ 
 and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim 
 uncertain thini^s we wanted to dra^^ out into the lif^ht 
 of expression. IJritten had got hold of Iti Mcmoriamy 
 and I had disinterred ro[)e''s Kssdj/ on Man and Uahhi 
 lull Kzni^ and tliese thiuf^s had set our theoloi^ical and 
 cosmic solicitudes talking. I was somewhere between 
 sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked 
 along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully 
 to one another that we had never read Lucretius. 
 Wq. thought every one who mattered had read 
 Lucretius. 
 
 \\'hcn I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken 
 ill very suddenly, and died of some perplexing complaint 
 that involved a post-mortem examination ; it was, I 
 think, the trouble that has since those days been 
 recognized as appendicitis. This led to a considerable 
 change in mv circumstances; the house at IVnge was 
 given up, and my Staffordshiro uncle arranged for me 
 to lodge during school terms with a needy solicitor and 
 his wife in Vicars Street, S.W., about a mile and a half 
 from the school. So it was I came right into London ; 
 I had almost two years of London before I went to 
 Caml)ridge. 
 
 Those were our great days together. Afterwards 
 we were torn apart; Ihitten went to Oxford, and our 
 circumstances never afterwards threw us continuously 
 together until the days of the Blue Wccklij. 
 
 As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the 
 same books, pursued the same eni[uiries. \Ve got a 
 reputation as inseparables and the nickname of the 
 
S6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set 
 with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of 
 face ; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller 
 than he. Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain 
 very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with 
 politics and religion, we went to that little meeting- 
 house of William Morris's at Hammersmith and worked 
 out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and 
 we got up the Darwinian theory with the help of 
 Britten's medical-student brother and the f^alleries of 
 the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. 
 Those wonderful cases on the ground floor illustrating 
 mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our 
 times, and we went through them with earnest industry 
 and tried over our Darwinism in the lio^ht of that. 
 Such topics we did exhaustively. But on the other 
 hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of 
 human sex or sexual relationships. There, in spite of 
 intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a 
 peculiar shyness. And I do not believe w^e ever had 
 occasion either of us to use the word " love.**' It was not 
 only that we were instinctively shy of the subject, but 
 that we were mightily ashamed of the extent of our 
 ig-norance and uncertaintv in these matters. We 
 evaded them elaborately with an assumption of ex- 
 haustive knowledge. 
 
 We certainly had no shyness about theology. We 
 marked the emancipation of our spirits from the fright- 
 ful teachings that had oppressed our boyhood, by much 
 indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret 
 literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of 
 theological caricature. Britten's father had delighted 
 his family by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's 
 Tw'iUglit of the Gods, and Britten conveyed the precious 
 
SCHOLASTIC 87 
 
 volmnc to nie. Tliat aiui the Ihib Ihilldds were the 
 inspiration of some ot" our earliest lucubrations. 
 
 For an imaginative boy the first experience of 
 writing is like a tiger's first taste of blood, and our 
 literary flowerings led very directly to the revival of 
 the school niaga/ine, whic-h had been comatose for some 
 years. But there we came upon a disappointment. 
 
 §7 
 
 In that revival we associated certain other of the 
 Sixth I'orm boys, and notably one for whom our enter- 
 prise was to lay the foundations of a career that has 
 ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, now 
 Lord Taddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a 
 rather heavy, rather good-looking boy who was chieily 
 eminent in cricket, an outsider even as we were, and 
 j)reoccupicd no doubt, had we been sufliciently detiiched 
 to observe him, with private imaginings very much of 
 the same ([uality and spirit as our own. He was, we 
 were inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather 
 a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic style, played 
 chess very well, betrayed a belief in will-power, and 
 earned Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, 
 by the invariable neatness of his collars and ties. He 
 came into our magazine with a vigour that we found 
 extremely surprising and unwelcome. 
 
 Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed 
 figured our project modestly as a manuscript magazine 
 of satiricid, liberal and brilliant literature by which in 
 some ratlicr inexplicable way the vague tunudt of ideas 
 that teemed within us was to find form and expression; 
 Cossington, it was manife^^t from the outset, wanted 
 
88 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 neither to write nor writing, but a magazine. I 
 remember the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's 
 study — we had had great trouble in getting it together 
 — and how effectually Cossington bolted with the 
 proposal. 
 
 " I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said 
 Cossington. " The school used to have one. A school 
 like this ousrht to have a maorazine." 
 
 '* The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the 
 hearthrug. " Called the Observer. Rot rather." 
 
 " Bad title," said Cossington. 
 
 " There was a Tatler before that,**' said Britten, sit- 
 ting on the writing-table at the window that was closed 
 to deaden the cries of the Lower School at play, and 
 clashing his boots together. 
 
 " We want something suggestive of City Merchants." 
 
 " City Merchandize^^'' said Britten. 
 
 "Too fanciful. What of Arvonimi? Richard 
 Arvon was our founder, and it seems almost a duty " 
 
 " They call them all -usians or -onians," said Britten. 
 
 *' I like City Merchandize^'' I said. " We could 
 probably find a quotation to suggest — oh ! mixed 
 good things." 
 
 Cossington regarded me abstractedly. 
 
 " Don't want to put the accent on the City, do 
 we ? " said Shoesmith, who had a feeling for county 
 families, and Naylor supported him by a murmur of 
 approval. 
 
 " We ought to call it the Ai'von'ian^^'' decided 
 Cossington, " and we might very well have underneath, 
 'With which is incorporated the Observer.'' That 
 picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old 
 boys and all that, and it gives us something to print 
 under the title." 
 
SCHOLASTIC .^9 
 
 I still held out for City AfnrhandizCj which h.ul 
 taken my fancv. " Some of the chaps'* people woiTt 
 like it," said Naylor, "certain not to. And it sounds 
 Rum." 
 
 "Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto 
 spoken. 
 
 "We aren't ^oing to do anything Queer," said 
 Shoesmith, pointedly not lookincj at Written. 
 
 The (piestion of the title had manil'estlyi^one against 
 us. "Oh! have it A rvoniaii,'''* I said. 
 
 " And next, what size shall we have ? " said 
 Cossington. 
 
 "Something like Mdcmilhins j\[ciga::inc — or 
 Longmans' ; Longmans is better because it has a whole 
 page, not columns. It makes no end of difference to 
 one's effects." 
 
 " What effects ? " asked Shoesmith abruptly. 
 
 "Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've 
 got to write closer for a double colunni. It's nuggetty. 
 You can't get a swing on your prose." I had discussed 
 this thoroughly with IJritten. 
 
 "If the fellows are going to write " began 
 
 Britten. 
 
 " We ought to keep of!" fine writing," said Shoesmith. 
 " It's cheek. I vote we don't have any." 
 
 " We shan't get any," said Cossington, and then as 
 an olive branch to me, "unless Kemington does a bit. 
 Or Britten. But it's no good making too much space 
 for it." 
 
 " We ought to be very careful about the writing," 
 said Shoesmith. " We don't want to give ourselves 
 away." 
 
 " I vote we ask old To})ham to see us through," said 
 Nay lor. 
 
90 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 Britten frroaned aloud and every one regarded him. 
 "Greek epigrams on the fellows' names,"" he said. 
 "Small beer in ancient bottles. Let's get a stuffed 
 broody hen to sit on the magazine." 
 
 " We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said 
 Cossington. " One in each number. It — it impresses 
 parents and keeps up our classical tradition. And the 
 masters ca?i help. We don't want to antagonize them. 
 Of course — we've got to departmentalize. Writing is 
 only one section of the thing. The Arvonian has to 
 stand for the school. There's questions of space and 
 questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk 
 of printed prose like — like wet cold toast and call it a 
 magazine." 
 
 Britten writhed, appreciating the image. 
 
 " There's to be a section of sports. You must do 
 that." 
 
 " I'm not going to do any fine writing," said 
 Shoesmith. 
 
 " What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps 
 and put a note to their play : — ' Naylor minor must 
 pass more. Football isn't the place for extreme In- 
 dividualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half-back.' 
 Things like that." 
 
 " I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, 
 brightening and manifestly becoming pregnant with 
 judgments. 
 
 "One great thing about a magazine of this sort," 
 said Cossington, "is to mention just as many names as 
 you can in each number. It keeps the interest alive. 
 Chaps will turn it over looking for their own little bit. 
 Then it all lights up for them." 
 
 " Do you want any reports of matches .^ " Shoesmith 
 broke from his meditation. 
 
SCHOLASTIC 91 
 
 " Ratlier. With coninieiits." 
 
 *' Navlor suipassL'd hiinself and negotiated the 
 lemon safely hoine/"* said Shoesniith. 
 
 '' Shut it," said Naylor modestly. 
 
 " Exactly/' said Cossington. " That gives us three 
 features," touchiiif; them oil* on his (in<;ers, " K{)if^ram, 
 Literary Section, Sports. Tlien we want a section to 
 shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything that's 
 coinii on. So on. Our Note Book." 
 
 " Oh, Hell ! " said Britten, and clashed his boots, to 
 the silent disapproval of every one. 
 
 " Then we want an editorial." 
 
 " A Tcliat ?" cried Britten, with a note of real terror 
 in his voice. 
 
 " Well, don't we ? Unless we have our Note Book 
 to begin on the front page. It gives a scrappy eflect 
 to do that. We want something manlv and straight- 
 forward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or 
 Esprit dc Corps^ or After-Life." 
 
 I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not con- 
 sidered Cossington mattered very much in the world. 
 
 He went over us as a motor-car goes over a dog. 
 There was a sort of energy about him, a new sort of 
 energy to us ; we had never realized that anything of 
 the sort existed in tlie world. We were hopelessly at a 
 disadvantage. Almost instantly he had develoj)ed a 
 clear and detailed vision of a magazine made up of 
 everything that was most acceptable in the magazines 
 that flourished in the adult world about us, and had 
 determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of 
 instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarized every 
 successful magazine and breathed into this dusty 
 mixture the breath of life. He was elected at his own 
 suggestion managing director, with the earnest support 
 
92 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of Slioesmith and Naylor, and conducted the magazine 
 so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole 
 back page of advertisements from the big sports shop 
 in Holborn, and made the printers pay at the same rate 
 for a notice of certain books of their own which they 
 said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up space. 
 The only literary contribution in the first number was a 
 column by Topham in foultless stereotyped English in 
 depreciation of some fancied evil called Utilitarian 
 Studies and ending with that noble old quotation : — 
 
 " To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.'* 
 
 And Flack crowded us out of number two with a 
 bright little paper on the " Humours of Cricket," and 
 the Head himself was profusely thoughtful all over the 
 editorial under the heading of " The School Chapel ; 
 and How it Seems to an Old Boy."" 
 
 Britten and I found it difficult to express to each 
 other with any grace or precision what we felt about 
 that magazine. 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 Adolescence 
 
 § 1 
 
 I FIND it very difTicult to trace how form was added to 
 form and interpretation followed interpretation in my 
 ever-spreading, ever-deepening, ever-multiplying and 
 enriching vision of this world into which I had been 
 born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its 
 subtle explications to the growing understanding. 
 Day after day the living interlacing threads of a 
 mind weave together. Every morning now for three 
 weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I started 
 on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea 
 of the factors and early influences by which my particular 
 scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the 
 chikl playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by 
 his mother, gazing aghast at his dead lather, exploring 
 interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the 
 sexuid mystery, coming in with a sort of confused 
 avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It 
 is only by such 'an eflbrt to write it down that one 
 realizes how marvellously crowded, how marvellously 
 analytical and synthetic those vears must be. One 
 begins with the little child to whom tlie sky is a roof 
 of blue, the world a screen of opatjue and disconnected 
 
 93 
 
94 THE NEW INIACHIAVELLl 
 
 facts, the home a thing eternal, and " being good "" just 
 simple obedience to unquestioned authority ; and one 
 comes at last to the vast world of one's adult perception, 
 pierced deep by flaring searchlights of partial under- 
 standing, here masked by mists, here refracted and 
 distorted through half translucent veils, here showing 
 broad prospects and limitless vistas, and here impene- 
 trably dark. 
 
 I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even 
 prayers by night, and strange occasions when by a 
 sort of hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought 
 to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is hard 
 to measure these things in receding perspective, and 
 now I cannot trace, so closely has mood succeeded and 
 overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an 
 utter horror of death was replaced by the growing 
 realization of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of 
 the imagination with infinite space, infinite time, 
 entangled my mind ; and moral distress for the pain 
 and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of 
 reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony 
 upon now irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate 
 perplexity of these broadening years did not so much 
 get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me away 
 from it. 
 
 I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, 
 and in that passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged 
 widely in my search for some permanently satisfying 
 Truth. That, too, "ceased after a time to be urgently 
 interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures 
 to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute con- 
 fidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Compre- 
 hensive which must needs be the substratum of all 
 things, may be. Feeling of it, feeling hi/ it, I cannot 
 
ADOLESCENCE 95 
 
 feci afraid of it. I think I had ^ot (luitc clearly and 
 finally to that adjustment lonf^ before my Cambridge 
 days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is 
 transitory and finite like an accident or distress in 
 the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may 
 trust Him, even thou^^h life hurts so that one must 
 needs cry out at it, even thou^^h it sliows no con- 
 sei[uence but faihire, no promise but pain. . . . 
 
 But while I was fearless of theol();;y I nuist confess 
 it was comparatively late before I faced and dared to 
 prob the secrecies of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had 
 an instinctive perception that it would be a large and 
 difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all 
 in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, 
 iis somethin£:C disconnected from all the broad signifi- 
 canccs of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. 
 The world was never so emasculated in thought, I 
 suppose, as it was in the Victorian time. . . . 
 
 I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have 
 always found inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) 
 beauty. Even as a boy I knew the thing as a haunting 
 and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away from. 
 Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the 
 extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my 
 upbringing. . . . 
 
 The plaster Venuses and A polios that used to adorn 
 the vast aisle and hujxe 'rrey terraces of the Crystal 
 Palace were the first intimations of the beauty of the 
 ])ody that ever came into my life. As I write of it I 
 feel again the shameful attraction of those gracious 
 forms. I used to look at them not simply, but 
 curiously and askance. Once at least in my later days 
 at Tenge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the 
 sake of them. . . . 
 
96 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary 
 upbringing seems to me now that swathing up of all 
 the splendours of the flesh, that strange combination 
 of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me 
 about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I 
 will not say blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance 
 blurred and dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical 
 warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in 
 which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like a 
 thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. 
 There was indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful 
 Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and 
 minatory gap. I have told how at last a new Venus 
 was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the 
 twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes 
 shining out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, 
 passion-stirring atmosphere rather than incarnate in a 
 body. And I have told, too, how I bought a picture. 
 
 All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, 
 a locked avoided chamber. . . . 
 
 It was not until my last year at Trinity that I 
 really broke down the barriers of this unwholesome 
 silence and brought my secret broodings to the light 
 of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into 
 what we called at first sociological discussion. I can 
 still recall even the physical feeling of those first 
 tentative talks. I remember them mostly as occurring 
 in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the 
 corner by the Trinity great gate, but we also used to 
 talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named, if 
 I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of 
 Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke 
 against a background brown and deep. He professed 
 himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings — he had 
 
ADOLESCENCE 97 
 
 siifTercd the niartvrdoin of ducking; for it — and a liiiL^e 
 French ]\Iav-l);iv })()stL'r dispLiyini^ a splendid prole- 
 tarian in red and bhick on a barricade against a flaring 
 orange skv, dominated his decorations. Ilatherleigh 
 affected a fine untidiness, and all the place, even the 
 floor, was littered with books, for the most part open 
 and face downward ; deeper darknesses were supplieil 
 by a discariled gown and our caps, all conscientiously 
 battered, Ilatherleigh's flopped like an elephant's ear, 
 and inserted c[uill })ens supported the corners of mine ; 
 the high lights of the picture came chiefly as reflections 
 from his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. \Ve 
 sat on oak chairs, except the four or five who crowded 
 on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were 
 often fuddled, and occasionally quite drunk, and we all 
 smoked reckless-looking pipes, — there was a transient 
 fashion among us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, 
 I think, was responsible. Our little excesses with 
 licpior were due far more to conscience than appetite, 
 indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints 
 that we suspected were keeping us off the instructive 
 knife-edges of life. Hatherleigh was a good English- 
 man of the premature type with a red face, a lot of 
 hair, a deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, 
 and it was he who said one evening — Heaven knows 
 how we got to it — "Look here, you know, it's all 
 Rot, this Shutting Up about Women. We ou^lit 
 to talk about them. A\'hat are we croinir to do about 
 them ? It's got to come. AWre all festering inside 
 about it. Let's out with it. There's too much 
 Decency altogether about this Infernal University ! ' 
 
 AVe rose to his challenge a little aw kwardly and our 
 first talk was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red 
 ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a 
 
 u 
 
98 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 monologue on decency. " Modesty and Decency," said 
 Hatherleigh, " are Oriental vices. The Jews brought 
 them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monas- 
 ticism here and the seclusion of women and mutilating 
 the dead on a battlefield. And all that sort of thing.*" 
 
 Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps 
 that were usually wildly inaccurate, and for a time we 
 engaged hotly upon the topic of those alleged mutila- 
 tions and the Semitic responsibility for decency. Hather- 
 leigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the 
 less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the north- 
 w^est frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that 
 time a little-known author, and Cunninghame Graham 
 to show that the Arab was worse than a county-town 
 spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case 
 was too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill pene- 
 trating voice and his way of pointing with all four long 
 fingers flat together, carried the point against him. 
 He quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries 
 of Thibet. 
 
 " Well, anyway,*" said Hatherleigh, escaping from 
 our hands like an intellectual frog, " Semitic or not, 
 Fve got no use for decency." 
 
 We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an 
 unusually balanced and tolerating attitude. " I don't 
 mind a certain refinement and dignity," he admitted 
 generously. " What I object to is this spreading out 
 of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it 
 makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most 
 important things, until it makes a man afraid to 
 look a frank book in the face or think — even think ! 
 until it leads to our coming to — to the business 
 at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few 
 hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and" — he waved a 
 
ADOLESCENCE 99 
 
 hand and seemed to seek nnd catch his inm«:^c in the 
 air — "oh, a confounded buttered slide of sentiment, to 
 guide us. I tell you Fm goin^ij to think aljout it and 
 talk about it until I sec a little more davliiiht than I 
 do at present. I'm twenty-two. Tilings might happen 
 to me anywhcn. You men can go out into the world if 
 you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools, not 
 knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask. 
 You'll take the consequences, too, I exj)ect, pretty 
 meekly, sniggering a bit, sentimentalizing a bit, like — 
 like Cambridge humorists. . . . / mean to know what 
 I'm doing." 
 
 He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas 
 of my own. But one is apt to forget one's own share 
 in a talk, I find, more than one does the clear-cut 
 objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how 
 far I contributed to this discussion that followed. I 
 am, however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal 
 that we were pleased to call aristocracy and which soon 
 became the common property of our set was developed. 
 It was Esmecr, I know, who laid down and maintained 
 the proposition that so far as minds went there were 
 really only two sorts of man in the world, the 
 aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to other 
 people's. 
 
 *" I couldn't thinlc of it, Sir,"*" said Esmeer in his 
 elucidatory tones ; "■ that's what a servant says. His 
 mind even is broken in to run between fences, and he 
 admits it. Were got to be able to think of anything. 
 And '.such things aren't for the Likes of T^s ! ' That's 
 another servant's saying. Well, everything if for the 
 Likes of l^s. If we see fit, that is." 
 
 A small fresh-coloured man in grev objectetl. 
 
 "Well,'^ exploded Ilatherleigh, **Mf that isnt so 
 
100 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 what the deuce are we up here for ? Instead of working 
 in mines ? If some things aren't to be thought about 
 ever ! We've got the privilege of all these extra years 
 for jretting thin^js straiMit in our heads, and then we 
 won't use 'em. Good God ! what do you think a 
 university's for ? " . . . 
 
 Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emanci- 
 pation to several of us. We were not going to be 
 afraid of ideas any longer, we were going to throw 
 down every barrier of prohibition and take them in 
 and see what came of it. We became for a time even 
 intemperately experimental, and one of us, at the bare 
 suggestion of an eminent psychic investigator, took 
 hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of 
 our great elucidation. 
 
 The chief matter of our interchanges was of course 
 the discussion of sex. Once the theme had been 
 opened it became a sore place in our intercourse ; none 
 of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our imagi- 
 nations got astir with it. We made up for lost time 
 and went round it and through it and over it ex- 
 haustively. I recall prolonged discussion of polygamy 
 on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to 
 Madingley, when amidst much profanity from Hather- 
 leigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, 
 we weighed the reasons, if any, for the institution of 
 marriage. The fine dim night-time spaces of the Great 
 Court are bound up with the inconclusive finales of 
 mighty hot- eared wrangles ; the narrows of Trinity 
 Street and Petty Cury and Market Hill have their 
 particular associations for me with that spate of con- 
 fession and free speech, that almost painful goal delivery 
 of long pent and crappled and sometimes crippled ideas. 
 
 And we went on a reading party that Easter to a 
 
ADOLESCENCE loi 
 
 place calU'd Pull)()roii<;h in Siisscx/wlicre there is a fish- 
 ing inn and a river that goes under a bridge. It was a 
 late Easter and a l^lazing one, and we boated and 
 bathed and talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of 
 the body until at moments it seemed to us that we 
 were destined to restore the (lolden Af^c, by the simple 
 abolition of tailors and outfitters. 
 
 Those undergraduate talks ! how lich and «:lorious 
 they seemed, how splendidly new the ideas that grew 
 and nudtiplied in our seething minds! ^Ve made long 
 afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards 
 Arundel, and would come tramping back through the 
 still keen moonliiiht sino-ijifi and shoutiuf^. We formed 
 romantic friendships with one another, and grieved more 
 or less convincingly that there were no splendid women 
 fit to be our companions in the world. Jkit Ilather- 
 leigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was 
 gloriously red. *' ^ly God!"" said llatherleigh to con- 
 vey the ([uality of her; just simply and with projectile 
 violence : " My God ! '' 
 
 Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a 
 man refusing to be married to him — we thought that 
 splendid beyond measure, — I cannot now imagine why. 
 She was '"like a tender goddess,"'' Benton said. A sort 
 of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal 
 intentions when IJenton committed himself to that. 
 And after such talk we would fall upon great pauses of 
 emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl 
 in a governess cart, or some farmer's daughter wiilking 
 to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously 
 indiflerent to her. lor might she not be just that one 
 exception to the banal decency, the sicklv })ointless 
 conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in 
 which we lived.'' 
 
102 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We felt we stood for a new movement, not realizing 
 how perennially this same emancipation returns to those 
 ancient courts beside the Cam. We were the anti- 
 decency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we 
 flourished about in the Union and made our watch- 
 word, namely, " stark fact."' AVe hung nude pictures 
 in our rooms much as if they had been flags, to the 
 earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my 
 long-kept engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, 
 and found for it a completer and less restrained com- 
 panion, a companion I never cared for in the slightest 
 degree. ... 
 
 This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it 
 rather helped, our more formal university work, for 
 most of us took Firsts, and three of us got Fellowships 
 in one year or another. There was Benton who had 
 a Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there 
 Avas Esmeer and myself who both became Residential 
 Fellows. I had taken the Mental and Moral Science 
 Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a 
 lectureship in political science. In those days it was 
 disguised in the cloak of Political Economy. 
 
 § 3 
 
 It was our affectation to be a little detached from 
 the main stream of undergraduate life. We worked 
 pretty hard, but by virtue of our beer, our socialism 
 and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be diffe- 
 rentiated from the swatting reading man. None of 
 us, except Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather 
 abnormal blue with an appetite for ideas, took games 
 seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we 
 
ADOT.ESCENCE 103 
 
 intimated conLtinjjt for the rather niediocrc, deliberately 
 humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild 
 underf^raduate men who made up the nnuss of Candjriilge 
 life. After the manner of youth we were altogether too 
 hard on our contemporaries. AVe battered our ca})s and 
 tore our ^owns lest they should seem new, and we de- 
 spised these others extremely fordoing exactly the same 
 things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond 
 measure a similar weakness in these our brothers. 
 
 There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to 
 be a type — Vm a little doubtful at times now whether 
 after all we didn't create it — for which Ilatherleigh 
 invented the nickname the " Pinky Dinkys,'' intending 
 thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal 
 measure. The Pinky Dinky summarized all that we 
 particularly did not want to be, and also, I now per- 
 ceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly 
 dreaded ])ecoming. 
 
 But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for 
 all that it meant so much to us. We spent one even- 
 ing at least during that reading party upon the Pinky 
 Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the 
 rain — it was our only wet day — smoked our excessively 
 virile pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the 
 Pinky Dinky. We improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky 
 litany, and Ilatherleigh supplied deep notes for the 
 responses. 
 
 "The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amuse- 
 ment from life," said some one. 
 
 "Damned prig!" said Ilatherleigh. 
 
 "The Pinkv Dinky arises in the Union and treats 
 the (piestion with a light gay touch. He makes the 
 weird ones mad. Ihit sometimes he cannot go on 
 because of the amusement he extracts.^ 
 
104 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " I want to shy books at the giggling swine," said 
 Hathcrleigh. 
 
 " The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making 
 the tea, ' We're all being frightfully funny. It's time 
 for you to say something now." " 
 
 " The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says : ' I'm 
 afraid I shall never be a responsible being.' And he 
 really is frivolous."" 
 
 " Frivolous but not vulgar," said Esmeer. 
 
 " Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds 
 nip])cd," said Ilatherleigh. "They're Plebs and they 
 know it. They haven't the Guts to get hold of things. 
 And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of 
 theirs to carry it off." . . . 
 
 We tried bad ones for a time, viciously flavoured. 
 
 " Pinky Dinkys are due to over-production of the 
 type that ought to keep outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys 
 would like to keep outfitters' shops with whimsy 
 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, 
 and not be snobs to customers, no ! — not even if they 
 had titles." 
 
 "Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good 
 people, and better than most Pinky Dinky's people. 
 But he does not put on side." 
 
 "Pinky Dinkys become playful at the sight of 
 women." 
 
 " ' Croquet's my game,' said the Pinky Dinky, and 
 felt a man condescended." 
 
 " But what the devil do they think they're up to, 
 anyhow ? " roared old Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping 
 plump into bottomless despair. 
 
 We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the 
 mystery of the Pinky Dinky. 
 
 We tried over things about his religion. "The 
 
ADOLESCENCE 105 
 
 I'inkv Dlnkv n;nc\s to Kini;"'s C'haj)cl, and sits and feels 
 in the dusk. Solemn things ! Oh hwsh ! lie wouldn't 
 tell you " 
 
 "lie could lit tell you."" 
 
 " Religion is so sacred to him he never talks aliout 
 it, never reads about it, never thinks about it. Just 
 feels ! " 
 
 "But in his heart of hearts, oh! ever so deep, the 
 Pinky Dinky has a doubt " 
 
 Some one protested. 
 
 *' Not a vulgar doubt,'"* Esmeer went on, " but a 
 kind of hesitation whether the Ancient of Days is 
 reallv exactly what one would call good form. . . . 
 There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world 
 somehow. Somchodij put it there. . . . And anyhow 
 there's no particular reason why a man should be seen 
 about with Him. He's jolly Awful of course and all 
 that " 
 
 " The Pinky Dinky for all his fun and levity has 
 a clean mind." 
 
 *' A thoroughly clean mind. Not like Esmeer's — 
 the Pig ! " 
 
 "If once he began to think about sex, how could 
 he be comfortable at cro([uet ? ''"' 
 
 " It's their Damned iModesty," said Ilatherleigh 
 suddenly, " that's what's the matter with the Pinky 
 Dinky. It's Mental Cowardice dressed up as a virtue 
 and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked 
 with it; it's some confounded local bacillus. Like the 
 thing that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He 
 comes up here to be made into a man and a ruler of 
 the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition 
 not to take on the job! How the Devil is a great 
 Empire to be run with men like him .^'*' 
 
io6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer, 
 reorarding his feet on the fender, "it's just a nervous 
 snicTirerinf]: — because he's afraid. . . . Oxford's no 
 better." 
 
 " What's he afraid of ? " said I. 
 
 " God knows ! " exploded Ilatherleigh and stared at 
 the fire. 
 
 " Ufe ! " said Esmeer. " And so in a way are we," 
 he added, and made a thoughtful silence for a time. 
 
 " I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural 
 Science Tripos, *' what is the adult form of the Pinky 
 Dinky.?" 
 
 But there we were checked by our ignorance of the 
 world. 
 
 " What is the adult form of any of us ? " asked 
 Benton, voicing the thought that had arrested our 
 flow. 
 
 §3 
 
 I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism 
 to the dons and the organization of the University. I 
 think we took them for granted. When I look back 
 at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude 
 of things that we took for granted. It seemed to us 
 that Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the 
 world like having eyebrows or a vermiform appendix. 
 Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can 
 entertain very fundamental doubts about these old 
 universities. Indeed I had a scheme 
 
 I do not see what harm I can do now by laying 
 bare the purpose of the political combinations I was 
 trying to effect. 
 
 My educational scheme was indeed the starting- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 107 
 
 point of all the biu; project of eonscions public recon- 
 struction lit which I aimed. I wanted to build up a 
 new eduoitional machine altogether for the f^overninf^ 
 class out of a consolidated system of special ])ublic 
 service schools. I meant to get to work upon this 
 whatever oliice I was given in the new government. I 
 could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the 
 War Office quite as easily as from the Education 
 Office. I am lirndy convinced it is hopeless to think 
 of reforming the old public schools and universities 
 to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their 
 roots too deep and far, the cost would exceed any 
 good that could possibly be effected, and so I have 
 sought a way round this invincible obstacle. I do 
 think it would be quite practicable to side-track, as the 
 Americans say, the whole system by creating hard- 
 working, hard-living, modern and scientific boys' 
 schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for the 
 public service generally, and as they grew, opening them 
 to the public without any absolute obligation to subse- 
 quent service. Simultaneously with this it would not 
 be impossible to develop a new college svstem with 
 strong faculties in modern philosophv, modern history, 
 European literature and criticism, physical and biological 
 science, education and sociology. 
 
 We could in fact create a new liberal education in 
 this way, and cut the umbilicus of the classical languages 
 for good and all. I should have set this going, and 
 trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and 
 the Oxford and Cambridge tradition alto«:ether. I 
 had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should 
 have found others. I should have aimed at making a 
 hard-trained, capable, intellectually active, proud tvpe 
 of man. Everything else would have been made 
 
io8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on the 
 men through their vacation, and somehow or other I 
 would have contrived a young woman to match them. 
 I think I could have seen to it effectually enough that 
 they didn't get at croquet and tennis with the vicarage 
 daughters and discover sex in the Peeping Tom fashion 
 I did, and that they realized quite early in life that it 
 isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I should have had 
 military manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, 
 mountaineering and so forth, in the place of the solemn 
 trivialities of games, and I should have fed and housed 
 my men clean and very hard — where there wasn't any 
 audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high 
 pressure douches. . . . 
 
 I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after 
 time since I came down, and so far as the Empire goes, 
 I want to get clear of those two places. . . . 
 
 Always I renew my old feelings, a physical op- 
 pression, a sense of lowness and dampness almost 
 exactly like the feeling of an underground room where 
 paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of in- 
 eradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the 
 narrow ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of 
 stuffy little villas. Those little villas have destroyed 
 all the good of the old monastic system and none of its 
 evil. . . . 
 
 Some of the most charming people in the world 
 live in them, but their collective effect is below the 
 quality of any individual among them. Cambridge is 
 a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, 
 of prim conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, 
 but it has no fear of God ; it offers amidst surroundings 
 that vary between dinginess and antiquarian charm the 
 inflammation of literature's purple draught ; one hears 
 
ADOLESCENCE 109 
 
 there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in 
 the world — a covetous scandal — so that I am always 
 reminded of Ibsen in Cambridf^e. In Cambridge and 
 the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem ap{)ropriate for 
 the heroine before the great crises of lifi; to "enter, 
 take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon 
 the writing desk." . . . 
 
 "We have to make a new Academic mind for modem 
 needs, and the last thing to make it out of, I am con- 
 vinced, is the old x\cademic mind. One might as soon 
 try to fake the old Victory at Portsmouth into a line 
 of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic 
 mind, like those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is 
 nuich too delightful in its peculiar and distinctive way 
 to damage by futile patching. 
 
 ]\Iy heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity 
 as I recall dear old Codger, surely the most " unleaderly " 
 of men. No more than from the old Schoolmen, his 
 kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. 
 Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and 
 adorable as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he 
 was a power in C ambridge, he could make and bar and 
 destroy, and in a way he has become the (quintessence 
 of Cambridge in my thoughts. 
 
 I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with 
 his plump childish face, his round innocent eyes, his 
 absurdly non-prehensile fiit hand carrying his cap, his 
 grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a triHe 
 inturned, and going across the great court with a cjueer 
 tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive 
 undergraduate eye. Ov I see him lecturing. He 
 lectured walking up and down between the desks, 
 talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost 
 lucidity. If he could not walk up and down he could 
 
no THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the 
 fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid ; one felt it 
 could flow round anything and overcome nothing. 
 And its nimble eddies were wonderful ! Or again I 
 recall him drinking port with little muscular move- 
 ments in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows 
 knit — very judicial, very concentrated, preparing to say 
 the apt just thing ; it was the last thing he would have 
 told a lie about. 
 
 When I think of Codger I am reminded of an in- 
 scription I saw on some occasion in Regent's Park 
 above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent than 
 his — "Born in the Menagerie." Never once since 
 Codger began to display the early promise of scholar- 
 ship at the age of eight or more, had he been outside 
 the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here 
 and lecture there. His student phase had culminated 
 in papers of quite exceptional brilliance, and he had 
 gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit 
 and mannerism that had made him a success from the 
 becrinninff. He has lectured ever since. He lectures 
 still. Year by year he has become plumper, more 
 rubicund and more and more of an item for the 
 intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was 
 pointed out to people as part of our innumerable 
 enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He has be- 
 come now almost the leading Character in a little 
 donnish world of much too intensely appreciated 
 Characters. 
 
 He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his 
 knowledge of port wine. Of other wines he confessed 
 quite frankly he had no " special knowledge." Beyond 
 these things he had little pride except that he claimed 
 to have read every novel by a woman writer that had 
 
ADOLESCENCE t t i 
 
 ever entered the Union Library. This, liowcver, he 
 held to he remarkable rather than eiiiioblinc^, and such 
 boasts as he made of it were tinned with ])layfulness. 
 Certainly he had a scholar's knowlcdf^e of the works of 
 Miss Marie Corelh, Miss Braddon, Miss Elinor (ilvn 
 and Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished 
 and flattered those ladies enormouslv, and he loved 
 nothini; so much in his hours of relaxation as to pro- 
 pound and answer diflitult (picstions upon their books. 
 Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field, 
 their bouts were memorable and rarely other than 
 glorious for Codger ; but then Tusher spread himself 
 too much, he also undertook to rehearse whole pages 
 out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the changes how 
 to get from any station to any station in Great Britain 
 by the nearest and cheapest routes. . . . 
 
 Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, 
 Mrs. Araminta ]\Iergle, who was understood to be her- 
 self a very redoubtable Character in the Gvp-Bedder 
 class ; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes. 
 He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to 
 her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical 
 in import with those of the Oxford and Harvard 
 l^ragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure 
 war. . . . 
 
 It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, 
 philosophy ! the intimate wisdom of things. lie dealt 
 in a variety of Hegelian stuff like nothing else in the 
 world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It was 
 a wcmderful web he s{)un out of that (jueer big active 
 childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor 
 grieved nor feared nor passionately loved, — a web of 
 iridescent threads. He had luminous linal theories 
 about Love and Death and Innnortality, odd matters 
 
112 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 they seemed for him to think about ! and all his woven 
 thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of 
 things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beauti- 
 ful, oh ! — as a dew-wet spider's web slung in the morn- 
 ing sunshine across the black mouth of a gun. . , , 
 
 § 4 
 
 All through those years of development I perceive 
 now there must have been growing in me, slowly, 
 irregularly, assimilating to itself all the phrases and 
 forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses, 
 utilizing my aesthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, 
 the statesman's idea, that idea of social service which 
 is the protagonist of my story, that real though com- 
 plex passion for Making, making widely and greatly, 
 cities, national order, civilization, whose interplay with 
 all those other factors in life I have set out to present. 
 It was growing in me — as one's bones grow, no man 
 intending it. 
 
 I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the 
 fact of disorderliness, the conception of social life as 
 being a multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to 
 me. One always of course simplifies these things in the 
 telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at 
 large in any other terms. I never at any stage enter- 
 tained the idea which sustained my mother, and which 
 sustains so many people in the world, — the idea that 
 the universe, whatever superficial discords it may 
 present, is as a matter of fact " all right,'' is being 
 steered to definite ends by a serene and unquestionable 
 God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and 
 that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed 
 
ADOLESCENCE 113 
 
 rebellion ; I feel and have always felt that order rebels 
 ajrainst and stniirirles aij;ainst disorder, that order has 
 an up-hill job, in t;ardens, ex})criincnts, suburbs, every- 
 thing alike; from the very bef;innings of my experience 
 I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping 
 from control. 
 
 The current of livinfr and contemporary ideas in 
 Avhich mv mind was presently swimmini; made all in 
 the same direction ; in place of my mother's attentive, 
 meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible Provi- 
 dence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existence and 
 the survival not of the Best — that was nonsense, but of 
 the fittest to survive. 
 
 The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of 
 the Individualist's hi'isscz fa'irc never won upon me. 
 I disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his 
 autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved 
 him. I remember as early as the C'ity jNIerchants"* days 
 how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous cjuestion- 
 begging word " Evolution,*' having, so to speak, found 
 it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had 
 remarked at the Britten lunch table, had led not only 
 to man but to the liver-lluke and skunk, obviously 
 it might lead anywhere ; order came into things only 
 throuijh the struLjirlin": mind of man. That lit thinLrs 
 wonderfully for us. When I went up to Cand^ridge 
 I was perfectly clear that life was a various and 
 splendid disorder of forces that the spirit of man sets 
 itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from 
 that persuasion. 
 
 I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in 
 reaching these conclusions and a sort of religious 
 finality for myself by eighteen or nineteen. I know 
 men and women vary very nuich in these mattei-s, 
 
 I 
 
114 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 just fis children do in learning to talk. Some will 
 chatter at eighteen months and some will hardly 
 speak until three, and the thing has very little to 
 do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is 
 with young people ; some will begin their religious, 
 their social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some 
 not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I 
 belonged to one of the precocious types, and Cossington 
 very probably to another. It wasn't that there was 
 anything priggish about any of us ; we should have 
 been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests 
 and ape the theoretical boy. 
 
 The world of man centred for my imagination in 
 London, it still centres there ; the real and present 
 world, that is to say, as distinguished from the wonder- 
 lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars 
 and future time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had 
 never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and 
 I had formed a very good working idea of this round 
 globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests 
 and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were 
 scattered^ over its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and 
 changing every day ; how it was changing, and the 
 changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind 
 beyond measure. 
 
 I used to find a charm in old maps that showed 
 The World as Known to the Ancients, and I wish I 
 could now without any suspicion of self-deception write 
 down compactly the world as it was known to me at 
 nineteen. So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very 
 like the world I know now at forty-two ; I had 
 practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries 
 and races, products and possibilities that I have now. 
 But its intension was very different. All the interval 
 
ADOLESCENCE 115 
 
 has been increasing and (lecpeninf^ my social know- 
 ledge, replacing crude and secondhand impressions by 
 felt and realized distinctions. 
 
 In 1S95— that was my last year with IJrittcn, for I 
 went up to Cambridge in September — my vision of the 
 world had much the same relation to the vision I have 
 to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the 
 direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked 
 at our world and saw — what did we see ? Forms and 
 colours side by side that we had no suspicion were 
 interdependent. AVe had no conception of the roots of 
 things nor of the reactions of things. It did not seem 
 to us, for example, that business had anything to do with 
 government, or that money and means affected the 
 heroic issues of war. There were no waggons in our 
 war game, and where there were guns, there it was 
 assumed the ammunition was gathered together. 
 Finance again was a sealed book to us ; we did not 
 so much connect it with the broad aspects of human 
 affairs as rei^ard it as a sort of intrusive nuisance to 
 be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men. We 
 had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how 
 "interests" came into such affairs ; we believed men 
 were swayed by purely intellectual convictions and 
 were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in 
 which case they deserved to be shot), good or bad. AVe 
 knew nothing; of mental inertia, and could imairine the 
 opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid and 
 convincing exposition. We were capable of the most 
 incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our 
 own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and 
 Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the 
 throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of 
 the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the 
 
ii6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 course of an accurately transposed French Revolution. 
 We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in 
 a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its popu- 
 lation oi masse to the North Downs by an order of the 
 Local Government Board. We thought nothing of 
 throwing religious organizations out of employment or 
 superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed 
 bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of 
 laws abolishing whole classes ; we were et^ual to such a 
 dream as the peaceful and orderly proclamation of 
 Communism from the steps of St. PauFs Cathedral, 
 after the passing of a simply worded bill, — a close and 
 not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third 
 reading. I remember quite distinctly evolving that 
 vision. We were then fully fifteen and we were pre- 
 fectly serious about it. We were not fools ; it was 
 simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all 
 of the limits and powers of legislation and conscious 
 collective intention. . . . 
 
 I think this statement does my boyhood justice, 
 and yet I have my doubts. It is so hard now to say 
 ■what one understood and what one did not understand. 
 It isn't only that every day changed one's general out- 
 look, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases 
 of quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily 
 magnificent puerility. Sometimes I myself was in those 
 tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion 
 House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated 
 Mirabeau ; sometimes it was I who sat judging and 
 condemning and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and 
 feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the Pro- 
 visional Government, which occupied, of all incon- 
 venient places ! the General Post Office at St. IMartinV 
 le-Grand ! . . . 
 
ADOLESCENCE 117 
 
 I cannot trace the development of my ideas at 
 C\ambii(l(:;e, but 1 believe the mere plivsical fact of 
 <;oing two houiV journey away from London [^ave that 
 place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagi- 
 nation. I <r()t outside London. It became tangible 
 instead of being a frame almost as universal as sea 
 and sky. 
 
 At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue ; 
 in exchange for Britten, with whom, however, I corre- 
 sponded lengthily, stylishly and self-consciously for 
 some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I 
 got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to 
 speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all 
 pretty busily sharpening each other's wits and correct- 
 ing each other's intcr[)retations. Cambridge made 
 politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we 
 had had no sense of efl'ective contact ; we boasted, it is 
 true, an under secretary and a colonial governor among 
 our old boys, but they were never real to us ; such dis- 
 tini^uished sons as returned to visit the old school were 
 allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, 
 and pretended to be in earnest about nothing but our 
 football and cricket, to mourn the abolition of " water," 
 and find a shuddering personal interest in the ancient 
 swishing block. At Cand)ridge I felt for the first time 
 that I touched the thing that was going on. Ueal 
 living statesmen came down to debate in the L^nion, 
 the older dons had been their college intimates, their 
 sons and nephews expounded them to us and made 
 them real to us. They invited us to entertain ideas ; 
 I found myself for the first time in my life expected to 
 read and think and discuss, my secret vice had become 
 a virtue. 
 
 That combinatiou-room world is at least larger and 
 
ii8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 more populous and various than the world of school- 
 masters. The Shoesmiths and Najlors who had been 
 the aristocracy of City IVlerchants' fell into their 
 place in my mind ; they became an undistinguished 
 mass on the more athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and 
 their hostility to ideas and to the expression of ideas 
 ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of 
 each generation stay up ; these others go down to 
 propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as 
 mediocre professional men, as assistant masters in 
 schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the 
 nature of things least oppressed by them, — except when 
 it comes to a vote in Convocation. 
 
 AVe were still in those days under the shadow of 
 the great Victorians. I never saw Gladstone (as I 
 never set eyes on the old Queen), but he had resigned 
 office only a year before I went up to Trinity and the 
 Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about 
 him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the 
 gladiatorial stage of Parliamentary history, talk that 
 leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling 
 of our guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the 
 arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties 
 had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. ]\Ir. Evesham 
 we asked to come to the Union every year, IMasters, 
 Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire ; they 
 did not come indeed, but their polite refusals brought 
 us all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One 
 heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country 
 houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so 
 far as to read political memoirs and the novels of 
 Disraeli and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. From gossip, 
 example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt 
 something of the way in which parties were split, 
 
ADOLESCENCE 119 
 
 coalitions formed, how permanent officials worked and 
 controlled their ministers, liow measures were broii<^ht 
 forward and projects niodified. 
 
 And while I was gcttinf^ the i^reat leadiiif^ fipjiires 
 on the political stage, who had hci-n presented to me 
 in my schooldays not so much as men as the pantomimic 
 monsters of political caricature, while I was getting 
 them reduced in my imagination to the stature of 
 humanity, and their motives to the quality of impulses 
 like my own, I was also ac(]uiring in my Tripos work 
 a constantly developing and enriching conception of 
 the world of men as a complex of economic, intellectual 
 and moral processes. , . , 
 
 § 5 
 
 Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men 
 of my generation it came as the revolt of the workers. 
 Kodbertus we never heard of and the Fabian Society 
 we did not understand ; Marx and Morris, the Chicago 
 Anarchists, Ju.stice and Social Democratic Federation 
 (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds, 
 liatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new 
 doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a 
 liuge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledge- 
 hammer in hand across a revolutionary barricade, 
 seemed the (piintessence of what he had to expound. 
 Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the 
 workers, and were driving them cpiite automatically to 
 inevitable insurrection. They would arise and the 
 capitalist system would flee and vanish like the mists 
 before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise, 
 giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to 
 
I20 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 an era of Right and Justice and Virtue and Well Being, 
 and in short a Perfectly Splendid Time. 
 
 I had already discussed this sort of socialism under 
 the guidance of Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. 
 It was all mixed up with ideas about freedom and 
 natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles, wealth 
 and officials, and it was symbolized by the red ties we 
 wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was 
 that they were "all wrong.'' The rich were robbers 
 and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and knew 
 it, religious teachers were impostors in league with 
 power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on 
 the part of the few to expropriate the many. We went 
 about feeling scornful of all the current forms of life, 
 forms that esteemed themselves solid, that were, w^e 
 knew, no more than shapes painted on a curtain that 
 was presently to be torn aside. . . . 
 
 It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for 
 overstating things, I think, that first qualified my simple 
 revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps also I had met with 
 Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the circum- 
 stances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with 
 its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the 
 material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond 
 this melodramatic interpretation of human affairs. 
 
 I compared that Working Man of the poster with 
 any sort of working man I knew. I perceived that 
 the latter was not going to change, and indeed could 
 not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, 
 into the former. It crept into my mind as slowly and 
 surely as the dawn creeps into a room that the former 
 was not, as I had at first rather glibly assumed, an 
 " ideal," but a complete misrepresentation of the quality 
 and possibilities of things. 
 
ADOT.ESCENCE 121 
 
 I tlo not know now whuthcr it was during; niv school- 
 days or at ('junbridgo that I llrst began not merely to 
 see the world as a f:jreat contrast of rich anil poor, but 
 to feci the massive effect of that nudtitudinous majority 
 of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious 
 about wavs and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, 
 ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and 
 continually suffer misadventures, hardships and t dis- 
 tresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen 
 upon the fringe of the possessing minority ; if I did not 
 know the want of necessities I knew shabbiness, and 
 the world that let me go on to a university education 
 intimated very plainly that there was not a thing 
 beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagina- 
 tion might demand that it would not be an effort for me 
 to secure. A certain a^c^ressive radicalism asainst the 
 ruling and propertied classes followed almost naturally 
 from my circumstances. It did not at first connect itself 
 at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human 
 affairs that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere 
 of my upbringing, nor did it link me in sympathy with 
 any of the profounder realities of poverty. It was a 
 personal independent thing. The dingier people one 
 saw in the back streets and lower quarters of Bromstead 
 and Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old 
 women, street loafers, grimy workers that made the 
 social background of London, the stories one heard of 
 privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly with 
 the general propositions I was making about life. We 
 could [become splendidly eloquent about the social 
 revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the 
 class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that 
 it came to me that mv bedder, a garrulous old thing 
 with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an 
 
122 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries 
 that clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians -who 
 yelled papers about the streets, were really material to 
 such questions. 
 
 Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found 
 ourselves in immediate contact with servants or cadgers 
 or gyps or bedders or plumbers or navvies or cabmen or 
 railway porters we became unconsciously and unthink- 
 ingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures 
 altered. AVe behaved just as all the other men, rich or 
 poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, 
 and exactly as we were expected to behave. On the 
 whole it is a population of poor quality round about 
 Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very 
 difficult to idealize. That theoretical Working; Man of 
 ours ! — if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I 
 suppose,!by assuming that he came from another part of 
 the country ; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere 
 in the Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish 
 fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, 
 assured us we ouojht to know the Scottish miner. Mv 
 private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because 
 of his co-operative societies, and because what Lanca- 
 shire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow. . . , 
 And also I had never been in Lancashire. 
 
 By little increments of realization it was that the 
 profounder verities of the problem of socialism came to 
 me. It helped me very much that I had to go down 
 to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with 
 my uncle and guardian ; I walked about and saw Bursley 
 Wakes and much of the human aspects of organized 
 industrialism at close quarters for the first time. The 
 picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his 
 innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and 
 
ADOT.ESCEXCE 123 
 
 dash tills scoundrelly unci scandalous system of private 
 ownership to fragments, began to give place to a 
 limitless spectacle of inelllciency, to a conception of 
 millions of people not organized as they should be, 
 not educated as they should be, not simj)ly prevented 
 from but incapable of nearly every sort of beautv, 
 mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, 
 mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily 
 diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, 
 that the poor were nearing a limit of painful experience, 
 and awakeninix to a sense of intolerable wron<i;s, ]3ei;an 
 to develop into the more appalling conception that the 
 poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive 
 way — ''muddling along''; that they wanted nothing 
 very definitely nor very urgently, that mean fears en- 
 slaved them and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that 
 they took the very gift of hfe itself with a spiritless 
 lassitude, hoarding;: it, beimj; rather anxious not to lose 
 it than to use it in any way whatever. 
 
 The complete development of that realization was 
 the work of many years. I had only the first intima- 
 tions at Cambridge. But I did have intimations. 
 IMost acutely do I remember the doubts that followed 
 the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was 
 heralded by such heroic anticipations, and he was so 
 entirely what we had not anticipated. 
 
 llatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of 
 meeting for him at Redmayne's rooms in King's, and 
 was very proud and proprietorial. It failed to stir 
 Candjridge at all profoundly. Reyond a futile attempt 
 to screw up llatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers 
 who used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was 
 no attempt to rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and 
 spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and left 
 
1-4 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty 
 men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically 
 in those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition. 
 
 And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and 
 heroic Worker of the poster, a little wrinkled grey- 
 bearded apologetic man in ready-made clothes, with 
 ■watchfid innocent brown eyes and a persistent and 
 invincible air of being out of his element. He sat 
 Avith his stout boots tucked up under his chair, and 
 clung to a teacup and saucer and looked away from us 
 into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and chair- 
 arms and window-sills and boxes and anywhere except 
 upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only 
 other chair w^hose seat was occupied was the one con- 
 taining his knitted \voollen comforter and his picturesque 
 old beach-photographer's hat. We were all shy and 
 didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got 
 him, and, ^vhich was disconcertingly unanticipated, he 
 was manifestly having the same difficulty with us. We 
 had expected to be gripped. 
 
 " 111 not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," 
 he repeated with a north-country quality in his speech. 
 
 We made reassuring noises. 
 
 The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea 
 earnestly through an uncomfortable pause. 
 
 " rd best tell 'em something of how things are in 
 Lancashire, what with the new machines and all that," 
 he speculated at last with red reflections in his 
 thoughtful eyes. 
 
 We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would 
 make a mess of the meeting. 
 
 But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed 
 meshes of refined conversation, but speaking with an 
 audience before him, he became a different man. He 
 
ADOLESCENCE 125 
 
 declared ho would explain to us just exactly what 
 socialism was, and went on at once to an ini{)assi()ned 
 conti'jist of social conditions. "You }'oun«r men/' he 
 said, "come from homes of luxury; every need you 
 feel is supplied '' 
 
 We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupy- 
 ing^ every inch of Ilcdmayne's floor space except the 
 hearthrug-platform, and we listened to him and Uiought 
 him over. He was the voice of wronrrs that made us 
 indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he 
 had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his 
 j)rovincial accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, 
 we were carried away by his indignations. AVe looked 
 with shining eyes at one another and at the various 
 dons who had dropped in and were striving to maintain 
 a front of judicious severity. We felt more and more 
 that social injustice must cease, and cease forthwith. 
 We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we 
 clapped and murmured our applause and wanted badly 
 to cheer. 
 
 Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the 
 heckling. Denson, that indolent liberal-minded sceptic, 
 did most of the questioning. He lay contorted in a 
 chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and 
 his left boot very high, and he pointed his remarks 
 with a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the 
 unstable glasses that hid his watery eyes. " I don't 
 want to carp," he began. "The present system, I 
 admit, stands condennied. Every present system 
 always has stood condennied in the minds of intelli- 
 gent men. But where it seems to me you get thin, 
 is just where everybody lias been thin, and that's when 
 you come to the remedy. '"* 
 
 "Socialism,'" said Chris Uobinson, as if it answered 
 
126 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 everything, and Hatheileigh said " Hear ! Hear ! " very 
 resolutely. 
 
 " I suppose I ought to take that as an answer,"" said 
 Denson, getting his shoulder-blades well down to the 
 seat of his chair; "but I don't. I don't, you know. 
 It's rather a shame to cross-examine you after this fine 
 address of yours" — Chris Robinson on the hearthrug 
 made acquiescent and inviting noises — "but the real 
 question remains how exactly are you going to end all 
 these wrongs ? There are the administrative questions. 
 If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a 
 very complex and clumsy way of getting businesses run, 
 land controlled and things in general administered, but 
 you don't get rid of the need of administration, you 
 know." 
 
 " Democracy," said Chris Robinson. 
 
 " Organized somehow," said Denson. " And it's 
 just the How perplexes me. I can quite easily imagine 
 a socialist state administered in a sort of scramblingr 
 tumult that would be worse than anything we have got 
 
 now." 
 
 " Nothing could be worse than things are now," said 
 Chris Robinson. " I have seen little children " 
 
 " I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, 
 could easily be worse — or life in a beleagured town." 
 
 Murmurs. 
 
 They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect 
 upon me of coming out from the glow of a good 
 matinee performance into the cold daylight of late 
 afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict 
 with Denson; he was an orator and not a dialectician, 
 and he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposi- 
 tion to plunge into untimely pathos and indignation. 
 And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his 
 
ADOLESCENCE 127 
 
 shafts. " Suppose/' he said, " you found yourself prime 
 
 minister '"■ 
 
 I looked at Chris lloljinson, bri^ht-evcd and his 
 hair a little rullled and his whole being rhetorical, and 
 measured himaijainst the hufje machine of jrovernment 
 
 n n O 
 
 muddled and mysterious. Oh ! hut I was perplexed ! 
 
 And then we took him back to IlatherltiMrs 
 rooms and drank beer and smoked about him wliilc he 
 nursed his knee with hairy-wristed hands that pro- 
 truded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade 
 under the cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and 
 we had a great discursive talk with him. 
 
 "Eh ! you should see our big meetings up north ? '" 
 he said. 
 
 Denson had ruflled him and worried him a o-ood 
 deal, and ever and again he came back to that dis- 
 cussion. " It's all very easy for your learned men to 
 sit and pick holes,"" he said, " while the children suffer 
 and die. They don't pick holes up north. They mean 
 business.'" 
 
 He talked, and that was the most interesting part 
 of it all, of his going to work in a factory when he 
 was twelve — " when you Chaps were all with vour 
 ma!nmies" — and how he had educated himself of 
 nights until he would fall asleep at his reading. 
 
 " It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he 
 remarked, " all that clemming for education. Why ! 
 I longed all through one winter to reatl a bit of 
 Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for 
 it, I saiil. And I couJdno' get the book." 
 
 Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank 
 beer at him with round eyes over the mug. 
 
 " Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and 
 Latin," said Chris Robinson. " And one learns to go 
 
128 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 straight at a thing without splitting straws. One gets 
 hold of the Elementals." 
 
 (Well, did they ? That was the gist of my 
 perplexity.) 
 
 " One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his 
 rankling memory of Denson, " while men decay and 
 starve." 
 
 " But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into 
 opposition, " the alternative is to risk a worse disaster 
 — or do something patently futile." 
 
 " I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. " We 
 don't propose anything futile, so far as I can see." 
 
 §6 
 
 The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was 
 not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite 
 exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were 
 all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists 
 also, and professed a vivid sense of the " White Man's 
 Burden." 
 
 It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings 
 of that period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly 
 and exhaustively mocked, criticized and torn to shreds 
 — never was a man so violently exalted and then, him- 
 self assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the 
 middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little 
 figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of 
 vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish 
 enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the 
 sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its 
 wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and 
 the under officer and the engineer, and " shop " as a 
 
ADOLESCENCE 129 
 
 poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He 
 got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinklincr 
 and hauntinnr (|uotations, he stirred Britten and myself 
 to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our 
 conversation. He rose to his climax with his "Reces- 
 sional,"'"* while I was still an undergraduate. 
 
 What did he give me exactly .'' 
 
 lie helped to broaden my geographical sense 
 innnensely, and he provided phrases for just that 
 desire for discipline and devotion and organized effort 
 the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the 
 current socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. 
 The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore some- 
 thing out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, 
 and I took it back from him shaped and let much of 
 the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the 
 hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and 
 inconsistency, go uncriticized for the sake of it : — 
 
 "Keep yo the Law — ho swift in nil obedience — 
 Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford, 
 Make ye sure to each hid own 
 That ho reap where he hath sown ; 
 
 By the peace among Our peoples let men know we servo the 
 Lord!" 
 
 And then again, and for all our later criticism, this 
 sticks in my mind, sticks there now as quintessential 
 wisdom : 
 
 •* The *eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone ; 
 *E don't obey no orders uulcss they is 'is own ; 
 'E keeps 'is side-arms awful : 'e leaves 'em all abont, 
 An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes tho 'cuthen out. 
 All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess. 
 All iilong o' (loin* thini'-rt rrttlu-r-niore-or-less. 
 All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho. 
 Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so! " 
 
 K 
 
I30 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not 
 having been born and brought up in Bromstead and 
 Penge, and the war in South Africa being yet in the 
 womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now 
 remarkable delusion that Ens-land had her side-arms 
 at that time kept anything but "awful." He learnt 
 better, and we all learnt with him in the dark years 
 of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed, 
 and I do not see that we fellow-learners are justified 
 in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance 
 and assumption. . . . 
 
 South Africa seems always painted on the back 
 cloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense those 
 disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English 
 world has long since contrived in any edifying or 
 profitable sense to forget ! How we thrilled to the 
 shouting newspaper sellers as the first false flush of 
 victory gave place to the realization of defeat ! Far 
 away there, our army showed itself human, mortal and 
 human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant 
 officers we had imagined would change to wonderful 
 heroes at the first crackling of rifles, remained the 
 pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always 
 been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, 
 failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they 
 were just what our streets and country-side had made 
 them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles for 
 them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they, — - 
 just ill-trained and fairly plucky and wonderfully good- 
 tempered men — paying for it. And how it lowered 
 our vitality all that first -winter to hear of Nicholson's 
 Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to 
 realize the bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shatter- 
 ing retreat from Stormberg, Colenso — Colenso, that 
 
ADOLESCENCE 131 
 
 blundering battle, with White, as it scenicd, in Lady- 
 smith near the point of surrender ! and so through the 
 loni^ unfoldinir catalo<rue of bleak di^illusioninents, of 
 achin((, uneoneealed anxiety lest worse should follow. 
 To advanee upon your enemy sin^inj; about his lack 
 of cleanliness and method went out of fashion alto- 
 gether ! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from 
 our scheme of illusion. 
 
 All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns 
 boomed and the rifles crackled away there on the 
 veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of accidents 
 and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores 
 and money poured into South Africa, and the con- 
 valescent wounded streamed home. I see it in my 
 memory as if I had looked at it all through a window 
 instead of through the pages of the illustrated papers ; 
 I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the 
 ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted 
 men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the 
 wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated 
 farms, and at last the blockhouses and the fences of 
 barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless miles 
 across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at 
 last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we 
 had him in the toils. If one's attention strayed in the 
 lecture-room it wandered to those battle-fields. 
 
 Aid that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an 
 accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old 
 Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bou;^ht 
 and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception 
 of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at 
 last that seemed to some of us more shameful than 
 defeats. . . . 
 
132 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 §7 
 
 A book that stands out among these memories, that 
 stimulated me immensely so that I forced it upon my 
 companions, half in the spirit of propaganda and half 
 to test it by their comments, was Meredith's One of 
 Our Conquerors. It is one of the books that have 
 made me. In that I got a supplement and corrective 
 of Kipling. It was the first detached and adverse 
 criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. 
 It must have been published already nine or ten years 
 when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, 
 had gone on to the expensive lessons of the War 
 because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such 
 intimations, and so I could read it as a book justified. 
 The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined 
 each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that 
 gathered against our system across the narrow seas. 
 It discovered Europe to me, as watching and critical. 
 
 But while I could respond to all its criticisms of 
 my country's intellectual indolence, of my country's 
 want of training and discipline and moral courage, I 
 remember that the idea that on the continent there 
 were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert 
 while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggres- 
 sive and preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a 
 reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to me. 
 It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects 
 for social and political reconstruction upon a new 
 uncomfortable footing. It made them no longer merely 
 desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love 
 of making one might own to a baser motive. Under 
 Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the continent 
 
ADOLESCENCE 133 
 
 of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our 
 own world-wide display. I bef^an now to have a dis- 
 turbing sense as it were of busy searehli;;hts over the 
 horizon. . . . 
 
 One consequence of the patriotic chai^rin Meredith 
 produced in nie was an attempt to belittle his merit. 
 "It isn't a good novel, anyhow," I said. 
 
 The charge I brought against it was, I remember, 
 a lack of unity. It professed to be a study of the 
 English situation in the early nineties, but it was all 
 deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by 
 the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to 
 vindicate the woman he had loved and never married. 
 Now in the retrospect and with a mind full of bitter 
 enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit 
 the conflict was not only essential but cardinal in his 
 picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts 
 and the still more terrible claim of IVIrs. Rurman 
 Radnor, the " infernal punctilio,'' and Dudley 
 Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of 
 that inalertness the book set itself to assail. So many 
 things have been brought together in my mind that 
 were once remotely separated. A people that will not 
 valiantly face and understand and admit love and 
 passion can understand nothing whatever. J3ut in 
 those days what is now just obvious truth to me wiis 
 altogether outside my range of comprehension. . . , 
 
 §8 
 
 As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of 
 my apprehension of the world, as I flounder among the 
 half-rcnicmbercd developments that found me a crude 
 
134 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it 
 stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That 
 did not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow 
 of Trinity, and the Peace of Vereeniging had just been 
 signed. 
 
 I went with a man named Willersley, a man some 
 years senior to myself, who had just missed a fellowship 
 and the higher division of the Civil Service, and who 
 had become an enthusiastic member of the London 
 School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the 
 support of the " advanced ^ people had placed him. 
 He had, like myself, a small independent income that 
 relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he 
 had a kindred craving for social theorising and some 
 form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance 
 after reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of 
 Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It 
 had marched with some thoughts of his own. 
 
 We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, 
 then up the Gemmi, and thence with one or two halts 
 and digressions and a little modest climbing we crossed 
 over by the Antrona pass (on which we were benighted) 
 into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa 
 Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the 
 lake to Locarno (where, as I shall tell, we stayed some 
 eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia and over to 
 Airolo and home. 
 
 As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of 
 its freshness and enlargement returns to me. I feel 
 again the faint pleasant excitement of the boat train, 
 the trampling procession of people with hand baggage 
 and laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone 
 pier, the scarely perceptible swaying of the moored 
 boat beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, 
 
ADOLESCENCE 135 
 
 the little emotion of standint; out from the homeland 
 and seeinf; the lon^^ white Kentish c-lill's recede. One 
 walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel 
 absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of 
 people directed one's attention to a white lif^hthouse 
 on a cliir to the east of us, cominf:r up suddenly ; and 
 then one turned to scan the liLtle dillerent French 
 coast villages, and then, sliding by in a pale sunshine, 
 came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children 
 upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne. 
 
 One took it all with the outward calm that became 
 a young man of nearly three and twenty, but one was 
 alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing little stimula- 
 tions. The custom house examination excited one, 
 the strangeness of babble in a foreign tongue ; one 
 found the French of City Merchants"' and Cambridge 
 a shy and viscous flow, and then one was standing: in 
 the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street 
 to Boulogne Villc, and one looked out at the world in 
 French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous 
 purple trousers, police officers in peaked caps instead 
 of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on 
 two wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements 
 instead of sash windows, and great numbers of neatly 
 dressed women in economical mourning. 
 
 " Oh ! there's a priest ! " one said, and was betrayed 
 into suchlike artless cries. 
 
 It was a real other world, with diflerent government 
 and different methods, and in the night one was roused 
 from uneasy slumbers and sat bHnking and surly, 
 wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's oreiller 
 all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the 
 German oliicial, so different in manner from the 
 British ; and when one woke again after that one had 
 
136 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee in 
 Switzerland. . . . 
 
 I have been over that route dozens of times since, 
 but it still revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a 
 certain sense of cheerful release in me. 
 
 I remember that I and Willersley became very 
 sociological as we ran on to Spiez, and made all sorts of 
 generalizations from the steeply sloping fields on the 
 hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and 
 from little differences in the way things were done. 
 
 The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the 
 big clean stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, 
 as I thought of the vast dirtiness of London, the mean 
 dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that 
 perhaps my scheme of international values ^vas all 
 wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges 
 for us and our empire might be developing here — and 
 I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new 
 understanding. 
 
 Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn 
 Norfolk suit of greenish grey tweeds that ended un- 
 familiarly at his rather impending, spectacled, in- 
 tellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the 
 contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans 
 about us. Convict-coloured stockings and vast hobnail 
 boots finished him below% and all his lufrsaore was a 
 borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not 
 want to shave in the train, but I made him at one of 
 the Swiss stations— -I dislike these Oxford slovenli- 
 nesses — and then, confound him ! he cut himself and 
 bled. . . . 
 
 Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating 
 air that seemed to have washed our very veins to an 
 incredible cleanliness, and eating hard-boiled eggs in a 
 
ADOLESCENCE 137 
 
 vast clear sj)ac'e of riinc-cd^od rocks, snow-nioltlL-d, 
 above a blue-cashed glacier. All about us the monstrous 
 rock surfaces rose towards the shinin<^ peaks above, and 
 there were windin<j^ moraines iVom which the ice had 
 receded, and then dark clusteriufr fir trees far below. 
 
 I had an extraordinary feelinfr of havinc: come out 
 of things, of being outside. 
 
 " But this is the round world ! " I said, with a sense 
 of never having perceived it before ; " this is the round 
 world ! " 
 
 §9 
 
 That holiday was full of big comprehensive cfTects ; 
 the first view of the Rhone valley and the distant 
 Valaisian Alps, for example, which we saw from the 
 shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the 
 early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved 
 from our night's crouching and munched bread and 
 chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs amonir the 
 tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake 
 Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track 
 going down and down to Antronapiano. 
 
 And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our 
 impressions. AVillersley's mind abounded in historical 
 matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit of topo- 
 graphical reference ; he made me see and trace and sec 
 again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding 
 valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among 
 the warring tribes of men. . . . 
 
 In the retrospect each of us seems to have been 
 talking about our outlook almost continually. Each of 
 us, you see, Wiis full of the same cpiestion, very near 
 
1^,8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 O 
 
 and altogether predominant to us, the question : " What 
 am I going to do with my life ? " He saw it almost 
 as importantly as I, but from a different angle, because 
 his choice was largely made and mine still hung in the 
 balance. 
 
 "■ I feel we might do so many things," I said, " and 
 everything that calls one, calls one away from something 
 else." 
 
 Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals. 
 
 "We have got to think out," he said, "just what 
 we are and what we are up to. We've got to do that 
 now. And then — it's one of those questions it is 
 inadvisable to reopen subsequently." 
 
 He beamed at me through his glasses. The 
 sententious use of long words was a playful habit with 
 him, that and a slight deliberate humour, habits 
 occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to 
 intensify. 
 
 " You've made your decision ? " 
 
 He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of 
 his head. 
 
 " How would you put it ? " 
 
 " Social Service — education. Whatever else matters 
 or doesn't matter, it seems to me there is one thing we 
 must have and increase, and that is the number of people 
 who can think a little — and have " — he beamed again 
 — " an adequate sense of causation." 
 
 " You're sure it's worth while." 
 
 " For me — certainly. I don't discuss that any 
 more." 
 
 " I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added. 
 " After all, the work is all one. We who know, we 
 who feel, are building the great modern state, joining 
 wall to wall and way to way, the new great England 
 
ADOLESCENCE 139 
 
 rising out of the (Iccayiiig old . . . we arc the real 
 statesmen — I like that use of 'statesmen.'' . . ."" 
 
 " Yes," I said with many doubts. " Yes, of 
 course. . . .'' 
 
 Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his 
 hair and a deepening benevolence in his always amiable 
 face, and he has very fairly kej)t his word. He has 
 lived for social service and to do vast masses of use- 
 ful, undistinguished, fertilizing work. Think of the 
 days of arid administrative plodding and of con- 
 tention still more arid and unrewarded, that he must 
 have spent ! His little affectations of gesture and 
 manner, imitative affectations for the most part, have 
 increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous 
 intonations have become a thing he puts on every 
 mornintx like an old coat. His devotion is minted 
 with a considerable whimsicality, and they say he is 
 easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended into 
 opposition by colleagues ; he has made mistakes at 
 times and followed wrong courses, still there he is, a 
 flat contradiction to all the ordinary doctrine of motives, 
 a man who has foregone any chances of wealth and 
 profit, foregone any easier paths to distinction, foregone 
 marriage and parentage, in order to serve the com- 
 munity. He does it without any fee or reward except 
 his personal self-satisfaction in doing this work, and he 
 does it without any hope of future joys and punish- 
 ments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No doubt 
 he idealizes himself a little, and dreams of recognition. 
 No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, 
 from the spending and husbanding of large sums of 
 public money, and from the inevitable j)roprietorship 
 he must feel in the fair, fine, well-ordered schools he 
 has done so much to develop. " But for me," he can 
 
I40 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 say, " there would have been a Job about those diagrams, 
 and that subject or this would have been less ably 
 taught.'"' . . . 
 
 The fact remains that for him the rewards have 
 been adequate, if not to content at any rate to keep 
 him w^orking. Of course he covets the notice of the 
 ■world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his 
 mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, 
 he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men 
 talking of him, and they w^ere noting, with little mean 
 smiles, how he had shown himself self-conscious while 
 there was talk of some honorary degree-giving or other ; 
 it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly if his 
 work were to flower into a crimson gown in some 
 Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is 
 incidental vanity at the worst; he goes on anyhow. 
 Most men don't. 
 
 But we had our walk twenty years and more ago 
 now. He was oldish even then as a young man, just 
 as he is oldish still in middle age. Long may his in- 
 dustrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world ! 
 He lectured a little in conversation then ; he lectures 
 more now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling 
 what you already understand, giving you in detail the 
 data you know ; these are things like callosities that 
 come from a man's w^ork. 
 
 Our long three wrecks' talk comes back to me as a 
 memory of ideas and determinations slowly growing, 
 all mixed up with a smell of wood smoke and pine 
 woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow- 
 fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing 
 through deep gorges far below. It is mixed, too, with 
 gossips with waitresses and fellow-travellers, with my 
 first essays iu colloquial German and Italian, with 
 
ADOLESCENCE 141 
 
 disputes about the way to take, and other things that 
 I will tell of in another seetion. But the white passion 
 of human service was our dominant theme. Not simply 
 perhaps nor altoi;ethcr unselfishly, but (|uite honestly, 
 and with at least a frecpient self- forgetful ness, did wc 
 want to do fine and noble things, to help in their 
 developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. 
 It is very hard — perhaps it is impossible — to present in 
 a page or two the substance and cpiality of nearly a 
 month's conversation, conversation that is casual and 
 discursive in form, that ranges carelessly from triviality 
 to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a con- 
 structive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest 
 and go and come back, and all the while build. 
 
 We got it more and more definite that the core of 
 our purpose beneath all its varied aspects must needs 
 be order and discipline. " Muddle,"" said I, *' is the 
 enemy."" That remains my belief to this day. Clear- 
 ness and order, light and foresight, these things I know 
 for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the 
 still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the 
 war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder 
 of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that 
 gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness 
 and unemployment of the poor. INIuddle ! I remember 
 myself quoting Kipling — 
 
 "All along o' dirtiuess, all along 'o mess, 
 All uluDg o' doin' things rather-more-or-lcss." 
 
 " We build the state,'** we said over and over again. 
 *" That is what we are for — servants of the new re- 
 organization ! " 
 
 We planned half in earnest and half Utopianizing, 
 a League of Social Service. 
 
142 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We talked of the splendid world of men that might 
 grow out of such unpaid and ill-paid work as we were 
 setting our faces to do. We spoke of the intricate 
 difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the hos- 
 tilities to such a development as we conceived our work 
 subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence 
 in the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is 
 natural to young and scarcely tried men. 
 
 We talked much of the detailed life of politics so 
 far as it was known to us, and there Willersley was 
 more experienced and far better informed than I ; we 
 discussed possible combinations and possible develop- 
 ments, and the chances of some great constructive 
 movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer 
 war had occasioned. We would sink to gossip — even 
 at the Suetonious level. Willersley would decline to- 
 wards illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or 
 less loosely from my private reading. We were par- 
 ticularly wise, I remember, upon the management of 
 newspapers, because about that we knew nothing what- 
 ever. We perceived that great things were to be done 
 through newspapers. We talked of swaying opinion 
 and moving great classes to massive action. 
 
 Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our 
 splendid projects were thickset with the first personal 
 pronoun. We both could write, and all that we said 
 in general terms was reflected in the particular in our 
 minds ; it was ourselves we saw, and no others, writing 
 and speaking that moving word. We had already 
 produced manuscript and passed the initiations of proof 
 reading ; I had been a frequent speaker in the Union, 
 and Willersley was an active man on the School Board. 
 Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led up 
 and up. He was six and twenty, and I twenty-two. 
 
ADOLESCENCE 143 
 
 We intiiuatcd our individual carrcrs in terms of bold 
 expectation. I had prophetic gliuip^es of walls and 
 hoardin<^s clamorous with " Vote for Remington," and 
 AVillersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this 
 connnittee and that, saying a few slightly ironical 
 wortls after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting 
 frienilly beside me on the government benches. There 
 wiis nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the 
 lioard of Education for him ? My preference at that 
 time wavered between the Local Government Board — I 
 had great ideas about town-planning, about revisions 
 of municipal areas and re-organized internal transit — 
 and the \Var Ollice. I swayed strongly towards the 
 latter as the journey progressed. My educational 
 bias came later. 
 
 The swelling ambitions that have tramped over 
 Alpine passes ! How many of them, like mine, have 
 come almost within sight of realization before they 
 failed ? 
 
 There were times when we posed like young gods 
 (of unassuming exterior), and times Avhen we were full 
 of the absurdest little solicitudes about our prospects. 
 There were times when one surveyed the whole world 
 of men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by 
 way of contrast I remember once lying in bed — it nmst 
 have been during this holiday, though I cannot for the 
 life of me fix where — and speculating whether perhaps 
 some day I might not be a K.C'.B., Sir Richard 
 Kcmington, K.C.B., M.l\ 
 
 IkiL the big style prevailed. . . . 
 
 We could not tell from minute to minute whether 
 we were planning for a world of solid ix?ality, or telling 
 ourselves fairy tales about this prospect of life. So 
 much seemed possible, and everything we could think 
 
144 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed 
 to me I could never be anything but just the entirely 
 unimportant and undistinguished young man I was for 
 ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five 
 and thirty. 
 
 Once I remember Willersley going over a list of 
 failures, and why they had failed — but young men in 
 the twenties do not know much about failures. 
 
 §10 
 
 Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, 
 but by this time I knew my Rodbertus as well as 
 my Marx, and there was much in our socialism that 
 would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as any- 
 thing in life could have shocked him. Socialism as 
 a simple democratic cry we had done with for ever. 
 We were socialists because Individualism for us meant 
 muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined 
 little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing 
 things jarringly, each one in his own way. " Each,"" 
 I said, quoting words of my father''s that rose apt 
 in my memory, " snarling from his own little bit 
 of property, like a dog tied to a cart's tail." 
 
 " Essentially," said Willersley, " essentially we're 
 for conscription, in peace and war alike. The man 
 who owns property is a public official and has to 
 behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I 
 understand it." 
 
 "Or be dismissed from his post," I said, "and 
 replaced by some better sorb of official. A man's 
 none the less an official because he's irresponsible. 
 What he does with his property affects people just 
 
ADOLESCENCE 145 
 
 the same. Pi ivnle ! No one is really private but an 
 outlaw. . . ."' 
 
 Order and devotion were the very essence of our 
 socialism, and a splendid collective vigour /uid 
 happiness its end. ^\c projected an ideal state, an 
 organized state as conlident and powerful as modern 
 science, as ])alanced and beautiful as a body, as 
 benelicent as sunshine, the organized state that should 
 end muddle for ever ; it ruled all our ideas and gave 
 form to all our ambitions. 
 
 Every man was to be definitely related to that, 
 to have his predominant duty to that. Such was 
 the 'England renewed we had in mind, and liow to 
 serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and 
 undisciplined wealth to it, and make the Scientific 
 Commonweal, King, was the continuing substance of 
 our intercourse. 
 
 §11 
 
 Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger 
 in our blood, and the flush of our youth deeper. We 
 would go in the morning sunlight along some narrow 
 Al})ine mule-path shouting large suggestions for 
 national re-organization, and weighing considerations 
 as lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. 
 "Great England," we said in eflect, over and over 
 again, " and we will be among the makers ! England 
 renewed ! The country has been warned ; it has learnt 
 its lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the war have 
 sunk in. England has ])cc()me serious. . . . Oh ! there 
 are big things before us to do ; big enduring things !" 
 
 One evening we walked up to the loggia of a 
 
 L 
 
146 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 little pilgrimage church, I forget its name, that 
 stands out on a conical hill at the head of a winding 
 stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the 
 houses clustered amidst a confusion of heat-bitten 
 greenery. I had been sitting silently on the parapet, 
 looking across to the purple mountain masses where 
 Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our 
 talk seemed suddenly to gather to a head. 
 
 I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts 
 that had been accumulating. My words have long 
 since passed out of my memory, the phrases of familiar 
 expression have altered for me, but the substance 
 remains as clear as ever. I said how we were in our 
 measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do 
 as we pleased with life ; we classed among the happy 
 ones, our bread and common necessities were given us 
 for nothing, we had abilities, — it wasn't modesty but 
 cowardice to behave as if we hadn't — and Fortune 
 watched us to see what we might do with opportunity 
 and the world. 
 
 " There are so many things to do, you see," began 
 Willersley, in his judicial lecturer's voice. 
 
 "So many things we may do," I interrupted, 
 " with all these years before us. . . . We're exceptional 
 men. It's our place, our duty, to do things." 
 
 " Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint 
 amusement of his face, " I've got no modesty. 
 Everything conspires to set me up. Why should I 
 run about like all those grubby little beasts down 
 there, seeking nothing but mean little vanities and 
 indulgences — and then take credit for modesty ? I 
 Jcnow 1 am capable. I know I have imagination. 
 Modesty ! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest 
 things in life I am a damned shirk. The very biggest ! 
 
ADOLESCENCE 147 
 
 Somebody has to fittompt them. I feel hke a loaded 
 <fun that is only a Httle perplexed because it has to 
 find out just where to aim itself. . . ." 
 
 The Jako 'and the frontier villages, a uhite puff 
 of steam on the distant railway to I^uino, the busy 
 boats and steamers trailing triangular wakes of foam, 
 the long vista eastward towards battlemented IJellin- 
 zona, the vast mountain distances, now tinged with 
 sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and tlie 
 southward waters with remote coast towns shininrr 
 dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden 
 haze, made a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as 
 if one surveyed the world, — and it was like the games 
 I used to set out upon my nursery floor. I was exalted 
 by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel. 
 
 That sense of largeness came to me then, and it 
 has come to me since, again and again, a splendid 
 intimation or a splendid vanity. Once, I remember, 
 when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest 
 behind the town and saw that multitudinous place 
 in all its beauty of width and abundance and clustering 
 human effort, and once as I was steaming past the 
 brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towerintr 
 vigour and clamorous vitality of New York City, that 
 mood rose to its quintessence. And once it came to 
 me, as I shall tell, on Dover clifls. And a hundred 
 times when I have thought of England as our country 
 nn'ght be, with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a 
 nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful 
 amidst its vales and rivers, that emotion of collective 
 ends and collective purposes has returned to me, I 
 felt as great as humanity. For a brief moment I was 
 humanity, looking at the world I had made and had 
 still to make. . . , 
 
148 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 §12 
 
 And mingled with these dreams of power and 
 patriotic service there was another series of a different 
 quality and a different colour, like the antagonistic 
 colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, 
 contrasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn 
 from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle 
 peacefully one with the other. I was asking myself 
 openly and distinctly : what are you going to do for 
 the world ? What are you going to do with yourself ? 
 and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature 
 in spite of my averted attention was asking me in 
 penetrating undertones : what are you going to do 
 about this other fundamental matter, the beauty of 
 girls and women and your desire for them ? 
 
 I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow 
 circumstances of my upbringing. It made all women- 
 kind mysterious to me. If it had not been for my 
 Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have 
 known any girls at all until I was twenty. Of Stafford- 
 shire I will tell a little later. But I can remember 
 still how through all those ripening years, the thought 
 of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world 
 beside me and the unknown, untried reactions of their 
 intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange 
 presence grows in a room when one is occupied by 
 other things. I busied myself and pretended to be 
 wholly occupied, and there the woman stood, full half 
 of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind 
 sometimes that she was there clad and dignified and 
 divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and command- 
 ing, and sometimes that Venus who stoops and allures. 
 
ADOLESCENCE 149 
 
 This travel abroad seemed to have released a 
 multitude of things in my mind; the clear air, the 
 beauty of the sunshine, the very blue of the glaciers 
 made me feel my body and (juickened all those dis- 
 regarded dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of 
 women's forms all about me, in the checrfid waitresses 
 at the inns, in the ])edestrians one encountered in the 
 tracks, in the chance fellow-travellers at the liotel 
 tables. "Confound it!" said I, and talked all the 
 more zealously of that greater England that wiis 
 calling us. 
 
 I remember that we passed two Germans, an old 
 man and a tall fair girl, father and daughter, who were 
 walking down from Saas. She came swinging and 
 shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped 
 her as she approached. 
 
 " Gut Tag ! '"* said Willersley, removing his hat. 
 
 " Morgen ! " said the old man, saluting. 
 
 I stared stockishly at the girl, who passed with an 
 inclKFercrit face. 
 
 That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a 
 room, it has kept there bright and fresh as a thing 
 seen yesterday, for twenty years. . . . 
 
 I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely 
 serving girls, and was a little ashamed lest Willersley 
 should detect the keen interest I took in them, and 
 then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria 
 Maggiore to Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took 
 me by surprise and flooded me and broke down my 
 pretences. 
 
 The women in that valley are very beautiful — 
 women vary from valley to valley in the Alj)s and are 
 plain and squat here and divinities five miles away — 
 and as we came down we passed a group of five or six 
 
I50 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were 
 beside them, and one like Ceres held a reaping-hook 
 in her brown hand. She watched us approaching and 
 smiled faintly, her eyes at mine. 
 
 There was some greeting, and two of them laughed 
 together. 
 
 We passed. 
 
 "Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and 
 suddenly an immense sense of boredom enveloped me. 
 I saw myself striding on down that winding road, talk- 
 ing of politics and parties and bills of parliament and 
 all sorts of desiccated things. That road seemed to me 
 to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreari- 
 ness. I knew it for a way of death. Reality was 
 behind us. 
 
 Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. 
 " I'm not so sure," he said in a voice of intense dis- 
 criminations, "after all, that agricultural work isn't 
 good for women." 
 
 " Damn agricultural work ! " I said, and broke out 
 into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. " Fettered 
 things we are ! " I cried. " I wonder why I stand it ! " 
 
 " Stand what ? " 
 
 " AVhy don't I go back and make love to those 
 girls and let the world and you and everything go 
 hang ? Deep breasts and rounded limbs — and we poor 
 emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of 
 youth in us ! . . ." 
 
 " Fm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, 
 looking at me with a deliberately quaint expression 
 over his glasses, " that picturesque scenery is altogether 
 good for your morals." 
 
ADOLESCENCE 151 
 
 § 13 
 
 That fever was still in my blood when we came to 
 Locarno. 
 
 Alonfij the hot and dusty lower road between the 
 Orrido of Traliiunie and Cannobio AVillersIey had 
 developed his first blister. And partly because of that 
 and partly because there was a bag at the station that 
 gave us the refreshment of clean linen and partly 
 because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, 
 we decided upon three or four days"* sojourn in tlie 
 Empress Hotel. 
 
 AV'e dined that night at a table-d'hote, and I 
 found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a 
 conversation that was resumed presently in the hotel 
 lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirty- three or 
 thirty-four, slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin 
 and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a 
 petulant-looking heavy-faced man of perhaps fifty- 
 three, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee 
 and presently went to bed. " lie always goes to bed 
 like that," she confided startlingly. " He sleeps after 
 all his meals. I never knew such a man to sleep.'' 
 
 Then she returned to our talk, whatever it was. 
 
 We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries 
 and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our 
 })edestrian travel. " My husband doesn't walk," she said. 
 *"" His heart is weak and lie cainiot manage the hills." 
 
 There was something friendly and adventurous in 
 her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when 
 presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk 
 sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt 
 enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with 
 
152 THE NEAV MACHIAVELLI 
 
 people one has never seen before and may never see 
 a£i;ain. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beauti- 
 ful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her 
 laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I 
 can remember I said she made them bold. " Blue they 
 are,""" she remarked, smiHng archly. " I like blue eyes." 
 Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was 
 the Woman of Thirty, *' George Moore's Woman of 
 Thirtv." 
 
 I had not read George Moore at the time, but I 
 pretended to understand. 
 
 That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went 
 to bed, smiling good night quite prettily down the big 
 staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in 
 the garden. ]\Iy head was full of her, and I found 
 it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a 
 problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these 
 people ? " I said, " and how do they get a living ? They 
 seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as 
 
 being Willersley, what is a drysalter ? I think 
 
 he's a retired drysalter." 
 
 Willersley theorized while I thought of the woman 
 and that provocative quality of dash she had displayed. 
 The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. 
 A huge mass of private thinking during the interval 
 had been added to our effect upon one another. We 
 talked for a time of insignificant thin^^s. 
 
 " What do you do," she asked rather quickly, "after 
 lunch ? Take a siesta ? " 
 
 " Sometimes," I said, and hung for a moment eye 
 to eye. 
 
 We hadn''t a doubt of each other, but my heart was 
 beating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the 
 water. 
 
ADOLESCENCE 153 
 
 "Do vou get a view from vour rooin?"" >he asked 
 after a pause. 
 
 "It's oil the third floor, Nundjer seventeen, near the 
 staircase. ^Iv friciuTs next door."^ 
 
 She befjaii to talk of books. She was interested in 
 Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I 
 for«^et altogether what that book was called, though I 
 remember to this day with the utmost exactness the 
 ])urplish magenta of its cover. She said she would lend 
 it to me, and hesitated. 
 
 Willersley wanted to go for an expedition across the 
 lake that afternoon, but I refused. He made some 
 other proposals that I rejected abruptly. " I shall 
 write in my room,'"" I said. 
 
 " Why not write down here ? " 
 
 " I shall write in my room.'"* I snarled like a thwarted 
 animal, and he looked at me curiously. " Very well," 
 he said ; "then I'll make some notes and think about 
 that order of ours out under the magnolias." 
 
 I hovered about the lounge for a time buying post- 
 cards and feverishly restless, watching the movements 
 of the other people. Finally I went up to my room 
 and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came 
 a little tap at the unlocked door, and in an instant, 
 like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it 
 open. 
 
 " Here is that book," she said, and we hesitated. 
 
 " Covie in ! " I whispered, trembling from head to 
 foot. 
 
 " YouVe just a boy," she said in a low tone. 
 
 I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar 
 with the safe-door nearly opened. "Come in," I said 
 almost impatiently, for any one might be in the passage, 
 and I gripj)ed her wrist and drew her towards me. 
 
154 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " What do you mean ? " Bhe answered with a faint 
 smile on her hps, and awkward and yielding. 
 
 I shut the door behind her, still holding her with 
 one hand, then turned upon her — she was laughing 
 nervously — and without a word drew her to me and 
 kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her, her 
 face, close to mine, became solemn and tender. 
 
 She was suddenly a different being from the dis- 
 contented wife who had tapped a moment since on my 
 door, a woman transfigured. . , . 
 
 That evening I came down to dinner a monster of 
 pride, for behold ! I was a man. I felt myself the most 
 wonderful and unprecedented of adventurers. It was 
 hard to believe that any one in the world before had 
 done as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we 
 carried things off admirably, and it seemed to me that 
 Willersley was the dullest old dog in the world. I 
 wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him 
 derisive pokes. After dinner and coffee in the lounge I 
 was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him 
 come with me down to the cafe under the arches by the 
 pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant 
 nonsense about everything under the sun, in order not 
 to talk about the happenings of the afternoon. All 
 the time something shouted within me : " I am a man ! 
 I am a man ! " . . . 
 
 " What shall we do to-morrow ? " said he. 
 
 " Fm for loafing,'"' I said. " Let's row in the morn- 
 ing and spend to-morrow afternoon just as we did 
 to-day." 
 
 "They say the church behind the town is worth 
 seeing." 
 
 " We'll go up about sunset ; that's the best time 
 for it. We can start about five." 
 
ADOLESCENCE 155 
 
 We heard iniKsic, and went fLiiLlicr aloii^ llic arcade 
 to discover a 2)lace where girls in operatic Swiss peasant 
 costume were singing and dancing on a creaking, pro- 
 testing httle stage. I eyed their generous display of 
 pink neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who 
 has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and 
 easy, I felt, if one took it the right way. 
 
 Next day Willersley wanted to go on, hut I delayed. 
 Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly 
 my mood changed, and we decided to start early the 
 following morning. I remember, though a little indis- 
 tinctly, the feeling of my last talk with that woman 
 whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt 
 or I have forgotten. (Her christian name was Millv.) 
 She was tired and rather low-spirited, and disposed to be 
 sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I 
 found myself liking her for the sake of her own person- 
 ality. There was something kindly and generous 
 appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled 
 sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality 
 of motherlincss in her attitude to me that somethinir 
 in my nature answered and aj)proved. She didn't pre- 
 tend to keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. 
 *' Tve done you no harm,'"' she said a little doubtfullv, 
 an odd note for a man's victim ! And, " we've had a 
 good time. You have liked me, haven't you ? " 
 
 She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life ; she 
 was childless and had no hope of children, and her 
 husband was the only son of a rich meat salesman, very 
 mean, a mighty smoker — "he reeks of it,"" she said, 
 "always" — and interested in nothing but golf, billiards 
 (which he played very badly), pigeon shooting, con- 
 vivial Tree ^lasonry and Stock Exchange punting. 
 ]\Iostly they drifted about the Uiviera. Her mother 
 
156 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 had contrived her marriage when she was eiohteen. 
 They were the first samples I ever encountered of the 
 great multitude of functionless property owners which 
 encumbers modern civilization — but at the time I didn't 
 think much of that aspect of them. . . . 
 
 I tell all this business as it happened without com- 
 ment, because I have no comment to make. It was all 
 strange to me, strange rather than wonderful, and, it 
 may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those 
 furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could 
 scarcely have been more irresponsible in the matter or 
 controlled events less if I had been suddenly pushed 
 over a clifF into water. I swam, of course — finding 
 myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I 
 have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there 
 had been such a thing, was gone. And here is the 
 remarkable thing about it ; at the time and for some 
 days I was over-weeningly proud ; I have never been so 
 proud before or since ; I felt I had been promoted to 
 virility ; I was unable to conceal my exultation from 
 Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless un- 
 gracious self-approval. As he and I went along in the 
 cool morning sunshine by the rice-fields in the throat 
 of the Val Maggia a silence fell between us. 
 
 Willersley looked at me over the corner of his 
 spectacles. " I know," he said abruptly. 
 
 " Know what ? " I asked. 
 
 "I heard her. I heard her whispering. . . . The 
 whispering and rustling and so on. I was in my room 
 yesterday. . . . Any one might have heard you. . . ." 
 
 I went on with my head in the air. " Well," said I, 
 " since you know, I won't deny. Why shouldn't I ? " 
 
 "You might have been caught, and that would 
 have meant endless trouble. You might have incurred 
 
ADOLESCENCE 157 
 
 all sorts of consequences. AVhat did yon know n])out 
 her? . . . ^Ve have wasted lour days in that hot close 
 place. AVhen we found tliat Lea^^ue of Social Service 
 we were talkin^^ about," he said with a determined eye 
 upon me, " chastity will be fust among the virtues 
 prescribed."^ 
 
 " I shall form a rival Icai^uc,"'"' I said a little damped. 
 "Tm hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I 
 know why."" 
 
 He lifted his chin and stared before him through 
 his glasses at nothing. "There are some things," he 
 said, " that a man who means to work — to do irreat 
 public services — viust turn his back upon. Tm not 
 discussing the rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. 
 It happens to be the conditions we work under. It 
 will probably always be so. If you want to experiment 
 in that way, if you want even to discuss it, — out you 
 go from political life. You must know that's so. . . . 
 You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink 
 in you. You've a sort of force. You might happen 
 to do immense things. . . . Only " 
 
 He stopped. He had said all that he had forced 
 himself to say. 
 
 "I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I'm 
 going to get experience for humanity out of all my 
 talents — and bury nothing."*' 
 
 Willersley twisted his face to its humorous 
 expression. "I doubt if sexual proclivities," he said 
 drily, " come within the scope of the parable." 
 
 I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. 
 "Sex!" said I, "is a fundamental thing in life. We 
 went through all this at Trinity. I'm going to look at 
 it, experience it, think about it — and get it square with 
 the rest of life. Career and Politics must take their 
 
1 58 THE NEW IMACHIAVELLI 
 
 chances of that. It's part of the general English slack- 
 ness that thev won't look this in the face. Gods ! what 
 a muflled time we're coming out of! Sex means breed- 
 ing, and breeding is a necessary function in a nation. 
 The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans 
 fade out amidst their successes. Eugenics " 
 
 " Tliat wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley. 
 
 "It was a woman," I said after a little interval, 
 feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer 
 him, and yet had a strong dumb case against him. 
 
BOOK THE SECOND 
 MARGARET 
 
CIIArTER THE FIRST 
 
 Margaret in STAFroiiDsiiiiic 
 
 §1 
 
 I MUST go back a little way with my story. In ilie 
 previous book I have described the kind of education 
 that happens to a man of my class nowadays, and it 
 has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience 
 that I must now set out at length. I want to tell in 
 this second book how I came to marry, and to do that 
 I must give something of the atmosphere in which I 
 first met my wife and some intimations of the forces 
 that went to her making:. I met her in Staffordshire 
 while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have 
 already spoken, the uncle who sold my father's houses 
 and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was 
 twenty then and I was twenty-two. 
 
 It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland 
 that opened up so much of the world to me. I saw 
 her once, for an afternoon, and circumstances so threw 
 licr up in relief that I formed a very vivid memory of 
 her. She w.ts in the sharpest contrast with the intius- 
 trial world about lier ; she impressed me as a dainty 
 blue flower might do, come upon suddenly on a clinker 
 hea{). She remained in my mind at once a {xirplexing 
 
 interrogation and a symbol. . . • 
 
 loi K 
 
1 62 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins 
 and the world that served as a foil for her. 
 
 §2 
 
 I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an 
 awkward youth of sixteen, wearing deep mourning for 
 my mother. My uncle wanted to talk things over 
 with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go 
 into business instead of going up to Cambridge. 
 
 I remember that visit on account of all sorts of 
 novel things, but chiefly, I think, because it was the 
 first time I encountered anything that deserves to be 
 spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life I 
 had to do with people who seemed to have endless 
 supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous 
 servants ; whose daily life was made up of things that 
 I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional 
 extravagances. My cousins of eighteen and nineteen 
 took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and 
 travelled first-class in the local trains that run up and 
 down the district of the Five Towns with an entire 
 unconsciousness of the magnificence, as it seemed to 
 me, of such a proceeding. 
 
 The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with 
 big lawns before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite 
 a lot of shrubs, a coach house and stable, and subordi- 
 nate dwelling-places for the gardener and the coach- 
 man. Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a 
 canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bath-room 
 attached equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings 
 my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and 
 stamped with his name, and the house was furnished 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 163 
 
 throughout with chairs and tables in bright shining 
 wood, soft and prevalently red 'J'urkish carpets, cosy 
 corners, curtained archways, gold-tnuned landscapes, 
 overmantels, a dining-room sideboard like a palace, 
 with a large Tantahis, and electric light fittings of a 
 gay and expensive quahty. There was a fine bilhard- 
 room on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas 
 and a rotating bookcase containing an excellent collec- 
 tion of the English and American humorists from 
 Three Men in a Boat to the penultimate Mark Twain. 
 There was also a conservatory opening out of the 
 dining-room, to which the gardener brought potted 
 flowers in their season. . . . 
 
 ]\Iy aunt was a little woman with a scared look and 
 a cap that would get over one eye, not very like my 
 mother, and nearly eight years her junior ; she was 
 very much concerned with keeping everything nice, 
 and unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took 
 after their father and followed the imaginations of their 
 own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls, 
 handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest 
 and tallest, had eyes that were almost black ; Sybil was 
 of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was 
 shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sybil's hair waved, 
 and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated 
 me on my first visit with all the contempt of the 
 adolescent girl for a boy a little younger and infinitely 
 less expert in the business of life than herself. They 
 were very busy with the writings of notes and certain 
 mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left 
 me very much to my own devices. Their speech in my 
 presence was full of unfathomable allusions. They were 
 the sort of girls who will talk over and through an uniniti- 
 ated stranger with the pleasantest sense of superiority. 
 
1 64 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the 
 half-past six o'clock high tea that formed the third 
 chief meal of the day. I heard them rattling off the 
 compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with great 
 decision and effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis 
 foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelli- 
 gence that my presence was unnecessary. Then I 
 M'ent off to find some readable book in the place, but 
 apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some veterinary 
 works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of 
 The Ilhtstrated London News and a large, popular 
 illustrated History of England, there was very little to 
 be found. My aunt talked to me in a casual feeble 
 way, chiefly about my mother's last illness. The two 
 had seen very little of each other for many years ; she 
 made no secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my 
 father were the cause of the estrangement. The only 
 other society in the house during the day was an old 
 and rather decayed Skye terrier in constant conflict with 
 what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took myself off 
 for a series of walks, and acquired a considerable know- 
 ledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries. 
 
 It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, 
 where it was country-side and often quite pretty, with 
 hedgerows and fields and copses and flowers. But 
 always I went eastward, where in a long valley in- 
 dustrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff' to 
 which I turned by nature, to the human effort, and the 
 accumulation and jar of men^s activities. And in such 
 a country as that valley social and economic relations 
 were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless 
 confusion of London's population, in which no man can 
 trace any but the most slender correlation between rich 
 and poor, in which every one seems disconnected and 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 165 
 
 adrift from every one, you can see here the works, the 
 j)()tbank or the ironworks or what not, and here ck)se 
 at hand tlic con<;e.stcd, nicanly-hoiiscd workers, and at a 
 little distance a small middle-class (juarter, and a[;ain 
 remoter, the big house of the employer. It was like a 
 very simplified diagram — after the untraceable confusion 
 of London. 
 
 I prowled alone, curious and interested, through 
 shabby back streets of mean little homes; I followed 
 canals, sometimes canals of mysteriously heated waters 
 with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened 
 walls or a distant prospect of dustbin-fed vegetable 
 gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the pot- 
 banks, heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, 
 lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the 
 south country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous 
 level crossings, and surveyed across dark intervening 
 spaces, the Haming uproar, the gnome-like activities of 
 iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumours of 
 strikes, and learnt from the columns of some obscure 
 labour paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the 
 lead poisoning that was in those days one of the normal 
 risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back I 
 came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of 
 that period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance 
 of money and more or less furtive flirtations and the 
 tinkle of ^loskowski and Chaminade. It was, I say, 
 diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the 
 expropriated — as if Marx had arranged the picture. 
 It was as jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous 
 than any of the confusions of building and development 
 that had surrounded my youth at Ihomstead and Penge, 
 but it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found 
 great virtue in the word "exploitation.'" 
 
1 66 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of 
 the whole thing the twisted figure of a man, whose face 
 had been horribly scalded — I can't describe how, except 
 that one eye was just expressionless white — and he 
 ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak 
 and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded 
 by the hot water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace 
 of Lord Pandram's works. He had been scalded and 
 quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And 
 Lord Pandram was worth half a million. 
 
 That upturned sightless white eye of his took 
 possession of my imagination. I don"'t think that even 
 then I was swayed by any crude melodramatic con- 
 ception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe 
 the card wasn"'t a punctiliously accurate statement of 
 fact, and that a case could be made out for Lord 
 Pandram. Still there in the muddy gutter, painfully 
 and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and 
 scalded and wretched, and he ground his dismal hurdy- 
 gurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the 
 passer-by for help, for help and some sort of righting — 
 one could not imagine quite what. There he was as a 
 fact, as a by-product of the system that heaped my 
 cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels 
 and the abundant cigars and spacious billiard-room 
 of my uncle's house. I couldn''t disconnect him and 
 them. 
 
 My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the 
 state of war that existed between himself and his 
 workers, and the mingled contempt and animosity he 
 felt from them. 
 
ISIAIIGAIIET IN STAFFORDSIIIllE 167 
 
 §3 
 
 Prospcritv had overtaken my mule. So (juile 
 naturally he believed that every man vho was not as 
 prosperous as he was had only himself to blame. He 
 was rich and he had left school and ^one into his father's 
 business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper 
 ncre at which every one's education should terminate. 
 He was very anxious to dissuade me from <!;nini^ up to 
 Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all 
 my visit. 
 
 I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, 
 striding destructively about the nursery floor of my 
 childhood, and saluting my existence by slaps, loud 
 laughter, and questions about half herrings and half 
 eggs subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I 
 didn't see him for some years until my father's death, 
 and then he seemed rather smaller, though still a fiiir 
 size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly 
 ajrirressive. This altered effect was due not so much to 
 my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts 
 that he was suffering for continuous cigar-smoking, and 
 being taken in hand by his adolescent daughters who 
 had just returned from school. 
 
 During my first visit there was a perpetual series 
 of — the only word is rows, between them and him. 
 Up to the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he had main- 
 tiiined his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned 
 j)hysical chastisement. Then after an interlude of a 
 year it had dawned upon them that j)()\verhad mysteri- 
 ously departed from him. He had tried stopping their 
 pocket money, but thev found their mother financially 
 amenable; besides which it was finidamental to my 
 uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely. 
 
1 68 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Not to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in 
 making it. So that after he had stopped their allow- 
 ances for the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were 
 prepared to face beggary without a qualm. It had 
 been his pride to give them the largest allowance of 
 any girls at the school, not even excepting the grand- 
 daughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul 
 recoiled from this discipline as it had never recoiled 
 from the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both 
 girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual 
 recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found 
 it an altogether deadlier thing than the power of the 
 raised voice that had always cowed my aunt. When- 
 ever he became heated with them, they frowned as if 
 involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said : 
 
 "Daddy, you really must not say " and corrected 
 
 his pronunciation. Then, at a great advantage, they 
 resumed the discussion. . . . 
 
 i\Iy uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were 
 perfectly clear and definite. It was waste of time and 
 money. It was all damned foolery. Did they make 
 a man a better business man ? Not a bit of it. He gave 
 instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him 
 " false ideas. '"* Some men said that at college a man 
 formed useful friendships. What use were friendships 
 to a business man ? He might get to know lords, but, 
 as my uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his 
 line of faience were little greater than a common man's. 
 If college introduced him to hotel proprietors there 
 might be something in it. Perhaps it Relped a man 
 into Parliament, Parliament still being a confused 
 retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and 
 suchlike sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of 
 common- sense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 169 
 
 twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into 
 Pailianient, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I 
 mean to be a lawyer? It cost no end of money, and 
 was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor 
 great solicitors among my relations. '^ Young chaps 
 think they get on by themselves," said my uncle. " It 
 isn't so. Not unless they take their coats ofK. I took 
 mine off before I was your age by nigh a year.'' 
 
 We were at cross purposes from the outset, because 
 I did not think men lived to make money ; and I was 
 obtuse to the hints he was throwing out at the possi- 
 bilities of his own potbank, not wilfully obtuse, but 
 just failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City 
 ^Merchants had or hud not done for me, Tlack, To[)ham 
 and old Gates had certainly barred my mistaking the 
 profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and 
 bathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only 
 upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the 
 splendid chance for a young fellow with my uncle, 
 " me, having no son of my own,'"' was anything but an 
 illustration for comparison with my own chosen career. 
 
 I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk, — 
 he loved to speak " reet Staffordshire " — his rather 
 ilabby face with the mottled complexion that told of 
 crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures — he 
 kept emphasizing his points by prodding at me with 
 his finger — the ill-worn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the 
 watch chain of plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust 
 back from his head. lie tackled me lirst in the 
 ganlcn after lunch, and then tried to raise me to 
 enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing 
 me its organization, from the dusty grinding mills in 
 which whitened men worked and coughed, through the 
 highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely 
 
I70 THE NEW IVIACHIAVELLI 
 
 masked girls looked ashamed of themselves, — " Theyll 
 risk death, the fools, to show their faces to a man," 
 said my uncle, quite audibly — to the firing kilns and 
 the glazing kilns, and so round the whole place to the 
 railway siding and the gratifying spectacle of three 
 trucks laden with executed orders. 
 
 Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to 
 his little office, and he showed off before me for a 
 while, with one or two subordinates and the telephone. 
 
 " None of your Gas," he said, " all this. It's Real 
 every bit of it. Hard cash and hard glaze." 
 
 '*' Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read 
 pamphlet in my mind, and without any satirical in- 
 tention, " I suppose you must use lead in your glazes "^ " 
 
 Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling griev- 
 ance of my uncle's life. He hated leadless glazes more 
 than he hated anything, except the benevolent people 
 who had oro^anized the agitation for their use. " Lead- 
 less glazes ain't only fit for buns," he said. " Let me 
 tell you, my boy " 
 
 He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that 
 presently warmed to anger, to explain the whole 
 matter. I hadn't the rights of the matter at all. 
 Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead 
 poisoning. Secondly, not every one w^as liable to lead 
 poisoning, and it would be quite easy to pick out the 
 susceptible t}^es — as soon as they had it — and put 
 them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects of lead 
 poisoning were much exaggerated. Fourthly, and this 
 was in a particularly confidential undertone, many of 
 the people liked to get lead poisoning, especially the 
 women, because it caused abortion. I might not 
 believe it, but he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, the 
 workpeople simply would not learn the gravity of 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 171 
 
 the danger, and would cat with unwashed hands, and 
 incur all sorts of risks, so that, as my uncle put it : 
 " the fools deserve what they get." Sixthly, he and 
 several associated firms had organized a simple and 
 generous insurance scheme against lead-poisoning 
 risks. Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as 
 distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) 
 precautions against the disease. Eiglithly, in the 
 ill-ecjuipped shops of his minor competitors had 
 poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people 
 had generalized from these exceptional cases. The 
 small shops, he hazarded, looking out of the cracked 
 and dirty window at distant chimneys, might be 
 advantageously closed. . . . 
 
 "But what's the good of talking.^" said my uncle, 
 getting off the table on which he had been sitting. 
 "Seems to me there'll come a time when a master 
 will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing 
 his cirls' noses for them. That's about what it'll 
 come to."" 
 
 He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on 
 the threadbare rug, and urged me not to be misled by 
 the stories of prejudiced and interested enemies of our 
 national industries. 
 
 " They'll get a strike one of these days, of 
 employers, and then we'll see a bit,"' he saiil. 
 "They'll drive Capital abroad and then they'll whistle 
 to get it back again." . . . 
 
 He led the way down the shaky wooden steps 
 and cheered up to tell me of his way of checking 
 his coal consumption. He exchanged a ferocious 
 greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came 
 out of the factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, 
 paved with a peculiarly hard diapered brick of an 
 
172 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 unpleasing inky-blue colour, and bordered with the 
 mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood 
 open and showed grimy interiors, and dirty ill-clad 
 children played in the kennel. 
 
 We passed a sickly-looking girl with a sallow face, 
 who dragged her limbs and peered at us dimly with 
 painful eyes. She stood back, as partly blinded people 
 will do, to allow us to pass, although there was plenty 
 of room for us. 
 
 I glanced back at her. 
 
 " Thafs ploombism,''' said my uncle casually. 
 
 "What?" said I. 
 
 " Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of 
 a girl, and what d'you think ? She'd got a basin that 
 hadn't been fired, a cracked piece of biscuit it was, up 
 on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze, killing 
 glaze, man, and she was putting up her hand if you 
 please, and eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner 
 in it ! 
 
 " Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud 
 and bitter tones, and punched me hard in the ribs. 
 
 "And then they comes to that — and grumbles. 
 And the fools up in Westminster want you to put in 
 fans here and fans there — the Longton fools have. . . . 
 And them eating their dinners out of it all the 
 time ! " . . . 
 
 At high tea that night — my uncle was still holding 
 out against evening dinner — Sibyl and Gertrude made 
 what was evidently a concerted demand for a motor-car. 
 
 " YouVe got your mother's brougham," he said, 
 " that's good enough for you." But he seemed shaken 
 by the fact that some Burslem rival was launching out 
 with the new invention. " He spoils his girls," he 
 remarked. " He's a fool," and became thoughtful. 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 173 
 
 Afterwards he asked inc to come to him into liis 
 study ; it was a room with a writiiiL^-dcsk and full of 
 pieces of earthenware and suchlike litter, and we had 
 our great row about Cambridge. 
 
 " Have you thought things over, Dick ? ^ he said. 
 
 "I think ril go to Trinity, Uncle,^^ I said firmly. 
 "I want to go to Trinity. It is a great college."" 
 
 He was manifestly chagrined. " You're a fool,'' 
 he said. 
 
 I made no answer. 
 
 " YouVe a damned fool,'" he said. "But I suppose 
 
 vou've got to do it. You could have come here 
 
 That don't matter, though, now. . . You'll have your 
 time and spend your money, and be a poor half- 
 starved clerirvman, mucking about with the women 
 all the day and afraid to have one of your own ever, 
 or you'll be a schoolmaster or some such fool for the 
 rest of vour life. Or some newspaper chap. That's 
 what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind 
 not to let you. Eh ? More than half a mind. . . . 
 
 " You've got to do the thing you can," he said, 
 after a pause, " and likely it's what you're fitted for.''' 
 
 §4 
 
 I paid several short visits to StafTordshire during 
 my Cambridge days, and always these relations of mine 
 produced the same effect of hardness. My uncle's 
 thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He 
 lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific 
 construction that filled my mind. He could as easily 
 have understood Chinese poetrv. His motives were 
 made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class 
 
174 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and 
 fancied slights, a habit of acquisition that had become 
 a second nature, a keen love both of efficiency and dis- 
 play in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have no 
 sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of 
 beauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling 
 whatever. lie had strong bodily appetites, he ate and 
 drank freely, smoked a great deal, and occasionally was 
 carried off* by his passions for a "bit of a spree" to 
 Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The in- 
 dulgences of these occasions were usually followed by a 
 period of reaction, when he was urgent for the suppres- 
 sion of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a harsh and 
 forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley. 
 And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights 
 of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, 
 by the unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he 
 treated with a kindly contempt and considerable 
 financial generosity, but his daughters tore his heart ; 
 he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money 
 to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively 
 jealous of every man who came near them. 
 
 My uncle has been the clue to a great number of 
 men for me. He was an illuminating extreme. I 
 have learnt what not to expect from them through him, 
 and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden 
 antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in 
 their more complex forms, if I had not first seen them 
 in him in their feral state. 
 
 With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his 
 rather heavy, rather mottled face, his rationally thick 
 boots and slouching tweed-clad form, a little round- 
 shouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls 
 through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, 
 
MAKGAllET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 175 
 
 nnd occasionally throwinuj out n. shrewd aphorism, the 
 intractal)le unavoidable ore of the new civilization. 
 
 Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he 
 hated and despised in equal measure whatever seemed 
 to suggest that he personally was not the most perfect 
 human being conceivable, lie hated all education after 
 fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, 
 he hated all people who did not have high tea until 
 he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated 
 every game except football, which he had played and 
 could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign 
 languages because he knew no language but Stafford- 
 shire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, 
 and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. 
 Also he hated particularly, and in this order, I^ondoners, 
 Yorkshiremcn, Scotch, Welsh and Irish, because they 
 were not "reet Staffordshire,''' and he hated all other 
 Staffordshire men as insufliciently "reet/" He wanted 
 to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he 
 had a call upon every other woman in the world. He 
 wanted to have the best cigars and the best brandy in 
 the world to consume or give away magnificently, and 
 every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table 
 was an extra large size, specially made and very incon- 
 venient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they 
 interfered with his autocratic direction of his works, 
 and his workpeople because they were not obedient and 
 untiring mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in 
 fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He w;ls 
 about as nuich civilizctl, about as much tamed to the 
 ideas of collective action and mutual consideration as a 
 Central African necrro. 
 
 There are hordes of such men as he throujxhout all 
 the modern industrial world. Vou will find the same 
 
176 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 type ^vith the slightest modifications in the Pas de 
 Calais or llhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North 
 Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. 
 Yet it is only in Arnold Bennett's novels that I 
 have ever found a picture of them. These men 
 have raised themselves up from the general mass of 
 untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a hard in- 
 dustrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have 
 had first to drive themselves. They have never yet had 
 occasion or leisure to think of the state or social life 
 as a whole, and as for dreams of beauty, it was a con- 
 dition of survival that they should ignore such cravings. 
 All the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought 
 of as dictated by his conditions ; his success and harsh- 
 ness, the extravagances that expressed his pride in 
 making money, the uncongenial luxury that sprang 
 from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for 
 broad views, his contempt for everything that he could 
 not understand. 
 
 His daughters were the inevitable children of his 
 life. Queer girls they were ! Curiously " spirited " as 
 people phrase it, and curiously limited. During my 
 Cambridge days I went down to StaflPordshire several 
 times. My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to 
 go into his business, was also in his odd way proud of 
 me. I was his nephew and poor relation, and yet there 
 I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unre- 
 munera-tive things in the grandest manner, " Latin and 
 mook,'' while the sons of his neighbours, not nephews 
 merely, but sons, staved unpolished in their native town. 
 Every time I went down I found extensive changes and 
 altered relations, and before I had settled down to them 
 off I went again. I don't think I was one person to 
 them; I was a series of visitors. There is a gulf of 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 177 
 
 Rf!;cs between a <;aiint schoolboy of sixteen in nnbecom- 
 in«^ nioiirniiio^ nnd two vividly self-conscious ^irls of 
 eighteen and nineteen, l)ut a ('ainbrid«;e *'nian"" of two 
 and twenty with a first and f^ood tennis and a fjrowin<T 
 social experience, is a fair contemporary for two f^irls of 
 twenty-three and twenty-four. 
 
 A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a 
 bottle-i^reen afl'air that opened behind, had dark j)urple 
 cushions, and was controlled mysteriously by a man in 
 shiny black costume and a flat cap. The hif^h tea had 
 been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my 
 uncle would not dress or consent to have wine ; and 
 after one painful experiment, I n;athered, and a scene, 
 he put his foot down and prohibited any but high- 
 necked dresses. 
 
 "Daddy's perfectly impossible,"" Sybil told me. 
 
 The foot had descended vehemently! "My own 
 
 daughters!" he had said, "dressed up like *" — and 
 
 had arrested himself and fumbled and decided to say — 
 "actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to 
 stare at ! " Nor would he have any people invited to 
 dinner. He didn't, he had explained, want strangers 
 poking about in his house when he came home tired. 
 So such callin^T as occurred went on during; his absence 
 in the afternoon. 
 
 One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant 
 families of the industrial class to which wealth has 
 come, is its tremendous insulations. There were no 
 customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All the 
 isolated prosperities of the district sprang from econo- 
 mizing, hard-driven homes, in which there was neither 
 time nor means for hospitality. Social intercourse 
 centred very largely upon the church or chapel, and 
 the chapels were better at bringing people together 
 
178 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged. 
 Their chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore 
 through the acquaintances they had formed at school, 
 and through two much less prosperous families of 
 relations who lived at Longton and Hanley. A num- 
 ber of gossiping friendships with old school mates were 
 " kept up," and my cousins would " spend the after- 
 noon " or even spend the day with these ; such occasions 
 led to other encounters and interlaced with the furtive 
 correspondences and snatched meetings that formed 
 the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard 
 table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in 
 a few approved friends for an occasional game, but 
 mostly the billiard-room was for glory and the girls. 
 Both of them played very well. They never, so far as 
 I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter 
 domestic conflicts they began to go to dances, they 
 went with the quavering connivance of my aunt, and 
 changed into ball frocks at friends^ houses on the way. 
 There was a tennis club that formed a convenient 
 afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period 
 of my earlier visits the young bloods of the district 
 found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in 
 dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a dis- 
 position that died in tangled tandems at the apparition 
 of motor-cars. 
 
 My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life 
 for their daughters at all. In the undifferentiated 
 industrial community from which they had sprung, 
 girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to 
 them that the concentration of property that had made 
 them wealthy, had cut their children off from the 
 general social sea in which their own awkward meeting 
 had occurred, without necessarily opening any other 
 
MARGARET IX STAFFORDSHIRE 179 
 
 workl in exchange. My uncle was too much occupied 
 with tlie works and his business affairs and his private 
 vices to phihisopliize about his ^irls ; he wanted thcni 
 just to keep pjirls, preferably about sixteen, and to be 
 a sort of animated flowers and make home bri^lit, and 
 be given things. He was irritated that they would 
 not remain at this, and still more irritated that they 
 failed to sup]u*ess altogether their natural interest in 
 young men. The tandems would be steered by weird 
 and devious routs to evade the bare chance of his 
 bloodshot eye. ^ly aunt seemed to have no ideas 
 whatever about what was likely to happen to her 
 children. She had indeed no ideas about anything; 
 she took her husband and the days as they came. 
 
 I can see now the pathetic difliculty of my cousins'* 
 position in life; the absence of any guidance or 
 instruction or provision for their development. They 
 supplemented the silences of home by the conversation 
 of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. 
 They had to make what they could out of life with 
 such hints as these. The church was far too modest 
 to ofl'er them any advice. It was obtruded upon my 
 mind upon my first visit that they were both carrying 
 on correspondences and having little furtive passings 
 and seoings and meetings with the mysterious owners 
 of certain initials, S. and L. K. and, if I reuRMiibcr 
 rightly, " the R.N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, 
 of their friends. The same thing was going on, with 
 a certain intensification, at my next visit, excepting 
 only that the initials were diffLMTnt. Rut when I came 
 again their methods were maturer or I was no longer 
 a negligible (piantitv, and the notes and the initials 
 were no longer flaunted quite so openly in my face. 
 
 My coubins had worked it out from the indications 
 
I So THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of their universe that the end of life is to have a "ffood 
 time." They used the phrase. That and the drives 
 in dog-carts were only the first 'of endless points of 
 resemblance between them and the commoner sort of 
 American girl. "When some years ago I paid my first 
 and only visit to America I seemed to recover my 
 cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at 
 Euston. There were three girls in my compartment 
 supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being 
 seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager 
 about the " steamer letters " they would get at Liver- 
 pool ; they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. 
 The chief elements of a good time, as my cousins 
 judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young 
 women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and 
 to feel that you are looking well and attracting atten- 
 tion. Shopping is one of its leading joys. You buy 
 things, clothes and trinkets for yourself and presents 
 for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying 
 about in that circle ; flowers and boxes of sweets were 
 common currency. My cousins were always getting 
 and giving, my uncle caressed them with parcels and 
 cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns 
 as a stroked Aphis exudes honey. It was like the new 
 language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never 
 learnt how to express myself in it, for nature and 
 training make me feel encumbered to receive presents 
 and embarrassed in giving them. But then, like my 
 father, I hate and distrust possessions. 
 
 Of the quality of their private imagination I never 
 learnt anything ; I suppose it followed the lines of the 
 fiction they read and was romantic and sentimental. 
 So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at 
 once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, 
 
MAKGAUKT IX STAITOUDSIIIRE i8i 
 
 coniposcJ in ec^iuil measure of beconiiiif;; important and 
 ])ccoming old. I don't know wliat they thought about 
 children. I doubt if thev thou^-ht about them at all. 
 It was very secret if they did. 
 
 As for the poor and dinfi^y people all about them, my 
 cousins were always ready to take part in a Charitable 
 l^izaar. They were unaware of anv economic correla- 
 tion of their own prosperity and that circumambient 
 poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as dis- 
 agreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper. 
 They knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except 
 that there were " Agitators." It surprised them a 
 little, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically 
 put down. But they had a sort of instinctive dread 
 of social discussion as of something that mifrht breach 
 the happiness of their ignorance. , 
 
 
 §5 
 
 ^ly cousins did more than illustrate ^larx for me ; 
 they also undertook a stage of my emotional education. 
 Their method in that as in everything else was extremely 
 simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise. 
 
 It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took 
 me in hand. Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only 
 in profile, but now she became almost completely full 
 face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes of 
 hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfast — it 
 was the first morning of mv visit — before I asked for 
 them. 
 
 \Vhen young men are looked at by pretty cousins, 
 they become intensely aware of those cousins. It seemed 
 to me that I had always admired Sybil's eyes very 
 
i82 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 greatly, and that there was something in her tempera- 
 ment congenial to mine. It was odd I had not noted 
 it on my previous visits. 
 
 We walked round the garden somewhen that morn- 
 ing, and talked about Cambridge. She asked quite a 
 lot of questions about my work and my ambitions. She 
 said she had always felt sure I was clever. 
 
 The conversation languished a little, and we picked 
 some flowers for the house. Then she asked if I could 
 run. I conceded her various starts and we raced up 
 and down the middle garden path. Then, a little 
 breathless, we went into the new twenty-five guinea 
 summer-house at the end of the herbaceous border. 
 
 We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the 
 house, and she became anxious about her hair, which 
 was slightly and prettily disarranged, and asked me to 
 help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had 
 never in my life been so near the soft curly hair and 
 the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of 
 a girl, and I was stirred 
 
 It stirs me now to recall it. 
 
 I became a battleground of impulses and in- 
 hibitions. 
 
 " Thank you," said my cousin, and moved a little 
 away from me. 
 
 She began to talk about friendship, and lost her 
 thread and forgot the little electric stress between us 
 in a rather meandering analysis of her principal girl 
 friends. 
 
 But afterwards she resumed her purpose. 
 
 I went to bed that night with one proposition 
 overshadowing everything else in my mind, namely, 
 that kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult, but not 
 impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 1S3 
 
 of a doubt wlieLhcr on the whole it was worth doin^. 
 The thiii<;- had come into my existence, disturbing and 
 interrupting its flow exactly as a fever docs. Sybil 
 had infected nie with herself. 
 
 The next day matters came to a crisis in the little 
 npstairs sitting-room which had been assigned nje as 
 a study during my visit. I was working up there, or 
 rather trying to work in spite of the outrageous 
 capering of some verv primitive elements in my brain, 
 when she came up to me, untler a transparent pretext 
 of looking for a book. 
 
 I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. 
 I quite forget what our conversation was about, but I 
 know she led me to believe I might kiss her. Then 
 when I attempted to do so she averted her face. 
 
 " How could you ? '' she said ; '' I didn't mean that ! "" 
 That remained the state of our relations for two 
 days. I developed a growing irritation with and 
 resentment against cousin Sybil, combined with an 
 intense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered 
 and thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy 
 persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her 
 game, so far as she was concerned, was played and 
 won. It wasn't until I had fretted for two days that 
 I realized that I was being used for the commonest 
 form of excitement possible to a conunonplace girl ; 
 that dozens perhaps of young men had played the part 
 of Tantalus at cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my 
 room at nights, damning her and calling her by terms 
 which on the whole she rather deserved, while Sybil 
 went to sleep pitying "• poor old Dick ! " 
 
 " Damn it ! '' I said, *' I will be equal with you." 
 But I never did equalize the disadvantage, and 
 perhaps it's as well, for I fancy that sort of rcNcnge 
 
1 84 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 cuts both people too much for a rational man to seek 
 it. . . . 
 
 " Why are men so silly ? " said cousin Sybil next 
 morning, wriggling back with down-bent head to 
 release herself from what should have been a compelling 
 embrace. 
 
 " Confound it ! " I said, with a flash of clear vision. 
 " You started this game." 
 
 " Oh ! " 
 
 She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little 
 flushed and excited and interested, and ready for the 
 delightful defensive if I should renew my attack. 
 
 " Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. 
 "I don't know whether Fm so keen on kissing you, 
 Sybil, after all. I just thought you wanted me to." 
 
 I could have whipped her, and my voice stung more 
 than my words. 
 
 Our eyes met ; a real hatred in hers leaping up to 
 meet mine. 
 
 " Let's play tennis," I said, after a moment's pause. 
 
 " No," she answered shortly, " Tm going indoors." 
 
 " Very well." 
 
 And that ended the affair with Sybil. 
 
 I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment 
 when Gertrude awoke from some preoccupation to an 
 interest in my existence. She developed a disposition 
 to touch my hand by accident, and let her fingers rest 
 in contact with it for a moment, — she had pleasant soft 
 hands ; — she began to drift into summer-houses with 
 me, to let her arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask 
 questions about Cambridge. They were much the 
 same questions that Sybil had asked. But I con- 
 trolled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent 
 and entirely civil indifference to her blandishments. 
 
MARGARET IN STAFF01{DSII1RE 1S5 
 
 What (•rcrtrude made of it came out one eveniiiir 
 in some talk — I for^^et about wliat — with Sybil. 
 
 "Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, 
 « Dick^s Pi." 
 
 And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent 
 levity IVoui this theory of my innate and virginal 
 piety. 
 
 § c 
 
 It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire 
 background that I think I must have seen ^Margaret 
 for the first time. I say I think because it is (juite 
 possible that we had passed each other in the streets of 
 Cambridge, no doubt with that affectation of mutual 
 disregard which was once customary between under- 
 graduates and Newnham girls. But if that was so I 
 had noted nothinf; of the slender ijraciousness that 
 shone out so pleasingly against the bleaker midland 
 surroundings. 
 
 She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and 
 the step-daughter of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of 
 Burslem. She was not only not in my cousins' genera- 
 tion but not in their set, she was one of a small hard- 
 working group who kept immaculate note-books, and 
 did as much fis is humanly possible of that insensate 
 pile of written work that the Girls' l*ublic School 
 movement has inflicted upon school-girls. She really 
 learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, 
 she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching industry 
 can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and 
 she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after the 
 usual conflict with her family, to work for the History 
 Tripos. 
 
iS6 THE NEW MACHIxiVELLI 
 
 There in her third year she made herself thoroughly 
 ill through overwork, so ill that she had to give 
 up Newnham altogether and go abroad with her 
 mother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do in 
 those university colleges, through the badness of her 
 home and school training. She thought study must 
 needs be a hard straining of the mind. She worried 
 her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole, 
 she felt herself not making headway and she cut her 
 games and exercise in order to increase her hours of 
 toil, and worked into the night. She carried a knack 
 of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and 
 inessentials of her subject. It didn't need the bad- 
 ness of the food for which Bennett Hall is celebrated, 
 and the remarkable dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes 
 and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented 
 it, to ensure her collapse. Her mother brought her 
 home, fretting and distressed, and then finding her 
 hopelessly unhappy at home, took her and her half- 
 brother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three 
 years later, for a journey to Italy. 
 
 Italy did much to assuage Margaret^s chagrin. I 
 think all three of them had a very good time there. 
 At home Mr. Seddon, her step -father, played the part 
 of a well-meaning blight by reason of the moods that 
 arose from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, 
 equipped with various introductions and much sound 
 advice from sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having 
 acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto, 
 and at last Rome. They returned, if I remember 
 rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months 
 or more they had had abroad, and now Margaret was 
 back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very 
 civilized person. 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 1S7 
 
 New ideas were abroad, it was Maytinic andasprin;; 
 of abundant flowers — dallbdils were particularly good 
 that year — and Mrs. Seddon celebrated her return by 
 giving an afternoon reception at short notice, with the 
 clear intention of letting every one out into the garilen 
 if the weather held. 
 
 The Seddons had a biir old farmhouse modi lied to 
 modern ideas of comfort on the road out towards 
 IVlisterton, with an orchard that had been rather 
 l^leasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich 
 blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of 
 grass full of nodding vellow trumpets had been left 
 amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as 
 it were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn or 
 glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above 
 her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came to 
 meet our rather too consciously dressed party, — we had 
 come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in grey 
 silk. Mariiaret wore a soft flowin<j: flowered blue dress 
 of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the fashion 
 and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, un- 
 bountiful Prima vera. 
 
 It was one of those May days that ape the light and 
 heat of sunmier, and I remember disconnectedly (|uite 
 a number of brightly lit iigures and groups walking 
 about, and a white gate between orchard and garden 
 and a large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian 
 house with a verandah and open French windows, 
 through which the tea drinking had come out upon the 
 moss-edged flagstones, even as Mrs. Seddon had plannetl. 
 
 The party wiis almost entirely feminine except for a 
 little curate with a large head, a good voice and a 
 radiant manner, who was obviously attracted by 
 ^largaret, and two or three young husbands still 
 
1 88 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 sufficiently addicted to their ^vives to accompany them. 
 One of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with 
 abundant blond curly hair on which was poised a grey 
 felt hat encircled by a refined black band. He wore, 
 moreover, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a 
 long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and 
 presently he removed his hat and carried it in one hand. 
 There were two tennis-playing youths besides myself. 
 There was also one father with three daughters in 
 anxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half 
 broken in, reluctant, rebellious and consciously and con- 
 scientiously " reet Staffordshire.''"' The daughters were 
 all alert to suppress the possible plungings, the un- 
 desirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. 
 They nipped his very gestures in the bud. The rest of 
 the people were mainly mothers with daughters — 
 daughters of all ages, and a scattering of aunts, and 
 there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together 
 and regarded parties suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in 
 hiding, I think, all the time, though not formally 
 absent. 
 
 Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of 
 the French windows, where four trim maids went to and 
 fro busily between the house and the clumps of people 
 seated or standing before it ; and tennis and croquet 
 were intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank 
 of rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of 
 high spring. 
 
 Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret 
 partly assisted and partly talked to me and my cousin 
 Sibyl — Gertrude had found a disused and faded initial 
 and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle 
 revival — while their mother exercised a divided chaperon- 
 age from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, 
 
MARGARET IX STArFORDSIIIRE 1S9 
 
 stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our 
 party, and preluded, I remember, every ohservation he 
 made by a vigorous resumption of stirring. 
 
 We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kcj)t lis to 
 it. The curate was a Selwyn man and had taken a pa.ss 
 degree in theology, but Margaret had come to Gavlord's 
 lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown, 
 and understood these difFerences. She had the eairerness 
 of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places and 
 personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were 
 enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the Backs, and 
 the curate, addressing himself more particularly to 
 Sibyl, told a long confused story illustrative of his dis- 
 position to reckless devilry (of a pure-minded kindly 
 sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on the 
 way to Grantchester. 
 
 I can still see jMargaret as I saw her that afternoon, 
 see her fresh fair face, with the little oblicjuity of the 
 upper lip, and her brow always slightly knitted, and her 
 manner as of one breathlessly shy but determined. She 
 had rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even 
 musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost 
 of a lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that 
 Cambridge still existed. " I went to Grantchester," she 
 said, "last year, and had tea under the apple-blossom. 
 I didn't think then I should have to come down.'' (It 
 was that started the curate upon his anecdote.) 
 
 " Fvc seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about 
 them — at the Pitti and the Brera, — the Brera is wonder- 
 ful — wonderful places, — but it isn't like real study," 
 she was saying presently. . . . '' We bought bales of 
 photographs," she said. 
 
 I thought the bales a little out of keeping. 
 
 But fair-haired and quite simply and yet graciously 
 
I go THE NEW ISIACHIAVELLI 
 
 and f^mcifullv dressed, talkinej of art and beautiful 
 things and a beautiful land, and with so much manifest 
 regret for learning denied, she seemed a different 
 kind of being altogether from my smart, hard, high- 
 coloured, black-haired and resolutely hatted cousin; 
 she seemed translucent beside Gertrude. Even the 
 little twist and droop of her slender body was a grace 
 to me. 
 
 I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set 
 myself to interest and please her as well as I knew how. 
 
 We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the 
 shrubs of Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visit — 
 he had mven a talk to Bennett Hall also — and our 
 impression of him. 
 
 " He disappointed me too," said Margaret. 
 
 I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own 
 views in the matter of social progress, and she listened 
 — oh ! with a kind of urged attention, and her brow 
 a little more knitted, very earnestly. The little curate 
 desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and 
 general debris of his story, and made himself look very 
 alert and intelligent. 
 
 "We did a lot of that when I was up in the 
 eighties,"' he said. "Fm glad Imperialism hasn't 
 swamped you fellows altogether." 
 
 Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to 
 join our talk from the shrubbery ; the initial a little 
 flushed and evidently in a state of refreshed relation- 
 ship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pink and 
 more particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined 
 our little group. Gertrude had been sipping admira- 
 tion and was not disposed to play a passive part in the 
 talk. 
 
 " Socialism ! " she cried, catching the word. " It's 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 191 
 
 well Pa isn't hero. lie lias Fits when people talk of 
 socialism. Fits ! "" 
 
 The initial laufrhed in a general kind of way. 
 
 The curate said there was socialism and socialism, 
 and looked at ^fargaret to gauge whether he had been 
 too bold in this utterance. But she was all, he 
 ])crceived, for broad-mindedness, and he stirred himself 
 (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of 
 expression. He said the state of the poor was appall- 
 ing, simply appalling ; that there were times when he 
 wanted to shatter the whole system, " only," he said, 
 turning to me appealingly, " ^Vhat have we got to put 
 in its place ?" 
 
 " The thing that exists is always the more evident 
 alternative,"" I said. 
 
 The little curate looked at it for a moment. 
 " Precisely,'*' he said explosively, and turned stirring 
 and with his head a little on one side, to hear what 
 ^largaret was saying. 
 
 INIargaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect 
 of daring, that she had no doubt she was a socialist. 
 
 " And wearinij a irold chain ! " said Gertrude, " and 
 drinking out of eggshell ! I like that ! '" 
 
 I came to ^Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow 
 that because one's a socialist one ought to dress in 
 sackcloth and ashes." 
 
 The initial coloured deeply, and having secured 
 my attention by prodding me slightly with the wrist 
 of the hand that held his teacup, cleared his throat 
 and suggested that " one ought to be consistent." 
 
 I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion 
 of the elements. We beiran an interesting little 
 wrangle, one of those crude discussions of general ideas 
 that are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret 
 
192 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 supported one another as socialists, Gertrude and 
 Sybil and the initial maintained an anti-socialist 
 position, the curate attempted a cross-bench position 
 with an air of intending to come down upon us pre- 
 sently with a casting vote. He reminded us of a 
 number of useful principles too often overlooked in 
 argument, that in a big question like this there was 
 much to be said on both sides, that if every one did 
 his or her duty to every one about them there would 
 be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over 
 and above all enactments we needed moral changes in 
 people themselves. My cousin Gertrude was a difficult 
 controversialist to manage, being unconscious of incon- 
 sistency in statement and absolutely impervious to 
 reply. Her standpoint was essentially materialistic ; 
 she didn't see why she shouldn't have a good time 
 because other people didn't ; they would have a good 
 time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said that if we 
 did give up everything we had to other people, they 
 wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She 
 asked if we were so fond of work-people, why we didn't 
 go and live among them, and expressed the inflexible 
 persuasion that if we had socialism, everything would 
 be just the same again in ten years' time. She also 
 threw upon us the imputation of ingratitude for a 
 beautiful world by saying that so far as she was con- 
 cerned she didn't want to upset everything. She was 
 contented with things. as they were, thank you. 
 
 The discussion led in some way that I don't in the 
 least recall now, and possibly by abrupt transitions, 
 to a croquet foursome in which Margaret involved the 
 curate without involving herself, and then stood beside 
 me on the edge of the lawn while the others played. 
 We watched silently for a moment. 
 
MARGARET IX STAFFORDSHIRE 193 
 
 " I hate that sort of view,'*'' she said suddenly in a 
 confidential undertone, with her delicate pink flush 
 return iuf^. 
 
 "It's want of iina^^ination/' I said. 
 
 "To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went 
 on ; "just to go on dressing and playing and having 
 meals and spending money!"" She seemed to be 
 referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole 
 world of intlustry and property about us. " lUit what 
 is one to do?" she asked. '' I do wi^h I had not had 
 to come down. It's all so pointless here. There seems 
 to be nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No 
 one here seems to feel (piite what I feel, the sort of 
 need there is for meaning in things. I hate things 
 without meaning."'' 
 
 " Don't you do — local work ? "" 
 
 " I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find some- 
 thing. Do you think — if one were to attempt some 
 sort of ])ropaganda ? '"* 
 
 " Could you ?" I began a little doubtfullv. 
 
 "I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a 
 thoughtful moment. " I suppose it would come to 
 nothing. And yet I feel there is so much to be done 
 for the world, so much one ought to be doing. ... I 
 want to do somethiiifr for the world." 
 
 I can see her now as she stood there with her brows 
 nearly frowning, her blue eyes looking before her, her 
 mouth almost petulant. " One feels that there are 
 so many things going on — out of one's reach,"'"' she 
 said. 
 
 I went back in the motor-car with my mind full 
 of her, the cjuality of delicate discontent, the sugges- 
 tion of exile. Kven a kind of weakness in her was 
 sympathetic. She told tremendously against her 
 
 o 
 
194 THE T^EW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 background. She was, I say, like a protesting blue 
 flower upon a cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she 
 connects and mingles with the furious quarrel I had 
 with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. 
 Indirectly IMargaret was responsible. My mind was 
 running on ideas she had revived and questions she 
 had set clamouring, and quite inadvertently in my 
 attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his 
 profoundest feelings. . . , 
 
 §7 
 
 What a preposterous shindy that was ! 
 
 I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding 
 what I considered to be the most indisputable and 
 non-contentious propositions conceivable — until, to 
 my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me a 
 " damned young puppy." 
 
 It was seismic. 
 
 "Tremendously interesting time,'** I said, "just in 
 the beginning of making a civilization.'" 
 
 " Ah ! " he said, with an averted face, and nodded, 
 leaning forward over his cigar. 
 
 I had not the remotest thought of annoying him. 
 
 " Monstrous muddle of things we have got,"" I said, 
 " j umbled streets, ugly population, ugly factories '" 
 
 " You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," 
 said my uncle, regarding me askance. 
 
 " Not me. But a world that had a collective plan 
 and knew where it meant to be going would do a sight 
 better, anyhow. We're all swimming in a flood of 
 ill-calculated chances '' 
 
 " You'll be making out I organized that business 
 
MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 195 
 
 down there — ])y chance — next,""* said my uncle, his 
 voice thick willi challeiifre. 
 
 I went on us llioiicfh I was back in Trinitv. 
 
 ''There's a lot of chance in the niakini^ of all f^reat 
 businesses,"* I said. 
 
 My uncle remarked that that showed how much I 
 knew about businesses. If chance made businesses, 
 why was it that he always succeeded and ^rew while 
 those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second 
 place ? He showed a disposition to tell the frlorious 
 history of how once Ackroyd's overshadowed him, 
 and how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times 
 over. But I wanted to <;et out what was in my mind. 
 
 " Oh ! " I said, " as between man and man and 
 business and business, some of course get the pull bv 
 this quality or that — but it's forces quite outside the 
 individual case that make the big part of any success 
 under modern conditions. Vou never invented pottery, 
 nor any process in pottery that matters a rap in your 
 works ; it wasn't 7/our foresight that joined all England 
 up with railways and made it possible to organize 
 production on an altogether different scale. You 
 really at the utmost can't take credit for much more 
 than being the sort of man who happened to fit what 
 happened to be the requirements of the time, and who 
 ha])pened to be in a position to take advantage of 
 them ^ 
 
 It was then my uncle cried out and called me a 
 damned young puppy? find became involved in some 
 unexpected trouble of his own. 
 
 I woke up as it were from mv analysis of the 
 situation to discover him bent over a splendid spittoon, 
 cursing incoherentlv, retching a little, and spitting out 
 the end of his cigar which he had bitten oft' in his 
 
196 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 last attempt at self-control, and withal fully prepared 
 as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just 
 all that he considered to be the contents of his mind 
 upon the condition of mine. 
 
 Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him ? He'd 
 never had an outside view of himself for years, and I 
 resolved to stand up to him. We went at it hammer 
 and tongs ! It became clear that he supposed me to 
 be a Socialist, a zealous, embittered haber of all 
 ownership — and also an educated man of the vilest, 
 most pretentiously superior description. His principal 
 grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to 
 that he recurred again and again. . . . 
 
 We had been maintaining an armed truce with 
 each other since my resolve to go up to Cambridge, 
 and now we had out all that had accumulated between 
 us. There had been stupendous accumulations. , . . 
 
 The particular things we said and did in that 
 bawlinsc encounter matter nothinf^ at all in this storv. 
 I can't now estimate how near we came to fisticuffs. 
 It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of 
 benefits conferred and remembered, that I didn't want 
 to stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in 
 a state of puerile fury, to pack and go off to the 
 Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility, tele- 
 phoned for a cab. 
 
 " Good riddance ! " shouted my uncle, seeing me 
 off into the night. 
 
 On the face of it our row was preposterous, but 
 the underlying reality of our quarrel was the essential 
 antagonism, it seemed to me, in all human affairs, the 
 antagonism between ideas and the established method, 
 that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. 
 The world I hate is the rule-of-thumb world, the 
 
MAllGARET IN STAITOUDSIIIRE 197 
 
 thing I and my kind of people cxisl for primarily 
 is battle with that, to annoy it, disarran^^e it, re- 
 construct it. We (|uestion everythin«r, disturl) any- 
 thin<^ that cannot give a clear justification to our 
 questioning, because we believe inherently that our 
 sense of disorder implies the })ossibility of a better 
 order. Of course we are detestable. My uncle was 
 of that other vaster mass who accept everything for 
 the thing it seems to be, hate encjuiry and analysis 
 as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist cliange, 
 oppose experiment, desjiise science. The world is 
 our battleground ; and all history, all literature that 
 matters, all science, deals with this conflict of the 
 thing that is and the speculative "if that will 
 destroy it. 
 
 But that is why I did not see Margaret again for 
 five years. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 ^Iargaret in London 
 
 I WAS twenty-seven when I met Margaret again, and 
 the intervening five years had been years of vigorous 
 activity for me, if not of very remarkable growth 
 When I saw her again, I could count myself a grown 
 man. I think, indeed, I counted myself more com- 
 pletely grown than I was. At any rate, by all ordinary 
 standards, I had " got on " very well, and my ideas, 
 if they had not changed very greatly, had become 
 much more definite and my ambitions clearer and 
 bolder. 
 
 I had long since abandoned my fellowship and 
 come to London. I had published two books that 
 had been talked about, written several articles, and 
 established a regular relationship wdth the Weekly 
 Review and the Evening Gazette. I was a member 
 of the Eighty Club and learning to adapt the style 
 of the Cambridge Union to laro;er uses. The London 
 world had opened out to me very readily. I had 
 developed a pleasant variety of social connections. I 
 had made the acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had 
 been attracted by my New Rider, and who talked 
 
 198 
 
MARCAKET IX LONDON 199 
 
 about it and luc, and so did a very f^rcat deal to 
 make a way for me into the company of prominent and 
 anuisinf]^ people. I dined ont (juite frecpiently. The 
 glitter and interest of ;;()0(1 London dinner parties 
 became a common experience. I liked the sort of 
 conversation one got at them extremely, the little 
 glow of dnolognes burning np into more general 
 discussions, the closing-in of the men after the going 
 of the women, the sage, substantial masculine gossij)- 
 ing, the later resumption of effective talk with some 
 pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide 
 range of houses : Cambridf^e had linked me to one or 
 two correlated sets of artistic and literary people, and 
 my books and Mr. Evesham had opened to me the big 
 vague workl of *' society." I wasn't aggressive nor 
 particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I 
 talked well, and if I had nothing interesting to say I 
 said as little as possible, and I had a youthful gravity 
 of manner that was liked by hostesses. And the other 
 side of my nature that first flared through the cover of 
 restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity 
 to develop along the line London renders practicable. 
 I had had my experiences and secrets and adventures 
 among that fringe of ill-mated or erratic or discredited 
 women the London world possesses. The thing had 
 long ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, 
 and had become a cjuestion of appetites and excite- 
 ment, and amouii other thin<is the excitement of not 
 being found out. 
 
 1 write rather doubtfully of my growing during 
 this period. Indeed I find it hard to judge whether I 
 can say that I grew at all in any real sense of the word, 
 between three and twenty and twenty-seven. It seems 
 to me now to have been rather a phase of realization 
 
200 THE NEW MACllIAVELLI 
 
 and clarification. All the broad lines of my thought 
 were laid down, I am sure, by the date of my Locarno 
 adventure, but in those five years I discussed things 
 over and over again with myself and others, filled 
 out with concrete fact forms I had at first appre- 
 hended sketchily and conversationally, measured my 
 powers against my ideals and the forces in the world 
 about me. It was evident that many men no better than 
 myself and with no greater advantages than mine had 
 raised themselves to influential and even decisive 
 positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I was 
 gathering the confidence and knowledge necessary to 
 attack the world in the large manner ; I found I could 
 write, and that people would let me write if I chose, as 
 one having authority and not as the scribes. Socially 
 and politically and intellectually I knew myself for an 
 honest man, and that quite without any deliberation 
 on my part this showed and made things easy for me. 
 People trusted my good faith from the beginning — 
 for all that I came from nowhere and had no better 
 position than any adventurer. 
 
 But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing 
 bigger at twenty-seven than at twenty-two, however 
 much saner and stronger, and any one looking closely 
 into my mind during that period might well have 
 imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly 
 evident to me now that I came no nearer to any under- 
 standing of women during that time. That Locarno 
 affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed. 
 It ended something— nipped something in the bud 
 perhaps — took me at a stride from a vague, fine, 
 ignorant, closed world of emotion to intrigue and a 
 perfectly definite and limited sensuality. It ended my 
 youth, and for a time it prevented my manhood. I had 
 
MARGARET IN L(3XD0N 201 
 
 never vet even peeped at llic sweetest, profoiindest 
 thing ill the world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or 
 dreamt with anv (jiiality of reality of a wife or any 
 sueh thing as a friend among wotnaiikind. My vague 
 anticipation of sueh things in life had vanished 
 altogether. I turned away from their possibility. It 
 seemed to me I knew what had to be known about 
 womankind. I wanted to work hard, to get on to a 
 position in which I could develop and forward my 
 constructive projects. Women, I thought, liad nothing 
 to do with that. It seemed clear I could not marry 
 for some years; I was attractive to certain types of 
 women, I liad vanity enough to give me an agreeable 
 confidence in love-making, and I went about seeking a 
 convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who 
 should serve my purpose and say in the end, like that 
 kindly fii-st mistress of mine, " Tve done you no harm,'' 
 and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of 
 disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle 
 and wreck the career I was intent upon. 
 
