The New Machiavelli

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Willersley took me there one evening. The place was almost
pretentiously matter-of-fact and unassuming. The narrow passage-
hall, papered with some ancient yellowish paper, grained to imitate
wood, was choked with hats and cloaks and an occasional feminine
wrap. Motioned rather than announced by a tall Scotch servant
woman, the only domestic I ever remember seeing there, we made our
way up a narrow staircase past the open door of a small study packed
with blue-books, to discover Altiora Bailey receiving before the
fireplace in her drawing-room. She was a tall commanding figure,
splendid but a little untidy in black silk and red beads, with dark
eyes that had no depths, with a clear hard voice that had an almost
visible prominence, aquiline features and straight black hair that
was apt to get astray, that was now astray like the head feathers of
an eagle in a gale. She stood with her hands behind her back, and
talked in a high tenor of a projected Town Planning Bill with Blupp,
who was practically in those days the secretary of the local
Government Board. A very short broad man with thick ears and fat
white hands writhing intertwined behind him, stood with his back to
us, eager to bark interruptions into Altiora's discourse. A slender
girl in pale blue, manifestly a young political wife, stood with one
foot on the fender listening with an expression of entirely puzzled
propitiation. A tall sandy-bearded bishop with the expression of a
man in a trance completed this central group.

The room was one of those long apartments once divided by folding
doors, and reaching from back to front, that are common upon the
first floors of London houses. Its walls were hung with two or
three indifferent water colours, there was scarcely any furniture
but a sofa or so and a chair, and the floor, severely carpeted with
matting, was crowded with a curious medley of people, men
predominating. Several were in evening dress, but most had the
morning garb of the politician; the women were either severely
rational or radiantly magnificent. Willersley pointed out to me the
wife of the Secretary of State for War, and I recognised the Duchess
of Clynes, who at that time cultivated intellectuality. I looked
round, identifying a face here or there, and stepping back trod on
some one's toe, and turned to find it belonged to the Right Hon. G.
B. Mottisham, dear to the PUNCH caricaturists. He received my
apology with that intentional charm that is one of his most
delightful traits, and resumed his discussion. Beside him was
Esmeer of Trinity, whom I had not seen since my Cambridge days. . . .

Willersley found an ex-member of the School Board for whom he had
affinities, and left me to exchange experiences and comments upon
the company with Esmeer. Esmeer was still a don; but he was
nibbling, he said, at certain negotiations with the TIMES that might
bring him down to London. He wanted to come to London. "We peep at
things from Cambridge," he said.

"This sort of thing," I said, "makes London necessary. It's the
oddest gathering."

"Every one comes here," said Esmeer. "Mostly we hate them like
poison--jealousy--and little irritations--Altiora can be a horror at
times--but we HAVE to come."

"Things are being done?"

"Oh!--no doubt of it. It's one of the parts of the British
machinery--that doesn't show. . . . But nobody else could do it.

"Two people," said Esmeer, "who've planned to be a power--in an
original way. And by Jove! they've done it!"

I did not for some time pick out Oscar Bailey, and then Esmeer
showed him to me in elaborately confidential talk in a corner with a
distinguished-looking stranger wearing a ribbon. Oscar had none of
the fine appearance of his wife; he was a short sturdy figure with a
rounded protruding abdomen and a curious broad, flattened, clean-
shaven face that seemed nearly all forehead. He was of Anglo-
Hungarian extraction, and I have always fancied something Mongolian
in his type. He peered up with reddish swollen-looking eyes over
gilt-edged glasses that were divided horizontally into portions of
different refractive power, and he talking in an ingratiating
undertone, with busy thin lips, an eager lisp and nervous movements
of the hand.

