THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 34

  Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and

  tradition-worship of my political associates. None of these things

  were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.

  I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame. The

  real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the

  enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of

  human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the

  invigoration of research-and whatever one does in human affairs has

  or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.

  With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I

  was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life

  of politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still

  against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to

  their essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went

  nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire

  fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward

  appearances whose ultimaterealities were jerry-built conclusions,

  hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and

  prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men. How are we through

  politics to get at that confusion?

  We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create

  a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all

  educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues,

  and the evasion of life.

  We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and

  literature, and its exploration through research.

  We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,

  and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free

  criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike

  degenerate into tradition or imposture.

  Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,

  disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the

  scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually

  beautiful, become-EASY…

  It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could

  engage would be those which most directly affected the Church,

  public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature,

  and the channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my

  position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and

  conduced to this essential work.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  SEEKING ASSOCIATES

  1

  I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits

  of party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.

  Regarding the development of the social and individual mental

  hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on

  very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may

  call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the

  changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who

  dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a

  possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by

  habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must have an

  aristocracy-not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose-or

  mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I

  look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.

  I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.

  I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and

  the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and

  finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far

  beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively

  invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale

  than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very

  much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.

  We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and

  education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here

  my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If

  humanity at large is capable of that high education and those

  creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and

  more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and

  leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot

  be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of

  humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has

  become my general conception in politics, the conception of the

  constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful

  people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people,

  amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-

  conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic

  culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the

  development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the

  spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary

  needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human

  interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and

  acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and

  redirected by literature and art…

  But now the reader will understand how it came about that,

  disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and

  disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed

  Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big

  people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism

  pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all,

  it was not my particular job to work through them and not against

  them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-? Weren't

  there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack,

  and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were they really

  the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible

  new braveries of life?

  2

  The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The

  conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly

  errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of

  Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the

  financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against

  the consumer. The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it

  was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to

  all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief,

  and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that

  after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism

  might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression

  of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational

  and philosophical movement such as no formula of Liberalism

  supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed

  to its stron
g popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness and

  humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social

  efficiency, a realspirit of animation and enterprise. There

  suddenly appeared in my world-I saw them first, I think, in 1908-a

  new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the

  slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small

  boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing,

  earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and

  occasionally a little beyond his strength-the Boy Scout. I liked

  the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it

  mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate

  national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and

  had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.

  3

  In those days there existed a dining club called-there was some

  lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title-the

  Pentagram Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir

  Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the

  big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya,

  and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us. We were

  men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was

  to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. We

  dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of

  years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen. The

  dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd

  how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering

  became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the

  waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us

  would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of

  some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver

  ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one

  present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare

  we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my

  house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me

  and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three.

  We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the

  end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our

  closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.

  I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more

  particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of

  such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New

  Imperialists who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey

  Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all

  mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it

  were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of

  constructive policy. They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams

  of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the

  Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think

  mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.

  They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a

  curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that

  side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were

  disposed to spend money much more generously on education and

  research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed

  likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the

  Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the

  universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of

  the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line with

  these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's

  sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in

  such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of

  Progress." It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than

  their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time

  are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that

  I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important

  to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them. By 1908 I had

  already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a

  transfer of my political allegiance.

  These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory

  of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy

  bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed

  central trophy of dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and

  cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton

  sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had

  while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and

  Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for

  confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the

  Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and

  round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths

  of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to

  conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes

  in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as

  people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to speak at

  me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly

  for an after-talk.

  He opened his heart to me.

  "Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-

  handed sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do

  that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as

  constructive a twist as we can. That's MY Toryism."

  "Is it Kindling's-or Gerbault's?"

  "No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs

  out. You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why

  aren't we working together?"

  "Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.

  "That's a secret nobody tells," he said.

  "What are the Confederates after?"

  "Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to

  do."…

  The Confederates were beingheard of at that time. They were at

  once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose

  membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff

  Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In

  the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised

  power. I have no doubt the rumour of them greatly influenced my

  ideas…

  In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two

  years I was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a

  matter. I was not dealing with any simple question of principle,

  but with elusive and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse

  forces and of the nature of my own powers. All through that period

  I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates

  mere dreamers? How far-and th
is was more vital-are they rendering

  lip-service to social organisations? Is it true they desire war

  because it confirms the ascendency of their class? How far can

  Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the

  thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than a

  mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard

  suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the

  community?

  That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like

  asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer

  varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the

  people I was watching. How fine can people be? How generous?-not

  incidentally, but all round? How far can you educate sons beyond

  the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-

  indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and

  solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class

  possible?-was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible?

  Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth

  the retrogression that may be its price?

  4

  It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new

  conceptions that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of

  my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY

  and our wing of the present New Tory party. I do that without any

  excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's

  production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very

  large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed

  that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts to pop.

  The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very vividly in my

  memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight

  we went to finish our talk at my house.

  We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and

  so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced

  Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now

  the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember