THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

CHAPTER THE THIRD
SCHOLASTIC
1

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 goodmemory, 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 remarkable 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 proceeds 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, absorbing my time and

interest, and I never acquired that detailed and intimate knowledge

of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town

and outskirts of Bromstead.

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more

completely 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 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 topography. 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 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 lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards

he must have disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after

another of his careless, sceptical, experimental temperament 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 raining 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 seenherself 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 reading fits and his bulldog pipes,

must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent

anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would

swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed

like 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 constantly. 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 condition 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

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 fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket

books. She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer

stiff little comments on casual visitors,-" Miss G. and much noisy

shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY. A.

delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.

She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my

father is always "A.," and Iam 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 disrespect 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 misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to

read, "D. very kind and good. He grows more thoughtful every day."

I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think

the death of my father must have stirred her for the first time for

many years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in

any peace at all, believing that he had indeed been flung headlong

into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never,

and for her diary also she could find no phrases. But on a loose

half-sheet of notepaper between its pages I find this passage that

follows, written very carefully. I do not know whose lines they are

nor how she came upon them. They run:-

"And if there be no meeting past the 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 company, 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 as a loving

and feeling and desiring and muddle-headed person. There are times

when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to

her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow

intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so

abundantly on me. 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, infinitely 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

estrangement followed from that.

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love

and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must

needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I

suppose Iam a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I

hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of intolerance cast

by religious 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 magazine called, if I

remember rightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, 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

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…