THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  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 placard-plastered motor-car or

  an argumentative group of people outside a public-house 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 absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving

  the country.

  My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General 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

  undesirability of some course taken by mine.

  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 world's

  resources…

  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 non-resonating

  gatherings. Even the platform supporters grewrestive

  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 dog-fight.

  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 and-what 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.

  One goes on from phase to phase in these things.

  "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 begins."

  But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache

  and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated 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 ill-graded and badly metalled

  cross-roads 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 ill-regulated 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 meeting-house, now in a Masonic

  Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking

  in the dinner hour outside gas-works 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, dog-kennels; 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, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.

  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 marched towards Parliament.

  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 fur-trimmed 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

  self-assertion. 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 had come so far

  and taken so much trouble!

  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 assured.

  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 mixture-if 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."

  "I DO wish you wouldn't," she said, distressed.

  It was absurd to feel irritated; it was so admirable of her, a

  little childish, infinitely womanly and devoted and fine-and 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 too

  seductive for dalliance…

  4

  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 frame-it seemed to me to the public danger, but

  afterwards I came to understand the quality of her nerve better-and

  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 had written.

  I wonder if it was.

  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 pad-one impish wizened visage

  is oddly like little Bailey-and 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 car-my colours fluttered from handle-bar and shoulder-

  knot-and her waving hand and the sharp note of her voice. She

  cried out something, I don't know what, some greeting.

  "What a pretty girl!" said Margaret.

  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 best workers you have," he said…

  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 quiet-I recall dead white

  panelling and oval mirrors horizontally set and a marble fireplace

  between white marble-blind Homer and marble-blind Virgil, very grave

  and fine-and how Isabel came in to lunch in a shapeless thing like

  a blue smock that made her bright quick-changing face seem yellow

  under her cloud of black hair. Her step-sister was there, Miss

  Gamer, to whom the house was to descend, a well-dressed lady of

  thirty, amiably disavowing responsibility for Isabel in every p
hrase

  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 well-behaved…!"

  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 doubly-earned V. C. and the plucky defence of

  Kardin-Bergat 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 hunting-field 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 red-walled 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 comprehension."

  "There's good work sometimes," said Sir Graham, "in undoing."

  "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