People say that thirty years before at Oxford he was almost exactly
the same eager, clever little man he was when I first met him. He
had come up to Balliol bristling with extraordinary degrees and
prizes capturned in provincial and Irish and Scotch universities--
and had made a name for himself as the most formidable dealer in
exact fact the rhetoricians of the Union had ever had to encounter.
From Oxford he had gone on to a position in the Higher Division of
the Civil Service, I think in the War Office, and had speedily made
a place for himself as a political journalist. He was a
particularly neat controversialist, and very full of political and
sociological ideas. He had a quite astounding memory for facts and
a mastery of detailed analysis, and the time afforded scope for
these gifts. The later eighties were full of politico-social
discussion, and he became a prominent name upon the contents list of
the NINETEENTH CENTURY, the FORTNIGHTLY and CONTEMPORARY chiefly as
a half sympathetic but frequently very damaging critic of the
socialism of that period. He won the immense respect of every one
specially interested in social and political questions, he soon
achieved the limited distinction that is awarded such capacity, and
at that I think he would have remained for the rest of his life if
he had not encountered Altiora.

But Altiora Macvitie was an altogether exceptional woman, an
extraordinary mixture of qualities, the one woman in the world who
could make something more out of Bailey than that. She had much of
the vigour and handsomeness of a slender impudent young man, and an
unscrupulousness altogether feminine. She was one of those women
who are waiting in--what is the word?--muliebrity. She had courage
and initiative and a philosophical way of handling questions, and
she could be bored by regular work like a man. She was entirely
unfitted for her sex's sphere. She was neither uncertain, coy nor
hard to please, and altogether too stimulating and aggressive for
any gentleman's hours of ease. Her cookery would have been about as
sketchy as her handwriting, which was generally quite illegible, and
she would have made, I feel sure, a shocking bad nurse. Yet you
mustn't imagine she was an inelegant or unbeautiful woman, and she
is inconceivable to me in high collars or any sort of masculine
garment. But her soul was bony, and at the base of her was a vanity
gaunt and greedy! When she wasn't in a state of personal untidiness
that was partly a protest against the waste of hours exacted by the
toilet and partly a natural disinclination, she had a gypsy
splendour of black and red and silver all her own. And somewhen in
the early nineties she met and married Bailey.

I know very little about her early years. She was the only daughter
of Sir Deighton Macvitie, who applied the iodoform process to
cotton, and only his subsequent unfortunate attempts to become a
Cotton King prevented her being a very rich woman. As it was she
had a tolerable independence. She came into prominence as one of
the more able of the little shoal of young women who were led into
politico-philanthropic activities by the influence of the earlier
novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward--the Marcella crop. She went
"slumming" with distinguished vigour, which was quite usual in those
days--and returned from her experiences as an amateur flower girl
with clear and original views about the problem--which is and always
had been unusual. She had not married, I suppose because her
standards were high, and men are cowards and with an instinctive
appetite for muliebrity. She had kept house for her father by
speaking occasionally to the housekeeper, butler and cook her mother
had left her, and gathering the most interesting dinner parties she
could, and had married off four orphan nieces in a harsh and
successful manner. After her father's smash and death she came out
as a writer upon social questions and a scathing critic of the
Charity Organisation Society, and she was three and thirty and a
little at loose ends when she met Oscar Bailey, so to speak, in the
CONTEMPORARY REVIEW. The lurking woman in her nature was fascinated
by the ease and precision with which the little man rolled over all
sorts of important and authoritative people, she was the first to
discover a sort of imaginative bigness in his still growing mind,
the forehead perhaps carried him off physically, and she took
occasion to meet and subjugate him, and, so soon as he had
sufficiently recovered from his abject humility and a certain panic
at her attentions, marry him.

This had opened a new phase in the lives of Bailey and herself. The
two supplemented each other to an extraordinary extent. Their
subsequent career was, I think, almost entirely her invention. She
was aggressive, imaginative, and had a great capacity for ideas,
while he was almost destitute of initiative, and could do nothing
with ideas except remember and discuss them. She was, if not exact,
at least indolent, with a strong disposition to save energy by
sketching--even her handwriting showed that--while he was
inexhaustibly industrious with a relentless invariable caligraphy
that grew larger and clearer as the years passed by. She had a
considerable power of charming; she could be just as nice to people--
and incidentally just as nasty--as she wanted to be. He was always
just the same, a little confidential and SOTTO VOCE, artlessly rude
and egoistic in an undignified way. She had considerable social
experience, good social connections, and considerable social
ambition, while he had none of these things. She saw in a flash her
opportunity to redeem his defects, use his powers, and do large,
novel, rather startling things. She ran him. Her marriage, which
shocked her friends and relations beyond measure--for a time they
would only speak of Bailey as "that gnome"--was a stroke of genius,
and forthwith they proceeded to make themselves the most formidable
and distinguished couple conceivable. P. B. P., she boasted, was
engraved inside their wedding rings, Pro Bono Publico, and she meant
it to be no idle threat. She had discovered very early that the
last thing influential people will do is to work. Everything in
their lives tends to make them dependent upon a supply of
confidently administered detail. Their business is with the window
and not the stock behind, and in the end they are dependent upon the
stock behind for what goes into the window. She linked with that
the fact that Bailey had a mind as orderly as a museum, and an
invincible power over detail. She saw that if two people took the
necessary pains to know the facts of government and administration
with precision, to gather together knowledge that was dispersed and
confused, to be able to say precisely what had to be done and what
avoided in this eventuality or that, they would necessarily become a
centre of reference for all sorts of legislative proposals and
political expedients, and she went unhesitatingly upon that.

Bailey, under her vigorous direction, threw up his post in the Civil
Service and abandoned sporadic controversies, and they devoted
themselves to the elaboration and realisation of this centre of
public information she had conceived as their role. They set out to
study the methods and organisation and realities of government in
the most elaborate manner. They did the work as no one had ever
hitherto dreamt of doing it. They planned the research on a
thoroughly satisfying scale, and arranged their lives almost
entirely for it. They took that house in Chambers Street and
furnished it with severe economy, they discovered that Scotch
domestic who is destined to be the guardian and tyrant of their
declining years, and they set to work. Their first book, "The
Permanent Official," fills three plump volumes, and took them and
their two secretaries upwards of four years to do. It is an
amazingly good book, an enduring achievement. In a hundred
directions the history and the administrative treatment of the
public service was clarified for all time. . . .

They worked regularly every morning from nine to twelve, they
lunched lightly but severely, in the afternoon they "took exercise"
or Bailey attended meetings of the London School Board, on which he
served, he said, for the purposes of study--he also became a railway
director for the same end. In the late afternoon Altiora was at
home to various callers, and in the evening came dinner or a
reception or both.

Her dinners and gatherings were a very important feature in their
scheme. She got together all sorts of interesting people in or
about the public service, she mixed the obscurely efficient with the
ill-instructed famous and the rudderless rich, got together in one
room more of the factors in our strange jumble of a public life than
had ever met easily before. She fed them with a shameless austerity
that kept the conversation brilliant, on a soup, a plain fish, and
mutton or boiled fowl and milk pudding, with nothing to drink but
whisky and soda, and hot and cold water, and milk and lemonade.
Everybody was soon very glad indeed to come to that. She boasted
how little her housekeeping cost her, and sought constantly for
fresh economies that would enable her, she said, to sustain an
additional private secretary. Secretaries were the Baileys' one
extravagance, they loved to think of searches going on in the
British Museum, and letters being cleared up and precis made
overhead, while they sat in the little study and worked together,
Bailey with a clockwork industry, and Altiora in splendid flashes
between intervals of cigarettes and meditation. "All efficient
public careers," said Altiora, "consist in the proper direction of
secretaries."

"If everything goes well I shall have another secretary next year,"
Altiora told me. "I wish I could refuse people dinner napkins.
Imagine what it means in washing! I dare most things. . . . But as
it is, they stand a lot of hardship here."

"There's something of the miser in both these people," said Esmeer,
and the thing was perfectly true. For, after all, the miser is
nothing more than a man who either through want of imagination or
want of suggestion misapplies to a base use a natural power of
concentration upon one end. The concentration itself is neither
good nor evil, but a power that can be used in either way. And the
Baileys gathered and reinvested usuriously not money, but knowledge
of the utmost value in human affairs. They produced an effect of
having found themselves--completely. One envied them at times
extraordinarily. I was attracted, I was dazzled--and at the same
time there was something about Bailey's big wrinkled forehead, his
lisping broad mouth, the gestures of his hands and an uncivil
preoccupation I could not endure. . . .

