The New Machiavelli

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"It has the same relation to progress--the reality of progress--that
the things they paint on door panels in the suburbs have to art and
beauty. There's a sort of filiation. . . . Your Altiora's just the
political equivalent of the ladies who sell traced cloth for
embroidery; she's a dealer in Refined Social Reform for the Parlour.
The real progress, Remington, is a graver thing and a painfuller
thing and a slower thing altogether. Look! THAT"--and he pointed
to where under a boarding in the light of a gas lamp a dingy
prostitute stood lurking--" was in Babylon and Nineveh. Your little
lot make believe there won't be anything of the sort after this
Parliament! They're going to vanish at a few top notes from Altiora
Bailey! Remington!--it's foolery. It's prigs at play. It's make-
believe, make-believe! Your people there haven't got hold of
things, aren't beginning to get hold of things, don't know anything
of life at all, shirk life, avoid life, get in little bright clean
rooms and talk big over your bumpers of lemonade while the Night
goes by outside--untouched. Those Crampton fools slink by all
this,"--he waved at the woman again--"pretend it doesn't exist, or
is going to be banished root and branch by an Act to keep children
in the wet outside public-houses. Do you think they really care,
Remington? I don't. It's make-believe. What they want to do, what
Lewis wants to do, what Mrs. Bunting Harblow wants her husband to
do, is to sit and feel very grave and necessary and respected on the
Government benches. They think of putting their feet out like
statesmen, and tilting shiny hats with becoming brims down over
their successful noses. Presentation portrait to a club at fifty.
That's their Reality. That's their scope. They don't, it's
manifest, WANT to think beyond that. The things there ARE,
Remington, they'll never face! the wonder and the depth of life,--
lust, and the night-sky,--pain."

"But the good intention," I pleaded, "the Good Will!"

"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but
dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.
That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have
good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their
hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring,
satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"

"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."

"God help us!" said Britten. . . .

"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment
from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral
animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of
all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking,
temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-
believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."
He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:
"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this
set!"

"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "
You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.
Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.
There's depths in Liberalism--"

"We were talking about Liberals."

"Liberty!"

"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"

"What does any little lot know of liberty?"

"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night
and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I
know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and
trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood--and
my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a
drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut
me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it any more. I've paid
something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."

He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he
cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis. . . ."

"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat
gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room
and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and
Margaret's admirable equipment of me.

I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it
was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private
room. . . .

3

I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and
selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial
circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating,
men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual
temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply
party but school and college and county and country that lose their
glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of
the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or
that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the
Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense
of fair play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down--
freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by
propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses. . . .

There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example,
or Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the
fact that the party system has been essential in the history of
England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile
of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich
with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing
itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems almost
scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
strange qualities the savour of these old associations.

That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall,
thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once
held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible
profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I
think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at
most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On
this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."
Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on
the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he
murmurs, "would not have done that," and laments a vanished subtlety
even while Mr. Evesham is speaking. He is always gloomily disposed
to lapse into wonderings about what things are coming to, wonderings
that have no grain of curiosity. His conception of perfect conduct
is industrious persistence along the worn-down, well-marked grooves
of the great recorded days. So infinitely more important to him is
the documented, respected thing than the elusive present.

Cladingbowl and Dayton do not shine in the House, though Cladingbowl
is a sound man on a committee, and Dayton keeps the OLD COUNTRY
GAZETTE, the most gentlemanly paper in London. They prevail,
however, in their clubs at lunch time. There, with the pleasant
consciousness of a morning's work free from either zeal or shirking,
they mingle with permanent officials, prominent lawyers, even a few
of the soberer type of business men, and relax their minds in the
discussion of the morning paper, of the architecture of the West
End, and of the latest public appointments, of golf, of holiday
resorts, of the last judicial witticisms and forensic "crushers."
The New Year and Birthday honours lists are always very sagely and
exhaustively considered, and anecdotes are popular and keenly
judged. They do not talk of the things that are really active in
their minds, but in the formal and habitual manner they suppose to
be proper to intelligent but still honourable men. Socialism,
individual money matters, and religion are forbidden topics, and sex
and women only in so far as they appear in the law courts. It is to
me the strangest of conventions, this assumption of unreal loyalties
and traditional respects, this repudiation and concealment of
passionate interests. It is like wearing gloves in summer fields,
or bathing in a gown, or falling in love with the heroine of a
novel, or writing under a pseudonym, or becoming a masked Tuareg. . . .

It is not, I think, that men of my species are insensitive to the
great past that is embodied in Westminster and its traditions; we
are not so much wanting in the historical sense as alive to the
greatness of our present opportunities and the still vaster future
that is possible to us. London is the most interesting, beautiful,
and wonderful city in the world to me, delicate in her incidental
and multitudinous littleness, and stupendous in her pregnant
totality; I cannot bring myself to use her as a museum or an old
bookshop. When I think of Whitehall that little affair on the
scaffold outside the Banqueting Hall seems trivial and remote in
comparison with the possibilities that offer themselves to my
imagination within the great grey Government buildings close at
hand.

It gives me a qualm of nostalgia even to name those places now. I
think of St. Stephen's tower streaming upwards into the misty London
night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which
the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by
taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I
think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts
sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the
camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining
river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow
seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and
corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished
little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the
tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-
studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and
fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and
corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria
Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one
another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and
scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace,
witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests
along it from every land on earth. . . . Interwoven in the texture
of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the
gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: "You and your
kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the
destiny of Man!"

4

My first three years in Parliament were years of active discontent.
The little group of younger Liberals to which I belonged was very
ignorant of the traditions and qualities of our older leaders, and
quite out of touch with the mass of the party. For a time
Parliament was enormously taken up with moribund issues and old
quarrels. The early Educational legislation was sectarian and
unenterprising, and the Licensing Bill went little further than the
attempted rectification of a Conservative mistake. I was altogether
for the nationalisation of the public-houses, and of this end the
Bill gave no intimations. It was just beer-baiting. I was
recalcitrant almost from the beginning, and spoke against the
Government so early as the second reading of the first Education
Bill, the one the Lords rejected in 1906. I went a little beyond my
intention in the heat of speaking,--it is a way with inexperienced
man. I called the Bill timid, narrow, a mere sop to the jealousies
of sects and little-minded people. I contrasted its aim and methods
with the manifest needs of the time.

I am not a particularly good speaker; after the manner of a writer I
worry to find my meaning too much; but this was one of my successes.
I spoke after dinner and to a fairly full House, for people were
already a little curious about me because of my writings. Several
of the Conservative leaders were present and stayed, and Mr.
Evesham, I remember, came ostentatiously to hear me, with that
engaging friendliness of his, and gave me at the first chance an
approving "Hear, Hear!" I can still recall quite distinctly my two
futile attempts to catch the Speaker's eye before I was able to
begin, the nervous quiver of my rather too prepared opening, the
effect of hearing my own voice and my subconscious wonder as to what
I could possibly be talking about, the realisation that I was
getting on fairly well, the immense satisfaction afterwards of
having on the whole brought it off, and the absurd gratitude I felt
for that encouraging cheer.

Addressing the House of Commons is like no other public speaking in
the world. Its semi-colloquial methods give it an air of being
easy, but its shifting audience, the comings and goings and
hesitations of members behind the chair--not mere audience units,
but men who matter--the desolating emptiness that spreads itself
round the man who fails to interest, the little compact, disciplined
crowd in the strangers' gallery, the light, elusive, flickering
movements high up behind the grill, the wigged, attentive, weary
Speaker, the table and the mace and the chapel-like Gothic
background with its sombre shadows, conspire together, produce a
confused, uncertain feeling in me, as though I was walking upon a
pavement full of trap-doors and patches of uncovered morass. A
misplaced, well-meant "Hear, Hear!" is apt to be extraordinarily
disconcerting, and under no other circumstances have I had to speak
with quite the same sideways twist that the arrangement of the House
imposes. One does not recognise one's own voice threading out into
the stirring brown. Unless I was excited or speaking to the mind of
some particular person in the house, I was apt to lose my feeling of
an auditor. I had no sense of whither my sentences were going, such
as one has with a public meeting well under one's eye. And to lose
one's sense of an auditor is for a man of my temperament to lose
one's sense of the immediate, and to become prolix and vague with
qualifications.

5

My discontents with the Liberal party and my mental exploration of
the quality of party generally is curiously mixed up with certain
impressions of things and people in the National Liberal Club. The
National Liberal Club is Liberalism made visible in the flesh--and
Doultonware. It is an extraordinary big club done in a bold,
wholesale, shiny, marbled style, richly furnished with numerous
paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full-length statues of the
late Mr. Gladstone; and its spacious dining-rooms, its long, hazy,
crowded smoking-room with innumerable little tables and groups of
men in armchairs, its magazine room and library upstairs, have just
that undistinguished and unconcentrated diversity which is for me
the Liberal note. The pensive member sits and hears perplexing
dialects and even fragments of foreign speech, and among the
clustering masses of less insistent whites his roving eye catches
profiles and complexions that send his mind afield to Calcutta or
Rangoon or the West Indies or Sierra Leone or the Cape. . . .