 I don't apologize for, or defend my mental and 
 moral phases. So it was I appraised life and prepared 
 to take it, and so it is a thousand ambitious men see 
 it to-day. . . . 
 
 For the rest these five years were a period of 
 definition. ]\Iy political conceptions were j^erfectly 
 plain and honest. I had one constant desire ruling my 
 thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire 
 better ordered than I found it, to organize and discipline, 
 to build uj) a constructive and controlling State out of 
 my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse 
 education with public intention, to develop a new 
 better-living generation with a collectivist habit of 
 thought, to link now chaotic activities in every human 
 
202 THE NEW MACIIIAVELLI 
 
 affair, and jxarticularly to catch that escaped, world- 
 making, world-ruining, dangerous thing, industrial and 
 financial enterprise, and bring it back to the service 
 of the general good. I had then the precise image that 
 still serves me as a symbol for all I wish to bring about, 
 the image of an engineer building a lock in a swelling 
 torrent — with water-pressure as his only source of power. 
 My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that 
 enterprise ; it gave shape and direction to all my life. 
 The problem that most engaged my mind during those 
 years was the practical and personal problem of just 
 where to apply myself to serve this almost innate 
 purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, 
 struggling upward through the confusion, to take hold 
 of things ? Somewhere between politics and literature 
 my grip must needs be found, but where ? Always I 
 seem to have been looking for that in those opening 
 years, and disregarding everything else to discover it. 
 
 §2 
 
 The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret 
 again, were in the sharpest contrast with the narrow in- 
 dustrialism of the Staffordshire world. They were indeed 
 at the other extreme of the scale, two active self-centred 
 people, excessively devoted to the public service. It 
 was natural I should gravitate to them, for they seemed 
 to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better 
 informed expression of all I was then urgent to attempt 
 and do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or 
 public officials, they described themselves as publicists 
 — a vague yet sufficiently significant term. They 
 lived and worked in a hard little house in Chambers 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 203 
 
 Street, Westminster, and ni.ule a centre for (juitc an 
 astonishinif amount of political and social activity. 
 
 \\'illcrslcy took me there one evenin<^. Tlie place 
 v/as almost pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassum- 
 ing. The narrow passage-hall, papereil with some 
 ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was 
 choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine 
 wrap. Motioned on rather than announced by a tall 
 Scotch servant woman, the oidy domestic I ever remem- 
 ber seeing there, we made our way up a narrow stair- 
 case past the open door of a small study packed with 
 blue-books, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before 
 the iircj)lace in her drawing-room. She was a tall 
 commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in 
 black silk and red beads, with dark eyes that had no 
 depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost 
 visible prominence, aquiline features and straight black 
 hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray 
 like the head feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood 
 with her hands behind her back, and talked in a high 
 tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with lJlu})p, 
 who was practically in those days the secretary of the 
 Local Government Board. A very short broad man 
 with thick ears and fat white hands writhing inter- 
 twined behind him, stood with his back to us, eager to 
 bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender 
 girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, 
 stood with one foot on the fender listening with an 
 expression of entirely puzzled propitiation. A tall 
 sandy-bearded bishop with the ex})ression of a man 
 in a trance completed this central group. 
 
 The room was one of those long apartments once 
 divided by folding doors, and reaching from back to 
 front, that are common upon the first floors of London 
 
204 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 houses. Its walls were hung with two or three in- 
 different water colours, there was scarcely any furniture 
 but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely 
 carpeted with matting, was crowded with a curious 
 medley of people, men predominating. Several were 
 in evening dress, but most had the morning garb of 
 the poHtician ; the women were either severely rational 
 or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed out to 
 me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I 
 recognized the Duchess of Clynes, who at that time 
 cultivated intellectuality. I looked round, identifying 
 a face here or there, and stepping back trod on some 
 one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right 
 Hon. G. B. IMottisham, dear to the Punch caricaturists. 
 He received my apology with that intentional charm 
 that is one of his most delightful traits, and resumed 
 his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, 
 whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days. . . . 
 
 Willersley found an ex-member of the School 
 Board for whom he had affinities, and left me to 
 exchange experiences and comments upon the company 
 with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don ; but he was 
 nibbling, he said, at certain negotiations with the 
 Times that might bring him down to London. He 
 wanted to come to London. " We peep at things from 
 Cambridge,'' he said. 
 
 " This sort of thing," I said, " makes London 
 necessary. It's the oddest gathering." 
 
 " Every one comes here,"'"' said Esmeer. " Mostly we 
 hate them like poison — jealousy — and little irritations 
 — Altiora can be a horror at times — but we have to 
 come." 
 
 " Things are being done 't " 
 
 " Oh ! — no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of 
 
MARGARET IX LONDON 205 
 
 the Ihitisli machinery — tliat doesn't show. . . . Ihit 
 nobody else could do it. 
 
 "Two people," said Esmccr, "who've planned to 
 he a power — in an original way. And by Jove ! 
 they've done it ! " 
 
 I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and 
 then lOsnioer showed him to me in elaborately con- 
 fidential talk in a corner with a distinr^uished-looking 
 stranger wearing a ril)bon. Oscar had none of the fine 
 appearance of his wife ; he was a short sturdy figure 
 with a rounded protruding abdomen and a curious 
 broad, flattened, clean-shaven face that seemed nearly 
 all forehead. He was of Anglo-IIungarian extraction, 
 and I have always fancied somethini^ Mon<]:olian in his 
 type. He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes 
 over gilt-edged glasses tliat were divided horizontally 
 into portions of different refractive power, and he 
 talked in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin 
 lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements of the hand. 
 
 reo})le say that thirty years before at Oxford he 
 was almost exactly the same eager, clever little man he 
 was when first I met him. He had come up to Balliol 
 bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes captured 
 in provincial and Iri.^h and Scotch universities — and 
 had made a name for himself as the most formidable 
 dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had 
 ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on 
 to a position in the Higher Division of the Civil 
 Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily 
 made a place for himself as a political journalist. He 
 was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full 
 of political nnd sociological ideas. He had a (juite 
 astounding memory for facts and a mastery of detailed 
 analysis, and the time afforded sco})e for these gifts. 
 
ic6 THE NEW IMACHIAVELLI 
 
 The later ei«^litics were full of politico-social discussion, 
 and he became a prominent name upon the contents 
 list of the Nineteenth Centurij^ the Fortnightly and 
 Contemporarij chiefly as a half sympathetic but 
 frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of 
 that period. He won the immense respect of every one 
 specially interested in social and political questions, he 
 soon achieved the limited distinction that is awarded 
 such capacity, and at that I think he would have 
 remained for the rest of his life if he had not en- 
 countered Altiora. 
 
 But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional 
 woman, an extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one 
 woman in the world who could make something more 
 out of Bailey than that. She had much of the vigour 
 and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, 
 and an unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was 
 one of those women who are waiting in — what is the 
 woj'd? — muliebrity. She had courage and initiative 
 and a philosophical way of handling questions, and she 
 could be bored by regular work like a man. She was 
 entirely unfitted for her sex's sphere. She was neither 
 uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and altogether too 
 stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours 
 of ease. Her cookery would have been about as 
 sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite 
 illegible, and she would have made, I feel sure, a 
 shocking bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she 
 was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she is 
 inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of 
 masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at 
 the base of her was a vanity gaunt and greedy ! 
 When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness 
 that was partly a protest against the waste of hours 
 
MARGARET IX LONDON 207 
 
 exacted by tlie toilet and partly a natural disinclina- 
 tion, she had a ^vp^v splcMidour of black and red and 
 silver all her own. And somewhen in the early 
 nineties she met and married IJailey. 
 
 I know very little about her early years. She was 
 the onlv daup;hler of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who 
 applied the iociifonn process to cotton, and only his 
 subsecpient unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton 
 King prevented her being a very rich woman. As it 
 was she had a tolerable independence. She came into 
 prominence as one of the more able of the little shoal 
 of young women who were led into politico-philan- 
 thropic activities bv the influence of the earlier novels 
 of Mrs. IIum{)hrey AVard — the jNIarcella crop. Shu 
 went "slumming" with distinguished vigour, which 
 was cpiite usual in those days — and returned from her 
 experiences as an amateur flower girl with clear and 
 original views about the problem — which is and always 
 had been unusual. She had not married, I suppose 
 because her standards were high, and men are cowards 
 and with an instinctive appetite for muliebrity. She 
 had kept house for her father by speaking occasionally 
 to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother had left 
 her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties 
 she could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a 
 harsh and successful manner. After her father's smash 
 and death she came out as a writer upon social ques- 
 tions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organization 
 Society, and she was three and thirty and a little at 
 loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in 
 the Contcinporarij Review. The lurking woman in her 
 nature was fascinated bv the ease and precision with 
 which the little man rolled over all sorts of important 
 and authoritative people, she Wius the first to discover 
 
2o8 THE NEW IMACIIIAVELLT 
 
 a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind, 
 the forehead perhaps carried him off' physically, and 
 she took occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so 
 soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject 
 humility and a certain panic at her attentions, marry 
 him. 
 
 This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey 
 and herself. The two supplemented each other to an 
 extraordinary extent. Their subsequent career was, I 
 think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggres- 
 sive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, 
 while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could 
 do nothing with ideas except remember and discuss 
 them. She was, if not inexact, at least indolent, with 
 a strong disposition to save energy by sketching — 
 even her handwriting showed that — while he was in- 
 exhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable 
 caligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years 
 passed by. She had a considerable power of charming ; 
 she could be just as nice to people — and incidentally 
 just as nasty — as she wanted to be. He was always 
 just the same, a little confidential and sotto voce, 
 artlessly rude and egoistic in an undignified way. She 
 had considerable social experience, good social con- 
 nections, and considerable social ambition, while he 
 had none of these things. She saw in a flash her 
 opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and 
 do large, novel, rather startling things. She ran him. 
 Her marriage, which shocked her friends and relations 
 beyond measure — for a time they would only speak of 
 Bailey as " that gnome " — was a stroke of genius, and 
 forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most 
 formidable and distinguished couple conceivable. 
 P. B. P., she boasted, was engraved inside their 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 209 
 
 wcddinsj rings, Pro liono Publico, and she meant it to 
 be no idle threat. She had discovered very early that 
 the last tiling influential people will do is to work. 
 Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent 
 upon a supply of confidently administered detail. Their 
 business is with the window and not the stock behind, 
 and in the end they are dependent upon the stock 
 behind for what goes into the window. She linked 
 with that the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as 
 a museum, and an invincible power over detail. She 
 saw that if two people took the necessary pains to 
 know the facts of government and administration with 
 precision, to gather together knowledge that was dis- 
 persed and confused, to be able to say precisely what 
 had to be done and what avoided in this eventuality or 
 that, they would necessarily become a centre of reference 
 for all sorts of legislative proposals and political ex- 
 pedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that. 
 
 Uailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his 
 post in the Civil Service and abandoned sporadic 
 controversies, and they devoted themselves to the 
 elaboration and realization of this centre of public 
 information she had conceived as their role. They set 
 out to study the methods and organization and realities 
 of government in the most elaborate manner. They 
 did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt of 
 doing it. They planned the research on a thoroughly 
 satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost entirely 
 for it. They took that house in Chambei-s Street and 
 furnished it with severe economv, thev discovered that 
 Scutch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and. 
 tyrant of their declining years, and they set to work. 
 Their first book, "The Permanent Oflicial," fills three 
 plump volumes, and took them ami their two secretaries 
 
 f 
 
2IO THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly good 
 book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred direc- 
 tions the history and the administrative treatment of 
 the public service was clarified for all time. . . . 
 
 They worked regularly every morning from nine to 
 twelve, they lunched lightly but severely, in the after- 
 noon they " took exercise "" or Bailey attended meetings 
 of the London School Board, on which he served, he 
 said, for the purposes of study — he also became a rail- 
 way director for the same end. In the late afternoon 
 Altiora was at home to various callers, and in the 
 evening came dinner or a reception or both. 
 
 Her dinners and gatherings were a very important 
 feature in their scheme. She got together all sorts of 
 interesting people in or about the public service, she 
 mixed the obscurely efficient with the ill-instructed 
 famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one 
 room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a 
 public life than had ever met easily before. She fed 
 them with a shameless austerity that kept the con- 
 versation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton 
 or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink 
 but whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk 
 and lemonade. Everybody was soon very glad indeed 
 to come to that. She boasted how little her house- 
 keeping cost her, and sought constantly for fresh 
 economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain 
 an additional private secretary. Secretaries were the 
 Baileys"* one extravagance; they loved to think of 
 searches going on in the British Museum, and letters 
 being cleared up and precis made overhead, while they 
 sat in the little study and worked together, Bailey with 
 a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes 
 between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. " All 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 211 
 
 efficient public careers,"'' said Altiora, " consist in the 
 proper direction of secretaries." 
 
 " If everything goes well I shall have another 
 socrctarv next year/' Altiora told nie. " I wish I 
 could refuse people dinner napkins. Imagine what it 
 means in washing! I dare most things. . . . But as it 
 is, they stand a lot of hardship here." 
 
 "There's something of the miser in both these 
 people," said Esmeer, and the thing was perfectly tnie. 
 For, after all, the miser is nothing more than a man 
 who either through want of imagination or want of 
 suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of 
 concentration upon one end. The concentration itself 
 is neither good nor evil, but a power that can be used 
 in either way. And the Baileys gathered and re- 
 invested usuriously not money, but knowledge of the 
 utmost value in human affairs. They prochiced an 
 effect of having found themselves — completely. One 
 envied them at times extraordinarily. I was attracted, 
 I was dazzled — and at the same time there was some- 
 thing about Bailey \s big wrinkled forehead, his lisping 
 broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil 
 preoccupation I could not endure. . . • 
 
 § 3 
 
 Their effect upon me was from the outset very 
 considerable. 
 
 Both of them found occasion on that first visit of 
 mine to talk to me about my publisluii writings and 
 particularly about my then just published book Tlie 
 XiW Jiultr, which had interested them very much. It 
 fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking 
 
212 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 that I doubt if they ever understood how independently 
 I had arrived at my conclusions. It was their weakness 
 to claim excessively. That irritation, however, came 
 later. We discovered each other immensely ; for a time 
 it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and co- 
 operation. 
 
 Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed 
 a great army of such constructive-minded people as 
 ourselves — as yet undiscovered by one another. 
 
 " It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," 
 said Oscar, " and presently hearing the tapping of the 
 workers from the other end."" 
 
 " If you didn't know of them beforehand,*" I said, 
 " it might be a rather badly joined tunnel."" 
 
 " Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, " and 
 that's why we all want to find out each other. . . .'''' 
 
 They didn"'t talk like that on our first encounter, 
 but they urged me to lunch with them next day, and 
 then it was we went into things. A \voman Factory 
 Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banks- 
 land and his wife were also there, but I don't remember 
 they made any contribution to the conversation. The 
 Baileys saw to that. They kept on at me in an urgent 
 litigious way. 
 
 " We have read your book,"" each began — as though 
 it had been a joint function. " And we consider "" 
 
 " Yes," I protested, " / think " 
 
 That was a secondary matter. 
 
 They did not consider, said Altiora, raising her 
 voice and going right over me, that I had allowed 
 sufficiently for the inevitable development of an 
 official administrative class in the modern state. 
 
 " Nor of its importance,"" echoed Oscar. 
 
 That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the 
 
MAllGARET IN LONDON 213 
 
 cardiiKil idea of their lives, what they were up to, what 
 they stood for, *' We want to su^^est to yoii,'" they 
 said — and I found this was a stock opening of theirs — 
 "that from the mere necessities of convenience elected 
 bodies inu,sl avail themselves more and more of the 
 services of expert oflicials. We have that very much in 
 mind. The more com[)licated and technical affairs 
 become, the less confidence will the elected oflicial have 
 in himself. We want to suggest that these expert 
 oflicials must necessarily develop into a new class and a 
 very powerful class in the community. We want to 
 organize that. It may be the power of the future. They 
 will nccessarilv have to have very much of a common 
 training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaitl 
 precursors of such a class/"* . . . 
 
 The vision they displayed for my consideration as 
 the aim of public-spirited endeavour, seemed like a 
 harder, narrower, more specialized version of the idea 
 of a trained and disciplined state that Willersley and I 
 had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things 
 more organized, more correlated with government and 
 a collective purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not 
 in terms of a growing collective understanding, but in 
 terms of functionaries, legislative change, and methods 
 of administration. . . . 
 
 It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The 
 Baileys were very anxious to win me to co-operation, 
 and I was (juite prepared at first to identify their 
 distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so 
 we came very readily into an alliance that wiis to last 
 some yei rs, and break at last very })ainfully. Altiora 
 manifestly liked me, I was soon discussing with her the 
 perplexity I found in placing myself ediciently in the 
 world, the problem of how to take hold of things that 
 
214 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out 
 careers for my consideration, very much as an architect 
 on his first visit sketches houses, considers requirements, 
 and puts before you this example and that of the more 
 or less similar thing already done. . , . 
 
 § 4 
 
 It is easy to see how much in common there was 
 between the Baileys and me, and how natural it was 
 that I should become a constant visitor at their house 
 and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not 
 nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of 
 spirit that also held between us. There was a differ- 
 ence in texture, a difference in quality. How can I 
 express it ? The shapes of our thoughts were the same, 
 but the substance quite different. It was as if they had 
 made in china or cast iron what I had made in trans- 
 parent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly 
 from my point of view.) Certain things never seemed 
 to show through their ideas that were visible, refracted 
 perhaps and distorted, but visible always through 
 mine. 
 
 I thought for a time the essential difference lay in 
 our relation to beauty. With me beauty is quite 
 primary in life ; I like truth, order and goodness, 
 wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to 
 beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got 
 that or they didn't see it. They seemed at times to 
 prefer things harsh and ugly. That puzzled me 
 extremely. The aesthetic quality of many of their 
 proposals, the " manners " of their work, so to speak, 
 were at times as dreadful a^ — well, War Office barrack 
 architecture. A caricature by its exaggerated state- 
 
MARGARET IX LONDON 215 
 
 mcnts will sometimes serve to j)oint a truth by anta^o- 
 nizin£^ falsity and falsity. I remcinher talking to a 
 prominent museum ollicial in need of more public funds 
 for the work he had in hand. I mentioned tlie possibility 
 of enlisting Bailey's influence. 
 
 ''Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal 
 Bottle-Imp runnini; us/' he said hastily, and would 
 hear of no concerted action for the end he had in 
 view. " l\\ rather not have the extension. 
 
 " You see," he went on t(^ explain, "" Bailey's want- 
 ing in the essentials." 
 
 " What essentials ? " said I. 
 
 " Oh ! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine 
 for some merely subordinate necessity among all my 
 delicate stuff. He'd do all we wanted no doubt in the 
 way of money and powers — and he'd do it wrong and 
 mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know. 
 He's just a means. Just a very aggressive and un- 
 manageable means. This isn't a plumber's job. . . ." 
 
 I stuck to my argument. 
 
 *' I don't like him," said the official conclusively, 
 and it seemed to me at the time he was just blind 
 prejudice speaking. . . . 
 
 I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came 
 to realize that our philosophies differed profoundly. 
 That isn't a very curable diiference, — once people have 
 grown up. Theirs was a {)hilosophy devoid oi finesse. 
 Temperamentally the Bailevs were specialized, con- 
 centrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some 
 inner force or some entirely assimilated influence in 
 my training, always to round off ami shadow my out- 
 lines. I hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to 
 modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, 
 loved a world aa flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's 
 
ii6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 COWS. If they had the universe in hand, I know they 
 ■would take down all the trees and put up stamped 
 tin green shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora 
 thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great 
 mistake. ... I got things clearer as time went on. 
 Though it was an Hegelian mess of which I had par- 
 taken at Codger's table by way of a philosophical 
 training, my sympathies have always been Pragmatist. 
 I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragma- 
 tism that, following the mediaeval Nominalists, bases 
 itself upon a denial of the reality of classes, and of the 
 validity of general laws. The Baileys classified every- 
 thing. They were, in the scholastic sense — which so 
 oddly contradicts the modern use of the w^ord — 
 "Realists." They believed classes were real and inde- 
 pendent of their individuals. This is the common 
 habit of all so-called educated people who have no 
 metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical training. 
 It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the 
 world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak 
 of everybody as a " type " ; she saw men as samples 
 moving; her dining-room became a chamber of repre- 
 sentatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air to 
 many of their generalizations, using " scientific " in its 
 nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, 
 an air that only began to disappear when you thought 
 them over again in terms of actuality and the people 
 one knew. . . . 
 
 At the Baileys'" one always seemed to be getting 
 one's hands on the very strings that guided the world. 
 You heard legislation projected to affect this "type'' 
 and that ; statistics marched by you with sin and 
 shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite 
 manageable percentages, you found men who were to 
 
MARGAllET IN LONDON 217 
 
 frame or amend bills in grave antl intimate cxchanf^e 
 with iiailcy's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvass- 
 ing ap[)roaching resignations and possil)le appoint- 
 ments that might make or mar a revolution in 
 administrative methods, and doing it with a vigorous 
 directness that manifestly swayed the decision ; and 
 you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers 
 all about you, and the world outside there, albeit a 
 little dark antl mysterious beyond the window, running 
 on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating 
 lights, true and steady to trim termini. 
 
 And then with all this administrative fizzle, this 
 pseudo-scientific administrative chatter, dying away in 
 your head, out you went into the limitless grimy chaos 
 of London streets and squares, roads and avenues lined 
 with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers 
 Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the 
 chaotic clamour of hoardings, the jumble of traflic, 
 the coming and going of mysterious myriads, you 
 heard the rumble of traflic like the noise of a torrent ; 
 a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton 
 crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards ; 
 imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered trium- 
 phant in the dazzling windows of the shops ; and you 
 found yourself swaying back to the opposite conviction 
 that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that 
 held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey 
 stage. . . . 
 
 Under the lamps you were jostled by people like 
 my Stafibrdshire uncle out for a spree, you saw shy 
 youths conversing with })r()stitutes, you passed young 
 lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social 
 suitability of the "types" they might blend or create, 
 you saw men leaniiig drunken against lamp-posts whom 
 
2i8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 you knew for the " type "" that will charge with fixed 
 bayonets into the face of death, and you found your- 
 self unable to imagine little Bailey achieving either 
 drunkenness or the careless defiance of annihilation. 
 You realized that quite a lot of types were under- 
 represented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure 
 and altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as 
 yet altogether unassimilated by those neat administra- 
 tive reorganizations. 
 
 §5 
 
 Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappear- 
 ance by announcing her as a " new type.""' 
 
 I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys'* dinners 
 in those days, for a preliminary gossip with Altiora 
 in front of her drawing-room fire. One got her alone, 
 and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciation 
 she valued. She had every woman's need of followers 
 and servants. 
 
 "I'm going to send you down to-night," she said, 
 " with a very interesting type indeed — one of the new 
 generation of serious gals. Middle-class origin — and 
 quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step-father was a 
 solicitor and something of an entrepreneur towards the 
 end, I fancy — in the Black Country. There was a 
 little brother died, and she's lost her mother quite 
 recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She's never 
 been out into society very much, and doesn't seem 
 really very anxious to go. . . . Not exactly an in- 
 tellectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force 
 of character. Came up to London on her own and 
 came to us — some one had told her we were the sort 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 219 
 
 of people to advise her — to ask what to do. Tin sure 
 she'll iiitercbt voii. . . /' 
 
 " AVhat can people of that sort do ? " I asked. " Is 
 she capable of investigation ? "" 
 
 Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. 
 She always did shake her head when you asked that 
 of any one. 
 
 " Of course what she ought to do/"* said Altiora, 
 with her silk dress pulled back from her knee before 
 the fire, and with a lift of her voice towards a chuckle 
 at her daring way of putting things, " is to marry a 
 inetnber of rarlianient and see he docs his work. . . . 
 IVrhaps slie will. It's a very exceptional gal who can 
 do anything by herself — (piite exceptional. The more 
 serious they are — without being exceptional — the more 
 we want them to marry." 
 
 Her exposition was truncated by the entry of the 
 type in question. 
 
 " Well ! " cried Altiora, turning, and with a high 
 note of welcome, " Hc?-e you are ! "" 
 
 Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by 
 the lapse of five years, and she was now very beautifully 
 and richly and simply dressed. Her fair hair had been 
 done in some way that made it seem softer and more 
 abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of 
 purple velvet-set diamonds showed amidst its mist of 
 little golden and brown lines. Her dress was of white 
 anil violet, the last trace of mourning for her mother, 
 and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender 
 body. She did not suggest StalKordshire at all, and I 
 was puzzled for a moment to think where I liad met 
 her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the slight 
 ohliciuity of the lij) and the little kink in her brow 
 were extraordmarilv familiar to me. Ikit she had 
 
220 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered 
 my name. " We met,'' she said, " while my step-father 
 was alive — at jNIisterton. You came to see us " ; and 
 instantly I recalled the sunshine between the apple 
 blossom and a slender pale blue girlish shape among 
 the daffodils, like something that had sprung from a 
 bulb itself. I recalled at once that I had found her 
 very interesting, though I did not clearly remember 
 how it was she had interested me. 
 
 Other guests arrived — it was one of Altiora's boldly 
 blended mixtures of people with ideas and people with 
 influence or money who might perhaps be expected to 
 resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air 
 of hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said 
 absolutely nothing to her — there being no information 
 either to receive or impart and nothing to do — but 
 stood snatching his left cheek until I rescued him and 
 her, and left him free to congratulate the new Lady 
 Snape on her husband's K.C.B. 
 
 I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of 
 mutual expression, except that it was abundantly clear 
 we were both very pleased and interested to meet again, 
 and that we had both kept memories of each other. 
 We made that Misterton tea-party and the subsequent 
 marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem 
 generally, matter for quite an agreeable conversation 
 until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom, 
 called me by name imperatively out of our duologue. 
 
 *' Mr. Remington,^"* she said, " we want your opinion *" 
 
 in her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads 
 of conversation into her own hands for the climax that 
 always wound up her dinners. How the other women 
 used to hate those concluding raids of hers ! I forget 
 most of the other people at that dinner, nor can I 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 221 
 
 recall what the crowninc^ rally was ahout. It diciirt in 
 any way join on to my impression of Margaret. 
 
 In the (lrawin«;-room of the matlint; floor I rejoined 
 her, with Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the 
 interval I had been thinking of our former meeting. 
 
 "Do you find London,'"' I asked, "give you more 
 opportunity for doing things and learning things than 
 Ikirslem ? " 
 
 She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to 
 her former confidences. " I was very discontented 
 then/' she said, and paused. " Fve really only been in 
 London for a few months. It's so different. In 
 Burslem, life seems all business and getting — without 
 any reason. One went on and it didn't seem to mean 
 anything. At least anything that mattered. . . . 
 London seems to be so full of meanings — all mixed up 
 together." 
 
 She knitted her brows over her words and smiled 
 ajjpealingly at the end as if for consideration for 
 her inadequate expression, appealingly and almu>t 
 humorously. 
 
 I looked understandingly at her. "We have all,'' 
 I agreed, " to come to London." 
 
 " One sees so much distress," she added, tis if she 
 felt she had completely omitted something, and needed 
 a codicil. 
 
 " What are you doing in London ? " 
 
 "I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. 
 I thought perhaps I might go and study social con- 
 ditions as Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps as a work-girl 
 or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thought 
 perhaps it wasn't quite my work." 
 
 " Are you studying ? " 
 
 " I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I 
 
 U- 
 
222 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 shall take up a regular course at the Westminster 
 School of Politics and Sociology. But Mrs. Bailey 
 doesn''t seem to believe very much in that either." 
 
 Her faintly whimsical smile returned. " I seem 
 rather indefinite,''^ she apologized, "but one does not 
 want to set entano;led in things one can''t do. One — 
 one has so many advantages, one"'s life seems to be such 
 a trust and such a responsibility " 
 
 She stopped. 
 
 "A man gets driven into work," I said. 
 
 " It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied 
 with a fflance of envious admiration across the room. 
 
 " She has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked. 
 
 "She /iflc?," said Margaret with the pride of one 
 who has received great confidences. 
 
 §6 
 
 " YouVe met before ? " said Altiora, a day or so 
 later. 
 
 I explained when. 
 
 " You find her interesting ? " 
 
 I saw in a flash that Altiora meant to marry me to 
 Margaret. 
 
 Her intention became much clearer as the year 
 developed. Altiora was systematic even in matters 
 that evade system. I was to marry Margaret, and 
 freed from the need of making an income I was to come 
 into politics — as an exponent of Bailey ism. She put it 
 down with the other excellent and advantageous things 
 that should occupy her summer holiday. It was her 
 pride and glory to put things down and plan them out 
 in detail beforehand, and Fm not quite sure that she 
 
MARGARET IX I.ONDOX 2:3 
 
 (lid not even mark ofl' tlie day upon whitli the cnirafro- 
 niciit was to be declareil. If she did, I disappointed 
 her. We di(hrt come to an enf;afrcment, in spite of 
 the broadest liints and the <^hirin<; obviousness of 
 ever}' thin ij;, that summer. 
 
 Every summer the IJailcys went out of London to 
 some house they hired or borrowed, leavini; their secre- 
 taries toihng behind, and they went on working hard 
 in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise in 
 the open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously 
 and went for long walks at a trot, and raided and 
 studied (and incidentally exphiined themselves to) any 
 social " tvpes"' that lived in the neighbourhood. One 
 invaded type, resentful under research, described them 
 with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho 
 Panza — and himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no 
 one and signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at 
 things. This particular summer they were at a 
 pleasant fjirmhouse in level country near Pangboume, 
 belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they 
 asked me to come down to rooms in the neighbourhood — 
 Altiora took them for a month for me in August — and 
 board with them upon extremely reasonable terms ; 
 and when I got there I found ^Margaret sitting in a 
 hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, 
 were coming and goin^: in the neiixhbourhood, the l^onts 
 were in a villa on the river, and the Rickhams' house- 
 boat was to moor for some days ; but these irruptions 
 did not impede a great deal of duologue between 
 ^lai'garet and mvself. 
 
 Altiora was efficient ratlier than artistic in her 
 match-making. She sent us off for long walks together 
 — Margaret was a fairly good walker — she exhumed 
 some defective croquet things and incited us to croquet. 
 
2 24 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 not understanding that detestable game is the worst 
 stimulant for lovers in the world. And ^largaret and 
 I were always getting left about, and finding ourselves 
 for odd half-hours in the kitchen garden with nothing 
 to do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the 
 hand to run away and amuse each other. 
 
 Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from 
 fiction rather than imagination or experience the con- 
 clusive nature of such excursions. But there she 
 fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's 
 brink to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so 
 much zeal and so little skill — his hat fell off and he 
 became miraculously nothing but paddle-clutching 
 hands and a vast wrinkled brow — that at last he had 
 to be paddled ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, 
 after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as possible 
 drowned herself — and me no doubt into the bargain — 
 with a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasize 
 the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency 
 of the Charity Organization Society. We shipped 
 about an inch of water and sat in it for the rest of the 
 time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We 
 had difficulties in landing Oscar from his frail craft 
 upon the ait of our feasting, — he didn't balance side- 
 ways and was much alarmed — and afterwards, as 
 Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my 
 canoe, let him hide his shame with an ineffectual but 
 not positively harmful paddle, and towed the other by 
 means of the joined painters. Still it w^as the fault of 
 the inadequate information supplied in the books and 
 not of Altiora that that was not the date of my 
 betrothal. 
 
 I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me 
 back from proposing marriage to Margaret that sum- 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 225 
 
 nicr, and what urged me forward at last to marry licr. 
 It is so much easier to remember one's resohitions than 
 to remember the moods and suggestions that produced 
 them. 
 
 Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty 
 simple allair to Altiora ; it was something that hap- 
 pened to the adolescent and unmarried when vou 
 threw them together under the circumstances of health, 
 warmth and leisure. It happened with the kindly and 
 approving smiles of the more experienced elders who 
 had organized these proximities. The young people 
 married, settled down, children ensued, and father and 
 mother turned their minds, now decently and properly 
 disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was 
 the normal sexual life, and she believed it to be the 
 quality of the great bulk of the life about her. 
 
 One of the great barriers to human understanding 
 is the wide temperamental difference one finds in the 
 values of things relating to sex. It is the issue upon 
 which people most need training in charity and im- 
 aginative sympathy. Here are no universal standards 
 at all, and indeed for no single man or woman does 
 there seem to be any fixed standard, so much do the 
 accidents of circumstance and one's physical phases 
 afl'ect one's interpretations. There is nothing in the 
 whole range of sexual fact that may not seem supremely 
 beautiful or humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or 
 disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, accord- 
 ing to the eye that sees or the mood that colours. 
 Here is something that may fill the ^kies and every 
 waking hour or be almost completely banished from 
 a life. It may be evervthiuir on Monday and less 
 than nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws 
 and rules as though in these matters ail men and 
 
2 26 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 women were commensurable one with another, with 
 an equal steadfast passion and an equal constant 
 duty. . . . 
 
 I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had 
 in her schoolroom days, I always suspected her of 
 suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainly her 
 general effect now was of an entirely passionless worldli- 
 ness in these matters. Indeed, so far as I could get at 
 her, she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more 
 legitimate in a civilized person than — let us say — 
 homicidal mania. She must have forgotten — and 
 Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married 
 him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest 
 intimation of the dimensions sexual love can take in 
 the thoughts of the great majority of people with 
 whom they came in contact. They loved in their way 
 — an intellectual way it was and a fond way — but it 
 had no relation to beauty and physical sensation — 
 except that there seemed a decree of exile against 
 these things. They got their glow in high moments 
 of altruistic ambition — and in moments of vivid worldly 
 success. They sat at opposite ends of their dinner 
 table with so and so " captured,'"* and so and so, flushed 
 with a mutual approval. They saw people in love 
 forgetful and distraught about them, and just put it 
 down to forgetfulness and distraction. At any rate, 
 Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's 
 with an abnormal and entirely misleading simplicity. 
 There was the girl, rich, with an acceptable claim to 
 be beautiful, shiningly virtuous, quite capable of 
 political interests, and there was I, talented, ambitious 
 and full of political and social passion, in need of just 
 the money, devotion and regularization Margaret could 
 provide. We were both unmarried — white sheets of 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 227 
 
 uiiinscrihtHl paper. Was there ever a simpler situa- 
 tion ? \Vhat more could we possibly want? 
 
 She was even a little ofFonded at the inconclusive- 
 ness that did not settle things at Pauf^bourne. I 
 seemed to her, I suspect, to reflect upon her judgment 
 and good intentions. 
 
 §7 
 
 I didn't sec things with Altiora's simplicity. 
 
 I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware 
 of all that she and I might give each other; indeed, so 
 far as Altiora went we were quite in agreement. But 
 what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the ultimate 
 footing of her emasculated world, was to me just the 
 superlicial covering of a gulf — oh ! abysses of vague 
 and dim, and yet stupendously significant things. 
 
 I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of 
 sex as xVltiora did. Work, I agreed, was important; 
 career and success; but deep unanalyzable instincts 
 told me this preoccupation was a thing quite as impor- 
 tant ; dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but 
 none the less a dominating interest in life. I have 
 told how tlittingly and uninvited it came like a moth 
 from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew iu 
 me with my manhood, how it found its way to speech 
 and grew daring, and led me at last to experience. 
 After that adventure at Locarno sex and the interests 
 and desires of sex never left me for long at peace. I 
 went on with my work and my career, and all the time 
 it was like — like some one talking: ever ami a;jiin in 
 a room while one tries to write. 
 
 There were times when I could have wished the 
 
228 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 world a world all of men, so greatly did this unassimi- 
 lated series of motives and curiosities hamper me ; and 
 times when I could have wished the world all of women. 
 I seemed always to be seeking something in women, in 
 girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking. 
 But never — even at my coarsest — was I moved by 
 physical desire alone. Was I seeking help and fellow- 
 ship ? Was I seeking some intimacy with beauty ? 
 It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed 
 always desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves 
 of gross sensuousness arose out of this preoccupation, 
 carried me to a crisis of gratification or disappointment 
 that was clearly not the needed thing ; they passed 
 and left my mind free again for a time to get on with 
 the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently 
 this solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as 
 it seemed, and yet a constantly recurring demand. 
 
 I don''t want particularly to dwell upon things that 
 are disagi'eeable for others to read, but I cannot leave 
 them out of my story and get the right proportions of 
 the forces I am balancing. I was no abnormal man, 
 and that world of order we desire to make must be 
 built of such stuff as I was and am and can bejxet. 
 You cannot have a world of Baileys ; it would end in 
 one orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in 
 Desire, lives by Desire. 
 
 " Loye which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb ; 
 Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom." 
 
 I echo Henley. 
 
 I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, 
 well-fed, well-exercised and imaginatively stirred young 
 man of the educated classes is supposed to lead from 
 the age of nineteen or twenty, when Nature certainly 
 
MARGARET IN r.ONDON 229 
 
 meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when civiliza- 
 tion permits him to do so, is the most impossible thin<; 
 in the world. We deal here with facts that are kept 
 secret and obscure, but I doubt for my own part if 
 more than one man out of five in our class satisfies that 
 ideal demand. The rest are even as I was, and Ilatlier- 
 leigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no 
 lessons and oH'er no panacea; I have to tell the cjuality 
 of life, and this is how it is. This is how it will remain 
 until men and women have the courage to face the 
 facts of life. 
 
 I was no systematic libertine, you must understand ; 
 things happened to me and desire drove me. Any 
 young man would have served for that Locarno adven- 
 ture, and after that what had been a mystic and 
 wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly 
 misdirected and complicating one. I can count a 
 meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my youth, 
 to include that first experience, and of them all only 
 two were sustained relationships, liesides these five 
 "aflairs,'"' on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the 
 inky dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of 
 those pairs of correlated figures, the woman in her 
 squalid finery sailing homeward, the man modestly 
 aloof and behind, that every night in the London year 
 flit by the score of thousands across the sight of the 
 observant. . . . 
 
 How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now 
 without qualification ! Yet at the time there wiu» 
 surely something not altogether ugly in it — something 
 that has vanished, some line thing mortally ailing. 
 
 One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision 
 deep down in a pit, as if it had ha{)pened in another 
 state of existence to some one else. And yet it is the 
 
230 THE NEW JMACHIAVELLI 
 
 sort of thing that has happened, once or twice at least, 
 to half the men in London who have been in a position 
 to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar 
 effect. Man or woman, you ought to know of it. 
 
 Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that 
 network of streets that lies about Tottenham Court 
 Road, a dingy bedroom lit by a solitary candle and 
 carpeted with scraps and patches, with curtains of 
 cretonne closing the window, and a tawdry ornament 
 of paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a weary- 
 eyed, fair-haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, 
 who is telling me in broken German something that my 
 knowledge of German is at first inadequate to under- 
 stand. . . . 
 
 I thought she was boasting about her family, and 
 then slowly the meaning came to me. She was a Lett 
 from near Libau in Courland, and she was telling me — 
 just as one tells something too strange for comment or 
 emotion — how her father had been shot and her sister 
 outraged and murdered before her eyes. 
 
 It was as if one had dipped into something pri- 
 mordial and stupendous beneath the smooth and trivial 
 surfaces of life. There was I, you know, the promis- 
 ing young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite 
 brilliantly about politics and might presently get into 
 Parliament, with my collar and tie in my hand, and a 
 certain sense of shameful adventure fading out of my 
 mind. 
 
 " Ach Gott ! '" she sighed by way of comment, and 
 mused deeply for a moment before she turned her face 
 to me, as to something forgotten and remembered, and 
 assumed the half-hearted meretricious smile. 
 
 " Bin ich eine hubsche ? " she asked like one who 
 repeats a lesson. 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 231 
 
 I was iiiovcd to cnivc her pardon luul conic away. 
 
 " Bin ich cine hubsche ? " she asked a little anxiously, 
 laying a detainin*; hand upon nie, and evidently not 
 understanding a word of what I was striving to say. 
 
 §8 
 
 I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the 
 phases by which I passed from my first admiration of 
 ^lariiarefs earnestness and unconscious daintiness to 
 an intimate accjuaintance. The earlier encounters 
 stand out clear and hard, but then the impressions 
 become crowded and mingle not only with each other 
 but with all the subsecjuent developments of relation- 
 ship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation and 
 comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping 
 into my memories is like di})ping into a ragbag, one 
 brings out this memory or that, with no intimation 
 of liow they came in time or what led to them and 
 joined them together. And they are all mixed up 
 with subsecjuent associations, with sympathies and dis- 
 cords, habits of intercourse, surprises and disappoint- 
 ments and discovered misunderstandings. I know only 
 that always my feelings for Margaret were complicated 
 feelings, woven of many and various strands. 
 
 It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life 
 how at the same time and in relation to the same 
 reality we can have in our minds streams of thought 
 at quite different levels. We can be at the same time 
 idealizing a person and seeing and criticizing that 
 person (juite coldly and clearly, and we slip un- 
 consciously from level to level and produce all sorts of 
 inconsi.stent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about 
 
2%2 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 O 
 
 Margaret ; in a sense my conception of Margaret was 
 entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind 
 to certain defects of hers, and quite as certainly they 
 didn't seem to matter in the slightest degree. Her 
 mind had a curious want of vigour, "flatness" is the 
 only word ; she never seemed to escape from her 
 phrase; her way of thinking, her way of doing was 
 indecisive ; she remained in her attitude, it did not 
 flow out to easy, confirmatory action. 
 
 I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and 
 talked together I seemed always trying for animation 
 in her and never finding it. I would state my ideas. 
 " I know," she would say, " I know." 
 
 I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, 
 but she made no answering revelations. I talked 
 politics, and she remarked with her blue eyes wide and 
 earnest : " Every ivord you say seems so just." 
 
 I admired her appearance tremendously but — I can 
 only express it by saying I didn't want to touch her. 
 Her fair hair was always delectably done. It flowed 
 beautifully over her pretty small ears, and she would 
 tie its fair coilings with fillets of black or blue velvet 
 that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The 
 light, the faint down on her brow and cheek was 
 delightful. And it was clear to me that I made her 
 happy. 
 
 My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way 
 of my falling at last very deeply in love with her. Her 
 very shortcomings seemed to offer me something. . . , 
 
 She stood in my mind for goodness — and for things 
 from which it seemed to me my hold was slipping. 
 
 She seemed to promise a way of escape from the 
 deepening opposition in me between physical passions 
 and the constructive career, the career of wide aims and 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 233 
 
 liuinan service, upon which 1 h,ul eml);irkc(l. All the 
 time that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather 
 ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously 
 as a shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, 
 coining into my darkling disorders of lust and impulse. 
 I could understand clearly that she was incapable of 
 the most necessary subtleties of political thought, and 
 yet I could contemplate praying to her and putting 
 all the intricate troubles of my life at her feet. 
 
 Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world 
 at all an unwonted disgust with the consequences and 
 (jualitv of mv })assions had arisen in my mind. Among 
 other things that moment with the Lettish girl haunted 
 me persistently. I would see myself again and again 
 sitting amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and 
 tie in hand, while her heavy German words grouped 
 themselves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I would 
 feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was 
 not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any 
 permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, 
 hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world 
 as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will. 
 
 *^Good God !" I put it to myself, "that I should 
 finish the work those Cossacks had begun ! I who 
 want order and justice before everything! There's 
 nt) way out of it, no decent excuse ! If I didn't think, 
 I ou«2:ht to have thou";ht ! *" . . . 
 
 *' How did I get to it?'" ... I would ransack 
 tlie phases of mv development from the first shy un- 
 veiling of a hidilen wonder to that last extremity as a 
 man will go through muddled account books to find 
 some disorganizing error. . . . 
 
 I was also involved at that time — I find it hard to 
 place these things in the exact order of their dates 
 
234 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 because they were vSo disconnected with tlie regidar 
 progress of my work and life — in an intrigue, a clumsy, 
 sensuous, pretentious, artificially stimulated intrigue, 
 with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from 
 her husband. I will not go into particulars of that 
 episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed one another. 
 She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of 
 "whims about our meetings ; she was careless of our 
 secret, and vulgarized our relationship by intolerable 
 interpretations ; except for some glowing moments of 
 gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially 
 vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, 
 we both fretted at a vexatious and unexpectedly bind- 
 ing intimacy. The interim was full of the quality of 
 work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure 
 precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappoint- 
 ment is almost inherent in illicit love. I had, and 
 perhaps it was part of her recurrent irritation also, 
 a feeling as though one had followed something fine 
 and beautiful into a net — into bird lime ! These 
 furtive scuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of 
 assignation, w^as what we had made out of the sugges- 
 tion of pagan beauty ; this w^as the reality of our 
 vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life 
 amidst incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon 
 the wonder and glory of bodily love and wasted 
 them. . . . 
 
 It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possi- 
 bilities getting entangled and marred for ever that 
 oppressed me. I had missed, I had lost. I did not 
 turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys, 
 as one turns from something low and embarrassing. I 
 felt that these great organic forces were still to be 
 wrought into a harmony with my constructive passion. 
 
MAKCAKET IN LONDON 
 
 -J 5 
 
 I felt too that I was not doini; it. I had not under- 
 stood the forces in this strn^^i^le or its nature, and as 
 I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had 
 gone on wroncj, in a world that was nuiddled and con- 
 fused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and 
 twisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures 
 that were perhaps destroy ini^ any chance of profit in 
 mv lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated 
 ^vith moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of 
 dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the 
 Bailevs thouLrht I was p-oincc on. There were times 
 when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely. 
 Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between 
 twenty-three and twenty-eight, this rottenness, known 
 to scarcely any one but myself, grew and spread. My 
 sense of the probability of a collapse intensified. I 
 knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied 
 five years before, that I was entangling myself in 
 something that might smother all my uses in the 
 world. Down there among those incommunicable 
 difliculties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was 
 losing my hold upon things ; the chaotic and adventu- 
 rous element in life was spreading upward and getting 
 the better of me, over-mastering me and all my will 
 to rule and make. . . . And the strength, the drugging 
 urgency of the passion ! . . . 
 
 ^largaret shone at times in my imagination like 
 a radiant angel in a world of mire and disorder, in a 
 world of cravings, hot and dull red like sa\rs in- 
 llamed. . . . 
 
 I suppose it was because I had so great a need of 
 such help as her whiteness proffered, that I could 
 ascribe impossible perfections to her, a power of in- 
 tellect, a moral power and patience to which she, jx)or 
 
2;6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 J 
 
 fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of 
 us were angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how 
 easy life might be ! I wanted her so badly, so very 
 badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to 
 save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see 
 her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her 
 mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh 
 precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness 
 threw up her fineness into relief and made a grace of 
 every weakness. 
 
 Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked 
 with Margaret as one talks politely to those who are 
 hopelessly inferior in mental quality, explaining with 
 a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the feeblest 
 response, when possible moulding and directing, are 
 times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, worship 
 the ground she trod on. I was equally honest and 
 unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But in 
 neither phase could I find it easy to make love to 
 ]\Iargaret. For in the first I did not want to, though 
 I talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, 
 and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on to 
 some personal application; and in the second she seemed 
 inaccessible — I felt I must make confessions and put 
 things before her that would be the grossest outrage 
 upon the noble purity I attributed to her. 
 
 §9 
 
 I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, 
 wrought up to the mood of one who stakes his life on a 
 cast. Separated from her, and with the resonance of an 
 evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimer 
 
MARGARET 1\ LONDON 237 
 
 echoing in mv mind, I discovered myself to be (juile 
 passionately in love ^vilh Mari^aret. I^st shreds of 
 doubt vanished. It has always been a feature of our 
 relationship that Mar^^aret absent means more to mc 
 than Mar«;aret present; her memory cHstils from its 
 dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and quali- 
 fications of her vanished into some dark corner of my 
 mind. She wjis the ladv of my salvation ; I must win 
 my way to her or perish. 
 
 I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved 
 me, in passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremblc. 
 She was staving with the Rockleys at Woking, for 
 Shcna Hockley had been at Bennett Hall with her 
 and they had resumed a close intimacy ; and I went 
 down to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept 
 waiting for some minutes, I remember, in a little room 
 upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full 
 of pots of large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in 
 flower. And there was a big laccjuer cabinet, a Chinese 
 thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red- 
 toned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is 
 inseparably bound up with the sight of a cyclamen's 
 back-turned petals. 
 
 She came in, looking pale and drooping rather 
 more than usual. I suddenly realized that Altiora's 
 hint of a disappointment leading to positive illness 
 was something more than a vindictive comment. She 
 closed the door and came across to me and took and 
 dropped my hand and stood still. " What is it you 
 want with me ? '' she asked. 
 
 The speech I had been turning over and over in my 
 mind on the way vanished at the sight of her. 
 
 " I want to talk to you," I answered lamely. 
 
 For some seconds neither of us said a word. 
 
238 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " I want to tell you things about my life,"' I 
 began. 
 
 She answered with a scarcely audible " yes." 
 
 " I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne,*" 
 I plunged. " I didn't. I didn't because — because you 
 had too much to give me.'* 
 
 " Too much ! " she echoed, " to give you ! " She 
 had lifted her eyes to my face and the colour was 
 coming into her cheeks. 
 
 " Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. " I want 
 to tell you things, things you don't know. Don't 
 answer me. I want to tell you." 
 
 She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate 
 answer shining through the quiet of her face. " Go 
 on," she said, very softly. It was so pitilessly mani- 
 fest she was resolved to idealize the situation whatever 
 I might say. I began walking up and down the room 
 between those cyclamens and the cabinet. There were 
 little gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little 
 islands that each had a pagoda and a tree, and there 
 were also men in boats or something, I couldn't deter- 
 mine what, and some obscure sub-office in my mind 
 conceri:^ed itself with that quite intently. Yet I seem 
 to have been striving with all my being to get words 
 for the truth of things. " You see," I emerged, " you 
 make everything possible to me. You can give me 
 help and sympathy, support, understanding. You 
 know my political ambitions. You know all that I 
 might do in the world. I do so intensely want to do 
 constructive things, big things perhaps, in this wild 
 jumble. . . . Only you don't know a bit what I am. I 
 want to tell you what I am. I'm complex. . , . I'm 
 streaked." 
 
 I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 239 
 
 expression of blissful tlisrc'L,^'lnl for any mcaniiif^ I was 
 seekin<;* to fonyoy. 
 
 " Vou see," 1 said, " Tin a bad man/"' 
 
 She sounded a note of valiant incredulity. 
 
 Everything seemed to be sli[)ping away from me. I 
 pushed on to the ugly facts that remained over from 
 the wreck of my interpretation. '*• What has held me 
 back,'' I said, " is the thouf^ht that you could not 
 possibly understand certain things in my life. Men are 
 not pure as women are. I have had love affairs. I 
 mean I have had aflairs. Passion — desire. You see, I 
 have had a mistress, I have been entangled "^ 
 
 She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. " Fm 
 not telling you," I said, " what I meant to tell you. I 
 want you to know clearly that there is another side to 
 my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It 
 didn't seem so at first " 
 
 I stopped blankly. " Dirty," I thought, was the 
 most idiotic choice of words to have made. 
 
 I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been 
 dirty. 
 
 " I drifted into this — as men do," I said after a 
 little pause and stopped again. 
 
 She was looking at me with her wide blue eves. 
 
 " Did you imagine," she began, " that I thought 
 you — that I expected " 
 
 " But how can you know .'' " 
 
 " I know. I do know." 
 
 " But " I began. 
 
 " I know," she persisted, dropping her evelids. " Of 
 course I know," and nothing could have convinced me 
 more completely that she did not know. 
 
 "All men " she generalized. *' A woman does 
 
 not understand these temptations." 
 
240 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I was astonished beyond measure at her way of 
 taking my confession. . . . 
 
 "Of course,'' she said, hesitating a little over a 
 transparent difficulty, " it is all over and past." 
 
 " It's all over and past," I answered. 
 
 There was a little pause. 
 
 " I don't want to know," she said. " None of that 
 seems to matter now in the sliifhtest deccree." 
 
 She looked up and smiled as though we had ex- 
 changed some acceptable commonplaces. " Poor dear ! " 
 she said, dismissing everything, and put out her arms, 
 and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl 
 in the background — doomed safety-valve of purity in 
 this intolerable world ! — telling something in indistin- 
 guishable German — I knew not what nor why. . . . 
 
 I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her 
 eyes were wet with tears. She clung to me and was 
 near, I felt, to sobbing. 
 
 " I have loved you," she whispered presently, " oh ! 
 ever since we met in JNlisterton — six years and more 
 ago." 
 
CHAPTER THE TIIIKD 
 
 Margaret in Venice 
 
 § 1 
 
 TiiKiiE comes into my mind a confuscil memory of con- 
 versations with Margaret; we must have had dozens 
 altogether, and they mix in now for the most part 
 inextricably not only with one another, but with later 
 talks and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We 
 had the immensest anticipations of the years and oppor- 
 tunities that lay before us. I was now very deeply in 
 love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned 
 up my life, but that she had. We called each other 
 ''confederate," I remember, and made during our brief 
 engagement a series of visits to the various legislative 
 bodies in London, the County Council, the House of 
 ( onnnons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. 
 Tancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was 
 full of plans and so was she of the way in which we 
 were to live and work. ^Ve were to pay back in public 
 service whatever excess of wealth bevond his merits old 
 Seddon's economic advantaire had won for him from the 
 toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer 
 War wixs so recent that that l)lesscd word " efliciencv ^ 
 echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. Lord 
 
 241 a 
 
242 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 Rosebery in a memorable oration had put it into the 
 heads of the big outer public, but the Baileys with a 
 certain show of justice claimed to have set it going in 
 the channels that took it to him — if as a matter of fact 
 it was taken to him. But then it was their habit to 
 make claims of that sort. They certainly did their 
 share to keep " efficient "*' going. Altiora's highest 
 praise w^as " thoroughly efficient."*' We were to be a 
 "thoroughly efficient "'* political couple of the "new 
 type." She explained us to herself and Oscar, she 
 explained us to ourselves, she explained us to the 
 people who came to her dinners and afternoons until 
 the world was highly charged with explanation and 
 expectation, and the proposal that I should be the 
 Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division 
 seemed the most natural development in the world. 
 
 I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and 
 relentless activity, and throughout a beautiful November 
 at Venice, where chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we 
 turned over and over again and discussed in every 
 aspect our conception of a life tremendously focussed 
 upon the ideal of social service. 
 
 IMost clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves 
 talking in a gondola on our way to Torcello. Far 
 away behind us the smoke of Murano forms a black 
 stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth 
 w^ater, water as unruffled and luminous as the sky 
 above, a mirror on which rows of posts and distant 
 black high- stemmed, swan-necked boats with their 
 minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. 
 Remote and low before us rises the little tower of our 
 destination. Our men swing together and their oars 
 swirl leisurely through the w^ater, bump back in the 
 rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 243 
 
 Margaret lies back on cushions, with lier face shailcd 
 by a hoi land parasol, and I sit up beside iicr. 
 
 " You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note 
 of perfect accjuiescence I feel myself reasoning against 
 an indefinable antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a 
 slack way with life. There may seem to be something 
 priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is 
 so e;isy to slip iiito indolent habits — and lo be distracted 
 from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants 
 men to serve its constructive needs, to work out and 
 carry out plans. For a man who has to make a living 
 the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like our- 
 selves it's — it's the constant small opportunity of 
 agreealjle things." 
 
 "Frittering away," she says, "time and strength."* 
 
 "That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend 
 one is simply modest, it looks so foolish at times to 
 take one's self too seriously. We've ffot to take our- 
 selves seriously." 
 
 She endorses my words with her eves. 
 
 " I feel I can do great things with life.'' 
 
 " I know you can." 
 
 " But that's only to be done by concentrating one's 
 life upon one main end. We have to plan our days, to 
 make everything subserve our scheme." 
 
 "I feel," she answers softly, "we ought to give — 
 every hour." 
 
 Her face becomes dreamy, "I zcant to give every 
 hour," she adds. 
 
 §2 
 
 That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a 
 little artificial lake in uneven confused country, as 
 
244 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 something very bright and skylike, and discontinuous 
 with all about it. The faded quality of the very sun- 
 shine of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces 
 and places, the huge, time-ripened paintings of departed 
 splendours, the whispering, nearly noiseless passage of 
 hearse-black gondolas, for the horrible steam launch 
 had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of 
 the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made 
 me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars 
 of reality. There were not a dozen people all told, no 
 Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big 
 cavern of a dining-room, with its vistas of separate 
 tables, its distempered walls and its swathed chandeliers. 
 We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting beauty 
 on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was 
 well with ourselves and the world. It was ten days or 
 a fortnisrht before I became fretful and anxious for 
 action ; a long tranquillity for such a temperament as 
 mine. 
 
 Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession 
 of shared aesthetic appreciation threads all that time. 
 Our honeymoon was no exultant coming together, no 
 mutual shout of "?/om.'" We were almost shy with 
 one another, and felt the relief of even a picture to 
 help us out. It was entirely in my conception of things 
 that I should be very watchful not to shock or distress 
 Margaret or press the sensuous note. Our love-making 
 had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons. We 
 talked in delicate inuendo of what should be glorious 
 freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in 
 her previous Italian journey — fear of the mosquito had 
 driven her mother across Italy to the westward route — 
 and now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titians 
 and Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 245 
 
 photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series 
 delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that 
 irrc.it statue of Bartolonieo Collconi that Ku.skin 
 praised. 
 
 lUit since I am not a man to look at })icturcs and 
 architectural eflccts day after day, I did watch Margaret 
 very closely and store a thousand memories of her. I 
 can see her now, her long body drooping a little forward, 
 her sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar 
 masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I 
 can hear ai^ain the soft cadences of her voice nmrmur- 
 ing commonplace comments, for she had no gift of 
 expressing the shapeless satisfactions these things gave 
 her. 
 
 iVIargaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the 
 first cultivated person with whom I had ever come into 
 close contact. She was cultivated and moral, and I, I 
 now realize, was never either of these things. She was 
 passive, and I am active. She did not simply and 
 naturally look for beauty, but she had been incited to 
 look for it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest 
 in books and lectures and all the organization of beauti- 
 ful things than she did in beauty itself; she found nuich 
 of her delight in being guided to it. Now a thing 
 ceases to be beautiful to me when some finger points 
 me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I 
 take my beauty as a wild beast gets its salt, as a con- 
 stituent of the meal. . . . 
 
 And besides, there was that between us that should 
 have seemed more beautiful than any picture. . . . 
 
 So we went about Venice tracking down pictures 
 and spiral staircases and such-like things, and my brains 
 were busy all the time with such things as a comparison 
 of \'enice and its nearest modern ccpiivalcnt, New 
 
246 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when 
 we returned to London, with the development of a 
 theory of Margaret. 
 
 Our marriage had done this much at least — that it 
 had fused and destroyed those two independent ways 
 of thinking about her that had gone on in my mind 
 hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, 
 and a very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generali- 
 zation behind a thousand questions, like the sky or 
 England. The judgments and understandings that had 
 worked when she was, so to speak, miles away from my 
 life, had now to be altogether revised. Trifling things 
 began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and 
 easily fatigued back, for example, or that when she 
 knitted her brows and stammered a little in talking, 
 it didn't really mean that an exquisite significance 
 struggled for utterance. 
 
 We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the 
 afternoon, unless we were making a day-long excursion 
 in a gondola, Margaret would rest for an hour while I 
 prowled about in search of English newspapers, and 
 then we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and 
 watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going 
 into the little doors beneath the sunlit arches and 
 domes of Saint Mark's. Then perhaps we would stroll 
 on the Piazzetta, or go out into the sunset in a gondola. 
 Margaret became very interested in the shops that 
 abound under the colonnades, and decided at last to 
 make an extensive purchase of table glass. "These 
 things,"' she said, " are quite beautiful, and far cheaper 
 than anything but the most ordinary-looking English 
 ware." I was interested in her idea, and a good deal 
 charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, 
 slender handle and twisted stem. I suggested we 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 247 
 
 should get not simply tumblers and wineglasses, but 
 bedroom water-bottles, fruit- and sweet-dishes, water- 
 jugs, and in the end we made (juite a business-like 
 afternoon of it. 
 
 I was beginning now to long cjuite definitely for 
 events. Energy was accumulating in me, and worrying 
 nie for an outlet. I found the Times and the Da'dif 
 Telegraph and the other ])apers I managed to get hold 
 of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the 
 former paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord 
 Grimthorpe — I forget now upon what point. I chafed 
 secretly against this life of tran([uil appreciations more 
 and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and 
 delicate affection for Mar2:aret increasinf^ly difficult to 
 sustain. I surprised myself and her by little gusts of 
 irritability, gusts like the catspaws before a gale. I 
 was alarmed at these symptoms. 
 
 One night when ]\Iargaret had gone up to her room, 
 I put on a light overcoat, went out into the night and 
 prowled for a long time [through the narrow streets, 
 smoking and thinking. I returned and went and sat on 
 the edge of her bed to talk to her. 
 
 " Look here, Margaret," I said ; " this is all very 
 well, ])ut Fni restless." 
 
 *' Restless ! " she said with a fi\int surprise in her 
 voice. 
 
 " Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of 
 feeling — IVe never had it before — as though I was 
 getting fat." 
 
 " My dear ! " she cried. 
 
 " I want to do things; — ride horses, climb mouutiiins, 
 take the devil out of myself." 
 
 She watched me thoughtfully. 
 
 " Couldn't we do somethiu'^ 'r " she said. 
 
248 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 "Do what?" 
 
 " I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from 
 here soon — and walk in the mountains — on our way 
 home." 
 
 I thought. " There seems to be no exercise at all 
 in this place." 
 
 " Isn't there some walk ? " 
 
 " I wonder," I answered. " We might walk to 
 Chioggia, perhaps, along the Lido." And we tried that, 
 but the long stretch of beach fatigued Margaret's back, 
 and gave her blisters, and we never got beyond 
 Malamocco. . . . 
 
 A day or so after we went out to those pleasant 
 black-robed, bearded Armenians in their monastery at 
 Saint Lazzaro, and returned towards sundown. We 
 fell into a silence. " Piu lento^^ said Margaret to the 
 gondolier, and released my accumulated resolution. 
 
 " Let us go back to London," I said abruptly. 
 
 Margaret looked at me with surprised blue eyes. 
 
 "This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I 
 said, sticking to my point, " but I have work to do." 
 
 She was silent for some seconds. " I had forgotten,'' 
 she said. 
 
 " So had I," I sympathized, and took her hand. 
 " Suddenly I have remembered." 
 
 She remained quite still. " There is so much to be 
 done," I said, almost apologetically. 
 
 She looked long away from me across the lagoon, 
 and at last sighed, like one who has drunk deeply, and 
 turned to me. 
 
 " I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she 
 said. " Everything has been so beautiful and so simple 
 and splendid. And clean. It has been just With You 
 — the time of my life. It's a pity such things must 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 249 
 
 end. lint the woikl is calliii*; you, dear. ... I ou^^lit 
 not to have forf^ottcn it. I tlioiif^lit vou were rcstini; 
 — and tliinklni;. liut if you are rested. — Would you 
 like us to start to-morrow ? " 
 
 She looked at once so frai^ile and so devoted that on 
 tlie spur of the moment I relented, and we stayed in 
 Venice four more days. 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 The House in Westminster 
 
 §1 
 
 Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor 
 Square, Westminster, before our marriage, a house that 
 seemed particularly adaptable to our needs as public- 
 spirited efficients ; it had been very pleasantly painted 
 and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint 
 and clean open purples and green predominating, and 
 now we set to work at once upon the interesting 
 business of arranging and — with our Venetian glass 
 as a beginning — furnishing it. We had been fairly 
 fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most 
 part it was open to us to choose just exactly what 
 we would have and just precisely where we would 
 put it. 
 
 Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether 
 superior to mine, and so quite apart from the fact that 
 it was her money equipped us, I stood aside from all 
 these matters or obeyed her summons to a consultation 
 only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until 
 everything was settled I went every day to my old 
 rooms in Vincent Square and worked at a series of 
 papers that were originally intended for the Fortnightly 
 
 250 
 
THE HOUSE IN \VES1\^^XSTER 251 
 
 Review^ the papers that afterwards became my fourth 
 book, " New Aspects of Lil)eralism." 
 
 I still remember as dL'li<;htful most of the circum- 
 stances of getting into 79, lladnor Scjuare. The thin 
 flavour of indecision about Margaret disappeared alto- 
 gether in a shop ; she had the prccisest ideas of 
 what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did 
 not sway her. It was very pleasant to find her taking 
 things out of my hands with a certain masterfulness, 
 and showing the distinctest determination to make a 
 house in which I should be able to work in that great 
 project of " doing something for the world/' 
 
 "And I do want to make things pretty about us,"' 
 she said. "You don't think it wrung to have things 
 pretty?" 
 
 " I want them so." 
 
 " Altiora has things hard." 
 
 " Altiora," I answered, " takes a pride in standing 
 ugly and uncomfortable things. 13ut I don't see that 
 they help her. Anyhow, they won't help me." 
 
 So Margaret went to the best shops and got every- 
 thing very simple and very good. She bought some 
 pictures very well indeed ; there was a little Sussex 
 landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for 
 my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had 
 gone out to get some such expression for myself. 
 
 "We will buy a picture just now and then," she 
 said, " sometimes — when we see one." 
 
 I would come back through the Januarv mire or 
 fog from Vincent S(|uare to the door of 79, and reach 
 it at liLst with a cpiite childish appreciation of the fact 
 that its solid (rcorgian proportions and its fine brass 
 furnishings belonged to mij home ; I would use my 
 latchkey and discover ^Margaret in the warm lit, 
 
252 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 spacious hall with a partially opened packing-case, 
 fExtiojued but happy, or go up to have tea with her out 
 of the right tea-things, " come at last,'"* or be told to 
 notice what was fresh there. It wasn't simply that I 
 had never had a house before, but I had really never 
 been, except in the most transitory way, in any house 
 that was nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. 
 Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and 
 harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had a green 
 dining-room with gleaming silver, dark oak, and Eng- 
 lish colour-prints ; above was a large drawing-room 
 that could be made still larger by throwing open fold- 
 ing doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and 
 blues, for the most part with real Sheraton supple- 
 mented by Sheraton so skilfully imitated by an expert 
 Margaret had discovered as to be indistinguishable 
 except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above this 
 and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with 
 specially thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in 
 the bedroom overhead and a big old desk for me to sit 
 at and work between fire and window, and another desk 
 specially made for me by that expert if I chose to stand 
 and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and 
 every sort of convenient fitting. There were electric 
 heaters beside the open fire, and everything was put 
 for me to make tea at any time — electric kettle, infuser, 
 biscuits and fresh butter, so that I could get up and 
 work at any hour of the day or night. I could do no 
 work in this apartment for a long time, I was so 
 interested in the perfection of its arrangements. And 
 when I brought in my books and papers from Vincent 
 Square, Margaret seized upon all the really shabby 
 volumes and had them re-bound in a fine ofiicial-looking 
 leather. 
 
THE HOUSE IN WEST>nNSTER 2:^ 
 
 J J 
 
 I can rcnicml)cr sitting; down at Uiat desk and 
 lookin^^ roiincl me and feclinfr with a queer effect of 
 surprise that after all even a ])lace in the Cabinet, 
 though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same 
 lari^e world with these fine and (juietly expensive 
 things. 
 
 On the same floor Margaret had a " den,"" a very 
 neat and pretty den with good colour-prints of IJotti- 
 cellis and Carpaccios, and there was a third apartment 
 for secretarial purposes should the necessity for them 
 arise, with a severe-looking desk ec^uipjjcd with patent 
 files. And ^largaret would come flitting into the 
 room to me, or appear noiselessly standing, a tall 
 gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. 
 " Is everything right, dear ? " she would ask. 
 
 " Come in," I would say ; " Tm sorting out papers.*" 
 
 She would come to the hearthrug. 
 
 " I mustn't disturb you,"" she would remark. 
 
 " Fm not busy yet." 
 
 "Things are getting into order. Then we must 
 make out a time-table as the 13aileys do, and bc^in /" 
 
 Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a 
 number of serious young wives known to Altiora 
 called and were shown over the house, and discussed 
 its arrangements with INIargaret. They were all 
 tremendously keen on efficient arrangements. 
 
 " A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest 
 disapproval, " still " 
 
 It was clear she thought we should grow out of 
 that. 
 
 From the day of our return we found other 
 people's houses open to us and eagi'r for us. We 
 went out of I^ondon for week-ends and dined out, 
 and began discussing our projects for reciprocating 
 
254 THE NEW MACHTAVELLI 
 
 these hospitalities. As a single man unattached, I 
 had had a wide and miscellaneous social range, but 
 now I found myself falling into place in a set. For 
 a time I acquiesced in this. I went very little to 
 my clubs, the Climax and the National Liberal, and 
 participated in no bachelor dinners at all. For a 
 time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary 
 and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put up 
 for the Reform, not so much for the use of the club 
 as a sign of serious and substantial political standing. 
 I didn't go up to Cambridge, I remember, for nearly a 
 year, so occupied was I with my new adjustments. 
 
 The people we found ourselves among at this time 
 were people, to put it roughly, of the Parliamentary 
 candidate class, or people already actually placed in 
 the political world. They ranged between very con- 
 siderable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as 
 old Willersley and the sister who kept house for him 
 possessed. There were quite a number of young 
 couples like ourselves, a little younger and more 
 artless, or a little older and more established. Among 
 the vouns^er men I had a sort of distinction because 
 of my Cambridge reputation and my writing, and 
 because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had. 
 won and married my way into their circles instead of 
 being naturally there. They couldn't quite reckon 
 upon what I should do ; they felt I had reserves of 
 experience and incalculable traditions. Close to us 
 were the Cramptons, Willie Crampton, who has since 
 been Postmaster- General, rich and very important in 
 Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has 
 specialized in history and become one of those un- 
 imaginative men of letters who are the glory of 
 latter-day England. Then there was Lewis, further 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 255 
 
 towards Kcnsirif^ton, where liis cousins the Solomons 
 and the llartsteins lived, a brilliant representative 
 ot" liis race, able, industrious and invariably unin- 
 spired, with a wife a little in revolt ap^ainst the racial 
 tradition of feminine servitude and inclined to the 
 sufiVat^ette 2)oint of view; and IJuiilin^r Ilarblow, an 
 old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under 
 the control of the able little cousin he had married. 1 
 had known all these men, but now (with Altiora float- 
 j"n f^"g<^lit^^lly in benediction) tiiey opened their hearts 
 to me and took me into their order. They were all 
 like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a 
 feeling that the period of wandering in the wilderness 
 of opposition was drawing near its close. They were 
 all tremendously keen upon social and political service, 
 and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a 
 simple, strenuous life, a life fniding its satisfactions 
 in political achievements and distinctions. The young 
 wives were as keen about it as the young husbands, 
 iNIargaret most of all, and I — whatever elements in 
 me didn't march with the attitudes and habits of this 
 set were very much in the background during that 
 time. 
 
 We would give little dinners and have evening 
 gatherings at which everything was very simple and 
 very good, with a slight but perceptible austerity, 
 and there was more good fruit and flowers and less 
 perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees 
 than was customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala 
 and liqueurs, and there was always good home-made 
 lemonade available. No men waited, l)ut very expert 
 parlourmaids. Our meat was usually ^Velsh mutton — 
 I don't know why, unless that mountains have ever 
 been the last refuire of the severer virtues. And we 
 
256 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 talked politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw 
 (who was a department by himself and supposed in 
 those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and 
 mingled with the intellectuals — I myself was, as it 
 were, a promoted intellectual. 
 
 The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things 
 aloud on their less frequented receptions, but I have 
 never been able to participate submissively in this 
 hyper-digestion of written matter, and generally 
 managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were 
 all very earnest to make the most of ourselves and 
 to be and do, and I wonder still at times, with an 
 unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase 
 of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself 
 to be most remote from realit}^ 
 
 §2 
 
 I look back now across the detachinjx intervention 
 of sixteen crowded years, critically and I fancy almost 
 impartially, to those beginnings of my married life. 
 1 try to recall in something near to their proper 
 order the developing phases of relationship. I am 
 struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, 
 generous-spirited insincerities upon which Margaret 
 and I were building. 
 
 It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps 
 the commonest experience of all among married 
 educated people, the deliberate, shy, complex effort 
 to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they 
 appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge 
 abysses, level barriers, evade violent pressures. I have 
 come in these latter years of my life to believe that 
 
THE HOUSE IX WESTMINSTER 257 
 
 it is possible for a man and woman to ho absolutely 
 real with one another, to stand naked soulcd to each 
 other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural 
 all-glorifying love between them. It is jiossible to 
 love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through 
 the air. But it is a rare and intricate chance that 
 brings two people within sight of that essential union, 
 and for the majority marriage nuist adjust itself on 
 other terms. ]\Iost coupled people never really look 
 at one another. They look a little away to pre- 
 conceived ideas. And each from the first days of 
 love-making hides from the other, is afraid of dis- 
 appointing, afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries 
 in either sense. They build not solidly upon the rock 
 of truth, but upon arches and pillars and c^ueer provi- 
 sional supports that are needed to make a common 
 foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, 
 below the fine fabric they sustain together begins for 
 each of them a cavernous hidden life. Down there 
 things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to 
 consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless 
 nights, passions that Hash out for an instant in an 
 angry glance and are seen no more, starved victims and 
 beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of 
 us there is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and 
 the life above goes on to its honourable end. 
 