3

Their effect upon me was from the outset very considerable.

Both of them found occasion on that first visit of mine to talk to
me about my published writings and particularly about my then just
published book THE NEW RULER, which had interested them very much.
It fell in indeed so closely with their own way of thinking that I
doubt if they ever understood how independently I had arrived at my
conclusions. It was their weakness to claim excessively. That
irritation, however, came later. We discovered each other
immensely; for a time it produced a tremendous sense of kindred and
cooperation.

Altiora, I remember, maintained that there existed a great army of
such constructive-minded people as ourselves--as yet undiscovered by
one another.

"It's like boring a tunnel through a mountain," said Oscar, "and
presently hearing the tapping of the workers from the other end."

"If you didn't know of them beforehand," I said, "it might be a
rather badly joined tunnel."

"Exactly," said Altiora with a high note, "and that's why we all
want to find out each other. . . ."

They didn't talk like that on our first encounter, but they urged me
to lunch with them next day, and then it was we went into things. A
woman Factory Inspector and the Educational Minister for New
Banksland and his wife were also there, but I don't remember they
made any contribution to the conversation. The Baileys saw to that.
They kept on at me in an urgent litigious way.

"We have read your book," each began--as though it had been a joint
function. "And we consider--"

"Yes," I protested, "I think--"

That was a secondary matter.

"They did not consider," said Altiora, raising her voice and going
right over me, that I had allowed sufficiently for the inevitable
development of an official administrative class in the modern
state."

"Nor of its importance," echoed Oscar.

That, they explained in a sort of chorus, was the cardinal idea of
their lives, what they were up to, what they stood for. "We want to
suggest to you," they said--and I found this was a stock opening of
theirs--"that from the mere necessities of convenience elected
bodies MUST avail themselves more and more of the services of expert
officials. We have that very much in mind. The more complicated
and technical affairs become, the less confidence will the elected
official have in himself. We want to suggest that these expert
officials must necessarily develop into a new class and a very
powerful class in the community. We want to organise that. It may
be THE power of the future. They will necessarily have to have very
much of a common training. We consider ourselves as amateur unpaid
precursors of such a class." . . .

The vision they displayed for my consideration as the aim of public-
spirited endeavour, seemed like a harder, narrower, more specialised
version of the idea of a trained and disciplined state that
Willersley and I had worked out in the Alps. They wanted things
more organised, more correlated with government and a collective
purpose, just as we did, but they saw it not in terms of a growing
collective understanding, but in terms of functionaries, legislative
change, and methods of administration. . . .

It wasn't clear at first how we differed. The Baileys were very
anxious to win me to co-operation, and I was quite prepared at first
to identify their distinctive expressions with phrases of my own,
and so we came very readily into an alliance that was to last some
years, and break at last very painfully. Altiora manifestly liked
me, I was soon discussing with her the perplexity I found in placing
myself efficiently in the world, the problem of how to take hold of
things that occupied my thoughts, and she was sketching out careers
for my consideration, very much as an architect on his first visit
sketches houses, considers requirements, and puts before you this
example and that of the more or less similar thing already done. . . .

4

It is easy to see how much in common there was between the Baileys
and me, and how natural it was that I should become a constant
visitor at their house and an ally of theirs in many enterprises.
It is not nearly so easy to define the profound antagonism of spirit
that also held between us. There was a difference in texture, a
difference in quality. How can I express it? The shapes of our
thoughts were the same, but the substance quite different. It was
as if they had made in china or cast iron what I had made in
transparent living matter. (The comparison is manifestly from my
point of view.) Certain things never seemed to show through their
ideas that were visible, refracted perhaps and distorted, but
visible always through mine.

