THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  this with extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our

  political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust

  storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we

  made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good

  writing. It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords

  were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the

  longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and

  tumult of that immediate conflict were over. Meanwhile we had to

  get into touch with just as many goodminds as possible.

  As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly

  conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain

  later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused

  Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's

  House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic

  virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow

  excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had

  been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In addition,

  without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and

  Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself

  to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.

  That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE

  WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the

  confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the

  general need of metaphysical training… The great mass of

  people-and not simply common people, but people active and

  influential in intellectual things-are still quite untrained in the

  methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of

  method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy

  patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by

  a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to

  their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that

  minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general

  terms and a certain use for generalisations. They are-to fall back

  on the ancient technicality-Realists of a crude sort. When I say

  Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not

  Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to

  Idealist. Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great

  prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are

  whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied

  contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of

  definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest

  belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are

  using. They are Realists-Cocksurists-in matter of fact;

  sentimentalists in behaviour. The Baileys having got to this

  glorious stage in mental development-it is glorious because it has

  no doubts-were always talking about training "Experts" to apply the

  same simple process to all the affairs of mankind. Well, Realism

  isn't the last word of human wisdom. Modest-minded people, doubtful

  people, subtle people, and the like-the kind of people William

  James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical

  happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms.

  They are truer-and less confident. They have reached scepticism

  and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new Nominalism.

  Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of

  intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind,

  that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can

  only function properly upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always

  been her side of our mental co-operation rather than mine. Her mind

  has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power;

  she has a wonderful art in illustration, and, as the reader probably

  knows already, she writes of metaphysical matters with a rare charm

  and vividness. So far there has been no collection of her papers

  published, but they are to be found not only in the BLUE WEEKLY

  columns but scattered about the monthlies; many people must be

  familiar with her style. It was an intention we did much to realise

  before our private downfall, that we would use the BLUE WEEKLY to

  maintain a stream of suggestion against crude thinking, and at last

  scarcely a week passed but some popular distinction, some large

  imposing generalisation, was touched to flaccidity by her pen or

  mine…

  I was at great pains to give my philosophical, political, and social

  matter the best literary and critical backing we could get in

  London. I hunted sedulously for good descriptive writing and good

  criticism; I was indefatigable in my readiness to hear and consider,

  if not to accept advice; I watched every corner of the paper, and

  had a dozen men alert to get me special matter of the sort that

  draws in the unattached reader. The chief danger on the literary

  side of a weekly is that it should fall into the hands of some

  particular school, and this I watched for closely. It seems

  impossible to get vividness of apprehension and breadth of view

  together in the same critic. So it falls to the wise editor to

  secure the first and impose the second. Directly I detected the

  shrill partisan note in our criticism, the attempt to puff a poor

  thing because it was "in the right direction," or damn a vigorous

  piece of work because it wasn't, I tackled the man and had it out

  with him. Our pay was good enough for that to matter a good deal…

  Our distinctive little blue and white poster kept up its neat

  persistent appeal to the public eye, and before 1911 was out, the

  BLUE WEEKLY was printing twenty pages of publishers' advertisements,

  and went into all the clubs in London and three-quarters of the

  country houses where week-end parties gather together. Its sale by

  newsagents and bookstalls grew steadily. One got more and more the

  reassuring sense of being discussed, and influencing discussion.

  5

  Our office was at the very top of a big building near the end of

  Adelphi Terrace; the main window beside my desk, a big undivided

  window of plate glass, looked out upon Cleopatra's Needle, the

  corner of the Hotel Cecil, the fine arches of Waterloo Bridge, and

  the long sweep of south bank with its shot towers and chimneys, past

  Bankside to the dimly seen piers of the great bridge below the

  Tower. The dome of St. Paul's just floated into view on the left

  against the hotel facade. By night and day, in every light and

  atmosphere, it was a beautiful and various view, alive as a

  throbbing heart; a perpetual flow of traffic ploughed and splashed

  the streaming silver of the river, and by night the shapes of things

  became velvet black and grey, and the water a shining mirror of

  steel, wearing coruscating gems of light. In the foreground the

  Embankment trams sailed glowing by, across the water advertisements

  flashed and flickered, trains went
and came and a rolling drift of

  smoke reflected unseen fires. By day that spectacle was sometimes a

  marvel of shining wet and wind-cleared atmosphere, sometimes a

  mystery of drifting fog, sometimes a miracle of crowded details,

  minutely fine.

  As I think of that view, so variously spacious in effect, Iam back

  there, and this sunlit paper might be lamp-lit and lying on my old

  desk. I see it all again, feel it all again. In the foreground is

  a green shaded lamp and crumpled galley slips and paged proofs and

  letters, two or three papers in manuscript, and so forth. In the

  shadows are chairs and another table bearing papers and books, a

  rotating bookcase dimly seen, a long window seat black in the

  darkness, and then the cool unbroken spectacle of the window. How

  often I would watch some tram-car, some string of barges go from me

  slowly out of sight. The people were black animalculae by day,

  clustering, collecting, dispersing, by night, they were phantom

  face-specks coming, vanishing, stirring obscurely between light and

  shade.

