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The New Machiavelli Chapter 9 Part 2 · The H. G. Wells Library

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Speaker 1: Chapter nine, 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. My discontents with the Liberal Party and my
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Speaker 1: mental exploration of the quality of party generally is curiously
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Speaker 1: mixed up with certain impressions of things and people in
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Speaker 1: the National Liberal Club. The National Liberal Club is Liberalism
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Speaker 1: made visible in the flesh and daltonware. It is an
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Speaker 1: extraordinary big club done in a bold, wholesale, shiny marbled style,
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Speaker 1: richly furnished with numerous paintings, steel engravings, busts, and full
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Speaker 1: length statues of the late mister Gladstone. And its spacious
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Speaker 1: dining rooms, Its long, hazy, crowded smoking room with innumerable
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Speaker 1: little tables and group of men in armchairs. Its magazine
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Speaker 1: room and library upstairs have just that undistinguished and unconcentrated
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Speaker 1: diversity which is for me the liberal note. The pensive
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Speaker 1: member sits and hears perplexing dialects and even fragments of
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Speaker 1: foreign speech, and among the clustering masses of less insistent whites,
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Speaker 1: his roving eye catches profiles and complexions that send his
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Speaker 1: mind afield to Calcutta or Rangoon, or the West Indies,
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Speaker 1: or Sierra Leone or the Cape. I was not infrequently
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Speaker 1: that pensive member. I used to go to the club
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Speaker 1: to doubt about liberalism. About two o'clock in the day,
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Speaker 1: the great smoking room is crowded with countless little groups.
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Speaker 1: They sit about small round tables or in circles of chairs,
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Speaker 1: and the haze of tobacco seems to prolong the great
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Speaker 1: narrow place, with its pillars and bays to infinity. Some
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Speaker 1: of the groups are big, as many as a dozen.
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Speaker 1: Men talk in loud tones, some are dua logs, and
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Speaker 1: there is always a sprinkling of lonely, disassociated men. At first,
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Speaker 1: one gets an impression of men going from group to group,
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Speaker 1: and as it were, linking them. But as one watches closely,
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Speaker 1: one finds that these men just visit three or four
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Speaker 1: groups at the outside and know nothing of the others.
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Speaker 1: One begins to perceive more and more distinctly that one
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Speaker 1: is dealing with a sort of human mosaic, that each
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Speaker 1: patch in that great place is of a different quality
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Speaker 1: and color from the next, and never to be mixed
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Speaker 1: with it. Most clubs have a common link, a lowest
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Speaker 1: common denominator in the club bore who spares no one.
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Speaker 1: But even the national liberal bores are specialized and sectional.
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Speaker 1: As one looks round, one sees here there are a
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Speaker 1: clump of men from the North Country or the Potteries.
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Speaker 1: Here in Ireland of South London politicians. Here, a couple
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Speaker 1: of young Jews ascendant from Whitechapel. Here are a circle
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Speaker 1: of journalists and writers. Here a group of Irish politicians.
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Speaker 1: Here to East Indians. Here a priest or so here
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Speaker 1: a clump of old fashioned Protestants. Here are little not
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Speaker 1: of eminent rationalists indulging in a blasphemous story, so sot
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Speaker 1: a voccie. Next them are a group of anglicized Germans
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Speaker 1: and highly specialized chess players. And then two of the
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Speaker 1: oddest looking persons, bulging with documents and intent upon extraordinary
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Speaker 1: business transactions. Over long cigars, I would listen to a
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Speaker 1: stormy sea of babblement and try to extract some constructive intimations.
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Speaker 1: Every now and then I got a whiff of politics.
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Speaker 1: It was clear they were against the lords, against plutocras,
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Speaker 1: against Cossington's newspapers, against the Brewers. It was tremendously clear
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Speaker 1: what they were against. The trouble was to find out
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Speaker 1: what on earth they were for. As I sat and thought,
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Speaker 1: the streaked and motteled pillars and wall, the various views,
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Speaker 1: aspects and portraits of mister and Missus Gladstone, the partitions
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Speaker 1: of Polish Mahogany, the yellow vested waiters would dissolve and vanish,
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Speaker 1: and I would have a vision of this sample of
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Speaker 1: miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests, and a universal littleness
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Speaker 1: of imagination enlarged unlimited, no longer a sample, but a community, spreading,
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Speaker 1: stretching out to infinity, all in little groups and duologus
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Speaker 1: and circles, all with their special and narrow concerns, all
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Speaker 1: with their backs to most of the others. What but
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Speaker 1: a common antagonism would ever heap these multitudes together? I
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Speaker 1: understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it denunciation.
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Speaker 1: Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive,
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Speaker 1: But not let us do There is no real appeal
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Speaker 1: to the commonplace mind in let us do. That calls
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Speaker 1: for the creative imagination, and few have been accustomed to
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Speaker 1: respond to that call. The other merely needs jealousy and bait,
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Speaker 1: of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in
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Speaker 1: every human heart. I remember that vision of endless, narrow,
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Speaker 1: jealous individuality, very vividly, a seething limitlessness. It became at
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Speaker 1: last like a waste place covered by crawling locusts that
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Speaker 1: men sweep up by the sack load and drown by
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Speaker 1: the million in ditches. Grotesquely against it came the lean features,
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Speaker 1: the sidelong, shy movements of Edward cra Hampton, seated in
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Speaker 1: a circle of talkers. Close at hand. I had a
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Speaker 1: whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold he was
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Speaker 1: saying something about the will of the people, the immense
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Speaker 1: and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life. I forgot the smoke
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Speaker 1: and jabber of the club altogether. I became a lonely spirit,
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Speaker 1: flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a
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Speaker 1: ledge in some high and rocky wilderness. And below, as
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Speaker 1: far as the eye could reach, stretch the swarming infinitesimals
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Speaker 1: of humanity, like grass upon the field, like pebbles upon
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Speaker 1: unbounded beaches. Was there ever to be in human life
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Speaker 1: more than that endless, struggling individualism. Was there? Indeed, some giantry,
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Speaker 1: some immense, valiant synthesis still to come, or present it
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Speaker 1: might be, and still unseen by me? Or was this
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Speaker 1: the beginning, and with all the last phase of mankind?