 I have told how 1 loved Margaret and how I came 
 to marry her. Perhaps already unintentionally I have 
 indicated the quality of the injustice our marriaiie did 
 us both. Tliere was no kindred between us and no 
 understanding. We were drawn to one another by the 
 unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunder- 
 stood in each other. I know a score of couples who 
 have married in that fashion. 
 
2 58 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in par- 
 ticular the intenser and subtler perceptions of modern 
 life, press more and more heavily upon a marriage tie 
 whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discrimi- 
 natiuG: time. When the wife was her husband's sub- 
 ordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically for 
 simple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic 
 relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of 
 life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental 
 and temperamental incompatibilities mattered com- 
 paratively little. But now the wife, and particularly 
 the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a 
 relentless demand for a complete association, and the 
 husband exacts unthought of delicacies of understand- 
 ing and co-operation. These are stupendous demands. 
 People not only think more fully and elaborately about 
 life than they ever did before, but marriage obliges us 
 to make that ever more accidented progress a three- 
 legged race of carelessly assorted couples. . . . 
 
 Our very mental texture was different. I was rough- 
 minded, to use the phrase of William James, primary 
 and intuitive and illogical ; she was tender-minded, 
 logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to 
 pledges and persons, sentimental and faithful ; I am 
 loyal to ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. 
 My imagination moves in broad gestures ; hers was 
 delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My 
 quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses ; hers 
 was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like 
 the facts of the case and to mention everything ; I 
 like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She 
 abounded in reservations, in circumlocutions and 
 evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary points. 
 Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 259 
 
 National Gallery, the Orif^in of the Milky Way. It 
 is an admirable test of temperamental (juality. In 
 spite of my earlv trainint^ I have come to rei^.inl that 
 picture as altoi^ether delightful ; to Marpiret it has 
 always been "needlessly oHensive.'"' In that you have 
 our fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no means 
 rare, of damning what she did not like or find sympa- 
 thetic in me on the score that it was not my " true self,'' 
 and she did not so much accept the universe as select 
 from it and do her best to ii^nore the rest. And also 
 I had far more initiative than had she. This is no 
 catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superiorities and 
 inferiorities ; it is a catalogue of differences between 
 two people linked in a relationship that constantly 
 becomes more intolerant of differences. 
 
 This is how we stood to each other, and none of it 
 was clear to either of us at the outset. To begin with, 
 I found myself reserving myself from her, then slowly 
 apprehending a jarring between our minds and what 
 seemed to me at first a queer little habit of misunder- 
 standing in her. . . . 
 
 It did not hinder my being very fond of 
 her. . . . 
 
 Where our system of reservation became at once 
 most usual and most astounding was in our personal 
 relations. It is not toi) much to say that in that regard 
 we never for a moment achieved sinceritv with one 
 another during the first six years of our life together. 
 It goes even deeper than that, for in my eflort to realize 
 the ideal of my marriage I ceased even to attempt to 
 be sincere with mvself. I woukl not admit mv own 
 perceptions and interpretations, I tried to fit myself 
 to her thinner and finer determinations. There are 
 people who will say with a note of approval that I was 
 
26o THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 learning to conquer myself. I record that much without 
 any note of approval. . . . 
 
 For some years I never deceived Margaret about 
 any concrete fact nor, except for the silence about my 
 earlier life that she had almost forced upon me, did I 
 hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but 
 from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual con- 
 cealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a 
 spiritual subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended 
 feelings. . • • 
 
 The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, 
 of walking about it from room to room and from floor 
 to floor, of sitting at one's own dinner-table and watch- 
 ing one's wife control conversation with a pretty, timid 
 resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free 
 people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the 
 interest and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature 
 for the Kinghamstead Division, that shapeless chunk 
 of agricultural midland between the Great Western 
 and the North Western railways. I was going to 
 "take hold'' at last, the Kinghamstead Division was 
 my appointed handle. I was to find my place in the 
 rather indistinctly sketched constructions that were 
 implicit in the minds of all our circle. The precise 
 place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to 
 discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we 
 felt sure, would become plain as things developed. 
 
 A few brief months of the vague activities of 
 "nursing" gave place to the excitements of the contest 
 that followed the return of Mr. Campbell-Bannerman 
 to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 261 
 
 was concerned it was a (Icprcssccl and tepid battle. I 
 went about the constituency niakini:^ three speeches 
 that were soon threadbare, and an odd little collection 
 of jK'0])le worked for nie ; two solicitors, a cheap 
 photoi^rapher, a democratic parson, a nund)er of dis- 
 senting ministers, the Mayor of Kin<]jhamstead, a Mrs. 
 Bul<;er, the widow of an old Chartist who had f^rown 
 rich through electric traction patents. Sir Roderick 
 Newton, a Jew who had bought Calersham Castle, and 
 old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old soldier, were 
 among my chief supporters. We had headquarters in 
 each town and village, mostly they were empty shops 
 we leased temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss 
 and a cominir and iioin": were maintained. The rest 
 of the population stared in a state of suspended judg- 
 ment as we went about the business. The country was 
 supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and 
 deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure 
 as a momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional 
 flare of bill-sticking or a bill in a window or a placard- 
 plastered motor-car or an argumentative group of 
 people outside a public-house or a sluggish movement 
 towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was 
 scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its 
 destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on a 
 doorstep. For the most part people went about their 
 business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the 
 stability of the universe. At times one felt a little 
 absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of 
 saving the country. 
 
 My opponent was a (juite undistinguished Major- 
 General who relied upon his advocacy of Protection, 
 and was particularly anxious we should avoid " person- 
 alities '^ and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly 
 
262 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 spirit. He was always writing nie notes, apologizing 
 for excesses on the part of his supporters, or point- 
 ing out the undesirability of some course taken by 
 mine. 
 
 My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, 
 but they lost touch with these as the polling 
 approached. To begin with I made a real attempt 
 to put what was in my mind before the people I was 
 to supply with a political voice. I spoke of the 
 greatness of our empire and its destinies, of the 
 splendid projects and possibilities of life and order 
 that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and 
 constructive effort might do at the present time. " We 
 are building a state," I said, " secure and splendid, we 
 are in the dawn of the great age of mankind." Some- 
 times that would get a solitary " "*Ear ! 'ear ! " Then 
 having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I 
 turned upon the history of the last Conservative 
 administration and brought it into contrast with the 
 wide occasions of the age ; discussed its failure to 
 control the grasping financiers in South Africa, its 
 failure to release public education from sectarian 
 squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste 
 of the world's resources. . . , 
 
 It soon became manifest that my opening and my 
 general spaciousness of method bored my audiences a 
 good deal. The richer and wider my phrases the 
 thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating 
 gatherings. Even the platform supporters grew restive 
 unconsciously, and stirred and coughed. They did not 
 recognize themselves as mankind. Building an empire, 
 preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had 
 no appeal for them. They were mostly everyday, 
 toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes, and 
 
THE HOUSE IN WEST>nNSTER 263 
 
 they came to my incetiiif^s, I think, very lar^^ely as a 
 relaxation. This sluli' ^v^us not relaxing. They did 
 not think {)()litics was a great constructive process, they 
 thought it was a kind of dog-light. They wanted fun, 
 they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also 
 a chance to say "'Ear, "ear!" in an intelligent and 
 honourable manner and clap their hands and drum 
 with their feet. The great constructive j)rocess in 
 history gives so little scope for clapping and drunnning 
 and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of 
 hounding on the solar system. 
 
 So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences 
 to the level of the issues involved, I began to ada})t 
 myself to them. I cut down my review of our 
 imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and 
 developed a series of hits and anecdotes and — what 
 shall I call them ? — " crudifications " of the issue. My 
 helpers congratulated me on the rapid improvement of 
 my platform style. I ceased to speak of the late IVime 
 Minister with the res|)ect I bore him, and began to fall 
 in with the popular caricature of him as an artful 
 rabbit-witted person intent only on keeping his leader- 
 ship, in spite of the vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph 
 Chamberlain to oust him therefrom. I ceased to 
 ([Ualify my statement that Protection would make food 
 dearer for the agricultural labourer. I began to speak 
 of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an inHuence at once insane 
 and diabolical, as a man inspired by a passionate desire 
 to substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for 
 honest British labourers throughout the world. And 
 when it came to the mention of our own kindly leatler, 
 of Mr. John Burns or any one else of any prominence 
 at all on our side, I fell more and more into the intona- 
 tion of one who mentions the high gods.' And I had 
 
264 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 my reward in brighter meetings and readier and readier 
 ap})lause. 
 
 One goes on from phase to phase in these things. 
 
 " After all,"'' I told myself, " if one wants to get 
 to Westminster one must follow the road that leads 
 there," but I found the road nevertheless rather 
 unexpectedly distasteful. " When one gets there,"" I 
 said, " then it is one begins."" 
 
 But I would lie awake at nights with that sore 
 throat and headache and fatigue which come from 
 speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and wondering how 
 far it was possible to educate a whole people to great 
 political ideals. Why should political work always rot 
 down to personalities and personal appeals in this way ? 
 Life is, I suppose, to begin with and end with a matter 
 of personalities, from personalities all our broader 
 interests arise and to personalities they return. All 
 our social and political effort, all of it, is like trying 
 to make a crowd of people fall into formation. The 
 broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excite- 
 ment and irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order 
 has vanished and the marshals must begin the work 
 over again ! 
 
 My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. 
 There was a frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it ; 
 for the Kinghamstead Division is extensive, abounding 
 in ill-graded and badly metalled cross-roads and vicious 
 little hills, and singularly unpleasing to the eye in a 
 muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to 
 have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expan- 
 sion that made Bromstead the place it is. Several 
 of its overgrown villages have developed strings of 
 factories and sidings along the railway lines, and there 
 is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to 
 
THE HOUSE IX WESTMINSTER 265 
 
 be no place at ^vhirh one could take hold of more 
 than this or that clement of the population. Now we 
 met in a mcetin*;-hou.se, now in a Masonic Hall or 
 Drill Hall ; I also did a certain amount of o[)en-air 
 speaking in the dinner hour outside gas-works and 
 groups of factories. Some special sort of people was, 
 as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal. 
 One said things carefully adjusted to the distinctive 
 limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible 
 silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers 
 made us declare that if we were elected we would live 
 in the district, and one hasty agent had bills printed, 
 " If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here.'' The 
 enemy obtained a number of these bills and stuck them 
 on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels ; you cannot imagine 
 how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The 
 vast drifting indiflerence in between my meetings im- 
 pressed me more and more. I realized the vagueness 
 of my own plans as I had never done before I brought 
 them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed 
 by the riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of 
 the word, taking hold at all, how far I wasn't myself 
 flowing into an accepted groove. 
 
 Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She 
 was clear, I had to go into Tarliament on the side of 
 l.iberalism and the light, as against the late Government 
 and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first 
 contest, is the memory of her clear bright face, very 
 resolute and grave, helping me consciously, stead- 
 fastly, with all her strength. Her (juiet confidence, 
 while I wiLs so dissatisfied, workeil curiously towards 
 the alienation of my sympathies. I fVlt slie had no 
 business to be so sure of me. I had moments of viviil 
 resentment at being thus marched towards rarliament. 
 
266 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of 
 character in her. Her way of taking life diverged from 
 me more and more. She sounded amazing, indepen- 
 dent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs 
 for the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she 
 appeared. She also made me a birthday present in 
 November of a heavily fur-trimmed coat, and this she 
 would make me remove as I went on to the platform, 
 and hold over her arm until I was ready to resume it. 
 It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be 
 heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence a 
 towering self-assertion. I would glance sideways while 
 some chairman floundered through his introduction 
 and see the clear blue eye with which she regarded the 
 audience, which existed so far as she was concerned 
 merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly 
 eye, provided they were not silly or troublesome. But 
 it kindled a little at the hint of a hostile question. 
 After we had come so far and taken so much trouble ! 
 
 She constituted herself the dragoman of our political 
 travels. In hotels she was serenely resolute for the 
 quietest and the best, she rejected all their proposals 
 for meals and substituted a severely nourishing dietary 
 of her own, and even in private houses she astonished 
 me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts 
 and sustenance. I can see her face now as it would 
 confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly resolute 
 and assured. 
 
 Since our marriage she had read a number of 
 political memoirs, and she had been particularly im- 
 pressed by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't think 
 it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality 
 with that of Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her 
 of a deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by 
 
THE HOUSE IN AVESTWINSTER 267 
 
 j)arallcl niLthods. I was to be (iladstonizcilJ (ilaclstone, 
 it appcarcil, used to lubricate his speeches with a mix- 
 ture — if my memory serves me ri<;ht — of ef^^ beaten u[) 
 in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should take 
 a leaf from that celebrated book. She wanted, I know, 
 to hold the glass in her hand while I was speaking. 
 
 lint here I was firm. " No,'' I said, very decisively, 
 " simplv I won't stand that. It's a matter of conscience. 
 I shouldn't feel — democratic. I'll take my chance of 
 the common water in the carafe on the chairman's 
 table." 
 
 " I do wish you wouldn't,'" she said, distressed. . . . 
 
 It was absurd to feel irritated ; it was so admirable 
 of her, a little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted 
 and fine — and I see now how pathetic. But I could 
 not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow my 
 own leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring 
 pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efiicient 
 pursuit of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a 
 very doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, 
 was all too seductive for dalliance. . • • 
 
 § 4 
 
 And into all these things with the manner of a 
 trifhng and casual incident comes the figure of Isabel 
 Kivers. My first impressions of her were of a rather 
 ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting school- 
 girl with a beautiful tjuick flush under her warm brown 
 skin, who said and did amusing and surprising things. 
 \Vhen first I saw her she Wiis riding a very old bicycle 
 downhill with her feet on the fork of the frame — it 
 seemed to me to the })ublic danger, but afterwards I 
 
268 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 came to understand the quality of her nerve better — 
 and on the third occasion she was for her own private 
 satisfaction climbing a tree. On the intervening 
 occasion we had what seems now to have been a long 
 sustained conversation about the political situation and 
 the books and papers I had written. 
 
 I wonder if it was. 
 
 What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman 
 she was at that time, and how little I reckoned on the 
 part she would play in my life ! And since she has 
 played that part, how impossible it is to tell now 
 of those early days ! Since I wrote that opening 
 paragraph to this section my idle pen has been, as it 
 were, playing by itself and sketching faces on the 
 blotting pad — one impish wizened visage is oddly like 
 little Bailey — and I have been thinking cheek on fist 
 amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below 
 me on the low wall under the olive trees with our little 
 child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my 
 life. It still seems a little incredible that that should 
 be so. She has destroyed me as a politician, brought 
 me to this belated rebefjinninor of life. When I sit 
 down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the 
 Arabian fisherman who tried to put the genius back 
 into the pot from which it had spread gigantic across 
 the skies. . . . 
 
 I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past 
 our labouring ascendant car — my colours fluttered from 
 handle-bar and shoulder-knot — and her waving hand 
 and the sharp note of her voice. She cried out some- 
 thing, I don't know what, some greeting. 
 
 " What a pretty girl ! " said Margaret. 
 
 Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious 
 organizer for whom by way of repayment I got those 
 
THE HOUSE IN WEST^HXSTER 269 
 
 niacjic letters, that kiiit^hthood of tlie undcrlinfj^s, 
 *' J.P./' was in the car with us and exj)lainc(l her to us. 
 "One of the best workers you have," he said. . . . 
 
 And then after a toilsome troubled morning wc 
 came, rather cross from the strain of sustained ami- 
 ability, to Sir (iraham Rivers' house. It seemed all 
 softness and quiet — I recall dead white panelling and 
 oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace 
 between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind 
 Virpjil, very grare and fine — and how Isabel came in to 
 lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that made 
 her bright quick-changing face seem yellow under her 
 cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Mi.ss 
 Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well- 
 dressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing responsi- 
 bility for Isabel in every phrase and gesture. xVnd 
 there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who 
 seemed on excellent terms with every one. It was 
 manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the 
 girl, but on this occasion she wasn't sparring and 
 refused to be teased into a display in spite of the taunts 
 of either him or her father. She was, they discovered 
 with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity 
 too rare for them to miss. They proclaimed her 
 enthusiasm for me in a way that brought a flush to her 
 cheek and a look into her eve between appeal and 
 defiance. They declared she had read my books, which 
 I thought at the time was exaggeration, their dry 
 political tjuality was so distinctly not what one was 
 accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading. Mi.^s 
 Gamer protested to protect her, *' When once in a blue 
 moon Isabel is well-behaved . . . ! '' 
 
 Except for these attacks I do not remember nuuh 
 of the conversation at table ; it w;u>, I know, discursive 
 
270 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and concerned with the sort of topographical and social 
 and electioneering fact natural to such a visit. Old 
 Rivers struck me as a delightful person, modestly 
 unconscious of his doubly-earned V.C. and the plucky 
 defence of Kardin-Bergat that won his baronetcy. He 
 was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and we 
 began that day a friendship that was only ended by 
 his death in the hunting-field three years later. He 
 interested Margaret into a disregard of my plate and 
 the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of 
 Moselle. After lunch we went for coffee into another 
 low room, this time brown panelled and looking through 
 French windows on a red-walled garden, graceful even 
 in its winter desolation. And there the conversation 
 suddenly picked up and became good. It had fallen to 
 a pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throw- 
 ing off a mask and wrecking an established tranquillity, 
 remarked : " Very probably you Liberals will come in, 
 though Fm not sure youll come in so mightily as you 
 think, but what you'll do when you do come in passes 
 my comprehension." 
 
 "There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, 
 " in undoing." 
 
 "You can't govern a great empire by amending and 
 repealing the Acts of your predecessors," said the 
 doctor. 
 
 There came that kind of pause that happens when 
 a subject is broached too big and difficult for the 
 gathering. Margaret's blue eyes regarded the speaker 
 with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to 
 me in the not too confident hope that I would snub 
 him out of existence with some prompt rhetorical 
 stroke. A voice spoke out of the big armchair. 
 
 " We'll do things," said Isabel. 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMTXSTEli 271 
 
 The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fishcrniui 
 ^vho strikes liis fish at last. *' \\'liat will you do?" he 
 asked her. 
 
 "Kvery one knows weVe a mixed lot," said Isabel. 
 
 " Poor old chaps like nie ! " interjected the general. 
 
 **But that's not a programme,"* said the doctor. 
 
 " But Mr. Remington has published a programme,'^ 
 said Isabel. 
 
 The doctor cocked half an eye at me. 
 
 "In some review," the girl went on. "After all, 
 we're not going to elect the whole Liberal party in the 
 Kinghamstead Division. Vm a Kemington-ite ! "" 
 
 " But the programme," said the doctor, " the 
 programme " 
 
 ** In front of Mr. Remington ! " 
 
 "Scandal always comes home at last," said the 
 doctor. " Let him hear the worst." 
 
 " rd like to hear," I said. " Electioneering shatters 
 convictions and enfeebles the mind." 
 
 " Not mine," said Isabel stoutly. " I mean 
 
 Well, anyhow I take it Mr. Remington stands for 
 constructing a civilized state out of this muddle." 
 
 " This muddle," protested the doctor with an 
 appeal of the eye to the beautiful long room and the 
 ordered garden outside the bright clean windows. 
 
 "Well, (hdt muddle, if you like! There's a slum 
 within a mile of us already. The dust and blacks get 
 woi-se and worse, Sissie ? " 
 
 " They do," agreed Miss Gamer. 
 
 " Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, 
 education, discipline." 
 
 " And you ? " said the doctor. 
 
 " I'm a good Remington-ite." 
 
 "Discipline!" said the doctor. 
 
272 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Oh ! '' said Isabel. " At times one has to be — 
 Napoleonic. They want to libel me, Mr. Remington. 
 A political worker can't always be in time for meals, 
 can she ? At times one has to make — splendid cuts."" 
 
 Miss Gamer said something indistinctly. 
 
 " Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham. 
 " Excellent things ! But I've a sort of memory — in 
 my young days — we talked about something called 
 liberty." ' 
 
 " Liberty under the law," I said, with an un- 
 expected approving murmur from Margaret, and took 
 up the defence. " The old Liberal definition of liberty 
 was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions 
 are not the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, 
 underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man 
 who has lost the possibility of liberty. There's no 
 liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming 
 hopelessly for life wants nothing but the liberty to get 
 out of the water ; he'll give every other liberty for it— 
 until he gets out." 
 
 Sir Graham took me up, and we fell into a discus- 
 sion of the changing qualities of Liberalism. It was 
 a good give-and-take talk, extraordinarily refreshing 
 after the nonsense and crowding secondary issues of 
 the electioneering outside. We all contributed more 
 or less except Miss Gamer ; Margaret followed with 
 knitted brows and occasional interjections. " People 
 won't see that," for example, and " It all seems so 
 plain to me." The doctor showed himself clever but 
 unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel sat back with 
 her black mop of hair buried deep in the chair, looking 
 quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went 
 with her vivid intellectual excitement ; occasionally 
 she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 273 
 
 a lizard's ton(;nc into the discussion. I remcni])fr 
 chieflv that a cliance illustration betrayed that she had 
 read liishop IJurnct. . . . 
 
 After lliat it was not surprising that Isabel should 
 ask for a lift in our car as far as the Lurky Committee 
 Room, and that she should offer me quite sound advice 
 CJi route upon the intellectual temperament of the 
 I.urkv gasworkers. . . 
 
 On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as 
 I have said, climbing a tree — and a very creditable 
 tree — for her own private satisfaction. It was a lapse 
 from the high seriousness of politics, and I perceived 
 she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too 
 much importance to it. I had some difficulty in re- 
 assuring her. And it's odd to note now — it has never 
 occurred to me before — that from that day to this I 
 do not think I have ever reminded Isabel of that 
 encounter. 
 
 And after that memory she seems to be ffickcring 
 about always in the election, an inextinguishable ffame ; 
 now she ffew by on her bicycle, now she da.^hed into 
 committee rooms, now she appeared on doorstej)s in 
 animated conversation with dubious voters; I took 
 every chance I could to talk to her — I had never met 
 anything like her before in the world, and she interested 
 me innnensely — and before the polling day she and I 
 had become, in the frankest simplicity, fast friends. . . . 
 
 That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our 
 early relationship. But it is hard to get it true, either 
 in form or texture, because of the bright, translucent, 
 coloured, and refracting memories that come between. 
 One forgets not only the tint anil (juality of thoughts 
 and impressions through that intervening haze, one 
 forgets tlu 111 altogether. I don't remember now that 
 
 I 
 
2 74 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the 
 possibihty of such love between us. I may have done 
 so again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I 
 don't think I ever thought of such aspects. I had 
 no more sense of any danger between us, seeing the 
 years and things that separated us, than I could have 
 had if she had been an intelligent bright-eyed bird. 
 Isabel came into my life as a new sort of thing ; she 
 didn't join on at all to my previous experiences of woman- 
 hood. They were not, as I have laboured to explain, 
 either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the 
 whole, " strangled dinginess '' expresses them, but I do 
 not believe they were narrower or shallower than those 
 of many other men of my class. I thought of women 
 as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather 
 than beautiful, attractive and at times disconcertingly 
 attractive, often bright and witty, but, because of the 
 vast reservations that hid them from me, wanting, 
 subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My 
 idealization of Margaret had evaporated insensibly 
 after our marriage. The shrine I had made for her 
 in my private thoughts stood at last undisguisedly 
 empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of 
 either idealization or interested contempt. She opened 
 a new sphere of womanhood to me. With her steady 
 amber-brown eyes, her unaffected interest in impersonal 
 things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, 
 decision and courage, she seemed rather some new and 
 infinitely finer form of boyhood than a feminine 
 creature, as I had come to measure femininity. She 
 was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my 
 world been more wisely planned, to this day we might 
 have been such friends. 
 
 She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 275 
 
 she has told mc since how full she was of protesting 
 curiosities and restrained emotions. She spoke, as 
 indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and 
 vividlv ; schooli^irl slang mingled with words that 
 marked ample voracious reading, and she moved (juiikly 
 with the free directness of some graceful young animal. 
 She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister 
 nn'ght have done with me. She would touch my arm, 
 lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of 
 a breast-pocket as she talked to me. She says now she 
 loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there 
 was a suspicion of that in her mind in those days. I 
 used to find her regarding me with the clearest, steadiest 
 gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice 
 healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquir- 
 ing, speculative, but singularly untroubled. . , , 
 
 §•5 
 
 Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy 
 crescendo. The excitement was not of the sort that 
 makes one forget one is tired out. The waitiuix for 
 the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my 
 memory, and then every one was shaking my hand and 
 repeating, " Nine hundred and seventy-six.'' 
 
 My success had been a foregone conclusion since the 
 afternoon, but we all behaved as though we had not 
 been anticipating this result for hours, as though any 
 other figures but nine hundred and seventy-six would 
 have meant something entirely different. "Nine 
 hundred and seventy-six!" said Margaret. "They 
 didn't expect three hundred." 
 
 "Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short 
 
2 76 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 infin with a paper. " It means a big turnover. Two 
 dozen short of a thousand, you know."" 
 
 A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of 
 fresh people came into the room. 
 
 Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows 
 where she had sprung from at that time of night ! was 
 running her hand down my sleeve almost caressingly, 
 with the innocent bold affection of a girl. " Got you 
 in ! '' she said. " It's been no end of a lark." 
 
 " And now,'' said I, " I must go and be constructive.'' 
 
 " Now you must go and be constructive," she said. 
 
 "" You've got to live here," she added. 
 
 " By Jove ! yes," I said. " We'll have to house 
 hunt." 
 
 " I shall read all your speeches." 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 " I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though 
 it w^as not exactly the thing she was meaning to say. 
 
 " They want you to speak," said Margaret, with 
 something unsaid in her face. 
 
 " You must come out with me," I answered, putting 
 my arm through hers, and felt some one urging me to 
 the French windows that gave on the balcony. 
 
 " If you think " she said, yielding gladly. 
 
 " Oh, rather ! " said I. 
 
 The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man 
 with no great belief in my oratorical powers, was 
 sticking his face up to mine. 
 
 " It's all over," he said, " and you've won. Say all 
 the nice things you can and say them plainly." 
 
 I turned and handed Margaret out through the 
 window and stood looking over the Market-place, 
 "svhich was more than half filled with swaying people. 
 The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us. 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 277 
 
 tempered by a little bo()in^^ Down in one comer of 
 the square a fif^ht was ^o'uv^ on for a Ha^, a fif^ht that 
 even the prospect of a speech could not instantly check. 
 "Speech!'" cried voices, ''Speech!'"' and then a brief 
 *' boo-00-oo " that was drowned in a cascade of shouts 
 and cheers. The conflict round the fla;; culminated in 
 the smashini; of a pane of glass in the chemist's window 
 and instantly sank to peace. 
 
 "Gentlemen voters of the Kinp^hamstead Division,"" 
 I began. 
 
 "Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst 
 lau'diter — the first time I remember hearing that 
 memorable war-cry. 
 
 "Three cheers for Mrs. Remington !"" 
 
 "Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you,"""* I said, 
 amidst further uproar and reiterated cries of " Speech ! " 
 
 Then silence came with a startling swiftness. 
 
 Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. " I shall go 
 to Westminster," I began. I sought for some com- 
 pelling phrase and could not find one. " To do my 
 share," I went on, "in building up a great and splendid 
 civilization." 
 
 I paused, and there was a weak gust of cheering, 
 and then a renewal of booing. 
 
 "This election," I said, " has been the end and the 
 befrinninfi of much. New ideas are abroad " 
 
 " Chinese lal)our," yelled a voice, and across the 
 square swept a wildfire of hooting and bawling. 
 
 It is one of the few occasions when I cpiite lost niy 
 hold on a speech. I glanced sideways and saw the 
 Mayor of Kinghamstcad speaking behind his hand to 
 rarvill. By a liappv chance Parvill caught my eye. 
 
 " What do they want.''" 1 asked. 
 
 - Eh .> " 
 
278 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " What do they want ? " 
 
 "Say something about general fairness — the other 
 side,"" prompted Parvill, flattered but a little surprised 
 by my appeal. I pulled myself hastily into a more 
 popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent's 
 good taste. 
 
 " Chinese labour ! " cried the voice again. 
 
 " You\'e given that notice to quit,"" I answered. 
 
 The Market-place roared delight, but whether that 
 delight expressed hostility to Chinamen or hostility to 
 their practical enslavement no student of the General 
 Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine. 
 Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side 
 displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing 
 more. There was not even a legend to it. How it 
 impressed the electorate we did not know, but that it 
 impressed the electorate profoundly there can be no 
 disputing. 
 
 §6 
 
 Kingham stead was one of the earliest constitu- 
 encies fought, and we came back — it must have been 
 Saturday — triumphant but very tired, to our house in 
 Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intima- 
 tions that the victory of our party was likely to be a 
 sweeping one. 
 
 Then came a period when one was going about 
 receiving and giving congratulations and watching the 
 other men arrive, very like a boy who has returned to 
 school with the first batch after the holidays. The 
 London world reeked with the General Election ; it had 
 invaded the nurseries. All the children of one's friends 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTMlNSTEll 279 
 
 had got big maps of England cut up into squares to 
 rc})rcscnt constituencies and were l)u.«y sticking gununed 
 l)lue labels over the con(|uered red of I'nionisni that 
 had hitherto submerged the country. And there were 
 also orange labels, if I remember rightly, to represent 
 the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I 
 engaged myself to speak at one or two London meet- 
 ings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly 
 tepid, and dined and spent one or two tunudtuous 
 evenings at the i National Liberal Club, which wa.s 
 in active eruption. The National Liberal became 
 feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of 
 the counting came dropping in. A big green-baize 
 screen had been fixed up at one end of the large smok- 
 ing-room with the names of the constituencies that 
 were voting that day, and directly the figures came to 
 hand, up they went, amidst cheers that at last lo.^t 
 their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there 
 was record of a Liberal gain. I don't remember what 
 happened when there was a Liberal loss ; I dont think 
 that any were announced while I was there. 
 
 How packed and noisy the place was, and what a 
 reek of tobacco and whisky fumes we made ! Every- 
 body was excited and talking, making waves of harsii 
 confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every 
 now and then hoarse voices would shout for some one 
 to speak. Our little set was much in evidence. Both 
 the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Ihuiting Ilarblow. 
 AVc gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement 
 ami the late hour, amidst much enthu^ia^m. 
 
 "Now we can do things ! '' I said amidst a rapture 
 of applause. iSlen I did not know IVom Adam held up 
 glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled ap[)roval 
 as I came down piist them into the crowd again. 
 
2So THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose 
 more or less than two hundred seats. 
 
 "I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I 
 heard one sceptic speculating. . . . 
 
 After these orgies I would get home very tired and 
 excited, and find it difficult to get to sleep. I would 
 lie and speculate about what it was we zoere going to 
 do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous 
 accession to power for one's party. Liberalism was 
 swirling in like a flood. . . . 
 
 I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and 
 distressing. I don't clearly remember what it was I 
 had expected ; I suppose the fuss and strain of the 
 General Election had built up a feeling that my return 
 would in some way put power into my hands, and 
 instead I found myself a mere undistinguished unit in 
 a vast but rather vague majority. There were moments 
 when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be 
 too big a crowd altogether. I had all my work still 
 before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but oppor- 
 tunity, and a very crowded opportunity it was at that. 
 Every one about me was chatting Parliament and 
 appointments ; one breathed distracting and irritat- 
 hig speculations as to what would be done and who 
 would be asked to do it. I was chiefly impressed 
 by what was unlikely to be done and by the 
 absence of any general plan of legislation to hold us 
 all together. I found the talk about Parliamentary 
 procedure and etiquette particularly trying. We 
 dined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old 
 Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the House 
 liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impres- 
 sion and what a bad one. " A man shouldn't speak 
 more than twice in his first session, and not at 
 
THE HOUSE IN ^VEST^^NSTER 2S1 
 
 first on loo contentious a topic,*' suid Sir Edward. 
 " No." 
 
 "Very much depends on manner. Tlie House hates 
 a lecturer. There's a sort of airy earnestness " 
 
 lid waved his ci«^ar to eke out his words. 
 
 " Little peculiarities of costume count for a great 
 deal. I could name one man who spent three years 
 living down a pair of spatterdashers. On the other 
 hand — a thing like that — if it catches the eye of the 
 Punch man, for example, may be your making." 
 
 He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the 
 House had come to like an originally un])opular 
 Irishman named Biggar. . . . 
 
 The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar 
 moods. I began to feci more and more like a branded 
 sheep. We were sworn in in batches, dozens and scores 
 of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the 
 inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carry- 
 ing new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats. It is 
 one of my vivid memories from this period, the sudden 
 outbreak of silk hats in the smoking-room of the 
 National Liberal Club. At first I thouirht there must 
 have been a funeral. Familiar faces that one had 
 grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, 
 uniler liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic 
 lies and tweed jackets, suddenly met one, staring with 
 the stern gaze of self-consciousness, from under silk hats 
 of incredible glossiness. There was a disposition to 
 wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good 
 Tarliamentary style. 
 
 There was much play with the hats all through; a 
 tremeniious competition to get in first and put hats on 
 coveted seats. A memorv hangs about me of the 
 House ill the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation 
 
2S2 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 inhabited almost entirely by silk hats. The current 
 use of cards to secure seats came later. There were 
 yards and yards of empty green benches with hats and 
 hats and hats distributed along them, resolute-looking 
 top hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy grin 
 under them, sensible top hats brim upward, and one 
 scandalous incontinent that had rolled from a back 
 Opposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A 
 headless hat is surely the most soulless thing in the 
 world, far worse even than a skull. . . . 
 
 At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to 
 the Address ; and I found myself packed in a dense 
 elbowing crowd to the right of the Speaker's chair ; 
 while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless after 
 the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at 
 its ease amidst its empty benches. 
 
 There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, 
 and I craned to see over the shoulder of the man in 
 front. " Order, order, order ! " 
 
 '* What's it about ? " I asked. 
 
 The man in front of me was clearly no better 
 informed, and then I gathered from a slightly con- 
 temptuous Scotchman beside me that it was Chris 
 Robinson had walked between the honourable member 
 in possession of the house and the Speaker. I caught 
 a glimpse of him blushingly whispering about his mis- 
 adventure to a colleague. He was just that same little 
 figure I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, 
 but grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the 
 same knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless 
 half-hour while he talked to us in Hatherleigh's 
 rooms. 
 
 It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly 
 wanted in the House, and that I should get all I 
 
THE HOUSE Ix\ WESTMINSTER 2S3 
 
 needed of the openiiit; speeches next day from the 
 1 imcs. 
 
 I in.ide my way out, and was presently walking 
 rather aimlessly through the outer lohby. 
 
 I cau<Tht myself re^ardiiif^ the shadow that spread 
 itself out before me, multiplied itself in blue tints of 
 various intensity, shuffled itself like a pack of cards 
 under the many li<;hts, the square shoulders, the silk 
 hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; 
 I found 1 was surveying this statesmanlike outline 
 with a weak approval. "A member 1^^ I felt the little 
 cluster of people that were scattered about the lobby 
 nmst be saying. 
 
 "Good Ciod ! '" I said in hot reaction, "what am I 
 doing here ? '' 
 
 It was one of those moments, infinitely trivial in 
 themselves, that yet are cardinal in a man's life. It 
 came to me with extreme vividness that it wasn't so 
 much that I had got hold of something as that some- 
 thing had got hold of me. I distinctly vecall the 
 rebound of my mind. Whatever happened in this 
 Parliament, I at least would attempt something. " IW 
 God ! "" I said, *' I won't be overwhelmed. I am here 
 to do something, and do something I will ! " 
 
 Ikit I felt that for the moment I could not remain 
 in the House. 
 
 I went out by myself with my thoughts into the 
 night. It was a chilling night, and rare spots of rain 
 were falling. I glanced over my shoulder at the lit 
 windows of the Lords. I walked, I remendjer, west- 
 ward, and presently came to the Grosvenor Embank- 
 ment and followed it, watchin*: the jrlitterini: black rush 
 of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges round which 
 the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched 
 
2S4 THE NEW MACIIIAVELLI 
 
 sky-line of Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. 
 Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted 
 line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Water- 
 loo station. IVIvsterious black li inures came by me and 
 were suddenly changed to the commonplace at the touch 
 of the nearer lamps. It was a big confused world, I felt, 
 for a man to lay his hands upon. 
 
 I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for 
 a time watching the huge black shapes in the darkness 
 under the gas-works. A shoal of coal barges lay in- 
 distinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, 
 and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal 
 into mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the 
 empty clutch back to the barges. Just one or two 
 minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst 
 these monster shapes. They did not seem to be con- 
 trolling them, but only moving about among them. 
 These gas-works have a big chimney that belches a 
 lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, 
 shot with strange crimson streaks. . . . 
 
 On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs 
 go down to the lapping water of the river; the lower 
 steps are luminous under the lamps, and one treads 
 unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem 
 to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, 
 they have an air of absolute indifference to mortal 
 ends. 
 
 Those shapes and large inhuman places — for all of 
 mankind that one sees at night about Lambeth is 
 minute and pitiful beside the industrial monsters that 
 snort and toil there — mix up inextricably with my 
 memories of my first days as a legislator. Black 
 figures drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper 
 rough tears by on a motor bicycle, and presently, on 
 
THE HOUSE IN WESTiAHNSTER 2S5 
 
 the Albert Enibanknicnt, every seat has its one or Iwo 
 outcasts huddled tof^ether and sluniberinir. 
 
 "These thinfjjs come, these things go," a whispering 
 voice urged upon nie, "as once those vast unmeaning 
 Saurians whose bones encumber museums came and 
 went, rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . . 
 
 Fruitless lives ! — was that the truth of it all ? . . . 
 
 Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment in front of the colonnades of St. Thomas's 
 IIos})ital. I leant on the parapet close by a lamp-stand 
 of twisted dolphins — and I prayed ! 
 
 I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, 
 and how a string of barges presently came swinging 
 and bumping round as high water turned to ebb. 
 That sudden change of ])osition and my brief per- 
 j)lcxity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the 
 substance of my thoughts. It was then I was moved 
 to prayer. I prayed that night that life might not be 
 in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I 
 praved for strength and faith, that the monstrous 
 blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, 
 might not beat me back to futility and a meaningless 
 acquiescence in existent things. I knew myself for the 
 weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it was set for 
 me to make such order as I could out of these disorders, 
 and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a 
 sense of yielding feebleness. 
 
 " Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, 
 torment me, destroy me as you will, but save me from 
 self-complacency and little interests and little successes 
 and the life that passes like the shadow of a dream." 
 
BOOK THE THIRD 
 THE HEART OF rOLITICS 
 
CHAPTER THE FIRST 
 
 The Riddle lou the Statesman 
 
 §1 
 
 I HAVE been planning and rcj)lanning, ^vriling and 
 rewriting, this next portion of my book for many 
 days. I perceive I must leave it raw edged and ill 
 joined. I have learnt something of the impossi- 
 bility of History. For all I have had to tell is the 
 storv of one man's convictions and aims and how they 
 reacted upon his life ; and I find it too subtle and 
 involved and intricate for the doing. I find it tax all 
 my powers to convey even the main forms and forces 
 in that development. It is like looking through moving 
 media of chan":inLj luie and variable refraction at some- 
 tiling vitally unstable. Ihoad theories and generaliza- 
 tions are mingled with personal influences, with prevalent 
 prejudices; and not only coloured but altered by phases 
 of hopefulness and moods of depression. The web is 
 made up of the most diverse elements, beyond treat- 
 ment multitudinous. . . . J'\)r a week or so I desisted 
 altogether, and walked over the mountains and re- 
 turned to sit through the warm soft mornings among 
 the shaded rocks above this little perched-up house of 
 ours, discussing my difficulties with Isabel, and I think 
 
 2S9 u 
 
290 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 oil tlie whole complicating them further in the effort 
 to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements. 
 
 Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary 
 analysis of this confused process. A main strand is 
 quite easily traceable. This main strand is the story of 
 my obvious life, my life as it must have looked to most 
 of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young 
 couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out 
 under Altiora's auspices to make a career. You figure 
 us well dressed and active, running about in motor-cars, 
 visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant 
 companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby, 
 Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses. We 
 must have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during 
 that time. 
 
 We did very continually and faithfully serve our 
 joint career. I thought about it a great deal, and did 
 and refrained from doing ten thousand things for the 
 sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by 
 inertia, long after things had happened and changes 
 occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible. 
 Under certain very artless pretences, we wanted stead- 
 fastly to make a handsome position in the world, 
 achieve respect, succeed. Enormous unseen changes 
 had been in progress for years in my mind and the 
 realities of my life, before our general circle could have 
 had any inkling of their existence, or suspected the 
 appearances of our life. Then suddenly our proceed- 
 ings began to be deflected, our outward unanimity 
 visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of these 
 so long-hidden developments. 
 
 That career had its own hidden side, of course ; but 
 when I write of these unseen factors I do not mean 
 that but something altogether broader. I do not mean 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 291 
 
 the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical ob- 
 server scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect 
 of the fair but limited anil)itions of my ostensible 
 self. This *' sub-careerist '' element noted little thin«:s 
 that aft'ected the career, made me suspicious of the 
 rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-and-so, wliom, 
 as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least 
 sympathetic towards ; guarded with that man, who for 
 all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little 
 touchy at the appearance of neglect from that. No, 
 I mean something greater and not something smaller 
 when I write of a hidden life. 
 
 In the ostensible self who glowed under the appro- 
 bation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed, 
 praised and depreciated, in the House and in smoking- 
 room gossip, you really have as much of a man as 
 usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I 
 am tremendously impressed now in the retrospect bv 
 the realization of how little that frontage represented 
 me, and just how little such frontages do represent the 
 complexities of the intelligent contcm[)orary. Behind 
 it, yet struggling to disorganize and alter it altogether, 
 was a far more essential reality, a self less personal, 
 less individualized, and broader in its references. Its 
 aims were never simply to get on ; it had an altogether 
 different system of demands and satisfactions. It was 
 critical, curious, more than a little unfeeling — and re- 
 lentlessly illuminating. 
 
 It is just the existence and development of this more 
 generalized self-behind-the-frontage that is making 
 modern life so much more subtle and intricate to render, 
 and so much more hopeful in its relations to the per- 
 plexities of the universe. I sec this mental and spiritual 
 hinterland var}' enormou:>ly in the people about me, 
 
292 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 between a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its 
 goods in the window, to others who, like myself, come 
 to regard the ostensible existence more and more as a 
 mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater 
 personality behind. And this back-self has its history 
 and phases, its crises and happy accidents and irre- 
 vocable conclusions, more or less distinct from the 
 adventures and achievements of the ostensible self. It 
 meets persons and phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a 
 book, it is startled into new realizations by some acci- 
 dent that seems altogether irrelevant to the general 
 tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the 
 ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective 
 criticism ; it accumulates disturbing energy. Then it 
 breaks our overt promises and repudiates our pledges, 
 coming down at last like an overbearing mentor upon 
 the small engagements of the pupil. 
 
 In the life of the individual it takes the role that 
 the growth of philosophy, science, and creative literature 
 may play in the development of mankind. 
 
 §2 
 
 It is curious to recall how Britten helped to shatter 
 that obvious, lucidly explicable presentation of myself 
 upon which I had embarked with Margaret. He re- 
 turned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and 
 a habit of adolescent frankness ; he reached throuo-h 
 my shallow frontage as no one else seemed capable of 
 doing, and dragged that back-self into relation with it. 
 
 I remember very distinctly a dinner and a sub- 
 sequent walk with him which presents itself now as 
 altogether typical of the quality of his influence. 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 293 
 
 I had come upon him one clay while hmchinf^ with 
 Somers and Sutton at the Playwriirlits' Chib, and h;id 
 asked him to dinner on the spur of tlie moment. He 
 was oddly the same curly-headetl, red-faced ventrilo- 
 quist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as 
 untidy, and at iirst a little inclined to make com- 
 parisons with my sleek successfulness. Ihit that dis- 
 position presently evaporated, and his talk was rrood 
 and fresh and provocative. And something that had 
 long been straining at its checks in my mind Happed 
 over, and he and I found ourselves of one accord. 
 
 Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came 
 matters were apt to become confusedly strenuous. 
 There was always a sliMit and ineffectual strujTfjle at 
 the end on the part of ]\Iargaret to anticipate Altiora's 
 overpowering tendency to a rally and the establishment 
 of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a coup-de- 
 ma'in. When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter 
 influence of the Cramptons prevailed ; temperance and 
 information for its own sake prevailed excessively over 
 dinner and the play of thought. . . . Good Lord ! what 
 bores the Cramptons were ! I wonder I endured 
 them as I did. They had all of them the trick of 
 lying in wait conversationally ; they had no sense of 
 the self-exposures, the gallant experiments in state- 
 ment that are necessary for good conversation. They 
 would watch one talking with an expression exactly 
 like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as 
 it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some 
 secondary fact, and back to cover. They gave one 
 twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still 
 difficult at a stretch ; they talked a good deal about 
 children and servants, but with an air caught from 
 Altiora of making observations upon sociological types. 
 
294 THE NEW JMACHIAVELLI 
 
 I^ewis gossiped caboiit the House in an entirely finite 
 manner. He never raised a discussion ; nobody ever 
 raised a discussion. He would ask what Ave thought of 
 Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would 
 say it was good, and Mrs. AVillie, who had been behind 
 the grille, would think it was very good, and then 
 Willie, parting the branches, would say rather con- 
 clusively that he didn't think it was very much good, 
 and I would deny hearing the question in order to 
 evade a profitless statement of views in that vacuum, 
 and then we would cast about in our minds for some 
 other topic of equal interest. . . . 
 
 On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify 
 our Young Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham, 
 with her white hair and her fresh mind and complexion, 
 and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not 
 his wife, who was having her third baby on principle ; 
 his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and 
 of course the Bunting Harblows. There was also some 
 other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the 
 life of me I cannot remember her name. 
 
 Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward 
 Crampton and Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion 
 about the partition of Poland. Edward was at work 
 then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life 
 of Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps 
 not altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignor- 
 ance of accessible literature. At any rate, his correc- 
 tion of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was 
 a distinct and not altogether delightful pause, and then 
 some one, it may have been the pale-blue lady, asked 
 Mrs. Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had 
 returned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That 
 led to a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen. 
 
IIIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 295 
 
 niul Willie told us how he liad jirofilcd by the no- 
 breakfast system. It Imd increased his {)o\ver of work 
 enormously. He could get through ten hours a day 
 now without inconvenience. 
 
 " \\'hat do you do.'^" said Esmecr abruptly. 
 
 " Oh ! no end of work. There's all the estate and 
 looking after things.'*"' 
 
 "But publicly .^'^ 
 
 " I asked three questions yesterday. And for one 
 of them I had to consult nine books ! "" 
 
 AVe were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor 
 Ilaig's system of dietary, and whether the exclusion or 
 inclusion of fish and chicken were most conducive to 
 h'lrrh efficiency, when Britten, who had refused lemonade 
 and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and 
 was discovered to be demanding in his throat just what 
 we Young Liberals thought we were up to? 
 
 "I want,'^ said ]}ritten, repeating his challenge a 
 little louder, " to hear just exactly what you think you 
 are doing in Parliament ? " 
 
 Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were 
 " Seeking the Good of the Community.'' 
 
 "//ore;.?" 
 
 "Beneficent Legislation,"" said Lewis. 
 
 "Beneficent in what direction?" insisted Ihitten. 
 " I want to know where you think you are going." 
 
 "Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis. 
 
 " That's only a phrase ! " 
 
 "You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?" 
 
 " rd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, 
 and waited. 
 
 " Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neat- 
 ness, and turned to ask Mrs. Bunting Ilaiblow about 
 her little boy's French. 
 
296 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but 
 the natural mischief in Mrs. IVIillingham had been 
 stirred, and she was presently echoing his demand in 
 lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. " AVhat are we 
 Liberals doing ? " Then Esmeer fell in with the 
 revolutionaries. 
 
 To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour 
 for fundamentals — and a little disconcerted. I had the 
 experience that I suppose comes to every one at times 
 of discoverinfic oneself too-ether with two different sets 
 of people with whom one has maintained two different 
 sets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an 
 instinctive suppression in our circle that we shouldn't 
 be more than vague about our political ideals. It had 
 almost become part of my morality to respect this con- 
 vention. It was understood we were all working hard, 
 and keeping ourselves fit, tremendously fit, under 
 Altiora's inspiration. Pro Bono Publico. Bunting Har- 
 blow had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the 
 verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to 
 be in the nature of confirmations. ... It added to the 
 discomfort of the situation that these plunging enquiries 
 were being made in the presence of our wives. 
 
 The rebel section of our party forced the talk. 
 
 Edward Crampton was presently declaring — I forget 
 in what relation : " The country is with us." 
 
 My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereo- 
 typed phrases about the Country and the House got the 
 better of me. I showed my cloven hoof to my friends 
 for the first time. 
 
 " We don't respect the Country as we used to do," 
 I said. " We haven't the same belief we used to have 
 in the will of the people. It's no good, Crampton, trying 
 to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of fact 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 297 
 
 — nowadays every one knows — that tlie monster that 
 brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no 
 head. We've got to give it one — if possible with ])rains 
 and a will. That lies in the future. For tlie present 
 if the country is with us, it means merely that we 
 happen to have hold of its tether.'"* 
 
 Lewis was shocked. A "mandate'" from the Country 
 was sacred to his system of pretences, 
 
 Britten wasn't subdued by his fust rebuff; 
 presently he was at us again. There were several 
 attempts to check his outbreak of interrogation ; I 
 remember the Cramptons asked questions about the 
 welfare of various cousins of Lewis who were unknown 
 to the rest of us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten 
 in a sympathetic discussion of the Arts and Crafts 
 exhibition. lUit Britten and Esmeer were persistent, 
 Mrs. Millinrrham was mischievous, and in the end our 
 rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets 
 for good, while we talked all over them of the preva- 
 lent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was 
 perplexed by me. It is only now I perceive just how 
 perplexing I must have been. "Of course," she said 
 with that faint stress of apprehension in her eyes, " one 
 must have aims." And, "it isn't always easy to put 
 everything into phrases." "Don't be long," said Mrs. 
 Edward Crampton to her husband as the wives troo[)ed 
 out. And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an 
 indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criti- 
 cizing Britten's share in our talk in an altogether 
 unfavourable spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought 
 him aggressive and impertinent, and Margaret with 
 a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him 
 at once into a corner and showed him Italian photo- 
 graphs by Coburn. We dispersed early. 
 
2 98 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets 
 towards Battersea Bridge — he lodged on the south side. 
 
 " Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began. 
 
 " She^s a dear." 
 
 " I liked her demand for a hansom because a four- 
 wheeler was too safe." 
 
 " She was worked up," I said. " She's a woman of 
 faultless character, but her instincts, as Altiora would 
 say, are anarchistic — when she gives them a chance." 
 
 " So she takes it out in hansom cabs." 
 
 "Hansom cabs." 
 
 " She's wise," said Britten. . . . 
 
 " I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, " I 
 didn't rag your other guests too much. I've a sort of 
 
 feeling at moments Remington, those chaps are 
 
 so infernally not — not bloody. It's part of a man's 
 duty sometimes at least to eat red beef and get drunk. 
 How is he to understand government if he doesn't .f* 
 It scares me to think of your lot — by a sort of mis- 
 apprehension — being in power. A kind of neuralgia 
 in the head, by way of government. I don't under- 
 stand where you come in. Those others — they've no 
 lusts. Their ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at 
 least a lust to take hold of life and make something of 
 it. They — they want to take hold of life and make 
 nothing of it. They want to cut out all the stimulants. 
 Just as though life was anything else but a reaction to 
 stimulation ! " . . . 
 
 He began to talk of his own life. He had had 
 ill-fortune through most of it. He was poor and un- 
 successful, and a girl he had been very fond of had been 
 attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very 
 horrible manner. These things had ^vounded and 
 tortured him, but they hadn't broken him. They had, 
 
IIIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 299 
 
 it seemed to me, made a kind of cii[)j)]ed and u^\v 
 demigod of him. He was, I be<;an to perceive, so much 
 better than I had any ii<;]it to expect. At first I liad 
 been rather struck by his unkempt h)ok, and it made 
 my reaction all the stron^^er. 'J'liere was n])out him 
 somethinj;, a kind of raw and blecdintj faith in the 
 deep thini^s of Hfe, that stirred mc as he showed it. 
 ^ly set of })eople had irritated him and disappointed 
 liim. I discovered at his touch how they irritated me. 
 He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed 
 of my easy acquiescences as I walked in my sleek tall 
 neatness beside his rather old coat, his rather battered 
 hat, his sturdier shorter shape, and listened to his 
 denunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and 
 Proffressivism. 
 
 *' It has the same relation to prop^ress — the reality 
 of jirogress — that the things they paint on door panels 
 in the suburbs have to art and beauty. There's a sort 
 of filiation. . . . Your Altiora's just the political ecpiiva- 
 lent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery ; 
 she's a dealer in llefined Social Reform for the Parlour. 
 The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and 
 a painfuiler thing and a slower thing altogether. Look ! 
 ihaf'' — and he pointed to where under a hoarding in 
 the light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood lurking 
 — "was in Rabylon and Nineveh. Your little lot make 
 believe there won't be anything of the sort after this 
 Parliament ! They're going to vanish at a few top 
 notes from Altiora Bailey! Remington ! — Ifs foolery. 
 It's prigs at play. It's make-believe, make-believe ! 
 Your people there haven't got hold of things, aren't 
 begiiniing to get hold of things, don't know anything 
 of life at all, shirk life, avoitl life, get in little bright 
 clean rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade 
 
300 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 while the Night goes by outside — untouched. Those 
 Crampton fools slink by all this"" — he waved at the 
 woman again — "pretend it doesn't exist, or is going 
 to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep 
 children in the wet outside public-houses. Do you 
 think they really care, llemington ? / don't. It's 
 make-believe. What they want to do, what Lewis 
 wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her 
 husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave and 
 necessary and respected on the Government benches. 
 They think of putting their feet out like statesmen, 
 and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over 
 their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club 
 at fifty. That's their Reality. That's their scope. 
 They don't, it's manifest, icant to think beyond that. 
 The things there are^ Remington, they'll never face ! 
 \^ the wonder and the depth of life, — lust, and the night- 
 sky, — pain." 
 
 "But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good 
 Will ! " 
 
 "Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good W^ill 
 is anything but dishonesty unless it frets and burns 
 and hurts and destroys a man. That lot of yours have 
 nothing but a good will to think they have good will. 
 Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their 
 hearts as we do ? Lewis ? Crampton ? Or those neat, 
 admiring, satisfied little wives ? See how they shrank 
 from the probe ! " 
 
 " We all," I said, " shrink from the probe." 
 
 " God help us ! " said Britten. . . . 
 
 " We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he 
 broke out, " and the greatest saint only a worm that 
 has lifted its head for a moment from the dust. We 
 are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animal- 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 301 
 
 culac building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. 
 But of all the damned thin^^s that ever were damned, 
 your damned sliirking, temperate, sham-efficient, self- 
 satisfied, respectable, make-believe, Fabian-spirited 
 Young Liberal is the utterly damnedest."" He paused 
 for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different 
 note : " Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, 
 to find you in this set ! '"' 
 
 '' VouVe just the old plunger you used to be, 
 Britten," I said. "You're going too far with all your 
 might for the sake of the damns. Like a donkey that 
 drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths 
 in Liberalism '' 
 
 " We were talking about Liberals." 
 
 "Liberty!" 
 
 "Liberty! What do your little lot know of 
 liberty?" 
 
 " What docs any little lot know of liberty ?" 
 
 "It waits outside, too bi«r for our understandinir. 
 Like the night and the stars. And lust, Remington ! 
 lust and bitterness ! Don't I know them ? with all 
 the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, 
 the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood 
 — and my poor nunnble of a life going on ! Lm within 
 slight of beinfT a drunkard, Remiuixton ! I'm a failure 
 by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. 
 But I'm not afraid of it any more. I've paid some- 
 thing of the price, Tve seen something of the meaning." 
 
 lie flfw off at a tangent. ** Td rather die in 
 Delirium Tremens," he cried, " than be a Crampton or 
 a Lewis. . . ." 
 
 " Make-believe. Make-believe." The j)hrase and 
 Britten's squat gestures haunted me as I walked 
 homeward alone. I went to mv room and stood before 
 
o 
 
 02 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's 
 admirable equipment of me. 
 
 I perceived in the lurid light of Britten''s sugges- 
 tions that so it was ]\Ir. George Alexander would have 
 mounted a statesman's private room. . , , 
 
 §3 
 
 I was never at any stage a loynl 'party man. I 
 doubt if party will ever again be the force it was 
 during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Men 
 are becoming increasingly constructive and selective, 
 less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial 
 circumstances. As education becomes more universal 
 and liberating, men will sort themselves more and 
 more by their intellectual temperaments and less and 
 less by their accidental associations. The past will 
 rule them less ; the future more. It is not simply 
 party but school and college and county and country 
 that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly 
 as much as our forefathers did of the " old Harrovian," 
 " old Arvonian,'' " old Etonian " claim to this or that 
 unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the 
 Scotch and the Devonians weaken a little in their clan- 
 nishness. A widening sense of fair play destroys such 
 things. They follow freemasonry down — freemasonry 
 of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in Eng- 
 land by propitiatory symbols outside shady public- 
 houses. . . . 
 
 There is, of course, a type of man which clings 
 very obstinately to party ties. These are the men 
 with strong reproductive imaginations and no imagi- 
 native initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATES.MAN -,o 
 
 j^j 
 
 or Dayton. They arc the scholars-at-large in life. 
 For thcni the lac-t tliat the })arty system has been 
 essential in the history of EiighuKi lor two hundred 
 years gives it an overwhehning glamour. Thev have 
 read histories and memoii*s, they see the great grey 
 pile of Westminster not so much for uhat it is as for 
 what it was, rich with dramatic memories, populous 
 with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anec- 
 dotes and (piotations. It seems almost scanchdous that 
 new things should continue to happen, swamping with 
 strange qualities the savour of these old associations. 
 
 That Mr. Ramsay jNIactionald should walk througli 
 Westminster Hall, thrust himself, it may be, through 
 tlie very piece of space that once held Charles the 
 Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation 
 to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, 
 I think, like to have the front benches left empty now 
 for ever, or at most adorned with laureated ivory 
 tablets, *' Here Dizzy sat," and "On this Spot WilHam 
 Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech." 
 Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty 
 and respect on the part of the survivors, meticulous 
 imitation. "Mr. G.,"" he murmurs, "would not have 
 done that,^"* and laments a vanished subtlety even while 
 Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily dis- 
 posed to lapse into wonderings about what things are 
 coming to, wonderings that liave no grain of curiositv. 
 His conception of perfect conduct is industrious per- 
 sistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves of 
 the great recorded days. So infinitelv more injportant 
 to him is the documented, respected thing than the 
 elusive })resent. 
 
 Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, 
 though Cladingbowl is a sound man on a connnittee, 
 
304 THE NEW INIACHIAVELLI 
 
 and Dayton keeps the Old Country Gazette, the most 
 gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, 
 in their clubs at lunch-time. There, with the pleasant 
 consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal 
 or shirking, they mingle with permanent officials, promi- 
 nent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type of business 
 men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the 
 morning paper, of the architecture of the West End, 
 of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday 
 resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic 
 "crushers."' The New Year and Birthday honours 
 lists are always very sagely and exhaustively considered, 
 and anecdotes are popular and keenly judged. They 
 do not talk of the things that are really active in their 
 minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they 
 suppose to be proper to intelligent but still honourable 
 men. Socialism, individual money matters, and religion 
 are forbidden topics, and sex and women only in so 
 far as they appear in the law courts. It is to me the 
 strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal 
 loyalties and traditional respects, this repudiation and 
 concealment of passionate interests. It is like wearing 
 gloves in summer fields, or bathing in a gown, or 
 falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or writing 
 under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . . 
 It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensi- 
 tive to the great past that is embodied in Westminster 
 and its traditions ; we are not so much wanting in the 
 historical sense as alive to the greatness of our present 
 opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible 
 to us. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and 
 wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her 
 incidental and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous 
 in her pregnant totality : I cannot bring myself to use 
 
KIDDLE FOR THE STATESINIAN 305 
 
 her as a iiuiscuni or an old booksliop. \\'lK'n I tliink 
 of Whitehall that little affair on the seaflbld outside 
 the Banqueting; Hall seems trivial and remote in com- 
 parison with the })ossibilities that ofl'er themselves to 
 my ima<;ination within the f^reat i^rcy (iovernment 
 buildini^s close at har.d. 
 
 It gives me a (|ualui of nostal<;ia even to name those 
 places now. I think of St. Stephen's tower streaming; 
 upwards into the misty London night and the great wet 
 (|uadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the liansom 
 cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more 
 bv taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Kdward 
 the Seventh aged ; I think of the Admiralty and \\'ar 
 Office with their tall Marconi masts sending out in- 
 visible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, 
 to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly 
 shining river goes flooding through my memory once 
 again, on to those narrow seas that part us from our rival 
 nations ; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious grey- 
 toned offices in which undistinguished little men and 
 little files of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to 
 frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple- 
 studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, 
 to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and watch- 
 towers and t^raziu": lands and corn lands all about the 
 globe. Once more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and 
 (lark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one another, 
 pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags 
 and scutcheons, follow the ])road avenue that leads to 
 Ikickingham Palace, witness the coming and going of 
 troops and officials and guests along it from every land 
 on earth. . . . Interwoven in the texture of it all, 
 mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is 
 the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge : 
 
 X 
 
o 
 
 06 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " You and your kind might still, if you could but grasp 
 it here, mould all the destiny of Man ! '' 
 
 § 4 
 
 My first three years in Parliament were years of 
 active discontent. The little group of younger Liberals 
 to which I belonged was very ignorant of the traditions 
 and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out of 
 touch with the mass of the party. For a time Par- 
 liament was enormously taken up with moribund 
 issues and old quarrels. The early Educational legis- 
 lation was sectarian and unenterprising, and the 
 Licensing Bill went little further than the attempted 
 rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was alto- 
 gether for the nationalization of the public-house, 
 and of this end the Bill gave no intimations. It 
 Avas just beer- baiting. I was recalcitrant almost from 
 the beginning, and spoke against the Government 
 so early as the second reading of the first Education 
 Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a 
 little beyond my intention in the heat of speaking, — it 
 is a way with inexperienced men. I called the Bill 
 timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies of sects and 
 little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods 
 with the manifest needs of the time. 
 
 I am not a particularly good speaker; after the 
 manner of a writer, I worry to fine my meaning too 
 much ; but this was one of my successes. I spoke after 
 dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were 
 already a little curious about me because of my writings. 
 Several of the Conservative leaders were present and 
 stayed, and Mr. Evesham, I remember, came ostenta- 
 
IIIDDT.E FOR THE STATESMAN 307 
 
 tiously to hear mo, with that enf^ajrinrr fricndHness of 
 his, and ^ave me at the first chance an appr()vin<r 
 "Hear, Ilear!"* I can still recall quite distinctly my 
 two futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eve before I 
 was able to begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too 
 prepared opening, the effect of hearing my own voice 
 and my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly 
 be talking about, the realization that I wa.s getting on 
 fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of 
 having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd 
 gratitude I felt for that encouraging cheer. 
 
 Addressing the House of Commons is like no other 
 public speaking in the world. Its semi-collocjuial 
 methods give it an air of being easy, but its shifting 
 audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of 
 members behind the chair — not mere audience units, 
 ])ut men who matter — the desolating emptiness that 
 spreads itself round the man who fails to interest, 
 the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers'" 
 gallerv, the light, elusive, flickering movements high 
 up behind the grille, the wigged, attentive, weary 
 Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like 
 Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire 
 together, produce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, 
 as though I was walking upon a pavement full of traji- 
 doors and patches of uncovered morass. A misplaced, 
 well-meant •■' Hear, Hear I"" is apt to be extraordinarily 
 disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I 
 had to speak with (juite the same sideways twist that 
 the arrangement of the House imposes. One docs not 
 recognize one's own voice threading out into the stirring 
 brown. I'nless I was excited or speaking to the mind 
 of some particular person in the House, I was apt to 
 lose my feeling of an auditor. I had no sense of 
 
3oS THE NEW MACIIIAVELLI 
 
 whither my sentences were going, such as one has with 
 a public meeting well under one's e3'e. And to lose 
 one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my tempera- 
 ment to lose one's sense of the immediate, and to 
 become prolix and vague with qualifications. 
 
 §5 
 
 My discontents with the Liberal party and my 
 mental exploration of the quality of party generally 
 is curiously mixed up with certain impressions of 
 things and people in the National Liberal Club. The 
 National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in 
 the flesh — and Doultonware. It is an extraordinary 
 big club done in a bold, wholesale, shiny, marbled 
 style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel 
 engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the late 
 Mr. Gladstone ; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, 
 hazy, crowded smoking-room with innumerable little 
 tables and groups of men in armchairs, its magazine 
 room and library upstairs, have just that undis- 
 tinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for 
 me the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and 
 hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign 
 speech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent 
 whites his roving eye catches profiles and complexions 
 that send his mind afield to Calcutta or Rangoon or 
 the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . . 
 
 I was not infrequently that pensive member. I 
 used to go to the Club to doubt about Liberalism. 
 
 About two o'clock in the day the great smoking- 
 room is crowded with countless little groups. They 
 sit about small round tables, or in circles of chairs. 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 309 
 
 and the haze of tobacco seems to prolonf]^ the great 
 narrow place, with its pilhirs and bays, to infinity. 
 Some of tiie groups are big, as many as a dozen men 
 talk in loud tones; some are duologues, and there is 
 always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At 
 first one gets an impression of men going from grouj) 
 to group and as it were linking them, but as one 
 watches closely one finds that these men just visit 
 three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing 
 of the others. One begins to perceive more and more 
 distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human 
 mosaic ; that each patch in that great place is of a 
 difierent (jualilv and colour from the next and never 
 to be mixed with it. Most clubs have a connnon link, 
 a lowest common denominator in the Club Bore, who 
 spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores are 
 specialized and sectional. As one looks round one sees 
 here a clump of men from the North Country or the 
 Potteries, here an island of South London politicians, 
 here a couple of young Jews ascendant from ^Vhite- 
 chapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a 
 group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here 
 a priest or so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, 
 here a little knot of eminent Rationali.sts indulging in 
 a blasphemous story sotto voce. Next them are a group 
 of anglicized Germans and highly specialized chess- 
 players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons — 
 bulging with documents and intent upon extraordinary 
 business transactions over long cigars. . . . 
 
 I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and 
 try to extract some constructive intimations. Every 
 now and then I got a whill' of politics. It was clear 
 they were against the Lortls — against pluto- 
 crats — against Cossington's newspapers — against the 
 
\/ 
 
 310 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 brewers. ... It was tremendously clear what they were 
 against. The trouble was to find out what on earth 
 they were for / . . . 
 
 As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled 
 pillars and walls, the various views, aspects, and por- 
 traits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the partitions of 
 polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would 
 dissolve and vanish, and 1 would have a vision of this 
 sample of miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests 
 and a universal littleness of imagination enlarged, un- 
 limited, no longer a sample but a community, spreading, 
 stretching out to infinity — all in little groups and 
 duologues and circles, all with their special and 
 narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the 
 others. 
 
 What but a common antagonism would ever keep 
 these multitudes together ? I understood why modern 
 electioneering is more than half of it denunciation. 
 Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and 
 deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to 
 the commonplace mind in " Let us do."" That calls 
 for the creative imagination, and few have been 
 accustomed to respond to that call. The other 
 merely needs jealousy and hate, of which there are 
 great and easily accessible reservoirs in every human 
 heart. . . . 
 
 I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous 
 individuality very vividly. A seething limitlessness it 
 became at last, like a waste place covered by crawling 
 locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown 
 by the million in ditches. . . . 
 
 Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the 
 sidelong shy movements of Edward Crampton, seated 
 in a circle of talkers close at hand. I had a whiff 
 
KIDULE roil THE STA'JESMAN 311 
 
 of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold ! he was 
 savinfT soniethini^ about the " \Vill of the People. . . /"' 
 
 Tlie inunense and wonderful disconnectednesses of 
 human life ! I forgot the smoke and jabber of the 
 clui) altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung aloft 
 by some (jueer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some 
 high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye 
 could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of 
 humanity, like grass upon the field, like |)ebljles upon 
 unbounded beaches. \Vas there ever to be in human 
 life more than that endless struggling individualism ? 
 Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant 
 svnthcsis, still to come — or present it might be and 
 still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and 
 ■withal the last phase of mankind ? . . . 
 
 I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence 
 of our ambitions, the tremendous enterprise to which 
 the modern statesman is implicitly addressed. I was 
 as it Avere one of a little swarm of would-be reef 
 builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the 
 ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history 
 of life, has been and will be the story of something 
 struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling 
 to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual 
 lives — an effort of insidious attraction, an idea of 
 invincible appeal. That something greater than our- 
 selves, which does not so much exist as seek existence, 
 palpitating between being and not-being, how mar- 
 vellous it is ! It has w orn the form and visage of ten 
 thousand different Gods, sought a shape for itself in 
 stone and ivorv and music and wonderful words, spoken 
 more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery 
 of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty 
 beyond the connnon impulses of men. It is something 
 
 / 
 
312 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is 
 withdrawn ; withdrawn so completely that one doubts 
 if it has ever been. . , , 
 
 I would mark with a curious interest the stray 
 country member of the club up in town for a night 
 or so. My mind would be busy with speculations 
 about him, about his home, his family, his reading, 
 his horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn*'t belong 
 and never came up. I would fill in the outline of him 
 with memories of my uncle and his Staffordshire neigh- 
 bours. He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor 
 That down there, a great man in his ward, J.P. within 
 seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God 
 in his home. Here he was nobody, and very shy, and 
 either a little too arroo;ant or a little too meek towards 
 our very democratic-mannered but still liveried waiters. 
 Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He 
 overated himself lest he should appear mean, went 
 through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank, un- 
 less he was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his 
 best, in spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a 
 state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, 
 black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of 
 temperance omit the brandy and have rather more 
 coffee, in the smoking-room. I would sit and watch 
 that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder, 
 wonder. . . . 
 
 An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I 
 would have visions of him in relation to his wife, 
 checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes being 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 313 
 
 ostentatiously " kiiur'; I would see him glance furtively 
 at his domestic servants upon his stairctsc, or stiffen 
 his upper lip a;]^aiiist the reluctant, protesting business 
 employee. We imaginative peo{)le are base enough, 
 heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter 
 penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the 
 viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed 
 self-justification of the dull. 
 
 I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and 
 see others of him and others. What did he think he 
 was up to ? Did he for a moment realize that his 
 presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me 
 meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we 
 were jointly doing something with the nation and the 
 empire and mankind? . . . IIow on earth could any 
 one get hold of him, make any noble use of him ? He 
 didn't read beyond his newspaper. He never thought, 
 but only followed imaginings in his heart. He never 
 discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper 
 gave wav. He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered 
 tank of resentments and quite irrational moral rages. 
 Yet withal I would have to resist an impulse to go 
 over to him and nudge him and say to him, *' Look 
 here! What indeed do you think we are doing with 
 the nation and the empire and mankind ? You know 
 ^Mankind !'' 
 
 I wonder what reply I should have got .'* 
 So far as any average could be struck and so far 
 as any backbone could be located, it seemed to me 
 that this silent, shy, replete, sub-angry, middle-class 
 sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties 
 and dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I 
 could be considered as representing anything in the 
 House, I pretended to sit for the elements of hifi. . . . 
 
14 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 §7 
 
 For a time I turned towards the Socialists. Thev 
 at least had an air of coherent intentions. At that 
 time Sociahsm had come into politics again after a 
 period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous 
 eclat. There was visibly a following of Socialist 
 members to Chris Robinson ; mysteriously uncommuni- 
 cative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short coats and 
 square-toed boots who replied to casual advances a 
 little surprisingly in rich North Country dialects. 
 Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible,'"* 
 as Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the 
 Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a 
 stick and speaking with a fire that was altogether 
 revolutionary. This was Philip Snowden, the member 
 for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty strong 
 altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to 
 come in much stronger. They were only one aspect 
 of what seemed at that time a big national movement. 
 Socialist societies, we gathered, were springing up all 
 over the country, and every one was inquiring about 
 Socialism and discussincr Socialism. It had taken the 
 Universities with particular force, and any youngster 
 with the slightest intellectual pretension was either 
 actively for or brilliantly against. For a time our 
 Young Liberal group was ostentatiously sympa- 
 thetic. . . . 
 
 When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid 
 memory of certain evening gatherings at our house. . . . 
 
 These gatherings had been organized by Margaret 
 as the outcome of a discussion at the Baileys\ Altiora 
 had been very emphatic and uncharitable upon the 
 
KIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 315 
 
 futility of the Socialist niovenicnt It seemed that 
 even the leaders fou*;ht shy of diiiner-paiiics. 
 
 '*They never meet each other," said Altiora, " much 
 less people on the other side. How can they begin to 
 understand politics until they do that ? " 
 
 "Most of them have totiilly unpresentable wives," 
 said Altiora, "totally!" and (juoted instances, " and 
 thev ic'ill bring them. Or they won't come! Some of 
 the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table 
 manners. They just make holes in the talk. . . .'' 
 
 I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath 
 Altiora's outburst. The presentation of the Socialist 
 case seemed very greatly crippled by the want of a 
 common intimacv in its leaders ; the want of intimacy 
 didn't at first aj)pear to be more than an accident, and 
 our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance 
 and easy intercourse afoot among them and between 
 them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave 
 a series of weekly diiniers, planned, I think, a little too 
 accurately upon xMtiora's model, and after each we had 
 as catholic a reception as we could contrive. 
 
 , Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as 
 catholic as receptions could be. Margaret found herself 
 with a weekly houseful of insoluble problems in inter- 
 course. One did one's best, but one got a nightmare 
 feeling; as the eveniuLC wore on. 
 
