THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge

days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of

hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.

He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific

construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have

understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense

rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive

hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of

acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of

efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have

no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no

charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had strong

bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and

occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"

to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these

occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was

urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a

harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the

valley. And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights

of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the

unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly

contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters

tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money

to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every

man who came near them.

My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was

an illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them

through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden

antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more

complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral

state.

With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,

rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-

clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he

strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and

occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable

unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.

Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and

despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he

personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He

hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education

after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until

he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except

football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people

who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but

Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and

all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated

particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,

Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he

hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet." He

wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a

call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the

best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away

magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His

billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very

inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered

with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople

because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his

bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He

was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of

collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African

negro.

There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern

industrial world. You will find the same type with the slightest

modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey

or North Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men

have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,

uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.

To drive others they have had first to drive themselves. They have

never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social

life as a whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of

survival that they should ignore such cravings. All the distinctive

qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his

conditions; his success and harshness, the extravagances that

expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that

sprang from rivalry, and his self-reliance, his contempt for broad

views, his contempt for everything that he could not understand.

His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls

they were! Curiously "spirited" as people phrase it, and curiously

limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire

several times. My uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go

into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me. I was his

nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman

learning all sorts of unremunerative things in the grandest manner,

"Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews

merely, but sons, stayed unpolished in their native town. Every

time I went down I found extensive changes and altered relations,

and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't

think I was one person to them; I was a series of visitors. There

is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming

mourning and two vividly self-conscious girls of eighteen and

nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a first and

good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary

for two girls of twenty-three and twenty-four.

A motor-car appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottle-green

affair that opened behind, had dark purple cushions, and was

controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat

cap. The high tea had been shifted to seven and rechristened

dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and

after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his

foot down and prohibited any but high-necked dresses.

"Daddy's perfectly impossible," Sybil told me.

The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said,

"dressed up like -"-and had arrested himself and fumbled and

decided to say-"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every

fool to stare at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner.

He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking about in his

house when he came home tired. So such calling as occurred went on

during his absence in the afternoon.

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of

the industrial class to which wealth has come, is its tremendous

insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five

Towns. All the isolated prosperities of the district sprang from

economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor

means for hospitality. Social intercourse centred very largely upon

the church or chapel, and the chapels were better at bringing people

together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their

chief outlet to the wider world lay therefore through the

acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much less

prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley. A

number of gossiping friendships with old school mates were "kept

up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the

day with these; such occasions led to other encounters and

interlaced with the furtive correspondences and snatched meetings

that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard

table had been new, my uncle had taken to asking in a few approved

friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiard-room was for

glory and the girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so

far as I know, dined out, and when at last after bitter domestic

conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering

connivance of my aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends'

houses on the way. There was a tennis club that formed a convenient

afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier

visits the young bloods of the district found much satisfaction in

taking girls for drives in dog-carts and suchlike high-wheeled

vehicles, a disposition that died in tangled tandems at the

apparition of motor-car's.

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters

at all. In the undifferentiated industrial community from which

they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to

them that the concentration of property that had made them wealthy,

had cut their children off from the general social sea in which

their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening

any other world in exchange. My uncle was too much occupied with

the works and his business affairs and his private vices to

philosophise about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls,

preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated flowers and

make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they

would not remain at this, and still more irritated that they failed

to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The

tandems would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the

bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed to have no ideas

whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had

indeed no ideas about anything; she took her husband and the days as

they came.

I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in

life; the absence of any guidance or instruction or provision for

their development. They supplemented the silences of home by the

conversation of schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular

fiction. They had to make what they could out of life with such

hints as these. The church was far too modest to offer them any

advice. It was obtruded upon my mind upon my first visit that they

were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive

passings and seeings and meetings with the mysterious owners of

certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.

N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same

thing was going on, with a certain intensification, at my next

visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I

came again their methods were maturer or I was no longer a

negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer

flaunted quite so openly in my face.

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe

that the end of life is to have a "good time." They used the

phrase. That and the drives in dog-carts were only the first of

endless points of resemblance between them and the commoner sort of

American girl. When some years ago I paid my first and only visit

to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I

entered the train at Euston. There were three girls in my

compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being

seen off by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the

"steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they were the very

soul-sisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a good time, as

my cousins judged it, as these countless thousands of rich young

women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that

you are looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of

its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets for yourself

and presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying

about in that circle; flowers and boxes of sweets were common

currency. My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle

caressed them with parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he

exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey. It was like the

new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how

to express myself in it, for nature and training make me feel

encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But

then, like my father, I hate and distrust possessions.

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything;

I suppose it followed the lines of the fiction they read and was

romantic and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married

state seemed at once very attractive and dreadfully serious to them,

composed in equal measure of becoming important and becoming old. I

don't know what they thought about children. I doubt if they

thought about them at all. It was very secret if they did.

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were

always ready to take part in a Charitable Bazaar. They were unaware

of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that

circumambient poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as

disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper. They

knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were

"Agitators." It surprised them a little, I think, that Agitators

were not more drastically put down. But they had a sort of

instinctive dread of social discussion as of something that might

breach the happiness of their ignorance…