THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

7

Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham

with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face,

his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing

oratory. He led all these people wonderfully. He was always

curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing

frankness-and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.

For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the

throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the

Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants

of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break

against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed

he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the

last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical

aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that

he remained a commoner to the end of his days.

I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early

papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered

liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.

He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in

British political life. Some men one sees through and understands,

some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay,

but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth

and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. No

other contemporary has had that effect upon me. I've sat beside him

at dinners, stayed in houses with him-he was in the big house party

at Champneys-talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat

beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a

rare sense of beingunderstood. Other men have to be treated in a

special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,

flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.

Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have

ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of

stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.

And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with

Mankind? That I thought worth knowing.

I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a

dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost

forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive

purpose in politics.

"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party

converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country

towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under

every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do,

and people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion

become matters of science-and cease to be party questions."

He instanced education.

"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."

"Apart from the religious question."

He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his

general theme that political conflict was the outcome of

uncertainty. "Directly you get a thing established, so that people

can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people

can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no

more to be said. The thing has to be done…"

And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely

tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing

constructive conviction, there are other memories.

Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive,

indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning

over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it,

or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a

diabolical skill to preserve what are in effect religious tests,

tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the

consciences of a quarter-and that perhaps the best quarter-of the

youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?

In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham

displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his

subtle mind. I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and

listen to his urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care?

Did anything matter to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why

did he trouble to serve the narrowness and passion of his side? Or

did he see far beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was

justified by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?

They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly

well cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate

intimacy; he pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think

at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily

circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics.

And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight

of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond

question he was great! No other contemporary politician had his

quality. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great

contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of

statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only

interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the

conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at

times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the

reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own

thoughts, who waits behind a lesser master's chair…