 It was one of the few unanimities of these parties 
 that every one should be a little odd in appearance, 
 funny about the hair or the tie or the shoes or more 
 generally, and that bursts of violent aggression should 
 alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A 
 number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue 
 that never came, and stood and sat about silently, 
 mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did not 
 
3i6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 discover their distinctive Open-Sesames. There was a 
 sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in shape- 
 less garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy 
 social intercourse, and any conversation at any moment 
 was liable to become oracular. One was in a state of ten- 
 sion from first to last ; the most innocent remark seemed 
 capable of exploding resentment, and replies came out 
 at the most unexpected angles. AVe Young Liberals 
 went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had 
 evoked. The Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole 
 wonderfully discreet, superfluous steam is let out far 
 away from home in the Balkans or Africa, and the neat, 
 stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow, and 
 Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats indi- 
 cative of the House, or in what is sometimes written 
 of as " faultless evening dress,'"* stood about on those 
 evenings, they and their very quietly and simply and 
 expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line 
 amidst lakes and mountains. 
 
 I didn't at first see the connection between syste- 
 matic social reorganization and arbitrary novelties in 
 dietary and costume, just as I didn't realize why the 
 most comprehensive constructive projects should appear 
 to be supported solely by odd and exceptional person- 
 alities. On one of these evenings a little group of 
 rather jolly-looking pretty young people seated them- 
 selves for no particular reason in a large circle on the 
 floor of my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge, 
 in the game of Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual 
 equivalent of Hunt the Slipper. It must have been 
 that same evening I came upon an unbleached young 
 gentleman before the oval mirror on the landing 
 engaged in removing the remains of an anchovy sand- 
 wich from his protruded tongue — visible ends of cress 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESxMAX 317 
 
 haviiif]: misled him into the belief that he was dealinnr 
 with tlottriiially permissible food. It was not unusual 
 lo be given hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, 
 but there I had the advantage over Lewis, who was too 
 taetful to refuse the stuff, too neatly dressed to pocket 
 it, and had no writing-desk available upon which he 
 could relieve himself in a manner flatteriiii: to the iriver. 
 So that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, 
 compact little woman in what ^Margaret declared to be 
 an extremely expensive black dress has also printed 
 herself on my memory ; she had set her heart uj)on my 
 contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest 
 with which she was associated, and I spent nuich time 
 and care in evading her. 
 
 ^Mingling with the more hygienic types were a 
 number of Anti-Puritan Socialists, bulirine: with bias 
 against temperance, and breaking out against austere 
 methods of living all over their faces. Their manner 
 was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke 
 the approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set 
 up downstairs, and there engage in discussions of 
 Determinism — it always seemed to be Determinism — 
 which became heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious 
 even in the small hours. It seemed impossible to settle 
 about this Determinism of theirs — ever. And there 
 were worldly Socialists also. I particularly recall a 
 large, active, buoyant, lady-killing individual ^itli an 
 eyeghiss borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam 
 about us one evening. He nnght liave been a slightly 
 frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat, 
 and the sort of black and white check trousers that 
 twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aristocratic 
 intonations, and he seemed to be in a perpetual state of 
 interrogation. "What are we all he-a for.^ " he would 
 
J 
 
 iS THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ask only too audibly. "What are we doing he-a? 
 What's the connection ? " 
 
 \Vhat 7cas the connection ? 
 
 We made a special effort with our last assembly in 
 June, 1907. W^e tried to get something like a repre- 
 sentative collection of the parliamentary leaders of 
 Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought 
 and a number of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. 
 Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh 
 appeared for ten minutes and talked charmingly to 
 Margaret and then vanished again ; there was Wilkins 
 the novelist and Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris 
 Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, 
 and IMagdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour 
 members. And on our side we had our particular little 
 group, Bunting Harblow, Cramp ton, Lewis, all look- 
 ing as broad-minded and open to conviction as they 
 possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from 
 their bushes almost boldly. But the gathering as a 
 whole refused either to mingle or dispute, and as an 
 experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure. 
 Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists 
 one had supposed friendly. I could not have imagined 
 it was possible for half so many people to turn their 
 backs on everybody else in such small rooms as ours. 
 But the unsaid things those backs expressed broke out, 
 I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the various 
 organs of the various sections of the party next week. 
 
 I talked, I remember, with Dr. Tumpany, a large 
 young man in a still larger professional frock-coat, and 
 with a great shock of very fair hair, who was candidate 
 for some North Country constituency. AVe discussed 
 the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at 
 that time, he was full of vague threatenings against 
 
lilDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 319 
 
 tlio Liberal party. I was struck by a thin;; in him 
 that I had ahvady observed less vividly in many others 
 of these Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last 
 a clue to the whole business. He behaved exactly like 
 a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who 
 wants to be dealt with. He had an air of having a 
 corner in ideas. Then it Hashed into my head that 
 the whole l^ocialist movement was an attempted corner 
 in ideas. . • , 
 
 §8 
 
 Late that night I found myself alone with iVIargaret 
 amid the debris of the gathering. 
 
 I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, 
 looking white and weary, came and leant upon the 
 mantel. 
 
 *^0h Lord !" said Margaret. 
 
 I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation. 
 
 "Ideas,'' I said, " count for more than I thought in 
 the world." 
 
 ^Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression 
 behind wliich she was accustomed to wait for clues. 
 
 '• When you think of the height and depth and 
 im[)ortance and wisdom of the Socialist ideas, and see 
 the men who are running them," I explained. . . . 
 *' A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out of 
 the obvious connnon sense of our present conditions. 
 
 It's as impersonal as science. All these men 
 
 They've given nothing to it. They're just people who 
 have pegged out claims upon a big intellectual No- 
 Man's-I^nd — and don't feel (juite sure of the law. 
 There's a sort of cpiarrelsome uneasiness. ... If we 
 
o 
 
 20 THE NEW IMACHIAVELLI 
 
 professed Socialism do you think they'd Avelcome us ? 
 Not a man of them ! They'd feel it was burglary. . . ." 
 
 " Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. " That 
 is just Avhat / felt about them all the evening. . . . 
 Particularly Dr. Tumpany." 
 
 " We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists," 
 I said ; " that's the moral of it. I suppose if God were 
 to find He had made a mistake in dates or something, 
 and went back and annihilated everybody from Owen 
 onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist 
 leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it 
 is and what it is to-day — a growing realization of con- 
 structive needs in every man's mind, and a little corner 
 in party politics. So, I suppose, it will always be. . . . 
 But they were a damned lot, Margaret ! " 
 
 I looked up at the little noise she made. " Twice ! " 
 she said, smiling indulgently, " to-day ! " (Even the 
 smile was Altiora's.) 
 
 I returned to my thoughts. They were a damned 
 human lot. It was an excellent word in that con- 
 nection. . . . 
 
 But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, 
 just as though men's brains were no more than stepping- 
 stones, just as though some great brain in M'hich we are 
 all little cells and corpuscles was thinking them ! . . . 
 
 "I don't think there is a man among them who 
 makes me feel he is trustworthy," said Margaret; 
 " unless it is Featherstonehaugh." 
 
 I sat taking in this proposition. 
 
 " They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret. 
 
 "Us.?" 
 
 " The Liberals." 
 
 " Oh, damn the Liberals ! " I said. " They'll never 
 even help themselves." 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 321 
 
 "I don't think I could possibly pjct on with any of 
 those pco{)le,"" said Mar<;arc't, after a pause. 
 
 She remained for a time lookini^ down at me and, I 
 eould feel, jierplexed by me, but I wanted to ^o on with 
 niy thinking, and so I did not look u}), and presently 
 she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went 
 rustlinfi; softly to her room. 
 
 I remained in my study for a lonf^ time with my 
 tluniixhts ervstallizini^ out. . . . 
 
 It was then, I think, that 1 first apprehended clearly 
 how that opposition to which I have already alluded 
 of tiie innneiliate life and the mental hinterland of a 
 man, can be applied to public and social affairs. The 
 ideas y;o on — and no person or party succeeds in cm- 
 bodying them. The reality of human progress never 
 comes to the surface ; it is a power in the deeps, an 
 imdertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in 
 studies where they write self-forget fully, in laboratories 
 under the urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare 
 illumination of honest talk, in moments of emotional 
 insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday 
 affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an 
 everyday affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, 
 the being of habits, interests, usage. Temper, vanity, 
 hasty reaction to imitation, personal feeling, are their 
 substance. No man can abolish his immediate self 
 and specialize in the depths; if he attempt that, he 
 simply turns himself into something a little less than 
 the common man. He may have an immense hinter- 
 land, but that does not absolve him from a frontage. 
 That is the essential error of the specialist philosf)pher, 
 the specialist teacher, the sj)ecialist publicist. They 
 repudiate frontage ; claim to be pure hinterland. 
 Tliat is what bothered me about Codger, about tJiose 
 
 Y 
 
322 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 various schoolmasters who had pi'cpared me for life, 
 about the Baileys and their drcaiii of an official ruling 
 class. A human bcin^; who is a philosopher in the 
 first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman 
 in the first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he 
 bring God-like gifts to the pretence — a quack. These 
 are attempts to live deep-side shallow, inside out. 
 They produce merely a new pettiness. To understand 
 Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook ; 
 to join a Socialist organization is to join a narrow cult 
 which is not even tolerably serviceable in presenting or 
 spreading the ideas for which it stands. . . . 
 
 I perceived I had got something quite fundamental 
 here. It had taken me some years to realize the true 
 relation of the great constructive ideas that swayed me 
 not only to political parties, but to myself. I had been 
 disposed to identify the formulae of some one party 
 with social construction, and to regard the other as 
 necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined 
 to follow the Baileys in the self-righteousness of sup- 
 posing myself to be wholly constructive. But I saw 
 now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour 
 is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and that 
 no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats 
 in himself the conflict of the race between the splendour 
 of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We 
 may be shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and 
 answer the dinner gong, and have our salt of flattery 
 and self-approval. In politics a man counts not for 
 what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but 
 for his common, workaday, selfish self; and political 
 parties are held together not by a community of ulti- 
 mate aims, but by the stabler bond of an accustomed 
 life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 323 
 
 nearly everybody is opposed to any chanfrc, except in 
 so far as i^ross increments are change, in his particular 
 method of living and behaviour. Every party stands 
 essentially for the interests and mental usai^es of some 
 defniite class or group of classes in the existing com- 
 munity, and every party has its scientific-minded and 
 constructive leading section, with well-defined hinter- 
 lands formulating its social functions in a public- 
 s[)irited form, and its superiicial-mindetl following con- 
 fessing its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No 
 class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of life, 
 or dnistically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indis- 
 posed to co-operate in the unlimited socialization of any 
 other class. In that capacity for aggression upon other 
 classes lies the essential driving force of motlern affairs. 
 The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway 
 and strufrirle. The ideas and understandin<Ts march 
 on and achieve themselves for all — in spite of every 
 one. . . . 
 
 The methods and traditions of British politics 
 maintain the form of two great parties, with rider 
 groups seeking to gain specific ends in the event of a 
 small Government majority. These two main parties 
 are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, 
 however, has certain necessary characteristics. The 
 Conservative Party has always stood (juite definitely 
 for the estid)lished {)ropertied interests. The land- 
 owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church, and 
 latterly the huge private monopoly of the liijuor trade 
 which has been created by teniperance legislation, are 
 the essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the 
 native wealthy are the families of the great international 
 usurers, and a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enter- 
 prise. Outside the range of resistance implied by these 
 
324 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 interests, the Conservative Party has always shown itself 
 just as constructive and collectivist as any other party. 
 The great landowners have been as well-disposed to- 
 wards the endowment of higher education, and as 
 willing to co-operate with the Church in protective 
 and mildly educational legislation for children and 
 the working class, as any political section. The 
 financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager for 
 mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are 
 prepared to spend public money upon research, upon 
 ports and harbours and public communications, upon 
 sanitation and hygienic organization. A certain rude 
 benevolence of public intention is equally characteristic 
 of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads to no 
 excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager 
 to see the common man prosperous, happy, and with 
 money to spend in a bar. All sections of the party are 
 aggressively patriotic and favourably inclined to the 
 idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised 
 population in uniform. Of course there are reaction- 
 ary landowners and old-fashioned country clergy, full 
 of localized self-importance, jealous even of the cottager 
 who can read, but they have neither the power nor the 
 ability to retard the constructive forces in the party as 
 a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to 
 any definitely confiscatory proposal, to the public owner- 
 ship and collective control of land, for example, or state 
 mining and manufactures, or the nationalization of the 
 so-called public-house or extended municipal enterprise, 
 or even to an increase of the taxation of property, then 
 the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine 
 bar. It does not stand for, it is, the existing arrange- 
 ment in these affairs. 
 
 Even more definitely a class party is the Labour 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 325 
 
 Party, whose ininiucliatc interest is to raise waf]jes, 
 shorten hours of labour, increase eniployinent, and 
 make ])etter terms for the workini;-man tenant and 
 working-man j)urcha.ser. Its leaders are no doubt 
 constructive minded, but the mass of the following is 
 naturally suspicious of education and discipline, hostile 
 to the higher education, and — except for an obvious 
 antagonism to employers and property owners — almost 
 (k'slitute of ideas. What else can it be? It stands 
 for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation 
 anil dilHculty arise from its individual lack of initiative 
 and organizing power. It favours the nationalization 
 of land and capital with no sense of the dilliculties 
 involved in the process; but, on the other hand, the 
 ei[ually reasonable socialization of individuals which 
 is implied by military service is steadily and (juite 
 naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is 
 only in recent years that Labour has emerged as a 
 separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai 
 of Liberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency 
 to step back again into that multitudinous assemblage. 
 For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal 
 characteristic. Liberalism never has been nor ever can 
 be anything but a diversified crowd. Liberalism has 
 to voice everything that is left out by these other 
 parlies. It is the party against the predominating 
 interests. It is at once the party of the failing and of 
 the untried ; it is the party of decadence and ho[)e. 
 I'rom its nature it must be a vague ;uk1 planless 
 association in comparison with its antagonist, neither 
 so constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so 
 comj)etent to hinder the inevitable constructions of 
 the civilized state. Essentially it is the party of 
 criticism, the ''Anti'' party. It is a system of hos- 
 
 '•- 
 
o 
 
 26 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 tilitics and objections that somehow achieves at times 
 an elusive common soul. It is a <]jathering together of 
 all the smaller interests which find themselves at a 
 disadvantage against the big established classes, the 
 leasehold tenant as against the landowner, the retail 
 tradesman as against the merchant and moneylender, 
 the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the 
 small employer as against the demoralizing hospitable 
 publican, the man without introductions and broad 
 connections against the man who has these things. It 
 is the party of the many small men against the fewer 
 prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for 
 loving the Collectivist state than the Conservatives ; 
 the small dealer is doomed to absorption in that just 
 as much as the large owner ; but it resorts to the state 
 against its antagonists as in the middle ages common 
 men pitted themselves against the barons by siding 
 with the king. The Liberal Party is the party against 
 " class privilege " because it represents no class advan- 
 tages, but it is also the party that is on the whole 
 most set against Collective control because it repre- 
 sents no established responsibility. It is constructive 
 only so far as its antagonism to the great owner is 
 more powerful than its jealousy of the state. It 
 organizes only because organization is forced upon it 
 by the organization of its adversaries. It lapses in 
 and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between 
 hostility to wealth and hostility to public expen- 
 diture. . . . 
 
 Every modern European state will have in some 
 form or other these three parties : the resistent, mili- 
 tant, authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic party of 
 establishment and success, the rich party ; the confused, 
 sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 327 
 
 Hti'UfTjL^liii^;, various, inuliscipliiu'd men, thu poor man's 
 party ; and a third party soniclinics detaching itself 
 from the second and sonielinKvs reunitin<x with it, the 
 party of the alto«;ether exproj)riated njasses, the pro- 
 letarians. Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal 
 to Uepubliean and Democrat, for example, and vou 
 have the conditions in the United States. The Crown 
 or a dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a 
 dispossessed church, nationalist secessions, the person- 
 alities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and 
 confuse the self-expression of these three necessai v 
 divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will 
 make them out none the less for that. . . . 
 
 .\nd then I came back as if I came back to a 
 refrain ; — the ideas p^o on — as thoun;h we arc all no 
 more than little cells and corpuscles in some great 
 brain beyond our understanding. . . . 
 
 So it was I sat and thought my problem out. . . . 
 I still remember my satisfaction at seeing things plainly 
 at last. It wixs like clouds dispersing to show the sky. 
 Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold a party 
 together alone, "interests and habits, not ideas,'' I 
 had that now, and so the great constructive scheme 
 of Socialisn), invading and inspiring all parties, was 
 necessarily claimed only by this collection of odds and 
 ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional 
 people. This was true not only of the Socialist idea, 
 but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity — of human 
 confidence in humanity — of all that mattered in human 
 life outside the life of individuals. . , . The only real 
 party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour 
 Tarty, and that in the entirely one-sided form of an 
 irresponsible and non-constructive attack on property. 
 Socialism in that nnitilalcd lorm, the teeth and claws 
 
r,28 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 O 
 
 without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I 
 wanted anything in the world. 
 
 Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why 
 hadn't I seen it before ? . . . I looked at my watch, 
 and it was half-past two. 
 
 I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed. 
 
 §9 
 
 My ideas about statecraft have passed through 
 three main phases to the final convictions that remain. 
 There was the first immediacy of my dream of ports 
 and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and admi- 
 nistered territories — the vision I had seen in the haze 
 from that little church above Locarno. Slowly that 
 had passed into a more elaborate legislative construc- 
 tiveness, which had led to my uneasy association with 
 the Baileys and the professedly constructive Young 
 Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realized the 
 need of organization, knowledge, expertness, a wide 
 movement of co-ordinated methods. On the individual 
 side I thought that a life of urgent industry, temper- 
 ance, and close attention was indicated by my percep- 
 tion of these ends. I married Margaret and set to 
 work. But something in my mind refused from the 
 outset to accept these determinations as final. There 
 was always a doubt lurking below, always a faint re- 
 sentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of vitally 
 important omissions. 
 
 I arrived at last at the clear realization that ray 
 political associates, and I in my association with them, 
 were oddly narrow, priggish, and unreal, that the 
 Socialists with whom we were attempting co-operation 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 329 
 
 were prcpostcroiislv iirelcvjiut to their own theories, 
 that my political life didirt in some way comprehend 
 more than itself, that rather perplexinf^ly I was missint^ 
 the thinir I was seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's 
 self-assertions, her fits of ener^retic planniii«^, her 
 quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuniiiiatin<; 
 attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited trivi- 
 ality of such Liberalism as the ('liildren's Charter, 
 served to point my way to my present conclusions. 
 I luul been trying to deal all along with human })ro- 
 gress as something innnediate in life, something to be 
 immediately attacked by political parties and groups 
 pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that 
 just as in my own being there was the rather shallow, 
 rather vulgar, self-seeking careerist, who wore an 
 admirable silk hat and bustled self-consciously through 
 the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely growing 
 unpublished personality behind him — my hinterland, I 
 have called it — so in human allairs generally the per- 
 manent reality is also a hinterland, which is never 
 really immediate, which draws continually upon human 
 experience and influences human action more and more, 
 but which is itself never the actual player upon the 
 stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a 
 call. Now it was just through the fact that our group 
 about the Baileys didn't understand this, that witli a 
 sort of frantic energy they were trying to devL'lu}) that 
 sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and 
 direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note 
 of silliness and shallowness that 1 had always felt and 
 felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. 
 They were neglecting human life altogether in social 
 organization. 
 
 In the development of intellectual modesty lies the 
 
330 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 growth of statesmanship. It has been the chronic 
 mistake of statecraft and all organizing spirits to 
 attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and 
 achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, 
 leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of 
 assuming that they can think out the whole — or at 
 any rate completely think out definite parts — of the 
 purpose and future of man, clearly and finally ; they 
 have set themselves to legislate and construct on that 
 assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy 
 and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, 
 persecution, training, pruning, secretive education, and 
 all the stupidities of self-sufficient energy. In the 
 passion of their good intentions they have not hesitated 
 to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush disturbing 
 initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so 
 it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the 
 making, that any extension of social organization is at 
 present achieved. 
 
 Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation 
 from immediacy is grasped, directly the dominating 
 importance of this critical, less personal, mental hinter- 
 land in the individual and of the collective mind in 
 the race is understood, the whole problem of the 
 statesman and his attitude towards politics gain a 
 new significance, and become accessible to a new series 
 of solutions. He wants no longer to "fix up,"' as 
 people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces to 
 the development of that needed intellectual life without 
 which all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. 
 He ceases to build on the sands, and sets himself to 
 gather foundations. 
 
 You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan 
 and build cities and harbours for mankind ; I ended in 
 
RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 331 
 
 the middle thirties by desiri!i«; only to serve and in- 
 crease a <i;eneral process of tliotii^ht, a process fearless, 
 critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give 
 cities, harbours, air, happiness, every thin/^ at a scale 
 and (|ualitv and in a lii^lit alto£;etlier beyond the 
 match-striking; imaginations of a contemporary mind. 
 I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigour 
 of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of 
 veracity that lurks more or less discouraged in every 
 man. With that I felt there must go an emotion. I 
 hit upon a phrase that became at last something of a 
 refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the spirit 
 that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress 
 — love and fine thinking. 
 
 (I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England 
 gets through a week without the repetition of that 
 phrase.) 
 
 My convictions crystallized more and more definitely 
 npon this. The more of love and fine thinking the 
 better for men, I said ; the less, the worse. And upon 
 this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I as a 
 politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding 
 an ade(|uate expression for all that was in me, for those 
 forces that had rebelled at the crude presentations of 
 Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressit)ns of my 
 youth, at the dull unrealities of City IMerchants', at 
 the conventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, 
 at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases 
 and tradition-worship of mv political associates. None 
 of these things were half alive, and I wanted life to be 
 intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an 
 e<lge of steel and desire like a flame. The real work 
 before mankind now, I realized once and for all, is the 
 enlargement of human expression, the release and 
 
y^2 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 intensification of human thought, the vivider utilization 
 of experience and the invigoration of research — and 
 whatever one does in human affairs has or lacks value 
 as it helps or hinders that. 
 
 With that I had got my problem clear, and the 
 solution, so far as I was concerned, lay in finding out 
 the point in the ostensible life of politics at which I 
 could most subserve these ends. I was still against the 
 muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down 
 now to their essential form. The jerry-built slums, 
 the roads that went nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious 
 notice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the litter and 
 the heaps of dump, were only the outward appear- 
 ances whose ultimate realities were jerry-built con- 
 clusions, hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and 
 imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts and 
 souls of men. How are we through politics to get at 
 that confusion ? 
 
 We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. 
 We want to create a sustained counter effort to the per- 
 petual tendency of all educational organizations towards 
 classicalism, secondary issues, and the evasion of life. 
 
 We want to stimulate the expression of life through 
 art and literature, and its exploration through research. 
 
 We want to make the best and finest thought 
 accessible to every one, and more particularly to create 
 and sustain an enormous free criticism, without which 
 art, literature, and research alike degenerate into 
 tradition or imposture. 
 
 Then all the other problems which are now so 
 insoluble, destitution, disease, the difficulty of main- 
 taining international peace, the scarcely faced possi- 
 bility of making life generally and continually 
 beautiful, become— ^a^^. . , 
 
IIIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 333 
 
 It was clear to me that the most vital activilics in 
 which I c(nil(l eiii^a^c would he thos(» which most 
 directly afleclcd the Church, |)u])lic hahits of thought, 
 education, or«i;anized research, literature, and the 
 channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself 
 how my position as Liberal member for Kiuf^hampstead 
 squared with and conduced to this essential work. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 Seeking Associates 
 
 § 1 
 
 I HAVE told of my gradual abandonment of the pre- 
 tensions and habits of party Liberalism. In a sense 
 I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding the 
 development of the social and individual mental hinter- 
 land 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 unorganized 
 medley of rich people and privileged people who 
 dominate the civilized world 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 man- 
 kind 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 fine initiatives. If 
 
 334 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 335 
 
 luimanitv cannot develop an education lar hevond 
 anvthiii^^ that is now provided, it' it cannot collectively 
 invent devices and solve problems on a n)iich richer, 
 broader scale than it does at the present time, it 
 cannot hope to achieve any very nnich finer order 
 or any more »;eneral happiness than it now enjoys. 
 AVe nuist believe, therefore, that it can develop 
 such a trainin«^ and education, or we must abandon 
 secular constructive hope. And here my peculiar 
 difliculty 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 pro- 
 duce 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 piLSsions and 
 motives, modifieil aiid redirected by literature and 
 art. . . . 
 
 But now the reader will understand how it came 
 about that, disappointed by the essential littleness of 
 
c;;6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 JO 
 
 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- ? AVeren'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 con- 
 tinually 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 sustain- 
 ing 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 337 
 
 strong popular appeal. ^Nlixcil in with llic noisiness 
 and liuinbu«jj of the movement there appeared a real 
 regard for social cfHeiency, a real spirit of animation 
 and enterprise. There suddenly ap})eared in my world 
 — I saw them first, I think, in TJOS — a new soit of 
 little bov, a most agreeable development of tlie slouch- 
 ing, running, 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 
 bivond his strength — the Boy Scout. I liked tlie Boy 
 Scout, and I find it dilllcult to expiess 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 
 Hailey and Dayton and mvself. 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. AVe were men of all parties and 
 very various experiences, and our object was to discuss 
 the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. 
 \Ve dined monthly at the Mermaid in AVest minster, 
 and for a couple of years we kept up an average ^ 
 attendance of ten out of fourteen. The diimcr-time 
 was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd 
 
338 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 how warm and good the social atmosphere of that 
 little tratherins: 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 pro- 
 loniied our closin<ir discussions and made our continuance 
 impossible. 
 
 I learned very much and very many things at those 
 dinners, but more particularly did I become familiarized 
 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 advo- 
 cates 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 organization, and with 
 a curious little martinet twist in their minds that 
 boded ill for that side of public liberty. So much 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIA'lES 339 
 
 against them. But they wcro disposed to spend 
 money miuli more <;enerou.sly on education and 
 research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals 
 seemed likely to do ; and they were altofi^ether more 
 accessible than the Young liberals to bold, construc- 
 tive ideas affecting the universities and up|)er classes. 
 The Liberals are abjectly afraid of the universities. 
 I fountl myself constantly falling into line with these 
 men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to 
 Dayton's sentimentalizing evasions of definite schemes 
 and Minns' trust in such things as the "Spirit of our 
 People'' and the "General Trend of Progress." It 
 wjusn'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. 
 ]}y 1908 I had already arrived at a p(Mnt where I 
 could be defuiitely 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 nutshells 
 and cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memo- 
 randa. 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 cocka- 
 too with a taste for confidences, telling us in a 
 hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. 
 Thorns lounges, rolling his rountl face and round eyes 
 
340 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 organized 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 341 
 
 inevitable in such a matter. I was not clealin<^ with any 
 simple (juestion of principle, but witli elusive and Huctu- 
 ating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the 
 nature of mv own powers. All throu<;h that period I 
 was asking; over and over a^ain : how far are these Con- 
 federates mere dreamers ? How far — and this was more 
 vital — are they rendering lij)-service to social organi- 
 zation? 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 connn unity .'' 
 
 That is a research which yields no statistics, an 
 rnv]uiry like asking what is the ruling colour of a 
 chameleon. The shadowy answer varied with mv 
 health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the 
 people I was watching. How fine can })eople 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 
 atUiinable 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. 
 
342 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I count the evening of my paper the beginning of the 
 movement that created the Bliie 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 largely through my fellow-mem- 
 bers; 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 343 
 
 vanished willi a thousand other papers, but some odd 
 chance has preserved and brought witli me to Italy the 
 menu for the eveninrr; its back black with the scrawled 
 notes I made of the discussion for my replv. I found 
 it the other day amoni^ some letters from Marc^aret 
 and a copy of the IDOi) Report of the Poor Law 
 Commission, also rich with pencilled mart^inalia. 
 
 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 sit- 
 ting 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 — {|uite 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. / 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 wa.s 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 recognize 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 — 
 
344 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!'' I sailed on over him to 
 my next propositions. The prime essential in a pro- 
 iiressive civilization 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 patronize 
 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 dont,''^ from Dayton — we wanted all the 
 brilliant stufi' 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 becomino; idiotic about character." 
 
 Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round 
 upon me an eye of agonized aversion. 
 
 I expatiated on the small proportion of the avail- 
 able 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 indi- 
 viduals. ("Less," said Thorns.) ^y, to be more 
 precise, 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, 
 
SEEKING 7VSSOCIATES 315 
 
 the timely stiimiliis, the aj)t su^^cstion at the fortiinatL' 
 moment, the needed trainin;^, tlie k'isure. The rest 
 are h)st in the crowd, fail throii^jjh the defects of their 
 (jiialities, become commonplace workmen and second- 
 rate professional men, marry commonplace wives, are as 
 nuich waste as the driftage of superlluous pollen in a 
 pine forest is waste/"' 
 
 "Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his hread- 
 cruniljs, with his chin in his necktie. *' Wa.slr I ''' 
 
 "And tile people who do get what we call oppor- 
 tunity 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, 
 hut helpers, resonators. Round and about what I 
 might call the 7ral men, you want the sympathetic 
 co-operators, 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 undilierentiated 
 a public, ^lost 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 distress us ; it's the cardinal problem 
 of the state — to discover, develo}), and ust} the ex- 
 ceptional gifts of men. And I see that best done — 
 I drift more and more away from the connnon stu(f 
 of legislative and administrative activity — by a cpiite 
 revolutionary development of the educational machinery, 
 but by a still more unprecedented attem[)t 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. Vou 
 know none of these things have ever been kept going 
 
346 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexpHc- 
 ably." 
 
 " Hear, hear ! " from Dayton, cough, nodding of 
 the head, and an expression of mystical profundity. 
 
 " They've lit up a civilization and vanished, to give 
 place to darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't 
 mean to go back to darkness again — and so iTs got to 
 keep its hght burning." I went on to attack the 
 present organization of our schools and universities, 
 which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well- 
 behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each genera- 
 tion 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 con- 
 fessing my doubt from which party or combination of 
 groups these developments of science and literature and 
 educational organization could most reasonably be ex- 
 pected. 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 he 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." 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 347 
 
 "We're working altogether too much at the social 
 basement in education and training," said Gane. 
 "llemington 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 u.sing 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 Cruj)p, 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 Boval 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, reorganize 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." 
 
343 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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 over- 
 whelmingly ? " 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 for 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 organize people, particular groups 
 and classes of individuals," he insisted. " It isn't that. 
 That's the standing error of politicians. You want to 
 organize a culture. Civilization isn't a matter of con- 
 crete 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 reorganize 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. 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 349 
 
 He became audible, sketchinrr a possible line 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 mi^ht produce 
 enormous results."" 
 
 " Leave me out of it,'"* said ])ayton, "t/'vou please.'"' 
 
 " We should,""' said Thorns under his breath. 
 
 I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and 
 expanded it. 
 
 " I believe we could do — extensive tilings,""* I 
 insisted. 
 
 " IJevivals and revisions of Torvism 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 
 Davton fled our presence, after some clumsy sentence 
 that I decided upon reflection was intended to remind 
 me of my duty to my party. 
 
 I'hcn I remember Thorns firing doubts at me 
 obliijuelv across the table. "You can't run a country 
 through its spoilt children," he said. " ^^'hat 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 Ikidget 
 row leads to a storm, and these big people get their 
 j)ower clipped, what's going to happen .'' Have you 
 thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and 
 barrel, who comes in .'' " 
 
350 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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 civilization 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 iigure," 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 rea.l progress in a country, except a rise in the level 
 of its free intellectual activity. 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, con- 
 fused ugliness becomes rigid ugliness, — that's all. No 
 doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, 
 and from irresponsible controls to organized controls — 
 and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming. 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 351 
 
 ns ]3COple say, cleinoi'nitizcd ; but all the more need 
 ill that, for an ark in which the Hviii<^ element may be 
 saved/^ 
 
 '* Hear, hear ! " said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing. 
 
 It must have been in my house afterwards tliat 
 Shoesmith became noticeable. He seemed trying to 
 sav somelhini: vai'ue and diflicult that he didn't f^et 
 
 • O t' CD 
 
 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. . . . 
 
 \\'e parted that night on my doorstep in a tre- 
 mendous jrlow — but in that sort of glow one don'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 development it played a large part, not 
 so much by starting new trains of thought as bv con- 
 firming 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 cjuestions 
 that were never very distant from our discussions, that 
 came apt to every toj)ic, was the true significance of 
 democracv, Tariff lleform as a method of international 
 
352 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 wqth 
 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 Mas full of 
 that old INliddle 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 353 
 
 Willcrslcy and by Mereditirs '* One of Our ('onqiicrors.'"* 
 'J'lmt (jiiile justifiable dread of a punishment for all 
 the slackness, mental dishonesty, j)resuinption, mer- 
 tcnarv respectability and sentanientalized commercialism 
 of the \'ictorian period, at the hands of the better 
 orp^anized, more vigorous, and now far more hi/^ldy 
 civilized peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to 
 have both a good and bad series of consecjuences. It 
 seemed the only thinf^ capable of bracin^r llnglish 
 minds to education, sustained constructive eflbrt and 
 research ; but on the other hand it produced tiie 
 quality of panic, hasty preparation, impatience of 
 thoup^ht, a wasteful and sometimes quite futile im- 
 mediacy. In 1909, for example, there was a vast 
 clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts — 
 
 " We want eif^ht 
 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 conse- 
 quent faihn-e to distinguish men of the quality needed 
 to carry on the modern type of war. Almost uni- 
 versally 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 un- 
 consciously, 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 sj)itc of tremendous 
 defects she is still far more anxious for quality in 
 achievement than we are. I remember saying that in 
 
 »v A 
 
354 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 niv })aper. 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 verte- 
 brated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlanto- 
 saurus 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." .1 
 
 " Turn it round and make it go backwards," inter- 
 jected 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 blow 
 soap-bubbles or such a Mezozoic saurian as I had 
 conjured up, while the clumsy monster''s fate, all teeth 
 and brains, crept nearer and nearer. . . . 
 
 Tve 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 aggres- 
 sion 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 355 
 
 htosn't upset the historical fall of man, that cricket is 
 moral trainini^, and that Socialism is an outraf:;e upon 
 the tcachini;s of Christ. A sort of dii^nilicd dexterity 
 of eva.sion is the national reward. Germany, with a 
 larger population, a vif^orous and irreconcilable pro- 
 letariat, a bolder intellectual traininii^, a harsher spirit, 
 can scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realization of 
 intolerable strain. So we may never h^^^ht at all. The 
 war of preparations that has been goiuf;^ on for thiity 
 years may end like a sliam-fi<;ht at last in an umpire's 
 decision. ^Ve shall proudly but very firmly take the 
 second place. For my own part, since I love Eni^land 
 as much as I detest her present lethar<]jy of soul, I pray / 
 for a chastening war — I wouldn't mind her flai^ in the 
 dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was 
 able to shake oil' 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 lonij^er foresee, as once I was 
 inclined to see, disaster. The English rule in India 
 is surely one of the more extraordinary accidents that 
 has ever happened in history. We are there like a 
 man who has fallen oW a ladder on to the neck of an 
 elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to fxct 
 down. Until something happens he remains. Our 
 functions in India are absurd. We English do not 
 own that lountry, do not even rule it. \Ve make 
 nothing happen ; at the most we prevent things 
 hapj)ening. We suppress our own literature there. 
 Most English people cannot even go to this land they 
 possess; the authorities woulti prevent it. If Messrs. 
 Perowne or Cook organized a cheap tour of Manchester 
 operatives, it would be stopjjcd. No one dare bring 
 
356 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 niv time I have talked to English 
 statesmen, Indian olHcials 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 
 or 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. . . . 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 357 
 
 111 sonic manner we shall have to conic out of India. 
 Wc have had our chance, and we have demonstrated 
 nothing hut the appalHn*^ duhicss of our national 
 iniaj^inatioii. \Vc are not ^ood enough to do aiivthiii<^ 
 with India. C'od^cr and I'lack, and (iatcs and Dayton, 
 Cladin^bowl in the cUib, and the Home CJunrhinan in 
 the home, cant about "character,"^ worship of strenuous 
 force and contempt of truth ; for the sake of such men 
 and thin«^s as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in 
 appearance, that empty domination. Had we ^rcat 
 schools and a powerful tcachinf^, could we boast great 
 men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our 
 lives, then indeed it miiiht be different. But a race 
 that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to justify it. 
 
 It docs not follow that we shall be driven catastro- 
 phically 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 enn)ire. ^Ve 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 (juick 
 to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat 
 our South African diplomacy, and arrange for some 
 settlement that will abandon the rcalitv, such as it is, 
 and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror 
 dc facto will become the new *Moval Ihiton," and the 
 democracy at home will be invilcd to celebrate our 
 recession — triumphantlv. I am no believer in the 
 imminent dissolution of our Kinpiic; I am less and 
 less inclined to see in either India or German v the 
 
y^S THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 probability of an abrupt truncation of those slow 
 intellectual 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 fafades of sunlit 
 building 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 pictTu^es 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 pre- 
 dominance upon the political and social side. 
 
SEEKING ASSOCL\TES 359 
 
 T rcniLMnbcr sittinn^ in one of llic ilcc^sls at tlie end 
 of the hi^ saloon with Mrs. Ucdniondson, one of those 
 sharp-minded, ])eautiful rich women one meets so often 
 in London, who seem to have done nothin<^ and to be 
 capable of everything, and we watched the crowd — 
 uniforms and splendours were streamin«; in from a 
 State ball — and exchann-cd information. I told lier 
 about the ])oliticians 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 bi<,^ger 
 than the average of people in London, and a hand- 
 some lot, even when they were not subtly individualized. 
 "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, anvhow,'*' I witnessed, 
 "and that's an achievement. I don't think I could 
 ever be content under a ])ad-tempered, sentimentaliz- 
 ing, 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 modestv. 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 aomf' 
 ih'inir '' 
 
 " Which they haven't got." 
 
36o THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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. Fve been puzzling my wits to 
 know. TheyVe 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." 
 
 " W^e 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 361 
 
 attitude of the country towards science and litera- 
 ture " 
 
 *' ^Ve all do/' said Mrs. Uedmoiidson. " Wc 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. ...'"" Yon 
 want,"'"' she said, "to say to the aristocracy, ^ U<i 
 aristocrats. Noblesse oblige.'' Do you remember what 
 liappened to the monarch who was told to ' lie 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 some- 
 thing free and fearless about their bearing that I liked 
 extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, 
 fine-thinking. Mrs. lledmondson talked as fidly and 
 widt'lv and boldly as a man, and with those tliUihes of 
 intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of percep- 
 tion 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-chuss order. . . . 
 
 After all, if one's game resolved ilsLlt' into the 
 development of a tvpe and culture of men, why 
 shouldn't one begin at this end r 
 
362 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 §■7 
 
 It is very easy indeed to generalize 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 wonder- 
 ful 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 common- 
 place dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, 
 I am afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but re- 
 spectful 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 youll get a lot of men who'll 
 work hard to keep things together, and that's what 
 we re all after, isn't ut .^ " 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 363 
 
 ''Ifs not an ideal arraiiircincnt.'"' 
 
 *'Tc'll iiiL' anything better,"'^ said Lady Forthimd red. 
 
 On the whole, and because she refused enij)}mtically 
 to believe in echication, Lady Foithundied scored. 
 
 AVe had been discussing Cossiiif^toirs recent peerage, 
 for Cossington, my old schoolfellow at City Merchants, 
 and mv victor in the affair of tlie magazine, had 
 clambered to an amazing wealtli up a piled heap of 
 energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, 
 and a group of daily newspapers. I had expected to 
 lind 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. AVe assimilate 
 
 1 n 
 
 um. 
 
 "Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble.^" 
 
 " Then they don't give trouble." 
 
 " They learn to shoot ? " 
 
 "And all that,"' said Lady Forthundied. "Yes. 
 And things go on. Sometimes better than others, but 
 they go on — somehow. It depends very nmch 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 nuist take the bad and the good of 'um," said 
 Lady Forthundied, courageously. . . . 
 
 Now, was she a sample.'' It happened she talked. 
 What was there in the brains of the multitude of her 
 iirst, second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, who didn't 
 talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finelv, 
 against a background of deft, attentive maids and 
 
364 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 valets, on every spacious social scene ? How did things 
 look to them ? 
 
 §8 
 
 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 strength- 
 ened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me 
 to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in 
 Ikitish 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, 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 365 
 
 because he was so big and atmosplieric a personality. 
 No other contcii){)()r.u y has had that eflcct upon nie. 
 I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with 
 liiin — he was in the bi<; house party at Champneys — 
 talked to him, sounded him, watchin<^ him as I sat 
 beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary 
 freedom and a rare sense of bein<^ understood. Other 
 men have to be treated in a special manner; approached 
 tiu'ough their own mental dialect, flattered by a minute 
 reuard for what they have said and done. Kvesliam 
 was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I 
 have ever met. The common politicians beside him 
 seemed like rows of stuffv little rooms lookin^]^ 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 
 ecjuipped 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 county 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 
 ni.itters of opinion become matters of science — and 
 cease to be party cjuestions."* 
 
 lie instanced education. 
 
 "Apart," said I, ''from the religious question.*^ 
 
 "Apart from the religious (juestion." 
 
 He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and 
 
366 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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, per- 
 suasive, 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 dia- 
 bolical skill to preserve Avhat 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 advan- 
 tage Evesham displayed at times a quite wicked un- 
 scrupulousness 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 367 
 
 being charmed and pleased. One might think at 
 times tliere was no more of him than a clever man 
 happily circumstanceii, and iiiuling an interest and 
 occupation in politics. ^Vnil then came a glimpse of 
 thought, of imagination, like the sight of a soaring 
 eagle through a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond ques- 
 tion he was great! No other contemporary politician 
 had his (pialitv. In no man have I perceived so sym- 
 pathetically 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 all'ections and indolences, he paralleled the 
 conHict 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. . . . 
 
 §9 
 
 Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the 
 organized state becoming so finely true to practicability 
 and so clearly stated as to have the compelling convic- 
 tion of physical science, he spoke quite after my heart. 
 Had he really embodied the attempt to realize 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 wtus possible 
 to question whether they had any imaginative conccj)- 
 tion of constructive statecraft at all ; whether they 
 didn't opaquely accept the world for what it was, and 
 
368 THE NEW JMACHIAVELLI 
 
 set themselves single-mindcdly to make a place for 
 themselves and cut a fii^ciire 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 pei-plexing and exacting problem of 
 the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply 
 bold. They wanted to arm and they wanted to edu- 
 cate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them 
 far more eager to arm than to educate, and their 
 experience of heterogeneous controls made them over- 
 rate the need for obedience in a homogeneous country. 
 They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained men, un- 
 certain 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). ]\Iy 
 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, vul- 
 gar 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, Napo- 
 leonic 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 369 
 
 the folly in him — but I feel I never plumbed his wis- 
 dom. I remember him one day after a lunch at the 
 Barhams"* sayin<^ suddenly, out of a profound medita- 
 tion over the end of a ci<;ar, one of those sentences that 
 seem to lii^ht the whole interior beiuf; of a man. 
 "Some dav," he said softly, rather to himself than to 
 me, and a pwpos of nothing — "some day I will raise 
 the country." 
 
 " \Viiv not ?" I said, after a pause, and leant across 
 liim 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 lawvers, 
 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 organization. 
 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-[)oliticians ; 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. Thev varied in insensible 
 gradations between the noble sportsmen on the one 
 hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our Pen- 
 tagrain club on the other. Vou perceive how a man 
 might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an 
 average of j)ublic serviceability in this miscellany ! 
 And mixed up with these, mixeil up sometimes in the 
 
 i2 w 
 
370 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predomi- 
 nant idea was that the village schools should confine 
 themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and 
 curtseying, 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 im- 
 portant 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 371 
 
 and his hc.ul on one side. One whisker was turned 
 back a^^ainst the comfortable pachhii;:;. I lis |)hnii[) 
 strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his 
 frown was a bttle 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 connnent that it dichi't even occur 
 to me then to wake him up and ask him what lie was 
 up to with mankind. 
 
 § 10 
 
 One countervailing influence to mv drift to Toryism 
 in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the 
 Liberals. I realized that slowly and with a mild 
 astom'shment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning 
 mv own change of opinion. AVc came at last incident- 
 ally, 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 explora- 
 tion of I^ady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, 
 out of some connnents of mine upon our fellow-guests, 
 but it is one of those memories of which the scene and 
 (|uaHty 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 hell, and we were in Margaret's big silver- 
 adorned, chintz-hright room, looking out on the trim 
 Italian garden. . . . Yes, the beginning of it has 
 escaped me altogether, l)ut I remember it as an odd, 
 exceptional little wrangle. 
 
372 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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,'' IVIargaret parried. 
 " It's the scale and spirit of things." 
 
 I questioned that. " They're cynical," said Mar- 
 garet, 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 some- 
 thing not of our civilization. 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." 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 373 
 
 "That's just it," said Margaret. 
 
 "Charity," I sii;;i;c\stc(l. 
 
 " I don't like that sort of toleration." 
 
 I was oddly annoyed. " Like eating with puhlicans 
 and sinners,'"* I said. " No ! . . /' 
 
 ]5ut scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards 
 their condonation displayed, weren't more than the 
 sharp edge of the trouble. " Ifs their whole })o.sition, 
 their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy against 
 the mass of people," said Margaret. " When I sit at 
 dinner in that s[)lendid room, with its glitter and white 
 reflections and candlelight, and its Howers 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 iNIargaret 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 
 1 ory .'' 
 
 " They must know," said Margaret. 
 
 I found myself questioning that. I see now that 
 to Margaret it must have seemed the perversest carp- 
 ing against manifest things, but at the time I was 
 concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view 
 and my own ; I wanted to get her conception in the 
 shar[)est, hardest lines that were possible. It was 
 perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical 
 element in ail'airs. The thing showed in its hopeless 
 
374 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 benevo- 
 lence 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 regu- 
 larity " 
 
 " 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 ! " 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 375 
 
 " xVh ! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, 
 its half-cunning, half-.^illy way of getting at everything 
 in a roundabout fashion. If neglecting children is an 
 offence, and it is an offence, then deal ^vith it as such, 
 but don't go badgering and restricting peo[)le 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 selHng honest 
 drink that jx-'rhaps 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. IMake the 
 public-house Jit 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 Howers. . . . 
 
 "But prevention," I heard ^largaret 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 think- 
 ing. Make people fine, make fine j)eople. Don't be 
 afraid. These Tory leaders are better peoj)le indi- 
 vidually than the average ; why cast them for the 
 villains of the piece.'' The real villain in the })iece — 
 in the whole human tiraina — is the muddle-headedness. 
 
3/6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 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 
 })leased. 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 sec things like this." 
 
 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 essen- 
 tially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility 
 while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and 
 stupid observation you tread your part in the platitu- 
 dinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs. . . . 
 
 The most impossible of all autobiographies is an 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 377 
 
 intellectual autobiography. I have thrown together in 
 the crudest way the elements of the j)rol)l('m I struf^gled 
 ^vith, hut I can give no record of the sul)tle details; I 
 can tell nothin<r of the long vacillations between Protean 
 values, the talks and re- talks, the meditations, tiie 
 bleak lucidities of sleepless nights. . . . 
 
 And vet these things I have strurrMcd with nnist 
 be thought out, and, to begin with, they must be 
 thought out in this muddled, experimenting way. To 
 go into a studv to think about statecraft is to tuni 
 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 (piestionings 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 tiling 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 pre- 
 occupations of mine was a curious irritability towards 
 IMargaret that I i'ound dillicult to conceal. It was one 
 of the incidental cruelties of our position that this 
 should happen. I w.is in such doubt myself, that I 
 liad 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 nuich in earnest and 
 too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk 
 with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague 
 formula,' and sentimental aspirations exasperated me ; 
 her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few 
 
S7S THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 pre- 
 meditation fitted into the weaknesses of my new 
 intimations, as though they had nothing but weak- 
 nesses. 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 w^ant to be re- 
 minded of that, just when I was in full effort to realize 
 the finer elements in their composition. Margaret 
 classed them and disposed of them. It was our in- 
 curable 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 becom- 
 ing 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. 
 
CIIAPTER THE TIIIUD 
 
 Secession 
 
 §1 
 
 At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, 
 decision distilled i[uite suddenly. I succumbed to 
 Evesham and that dream of the right thing triumphant 
 through expression. I determined I uould go over to 
 the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on 
 the side of such forces on that side as made for edu- 
 cational reorganization, scientific research, literature, 
 criticism, and intellectual development. That was in 
 1901). I judged the Tories were driving straight at a 
 conflict with the country, and I thought them bound 
 to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their 
 strength in the counties. There would follow, I calcu- 
 lated, a period of profound reconstruction in method 
 and policy alike. 1 was entirely at one with Crupp in 
 perceiving in this an immense opportunity for the 
 things we desired. An aristocracy cjuickened by con- 
 flict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of 
 justification by reconstruction, might prove altogether 
 more apt for thought and high professions than Mrs. 
 Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now in- 
 evitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, 
 
 379 
 
3So THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 there would be great heart searchings and educational 
 endeavour. On that we reckoned. . . . 
 
 At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and 
 Crupp and Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our 
 definite agreement together. . . . 
 
 I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret 
 one evening. 
 
 She was just back from the display of some new 
 musicians at the Hartsteins. I remember she wore a 
 dress of golden satin, very rich-looking and splendid. 
 About her slender neck there was a rope of gold-set 
 amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and 
 returned these golden notes. I, too, was in evening 
 dress, but where I had been escapes me, — some for- 
 gotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I 
 remember I didn't speak for some moments. I went 
 across to the window and pulled the blind aside, and 
 looked out upon the railed garden of the square, with 
 its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and 
 irregularly in the light of the big electric standard in 
 the corner. 
 
 " Margaret," I said, " I think I shall break with the 
 party." 
 
 She made no answer. I turned presently, a move- 
 ment of enquiry. 
 
 " I was afraid you meant to do that," she said. 
 
 " I'm out of touch," I explained. " Altogether." 
 
 "Oh! I know." 
 
 " It places me in a difficult position,'* I said. 
 
 Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking stead- 
 fastly at herself in the glass, and with her fingers playing 
 with a litter of stoppered bottles of tinted glass. " I 
 was afraid it was coming; to this," she said. 
 
 "In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe 
 
SECESSION 381 
 
 niv scat to you. I couldn't have ^ouc into pnilia- 
 ment. . . /"' 
 
 " I don't want considerations like that to aflcct us," 
 she interrupted. 
 
 There was a pause. She sat down in a chair bv her 
 drcssinjj^-table, lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it 
 down an;ain. 
 
 '' I wish/"' she said, with somethinc^ like a sob in licr 
 voice, "it were possible that you shouldn't do this." 
 She stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, 
 ])ecause I could feel the efibrt she was making to 
 control herself. 
 
 " I thought," she began again, " when you came 
 into parliament " 
 
 There came another silence. " It's all gone so 
 diflerently," she said. *' Everything has gone so 
 dillerently." 
 
 I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant 
 after the Kinghampstead election, and for the first lime 
 I realized just how perplexing and disappointing wy 
 subsecjuent career must have been to her. 
 
 " Tm not doing this without consideration,^ I said. 
 
 " I know,'"' she said, in a voice of despair, " I've seen 
 it coming. But — I still don't understand it. I don't 
 understand how you can go over." 
 
 " My ideas have changed and developed," I said. 
 
 I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood 
 by the mantel. 
 
 "To think that you," she said; "you who might 
 
 have been leader " She could not finish it. "All 
 
 the forces of reaction," she threw out. 
 
 "I don't think they are the loices of reaction," I 
 said. "I think I can find work to do — better work on 
 that side." 
 
382 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Against us ! " she said. " As if progress wasn't 
 hard enough ! As if it didn't call upon every able 
 man ! " 
 
 " I don't think Liberalism has a monoply of pro- 
 gress.**' 
 
 She did not answer that. She sat quite still, looking 
 in front of her. " Why have you gone over ? " she 
 asked abruptly as though I had said nothing. 
 
 There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I 
 began a stiff dissertation from the hearthrug. " I am 
 going over, because I think I may join in an intellectual 
 renascence on the Conservative side. I think that in the 
 coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether 
 confused and demoralizing victory for democracy, that 
 will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative 
 party into an energetic revival. They will set out to 
 win back, and win back. Even if my estimate of con- 
 temporary forces is wrong and they win, they will still 
 be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad 
 will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The 
 effort at renascence is bound to come by either alter- 
 native. I believe I can do more in relation to that 
 effort than in any other connection in the world of 
 politics at the present time. That's my case, Margaret." 
 
 She certainly did not grasp what I said. " And so 
 you will throw aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs 
 and pledges " Again her sentence remained incom- 
 plete. " I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they 
 will welcome you." 
 
 " That hardly matters." 
 
 I made an effort to resume my speech. 
 
 " I came into parliament, Margaret," I said, " a 
 little prematurely. Still — I suppose it was only by 
 coming into parliament that I could see things as I do 
 
SECESSION 383 
 
 now in terms of personality and imai^inativc rnn^^c. . . ."" 
 I stopped. Her stiff, unhappy, unlistening silence broke 
 up my disquisition. 
 
 "After all," I remarked, "most of this has been 
 implicit in my writings/" 
 
 She made no sii^n of achnission. 
 
 " \\'hat are you goint; to do ?" she asked. 
 
 " Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of 
 my breach clear. Then either I must resin;n or — pro- 
 bably this new Budget will lead to a General Election. 
 It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a 
 quarrel."" 
 
 '' Von might, I think, have stayed to fight for tlie 
 Budget.'' 
 
 "Tm not,'' I said, "so keen against the Lords." 
 
 On that we halted. 
 
 " But what are you going to do ?" she asked. 
 
 " I shall make my (juarrel over some points in the 
 Budget. I can't quite tell you yet where my chance 
 will come. Then I shall either resign my seat — or if 
 things drift to a dissolution I shan't stand again." 
 
 " It's pohtical suicide." 
 
 '* Not altogether." 
 
 "I can't imagine you out of parliament again. It's 
 just like — like undoing all we have done. What will 
 you do ? " 
 
 " Write. iVIake a new, more definite place for 
 myself. Vou know of course, there's already a sort of 
 group about Crupp and Gane." 
 
 Margaret seemed lost for a time in painful thought. 
 
 "For me," she said at hist, "our political work iuis 
 been a religion — it has been more than a religion." 
 
 I heard in silence. I had no form of protest avail- 
 able against the implications of that. 
 
384 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 " And then I find you turning against all we aimed 
 to do — talking of going over, almost lightly — to those 
 others."" . . . 
 
 She was white-lipped as she spoke. In the most 
 curious way she had captured the moral values of the 
 situation. I found myself protesting ineffectually 
 against her fixed conviction. " It's because I think my 
 duty lies in this change that I make it," I said. 
 
 " I don't see how you can say that," she replied 
 quietly. 
 
 Tiiere was another pause between us. 
 
 " Oh ! " she said, and clenched her hand upon the 
 table. " That it should have come to this ! " 
 
 She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily 
 absurd. She was hurt and thwarted beyond measure. 
 She had no place in her ideas, I thought, for me. I 
 could see how it appeared to her, but I could not make 
 her see anything of the intricate process that had 
 brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our 
 intellectual temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. 
 What was there for me to say ? A flash of intuition 
 told me that behind the white dignity was a passionate 
 disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed 
 before everything else the relief of weeping. 
 
 " I've told you," I said awkwardly, " as soon as I 
 could." 
 
 There was another long silence. " So that is how 
 we stand," I said, with an air of having things defined. 
 I walked slowly to the door. 
 
 She had risen, and stood now staring in front of her. 
 
 " Good night," I said, making no movement towards 
 our habitual kiss. 
 
 " Good night," she answered in a tragic note. . . . 
 
 I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment 
 
SECESSION 385 
 
 or so on the Iji'tc laiulin*;}^, hcsitatinii; between my bed- 
 room and my study. As I did so I heard the soft 
 rustle of her movement and tlic ehek of the key in her 
 bedroom door. Then everything was still. . . . 
 
 She hid her tears from me. Something gripped my 
 heart at the thought. 
 
 "Damnation!'' I said, wincing. *' Why the devil 
 can't people at least tJihik in the same manner .'''' 
 
 § 2 
 
 And that insnfllcicnt colloquy was the ])egimn'ng of 
 a prolonged estrangement between us. It was cha- 
 racteristic of our relations that we never reopened the 
 discussion. The thing had been in the air for some 
 time ; we had recognized it now ; the widening breach 
 between ns was confessed. I\Iy own feelings were cuii- 
 ously divided. It is remarkable that my very real 
 affection for Margaret only became evident to me with 
 this qnarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle 
 chanjxes. I am ciuite unaware liow or when my early 
 romantic love for her purity and beauty and high-prin- 
 cipled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do 
 know that (piite early in my jiarliamcntary days there 
 had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at the tie 
 that seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards 
 of private living and puljlic act. I felt I was caught, 
 and none the less so because it had been my own act to 
 rivet on my shackles. So long as I still held myself 
 bound to her that resentment grew. Now, since I 
 had ])r()ken my bonds and taken my line it withered 
 again, and I could think of Margaret with a returning 
 kindliness. 
 
 2 c 
 
386 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 But I still felt embarrassments with her. I felt 
 myself dependent upon her for house room and food 
 and social support, as it were under false pretences. I 
 would have liked to have separated our financial affairs 
 altoixether. But I knew that to raise the issue would 
 have seemed a last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost 
 furtively to keep my personal expenditure within the 
 scope of the private income I made by writing, and we 
 went out together in her motor brougham, dined and 
 made appearances, met politely at breakfast — parted at 
 night with a kiss upon her cheek. The locking of her 
 door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, 
 which I understand now, became for a time in my mind, 
 through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. 
 I never crossed the landing to her room again. 
 
 In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations 
 with Margaret, I perceive now I behaved badly and 
 foolishly. My manifest blunder is that I, who was 
 several years older than she, much subtler and in many 
 ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and 
 control her. After our marriage I treated her always 
 as an equal, and let her go her way ; held her respon- 
 sible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate 
 things she said and did to me. She wasn't clever 
 enough to justify that. It wasn't fair to expect her to 
 sympathize, anticipate, and understand. I ought to 
 have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came 
 to crossing the difficult places. If I had loved her 
 more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if there had not 
 been the consciousness of my financial dependence on 
 her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have 
 moved with me from the outset, and left the Liberals 
 with me. But she did not get any inkling of the ends 
 I sought in my change of sides. It must have seemed 
 
SECESSION 387 
 
 to her inoxplicablc perversity. She hml, I knew — for 
 surely I knew it then ! — an innncnsc capacity for loyalty 
 and devotion. There she was witli these treasures un- 
 touched, neglected and perplexed. A woman who loves 
 wants to give. It is the duty and business of the man 
 she has married for love to help her to help and give. 
 But I was stupid. I\Iy eyes had never been opened. 
 I was stiff with her and diilicult to her, because even 
 on my wedding morning there had been, deep down in 
 my soul, voiceless though present, something weakly 
 protesting, a faint perception of wrong-doing, the 
 infinitesimally small, slow -multiplying germs of shame. 
 
 § 3 
 
 I made my breach with the party on the Budget. 
 
 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 organization on the part of the 
 Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve 
 to cross the floor of the house. It made it more neces- 
 sary, 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 com- 
 mittee. 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 nationalization, but I did object most strenuously 
 to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and attempt- 
 ing to i)roduce beneficial social results Uirough the 
 
388 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 direc- 
 tion 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 landowning 
 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 land- 
 lordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive 
 it to a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently 
 stroniT 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 Kinghampstead 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 meet- 
 ings at diiferent ends of the constituency, and then I 
 had a correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the 
 photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation. 
 
SECESSION 3S9 
 
 ]\fv impression is that it consisted of about eighteen 
 or twenty puople. They had had to come upstairs to 
 me, and they were manifestly full of in(li«j;nation and 
 a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, 
 J. P., dressed wholly in hlack — I think to mark his 
 sense of the occasion — and curiously suirfrcstive in his 
 respect for my character and liis concern for the 
 honourableness of the Kiu^lunnpstciid (httirtl'imi editor, 
 of Mark Antony at the funeral of Casar. There was 
 Mrs. Bulf^er, also in mourning ; she had never aban- 
 doned 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 
 voung Hebrew of the graver tyj)e, and a couple of 
 dissenting ministers in hi^^h 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 com- 
 pressed. 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 u{)on 
 them at the time. 
 
 I regarded this appalling di'putation as Parvill's 
 apologetic but quite definite utterances drew to an 
 end. I had a moment of vision. Pehind them I saw 
 the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for 
 
390 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 public opinion, that are as much pubHc 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 
 Kino- backs the Lords — and I don't see why he 
 shouldn't — you have no Republican movement what- 
 ever 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. ..." 
 
SECESSION 391 
 
 §4 
 
 IVfy 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 whicli 
 we were preparing our new developments, in a state 
 of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent 
 state, as a chemist would say. I w;is 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 con- 
 jrenial. We meant no less than to orfjanize a new 
 movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate 
 a i'ublic Opinion and prepare the ground for a revised 
 and renovated ruling culture. 
 
 For a time I seemed (juite wonderfully able to do 
 whatever I wanted to do. Shoesmith responded to my 
 first advances. AVe decided to create a weekly paper 
 as our nucleus, and Cruj)p and I set to work fortliwith 
 to collect a group of writers and speakers, including 
 Esmeer, Britten, Lord Ganc, 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 t)ur deliberations 
 
392 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 journa- 
 list, 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 
 throuorh 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 lono:er p-ame of reconstruction that would beijin 
 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 out- 
 set, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane great 
 searchings of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of 
 Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristo- 
 cratic virtues, and we did much to humanize and 
 liberalize the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of 
 the Poor Law agitation, which had been organized 
 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 
 
SECESSION 393 
 
 matter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical 
 quality in our cohinuis. 
 
 That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and character- 
 istic of the Blue Wccklij. I was now very definitely 
 convinced lliat nuuli of the confusion and futility of 
 contemporary thought was due to the fi^eneral need 
 of metaphysical training. . . . The great mass of 
 peo])le — and not simply common people, but peo|)le 
 active and influential in intellectual thinirs — are still 
 quite untrained in the methods of thought and abso- 
 lutely 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 generalizations. 
 They are — to fjxll back on the ancient technicality — 
 Realists of a crude sort. 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 generalization and deduction with the c()mj)letest 
 belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument 
 they are using. They are Realists— Cocksurists— in 
 matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour. The 
 Raileys having got to this glorious stage in mental 
 development — it is glorious because it has no doubts — 
 were always talking about training" Kxpcrts'' to apply 
 the same simple process to all the affairs of mankincl. 
 'Well, Itealism isn't the last word of human wisdom. 
 Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, 
 
394 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 premisses 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 ; they are to be found not only 
 in the Blue Weeldjj columns, but scattered about the 
 monthlies ; many people must be familiar with her style. 
 It was an intention we did much to realize before our 
 private downfall, that we would use the Bliie Weekly 
 to maintain a stream of suggestion against crude 
 thinking, and at last scarcely a week passed but some 
 popular distinction, some large imposing generali- 
 zation, 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 
 
SECESSION 395 
 
 paper, and had a dozen men alert to get me special 
 matter of the sort that draws in the unattached reader. 
 The chief dan^^er 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 almost 
 impossible to f^et vividness of apprehension and breadth 
 of view toi^ether in the same critic. So it falls to the 
 wise editor to secure the first and impose the second. 
 Directly I detected the shrill partizan 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 witli 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 eve, and before 
 1911 was out, the lUitc Wcckhj was printing twenty 
 pages of })ublishers' advertisements, and went into all 
 the chibs 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 dis- 
 cussed, and influencing discussion. 
 
 § 5 
 
 Our ofllce 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, l(K)keil 
 out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel 
 Cecil, the fine arches of ^^'^aterloo Bridge, and the long 
 sweep of south bank with its shot towei-s and chimneys, 
 pa.st IJankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge 
 
396 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 below the Tower. The dome of St. PauFs 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 
 eff'ect, 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, dis- 
 persing ; 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 
 
SECESSION 397 
 
 cfTective stroiiuoiis work. Once some piece of \viitin<r 
 went on, holdinf; nie intent and fornjetlul of time until 
 I looked u|) from the warm circle of my electric lamp 
 to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of 
 the Tower Brid«;e, flushed and handed bri«rhtly with 
 the dawn. 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 The Besetting of Sex 
 
 § 1 
 
 Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I 
 am concerned with a more tangled business than 
 selection, I want to show a contemporary man in 
 relation to the state and social usage, and the 
 social organism in relation to that man. To tell my 
 story at all I have to simplify. I have given now the 
 broad lines of my political development, and how I 
 passed from my initial liberal-socialism to the con- 
 ception of a constructive aristocracy. I have tried to 
 set that out in the form of a man discovering himself. 
 Incidentally that self-development led to a profound 
 breach with my wife. One has read stories before of 
 husband and wife speaking severally two different 
 languages and coming to an understanding. But 
 Mariraret and I began in her dialect, and, as I came 
 more and more to use my own, diverged. 
 
 I had thought when I married that the matter of 
 womankind had ended for me. I have tried to tell all 
 that sex and women had been to me up to my married 
 life with jMargaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to 
 show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way 
 
 398 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 399 
 
 in which these interests break upon the life of a yoiin;; 
 man under contemporary conditions. I do not think. 
 my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance 
 of sisters and «]jirl playmates, but that is not an 
 uncommon misadventure in an a^e of small families; I 
 never came to know any woman at all intimately until 
 I was married to Margaret. My earHer love afiairs 
 were encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness 
 and adventure that made them things in themselves, 
 restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish dis- 
 position to be mystical and worship})ing towards 
 women I had passed into a disregardful attitude, as 
 though women were things inferior or irrelevant, dis- 
 turbers in great afiairs. For a time Margaret had 
 blotted out all other women ; she was so different and 
 so near ; she was like a person who stands suddenly in 
 front of a little window through which one has been 
 surveying a crowd. She didn't become womankind for 
 me so much as eliminate womankind from my world. 
 . . . And then came this secret separation. . . . 
 
 Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncon- 
 trollable development of my relations with Isabel which 
 chanced to follow it, I seemed to have solved the 
 problem of women by marriage and disregard. I 
 thought these things were over. I went about my 
 career with Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, 
 her manner faintly strenuous, helping, helj)ing ; and if 
 we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least 
 so circumscribed and isolated it that it would not 
 have afiected the general tenor of our lives in the 
 slightest degree if we had. 
 
 And then, clothing itself more and more in the 
 form of Isabel and her problems, this old, this funda- 
 mental obsession of my life returned. The thing stole 
 
400 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion 
 and how it was changing our long intimacy. I have 
 ah'eady compared the lot of the modern publicist to 
 ]\lachiavelli writing in his study : in his day women and 
 sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us 
 say, the chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in 
 the fields ; in ours the case has altogether changed, 
 and woman has come now to stand beside the tall 
 candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the 
 shadows, besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelent- 
 ingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I feel 
 that in these matters my life has been almost typical 
 of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She 
 is no longer a mere physical need, an aesthetic bye- 
 play, a sentimental background ; she is a moral and 
 intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to 
 the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen ? 
 Is she a thing or a soul ? She comes to the individual 
 man, as she came to me, and asks, Is she a cherished 
 iveakling or an equal mate, an unavoidable helper? 
 Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and con- 
 trolled, bond or free ? For if she is a mate, one 
 must at once trust more and exact more, exacting 
 toil, courage, and the hardest, most necessary thing 
 of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of 
 understanding. , . . 
 
 §2 
 
 In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had 
 tacitly assumed either that the relations of the sexes 
 were all right or that anyhow they didn't concern 
 the state. It was a matter thev, whoever " they " 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 401 
 
 were, had to settle anioiifr themselves. 'I'liat sort of 
 disregard was possible then. Hut even before !!)()() 
 there were endless intimations that the dams holding- 
 baek ureat reservoirs of discussion were crumbling;. 
 We political schemers were ploughing wider than any 
 one had ploughed before in the field of social recon- 
 struction. We had also, we realized, to plough deeper. 
 AVe had to plough down at last to the jiassionate 
 elements of sexual relationship and examine and decide 
 upon them. 
 
 The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the 
 police of the metropolis were scarce suOicient to pro- 
 tect the House from one clamorous aspect of the new 
 problem. The members went about \Vestminster with 
 an odd, new sense of being beset. A good proportion 
 of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women 
 was an isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic 
 madness that would presently pass. But it was mani- 
 fest to any one who sought more than comfort in the 
 matter that the streams of women and sympathizers 
 and money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider 
 things than an idle fancy for the franchise. The 
 existing laws and conventions of relationship between 
 Man and Woman were ju^t as unsatisfactory a dis- 
 order as anything else in our tumbled confusion of 
 a world, and that also was coming to bear upon 
 statecraft. 
 
 My first parliament was the parliament of the 
 Suffragettes. I don't })r()[)()se to tell here of that 
 amazing cam})aign, with its absurdities and follies, its 
 courage and devotion. There were aspects of that 
 unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and 
 aspects that were absolutely pitiful. It was unreason- 
 able, unwise, and, except for its one central insistence, 
 
 i2 D 
 
402 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly effective. 
 The very incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, 
 to the forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple 
 argument based on a simple assumption ; it was the 
 first crude expression of a great mass and mingling of 
 convergent feelings, of a widespread, confused persua- 
 sion among modern educated women that the con- 
 ditions of their relations with men were oppressive, 
 ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had 
 not merely adopted the Vote as a symbol of equality ; 
 it was fairly manifest to me that, given it, they meant 
 to use it, and to use it perhaps even vindictively and 
 blindly, as a weapon against many things they had 
 every reason to hate. . . . 
 
 I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great 
 night early in the session of 1909, when — I think it 
 was — fifty or sixty women went to prison. I had 
 been dining at the Brahams\ and Lord Braham and 
 I came down from the direction of St. James's Park 
 into a crowd and a confusion outside the Caxton Hall. 
 We found ourselves drifting with an immense multi- 
 tude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a 
 silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for 
 the most part white-faced and intent. I still re- 
 member the effect of their faces upon me. It was 
 quite different from the general effect of staring about 
 and divided attention one gets in a political procession 
 of men. There was an expression of heroic tension. 
 
 There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the 
 part of the women's organizers to the Unemployed, 
 who had been demonstrating throughout that winter, 
 to join forces with the movement, and the result was 
 shown in the quality of the crowd upon the pavement. 
 It was an ugly, dangerous-looking crowd, but as yet 
 good-tempered and sympathetic. When at last we got 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 403 
 
 within sio;ht of the House the square was a seething sea 
 of excited people, antl the army of police on horse and 
 on foot might have been assembled for a revolutionary 
 outbreak. There were dense masses of peoj)le up 
 Whitehall, and right on to \Vestminster Bridge. The 
 scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explo- 
 sion to follow such stupendous preparations. . . . 
 
 Later on in that vear the women began a new 
 attack. Day and night, and all through the long 
 nights of the Budget sittings, at all the piers of the 
 gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, 
 stood women pickets, and watched us silently and 
 reproachfully as we went to and fro. They were women 
 of all sorts, though, of course, the independent worker- 
 class predominated. There were grey-headed old ladies 
 standing there, sturdily charming in the rain ; battered- 
 looking, ambiguous women, with something of the des- 
 perate bitterness of battered women showing in their 
 eyes ; north-country factory girls ; cheaply-dressed sub- 
 urban women; trim, comfortable mothers of families; 
 valiant-eyed girl graduates and undergraduates ; lank, 
 hungry-looking creatures, who stirred one's imagination ; 
 one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I recall, 
 grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. 
 Some of those women looked defiant, some timidly aggres- 
 sive, some full of the stir of adventure, some drooping 
 with cold and fatigue. The supply never ceased. I hatl 
 a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or 
 cease. I found that continual siege of the legislature 
 extraordinarily impressive — infinitely more impressive 
 
404 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 than the feeble-forcible "ragoing" of the more mili- 
 tant section. I thouoht of the appeal that must be 
 going through the country, summoning the women 
 from countless scattered homes, rooms, colleges, to 
 Westminster. 
 
 I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt, 
 whether I should ignore these pickets altogether, or 
 lift a hat as I hurried past with averted eyes, or look 
 them in the face as I did so. Towards the end the 
 House evolved an etiquette of salutation. 
 
 § 4 
 
 There was a tendency, even on the part of its sym- 
 pathizers, to treat the whole suffrage agitation as if it 
 were a disconnected issue, irrelevant to all other broad 
 developments of social and political life. We struggled, 
 all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it thnjst out 
 before us. " Your schemes, for all their bigness,**' it 
 insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, " still don't go 
 down to the essential things. . . ." 
 
 We have to go deeper, or our inadequate chil- 
 dren's insufficient children will starve amidst harvests of 
 earless futility. That conservatism which works in 
 every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual 
 daily life is all against a profounder treatment of 
 political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly as 
 the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnifi- 
 cent preludes, vast intimations, to specialize himself out 
 of the reality he has so stupendously summoned — he 
 bolts back to littleness. The world has to be moulded 
 anew, he continues to admit, but without, he adds, 
 any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning 
 cup of tea. . . . 
 
THE HESETTING OF SEX 405 
 
 The discussion of the relations of men and women dis- 
 turbs every one. It reacts upon the private life of every 
 one who attenipts it. And at anv particular time only 
 a small minority liave a personal interest in chanj;ing 
 the established state of affairs. Habit and interest are 
 ill a constantly recruited majority af;ainst conscious 
 chanu;e and adjustment in these matters. Drift rules 
 us. The <;reat mass of people, and an ovcrwhelmini; 
 proportion of inlluential people, are people who have 
 banished lliLir dreams and made their coiii[)romisc. 
 Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no lonf^er to 
 be thouf^ht about. They have ^iven up any aspira- 
 tions for intense love, for splendid ofTsprinf,^ for keen 
 delif;hts, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an 
 uncritical sense of righteousness as their compensation. 
 It's a settled affair with them, a settled, dangerous 
 afl'air. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest 
 reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once 
 said to the Pentajjram Circle, when we were discussing: 
 the problem of a universal marriage and divorce 
 law throughout the Empire, " I am for leaving all the>e 
 things alone.'' And then, with a groan in his voice, 
 " I^ave them alone ! Leave them all alone ! " 
 
 That was his whole speech for the evening, in a 
 note of suppressed pa.ssion, and presently, against all 
 our eti([uette, he got up and went out. 
 
