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

When I think of the Socialists there comes a vivid memory of certain
evening gatherings at our house. . . .

These gatherings had been organised by Margaret as the outcome of a
discussion at the Baileys'. Altiora had been very emphatic and
uncharitable upon the futility of the Socialist movement. It seemed
that even the leaders fought shy of dinner-parties.

"They never meet each other," said Altiora, "much less people on the
other side. How can they begin to understand politics until they do
that?"

"Most of them have totally unpresentable wives," said Altiora,
"totally!" and quoted instances, "and they WILL bring them. Or they
won't come! Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt their
table manners. They just make holes in the talk. . . ."

I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath Altiora's
outburst. The presentation of the Socialist case seemed very
greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in its leaders;
the want of intimacy didn't at first appear to be more than an
accident, and our talk led to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance
and easy intercourse afoot among them and between them and the Young
Liberals of our group. She gave a series of weekly dinners,
planned, I think, a little too accurately upon Altiora's model, and
after each we had as catholic a reception as we could contrive.

Our receptions were indeed, I should think, about as catholic as
receptions could be. Margaret found herself with a weekly houseful
of insoluble problems in intercourse. One did one's best, but one
got a nightmare feeling as the evening wore on.

It was one of the few unanimities of these parties that every one
should be a little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the
tie or the shoes or more generally, and that bursts of violent
aggression should alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A
number of our guests had an air of waiting for a clue that never
came, and stood and sat about silently, mildly amused but not a bit
surprised that we did not discover their distinctive Open-Sesames.
There was a sprinkling of manifest seers and prophetesses in
shapeless garments, far too many, I thought, for really easy social
intercourse, and any conversation at any moment was liable to become
oracular. One was in a state of tension from first to last; the
most innocent remark seemed capable of exploding resentment, and
replies came out at the most unexpected angles. We Young Liberals
went about puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked. The
Young Liberals' tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
superfluous steam is let out far away from home in the Balkans or
Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of the Cramptons, Bunting
Harblow, and Lewis, either in extremely well-cut morning coats
indicative of the House, or in what is sometimes written of as
"faultless evening dress," stood about on those evenings, they and
their very quietly and simply and expensively dressed little wives,
like a datum line amidst lakes and mountains.

I didn't at first see the connection between systematic social
reorganisation and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume, just
as I didn't realise why the most comprehensive constructive projects
should appear to be supported solely by odd and exceptional
personalities. On one of these evenings a little group of rather
jolly-looking pretty young people seated themselves for no
particular reason in a large circle on the floor of my study, and
engaged, so far as I could judge, in the game of Hunt the Meaning,
the intellectual equivalent of Hunt the Slipper. It must have been
that same evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before
the oval mirror on the landing engaged in removing the remains of an
anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongue--visible ends of cress
having misled him into the belief that he was dealing with
doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual to be given hand-
bills and printed matter by our guests, but there I had the
advantage over Lewis, who was too tactful to refuse the stuff, too
neatly dressed to pocket it, and had no writing-desk available upon
which he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver.
So that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless, compact
little woman in what Margaret declared to be an extremely expensive
black dress has also printed herself on my memory; she had set her
heart upon my contributing to a weekly periodical in the lentil
interest with which she was associated, and I spent much time and
care in evading her.

Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of Anti-Puritan
Socialists, bulging with bias against temperance, and breaking out
against austere methods of living all over their faces. Their
manner was packed with heartiness. They were apt to choke the
approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set up downstairs, and
there engage in discussions of Determinism--it always seemed to be
Determinism--which became heartier and noisier, but never
acrimonious even in the small hours. It seemed impossible to settle
about this Determinism of theirs--ever. And there were worldly
Socialists also. I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant,
lady-killing individual with an eyeglass borne upon a broad black
ribbon, who swam about us one evening. He might have been a
slightly frayed actor, in his large frock-coat, his white waistcoat,
and the sort of black and white check trousers that twinkle. He had
a high-pitched voice with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to
be in a perpetual state of interrogation. "What are we all he-a
for?" he would ask only too audibly. "What are we doing he-a?
What's the connection?"

What WAS the connection?

We made a special effort with our last assembly in June, 1907. We
tried to get something like a representative collection of the
parliamentary leaders of Socialism, the various exponents of
Socialist thought and a number of Young Liberal thinkers into one
room. Dorvil came, and Horatio Bulch; Featherstonehaugh appeared
for ten minutes and talked charmingly to Margaret and then vanished
again; there was Wilkins the novelist and Toomer and Dr. Tumpany.
Chris Robinson stood about for a time in a new comforter, and
Magdeberg and Will Pipes and five or six Labour members. And on our
side we had our particular little group, Bunting Harblow, Crampton,
Lewis, all looking as broad-minded and open to conviction as they
possibly could, and even occasionally talking out from their bushes
almost boldly. But the gathering as a whole refused either to
mingle or dispute, and as an experiment in intercourse the evening
was a failure. Unexpected dissociations appeared between Socialists
one had supposed friendly. I could not have imagined it was
possible for half so many people to turn their backs on everybody
else in such small rooms as ours. But the unsaid things those backs
expressed broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the
various organs of the various sections of the party next week.

I talked, I rememher, with Dr. Tumpany, a large young man in a still
larger professional frock-coat, and with a great shock of very fair
hair, who was candidate for some North Country constituency. We
discussed the political outlook, and, like so many Socialists at
that time, he was full of vague threatenings against the Liberal
party. I was struck by a thing in him that I had already observed
less vividly in many others of these Socialist leaders, and which
gave me at last a clue to the whole business. He behaved exactly
like a man in possession of valuable patent rights, who wants to be
dealt with. He had an air of having a corner in ideas. Then it
flashed into my head that the whole Socialist movement was an
attempted corner in ideas. . . .

8

Late that night I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris
of the gathering.

I sat before the fire, hands in pockets, and Margaret, looking white
and weary, came and leant upon the mantel.

"Oh, Lord!" said Margaret.

I agreed. Then I resumed my meditation.

"Ideas," I said, "count for more than I thought in the world."

Margaret regarded me with that neutral expression behind which she
was accustomed to wait for clues.

"When you think of the height and depth and importance and wisdom of
the Socialist ideas, and see the men who are running them," I
explained. . . . "A big system of ideas like Socialism grows up out
of the obvious common sense of our present conditions. It's as
impersonal as science. All these men--They've given nothing to it.
They're just people who have pegged out claims upon a big
intellectual No-Man's-Land--and don't feel quite sure of the law.
There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness. . . . If we professed
Socialism do you think they'd welcome us? Not a man of them!
They'd feel it was burglary. . . ."

"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire. "That is just what I
felt about them all the evening. . . . Particularly Dr. Tumpany."

"We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's
the moral of it. I suppose if God were to find He had made a
mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated
everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist
leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what
it is to-day--a growing realisation of constructive needs in every
man's mind, and a little corner in party politics. So, I suppose,
it will always be. . . . But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"

I looked up at the little noise she made. "TWICE!" she said,
smiling indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)

I returned to my thoughts. They WERE a damned human lot. It was an
excellent word in that connection. . . .

But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's
brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great
brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking
them! . . .

"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is
trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."

I sat taking in this proposition.

"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.

"Us?"

"The Liberals."

"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said. "They'll never even help
themselves."

"I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,"
said Margaret, after a pause.

She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel,
perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so I
did not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed
me and went rustling softly to her room.

I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts
crystallising out. . . .

It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that
opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and
the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social
affairs. The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in
embodying them. The reality of human progress never comes to the
surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in
silence while men think, in studies where they write self-
forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal
curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of
emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday
affairs. Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair,
are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits,
interests, usage. Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation,
personal feeling, are their substance. No man can abolish his
immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he
simply turns himself into something a little less than the common
man. He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve
him from a frontage. That is the essential error of the specialist
philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They
repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland. That is what
bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had
prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an
official ruling class. A human being who is a philosopher in the
first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the
first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like
gifts to the pretence--a quack. These are attempts to live deep-
side shallow, inside out. They produce merely a new pettiness. To
understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to
join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not
even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for
which it stands. . . .

