The New Machiavelli

H >> H. G. Wells >> The New Machiavelli

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER

1

Margaret had already taken a little house in Radnor Square,
Westminster, before our marriage, a house that seemed particularly
adaptable to our needs as public-spirited efficients; it had been
very pleasantly painted and papered under Margaret's instructions,
white paint and clean open purples and green predominating, and now
we set to work at once upon the interesting business of arranging
and--with our Venetian glass as a beginning--furnishing it. We had
been fairly fortunate with our wedding presents, and for the most
part it was open to us to choose just exactly what we would have and
just precisely where we would put it.

Margaret had a sense of form and colour altogether superior to mine,
and so quite apart from the fact that it was her money equipped us,
I stood aside from all these matters and obeyed her summons to a
consultation only to endorse her judgment very readily. Until
everything was settled I went every day to my old rooms in Vincent
Square and worked at a series of papers that were originally
intended for the FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW, the papers that afterwards
became my fourth book, "New Aspects of Liberalism."

I still remember as delightful most of the circumstances of getting
into 79, Radnor Square. The thin flavour of indecision about
Margaret disappeared altogether in a shop; she had the precisest
ideas of what she wanted, and the devices of the salesman did not
sway her. It was very pleasant to find her taking things out of my
hands with a certain masterfulness, and showing the distinctest
determination to make a house in which I should be able to work in
that great project of "doing something for the world."

"And I do want to make things pretty about us," she said. "You
don't think it wrong to have things pretty?"

"I want them so."

"Altiora has things hard."

"Altiora," I answered, "takes a pride in standing ugly and
uncomfortable things. But I don't see that they help her. Anyhow
they won't help me."

So Margaret went to the best shops and got everything very simple
and very good. She bought some pictures very well indeed; there was
a little Sussex landscape, full of wind and sunshine, by Nicholson,
for my study, that hit my taste far better than if I had gone out to
get some such expression for myself.

"We will buy a picture just now and then," she said, "sometimes--
when we see one."

I would come back through the January mire or fog from Vincent
Square to the door of 79, and reach it at last with a quite childish
appreciation of the fact that its solid Georgian proportions and its
fine brass furnishings belonged to MY home; I would use my latchkey
and discover Margaret in the warm-lit, spacious hall with a
partially opened packing-case, fatigued but happy, or go up to have
tea with her out of the right tea things, "come at last," or be told
to notice what was fresh there. It wasn't simply that I had never
had a house before, but I had really never been, except in the most
transitory way, in any house that was nearly so delightful as mine
promised to be. Everything was fresh and bright, and softly and
harmoniously toned. Downstairs we had a green dining-room with
gleaming silver, dark oak, and English colour-prints; above was a
large drawing-room that could be made still larger by throwing open
folding doors, and it was all carefully done in greys and blues, for
the most part with real Sheraton supplemented by Sheraton so
skilfully imitated by an expert Margaret had discovered as to be
indistinguishable except to a minute scrutiny. And for me, above
this and next to my bedroom, there was a roomy study, with specially
thick stair-carpet outside and thick carpets in the bedroom overhead
and a big old desk for me to sit at and work between fire and
window, and another desk specially made for me by that expert if I
chose to stand and write, and open bookshelves and bookcases and
every sort of convenient fitting. There were electric heaters
beside the open fire, and everything was put for me to make tea at
any time--electric kettle, infuser, biscuits and fresh butter, so
that I could get up and work at any hour of the day or night. I
could do no work in this apartment for a long time, I was so
interested in the perfection of its arrangements. And when I
brought in my books and papers from Vincent Square, Margaret seized
upon all the really shabby volumes and had them re-bound in a fine
official-looking leather.

I can remember sitting down at that desk and looking round me and
feeling with a queer effect of surprise that after all even a place
in the Cabinet, though infinitely remote, was nevertheless in the
same large world with these fine and quietly expensive things.

On the same floor Margaret had a "den," a very neat and pretty den
with good colour-prints of Botticellis and Carpaccios, and there was
a third apartment for sectarial purposes should the necessity for
them arise, with a severe-looking desk equipped with patent files.
And Margaret would come flitting into the room to me, or appear
noiselessly standing, a tall gracefully drooping form, in the wide
open doorway. "Is everything right, dear?" she would ask.

