The New Machiavelli

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"Lost anythink, Matey?" said he.

I explained.

"'E's dropped 'is knife," said my interlocutor, and joined in the
search.

"What sort of 'andle was it, Matey?" said a small white-faced
sniffing boy in a big bowler hat.

I supplied the information. His sharp little face scrutinised the
ground about us.

"GOT it," he said, and pounced.

"Give it 'ere," said the big boy hoarsely, and secured it.

I walked towards him serenely confident that he would hand it over
to me, and that all was for the best in the best of all possible
worlds.

"No bloomin' fear!" he said, regarding me obliquely. "Oo said it
was your knife?"

Remarkable doubts assailed me. "Of course it's my knife," I said.
The other boys gathered round me.

"This ain't your knife," said the big boy, and spat casually.

"I dropped it just now."

"Findin's keepin's, I believe," said the big boy.

"Nonsense," I said. "Give me my knife."

"'Ow many blades it got?"

"Three."

"And what sort of 'andle?"

"Bone."

"Got a corkscrew like?"

"Yes."

"Ah! This ain't your knife no'ow. See?"

He made no offer to show it to me. My breath went.

"Look here!" I said. "I saw that kid pick it up. It IS my knife."

"Rot!" said the big boy, and slowly, deliberately put my knife into
his trouser pocket.

I braced my soul for battle. All civilisation was behind me, but I
doubt if it kept the colour in my face. I buttoned my jacket and
clenched my fists and advanced on my antagonist--he had, I suppose,
the advantage of two years of age and three inches of height. "Hand
over that knife," I said.

Then one of the smallest of the band assailed me with extraordinary
vigour and swiftness from behind, had an arm round my neck and a
knee in my back before I had the slightest intimation of attack, and
so got me down. "I got 'im, Bill," squeaked this amazing little
ruffian. My nose was flattened by a dirty hand, and as I struck out
and hit something like sacking, some one kicked my elbow. Two or
three seemed to be at me at the same time. Then I rolled over and
sat up to discover them all making off, a ragged flight, footballing
my cap, my City Merchants' cap, amongst them. I leapt to my feet in
a passion of indignation and pursued them.

But I did not overtake them. We are beings of mixed composition,
and I doubt if mine was a single-minded pursuit. I knew that honour
required me to pursue, and I had a vivid impression of having just
been down in the dust with a very wiry and active and dirty little
antagonist of disagreeable odour and incredible and incalculable
unscrupulousness, kneeling on me and gripping my arm and neck. I
wanted of course to be even with him, but also I doubted if catching
him would necessarily involve that. They kicked my cap into the
ditch at the end of the field, and made off compactly along a cinder
lane while I turned aside to recover my dishonoured headdress. As I
knocked the dust out of that and out of my jacket, and brushed my
knees and readjusted my very crumpled collar, I tried to focus this
startling occurrence in my mind.

I had vague ideas of going to a policeman or of complaining at a
police station, but some boyish instinct against informing prevented
that. No doubt I entertained ideas of vindictive pursuit and
murderous reprisals. And I was acutely enraged whenever I thought
of my knife. The thing indeed rankled in my mind for weeks and
weeks, and altered all the flavour of my world for me. It was the
first time I glimpsed the simple brute violence that lurks and peeps
beneath our civilisation. A certain kindly complacency of attitude
towards the palpably lower classes was qualified for ever

4

But the other experience was still more cardinal. It was the first
clear intimation of a new motif in life, the sex motif, that was to
rise and increase and accumulate power and enrichment and interweave
with and at last dominate all my life.

It was when I was nearly fifteen this happened. It is inseparably
connected in my mind with the dusk of warm September evenings. I
never met the girl I loved by daylight, and I have forgotten her
name. It was some insignificant name.

Yet the peculiar quality of the adventure keeps it shining darkly
like some deep coloured gem in the common setting of my memories.
It came as something new and strange, something that did not join on
to anything else in my life or connect with any of my thoughts or
beliefs or habits; it was a wonder, a mystery, a discovery about
myself, a discovery about the whole world. Only in after years did
sexual feeling lose that isolation and spread itself out to
illuminate and pervade and at last possess the whole broad vision of
life.

It was in that phase of an urban youth's development, the phase of
the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came
by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a
row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a
glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number.
These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the
lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the
great suburban growths--unkindly critics, blind to the inner
meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys' Parades--the shop
apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth,
stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money
upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-
sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague
transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down,
to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer
instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which
so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if
you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need--a need that
hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.

Vulgar!--it is as vulgar as the spirit that calls the moth abroad in
the evening and lights the body of the glow-worm in the night. I
made my way through the throng, a little contemptuously as became a
public schoolboy, my hands in my pockets--none of your cheap canes
for me!--and very careful of the lie of my cigarette upon my lips.
And two girls passed me, one a little taller than the other, with
dim warm-tinted faces under clouds of dark hair and with dark eyes
like pools reflecting stars.

I half turned, and the shorter one glanced back at me over her
shoulder--I could draw you now the pose of her cheek and neck and
shoulder--and instantly I was as passionately in love with the girl
as I have ever been before or since, as any man ever was with any
woman. I turned about and followed them, I flung away my cigarette
ostentatiously and lifted my school cap and spoke to them.

The girl answered shyly with her dark eyes on my face. What I said
and what she said I cannot remember, but I have little doubt it was
something absolutely vapid. It really did not matter; the thing was
we had met. I felt as I think a new-hatched moth must feel when
suddenly its urgent headlong searching brings it in tremulous
amazement upon its mate.

We met, covered from each other, with all the nets of civilisation
keeping us apart. We walked side by side.

It led to scarcely more than that. I think we met four or five
times altogether, and always with her nearly silent elder sister on
the other side of her. We walked on the last two occasions arm in
arm, furtively caressing each other's hands, we went away from the
glare of the shops into the quiet roads of villadom, and there we
whispered instead of talking and looked closely into one another's
warm and shaded face. "Dear," I whispered very daringly, and she
answered, "Dear!" We had a vague sense that we wanted more of that
quality of intimacy and more. We wanted each other as one wants
beautiful music again or to breathe again the scent of flowers.

And that is all there was between us. The events are nothing, the
thing that matters is the way in which this experience stabbed
through the common stuff of life and left it pierced, with a light,
with a huge new interest shining through the rent.

When I think of it I can recall even now the warm mystery of her
face, her lips a little apart, lips that I never kissed, her soft
shadowed throat, and I feel again the sensuous stir of her
proximity. . . .

Those two girls never told me their surname nor let me approach
their house. They made me leave them at the corner of a road of
small houses near Penge Station. And quite abruptly, without any
intimation, they vanished and came to the meeting place no more,
they vanished as a moth goes out of a window into the night, and
left me possessed of an intolerable want. . . .

The affair pervaded my existence for many weeks. I could not do my
work and I could not rest at home. Night after night I promenaded
up and down that Monkeys' Parade full of an unappeasable desire,
with a thwarted sense of something just begun that ought to have
gone on. I went backwards and forwards on the way to the vanishing
place, and at last explored the forbidden road that had swallowed
them up. But I never saw her again, except that later she came to
me, my symbol of womanhood, in dreams. How my blood was stirred! I
lay awake of nights whispering in the darkness for her. I prayed
for her.

Indeed that girl, who probably forgot the last vestiges of me when
her first real kiss came to her, ruled and haunted me, gave a Queen
to my imagination and a texture to all my desires until I became a
man.

I generalised her at last. I suddenly discovered that poetry was
about her and that she was the key to all that had hitherto seemed
nonsense about love. I took to reading novels, and if the heroine
could not possibly be like her, dusky and warm and starlike, I put
the book aside. . . .

I hesitate and add here one other confession. I want to tell this
thing because it seems to me we are altogether too restrained and
secretive about such matters. The cardinal thing in life sneaks in
to us darkly and shamefully like a thief in the night.

