THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 37

  but much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for

  instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent

  presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering

  blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and

  chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps

  and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue

  and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would

  expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be

  aristocratic. I was, Iam afraid, posing a little as the

  intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the

  great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She

  affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the

  governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all

  a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained.

  "That's my remedy."

  In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.

  "Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.

  It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic

  theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet

  unformulated intentions.

  "You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady

  Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get

  a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's

  what we're all after, isn't ut?

  "It's not an ideal arrangement."

  "Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.

  On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in

  education, Lady Forthundred scored.

  We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington,

  my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair

  of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap

  of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group

  of daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile

  to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.

  "We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any

  nonsense about nobility."

  She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a

  practical people. We assimilate 'um."

  "Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"

  "Then they don't give trouble."

  "They learn to shoot?"

  "And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on.

  Sometimes better than others, but they go on-somehow. It depends

  very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."

  I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty

  thousand a year by at least detrimental methods-socially speaking.

  "We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,

  courageously…

  Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in

  the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and

  fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing

  themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and

  valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to

  them?

  7

  Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham

  with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face,

  his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing

  oratory. He led all these people wonderfully. He was always

  curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing

  frankness-and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.

  For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the

  throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the

  Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants

  of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break

  against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed

  he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the

  last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical

  aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that

  he remained a commoner to the end of his days.

  I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early

  papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered

  liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.

  He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in

  British political life. Some men one sees through and understands,

  some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay,

  but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth

  and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. No

  other contemporary has had that effect upon me. I've sat beside him

  at dinners, stayed in houses with him-he was in the big house party

  at Champneys-talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat

  beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a

  rare sense of beingunderstood. Other men have to be treated in a

  special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,

  flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.

  Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have

  ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of

  stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.

  And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with

  Mankind? That I thought worth knowing.

  I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a

  dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost

  forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive

  purpose in politics.

  "I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party

  converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country

  towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under

  every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do,

  and people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion

  become matters of science-and cease to be party questions."

  He instanced education.

  "Apart," said I, "from the religious question."

  "Apart from the religious question."

  He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his

  general theme that political conflict was the outcome of

  uncertainty. "Directly you get a thing established, so that people

  can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people

  can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no

  more to be said. The thing has to be done…"

  And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely

  tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing

  constructive conviction, there are other memories.

  Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive,

  indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning

  over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it,

  or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a

  diabolical skill t
o preserve what are in effect religious tests,

  tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the

  consciences of a quarter-and that perhaps the best quarter-of the

  youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?

  In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham

  displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his

  subtle mind. I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and

  listen to his urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care?

  Did anything matter to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why

  did he trouble to serve the narrowness and passion of his side? Or

  did he see far beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was

  justified by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?

  They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly

  well cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate

  intimacy; he pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think

  at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily

  circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics.

  And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight

  of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond

  question he was great! No other contemporary politician had his

  quality. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great

  contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of

  statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only

  interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the

  conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at

  times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the

  reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own

  thoughts, who waits behind a lesser master's chair…

  8

  Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state

  becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as

  to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke

  quite after my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise

  that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly. But

  neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist of my story.

  And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and

  Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was

  possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of

  constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely accept

  the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to

  make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.

  There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the

  great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa,

  Framboya-Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So

  far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they

  had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the

  perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little

  glorious, a little too simply bold. They wanted to arm and they

  wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them

  far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of

  heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in

  a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained

  men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the

  things that matter in England… There were also the great

  business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord

  Paddockhurst). My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the

  scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the

  perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar

  competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of

  gain. For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington-I wish I had kept

  a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day

  to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and

  wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity of sweeping

  actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent

  ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting

  pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed

  him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in

  him-but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day

  after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound

  meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem

  to light the whole interior being of a man. "Some day," he said

  softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing-"some

  day I will raise the country."

  "Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the

  little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette…

  Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and

  again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and

  their big lawyers, accustomed to-well, qualified statement. And

  below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods,

  young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen

  service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers,

  keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.

  Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside

  the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their

  chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than welt-

  politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the

  Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-

  hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for

  bullying. They varied in insensible gradations between the noble

  sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our

  Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man might exercise

  his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public

  serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed

  up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose

  predominant idea was that the village schools should confine

  themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying,

  and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request…

  I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the

  figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the

  library of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of

  those things-I think they are called gout stools. He had been

  playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he

  had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted

  to irascible important men whose insteps are painful. Among other

  things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand

  statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly

  that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in

  population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and

  circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who


  pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of

  upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established

  Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue

  about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered

  his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to

  the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an

  appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable,

  responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a

  number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive

  retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to

  the forensic mind. Now he reposed. He was breathing heavily with

  his mouth a little open and his head on one side. One whisker was

  turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump strong hands

  gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.

  How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence,

  respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his

  unguarded expression!

  I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake

  him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.

  9

  One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days

  was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised

  that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even

  then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last

  incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as

  nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative

  side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that

  witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly,

  I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it

  is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more

  vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite

  beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and

  the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,

  chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden…

  Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember