THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, "Take that!"

  The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a

  fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold

  tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable

  aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned

  for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows,

  flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe

  with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame. Something of the awe

  of that moment returns to me as I write of it.

  Well, my boy," he said, approaching with an expression of beneficent

  happiness, "I've done with gardening. Let's go for a walk like

  reasonable beings. I've had enough of this"-his face was convulsed

  for an instant with bitter resentment-" Pandering to cabbages."

  4

  That afternoon's walk sticks in my memory for many reasons. One is

  that we went further than I had ever been before; far beyond Keston

  and nearly to Seven-oaks, coming back by train from Dunton Green,

  and the other is that my father as he went along talked about

  himself, not so much to me as to himself, and about life and what he

  had done with it. He monologued so that at times he produced an

  effect of weird world-forgetfulness. I listened puzzled, and at

  that time not upderstanding many things that afterwards became plain

  to me. It is only in recent years that I have discovered the pathos

  of that monologue; how friendless my father was and uncompanioned in

  his thoughts and feelings, and what a hunger he may have felt for

  the sympathy of the undeveloped youngster who trotted by his side.

  "I'm no gardener," he said, "I'm no anything. Why the devil did I

  start gardening?

  "I suppose man was created to mind a garden… But the Fall let

  us out of that! What was I created for? God! what was I created

  for?…

  "Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn't suit me,

  you know. I've got no hands and no patience. I've mucked about

  with life. Mucked about with life." He suddenly addressed himself

  to me, and for an instant I started like an eavesdropper discovered.

  "Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good

  Plan and stick to it. Find out what life is about-I never have-

  and set yourself to do whatever you ought to do. I admit it's a

  puzzle…

  "Those damned houses have been the curse of my life. Stucco white

  elephants! Beastly cracked stucco with stains of green-black and

  green. Conferva and soot… Property, they are!… Beware

  of Things, Dick, beware of Things! Before you know where you are

  you are waiting on them and minding them. They'll eat your life up.

  Eat up your hours and your blood and energy! When those houses came

  to me, I ought to have sold them-or fled the country. I ought to

  have cleared out. Sarcophagi-eaters of men! Oh! the hours and

  days of work, the nights of anxiety those vile houses have cost me!

  The painting! It worked up my arms; it got all over me. I stank of

  it. It made me ill. It isn't living-it's minding…

  "Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this

  country all cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all

  those villas we passed just now and those potato patches and that

  tarred shanty and the hedge! Somebody's minding every bit of it

  like a dog tied to a cart's tail. Patching it and bothering about

  it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by. Look at that notice-

  board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep us other

  rotten little beasts off HIS patch,-God knows why! Look at the

  weeds in it. Look at the mended fence!… There's no property

  worth having, Dick, but money. That's only good to spend. All

  these things. Human souls buried under a cartload of blithering

  rubbish…

  "I'm not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go.

  I ought to have made a better thing of life.

  "I'm sure I could have done things. Only the old people pulled my

  leg. They started me wrong. They never started me at all. I only

  began to find out what life was like when I was nearly forty.

  "If I'd gone to a university; if I'd had any sort of sound training,

  if I hadn't slipped into the haphazard places that came easiest…

  "Nobody warned me. Nobody. It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's

  a cascade of accidents; it's a chaos exasperated by policemen! YOU

  be warned in time, Dick. You stick to a plan. Don't wait for any

  one to show you the way. Nobody will. There isn't a way till you

  make one. Get education, get a good education. Fight your way to

  the top. It's your only chance. I've watched you. You'll do no

  good at digging and property minding. There isn't a neighbour in

  Bromstead won't be able to skin you at suchlike games. You and I

  are the brainy unstable kind, topside or nothing. And if ever those

  blithering houses come to you-don't have 'em. Give them away!