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Speaker 1: I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
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Speaker 1: the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is implicitly addressed.
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Speaker 1: I was, as it were, one of a little swarm
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Speaker 1: of would be reef builders, looking back at the teeming
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Speaker 1: slime upon the ocean floor. All the history of mankind,
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Speaker 1: all the history of life, has been, and will be,
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Speaker 1: the story of something struggling out of the indiscriminated abyss,
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Speaker 1: struggling to exist and prevail over and comprehend individual lives,
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Speaker 1: an effort of insiduous attraction, an idea of invincible appeal,
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Speaker 1: that something greater than ourselves, which does not so much
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Speaker 1: exist as seek existence, palpitating between being and not being.
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Speaker 1: How marvelous it is it has worn the form and
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Speaker 1: visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for
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Speaker 1: itself in stone and ivory, music and wonderful words, spoken
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Speaker 1: more and more clearly of a mystery of love, a
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Speaker 1: mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile in blood and cruelty, beyond
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Speaker 1: the common impulses of men. It is something that comes
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Speaker 1: and goes, like a light, that shines and is withdrawn,
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Speaker 1: withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever
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Speaker 1: been six. I would mark with a curious interest the
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Speaker 1: stray country member of the club up in town for
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Speaker 1: a night or so. My mind would be busy with
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Speaker 1: speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading,
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Speaker 1: his horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never
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Speaker 1: came up. I would fill in the outline of him
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Speaker 1: with memories of my uncle and his Staffordshire neighbors. He
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Speaker 1: was perhaps alderman this, or counselor that down there, a
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Speaker 1: great man in his ward JP within seven miles of
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Speaker 1: the boundary of the borough, and a god in his home. Here.
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Speaker 1: He was nobody and very shy, and either a little
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Speaker 1: too arrogant or a little too meek towards our very democratic,
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Speaker 1: mannered but still livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone
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Speaker 1: of England. He overret himself lest he should appear mean,
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Speaker 1: went through our special dinner conscientiously drank, unless he was
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Speaker 1: teetotal of unfamiliar wines and did his best in spite
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Speaker 1: of the rules, to tip. Afterwards, in a state of
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Speaker 1: flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black coffee and
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Speaker 1: a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance, amit
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Speaker 1: the brandy and have rather more coffee in the smoking room.
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Speaker 1: I would sit and watch that stiff dignity of self indulgence,
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Speaker 1: and wonder, wonder, an infernal clairvoyance would come to me.
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Speaker 1: I would have visions of him in relation to his wife,
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Speaker 1: checking always, sometimes bullying, sometimes being ostentatiously kind. I would
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Speaker 1: see him glance furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase,
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Speaker 1: or stiffen his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.
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Speaker 1: We imaginative people are base enough, Heaven knows, but it
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Speaker 1: is only in rare moods of bitter penetration that we
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Speaker 1: pierced down to the baser lusts, the viles, shames, the everlasting,
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Speaker 1: lying and muddle headed self justification of the dull. I
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Speaker 1: would turn my eyes down the crowded room and see
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Speaker 1: others of him, and others what did he think he
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Speaker 1: was up to? Did he for a moment realize that
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Speaker 1: his presence under that ceramic glory of a ceiling with
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Speaker 1: me meant, if it had any rational meaning at all,
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Speaker 1: that we were jointly doing something with the nation and
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Speaker 1: the empire and mankind. How on earth could anyone get
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Speaker 1: hold of him, make any noble use of him. He
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Speaker 1: didn't read beyond his newspaper. He never thought, but only
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Speaker 1: followed imaginings in his heart. He never discussed. At the
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Speaker 1: first hint of discussion, his temper gave way. He was,
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Speaker 1: I knew, a deep, thinly covered tank of resentments and
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Speaker 1: quite irrational moral rages. Yet with all I would have
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Speaker 1: to resist an impulse to go over to him and
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Speaker 1: nudge him and say to him, look here, what indeed
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Speaker 1: do you think we are doing with the nation and
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Speaker 1: the empire and mankind? You know, mankind. I wonder what
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Speaker 1: reply I should have got. So far as any average
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Speaker 1: could be struck, and so far as any backbone could
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Speaker 1: be located, it seemed to me that this silent, shy, replete,
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Speaker 1: sub angry, middle class sentimentalist was, in his endless species
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Speaker 1: and varieties and dialects, the backbone of our party. So
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Speaker 1: far as I could be considered as represent ing anything
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Speaker 1: in the house, I pretended to sit for the elements
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Speaker 1: of him. Seven for a time I turned towards the Socialists,
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Speaker 1: there at least had an air of coherent intentions. At
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Speaker 1: that time socialism had come into politics again after a
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Speaker 1: period of depression and obscurity, with a tremendous excla. There
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Speaker 1: was visibly a following of Socialist members to Chris Robinson,
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Speaker 1: mysteriously uncommunicative gentlemen in soft felt hats and short coats
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Speaker 1: and square toed boots, who replied to casual advances little
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Speaker 1: Surprisingly in rich North Country Dialects members became aware of
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Speaker 1: a sea green incorruptible, as Colonel Marlowe put it to me,
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Speaker 1: speaking on the address, a slender, twisted figure supporting itself
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Speaker 1: on a stick and speaking with a fire that was
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Speaker 1: altogether revolutionary. This was Philip Snowdon, the memory for Blackburn.
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Speaker 1: They had come in nearly forty strong altogether, and with
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Speaker 1: an air of presently meaning to come in much stronger.
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Speaker 1: There were only one aspect to what seemed at that
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Speaker 1: time a big national movement. Socialist societies we gathered were
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Speaker 1: springing up all over the country, and everyone was inquiring
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Speaker 1: about socialism and discussing socialism it had taken the universities
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Speaker 1: with particular force, and any youngster with the slightest intellectual
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Speaker 1: pretension was either actively four or brilliantly against. For a time,
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Speaker 1: our young liberal group was ostentatiously sympathetic. When I think
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Speaker 1: of the socialists, there comes a vivid memory of certain
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Speaker 1: evening gatherings at our house. These gatherings had been organized
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Speaker 1: by Margaret as the outcome of a discussion at the bailies.
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Speaker 1: Altiora had been very emphatic and uncharitable upon the futility
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Speaker 1: of the socialist movement. It seemed that even the leaders
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Speaker 1: fought shy of dinner parties. They never meet each other,
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Speaker 1: said Altiora. Much less people on the other side, How
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Speaker 1: can they begin to understand politics until they do that.
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Speaker 1: Most of them have totally unpresentable wives, said Altiora, totally
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Speaker 1: and quoted instances. And they will bring them or they
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Speaker 1: won't come. Some of the poor creatures have scarcely learnt
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Speaker 1: their table manners. They just make holes in the talk.
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Speaker 1: I thought there was a great deal of truth beneath
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Speaker 1: Altiorra's outburst. The presentation of the socialist case seemed very
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Speaker 1: greatly crippled by the want of a common intimacy in
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Speaker 1: its leaders. The want of intimacy didn't at first appear
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Speaker 1: to be more than an accident, and our talk led
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Speaker 1: to Margaret's attempt to get acquaintance and easy inter course
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Speaker 1: afoot among them and between them and the young liberals
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Speaker 1: of our group. She gave a series of weekly dinners
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Speaker 1: planned I think think a little too accurately upon Altiorra's model,
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Speaker 1: and after each we had as catholic a reception as
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Speaker 1: we could contrive. Our receptions were, indeed, I should think
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Speaker 1: about as catholic as receptions could be. Margaret found herself
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Speaker 1: with a weekly house full of insoluble problems and intercourse.
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Speaker 1: One did one's best, but one got a nightmare feeling
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Speaker 1: as the evening wore on. It was one of the
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Speaker 1: few unanimities of these parties that everyone should be a
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Speaker 1: little odd in appearance, funny about the hair or the tie,
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Speaker 1: or the shoes, or more generally, and that bursts of
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Speaker 1: violent aggression should alternate with an attitude entirely defensive. A
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Speaker 1: number of our guests had an air of waiting for
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Speaker 1: a clue that never came, and stood and sat about silently,
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Speaker 1: mildly amused but not a bit surprised that we did
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Speaker 1: not discover their distinctive open sesames. There was a sprinkling
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Speaker 1: of manifest seers and prophetesses in shapeless garments, far too many,
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Speaker 1: I thought, for really easy social intercourse, and any conversation
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Speaker 1: at any moment was liable to become oracular. One was
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Speaker 1: in a state of tension from first to last. The
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Speaker 1: most innocent remarks seemed capable of exploding resentment, and replies
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Speaker 1: came out at the most unexpected angles. We young Liberals
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Speaker 1: went about, puzzled but polite to the gathering we had evoked.
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Speaker 1: The Young Liberals tradition is on the whole wonderfully discreet,
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Speaker 1: superfluous steam is let out far away from home in
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Speaker 1: the Balkans or Africa, and the neat, stiff figures of
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Speaker 1: the Cramptons, Bunting, Harblow and Lewis, either in extremely well
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Speaker 1: cut morning coats indicative of the house, or in what
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Speaker 1: is sometimes written of as faultless evening dress, stood about
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Speaker 1: on those evenings they and their very quietly and simply
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Speaker 1: and expensively dressed little wives like a datum line amidst
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Speaker 1: lakes and mountains. I didn't at first see the connection
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Speaker 1: between systematic social reorganization and arbitrary novelties in dietary and costume,
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Speaker 1: just as I didn't realize why the most comprehensive, constructive
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Speaker 1: projects should appear to be supported solely by odd and
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Speaker 1: exceptional personalities. On one of these evenings, a little group
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Speaker 1: of rather jolly looking, pretty young people seated themselves for
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Speaker 1: no particular reason, in a large circle on the floor
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Speaker 1: of my study and engaged, so far as I could judge,
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Speaker 1: in the game of hunt the meaning the intellectual equivalent
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Speaker 1: of hunt the slipper, it must have been that same
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Speaker 1: evening I came upon an unbleached young gentleman before the
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Speaker 1: oval mirror on the landing, engaged in removing the remains
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Speaker 1: of an anchovy sandwich from his protruded tongueung visible ends
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Speaker 1: of cress, having misled him into the belief that he
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Speaker 1: was dealing with doctrinally permissible food. It was not unusual
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Speaker 1: to be given hand bills and printed matter by our guests,
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Speaker 1: but there I had the advantage over Lewis, who was
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Speaker 1: too tactful to refuse the stuff, too neatly dressed to
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Speaker 1: pocket it, and had no writing desk available. Upon which
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Speaker 1: he could relieve himself in a manner flattering to the giver,
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Speaker 1: so that his hands got fuller and fuller. A relentless,
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Speaker 1: compact little woman in what Margaret declared to be an
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Speaker 1: extremely expensive black dress, has also printed herself on my memory.
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Speaker 1: She had set her heart upon my contributing to a
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Speaker 1: weekly periodical in the lential interest with which she was associated,
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Speaker 1: and I spent much time and care in evading her.
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Speaker 1: Mingling with the more hygienic types were a number of
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Speaker 1: anti Puritan socialists, bulging with bias against temperance and breaking
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Speaker 1: out against austere methods of living all over their faces.
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Speaker 1: Their manner was packed with heartiness. They were apt to
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Speaker 1: choke the approaches to the little buffet Margaret had set
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Speaker 1: up downstairs, and there engage in discussions of determinism. It
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Speaker 1: always seemed to be determinism which became heartier and noisier,
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Speaker 1: but never acrimonious. Even in the small hours. It seemed
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Speaker 1: impossible to settle about this determinism of theirs. Ever, and
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Speaker 1: there were worldly socialists also. I particularly recall a large, active, buoyant,
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Speaker 1: lady killing individual with an eyeglass born upon a broad
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Speaker 1: black Ribbon who swam about us one evening. He might
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Speaker 1: have been a slightly frayed actor in his large frock coat,
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Speaker 1: his white waistcoat, and the sort of black and white
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Speaker 1: checked trousers that twinkle. He had a high pitched voice
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Speaker 1: with aristocratic intonations, and he seemed to be in a
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Speaker 1: perpetual state of interrogation. What are we all here? For?
