Wfff 
 
THE NEW MACHIAVELLJ 
 
MR. WELLS HAS ALSO WRITTEN 
 
 The following NOVELS : 
 
 LOVE AND MR. LEWISUAM 
 
 KIPPS MR. POLLY 
 
 ANN VERONICA and TONO BCNGAY 
 
 Numerous short stories to be collected 
 
 presently in one volume. 
 The following fantastic and imaginative 
 ROMANCES : 
 
 THE TIME MACHINE 
 
 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 AIK 
 
 THE FIRST MEN IN THB MOON and 
 
 THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAD 
 
 And a scries of books upon social and 
 political questions of which 
 
 ANTICIPATIONS (1900) 
 
 A MODERN UTOPIA 
 
 FIRST AND LAST THINGS (RELIGION AND 
 
 PHILOSOPHY) and NEW WORLDS FOB OLD 
 are the chief. 
 
. THE 
 NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 H. G. WELLS 
 
 X, 
 
 Author of "Tono Bungky" "The History of 
 Mr. Polly," etc. 
 
 "A closer examination . . . shows that Abelard was a Nominalist under 
 a new name." G. H. LEWES, Hist. Philos. 
 
 "It suffices for our immediate purpose that tender-minded and tough- 
 minded people ... do both exist." WILLIAM JAMES, Pragmatism. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
 
 1921 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1910 
 
 DUFFIELD & COMPANY 
 
 \B 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK THE FIRST 
 
 THE MAKING OF A MAN 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN . 3 
 
 II. BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 12 
 
 III. SCHOLASTIC 46 
 
 IV. ADOLESCENCE . . 87 
 
 BOOK THE SECOND 
 
 MARGARET 
 
 I. MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE . . , ; :,, -.. , . 151 
 
 II. MARGARET IN LONDON . ......... 185 
 
 III. MARGARET IN VENICE . . ... . . . . 225 
 
 IV. THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER . . ; . ; ... ... 233 
 
 BOOK THE THIRD 
 THE HEART OF POLITIC* 
 
 I. THE RIDDLE FOB THE STATESMAN . . . 969 
 
 II. SEEKING ASSOCIATES . 311 
 
 III. SECESSION . . 353 
 
 IV. THE BESETTING OF SEX .;.... . ,. . 370 
 
 BOOK THE FOURTH 
 ISABEL 
 
 I. LOVE AND SUCCESS ,. . . 389 
 
 II. THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 419 
 
 III. THE BREAKING POINT 453 
 
BOOK THE FIRST 
 THE MAKING OF A MAN 
 
THE 
 NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 CHAPTER THE FIRST . 
 
 CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER, 
 WRITTEN 
 
 . 1 
 
 SINCE I came to this place I have been very restless, 
 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 Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at 
 very much the age I have reached, and wrote a book 
 to engage the restlessness of his mind, very much as I 
 have wanted to do. He wrote about the relation of 
 the great constructive spirit in politics to individual 
 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 
 
4 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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, .ft-oin his literary precedent, that he still has 
 his toe- for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim 
 Hridrad 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. 
 
 The state-making 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 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK 5 
 
 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 Machiavelli. 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 Donate 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 
 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 
 personal 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 
 
6 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the less none 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 Dionysius 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 forgetfulness, 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 " 
 and thought out the manner of my now abandoned 
 project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of 
 human thought one calls by way of embodiment the 
 French Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach 
 to such a question. Machiavelli, like Plato 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 thoughts 
 towards realisation, their attitudes became what shall 
 I call it? secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had some 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK 7 
 
 little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, 
 whether it was Caesar Borgia of 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 equivalent of a Prince. At various times I 
 redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, 
 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 realise 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 
 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, 
 
8 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 because it has dispersed itself and specialised. 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 organisers has achieved this de- 
 velopment of human possibilities, achieved it in spite 
 of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, 
 and the passionate resistance of the active dull, my 
 imagination grows giddy with dazzling intimations 
 of the human splendours the justly organised 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 confu- 
 sions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a 
 flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the un- 
 seen fellowship 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. . . 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK 9 
 
 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 Machiavelli'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 
 hours of Princes. He left the thought of women out- 
 side with his other dusty things when he went into his 
 study to write, dismissed them from his mind. But 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 per. 
 and turns to discuss his writing with them. 
 
 It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing col- 
 lectively 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 realisations 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 learn 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 
 
10 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. . . . 
 
 3 
 
 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 
 houses of pink and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleam- 
 ing sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains 
 hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly 
 steamships 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' offices, the splendid 
 grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetu- 
 ally to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency 
 and eventfulness of that great rain-swept heart of the 
 modern world. 
 
 It is difficult 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, 
 
CONCERNING A BOOK 11 
 
 constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud 
 shouting. . . . 
 
 It is over for me now 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 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, but for this red blaze that came 
 out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for 
 ever. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 
 
 I DREAMT first of states and cities and political things 
 when I was a little boy in knickerbockers. 
 
 When I think of how such things began in rpy 
 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 coloring. 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 
 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 
 
 1* 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 13 
 
 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 and houses and churches and 
 citadels; I could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and 
 make causeways over 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 hundred, 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 con- 
 flagration. 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 way* 
 
14 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 beleaguered 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 civilisation one my 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 
 hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus brandishing 
 spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks 
 concealing 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 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 15 
 
 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 clockwork 
 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 
 one might expect from an aunt, that I used as Nero 
 used his Christians to ornament my public buildings; 
 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 went gingerly 
 across its territories. Occasionally, alas ! they stooped 
 to scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the 
 slow growth of whole days of civilised development. 
 I still remember the hatred and disgust of these 
 
16 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did 
 I disregard them, coarse red hands would descend, 
 plucking 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 bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces 
 that were very destructive to the more hazardous 
 viaducts of the Imperial Road. She was always, I 
 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 
 top 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. 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 17 
 
 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 cardboard 
 slide four at a time, and dropped most satis fyingly 
 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. 
 
 It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than 
 suspect, most of my ideas. " Here's some corrugated 
 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 
 you see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road? won't 
 do for your cattle ranch." And I would find a bright 
 new lead tiger like a special creation at large in the 
 world, and demanding a hunting expedition and much 
 elaborate effort 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 
 
18 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 my father used to get books for himself and me from 
 the Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne 
 Reid and illustrated histories; one of the Russo- 
 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 Punch, from which I 
 derived conceptions of foreign and domestic politics 
 it has taken years of adult reflection to correct. And 
 at home permanently we had Wood's Natural History, 
 a brand-new illustrated Green's History of the English 
 People, Irving's Companions of Columbus, a great num- 
 ber of unbound parts of some geographical work, a 
 Voyage Round the World I think it was called, with 
 pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's New Testament 
 with 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 
 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 bird's-eye view, 
 representing the Crimea, that fascinated me and kept 
 me for hours navigating its waters with a pin. 
 
 2 
 
 My 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 Kent under 
 the old Science and Art Department, and " visiting " 
 various schools; and our resources were eked out by 
 
BKOMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 19 
 
 my mother's income of nearly a hundred pounds a 
 year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three pala- 
 tial but structurally unsound stucco houses near Brom- 
 stead 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 
 high (which would have been cool and pleasant in a 
 hot climate), and the stairs w6nt steeply up, to end 
 at last in attics too inaccessible for occupation. The 
 ceilings 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 father 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 while, 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 pur- 
 
20 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 poses of dessert. The grape-vine played an important 
 part in my life, for my father broke his neck while he 
 was pruning it, when I was thirteen. 
 
 /Mv 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 attendance had made it evident that the 
 days of small private schools kept by unqualified persons 
 were numbered. Thereupon my father had roused him- 
 self and had qualified as a science teacher under the 
 Science and Art Department, which in those days had 
 charge of the scientific and artistic education of the 
 mass of the English population, and had thrown him- 
 self into science teaching and the earning of govern- 
 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 machin- 
 ery. 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 remem- 
 ber indistinctly my father rejoicing at the breakfast- 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 21 
 
 table over the liberation of London from the corrupt 
 and devastating 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 
 shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything 
 of the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate peo- 
 ple who could neither read a book nor write more than 
 perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found every- 
 where in England; and great masses of the popula- 
 tion were getting no instruction at all. Only a few 
 schools flourished 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 cen- 
 tres of population multitudes of children were sweated 
 in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and 
 the under-equipped and under-staffed 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 indifference 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 organisation 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 
 
22 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 businesslike 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, 
 and since it was manifest that it was individual and 
 local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly 
 agreed to stimulate them by money payments. The 
 State set up a machinery of examination both in Sci- 
 ence 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 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 23 
 
 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. 
 
 Other remarkable compromises had also to be made 
 with the spirit of the age. The unfortunate conflict 
 between Religion and Science prevalent at this time was 
 mitigated, if 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 efficiency prevalent in 
 the district. Private enterprise made a particularly 
 good thing of the books, A number of competing 
 firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising 
 in Science and Art Department work; they set them- 
 selves to produce text-books that should supply exactly 
 the quantity and quality 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 efficiency, 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- 
 
24 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 her him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a 
 yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae 
 to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of 
 desks before him. Occasionally he would slide to his 
 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 
 diagrams and drawings 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 de- 
 moralising controversies. Quite early in life I ac- 
 quired 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 sub- 
 ject XII., Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal 
 Physiology, when you blow into a glass of lime water 
 it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue to 
 iblow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow 
 into the stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER ITS 
 
 crimson in the face and painful under the ears, and it 
 never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew, too, tliat 
 in science if you put potassium chlorate into a retort 
 and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged 
 and may be collected over water, whereas in re -I 1 fcfe 
 if you do anything of the sort the vecsel cracks Trith a 
 loud report, the potassium chlorate descends ciszling 
 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 organised conquest of Nature, and I 
 can quite understand that ancient libertine refusing to 
 cooperate in her own undoing. And I can quite 
 understand, 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 just 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, " Please, sir, what is 
 flocculent ? " 
 
 " The precipitate is." 
 
26 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Yes, sir, but what does it mean ? " 
 
 " Oh ! flocculent ! " said my father, " floccolent ! 
 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. 
 
 My 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 was between 
 eleven and twelve. I was mobilised 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 
 immense vigour alternating with periods of paralysing 
 distaste for the garden. And for weeks he talked 
 about eight hundred pounds an acre at every meal. 
 
 A garden, even when it is not exasperated by 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 27 
 
 intensive methods, is a thing as exacting as a baby, 
 its moods have to be watched; it does 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 demoralised and over- 
 irritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with 
 our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew 
 wrong from the 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 your 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 obliquity and 
 the various wind-breaks and scare-crows he erected, 
 and particularly an irrigation contrivance he began 
 and never finished by which everything was to be 
 watered at once by means of pieces of gutter from the 
 roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and 
 particularly obstinate clump of elder-bushes in the 
 abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely 
 either by axe or by fire, combined to give the gardens 
 under intensive culture a singularly desolate and dis- 
 orderly appearance. He took steps towards the diver- 
 sion of our house drain under the influence of the 
 
28 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Sewage Utilisation Society; tut 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 organisation, or sum- 
 marising 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 be- 
 come 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 
 and the Agricultural Chemistry Class at six! Bah! 
 Aaaaaah! " 
 
 My 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 say such things " 
 
 He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. 
 
BROM STEAD AND MY FATHER 29 
 
 " The towel ! " he would cry, flicking suds from his 
 fingers in every direction ; " the towel ! I'll let the 
 blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! 
 I'll 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 French 
 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, flicked off the heads of half a row of arti- 
 chokes, 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. 
 
 "Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an 
 expression of beneficent happiness, " I've 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- 
 
80 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 not 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. 
 
 " I'm 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 I created 
 for ? God ! what was I created for ? . . . 
 
 " Slaves to matter ! Minding inanimate things ! 
 It doesn't suit me, you know. I've got no hands and 
 no patience. I've mucked about with life. Mucked 
 about with life." He suddenly addressed himself to 
 me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper 
 discovered. " Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, 
 make a Plan. Make a good Plan and stick to it. Find 
 out what life is about I never have and set yourself 
 to do whatever you ought 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 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 81 
 
 to me, I ought to have sold them or fled 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 painting! 
 It worked up my arms; it got all over me. I stank of 
 it. It made me ill. It isn't living it's minding. . . . 
 
 " Property's the curse of life. Property ! Ugh ! 
 Look at this country all cut up into silly little paral- 
 lelograms, 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 dog 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 his 
 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. . . . 
 
 " I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagina- 
 tion, a sort of go. I ought to have made a better thing 
 of life. 
 
 " I'm 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 I'd gone to a university; if I'd 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 
 
32 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 education. Fight your way to the top. It's your only 
 chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at dig- 
 ding and property minding. There isn't a neighbour 
 in Bromstead 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 ! Dyna- 
 mite '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 
 tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of his head 
 and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and 
 sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became 
 diverted by his talk from his original exasperation. . . . 
 
 This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in 
 my 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 re- 
 mained fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the 
 extraordinary 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 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 33 
 
 variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I 
 do not remember that he ever used that word, I sup- 
 pose many people nowadays would identify with So- 
 cialism, 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. ... 
 
 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 strug- 
 gle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order. 
 
 First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hun- 
 dred 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, 
 
34 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody 
 in the place. It was, in fact, a definite place and 
 a real human community in those days. There was a 
 pleasant 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 hunted 
 within five miles of London Bridge, and the local 
 gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant 
 cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to th 
 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 Rip 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- 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 35 
 
 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 
 have 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. 
 
 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 flow- 
 ing 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 woodwork 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 
 
36 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 horse-track to Dover, only passable by adventurous 
 coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, 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 off its worst contortions. Residential 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 square glass 
 panes, and the place 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 1834, and about that 
 date my father's three houses must have been built 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 37 
 
 convenient for the London Road. They mark nearly 
 the beginning of the real suburban quality; they were 
 let at first to City people still engaged in business. 
 
 And then hard on the gasworks had come the rail- 
 way 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, Blodgett's 
 laundries, and the railway goods-yard. Weekly prop- 
 erties, 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 
 the west, and Blamely four miles to the east of Brom- 
 stead, were experiencing similar distensions and pro- 
 liferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of 
 
38 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 locality or community had gone from these places long 
 before I was born; hardly any one knew any one; there 
 was no general meeting place any more, the old fairs 
 were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies, van 
 showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches 
 were incapable of a quarter of the population. One or 
 two local papers of shameless veniality reported the 
 proceedings of the local Bench and the local Board, 
 compelled tradesmen who were interested in these 
 affairs to advertise, used the epithet " Bromstedian " as 
 one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in 
 the general mind a weak tradition of some local quality 
 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 Bromstead 
 Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably high- 
 minded and sorrowful varieties of conifer. A stone- 
 mason took one of the 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 memo- 
 ries are of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by 
 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 swal- 
 lowed up by drain-pipes. Big trees, and especially 
 elms, cleared of undergrowth and left standing amid 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 39 
 
 such things, acquired a peculiar tattered dinginess 
 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 beyond there were flat meadows, 
 Roper's meadows. The Ravensbrook 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 rushes 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. The deep places were rich with 
 tangled weeds, and in them fishes lurked to me 
 they were big fishes water-boatmen and water-beetles 
 
40 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 traversed the calm surface of these still deeps; in 
 one pool were yellow lilies and water-soldiers, and in 
 the shoaly places hovering fleets 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 
 panic and babbled and hastened. Well 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 
 Beckington, and made me first acquainted 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. Roper'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 rise 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 wood-work warping and rotting. 
 The Ravensbrook 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. . . . 
 
 That indeed was my most striking perception in 
 the growth of Bromstead. The Ravensbrook had 
 been important to my imaginative life; that way had 
 
EROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 41 
 
 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 realised 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 culti- 
 vation 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 lentil later), 
 and in trespass boards that used vehement language. 
 Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. 
 Cheap glass, cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a free 
 untaxed Press had rushed upon a world quite un- 
 prepared to dispose of these blessings when the fulness 
 of enjoyment was past. 
 
42 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that 
 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 prod- 
 ucts, 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 may 
 not be found in a mud torrent of human production 
 or so large a scale, but will any one, a hundred years 
 from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians 
 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 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 43 
 
 power, by possessions and great new freedoms, and 
 unable to make any civilised 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 nor 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. 
 
 6 
 
 Chaotic indiscipline, ill-adjusted effort, spasmodic 
 aims, these give the quality of all my Bromstead 
 memories. The crowning one of them all rises to 
 desolating 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 
 
44 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 vine. He had never had a ladder long enough to 
 reach the sill of the third-floor windows at house- 
 painting times he had borrowed one from the plumber 
 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 tableknife tied to 
 end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had been 
 rapping for some time at the front door unable to make 
 him hear, and then we came round by the door in the 
 side trellis into the garden and so discovered him. 
 
 " Arthur ! " I remember my mother crying with the 
 strangest break in her voice, "What are you doing 
 there? Arthur! And Sunday!'' 
 
 I was coming behind her, musing 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, 
 he and his ways, 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? " 
 
 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 
 
BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER 45 
 
 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 Beaseley, * 
 and carry him indoors." 
 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 SCHOLASTIC 
 
 MY formal education began in a small preparatory 
 school in Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The 
 charge 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 
 Merchants 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 Bromstead 
 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 Penge within sight of that immense 
 facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace. Then he 
 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, ab- 
 sorbing 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. 
 
 46 
 
SCHOLASTIC 47 
 
 It was a district of very much the same character, 
 but it was more completely urbanised 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, Wembledon, 
 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 realisations 
 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 
 railway trains and railway signals lit up in the darkness. 
 My first rambles in the evening occurred at Penge I 
 was becoming a big and independent-spirited boy and 
 I began my experience of smoking 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 stayed 
 for preparation, and often I was not back home again 
 
48 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 topog- 
 raphy. On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St. 
 'Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to 
 walk out alone on 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. My reason would not permit even a 
 remote chance of his being in hell, he was so manifestly 
 not evil, and this religion would not permit him a 
 remote chance of being out yet. When I was a little 
 boy my mother had taught me to read and write and 
 pray 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 49 
 
 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- 
 making 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 
 interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) 
 little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted. 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. My father's science-teaching, 
 his diagrams 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 
 
50 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 like summer 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 
 by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid 
 him from her. The blazing things he said rankled in 
 her mind unforgettably. 
 
 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. 
 " Your 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 Herne Hill days 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 housework that our generally servantless con- 
 dition put upon her she used to have a charwoman in 
 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 
 with 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 51 
 
 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 Miss 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 
 way I think she found these among her happy times. 
 On such occasions she was wont to put her work down 
 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 states without definite forms. 
 
 She carried on a correspondence with a number 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 
 
52 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 visitors, "Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk 
 about games and such frivolities and croquay. A. de- 
 lighted and very attentive.' 9 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 Wales, 
 who is now Queen Mother, 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 
 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 : " I fear his 
 father's teaching." Dreadful little tangle of misap- 
 prehensions and false judgments! More comforting 
 for me to read, " D. very kind and good. He grows 
 more thoughtful every day." I suspect myself of for- 
 gotten 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 53 
 
 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 grave; 
 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 
 hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went 
 through all her diaries, trying to find something more 
 than a conventional term of tenderness for my father. 
 But I found nothing. And yet somehow there grew 
 upon me the realisation that there had been love. . . . 
 Her love for me, on the other hand, was abundantly 
 expressed. 
 
 I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at 
 the time; such expression as it found was all beyond 
 my schoolboy range. I did not know when I pleased 
 her and I did not know when I distressed her. 
 Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull com- 
 pany, as a mind thorny with irrational conclusions 
 and incapable of explication, as one believing quite 
 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 realisations 
 and attitudes that dissolve my estrangement from her, 
 I can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her 
 
54 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 evi- 
 dently lavished so abundantly on me. \ But then again 
 I ask how I could make that return? And I realise 
 the futility of such dreaming. Her demand was 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 last, fixed, still, infi- 
 nitely intimate, infinitely remote. . . . 
 
 My own case with my mother, however, does not 
 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 narrow 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 es- 
 trangement 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 55 
 
 shadow of intolerance cast by religious organisations. 
 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. 
 Deprecation of all outside the household of faith, 
 an organised undervaluation of heretical goodness and 
 lovableness, follows necessarily. Every petty difference 
 is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a 
 damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to 
 shield the believer's mind against broad or amiable 
 suggestions; 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. For only by isolating 
 its flock can the organisation 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 
 commendation. 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 
 
56 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Sabbath-breaking, and 
 upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism, or 
 treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; 
 there would be great rejoicings over the conversion of 
 alleged Jews, and terrible descriptions of the death- 
 beds of prominent infidels with boldly invented last 
 words, the most unscrupulous lying; there would be 
 the appallingly 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 was 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 57 
 
 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 
 seemed to be shaping 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 kindrd 
 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 thing 
 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 Holborn 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 
 
58 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 women characters, not being in holy wedlock, desire a 
 baby and say so. ... 
 
 The broadening of human thought is a slow and 
 complex process. We do go on, we do get on. But 
 when one thinks that people are living and dying now, 
 quarrelling arid 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 ! 
 
 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 
 realised. 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 
 disturbing and illuminating 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 carefuly accumulated 
 half-crown, and amounted indeed to a new experience 
 
SCHOLASTIC 59 
 
 in knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then 
 one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in my pocket 
 on a footpath crossing a field between Penge and 
 Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without 
 at the time appreciating what had happened, then 
 later, before I got home, when my hand wandered into 
 my pocket to embrace the still dear new possession I 
 found it gone, and instantly that memory of something 
 hitting the ground sprang up into consciousness. I 
 went back and commenced a search. Almost immedi- 
 ately 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 anythink, Matey ? " said he. 
 
 I explained. 
 
 " 'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and 
 joined in the search. 
 
 " What sort of 'andle was it, Matey ? " said a small 
 white-faced sniffing boy in a big bowler hat. 
 
 I supplied the information. His sharp little face 
 scrutinised 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. 
 
 " This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat 
 casually. 
 
 "I dropped it just now." 
 
 " Findin's keepin's, I believe/' said the big boy. 
 
60 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Nonsense/' I said. " Give me my knife." 
 
 " 'Ow 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 to 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 civilisation 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 
 them. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation 
 and pursued them. 
 
 But I did not overtake them. We are beings of 
 mixed composition, and I doubt if mine was a single- 
 minded pursuit. I knew that honour required me to 
 pursue^ and I had a vivid impression of having just 
 
SCHOLASTIC 61 
 
 ibcen 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 re- 
 cover my dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the 
 dust 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 boyish in- 
 stinct against informing prevented that. No doubt I 
 entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous 
 reprisals. And 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 glimpsefl the 
 simple brute violence that lurks and peeps beneath our 
 civilisation. A certain kindly complacency of attitude 
 towards the palpably lower classes was qualified fo? 
 ever. 
 
 4 
 
 But the other experience was still more cardinal. It 
 was the first clear intimation of a new motif in life, 
 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 
 warm September evenings. I never met the gi<rl I 
 loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It 
 was some insignificant name. 
 
 Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it 
 
62 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 shining darkly like some deep coloured gem in the com- 
 mon setting of my memories. It came as something 
 new and strange, something that did not join on to 
 anything else in my life or connect with any of my 
 thoughts or beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a 
 mystery, 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 subur- 
 ban growths unkindly critics, blind to the inner mean- 
 ings 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 cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague trans- 
 figuring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up 
 and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make 
 friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow 
 limited friendless homes in which so many find them- 
 selves, a going out towards something, romance if you 
 will, beauty, 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 63 
 
 glow-worm in the night. I made my way through the 
 throng, a little contemptuously as became a public 
 schoolboy, 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 said I cannot remem- 
 ber, but I have little doubt it was something absolutely 
 vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we 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. 
 
 We met, covered from each other, with all the nets 
 of civilisation keeping us apart. We 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 
 
64 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 quality of intimacy and more. We wanted 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, with 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. . . . 
 
 Those 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 of an intolerable 
 want. . . . 
 
 The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. 
 I could not do my work and I could not rest at home. 
 Night after night I promenaded up and down that 
 Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a 
 thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to 
 have gone 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 dark- 
 ness for Jier. I prayed for her. 
 
 Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last 
 vestiges 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. 
 
SCHOLASTIC 05 
 
 I generalised 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 add here one other confession. I want 
 to tell this thing because it seems to me we are alto- 
 gether 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 must have 
 been in my first year before I knew Hatherleigh I 
 saw in a print-shop window near the Strand an en- 
 graving 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 way, 
 then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. 
 The odd thing is that I was more than a little shame- 
 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. 
 
66 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Herne 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 boy- 
 hood's London have passed and left them, and I have 
 revived the impression of them again and again in re- 
 cent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a hansom 
 or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. 
 The main gate still looks out with the same expression 
 of ancient well-proportioned kindliness upon St. Mar- 
 garet's Close. There are imposing new science labora- 
 tories 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 community. 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 67 
 
 a definite function towards the general scheme of the 
 nation, as being in a sense designed 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 carp at 
 schoolmasters and set up for an Educational Reformer, 
 I know, but still it is impossible not to feel how in- 
 finitely more effectually given certain impossibilities 
 perhaps the job might be done. 
 
 My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever 
 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 Westminster 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. Margaret's Close and through the school gate 
 into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things. 
 
68 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was 
 necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and fo* 
 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 
 more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few 
 Levantine monasteries. At the utmost our men read 
 them. We were taught these languages because long 
 ago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the 
 one way of escape from the narrow and localised life 
 had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards 
 Greek had come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and 
 amazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the 
 sole means of initiation to the detached criticism and 
 partial comprehension of the world. I can imagine the 
 fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper, 
 teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a pro- 
 gressive Chinaman might 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 Imperialism had arisen about the 
 school, had assimilated all these amazing and incredible 
 ideas, had gone on to new and yet more amazing de- 
 velopments of its own. But the City Merchants School 
 still made the substance of its teaching Latin and 
 Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed 
 in a dream amidst the harvesting. 
 
 There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just 
 
SCHOLASTIC 69 
 
 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 im- 
 possible to write good English without an illuminating 
 knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an in- 
 finitive and failed to button up a sentence in saying so. 
 His main argument conceded every objection a reason- 
 able person could make to the City Merchants' cur- 
 riculum. He admitted that translation had now 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 gram- 
 matical exercises no other subjects of instruction pos- 
 sessed. Nothing else provided the same strengthening 
 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 we 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, re- 
 straint, sustained constructive effort and various yet 
 systematic adjustment. And that was as far as his 
 imagination could go. 
 
 It is infinitely easier to begin organised human 
 affairs than end them; the curriculum and the social 
 organisation of the English public school are the crown- 
 ing 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 disrespect- 
 fully. But public schools and university colleges 
 
70 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 institutions. In a 
 century, by its very success, this revolutionary innova- 
 tion of Renascence public schools had become an im- 
 mense tradition woven closely into the fabric of the 
 national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased 
 to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was 
 wanted, but that only left the schoolmaster the freer 
 to elaborate his point. Since most men of any im- 
 portance or influence in the country had been through 
 the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade 
 them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling 
 mill the wit of man could devise. And, moreover, they 
 did not want their children made strange 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 might 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 languages for seven long years. It was the 
 Strangest of detachments. We would sit under the 
 desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who 
 had fallen 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. He 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 "glorious." The very sight of Greek letter* 
 
SCHOLASTIC 71 
 
 brings back to me the dingy, faded, ink-splashed 
 quality of our class-room, the banging of books, Top- 
 ham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, 
 his deep unmusical intonations and the wide 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 reverbera- 
 tion and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded 
 freely. We all accepted from him unquestioningly 
 that these melodies, these strange sounds, exceeded 
 any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic intri- 
 cacy, 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 visualised 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 con- 
 struing 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 
 
72 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 old gate into the evening light and the spectacle of 
 London hurrying like a cataract, London in black and 
 brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the 
 very loom of Time. We came out into the new world 
 no teacher has yet had the power and courage 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 pro- 
 cession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bear- 
 ing 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 mingled with the warm glow of the declining 
 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 realise 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 newspapers, 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 up 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 cen- 
 tury? 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 73 
 
 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 Marathon, ap- 
 peared 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 or 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 unexpetced 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 way 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. 
 
 6 
 These schoolmasters move through my memory as 
 
74 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 gowns, a 
 uniform which greatly increased their detachment from 
 the world of actual men. Gates, the head, was a lean 
 loose-limbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I 
 reached 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 my 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 Mark- 
 lows, 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- 
 glass window falling in coloured patches on his face. 
 It gave him the appearance of having no colour of his 
 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 invariably 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 
 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 75 
 
 at times display a disposition towards developments. 
 City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian 
 spirits were carping in the Pall Mall Gazette and else- 
 where at the omissions from our curriculum, and par- 
 ticularly 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 organisation 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, compar- 
 ing 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 
 the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to complete 
 illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the dai's, 
 his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his 
 hazardous way through sentences that dragged incon- 
 clusive tails and dropped redundant prepositions. And 
 he pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that what 
 we all knew for Sin was sinful^ and on the whole best 
 
76 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 7 
 
 The school never quite got hold of me. Partly 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 my own way and 
 have my private dreams, partly because I was a little 
 antagonised 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 quite forgot it. I suffered 
 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 modern warfare. I read the morning 
 papers in the Reading Room during the midday recess, 
 never missed the illustrated weeklies, and often when I 
 could afford it I bought a Pall Mall Gazette on my 
 way home. 
 
 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 affairs. 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 boys' books which 
 I detested and fiction. I read histories, travel, popu- 
 lar 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 77 
 
 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 clois- 
 ters, 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 rush- 
 ing and impending London all about it, was indeed a 
 continual pleasure to me. But these things were cer- 
 tainly 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, Brit- 
 ten, 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 Malays 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 
 gave him a startling quality of living knowledge. From 
 these pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of 
 religions, and from that, by a sudden plunge, to en- 
 tirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions concern- 
 ing Gates' last outbreak of simple piety in School As- 
 sembly. We 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 
 my higher education, and aired and examined and de- 
 
78 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 veloped in conversation the doubts, the ideas, the in- 
 terpretations that had been forming in my mind. As 
 we were both day-boys with a good deal of control over 
 our time we organised walks and expeditions together, 
 and my habit of solitary and rather vague prowling 
 gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. 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 quarters. We went in a 
 river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that 
 made an excursion to Margate and back; we explored 
 London docks and Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat 
 Lane and all sorts of out-of-the-way places together. 
 
 We confessed shyly to one another a common secret 
 vice, " Phantom, warfare/' When we walked alone, 
 especially in the country, we had both developed the 
 same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us 
 as we walked. As we went along we were generals, 
 and our attacks pushed along on either side, crouching 
 and gathering behind hedges, cresting ridges, occu- 
 pying 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 roy- 
 alist 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 
 
SCHOLASTIC 79 
 
 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. 
 
 And we also began, it was certainly before we were 
 sixteen, to write, for the sake of writing. We liked 
 writing. We had discovered Lamb and the best of the 
 middle articles in such weeklies as the Saturday Gazette, 
 and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim 
 uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light 
 of expression. Britten had got hold of In Memoriam, 
 and I had disinterred Pope's Essay on Man and Rabbi 
 Ben Ezra, and these things had set our theological 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. We 
 thought every one who mattered had read Lucretius. 
 
 When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken 
 ill very suddenly, and died of some perplexing com- 
 plaint that involved a post-mortem examination; it was, 
 
80 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I think, the trouble that has since those days been 
 recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable 
 {change in my circumstances; the house at Penge was 
 given up, and my Staffordshire 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 Cambridge. 
 
 Those were our great days together. Afterwards 
 we were torn apart; Britten went to Oxford, and our 
 circumstances never afterwards threw us continuously 
 together until the days of the Blue Weekly. 
 
 As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the 
 same books, pursued the same enquiries. We got a 
 reputation as inseparables and the nickname of the 
 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 Brit- 
 ten's medical-student brother and the galleries 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 light 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 we ever had occasion 
 
SCHOLASTIC 81 
 
 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 ignorance 
 ahd uncertainty in these matters. We evaded them 
 elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowl- 
 edge. 
 
 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 liter- 
 ature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theo- 
 logical caricature. Britten's father had delighted his 
 family by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's 
 Twilight of the Gods, and Britten conveyed the precious 
 volume to me. That and the Bab Ballads were the 
 inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations. 
 
 For an imaginative boy the first experience of writ- 
 ing is like a tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary 
 flowerings led very directly to the revival of the school 
 magazine, which had been comatose for some years. 
 But there we came upon a disappointment. 
 
 8 
 
 In that revival we associated certain other of the 
 Sixth Form 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 Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a 
 rather heavy, rather good-looking boy who was chiefly 
 eminent in cricket, an outsider even as we were and 
 preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached 
 to observe him, with private imaginings very much of 
 the same quality 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 
 
82 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 satirical, liberal and brilliant literature by which in 
 some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult of ideas 
 that teemed within us was to find form and expression; 
 Cossington, it was manifest from the outset, wanted 
 neither to write nor writing, but a magazine. I re- 
 member the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's 
 study we had had great trouble in getting it together 
 and how effectually Cossington bolted with the pro- 
 posal. 
 
 " I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said 
 Cossington* " The school used to have one. A school 
 like this ought to have a magazine." 
 
 " The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from 
 the hearthrug. " Called the Observer. Rot rather." 
 
 "Bad title/' said Cossington. 
 
 " There was a Taller 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 Arvonian? Richard Ar- 
 von was our founder, and it seems almost a duty " 
 
 " They call them all -usians or -onians/' said Brit- 
 ten. 
 
 " I like City Merchandise/' I said. " We could prob- 
 ably find a quotation to suggest oh! mixed good 
 things." 
 
 Cossington regarded me abstractedly. 
 
SCHOLASTIC 83 
 
 " 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 Arvonian," decided Cos- 
 sington, " 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." 
 
 I still held out for City Merchandize, which had 
 taken my fancy. " Some of the chaps' people won't like 
 it," said Naylor, "certain not to. And it sounds 
 Bum." 
 
 " Sounds Weird," said a boy who had not hitherto 
 spoken. 
 
 " We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoe- 
 smith, pointedly not looking at Britten. 
 
 The question of the title had manifestly gone against 
 us. "Oh! have it Arvonian" I said. 
 
 "And next, what size shall we have?" said Cossing- 
 ton. 
 
 " Something like Macmillan's Magazine or Long- 
 mans'; 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 column. It's nuggetty. 
 You can't get a swing on your prose." I had discussed 
 this thoroughly with Britten. 
 
 " If the fellows are going to write " began Brit- 
 ten. 
 
