THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the

statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the

protagonist of my story, that real though complex 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 entertamed 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, everything 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, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible

Providence, 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 remarked 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 twenties. Britten and I belonged to one of the precocious

types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't that

there was anything priggish about any of us; we should have been

prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and ape the

theoretical boy.

The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still

centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as

distinguished from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic

science and the stars and future time. I had travelled scarcely at

all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I

had formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its

mountains and wildernesses and forests and all the sorts and

conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface. It

was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing,

and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond

measure.

I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to

the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-

deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at

nineteen. So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the

world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains

and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I

have now. But its intension was very different. All the interval

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 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 ease 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 population 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 perfectly serious about it. We were not fools;

it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of

the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective

intention…

I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my

doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one

did not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's

general outlook, 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 Mirabean; 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 Provisional Government, which occupied, of all

inconvenient 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

imagination. I got outside London. It became tangible instead of

being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.

At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for

Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded 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 correcting 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 our old boys, but they were never real to us; such

distinguished 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 living 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 schoolmasters. 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 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 humanity,

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…