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The New Machiavelli Chapter 4 Part 2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter four, Section two of the New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells.
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Speaker 1: This LibriVox recording is in the public domain recording by
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Speaker 1: Antoniogus five. Socialism is an intellectual proteus. But to the
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Speaker 1: men of my generation it came as the revolt of
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Speaker 1: the workers. Rodbertus we never heard of, and the Fabian
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Speaker 1: Society we did not understand. Marx and Morris, the Chicago Anarchists,
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Speaker 1: Justice and Social Democratic Federation, as it was then presented
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Speaker 1: socialism to our minds. Hathilely was the leading exponent of
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Speaker 1: the new Doctrine's in Trinity, and the figure upon his
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Speaker 1: wall of a huge, muscled, black headed toiler swaggering sledge
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Speaker 1: hammer in hand across a revolutionary barricade seemed the quintessence
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Speaker 1: of what he had to expound. Landlord and capitalists had
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Speaker 1: robbed an enslaved the workers and were driving them quite
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Speaker 1: automatically to inevitable insurrection. They would arise, and the capitalist
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Speaker 1: system would flee and vanish, like the mists before the morning,
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Speaker 1: like the Jews before the sunrise, giving place, in the
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Speaker 1: most simple and obvious manner, to an era of right
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Speaker 1: and justice and virtue and well being. And in short,
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Speaker 1: a perfectly splendid time. I had already discussed this sort
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Speaker 1: of socialism under the guidance of Britain before I went
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Speaker 1: up to Cambridge. It was all mixed up with ideas
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Speaker 1: about freedom and natural virtue, and a great scorn for kings, titles,
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Speaker 1: wealth and officials, and it was symbolized by the red
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Speaker 1: ties we wore. Our simple verdict on existing arrangements was
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Speaker 1: that they were all wrong. The rich were robbers and
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Speaker 1: knew it. Kings and princes were usurpers and knew it.
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Speaker 1: Religious teachers were impostors in league with power. The economic
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Speaker 1: ceism was an elaborate plot on the part of the
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Speaker 1: few to expropriate the many. We went about feeling scornful
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Speaker 1: of all the current forms of life forms that esteemed
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Speaker 1: themselves solid, that were we knew no more than shapes
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Speaker 1: painted on a curtain that was presently to be torn aside.
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Speaker 1: It was Hathalya's poster and his capacity for overstating things
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Speaker 1: I think that first qualified my simple revolutionary enthusiasm. Perhaps
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Speaker 1: also I had met with fabian publications, But if I did,
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Speaker 1: I forget the circumstances, and no doubt my innate constructiveness,
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Speaker 1: with its practical corollary of an analytical treatment of the
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Speaker 1: material supplied, was bound to push me on beyond this
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Speaker 1: melodramatic interpretation of human affairs. I compared that working man
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Speaker 1: of the poster with any sort of working man I knew.
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Speaker 1: I perceived that the latter was not going to change,
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Speaker 1: and indeed could not, under any stimulus whatever, be expected
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Speaker 1: to change into the former. It crept into my mind,
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Speaker 1: as slowly and surely as the dawn creeps into a room,
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Speaker 1: that the form was not as I had at first,
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Speaker 1: rather glibly assumed an ideal, but a complete misrepresentation of
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Speaker 1: the quality and possibilities of things. I do not know
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Speaker 1: now whether it was during my school days or at
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Speaker 1: Cambridge that I first began not merely to see the
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Speaker 1: world as a great contrast of rich and poor, but
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Speaker 1: to feel the massive effect of that multitudinous majority of
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Speaker 1: people who toil continually, who are forever anxious about ways
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Speaker 1: and means, who are restricted, ill clothed, ill fed, and
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Speaker 1: ill housed, who have limited outlooks, and continually suffer misadventures, hardships,
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Speaker 1: and distresses through the want of money. My lot had
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Speaker 1: fallen upon the fringe of the possessing minority. If I
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Speaker 1: did not know the want of necessities, I knew so shabbiness,
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Speaker 1: and the world that let me go on to a
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Speaker 1: university education intimated very plainly that there was not a
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Speaker 1: thing beyond the primary needs that my stimulated imagination might demand.
