THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  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 uncriticised for the sake of it:-

  "Keep ye the Law-be 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 know we serve the Lord!"

  And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my

  mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:

  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 side-arms 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 rather-more-or-less,

  All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,

  Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"

  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 side-arms 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

  co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they

  were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden

  magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor

  disgraceful were they,-just ill-trained and fairly plucky and

  wonderfully good-tempered men-paying 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 lecture-room it wandered to those

  battle-fields.

  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 than

  defeats…

  7

  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 Europe to

  me, as watching and critical.

  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

  world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense as it

  were of busy searchlights over the horizon…

  One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was

  an attempt to belittle his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow,"

  I said.

  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

  was altogether outside my range of comprehension…

  8

  As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension

  of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered 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 twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and

  the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.

  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 marched with some thoughts of

  his own.

  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 to Airolo and home.

  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 clustering town of Boulogne.

  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 finger-tips 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

  rail-laid 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 dressed women in economical mourning.

  "Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike

  artless cries.

  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 sense of

  cheerful release in me.

  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 from little differences in the way things were done.

  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 here-and I recalled Meredith's

  Skepsey in France with a new understanding.

  Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn 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 stations-I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses-and

  then confound him! he cut himself and bled…

  Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed

  to have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and

  eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,

  snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed 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.

  I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of

  being outside.

  "But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having

  perceived it before; "this is the round world!"

  9

  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 thought
s 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 warring

  tribes of men…

  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 was

  largely made and mine still hung in the balance.

  "I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that

  calls one, calls one away from something else."

  Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.

  "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 then-it's one of those

  questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."

  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.

  "You've made your decision?"

  He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.

  "How would you put it?"

  "Social Service-education. 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 little-and have "-

  he beamed again-" an adequate sense of causation."

  "You're sure it's worth while."

  "For me-certainly. I don't discuss that any more."

  "I don't limitmyself 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 statesmen-I

  like that use of 'statesmen.'…"

  "Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course…"

  Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a

  deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very