 For some years after my marriage, I too was for 
 leaving them alone. I developed a dread and disHke 
 for romance, for emotional music, for the human figure 
 in art — turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to 
 sneer at lovers and their ecstacies, and was uncomfort- 
 able until I found the effective sneer. In matters of 
 private morals these were my most uncharitable years. 
 I didn't want to think of these things any more for 
 
4o6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ever. I hated the people whose talk or practice showed 
 they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe that 
 their views were immoral and objectionable and con- 
 temptible, because I had decided to treat them as at 
 that level. I was, in fixct, falling into the attitude of 
 the normal decent man. 
 
 And yet one cannot help thinking ! The sensible 
 moralized man finds it hard to escape the stream of 
 suggestion that there are still dreams beyond these 
 commonplace acquiescences, — the appeal of beauty 
 suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings 
 of serene summer nights, the sweetness of distant 
 music. . . . 
 
 It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public 
 life at the present time, which penalizes abandonment 
 to love so abundantly, so heavily, that power and in- 
 fluence and control fall largely to unencumbered people 
 and sterile people and people who have married for 
 passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in 
 feeling has left them free to follow ambition, people 
 beauty-blind, who don''t understand what it is to fall 
 in love, what it is to desire children or have them, what 
 it is to feel in their blood and bodies the supreme claim 
 of good births and selective births above all other affairs 
 in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most 
 fundamental aspect of existence. , . , 
 
 §5 
 
 It wasn^ however, my deepening sympathy with 
 and understanding of the position of women in general, 
 or the change in my ideas about all these intimate things 
 my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 407 
 
 led mc to the heretical views I have in the hist five 
 years dra^p;ccl tVoin the re<rion of academic and timid 
 discussion into the field of practical politics. Those 
 influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end, 
 and f^iven me a powerful emotional push upon my road, 
 but it was a broader and colder view of thini^s that first 
 determined me in my attempt to graft the iMidowincnt 
 of Motherhood in some form or other upon British 
 Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political 
 world, it is possible to estimate just how eflectually that 
 sraftinff has been done. 
 
 I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy 
 and a universal education grew to paramount importance 
 in my political scheme. It is but a short step from this 
 to the question of the quantity and quality of births in 
 the community, and from that again to these forbidden 
 and fear-beset topics of marriage, divorce, and the family 
 organization. A sporadic discussion of these aspects 
 had been going on for years, a Eugenic society existed, 
 and articles on the Falling IJirth Kate, and the Rapid 
 Multi{)lication of the Unfit were staples of the monthly 
 magfizines. But beyond an intermittent scolding of pros- 
 perous childless people in general — one never addressed 
 them in particular — nothing was done towards arrest- 
 ing those adverse processes. Almost against my natural 
 inclination, I found myself forced to go into these 
 things. I came to the conclusion that under modern 
 conditions the isolated private family, based on the 
 existing marriage contract, was failing in its work. It 
 wasn't producing enough children, and children good 
 enou<ih and well trained ent)u<i;h for the demands of the 
 developing civilized sUite. Our civilization was growing 
 outwardly, and decaying in its intimate substance, and 
 unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensive 
 
4o8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and courageous reorganization was needed. The old 
 haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more 
 by worldly discretions, no longer secures us a young 
 population numerous enough or good enough for the 
 growing needs and possibilities of our Empire. State- 
 craft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but 
 with a puny, ugly, insufficient baby in the cradle. 
 
 No one so far has dared to take up this problem as 
 a present question for statecraft, but it comes un- 
 heralded, unadvocated, and sits at every legislative 
 board. Every improvement is provisional except the 
 improvement of the race, and it became more and more 
 doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all ! 
 Splendid and beautiful and courageous people must 
 come together and have children, women with their 
 fine senses and glorious devotion must be freed from the 
 net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to 
 be childless and useless, or to bear children ignobly to 
 men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous 
 pressure of circumstances have forced upon them. We 
 all know that, and so few dare even to whisper it for 
 fear that they should seem, in seeking to save the 
 family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of 
 pigmies in a not too capacious room had been joined 
 by a carnivorous giant — and decided to go on living 
 happily by cutting him dead. . . . 
 
 The problem the developing civilized state has to 
 solve is how it can get the best possible increase under 
 the best possible conditions. I became more and more 
 convinced that the independent family unit of to-day, 
 in which the man is master of the wife and owner of 
 the children, in which all are dependent upon him, 
 subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his 
 fortunes up or down, does not supply anything like the 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 409 
 
 best conceivable conditions. We want to modernize 
 the family footing; alto^elher. An enormous premium 
 both in pleasure and competitive efliciency is j)ut upon 
 voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements arc 
 held out to women to subordinate instinctive and 
 selective preferences to social and material considera- 
 tions. 
 
 The practical reaction of modern conditions upon 
 the old tradition of the family is this : that beneath 
 the pretence lh;it nothin^^ is chan^iufr, secretly and 
 with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything; is 
 changed. Oflspring fall away, the birth rate falls and 
 falls most amoni; ju^t the most eflicient and active and 
 best adajitcd classes in the community. The species is 
 recruited from amonf]^ its failures and from amonfjc less 
 civilized aliens. Contemporary civilizations arc in efiect 
 burning the best of their possible babies in the furnaces 
 that run the machinery. In the United States the 
 native Ann^lo-xVmerican strain has scarcely increased at 
 all since 1830, and in most Western European countries 
 the same is probably true of the ablest and most 
 energetic elements in the connnunity. The women of 
 these classes still remain legally and practically de- 
 pendent and protected, with the only natural excuse 
 lor their dependance gone. . . . 
 
 The modern world becomes an innnensc spectacle of 
 unsatisfactory groupings ; here childless couples bored 
 to death in the hopeless effort to sustain an incessant 
 honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child grows 
 unsocially, here small two or three-child homes that do 
 no more than continue the culture of the parents at a 
 great social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated 
 but childless married women, here careless, decivilized 
 fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the 
 
4IO THE NEAV MACHIAVELLI 
 
 heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly prolifera- 
 tion of Bromstead over again, in lives instead of in 
 houses. 
 
 What is the good, what is the common sense, of 
 rectifying boundaries, pushing research and discovery, 
 building cities, improving all the facilities of life, 
 making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless 
 decadence remains the quality of the biological out- 
 look ? . . . 
 
 It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my 
 early aversion until I faced this mass of problems. But 
 so far back as 1910 I had it clear in my mind that I 
 would rather fail utterly than participate in all the 
 surrenders of mind and body that are implied in Day- 
 ton's snarl of " Leave it alone ; leave it all alone ! '"* 
 Marriage and the begetting and care of children are the 
 very ground substance in the life of the community. 
 In a world in which everything changes, in which fresh 
 methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually 
 renew the circumstances of life, it is preposterous that 
 we should not even examine into these matters, should 
 rest content to be ruled by the uncriticized traditions 
 of a barbaric age. 
 
 §6 
 
 Now, it seems to me that the solution of this 
 problem is also the solution of the woman's individual 
 problem. The two go together, are right and left of 
 one question. The only conceivable way out from our 
 impasse lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to 
 say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance 
 product of individual passions, but a service rendered 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 411 
 
 to the State. Women must become less and less sub- 
 ordinated to individual men, since this works out in a 
 more or less complete limitation, waste, and .steriliza- 
 tion of their essentially social function ; they must 
 become more and more subordinated as individually 
 independent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, 
 to express the thing by a familiar j)hrase, the highly 
 organized, scientific state we desire must, if it is to 
 exist at all, base itself, not upon the irresponsible 
 man-ruled family, but upon the matriarchal family, 
 the citizenship and freedom of women and the pubHc 
 endowment of motherhood. 
 
 After two generations of confused and experi- 
 mental revolt, it grows clear to modern women that 
 a conscious, deliberate motherhood and mothering is 
 their special function in the State, and that a personal 
 subordination to aii individual man with an unlimited 
 power of control over this intimate and supi*eme duty 
 is a degradation. No contemporary woman of educa- 
 tion put to the test is willing to recognize any claim 
 a man can make upon her but the claim of her freely- 
 given devotion to him. She wants the reality of her 
 choice and she means "family"" while a man too often 
 means only possession. This alters the sj)irit of the 
 family relationships fundamentally. Their form re- 
 mains just what it was when woman was esteemed a 
 pretty, desirable, and incidentally a child-producing, 
 chattel. Against these time-honoured ideas the new 
 spirit of womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, 
 bitterness, and tears. . . . 
 
 I confess myself altogi-ther feminist. I have no 
 doubts in the matter. I want this coddlinix and brow- 
 beating of women to cease. I want to .see women come 
 in, iiee and fearless, to a full participation in the 
 
412 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 collective purpose of mankind. Women, I am con- 
 vinced, are as fine as men ; they can be as wise as 
 men ; they are capable of far greater devotion than 
 men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage 
 law framed primarily for them and for their protection 
 and the good of the race, and not for men's satisfac- 
 tions. I want to see them bearing and rearing good 
 children in the State as a generously rewarded public 
 duty and service, choosing their husbands freely and 
 discerningly, and in no way enslaved by or subordi- 
 nated to the men they have chosen. The social 
 consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, 
 an almost untouched mine of wealth for the con- 
 structive purpose of the world. I want to change the 
 respective values of the family group altogether, and 
 make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the 
 mother the owner and responsible guardian of her 
 children. 
 
 It is no use pretending that this is not novel and 
 revolutionary ; it is. The Endowment of Motherhood 
 implies a new method of social organization, a rearrange- 
 ment of the social unit, untried in human experience — 
 as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. 
 Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of 
 marriage profoundly. To me tbat is a secondary con- 
 sideration. I do not believe that particular assertion 
 myself, because I am convinced that a practical mono- 
 gamy is a psychological necessity to the mass of civilized 
 people. But even if I did believe it I should still keep 
 to my present line, because it is the only line that will 
 prevent a highly organized civilization from ending in 
 biological decay. The public Endowment of Mother- 
 hood is the only possible way which will ensure the 
 permanently developing civilized state at which all con- 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 413 
 
 striictive niiiuls are aiming. A point is reached in the 
 hfu-historv of a civilization when cither this reconstruc- 
 tion must be eflcctccl or the (juaHty and monile of the 
 popuhition prove insuflicient for the needs of the 
 developing organization. It is not so much moral 
 decadence that will destroy us as moral inadaptihility. 
 The old code fails inider the new needs, 'i'he only 
 alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay 
 in human c[uality and social collapse. Either this 
 unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by our 
 civilization, or it must presently come u[)on a phase of 
 disorder and crumble and perish, as Rome perished, as 
 France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim Fathers 
 dwindles out of America. AVhatever hope there may 
 be in the attempt, therefore, there is no alternative to 
 the attempt. 
 
 I wanted political success now dearly enough, but 
 not at the price of constructive realities. These ques- 
 tions were no doubt monstrously dangerous in the 
 political world ; there wasn't a politician alive who 
 didn't look scared at the mention of "The Family,*' 
 but if raising these issues were essential to the social 
 reconstructions on which mv life was set, that did not 
 matter. It only implied that I should take them up 
 with deliberate caution. There was no release because 
 of risk or dilllcultv. 
 
 The (question of whether I should connuit myself to 
 some open project in this direction was going on in my 
 mind concurrently with mv sjjeculations about a change 
 of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of 
 
414 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 music. The two dr?w to a conclusion together. I 
 would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would 
 attempt to biologize Imperialism. 
 
 I thouo^ht at first that I was undertaking a mon- 
 strous uphill task. But as I came to look into the 
 possibilities of the matter, a strong persuasion grew up 
 in my mind that this panic fear of legislative proposals 
 affecting the family basis was excessive ; that things were 
 much riper for development in this direction than old, 
 experienced people out of touch with the younger 
 generation imagined ; that, to phrase the thing in a 
 parliamentary fashion, " something might be done in 
 the constituencies " with the Endowment of ^Motherhood 
 forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly 
 clear that anything a sane person could possibly 
 intend by " morality " was left untouched by these 
 proposals. 
 
 I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the 
 Daily Telephone and Burkett of the Dial to try over a 
 silly-season discussion of State Help for Mothers, and I 
 put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fall in the 
 birth-rate, and similar topics in the Blue Weelcly, leading 
 up to a tentative and generalized advocacy of the public 
 endowment of the nation's children. I was more and 
 more struck by the acceptance won by a sober and 
 restrained presentation of this suggestion. 
 
 And then, in the fourth year of the Blue WeeMifs 
 career, came the Handitch election, and I was forced 
 by the clamour of my antagonist, and very willingly 
 forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returned 
 triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endow- 
 ment of Motherhood as part of my open profession and 
 with the full approval of the party press. Applauding 
 
THE BESETTIXO OF SEX 415 
 
 benches of Ini})ei'ialists cheered ni/^i on my way to the 
 table between tlie whips. 
 
 That second time I took the oath I was not one of 
 a crowd of new members, but sahent, an event, a symbol 
 of profound changes and new purposes in tlie national 
 life. 
 
BOOK THE FOURTH 
 ISABEL 
 
CHArXER THE FIRST 
 
 Love and Success 
 
 § 1 
 
 And now I come to the most evasive and dilTicult part 
 of mv storv, which is to tell how Isabel and I have 
 made a common wreck of our joint lives. 
 
 It is not the telling of one simple disastrous 
 accident, but of a vein in our natures, and how 
 gradually and at this point it crept to the surface. 
 A thing so pervasive has necessarily a thousand 
 aspects and a thousand values. One may indeed see 
 it in the form of a catastro})hc as disconnected and 
 conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven 
 upon two friends and crushing them both. But I do 
 not think that is true to our situation or ourselves. 
 We were not taken by surprise. The thing was in us 
 and not from without, it was akin to our way of think- 
 ing and our liabitual attitudes; it had, for all its im- 
 pulsive effect, a certain necessity. AVe might have 
 escaped, no doubt, as two men at a hundred yards may 
 shoot at each other with pistols for a considerable time 
 and escape. But it isn't particularly reiusonable to talk 
 of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit. 
 
 Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several 
 years of friendship, and not quite unwittingly so. 
 
 419 2 E 2 
 
420 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 In writing this, moreover, there is a very great 
 difllculty in steering my way between two equally un- 
 desirable tones in the telling. In the first place, I do 
 not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence 
 I am very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got 
 Isabel we can no doubt reckon the cost and feel 
 unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure, if we 
 could be put back now into such circumstances as we 
 were in a year ago, or two years ago, whether with my 
 eyes fully open I should not do over again very much 
 as I did. And on the other hand, I do not want to 
 justify. We are two bad people, we have acted badly, 
 and quite apart from any other considerations we've 
 largely wasted our own very great possibilities. But it 
 is part of a queer humour that underlies all this, that I 
 find myself slipping again and again into a sentimental 
 treatment of our case that is as unpremeditated as it is 
 insincere. It seems almost the natural way of telling 
 of irregular love. It is certainly the easiest way, and 
 when I am a little tired after a morning's writing I find 
 getting into every other sentence the faint suggestion 
 that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the 
 fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. 
 Indeed, I feel so little confidence in my ability to keep 
 this altogether out of my book that I must warn the 
 reader here that in spite of anything he may read 
 elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an 
 esoteric and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the 
 plain truth of this business is that Isabel and I wanted 
 each other with a want entirely formless, inconsiderate, 
 and overwhelming. And though I could tell you 
 countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, 
 were this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyze 
 that want or account for its extreme intensity. 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 421 
 
 I will confess lliat in my mind is a belief in a sort 
 of wild rii;htness about any love that is fraught with 
 bcautv, but that eludes me and vanishes again, and is 
 not, I feel, to ])e put with the real veracities and 
 righteousnesses and virtues, into the paddocks and 
 menageries of human reason. . . . 
 
 AVe have already a child, and ^VTargaret was child- 
 less, and I find myself particularly prone to insist upon 
 that as if it was a justification. IJut, indeed, when we 
 became lovers there was small thought of Kugenics 
 between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philopro- 
 genitive passion. Old Nature behind us may have had 
 such purposes with us, but it is not for us to annex her 
 intentions by a moralizing afterthought. There isn't, 
 in fact, any decent justification for us whatever — at 
 that the story must stand. 
 
 Jkit if there is no justification there is at least a 
 very eifective excuse in the mental confuscdness of our 
 time. The evasion of that passionately thorough ex- 
 position of belief and of the grounds of morality, which 
 is the outcome of the mercenary religious compromises 
 of the late Victorian period, the stupid suppression of 
 anything but the most timid discussion of sexual 
 morality in our literature and drama, the pervading 
 cultivated and protected muddle-headcdness, leaves 
 mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous 
 powers of destruction and little eflective help. 'Ihey 
 find themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices 
 of manifestly connnonplace people, and by that extra- 
 ordinary patched up Christianity, the cult of that 
 *' Ih'omsteadized "' deity, difi'used, scattered, and aimless, 
 which hides from examination and any possibility of 
 faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about 
 whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. 
 
42 2 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We are forced to be laws unto ourselves and to live 
 experimentally. It is inevitable that a considerable 
 fraction of just that bolder, more initiatory section of 
 the intellectual community, the section that can least 
 be spared from the collective life in a period of trial 
 and change demanding the utmost versatility, will drift 
 into such emotional crises and such disaster as overtook 
 us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down, 
 many more than the world can spare. It is the un- 
 written law of all our public life, and the same holds 
 true of America, that an honest open scandal ends a 
 career. England in the last quarter of a century has 
 w^asted half a dozen statesmen on this score ; she would, 
 I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her, 
 she would turn her back upon Wellington. 
 
 Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this 
 ostracism should seem the cruellest as well as the most 
 foolish waste of necessary social elements ? It destroys 
 no vice ; for vice hides by nature. It not only rewards 
 clulness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an 
 enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, 
 and that is why I am telling this side of my story 
 with so much explicitness. 
 
 §2 
 
 Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had main- 
 tained what seemed a desultory friendship with Isabel. 
 At first it was rather Isabel kept it up than I. W^hen- 
 ever Margaret and I -went down to that villa, with its 
 three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, 
 which fulfilled our election promise to live at King- 
 hamstead, Isabel would turn up in a state of frank 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 423 
 
 cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was 
 readiiii; and thinking to lue, and slay for all the 
 rest of the day. In her shameless liking for me she 
 was as natural as a savage. She wonld exercise me 
 vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested 
 her hack in the afternoon, or guide me for some 
 long rand)le that dod«xed the suhurhan and cono-ested 
 patches of the constituency with amazing skill. She 
 took possession of me in that unabashed, straight- 
 minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a man, 
 chose my path or criticized my game with a motherly 
 solicitude for my welfare that was absurd and delight- 
 ful. And we talked. We discussed and criticized the 
 stories of novels, scraps of history, pictures, social 
 cjuestions, socialism, the policy of the Government. 
 She was young and most unevenly informed, but she 
 was amazingly sharp and cjuick and good. Never 
 before in my life had I known a girl of her age, or a 
 woman, of her c[uality. I had never dreamt there was 
 such talk in the world. Kinghamstcad became a light- 
 less place when she went to college. Heaven knows 
 how much that may not have precipitated my abandon- 
 ment of the seat ! 
 
 At that time I think we neither of us suspected 
 the possibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake 
 in the path before us. It seemed to us that we 
 had the cjuaintest, most delightful friendship in the 
 world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, }>liilo- 
 sopher, and friend. People smiled indulgently — even 
 IMargaret smiled indulgently — at our attraction for 
 one another. 
 
 Such friendships are not uncommon nowadavs — 
 among easy-going, liberal-minded })eople. For the 
 most part there's no sort of harm, as people say, in 
 
424 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 them. The two persons concerned are never supposed 
 to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to 
 the friendship, or if they do, then they banish the 
 thought. I think we kept the thought as permanently 
 in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd 
 moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately 
 it wasn't there. 
 
 Only we were both very easily jealous of each 
 other's attention, and tremendously insistent upon each 
 other's preference. 
 
 I remember once during the college days an inti- 
 mation that should have set me thinking, and I suppose 
 discreetly disentangling myself. It was one Sunday 
 afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the 
 trees and shrubs were gay with blossom, and fresh 
 w'ith the new sharp greens of spring. I had walked 
 talking with Isabel and a couple of other girls through 
 the wide gardens of the place, seen and criticized 
 the new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of 
 this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees, 
 and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties 
 on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a 
 Siberian crab near the great bay window. There I sat 
 and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed the 
 tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some comments 
 upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the 
 men in Pembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group 
 of girls and women dons were now having it out 
 with me. 
 
 I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it 
 was made Isabel interrupt me. She did interrupt me. 
 She had been lying prone on the ground at my right 
 hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and I was 
 sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 425 
 
 turned to Isabel's voice, and saw lier face uplifted, and 
 her dear cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and 
 barred with sunlip;ht and the shadows of tlie twin;s of 
 the trees behind me. And soniethin;^ — an infinite 
 tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feel- 
 ing:, like nothinc: I had ever felt before. For the first 
 time in niv narrow and concentrated life another 
 human bein«; had really thrust into my being and 
 [;rip})ed my very heart. 
 
 ( )ur eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. 
 Then I turned back and addressed myself a little stifllv 
 to the substance of her intervention. For some time I 
 couldn't look at her again. 
 
 From that time forth I knew I loved Isabel beyond 
 measure. 
 
 Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a 
 year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion 
 between us. I have told how definitely I put my 
 imajxination into harness in those matters at mv 
 marriage, and I was living now in a world of big 
 interests, where there is neither much time nor incli- 
 nation for deliberate love-making. I suj)pose there is 
 a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman 
 without thinking of sex, who meet a friend's daughter 
 and decide: ''Mustn't get friendly with her — wouldn't 
 ^/o," and set invisible bars between themselves and all 
 the wives in the world. Ferhaps that is the way to 
 live. Perhaps there is no other method than this 
 effectual annihilation of half — anil the most sympa- 
 thetic and attractive half — of the human beings in the 
 world, so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. I 
 am i[uite convinced, anyhow, that such a qualified in- 
 timacy as ours, such a drifting into the sense of 
 possession, such untrammelled conversation with an 
 
426 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy 
 glows, is no kind of tolerable compromise. If men and 
 women are to go so far together, they must be free to 
 go as ftir as they may want to go, without the vindictive 
 destruction that has come upon us. On the basis of the 
 accepted code the jealous people are right, and the 
 liberal-minded ones are playing with fire. If people 
 are not to love, then they must be kept apart. If they 
 are not to be kept apart, then we must prepare for an 
 unprecedented toleration of lovers. 
 
 Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but 
 sex marches into the life of an intelligent girl with 
 demands and challenges far more urgent than the mere 
 call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a 
 young man. No woman yet has dared to tell the story 
 of that unfolding. She attracted men, and she en- 
 couraged them, and watched them, and tested them, 
 and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her 
 thoughts about them in the way that seems instinctive 
 in a natural-minded girl. There was even an eno-age- 
 ment — amidst the protests and disapproval of the 
 college authorities. I never saw the man, though she 
 gave me a long history of the affair, to which I listened 
 with a forced and insincere sympathy. She struck me 
 oddly as taking the relationship for a thing in itself, 
 and regardless of its consequences. After a time she 
 became silent about him, and then threw him over ; 
 and by that time, I think, for all that she was so much 
 my junior, she knew more about herself and me than I 
 was to know for several years to come. 
 
 We didn't see each other for some months after my 
 resignation, but we kept up a frequent correspondence. 
 She said twice over that she wanted to talk to me, that 
 letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and I 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 427 
 
 went lip to Oxford pretty (lefiintely to see her — though 
 I combined it with one or two other enf;af:rcnicnts — 
 soniewhen in I'eljrimry. Insensibly she had Ijeconie 
 ini])ortant enou<;h for me to make journeys for her. 
 
 But we di(hrt see very much of one another on that 
 occasion. There was something in the air between us 
 that made a faint embarrassment ; the mere fact, per- 
 haps, that slie had asked me to come up. 
 
 A year before she would have dashed off with me 
 quite unscrupulously to talk alone, carried me off to 
 her room for an hour with a minute of chaperonage to 
 satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or 
 other near us that it seemed impossible to exorcise. 
 
 We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with 
 old Fortescue, K.C., who'd come up to see his two 
 daughters, both great friends of Isabel's, and some 
 mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was 
 in a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us 
 played a game of conversational entanglements through- 
 out, and mostly I was impressing the Fortescue girls 
 with the want of mental concentration possible in a 
 rising politician. We went down Carfax, I remember, 
 to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then 
 back by way of jNIerton to the Botanic Gardens and 
 Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she 
 got almost her only chance with me. 
 
 "Last months of college,"' slie said. 
 
 " And then ? '' I asked. 
 
 " Fm coming to London," she said. 
 
 "To write ?^" 
 
 She was silent for a moment. Then she said 
 abruptly, with that quick flusli of hers and a sudden 
 boldness in her eyes: " Fm going to work with you. 
 Why shouldn't 1 1 " 
 
423 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 §3 
 
 Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the 
 drift of things. I seem to remember myself in the 
 train to Paddington, sitting with a handful of papers — 
 galley proofs for the Blue Weekly^ I suppose — on my 
 lap, and thinking about her and that last sentence of 
 hers, and all that it might mean to me. 
 
 It is very hard to recall even the main outline of 
 anything so elusive as a meditation. I know that the 
 idea of working with her gripped me, fascinated me. 
 That my value in her life seemed growing filled me 
 with pride and a kind of gratitude. I was already in 
 no doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It 
 made it none the less, that in those days I was obsessed 
 by the idea that she Avas transitory, and bound to go 
 out of my life again. It is no good trying to set too 
 fine a face upon this complex business ; there is gold 
 and clay and sunlight and savagery in every love-story, 
 and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath 
 the fine rich curtain of affection that masked our future. 
 Fve never properly weighed how immensely my vanity 
 was gratified by her clear preference for me. Nor can 
 I for a moment determine how much deliberate intention 
 I hide from myself in this affair. 
 
 Certainly I think some part of me must have been 
 saying in the train : " Leave go of her. Get away from 
 her. End this now.'' I can't have been so stupid as 
 not to have had that in my mind. . . . 
 
 If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with 
 me, I think I could have managed the situation. Once 
 or twice since my marriage and before Isabel became of 
 any significance in my life, there had been incidents 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 429 
 
 with other people, flashes of tcmpLation — no tL'lliii<; 
 is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere 
 beauty and passion would not have taken nie. IJut 
 between myself and Isabel thinf^s were incurably 
 complicated by the intellectual svmpalhv we had, the 
 jolly march of our minds together. That has always 
 mattered enormously. I should have wanted her 
 company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled 
 old lady ; we would have hunted shoulder to shoulder, 
 as two men. Only two men would never have had the 
 patience and readiness for one another we two had. I 
 had never for years met any one with whom I could be 
 so carelessly sure of understanding or to whom I could 
 listen so easily and fully. She gave me, with an extra- 
 ordinary completeness, that rare, precious effect of 
 always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so 
 that it filled into and folded about all the little 
 recesses and corners of my mind with an indnite, soft 
 ftimiliarity. It is impossible to explain that. It is 
 like trying to explain why her voice, her voice heard 
 speaking to any one — heard speaking in another room 
 — pleased my ears. 
 
 She spent the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire, 
 writing to me continually of all she now meant to 
 do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London 
 for the autumn session. For a time she stayed with 
 old Lady Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess 
 when it became clear she wanted to write, not novels, 
 but journalism, and then she set every one talking 
 by taking a flat near \'ictoria and installing ;ls her 
 sole protector an elderly German governess she had 
 engaged through a scholastic agency. She began 
 writing, not in that copious flood the undisciplined 
 young woman of gifts is apt to produce, but in exactly 
 
430 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the mannor of an able young man, experimenting with 
 forms, developing the phrasing of opinions, taking a 
 definite line. She was, of course, tremendously dis- 
 cussed. She was disapproved of, but she was invited 
 out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the 
 management of elderly distinguished men. It was an 
 odd experience to follow jNIargaret's soft rustle of silk 
 into some big drawing-room and discover my snub- 
 nosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a shining 
 creature in the soft splendour of pearls and ivory-white 
 and lace, and with a silver band about her dusky hair. 
 
 For a time we did not meet very frequently, though 
 always she professed an unblushing preference for my 
 company, and talked my views and sought me out. 
 Then her usefulness upon the Blue Weekly began to 
 link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and 
 sit by the window and talk over the proofs of the next 
 week's articles, going through my intentions with a 
 keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me 
 in mind of a steel blade. Her writing became rapidly 
 very good ; she had a wit and a turn of the phrase that 
 was all her own. We seemed to have fors^otten the 
 little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over 
 our last meeting. Everything seemed natural and easy 
 between us in those days ; a little unconventional, but 
 that made it all the brighter. 
 
 We developed something like a custom of walks, 
 about once a week or so, and letters and notes became 
 frequent. I won't pretend things were not keenly 
 personal between us, but they had an air of being 
 innocently mental. She used to call me " Master "" in 
 our talks, a monstrous and engaging flattery, and 
 I was inordinately proud to have her as my pupil. 
 Who wouldn't have been ? And we went on at that 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 431 
 
 (Ustniicc lor a lon<; time — until within a year of the 
 Ilaiulitch election. 
 
 After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altofrethcr too 
 "intellectual"" for conifortahh; control, Isabel was 
 taken up by the Jialfes in a less formal and compro- 
 mising manner, and week-ended with them and their 
 cousin Leonora S{)arling, and spent large portions of 
 her summer with them in Herefordshire. There was a 
 lover or so in that time, men who came a little timidly 
 at this brilliant young person with the frank manner 
 and the xVmazonian mind, and, she declared, received 
 her kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold 
 Shoesmith struck up a sort of friendship that oddly 
 imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he 
 was clumsy and shy and inexpressive ; she embarked 
 upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his 
 soul. I had some twinges of jealousy about that. I 
 didn't see the necessity of him. lie invaded her time, 
 and I thought that might interfere with her work. If 
 their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's writing, 
 it did not for a long while interfere with our walks or 
 our talks, or the close intimacy we had together. 
 
 § 4 
 
 Then suddenly Isabel and I found ourselves pas- 
 sionatelv in love. 
 
 Tile change came so entirely without warnin«T or 
 intention that I find it impossible now to tell the 
 order of its phases. What disturbed pebble started the 
 avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that 
 the barriers between us and this masked aspect of life 
 had been wearing down un perceived. 
 
432 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 And there came a change in Isabel. It was like 
 some change in the cycle of nature, like the onset of 
 spring — a sharp brightness, an uneasiness. She became 
 restless with her work ; little encounters with men 
 began to happen, encounters not quite in the quality 
 of the earlier proposals ; and then came an odd inci- 
 dent of which she told me, but somehow, I felt, didn't 
 tell me completely. She told me all she was able to 
 tell me. She had been at a dance at the Ropers', 
 and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed 
 her. The thing amazed her beyond measure. It was 
 the sort of thing immediately possible between any 
 man and any woman, that one never expects to happen 
 until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a 
 judge generally known to be bald suddenly whipping 
 off his wig in court. No absolutely unexpected reve- 
 lation could have quite the same quality of shock. 
 She went through the whole thing to me with a 
 remarkable detachment, told me how she had felt — 
 and the odd things it seemed to open to her. 
 
 " I want to be kissed, and all that sort of thing,'' 
 she avowed. "I suppose every woman does." 
 
 She added after a pause : " And I don't want any 
 one to do it." 
 
 This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's 
 attitude to these things. " Some one presently will — 
 solve that," I said. 
 
 " Some one will, perhaps." 
 
 I was silent. 
 
 "Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And 
 then we'll have to stop these walks and talks of ours, 
 dear Master. . . . I'll be sorry to give them up." 
 
 " It's part of the requirements of the situation," I 
 said, " that he should be — oh, very interesting ! He'll 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 433 
 
 start, no (l()ul)t, nil sorts of mw topics, and open 
 no end of altnictivc vistas. . . . Voii can't, you know, 
 always f]jo about in a state of pupilai^o/'' 
 
 *' I tion't think I can," said Isabel. "Hut it's only 
 just recent Iv I've begun to doubt about it." 
 
 I remember these things being said, but just how 
 much we saw and understood, and just how far we were 
 really kee})ing opacjue to each other then, I cannot 
 remember. But it nnist have been quite soon after 
 this lliat we spent nearlv a ^\hole day together at Kew 
 Gardens, with the curtains up and the barriers down, 
 and the thing that had happened })lain before our eyes. 
 I don't remember we ever made any declaration. \\'e 
 just assumed the new footing. . . . 
 
 It was a dav earlv in the year — I think in January, 
 because there was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and 
 we noted that oidy two other people had been to the 
 Pagoda that day. Tve a curious impression of greenish 
 colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very 
 much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the 
 time in the Tropical House. But I also remember 
 very vividly looking at certain orange and red spray- 
 like flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been 
 there. It is a curious thing that I do not rcmend)er 
 we made any profession of passionate love for one 
 another; we talked as though the fact of our intense 
 love for each other had always been patent between us. 
 There was so lontr and frank an intimacy between us 
 that we talked far more like brother and sister or hus- 
 band and wife than two ])eoj)le engaged in the war of 
 the sexes. Wo wanted to know what we were going to 
 do, and whatever we did we meant to do in the most 
 perfect concert. We both felt an extraordinary acces- 
 sion of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again 
 
434 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in 
 spite of the perplexities we faced, an immense satis- 
 faction about that day. It was as if we had taken off 
 something that had hindered our view of each other, 
 like people who unvizard to talk more easily at a 
 masked ball. 
 
 Fve had since to view our relations from the stand- 
 point of the ordinary observer. I find that vision in 
 the most preposterous contrast with all that really 
 went on between us. I suppose there I should figure 
 as a Mncked seducer, while an unprotected girl suc- 
 cumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it 
 didn't occur to us that there was any personal ?inequality 
 between us. I knew her for my equal mentally ; in so 
 many things she was beyond comparison cleverer than 
 I ; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her 
 mind evoked a flash of joy in mine like the response of 
 an induction wire ; her way of thinking was like watch- 
 ing sunlight reflected from little M'aves upon the side 
 of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, so variously and 
 easily true to its law. In the back of our minds we 
 both had a very definite belief that making love is full 
 of joyous, splendid, tender, and exciting possibilities, 
 and we had to discuss why we shouldn't be to the last 
 deccree lovers. 
 
 Now, what I would like to print here, if it were 
 possible, in all the screaming emphasis of red ink, is 
 this : that the circumstances of my upbringing and the 
 circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not a 
 shadow of belief or feeling that the utmost passionate 
 love between us w^as in itself intrinsically xvrong. IVe 
 told with the fullest particularity just all that I was 
 taught or found out for myself in these matters, and 
 IsabeFs reading and thinking, and the fierce silences of 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 435 
 
 hcT cjovrrncsscs and the brcalhlcss warnings of loaclicis, 
 and all thu sDtial and religions intlnt-nc-cs that had btcii 
 brought to bear upon licr, had worked out to the same 
 void of convietion. The code luul failed with us alto- 
 <;ether. Wc didn't for a moment consider anythinf; 
 but the expediency of what we both, for all our (juiet 
 faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to tlo. 
 
 \W'I1, here you have the state of mind of whole 
 brigades of people, and particularly of young people, 
 nowadays. The current morality hasn't gripped them ; 
 they don't really believe in it at all. They may render 
 it lip-service, but that is (piite another thing. There are 
 scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions; 
 its prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst 
 these ugly suppressions. You may, if you choose, 
 silence the admission of this in literature and current 
 discussion ; you will not prevent it working out in 
 lives. People come up to the great moments of passion 
 crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared, as no really 
 civilized and intelligently planned connnunity would 
 let any one be unprepared. They find themselves 
 hedged about with customs that have no organic hold 
 upon them, and mere discretions all generous spirits 
 are disposed to despise. 
 
 Consider the infinite absurdities of it ! IMullitudes 
 of us are trying to run this complex modern connnunity 
 on a basis of "Hush"" without explaining to our children 
 or discussing with them anything about lovi,' and 
 marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in 
 enforced darknesses and silences. ^Ve are living upon 
 an ancient tradition which everybody doubts and no- 
 body has ever analyzed. We afl'ect a tremendous and 
 cultivated shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the 
 most arbitrary appearance. What ensues.'' What did 
 
436 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ensue with us, for example ? On the one hand was a 
 great desire, robbed of any ap})carance of shame and 
 grossness by the power of love, and on the other hand, 
 the possible jealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so 
 and so, material risks and dangers. It is only in the 
 retrospect that we have been able to grasp something 
 of the effectual case against us. The social prohibition 
 lit by the intense glow of our passion, presented itself 
 as preposterous, irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a 
 monster fit only for mockery. We might be ruined ! 
 AVell, there is a phase in every love-affair when death 
 and ruin are agreeable additions to the prospect. It 
 gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people 
 may hesitate and draw back with a vague instinctive 
 terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, 
 but neither Isabel nor I are timid people. 
 
 We weighed what was against us. We decided 
 iust exactly as scores of thousands of people have 
 decided in this very matter, that if it were possible to 
 keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against 
 it. And so we took our first step. W^ith the hunger 
 of love in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, 
 and still keep everything to ourselves. That cleared 
 our minds of the one persistent obstacle that mattered 
 to us — the haunting presence of Margaret. 
 
 We took that step at last — with all the tremulous 
 joy, the clean abandon, of lovers in Paradise. 
 
 And then we found, as all those scores of thousands 
 of people scattered about us have found, that we could 
 not keep it to ourselves. Love will out. All the rest 
 of this story is the chronicle of that. Love with 
 sustained secrecy cannot be love. It is just exactly the 
 point people do not understand. 
 
LOVE AXD SUCCESS 437 
 
 § 3 
 
 But before things came to that pass, some months 
 and many phases and a sudden journey to America 
 intervene(h 
 
 "This thing spells disaster," I said. " You are too 
 big and I am too big to attempt this secrecy. Think 
 of the intolerable possibility of being found out! At 
 any cost we have to stop — even at the cost of parting." 
 
 "Just because we may be found out ! " 
 
 "Just because we mav be found out." 
 
 There followed a struggle of immense insincerity 
 between us. It is hard to tell who urged and who 
 resisted. 
 
 I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile 
 journey to America that puzzled all my friends. 
 
 I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation 
 with all my strength, put in Ih'itten with sketchy, hasty 
 instructions to edit the paper, and started headlong 
 and with luggage, from which, among other things, my 
 shaving things were omitted, upon a tour round the 
 world. 
 
 Preposterous flight that was ! I remember as a 
 thing almost farcical mv explanations to ]\bugaret, 
 and how frantically anxious I was to prevent the 
 remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I 
 crossed in the Tuscan, a bad, wet boat, and mixed sea- 
 sickness and ungovernable sorrow. I wept — tears. It 
 was inexj)ressibly cjueer and ridiculous — and, good (iod ! 
 how I hated my fcUow-passengcrs ! 
 
 New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and 
 when things slackened, I whirled westward to Chicago — 
 eating and drinking, I remember, in the train from 
 
43S THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate voracity. 
 I did the queerest things to distract myself — no novelist 
 would dare to invent my mental and emotional muddle. 
 Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from 
 civilization that the place is ! and then abruptly, with 
 hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some 
 days in Denver, I found myself at the end of my 
 renunciations, and turned and came back headlong to 
 London. 
 
 Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and 
 incurable trust and confidence that brought me back, 
 or any idea that now I had strength to refrain. It was 
 a sudden realization that after all the separation might 
 succeed; some careless phrasing in one of her jealously 
 read letters set that idea going in my mind — the 
 haunting perception that I might return to London 
 and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it. 
 Honour, discretion, the careers of both of us, became 
 nothing at the thought. I couldn't conceive my life 
 resuming there without Isabel. I couldn't, in short, 
 stand it. 
 
 I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. 
 I ought to have kept upon my way westward — and 
 held out. I couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and I wanted 
 her so badly now that everything else in the world 
 was phantom-like until that want was satisfied. Per- 
 haps 3^ou have never wanted anything like that. I 
 went straight to her. 
 
 But here I come to untellable things. There is 
 no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things 
 are nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except 
 that somehow there falls a light upon them and a 
 wonder. Of how we met, and the thrill of the adven- 
 ture, the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 439 
 
 Imvinr^ (l.ircd, I can't tell — I can but hint of jii.st one 
 aspect, of what an amazing lark — ifs the only word — 
 it seemed to us. The beauty which was the essence of 
 it, which justifies it so far as it will bear justification, 
 eludes statement. 
 
 What can a record of contrived mcetinfrs, of 
 sundering; dillicuUics evaded and overcome, sii^nify 
 here? Or what can it convey to say that one looked 
 deep into two dear, stcadfixst eyes, or felt a heart throb 
 and beat, or <;iipped soft hair softly in a trem])linf; 
 liand ? Jiobbed of encompassing love, these things are 
 of no more value than the taste of good wine or the 
 sight of good pictures, or the hearing of music, — just 
 sensuality and no more. No one can tell love — we can 
 only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences. 
 Given love — given mutuality, and one has cflected a 
 supreme synthesis and come to a new level of life — but 
 only those who know can know. This business has 
 brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had 
 ever expected to bear, but even now I will not say that 
 I regret that wilful home-coming. \Vc loved — to the 
 uttermost. Neither of us could have lo\cd any one 
 else as we did and do love one another. It was ours, 
 that beauty; it existed only between us when we were 
 close together, for no one in the world ever to know 
 save ourselves. 
 
 i\Iy return to the oflice sticks out in my memory 
 with an extreme vividness, because of the wild eagle of 
 j)ride that screamed within me. It was Tuesday morn- 
 ing, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet 
 t xcept Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I 
 came in upon Britten and stood in the doorway. 
 
 " God ! " he said at the sight of me. 
 
 " I'm back,'' I said. 
 
440 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 He looked at my excited face with those red-brown 
 eyes of liis. Silently I defied him to speak his mind. 
 " AVhere did you tarn back ? '' he said at last. 
 
 I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember, 
 my first positive lies to IMargaret in explaining that 
 return. I had written to her from Chicago and again 
 from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on 
 the spot in England for the new session, and that I 
 was coming back — presently. I concealed the name of 
 my boat from her, and made a calculated prevarication 
 when I announced my presence in London. I tele- 
 phoned before I went back for my rooms to be pre- 
 pared. She was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows 
 in Durham, and when she came back to Radnor Square 
 I had been at home a day. 
 
 I remember her return so well. 
 
 My going away and the vivid secret of the present 
 had wiped out from my mind much of our long 
 estrangement. Something, too, had changed in her. 
 I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I 
 saw it plainly. I came out of my study upon the 
 landing when I heard the turmoil of her arrival below, 
 and she came upstairs M-itli a quickened gladness. It 
 was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar 
 dark furs that suited her extremely and reinforced 
 the delicate flush of her sweet face. She held out both 
 her hands to me, and drew me to her unhesitatingly 
 and kissed me. 
 
 " So glad you are back, dear,"" she said. " Oh ! so 
 very glad you are back." 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 441 
 
 I returned her kiss with fi (jiieer feelin;^ at my 
 heart, too uiKliflerentiated to be even a definite sense 
 of guilt or meanness. I tliink it was chielly amaze- 
 ment — at the universe — at myself. 
 
 "I never knew what it was to be away from you," 
 she said. 
 
 I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to ind 
 our cstran<Tement. She put herself so that my arm 
 came caressingly about her. 
 
 "These are jolly furs," I said. 
 
 " I got them for you." 
 
 The parlourmaid appeared below, dealing with the 
 maid and the luggage cab. 
 
 " Tell me all about America," said Margaret. " I 
 feel as though you\l been away six years." 
 
 We went arm-in-arm into her little sitting-room, 
 and I took off the furs for her and sat down upon the 
 chintz-covered sofa by the fire. She had ordered tea, 
 and came and sat by me. I don't know what I had 
 expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected 
 this sudden abolition of our distances. 
 
 *' I want to know all about America," she repeated, 
 with her eyes scrutinizing me. " AVhy did vou come 
 back.?-" 
 
 I repeated the substance of my letters rather 
 lamely, and she sat listening. 
 
 "But why did you turn back — without going to 
 Denver ? " 
 
 " I wanted to come back. I was restless." 
 
 "Restlessness," she said, and thought. '* Vou were 
 restless in Venice. You said it was restlessness took 
 you to America." 
 
 Again she studied me. She turned a Httle awkwardly 
 to her tea-things, and poured needless water I'rom the 
 
442 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 silver kettle into the teapot. Then she sat still for 
 some moments looking at the equipage with ex- 
 pressionless eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of 
 the tahle tremble slightly. I watched her closely. A 
 vague uneasiness possessed me. What might she not 
 know or guess ? 
 
 She spoke at last with an effort. " I wish you 
 were in Parliament again," she said. " Life doesn't 
 give you events enough."" 
 
 " If I was in Parliament again, I should be on the 
 Conservative side." 
 
 ''I know," she said, and was still more thoughtful. 
 
 "Lately," she began, and paused. "Lately I've 
 been reading — you." 
 
 I didn't help her out with what she had to say. I 
 waited. 
 
 *' I didn't understand what you were after. I had 
 misjudged. I didn't know. I think perhaps I was 
 rather stupid." Her eyes were suddenly shining with 
 tears. "You didn't give me much chance to under- 
 stand." 
 
 She turned upon me suddenly with a voice full of 
 tears. 
 
 " Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two 
 hands out to me, " I want to begin over again ! " 
 
 I took her hands, perplexed beyond measure. " ]\Iy 
 dear ! " I said. 
 
 "I want to begin over again." 
 
 I bowed my head to hide my face, and found her 
 hand in mine and kissed it. 
 
 "Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. 
 She leant forward with her arm on the sofa-back, and 
 looked very intently into my face. I felt the most 
 damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 443 
 
 gaze. The lliou^^ht of Isabel's tlarkly shining eyes 
 seemed like a ])hysical presence between us. . . . 
 
 ''Tell me/' I said presently, to break the intoler- 
 able tension, " tell me plainly what you mean by this." 
 
 I sat a little away from her, and then took my tea- 
 cup in hand, with an odd efiect of defending myself. 
 "Have you been reading that old book of mine.''" I 
 asked. 
 
 "That and the paper. I took a complete set from 
 the beirinnine: down to Durham with me. I have read 
 it over, thought it over. I didn't understand — what 
 you were teaching.'' 
 
 There was a little pause. 
 
 *' It all seems so plain to me now,'' she said, "and 
 so true." 
 
 I was jirofoiuidly disconcerted. I put down my 
 tea-cup, stood up in the middle of the hearthrug, and 
 began talking. " I'm tremendously glad, Margaret, 
 that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse," I 
 began. I launched out into a rather trite and windy 
 exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the 
 sofa, looking up into my face, hanging on my words, a 
 deliberate and invincible convert. 
 
 " Yes," she said, " yes." . . . 
 
 I had never doubted my new conceptions before ; 
 now I doubted them profoundly, lint I went on talk- 
 ing. It's the grim irony in the Hves of all politicians, 
 writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at 
 their feet, a new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't 
 their business to atlinit doubts and imperfections. 
 Thev have to go on talking. And I was now so accus- 
 tomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, (pialifications, 
 restatements, and confirmations. . , , 
 
 Martj:aret and I dined together at home. She made 
 
444 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 me open out my political projects to her. "I have 
 been foolish," she said. "I want to help." 
 
 And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me 
 come to her room. I think it was some book I had to 
 take her, some American book I had brought back 
 with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with 
 it, and put it down on the table and turned to go. 
 
 " Husband ! " she cried, and held out her slender 
 arms to me. I was compelled to go to her and kiss 
 her, and she twined them softly about my neck and 
 drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them 
 very gently, and took each wrist and kissed it, and the 
 backs of her hands. 
 
 " Good night," I said. There came a little pause. 
 " Good night, INIargaret," I repeated, and walked very 
 deliberately and with a kind of sham preoccupation to 
 the door. 
 
 I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, 
 watching me. If I had looked up, she would, I knew, 
 have held out her arms to me. . . . 
 
 At the very outset that secret, which was to touch 
 no one but Isabel and myself, had reached out to stab 
 another human being. 
 
 The whole world had changed for Isabel and me ; 
 and we tried to pretend that nothing had changed 
 except a small matter between us. We believed quite 
 honestly at that time that it was possible to keep 
 J this thing that had happened from any reaction at 
 all, save perhaps through some magically enhanced 
 vigour in our Avork, upon the world about us ! Seen in 
 
T.OVE AXD SUCCESS 445 
 
 retrospect, one can realize the absurdity of this belief; 
 within a week I realized it; but that does not alter 
 the fact that we did believe ns much, and that people 
 who are deeplv in love and unable to marry will con- 
 tinue to believe so to the very end of time. They will 
 continue to believe out of existence every consideration 
 that separates them until they have come tofrcther. 
 Then tliev will count the cost, as we two had to do. 
 
 I am tellin<T a story, and not propound infi^ theories 
 in this book ; and chielly I am telling of the ideas and 
 influences and emotions that have happened to me — 
 me as a sort of sounding-board for my world. The 
 moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his 
 measure and say, "At this point or at that you went 
 wrong, and you ought to have done" — so-and-so. 1'he 
 point of interest to the statesman is that it didn't for a 
 moment occur to us to do so-and-so when the time for 
 doini: it came. It amazes me now to think how little 
 cither of us troubled about the established rights or 
 wrongs of the situation. A\'e hadn't an atom of resj)ect 
 for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public 
 morals will say we were very bad peoj)le ; I submit in 
 defence that they are very bad guardians — provocative 
 guardians. . . . And when at last there came a claim 
 against us that had an efl'ective validity for us, we were 
 in the full tide of passionate intimacy. 
 
 I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after 
 Margaret's return. She had suddenly presented her- 
 self to me like something dramatically recalled, fine, 
 generous, infinitelv ca])able of feeling. I was amazed 
 how much I had forgotten her. In my contem})t for 
 vulgarized and conventionalized honour I had forgotten 
 that for me there was such a reality as honour. And 
 here it was, warm and near to me, living, breathing, 
 
446 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 iinsuspectinfT. Margaret's pride was my honour, that 
 I had had no right even to imperil. 
 
 I do not now remember if I thought at that time 
 of going to Isabel and putting this new aspect of the 
 case before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I may have 
 considered even then the possibility of ending what 
 had so freshly and passionately begun. If I did, 
 it vanished next day at the sight of her. Whatever 
 regrets came in the darkness, the daylight brought an 
 obstinate confidence in our resolution aq^ain. We 
 would, we declared, " pull the thing off." Margaret 
 must not know. ^largaret should not know. If 
 Margaret did not know, then no harm whatever 
 would be done. We tried to sustain that. . . . 
 
 For a brief time we had been like two people in a 
 magic cell, magically cut off from the world and full of 
 a light of its own, and then we began to realize that we 
 were not in the least cut off, that the world was all 
 about us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threaten- 
 ing us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore 
 the injury to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. 
 I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden love 
 made no difference to the now irreparable breach 
 between husband and wife. But I never spoke of it 
 to Isabel or let her see that aspect of our case. How 
 could I ? The time for that had gone. . . . 
 
 Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. 
 Distressful elements crept in by reason of our unavoid- 
 able furtiveness ; we ignored them, hid them from each 
 other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves. 
 Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we 
 had to be secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a 
 whispering, warm conspiracy ; then presently it became 
 irksome and a little shameful. Her essential frank- 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 447 
 
 ncss of soul was all against the iiuisks and falsehoods 
 that many women would have enjoyed. Together in 
 our secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other 
 people again it was tiresome to have to watch for the 
 careless, too easy phrase, to snalcli back one's hand 
 from the limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch. 
 
 J^ove becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful 
 thing, if it develops no continuing and habitual intimacy. 
 "We were always meeting, and most gloriously loving 
 and l)eij:inninir — and then we had to snatch at remorse- 
 lessly ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go 
 back to this or that. That is all very well for the 
 intrigues of^idle people, perhaps, but not for an intense 
 personal relationship. It is like lighting a candle for 
 the sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each 
 time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very 
 amusing to children playing with the matches, but not 
 to people who love warm light, and want it in order 
 to do fine and honourable things together. AVe had 
 achieved — I give the ugly phrase that expresses the 
 increasing discoloration in my mind — "illicit inter- 
 course." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in 
 our style. But where were we to end ? . . . 
 
 Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. 
 I think if we could have seen ahead and around us we 
 might have done so. But the glow of our cell blinded us. 
 ... I wonder what might have happened if at that 
 time we had given it up;- . . . AVe propounded it, we met 
 again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering passion 
 for one another reduced that meeting to absurility. . . . 
 
 Presently the idea of children crept between us. 
 It came in from all our conceptions of life and public 
 service; it was, we found, in the (piality of our minds 
 that physical love without children is a little weak, 
 
448 THE NEW JMACHIAVELLI 
 
 timorous, more than a little shameful. AVith imajxina- 
 tive people there very speedily comes a time when it 
 is impossible for that to go on. We hadn't thought 
 of that before — it isn't natural to think of that before. 
 We hadn't known. There is no literature in English 
 dealing with such things. 
 
 There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. 
 These came in their order, and with them, unanticipated 
 tarnishings on the first bright perfection of our rela- 
 tions. For a time these developing phases were no 
 more than a secret and private trouble between us, 
 little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees 
 across that vivid and luminous cell. 
 
 §8 
 
 The Handitch election flung me suddenly into 
 prominence. 
 
 It is still only two years since that struggle, and I 
 will not trouble the reader with a detailed history of 
 events that must be quite sufliciently present in his 
 mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of j ournal- 
 ism have dealt with Handitch and its significance. 
 For the reader very probably, as for most people 
 outside a comparatively small circle, it meant my 
 emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's 
 name in the Blue Wceldij ; I had never as yet been on 
 the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a 
 journalist and writer of no great public standing ; 
 after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little 
 group of persons who stood for the Young Imperialist 
 movement. Handitch was, to a very large extent, my 
 afl'air. I realized then, as a man comes to do, how 
 much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 449 
 
 tlie socoiitl election I was a man takini^ hold of thini;s ; 
 at Kin<;iianistea(l I had been simply a voiing candi- 
 date, a party unit, led about the eonstituenev, told to 
 do this and that, and finally washed in bv fhe /(reat 
 Anti-Imperialist Hood, Hive a starfish rollin<; up a 
 beach. 
 
 My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the 
 party, and 1 do not think I should have got the chance 
 of Ilanditch or indeed any chance at all of Parliament 
 for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with 
 its long record of I^iberal victories and its Liberal 
 majority of '5G42 at the last election, oflcred a 
 hopeless contest. The Liberal dissensions and the 
 belated but by no means contemptible Socialist 
 candidate were providential interpositions. I think, 
 however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in 
 coming down to fight for me, did count tremendously in 
 niv favour. "We aren't going to win, perhaps,'"* said 
 Cru{)]), " but we are going to talk." And until the very 
 eve of victory, we treated Ilanditch not so much as a 
 battlefield as a hoarding. And so it wi\s the Endow- 
 ment of Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics 
 got into English politics. 
 
 riutus, our agent, was scared out of his wits when 
 the thing began. 
 
 ''They're ascribing all sorts of queer ideas to you 
 about the Family," he said. 
 
 " I think the Pamily exists for the good of the 
 children," I said; "is that queer?" 
 
 "Not when you explain it — but they won't let you 
 explain it. And about marriage .^ " 
 
 " Lm all right about marriage — trust me." 
 
 "Of course, if 7/oi6 had children," said Plutus, rather 
 inconbideratcly. . . . 
 
 2 G 
 
450 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 They opened fire upon me in a little electioneerinp^ 
 racf called the Handitch SentincL with a strin^: of 
 garbled quotations and misrepresentations that gave 
 me an admirable text for a speech. I spoke for an 
 hour and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled 
 copy of the Sentinel in my hand, and I made the fullest 
 and completest exposition of the idea of endowing 
 motherhood that I think had ever been made up to 
 that time in England. Its effect on the press was 
 extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite 
 unprecedented space under the impression that I had 
 only to be given rope to hang myself; the Conservatives 
 cut me down or tried to justify me ; the whole country 
 was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the 
 subject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the 
 bookstalls within three days. It sold enormously and 
 brought me bushels of letters. We issued over three 
 thousand in Handitch alone. At meeting after meeting 
 I was heckled upon nothing else. Long before polling 
 day Plutus was converted. 
 
 "It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. 
 " We've dished the Liberals ! To think that such a 
 project should come from our side ! "*' 
 
 But it was only ^vith the declaration of the poll 
 that my battle was won. No one expected more than 
 a snatch victory, and I was in by over fifteen hundred. 
 At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apolo- 
 getics varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. " A 
 renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in 
 his chief daily on the morning after the polling, and 
 claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the 
 pioneers ir^ sanely bold constructive projects. 
 
 I came up to London with a weary but rejoicing 
 Margaret by the night train. 
 
ClIAPTEli THE SECOND 
 
 The Impossible Positiun 
 
 § 1 
 
 To any one who (lid not know of that <]^lowin£^ secret 
 between Isabel and myself, I mii^ht well have appeared 
 at that time the most successful and enviable of men. 
 I had recovered rapidly from an unconn;enial start in 
 political life ; I had become a considerable force through 
 the Blue WceJiI?/, and was shaping an increasingly 
 influential body of opinion ; I had re-entered Parlia- 
 ment with quite dramatic distinction, and in spite of 
 a certain faltering on the part of the orthodox Con- 
 servatives towards the bolder elements in our propa- 
 ganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were 
 making me a power in the party. People were coming 
 to our group, understandings were developing. It was 
 clear we should play a prominent part in the next 
 general election, and tha:, given a Conservative victory, 
 I should be assured of ollice. The world opened out to 
 me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape 
 in my mind, always more concrete, always more prac- 
 ticable; tlie years ahead seemed fulling into order, 
 shining with the credible promise of innnense achieve- 
 ment. 
 
 And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, 
 
 451 
 
452 THE NEW INIACHIAVELLI 
 
 ^vas the secret of my relations with Isabel — like a seed 
 that germinates and thrusts, thrusts relentlessly. 
 
 From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, 
 my meetings with her had been more and more per- 
 vaded by the discussion of our situation. It had 
 innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that 
 we wanted to be together as much as possible — we were 
 beginning to long very much for actual living together 
 in the same house, so that one could come as it were 
 carelessly — unawares — upon the other, busy perhaps 
 about some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each 
 other in the daily atmosphere. Preceding our im- 
 peratively sterile passion, you must remember, outside 
 it, altogether greater than it so far as our individual 
 lives were concerned, there had grown and still grew an 
 enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between 
 us. We brought all our impressions and all our ideas 
 to each other, to see them in each other's light. It is 
 hard to convey that quality of intellectual unison to 
 any one who has not experienced it. I thought more 
 and more in terms of conversation with Isabel ; her 
 possible comments upon things would flash into my 
 mind, oh ! — with the very sound of her voice. 
 
 I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the 
 distance going about Handitch, like any stranger can- 
 vasser; the queer emotion of her approach along the 
 street, the greeting as she passed. The morning of the 
 polling slie vanished from the constituency. I saw her 
 for an instant in the passage behind our Committee 
 rooms. 
 
 " Going ? " said I, 
 
 She nodded. 
 
 "Stay it out. I want you to see the fun. I 
 remember — the other time.'' 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 453 
 
 She didn't answer for a moment or so, and stood 
 uith face averted. 
 
 "'It's ^Marf^aret's sliow," she saiil a])riij)tlv. '*If I 
 
 see her smilin«^ there hke a queen by your side ! She 
 
 did — last time. 1 remember.''"* She caught at a sob, 
 and dashed her hand across lier face iinj)atientlv. 
 " Jeak)us fool, mean and petty, jealous fool ! . . . 
 Clood luck, old man, to vou ! You're iroinix to win. 
 Ihit I don't want to sec the end of it all the 
 same. . . ." 
 
 " Good-bye ! "* said I, clasping her hand as some 
 supporter appeared in the passage. . . . 
 
 I came back to London victorious, and a little 
 flushed and coarse with victory ; and so soon as I could 
 break awav I went to Isabel's flat and found her white 
 and worn, with the stain of secret weeping about her 
 eves. I came into the room to her and shut the 
 door. 
 
 *" You said I'd win," I said, and held out my arms. 
 
 She hugged me closely for a moment. 
 
 " i\Iy dear," I whispered, "it's nothing — without 
 you — nothing ! " 
 
 We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she 
 slipped from mv hold. "Look!" she said, smiling 
 like winter sunshine. " I've had in all the morning 
 papers — the pile of tiicm, and you — resounding." 
 
 " It's more than I dared hope." 
 
 '•Or I."' 
 
 She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and 
 then she was sobbin<r in mv arms. "The bi«r<xer vou 
 are — the more you show,'^ she said — " the more we arc 
 parted. I know, I know " 
 
 I held her close to me, making no answer. 
 
 Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, 
 
454 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and wiped her eyes and sat down on the Httle sofa by 
 the fire ; and I sat down beside her. 
 
 "I didn't know all there was in love," she said, 
 staring at the coals, " when we went love-making." 
 
 I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her 
 dear soft hair in my hand and kissed it. 
 
 "YouVe done a great thing this time," she said. 
 " Handitch will make you." 
 
 "It opens big chances," I said. "But why arc you 
 weeping, dear one ? " 
 
 " Envy," she said, " and love." 
 
 "You're not lonely?" 
 
 " Fve plenty to do — and lots of people.*' 
 
 "Well.?" 
 
 " I want you." 
 
 " You've got me." 
 
 She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I 
 want you," she said, "just as if I had nothing of you. 
 You don't understand — how a woman wants a man. I 
 thought once if I just gave myself to you it would be 
 enough. It was nothing — it was just a step across the 
 threshold. My dear, every moment you are away I 
 ache for you — ache ! I want to be about when it isn't 
 love-making or talk. I want to be doing things for 
 you, and watching you when you're not thinking of me. 
 All those safe, careless, intimate things. And some- 
 thing else " She stopped. " Dear, I don't want to 
 
 bother you. I just want you to know I love you. . . ." 
 
 She caught my head in her hands and kissed it, then 
 stood up abruptly. 
 
 I looked up at her, a little perplexed. 
 
 " Dear heart," said I, " isn't this enough ? YouVe 
 my councillor, my colleague, my right hand, the secret 
 soul of my life — — " 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE TOSITION 455 
 
 "And I want to darn your socks,'' she said, smiling 
 back at inc. 
 
 " YouVc insatiable." 
 
 She smiled. " No,"*' she said. *' I'm not insatiable, 
 IMastcr. lUit Vm a woman in love. .And I'm lindinf; 
 out what I want, and what is necessary to me — and 
 what I can't have. That's all." 
 
 " We iTC't a lot." 
 
 "We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for 
 the thinirs wc like. It's verv evident we've got nearlv 
 all we can ever have of one another — and I'm not 
 satisfied." 
 
 "What more is there?" 
 
 "For you — very little. I wonder. For me — every- 
 thing. Yes — everything. You didn't mean it; you 
 didn't know any more than I did when I began, but 
 lt)ve between a man and a woman is sometimes very 
 one-sided. Fearfully one-sided ! That's all. . . ." 
 
 " Don't you ever want children .''" she said abiiiptly. 
 
 " I suppose I do." 
 
 "You don't!" 
 
 " I haven't thought of them." 
 
 "A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have. ... I 
 "want them — like hun<xer. Your children, and home 
 with you. Keally, continually you ! That's the 
 trouble. ... I can't have 'em, and I can't have you." 
 
 She was crying, and through her tears she laughed. 
 
 "I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get 
 this over. I'm so discontented and miserable ; I've got 
 to tell you. It would come between us if I didn't. 
 I'm in love with you, with everything — with all my 
 brains. I'll pull through all right. I'll be good, 
 never you fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all 
 my being. This election You're going up ; 
 
456 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 youVe going on. In these papers — you're a great big 
 fact. It's suddenly come home to me. At the back 
 of my mind I've always had the idea I was going 
 to have you somehow presently for myself — I mean to 
 have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to 
 get meals for, to watch for of an evening. It's a sort 
 of habitual background to my thought of you. And 
 it's nonsense — utter nonsense ! " She stopped. She 
 was crying and choking. " And the child, you know 
 —the child ! " 
 
 I Avas troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and 
 its intimations were clear and stronfj. 
 
 " We can't have that," I said. 
 
 " No," she said, " we can't have that." 
 
 " We've got our own things to do." 
 
 " Your things," she said. 
 
 " Aren't they yours too ? " 
 
 " Because of you," she said. 
 
 *' Aren't they your very own things ? " 
 
 ''Women don't have that sort of very own thing. 
 Indeed, it's true ! And think ! You've been down 
 there preaching the goodness of children, telling them 
 the only good thing in a state is happy, hopeful chil- 
 dren, working to free mothers and children " 
 
 '' And we give our own children to do it ? " I said. 
 
 " Yes," she said. " And sometimes I think it's too 
 much to give — too much altogether. . . . Children 
 get into a woman's brain — when she mustn't have 
 them, especially when she must never hope for them. 
 Think of the child we mio^ht have now ! — the little 
 creature with soft, tender skin, and little hands and 
 little feet ! At times it haunts me. It comes and says. 
 Why wasn't I given life ? I can hear it in the night. . . . 
 The world is full of such little ghosts, dear lover — little 
 
THE IMrOSSlBLE rOSlTlOX 457 
 
 tilings that asked for life and wero refused. They 
 clamour to me. It's like a little list beatinf]^ at my 
 heart. Love children, beautiful cliildren. Little cold 
 hands that tear at my heart ! Oh, my heart and my 
 lord ! " She was Iioldin'T mv aim with hotli her hands 
 and weeping; against it, and now she drew herself to 
 my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. 
 "I shall never sit with vour child on my knee and 
 you beside me — never, and I am a woman and your 
 lover! . . r 
 
 §2 
 
 But the profound impossibility of our relation was 
 now becoming more and more apparent to us. AVe 
 found ourselves seeking justification, clinging passion- 
 ately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impos- 
 sible and fated. We wanted (piite intensely to live 
 tofrether and have a child, but also we wanted very 
 many other things that were incompatible willi these 
 desires. It was extraordinarily diflicult to weigh our 
 political and intellectual ambitions against those 
 intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according 
 as one found oneself grasping this valued thing or 
 that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything 
 aside for our love, and have that as we wanted it. 
 Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or 
 even chiefly, a thing in itself — it is for the mo>t 
 part a value set upon things. Our love was inter- 
 woven with all our other interests ; to go out of the 
 world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing 
 the best parts of each other ; we loved the sight of 
 each other engaged finely and characteristically, we 
 
458 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 knew each other best as activities. We had no 
 delusions about material facts ; we didn't want each 
 other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully 
 alive. We wanted to do big things together, and 
 for us to take each other openly and desperately 
 would leave us nothing in the world to do. We 
 Avanted children indeed ])assionately, but children 
 with every helpful chance in the world, and children 
 born in scandal would be handicapped at every turn. 
 AVe wanted to share a home, and not a solitude. 
 
 And when we were at this stage of realization, 
 beo-an the intimations that we were found out, and 
 that scandal was afoot against us. . . . 
 
 I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately 
 mentioned it, with that steady grey eye of his watching 
 me, as an instance of the preposterous falsehoods people 
 will circulate. It came to Isabel almost simultaneously 
 through a married college friend, who made it her 
 business to demand either confirmation or denial. It 
 filled us both with consternation. In the surprise of 
 the moment Isabel admitted her secret, and her friend 
 went off " reserving her freedom of action." 
 
 Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends 
 with grave faces and an atmosphere of infinite tact 
 invaded us both. Other friends ceased to invade either 
 of us. It was manifest we had become — we knew not 
 how — a private scandal, a subject for duologues, an 
 amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few 
 brief weeks it seemed London passed from absolute 
 unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its 
 knowledge of our relations. 
 
 It was just the most inappropriate time for that 
 disclosure. The long smouldering antagonism to my 
 endowment of motherhood ideas had flared up into an 
 
THE iiNirossiHr.E position 459 
 
 active cainpaii;ii in Ihc K.vp}(ri!;nt()}\ and it would ])e 
 alto<;cthc'r disastrous to us it" 1 siiould be convicted of 
 any personal irre<;ularity. It was just because of the 
 manifest and challenging respectability of my position 
 that I had been able to carry tiie tiling as far iis I had 
 done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, 
 and scamlal was pouring in. ... It chanced, too, that 
 a wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through 
 London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of 
 the consciously just finds an ally in tlie panic of the 
 undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgctt had been 
 preaching against social corruption with extraordinary 
 force, and had roused the Church of England people 
 to a kind of competition in denunciation. The old 
 methods of the Anti-Socialist campaign had been 
 renewed and had offered far too wide a scope and 
 too tempting an opportunity for private animosity to 
 ])e restricted to the private affairs of the Socialists. I 
 had intimations of an extensive circulation of "private 
 and confidential " letters. . . . 
 
 I think there can be nothing else in life quite like 
 the unnervinfj realization that rumour and scandal are 
 afoot about one. Abruptly one's confidence in the 
 solidity of the universe disapj)ears. One walks silenced 
 through a world that one feels to be full of inaudible 
 accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it 
 out into the open, separate truth and falsehoo(.l. It 
 slinks from you, turns aside its face. Old acquaintances 
 suddenly evaded me, made extraordinary excuses; men 
 who had presumed on the verge of my world and 
 pestered me with an intrusive enterprise, now took 
 the bold step of flat repudiation. I became doubtful 
 about the return of a nod, retracted all those tentacles 
 of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. 
 
46o THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I still grow warm with amazed indignation when I 
 recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the 
 steps of the Climax Club, cut me dead. "By God !" 
 I cried, and came near catching him by the throat and 
 wringing out of him what of all good deeds and bad, 
 could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty 
 beyond comparison, to dare to play the judge to me. 
 And then I had an open slight from IMrs. Millingham, 
 wdiom I had counted on as one counts upon the sunrise. 
 I had not expected things of that sort ; they were dis- 
 concerting beyond measure ; it was as if the world were 
 giving way beneath my feet, as though something failed 
 in the essential confidence of life, as though a hand of 
 wet ice had touched my heart. Similar things were 
 happening to Isabel. Yet we went on, working, visit- 
 ing, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of 
 implacable forces against us. 
 
 For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to 
 account for this campaign. I went about watchful, 
 alert, raging internally. I suspected every one. For 
 a time, I will confess, I turned my thoughts to Altiora 
 Bailey. There was a certain reason in that. The 
 Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of 
 the Young Liberal group they had done so much to 
 inspire and organize ; their dinner-table had long been 
 a scene of hostile depreciation of the Blue Weeldij and 
 all its allies ; week after week Altiora proclaimed that 
 I was " doing nothing,^' and found other causes for our 
 bye-election triumphs ; I counted Chambers Street a 
 dangerous place for me. Always I had been a wasp 
 in their spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, 
 critical, antagonistic. I admired their work and 
 devotion enormously, but I had never concealed my 
 contempt for a certain childish vanity they displayed, 
 
THE IMrOSSIBLE POSITIOX 461 
 
 and for Uio frc(iiicnt puerility of their ]iolitical 
 inlrii^ues. Vet it scarcely seemed consistent ^vith a 
 certain «;allantry in Altiora's character that she shouUl 
 use a private scandal a^^ainst me. 
 
 Then with a real feelinf^ of relief towards her, I 
 came upon the culprits, the IJooles, those queer rivals 
 and allies and under-studies of the Baileys. It was 
 odd I didn't think of the IJooles from the outset, but 
 I didn't. Countini; on a certain j)hysical resemblance 
 to Altiora, IMrs. Boole had set herself (|uite deliberately 
 to plagiarize her success, and had contrived the oddest 
 duplication. It is one of the penalties of success, this 
 usurpation of a personality, and IVIrs. Boole managed 
 to carry it even to a similarity of intonation and a 
 travesty of Altiora's relations to her husband. But 
 she had none of that largeness of mind one admired 
 in Altiora; she was a vulgar careerest aiming only at 
 prominence, and perhaps her best quality was a real 
 unreasoning devotion to what she imagined were her 
 great examplar\s interests. She felt no doubt that 
 what injured Altiora must necessarily injure her. And 
 these Booles, more galled by my manifest disregard of 
 Bailey ism than the Baileys could ever have been, set 
 themselves industriously with all the loyalty of parasites 
 to disseminate a highly coloured scandal against me. 
 It was ahnost entirely their doing, I am per>uadeil ; at 
 the worst the Baileys were guilty only of a passive 
 ac(|uiesccnce. But the Books certainly needed no 
 help. Boole, I found, was warning fathers of girls 
 against me as a *' reckless libertine,"''' and his wife. 
 Hushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her 
 fender curb after dinner, and pledging little parties 
 of five or six women at a time with iiiHnite gusto 
 not to let the matter go further. Our cell was open 
 
462 THE NEW JMACHIAVELLI 
 
 to the world, and a bleak, distressful daylight stream- 
 
 ing m. 
 
 I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Mrs. 
 I^oolc from the reports that came to me. Isabel had 
 been doing a series of five or six articles in the Political 
 Review in support of our campaign, the Political Review 
 which had hitherto been loyally Bailey ite. Quite her 
 best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those 
 papers, and no doubt the Baileyites had had not only 
 to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her 
 praises in the mouths of the tactless influential. ]\lrs. 
 Boole is a person of literary ambitions herself, but she 
 writes a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argu- 
 ment badly ; the literary gift even of Altiora is not 
 above criticism, and Isabel has her University training 
 behind her and wrote from the first with the stark 
 power of a clear-headed man. " Now we know," said 
 Mrs. Boole on her curb, with just a gleam of malice 
 showing through her brightness, "now we know who 
 helps with the writing ! "" 
 
 She revealed astonishing knowledge. 
 