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Speaker 1: That it would not be an effort for me to
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Speaker 1: secure a certain aggressive radicalism against the ruling and propitied
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Speaker 1: classes followed almost naturally from my circumstances. It did not
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Speaker 1: at first connect itself at all with the perception of
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Speaker 1: a plan and its disorder in human affairs that had
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Speaker 1: been forced upon me by the atmosphere of my upbringing,
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Speaker 1: nor did it link me in sympathy with any of
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Speaker 1: the profounder realities of poverty. It was a personal, independent thing.
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Speaker 1: The dingier people once saw in the back streets and
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Speaker 1: lower quarters of Bromstad and Penge, the drift of dirty children,
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Speaker 1: ragged old women, street loafers, grimy workers that made the
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Speaker 1: social background of London. The story is one heard of
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Speaker 1: privation and sweating. Only joined up very slowly with the
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Speaker 1: general propositions I was making about life. We could become
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Speaker 1: splendidly eloquent about the social revolution and the triumph of
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Speaker 1: the proletariat after the class war. And it was only
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Speaker 1: by sort of inspiration that it came to me that
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Speaker 1: my bedter, a garrulous old thing with a dusty black
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Speaker 1: bonnet over one eye and an ostentatiously clean apron outside
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Speaker 1: the dark mysteries that clothed her, or the cheeky little
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Speaker 1: ruffians who yelled papers about the streets, were really material
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Speaker 1: to such questions. Directly, any of us young socialists of
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Speaker 1: Trinity found ourselves in immediate contact with servants or cadgers
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Speaker 1: or jyps, or bedds, or plumbers or navvies or cabmen
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Speaker 1: or railway porters, we became unconsciously and unthinkingly aristocrats. Our
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Speaker 1: voices altered, our gestures altered. We behaved just as all
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Speaker 1: the other men, rich or poor, or swatters or sportsmen
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Speaker 1: or pinky dinks behaved, and exactly as we are expected
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Speaker 1: to behave. On the whole. It is a population of
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Speaker 1: poor quality round about Cambridge, rather stunted and spiritless, and
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Speaker 1: very difficult to idealize that theoretical working man of ours,
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Speaker 1: if we felt the clash at all, we explained it,
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Speaker 1: I suppose by assuming that he came from another part
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Speaker 1: of the country, Esmere I remember, who lived somewhere in
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Speaker 1: the fens, was very eloquent about the Cornish fisherman. And Hathiley,
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Speaker 1: who was a Hampshire man, assured us we ought to
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Speaker 1: know the Scottish miner. My private fancy was for the
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Speaker 1: Lancashire Operative because of his cooperative societies, and because what
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Speaker 1: Lancashire thinks today, England thinks tomorrow. And also I had
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Speaker 1: never been in Lancashire. My little increments of realization, it
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Speaker 1: was that the profounder verities of the problem of socialism
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Speaker 1: came to me. It helped me very much that I
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Speaker 1: had to go down to the potteries several times to
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Speaker 1: discuss my future with my uncle and guardian. I walked
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Speaker 1: about and saw Bursley, Wakes and much of the human
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Speaker 1: aspects of organized industrialism at close quarters. For the first time,
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Speaker 1: the picture of a splendid working man cheated out of
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Speaker 1: his innate, glorious possibilities and presently to arise and dash.
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Speaker 1: This scoundrelly and scandalous system of private ownership to fragments
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Speaker 1: began to give place to a limitless spectacle of inefficiency,
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Speaker 1: to a conception of millions of people, not organized as
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Speaker 1: they should be, not educated as they should be, not
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Speaker 1: simply prevented from, but incapable of nearly every sort of beauty,
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Speaker 1: mostly kindly and well meaning, mostly incompetent, mostly obstinate, and
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Speaker 1: easily humbugged, and easily diverted. Even the tragic and inspiring
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Speaker 1: idea of Marx that the poor were nearing a limit
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Speaker 1: of painful experience and awakening to a sense of intolerable
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Speaker 1: wrongs began to develop into the more appalling conception that
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Speaker 1: the poor were simply, in a witless, uncomfortable, inconclusive way,
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Speaker 1: muddling along. That they wanted nothing very definitely nor very urgently,
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Speaker 1: that mean fears enslaved them, and mean satisfactions decoyed them.
