THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new

conceptions that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of

my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY

and our wing of the present New Tory party. I do that without any

excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's

production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very

large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed

that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts to pop.

The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very vividly in my

memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight

we went to finish our talk at my house.

We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and

so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced

Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now

the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember

his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile

at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic

entanglement that was destined to involve us both. Gane was

present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was

absent. Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely

characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on

my mind.

I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my

title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it

was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People." It is not the title

I should choose now-for since that time I have got my phrase of

"mental hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The

World Exists for Mental Hinterland."

The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a

thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought

with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the

scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it

the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the

1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled

marginalia.

My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon

lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding

sections. I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and

tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were

treated to one of his platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in

his chair with that small obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling,

and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating-quite

regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others

in the debate-the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge

from reality. "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of

his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the

People. I do." And so on. Nothing in his life or work had ever

shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark.

He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.

After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show

that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either

recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is

aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the

reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment

of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and

understanding. There was a disgusted grunt from Dayton, "Superman

rubbish-Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed on over him to my next

propositions. The prime essential in a progressive civilisation was

the establishment of a more effective selective process for the

privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational

opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise

scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a

reward for virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an

invitation to capacity. We had no more right to drag in virtue, or

any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the

tallest man. We didn't want a mere process for the selection of

good as distinguished from gifted and able boys-"No, you DON'T,"

from Dayton-we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world

concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate

Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in

educational, artistic, and legislative work. "Good teaching," I

said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic about

character."

Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of

agonised aversion.

I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that

is really serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the

thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter,

are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned

by-how many?-by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said

Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or

four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain

no illusions as to their innate rarity. We know that they are just

the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and

confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate

moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the

crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become

commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry

commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous

pollen in a pine forest is waste."

"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his

chin in his necktie. "WASTE!"

"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually

in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of

intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and

opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might

call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by

understanding. It isn't that our-SALT of three or four thousand is

needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and

undifferentiated a public. Most of the good men we know are not

really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a

little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.

Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,

futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal

problem of the state-to discover, develop, and use the exceptional

gifts of men. And I see that best done-I drift more and more away

from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity-by

a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but

by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep

literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all

science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism

going. You know none of these things have ever been kept going

hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."

"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an

expression of mystical profundity.

"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to

darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to

darkness again-and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went

on to attack the present organisation of our schools and

universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-

behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the

authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon

lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this

story…

So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new

ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or

combination of groups these developments of science and literature

and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I

looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.

There I left it to them.

We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we

emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.

The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.

I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way

we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a

lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a

walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he

said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible

movement. It's not only possible, but necessary-urgently

necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."

"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in

education and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our

neglect of the higher levels."

Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called

the spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community

needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken

seriously," I remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either

dull responsibility or merely witty art."

I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown

out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate

these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.

"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind

went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and

how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers

nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some

defensive devices.

"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said

Crupp, with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The

Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or

literature."

"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said

Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were

made of," he added.

"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've

got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make

it work. But he's certainly suggested a method."

"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to

the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."

"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't

do without it."

"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes,

aristocrats indeed-if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said

Britten.

"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.

"I agree," said Gane.

"No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."

It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with

ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out

suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we

tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I

think, got more said than any one. "You all seem to think you want

to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,"

he insisted. "It isn't that. That's the standing error of

politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a

matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.

The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question

for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help

this culture forward."

"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You

yourself were asking that a little while ago."

"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a

movement to reorganise aristocracy-Reform of the House of Lords,

they'll call the political form of it."

"Bailey thinks that," said some one.

"The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said

Thorns.

He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.

"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of

those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady

jet of ideas might produce enormous results."

"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."

"We should," said Thorns under his breath.

I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.

"I believe we could do-extensive things," I insisted.

"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said

Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."

"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the

peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently

progressive and rejuvenescent."

I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our

presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection

was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.

Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the

table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he

said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.

They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."

"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.

"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.

"Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm,

and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to

happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock,

and barrel, who comes in?"

"Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.

"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.

"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns.

"I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in

three years."

"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing

emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and

almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all

the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march

with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.

Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I

concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,-I want

to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly-his first remark for a long

time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.

"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by

transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed

many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of

a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the

liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except

a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other

progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams

of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no

free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid

ugliness,-that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to

discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls-

and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people

say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in

which the living element may be saved."

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.

It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became

noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult

that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do

immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.

And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was

only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist

in our hands…

We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow-but in

that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration,

and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the

indications of that opening talk.