The New Machiavelli..........................................................................................................................................1

H. G. Wells..............................................................................................................................................1

Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my energies in the futile beginning of

illconceived books. One does not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, and I

have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of

homeless bees in my head. My mind has been full of confused protests and justifications. In any case I should

have found difficulties enough in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it has added greatly to my

trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very

much the age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of his mind, very much as I have

wanted to do. He wrote about the relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual character and

weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a deep rut in the road of my intention. It has taken me far

astray. It is a matter of many weeks nowdiversified indeed by some long drives into the mountains behind

us and a memorable sail to Genoa across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelleysince I began a

laboured and futile imitation of "The Prince." I sat up late last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at

last made a little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheetto begin again clear this morning.

But incidentally I have reread most of Machiavelli, not excepting those scandalous letters of his to Vettori,

and it seems to me, now that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he still has his

use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred with him and set his name upon my titlepage, in

partial intimation of the matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reason of the dream he

pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature. His vices come in, essential to my

issue. He is dead and gone, all his immediate correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance,

leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living

personality, exposed down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be exposed. Of

those double strands it is I have to write, of the subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and

desire against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to lie very far apart in

Machiavelli's time have come near to one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling against

The statemaking dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's history. It plays too small a part in novels.

Plato and Confucius are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred aspiration, have

dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful

and peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms of harbours and shining

navies, great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and

diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human possibilities; they thought of these

things with passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands of

men there are today almost mastered by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who reads

and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering response. But in every one it presents itself

It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he lived in retirement upon his property after the

fall of the Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking in his

limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was "The Prince" was written. All day he went

about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday passions. He

would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company, or pace the lonely

woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned home and went to his

study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes covered with the dust and dirt of that

immediate life, washed himself, put on his "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling and

getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment to those

I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the light of candles in silver candlesticks, or

heading some new chapter of "The Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.

So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of his animal humour, his queer indecent

side, and because of such lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the

beggingletter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the

gist of his matter, of the continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him. They are my

reason for preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and whose

correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished; or to Confucius who travelled China in search of a

Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages. They have achieved the

apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the

Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with his tradition. They have passed into the world of the

ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and less popular,

is still all human and earthly, a fallen brotherand at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming

That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in my story. But as I reread "The Prince"

and thought out the manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of

human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach

to such a question. Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before

him, saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the work of state

building, and that was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts

towards realisation, their attitudes became what shall I call it?secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had

some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or

Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my mind

for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of

Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor who was once my

schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. Rockefellerall of them men in their several ways and

circumstances and possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord towards irony

becausebecause, although at first I did not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal was

unfair. The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world. The commonweal is one

man's absolute estate and responsibility no more. In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree

one man's affair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all

power are ended. We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and

statesman is something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince. No magnificent

In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful how it has increased. I sit here, an

unarmed discredited man, at a small writingtable in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no

human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate selfimmolation of murdering me, nor destroy its

fruits except by theft and crime. No King, no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence

me. Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is not because power has

diminished, but because it has increased and become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and

specialised. It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do. This

age, far beyond all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achieve

The things that might be done today! The things indeed that are being done! It is the latter that give one so

vast a sense of the former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine and

sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,

the power now available for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with anything that

has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined

and uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this

development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge

majority, and the passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with dazzling

intimations of the human splendours the justly organised state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering

But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches at thousands of readers for the eye of a

Prince diffused. It is the old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of confusions, but

instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship

about him. The last written dedication of all those I burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially

There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my world and Machiavelli's. We are

discovering women. It is as if they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of

In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region of life almost infinitely remote from his

statecraft. They were the vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to day have ever

had an inkling of the significance that might give them in the state. They did their work, he thought, as the

ploughed earth bears its crops. Apart from their function of fertility they gave a humorous twist to life,

stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought of women outside with his

other dusty things when he went into his study to write, dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world

is burthened with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of women. They stand now, as it

were, close beside the silver candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen and turns to

It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if

my picture is to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the telling of my own story. In my

life I have paralleled very closely the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me. I began life

ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my

life and after misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man and woman and learnt how

it must needs frame a justifiable vision of the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my

career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value. But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he

went into his study, left not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.

Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one step further, I too am an exile. Office and

leading are closed to me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered and ended for ever.

I look out from this vinewreathed veranda under the branches of a stone pine; I see wide and far across a

purple valley whose sides are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of Liguria gleaming

sapphire blue, and cloudlike baseless mountains hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly

steamships heaving on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet with rain, I recall as if

I were back there the busy exit from Charing Cross, the cross and the moneychangers' offices, the splendid

grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and

It is difficult to think we have left thatfor many years if not for ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace

Yard and hear the clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I go in vivid recent

memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit again at eventful dinners in those old diningrooms like cellars

below the Housedinners that ended with shrill division bells, I think of huge clubs swarming and excited

by the bulletins of that electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I see the stencilled names and

numbers go up on the green baize, constituency after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting. . . .

It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no more. Very probably you have heard

already some crude inaccurate version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed your

partial judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone table, half out of life already, in a warm, large,

shadowy leisure, splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper before me to distil such

wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during the

I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my party. I do not know where I might not

have ended, but for this red blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for ever.

I dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a little boy in knickerbockers.

When I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me the memory of an enormous

bleak room with its ceiling going up to heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective

oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a "surround" as they call it, of dark stained wood. Here and there against

the wall are trunks and boxes. There are cupboards on either side of the fireplace and bookshelves with books

above them, and on the wall and rather tattered is a large yellowvarnished geological map of the South of

England. Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral rock and several big fossil bones, and above that

hangs the portrait of a brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of intricate detail and much

vigour of coloring. It is the floor I think of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread

towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are steep square hills (geologically, volumes of Orr's

CYCLOPAEDIA OF THE SCIENCES) and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown surround

I still remember with infinite gratitude the greatuncle to whom I owe my bricks. He must have been one of

those rare adults who have not forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous west of

England builder; including my father he had three nephews, and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to

be made by an outofwork carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop, you understand, but a really

adequate quantity of bricks made out of oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a

half by one, and halfbricks and quarterbricks to correspond. There were hundreds of them, many hundreds.

I could build six towers as high as myself with them, and there seemed quite enough for every engineering

project I could undertake. I could build whole towns with streets and houses and churches and citadels; I

could bridge every gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over crumpled spaces (which I feigned to be

morasses), and on a keel of whole bricks it was possible to construct ships to push over the high seas to the

remotest port in the room. And a disciplined population, that rose at last by sedulous begging on birthdays

and all convenient occasions to well over two hundred, of lead sailors and soldiers, horse, foot and artillery,

Justice has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about toys. The praises of the toy

theatre have been a common theme for essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out of

the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of the performance and the final conflagration. I

had such a theatre once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and soldiers were my

perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of interests. There was the mystery and charm of the

complicated buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows through which one peeped

into their intricacies, and by means of slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles

rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun

emplacements and covered ways in which one's soldiers went. And there was commerce; the shops and

markets and storerooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the

garden; such stuff one stored in matchboxes and pill boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up

with thread and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian

frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on the way.

That great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by what benefactor, certain particularly

fierce red Indians of lead I have never seen such soldiers sinceand for these my father helped me to

make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate country under the frowning

nailstudded cliffs of an ancient trunk. Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no

doubt through contact with civilisationone my mother trod onand their land became a wilderness again

and was ravaged for a time by a clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the coalscuttle

was a region near the impassable thickets of the ragged hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus brandishing

spears, and a mountain country of rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and

several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of survivors from a Noah's Ark made a

various, dangerous, albeit frequently invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated

wildness of this region further by trees of privet twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden

borders. By these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the

oilcloth, tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hillsone tunnel was three volumes longdefended as occasion

required by camps of paper tents or brick blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and developed from small beginnings,

incorporating now this suggestion and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or twelve. I

played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the retrospect far more significantly than they did at the

time. I played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods; through the spring and summer I was

mostly out of doors, and school and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I see them all not only

magnified and transfigured, but foreshortened and confused together. A clockwork railway, I seem to

remember, came and went; one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, being keeled, would do

nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over,

given me by a maiden aunt, and very much what one might expect from an aunt, that I used as Nero used his

Christians to ornament my public buildings; and I finally melted some into fratricidal bullets, and therewith

blew the rest to flat splashes of lead by means of a brass cannon in the garden.

I find this empire of the floor much more vivid and detailed in my memory now than many of the owners of

the skirts and legs and boots that went gingerly across its territories. Occasionally, alas! they stooped to

scrub, abolishing in one universal destruction the slow growth of whole days of civilised development. I still

remember the hatred and disgust of these catastrophes. Like Noah I was given warnings. Did I disregard

them, coarse red hands would descend, plucking garrisons from fortresses and sailors from ships, jumbling

them up in their wrong boxes, clumsily so that their rifles and swords were broken, sweeping the splendid

curves of the Imperial Road into heaps of ruins, casting the jungle growth of Zululand into the fire.

Well, Master Dick," the voice of this cosmic calamity would say, "you ought to have put them away last

night. No! I can't wait until you've sailed them all away in ships. I got my work to do, and do it I will."

And in no time all my continents and lands were swirling water and swiping strokes of houseflannel.

That was the worst of my giant visitants, but my mother too, dear lady, was something of a terror to this

microcosm. She wore spring sided boots, a kind of boot now vanished, I believe, from the world, with dull

bodies and shiny toes, and a silk dress with flounces that were very destructive to the more hazardous

viaducts of the Imperial Road. She was always, I seem to remember, fetching me; fetching me for a meal,

fetching me for a walk or, detestable absurdity! fetching me for a wash and brush up, and she never seemed

to understand anything whatever of the political Systems across which she came to me. Also she forbade all

toys on Sundays except the bricks for churchbuilding and the soldiers for church parade, or a Scriptural use

of the remains of the Noah's Ark mixed up with a wooden Swiss dairy farm. But she really did not know

whether a thing was a church or not unless it positively bristled with cannon, and many a Sunday afternoon

have I played Chicago (with the fear of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that it was a new sort of

Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father's description of the pig slaughterings in that city and

certain pictures I had seen. You made your beastswhich were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived

as pigsgo up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which they went down a cardboard slide four at a

time, and dropped most satisfyingly down a brick shaft, and pitter litter over some steep steps to where a

head slaughterman (ne Noah) strung a cotton loop round their legs and sent them by pin hooks along a wire to

a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs. Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them

My mother did not understand my games, but my father did. He wore brightcoloured socks and carpet

slippers when he was indoorsmy mother disliked boots in the houseand he would sit down on my little

chair and survey the microcosm on the floor with admirable understanding and sympathy.

It was he gave me most of my toys and, I more than suspect, most of my ideas. "Here's some corrugated

iron," he would say, "suitable for roofs and fencing," and hand me a lump of that stiff crinkled paper that is

used for packing medicine bottles. Or, "Dick, do you see the tiger loose near the Imperial Road?won't do

for your cattle ranch." And I would find a bright new lead tiger like a special creation at large in the world,

and demanding a hunting expedition and much elaborate effort to get him safely housed in the city menagerie

beside the captured dragon crocodile, tamed now, and his key lost and the heart and spring gone out of him.

And to the various irregular reading of my father I owe the inestimable blessing of never having a boy's book

in my boyhood except those of Jules Verne. But my father used to get books for himself and me from the

Bromstead Institute, Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid and illustrated histories; one of the RussoTurkish

war and one of Napier's expedition to Abyssinia I read from end to end; Stanley and Livingstone, lives of

Wellington, Napoleon and Garibaldi, and back volumes of PUNCH, from which I derived conceptions of

foreign and domestic politics it has taken years of adult reflection to correct. And at home permanently we

had Wood's NATURAL HISTORY, a brandnew illustrated Green's HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH

PEOPLE, Irving's COMPANIONS OF COLUMBUS, a great number of unbound parts of some geographical

work, a VOYAGE ROUND THE WORLD I think it was called, with pictures of foreign places, and Clarke's

NEW TESTAMENT with a map of Palestine, and a variety of other informing books bought at sales. There

was a Sowerby's BOTANY also, with thousands of carefully tinted pictures of British plants, and one or two

other important works in the sittingroom. I was allowed to turn these over and even lie on the floor with

And in the attic I found one day a very old forgotten map after the fashion of a bird'seye view, representing

the Crimea, that fascinated me and kept me for hours navigating its waters with a pin.

My father was a lanklimbed man in easy shabby tweed clothes and with his hands in his trouser pockets. He

was a science teacher, taking a number of classes at the Bromstead Institute in Kent under the old Science

and Art Department, and "visiting" various schools; and our resources were eked out by my mother's income

of nearly a hundred pounds a year, and by his inheritance of a terrace of three palatial but structurally

They were big clumsy residences in the earliest Victorian style, interminably high and with deep damp

basements and downstairs coalcellars and kitchens that suggested an architect vindictively devoted to the

discomfort of the servant class. If so, he had overreached himself and defeated his end, for no servant would

stay in them unless for exceptional wages or exceptional tolerance of inefficiency or exceptional freedom in

repartee. Every storey in the house was from twelve to fifteen feet high (which would have been cool and

pleasant in a hot climate), and the stairs went steeply up, to end at last in attics too inaccessible for

occupation. The ceilings had vast plaster cornices of classical design, fragments of which would sometimes

fall unexpectedly, and the wallpapers were bold and gigantic in pattern and much variegated by damp and

As my father was quite unable to let more than one of these houses at a time, and that for the most part to

eccentric and undesirable tenants, he thought it politic to live in one of the two others, and devote the rent he

received from the let one, when it was let, to the incessant necessary repairing of all three. He also did some

of the repairing himself and, smoking a bulldog pipe the while, which my mother would not allow him to do

in the house, he cultivated vegetables in a sketchy, unpunctual and not always successful manner in the

unoccupied gardens. The three houses faced north, and the back of the one we occupied was covered by a

grapevine that yielded, I remember, small green grapes for pies in the spring, and imperfectly ripe black

grapes in favourable autumns for the purposes of dessert. The grapevine played an important part in my life,

My father was what is called a man of ideas, but they were not always good ideas. My grandfather had been a

private schoolmaster and one of the founders of the College of Preceptors, and my father had assisted him in

his school until increasing competition and diminishing attendance had made it evident that the days of small

private schools kept by unqualified persons were numbered. Thereupon my father had roused himself and had

qualified as a science teacher under the Science and Art Department, which in these days had charge of the

scientific and artistic education of the mass of the English population, and had thrown himself into science

teaching and the earning of government grants therefor with great if transitory zeal and success.

I do not remember anything of my father's earlier and more energetic time. I was the child of my parents'

middle years; they married when my father was thirtyfive and my mother past forty, and I saw only the last

The Science and Art Department has vanished altogether from the world, and people are forgetting it now

with the utmost readiness and generosity. Part of its substance and staff and spirit survive, more or less

The world does move on, even in its government. It is wonderful how many of the clumsy and limited

governing bodies of my youth and early manhood have given place now to more scientific and efficient

machinery. When I was a boy, Bromstead, which is now a borough, was ruled by a strange body called a

Local Boardit was the Age of Boardsand I still remember indistinctly my father rejoicing at the

breakfasttable over the liberation of London from the corrupt and devastating control of a Metropolitan

Board of Works. Then there were also School Boards; I was already practically in politics before the London

School Board was absorbed by the spreading tentacles of the London County Council.

It gives a measure of the newness of our modern ideas of the State to remember that the very beginnings of

public education lie within my father's lifetime, and that many most intelligent and patriotic people were

shocked beyond measure at the State doing anything of the sort. When he was born, totally illiterate people

who could neither read a book nor write more than perhaps a clumsy signature, were to be found everywhere

in England; and great masses of the population were getting no instruction at all. Only a few schools

flourished upon the patronage of exceptional parents; all over the country the old endowed grammar schools

were to be found sinking and dwindling; many of them had closed altogether. In the new great centres of

population multitudes of children were sweated in the factories, darkly ignorant and wretched and the

underequipped and understaffed National and British schools, supported by voluntary contributions and

sectarian rivalries, made an ineffectual fight against this festering darkness. It was a condition of affairs

clamouring for remedies, but there was an immense amount of indifference and prejudice to be overcome

before any remedies were possible. Perhaps some day some industrious and lucid historian will disentangle

all the muddle of impulses and antagonisms, the commercialism, utilitarianism, obstinate conservatism,

humanitarian enthusiasm, out of which our present educational organisation arose. I have long since come to

believe it necessary that all new social institutions should be born in confusion, and that at first they should

present chiefly crude and ridiculous aspects. The distrust of government in the Victorian days was far too

great, and the general intelligence far too low, to permit the State to go about the new business it was taking

up in a businesslike way, to train teachers, build and equip schools, endow pedagogic research, and provide

properly written schoolbooks. These things it was felt MUST be provided by individual and local effort, and

since it was manifest that it was individual and local effort that were in default, it was reluctantly agreed to

stimulate them by money payments. The State set up a machinery of examination both in Science and Art and

for the elementary schools; and payments, known technically as grants, were made in accordance with the

examination results attained, to such schools as Providence might see fit to send into the world. In this way it

was felt the Demand would be established that would, according to the beliefs of that time, inevitably ensure

the Supply. An industry of "Grant earning" was created, and this would give education as a necessary

In the end this belief was found to need qualification, but Grant earning was still in full activity when I was

a small boy. So far as the Science and Art Department and my father are concerned, the task of examination

was entrusted to eminent scientific men, for the most part quite unaccustomed to teaching. You see, if they

also were teaching similar classes to those they examined, it was feared that injustice might be done. Year

after year these eminent persons set questions and employed subordinates to read and mark the increasing

thousands of answers that ensued, and having no doubt the national ideal of fairness well developed in their

minds, they were careful each year to reread the preceding papers before composing the current one, in

order to see what it was usual to ask. As a result of this, in the course of a few years the recurrence and

permutation of questions became almost calculable, and since the practical object of the teaching was to teach

people not science, but how to write answers to these questions, the industry of Grant earning assumed a

Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with the spirit of the age. The unfortunate conflict

between Religion and Science prevalent at this time was mitigated, if I remember rightly, by making

graduates in arts and priests in the established church Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and

private enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according to the conceptions of efficiency

prevalent in the district. Private enterprise made a particularly good thing of the books. A number of

competing firms of publishers sprang into existence specialising in Science and Art Department work; they

set themselves to produce textbooks that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of knowledge

necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty subjects into which desirable science was divided, and

copies and models and instructions that should give precisely the method and gestures esteemed as

proficiency in art. Every section of each book was written in the idiom found to be most satisfactory to the

examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former years were appended to every chapter. By

means of these last the teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of grantearning efficiency,

and very naturally he cast all other methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with questions and

That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes as an elementary grantearner from the age

of ten until his death, and it is so I remember him, sitting on the edge of a table, smothering a yawn

occasionally and giving out the infallible formulae to the industriously scribbling class sitting in rows of

desks before him. Occasionally be would slide to his feet and go to a blackboard on an easel and draw on that

very slowly and deliberately in coloured chalks a diagram for the class to copy in coloured pencils, and

sometimes he would display a specimen or arrange an experiment for them to see. The room in the Institute

in which he taught was equipped with a certain amount of apparatus prescribed as necessary for subject this

and subject that by the Science and Art Department, and this my father would supplement with maps and

But he never really did experiments, except that in the class in systematic botany he sometimes made us tease

common flowers to pieces. He did not do experiments if he could possibly help it, because in the first place

they used up time and gas for the Bunsen burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second

they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger the apparatus of the Institute and even the

lives of his students. Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover they always turned

out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant learner very seriously and opened demoralising

controversies. Quite early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the unscientific perversity of

Nature and the impassable gulf that is fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for example,

that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when

you blow into a glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue to blow it clears again,

whereas in truth you may blow into the stuff from the limewater bottle until you are crimson in the face and

painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And I knew, too, that in science if you put

potassium chlorate into a retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and may be collected

over water, whereas in real life if you do anything of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the

potassium chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says "Oh! Damn!" with astonishing

heartiness and distinctness, and a lady student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite understand that ancient libertine refusing to

cooperate in her own undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference for what he called an

illustrative experiment, which was simply an arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing

whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool, and then a slow luminous description of

just what you did put in it when you were so illadvised as to carry the affair beyond illustration, and just

exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that

in this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed from any unpleasant nervous tension,

could draw this still life without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then my father would

produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be copied instead. And he would also write on the

blackboard any exceptionally difficult but grantearning words, such as "empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."

Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once sticking up my hand and asking him in the

"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why" he extended his hand and arm and twiddled his

I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you

My father, I am afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical affairs to an exceptionally high level. He

combined practical incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine temperament, in a manner

that I have never seen paralleled in any human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest

manner, under the suggestion of books or papers or his own spontaneous imagination, and as he had never

been trained to do anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were extensive and thorough. At one

time he nearly gave up his classes for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the peculiar

pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory

memories for a lifetime. The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near the end of his

career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions,

and assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lanternlight that wrecked my preparation work for school

next day. My father dug up both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour alternating

with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a thing as exacting as a baby, its moods

have to he watched; it does not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its own. Intensive

culture greatly increases this disposition to trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a

drugged and demoralised and overirritated garden. My father got at cross purposes with our two patches at

an early stage. Everything grew wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified nothing

else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The peas were eaten in the night before they were three

inches high, the beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a spraying of the potatoes was to

develop a PENCHANT in the cat for being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the catapulting

of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane

with its occasional passersby did much to wreck the intensive scheme, because my father always stopped

work and went indoors if any one watched him. His special manure was apt to arouse a troublesome spirit of

In digging his rows and shaping his patches he neglected the guiding string and trusted to his eye altogether

too much, and the consequent obliquity and the various windbreaks and scarecrows he erected, and

particularly an irrigation contrivance he began and never finished by which everything was to be watered at

once by means of pieces of gutter from the roof and outhouses of Number 2, and a large and particularly

obstinate clump of elderbushes in the abolished hedge that he had failed to destroy entirely either by axe or

by fire, combined to give the gardens under intensive culture a singularly desolate and disorderly appearance.

He took steps towards the diversion of our house drain under the influence of the Sewage Utilisation Society;

but happily he stopped in time. He hardly completed any of the operations he began; something else became

more urgent or simply he tired; a considerable area of the Number 2 territory was never even dug up.

In the end the affair irritated him beyond endurance. Never was a man less horticulturallyminded. The

clamour of these vegetables he had launched into the world for his service and assistance, wore out his

patience. He would walk into the garden the happiest of men after a day or so of disregard, talking to me of

history perhaps or social organisation, or summarising some book he had read. He talked to me of anything

that interested him, regardless of my limitations. Then he would begin to note the growth of the weeds. "This

More weeding would follow and the talk would become fragmentary. His hands would become earthy, his

nails black, weeds would snap off in his careless grip, leaving the roots behind. The world would darken. He

would look at his fingers with disgusted astonishment. "CURSE these weeds!" he would say from his heart.

I have memories, too, of his sudden unexpected charges into the tranquillity of the house, his hands and

clothes intensively enriched. He would come in like a whirlwind. "This damned stuff all over me and the

My mother would never learn not to attempt to break him of swearing on such occasions. She would remain

standing a little stiffly in the scullery refusing to assist him to the adjectival towel he sought.

He would dance with rage and hurl the soap about. "The towel!" he would cry, flicking suds from big fingers

in every direction; "the towel! I'll let the blithering class slide if you don't give me the towel! I'll give up

At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was in the little arbour learning Latin

irregular verbs when it happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain,

shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable

mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were

rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great wipes

The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a fantastic massacre. It was the French

Revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he had

assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows,

flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber

Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent happiness, "I've done with gardening.

Let's go for a walk like reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"his face was convulsed for an instant

That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is that we went further than I had ever

been before; far beyond Keston and nearly to Sevenoaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green, and the

other is that my father as he went along talked about himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life

and what he had done with it. He monologued so that at times he produced an effect of weird

worldforgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards

became plain to me. It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos of that monologue; how

friendless my father was and uncompanioned in his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have

"I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I start gardening?

"I suppose man was created to mind a garden. . . But the Fall let us out of that! What was I created for? God!

"Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me, you know. I've got no hands and no patience.

I've mucked about with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for an

instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered. "Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan.

Make a good Plan and stick to it. Find out what life is aboutI never have and set yourself to do whatever

"Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with

stains of greenblack and green. Conferva and soot. . . . Property, they are! . . . Beware of Things, Dick,

beware of Things! Before you know where you are you are waiting on them and minding them. They'll eat

your life up. Eat up your hours and your blood and energy! When those houses came to me, I ought to have

sold themor fled the country. I ought to have cleared out. Sarcophagieaters of men! Oh! the hours and

days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me! The painting! It worked up my arms; it

got all over me. I stank of it. It made me ill. It isn't livingit's minding. . . .

"Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all cut up into silly little parallelograms,

look at all those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the hedge!

Somebody's minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about it.

Bothering! Yapping at every passerby. Look at that notice board! One rotten worried little beast wants to

keep us other rotten little beasts off HIS patch,God knows why! Look at the weeds in it. Look at the

mended fence! . . . There's no property worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All these

"I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. I ought to have made a better thing of life.

"I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my leg. They started me wrong. They never

started me at all. I only began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

"If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training, if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places

"Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos

exasperated by policemen! YOU be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any one to show

you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you make one. Get education, get a good education. Fight

your way to the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no good at digging and property

minding. There isn't a neighbour in Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I are the

brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those blithering houses come to youdon't have 'em.

Give them away! Dynamite 'emand off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if I can, Dick, but

So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words, yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched

along the southward road, with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and flinging out clumsy

illustrative motions at the outskirts of Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon he hated

Bromstead, from its foottiring pebbles up. He had no illusions about Bromstead or himself. I have the

clearest impression of him in his gardenstained tweeds with a deerstalker hat on the back of his head and

presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted

This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with many other afternoons; all sorts of things

my father said and did at different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at the time with a great

unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I

didn't understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me two very broad ideas in that talk

and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in

my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the human life that went

on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he called variously Science and

Civilisation, and which, though I do not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people

He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand, but he seemed always to be waving his

hand towards it,just as his contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doinghe belonged to his age and

mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told

me that this Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning and travailing

When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up with the disorders of my father's

gardening, and the odd patchings and paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece with that.

Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and something of its history. It is the quality and

history of a thousand places round and about London, and round and about the other great centres of

population in the world. Indeed it is in a measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which

we who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still of evolving order.

First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years ago, as a narrow irregular little street of

thatched houses strung out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a social order that

had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its own. At that time its population numbered a little under two

thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades serving agriculture. There was a

blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist, a doctor, a barber, a linendraper (who brewed his own beer); a veterinary

surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns. Round and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's

seats, whose owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the very tolerable highroad. The

church was big enough to hold the whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a large

proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and everybody, to begin with, was christened at its

font and buried at last in its yewshaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the place. It was, in fact, a

definite place and a real human community in those days. There was a pleasant old markethouse in the

middle of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much cheerful merry making and

homely intoxication occurred; there was a pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge,

and the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant cricket matches for a hundred guineas

a side, to the vast excitement of the entire population. It was very much the same sort of place that it had been

for three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most

of the old houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved and differentiated one from the

other, the same roads rather more carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient familiar

markethouse. The occasional wheeled traffic would have struck him as the most remarkable difference, next

perhaps to the swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the protestant severity of the

communiontable in the parish church, both from the material point of view very little things. A Rip van

Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater changes; fewer clergy, more people, and

particularly more people of the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses, the stylish

chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed him, and suchlike details. The place would have

had the same boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still itself in the way that a man

is still himself after he has "filled out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.

But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was destined to alter the scale of every human

That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to improve material things. In another part

of England ingenious people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were producing metal in

abundance and metal castings in sizes that had hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or preparation,

increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was coming to the strength of horses and

men. "Power," all unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social body.

Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had calculated its probable

consequences. Suddenly, almost inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have

amazed their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles much more easily and cheaply than they

had ever done before, to make up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too heavy for

locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical

possibilities, to trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods abroad in a wholesale and

systematic way, to bring back commodities from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods

in bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances replaced wooden, breeding of stock became

systematic, papermaking and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and tile appeared amidst and

presently prevailed over the original Bromstead thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was

extensively enclosed, and what had been an illdefined horsetrack to Dover, only passable by adventurous

coaches in dry weather, became the Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of several

daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be too tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new

road cut off its worst contortions. Residential villas appeared occupied by retired tradesmen and widows, who

esteemed the place healthy, and by others of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money

invested in jointstock enterprises. First one and then several boys' boardingschools came, drawing their

pupils from London,my grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the north west, was

But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first trickle of the coming flood of mechanical

power. Away in the north they were casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way to the

production of steel on a large scale, applying power in factories. Bromstead had almost doubted in size again

long before the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High Street, but instead were houses

with handsome brassknockered front doors and several windows, and shops with shopfronts all of square

glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps previously only one flickering lamp

outside each of the coaching inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk, it long remained

talk,of gas. The gasworks came in 1834, and about that date my father's three houses must have been built

convenient for the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the real suburban quality; they were let

And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal; there was a wild outbreak of brickfields

upon the claylands to the east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural placidities that

had formerly come to the very borders of the High Street were broken up north, west and south, by new

roads. This enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses, irrespective of every other

enterprising person who was doing the same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and with much

hesitation and pennywise economy inaugurated drainage works. Rates became a common topic, a fact of

accumulating importance. Several chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in

commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the residential district out beyond the

The population doubled again and doubled again, and became particularly teeming in the prolific

"workingclass" district about the deeprutted, muddy, coalblackened roads between the gasworks,

Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goodsyard. Weekly properties, that is to say small houses built by

small property owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the Cage Fields, and presently extended right up

the London Road. A single national school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to collect

subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy offspring of this dingy new population to read. The

villages of Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely four miles to the east of

Bromstead, were experiencing similar distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect of

locality or community had gone from these places long before I was born; hardly any one knew any one;

there was no general meeting place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by gypsies,

van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches were incapable of a quarter of the population.

One or two local papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local Bench and the local

Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian"

as one expressing peculiar virtues, and so maintained in the general mind a weak tradition of some local

quality that embraced us all. Then the parish graveyard filled up and became a scandal, and an ambitious area

with an air of appetite was walled in by a Bromstead Cemetery Company, and planted with suitably

highminded and sorrowful varieties of conifer. A stonemason took one of the earlier villas with a front

garden at the end of the High Street, and displayed a supply of urns on pillars and headstones and crosses in

stone, marble, and granite, that would have sufficed to commemorate in elaborate detail the entire population

The cemetery was made when I was a little boy of five or six; I was in the full tide of building and growth

from the first; the second railway with its station at Bromstead North and the drainage followed when I was

ten or eleven, and all my childish memories are of digging and wheeling, of woods invaded by building,

roads gashed open and littered with iron pipes amidst a fearful smell of gas, of men peeped at and seen toiling

away deep down in excavations, of hedges broken down and replaced by planks, of wheelbarrows and

builders' sheds, of rivulets overtaken and swallowed up by drain pipes. Big trees, and especially elms,

cleared of undergrowth and left standing amid such things, acquired a peculiar tattered dinginess rather in the

The Ravensbrook of my earlier memories was a beautiful stream. It came into my world out of a mysterious

Beyond, out of a garden, splashing brightly down a weir which had once been the weir of a mill. (Above the

weir and inaccessible there were bulrushes growing in splendid clumps, and beyond that, pampas grass,

yellow and crimson spikes of hollyhock, and blue suggestions of wonderland.) From the pool at the foot of

this initial cascade it flowed in a leisurely fashion beside a footpath,there were two pretty thatchcd cottages

on the left, and here were ducks, and there were willows on the right,and so came to where great trees

grew on high banks on either hand and bowed closer, and at last met overhead. This part was difficult to

reach because of an old fence, but a little boy might glimpse that long cavern of greenery by wading. Either I

have actually seen kingfishers there, or my father has described them so accurately to me that he inserted

them into my memory. I remember them there anyhow. Most of that overhung part I never penetrated at all,

but followed the field path with my mother and met the stream again, where beyond there were flat meadows,

Roper's meadows. The Ravensbrook went meandering across the middle of these, now between steep banks,

and now with wide shallows at the bends where the cattle waded and drank. Yellow and purple loosestrife

and ordinary rushes grew in clumps along the bank, and now and then a willow. On rare occasions of rapture

one might see a rat cleaning his whiskers at the water's edge. The deep places were rich with tangled weeds,

and in them fishes lurkedto me they were big fisheswaterboatmen and waterbeetles traversed the

calm surface of these still deeps; in one pool were yellow lilies and watersoldiers, and in the shoaly places

hovering fleets of small fry basked in the sunshineto vanish in a flash at one's shadow. In one place, too,

were Rapids, where the stream woke with a start from a dreamless brooding into foaming panic and babbled

and hastened. Well do I remember that halfmile of rivulet; all other rivers and cascades have their reference

to it for me. And after I was eleven, and before we left Bromstead, all the delight and beauty of it was

The volume of its water decreased abruptlyI suppose the new drainage works that linked us up with

Beckington, and made me first acquainted with the geological quality of the London clay, had to do with

thatuntil only a weak uncleansing trickle remained. That at first did not strike me as a misfortune. An

adventurous small boy might walk dryshod in places hitherto inaccessible. But hard upon that came the pegs,

the planks and carts and devastation. Roper's meadows, being no longer in fear of floods, were now to be

slashed out into parallelograms of untidy road, and built upon with rows of workingclass cottages. The

roads came,horribly; the houses followed. They seemed to rise in the night. People moved into them as

soon as the roofs were on, mostly workmen and their young wives, and already in a year some of these raw

houses stood empty again from defaulting tenants, with windows broken and woodwork warping and

rotting. The Ravensbrook became a dump for old iron, rusty cans, abandoned boots and the like, and was a

river only when unusual rains filled it for a day or so with an inky flood of surface water. . . .

That indeed was my most striking perception in the growth of Bromstead. The Ravensbrook had been

important to my imaginative life; that way had always been my first choice in all my walks with my mother,

and its rapid swamping by the new urban growth made it indicative of all the other things that had happened

just before my time, or were still, at a less dramatic pace, happening. I realised that building was the enemy. I

began to understand why in every direction out of Bromstead one walked past scaffoldpoles into litter, why

fragments of broken brick and cinder mingled in every path, and the significance of the universal

noticeboards, either white and new or a year old and torn and battered, promising sites, proffering houses to

be sold or let, abusing and intimidating passersby for fancied trespass, and protecting rights of way.

It is difficult to disentangle now what I understood at this time and what I have since come to understand, but

it seems to me that even in those childish days I was acutely aware of an invading and growing disorder. The

serene rhythms of the old established agriculture, I see now, were everywhere being replaced by cultivation

under notice and snatch crops; hedges ceased to be repaired, and were replaced by cheap iron railings or

chunks of corrugated iron; more and more hoardings sprang up, and contributed more and more to the nomad

tribes of filthy paper scraps that flew before the wind and overspread the country. The outskirts of Bromstead

were a maze of exploitation roads that led nowhere, that ended in tarred fences studded with nails (I don't

remember barbed wire in those days; I think the Zeitgeist did not produce that until later), and in trespass

boards that used vehement language. Broken glass, tin cans, and ashes and paper abounded. Cheap glass,

cheap tin, abundant fuel, and a free untaxed Press had rushed upon a world quite unprepared to dispose of

I suppose one might have persuaded oneself that all this was but the replacement of an ancient tranquillity, or

at least an ancient balance, by a new order. Only to my eyes, quickened by my father's intimations, it was

manifestly no order at all. It was a multitude of incoordinated fresh starts, each more sweeping and

destructive than the last, and none of them ever really worked out to a ripe and satisfactory completion. Each

left a legacy of products, houses, humanity, or what not, in its wake. It was a sort of progress that had bolted;

it was change out of hand, and going at an unprecedented pace nowhere in particular.

No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment

of the most slovenly and wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are necessary. I

suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred

convincing forms the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods. The

nineteenth century was an age of demonstrations, some of them very impressive demonstrations, of the

powers that have come to mankind, but of permanent achievement, what will our descendants cherish? It is

hard to estimate what grains of precious metal may not be found in a mud torrent of human production on so

large a scale, but will any one, a hundred years from now, consent to live in the houses the Victorians built,

travel by their roads or railways, value the furnishings they made to live among or esteem, except for curious

or historical reasons, their prevalent art and the clipped and limited literature that satisfied their souls?

That age which bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and undisciplined people, overtaken by power,

by possessions and great new freedoms, and unable to make any civilised use of them whatever; stricken now

by this idea and now by that, tempted first by one possession and then another to illconsidered attempts; it

was my father's exploitahon of his villa gardens on the wholesale level. The whole of Bromstead as I

remember it, and as I saw it lastit is a year ago nowis a dull useless boilingup of human activities, an

immense clustering of futilities. It is as unfinished as ever; the builders' roads still run out and end in

midfield in their old fashion; the various enterprises jumble in the same hopeless contradiction, if anything

intensified. Pretentious villas jostle slums, and publichouse and tin tabernacle glower at one another across

the cathaunted lot that intervenes. Roper's meadows are now quite frankly a slum; back doors and sculleries

gape towards the railway, their yards are hung with tattered washing unashamed; and there seem to be more

boards by the railway every time I pass, advertising pills and pickles, tonics and condiments, and suchlike

Well, we have to do better. Failure is not failure nor waste wasted if it sweeps away illusion and lights the

Chaotic indiscipline, illadjusted effort, spasmodic aims, these give the quality of all my Bromstead

memories. The crowning one of them all rises to desolating tragedy. I remember now the wan spring sunshine

of that Sunday morning, the stiff feeling of best clothes and aggressive cleanliness and formality, when I and

my mother returned from church to find my father dead. He had been pruning the grape vine. He had never

had a ladder long enough to reach the sill of the thirdfloor windowsat housepainting times he had

borrowed one from the plumber who mixed his paintand he had in his own happygolucky way

contrived a combination of the garden fruit ladder with a battered kitchen table that served all sorts of odd

purposes in an outhouse. He had stayed up this arrangement by means of the garden roller, and the roller had

at the critical moment rolled. He was lying close by the garden door with his head queerly bent back

against a broken and twisted rainwater pipe, an expression of pacific contentment on his face, a bamboo

curtain rod with a tableknife tied to end of it, still gripped in his hand. We had been rapping for some time at

the front door unable to make him hear, and then we came round by the door in the side trellis into the garden

"Arthur!" I remember my mother crying with the strangest break in her voice, "What are you doing there?

I was coming behind her, musing remotely, when the quality of her voice roused me. She stood as if she

could not go near him. He had always puzzled her so, he and his ways, and this seemed only another enigma.

Then the truth dawned on her, she shrieked as if afraid of him, ran a dozen steps back towards the trellis door

and stopped and clasped her ineffectual gloved hands, leaving me staring blankly, too astonished for feeling,

The same idea came to me also. I ran to her. "Mother!" I cried, pale to the depths of my spirit, "IS HE

I had been thinking two minutes before of the cold fruit pie that glorified our Sunday dinnertable, and how I

might perhaps get into the tree at the end of the garden to read in the afternoon. Now an immense fact had

come down like a curtain and blotted out all my childish world. My father was lying dead before my eyes. . . .

My formal education began in a small preparatory school in Bromstead. I went there as a day boy. The charge

for my instruction was mainly set off by the periodic visits of my father with a large bag of battered fossils to

lecture to us upon geology. I was one of those fortunate youngsters who take readily to school work, I had a

good memory, versatile interests and a considerable appetite for commendation, and when I was barely

twelve I got a scholarship at the City Merchants School and was entrusted with a scholar's railway season

ticket to Victoria. After my father's death a large and very animated and solidly built uncle in tweeds from

Staffordshire, Uncle Minter, my mother's sister's husband, with a remarkable accent and remarkable vowel

sounds, who had plunged into the Bromstead home once or twice for the night but who was otherwise

unknown to me, came on the scene, sold off the three gaunt houses with the utmost gusto, invested the

proceeds and my father's life insurance money, and got us into a small villa at Penge within sight of that

immense facade of glass and iron, the Crystal Palace. Then he retired in a mood of goodnatured contempt to

School became a large part of the world to me, absorbing my time and interest, and I never acquired that

detailed and intimate knowledge of Penge and the hilly villadom round about, that I have of the town and

It was a district of very much the same character, but it was more completely urbanised and nearer to the

centre of things; there were the same unfinished roads, the same occasional disconcerted hedges and trees, the

same butcher's horse grazing under a builder's noticeboard, the same incidental lapses into slum. The

Crystal Palace grounds cut off a large part of my walking radius to the west with impassable fences and

forbiddingly expensive turnstiles, but it added to the ordinary spectacle of meteorology a great variety of

gratuitous fireworks which banged and flared away of a night after supper and drew me abroad to see them

better. Such walks as I took, to Croydon, Wembledon, West Wickham and Greenwich, impressed upon me

the interminable extent of London's residential suburbs; mile after mile one went, between houses, villas,

rows of cottages, streets of shops, under railway arches, over railway bridges. I have forgotten the detailed

local characteristicsif there were anyof much of that region altogether. I was only there two years, and

half my perambulations occurred at dusk or after dark. But with Penge I associate my first realisations of the

wonder and beauty of twilight and night, the effect of dark walls reflecting lamplight, and the mystery of blue

hazeveiled hillsides of houses, the glare of shops by night, the glowing steam and streaming sparks of

railway trains and railway signals lit up in the darkness. My first rambles in the evening occurred at PengeI

was becoming a big and independent spirited boyand I began my experience of smoking during these

twilight prowls with the threepenny packets of American cigarettes then just appearing in the world.

My life centred upon the City Merchants School. Usually I caught the eighteighteen for Victoria, I had a

midday meal and tea; four nights a week I stayed for preparation, and often I was not back home again until

within an hour of my bedtime. I spent my half holidays at school in order to play cricket and football. This,

and a pretty voracious appetite for miscellaneous reading which was fostered by the Penge Middleton

Library, did not leave me much leisure for local topography. On Sundays also I sang in the choir at St.

Martin's Church, and my mother did not like me to walk out alone on the Sabbath afternoon, she herself

slumbered, so that I wrote or read at home. I must confess I was at home as little as I could contrive.

Home, after my father's death, had become a very quiet and uneventful place indeed. My mother had either

an unimaginative temperament or her mind was greatly occupied with private religious solicitudes, and I

remember her talking to me but little, and that usually upon topics I was anxious to evade. I had developed

my own view about lowChurch theology long before my father's death, and my meditation upon that event

had finished my secret estrangement from my mother's faith. My reason would not permit even a remote

chance of his being in hell, he was so manifestly not evil, and this religion would not permit him a remote

chance of being out yet. When I was a little boy my mother had taught me to read and write and pray and had

done many things for me, indeed she persisted in washing me and even in making my clothes until I rebelled

against these things as indignities. But our minds parted very soon. She never began to understand the mental

processes of my play, she never interested herself in my school life and work, she could not understand things

I said; and she came, I think, quite insensibly to regard me with something of the same hopeless perplexity

Him she must have wedded under considerable delusions. I do not think he deceived her, indeed, nor do I

suspect him of mercenariness in their union; but no doubt he played up to her requirements in the half

ingenuous way that was and still is the quality of most wooing, and presented himself as a very brisk and

orthodox young man. I wonder why nearly all lovemaking has to be fraudulent. Afterwards he must have

disappointed her cruelly by letting one aspect after another of his careless, sceptical, experimental

temperament appear. Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in church and

decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic of the large mass of the English

peoplefor after all, the rather lowChurch section WAS the largest single massin early Victorian times.

She had dreams, I suspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a large

flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a little lacetrimmed parasol, and he in a tall

silk hat and pegtop trousers and a rollcollar coat, and looking rather like the Prince Consort,white

angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their amiable progress. Perhaps she dreamt gently of

muchbelaced babies and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical) little girl or boy or so,

also angelhaunted. And I think, too, she must have seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a

vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawingroom, or again, making preserves in the kitchen.

My father's science teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts

that contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a

clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather

unintelligent anticipations. His wild moments of violent temper when he would swear and smash things,

absurd almost lovable storms that passed like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her. She

was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to understand or tolerate these outbreaks. She

tried them by her standards, and by her standards they were wrong. Her standards hid him from her. The

As I remember them together they chafed constantly. Her attitude to nearly all his moods and all his

enterprises was a sceptical disapproval. She treated him as something that belonged to me and not to her.

She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self subsisting before her marriage. Even in

those Herne Hill days I used to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old speculative

curiosity return as I write this. She took a considerable interest in the housework that our generally

servantless condition put upon hershe used to have a charwoman in two or three times a weekbut she

did not do it with any great skill. She covered most of our furniture with flouncey illfitting covers, and she

cooked plainly and without very much judgment. The Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead

things, was crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a

condiment she used very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces. My mother had an equal dread of

"blacks" by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were rarely open.

She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the headlines, but she did not read it until the

afternoon and then, I think, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in railway and mine

disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the Royal Family. Most of the books at home were my father's,

and I do not think she opened any of them. She had one or two volumes that dated from her own youth, and

she tried in vain to interest me in them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book I

remember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDE WORLD. She made these books

of hers into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin. To me in these

My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoiced to watch me in the choir.

On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the table at which I sat, head on hand

reading, and she would be darning stockings or socks or the like. We achieved an effect of rather stuffy

comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way I think she found these among her happy times. On

such occasions she was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing

that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity. For like most young people I could not imagine

She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian

hand and dealing mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and the

And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own that I suspected nothing of at the time,

that only now becomes credible to me. She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary of fragmentary

entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books. She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and

queer stiff little comments on casual visitors," Miss G. and much noisy shrieking talk about games and

such frivolities and CROQUAY. A. delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.

She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my father is always "A.," and I am always "D."

It is manifest she followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales, who is now Queen

Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy. "Pray G. all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.

But there are things about myself that I still find too poignant to tell easily, certain painful and clumsy

circumstances of my birth in very great detail, the distresses of my infantile ailments. Then later I find such

things as this: "Heard D. s." The "s" is evidently "swear "" G. bless and keep my boy from evil." And

again, with the thin handwriting shaken by distress: "D. would not go to church, and hardened his heart and

said wicked infidel things, much disrespect of the clergy. The anthem is tiresome!!! That men should set up

to be wiser than their maker!!!" Then trebly underlined: "I FEAR HIS FATHER'S TEACHING." Dreadful

little tangle of misapprehensions and false judgments! More comforting for me to read, "D. very kind and

good. He grows more thoughtful every day." I suspect myself of forgotten hypocrisies.

At just one point my mother's papers seem to dip deeper. I think the death of my father must have stirred her

for the first time for many years to think for herself. Even she could not go on living in any peace at all,

believing that he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me,

never, and for her diary also she could find no phrases. But on a loose halfsheet of notepaper between its

pages I find this passage that follows, written very carefully. I do not know whose lines they are nor how she

"And if there be no meeting past the grave; If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest. Be not afraid ye waiting

hearts that weep, For God still giveth His beloved sleep, And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."

That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder if my mother really grasped the import of

what she had copied out. It affected me as if a stonedeaf person had suddenly turned and joined in a

whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its general effect quite hopelessly limited, might

range. After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional term of

tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow there grew upon me the realisation that

there had been love. . . . Her love for me, on the other hand, was abundantly expressed.

I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such expression as it found was all beyond my

schoolboy range. I did not know when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly I was

aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of

explication, as one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it had to be; life

was coming to me in new forms and with new requirements. It was essential to our situation that we should

fail to understand. After this space of years I have come to realisations and attitudes that dissolve my

estrangement from her, I can pierce these barriers, I can see her and feel her as a loving and feeling and

desiring and muddleheaded person. There are times when I would have her alive again, if only that I might

be kind to her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow intense affection, the tender desires,

she evidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I could make that return? And I realise

the futility of such dreaming. Her demand was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.

So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as I saw her last, fixed, still, infinitely

My own case with my mother, however, does not awaken the same regret I feel when I think of how she

misjudged and irked my father, and turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I could

look back without that little twinge to two people who were both in their different quality so good. But

goodness that is narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitude to my father seems to me one of

the essentially tragic things that have come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can transfigure,

that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any explanation, for as I remember him he was indeed the

most lovable of weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard and narrow system that

made evil out of many things not in the least evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love and happiness, and not only that but

what we Machiavellians must needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I suppose I

am a deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I hate more and more, as I grow older, the shadow of

intolerance cast by religious organisations. All my life has been darkened by irrational intolerance, by

arbitrary irrational prohibitions and exclusions. Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I suppose, the

blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any

of the anterior paganisms, with this same hateful quality. It is their exclusive claim that sends them wrong,

the vain ambition that inspires them all to teach a uniform onesided God and be the one and only gateway to

salvation. Deprecation of all outside the household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical

goodness and lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty difference is exaggerated to the quality of a

saving grace or a damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the believer's mind against broad

or amiable suggestions; the faithful are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books, from

theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly instruments that mingle human sympathy. For only

Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I remember rightly, the HOME

CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing

that ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with one woodcut illustration on the front

page of each number; now the uninviting visage of some exponent of the real and only doctrine and attitudes,

now some coral strand in act of welcoming the missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new

church in the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was! A score of vices that shun the policeman have nothing of

its subtle wickedness. It was an outrage upon the natural kindliness of men. The contents were all admirably

adjusted to keep a spirit in prison. Their force of sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be

dreadful intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for Sabbathbreaking, and upon nations

for weakening towards Ritualism, or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would be

great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and terrible descriptions of the deathbeds of prominent

infidels with boldly invented last words,the most unscrupulous lying; there would be the appallingly

edifying careers of "early piety" lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced their

final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads people to give up subscribing to the HOME

Every month that evil spirit brought about a slump in our mutual love. My mother used to read the thing and

become depressed and anxious for my spiritual welfare, used to be stirred to unintelligent pestering. . . .

A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It was at one of the weekly dinners of

I heard the paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the man with interest. No doubt he was only a

successor of the purveyor of discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an influence so

terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He was seated some way down a table at right angles to the

one at which I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin, with a square nose, a heavy

wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple sticking out between the wings of his collar. He ate with

considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was underhung, he chummed and made the

moustache wave like reeds in the swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientious look. After dinner he a little

forced himself upon me. At that time, though the shadow of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed

to be shaping for great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and anxious to intimate

political sympathy and support. I tried to make him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred

publications he ran, but he was manifestly ashamed of his job so far as I was concerned.

"One wants," he said, pitching himself as he supposed in my key, "to put constructive ideas into our readers,

but they are narrow, you know, very narrow. Very." He made his moustache and lips express judicious regret.

"One has to consider them carefully, one has to respect their attitudes. One dare not go too far with them. One

A hireling, beyond question, catering for a demand. I gathered there was a home in Tufnell Park, and three

I had the curiosity to buy a copy of his magazine afterwards, and it seemed much the same sort of thing that

had worried my mother in my boyhood. There was the usual Christian hero, this time with mutton chop

whiskers and a long bare upper lip. The Jesuits, it seemed, were still hard at it, and Heaven frightfully upset

about the Sunday opening of museums and the falling birthrate, and as touchy and vindictive as ever. There

were two vigorous paragraphs upon the utter damnableness of the Rev. R. J. Campbell, a contagious

damnableness I gathered, one wasn't safe within a mile of Holborn Viaduct, and a foulmouthed attack on

poor little Wilkins the novelistwho was being baited by the moralists at that time for making one of his big

The broadening of human thought is a slow and complex process. We do go on, we do get on. But when one

thinks that people are living and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and misunderstanding, vaguely

fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darknesses of these narrow cultsOh, God! one

While I lived at Penge two little things happened to me, trivial in themselves and yet in their quality

profoundly significant. They had this in common, that they pierced the texture of the life I was quietly taking

for granted and let me see through it into realities realities I had indeed known about before but never

realised. Each of these experiences left me with a sense of shock, with all the values in my life perplexingly

altered, attempting readjustment. One of these disturbing and illuminating events was that I was robbed of a

new pocketknife and the other that I fell in love. It was altogether surprising to me to be robbed. You see, as

an only child I had always been fairly well looked after and protected, and the result was an amazing

confidence in the practical goodness of the people one met in the world. I knew there were robbers in the

world, just as I knew there were tigers; that I was ever likely to meet robber or tiger face to face seemed

The knife as I remember it was a particularly jolly one with all sorts of instruments in it, tweezers and a thing

for getting a stone out of the hoof of a horse, and a corkscrew; it had cost me a carefuly accumulated

halfcrown, and amounted indeed to a new experience in knives. I had had it for two or three days, and then

one afternoon I dropped it through a hole in my pocket on a footpath crossing a field between Penge and

Anerley. I heard it fall in the way one does without at the time appreciating what had happened, then, later,

before I got home, when my hand wandered into my pocket to embrace the still dear new possession I found

it gone, and instantly that memory of something hitting the ground sprang up into consciousness. I went back

and commenced a search. Almost immediately I was accosted by the leader of a little gang of four or five

extremely dirty and ragged boys of assorted sizes and slouching carriage who were coming from the Anerley

"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small whitefaced sniffing boy in a big bowler hat.

I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the ground about us.

I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over to me, and that all was for the best in the

"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely. "Oo said it was your knife?"

Remarkable doubts assailed me. "Of course it's my knife," I said. The other boys gathered round me.

"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into his trouser pocket.

I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I doubt if it kept the colour in my face. I

buttoned my jacket and clenched my fists and advanced on my antagonisthe had, I suppose, the advantage

Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary vigour and swiftness from behind, had an

arm round my neck and a knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and so got me

down. "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little ruffian. My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I

struck out and hit something like sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or three seemed to be at me at the

same time. Then I rolled over and sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, footballing my cap,

my City Merchants' cap, amongst them. I leapt to my feet in a passion of indignation and pursued them.

But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition, and I doubt if mine was a singleminded

pursuit. I knew that honour required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just been down in

the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and

incalculable unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I wanted of course to be even

with him, but also I doubted if catching him would necessarily involve that. They kicked my cap into the

ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder lane while I turned aside to recover my

dishonoured headdress. As I knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my knees and

readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this startling occurrence in my mind.

I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a police station, but some boyish instinct

against informing prevented that. No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and murderous reprisals.

And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought of my knife. The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks

and weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me. It was the first time I glimpsed the simple brute

violence that lurks and peeps beneath our civilisation. A certain kindly complacency of attitude towards the

But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex

motif, that was to rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave with and at last

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably connected in my mind with the dusk of warm

September evenings. I never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her name. It was some

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly like some deep coloured gem in the common

setting of my memories. It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on to anything

else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a

discovery about myself, a discovery about the whole world. Only in after years did sexual feeling lose that

isolation and spread itself out to illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of life.

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of the cheap cigarette, that this thing

happened. One evening I came by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of

shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their

strolling number. These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middleclass, are

one of the odd social developments of the great suburban growthsunkindly critics, blind to the inner

meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Paradesthe shop apprentices, the young work girls, the

boy clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their firstearned money upon collars and

ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the

vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost

and make friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which so many

find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a

Vulgar!it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in the evening and lights the body of the

glowworm in the night. I made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a public

schoolboy, my hands in my pocketsnone of your cheap canes for me!and very careful of the lie of my

cigarette upon my lips. And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with dim warmtinted faces

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her shoulderI could draw you now the pose of

her cheek and neck and shoulderand instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl as I have ever

been before or since, as any man ever was with any woman. I turned about and followed them, I flung away

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said and what she said I cannot remember, but

I have little doubt it was something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was we had met. I felt

as I think a newhatched moth must feel when suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation keeping us apart. We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five times altogether, and always with her nearly

silent elder sister on the other side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in arm, furtively

caressing each other's hands, we went away from the glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and

there we whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's warm and shaded face. "Dear," I

whispered very daringly, and she answered, "Dear!" We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that

quality of intimacy and more. We wanted each other as one wants beautiful music again or to breathe again

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the thing that matters is the way in which this

experience stabbed through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light, with a huge new interest

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never

kissed, her soft shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her proximity. . . .

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach their house. They made me leave them at

the corner of a road of small houses near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any intimation, they

vanished and came to the meeting place no more, they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my work and I could not rest at home.

Night after night I promenaded up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire, with a

thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have gone on. I went backwards and forwards on the

way to the vanishing place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed them up. But I never

saw her again, except that later she came to me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How my blood was

stirred! I lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her. I prayed for her.

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when her first real kiss came to her, ruled and

haunted me, gave a Queen to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a man.

I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was about her and that she was the key to all that

had hitherto seemed nonsense about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine could not possibly be

I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this thing because it seems to me we are altogether

too restrained and secretive about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in to us darkly and

One day during my Cambridge daysit must have been in my first year before I knew HatherleighI saw

in a printshop window near the Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and its

dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare shouldered, barebreasted Oriental with arms akimbo,

smiling faintly. I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought it. I felt I must have it. The odd

thing is that I was more than a little shamefaced about it. I did not have it framed and hung in my room open

to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the drawer of my writingtable. And I kept that drawer locked

for a year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark girl of Penge. That engraving became

in a way my mistress. Often when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was sitting with it

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a time nobody suspected what was locked in

These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above and below and before me. They had an air

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City Merchants School. Home was a place where I

slept and read, and the mooning explorations of the southeastern postal district which occupied the restless

evenings and spare days of my vacations mere interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant

spaces between the woven threads of a schoolboy's career. School life began for me every morning at Herne

Hill, for there I was joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went together. Most of the

streets and roads we traversed in our morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of rebuilding

that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have passed and left them, and I have revived the

impression of them again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a hansom or hummed

along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient

well proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are imposing new science laboratories in

Chambers Street indeed, but the old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams that go

droning and spitting blue flashes along the western boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I

have not been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have

grown mentally to man's estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our national process

and our national needs, I am more and more struck by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their

aimless disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community. I suppose if we are to view the

public school as anything more than an institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as having

a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation, as being in a sense designed to take the crude

young male of the more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms, broaden his outlook, give him

a grasp of the contemporary developments he will presently be called upon to influence and control, and send

him on to the university to be made a leading and ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at

schoolmasters and set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is impossible not to feel how

infinitely more effectuallygiven certain impossibilities perhapsthe job might be done.

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of elucidation it seems reasonable to

demand from it. Here all about me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic forces, that

filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and

my school not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to make upon it at all. We were

within three miles of Westminster and Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all

within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with

election placards, now the Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession through the

wintergrey streets, now the newspaper placards outside newsshops told of battles in strange places, now of

amazing discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty, imperial splendour and luxury,

Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row, Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbagelittered streets of bawling

costermongers, the inky silver of the bargeladen Thamessuch was the background of our days. We went

across St. Margaret's Close and through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all these things.

We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for

the rest played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly proportioned and timeworn and

for all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by Inigo

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin and Greek. We were taught very badly

because the men who taught us did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them any more

now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine monasteries. At the utmost our men read them. We were

taught these languages because long ago Latin had been the language of civilisation; the one way of escape

from the narrow and localised life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had come in as

the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas. Once these two languages had been the sole means of

initiation to the detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world. I can imagine the fierce zeal of

our first Heads, Gardener and Roper, teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive Chinaman

might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily, impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely,

patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the irresistible stimulus to a new phase of

history. That was long ago. A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school, had

assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on to new and yet more amazing developments

of its own. But the City Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and Greek, still, with

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a

review article in defence of our curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted that it was

impossible to write good English without an illuminating knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an

infinitive and failed to button up a sentence in saying so. His main argument conceded every objection a

reasonable person could make to the City Merchants' curriculum. He admitted that translation had now placed

all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely a field of endeavour remained in which

modern work had not long since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any utility. But there

was, he said, a peculiar magic in these grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.

Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline for the mind.

Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case. In schools as we knew them, and with the sort

of assistant available, the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old lines, he could see no other

teaching so effectual in developing attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end them; the curriculum and the social

organisation of the English public school are the crowning instances of that. They go on because they have

begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions but reproductive ones. Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew

nothing, I am sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have dealt with them disrespectfully.

But public schools and university colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to the

universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as they themselves had been taught, before they had

ever made any real use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd perpetually renewed and

unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its

very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public schools had become an immense tradition

woven closely into the fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased to talk Latin or read

Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point.

Since most men of any importance or influence in the country had been through the mill, it was naturally a

little difficult to persuade them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit of man could

devise. And, moreover, they did not want their children made strange to them. There was all the machinery

and all the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever new the critic might propose.

Such science instruction as my father gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical grind. It

So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages for seven long years. It was the

strangest of detachments. We would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures who had

fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say,

a Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He would walk about the classroom

mouthing great lines in a rich roar, and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not

"GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the dingy, faded, inksplashed quality of

our classroom, the banging of books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his deep

unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings

we would consent that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering reverberation and a

sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely. We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies,

these strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the Gothic intricacy, the splash and

glitter, the jar and recovery, the stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English tongue. That

indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against

And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it best? We visualised dimly through that

dust and the grammatical difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely, helping out

protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of

inexplicable incest, of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not believe in for a

moment, that no modern western European can believe in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing

wigs and costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as yet to touch these things to

life again. It was like the ghost of an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed into a

Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the leathery stuffiness of timeworn Big Hall. .

And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the evening light and the spectacle of London

hurrying like a cataract, London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like the very loom

of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher has yet had the power and courage to grasp and

expound. Life and death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an intricacy as never

Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing

countless people we knew not whence, we knew not whither. Hansoms clattered, foot passengers jostled one,

a thousand appeals of shop and boarding caught the eye. The multicoloured lights of window and street

mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly flushing London skies; the everchanging

placards, the shouting newsvendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe. One did not realise

what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote

That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to living interests where it might have done so.

We were left absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political speeches, to the cartoons of the

comic papers or a chance reading of some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the huge

swirling world process in which we found ourselves. I always look back with particular exasperation to the

cessation of our modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up abruptly, as though it had come upon

But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge adjustments of the nineteenth century?

Flack was the chief cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which pretends that the place of this

or that county in the struggle for the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys. He obliged us

to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms. What a

fuss there would be when some welltrained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared with an evening

Under Flack's pressure I became, I confess, a cricket humbug of the first class. I applied myself industriously

year by year to mastering scores and averages; I pretended that Lords or the Oval were the places nearest

Paradise for me. (I never went to either.) Through a slight mistake about the county boundary I adopted

Surrey for my loyalty, though as a matter of fact we were by some five hundred yards or so in Kent. It did

quite as well for my purposes. I bowled rather straight and fast, and spent endless hours acquiring the skill to

bowl Flack out. He was a bat in the Corinthian style, rich and voluminous, and succumbed very easily to a

low shooter or an unexpected Yorker, hut usually he was caught early by long leg. The difficulty was to bowl

him before he got caught. He loved to lift a ball to leg. After one had clean bowled him at the practice nets

Flack went about a world of marvels dreaming of leg hits. He has been observed, going across the Park on his

way to his highly respectable club in Piccadilly, to break from profound musings into a strange brief dance

that ended with an imaginary swipe with his umbrella, a roofer, over the trees towards Buckingham Palace.

These schoolmasters move through my memory as always a little distant and more than a little

incomprehensible. Except when they wore flannels, I saw them almost always in old college caps and gowns,

a uniform which greatly increased their detachment from the world of actual men. Gates, the head, was a lean

looselimbed man, rather stupid I discovered when I reached the Sixth and came into contact with him, but

honest, simple and very eager to be liberal minded. He was bald, with an almost conical baldness, with a

grizzled pointed beard, small featured and, under the stresses of a Zeitgeist that demanded liberality, with an

expression of puzzled but resolute resistance to his own unalterable opinions. He made a tall dignified figure

in his gown. In my junior days he spoke to me only three or four times, and then he annoyed me by giving me

a wrong surname; it was a sore point because I was an outsider and not one of the old school families, the

Shoesmiths, the Naylors, the Marklows, the Tophams, the Pevises and suchlike, who came generation after

generation. I recall him most vividly against the background of faded brown bookbacks in the old library in

which we less destructive seniors were trusted to work, with the light from the stainedglass window falling

in coloured patches on his face. It gave him the appearance of having no colour of his own. He had a habit of

scratching the beard on his cheek as he talked, and he used to come and consult us about things and

invariably do as we said. That, in his phraseology, was "maintaining the traditions of the school."

He had indeed an effect not of a man directing a school, but of a man captured and directed by a school. Dead

and gone Elizabethans had begotten a monster that could carry him about in its mouth.

Yet being a man, as I say, with his hair a little stirred by a Zeitgeist that made for change, Gates did at times

display a disposition towards developments. City Merchants had no modern side, and utilitarian spirits were

carping in the PALL MALL GAZETTE and elsewhere at the omissions from our curriculum, and particularly

at our want of German. Moreover, four classes still worked together with much clashing and uproar in the old

Big Hall that had once held in a common tumult the entire school. Gates used to come and talk to us older

"I don't wish to innovate unduly," he used to say. But we ought to get in some German, you know,for those

He referred to the organisation of regular evening preparation for the lower boys in Big Hall as a

"revolutionary change," but he achieved it, and he declared he began the replacement of the hacked wooden

tables, at which the boys had worked since Tudor days, by sloping desks with safety inkpots and

scientifically adjustable seats, "with grave misgivings." And though he never birched a boy in his life, and

was, I am convinced, morally incapable of such a scuffle, he retained the block and birch in the school

through all his term of office, and spoke at the Headmasters' Conference in temperate approval of corporal

I wish I could, in some measure and without tediousness, convey the effect of his discourses to General

Assembly in Big Hall. But that is like trying to draw the obverse and reverse of a sixpence worn to complete

illegibility. His tall fine figure stood high on the days, his thoughtful tenor filled the air as he steered his

hazardous way through sentences that dragged inconclusive tails and dropped redundant prepositions. And he

pleaded ever so urgently, ever so finely, that what we all knew for Sin was sinful, and on the whole best

avoided altogether, and so went on with deepening notes and even with short arresting gestures of the right

arm and hand, to stir and exhort us towards goodness, towards that modern, unsectarian goodness, goodness

in general and nothing in particular, which the Zeitgeist seemed to indicate in those transitional years.

The school never quite got hold of me. Partly I think that was because I was a dayboy and so freer than most

of the boys, partly because of a temperamental disposition to see things in my own way and have my private

dreams, partly because I was a little antagonised by the family traditions that ran through the school. I was

made to feel at first that I was a rank outsider, and I never quite forgot it. I suffered very little bullying, and I

never had a fightin all my time there were only three fightsbut I followed my own curiosities. I was

already a very keen theologian and politician before I was fifteen. I was also intensely interested in modern

warfare. I read the morning papers in the Reading Room during the midday recess, never missed the

illustrated weeklies, and often when I could afford it I bought a PALL MALL GAZETTE on my way home.

I do not think that I was very exceptional in that; most intelligent boys, I believe, want naturally to be men,

and are keenly interested in men's affairs. There is not the universal passion for a magnified puerility among

them it is customary to assume. I was indeed a voracious reader of everything but boys' bookswhich I

detestedand fiction. I read histories, travel, popular science and controversy with particular zest, and I

loved maps. School work and school games were quite subordinate affairs for me. I worked well and made a

passable figure at games, and I do not think I was abnormally insensitive to the fine quality of our school, to

the charm of its mediaeval nucleus, its Gothic cloisters, its scraps of Palladian and its dignified Georgian

extensions; the contrast of the old quiet, that in spite of our presence pervaded it everywhere, with the rushing

and impending London all about it, was indeed a continual pleasure to me. But these things were certainly not

I had to conceal my wider outlook to a certain extentfrom the masters even more than from the boys.

Indeed I only let myself go freely with one boy, Britten, my especial chum, the son of the AgentGeneral for

East Australia. We two discovered in a chance conversation A PROPOS of a map in the library that we were

both of us curious why there were Malays in Madagascar, and how the Mecca pilgrims came from the East

Indies before steamships were available. Neither of us had suspected that there was any one at all in the

school who knew or cared a rap about the Indian Ocean, except as water on the way to India. But Britten had

come up through the Suez Canal, and his ship had spoken a pilgrim ship on the way. It gave him a startling

quality of living knowledge. From these pilgrims we got to a comparative treatment of religions, and from

that, by a sudden plunge, to entirely sceptical and disrespectful confessions concerning Gates' last outbreak of

The discovery of Britten happened to me when we were both in the Lower Fifth. Previously there had been a

watertight compartment between the books I read and the thoughts they begot on the one hand and human

intercourse on the other. Now I really began my higher education, and aired and examined and developed in

conversation the doubts, the ideas, the interpretations that had been forming in my mind. As we were both

dayboys with a good deal of control over our time we organised walks and expeditions together, and my

habit of solitary and rather vague prowling gave way to much more definite joint enterprises. I went several

times to his house, he was the youngest of several brothers, one of whom was a medical student and let us

assist at the dissection of a cat, and once or twice in vacation time he came to Penge, and we went with

parcels of provisions to do a thorough day in the grounds and galleries of the Crystal Palace, ending with the

fireworks at close quarters. We went in a river steamboat down to Greenwich, and fired by that made an

excursion to Margate and back; we explored London docks and Bethnal Green Museum, Petticoat Lane and

We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom warfare." When we walked alone,

especially in the country, we had both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us as

we walked. As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and

gathering behind hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house to

house. The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had

created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey. For him West Kensington was chiefly important

as the scene of a desperate and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized the Navy, the

Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army reinforced by Germansadvancing for reasons best

known to themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing. It is a secret and solitary game, as we found when we

tried to play it together. We made a success of that only once. All the way down to Margate we schemed

defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset. Afterwards we recapitulated all

that conflict by means of a large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper.

A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of

his father's, admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton Hall.

We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead soldiers, some

excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of

rules. For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure. Some of our battles lasted

several days. We kept the game a profound secret from the other fellows. They would not have understood.

And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write, for the sake of writing. We liked

writing. We had discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY

GAZETTE, and we imitated them. Our minds were full of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into

the light of expression. Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON

MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking. I was

somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment

confessing shamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius. We thought every one who mattered

When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and died of some perplexing complaint

that involved a postmortem examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days been

recognised as appendicitis. This led to a considerable change in my circumstances; the house at Penge was

given up, and my Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needy solicitor and

his wife in Vicars Street, S. W., about a mile and a half from the school. So it was I came right into London; I

Tehose were our great days together. Afterwards we were torn apart; Britten went to Oxford, and our

circumstances never afterwards threw us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.

As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued the same enquiries. We got a

reputation as inseparables and the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thickset with

dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and fairhaired and some inches taller than

he. Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite limitations. We were amazingly free with politics

and religion, we went to that little meetinghouse of William Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the

principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's

medical student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road. Those

wonderful cases on the ground floor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our times,

and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over our Darwinism in the light of that. Such topics

we did exhaustively. But on the other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or

sexual relationships. There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a peculiar shyness.

And I do not believe we ever had occasion either of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we were

instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed of the extent of our ignorance and

uncertainty in these matters. We evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.

We certainly had no shyness about theology. We marked the emancipation of our spirits from the frightful

teachings that had oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit. We had a secret

literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological caricature. Britten's father had delighted his

family by reading aloud from Dr. Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed the

precious volume to me. That and the BAB BALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest

For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary

flowerings led very directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some years.

In that revival we associated certain other of the Sixth Form boys, and notably one for whom our enterprise

was to lay the foundations of a career that has ended in the House of Lords, Arthur Cossington, now Lord

Paddockhurst. Cossington was at that time a rather heavy, rather goodlooking boy who was chiefly eminent

in cricket, an outsider even as we were and preoccupied no doubt, had we been sufficiently detached to

observe him, with private imaginings very much of the same quality and spirit as our own. He was, we were

inclined to think, rather a sentimentalist, rather a poseur, he affected a concise emphatic styl, played chess

very well, betrayed a belief in willpower, and earned Britten's secret hostility, Britten being a sloven, by the

invariable neatness of his collars and ties. He came into our magazine with a vigour that we found extremely

Britten and I had wanted to write. We had indeed figured our project modestly as a manuscript magazine of

satirical, liberal and brilliant literature by which in some rather inexplicable way the vague tumult of ideas

that teemed within us was to find form and expression; Cossington, it was manifest from the outset, wanted

neither to write nor writing, but a magazine. I remember the inaugural meeting in Shoesmith major's

studywe had had great trouble in getting it togetherand how effectually Cossington bolted with the

"I think we fellows ought to run a magazine," said Cossington. "The school used to have one. A school like

"The last one died in '84," said Shoesmith from the hearthrug. "Called the OBSERVER. Rot rather."

"There was a TATLER before that," said Britten, sitting on the writing table at the window that was closed to

"Too fanciful. What of ARVONIAN? Richard Arvon was our founder, and it seems almost a duty"

"I like CITY MERCHANDIZE," I said. "We could probably find a quotation to suggestoh! mixed good

Don't want to put the accent on the City, do we?" said Shoesmith, who had a feeling for county families, and

"We ought to call it the ARVONIAN," decided Cossington, "and we might very well have underneath, 'With

which is incorporated the OBSERVER.' That picks up the old traditions, makes an appeal to old boys and all

I still held out for CITY MERCHANDIZE, which had taken my fancy. "Some of the chaps' people won't like

"We aren't going to do anything Queer," said Shoesmith, pointedly not looking at Britten.

The question of the title had manifestly gone against us. "Oh! HAVE it ARVONIAN," I said.

"Something like MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINEor LONGMANS'; LONGMANS' is better because it has a

"Oh! a pause or a white line or anything. You've got to write closer for a double column. It's nuggetty. You

"We ought to keep off fine writing," said Shoesmith. "It's cheek. I vote we don't have any."

"We sha'n't get any," said Cossington, and then as an olive branch to me, "unless Remington does a bit. Or

"We ought to be very careful about the writing," said Shoesmith. "We don't want to give ourselves away."

Britten groaned aloud and every one regarded him. "Greek epigrams on the fellows' names," he said. " Small

beer in ancient bottles. Let's get a stuffed broody hen to SIT on the magazine."

"We might do worse than a Greek epigram," said Cossington. "One in each number. Itit impresses parents

and keeps up our classieal tradition. And the masters CAN help. We don't want to antagonise them. Of

coursewe've got to dcpartmentalise. Writing is only one section of the thing. The ARVONIAN has to stand

for the school. There's questions of space and questions of expense. We can't turn out a great chunk of printed

"What you've got to do is just to list all the chaps and put a note to their play:'Naylor minor must pass

more. Football isn't the place for extreme individualism.' 'Ammersham shapes well as half back.' Things like

"I could do that all right," said Shoesmith, brightening and manifestly hecoming pregnant with judgments.

"One great thing about a magazine of this sort," said Cossington, "is to mention just as many names as you

can in each number. It keeps the interest alive. Chaps will turn it over looking for their own little bit. Then it

"Naylor surpassed himself and negotiated the lemon safely home," said Shoesmith.

"Exactly," said Cossington. "That gives us three features," touching them off on his fingers, "Epigram,

Literary Section, Sports. Then we want a section to shove anything into, a joke, a notice of anything that's

"Oh, Hell!" said Britten, and clashed his boots, to the silent disapproval of every one.

"Well, don't we? Unless we have our Note Book to begin on the front page. It gives a scrappy effect to do

that. We want something manly and straightforward and a bit thoughtful, about Patriotism, say, or ESPRIT

I looked at Britten. Hitherto we had not considered Cossington mattered very much in the world.

He went over us as a motorcar goes over a dog. There was a sort of energy about him, a new sort of energy

to us; we had never realised that anything of the sort existed in the world. We were hopelessly at a

disadvantage. Almost instantly we had developed a clear and detailed vision of a magazine made up of

everything that was most acceptable in the magazines that flourished in the adult world about us, and had

determined to make it a success. He had by a kind of instinct, as it were, synthetically plagiarised every

successful magazine and breathed into this dusty mixture the breath of life. He was elected at his own

suggestion managing director, with the earnest support of Shoesmith and Naylor, and conducted the

magazine so successfully and brilliantly that he even got a whole back page of advertisements from the big

sports shop in Holborn, and made the printers pay at the same rate for a notice of certain books of their own

which they said they had inserted by inadvertency to fill up space. The only literary contribution in the first

number was a column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of some fancied evil called

And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on the "Humours of Cricket," and the

Head himself was profusely thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School Chapel; and

Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any grace or precision what we felt about that

I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and interpretation followed interpretation in my

everspreading, ever deepening, evermultiplying and enriching vision of this world into which I had been

born. Every day added its impressions, its hints, its subtle explications to the growing understanding. Day

after day the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every morning now for three weeks and

more (for today is Thursday and I started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the

factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child

playing on the nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father, exploring

interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused

avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by such an effort to write it down that one realises

how marvellously crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must be. One begins with

the little child to whom the sky is a roof of blue, the world a screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the

home a thing eternal, and "being good" just simple obedience to unquestioned authority; and one comes at

last to the vast world of one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of partial understanding,

here masked by mists, here refracted and distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad

I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by night, and strange occasions when by a sort of

hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of appearances about me. It is hard to

measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot trace, so closely has mood succeeded and

overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an utter horror of death was replaced by the growing

realisation of its necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite space, infinite time,

entangled my mind; and moral distress for the pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of

reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate

perplexity of these broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded me away

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged

widely in my search for some permanently satisfying Truth. That, too, ceased after a time to be urgently

interesting. I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence

in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be.

Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that

adjustment long before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite

like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life

hurts so that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no promise but

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was comparatively late before I faced and dared to

probe the secrecies of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it would be a large and

difficult thing in my life, but my early training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as

something disconnected from all the broad significances of life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The

world was never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time. . . .

I was afraid to think either of sex or (what I have always found inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion)

beauty. Even as a boy I knew the thing as a haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away from. Its

dim presence obsessed me none the less for all the extravagant decency, the stimulating silences of my

The plaster Venuses and Apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and huge grey terraces of the Crystal Palace

were the first intimations of the beauty of the body that ever came into my life. As I write of it I feel again the

shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to look at them not simply, but curiously and askance.

Once at least in my later days at Penge, I spent a shilling in admission chiefly for the sake of them. . . .

The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing seems to me now that swathing up of all the

splendours of the flesh, that strange combination of fanatical terrorism and shyness that fenced me about with

prohibitions. It caused me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant, but with an ignorance blurred and

dishonoured by shame, by enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a fascinated

curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net. I knew so little and I felt so much. There was indeed no

Aphrodite at all in my youthful Pantheon, but instead there was a mysterious and minatory gap. I have told

how at last a new Venus was born in my imagination out of gas lamps and the twilight, a Venus with a

cockney accent and dark eyes shining out of the dusk, a Venus who was a warm, passionstirring atmosphere

All this was a thing apart from the rest of my life, a locked avoided chamber. . . .

It was not until my last year at Trinity that I really broke down the barriers of this unwholesome silence and

brought my secret broodings to the light of day. Then a little set of us plunged suddenly into what we called

at first sociological discussion. I can still recall even the physical feeling of those first tentative talks. I

remember them mostly as occurring in the rooms of Ted Hatherleigh, who kept at the corner by the Trinity

great gate, but we also used to talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a man named, if I remember rightly,

Redmayne. The atmosphere of Hatherleigh's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a background brown

and deep. He professed himself a socialist with anarchistic leanings he had suffered the martyrdom of

ducking for itand a huge French Mayday poster displaying a splendid proletarian in red and black on a

barricade against a flaring orange sky, dominated his decorations. Hatherleigh affected a fine untidiness, and

all the place, even the floor, was littered with books, for the most part open and face downward; deeper

darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown and our caps, all conscientiously battered, Hatherleigh's

flopped like an elephant's ear and inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine; the highlights of the

picture came chiefly as reflections from his chequered blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs,

except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle, we drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled, and

occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked recklesslooking pipes,there was a transient fashion among

us for corn cobs for which Mark Twain, I think, was responsible. Our little excesses with liquor were due far

more to conscience than appetite, indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that we suspected

were keeping us off the instructive knifeedges of life. Hatherleigh was a good Englishman of the premature

type with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice and an explosive plunging manner, and it was he who said one

eveningHeaven knows how we got to it" Look here, you know, it's all Rot, this Shutting Up about

Women. We OUGHT to talk about them. What are we going to do about them? It's got to come. We're all

festering inside about it. Let's out with it. There's too much Decency altogether about this Infernal

We rose to his challenge a little awkwardly and our first talk was clumsy, there were flushed faces and red

ears, and I remember Hatherleigh broke out into a monologue on decency. "Modesty and Decency," said

Hatherleigh, "are Oriental vices. The Jews brought them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our

monasticism here and the seclusion of women and mutilating the dead on a battlefield. And all that sort of

Hatherleigh's mind progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually wildly inaccurate, and for a time we

engaged hotly upon the topic of those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.

Hatherleigh tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the

northwest frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a littleknown author, and Cunninghame

Graham to show that the Arab was worse than a county town spinster in his regard for respectability. But his

case was too preposterous, and Esmeer, with his shrill penetrating voice and his way of pointing with all four

long fingers flat together, carried the point against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the monasteries

"Well, anyway," said Hatherleigh, escaping from our hands like an intellectual frog, "Semitic or not, I've got

We argued points and Hatherleigh professed an unusually balanced and tolerating attitude. "I don't mind a

certain refinement and dignity," he admitted generously. "What I object to is this spreading out of decency

until it darkens the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid to speak of the most important things, until

it makes a man afraid to look a frank book in the face or thinkeven think! until it leads to our coming

toto the business at last with nothing but a few prohibitions, a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes and, and "he

waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch his image in the air" oh, a confounded buttered slide of

sentiment, to guide us. I tell you I'm going to think about it and talk about it until I see a little more daylight

than I do at present. I'm twentytwo. Things might happen to me anywhen. You men can go out into the

world if you like, to sin like fools and marry like fools, not knowing what you are doing and ashamed to ask.

You'll take the consequences, too, I expect, pretty meekly, sniggering a bit, sentimentalising a bit, likelike

He paused to drink, and I think I cut in with ideas of my own. But one is apt to forget one's own share in a

talk, I find, more than one does the clearcut objectivity of other people's, and I do not know how far I

contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however, pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we

were pleased to call aristocracy and which soon became the common property of our set was developed. It

was Esmeer, I know, who laid down and maintained the proposition that so far as minds went there were

really only two sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and the man who subdues his mind to other people's.

"'I couldn't THINK of it, Sir,'" said Esmeer in his elucidatory tones; "that's what a servant says. His mind

even is broken in to run between fences, and he admits it. WE'VE got to he able to think of anything. And

'such things aren't for the Likes of Us!' That's another servant's saying. Well, everything IS for the Likes of

"Well," exploded Hatherleigh, "if that isn't so what the deuce are we up here for? Instead of working in

mines? If some things aren't to be thought about ever! We've got the privilege of all these extra years for

getting things straight in our heads, and then we won't use 'em. Good God! what do you think a university's

Esmeer's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to several of us. We were not going to be afraid of

ideas any longer, we were going to throw down every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see what

came of it. We became for a time even intemperately experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion of an

eminent psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly died of it within a fortnight of our great

The chief matter of our interchanges was of course the discussion of sex. Once the theme had been opened it

became a sore place in our intercourse; none of us seemed able to keep away from it. Our imaginations got

astir with it. We made up for lost time and went round it and through it and over it exhaustively. I recall

prolonged discussion of polygamy on the way to Royston, muddy November tramps to Madingley, when

amidst much profanity from Hatherleigh at the serious treatment of so obsolete a matter, we weighed the

reasons, if any, for the institution of marriage. The fine dim nighttime spaces of the Great Court are bound

up with the inconclusive finales of mighty hoteared wrangles; the narrows of Trinity Street and Petty Cury

and Market Hill have their particular associations for me with that spate of confession and free speech, that

almost painful goal delivery of long pent and crappled and sometimes crippled ideas.

And we went on a reading party that Easter to a place called Pulborough in Sussex, where there is a fishing

inn and a river that goes under a bridge. It was a late Easter and a blazing one, and we boated and bathed and

talked of being Hellenic and the beauty of the body until at moments it seemed to us that we were destined to

Those undergraduate talks! how rich and glorious they seemed, how splendidly new the ideas that grew and

multiplied in our seething minds! We made long afternoon and evening raids over the Downs towards

Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen moonlight singing and shouting. We formed

romantic friendships with one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were no splendid

women fit to be our companions in the world. But Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair

was gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of her; just simply and with projectile

Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be married to himwe thought that splendid

beyond measure,I cannot now imagine why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A sort of shame

came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton committed himself to that. And after

such talk we would fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming, and if by chance we passed a girl in a

governess cart, or some farmer's daughter walking to the station, we became alertly silent or obstreperously

indifferent to her. For might she not be just that one exception to the banal decency, the sickly pointless

We felt we stood for a new movement, not realising how perennially this same emancipation returns to those

ancient courts beside the Cam. We were the antidecency party, we discovered a catch phrase that we

flourished about in the Union and made our watchword, namely, "stark fact." We hung nude pictures in our

rooms much as if they had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders, and I disinterred my longkept

engraving and had it framed in fumed oak, and found for it a completer and less restrained companion, a

This efflorescence did not prevent, I think indeed it rather helped, our more formal university work, for most

of us took firsts, and three of us got Fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton who had a

Research Fellowship and went to Tubingen, there was Esmeer and myself who both became Residential

Fellows. I had taken the Mental and Moral Science Tripos (as it was then), and three years later I got a

lectureship in political science. In those days it was disguised in the cloak of Political Economy.

It was our affectation to be a little detached from the main stream of undergraduate life. We worked pretty

hard, but by virtue of our beer, our socialism and suchlike heterodoxy, held ourselves to be differentiated

from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter, who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue

with an appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train, and on the other hand we intimated contempt

for the rather mediocre, deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly and consciously wild undergraduate

men who made up the mass of Cambridge life. After the manner of youth we were altogether too hard on our

contemporaries. We battered our caps and tore our gowns lest they should seem new, and we despised these

others extremely for doing exactly the same things; we had an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure

There was a type, or at least there seemed to us to be a typeI'm a little doubtful at times now whether after

all we didn't create it for which Hatherleigh invented the nickname the "Pinky Dinkys," intending thereby

both contempt and abhorrence in almost equal measure. The Pinky Dinky summarised all that we particularly

did not want to be, and also, I now perceive, much of what we were and all that we secretly dreaded

But it is hard to convey the Pinky Dinky idea, for all that it meant so much to us. We spent one evening at

least during that reading party upon the Pinky Dinky; we sat about our one fire after a walk in the rainit

was our only wet daysmoked our excessively virile pipes, and elaborated the natural history of the Pinky

Dinky. We improvised a sort of Pinky Dinky litany, and Hatherleigh supplied deep notes for the responses.

"The Pinky Dinky arises in the Union and treats the question with a light gay touch. He makes the weird ones

"The Pinky Dinky says suddenly while he is making the tea, 'We're all being frightfully funny. It's time for

"The Pinky Dinky shakes his head and says: 'I'm afraid I shall never be a responsible being.' And he really IS

"Pinky Dinkys are chaps who've had their buds nipped," said Hatherleigh. "They're Plebs and they know it.

They haven't the Guts to get hold of things. And so they worry up all those silly little jokes of theirs to carry it

Pinky Dinkys are due to overproduction of the type that ought to keep outfitters' shops. Pinky Dinkys would

like to keep outfitters' shops with whimsy 'scriptions on the boxes and make your bill out funny, and not be

"Every Pinky Dinky's people are rather good people, and better than most Pinky Dinky's people. But he does

"But what the devil do they think they're up to, anyhow?" roared old Hatherleigh suddenly, dropping plump

We felt we had still failed to get at the core of the mystery of the Pinky Dinky.

We tried over things about his religion. "The Pinky Dinky goes to King's Chapel, and sits and feels in the

"Religion is so sacred to him he never talks about it, never reads about it, never thinks about it. Just feels!"

"Not a vulgar doubt," Esmeer went on, "but a kind of hesitation whether the Ancient of Days is really exactly

what one would call good form. . . . There's a lot of horrid coarseness got into the world somehow.

SOMEBODY put it there. . . . And anyhow there's no particular reason why a man should be seen about with

"It's their Damned Modesty," said Hatherleigh suddenly, "that's what's the matter with the Pinky Dinky. It's

Mental Cowardice dressed up as a virtue and taking the poor dears in. Cambridge is soaked with it; it's some

confounded local bacillus. Like the thing that gives a flavour to Havana cigars. He comes up here to be made

into a man and a ruler of the people, and he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take on the job! How the

"All his little jokes and things," said Esmeer regarding his feet on the fender, "it's just a nervous

"LIFE!" said Esmeer. "And so in a way are we," he added, and made a thoughtful silence for a time.

"I say," began Carter, who was doing the Natural Science Tripos, "what is the adult form of the Pinky

"What is the adult form of any of us?" asked Benton, voicing the thought that had arrested our flow.

I do not remember that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and the organisation of the University. I think

we took them for granted. When I look back at my youth I am always astonished by the multitude of things

that we took for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in the order of things, for all the world like

having eyebrows or a vermiform appendix. Now with the larger scepticism of middle age I can entertain very

I do not see what harm I can do now by laying bare the purpose of the political combinations I was trying to

My educational scheme was indeed the startingpoint of all the big project of conscious public reconstruction

at which I aimed. I wanted to build up a new educational machine altogether for the governing class out of a

consolidated system of special public service schools. I meant to get to work upon this whatever office I was

given in the new government. I could have begun my plan from the Admiralty or the War Office quite as

easily as from the Education Office. I am firmly convinced it is hopeless to think of reforming the old public

schools and universities to meet the needs of a modern state, they send their roots too deep and far, the cost

would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and so I have sought a way round this invincible

obstacle. I do think it would be quite practicable to sidetrack, as the Americans say, the whole system by

creating hardworking, hardliving, modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the Royal Navy and then for

the public service generally, and as they grew, opening them to the public without any absolute obligation to

subsequent service. Simultaneously with this it would not be impossible to develop a new college system

with strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern history, European literature and criticism, physical and

We could in fact create a new liberal education in this way, and cut the umbilicus of the classical languages

for good and all. I should have set this going, and trusted it to correct or kill the old public schools and the

Oxford and Cambridge tradition altogether. I had men in my mind to begin the work, and I should have found

others. I should have aimed at making a hardtrained, capable, intellectually active, proud type of man.

Everything else would have been made subservient to that. I should have kept my grip on the men through

their vacation, and somehow or other I would have contrived a young woman to match them. I think I could

have seen to it effectually enough that they didn't get at croquet and tennis with the vicarage daughters and

discover sex in the Peeping Tom fashion I did, and that they realised quite early in life that it isn't really virile

to reek of tobacco. I should have had military manoeuvres, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering

and so forth, in the place of the solemn trivialities of games, and I should have fed and housed my men clean

and very hardwhere there wasn't any audit ale, no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches. . .

I have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I came down, and so far as the Empire goes, I

Always I renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of lowness and dampness almost exactly like

the feeling of an underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable

contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditchlike rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little

villas. Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of its evil. . . .

Some of the most charming people in the world live in them, but their collective effect is below the quality of

any individual among them. Cambridge is a world of subdued tones, of excessively subtle humours, of prim

conduct and free thinking; it fears the Parent, but it has no fear of God; it offers amidst surroundings that vary

between disguises and antiquarian charm the inflammation of literature's purple draught; one hears there a

peculiar thin scandal like no other scandal in the worlda covetous scandalso that I am always reminded

of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and the plays of Ibsen alone does it seem appropriate for the heroine

before the great crisis of life to "enter, take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon the writing

We have to make a new Academic mind for modern needs, and the last thing to make it out of, I am

convinced, is the old Academic mind. One might as soon try to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a

line of battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old bathless, damp Gothic colleges,

is much too delightful in its peculiar and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.

My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old Codger, surely the most "unleaderly"

of men. No more than from the old Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes. Yet

apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a

power in Cambridge, he could make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of

I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish face, his round innocent eyes, his

absurdly nonprehensile fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a trifle

inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive

undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks, talking in a

fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His

mind and voice had precisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it could flow round

anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies were wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port

with little muscular movements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knitvery judicial, very

concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was the last thing he would have told a lie about.

When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some occasion in Regent's Park above two

eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent than his"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger began to

display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more, had he been outside the bars. His utmost

travel had been to lecture here and lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite

exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism that

had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has

become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my

time he was pointed out to people as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He has

become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish world of much too intensely appreciated

He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port wine. Of other wines he confessed quite

frankly he had no "special knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he claimed to have

read every novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the Union Library. This, however, he held to be

remarkable rather than ennobling, and such boasts as he made of it were tinged with playfulness. Certainly he

had a scholar's knowledge of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and

Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those ladies enormously, and he loved nothing

so much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their books. Tusher of

King's was his ineffectual rival in this field, their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for

Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook to rehearse whole pages out of

Bradshaw, and tell you with all the changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain by the

Codger lodged with a little deaf innocent old lady, Mrs. Araminta Mergle, who was understood to be herself a

very redoubtable Character in the GypBedder class; about her he related quietly absurd anecdotes. He

displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in

import with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he waged a fierce obscure war. . . .

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a

variety of Hegelian stuff like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with itself. It was a

wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved

nor feared nor passionately loved,a web of iridescent threads. He had luminous final theories about Love

and Death and Immortality, odd matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven thoughts lay

across my perception of the realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!as a

dewwet spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of a gun. . . .

All through those years of development I perceive now there must have been growing in me, slowly,

irregularly, assimilating to itself all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious impulses,

utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is

the protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for Making, making widely and greatly, cities,

national order, civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I have set out to present. It was

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of disorderliness, the conception of social life as

being a multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of course simplifies these things in the

telling, but I do not think I ever saw the world at large in any other terms. I never at any stage entertamed the

idea which sustained my mother, and which sustains so many people in the world,the idea that the

universe, whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact "all right," is being steered to

definite ends by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and that disorder

was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel and have always felt that order rebels against and

struggles against disorder, that order has an uphill job, in gardens, experiments, suburbs, everything alike;

from the very beginnings of my experience I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was presently swimming made all in the

same direction; in place of my mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible

Providence, the talk was all of the Struggle for Existenc and the survival not of the Bestthat was nonsense,

The attempts to rehabilitate Faith in the form of the Individualist's LAISSEZ FAIRE never won upon me. I

disliked Herbert Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and then I laughed a little and loved him. I

remember as early as the City Merchants' days how Britten and I scoffed at that pompous question begging

word "Evolution," having, so to speak, found it out. Evolution, some illuminating talker had remarked at the

Britten lunch table, had led not only to man, but to the liverfluke and skunk, obviously it might lead

anywhere; order came into things only through the struggling mind of man. That lit things wonderfully for us.

When I went up to Cambridge I was perfectly clear that life was a various and splendid disorder of forces that

the spirit of man sets itself to tame. I have never since fallen away from that persuasion.

I do not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these conclusions and a sort of religious finality for

myself by eighteen or nineteen. I know men and women vary very much in these matters, just as children do

in learning to talk. Some will chatter at eighteen months and some will hardly speak until three, and the thing

has very little to do with their subsequent mental quality. So it is with young people; some will begin their

religious, their social, their sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in the twenties. Britten and I

belonged to one of the precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't that there was

anything priggish about any of us; we should have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests and

The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres there; the real and present world, that

is to say, as distinguished from the wonderlands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and future

time. I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and I had

formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests and all

the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface. It was all alive, I felt, and changing

every day; how it was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond

I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the Ancients, and I wish I could now

without any suspicion of self deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen.

So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at fortytwo; I had practically all the

mountains and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I have now. But its intension was

very different. All the interval has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing crude and

In 1895that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge in Septembermy vision of the

world had much the same relation to the vision I have today that an illdrawn daub of a mask has to the

direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked at our world and sawwhat did we see? Forms and

colours side by side that we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no conception of the roots of

things nor of the reaction of things. It did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do with

government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues of war. There were no wagons in our war

game, and where there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together. Finance again

was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as

a sort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all rightminded men. We had no conception of the

quality of politics, nor how "interests" came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely

intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which ease they deserved to be

shot), good or bad. We knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation

changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the

scroll of history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil wars for

the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set about with

guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of

Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN MASSE to the North

Downs by an order of the Local Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations

out of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed bulletins. We could contemplate

the possibility of laws abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and orderly

proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded

bill,a close and not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I remember quite distinctly

evolving that vision. We were then fully fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools; it

was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of legislation and

I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my doubts. It is so hard now to say what one

understood and what one did not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's general outlook, but

also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent

puerility. Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion House, a

Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning

and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the Provisional

Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin'sle Grand! .

I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe the mere physical fact of going two

hours' journey away from London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination. I got

outside London. It became tangible instead of being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.

At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for Britten, with whom, however, I

corresponded lengthily, stylishly and selfconsciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial friends. I

got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all pretty

busily sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's interpretations. Cambridge made politics

personal and actual. At City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we boasted, it is true, an

under secretary and a colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such

distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style,

and pretended to be in earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the abolition of "water,"

and find a shuddering personal interest in the ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time

that I touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came down to debate in the Union, the older

dons had been their college intimates, their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them real to

us. They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for the first time in my life expected to read and think

That combinationroom world is at last larger and more populous and various than the world of

schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their

place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and

their hostility to ideas and to the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men of each

generation stay up; these others go down to propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre

professional men, as assistant masters in schools. Cambridge which perfects them is by the nature of things

We were still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians. I never saw Gladstone (as I never set

eyes on the old Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to Trinity, and the

Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the

gladiatorial stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such sets as mine. The ceiling of our

guest chamber at Trinity was glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties had

seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to come to the Union every year, Masters,

Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals brought us

all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses.

Some of us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and

Mrs. Humphry Ward. From gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something of the way

in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanent officials worked and controlled their ministers,

And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political stage, who had been presented to me in my

schooldays not so much as men as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was getting them

reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity, and their motives to the quality of impulses like my

own, I was also acquiring in my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching conception of the world

Socialism is an intellectual Proteus, but to the men of my generation it came as the revolt of the workers.

Rodbertus we never heard of and the Fabian Society we did not understand; Marx and Morris, the Chicago

Anarchists, JUSTICE and Social Democratic Federation (as it was then) presented socialism to our minds.

Hatherleigh was the leading exponent of the new doctrines in Trinity, and the figure upon his wall of a

hugemuscled, black haired toiler swaggering sledgehammer in hand across a revolutionary barricade,

seemed the quintessence of what he had to expound. Landlord and capitalist had robbed and enslaved the

workers, and were driving them quite automatically to inevitable insurrection. They would arise and the

capitalist system would flee and vanish like the mists before the morning, like the dews before the sunrise,

giving place in the most simple and obvious manner to an era of Right and Justice and Virtue and Well

I had already discussed this sort of socialism under the guidance of Britten, before I went up to Cambridge. It

was all mixed up with ideas about freedom and natural virtue and a great scorn for kings, titles, wealth and

officials, and it was symbolised by the red ties we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was

that they were "all wrong." The rich were robbers and knew it, kings and princes were usurpers and knew it,

religious teachers were impostors in league with power, the economic system was an elaborate plot on the

part of the few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful of all the current forms of life, forms

that esteemed themselves solid, that were, we knew, no more than shapes painted on a curtain that was

It was Hatherleigh's poster and his capacity for overstating things, I think, that first qualified my simple

revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps also I had met with Fabian publications, but if I did I forget the

circumstances. And no doubt my innate constructiveness with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment

of the material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this melodramatic interpretation of human affairs.

I compared that Working Man of the poster with any sort of working man I knew. I perceived that the latter

was not going to change, and indeed could not under any stimulus whatever be expected to change, into the

former. It crept into my mind as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps into a room that the former was not, as

I had at first rather glibly assumed, an "ideal," but a complete misrepresentation of the quality and

I do not know now whether it was during my schooldays or at Cambridge that I first began not merely to see

the world as a great contrast of rich and poor, but to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous majority of

people who toil continually, who are for ever anxious about ways and means, who are restricted, ill clothed,

ill fed and ill housed, who have limited outlooks and continually suffer misadventures, hardships and

distresses through the want of money. My lot had fallen upon the fringe of the possessing minority; if I did

not know the want of necessities I knew shabbiness, and the world that let me go on to a university education

intimated very plainly that there was not a thing beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination

might demand that it would not be an effort for me to secure. A certain aggressive radicalism against the

ruling and propertied classes followed almost naturally from my circumstances. It did not at first connect

itself at all with the perception of a planless disorder in human affairs that had been forced upon me by the

atmosphere of my upbringing, nor did it link me in sympathy with any of the profounder realities of poverty.

It was a personal independent thing. The dingier people one saw in the back streets and lower quarters of

Bromstead and Penge, the drift of dirty children, ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made

the social background of London, the stories one heard of privation and sweating, only joined up very slowly

with the general propositions I was making about life. We could become splendidly eloquent about the social

revolution and the triumph of the Proletariat after the Class war, and it was only by a sort of inspiration that it

came to me that my bedder, a garrulous old thing with a dusty black bonnet over one eye and an

ostentatiously clean apron outside the dark mysteries that clothed her, or the cheeky little ruffians who yelled

Directly any of us young socialists of Trinity found ourselves in immediate contact with servants or cadgers

or gyps or bedders or plumbers or navvies or cabmen or railway porters we became unconsciously and

unthinkingly aristocrats. Our voices altered, our gestures altered. We behaved just as all the other men, rich or

poor, swatters or sportsmen or Pinky Dinkys, behaved, and exactly as we were expected to behave. On the

whole it is a population of poor quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless and very difficult

to idealise. That theoretical Working Man of ours! if we felt the clash at all we explained it, I suppose, by

assuming that he came from another part of the country; Esmeer, I remember, who lived somewhere in the

Fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish fishermen, and Hatherleigh, who was a Hampshire man, assured

us we ought to know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the Lancashire operative because of his

cooperative societies, and because what Lancashire thinks today England thinks tomorrow. . . . And also

By little increments of realisation it was that the profounder verities of the problem of socialism came to me.

It helped me very much that I had to go down to the Potteries several times to discuss my future with my

uncle and guardian; I walked about and saw Bursley Wakes and much of the human aspects of organised

industrialism at close quarters for the first time. The picture of a splendid Working Man cheated out of his

innate glorious possibilities, and presently to arise and dash this scoundrelly and scandalous system of private

ownership to fragments, began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency, to a conception of

millions of people not organised as they should be, not educated as they should be, not simply prevented from

but incapable of nearly every sort of beauty, mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly

obstinate, and easily humbugged and easily diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring idea of Marx, that the poor

were nearing a limit of painful experience, and awakening to a sense of intolerable wrongs, began to develop

into the more appalling conception that the poor were simply in a witless uncomfortable inconclusive way

"muddling along"; that they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently, that mean fears enslaved them

and mean satisfactions decoyed them, that they took the very gift of life itself with a spiritless lassitude,

hoarding it, being rather anxious not to lose it than to use it in any way whatever.

The complete development of that realisation was the work of many years. I had only the first intimations at

Cambridge. But I did have intimations. Most acutely do I remember the doubts that followed the visit of

Chris Robinson. Chris Robinson was heralded by such heroic anticipations, and he was so entirely what we

Hatherleigh got him to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at Redmayne's rooms in King's, and was

very proud and proprietorial. It failed to stir Cambridge at all profoundly. Beyond a futile attempt to screw up

Hatherleigh made by some inexpert duffers who used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there was no

attempt to rag. Next day Chris Robinson went and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and left

Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically

And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the poster, a little wrinkled greybearded

apologetic man in readymade clothes, with watchful innocent brown eyes and a persistent and invincible air

of being out of his element. He sat with his stout boots tucked up under his chair, and clung to a teacup and

saucer and looked away from us into the fire, and we all sat about on tables and chairarms and windowsills

and boxes and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of young men. The only other chair whose seat

was occupied was the one containing his knitted woollen comforter and his picturesque old

beachphotographer's hat. We were all shy and didn't know how to take hold of him now we had got him,

and, which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was manifestly having the same difficulty with us. We had

"I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a northcountry quality in his speech.

The Ambassador of the Workers stirred his tea earnestly through an uncomfortable pause.

"I'd best tell 'em something of how things are in Lancashire, what with the new machines and all that," he

But when he was no longer in the unaccustomed meshes of refined conversation, but speaking with an

audience before him, he became a different man. He declared he would explain to us just exactly what

socialism was, and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of social conditions. "You young men," he

We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of Redmayne's floor space except the

hearthrugplatform, and we listened to him and thought him over. He was the voice of wrongs that made us

indignant and eager. We forgot for a time that he had been shy and seemed not a little incompetent, his

provincial accent became a beauty of his earnest speech, we were carried away by his indignations. We

looked with shining eyes at one another and at the various dons who had dropped in and were striving to

maintain a front of judicious severity. We felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and cease

forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it. At the end we clapped and murmured our applause and wanted

Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson, that indolent, liberalminded sceptic, did

most of the questioning. He lay contorted in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his legs crossed and his left

boot very high, and he pointed his remarks with a long thin hand and occasionally adjusted the unstable

glasses that hid his watery eyes. "I don't want to carp," he began. "The present system, I admit, stands

condemned. Every present system always HAS stood condemned in the minds of intelligent men. But where

it seems to me you get thin, is just where everybody has been thin, and that's when you come to the remedy."

"Socialism," said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and Hatherleigh said "Hear! Hear!" very

"I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting his shoulderblades well down to the

seat of his chair; "but I don't. I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to crossexamine you after this fine

address of yours"Chris Robinson on the hearthrug made acquiescent and inviting noises"but the real

question remains how exactly are you going to end all these wrongs? There are the admimstrative questions.

If you abolish the private owner, I admit you abolish a very complex and clumsy way of getting businesses

run, land controlled and things in general administered, but you don't get rid of the need of administration,

"Organised somehow," said Denson. "And it's just the How perplexes me. I can quite easily imagine a

socialist state administered in a sort of scrambling tumult that would be worse than anything we have got

"Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson. "I have seen little children"

"I submit life on an illprovisioned raft, for example, could easily be worseor life in a beleagured town."

They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect upon me of coming out from the glow of a good matinee

performance into the cold daylight of late afternoon. Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson; he

was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into

untimely pathos and indignation. And Denson hit me curiously hard with one of his shafts. "Suppose," he

I looked at Chris Robinson, brighteyed and his hair a little ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and

measured him against the huge machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was perplexed!

And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and smoked about him while he nursed his

knee with hairy wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the cartoon of

Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and again he came back to that discussion.

"It's all very easy for your learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children suffer and die. They

He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his going to work in a factory when he was

twelve" when you Chaps were all with your mammies "and how he had educated himself of nights until

"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all that clemming for education. Why! I longed

all through one winter to read a bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for it, I said. And I

Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with round eyes over the mug.

"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris Robinson. "And one learns to go straight at

"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of Denson, "while men decay and starve."

"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the alternatve is to risk a worse disasteror do

"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose anything futile, so far as I can see."