I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here. It had
taken me some years to realise the true relation of the great
constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but
to myself. I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one
party with social construction, and to regard the other as
necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow
the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be
wholly constructive. But I saw now that every man of intellectual
freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and
that no man is disinterestedly so. Each one of us repeats in
himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its
possibilities and its immediate associations. We may be shaping
immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and
have our salt of flattery and self-approval. In politics a man
counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are
held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the
stabler bond of an accustomed life. Everybody almost is for
progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change,
except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular
method of living and behaviour. Every party stands essentially for
the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of
classes in the exciting community, and every party has its
scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-
defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-
spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its
meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will abolish
itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct
itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited
socialisation of any other class. In that capacity for aggression
upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern
affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway
and struggle. The ideas and understandings march on and achieve
themselves for all--in spite of every one. . . .

The methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of
two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific ends
in the event of a small Government majority. These two main parties
are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however, has
certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative Party has
always stood quite definitely for the established propertied
interests. The land-owner, the big lawyer, the Established Church,
and latterly the huge private monopoly of the liquor trade which has
been created by temperance legislation, are the essential
Conservatives. Interwoven now with the native wealthy are the
families of the great international usurers, and a vast
miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise. Outside the range of
resistance implied by these interests, the Conservative Party has
always shown itself just as constructive and collectivist as any
other party. The great landowners have been as well-disposed
towards the endowment of higher education, and as willing to co-
operate with the Church in protective and mildly educational
legislation for children and the working class, as any political
section. The financiers, too, are adventurous-spirited and eager
for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared
to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours and
public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organisation. A
certain rude benevolence of public intention is equally
characteristic of the liquor trade. Provided his comfort leads to
no excesses of temperance, the liquor trade is quite eager to see
the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend in a bar.
All sections of the party are aggressively patriotic and favourably
inclined to the idea of an upstanding, well-fed, and well-exercised
population in uniform. Of course there are reactionary landowners
and old-fashioned country clergy, full of localised self-importance,
jealous even of the cottager who can read, but they have neither the
power nor the ability to retard the constructive forces in the party
as a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to any definitely
confiscatory proposal, to the public ownership and collective
control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures, or
the nationalisation of the so-called public-house or extended
municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the taxation of
property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly adamantine
bar. It does not stand for, it IS, the existing arrangement in
these affairs.

Even more definitely a class party is the Labour Party, whose
immediate interest is to raise wages, shorten hours of labor,
increase employment, and make better terms for the working-man
tenant and working-man purchaser. Its leaders are no doubt
constructive minded, but the mass of the following is naturally
suspicious of education and discipline, hostile to the higher
education, and--except for an obvious antagonism to employers and
property owners--almost destitute of ideas. What else can it be?
It stands for the expropriated multitude, whose whole situation and
difficulty arise from its individual lack of initiative and
organising power. It favours the nationalisation of land and
capital with no sense of the difficulties involved in the process;
but, on the other hand, the equally reasonable socialisation of
individuals which is implied by military service is steadily and
quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it. It is only in
recent years that Labour has emerged as a separate party from the
huge hospitable caravanserai of Liberalism, and there is still a
very marked tendency to step back again into that multitudinous
assemblage.

For multitudinousness has always been the Liberal characteristic.
Liberalism never has been nor ever can be anything but a diversified
crowd. Liberalism has to voice everything that is left out by these
other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.
It is at once the party of the failing and of the untried; it is the
party of decadence and hope. From its nature it must be a vague and
planless association in comparison with its antagonist, neither so
constructive on the one hand, nor on the other so competent to
hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilised state.
Essentially it is the party of criticism, the "Anti" party. It is a
system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at times
an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together of all the
smaller interests which find themselves at a disadvantage against
the big established classes, the leasehold tenant as against the
landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant and the
moneylender, the Nonconformist as against the Churchman, the small
employer as against the demoralising hospitable publican, the man
without introductions and broad connections against the man who has
these things. It is the party of the many small men against the
fewer prevailing men. It has no more essential reason for loving
the Collectivist state than the Conservatives; the small dealer is
doomed to absorption in that just as much as the large owner; but it
resorts to the state against its antagonists as in the middle ages
common men pitted themselves against the barons by siding with the
king. The Liberal Party is the party against "class privilege"
because it represents no class advantages, but it is also the party
that is on the whole most set against Collective control because it
represents no established responsilibity. It is constructive only
so far as its antagonism to the great owner is more powerful than
its jealousy of the state. It organises only because organisation
is forced upon it by the organisation of its adversaries. It lapses
in and out of alliance with Labour as it sways between hostility to
wealth and hostility to public expenditure. . . .