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Speaker 1: He would ask, only too audibly, what are we doing here?
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Speaker 1: What's the connection? What was the connection? We made a
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Speaker 1: special effort with our last assembly in June nineteen o seven.
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Speaker 1: We tried to get something like a representative collection of
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Speaker 1: the parliamentary leaders of socialism, the various exponents of socialist thought,
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Speaker 1: and a number of young liberal thinkers into one room.
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Speaker 1: D'auville came, and Horatio Bulsch Featherstenhoff appeared for ten minutes
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Speaker 1: and talked charmingly to Margaret, and then vanished again. There
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Speaker 1: was Wilkins, the novelist, and Tumor and Dr Tumpany, Chris
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Speaker 1: Robinston stood about for a time in a new comforter,
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Speaker 1: and Magdeburgen Willed Pipes, and five or six labor members.
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Speaker 1: And on our side we had our particular little group Bunting, Harblow,
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Speaker 1: Crampton Lewis, all looking as broad minded and open to
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Speaker 1: conviction as they possibly could, and even occasionally talking out
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Speaker 1: from their bushes, almost boldly. But the gathering as a
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Speaker 1: whole refused either to mingle or dispute, and as an
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Speaker 1: experiment in intercourse, the evening was a failure. Unexpected dissociations
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Speaker 1: appeared between socialists one had supposed friendly. I could not
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Speaker 1: have imagined it was possible for half so many people
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Speaker 1: to turn their backs on everybody else in such small
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Speaker 1: rooms as ours. But the unsaid things those backs expressed
21:43
Speaker 1: broke out, I remarked, with refreshed virulence in the various
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Speaker 1: organs of the various sections of the party. Next week
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Speaker 1: I talked. I remember with Dr Tumpany, a large young
21:55
Speaker 1: man in a still larger professional frock coat and with
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Speaker 1: a great shock of very fair hair, who was candidate
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Speaker 1: for some North Country constituency. We discussed the political outlook,
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Speaker 1: and like so many socialists at that time, he was
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Speaker 1: full of vague threatenings against the Liberal Party. I was
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Speaker 1: struck by a thing in him that I had already
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Speaker 1: observed less vividly in many others of these socialist leaders,
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Speaker 1: and which gave me at last a clue to the
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Speaker 1: whole business. He behaved exactly like a man in possession
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Speaker 1: of valuable pattern rights who wants to be dealt with.
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Speaker 1: He had an air of having a corner in ideas.
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Speaker 1: Then it flashed into my head that the whole socialist
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Speaker 1: movement was an attempted corner in ideas. Eight late that night,
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Speaker 1: I found myself alone with Margaret amid the debris of
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Speaker 1: the gathering. I sat before the fire, hands in pockets,
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Speaker 1: and Margaret, looking white and weary, came and lent upon
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Speaker 1: the mantle. O Lord, said Margaret. I agreed. Then I
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Speaker 1: resume my meditation. Ideas, I said, count for more than
23:11
Speaker 1: I thought in the world. Margaret regarded me with that
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Speaker 1: neutral expression behind which he was accustomed to wait for clues.
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Speaker 1: When you think of the height and depth and importance
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Speaker 1: and wisdom of the socialist ideas, and see the men
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Speaker 1: who are running them, I explained, a big system of
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Speaker 1: ideas like socialism, grows up out of the obvious common
23:33
Speaker 1: sense of our present conditions. It's as impersonal as science.
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Speaker 1: All these men they've given nothing to it. They're just
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Speaker 1: people who have pegged out claims upon a big intellectual
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Speaker 1: no man's land, and don't feel quite sure of the law.
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Speaker 1: There's a sort of quarrelsome uneasiness if we profess socialism.
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Speaker 1: Do you think they'd welcome us, not a man of them,
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Speaker 1: they'd feel it was burglary, Yes, said Margaret, looking into
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Speaker 1: the fire. That is just what I felt about them
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Speaker 1: all the evening, particularly doctor Tumpany. We mustn't confuse socialism
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Speaker 1: with the socialists, I said, that's the moral of it.
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Speaker 1: I suppose if God were to find he had made
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Speaker 1: a mistake in dates or something, and went back and
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Speaker 1: annihilated everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way
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Speaker 1: known as a socialist leader or teacher, socialism will be
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Speaker 1: exactly where it is and what it is to day,
24:30
Speaker 1: a growing realization of constructive needs in every man's mind,
24:35
Speaker 1: and a little corner in party politics. So I suppose
24:39
Speaker 1: it will always be. But they were a damned lot, Margaret.
24:45
Speaker 1: I looked up at the little noise she made twice,
24:49
Speaker 1: she said, smiling indulgently. To day, even the smile was Altiora's.
24:55
Speaker 1: I returned to my thoughts. They were a damned human lot.
25:00
Speaker 1: It was an excellent word in that connection. But the
25:04
Speaker 1: ideas marched on. The ideas marched on, just as though
25:08
Speaker 1: men's brains were no more than stepping stones, just as
25:12
Speaker 1: though some great brain in which we are all little
25:15
Speaker 1: cells and corpuscles, was thinking them. I don't think there
25:19
Speaker 1: is a man among them who makes me feel he
25:21
Speaker 1: is trustworthy, said Margaret, unless it's featherstone Hoff. I sat
25:28
Speaker 1: taking in this proposition. They'll never help us, I feel,
25:32
Speaker 1: said Margaret. Us the liberals, Oh damn, the liberals, I said,
25:39
Speaker 1: they'll never even help themselves. I don't think I could
25:42
Speaker 1: possibly get on with any of those people, said Margaret.