The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite

exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists

It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and

exhaustively mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself

assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure

with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for

effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful

discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic

dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and

haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our

conversation. He rose to his climax with his "Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.

He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for

discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current

socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore something

out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of the rest of

him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go

"Keep ye the Lawbe swift in all obedience Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,

Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown; By the peace among Our peoples let men

And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my mind, sticks there now as quintessential

The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone; 'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own; 'E

keeps 'is sidearms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o' doin' things rathermoreorless, All along of abbynay,

It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge,

and the war in South Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain the now remarkable

delusion that England had her sidearms at that time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all

learnt with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle that followed, and I do not see that

we fellow learners are justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and assumption. . . .

South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense those

disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or

profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory

gave place to the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human, mortal and human in

the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first

crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been, failing to imagine,

failing to plan and cooperate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets

and countryside had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor

disgraceful were they,just illtrained and fairly plucky and wonderfully goodtempered menpaying for

it. And how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and then presently close

upon one another, to realise the bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg,

Colenso Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in Ladysmith near the point of

surrender! and so through the long unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed

anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and

method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.

All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles crackled away there on the veldt,

and the horsemen rode and the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and

money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I

had looked at it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had

been there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki, the

scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at

last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless miles across the

desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the

toils. If one's attention strayed in the lectureroom it wandered to those battlefields.

And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old

Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful

reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful

A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me immensely so that I forced it upon my

companions, half in the spirit of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's ONE OF

OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me. In that I got a supplement and corrective of

Kipling. It was the first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered. It must

have been published already nine or ten years when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on

to the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our people feel for all such intimations, and

so I could read it as a book justified. The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined each warning

indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered

But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's intellectual indolence, of my country's want of

training and discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the continent there were other

peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and

preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to me. It set me

worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable

footing. It made them no longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love of making one

might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it

as a mere envious echo to our own worldwide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense as it were of

One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was an attempt to belittle his merit. "It

The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It professed to be a study of the English

situation in the early nineties, but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by the story of

Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the woman he had loved and never married. Now in the

retrospect and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the conflict was

not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more

terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the "infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the

central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail. So many things have been brought together in

my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly face and understand and admit

love and passion can understand nothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me

As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of the world, as I flounder among the

halfremembered developments that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if it

stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen until I was twentytwo. I was a fellow of

I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself, who had just missed a fellowship

and the higher division of the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the London

School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the "advanced" people had placed him. He

had, like myself, a small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a

kindred craving for social theorising and some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance after

reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had

We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi, and thence with one or two halts and

digressions and a little modest climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were benighted)

into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up

the lake to Locarno (where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia and over

As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and enlargement returns to me. I feel again

the faint pleasant excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage and

laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored boat

beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland and

seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly

adventurous, and presently a movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to

the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the little different French coast villages, and

then, sliding by in a pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon it, and the

One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly three and twenty, but one was alive

to one's fingertips with pleasing little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the

strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy

and viscous flow, and then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the raillaid street to

Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple

trousers, police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on two

wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of neatly

It was a real other world, with different government and different methods, and in the night one was roused

from uneasy slumbers and sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with one's oreiller all

awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the German official, so different in manner from the British;

and when one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled to get coffee in Switzerland. .

I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain

I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran on to Spiez, and made all sorts of

generalisations from the steeply sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms and

The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I

thought of the vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It came to me that perhaps my

scheme of international values was all wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and

our empire might be developing hereand I recalled Meredith's Skepsey in France with a new

Willersley had dressed himself in a worldworn Norfolk suit of greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly

at his rather impending, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember, like the contrast of him with the

drilled Swiss and Germans about us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him below,

and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied askew. He did not want to shave in the train, but I

made him at one of the Swiss stationsI dislike these Oxford slovenlinessesand then confound him! he

Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed to have washed our very veins to an

incredible cleanliness, and eating hardboiled eggs in a vast clear space of rimeedged rocks, snowmottled,

above a bluegashed glacier. All about us the monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above,

and there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then dark clustering fir trees far below.

"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having perceived it before; "this is the round

That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view of the Rhone valley and the distant

Valaisian Alps, for example, which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and the

early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our night's crouching and munched bread and

chocolate and stretched our stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over Lake

Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down and down to Antronapiano.

And our thoughts were as comprehensive as our impressions. Willersley's mind abounded in historical

matter; he had an inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see and trace and see

again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the

In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our outlook almost continually. Each of us, you

see, was full of the same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the question: "What am I

going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice

"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that calls one, calls one away from something

"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we are up to. We've got to do that now. And

He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long words was a playful habit with him, that

and a slight deliberate humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to intensify.

"Social Serviceeducation. Whatever else matters or doesn't matter, it seems to me there is one thing we

MUST have and increase, and that is the number of people who can think a littleand have " he beamed

"I don't limit myself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work is all one. We who know, we who feel, are

building the great modern state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England rising out of the

decaying old . . . we are the real statesmenI like that use of 'statesmen.'. . ."

Willersley is middleaged now, with silver in his hair and a deepening benevolence in his always amiable

face, and he has very fairly kept his word. He has lived for social service and to do vast masses of useful,

undistinguished, fertilising work. Think of the days of arid administrative plodding and of contention still

more arid and unrewarded, that he must have spent! His little affectations of gesture and manner, imitative

affectations for the most part, have increased, and the humorous beam and the humorous intonations have

become a thing he puts on every morning like an old coat. His devotion is mingled with a considerable

whimsicality, and they say he is easily flattered by subordinates and easily offended into opposition by

colleagues; he has made mistakes at times and followed wrong courses, still there he is, a flat contradiction to

all the ordinary doctrine of motives, a man who has foregone any chances of wealth and profit, foregone any

easier paths to distinction, foregone marriage and parentage, in order to serve the community. He does it

without any fee or reward except his personal selfsatisfaction in doing this work, and he does it without any

hope of future joys and punishments, for he is an implacable Rationalist. No doubt he idealises himself a

little, and dreams of recognition. No doubt he gets his pleasure from a sense of power, from the spending and

husbanding of large sums of public money, and from the inevitable proprietorship he must feel in the fair,

fine, wellordered schools he has done so much to develop. "But for me," he can say, "there would have been

a Job about those diagrams, and that subject or this would have been less ably taught." . . .

The fact remains that for him the rewards have been adequate, if not to content at any rate to keep him

working. Of course he covets the notice of the world he has served, as a lover covets the notice of his

mistress. Of course he thinks somewhere, somewhen, he will get credit. Only last year I heard some men

talking of him, and they were noting, with little mean smiles, how he had shown himself self conscious

while there was talk of some honorary degreegiving or other; it would, I have no doubt, please him greatly

if his work were to flower into a crimson gown in some Academic parterre. Why shouldn't it? But that is

But we had our walk twenty years and more ago now. He was oldish even then as a young man, just as he is

oldish still in middle age. Long may his industrious elderliness flourish for the good of the world! He lectured

a little in conversation then; he lectures more now and listens less, toilsomely disentangling what you already

understand, giving you in detail the data you know; these are things like callosities that come from a man's

Our long three weeks' talk comes back to me as a memory of ideas and determinations slowly growing, all

mixed up with a smell of wood smoke and pine woods and huge precipices and remote gleams of snow

fields and the sound of cascading torrents rushing through deep gorges far below. It is mixed, too, with

gossips with waitresses and fellow travellers, with my first essays in colloquial German and Italian, with

disputes about the way to take, and other things that I will tell of in another section. But the white passion of

human service was our dominant theme. Not simply perhaps nor altogether unselfishly, but quite honestly,

and with at least a frequent self forgetfulness, did we want to do fine and noble things, to help in their

developing, to lessen misery, to broaden and exalt life. It is very hardperhaps it is impossibleto present

in a page or two the substance and quality of nearly a month's conversation, conversation that is casual and

discursive in form, that ranges carelessly from triviality to immensity, and yet is constantly resuming a

constructive process, as workmen on a wall loiter and jest and go and come back, and all the while build.

We got it more and more definite that the core of our purpose beneath all its varied aspects must needs be

order and discipline. "Muddle," said I, "is the enemy." That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and

order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly

painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities

and industrial country side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and

"All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess, All along o' doin' things rathermoreorless."

"We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we are forservants of the new

We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such unpaid and illpaid work as we were

setting our faces to do. We spoke of the intricate difficulties, the monstrous passive resistances, the hostilities

to such a development as we conceived our work subserved, and we spoke with that underlying confidence in

the invincibility of the causes we adopted that is natural to young and scarcely tried men.

We talked much of the detailed life of politics so far as it was known to us, and there Willersley was more

experienced and far better informed than I; we discussed possible combinations and possible developments,

and the chances of some great constructive movement coming from the heartsearchings the Boer war had

occasioned. We would sink to gossipeven at the Suetonius level. Willersley would decline towards

illuminating anecdotes that I capped more or less loosely from my private reading. We were particularly

wise, I remember, upon the management of newspapers, because about that we knew nothing whatever. We

perceived that great things were to be done through newspapers. We talked of swaying opinion and moving

Men are egotistical even in devotion. All our splendid projects were thickset with the first personal pronoun.

We both could write, and all that we said in general terms was reflected in the particular in our minds; it was

ourselves we saw, and no others, writing and speaking that moving word. We had already produced

manuscript and passed the initiations of proof reading; I had been a frequent speaker in the Union, and

Willersley was an active man on the School Board. Our feet were already on the lower rungs that led up and

up. He was six and twenty, and I twentytwo. We intimated our individual careers in terms of bold

expectation. I had prophetic glimpses of walls and hoardings clamorous with "Vote for Remington," and

Willersley no doubt saw himself chairman of this committee and that, saying a few slightly ironical words

after the declaration of the poll, and then sitting friendly beside me on the government benches. There was

nothing impossible in such dreams. Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time

wavered between the Local Government BoardI had great ideas about townplanning, about revisions of

municipal areas and reorganised internal transitand the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the latter

The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How many of them, like mine, have come

There were times when we posed like young gods (of unassuming exterior), and times when we were full of

the absurdest little solicitudes about our prospects. There were times when one surveyed the whole world of

men as if it was a little thing at one's feet, and by way of contrast I remember once lying in bedit must

have been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix whereand speculating whether perhaps

We could not tell from minute to minute whether we were planning for a world of solid reality, or telling

ourselves fairy tales about this prospect of life. So much seemed possible, and everything we could think of

so improbable. There were lapses when it seemed to me I could never be anything but just the entirely

unimportant and undistinguished young man I was for ever and ever. I couldn't even think of myself as five

Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why they had failedbut young men in the

Willersley and I professed ourselves Socialists, but by this time I knew my Rodbertus as well as my Marx,

and there was much in our socialism that would have shocked Chris Robinson as much as anything in life

could have shocked him. Socialism as a simple democratic cry we had done with for ever. We were socialists

because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all

obstinately and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way. "Each," I said quoting words of

my father's that rose apt in my memory, "snarling from his own little bit of property, like a dog tied to a cart's

"Essentially," said Willersley, "essentially we're for conscription, in peace and war alike. The man who owns

property is a public official and has to behave as such. That's the gist of socialism as I understand it."

"Or be dismissed from his post," I said, " and replaced by some better sort of official. A man's none the less

an official because he's irresponsible. What he does with his property affects people just the same. Private!

Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a splendid collective vigour and happiness its

end. We projected an ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced

and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it

Every man was to be definitely related to that, to have his predominant duty to that. Such was the England

renewed we had in mind, and how to serve that end, to subdue undisciplined worker and undisciplined wealth

to it, and make the Scientific Commonweal, King, was the continuing substance of our intercourse.

Every day the wine of the mountains was stronger in our blood, and the flush of our youth deeper. We would

go in the morning sunlight along some narrow Alpine mulepath shouting large suggestions for national

reorganisation, and weighing considerations as lightly as though the world was wax in our hands. "Great

England," we said in effect, over and over again, "and we will be among the makers! England renewed! The

country has been warned; it has learnt its lesson. The disasters and anxieties of the war have sunk in. England

has become serious. . . . Oh! there are big things before us to do; big enduring things!"

One evening we walked up to the loggia of a little pilgrimage church, I forget its name, that stands out on a

conical hill at the head of a winding stair above the town of Locarno. Down below the houses clustered

amidst a confusion of heatbitten greenery. I had been sitting silently on the parapet, looking across to the

purple mountain masses where Switzerland passes into Italy, and the drift of our talk seemed suddenly to

I broke into speech, giving form to the thoughts that had been accumulating. My words have long since

passed out of my memory, the phrases of familiar expression have altered for me, but the substance remains

as clear as ever. I said how we were in our measure emperors and kings, men undriven, free to do as we

pleased with life; we classed among the happy ones, our bread and common necessities were given us for

nothing, we had abilities,it wasn't modesty but cowardice to behave as if we hadn'tand Fortune watched

"There are so many things to do, you see," began Willersley, in his judicial lecturer's voice.

"So many things we may do," I interrupted, "with all these years before us. . . . We're exceptional men. It's

"Here anyhow," I said, answering the faint amusement of his face; "I've got no modesty. Everything

conspires to set me up. Why should I run about like all those grubby little beasts down there, seeking nothing

but mean little vanities and indulgenciesand then take credit for modesty? I KNOW I am capable. I

KNOW I have imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest things in life I am a damned

shirk. The very biggest! Somebody has to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little perplexed

The lake and the frontier villages, a white puff of steam on the distant railway to Luino, the busy boats and

steamers trailing triangular wakes of foam, the long vista eastward towards battlemented Bellinzona, the vast

mountain distances, now tinged with sunset light, behind this nearer landscape, and the southward waters

with remote coast towns shining dimly, waters that merged at last in a luminous golden haze, made a broad

panoramic spectacle. It was as if one surveyed the world,and it was like the games I used to set out upon

my nursery floor. I was exalted by it; I felt larger than men. So kings should feel.

That sense of largness came to me then, and it has come to me since, again and again, a splendid intimation

or a splendid vanity. Once, I remember, when I looked at Genoa from the mountain crest behind the town and

saw that multitudinous place in all its beauty of width and abundance and clustering human effort, and once

as I was steaming past the brown low hills of Staten Island towards the towering vigour and clamorous

vitality of New York City, that mood rose to its quintessence. And once it came to me, as I shall tell, on

Dover cliffs. And a hundred times when I have thought of England as our country might be, with no wretched

poor, no wretched rich, a nation armed and ordered, trained and purposeful amidst its vales and rivers, that

emotion of collective ends and collective purposes has returned to me. I felt as great as humanity. For a brief

moment I was humanity, looking at the world I had made and had still to make. . . .

And mingled with these dreams of power and patriotic service there was another series of a different quality

and a different colour, like the antagonistic colour of a shot silk. The white life and the red life, contrasted

and interchanged, passing swiftly at a turn from one to another, and refusing ever to mingle peacefully one

with the other. I was asking myself openly and distinctly: what are you going to do for the world? What are

you going to do with yourself? and with an increasing strength and persistence Nature in spite of my averted

attention was asking me in penetrating undertones: what are you going to do about this other fundamental

I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of my upbringing. It made all womenkind

mysterious to me. If it had not been for my Staffordshire cousins I do not think I should have known any girls

at all until I was twenty. Of Staffordshire I will tell a little later. But I can remember still how through all

those ripening years, the thought of women's beauty, their magic presence in the world beside me and the

unknown, untried reactions of their intercourse, grew upon me and grew, as a strange presence grows in a

room when one is occupied by other things. I busied myself and pretended to be wholly occupied, and there

the woman stood, full half of life neglected, and it seemed to my averted mind sometimes that she was there

clad and dignified and divine, and sometimes Aphrodite shining and commanding, and sometimes that Venus

This travel abroad seemed to have released a multitude of things in my mind; the clear air, the beauty of the

sunshine, the very blue of the glaciers made me feel my body and quickened all those disregarded dreams. I

saw the sheathed beauty of women's forms all about me, in the cheerful waitresses at the inns, in the

pedestrians one encountered in the tracks, in the chance fellow travellers at the hotel tables. "Confound it!"

said I, and talked all the more zealously of that greater England that was calling us.

I remember that we passed two Germans, an old man and a tall fair girl, father and daughter, who were

walking down from Saas. She came swinging and shining towards us, easy and strong. I worshipped her as

That sticks in my mind as a picture remains in a room, it has kept there bright and fresh as a thing seen

I flirted hesitatingly once or twice with comely serving girls, and was a little ashamed lest Willersley should

detect the keen interest I took in them, and then as we came over the pass from Santa Maria Maggiore to

Cannobio, my secret preoccupation took me by surprise and flooded me and broke down my pretences.

The women in that valley are very beautifulwomen vary from valley to valley in the Alps and are plain and

squat here and divinities five miles awayand as we came down we passed a group of five or six of them

resting by the wayside. Their burthens were beside them, and one like Ceres held a reaping hook in her brown

"Glorious girls they were," said Willersley, and suddenly an immense sense of boredom enveloped me. I saw

myself striding on down that winding road, talking of politics and parties and bills of parliament and all sorts

of dessicated things. That road seemed to me to wind on for ever down to dust and infinite dreariness. I knew

Willersley set himself to draw a sociological moral. "I'm not so sure," he said in a voice of intense

"Damn agricultural work!" I said, and broke out into a vigorous cursing of all I held dear. "Fettered things we

"Why don't I go back and make love to those girls and let the world and you and everything go hang? Deep

breasts and rounded limbsand we poor emasculated devils go tramping by with the blood of youth in us! . .

"I'm not quite sure, Remington," said Willersley, looking at me with a deliberately quaint expression over his

Along the hot and dusty lower road between the Orrido of Traffiume and Cannobio Willersley had developed

his first blister. And partly because of that and partly because there was a bag at the station that gave us the

refreshment of clean linen and partly because of the lazy lower air into which we had come, we decided upon

We dined that night at a tabled'hote, and I found myself next to an Englishwoman who began a conversation

that was resumed presently in the hotel lounge. She was a woman of perhaps thirtythree or thirtyfour,

slenderly built, with a warm reddish skin and very abundant fair golden hair, the wife of a petulantlooking

heavy faced man of perhaps fiftythree, who smoked a cigar and dozed over his coffee and presently went

to bed. "He always goes to bed like that," she confided startlingly. "He sleeps after all his meals. I never knew

We had begun at the dinner table with itineraries and the usual topographical talk, and she had envied our

pedestrian travel. "My husband doesn't walk," she said. "His heart is weak and he cannot manage the hills."

There was something friendly and adventurous in her manner; she conveyed she liked me, and when

presently Willersley drifted off to write letters our talk sank at once to easy confidential undertones. I felt

enterprising, and indeed it is easy to be daring with people one has never seen before and may never see

again. I said I loved beautiful scenery and all beautiful things, and the pointing note in my voice made her

laugh. She told me I had bold eyes, and so far as I can remember I said she made them bold. "Blue they are,"

she remarked, smiling archly. "I like blue eyes." Then I think we compared ages, and she said she was the

That, I think, was our limit that evening. She went to bed, smiling goodnight quite prettily down the big

staircase, and I and Willersley went out to smoke in the garden. My head was full of her, and I found it

necessary to talk about her. So I made her a problem in sociology. "Who the deuce are these people?" I said,

and how do they get a living? They seem to have plenty of money. He strikes me as beingWillersley, what

Willersley theorised while I thought of the woman and that provocative quality of dash she had displayed.

The next day at lunch she and I met like old friends. A huge mass of private thinking during the interval had

been added to our effect upon one another. We talked for a time of insignificant things.

We hadn't a doubt of each other, but my heart was beating like a steamer propeller when it lifts out of the

"It's on the third floor, Number seventeen, near the staircase. My friend's next door."

She began to talk of books. She was interested in Christian Science, she said, and spoke of a book. I forget

altogether what that book was called, though I remember to this day with the utmost exactness the purplish

Wlllersley wanted to go for an expedition across the lake that afternoon, but I refused. He made some other

"I shall write in my room," I snarled like a thwarted animal, and he looked at me curiously. "Very well," he

said; "then I'll make some notes and think about that order of ours out under the magnolias."

I hovered about the lounge for a time buying postcards and feverishly restless, watching the movements of

the other people. Finally I went up to my room and sat down by the windows, staring out. There came a little

tap at the unlocked door and in an instant, like the go of a taut bowstring, I was up and had it open.

I did not feel a bit like a lover, I felt like a burglar with the safedoor nearly opened. "Come in," I said almost

impatiently, for anyone might be in the passage, and I gripped her wrist and drew her towards me.

"What do you mean?" she answered with a faint smile on her lips, and awkward and yielding.

I shut the door behind her, still holding her with one hand, then turned upon hershe was laughing

nervouslyand without a word drew her to me and kissed her. And I remember that as I kissed her she made

a little noise almost like the purring miaow with which a cat will greet one and her face, close to mine,

She was suddenly a different being from the discontented wife who had tapped a moment since on my door, a

That evening I came down to dinner a monster of pride, for behold! I was a man. I felt myself the most

wonderful and unprecedented of adventurers. It was hard to believe that any one in the world before had done

as much. My mistress and I met smiling, we carried things off admirably, and it seemed to me that Willersley

was the dullest old dog in the world. I wanted to give him advice. I wanted to give him derisive pokes. After

dinner and coffee in the lounge I was too excited and hilarious to go to bed, I made him come with me down

to the cafe under the arches by the pier, and there drank beer and talked extravagant nonsense about

everything under the sun, in order not to talk about the happenings of the afternoon. All the time something

"I'm for loafing," I said. "Let's row in the morning and spend to morrow afternoon just as we did today."

"We'll go up about sunset; that's the best time for it. We can start about five."

We heard music, and went further along the arcade to discover a place where girls in operatic Swiss peasant

costume were singing and dancing on a creaking, protesting little stage. I eyed their generous display of pink

neck and arm with the seasoned eye of a man who has lived in the world. Life was perfectly simple and easy,

Next day Willersley wanted to go on, but I delayed. Altogether I kept him back four days. Then abruptly my

mood changed, and we decided to start early the following morning. I remember, though a little indistinctly,

the feeling of my last talk with that woman whose surname, odd as it may seem, either I never learnt or I have

forgotten. (Her christian name was Milly.) She was tired and rather lowspirited, and disposed to be

sentimental, and for the first time in our intercourse I found myself liking her for the sake of her own

personality. There was something kindly and generous appearing behind the veil of naive and uncontrolled

sensuality she had worn. There was a curious quality of motherliness in her attitude to me that something in

my nature answered and approved. She didn't pretend to keep it up that she had yielded to my initiative. "I've

done you no harm," she said a little doubtfully, an odd note for a man's victim! And, "we've had a good time.

She interested me in her lonely dissatisfied life; she was childless and had no hope of children, and her

husband was the only son of a rich meat salesman, very mean, a mighty smoker"he reeks of it," she said,

"always"and interested in nothing but golf, billiards (which he played very badly), pigeon shooting,

convivial Free Masonry and Stock Exchange punting. Mostly they drifted about the Riviera. Her mother had

contrived her marriage when she was eighteen. They were the first samples I ever encountered of the great

multitude of functionless property owners which encumbers modern civilisationbut at the time I didn't

I tell all this business as it happened without comment, because I have no comment to make. It was all

strange to me, strange rather than wonderful, and, it may be, some dream of beauty died for ever in those

furtive meetings; it happened to me, and I could scarcely have been more irresponsible in the matter or

controlled events less if I had been suddenly pushed over a cliff into water. I swam, of coursefinding

myself in it. Things tested me, and I reacted, as I have told. The bloom of my innocence, if ever there had

been such a thing, was gone. And here is the remarkable thing about it; at the time and for some days I was

overweeningly proud; I have never been so proud before or since; I felt I had been promoted to virility; I

was unable to conceal my exultation from Willersley. It was a mood of shining shameless ungracious

selfapproval. As he and I went along in the cool morning sunshine by the rice fields in the throat of the Val

Willersley did not answer for a moment. He looked at me over the corner of his spectacles.

"Oh! all the way!" and I had a twinge of fatuous pride in my unpremeditated achievement.

"I heard her. I heard her whispering. . . . The whispering and rustling and so on. I was in my room yesterday. .

"You might have been caught, and that would have meant endless trouble. You might have incurred all sorts

of consequences. What did you know about her? . . . We have wasted four days in that hot close place. When

we found that League of Social Service we were talking about," he said with a determined eye upon me,

"I shall form a rival league," I said a little damped. "I'm hanged if I give up a single desire in me until I know

He lifted his chin and stared before him through his glasses at nothing. "There are some things," he said, "that

a man who means to workto do great public servicesMUST turn his back upon. I'm not discussing the

rights or wrongs of this sort of thing. It happens to be the conditions we work under. It will probably always

be so. If you want to experiment in that way, if you want even to discuss it,out you go from political life.

You must know that's so. . . . You're a strange man, Remington, with a kind of kink in you. You've a sort of

"I mean to take myself as I am," I said. "I'm going to get experience for humanity out of all my talentsand

Willersley twisted his face to its humorous expression. "I doubt if sexual proclivities," he said drily, come

I let that go for a little while. Then I broke out. "Sex!" said I, "is a fundamental thing in life. We went through

all this at Trinity. I'm going to look at it, experience it, think about it and get it square with the rest of life.

Career and Politics must take their chances of that. It's part of the general English slackness that they won't

look this in the face. Gods! what a muffled time we're coming out of! Sex means breeding, and breeding is a

necessary function in a nation. The Romans broke up upon that. The Americans fade out amidst their

"It was a woman," I said after a little interval, feeling oddly that I had failed altogether to answer him, and yet

I must go back a little way with my story. In the previous book I have described the kind of education that

happens to a man of my class nowadays, and it has been convenient to leap a phase in my experience that I

must now set out at length. I want to tell in this second hook how I came to marry, and to do that I must give

something of the atmosphere in which I first met my wife and some intimations of the forces that went to her

making. I met her in Staffordshire while I was staying with that uncle of whom I have already spoken, the

uncle who sold my father's houses and settled my mother in Penge. Margaret was twenty then and I was

It was just before the walking tour in Switzerland that opened up so much of the world to me. I saw her once,

for an afternoon, and circumstances so threw her up in relief that I formed a very vivid memory of her. She

was in the sharpest contrast with the industrial world about her; she impressed me as a dainty blue flower

might do, come upon suddenly on a clinker heap. She remained in my mind at once a perplexing

But first I must tell of my Staffordshire cousins and the world that served as a foil for her.

I first went to stay with my cousins when I was an awkward youth of sixteen, wearing deep mourning for my

mother. My uncle wanted to talk things over with me, he said, and if he could, to persuade me to go into

I remember that visit on account of all sorts of novel things, but chiefly, I think, because it was the first time I

encountered anything that deserves to be spoken of as wealth. For the first time in my life I had to do with

people who seemed to have endless supplies of money, unlimited good clothes, numerous servants; whose

daily life was made up of things that I had hitherto considered to be treats or exceptional extravagances. My

cousins of eighteen and nineteen took cabs, for instance, with the utmost freedom, and travelled firstclass in

the local trains that run up and down the district of the Five Towns with an entire unconsciousness of the

The family occupied a large villa in Newcastle, with big lawns before it and behind, a shrubbery with quite a

lot of shrubs, a coach house and stable, and subordinate dwellingplaces for the gardener and the coachman.

Every bedroom contained a gas heater and a canopied brass bedstead, and had a little bathroom attached

equipped with the porcelain baths and fittings my uncle manufactured, bright and sanitary and stamped with

his name, and the house was furnished throughout with chairs and tables in bright shining wood, soft and

prevalently red Turkish carpets, cosy corners, curtained archways, goldframed landscapes, overmantels, a

diningroom sideboard like a palace with a large Tantalus, and electric light fittings of a gay and expensive

quality. There was a fine billiardroom on the ground floor with three comfortable sofas and a rotating

bookcase containing an excellent collection of the English and American humorists from THREE MEN IN A

BOAT to the penultimate Mark Twain. There was also a conservatory opening out of the diningroom, to

My aunt was a little woman with a scared look and a cap that would get over one eye, not very like my

mother, and nearly eight years her junior; she was very much concerned with keeping everything nice, and

unmercifully bullied by my two cousins, who took after their father and followed the imaginations of their

own hearts. They were tall, dark, warmly flushed girls handsome rather than pretty. Gertrude, the eldest and

tallest, had eyes that were almost black; Sibyl was of a stouter build, and her eyes, of which she was

shamelessly proud, were dark blue. Sibyl's hair waved, and Gertrude's was severely straight. They treated me

on my first visit with all the contempt of the adolescent girl for a boy a little younger and infinitely less

expert in the business of life than herself. They were very busy with the writings of notes and certain

mysterious goings and comings of their own, and left me very much to my own devices. Their speech in my

presence was full of unfathomable allusions. They were the sort of girls who will talk over and through an

I met them at breakfast and at lunch and at the halfpast six o'clock high tea that formed the third chief meal

of the day. I heard them rattling off the compositions of Chaminade and Moskowski, with great decision and

effect, and hovered on the edge of tennis foursomes where it was manifest to the dullest intelligence that my

presence was unnecessary. Then I went off to find some readable book in the place, but apart from

miscellaneous popular novels, some veterinary works, a number of comic books, old bound volumes of THE

ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS and a large, popular illustrated History of England, there was very little

to be found. My anut talked to me in a casual feeble way, chiefly about my motber's last illness. The two bad

seen very little of each other for many years; she made no secret of it that the ineligible qualities of my father

were the cause of the estrangement. The only other society in the house during the day was an old and rather

decayed Skye terrier in constant conflict with what were no doubt imaginary fleas. I took myself off for a

series of walks, and acquired a considerable knowledge of the scenery and topography of the Potteries.

It puzzled my aunt that I did not go westward, where it was country side and often quite pretty, with

hedgerows and fields and copses and flowers. But always I went eastward, where in a long valley

industrialism smokes and sprawls. That was the stuff to which I turned by nature, to the human effort, and the

accumulation and jar of men's activities. And in such a country as that valley social and economic relations

were simple and manifest. Instead of the limitless confusion of London's population, in which no man can

trace any but the most slender correlation between rich and poor, in which everyone seems disconnected and

adrift from everyone, you can see here the works, the potbank or the ironworks or what not, and here close at

hand the congested, meanlyhoused workers, and at a little distance a small middleclass quarter, and again

remoter, the big house of the employer. It was like a very simplified diagram after the untraceable

I prowled alone, curious and interested, through shabby back streets of mean little homes; I followed canals,

sometimes canals of mysteriously heated waters with ghostly wisps of steam rising against blackened walls

or a distant prospect of dustbinfed vegetable gardens, I saw the women pouring out from the potbanks,

heard the hooters summoning the toilers to work, lost my way upon slag heaps as big as the hills of the south

country, dodged trains at manifestly dangerous level crossings, and surveyed across dark intervening spaces,

the flaming uproar, the gnomelike activities of iron foundries. I heard talk of strikes and rumours of strikes,

and learnt from the columns of some obscure labour paper I bought one day, of the horrors of the lead

poisoning that was in those days one of the normal risks of certain sorts of pottery workers. Then back I

came, by the ugly groaning and clanging steam tram of that period, to my uncle's house and lavish abundance

of money and more or less furtive flirtations and the tinkle of Moskowski and Chaminade. It was, I say,

diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the expropriatedas if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as

jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and development that had

surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great

There stuck in my mind as if it was symbolical of the whole thing the twisted figure of a man, whose face had

been horribly scaldedI can't describe how, except that one eye was just expressionless whiteand he

ground at an organ bearing a card which told in weak and bitterly satirical phrasing that he had been scalded

by the hot water from the tuyeres of the blast furnace of Lord Pandram's works. He had been scalded and

quite inadequately compensated and dismissed. And Lord Pandram was worth half a million.

That upturned sightless white eye of his took possession of my imagination. I don't think that even then I was

swayed by any crude melodramatic conception of injustice. I was quite prepared to believe the card wasn't a

punctiliously accurate statement of fact, and that a case could be made out for Lord Pandram. Still there in the

muddy gutter, painfully and dreadfully, was the man, and he was smashed and scalded and wretched, and he

ground his dismal hurdygurdy with a weary arm, calling upon Heaven and the passerby for help, for help

and some sort of rightingone could not imagine quite what. There he was as a fact, as a byproduct of the

system that heaped my cousins with trinkets and provided the comic novels and the abundant cigars and

My uncle on his part did nothing to conceal the state of war that existed between himself and his workers, and

Prosperity had overtaken my uncle. So quite naturally he believed that every man who was not as prosperous

as he was had only himself to blame. He was rich and he had left school and gone into his father's business at

fifteen, and that seemed to him the proper age at which everyone's education should terminate. He was very

anxious to dissuade me from going up to Cambridge, and we argued intermittently through all my visit.

I had remembered him as a big and buoyant man, striding destructively about the nursery floor of my

childhood, and saluting my existence by slaps, loud laughter, and questions about half herrings and half eggs

subtly framed to puzzle and confuse my mind. I didn't see him for some years until my father's death, and

then he seemed rather smaller, though still a fair size, yellow instead of red and much less radiantly

aggressive. This altered effect was due not so much to my own changed perspectives, I fancy, as to the facts

that he was suffering for continuous cigar smoking, and being taken in hand by his adolescent daughters who

During my first visit there was a perpetual series ofthe only word is rows, between them and him. Up to

the age of fifteen or thereabouts, he had maintamed his ascendancy over them by simple oldfashioned

physical chastisement. Then after an interlude of a year it had dawned upon them that power had

mysteriously departed from him. He had tried stopping their pocket money, but they found their mother

financially amenable; besides which it was fundamental to my uncle's attitude that he should give them

money freely. Not to do so would seem like admitting a difficulty in making it. So that after he had stopped

their allowances for the fourth time Sybil and Gertrude were prepared to face beggary without a qualm. It had

been his pride to give them the largest allowance of any girls at the school, not even excepting the

granddaughter of Fladden the Borax King, and his soul recoiled from this discipline as it had never recoiled

from the ruder method of the earlier phase. Both girls had developed to a high pitch in their mutual

recriminations a gift for damaging retort, and he found it an altogether deadlier thing than the power of the

raised voice that had always cowed my aunt. Whenever he became heated with them, they frowned as if

involuntarily, drew in their breath sharply, said: "Daddy, you really must not say " and corrected his

My uncle's views about Cambridge, however, were perfectly clear and definite. It was waste of time and

money. It was all damned foolery. Did they make a man a better business man? Not a bit of it. He gave

instances. It spoilt a man for business by giving him "false ideas." Some men said that at college a man

formed useful friendships. What use were friendships to a business man? He might get to know lords, but, as

my uncle pointed out, a lord's requirements in his line of faience were little greater than a common man's. If

college introduced him to hotel proprietors there might be something in it. Perhaps it helped a man into

Parliament, Parliament still being a confused retrogressive corner in the world where lawyers and suchlike

sheltered themselves from the onslaughts of commonsense behind a fog of Latin and Greek and twaddle and

tosh; but I wasn't the sort to go into Parliament, unless I meant to be a lawyer. Did I mean to be a lawyer? It

cost no end of money, and was full of uncertainties, and there were no judges nor great solicitors among my

relations. "Young chaps think they get on by themselves," said my uncle. It isn't so. Not unless they take their

We were at cross purposes from the outset, because I did not think men lived to make money; and I was

obtuse to the hints he was throwing out at the possibilities of his own potbank, not willfully obtuse, but just

failing to penetrate his meaning. Whatever City Merchants had or had not done for me, Flack, Topham and

old Gates had certainly barred my mistaking the profitable production and sale of lavatory basins and

bathroom fittings for the highest good. It was only upon reflection that it dawned upon me that the splendid

chance for a young fellow with my uncle, "me, having no son of my own," was anything but an illustration

I still remember very distinctly my uncle's talk,he loved to speak "reet Staffordshire"his rather flabby

face with the mottled complexion that told of crude illregulated appetites, his clumsy gestureshe kept

emphasising his points by prodding at me with his fingerthe illworn, costly, grey tweed clothes, the

watch chain of plain solid gold, and soft felt hat thrust back from his head. He tackled me first in the garden

after lunch, and then tried to raise me to enthusiasm by taking me to his potbank and showing me its

organisation, from the dusty grinding mills in which whitened men worked and coughed, through the highly

ventilated glazing room in which strangely masked girls looked ashamed of themselves,"They'll risk death,

the fools, to show their faces to a man," said my uncle, quite audiblyto the firing kilns and the glazing

kilns, and so round the whole place to the railway siding and the gratifying spectacle of three trucks laden

Then we went up a creaking outside staircase to his little office, and he showed off before me for a while,

"None of your Gas," he said, "all this. It's Real every bit of it. Hard cash and hard glaze."

"Yes," I said, with memories of a carelessly read pamphlet in my mind, and without any satirical intention, "I

Whereupon I found I had tapped the ruling grievance of my uncle's life. He hated leadless glazes more than

he hated anything, except the benevolent people who had organised the agitation for their use. "Leadless

He began in a voice of bland persuasiveness that presently warmed to anger, to explain the whole matter. I

hadn't the rights of the matter at all. Firstly, there was practically no such thing as lead poisoning. Secondly,

not everyone was liable to lead poisoning, and it would be quite easy to pick out the susceptible typesas

soon as they had itand put them to other work. Thirdly, the evil effects of lead poisoning were much

exaggerated. Fourthly, and this was in a particularly confidential undertone, many of the people liked to get

lead poisoning, especially the women, because it caused abortion. I might not believe it, but he knew it for a

fact. Fifthly, the workpeople simply would not learn the gravity of the danger, and would eat with unwashed

hands, and incur all sorts of risks, so that as my uncle put it: "the fools deserve what they get." Sixthly, he and

several associated firms had organised a simple and generous insurance scheme against leadpoisoning risks.

Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from excessive, futile and expensive) precautions

against the disease. Eighthly, in the illequipped shops of his minor competitors lead poisoning was a

frequent and virulent evil, and people had generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he

hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant chimneys, might be advantageously closed. .

"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the table on which he had been sitting. "Seems to

me there'll come a time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works blowing his girls noses

He walked to the black mantelpiece and stood on the threadbare rug, and urged me not to be misled by the

"They'll get a strike one of these days, of employers, and then we'll see a bit," he said. "They'll drive Capital

He led the way down the shaky wooden steps and cheered up to tell me of his way of checking his coal

consumption. He exchanged a ferocious greeting with one or two workpeople, and so we came out of the

factory gates into the ugly narrow streets, paved with a peculiarly hard diapered brick of an unpleasing

inkyblue colour, and bordered with the mean and squalid homes of his workers. Doors stood open and

We passed a sicklylooking girl with a sallow face, who dragged her limbs and peered at us dimly with

painful eyes. She stood back, as partly blinded people will do, to allow us to pass, although there was plenty

"Ploombism. And the other day I saw a fool of a girl, and what d'you think? She'd got a basin that hadn't been

fired, a cracked piece of biscuit it was, up on the shelf over her head, just all over glaze, killing glaze, man,

and she was putting up her hand if you please, and eating her dinner out of it. Got her dinner in it!

"Eating her dinner out of it," he repeated in loud and bitter tones, and punched me hard in the ribs.

"And then they comes to THATand grumbles. And the fools up in Westminster want you to put in fans

here and fans therethe Longton fools have. . . . And then eating their dinners out of it all the time!" . . .

At high tea that nightmy uncle was still holding out against evening dinnerSibyl and Gertrude made

"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for you." But he seemed shaken by the fact

that some Burslem rival was launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he remarked. "He's a

Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room with a writingdesk and full of pieces

"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go to Trinity. It is a great college."

"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do it. You could have come hereThat don't

matter, though, now. . . You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half starved clergyman,

mucking about with the women all the day and afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a

schoolmaster or some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap. That's what you'll get from

"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and likely it's what you're fitted for."

I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge days, and always these relations of mine

produced the same effect of hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery. He lived in a

different universe from the dreams of scientific construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have

understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense rivalries with other men of his class and

kind, a few vindictive hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of acquisition that had become a

second nature, a keen love both of efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have no

sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no charity and no sort of religious feeling

whatever. He had strong bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and occasionally was

carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree" to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences

of these occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was urgent for the suppression of

nudity in the local Art Gallery and a harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the valley. And

he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights of his jollydog period, when he spoke of them at all, by

the unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly contempt and considerable financial

generosity, but his daughters tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money to spend, so

My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was an illuminating extreme. I have learnt

what not to expect from them through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden

antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more complex forms, if I had not first seen them

With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy, rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots

and slouching tweed clad form, a little roundshouldered and very obstinate looking, he strolls through all

my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable

Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in equal measure whatever seemed to

suggest that he personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after

fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until he

himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and could

judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but Staffordshire, he

hated all foreigners because he was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he

hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were

not "reet Staffordshire," and he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet." He wanted to have

all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to

have the best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and every one

else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very inconvenient.)

And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his works, and his

workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his bidding. He was, in fact, a

very naive, vigorous human being. He was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of

There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern industrial world. You will find the same type

with the slightest modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey or North Italy. No

doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men have raised themselves up from the general mass of

untrained, uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle. To drive others they have had first

to drive themselves. They have never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social life as a

whole, and as for dreams or beauty, it was a condition of survival that they should ignore such cravings. All

the distinctive qualities of my uncle can be thought of as dictated by his conditions; his success and

harshness, the extravagances that expressed his pride in making money, the uncongenial luxury that sprang

from rivalry, and his selfreliance, his contempt for broad views, his contempt for everything that he could

His daughters were the inevitable children of his life. Queer girls they were! Curiously "spirited" as people

phrase it, and curiously limited. During my Cambridge days I went down to Staffordshire several times. My

uncle, though he still resented my refusal to go into his business, was also in his odd way proud of me. I was

his nephew and poor relation, and yet there I was, a young gentleman learning all sorts of unremunerative

things in the grandest manner, "Latin and mook," while the sons of his neighhours, not nephews merely, but

sons, stayed unpolished in their native town. Every time I went down I found extensive changes and altered

relations, and before I had settled down to them off I went again. I don't think I was one person to them; I was

a series of visitors. There is a gulf of ages between a gaunt schoolboy of sixteen in unbecoming mourning and

two vividly selfconscious girls of eighteen and nineteen, but a Cambridge "man" of two and twenty with a

first and good tennis and a growing social experience, is a fair contemporary for two girls of twentythree

A motorcar appeared, I think in my second visit, a bottlegreen affair that opened behind, had dark purple

cushions, and was controlled mysteriously by a man in shiny black costume and a flat cap. The high tea had

been shifted to seven and rechristened dinner, but my uncle would not dress nor consent to have wine; and

after one painful experiment, I gathered, and a scene, he put his foot down and prohibited any but

The foot had descended vehemently! "My own daughters!" he had said, "dressed up like "and had

arrested himself and fumbled and decided to say"actresses, and showin' their fat arms for every fool to

stare at!" Nor would he have any people invited to dinner. He didn't, he had explained, want strangers poking

about in his house when he came home tired. So such calling as occurred went on during his absence in the

One of the peculiarities of the life of these ascendant families of the industrial class to which wealth has

come, is its tremendous insulations. There were no customs of intercourse in the Five Towns. All the isolated

prosperities of the district sprang from economising, hard driven homes, in which there was neither time nor

means for hospitality. Social intercourse centred very largely upon the church or chapel, and the chapels were

better at bringing people together than the Establishment to which my cousins belonged. Their chief outlet to

the wider world lay therefore through the acquaintances they had formed at school, and through two much

less prosperous families of relations who lived at Longton and Hanley. A number of gossiping friendships

with old school mates were "kept up," and my cousins would "spend the afternoon" or even spend the day

with these; such occasions led to other encounters and interlaced with the furtive correspondences and

snatched meetings that formed the emotional thread of their lives. When the billiard table had been new, my

uncle had taken to asking in a few approved friends for an occasional game, but mostly the billiardroom was

for glory and the girls. Both of them played very well. They never, so far as I know, dined out, and when at

last after bitter domestic conflicts they began to go to dances, they went with the quavering connivance of my

aunt, and changed into ball frocks at friends' houses on the way. There was a tennis club that formed a

convenient afternoon rendezvous, and I recall that in the period of my earlier visits the young bloods of the

district found much satisfaction in taking girls for drives in dogcarts and suchlike highwheeled vehicles, a

My aunt and uncle had conceived no plans in life for their daughters at all. In the undifferentiated industrial

community from which they had sprung, girls got married somehow, and it did not occur to them that the

concentration of property that had made them wealthy, had cut their children off from the general social sea

in which their own awkward meeting had occurred, without necessarily opening any other world in exchange.

My uncle was too much occupied with the works and his business affairs and his private vices to philosophise

about his girls; he wanted them just to keep girls, preferably about sixteen, and to be a sort of animated

flowers and make home bright and be given things. He was irritated that they would not remain at this, and

still more irritated that they failed to suppress altogether their natural interest in young men. The tandems

would be steered by weird and devious routes to evade the bare chance of his bloodshot eye. My aunt seemed

to have no ideas whatever about what was likely to happen to her children. She had indeed no ideas about

I can see now the pathetic difficulty of my cousins' position in life; the absence of any guidance or instruction

or provision for their development. They supplemented the silences of home by the conversation of

schoolfellows and the suggestions of popular fiction. They had to make what they could out of life with such

hints as these. The church was far too modest to offer them any advice. It was obtruded upon my mind upon

my first visit that they were both carrying on correspondences and having little furtive passings and seeings

and meetings with the mysterious owners of certain initials, S. and L. K., and, if I remember rightly, "the R.

N." brothers and cousins, I suppose, of their friends. The same thing was going on, with a certain

intensification, at my next visit, excepting only that the initials were different. But when I came again their

methods were maturer or I was no longer a negligible quantity, and the notes and the initials were no longer

My cousins had worked it out from the indications of their universe that the end of life is to have a "good

time." They used the phrase. That and the drives in dogcarts were only the first of endless points of

resemblance between them and the commoner sort of American girl. When some years ago I paid my first

and only visit to America I seemed to recover my cousins' atmosphere as soon as I entered the train at Euston.

There were three girls in my compartment supplied with huge decorated cases of sweets, and being seen off

by a company of friends, noisily arch and eager about the "steamer letters" they would get at Liverpool; they

were the very soulsisters of my cousins. The chief elements of a good time, as my cousins judged it, as these

countless thousands of rich young women judge it, are a petty eventfulness, laughter, and to feel that you are

looking well and attracting attention. Shopping is one of its leading joys. You buy things, clothes and trinkets

for yourself and presents for your friends. Presents always seemed to be flying about in that circle; flowers

and boxes of sweets were common currency. My cousins were always getting and giving, my uncle caressed

them with parcels and cheques. They kissed him and he exuded sovereigns as a stroked APHIS exudes honey.

It was like the new language of the Academy of Lagado to me, and I never learnt how to express myself in it,

for nature and training make me feel encumbered to receive presents and embarrassed in giving them. But

Of the quality of their private imagination I never learnt anything; I suppose it followed the lines of the

fiction they read and was romantic and sentimental. So far as marriage went, the married state seemed at once

very attractive and dreadfully serious to them, composed in equal measure of becoming important and

becoming old. I don't know what they thought about children. I doubt if they thought about them at all. It was

As for the poor and dingy people all about them, my cousins were always ready to take part in a Charitable

Bazaar. They were unaware of any economic correlation of their own prosperity and that circumambient

poverty, and they knew of Trade Unions simply as disagreeable external things that upset my uncle's temper.

They knew of nothing wrong in social life at all except that there were "Agitators." It surprised them a little, I

think, that Agitators were not more drastically put down. But they had a sort of instinctive dread of social

discussion as of something that might breach the happiness of their ignorance. . . .

My cousins did more than illustrate Marx for me; they also undertook a stage of my emotional education.

Their method in that as in everything else was extremely simple, but it took my inexperience by surprise.

It must have been on my third visit that Sybil took me in hand. Hitherto I seemed to have seen her only in

profile, but now she became almost completely full face, manifestly regarded me with those violet eyes of

hers. She passed me things I needed at breakfastit was the first morning of my visitbefore I asked for

When young men are looked at by pretty cousins, they become intensely aware of those cousins. It seemed to

me that I had always admired Sybil's eyes very greatly, and that there was something in her temperament

We walked round the garden somewhen that morning, and talked about Cambridge. She asked quite a lot of

questions about my work and my ambitions. She said she had always felt sure I was clever.

The conversation languished a little, and we picked some flowers for the house. Then she asked if I could

run. I conceded her various starts and we raced up and down the middle garden path. Then, a little breathless,

we went into the new twentyfive guinea summer house at the end of the herbaceous border.

We sat side by side, pleasantly hidden from the house, and she became anxious about her hair, which was

slightly and prettily disarranged, and asked me to help her with the adjustment of a hairpin. I had never in my

life been so near the soft curly hair and the dainty eyebrow and eyelid and warm soft cheek of a girl, and I

She began to talk about friendship, and lost her thread and forgot the little electric stress between us in a

I went to bed that night with one propostion overshadowing everything else in my mind, namely, that kissing

my cousin Sybil was a difficult, but not impossible, achievement. I do not recall any shadow of a doubt

whether on the whole it was worth doing. The thing had come into my existence, disturbing and interrupting

The next day matters came to a crisis in the little upstairs sittingroom which had been assigned me as a

study during my visit. I was working up there, or rather trying to work in spite of the outrageous capering of

some very primitive elements in my brain, when she came up to me, under a transparent pretext of looking

I turned round and then got up at the sight of her. I quite forget what our conversation was about, but I know

she led me to believe I might kiss her. Then when I attempted to do so she averted her face.

That remained the state of our relations for two days. I developed a growing irritation with and resentment

against cousin Sybil, combined with an intense desire to get that kiss for which I hungered and thirsted.

Cousin Sybil went about in the happy persuasion that I was madly in love with her, and her game, so far as

she was concerned, was played and won. It wasn't until I had fretted for two days that I realised that I was

being used for the commonest form of excitement possible to a commonplace girl; that dozens perhaps of

young men had played the part of Tantalus at cousin Sybil's lips. I walked about my room at nights, damning

her and calling her by terms which on the whole she rather deserved, while Sybil went to sleep pitying "poor

But I never did equalise the disadvantage, and perhaps it's as well, for I fancy that sort of revenge cuts both

"Why are men so silly?" said cousin Sybil next morning, wriggling back with downbent head to release

She stood back against a hedge of roses, a little flushed and excited and interested, and ready for the

"Beastly hot for scuffling," I said, white with anger. "I don't know whether I'm so keen on kissing you, Sybil,

I was still in the full glare of this disillusionment when Gertrude awoke from some preoccupation to an

interest in my existence. She developed a disposition to touch my hand by accident, and let her fingers rest in

contact with it for a moment,she had pleasant soft hands;she began to drift into summer houses with me,

to let her arm rest trustfully against mine, to ask questions about Cambridge. They were much the same

questions that Sybil had asked. But I controlled myself and maintained a profile of intelligent and entirely

What Gertrude made of it came out one evening in some talkI forget about whatwith Sybil.

And I never disillusioned her by any subsequent levity from this theory of my innate and virginal piety.

It was against this harsh and crude Staffordshire background that I think I must have seen Margaret for the

first time. I say I think because it is quite possible that we had passed each other in the streets of Cambridge,

no doubt with that affectation of mutual disregard which was once customary between undergraduates and

Newnham girls. But if that was so I had noted nothing of the slender graciousness that shone out so

She was a younger schoolfellow of my cousins', and the stepdaughter of Seddon, a prominent solicitor of

Burslem. She was not only not in my cousins' generation but not in their set, she was one of a small

hardworking group who kept immaculate notebooks, and did as much as is humanly possible of that

insensate pile of written work that the Girls' Public School movement has inflicted upon school girls. She

really learnt French and German admirably and thoroughly, she got as far in mathematics as an unflinching

industry can carry any one with no great natural aptitude, and she went up to Bennett Hall, Newnham, after

There in her third year she made herself thoroughly ill through overwork, so ill that she had to give up

Newnham altogether and go abroad with her stepmother. She made herself ill, as so many girls do in those

university colleges, through the badness of her home and school training. She thought study must needs be a

hard straining of the mind. She worried her work, she gave herself no leisure to see it as a whole, she felt

herself not making headway and she cut her games and exercise in order to increase her hours of toil, and

worked into the night. She carried a knack of laborious thoroughness into the blind alleys and inessentials of

her subject. It didn't need the badness of the food for which Bennett Hall is celebrated and the remarkable

dietary of nocturnal cocoa, cakes and soft biscuits with which the girls have supplemented it, to ensure her

collapse. Her mother brought her home, fretting and distressed, and then finding her hopelessly unhappy at

home, took her and her halfbrother, a rather ailing youngster of ten who died three years later, for a journey

Italy did much to assuage Margaret's chagrin. I think all three of them had a very good time there. At home

Mr. Seddon, her step father, played the part of a wellmeaning blight by reason of the moods that arose

from nervous dyspepsia. They went to Florence, equipped with various introductions and much sound advice

from sympathetic Cambridge friends, and having acquired an ease in Italy there, went on to Siena, Orvieto,

and at last Rome. They returned, if I remember rightly, by Pisa, Genoa, Milan and Paris. Six months or more

they had had abroad, and now Margaret was back in Burslem, in health again and consciously a very civilised

New ideas were abroad, it was Maytime and a spring of abundant flowersdaffodils were particularly good

that yearand Mrs. Seddon celebrated her return by giving an afternoon reception at short notice, with the

The Seddons had a big old farmhouse modified to modern ideas of comfort on the road out towards

Misterton, with an orchard that had been rather pleasantly subdued from use to ornament. It had rich

blossoming cherry and apple trees. Large patches of grass full of nodding yellow trumpets had been left

amidst the not too precisely mown grass, which was as it were grass path with an occasional lapse into lawn

or glade. And Margaret, hatless, with the fair hair above her thin, delicately pink face very simply done, came

to meet our rather too consciously dressed party,we had come in the motor four strong, with my aunt in

grey silk. Margaret wore a soft flowing flowered blue dress of diaphanous material, all unconnected with the

It was one of those May days that ape the light and heat of summer, and I remember disconnectedly quite a

number of brightly lit figures and groups walking about, and a white gate between orchard and garden and a

large lawn with an oak tree and a red Georgian house with a verandah and open French windows, through

which the tea drinking had come out upon the mossedged flagstones even as Mrs. Seddon had planned.

