THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, 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 of me I cannot remember her name.

  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 pale-blue lady, asked Mrs.

  Lewis whether her aunt Lady Carmixter had returned from her rest-

  and-sun-cure in Italy. That led to a rather anxiously sustained

  talk about regimen, and Willie told us how he had profited by the

  no-breakfast system. It had increased his power of work enormously.

  He could get through ten hours a day now without inconvenience.

  "What do you do?" said Esmeer abruptly.

  "Oh! no end of work. There's all the estate and looking after

  things."

  "But publicly?"

  "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 just what we Young

  Liberals thought we were up to?

  "I want," said Britten, repeating his challenge a little louder, "to

  hear just exactly what you think you are doing in Parliament?"

  Lewis laughed nervously, and thought we were "Seeking the Good of

  the Community."

  "HOW?"

  "Beneficient Legislation," said Lewis.

  "Beneficient in what direction?" insisted Britten. "I want to know

  where you think you are going."

  "Amelioration of Social Conditions," said Lewis.

  "That's only a phrase!"

  "You wouldn't have me sketch bills at dinner?"

  "I'd like you to indicate directions," said Britten, and waited.

  "Upward and On," said Lewis with conscious neatness, and turned to

  ask Mrs. Bunting Harblow about her little boy's French.

  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, quasi-confidential undertones. "What

  ARE we Liberals doing?" Then Esmeer fell in with the

  revolutionaries.

  To begin with, I was a little shocked by this clamour for

  fundamentals-and 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 under-secretaryship, 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 were being made in the

  presence of our wives.

  The rebel section of our party forced the talk.

  Edward Crampton was presently declaring-I forget in what relation:

  "The country is with us."

  My long-controlled hatred of the Cramptons' stereotyped phrases

  about the Country and the House got the better of me. I showed my

  cloven hoof to my friends for the first time.

  "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 fact-nowadays every one knows-that the monster that

  brought us into power has, among other deficiencies, no head. We've

  got to give it one-if 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 Italian photographs by Coburn.

  We dispersed early.

  I walked with Britten along the Chelsea back streets towards

  Battersea Bridge-he lodged on the south side.

  "Mrs. Millingham's a dear," he began.

  "She's a dear."

  "I liked her demand for a hansom because a four-wheeler was too

  safe."

  "She was worked up," I said. "She's a woman of faultless character,

  but her instincts, as Altiora would say, are anarchistic-when she

  gives them a chance."

  "So she takes it out in hansom cabs."

  "Hansom cabs."

  "She's wise," said Britten…

  "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 not-not 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 lot-by a sort of misapprehension-being in power. A

  kind of neuralgia in the head, by way of government. I don't

  understand where YOU come in. Those others-they'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. They-they 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 but a reaction to

  stimulation!"…

  He began to talk of his own life. He had had ill-fortune 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 self-satisfied New Liberalism and

  Progressivism.

  "It has the same relation to progress-the reality of progress-that

  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, make-believe! 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 outside-untouched. 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 public-houses. Do you think they really care,

  Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. 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 never face! the wonder and the depth of life,-

  lust, and the night-sky,-pain."

  "But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"

  "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 little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"

  "We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."

  "God help us!" said Britten…

  "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, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-

  believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."

  He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:

  "Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this

  set!"

  "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-"

  "We were talking about Liberals."

  "Liberty!"

  "Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"

  "What does any little lot know of liberty?"

  "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 understood-and

  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…"

  "Make-believe. Make-believe." 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 equipment of me.

  I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it

  was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private

  room…

  3

  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 public-houses…

  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 scholars-at-large 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 these old associations.

  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