THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

10

The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and

difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will

permit the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has

an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency

with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of

life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be

silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the

sight of all men. Those who have no real political experience can

scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is

between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the

"thinking-out" process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult

to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex,

to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under

jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the

platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs…

The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual

autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the

elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record

of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations

between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the

bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…

And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,

to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,

experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is

to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to

feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to

choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent

questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use

dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap

haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the

whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a

poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get

something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to

put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement…

One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a

curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to

conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position

that this should happen. I was in such doubtmyself, that I had no

power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I

had stage-managed our "serious" conversations. Now I was too much

in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk

with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and

sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic

apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes

distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right,

and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling

to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I

could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing

ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation

fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had

nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big

people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were

temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than

our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be

reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the

finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and

disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in habits and

gestures of thought coming between us again.

The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon

myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone;

an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening,

a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and

more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I

maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during

that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow

acquisitions.