THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

5

My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of

the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain

impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The

National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh-and

Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold,

wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous

paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the

late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy,

crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of

men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just

that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me

the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and hears perplexing

dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the

clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches

profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or

Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape…

I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the

Club to doubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with

countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in

circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the

great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of

the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some

are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely,

dissociated men. At first one gets an impression of men going from

group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches

closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at

the outside, and know nothing of the others. One begins to perceive

more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human

mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different

quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.

Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the

Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores

are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a

clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island

of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant

from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a

group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or

so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of

eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.

Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised

chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons-bulging

with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions

over long cigars…

I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract

some constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of

politics. It was clear they were against the Lords-against

plutocrats-against Cossington's newspapers-against the brewers…

It was tremendously clear what they were against. The trouble

was to find out what on earth they were for!…

As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the

various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the

partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would

dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of

miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal

littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample

but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity-all in

little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and

narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.

What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes

together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half

of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct

and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the

commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative

imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.

The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great

and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart…

I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality

very vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a

waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the

sackload and drown by the million in ditches…

Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy

movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at

hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!

he was saying something about the "Will of the People…"

The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I

forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a

lonelyspirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a

ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye

could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like

grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was

there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling

individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant

synthesis, still to come-or present it might be and still unseen by

me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of

mankind?…

I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,

the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is

implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of

would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the

ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life,

has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the

indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and

comprehend individual lives-an effort of insidious attraction, an

idea of invincible appeal. That something greater than ourselves,

which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between

being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and

visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in

stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more

clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile

in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men. It is

something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is

withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever

been…