'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.
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Daily Graphic. — "Its descriptive power is remarkable. The author
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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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