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Speaker 1: That they took the very gift of life itself with
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Speaker 1: a spiritless lassitude, hoarding it, being rather anxious not to
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Speaker 1: lose it than to use it in any way whatever.
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Speaker 1: The complete development of that realization was the work of
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Speaker 1: many years. I had only the first intimations at Cambridge,
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Speaker 1: but I did have intimations. Most acutely, do I remember
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Speaker 1: the doubts that followed the visit of Chris Robinson. Chris
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Speaker 1: Robinson was heralded by such hero anticipations, and he was
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Speaker 1: so entirely what we had not anticipated. Hathley got him
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Speaker 1: to come, arranged a sort of meeting for him at
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Speaker 1: Red Men's Rooms in King's and was very proud and proprietorial.
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Speaker 1: It failed to stir Cambridge at all, profoundly beyond a
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Speaker 1: futile attempt to screw up Hathley made by some inexpert
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Speaker 1: duffers who used nails instead of screws and gimlets, there
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Speaker 1: was no attempt to rag. Next day Chris Robinson went
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Speaker 1: and spoke at Bennett Hall in Newnham College, and left
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Speaker 1: Cambridge in the evening amidst the cheers of twenty men
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Speaker 1: or so. Socialism was at such a low ebb politically
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Speaker 1: in those days that it didn't even rouse men to opposition.
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Speaker 1: And there sat Chris under that flamboyant and heroic worker
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Speaker 1: of the poster, a little wrinkled, graybearded, apologetic man in
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Speaker 1: ready made clothes, with watchful, innocent brown eyes and a
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Speaker 1: persist an invincible air of being out of his elements.
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Speaker 1: He sat with his stout boots tucked up under his
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Speaker 1: chair and clung to a teacup and saucer and looked
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Speaker 1: away from us into the fire. And we all sat
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Speaker 1: about on tables and chair arms, and window sills and
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Speaker 1: boxes and anywhere except upon chairs after the manner of
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Speaker 1: young men. The only other chair whose seat was occupied
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Speaker 1: was the one containing his knitted woolen comforter and his
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Speaker 1: picturesque old beach photographer's hat. We were all shy and
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Speaker 1: didn't know how to take hold of him now we
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Speaker 1: had got him, and which was disconcertingly unanticipated, he was
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Speaker 1: manifestly having the same difficulty with us we had expected
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Speaker 1: to be gripped. I'll not be knowing what to say
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Speaker 1: to these chaps, he repeated, with the North Country quality
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Speaker 1: in his speech. We made reassuring noises. The ambassador of
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Speaker 1: the workers stirred his tea earnestly through an uncomfortable pause.
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Speaker 1: I'd best tell him something of how things are in Lancashire,
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Speaker 1: what with the new machines and all that, he speculated
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Speaker 1: at last, with red reflections in his thoughtful eyes. We
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Speaker 1: had an inexcusable dread that perhaps he would make a
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Speaker 1: mess of the meeting. But when he was no longer
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Speaker 1: in the unaccustomed meshes of refined conversation. But speaking with
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Speaker 1: an audience before him, he became a different man. He
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Speaker 1: declared he would explain to us just exactly what socialism was,
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Speaker 1: and went on at once to an impassioned contrast of
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Speaker 1: social conditions. You're young men, he said, come from holmes
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Speaker 1: of luxury. Every need you'll feel is applied. We sat
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Speaker 1: and stood and sprawled about him, occupying every inch of
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Speaker 1: Red Main's floor space except the hearth rug platform. And
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Speaker 1: we listened to him and thought him over. He was
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Speaker 1: the voice of wrongs that made us indignant and eager.
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Speaker 1: We forgot for a time that he had been shy
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Speaker 1: and seemed not a little incompetent. His provincial accent became
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Speaker 1: a beauty of his earnest speech. We were carried away
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Speaker 1: by his indignations. We looked with shining eyes at one
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Speaker 1: another and at the various dons were dropped in and
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Speaker 1: were striving to maintain a front of judicious severity. We
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Speaker 1: felt more and more that social injustice must cease, and
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Speaker 1: cease forthwith. We felt we could not sleep upon it.
