THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 huge-muscled, black-

haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer 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 capitalist 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 natural 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

themselves 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 circumstances. 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 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 distresses 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 beyond

the primary needs that my stimulated imagination 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 human affairs

that had been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing, nor

did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of

poverty. 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 revolution 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

ostentatiously 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 unthinkingly 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

fishermen, 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 Lancashire 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 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 diverted. Even the

tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor were nearing a

limit of painfulexperience, 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 enslaved 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 intimations 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 men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically in

those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.

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 windowsills 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-photographer'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 manifestly

having the same difficulty with us. We had expected 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 thoughtful 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

socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of

social conditions. "You young men," he said "come from homes of

luxury; every need you feel is supplied-"

We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying 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 maintain a

front of judicious severity. We felt more and more that social

injustice must cease, and cease forthwith. 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 sceptic, 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 remarks 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 admit, 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 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 admimstrative 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 disposition 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 his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the

cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive

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 discussion. "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 mammies "-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 Darwin. 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 thing without

splitting straws. One gets hold of the Elementals."

(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)

"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 opposition, "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."