THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  predominant nose.

  The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were

  pervaded by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of

  reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up

  the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable equilibrium,

  that sooner or later something must happen there-something very

  serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly detested these topics. He

  was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is

  inconvenient or disagreeable to the English mind could be

  annihilated by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his

  chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of

  the utmost moral fervour, is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse."

  Then he would cough shortly and twitch his head back and frown, and

  seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive statement

  we could still go on talking of war.

  All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international

  conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses

  that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental

  journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors."

  That quite justifiable dread of a punishment for all the slackness,

  mental dishonesty, presumption, mercenary respectability and

  sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands

  of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly

  civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a

  good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the only thing

  capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained

  constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced

  the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience of thought, a

  wasteful and sometimes quite futile immediacy. In 1909, for

  example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts-

  "We want eight

  And we won't wait,"

  but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent,

  our mean standard of intellectual attainment, our disingenuous

  criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the

  quality needed to carry on the modern type of war. Almost

  universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility

  and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have

  poorly qualified, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because

  our criticism is worthless and, so habitually as to be now almost

  unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in every

  matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended

  sedulously to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because

  in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for

  quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my

  paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had

  flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is like some

  of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the

  Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character;

  its backbone, that is to say,-especially in the visceral region-is

  bigger than its cranium. It's no accident that things are so.

  We've worked for backbone. We brag about backbone, and if the

  joints are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half

  awake to our error. You can't change that suddenly."

  "Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.

  "It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."

  And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten a nightmare which

  haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately and belatedly to

  blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as

  I had conjured up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and

  brains, crept nearer and nearer…

  I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that

  apprehension. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very

  humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but

  I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing

  class as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in

  English life-it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial

  endurance-is one of underbred aggression in prosperity and

  diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully haughtily where

  we can and assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing that our

  upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest

  character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite

  honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man,

  that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage

  upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified dexterity of

  evasion is the national reward. Germany, with a larger population,

  a vigorous and irreconcilable proletariat, a bolder intellectual

  training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to

  a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all.

  The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may

  end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall

  proudly but very firmly take the second place. For my own part,

  since I love England as much as I detest her present lethargy of

  soul, I pray for a chastening war-I wouldn't mind her flag in the

  dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was able to

  shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable

  destruction truncating all my schemes. At the most, a European war

  would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction I had in view.

  In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see,

  disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most

  extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are

  there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an

  elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until

  something happens he remains. Our functions in India are absurd.

  We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make

  nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. We

  suppress our own literature there. Most English people cannot even

  go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it. If

  Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester

  operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average

  English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the

  Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I

  have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials,

  viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what

  India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought

  we were up to there. Iam not writing without my book in these

  matters. And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"-and

  look at our sedition trials!-they told me nothing. Time after time

  I have heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who,

  when asked what would happen if we left Ind
ia, replied that in a

  week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee

  nor a virgin would he left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as

  our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve

  the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic

  inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and

  sword than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without

  plans, without intentions-a vast preventive. The sum total of our

  policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would

  enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for

  themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment of men held

  back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian

  sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth

  gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection

  breaks out in spite of espionage and seizures. Our conflict for

  inaction develops stupendous absurdities. The other day the British

  Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for

  seditious emblems and inscriptions…

  In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our

  chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness

  of our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything

  with India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in

  the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about

  "character," worship of strenuous force and contempt of truth; for

  the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact,

  if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we great schools

  and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit

  of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be

  different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to

  justify it.

  It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from

  India. That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our

  bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be

  able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there. It is

  our new method. We train our future rulers in the public schools to

  have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power

  arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a

  native state, we shall he willing to deal with it. We may or may

  not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when

  we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy,

  and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such

  as it is, and preserve the semblance of power. The conqueror DE

  FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home

  will be invited to celebrate our recession-triumphantly. Iam no

  believer in the imminent dissolution of our Empire; Iam less and

  less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of

  an abrupt truncation of those slow intellectual and moral

  constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.

  6

  I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water-

  this morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still

  not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and

  the torrent that crosses the salita is full and boastful,-and I try

  to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious

  time, before I went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying-

  chaotic task-to gauge the possibilities inherent in the quality of

  the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of

  wide parks, diversified by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled

  with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big

  facades of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large

  fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of

  representative picture to set off against those other pictures of

  Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge

  assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at Stamford House. The

  place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge

  clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished floors and

  wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a Gargantuan

  scale. And there she sought to gather all that was most

  representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those

  brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of

  our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon

  the political and social side.

  I remember sitting in one of the recesses at the end of the big

  saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful

  rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done

  nothing and to be capable of everything, and we watched the crowd-

  uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State ball-and

  exchanged information. I told her about the politicians and

  intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we

  sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful

  people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of

  tallness was or was not an illusion.

  They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of

  people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly

  individualised. "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared

  for. I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant

  consideration for each other."

  "Kindly, good tempered, and at bottom utterly selfish," she said,

  "like big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered children. What

  else can you expect from them?"

  "They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an

  achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-

  tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I

  couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief

  surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time

  is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty. I confess

  I admire them. Oh! I like them. I wouldn't at all mind, I believe,

  giving over the country to this aristocracy-given SOMETHING-"

  "Which they haven't got."

  "Which they haven't got-or they'd be the finest sort of people in

  the world."

  "That something?" she inquired.

  "I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done

  all sorts of things-"

  "That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken-

  you remember?-at Spion Kop."

  "It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove

  resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a

  little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's

  got the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown

  pluck, you know-brought something off."

  "Not quite enough," she suggested.

  "I think that's it," I said. "Not quite enough-not quite hard

  enough," I added.

  She laughed and lo
oked at me. "You'd like to make us," she said.

  "What?"

  "Hard."

  "I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."

  "We shan't be so pleasant if we do."

  "Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an

  aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm

  not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted. I want

  to better this, because it already looks so good."

  "How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.

  "Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying

  to answer that! It makes me quarrel with"-I held up my fingers and

  ticked the items off-"the public schools, the private tutors, the

  army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of

  the country towards science and literature-"

  "We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at the

  beginning," she added.

  "Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a

  movement?

  "There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked

  a gleam of curiosity… "You want," she said, "to say to the

  aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember

  what happened to the monarch who was told to 'Be a King'?"

  "Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."

  "This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen

  are off the stage. These are the brilliant ones-the smart and the

  blues… They cost a lot of money, you know."

  So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not

  stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people,

  charitable minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious lives, and

  there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I

  liked extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-

  thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully and widely and boldly as

  a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden

  delicacies of perception few men display. I liked, too, the

  relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance,

  their antagonism to the harsh jealousies that are the essence of the

  middle-class order…

  After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a

  type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?

  It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings,