THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 15

  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

  self-satisfaction 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,

  well-ordered 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 degree-giving 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 incidental vanity at the worst; he goes

  on anyhow. Most men don't.

  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 work.

  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 hard-perhaps it is impossible-to 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 unemployment of the poor. Muddle! I remember

  myself quoting Kipling-

  "All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,

  All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less."

  "We build the state," we said over and over again. "That is what we

  are for-servants of the new reorganisation!"

  We planned half in earnest and half Utopianising, a League of Social

  Service.

  We talked of the splendid world of men that might grow out of such

  unpaid and ill-paid 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 heart-searchings the Boer war had

  occasioned. We would sink to gossip-even 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 great classes to massive action.

  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 twenty-two. 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 doubtsawhimself 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 impossi
ble in such dreams.

  Why not the Board of Education for him? My preference at that time

  wavered between the Local Government Board-I had great ideas about

  town-planning, about revisions of municipal areas and re-organised

  internal transit-and the War Office. I swayed strongly towards the

  latter as the journey progressed. My educational bias came later.

  The swelling ambitions that have tramped over Alpine passes! How

  many of them, like mine, have come almost within sight of

  realisation before they failed?

  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 bed-it must have

  been during this holiday, though I cannot for the life of me fix

  where-and speculating whether perhaps some day I might not be a

  K. C. B., Sir Richard Remington, K. C. B., M. P.

  But the big style prevailed…

  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 and thirty.

  Once I remember Willersley going over a list of failures, and why

  they had failed-but young men in the twenties do not know much

  about failures.

  10

  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 tail."

  "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! No one is really private but an outlaw…

  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

  ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.

  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.

  11

  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 mule-path shouting large suggestions for

  national re-organisation, 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 heat-bitten 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 gather to a head.

  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't-and Fortune watched

  us to see what we might do with opportunity and the world.

  "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 our place, our duty,

  to do things."

  "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 indulgencies-and then

  take credit for modesty? I KNOW Iam capable. I KNOW I have

  imagination. Modesty! I know if I don't attempt the very biggest

  things in life Iam a damned shirk. The very biggest! Somebody has

  to attempt them. I feel like a loaded gun that is only a little

  perplexed because it has to find out just where to aim itself…"

  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, a
nd 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…

  12

  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 matter, the beauty

  of girls and women and your desire for them?

  I have told of my sisterless youth and the narrow circumstances of

  my upbringing. It made all women-kind 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