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Speaker 1: At the end, we clapped and murmured our applause, and
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Speaker 1: wanted badly to cheer. Then like a lance it stuck
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Speaker 1: into a bladder. Came the heckling Denson, that indolent, liberal
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Speaker 1: minded skeptic, did most of the questioning. He lay contorted
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Speaker 1: in a chair, with his ugly head very low, his
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Speaker 1: legs crossed, and his left boot very high, and he
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Speaker 1: pointed his remark with a long, thin hand and occasionally
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Speaker 1: adjusted the unstable glasses that hid his watery eyes. I
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Speaker 1: don't want to carp, he began. The present system, I
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Speaker 1: admit stands condemned. Every present system always has stood condemned
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Speaker 1: in the minds of intelligent men. But where it seems
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Speaker 1: to me you get thin is just where everybody has
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Speaker 1: been thin. And that's when you come to the remedy socialism,
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Speaker 1: said Chris Robinson, as if it answered everything, and hathily
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Speaker 1: said here her very resolutely. I suppose I ought to
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Speaker 1: take that as an answer, said Denson, getting his shoulder
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Speaker 1: blades well down to the seat of his chair. But
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Speaker 1: I don't. I don't you know, it's rather a shame
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Speaker 1: to cross examine you after this fine address of yours.
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Speaker 1: Chris Robinson and the hearthrike made acquiescent and inviting noises,
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Speaker 1: but The real question remains how exactly you're going to
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Speaker 1: end all these wrongs. There are the administrative questions if
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Speaker 1: you abolish the private owner. I admit your bolish a
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Speaker 1: very complex and clumsy way of getting businesses run, land controlled,
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Speaker 1: and things in general administered, But you don't get rid
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Speaker 1: of the need of administration, you know, democracy, said Chris Robinson.
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Speaker 1: Organized somehow, said Denson. And it's just the how perplexes me.
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Speaker 1: I can quite easily imagine a socialist state administer in
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Speaker 1: a sort of scrambling tumult that will be worse than
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Speaker 1: anything we have got now. Nothing could be worse than
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Speaker 1: things are now, said Chris Robinson. I have seen little children.
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Speaker 1: I submit. Life on an ill provisioned raft, for example,
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Speaker 1: could easily be worse, or life in a beleagued town murmurs.
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Speaker 1: They wrangled for some time, and it had the effect
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Speaker 1: upon me of coming out from the glow of a
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Speaker 1: good matter a performance into the cold daylight of late afternoon.
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Speaker 1: Chris Robinson did not shine in conflict with Denson. He
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Speaker 1: was an orator and not a dialectician, and he missed
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Speaker 1: Denson's points and displayed a disposition to plunge into untimely
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Speaker 1: pathos and indignation, and Denson hit me curiously hard with
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Speaker 1: one of his shafts. Suppose he said, you found yourself
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Speaker 1: Prime Minister. I looked at Chris Robinson, bright eyed and
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Speaker 1: his hair a little ruffled, and his whole being rhetorical,
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Speaker 1: and measured him against the huge machine of government, muddled
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Speaker 1: and mysterious. Oh but I was perplexed. And then we
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Speaker 1: took him back to Hathely's rooms and drank beer and
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Speaker 1: smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy
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Speaker 1: wristed hands that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank
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Speaker 1: lemonade under the cartoon of that emancipated worker. And we
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Speaker 1: had a great discursive talk with him. Eh, you should
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Speaker 1: see our big meetings up north. He said. Denson had
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Speaker 1: ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever
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Speaker 1: and again he came back to that discussion. It's all
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Speaker 1: very easy for your learned men to sit and pick holes,
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Speaker 1: he said, while the children suffer and die. They don't
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Speaker 1: pick holes up north. They mean business, he talked. And
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Speaker 1: that was the most interesting part of it, all of
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Speaker 1: his going to work in a factory when he was twelve,
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Speaker 1: when you chaps roar with your mummies, and how he
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Speaker 1: had educated himself of knights until he would fall asleep
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Speaker 1: at his reading. It's made many of us keen for
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Speaker 1: all our lives, he remarked, All that clemming for education.
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Speaker 1: Why I long a through one winter to read a
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Speaker 1: bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if
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Speaker 1: I'd die for it, I said, And I could now
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Speaker 1: get the book. Hathley made an enthusiastic no, and drank
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Speaker 1: beer at him with round eyes over the mug. Well, anyhow,
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Speaker 1: I wasted no time on Greek and Latin, said Chris Robinson.
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Speaker 1: And one lands to go straight at a thing without
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Speaker 1: splitting straws. One gets hold of the elementals. Well did they?
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Speaker 1: That was the gist of my perplexity. Well, it doesn't quabble,
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Speaker 1: he said, returning to his rankling memory of Denson. While
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Speaker 1: men decay and starve. But suppose, I said, suddenly dropping
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Speaker 1: into opposition. The alternative is to risk a worse disaster,
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Speaker 1: or do something patently futile. I don't follow that, said
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Speaker 1: Chris Robinson. We don't propose anything futile so far as
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Speaker 1: I can see. Six The prevailing force in my undergraduate
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Speaker 1: days was not socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite
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Speaker 1: exceptional in its socialistic professions, and we were all you
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Speaker 1: must understand, and very distinctly imperialists also, and professed a
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Speaker 1: vivid sense of the white man's burden. It is a
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Speaker 1: little difficult now to get back to the feelings of
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Speaker 1: that period. Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticized,
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Speaker 1: and torn to shreds. Never was a man so violently exalted,
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Speaker 1: and then himself assisting so relentlessly called down. But in
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Speaker 1: the middle nineties, this spectacled and mustache little figure, with
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Speaker 1: its heavy chin, and its general effect of vehement gesticulation,
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Speaker 1: its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its
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Speaker 1: lyric delight in the sounds and colours in the very
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Speaker 1: odors of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste,
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Speaker 1: and the under officer and the engineer and shop as
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Speaker 1: a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got
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Speaker 1: hold of us wonderfully, He filled us with tinker and
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Speaker 1: haunting quotations. He stirred Britain and myself to futile imitations
19:06
Speaker 1: he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose
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Speaker 1: to his climax with his recessional while I was still
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Speaker 1: an undergraduate. What did he give me exactly? He helped
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Speaker 1: to broader my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases
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Speaker 1: for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organized effort.
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Speaker 1: The socialism of our time failed to express that. The
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Speaker 1: current socialist movement still fails, I think to express the
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Speaker 1: sort of thing that follows. For example, tore something out
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Speaker 1: of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, And
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Speaker 1: I took it back from him, shaped, and let much
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Speaker 1: of the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying,
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Speaker 1: the hysteria, and the impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticized.
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Speaker 1: For the sake of it. Keep he the law, be
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Speaker 1: swift in all obedient, clear the land of evil, drive
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Speaker 1: the road and bridge the ford. Make he sure to
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Speaker 1: each his own, that he reap where he hath sown
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Speaker 1: by the peace among our peoples. Let men know we
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Speaker 1: serve the Lord. And then again, and for all our
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Speaker 1: later criticism, this sticks in my mind, sticks there now
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Speaker 1: as quintessential wisdom. The ethen in his blindness, bows down
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Speaker 1: to wooden Stone. He don't obey no orders unless they
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Speaker 1: is his own. He keeps his side arms awful. He
20:32
Speaker 1: leaves them all about and then comes up the regiment
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Speaker 1: and pokes the ethan out, All along a dirtiness, all
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Speaker 1: along a mess, all along a doing things rather more
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Speaker 1: or less, all along of abbe neae call, And as
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Speaker 1: our hoe mind, you keep your rifle and yourself just so.
20:51
Speaker 1: It is, after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not
20:55
Speaker 1: having been born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge,
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Speaker 1: and the war in South Africa being yet in the
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Speaker 1: womb of time, could quite honestly entertain then our remarkable
21:04
Speaker 1: delusion that England had her side arms at that time
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Speaker 1: kept anything but awful. He learnt better, and we all
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Speaker 1: learnt with him in the dark years of exasperating and
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Speaker 1: humiliating struggle that followed. And I do not see that
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Speaker 1: we fellow learners, are justified in turning resentfully upon him
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Speaker 1: for a common ignorance and assumption. South Africa seems almost
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Speaker 1: painted on the backcloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense
21:33
Speaker 1: those disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English
21:37
Speaker 1: world has long since contrived in any edifying or profitable
21:41
Speaker 1: sense to forget, how we thrilled to the shouting newspaper
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Speaker 1: sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place
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Speaker 1: to the realization of defeat far away. There our army
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Speaker 1: showed itself human, mortal, and human in the sight of
21:57
Speaker 1: all the world. The pleasant officers, as we had imagined,
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Speaker 1: would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of rifles,
22:05
Speaker 1: remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been,
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Speaker 1: failing to imagine, failing to plan and cooperate, failing to
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Speaker 1: grip and the common soldiers too. They were just what
22:18
Speaker 1: our streets and countryside had made them. No sudden magic
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Speaker 1: came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid
22:26
Speaker 1: nor disgraceful. Were they just ill trained and fairly plucky
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Speaker 1: and wonderfully good tempered men paying for it, And how
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Speaker 1: it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear
22:37
Speaker 1: of Nicholson's neck, and then presently close upon one another,
22:41
Speaker 1: to realize the bloody waste of Margas Fontaine, the shattering
22:45
Speaker 1: retreat from stormbare Glenzo colenso that blundering battle with white,
22:51
Speaker 1: as it seemed in Ladysmith, near the point of surrender.
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Speaker 1: And so through the long unfolding catalog obleek disillusionments of
23:00
Speaker 1: aching unconcealed anxiety, lest worse should follow. To advance upon
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Speaker 1: your enemy, singing about his lack of cleanliness and method
23:09
Speaker 1: went out of fashion. Altogether, the dirty, retrogressive boar vanished
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Speaker 1: from our scheme of illusion. All through my Middle Cambridge period,
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Speaker 1: the guns boomed and the rifles crackled away there on
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Speaker 1: the Veldt, and the horsemen rode, and the tail of
23:25
Speaker 1: accidents and blundering went on, men, mules, horses, stores, and
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Speaker 1: money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home.
23:37
Speaker 1: I see it in my memory as if I had
23:39
Speaker 1: looked at it through a window instead of through the
23:41
Speaker 1: pages of the illustrated papers. I recall, as if I
23:45
Speaker 1: had been there, the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides,
23:49
Speaker 1: the open order, attacks of helmeted men in Kharquay, the
23:53
Speaker 1: scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in
23:57
Speaker 1: great lonely places, the burnt, isolated farms, and at last,
24:02
Speaker 1: the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and
24:06
Speaker 1: spreading for endless mars across the desert, netting the elusive enemy,
24:11
Speaker 1: until at last, though he broke the measures again and again,
24:15
Speaker 1: we had in him in the toils. If one's attention
24:19
Speaker 1: strayed in the lecture room, it wandered to those battlefields,
24:24
Speaker 1: and that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment
24:28
Speaker 1: of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of
24:32
Speaker 1: the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open, in
24:36
Speaker 1: the twilight of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and
24:41
Speaker 1: the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of
24:45
Speaker 1: us more shameful than defeats. Seven. A book that stands
24:53
Speaker 1: out among these memories, that stimulated me immensely, so that
24:57
Speaker 1: I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit
25:01
Speaker 1: of propaganda and half to test it by their comments,
25:04
Speaker 1: was Meredith's, One of our conquerors. It is one of
25:08
Speaker 1: the books that have made me in that I got
25:11
Speaker 1: a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the first
25:14
Speaker 1: attached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever encountered.
25:19
Speaker 1: It must have been published already nine or ten years
25:22
Speaker 1: when I read it, the country had paid no heed
25:25
Speaker 1: to it, had gone on to the expensive lessons of
25:28
Speaker 1: the war. Because of the Duller version, our people feel
25:32
Speaker 1: for all such intimations, and so I could read it
25:35
Speaker 1: as a book justified the war, endorsed its every word
25:40
Speaker 1: for me, underlined each warning indication of the gigantic dangers
25:44
Speaker 1: that gathered against our system across the narrow seas. It
25:48
Speaker 1: discovered Europe to me as watching and critical. But while
25:53
Speaker 1: I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
25:56
Speaker 1: intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training, discipline and
26:00
Speaker 1: moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the
26:04
Speaker 1: continent there were other people's going ahead of us mentally
26:07
Speaker 1: alert while we fumbled discipline, while we slouched, aggressive and
26:12
Speaker 1: preparing to bring our imperial pride to a reckoning was
26:15
Speaker 1: extremely novel and distasteful to me. It set me worrying
26:20
Speaker 1: of knights. It put all my projects for social and
26:23
Speaker 1: political reconstruction upon a new, uncomfortable footing. It made them
26:28
Speaker 1: no longer merely desirable, but urgent. Instead of pride and
26:33
Speaker 1: the love of making, one might own to a baser motive.
26:36
Speaker 1: Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the continent
26:40
Speaker 1: of Europe treated as a mere envious echo to our
26:43
Speaker 1: worldwide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense,
26:48
Speaker 1: as it were, of busy search lights over the horizon.
26:53
Speaker 1: One consequence of the patriotic chagrat Meredith produced in Me
26:57
Speaker 1: was an attempt to belittle his merit. It isn't a
27:00
Speaker 1: good novel anyhow, I said. The charge I brought against
27:05
Speaker 1: it was, I remember a lack of unity. It professed
27:08
Speaker 1: to be a study of the English situation in the
27:11
Speaker 1: early nineties. But it was all deflected, I said, and
27:14
Speaker 1: all the interest was confused by the story of Victor
27:18
Speaker 1: Radner's fight with society to vindicate the woman he had
27:21
Speaker 1: loved and never married. Now, in the retrospect, and with
27:25
Speaker 1: a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith
27:28
Speaker 1: justice and admit the conflict was not only essential but
27:32
Speaker 1: cardinal in his picture that the terrible inflexibility of the
27:36
Speaker 1: rich aunt's and the still more terrible claim of Missus
27:39
Speaker 1: Burman Radner, the infernal punctilio and Dudley Sowerby's limitations were
27:45
Speaker 1: the central substance of that In Alertness, the book set
27:48
Speaker 1: itself to a sale. So many things have been brought
27:52
Speaker 1: together in my mind that were once remotely separated. A
27:56
Speaker 1: people that will not valiently face and understand and admit
27:59
Speaker 1: love and passion can understand nothing whatever. But in those
28:04
Speaker 1: days what is now just obvious truth to me was
28:07
Speaker 1: altogether outside my range of comprehension. Eight. As I seek
28:15
Speaker 1: to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of the world,
28:20
Speaker 1: as I flounder among the half remembered developments that found
28:24
Speaker 1: me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there
28:28
Speaker 1: comes out, as if it stood for all the rest.
28:31
Speaker 1: My first holiday abroad that did not happen until I
28:35
Speaker 1: was twenty two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and
28:38
Speaker 1: the piece of Forrainigan had just been signed. I went
28:42
Speaker 1: with a man named Willesley, a man some years senior
28:45
Speaker 1: to myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the
28:48
Speaker 1: higher division of the civil service, and who had become
28:51
Speaker 1: an enthusiastic member of the London school Board upon which
28:55
Speaker 1: the cumulative vote and the support of the advanced people
28:59
Speaker 1: had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent
29:03
Speaker 1: income that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living,
29:07
Speaker 1: and he had a kindred craving for social theorizing and
29:10
Speaker 1: some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance
29:15
Speaker 1: after reading a paper of mine forgotten by the visit
29:18
Speaker 1: of Chris Robinson, on the limits of pure democracy. It
29:22
Speaker 1: had marked through some thoughts of his own. We went
29:26
Speaker 1: by train to Spietz on the Lake of Tin, then
29:29
Speaker 1: up the Demi, and thence, with one or two halts
29:32
Speaker 1: and digressions and a little modest climbing, we crossed over
29:36
Speaker 1: by the Entrona pass on which we were benighted into Italy,
29:40
Speaker 1: and by way of Domodossola and the Santa Maria Madiore
29:44
Speaker 1: Valley to Carnobio, and thence up the lake to Locano,
29:48
Speaker 1: where as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days
29:52
Speaker 1: and sew up the Valmaggia and over to Aiollo and home.
29:56
Speaker 1: As I write of that long tramp of ours, something
29:59
Speaker 1: of its freshness and enlargement returns to me. I feel
30:04
Speaker 1: again the faint, pleasant excitement of the boat train, the
30:08
Speaker 1: trampling procession of people with hand baggage and laden porters
30:12
Speaker 1: along the platform of the Folkston pier, the scarcely perceptible
30:16
Speaker 1: swaying of the maud boat beneath our feet. Then very
30:21
Speaker 1: obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from
30:24
Speaker 1: the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede.