Every modern European state will have in some form or other these
three parties: the resistent, militant, authoritative, dull, and
unsympathetic party of establishment and success, the rich party;
the confused, sentimental, spasmodic, numerous party of the small,
struggling, various, undisciplined men, the poor man's party; and a
third party sometimes detaching itself from the second and sometimes
reuniting with it, the party of the altogether expropriated masses,
the proletarians, Labour. Change Conservative and Liberal to
Republican and Democrat, for example, and you have the conditions in
the United States. The Crown or a dethroned dynasty, the
Established Church or a dispossessed church, nationalist secessions,
the personalities of party leaders, may break up, complicate, and
confuse the self-expression of these three necessary divisions in
the modern social drama, the analyst will make them out none the
less for that. . . .

And then I came back as if I came back to a refrain;--the ideas go
on--as though we are all no more than little cells and corpuscles in
some great brain beyond our understanding. . . .

So it was I sat and thought my problem out. . . . I still remember
my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last. It was like
clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas, of course,
couldn't hold a party together alone, "interests and habits, not
ideas," I had that now, and so the great constructive scheme of
Socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily
claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this residuum of
disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not only of the
Socialist idea, but of the scientific idea, the idea of veracity--of
human confidence in humanity--of all that mattered in human life
outside the life of individuals. . . . The only real party that
would ever profess Socialism was the Labour Party, and that in the
entirely one-sided form of an irresponsible and non-constructive
attack on property. Socialism in that mutilated form, the teeth and
claws without the eyes and brain, I wanted as little as I wanted
anything in the world.

Perfectly clear it was, perfectly clear, and why hadn't I seen it
before? . . . I looked at my watch, and it was half-past two.

I yawned, stretched, got up and went to bed.

9

My ideas about statecraft have passed through three main phases to
the final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of
my dream of ports and harbours and cities, railways, roads, and
administered territories--the vision I had seen in the haze from
that little church above Locarno. Slowly that had passed into a
more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led to my
uneasy association with the Baileys and the professedly constructive
Young Liberals. To get that ordered life I had realised the need of
organisation, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement of co-ordinated
methods. On the individual side I thought that a life of urgent
industry, temperance, and close attention was indicated by my
perception of these ends. I married Margaret and set to work. But
something in my mind refused from the outset to accept these
determinations as final. There was always a doubt lurking below,
always a faint resentment, a protesting criticism, a feeling of
vitally important omissions.

I arrived at last at the clear realisation that my political
associates, and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow,
priggish, and unreal, that the Socialists with whom we were
attempting co-operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own
theories, that my political life didn't in some way comprehend more
than itself, that rather perplexingly I was missing the thing I was
seeking. Britten's footnotes to Altiora's self-assertions, her fits
of energetic planning, her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his
illuminating attacks on Cramptonism and the heavy-spirited
triviality of such Liberalism as the Children's Charter, served to
point my way to my present conclusions. I had been trying to deal
all along with human progress as something immediate in life,
something to be immediately attacked by political parties and groups
pointing primarily to that end. I now began to see that just as in
my own being there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self-
seeking careerist, who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled self-
consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and indefinitely
growing unpublished personality behind him--my hinterland, I have
called it--so in human affairs generally the permanent reality is
also a hinterland, which is never really immediate, which draws
continually upon human experience and influences human action more
and more, but which is itself never the actual player upon the
stage. It is the unseen dramatist who never takes a call. Now it
was just through the fact that our group about the Baileys didn't
understand this, that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying
to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan, regulate,
and direct the affairs of humanity, that the perplexing note of
silliness and shallowness that I had always felt and felt now most
acutely under Britten's gibes, came in. They were neglecting human
life altogether in social organisation.

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