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The New Machiavelli Chapter 4 Part 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Chapter four, Section one 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 Adolescence one. I find it very difficult to trace
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  Speaker 1: how form was added to form an interpretation followed interpretation
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  Speaker 1: in my ever spreading, ever deepening, ever multiplying and enriching
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  Speaker 1: vision of this world into which I had been born.
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  Speaker 1: Every day added its impressions, its hints, its subtle explications
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  Speaker 1: to the growing understanding day after day, the living, interlacing
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  Speaker 1: threads of a mind weave together every morning now for
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  Speaker 1: three weeks and more. For to day is Thursday, and
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  Speaker 1: I started on a Tuesday. I have been trying to
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  Speaker 1: convey some idea of the factors and early influences by
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  Speaker 1: which my particular scrap of subjective tapestry was shaped. To
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  Speaker 1: show the child playing on the nursery floor the sun,
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  Speaker 1: perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his dead father,
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  Speaker 1: exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first intimations of the sexual mystery,
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  Speaker 1: coming in with a sort of confused avidity, towards the
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  Speaker 1: centers of the life of London. It is only by
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  Speaker 1: such an effort to write it down, that one realizes
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  Speaker 1: how marvelously crowded, how marvelously analytical and synthetic, those ears
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  Speaker 1: must be. One begins with a little child, to whom
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  Speaker 1: the sky is a roof of blue, the world a
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  Speaker 1: screen of opaque and disconnected facts, the home a thing
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  Speaker 1: eternal and being good, just simple obedience to unquestioned authority.
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  Speaker 1: And one comes at last to the vast world of
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  Speaker 1: one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of partial
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  Speaker 1: understanding here mass by mists, here a fracted and distorted
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  Speaker 1: through half translucent veils, here showing broad prospects and limitless fistas,
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  Speaker 1: and here impenetrably dark. I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts,
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  Speaker 1: and even prayers by night, and strange occasions when by
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  Speaker 1: sort of hypnotic contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce
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  Speaker 1: the web of appearances about me. It is hard to
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  Speaker 1: measure these things in receding perspective, and now I cannot
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  Speaker 1: trace so closely as mood succeeded in overlaid and obliterated mood,
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  Speaker 1: the phases by which an utter horror of death was
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  Speaker 1: replaced by the growing realization of its necessity and dignity,
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  Speaker 1: difficulty of the imagination with infinite space infinite time entangled
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  Speaker 1: my mind and moral distress for the pain and suffering
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  Speaker 1: of bygone ages that made all thought of reformation in
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  Speaker 1: the future seemed but the grimace irony upon now irreparable wrongs.
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  Speaker 1: Many an intricate perplexity of these broadening years did not
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  Speaker 1: so much get settled as cease to matter. Life crowded
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  Speaker 1: me away from it. I have confessed myself a temorareus theologian,
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  Speaker 1: And in that passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged
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  Speaker 1: widely in my search for some permanently satisfying truth that
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  Speaker 1: too ceased after a time to be urgently interesting. I
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  Speaker 1: came at last into a phase that endures to this day,
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  Speaker 1: of absolute tranquility, of absolute confidence in whatever that incomprehensible, comprehensive,
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  Speaker 1: which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be,
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  Speaker 1: feeling of it, feeling by it. I cannot feel afraid
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  Speaker 1: of it. I think I have got quite clearly and
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  Speaker 1: finally to that adjustment, long before my Cambridge days were done.
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  Speaker 1: I'm sure that the even in life is transitory and finite,
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  Speaker 1: like an accident or distress in the nursery, that God
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  Speaker 1: is my father, and that I may trust him even
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  Speaker 1: though life hurts so that one must needs cry out
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  Speaker 1: at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure,
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  Speaker 1: no promise but pain. But while I was fearless of theology,
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  Speaker 1: I must confess it was comparatively late before I faced
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  Speaker 1: and dared to probe the secrecies of sex. I was
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  Speaker 1: afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that it
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  Speaker 1: would be a large and difficult thing in my life.
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  Speaker 1: But my early training was all in the direction of
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  Speaker 1: regarding it as an irrelevant thing, as something disconnected from
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  Speaker 1: all the broad significances of life, as hostile and disgraceful
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  Speaker 1: in its quality. The world was never so emasculated in thought,
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  Speaker 1: I suppose, as it was in the Victorian time. I
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  Speaker 1: was afraid to think either of sex or or what
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  Speaker 1: I have always found inseparable from a kind of sexual emotion, beauty.
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  Speaker 1: Even as a boy, I knew the thing as a
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  Speaker 1: haunting and alluring mystery that I tried to keep away from.