25:46
Speaker 1: After a pause. She remained for a time looking down
25:50
Speaker 1: at me, and I could feel perplexed by me. But
25:54
Speaker 1: I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so
25:57
Speaker 1: I did not look up. And presently she stooped to
26:00
Speaker 1: my forehead and kissed me, and went rustling softly to
26:04
Speaker 1: her room. I remained in my study for a long time,
26:08
Speaker 1: with my thoughts crystallizing out. It was then I think
26:13
Speaker 1: that I first apprehended clearly how that opposition to which
26:17
Speaker 1: I have already alluded of the immediate life and the
26:20
Speaker 1: mental hinterland of a man can be applied to public
26:24
Speaker 1: and social affairs. The ideas go on, and no personal
26:29
Speaker 1: party succeeds in embodying them. The reality of human progress
26:34
Speaker 1: never comes to the surface. It is a power in
26:38
Speaker 1: the deeps, an undertow. It goes on in silence, while
26:43
Speaker 1: men think in studies where they rite self forgetfully in
26:47
Speaker 1: laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the
26:52
Speaker 1: rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of emotional insight,
26:57
Speaker 1: in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday affairs. Everyday affairs
27:03
Speaker 1: and whatever is made an everyday affair are transactions of
27:07
Speaker 1: the ostensible self, the being of habits, interests, usage, temper, vanity,
27:15
Speaker 1: hasty reaction to imitation, personal feeling of their substance. No
27:20
Speaker 1: man can abolish his immediate self and specialize in the depths.
27:25
Speaker 1: If he attempts that, he simply turns himself into something
27:28
Speaker 1: a little less than the common man. He may have
27:31
Speaker 1: an immense hinter land, but that does not absolve him
27:34
Speaker 1: from a frontage. That is the essential error of the
27:38
Speaker 1: specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist. They repudiate
27:45
Speaker 1: frontage claim to be pure hinterland, that is what bothered
27:49
Speaker 1: me about Coja, about those various schoolmasters who had prepared
27:53
Speaker 1: me for life, about the bailies and their dream of
27:57
Speaker 1: an official ruling class. Human being who is a philosopher
28:01
Speaker 1: in the first place, a teacher in the first place,
28:04
Speaker 1: or a statesman in the first place, is thereby and inevitably,
28:09
Speaker 1: though he bring godlike gifts to the pretense a quack.
28:13
Speaker 1: These are attempts to live deep side, shallow inside out.
28:17
Speaker 1: They produce merely a new pettiness. To understand socialism again
28:22
Speaker 1: is to gain a new breadth of outlook. To join
28:25
Speaker 1: a socialist organization is to join a narrow cult which
28:29
Speaker 1: is not even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the
28:33
Speaker 1: ideas for which it stands. I perceived I had got
28:38
Speaker 1: something quite fundamental here. It had taken me some years
28:42
Speaker 1: to realize the true relation of the great constructive ideas
28:46
Speaker 1: that swayed me not only to political parties but to myself.
28:51
Speaker 1: I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some
28:55
Speaker 1: one party with social construction, and to regard the other
28:59
Speaker 1: as necessoroly anti constructive. Just as I had been inclined
29:03
Speaker 1: to follow the bailies in the self righteousness of supposing
29:07
Speaker 1: myself to be wholly constructive. But I saw now that
29:11
Speaker 1: every man of intellectual freedom and vigor is necessarily constructive
29:16
Speaker 1: minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly. So each
29:22
Speaker 1: one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the
29:25
Speaker 1: race between the splendor of its possibilities and its immediate associations.
29:31
Speaker 1: We may be shaping immortal things, but we must sleep
29:35
Speaker 1: and answer the dinner gonge, and have our sort of
29:38
Speaker 1: flattery and self approval. In politics, a man counts not
29:43
Speaker 1: for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but
29:46
Speaker 1: for his common worka day, selfish self. And political parties
29:52
Speaker 1: are held together not by a community of ultimate aims,
29:56
Speaker 1: but by the stable bond of an accustomed life. Everybody
30:01
Speaker 1: almost is for progress in general, and nearly everybody is
30:04
Speaker 1: opposed to any change, except in so far as gross
30:08
Speaker 1: increments are change in his particular method of living and behavior.
30:13
Speaker 1: Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages
30:18
Speaker 1: of some definite class or group of classes in the
30:21
Speaker 1: existing community, and every party has its scientific, minded and
30:26
Speaker 1: constructive leading section, with well defined hinterlands, formulating its social functions.
30:32
Speaker 1: In a public spirited form and its superficial minded following
30:37
Speaker 1: confessing its meannesses and vanities and prejudices. No class will
30:43
Speaker 1: abolish itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically
30:47
Speaker 1: reconstruct itself orbeit no classes indisposed to co operate in
30:52
Speaker 1: the unlimited socialization of any other class. In that capacity
30:58
Speaker 1: for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving force
31:03
Speaker 1: of modern affairs. The instincts, the persons, the parties and
31:08
Speaker 1: vanities sway and struggle, The ideas and understandings march on
31:13
Speaker 1: and achieve themselves for all in spite of everyone. The
31:19
Speaker 1: methods and traditions of British politics maintain the form of
31:22
Speaker 1: two great parties, with rider groups seeking to gain specific
31:26
Speaker 1: ends in the event of a small government majority. These
31:31
Speaker 1: two main parties are more or less heterogeneous in composition. Each, however,
31:36
Speaker 1: has certain necessary characteristics. The Conservative Party has always stood
31:42
Speaker 1: quite definitely for the established propertied interests. The landowner, the
31:47
Speaker 1: big lawyer, the established church, and latterly the huge private
31:51
Speaker 1: monopoly of the liquor trade which has been created by
31:54
Speaker 1: temperance legislation, are the essential Conservatives. And two oven now
32:01
Speaker 1: with the native wealthy, are the families of the great
32:03
Speaker 1: international usurers, and a vast miscellaneous mass of financial enterprise
32:10
Speaker 1: outside the range of resistance implied by these interests. The
32:14
Speaker 1: Conservative Party has always shown itself just as constructive and
32:18
Speaker 1: collectivist as any other party. The great landowners have been
32:23
Speaker 1: as well disposed towards the endowment of higher education, and
32:27
Speaker 1: as willing to cooperate with the Church in protective and
32:31
Speaker 1: mildly educational legislation for children in the working class as
32:35
Speaker 1: any political section. The financiers, too, are adventurous, spirited, and
32:41
Speaker 1: eager for mechanical progress and technical efficiency. They are prepared
32:46
Speaker 1: to spend public money upon research, upon ports and harbours,
32:50
Speaker 1: and public communications, upon sanitation and hygienic organization. A certain
32:58
Speaker 1: rude benevolence of public intems tension is equally characteristic of
33:02
Speaker 1: the liquor trade, provided his comfort leads to no excesses
33:06
Speaker 1: of temperance. The liquor trade is quite eager to see
33:09
Speaker 1: the common man prosperous, happy, and with money to spend
33:13
Speaker 1: in a bar. All sections of the party are aggressively
33:17
Speaker 1: patriotic and favorably inclined to the idea of an upstanding,
33:22
Speaker 1: well fared, and well exercised population in uniform. Of course,
33:27
Speaker 1: there are reactionary landowners and old fashioned country clergy full
33:31
Speaker 1: of localized self importance, jealous even of the cottager who
33:36
Speaker 1: can read. But they have neither the power nor the
33:39
Speaker 1: ability to retard the constructive forces in the party as
33:42
Speaker 1: a whole. On the other hand, when matters point to
33:46
Speaker 1: any definitely confiscatory proposal to the public ownership and collective
33:51
Speaker 1: control of land, for example, or state mining and manufactures,
33:56
Speaker 1: or the nationalization of the so called public house or
33:59
Speaker 1: extended municipal enterprise, or even to an increase of the
34:03
Speaker 1: taxation of property, then the Conservative Party presents a nearly
34:08
Speaker 1: adamantine bar. It does not stand, for it is the
34:13
Speaker 1: existing arrangement in these affairs. Even more definitely a class
34:19
Speaker 1: party is the labour party, whose immediate interest is to
34:22
Speaker 1: raise wages, shortened hours of labour, increase employment, and make
34:27
Speaker 1: better terms for the working man, tenant and workingman purchaser.