The party was almost entirely feminine except for a little curate with a large head, a good voice and a radiant

manner, who was obviously attracted by Margaret, and two or three young husbands still sufficiently addicted

to their wives to accompany them. One of them I recall as a quite romantic figure with abundant blond curly

hair on which was poised a grey felt hat encircled by a refined black band. He wore, moreover, a loose rich

shot silk tie of red and purple, a long frock coat, grey trousers and brown shoes, and presently he removed his

hat and carried it in one hand. There were two tennisplaying youths besides myself. There was also one

father with three daughters in anxious control, a father of the old school scarcely half broken in, reluctant,

rebellious and consciously and conscientiously "reet Staffordshire." The daughters were all alert to suppress

the possible plungings, the undesirable humorous impulses of this almost feral guest. They nipped his very

gestures in the bud. The rest of the people were mainly mothers with daughtersdaughters of all ages, and a

scattering of aunts, and there was a tendency to clotting, parties kept together and regarded parties

suspiciously. Mr. Seddon was in hiding, I think, all the time, though not formally absent.

Matters centred upon the tea in the long room of the French windows, where four trim maids went to and fro

busily between the house and the clumps of people seated or standing before it; and tennis and croquet were

intermittently visible and audible beyond a bank of rockwork rich with the spikes and cups and bells of high

Mrs. Seddon presided at the tea urn, and Margaret partly assisted and partly talked to me and my cousin

SibylGertrude had found a disused and faded initial and was partnering him at tennis in a state of gentle

revivalwhile their mother exercised a divided chaperonage from a seat near Mrs. Seddon. The little curate,

stirring a partially empty cup of tea, mingled with our party, and preluded, I remember, every observation he

We talked of Cambridge, and Margaret kept us to it. The curate was a Selwyn man and had taken a pass

degree in theology, but Margaret had come to Gaylord's lecturers in Trinity for a term before her breakdown,

and understood these differences. She had the eagerness of an exile to hear the old familiar names of places

and personalities. We capped familiar anecdotes and were enthusiastic about Kings' Chapel and the Backs,

and the curate, addressing himself more particularly to Sibyl, told a long confused story illustrative of his

disposition to reckless devilry (of a pure minded kindly sort) about upsetting two canoes quite needlessly on

I can still see Margaret as I saw her that afternoon, see her fresh fair face, with the little obliquity of the upper

lip, and her brow always slightly knitted, and her manner as of one breathlessly shy but determined. She had

rather open blue eyes, and she spoke in an even musical voice with the gentlest of stresses and the ghost of a

lisp. And it was true, she gathered, that Cambridge still existed. "I went to Grantchester," she said, "last year,

and had tea under the appleblossom. I didn't think then I should have to come down." (It was that started the

"I've seen a lot of pictures, and learnt a lot about themat the Pitti and the Brera,the Brera is

wonderfulwonderful places,but it isn't like real study," she was saying presently. . . . "We bought bales

But fairhaired and quite simply and yet graciously and fancifully dressed, talking of art and beautiful things

and a beautiful land, and with so much manifest regret for learning denied, she seemed a different kind of

being altogether from my smart, hard, high coloured, blackhaired and resolutely hatted cousin; she seemed

translucent beside Gertrude. Even the little twist and droop of her slender body was a grace to me.

I liked her from the moment I saw her, and set myself to interest and please her as well as I knew how.

We recalled a case of ragging that had rustled the shrubs of Newnham, and then Chris Robinson's visithe

I was moved to tell Margaret something of my own views in the matter of social progress, and she

listenedoh! with a kind of urged attention, and her brow a little more knitted, very earnestly. The little

curate desisted from the appendices and refuse heaps and general debris of his story, and made himself look

"We did a lot of that when I was up in the eighties," he said. "I'm glad Imperialism hasn't swamped you

Gertrude, looking bright and confident, came to join our talk from the shrubbery; the initial, a little flushed

and evidently in a state of refreshed relationship, came with her, and a cheerful lady in pink and more

particularly distinguished by a pink bonnet joined our little group. Gertrude had been sipping admiration and

"Socialism!" she cried, catching the word. "It's well Pa isn't here. He has Fits when people talk of socialism.

The curate said there was socialism AND socialism, and looked at Margaret to gauge whether he had been

too bold in this utterance. But she was all, he perceived, for broadmindness, and he stirred himself (and

incidentally his tea) to still more liberality of expression. He said the state of the poor was appalling, simply

appalling; that there were times when he wanted to shatter the whole system, "only," he said, turning to me

The little curate looked at it for a moment. "Precisely," he said explosively, and turned stirring and with his

Margaret was saying, with a swift blush and an effect of daring, that she had no doubt she was a socialist.

"And wearing a gold chain!" said Gertrude, "And drinking out of eggshell! I like that!"

I came to Margaret's rescue. "It doesn't follow that because one's a socialist one ought to dress in sackcloth

The initial coloured deeply, and having secured my attention by prodding me slightly with the wrist of the

hand that held his teacup, cleared his throat and suggested that "one ought to be consistent."

I perceived we were embarked upon a discussion of the elements. We began an interesting little wrangle one

of those crude discussions of general ideas that are dear to the heart of youth. I and Margaret supported one

another as socialists, Gertrude and Sybil and the initial maintained an antisocialist position, the curate

attempted a crossbench position with an air of intending to come down upon us presently with a casting

vote. He reminded us of a number of useful principles too often overlooked in argument, that in a big

question like this there was much to be said on both sides, that if every one did his or her duty to every one

about them there would be no difficulty with social problems at all, that over and above all enactments we

needed moral changes in people themselves. My cousin Gertrude was a difficult controversialist to manage,

being unconscious of inconsistency in statement and absolutely impervious to reply. Her standpoint was

essentially materialistic; she didn't see why she shouldn't have a good time because other people didn't; they

would have a good time, she was sure, if she didn't. She said that if we did give up everything we had to other

people, they wouldn't very likely know what to do with it. She asked if we were so fond of workpeople, why

we didn't go and live among them, and expressed the inflexible persuasion that if we HAD socialism,

everything would be just the same again in ten years' time. She also threw upon us the imputation of

ingratitude for a beautiful world by saying that so far as she was concerned she didn't want to upset

The discussion led in some way that I don't in the least recall now, and possibly by abrupt transitions, to a

croquet foursome in which Margaret involved the curate without involving herself, and then stood beside me

on the edge of the lawn while the others played. We watched silently for a moment.

"I HATE that sort of view," she said suddenly in a confidential undertone, with her delicate pink flush

"To think we are just to enjoy ourselves," she went on; "just to go on dressing and playing and having meals

and spending money!" She seemed to be referring not simply to my cousins, but to the whole world of

industry and property about us. "But what is one to do?" she asked. "I do wish I had not had to come down.

It's all so pointless here. There seems to be nothing going forward, no ideas, no dreams. No one here seems to

feel quite what I feel, the sort of need there is for MEANING in things. I hate things without meaning."

"I suppose I shall. I suppose I must find something. Do you think if one were to attempt some sort of

"I suppose I couldn't," she answered, after a thoughtful moment. "I suppose it would come to nothing. And

yet I feel there is so much to be done for the world, so much one ought to be doing. . . . I want to do

I can see her now as she stood there with her brows nearly frowning, her blue eyes looking before her, her

mouth almost petulant. "One feels that there are so many things going onout of one's reach," she said.

I went back in the motorcar with my mind full of her, the quality of delicate discontent, the suggestion of

exile. Even a kind of weakness in her was sympathetic. She told tremendously against her background. She

was, I say, like a protesting blue flower upon a cinder heap. It is curious, too, how she connects and mingles

with the furious quarrel I had with my uncle that very evening. That came absurdly. Indirectly Margaret was

responsible. My mind was running on ideas she had revived and questions she had set clamouring, and quite

inadvertently in my attempt to find solutions I talked so as to outrage his profoundest feelings. . . .

I sat with him in the smokingroom, propounding what I considered to be the most indisputable and

noncontentious propositions conceivableuntil, to my infinite amazement, he exploded and called me a

"Tremendously interesting time," I said, "just in the beginning of making a civilisation."

"Ah!" he said, with an averted face, and nodded, leaning forward over his cigar.

"Monstrous muddle of things we have got," I said, "jumbled streets, ugly population, ugly factories"

"You'd do a sight better if you had to do with it," said my uncle, regarding me askance.

"Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant to be going would do a sight better,

"You'll be making out I organised that business down thereby chancenext," said my uncle, his voice

My uncle remarked that that showed how much I knew about businesses. If chance made businesses, why

was it that he always succeeded and grew while those fools Ackroyd and Sons always took second place? He

showed a disposition to tell the glorious history of how once Ackroyd's overshadowed him, and how now he

could buy up Ackroyd's three times over. But I wanted to get out what was in my mind.

"Oh!" I said, "as between man and man and business and business, some of course get the pull by this quality

or thatbut it's forces quite outside the individual case that make the big part of any success under modern

conditions. YOU never invented pottery, nor any process in pottery that matters a rap in your works; it wasn't

YOUR foresight that joined all England up with railways and made it possible to organise production on an

altogether different scale. You really at the utmost can't take credit for much more than being the sort of man

who happened to fit what happened to be the requirements of the time, and who happened to be in a position

It was then my uncle cried out and called me a damned young puppy, and became involved in some

I woke up as it were from my analysis of the situation to discover him bent over a splendid spittoon, cursing

incoherently, retching a little, and spitting out the end of his cigar which he had bitten off in his last attempt

at selfcontrol, and withal fully prepared as soon as he had cleared for action to give me just all that he

Well, why shouldn't I talk my mind to him? He'd never had an outside view of himself for years, and I

resolved to stand up to him. We went at it hammer and tongs! It became clear that he supposed me to be a

Socialist, a zealous, embittered hater of all ownershipand also an educated man of the vilest, most

pretentiously superior description. His principal grievance was that I thought I knew everything; to that he

We had been maintaining an armed truce with each other since my resolve to go up to Cambridge, and now

we had out all that had accumulated between us. There had been stupendous accumulations. . . .

The particular things we said and did in that bawlmg encounter matter nothing at all in this story. I can't now

estimate how near we came to fisticuffs. It ended with my saying, after a pungent reminder of benefits

conferred and remembered, that I didn't want to stay another hour in his house. I went upstairs, in a state of

puerile fury, to pack and go off to the Railway Hotel, while he, with ironical civility, telephoned for a cab.

On the face of it our row was preposterous, but the underlying reality of our quarrel was the essential

antagonism, it seemed to me, in all human affairs, the antagonism between ideas and the established method,

that is to say, between ideas and the rule of thumb. The world I hate is the ruleofthumb world, the thing I

and my kind of people exist for primarily is to battle with that, to annoy it, disarrange it, reconstruct it. We

question everything, disturb anything that cannot give a clear justification to our questioning, because we

believe inherently that our sense of disorder implies the possibility of a better order. Of course we are

detestable. My uncle was of that other vaster mass who accept everything for the thing it seems to be, hate

enquiry and analysis as a tramp hates washing, dread and resist change, oppose experiment, despise science.

The world is our battleground; and all history, all literature that matters, all science, deals with this conflict of

I was twentyseven when I met Margaret again, and the intervening five years had been years of vigorous

activity for me, if not of very remarkable growth. When I saw her again, I could count myself a grown man. I

think, indeed, I counted myself more completely grown than I was. At any rate, by all ordinary standards, I

had "got on" very well, and my ideas, if they had not changed very greatly, had become much more definite

I had long since abandoned my fellowship and come to London. I had published two books that had been

talked about, written several articles, and established a regular relationship with the WEEKLY REVIEW and

the EVENING GAZETTE. I was a member of the Eighty Club and learning to adapt the style of the

Cambridge Union to larger uses. The London world had opened out to me very readily. I had developed a

pleasant variety of social connections. I had made the acquaintance of Mr. Evesham, who had been attracted

by my NEW RULER, and who talked about it and me, and so did a very great deal to make a way for me into

the company of prominent and amusing people. I dined out quite frequently. The glitter and interest of good

London dinner parties became a common experience. I liked the sort of conversation one got at them

extremely, the little glow of duologues burning up into more general discussions, the closingin of the men

after the going of the women, the sage, substantial masculine gossiping, the later resumption of effective talk

with some pleasant woman, graciously at her best. I had a wide range of houses; Cambridge had linked me to

one or two correlated sets of artistic and literary people, and my books and Mr. Evesham and opened to me

the big vague world of "society." I wasn't aggressive nor particularly snobbish nor troublesome, sometimes I

talked well, and if I had nothing interesting to say I said as little as possible, and I had a youthful gravity of

manner that was liked by hostesses. And the other side of my nature that first flared through the cover of

restraints at Locarno, that too had had opportunity to develop along the line London renders practicable. I had

had my experiences and secrets and adventures among that fringe of illmated or erratic or discredited

women the London world possesses. The thing had long ago ceased to be a matter of magic or mystery, and

had become a question of appetites and excitement, and among other things the excitement of not being

I write rather doubtfully of my growing during this period. Indeed I find it hard to judge whether I can say

that I grew at all in any real sense of the word, between three and twenty and twentyseven. It seems to me

now to have been rather a phase of realisation and clarification. All the broad lines of my thought were laid

down, I am sure, by the date of my Locarno adventure, but in those five years I discussed things over and

over again with myself and others, filled out with concrete fact forms I had at first apprehended sketchily and

conversationally, measured my powers against my ideals and the forces in the world about me. It was evident

that many men no better than myself and with no greater advantages than mine had raised themselves to

influential and even decisive positions in the worlds of politics and thought. I was gathering the confidence

and knowledge necessary to attack the world in the large manner; I found I could write, and that people

would let me write if I chose, as one having authority and not as the scribes. Socially and politically and

intellectually I knew myself for an honest man, and that quite without any deliberation on my part this

showed and made things easy for me. People trusted my good faith from the beginningfor all that I came

But the growth process was arrested, I was nothing bigger at twenty seven than at twentytwo, however

much saner and stronger, and any one looking closely into my mind during that period might well have

imagined growth finished altogether. It is particularly evident to me now that I came no nearer to any

understanding of women during that time. That Locarno affair was infinitely more to me than I had supposed.

It ended somethingnipped something in the bud perhaps took me at a stride from a vague, fine, ignorant,

closed world of emotion to intrigue and a perfectly definite and limited sensuality. It ended my youth, and for

a time it prevented my manhood. I had never yet even peeped at the sweetest, profoundest thing in the world,

the heart and meaning of a girl, or dreamt with any quality of reality of a wife or any such thing as a friend

among womanhood. My vague anticipation of such things in life had vanished altogether. I turned away from

their possibility. It seemed to me I knew what had to be known about womankind. I wanted to work hard, to

get on to a position in which I could develop and forward my constructive projects. Women, I thought, had

nothing to do with that. It seemed clear I could not marry for some years; I was attractive to certain types of

women, I had vanity enough to give me an agreeable confidence in lovemaking, and I went about seeking a

convenient mistress quite deliberately, some one who should serve my purpose and say in the end, like that

kindly first mistress of mine, "I've done you no harm," and so release me. It seemed the only wise way of

disposing of urgencies that might otherwise entangle and wreck the career I was intent upon.

I don't apologise for, or defend my mental and moral phases. So it was I appraised life and prepared to take it,

For the rest these five years were a period of definition. My political conceptions were perfectly plain and

honest. I had one constant desire ruling my thoughts. I meant to leave England and the empire better ordered

than I found it, to organise and discipline, to build up a constructive and controlling State out of my world's

confusions. We had, I saw, to suffuse education with public intention, to develop a new betterliving

generation with a collectivist habit of thought, to link now chaotic activities in every human affair, and

particularly to catch that escaped, world making, worldruining, dangerous thing, industrial and financial

enterprise, and bring it back to the service of the general good. I had then the precise image that still serves

me as a symbol for all I wish to bring about, the image of an engineer building a lock in a swelling

torrentwith water pressure as his only source of power. My thoughts and acts were habitually turned to that

enterprise; it gave shape and direction to all my life. The problem that most engaged my mind during those

years was the practical and personal problem of just where to apply myself to serve this almost innate

purpose. How was I, a child of this confusion, struggling upward through the confusion, to take hold of

things? Somewhere between politics and literature my grip must needs be found, but where? Always I seem

to have been looking for that in those opening years, and disregarding everything else to discover it.

The Baileys, under whose auspices I met Margaret again, were in the sharpest contrast with the narrow

industrialism of the Staffordshire world. They were indeed at the other extreme of the scale, two active

selfcentred people, excessively devoted to the public service. It was natural I should gravitate to them, for

they seemed to stand for the maturer, more disciplined, better informed expression of all I was then urgent to

attempt to do. The bulk of their friends were politicians or public officials, they described themselves as

publicistsa vague yet sufficiently significant term. They lived and worked in a hard little house in

Chambers Street, Westminster, and made a centre for quite an astonishing amount of political and social

Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost pretentiously matteroffact and unassuming.

The narrow passage hall, papered with some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate wood, was choked

with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine wrap. Motioned rather than announced by a tall Scotch

servant woman, the only domestic I ever remember seeing there, we made our way up a narrow staircase past

the open door of a small study packed with bluebooks, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before the

fireplace in her drawingroom. She was a tall commanding figure, splendid but a little untidy in black silk

and red beads, with dark eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost visible

prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the

head feathers of an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her back, and talked in a high tenor of a

projected Town Planning Bill with Blupp, who was practically in those days the secretary of the local

Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat white hands writhing intertwined behind

him, stood with his back to us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender girl in pale blue,

manifestly a young political wife, stood with one foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely

puzzled propitiation. A tall sandybearded bishop with the expression of a man in a trance completed this

The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding doors, and reaching from back to front,

that are common upon the first floors of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or three indifferent

water colours, there was scarcely any furniture but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely carpeted

with matting, was crowded with a curious medley of people, men predominating. Several were in evening

dress, but most had the morning garb of the politician; the women were either severely rational or radiantly

magnificent. Willersley pointed out to me the wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the

Duchess of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I looked round, identifying a face here or there,

and stepping back trod on some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G. B. Mottisham,

dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most

delightful traits, and resumed his discussion. Beside him was Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since

Willersley found an exmember of the School Board for whom he had affinities, and left me to exchange

experiences and comments upon the company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was nibbling, he

said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might bring him down to London. He wanted to come to

"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary. It's the oddest gathering."

"Every one comes here," said Esmeer. "Mostly we hate them like poisonjealousyand little

"Oh!no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British machinerythat doesn't show. . . . But nobody else

"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a powerin an original way. And by Jove! they've done

I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer showed him to me in elaborately confidential

talk in a corner with a distinguishedlooking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of the fine

appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad,

flattened, clean shaven face that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo Hungarian extraction, and I

have always fancied something Mongolian in his type. He peered up with reddish swollenlooking eyes over

giltedged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of different refractive power, and he talking in

an ingratiating undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements of the hand.

People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly the same eager, clever little man he was

when I first met him. He had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and prizes capturned in

provincial and Irish and Scotch universities and had made a name for himself as the most formidable

dealer in exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter. From Oxford he had gone on to a

position in the Higher Division of the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made a place

for himself as a political journalist. He was a particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and

sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory for facts and a mastery of detailed analysis, and the

time afforded scope for these gifts. The later eighties were full of politicosocial discussion, and he became a

prominent name upon the contents list of the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and

CONTEMPORARY chiefly as a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the socialism of that

period. He won the immense respect of every one specially interested in social and political questions, he

soon achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and at that I think he would have

But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one

woman in the world who could make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of the vigour

and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was

one of those women who are waiting inwhat is the word?muliebrity. She had courage and initiative and

a philosophical way of handling questions, and she could be bored by regular work like a man. She was

entirely unfitted for her sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor hard to please, and altogether too

stimulating and aggressive for any gentleman's hours of ease. Her cookery would have been about as sketchy

as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad

nurse. Yet you mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she is inconceivable to me in

high collars or any sort of masculine garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity

gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness that was partly a protest against the waste

of hours exacted by the toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy splendour of black and red

and silver all her own. And somewhen in the early nineties she met and married Bailey.

I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the

iodoform process to cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a Cotton King prevented

her being a very rich woman. As it was she had a tolerable independence. She came into prominence as one

of the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into politicophilanthropic activities by the

influence of the earlier novels of Mrs. Humphry Wardthe Marcella crop. She went "slumming" with

distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those daysand returned from her experiences as an amateur

flower girl with clear and original views about the problemwhich is and always had been unusual. She had

not married, I suppose because her standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive appetite

for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father by speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and

cook her mother had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she could, and had married off

four orphan nieces in a harsh and successful manner. After her father's smash and death she came out as a

writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and

thirty and a little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW.

The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled

over all sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to discover a sort of imaginative bigness

in his still growing mind, the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took occasion to meet and

subjugate him, and, so soon as he had sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic at

This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The two supplemented each other to an

extraordinary extent. Their subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She was aggressive,

imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas, while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do

nothing with ideas except remember and discuss them. She was, if not exact, at least indolent, with a strong

disposition to save energy by sketchingeven her handwriting showed thatwhile he was inexhaustibly

industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by. She had

a considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people and incidentally just as nastyas

she wanted to be. He was always just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude and

egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social experience, good social connections, and

considerable social ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her opportunity to redeem

his defects, use his powers, and do large, novel, rather startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which

shocked her friends and relations beyond measurefor a time they would only speak of Bailey as "that

gnome"was a stroke of genius, and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable and

distinguished couple conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono

Publico, and she meant it to be no idle threat. She had discovered very early that the last thing influential

people will do is to work. Everything in their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of

confidently administered detail. Their business is with the window and not the stock behind, and in the end

they are dependent upon the stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that the fact that

Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an invincible power over detail. She saw that if two people

took the necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration with precision, to gather

together knowledge that was dispersed and confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and

what avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a centre of reference for all sorts of

legislative proposals and political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.

Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil Service and abandoned sporadic

controversies, and they devoted themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of public

information she had conceived as their role. They set out to study the methods and organisation and realities

of government in the most elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever hitherto dreamt of doing

it. They planned the research on a thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost entirely for it.

They took that house in Chambers Street and furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch

domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their declining years, and they set to work. Their

first book, "The Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and their two secretaries

upwards of four years to do. It is an amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred directions

the history and the administrative treatment of the public service was clarified for all time. . . .

They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon

they "took exercise" or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he served, he said,

for the purposes of studyhe also became a railway director for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora

was at home to various callers, and in the evening came dinner or a reception or both.

Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their scheme. She got together all sorts of

interesting people in or about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the illinstructed

famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public

life than had ever met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity that kept the conversation

brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but

whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade. Everybody was soon very glad indeed to

come to that. She boasted how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for fresh economies

that would enable her, she said, to sustain an additional private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one

extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the British Museum, and letters being cleared up

and precis made overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together, Bailey with a clockwork

industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient public

"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year," Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse

people dinner napkins. Imagine what it means in washing! I dare most things. . . . But as it is, they stand a lot

"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer, and the thing was perfectly true. For,

after all, the miser is nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or want of suggestion

misapplies to a base use a natural power of concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither

good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously

not money, but knowledge of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced an effect of having found

themselvescompletely. One envied them at times extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzledand at

the same time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his lisping broad mouth, the

Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to me about my published writings and

particularly about my then just published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much. It

fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I doubt if they ever understood how

independently I had arrived at my conclusions. It was their weakness to claim excessively. That irritation,

however, came later. We discovered each other immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of

Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of such constructiveminded people as

"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and presently hearing the tapping of the workers

"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a rather badly joined tunnel."

"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all want to find out each other. . . ."

They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me to lunch with them next day, and then it

was we went into things. A woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New Banksland and

his wife were also there, but I don't remember they made any contribution to the conversation. The Baileys

"We have read your book," each beganas though it had been a joint function. "And we consider"

"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going right over me, that I had allowed

sufficiently for the inevitable development of an official administrative class in the modern state."

That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of their lives, what they were up to, what they

stood for. "We want to suggest to you," they saidand I found this was a stock opening of theirs"that

from the mere necessities of convenience elected bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the

services of expert officials. We have that very much in mind. The more complicated and technical affairs

become, the less confidence will the elected official have in himself. We want to suggest that these expert

officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very powerful class in the community. We want to

organise that. It may be THE power of the future. They will necessarily have to have very much of a common

training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid precursors of such a class." . . .

The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public spirited endeavour, seemed like a

harder, narrower, more specialised version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that Willersley and I

had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things more organised, more correlated with government and a

collective purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing collective understanding, but in

terms of functionaries, legislative change, and methods of administration. . . .

It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very anxious to win me to cooperation, and I was

quite prepared at first to identify their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own, and so we came very

readily into an alliance that was to last some years, and break at last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked

me, I was soon discussing with her the perplexity I found in placing myself efficiently in the world, the

problem of how to take hold of things that occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out careers for my

consideration, very much as an architect on his first visit sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts

before you this example and that of the more or less similar thing already done. . . .

It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys and me, and how natural it was that I

should become a constant visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises. It is not nearly so

easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit that also held between us. There was a difference in texture,

a difference in quality. How can I express it? The shapes of our thoughts were the same, but the substance

quite different. It was as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in transparent living matter.

(The comparison is manifestly from my point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their

ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but visible always through mine.

I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in

life; I like truth, order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead straight to beautiful

consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got that or they didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things

harsh and ugly. That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of many of their proposals, the "manners" of

their work, so to speak, were at times as dreadful aswell, War Office barrack architecture. A caricature by

its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity. I

remember talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds for the work he had in hand. I

"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal BottleImp running us," he said hastily, and would hear of no

concerted action for the end he had in view. "I'd rather not have the extension.

"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some merely subordinate necessity among all my

delicate stuff. He'd do all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powersand he'd do it wrong and

mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know. He's just a means. Just a very aggressive and

"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to me at the time he was just blind prejudice

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a

very curable difference,once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy devoid of FINESSE.

Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised, concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner

force or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to round off and shadow my outlines. I

hate them hard. I would sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to me, loved a world

as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If they had the universe in hand I know they would take down

all the trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly

irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake. . . . I got things clearer as time went on. Though it was an Hegelian

mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have

always been Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism that, following the medieval

Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The

Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense which so oddly contradicts the modern

use of the word�"Realists." They believed classes were REAL and independent of their individuals. This is

the common habit of all socalled educated people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical

training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to

speak of everybody as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her diningroom became a chamber of

representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its

nineteenthcentury uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that only began to disappear when you thought

At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the very strings that guided the world. You

heard legislation projected to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin and shame and

injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend

bills in grave and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora canvassing approaching

resignations and possible appointments that might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and

doing it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision; and you felt you were in a sort of

signal box with levers all about you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond

the window, running on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudoscientific administrative chatter, dying away in your

head, out you went into the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and avenues lined with

teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic

clamour of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of mysterious myriads, you heard the

rumble of traffic like the noise of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton crimes and

accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in

dazzling windows of the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite conviction that the huge

formless spirit of the world it was that held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage. . . .

Under the lamps you were jostled by people like my Staffordshire uncle out for a spree, you saw shy youths

conversing with prostitutes, you passed young lovers pairing with an entire disregard of the social suitability

of the "types" they might blend or create, you saw men leaning drunken against lampposts whom you knew

for the "type" that will charge with fixed bayonets into the face of death, and you found yourself unable to

imagine little Bailey achieving either drunkenness or the careless defiance of annihilation. You realised that

quite a lot of types were underrepresented in Chambers Street, that feral and obscure and altogether

monstrous forces must be at work, as yet altogether unassimilated by those neat administrative

Altiora, I remember, preluded Margaret's reappearance by announcing her as a "new type."

I was accustomed to go early to the Baileys' dinners in those days, for a preliminary gossip with Altiora in

front of her drawingroom fire. One got her alone, and that early arrival was a little sign of appreciation she

"I'm going to send you down tonight," she said, "with a very interesting type indeedone of the new

generation of serious gals. Middleclass originand quite well off. Rich in fact. Her step father was a

solicitor and something of an ENTREPRENEUR towards the end, I fancyin the Black Country. There was

a little brother died, and she's lost her mother quite recently. Quite on her own, so to speak. She's never been

out into society very much, and doesn't seem really very anxious to go. . . . Not exactly an intellectual person,

you know, but quiet, and great force of character. Came up to London on her own and came to ussomeone

had told her we were the sort of people to advise herto ask what to do. I'm sure she'll interest you."

Altiora compressed her lips and shook her head. She always did shake her head when you asked that of

"Of course what she ought to do," said Altiora, with her silk dress pulled back from her knee before the fire,

and with a lift of her voice towards a chuckle at her daring way of putting things, "is to marry a member of

Parliament and see he does his work. . . . Perhaps she will. It's a very exceptional gal who can do anything by

herselfquite exceptional. The more serious they arewithout being exceptionalthe more we want them

Margaret had gained in dignity and prettiness by the lapse of five years, and she was now very beautifully

and richly and simply dressed. Her fair hair had been done in some way that made it seem softer and more

abundant than it was in my memory, and a gleam of purple velvetset diamonds showed amidst its mist of

little golden and brown lines. Her dress was of white and violet, the last trace of mourning for her mother,

and confessed the gracious droop of her tall and slender body. She did not suggest Staffordshire at all, and I

was puzzled for a moment to think where I had met her. Her sweetly shaped mouth with the slight obliquity

of the lip and the little kink in her brow were extraordinarily familiar to me. But she had either been prepared

by Altiora or she remembered my name. "We met," she said, "while my stepfather was aliveat Misterton.

You came to see us"; and instantly I recalled the sunshine between the apple blossom and a slender pale blue

girlish shape among the daffodils, like something that had sprung from a bulb itself. I recalled at once that I

had found her very interesting, though I did not clearly remember how it was she had interested me.

Other guests arrivedit was one of Altiora's boldly blended mixtures of people with ideas and people with

influence or money who might perhaps be expected to resonate to them. Bailey came down late with an air of

hurry, and was introduced to Margaret and said absolutely nothing to herthere being no information either

to receive or impart and nothing to dobut stood snatching his left cheek until I rescued him and her, and

I took Margaret down. We achieved no feats of mutual expression, except that it was abundantly clear we

were both very pleased and interested to meet again, and that we had both kept memories of each other. We

made that Misterton teaparty and the subsequent marriages of my cousins and the world of Burslem

generally, matter for quite an agreeable conversation until at last Altiora, following her invariable custom,

called me by name imperatively out of our duologue. "Mr. Remington," she said, "we want your opinion"

in her entirely characteristic effort to get all the threads of conversation into her own hands for the climax that

always wound up her dinners. How the other women used to hate those concluding raids of hers! I forget

most of the other people at that dinner, nor can I recall what the crowning rally was about. It didn't in any

In the drawingroom of the matting floor I rejoined her, with Altiora's manifest connivance, and in the

"Do you find London," I asked, "give you more opportunity for doing things and learning things than

She showed at once she appreciated my allusion to her former confidences. "I was very discontented then,"

she said and paused. "I've really only been in London for a few months. It's so different. In Burslem, life

seems all business and gettingwithout any reason. One went on and it didn't seem to mean anything. At

least anything that mattered. . . . London seems to be so full of meaningsall mixed up together."

She knitted her brows over her words and smiled appealingly at the end as if for consideration for her

"One sees so much distress," she added, as if she felt she had completely omitted something, and needed a

"I'm thinking of studying. Some social question. I thought perhaps I might go and study social conditions as

Mrs. Bailey did, go perhaps as a workgirl or see the reality of living in, but Mrs. Bailey thought perhaps it

"I'm going to a good many lectures, and perhaps I shall take up a regular course at the Westminster School of

Politics and Sociology. But Mrs. Bailey doesn't seem to believe very much in that either."

Her faintly whimsical smile returned. "I seem rather indefinite," she apologised, "but one does not want to get

entangled in things one can't do. Oneone has so many advantages, one's life seems to be such a trust and

"It must be splendid to be Mrs. Bailey," she replied with a glance of envious admiration across the room.

"She HAD," said Margaret with the pride of one who has received great confidences.

Her intention became much clearer as the year developed. Altiora was systematic even in matters that evade

system. I was to marry Margaret, and freed from the need of making an income I was to come into

politicsas an exponent of Baileyism. She put it down with the other excellent and advantageous things that

should occupy her summer holiday. It was her pride and glory to put things down and plan them out in detail

beforehand, and I'm not quite sure that she did not even mark off the day upon which the engagement was to

be declared. If she did, I disappointed her. We didn't come to an engagement, in spite of the broadest hints

Every summer the Baileys went out of London to some house they hired or borrowed, leaving their

secretaries toiling behind, and they went on working hard in the mornings and evenings and taking exercise

in the open air in the afternoon. They cycled assiduously and went for long walks at a trot, and raided and

studied (and incidentally explained themselves to) any social "types" that lived in the neighbourhood. One

invaded type, resentful under research, described them with a dreadful aptness as Donna Quixote and Sancho

Panzaand himself as a harmless windmill, hurting no one and signifying nothing. She did rather tilt at

things. This particular summer they were at a pleasant farmhouse in level country near Pangbourne,

belonging to the Hon. Wilfrid Winchester, and they asked me to come down to rooms in the

neighbourhoodAltiora took them for a month for me in Augustand board with them upon extremely

reasonable terms; and when I got there I found Margaret sitting in a hammock at Altiora's feet. Lots of

people, I gathered, were coming and going in the neighbourhood, the Ponts were in a villa on the river, and

the Rickhams' houseboat was to moor for some days; but these irruptions did not impede a great deal of

Altiora was efficient rather than artistic in her matchmaking. She sent us off for long walks

togetherMargaret was a fairly good walkershe exhumed some defective croquet things and incited us to

croquet, not understanding that detestable game is the worst stimulant for lovers in the world. And Margaret

and I were always getting left about, and finding ourselves for odd halfhours in the kitchengarden with

nothing to do except talk, or we were told with a wave of the hand to run away and amuse each other.

Altiora even tried a picnic in canoes, knowing from fiction rather than imagination or experience the

conclusive nature of such excursions. But there she fumbled at the last moment, and elected at the river's

brink to share a canoe with me. Bailey showed so much zeal and so little skillhis hat fell off and he became

miraculously nothing but paddleclutching hands and a vast wrinkled browthat at last he had to be paddled

ignominiously by Margaret, while Altiora, after a phase of rigid discretion, as nearly as possible drowned

herselfand me no doubt into the bargainwith a sudden lateral gesture of the arm to emphasise the high

note with which she dismissed the efficiency of the Charity Organisation Society. We shipped about an inch

of water and sat in it for the rest of the time, an inconvenience she disregarded heroically. We had difficulties

in landing Oscar from his frail craft upon the ait of our feasting,he didn't balance sideways and was much

alarmed, and afterwards, as Margaret had a pain in her back, I took him in my canoe, let him hide his shame

with an ineffectual but not positively harmful paddle, and towed the other by means of the joined painters.

Still it was the fault of the inadequate information supplied in the books and not of Altiora that that was not

I find it not a little difficult to state what kept me back from proposing marriage to Margaret that summer, and

what urged me forward at last to marry her. It is so much easier to remember one's resolutions than to

Marrying and getting married was, I think, a pretty simple affair to Altiora; it was something that happened to

the adolescent and unmarried when you threw them together under the circumstances of health, warmth and

leisure. It happened with the kindly and approving smiles of the more experienced elders who had organised

these proximities. The young people married, settled down, children ensued, and father and mother turned

their minds, now decently and properly disillusioned, to other things. That to Altiora was the normal sexual

life, and she believed it to be the quality of the great bulk of the life about her.

One of the great barriers to human understanding is the wide temperamental difference one finds in the values

of things relating to sex. It is the issue upon which people most need training in charity and imaginative

sympathy. Here are no universal standards at all, and indeed for no single man nor woman does there seem to

be any fixed standard, so much do the accidents of circumstances and one's physical phases affect one's

interpretations. There is nothing in the whole range of sexual fact that may not seem supremely beautiful or

humanly jolly or magnificently wicked or disgusting or trivial or utterly insignificant, according to the eye

that sees or the mood that colours. Here is something that may fill the skies and every waking hour or be

almost completely banished from a life. It may be everything on Monday and less than nothing on Saturday.

And we make our laws and rules as though in these matters all men and women were commensurable one

I don't know what dreams Altiora may have had in her schoolroom days, I always suspected her of

suppressed and forgotten phases, but certainly her general effect now was of an entirely passionless

worldliness in these matters. Indeed so far as I could get at her, she regarded sexual passion as being hardly

more legitimate in a civilised person thanlet us sayhomicidal mania. She must have forgottenand

Bailey too. I suspect she forgot before she married him. I don't suppose either of them had the slightest

intimation of the dimensions sexual love can take in the thoughts of the great majority of people with whom

they come in contact. They loved in their wayan intellectual way it was and a fond waybut it had no

relation to beauty and physical sensationexcept that there seemed a decree of exile against these things.

They got their glow in high moments of altruistic ambitionand in moments of vivid worldly success. They

sat at opposite ends of their dinner table with so and so "captured," and so and so, flushed with a mutual

approval. They saw people in love forgetful and distraught about them, and just put it down to forgetfulness

and distraction. At any rate Altiora manifestly viewed my situation and Margaret's with an abnormal and

entirely misleading simplicity. There was the girl, rich, with an acceptable claim to be beautiful, shiningly

virtuous, quite capable of political interests, and there was I, talented, ambitious and full of political and

social passion, in need of just the money, devotion and regularisation Margaret could provide. We were both

unmarriedwhite sheets of uninscribed paper. Was there ever a simpler situation? What more could we

She was even a little offended at the inconclusiveness that did not settle things at Pangbourne. I seemed to

I admired Margaret very much, I was fully aware of all that she and I might give each other; indeed so far as

Altiora went we were quite in agreement. But what seemed solid ground to Altiora and the ultimate footing of

her emasculated world, was to me just the superficial covering of a gulfoh! abysses of vague and dim, and

I couldn't dismiss the interests and the passion of sex as Altiora did. Work, I agreed, was important; career

and success; but deep unanalysable instincts told me this preoccupation was a thing quite as important;

dangerous, interfering, destructive indeed, but none the less a dominating interest in life. I have told how

flittingly and uninvited it came like a moth from the outer twilight into my life, how it grew in me with my

manhood, how it found its way to speech and grew daring, and led me at last to experience. After that

adventure at Locarno sex and the interests and desires of sex never left me for long at peace. I went on with

my work and my career, and all the time it was likelike someone talking ever and again in a room while

There were times when I could have wished the world a world all of men, so greatly did this unassimilated

series of motives and curiosities hamper me; and times when I could have wished the world all of women. I

seemed always to be seeking something in women, in girls, and I was never clear what it was I was seeking.

But never even at my coarsestwas I moved by physical desire alone. Was I seeking help and

fellowship? Was I seeking some intimacy with beauty? It was a thing too formless to state, that I seemed

always desiring to attain and never attaining. Waves of gross sensuousness arose out of this preoccupation,

carried me to a crisis of gratification or disappointment that was clearly not the needed thing; they passed and

left my mind free again for a time to get on with the permanent pursuits of my life. And then presently this

solicitude would have me again, an irrelevance as it seemed, and yet a constantly recurring demand.

I don't want particularly to dwell upon things that are disagreeable for others to read, but I cannot leave them

out of my story and get the right proportions of the forces I am balancing. I was no abnormal man, and that

world of order we desire to make must be built of such stuff as I was and am and can beget. You cannot have

a world of Baileys; it would end in one orderly generation. Humanity is begotten in Desire, lives by Desire.

"Love which is lust, is the Lamp in the Tomb; Love which is lust, is the Call from the Gloom."

I suppose the life of celibacy which the active, wellfed, well exercised and imaginatively stirred young

man of the educated classes is supposed to lead from the age of nineteen or twenty, when Nature certainly

meant him to marry, to thirty or more, when civilisation permits him to do so, is the most impossible thing in

the world. We deal here with facts that are kept secret and obscure, but I doubt for my own part if more than

one man out of five in our class satisfies that ideal demand. The rest are even as I was, and Hatherleigh and

Esmeer and all the men I knew. I draw no lessons and offer no panacea; I have to tell the quality of life, and

this is how it is. This is how it will remain until men and women have the courage to face the facts of life.

I was no systematic libertine, you must understand; things happened to me and desire drove me. Any young

man would have served for that Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful

thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of

five illicit loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were

sustained relationships. Besides these five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped so low as the inky

dismal sensuality of the streets, and made one of those pairs of correlated figures, the woman in her squalid

finery sailing homeward, the man modestly aloof and behind, that every night in the London year flit by the

How ugly it is to recall; ugly and shameful now without qualification! Yet at the time there was surely

something not altogether ugly in itsomething that has vanished, some fine thing mortally ailing.

One such occasion I recall as if it were a vision deep down in a pit, as if it had happened in another state of

existence to someone else. And yet it is the sort of thing that has happened, once or twice at least, to half the

men in London who have been in a position to make it possible. Let me try and give you its peculiar effect.

Figure to yourself a dingy room, somewhere in that network of streets that lies about Tottenham Court Road,

a dingy bedroom lit by a solitary candle and carpeted with scraps and patches, with curtains of cretonne

closing the window, and a tawdry ornament of paper in the grate. I sit on a bed beside a wearyeyed, fair

haired, sturdy young woman, half undressed, who is telling me in broken German something that my

I thought she was boasting about her family, and then slowly the meaning came to me. She was a Lett from

near Libau in Courland, and she was telling mejust as one tells something too strange for comment or

emotionhow her father had been shot and her sister outraged and murdered before her eyes.

It was as if one had dipped into something primordial and stupendous beneath the smooth and trivial surfaces

of life. There was I, you know, the promising young don from Cambridge, who wrote quite brilliantly about

politics and might presently get into Parliament, with my collar and tie in my hand, and a certain sense of

"Ach Gott!" she sighed by way of comment, and mused deeply for a moment before she turned her face to

me, as to something forgotten and remembered, and assumed the halfhearted meretricious smile.

"Bin ich eine hubsche?" she asked a little anxiously, laying a detaining hand upon me, and evidently not

I find it extraordinarily difficult to recall the phases by which I passed from my first admiration of Margaret's

earnestness and unconscious daintiness to an intimate acquaintance. The earlier encounters stand out clear

and hard, but then the impressions become crowded and mingle not only with each other but with all the

subsequent developments of relationship, the enormous evolutions of interpretation and comprehension

between husband and wife. Dipping into my memories is like dipping into a ragbag, one brings out this

memory or that, with no intimation of how they came in time or what led to them and joined them together.

And they are all mixed up with subsequent associations, with sympathies and discords, habits of intercourse,

surprises and disappointments and discovered misunderstandings. I know only that always my feelings for

It is one of the curious neglected aspects of life how at the same time and in relation to the same reality we

can have in our minds streams of thought at quite different levels. We can be at the same time idealising a

person and seeing and criticising that person quite coldly and clearly, and we slip unconsciously from level to

level and produce all sorts of inconsistent acts. In a sense I had no illusions about Margaret; in a sense my

conception of Margaret was entirely poetic illusion. I don't think I was ever blind to certain defects of hers,

and quite as certainly they didn't seem to matter in the slightest degree. Her mind had a curious want of

vigour, "flatness" is the only word; she never seemed to escape from her phrase; her way of thinking, her way

of doing was indecisive; she remained in her attitude, it did not flow out to easy, confirmatory action.

I saw this quite clearly, and when we walked and talked together I seemed always trying for animation in her

and never finding it. I would state my ideas. "I know," she would say, "I know."

I talked about myself and she listened wonderfully, but she made no answering revelations. I talked politics,

and she remarked with her blue eyes wide and earnest: "Every WORD you say seems so just."

I admired her appearance tremendously butI can only express it by saying I didn't want to touch her. Her

fair hair was always delectably done. It flowed beautifully over her pretty small ears, and she would tie its

fair coilings with fillets of black or blue velvet that carried pretty buckles of silver and paste. The light, the

faint down on her brow and cheek was delightful. And it was clear to me that I made her happy.

My sense of her deficiencies didn't stand in the way of my falling at last very deeply in love with her. Her

She stood in my mind for goodnessand for things from which it seemed to me my hold was slipping.

She seemed to promise a way of escape from the deepening opposition in me between physical passions and

the constructive career, the career of wide aims and human service, upon which I had embarked. All the time

that I was seeing her as a beautiful, fragile, rather ineffective girl, I was also seeing her just as consciously as

a shining slender figure, a radiant reconciliation, coming into my darkling disorders of lust and impulse. I

could understand clearly that she was incapable of the most necessary subtleties of political thought, and yet I

could contemplate praying to her and putting all the intricate troubles of my life at her feet.

Before the reappearance of Margaret in my world at all an unwonted disgust with the consequences and

quality of my passions had arisen in my mind. Among other things that moment with the Lettish girl haunted

me persistently. I would see myself again and again sitting amidst those sluttish surroundings, collar and tie

in hand, while her heavy German words grouped themselves to a slowly apprehended meaning. I would feel

again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any

permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world

"Good God!" I put it to myself, "that I should finish the work those Cossacks had begun! I who want order

and justice before everything! There's no way out of it, no decent excuse! If I didn't think, I ought to have

How did I get to it?" . . . I would ransack the phases of my development from the first shy unveiling of a

hidden wonder to the last extremity as a man will go through muddled account books to find some

I was also involved at that timeI find it hard to place these things in the exact order of their dates because

they were so disconnected with the regular progress of my work and lifein an intrigue, a clumsy, sensuous,

pretentious, artificially stimulated intrigue, with a Mrs. Larrimer, a woman living separated from her

husband. I will not go into particulars of that episode, nor how we quarrelled and chafed one another. She

was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and

vulgarised our relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification,

except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at

a vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality of work delayed, of time

and energy wasted, of insecure precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent

in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had

followed something fine and beautiful into a netinto bird lime! These furtive scuffles, this sneaking into

shabby houses of assignation, was what we had made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the

reality of our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst incessant sunshine. We had laid

It was the sense of waste, of finely beautiful possibilities getting entangled and marred for ever that oppressed

me. I had missed, I had lost. I did not turn from these things after the fashion of the Baileys, as one turns from

something low and embarrassing. I felt that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony

with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle

nor its nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that was

muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations. I learnt to see it so by

failures that were perhaps destroying any chance of profit in my lessons. Moods of clear keen industry

alternated with moods of relapse and indulgence and moods of dubiety and remorse. I was not going on as the

Baileys thought I was going on. There were times when the blindness of the Baileys irritated me intensely.

Beneath the ostensible success of those years, between twentythree and twentyeight, this rottenness,

known to scarcely any one but myself, grew and spread. My sense of the probability of a collapse intensified.

I knew indeed now, even as Willersley had prophesied five years before, that I was entangling myself in

something that might smother all my uses in the world. Down there among those incommunicable

difficulties, I was puzzled and blundering. I was losing my hold upon things; the chaotic and adventurous

element in life was spreading upward and getting the better of me, over mastering me and all my will to rule

Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a world of mire and disorder, in a world of

I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe

impossible perfections to her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor fellow

mortal, had indeed no claim. If only a few of us WERE angels and freed from the tangle of effort, how easy

life might be! I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I

forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental

vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up

Mixed up with the memory of times when I talked with Margaret as one talks politely to those who are

hopelessly inferior in mental quality, explaining with a false lucidity, welcoming and encouraging the

feeblest response, when possible moulding and directing, are times when I did indeed, as the old phrase goes,

worship the ground she trod on. I was equally honest and unconscious of inconsistency at each extreme. But

in neither phase could I find it easy to make love to Margaret. For in the first I did not want to, though I

talked abundantly to her of marriage and so forth, and was a little puzzled at myself for not going on to some

personal application, and in the second she seemed inaccessible, I felt I must make confessions and put things

before her that would be the grossest outrage upon the noble purity I attributed to her.

I went to Margaret at last to ask her to marry me, wrought up to the mood of one who stakes his life on a cast.

Separated from her, and with the resonance of an evening of angry recriminations with Mrs. Larrimer

echoing in my mind, I discovered myself to be quite passionately in love with Margaret. Last shreds of doubt

vanished. It has always been a feature of our relationship that Margaret absent means more to me than

Margaret present; her memory distils from its dross and purifies in me. All my criticisms and qualifications of

her vanished into some dark corner of my mind. She was the lady of my salvation; I must win my way to her

I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionate selfabasement, white and atremble. She

was staying with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and they had

resumed a close intimacy; and I went down to her on an impulse, unheralded. I was kept waiting for some

minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of pots of large

mauveedged, white cyclamens in flower. And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of

black and gold against the redtoned wall. To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with

She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual. I suddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a

disappointment leading to positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment. She closed the

door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand and stood still. "What is it you want with me?"

The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way vanished at the sight of her.

"I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged. "I didn't. I didn't becausebecause you had too

"Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to my face and the colour was coming into

"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily. "I want to tell you things, things you don't know. Don't answer me.

She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining through the quiet of her face. "Go on," she

said, very softly. It was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whatever I might say.

I began walking up and down the room between those cyclamens and the cabinet. There were little gold

fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men

in boats or something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure suboffice in my mind concerned itself

with that quite intently. Yet I seem to have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of

things. "You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me. You can give me help and sympathy,

support, understanding. You know my political ambitions. You know all that I might do in the world. I do so

intensely want to do constructive things, big things perhaps, in this wild jumble. . . . Only you don't know a

I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of blissful disregard for any meaning I was

Everything seemed to be slipping away from me. I pushed on to the ugly facts that remained over from the

wreck of my interpretation. "What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not possibly

understand certain things in my life. Men are not pure as women are. I have had love affairs. I mean I have

had affairs. Passiondesire. You see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled"

She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted. "I'm not telling you," I said, "what I meant to tell you. I want

you to know clearly that there is another side to my life, a dirty side. Deliberately I say, dirty. It didn't seem

I stopped blankly. "Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice of words to have made.

"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids. "Of course I know," and nothing could have convinced me

"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent difficulty, "it is all over and past."

"I don't want to know," she said. "None of that seems to matter now in the slightest degree."

She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable commonplaces. "Poor dear!" she

said, dismissing everything, and put out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in the

backgrounddoomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable worldtelling something in indistinguishable

I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her. Her eyes were wet with tears. She clung to me and was near, I

"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met in Mistertonsix years and more ago."

There comes into my mind a confused memory of conversations with Margaret; we must have had dozens

altogether, and they mix in now for the most part inextricably not only with one another, but with later talks

and with things we discussed at Pangbourne. We had the immensest anticipations of the years and

opportunities that lay before us. I was now very deeply in love with her indeed. I felt not that I had cleaned up

my life but that she had. We called each other "confederate" I remember, and made during our brief

engagement a series of visits to the various legislative bodies in London, the County Council, the House of

Commons, where we dined with Villiers, and the St. Pancras Vestry, where we heard Shaw speaking. I was

full of plans and so was she of the way in which we were to live and work. We were to pay back in public

service whatever excess of wealth beyond his merits old Seddon's economic advantage had won for him from

the toiling people in the potteries. The end of the Boer War was so recent that that blessed word "efficiency"

echoed still in people's minds and thoughts. Lord Roseberry in a memorable oration had put it into the heads

of the big outer public, but the Baileys with a certain show of justice claimed to have set it going in the

channels that took it to himif as a matter of fact it was taken to him. But then it was their habit to make

claims of that sort. They certainly did their share to keep "efficient" going. Altiora's highest praise was

"thoroughly efficient." We were to be a "thoroughly efficient" political couple of the "new type." She

explained us to herself and Oscar, she explained us to ourselves, she explained us to the people who came to

her dinners and afternoons until the world was highly charged with explanation and expectation, and the

proposal that I should be the Liberal candidate for the Kinghamstead Division seemed the most natural

I was full of the ideal of hard restrained living and relentless activity, and throughout a beautiful November at

Venice, where chiefly we spent our honeymoon, we turned over and over again and discussed in every aspect

our conception of a life tremendously focussed upon the ideal of social service.

Most clearly there stands out a picture of ourselves talking in a gondola on our way to Torcella. Far away

behind us the smoke of Murano forms a black stain upon an immense shining prospect of smooth water,

water as unruffled and luminous as the sky above, a mirror on which rows of posts and distant black

highstemmed, swan necked boats with their minutely clear swinging gondoliers, float aerially. Remote and

low before us rises the little tower of our destination. Our men swing together and their oars swirl leisurely

through the water, hump back in the rowlocks, splash sharply and go swishing back again. Margaret lies back

on cushions, with her face shaded by a holland parasol, and I sit up beside her.