I thought for a time the essential difference lay in our relation to
beauty. With me beauty is quite primary in life; I like truth,
order and goodness, wholly because they are beautiful or lead
straight to beautiful consequences. The Baileys either hadn't got
that or they didn't see it. They seemed at times to prefer things
harsh and ugly. That puzzled me extremely. The esthetic quality of
many of their proposals, the "manners" of their work, so to speak,
were at times as dreadful as--well, War Office barrack architecture.
A caricature by its exaggerated statements will sometimes serve to
point a truth by antagonising falsity and falsity. I remember
talking to a prominent museum official in need of more public funds
for the work he had in hand. I mentioned the possibility of
enlisting Bailey's influence.

"Oh, we don't want Philistines like that infernal Bottle-Imp running
us," he said hastily, and would hear of no concerted action for the
end he had in view. "I'd rather not have the extension.

"You see," he went on to explain, "Bailey's wanting in the
essentials."

"What essentials?" said I.

"Oh! he'd be like a nasty oily efficient little machine for some
merely subordinate necessity among all my delicate stuff. He'd do
all we wanted no doubt in the way of money and powers--and he'd do
it wrong and mess the place for ever. Hands all black, you know.
He's just a means. Just a very aggressive and unmanageable means.
This isn't a plumber's job. . . ."

I stuck to my argument.

"I don't LIKE him," said the official conclusively, and it seemed to
me at the time he was just blind prejudice speaking. . . .

I came nearer the truth of the matter as I came to realise that our
philosophies differed profoundly. That isn't a very curable
difference,--once people have grown up. Theirs was a philosophy
devoid of FINESSE. Temperamentally the Baileys were specialised,
concentrated, accurate, while I am urged either by some Inner force
or some entirely assimilated influence in my training, always to
round off and shadow my outlines. I hate them hard. I would
sacrifice detail to modelling always, and the Baileys, it seemed to
me, loved a world as flat and metallic as Sidney Cooper's cows. If
they had the universe in hand I know they would take down all the
trees and put up stamped tin green shades and sunlight accumulators.
Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great
mistake. . . . I got things clearer as time went on. Though it
was an Hegelian mess of which I had partaken at Codger's table by
way of a philosophical training, my sympathies have always been
Pragmatist. I belong almost by nature to that school of Pragmatism
that, following the medieval Nominalists, bases itself upon a denial
of the reality of classes, and of the validity of general laws. The
Baileys classified everything. They were, in the scholastic sense--
which so oddly contradicts the modern use of the word—"Realists."
They believed classes were REAL and independent of their
individuals. This is the common habit of all so-called educated
people who have no metaphysical aptitude and no metaphysical
training. It leads them to a progressive misunderstanding of the
world. It was a favourite trick of Altiora's to speak of everybody
as a "type"; she saw men as samples moving; her dining-room became a
chamber of representatives. It gave a tremendously scientific air
to many of their generalisations, using "scientific" in its
nineteenth-century uncritical Herbert Spencer sense, an air that
only began to disappear when you thought them over again in terms of
actuality and the people one knew. . . .

At the Baileys' one always seemed to be getting one's hands on the
very strings that guided the world. You heard legislation projected
to affect this "type" and that; statistics marched by you with sin
and shame and injustice and misery reduced to quite manageable
percentages, you found men who were to frame or amend bills in grave
and intimate exchange with Bailey's omniscience, you heard Altiora
canvassing approaching resignations and possible appointments that
might make or mar a revolution in administrative methods, and doing
it with a vigorous directness that manifestly swayed the decision;
and you felt you were in a sort of signal box with levers all about
you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and
mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready
obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim
termini.

And then with all this administrative fizzle, this pseudo-scientific
administrative chatter, dying away in your head, out you went into
the limitless grimy chaos of London streets and squares, roads and
avenues lined with teeming houses, each larger than the Chambers
Street house and at least equally alive, you saw the chaotic clamour
of hoardings, the jumble of traffic, the coming and going of
mysterious myriads, you heard the rumble of traffic like the noise
of a torrent; a vague incessant murmur of cries and voices, wanton
crimes and accidents bawled at you from the placards; imperative
unaccountable fashions swaggered triumphant in dazzling windows of
the shops; and you found yourself swaying back to the opposite
conviction that the huge formless spirit of the world it was that
held the strings and danced the puppets on the Bailey stage. . . .

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