"Come in," I would say, "I'm sorting out papers."

She would come to the hearthrug.

"I mustn't disturb you," she would remark.

"I'm not busy yet."

"Things are getting into order. Then we must make out a time-table
as the Baileys do, and BEGIN!"

Altiora came in to see us once or twice, and a number of serious
young wives known to Altiora called and were shown over the house,
and discussed its arrangements with Margaret. They were all
tremendously keen on efficient arrangements.

"A little pretty," said Altiora, with the faintest disapproval,
"still--"

It was clear she thought we should grow out of that. From the day
of our return we found other people's houses open to us and eager
for us. We went out of London for week-ends and dined out, and
began discussing our projects for reciprocating these hospitalities.
As a single man unattached, I had had a wide and miscellaneous
social range, but now I found myself falling into place in a set.
For a time I acquiesced in this. I went very little to my clubs,
the Climax and the National Liberal, and participated in no bachelor
dinners at all. For a time, too, I dropped out of the garrulous
literary and journalistic circles I had frequented. I put up for
the Reform, not so much for the use of the club as a sign of serious
and substantial political standing. I didn't go up to Cambridge, I
remember, for nearly a year, so occupied was I with my new
adjustments.

The people we found ourselves among at this time were people, to put
it roughly, of the Parliamentary candidate class, or people already
actually placed in the political world. They ranged between very
considerable wealth and such a hard, bare independence as old
Willersley and the sister who kept house for him possessed. There
were quite a number of young couples like ourselves, a little
younger and more artless, or a little older and more established.
Among the younger men I had a sort of distinction because of my
Cambridge reputation and my writing, and because, unlike them, I was
an adventurer and had won and married my way into their circles
instead of being naturally there. They couldn't quite reckon upon
what I should do; they felt I had reserves of experience and
incalculable traditions. Close to us were the Cramptons, Willie
Crampton, who has since been Postmaster-General, rich and very
important in Rockshire, and his younger brother Edward, who has
specialised in history and become one of those unimaginative men of
letters who are the glory of latter-day England. Then there was
Lewis, further towards Kensington, where his cousins the Solomons
and the Hartsteins lived, a brilliant representative of his race,
able, industrious and invariably uninspired, with a wife a little in
revolt against the racial tradition of feminine servitude and
inclined to the suffragette point of view, and Bunting Harblow, an
old blue, and with an erratic disposition well under the control of
the able little cousin he had married. I had known all these men,
but now (with Altiora floating angelically in benediction) they
opened their hearts to me and took me into their order. They were
all like myself, prospective Liberal candidates, with a feeling that
the period of wandering in the wilderness of opposition was drawing
near its close. They were all tremendously keen upon social and
political service, and all greatly under the sway of the ideal of a
simple, strenuous life, a life finding its satisfactions in
political achievements and distinctions. The young wives were as
keen about it as the young husbands, Margaret most of all, and I--
whatever elements in me didn't march with the attitudes and habits
of this set were very much in the background during that time.

We would give little dinners and have evening gatherings at which
everything was very simple and very good, with a slight but
perceptible austerity, and there was more good fruit and flowers and
less perhaps in the way of savouries, patties and entrees than was
customary. Sherry we banished, and Marsala and liqueurs, and there
was always good home-made lemonade available. No men waited, but
very expert parlourmaids. Our meat was usually Welsh mutton--I
don't know why, unless that mountains have ever been the last refuge
of the severer virtues. And we talked politics and books and ideas
and Bernard Shaw (who was a department by himself and supposed in
those days to be ethically sound at bottom), and mingled with the
intellectuals--I myself was, as it were, a promoted intellectual.

The Cramptons had a tendency to read good things aloud on their less
frequented receptions, but I have never been able to participate
submissively in this hyper-digestion of written matter, and
generally managed to provoke a disruptive debate. We were all very
earnest to make the most of ourselves and to be and do, and I wonder
still at times, with an unassuaged perplexity, how it is that in
that phase of utmost earnestness I have always seemed to myself to
be most remote from reality.

2

I look back now across the detaching intervention of sixteen crowded
years, critically and I fancy almost impartially, to those
beginnings of my married life. I try to recall something near to
their proper order the developing phases of relationship. I am
struck most of all by the immense unpremeditated, generous-spirited
insincerities upon which Margaret and I were building.

It seems to me that here I have to tell perhaps the commonest
experience of all among married educated people, the deliberate,
shy, complex effort to fill the yawning gaps in temperament as they
appear, the sustained, failing attempt to bridge abysses, level
barriers, evade violent pressures. I have come these latter years
of my life to believe that it is possible for a man and woman to be
absolutely real with one another, to stand naked souled to each
other, unashamed and unafraid, because of the natural all-glorifying
love between them. It is possible to love and be loved untroubling,
as a bird flies through the air. But it is a rare and intricate
chance that brings two people within sight of that essential union,
and for the majority marriage must adjust itself on other terms.
Most coupled people never really look at one another. They look a
little away to preconceived ideas. And each from the first days of
love-making HIDES from the other, is afraid of disappointing, afraid
of offending, afraid of discoveries in either sense. They build not
solidly upon the rock of truth, but upon arches and pillars and
queer provisional supports that are needed to make a common
foundation, and below in the imprisoned darknesses, below the fine
fabric they sustain together begins for each of them a cavernous
hidden life. Down there things may be prowling that scarce ever
peep out to consciousness except in the grey half-light of sleepless
nights, passions that flash out for an instant in an angry glance
and are seen no more, starved victims and beautiful dreams bricked
up to die. For the most of us there is no jail delivery of those
inner depths, and the life above goes on to its honourable end.

I have told how I loved Margaret and how I came to marry her.
Perhaps already unintentionally I have indicated the quality of the
injustice our marriage did us both. There was no kindred between us
and no understanding. We were drawn to one another by the
unlikeness of our quality, by the things we misunderstood in each
other. I know a score of couples who have married in that fashion.

Modern conditions and modern ideas, and in particular the intenser
and subtler perceptions of modern life, press more and more heavily
upon a marriage tie whose fashion comes from an earlier and less
discriminating time. When the wife was her husband's subordinate,
meeting him simply and uncritically for simple ends, when marriage
was a purely domestic relationship, leaving thought and the vivid
things of life almost entirely to the unencumbered man, mental and
temperamental incompatibilities mattered comparatively little. But
now the wife, and particularly the loving childless wife,
unpremeditatedly makes a relentless demand for a complete
association, and the husband exacts unthought of delicacies of
understanding and co-operation. These are stupendous demands.
People not only think more fully and elaborately about life than
they ever did before, but marriage obliges us to make that ever more
accidented progress a three-legged race of carelessly assorted
couples. . . .

Our very mental texture was different. I was rough-minded, to use
the phrase of William James, primary and intuitive and illogical;
she was tender-minded, logical, refined and secondary. She was
loyal to pledge and persons, sentimental and faithful; I am loyal to
ideas and instincts, emotional and scheming. My imagination moves
in broad gestures; her's was delicate with a real dread of
extravagance. My quality is sensuous and ruled by warm impulses;
hers was discriminating and essentially inhibitory. I like the
facts of the case and to mention everything; I like naked bodies and
the jolly smells of things. She abounded in reservations, in
circumlocutions and evasions, in keenly appreciated secondary
points. Perhaps the reader knows that Tintoretto in the National
Gallery, the Origin of the Milky Way. It is an admirable test of
tempera-mental quality. In spite of my early training I have come
to regard that picture as altogether delightful; to Margaret it has
always been "needlessly offensive." In that you have our
fundamental breach. She had a habit, by no means rare, of damning
what she did not like or find sympathetic in me on the score that it
was not my "true self," and she did not so much accept the universe
as select from it and do her best to ignore the rest. And also I
had far more initiative than had she. This is no catalogue of
rights and wrongs, or superiorities and inferiorities; it is a
catalogue of differences between two people linked in a relationship
that constantly becomes more intolerant of differences.

This is how we stood to each other, and none of it was clear to
either of us at the outset. To begin with, I found myself reserving
myself from her, then slowly apprehending a jarring between our
minds and what seemed to me at first a queer little habit of
misunderstanding in her. . . .

It did not hinder my being very fond of her. . . .

Where our system of reservation became at once most usual and most
astounding was in our personal relations. It is not too much to say
that in that regard we never for a moment achieved sincerity with
one another during the first six years of our life together. It
goes even deeper than that, for in my effort to realise the ideal of
my marriage I ceased even to attempt to be sincere with myself. I
would not admit my own perceptions and interpretations. I tried to
fit myself to her thinner and finer determinations. There are
people who will say with a note of approval that I was learning to
conquer myself. I record that much without any note of approval. . . .

For some years I never deceived Margaret about any concrete fact
nor, except for the silence about my earlier life that she had
almost forced upon me, did I hide any concrete fact that seemed to
affect her, but from the outset I was guilty of immense spiritual
concealments, my very marriage was based, I see now, on a spiritual
subterfuge; I hid moods from her, pretended feelings. . . .

3

The interest and excitement of setting-up a house, of walking about
it from room to room and from floor to floor, or sitting at one's
own dinner table and watching one's wife control conversation with a
pretty, timid resolution, of taking a place among the secure and
free people of our world, passed almost insensibly into the interest
and excitement of my Parliamentary candidature for the Kinghamstead
Division, that shapeless chunk of agricultural midland between the
Great Western and the North Western railways. I was going to "take
hold" at last, the Kinghamstead Division was my appointed handle. I
was to find my place in the rather indistinctly sketched
constructions that were implicit in the minds of all our circle.
The precise place I had to fill and the precise functions I had to
discharge were not as yet very clear, but all that, we felt sure,
would become plain as things developed.

A few brief months of vague activities of "nursing" gave place to
the excitements of the contest that followed the return of Mr.
Camphell-Bannerman to power in 1905. So far as the Kinghamstead
Division was concerned it was a depressed and tepid battle. I went
about the constituency making three speeches that were soon
threadbare, and an odd little collection of people worked for me;
two solicitors, a cheap photographer, a democratic parson, a number
of dissenting ministers, the Mayor of Kinghamstead, a Mrs. Bulger,
the widow of an old Chartist who had grown rich through electric
traction patents, Sir Roderick Newton, a Jew who had bought
Calersham Castle, and old Sir Graham Rivers, that sturdy old
soldier, were among my chief supporters. We had headquarters in
each town and village, mostly there were empty shops we leased
temporarily, and there at least a sort of fuss and a coming and
going were maintained. The rest of the population stared in a state
of suspended judgment as we went about the business. The country
was supposed to be in a state of intellectual conflict and
deliberate decision, in history it will no doubt figure as a
momentous conflict. Yet except for an occasional flare of bill-
sticking or a bill in a window or a placard-plastered motor-car or
an argumentative group of people outside a public-house or a
sluggish movement towards the schoolroom or village hall, there was
scarcely a sign that a great empire was revising its destinies. Now
and then one saw a canvasser on a doorstep. For the most part
people went about their business with an entirely irresponsible
confidence in the stability of the universe. At times one felt a
little absurd with one's flutter of colours and one's air of saving
the country.

My opponent was a quite undistinguished Major-General who relied
upon his advocacy of Protection, and was particularly anxious we
should avoid "personalities" and fight the constituency in a
gentlemanly spirit. He was always writing me notes, apologising for
excesses on the part of his supporters, or pointing out the
undesirability of some course taken by mine.

My speeches had been planned upon broad lines, but they lost touch
with these as the polling approached. To begin with I made a real
attempt to put what was in my mind before the people I was to supply
with a political voice. I spoke of the greatness of our empire and
its destinies, of the splendid projects and possibilities of life
and order that lay before the world, of all that a resolute and
constructive effort might do at the present time. "We are building
a state," I said, "secure and splendid, we are in the dawn of the
great age of mankind." Sometimes that would get a solitary "'Ear!
'ear!" Then having created, as I imagined, a fine atmosphere, I
turned upon the history of the last Conservative administration and
brought it into contrast with the wide occasions of the age;
discussed its failure to control the grasping financiers in South
Africa, its failure to release public education from sectarian
squabbles, its misconduct of the Boer War, its waste of the world's
resources. . . .

It soon became manifest that my opening and my general spaciousness
of method bored my audiences a good deal. The richer and wider my
phrases the thinner sounded my voice in these non-resonating
gatherings. Even the platform supporters grew restive
unconsciously, and stirred and coughed. They did not recognise
themselves as mankind. Building an empire, preparing a fresh stage
in the history of humanity, had no appeal for them. They were
mostly everyday, toiling people, full of small personal solicitudes,
and they came to my meetings, I think, very largely as a relaxation.
This stuff was not relaxing. They did not think politics was a
great constructive process, they thought it was a kind of dog-fight.
They wanted fun, they wanted spice, they wanted hits, they wanted
also a chance to say "'Ear', 'ear!" in an intelligent and honourable
manner and clap their hands and drum with their feet. The great
constructive process in history gives so little scope for clapping
and drumming and saying "'Ear, 'ear!" One might as well think of
hounding on the solar system.

So after one or two attempts to lift my audiences to the level of
the issues involved, I began to adapt myself to them. I cut down my
review of our imperial outlook and destinies more and more, and
developed a series of hits and anecdotes and--what shall I call
them?--"crudifications" of the issue. My helper's congratulated me
on the rapid improvement of my platform style. I ceased to speak of
the late Prime Minister with the respect I bore him, and began to
fall in with the popular caricature of him as an artful rabbit-
witted person intent only on keeping his leadership, in spite of the
vigorous attempts of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain to oust him therefrom.
I ceased to qualify my statement that Protection would make food
dearer for the agricultural labourer. I began to speak of Mr.
Alfred Lyttelton as an influence at once insane and diabolical, as a
man inspired by a passionate desire to substitute manacled but still
criminal Chinese for honest British labourers throughout the world.
And when it came to the mention of our own kindly leader, of Mr.
John Burns or any one else of any prominence at all on our side I
fell more and more into the intonation of one who mentions the high
gods. And I had my reward in brighter meetings and readier and
readier applause.

One goes on from phase to phase in these things.

"After all," I told myself, "if one wants to get to Westminster one
must follow the road that leads there," but I found the road
nevertheless rather unexpectedly distasteful. "When one gets
there," I said, "then it is one begins."

But I would lie awake at nights with that sore throat and headache
and fatigue which come from speaking in ill-ventilated rooms, and
wondering how far it was possible to educate a whole people to great
political ideals. Why should political work always rot down to
personalities and personal appeals in this way? Life is, I suppose,
to begin with and end with a matter of personalities, from
personalities all our broader interests arise and to personalities
they return. All our social and political effort, all of it, is
like trying to make a crowd of people fall into formation. The
broader lines appear, but then come a rush and excitement and
irrelevancy, and forthwith the incipient order has vanished and the
marshals must begin the work over again!

My memory of all that time is essentially confusion. There was a
frightful lot of tiresome locomotion in it; for the Kinghamstead
Division is extensive, abounding in ill-graded and badly metalled
cross-roads and vicious little hills, and singularly unpleasing to
the eye in a muddy winter. It is sufficiently near to London to
have undergone the same process of ill-regulated expansion that made
Bromstead the place it is. Several of its overgrown villages have
developed strings of factories and sidings along the railway lines,
and there is an abundance of petty villas. There seemed to be no
place at which one could take hold of more than this or that element
of the population. Now we met in a meeting-house, now in a Masonic
Hall or Drill Hall; I also did a certain amount of open-air speaking
in the dinner hour outside gas-works and groups of factories. Some
special sort of people was, as it were, secreted in response to each
special appeal. One said things carefully adjusted to the
distinctive limitations of each gathering. Jokes of an incredible
silliness and shallowness drifted about us. Our advisers made us
declare that if we were elected we would live in the district, and
one hasty agent had bills printed, "If Mr. Remington is elected he
will live here." The enemy obtained a number of these bills and
stuck them on outhouses, pigstyes, dog-kennels; you cannot imagine
how irksome the repetition of that jest became. The vast drifting
indifference in between my meetings impressed me more and more. I
realised the vagueness of my own plans as I had never done before I
brought them to the test of this experience. I was perplexed by the
riddle of just how far I was, in any sense of the word, taking hold
at all, how far I wasn't myself flowing into an accepted groove.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34