THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

CHAPTER THE FOURTH
ADOLESCENCE
1

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 growingunderstanding. 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 begins 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 "beinggood" 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 understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and

distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad

prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably 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, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the

pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of

reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now

irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these

broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.

Life crowded me away from it.

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that

passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for

some permanently satisfyingTruth. That, too, ceased after a time

to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that

endures to this day, of absolutetranquillity, of absolute

confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive 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. Iam 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 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 significances of

life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The world was

never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the

Victorian time…

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found

inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion) beauty. Even as a boy I

knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to

keep away from. Its dim presence obsessed me none the less for

all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my

upbringing…

The plaster Venuses and 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 curiously

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 upbringing seems to

me now that swathing up of all the splendours of the flesh, that

strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced

me about with prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say

blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and dishonoured by

shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an

ignorance in which a fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like

a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was

indeed no Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead

there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told how at last a

new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the

twilight, a Venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of

the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passion-stirring atmosphere rather

than incarnate in a body. And I have told, too, how I bought a

picture.

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked

avoided chamber…

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down

the barriers of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret

broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged

suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion. I

can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative

talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted

Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity great gate, but

we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named,

if I remember rightly, Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's

rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown and

deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings-

he had 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 littered with books, for the most part open and face

downward; deeper darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and

our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's flopped like

an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of

mine; the highlights of the picture came chiefly as reflections from

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 Englishman

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 monasticism 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 mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for

decency. Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the

less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest frontier of

India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a little-known author, and

Cunninghame Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county-

town spinster in his regard for respectability. But his case was

too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating 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 unusually balanced and

tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a certain refinement and

dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this

spreading out of decency until it darkens the whole sky, until it

makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things,

until it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or

think-even think! until it leads to our coming to-to the business

at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of

dirty jokes and, and "-he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch

his image in the air-" oh, a confounded 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 anywhen. 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,

sniggering 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 objectivity of other people's, and I do not

know how far I contributed to this discussion that followed. Iam,

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 he 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 university's for?"…

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of

us. We were not going to be afraid of ideas any longer, we were

going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in

and see what came of it. We became for a time even intemperately

experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an eminent

psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within

a fortnight of our great elucidation.

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of

sex. Once the theme had been opened it became a sore place in our

intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our

imaginations got astir with it. We made up for lost time and went

round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall

prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy

November tramps to Madingley, when amidst much profanity from

Hatherleigh 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 confession and free speech,

that almost painfulgoal delivery of long pent and crappled and

sometimes crippled ideas.

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called

Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing 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

Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was

gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey 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 liberal

intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after such

talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotionaldreaming, 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 watchword,

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 and less restrained companion, 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 lectureship in political science. In those days

it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.