"You see," I say, and in spite of Margaret's note of perfect acquiescence I feel myself reasoning against an

indefinable antagonism, "it is so easy to fall into a slack way with life. There may seem to be something

priggish in a meticulous discipline, but otherwise it is so easy to slip into indolent habitsand to be

distracted from one's purpose. The country, the world, wants men to serve its constructive needs, to work out

and carry out plans. For a man who has to make a living the enemy is immediate necessity; for people like

"That is what I feel. It's so pleasant to pretend one is simply modest, it looks so foolish at times to take one's

"But that's only to be done by concentrating one's life upon one main end. We have to plan our days, to make

That holiday in Venice is set in my memory like a little artificial lake in uneven confused country, as

something very bright and skylike, and discontinuous with all about it. The faded quality of the very sunshine

of that season, the mellow discoloured palaces and places, the huge, timeripened paintings of departed

splendours, the whispering, nearly noiseless passage of hearseblack gondolas, for the horrible steam launch

had not yet ruined Venice, the stilled magnificences of the depopulated lagoons, the universal autumn, made

me feel altogether in recess from the teeming uproars of reality. There was not a dozen people all told, no

Americans and scarcely any English, to dine in the big cavern of a diningroom, with its vistas of separate

tables, its distempered walls and its swathed chandeliers. We went about seeing beautiful things, accepting

beauty on every hand, and taking it for granted that all was well with ourselves and the world. It was ten days

or a fortnight before I became fretful and anxious for action; a long tranquillity for such a temperament as

Our pleasures were curiously impersonal, a succession of shared aesthetic appreciation threads all that time.

Our honeymoon was no exultant coming together, no mutual shout of "YOU!" We were almost shy with one

another, and felt the relief of even a picture to help us out. It was entirely in my conception of things that I

should be very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the sensuous note. Our lovemaking had

much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious

freedoms. Margaret had missed Verona and Venice in her previous Italian journeyfear of the mosquito had

driven her mother across Italy to the westward routeand now she could fill up her gaps and see the Titians

and Paul Veroneses she already knew in colourless photographs, the Carpaccios, (the St. George series

delighted her beyond measure,) the Basaitis and that great statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni that Ruskin praised.

But since I am not a man to look at pictures and architectural effects day after day, I did watch Margaret very

closely and store a thousand memories of her. I can see her now, her long body drooping a little forward, her

sweet face upraised to some discovered familiar masterpiece and shining with a delicate enthusiasm. I can

hear again the soft cadences of her voice murmuring commonplace comments, for she had no gift of

Margaret, I perceived, was a cultivated person, the first cultivated person with whom I had ever come into

close contact. She was cultivated and moral, and I, I now realise, was never either of these things. She was

passive, and I am active. She did not simply and naturally look for beauty but she had been incited to look for

it at school, and took perhaps a keener interest in books and lectures and all the organisation of beautiful

things than she did in beauty itself; she found much of her delight in being guided to it. Now a thing ceases to

be beautiful to me when some finger points me out its merits. Beauty is the salt of life, but I take my beauty

And besides, there was that between us that should have seemed more beautiful than any picture. . . .

So we went about Venice tracking down pictures and spiral staircases and suchlike things, and my brains

were busy all the time with such things as a comparison of Venice and its nearest modern equivalent, New

York, with the elaboration of schemes of action when we returned to London, with the development of a

Our marriage had done this much at least, that it had fused and destroyed those two independent ways of

thinking about her that had gone on in my mind hitherto. Suddenly she had become very near to me, and a

very big thing, a sort of comprehensive generalisation behind a thousand questions, like the sky or England.

The judgments and understandings that had worked when she was, so to speak, miles away from my life, had

now to be altogether revised. Trifling things began to matter enormously, that she had a weak and easily

fatigued back, for example, or that when she knitted her brows and stammered a little in talking, it didn't

We visited pictures in the mornings chiefly. In the afternoon, unless we were making a daylong excursion in

a gondola, Margaret would rest for an hour while I prowled about in search of English newspapers, and then

we would go to tea in the Piazza San Marco and watch the drift of people feeding the pigeons and going into

the little doors beneath the sunlit arches and domes of Saint Mark's. Then perhaps we would stroll on the

Piazzetta, or go out into the sunset in a gondola. Margaret became very interested in the shops that abound

under the colonnades and decided at last to make an extensive purchase of table glass. "These things," she

said, are quite beautiful, and far cheaper than anything but the most ordinary looking English ware." I was

interested in her idea, and a good deal charmed by the delightful qualities of tinted shape, slender handle and

twisted stem. I suggested we should get not simply tumblers and wineglasses but bedroom waterbottles,

fruit and sweet dishes, waterjugs, and in the end we made quite a businesslike afternoon of it.

I was beginning now to long quite definitely for events. Energy was accumulating in me, and worrying me

for an outlet. I found the TIMES and the DAILY TELEGRAPH and the other papers I managed to get hold

of, more and more stimulating. I nearly wrote to the former paper one day in answer to a letter by Lord

GrimthorpeI forget now upon what point. I chafed secretly against this life of tranquil appreciations more

and more. I found my attitudes of restrained and delicate affection for Margaret increasingly difficult to

sustain. I surprised myself and her by little gusts of irritability, gusts like the catspaws before a gale. I was

One night when Margaret had gone up to her room, I put on a light overcoat, went out into the night and

prowled for a long time through the narrow streets, smoking and thinking. I returned and went and sat on the

"Yes. I think I want exercise. I've got a sort of feelingI've never had it beforeas though I was getting

"I want to do things;ride horses, climb mountains, take the devil out of myself."

"I don't know. Couldn't we perhaps go away from here soonand walk in the mountainson our way

"I wonder," I answered. "We might walk to Chioggia perhaps, along the Lido." And we tried that, but the

long stretch of beach fatigued Margaret's back, and gave her blisters, and we never got beyond Malamocco. .

A day or so after we went out to those pleasant blackrobed, bearded Armenians in their monastery at Saint

Lazzaro, and returned towards sundown. We fell into silence. "PIU LENTO," said Margaret to the gondolier,

"This is beautiful beyond measure, you know," I said, sticking to my point, "but I have work to do."

She remained quite still. "There is so much to be done," I said, almost apologetically.

She looked long away from me across the lagoon and at last sighed, like one who has drunk deeply, and

"I suppose one ought not to be so happy," she said. "Everything has been so beautiful and so simple and

splendid. And clean. It has been just With Youthe time of my life. It's a pity such things must end. But the

world is calling you, dear. . . . I ought not to have forgotten it. I thought you were restingand thinking. But

She looked at once so fragile and so devoted that on the spur of the moment I relented, and we stayed in

Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square, Westminster, before our marriage, a house that

seemed particularly adaptable to our needs as publicspirited efficients; it had been very pleasantly painted

and papered under Margaret's instructions, white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and

now we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging andwith our Venetian glass as a

beginningfurnishing it. We had been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most part it

was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and just precisely where we would put it.

Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine, and so quite apart from the fact that it

was her money equipped us, I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a consultation

only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in

Vincent Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally intended for the FORTNIGHTLY

REVIEW, the papers that afterwards became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."

I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of

indecision about Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest ideas of what she wanted,

and the devices of the salesman did not sway her. It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my

hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest determination to make a house in which I

should be able to work in that great project of "doing something for the world."

"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"

"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and uncomfortable things. But I don't see that they help

So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple and very good. She bought some pictures

very well indeed; there was a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson, for my study,

that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to get some such expression for myself.

"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes when we see one."

I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last

with a quite childish appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its fine brass furnishings

belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey and discover Margaret in the warmlit, spacious hall with a

partially opened packingcase, fatigued but happy, or go up to have tea with her out of the right tea things,

"come at last," or be told to notice what was fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never had a house before,

but I had really never been, except in the most transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as

mine promised to be. Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and harmoniously toned. Downstairs we

had a green diningroom with gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colourprints; above was a large

drawingroom that could be made still larger by throwing open folding doors, and it was all carefully done in

greys and blues, for the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so skilfully imitated by an

expert Margaret had discovered as to be indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above this

and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially thick staircarpet outside and thick carpets

in the bedroom overhead and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and window, and another

desk specially made for me by that expert if I chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases

and every sort of convenient fitting. There were electric heaters beside the open fire, and everything was put

for me to make tea at any timeelectric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so that I could get up and

work at any hour of the day or night. I could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so interested

in the perfection of its arrangements. And when I brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square,

Margaret seized upon all the really shabby volumes and had them rebound in a fine officiallooking leather.

I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and feeling with a queer effect of surprise

that after all even a place in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the same large world

On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den with good colourprints of Botticellis and

Carpaccios, and there was a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for them arise, with a

severelooking desk equipped with patent files. And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or

appear noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide open doorway. "Is everything right,

"Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a timetable as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"

Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious young wives known to Altiora called and

were shown over the house, and discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all tremendously keen

It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day of our return we found other people's

houses open to us and eager for us. We went out of London for weekends and dined out, and began

discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities. As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and

miscellaneous social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set. For a time I acquiesced in this.

I went very little to my clubs, the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor dinners at

all. For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous literary and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put up

for the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious and substantial political standing. I

didn't go up to Cambridge, I remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new adjustments.

The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put it roughly, of the Parliamentary

candidate class, or people already actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very

considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old Willersley and the sister who kept house for

him possessed. There were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little younger and more artless,

or a little older and more established. Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my

Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was an adventurer and had won and

married my way into their circles instead of being naturally there. They couldn't quite reckon upon what I

should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons,

Willie Crampton, who has since been PostmasterGeneral, rich and very important in Rockshire, and his

younger brother Edward, who has specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of

letters who are the glory of latterday England. Then there was Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his

cousins the Solomons and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race, able, industrious and

invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and

inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an old blue, and with an erratic disposition

well under the control of the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these men, but now (with

Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they opened their hearts to me and took me into their order. They

were all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that the period of wandering in the

wilderness of opposition was drawing near its close. They were all tremendously keen upon social and

political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a simple, strenuous life, a life finding its

satisfactions in political achievements and distinctions. The young wives were as keen about it as the young

husbands, Margaret most of all, and I whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits

We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which everything was very simple and very

good, with a slight but perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and less perhaps in

the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs,

and there was always good homemade lemonade available. No men waited, but very expert parlourmaids.

Our meat was usually Welsh muttonI don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last

refuge of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas and Bernard Shaw (who was a

department by himself and supposed in those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less frequented receptions, but I have never

been able to participate submissively in this hyperdigestion of written matter, and generally managed to

provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I

wonder still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in that phase of utmost earnestness I have

I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded years, critically and I fancy almost

impartially, to those beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to their proper order the

developing phases of relationship. I am struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generousspirited

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest experience of all among married educated

people, the deliberate, shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they appear, the

sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter

years of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be absolutely real with one another, to

stand naked souled to each other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural allglorifying love between

them. It is possible to love and be loved untroubling, as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and

intricate chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union, and for the majority marriage must

adjust itself on other terms. Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a little away to

preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of lovemaking HIDES from the other, is afraid of

disappointing, afraid of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not solidly upon the rock

of truth, but upon arches and pillars and queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common

foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine fabric they sustain together begins for

each of them a cavernous hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever peep out to

consciousness except in the grey halflight of sleepless nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an

angry glance and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked up to die. For the most of us

there is no jail delivery of those inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.

I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her. Perhaps already unintentionally I have

indicated the quality of the injustice our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us and no

understanding. We were drawn to one another by the unlikeness of our quality, by the things we

misunderstood in each other. I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser and subtler perceptions of modern life,

press more and more heavily upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less discriminating

time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate, meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends,

when marriage was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid things of life almost entirely

to the unencumbered man, mental and temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But

now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife, unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a

complete association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of understanding and cooperation.

These are stupendous demands. People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than they ever did

before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more accidented progress a threelegged race of carelessly

Our very mental texture was different. I was roughminded, to use the phrase of William James, primary and

intuitive and illogical; she was tenderminded, logical, refined and secondary. She was loyal to pledge and

persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination

moves in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of extravagance. My quality is sensuous and

ruled by warm impulses; hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the facts of the case and to

mention everything; I like naked bodies and the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in

circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary points. Perhaps the reader knows that

Tintoretto in the National Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of temperamental

quality. In spite of my early training I have come to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it

has always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no

means rare, of damning what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it was not my "true

self," and she did not so much accept the universe as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest. And also

I had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of rights and wrongs, or superiorities and

inferiorities; it is a catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship that constantly

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to either of us at the outset. To begin with, I

found myself reserving myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our minds and what

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most astounding was in our personal

relations. It is not too much to say that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with one

another during the first six years of our life together. It goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise

the ideal of my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I would not admit my own

perceptions and interpretations. I tried to fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations. There are people

who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to conquer myself. I record that much without any

For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact nor, except for the silence about my earlier

life that she had almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to affect her, but from the

outset I was guilty of immense spiritual concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual

The interest and excitement of settingup a house, of walking about it from room to room and from floor to

floor, or sitting at one's own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a pretty, timid

resolution, of taking a place among the secure and free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the

interest and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead Division, that shapeless chunk

of agricultural midland between the Great Western and the North Western railways. I was going to "take

hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I was to find my place in the rather

indistinctly sketched constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle. The precise place I had to

fill and the precise functions I had to discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure, would

A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to the excitements of the contest that followed

the return of Mr. CamphellBannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead Division was

concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went about the constituency making three speeches that were

soon threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me; two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a

democratic parson, a number of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger, the widow

of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had

bought Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old soldier, were among my chief

supporters. We had headquarters in each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased

temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and going were maintained. The rest of the

population stared in a state of suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country was supposed

to be in a state of intellectual conflict and deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a

momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of bill sticking or a bill in a window or a

placardplastered motorcar or an argumentative group of people outside a publichouse or a sluggish

movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising

its destinies. Now and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part people went about their

business with an entirely irresponsible confidence in the stability of the universe. At times one felt a little

My opponent was a quite undistinguished MajorGeneral who relied upon his advocacy of Protection, and

was particularly anxious we should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a gentlemanly spirit.

He was always writing me notes, apologising for excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the

My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch with these as the polling approached. To

begin with I made a real attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply with a

political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and its destinies, of the splendid projects and

possibilities of life and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and constructive effort might do

at the present time. "We are building a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the great age

of mankind." Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear! 'ear!" Then having created, as I imagined, a fine

atmosphere, I turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and brought it into contrast with

the wide occasions of the age; discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South Africa, its

failure to release public education from sectarian squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the

It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness of method bored my audiences a good

deal. The richer and wider my phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these nonresonating gatherings.

Even the platform supporters grew restive unconsciously, and stirred and coughed. They did not recognise

themselves as mankind. Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage in the history of humanity, had no appeal

for them. They were mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes, and they came to my

meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation. This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think politics was a

great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dogfight. They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they

wanted hits, they wanted also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable manner and clap

their hands and drum with their feet. The great constructive process in history gives so little scope for

clapping and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of hounding on the solar system.

So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of the issues involved, I began to adapt myself

to them. I cut down my review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and developed a series

of hits and anecdotes andwhat shall I call them?"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated

me on the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of the late Prime Minister with the

respect I bore him, and began to fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit witted person

intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust

him therefrom. I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food dearer for the agricultural

labourer. I began to speak of Mr. Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a man

inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still criminal Chinese for honest British labourers

throughout the world. And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr. John Burns or any

one else of any prominence at all on our side I fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions

the high gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and readier applause.

"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one must follow the road that leads there," but I

found the road nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets there," I said, "then it is one

But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache and fatigue which come from speaking in

illventilated rooms, and wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great political

ideals. Why should political work always rot down to personalities and personal appeals in this way? Life is,

I suppose, to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from personalities all our broader interests

arise and to personalities they return. All our social and political effort, all of it, is like trying to make a crowd

of people fall into formation. The broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and irrelevancy,

and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the marshals must begin the work over again!

My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for

the Kinghamstead Division is extensive, abounding in illgraded and badly metalled crossroads and vicious

little hills, and singularly unpleasing to the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to have

undergone the same process of illregulated expansion that made Bromstead the place it is. Several of its

overgrown villages have developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines, and there is an

abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no place at which one could take hold of more than this or that

element of the population. Now we met in a meetinghouse, now in a Masonic Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a

certain amount of openair speaking in the dinner hour outside gasworks and groups of factories. Some

special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each special appeal. One said things carefully

adjusted to the distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible silliness and shallowness

drifted about us. Our advisers made us declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and one

hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he will live here." The enemy obtained a number

of these bills and stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dogkennels; you cannot imagine how irksome the

repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and

more. I realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I brought them to the test of this

experience. I was perplexed by the riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold at all,

Margaret was troubled by no such doubts. She was clear I had to go into Parliament on the side of Liberalism

and the light, as against the late Government and darkness. Essential to the memory of my first contest, is the

memory of her clear bright face, very resolute and grave, helping me consciously, steadfastly, with all her

strength. Her quiet confidence, while I was so dissatisfied, worked curiously towards the alienation of my

sympathies. I felt she had no business to be so sure of me. I had moments of vivid resentment at being thus

I seemed now always to be discovering alien forces of character in her. Her way of taking life diverged from

me more and more. She sounded amazing, independent notes. She bought some particularly costly furs for

the campaign that roused enthusiasm whenever she appeared. She also made me a birthday present in

November of a heavily furtrimmed coat and this she would make me remove as I went on to the platform,

and hold over her arm until I was ready to resume it. It was fearfully heavy for her and she liked it to be

heavy for her. That act of servitude was in essence a towering selfassertion. I would glance sideways while

some chairman floundered through his introduction and see the clear blue eye with which she regarded the

audience, which existed so far as she was concerned merely to return me to Parliament. It was a friendly eye,

provided they were not silly or troublesome. But it kindled a little at the hint of a hostile question. After we

She constituted herself the dragoman of our political travels. In hotels she was serenely resolute for the

quietest and the best, she rejected all their proposals for meals and substituted a severely nourishing dietary of

her own, and even in private houses she astonished me by her tranquil insistence upon special comforts and

sustenance. I can see her face now as it would confront a hostess, a little intent, but sweetly resolute and

Since our marriage she had read a number of political memoirs, and she had been particularly impressed by

the career of Mrs. Gladstone. I don't think it occurred to her to compare and contrast my quality with that of

Mrs. Gladstone's husband. I suspect her of a deliberate intention of achieving parallel results by parallel

methods. I was to be Gladstonised. Gladstone it appeared used to lubricate his speeches with a mixtureif

my memory serves me right of egg beaten up in sherry, and Margaret was very anxious I should take a leaf

from that celebrated book. She wanted, I know, to hold the glass in her hand while I was speaking.

But here I was firm. "No," I said, very decisively, "simply I won't stand that. It's a matter of conscience. I

shouldn't feel democratic. I'll take my chance of the common water in the carafe on the chairman's table."

It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and

fineand I see now how pathetic. But I could not afford to succumb to her. I wanted to follow my own

leading, to see things clearly, and this reassuring pose of a high destiny, of an almost terribly efficient pursuit

of a fixed end when as a matter of fact I had a very doubtful end and an aim as yet by no means fixed, was all

And into all these things with the manner of a trifling and casual incident comes the figure of Isabel Rivers.

My first impressions of her were of a rather ugly and ungainly, extraordinarily interesting schoolgirl with a

beautiful quick flush under her warm brown skin, who said and did amusing and surprising things. When first

I saw her she was riding a very old bicycle downhill with her feet on the fork of the frameit seemed to me

to the public danger, but afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve betterand on the third

occasion she was for her own private satisfaction climbing a tree. On the intervening occasion we had what

seems now to have been a long sustained conversation about the political situation and the books and papers I

What a delightful mixture of child and grave woman she was at that time, and how little I reckoned on the

part she would play in my life! And since she has played that part, how impossible it is to tell now of those

early days! Since I wrote that opening paragraph to this section my idle pen has been, as it were, playing by

itself and sketching faces on the blotting padone impish wizened visage is oddly like little Baileyand I

have been thinking cheek on fist amidst a limitless wealth of memories. She sits below me on the low wall

under the olive trees with our little child in her arms. She is now the central fact in my life. It still seems a

little incredible that that should be so. She has destroyed me as a politician, brought me to this belated

rebeginning of life. When I sit down and try to make her a girl again, I feel like the Arabian fisherman who

tried to put the genius back into the pot from which it had spread gigantic across the skies. . . .

I have a very clear vision of her rush downhill past our labouring ascendant carmy colours fluttered from

handlebar and shoulder knotand her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She cried out

Parvill, the cheap photographer, that industrious organiser for whom by way of repayment I got those magic

letters, that knighthood of the underlings, "J. P." was in the car with us and explained her to us. "One of the

And then after a toilsome troubled morning we came, rather cross from the strain of sustained amiability, to

Sir Graham Rivers' house. It seemed all softness and quietI recall dead white panelling and oval mirrors

horizontally set and a marble fireplace between white marbleblind Homer and marbleblind Virgil, very

grave and fineand how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like a blue smock that made her bright

quickchanging face seem yellow under her cloud of black hair. Her stepsister was there, Miss Gamer, to

whom the house was to descend, a welldressed lady of thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel

in every phrase and gesture. And there was a very pleasant doctor, an Oxford man, who seemed on excellent

terms with every one. It was manifest that he was in the habit of sparring with the girl, but on this occasion

she wasn't sparring and refused to be teased into a display in spite of the taunts of either him or her father.

She was, they discovered with rising eyebrows, shy. It seemed an opportunity too rare for them to miss. They

proclaimed her enthusiasm for me in a way that brought a flush to her cheek and a look into her eye between

appeal and defiance. They declared she had read my books, which I thought at the time was exaggeration,

their dry political quality was so distinctly not what one was accustomed to regard as schoolgirl reading. Miss

Gamer protested to protect her, "When once in a blue moon Isabel is wellbehaved. . . .!"

Except for these attacks I do not remember much of the conversation at table; it was, I know, discursive and

concerned with the sort of topographical and social and electioneering fact natural to such a visit. Old Rivers

struck me as a delightful person, modestly unconscious of his doublyearned V. C. and the plucky defence of

KardinBergat that won his baronetcy. He was that excellent type, the soldier radical, and we began that day

a friendship that was only ended by his death in the huntingfield three years later. He interested Margaret

into a disregard of my plate and the fact that I had secured the illegal indulgence of Moselle. After lunch we

went for coffee into another low room, this time brown panelled and looking through French windows on a

redwalled garden, graceful even in its winter desolation. And there the conversation suddenly picked up and

became good. It had fallen to a pause, and the doctor, with an air of definitely throwing off a mask and

wrecking an established tranquillity, remarked: "Very probably you Liberals will come in, though I'm not

sure you'll come in so mightily as you think, but what you do when you do come in passes my

"You can't govern a great empire by amending and repealing the Acts of your predecessors," said the doctor.

There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached too big and difficult for the gathering.

Margaret's blue eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in the

not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke. A voice

The doctor's eye lit with the joy of the fisherman who strikes his fish at last. "What will you do?" he asked

"In some review," the girl went on. "After all, we're not going to elect the whole Liberal party in the

"I'd like to hear," I said. "Electioneering shatters convictions and enfeebles the mind."

"Not mine," said Isabel stoutly. "I meanWell, anyhow I take it Mr. Remington stands for constructing a

"THIS muddle," protested the doctor with an appeal of the eye to the beautiful long room and the ordered

"Well, THAT muddle, if you like! There's a slum within a mile of us already. The dust and blacks get worse

"Oh!" said Isabel. "At times one has to beNapoleonic. They want to libel me, Mr. Remington. A political

worker can't always be in time for meals, can she? At times one has to makesplendid cuts."

"Order, education, discipline," said Sir Graham. "Excellent things! But I've a sort of memoryin my young

"Liberty under the law," I said, with an unexpected approving murmur from Margaret, and took up the

defence. "The old Liberal definition of liberty was a trifle uncritical. Privilege and legal restrictions are not

the only enemies of liberty. An uneducated, underbred, and underfed propertyless man is a man who has lost

the possibility of liberty. There's no liberty worth a rap for him. A man who is swimming hopelessly for life

wants nothing but the liberty to get out of the water; he'll give every other liberty for ituntil he gets out."

Sir Graham took me up and we fell into a discussion of the changing qualities of Liberalism. It was a good

giveandtake talk, extraordinarily refreshing after the nonsense and crowding secondary issues of the

electioneering outside. We all contributed more or less except Miss Gamer; Margaret followed with knitted

brows and occasional interjections. "People won't SEE that," for example, and "It all seems so plain to me."

The doctor showed himself clever but unsubstantial and inconsistent. Isabel sat back with her black mop of

hair buried deep in the chair looking quickly from face to face. Her colour came and went with her vivid

intellectual excitement; occasionally she would dart a word, usually a very apt word, like a lizard's tongue

into the discussion. I remember chiefly that a chance illustration betrayed that she had read Bishop Burnet. . .

After that it was not surprising that Isabel should ask for a lift in our car as far as the Lurky Committee

Room, and that she should offer me quite sound advice EN ROUTE upon the intellectual temperament of the

On the third occasion that I saw Isabel she was, as I have said, climbing a treeand a very creditable

treefor her own private satisfaction. It was a lapse from the high seriousness of politics, and I perceived

she felt that I might regard it as such and attach too much importance to it. I had some difficulty in reassuring

her. And it's odd to note nowit has never occurred to me beforethat from that day to this I do not think I

And after that memory she seems to be flickering about always in the election, an inextinguishable flame;

now she flew by on her bicycle, now she dashed into committee rooms, now she appeared on doorsteps in

animated conversation with dubious voters; I took every chance I could to talk to herI had never met

anything like her before in the world, and she interested me immenselyand before the polling day she and I

That, I think, sets out very fairly the facts of our early relationship. But it is hard to get it true, either in form

or texture, because of the bright, translucent, coloured, and refracting memories that come between. One

forgets not only the tint and quality of thoughts and impressions through that intervening haze, one forgets

them altogether. I don't remember now that I ever thought in those days of passionate love or the possibility

of such love between us. I may have done so again and again. But I doubt it very strongly. I don't think I ever

thought of such aspects. I had no more sense of any danger between us, seeing the years and things that

separated us, than I could have had if she had been an intelligent brighteyed bird. Isabel came into my life as

a new sort of thing; she didn't join on at all to my previous experiences of womanhood. They were not, as I

have laboured to explain, either very wide or very penetrating experiences, on the whole, "strangled

dinginess" expresses them, but I do not believe they were narrower or shallower than those of many other

men of my class. I thought of women as pretty things and beautiful things, pretty rather than beautiful,

attractive and at times disconcertingly attractive, often bright and witty, but, because of the vast reservations

that hid them from me, wanting, subtly and inevitably wanting, in understanding. My idealisation of Margaret

had evaporated insensibly after our marriage. The shrine I had made for her in my private thoughts stood at

last undisguisedly empty. But Isabel did not for a moment admit of either idealisation or interested contempt.

She opened a new sphere of womanhood to me. With her steady amberbrown eyes, her unaffected interest

in impersonal things, her upstanding waistless blue body, her energy, decision and courage, she seemed rather

some new and infinitely finer form of boyhood than a feminine creature, as I had come to measure

femininity. She was my perfect friend. Could I have foreseen, had my world been more wisely planned, to

She seemed at that time unconscious of sex, though she has told me since how full she was of protesting

curiosities and restrained emotions. She spoke, as indeed she has always spoken, simply, clearly, and vividly;

schoolgirl slang mingled with words that marked ample voracious reading, and she moved quickly with the

free directness of some graceful young animal. She took many of the easy freedoms a man or a sister might

have done with me. She would touch my arm, lay a hand on my shoulder as I sat, adjust the lapel of a

breastpocket as she talked to me. She says now she loved me always from the beginning. I doubt if there

was a suspicion of that in her mind those days. I used to find her regarding me with the clearest, steadiest

gaze in the world, exactly like the gaze of some nice healthy innocent animal in a forest, interested, inquiring,

Polling day came after a last hoarse and dingy crescendo. The excitement was not of the sort that makes one

forget one is tired out. The waiting for the end of the count has left a long blank mark on my memory, and

My success had been a foregone conclusion since the afternoon, but we all behaved as though we had not

been anticipating this result for hours, as though any other figures but nine hundred and seventy six would

have meant something entirely different. "Nine hundred and seventysix!" said Margaret. "They didn't expect

"Nine hundred and seventysix," said a little short man with a paper. "It means a big turnover. Two dozen

A tremendous hullaboo began outside, and a lot of fresh people came into the room.

Isabel, flushed but not out of breath, Heaven knows where she had sprung from at that time of night! was

running her hand down my sleeve almost caressingly, with the innocent bold affection of a girl. "Got you in!"

"I wish I was you," she said, and said it as though it was not exactly the thing she was meaning to say.

"You must come out with me," I answered, putting my arm through hers, and felt someone urging me to the

The Mayor of Kinghamstead, a managing little man with no great belief in my oratorical powers, was

"It's all over," he said, " and you've won. Say all the nice things you can and say them plainly."

I turned and handed Margaret out through the window and stood looking over the Marketplace, which was

more than half filled with swaying people. The crowd set up a roar of approval at the sight of us, tempered by

a little booing. Down in one corner of the square a fight was going on for a flag, a fight that even the prospect

of a speech could not instantly check. "Speech!" cried voices, "Speech!" and then a brief "boooooo" that

was drowned in a cascade of shouts and cheers. The conflict round the flag culminated in the smashing of a

"Votes for Women!" yelled a voice, amidst laughterthe first time I remember hearing that memorable

"Mrs. Remington asks me to thank you," I said, amidst further uproar and reiterated cries of "Speech!"

Isabel was still in my mind, I suppose. "I shall go to Westminster," I began. I sought for some compelling

phrase and could not find one. "To do my share," I went on, "in building up a great and splendid civilisation."

"This election," I said, " has been the end and the beginning of much. New ideas are abroad"

"Chinese labour," yelled a voice, and across the square swept a wildfire of booting and bawling.

It is one of the few occasions when I quite lost my hold on a speech. I glanced sideways and saw the Mayor

of Kinghamstead speaking behind his hand to Parvill. By a happy chance Parvill caught my eye.

"Say something about general fairnessthe other side," prompted Parvill, flattered but a little surprised by

my appeal. I pulled myself hastily into a more popular strain with a gross eulogy of my opponent's good taste.

The Marketplace roared delight, but whether that delight expressed hostility to Chinamen or hostility to

their practical enslavement no student of the General Election of 1906 has ever been able to determine.

Certainly one of the most effective posters on our side displayed a hideous yellow face, just that and nothing

more. There was not even a legend to it. How it impressed the electorate we did not know, but that it

Kinghamstead was one of the earliest constituencies fought, and we came backit must have been

Saturdaytriumphant but very tired, to our house in Radnor Square. In the train we read the first intimations

Then came a period when one was going about receiving and giving congratulations and watching the other

men arrive, very like a boy who has returned to school with the first batch after the holidays. The London

world reeked with the General Election; it had invaded the nurseries. All the children of one's friends had got

big maps of England cut up into squares to represent constituencies and were busy sticking gummed blue

labels over the conquered red of Unionism that had hitherto submerged the country. And there were also

orange labels, if I remember rightly, to represent the new Labour party, and green for the Irish. I engaged

myself to speak at one or two London meetings, and lunched at the Reform, which was fairly tepid, and dined

and spent one or two tumultuous evenings at the National Liberal Club, which was in active eruption. The

National Liberal became feverishly congested towards midnight as the results of the counting came dropping

in. A big greenbaize screen had been fixed up at one end of the large smokingroom with the names of the

constituencies that were voting that day, and directly the figures came to hand, up they went, amidst cheers

that at last lost their energy through sheer repetition, whenever there was record of a Liberal gain. I don't

remember what happened when there was a Liberal loss; I don't think that any were announced while I was

How packed and noisy the place was, and what a reek of tobacco and whisky fumes we made! Everybody

was excited and talking, making waves of harsh confused sound that beat upon one's ears, and every now and

then hoarse voices would shout for someone to speak. Our little set was much in evidence. Both the

Cramptons were in, Lewis, Bunting Harblow. We gave brief addresses attuned to this excitement and the late

Now we can DO things!" I said amidst a rapture of applause. Men I did not know from Adam held up glasses

and nodded to me in solemn fuddled approval as I came down past them into the crowd again.

Men were betting whether the Unionists would lose more or less than two hundred seats.

"I wonder just what we shall do with it all," I heard one sceptic speculating. . . .

After these orgies I would get home very tired and excited, and find it difficult to get to sleep. I would lie and

speculate about what it was we WERE going to do. One hadn't anticipated quite such a tremendous accession

I found the next few weeks very unsatisfactory and distressing. I don't clearly remember what it was I had

expected; I suppose the fuss and strain of the General Election had built up a feeling that my return would in

some way put power into my hands, and instead I found myself a mere undistinguished unit in a vast but

rather vague majority. There were moments when I felt very distinctly that a majority could be too big a

crowd altogether. I had all my work still before me, I had achieved nothing as yet but opportunity, and a very

crowded opportunity it was at that. Everyone about me was chatting Parliament and appointments; one

breathed distracting and irritating speculations as to what would be done and who would be asked to do it. I

was chiefly impressed by what was unlikely to be done and by the absence of any general plan of legislation

to hold us all together. I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and etiquette particularly trying. We

dined with the elder Cramptons one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the House

liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impression and what a bad one. "A man shouldn't speak more

than twice in his first session, and not at first on too contentious a topic," said Sir Edward. "No."

"Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's a sort of airy earnestness"

"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could name one man who spent three years living

down a pair of spatterdashers. On the other handa thing like thatif it catches the eye of the PUNCH

He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to like an originally unpopular Irishman

The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to feel more and more like a branded

sheep. We were sworn in in batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too fresh under the

inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats. It is

one of my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats in the smokingroom of the

National Liberal Club. At first I thought there must have been a funeral. Familiar faces that one had grown to

know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed

jackets, suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of selfconsciousness, from under silk hats of

incredible glossiness. There was a disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good

There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous competition to get in first and put hats on

coveted seats. A memory hangs about me of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane desolation

inhabited almost entirely by silk hats. The current use of cards to secure seats came later. There were yards

and yards of empty green benches with hats and hats and hats distributed along them, resolutelooking top

hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy grin under them, sensible top bats brim upward, and one scandalous

incontinent that had rolled from the front Opposition bench right to the middle of the floor. A headless hat is

At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I found myself packed in a dense elbowing

crowd to the right of the Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless after the

massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its ease amidst its empty benches.

There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see over the shoulder of the man in front.

The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I gathered from a slightly contemptuous

Scotchman beside me that it was Chris Robinson had walked between the bonourable member in possession

of the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him blushingly whispering about his misadventure to a

colleague. He was just that same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at Cambridge, but greyhaired

now, and still it seemed with the same knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless halfhour while he

It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House, and that I should get all I needed of the

I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through the outer lobby.

I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various

intensity, shuffled itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square shoulders, the silk hat, already

worn with a parliamentary tilt backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a weak

approval. "A MEMBER!" I felt the little cluster of people that were scattered about the lobby must be saying.

It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that yet are cardinal in a man's life. It came to me

with extreme vividness that it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as that something had got hold

of me. I distinctly recall the rebound of my mind. Whatever happened in this Parliament, I at least would

attempt something. "By God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed. I am here to do something, and do something

I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a chilling night, and rare spots of rain were

falling. I glanced over my shoulder at the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember, westward, and

presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and followed it, watching the glittering black rush of the river

and the dark, dimly lit barges round which the water swirled. Across the river was the hunched skyline of

Doulton's potteries, and a kiln flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted line of lamps,

and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station. Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly

changed to the commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It was a big confused world, I felt, for a man to

I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching the huge black shapes in the darkness

under the gasworks. A shoal of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water below, and

a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty

clutch back to the barges. Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men toiled amidst these monster

shapes. They did not seem to be controlling them but only moving about among them. These gasworks have

a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange

On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the lapping water of the river; the lower steps

are luminous under the lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem to be purely

architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.

Those shapes and large inhuman placesfor all of mankind that one sees at night about Lambeth is minute

and pitiful beside the industrial monsters that snort and toil theremix up inextricably with my memories of

my first days as a legislator. Black figures drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a

motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat has its one or two outcasts huddled

"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon me, "as once those vast unmeaning

Saurians whose bones encumber museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . .

Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I

I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of barges presently came swinging and

bumping round as highwater turned to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief perplexity at it,

sticks like a paper pin through the substance of my thoughts. It was then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that

night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not live in vain. I prayed for strength and faith,

that the monstrous blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me back to futility and a

meaningless acquiescence in existent things. I knew myself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it

was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders, and my task cowed me, gave me at the

"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me, destroy me as you will, but save me from

selfcomplacency and little interests and little successes and the life that passes like the shadow of a dream."

I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this next portion of my book for many days. I

perceive I must leave it raw edged and ill joined. I have learnt something of the impossibility of History. For

all I have had to tell is the story of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I

find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the

main forms and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving media of changing hue and

variable refraction at something vitally unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with

personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness

and moods of depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond treatment multitudinous.

. . . For a week or so I desisted altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit through the

warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this little perchedup house of ours, discussing my

difficulties with Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the effort to simplify them to

Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this confused process. A main strand is quite

easily traceable. This main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have looked to most of

my acquaintances. It presents you with a young couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under

Altiora's auspices to make a career. You figure us well dressed and active, running about in motorcars,

visiting in great people's houses, dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in the lobby.

Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during

We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I thought about it a great deal, and did and

refrained from doing ten thousand things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it, as it were by inertia,

long after things had happened and changes occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible. Under

certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a handsome position in the world, achieve

respect, SUCCEED. Enormous unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the realities of

my life, before our general circle could have had any inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances

of our life. Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our outward unanimity visibly strained and

That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of these unseen factors I do not mean that but

something altogether broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the cynical observer scope

and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This "sub

careerist" element noted little things that affected the career, made me suspicious of the rivalry of soandso,

propitiatory to so andso, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the least sympathetic towards;

guarded with that man, who for all his charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the appearance

of neglect from that. No, I mean something greater and not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.

In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed,

praised and depreciated, in the House and in smokingroom gossip, you really have as much of a man as

usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But I am tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by

the realisation of how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such frontages do represent the

complexities of the intelligent contemporary. Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter it, altogether,

was a far more essential reality, a self less personal, less individualised, and broader in its references. Its aims

were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different system of demands and satisfactions. It was

It is just the existence and development of this more generalised selfbehindthefrontage that is making

modern life so much more subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its relations to the

perplexities of the universe. I see this mental and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,

from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the window, to others who, like myself, come

to regard the ostensible existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for that greater

personality behind. And this backself has its history of phases, its crises and happy accidents and

irrevocable conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and achievements of the ostensible self. It

meets persons and phrases, it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new realisations by some

accident that seems altogether irrelevant to the general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the

ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks

our overt promises and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing mentor upon the

In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of philosophy, science, and creative literature may

It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious, lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon

which I had embarked with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams and a habit of

adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and

I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him which presents itself now as altogether

I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at the Playwrights' Club, and had asked

him to dinner on the spur of the moment. He was oddly the same curlyheaded, redfaced ventriloquist, and

oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy, and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek

successfulness. But that disposition presently evaporated, and his talk was good and fresh and provocative.

And something that had long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he and I found

Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to become confusedly strenuous. There was

always a slight and ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to anticipate Altiora's overpowering

tendency to a rally and the establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP DEMAIN.

When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieter influence of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and

information for its own sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought. . . . Good Lord! what

bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait

conversationally; they had no sense of the selfexposures, the gallant experiments in statement that are

necessary for good conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping

through bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and

back to cover. They gave one twilight nerves. Their wives were easier but still difficult at a stretch; they

talked a good deal about children and servants, but with an air caught from Altiora of making observations

upon sociological types. Lewis gossiped about the House in an entirely finite manner. He never raised a

discussion; nobody ever raised a discussion. He would ask what we thought of Evesham's question that

afternoon, and Edward would say it was good, and Mrs. Willie, who had been behind the grille, would think

it was very good, and then Willie, parting the branches, would say rather conclusively that he didn't think it

was very much good, and I would deny hearing the question in order to evade a profitless statement of views

in that vacuum, and then we would cast about in our minds for some other topic of equal interest. . . .

On this occasion Altiora was absent, and to qualify our Young Liberal bleakness we had Mrs. Millingham,

with her white hair and her fresh mind and complexion, and Esmeer. Willie Crampton was with us, but not

his wife, who was having her third baby on principle; his brother Edward was present, and the Lewises, and

of course the Bunting Harblows. There was also some other lady. I remember her as pale blue, but for the life

Quite early there was a little breeze between Edward Crampton and Esmeer, who had ventured an opinion

about the partition of Poland. Edward was at work then upon the seventh volume of his monumental Life of

Kosciusko, and a little impatient with views perhaps not altogether false but betraying a lamentable ignorance

of accessible literature. At any rate, his correction of Esmeer was magisterial. After that there was a distinct

and not altogether delightful pause, and then some one, it may have been the paleblue lady, asked Mrs.

Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest andsuncure in Italy. That led to a

rather anxiously sustained talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the nobreakfast

system. It had increased his power of work enormously. He could get through ten hours a day now without

"I asked three questions yesterday. And for one of them I had to consult nine books!"

We were drifting, I could see, towards Doctor Haig's system of dietary, and whether the exclusion or

inclusion of fish and chicken were most conducive to high efficiency, when Britten, who had refused

lemonade and claret and demanded Burgundy, broke out, and was discovered to be demanding in his throat

"I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to hear just exactly what you think you are

Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of the Community."

"Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know where you think you are going."

"Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her

For a time talk frothed over Britten's head, but the natural mischief in Mrs. Millingham had been stirred, and

she was presently echoing his demand in lisping, quasiconfidential undertones. "What ARE we Liberals

To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for fundamentalsand a little disconcerted. I had the

experience that I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with two different sets

of people with whom one has maintained two different sets of attitudes. It had always been, I perceived, an

instinctive suppression in our circle that we shouldn't be more than vague about our political ideals. It had

almost become part of my morality to respect this convention. It was understood we were all working hard,

and keeping ourselves fit, tremendously fit, under Altiora's inspiration, Pro Bono Publico. Bunting Harblow

had his undersecretaryship, and Lewis was on the verge of the Cabinet, and these things we considered to be

in the nature of confirmations. . . . It added to tbe discomfort of the situation that these plunging enquiries

Edward Crampton was presently declaringI forget in what relation: "The country is with us."

My longcontrolled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases about the Country and the House got the

"We don't respect the Country as we used to do," I said. "We haven't the same belief we used to have in the

will of the people. It's no good, Crampton, trying to keep that up. We Liberals know as a matter of

factnowadays every one knowsthat the monster that brought us into power has, among other

deficiencies, no head. We've got to give it oneif possible with brains and a will. That lies in the future. For

the present if the country is with us, it means merely that we happen to have hold of its tether."

Lewis was shocked. A "mandate" from the Country was sacred to his system of pretences.

Britten wasn't subdued by his first rebuff; presently he was at us again. There were several attempts to check

his outbreak of interrogation; I remember the Cramptons asked questions about the welfare of various cousins

of Lewis who were unknown to the rest of us, and Margaret tried to engage Britten in a sympathetic

discussion of the Arts and Crafts exhibition. But Britten and Esmeer were persistent, Mrs. Millingham was

mischievous, and in the end our rising hopes of Young Liberalism took to their thickets for good, while we

talked all over them of the prevalent vacuity of political intentions. Margaret was perplexed by me. It is only

now I perceive just how perplexing I must have been. "Of course, she said with that faint stress of

apprehension in her eyes, one must have aims." And, "it isn't always easy to put everything into phrases."

"Don't be long," said Mrs. Edward Crampton to her hsuband as the wives trooped out. And afterwards when

we went upstairs I had an indefinable persuasion that the ladies had been criticising Britten's share in our talk

in an altogether unfavourable spirit. Mrs. Edward evidently thought him aggressive and impertinent, and

Margaret with a quiet firmness that brooked no resistance, took him at once into a corner and showed him

I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards Battersea Bridgehe lodged on the south side.

"She was worked up," I said. "She's a woman of faultless character, but her instincts, as Altiora would say,

"I hope, Remington," he went on after a pause, "I didn't rag your other guests too much. I've a sort of feeling

at moments Remington, those chaps are so infernally notnot bloody. It's part of a man's duty sometimes

at least to eat red beef and get drunk. How is he to understand government if he doesn't? It scares me to think

of your lotby a sort of misapprehensionbeing in power. A kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of

government. I don't understand where YOU come in. Those othersthey've no lusts. Their ideal is anaemia.

You and I, we had at least a lust to take hold of life and make something of it. Theythey want to take hold

of life and make nothing of it. They want to cut out all the stimulants. Just as though life was anything else

He began to talk of his own life. He had had illfortune through most of it. He was poor and unsuccessful,

and a girl he had been very fond of had been attacked and killed by a horse in a field in a very horrible

manner. These things had wounded and tortured him, but they hadn't broken him. They had, it seemed to me,

made a kind of crippled and ugly demigod of him. He was, I began to perceive, so much better than I had any

right to expect. At first I had been rather struck by his unkempt look, and it made my reaction all the stronger.

There was about him something, a kind of raw and bleeding faith in the deep things of life, that stirred me

profoundly as he showed it. My set of people had irritated him and disappointed him. I discovered at his

touch how they irritated him. He reproached me boldly. He made me feel ashamed of my easy acquiescences

as I walked in my sleek tall neatness beside his rather old coat, his rather battered hat, his sturdier shorter

shape, and listened to his denunciations of our selfsatisfied New Liberalism and Progressivism.

"It has the same relation to progressthe reality of progressthat the things they paint on door panels in the

suburbs have to art and beauty. There's a sort of filiation. . . . Your Altiora's just the political equivalent of the

ladies who sell traced cloth for embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour. The real

progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller thing and a slower thing altogether. Look!

THAT"and he pointed to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy prostitute stood

lurking" was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after

this Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora Bailey! Remington!it's foolery. It's

prigs at play. It's make believe, makebelieve! Your people there haven't got hold of things, aren't beginning

to get hold of things, don't know anything of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean rooms

and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night goes by outsideuntouched. Those Crampton

fools slink by all this,"he waved at the woman again"pretend it doesn't exist, or is going to be banished

root and branch by an Act to keep children in the wet outside publichouses. Do you think they really care,

Remington? I don't. It's makebelieve. What they want to do, what Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting

Harblow wants her husband to do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the

Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming

brims down over their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty. That's their Reality. That's

their scope. They don't, it's manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE, Remington, they'll

"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts

and destroys a man. That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have good will. Do you think

they lie awake of nights searching their hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring, satisfied

"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the greatest saint only a worm that has lifted

its head for a moment from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral animalculae building

upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned

shirking, temperate, shamefficient, selfsatisfied, respectable, make believe, Fabianspirited Young

Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest." He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note: "Which

"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. " You're going too far with all your might for the

sake of the damns. Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles. There's depths in Liberalism"

"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and

bitterness! Don't I know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and trampled, the dear eyes and

the brain that loved and understoodand my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a

drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it

any more. I've paid something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."

He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."

"Makebelieve. Makebelieve." The phrase and Britten's squat gestures haunted me as I walked homeward

alone. I went to my room and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable

I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it was Mr. George Alexander would have

I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will ever again be the force it was during the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and selective, less patient

under tradition and the bondage of initial circumstances. As education becomes more universal and

liberating, men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual temperaments and less and less by

their accidental associations. The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply party but school

and college and county and country that lose their glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our

forefathers did of the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or that unfair advantage or

unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense

of fair play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down freemasonry of which one is chiefly

reminded nowadays in England by propitiatory symbols outside shady publichouses. . . .

There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to party ties. These are the men with strong

reproductive imaginations and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example, or Dayton.

They are the scholarsatlarge in life. For them the fact that the party system has been essential in the history

of England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour. They have read histories and memoirs,

they see the great grey pile of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich with dramatic

memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems

almost scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with strange qualities the savour of

That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall, thrust himself, it may be, through the

very piece of space that once held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible profanation to

Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I think, like to have the front benches left empty now for

ever, or at most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On this Spot William Ewart

Gladstone made his First Budget Speech." Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect

on the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he murmurs, "would not have done that," and

laments a vanished subtlety even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily disposed to lapse

into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings that have no grain of curiosity. His conception

of perfect conduct is industrious persistence along the worndown, wellmarked grooves of the great

recorded days. So infinitely more important to him is the documented, respected thing than the elusive

Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl is a sound man on a committee, and

Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail,

however, in their clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant consciousness of a morning's work free from

either zeal or shirking, they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few of the soberer

type of business men, and relax their minds in the discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the

West End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and

forensic "crushers." The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and exhaustively

considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly judged. They do not talk of the things that are really active

in their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to be proper to intelligent but still

honourable men. Socialism, individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex and women

only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of

unreal loyalties and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of passionate interests. It is like

wearing gloves in summer fields, or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a novel, or

It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the great past that is embodied in Westminster and

its traditions; we are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the greatness of our present

opportunities and the still vaster future that is possible to us. London is the most interesting, beautiful, and

wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in

her pregnant totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old bookshop. When I think of

Whitehall that little affair on the scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in comparison

with the possibilities that offer themselves to my imagination within the great grey Government buildings

It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I think of St. Stephen's tower streaming

upwards into the misty London night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the

hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the second Parliament of

King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending

out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded,

darkly shining river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us from

our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious greytoned offices in which undistinguished

little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to

vast temple studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses

and watchtowers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria Street,

grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West End

with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace, witness the

coming and going of troops and officials and guests along it from every land on earth. . . . Interwoven in the

texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the gleaming consciousness, the

challenging knowledge: "You and your kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destiny

My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent. The little group of younger Liberals to

which I belonged was very ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and quite out of touch

with the mass of the party. For a time Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old

quarrels. The early Educational legislation was sectarian and unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little

further than the attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was altogether for the nationalisation of

the publichouses, and of this end the Bill gave no intimations. It was just beerbaiting. I was recalcitrant

almost from the beginning, and spoke against the Government so early as the second reading of the first

Education Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my intention in the heat of

speaking,it is a way with inexperienced man. I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies of

sects and littleminded people. I contrasted its aim and methods with the manifest needs of the time.

I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I worry to find my meaning too much; but

this was one of my successes. I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were already a little

curious about me because of my writings. Several of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and

Mr. Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that engaging friendliness of his, and gave

me at the first chance an approving "Hear, Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two futile attempts to

catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the

effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what I could possibly be talking about, the

realisation that I was getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of having on the whole

Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in the world. Its semicolloquial methods

give it an air of being easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and hesitations of members

behind the chairnot mere audience units, but men who matterthe desolating emptiness that spreads itself

round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light,

elusive, flickering movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary Speaker, the table and

the mace and the chapellike Gothic background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a

confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a pavement full of trapdoors and patches of

uncovered morass. A misplaced, wellmeant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily disconcerting, and

under no other circumstances have I had to speak with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of

the House imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into the stirring brown. Unless I

was excited or speaking to the mind of some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of an

auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such as one has with a public meeting well under

one's eye. And to lose one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose one's sense of the

My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of the quality of party generally is curiously

mixed up with certain impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The National Liberal

Club is Liberalism made visible in the fleshand Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a

bold, wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel engravings, busts, and

fulllength statues of the late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious diningrooms, its long, hazy, crowded

smokingroom with innumerable little tables and groups of men in armchairs, its magazine room and library

upstairs, have just that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me the Liberal note. The

pensive member sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the

clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his mind

afield to Calcutta or Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .

I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the Club to doubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smokingroom is crowded with countless little groups. They sit about

small round tables, or in circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great narrow place,

with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones;

some are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely, dissociated men. At first one gets an

impression of men going from group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches closely one

finds that these men just visit three or four groups at the outside, and know nothing of the others. One begins

to perceive more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human mosaic; that each patch in that

great place is of a different quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it. Most clubs have a

common link, a lowest common denominator in the Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National

Liberal bores are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a clump of men from the North

Country or the Potteries, here an island of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant

from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a group of Irish politicians, here two East

Indians, here a priest or so, here a clump of oldfashioned Protestants, here a little knot of eminent

Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE. Next them are a group of anglicised Germans

and highly specialised chessplayers, and then two of the oddestlooking personsbulging with documents

I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract some constructive intimations. Every now and

then I got a whiff of politics. It was clear they were against the Lordsagainst plutocratsagainst

Cossington's newspapersagainst the brewers. . . . It was tremendously clear what they were against. The

As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr.

and Mrs. Gladstone, the partitions of polished mahogany, the yellowvested waiters, would dissolve and

vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a

universal littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample but a community, spreading,

stretching out to infinityall in little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and narrow

What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together? I understood why modern

electioneering is more than half of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive,

but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative

imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and bate,

of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart. . . .

I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality very vividly. A seething limitlessness it

became at last, like a waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the sackload and drown

Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a

circle of talkers close at hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was saying

The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I forgot the smoke and jabber of the club

altogether; I became a lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a ledge in some high and

rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity,

like grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life more than

that endless struggling individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant synthesis, still

to comeor present it might be and still unseen by me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of

I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions, the tremendous enterprise to which the

modern statesman is implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of wouldbe reef builders

looking back at the teeming slime upon the ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life, has

been and will be the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and

prevail over and comprehend individual livesan effort of insidious attraction, an idea of invincible appeal.

That something greater than ourselves, which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between

being and notbeing, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and visage of ten thousand different gods,

sought a shape for itself in stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more clearly of

a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses

of men. It is something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is withdrawn, withdrawn so

I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the club up in town for a night or so. My

mind would be busy with speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his horizons, his

innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came up. I would fill in the outline of him with memories

of my uncle and his Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or Councillor That down there,

a great man in his ward, J. P. within seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home. Here

he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant or a little too meek towards our very democratic

mannered but still livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He over ate himself lest he

should appear mean, went through our Special Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of

unfamiliar wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of flushed repletion, he

would have old brandy, black coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the brandy and

have rather more coffee, in the smokingroom. I would sit and watch that stiff dignity of selfindulgence,

An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of him in relation to his wife, checking

always, sometimes bullying, sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance furtively at his

domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business

employee. We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter

penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddleheaded

I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and others. What did he think he was up

to? Did he for a moment realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with me meant, if it

had any rational meaning at all, that we were jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and

mankind? . . . How on earth could any one get hold of him, make any noble use of him? He didn't read

beyond his newspaper. He never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart. He never discussed. At

the first hint of discussion his temper gave way. He was, I knew, a deep, thinlycovered tank of resentments

and quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist an impulse to go over to him and nudge

him and say to him, "Look here! What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and the empire and

So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone could be located, it seemed to me that this

silent, shy, replete, subangry, middleclass sentimentalist was in his endless species and varieties and

dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I could be considered as representing anything in the House, I

For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an air of coherent intentions. At that time

Socialism had come into politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous ECLAT.