  Dynamite 'em-and off! LIVE, Dick! I'll get rid of them for you if

  I can, Dick, but remember what I say."…

  So it was my father discoursed, if not in those particular words,

  yet exactly in that manner, as he slouched along the southward road,

  with resentful eyes becoming less resentful as he talked, and

  flinging out clumsy illustrative motions at the outskirts of

  Bromstead as we passed along them. That afternoon he hated

  Bromstead, from its foot-tiring pebbles up. He had no illusions

  about Bromstead or himself. I have the clearest impression of him

  in his garden-stained tweeds with a deer-stalker hat on the back of

  his head and presently a pipe sometimes between his teeth and

  sometimes in his gesticulating hand, as he became diverted by his

  talk from his original exasperation…

  This particular afternoon is no doubt mixed up in my memory with

  many other afternoons; all sorts of things my father said and did at

  different times have got themselves referred to it; it filled me at

  the time with a great unprecedented sense of fellowship and it has

  become the symbol now for all our intercourse together. If I didn't

  understand the things he said, I did the mood he was in. He gave me

  two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with

  it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained

  fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion

  and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about

  us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he

  called variously Science and Civilisation, and which, though I do

  not remember that he ever used that word, I suppose many people

  nowadays would identify with Socialism,-as the Fabians expound it.

  He was not very definite about this Science, you must understand,

  but he seemed always to be waving his hand towards it,-just as his

  contemporary Tennyson seems always to be doing-he belonged to his

  age and mostly his talk was destructive of the limited beliefs of

  his time, he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this

  Sci
ence was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a

  world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…

  5

  When I think of Bromstead nowadays I find it inseparably bound up

  with the disorders of my father's gardening, and the odd patchings

  and paintings that disfigured his houses. It was all of a piece

  with that.

  Let me try and give something of the quality of Bromstead and

  something of its history. It is the quality and history of a

  thousand places round and about London, and round and about the

  other great centres of population in the world. Indeed it is in a

  measure the quality of the whole of this modern world from which we

  who have the statesman's passion struggle to evolve, and dream still

  of evolving order.

  First, then, you must think of Bromstead a hundred and fifty years

  ago, as a narrow irregular little street of thatched houses strung

  out on the London and Dover Road, a little mellow sample unit of a

  social order that had a kind of completeness, at its level, of its

  own. At that time its population numbered a little under two

  thousand people, mostly engaged in agricultural work or in trades

  serving agriculture. There was a blacksmith, a saddler, a chemist,

  a doctor, a barber, a linen-draper (who brewed his own beer); a

  veterinary surgeon, a hardware shop, and two capacious inns. Round

  and about it were a number of pleasant gentlemen's seats, whose

  owners went frequently to London town in their coaches along the

  very tolerable high-road. The church was big enough to hold the

  whole population, were people minded to go to church, and indeed a

  large proportion did go, and all who married were married in it, and

  everybody, to begin with, was christened at its font and buried at

  last in its yew-shaded graveyard. Everybody knew everybody in the

  place. It was, in fact, a definite place and a real human community

  in those days. There was a pleasant old market-house in the middle

  of the town with a weekly market, and an annual fair at which much

  cheerful merry making and homely intoxication occurred; there was a

  pack of hounds which hunted within five miles of London Bridge, and

  the local gentry would occasionally enliven the place with valiant

  cricket matches for a hundred guineas a side, to the vast excitement

  of the entire population. It was very much the same sort of place

  that it had been for three or four centuries. A Bromstead Rip van

  Winkle from 1550 returning in 1750 would have found most of the old

  houses still as he had known them, the same trades a little improved

  and differentiated one from the other, the same roads rather more

  carefully tended, the Inns not very much altered, the ancient

  familiar market-house. The occasional wheeled traffic would have

  struck him as the most remarkable difference, next perhaps to the

  swaggering painted stone monuments instead of brasses and the

  protestant severity of the communion-table in the parish church,-

  both from the material point of view very little things. A Rip van

  Winkle from 1350, again, would have noticed scarcely greater

  changes; fewer clergy, more people, and particularly more people of

  the middling sort; the glass in the windows of many of the houses,

  the stylish chimneys springing up everywhere would have impressed

  him, and suchlike details. The place would have had the same

  boundaries, the same broad essential features, would have been still

  itself in the way that a man is still himself after he has "filled

  out" a little and grown a longer beard and changed his clothes.

  But after 1750 something got hold of the world, something that was

  destined to alter the scale of every human affair.

  That something was machinery and a vague energetic disposition to

  improve material things. In another part of England ingenious

  people were beginning to use coal in smelting iron, and were

  producing metal in abundance and metal castings in sizes that had

  hitherto been unattainable. Without warning or preparation,

  increment involving countless possibilities of further increment was

  coming to the strength of horses and men. "Power," all

  unsuspected, was flowing like a drug into the veins of the social

  body.