 " We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith. 
 " It's cheek. I vote we don't have any." 
 
 " We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as 
 an olive branch to me, " unless Remington does a bit. 
 
84 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Topham to see us through/' said 
 Naylor. 
 
 Britten groaned 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 can help. We don't want to antagonise them. 
 Of course we've got to departmentalise. 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 Shoe- 
 smith. 
 
 "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, bright- 
 ening and manifestly becoming pregnant with judg- 
 ments. 
 
 " One great thing about a magazine of this sort/' 
 said Cossington, *^ is ^to mention just as many names as 
 
SCHOLASTIC 85 
 
 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. 
 
 " Rather. With comments." 
 
 " Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon 
 safely home/' said Shoesmith. 
 
 " Shut it/' said Naylor modestly. 
 
 " Exactly/' said Cossington. " That gives us three 
 features/' touching them off on his fingers, " Epigram, 
 Literary Section, Sports. Then we want a section to 
 shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything that's 
 going 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 what? " 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 effect 
 to do that. We want something manly and straight- 
 forward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or 
 Esprit de Corps, or After-Life." 
 
 I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not consid- 
 ered 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 realised that anything of! 
 the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly at a 
 disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed 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 plagiarised every 
 
86 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 successful magazine and breathed into this dusty mix- 
 ture the breath of life. He was elected at his own 
 suggestion managing director, with the earnest support 
 of Shoesmith 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 Holbornj 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 num- 
 ber was a column by Topham in faultless 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 
 
 I FIND it very difficult 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 
 child playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by 
 his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring 
 interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of 
 the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused 
 avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It 
 is only by such an effort to write it down that one 
 realises how marvellously crowded, how marvellously 
 analytical and synthetic those ears must be. One be- 
 gins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of 
 blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected 
 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- 
 
 87 
 
88 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 standing, here masked by mists, here refracted and dis- 
 torted 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 
 realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of 
 the imagination with infinite space, infinite time, en- 
 tangled 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 per- 
 plexity 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 by it, I cannot 
 feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly and 
 finally to that adjustment long 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 though life hurts so that one must needs 
 
ADOLESCENCE 81 
 
 cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but 
 failure, no promise but pain. ... 
 
 But while I was fearless of theology I must confess 
 it was comparatively late before I faced and dared to 
 probe 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, 
 as something disconnected from all the broad signifi- 
 cances of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. 
 The world was never so emasculated in thought, I sup- 
 pose, 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 emo- 
 tion) 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 Apollos that used to adorn 
 the vast aisle and huge grey terraces of the Crystal 
 Palace were the first intimations of the beauty of the 
 body 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 curi- 
 ously and askance. Once at least in my later days at 
 Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the 
 sake of them. . . . 
 
 The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary up- 
 bringing 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 
 
90 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 in- 
 stead 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 Trin- 
 ity 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 back- 
 ground brown and deep. He professed himself a soci- 
 alist with anarchistic leanings he had suffered the 
 martyrdom of ducking for it and a huge French May- 
 day poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and 
 black on a barricade against a flaring orange sky, 
 dominated his decorations. Hatherleigh affected a fine 
 untidiness, and all the place, even the floor, was lit- 
 tered with books, for the most part open and face down- 
 ward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded 
 gown and our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hath- 
 erleigh's flopped like an elephant's ear and inserted 
 quill pens supported the corners of mine; the high 
 
ADOLESCENCE 91 
 
 lights of the picture came chiefly as reflections front 
 his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We 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 
 liquor 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 ought to talk 
 about them. What are we going to do about them? 
 It's got to come. We're all festering inside about it. 
 Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether 
 about this Infernal University!" 
 
 We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our 
 first talk was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red 
 ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a 
 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- 
 west frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that 
 
92 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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, 
 I've got no use for decency." 
 
 We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an un- 
 usually 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 im- 
 portant 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 hand and seemed 
 to seek and catch his image in the air " oh, a con- 
 founded buttered slide of sentiment, to guide us. I 
 tell you I'm going to think about it and talk about it 
 until I see a little more daylight than I do at present. 
 I'm twenty-two. Things might happen to me any- 
 when. 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 expect, pretty meekly, snigger- 
 ing a bit, sentimentalising a bit, like like Cambridge 
 humorists. . . . I 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 
 
ADOLESCENCE 93 
 
 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 Esmeer, 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 think 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. We've got to be able to think of anything. 
 And ' such things aren't for the Likes of Us ! ' That's 
 another servant's saying. Well, everything is for the 
 Likes of Us. If we see fit, that is." 
 
 A small fresh-coloured man in grey objected. 
 
 " Well," exploded Hatherleigh, " if that isn't so 
 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 getting things straight in our heads, and then we 
 won't use 'em. Good God ! what do you think a univer- 
 sity'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 
 
94 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 gaol 
 delivery of long pent and cramped and sometimes 
 crippled ideas. 
 
 And we went on a reading party that Easter to a 
 place called Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fish- 
 ing inn and a river that goes under a bridge. It was a 
 late Easter and a blazing 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 Golden Age, by the simple 
 abolition of tailors and outfitters. 
 
 Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious 
 they seemed, how splendidly new the ideas that grew 
 and multiplied in our seething minds ! We made long 
 afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards 
 Arundel, and would come tramping back through the 
 still keen moonlight singing and shouting. 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. But Hather- 
 leigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was 
 gloriously red. " My God ! " said Hatherleigh to con- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 95 
 
 vey the quality 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 lib- 
 eral intentions when Benton 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 walking 
 to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously 
 indifferent to her. For might she not be just that one 
 exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless 
 conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in 
 which we lived? 
 
 We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising 
 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." We 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 antf 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 
 was 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 
 
96 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 lectureship in political science. In those days it was 
 disguised in the cloak of Political Economy. 
 
 2 
 
 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 differ- 
 entiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, 
 except Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather ab- 
 normal blue with an appetite for ideas, took games 
 seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we 
 intimated contempt for the rather mediocre, deliber- 
 ately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously 
 wild undergraduate men who made up the mass of 
 Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were 
 altogether too hard on our contemporaries. We 
 battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should 
 seem new, and we despised these others extremely for 
 doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of our- 
 selves 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 I'm a little doubtful at times now whether 
 after all we didn't create it for which Hatherleigh 
 invented the nickname the " Pinky Dinkys," intending 
 thereby both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal 
 measure. The Pinky Dinky summarised 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 becoming. 
 
 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 
 
ADOLESCENCE 97 
 
 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 Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the 
 responses. 
 
 " The Pinky Dinky extracts a good deal of amuse- 
 ment from life/' said some one. 
 
 " Damned prig ! " said Hatherleigh. 
 
 " The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats 
 the question with a light gay touch. He makes the 
 weird ones mad. But sometimes he cannot go on 
 because of the amusement he extracts." 
 
 " I want to shy books at the giggling swine/' said 
 Hatherleigh. 
 
 " 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 
 nipped," said Hatherleigh. " 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 
 Ascriptions 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." 
 
98 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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 Pinky 
 Dinky goes to King's Chapel, and sits and feels in 
 the dusk. Solemn things! Oh hush! He wouldn't 
 tell you " 
 
 " He couldn't tell you." 
 
 " Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about 
 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 
 really exactly what one would call good form. . . . 
 There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world 
 somehow. Somebody put it there. . . . And any- 
 how 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 croquet ? " 
 
 " It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh 
 suddenly, "that's what's the matter with the Pinky 
 
ADOLESCENCE 99 
 
 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 ? " 
 
 "All his little jokes and things/' said Esmeer re- 
 garding his feet on tlie fender, "it's just a nervous 
 sniggering because he's afraid. . . Oxford's no 
 better." 
 
 "What's he afraid of?" said I. 
 
 " God knows ! " exploded Hatherleigh and stared at 
 the fire. 
 
 "Life!" 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 organisation 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 uni- 
 versities. Indeed I had a scheme 
 
100 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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- 
 point of all the big project of conscious public recon- 
 struction at which I aimed. I wanted to build up a 
 new educational machine altogether for the governing 
 class out of a consolidated system of special public 
 service schools. I meant to get to work upon this 
 whatever office 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 firmly 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 system with 
 strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern history, 
 European literature and criticism, physical and biologi- 
 cal science, education rnd 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 altogether. I had 
 men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have 
 found others. I should have aimed at making a hard- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 101 
 
 trained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of 
 man. Everything else would have been made sub- 
 servient 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 realised 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 ed aiad housed 
 my men clean and very hard where. 1 there wasn't any 
 audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty 'o kigh presK 
 sure 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 oppres- 
 sion, 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 inerad- 
 icable 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 disguises and antiquarian charm the 
 inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears 
 
102 THE NEW MACHIAVELLi 
 
 there a peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in 
 the world a covetous scandal so that I am always 
 reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and 
 the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for 
 the heroine before the great crisis of life to " enter, 
 take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon 
 the writing desk." . . 
 
 We have to make a new Academic mind for modern 
 needs, and the last thing to make it out of, I am con- 
 vinced, is the old Academic 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 thosie old bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is 
 nmoh too delightful in its peculiar and distinctive way 
 to damage by futile patching. 
 
 My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity 
 as I recall dear old Codger, surely the most " unlead- 
 erly " 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 Cambridge, 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 fat hand carrying his cap, his 
 grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a trifle 
 inturned, and going across the great court with a queer 
 tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive 
 undergraduate eye. Or 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 
 not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the 
 fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it 
 
ADOLESCENCE 103 
 
 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 
 beginning. 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 knowl- 
 edge 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 
 ever entered the Union Library. This, however, he 
 held to be remarkable rather than ennobling, and such 
 boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. 
 Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the works of 
 
104. THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn 
 and Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished 
 and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved 
 nothing so much in his hours of relaxation as to pro- 
 pound and answer difficult questions 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 Mergle, who was understood to be her- 
 self a very redoubtable Character in the Gyp-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 
 Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure 
 war. . . . 
 
 It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, 
 philosophy! the intimate wisdom of things. He dealt 
 in a variety of Hegelian stuff like nothing else in the 
 world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It was 
 a wonderful web he spun out of that queer 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 final theories 
 about Love and Death and Immortality, odd matters 
 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. * - 
 
ADOLESCENCE 105 
 
 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, 
 utilising 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, civilisation, 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 
 rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels 
 against and struggles against disorder, that order has 
 an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments, suburbs, every- 
 thing alike; from the very beginnings of my experience 
 I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from 
 control. 
 
 The current of living and contemporary ideas in 
 which my mind was presently swimming made all in 
 the same direction; in place of my mother's attentive, 
 
106 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible Provi- 
 dence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existenc 
 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 laissez faire 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 City Merchants' days 
 how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question- 
 begging word " Evolution," having, so to speak, found 
 it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had re- 
 marked at the Britten lunch table, had led not only to 
 man, but to the liver-fluke and skunk, obviously it 
 might lead anywhere; order came into things only 
 through the struggling mind of man. That lit things 
 wonderfully for us. When I went up to Cambridge 
 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 much in these matters, just 
 as 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 twen- 
 ties. 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. 
 
ADOLESCENCE 107 
 
 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 has 
 been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, 
 replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt 
 and realised distinctions. 
 
 In 1895 that was my last year with Britten, 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. We had no conception of the roots of 
 things nor of the reaction 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 
 
108 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 heroic issues of war. There were no wagons 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 regard 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. We 
 knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine 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 
 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 en masse to the North Downs by an order of 
 the Local Government Board. We thought nothing of 
 throwing religious organisations out of employment or 
 superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed 
 bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of 
 laws abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a 
 dream as the peaceful and orderly proclamation of 
 Communism from the steps of St. Paul's 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 per- 
 fectly serious about it. We were not fools; it was 
 
ADOLESCENCE 103 
 
 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 inconven- 
 ient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le- 
 Grand! . . . 
 
 I cannot trace the development of my ideas at 
 Cambridge, but I believe the mere physical fact of 
 going two hours' journey away from London gave that 
 place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagi- 
 nation. I got outside London. It became tangible in- 
 stead 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 interpretations. Cambridge made 
 politics personal and actual. At City Merchants' we 
 had had no sense of effective contact; we boasted, it is 
 true, an under secretary and a colonial governor among 
 
110 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 our old boys, but they were never real to us; such dis- 
 tinguished 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 Cambridge I felt for the first time 
 that I touched the thing that was going on. Real liv- 
 ing statesmen came down to debate in the Union, 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 combination-room world is at last larger and 
 more populous and various than the world of school- 
 masters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who had been 
 the aristocracy of City Merchants' 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. 
 
 We 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 Parlimentary history, talk that 
 
ADOLESCENCE 111 
 
 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. Mr. Evesham 
 we asked to come to the Union every year, Masters, 
 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. Humphry Ward. From gossip, 
 example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt 
 something of the way in which parties were split, 
 coalitions formed, how permanent officials worked and 
 controlled their ministers, how measures were brought 
 forward and projects modified. 
 
 And while I was getting the great leading figures 
 on the political stage, who had been 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 hu- 
 manity, and their motives to the quality of impulses 
 like my own, I was also acquiring 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. 
 Rodbertus we never heard of and the Fabian Society 
 we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago 
 Anarchists, Justice and Social Democratic Federation 
 (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds. 
 Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new 
 doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a 
 
112 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 huge-muscled, black-haired toiler swaggering sledge- 
 hammer in hand across a revolutionary barricade, 
 seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound. 
 Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the 
 workers, and were driving them quite automatically to 
 inevitable insurrection. They would arise and the capi- 
 talist 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 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 nat- 
 ural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles, wealth 
 and officials, and it was symbolised 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 themiselves solid, that were, we 
 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 
 
ADOLESCENCE 113 
 
 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. 
 
 I do not know now whether it was during my school- 
 days or at Cambridge that I first began not merely to 
 see the world as a great contrast of rich and poor, but 
 to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous majority 
 of people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious 
 about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, 
 ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and 
 continually suffer misadventures, hardships and 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 be- 
 yond the primary needs that my stimulated imagina- 
 tion might demand that it would not be an effort for me 
 to secure. A certain aggressive radicalism against 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 hu- 
 man affairs that had been forced upon me by the at- 
 mosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link me in 
 sympathy with any of the profounder realities of pov- 
 erty. 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 revo- 
 
114 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 lution 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 my bedder, a garrulous old thing 
 with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an osten- 
 tatiously 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. We 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 idealise. 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 fish- 
 ermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, 
 assured us we ought to know the Scottish miner. My 
 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 realisation 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 organised 
 industrialism at close quarters for the first time. The 
 
ADOLESCENCE 115 
 
 picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his 
 innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and 
 dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system of private 
 ownership to fragments, began to give place to a 
 limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of 
 millions of people not organised as they should be, 
 not educated as they should be, not simply prevented 
 from but incapable of nearly every sort of beauty, 
 mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, 
 mostly obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily di- 
 verted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that 
 the poor were nearing a limit of painful experience, 
 and awakening to a sense of intolerable wrongs, began 
 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 life itself with a spiritless 
 lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose 
 it than to use it in any way whatever. 
 
 The complete development of that realisation was 
 the work of many years. I had only the first intima- 
 tions at Cambridge. But I did have intimations. 
 Most 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. 
 
 Hatherleigh 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 
 Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt 
 to screw up Hatherleigh 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 
 Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty 
 
116 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically 
 in those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposi- 
 tion. 
 
 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 watchful 
 innocent brown eyes and a persistent and invincible air 
 of being out of his element. He sat with 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 whose 
 seat was occupied was the one containing his knitted 
 woollen comforter and his picturesque old beach-pho- 
 tographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't know 
 how to take hold of him now we had got him, and, 
 which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was mani- 
 festly having the same difficulty with us. We had ex- 
 pected to be gripped. 
 
 " I'll 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. 
 
 " I'd 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 thought- 
 ful 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 
 declared he would explain to us just exactly what social- 
 ism was, and went on at once to an impassioned con- 
 trast of social conditions. "You young men," he said 
 
ADOLESCENCE 117 
 
 " come from homes of luxury ; every need you feel is 
 supplied " 
 
 We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupy- 
 ing every inch of Redmayne's floor space except the 
 hearthrug-platform, and we listened to him and thought 
 him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us 
 indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he 
 had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his 
 provincial accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, 
 we were carried away by his indignations. We looked 
 with shining eyes at one another and at the various 
 dons who had dropped in and were striving to main- 
 tain a front of judicious severity. We felt more and 
 more that social injustice must cease, and cease forth- 
 with. 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 scep- 
 tic, 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 re- 
 marks 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 ad- 
 mit, stands condemned. Every present system always 
 has stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men. 
 But where it seems to me you get thin, is just where 
 everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to 
 the remedy." 
 
 "Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered 
 everything, and Hatherleigh 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 
 
118 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 "Organised somehow," said Denson. "And it's just 
 the How perplexes me. I can quite easily imagine a 
 socialist state administered in a sort of scrambling 
 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 
 shafts. " Suppose," he said, " you found yourself prime 
 minister " 
 
 I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his 
 hair a little ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and 
 measured him against the huge machine of government 
 muddled and mysterious. Oh ! but I was perplexed ! 
 
 And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms 
 and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed 
 his knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from 
 
ADOLESCENCE 119 
 
 his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon 
 of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great dis- 
 cursive talk with him. 
 
 "Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" 
 he said. 
 
 Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good 
 deal, and ever and again he came back to that discus- 
 sion. " 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 your mam- 
 mies " 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 read a bit of Dar- 
 win. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I 
 said. And I couldno* 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 
 straight at a ching without splitting straws. One gets 
 hold of the Elementals." 
 
 (Well, did they? That was the gist of my per- 
 plexity.) 
 
 " 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 op- 
 position, " the alternatve 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." 
 
120 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 6 
 
 The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was 
 not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite ex- 
 ceptional 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, criticised 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 en- 
 thusiasm 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 
 poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He 
 got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling 
 and haunting quotations, 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? 
 
 He helped to broaden my geographical sense im- 
 mensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire 
 for discipline and devotion and organised effort the 
 Socialism of our time failed to express, that the cur- 
 rent 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 hys- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 121 
 
 teria and the impatience, the incoherence and incon- 
 sistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it: 
 
 " Keep ye the Law be swift in all obedience 
 Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the fcrd, 
 Make ye sure to each his own 
 That he reap where he hath sown; 
 
 By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve 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 unless they is Ms own; 
 
 'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about 
 
 An' then cdmes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out. 
 All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, 
 All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less, 
 All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho, 
 Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!" 
 
 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 England 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 dis- 
 asters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English 
 world has long since contrived in any edifying or profit- 
 able sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shout- 
 
122 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ing newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory 
 gave place to the realisation 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 realise the bloody 
 waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from 
 Stormberg, Colenso Colenso, that blundering battle, 
 with White, as it seemed, in Ladysmith near the point 
 of surrender! and so through the long unfolding cat- 
 alogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed 
 anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon 
 your enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and 
 method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty 
 retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of il- 
 lusion. 
 
 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 anc 
 money poured into South Africa, and the convalescen 
 wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as 
 if I had looked at it through a window instead oi 
 through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as 
 if I had been there the wide open spaces, the raggec 
 hillsides,, the open order attacks of helmeted men in 
 
ADOLESCENCE 123 
 
 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. 
 
 And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an 
 accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old 
 Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily 
 bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubt- 
 ful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate 
 rej oicings at last that seemed to some of us more shame- 
 ful than defeats. . . . 
 
 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 be- 
 cause 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 
 
124 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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, ag- 
 gressive 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 un- 
 comfortable 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 
 of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our 
 own world-wide display. I began now to have a dis- 
 turbing sense as it were of busy searchlights over the 
 horizon. . . . 
 
 One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith 
 produced in me 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 vin- 
 dicate 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 Mrs. Burman Rad- 
 nor, the "infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's 
 limitations, were the central substance of that inalert- 
 ness the book set itself to assail. So many things have 
 been brought together in my mind that were once re- 
 motely separated. A people that will not valiantly face 
 and understand and admit love and passion can under- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 125 
 
 stand nothing whatever. But in those days what is 
 now just obvious truth to me was 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-remembered developments that found me a crude 
 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 fellow- 
 ship 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 acquaint- 
 ance after reading a paper of mine (begotten by the 
 visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democ- 
 racy. 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) afjSd so up the Val Maggia and over to 
 Airolo and home. 
 
 As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of 
 
126 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored 
 boat beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, 
 the little emotion of standing out from the homeland 
 and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs 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 lighthouse 
 on a cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and 
 then one turned to scan the little different 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 a 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 Ville, and one looked out at the world in 
 French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous pur- 
 ple trousers, police officers in peaked caps instead of 
 helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on two 
 wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements in- 
 stead 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 different government 
 and different methods, and in the night one was roused 
 from uneasy slumbers and sat blinking and surly, 
 
ADOLESCENCE 127 
 
 wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's oreiller 
 all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the 
 German official, so different in manner from the Brit- 
 ish; and when one woke again after that one had come 
 to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee in Switzer- 
 land. . . . 
 
 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 soci- 
 ological as we ran on to Spiez, and made all sorts of 
 generalisations 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 per- 
 haps my scheme of international values was 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 Nor- 
 folk suit of greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamil- 
 iarly at his rather impending, spectacled, intellectual 
 visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him 
 with the drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Con- 
 vict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished 
 him below, and all his luggage was a borrowed ruck- 
 sac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave 
 in the train, but I made him at one of the Swiss sta- 
 tions I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses 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 
 
128 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 incredible cleanliness, and eating hard-boiled eggs in a 
 vast clear space of rime-edged rocks, snow-mottled, 
 above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the mon- 
 strous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks 
 above, and there were winding moraines from which 
 the ice had receded, and then dark clustering fir trees 
 far below. 
 
 I had an extraordinary feeling of having 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 effects; 
 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 among 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 im- 
 pressions. Willersley's mind abounded in historical 
 matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit of topo- 
 graphical reference; he made me see and trace and see 
 again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding val- 
 leys, and the coming of the first great Peace among 
 the warring tribes of men. . . . 
 
 In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talk- 
 ing about our outlook almost continually. Each of us, 
 you see, was full of the same question, very near 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 
 
ADOLESCENCE 129 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 in- 
 advisable to reopen subsequently." 
 
 He beamed at me through his glasses. The sen- 
 tentious use of long words was a playful habit with 
 him, that and a slight deliberate humour, habits oc- 
 casional 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 peo- 
 ple 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 
 rising out of the decaying old . . . we are 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 
 
130 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 hair and a deepening benevolence in his always amiable 
 face, and he has very fairly kept his word. He has 
 lived for social service and to do vast masses of use- 
 ful, undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the 
 days of arid administrative plodding and of contention 
 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 be- 
 come a thing he puts on every morning like an old 
 coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable 
 whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by 
 subordinates and easily offended into opposition by col- 
 leagues; 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 community. 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 punishments, for he is an 
 implacable Rationalist. No doubt he idealises 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 proprietorship he must feel in the 
 fair, fine, well-ordered schools he has done so much 
 to develop. "But for me/' he can say, "there would 
 have been a Job about those diagrams, and that sub- 
 ject 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 working. 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, 
 
ADOLESCENCE 131 
 
 he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men 
 talking of him, and they were 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 Aca- 
 demic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is inci- 
 dental 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 work. 
 
 Our long three weeks' 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 in colloquial German and Italian, with dis- 
 putes about the way to take, and other things that I 
 will tell of in another section. But the white passion 
 of human service was our dominant theme. Not simply 
 perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly, 
 and with at least a frequent self-forgetfulness, did we 
 want to do fine and noble things, to help in their de- 
 veloping, 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 quality of nearly a 
 month's conversation, conversation that is casual and 
 
132 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 dis- 
 order of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle 
 that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretch- 
 edness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I re- 
 member myself quoting Kipling 
 
 "All along o* dirtiness, all along o* mess, 
 All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less. n 
 
 " We build the state," we said over and over again. 
 " That is what we are for servants of the new re- 
 organisation ! " 
 
 We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, 
 a League of Social Service. 
 
 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 
 
ADOLESCENCE 133 
 
 discussed possible combinations and possible develop- 
 ments, and the chances of some great constrnctive 
 movement coming from the heart-searchings the Boer 
 war had occasioned. We would sink to gossip even 
 at the Suetonius 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 pro- 
 duced 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. 
 We intimated our individual careers in terms of bold 
 expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and 
 hoardings clamorous with " Vote for Remington," and 
 Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this com- 
 mittee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words 
 after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting 
 friendly beside me on the government benches. There 
 Yras nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the 
 Board 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-organised internal transit 
 and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the 
 
134 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 realisation before they 
 failed? 
 
 There were times when we posed like young goas 
 (of unassuming exterior), and times when 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 must 
 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 Rem- 
 ington, K. C. B., M. P. 
 
 But the big style prevailed. . . . 
 
 We could not tell from minute to minute whether 
 we were planning for a world of solid reality, or telling 
 ourselves fairy tales about this prospect of life. So 
 much seemed possible, and everything we could think 
 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 anything in life 
 could have shocked him. Socialism as a simple demo- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 135 
 
 cratic cry we had done with for ever. We were soci- 
 alists because Individualism for us meant muddle, 
 meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little peo- 
 ple all obstinately and ignorantly doing things jar- 
 ringly, each one in his own way. "Each/' I said, 
 quoting words of my father's that rose apt in my mem- 
 ory, " 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 be- 
 have as such. That's the gist of socialism as I under- 
 stand it." 
 
 " Or be dismissed from his post," I said, " and re- 
 placed by some better sort of official. A man's none 
 the less an official because he's irresponsible. What 
 he does with his property affects people just the same. 
 Private ! No one is really private but an outlaw. . . ." 
 
 Order and devotion were the very essence of our 
 socialism, and a splendid collective vigour and hap- 
 piness its end. We projected an ideal state, an organ- 
 ised state as confident and powerful as modern science, 
 as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as 
 sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle 
 for ever; it ruled all our ideals 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 Eng- 
 land renewed we had in mind, and how 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 alon^c some narrow 
 
136 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Alpine mule-path shouting large suggestions for na- 
 tional re-organisation, and weighing considerations as 
 lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. 
 "Great England/' we said in effect, 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 become serious. ... Oh! there 
 are big things before us to do ; big enduring things ! " 
 
 One evening we walked up to the loggia of a 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 
 \:he 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 ex- 
 pression 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 fop 
 nothing, we had abilities, it wasn't modesty but cow- 
 ardice 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 amuse- 
 
ADOLESCENCE 137 
 
 ment 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 noth- 
 ing but mean little vanities and indulgencies and then 
 take credit for modesty? I know I 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! Somebody has to 
 attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only 
 a little perplexed because it has to find out just where 
 to aim itself. . . ." 
 
 The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of 
 steam on the distant railway to Luino, the busy boats 
 and steamers trailing triangular wakes of foam, the 
 long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, 
 the vast mountain distances, now tinged with sunset 
 light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward 
 waters with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters 
 that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made 
 a broad panoramic spectacle. It was as if one sur- 
 veyed 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 largness came to me then, and it has 
 come to me since, again and again, a splendid intima- 
 tion 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 towering 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 cliffs. And a hundred times when I 
 have thought of England as our country might be, 
 with no wretched poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed 
 
138 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales 
 and rivers, that emotion of collective ends and collec- 
 tive purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as 
 humanity. For .a brief moment I was humanity, look- 
 ing at the world I had made and had still to make. . . . 
 
 12 
 
 And mingled with these dreams of power and patri- 
 otic service there was another series of a different qual- 
 ity and a different colour, like the antagonistic colour 
 of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, con- 
 trasted and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn 
 from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peace- 
 fully 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 Staf- 
 fordshire I will tell a little later. But I can remem- 
 ber 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 
 
ADOLESCENCE 139 
 
 divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and command- 
 ing, and sometimes that Venus who stoops and allures. 
 
 This travel abroad seemed to have released a multi- 
 tude 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 quickened all those disregarded 
 dreams. I saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms 
 all about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, 
 in the pedestrians one encountered in the tracks, in 
 the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables. " Con- 
 found it ! " said I, and talked all the more zealously 
 of that greater England that was 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 
 indifferent 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 Alps and are 
 plain and squat here and divinities five miles away 
 and as we came down we passed a group of five or six 
 ^f them resting by the wayside. Their burthens were 
 
140 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 dessicated 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 be- 
 hind 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?" 
 
 "Why don't I go back and make love to those girls 
 and let the world and you and everything go nang? 
 Deep breasts and rounded limbs and we poor emas- 
 culated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth 
 in us ! . . ." 
 
 " I'm 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." 
 
 That fever was still in my blood when we came to 
 Locarno. 
 
 Along the hot and dusty lower road between tl 
 
ADOLESCENCE 141 
 
 Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley 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 be- 
 cause of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we 
 decided upon three or four days' sojourn in the Empress 
 Hotel. 
 
 We 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. " He 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 pedestrian travel. " My husband doesn't walk," she 
 said. " His heart is weak and he cannot 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 
 people one has never seen before and may never see 
 again. 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, smiling archly. " I like blue eyes." 
 
142 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was 
 the Woman of Thirty, " George Moore's Woman of 
 Thirty/' 
 
 I had not read George Moore at the time, but I pre- 
 tended 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. My head was full of her, and I found 
 it necessary to talk about her. So I made her a prob- 
 lem 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 theorised 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 things. 
 
 " 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 
 Seating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the 
 water. 
 
 " Do you get a view from your room ? " she asked 
 after a pause. 
 
 " It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the 
 staircase. My friend's next door." 
 
 She began to talk of books. She was interested in 
 Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I 
 forget altogether what that book was called, though I 
 remember to this day with the utmost exactness the 
 
ADOLESCENCE 143 
 
 purplish 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. 
 
 " Come in! " I whispered, trembling from head to 
 foot. 
 
 " You're 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 anyone might be in the passage, 
 and I gripped her wrist and drew her towards me. 
 
 " What do you mean ? " she answered with a faint 
 smile on her lips, 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 she 
 made a little noise almost like the purring miaow with 
 which a cat will greet one and her face, close to mine, 
 became solemn and tendei 
 
 She was suddenly a different being from the discon- 
 
144 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 tented 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 non- 
 sense 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. 
 
 " I'm 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." 
 
 We heard music, and went further alon^ the arcade 
 to discover a place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant 
 costume were singing and dancing on a creaking, pro- 
 testing little 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, but I delayed. 
 Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly 
 my mood changed, and we decided to start early the 
 
ADOLESCENCE 145 
 
 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 Milly.) 
 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 motherliness in her attitude to me that something 
 in my nature answered and approved. She didn't pre- 
 tend to keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. 
 " I've done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully 
 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 Free Masonry and Stock Exchange punting, 
 Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother 
 had contrived her marriage when she was eighteen. 
 They were the first samples I ever encountered of the 
 great multitude of functionless property owners which 
 encumbers modern civilisation 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 
 
146 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 " You know ? " I said abruptly, " about that 
 woman ? " 
 
 Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked 
 at me over the corner of his spectacles. 
 
 " Things went pretty far ? " he asked. 
 
 " Oh ! all the way ! " and I had a twinge of fatuous 
 pride in my unpremeditated achievement. 
 
 " She came to your room ? " 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " 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. 
 
 " You might have been caught, and that would have 
 meant endless trouble. You might have incurred all 
 sorts of consequences. What did you know about 
 her? . . . We have wasted four days in that hot close 
 place. When we found that League of Social Service 
 we were talking about," he said with a determined eye 
 upon me, " chastity will be first among the virtues pre- 
 scribed." 
 
 " I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. 
 " I'm hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I 
 know why." 
 
ADOLESCENCE 147 
 
 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 great 
 public services must turn his back upon. I'm 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 expres- 
 sion. " 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 
 chances of that. It's part of the general English slack- 
 ness that they won't look this in the face. Gods ! what 
 a muffled 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 " 
 
 " That wasn't Eugenics," said Willersley. 
 
 " It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feel- 
 ing oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, 
 and yet had a strong dumb case against him. 
 
BOOK THE SECOND 
 MARGARET 
 
CHAPTER THE FIRST 
 
 MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE 
 
 I,, 
 IUST go back a little way with my story. In the 
 vious 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 
 her up in relief that I formed a very vivid memory of 
 her. She was in the sharpest contrast with the indus- 
 trial world about her; she impressed me as a dainty 
 blue flower might do, come upon suddenly on a clinker 
 heap. She remained in my mind at once a perplexing 
 interrogation and a symbol. . . . 
 
 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 
 151 
 
152 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 sup- 
 plies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous serv- 
 ants; 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 bathroom at- 
 tached equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings 
 my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and 
 stamped with his name, and the house was furnished 
 throughout with chairs and tables in bright shining 
 wood, soft and prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy 
 corners, curtained archways, gold-framed landscapes, 
 overmantels, a dining-room sideboard like a palace, 
 with a large Tantalus, and electric light fittings of a 
 gay and expensive quality. There was a fine billiard- 
 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 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 153 
 
 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. . . . 
 
 My 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 3 
 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; Sibyl was 
 of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was 
 shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl'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 uninitiated stranger with the pleasantest sense of 
 superiority. 
 
 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 
 went off to find some readable book in the place, but 
 apart from miscellaneous popular novels, some veteri- 
 nary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes 
 
154 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of The Illustrated 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, cbiefly 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 consid- 
 erable knowledge 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 indus- 
 trialism 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 everyone seems disconnected and 
 adrift from everyone, you can see here the works, the 
 potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close 
 at hand the congested, meanly-housed workers, and at a 
 little distance a small middle-class quarter, and again 
 remoter, the big house of the employer. It was like a 
 very simplified diagram after the untraceable confu- 
 sion 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 
 

 IN STAFFORDSHIRE 155 
 
 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 flaming 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 Moskowski 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 Bromstead and Penge, 
 but it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found 
 great virtue in the word " exploitation." 
 
 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 pos- 
 session of my imagination. I don't think that even 
 then I was swayed by any crude melodramatic con- 
 
156 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 8 
 
 Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite 
 naturally he believed that every man who was not as 
 prosperous as he was had only himself to blame. He 
 was rich and he had left school and gone into his fath- 
 er's business at fifteen, and that seemed to him the 
 proper age at which everyone's education should termi- 
 nate. He was very anxious to dissuade me from going 
 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. 
 
