THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

7

A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me

immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit

of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's

ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me.

In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the

first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever

encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years

when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to

the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our

people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a

book justified. The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined

each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered

against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe to

me, as watching and critical.

But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's

intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and

discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the

continent there were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert

while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and

preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely

novel and distasteful to me. It set me worrying of nights. It put

all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new

uncomfortable footing. It made them no longer merely desirable but

urgent. Instead of pride and the love of making one might own to a

baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the

continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our own

world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense as it

were of busy searchlights over the horizon…

One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was

an attempt to belittle his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow,"

I said.

The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity.

It professed to be a study of the English situation in the early

nineties, but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was

confused by the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to

vindicate the woman he had loved and never married. Now in the

retrospect and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do

Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was not only essential but

cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich

aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the

"infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the

central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail.

So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once

remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly face and

understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing

whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me

was altogether outside my range of comprehension…