One day during my Cambridge days--it must have been in my first year
before I knew Hatherleigh--I saw in a print-shop window near the
Strand an engraving of a girl that reminded me sharply of Penge and
its dusky encounter. It was just a half length of a bare-
shouldered, bare-breasted Oriental with arms akimbo, smiling
faintly. I looked at it, went my way, then turned back and bought
it. I felt I must have it. The odd thing is that I was more than a
little shamefaced about it. I did not have it framed and hung in my
room open to the criticism of my friends, but I kept it in the
drawer of my writing-table. And I kept that drawer locked for a
year. It speedily merged with and became identified with the dark
girl of Penge. That engraving became in a way my mistress. Often
when I had sported my oak and was supposed to be reading, I was
sitting with it before me.

Obeying some instinct I kept the thing very secret indeed. For a
time nobody suspected what was locked in my drawer nor what was
locked in me. I seemed as sexless as my world required.

5

These things stabbed through my life, intimations of things above
and below and before me. They had an air of being no more than
incidents, interruptions.

The broad substance of my existence at this time was the City
Merchants School. Home was a place where I slept and read, and the
mooning explorations of the south-eastern postal district which
occupied the restless evenings and spare days of my vacations mere
interstices, giving glimpses of enigmatical lights and distant
spaces between the woven threads of a school-boy's career. School
life began for me every morning at Herne Hill, for there I was
joined by three or four other boys and the rest of the way we went
together. Most of the streets and roads we traversed in our
morning's walk from Victoria are still intact, the storms of
rebuilding that have submerged so much of my boyhood's London have
passed and left them, and I have revived the impression of them
again and again in recent years as I have clattered dinnerward in a
hansom or hummed along in a motor cab to some engagement. The main
gate still looks out with the same expression of ancient well-
proportioned kindliness upon St. Margaret's Close. There are
imposing new science laboratories in Chambers Street indeed, but the
old playing fields are unaltered except for the big electric trams
that go droning and spitting blue flashes along the western
boundary. I know Ratten, the new Head, very well, but I have not
been inside the school to see if it has changed at all since I went
up to Cambridge.

I took all they put before us very readily as a boy, for I had a
mind of vigorous appetite, but since I have grown mentally to man's
estate and developed a more and more comprehensive view of our
national process and our national needs, I am more and more struck
by the oddity of the educational methods pursued, their aimless
disconnectedness from the constructive forces in the community. I
suppose if we are to view the public school as anything more than an
institution that has just chanced to happen, we must treat it as
having a definite function towards the general scheme of the nation,
as being in a sense designed to take the crude young male of the
more or less responsible class, to correct his harsh egotisms,
broaden his outlook, give him a grasp of the contemporary
developments he will presently be called upon to influence and
control, and send him on to the university to be made a leading and
ruling social man. It is easy enough to carp at schoolmasters and
set up for an Educational Reformer, I know, but still it is
impossible not to feel how infinitely more effectually--given
certain impossibilities perhaps--the job might be done.

My memory of school has indeed no hint whatever of that quality of
elucidation it seems reasonable to demand from it. Here all about
me was London, a vast inexplicable being, a vortex of gigantic
forces, that filled and overwhelmed me with impressions, that
stirred my imagination to a perpetual vague enquiry; and my school
not only offered no key to it, but had practically no comment to
make upon it at all. We were within three miles of Westminster and
Charing Cross, the government offices of a fifth of mankind were all
within an hour's stroll, great economic changes were going on under
our eyes, now the hoardings flamed with election placards, now the
Salvation Army and now the unemployed came trailing in procession
through the winter-grey streets, now the newspaper placards outside
news-shops told of battles in strange places, now of amazing
discoveries, now of sinister crimes, abject squalor and poverty,
imperial splendour and luxury, Buckingham Palace, Rotten Row,
Mayfair, the slums of Pimlico, garbage-littered streets of bawling
costermongers, the inky silver of the barge-laden Thames--such was
the background of our days. We went across St. Margaret's Close and
through the school gate into a quiet puerile world apart from all
these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was
necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest
played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly
proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart
virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed portals by
Inigo Jones.