 For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover 
 her sources. I had, indeed, a desperate intention 
 of challenging her, and then I bethought me of a 
 youngster named Curmain, who had been my supple- 
 mentary typist and secretary for a time, and whom I 
 had sent on to her before the days of our breach. " Of 
 course ! " said I, " Curmain ! " He was a tall, drooping, 
 sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, 
 and a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I sus- 
 pected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found 
 him one day on a turn of the stairs looking guilty and 
 ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's 
 manifestly in a state of hot indignation. I saw 
 
THE nrPOSSIBI.E rOSITION 463 
 
 iiothini^, bill I i'vlt cvcrvtliinir in the air between llieni. 
 I liatc this pestcrini; of servants, but at the same time 
 I di(hi't want Ciirniain wiped out of existence, so I had 
 packed him off without unnecessary discussion to Mrs. 
 Hoole. I had intended liim for Altiora at first. Mrs. 
 Boole came in as an aftcrthoutrjit. He was (juick and 
 cheap, anvhow, and Ithoui^ht Altiora's i^cncral austerity 
 ought to redeem him if anything could; the Chambers 
 Street housemaid wasn't for any man's kissing and 
 showed it, and the stamps and private letters were 
 looked after with an efliciency altogether surpassing 
 mine. But alas ! he fell to Mrs. Boole — I didn't 
 reflect on what the diflerence meant — and she, I've no 
 doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesir- 
 able about me, and scenting a story, had him to dinner 
 alone one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. 
 She got (piitc to the bottom of it, — it must have been 
 a queer duologue. She read IsabeFs careless, intimate 
 letters to me, so to speak, by this proxy, ami she wasn't 
 ashamed to use this information in the service of the 
 bitterness that had sprung up in her since my political 
 breach with the people to whom she had attached 
 herself. It was essentially a personal bitterness ; it 
 helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me. 
 My downfall in any public sense was sheer waste, — the 
 loss of a man. She knew she was behavinc: badlv, and 
 so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse. 
 She'd got names and dates and places ; the efficiency of 
 her information was irresistible. And she set to work 
 at it marvellously. Never, in all her pursuit of 
 ellicient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels of 
 efficiency as her understudy attiiined in this pursuit. I 
 wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-advised and angrv. 
 I went to her and tried to stoj) her. The woman 
 
464 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 ^voul(ln't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied and 
 lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old 
 which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't 
 only, I think, that she couldn't bear our political and 
 social influence ; she also — I realized at that interview 
 — couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to her the 
 sickliest thing, — a thing quite unendurable. While 
 such things were, the virtue had gone out of her 
 world. 
 
 I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd 
 just come in and taken oft' her hat, and she was grey 
 and dishevelled and tired, and in a business-like dress 
 of black and crimson, a frank adoption of Altiora's 
 colours, that didn't suit her and was muddy about 
 the skirts. She'd a cold in her head and sniffed 
 penetratingly ; she avoided my eye as she talked and 
 interrupted everything I had to say ; she kept stab- 
 bing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with a long 
 hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with 
 grief at the debacle she was deliberately organizing. 
 
 " Then part," she cried, " part. If you don't want 
 a smashing up, — part ! You two have got to be 
 parted. You've got never to see each other ever, never 
 to speak." There was a zest in her voice. " We're not 
 circulating stories," she denied. "No ! And Curmain 
 never told us anything — Curmain is an excellent young 
 man ; oh ! a quite excellent young man. You mis- 
 judged him altogether." . . . 
 
 I was equally unsuccessful with Boole. I caught 
 the little wretch in the League Club, and he wriggled 
 and lied. He tried to get past me as though he hadn't 
 seen me. He wouldn't say where he had got his facts, 
 he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave 
 him the names of two men who had come to me 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 465 
 
 nstonishcd and incredulous, he alleniplcd absurdlv to 
 make nie think they had told him. lie did his horrible 
 little best to sugf^est that honest old Quackett, who had 
 ju^t left Enfrland for the Cape, was the real scandal- 
 nionf]^er. That struck me as mean, even for IJoole. 
 I've still the odd vivid impression of his flutinf^ voice, 
 excusinf^ the inexcusable, his h\^^ shifty face evadin^ir 
 me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shruf^^^ing 
 shoulders, and the would-be exculpatory gestures — 
 Iloundsditch gestures — of his enormous ugly hands. 
 
 " I can assure you, my dear fellow," he lisped ; " I 
 can assure you we've done everything to shield vou — 
 everything/' . . , 
 
 § 3 
 
 Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in 
 the ofiice. IShe made a white-robed, duskv figure 
 against the deep blues of my big window. I sat at 
 my desk and tore a (juill pen to pieces as I talked. 
 
 "The liooles don't intend to let this drop," I 
 said. "They mean that every one in London is to 
 know about it." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 " Well I " I said. 
 
 "Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good 
 waiting for things to overtake us; we're at the parting 
 of the ways." 
 
 " \Vhat are we to do ? " 
 
 " They won't let us go on." 
 
 "Damn them! To be separated bv people like 
 that ! " 
 
 " They are organizing scandal." 
 
 2 II 
 
466 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " It's no good waiting for things to overtake us,"' I 
 echoed ; " they have overtaken us/' I turned on her. 
 " What do you want to do ? " 
 
 " Everything,'' she said. " Keep you and have our 
 work. Aren't we Mates ? " 
 
 " We can't.'' 
 
 " And we can't ! " 
 
 " I've got to tell Margaret," I said. 
 
 " Margaret ! " 
 
 "I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in 
 front with it. I've been wincing about Margaret 
 secretly " 
 
 " I know. You'll have to tell her. Yes. . . ." 
 
 She leant back against the bookcases under the 
 window. 
 
 "We've had some good times. Master," she said, 
 with a sigh in her voice. 
 
 And then for a long time we stared at one another 
 in silence. 
 
 " We haven't much time left," she said. 
 
 " Shall we bolt ? " I said. 
 
 "And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes 
 going round the room. " And that "^ " And her head 
 indicated Westminster. " No ! " 
 
 I said no more of bolting. 
 
 "We've got to screw ourselves up to surrender," 
 she said. 
 
 " Something." 
 
 "A lot." 
 
 "Master," she said, "it isn't all sex and stuff 
 between us ? " 
 
 "No!" 
 
 " I can't give up the work. Our work's my life." 
 
 We came upon another long pause. 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 467 
 
 " No 0110 will believe we've ceased to be lovers — if 
 we simply do," she said. 
 
 "We shouldn't." 
 
 " We've got to do something more parting than 
 that. AVe've got to part — part thoroughlv, opeidy, 
 finally." 
 
 I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming 
 to something. 
 
 "I could marry Shocsmith," she said abruptly. 
 
 "But " I objected. 
 
 "He knows. It wasn't fair. I told him." 
 
 "Oh, that explains," I said. "There's been a kind 
 of sulkiness But — you told him ?" 
 
 She nodded. "He's rather badly hurt," she said. 
 " He's been a good friend to me. He's curiously 
 loyal. But something, something he said one day — 
 forced me to let him know. . . . That's been the beast- 
 liness of all this secrecy. That's the beastliness of all 
 secrecy. Vou have to spring surprises on people. 
 But he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd already sus- 
 pected. He wants me very badly to marry him. . . .'"* 
 
 "But you don't want to marry him ?" 
 
 "I'm forced to think of it." 
 
 "But does he want to marry vou at that? Take 
 you as a present from the world at large ? — against 
 your will and desire.'^ ... I don't understand him." 
 
 " He cares for me." 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "He thinks this is a fearful moss for mo. He 
 wants to pull it straight." 
 
 We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations tliat 
 obstinately refused to take up the realities of this 
 proposition. 
 
 " I don't want vou to marry Shoesmith," I said at last. 
 
468 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 "Don't you like him?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " He's a very clever and sturdy person — and very 
 generous and devoted to me." 
 
 " And me ? " 
 
 *"• You can't expect that. He thinks you are won- 
 derful — and, naturally, that you ought not to have 
 started this." 
 
 " I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that 
 but myself. I'm quite ready to think it myself." 
 
 " He'd let us be friends — and see each other at 
 times." 
 
 " Let us be friends ! " I cried, after a long pause. 
 "You and me!" 
 
 " He wants me to be eno-ao-ed soon. He wants 
 our parting to be clear and conclusive. Then, he 
 says, he can go round fighting these rumours, defend- 
 ing us both — and force a quarrel on the Booles." 
 
 " I don't understand him," I said, and added, " I 
 don't understand you." 
 
 I was staring at her face. It seemed white and set 
 in the dimness. 
 
 "Do you really mean this, Isabel ?'''' I asked. 
 
 " What else is there to do, my dear ? — what else is 
 there to do at all ? Fve been thinking day and night. 
 You can't go away with me. You can't smash your- 
 self suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die 
 than that should happen. Look what you are becom- 
 ing in the country ! Look at all you've built up ! — me 
 helping. I wouldn't let you do it if you could. I 
 wouldn't let you — if it were only for Margaret's sake. 
 This . . . closes the scandal, closes everything." 
 
 " It closes all our life together," I cried. 
 
 She was silent. 
 
THE IMrOSSTBLE TOSITION 469 
 
 "It never oui^lit to have ])ef^iin/' I said. 
 
 She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees 
 before me, with her hands upon my shoulder and her 
 eyes meeting mine. 
 
 "!My dear/' she said very earnestly, "don't mis- 
 understand me ! Don't think Fni retreatin<r from the 
 things we've done ! Our love is the best thing I could 
 ever have had from life. Nothing can ever ecpial it; 
 nothing could ever equal the beauty and delight you 
 and I have had toirether. Never ! You have lovcil 
 me ; you do love me. . . . 
 
 " No one could ever know how to love you as I 
 have loved you ; no one could ever love me as you have 
 loved me, my king. And it's just because it's been so 
 splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than 
 have a tithe of all this wiped out of my life again — for 
 it's made me, it's all I am — dear, it's years since I 
 began loving you — it's just because of its goodness that 
 I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end in the 
 smashing up of all the big things I understand in you 
 and love in you. . . . 
 
 " What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" 
 she went on. "All the h\a: interests in our lives will 
 vanish — everything. We shall become specialized 
 people — people overshadowed by a situation. \\'e 
 shall be an elopement, a romance — all our breadth and 
 meaning gone ! People will always think of it first 
 when they think of us; all our work and aims will be 
 "warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good 
 enough, dear ? Just to specialize. ... I think of you. 
 We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, 
 but do we want to spend all our lives defending it and 
 justifying it.^ And there's that other life. I know- 
 now vou care for ^Slariraret — vou care more than vou 
 
470 THE NEW MACIIIA^^ELL1 
 
 think you do. You have said fuie things of her. Fve 
 watched you about her. Little things have dropped 
 from you. She's given her life for you ; she's nothing 
 Avithout you. You feel that to your marrow all the 
 time you are thinking about these things. Oh, Tm 
 not jealous, dear. I love you for loving her. I love 
 you in relation to her. But there it is, an added 
 weight against us, another thing worth saving."" 
 
 Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels 
 and looked up into my face. " We've done wrong — and 
 parting's paying. It's time to pay. We needn't have 
 paid, if we'd kept to the track. . . , You and I, jMaster, 
 we've got to be men." 
 
 " Yes/' I said ; " we've got to be men." 
 
 §4 
 
 I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation 
 by my intolerable dread that otherwise the thing might 
 come to her through some stupid and clumsy informant. 
 She might even meet ]\Irs. Boole, and have it from her. 
 
 I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk 
 that night in that large study of mine in Radnor 
 Square, waiting for JMargaret to come home. It was 
 oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception-room ; 
 only it was for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, 
 cruel hands. I had left the door open so that she 
 would come in to me. 
 
 I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and 
 then she was in the doorway. " May I come in ? " she 
 said. 
 
 " Do,*" I said, and turned round to her. 
 
 " Working ? " she said. 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 471 
 
 '' lliirtl," I an.s\VL'iccI. *' Wlicic have ijnn been ? '' 
 
 "At the Vallcrvs'. jNIr. Evesham was talking about 
 vou. Thev were all talkiii*;-. I doiTt tliink everybody 
 knew who I was. Just Mrs. Mumble Td been to 
 them. Lord Wardenham doesn't like you.'"* 
 
 ^' lie doesn't" 
 
 " But they all feel you're rather ])ig, anyhow. 
 Then I went on to Park Lane to hear a new jjianist 
 and some other music at Eva's." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Then I looked in at the IJrabants' for some 
 niidni«;lit tea before I eame on here. They'd got 
 some writers — and Grant was there." 
 
 " You have been flying round. . . ." 
 
 There was a little pause between us. 
 
 I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the 
 slender grace of her golden-robed body. What gulfs 
 there were between us ! " You've been amused," I said. 
 
 " It's been amusing. You've been at the House .'*" 
 
 "The Medical Education Bill kept me." . . . 
 
 After all, why should I tell her .^ She'd got to a 
 way of living that fulfilled her recpiirements. Perhajjs 
 she'd never hear. But all that day and the day before 
 rd been making u[) my mind to do the thing. 
 
 "I want to tell you something," I said. "I wish 
 you'd sit down for a moment or so." . . . 
 
 Once I had begun, it seemed to me I had to go 
 through with it. 
 
 Something in the quality of my voice gave her an 
 intimation of unusual gravity. She looked at me 
 steadily for a moment and sat down slowly in my 
 armchair. " What is it .'' " she said. 
 
 I went on aw k ward 1 v. ** I've got to tell you — 
 something extraordinarily distressing," I said. 
 
4/2 THE NEW INIACHIAVELLI 
 
 She was manifestly altogether unaware. 
 
 " There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad 
 — I've only recently heard of it — about myself — and 
 Isabel." 
 
 " Isabel ! " 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " What do they say ? '' she asked. 
 
 It was difficult, I found, to speak. 
 
 " They say she's my mistress." 
 
 "Oh! How abominable!" 
 
 She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our 
 eyes met. 
 
 " WeVe been great friends," I said. 
 
 " Yes. And to make that of it. My poor dear ! 
 But how can they ? " She paused and looked at me. 
 " It's so incredible. How can any one believe it ? I 
 couldnt." 
 
 She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. 
 Her expression changed to dread. There was a tense 
 stillness for a second, perhaps. 
 
 I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and 
 dropped a handful of paper fasteners. 
 
 "Margaret," I said, "I'm afraid you'll have to 
 believe it.'' 
 
 §5 
 
 Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her 
 again, her face was very white, and her distressed eyes 
 scrutinized me. Her lips quivered as she spoke. 
 " You really mean — that ? " she said. 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " I never dreamt." 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 473 
 
 "I never meant you to dream." 
 
 "And that is why — we've been apart ?" 
 
 I thought. " I suppose it is/' 
 
 "Why have you told me now ? " 
 
 "Tliose rumours. I dichTt want any one else to 
 tell vou."" 
 
 '"Or else it wouldn't have mattered?'' 
 
 " No." 
 
 She turned her eyes from me to the lire, 'i'hen for 
 a moment she looked about the room she had made 
 for me, and then (juite silently, with a childish ([uiver- 
 ing of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon 
 her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her 
 dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms 
 dropped limp over the arms of her chair, and her eye.s 
 averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch 
 her tears. " I am sorry, INIargaret,"" I said. " I was 
 in love. ... I did not understand. . . ."* 
 
 Tresently she asked : " What are you going to do .'' "* 
 
 " You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your 
 affair — I want to know what you — what you want." 
 
 " You want to leave me ? " 
 
 " If you want me to, I must." 
 
 "Leave Tarliament — leave all the things vou are 
 doing, — all this fine movement of yours.'' " 
 
 " No." I spoke sullenly. " I don't want to leave 
 anything. I want to stay on. I've told vou, because 
 I think we — Isabel and I, I mean — have got to drive 
 through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how 
 far things may go, how much people mav feel, and I 
 can't, I can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to 
 any revelation " 
 
 She made no answer. 
 
 *' When the thing began — T knew it was stupid, 
 
474 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 but I thoiiglit it was a thing that wouldirt change, 
 wouldn't be anything but itself, wouldn't unfold — 
 consequences. . . . People have got hold of these vague 
 rumours. . . . Directly it reached any one else but — 
 but us two — I saw it had to come to you." 
 
 I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have 
 always had with Margaret, of not being altogether sure 
 she heard, of being doubtful if she understood. I per- 
 ceived that once again I had struck at her and shattered 
 a thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't 
 get at her, to help her, or touch her mind ! I stood 
 up, and at my movement she moved. She produced a 
 little dainty handkerchief, and made an effort to wipe 
 her face with it, and held it to her eyes. "Oh, my 
 Husband ! " she sobbed. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " she said, with her voice 
 muffled by her handkerchief. 
 
 " We're going to end it,'** I said. 
 
 Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. 
 I drew a chair beside her and sat down. " You and I, 
 Margaret, have been partners,"" I began. " We've built 
 up this life of ours together ; I couldn't have done it 
 without you. We've made a position, created a 
 work *' 
 
 She shook her head. " You," she said. 
 
 " You helping. I don't want to shatter it — if you 
 don't want it shattered. I can't leave my work. I 
 can't leave you. I want you to have — all that you 
 have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've 
 made an immense and tragic blunder. My character 
 
 and accident have conspired We'll pay — in 
 
 ourselves, not in our public service." 
 
 I halted again. Margaret remained very still. 
 
 " I want you to understand that the thing is at an 
 
THE IMrOSSIBLE rOSITION 475 
 
 end. It is dciiiiilcly at an end. AVu — we talked — 
 yesterday. We mean to end it alto(;etlier." I clenched 
 my liands. "She's — she's goin^ to marry Arnold 
 Shoesmith.'' 
 
 I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I 
 heard the rustle of lier movement as she turned on me. 
 
 " It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation. 
 " We're doing nothing shabby. He knows. lie will. 
 It's all as right — as things can be now. AVe're not 
 cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing things 
 straight — now. Of course, you know. . . . We 
 shall — we shall have to make sacrifices. Give things 
 up pretty completely. . . . \Ve shall have not to see 
 each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not a long 
 time. Or write — or just any of that sort of thing 
 ever 
 
 Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I 
 found myself crying uncontrollably — as I have never 
 cried since I was a little child. I was amazed and 
 horrified at myself. And wonderfully, IVIargaret was 
 on her knees beside me, Nvith her arms about me, 
 mingling her weeping with mine. " Oh, my Husband ! '"* 
 she cried, "my poor Ilusl^and ! Does it hurt you so .^ 
 I would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I 
 love you. I love you over and away and above all these 
 jealous little things ! " 
 
 She drew down my head to her as a mother might 
 draw down the head of a son. She caressed me, weeping 
 bitterly with me. *' Oh ! my dear," she sobbed, *' my 
 dear ! I've never seen you cry ! I've never seen you 
 crv. Ever ! I didn't know you could. Oh ! my dear ! 
 Can't you have her, my dear, if you want her.'^ I can't 
 bear it ! Let me help you, dear. Oh ! my Husband ! 
 i\Iy ^lan ! I can't bear to have you cry ! " For a time 
 
476 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 she held me in silence. " Tve thouoht this miMit 
 happen, I dreamt it might liappen. You two, I mean. 
 It was dreaming put it into my head. When I've seen 
 you together, so glad with each other. . . . Oh ! Hus- 
 band mine, believe me ! believe me ! I'm stupid, Fm 
 cold, Fm only beginning to realize how stupid and cold, 
 but all I want in all the world is to give my life to 
 you.'' . . , 
 
 §6 
 
 " We can't part in a room,"' said Isabel. 
 
 " We'll have one last talk together," I said, and 
 planned that we should meet for a half a day between 
 Dover and Walmer and talk ourselves out. I still 
 recall that day very well, recall even the curious exalta- 
 tion of grief that made our mental atmosphere dis- 
 tinctive and memorable. We had seen so much of one 
 another, had become so intimate, that we talked of 
 parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible 
 remoteness. We w^ent together up over the cliffs, and 
 to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the 
 "white, quaint-lanterned lighthouses of the South Fore- 
 land. There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we 
 sat talking. It was a spacious day, serenely blue and 
 warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely below a black 
 tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and 
 engaged in mysterious manoeuvres. Shrieking gulls 
 and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, 
 and dived and swooped ; and a skerry of weedy, fallen 
 chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again, as 
 the tide fell and rose. 
 
 We talked and thought that afternoon on every 
 aspect of our relations. It seems to me now we talked so 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 477 
 
 wide and far that scarcely an issue in the life between 
 man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch 
 upon. Lyin^ there at Isabers feet, I have beccjme for 
 mvsL'lf a symbol of all this world-witle problem between 
 duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still 
 to solve. The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us 
 out of ourselves until we were somethiiif; representative 
 and general. She was womanhood become articulate, 
 talking to her lover. 
 
 *' I ought," I said, " never to have loved you."* 
 
 "It wasn't a thing planned," she said. 
 
 "I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, 
 never to have turned back from America. 
 
 "Tm glad we did it,'** she said. "Don't think I 
 repent.'' 
 
 I looked at her. 
 
 "I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as 
 though she clung to her life in saying it. 
 
 I remember we talked for a lonir time of divorce. 
 It seemed to us then, and it seems to us still, that it 
 ought to have been possible for ]\Iargaret to divorce 
 me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and 
 ugly publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow 
 such a readjustment. We went on to the whole 
 perplexing riddle of marriage. A\'e criticized the 
 current code, how muddled and conventionalizetl it had 
 become, how modified by subterfuges and concealments 
 and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of 
 women. " It's all like Bromstead when the buikiinf 
 came," I said ; for I had often talked to her of that 
 early imjjression of purpose dissolving iigain into 
 chaotic forces. "There is no clear right in liie world 
 any more. The world is Byzantine. 'I'he justcst man 
 to-day must practise a tainted goodness." 
 
478 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 These questions need discussion — a magnificent 
 frankness of discussion — if any standards are again to 
 establish an effective hold upon educated people. Dis- 
 cretions, as I have said already, will never hold any one 
 worth holding — longer than they held us. Against 
 every " shalt not"' there must be a " why not" plainly 
 put, — the " why not "" largest and plainest, the law 
 deduced from its purpose. " You and I, Isabel," I said, 
 " have always been a little disregardful of duty, partly 
 at least because the idea of duty comes to us so ill-clad. 
 Oh ! I know there's an extravagant insubordinate strain 
 in us, but that wasn't all. I wish humbugs would leave 
 duty alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime. 
 That's -where the real mischief comes in. Passion can 
 always contrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself 
 splendid. That carried us. But for all its mean 
 associations there is this duty. . . ." 
 
 " Don't we come rather late to it ? " 
 
 " Not so late that it won't be atrociously hard 
 to do." 
 
 We talked for a long time of IMargaret, and I told 
 Isabel of my new impressions of her quality. " I used 
 in a manner to despise her," I confessed. " But, Isabel, 
 she's so much better than we, so much cleaner and 
 finer . . . not simply because she's simpler — but in grain. 
 Think of her away there in London, knowing perhaps 
 we are here. She must know we are here. The pride 
 of her ! Think of the sort of courage she shows, the 
 conquest of jealousy — and mortification. She's been 
 cheated, slighted. . . . Never once has she been for 
 a second, base." 
 
 " It's queer to think of now," said Isabel. " Who 
 could believe we did all we have done honestly ? Well, 
 in a manner honestly. Who could believe we thought 
 
THE IMTOSSIBLE POSITION 479 
 
 this niii^ht be hidden ? Who could trace it all step by 
 step from the tinieuhrn we found that a certain bold- 
 ness in our talk was plcasini;? We talked of love. . . . 
 IMaster, there's not much for us to do in the way of 
 Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were 
 possible to tell the very heart of our story. . . . 
 
 "Does Mart^^aret really want to «;o on with you.''" 
 she asked — " shield you — knowini; of . . . th'is?^^ 
 
 "I'm certain. I don't understand — just as I (h)n't 
 understand Shoesmith, but she does. These people 
 walk on solid ground which is just thin air to us. 
 They've jrot somethinc: we haven't got. Assurances ? 
 I wonder." . . . 
 
 Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and 
 what her life might be with him. 
 
 " He's good," she said ; " he's kindly. He's every- 
 thing but magic. He's the very image of the decent, 
 sober, honourable life. You can't say a thing against 
 him or I — except that something — something in his 
 imafrination, something; in the tone of his voice — fails 
 for me. AVhy don't I love him ? — he's a better man 
 than vou ! ^Vhy don't vou ? Is he a better man than 
 you ? lie's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, 
 he's the breed and the tradition, — a gentleman. You're 
 your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will 
 trust his sort and love your sort to the very enil of 
 time. . . ." 
 
 We spent a long time talking of laws and customs, 
 and how they might change in the coming years. 
 Wii lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as 
 we talked. It seemed enormously umeasonable to us 
 that two people who had come to the pitch of easy 
 and confident allectionand ha{)piness that held between 
 us should be obhged to part and shun one another, or 
 
48o THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 murder half the substance of their lives. We felt 
 ourselves crushed and beaten by an indiscriminating 
 machine which destroys happiness in the service of 
 icalousy. "The mass of people don't feel these things 
 in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said. 
 " Is it because we're different in grain, or educated out 
 of some primitive instinct ? " 
 
 " It's because we've explored love a little, and they 
 know no more than the gateway ,"*' I said. " Lust and 
 then jealousy ; their simple conception — and we have 
 gone a little beyond that. . . ."" 
 
 I remember that for a time we watched two of that 
 larger sort of gull, whose wings are brownish-white, 
 circle and hover against the blue. And then we lay 
 and looked at a band of water mirror-clear far out to 
 sea, and wondered why the breeze that rippled all the 
 rest should leave it so serene. 
 
 " And in this State of ours,"" I resumed. 
 
 "Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting 
 posture and looking out at the horizon. " Let's talk 
 no more of thino-s we can never see. Talk to me of 
 the work you are doing and all we shall do — after we 
 have parted. We've said too little of that. We've 
 had our red life, and it's over. Thank Heaven! — 
 though we stole it ! Talk about your work, dear, and 
 the things we'll go on doing — ^just as though we were 
 still to2:ether. We'll still be too'ether in a sense — 
 through all these thinsrs we have in common." 
 
 And so we talked about politics and our outlook. 
 We were interested to the pitch of self-forgetfulness. 
 We weighed persons and forces, discussed the probabili- 
 ties of the next general election, the steady drift of 
 public opinion in the north and west away from 
 Liberalism towards us. It was very manifest that in 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE rOSITTON 4S1 
 
 spite of Warclcnham and the E.rpiirgnfor^ we should 
 come into the new (iovernment stron;^ly. The party 
 had no one else, all the younf^ men were formal I v or 
 informally with us; Esmeer would have ollice, Lord 
 Tarvrillo, I . . . and very probably there would be 
 something for Shoesmith. "And for my own part," I 
 said, " I count on a backinf]^ on the Liberal side. For 
 the last two years we\'e been forcing competition in 
 constructive legislation between the parlies. The 
 Liberals have not been long in following up our 
 Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to 
 give votes and li[) service anyhow. Half the readers 
 o[ the Blue ira'A/^, they say, are Liberals. . . . 
 
 *' I remember talkinj; about thinijs of this sort witli 
 old Willerslcy,"''' I said, *'ever so many years ago. It 
 was some place near Locarno, and we looked down the 
 lake that shone weltering — ^just as now we look over 
 the sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct feature- 
 less way of all that you and I are doing now."" 
 
 **!!"'' said Isabel, and laughed. 
 
 "Well, of some such thing,'" I said, and remained 
 for awhile silent, thinking of Locarno. 
 
 I recalled once more the largeness, the release from 
 small personal things that I had felt in my youth; 
 statecraft became real and wonderful again with the 
 memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems. 
 I began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, 
 as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel ; 
 began to recover again the purpose that lay under all 
 my political ambitions and adjustments and antici- 
 pations. I saw the State, splendid and wide as I had 
 seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was no 
 mere distant prospect of spires and pinnacles, but 
 
 populous with fine-trained, bold-thinking, bold-doing 
 
 o » 
 
4S2 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 people. It was as if I had forgotten for a long time 
 and now remembered with amazement. 
 
 At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss 
 how I could do anything to battle against the aimless 
 muddle of our world ; I had wanted a clue — until she 
 had come into my life questioning, suggesting, un- 
 consciously illuminating. " But I have done nothing," 
 she protested. I declared she had done everything in 
 growing to education under my eyes, in reflecting again 
 upon all the processes that had made myself, so that 
 instead of abstractions and blue-books and bills and 
 devices, I had realized the world of mankind as a 
 crowd needing: before all things fine women and 
 men. We'd spoilt ourselves in learning that, but 
 anyhow we had our lesson. Before her I was in a 
 nineteenth-century darkness, dealing with the nation 
 as if it were a crowd of selfish men, forgetful of 
 women and children and that shy wild thing in the 
 hearts of men, love, which must be drawn upon as 
 it has never been drawn upon before, if the State is 
 to live. I saw now how it is possible to bring the 
 loose factors of a great realm together, to create a 
 mind of literature and thought in it, and the expression 
 of a purpose, to make it self-conscious and fine. I had 
 it all clear before me, so that at a score of points I 
 could presently begin. The Blue Weeldij was a centre 
 of force. Already we had given Imperialism a criticism, 
 and leavened half the press from our columns. Our 
 movement consolidated and spread. We should 
 presently come into power. Everything moved towards 
 our hands. We should be able to get at the schools, 
 the services, the universities, the church; enormously 
 increase the endowment of research, and organize what 
 was sorely wanted, a criticism of research ; contrive a 
 
THE IMPOSSTRI.K POSTTTON 483 
 
 closer contact between the press and creative intellectual 
 life ; foster literature, clarify, stren;;then the pubHc con- 
 sciousness, develop social or*:;anizali()n and a sense of tlur 
 Stale. Men were coniinj^ to us every day, brilliant 
 youn^^ peers like Lord Dentonhill, writers like Carnot 
 and Cresswell. It filled nie with [)ride to win such men. 
 " AVe stand for so much more than we seem to stand 
 for," I said. I opened my heart to her, so freely that I 
 hesitate so to open my heart even to the reader, tellinf; 
 of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my conscious- 
 ness of ^reat powers and widening opportunities. . . . 
 
 Isabel watched me as I talked. 
 
 She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a 
 while. For it is curious and I think a very signifi- 
 cant thing that since we had become lovers, we had 
 talked very little of the broader things that had once 
 so strongly gripped our imaginations. 
 
 " It's good," I said, " to talk like this to you, to get 
 back to youth and great ambitions with you. There 
 have been times latelv when politics has seemed the 
 pettiest game played with mean souls for mean ends — 
 and none the less so that the happiness of three hundred 
 million people might be touched by our follies. I talk 
 to no one else like this. . . . And now I think of part- 
 ing, I think but of how much more I might have talked 
 to vou." . . . 
 
 Things drew to an end at hi-st, but after we had 
 spoken of a thousand things. 
 
 "We\'e talked awjiy our last half-day," I said, 
 staring over my shoulder at the blazing sunset sky 
 behind us. "Dear, it's been the last day of our lives 
 for us. ... It doesn't seem like the last day of our 
 lives. Or any day." 
 
 *' I wonder how it will feel .'' *" said IsabcL 
 
4S4 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " It will be very strange at first — not to be able to 
 tell you things." 
 
 " Tve a superstition that after — after weVe parted — 
 if ever I go into my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll 
 be — somewhere." 
 
 *' I shall be in the world — yes." 
 
 " I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. 
 Here we are, here we remain." 
 
 "Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two 
 immortals, who didn't live in time and space at all, 
 who never met, who couldn't part, and here we lie on 
 Olympus. And those two poor creatures who did 
 meet, poor little Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, 
 who met and loved too much and had to part, they 
 part and go their ways, and we lie here and watch 
 them, you and I. She'll cry, poor dear." 
 
 " She'll cry. She's crying now ! " 
 
 " Poor little beasts ! I think he'll cry too. He 
 winces. He could — for tuppence. I didn't know he 
 had lachrymal glands at all until a little while ago. 
 Poor mites ! Silly little pitiful creatures ! How we 
 have blundered ! Think how we must look to God ! 
 Well, we'll pity them, and then we'll inspire him to 
 stiffen up again — and do as we've determined he shall 
 do. We'll see it through, — we who lie here on the 
 cliff. They'll be mean at times, and horrid at times ; 
 we know them ! Do you see her, a poor little fine 
 lady in a great house, — she sometimes goes to her room 
 and writes." 
 
 " She writes for his Blue WeeMy still." 
 
 "Yes. Sometimes — I hope. And he's there in the 
 office with a bit of her copy in his hand." 
 
 " Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him 
 before she wrote it ? Is it ? " 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 485 
 
 " Ikttcr, I think. Let's play it's better — anyhow. 
 It iiiav be that talkintr over was rather mixed with 
 love-making. After all, lovc-makiiifr is joy rather than 
 magic. Don't let's pretend about that even. . . . Let's 
 go on watching him. (I don't ^( e why her writing 
 shouldn't be better. Indeed I don't.) Sec! I'here 
 he goes down along the Embankment to Westminster 
 just like a real man, for all that he's smaller than a 
 grain of dust. What is running round inside that 
 speck of a head of his. ^ Look at him going ])ast the 
 policemen, specks too — selected large ones from the 
 country. I think he's going to dinner with the Speaker 
 — some old thing like that. Is his face harder or 
 commoner or stronger.'' — I ain't quite see. . . . And 
 now he's up and speaking in the House. Hope lie'U 
 hold on to the thread. He'll have to plan his speeches 
 to the very end of his days — and learn the headings."" 
 
 " Isn't she up in the women's gallery to hear 
 him?" 
 
 " No. Unless it's by accident." 
 
 "She's there," she said. 
 
 " Well, by accident it happens. Not too many 
 accidents, Isabel. Never any more adventure for us, dear, 
 now. . . . They ])lay the game, you know. They've 
 begun late, but now they've got to. Vou see it's not 
 so \i^ry hard for them since you and I, my dear, are 
 always here, always faithfully here on this warm clifl' 
 of love accomplished, watching and helping them under 
 high lieaven. It isn't so vvrj/ hard, leather good in 
 some ways. Some people hdrc to be broken a little. 
 Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance .'' " 
 
 "She's too little to be seen,"" she said. 
 
 " Can you see the sins they once committed ? " 
 
 "I can onlv see vou here beside me, dear — for ever. 
 
486 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 For all my life, dear, till 1 die. Was that — the 
 
 sin ? " . . . 
 
 §7 
 
 I took her to the station, and after she had gone 
 I was to drive to Dover and cross to Calais by the 
 night boat. I couldn't, I felt, return to London. We 
 walked over the crest and down to the little station 
 of Martin Mill side by side, talking at first in broken 
 fragments, for the most part of unimportant things. 
 
 " None of this,'' she said abruptly, " seems in the 
 slightest degree real to me. I've got no sense of things 
 ending." 
 
 " We're parting," I said. 
 
 "We're parting — as people part in a play. It's 
 distressing. But I don't feel as though you and I 
 were really never to see each other again for years. Do 
 you?" 
 
 I thought. " No," I said. 
 
 "After we've parted I shall look to talk it over 
 with you." 
 
 "So shall I." 
 
 "That's absurd." 
 
 " Absurd." 
 
 "I feel as if you'd always be there, just about 
 where you are now. Invisible perhaps, but there. 
 We've spent so much of our lives joggling elbows." . . . 
 
 "Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realize it. I 
 suppose I shall begin to when the train goes out of the 
 station. Are we wanting in imagination, Isabel ? " 
 
 " I don't know. We've always assumed it was the 
 other way about." 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLP: position 4S7 
 
 " Even when the train goes out of the station ! 
 
 Tve seen you into so many trains." 
 
 *' I shall <^o on Ihinkint; of tliin;.;s to say to you — 
 thinp^s to put in your letters. For years to come. 
 How can I ever stop thinkinfij in that way now .^ 
 We've got into each other's brains." 
 
 "It isn't real," I said; "notliing is real. The 
 uorkl's no more than a fantastic dream. AN'hv are we 
 parting, Isabel P" 
 
 "I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I 
 suppose we have to. Can't we meet? — don't you think 
 we shall meet even in dreams.''" 
 
 " \Ve'll meet a thousand times in dreams," I said. 
 
 "I wish we could dream at the same time," said 
 Isabel. ..." Dream walks. I can't believe, dear, I 
 shall never have a walk with you again." 
 
 " If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, " we 
 might have walked long walks and talked long talks 
 for all our lives." 
 
 " Not in a world of Baileys," said Isabel. *' And 
 anyhow " 
 
 She stopped short. I looked interrogation. 
 
 " We've loved, dear one," she said. 
 
 I took her ticket, and stood by the door of the 
 compartment. "Good-bye," I said a little stiffly, 
 conscious of the people upon the j)latform. She bent 
 above me, white and dusky, looking at me very stead- 
 fastly. 
 
 " Come here," she w hispered. " Never mind the 
 porters. What can they know ? Just one time more 
 ■ — I nmst." 
 
 She rested her hand against the door of the carriage 
 and bent down upon nie, and put her cold, moist lips 
 to mine. 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 The Breaking Point 
 
 §1 
 
 And then we broke down. We broke our faith with 
 both INlargaret and Shoesmith, flung career and duty 
 out of our lives, and went away together. 
 
 It is only now, almost a year after these events, that 
 I can begin to see what happened to me. At the 
 time it seemed to me I was a rational, responsible 
 creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two 
 days before I became a monomaniac to whom nothing 
 could matter but Isabel. Every truth had to be 
 squared to that obsession, every duty. It astounds 
 me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, 
 forgot everything but that we two were parted. I 
 still believe that with better chances we might have 
 escaped the consequences of the emotional storm that 
 presently seized us both. But we had no foresight 
 of that, and no preparation for it, and our circum- 
 stances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's 
 unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after the 
 end of the session — partly my own amazing folly in 
 returning within four days to Westminster. But we 
 were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal 
 
 488 
 
THE lUlEAKIXG POINT 4S9 
 
 and the complete restoration of appearances. It 
 seemed necessary that Shoesmith's marriage should 
 not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I 
 should not vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible 
 with Margaret in London just as much as j)ossiblc ; 
 we went to restaurants, we visited the theatre ; uc 
 could even contemplate the possibility of my presence 
 at the weddintr. For that, however, we had schemed 
 a week-end visit to AN'ales, and a fictitious sjjrained 
 ankle at the last moment which would justify n)y 
 absence. . . . 
 
 I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretched- 
 ness and rebellion of my separation from Isabel. It 
 seemed that in the past two years all my thouf^hts 
 had spun commissures to Isabel's brain, and I could 
 think of nothin'^ that did not lead me surely to the 
 need of the one intimate I had found in the world. 
 I came back to the House and the oflice and mv 
 home, I filled all my days with appointments and 
 duty, and it did not save me in the least from a lonely 
 emptiness such as I had never felt before in all my 
 life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I did a 
 hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two 
 occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well, 
 and it seemed to me that I was going about in my 
 own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose 
 owner lies dead upstairs. 
 
 I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of 
 Tarvrille's. Something in that stripped my soul bare 
 
 It was an occasion made absurd and strange Ijy 
 the odd accident that the house caught fire upstairs 
 while we were dininjx below. It was a men's dinner — 
 " A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he invited 
 me; '* everything from Evcbham and Gane to Wilkins 
 
490 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the author, and Heaven knows what will happen ! " I 
 remember that afterwards Tarvrille was accused of 
 having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel 
 and a memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, 
 and I suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in 
 misery, I should have found the same wild amusement 
 in it that glowed in all the others. There were one 
 or two university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing 
 man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men, 
 Weston Massinghay and another prominent Liberal 
 whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrille 
 had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, AVaulsort, 
 the member for Monckton, Neal, and several others. 
 We began a little coldly, with duologues, but the 
 conversation was already becoming general — so far as 
 such a long table permitted — when the lire asserted 
 itself. 
 
 It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic 
 smell of burning rubber, — it was caused by the fusing 
 of an electric wire. The reek forced its way into the 
 discussion of the Pekin massacres that had sprung 
 up between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the 
 end of the table. " Something burning," said the man 
 next to me. 
 
 " Something must be burning," said Panmure. 
 
 Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had 
 a particularly imperturbable butler with a cadaverous 
 sad face and an eye of rigid disapproval. He spoke to 
 this individual over his shoulder. " Just see, will you," 
 he said, and caught up the pause in the talk to his 
 left. 
 
 Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was 
 curious. The story of the siege of the Legations 
 in China in the year 1900 and all that follow^ed upon 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 491 
 
 lliat, is just one of ilio^c (lisliiil)iiii; interludes in 
 history that refuse to join on to that general scheme 
 of protestation by which civiHzation is maintained. 
 It is a break in the general fh)w of experience as 
 disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife 
 and the sculUe that followed it had been to me when I 
 was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain 
 revealing (juite unexpected backgrounds. I had never 
 given the business a thought for years; now this talk 
 brought back a string of j)ictures to my mind ; how 
 the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how 
 section after section of the International Army was 
 drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection 
 spread upward until the wives of Ministers were busy 
 looting, and the very sentinels stripped and crawled 
 like snakes into the Palace they were set to guard. It 
 did not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, 
 being plundered, were outraged, children were butchered ; 
 strong men had found themselves with arms in a law- 
 less, defenceless city, and this had followed. Now it 
 was all recalled. 
 
 *' Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at 
 home were as bad as any one," said Panmure. " Glaze- 
 brook told me of one — flushed like a woman at a 
 bargain sale, he said — and when he pointed out to 
 her that the silk she'd got was bloodsbiined, she just 
 said, 'Oh, bother!' and threw it aside and went 
 back. . . r 
 
 We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had re- 
 turned. We tried not to seem to listen. 
 
 '* Beg pardon, nriord,'"* he said. **Thc house is on 
 lire, mlord."* 
 
 " Upstairs, m'lord.'' 
 
 "Just overhead, m'lord.'^ 
 
492 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 "The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've 
 telephoned /Zrc." 
 
 " No, m'lord, no immediate danger." 
 
 " It's all right,'' said Tarvrille to the table generally. 
 " Go on ! It's not a general conflagration, and the fire 
 brigade won't be five minutes. Don't see that it's our 
 affair. The stuff's insured. They say old Lady Pasker- 
 shortly was dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager 
 Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet 
 things — hidden away. Susan went straight for them — 
 used to take an umbrella for the silks. Born shop- 
 lifter." 
 
 It was evident he didn't want his dinner spoilt, and 
 we played up loyally. 
 
 "This is recorded history," said Wilkins, — "prac- 
 tically. It makes one wonder about unrecorded history. 
 In India, for example." 
 
 But nobody touched that. 
 
 "Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable 
 butler, and indicating the table generally, " champagne. 
 Champagne. Keep it going." 
 
 " M'lord," and Thompson marshalled his assistants. 
 
 Some man I didn't know began to remember things 
 about Mandalay. "It's queer," he said, "how people 
 break out at times ; " and told his story of an army 
 doctor, brave, public-spirited, and, as it happened, 
 deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the 
 excitement of plundering — and stole and hid, twisted 
 the wrist of a boy until it broke, and was afterwards 
 overcome by wild remorse. 
 
 I watched Evesham listening intently. " Strange," 
 he said, " very strange. We are such stuff as thieves 
 are made of. And in China, too, they murdered people 
 — for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, from 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 493 
 
 mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt 
 of it in certain cases. No douht at all. Vounf; soldiers 
 ■ — fresh from German high sihools and I'Jiglish homes ! "" 
 
 "Did our people? " asked some patriot. 
 
 "Not so much. 15ut Tm afraid there were cases 
 . . . Some of the Indian troops were pretty had."*^ 
 
 Gane picked up the tale with confirmations. 
 
 It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture 
 upon my memory, so that were I a painter 1 think I 
 could <^ive the deep rich browns and warm c^reys beyond 
 the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces, 
 strongly illuminated, interested and keen, above the 
 black and white of evening dress, the alert men- 
 servants with their heavier, clean-shaved faces indis- 
 tinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was 
 coloured emotionally for me by my aching sense of 
 loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our talk 
 to the breaches and unrealities of the civilized scheme. 
 We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe 
 of darkness and violence ; an effect to which the diminish- 
 ing smell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet over- 
 head, the swish of water, added enormously. Everybody 
 — unless, perhaps, it was Evesham — drank rather care- 
 lessly because of the suppressed excitement of our 
 situation, and talked the louder and more freelv. 
 
 " But what a flimsy thing our civilization is ! " said 
 Evesham ; " a mere thin net of habits and associations ! "* 
 
 "I suppose those men came back,'' said Wilkins. 
 
 ** Lady Paskershortly did ! " chuckled Evesham. 
 
 " How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives ?^ 
 "Wilkins speculated. *' I suppose there's Pekin-stained 
 police officers, Tekin-staincd .J.P.'s — trying petty pil- 
 ferers in the severest manner.'' . . . 
 
494 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Then for a time things became preposterous. There 
 was a sudden cascade of water by the fireplace, and then 
 absurdly the ceiling began to rain upon us, first at this 
 point and then that. " My new suit ! " cried some one. 
 " Perrrrrr-up pe-rr " — a new vertical line of blackened 
 water would establish itself and form a spreading pool 
 upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would 
 arrange catchment areas of plates and flower-bowls. 
 "Draw up!" said Tarvrille, "draw up. That's the 
 bad end of the table ! " He turned to the imperturb- 
 able butler. " Take round bath towels," he said ; and 
 presently the men behind us were offering — with in- 
 flexible dignity — " Port wine, Sir. Bath towel. Sir ! "" 
 Waulsort, with streaks of blackened water on his 
 forehead, was suddenly reminded of a wet year when 
 he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An 
 animated dispute sprang up between him and Neal 
 about the relative efficiency of the new French and 
 German field guns. Wrassleton joined in, and a little 
 drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a 
 black -splashed shirt front who presently silenced them 
 all by the immensity and particularity of his know- 
 ledge of field artillery. Then the talk drifted to 
 Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon drinking- 
 water, which brought Wrassleton and Weston Massing- 
 hay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. " The 
 trouble in South Africa," said Weston Massinghay, 
 " wasn't that we didn't boil our water. It was that we 
 didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the same stuff* 
 we did. They didn't get dysentery." 
 
 That argument went on for some time. I was 
 attacked across the table by a man named Burshort 
 about my Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but in 
 the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 495 
 
 IMassincjhay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened 
 voice : '•' W/r// didn't <;et dysentery." 
 
 I think Evesham went early. Tlie rest of us clustered 
 more and more closely towards the drier end of the room, 
 the table was pushed alon^, and the area beneath the 
 extini^uished conHaf^ration abandoned to a tinklinfr, 
 splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and 
 baths. Everybody was now disposed to be hilarious 
 and noisy, to say startling and aggressive things; we 
 must have sounded a queer clamour to a listener in the 
 next room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting 
 me. " Ours isn't the Tory party any more,'"* said 
 Burshort. *' Remington has made it the Obstetric 
 I'arty.'' 
 
 "That's good!""' said Weston IVIassinghay, with all 
 his teeth gleaming; "I shall use that against you in 
 the House ! '' 
 
 '' I shall denounce you for abusing private con- 
 fidences if you do/' said Tarvrillc. 
 
 " Remington wants us to give up launching Dread- 
 noughts and launch babies instead,'' Burshort urged. 
 '* For the price of one Dreadnought ^ 
 
 The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient 
 about guns joined in the baiting, and displavcd him- 
 self a venomous creature. ^Something in his eye told 
 me he knew of Isabel and hated me for it. "Love and 
 fine thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking 
 over a wine-glass with a too easy gesture. " Love and 
 fine thinking. Two things don't go together. No 
 ph'losophy worth a damn ever came out of excesses of 
 love. Salt Lake City — Piggott — Ag — Agapemone 
 again — no works to matter."" 
 
 Everybody laughed. 
 
 "Got to rec'nize these facts,"" said my assailant. 
 
496 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ''Love and fine think'n pretty phrase — attractive. 
 Suitable for political decorations. Postcard, Christmas, 
 gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise 
 vahfble." 
 
 I made some remark, I forget what, but he over- 
 bore me. 
 
 " Real things we want are Hate — Hate and coarse 
 think'n. I blong to the school of Mrs. Fs Aunt " 
 
 " What ? "*'* said some one, intent. 
 
 "In 'Little Dorrit,'" explained Tarvrille ; "go 
 on!" 
 
 " Hate a fool," said my assailant. 
 
 Tarvrille glanced at me. I smiled to conceal the 
 loss of my temper. 
 
 " Hate," said the little man, emphasizing his point 
 with a clumsy fist. " Hate's the driving force. What's 
 m'rality ? — hate of rotten goings on. What's patriotism ? 
 — hate of int'loping foreigners. What's Radicalism ? — 
 hate of lords. What's Toryism ? — hate of disturbance. 
 It's all hate — hate from top to bottom. Hate of a 
 mess. Remington owned it the other day, said he 
 hated a — mu'll. There you are ! If you couldn't get 
 hate into an election, damn it (hie) people wou'n't poll. 
 Poll for love ! — no' me ! " 
 
 He paused, but before any one could speak he had 
 resumed. 
 
 " Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a 
 bear pit armed with a tagle — talgent — talgent gal- 
 v'nometer. Like going to fight a mad dog with 
 Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking — what we 
 want is the thickes' thinking we can get. Thinking 
 that stands up alone. Taf Reform means work for all, 
 — thassort of thing." 
 
 The gentleman from Cambridge paused. " You a 
 
THE BREAKIXC; POINT 497 
 
 n.ii:!" lie said. " Td as soon <^o to baY-ll iirKp wet 
 tissue paper ! "" 
 
 My best answer on the spur of the moment was : 
 "The Japanese (lid.'"* ^^'hi(•h was absurd. 
 
 I went on to some other reply, I fort^et exactly 
 what, and the talk of the whole tal)le drew round me. 
 It was an extraordinary revelation to me. Every one 
 was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amaz- 
 ing how manifestly they echoed the fcelini; of this old 
 'I'ory spokesman. They were quite friendly to me, 
 they regarded me and the Blue Weekly as valua})le 
 })arty assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached 
 no more importance to wliat were my realities than 
 tlu'v did to tlie remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. 
 llildv. Tiicv were flushed and anuised, perhaps they 
 went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but 
 they left the impression on my nn'nd of men irrevocably 
 set upon narrow and cvnical views of political life. 
 For them the political struggle was a game, whose 
 counters were human hate and human creilulity ; their 
 real aim was just every one's aim, the preservation of 
 the class and way of living to which their lives were 
 attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how 
 exhausted mentally and moiallv, nor how cruel their 
 convergent attack on me chanced to be. Ihit my 
 temper gave way, I became tart and fierce, perhaps my 
 replies were a triHe absurd, and Tarvrille, with that 
 (|uick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. 
 Then for a time I sat silent and drank port wine while 
 the others talked. The disorder of the room, the still 
 dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties and 
 crumpled shirts of mv companions, jarred on my tor- 
 mented nerves. . . . 
 
 It was long past midnight \\hen we dispersed. I 
 
 2 K 
 
498 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 remember Tarvrille coming with me into the hall, and 
 then suggesting we should go upstairs to see the 
 damage. A manservant carried up two flickering 
 candles for us. One end of the room w^as gutted, cur- 
 tains, hangings, several chairs and tables were com- 
 pletely burnt, the panelling was scorched and warped, 
 three smashed windows made the candles flare and 
 gutter, and some scraps of broken china still lay on 
 the puddled floor. 
 
 As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back 
 from some party, a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed 
 figure with amazed blue eyes beneath her golden hair. 
 I remember how stupidly w^e laughed at her surprise. 
 
 §2 
 
 I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington 
 Street, and went my way alone. But I did not go 
 home ; I turned w^estward and walked for a long way, 
 and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too 
 miserable to go to my house. 
 
 I wandered about that night like a man who has 
 discovered his Gods are dead. 
 
 I do not feel now the logical force of the process 
 that must have convinced me then that I had made my 
 sacrifice and spent my strength in vain. At no time 
 had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had 
 higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me 
 like a thing newly discovered that the men I had to 
 work with had for the most part no such dreams, no 
 sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I 
 held. They were just as immediately intent upon 
 personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 499 
 
 tlio men in any other group or party. IVrlmps I Imd 
 sli[)po(l nn.'iwarcs for a time into the (iclusions oi" ;i 
 partv man — but I do not think so. 
 
 No, it was the mood of profound despondency that 
 had followed upon the abrupt cessation of mv familiar 
 intercourse with Isabel, that gave this fact that had 
 always been ])resent in my mind its (juality of 
 devastating revelation. It seemed as though I had 
 never seen before nor suspected the stupendous gap 
 between the chaotic aims, the routine, the conventional 
 ncquiescences, the vulgarizaticms of the personal life, 
 and that clearly conscious development and service of 
 a collective thought and purpose at which mv eflbrts 
 aimed. I had thought them but a little way apart, 
 and now I saw they were separated by all the distance 
 between earth and heaven. I saw now in myself and 
 every one around me, a concentration upon interests 
 close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the 
 provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts 
 and shy timidities that touched one at every point ; 
 and, save for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of 
 broader aims and remoter possibilities that made the 
 white passion of statecraft seem as unearthly and 
 irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer 
 will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of 
 habitable planets and answering intelligences, sun.' 
 distances uncounted across the deep. It seemed to me 
 I had aspired too high and thought too fai-, had 
 mocked my own littleness by j)resumption, had given 
 the uttermost dear reality of life for a theurizer's 
 dream. 
 
 All through that wandering agony of mine that 
 night a dozen threads of thought interwove ; now I 
 was a soul speaking in protest to God against n task 
 
500 THE NEW MACIIlAv ELLI 
 
 too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, 
 scorned and pointed npon, who had let life cheat 
 him of the nltimate pride of his soul. Now I was 
 the fool of ambition, who opened his box of gold to 
 find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy 
 thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch. I realized 
 for the first time how much I had come to depend upon 
 the mind and faith of Isabel, how she had confirmed 
 me and sustained me, how little strength I had to go 
 on with our purposes now that she had vanished from 
 my life. She had been the incarnation of those great 
 abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered 
 back. There was no support that night in the things 
 that had been. We were alone together on the cliflP 
 for ever more ! — that was very pretty in its way, but it 
 had no truth whatever that could help me now, no 
 ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, 
 no sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive, — to 
 talk to me, to touch me, to hold me together. I 
 wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness of her 
 presence, the consolation of her voice. 
 
 We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a 
 passing cabman into interest by laughing aloud at that 
 magnificent and characteristic sentimentality. What 
 a lie it was! That was just where we shouldn't 
 remain. We of all people had no distinction from 
 that humanity whose lot is to forget. We should go 
 out to other interests, new experiences, new demands. 
 That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious understand- 
 ings we had built up together in our intimacy would 
 be the first to go ; and last perhaps to endure with us 
 would be a few gross memories of sights and sounds, 
 and trivial incidental excitements. . . . 
 
 I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 501 
 
 toucli wilh lite for a long time, and had now been 
 reniintlcd of its (jualily. That infernal little don's 
 parody of niv ruling phrase, " I late and coarse think- 
 ing," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned (hirt, a centre 
 of inllanunation. Just as a man who is debilitated 
 has no longer the vitality to re>ist an infection, so 
 my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation 
 from Isabel, could find no resistance to iiis em[)hatic 
 suggestion. It seemed to me that what he liad said was 
 overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but 
 of all possible human life. Love is the rare thing, 
 the treasured thing; you lock it away jealously and 
 watch, and well you may ; hate and aggression and 
 force keep the streets and rule the world. And line 
 thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, 
 is a balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal 
 impartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. 
 "Good honest men,'"" as Dayton calls them, rule the 
 world, with a way of thinking out decisions like shoot- 
 ing cartloads of bricks, anil with a steadfast })leasure in 
 hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists " blag- 
 gards and scoundrels" — it justified his opposition — 
 the Lords were " scoundrels,'" all peoj)le riclur than 
 he were " scoundrels," all Socialists, all troublesome 
 poor people ; he liked to think of jails and justice 
 being done. His public spirit was saturatetl with the 
 sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of 
 condign {)unishment for all recalcitrant souls. Tliat 
 was the way o( it, I perceived. That had survival 
 value, as the biologists sav. lie was fool enough in 
 jiolitics to be a consistent and happv j)olitician. . . . 
 
 Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth 
 of the phrase beat me down that night ! I couldn't 
 remember that I had known this all along, and that it 
 
502 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had 
 worked it all out lonij a«TO in other terms, when I had 
 seen how all parties stood for interests inevitably, and 
 how the purpose in life achieves itself, if it achieves 
 itself at all, as a bye-product of the war of individuals 
 and classes. Hadn't I always known that science and 
 philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the pas- 
 sion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities 
 and weakness of their servants, in spite of all the 
 heated disorder of contemporary things ? Wasn't it 
 my own phrase to speak of *' that greater mind in men, 
 in which we are but moments and transitorily lit cells "" ? 
 Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like 
 a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that 
 the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster ? 
 Hadn't I known that we who think without fear and 
 speak without discretion will not come to our own for 
 the next two thousand years ? 
 
 It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith 
 mislaid. Before mankind, in my vision that night, 
 stretched new centuries of confusion, vast stupid wars, 
 hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs of 
 order, lapses, set-backs, despairs, catastrophes, new 
 beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh 
 plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to 
 assuage my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to 
 imagine great rewards for our separation, great personal 
 rewards, we had promised ourselves success visible and 
 shining in our lives. To console ourselves in our separa- 
 tion we had made out of the Blue WeeMy and our 
 young Tory movement preposterously enormous things 
 — as though those poor fertilizing touches at the soil 
 were indeed the germinating seeds of the millennium, 
 as though a million lives such as ours had not to 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 503 
 
 contribute before the be<^innin<r of the be£rinnin'T. That 
 poor prctenco had failed. 'J'hat inai^nidtont piopo.sitioii 
 shiivclk'd to nothing in the black lonelinubs of that 
 night. 
 
 I saw that there were to be no such compensations. 
 So far as my real services to mankind were concerned I 
 liad to live an unrccoiijnized and unrewarded life. If T 
 made successes it would be by the way. Our s('[)ara- 
 tion would alter nothing of that. My scandal would 
 clinrr to me now for all my life, a thinjx affectiner rela- 
 tionships, embarrassing^ and hampering my spirit. I 
 should follow the conniion lot of those who live by the 
 imagination, anil follow it now in iuHnite loneliness of 
 soul; the one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, 
 was lost to me for ever; I should do good and evil 
 together, no one caring to understand; I should pro- 
 duce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much 
 absolute evil ; the good in me woukl be too often ill- 
 expressed and missed or misinterpreted. In the end I 
 mijrht leave one «rleamini; flake or so amidst the sla*' 
 heaps for a moment of postmortem sympathy. I was 
 afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because I 
 believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking, that 
 did not mean that I should necessarily either love 
 steadfastly or think finely. I remember how I fell 
 talking to God — I think I talked out loutl. " Why do 
 I care for these things," I cried, " when I can do so 
 little.'^ ^Vhy am I set apart from the jolly thoughtless 
 fighting life of men.'' These dreams fade to nothing- 
 ness, and leave me bare ! " 
 
 I scolded. " Why don't you speak to a man, show 
 youi*self.^ I thought I had a gleam of you in Isabel, — 
 and then you take her awav. Do vou really think 
 I can cany on this game alone, tloing your work in 
 
504 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half 
 living, half dying ? " 
 
 Grotes(jue analogies arose in my mind. I discovered 
 a strange parallelism between my now tattered phrase 
 of " Love and fine thinking;'" and the "Love and the 
 Word '"* of Christian thought. Was it possible the 
 Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just 
 that system of attitudes I had been feeling my way 
 towards from the very beginning of my life ? Had I 
 spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It 
 mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid. 
 I went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and 
 sentences ; I had a new vision of that great central 
 figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking 
 even in the disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave 
 at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public 
 satisfaction in His fate. . . . 
 
 It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy 
 disordered dinner should lead a man to these specula- 
 tions, but they did. " He did mean that ! "*' I said, and 
 suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made of 
 His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient 
 enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, 
 danced and gibbered a long procession of the champions 
 of orthodoxy. " He wasn't human,"" I said, and re- 
 membered that last despairing cry, " My God ! My 
 God ! why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " 
 
 "Oh, He forsakes every one,"" I said, flying out as a 
 tired mind will, with an obvious repartee. . . . 
 
 I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology 
 to a towering rage against the Booles. In an instant 
 and with no sense of absurdity I wanted — in the 
 intervals of love and fine thinkinor — to flins: about 
 that strenuously virtuous couple ; I wanted to kick 
 
THE BREAKIXC; TOINT 505 
 
 Kevholc of the Pcrpshozc into the /gutter and make a 
 coiinnon massacre of all the prosperous rasealdoni that 
 makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that 
 transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of 
 weakly decisive an^er which is for people of my tenipera- 
 ment the concomitant of exhaustion. 
 
 *'I will have her," I cried. ^' By Heaven! I uill 
 have her! Life mocks me and cheats me. Nothing 
 can be made ^^ood to me a^ain. . . . Whv shouldn't 
 I save what I can? I can't save myself without 
 her. . . ." 
 
 I remember myself — as a sort of anti-climax to that 
 — rather tediously askini^ my way home. I was some- 
 where in the neighbourhood of Holland Park. . . . 
 
 It was then between one and two. I felt that I 
 could go home now without any risk of meeting 
 INIargaret. It had been the thought of returning to 
 MarjT^aret that had sent me wanderinir that ni'^-ht. It 
 is one of the ugliest facts I recall about that time of 
 crisis, the intense aversion I felt for Margaret. No 
 sense of her goodness, her injury and nobility, and the 
 enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sudiced to miti- 
 gate that. I hope now that in this book I am able to 
 give something of her silvery splendour, but all through 
 this cribis I felt nothing of that. There was a trium- 
 phant kindliness about her that I found intolerable, 
 ijhe meant to be so kind to me, to oiler unstinted 
 corsolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all she 
 imagined I.^abel had given me. 
 
 When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate 
 exactly how she woukl meet my homecoming. She 
 would be per])lexed by mv crumpleii shirt front, on 
 which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would over- 
 look that by an eflbrt, explain it sentimentally, rc>olve 
 
5o6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 it should make no difference to her. She would want 
 to know who had been present, what we had talked 
 about, show the alcrtest interest in whatever it was — 
 it didn't matter what. . . . No, I couldn't face her. 
 
 So I did not reach my study until two o'clock. 
 
 There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful 
 old silver candlesticks that she had set there two days 
 since to please me — the foolish kindliness of it ! But 
 in her search for expression, Margaret heaped presents 
 upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric 
 lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write 
 my note to Isabel. "Give me a word — the world 
 aches without you," was all I scrawled, though I fully 
 meant that she should come to me. I knew, though 
 I ought not to have known, that now she had left her 
 flat, she was with the Balfes — she was to have been 
 married from the Balfes — and I sent my letter there. 
 And I went out into the silent square and posted the 
 note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I 
 left it until morning I should never post it at all. 
 
 §3 
 
 I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of 
 our meeting. (Of all places for such a clandestine 
 encounter she had chosen the Bridge opposite Bucking- 
 ham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self-pity, 
 and eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But 
 the ill-written scrawl in which she had replied had 
 been full of the suggestion of her own weakness and 
 misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows 
 were altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful 
 tenderness. Something had happened to her that I 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 507 
 
 did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She cauie 
 towards me wearilv, she who had always l)ornc herself so 
 bravely ; her sliouldcrs seemed bent, and her eyes were 
 tired, and her faee white and drawn. All my life has 
 been a narrow vself-centred life; no brothers, no sisters 
 or children or weak thinp;s had ever yet made any 
 intimate appeal to me, and suddenly — I verily believe 
 for the first time in my life! — I felt a great passion of 
 protective ownership; I felt that here w\'is something 
 that I could die to shelter, something that meant more 
 than jov or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid 
 creation to me, a new kind of hold upon mc, a new 
 power in the world. Some sealed fountain was opened 
 in my lire^^st. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, 
 Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I 
 could love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in 
 life. I didn't care any more for anything in the world 
 but Isabel, and that I should protect her. I trembled 
 as I came near her, and could scarcely speak to her for 
 the emotion that filled me. . . . 
 
 " I had your letter," I said. 
 
 " I had yours." 
 
 '' Where can we talk ? '" 
 
 I remember my lame sentences. '* \Ve'll have a 
 boat That's best here.'* 
 
 I took her to the little boat-house, and there we 
 hired a boat, and I rowed in silence under the bridge 
 and into the shade of a tree. The s([uare grey stone 
 nuisses of the Foreign Olllce loomed through the twigs, 
 I remember, and a little space of gniss separated us 
 from the pathway and the scrutiny of }jassers-by. And 
 there we talked. 
 
 '' I had to write to you,'' I said. 
 
 *' I had to cume." 
 
5o8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " When are you to be married ? " 
 
 " Thursday week." 
 
 " \Vell ? " 1 said. " But— can we ? " 
 
 She leant forward and scrutinized my face with eyes 
 wide open. " What do you mean .'' " she said at last 
 in a whisper. 
 
 " Can we stand it ? After all ? " 
 
 I looked at her white face, " Can you ? " I said. 
 
 She whispered. " Your career ? " 
 
 Then suddenly her face was contorted, — she wept 
 silently, exactly as a child tormented beyond endurance 
 might suddenly weep. . . . 
 
 " Oh ! I don't care,'"* I cried, " now. I don't care. 
 Damn the whole system of things ! Damn all this 
 patching of the irrevocable ! I w^ant to take care 
 of you, Isabel ! and have you with me." 
 
 " I can't stand it," she blubbered. 
 
 " You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for 
 you. ... I thought indeed it was best for you. I 
 thought even you wanted it like that." 
 
 " Couldn't I live alone — as I meant to do ? " 
 
 " No," I said, " you couldn't. You're not strong 
 enough. I've thought of that. I've got to shelter you. 
 
 " And I want you," I went on. " I'm not strong 
 enough — I can't stand life without you." 
 
 She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to 
 control herself, and looked at me steadfastly for a 
 moment. " I was going to kill myself," she whispered. 
 '* You don't know all. ... I was going to kill myself 
 quietly — somehow. I meant to w^ait a bit and have 
 an accident. I thought — you didn't understand. You 
 were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ." 
 
 " People can't do as we thought we could do," I 
 said. " We've gone too far together." 
 
THE liREAIvINC; POINT 509 
 
 " Vcs," she said, and I stared into her eyt's. 
 
 "The horror of it," she whispered. "The horror 
 of being handed over. It's just only begun to dawn 
 upon nie, seeing him now as I do. lie tries to be kind 
 to me. ... I di(hrt know. I felt adventurous before. 
 . . It makes me feel like all the women in the 
 world who have ever been owned and subdued. . . . 
 It's not that he isn't the best of men, it's because I'm 
 a part of you. ... I can't go through with it. If I 
 go through with it, I .shall be left — robbed of pride — 
 outraged — a woman beaten. . . ." 
 
 "I know," I said, "I know." 
 
 " I want to live alone. ... I don't care for any- 
 thing now but just escape. If you can help me. . . ." 
 
 " 1 nuist take you away. There's nothing for us 
 but to go away together." 
 
 "But your work," she said; "your career! 
 Margaret ! Our promises ! " 
 
 " We've made a mess of things, Isa])el — or things 
 have made a mess of us. I don't know which. Our 
 Hags are in the mud, anyhow. It's too late to save 
 those other things ! Thev have to go. Vou can't 
 make terms in a lout. I thoufjht it was Marjiaret 
 needed me most. But it's you. And I need you. I 
 didn't think of that either. I haven't a doubt left 
 in the world now. We've got to leave everything 
 rather than leave each other. I'm sure of it. Now 
 we have gone so far. We've got to go right down to 
 earth and begin again. . . . Dear, I zcujit disgrace 
 with vou. . . ." 
 
 So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together 
 on the faded cushions of the boat, this white and weary 
 young woman who had been so valiant and careless 
 a girl. " I don't care," I ^aid. " I don't care for 
 
5IO THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 anything, if I can save you out of the wreckage wc have 
 made together.'"' 
 
 § 4 
 
 The next day I went to the office of the Blue 
 Weeldy in order to get as much as possible of its affairs 
 in working order before I left London with Isabel. I 
 just missed Shoesmith in the lower office. Upstairs 
 I found Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, 
 methodically reading the title of each and sometimes 
 the first half-dozen lines, and either dropping them in 
 a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, or 
 putting them aside for consideration. I interrupted 
 him, squatted on the window-sill of the open window, 
 and sketched out my ideas for the session. 
 
 " You're far-sighted," he remarked at something of 
 mine which reached out ahead. 
 
 " I like to see things prepared,'' I answered. 
 
 *' Yes," he said, and ripped open the envelope of a 
 fresh aspirant. 
 
 I was silent while he read. 
 
 "You're going away with Isabel Rivers," he said 
 abruptly. 
 
 " Well ! " I said, amazed. 
 
 " I know," he said, and lost his breath. " Not my 
 
 business. Only " 
 
 It was queer to find Britten afraid to say a thing. 
 
 " It's not playing the game," he said. 
 
 " What do you know ? " 
 
 " Everything that matters." 
 
 "Some games," I said, "are too hard to play." 
 
 There came a pause between us. 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 511 
 
 "I didn't know von were watching all this/' I said. 
 
 "Yes,"" he answered, after a pause, ^'I've watched." 
 
 *'Sorrv — sorry you don't approve." 
 
 " It means smashin<; such an infernal lot of things, 
 Reminj^ton.'"' 
 
 I did not answer. 
 
 " YouVe going away, then ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 "Soon?" 
 
 "llight away." 
 
 "There's your wife." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 " Shoesniith — whom you're pledged to in a manner. 
 You\'e just picked him out and made him conspicuous. 
 Every one will know. Oh ! of course — it's notliing to 
 you. Honour " 
 
 "I know." 
 
 "Common decency." 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " All this movement of ours. That's what / care 
 for most. . . . It's come to be a big thing, Remington." 
 
 "That will go on." 
 
 " AVe have a use for yon — no one else quite fills it. 
 No one. . . . I'm not sure it will go on." 
 
 " Do you think I haven't thought of all these 
 things ? " 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders, and rejected two papers 
 unread. 
 
 " I knew," he remarked, " when yon came back from 
 America. You were alight with it." 'J'hen lie let his 
 bitterness gleam for a moment. ^'Rut I thought you 
 woidd stick to your bargain." 
 
 "It's not so much choice as you think," I said. 
 
 "There's alwavs a choice." 
 
512 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " No," I scaid. 
 
 He scrutinized my face. 
 
 " I can't live without her — I can't work. She's all 
 mixed up with this — and everything. And besides, 
 there's things you can't understand. There's feelings 
 you've never felt. . . . You don't understand how 
 much we've been to one another." 
 
 Britten frowned and thought. 
 
 " Some things one's got to do," he threw out 
 
 " Some things one can't do." 
 
 "These infernal institutions " 
 
 " Some one must begin," I said. 
 
 He shook his head. " Not t/o?^" he said. " No ! *" 
 
 He stretched out his hands on the desk before him, 
 and spoke again. 
 
 " Remington," he said, " I've thought of this busi- 
 ness day and night too. It matters to me. It matters 
 immensely to me. In a way — it's a thing one doesn't 
 often say to a man — I've loved you. I'm the sort of 
 man who leads a narrow life. . . . But you've been 
 something fine and good for me, since that time, do 
 you remember ? when we talked about Mecca together." 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "Yes. And you'll always be something fine and 
 good for me anyhow. I know things about you, — 
 qualities — no mere act can destroy them. . . . Well, I 
 can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on 
 now like a man who is hypnotized and can't turn 
 round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It was wrong 
 for you two people ever to be lovers." 
 
 He paused. 
 
 " It gripped us hard," I said. 
 
 " Yes ! — but in your position ! And hers ! It was 
 vile ! " 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 513 
 
 " Voifve not ])ccn tempted/"' 
 
 "How do voii know? Anyhow — having; done th.it, 
 you oii^ht to have stood the eonscquences and thought 
 of other people. Vou could have ended it at the first 
 pause for reflection. You didn't. Vou blundered 
 a<;ain. Vou kept on. Vou owed a certain secrecy to 
 all of us ! Vou didn't keep it. Vou were careless. 
 Vou made thin«;s worse. This enc^a<rcment and this 
 publicity ! Damn it, Remington ! '"* 
 
 " I know," I said, with smarting eyes. " Damn it ! — 
 with all my heart ! It came of trying to patch. . . . 
 Vou cajit patch." 
 
 " And now, as I care for anything under heaven, 
 Remington, you two ought to stand these last conse- 
 quences — and part. Vou ought to part. Other people 
 have to stand things ! Other people have to part. 
 Vou ought to. Vou say — what do you say .'' It's loss 
 of so much life to lose each other. So is losinir a 
 hand or a leg. But it's what you've incurred. Am- 
 putate. Take your punishment After all, you 
 
 chose it." 
 
 " Oh, damn ! " I said, standing up and going to the 
 window. 
 
 *' Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full 
 of justifiable damns. But you two did choose it. Vou 
 ought to stick to your undertaking." 
 
 I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. " My 
 dear Britten ! " I cried. *' Don't I kno:c I'm doinnr 
 wrong? Aren't I in a net? Suppose I don't go ! Is 
 there any right in that? Do you think we're going to 
 be much to ourselves or any one after this parting.-* 
 I've been thinking all last night of this business, trying 
 it over and over again from the beginning. How was 
 it we went wrong? Since I came back from America 
 
 2 L 
 
514 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 — I grant you that — but slnce^ there'*s never been a step 
 that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or 
 more, as wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of 
 steel that could bend this way or that and never change. 
 You talk as though Isabel was a cat one could give to 
 any kind owner. . . . We two are things that change 
 and grow and alter all the time. WeVe — so inter- 
 woven that being parted now will leave us just mis- 
 shapen cripples. . . . You don't know the motives, you 
 don't know the rush and feel of things, you don't know 
 how it was with us, and how it is with us. You don't 
 know the hunger for the mere sight of one another ; 
 you don't know anything." 
 
 Britten looked at his finger-nails closely. His red 
 face puckered to a wry frown. " Haven't we all at 
 times wanted the world put back ? " he grunted, and 
 looked hard and close at one particular nail. 
 
 There was a long pause. 
 
 " I want her," I said, " and I'm going to have her. 
 I'tn too tired for balancing the right or wrong of it 
 any more. You can't separate them. I saw her 
 yesterday. . . . She's — ill. . . . Fd take her now, if 
 death were just outside the door waiting for us." 
 