  Nobody seems to have perceived this coming of power, and nobody had

  calculated its probable consequences. Suddenly, almost

  inadvertently, people found themselves doing things that would have

  amazed their ancestors. They began to construct wheeled vehicles

  much more easily and cheaply than they had ever done before, to make

  up roads and move things about that had formerly been esteemed too

  heavy for locomotion, to join woodwork with iron nails instead of

  wooden pegs, to achieve all sorts of mechanical possibilities, to

  trade more freely and manufacture on a larger scale, to send goods

  abroad in a wholesale and systematic way, to bring back commodities

  from overseas, not simply spices and fine commodities, but goods in

  bulk. The new influence spread to agriculture, iron appliances

  replaced wooden, breeding of stock became systematic, paper-making

  and printing increased and cheapened. Roofs of slate and tile

  appeared amidst and presently prevailed over the original Bromstead

  thatch, the huge space of Common to the south was extensively

  enclosed, and what had been an ill-defined horse-track to Dover,

  only passable by adventurous coaches in dry weather, became the

  Dover Road, and was presently the route first of one and then of

  several daily coaches. The High Street was discovered to be too

  tortuous for these awakening energies, and a new road cut off its

  worst contortions. Residential villas appeared occupied by retired

  tradesmen and widows, who esteemed the place healthy, and by others

  of a strange new unoccupied class of people who had money invested

  in joint-stock enterprises. First one and then several boys'

  boarding-schools came, drawing their pupils from London,-my

  grandfather's was one of these. London, twelve miles to the north-

  west, was making itself felt more and more.

  But this was only the beginning of the growth period, the first

  trickle of the coming flood of mechanical power. Away in the north

  they were casting iron in bigger and bigger forms, working their way

  to the production of steel on a large scale, applying power in

  factories. Bromstead had almost doubted in size again long before

  the railway came; there was hardly any thatch left in the High

  Street, but instead were houses with handsome brass-knockered front

  doors and several windows, and shops with shop-fronts all of square

  glass panes, and the place was lighted publicly now by oil lamps-

  previously only one flickering lamp outside each of the coaching

  inns had broken the nocturnal darkness. And there was talk, it long

  remained talk,-of gas. The gasworks came in 1834, and about that

  date my father's three houses must have been built convenient for

  the London Road. They mark nearly the beginning of the real

  suburban quality; they were let at first to City peopl
e still

  engaged in business.

  And then hard on the gasworks had come the railway and cheap coal;

  there was a wild outbreak of brickfields upon the claylands to the

  east, and the Great Growth had begun in earnest. The agricultural

  placidities that had formerly come to the very borders of the High

  Street were broken up north, west and south, by new roads. This

  enterprising person and then that began to "run up" houses,

  irrespective of every other enterprising person who was doing the

  same thing. A Local Board came into existence, and with much

  hesitation and penny-wise economy inaugurated drainage works. Rates

  became a common topic, a fact of accumulating importance. Several

  chapels of zinc and iron appeared, and also a white new church in

  commercial Gothic upon the common, and another of red brick in the

  residential district out beyond the brickfields towards Chessington.

  The population doubled again and doubled again, and became

  particularly teeming in the prolific "working-class" district about

  the deep-rutted, muddy, coal-blackened roads between the gasworks,

  Blodgett's laundries, and the railway goods-yard. Weekly

  properties, that is to say small houses built by small property

  owners and let by the week, sprang up also in the Cage Fields, and

  presently extended right up the London Road. A single national

  school in an inconvenient situation set itself inadequately to

  collect subscriptions and teach the swarming, sniffing, grimy

  offspring of this dingy new population to read. The villages of

  Beckington, which used to be three miles to the west, and Blamely

  four miles to the east of Bromstead, were experiencing similar

  distensions and proliferations, and grew out to meet us. All effect

  of locality or community had gone from these places long before I

  was born; hardly any one knew any one; there was no general meeting

  place any more, the old fairs were just common nuisances haunted by

  gypsies, van showmen, Cheap Jacks and London roughs, the churches

  were incapable of a quarter of the population. One or two local

  papers of shameless veniality reported the proceedings of the local

  Bench and the local Board, compelled tradesmen who were interested

  in these affairs to advertise, used the epithet "Bromstedian" as one