There was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative

gentlemen in soft felt hats and short coats and squaretoed boots who replied to casual advances a little

surprisingly in rich North Country dialects. Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as Colonel

Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and

speaking with a fire that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip Snowden, the member for Blackburn.

They had come in nearly forty strong altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much

stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a big national movement. Socialist societies,

we gathered, were springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about Socialism and

discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest

intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly against. For a time our Young Liberal group was

When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain evening gatherings at our house. . . .

These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had

been very emphatic and uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed that even the

"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the other side. How can they begin to

"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora, "totally!" and quoted instances, "and they

WILL bring them. Or they won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their table manners.

I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's outburst. The presentation of the Socialist case

seemed very greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders; the want of intimacy didn't at

first appear to be more than an accident, and our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance and easy

intercourse afoot among them and between them and the Young Liberals of our group. She gave a series of

weekly dinners, planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's model, and after each we had as

Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as receptions could be. Margaret found herself

with a weekly houseful of insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one got a nightmare

It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one should be a little odd in appearance, funny

about the hair or the tie or the shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent aggression should alternate

with an attitude entirely defensive. A number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that never came,

and stood and sat about silently, mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did not discover their

distinctive OpenSesames. There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments,

far too many, I thought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to

become oracular. One was in a state of tension from first to last; the most innocent remark seemed capable of

exploding resentment, and replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young Liberals went about

puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked. The Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully

discreet, superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or Africa, and the neat, stiff figures

of the Cramptons, Bunting Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely wellcut morning coats indicative of the

House, or in what is sometimes written of as "faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they

and their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives, like a datum line amidst lakes and

I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary

and costume, just as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects should appear to be

supported solely by odd and exceptional personalities. On one of these evenings a little group of rather

jollylooking pretty young people seated themselves for no particular reason in a large circle on the floor of

my study, and engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning, the intellectual equivalent

of Hunt the Slipper. It must have been that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before

the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an anchovy sandwich from his protruded

tonguevisible ends of cress having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with doctrinally

permissible food. It was not unusual to be given hand bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had

the advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no

writingdesk available upon which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver. So that his

hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact little woman in what Margaret declared to be an extremely

expensive black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her heart upon my contributing to a

weekly periodical in the lentil interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and care in

Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of AntiPuritan Socialists, bulging with bias against

temperance, and breaking out against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their manner was packed

with heartiness. They were apt to choke the approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs,

and there engage in discussions of Determinismit always seemed to be Determinismwhich became

heartier and noisier, but never acrimonious even in the small hours. It seemed impossible to settle about this

Determinism of theirsever. And there were worldly Socialists also. I particularly recall a large, active,

buoyant, ladykilling individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black ribbon, who swam about us one

evening. He might have been a slightly frayed actor, in his large frockcoat, his white waistcoat, and the sort

of black and white check trousers that twinkle. He had a highpitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and

he seemed to be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are we all hea for?" he would ask only too

We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We tried to get something like a representative

collection of the parliamentary leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of Socialist thought and a number

of Young Liberal thinkers into one room. Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared for

ten minutes and talked charmingly to Margaret and then vanished again; there was Wilkins the novelist and

Toomer and Dr. Tumpany. Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, and Magdeberg and

Will Pipes and five or six Labour members. And on our side we had our particular little group, Bunting

Harblow, Crampton, Lewis, all looking as broadminded and open to conviction as they possibly could, and

even occasionally talking out from their bushes almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to

mingle or dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening was a failure. Unexpected dissociations

appeared between Socialists one had supposed friendly. I could not have imagined it was possible for half so

many people to turn their backs on everybody else in such small rooms as ours. But the unsaid things those

backs expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the various organs of the various sections

I talked, I rememher, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still larger professional frockcoat, and with

a great shock of very fair hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We discussed the

political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at that time, he was full of vague threatenings against the

Liberal party. I was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed less vividly in many others of these

Socialist leaders, and which gave me at last a clue to the whole business. He behaved exactly like a man in

possession of valuable patent rights, who wants to be dealt with. He had an air of having a corner in ideas.

Then it flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an attempted corner in ideas. . . .

Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris of the gathering.

I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white and weary, came and leant upon the

Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she was accustomed to wait for clues.

"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of the Socialist ideas, and see the men

who are running them," I explained. . . . "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out of the obvious

common sense of our present conditions. It's as impersonal as science. All these menThey've given nothing

to it. They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big intellectual NoMan'sLandand don't

feel quite sure of the law. There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness. . . . If we professed Socialism do you

"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I felt about them all the evening. . . .

"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find

He had made a mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated everybody from Owen onwards

who was in any way known as a Socialist leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what

it is todaya growing realisation of constructive needs in every man's mind, and a little corner in party

politics. So, I suppose, it will always be. . . . But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"

I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said, smiling indulgently, "today!" (Even the smile

I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an excellent word in that connection. . . .

But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's brains were no more than

steppingstones, just as though some great brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking

"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is

"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people," said Margaret, after a pause.

She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with

my thinking, and so I did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went

I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising out. . . .

It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that opposition to which I have already alluded of the

immediate life and the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs. The ideas go

onand no person or party succeeds in embodying them. The reality of human progress never comes to the

surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence while men think, in studies where they

write self forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination

of honest talk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday affairs. Everyday

affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,

interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal feeling, are their substance. No man can

abolish his immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself into

something a little less than the common man. He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve

him from a frontage. That is the essential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher, the

specialist publicist. They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is what bothered me about

Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream

of an official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first place,

or a statesman in the first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring Godlike gifts to the pretencea

quack. These are attempts to live deep side shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To

understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join a Socialist organisation is to join a

narrow cult which is not even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which it stands. . .

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had taken me some years to realise the true

relation of the great constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself. I had been

disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social construction, and to regard the other as

necessarily anticonstructive, just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the selfrighteousness of

supposing myself to be wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour

is necessarily constructiveminded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in

himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations. We

may be shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and have our salt of flattery

and selfapproval. In politics a man counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but for

his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held together not by a community of ultimate

aims, but by the stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for progress in general, and nearly

everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular method

of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of some definite

class or group of classes in the exciting community, and every party has its scientificminded and

constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public

spirited form, and its superficialminded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and prejudices.

No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is

indisposed to cooperate in the unlimited socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression upon

other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and

vanities sway and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve themselves for allin spite

The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of two great parties, with rider groups

seeking to gain specific ends in the event of a small Government majority. These two main parties are more

or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative

Party has always stood quite definitely for the established propertied interests. The landowner, the big

lawyer, the Established Church, and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has been

created by temperance legislation, are the essential Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy

are the families of the great international usurers, and a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise.

Outside the range of resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has always shown itself just

as constructive and collectivist as any other party. The great landowners have been as welldisposed towards

the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co operate with the Church in protective and mildly

educational legislation for children and the working class, as any political section. The financiers, too, are

adventurousspirited and eager for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared to spend

public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and public communications, upon sanitation and

hygienic organisation. A certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally characteristic of the liquor

trade. Provided his comfort leads to no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see the

common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar. All sections of the party are aggressively

patriotic and favourably inclined to the idea of an upstanding, wellfed, and wellexercised population in

uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners and oldfashioned country clergy, full of localised

selfimportance, jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the power nor the ability to

retard the constructive forces in the party as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely

confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective control of land, for example, or state mining and

manufactures, or the nationalisation of the socalled publichouse or extended municipal enterprise, or even

to an increase of the taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine bar. It

Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten

hours of labor, increase employment, and make better terms for the workingman tenant and workingman

purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally suspicious

of education and discipline, hostile to the higher education, andexcept for an obvious antagonism to

employers and property ownersalmost destitute of ideas. What else can it be? It stands for the expropriated

multitude, whose whole situation and difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and organising

power. It favours the nationalisation of land and capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the

process; but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of individuals which is implied by

military service is steadily and quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in recent years

that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is

still a very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous assemblage.

For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic. Liberalism never has been nor ever can be

anything but a diversified crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these other parties. It is

the party against the predominating interests. It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the

party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and planless association in comparison with

its antagonist, neither so constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to hinder the inevitable

constructions of the civilised state. Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a system of

hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together

of all the smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against the big established classes, the

leasehold tenant as against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the moneylender,

the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small employer as against the demoralising hospitable

publican, the man without introductions and broad connections against the man who has these things. It is the

party of the many small men against the fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving the

Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is doomed to absorption in that just as much as the

large owner; but it resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages common men pitted

themselves against the barons by siding with the king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"

because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party that is on the whole most set against

Collective control because it represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only so far as its

antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of the state. It organises only because

organisation is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses in and out of alliance with

Labour as it sways between hostility to wealth and hostility to public expenditure. . . .

Every modern European state will have in some form or other these three parties: the resistent, militant,

authoritative, dull, and unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party; the confused,

sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small, struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's

party; and a third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes reuniting with it, the party

of the altogether expropriated masses, the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to

Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in the United States. The Crown or a

dethroned dynasty, the Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions, the personalities

of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and confuse the selfexpression of these three necessary divisions

in the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the less for that. . . .

And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;the ideas go onas though we are all no more than

So it was I sat and thought my problem out. . . . I still remember my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at

last. It was like clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course, couldn't hold a party

together alone, "interests and habits, not ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of

Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily claimed only by this collection of odds and

ends, this residuum of disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the Socialist idea, but

of the scientific idea, the idea of veracityof human confidence in humanityof all that mattered in human

life outside the life of individuals. . . . The only real party that would ever profess Socialism was the Labour

Party, and that in the entirely onesided form of an irresponsible and nonconstructive attack on property.

Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted

Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it before? . . . I looked at my watch, and it was

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

territoriesthe 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 coordinated 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

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 cooperation 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

selfassertions, her fits of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on

Cramptonism and the heavyspirited 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 himmy hinterland, I have called

itso 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 wholeor at any rate completely think out definite partsof 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

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

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,

realspirited, that would in its own time give cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality

and in a light altogether beyond the matchstriking 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

(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 traditionworship 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 researchand whatever one does in human affairs has or lacks value as it helps or hinders

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 jerrybuilt slums, the roads that

went nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious noticeboards and barbed wire fencing, the litter and the heaps of

dump, were only the outward appearances whose ultimate realities were jerrybuilt conclusions, hasty

purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men.

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

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

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,

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

I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits of party Liberalism. In a sense I was

moving towards aristocracy. Regarding the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the

essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what

I may call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley of rich

people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of today, but as opposed to this, a possibility

of coordinating the will of the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must

have an aristocracynot of privilege, but of understanding and purposeor mankind will fail. I find this

dawning more and more clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and

I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the expansion of human life lies in the

direction of education and finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that

is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale

than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general

happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and education,

or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy

comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope

demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power

and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot be won to the idea of collective

selfdevelopment, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has

become my general conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination working upon the

vast complex of powerful people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people, amidst whom power

is diffused today, to produce that self conscious, highly selective, openminded, devoted aristocratic

culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human

progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a

natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and

acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and redirected by literature and art. . . .

But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed by the essential littleness of

Liberalism, and disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed Socialists, I turned my mind

more and more to a scrutiny of the big people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism

pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular job to work through

them and not against them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti? Weren't there big bold

qualities about these people that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were

they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible new braveries of life?

The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The conception of the Boer War had been

clumsy and puerile, the costly errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of Mr.

Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial adventurers of the Empire in one

vast conspiracy against the consumer. The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it was speedily

adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permitted big

mischief, and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that after all in some development of

the idea of Imperial patriotism might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression of a

constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational and philosophical movement such as no formula

of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal.

Mixed in with the noisiness and humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social efficiency, a

real spirit of animation and enterprise. There suddenly appeared in my worldI saw them first, I think, in

1908a new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching, cunning, cigarettesmoking,

townbred youngster, a small boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing, earnestly engaged

in wholesome and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond his strengththe Boy Scout. I

liked the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias in

favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and had indeed never

In those days there existed a dining club calledthere was some lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling

in its titlethe Pentagram Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns, Lord

Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of

Framboya, and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very

various experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. We

dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance of

ten out of fourteen. The dinnertime was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd how warm and

good the social atmosphere of that little gathering became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as

the waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us would open with perhaps fifteen or

twenty minutes' exposition of some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver ourselves in

turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one present had spoken once talk became general again, and

it was rare we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my house was conveniently near,

a knot of men would come home with me and go on talking and smoking in my diningroom until two or

three. We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and his stupendous flow of

words materially prolonged our closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.

I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more particularly did I become familiarised

with the habits of mind of such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists who

belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and

they were all mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal instead of

at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams of trade

could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the Empire by common interests, and they were

persuaded, I still think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal. They were

also very keen on military organisation, and with a curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill

for that side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were disposed to spend money much more

generously on education and research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed likely to do; and

they were altogether more accessible than the Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the

universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of the universities. I found myself constantly

falling into line with these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's sentimentalising

evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General

Trend of Progress." It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I believe all definite

party "sides" at any time are bound to be about equally right and equally lopsided; but that I thought I could

get more out of them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if I cooperated with them. By

1908 I had already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a transfer of my political

These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of a shining long white table, and our

hock bottles and burgundy bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy of

dessert, and scattered glasses and nutshells and cigaretteends and menucards used for memoranda. I see

old Dayton sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the

ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for

confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his

round face and round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths of misery whenever Neal

begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious

purposes in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as people say, his eye on me from the

beginning. He used to speak at me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly for an

"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny handed sons of toil. We want to get hold of

the handles, and to do that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as we can.

"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You and I and Bailey are all after the same

The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once attractive and repellent to me, an odd

secret society whose membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample

constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised

In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I was hesitating. Hesitations were

inevitable in such a matter. I was not dealing with any simple question of principle, but with elusive and

fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature of my own powers. All through that

period I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates mere dreamers? How farand this

was more vitalare they rendering lipservice to social organisations? Is it true they desire war because it

confirms the ascendency of their class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it

resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than a mass of prejudice and conceit,

cynical indulgence, and a hard suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the community?

That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon.

The shadowy answer varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was

watching. How fine can people be? How generous?not incidentally, but all round? How far can you

educate sons beyond the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self indulgent class above

the protests of its business agents and solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class

possible?was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable in

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

fellowmembers; 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,

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 newlyadded 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

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 nowfor

since that time I have got my phrase of "mental hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The

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,

repeatingquite regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others in the debatethe 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,

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 rubbishNietzsche. 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

Daytonwe 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

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 today. "I suppose

today all the thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter, are supplied so far as the

Englishspeaking community is concerned byhow 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 secondrate 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 breadcrumbs, 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 ourSALT 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 secondbest 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 stateto discover, develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that best

doneI drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activityby 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

"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 againand 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

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, shortfingered 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 necessaryurgently 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.

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

"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy,

"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to the ceiling, "if the House of Lords

"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 indeedif the Liberals come in

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 selfcontradictions. 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 aristocracyReform

"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those indeterminate, confused, eventful times

"Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said Thorns, "from the Young England

"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the peculiarity of English conservatism that it's

I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our presence, after some clumsy sentence that I

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

"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

"Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns. "I admit the horrors of the alternative.

"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

"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenlyhis first remark for a long time. "A firstrate figure," said

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

muddleheaded few to the muddleheaded 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

freemoving 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

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 glowbut 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

I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my developments it played a large part, not so

much by starting new trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already hesitatingly

entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that

otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians of Plato or the labour

laws of More. Among other questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that came apt to

every topic, was the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and

the imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that

democracy was really just a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official by means of the

polling booth. "If they don't like things," said he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what

happens thenand that, you see, is why we don't want proportional representation to let in the wild men." I

opened my eyesthe lids had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth soundsto see if

The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were pervaded by the feeling that all things

moved towards a day of reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up the

suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium, that sooner or later something must happen

theresomething very serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He was full of that old

Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be

annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would

declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse." Then he would cough

shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive

All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international conflict, and their influence revived for a

time those uneasinesses that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental journey with

Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors." That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all

the slackness, mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised commercialism

of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised

peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the

only thing capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on

the other hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a wasteful and

sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional

but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our mean standard of intellectual

attainment, our disingenuous criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to

carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility

and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful

subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost unconsciously,

dishonest. Germany is beating England in every matter upon which competition is possible, because she

attended sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects

she is still far more anxious for quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my paper.

From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is

like some of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus and suchlike; it

sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone, that is to say,especially in the visceral regionis bigger than

its cranium. It's no accident that things are so. We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, and if

the joints are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half awake to our error. You can't change

And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which haunted him of nights; he was trying

desperately and belatedly to blow a brain as one blows soapbubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had

conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer and nearer. . . .

I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that apprehension. I still think a European war, and

conceivably a very humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I do not think there is

any such heroic quality in our governing class as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in

English lifeit is one of the essential secrets of our imperial enduranceis one of underbred aggression in

prosperity and diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where we can and

assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing that our upper and middleclass youth is educated by teachers

of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't

upset the historical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage upon the

teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity of evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a larger

population, a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can

scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all. The war of

preparations that has been going on for thirty years may end like a shamfight at last in an umpire's decision.

We shall proudly but very firmly take the second place. For my own part, since I love England as much as I

detest her present lethargy of soul, I pray for a chastening warI wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only

her spirit would come out of it. So I was able to shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable

destruction truncating all my schemes. At the most, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the

In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see, disaster. The English rule in India is surely

one of the most extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there like a man who has

fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until

something happens he remains. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not own that country, do

not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. We suppress our own

literature there. Most English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent

it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one

dare bring the average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the Indian native have a

glimpse of the English voter. In my time I have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and exofficials,

viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what India signifies, and I have prayed them to

tell me what they thought we were up to there. I am not writing without my book in these matters. And

beyond a phrase or so about "evenhanded justice"and look at our sedition trials!they told me nothing.

Time after time I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the northwest, who, when asked what would

happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee

nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification. But is it our

business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better

plunder than paralysis, better fire and sword than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without plans,

without intentionsa vast preventive. The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any

conferences that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for themselves. But

that does not arrest the resentment of men held back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated

Indian sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged and his hands bound behind

him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for inaction

develops stupendous absurdities. The other day the British Empire was taking off and examining printed

In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our chance, and we have demonstrated

nothing but the appalling dulness of our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with

India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in

the home, cant about "character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men

and things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we great

schools and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our

lives, then indeed it might be different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to justify it.

It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India. That was my earlier mistake. We are

not proud enough in our bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon

India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We train our future rulers in the public schools

to have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of us, be it a

man or a culture, or a native state, we shall he willing to deal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our

governing class will be quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African

diplomacy, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such as it is, and preserve the

semblance of power. The conqueror DE FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at

home will be invited to celebrate our recessiontriumphantly. I am no believer in the imminent dissolution

of our Empire; I am less and less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of an abrupt

truncation of those slow intellectual and moral constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.

I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water this morning we had rain, and the roof of our

little casa is still not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent that crosses

the salita is full and boastful,and I try to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious

time, before I went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying chaotic taskto gauge the possibilities

inherent in the quality of the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks,

diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient

trees; of big facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of handsome,

easymannered people. As a sort of representative picture to set off against those other pictures of Liberals

and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at

Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge clustering mass of

white and gold saloons with polished floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a

Gargantuan scale. And there she sought to gather all that was most representative of English activities, and

did, in fact, in those brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of our social and

intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon the political and social side.

I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those

sharpminded, beautiful rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be

capable of everything, and we watched the crowd uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State

balland exchanged information. I told her about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the

aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful people among the

latter, and wondered if the general effect of tallness was or was not an illusion.

They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of people in London, and a handsome lot,

even when they were not subtly individualised. "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared for. I like

their quiet, welltrained movements, their pleasant consideration for each other."

"Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said, "like big, rather carefully trained, rather

"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an achievement. I don't think I could ever be

content under a bad tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the

Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across these big people for the first

time is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them. I

wouldn't at all mind, I believe, giving over the country to this aristocracygiven SOMETHING"

"I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done all sorts of things"

"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken you remember?at Spion Kop."

"It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the

sword. When I was a little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's got the V. C. Most of

"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained,

and yet kindly. I'm not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want to better this, because

"Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying to answer that! It makes me quarrel

with"I held up my fingers and ticked the items off"the public schools, the private tutors, the army

exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the country towards science and literature"

"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at the beginning," she added.

"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked a gleam of curiosity. . . . "You want," she

said, "to say to the aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to

"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are off the stage. These are the brilliant

So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not stated in our speech. They were on the

whole handsome people, charitable minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and there was

something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely. The women particularly were

widereading, fine thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as a man, and with

those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies of perception few men display. I liked, too, the

relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance, their antagonism to the harsh jealousies

After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type and culture of men, why shouldn't one

It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, but much harder to produce a sample. Was

old Lady Forthundred, for instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a

towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small

fine features and chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps and cushions upon the

great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you

would expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am afraid, posing

a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the great world, and she was

certainly posing as my informant. She affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the

governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all a peerage when they get twenty thousand

It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic theory currently working as distinguished from

"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps

everywhere, but you'll get a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what we're all

On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in education, Lady Forthundred scored.

We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my old schoolfellow at City Merchants',

and my victor in the affair of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of

energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of daily newspapers. I had expected to

find the great lady hostile to the newcomer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.

"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any nonsense about nobility."

She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a practical people. We assimilate 'um."

"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on. Sometimes better than others, but they go

I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a year by at least detrimental

"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred, courageously. . . .

Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the brains of the multitude of her first,

second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely, against

a background of deft, attentive maids and valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to

Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with his tall, bent body, his littlefeatured

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

franknessand 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

himhe was in the big house party at Champneystalked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat

beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. 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

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

"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

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

And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily

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 quarterand that perhaps the

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

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,

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 singlemindedly to make a place for

There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the great peers who had administered Egypt,

India, South Africa, FramboyaCromer, 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, illtrained 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 farsighted 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 CossingtonI 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 widethinking 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 himbut 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

"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little silver spiritlamp, 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 towell, 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, brownfaced 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, hattouching and courtesying, and be given a

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 thingsI 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 W., 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

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

One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the

Liberals. I realised that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even then questioning my

own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as

nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think

during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly, I think, out of

some comments of mine upon our fellowguests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and

quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite beginning or end. It was

afternoon, in the pause between tea and the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silveradorned,

chintzbright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden. . . . Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me

At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some

way too feminine for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I know, that Champneys

I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least affected people I had ever met. "And are

they really so extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any other

"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale and spirit of things."

I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before her out of the window.

I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of

it from Altiora, and it was also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us.

"You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy girl. Every one knows about it. I shiver when I

look at him. He seemsoh! like something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to

"No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners arequite right. That only makes it worse, I think. It

shows he might have helpedall that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none of

I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I said. "No! . . .

But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation displayed, weren't more than the sharp

edge of the trouble. "It's their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy against the

mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white

reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem

to feel the slums and the mines and the overcrowded cottages stuffed away under the table."

I was moved to question her. "Do you really think," I asked, "that the Tories and peers and rich people are to

blame for social injustice as we have it today? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the Liberal

I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have seemed the perversest carping

against manifest things, but at the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view and my

own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were possible. It was perfectly clear

that she saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the

clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library at

Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my

replete citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton discussing the care and

management of the stomach over a specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive

frockcoat pegging out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and wings of the angelic side. It was

"I don't see things at all as you do," I said. "I don't see things in the same way."

"Think of every one," I said. "We Liberals have done more mischief through wellintentioned benevolence

than all the selfishness in the world could have done. We built up the liquor interest."

"Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent people drinking what they liked,

"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking mere wickedness.

"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half cunning, halfsilly way of getting at everything

in a roundabout fashion. If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal with it as such,

but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some cases lead to a

neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink

that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't intensify the viciousness of the publichouse by

assuming the place isn't fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the publichouse FIT

for women and children. Make it a real public house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall

presently want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt men to forgery. We do already

threaten the privacy of the post because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow,

I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst

trimcut borderings of yew. Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow

I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking. Make

people fine, make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually than the

average; why cast them for the villains of the piece? The real villain in the piecein the whole human

dramais the muddleheadedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuousminded or wicked. I want to get

at muddleheadedness. If I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do

what it jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightly neglected dogin an otherwise well

"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest distress. "I can't understand how it is you are

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

"thinkingout" 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, illpresented march of

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 retalks, the meditations, the bleak

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

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 doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had

stagemanaged 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

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,

At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham

and that dream of the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would go over to the

Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the side of such forces on that side as made for

educational reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. That was in

1909. I judged the Tories were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought them bound to

incur an electoral defeat. I underestimated their strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a

period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving

in this an immense opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by conflict and on the

defensive, and full of the idea of justification by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought

and high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the now inevitable struggle for a

reform of the House of Lords, there would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that we

At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite

She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of

golden satin, very rich looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of goldset amber

beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where

I had been escapes me,some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her room. I remember I didn't speak

for some moments. I went across to the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the railed

garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the

Margaret stood at her dressingtable, looking steadfastly at herself in the glass, and with her fingers playing

with a litter of stoppered bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to this," she said.

"In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't have gone into Parliament. . . ."

There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressingtable, lifted an ivory handglass, and put it down

"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were possible that you shouldn't do this." She

stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to control herself.

There came another silence. "It's all gone so differently," she said. "Everything has gone so differently."

I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I

realised just how perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to her.

"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming. ButI still don't understand it. I don't

"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader" She could not finish it. "All the forces of

"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I can find work to dobetter work on that side."

"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if it didn't call upon every able man!"

She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of her. "WHY have you gone over?" she asked

There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff dissertation from the hearthrug. "I am going

over, because I think I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side. I think that in the

coming struggle there will be a partial and altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that

will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into an energetic revival. They will set out to

win back, and win back. Even if my estimate of contemporary forces is wrong and they win, they will still

be forced to reconstruct their outlook. A war abroad will supply the chastening if home politics fail. The

effort at renascence is bound to come by either alternative. I believe I can do more in relation to that effort

than in any other connexion in the world of politics at the present time. That's my case, Margaret."

She certainly did not grasp what I said. "And so you will throw aside all the beginnings, all the beliefs and

pledges" Again her sentence remained incomplete. "I doubt if even, once you have gone over, they will

"I came into Parliament, Margaret," I said, "a little prematurely. StillI suppose it was only by coming into

Parliament that I could see things as I do now in terms of personality and imaginative range. . . ." I stopped.

"Keep my seat for a time and make the reasons of my breach clear. Then either I must resign orprobably

this new Budget will lead to a General Election. It's evidently meant to strain the Lords and provoke a

"I shall make my quarrel over some points in the Budget. I can't quite tell you yet where my chance will

come. Then I shall either resign my seator if things drift to dissolution I shall stand again."

"I can't imagine you out of Parliament again. It's just likelike undoing all we have done. What will you

"Write. Make a new, more definite place for myself. You know, of course, there's already a sort of group

"For me," she said at last, "our political work has been a religion it has been more than a religion."

I heard in silence. I had no form of protest available against the implications of that.

"And then I find you turning against all we aimed to dotalking of going over, almost lightlyto those

She was whitelipped as she spoke. In the most curious way she had captured the moral values of the

situation. I found myself protesting ineffectually against her fixed conviction. "It's because I think my duty

"Oh!" she said and clenched her hand upon the table. "That it should have come to this!"

She was extraordinarily dignified and extraordinarily absurd. She was hurt and thwarted beyond measure.

She had no place in her ideas, I thought, for me. I could see how it appeared to her, but I could not make her

see anything of the intricate process that had brought me to this divergence. The opposition of our intellectual

temperaments was like a gag in my mouth. What was there for me to say? A flash of intuition told me that

behind her white dignity was a passionate disappointment, a shattering of dreams that needed before

There was another long silence. "So that is how we stand," I said with an air of having things defined. I

I closed the door softly. I remained for a moment or so on the big landing, hesitating between my bedroom

and my study. As I did so I heard the soft rustle of her movement and the click of the key in her bedroom

"Damnation!" I said wincing. "Why the devil can't people at least THINK in the same manner?"

And that insufficient colloquy was the beginning of a prolonged estrangement between us. It was

characteristic of our relations that we never reopened the discussion. The thing had been in the air for some

time; we had recognised it now; the widening breach between us was confessed. My own feelings were

curiously divided. It is remarkable that my very real affection for Margaret only became evident to me with

this quarrel. The changes of the heart are very subtle changes. I am quite unaware how or when my early

romantic love for her purity and beauty and highprincipled devotion evaporated from my life; but I do know

that quite early in my parliamentary days there had come a vague, unconfessed resentment at the tie that

seemed to hold me in servitude to her standards of private living and public act. I felt I was caught, and none

the less so because it had been my own act to rivet on my shackles. So long as I still held myself bound to her

that resentment grew. Now, since I had broken my bonds and taken my line it withered again, and I could

But I still felt embarrassment with her. I felt myself dependent upon her for house room and food and social

support, as it were under false pretences. I would have liked to have separated our financial affairs altogether.

But I knew that to raise the issue would have seemed a last brutal indelicacy. So I tried almost furtively to

keep my personal expenditure within the scope of the private income I made by writing, and we went out

together in her motor brougham, dined and made appearances, met politely at breakfastparted at night with

a kiss upon her cheek. The locking of her door upon me, which at that time I quite understood, which I

understand now, became for a time in my mind, through some obscure process of the soul, an offence. I never

In all this matter, and, indeed, in all my relations with Margaret, I perceive now I behaved badly and

foolishly. My manifest blunder is that I, who was several years older than she, much subtler and in many

ways wiser, never in any measure sought to guide and control her. After our marriage I treated her always as

an equal, and let her go her way; held her responsible for all the weak and ineffective and unfortunate things

she said and did to me. She wasn't clever enough to justify that. It wasn't fair to expect her to sympathise,

anticipate, and understand. I ought to have taken care of her, roped her to me when it came to crossing the

difficult places. If I had loved her more, and wiselier and more tenderly, if there had not been the

consciousness of my financial dependence on her always stiffening my pride, I think she would have moved

with me from the outset, and left the Liberals with me. But she did not get any inkling of the ends I sought in

my change of sides. It must have seemed to her inexplicable perversity. She had, I knewfor surely I knew

it thenan immense capacity for loyalty and devotion. There she was with these treasures untouched,

neglected and perplexed. A woman who loves wants to give. It is the duty and business of the man she has

married for love to help her to help and give. But I was stupid. My eyes had never been opened. I was stiff

with her and difficult to her, because even on my wedding morning there had been, deep down in my soul,

voiceless though present, something weakly protesting, a faint perception of wrong doing, the

In many ways I was disposed to regard the 1909 Budget as a fine piece of statecraft. Its production was

certainly a very unexpected display of vigour on the Liberal side. But, on the whole, this movement towards

collectivist organisation on the part of the Liberals rather strengthened than weakened my resolve to cross the

floor of the house. It made it more necessary, I thought, to leaven the purely obstructive and reactionary

elements that were at once manifest in the opposition. I assailed the land taxation proposals in one main

speech, and a series of minor speeches in committee. The line of attack I chose was that the land was a great

public service that needed to be controlled on broad and farsighted lines. I had no objection to its

nationalisation, but I did object most strenuously to the idea of leaving it in private hands, and attempting to

produce beneficial social results through the pressure of taxation upon the landowning class. That might

break it up in an utterly disastrous way. The drift of the government proposals was all in the direction of

sweating the landowner to get immediate values from his property, and such a course of action was bound to

give us an irritated and vindictive landowning class, the class upon which we had hitherto reliednot

unjustifiablyfor certain broad, patriotic services and an influence upon our collective judgments that no

other class seemed prepared to exercise. Abolish landlordism if you will, I said, buy it out, but do not drive it

to a defensive fight, and leave it still sufficiently strong and wealthy to become a malcontent element in your

state. You have taxed and controlled the brewer and the publican until the outraged Liquor Interest has

become a national danger. You now propose to do the same thing on a larger scale. You turn a class which

has many fine and truly aristocratic traditions towards revolt, and there is nothing in these or any other of

your proposals that shows any sense of the need for leadership to replace these traditional leaders you are

ousting. This was the substance of my case, and I hammered at it not only in the House, but in the press. . . .

Then it woke up suddenly, and began, in the columns of the KINGSHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN, an

indignant, confused outcry. I was treated to an open letter, signed Junius Secundus," and I replied in

provocative terms. There were two thinly attended public meetings at different ends of the constituency, and

then I had a correspondence with my old friend Parvill, the photographer, which ended in my seeing a

My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty people. They had had to come upstairs to me

and they were manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There was Parvill himself, J.P.,

dressed wholly in blackI think to mark his sense of the occasionand curiously suggestive in his respect

for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of

Mark Antony at the funeral of Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never abandoned the

widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest

type was part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick Newton, a bright young Hebrew

of the graver type, and a couple of dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway between

the bowler of this world and the shovelhat of heaven. There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in

the horsey style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and a face contracting below as

though the jawbones and teeth had been taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation,

which included two other publicspirited ladies and several ministers of religion, might have been raked out

of any omnibus going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill forward as spokesman, and

manifested a strong disposition to say "Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't

I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but quite definite utterances drew to an end. I had a

moment of vision. Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand for public opinion,

that are as much public opinion as exists indeed at the present time. The whole process of politics which

bulks so solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth of petty motives above abysms of

"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll resign if there isn't a dissolution before next

February, and if there is I shan't stand again. You don't want the bother and expense of a byeelection

(approving murmurs) if it can be avoided. But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be

necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the better for the party. The Lords are in a

corner; they've got to fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget. Then they will go on

fighting. It is a fight that will last for years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You

Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared

with any ideas whatever in the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British constitution

uptodate. Anything may happen, provided only that it is sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the

Lordsand I don't see why he shouldn'tyou have no Republican movement whatever to fall back upon.

You lost it during the Era of Good Taste. The country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to

give it. I don't see what you will do. . . . For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between a window and

I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all this with very great regret. . . ."

My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that played itself out within the

four walls of our house in Radnor Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and fro

between my house and the House of Commons, and the diningrooms and clubs and offices in which we

were preparing our new developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state,

as a chemist would say. I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous sense of

released energies. I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself

for so long in my imagination. Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial. We meant no

less than to organise a new movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare

For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to do. Shoesmith responded to my first

advances. We decided to create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to

collect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger

men, which should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch

on Tuesday to sustain our general co operations. We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of

our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all sorts

of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in my editorial decisions.

My only influential councillor at first was old Britten, who became my subeditor. It was curious how we

two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give and take of our speculative

For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work. Britten was an experienced journalist, and I

had most of the necessary instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper right and good down to the

smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this with extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our

political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust storm and tumult and stress of the political

struggle of 1910, we made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing. It was the firm

belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the longer

game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and tumult of that immediate conflict were over.

As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly conceived and consistent political attitude. As

I will explain later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane great searching

of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues,

and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Breakup of the Poor Law

agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In addition, without any very

definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set

That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE WEEKLY. I was now very definitely

convinced that much of the confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the general need of

metaphysical training. . . . The great mass of peopleand not simply common people, but people active and

influential in intellectual thingsare still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent

of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous

and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found

to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have at some

time or other discovered general terms and a certain use for generalisations. They areto fall back on the

ancient technicalityRealists of a crude sort. When I say Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to

Nominalist, and not Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to Idealist. Such are the

Baileys; such, to take their great prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are whole

regiments of prominent and entirely selfsatisfied contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of

definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest belief in the validity of the intellectual

instrument they are using. They are RealistsCocksuristsin matter of fact; sentimentalists in behaviour.

The Baileys having got to this glorious stage in mental developmentit is glorious because it has no

doubtswere always talking about training "Experts" to apply the same simple process to all the affairs of

mankind. Well, Realism isn't the last word of human wisdom. Modestminded people, doubtful people,

subtle people, and the likethe kind of people William James writes of as "toughminded," go on beyond

this methodical happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms. They are truerand less

confident. They have reached scepticism and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new

Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs

of mankind, that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can only function properly upon

neoNominalist lines. This has always been her side of our mental cooperation rather than mine. Her mind

has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power; she has a wonderful art in illustration,

and, as the reader probably knows already, she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm and

vividness. So far there has been no collection of her papers published, but they are to be found not only in the

BLUE WEEKLY columns but scattered about the monthlies; many people must be familiar with her style. It

was an intention we did much to realise before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY

to maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last scarcely a week passed but some

popular distinction, some large imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or mine. . . .

I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social matter the best literary and critical backing

we could get in London. I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good criticism; I was

indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider, if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the

paper, and had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that draws in the unattached reader. The

chief danger on the literary side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some particular school, and

this I watched for closely. It seems impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view together

in the same critic. So it falls to the wise editor to secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected

the shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor thing because it was "in the right direction,"

or damn a vigorous piece of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out with him. Our pay was

Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat persistent appeal to the public eye, and before

1911 was out, the BLUE WEEKLY was printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements, and went into

all the clubs in London and threequarters of the country houses where weekend parties gather together. Its

sale by newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily. One got more and more the reassuring sense of being

Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside my

desk, a big undivided window of plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the corner of the Hotel

Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and the long sweep of south bank with its shot towers and

chimneys, past Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge below the Tower. The dome of St. Paul's

just floated into view on the left against the hotel facade. By night and day, in every light and atmosphere, it

was a beautiful and various view, alive as a throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed

the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things became velvet black and grey, and the

water a shining mirror of steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the Embankment trams

sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements flashed and flickered, trains went and came and a rolling

drift of smoke reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a marvel of shining wet and

windcleared atmosphere, sometimes a mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details,

As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, I am back there, and this sunlit paper might be

lamplit and lying on my old desk. I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is a green shaded lamp

and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the

shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long

window seat black in the darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window. How often I would

watch some tramcar, some string of barges go from me slowly out of sight. The people were black

animalculae by day, clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom facespecks coming,

I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came, hours full of the peculiar happiness of

effective strenuous work. Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful of time until I

looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the

Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But I am concerned with a more tangled business than

selection, I want to show a contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the social

organism in relation to that man. To tell my story at all I have to simplify. I have given now the broad lines of

my political development, and how I passed from my initial liberalsocialism to the conception of a

constructive aristocracy. I have tried to set that out in the form of a man discovering himself. Incidentally that

selfdevelopment led to a profound breach with my wife. One has read stories before of husband and wife

speaking severally two different languages and coming to an understanding. But Margaret and I began in her

I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended for me. I have tried to tell all that sex

and women had been to me up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement, tried to show the

queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in which these interests break upon the life of a young man

under contemporary conditions. I do not think my lot was a very exceptional one. I missed the chance of

sisters and girl playmates, but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small families; I never

came to know any woman at all intimately until I was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were

encounters of sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them things in themselves,

restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I

had passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great

affairs. For a time Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and so near; she was like a

person who stands suddenly in front of a little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She

didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from my world. . . . And then came this

Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development of my relations with Isabel which

chanced to follow it, I seemed to have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I thought

these things were over. I went about my career with Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner

faintly strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished sex we had at least so

circumscribed and isolated it that it would not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest

And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and her problems, this old, this fundamental

obsession of my life returned. The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its invasion and how it

was changing our long intimacy. I have already compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli

writing in his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these high affairs as, let us say, the

chemistry of air or the will of the beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and woman has

come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting,

interrupting, demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I feel that in these matters my

life has been almost typical of my time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere physical

need, an aesthetic byeplay, a sentimental background; she is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's

life. She comes to the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a thing or a soul? She comes

to the individual man, as she came to me and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an

unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and controlled, bond or free? For if she is a

mate, one must at once trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest, most necessary

thing of all, the clearest, most shameless, explicitness of understanding. . . .

In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed either that the relations of the sexes were all

right or that anyhow they didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they" were, had to settle

among themselves. That sort of disregard was possible then. But even before 1906 there were endless

intimations that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were crumbling. We political schemers

were ploughing wider than any one had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction. We had also, we

realised, to plough deeper. We had to plough down at last to the passionate elements of sexual relationship

The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the

House from one clamorous aspect of the new problem. The members went about Westminster with an odd,

new sense of being beset. A good proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an

isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would presently pass. But it was manifest to any one

who sought more than comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and money

forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle fancy for the franchise. The existing laws and

conventions of relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a disorder as anything else

in our tumbled confusion of a world, and that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.

My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't propose to tell here of that amazing

campaign, with its absurdities and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that unquenchable

agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that were absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise,

and, except for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was amazingly effective. The very

incoherence of the demand witnessed, I think, to the forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple argument

based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent

feelings, of a widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the conditions of their

relations with men were oppressive, ugly, dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had not merely adopted

the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that, given it, they meant to use it, and to use it

perhaps even vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had every reason to hate. . . .

I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in the session of 1909, whenI think it

wasfifty or sixty women went to prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I came

down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a confusion outside the Caxton Hall. We found

ourselves drifting with an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a silent,

closepacked column of girls and women, for the most part whitefaced and intent. I still remember the

effect of their faces upon me. It was quite different from the general effect of staring about and divided

attention one gets in a political procession of men. There was an expression of heroic tension.

There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's organisers to the Unemployed, who had

been demonstrating throughout that winter, to join forces with the movement, and the result was shown in the

quality of the crowd upon the pavement. It was an ugly, dangerouslooking crowd, but as yet goodtempered

and sympathetic. When at last we got within sight of the House the square was a seething seat of excited

people, and the array of police on horse and on foot might have been assembled for a revolutionary outbreak.

There were dense masses of people up Whitehall, and right on to Westminster Bridge. The scuffle that ended

in the arrests was the poorest explosion to follow such stupendous preparations. . . .

Later on in that year the women began a new attack. Day and night, and all through the long nights of the

Budget sittings, at all the piers of the gates of New Palace Yard and at St. Stephen's Porch, stood women

pickets, and watched us silently and reproachfully as we went to and fro. They were women of all sorts,

though, of course, the independent workerclass predominated. There were greyheaded old ladies standing

there, sturdily charming in the rain; battered looking, ambiguous women, with something of the desperate

bitterness of battered women showing in their eyes; northcountry factory girls; cheaplydressed suburban

women; trim, comfortable mothers of families; valianteyed girl graduates and undergraduates; lank,

hungrylooking creatures, who stirred one's imagination; one very dainty little woman in deep mourning, I

recall, grave and steadfast, with eyes fixed on distant things. Some of those women looked defiant, some

timidly aggressive, some full of the stir of adventure, some drooping with cold and fatigue. The supply never

ceased. I had a mortal fear that somehow the supply might halt or cease. I found that continual siege of the

legislature extraordinarily impressiveinfinitely more impressive than the feebleforcible "ragging" of the

more militant section. I thought of the appeal that must be going through the country, summoning the women

I remember too the petty little difficulty I felt whether I should ignore these pickets altogether, or lift a hat as

I hurried past with averted eyes, or look them in the face as I did so. Towards the end the House evoked an

There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a

disconnected issue, irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political life. We struggled, all of

us, to ignore the indicating finger it thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it insisted to

our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to the essential things. . . ."

We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient children will starve amidst harvests of earless

futility. That conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its essentials the habitual daily life is all

against a profounder treatment of political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly as the philosopher, tends

constantly, in spite of magnificent preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality he has so

stupendously summonedhe bolts back to littleness. The world has to be moulded anew, he continues to

admit, but without, he adds, any risk of upsetting his weekend visits, his morning cup of tea. . . .

The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one. It reacts upon the private life of every

one who attempts it. And at any particular time only a small minority have a personal interest in changing the

established state of affairs. Habit and interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious change

and adjustment in these matters. Drift rules us. The great mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of

influential people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their compromise. Wonderful and

beautiful possibilities are no longer to be thought about. They have given up any aspirations for intense love,

their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of

righteousness as their compensation. It's a settled affair with them, a settled, dangerous affair. Most of them

fear, and many hate, the slightest reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to the

Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal marriage and divorce law throughout

the Empire, "I am for leaving all these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice, "Leave them alone!

That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed passion, and presently, against all our

For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone. I developed a dread and dislike for

romance, for emotional music, for the human figure in artturning my heart to landscape. I wanted to sneer

at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable until I found the effective sneer. In matters of private

morals these were my most uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of these things any more for ever. I

hated the people whose talk or practice showed they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe that their

views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible, because I had decided to treat them as at that level.

And yet one cannot help thinking! The sensible moralised man finds it hard to escape the stream of

suggestion that there are still dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,the appeal of beauty

suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer nights, the sweetness of distant music. . .

It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the present time, which penalises abandonment to love

so abundantly and so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to unencumbered people and

sterile people and people who have married for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling

has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't understand what it is to fall in love, what

it is to desire children or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the supreme claim of good

births and selective births above all other affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most

It wasn't, however, my deepening sympathy with and understanding of the position of women in general, or

the change in my ideas about all these intimate things my fast friendship with Isabel was bringing about, that

led me to the heretical views I have in the last five years dragged from the region of academic and timid

discussion into the field of practical politics. Those influences, no doubt, have converged to the same end,

and given me a powerful emotional push upon my road, but it was a broader and colder view of things that

first determined me in my attempt to graft the Endowment of Motherhood in some form or other upon British

Imperialism. Now that I am exiled from the political world, it is possible to estimate just how effectually that

I have explained how the ideas of a trained aristocracy and a universal education grew to paramount

importance in my political scheme. It is but a short step from this to the question of the quantity and quality

of births in the community, and from that again to these forbidden and fearbeset topics of marriage, divorce,

and the family organisation. A sporadic discussion of these aspects had been going on for years, a Eugenic

society existed, and articles on the Falling Birth Rate, and the Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit were staples

of the monthly magazines. But beyond an intermittent scolding of prosperous childless people in

generalone never addressed them in particularnothing was done towards arresting those adverse

processes. Almost against my natural inclination, I found myself forced to go into these things. I came to the

conclusion that under modern conditions the isolated private family, based on the existing marriage contract,

was failing in its work. It wasn't producing enough children, and children good enough and well trained

enough for the demands of the developing civilised state. Our civilisation was growing outwardly, and

decaying in its intimate substance, and unless it was presently to collapse, some very extensive and

courageous reorganisation was needed. The old haphazard system of pairing, qualified more and more by

worldly discretions, no longer secures a young population numerous enough or good enough for the growing

needs and possibilities of our Empire. Statecraft sits weaving splendid garments, no doubt, but with a puny,

No one so far has dared to take up this problem as a present question for statecraft, but it comes unheralded,

unadvocated, and sits at every legislative board. Every improvement is provisional except the improvement

of the race, and it became more and more doubtful to me if we were improving the race at all! Splendid and

beautiful and courageous people must come together and have children, women with their fine senses and

glorious devotion must be freed from the net that compels them to be celibate, compels them to be childless

and useless, or to bear children ignobly to men whom need and ignorance and the treacherous pressure of

circumstances have forced upon them. We all know that, and so few dare even to whisper it for fear that they

should seem, in seeking to save the family, to threaten its existence. It is as if a party of pigmies in a not too

capacious room had been joined by a carnivorous giant and decided to go on living happily by cutting him

The problem the developing civilised state has to solve is how it can get the best possible increase under the

best possible conditions. I became more and more convinced that the independent family unit of today, in

which the man is master of the wife and owner of the children, in which all are dependent upon him,

subordinated to his enterprises and liable to follow his fortunes up or down, does not supply anything like the

best conceivable conditions. We want to modernise the family footing altogether. An enormous premium

both in pleasure and competitive efficiency is put upon voluntary childlessness, and enormous inducements

are held out to women to subordinate instinctive and selective preferences to social and material

The practical reaction of modern conditions upon the old tradition of the family is this: that beneath the

pretence that nothing is changing, secretly and with all the unwholesomeness of secrecy everything is

changed. Offspring fall away, the birth rate falls and falls most among just the most efficient and active and

best adapted classes in the community. The species is recruited from among its failures and from among less

civilised aliens. Contemporary civilisations are in effect burning the best of their possible babies in the

furnaces that run the machinery. In the United States the native AngloAmerican strain has scarcely

increased at all since 1830, and in most Western European countries the same is probably true of the ablest

and most energetic elements in the community. The women of these classes still remain legally and

practically dependent and protected, with the only natural excuse for their dependence gone. . . .

The modern world becomes an immense spectacle of unsatisfactory groupings; here childless couples bored

to death in the hopeless effort to sustain an incessant honeymoon, here homes in which a solitary child grows

unsocially, here small two or threechild homes that do no more than continue the culture of the parents at a

great social cost, here numbers of unhappy educated but childless married women, here careless, decivilised

fecund homes, here orphanages and asylums for the heedlessly begotten. It is just the disorderly proliferation

What is the good, what is the common sense, of rectifying boundaries, pushing research and discovery,

building cities, improving all the facilities of life, making great fleets, waging wars, while this aimless

It is difficult now to trace how I changed from my early aversion until I faced this mass of problems. But so

far back as 1910 I had it clear in my mind that I would rather fail utterly than participate in all the surrenders

of mind and body that are implied in Dayton's snarl of "Leave it alone; leave it all alone!" Marriage and the

begetting and care of children, is the very ground substance in the life of the community. In a world in which

everything changes, in which fresh methods, fresh adjustments and fresh ideas perpetually renew the

circumstances of life, it is preposterous that we should not even examine into these matters, should rest

Now, it seems to me that the solution of this problem is also the solution of the woman's individual problem.

The two go together, are right and left of one question. The only conceivable way out from our IMPASSE

lies in the recognition of parentage, that is to say of adequate mothering, as no longer a chance product of

individual passions but a service rendered to the State. Women must become less and less subordinated to

individual men, since this works out in a more or less complete limitation, waste, and sterilisation of their

essentially social function; they must become more and more subordinated as individually independent

citizens to the collective purpose. Or, to express the thing by a familiar phrase, the highly organised, scientific

state we desire must, if it is to exist at all, base itself not upon the irresponsible manruled family, but upon

the matriarchal family, the citizenship and freedom of women and the public endowment of motherhood.

After two generations of confused and experimental revolt it grows clear to modern women that a conscious,

deliberate motherhood and mothering is their special function in the State, and that a personal subordination

to an individual man with an unlimited power of control over this intimate and supreme duty is a degradation.

No contemporary woman of education put to the test is willing to recognise any claim a man can make upon

her but the claim of her freelygiven devotion to him. She wants the reality of her choice and she means

"family" while a man too often means only possession. This alters the spirit of the family relationships

fundamentally. Their form remains just what it was when woman was esteemed a pretty, desirable, and

incidentally a childproducing, chattel. Against these timehonoured ideas the new spirit of womanhood

I confess myself altogether feminist. I have no doubts in the matter. I want this coddling and browbeating of

women to cease. I want to see women come in, free and fearless, to a full participation in the collective

purpose of mankind. Women, I am convinced, are as fine as men; they can be as wise as men; they are

capable of far greater devotion than men. I want to see them citizens, with a marriage law framed primarily

for them and for their protection and the good of the race, and not for men's satisfactions. I want to see them

bearing and rearing good children in the State as a generously rewarded public duty and service, choosing

their husbands freely and discerningly, and in no way enslaved by or subordinated to the men they have

chosen. The social consciousness of women seems to me an unworked, an almost untouched mine of wealth

for the constructive purpose of the world. I want to change the respective values of the family group

altogether, and make the home indeed the women's kingdom and the mother the owner and responsible

It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a

new method of social organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human expericnceas

untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800. Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of

marriage profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not believe that particular assertion

myself, because I am convinced that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass of

civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still keep to my present line, because it is the only line

that will prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological decay. The public Endowment of

Motherhood is the only possible way which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at which

all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the lifehistory of a civilisation when either this

reconstruction must be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove insufficient for the

needs of the developing organisation. It is not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral

inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only alternative to this profound reconstruction is

a decay in human quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented rearrangement must be achieved by

our civilisation, or it must presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as Rome

perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope

I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price of constructive realities. These questions

were no doubt monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a politician alive who didn't look

scared at the mention of "The Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social reconstructions

on which my life was set, that did not matter. It only implied that I should take them up with deliberate

The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project in this direction was going on in my

mind concurrently with my speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a complex piece of

music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt

I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task. But as I came to look into the possibilities of

the matter, a strong persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative proposals affecting the

family basis was excessive, that things were much riper for development in this direction than

oldexperienced people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to phrase the thing in a

parliamentary fashion, "something might be done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood

forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that anything a sane person could possibly intend by

I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a

sillyseason discussion of State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics, upon the fall in

the birthrate, and similar topics in the BLUE WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy

of the public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more struck by the acceptance won by a

And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the Handitch election, and I was forced

by the clamour of my antagonist, and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I returned

triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of Motherhood as part of my open profession and

with the full approval of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me on my way to the

That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new members, but salient, an event, a symbol of

Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell

how I was swept out of this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third Book as I opened it, with

an admission of difficulties and complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to confess

Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing realisation that the essential quality of

all political and social effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of individual lives.