30:30
Speaker 1: One walked about the boat, doing one's best not to
30:32
Speaker 1: feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people directed
30:37
Speaker 1: one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to
30:40
Speaker 1: the east of us, coming up suddenly. And then one
30:44
Speaker 1: turned to scan the little different French coast villages, and then,
30:49
Speaker 1: sliding by an appel sunshine, came a long wooden pier
30:53
Speaker 1: with oddly dressed children upon it, and the clustering town
30:57
Speaker 1: of Bouloon. It all with the outward calm that became
31:02
Speaker 1: a young man of nearly three and twenty, but one
31:05
Speaker 1: was alive to one's fingertips with pleasing little stimulations. The
31:11
Speaker 1: custom house examination excited one the strangeness of a babble
31:15
Speaker 1: in a foreign tongue. One found the French of city
31:19
Speaker 1: merchants and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow. And then
31:23
Speaker 1: one was standing in the train as it went slowly
31:26
Speaker 1: through the rail laid street to Bolonville, and one looked
31:30
Speaker 1: out at the world in French porters in blouses, workmen
31:34
Speaker 1: in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peak caps instead
31:39
Speaker 1: of helmets, and romantically cloaked big carts all on two
31:44
Speaker 1: wheels instead of four, green shuttered casements instead of sashed windows,
31:50
Speaker 1: and great numbers of neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
31:54
Speaker 1: Oh there's a priest, one said, and was betrayed into
31:58
Speaker 1: such like artless crime. It was a real other world,
32:03
Speaker 1: with different government and different methods. And in the night
32:06
Speaker 1: one was roused from uneasy slumbers and sat blinking and
32:10
Speaker 1: surly wrapped up in one's couverture, and with one's array,
32:15
Speaker 1: all awry to encounter a new social phenomenon. The German
32:19
Speaker 1: official so different in manner from the British. And when
32:23
Speaker 1: one woke again after that, one had come to barle
32:27
Speaker 1: and out one tumbled to get coffee in Switzerland. I
32:31
Speaker 1: have been over that route dozens of times since, but
32:34
Speaker 1: it still revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense
32:39
Speaker 1: of cheerful release in me. I remember that Iron Willersley
32:44
Speaker 1: became very sociological as we ran on to Spieres and
32:48
Speaker 1: made all sorts of generalizations from the steeply sloping fields
32:52
Speaker 1: on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on platforms,
32:56
Speaker 1: and from little differences in the way things were done.
33:00
Speaker 1: The clean prosperity of Barle and Switzerland, the big clean stations,
33:05
Speaker 1: filled me with patriotic misgivings. As I thought of the
33:08
Speaker 1: vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtedness of Cambridgeshire. It
33:14
Speaker 1: came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values
33:17
Speaker 1: was all wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for
33:21
Speaker 1: us and our empire might be developing here. And I
33:25
Speaker 1: recall marethis skepsy in France with a new understanding. Willesley
33:31
Speaker 1: had dressed himself in a world worn Norfolk suit of
33:34
Speaker 1: greenish gray tweeds that ended unfamiliarly that his rather impending,
33:39
Speaker 1: spectacled intellectual visage I didn't I remember, like the contrast
33:45
Speaker 1: of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about us.
33:49
Speaker 1: Convict colored stockings and vast hobnailed boots finished him below,
33:54
Speaker 1: and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksack that he
33:57
Speaker 1: had tied a skew. He did not want to shame
34:00
Speaker 1: the train, but I made him at one of the
34:02
Speaker 1: Swiss stations. I disliked these Oxford sloverlinesses, and then confound him.
34:08
Speaker 1: He cut himself and bled. Next morning, we were breathing
34:12
Speaker 1: a thin, exhilarating air that seemed to have washed our
34:16
Speaker 1: very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and eating hard boiled
34:20
Speaker 1: eggs in a vast, clear space of rime edged rocks,
34:24
Speaker 1: slow mottled above a blue gashed glacier. All about us.
34:30
Speaker 1: The monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above,
34:35
Speaker 1: and there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded,
34:39
Speaker 1: and then dark, clustering fir trees far below. I had
34:44
Speaker 1: an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of
34:48
Speaker 1: being outside. But this is the round world, I said,
34:52
Speaker 1: with the sense of never having perceived it before. This
34:56
Speaker 1: is the round world. Chapter four, Section two