Within, we were taught as the chief subjects of instruction, Latin
and Greek. We were taught very badly because the men who taught us
did not habitually use either of these languages, nobody uses them
any more now except perhaps for the Latin of a few Levantine
monasteries. At the utmost our men read them. We were taught these
languages because long ago Latin had been the language of
civilisation; the one way of escape from the narrow and localised
life had lain in those days through Latin, and afterwards Greek had
come in as the vehicle of a flood of new and amazing ideas. Once
these two languages had been the sole means of initiation to the
detached criticism and partial comprehension of the world. I can
imagine the fierce zeal of our first Heads, Gardener and Roper,
teaching Greek like passionate missionaries, as a progressive
Chinaman might teach English to the boys of Pekin, clumsily,
impatiently, with rod and harsh urgency, but sincerely,
patriotically, because they felt that behind it lay revelations, the
irresistible stimulus to a new phase of history. That was long ago.
A new great world, a vaster Imperialism had arisen about the school,
had assimilated all these amazing and incredible ideas, had gone on
to new and yet more amazing developments of its own. But the City
Merchants School still made the substance of its teaching Latin and
Greek, still, with no thought of rotating crops, sowed in a dream
amidst the harvesting.

There is no fierceness left in the teaching now. Just after I went
up to Trinity, Gates, our Head, wrote a review article in defence of
our curriculum. In this, among other indiscretions, he asserted
that it was impossible to write good English without an illuminating
knowledge of the classic tongues, and he split an infinitive and
failed to button up a sentence in saying so. His main argument
conceded every objection a reasonable person could make to the City
Merchants' curriculum. He admitted that translation had now placed
all the wisdom of the past at a common man's disposal, that scarcely
a field of endeavour remained in which modern work had not long
since passed beyond the ancient achievement. He disclaimed any
utility. But there was, he said, a peculiar magic in these
grammatical exercises no other subjects of instruction possessed.
Nothing else provided the same strengthening and orderly discipline
for the mind.

He said that, knowing the Senior Classics he did, himself a Senior
Classic!

Yet in a dim confused way I think be was making out a case. In
schools as we knew them, and with the sort of assistant available,
the sort of assistant who has been trained entirely on the old
lines, he could see no other teaching so effectual in developing
attention, restraint, sustained constructive effort and various yet
systematic adjustment. And that was as far as his imagination could
go.

It is infinitely easier to begin organised human affairs than end
them; the curriculum and the social organisation of the English
public school are the crowning instances of that. They go on
because they have begun. Schools are not only immortal institutions
but reproductive ones. Our founder, Jabez Arvon, knew nothing, I am
sure, of Gates' pedagogic values and would, I feel certain, have
dealt with them disrespectfully. But public schools and university
colleges sprang into existence correlated, the scholars went on to
the universities and came back to teach the schools, to teach as
they themselves had been taught, before they had ever made any real
use of the teaching; the crowd of boys herded together, a crowd
perpetually renewed and unbrokenly the same, adjusted itself by
means of spontaneously developed institutions. In a century, by its
very success, this revolutionary innovation of Renascence public
schools had become an immense tradition woven closely into the
fabric of the national life. Intelligent and powerful people ceased
to talk Latin or read Greek, they had got what was wanted, but that
only left the schoolmaster the freer to elaborate his point. Since
most men of any importance or influence in the country had been
through the mill, it was naturally a little difficult to persuade
them that it was not quite the best and most ennobling mill the wit
of man could devise. And, moreover, they did not want their
children made strange to them. There was all the machinery and all
the men needed to teach the old subjects, and none to teach whatever
new the critic might propose. Such science instruction as my father
gave seemed indeed the uninviting alternative to the classical
grind. It was certainly an altogether inferior instrument at that
time.