  I recall many hours at my desk in that room before the crisis came,

  hours full of the peculiar happiness of effective strenuous work.

  Once some piece of writing went on, holding me intent and forgetful

  of time until I looked up from the warm circle of my electric lamp

  to see the eastward sky above the pale silhouette of the Tower

  Bridge, flushed and banded brightly with the dawn.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  THE BESETTING OF SEX

  1

  Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But Iam concerned

  with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a

  contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the

  social organism in relation to that man. To tell my story at all I

  have to simplify. I have given now the broad lines of my political

  development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to

  the conception of a constructive aristocracy. I have tried to set

  that out in the form of a man discovering himself. Incidentally

  that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife. One

  has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two

  different languages and coming to an understanding. But Margaret

  and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my

  own, diverged.

  I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended

  for me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me

  up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement,

  tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in

  which these interests break upon the life of a young man under

  contemporary conditions. I do not think my lot was a very

  exceptional one. I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates,

  but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small

  families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I

  was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were encounters of

  sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them

  things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish

  disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had

  passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things

  inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time

  Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and

  so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a

  little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She

  didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from

  my world… And then came this secret separation…

  Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development

  of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to

  have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I

  thought these things were over. I went about my career with

  Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly

  strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished

  sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would

  not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest

  degree if we had.

  And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and

  her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life

  returned. The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its

  invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy. I have already

  compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in

  his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these

  high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the

  beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and

  woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the

  light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting,

  demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I

  feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my

  time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere

  physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she

  is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to

  the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a

  thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came to me

  and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an

  unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and

  controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once

  trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest,

  most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,

  explicitness of understanding…

  2

  In all my earlier imaginings of statecraft I had tacitly assumed

  either that the relations of the sexes were all right or that anyhow

  they didn't concern the state. It was a matter they, whoever "they"

  were, had to settle among themselves. That sort of disregard was

  possible then. But even before 1906 there were endless intimations

  that the dams holding back great reservoirs of discussion were

  crumbling. We political schemers were ploughing wider than any one

  had ploughed before in the field of social reconstruction. We had

  also, we realised, to plough deeper. We had to plough down at last

  to the passionate elements of sexual relationship and examine and

  decide upon them.

  The signs multiplied. In a year or so half the police of the

  metropolis were scarce sufficient to protect the House from one

  clamorous aspect of the new problem. The members went about

  Westminster with an odd, new sense of being beset. A good

  proportion of us kept up the pretence that the Vote for Women was an

  isolated fad, and the agitation an epidemic madness that would

  presently pass. But it was manifest to any one who sought more than

  comfort in the matter that the streams of women and sympathisers and

  money forthcoming marked far deeper and wider things than an idle

  fancy for the fr
anchise. The existing laws and conventions of

  relationship between Man and Woman were just as unsatisfactory a

  disorder as anything else in our tumbled confusion of a world, and

  that also was coming to bear upon statecraft.

  My first parliament was the parliament of the Suffragettes. I don't

  propose to tell here of that amazing campaign, with its absurdities

  and follies, its courage and devotion. There were aspects of that

  unquenchable agitation that were absolutely heroic and aspects that

  were absolutely pitiful. It was unreasonable, unwise, and, except

  for its one central insistence, astonishingly incoherent. It was

  amazingly effective. The very incoherence of the demand witnessed,

  I think, to the forces that lay behind it. It wasn't a simple

  argument based on a simple assumption; it was the first crude

  expression of a great mass and mingling of convergent feelings, of a

  widespread, confused persuasion among modern educated women that the

  conditions of their relations with men were oppressive, ugly,

  dishonouring, and had to be altered. They had not merely adopted

  the Vote as a symbol of equality; it was fairly manifest to me that,

  given it, they meant to use it, and to use it perhaps even

  vindictively and blindly, as a weapon against many things they had

  every reason to hate…

  I remember, with exceptional vividness, that great night early in

  the session of 1909, when-I think it was-fifty or sixty women went

  to prison. I had been dining at the Barham's, and Lord Barham and I

  came down from the direction of St. James's Park into a crowd and a

  confusion outside the Caxton Hall. We found ourselves drifting with

  an immense multitude towards Parliament Square and parallel with a

  silent, close-packed column of girls and women, for the most part

  white-faced and intent. I still remember the effect of their faces

  upon me. It was quite different from the general effect of staring

  about and divided attention one gets in a political procession of

  men. There was an expression of heroic tension.

  There had been a pretty deliberate appeal on the part of the women's

  organisers to the Unemployed, who had been demonstrating throughout