 "Torture.?" 
 
 I thought. " Yes." 
 
 " For her ? " 
 
 "There isn't," I said. 
 
 "If there was.?" 
 
 I made no answer. 
 
 " It's blind Want. And there's nothino; ever been 
 put into you to stand against it. What are you going 
 to do with the rest of your lives .? " 
 
 " No end of things." 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
THE BREAKING I'OINT 515 
 
 "I don't bolicve yon are right,'"* I said. "I believe 
 \\c can save sonu'lliiiiL;' '' 
 
 Britten shook his head. '* Sonic scraps of salvage 
 won't excuse yon," he said. 
 
 His indignation rose. " In the middle of life ! " he 
 said. " No man has a right to take hi.s hand from the 
 plough ! '** 
 
 He leant forward on his desk and opened an argu- 
 mentative palm. '' You know. Remington,'"' he said, 
 " and I know, that if this could be fended off for six 
 months — if yon could be clapped in prison, or got out 
 of the way somehow, — until this marriage was all over 
 and settled down for a year, say — you know then you 
 two could meet, curious, happy, as friends. Saved ! 
 You JinoTa it."*"* 
 
 I turned and stared at him. " YouVc wrong, 
 Britten,'"* I said. "And does it matter if we could .'^''' 
 
 I found that in talking to him I could frame the 
 apologetics I had not been able to find for myself 
 alone. 
 
 "I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our 
 duty not to hush up this scandal."" 
 
 He raised his eyebrows. 
 
 " It's our duty," I went on, " to smash now openly 
 in the sight of every one. I've got that as clean and 
 plain — as prison whitewash. I am convinced that we 
 have got to be public to the uttermost now — I mean 
 it — until every corner of our world knows this story, 
 knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the 
 Ash ton Dean story and the Carmel story and the 
 Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have 
 ])icked man after man out of English public life, the 
 men with active imaginations, the men of strong initi- 
 ative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden 
 
5i6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLl 
 
 Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score ! 
 Vou say I ought to be penitent " 
 
 Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly. 
 
 " I'm boiling with indignation,"' I said. " I lay in 
 ])ed last night and went through it all. What in 
 God's name was to be expected of us but what has 
 happened ? I went through my life bit by bit last 
 night, I recalled all Tve had to do with virtue and 
 women, and all I was told and how I was prepared. I 
 was born into cowardice and debasement. We all are. 
 Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the 
 most beautiful things in life — Hke peeping Tom of 
 Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a 
 touch of natural manhood by all this dingy, furtive, 
 canting, humbugging English world. Thank God ! 
 I'll soon be out of it ! The shame of it ! The very 
 savages in Australia initiate their children better than 
 the English do to-day. Neither of us was ever given a 
 view of what they call morality that didn't make it 
 show as shabby subservience, as the meanest discretion, 
 an abject submission to unreasonable prohibitions ! 
 meek surrender of mind and body to the dictation of 
 pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taught 
 — we were mumbled at ! *' 
 
 « Yes," said Britten. " That's all very well " 
 
 I interrupted him. "I know there's a case — I'm 
 becrinninor to think it a valid case aojainst us ; but we 
 never met it ! There's a steely pride in self-restraint, a 
 nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and 
 think and act — untrammelled and unafraid." I put 
 my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him. 
 " This is a dirty world, Britten, simply because it is a 
 muddled world, and the thing you call morality is 
 dirtier now than the thing you call immorality. Why 
 
THE brp:aking point 517 
 
 don't the moralists pick tlicir stufl' out of the slime if 
 they care for it, and wipe it? — damn them! I am 
 burninfi^ now to say : * Yes, we did this and this,' to all 
 the world. All the world ! . . . 1 will ! " 
 
 IJritten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner 
 of his desk. "That's all very well, Remington,"' he 
 said. " You mean to i^o," 
 
 lie stopped and be<ran a<;ain. "If vou didn't 
 know you were in tlie wronf^ you wouldn't be so 
 damned rhetorical. You're in the wroni;. It's as 
 plain to you as it is to me. YouVe leaving a big 
 work, you're leaving a wife who trusted you, to go and 
 live with your jolly mistress. . . . You won't see you're 
 a statesman that matters, that no single man, mavbe, 
 might come to such influence as you in the next ten 
 years. You're throwing yourself away and accusing 
 your country of rejecting you."" 
 
 He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Reming- 
 ton,'" he said, " have you forgotten the immense things 
 our movement means .'' ^ 
 
 I thought. " Perhaps I am rhetorical,"*^ I said. 
 
 " But the things we might achieve ! If you'd only 
 stay now — even now ! Oh ! you'd suffer a little soci- 
 ally, but what of that ? Y'ou'd be able to go on — 
 perhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd 
 get. You know, Remington — you knorcP 
 
 I thought and went back to his earlier point. " If 
 I am rhetorical, at any rate it's a living feeling behind 
 it. Yes, I remember all the imj)lications of our aims — 
 very splendid, very remote. Rut just now it's rather 
 like ofi'erinf; to ;rive a freezini: man the sunlit Ilima- 
 layas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. 
 When you talk of me and my jollv mistress, it isn't 
 fair. That misrepresents everytliing. I'm not going 
 
5iS THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 out of this — for delights. That's the sort of thing 
 men like Snuffles and Keyhole imagine — that excites 
 them ! When I think of the things these creatures 
 think ! Ugh ! But you know better ? You know 
 that physical passion that burns like a fire — ends clean. 
 I'm going for love, Britten — if I sinned for passion. 
 I'm going, Britten, because when I saw her the other 
 day she hurt me. She hurt me damnably, Britten. . . . 
 I've been a cold man — I've led a rhetorical life — vou 
 hit me with that word ! — I put things in a windy 
 ■way, I know, but what has got hold of me at last is 
 her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand ? She's 
 a sick thing — a weak thing. She's no more a god- 
 dess than I'm a god. . . . I'm not in love with her 
 now; I'm raxv with love for her. I feel like a man 
 that's been flayed. I have been flayed. . . . You 
 don't begin to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude. 
 . . . She's not going to do things easily ; she's ill. 
 Ker courage fails. . . . It's hard to put things when 
 one isn't rhetorical, but it's this, Britten — there are 
 distresses that matter more than all the delimits or 
 achievements in the world. ... I made her what she 
 is — as I never made Margaret. I've made her — I've 
 broken her. . . . I'm going with my own woman. The 
 rest of my life and England, and so forth, must square 
 itself to that." 
 
 For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent 
 and motionless. We'd said all we had to say. My 
 eyes caught a printed slip upon the desk before him, 
 and I came back abruptly to the paper. 
 
 I picked up this galley proof. It was one of 
 Winter's essays. "This man goes on doing first-rate 
 stuff"," I said. " I hope you will keep him going." 
 
 He made no answer. He sat back in his chair with 
 
THE BREAKING TOINT 519 
 
 Ill's chin in his collar uiitl liii hands dfcp in his trouper 
 pockets. 
 
 §5 
 
 I have a letter IVIar^arct wrote nie within a week 
 of our Hight. I cannot resist transcribint; some of it 
 here, because it li«;hts thin^^s as no words of mine can 
 do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts 
 written in jjcncil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its 
 very inconsecutiveness is essential. IMany words are 
 underlined. It was in answer to one from me; but 
 what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind. . . . 
 
 " Certainly," she says, " I want to hear from you, 
 but I do not want to see you. There's a sort of 
 abstract you that I want to go on with. Something 
 Tve made out of you. ... I want to know things 
 about you — but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. 
 \Vhen some day I have got rid of my intolerable sense 
 of proprietorship, it may be different. Then perhaps 
 we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss 
 of our political work and dreams that I am feeling 
 than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I 
 thought so nmch of the things we were do'ui^ for the 
 world — had given myself so unreservedly. You've left 
 me with nothing to do. I am suddenly at loose 
 ends. . . . 
 
 " We women are trained to be so dependent on a 
 man. Tve got no life of my own at all. It seems 
 now to me that I wore my clothes even for you and 
 your schemes. . . . 
 
 "After I have tokl myself a hundred times why 
 this has happened, I ask again, *Why did he give 
 things up? Why did he give things up?' . . . 
 
520 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " It is just as though you were wilfully dead. . . . 
 
 "Then I ask again and again whether this thing 
 need have happened at all, whether if I had had a 
 warning, if I had understood better, I might not have 
 adapted myself to your restless mind and made this 
 catastrophe impossible. . . . 
 
 " Oh, my dear ! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt 
 me at the beginning, and tell me what you thought of 
 me and life ? You didn't give me a chance ; not a 
 chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things 
 you and I stood away from. You let my first 
 repugnances repel you. . . . 
 
 " It is strange to think after all these years that I 
 should be asking myself, do I love you ? have I loved 
 you ? In a sense I think I hate you. I feel you have 
 taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time, 
 thrown it aside. I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, 
 for why should I exact that you should watch and 
 understand my life, when clearly I have understood 
 so little of yours ? But I am savage — savage at the 
 wrecking of all you were to do. 
 
 " Oh, why — why did you give things up .'^ 
 
 "No human being is his own to do what he likes 
 with. You were not only pledged to my tiresome, 
 ineffectual companionship, but to great purposes. 
 They are great purposes. . . . 
 
 " If only I could take up your work as you leave 
 it, with the strength you had — then indeed I feel I 
 could let you go — you and your young mistress. . , , 
 All that matters so little to me. . . . 
 
 "Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in 
 my slower way. At times I am mad with jealousy 
 at the thought of all I hadn't the wit to give you. . . . 
 I've always hidden my tears from you — and what was 
 
THE miEAKlxXG POINT 521 
 
 in my licait. It's my nature to hide — and you, you 
 want things bronoht to vou to see. You are so 
 curious as to ])e almost cruel. Vou don't understand 
 reserves. Vou have no mercy ^^ith restraints and 
 reservations. Vou are not really a (ivllized man at 
 all. Vou hate pretences — and not only pretences but 
 decent coveriiif^s. . . . 
 
 " It's only after one has lost love and the chance 
 of loving that slow people like myself find what they 
 might have done. Why wasn't I bold and reckless and 
 abandoned ? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, 
 as to ask why my hair is fair. . . . 
 
 "I go on with these perhapses over and over again 
 here when I (ind myself alone. . . . 
 
 " My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation 
 
 of things I shall never go back to that house we 
 
 furnished together, that was to have been the laboratory 
 (do you remember calling it a hiboratory l!) in which you 
 were to forge so much of the new order. . . . 
 
 "I^ut, dear, if I can help you — even now — in any 
 way — help both of you, I mean. ... It tears me 
 when I think of you poor and discredited. Vou will 
 let me help you if I can — it will be the last wrong not 
 to let me do that. . . . 
 
 " Vou had belter not get ill. If you do, and I hear 
 of it — I shall come after you with a troupe of doctors 
 and nurses. If I am a failure as a wife, no one has 
 ever said I was anything but a success as a district 
 visitor. . . ." 
 
 There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether 
 they were written before or after the ones from which 
 I have quoted. And most of them have little things 
 too intimate to set down. Hut this oddly penetrating 
 analysis of our differences must, I think, be given. 
 
522 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " There are all sorts of things I can't express about 
 this and want to. There''s this difference that has 
 always been between us, that you like nakedness and 
 wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through 
 everything. You are always talking of order and system, 
 and the splendid dream of the order that might replace 
 the muddled system you hate, but by a sort of instinct 
 you seem to want to break the law. I've watched you 
 so closely. Now / want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, 
 to follow rules. I don't want to make, but I do want 
 to keep. You are at once makers and rebels, you and 
 Isabel too. You're bad people — criminal people, I feel, 
 and yet full of something the world must have. You're 
 so much better than me, and so much viler. It may 
 be there is no making without destruction, but it seems 
 to me sometimes that it is nothing but an instinct for 
 lawlessness that drives you. You remind me — do you 
 remember.'' — of that time we went from Naples to 
 Vesuvius, and walked over the hot new lava there. 
 Do you remember how tired I was "^ I know it 
 disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there 
 in spite of the heat because there was a crust ; like 
 custom, like law. But directly a crust forms on things, 
 you are restless to break down to the fire again. You 
 talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, 
 mysterious, imperative. Your beauty is something 
 altogether different from anything I know or feel. It 
 has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was 
 something; I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. 
 My beauty is a quiet thing. Y''ou have always laughed 
 at my feeling for old-fashioned chintz and blue china 
 and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar used things. 
 My beauty is still beauty, and yours is excitement. I 
 know nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why one 
 
THE P,1{EAKING 1H)INT 523 
 
 should <;o deliberately out of all the decent fine thini^s 
 of life to run dan<cers and be sin«red and tormented 
 and destroyed. I don't understand. . . /"' 
 
 I remember very freshly the mood of our departure 
 from London, the platform of C'harinii; Cross with the 
 l)iir illuminated clock overhead, the bustle of porters 
 and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboys 
 and boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of 
 friends seeing travellers off by the boat train. Isa])el 
 sat very quiet and still in the compartment, and I 
 stood upon the platform with the door open, with a 
 curious reluctance to take the last step that should 
 sever me from London's ground. I showed our tickets, 
 and bought a handful of red roses for her. At last 
 came the guards crying : " Take your seats," and I 
 got in and closed the door on nie. AV'e had, thank 
 Heaven ! a compartment to ourselves. I let down the 
 wintlow and stared out. 
 
 There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, 
 a cry of " Stand away, please, stand away ! " and the 
 train was gliding slowly and smoothly out of the 
 station. 
 
 I looked out upon the river as the train rundjled 
 with slowly gathering pace across the bridge, and the 
 bobbing black heads of the pedestrians in the footway, 
 and the curve of the river and the glowin*; meat hotels, 
 and the lights and reflections and blacknesses of that 
 old, familiar spectacle. Then with a common thought, 
 we turned our eyes westward to where the pinnacles of 
 AV'estminster and the shining clock tower rose hard and 
 clear against the still, luminous sky. 
 
524 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 "They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill 
 to-night," I said, a little stupidly. 
 
 " And so," I added, " good-bye to London ! " 
 
 We said no more, but watched the south-side streets 
 below — bright gleams of lights and movement, and the 
 dark, dim, monstrous shapes of houses and factories. 
 We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, 
 New Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It 
 seemed to me that for a time we had exhausted our 
 emotions. We had escaped, we had cut our knot, we 
 had accepted the last penalty of that headlong return 
 of mine from Chicago a year and a half ago. That 
 was all settled. That harvest of feelings we had reaped. 
 I thought now only of London, of London as the 
 symbol of all we were leaving and all we had lost in 
 the world. I felt nothing now but an enormous and 
 overwhelming regret. . . . 
 
 The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran 
 through old Bromstead, where once I had played with 
 cities and armies on the nursery floor. The sprawling 
 suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim 
 tree-set country under a cloud-veiled, intermittently 
 shining moon. We passed Cardcaster Place. Perhaps 
 old Wardingham, that pillar of the old Conservatives, 
 was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with 
 our young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn 
 of the wheel and how it would confirm his contempt of 
 all our novelties. Perhaps some faint intimation drew 
 him to the window to see behind the stems of the 
 young fir trees that bordered his domain, the little 
 string of lighted carriage windows gliding south- 
 ward. . . . 
 
 Suddenly I began to realize just what it was we 
 were doing. 
 
THE BREAKING TOINT 525 
 
 And now, indeed, I knew what London had been 
 to nie, London where I had been born and echicated, 
 the slovenly mother of my mind and all my ambitions, 
 London and the empire ! It seemed to me we must 
 be going out to a world that was utterly empty. All 
 our significance fell from us — and before us was no 
 meaning any more. We were leaving London ; my 
 hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex 
 life, had been forced from it, my fingers left their hold. 
 That was over. I should never have a voice in public 
 affairs again. The inexorable unwritten law which 
 forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going 
 out to a new life, a life that appeared in that moment 
 to be a mere shrivelled remnant of life, a mere resi- 
 duum of sheltering and feeding and seeing amidst alien 
 scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We 
 were going to live cheaply in a foreign place, so cut 
 off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the 
 commonest tweed - clad stranger with a mixture of 
 shyness and hunger. . . . And suddenly all the 
 schemes I was leaving appeared fine and adventurous 
 and hopeful as they had never done before. IIow 
 great was this purpose I had relinquished, this bold 
 and subtle remakin<; of the English will ! I had 
 doubted so many things, and now suddenly I doubted 
 mv unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal 
 abandonment. AVas I not a trusted messenger, greatly 
 trusted and favoured, who had turned aside by the 
 way? Had I not, after all, stood for far more than I 
 had thought; was I notMilching from that dear great 
 city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, 
 a key, a link, a reconciling clue in her political develop- 
 ment, that now she might seek vaguely for in vain ? 
 What is one life ajj^ainst the State.'* (Dui'ht I not to 
 
526 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for 
 Isabel, and held to my thing — stuck to my thing ? 
 
 I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage 
 Britten's " It zcas a good game. No end of a game." 
 And for the first time I imagined the faces and voices 
 of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt of 
 this secret flight, this flight of which they were quite 
 unwarned. And Shoesmith might be there in the 
 house, — Shoesmith who was to have been married in 
 four days — the thing might hit him full in front of any 
 kind of people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why 
 the devil hadn't I written letters to warn them all? 
 I could have posted them five minutes before the train 
 started. I had never thought to that moment of the 
 immense mess they would be in ; how the whole edifice 
 would clatter about their ears. I had a sudden desire 
 to stop the train and go back for a day, for two days, 
 to set that negligence right. My brain for a moment 
 brightened, became animated and prolific of ideas. I 
 thought of a brilliant line we might have taken on that 
 confounded Reformatory Bill. . . . 
 
 That sort of thing was over. . . . 
 
 What indeed wasn't over ? I passed to a vaguer, 
 more multitudinous perception of disaster, the friends I 
 had lost already since the campaign of scandal began, 
 the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thought 
 of people I had been merry with, people I had worked 
 with and played with, the companions of talkative 
 walks, the hostesses of houses that had once glowed 
 with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose 
 them all. I saw life like a tree in late autumn that had 
 once been rich and splendid with friends — and now the 
 last brave dears would be hanging on doubtfully against 
 the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured in the 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 527 
 
 universal gale of iiuligimtion, trying to evade the cold 
 blast of the truth. I liad betrayed inv party, my 
 intimate friend, my wife, the wife* wliose devotion luul 
 made me what I was. For awhile tlie figure of Mar- 
 gaiet, remote, wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, 
 and the thought of my immense ingratitude. Danui 
 tliiMu ! theyM take it out of her too. I had a feeling 
 tliat I wanted to go straight back and grip some one 
 ])V tlie throat, some one talking ill of Margaret. They'd 
 blame her for not keeping me, for letting things go so 
 far. ... I wanted the whole world to know how fine 
 she was. I saw in imagination the busy, excited dinner- 
 tables at work upon us all, rather pleasantly excited, 
 brightly indignant, merciless. 
 
 Well, it's the stuff we are ! . 
 
 Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a 
 vision of Margaret's tears and the sound of her voice 
 saying, " Husband mine ! Oh ! husband mine ! To 
 see you cry !'"".. . 
 
 I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the 
 narrow compartment, with its feeble lamp overhead, 
 and our rugs and hand-baggage swaying on the rack, 
 and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my 
 wilting: red roses tightlv in her bare and rinixless hand. 
 
 For a moment I could not understand her attitude, 
 and then I perceived she was sitting bent together with 
 her head averted from the light to hide the tears that 
 were streaming down her face. Slie had not got her 
 handkerchief out for fear that I should see this, but 
 I saw her tears, dark drops of tears, upon her 
 sleeve. . . . 
 
 I sup[)ose slie had been watching my expression, 
 divining my thoughts. 
 
 For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in 
 
528 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 a sort of still and weary amazement. ^Vhy had we 
 done this injury to one another? Why? Then some- 
 thing stirred within me. 
 
 " Isabel ! ""' I whispered. 
 
 She made no sign. 
 
 " Isabel ! " I repeated, and then crossed over to her 
 and crept closely to her, put my arm about her, and 
 drew her wet cheek to mine. 
 
MR. II. G. WELLS'S FIRST BOOK. 
 
 Select Conversations with an 
 
 U ncle (Now Extinct) and two other remi- 
 niscences by H. G. Wflls. F'cap 8vo. 3s. 6d. 
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The Twilight of the Gods 
 
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 aphere. — "Those who take the book up will find that the story has given 
 tliem some pleasant hours." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — "This is written with great spirit and a considerable 
 power of story-telling. It hag sutficient attractive qualities to make it a 
 readable piece of work." 
 
 Experiences of An A.D.C. 
 
 By SHELLAND BRADLEY 
 Crown 8vo 6s. 
 
 Weitminittr Gazette. — " . . . makes better and more entertaining reading 
 than nine out of every ten novels of the day. Those who know nothin,,' 
 about Anglo-Indian Social life will be as well entertained by this story as 
 those who know everything about it." 
 
 Times. — "Full of delightful humour." 
 
 Daily Chr(,nicle. — " Mr. Bradley's narrative is bright and amusing. Wc 
 can recommend the book cordially." 
 
 Sunday Times. — "It ii emphatically a book to read," 
 
The Island Providence 
 
 By FREDERICK NIVEN 
 Author of "The Lost Cabin Mine." 
 
 Crown Svo 6s. 
 
 Daily Graphic. — "Its descriptive power is remarkable. The author 
 'springs imagination,' to use George Meredith's words, and springs it with 
 no more than the few words prescribed by that master." 
 
 Academy. — " Vigorous writing." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — *• It is told with a vigour of constant originality, 
 which is worthy of high praise." 
 
 Daily Chronicle. — "Admirable characterisation. A story of unusual 
 excellence." 
 
 Maurin the Illustrious 
 
 By JEAN AICARD 
 
 Translated from the French by Alfred AlIinso»f M.A» 
 
 Crown Svo 6s. 
 
 Evening Standard. — "If he had never done anything else M. Aicard 
 would have earned his seat in the French Academy by his creation of 
 Maurin. For Maurin is an addition to the world's stock of fictional 
 characters — to that picture gallery where no restorer is ever wanted." 
 
 Athenaum. — "There are characters and anecdotes in this book which 
 will linger long in the memory of readers." 
 
 Globe. — "Wit and wisdom fill the pages and considerable literary art 
 raises the story far above others of its class." 
 
 Daily Telegraph, — "Considerable achievement." 
 
 The Diverting Adventures of Maurin 
 
 By JEAN AICARD 
 
 Translated from the French by Alfred Allinson^ M.A, 
 
 Crown Svo 6s. 
 
 f Westminster Gazette. — " Maurin, hunter, poacher, boaster, and lover of 
 women, is a magnificently drawn type of the Meridional, who is in some 
 ways the Irishman of France ... a fine, sane, work. . . . The translation 
 is excellent." 
 
 Morning Leader. — "Indubitably laughable. An encyclopedia of the 
 best form of foolishness." 
 
 Globe. — " The characterisation is sensitive, the gaiety unstrained, the 
 spirit gentle and dashing by turns. The novel will enliven the dullest of 
 our pessimists." 
 
 Scotsman. — " The sketches are cleverly drawn. There is not a dull page 
 in the volume." 
 
 John Lane, The Bodley Head, Vigo St., London, W. 
 
THE WORKS OF 
 ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 T has long been a reproach to 
 England that only one volume 
 by ANATOLE FRANCE 
 has been adequately rendered 
 into English ; <yet outside this 
 country he shares with 
 TOLSTOI the distinction 
 greatest and most daring 
 student of humanity living. 
 
 II There have been many difficulties to 
 encounter in completing arrangements for a 
 uniform edition, though perhaps the chief bar- 
 rier to publication here has been the fact that 
 his writings are not for babes — but for men 
 and the mothers of men. Indeed, some of his 
 Eastern romances are written with biblical can- 
 dour. " I have sought truth strenuously,** he 
 tells us, ** I have met her boldly. I have never 
 turned from her even when she wore an 
 
 being 
 
THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 unexpected aspect/* Still, it is believed that the day has 
 come for giving English versions of all his imaginative 
 works, as well as of his monumental study JOAN OF 
 ARC, which is undoubtedly the most discussed book in the 
 world of letters to-day. 
 
 H MR. JOHN LANE has pleasure in announcing that 
 the following volumes are either already published or are 
 passing through the press. 
 
 THE RED LILY 
 
 MOTHER OF PEARL 
 
 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 
 
 THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD 
 
 BALTHASAR 
 
 THE WELL OF ST. CLARE 
 
 THAIS 
 
 THE WHITE STONE 
 
 PENGUIN ISLAND 
 
 THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNE 
 
 BROCHE 
 JOCASTA AND THE FAMISHED CAT 
 THE ELM TREE ON THE MALL 
 THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN 
 AT THE SIGN OF THE REINE PEDAUQUE 
 THE OPINIONS OF JEROME COIGNARD 
 MY FRIEND'S BOOK 
 THE ASPIRATIONS OF JEAN SERVIEN 
 LIFE AND LETTERS (4 vols.) 
 JOAN OF ARC (2 vols.) 
 
 11 All the books will be published at 6/- each with the 
 exception of JOAN OF ARC, which will be 25/- net 
 the two volumes, with eight Illustrations. 
 
 IT The format of the volumes leaves little to be desired. 
 The size is Demy 8vo (9 X 5|), and they are printed from 
 Caslon type upon a paper light in weight and strong of 
 texture, with a cover design in crimson and gold, a gilt top, 
 end-papers from designs by Aubrey Beardsley and initials by 
 Henry Ospovat. In short, these are volumes for the biblio- 
 phile as well as the lover of fiction, and form perhaps the 
 cheapest library edition of copyright novels ever published^ 
 for the price is only that of an ordinary novel. 
 
 ^ The translation of these books has been entrusted to 
 such competent French scholars as MR. Alfred allinson, 
 
THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 MR. FREDERIC CHAPMAN, MR. ROBERT B. D O L' C L A S, 
 MR. A. W. EVANS, MKS. FARLEY, MR. I.AFCADIO HEARS, 
 MRS. W. S. JACKSON, MRS. JOHN LANE, MRS. NEWMARCH, 
 MR. C. E. ROCHE, MISS WINIFRED STEPHENS, and MISS 
 VI. P. WILLCOCKS. 
 
 f As Anatole Tliibault, dit Anatolc France, is to most 
 English readers merely a name, it will be well to state that 
 he was born in 1844 in the picturesque and inspiring 
 surroundings of an old bookshop on the Quai Voltaire, 
 Paris, kept by his father, Monsieur Thibault, an authority on 
 cighteenth-century history, from whom the boy caught the 
 passion for the principles of the Revolution, while from his 
 mother lie was learning to love the ascetic ideals chronicled 
 in the Lives of the Saints. He was schooled with the lovers 
 of old books, missals and manuscript ; he matriculated on the 
 Quais with the old Jewish dealers of curios and objeis d'art; 
 he graduated in the great university of life and experience. 
 It will be recognised that all his work is permeated by his 
 youthful impressions ; he is, in fact, a virtuoso at large. 
 
 % He has written about thirty volumes of fiction. His 
 first novel was JOCASTA & THE FAMISHED CAT 
 (1879). THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARQ 
 appeared in i88i,and had the distinction of being crowned 
 by the French Academy, into which he was received in 1896. 
 
 H His work is illuminated with style, scholarship, and 
 psychology ; but its outstanding features are the lambent wit, 
 the gay mockery, the genial irony with which he touches every 
 subject he treats. But the wit is never malicious, the mockery 
 never derisive, the irony never barbed. To quote from his own 
 GARDEN OF EPICURUS : " Irony and Pity are both oi 
 good counsel ; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable, 
 the other sanctifies it to us with her tears. The Irony I 
 invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love nor 
 beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth 
 disarms anger and it is she teaches us to laugh at rogues and 
 fools whom but for her we might be so weak as to hate.*' 
 
 H Often he shows how divine humanity triumphs over 
 mere asceticism, and with entire reverence ; indeed, lie 
 might be described as an ascetic overflowing with humanity, 
 just as he has been termed a " pagan, but a pagan 
 constantly haunted by the pre-occupation of Christ." 
 He is in turn — like his own Choulette in THE RED 
 LILY — saintly and Rabelaisian, yet without incongruity. 
 
THE WORKS OF ANATOLE FRANCE 
 
 At all times he is the unrelenting foe of superstition and 
 hypocrisy. Of himself he once modestly said : " You will 
 find in my writings perfect sincerity (lying demands a talent 
 I do not possess), much indulgence, and some natural 
 affection for the beautiful and good." 
 
 H The mere extent of an author's popularity is perhaps a 
 poor argument, yet it is significant that two books by this 
 author are in their HUNDRED AND TENTH THOU- 
 SAND, and numbers of them well into their SEVENTIETH 
 THOUSAND, whilst the one which a Frenchman recently 
 described as " Monsieur France's most arid book " is in its 
 FIFTY-EIGHT-THOUSAND. 
 
 ^ Inasmuch as M. FRANCE'S ONLY contribution to 
 an English periodical appeared in THE YELLOW BOOK, 
 vol. v., April 1895, together with the first important English 
 appreciation of his work from the pen of the Hon. Maurice 
 Baring, it is peculiarly appropriate that the English edition 
 of his works should be issued from the Bodley Head. 
 
 ORDER FORM. 
 
 „ 1 90 
 
 To Mr 6.^S<:.r.:{.Jr..L)!:^.k 
 
 Bookseller, 
 
 Please send me the following works 0/ Anaiole France: 
 THAlS PENGUIN ISLAND 
 
 BALTHASAR THE WHITE STONE 
 
 THE RED LILY MOTHER OF PEARL 
 
 THE GARDEN OF EPICURUS 
 THE CRIME OF SYLVESTRE BONNARD 
 THE WELL OF ST. CLARE 
 THE MERRIE TALES OF JACQUES TOURNE- 
 
 BROCHE 
 THE ELM TREE ON THE MALL 
 THE WICKER-WORK WOMAN 
 JOCASTA AND THE FAMISHED CAT 
 JOAN OF ARC (2 Vols.) 
 LIFE AND LETTERS (4 Vols.) 
 
 for which I enclose. ..^^ _ _ 
 
 Name... S^..^..^^.. fi.S^.X..i 
 
 Address L....^:..±.±.fc.>f.Hfc.:k.,.*?^ 
 
 JOHN LANE, Publisher. The Bodlev Head, Vigo St., London, W. 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OV FICTION 
 
 BY ARTHUR H. ADAMS. 
 
 GALAHAD JONKS. A Tra^jic Farce. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Wiili i() liill-pai;i' Illustrations by Norman Lindsay. 
 
 %• Cialahad Jones is a middle-aired bank clerk, witfi a family. One day, on 
 his way home, a leller falls to his (eel from the balcony oi a house he is passinf^. 
 It is addressed "To You," and on readinp it he discovers that he is requested 
 to meet the writer in the garden ol the house at lo o'clock that nijjht. In a spirit 
 of knight-errantry, he decides to do s(i, and learns that the writer a young K" 1 — 
 is kept practically in prison by her father, because of lier affection for a man of 
 whom he does not approve. The chivalry of (ialahad Jones plunges him into 
 many ditFiculties, ana leads to some very awkward and extremely amusing 
 situations. 
 
 BY FRANCIS ADAMS. 
 
 A CHILD OF THE AGE. Crown Svo. i/- 
 
 J'liU Malt Gaztllf — " It comes recofjnisably near to great excellence. There is 
 a love episode in this book which is certainly fine. Clearly conceived and 
 expressed with point 
 
 BY JEAN AICARD. 
 
 THE DIVFRTIXG ADX'ENTURES OF MAURIX. Cr. 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Translated troni the French by Alfretl Allinson, M.A. 
 
 IVesltutuslcr Gfisf/Zt— Mauri n, hunter, poacher, boaster, and lover of women, 
 is a magnificently drawn type of the Meridional, who is in some ways the Irishman 
 of France. . . . a fine, sane, work. . . . The translation is excellent." 
 
 Morniti^ Lender—" Indubitably laughable. An encyclopaedia of the best 
 form of foolishness." 
 
 MAURIX THE ILLUSTRIOUS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Translated from tlie French by .Alfred .Allinson, M.A. 
 Evenit'.r Slnndard — "If he had never done anything,' else M. Aicard would 
 have earned his seat iu the French Ac.idemy by his creation of Maurin. For 
 Maurin is an addition to the world's stock of fictional characters— lo that picture 
 gallery where no restorer is ever wanted." 
 
 BY GRANT ALLEN. 
 
 THE BRITISH BARHARIAXS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 .Also Canvas Back 1/6 
 Saturday Review — " Mr. Allen takes occasion to say a good many things that 
 require saying, and suggests a good manv reforms that would, il adopted, bring 
 our present legal code more into harmony with m >de! n humanity and the 
 exigencies of ;ls development." 
 
 BY MAUD ANNESLEY. 
 
 THE WINE OF LIFE. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Pttt Malt Giiscttc--" The story is full of life and interest and the startling 
 denouement is led up to with considerable skill." 
 
 THE DOOR OF DARKNESS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 I'tiii .l/./.V Gasetti—" An entliralling s'oiy, powerfully imagined and distin- 
 guished for artistry of no mean ordci. " 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 ANONYMOUS. 
 
 ELIZABETH'S CHILDREN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph— The book is charming . . . the author . . . has a delicate 
 lanciful touch, a charming imagination . . . skilfully suggests character and 
 moods ... is bright and witty, and writes about children with exquisite know- 
 ledge and sympathy." 
 
 HELEN ALLISTON. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 By the author of " Elizabeth's Children." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " The book has vivacity, fluency, colour, more than a touch 
 ol poetry and passion. . . . We shall look forward witn interest to future work 
 by the author of ' Helen AUiston.' " 
 
 THE YOUNG O'BRIENS. 
 
 By the author of " Elizabeth's Children," and " Helen Alliston." 
 Saturday Review—''' Delightful . . . the author treats them (the Young 
 O'Briens) very skilfully." 
 
 THE MS. IN A RED BOX. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Speaker — •" It is that rarest and most welcome of works, a good romance of 
 pure fiction. . . . The use made of local colour and historical incident is one of 
 the author's unknown triumphs. ... In these respects ... it is the best novel 
 that has appeared since ' Loma Doone.' One of the most exciting books of its 
 own kind that we have ever read." 
 
 BY W. M. ARDAGH. 
 
 THE MAGADA. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 P all Mall Gazette — " 'The Magada' is a store-house of rare and curious learn- 
 ing ... it is a well-written and picturesque story of high adventure and deeds 
 of derring-do." 
 
 Observer — "The book has admirably caught the spirit of romance." 
 Daily Chronicle — "'The Magada' is a fine and finely told story, and we 
 congratulate Mr. Ardagh," 
 
 BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON. 
 
 SENATOR NORTH . Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 New York Herald— '■'■ In the description of Washington life Mrs. Atherton 
 shows not only a very considerable knowledge of externals, but also an insight 
 into the underlying political issues that is remarkable." 
 
 Outlook — "The novel has genuine historical value." 
 
 THE ARISTOCRATS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Also in paper boards, cloth back, at i/6. 
 
 The Times— '^ Clever and entertaining. . . . This gay volume is written by 
 some one with a pretty wit, an eye for scenery, and a mind quick to grasp natural 
 as well as individual characteristics. Her investigations into the American 
 character are acute as well as amusing." 
 
 THE DOOMSWOMAN . Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post—''A fine drama, finely conceived and finely executed 
 Athenaum — " Eminently picturesque , . . gorgeous colouring." 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON - cc;//;;;//,./. 
 A WHIRL ASl'N'DLR . I'apcr Cover. i/- 
 
 Hysldndi-r " It can be recommended as a fine romance. . . . There is plenty 
 of incident." 
 
 Oni/ook— "The story is a curious achievement in the violently and crudely 
 picturetique style that is peculiar to the aiithtir writer. ' 
 
 BY ARNOLD BENNETT. 
 
 A MAN FROM THE NORTH. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Black and H'/titi—" A work that will come to the jaded novel reader as ■ 
 splendid surprise." 
 
 Datlv Clironicle — " Admirably fresh and brisk, vibrating with a wild, young 
 ecstasy." 
 
 BY EX-LIEUTENANT BILSE. 
 
 LIFE IN A C.ARRI.SON TOWN. Crown 8vo. 1/- 
 
 Tlic suppressed C»eniiHU Ncnol. With a preface written by the 
 author whil.st in London, and an introduction by Arnold White. 
 
 Truth — "Tlie dis^acelul exposures of the book were expressly .idniilted to 
 be true by the Minister of War in the Reichstag. What tlie book will probably 
 suggest to you is. that (.ieinian militarism is cutting its own throat, and will one 
 day DC hoist with its own petard." 
 
 BY SHELLAND BRADLEY. 
 
 EXPERIENCES OF AN A.D.C . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 li'cslniinstf) Gazette — " . . . makes better and more entertaining reading 
 than nine out ol every ten novels of the day. . . . Those who know nothing about 
 Anglo-Indian social life will be as well entertained by this story as those who 
 know everything about it." 
 
 Times — " Full of delightful humour." 
 
 BY JOHN BUCHAN. 
 
 JOHN BURNET OF BARNS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 JrutJt - " In .short, this is a novel to lay aside and read a second time, nor 
 should we torget the spirited snatches of song which show that the winner of the 
 Newdigate has the soul o( the poet." 
 
 A LOST LADY OF OLD YEARS . Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Athcftctunt — " Written in strong and scholarly fashion." 
 Morntnii Pust " We have nothing but praise for Mr. IJuchan. The book 
 of sterling merit and sustained interest." 
 
 Lvctung mandard — "Stirring and well told." 
 
 BY GILBERT K- CHESTERTON. 
 
 THE NAPOLEON Ol- NOTTINC Hll.L. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Witli O Uhisiralioiis by \\ . Urahara Roberlhon. 
 
 Daily Mail -" Mr. Chesterton, as our laughing philosopher, is at his best in 
 this delightlul fantasy." 
 
 VVesttmuster Gazette—" It is undeniably clever. It scintillates that is exactly 
 the right word with bright and epigrammatic observations, and it is writtrn 
 tbrougliout with undoubted literary skill." 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY T. B. CLEGG. 
 
 THE LOVE CHILD . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 /"/m//;—" A singularly powerful book. . . . The painful story grips you from 
 first to last." 
 
 Daily Telcgra(>h — "A strong and interesting story, the iruit of careful 
 thought and conscientious workmanship. . . . Mr. Clegg has presented intensely 
 dramatic situations without letting them degenerate into the melodramatic." 
 
 THE WILDERNESS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph—"' A really admirable story." 
 
 Alhcnoemn — "Mr. Clegg claims the gift of powerful and truthful writing." 
 
 THE BISHOPS SCAPEGOAT. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Athcnoemn — " Inspired with a deep sense of the beautiful in Nature and the 
 instinctive goodness of the human heart, and the divine meaning of life." 
 
 Daily Mail — "A really good novel. It is so good that we hope Mr. Clegg 
 will give us some more from the same store." 
 
 JOAN OF THE HILLS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Tirtics — "Another of Mr. Clegg's admirable novels of Australian life." 
 Globe — "A good story, interesting all through." 
 
 BY FREDERICK BARON CORYO. 
 
 IN HIS OWN IMAGE. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Westtninster Gazette — "The book is cleverly written and the author has 
 obviously a very pretty literary talent." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette— " Always delightful and well worth reading." 
 
 BY YICTORIA CROSS. 
 
 THE WOMAN W^HO DIDN'T. Crown Svo. i/- 
 
 Speaker—'' The feminine gift of intuition seems to be developed with uncanny 
 strength, and what she sees she has the power of flashing upon her readers with 
 wonderful vividness and felicity of phrase. ... A strong and subtle study of 
 feminine nature, biting irony, restrained passion, and a style that is both forcible 
 and polished."' 
 
 BY A. J. DAWSON. 
 
 MIDDLE GREYNESS. (Canvas-back Library). i/6 
 
 Daily Telegraph— "■The novel has distinct ability. The descriptions of up- 
 country manners are admirable." 
 
 MERE SENTIMENT Crown Svo. 3/6 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette— ''There is some clever writing in Mr. Dawson's short 
 stories collected to form a new ' Keynotes ' volume under the title of Mere Senti- 
 ment.' . . . Avery clever piece ot work. . . . Mr. Dawson has a pretty style 
 . . shows dramatic instinct." 
 
JOHN LANK'S LIST OF FICTION 
 BY GEORGE EGERTON. 
 
 KEYNOTES. Crown Svo. 3/0 net. Ninth Edition. 
 
 ::>/. J, iims's Gdztllc—" Tins is a collection of eijjht of the prettiest short 
 stones "ilial have appeared lor many a tlay. They turn for the most part on 
 feminine trans of character ; in fact, the book is a little psychological study of 
 woman under varums circumstances. The characters are so admirably drawn, 
 and the scenes and landscapes are described with so much and so rare vividness, 
 that \vf cannot help beiiif; almost spell-bound by their perusal." 
 
 DISCORDS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 net. Sixth Edition. 
 
 Dui/v yV/f^'^ (//>//— "These masterly word-sketches." 
 
 Spc'tkcr -" The book is true to human nature, for the author has genius, and 
 let us add, has heart. ll is representative ; it is, in the hackneyed phrase, 
 a human document." 
 
 SY.Ml'Ht>.\II£S. Crown 8vo. 6/- net. Second Edition. 
 
 St. Jtitties's Gazette— "There is plenty of pathos and no little power in the 
 volume before us." 
 
 Daily News— '* The impressionistic descriptive passafres and the human 
 touches 'that abound in the book lay hold of the irnajjinalion and linger in the 
 memory of the reader." 
 
 FANTASIAS. Crown S\io. 3/6 net. Canvas back, 1/6 net. 
 
 Daily C/troiiiclc— "These ' Fantasias ' are pleasant reading— typical scenes or 
 tales upon the poetry and prose of life, prostitution, and the beauty of dreams 
 and truth." 
 
 BY A. C. FOX DAYIES. 
 
 THE DANGKRXILLK IXHERITAXCK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Sccoiid Hldition. 
 
 MorninL^ Post -" Mr. Fox-Davies has written a detective story of which 
 Gaboriau might have been proud." 
 
 Daily Telegraph—" The stoi-y is one that, once begun, must be finished." 
 
 THE MAULHX'KRKR MTRDHRS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Aiso 1/- net. 
 
 Evening Standard— " A.n entertaining blend ol the Society novel and the 
 detective story." 
 
 IVcstnnnslcr Gazette— "VJe heartily recommend this book for a holiday or a 
 railway journey. An exciting and ingenious tale." 
 
 THE FINANCES OF SIR JOHN KYNNERSLEY. 
 
 Crown S\ o. 6/- 
 
 Pnnch—" 1 read every wonl of the book, and enjoyed nearly all of them." 
 Morning Post—" Mr. Fox-Davies" extremely clever and entertaining book." 
 
 BY HAROLD FREDERIC. 
 
 M ARC 11 H.\Ri:.S Crown Svo. 3/6. Third Edition. 
 
 Duiiv LJirunuU—" iiuoyant. tanciful, stimulating, a pure creation of fanc> 
 and high spirits. ' March Hares has a joyous impetus which carries everything 
 before it ; and it enriches a class ol tiction which unfoi innately is not copious," 
 
 5 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY HAROLD FREDERIC-cc;;///,///,7y. 
 MRS. ALBERT GRUNDY. Observations in Philistia. 
 
 F'Cap. 8vo. 3/6. Second Edition. 
 
 Fall Mall Gazette—''' Mr. Frederic is at his very best in this light and delicate 
 satire, which is spread with laughter and good humour." 
 
 BY RICHARD GARNETT. 
 
 THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS AND OTHER STORIES 
 
 Crown 8vo. 6/- Second Edition. 
 
 Daily Chronicle — " A subtle compound of philosophy and irony. Let the 
 reader take these stories as pure fun — lively incident and droll character — and he 
 will be agreeably surprised to find how stirnulating they are." 
 
 Ttnus — " Here is learning in plentj^ drawn from all ages and most languages, 
 but of dryness or dulness not a sentence. The book bubbles with laughter. . . . 
 His sense of humour has a wide range." 
 
 BY ELIZABETH GODFREY. 
 
 THE WINDING ROAD . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Literary ^-Fo/A^-" A carefully written story. . . . Miss Godfrey has the mind 
 of a poet ; her pages breathe of the beautiful in nature without giving long 
 description, while the single-hearted love between Jasper and Phenice is des- 
 cribed with power and charm." 
 
 THE BRIDAL OF ANSTACE . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 IVestminster Gazette — " An individual charm and a sympathetic application 
 have gone to the conception of Miss Godfrey's book, a remarkable power of 
 characterisation to its making, and a refined literary taste to its composition." 
 
 Truth — " Charmingly told. ... A story in which your interest gains and 
 deepens from the beginning." 
 
 THE CRADLE OF A POET. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 %* The poet is a product of the stone quarrj' region of Dorsetshire, and the 
 story concerns itself with his development and a conflict between ancient tradition 
 and modern spirit. 
 
 BY A. R. GORING THOMAS. 
 
 MRS. GRAMERCY PARK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 IVorM—'^ In the language of the heroine herself this, her story, is delight- 
 fully 'bright and cute.' " 
 
 Observer — " Fresh and amusing." 
 
 BY HANDASYDE. 
 
 FOR THE W^EEK-END. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Standard — " Only a woman, surely, would write such deep and intimate 
 truth about the heart of another woman and the things that give her joy when a 
 man loves her." 
 
 A GIRL'S LIFE IN A HUNTING COUNTRY. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Daily News — " A sweet and true representation of a girl's romance." 
 Scotsman — "Tliere are some admirable character sketches in the book and a 
 
 lot of quaint philosophy, whimsical thoughts and quoted verse, all of which 
 
 should greatly entertain the reader." 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY HENRY HARLAND. 
 
 THE CARDINALS SNUFF BOX. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 lUustratod by G. C. Wilmhurst. 165th. Thou.sand. 
 
 y/carfofijr-" The drawings are all excellent in style and really illustratire of 
 the tale." 
 
 Saturday /^rt'iVtt'—'" Wholly dellKhtful." 
 Faii Mall GtiMeite—" Dainty and delicious." 
 Times—'* A book amonff a tnousand." 
 Spectator — "A charming romance." 
 
 MV FRIKND PROSTFRO . Crown 8vo. 6/- Third Edition. 
 
 / imes—" Ihere is no denying the charm of the work, the delicacj and 
 fragrancy of the style, the sunny play of the dialogue, the vivacity of the wit, aad 
 the graceful flicht of the fancy." 
 
 Jf't;r/<y— "The reading ol'it is a pleasure rare and unalloyed." 
 
 THE LADY PARAMOUNT. Crown 8vo. 6/- 55th Thou.sand. 
 
 Ttmes—'' A fantastic, delightful love-idyll." 
 
 Spectator — "A roseate romance without a crumpled rose leaf." 
 
 Daily Mail — "Charming, dainty, delightful." 
 
 COMEDIES AND ERRORS. Crown Svo. 6/- Third Edition. 
 
 Mr. Hknry Jamks, in Fortnightly /?«'iV.f — " Mr. Harland has clearly thought 
 out a fonn. . . . He has maslerea a method and learned how to paint. . .. Hia 
 art is all alive with felicities and delicacies." 
 
 GREY ROSES. Crown Svo. 3/6 Fourth Edition. 
 
 Daily Telegrat>h~'" Grey Roses'" are entitled to rank among the choicest 
 flowers of the realms of romance.'" 
 
 Spectator—" Really delightful. 'Castles near Spain' is as near perfection as 
 it could well be." 
 
 Daily CA/CMiV/^—" Charming stories, simple, full of freshness." 
 
 MADE.MOISELLE MISS . Crown Svo. 3/6 Third Edition. 
 
 Sbeaker — "All through the book we are pleased and entertained." 
 nookman—" An interesting collection of early work. In it may be noted the 
 undoubted delicacy and strength of Mr. Harlaiid's manner." 
 
 BY ALICE HERBERT. 
 
 THE MEASURE OF OUR YOUTH. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Evcnitti; Slamlanl -" A very human, iiitclli>;ible book. . . . exceedingly 
 clever and earnestly real." 
 
 Mornitu; Post—" Reveals an unusual clearness of vision and distiaction of 
 style and thought." 
 
 BY MURIEL HINE. 
 
 HALF IN EARNEST. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 *«* Derrick Kilinarncy, the secretary of a famous politician, is a young man 
 with the disposition to take the best that life offers hiin, and skirk the respon- 
 sibilities. He falls in love with a girl but shudders at the idea of the bondage of 
 marri.ige. His love is emancipated, unfettered. He is ambitious, politically, 
 allows nimsclf to become entangled with his chiefs wife, and is too indolent to 
 break with her even in justice to the girl he loves. K.ventually there comes a 
 time when all the threads have to be gathered together, when love ha-* to be 
 weighed with ambition, and in Kilmarney's case the denouement is unexpected 
 and startling. 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY ARNOLD HOLCOMBE. 
 
 THE ODD MAN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morniug Post—*' One of the most refreshinir and amusing books that we have 
 read for some months. ... ' The Odd Man ' is a book to put on one's shelves 
 and Mr. Holcombe's is a name to remember.' 
 
 Times — " A clever and competent piece of work." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " The brightness, spontaneity, and constant flow of its 
 humour make ' The Odd Man ' a feast of fun." 
 
 BY WILFRID SCARBOROUGH JACKSON. 
 
 NINE POINTS OF THE LAW. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Manchester Guardian — " The kindly humorous philosophy of this most divert- 
 ing story is as remarkable as its attractive style. There is hardly a page without 
 something quotable, some neat bit of phrasing or apt wording of a truth." 
 
 HELEN OF TROY. N.Y. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Chronicle— ^'The story is at once original, impossible, artificial, and 
 very amusing. Go, get the work and read." 
 
 Evening Standard — "There is a rollicking yet plausible tone that carries the 
 reader along." 
 
 TRIAL BY MARRIAGE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Globc — "Written with all Mr. Jackson's simple, unaSected charm." 
 
 World- " One can confidently promise the reader of this skilfully treated and 
 unconventional novel that he will not find a page of it dull. It is one that will be 
 not only read but remembered." 
 
 BY MRS. JOHN LANE. 
 
 KITWYK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 A Story with numerous illustrations by Howard Pyle, 
 Albert Sterner and George Wharton Edwards. 
 
 Times — " Mrs. Lane has succeeded to admiration, and chiefly by reason of 
 being so much interested in her theme that she makes no conscious efifort to 
 please. . . . Everyone who seeks to be diverted will read ' Kitwyk ' for its 
 obvious qualities of entertainment." 
 
 THE CHAMPAGNE STANDARD. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post — " The author's champagne overflows with witty sayings too 
 numerous to cite." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette — " Mrs. Lane's papers on our social manners and foibles are 
 the most entertaining, the kindest and the truest that have been oflered us for a 
 long time. . . . The book shows an airy philosophy that will render it ol service 
 to the social student." 
 
 Athenceum — "Mrs. Lane treats each subject with such freshness and origi- 
 nality that the work is as entertaining as it is suggestive." 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST UV FICTION 
 
 BY MRS. JOHN LANE— Co;///;///*:./. 
 ACCORniXC. TO M.M^IA . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Ihitiv J c/ii;ni/<Ji - " A iimrc ciiicrtaininp, companionable, pood-natured, and 
 yet critical piece of portrait lire we have iiol had the ^:<)oti luck to encounter these 
 many seasons. . . . ' According lo Maria" is as licsh, amusing, and human a 
 book as any man, woman, or girlcould desire lo bewitch a jaded moment, or drive 
 away a lit of the dumps." 
 
 O/A^'fj'rr -" Tlie wurld * according to Maria ' is a most diverting place. She 
 is a delii;ht, and must be secured at once lor every home." 
 
 Diitly C7/;()*/i</<- "This deli^rlitlul novel, sparkling with humour. . . . Maria's 
 world is real. . . . Mrs. Lane is remarkably true to life in that world. . . . Maria 
 IS priceless, and Mrs. Lane is a satirist whose life may be indefatigably joyous in 
 satiric art. For her eyes harvest the little absurdities, and her hand makes 
 sheaves of them. . . . Thackeray mi>;ht have made such sheaves if he had been 
 a woman." 
 
 BALTMASAR AM) OTHER STORIES . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Trauslatod by .Mrs. Jt.MiN La.nk from tlio French of Anatole France 
 
 Daily Graphic — "The original charm and distinction of the author's style has 
 survived the difficult ordeal of appearing in another language. . . . ''l"he Cure's 
 Mignonette " is as perfect in itsell as some little delicate flower." 
 
 Globe — " Every one of them is interesting." 
 
 BY RICHARD LE GALLIENNE. 
 
 THE ROOK l^ILLS OV .\ARlTSSUS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 Daily Chronicle—*' One of the most winsome volumes — winsome is surely the 
 one epithet — which have so far been given to us during the last decade of a 3ying 
 century." 
 
 C. di B. (Mr. Bernard Shaw) in //»<• 5/Mr—" I fan unusually 6ne literary instinct 
 could make it a solid book, Mr. le Gallienne would be at no loss for an enduring 
 reputation . . . Nothing could be prettier than his pleas and persuasions on 
 behalf of Narcissus and George Muncaster." 
 
 THE WORSHHMMCR (>F THE IM.XC^E. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Datiy C/;ro>irr.''«'-" Contains passages ol a poignancy which Mr. Le Gallienne 
 h;is never before compassed."" 
 
 THE or EST OF THE C^OLDE.X C^.IRL. Cr. Svo. 6/- 
 
 Fifteenth Edition. 
 
 Daily Neivs—'* A piece of literary art which compels our admiration."" 
 Mr. "Max Beerbohm in Z'fli/v J/niV— " Mr. Le (iallicnne's gentle, high spirits, 
 and his sympathy with existence is exhibited here. . . . rlis poetry, like his 
 humour, sutfuses the whole book and gives a charm to the most prosaic objects 
 and incidents of life. . . . The whole book is delightful, for this reason, that no 
 one else could have written a book ol the same kina. "' 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF ZION CHAPEL. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Second Edition. 
 
 ^1. James a GasftU — " .Mr. Le (jallH-niies masterpiece."" 
 
 TitPtes — " Kxtremely clever and pathetic. As tor sentiment Dickens might 
 have been justly proud of poor Jenny s lingering death, and readers whose hearts 
 have the mastery over their heads will certainly weep over it." 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY RICHARD LE GALLlEJftiE-contmued. 
 
 PAINTED SHADOWS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Scotsnian — ^" Material and workmanship are of the finest." 
 
 Queen—*" Really delightful stories, Mr. Le Gallienne writes prose like a poet." 
 
 LITTLE DINNERS WITH THE SPHINX. Cr. Svo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph — '* Here is the same delicate phrasing, the same tender revela- 
 tion of emotions, always presented with a daintiness of colouring that reveals the 
 true literary artist." 
 
 Slar—"* Mr. Le Gallienne touches with exquisite tenderness on the tragedy of 
 things that change and pass and fade." 
 
 BY A. E. J. LEGGE. 
 
 MUTINEERS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Spcaker — "An interesting story related with admirable lucidity and remark- 
 able grasp of character. Mr. Legge writes with polish and grace." 
 
 Literary IVorld — "A novel sure to win applause. . . . 'Mutineers' can 
 safely be recommended as a novel well consiructed and well written. It gave us 
 two pleasant hours." 
 
 BOTH GREAT AND SMALL. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Saiurday Revieiv — " We read on and on with increasing pleasure." 
 
 Titnes — " The style of this book is terse and witty." 
 
 Spectator—'" Full of quiet and clever observation and written with a good deal 
 of descriptive talent." 
 
 THE FORD. Crown Svo. 6/- Second Edition. 
 
 Standard— "" An impressive work . . . clever and thoughtful. 'The Ford,' 
 deserves to be largely read." 
 
 Mr. James Douglas, in Star — " It is full of finely phrased wit and costly satire. 
 It is modern in its handling, and it is admirably written." 
 
 BY W. J. LOCKE. 
 
 DERELICTS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Chronicle—"' Mr. Locke tells his story in a very true, very moving, and 
 very nobble book. If anyone can read the last chapter with dry eyes we shall be 
 surprised. ' Derelicts ' is an impressive and important book." 
 
 Morning Post— Mr. Locke's clever novel. One of the most effective stories 
 that have appeared for some time past." 
 
 IDOLS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Telegraph— "" A brilliantly written and eminently readable book." 
 
 Daily Mail— One of the most distinguished novels of the present book season." 
 
 Punch — " The Baron stronglj^ recommends Mr. W. J. Locke's 'Idols' to all 
 novel readers. It is well written. No time is wasted in superfluous descriptions ; 
 there is no fine writing for fine writing's sake, but the story will absorb the 
 reader. ... It is a novel that, once taken up, cannot willingly be put down 
 until finished." 
 
 lO 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF I ICTION 
 
 BY W. J. LOCKE -conttnuci. 
 A STUDY IN SHADOWS. Crown 8vo. 3/6 
 
 Daily (.'htoincU " Ml. Locke has achieved a distinct hucccss in this novel. 
 He has struck iH'tny emotional chords and struck ihein all with a firm sure hand." 
 
 Athfuaum " The character-drawing is distinctly cood. All the personaf^eH 
 stand out well defined with strongly marked individualities." 
 
 THE WHITF DOVP:. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Itmes " An intcre.stii\K story,, lull of dramatic scenes." 
 
 Morning /'o.s/— " An interesting stoi-y. The characters are stronply con 
 ceived and vividly presented, and the dramatic moments are powerfully realized." 
 
 THK USl'RPKR. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 H'orU--"Th\% quite uncommon novel." 
 
 Sptctator—'' Character and plot are most ingeniously wrought, and the con- 
 clusion, when it comes, is fully satisfying." 
 Tunes— " An impressive romance." 
 
 THK DEMAGOGUE AND LADY PHAVRP: . Cr. Svo. 3/6 
 
 AT THE c;ATE of SAMARIA. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Daily CViro*iiW*— "The heroine of this clever stoiy attracts our interest. . . . 
 She is a clever and subtle study. . . . We congratulate Mr. Locke." 
 
 Morninj^ Post—''A cleverly wi itten tale . . . the author's pictures ol 
 Bohemian life are bright and graphic." 
 
 WHERE love IS. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Mr. Jamk-s Duuglas, in S/ar — " I do not often praise a book with this 
 exultant gusto, but it pave me so much spiritual stimulus and moral pleasure that 
 I feel bound to snatch the additional delight of commending it to those readers 
 who long for a novel that is a piece of literature as well as a piece oflife." 
 
 Sidndnrd "A brilliant piece ot work." 
 
 7"i"»»iM— " The author has the true g^ft ; his people are alive." 
 
 THE MORXLS OF MARCUS ORDEYNE . Cr. Svo. 6/- 
 
 Mi. C. K. i>iiuKTKK, in S/-/urf - "A book which has just delighted my heart." 
 Tri4/Jt.' " Mr. Locke's new novel is one of the most artistic pieces of work I 
 
 have met with for many a day." 
 
 Daily CAroMiW*.— ' Mr. Locke succeeds, indeed, in every crisis of this most 
 
 original stor>-." 
 
 TH1-: I^1:L0\'ED \' \C..\BC^ND. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Trutlt. " Certainly 
 Evenirii; Stiit 
 it failed now. 
 
 ertainly it is tiie most brilliant piece of work Mr. I^Kke has done." 
 indara. " Mr. Locke can hardly fail to write beautifully. He has 
 
 SIMON THE JESTER. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 •^» The central figure of Mr. Locke's new novel is one Simon de (iex, M.P., 
 who having met life with a gay and serene philosophy is suddenly called upon to 
 face Death. This he tioes gallantly and jests at Death until he discovers to his 
 confusion that Destiny is a greater iester than he. Kventually by surrendering 
 his claims he attains salvation. Tlie heroine is Lola Hrandt, an ex-trainer of 
 animals, and an important figure in the story is a dwarf, Prolessor Anastasius 
 Papadopoulos, who has a troupe oi pcriorming cats. The scene of the novel is 
 laid in London and Algiers. 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY INGRAHAM LOYELL. 
 
 MARGARITA'S SOUL. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Punc/i.-^' There have been a great many ingenues (mock or real) in modern 
 fiction, and doubtless one or two in actual life ; iSut there never was one inside a 
 book or out of it who came within a four mile cab radius of Margarita. The book 
 is well worth reading." 
 
 IVi'slminsler Gazette. — "A book which does not let the reader's interest flag 
 for a moment. It is full of laughter and smiles, of seriousness, comfortable philo- 
 sophy and a few tears." 
 
 BY A. NEIL LYONS. 
 
 ARTHUR'S. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Tinies. — " Not only a very entertaining and amusing work, but a very kindly 
 and tolerant work also. Incidentally the work is a mirror of a phase of the low 
 London life of to-day as true as certain of Hogartli's transcripts in the eighteenth 
 century, and far more tender." 
 
 Punch. — " Mr. Neil Lyons seems to get right at the heart of things, and I con- 
 fess to a real admiration for this philosopher of the coffee-stall. " 
 
 SIXPENNY PIECES. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " It is pure, fast, sheer life, salted with a sense of humour." 
 
 Evening Standard. — "' Sixpenny Pieces ' is as good as 'Arthurs', and that 
 
 is saying a great deal. A book full of laughter and tears and hits innumerable 
 
 that one feels impelled to read aloud. ' bixpenny Pieces ' would be very hard 
 
 indeed to beat." 
 
 BY FIONA MACLEOD (William Sharp). 
 
 THE MOUNTAIN LOVERS. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Litcrary World. — " We eagerly devour page after page ; we are taken captive 
 by the speed and poetry of the book." 
 
 Graphic. — " It is as sad, as sweet, as the Hebridean skies themselves, but 
 with that soothing sadnessof Nature which is so blessed a relief after a prolonged 
 dose of the misery of ' mean streets.' " 
 
 BY ALLAN MCAULAY. 
 
 THE EAGLE'S NEST. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Athenceuni.—'^^We should describe the book as a brilliant tour de force. . . . 
 The story is spirited and interesting. The love interest also is excellent and 
 pathetic' 
 
 Spectator. — " This is one of those illuminating and stimulating romances which 
 set people reading history." 
 
 BY FREDERICK NIYEN. 
 
 THE LOST CABIN MINE. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Athencpum. — " The book should be read by lovers of good fiction." 
 IVestniinsfer Gazette. — " The whole story is told with an amount of spirit and 
 realism that grips the reader throughout."' 
 
 THE ISLAND PROVIDENCE. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Graphic. — " Its descriptive power is remarkable. The author 'springs 
 imagination," to use George Merediths words, and springs it with no more than 
 the few words prescribed by that master." 
 
 Academy. — " Vigorous writing." 
 
 12 
 
JOHN LAXK'S LIST ()!• FICriloN 
 BY FRANK NORRIS. 
 
 TlIK THIRP C llUl.i:. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Mi)riiii::; i'ost. "As a .sketch by a prv-at artist often reveals to the amateur 
 more of his power and skili than a larpe fiiiiAhcd work in which the effect is con- 
 cealed, so in these virile little studies we are made tr) realise quite clearly what 
 powers of observation and what a keen eye for cfTeciive incident Mr. Norris had.'' 
 
 Sj>ectator. —" A series of remarkable sketches and short stories by the late 
 Mr, tranlc Norris . . . well worth reading." 
 
 BY F. J. RANDALL. 
 
 LOVE AND THK I KON.MOXCKK. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 l)int\ Telei^riip};. — '• iiim.c the i;ay days when Mr. V. Anstey was writinjf his 
 inimitable series of humourous novels, we can recall no book of purely farcical 
 imajfination, so full of excellent entertainment as this first eflfort of Mr. F. J. 
 Randall. ' Love and the Ironmoneer' is certain to be a success." 
 
 limes — " As divertin>i a comedy of errors as the reader is likely 'o meet with 
 for a Ci)n3iderable time." 
 
 Mr. Clement Shorter in T/ie Sphere—** I thank the author for a delightful 
 hour's amusement. " 
 
 BY STEPHEN REYNOLDS. 
 
 A POOR MAX'S HOCSE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Ditily Mail "This is a remarkable book, and we hope it will receive the 
 attention it deserves." 
 
 Athettofitm—** A. remarkably vivid and sympathetic picture. It is an achieve- 
 ment of conspicuous merit.'" 
 
 TUP. WOW MOUNTAIN'. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Pinich—"^ . . . deserve.-^ autliing but praise ... a clever story well told, and 
 an endlessly amusing cai icature of the petty side of life." 
 ll'esttmnster Guzeite '~'*\'\\'id and brilliant." 
 Standard — " Here at last is an honest strong piece of work." 
 
 Ar.OXGSHORTv WHFRF. MAN AND SF \ ARK V.\CK TO F\CK 
 
 Ci'own iSwv (>/- 
 
 BY HENRY ROWLAND. 
 
 G^:R^^AI^•K. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 .ttlii:>i<rinn -" A conspicuously uncommon sloiT." 
 
 D'tttv Chrttnule "A well written story of distui-tly original flavour." 
 Outlook—*' Wo have in * Ciermaine' a really vital and original book — pas.nion- 
 ale yet pure, full of the det-p things of lite, v»:t aSriin with whimsical humour." 
 
 BY HUGH DE SELINCOURT. 
 
 A BOY'S MARRIAC.K. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Kfrnini; Sl'tndftid '" K.\< eedingly realistic . . . but does not give the impres* 
 sioii that anything is expatiated upon f)r the sake of cflTect. A daring but »incere 
 and simple book. . . . likely to attract a uood deal of attention." 
 
 .-///ic-/iarM»i -"The best points in Mr. do Srlincourt't novel are his delicacy ol 
 treatment and sense of character. . . . He has the making of a fine novolisL" 
 
 15 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY HUGH DE SELmCOURT—conttuued. 
 
 THE STRONGEST PLUME. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Acadcmy — "An uncomfortable story for the conventionally minded. It deals 
 a deadly blow to the ordinary accepted notions of the respectable." 
 
 Dail^' Telegraph — " The story is a very commendable as well as a very inter- 
 esting piece of work." 
 
 Daily Mail — " A neat, artistic story." 
 
 THE HIGH ADVENTURE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Evening Standard. — " A novel for all lovers of the poetry of life ' uttered or 
 unexpressed." 
 
 Morning Post. — " Mr. de Selincourt certainly has a talent for describing rather 
 nice young men." 
 
 Observer. — "A clever and refreshing story.' 
 
 THE WAY THINGS HAPPEN. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post. — "The book has moments of grace and charm that few contem- 
 porary writers give us." 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " ' The Way Things Happen ' confirms a long-settled con- 
 viction that among the young generation of writers there are few who can compete 
 with Mr. de Selincourt for pride of place." 
 
 Times. — " Reading this book is a surprising and a rare experience." 
 
 BY H. SIENKIEWICZ. 
 
 THE FIELD OF GLORY. Cr. Svo. 6/- Fifth Thousand. 
 
 Spectator, — "A spirited, picturesque romance . . . full of adventures, related 
 with all the authors picturesqueness of detail and vigour of outline." 
 
 Evening Standard. — "As a vital, humourous and extraordinarily effective 
 presentment of a childish, heroic, lovable race, it deserves to be read and remem- 
 bered . . . worthy of Dumas." 
 
 BY G, S. STREET. 
 
 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BOY. F'cap. Svo. 3/6 
 
 Fifth Edition. 
 
 Pall Mall Gazette. — " A creation in which there appears to be no flaw." 
 Speaker. — "The conception is excellent and the style perfect. One simmers 
 with laughter from first to last." 
 
 THE TRIALS OF THE BANTOCKS. Crown Svo. 3/6 
 
 Westminster Gazette. — " Since Mr. Matthew Arnold left us we remember 
 nothing so incisive about the great British Middle, and we know of nothing of 
 Mr. Street's that we like so well." 
 
 Saturday Review. — "Mr. Street has a very delicate gift of satire." 
 
 Times. — " A piece of irony that is full of distinction and wit." 
 
 THE WISE AND THE WAYWARD. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Mr. W. L. Courteney in Daily Telegraph. — "Mr. Street has given us a novel- 
 of rare distinction and charm. The fineness of his execution yields as much 
 artistic and literary delight as the delicacy of his perceptions and the acuteness 
 of his analysis." 
 
 14 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY HERMANN SUDERMANN. 
 
 REG IN A : or THK SINS OV THH FATHKRS. 
 
 Crown 8vo. 0/ Third Edition. 
 
 A Translation of " Dcr Katzensteg," by Beatrice Marshall. 
 
 St. James's Ctj«///.—** A Striking piece of work, full of excitement and strongly 
 drawn character. " 
 
 Giohe.— "The novel is a striking one, and deserves a careful and critical 
 attention. " 
 
 BY CLARA YIEBIG. 
 
 ABSOLUTION. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 7Vm<r5.—" There is considerable strength in 'Absolution' . . . Asa realistic 
 study the story has mnch merit." 
 
 Daily Trifftapft.— The tale is powerfully told . . . the tale will prove absorb- 
 ing with its minute characterisation and real passion." 
 
 OUR DAILY BREAD. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Athenaum. — " The story is not only of great human interest, but alsoextremely 
 valu.Tbie as a study of the conditions in which a large section of the poorer classes 
 and small tradespeople of German cities spend their lives. Clara Viebie manipu- 
 lates her material with extraordinary vigour. . . . Her characters are afive." 
 
 Daily Telegraph.— " Quite excellent. 
 
 BY MRS. WILFRID WARD. 
 
 THE LIGHT BEHIND . Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Athenaunt. — " Qualities of a very desirable kind, united to a quiet moderate 
 manner, do not belong to the common novel. It is perhaps superfluous to say 
 that Mrs. Wilfrid Ward's new story is not a common novel and tnat it abounds in 
 this pleasing combination. " 
 
 Punch. — "This is a book to read, and to keep to read again." 
 
 BY H. B. MARRIOTT WATSON. 
 
 GALLOPING DICK. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Daily Tclci;rtiph. -" \\!e have an always attractive theme worked up in an 
 unpretentious but thoroughly effective style." 
 
 \T THE FIRST CORNER . Crown Svo. 3/6 
 
 Saturcidv Revieiv. — "Admirably conceived and brilliantly finished ; the book 
 
 will be read." 
 
 THE HEART OF MIRANDA . Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Spectator. — " Mr. .Marriott Watson's literary gift is unmistakable." 
 
 BY EDITH WHARTON. 
 
 THE GREATER 1 NCLI XATIO.N. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Dailx Telecmph. — " Teems with literary ability and diamatic force." 
 Outlook. — Miss Wharton writes with a sympathy, insight and undersUndiog 
 that we have seldom seen equalled. " 
 
 15 
 
JOHN LANE'S LIST OF FICTION 
 
 BY M. P. WILLCOCKS. 
 
 WIDDICOMBE. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Even tug i> tt: ndnrd. — " Wonderfully alive and pulsatinjj with a curious fervour 
 
 which brings round the reader the very atmosphere which the author describes. 
 
 . . . A fine, rather unusual novel. . . . There are some striking studies of women." 
 Truth. — "A first novel of most unusual promise." 
 Q;<fcw/.— " An unusually clever book." 
 
 THE WINGLESS VICTORY. Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 ^^iimes. — " buch books are worth keeping on the shelves even by the classics, 
 for they are painted in colours that do not fade." 
 
 Daily Telegraph. — "A novel of such power as should win for its author a 
 position in the front rank of contemporary writers of fiction." 
 
 A MAN OF GENIUS . Crown 8vo. 6/- 
 
 Daiiy Telegraph. — " ' Widdicombe' was good, and 'The Wingless Victory" 
 was perhaps better, but in * A Man of Genius' the author has given us something 
 that should nssure her place in the front rank of our living novelists. In this 
 latest novel there is so much of character so much of incident, and to its writing 
 has gone so much insight and observation that it is not easy to praise it without 
 seeming exaggeration." 
 
 Punch. — " There is no excuse for not reading ' A Man of Genius ' and making 
 a short stay in the 'seventh Devon of delight." 
 
 Globe. — " Exquisite." 
 
 THE WAY UP. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 %* Michael Strode, the ironmaster, who is the central figure of Miss Willcocks' 
 new novel, devotes his life to the work of showing the Way Out of the economic 
 jungle of poverty by means of co-operative production ; he is prepared to sacrifice 
 everything : he is a fanatic, possessed by an idea. But Strode the thinker is also 
 Strode the man, bound by closest ties to a woman of the oldest type in the world. 
 The siren refuses to lend either her money or herself to further his scheme. The 
 novel is one, therefore, that touches three burning questions of the hour — capital 
 and labour, the claims of the individual against those of the State, the right of a 
 woman to her own individuality. In the clash of passion and duty, blow follows 
 blow, revelation succeeds revelation, till the wrappings that shroud reality are 
 stripped from it and both dreamers awake, but to what reality must be read in the 
 pages of the book itself, which, besides being a picture of a group of modern men 
 and women, is also a study of certain social tendencies of to-day and possibly 
 to-morrow. 
 
 BY F. E. MILLS YOUNG. 
 
 A MISTAKEN MARRIAGE. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Fall Mall Gnzctic. — " It is a very sincere and moving story. The heroine 
 
 claims our sympathies from the first, and we follow her fortunes with absorbed 
 
 interest." 
 
 CHIP. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 Morning Post. — " Original, vivid and realistic." 
 Athenmim. — "A tale . . . of unusual romantic interest." 
 
 ATONEMENT. Crown Svo. 6/- 
 
 %* The story, which is laid in South Africa, shows how Harborough, a man 
 of naturally honourable character, becomes entangled with Sylvia Wentworth, a 
 o-irl who deliberately sets to work to fascinate him while already engaged to 
 Sydney Ainleigh. When Harborough offers to marry her, Sylvia refuses and 
 steadily adheres to her determination to marry her fiance'. Harborough meets 
 and falls passionately in love with Naomi Bruce, the beautiful daughter of the 
 farmer on whose farm he is working. How he endeavours to conquer his love, 
 and how circumstances combine to bring him and Naomi together, the tale reveals. 
 Naomi is in ignorance of Harborough's former entanglement at the time of her 
 marriage. Later he confesses it to her, and she, disillusioned and horrified, leaves 
 him. How the tale ends the reader must find out for himself 
 
 i6 
 
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