 /t see him for some years until my father's death, 
 and then he seemed rather smaller, though still a fair 
 size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 157 
 
 aggressive. 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- 
 tained his ascendancy over them by simple old-fashioned 
 physical chastisement. Then after an interlude of a 
 year it had dawned upon them that power had mysteri- 
 ously departed from him. He had tried stopping their 
 pocket money, but they found their mother financially 
 amenable; besides which it was fundamental to my 
 uncle's attitude that he should give them money freely. 
 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 re- 
 coiled 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. . . . 
 
 My 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 
 
158 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 helped 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 
 twaddle and tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into 
 Parliament, 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 off. 
 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 willfully obtuse, but 
 just failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City 
 Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham 
 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, 
 
STAFFORDSHIRE 159 
 
 he loved to speak "reet Staffordshire" his rather 
 flabby face with the mottled complexion that told of 
 crude ill-regulated appetites, his clumsy gestures he 
 kept emphasising 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. He tackled me first in the 
 garden after lunch, and then tried to raise me to en- 
 thusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing 
 me its organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in. 
 which whitened men worked and coughed, through the 
 highly ventilated glazing room in which strangely 
 masked girls looked ashamed of themselves, " They'll 
 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 organised 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 
 
160 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 poisoning. Secondly, not everyone was liable to lead 
 poisoning, and it would be quite easy to pick out the 
 susceptible types 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 be- 
 lieve it, but he knew it for a fact. Fifthly, the work- 
 people simply would not learn the gravity of the dan- 
 ger, and would eat 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 sev- 
 eral associated firms had organised 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. Eighthly, in the 
 ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead 
 poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people 
 had generalised from these exceptional cases. The 
 small shops, he hazarded, looking out of the cracked 
 and dirty window at distant chimneys, might be ad- 
 vantageously 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 girls' 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 employ- 
 ers, and then we'll see a bit," he said. " They'll drive 
 
 : 
 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 161 
 
 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 greet- 
 ing 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 
 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. 
 
 " That's 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. Ana 
 the fools up in Westminster want you to put in fans 
 here and fans there the Longton fools have. . . . 
 And then 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 
 
162 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 what was evidently a concerted demand for a motor- 
 car. 
 
 "You've 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 re- 
 marked. " He's a fool/' and became thoughtful. 
 
 Afterwards he asked me to come to him* into his 
 study; it was a room with a writing-desk 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 I'll 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. 
 
 " You're a damned fool," he said. " But I suppose 
 
 you'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 
 clergyman, 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 your 
 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 Staffordshire 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 scien- 
 tific construction that filled my mind. He could as eas- 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 163 
 
 ily have understood Chinese poetry. His motives were 
 made up of intense rivalries with other men of his 
 class 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 display 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 feel- 
 ing whatever. He 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 sup- 
 pression 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 con- 
 siderable 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 in- 
 stinctively 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 an- 
 tagonisms 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, 
 
164 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 and occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the 
 intractable unavoidable ore of the new civilisation. 
 
 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. He 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, London- 
 ers, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welch and Irish, because 
 they were not " reet Staffordshire," and he hated all 
 other Staffordshire men as insufficiently " 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 inconvenient.) And he hated Trade 
 Unions because they interfered with his autocratic di- 
 rection 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 was about as much civilised, about as much 
 tamed to the ideas of collective action and mutual con- 
 sideration as a Central African negro. 
 
 There are hordes of such men as he throughout all 
 the modern industrial world. You will find the same 
 type with the slightest modifications in the Pas de 
 Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 165 
 
 Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. 
 These men have raised themselves up from the general 
 mass of untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a hard 
 industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have 
 had first to drive themselves. They have never yet had 
 occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social life 
 as a whole, and as for dreams or 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 mak- 
 ing 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 Staffordshire 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- 
 munerative things in the grandest manner, "Latin and 
 mook," while the sons of his neighbours, not nephews 
 merely, but sons, stayed 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 
 ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecom- 
 ing mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of 
 eighteen and nineteen, but a Cambridge " man " of two 
 and twenty with a first arid good tennis and a growing 
 social experience, is a fair contemporary for two girls 
 of twenty-three and twenty-four. 
 
166 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a 
 bottle-green affair that opened behind, had dark purple 
 cushions, and was controlled mysteriously by a man in 
 shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high tea had 
 been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my 
 uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and 
 after one painful experiment, I gathered, 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 calling 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- 
 mising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither 
 time nor means for hospitality. Social intercourse cen- 
 tred very largely upon the church or chapel, and the 
 chapels were better at bringing people together 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 number of gos- 
 siping friendships with old school mates were " kept 
 up," and my cousins would " spend the afternoon " or 
 even spend the day with these; such occasions led to 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 167 
 
 other encounters and interlaced with the furtive cor- 
 respondences 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 do- 
 mestic 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 ear- 
 lier visits the young bloods of the district found much 
 satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dog-carts and 
 suchlike high-wheeled vehicles, a disposition 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 gen- 
 eral social sea in whch their own awkward meeting 
 had occurred, without necessarily opening any other 
 world in exchange. My uncle was too much occupied 
 with the works and his business affairs and his private 
 vices to philosophise about his girls; he wanted them 
 just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be 
 a sort of animated flowers and make home bright and 
 be given things. He was irritated that they would 
 not remain at this, and still more irritated that they 
 failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in 
 young men. The tandems would be steered by weird 
 and devious routes to evade the bare chance of his 
 bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas what- 
 
168 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ever 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 difficulty of my cousins' 
 position in life; the absence of any guidance or in- 
 struction 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 offer 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 seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners 
 of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember 
 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 different. But when I came 
 again their methods were maturer or I was no longer 
 a negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials 
 were no longer flaunted quite so openly in my 
 face. 
 
 My cousins had worked it out from the indications 
 of their universe that the end of life is to have a " good 
 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 
 Liverpool ; they were the very soul-sisters of my cousins. 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 169 
 
 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, 
 composed in equal measure of becoming important and 
 becoming old. I don't know what they thought about 
 children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. 
 It was very secret if they did. 
 
 As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my 
 cousins were always ready to take part in a Charitable 
 Bazaar. They were unaware of any 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 lit- 
 tle, I think, that Agitators were not more drastically 
 put down. But they had a sort of instinctive dread 
 
170 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of social discussion as of something that might breach 
 the happiness of their ignorance. . . . 
 
 My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; 
 they also undertook a stage of my emotional education. 
 Their method in that as in everything else was ex- 
 tremely 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 my visit before I asked for 
 them. 
 
 When 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 greatly, and that there was something in her tem- 
 perament 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 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 171 
 
 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 inhibitions. 
 
 " 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 propostion over- 
 shadowing everything else in my mind, namely, that 
 kissing my cousin Sybil was a difficult, but not impos-i 
 sible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a 
 doubt whether on the whole it was worth doing. The 
 thing had come into my existence, disturbing and in- 
 terrupting its flow exactly as a fever does. Sybil had 
 infected me with herself. 
 
 The next day matters came to a crisis in the little 
 apstairs sitting-room which had been assigned me as 
 a study during my visit. I was working up there, or 
 rather trying to work in spite of the outrageous ca- 
 pering of some very primitive elements in my brain, 
 when she came up to me, under 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; 4 I didn't mean that!" 
 
 That remained the state of our relations for two 
 days. I developed a growing irritation with and re- 
 sentment against cousin Sybil, combined with an in- 
 tense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered and 
 thirsted. Cousin Sybil went about in the happy per- 
 
172 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 suasion 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 realised that I was being used for the commonest 
 form of excitement possible to a commonplace 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 equalise the disadvantage, and per- 
 haps it's as well, for I fancy that sort of revenge 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 re- 
 lease 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 I'm 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, " I'm going indoors." 
 
 " Very well." 
 
 And that ended the affair with Sybil. 
 
 I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 173 
 
 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 controlled 
 myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and 
 entirely civil indifference to her blandishments. 
 
 What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in 
 some talk I forget about what with Sybil. 
 
 "Oh, Dick!" said Gertrude a little impatiently, 
 "Dick's Pi." 
 
 And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent 
 levity from this theory of my innate and virginal piety. 
 
 6 
 
 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 quite 
 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 nothing of the slender graciousness 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 as is humanly possible of that insensate 
 pile of written work that the Girls' Public School move- 
 ment has inflicted upon school-girls. She really learnt 
 
174 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 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 step- 
 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. 1 
 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 hav- 
 ing acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, 
 Orvieto, and at last Rome. They returned, if I remem- 
 ber rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan sr.c? P^ris. Si* 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 175 
 
 months or more they had had abroad, and now Mar- 
 garet was back in Burslem, in health again and con- 
 sciously a very civilised person. 
 
 New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring 
 of abundant flowers daffodils 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 garden 
 if the weather held. 
 
 The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to 
 modern ideas of comfort on the road out towards Mis- 
 terton, with an orchard that had been rather pleasantly 
 subdued from use to ^ornament. It had rich blossom- 
 ing cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass 
 full of nodding yellow 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. Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress 
 of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the fash- 
 ion and tied with pretty ribbons, like a slenderer, un- 
 bountiful Primavera. 
 
 It \vas one of those May days that ape the light and 
 heat of summer, and I remember disconnectedly quite 
 a number of brightly lit figures 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 planned. 
 
 The party was almost entirely feminine except for a 
 little curate with a large head, a good voice and a 
 radiant manner, who was obviously attracted by Mar- 
 
176 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 garet, and two or three young husbands still sufficiently 
 addicted to their wives 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, more- 
 over, a loose rich shot silk tie of red and purple, a long 
 frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and pres- 
 ently 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 ab- 
 sent. 
 
 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 chaper- 
 onage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate, 
 stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 177 
 
 party, and preluded, I remember, every observation 
 he made by a vigorous resumption of stirring. 
 
 We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to 
 it. The curate was a Selwyn man and had taken a 
 pass degree in theology, but Margaret had come to 
 Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her 
 breakdown, and understood these differences. She had 
 the eagerness of an exile to hear the old familiar names 
 of places and personalities. We capped familiar anec- 
 dotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and 
 the Backs, and the curate, addressing himself more 
 particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story il- 
 lustrative of his disposition to reckless devilry (of a 
 pure-minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes 
 quite needlessly on the way to Grantchester. 
 
 I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, 
 see her fresh fair face, with the little obliquity 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-blos- 
 som. I didn't think then I should have to come down." 
 (It was that started the curate upon his anecdote.) 
 
 " I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about 
 them at the Pitti and the Brera, the Brera is won- 
 derful 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 
 and fancifully dressed, talking of art and beautiful 
 things and a beautiful land, and with so much manifest 
 regret for learning denied, she seemed a different kind 
 
178 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 of being altogether from my smart, hard, high-col- 
 oured, 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 given 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 gen- 
 eral debris of his story, and made himself look very 
 alert and intelligent. 
 
 "We did a lot of that when I was up in the eight- 
 ies," he saidc " I'm 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 relationship, came 
 with her, and a cheerful lady in pink and more par- 
 ticularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our lit- 
 tle group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and 
 was not disposed to play a passive part in the talk. 
 
 " Socialism ! " she cried, catching the word. " It's 
 well Pa isn't here. He has Fits when people talk of 
 socialism. Fits ! " 
 
 The initial laughed in a general kind of way. 
 
 The curate said there was socialism and socialism, 
 and looked at Margaret to gauge whether he had been 
 too bold in this utterance. But she was all, he per- 
 ceived, for broad-mindness, and he stirred himself 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 179 
 
 (and incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of ex- 
 pression. He said the state of the poor was appalling, 
 simply appalling; that there were times when he wanted 
 to shatter the whole system, " only," he said, turning 
 to me appealingly, "What 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. " Pre- 
 cisely," he said explosively, and turned stirring and 
 with his head a little on one side, to hear what Mar- 
 garet was saying. 
 
 Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an ef- 
 fect of daring, that she had no doubt she was a socialist. 
 
 " And wearing a gold 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 began an interesting little wrangle, 
 one of those crude discussions of general ideas that 
 are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret sup- 
 ported 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 presently 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 
 
180 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 social problems at all, that over and above all enact- 
 ments we needed moral changes in people themselves. 
 My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to 
 manage, being unconscious of inconsistency in state- 
 ment and absolutely impervious to reply. Her stand- 
 point 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 every- 
 thing 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 say- 
 ing that so far as she was concerned 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. 
 
 " I hate that sort of view," she said suddenly in a 
 confidential undertone, with her delicate pink flush re- 
 turning. 
 
 " It's want of imagination," 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 re- 
 ferring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole 
 world of industry and property about us. " But what 
 is one to do ? " she asked. " I do wish I had not had 
 to come down. It's all so pointless here. There seems 
 
IN STAFFORDSHIRE 181 
 
 to be nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No 
 one here seems to feel quite 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 propaganda? " 
 
 " Could you ? " I began a little doubtfully. 
 
 " 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 something 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 quality of delicate discontent, the suggestion 
 of exile. Even a kind of weakness in her was sym- 
 pathetic. She told tremendously against her back- 
 ground. She was, I say, like a protesting blue flower 
 upon a cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she con- 
 nects and mingles with the furious quarrel I had with 
 my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. In- 
 directly Margaret was responsible. My mind was run- 
 ning 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 profound- 
 est feelings. . . . 
 
 r 
 
 What a preposterous shindy that was ! 
 I sat with him in the smoking-room, propounding 
 what I considered to be the most indisputable and 
 
182 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 civilisation." 
 
 " 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, 
 " jumbled 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 organised that business 
 down there by chance next," said my uncle, his voice 
 thick with challenge. 
 
 I went on as though I was back in Trinity. 
 
 " There's a lot of chance in the making of all great 
 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 grew while 
 those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second 
 place? He showed a disposition to tell the glorious 
 history of how once Ackroyd 's overshadowed him, and 
 how now he could buy up Ackroyd's three times over. 
 But I wanted to get out what was in my mind. 
 
 " Oh ! " I said, " as between man and man and busi- 
 ness and business, some of course get the pull by this 
 quality or that but it's forces quite outside the indi- 
 vidual case that make the big part of any success under 
 modern conditions. You never invented pottery, nor 
 
STAFFORDSHIRE 183 
 
 any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works ; 
 it wasn't your foresight that joined all England up 
 with railways and made it possible to organise produc- 
 tion 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 happened to 
 be in a position to take advantage of them " 
 
 It was then my uncle cried out and called me a 
 damned young puppy, and became involved in some 
 unexpected trouble of his own. 
 
 I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situ- 
 ation to discover him bent over a splendid spittoon, 
 cursing incoherently, retching a little, and spitting out 
 the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in his 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 hater of all own- 
 ership 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 bawl- 
 ing encounter matter nothing at all in this story. I 
 can't now estimate how near we came to fisticuffs. It 
 ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of 
 
184 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Rail- 
 way Hotel, while he, with ironical civility, telephoned 
 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 thing 
 I and my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle 
 with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We 
 question everything, disturb anything that cannot give 
 a clear justification to our questioning, because we be- 
 lieve inherently that our sense of disorder implies the 
 possibility of a better order. Of course we are de- 
 testable. My uncle was of that other vaster mass who 
 accept everything for the thing it seems to be, hate en- 
 quiry and analysis as a tramp hates washing, dread and 
 resist change, oppose experiment, despise science. The 
 world is our battleground; and all history, all litera- 
 ture 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 Seddon 
 again for five years. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 MARGARET 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 with 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 larger 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 
 Ruler, and who talked about it and me, and so did a 
 very great deal to make a way for me into the com- 
 pany of prominent and amusing people. I dined out 
 quite frequently. The glitter and interest of good Lon- 
 don dinner parties became a common experience. I 
 liked the sort of conversation one got at them extremely, 
 the little glow of duologues burning up into more gen- 
 
 185 
 
186 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 eral discussions, the closing-in of the men after the 
 going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine 
 gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk with 
 some pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had 
 a wide range of houses; Cambridge had linked me to 
 one or two correlated sets of artistic and literary peo- 
 ple, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me 
 the big vague world of " society." I wasn't aggres- 
 sive nor particularly snobbish nor troublesome, some- 
 times 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 question of appetites and 
 excitement, and among other things the excitement of 
 not being found out. 
 
 I 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 realisation 
 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 apprehended 
 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 my- 
 self and with no greater advantages than mine had 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 187 
 
 raised themselves to influential and even decisive posi- 
 tions 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 bad per- 
 haps 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 never 
 yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in 
 the world, the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt 
 with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thing 
 as a friend among womanhood. My vague anticipa- 
 tion of such 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, had nothing to do with that. It 
 seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was 
 
188 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 attractive to certain types of women, I had 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 pur- 
 pose and say in the end, like that kindly first mistress 
 of mine, " I've 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 apologise 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 defini- 
 tion. My political conceptions were perfectly 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 organise and disci- 
 pline, to build up a constructive and controlling State 
 out of my world's confusions. We had, I saw, to suf- 
 fuse 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 
 affair, and particularly 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 habitu- 
 ally turned to that enterprise; it gave shape and di- 
 rection to all my life. The problem that most en- 
 gaged 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 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 189 
 
 child of this confusion, struggling upward through the 
 confusion, to take hold of things? Somewhere be- 
 tween politics and literature my grip must needs be 
 found, but where? Always I seem to have been look- 
 ing for that in those opening years, and disregarding 
 everything else to di c cover it. 
 
 2 
 
 The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret 
 again, were in the sharpest contrast with the narrow 
 industrialism 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 to do. The bulk of their friends were poli- 
 ticians or public officials, they described themselves as 
 publicists a vague yet sufficiently significant term. 
 They lived and worked in a hard little house in Cham- 
 bers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite 
 an astonishing amount of political and social activity. 
 
 Willersley took me there one evening. The place 
 was almost pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassum- 
 ing. The narrow passage-hall, papered with some 
 ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was 
 choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional femi- 
 nine wrap. Motioned rather than announced by a tall 
 Scotch servant woman, the only 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 fireplace 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 promi- 
 
190 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 nence, 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 Blupp, 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 intertwined 
 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 expres- 
 sion of entirely puzzled propitiation. A tall sandy- 
 bearded bishop with the expression 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 
 houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indif- 
 ferent 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 politician; 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 
 recognised 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. Mottisham, 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, 
 vhom I had not seen since my Cambridge days. . . 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 191 
 
 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 Es- 
 meer. 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 
 te London. "We peep at things from Cambridge/' 
 he said. 
 
 " This sort of thing/' I said, " makes London nec- 
 essary. It's the oddest gathering." 
 
 " Every one comes here," said Esmeer. <c Mostly 
 we hate them like poison jealousy and little irrita- 
 tions Altiora can be a horror at times but we have 
 to come." 
 
 " Things are being done ? " 
 
 "Oh! no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the 
 British machinery that doesn't show.... But no- 
 body else could do it. 
 
 " Two people," said Esmeer, " who've planned to be 
 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 Esmeer showed him to me in elaborately con- 
 fidential talk in a corner with a distinguished-looking 
 stranger wearing a ribbon. 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-Hungarian extraction, 
 and I have always fancied something Mongolian in his 
 type. He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes 
 over gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally 
 into portions of different refractive power, and he 
 talking in an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin 
 lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements of the hand. 
 
 People say that thirty years before at Oxford he 
 
192 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 was almost exactly the same eager, clever little man he 
 was when I first met him. He had come up to Balliol 
 bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes cap- 
 turned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities 
 and had made a name for himself as the most formid- 
 able 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 Serv- 
 ice, 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 and sociological ideas. He had a quite as- 
 tounding memory for facts and a mastery of detailed 
 analysis, and the time afforded scope for these gifts. 
 The later eighties were full of politico-social discussion, 
 and he became a prominent name upon the contents 
 list of the Nineteenth Century, the Fortnightly and 
 Contemporary chiefly as a half sympathetic but fre- 
 quently 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 re- 
 mained for the rest of his life if he had not encountered 
 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 wanting in what is the 
 word? 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 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 193 
 
 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 shock- 
 ing bad nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an 
 inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceiv- 
 able 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 pro- 
 test against the waste of hours exacted by the toilet 
 and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy 
 splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And 
 somewhen in the early nineties she met and married 
 Bailey. 
 
 I know very little about her early years. She was 
 the only daughter of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who ap- 
 plied the iodoform process to cotton, and only his sub- 
 sequent 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 promi- 
 nence as one of the more able of the little shoal of 
 young women who were led into politico-philanthropic 
 activities by the influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. 
 Humphry Ward the Marcella crop. She went 
 " slumming " with distinguished vigour, which was quite 
 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 un- 
 usual. 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 house- 
 keeper, butler and cook her mother had left her, and 
 gathering the most interesting dinner parties she could, 
 
194 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 questions 
 and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation Soci- 
 ety, and she was three and thirty and a little at loose 
 ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the 
 Contemporary Review. The lurking woman in her na- 
 ture was fascinated by the ease and precision with 
 which the little man rolled over all sorts of important 
 and authoritative people, she was the first to discover 
 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 exact, at least indolent, with 
 a strong disposition to save energy by sketching even 
 her handwriting showed that while he was inexhaust- 
 ibly 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 consid- 
 erable social experience, good social connections, and 
 considerable social ambition, while he had none of these 
 things. She saw in a flash her opportunity to redeem 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 195 
 
 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 wedding rings, Pro Bono 
 Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She 
 had discovered very early that the last thing influential 
 people will do is to work. Everything in their lives 
 tends to make them dependent upon a supply of con- 
 fidently 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 in- 
 vincible power over detail. She saw that if two peo- 
 ple took the necessary pains to know the facts of gov^ 
 ernment and administration with precision, to gather 
 together knowledge that was dispersed 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 expedients, and 
 she went unhesitatingly upon that. 
 
 Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his 
 post in the Civil Service and abandoned sporadic con- 
 troversies, and they devoted themselves to the elabora- 
 tion and realisation of this centre of public informa- 
 tion she had conceived as their role. They set out to 
 study the methods and organisation 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 satis- 
 fying scale, and arranged their lives almost entirely 
 
196 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 for it. They took that house in Chambers Street and 
 furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that 
 Scotch domestic who is destined to be the guardian and 
 tyrant of their declining years, and they set to work. 
 Their first book, " The Permanent Official," fills three 
 plump volumes, and took them and their two secretaries 
 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 meet- 
 ings of the London School Board, on which he served, 
 he said, for the purposes of study he also became a 
 railway director for the same end. In the late after- 
 noon 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 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 197 
 
 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 
 efficient public careers," said Altiora, " consist in the 
 proper direction of secretaries." 
 
 " If everything goes well I shall have another secre- 
 tary next year," Altiora told me. " 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 true. 
 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 rein- 
 vested usuriously not money, but knowledge of the 
 utmost value in human affairs. They produced 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. . . . 
 
 Their effect upon me was from the outset very con- 
 siderable. 
 
 Both of them found occasion on that first visit of 
 mine to talk to me about my published writings and 
 particularly about my then just published book The 
 New Ruler, which had interested them very much. It 
 
198 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking 
 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 woman Factory In- 
 spector 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 a though 
 it had been a joint function. "And we consider " 
 
 " Yes," I protested, " I 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 
 cardinal idea of their lives, what they were up to, what 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 199 
 
 they stood for. "We want to suggest to you," they 
 said and I found this was a stock opening of theirs 
 "that from the mere necessities of convenience elected 
 bodies must avail themselves more and more of the 
 services of expert officials. We have that very much in 
 mind. The more complicated and technical affairs be- 
 come, the less confidence will the elected official have 
 in himself. We want to suggest that these expert 
 officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a 
 very powerful class in the community. We want to 
 organise that. It may be the power of the future. They 
 will necessarily have to have very much of a common 
 training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid 
 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 specialised version of the idea 
 of a trained and disciplined state that Willersley and I 
 had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things 
 more organised, 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 quite prepared at first to identify their distinctive 
 expressions with phrases of my own, and so we came 
 very readily into an alliance that was to last some 
 years, and break at last very painfully. Altiora mani- 
 festly liked me, I was soon discussing with her the per- 
 plexity I found in placing myself efficiently in the 
 world, the problem of how to take hold of things that 
 occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out 
 careers for my consideration, very much as an architect 
 on his first visit sketches houses, considers require- 
 
200 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ments, and puts before you this example and that of the 
 more yr less similar thing already done. . . . 
 
 * 
 
 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 pro- 
 posals, the " manners " of their work, so to speak, were 
 at times as dreadful as well, War Office barrack 
 architecture. A caricature by its exaggerated state- 
 ments will sometimes serve to point a truth by antago- 
 nising falsity and falsity. I remember talking to a 
 prominent museum official in need of more public funds 
 for the work he had in hand. I mentioned the possi- 
 bility of enlisting Bailey's influence. 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 201 
 
 "Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal 
 Bottle-Imp running us," he said hastily, and would 
 hear of no concerted action for the end he had in view. 
 " I'd rather not have the extension. 
 
 " You see/' he went on to 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 preju- 
 dice speaking. . . . 
 
 I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came 
 to realise that our philosophies differed profoundly. 
 That isn't a very curable difference, once people have 
 grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid of finesse. 
 Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, con- 
 centrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some 
 inner force or some entirely assimilated influence in 
 my training, always to round off and 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 as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's 
 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 train- 
 
202 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ing, 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 word 
 " 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 generalisations, 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 
 frame or amend bills in grave and intimate exchange 
 with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvass- 
 ing approaching resignations and possible 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 and mysterious beyond the window, running 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 203 
 
 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 traffic, 
 the coming and going of mysterious myriads, you 
 heard the rumble of traffic 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 dazzling windows of tihe 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 Staffordshire uncle out for a spree, you saw shy 
 youths conversing with prostitutes, you passed young 
 lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social 
 suitability of the " types " they might blend or create, 
 you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom 
 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 realised 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 reorganisations. 
 
204 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 * 
 
 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 re- 
 cently. 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 intel- 
 lectual person, you know, but quiet, and great force 
 of character. Came up to London on her own and 
 came to us someone had told her we were the sort of 
 people to advise her to ask what to do. I'm sure 
 she'll interest you. . . ." 
 
 "What 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 anyone. 
 
 " 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 
 member of Parliament and see he does his work. . . . 
 Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 205 
 
 do anything by herself quite 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. " Here 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 
 and violet, the last trace of mourning for her mother, 
 and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender 
 body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, and I 
 was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met 
 her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the slight 
 obliquity of the lip and the little kink in her brow 
 were extraordinarily familiar to me. But she had 
 either been prepared by Altiora or she remembered my 
 name. " We met," she said, " while my step-father 
 was alive at Misterton. 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 
 
206 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Altiorp,, following her invariable custom, 
 called me by name imperatively out of our duologme. 
 
 " 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 
 recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in 
 any way join on to my impression of Margaret. , 
 
 In the drawing-room of the matting floor I rejoined 
 her, with Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the in- 
 terval 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 
 Burslem ? " 
 
 She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to 
 her former confidences. " I was very discontented 
 then," she said and paused. " I've 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." 
 

 MARGARET IN LONDON 207 
 
 She knitted her brows over her words and smiled 
 appealingly at the end as if for consideration for 
 her inadequate expression, appealingly and almost 
 humorously. 
 
 I looked understandingly at her. " We have all/' 
 I agreed, "to come to London." 
 
 " One sees so much distress/' she added, as 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 
 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 apologised, " but one does not 
 want to get entangled 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 glance of envious admiration across the room. 
 
 " She has no doubts, anyhow," I remarked. 
 
 " She had/' said Margaret with the pride of one who 
 has received great confidences. 
 
 "You've met before?" said Altiora, a day or so 
 later. 
 
208 THE NEW MACHIAVELL1 
 
 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 Baileyism. 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 I'm not quite sure that she 
 did not even mark off the day upon which the engage- 
 ment was to be declared. If she did, I disappointed 
 her. We didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the 
 broadest hints and the glaring obviousness of every- 
 thing, that summer. 
 
 Every summer the Baileys went out of London to 
 some house they hired or borrowed, leaving their secre- 
 taries toiling 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 explained themselves to) any 
 social " types " 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 pleas- 
 ant farmhouse in level country near Pangbourne, 
 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; 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 209 
 
 and when I got there I found Margeret sitting in a 
 hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of people, I gathered, 
 were coming and going in the neighbourhood, the Fonts 
 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 Mar- 
 garet and myself. 
 
 Altiora was efficient rather 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, 
 not understanding that detestable game is the worst 
 stimulant for lovers in the world. And Margaret 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 emphasise 
 the high note with which she dismissed the efficiency 
 of the Charity Organisation 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 
 
210 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 was 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- 
 mer, and what urged me forward at last to marry her. 
 It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions than 
 to remember the moods and suggestions that produced 
 them. 
 
 Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty 
 simple affair to Altiora; it was something that hap- 
 pened to the adolescent and unmarried when you 
 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 organised 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 nor woman does 
 there seem to be any fixed standard, so much do the 
 accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases 
 affect 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 
 

 MARGARET IN LONDON 211 
 
 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 skies and every 
 waking hour or be almost completely banished from a 
 life. It may be everything on Monday and less than 
 nothing on Saturday. And we make our laws and rules 
 as though in these matters all men and women were 
 commensurable one with another, with an equal stead- 
 fast 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 world- 
 liness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at 
 her, she regarded sexual passion as being hardly more 
 legitimate in a civilised 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 come 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 for- 
 getful 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 po- 
 
212 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 litical interests, and there was I, talented, ambitious 
 and full of political and social passion, in need of just 
 the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could 
 provide. We were both unmarried white sheets of un- 
 inscribed paper. Was there ever a simpler situation? 
 What more could we possibly want? 
 
 She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness 
 that did not settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to 
 her, I suspect, to reflect upon her judgment and good 
 intentions. 
 
 7 
 
 I didn't see 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 
 superficial 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 Altiora did. Work, I agreed, was important; 
 career and success; but deep unanalysable 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 flittingly and uninvited it came like a moth 
 from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew in 
 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 someone talking ever and again in a 
 room while one tries to write. 
 
 There were times when I could have wished the 
 porld a world all of men, so greatly did this unassimi- 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 213 
 
 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 disagreeable for others to read, but I cannot leave 
 them out of m,y 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 beget. 
 You cannot have a world of Baileys; it would end in 
 one orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in 
 Desire, lives by Desire. 
 
 
 "Love 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 
 meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when civilisa- 
 
214 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 tion permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing 
 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 Hather- 
 leigh and Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no 
 lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality 
 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 won- 
 derful 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. Besides these five 
 " affairs," 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 was 
 surely something not altogether ugly in it something 
 that has vanished, some fine thing mortally ailing. 
 
 One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision 
 deep down in a pit, as if it had happened in another 
 state of existence to someone else. And yet it is the 
 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 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 215 
 
 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 bril- 
 liantly 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. 
 
 I was moved to crave her pardon and come away. 
 
 " Bin ich eine hubsche ? " she asked a little anxiously, 
 laying a detaining hand upon me, and evidently not 
 understanding a word of what I was striving to say. 
 
216 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 8 
 
 I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the 
 phases by which I passed from my first admiration of 
 Margaret's earnestness and unconscious daintiness to 
 an intimate acquaintance. 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 subsequent developments of relation- 
 ship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation and 
 comprehension between husband and wife. Dipping 
 into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one 
 brings out this memory or that, with no intimation 
 of how they came in time or what led to them and 
 joined them together. And they are all mixed up 
 with subsequent 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 
 idealising a person and seeing and criticising that 
 person quite coldly and clearly, and we slip un- 
 consciously from level to level and produce all sorts of 
 inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about 
 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 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 217 
 
 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 word 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 ceilings 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 de- 
 lightful. 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 some- 
 thing. . . . 
 
 She stood in my mind for goodness and for things 
 from which it seemed to me my hold was slip- 
 ping. 
 
 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 
 human service, upon which I had embarked. 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, 
 coming 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 
 
218 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 quality of my passions 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 no way 
 out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I ought 
 to have thought ! " ... 
 
 " How did I get to it ? "... I would ransack the 
 phases of my development from the first shy unveil- 
 ing of a hidden wonder to the last extremity as a man 
 will go through muddled account books to find some 
 disorganising error. . . . 
 
 I was also involved at that time I find it hard to 
 place these things in the exact order of their dates 
 because they were so disconnected with the regular 
 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 vulgarised our relationship by intolerable 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 219 
 
 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 per- 
 haps 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 assigna- 
 tion, was what we had made out of the suggestion of 
 pagan beauty; this was the reality of our vision of 
 nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst 
 incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the won- 
 der 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 op- 
 pressed 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. 
 I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not under- 
 stood the forces in this struggle nor its Mature, and as 
 I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had 
 gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and con- 
 fused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and 
 twisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by failures 
 that were perhaps destroying any chance of profit in 
 my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry alternated 
 with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of 
 dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the 
 Baileys thought I was going on. There were times 
 when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely. 
 
220 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 some- 
 thing that might smother all my uses in the world. 
 Down there among those incommunicable difficulties, I 
 was puzzled and blundering. I was losing my hold 
 upon things; the chaotic and adventurous 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! . . . 
 
 Margaret 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 scars in- 
 flamed. . . . 
 
 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, poor 
 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 men- 
 tal vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh pre- 
 cisions 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 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 221 
 
 response, when possible moulding and directing, are 
 times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes, wor- 
 ship 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 Mar- 
 garet. 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 
 echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite 
 passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of 
 doubt vanished. It has always been a feature of our 
 relationship that Margaret absent means more to me 
 than Margaret present; her memory distils from its 
 dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and quali- 
 fications of her vanished into some dark corner of my 
 mind. She was the lady 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-tremble. 
 She was staying with the Rockleys at Woking, for 
 Shena Rockley 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 
 
222 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 flower. And there was a big lacquer 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 realised that Altiora's hint of 
 a disappointment leading to positive illness was some- 
 thing 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. 
 
 " 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 idealise 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- 
 
MARGARET IN LONDON 223 
 
 mine what, and some obscure sub-office in my mind 
 concerned 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 
 expression of blissful disregard for any meaning I was 
 seeking to convey. 
 
 " You see," I said, " I'm a bad man." 
 
 She sounded a note of valiant incredulity. 
 
 Everything seemed to be slipping 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 thought that you could not pos- 
 sibly understand certain things in my life. Men are 
 not pure as women are. I have had love affairs. I 
 mean I have had affairs. Passion desire. You see, I 
 have had a mistress, I have been entangled " 
 
 She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm 
 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. 
 
224 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes. 
 
 " 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 eyelids. " Of 
 course I know," and nothing could have convinced me 
 more completely that she did not know. 
 
 " All men " she generalised. " A woman does 
 
 not understand these temptations." 
 
 I was astonished beyond measure at her way of tak- 
 ing 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 slightest degree." 
 
 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 know 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 Misterton six years and more 
 ago." 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 MARGARET IN VENICE 
 
 THERE comes into my mind a confused 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 
 Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. 
 Pancras 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. We were to pay back in public 
 service whatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old 
 Seddon's economic advantage had won for him from 
 the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the 
 Boer War was so recent that that blessed word " ef- 
 ficiency " echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. 
 Lord Roseberry 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 
 
 225 
 
226 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 share to keep " efficient " going. Altiora's highest 
 praise was " 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 peo- 
 ple who came to her dinners and afternoons until the 
 world was highly charged with explanation and expecta- 
 tion, 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 Novem- 
 ber 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. 
 
 Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves 
 talking in a gondola on our way to Torcella. Far 
 away behind us the smoke of Murano forms a black 
 stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth wa- 
 ter, 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 water, bump back in the rowlocks, splash 
 sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies 
 back on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland 
 parasol, and I sit up beside her. 
 
 "You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note 
 of perfect acquiescence 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 easy to slip into indolent habits and to be dis- 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 227 
 
 traded 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 ourselves it's it's the constant small opportunity 
 of agreeable 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 got to take our- 
 selves seriously." 
 
 She endorses my words with her eyes. 
 
 "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 want 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 
 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 was not a dozen people all told, no 
 
228 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 chande- 
 liers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accept- 
 ing beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted 
 that all was well with ourselves and the world. It was 
 ten days or a fortnight before I became fretful and 
 anxious for action; a long tranquillity for such a tem- 
 perament 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 "you!" 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 innuendo 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 
 photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series 
 delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that 
 great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin 
 praised. 
 
 But since I am not a man to look at pictures and 
 architectural effects day after day, I did watch Mar- 
 garet very closely and store a thousand memories of 
 her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a lit- 
 tle forward, her sweet face upraised to some discovered 
 familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate en- 
 thusiasm. I can hear again the soft cadences of her 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 229 
 
 voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had 
 no gift of expressing the shapeless satisfaction these 
 things gave her. 
 
 Margaret, 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 realise, 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 organisation of beauti- 
 ful things than she did in beauty itself; she found 
 much 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 compari- 
 son of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New 
 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- 
 sation 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 
 
230 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 should get not simply tumblers and wineglasses but 
 bedroom waterbottles, fruit- and sweet-dishes, water- 
 jugs, and in the end we made quite a business-like 
 afternoon of it. 
 
 I was beginning now to long quite definitely for 
 events. Energy was accumulating in me, and worrying 
 me for an outlet. I found the Times and the Daily 
 Telegraph and the other papers 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 tranquil appreciations more 
 and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and 
 delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to 
 
MARGARET IN VENICE 231 
 
 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 Margaret 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, but I'm restless." 
 
 " Restless ! " she said with a faint surprise in her 
 voice. 
 
 " Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of 
 feeling I've never had it before as though I was 
 getting fat." 
 
 "My dear!" she cried. 
 
 " I want to do things ; ride horses, climb mountains, 
 take the devil out of myself." 
 
 She watched me thoughtfully. 
 
 " Couldn't we do something ? " she said. 
 
 " 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 
 3VIalamocco. . . . 
 
 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 silence. " Piu lento/' said Margaret to the 
 
232 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 gondolier, and released my accumulated resolu- 
 tion. 
 
 " 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 sympathised, 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 
 end. But the world is calling you, dear. ... I ought 
 not to have forgotten it. I thought you were resting 
 and thinking. But if you are rested. Would you 
 like us to start to-morrow ? " 
 
 She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on 
 the 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 and 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 
 Review, the papers that afterwards became my fourth 
 book, " New Aspects of Liberalism." 
 
 I still remember as delightful most of the circum- 
 stances of getting into 79, Radnor Square. The thin 
 flavour of indecision about Margaret disappeared alto- 
 gether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of 
 what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did 
 
 233 
 
234 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 wrong to have things 
 pretty ? " 
 
 " I want them so." 
 
 " Altiora has things hard." 
 
 " Altiora/' I answered, " takes a pride in standing 
 ugly and uncomfortable things. But 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 January mire or 
 fog from Vincent Square to the door of 79> and reach 
 it at last with a quite childish appreciation of the fact 
 that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass 
 furnishings belonged to my home; I would use my latch- 
 key and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious 
 hall with a partially opened packing-case, fatigued 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, ex- 
 cept in the most transitory way, in any house that was 
 nearly so delightful as mine promised to be. Every- 
 thing was fresh and bright, and softly and harmoni- 
 ously toned. Downstairs we had a green dining-room 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 235 
 
 with gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour- 
 prints; above was a large drawing-room that could be 
 made still larger by throwing open folding doors, and 
 it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for the 
 most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Shera- 
 ton 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 bed- 
 room, 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, bis- 
 cuits 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 official-looking leather. 
 
 I can remember sitting down at that desk and look- 
 ing round me and feeling with a queer effect of sur- 
 prise that after all even a place in the Cabinet, though 
 infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same large 
 world with these fine and quietly expensive things. 
 
 On the same floor Margaret had a " den," a very 
 neat and pretty den with good colour-prints of Botti- 
 cellis and Carpaccios, and there was a third apartment 
 for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them 
 arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent 
 files. And Margaret would come flitting into the room 
 to me, or appear noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully 
 
236 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 drooping form, in the wide open doorway. " Is every* 
 thing right, dear ? " she would ask. 
 
 " Come in," I would say, " I'm sorting out papers." 
 
 She would come to the hearthrug. 
 
 " I mustn't disturb you/' she would remark. 
 
 "I'm not busy yet." 
 
 " Things are getting into order. Then we must 
 make out a time-table as the Baileys do, and begin! " 
 
 Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a num- 
 ber of serious young wives known to Altiora called and 
 were shown over the house, and discussed its arrange- 
 ments with Margaret. They were all tremendously 
 keen on efficient arrangements. 
 
 " A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest dis- 
 approval, " still " 
 
 It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. 
 
 From the day of our return we found other peo- 
 ple's houses open to us and eager for us. We went 
 out of London for week-ends and dined out, and began 
 discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospi- 
 talities. 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 fre- 
 quented. 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 re- 
 member, 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- 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 237 
 
 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 
 younger 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 nat- 
 urally 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 Post- 
 master-General, rich and very important in Rockshire, 
 and his younger brother Edward, who has specialised 
 in history and become one of those unimaginative men 
 of letters who are the glory of latter-day England. 
 Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington, 
 where his cousins the Solomons and the Hartsteins 
 lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able, in- 
 dustrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a lit- 
 tle in revolt against the racial tradition of feminine 
 servitude and. inclined to the suffragette point of view, 
 and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an er- 
 ratic disposition well under the control of the able 
 little cousin he had married. I had known all these 
 men, but now (with Altiora floating angelically in ben- 
 ediction) they 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 draw- 
 ing 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 finding its satisfactions in political achievements 
 and distinctions. The young wives were as keen about 
 
238 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and 
 I whatever elements in me didn't march with the at- 
 titudes and habits of this set were very much in the 
 background during that time. 
 
 We would give little dinners and have evening gath- 
 erings 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 lemon- 
 ade available. No men waited, but very expert par- 
 lourmaids. Our meat was usually Welsh mutton I 
 don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been 
 the last refuge of the severer virtues. And we 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 pro- 
 moted 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 man- 
 aged 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 ear- 
 nestness I have always seemed to myself to be most 
 remote from reality. 
 
 2 
 
 I look back now across the detaching intervention 
 of sixteen crowded years, critically and I fancy almost 
 impartially, to those beginnings of my married life. 
 I try to recall something near to their proper order 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 239 
 
 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 sus- 
 tained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level bar- 
 riers, evade violent pressures. I have come these 
 latter years of my life to believe that it is possible for 
 a man and woman to be absolutely real with one an- 
 other, to stand naked souled to each other, unashamed 
 and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying love 
 between them. It is possible to love and be loved un- 
 troubling, 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 mar- 
 riage must adjust itself on other terms. Most coupled 
 people never really look at one another. They look a 
 little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the 
 first days of love-making hides from the other, is afraid 
 of disappointing, afraid of offending, afraid of dis- 
 coveries in either sense. They build not solidly upon 
 the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and queer 
 provisional 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 flash 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. 
 
240 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came 
 to marry her. Perhaps already unintentionally I have 
 indicated the quality of the injustice our marriage did 
 us both. There 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. 
 
 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- 
 nating time. When the wife was her husband's sub- 
 ordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically for sim- 
 ple ends, when marriage was a purely domestic rela- 
 tionship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life 
 almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and 
 temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively 
 little. But now the wife, and particularly the loving 
 childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a relentless de- 
 mand for a complete association, and the husband 
 exacts unthought of delicacies of understanding and 
 co-operation. These are stupendous demands, Peo- 
 ple 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 tough- 
 minded, to use the phrase of William James, primary 
 and intuitive and illogical; she was tender-minded, log- 
 ical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to pledge 
 and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to 
 ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagi- 
 nation 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 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 241 
 
 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 reserva- 
 tions, in circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly ap- 
 preciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows 
 that Tintoretto in the National Gallery, the Origin of 
 the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of tempera- 
 mental quality. In spite of my early training I have 
 come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; 
 to Margaret it has always been " needlessly offensive." 
 In that you have our fundamental breach. She had 
 a habit, by no means rare, of damning what she did not 
 like or find sympathetic 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 ignore the 
 rest. And also I had far more initiative than had she. 
 This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superior- 
 ities and inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences 
 between two people linked in a relationship that con- 
 stantly 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 too much to say that in that regard 
 we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one 
 another during the first six years of our life together. 
 It goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to real- 
 ise the ideal of my marriage I ceased even to attempt 
 to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own 
 perceptions and interpretations. J tried to fit myself 
 
242 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 to her thinner and finer determinations. There are 
 people who will say with a note of approval that I was 
 learning to conquer myself. I record that much with- 
 out 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. . . . 
 
 3 
 
 The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, 
 of walking about it from room to room and from floor 
 to floor, or 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 candida- 
 ture for the Kinghamstead Division, tiiat shapeless 
 chunk of agricultural midland between the Great West- 
 ern 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 im- 
 plicit in the minds of all our circle. The precise place 
 I had to fill and the precise functions I had to dis- 
 charge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt 
 sure, would become plain as things developed. 
 
 A few brief months of vague activities of " nurs- 
 ing" gave place to the excitements of the contest that 
 followed the return of Mr. Campbell-Bannerman to 
 power in 1906. So far as the Kinghamstead Division 
 was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 243 
 
 went about the constituency making three speeches that 
 were soon threadbare, and an odd little collection of 
 people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheap photog- 
 rapher, a democratic parson, a number of dissenting 
 ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, 
 the widow of an old Chartist who had grown 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 there were empty shops we 
 leased temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss 
 and a coming and going 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 peo- 
 ple 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 quite 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 
 spirit. He was always writing me notes, apologising 
 for excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing 
 out the undesirability of some course taken by mine. 
 
244 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 possibil- 
 ities 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." Sometimes that would get a soli- 
 tary " 'Ear ! 'ear ! " Then having created, as I imag- 
 ined, 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; dis- 
 cussed 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 thin- 
 ner sounded my voice in these non-resonating gather- 
 ings. Even the platform supporters grew restive un- 
 consciously, and stirred and coughed. They did not 
 recognise themselves as mankind. Building an empire, 
 preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had 
 no appeal for them. They were mostly everyday, toil- 
 ing people, full of small personal solicitudes, and they 
 came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxa- 
 tion. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think 
 politics was a great constructive process, they thought 
 it was a kind of dog-fight. They wanted fun ; they 
 wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted also a 
 chance to say " 'Ear, 'ear ! " in an intelligent and hon- 
 ourable manner and claj) their hands and drum with 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 245 
 
 their feet. The great constructive process in history 
 gives so little scope for clapping and drumming 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 adapt 
 myself to them. I cut down my review of our im- 
 perial outlook and destinies more and more, and devel- 
 oped a series of hits and anecdotes and what shall 
 I call them? " crudifications " of the issue. My help- 
 ers congratulated me on the rapid improvement of my 
 platform style. I ceased to speak of the late Prime 
 Minister with the respect 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 qual- 
 ify my statement that Protection would make food 
 dearer for the agricultural labourer. I began to speak 
 of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence 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 leader, 
 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 
 my reward in brighter meetings and readier and readier 
 applause. 
 
 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 un- 
 expectedly distasteful. " When one gets there," I said, 
 "then it is one begins." 
 
 But I would lie awake at nights with that sore 
 
246 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 in- 
 terests 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 ex- 
 pansion that made Bromstead the place it is. Several 
 of it? overgrown villages have developed strings of 
 factories and sidings along the railway lines, and there 
 is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be 
 no place at which one could take hold of more than 
 this or that element of the population. Now we met 
 in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic Hall or Drill 
 Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speak- 
 ing 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 limita- 
 tions of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silli- 
 ness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers 
 made us declare that if we were elected we would live 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 247 
 
 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 indifference in between my meetings im- 
 pressed me more and more, i realised 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 Parliament on the side of Lib- 
 eralism 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 quiet confidence, 
 while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards 
 the alienation of my sympathies. I felt she had no 
 business to be so sure of me. I had moments of vivid 
 resentment at being thus marched towards Parliament. 
 
 I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces 
 of character in her. Her way of taking life diverged 
 from me mere and more. She sounded amazing, inde- 
 pendent notes. She bought some particularly costly 
 furs for the campaign that roused enthusiasm when- 
 ever she appeared. She also made me a birthday pres- 
 ent 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 
 
248 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 polit- 
 ical memoirs, and she had been particularly impressed 
 by the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't think it oc- 
 curred 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 
 parallel methods. I was to be Gladstonised. Gladstone 
 it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with a mix- 
 ture if my memory serves me right of egg beaten 
 up 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 speak- 
 ing. 
 
 But here I was firm. "No," I said, very decisively, 
 "simply I won't stand that. It's a matter of con- 
 science. I shouldn't feel democratic. I'll take my 
 chance of the common water in the carafe on the chair- 
 man's table/' 
 
 " I do wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed. . . , 
 
 It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 249 
 
 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 efficient 
 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. . . . 
 
 * 
 
 And into all these things with the manner of a trifling 
 and casual incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers. 
 My first impressions of her were of a rather ugly and 
 ungainly, extraordinarily interesting schoolgirl with a 
 beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who 
 said and did amusing and surprising things. When 
 first I saw her she was riding a very old bicycle down- 
 hill with her feet on the fork of the frame it seemed 
 to me to the public danger, but afterwards I came to 
 understand the quality of her nerve better and on 
 the third occasion she was for her own private satis- 
 faction 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 para- 
 graph 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 
 
350 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 $n the low wall under the olive trees with our little 
 dbild 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 rebeginning 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 or- 
 ganiser for whom by way of repayment I got those 
 magic letters, that knighthood of the underlings, " J. 
 P." was in the car with us and explained her to us. 
 " One of the best workers you have," he said. . . . 
 
 And tlhen after a toilsome troubled morning we came 3 
 rather cross from the strain of sustained amiability, 
 to Sir Graham Rivers' house. It seemed all softness 
 and quiet I recall dead white panelling and oval mir- 
 rors horizontally set and a marble fireplace between 
 white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very 
 grave 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, Miss Gamer, 
 to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady 
 of thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel 
 in every phrase and gesture. And there was a very 
 pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on ex- 
 cellent terms with every one. It was manifest that he 
 was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 251 
 
 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 eye- 
 brows, 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 eye between appeal and defiance. They 
 declared she had read my books, which I thought at 
 the time was exaggeration, their dry political quality 
 was so distinctly not what one was accustomed to re- 
 gard as schoolgirl reading. Miss Gamer protested to 
 protect her, " When once in a blue moon Isabel is well- 
 behaved. . . .!" 
 
 Except for these attacks I do not remember much 
 of the conversation at table; it was, I know, discursive 
 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 un- 
 conscious 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 I'm not sure you'll come in so mightily as you 
 think, but what you'll do when you do come in passes 
 my comprehension." 
 
252 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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 doc- 
 tor. 
 
 There came that kind of pause that happens when 
 a subject is broached too big and difficult for the gath- 
 ering. 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 arm-chair. 
 
 "We'll do things," said Isabel. 
 
 The doctor's eye li with the joy of the fisherman 
 who strikes his fish at last. " What will you do ? " he 
 asked her. 
 
 " Every one knows we're a mixed lot," said Isabel. 
 
 "Poor old chaps like me!" 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. I'm a Remington-ite ! " 
 
 " But the programme," said the doctor, " the 
 programme " 
 
 "In front of Mr. Remington!" 
 
 " Scandal always comes home at last," said the doc- 
 tor. " Let him hear the worst." 
 
 " I'd 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 con- 
 structing a civilised state out of this muddle." 
 
 " This muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 253 
 
 of the eye to the beautiful long room and the ordered 
 garden outside the bright clean windows. 
 
 "Well, that muddle, if you like! There's a slum 
 within a mile of us already. The dust and blacks get 
 worse and worse, Sissie ? " 
 
 " They do," agreed Miss Gamer. 
 
 " Mr. Remington stands for construction, order, edu- 
 cation, discipline." 
 
 " And you ? " said the doctor. 
 
 " I'm a good Remington-ite." 
 
 " Discipline ! " said the doctor. 
 
 " 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 unexpected 
 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, un- 
 derbred, 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 hope- 
 lessly 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 
 
254 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 a 
 lizard's tongue into the discussion. I remember chiefly 
 that a chance illustration betrayed that she had read 
 Bishop Burnet. . . . 
 
 After that 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 
 en route upon the intellectual temperament of the 
 Lurky 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 en- 
 counter. 
 
 And after that memory she seems to be flickering 
 about always in the election, an inextinguishable flame; 
 now she flew by on her bicycle, now she dashed into 
 committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps 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 inter- 
 ested me immensely and before the polling day she 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 255 
 
 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 and quality of thoughts 
 and impressions through that intervening haze, one 
 forgets them altogether. I don't remember now that 
 I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the 
 possibility 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 
 womanhood. They were not, as I have laboured to ex- 
 plain, 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 discon- 
 certingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, because 
 of the vast reservations that hid them from me, want- 
 ing, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. 
 My idealisation 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 idealisation 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, 
 
256 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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, thougu 
 she has told me since how full she was of protesting 
 curiosities and restrained emotions. She spoke, as 
 indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and 
 vividly; schoolgirl slang mingled with words that 
 marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly 
 with the free directness of some graceful young animal. 
 She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister 
 might 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 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 waiting for 
 the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my 
 memory, and then everyone 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 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 257 
 
 hundred and seventy-six ! " said Margaret. " They 
 didn't expect three hundred." 
 
 " Nine hundred and seventy-six," said a little short 
 man 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 was 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 someone 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 stick- 
 ing 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, 
 which was more than half filled with swaying people. 
 
258 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, 
 tempered by a little booing. Down in one corner of 
 the square a fight was going on for a flag, a fight that 
 even the prospect of a speech could not instantly check. 
 "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!" and then a brief 
 " boo-oo-oo " that was drowned in a cascade of shouts 
 and cheers. The conflict round the flag culminated in 
 the smashing of a pane of glass in the chemist's window 
 and instantly sank to peace. 
 
 " Gentlemen voters of the Kinghamstead Division," 
 I began. 
 
 " Votes for Women ! " yelled a voice, amidst 
 laughter 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 
 civilisation." 
 
 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 
 beginning of much. New ideas are abroad " 
 
 " Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the 
 square swept a wildfire of hooting and bawling. 
 
 It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my 
 hold on a speech. I glanced sideways and saw the 
 Mayor of Kinghamstead speaking behind his hand to 
 Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye. 
 
 "What do they want?" I asked. 
 
 "Eh?" 
 
 "What do they want?" 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 259 
 
 " 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've 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. Cer- 
 tainly 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 
 
 Kinghamstead 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 
 had got big maps of England cut up into squares to 
 represent constituencies and were busy sticking gummed 
 blue labels over the conquered red of Unionism that 
 had hitherto submerged the country. And there were 
 also orange labels, if I remember rightly, to represent 
 
260 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 tumultuous 
 evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was 
 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 lost 
 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 don't 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 harsh 
 confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every 
 now and then hoarse voices would shout for someone 
 to speak. Our little set was much in evidence. Both 
 the Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. 
 We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement and 
 the late hour, amidst much enthusiasm. 
 
 " Now we can do things ! " I said amidst a rapture 
 of applause. Men I did not know from Adam held up 
 glasses and nodded to me in solemn fuddled approval 
 as I came down past them into the crowd again. 
 
 Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose 
 more or less than two hundred seats. 
 
 " I wonder j ust 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 were going to 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 261 
 
 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 a 
 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. 
 Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and 
 appointments; one breathed distracting and irritating 
 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 impression and what a 
 bad one. "A man shouldn't speak more than twice 
 in his first session, and not at first on too contentious 
 a topic," said Sir Edward. " No." 
 
 " Very much depends on manner. The House hates 
 a lecturer. There's a sort of airy earnestness " 
 
 He waved his cigar 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." 
 
262 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the 
 House had come to like an originally unpopular Irish- 
 man named Biggar. . , . 
 
 The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar 
 moods. I began to feel 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 thought there must 
 have been a funeral. Familiar faces that one had 
 grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, 
 under liberal-minded wide brims, and above artistic 
 ties 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 
 Parliamentary style. 
 
 There was much play with the hats all through; a 
 tremendous competition to get in first and put hats on 
 'coveted seats. A memory hangs about me of the 
 House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation 
 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 the front 
 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 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 263 
 
 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- 
 liour 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 needed 
 of the opening speeches next day from the Times. 
 
 I made my way out and was presently walking 
 rather aimlessly through the outer lobby. 
 
 I caught myself regarding 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 lights, the square shoulders, the silk 
 hat, already worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; 
 I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with 
 a weak approval. " A member! " I felt the little clus- 
 ter of people that were scattered about the lobby mus 
 be saying. 
 
 " Good God ! " I said in hot reaction, " what am I 
 doing here? " 
 
 It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in 
 
264 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 recall the re- 
 bound of my mind. Whatever happened in this Par- 
 liament, I at least would attempt something. " By 
 God ! " I said, " I won't be overwhelmed. I am here 
 to do something, and do something I will ! " 
 
 But 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 remember, west- 
 ward, and presently came to the Grosvenar Embank- 
 ment and followed it, watching the glittering black rush 
 of the river and the dark, dimly lit barges round which 
 the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched 
 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. Mysterious black figures 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 
 
HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER 265 
 
 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 un- 
 warned 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 Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two 
 outcasts huddled together and slumbering. 
 
 " These things come, these things go," a whispering 
 voice urged upon me, " 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 Hos- 
 pital. 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 position and my brief per- 
 plexity 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 
 prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous 
 blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, 
 
 
266 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 POLITICS 
 
CHAPTER THE FIRST 
 
 THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN 
 
 I HAVE been planning and replanning, writing and re- 
 writing, 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 impossibility of His- 
 tory. For all I have had to tell is the story of one 
 man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon 
 his life; and I find it too subtle and involved and in- 
 tricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to 
 convey even the main forms and forces in that devel- 
 opment. It is like looking through moving media of 
 changing hue and variable refraction at something 
 vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations 
 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. . . . For 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 
 on the 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 
 
270 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 visi- 
 bly 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 
 the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical ob- 
 server scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect 
 of the fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible 
 self. This " sub-careerist " element noted little things 
 that affected the career, made me suspicious of the 
 rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-^^xl-so, whom, 
 as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least 
 sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 271 
 
 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 by 
 the realisation of how little that frontage represented 
 me, and just how little such frontages do represent the 
 complexities of the intelligent contemporary. Behind 
 it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether, 
 was a far more essential reality, a self less personal, 
 less individualised, 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 
 generalised self-behind-the-frontage that is making 
 modern life so much more subtle and intricate to ren- 
 der, and so much more hopeful in its relations to the 
 perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and 
 spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about 
 me, from 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 of phases, its crises and happy accidents and 
 irrevocable 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 realisations by some acci- 
 
272 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 litera- 
 ture may play in the development of mankind. 
 
 2 
 
 It is curious to recall how Britten helped 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 through 
 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. 
 
 I had come upon him one day while lunching with 
 Somers and Sutton at the Playwrights' Club, and had 
 asked him to dinner on the spur of the moment. He 
 was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced ventrilo- 
 quist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as 
 untidy, and at first a little inclined to make compari- 
 sons with my sleek successfulness. But that disposi- 
 tion presently evaporated, and his talk was good and 
 fresh and provocative. And something that had long 
 been straining at its checks in my mind flapped 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 slight and ineffectual struggle at 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 273 
 
 the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's 
 overpowering tendency to a rally and the establishment 
 of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a coup-de- 
 main. 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. 
 Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite 
 manner. He never raised a discussion; nobody ever 
 raised a discussion. He would ask what we thought of 
 Evesham's question that afternoon, and Edward would 
 say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, 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 
 
274 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. J 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 igno- 
 rance 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 re- 
 turned from her rest-and-sun-cure in Italy. That led 
 to a rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, 
 and Willie told us how he had profited by the no- 
 breakfast system. It had increased his power of work 
 enormously. He could get through ten hours a day 
 now without inconvenience. 
 
 " What do you do ? " said Esmeer 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 ! " 
 
 We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor 
 Haig's system of dietary, and whether the exclusion or 
 inclusion of fish and chicken were most conducive to 
 high 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 Britten, repeating his challenge a 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 275 
 
 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." 
 
 14 How? " 
 
 " Beneficiont Legislation/' said Lewis. 
 
 " Beneficient in what direction ? " insisted Britten. 
 " 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 ? " 
 
 " I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, 
 and waited. 
 
 " Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neat- 
 ness, and turned to ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about 
 her little boy's French. 
 
 For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but 
 the natural mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been 
 stirred, and she was presently echoing his demand in 
 lisping, quasi-confidential undertones. " What are we 
 Liberals doing ? " Then Esmeer fell in with the revo- 
 lutionaries. 
 
 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 discovering oneself together 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 Alti- 
 ora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico. Bunting Harblow 
 had his under-secretaryship, and Lewis was on the 
 verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to 
 
276 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 mat- 
 ter of fact nowadays every one knows that the 
 monster that brought us into power has, among other 
 deficiencies, no head. We've got to give it one if 
 possible with brains and a will. That lies in the 
 future. For the 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 Coun- 
 try was sacred to his system of pretences. 
 
 Britten wasn t subdued by his first 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 vari- 
 ous cousins of Lewis who were unknown to the rest 
 of us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sym- 
 pathetic discussion of the Arts and Crafts exhibition. 
 But Britten and Esmeer were persistent. Mrs. Milling- 
 ham 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 prevalent vacuity 
 of political intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. 
 J* is only now I perceive just how perplexing I must 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 277 
 
 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 hsuband as the wives trooped out. 
 And afterwards when we went upstairs I had an inde- 
 finable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising 
 Britten's share in our talk in an altogether unfavour- 
 able spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him ag- 
 gressive and impertinent, and Margaret with a quiet 
 firmness that brooked no resistance, took him at once 
 into a corner and showed him Italian photographs by 
 Coburn. We dispersed early. 
 
 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? 
 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. Th^ir ideal is anaemia. You and I, we had at 
 
278 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 unsuc- 
 cessful, and a girl he had been very fond of had been 
 attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very hor- 
 rible manner. These things had wounded and tortured 
 him, but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed 
 to me, made a kind of crippled and ugly demigod of 
 him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than 
 I had any right to expect. At first I had been rather 
 struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction 
 all the stronger. There was about him something, a 
 kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of 
 life, that stirred me profoundly as he showed it. My 
 set of people had irritated him and disappointed him. 
 1 discovered at his touch how they irritated him. 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 de- 
 nunciations of our self-satisfied New Liberalism and 
 Progressivism. 
 
 " It has the same relation to progress the reality 
 of progress 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 equiv- 
 alent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for embroid- 
 ery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the 
 Parlour. The real progress, Remington, is a graver 
 thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing alto- 
 gether. Look ! that " and he pointed to where under 
 a hoarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy prosti- 
 tute stood lurking "was in Babylon and Nineveh. 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 279 
 
 Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of 
 the sort after this Parliament! They're going to van- 
 ish at a few top notes from Altiora Bailey! Reming- 
 ton! it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-be- 
 lieve, make-believe! Your people there haven't got 
 hold of things, aren't beginning to get hold of 
 things, don't know anything of life at all, shirk 
 life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms and talk 
 big over your bumpers of lemonade 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, 
 Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they 
 want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunt- 
 ing Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel 
 very grave and necessary and respected on the Gov- 
 ernment 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, want 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 Will 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 ! " 
 
280 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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- 
 culse building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. 
 But of all the damned things that ever were damned, 
 your damned shirking, 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! " 
 
 "You're just the old plunger you used to be, Brit- 
 ten/' 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 lib- 
 erty?" 
 
 "What does any little lot know of liberty?" 
 
 " It waits outside, too big for our understanding. 
 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 mumble of a life going on! I'm within 
 sight of being a drunkard, Remington! 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, I've seen something of the mean- 
 ing." 
 
 He flew off at a tangent. " I'd rather die in De- 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 281 
 
 lirium Tremens," he cried, " than be a Crampton or a 
 Lewis. . . ." 
 
 " Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and 
 Britten's squat gestures haunted me as I walked home- 
 ward alone. I went to my room and stood before my 
 desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's 
 admirable equipment of me. 
 
 I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions 
 that so it was Mr. George Alexander would have 
 mounted a statesman's private room. . . . 
 
 3 
 
 I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt 
 if party will ever again be the force it was during the 
 eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Men are becom- 
 ing 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 intel- 
 lectual temperaments and less and less by their acci- 
 dental 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 Eton- 
 ian " claim to this or that unfair advantage or unearnt 
 sympathy. Even the Scotch and the Devonians weaken 
 a little in their clannishness. A widening sense of fair 
 play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry 
 down freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded 
 nowadays in England 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 imaginative 
 initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or 
 
282 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For 
 them the fact that the party system has been essential 
 in the history of England for two hundred years gives 
 it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories 
 and memoirs, they see the great grey pile of West- 
 minster not so much for what it is as for what it was, 
 rich with dramatic memories, populous with glorious 
 ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and quo- 
 tations. It seems almost scandalous that new things 
 should continue to happen, swamping with strange qual- 
 ities the savour of these old associations. 
 
 That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through 
 Westminster Hall, thrust himself, it may be, through 
 the very piece of space that once held Charles the 
 Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profana- 
 tion 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 
 William 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 disposed to lapse into wonderings about what 
 things are coming to, wonderings that have no grain 
 of curiosity. His conception of perfect conduct is in- 
 dustrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked 
 grooves of the great recorded days. So infinitely more 
 important to him is the documented, respected thing 
 than the elusive present. 
 
 Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, 
 though Cladingbowl is a sound man on a committee, 
 and Dayton keeps the Old Country Gazette, the most 
 gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail, however, 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 283 
 
 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, prom- 
 inent lawyers, even a few of the soberer type of busi- 
 ness men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the 
 morning paper, of the architecture of the West End, 
 and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holi- 
 day resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic 
 " crushers." The New Year and Birthday honours 
 lists are always very sagely and exhaustively consid- 
 ered, 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 fall- 
 ing 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 in- 
 cidental and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous 
 in her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use 
 her as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think 
 of Whitehall that little affair on the scaffold outside 
 the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in com- 
 parison with the possibilities that offer themselves to 
 
284 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 my imagination within the great grey Government 
 buildings close at hand. 
 
 It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those 
 places now. I think of St. Stephen's tower streaming 
 upwards into the misty London night and the great wet 
 quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the han- 
 som cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and 
 more by taxicabs as the second Parliament of King 
 Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the Admiralty 
 and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending 
 out invisible 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 lit- 
 tle 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 moun- 
 tain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and 
 watch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all 
 about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria Street, 
 grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle 
 one another, pass the big embassies in the West End 
 with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad ave- 
 nue that leads to Buckingham Palace, witness the com- 
 ing 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 be- 
 yond measure, is the gleaming consciousness, the chal- 
 lenging knowledge : " 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 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 285 
 
 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 legislation 
 was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing 
 Bill went little further than the attempted rectifica- 
 tion of a Conservative mistake. I was altogether for 
 the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end 
 the Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-bait- 
 ing. I was recalcitrant almost from the beginning, 
 and spoke against the Government so early as the sec- 
 ond 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 man. 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 man- 
 ner of a writer I worry to find my meaning too much; 
 but this was one of my successes. I spoke after din- 
 ner 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- 
 tiously to hear me, with that engaging friendliness of 
 his, and gave me at the first chance an approving 
 " Hear, Hear ! " I can still recall quite distinctly my 
 two futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye 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 realisation that I was getting on 
 fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of hav- 
 
286 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ing on the whole brought it off, and the absurd grati- 
 tude I felt for that encouraging cheer. 
 
 Addressing the House of Commons is like no other 
 public speaking in the world. Its semi-colloquial meth- 
 ods give it an air of being easy, but its shifting audi- 
 ence, the comings and goings and hesitations of mem- 
 bers behind the chair not mere audience units, but 
 men who matter the desolating emptiness that spreads 
 itself round the man who fails to interest, the little 
 compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers' gallery, 
 the light, elusive, flickering movements high up behind 
 the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the 
 table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic back- 
 ground with its sombre shadows, conspire together, pro- 
 duce a confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I 
 was walking upon a pavement full of trap-doors and 
 patches of uncovered morass. A misplaced, well-meant 
 " Hear, Hear ! " is apt to be extraordinarily disconcert- 
 ing, and under no other circumstances have I had to 
 speak with quite the same sideways twist that the ar- 
 rangement of the House imposes. One does not recog- 
 nise one's own voice threading out into the stirring 
 brown. Unless 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 
 whither my sentences were going, such as one has with 
 a public meeting well under one's eye. 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 be- 
 come prolix and vague with qualifications. 
 
 5 
 
 My discontents with the Liberal party and my men- 
 tal exploration of the quality of party generally is 
 curiously mixed up with certain impressions of things 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 287 
 
 and people in the National Liberal Club. The Na- 
 tional 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 engrav- 
 ings, 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 undistinguished 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, 
 and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great 
 narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. 
 Some of the 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 group 
 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 dif- 
 ferent quality and colour from the next and never to 
 be mixed with it. Most clubs have a common link, a 
 
288 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 lowest common denominator in the Club Bore, who 
 spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores are 
 specialised 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 White- 
 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 Protest- 
 ants, here a little knot of eminent Rationalists indulg- 
 ing in a blasphemous story sotto voce. Next them are 
 a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised 
 chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking per- 
 sons bulging with documents and intent upon extra- 
 ordinary 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 whiff of politics. It was clear they were 
 against the Lords against plutocrats against Cos- 
 sington's newspapers against the 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 pil- 
 lars and wall, the various views, aspects, and portraits 
 of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the partitions of polished 
 mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would dissolve 
 and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample 
 of miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and 
 a universal littleness of imagination enlarged, unlim- 
 ited, no longer a sample but a community, spreading, 
 stretching out to infinity all in little groups and duo- 
 logues 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 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 289 
 
 electioneering is more than half of it denunciation. 
 Let us condemn, if possible,, let us obstruct and de- 
 prive, 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 accus- 
 tomed 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 
 of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was 
 saying something about the " Will of the People. . . ." 
 
 The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of 
 human life! I forgot the smoke and jabber of the 
 club altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung aloft 
 by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some 
 high arid rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye 
 could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of 
 humanity, like grass upon the field, like pebbles upon 
 unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human 
 life more than that endless struggling individualism? 
 Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant 
 synthesis, 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 were one of a little swarm of would-be reef build- 
 ers looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean 
 
290 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of 
 life, has been and will be the story of something strug- 
 gling 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 ourselves, which 
 does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating 
 between being and not-being, how marvellous it is! 
 It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand dif- 
 ferent gods, sought a shape for itself in stone and 
 ivory 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 
 common impulses of men. It is something that comes 
 and goes, like a light that shines and is withdrawn, 
 withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever 
 been. . . . 
 
 6 
 
 I would mark with a curious interest the stray coun- 
 try 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 mem- 
 ories of my uncle and his Staffordshire neighbours. 
 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 arrogant or a little too meek towards 
 our very democratic mannered but still liveried waiters. 
 Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He over- 
 ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through 
 our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he 
 was teetotal, of unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 291 
 
 spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of 
 flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black cof- 
 fee, 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, check- 
 ing always, sometimes bullying, sometimes being osten- 
 tatiously " kind " ; I would see him glance furtively at 
 his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his 
 upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business em- 
 ployee. We imaginative people 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 realise that his pres- 
 ence 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? . . . How 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 way. 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. 
 
292 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 him. . . . 
 
 7 
 
 For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They 
 at least had an air of coherent intentions. At that 
 time Socialism had come into politics again after a 
 period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous 
 eclat. There was visibly a following of Socialist mem- 
 bers to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative 
 gentlemen in soft felt hats and short coats and square- 
 toed boots who replied to casual advances a little sur- 
 prisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members 
 became aware of a " seagreen incorruptible," as Col- 
 onel 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 soci- 
 eties, we gathered, were springing up all over the coun- 
 try, and every one was inquiring about Socialism and 
 discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities 
 with particular force, and any youngster with the slight- 
 est intellectual pretension was either actively for or 
 brilliantly against. For a time our Young Liberal 
 group was ostentatiously sympathetic. . . . 
 
 When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid 
 memory of certain evening gatherings at our house. . . . 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 293 
 
 These gatherings had been organised by Margaret 
 as the outcome of a discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora 
 had been very emphatic and uncharitable upon the futil- 
 ity of the Socialist movement. It seemed that even 
 the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties. 
 
 " 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 totally unpresentable wives," 
 said Altiora, " totally ! " and quoted instances, " and 
 they will bring them. Or they won't come! Some of 
 the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table man- 
 ners. 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 cr ppled by the want of a 
 common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacy 
 didn't at first appear 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 dinners, planned, I think, a little too 
 accurately upon Altiora'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 her- 
 self with a weekly houseful of insoluble problems in 
 intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a night- 
 mare feeling as the evening 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 num- 
 ber of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that 
 never came, and stood and sat about silently, mildly 
 
1 
 t * 
 
 294 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 amused but not a bit surprised that we did not dis- 
 cover 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 
 tension from first to last; the most innocent remark 
 seemed capable of exploding resentment, and replies 
 came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young 
 Liberals went about puzzled but polite to the gather- 
 ing 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, stiif figures of the Cramptons, Bunting 
 Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morn- 
 ing coats indicative of the House, or in what is some- 
 times 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 reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in 
 dietary and costume, just as I didn't realise why the 
 most comprehensive constructive projects should appear 
 to be supported solely by odd and exceptionally 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 en- 
 gaged in removing the remains of an anchovy sandwich 
 from his protruded tongue visible ends of cress hav- 
 ing misled him into the belief that he was dealing with 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 295 
 
 doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to 
 be given hand-bills and printed matter by our guests, 
 but there I had the advantage over Lewis, who was too 
 tactful 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 flattering to the giver. 
 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 upon my 
 contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil interest 
 with which she was associated, and I spent much time 
 and care in evading her. 
 
 Mingling with the more hygienic types were a num- 
 ber of Anti-Puritan Socialists, bulging 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 Deter- 
 minism 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 with an 
 eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam 
 about us one evening. He might have been a slightly 
 frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waist- 
 coat, and the sort of black and white check trousers 
 that twinkle. He had a high-pitched voice with aris- 
 tocratic intonations, and he seemed to be in a perpet- 
 ual state of interrogation. " What are we all he-a 
 for ? " he would ask only too audibly. " What a*e we 
 doing he-a? What's the connection?" 
 
 What was the connection? 
 
296 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We made a special effort with our last assembly in 
 June, 1907. We 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 Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour 
 members. And on our side we had our particular little 
 group, Bunting Harblow, Crampton, 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. We discussed 
 the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at 
 that time, he was full of vague threatenings against 
 the Liberal party. I was struck by a thing in him 
 that I had already 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 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 297 
 
 wants to be dealt with. He had an air of having a 
 corner in ideas. Then it flashed into my head that 
 the whole Socialist movement was an attempted corner 
 in ideas. . . 
 
 8 
 
 Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret 
 amid the debris of the gathering. 
 
 I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Marga- 
 ret, looking white and weary, came and leant upon the 
 mantel. 
 
 "Oh, 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 which she was accustomed to wait for clues. 
 
 " When you think of the height and depth and 
 importance 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 common 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-Land and don't feel quite sure of the law. 
 There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness. ... If we 
 professed Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? 
 Not a man of them ! They'd feel it was burglary. . . ." 
 
 " Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. " That 
 is just what / 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 
 
298 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 realisation 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 connec- 
 tion. . . . 
 
 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 which 
 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 ; " un- 
 less 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." 
 
 " I don't think I could possibly get on with any of 
 those people," said Margaret, after a pause. 
 
 She remained for a time looking down at me and, I 
 could feel, perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with 
 my thinking, and so I did not look up, and presently 
 she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went 
 rustling softly to her room. 
 
 I remained in my study for a long time with my 
 thoughts crystallising out. . . . 
 
 It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 299 
 
 how that opposition to which I have already alluded 
 of the immediate life and the mental hinterland of a 
 man, can be applied to public and social affairs. The 
 ideas go on and no person or party succeeds in em- 
 bodying them. The reality of human progress never 
 comes to the surface, it is a power in the deeps, an 
 undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in 
 studies where they write self-forgetfully, in laborator- 
 ies under the urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in 
 the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of emo- 
 tional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in every- 
 day 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 immedi- 
 ate self and specialise 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 
 hinterland, but that does not absolve him from a front- 
 age. That is the essential error of the specialist phil- 
 osopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. 
 They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. 
 That is what bothered me about Codger, about those 
 various schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, 
 about the Baileys and their dream of an official ruling 
 class. A human being 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 Social- 
 ism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to 
 join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult 
 which is not even tolerably serviceable in presenting or 
 spreading the ideas for which it stands. . . . 
 
300 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I perceived I had got something quite fundamental 
 here. It had taken me some years to realise 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 flat- 
 tery 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 
 nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in 
 so far as gross increments are change, in his particular 
 method of living and behaviour. Every party stands 
 essentially for the interests and mental usages of some 
 definite class or group of classes in the exciting 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-spir- 
 ited form, and its superficial-minded following con- 
 fessing its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No 
 class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of 
 life, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class 
 is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited socialisa- 
 tion of any other class. In that capacity for aggres- 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 301 
 
 sion upon other classes lies the essential driving force 
 of modern affairs. The instincts, the persons, the 
 parties, and vanities sway and struggle. The ideas 
 and understandings march on and achieve themselves 
 for all in spite of every one. . . . 
 
 The methods and traditions of British politics main- 
 tain 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, how- 
 ever, has certain necessary characteristics. The Con- 
 servative Party has always stood quite definitely for 
 the established propertied interests. The land-owner, 
 the big lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly 
 the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which 
 has been created by temperance legislation, are the es- 
 sential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native 
 wealthy are the families of the great international 
 usurers, and a vast miscellaneous mass of financial en- 
 terprise. Outside the range of resistance implied by 
 these 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 towards the endowment of higher education, 
 and as willing to co-operate with the Church in pro- 
 tective 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 
 anitation and hygienic organisation. 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 
 
302 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 pop- 
 ulation in uniform. Of course there are reactionary 
 landowners and old-fashioned country clergy, full of 
 localised 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 own- 
 ership and collective control of land, for example, or 
 state mining and manufactures, or the nationalisation 
 of the so-called public-house or extended municipal en- 
 terprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of prop- 
 erty, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly 
 adamantine bar. It does not stand for, it is, the exist- 
 ing arrangement in these affairs. 
 
 Even more definitely a class party is the Labour 
 Party, whose immediate interest is to raise wages, 
 shorten hours of labor, increase employment, and 
 make better terms for the working-man tenant and 
 working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt con- 
 structive minded, but the mass of the following is nat- 
 urally suspicious of education and discipline, hostile 
 to the higher education, and except for an obvious 
 antagonism to employers and property owners almost 
 destitute of ideas. What else can it be? It stands 
 for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation 
 and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative 
 and organising power. It favours the nationalisation 
 of land and capital with no sense of the difficulties in- 
 volved in the process ; but, on the other hand, the equally 
 reasonable socialisation of individuals which is implied 
 by military service is steadily and quite naturally and 
 quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in recent 
 years that Labour has emerged as a separate party 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 303 
 
 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 part- 
 ies. It is the party against the predominating inter- 
 ests. It is at once the party of the failing and of the 
 untried; it is the party of decadence and hope. From 
 its nature it must be a vague and planless association 
 in comparison with its antagonist, neither so construc- 
 tive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to 
 hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state. 
 Essentially it is the party of criticism, the " Anti " 
 party. It is a system of hostilities and objections that 
 somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It 
 is a gathering 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 mer- 
 chant and the moneylender, the Nonconformist as 
 against the Churchman, the small employer as against 
 the demoralising 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 advantages, but it is also the party 
 that is on the whole most set against Collective control 
 
304 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 because it represents no established responsilibity. It 
 is constructive only so far as its antagonism to the 
 great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the 
 state. It organises only because organisation is forced 
 upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It 
 lapses in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways 
 between hostility to wealth and hostility to public ex- 
 penditure. . . . 
 
 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, 
 struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's 
 party; and a third party sometimes detaching itself 
 from the second and sometimes reuniting with it, the 
 party of the altogether expropriated masses, the pro- 
 letarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal 
 to Republican and Democrat, for example, and you 
 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 necessary 
 divisions in the modern social drama, the analyst will 
 make them out none the less for that. . . . 
 
 And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain ; 
 the ideas go on as though we are 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 was 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 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 305 
 
 that now, and so the great constructive scheme of So- 
 cialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was neces- 
 sarily 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 confi- 
 dence 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 Party, 
 and that in the entirely one-sided form of an irrespon- 
 sible and non-constructive attack on property. Social- 
 ism in that mutilated form, the teeth and claws without 
 the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted any- 
 thing 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 admin- 
 istered 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 realised the 
 need of organisation, 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 
 
306 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 realisation that my 
 political associates, and I in my association with them, 
 were oddly narrow, priggish, and unreal, that the So- 
 cialists with whom we were attempting co-operation 
 were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, 
 that my political life didn't in some way comprehend 
 more than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing 
 the thing I was seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's 
 self-assertions, her fits of energetic planning, her 
 quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating 
 attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited trivi- 
 ality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, 
 served to point my way to my present conclusions. I 
 had been trying to deal all along with human prog- 
 ress as something immediate 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 affairs 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 with a 
 sort of frantic energy they were trying to develop that 
 sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate, and 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 307 
 
 direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note 
 of silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and 
 felt now most acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. 
 They were neglecting human life altogether in social J fj ( 
 organisation. 
 
 In the development of intellectual modesty lies the 
 growth of statesmanship, (it has been the chronic 
 mistake of statecraft and all organising spirits to at- 
 tempt immediately to scheme and arrange and achieve- 
 Priests, schools of thought, political schemers, leaders 
 of men, have always slipped into the error of assum- 
 ing 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 them- 
 selves to legislate and construct on that assumption, and, 
 experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions of 
 reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, train- 
 ing, pruning, secretive education; and all the stupid- 
 ities of self-sufficient energy. In the passion of their 
 good intentions they have not hesitated to conceal fact, 
 suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and ap- 
 parently detrimental desires. And so it is blunder- 
 ingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that 
 any extension of social organisation is at present 
 achieved. 
 
 Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from 
 immediacy is grasped, directly the dominating import- 
 ance of this critical, less personal, mental hinterland 
 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 becomes accessible to a new series of solutions. He 
 wants no longer to " fix up," as people say, human af- 
 fairs, but to devote his forces to the development of 
 that needed intellectual life without which all his shal- 
 
308 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 low 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 
 the middle thirties by desiring only to serve and in- 
 crease a general process of thought, a process fearless, 
 critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give 
 cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale 
 and quality and in a light altogether 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 crystallised more and more definitely 
 upon 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 adequate expression for all that was in me, for those 
 forces that had rebelled at the crude presentations of 
 Bromstead, at the secrecies and suppressions of my 
 youth, at the dull unrealities of City Merchants, at 
 the conventions and timidities of the Pinky Dinkys, 
 at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases 
 and tradition-worship of my political associates. None 
 of these things were half alive, and I wanted life to be 
 intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought like an 
 edge of steel and desire like a flame. The real work 
 
RIDDLE FOR STATESMAN 309 
 
 before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the 
 enlargement of human expression, the release and in- 
 tensification of human thought, the vivider utilisation 
 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 solu- 
 tion, 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 mud- 
 dles 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 no- 
 tice-boards and barbed wire fencing, the litter and the 
 heaps of dump, were only the outward appearances 
 whose ultimate realities were jerry-built conclusions, 
 hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbe- 
 cile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of 
 men. How are we through politics to get at that con- 
 fusion ? 
 
 We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. 
 We want to create a sustained counter effort to the 
 perpetual tendency of all educational organisations 
 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 re- 
 search. 
 
 We want to make the best and finest thought acces- 
 sible 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 insol- 
 uble, destitution, disease, the difficulty of maintaining 
 international peace, the scarcely faced possibility of 
 
310 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 making life generally and continually beautiful, be- 
 come easy. . . . 
 
 It was clear to me that the most vital activities in 
 which I could engage would be those which most di- 
 rectly affected the Church, public habits of thought, 
 education, organised research, literature, and the chan- 
 nels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how 
 my position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead 
 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 unorganised 
 medley of rich people and privileged people who domi- 
 nate the civilised world of 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 com- 
 mon aim. We must have an aristocracy not of privi- 
 lege, but of understanding and purpose or mankind 
 will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly 
 when I look through my various writings of the years 
 between 1903 and IQlOo 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 finer initiatives. If 
 humanity cannot develop an education far beyond any- 
 thing that is now provided, if it cannot collectively 
 invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, 
 broader scale than it does at the present time, it can- 
 not hope to achieve any very much finer order or any 
 
 311 
 
312 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 more general happiness than it now enjoys. We must 
 believe, therefore, that it can develop such a training 
 and education, or we must abandon secular construc- 
 tive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against 
 crude democracy comes in. If humanity at large is 
 capable of that high education and those creative free- 
 doms 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 con- 
 ception 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 produce that self-conscious, 
 highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic cul- 
 ture, 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 nat- 
 ural but elaborate result of intricate human interde- 
 pendencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated 
 and acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, 
 modified and redirected by literature and art. . . . 
 
 But now the reader will understand how it came 
 about that, disappointed by the essential littleness of 
 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 Liberal- 
 ism 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- ? Weren't 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 313 
 
 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 obvi- 
 ous enough. The conception of the Boer War had 
 been clumsy and puerile, the costly errors of that strug- 
 gle 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 speed- 
 ily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned 
 to all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permit- 
 ted big mischief, and my mind was now continually 
 returning to the persuasion that after all in some de- 
 velopment of the idea of Imperial patriotism might 
 be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable ex- 
 pression 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 
 strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness 
 and humbug of the movement there appeared a real 
 regard for social efficiency, a real spirit of animation 
 and enterprise. There suddenly appeared in my world 
 I saw them first, I think, in 1908 a new sort of 
 little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouch- 
 ing, cunning, 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 be- 
 yond his strength the Boy Scout. I liked the Boy 
 
314 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Scout, and I find it difficult to express 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. 
 
 In those days there existed a dining club called 
 there was some lost allusion to the exorcism of party 
 feeling in its title the Pentegram Circle. It included 
 Bailey and Dayton and myself, 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. We were men of all parties and 
 very various experiences, and our object was to discuss 
 the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. 
 We dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, 
 and for a couple of years we kept up an average at- 
 tendance of ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was 
 given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd how 
 warm and good the social atmosphere of that little 
 gathering became as time went on; then over the des- 
 sert, so soon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs 
 and ceased to fret us, one of us would open with per- 
 haps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of some spe- 
 cially prepared question, and after him we would de- 
 liver 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 Hen- 
 don 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 prolonged our clos- 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 315 
 
 ing discussions and made our continuance impos- 
 sible. 
 
 I learned very much and very many things at those 
 dinners, but more particularly did I become familiar- 
 ised with the habits of mind of such men as Neal, 
 Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperial- 
 ists who belonged to us. They were nearly all like 
 Bailey Oxford men, though mostly of a younger gen- 
 eration, and they were all mysteriously and inexplic- 
 ably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the prin- 
 cipa.' instead of at best a secondary aspect of construc- 
 tive 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 organisation, and 
 with a curious little martinet twist in their minds that 
 boded ill for that side of public liberty. So much 
 against them. But they were disposed to spend money 
 much more generously on education and research of all 
 sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed likely 
 to do; and they were altogether more accessible than 
 the Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affect- 
 ing the universities and upper classes. The Liberals 
 are abjectly afraid of the universities. I found my- 
 self constantly falling into line with these men in our 
 discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's 
 sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' 
 trust in such things as the " Spirit of our People " and 
 the " General Trend of Progress." It wasn'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. By 1908 I had already ar- 
 
316 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 rived at a point where I could be definitely 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 nut-shells 
 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 cockatoo with a 
 taste for confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of 
 his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, 
 rolling his round face and round eyes from speaker to 
 speaker and sounding the visible depths of misery when- 
 ever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to 
 conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mys- 
 terious 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 to- 
 gether? " 
 
 " Are you a Confederate ? " I asked suddenly. 
 
 " That's a secret nobody tells/' he said. 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 317 
 
 "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 
 organised 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 inevitable in such a matter. I was not dealing 
 with any simple question of principle, but with elusive 
 and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces 
 and of the nature of my own powers. All through that 
 period I was asking over and over again: how far are 
 these Confederates mere dreamers? How far and 
 this was more vital are they rendering lip-service to 
 social organisations? Is it true they desire war be- 
 cause 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 community? 
 That is a research which yields no statistics, an 
 enquiry like asking what is the ruling colour of a 
 chameleon. The shadowy answer varied with my 
 health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the 
 people I was watching. How fine can people be? How 
 generous? not incidentally, but all round? How far 
 can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their fath- 
 ers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class 
 above the protests of its business agents and solicitors 
 
318 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 attainable 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. 
 I count the evening of my paper the beginning of the 
 movement that created the Blue 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 large 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 319 
 
 the liberal idea: it was, "The World Exists for Ex- 
 ceptional 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 
 vanished with a thousand other papers, but some odd 
 chance has preserved and brought with me to Italy the 
 menu for the evening; its back black with the scrawled 
 notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found 
 it the other day among some letters from Margaret 
 and a copy of the 1909 Report of the Poor Law Com- 
 mission, also rich with pencilled marginalia. 
 
 My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea 
 and method, upon lines such as I have already suf- 
 ficiently indicated in the preceding sections. I remem- 
 ber 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 sitting 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 quite 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. I 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 was 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 recognise aristocracy 
 in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy 
 in particular, and so I came to my point that the real- 
 
320 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ity of human progress lay necessarily through the es- 
 tablishment of freedoms for the human best and a col- 
 lective receptivity and understanding. There was a 
 disgusted grunt from Dayton, " Superman rubbish 
 Nietzsche. Shaw ! Ugh ! " I sailed on over him to 
 my next propositions. The prime essential in a pro- 
 gressive civilisation 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 patronise 
 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 don't/' from Dayton we wanted all the 
 brilliant stuff in the world concentrated upon the de- 
 velopment 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 becoming idiotic about character." 
 
 Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round 
 upon me an eye of agonised aversion. 
 
 I expatiated on the small proportion of the available 
 ability that is really serving humanity to-day. " I 
 suppose to-day all the thought, all the art, all the incre- 
 ments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so far as 
 the English-speaking community is concerned by how 
 many? by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less/ 
 said Thorns.) To be more precise, by 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 321 
 
 few out of many, the few who got in our world of 
 chance and confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt sug- 
 gestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, 
 the leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through 
 the defects of their qualities, become commonplace 
 workmen and second-rate professional men, marry 
 commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage 
 of superfluous pollen in a pine forest is waste." 
 
 " Decent honest lives ! " said Dayton to his bread- 
 crumbs, with his chin in his necktie. "Waste!" 
 
 " And the 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, 
 but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I 
 might call the real 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 undifferentiated a 
 public. Most 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 cen- 
 tre and origin of the muddle, futility, and unhappiness 
 that distresses us ; it's the cardinal problem of the state 
 to discover, develop, and use the exceptional gifts 
 of men. And I see that best done I drift more and 
 more away from the common stuff of legislative and 
 administrative activity by a quite revolutionary de- 
 velopment of the educational machinery, but by a still 
 more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to 
 keep literature going, and to keep what is the neces- 
 sary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent 
 and appreciative criticism going. You know none of 
 these things have ever been kept going hitherto; they've 
 come unexpectedly and inexplicably." 
 
322 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Hear, hear ! " from Dayton, cough, nodding of the 
 head, and an expression of mystical profundity. 
 
 " They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give 
 place to darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't 
 mean to go back to darkness again and so it's got to 
 keep its light burning." I went on to attack the pres- 
 ent organisation of our schools and universities, which 
 seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, 
 uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation 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 confess- 
 ing my doubt from which party or combination of 
 groups these developments of science and literature and 
 educational organisation could most reasonably be ex- 
 pected. I looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye in- 
 tent 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 we 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 neces- 
 sary urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is 
 to go on." 
 
 " We're working altogether too much at the social 
 basement in education and training," said Gane. 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 323 
 
 " Remington 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 re- 
 member 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 using 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 Cossing- 
 ton 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 Crupp, 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 Royal Commission on the Dramatic 
 Censorship," said Thorns, with a note of minute fair- 
 ness. " 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, reorganise 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." 
 
 " 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 
 
324 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ashes, aristocrats indeed if the Liberals come in over- 
 whelmingly? " said Britten. 
 
 " It's we who might decide that,," said Crupp, in- 
 sidiously. 
 
 " 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 far 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 organise people, particular groups 
 and classes of individuals," he insisted. " It isn't that. 
 That's the standing error of politicians. You want to 
 organise a culture. Civilisation 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 reorganise 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. 
 
 He became audible, sketching a possibility 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 might produce 
 enormous results." 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 325 
 
 " Leave me out of it," said Dayton, " if you please." 
 
 "We should," said Thorns under his breath. 
 
 I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and ex- 
 panded it. 
 
 " I believe we could do extensive things," I insisted. 
 
 " Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried 
 so often," said Thorns, " from the Young England 
 movement onward." 
 
 " Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I 
 said. " It's the peculiarity of English conservatism 
 that it's persistently progressive and rejuvenescent." 
 
 I think it must have been about that point that Day- 
 ton fled our presence, after some clumsy sentence that 
 I decided upon reflection was intended to remind me 
 of my duty to my party. 
 
 Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me 
 obliquely across the table. " You can't run a country 
 through its spoilt children," he said. "What you call 
 aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too 
 much of everything, except bracing experience." 
 
 " Children can always be educated," said Crupp. 
 
 " I said spoilt children," said Thorns. 
 
 "Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget 
 row leads to a storm, and these big people get their 
 power clipped, what's going to happen? Have you 
 thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and 
 barrel, who comes in ? " 
 
 " Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting 
 me. 
 
 " Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane. 
 
 "Quacks with a certificate of approval from Alti- 
 ora," said Thorns. " I admit the horrors of the al- 
 ternative. There'd be a massacre in three years." 
 
 " One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. 
 " One thing emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our 
 civilisation needs, and almost consciously needs, a cul- 
 
326 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ture of fine creative minds, and all the necessary toler- 
 ances, opennesses, considerations, that march with that. 
 For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. 
 Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as 
 you will; I concentrate on what is clearly the affair 
 of my sort of man, I want to ensure the quality of 
 the quarter deck." 
 
 " Hear, hear ! " said Shoesmith, suddenly his first 
 remark for a long time. "A first-rate figure,'* said 
 Shoesmith, gripping it. 
 
 " Our danger is in missing that," I went on. " Mud- 
 dle isn't ended by transferring power from the mud- 
 dle-headed few to the muddle-headed many, and then 
 cheating the many out of it again in the interests of a 
 bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit 
 of the liberal imagination. There is no real progress 
 in a country, except a rise in the level of its free in- 
 tellectual activity. All other progress is secondary and 
 dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams of effici- 
 ent machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no 
 free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes 
 rigid ugliness, that's all. No doubt things are mov- 
 ing from looseness to discipline, and from irresponsible 
 controls to organised controls and also and rather 
 contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, 
 democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark 
 in which the living element may be saved." 
 
 " Hear, hear ! " said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing. 
 
 It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoe- 
 emith became noticeable. He seemed trying to say 
 something vague and difficult that he didn't get said 
 at all on that occasion. "We could do immense things 
 [with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. 
 And there he left off and became a mute expressive- 
 ness, and it was only afterwards, when I was in 
 that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands. . . 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 327 
 
 We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous 
 glow but in that sort of glow one doesn't act upon 
 without much reconsideration, and it was some months 
 before I made my decision to follow up the indica- 
 tions of that opening talk. 
 
 5 
 
 I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram 
 Circle. In my developments it played a large part, not 
 so much by starting new trains of thought as by con- 
 firming the practicability of things I had already hesi- 
 tatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men 
 so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed 
 views that otherwise would have seemed only a little 
 less remote from actuality than the guardians of Plato 
 or the labour laws of More. Among other questions 
 that were never very distant from our discussions, that 
 came apt to every topic, was the true significance of 
 democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of international 
 hostility, and the imminence of war. On the first is- 
 sue 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. 
 
 Tke international situation exercised us greatly. 
 Our meetings were pervaded by the feeling that all 
 things moved towards a day of reckoning with Ger- 
 many, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up 
 
328 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable 
 equilibrium, that sooner or later something must hap- 
 pen there something very serious to our Empire. 
 Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of 
 that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is 
 inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could 
 be annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to 
 sit low in his chair and look mulish. " Militarism," he 
 would declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, 
 " is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse." Then he 
 would cough shortly and twitch his head back and 
 frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after 
 this conclusive statement we could still go on talking 
 of war. 
 
 All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of 
 international conflict, and their influence revived for 
 a time those uneasinesses that had been aroused in me 
 for the first time by my continental journey with 
 Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquer- 
 ors." That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for 
 all the slackness, mental dishonesty, presumption, mer- 
 cenary respectability and sentimentalised commercial- 
 ism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better 
 organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly 
 civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to 
 have both a good and bad series of consequences. It 
 seemed the only thing capable of bracing English 
 minds to education, sustained constructive effort and 
 research; but on the other hand it produced the quality 
 of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, 
 a wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 
 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight 
 additional Dreadnoughts 
 
 "We want eight 
 And we won't wait/' 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 329 
 
 but no clamour at all about our national waste of in- 
 ventive talent, our mean standard of intellectual at- 
 tainment, our disingenuous criticism, and the conse- 
 quent failure 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 re- 
 sponsibility and the right men in no place at all, almost 
 universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and 
 resentful subordinates, because our criticism is worth- 
 less and, so habitually as to be now almost uncon- 
 sciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in every 
 matter upon which competition is possible, because she 
 attended sedulously to her collective mind for sixty 
 pregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects 
 she is still far more anxious for quality in achievement 
 than we are. I remember saying that in my paper. 
 From that, I remember, I went on to an image that 
 had flashed into my mind. " The British Empire," I 
 said, "is like some of those early vertebrated monsters, 
 the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus and such-like; 
 it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone, that is 
 to say, especially in the visceral region is bigger 
 than its craniumL It's no accident that things are so. 
 We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, 
 and if the joints are anchylosed so much the better. 
 We're still but only half awake to our error. You 
 can't change that suddenly." 
 
 " Turn it round and make it go backwards," 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 blows 
 soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had con- 
 jured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth 
 and brains, crept nearer and nearer. . . . 
 
330 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I've grown, I think, since those days out of the 
 urgency of that apprehension. I still think a European 
 war, and conceivably a very humiliating war for Eng- 
 land, 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 prevail- 
 ing spirit in English life it is one of the essential 
 secrets of our imperial endurance is one of underbred 
 aggression in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in 
 moments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can 
 and assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing 
 that our upper and middle-class youth is educated by 
 teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentle- 
 men, men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwin- 
 ism hasn't upset the historical fall of man, that cricket 
 is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage upon 
 the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity 
 of evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a 
 larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable pro- 
 letariat, a bolder intellectual training, a harsher spirit, 
 can scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realisation of 
 intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all. The 
 war of preparations that has been going on for thirty 
 years may end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's 
 decision. We shall proudly but very firmly take the 
 second place. For my own part, since I love England 
 .as much as I detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray 
 jfor a chastening war I wouldn't mind her flag in the 
 Mirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was 
 able to shake off that earlier fear of some final and 
 irrevocable destruction truncating all my schemes. At 
 the most, a European war would be a dramatic episode 
 in the reconstruction I had in view. 
 
 In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was in- 
 clined to see, disaster. The English rule in India is 
 surely one of the most extraordinary accidents that 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 331 
 
 has ever happened in history. We are there like a 
 man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an 
 elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get 
 down. Until something happens he remains. Our 
 functions in India are absurd. We English do not 
 own that country, do not even rule it. We make noth- 
 ing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. 
 We suppress our own literature there. Most English 
 people cannot even go to this land they possess; the 
 authorities would prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or 
 Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester operatives, 
 it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average 
 English voter face to face with the reality of India, 
 or let the Indian native have a glimpse of the English 
 voter. In my time I have talked to English statesmen, 
 Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers, every 
 one who might be supposed to know what India signi- 
 fies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they 
 thought we were up to there. I am not writing with- 
 out 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 apochryphal native ruler in 
 the north-west, who, when asked what would happen 
 if we left India, replied that in a week his men would 
 be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a 
 virgin would be left in Lower Bengal. That is always 
 given as our conclusive justification. But is it our bus- 
 iness to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Ben- 
 gal 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 
 
332 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the resentment of men held back from life. Consider 
 what it must be for the educated Indian sitting at the 
 feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth 
 gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit 
 of insurrection breaks out in spite of espionage and 
 seizures. Our conflict for inaction develops stupendous 
 absurdities. The other day the British Empire was 
 taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps 
 for seditious emblems and inscriptions. . . . 
 
 In some manner we shall have to come out of India. 
 We have had our chance, and we have demonstrated 
 nothing but the appalling dulness of our national imag- 
 ination. We are not good enough to do anything with 
 India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, 
 Cladingbowl in the club, and the Home Churchman in 
 the home, cant about " character," worship of strenuous 
 force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men 
 and things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in 
 appearance, that empty domination. Had we great 
 schools and a powerful teaching, could we boast great 
 men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our 
 lives, then indeed it might be different. But a race 
 that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to justify it. 
 
 It does not follow that we shall be driven castastro- 
 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 empire. We may be able 
 to abandon India with an air of still remaining there, 
 It is our new method. We train our future rulers in 
 the public schools to have a very wholesome respect 
 for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India m 
 spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, 
 we shall be willing to deal with it. We may or may 
 not have a war, but our governing class will be quick 
 to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repent 
 our South African diplomacy, and arrange for 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 333 
 
 settlement that will abandon the reality, such as it is, 
 and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror 
 de facto will become the new " loyal Briton/' and the 
 democracy at home will be invited to celebrate our re- 
 cession triumphantly. I am no believer in the im- 
 minent dissolution of our Empire; I am less and less 
 inclined to see in either India or Germany the prob- 
 ability of an abrupt truncation of those slow intellect- 
 ual and moral constructions which are the essentials of 
 statecraft. 
 
 6 
 
 I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of 
 dripping water this morning we had rain, and the 
 roof of our little casa is still not dry, there are pools 
 in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent 
 that crosses the salita is full and boastful, and I try 
 to recall the order of my impressions during that 
 watching, dubious time, before I went over to the Con- 
 servative 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 fa9ades of sunlit build- 
 ings 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 pic- 
 tures of Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I re- 
 call one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clyiies 
 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 gal- 
 leries on a Gargantuan scale. And there she sought 
 
884 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 to gather all that was most representative of English 
 activities, and did, in fact, in those brilliant nocturnal 
 crowds, get samples of nearly every section of our 
 social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance 
 upon the political and social side. 
 
 I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end 
 of the big saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those 
 sharp-minded, beautiful rich women one meets so often 
 in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be 
 capable of everything, and we watched the crowd 
 uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a 
 State ball and exchanged information. I told her 
 about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me 
 about the aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on 
 them and counted the percentage of beautiful people 
 among the latter, and wondered if the general effect 
 of tallness was or was not an illusion. 
 
 They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger 
 than the average of people in London, and a handsome 
 lot, even when they were not subtly individualised. 
 " They look so well nurtured," I said, " well cared for. 
 I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleas- 
 ant consideration for each other.'* 
 
 " Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly self- 
 ish," she said, "like big, rather carefully trained, 
 rather pampered children. What else can you expect 
 from them ? " 
 
 " They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, 
 " and that's an achievement. I don't think I could 
 ever be content under a bad-tempered, sentimentalis- 
 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 modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I 
 like them. I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, giving 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 335 
 
 over the country to this aristocracy given some- 
 thing " 
 
 "Which they haven't got." 
 
 "Which they haven't got or they'd be the finest 
 sort of people in the world." 
 
 "That something?" she inquired. 
 
 " I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. 
 They've done all sorts of things " 
 
 " That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, " whose 
 leg was broken you remember? at Spion Kop." 
 
 " It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and 
 the white glove resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, 
 on the sword. When I was a little boy I wanted to 
 wear clothes like that. And the stars ! He's got the 
 V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate 
 hown pluck, you know brought something off." 
 
 " Not quite enough," she suggested. 
 
 " I think that's it," I said. " Not quite enough not 
 quite hard enough," I added. 
 
 She laughed and looked at me. " You'd like to 
 make us," she said. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 " Hard." 
 
 " I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard." 
 
 "We shan't be so pleasant if we do." 
 
 " Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I 
 don't see why an aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard 
 drained, 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 
 
336 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 attitude of the country towards science and litera- 
 ture " 
 
 "We all do/' said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't 
 begin again at the beginning," she added. 
 
 " Couldn't one/' I nodded at the assembly in general, 
 " start a movement? " 
 
 " There's the Confederates/' she said, with a faint 
 smile that masked a gleam of curiosity. ... " You 
 want," she said, " to say to the aristocracy, ' Be aris- 
 tocrats. Noblesse oblige. 9 Do you remember what 
 happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a 
 King'?" 
 
 " Well," I said, " I want an aristocracy." 
 
 " This," she said, smiling, " is the pick of them. 
 The backwoodsmen are off the stage. These are the 
 brilliant ones the smart and the blues. . . . They 
 cost a lot of money, you know." 
 
 So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained 
 full of things not stated in our speech. They were on 
 the whole handsome people, charitable minded, happy, 
 and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was 
 something free and fearless about their bearing that 
 I liked extremely. The women particularly were wide- 
 reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as 
 fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with those 
 flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of 
 perception few men display. I liked, too, the relations 
 that held between women and men, their general tol- 
 erance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that 
 are the essence of the middle-class order. . . . 
 
 After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the devel- 
 opment of a type and culture of men, whv shouldn't 
 one begin at this end ? 
 
 It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class of 
 human beings, but much harder to produce a sample. 
 Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance, fairly a sam- 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 337 
 
 pie? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent pres- 
 ence, 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 'urn 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 lit- 
 tle abashed. 
 
 " Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction. 
 
 It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the 
 aristocratic theory currently working as distinguished 
 from my as yet unformulated intentions. 
 
 " You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among *um," 
 said Lady Forthundred. " You get loafers and scamps 
 everywhere, but you'll get a lot of men who'll work 
 hard to keep things together, and that's what we're all 
 after, isn't ut? " 
 
 " It's not an ideal arrangement." 
 
 " Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred. 
 
 On the whole, and because she refused emphatically 
 to believe in education, Lady Forthundred scored. 
 
 We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, 
 for Cossington, my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', 
 and my victor in the affair of the magazine, had 
 clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of 
 
338 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, 
 and a group of daily newspapers. I had expected to 
 find the great lady hostile to the new-comer, but she 
 accepted him, she gloried in him. 
 
 " We're a peerage/' she said, " but none of us have 
 ever had any nonsense about nobility." 
 
 She turned and smiled down on me. " We English/' 
 she said, " are a practical people. We assimilate 'urn." 
 
 " Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble ? " 
 
 " Then they don't give trouble." 
 
 "They learn to shoot?" 
 
 "And all that," said Lady Forthundred. " Yesw 
 And things go on. Sometimes better than others, but 
 they go on somehow. It depends very much on the 
 sort of butler who pokes 'um about." 
 
 I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure 
 twenty thousand a year by at least detrimental meth- 
 ods socially speaking. 
 
 "We must take the bad and the good of 'um/' said 
 Lady Forthundred, courageously. . . . 
 
 Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. 
 iWhat was there in the brains of the multitude of her 
 first, second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, who didn't 
 talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely, 
 against a background of deft, attentive maids and 
 valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things 
 look to them? 
 
 7 
 
 Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious 
 to put Evesham with his tall, bent body, his little- 
 featured almost elvish face, his unequal mild brown 
 eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory. 
 He led all these people wonderfully. He was always 
 curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleas- 
 ing frankness and I tormented my brain to get to 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 339 
 
 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 com- 
 moner 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 
 British political life. Some men one sees through and 
 understands, some one cannot see into or round because 
 they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had a 
 sense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, 
 because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. 
 No other contemporary has had that effect upon me. 
 I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with 
 him he was in the big house party at Champneys 
 talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat 
 beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary 
 freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other 
 men have to be treated in a special manner; approached 
 through their own mental dialect, flattered by a minute 
 regard for what they have said and done. Evesham 
 was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I 
 have ever met. The common politicians beside him 
 seemed like rows of stuffy little rooms looking out upon 
 the sea. 
 
 And what was he up to? What did he think we 
 
340 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 were doing with Mankind? That I thought worth 
 knowing. 
 
 I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hart- 
 steins', at a dinner so tremendously floriferous and 
 equipped that we were almost forced into duologues, 
 about the Dossible common constructive purpose in pol- 
 itics. 
 
 " I feel so much," he said, " that the best people in 
 every party converge. We don't differ at Westminster 
 as they do in the country towns. There's a sort of 
 extending common policy that goes on . under every 
 government, because on the whole it's the right thing 
 to do, and people know it. Things that used to be 
 matters of opinion become matters of science and 
 cease to be party questions." 
 
 He instanced education. 
 
 " Apart," said I, " from the religious question." 
 
 " Apart from the religious question." 
 
 He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and 
 went on with his general theme that political conflict 
 was the outcome of uncertainty. " Directly you get a 
 thing established, so that people can say, ' Now this is 
 Right/ with the same conviction that people can say 
 water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's 
 no more to be said. The thing has to be done. . . ." 
 
 And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad 
 and humanely tolerant, posing as the minister of a 
 steadily developing constructive conviction, there are 
 other memories. 
 
 Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, per- 
 suasive, indefatigable, and by all my standards wick- 
 edly perverse, leaning over the table with those in- 
 sistent movements of his hand upon it, or swaying for- 
 ward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a 
 diabolical skill to preserve what are in effect religious 
 tests, tests he must have known would outrage and 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 341 
 
 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 nar- 
 rowness and passion of his side? Or did he see far 
 beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was justi- 
 fied by greater, remoter ends of which I had no inti- 
 mation ? 
 
 They accused him of nepotism. His friends and 
 family were certainly well cared for. In private life 
 he was full of an affectionate intimacy; he pleased by 
 being charmed and pleased. One might think at times 
 there was no more of him than a clever man happily 
 circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation 
 in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought, of 
 imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through 
 a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond question he was 
 great! No other contemporary politician had his qual- 
 ity. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically 
 the great contrast between warm, personal things and 
 the white dream of statecraft. Except that he had it 
 seemed no hot passions, but only interests and fine 
 affections and indolences, he paralleled the conflict of 
 my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but 
 at times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and 
 behind the reality of his life, like some splendid ser- 
 vant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits behind a 
 lesser master's chair. . . . 
 
 8 
 Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of tha 
 
342 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 organised 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 realise that, I 
 could have done no more than follow him blindly. But 
 neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist 
 of my story. And when it came to a study of others 
 among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt 
 increased, until with some at last it was possible to 
 question whether they had any imaginative conception 
 of constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't 
 opaquely accept the world for what it was, and set 
 themselves single-mindedly to make a place for them- 
 selves and cut a figure in it. 
 
 There were some very fine personalities among them: 
 there were the great peers who had administered Egypt, 
 India, South Africa, Framboya Cromer, Kitchener, 
 Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that 
 easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they 
 had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned 
 to the perplexing and exacting problem of the home 
 country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. 
 They wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, 
 but the habit of immediate necessity made them far 
 more eager to arm than to educate, and their experi- 
 ence of heterogeneous controls made them overrate the 
 need for obedience in a homogeneous country. They 
 didn't understand raw men, ill-trained men, uncertain 
 minds, and intelligent women; and these are the things 
 that matter in England. . . . There were also the 
 great business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington 
 (who was now Lord Paddockhurst). My mind re- 
 mained unsettled, and went up and down the scale 
 between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the 
 perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar 
 competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 343 
 
 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 par- 
 allel columns in the liberal press that never abashed 
 him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed 
 the folly in him but I feel I never plumbed his wis- 
 dom. I remember him one day after a lunch at the 
 Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound medita- 
 tion over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that 
 seem to light the whole interior being of a man. 
 " Some day," he said softly, rather to himself than to 
 
 me, and a propos of nothing " some day I will raise 
 
 the country." 
 
 "Why not? " I said, after a pause, and leant across 
 him for the little silver spirit-lamp, to light my 
 cigarette. . . . 
 
 Then the Tories had for another section the ancient 
 creations, and again there were the financial peers, 
 men accustomed to reserve, and their big lawyers, 
 accustomed to well, qualified statement. And below 
 the giant personalities of the party were the young 
 bloods, young, adventurous men of the type of Lord 
 Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa, who 
 had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, 
 interested in aviation, active in army organisation. 
 Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to 
 ideas outside the range of their activities, more ignorant 
 of science than their chaffeurs, and of the quality of 
 English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of 
 school and university by reason of the Gateses and 
 Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, 
 
344 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 light-hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a 
 certain aptitude for bullying. They varied in insensible 
 gradations between the noble sportsmen on the one 
 hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our Pen- 
 tagram club on the other. You perceive how a man 
 might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an 
 average of public serviceability in this miscellany! 
 And mixed up with these, mixed up sometimes in the 
 same man, was the pure reactionary, whose predomi- 
 nant idea was that the village schools should confine 
 themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and 
 courtesying, and be given a holiday whenever beaters 
 were in request. . . . 
 
 I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to 
 Evesham the figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in 
 the largest armchair in the library of Stamford Court 
 after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things 
 I think they are called gout stools. He had been 
 playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak in- 
 step; at lunch he had sat at my table and talked in 
 the overbearing manner permitted to irascible impor- 
 tant 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 cir- 
 culating 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 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 345 
 
 with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable, responded 
 to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a 
 number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, 
 vindictive retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice 
 that are so dear to the forensic mind. Now he reposed. 
 He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open 
 and his head on one side. One whisker was turned 
 back against the comfortable padding. His plump 
 strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his 
 frown was a little assuaged. How tremendously fed up 
 he looked! Honours, wealth, influence, respect, he had 
 them all. How scornful and hard it had made his 
 unguarded expression! 
 
 I note without comment that it didn't even occur 
 to me then to wake him up and ask him what he was 
 up to with mankind. 
 
 9 
 
 One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism 
 in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the 
 Liberals. I realised that slowly and with a mild 
 astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning 
 my own change of opinion. We came at last 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 Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, 
 out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, 
 but it is one of those memories of which the scene and 
 quality remain more vivid than the things said, a 
 memory without any very definite beginning or end. 
 It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and the 
 dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver- 
 adorned, chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim 
 Italian garden. . . . Yes, the beginning of it has 
 
346 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd 
 exceptional little wrangle. 
 
 At first we seem to have split upon the moral 
 quality of the aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that 
 in some way too feminine for me to understand our 
 hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that 
 Champneys distressed her; made her " eager for work 
 and reality again." 
 
 " But aren't these people real? " 
 
 " They're so superficial, so extravagant! " 
 
 I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They 
 seemed the least affected people I had ever met. " And 
 are they really so extravagant? " I asked, and put it to 
 her that her dresses cost quite as much as any other 
 woman's in the house. 
 
 " It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. 
 " It's the scale and spirit of things." 
 
 I questioned that. " They're cynical," said Marga- 
 ret, 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 civilisation. He will come and say 
 little things to me." 
 
 " Offensive things ? " 
 
 " No, politenesses and things. Of course his man- 
 ners 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 347 
 
 " That's just it," said Margaret. 
 
 " Charity," I suggested. 
 
 " I don't like that sort of toleration." 
 
 I was oddly annoyed. " Like eating with publicans 
 and sinners," I said. "No! . . ." 
 
 But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards 
 their condonation displayed, weren't more than the 
 sharp edge of the trouble. " It's their whole position, 
 their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy against 
 the mass of people," said Margaret. " When I sit at 
 dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white 
 reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its won- 
 derful service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem 
 to feel the slums and the mines and the over-crowded 
 cottages stuffed away under the table." 
 
 I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether 
 innocent of unearned increment. 
 
 " But aren't we doing our best to give it back ? " 
 she said. 
 
 I was moved to question her. " Do you really 
 think," I asked, " that the Tories and peers and rich 
 people are to blame for social injustice as we have it 
 to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of 
 light on the Liberal side against darkness on the 
 Tory? " 
 
 " They must know," said Margaret. 
 
 I found myself questioning that. I see now that 
 to Margaret it must have seemed the perversest carp- 
 ing against manifest things, but at the time I was con- 
 centrated simply upon the elucidation of her view 
 and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the 
 sharpest, hardest lines that were possible. It was 
 perfectly clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical 
 element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless 
 untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion with 
 which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in 
 the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking 
 
348 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 peoule drink whatever they 
 pleased ? " 
 
 " Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other 
 men and women ? " 
 
 " But think of the children ! " 
 
 " Ah ! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, 
 its half-cunning, half -silly way of getting at everything 
 in a roundabout fashion. If neglecting children is an 
 offence, and it is an offence, then deal with it as such, 
 but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 349 
 
 something that may possibly in some cases lead to a 
 neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence, 
 punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest 
 drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk 
 at all. Don't intensify the viciousness of the public- 
 house by assuming the place isn't fit for women and 
 children. That's either spite or folly Make the 
 public-house fit for women and children. Make it a 
 real public-house. If we Liberals go on as we are 
 going, we shall presently want to stop the sale of ink 
 and paper because those things tempt men to forgery. 
 We do already threaten the privacy of the post because 
 of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind 
 of thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, 
 stupid. . . ." 
 
 I stopped short and walked to the window and sur- 
 veyed a pretty fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, 
 amidst trim-cut borderings of yew. Beyond, and seen 
 between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of 
 yellow flowers. . . . 
 
 " But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, " is 
 the essence of our work." 
 
 I turned. " There's no prevention but education. 
 There's no antiseptics in life but love and fine think- 
 ing. Make people fine, make fine people. Don't be 
 afraid. These Tory leaders are better people indi- 
 vidually than the average; why cast them for the 
 villains of the piece? The real villain in the piece 
 in the whole human drama is the muddle-headedness, 
 and it matters very little if it's virtuous-minded or 
 wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I 
 could do that I could let all that you call wickedness 
 in the world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. 
 It would matter about as much as a slightly neglected 
 dog in an otherwise well-managed home." 
 
 My thoughts had run away with me. 
 
350 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the pro- 
 f oundest distress. " I can't understand how it is you 
 are coming to see things like this." 
 
 10 
 
 The moods of a thinking man in politics are 
 curiously evasive and difficult to describe. Neither 
 the public nor the historian will permit the statesman 
 moods. He has from the first to assume he has an 
 Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute 
 consistency with that. Those subtle questionings about 
 the very fundamentals of life which plague us all so 
 relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He 
 lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the 
 sight of all men. Those who have no real political 
 experience can scarcely imagine the immense mental 
 and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts 
 and utterances on the one hand and the " thinking- 
 out " process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult 
 to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme 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 
 intellectual autobiography. I have thrown together in 
 the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled 
 with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I 
 can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean 
 values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the 
 bleak lucidities of sleepless nights. . . . 
 
 And yet these things I have struggled with must 
 be thought out, and, to begin with, they must be 
 thought out in this muddled, experimenting way. To 
 go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn 
 your back on the realities you are constantly needing 
 
SEEKING ASSOCIATES 351 
 
 to, feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain 
 vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite of 
 all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of 
 your mind. It is no use dealing with the intricate as 
 though it were simple, to leap haphazard at the first 
 course of action that presents itself; the whole world 
 of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a 
 poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants 
 to " get something done," but the only sane thing to 
 do for the moment is to put aside that poker and take 
 thought and get a better implement. . . . 
 
 One of the results of these fundamental pre- 
 occupations of mine was a curious irritability towards 
 Margaret that I found difficult to conceal. It was one 
 of the incidental cruelties of our position that this 
 should happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I 
 had no power to phrase things for her in a form she 
 could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our " serious '' 
 conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and 
 too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk 
 with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague 
 formulae and sentimental aspirations exasperated me; 
 her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few 
 efforts to indicate my changing attitudes distressing 
 and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right, 
 and that she was always saying wrong. It was that 
 I was struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that 
 was, at any rate, half true, I could not gauge how 
 true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing ignored 
 these elusive elements of truth, and without 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 
 
352 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded 
 of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the 
 finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed 
 them and disposed of them. It was our incurable dif- 
 ferences in habits and gestures of thought coming be- 
 tween 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 in- 
 decisions, slow abandonments, and slow acquisition. 
 
CHAPTER THE THIRD 
 
 SECESSION 
 
 AT last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, 
 decision distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to 
 Evesham and that dream of the right thing triumphant 
 through expression. I determined I would 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 reorganisation, scientific research, literature, 
 criticism, and intellectual development. That was in 
 1909. 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. I was entirely at one with Crupp in 
 perceiving in this an immense opportunity for the 
 things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by con- 
 flict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of jus- 
 tification 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, 
 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. 
 
 353 
 
354 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 play- 
 ing 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 my 
 seat to you. I couldn't have gone into Parliament. . . ." 
 
 " I don't want considerations like that to affect us/' 
 slie interrupted. 
 
 There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her 
 dressing-table, lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it 
 down again. 
 
 " I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her 
 voice, " it were possible that you shouldn't do this." 
 She stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, be- 
 
SECESSION 355 
 
 cause I could feel the effort 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 
 differently," she said. " Everything has gone so 
 differently." 
 
 I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant 
 after the Kinghampstead election, and for the first time 
 I realised just how perplexing and disappointing my 
 subsequent career must have been to her. 
 
 " I'm 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 forces of reaction," I 
 said. " I think I can find work to do better work on 
 that side." 
 
 "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 monopoly of prog- 
 ress." 
 
 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 
 
356 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether 
 confused and demoralising 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 connexion 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 now in 
 terms of personality and imaginative range. ..." 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 sign of admission. 
 
 " What are you going to do ? ' she asked. 
 
 " Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of 
 my breach clear. Then either I must resign or prob- 
 ably this new Budget will lead to a General Election. 
 It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a 
 quarrel," 
 
 "You might, I think, have stayed to fight for the 
 Budget." 
 
SECESSION 357 
 
 " I'm 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 quarrel 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 dissolution I shall stand again." 
 
 "It's political 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. Make a new, more definite place for my- 
 self. You 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 last, " our political work has 
 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. 
 
 " 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. 
 
 There 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 
 
 . 
 
 
 
358 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 her 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 
 or so on the big landing, hesitating between my bed- 
 room and my study. As I did so I heard the soft rustle 
 of her movement and the click of the key in her bed- 
 room 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 think in the same manner ? " 
 
 8 
 
 And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of 
 a prolonged estrangement between us. It was char- 
 acteristic of our relations that we never reopened the 
 discussion. The thing had been in the air for some 
 time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach 
 between us was confessed. My own feelings were curi- 
 ously divided. It is remarkable that my very real affec- 
 tion for Margaret only became evident to me with 
 
SECESSION 359 
 
 this quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle 
 changes. I am quite unaware how 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 quite early in my parliamentary 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 public 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 broken my bonds and taken my line it withered 
 again, and I could think of Margaret with a returning 
 kindliness. 
 
 But I still felt embarrassment 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 
 altogether. 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- 
 
860 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 sympathise, 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 
 to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knew for 
 surely I knew it then ! an immense capacity for loyalty 
 and devotion. There she was with 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. My eyes had never been opened. 
 I was stiff with her and difficult 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. 
 
 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 organisation 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 
 
SECESSION 361 
 
 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 nationalisation, but I did object most strenuously 
 to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and attempt- 
 ing to produce beneficial social results through the pres- 
 sure 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 land-owning 
 class, the class upon which we had hitherto relied not 
 unjustifiably for certain broad, patriotic services and 
 an influence upon our collective judgments that no 
 other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish land- 
 lordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive 
 it to a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently 
 strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in 
 your state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer 
 and the publican until the outraged Liquor Interest 
 has become a national danger. You now propose to 
 do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class 
 which has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions 
 towards revolt, and there is nothing in these or any 
 other of your proposals that shows any sense of the 
 need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders 
 you are ousting. This was the substance of my case, 
 and I hammered at it not only in the House, but in 
 the press. . . . 
 
 The Kinghampstead division remained for some time 
 insensitive to my defection. 
 
 Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the col- 
 umns of the Kingshampstead Guardian, an indignant. 
 
 
362 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 different ends of the constituency, and then I 
 had a correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the 
 photographer, which ended in my seeing a deputation. 
 
 My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen 
 or twenty people. They had had to come upstairs to 
 me and they were manifestly full of indignation and 
 a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, 
 J.P., dressed wholly in black I think to mark his 
 sense of the occasion and curiously suggestive in his 
 respect for my character and his concern for the 
 honourableness of the Kinghampstead Guardian editor, 
 of Mark Antony at the funeral of Caesar. There was 
 Mrs. Bulger, 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 
 young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of 
 dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that 
 stopped halfway between the bowler of this world and 
 the shovel-hat of heaven. There was also a young 
 solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey style, and 
 there was a very little nervous man with a high brow 
 and a face contracting below as though the jawbones 
 and teeth had been taken out and the features 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 upon 
 them at the time. 
 
SECESSION 363 
 
 I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's 
 apologetic but quite definite utterances drew to an 
 end. I had a moment of vision. Behind them I saw 
 the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for 
 public opinion, that are as much public opinion as 
 exists indeed at the present time. The whole process 
 of politics which bulks so solidly in history seemed for 
 that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives 
 above abysms of indifference. . . . 
 
 Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak. 
 
 " Very well," I said, " I won't keep you long in 
 replying. I'll resign if there isn't a dissolution before 
 next February, and if there is I shan't stand again. 
 You don't want the bother and expense of a bye- 
 election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided. 
 But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it 
 will be necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you 
 find my successor the better for the party. The Lords 
 are in a corner; they've got to fight now or never, 
 and I think they will throw out the Budget. Then 
 they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last 
 for years. They have a sort of social discipline, and 
 you haven't. You Liberals will find yourselves with 
 a country behind you, vaguely indignant perhaps, but 
 totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in the 
 matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the 
 British constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, 
 provided only that it is sufficiently absurd. If the 
 King backs the Lords and I don't see why he 
 shouldn't you have no Republican movement 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." 
 
364 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I paused. " I think, gentlemen/' began Parvill, 
 " that we hear all this with very great regret. . . ." 
 
 4 
 
 My estrangement from Margaret stands in my 
 memory now as something that played itself out within 
 the four walls of our house in Radnor Square, which 
 was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and 
 fro between my house and the House of Commons, 
 and the dining-rooms and clubs and offices in which 
 we were preparing our new developments, in a state 
 of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent 
 state, as a chemist would say. I was free now, and 
 greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous 
 sense of released energies. I had got back to the sort 
 of thing I could do, and to the work that had been 
 shaping itself for so long in my imagination. Our 
 purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily con- 
 genial. We meant no less than to organise a new 
 movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate 
 a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a revised 
 and renovated ruling culture. 
 
 For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do 
 whatever I wanted to do. Shoesmith responded to my 
 first advances. We decided to create a weekly paper 
 as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith 
 to collect a group of writers and speakers, including 
 Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two 
 younger men, which should constitute a more or less 
 definite editorial council about me, and meet at a 
 weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co- 
 operations. We marked our claim upon Toryism even 
 in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves 
 collectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches 
 were open to all sorts of guests, and our deliberations 
 were never of a character to control me effectively in 
 
SECESSION 365 
 
 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 jour- 
 nalist, and I had most of the necessary instincts for the 
 business. We meant to make the paper right and 
 good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves 
 at this with extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention 
 to show our political motives too markedly at first, and 
 through all the dust storm and tumult and stress of the 
 political struggle of 1910, we made a little intellectual 
 oasis of good art criticism and good writing. It was 
 the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were 
 destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was 
 the longer game of reconstruction that would begin 
 when the shouting and tumult of that immediate con- 
 flict 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 
 searching 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 humanise and 
 liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of 
 the Poor Law agitation, which had been organised orig- 
 inally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In addition, 
 without any very definite explanation to any one but 
 Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small 
 matter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical 
 quality in our columns. 
 
 That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and character- 
 
366 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 istic of the Blue Weekly. I was now very definitely 
 convinced that much of the confusion and futility of 
 contemporary thought was due to the general need 
 
 of metaphysical training The great mass of 
 
 people and not simply common people, but people 
 active and influential in intellectual things are still 
 quite untrained in the methods of thought and 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 generalisations. 
 They are to fall back on the ancient technicality-- 
 Realists of a crude sort. When I say Realist of course 
 I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not Real- 
 ist in the almost diametrically different sense of oppo- 
 sition to Idealist. Such are the Baileys; such, to 
 take their great prototype, was Herbert Spencer 
 (who couldn't read Kant) ; such are whole regiments 
 of prominent and entirely self-satisfied contemporaries. 
 They go through queer little processes of definition 
 and generalisation and deduction with the completest 
 belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument 
 they are using. They are Realists Cocksurists in 
 matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour. The 
 Baileys having got to this glorious stage in mental de- 
 velopment it is glorious because it has no doubts-, 
 were always talking about training " Experts " to apply 
 the same simple process to all the affairs of mankind. 
 Well, Realism isn't the last word of human wisdom. 
 Modest-minded people, doubtful people, subtle people, 
 and the like the kind of people William James writes 
 of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical 
 
SECESSION 367 
 
 happiness, and are forever after critical of premises 
 and terms. They are truer and less confident. They 
 have reached scepticism and the artistic method. They 
 have emerged into the new Nominalism. 
 
 Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences 
 of intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs 
 of mankind, that the collective mind of this intricate 
 complex modern state can only function properly upon 
 neo-Nominalist lines. This has always been her side 
 of our mental co-operation rather than mine. Her 
 mind has the light movement that goes so often with 
 natural mental power; she has a wonderful art in illus- 
 tration, and, as the reader probably knows already, 
 she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm 
 and vividness. So far there has been no collection of 
 her papers published, but they are to be found not 
 only in the Blue Weekly columns but scattered about 
 the monthlies; many people must be familiar with her 
 style. It was an intention we did much to realise be- 
 fore our private downfall, that we would use the Blue 
 Weekly to maintain a stream of suggestion against 
 crude thinking, and at last scarcely a week passed but 
 some popular distinction, some large imposing gener- 
 alisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or 
 mine. . . . 
 
 I was at great pains to give my philosophical, polit- 
 ical, and social matter the best literary and critical 
 backing we could get in London. I hunted sedulously 
 for good descriptive writing and goood criticism; I was 
 indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if 
 not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the 
 paper, and had a dozen men alert to get me special 
 matter of the sort that draws in the unattached reader. 
 The chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is 
 that it should fall into the hands of some particular 
 school, and this I watched for closely. It seems almost 
 
368 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth 
 of view together in the same critic. So it falls to the 
 wise editor to secure the first and impose the second. 
 Directly I detected the shrill partisan note in our crit- 
 icism, the attempt to puff a poor thing because it was 
 " in the right direction,," or damn a vigorous piece of 
 work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it 
 out with him. Our pay was good enough for that to 
 matter a good deal. . . . 
 
 Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up 
 its neat persistent appeal to the public eye, and before 
 1911 was out, the Blue Weekly was printing twenty 
 pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into all 
 the clubs in London and three-quarters of the country 
 houses where week-end parties gather together. Its 
 sale by newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily. One 
 got more and more the reassuring sense of being dis- 
 cussed, and influencing discussion. 
 
 5 
 
 Our office was at the very top of a big building near 
 the end of Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside 
 my desk, a big undivided window of plate glass, looked 
 out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel 
 Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long 
 sweep of south bank with its shot towers and chimneys, 
 past Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge 
 below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just floated 
 into view on the left against the hotel fa9ade. 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 
 
SECESSION 369 
 
 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, some- 
 times a miracle of crowded details, minutely fine. 
 
 As I think of that view, so variously spacious in 
 effect, I am back there, and this sunlit paper might be 
 lamp-lit and lying on my old desk. I see it all again, 
 feel it all again. In the foreground is a green shaded 
 lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and 
 letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. 
 In the shadows are chairs and another table bearing 
 papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long 
 window seat black in the darkness, and then the cool 
 unbroken spectacle of the window. How often I would 
 watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from 
 me slowly out of sight. The people were black animal- 
 culae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by 
 night, they were phantom face-specks coming, vanish- 
 ing, stirring obscurely between light and shade. 
 
 I recall many hours at my desk in that room before 
 the crisis came, hours full of the peculiar happiness of 
 effective strenuous work. Once some piece of writing 
 went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time until 
 I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp 
 to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of 
 the Tower Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with 
 the dawn. 
 
CHAPTER THE FOURTH 
 
 THE BESETTING OF SEX 
 
 ART is selection and so is most autobiography. But I 
 am concerned with a more tangled business than selec- 
 tion, 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 conception of a constructive aris- 
 tocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a 
 man discovering himself. Incidentally that self-de- 
 velopment 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 Margaret and I began in her dia- 
 lect, and, as I came more and more to use my own, di- 
 verged. 
 
 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 Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to 
 show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way 
 in which these interests break upon the life of a young 
 man under contemporary conditions. I do not think 
 my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance 
 of sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an un- 
 common misadventure in an age of small families; I 
 
 370 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 371 
 
 never came to know any woman at all intimately until 
 I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs 
 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 worshipping towards women 
 I had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though 
 women were things inferior or irrelevant, disturbers 
 in great affairs. For a time Magaret 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 prob- 
 lem 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 man- 
 ner faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had 
 not altogether abolished sex we had at least so circum- 
 scribed and isolated it that it would not have affected 
 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 fundamental 
 obsession of my life returned. The thing stole upon 
 my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how 
 it was changing our long intimacy. I have already 
 compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machia- 
 velli 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 
 
872 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, 
 half in the light, half in the mystery of the shadows, 
 besetting, interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an al- 
 together 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 senti- 
 mental 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 weakling 
 or an equal mate, an unavoidable helper? Is she to 
 be tried and trusted or guarded and controlled, 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. . . . 
 
 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 they, whoever "they" were, 
 had to settle among themselves. That sort of disre- 
 gard was possible then. But even before 1906 there 
 were endless intimations that the dams holding back 
 great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We 
 political schemers were ploughing wider than any one 
 had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruc- 
 tion. We had also, we realised, to plough deeper. We 
 had to plough down at last to the passionate 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 sufficient to protect the 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 373 
 
 House from one clamorous aspect of the new problem. 
 The members went about Westminster with an odd, new 
 sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept 
 up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an iso- 
 lated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that 
 would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one 
 who sought more than comfort in the matter that the 
 streams of women and sympathisers and money forth- 
 coming 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 just as unsatisfactory a disorder 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 Suf- 
 fragettes. I don't propose to tell here of that amaz- 
 ing campaign, wih its absurdities and follies, its cour- 
 age and devotion. There were aspects of that un- 
 quenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and 
 aspects that were absolutely pitiful. It was unreason- 
 able, unwise, and, except for its one central in- 
 sistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly 
 effective. The very incoherence of the demand wit- 
 nessed, I think, to the forces that lay behind it. It 
 wasn't a simple argument based on a simple assump- 
 tion; it was the first crude expression of a great mass 
 and mingling of convergent feelings, of a widespread, 
 confused persuasion among modern educated women 
 that the conditions of their relations with men were op- 
 pressive, 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 vin- 
 dictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things 
 they had every reason to hate. . . . 
 
 I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great 
 
374 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Barham's, and Lord Barham and I carne 
 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 multitude 
 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 remember the ef- 
 fect of their faces upon me. It was quite diiferent 
 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 organisers 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-tem- 
 pered and sympathetic. When at last we got within 
 sight of the House the square was a seething seat of 
 excited people, and the array of police on horse and 
 on foot might have been assembled for a revolutionary 
 outbreak. There were dense masses of people up 
 Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The 
 scuffle that ended in the arrests was the poorest explo- 
 sion to follow such stupendous preparations. . . . 
 
 3 
 
 Later on in that year the women began a new at- 
 tack. 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 reproach- 
 fully as we went to and fro. They were women of all 
 sorts, though, of course, the independent worker-class 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 375 
 
 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 re- 
 call, grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant 
 things. Some of those women looked defiant, some 
 timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of adventure, 
 some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply 
 never ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the 
 supply might halt or cease. I found that continual 
 siege of the legislature extraordinarily impressive 
 infinitely more impressive than the feeble-forcible 
 " ragging " of the more militant section. I thought 
 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 evoked an etiquette of salutation. 
 
 4 
 
 There was a tendency, even on the part of its sym- 
 pathisers, 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 thrust 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. . . ." 
 
376 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's 
 insufficient children will starve amidst harvests of ear- 
 less 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 magnificent preludes, vast 
 intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality he 
 has so stupendously summoned he bolts back to lit- 
 tleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he con- 
 tinues to admit, but without, he adds, any risk of up- 
 setting his week-end visits, his morning cup of tea. . . . 
 
 The discussion of the relations of men and women 
 disturbs every one. It reacts upon the private life of 
 every one who attempts it. And at any particular time 
 only a small minority have a personal interest in chang- 
 ing the established state of affairs. Habit and inter- 
 est are in a constantly recruited majority against con- 
 scious change and adjustment in these matters. Drift 
 rules us. The great mass of people, and an overwhelm- 
 ing proportion of influential people, are people who 
 have banished their dreams and made their compromise. 
 Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to 
 be thought about. They have given up any aspira- 
 tions for intense love, their splendid offspring, for keen 
 delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an 
 uncritical sense of righteousness as their compensation. 
 It's a settled affair with them, a settled, dangerous af- 
 fair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest 
 reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once 
 said to the Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing 
 the problem of a universal marriage and divorce law 
 throughout the Empire, " I am for leaving all these 
 things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice, 
 " Leave them alone ! Leave them all alone ! " 
 
 That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 377 
 
 of suppressed passion, and presently, against all our 
 etiquette, he got up and went out. 
 