That is the collective human reality, the basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be

given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of individual lives. . . .

I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this book the part United Italy plays in

Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth

and rightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more into a disciplined and

understanding relation to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of

Now I come back to personality and the story of my selfbetrayal, and how it is I have had to leave all that

farreaching scheme of mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases them.

I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is to tell how Isabel and I have made a

It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was a vein in our natures that led to this collapse,

gradually and at this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our destructionfor indeed

politically we could not be more extinct if we had been shot deadin the form of a catastrophe as

disconnected and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two friends and crushing them

both. But I do not think that is true to our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The thing

was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its

impulsive effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two men at a hundred yards may

shoot at each other with pistols for a considerable time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable to talk

Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.

In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in steering my way between two equally undesirable

tones in the telling. In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my sins with a penitence I am very

doubtful if I feel. Now that I have got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel unquenchable

regrets, but I am not sure whether, if we could be put back now into such circumstances as we were in a year

ago, or two years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over again very much as I did. And

on the other hand I do not want to justify the things we have done. We are two bad peopleif there is to be

any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted badly, and quite apart from any other considerations

we've largely wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer humour that underlies all this,

that I find myself slipping again and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as unpremeditated

as it is insincere. When I am a little tired after a morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into

every other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the fashion of the prophet Hosea,

profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my book

that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may read elsewhere in the story, intimating however

shyly an esoteric and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this business is that Isabel and I

wanted each other with a want entirely formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell

you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were this a book in her praise, I cannot either

I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of wild rightness about any love that is fraught

with beauty, but that eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the real veracities and

righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and menageries of human reason. . . .

We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a

justification. But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of Eugenics between us. Ours was

a mutual and not a philoprogenitive passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us, but

it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent

But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective excuse in the mental confusedness of our time.

The evasion of that passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of morality, which is the

outcome of the mercenary religious compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of

anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our literature and drama, the pervading

cultivated and protected muddle headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous

possibilities of destruction and little effective help. They find themselves confronted by the habits and

prejudices of manifestly commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patchedup Christianity, the cult of

a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused, scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any possibility

of faith behind the plea of good taste. A god about whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We

are FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is inevitable that a considerable fraction

of just that bolder, more initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that can least be spared

from the collective life in a period of trial and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster

as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down, many more than the world can spare. It is

the unwritten law of all our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest open scandal ends

a career. England in the last quarter of a century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would, I

believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should

seem the cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary social element? It destroys no vice;

for vice hides by nature. It not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an enormous

premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I am telling this side of my story with so much

Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a desultory friendship with Isabel. At

first it was rather Isabel kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa, with its three or

four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead,

Isabel would turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk all she was reading and thinking

to me, and stay for all the rest of the day. In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a savage. She

would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me

for some long ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the constituency with amazing skill.

She took possession of me in that unabashed, straightminded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a man,

chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude for my welfare that was absurd and

delightful. And we talked. We discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history, pictures, social

questions, socialism, the policy of the Government. She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was

amazingly sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a girl of her age, or a woman of

her quality. I had never dreamt there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless place when

she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!

She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with me when presently after my breach with

the Liberals various little undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions. I favoured

Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At that time I think we neither of us suspected the

possibility of passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It seemed to us that we had the

quaintest, most delightful friendship in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher, and

friend. People smiled indulgentlyeven Margaret smiled indulgentlyat our attraction for one another.

Such friendships are not uncommon nowadaysamong easygoing, liberalminded people. For the most

part, there's no sort of harm, as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never supposed to think

of the passionate love that hovers so close to the friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think

we kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it did in odd moments come into our

Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and tremendously insistent upon each other's

I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should have set me thinking, and I suppose

discreetly disentangling myself. It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for the trees

and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and fresh with the new sharp greens of spring. I had

walked talking with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of the place, seen and

criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees,

and picked a way among the scattered teaparties on the lawn to our own circle on the grass under a Siberian

crab near the great bay window. There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed the tactics of the

Suffragettes. I had made some comments upon the spirit of the movement in an address to the men in

Pembroke, and it had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having it out with me.

I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She bad

been lying prone on the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully, and I was sitting beside

old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear cheeks

and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind

me. And something an infinite tenderness, stabbed me. It was a keen physical feeling, like nothing I had

ever felt before. It had a quality of tears in it. For the first time in my narrow and concentrated life another

Our eyes met perplexed for an extraordinary moment. Then I turned back and addressed myself a little stiffly

to the substance of her intervention. For some time I couldn't look at her again.

Yet it is curious that it never occurred to me for a year or so that this was likely to be a matter of passion

between us. I have told how definitely I put my imagination into harness in those matters at my marriage, and

I was living now in a world of big interests, where there is neither much time nor inclination for deliberate

love making. I suppose there is a large class of men who never meet a girl or a woman without thinking of

sex, who meet a friend's daughter and decide: "Mustn't get friendly with herwouldn't DO," and set

invisible bars between themselves and all the wives in the world. Perhaps that is the way to live. Perhaps

there is no other method than this effectual annihilation of halfand the most sympathetic and attractive

halfof the human beings in the world, so far as any frank intercourse is concerned. I am quite convinced

anyhow that such a qualified intimacy as ours, such a drifting into the sense of possession, such untrammeled

conversation with an invisible, implacable limit set just where the intimacy glows, it is no kind of tolerable

compromise. If men and women are to go so far together, they must be free to go as far as they may want to

go, without the vindictive destruction that has come upon us. On the basis of the accepted codes the jealous

people are right, and the liberalminded ones are playing with fire. If people are not to love, then they must

be kept apart. If they are not to be kept apart, then we must prepare for an unprecedented toleration of lovers.

Isabel was as unforeseeing as I to begin with, but sex marches into the life of an intelligent girl with demands

and challenges far more urgent than the mere call of curiosity and satiable desire that comes to a young man.

No woman yet has dared to tell the story of that unfolding. She attracted men, and she encouraged them, and

watched them, and tested them, and dismissed them, and concealed the substance of her thoughts about them

in the way that seems instinctive in a naturalminded girl. There was even an engagement amidst the

protests and disapproval of the college authorities. I never saw the man, though she gave me a long history of

the affair, to which I listened with a forced and insincere sympathy. She struck me oddly as taking the

relationship for a thing in itself, and regardless of its consequences. After a time she became silent about him,

and then threw him over; and by that time, I think, for all that she was so much my junior, she knew more

We didn't see each other for some months after my resignation, but we kept up a frequent correspondence.

She said twice over that she wanted to talk to me, that letters didn't convey what one wanted to say, and I

went up to Oxford pretty definitely to see herthough I combined it with one or two other

engagementssomewhere in February. Insensibly she had become important enough for me to make

But we didn't see very much of one another on that occasion. There was something in the air between us that

made a faint embarrassment; the mere fact, perhaps, that she had asked me to come up.

A year before she would have dashed off with me quite unscrupulously to talk alone, carried me off to her

room for an hour with a minute of chaperonage to satisfy the rules. Now there was always some one or other

We went for a walk on the Sunday afternoon with old Fortescue, K. C., who'd come up to see his two

daughters, both great friends of Isabel's, and some mute inglorious don whose name I forget, but who was in

a state of marked admiration for her. The six of us played a game of conversational entanglements

throughout, and mostly I was impressing the Fortescue girls with the want of mental concentration possible in

a rising politician. We went down Carfex, I remember, to Folly Bridge, and inspected the Barges, and then

back by way of Merton to the Botanic Gardens and Magdalen Bridge. And in the Botanic Gardens she got

She was silent for a moment. Then she said abruptly, with that quick flush of hers and a sudden boldness in

Here, again, I suppose I had a fair warning of the drift of things. I seem to remember myself in the train to

Paddington, sitting with a handful of papersgalley proofs for the BLUE WEEKLY, I supposeon my lap,

and thinking about her and that last sentence of hers, and all that it might mean to me.

It is very hard to recall even the main outline of anything so elusive as a meditation. I know that the idea of

working with her gripped me, fascinated me. That my value in her life seemed growing filled me with pride

and a kind of gratitude. I was already in no doubt that her value in my life was tremendous. It made it none

the less, that in those days I was obsessed by the idea that she was transitory, and bound to go out of my life

again. It is no good trying to set too fine a face upon this complex business, there is gold and clay and

sunlight and savagery in every love story, and a multitude of elvish elements peeped out beneath the fine rich

curtain of affection that masked our future. I've never properly weighed how immensely my vanity was

gratified by her clear preference for me. Nor can I for a moment determine how much deliberate intention I

Certainly I think some part of me must have been saying in the train: "Leave go of her. Get away from her.

End this now." I can't have been so stupid as not to have had that in my mind. . . .

If she had been only a beautiful girl in love with me, I think I could have managed the situation. Once or

twice since my marriage and before Isabel became of any significance in my life, there had been incidents

with other people, flashes of temptationno telling is possible of the thing resisted. I think that mere beauty

and passion would not have taken me. But between myself and Isabel things were incurably complicated by

the intellectual sympathy we had, the jolly march of our minds together. That has always mattered

enormously. I should have wanted her company nearly as badly if she had been some crippled old lady; we

would have hunted shoulder to shoulder, as two men. Only two men would never have had the patience and

readiness for one another we two had. I had never for years met any one with whom I could be so carelessly

sure of understanding or to whom I could listen so easily and fully. She gave me, with an extraordinary

completeness, that rare, precious effect of always saying something fresh, and yet saying it so that it filled

into and folded about all the little recesses and corners of my mind with an infinite, soft familiarity. It is

impossible to explain that. It is like trying to explain why her voice, her voice heard speaking to any

She was the only Oxford woman who took a first that year. She spent the summer in Scotland and Yorkshire,

writing to me continually of all she now meant to do, and stirring my imagination. She came to London for

the autumn session. For a time she stayed with old Lady Colbeck, but she fell out with her hostess when it

became clear she wanted to write, not novels, but journalism, and then she set every one talking by taking a

flat near Victoria and installing as her sole protector an elderly German governess she had engaged through a

scholastic agency. She began writing, not in that copious flood the undisciplined young woman of gifts is apt

to produce, but in exactly the manner of an able young man, experimenting with forms, developing the

phrasing of opinions, taking a definite line. She was, of course, tremendously discussed. She was disapproved

of, but she was invited out to dinner. She got rather a reputation for the management of elderly distinguished

men. It was an odd experience to follow Margaret's soft rustle of silk into some big drawingroom and

discover my snubnosed girl in the blue sack transformed into a shining creature in the soft splendour of

For a time we did not meet very frequently, though always she professed an unblushing preference for my

company, and talked my views and sought me out. Then her usefulness upon the BLUE WEEKLY began to

link us closelier. She would come up to the office, and sit by the window, and talk over the proofs of the next

week's articles, going through my intentions with a keen investigatory scalpel. Her talk always puts me in

mind of a steel blade. Her writing became rapidly very good; she had a wit and a turn of the phrase that was

all her own. We seemed to have forgotten the little shadow of embarrassment that had fallen over our last

meeting at Oxford. Everything seemed natural and easy between us in those days; a little unconventional, but

We developed something like a custom of walks, about once a week or so, and letters and notes became

frequent. I won't pretend things were not keenly personal between us, but they had an air of being innocently

mental. She used to call me "Master" in our talks, a monstrous and engaging flattery, and I was inordinately

proud to have her as my pupil. Who wouldn't have been? And we went on at that distance for a long

After Lady Colbeck threw her up as altogether too "intellectual" for comfortable control, Isabel was taken up

by the Balfes in a less formal and compromising manner, and weekended with them and their cousin

Leonora Sparling, and spent large portions of her summer with them in Herefordshire. There was a lover or

so in that time, men who came a little timidly at this brilliant young person with the frank manner and the

Amazonian mind, and, she declared, received her kindly refusals with manifest relief. And Arnold Shoesmith

struck up a sort of friendship that oddly imitated mine. She took a liking to him because he was clumsy and

shy and inexpressive; she embarked upon the dangerous interest of helping him to find his soul. I had some

twinges of jealousy about that. I didn't see the necessity of him. He invaded her time, and I thought that might

interfere with her work. If their friendship stole some hours from Isabel's writing, it did not for a long while

The change came so entirely without warning or intention that I find it impossible now to tell the order of its

phases. What disturbed pebble started the avalanche I cannot trace. Perhaps it was simply that the barriers

And there came a change in Isabel. It was like some change in the cycle of nature, like the onset of springa

sharp brightness, an uneasiness. She became restless with her work; little encounters with men began to

happen, encounters not quite in the quality of the earlier proposals; and then came an odd incident of which

she told me, but somehow, I felt, didn't tell me completely. She told me all she was able to tell me. She had

been at a dance at the Ropers', and a man, rather well known in London, had kissed her. The thing amazed

her beyond measure. It was the sort of thing immediately possible between any man and any woman, that one

never expects to happen until it happens. It had the surprising effect of a judge generally known to be bald

suddenly whipping off his wig in court. No absolutely unexpected revelation could have quite the same

quality of shock. She went through the whole thing to me with a remarkable detachment, told me how she

"I WANT to be kissed, and all that sort of thing," she avowed. "I suppose every woman does."

This struck me as queerly expressive of the woman's attitude to these things. "Some one presently

"Some one will," she said, almost viciously. "And then we'll have to stop these walks and talks of ours, dear

"It's part of the requirements of the situation," I said, "that he should beoh, very interesting! He'll start, no

doubt, all sorts of new topics, and open no end of attractive vistas. . . . You can't, you know, always go about

"I don't think I can," said Isabel. "But it's only just recently I've begun to doubt about it."

I remember these things being said, but just how much we saw and understood, and just how far we were

really keeping opaque to each other then, I cannot remember. But it must have been quite soon after this that

we spent nearly a whole day together at Kew Gardens, with the curtains up and the barriers down, and the

thing that had happened plain before our eyes. I don't remember we ever made any declaration. We just

It was a day early in that yearI think in January, because there was thin, crisp snow on the grass, and we

noted that only two other people had been to the Pagoda that day. I've a curious impression of greenish

colour, hot, moist air and huge palm fronds about very much of our talk, as though we were nearly all the

time in the Tropical House. But I also remember very vividly looking at certain orange and red spraylike

flowers from Patagonia, which could not have been there. It is a curious thing that I do not remember we

made any profession of passionate love for one another; we talked as though the fact of our intense love for

each other had always been patent between us. There was so long and frank an intimacy between us that we

talked far more like brother and sister or husband and wife than two people engaged in the war of the sexes.

We wanted to know what we were going to do, and whatever we did we meant to do in the most perfect

concert. We both felt an extraordinary accession of friendship and tenderness then, and, what again is

curious, very little passion. But there was also, in spite of the perplexities we faced, an immense satisfaction

about that day. It was as if we had taken off something that had hindered our view of each other, like people

I've had since to view our relations from the standpoint of the ordinary observer. I find that vision in the most

preposterous contrast with all that really went on between us. I suppose there I should figure as a wicked

seducer, while an unprotected girl succumbed to my fascinations. As a matter of fact, it didn't occur to us that

there was any personal inequality between us. I knew her for my equal mentally; in so many things she was

beyond comparison cleverer than I; her courage outwent mine. The quick leap of her mind evoked a flash of

joy in mine like the response of an induction wire; her way of thinking was like watching sunlight reflected

from little waves upon the side of a boat, it was so bright, so mobile, so variously and easily true to its law. In

the back of our minds we both had a very definite belief that making love is full of joyous, splendid, tender,

and exciting possibilities, and we had to discuss why we shouldn't be to the last degree lovers.

Now, what I should like to print here, if it were possible, in all the screaming emphasis of red ink, is this: that

the circumstances of my upbringing and the circumstances of Isabel's upbringing had left not a shadow of

belief or feeling that the utmost passionate love between us was in itself intrinsically WRONG. I've told with

the fullest particularity just all that I was taught or found out for myself in these matters, and Isabel's reading

and thinking, and the fierce silences of her governesses and the breathless warnings of teachers, and all the

social and religious influences that had been brought to bear upon her, had worked out to the same void of

conviction. The code had failed with us altogether. We didn't for a moment consider anything but the

expediency of what we both, for all our quiet faces and steady eyes, wanted most passionately to do.

Well, here you have the state of mind of whole brigades of people, and particularly of young people,

nowadays. The current morality hasn't gripped them; they don't really believe in it at all. They may render it

lipservice, but that is quite another thing. There are scarcely any tolerable novels to justify its prohibitions;

its prohibitions do, in fact, remain unjustified amongst these ugly suppressions. You may, if you choose,

silence the admission of this in literature and current discussion; you will not prevent it working out in lives.

People come up to the great moments of passion crudely unaware, astoundingly unprepared as no really

civilised and intelligently planned community would let any one be unprepared. They find themselves hedged

about with customs that have no organic hold upon them, and mere discretions all generous spirits are

Consider the infinite absurdities of it! Multitudes of us are trying to run this complex modern community on a

basis of "Hush" without explaining to our children or discussing with them anything about love and marriage

at all. Doubt and knowledge creep about in enforced darknesses and silences. We are living upon an ancient

tradition which everybody doubts and nobody has ever analysed. We affect a tremendous and cultivated

shyness and delicacy about imperatives of the most arbitrary appearance. What ensues? What did ensue with

us, for example? On the one hand was a great desire, robbed of any appearance of shame and grossness by

the power of love, and on the other hand, the possible jealousy of so and so, the disapproval of so and so,

material risks and dangers. It is only in the retrospect that we have been able to grasp something of the

effectual case against us. The social prohibition lit by the intense glow of our passion, presented itself as

preposterous, irrational, arbitrary, and ugly, a monster fit only for mockery. We might be ruined! Well, there

is a phase in every love affair, a sort of heroic hysteria, when death and ruin are agreeable additions to the

prospect. It gives the business a gravity, a solemnity. Timid people may hesitate and draw back with a vague

instinctive terror of the immensity of the oppositions they challenge, but neither Isabel nor I are timid people.

We weighed what was against us. We decided just exactly as scores of thousands of people have decided in

this very matter, that if it were possible to keep this thing to ourselves, there was nothing against it. And so

we took our first step. With the hunger of love in us, it was easy to conclude we might be lovers, and still

keep everything to ourselves. That cleared our minds of the one persistent obstacle that mattered to usthe

And then we found, as all those scores of thousands of people scattered about us have found, that we could

not keep it to ourselves. Love will out. All the rest of this story is the chronicle of that. Love with sustained

But before things came to that pass, some months and many phases and a sudden journey to America

"This thing spells disaster," I said. "You are too big and I am too big to attempt this secrecy. Think of the

intolerable possibility of being found out! At any cost we have to stopeven at the cost of parting."

"Master, I shouldn't in the least mind being found out with you. I'm afraidI'd be proud."

There followed a struggle of immense insincerity between us. It is hard to tell who urged and who resisted.

She came to me one night to the editorial room of the BLUE WEEKLY, and argued and kissed me with wet

salt lips, and wept in my arms; she told me that now passionate longing for me and my intimate life possessed

her, so that she could not work, could not think, could not endure other people for the love of me. . . .

I fled absurdly. That is the secret of the futile journey to America that puzzled all my friends.

I ran away from Isabel. I took hold of the situation with all my strength, put in Britten with sketchy, hasty

instructions to edit the paper, and started headlong and with luggage, from which, among other things, my

Preposterous flight that was! I remember as a thing almost farcical my explanations to Margaret, and how

frantically anxious I was to prevent the remote possibility of her coming with me, and how I crossed in the

TUSCAN, a bad, wet boat, and mixed seasickness with ungovernable sorrow. I wepttears. It was

inexpressibly queer and ridiculousand, good God! how I hated my fellowpassengers!

New York inflamed and excited me for a time, and when things slackened, I whirled westward to

Chicagoeating and drinking, I remember, in the train from shoals of little dishes, with a sort of desperate

voracity. I did the queerest things to distract myself no novelist would dare to invent my mental and

emotional muddle. Chicago also held me at first, amazing lapse from civilisation that the place is! and then

abruptly, with hosts expecting me, and everything settled for some days in Denver, I found myself at the end

Let me confess it wasn't any sense of perfect and incurable trust and confidence that brought me back, or any

idea that now I had strength to refrain. It was a sudden realisation that after all the separation might succeed;

some careless phrasing in one of her jealously read letters set that idea going in my mindthe haunting

perception that I might return to London and find it empty of the Isabel who had pervaded it. Honour,

discretion, the careers of both of us, became nothing at the thought. I couldn't conceive my life resuming

I don't even excuse my return. It is inexcusable. I ought to have kept upon my way westwardand held out. I

couldn't. I wanted Isabel, and I wanted her so badly now that everything else in the world was phantomlike

until that want was satisfied. Perhaps you have never wanted anything like that. I went straight to her.

But here I come to untellable things. There is no describing the reality of love. The shapes of things are

nothing, the actual happenings are nothing, except that somehow there falls a light upon them and a wonder.

Of how we met, and the thrill of the adventure, the curious bright sense of defiance, the joy of having dared, I

can't tellI can but hint of just one aspect, of what an amazing LARKit's the only wordit seemed to us.

The beauty which was the essence of it, which justifies it so far as it will bear justification, eludes statement.

What can a record of contrived meetings, of sundering difficulties evaded and overcome, signify here? Or

what can it convey to say that one looked deep into two dear, steadfast eyes, or felt a heart throb and beat, or

gripped soft hair softly in a trembling hand? Robbed of encompassing love, these things are of no more value

than the taste of good wine or the sight of good pictures, or the hearing of music,just sensuality and no

more. No one can tell lovewe can only tell the gross facts of love and its consequences. Given

lovegiven mutuality, and one has effected a supreme synthesis and come to a new level of lifebut only

those who know can know. This business has brought me more bitterness and sorrow than I had ever

expected to bear, but even now I will not say that I regret that wilful homecoming altogether. We lovedto

the uttermost. Neither of us could have loved any one else as we did and do love one another. It was ours, that

beauty; it existed only between us when we were close together, for no one in the world ever to know save

My return to the office sticks out in my memory with an extreme vividness, because of the wild eagle of pride

that screamed within me. It was Tuesday morning, and though not a soul in London knew of it yet except

Isabel, I had been back in England a week. I came in upon Britten and stood in the doorway.

He looked at my excited face with those redbrown eyes of his. Silently I defied him to speak his mind.

I had to tell what were, so far as I can remember my first positive lies to Margaret in explaining that return. I

had written to her from Chicago and again from New York, saying that I felt I ought to be on the spot in

England for the new session, and that I was coming backpresently. I concealed the name of my boat from

her, and made a calculated prevarication when I announced my presence in London. I telephoned before I

went back for my rooms to be prepared. She was, I knew, with the Bunting Harblows in Durham, and when

My going away and the vivid secret of the present had wiped out from my mind much of our long

estrangement. Something, too, had changed in her. I had had some hint of it in her letters, but now I saw it

plainly. I came out of my study upon the landing when I heard the turmoil of her arrival below, and she came

upstairs with a quickened gladness. It was a cold March, and she was dressed in unfamiliar dark furs that

suited her extremely and reinforced the delicate flush of her sweet face. She held out both her hands to me,

I returned her kiss with a queer feeling at my heart, too undifferentiated to be even a definite sense of guilt or

I perceived suddenly that she had resolved to end our estrangement. She put herself so that my arm came

"Tell me all about America," said Margaret. "I feel as though you'd been away six year's."

We went arm in arm into our little sittingroom, and I took off the fur's for her and sat down upon the

chintzcovered sofa by the fire. She had ordered tea, and came and sat by me. I don't know what I had

expected, but of all things I had certainly not expected this sudden abolition of our distances.

"I want to know all about America," she repeated, with her eyes scrutinising me. "Why did you come back?"

"Restlessness," she said, and thought. "You were restless in Venice. You said it was restlessness took you to

Again she studied me. She turned a little awkwardly to her tea things, and poured needless water from the

silver kettle into the teapot. Then she sat still for some moments looking at the equipage with expressionless

eyes. I saw her hand upon the edge of the table tremble slightly. I watched her closely. A vague uneasiness

She spoke at last with an effort. "I wish you were in Parliament again," she said. "Life doesn't give you events

"I didn't understand what you were after. I had misjudged. I didn't know. I think perhaps I was rather stupid."

Her eyes were suddenly shining with tears. "You didn't give me much chance to understand."

"Husband," she said abruptly, holding her two hands out to me, "I want to begin over again!"

"Ah!" she said, and slowly withdrew her hand. She leant forward with her arm on the sofaback, and looked

very intently into my face. I felt the most damnable scoundrel in the world as I returned her gaze. The thought

of Isabel's darkly shining eyes seemed like a physical presence between us. . . .

"Tell me," I said presently, to break the intolerable tension, "tell me plainly what you mean by this."

I sat a little away from her, and then took my teacup in hand, with an odd effect of defending myself. "Have

"That and the paper. I took a complete set from the beginning down to Durham with me. I have read it over,

I was profoundly disconcerted. I put down my teacup, stood up in the middle of the hearthrug, and began

talking. "I'm tremendously glad, Margaret, that you've come to see I'm not altogether perverse," I began. I

launched out into a rather trite and windy exposition of my views, and she sat close to me on the sofa,

looking up into my face, hanging on my words, a deliberate and invincible convert.

I had never doubted my new conceptions before; now I doubted them profoundly. But I went on talking. It's

the grim irony in the lives of all politicians, writers, public teachers, that once the audience is at their feet, a

new loyalty has gripped them. It isn't their business to admit doubt and imperfections. They have to go on

talking. And I was now so accustomed to Isabel's vivid interruptions, qualifications, restatements, and

Margaret and I dined together at home. She made me open out my political projects to her. "I have been

And by some excuse I have forgotten she made me come to her room. I think it was some book I had to take

her, some American book I had brought back with me, and mentioned in our talk. I walked in with it, and put

"Husband!" she cried, and held out her slender arms to me. I was compelled to go to her and kiss her, and she

twined them softly about my neck and drew me to her and kissed me. I disentangled them very gently, and

"Goodnight," I said. There came a little pause. "Goodnight, Margaret," I repeated, and walked very

I did not look at her, but I could feel her standing, watching me. If I had looked up, she would, I knew, have

At the very outset that secret, which was to touch no one but Isabel and myself, had reached out to stab

The whole world had changed for Isabel and me; and we tried to pretend that nothing had changed except a

small matter between us. We believed quite honestly at that time that it was possible to keep this thing that

had happened from any reaction at all, save perhaps through some magically enhanced vigour in our work,

upon the world about us! Seen in retrospect, one can realise the absurdity of this belief; within a week I

realised it; but that does not alter the fact that we did believe as much, and that people who are deeply in love

and unable to marry will continue to believe so to the very end of time. They will continue to believe out of

existence every consideration that separates them until they have come together. Then they will count the

I am telling a story, and not propounding theories in this book; and chiefly I am telling of the ideas and

influences and emotions that have happened to meme as a sort of sounding board for my world. The

moralist is at liberty to go over my conduct with his measure and say, "At this point or at that you went

wrong, and you ought to have done"soandso. The point of interest to the statesman is that it didn't for a

moment occur to us to do soandso when the time for doing it came. It amazes me now to think how little

either of us troubled about the established rights or wrongs of the situation. We hadn't an atom of respect for

them, innate or acquired. The guardians of public morals will say we were very bad people; I submit in

defence that they are very bad guardians provocative guardians. . . . And when at last there came a claim

against us that had an effective validity for us, we were in the full tide of passionate intimacy.

I had a night of nearly sleepless perplexity after Margaret's return. She had suddenly presented herself to me

like something dramatically recalled, fine, generous, infinitely capable of feeling. I was amazed how much I

had forgotten her. In my contempt for vulgarised and conventionalised honour I had forgotten that for me

there was such a reality as honour. And here it was, warm and near to me, living, breathing, unsuspecting.

I do not now remember if I thought at that time of going to Isabel and putting this new aspect of the case

before her. Perhaps I did. Perhaps I may have considered even then the possibility of ending what had so

freshly and passionately begun. If I did, it vanished next day at the sight of her. Whatever regrets came in the

darkness, the daylight brought an obstinate confidence in our resolution again. We would, we declared, "pull

the thing off." Margaret must not know. Margaret should not know. If Margaret did not know, then no harm

For a brief time we had been like two people in a magic cell, magically cut off from the world and full of a

light of its own, and then we began to realise that we were not in the least cut off, that the world was all about

us and pressing in upon us, limiting us, threatening us, resuming possession of us. I tried to ignore the injury

to Margaret of her unreciprocated advances. I tried to maintain to myself that this hidden love made no

difference to the now irreparable breach between husband and wife. But I never spoke of it to Isabel or let her

Then in new shapes and relations came trouble. Distressful elements crept in by reason of our unavoidable

furtiveness; we ignored them, hid them from each other, and attempted to hide them from ourselves.

Successful love is a thing of abounding pride, and we had to be secret. It was delightful at first to be secret, a

whispering, warm conspiracy; then presently it became irksome and a little shameful. Her essential frankness

of soul was all against the masks and falsehoods that many women would have enjoyed. Together in our

secrecy we relaxed, then in the presence of other people again it was tiresome to have to watch for the

careless, too easy phrase, to snatch back one's hand from the limitless betrayal of a light, familiar touch.

Love becomes a poor thing, at best a poor beautiful thing, if it develops no continuing and habitual intimacy.

We were always meeting, and most gloriously loving and beginningand then we had to snatch at

remorseless ticking watches, hurry to catch trains, and go back to this or that. That is all very well for the

intrigues of idle people perhaps, but not for an intense personal relationship. It is like lighting a candle for the

sake of lighting it, over and over again, and each time blowing it out. That, no doubt, must be very amusing

to children playing with the matches, but not to people who love warm light, and want it in order to do fine

and honourable things together. We had achievedI give the ugly phrase that expresses the increasing

discolouration in my mind"illicit intercourse." To end at that, we now perceived, wasn't in our style. But

Perhaps we might at this stage have given it up. I think if we could have seen ahead and around us we might

have done so. But the glow of our cell blinded us. . . . I wonder what might have happened if at that time we

had given it up. . . . We propounded it, we met again in secret to discuss it, and our overpowering passion for

Presently the idea of children crept between us. It came in from all our conceptions of life and public service;

it was, we found, in the quality of our minds that physical love without children is a little weak, timorous,

more than a little shameful. With imaginative people there very speedily comes a time when that realisation is

inevitable. We hadn't thought of that beforeit isn't natural to think of that before. We hadn't known. There

There is a necessary sequence of phases in love. These came in their order, and with them, unanticipated

tarnishings on the first bright perfection of our relations. For a time these developing phases were no more

than a secret and private trouble between us, little shadows spreading by imperceptible degrees across that

It is still only two years since that struggle, and I will not trouble the reader with a detailed history of events

that must be quite sufficiently present in his mind for my purpose already. Huge stacks of journalism have

dealt with Handitch and its significance. For the reader very probably, as for most people outside a

comparatively small circle, it meant my emergence from obscurity. We obtruded no editor's name in the

BLUE WEEKLY; I had never as yet been on the London hoardings. Before Handitch I was a journalist and

writer of no great public standing; after Handitch, I was definitely a person, in the little group of persons who

stood for the Young Imperialist movement. Handitch was, to a very large extent, my affair. I realised then, as

a man comes to do, how much one can still grow after seven and twenty. In the second election I was a man

taking hold of things; at Kinghamstead I had been simply a young candidate, a party unit, led about the

constituency, told to do this and that, and finally washed in by the great Anti Imperialist flood, like a starfish

My feminist views had earnt the mistrust of the party, and I do not think I should have got the chance of

Handitch or indeed any chance at all of Parliament for a long time, if it had not been that the seat with its long

record of Liberal victories and its Liberal majority of 3642 at the last election, offered a hopeless contest. The

Liberal dissensions and the belated but by no means contemptible Socialist candidate were providential

interpositions. I think, however, the conduct of Gane, Crupp, and Tarvrille in coming down to fight for me,

did count tremendously in my favour. "We aren't going to win, perhaps," said Crupp, "but we are going to

talk." And until the very eve of victory, we treated Handitch not so much as a battlefield as a hoarding. And

so it was the Endowment of Motherhood as a practical form of Eugenics got into English politics.

"I think the Family exists for the good of the children," I said; "is that queer?"

They opened fire upon me in a little electioneering rag call the HANDITCH SENTINEL, with a string of

garbled quotations and misrepresentations that gave me an admirable text for a speech. I spoke for an hour

and ten minutes with a more and more crumpled copy of the SENTINEL in my hand, and I made the fullest

and completest exposition of the idea of endowing motherhood that I think had ever been made up to that

time in England. Its effect on the press was extraordinary. The Liberal papers gave me quite unprecedented

space under the impression that I had only to be given rope to hang myself; the Conservatives cut me down or

tried to justify me; the whole country was talking. I had had a pamphlet in type upon the subject, and I

revised this carefully and put it on the bookstalls within three days. It sold enormously and brought me

bushels of letters. We issued over three thousand in Handitch alone. At meeting after meeting I was heckled

"It's catching on like old age pensions," he said. "We've dished the Liberals! To think that such a project

But it was only with the declaration of the poll that my battle was won. No one expected more than a snatch

victory, and I was in by over fifteen hundred. At one bound Cossington's papers passed from apologetics

varied by repudiation to triumphant praise. "A renascent England, breeding men," said the leader in his chief

daily on the morning after the polling, and claimed that the Conservatives had been ever the pioneers in

To any one who did not know of that glowing secret between Isabel and myself, I might well have appeared

at that time the most successful and enviable of men. I had recovered rapidly from an uncongenial start in

political life; I had become a considerable force through the BLUE WEEKLY, and was shaping an

increasingly influential body of opinion; I had reentered Parliament with quite dramatic distinction, and in

spite of a certain faltering on the part of the orthodox Conservatives towards the bolder elements in our

propaganda, I had loyal and unenvious associates who were making me a power in the party. People were

coming to our group, understandings were developing. It was clear we should play a prominent part in the

next general election, and that, given a Conservative victory, I should be assured of office. The world opened

out to me brightly and invitingly. Great schemes took shape in my mind, always more concrete, always more

practicable; the years ahead seemed falling into order, shining with the credible promise of immense

And at the heart of it all, unseen and unsuspected, was the secret of my relations with Isabellike a seed that

From the onset of the Handitch contest onward, my meetings with her had been more and more pervaded by

the discussion of our situation. It had innumerable aspects. It was very present to us that we wanted to be

together as much as possiblewe were beginning to long very much for actual living together in the same

house, so that one could come as it were carelesslyunawaresupon the other, busy perhaps about some

trivial thing. We wanted to feel each other in the daily atmosphere. Preceding our imperatively sterile

passion, you must remember, outside it, altogether greater than it so far as our individual lives were

concerned, there had grown and still grew an enormous affection and intellectual sympathy between us. We

brought all our impressions and all our ideas to each other, to see them in each other's light. It is hard to

convey that quality of intellectual unison to any one who has not experienced it. I thought more and more in

terms of conversation with Isabel; her possible comments upon things would flash into my mind, oh!with

I remember, too, the odd effect of seeing her in the distance going about Handitch, like any stranger

canvasser; the queer emotion of her approach along the street, the greeting as she passed. The morning of the

polling she vanished from the constituency. I saw her for an instant in the passage behind our Committee

"It's Margaret's show," she said abruptly. "If I see her smiling there like a queen by your side! She

didlast time. I remember." She caught at a sob and dashed her hand across her face impatiently. "Jealous

fool, mean and petty, jealous fool! . . . Good luck, old man, to you! You're going to win. But I don't want to

"Goodbye!" said I, clasping her hand as some supporter appeared in the passage. . . .

I came back to London victorious, and a little flushed and coarse with victory; and so soon as I could break

away I went to Isabel's flat and found her white and worn, with the stain of secret weeping about her eyes. I

We didn't speak for some seconds. Then she slipped from my hold. "Look!" she said, smiling like winter

sunshine. "I've had in all the morning papersthe pile of them, and youresounding."

She stood for a moment still smiling bravely, and then she was sobbing in my arms. "The bigger you

Presently she became still. "Oh, well," she said, and wiped her eyes and sat down on the little sofa by the fire;

"I didn't know all there was in love," she said, staring at the coals, "when we went lovemaking."

I put my arm behind her and took a handful of her dear soft hair in my hand and kissed it.

She put her arm about me and kissed me. "I want you," she said, "just as if I had nothing of you. You don't

understandhow a woman wants a man. I thought once if I just gave myself to you it would be enough. It

was nothingit was just a step across the threshold. My dear, every moment you are away I ache for

youache! I want to be about when it isn't lovemaking or talk. I want to be doing things for you, and

watching you when you're not thinking of me. All those safe, careless, intimate things. And something

else" She stopped. "Dear, I don't want to bother you. I just want you to know I love you. . . ."

"Dear heart," said I, "isn't this enough? You're my councillor, my colleague, my right hand, the secret soul of

She smiled "No," she said. "I'm not insatiable, Master. But I'm a woman in love. And I'm finding out what I

"We want a lot. You and I are greedy people for the things we like, Master. It's very evident we've got nearly

"For youvery little. I wonder. For meevery thing. Yes everything. You didn't mean it, Master; you

didn't know any more than I did when I began, but love between a man and a woman is sometimes very

"A man doesn't, perhaps. But I have. . . . I want themlike hunger. YOUR children, and home with you.

Really, continually you! That's the trouble. . . . I can't have 'em, Master, and I can't have you."

"I'm going to make a scene," she said, "and get this over. I'm so discontented and miserable; I've got to tell

you. It would come between us if I didn't. I'm in love with you, with everythingwith all my brains. I'll pull

through all right. I'll be good, Master, never you fear. But today I'm crying out with all my being. This

electionYou're going up; you're going on. In these papersyou're a great big fact. It's suddenly come

home to me. At the back of my mind I've always had the idea I was going to have you somehow presently for

myselfI mean to have you to go long tramps with, to keep house for, to get meals for, to watch for of an

evening. It's a sort of habitual background to my thought of you. And it's nonsenseutter nonsense!" She

I was troubled beyond measure, but Handitch and its intimations were clear and strong.

"Women don't have that sort of very own thing. Indeed, it's true! And think! You've been down there

preaching the goodness of children, telling them the only good thing in a state is happy, hopeful children,

"Yes," she said. "And sometimes I think it's too much to givetoo much altogether. . . . Children get into a

woman's brainwhen she mustn't have them, especially when she must never hope for them. Think of the

child we might have now!the little creature with soft, tender skin, and little hands and little feet! At times it

haunts me. It comes and says, Why wasn't I given life? I can hear it in the night. . . . The world is full of such

little ghosts, dear loverlittle things that asked for life and were refused. They clamour to me. It's like a little

fist beating at my heart. Love children, beautiful children. Little cold hands that tear at my heart! Oh, my

heart and my lord!" She was holding my arm with both her hands and weeping against it, and now she drew

herself to my shoulder and wept and sobbed in my embrace. "I shall never sit with your child on my knee and

But the profound impossibility of our relation was now becoming more and more apparent to us. We found

ourselves seeking justification, clinging passionately to a situation that was coldly, pitilessly, impossible and

fated. We wanted quite intensely to live together and have a child, but also we wanted very many other things

that were incompatible with these desires. It was extraordinarily difficult to weigh our political and

intellectual ambitions against those intimate wishes. The weights kept altering according as one found oneself

grasping this valued thing or that. It wasn't as if we could throw everything aside for our love, and have that

as we wanted it. Love such as we bore one another isn't altogether, or even chiefly, a thing in itselfit is for

the most part a value set upon things. Our love was interwoven with all our other interests; to go out of the

world and live in isolation seemed to us like killing the best parts of each other; we loved the sight of each

other engaged finely and characteristically, we knew each other best as activities. We had no delusions about

material facts; we didn't want each other alive or dead, we wanted each other fully alive. We wanted to do big

things together, and for us to take each other openly and desperately would leave us nothing in the world to

do. We wanted children indeed passionately, but children with every helpful chance in the world, and

children born in scandal would be handicapped at every turn. We wanted to share a home, and not a solitude.

And when we were at this stage of realisation, began the intimations that we were found out, and that scandal

I heard of it first from Esmeer, who deliberately mentioned it, with that steady grey eye of his watching me,

as an instance of the preposterous falsehoods people will circulate. It came to Isabel almost simultaneously

through a married college friend, who made it her business to demand either confirmation or denial. It filled

us both with consternation. In the surprise of the moment Isabel admitted her secret, and her friend went off

Discovery broke out in every direction. Friends with grave faces and an atmosphere of infinite tact invaded us

both. Other friends ceased to invade either of us. It was manifest we had becomewe knew not howa

private scandal, a subject for duologues, an amazement, a perplexity, a vivid interest. In a few brief weeks it

seemed London passed from absolute unsuspiciousness to a chattering exaggeration of its knowledge of our

It was just the most inappropriate time for that disclosure. The long smouldering antagonism to my

endowment of motherhood ideas had flared up into an active campaign in the EXPURGATOR, and it would

be altogether disastrous to us if I should be convicted of any personal irregularity. It was just because of the

manifest and challenging respectability of my position that I had been able to carry the thing as far as I had

done. Now suddenly my fortunes had sprung a leak, and scandal was pouring in. . . . It chanced, too, that a

wave of moral intolerance was sweeping through London, one of those waves in which the bitterness of the

consciously just finds an ally in the panic of the undiscovered. A certain Father Blodgett had been preaching

against social corruption with extraordinary force, and had roused the Church of England people to a kind of

competition in denunciation. The old methods of the AntiSocialist campaign had been renewed, and had

offered far too wide a scope and too tempting an opportunity for private animosity, to be restricted to the

private affairs of the Socialists. I had intimations of an extensive circulation of "private and confidential"

I think there can be nothing else in life quite like the unnerving realisation that rumour and scandal are afoot

about one. Abruptly one's confidence in the solidity of the universe disappears. One walks silenced through a

world that one feels to be full of inaudible accusations. One cannot challenge the assault, get it out into the

open, separate truth and falsehood. It slinks from you, turns aside its face. Old acquaintances suddenly

evaded me, made extraordinary excuses; men who had presumed on the verge of my world and pestered me

with an intrusive enterprise, now took the bold step of flat repudiation. I became doubtful about the return of

a nod, retracted all those tentacles of easy civility that I had hitherto spread to the world. I still grow warm

with amazed indignation when I recall that Edward Crampton, meeting me full on the steps of the Climax

Club, cut me dead. "By God!" I cried, and came near catching him by the throat and wringing out of him

what of all good deeds and bad, could hearten him, a younger man than I and empty beyond comparison, to

dare to play the judge to me. And then I had an open slight from Mrs. Millingham, whom I had counted on as

one counts upon the sunrise. I had not expected things of that sort; they were disconcerting beyond measure;

it was as if the world were giving way beneath my feet, as though something failed in the essential

confidence of life, as though a hand of wet ice had touched my heart. Similar things were happening to

Isabel. Yet we went on working, visiting, meeting, trying to ignore this gathering of implacable forces against

For a time I was perplexed beyond measure to account for this campaign. Then I got a clue. The centre of

diffusion was the Bailey household. The Baileys had never forgiven me my abandonment of the young

Liberal group they had done so much to inspire and organise; their dinnertable had long been a scene of

hostile depreciation of the BLUE WEEKLY and all its allies; week after week Altiora proclaimed that I was

"doing nothing," and found other causes for our byeelection triumphs; I counted Chambers Street a

dangerous place for me. Yet, nevertheless, I was astonished to find them using a private scandal against me.

They did. I think Handitch had filled up the measure of their bitterness, for I had not only abandoned them,

but I was succeeding beyond even their power of misrepresentation. Always I had been a wasp in their

spider's web, difficult to claim as a tool, uncritical, antagonistic. I admired their work and devotion

enormously, but I had never concealed my contempt for a certain childish vanity they displayed, and for the

frequent puerility of their political intrigues. I suppose contempt galls more than injuries, and anyhow they

had me now. They had me. Bailey, I found, was warning fathers of girls against me as a "reckless libertine,"

and Altiora, flushed, roguish, and dishevelled, was sitting on her fender curb after dinner, and pledging little

parties of five or six women at a time with infinite gusto not to let the matter go further. Our cell was open to

I had a gleam of a more intimate motive in Altiora from the reports that came to me. Isabel had been doing a

series of five or six articles in the POLITICAL REVIEW in support of our campaign, the POLITICAL

REVIEW which had hitherto been loyally Baileyite. Quite her best writing up to the present, at any rate, is in

those papers, and no doubt Altiora had had not only to read her in those invaded columns, but listen to her

praises in the mouths of the tactless influential. Altiora, like so many people who rely on gesture and vocal

insistence in conversation, writes a poor and slovenly prose and handles an argument badly; Isabel has her

University training behind her and wrote from the first with the stark power of a clear headed man. "Now

we know," said Altiora, with just a gleam of malice showing through her brightness, "now we know who

For a time I couldn't for the life of me discover her sources. I had, indeed, a desperate intention of

challenging her, and then I bethought me of a youngster named Curmain, who had been my supplemental

typist and secretary for a time, and whom I had sent on to her before the days of our breach. "Of course!" said

I, "Curmain!" He was a tall, drooping, sidelong youth with sandy hair, a little forward head, and a long thin

neck. He stole stamps, and, I suspected, rifled my private letter drawer, and I found him one day on a turn of

the stairs looking guilty and ruffled with a pretty Irish housemaid of Margaret's manifestly in a state of hot

indignation. I saw nothing, but I felt everything in the air between them. I hate this pestering of servants, but

at the same time I didn't want Curmain wiped out of existence, so I had packed him off without unnecessary

discussion to Altiora. He was quick and cheap anyhow, and I thought her general austerity ought to redeem

him if anything could; the Chambers Street housemaid wasn't for any man's kissing and showed it, and the

stamps and private letters were looked after with an efficiency altogether surpassing mine. And Altiora, I've

no doubt left now whatever, pumped this young undesirable about me, and scenting a story, had him to

dinner alone one evening to get to the bottom of the matter. She got quite to the bottom of it,it must have

been a queer duologue. She read Isabel's careless, intimate letters to me, so to speak, by this proxy, and she

wasn't ashamed to use this information in the service of the bitterness that had sprung up in her since our

political breach. It was essentially a personal bitterness; it helped no public purpose of theirs to get rid of me.

My downfall in any public sense was sheer waste,the loss of a man. She knew she was behaving badly,

and so, when it came to remonstrance, she behaved worse. She'd got names and dates and places; the

efficiency of her information was irresistible. And she set to work at it marvellously. Never before, in all her

pursuit of efficient ideals, had Altiora achieved such levels of efficiency. I wrote a protest that was perhaps

illadvised and angry, I went to her and tried to stop her. She wouldn't listen, she wouldn't think, she denied

and lied, she behaved like a naughty child of six years old which has made up its mind to be hurtful. It wasn't

only, I think, that she couldn't bear our political and social influence; she alsoI realised at that interview

couldn't bear our loving. It seemed to her the sickliest thing,a thing quite unendurable. While such things

I've the vividest memory of that call of mine. She'd just come in and taken off her hat, and she was grey and

dishevelled and tired, and in a businesslike dress of black and crimson that didn't suit her and was muddy

about the skirts; she'd a cold in her head and sniffed penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and

interrupted everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of her sofa with a long hatpin

and pretending she was overwhelmed with grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.

"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up, part! You two have got to be parted. You've

got never to see each other ever, never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're not circulating

stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told us anythingCurmain is an EXCELLENT young man;

I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in the League Club, and he wriggled and

lied. He wouldn't say where he had got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave him the

names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous, he attempted absurdly to make me think

they had told HIM. He did his horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just left

England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me as mean, even for Bailey. I've still the odd

vivid impression of his fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading me, his

perspiration beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the wouldbe exculpatory

"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've done everything to shield

Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made a whiterobed, dusky figure against

the deep blues of my big window. I sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.

"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said. "They mean that every one in London is to know about it."

"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for things to overtake us; we're at the parting of the

"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they have overtaken us." I turned on her. "What do

"I can't bear the idea of any one else getting in front with it. I've been wincing about Margaret secretly"

"And leave all this?" she asked, with her eyes going round the room. "And that?" And her head indicated

"Oh, that explains," I said. "There's been a kind of sulkiness Butyou told him?"

She nodded. "He's rather badly hurt," she said. "He's been a good friend to me. He's curiously loyal. But

something, something he said one dayforced me to let him know. . . . That's been the beastliness of all this

secrecy. That's the beastliness of all secrecy. You have to spring surprises on people. But he keeps on. He's

"But does he want to marry you at that? Take you as a present from the world at large?against your will

We sat for a time in silence, with imaginations that obstinately refused to take up the realities of this

"You can't expect that. He thinks you are wonderfuland, naturally, that you ought not to have started this."

"I've a curious dislike to any one thinking that but myself. I'm quite ready to think it myself."

"He wants me to be engaged soon. Then, he says, he can go round fighting these rumours, defending us

"What else is there to do, my dear?what else is there to do at all? I've been thinking day and night. You

can't go away with me. You can't smash yourself suddenly in the sight of all men. I'd rather die than that

should happen. Look what you are becoming in the country! Look at all you've built up!me helping. I

wouldn't let you do it if you could. I wouldn't let youif it were only for Margaret's sake. THIS . . . closes

She winced. Then abruptly she was on her knees before me, with her hands upon my shoulder and her eyes

"My dear," she said very earnestly, "don't misunderstand me! Don't think I'm retreating from the things we've

done! Our love is the best thing I could ever have had from life. Nothing can ever equal it; nothing could ever

equal the beauty and delight you and I have had together. Never! You have loved me; you do love me. . . .

No one could ever know how to love you as I have loved you; no one could ever love me as you have loved

me, my king. And it's just because it's been so splendid, dear; it's just because I'd die rather than have a tithe

of all this wiped out of my life againfor it's made me, it's all I amdear, it's years since I began loving

youit's just because of its goodness that I want not to end in wreckage now, not to end in the smashing up

"What is there for us if we keep on and go away?" she went on. "All the big interests in our lives will

vanisheverything. We shall become specialised peoplepeople overshadowed by a situation. We shall be

an elopement, a romanceall our breadth and meaning gone! People will always think of it first when they

think of us; all our work and aims will be warped by it and subordinated to it. Is it good enough, dear? Just to

specialise. . . . I think of you. We've got a case, a passionate case, the best of cases, but do we want to spend

all our lives defending it and justifying it? And there's that other life. I know now you care for

Margaretyou care more than you think you do. You have said fine things of her. I've watched you about

her. Little things have dropped from you. She's given her life for you; she's nothing without you. You feel

that to your marrow all the time you are thinking about these things. Oh, I'm not jealous, dear. I love you for

loving her. I love you in relation to her. But there it is, an added weight against us, another thing worth

Presently, I remember, she sat back on her heels and looked up into my face. "We've done wrongand

parting's paying. It's time to pay. We needn't have paid, if we'd kept to the track. . . . You and I, Master, we've

I was driven to tell Margaret about our situation by my intolerable dread that otherwise the thing might come

to her through some stupid and clumsy informant. She might even meet Altiora, and have it from her.

I can still recall the feeling of sitting at my desk that night in that large study of mine in Radnor Square,

waiting for Margaret to come home. It was oddly like the feeling of a dentist's reception room; only it was

for me to do the dentistry with clumsy, cruel hands. I had left the door open so that she would come in to me.

I heard her silken rustle on the stairs at last, and then she was in the doorway. "May I come in?" she said.

"At the Vallerys'. Mr. Evesham was talking about you. They were all talking. I don't think everybody knew

"But they all feel you're rather big, anyhow. Then I went on to Park Lane to hear a new pianist and some

"Then I looked in at the Brabants' for some midnight tea before I came on here. They'd got some

I looked at her pretty, unsuspecting face, and at the slender grace of her goldenrobed body. What gulfs there

After all, why should I tell her? She'd got to a way of living that fulfilled her requirements. Perhaps she'd

never hear. But all that day and the day before I'd been making up my mind to do the thing.

"I want to tell you something," I said. "I wish you'd sit down for a moment or so." . . .

Something in the quality of my voice gave her an intimation of unusual gravity. She looked at me steadily for

I went on awkwardly. "I've got to tell yousomething extraordinarily distressing," I said.

"There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroadI've only recently heard of itabout myselfand

"Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?" She paused and looked at me. It's so

She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression changed to dread. There was a tense

I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful of paper fasteners.

Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was very white, and her distressed eyes

scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she spoke. "You really meanTHAT?" she said.

She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked about the room she had made for me,

and then quite silently, with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon her face,

she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over

the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch her tears. "I am

"You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affairI want to know what youwhat you want."

"Leave Parliamentleave all the things you are doing,all this fine movement of yours?"

"No." I spoke sullenly. "I don't want to leave anything. I want to stay on. I've told you, because I think

weIsabel and I, I mean have got to drive through a storm of scandal anyhow. I don't know how far

things may go, how much people may feel, and I can't, I can't have you unconscious, unarmed, open to any

"When the thing beganI knew it was stupid but I thought it was a thing that wouldn't change, wouldn't be

anything but itself, wouldn't unfoldconsequences. . . . People have got hold of these vague rumours. . . .

I stopped. I had that distressful feeling I have always had with Margaret, of not being altogether sure she

heard, of being doubtful if she understood. I perceived that once again I had struck at her and shattered a

thousand unsubstantial pinnacles. And I couldn't get at her, to help her, or touch her mind! I stood up, and at

my movement she moved. She produced a dainty little handkerchief, and made an effort to wipe her face with

Something gripped me tormentingly as I said that. I drew a chair beside her and sat down. "You and I,

Margaret, have been partners," I began. "We've built up this life of ours together; I couldn't have done it

"You helping. I don't want to shatter itif you don't want it shattered. I can't leave my work. I can't leave

you. I want you to haveall that you have ever had. I've never meant to rob you. I've made an immense and

tragic blunder. You don't know how things took us, how different they seemed! My character and accident

"I want you to understand that the thing is at an end. It is definitely at an end. Wewe talkedyesterday.