34:32
Speaker 1: Its leaders are no doubt constructive minded, but the mass
34:36
Speaker 1: of the following is naturally suspicious of education and discipline,
34:41
Speaker 1: hostile to the higher education, and except for an obvious
34:45
Speaker 1: antagonism to employers and property owners or most destitute of ideas,
34:51
Speaker 1: what else can it be? It stands for the expropriated multitude,
34:56
Speaker 1: whose whole situation and difficulty arise from its individual lack
35:00
Speaker 1: of initiative an organizing power. It favors the nationalization of
35:05
Speaker 1: land and capital, with no sense of the difficulties involved
35:09
Speaker 1: in the process. But on the other hand, the equally
35:13
Speaker 1: reasonable socialization of individuals, which is implied by military service,
35:18
Speaker 1: is steadily and quite naturally and quite illogically opposed by it.
35:24
Speaker 1: It is only in recent years that labor has emerged
35:27
Speaker 1: as a separate party from the huge, hospitable caravan serai
35:32
Speaker 1: of liberalism, and there is still a very marked tendency
35:35
Speaker 1: to step back again into that multitudinous assemblage. For multitudinousness
35:42
Speaker 1: has always been the liberal characteristic Liberalism never has been,
35:46
Speaker 1: nor ever can be, anything but a diversified crowd. Liberalism
35:51
Speaker 1: has to voice everything that is left out by these
35:54
Speaker 1: other parties. It is the party against the predominating interests.
36:00
Speaker 1: It is at once the party of the failing and
36:02
Speaker 1: of the untried. It is the party of decadence and hope.
36:07
Speaker 1: From its nature it must be a vague and planness
36:10
Speaker 1: association In comparison with its antagonist, neither so constructive on
36:15
Speaker 1: the one hand, nor on the other so competent to
36:18
Speaker 1: hinder the inevitable constructions of the civilized state. Essentially, it
36:24
Speaker 1: is the party of criticism, the anti party. It is
36:29
Speaker 1: a system of hostilities and objections that somehow achieves at
36:33
Speaker 1: times an elusive common soul. It is a gathering together
36:38
Speaker 1: of all the smaller interests which find themselves at a
36:41
Speaker 1: disadvantage against the big established classes. The leasehold tenant as
36:47
Speaker 1: against the landowner, the retail tradesman as against the merchant
36:51
Speaker 1: and the money lender, the nonconformist as against the churchmen,
36:56
Speaker 1: the small employer as against the demoralizing hospitle bita publican,
37:01
Speaker 1: the man without introductions and broad connections against the man
37:05
Speaker 1: who has these things. It is the party of the
37:09
Speaker 1: many small men against the fewer prevailing men. It has
37:13
Speaker 1: no more essential reason for loving the collectivist state than
37:17
Speaker 1: the conservatives. The small dealer is doomed to absorption in
37:21
Speaker 1: that just as much as the large owner, but it
37:25
Speaker 1: resorts to the state against its antagonists. As in the
37:28
Speaker 1: Middle Ages, common men pitied themselves against the barons by
37:33
Speaker 1: siding with the king. The liberal party is the party
37:37
Speaker 1: against class privilege because it represents no class advantages, but
37:43
Speaker 1: is also the party that is on the whole most
37:45
Speaker 1: set against collective control because it represents no established responsibility.
37:51
Speaker 1: It is constructive only so far as its antagonism to
37:55
Speaker 1: the great owner is more powerful than its jealousy of
37:58
Speaker 1: the state. It organizes only because organization is forced upon
38:03
Speaker 1: it by the organization of its adversaries. It lapses in
38:08
Speaker 1: and out of alliance with labor as it sways between
38:12
Speaker 1: hostility to wealth and hostility to public expenditure. Every modern
38:17
Speaker 1: European state will have, in some form or other these
38:21
Speaker 1: three parties. The resistant, militant, authoritative, dull and unsympathetic Party
38:27
Speaker 1: of establishment and success, the rich Party, the confused, sentimental, spasmodic,
38:34
Speaker 1: numerous party of the small, struggling, various, undisciplined men, the
38:39
Speaker 1: poor Man's Party. And a third party, sometimes detaching itself
38:44
Speaker 1: from the second and sometimes reuniting with it, the party
38:48
Speaker 1: of the altogether expropriated masses. The proletarians Labor change conservative
38:55
Speaker 1: and liberal to republican and democrat, for example, and you
38:59
Speaker 1: have the condition in the United States, the crown or
39:03
Speaker 1: a dethroned dynasty, the established church or a dispossessed church.