 For some years after my marriage, I too was for 
 leaving them alone. I developed a dread and dislike 
 for romance, for emotional music, for the human figure 
 in art turning my heart to landscape. I wanted to 
 sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, 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 
 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 fact, falling into the attitude of 
 the normal decent man. 
 
 And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible 
 moralised 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 penalises abandonment 
 to love so abundantly and so heavily, that power, in- 
 fluence and control fall largely to unencumbered peo- 
 ple 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 
 beautyblind, 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 af- 
 fairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this 
 most fundamental aspect of existence. . . . 
 
378 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 
 
 It wasn't, 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 led me to the heretical views I have in the last five 
 years dragged from the region of academic and timid 
 discussion into the field of practical politics. Those 
 influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end, 
 and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, 
 but it was a broader and colder view of things that first 
 determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment 
 of Motherhood in some form or other upon British Im- 
 perialism. Now that I am exiled from the political 
 world, it is possible to estimate just how effectually that 
 grafting has been done. 
 
 I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristoc- 
 racy and a universal education grew to paramount im- 
 portance 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 organisation. A sporadic discussion of 
 these aspects had been going on for years, a Eugenic 
 society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, 
 and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples 
 of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermit- 
 tent scolding of prosperous childless people in general 
 one never addressed them in particular nothing was 
 done towards arresting those adverse processes. Al- 
 most against my natural inclination, I found myself 
 forced to go into these things. I came to the con- 
 clusion that under modern conditions the isolated 
 private family, based on the existing marriage contract, 
 was failing in its work. It wasn't producing enough 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 379 
 
 children, and children good enough and well trained 
 enough for the demands of the developing civilised 
 state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and de- 
 caying in its intimate substance, and unless it was pres- 
 ently to collapse, some very extensive and courageous 
 reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system 
 of pairing, qualified more and more by worldly discre- 
 tions, no longer secures a young population numerous 
 enough or good enough for the growing needs and pos- 
 sibilities of our Empire. Statecraft 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 unher- 
 alded, unadvocated, and sits at every legislative board. 
 Every improvement is provisional except the improve- 
 ment of the race, and it became more and more doubt- 
 ful to me if we were improving the race at all ! Splen- 
 did and beautiful and courageous people must come to- 
 gether 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 child- 
 less and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men 
 whom need and ignorance and the treacherous pres- 
 sure 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 car- 
 nivorous giant and decided to go on living happily by 
 cutting him dead. . . . 
 
 The problem the developing civilised 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 
 
380 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 the children, in which all are dependent upon him, sub- 
 ordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his 
 fortunes up or down, does not supply anything like the 
 best conceivable conditions. We want to modernise the 
 family footing altogether. An enormous premium both 
 in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon volun- 
 tary childlessness, and enormous inducements are held 
 out to women to subordinate instinctive and selective 
 preferences to social and material considerations. 
 
 The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the 
 old tradition of the family is this: that beneath the 
 pretence that nothing is changing, secretly and with all 
 the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is changed. 
 Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most 
 among just the most efficient and active and best 
 adapted classes in the community. The species is re- 
 cruited from among its failures and from among less 
 civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in ef- 
 fect burning the best of their possible babies in the 
 furnaces that run the machinery. In the United 
 States the native Anlgo-American strain has scarcely 
 increased at all since 1830, and in most Western Euro- 
 pean countries the same is probably true of the ablest 
 and most energetic elements in the community. The 
 women of these classes still remain legally and prac- 
 tically dependent and protected, with the only natural 
 excuse for their dependence gone. . 
 
 The modern world becomes an immense 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, decivilised 
 fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the 
 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 381 
 
 heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly prolifera- 
 tion of Brorastead over again, in lives instead of in 
 houses. 
 
 What is the good, what is the common sense, of recti- 
 fying boundaries, pushing research and discovery, build- 
 ing cities, improving all the facilities of life, making 
 great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless decadence 
 remains the quality of the biological outlook ? . . . 
 
 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, is 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 
 *est content to be ruled by the uncriticised traditions 
 of a barbaric age. 
 
 Now, it seems to me that the solution of this prob- 
 lem is also the solution of the woman's individual prob- 
 lem. 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 
 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 sterilisa- 
 tion of their essentially social function; they must be- 
 come more and more subordinated as individually in- 
 dependent citizens to the collective purpose. Or, to 
 express the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly or- 
 
382 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ganised, 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 citizen- 
 ship and freedom of women and the public endowment 
 of motherhood. 
 
 After two generations of confused and experimental 
 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 subordina- 
 tion to an individual man with an unlimited power of 
 control over this intimate and supreme duty is a deg- 
 radation. No contemporary woman of education put 
 to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can 
 make upon her but the claim of her freely-given devo- 
 tion to him. She wants the reality of her choice and 
 she means " family " while a man too often means only 
 possession. This alters the spirit of the family rela- 
 tionships fundamentally. Their form remains just 
 what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, de- 
 sirable, and incidentally a child-producing, chattel. 
 Against these time-honoured ideas the new spirit of 
 womanhood struggles in shame, astonishment, bitter- 
 ness, and tears. . . . 
 
 I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no 
 doubts in the matter. I want this coddling and brow- 
 beating of women to cease. I want to see women come 
 in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the col- 
 lective purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, 
 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 primar- 
 ily for them and for their protection and the good of 
 the race, and not for men's satisfactions. 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 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 383 
 
 in no way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they 
 have chosen. The social consciousness of women seems 
 to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine of 
 wealth for the constructive 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 re- 
 sponsible 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 rear- 
 rangement of the social unit, untried in human experi- 
 ence 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 that is a sec- 
 ondary consideration. I do not believe that particular 
 assertion myself, because I am convinced that a prac- 
 tical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass 
 of civilised 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 organised civilisa- 
 tion from ending in biological decay. The public En- 
 dowment of Motherhood is the only possible way which 
 will ensure the permanently developing civilised state 
 at which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is 
 reached in the life-history of a civilisation when either 
 this reconstruction must be effected or the quality and 
 morale of the population prove insufficient for the needs 
 of the developing organisation. It is not so nnich 
 moral decadence that will destroy us as moral inadapta- 
 bility. The old code fails under the new needs. The 
 only alternative to this profound reconstruction is a 
 decay in human quality and social collapse. Either 
 this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by 
 our civilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase 
 of disorder and crumble and perish, as Rome perished, 
 
 
384 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim Fathers 
 dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may 
 be in the attempt therefore, there is no alternative to 
 the attempt. 
 
 6 
 
 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 po- 
 litical 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 recon- 
 structions on which my life was set, that did not mat- 
 ter. It only implied that I should take them up with 
 deliberate caution. There was no release because of 
 risk or difficulty. 
 
 The question of whether I should commit myself to 
 some open project in this direction was going on in my 
 mind concurrently with my speculations about a change 
 of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of 
 music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I 
 would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would at- 
 tempt to biologise Imperialism. 
 
 I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous 
 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-experi- 
 enced people out of touch with the younger generation 
 imagined, that to phrase the thing in a parliamentary 
 fashion, " something might be done in the constitu- 
 encies " with the Endowment of Motherhood forthwith, 
 provided only that it was made perfectly clear that 
 anything a sane person could possibly intend by " moral- 
 ity " was left untouched by these proposals. 
 
THE BESETTING OF SEX 385 
 
 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 Weekly, 
 leading up to a tentative and generalised 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 Weekly's 
 career, came the Handitch election, and I was forced 
 by the clamour of my antagonist, and very willingly 
 forced, to put my conviction: to the test. I returned 
 triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endow- 
 ment of Motherhood .is part of my open profession and 
 with the full approval of the party press. Applauding 
 benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to the 
 table between the whips. 
 
 That second time I took the oath I was not one of a 
 crowd of new members, but salient, an event, a symbol 
 of profound changes and new purposes in the national 
 life. 
 
 Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in 
 a sense my book ends altogether. For the rest is but 
 to tell how I was swept out of this great world of po- 
 litical possibilities. I close this Third Book as I opened 
 it, with an admission of difficulties and complexities, 
 but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to 
 confess them unsurmounted and still entangled. 
 
 Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought 
 to show my growing realisation that the essential qual- 
 ity of all political and social effort is the development 
 of a great race mind behind the interplay of individual 
 lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis 
 of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives 
 
 
 
386 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 must be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh 
 release and further ennoblement of individual lives. . . . 
 
 I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind 
 play in this book the part United Italy plays in Machi- 
 avelli's Prince. I have called it the hinterland of real- 
 ity, shown it accumulating a dominating truth and 
 tightness which must force men's now sporadic motives 
 more and more into a disciplined and understanding 
 relation to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I 
 sought to serve this great clarification of our con- 
 fusions. . . . 
 
 Now I come back to personality and the story of my 
 self -betrayal, and how it is I have had to leave all that 
 far-reaching scheme of mine, a mere project and be- 
 ginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases 
 them. 
 
BOOK THE FOURTH 
 ISABEL 
 
 

 
CHAPTER THE FIRST 
 
 LOVE AND SUCCESS 
 
 I COME to the most evasive and difficult part of my 
 story, 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 acci- 
 dent. There was a vein in our natures that led to this 
 collapse, gradually and at this point and that it crept 
 to the surface. One may indeed see our destruction 
 for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if 
 we had been shot dead in the form of a catastrophe 
 as disconnected and conclusive as a meteoric stone fall- 
 ing 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 thinking and our habitual attitudes ; it had, 
 for all its impulsive effect, a certain necessity. We 
 might have escaped no doubt, as two men at a hundred 
 yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a con- 
 siderable time and escape. But it isn't particularly 
 reasonable to talk of the contrariety of fate if they 
 both get hit. 
 
 Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for sev- 
 eral years of friendship, and not quite unwittingly so. 
 
 In writing this, moreover, there is a very great dif- 
 ficulty in steering my way between two equally unde- 
 sirable tones in the telling. In the first place I do 
 not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence 
 
390 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I am very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got 
 Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel 
 unquenchable regrets, but I am not sure whether, 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 the things we have done. We are two bad peo- 
 ple if there is to be any classification of good and bad 
 at all, 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. When I am a 
 little tired after a morning's writing I find the faint 
 suggestion getting into every other sentence 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 al- 
 together out of my book that I 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 busi- 
 ness 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 analyse that want or account 
 for its extreme intensity. 
 
 I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief 
 in a sort of wild Tightness about any love that is fraught 
 with beauty, but that eludes me and vanishes again, and 
 is not, I feel, to be put with the real veracities and 
 righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and 
 menageries of human reason. . . . 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 391 
 
 We have already a child, and Margaret was child- 
 less, and I find myself prone to insist upon that, as if 
 it was a justification. But, indeed, when we became 
 lovers there was small thought of Eugenics between us. 
 Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive passion. 
 Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with 
 us, but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a 
 moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any de- 
 cent justification for us whatever at that the story 
 must stand. 
 
 But if there is no justification there is at least a very 
 effective excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. 
 The evasion of that passionately thorough exposition 
 of belief and of the grounds of morality, which is the 
 outcome of the mercenary religious compromises of the 
 late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of anything 
 but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our 
 literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and pro- 
 tected muddle-headedness, leaves mentally vigorous peo- 
 ple with relatively enormous possibilities of destruction 
 and little effective help. They find themselves con- 
 fronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly com- 
 monplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up 
 Christianity, the cult of a " Bromsteadised " deity, dif- 
 fused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from exam- 
 ination 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. We are forced to be laws 
 unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is in- 
 evitable 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, 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 unwritten law of 
 
392 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 wasted half a dozen 
 statesmen on this score; she would, I believe, reject 
 Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it wonderful 
 that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the 
 cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a 
 necessary social element? It destroys no vice; for vice 
 hides by nature. It not only rewards dulness as if it 
 were positive virtue, but sets an enormous premium 
 upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I 
 am teling this side of my story with so much explicit- 
 ness. 
 
 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. When- 
 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 
 cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was read- 
 ing and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of the 
 day. In her shameless liking for me she was as nat- 
 ural as a savage. She would exercise me vigorously 
 at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her back in 
 the afternoon, or guide me for some long ramble that 
 dodged the suburban and congested patches of the con- 
 stituency 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 criti- 
 cised my game with a motherly solicitude for my wel- 
 fare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked, 
 We discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps 
 of history, pictures, social questions, socialism, the pol- 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 393 
 
 icy of the Government. She was young and most un- 
 evenly informed, but she was amazingly sharp and 
 quick and good. Never before in my life had I known 
 a girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had 
 never dreamt there was such talk in the world. King- 
 hamstead became a lightless place when she went to 
 Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not have 
 precipitated my abandonment of the seat! 
 
 She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that cer- 
 tainly weighed with me when presently after my breach 
 with the Liberals various little undergraduate societies 
 began to ask for lectures and discussions. I favoured 
 Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. 
 At that time I think we neither of us suspected the pos- 
 sibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake in the 
 path before us. It seemed to us that we had the 
 quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she 
 was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and 
 friend. People smiled indulgently even Margaret 
 smiled indulgently at our attraction for one another. 
 
 Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays 
 among easy-going, liberal-minded people. For the 
 most part, there's no sort of harm, as people say, in 
 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 Oxford days an inti- 
 mation that should have set me thinking, and I suppose 
 discreetly disentangling myself. It was one Sunday 
 
394 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the 
 trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blos- 
 som, and fresh with 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 
 criticised 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 Pem- 
 broke, 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 turned 
 to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her 
 dear cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and 
 barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of 
 the trees behind me. And something an infinite ten- 
 derness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, 
 like nothing I had ever felt before. It had a quality 
 of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and 
 concentrated life another human being had really thrust 
 into my being and gripped my very heart. 
 
 Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. 
 Then I turned back and addressed myself a little stiffly 
 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 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 395 
 
 year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion 
 between us. I have told how definitely I put my imag- 
 ination into harness in those matters at my marriage, 
 and I was living now in a world of big interests, where 
 there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate 
 love-making. I suppose 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 do" and set invisible 
 bars between themselves and all the wives in the world. 
 Perhaps that is the way to live. Perhaps there is no 
 other method than this effectual annihilation of half 
 and the most sympathetic and attractive half of the 
 human beings in the world, so far as any frank inter- 
 course is concerned. I am quite convinced anyhow that 
 such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into 
 the sense of possession, such untrammeled conversation 
 with an invisible, implacable limit set just where the 
 intimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable compromise. If 
 men and women are to go so far together, they must 
 be free to go as far as they may want to go, without 
 the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On 
 the basis of the accepted codes 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 un- 
 folding. She attracted men, and she encouraged 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 
 
396 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 girl. There was even an engagement amidst the pro* 
 tests 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 in- 
 sincere 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 went 
 up to Oxford pretty definitely to see her though I 
 combined it with one or two other engagements some- 
 where in February. Insensibly she had become im- 
 portant enough for me to make journeys for her. 
 
 But we didn't 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 she 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 
 satisy 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 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 397 
 
 rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, 
 to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then 
 back by way of Merton to the Botanic Gardens and 
 Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she 
 got almost her only chance with me. 
 
 " Last months at Oxford," she said. 
 
 "And then?" I asked. 
 
 " I'm coming to London," she said. 
 
 "To write?" 
 
 She was silent for a moment. Then she said 
 abruptly, with that quick flush of hers and a sudden 
 boldness in her eyes: " I'm going to work with you. 
 Why shouldn't I?" 
 
 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 was 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. 
 I've never properly weighed how immensely my vanity 
 was gratified by her clear preference for me. Nor can 
 
 
398 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I for a moment determine how much deliberate inten- 
 tion 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 
 with other people, flashes of temptation no telling is 
 possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty 
 and passion would not have taken me. But between 
 myself and Isabel things were incurably complicated 
 by the intellectual sympathy 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 care- 
 lessly sure of understanding or to whom I could listen 
 so easily and fully. She gave me, with an extraordi- 
 nary 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 infinite, soft familiarity. 
 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 was the only Oxford woman who took a first 
 that year. 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 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 399 
 
 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 Victoria and installing 
 as 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 
 the manner 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 Margaret'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 forgotten the 
 little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over 
 our last meeting at Oxford. Everything seemed natural 
 and easy between us in those days; a little unconven- 
 tional, 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 
 
400 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 frequent. I won't pretend things were not keenly 
 personal between us, but they had an air of being in- 
 nocently 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 dis- 
 tance for a long time until within a year of the 
 Handitch election. 
 
 After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too 
 "intellectual" for comfortable control, Isabel was 
 taken up by the Balfes in a less formal and compro- 
 mising manner, and week-ended with them and their 
 cousin Leonora Sparling, 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 Amazonian 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. He 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 passion- 
 ately in love. 
 
 The change came so entirely without warning or 
 intention that I find it impossible now to tell the order 
 of its phases. What disturbed pebble started the ava- 
 lanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 401 
 
 barriers between us and this masked aspect of life had 
 been wearing down unperceived. 
 
 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 
 
402 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 start, no doubt, all sorts of new topics, and open 
 no end of attractive vistas. . . . You can't, you know, 
 always go about in a state of pupillage." 
 
 " I don't think I can," said Isabel. " But it's only 
 just recently 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 keeping opaque to each other then, I cannot 
 remember. But it must have been quite soon after 
 this that we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew 
 Gardens, with the curtains up and the barriers down, 
 and the thing that had happened plain before our eyes. 
 I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We 
 just assumed the new footing. . . . 
 
 It was a day early in that year I think in January, 
 because there was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and 
 we noted that only two other people had been to the 
 Pagoda that day. I've 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 remember 
 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 long and frank an intimacy between us 
 that we talked far more like brother and sister or hus- 
 band and wife than two people engaged in the war of 
 the sexes. We 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 
 is curious, very little passion. But there was also, in 
 spite of the perplexities we faced, an immense satis- 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 403 
 
 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. 
 
 I've 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 wicked 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 waves 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 
 degree lovers. 
 
 Now, what I should 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 was in itself intrinsically wrong. I've 
 told with the fullest particularity just all that I was 
 taught or found out for myself in these matters, and 
 Isabel's reading and thinking, and the fierce silences of 
 her governesses and the breathless warnings of teachers, 
 and all the social and religious influences that had been 
 brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same 
 void of conviction. The code had failed with us alto- 
 
 
404 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 gether. We didn't for a moment consider anything 
 but the expediency of what we both, for all our quiet 
 faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do. 
 
 Well, here you have the state of mind of whole bri- 
 gades 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 quite 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 
 civilised and intelligently planned community 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! Multitudes 
 of us are trying to run this complex modern community 
 on a basis of " Hush " without explaining to our chil- 
 dren or discussing with them anything about love and 
 marriage at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in 
 enforced darknesses and silences. We are living upon 
 an ancient tradition which everybody doubts and no- 
 body has ever analysed. We affect a tremendous and 
 cultivated shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the 
 most arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What did 
 ensue with us, for example? On the one hand was a 
 great desire, robbed of any appearance 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 tho 
 retrospect that we have been able to grasp something 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 405 
 
 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! 
 Well, there is a phase in every love affair, a sort of 
 heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable ad- 
 ditions 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 
 just 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. With 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. 
 
 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. 
 
 5 
 
 But before things came to that pass, some months 
 and many phases and a sudden journey to America 
 intervened. 
 
 " 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 ! " 
 
 
406 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Just because we may be found out." 
 
 "Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found 
 out with you. I'm afraid I'd be proud." 
 
 " Wait till it happens." 
 
 There followed a struggle of immense insincerity 
 between us. It is hard to tell who urged and who 
 resisted. 
 
 She came to me one night to the editorial room of 
 the Blue Weekly, and argued and kissed me with wet 
 salt lips, and wept in my arms; she told me that now 
 passionate longing for me and my intimate life pos- 
 sessed her, so that she could not work, could not think 
 could not endure other people for the love of me. . . . 
 
 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 Britten 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 my explanations to Margaret, 
 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 with ungovernable sorrow. I wept tears. It 
 was inexpressibly queer and ridiculous and, good God! 
 how I hated my fellow-passengers ! 
 
 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 
 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 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 401r 
 
 civilisation 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 realisation 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 you 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 
 having dared, I can't tell I can but hint of just one 
 aspect, of what an amazing lark it's 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 meetings, of 
 
 
408 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 sundering difficulties evaded and overcome, signify 
 here? Or what can it convey to say that one looked 
 deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throb 
 and beat, or gripped soft hair softly in a trembling 
 hand? Robbed 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 effected 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 altogether. We loved 
 to the uttermost. Neither of us could have loved 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. 
 
 My return to the office sticks out in my memory 
 with an extreme vividness, because of the wild eagle of 
 pride that screamed within me. It was Tuesday morn- 
 ing, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet 
 except 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. 
 
 He looked at my excited face with those red-brown 
 eyes of his. Silently I defied him to speak his mind. 
 
 "Where did you turn back? " he said at last. 
 
 / 
 6 
 
 I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember, 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 409 
 
 \ny first positive lies to Margaret 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 with 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." 
 
 I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my 
 heart, too undifferentiated to be even a definite sense 
 of guilt or meanness. I think it was chiefly 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 end 
 our estrangement. She put herself so that my arm 
 came caressingly about her. 
 
 
410 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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'd been away six years." 
 
 We went arm in arm into our 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 scrutinising me. " Why did you 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. " You were 
 restless in Venice. You said it was restlessness took 
 you to America." 
 
 Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly 
 to her tea things, and poured needless water from the 
 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 table 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. 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 411 
 
 " 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. " My 
 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 
 gaze. The thought of Isabel's darkly shining eyes 
 seemed like a physical 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 effect 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 beginning 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." 
 
412 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I was profoundly 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. But I went on talk- 
 ing. It's the grim irony in the lives 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 admit doubt and imperfections. 
 They have to go on talking. And I was now so accus- 
 tomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications, 
 restatements, and confirmations. . . . 
 
 Margaret and I dined together at home. She made 
 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, Margaret," I repeated, and walked very 
 deliberately and with a kind of sham preoccupation to 
 the door. 
 
 1 4id not look at her, but I could feel her standing, 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 413 
 
 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. 
 
 7 
 
 The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; 
 and we tried to pretend that nothing had changed ex- 
 cept a small matter between us. We believed quite 
 honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this 
 thing that had happened from any reaction at all, save 
 perhaps through some magically enhanced vigour in 
 our work, upon the world about us ! Seen in retro- 
 spect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; 
 within a week I realised it; but that does not alter 
 the fact that we did believe as much, and that people 
 who are deeply 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 together. 
 Then they will count the cost, as we two had to do. 
 
 I am telling a story, and not propounding theories 
 in this book; and chiefly 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. The 
 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 
 doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little 
 either of us troubled about the established rights or 
 wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an atom of respect 
 for them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public 
 morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in 
 
414 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 defence that they are very bad guardians provocative 
 guardians. . . . And when at last there came a claim 
 against us that had an effective 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, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed 
 how much I had forgotten her. In my contempt for 
 vulgarised and conventionalised 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, 
 unsuspecting. 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 re- 
 grets came in the darkness, the daylight brought an 
 obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, 
 we declared, " pull the thing off." Margaret must not 
 know. Margaret 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 realise 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 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 415 
 
 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 
 frankness of soul was all against the masks and false- 
 hoods 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 snatch back one's hand 
 from the limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch. 
 
 Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful 
 thing, if it develops no continuing and habitual inti- 
 macy. We were always meeting, and most gloriously 
 loving and beginning and then we had to snatch at 
 remorseless 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. We had 
 achieved I give the ugly phrase that expresses the 
 increasing discolouration 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 
 
416 THE NEW MACHIAVELL1 
 
 us. ... I wonder what might have happened if at 
 that time we had given it up. . . . We propounded it, 
 we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpower- 
 ing passion for one another reduced that meeting to 
 absurdity. . . . 
 
 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 quality of our minds 
 that physical love without children is a little weak, 
 timorous, more than a little shameful. With imagina- 
 tive people there very speedily comes a time when that 
 realisation is inevitable. 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 deal- 
 ing 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, lit- 
 tle shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across 
 that vivid and luminous cell. 
 
 8 
 
 The Handitch election flung me suddenly into promi- 
 nence. 
 
 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 sufficiently present in his mind 
 for my purpose already. Huge stacks of journalism 
 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 Weekly; I had never as yet been on the London 
 hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist and 
 
 
LOVE AND SUCCESS 417 
 
 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 affair. I 
 realised then, as a man comes to do, how much one can 
 still grow after seven and twenty. In the second elec- 
 tion I was a man taking hold of things; at Kingham- 
 stead I had been simply a young candidate, a party 
 unit, led about the constituency, told to do this and 
 that, and finally washed in by the great Anti-Imperial- 
 ist flood, like a starfish rolling up a beach. 
 
 My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the 
 party, and I do not think I should have got the chance 
 of Handitch 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 Liberal victories and its Liberal major- 
 ity of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless con- 
 test. The Liberal dissensions and the belated but by 
 no means contemptible Socialist candidate were provi- 
 dential interpositions. I think, however, the conduct 
 of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight 
 for me, did count tremendously in my favour. "We 
 aren't going to win, perhaps/' said Crupp, " but we are 
 going to talk." And until the very eve of victory, we 
 treated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoard- 
 ing. And so it was the Endowment of Motherhood as 
 a practical form of Eugenics got into English politics. 
 
 Plutus, 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 Family exists for the good of the chil- 
 dren," I said ; " is that queer ? " 
 
 " Not when you explain it but they won't let you 
 explain it. And about marriage ? " 
 
 " I'm all right about marriage trust me." 
 
418 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " Of course, if you had children/' said Plutus, rather 
 inconsiderately. . . . 
 
 They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering 
 rag call the Handitch Sentinel, with a string 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 extra- 
 ordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprece- 
 dented 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 sub* 
 ject, and I revised this carefully and put it on the book" 
 stalls within three days. It sold enormously and 
 brought me bushels of letters. We issued over three 
 thousand in Handitch alone. At meeting after meet- 
 ing 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 
 project should come from our side!" 
 
 But it was only with the declaration of the poll that 
 my battle was won. No one expected more than t\ 
 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 pio- 
 neers in sanely bold constructive projects. 
 
 I came up to London with a weary but rej oicing Mar- 
 garet by the night train. 
 
CHAPTER THE SECOND 
 
 THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 
 
 To any one who did not know of that glowing secret 
 between Isabel and myself, I might well have appeared 
 at that time the most successful and enviable of men. 
 I had recovered rapidly from an uncongenial start in 
 political lif e ; I had become a considerable force through 
 the Blue Weekly, and was shaping an increasingly in- 
 fluential body of opinion; I had re-entered Parliament 
 with quite dramatic distinction, and in spite of a cer- 
 tain faltering on the part of the orthodox Conserva- 
 tives towards the bolder elements in our propaganda, 
 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 that, given a Conservative victory, I should 
 be assured of office. The world opened out to me 
 brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape in 
 my mind, always more concrete, always more practic- 
 able; the years ahead seemed falling into order, shin- 
 ing with the credible promise of immense achievement. 
 
 And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, 
 was 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 pervaded 
 by the discussion of our situation. It had innumer- 
 able aspects. It was very present to us that we wanted 
 to be together as much as possible we were beginning 
 
 419 
 
420 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 to long very much for actual living together in the 
 same house, so that one could come as it were care- 
 lessly unawares upon the other, busy perhaps about 
 some trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in 
 the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively 
 sterile passion, you must remember, outside it, alto- 
 gether 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 she 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 remem- 
 ber the other time." 
 
 She didn't answer for a moment or so. and stood with 
 face averted. 
 
 " It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. " If I 
 
 see her smiling there like a queen by your side ! 
 
 She did last time. I remember." She caught at a 
 sob and dashed her hand across her face impatiently. 
 ** Jealous fool, mean and petty, j ealous fool ! . . . 
 Good luck, old man, to you! You're going to win. 
 But I don't want to see the end of it all the same. . . ." 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 421 
 
 " Good-bye ! " said I, clasping her hand as some sup- 
 porter 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 
 away I went to Isabel's flat and found her white and 
 worn, with the stain of secret weeping about her eyes. 
 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. 
 
 "My dear," I whispered, "it's nothing without 
 you nothing ! " 
 
 We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she 
 slipped from my hold. " Look ! " she said, smiling 
 like winter sunshine. " I've had in all the morning 
 papers the pile of them, and you resounding." 
 
 " It's more than I dared hope." 
 
 " Or I." 
 
 She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and 
 then she was sobbing in my arms. " The bigger you 
 are the more you show," she said " the more we are 
 parted. I know, I know " 
 
 I held her close to me, making no answer. 
 
 Presently she became still. " Oh, well," she said, 
 and wiped her eyes and sat down on the little sofa by 
 the fire; and I sat down beside her. 
 
 " I didn't know all there was in love," she said, star* 
 ing 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. 
 
 " You've done a great thing this time," she said. 
 " Handitch will make you." 
 
 " It opens big chances," I said. " But why are you 
 weeping, dear one? " 
 
 " Envy," she said, " and love." 
 
 "You're not lonely?" 
 
 " I've plenty to do and lots of people." 
 
422 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 "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 
 
 something 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? You're 
 my councillor, my colleague, my right hand, the secret 
 soul of my life " 
 
 " And I want to darn your socks," she said, smiling 
 back at me. 
 
 "You're insatiable." 
 
 She smiled. " No," she said. " I'm not insatiable, 
 Master. But I'm a woman in love. And I'm finding 
 out what I want, and what is necessary to me and 
 what I can't have. That's all." 
 
 "We get a lot." 
 
 "We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for 
 the things we like, Master. It's very evident we've got 
 nearly 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- 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 423 
 
 thing. Yes everything. You didn't mean it, Master; 
 you didn't know any more than I did when I began, 
 but love 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 abruptly. 
 
 " 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 hunger. Your children, and home iwith 
 you. Really, continually you! That's the trouble. . . . 
 I can't have 'em, Master, 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, Master, never 
 you fear. But to-day I'm crying out with all my be- 
 ing. This election You're going up; you're 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 some- 
 how 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 was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and 
 its intimations were clear and strong. 
 
 "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 toe ? " 
 
424 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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 might 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 
 things that asked for life and were refused. They 
 clamour to me. It's like a little fist beating at my 
 heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold 
 hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my heart and my 
 lord ! " She was holding my arm with both 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 your child on my knee and you be- 
 side me never, and I am a woman and your 
 lover! . , ." 
 
 But the profound impossibility of our relation was 
 now becoming more and more apparent to us. We 
 found ourselves seeking justification, clinging passion- 
 ately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impos- 
 sible and fated. We wanted quite intensely to live 
 together and have a child, but also we wanted very 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 425 
 
 many other things that were incompatible with these 
 desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our 
 political and intellectual ambitions against those inti- 
 mate 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 most part a value set 
 upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our 
 other interests ; to go out of the world and live in isola- 
 tion seemed to us like killing the best parts of each 
 other; we loved the sight of each other engaged finely 
 and characteristically, we 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 des- 
 perately would leave us nothing in the world 
 to do. We wanted children indeed passionately, 
 but children with every helpful chance in the 
 world, and children born in scandal would be 
 handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a 
 home, and not a solitude. 
 
 And when we were at this stage of realisation, began 
 the intimations that we were found out, and that scan- 
 dal 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 peo- 
 ple will circulate. It came to Isabel almost simul- 
 taneously 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." 
 
426 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 
 active campaign in the Expurgator, and it would be 
 altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of 
 any personal irregularity. It was just because of the 
 manifest and challenging respectability of my position 
 that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had 
 done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, 
 and scandal 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 the panic of the 
 undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett 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 re- 
 newed, and had offered far too wide a scope and too 
 tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be 
 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 unnerving realisation that rumour and scandal are 
 afoot about one. Abruptly one's confidence in the 
 solidity of the universe disappears. One walks si- 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 427 
 
 lenced through a world that one feels to be full of in- 
 audible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, 
 get it out into the open, separate truth and falsehood. 
 It slinks from you, turns aside its face. Old acquaint- 
 ances 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. 
 I still grow warm with amazed indignation when I re- 
 call 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 Mrs. Millingham, 
 whom 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 im- 
 placable forces against us. 
 
 For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to ac- 
 count for this campaign. Then I got a clue. The 
 centre of diffusion was the Bailey household. The 
 Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of 
 the young Liberal group they had done so much to 
 inspire and organise; their dinner-table had long been 
 a scene of hostile depreciation of the Blue Weekly and 
 all its allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that 
 I was " doing nothing," and found other causes for our 
 
428 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 bye-election triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a 
 dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was as- 
 tonished to find them using a private scandal against 
 me. They did. I think Handitch had filled up the 
 measure of their bitterness, for I had not only aban- 
 doned them, but I was succeeding beyond even their 
 power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a 
 wasp in their spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, 
 uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their work and de- 
 votion enormously, but I had never concealed my con- 
 tempt for a certain childish vanity they displayed, and 
 for the frequent puerility of their political intrigues. 
 I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and any- 
 how they had me now. They had me. Bailey, I 
 found, was warning fathers of girls against me as a 
 "reckless libertine," and Altiora, flushed, roguish, and 
 dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after din- 
 ner, and pledging little parties of five or six women 
 at a time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go 
 further. Our cell was open to the world, and a bleak, 
 distressful daylight streaming in. 
 
 I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora 
 from the reports that came to me. Isabel had been 
 doing a series of five or six articles in the Political Re- 
 view in support of our campaign, the Political Review 
 which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her 
 best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in those 
 papers, and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read 
 her in those invaded columns, but listen to her praises 
 in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like 
 so many people who rely on gesture and vocal insistence 
 in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose and 
 handles an argument badly; 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 Altiora, with just a gleam of malice showing 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 429 
 
 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 chal- 
 lenging her, and then I bethought me of a youngster 
 named Curmain, who had been my supplemental 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, side- 
 long youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and 
 a long thin neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, 
 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 nothing, but I 
 felt everything in the air between them. I hate this 
 pestering of servants, but at the same time I didn't 
 want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed 
 him off without unnecessary discussion to Altiora. He 
 was quick and cheap anyhow, and I thought her gen- 
 eral 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 let- 
 ters were looked after with an efficiency altogether sur- 
 passing mine. And Altiora, I've no doubt left now 
 whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me, and 
 scenting a story, had him to dinner alone one evening 
 to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to 
 the bottom of it, it must have been a queer duologue. 
 She read Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so 
 to speak, by this proxy, and she wasn't ashamed to use 
 this information in the service of the bitterness that 
 had sprung up in her since our political breach. It 
 was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no pub- 
 lic purpose of theirs to get rid of me. My downfall 
 
430 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 in any public sense was sheer waste, the loss of a 
 man. She knew she was behaving badly, 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 before, in all her pursuit of 
 efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels of ef- 
 ficiency. I wrote a protest that was perhaps ill-ad- 
 vised and angry, I went to her and tried to stop her. 
 She wouldn'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 realised at that interview 
 couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to her the sickli- 
 est 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 off her hat, and she was grey 
 and dishevelled and tired, and in a business-like dress 
 of black and crimson 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 organising. 
 
