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  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 Being, and in short a

  Perfectly Splendid Time.

  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 presently to be torn aside…

  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 possibilities of things.

  I do not know now whether it was during my school-days 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 papers about the

  streets, were really material to such questions.

  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 co-operative societies, and

  because what Lancashire thinks to-day England thinks to-morrow…

  And also I had never been in Lancashire.

  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 painfulexperience, 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

&nbs
p; 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 had not

  anticipated.

  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 in

  those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.

  And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic Worker of the

  poster, a little wrinkled grey-bearded apologetic man in ready-made

  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 chair-arms 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 beach-photographer'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 expected to be gripped.

  "I'll not be knowing what to say to these Chaps," he repeated with a

  north-country quality in his speech.

  We made reassuring noises.

  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 speculated at last with red

  reflections in his thoughtful eyes.

  We had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a mess of the

  meeting.

  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 said "come from homes of

  luxury; every need you feel is supplied-"

  We sat and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of

  Redmayne's floor space except the hearthrug-platform, 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 badly to cheer.

  Then like a lancet stuck into a bladder came the heckling. Denson,

  that indolent, liberal-minded 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 resolutely.

  "I suppose I OUGHT to take that as an answer," said Denson, getting

  his shoulder-blades well down to the seat of his chair; "but I

  don't. I don't, you know. It's rather a shame to cross-examine 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, you know."

  "Democracy," said Chris Robinson.

  "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 now.

  "Nothing could be worse than things are now," said Chris Robinson.

  "I have seen little children-"

  "I submit life on an ill-provisioned raft, for example, could easily

  be worse-or life in a beleagured town."

  Murmurs.

  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 said, "you found yourself

  prime minister-"

  I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed 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 that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive

  talk with him.

  "Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.

  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 don't pick holes up north. They mean

  business."

  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 he would fall asleep at his reading.

  "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 couldno' get the book."

  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 a thing without

  splitting straws. One gets hold of the Elementals."

  (Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)

  "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 disaster-or do something patently

  futile."

  "I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose

  anything futile, so far as I can see."

  6

  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 also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's

  Burden."

  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.

  What did he give me exactly?

  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