39:07
Speaker 1: Nationalist secessions, the personalities of party leaders may break up, complicate,
39:13
Speaker 1: and confuse the self expression of these three necessary divisions
39:18
Speaker 1: in the modern social drama. The analysts will make them
39:21
Speaker 1: out nonetheless for that. And then I came back, as
39:26
Speaker 1: if I came back to a refrain. The ideas go on,
39:30
Speaker 1: as though we are all no more than little cells
39:32
Speaker 1: and corpuscles in some great brain beyond our understanding. So
39:38
Speaker 1: it was I sat and thought my problem out. I
39:42
Speaker 1: still remember my satisfaction at seeing things plainly at last.
39:47
Speaker 1: It was like clouds dispersing to show the sky. Constructive ideas,
39:52
Speaker 1: of course, couldn't hold a party together alone. Interests and habits,
39:57
Speaker 1: not ideas. I had that now, And the great constructive
40:01
Speaker 1: scheme of socialism, invading and inspiring all parties, was necessarily
40:06
Speaker 1: claimed only by this collection of odds and ends, this
40:10
Speaker 1: residuum of disconnected and exceptional people. This was true not
40:15
Speaker 1: only of the socialist idea, but of the scientific idea,
40:19
Speaker 1: the idea of veracity, of human confidence in humanity, of
40:23
Speaker 1: all that mattered in human life outside the life of individuals.
40:29
Speaker 1: The only real party that would ever profess socialism was
40:32
Speaker 1: the Labour Party, and that in the entirely one sided
40:36
Speaker 1: form of an irresponsible and non constructive attack on property.
40:42
Speaker 1: Socialism in that mutilated form the teeth and claws without
40:46
Speaker 1: the eyes and brain. I wanted, as little as I
40:49
Speaker 1: wanted anything in the world, perfectly clear. It was perfectly clear.
40:55
Speaker 1: And why hadn't I seen it before? I looked at
40:59
Speaker 1: my watch and it was half past two. I yawned, stretched,
41:05
Speaker 1: got up and went to bed nine. My ideas about
41:14
Speaker 1: state craft have passed through three main phases to the
41:17
Speaker 1: final convictions that remain. There was the first immediacy of
41:22
Speaker 1: my dream of ports and harbors and cities, railways, roads
41:27
Speaker 1: and administered territories, the vision I had seen in the
41:30
Speaker 1: haze from that little church above Locano. Slowly that had
41:35
Speaker 1: passed into a more elaborate legislative constructiveness, which had led
41:39
Speaker 1: to my uneasy association with the bailies and the professedly
41:43
Speaker 1: constructive young liberals. To get that ordered life, I had
41:48
Speaker 1: realized the need of organization, knowledge, expertness, a wide movement
41:53
Speaker 1: of co ordinated methods. On the individual side, I thought
41:58
Speaker 1: that a life of urgent inducry, temperance, and close attention
42:03
Speaker 1: was indicated by my perception of these ends. I married
42:07
Speaker 1: Margaret and set to work. But something in my mind refused,
42:11
Speaker 1: from the outset to accept these determinations as final. There
42:16
Speaker 1: was always a doubt lurking below, always a faint resentment,
42:20
Speaker 1: a protesting criticism, a feeling of vitally important omissions. I arrived,
42:27
Speaker 1: at last at the clear realization that my political associates,
42:32
Speaker 1: and I in my association with them, were oddly narrow, priggish,
42:37
Speaker 1: and unreal That the socialists with whom we were attempting
42:41
Speaker 1: co operation were preposterously irrelevant to their own theories, that
42:46
Speaker 1: my political life didn't in some way comprehend more than itself,
42:50
Speaker 1: that rather perplexingly, I was missing the thing I was seeking.
42:55
Speaker 1: Britain's footnotes to Alteora's self assertions, her fits of energetic planning,
43:01
Speaker 1: her quarrels and rallies and vanities, his illuminating attacks on Cramptonism,
43:07
Speaker 1: and the heavy spirited triviality of such liberalism as the
43:11
Speaker 1: Children's Charter, served to point my way to my present conclusions.
43:17
Speaker 1: I had been trying to deal all along with human
43:19
Speaker 1: progress as something immediate in life, something to be immediately
43:24
Speaker 1: attacked by political parties and groups pointing primarily to that end.
43:30
Speaker 1: I now began to see that, just as in my
43:33
Speaker 1: own being, there was the rather shallow, rather vulgar, self
43:37
Speaker 1: seeking careerist who wore an admirable silk hat and bustled
43:41
Speaker 1: self consciously through the lobby, and a much greater and
43:45
Speaker 1: indefinitely growing unpublished personality behind him, my hinterland. I have
43:51
Speaker 1: called it so. In human affairs generally, the permanent reality
43:55
Speaker 1: is also a hinter land, which is never really immediate,
43:59
Speaker 1: which draws continually upon human experience and influences human action
44:04
Speaker 1: more and more, but which is itself never the actual
44:08
Speaker 1: player upon the stage. It is the unseen dramatist who
44:12
Speaker 1: never takes a call. Now it was just through the
44:16
Speaker 1: fact that our group about the bailies didn't understand this,
44:19
Speaker 1: that with a sort of frantic energy they were trying
44:22
Speaker 1: to develop that sham expert officialdom of theirs to plan,
44:26
Speaker 1: regulate and direct the affairs of humanity. That the perplexing
44:31
Speaker 1: note of silliness and shallowness that I had always felt
44:34
Speaker 1: and felt now most acutely under Britain's Gibes came in.
44:39
Speaker 1: They were neglecting human life altogether. In social organization, in
44:44
Speaker 1: the development of intellectual modesty lies the growth of statesmanship.