So it was I occupied my mind with the exact study of dead languages
for seven long years. It was the strangest of detachments. We
would sit under the desk of such a master as Topham like creatures
who had fallen into an enchanted pit, and he would do his
considerable best to work us up to enthusiasm for, let us say, a
Greek play. If we flagged he would lash himself to revive us. He
would walk about the class-room mouthing great lines in a rich roar,
and asking us with a flushed face and shining eyes if it was not
"GLORIOUS." The very sight of Greek letters brings back to me the
dingy, faded, ink-splashed quality of our class-room, the banging of
books, Topham's disordered hair, the sheen of his alpaca gown, his
deep unmusical intonations and the wide striding of his creaking
boots. Glorious! And being plastic human beings we would consent
that it was glorious, and some of us even achieved an answering
reverberation and a sympathetic flush. I at times responded freely.
We all accepted from him unquestioningly that these melodies, these
strange sounds, exceeded any possibility of beauty that lay in the
Gothic intricacy, the splash and glitter, the jar and recovery, the
stabbing lights, the heights and broad distances of our English
tongue. That indeed was the chief sin of him. It was not that he
was for Greek and Latin, but that he was fiercely against every
beauty that was neither classic nor deferred to classical canons.

And what exactly did we make of it, we seniors who understood it
best? We visualised dimly through that dust and the grammatical
difficulties, the spectacle of the chorus chanting grotesquely,
helping out protagonist and antagonist, masked and buskined, with
the telling of incomprehensible parricides, of inexplicable incest,
of gods faded beyond symbolism, of that Relentless Law we did not
believe in for a moment, that no modern western European can believe
in. We thought of the characters in the unconvincing wigs and
costumes of our school performance. No Gilbert Murray had come as
yet to touch these things to life again. It was like the ghost of
an antiquarian's toy theatre, a ghost that crumbled and condensed
into a gritty dust of construing as one looked at it.

Marks, shindies, prayers and punishments, all flavoured with the
leathery stuffiness of time-worn Big Hall. . . .

And then out one would come through our grey old gate into the
evening light and the spectacle of London hurrying like a cataract,
London in black and brown and blue and gleaming silver, roaring like
the very loom of Time. We came out into the new world no teacher
has yet had the power and courage to grasp and expound. Life and
death sang all about one, joys and fears on such a scale, in such an
intricacy as never Greek nor Roman knew. The interminable
procession of horse omnibuses went lumbering past, bearing countless
people we knew not whence, we knew not whither. Hansoms clattered,
foot passengers jostled one, a thousand appeals of shop and boarding
caught the eye. The multi-coloured lights of window and street
mingled with the warm glow of the declining day under the softly
flushing London skies; the ever-changing placards, the shouting
news-vendors, told of a kaleidoscopic drama all about the globe.
One did not realise what had happened to us, but the voice of Topham
was suddenly drowned and lost, he and his minute, remote
gesticulations. . . .

That submerged and isolated curriculum did not even join on to
living interests where it might have done so. We were left
absolutely to the hints of the newspapers, to casual political
speeches, to the cartoons of the comic papers or a chance reading of
some Socialist pamphlet for any general ideas whatever about the
huge swirling world process in which we found ourselves. I always
look back with particular exasperation to the cessation of our
modern history at the year 1815. There it pulled up abruptly, as
though it had come upon something indelicate. . . .

But, after all, what would Topham or Flack have made of the huge
adjustments of the nineteenth century? Flack was the chief
cricketer on the staff; he belonged to that great cult which
pretends that the place of this or that county in the struggle for
the championship is a matter of supreme importance to boys. He
obliged us to affect a passionate interest in the progress of county
matches, to work up unnatural enthusiasms. What a fuss there would
be when some well-trained boy, panting as if from Marathon, appeared
with an evening paper! "I say, you chaps, Middlesex all out for a
hundred and five!"

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