THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 31

  profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I

  think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at

  most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On

  this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."

  Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on

  the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he

  murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety

  even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily disposed

  to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings

  that have no grain of curiosity. His conception of perfect conduct

  is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves

  of the great recorded days. So infinitely more important to him is

  the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.

  Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl

  is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY

  GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail,

  however, in their clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant

  consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking,

  they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few

  of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the

  discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West

  End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday

  resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."

  The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and

  exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly

  judged. They do not talk of the things that are really active in

  their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to

  be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,

  individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex

  and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to

  me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties

  and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of

  passionate interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields,

  or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a

  novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg…

  It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the

  great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we

  are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the

  greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future

  that is possible to us. London is the most interesting, beautiful,

  and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental

  and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant

  totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old

  bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the

  scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in

  comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my

  imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at

  hand.

  It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I

  think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London

  night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which

  the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by

  taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I

  think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts

  sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the

  camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining

  river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow

  seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and

  corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished

  little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the

  tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-

  studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and

  fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and

  corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria

  Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one

  another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and

  scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace,

  witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests

  along it from every land on earth… Interwoven in the texture

  of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the

  gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your

  kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the

  destiny of Man!"

  4

  My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.

  The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very

  ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and

  quite out of touch with the mass of the party. For a time

  Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old

  quarrels. The early Educational legislation was sectarian and

  unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the

  attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was altogether

  for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the

  Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting. I was

  recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the

  Government so early as the second reading of the first Education

  Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my

  intention in the heat of speaking,-it is a way with inexperienced

  man. I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies

  of sects and little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods

  with the manifest needs of the time.

  I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I

  worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.

  I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were

  already a little curious about me because of my writings. Several

  of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr.

  Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that

  engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an

  approving "Hear, Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two

  futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to

  begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the

  effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what

  I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was

  getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of

  having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt

  for that encouraging cheer.

  Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in

  the world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being

  easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and

 
; hesitations of members behind the chair-not mere audience units,

  but men who matter-the desolating emptiness that spreads itself

  round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined

  crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering

  movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary

  Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic

  background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a

  confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a

  pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A

  misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily

  disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak

  with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House

  imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into

  the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of

  some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of

  an auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such

  as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose

  one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose

  one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with

  qualifications.

  5

  My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of

  the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain

  impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The

  National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh-and

  Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold,

  wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous

  paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the

  late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy,

  crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of

  men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just

  that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me

  the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and hears perplexing

  dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the

  clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches

  profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or

  Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape…

  I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the

  Club to doubt about Liberalism.

  About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with

  countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in

  circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the

  great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of

  the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some

  are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely,

  dissociated men. At first one gets an impression of men going from

  group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches

  closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at

  the outside, and know nothing of the others. One begins to perceive

  more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human

  mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different

  quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.

  Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the

  Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores

  are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a

  clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island

  of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant

  from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a

  group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or

  so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of

  eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.

  Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised

  chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons-bulging

  with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions

  over long cigars…

  I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract

  some constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of

  politics. It was clear they were against the Lords-against

  plutocrats-against Cossington's newspapers-against the brewers…

  It was tremendously clear what they were against. The trouble

  was to find out what on earth they were for!…

  As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the

  various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the

  partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would

  dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of

  miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal

  littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample

  but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity-all in

  little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and

  narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.

  What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes

  together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half

  of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct

  and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the

  commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative

  imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.

  The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great

  and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart…

  I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality

  very vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a

  waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the

  sackload and drown by the million in ditches…

  Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy

  movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at

  hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!

  he was saying something about the "Will of the People…"

  The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I

  forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a

  lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a

  ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye

  could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like

  grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was

  there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling

  individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant

  synthesis, still to come-or present it might be and still unseen by

  me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of

  mankind?…

  I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,

  the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is

  implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of

  would-be ree
f builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the

  ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life,

  has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the

  indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and

  comprehend individual lives-an effort of insidious attraction, an

  idea of invincible appeal. That something greater than ourselves,

  which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between

  being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and

  visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in

  stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more

  clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile

  in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men. It is

  something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is

  withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever

  been…

  6

  I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the

  club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with

  speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his

  horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came

  up. I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle

  and his Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or

  Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within

  seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.

  Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant

  or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still

  livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-

  ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special

  Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar

  wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards,

  in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black

  coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the

  brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room. I would

  sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder,

  wonder…

  An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of