THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

8

Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state

becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as

to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke

quite after my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise

that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly. But

neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist of my story.

And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and

Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was

possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of

constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely accept

the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to

make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.

There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the

great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa,

Framboya-Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So

far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they

had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the

perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little

glorious, a little too simply bold. They wanted to arm and they

wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them

far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of

heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in

a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained

men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the

things that matter in England… There were also the great

business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord

Paddockhurst). My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the

scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the

perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar

competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of

gain. For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington-I wish I had kept

a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day

to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and

wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity of sweeping

actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent

ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting

pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed

him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in

him-but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day

after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound

meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem

to light the whole interior being of a man. "Some day," he said

softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing-"some

day I will raise the country."

"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the

little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette…

Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and

again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and

their big lawyers, accustomed to-well, qualified statement. And

below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods,

young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen

service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers,

keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.

Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside

the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their

chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than welt-

politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the

Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-

hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for

bullying. They varied in insensible gradations between the noble

sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our

Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man might exercise

his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public

serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed

up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose

predominant idea was that the village schools should confine

themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying,

and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request…

I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the

figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the

library of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of

those things-I think they are called gout stools. He had been

playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he

had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted

to irascible important men whose insteps are painful. Among other

things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand

statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly

that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in

population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and

circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who

pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of

upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established

Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue

about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered

his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to

the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an

appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable,

responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a

number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive

retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to

the forensic mind. Now he reposed. He was breathing heavily with

his mouth a little open and his head on one side. One whisker was

turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump strong hands

gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.

How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence,

respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his

unguarded expression!

I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake

him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.