44:49
Speaker 1: It has been the chronic mistake of statecraft and all
44:53
Speaker 1: organizing spirits to attempt immediately to scheme and arrange and
44:57
Speaker 1: achieve priests rules of thought, political schemers leaders of men
45:04
Speaker 1: have always slipped into the error of assuming that they
45:07
Speaker 1: can think out the whole, or at any rate completely
45:10
Speaker 1: think out definite parts of the purpose and future of
45:13
Speaker 1: man clearly. And finally they have set themselves to legislate
45:18
Speaker 1: and construct on that assumption, and, experiencing the perplexing obduracy
45:24
Speaker 1: and evasions of reality, they have taken to dogma, persecution, training, pruning,
45:30
Speaker 1: secretive education, and all the stupidities of self sufficient energy.
45:36
Speaker 1: In the passion of their good intentions, they have not
45:39
Speaker 1: hesitated to conceal fact, suppress thought, crush disturbing initiatives and
45:45
Speaker 1: apparently detrimental desires. And so it is blunderingly and wastefully
45:51
Speaker 1: destroying with the making that any extension of social organization
45:56
Speaker 1: is at present achieved directly. However, this idea of an
46:01
Speaker 1: emancipation from immediacy is grasped directly. The dominating importance of
46:06
Speaker 1: this critical, less personal mental hinterland in the individual and
46:11
Speaker 1: of the collective mind in the race is understood. The
46:15
Speaker 1: whole problem of the statesman and his attitude towards politics
46:19
Speaker 1: gain a new significance and become accessible to a new
46:23
Speaker 1: series of solutions. He wants no longer to fix up,
46:27
Speaker 1: as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces
46:32
Speaker 1: to the development of that needed intellectual life, without which
46:36
Speaker 1: all his shallow attempts at fixing up a futile. He
46:40
Speaker 1: ceases to build on the sands and sets himself to
46:44
Speaker 1: gather foundations. You see, I began in my teens by
46:48
Speaker 1: wanting to plan and build cities and harbours for mankind.
46:53
Speaker 1: I ended in the middle thirties by desiring only to
46:56
Speaker 1: serve and increase a general process of thought, a process fearless, critical, real, spirited,
47:04
Speaker 1: that would, in its own time give cities, harbors, air, happiness,
47:09
Speaker 1: everything at a scale and quality, and in a light
47:12
Speaker 1: altogether beyond the match striking imaginations of a contemporary mind.
47:18
Speaker 1: I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion, vigor of thought,
47:23
Speaker 1: and the cultivation of that impulsive veracity that lurks more
47:27
Speaker 1: or less discourage in every man. With that, I felt
47:31
Speaker 1: there must go an emotion. I hit upon a phrase
47:34
Speaker 1: that became at last something of a refrain in my
47:37
Speaker 1: speech and writings, to convey the spirit that I felt
47:41
Speaker 1: was at the very heart of real human progress, love
47:45
Speaker 1: and fine thinking. I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in
47:50
Speaker 1: England gets through a week without the repetition of that phrase.
47:55
Speaker 1: My convictions crystallize more and more definitely upon this. The
48:00
Speaker 1: more of love and fine thinking, the better for men,
48:03
Speaker 1: I said, the less the worse. And upon this fresh
48:07
Speaker 1: basis I set myself to examine what eyes a politician
48:11
Speaker 1: might do. I perceived I was at last finding an
48:15
Speaker 1: adequate expression for all that was in me, for those
48:18
Speaker 1: forces that had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead,
48:23
Speaker 1: at the secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the
48:27
Speaker 1: dull unrealities of city merchants, at the conventions and timidities
48:32
Speaker 1: of the pinkie dinkies, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity,
48:36
Speaker 1: and the phrases and tradition worship of my political associates.
48:41
Speaker 1: None of these things were half alive, and I wanted
48:45
Speaker 1: life to be intensely alive and awake. I wanted thought
48:49
Speaker 1: like an edge of steel, and desire like a flame.
48:52
Speaker 1: The real work before mankind, now, I realize, once and
48:56
Speaker 1: for all, is the enlargement of human expression, the release
49:00
Speaker 1: and intensification of human thought, the vivider utilization of experience,
49:06
Speaker 1: and the invigoration of research. And whatever one does in
49:10
Speaker 1: human affairs has or lacks value as it helps or
49:14
Speaker 1: hinders that. With that, I had got my problem clear,
49:19
Speaker 1: and the solution, so far as I was concerned, lay
49:22
Speaker 1: in finding out the point in the ostensible life of
49:25
Speaker 1: politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I
49:30
Speaker 1: was still against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had
49:33
Speaker 1: hunted them down now to their essential form. The jerry
49:37
Speaker 1: built slums, the roads that went nowhere, the tarred fences,
49:42
Speaker 1: litigious notice boards and barbed wire fencing, the litter and
49:46
Speaker 1: the heaps of dump were only the outward appearances whose
49:50
Speaker 1: ultimate realities were jerry built conclusions, hasty purposes, aimless habits
49:56
Speaker 1: of thought, and imbecileed bars and prohibitions in the thoughts
50:00
Speaker 1: and souls of men. How are we, through politics to
50:04
Speaker 1: get at that confusion. We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education.
50:10
Speaker 1: We want to create a sustained counter effort to the
50:13
Speaker 1: perpetual tendency of all educational organizations towards classicalism, secondary issues,
50:21
Speaker 1: and the evasion of life. We want to stimulate the
50:24
Speaker 1: expression of life through art and literature, and its exploration
50:29
Speaker 1: through research. We want to make the best and finest
50:32
Speaker 1: thought accessible to everyone, and more particularly, to create and
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Speaker 1: sustain an enormous free criticism, without which art, literature, and
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Speaker 1: research alike degenerate into traditional imposture. Then all the other
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Speaker 1: problems which are now so insoluble, destitution, disease, the difficulty
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Speaker 1: of maintaining international peace, the scarcely faced possibility of making
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Speaker 1: life generally and continually beautiful, become easy. It was clear
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Speaker 1: to me that the most vital activities in which I
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Speaker 1: could engage would be those which most directly affected the church,
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Speaker 1: public habits of thought, education, organized research, literature, and the
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Speaker 1: channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how
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Speaker 1: my position as Liberal Member for kingdomstead squared with and
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Speaker 1: conduced to this essential work. End of Chapter nine, Section
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Speaker 1: two