We mean to end it altogether." I clenched my hands. "She'sshe's going to marry Arnold Shoesmith."

I wasn't looking now at Margaret any more, but I heard the rustle of her movement as she turned on me.

"It's all right," I said, clinging to my explanation. "We're doing nothing shabby. He knows. He will. It's all as

rightas things can be now. We're not cheating any one, Margaret. We're doing things straightnow. Of

course, you know. . . . We shallwe shall have to make sacrifices. Give things up pretty completely. Very

completely. . . . We shall have not to see each other for a time, you know. Perhaps not a long time. Two or

Some subconscious barrier gave way in me. I found myself crying uncontrollablyas I have never cried

since I was a little child. I was amazed and horrified at myself. And wonderfully, Margaret was on her knees

beside me, with her arms about me, mingling her weeping with mine. "Oh, my Husband!" she cried, my poor

Husband! Does it hurt you so? I would do anything! Oh, the fool I am! Dear, I love you. I love you over and

She drew down my head to her as a mother might draw down the head of a son. She caressed me, weeping

bitterly with me. "Oh! my dear," she sobbed, "my dear! I've never seen you cry! I've never seen you cry.

Ever! I didn't know you could. Oh! my dear! Can't you have her, my dear, if you want her? I can't bear it! Let

me help you, dear. Oh! my Husband! My Man! I can't bear to have you cry!" For a time she held me in

"I've thought this might happen, I dreamt it might happen. You two, I mean. It was dreaming put it into my

head. When I've seen you together, so glad with each other. . . . Oh! Husband mine, believe me! believe me!

I'm stupid, I'm cold, I'm only beginning to realise how stupid and cold, but all I want in all the world is to

"We'll have one last talk together," I said, and planned that we should meet for a half a day between Dover

and Walmer and talk ourselves out. I still recall that day very well, recall even the curious exaltation of grief

that made our mental atmosphere distinctive and memorable. We had seen so much of one another, had

become so intimate, that we talked of parting even as we parted with a sense of incredible remoteness. We

went together up over the cliffs, and to a place where they fall towards the sea, past the white,

quaintlanterned lighthouses of the South Foreland. There, in a kind of niche below the crest, we sat talking.

It was a spacious day, serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely below a black tender and

six hooded submarines came presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and

chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen

We talked and thought that afternoon on every aspect of our relations. It seems to me now we talked so wide

and far that scarcely an issue in the life between man and woman can arise that we did not at least touch

upon. Lying there at Isabel's feet, I have become for myself a symbol of all this worldwide problem between

duty and conscious, passionate love the world has still to solve. Because it isn't solved; there's a wrong in it

either way. . . . The sky, the wide horizon, seemed to lift us out of ourselves until we were something

representative and general. She was womanhood become articulate, talking to her lover.

"I ought never to have let our talk slip to that, never to have turned back from America."

"I will never repent," she said. "Never!" as though she clung to her life in saying it.

I remember we talked for a long time of divorce. It seemed to us then, and it seems to us still, that it ought to

have been possible for Margaret to divorce me, and for me to marry without the scandalous and ugly

publicity, the taint and ostracism that follow such a readjustment. We went on to the whole perplexing riddle

of marriage. We criticised the current code, how muddled and conventionalised it had become, how modified

by subterfuges and concealments and new necessities, and the increasing freedom of women. "It's all like

Bromstead when the building came," I said; for I had often talked to her of that early impression of purpose

dissolving again into chaotic forces. "There is no clear right in the world any more. The world is Byzantine.

These questions need discussiona magnificent frankness of discussionif any standards are again to

establish an effective hold upon educated people. Discretions, as I have said already, will never hold any one

worth holdinglonger than they held us. Against every "shalt not" there must be a "why not" plainly put,

the "why not" largest and plainest, the law deduced from its purpose. "You and I, Isabel," I said, "have

always been a little disregardful of duty, partly at least because the idea of duty comes to us so illclad. Oh! I

know there's an extravagant insubordinate strain in us, but that wasn't all. I wish humbugs would leave duty

alone. I wish all duty wasn't covered with slime. That's where the real mischief comes in. Passion can always

contrive to clothe itself in beauty, strips itself splendid. That carried us. But for all its mean associations there

"It's queer to think of now," said Isabel. "Who could believe we did all we have done honestly? Well, in a

manner honestly. Who could believe we thought this might be hidden? Who could trace it all step by step

from the time when we found that a certain boldness in our talk was pleasing? We talked of love. . . . Master,

there's not much for us to do in the way of Apologia that any one will credit. And yet if it were possible to tell

"Does Margaret really want to go on with you?" she asked"shield youknowing of . . . THIS?"

"I'm certain. I don't understandjust as I don't understand Shoesmith, but she does. These people walk on

solid ground which is just thin air to us. They've got something we haven't got. Assurances? I wonder." . . .

Then it was, or later, we talked of Shoesmith, and what her life might be with him.

"He's good," she said; "he's kindly. He's everything but magic. He's the very image of the decent, sober,

honourable life. You can't say a thing against him or Iexcept that somethingsomething in his

imagination, something in the tone of his voicefails for me. Why don't I love him?he's a better man than

you! Why don't you? IS he a better man than you? He's usage, he's honour, he's the right thing, he's the breed

and the tradition,a gentleman. You're your erring, incalculable self. I suppose we women will trust this sort

We lay side by side and nibbled at grass stalks as we talked. It seemed enormously unreasonable to us that

two people who had come to the pitch of easy and confident affection and happiness that held between us

should be obliged to part and shun one another, or murder half the substance of their lives. We felt ourselves

crushed and beaten by an indiscriminating machine which destroys happiness in the service of jealousy. "The

mass of people don't feel these things in quite the same manner as we feel them," she said. "Is it because

"It's because we've explored love a little, and they know no more than the gateway," I said. "Lust and then

jealousy; their simple conceptionand we have gone past all that and wandered hand in hand. . . ."

I remember that for a time we watched two of that larger sort of gull, whose wings are brownishwhite, circle

and hover against the blue. And then we lay and looked at a band of water mirror clear far out to sea, and

"Eh!" said Isabel, rolling over into a sitting posture and looking out at the horizon. "Let's talk no more of

things we can never see. Talk to me of the work you are doing and all we shall doafter we have parted.

We've said too little of that. We've had our red life, and it's over. Thank Heaven!though we stole it! Talk

about your work, dear, and the things we'll go on doingjust as though we were still together. We'll still be

And so we talked of politics and our outlook. We were interested to the pitch of selfforgetfulness. We

weighed persons and forces, discussed the probabilities of the next general election, the steady drift of public

opinion in the north and west away from Liberalism towards us. It was very manifest that in spite of

Wardenham and the EXPURGATOR, we should come into the new Government strongly. The party had no

one else, all the young men were formally or informally with us; Esmeer would have office, Lord Tarvrille, I

. . . and very probably there would be something for Shoesmith. "And for my own part," I said, "I count on

backing on the Liberal side. For the last two years we've been forcing competition in constructive legislation

between the parties. The Liberals have not been long in following up our Endowment of Motherhood lead.

They'll have to give votes and lip service anyhow. Half the readers of the BLUE WEEKLY, they say, are

"I remember talking about things of this sort with old Willersley," I said, "ever so many years ago. It was

some place near Locarno, and we looked down the lake that shone welteringjust as now we look over the

sea. And then we dreamt in an indistinct featureless way of all that you and I are doing now."

"Well, of some such thing," I said, and remained for awhile silent, thinking of Locarno.

I recalled once more the largeness, the release from small personal things that I had felt in my youth;

statecraft became real and wonderful again with the memory, the gigantic handling of gigantic problems. I

began to talk out my thoughts, sitting up beside her, as I could never talk of them to any one but Isabel; began

to recover again the purpose that lay under all my political ambitions and adjustments and anticipations. I saw

the State, splendid and wide as I had seen it in that first travel of mine, but now it was no mere distant

prospect of spires and pinnacles, but populous with finetrained, boldthinking, bolddoing people. It was as

At first, I told her, I had been altogether at a loss how I could do anything to battle against the aimless muddle

of our world; I had wanted a clueuntil she had come into my life questioning, suggesting, unconsciously

illuminating. "But I have done nothing," she protested. I declared she had done everything in growing to

education under my eyes, in reflecting again upon all the processes that had made myself, so that instead of

abstractions and bluebooks and bills and devices, I had realised the world of mankind as a crowd needing

before all things fine women and men. We'd spoilt ourselves in learning that, but anyhow we had our lesson.

Before her I was in a nineteenthcentury darkness, dealing with the nation as if it were a crowd of selfish

men, forgetful of women and children and that shy wild thing in the hearts of men, love, which must be

drawn upon as it has never been drawn upon before, if the State is to live. I saw now how it is possible to

bring the loose factors of a great realm together, to create a mind of literature and thought in it, and the

expression of a purpose to make it self conscious and fine. I had it all clear before me, so that at a score of

points I could presently begin. The BLUE WEEKLY was a centre of force. Already we had given

Imperialism a criticism, and leavened half the press from our columns. Our movement consolidated and

spread. We should presently come into power. Everything moved towards our hands. We should be able to

get at the schools, the services, the universities, the church; enormously increase the endowment of research,

and organise what was sorely wanted, a criticism of research; contrive a closer contact between the press and

creative intellectual life; foster literature, clarify, strengthen the public consciousness, develop social

organisation and a sense of the State. Men were coming to us every day, brilliant young peers like Lord

Dentonhill, writers like Carnot and Cresswell. It filled me with pride to win such men. "We stand for so much

more than we seem to stand for," I said. I opened my heart to her, so freely that I hesitate to open my heart

even to the reader, telling of projects and ambitions I cherished, of my consciousness of great powers and

She too, I think, had forgotten these things for a while. For it is curious and I think a very significant thing

that since we had become lovers, we had talked very little of the broader things that had once so strongly

"It's good," I said, "to talk like this to you, to get back to youth and great ambitions with you. There have

been times lately when politics has seemed the pettiest game played with mean tools for mean endsand

none the less so that the happiness of three hundred million people might be touched by our follies. I talk to

no one else like this. . . . And now I think of parting, I think but of how much more I might have talked to

"We've talked away our last half day," I said, staring over my shoulder at the blazing sunset sky behind us.

"Dear, it's been the last day of our lives for us. . . . It doesn't seem like the last day of our lives. Or any day."

"I've a superstition that afterafter we've partedif ever I go into my room and talk, you'll hear. You'll

"I don't feel as though these days ahead were real. Here we are, here we remain."

"Yes, I feel that. As though you and I were two immortals, who didn't live in time and space at all, who never

met, who couldn't part, and here we lie on Olympus. And those two poor creatures who did meet, poor little

Richard Remington and Isabel Rivers, who met and loved too much and had to part, they part and go their

"Poor little beasts! I think he'll cry too. He winces. He could for tuppence. I didn't know he had lachrymal

glands at all until a little while ago. I suppose all love is hystericaland a little foolish. Poor mites! Silly

little pitiful creatures! How we have blundered! Think how we must look to God! Well, we'll pity them, and

then we'll inspire him to stiffen up againand do as we've determined he shall do. We'll see it through,we

who lie here on the cliff. They'll be mean at times, and horrid at times; we know them! Do you see her, a poor

"Yes. SometimesI hope. And he's there in the office with a bit of her copy in his hand."

"Is it as good as if she still talked it over with him before she wrote it? Is it?"

"Better, I think. Let's play it's betteranyhow. It may be that talking over was rather mixed with

lovemaking. After all, love making is joy rather than magic. Don't let's pretend about that even. . . . Let's

go on watching him. (I don't see why her writing shouldn't be better. Indeed I don't.) See! There he goes

down along the Embankment to Westminster just like a real man, for all that he's smaller than a grain of dust.

What is running round inside that speck of a head of his? Look at him going past the Policemen, specks

tooselected large ones from the country. I think he's going to dinner with the Speakersome old thing like

that. Is his face harder or commoner or stronger?I can't quite see. . . . And now he's up and speaking in the

House. Hope he'll hold on to the thread. He'll have to plan his speeches to the very end of his daysand

"Well, by accident it happens. Not too many accidents, Isabel. Never any more adventures for us, dear, now.

No! . . . They play the game, you know. They've begun late, but now they've got to. You see it's not so very

hard for them since you and I, my dear, are here always, always faithfully here on this warm cliff of love

accomplished, watching and helping them under high heaven. It isn't so VERY hard. Rather good in some

ways. Some people HAVE to be broken a little. Can you see Altiora down there, by any chance?"

"I can only see you here beside me, dearfor ever. For all my life, dear, till I die. Was thatthe sin?" . . .

I took her to the station, and after she had gone I was to drive to Dover, and cross to Calais by the night boat.

I couldn't, I felt, return to London. We walked over the crest and down to the little station of Martin Mill side

by side, talking at first in broken fragments, for the most part of unimportant things.

"None of this," she said abruptly, "seems in the slightest degree real to me. I've got no sense of things

"We're partingas people part in a play. It's distressing. But I don't feel as though you and I were really

"I feel as if you'd always he there, just about where you are now. Invisible perhaps, but there. We've spent so

"Yes. Yes. I don't in the least realise it. I suppose I shall begin to when the train goes out of the station. Are

"Even when the train goes out of the station! I've seen you into so many trains."

"I shall go on thinking of things to say to youthings to put in your letters. For years to come. How can I

"It isn't real," I said; "nothing is real. The world's no more than a fantastic dream. Why are we parting,

"I don't know. It seems now supremely silly. I suppose we have to. Can't we meet?don't you think we shall

"I wish we could dream at the same time," said Isabel. . . . "Dream walks. I can't believe, dear, I shall never

"If I'd stayed six months in America," I said, "we might have walked long walks and talked long talks for all

I took her ticket, saw to her luggage, and stood by the door of the compartment. "Goodbye," I said a little

stiffly, conscious of the people upon the platform. She bent above me, white and dusky, looking at me very

"Come here," she whispered. "Never mind the porters. What can they know? Just one time moreI must."

She rested her hand against the door of the carriage and bent down upon me, and put her cold, moist lips to

And then we broke down. We broke our faith with both Margaret and Shoesmith, flung career and duty out of

It is only now, almost a year after these events, that I can begin to see what happened to me. At the time it

seemed to me I was a rational, responsible creature, but indeed I had not parted from her two days before I

became a monomaniac to whom nothing could matter but Isabel. Every truth had to be squared to that

obsession, every duty. It astounds me to think how I forgot Margaret, forgot my work, forgot everything but

that we two were parted. I still believe that with better chances we might have escaped the consequences of

the emotional storm that presently seized us both. But we had no foresight of that, and no preparation for it,

and our circumstances betrayed us. It was partly Shoesmith's unwisdom in delaying his marriage until after

the end of the sessionpartly my own amazing folly in returning within four days to Westminster. But we

were all of us intent upon the defeat of scandal and the complete restoration of appearances. It seemed

necessary that Shoesmith's marriage should not seem to be hurried, still more necessary that I should not

vanish inexplicably. I had to be visible with Margaret in London just as much as possible; we went to

restaurants, we visited the theatre; we could even contemplate the possibility of my presence at the wedding.

For that, however, we had schemed a weekend visit to Wales, and a fictitious sprained ankle at the last

I cannot convey to you the intolerable wretchedness and rebellion of my separation from Isabel. It seemed

that in the past two years all my thoughts had spun commisures to Isabel's brain and I could think of nothing

that did not lead me surely to the need of the one intimate I had found in the world. I came back to the House

and the office and my home, I filled all my days with appointments and duty, and it did not save me in the

least from a lonely emptiness such as I had never felt before in all my life. I had little sleep. In the daytime I

did a hundred things, I even spoke in the House on two occasions, and by my own low standards spoke well,

and it seemed to me that I was going about in my own brain like a hushed survivor in a house whose owner

I came to a crisis after that wild dinner of Tarvrille's. Something in that stripped my soul bare.

It was an occasion made absurd and strange by the odd accident that the house caught fire upstairs while we

were dining below. It was a men's dinner" A dinner of all sorts," said Tarvrille, when he invited me;

"everything from Evesham and Gane to Wilkins the author, and Heaven knows what will happen!" I

remember that afterwards Tarvrille was accused of having planned the fire to make his dinner a marvel and a

memory. It was indeed a wonderful occasion, and I suppose if I had not been altogether drenched in misery, I

should have found the same wild amusement in it that glowed in all the others. There were one or two

university dons, Lord George Fester, the racing man, Panmure, the artist, two or three big City men, Weston

Massinghay and another prominent Liberal whose name I can't remember, the three men Tarvrille had

promised and Esmeer, Lord Wrassleton, Waulsort, the member for Monckton, Neal and several others. We

began a little coldly, with duologues, but the conversation was already becoming generalso far as such a

It asserted itself first as a penetrating and emphatic smell of burning rubber,it was caused by the fusing of

an electric wire. The reek forced its way into the discussion of the Pekin massacres that had sprung up

between Evesham, Waulsort, and the others at the end of the table. "Something burning," said the man next to

Tarvrille hated undignified interruptions. He had a particularly imperturbable butler with a cadaverous sad

face and an eye of rigid disapproval. He spoke to this individual over his shoulder. "Just see, will you," he

Wilkins was asking questions, and I, too, was curious. The story of the siege of the Legations in China in the

year 1900 and all that followed upon that, is just one of those disturbing interludes in history that refuse to

join on to that general scheme of protestation by which civilisation is maintained. It is a break in the general

flow of experience as disconcerting to statecraft as the robbery of my knife and the scuffle that followed it

had been to me when I was a boy at Penge. It is like a tear in a curtain revealing quite unexpected

backgrounds. I had never given the business a thought for years; now this talk brought back a string of

pictures to my mind; how the reliefs arrived and the plundering began, how section after section of the

International Army was drawn into murder and pillage, how the infection spread upward until the wives of

Ministers were busy looting, and the very sentinels stripped and crawled like snakes into the Palace they were

set to guard. It did not stop at robbery, men were murdered, women, being plundered, were outraged, children

were butchered, strong men had found themselves with arms in a lawless, defenceless city, and this had

"Respectable ladies addicted to district visiting at home were as bad as any one," said Panmure. "Glazebrook

told me of oneflushed like a woman at a bargain sale, he saidand when he pointed out to her that the silk

she'd got was bloodstained, she just said, 'Oh, bother!' and threw it aside and went back. . . ."

We became aware that Tarvrille's butler had returned. We tried not to seem to listen.

"It's all right," said Tarvrille to the table generally. Go on! It's not a general conflagration, and the fire brigade

won't be five minutes. Don't see that it's our affair. The stuff's insured. They say old Lady Paskershortly was

dreadful. Like a harpy. The Dowager Empress had shown her some little things of hers. Pet thingshidden

away. Susan went straight for themused to take an umbrella for the silks. Born shoplifter."

"This is recorded history," said Wilkins," practically. It makes one wonder about unrecorded history. In

"Thompson," said Tarvrille to the imperturbable butler, and indicating the table generally, "champagne.

Some man I didn't know began to remember things about Mandalay. "It's queer," he said, "how people break

out at times;" and told his story of an army doctor, brave, publicspirited, and, as it happened, deeply

religious, who was caught one evening by the excitement of plunderingand stole and hid, twisted the wrist

I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made

of. And in China, too, they murdered peoplefor the sake of murdering. Apart, so to speak, from mercenary

considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from

"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases. . . . Some of the Indian troops were pretty bad."

It is all printed in the vividest way as a picture upon my memory, so that were I a painter I think I could give

the deep rich browns and warm greys beyond the brightly lit table, the various distinguished faces, strongly

illuminated, interested and keen, above the black and white of evening dress, the alert menservants with their

heavier, cleanshaved faces indistinctly seen in the dimness behind. Then this was coloured emotionally for

me by my aching sense of loss and sacrifice, and by the chance trend of our talk to the breaches and

unrealities of the civilised scheme. We seemed a little transitory circle of light in a universe of darkness and

violence; an effect to which the diminishing smell of burning rubber, the trampling of feet overhead, the

swish of water, added enormously. Everybodyunless, perhaps, it was Eveshamdrank rather carelessly

because of the suppressed excitement of our situation, and talked the louder and more freely.

"But what a flimsy thing our civilisation is!" said Evesham; "a mere thin net of habits and associations!"

"How do they fit it in with the rest of their lives?" Wilkins speculated. "I suppose there's Pekinstained police

officers, Pekinstained J. P.'strying petty pilferers in the severest manner." . . .

Then for a time things became preposterous. There was a sudden cascade of water by the fireplace, and then

absurdly the ceiling began to rain upon us, first at this point and then that. "My new suit!" cried some one.

"Perrrrrrup perr"a new vertical line of blackened water would establish itself and form a spreading pool

upon the gleaming cloth. The men nearest would arrange catchment areas of plates and flower bowls. "Draw

up!" said Tarvrille, "draw up. That's the bad end of the table!" He turned to the imperturbable butler. "Take

round bath towels," he said; and presently the men behind us were offeringwith inflexible dignity "Port

wine, Sir. Bath towel, Sir!" Waulsort, with streaks of blackened water on his forehead, was suddenly

reminded of a wet year when he had followed the French army manoeuvres. An animated dispute sprang up

between him and Neal about the relative efficiency of the new French and German field guns. Wrassleton

joined in and a little drunken shrivelled Oxford don of some sort with a black splashed shirt front who

presently silenced them all by the immensity and particularity of his knowledge of field artillery. Then the

talk drifted to Sedan and the effect of dead horses upon drinkingwater, which brought Wrassleton and

Weston Massinghay into a dispute of great vigour and emphasis. "The trouble in South Africa," said Weston

Massinghay, "wasn't that we didn't boil our water. It was that we didn't boil our men. The Boers drank the

That argument went on for some time. I was attacked across the table by a man named Burshort about my

Endowment of Motherhood schemes, but in the gaps of that debate I could still hear Weston Massinghay at

I think Evesham went early. The rest of us clustered more and more closely towards the drier end of the

room, the table was pushed along, and the area beneath the extinguished conflagration abandoned to a

tinkling, splashing company of pots and pans and bowls and baths. Everybody was now disposed to be

hilarious and noisy, to say startling and aggressive things; we must have sounded a queer clamour to a

listener in the next room. The devil inspired them to begin baiting me. "Ours isn't the Tory party any more,"

"That's good!" said Weston Massinghay, with all his teeth gleaming; "I shall use that against you in the

"I shall denounce you for abusing private confidences if you do," said Tarvrille.

"Remington wants us to give up launching Dreadnoughts and launch babies instead," Burshort urged. "For

The little shrivelled don who had been omniscient about guns joined in the baiting, and displayed himself a

venomous creature. Something in his eyes told me he knew Isabel and hated me for it. "Love and fine

thinking," he began, a little thickly, and knocking over a wineglass with a too easy gesture. "Love and fine

thinking. Two things don't go together. No philosophy worth a damn ever came out of excesses of love. Salt

"Got to rec'nise these facts," said my assailant. "Love and fine think'n pretty phraseattractive. Suitable for

p'litical dec'rations. Postcard, Christmas, gilt lets, in a wreath of white flow's. Not oth'wise valu'ble."

Real things we want are HateHate and COARSE think'n. I b'long to the school of Mrs. F's Aunt"

"Hate," said the little man, emphasising his point with a clumsy fist. "Hate's the driving force. What's

m'rality?hate of rotten goings on. What's patriotism?hate of int'loping foreigners. What's

Radicalism?hate of lords. What's Toryism?hate of disturbance. It's all hatehate from top to bottom.

Hate of a mess. Remington owned it the other day, said he hated a mu'll. There you are! If you couldn't get

hate into an election, damn it (hic) people wou'n't poll. Poll for love!no' me!"

"Then this about fine thinking. Like going into a bear pit armed with a tagletalgenttalgent galv'nometer.

Like going to fight a mad dog with Shasepear and the Bible. Fine thinkingwhat we want is the thickes'

thinking we can get. Thinking that stands up alone. Taf Reform means work for all, thassort of thing."

The gentleman from Cambridge paused. "YOU a flag!" he said. "I'd as soon go to ba'ell und' wet tissue

I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk of the whole table drew round me. It was an

extraordinary revelation to me. Every one was unusually careless and outspoken, and it was amazing how

manifestly they echoed the feeling of this old Tory spokesman. They were quite friendly to me, they regarded

me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable party assets for Toryism, but it was clear they attached no more

importance to what were my realities than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy. They

were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in their resolves to draw me, but they left the

impression on my mind of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political life. For them the

political struggle was a game, whose counters were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just

every one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which their lives were attuned. They did

not know how tired I was, how exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent attack on me

chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart and fierce, perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and

Tarvrille, with that quick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then for a time I sat silent and drank

port wine while the others talked. The disorder of the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the displaced

It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille coming with me into the hall, and then

suggesting we should go upstairs to see the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering candles for us.

One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings, several chairs and tables were completely burnt, the

panelling was scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare and gutter, and some

As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party, a slender, whitecloaked, satinfooted

figure with amazed blue eyes beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her surprise.

I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my way alone. But I did not go home, I

turned westward and walked for a long way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too miserable to go

I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods are dead. I can look back now detached

yet sympathetic upon that wild confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can understand, oh! half

I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have convinced me then that I had made my

sacrifice and spent my strength in vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory party had

higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like a thing newly discovered that the men I had to work

with had for the most part no such dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no atom of the faith I held.

They were just as immediately intent upon personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as the men in

any other group or party. Perhaps I had slipped unawares for a time into the delusions of a party manbut I

No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon the abrupt cessation of my familiar

intercourse with Isabel, that gave this fact that had always been present in my mind its quality of devastating

revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen before nor suspected the stupendous gap between the chaotic

aims, the routine, the conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of the personal life, and that clearly

conscious development and service of a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts aimed. I had

thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw they were separated by all the distance between earth and

heaven. I saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon interests close at hand, an

inability to detach oneself from the provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy

timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader

aims and remoter possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as unearthly and irrelevant to

human life as the story an astronomer will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable planets and

answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too high

and thought too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the uttermost dear reality of

All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads of thought interwove; now I was a soul

speaking in protest to God against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man, scorned and

pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate pride of his soul. Now I was the fool of ambition,

who opened his box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of flimsy thoughts, whose web

tore to rags at a touch. I realised for the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith of

Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little strength I had to go on with our purposes now

that she had vanished from my life. She had been the incarnation of those great abstractions, the saving

reality, the voice that answered back. There was no support that night in the things that had been. We were

alone together on the cliff for ever more!that was very pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that

could help me now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no sentiment or memory of her,

but Isabel alive,to talk to me, to touch me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky gentleness

We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman into interest by laughing aloud at that

magnificent and characteristic sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how satisfying it had been! That was just

where we shouldn't remain. We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is to forget. We

should go out to other interests, new experiences, new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious

understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the first to go; and last perhaps to endure

with us would be a few gross memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements. . . .

I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life for a long time, and had now been reminded of

its quality. That infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse thinking," stuck in my

thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre of inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the

vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis of my separation from Isabel, could find no

resistance to his emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was overpoweringly true, not

only of contemporary life, but of all possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing; you lock

it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and aggression and force keep the streets and rule the

world. And fine thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a balancing indecisive process,

discovers with disloyal impartiality a justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest men," as

Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and

with a steadfast pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists "blaggards and scoundrels"it

justified his oppositionthe Lords were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all

Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails and justice being done. His public spirit was

saturated with the sombre joys of conflict and the pleasant thought of condign punishment for all recalcitrant

souls. That was the way of it, I perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was fool enough

Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat me down that night! I couldn't remember

that I had known this all along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I had worked it all out

long ago in other terms, when I had seen how all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in

life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I

always known that science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the passion and narrowness of

men, in spite of the vanities and weakness of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of contemporary

things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and

transitorily lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like a thing that struggles out of mud

and slime, and that the mere effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we who think

without fear and speak without discretion will not come to our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid. Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched

new centuries of confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish temporary triumphs of order,

lapses, setbacks, despairs, catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a nigh plotless

drama of wrongheaded energies. In order to assuage my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine

great rewards for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised ourselves success visible and

shining in our lives. To console ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and our

young Tory movement preposterously enormous thingsas though those poor fertilising touches at the soil

were indeed the germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such as ours had not to

contribute before the beginning of the beginning. That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition

I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my real services to mankind were concerned I

had to live an unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be by the way. Our separation

would alter nothing of that. My scandal would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting relationships,

embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination,

and follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to

me for ever; I should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I should produce much weary

work, much badspirited work, much absolute evil; the good in me would be too often illexpressed and

missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a

moment of postmortem sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because I believed with

all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or

think finely. I remember how I fell talking to GodI think I talked out loud. "Why do I care for these

things?" I cried, "when I can do so little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of men?

I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought I had a gleam of you in Isabel,and

then you take her away. Do you really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in darkness and

Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange parallelism between my now tattered phrase of

"Love and fine thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it possible the Christian

propaganda had at the outset meant just that system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the

very beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to Christ? It mocks humanity to think

how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling longneglected phrases and sentences; I had a new

vision of that great central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about

Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in His fate. . . .

It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered dinner should lead a man to these speculations,

but they did. "He DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon they'd made of His

Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced

and gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He wasn't human," I said, and remembered

"Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind will, with an obvious repartee. . . .

I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage against the Baileys. In an instant and

with no sense of absurdity I wantedin the intervals of love and fine thinkingto fling about that

strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a

common massacre of all the prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can still feel that

transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of weakly decisive anger which is for people of my

"I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life mocks me and cheats me. Nothing can be made

good to me again. . . . Why shouldn't I save what I can? I can't save myself without her. . . ."

I remember myselfas a sort of anticlimax to thatrather tediously asking my way home. I was

It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now without any risk of meeting Margaret. It

had been the thought of returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is one of the ugliest

facts I recall about that time of crisis, the intense aversion I felt for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her

injury and nobility, and the enormous generosity of her forgiveness, sufficed to mitigate that. I hope now that

in this book I am able to give something of her silvery splendour, but all through this crisis I felt nothing of

that. There was a triumphant kindliness about her that I found intolerable. She meant to be so kind to me, to

offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all she imagined Isabel had given me.

When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she would meet my homecoming. She would be

perplexed by my crumpled shirt front, on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would overlook that by

an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it should make no difference to her. She would want to know who

had been present, what we had talked about, show the alertest interest in whatever it wasit didn't matter

There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver candlesticks that she had set there two days

since to please methe foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression, Margaret heaped presents

upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write

my note to Isabel. "Give me a wordthe world aches without you," was all I scrawled, though I fully meant

that she should come to me. I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her flat, she was

with the Balfesshe was to have been married from the Balfesand I sent my letter there. And I went out

into the silent square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly that if I left it until morning

I had a curious revulsion of feeling that morning of our meeting. (Of all places for such a clandestine

encounter she had chosen the bridge opposite Buckingham Palace.) Overnight I had been full of self pity, and

eager for the comfort of Isabel's presence. But the illwritten scrawl in which she had replied had been full of

the suggestion of her own weakness and misery. And when I saw her, my own selfish sorrows were

altogether swept away by a wave of pitiful tenderness. Something had happened to her that I did not

understand. She was manifestly ill. She came towards me wearily, she who had always borne herself so

bravely; her shoulders seemed bent, and her eyes were tired, and her face white and drawn. All my life has

been a narrow selfcentred life; no brothers, no sisters or children or weak things had ever yet made any

intimate appeal to me, and suddenlyI verily believe for the first time in my life!I felt a great passion of

protective ownership; I felt that here was something that I could die to shelter, something that meant more

than joy or pride or splendid ambitions or splendid creation to me, a new kind of hold upon me, a new power

in the world. Some sealed fountain was opened in my breast. I knew that I could love Isabel broken, Isabel

beaten, Isabel ugly and in pain, more than I could love any sweet or delightful or glorious thing in life. I

didn't care any more for anything in the world but Isabel, and that I should protect her. I trembled as I came

I took her to the little boathouse, and there we hired a boat, and I rowed in silence under the bridge and into

the shade of a tree. The square grey stone masses of the Foreign Office loomed through the twigs, I

remember, and a little space of grass separated us from the pathway and the scrutiny of passersby. And there

She leant forward and scrutinised my face with eyes wide open. "What do you mean?" she said at last in a

Then suddenly her face was contorted,she wept silently, exactly as a child tormented beyond endurance

"Oh! I don't care," I cried, "now. I don't care. Damn the whole system of things! Damn all this patching of the

"You needn't stand it. I thought it was best for you. . . . I thought indeed it was best for you. I thought even

"No," I said, "you couldn't. You're not strong enough. I've thought of that; I've got to shelter you."

"And I want you," I went on. "I'm not strong enoughI can't stand life without you."

She stopped weeping, she made a great effort to control herself, and looked at me steadfastly for a moment. "I

was going to kill myself," she whispered. "I was going to kill myself quietly somehow. I meant to wait a

bit and have an accident. I thought you didn't understand. You were a man, and couldn't understand. . . ."

"People can't do as we thought we could do," I said. "We've gone too far together."

"The horror of it," she whispered. "The horror of being handed over. It's just only begun to dawn upon me,

seeing him now as I do. He tries to be kind to me. . . . I didn't know. I felt adventurous before. . . . It makes

me feel like all the women in the world who have ever been owned and subdued. . . . It's not that he isn't the

best of men, it's because I'm a part of you. . . . I can't go through with it. If I go through with it, I shall be

"I want to live alone. . . . I don't care for anything now but just escape. If you can help me. . . ."

"We've made a mess of things, Isabelor things have made a mess of us. I don't know which. Our flags are

in the mud, anyhow. It's too late to save those other things! They have to go. You can't make terms with

defeat. I thought it was Margaret needed me most. But it's you. And I need you. I didn't think of that either. I

haven't a doubt left in the world now. We've got to leave everything rather than leave each other. I'm sure of

it. Now we have gone so far. We've got to go right down to earth and begin again. . . . Dear, I WANT

So I whispered to her as she sat crumpled together on the faded cushions of the boat, this white and weary

young woman who had been so valiant and careless a girl. "I don't care," I said. "I don't care for anything, if I

The next day I went to the office of the BLUE WEEKLY in order to get as much as possible of its affairs in

working order before I left London with Isabel. I just missed Shoesmith in the lower office. Upstairs I found

Britten amidst a pile of outside articles, methodically reading the title of each and sometimes the first half

dozen lines, and either dropping them in a growing heap on the floor for a clerk to return, or putting them

aside for consideration. I interrupted him, squatted on the windowsill of the open window, and sketched out

"Shoesmithwhom you're pledged to in a manner. You've just picked him out and made him conspicuous.

"All this movement of ours. That's what I care for most. . . . It's come to be a big thing, Remington."

"We have a use for youno one else quite fills it. No one. . . . I'm not sure it will go on."

"I knew," he remarked, "when you came back from America. You were alight with it." Then he let his

"I can't live without herI can't work. She's all mixed up with thisand everything. And besides, there's

things you can't understand. There's feelings you've never felt. . . . You don't understand how much we've

"Remington," he said, "I've thought of this business day and night too. It matters to me. It matters immensely

to me. In a wayit's a thing one doesn't often say to a manI've loved you. I'm the sort of man who leads a

narrow life. . . . But you've been something fine and good for me, since that time, do you remember? when

"Yes. And you'll always be something fine and good for me anyhow. I know things about

you,qualitiesno mere act can destroy them. . . . Well, I can tell you, you're doing wrong. You're going

on now like a man who is hypnotised and can't turn round. You're piling wrong on wrong. It was wrong for

"How do you know? Anyhowhaving done that, you ought to have stood the consequences and thought of

other people. You could have ended it at the first pause for reflection. You didn't. You blundered again. You

kept on. You owed a certain secrecy to all of us! You didn't keep it. You were careless. You made things

"I know," I said, with smarting eyes. "Damn it ! with all my heart! It came of trying to patch. . . . You CAN'T

"And now, as I care for anything under heaven, Remington, you two ought to stand these last

consequencesand part. You ought to part. Other people have to stand things! Other people have to part.

You ought to. You saywhat do you say? It's loss of so much life to lose each other. So is losing a hand or a

leg. But it's what you've incurred. Amputate. Take your punishmentAfter all, you chose it."

"Damn by all means. I never knew a topic so full of justifiable damns. But you two did choose it. You ought

I turned upon him with a snarl in my voice. "My dear Britten!" I cried. "Don't I KNOW I'm doing wrong?

Aren't I in a net? Suppose I don't go! Is there any right in that? Do you think we're going to be much to

ourselves or any one after this parting? I've been thinking all last night of this business, trying it over and

over again from the beginning. How was it we went wrong? Since I came back from AmericaI grant you

THATbut SINCE, there's never been a step that wasn't forced, that hadn't as much right in it or more, as

wrong. You talk as though I was a thing of steel that could bend this way or that and never change. You talk

as though Isabel was a cat one could give to any kind of owner. . . . We two are things that change and grow

and alter all the time. We'reso interwoven that being parted now will leave us just misshapen cripples. . . .

You don't know the motives, you don't know the rush and feel of things, you don't know how it was with us,

and how it is with us. You don't know the hunger for the mere sight of one another; you don't know

Britten looked at his fingernails closely. His red face puckered to a wry frown. "Haven't we all at times

wanted the world put back?" he grunted, and looked hard and close at one particular nail.

"I want her," I said, "and I'm going to have her. I'm too tired for balancing the right or wrong of it any more.

You can't separate them. I saw her yesterday. . . . She'sill. . . . I'd take her now, if death were just outside

"It's blind Want. And there's nothing ever been put into you to stand against it. What are you going to do with

His indignation rose. "In the middle of life!" he said. "No man has a right to take his hand from the plough!"

He leant forward on his desk and opened an argumentative palm. "You know, Remington," he said, "and I

know, that if this could be fended off for six monthsif you could be clapped in prison, or got out of the way

somehow,until this marriage was all over and settled down for a year, sayyou know then you two could

I turned and stared at him. "You're wrong, Britten," I said. "And does it matter if we could?"

I found that in talking to him I could frame the apologetics I had not been able to find for myself alone.

"I am certain of one thing, Britten. It is our duty not to hush up this scandal."

He raised his eyebrows. I perceived now the element of absurdity in me, but at the time I was as serious as a

"It's our duty," I went on, "to smash now openly in the sight of every one. Yes! I've got that as clean and

plainas prison whitewash. I am convinced that we have got to be public to the uttermost nowI mean

ituntil every corner of our world knows this story, knows it fully, adds it to the Parnell story and the

Ashton Dean story and the Carmel story and the Witterslea story, and all the other stories that have picked

man after man out of English public life, the men with active imaginations, the men of strong initiative. To

think this tottering oldwoman ridden Empire should dare to waste a man on such a score! You say I ought to

"I'm boiling with indignation," I said. " I lay in bed last night and went through it all. What in God's name

was to be expected of us but what has happened? I went through my life bit by bit last night, I recalled all I've

had to do with virtue and women, and all I was told and how I was prepared. I was born into cowardice and

debasement. We all are. Our generation's grimy with hypocrisy. I came to the most beautiful things in

lifelike peeping Tom of Coventry. I was never given a light, never given a touch of natural manhood by all

this dingy, furtive, canting, humbugging English world. Thank God! I'll soon be out of it! The shame of it!

The very savages in Australia initiate their children better than the English do today. Neither of us was ever

given a view of what they call morality that didn't make it show as shabby subservience, as the meanest

discretion, an abject submission to unreasonable prohibitions! meek surrender of mind and body to the

dictation of pedants and old women and fools. We weren't taughtwe were mumbled at! And when we

found that the thing they called unclean, unclean, was Pagan beautyGod! it was a glory to sin, Britten, it

I interrupted him. "I know there's a caseI'm beginning to think it a valid case against us; but we never met

it! There's a steely pride in self restraint, a nobility of chastity, but only for those who see and think and

actuntrammeled and unafraid. The other thing, the current thing, why! it's worth as much as the chastity of

a monkey kept in a cage by itself!" I put my foot in a chair, and urged my case upon him. "This is a dirty

world, Britten, simply because it is a muddled world, and the thing you call morality is dirtier now than the

thing you call immorality. Why don't the moralists pick their stuff out of the slime if they care for it, and wipe

it?damn them! I am burning now to say: 'Yes, we did this and this,' to all the world. All the world! . . . I

Britten rubbed the palm of his hand on the corner of his desk. "That's all very well, Remington," he said.

He stopped and began again. "If you didn't know you were in the wrong you wouldn't be so damned

rhetorical. You're in the wrong. It's as plain to you as it is to me. You're leaving a big work, you're leaving a

wife who trusted you, to go and live with your jolly mistress. . . . You won't see you're a statesman that

matters, that no single man, maybe, might come to such influence as you in the next ten years. You're

He swung round upon his swivel at me. "Remington," he said, "have you forgotten the immense things our

"But the things we might achieve! If you'd only stay noweven now! Oh! you'd suffer a little socially, but

what of that? You'd be able to go onperhaps all the better for hostility of the kind you'd get. You know,

I thought and went back to his earlier point. "If I am rhetorical, at any rate it's a living feeling behind it. Yes, I

remember all the implications of our aimsvery splendid, very remote. But just now it's rather like offering

to give a freezing man the sunlit Himalayas from end to end in return for his campfire. When you talk of me

and my jolly mistress, it isn't fair. That misrepresents everything. I'm not going out of thisfor delights.

That's the sort of thing men like Snuffles and Keyhole imaginethat excites them! When I think of the

things these creatures think! Ugh! But YOU know better? You know that physical passion that burns like a

fireends clean. I'm going for love, Brittenif I sinned for passion. I'm going, Britten, because when I saw

her the other day she HURT me. She hurt me damnably, Britten. . . . I've been a cold manI've led a

rhetorical lifeyou hit me with that word!I put things in a windy way, I know, but what has got hold of

me at last is her pain. She's ill. Don't you understand? She's a sick thing a weak thing. She's no more a

goddess than I'm a god. . . . I'm not in love with her now; I'm RAW with love for her. I feel like a man that's

been flayed. I have been flayed. . . . You don't begin to imagine the sort of helpless solicitude. . . . She's not

going to do things easily; she's ill. Her courage fails. . . . It's hard to put things when one isn't rhetorical, but

it's this, Britten there are distresses that matter more than all the delights or achievements in the world. . . .

I made her what she isas I never made Margaret. I've made herI've broken her. . . . I'm going with my

own woman. The rest of my life and England, and so forth, must square itself to that. . . ."

For a long time, as it seemed, we remained silent and motionless. We'd said all we had to say. My eyes

caught a printed slip upon the desk before him, and I came back abruptly to the paper.

I picked up this galley proof. It was one of Winter's essays. "This man goes on doing firstrate stuff," I said.

He did not answer for a moment or so. "I'll keep him going," he said at last with a sigh.

I have a letter Margaret wrote me within a week of our flight. I cannot resist transcribing some of it here,

because it lights things as no word of mine can do. It is a string of nearly inconsecutive thoughts written in

pencil in a fine, tall, sprawling hand. Its very inconsecutiveness is essential. Many words are underlined. It

was in answer to one from me; but what I wrote has passed utterly from my mind. . . .

"Certainly," she says, "I want to hear from you, but I do not want to see you. There's a sort of abstract YOU

that I want to go on with. Something I've made out of you. . . . I want to know things about youbut I don't

want to see or feel or imagine. When some day I have got rid of my intolerable sense of proprietorship, it may

be different. Then perhaps we may meet again. I think it is even more the loss of our political work and

dreams that I am feeling than the loss of your presence. Aching loss. I thought so much of the things we were

DOING for the worldhad given myself so unreservedly. You've left me with nothing to DO. I am suddenly

"We women are trained to be so dependent on a man. I've got no life of my own at all. It seems now to me

"After I have told myself a hundred times why this has happened, I ask again, 'Why did he give things up?

"Then I ask again and again whether this thing need have happened at all, whether if I had had a warning, if I

had understood better, I might not have adapted myself to your restless mind and made this catastrophe

"Oh, my dear! why hadn't you the pluck to hurt me at the beginning, and tell me what you thought of me and

life? You didn't give me a chance; not a chance. I suppose you couldn't. All these things you and I stood away

"It is strange to think after all these years that I should be asking myself, do I love you? have I loved you? In

a sense I think I HATE you. I feel you have taken my life, dragged it in your wake for a time, thrown it aside.

I am resentful. Unfairly resentful, for why should I exact that you should watch and understand my life, when

clearly I have understood so little of yours. But I am savage savage at the wrecking of all you were to do.

"No human being is his own to do what he likes with. You were not only pledged to my tiresome, ineffectual

"If only I could take up your work as you leave it, with the strength you hadthen indeed I feel I could let

you goyou and your young mistress. . . . All that matters so little to me. . . .

"Yet I think I must indeed love you yourself in my slower way. At times I am mad with jealousy at the

thought of all I hadn't the wit to give you. . . . I've always hidden my tears from youand what was in my

heart. It's my nature to hideand you, you want things brought to you to see. You are so curious as to be

almost cruel. You don't understand reserves. You have no mercy with restraints and reservations. You arc not

really a CIVILISED man at all. You hate pretencesand not only pretences but decent coverings. . . .

"It's only after one has lost love and the chance of loving that slow people like myself find what they might

have done. Why wasn't I bold and reckless and abandoned? It's as reasonable to ask that, I suppose, as to ask

"I go on with these perhapses over and over again here when I find myself alone. . . .

"My dear, my dear, you can't think of the desolation of thingsI shall never go back to that house we

furnished together, that was to have been the laboratory (do you remember calling it a laboratory?) in which

"But, dear, if I can help youeven nowin any wayhelp both of you, I mean. . . . It tears me when I

think of you poor and discredited. You will let me help you if I canit will be the last wrong not to let me do

"You had better not get ill. If you do, and I hear of itI shall come after you with a troupe of doctor's and

nurses. If I am a failure as a wife, no one has ever said I was anything but a success as a district visitor. . . ."

There are other sheets, but I cannot tell whether they were written before or after the ones from which I have

quoted. And most of them have little things too intimate to set down. But this oddly penetrating analysis of

"There are all sorts of things I can't express about this and want to. There's this difference that has always

been between us, that you like nakedness and wildness, and I, clothing and restraint. It goes through

everything. You are always TALKING of order and system, and the splendid dream of the order that might

replace the muddled system you hate, but by a sort of instinct you seem to want to break the law. I've

watched you so closely. Now I want to obey laws, to make sacrifices, to follow rules. I don't want to make,

but I do want to keep. You are at once makers and rebels, you and Isabel too. You're bad peoplecriminal

people, I feel, and yet full of something the world must have. You're so much better than me, and so much

viler. It may be there is no making without destruction, but it seems to me sometimes that it is nothing but an

instinct for lawlessness that drives you. You remind medo you remember?of that time we went from

Naples to Vesuvius, and walked over the hot new lava there. Do you remember how tired I was? I know it

disappointed you that I was tired. One walked there in spite of the heat because there was a crust; like

custom, like law. But directly a crust forms on things, you are restless to break down to the fire again. You

talk of beauty, both of you, as something terrible, mysterious, imperative. YOUR beauty is something

altogether different from anything I know or feel. It has pain in it. Yet you always speak as though it was

something I ought to feel and am dishonest not to feel. MY beauty is a quiet thing. You have always laughed

at my feeling for oldfashioned chintz and blue china and Sheraton. But I like all these familiar USED things.

My beauty is STILL beauty, and yours, is excitement. I know nothing of the fascination of the fire, or why

one should go deliberately out of all the decent fine things of life to run dangers and be singed and tormented

I remember very freshly the mood of our departure from London, the platform of Charing Cross with the big

illuminated clock overhead, the bustle of porters and passengers with luggage, the shouting of newsboys and

boys with flowers and sweets, and the groups of friends seeing travellers off by the boat train. Isabel sat very

quiet and still in the compartment, and I stood upon the platform with the door open, with a curious

reluctance to take the last step that should sever me from London's ground. I showed our tickets, and bought a

handful of red roses for her. At last came the guards crying: "Take your seats," and I got in and closed the

door on me. We had, thank Heaven! a compartment to ourselves. I let down the window and stared out.

There was a bustle of final adieux on the platform, a cry of "Stand away, please, stand away!" and the train

I looked out upon the river as the train rumbled with slowly gathering pace across the bridge, and the bobbing

black heads of the pedestrians in the footway, and the curve of the river and the glowing great hotels, and the

lights and reflections and blacknesses of that old, familiar spectacle. Then with a common thought, we turned

our eyes westward to where the pinnacles of Westminster and the shining clock tower rose hard and clear

"They'll be in Committee on the Reformatory Bill tonight," I said, a little stupidly.

We said no more, but watched the southside streets belowbright gleams of lights and movement, and the

dark, dim, monstrous shapes of houses and factories. We ran through Waterloo Station, London Bridge, New

Cross, St. John's. We said never a word. It seemed to me that for a time we had exhausted our emotions. We

had escaped, we had cut our knot, we had accepted the last penalty of that headlong return of mine from

Chicago a year and a half ago. That was all settled. That harvest of feelings we had reaped. I thought now

only of London, of London as the symbol of all we were leaving and all we had lost in the world. I felt

The train swayed and rattled on its way. We ran through old Bromstead, where once I had played with cities

and armies on the nursery floor. The sprawling suburbs with their scattered lights gave way to dim treeset

country under a cloudveiled, intermittently shining moon. We passed Cardcaster Place. Perhaps old

Wardingham, that pillar of the old Conservatives, was there, fretting over his unsuccessful struggle with our

young Toryism. Little he recked of this new turn of the wheel and how it would confirm his contempt of all

our novelties. Perhaps some faint intimation drew him to the window to see behind the stems of the young fir

trees that bordered his domain, the little string of lighted carriage windows gliding southward. . . .

And now, indeed, I knew what London had been to me, London where I had been born and educated, the

slovenly mother of my mind and all my ambitions, London and the empire! It seemed to me we must be

going out to a world that was utterly empty. All our significance fell from usand before us was no meaning

any more. We were leaving London; my hand, which had gripped so hungrily upon its complex life, had been

forced from it, my fingers left their hold. That was over. I should never have a voice in public affairs again.

The inexorable unwritten law which forbids overt scandal sentenced me. We were going out to a new life, a

life that appeared in that moment to be a mere shrivelled remnant of me, a mere residuum of sheltering and

feeding and seeing amidst alien scenery and the sound of unfamiliar tongues. We were going to live cheaply

in a foreign place, so cut off that I meet now the merest stray tourist, the commonest tweedclad stranger

with a mixture of shyness and hunger. . . . And suddenly all the schemes I was leaving appeared fine and

adventurous and hopeful as they had never done before. How great was this purpose I had relinquished, this

bold and subtle remaking of the English will! I had doubted so many things, and now suddenly I doubted my

unimportance, doubted my right to this suicidal abandonment. Was I not a trusted messenger, greatly trusted

and favoured, who had turned aside by the way? Had I not, after all, stood for far more than I had thought;

was I not filching from that dear great city of my birth and life, some vitally necessary thing, a key, a link, a

reconciling clue in her political development, that now she might seek vaguely for in vain? What is one life

against the State? Ought I not to have sacrificed Isabel and all my passion and sorrow for Isabel, and held to

I heard as though he had spoken it in the carriage Britten's "It WAS a good game. No end of a game. And for

the first time I imagined the faces and voices of Crupp and Esmeer and Gane when they learnt of this secret

flight, this flight of which they were quite unwarned. And Shoesmith might he there in the

house,Shoesmith who was to have been married in four daysthe thing might hit him full in front of any

kind of people. Cruel eyes might watch him. Why the devil hadn't I written letters to warn them all? I could

have posted them five minutes before the train started. I had never thought to that moment of the immense

mess they would be in; how the whole edifice would clatter about their ears. I had a sudden desire to stop the

train and go back for a day, for two days, to set that negligence right. My brain for a moment brightened,

became animated and prolific of ideas. I thought of a brilliant line we might have taken on that confounded

What indeed wasn't over? I passed to a vaguer, more multitudinous perception of disaster, the friends I had

lost already since Altiora began her campaign, the ampler remnant whom now I must lose. I thought of

people I had been merry with, people I had worked with and played with, the companions of talkative walks,

the hostesses of houses that had once glowed with welcome for us both. I perceived we must lose them all. I

saw life like a tree in late autumn that had once been rich and splendid with friendsand now the last brave

dears would be hanging on doubtfully against the frosty chill of facts, twisting and tortured in the universal

gale of indignation, trying to evade the cold blast of the truth. I had betrayed my party, my intimate friend,

my wife, the wife whose devotion had made me what I was. For awhile the figure of Margaret, remote,

wounded, shamed, dominated my mind, and the thought of my immense ingratitude. Damn them! they'd take

it out of her too. I had a feeling that I wanted to go straight back and grip some one by the throat, some one

talking ill of Margaret. They'd blame her for not keeping me, for letting things go so far. . . . I wanted the

whole world to know how fine she was. I saw in imagination the busy, excited dinner tables at work upon us

Then suddenly, stabbing me to the heart, came a vision of Margaret's tears and the sound of her voice saying,

I came out of a cloud of thoughts to discover the narrow compartment, with its feeble lamp overhead, and our

rugs and hand baggage swaying on the rack, and Isabel, very still in front of me, gripping my wilting red

For a moment I could not understand her attitude, and then I perceived she was sitting bent together with her

head averted from the light to hide the tears that were streaming down her face. She had not got her

handkerchief out for fear that I should see this, but I saw her tears, dark drops of tears, upon her sleeve. . . .

For a time I stared at her and was motionless, in a sort of still and weary amazement. Why had we done this

"Isabel!" I repeated, and then crossed over to her and crept closely to her, put my arm about her, and drew her