 " 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 Curmaln 
 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 Bailey. I caught 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 431 
 
 the little wretch in the League Club, and he wriggled 
 and lied. 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 aston- 
 ished and incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make 
 me think they had told him. He did his horrible lit- 
 tle best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had 
 just left England for the Cape, was the real scandal- 
 monger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. 
 I've still the odd vivid impression of his fluting voice, 
 excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading 
 me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging 
 shoulders, and the would-be exculpatory gestures 
 Houndsditch gestures of his enormous ugly hands. 
 
 " I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; " I 
 can assure you we've done everything to shield you 
 everything." . . . 
 
 Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in 
 the office. She made a white-robed, dusky figure 
 against the deep blues of my big window. I sat at my 
 desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked. 
 
 " The Baileys 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 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." 
 
 " What are we to do ? " 
 
 " They won't let us go on." 
 
 "Damn them!" 
 
 " They are organising scandal." 
 
 " It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I 
 
432 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 and make your 
 peace with her." 
 
 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 go- 
 ing 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 be- 
 tween us ? " 
 
 "No!" 
 
 " I can't give up the work. Our work's my life." 
 
 We came upon another long pause. 
 
 " No one will believe we've ceased to be lovers if 
 we simply do," she said. 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 433 
 
 "We shouldn't." 
 
 " We've got to do something more parting than that." 
 
 I nodded, and again we paused. She was coming 
 to something. 
 
 " I could marry Shoesmith/' 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. You have to spring surprises on people. But 
 he keeps on. He's steadfast. He'd already suspected. 
 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 you 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 mess for me. He 
 wants to pull it straight." 
 
 We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that 
 obstinately refused to take up the realities of this 
 proposition. 
 
 " I don't want you to marry Shoesmith/' I said at 
 last. 
 
 "Don't you like him?" 
 
 " Not as your husband." 
 
 " He's a very clever and sturdy person and very 
 generous and devoted to me." 
 
 "And me?" 
 
434 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " 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 meet." 
 
 " Let us be friends ! " I cried, after a long pause, 
 "You and me!" 
 
 " He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, 
 he can go round fighting these rumours, defending us 
 both and force a quarrel on the Baileys." 
 
 " 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? I've 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. 
 
 " It never ought to have begun," 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 I'm retreating from the 
 things we've done! Our love is the best thing I could 
 ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; 
 nothing could ever equal the beauty and delight you 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 435 
 
 and I have had together. Never! You have loved 
 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 big interests in our lives will 
 vanish everything. We shall become specialised peo- 
 ple people overshadowed by a situation. We shall 
 be an elopement, a romance all our breadth and mean- 
 ing 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 specialise. ... 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 you care 
 for Margaret you care more than you think you do. 
 You have said fine things of her. I've watched you 
 about her. Little things have dropped from you. 
 She's given her life for you; she's nothing without 
 you. You feel that to your marrow all the time you 
 are thinking about these things. Oh, I'm not jealous, 
 dear. I love you for loving her. I love you in rela- 
 tion 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 
 
436 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 paid, if we'd kept to the track. . . . You and I, Master, 
 we've got to be men." 
 
 " Yes/' I said; " we've got to be men." 
 
 * / 
 
 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 Altiora, 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 Margaret 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. 
 
 "Hard," I answ> ed. "Where have you been?" 
 
 " At the Vallerys'r Mr. Evesham was talking about 
 you. They were all talking. I don't think everybody 
 knew who I was. JtJt Mrs. Mumble I'd been to them. 
 Lord Wardenham doesn't like you." 
 
 " He doesn't." 
 
 " But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then 
 I went on to Park Lane to hear a new pianist and some 
 other music at Eva's." 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some mid- 
 night tea before I came on here. They'd got some 
 writers and Grant was there." 
 
 " You have been flying round. ..." 
 
 There was a little pause between us. 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 437 
 
 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 requirements. Per- 
 haps she'd never hear. But all that day and the day 
 before I'd been making up 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 stead- 
 ily for a moment and sat down slowly in my armchair. 
 "What is it?" she said. 
 
 I went on awkwardly. " I've got to tell you 
 something extraordinarily distressing/' I said. 
 
 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. 
 
 " We've 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 
 couldn't." 
 
 She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. 
 
438 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 be- 
 lieve it." 
 
 5 
 
 Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her 
 again, her face was very white, and her distressed eyes 
 scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she spoke. " You 
 really mean that? " she said. 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " I never dreamt." 
 
 " 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 ? " 
 
 " Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to 
 tell you." 
 
 " Or else it wouldn't have mattered ? " 
 
 " No." 
 
 She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for 
 a moment she looked about the room she had made 
 for me, and then quite silently, with a childish quiver- 
 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 eyes 
 averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch 
 her tears. " I am sorry, Margaret," I said. " I was 
 in love. ... I did not understand. . . ." 
 
 Presently she asked: " What are you going to do? " 
 
 " You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your af' 
 fair I want to know what you what you want/* 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 439 
 
 " You want to leave me ? " 
 
 " If you want me to, I must." 
 
 " Leave Parliament leave all the things you 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 you, 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 may feel, and I 
 can't, I can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to 
 any revelation " 
 
 She made no answer. 
 
 " When the thing began I knew it was stupid but 
 I thought it was a thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't 
 be anything but itself, wouldn't unfold conse- 
 quences. . . . 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 al- 
 ways 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 shat- 
 tered 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 pro- 
 duced a dainty little 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 to do ? " 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 
 
440 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 without you. We've made a position, created a 
 wor k " 
 
 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. You don't know 
 how things took us, how different they seemed! 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 
 end. It is definitely at an end. We we talked 
 yesterday. We mean to end it altogether." I clenched 
 my hands. " She's she's going to marry Arnold 
 Shoesmith." 
 
 I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I 
 heard the rustle of her movement as she turned on me. 
 
 " It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation. 
 " We're doing nothing shabby. He knows. He will. 
 It's all as right as things can be now. We'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. Very completely. . . . We shall 
 have not to see each other for a time, you know. Per- 
 haps not a long time. Two or three years. 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, Margaret was on her 
 knees beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her 
 weeping with mine. " Oh, my Husband ! " she cried, 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 441 
 
 "my poor Husband! 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, weep- 
 ing bitterly with me. " Oh ! my dear," she sobbed, 
 "my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen 
 you cry. 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 ! My Man ! I can't bear to have you cry ! " 
 For a time she held me in silence. 
 
 " I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might 
 happen. You two, I mean. It was dreaming put it 
 into my head. When I've seen you together, so glad 
 with each other. . . . Oh! Husband mine, believe me! 
 believe me! I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning 
 to realise 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 re- 
 call 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 went 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- 
 
442 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 manreuvres. 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 as- 
 pect of our relations. It seems to me now we talked so 
 wide and far that scarcely an issue in the life between 
 man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch 
 upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for 
 myself a symbol of all this world-wide problem between 
 duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still 
 to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in 
 it either way. . . . The sky, the wide horizon, seemed 
 to lift us out of ourselves until we were something 
 representative and general. She was womanhood be- 
 come 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." 
 
 " I'm 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 long time of divorce. 
 It seemed to us then, and it seems to us still, that it 
 ought to have been possible for Margaret 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 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 443 
 
 riddle of marriage. We criticised the current code, 
 how muddled and conventionalised 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 building came," I said; 
 for I had often talked to her of that early impression 
 of purpose dissolving again into chaotic forces. 
 " There is no clear right in the world any more. The 
 world is Byzantine. The justest man to-day must 
 practise a tainted goodness." 
 
 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 insub- 
 ordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish hum- 
 bugs 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." 
 
 " 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 
 this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by 
 step from the time when we found that a certain bold- 
 ness in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love. . . . 
 
444 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Master, 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 Margaret really want to go on with you ? " 
 she asked " shield you knowing of ... this? " 
 
 "I'm certain. I don't understand just as I don't 
 understand Shoesmith, but she does. These people 
 walk on solid ground which is just thin air to us. 
 They've got something 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 
 imagination, something in the tone of his voice fails 
 for me. Why don't I love him? he's a better man 
 than you! Why don't you? Is he a better man than 
 you? He'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 this sort and love your sort to the very end of 
 time. . . ." 
 
 We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as 
 we talked. It seemed enormously unreasonable to us 
 that two people who had come to the pitch of easy 
 and confident affection and happiness that held between 
 us should be obliged to part and shun one another, or 
 murder half the substance of their lives. We felt 
 ourselves crushed and beaten by an indiscriminating 
 machine which destroys happiness in the service of 
 jealousy. " The mass of people don't feel these things 
 in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said. 
 " Is it because they're different in grain, or educated 
 out of some primitive instinct ? " 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 44,5 
 
 " 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 past all that and wandered hand in hand. . . ." 
 
 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 things 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 together. We'll still be together in a sense 
 through all these things we have in common." 
 
 And so we talked of 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 
 spite of Wardenham and the Expurgator, we should 
 come into the new Government strongly. The party 
 had no one else, all the young men were formally or 
 informally with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord 
 Tarvrille, I ... and very probably there would be 
 something for Shoesmith. " And for my own part," I 
 said, " I count on backing on the Liberal side. For 
 the last two years we've been forcing competition in 
 constructive legislation between the parties. The 
 
446 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 Liberals have not been long in following up our 
 Endowment of Motherhood lead. They'll have to give 
 votes and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the 
 Blue Weekly, they say, are Liberals. . . . 
 
 " I remember talking about things of this sort with 
 old Willersley," 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." 
 
 " I ! " 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 bat 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 
 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, uncon- 
 sciously 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 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 447 
 
 devices, I had realised 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 Weekly 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 organise what 
 was sorely wanted, a criticism of research; contrive a 
 closer contact between the press and creative intellectual 
 life ; foster literature, clarify, strengthen the public con- 
 sciousness, develop social organisation and a sense of the 
 State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant 
 young peers like Lord Dentonhill, writers like Carnot 
 and Cresswell. It filled me with pride to win such men. 
 " We stand for so much more than we seem to stand 
 for/' I said. I opened my heart to her, so freely 
 that I hesitate to open my heart even to the 
 reader, telling of projects and ambitions I cher- 
 ished, of my consciousness of great powers and 
 widening opportunities. . . . 
 Isabel watched me as I talked. 
 
448 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 lately when politics has seemed the 
 pettiest game played with mean tools 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 you." . . . 
 
 Things drew to an end at last, but after we had 
 spoken of a thousand things. 
 
 "We've talked away 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 Isabel. 
 
 " It will be very strange at first not to be able to 
 tell you things." 
 
 " I've a superstition that after after we've 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 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 449 
 
 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. 
 I suppose all love is hysterical and a little foolish. 
 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 Weekly 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 ? " 
 
 " Better, I think. Let's play it's better anyhow. 
 It may be that talking over was rather mixed with 
 love-making. After all, love-making is joy rather than 
 magic. Don't let's pretend about that even. . . . Let's 
 go on watching him. (I don't see why her writing 
 shouldn't be better. Indeed I don't.) See! There 
 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 past 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 can't quite see. . . . And 
 now he's up and speaking in the House. Hope he'll 
 
450 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 acci- 
 dents, Isabel. Never any more adventures for us, dear, 
 now. No! . . . They play the game, you know. 
 They've begun late, but now they've got to. You see 
 it's not so very hard for them since you and I, my dear, 
 are here always, always faithfully here on this warm 
 cliff of love accomplished, watching and helping them 
 under high heaven. It isn't so very hard. Rather good 
 in some ways. Some people have 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 only see you here beside me, dear for ever. 
 For all my life, dear, till I die. Was that the 
 sin?" . . . 
 
 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 dis- 
 tressing. 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. 
 
THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION 451 
 
 " 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 realise it. I sup- 
 pose 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." 
 
 " Even when the train goes out of the station ! 
 
 I've seen you into so many trains." 
 
 " I shall go on thinking of things to say to you 
 things to put in your letters. For years to come. How 
 can I ever stop thinking in that way now? We've got 
 into each other's brains." 
 
 "It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real. The 
 world's no more than a fantastic dream. Why are we 
 parting, Isabel? " 
 
 " 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? " 
 
 " We'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," she said. 
 
452 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by 
 the door of the compartment. " Good-bye/' I said a 
 little stiffly, conscious of the people upon the platform. 
 She bent above me, white and dusky, looking at me 
 very steadfastly. 
 
 " Come here," she whispered. " Never mind the 
 porters. What can they know? Just one time more 
 I must." 
 
 She rested her hand against the door of the carriage 
 and bent down upon me, 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 Margaret 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 circumstances 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 West- 
 minster. But we were all of us intent upon the defeat 
 of scandal 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 possible; we 
 went to restaurants, we visited the theatre; we could 
 even contemplate the possibility of my presence at the 
 
 453 
 
454 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 wedding. For that, however, we had schemed a week* 
 end visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at 
 the last moment which would justify my absence. . . . 
 
 I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness 
 and rebellion of my separation from Isabel. It seemed 
 that in the past two years all my thoughts had spun 
 commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think of noth- 
 ing 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 office and my 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 stand- 
 ards 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 by the 
 odd accident that the house caught fire upstairs while 
 we were dining below. It was a men's dinner " A 
 dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he invited 
 me ; " everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins 
 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 amuse- 
 ment 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 Lib- 
 eral whose name I can't remember, the three men 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 455 
 
 Tarvrille had promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, 
 Waulsort, 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 fire 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 curi- 
 ous. The story of the siege of the Legations in China 
 in the year 1900 and all that followed upon that, is 
 just one of those disturbing interludes in history that 
 refuse to join on to that general scheme of protesta- 
 tion by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break 
 in the general flow of experience as disconcerting to 
 statecraft as the robbery of my knife and the scuffle 
 that followed it had been to me when I was a boy at 
 Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite 
 unexpected backgrounds. I had never given the busi- 
 ness a thought for years; now this talk brought back a 
 string of pictures 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 sen- 
 
456 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 tinels 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 out- 
 raged, children were butchered, strong men had found 
 themselves with arms in a lawless, 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 bar- 
 gain sale, he said and when he pointed out to her 
 that the silk she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 
 ' Oh, bother ! ' and threw it aside and went back. . . ." 
 
 We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had re- 
 turned. We tried not to seem to listen. 
 
 " Beg pardon, m'lord," he said. " The house is on 
 fire, m'lord." 
 
 " Upstairs, m'lord." 
 
 " Just overhead, m'lord." 
 
 " The maids are throwing water, m'lord, and I've tel- 
 ephoned fire." 
 
 " 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. 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 457 
 
 " 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 
 mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt 
 of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers 
 fresh from German high schools and English homes ! " 
 
 " Did our people ? " asked some patriot. 
 
 " Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases. 
 . . . Some of the Indian troops were pretty bad." 
 
 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 I think I 
 could give the deep rich browns and warm greys 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 civilised scheme. 
 We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a uni- 
 verse of darkness and violence; an effect to which the 
 
458 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 diminishing smell of burning rubber, the trampling of 
 feet overhead, the swish of water, added enormously. 
 Everybody unless, perhaps, it was Evesham drank 
 rather carelessly because of the suppressed excitement 
 of our situation, and talked the louder and more freely. 
 "But what a flimsy thing our civilisation 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, Pekin-stained J.F.'s trying petty pil- 
 ferers in the severest manner." . . . 
 
 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 knowl- 
 edge of field artillery. Then the talk drifted to 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 459 
 
 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 
 Massinghay at intervals repeat in a rather thickened 
 voice: " They didn't get dysentery." 
 
 I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered 
 more and more closely towards the drier end of the 
 room, the table was pushed along, and the area beneath 
 the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a tinkling, 
 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 
 Party." 
 
 " That's good ! " said Weston Massinghay, with all 
 his teeth gleaming; " I shall use that against you in 
 the House ! " 
 
 " I shall denounce you for abusing private confi- 
 dences if you do," said Tarvrille. 
 
 " 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 displayed him- 
 self a venomous creature. Something in his eyes told 
 
460 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. "Love ancf 
 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'nisp these facts/' said my assailant. 
 " Love and fine think'n pretty phrase attractive. 
 Suitable for p'litical dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, 
 gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise 
 valu'ble." 
 
 I made some remark, I forget what, but he over- 
 bore me. 
 
 " Real things we want are Hate Hate and coarse 
 think'n. I b'long to the school of Mrs. F's 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, emphasising his point 
 with a clumsy fist. " Hate's the driving force. What's 
 m'rality? hate of rotten goings on. What's patriot- 
 ism? hate of int'loping foreigners. What's Radical- 
 ism? 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- 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 461 
 
 v'nometer. Like going to fight a mad dog' with 
 Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinking wh'at 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 
 flag!" he said. "I'd as soon go to ba'ell und' wet 
 tissue paper ! " 
 
 My best answer on the spur of the moment was: 
 " The Japanese did." Which was absurd. 
 
 I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly 
 what, and the talk of the whole table 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 feeling of this old 
 Tory spokesman. They were quite friendly to me, 
 they regarded me and the Blue Weekly as valuable 
 party assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached 
 no more importance to what were my realities than 
 they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. 
 Eddy. They were flushed and amused, perhaps they 
 went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but 
 they left the impression on my mind of men irrevocably 
 set upon narrow and cynical views of political life. 
 For them the political struggle was a game, whose 
 counters were human hate and human credulity; 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 morally, nor how cruel their 
 convergent attack on me chanced to be. But my 
 temper gave way, I became tart and fierce, perhaps my 
 replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille, with that 
 quick 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 
 
462 THE NEW MACHIAVEKLI 
 
 dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced ties and 
 crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my tor- 
 mented nerves. . . . 
 
 It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I 
 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 was 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 we 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 westward and walked for a long way, 
 and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miser- 
 able to go to my house. 
 
 I wandered about that night like a man who has dis- 
 covered his Gods are dead. I can look back now de- 
 tached yet sympathetic upon that wild confusion of 
 moods and impulses, and by it I think I can understand, 
 oh! half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world. 
 
 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 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 463 
 
 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 men in any other group or party. Perhaps I had 
 slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a 
 party man but I do not think so. 
 
 No, it was the mood of profound despondency that 
 had followed upon the abrupt cessation of my familiar 
 intercourse with Isabel, that gave this fact that had 
 always been present in my mind its quality 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 
 acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, 
 and that clearly conscious development and service of 
 a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts 
 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, suns' distances 
 uncounted across the deep. It seemed to me I had! 
 aspired too high and thought too far, had mocked my 
 own littleness by presumption, had given the uttermotf 
 dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream. 
 
 All through that wandering agony of mine tha* 
 night a dozen threads of thought interwove; now I 
 was a soul speaking in protest to God against a task 
 
464 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, 
 scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat 
 him of the ultimate 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 realised 
 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 cliff 
 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 pres- 
 ence, 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, and how satisfying it had been! 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 ex- 
 periences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric 
 of ambitious understandings we had built up together 
 in our intimacy would be the first to go; and last per- 
 haps to endure with us would be a few gross memories 
 of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excite- 
 ments. . . . 
 
 I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost 
 touch with life for a long time, and had now been 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 465 
 
 reminded of its quality. That infernal little don's 
 parody of my ruling phrase, " Hate and coarse think- 
 ing," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre 
 of inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated 
 has no longer the vitality to resist an infection, so 
 my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation 
 from Isabel, could find no resistance to his emphatic 
 suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had 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 fine 
 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 
 shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast pleas- 
 ure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists 
 " blaggards and scoundrels " it justified his opposi- 
 tion the Lords were " scoundrels," all people richer 
 than he were " scoundrels," all Socialists, all trouble- 
 some poor people; he liked to think of jails and justice 
 being done. His public spirit was saturated with the 
 sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of 
 condign punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That 
 was the way of it, I perceived. That had survival 
 value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough in 
 politics to be a consistent and happy politician. . . . 
 
 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 
 did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had 
 worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had 
 seen how all parties stood for interests inevitably, and 
 
466 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 Weekly and our 
 young Tory movement preposterously enormous things 
 as though those poor fertilising touches at the soil 
 were indeed the germinating seeds of the millennium, 
 as though a million lives such as ours had not to con- 
 tribute before the beginning of the beginning. That 
 poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposi- 
 tion shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that 
 night. 
 
 I saw that there were to be no such compensations. 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 467 
 
 So far as my real services to mankind were concerned I 
 had to live an unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I 
 made successes it would be by the way. Our separa- 
 tion would alter nothing of that. My scandal would 
 cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting rela- 
 tionships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I 
 should follow the common lot of those who live by the 
 imagination, and follow it now in infinite 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 would be too often ill- 
 expressed and missed or misinterpreted. In the end I 
 might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst the slag 
 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 loud. " Why do 
 I care for these things ? " I cried, " when I can do so 
 little! Why am I 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 
 yourself? I thought I had a gleam of you in Isabel, 
 and then you take her away. Do you really think I 
 can carry on this game alone, doing your work in dark- 
 ness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, 
 half dying ? " 
 
 Grotesque 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 
 
468 THE NEW MACHlAVELLl 
 
 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 remem- 
 bered 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 Baileys. In an instant 
 and with no sense of absurdity I wanted in the 
 intervals of love and fine thinking to fling about 
 that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick 
 Keyhole of the Peepshorv into the gutter and make a 
 common massacre of all the prosperous rascaldom 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 anger which is for people of my tem- 
 perament the concomitant of exhaustion. 
 
 "I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I mill 
 have her! Life mocks me and cheats me. Nothing 
 can be made good to me again. . . . Why shouldn't 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 469 
 
 I save what I can? I can't save myself without 
 her. . . ." 
 
 I remember myself as a sort of anti-climax to thai 
 rather tediously asking my way home. I was some-i 
 where in the neighbourhood of Holland Park. . . . 
 
 It was then between one and two. I felt that \ 
 could go home now without any risk of meeting 
 Margaret. It had been the thought of returning to 
 Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. 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, sufficed 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 crisis I felt nothing of that. There was a trium- 
 phant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. 
 She meant to be so kind to me, to offer unstinted 
 consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all she 
 imagined Isabel had given me. 
 
 When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate 
 exactly how she would meet my homecoming. She 
 would be perplexed by my crumpled shirt front, on 
 which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would over-! 
 look that by an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolva 
 it should make no difference to her. She would want 
 to know who had been present, what we had talked 
 about, show the alertest 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 
 
470 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 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 
 did not understand. She was manifestly ill. She came 
 towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so 
 bravely; her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were 
 tired, and her face white and drawn. All my life has 
 been a narrow self-centred life; no brothers, no sisters 
 or children or weak things 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 was something 
 that I could die to shelter, something that meant more 
 than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid 
 creation to me, a new kind of hold upon me, a new 
 power in the world. Some sealed fountain was opened 
 in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, 
 Isabel beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 471 
 
 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. " We'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 square grey stone 
 masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs ; 
 I remember, and a little space of grass separated us 
 from the pathway and the scrutiny of passers-by. And 
 there we talked. 
 
 " I had to write to you," I said. 
 
 " I had to come." 
 
 " When are you to be married ? " 
 
 " Thursday week." 
 
 " Well ? " I said. " But can we ? " 
 
 She leant forward and scrutinised 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 want to take care of 
 you, Isabel! and have you with me." 
 
 " I can't stand it," she blubbered. 
 
472 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 " You needn't stand it. I thought it was best foi 
 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. 
 " I was going to kill myself quietly somehow. I 
 meant to wait 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." 
 
 " Yes," she said, and I stared into her eyes. 
 
 " The horror of it," she whispered. " The horror 
 of being handed over. It's just only begun to dawn 
 upon me, seeing him now as I do. He tries to be kind 
 to me. ... I didn't 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. . . ." 
 
 "I must take you away. There's nothing for us but 
 to go away together." 
 
 "But your work," she said; "your career! Mar- 
 garet ! Our promises ! " 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 473 
 
 "We've made a mess of things, Isabel or things 
 have made a mess of us. I don't know which. Our 
 flags are in the mud, anyhow. It's too late to save 
 those other things! They have to go. You can't 
 make terms with defeat. I thought it was Margaret 
 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 want disgrace 
 with you. . . ." 
 
 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 said. " I don't care for any- 
 thing, if I can save you out of the wreckage we have 
 made together." 
 
 The next day I went to the office of the Blue 
 Weekly 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. 
 
474 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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. 
 
 " I didn't know you were watching all this," I said. 
 
 " Yes," he answered, after a pause, " I've watched." 
 
 " Sorry sorry you don't approve." 
 
 " It means smashing such an infernal lot of things. 
 Remington." 
 
 I did not answer. 
 
 "You're going away then?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Soon?" 
 
 " Right away." 
 
 " There's your wife." 
 
 " I know." 
 
 " Shoesmith whom you're pledged to in a manner. 
 You've just picked him out and made him conspicuous. 
 Every one will know. Oh! of course it's nothing to 
 you. Honour " 
 
 "I know." 
 
 " Common decency." 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 "All this movement of ours That's what 7 care for 
 most. . . . It's come to be a big thing, Remington." 
 
 " That will go on." 
 
 " We have a use for you no one else quite fills it. 
 No one. ... I'm not sure it will go on." 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 475 
 
 "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 you came back from 
 America. You were alight with it." Then he let his 
 bitterness gleam for a moment. " But I thought you 
 would stick to your bargain." 
 
 " It's not so much choice as you think/' I said. 
 
 "There's always a choice." 
 
 " No," I said. 
 
 He scrutinised 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 you/' 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 
 
476 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going on 
 now like a man who is hypnotised 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!" 
 
 " You've not been tempted." 
 
 " How do you know? Anyhow having done that, 
 you ought to have stood the consequences and thought 
 of other people. You could have ended it at the first 
 pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered 
 again. You kept on. You owed a certain secrecy to 
 all of us ! You didn't keep it. You were careless. 
 You made things worse. This engagement 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. . . . 
 You can't patch." 
 
 " And now, as I care for anything under heaven,, 
 Remington, you two ought to stand these last conse- 
 quencesand part. You ought to part. Other people 
 have to stand things! Other people have to part. 
 You ought to. You say^-what do you say? It's loss 
 of so much life to lose each other. So is losing a hand 
 or a leg. But it's what you've incurred. Ampu- 
 tate. 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. You 
 ought to stick to your undertaking." 
 
 I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. " My 
 dear Britten!" I cried. "Don't I know I'm doing 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 477 
 
 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 
 I grant you that but since, 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 of owner. . . . We two are things that change 
 and grow and alter all the time. We're 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'm too tired for balancing the right or wrong of it 
 any more. You can't separate them. I saw her 
 yesterday. . . . She's ill. . . . I'd 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 nothing ever been 
 
478 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 put into you to stand against it. What are you 
 to do with the rest of your lives? " 
 
 " No end of things/' 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 " I don't believe you are right/' I said. " I believe 
 we can save something - " 
 
 Britten shook his head. " Some scraps of salvage 
 won't excuse you/' he said. 
 
 His indignation rose. " In the middle of life ! " he 
 said. " No man has a right to take his 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 you 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 i 
 You know it." 
 
 I turned and stared at him. " You're wrong, Brit- 
 ten," 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 ain certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty 
 not to hush up this scandal." 
 
 He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the ele- 
 ment of absurdity in me, but at the time I was as seri- 
 ous as a man who is burning. 
 
 " It's our duty," I went on, " to smash now openly 
 in the sight of every one. Yes ! I've got that as 
 clean and plain as prison whitewash. I am con- 
 vinced 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 Parncft 
 story and the Ashton Dean story and the Carmel story 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 479 
 
 and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that 
 have picked man after man out of English public 1'fe. 
 the men with active imaginations, the men of strdng 
 initiative. To think this tottering old-woman ridden 
 Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! 
 You say I ought to be penitent " 
 
 Britten shook his head and smiled very faintly. 
 
 " I'm boiling with indignation/' I said. " I lay in 
 bed 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 I've 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 genera- 
 tion's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most 
 beautiful things in life like peeping Tom of Cov- 
 entry. 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 ab- 
 ject 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! And when we found that the thing 
 they called unclean, unclean, was Pagan beauty God! 
 it was a glory to sin, Britten, it was a pride and 
 splendour b'ke bathing in the sunlight after dust and 
 grime ! " 
 
 "Yes," said Britten. "That's all very well -" 
 
 I interrupted him. " I know there's a case I'm 
 beginning to think it a vab'd case against us; but we 
 never met it! There's a steely pride in self restraint, 
 
480 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and 
 think and act untrammeled and unafraid. The other 
 thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as 
 the chastity of a monkey kept in a cage by itself ! " 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 
 don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if 
 they care for it, and wipe it? damn them! I am 
 burning now to say: ' Yes, we did this and this/ to all 
 the world. All the world! ... I will!" 
 
 Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner 
 of his desk. " That's all very well, Remington," he 
 said " You mean to go." 
 
 He stopped and began again. "If you didn't 
 know you were in the wrong you wouldn't be so 
 damned rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain 
 to you as it is to me. You're 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, maybe, 
 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? You'd be able to go on per- 
 haps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. 
 You know, Remington you know." 
 
 I thought and went back to his earlier point. " If 
 I am rhetorical, at any rate it's a living feeling behind 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 481 
 
 it. Yes, I remember all the implications of our aims 
 very splendid, very remote. But just now it's rather 
 like offering to give a freezing man the sunlit Hima- 
 layas from end to end in return for his camp-fire. 
 When you talk of me and my jolly mistress, it isn't 
 fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going 
 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 you 
 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 goddess than I'm a 
 god. . . . I'm not in love with her now; I'm raw 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. Her 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 delights 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 Win- 
 
482 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 ter's essays. " This man goes on doing first-rate 
 stuff/' I said. " I hope you will keep him going." 
 
 He did not answer for a moment or so. " I'll keep 
 him going," he said at last with a sigh. 
 
 5 
 
 I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of 
 our flight. I cannot resist transcribing some of it here, 
 because it lights things as no word of mine can do. It 
 is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written in 
 pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very incon- 
 secutiveness is essential. Many 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 ab- 
 stract you that I want to go on with. Something I've 
 made out of you. ... I want to know things about 
 you but I don't want to see or feel or imagine. When 
 some day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of 
 proprietorship, it may be different. Then perhaps wd 
 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 much of the things we were doing 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. I've 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 told myself a hundred times why this 
 has happened, I ask again, ' Why did he give things 
 up? Why did he give things up? ' . . . 
 
 " It is just as though you were wilfully dead. . . . 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 483 
 
 "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 un- 
 derstand 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, in- 
 effectual 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 in 
 iriy heart. It's my nature to hide and you, you want 
 things brought to you to see. You are so curious as 
 to be almost cruel. You don't understand reserves. 
 
484 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. 
 You are not really a civilised man at all. You hate 
 pretences and not only pretences but decent cover- 
 ings. . . . 
 
 " 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 find myself alone. . . . 
 
 " My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desola- 
 tion of things- I shall never go back to that house 
 we furnished together, that was to have been the labor- 
 atory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in 
 which you were to forge so much of the new order. . . . 
 
 " But, 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. You will let me 
 help you if I can it will be the last wrong not to let 
 me do that. . . . 
 
 " You had better 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 vis- 
 itor. . . ." 
 
 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. But this oddly penetrating 
 analysis of our differences must, I think, be given. 
 
 " 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 sys- 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 485 
 
 tern, 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 noth- 
 ing 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 some- 
 thing 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 dis- 
 honest not to feel. My beauty is a quiet thing. You 
 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 fas- 
 cination of the fire, or why one should go deliberately 
 out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers 
 and be singed and tormented and destroyed. I don't 
 understand. . . ." 
 
 6 
 I remember very freshly the mood of our departure 
 
486 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 from London, the platform of Charing Cross with the 
 big 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. Isabel 
 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 me. We had, thank Heaven! 
 a compartment to ourselves. I let down the window 
 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 sta- 
 tion. 
 
 I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with 
 slowly gathering pace across the bridge, and the bob- 
 bing black heads of the pedestrians in the footway, and 
 the curve of the river and the glowing great 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 
 Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hard and 
 clear against the still, luminous sky. 
 
 " 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 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 487 
 
 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 southward. . . . 
 
 Suddenly I began to realise just what it was we 
 were doing. 
 
 And now, indeed, I knew what London ha$ been to 
 me, London where I had been born and educated, 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 
 
 
488 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 out to a new life, a life that appeared in that moment 
 to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere resid- 
 uum 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 com- 
 monest 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. How great was this pur- 
 pose I had relinquished, this bold and subtle remaking 
 of the English will! I had doubted so many things, 
 and now suddenly I doubted my unimportance, doubted 
 my right to this suicidal abandonment. Was 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 not filch- 
 ing from that dear great city of my birth and life, 
 some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link, a reconcil- 
 ing clue in her political development, that now she 
 might seek vaguely for in vain? What is one life 
 against the State? Ought I not to 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 was 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 
 
THE BREAKING POINT 489 
 
 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 Altiora began her campaign, 
 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 universal gale of indignation, trying to evade 
 the cold blast of the truth. I had betrayed my party, 
 my intimate friend, my wife, the wife whose devotion 
 had made me what I was. For awhile the figure of 
 Margaret, remote, wounded, shamed, dominated my 
 mind, and the thought of my immense ingratitude. 
 Damn them! they'd take it out of her too. I had a 
 feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip 
 some one by the throat, some one talking ill of Mar- 
 garet. They'd blame her for not keeping me, for let- 
 ting 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 
 
490 THE NEW MACHIAVELLI 
 
 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 wilt- 
 ing red roses tightly in her bare and ringless 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. She 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 suppose she had been watching my expression, di- 
 vining my thoughts. 
 
 For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in 
 a sort of still and weary amazement. Why 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. 
 
 THE END 
 
 
 

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