THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

9

My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to

the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of

my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and

administered territories-the vision I had seen in the haze from

that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a

more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my

uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive

Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of

organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated

methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent

industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my

perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But

something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these

determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,

always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of

vitally important omissions.

I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political

associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,

priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were

attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own

theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more

than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was

seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits

of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his

illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited

triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to

point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal

all along with human progress as something immediate in life,

something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups

pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in

my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-

seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-

consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely

growing unpublished personality behind him-my hinterland, I have

called it-so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is

also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws

continually upon human experience and influences human action more

and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the

stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it

was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't

understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying

to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,

and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of

silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most

acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human

life altogether in social organisation.

In the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of

statesmanship. It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and

all organising spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange

and achieve. Priests, schools of thought, political schemers,

leaders of men, have always slipped into the error of assuming that

they can think out the whole-or at any rate completely think out

definite parts-of the purpose and future of man, clearly and

finally; they have set themselves to legislate and construct on that

assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy and evasions

of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training,

pruning, secretive education; and all the stupidities of self-

sufficient energy. In the passion of their good intentions they

have not hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush

disturbing initiatives and apparently detrimental desires. And so

it is blunderingly and wastefully, destroying with the making, that

any extension of social organisation is at present achieved.

Directly, however, this idea of an emancipation from immediacy is

grasped, directly the dominating importance of this critical, less

personal, mental hinterland in the individual and of the collective

mind in the race is understood, the whole problem of the statesman

and his attitude towards politics gain a new significance, and

becomes accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer

to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces

to the development of that needed intellectual life without which

all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to

build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.

You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and

harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring

only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process

fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give

cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality

and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of

a contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion,

vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity

that lurks more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt

there must go an emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last

something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the

spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress-

love and fine thinking.

(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week

without the repetition of that phrase.)

My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The

more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,

the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I

as a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an

adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that

had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the

secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of

City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky

Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and

tradition-worship of my political associates. None of these things

were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.

I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame. The

real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the

enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of

human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the

invigoration of research-and whatever one does in human affairs has

or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.

With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I

was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life

of politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still

against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to

their essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went

nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire

fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward

appearances whose ultimaterealities were jerry-built conclusions,

hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and

prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men. How are we through

politics to get at that confusion?

We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create

a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all

educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues,

and the evasion of life.

We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and

literature, and its exploration through research.

We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,

and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free

criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike

degenerate into tradition or imposture.

Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,

disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the

scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually

beautiful, become-EASY…

It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could

engage would be those which most directly affected the Church,

public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature,

and the channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my

position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and

conduced to this essential work.