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  him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying,

  sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance

  furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen

  his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.

  We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only

  in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser

  lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed

  self-justification of the dull.

  I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and

  others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment

  realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with

  me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were

  jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and

  mankind?… How on earth could any one get hold of him, make

  any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond his newspaper. He

  never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart. He never

  discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.

  He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and

  quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist

  an impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look

  here! What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and

  the empire and mankind? You know-MANKIND!"

  I wonder what reply I should have got.

  So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone

  could be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete,

  sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species

  and varieties and dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I

  could be considered as representing anything in the House, I

  pretended to sit for the elements of HIM…

  7

  For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an

  air of coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into

  politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a

  tremendous ECLAT. There was visibly a following of Socialist

  members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in

  soft felt hats and short coats and square-toed boots who replied to

  casual advances a little surprisingly in rich North Country

  dialects. Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as

  Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender

  twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a fire

  that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip Snowden, the

  member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty strong

  altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much

  stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a

  big national movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were

  springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about

  Socialism and discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities

  with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest

  intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly

  against. For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously

  sympathetic…

  When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain

  evening gatherings at our house…

  These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a

  discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and

  uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed

  that even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.

  "They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the

  other side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do

  that?"

  "Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora,

  "totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them. Or they

  won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their

  table manners. They just make holes in the talk…"

  I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's

  outburst. The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very

  greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders;

  the want of intimacy didn't at first appear to be more than an

  accident, and our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance

  and easy intercourse afoot among them and between them and the Young

  Liberals of our group. She gave a series of weekly dinners,

  planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's model, and

  after each we had as catholic a reception as we could contrive.

  Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as

  receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful

  of insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one

  got a nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.

  It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one

  should be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the

  tie or the shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent

  aggression should alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A

  number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that never

  came, and stood and sat about silently, mildly amused but not a bit

  surprised that we did not discover their distinctive Open-Sesames.

  There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in

  shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy social

  intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to become

  oracular. One was in a state of tension from first to last; the

  most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and

  replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young Liberals

  went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked. The

  Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,

  superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or

  Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting

  Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats

  indicative of the House, or in what is sometimes written of as

  "faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they and

  their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives,

  like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.

  I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social

  reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just

  as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects

  should appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional

  personalities. On one of these evenings a little group of rather

  jolly-looking pretty young people seated themselves for no

  particular reason in a large circle on the floor of my study, and

  engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning,

  the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper. It must have been

  that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before

  the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an

  anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue-visible ends of cress

  having misle
d him into the belief that he was dealing with

  doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be given hand-

  bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had the

  advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too

  neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon

  which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver.

  So that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact

  little woman in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive

  black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her

  heart upon my contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil

  interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and

  care in evading her.

  Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan

  Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out

  against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their

  manner was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the

  approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and

  there engage in discussions of Determinism-it always seemed to be

  Determinism-which became heartier and noisier, but never

  acrimonious even in the small hours. It seemed impossible to settle

  about this Determinism of theirs-ever. And there were worldly

  Socialists also. I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant,

  lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black

  ribbon, who swam about us one evening. He might have been a

  slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat,

  and the sort of black and white check trousers that twinkle. He had

  a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to

  be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are we all he-a

  for?" he would ask only too audibly. "What are we doing he-a?

  What's the connection?"

  What WAS the connection?

  We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We

  tried to get something like a representative collection of the

  parliamentary leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of

  Socialist thought and a number of Young Liberal thinkers into one

  room. Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared

  for ten minutes and talked charmingly to Margaret and then vanished

  again; there was Wilkins the novelist and Toomer and Dr. Tumpany.

  Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, and

  Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members. And on our

  side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow, Crampton,

  Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as they

  possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes

  almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to

  mingle or dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening

  was a failure. Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists

  one had supposed friendly. I could not have imagined it was

  possible for half so many people to turn their backs on everybody

  else in such small rooms as ours. But the unsaid things those backs

  expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the

  various organs of the various sections of the party next week.

  I talked, I rememher, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still

  larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair

  hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We

  discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at

  that time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal

  party. I was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed

  less vividly in many others of these Socialist leaders, and which

  gave me at last a clue to the whole business. He behaved exactly

  like a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who wants to be

  dealt with. He had an air of having a corner in ideas. Then it

  flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an

  attempted corner in ideas…

  8

  Late that night I found myselfalone with Margaret amid the debris

  of the gathering.

  I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white

  and weary, came and leant upon the mantel.

  "Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.

  I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.

  "Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."

  Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she

  was accustomed to wait for clues.

  "When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of

  the Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I

  explained… "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out

  of the obvious common sense of our present conditions. It's as

  impersonal as science. All these men-They've given nothing to it.

  They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big

  intellectual No-Man's-Land-and don't feel quite sure of the law.

  There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness… If we professed

  Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of them!

  They'd feel it was burglary…"

  "Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I

  felt about them all the evening… Particularly Dr. Tumpany."

  "We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's

  the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a

  mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated

  everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist

  leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what

  it is to-day-a growing realisation of constructive needs in every

  man's mind, and a little corner in party politics. So, I suppose,

  it will always be… But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"

  I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said,

  smiling indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)

  I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an

  excellent word in that connection…

  But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's

  brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great

  brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking

  them!…

  "I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is

  trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."

  I sat taking in this proposition.

  "They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.

  "Us?"

  "The Liberals."

  "Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said. "They'll never even help

  themselves."

  "I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,"

  said Margaret, after a pause.

  She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel,

  perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I

  did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed

  me and went rustling softly to her room.

  I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts

  crystallising out…

  It was then, I
think, that I first apprehended clearly how that

  opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and

  the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social

  affairs. The ideas go on-and no person or party succeeds in

  embodying them. The reality of human progress never comes to the

  surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in

  silence while men think, in studies where they write self-

  forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal

  curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of

  emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday

  affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair,

  are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,

  interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation,

  personal feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his

  immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he

  simply turns himself into something a little less than the common

  man. He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve

  him from a frontage. That is the essential error of the specialist

  philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They

  repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is what

  bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had

  prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an

  official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the

  first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the

  first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like

  gifts to the pretence-a quack. These are attempts to live deep-

  side shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To

  understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to

  join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not

  even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for

  which it stands…

  I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had

  taken me some years to realise the truerelation of the great

  constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but

  to myself. I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one

  party with social construction, and to regard the other as