THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting to his rare smile

  at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic

  entanglement that was destined to involve us both. Gane was

  present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was

  absent. Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely

  characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on

  my mind.

  I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my

  title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it

  was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People." It is not the title

  I should choose now-for since that time I have got my phrase of

  "mental hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The

  World Exists for Mental Hinterland."

  The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a

  thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought

  with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the

  scrawled notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it

  the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the

  1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled

  marginalia.

  My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon

  lines such as I have already sufficiently indicated in the preceding

  sections. I remember how old Dayton fretted in his chair, and

  tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were

  treated to one of his platitudinous harangues, he sitting back in

  his chair with that small obstinate eye of his fixed on the ceiling,

  and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating-quite

  regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others

  in the debate-the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge

  from reality. "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of

  his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the

  People. I do." And so on. Nothing in his life or work had ever

  shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark.

  He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.

  After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show

  that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either

  recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is

  aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the

  reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment

  of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and

  understanding. There was a disgusted grunt from Dayton, "Superman

  rubbish-Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed on over him to my next

  propositions. The prime essential in a progressive civilisation was

  the establishment of a more effective selective process for the

  privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational

  opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise

  scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a

  reward for virtue. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an

  invitation to capacity. We had no more right to drag in virtue, or

  any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the

  tallest man. We didn't want a mere process for the selection of

  good as distinguished from gifted and able boys-"No, you DON'T,"

  from Dayton-we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world

  concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate

  Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in

  educational, artistic, and legislative work. "Good teaching," I

  said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic about

  character."

  Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed round upon me an eye of

  agonised aversion.

  I expatiated on the small proportion of the available ability that

  is really serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the

  thought, all the art, all the increments of knowledge that matter,

  are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned

  by-how many?-by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said

  Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or

  four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain

  no illusions as to their innate rarity. We know that they are just

  the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and

  confusion, the timely stimulus, the apt suggestion at the fortunate

  moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the

  crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become

  commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry

  commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous

  pollen in a pine forest is waste."

  "Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his

  chin in his necktie. "WASTE!"

  "And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually

  in extremely limited and cramping forms. No man lives a life of

  intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and

  opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might

  call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by

  understanding. It isn't that our-SALT of three or four thousand is

  needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and

  undifferentiated a public. Most of the good men we know are not

  really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a

  little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use.

  Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle,

  futility, and unhappiness that distresses us; it's the cardinal

  problem of the state-to discover, develop, and use the exceptional

  gifts of men. And I see that best done-I drift more and more away

  from the common stuff of legislative and administrative activity-by

  a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery, but

  by a still more unprecedented attempt to keep science going, to keep

  literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all

  science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative criticism

  going. You know none of these things have ever been kept going

  hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."

  "Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an

  expression of mystical profundity.

  "They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to

  darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to

  darkness again-and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went

  on to attack the present organisation of our schools and

  universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-

  behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the

  authoritative leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon

  lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this

  story…

  So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new

  ground and set Crupp agog by confessing my doubt from which party or

  combination of groups these developments of scien
ce and literature

  and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I

  looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.

  There I left it to them.

  We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we

  emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude.

  The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.

  I see Crupp now with his arm bent before him on the table in a way

  we had, as though it was jointed throughout its length like a

  lobster's antenna, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a

  walnut shell into smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he

  said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible

  movement. It's not only possible, but necessary-urgently

  necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."

  "We're working altogether too much at the social basement in

  education and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our

  neglect of the higher levels."

  Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called

  the spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community

  needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken

  seriously," I remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either

  dull responsibility or merely witty art."

  I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped on an idea I had thrown

  out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate

  these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.

  "It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind

  went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and

  how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers

  nowadays to interfere with us, and we perhaps had learnt some

  defensive devices.

  "But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said

  Crupp, with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The

  Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or

  literature."

  "They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said

  Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were

  made of," he added.

  "It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've

  got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make

  it work. But he's certainly suggested a method."

  "There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to

  the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."

  "All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't

  do without it."

  "Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes,

  aristocrats indeed-if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said

  Britten.

  "It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously.

  "I agree," said Gane.

  "No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."

  It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with

  ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out

  suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate, and we

  tried to qualify them by minor self-contradictions. Britten, I

  think, got more said than any one. "You all seem to think you want

  to organise people, particular groups and classes of individuals,"

  he insisted. "It isn't that. That's the standing error of

  politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a

  matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing ideas.

  The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question

  for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help

  this culture forward."

  "Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You

  yourself were asking that a little while ago."

  "If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a

  movement to reorganise aristocracy-Reform of the House of Lords,

  they'll call the political form of it."

  "Bailey thinks that," said some one.

  "The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said

  Thorns.

  He became audible, sketching a possibility of action.

  "Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of

  those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady

  jet of ideas might produce enormous results."

  "Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."

  "We should," said Thorns under his breath.

  I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.

  "I believe we could do-extensive things," I insisted.

  "Revivals and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said

  Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward."

  "Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the

  peculiarity of English conservatism that it's persistently

  progressive and rejuvenescent."

  I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our

  presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided upon reflection

  was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.

  Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely across the

  table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he

  said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children.

  They've had too much of everything, except bracing experience."

  "Children can always be educated," said Crupp.

  "I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.

  "Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm,

  and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to

  happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock,

  and barrel, who comes in?"

  "Nature abhors a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.

  "Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.

  "Quacks with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns.

  "I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre in

  three years."

  "One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing

  emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and

  almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all

  the necessary tolerances, opennesses, considerations, that march

  with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing.

  Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I

  concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,-I want

  to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."

  "Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly-his first remark for a long

  time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.

  "Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by

  transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed

  many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of

  a bureaucracy of sham experts. But that seems the limit of the

  liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except

  a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other

  progress is secondary and dependant. If you take on Bailey's dreams

  of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no

>   free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid

  ugliness,-that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to

  discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls-

  and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people

  say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in

  which the living element may be saved."

  "Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.

  It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became

  noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult

  that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do

  immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think.

  And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness, and it was

  only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist

  in our hands…

  We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow-but in

  that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration,

  and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the

  indications of that opening talk.

  5

  I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my

  developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new

  trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I

  had already hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other

  men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed views that

  otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality

  than the guardians of Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other

  questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that

  came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy,

  Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the

  imminence of war. On the first issue I can still recall little

  Bailey, glib and winking, explaining that democracy was really just

  a dodge for getting assent to the ordinances of the expert official

  by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said

  he, "they can vote for the opposition candidate and see what happens

  then-and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional

  representation to let in the wild men." I opened my eyes-the lids

  had dropped for a moment under the caress of those smooth sounds-to

  see if Bailey's artful forefinger wasn't at the side of his