I was not infrequently that pensive member. I used to go to the
Club to doubt about Liberalism.

About two o'clock in the day the great smoking-room is crowded with
countless little groups. They sit about small round tables, or in
circles of chairs, and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the
great narrow place, with its pillars and bays, to infinity. Some of
the groups are big, as many as a dozen men talk in loud tones; some
are duologues, and there is always a sprinkling of lonely,
dissociated men. At first one gets an impression of men going from
group to group and as it were linking them, but as one watches
closely one finds that these men just visit three or four groups at
the outside, and know nothing of the others. One begins to perceive
more and more distinctly that one is dealing with a sort of human
mosaic; that each patch in that great place is of a different
quality and colour from the next and never to be mixed with it.
Most clubs have a common link, a lowest common denominator in the
Club Bore, who spares no one, but even the National Liberal bores
are specialised and sectional. As one looks round one sees here a
clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries, here an island
of South London politicians, here a couple of young Jews ascendant
from Whitechapel, here a circle of journalists and writers, here a
group of Irish politicians, here two East Indians, here a priest or
so, here a clump of old-fashioned Protestants, here a little knot of
eminent Rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story SOTTO VOCE.
Next them are a group of anglicised Germans and highly specialised
chess-players, and then two of the oddest-looking persons--bulging
with documents and intent upon extraordinary business transactions
over long cigars. . . .

I would listen to a stormy sea of babblement, and try to extract
some constructive intimations. Every now and then I got a whiff of
politics. It was clear they were against the Lords--against
plutocrats--against Cossington's newspapers--against the brewers. . . .
It was tremendously clear what they were against. The trouble
was to find out what on earth they were for! . . .

As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample
but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity--all in
little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and
narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.

What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes
together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half
of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct
and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the
commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative
imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.
The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great
and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart. . . .

I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality
very vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a
waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the
sackload and drown by the million in ditches. . . .

Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!
he was saying something about the "Will of the People. . . ."

The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I
forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a
lonely spirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a
ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye
could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like
grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was
there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling
individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant
synthesis, still to come--or present it might be and still unseen by
me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of
mankind? . . .

I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is
implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of
would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the
ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life,
has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the
indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and
comprehend individual lives--an effort of insidious attraction, an
idea of invincible appeal. That something greater than ourselves,
which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between
being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and
visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in
stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more
clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile
in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men. It is
something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is
withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever
been. . . .

6

I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the
club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with
speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came
up. I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle
and his Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or
Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within
seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.
Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant
or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still
livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-
ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special
Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar
wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards,
in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black
coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the
brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room. I would
sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder,
wonder. . . .

An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of
him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying,
sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance
furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen
his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.
We imaginative people are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only
in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser
lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed
self-justification of the dull.

I would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see others of him and
others. What did he think he was up to? Did he for a moment
realise that his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with
me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all, that we were
jointly doing something with the nation and the empire and
mankind? . . . How on earth could any one get hold of him, make
any noble use of him? He didn't read beyond his newspaper. He
never thought, but only followed imaginings in his heart. He never
discussed. At the first hint of discussion his temper gave way.
He was, I knew, a deep, thinly-covered tank of resentments and
quite irrational moral rages. Yet withal I would have to resist
an impulse to go over to him and nudge him and say to him, "Look
here! What indeed do you think we are doing with the nation and
the empire and mankind? You know--MANKIND!"

I wonder what reply I should have got.

So far as any average could be struck and so far as any backbone
could be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete,
sub-angry, middle-class sentimentalist was in his endless species
and varieties and dialects the backbone of our party. So far as I
could be considered as representing anything in the House, I
pretended to sit for the elements of HIM. . . .

7

For a time I turned towards the Socialists. They at least had an
air of coherent intentions. At that time Socialism had come into
politics again after a period of depression and obscurity, with a
tremendous ECLAT. There was visibly a following of Socialist
members to Chris Robinson; mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in
soft felt hats and short coats and square-toed boots who replied to
casual advances a little surprisingly in rich North Country
dialects. Members became aware of a "seagreen incorruptible," as
Colonel Marlow put it to me, speaking on the Address, a slender
twisted figure supporting itself on a stick and speaking with a fire
that was altogether revolutionary. This was Philip Snowden, the
member for Blackburn. They had come in nearly forty strong
altogether, and with an air of presently meaning to come in much
stronger. They were only one aspect of what seemed at that time a
big national movement. Socialist societies, we gathered, were
springing up all over the country, and every one was inquiring about
Socialism and discussing Socialism. It had taken the Universities
with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest
intellectual pretension was either actively for or brilliantly
against. For a time our Young Liberal group was ostentatiously
sympathetic. . . .

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