THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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

considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was

underhung, he chummed and made the moustache 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 kindred publications he ran,

but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.

"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed 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 big 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 and sulking, misled and misunderstanding,

vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close

darknesses of these narrow cults-Oh, God! one wants a gale out of

Heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!