THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys

and me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant

visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises.

It is not nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit

that also held between us. There was a difference in texture, a

difference in quality. How can I express it? The shapes of our

thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different. It was

as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in

transparent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly from my

point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their

ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but

visible always through mine.

I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to

beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth,

order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead

straight to beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got

that or they didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things

harsh and ugly. That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of

many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak,

were at times as dreadful as-well, War Office barrack architecture.

A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to

point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember

talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds

for the work he had in hand. I mentioned the possibility of

enlisting Bailey's influence.

"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running

us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the

end he had in view. "I'd rather not have the extension.

"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the

essentials."

"What essentials?" said I.

"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some

merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do

all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers-and he'd do

it wrong and mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know.

He's just a means. Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.

This isn't a plumber's job…"

I stuck to my argument.

"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to

me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking…

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our

philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable

difference,-once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy

devoid of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised,

concentrated, accurate, while Iam urged either by some Inner force

or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to

round off and shadow my outlines. I hate them hard. I would

sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to

me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If

they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the

trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.

Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great

mistake… I got things clearer as time went on. Though it

was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by

way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been

Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism

that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial

of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The

Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense-

which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word-"Realists."

They believed classes were REAL and independent of their

individuals. This is the common habit of all so-called educated

people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical

training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the

world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody

as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a

chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air

to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its

nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that

only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of

actuality and the people one knew…

At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the

very strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected

to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin

and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable

percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave

and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora

canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that

might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing

it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision;

and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about

you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and

mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready

obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim

termini.

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific

administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into

the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and

avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers

Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour

of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of

mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise

of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton

crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative

unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of

the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite

conviction that the huge formlessspirit of the world it was that

held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage…

Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire

uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths conversing with

prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire

disregard of the social suitability of the "types" they might blend

or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lamp-posts whom you

knew for the "type" that will charge with fixed bayonets into the

face of death, and you found yourself unable to imagine little

Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of

annihilation. You realised that quite a lot of types were

underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and

altogether monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether

unassimilated by those neat administrative reorganisations.