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  Speaker 1: Its dim presence obsessed me. Nonetheless, for all the extravagant decency,
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  Speaker 1: the stimulating silences of my upbringing, the plaster venuses and
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  Speaker 1: apollos that used to adorn the vast aisle and huge
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  Speaker 1: gray terraces of the Crystal Palace were the first intimations
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  Speaker 1: of the beauty of the body that ever came into
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  Speaker 1: my life. As I write of it, I feel again
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  Speaker 1: the shameful attraction of those gracious forms. I used to
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  Speaker 1: look at them, not simply but curiously and askance. Once,
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  Speaker 1: at least in my later days at Penge, I spent
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  Speaker 1: a shilling in admission, chiefly for the sake of them.
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  Speaker 1: The strangest thing of all my odd and solitary upbringing
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  Speaker 1: seems to me now that swathing up of all the
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  Speaker 1: splendors of the fleg that strange combination of fanatical terrorism
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  Speaker 1: and shyness that fenced me about with prohibitions. It caused
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  Speaker 1: me to grow up, I will not say blankly ignorant,
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  Speaker 1: but with an ignorance blurred and dishonored by shame, by
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  Speaker 1: enigmatical warnings, by cultivated aversions, an ignorance in which a
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  Speaker 1: fascinated curiosity and desire struggled like a thing in a net.
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  Speaker 1: I knew so little and I felt so much. There
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  Speaker 1: was indeed no aphrodite at all in my youthful pantheon.
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  Speaker 1: But instead there was a mysterious and miniatary gap. I
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  Speaker 1: have told how at last a new venus was borne
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  Speaker 1: in my imagination out of gas lamps in the twilight,
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  Speaker 1: a venus with a cockney accent and dark eyes shining
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  Speaker 1: out of the dusk, A venus who was a warm
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  Speaker 1: passion stirring atmosphere rather than incarnate in a body. And
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  Speaker 1: I have told too how I bought a picture. All
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  Speaker 1: this was a thing apart from the rest of my life,
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  Speaker 1: a locked, avoided chamber. It was not until my last
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  Speaker 1: year at Trinity that I really broke down the barriers
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  Speaker 1: of this unwholesome silence and brought my secret broodings to
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  Speaker 1: the light of day. Then a little set of us
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  Speaker 1: plunged suddenly into what we called at first sociological discussion.
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  Speaker 1: I can still recall even the physical feeling of those
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  Speaker 1: first tentative talks. I remember them mostly as occurring in
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  Speaker 1: the rooms of Ted Hatheley, who kept at the corner
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  Speaker 1: by the Trinity Great Gate. But we also used to
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  Speaker 1: talk a good deal at a man's in King's, a
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  Speaker 1: man named if I remember rightly, redmin the atmosphere of
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  Speaker 1: Hathelye's rooms was a haze of tobacco smoke against a
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  Speaker 1: background brown and deep. He professed himself a socialist with
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  Speaker 1: anarchistic leanings. He had suffered the martyrdom of Ducking for it,
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  Speaker 1: and a huge French May Day poster displaying a splendid
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  Speaker 1: plotarian in red and black on a barricade against a
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  Speaker 1: flaring orange sky dominated His decorations, hathily affected a fine, untidiness,
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  Speaker 1: and all the place, even the floor, was littered with
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  Speaker 1: books for the most part, open and face downward. Deeper
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  Speaker 1: darknesses were supplied by a discarded gown, and our caps,
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  Speaker 1: all conscientiously battered hatherlys flopped like an elephant's ear, and
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  Speaker 1: inserted quill pens supported the corners of mine. The highlights
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  Speaker 1: of the picture came chiefly as reflections from his checkered
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  Speaker 1: blue mugs full of audit ale. We sat on oak chairs,
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  Speaker 1: except the four or five who crowded on a capacious settle.
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  Speaker 1: We drank a lot of beer and were often fuddled
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  Speaker 1: and occasionally quite drunk, and we all smoked reckless looking pipes.
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  Speaker 1: There was a transient fashion among us for corn cobs,
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  Speaker 1: for which Mark Twain I think was responsible. Our little
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  Speaker 1: excesses with liquor would do far more to conscience than appetite.
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  Speaker 1: Indicated chiefly a resolve to break away from restraints that
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  Speaker 1: we suspected were keeping us off the instructive knife edges
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  Speaker 1: of life. Hatherley was a good Englishman, of the premature type,
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  Speaker 1: with a red face, a lot of hair, a deep voice,
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  Speaker 1: and an explosive, plunging manner. And it was he who
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  Speaker 1: said one evening, heaven knows how he got to it.
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  Speaker 1: Look here, you know, it's all rot this shutting up
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  Speaker 1: about women. We ought to talk about them. What are
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  Speaker 1: we going to do about them? It's got to come.
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  Speaker 1: We're all festering inside about it. Let's out with it.
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  Speaker 1: There's too much decency altogether about this infernal university. We
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  Speaker 1: rose to his challenge a little awkwardly, and our first
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  Speaker 1: talk was clumsy. There were flushed faces and red ears,
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  Speaker 1: and I remember Hathily broke out into a monologue on decency.
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  Speaker 1: Fristiern decency, said Hatheley. Are Oriental vices. The Jews brought
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  Speaker 1: them to Europe. They're Semitic, just like our monasticism here,
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  Speaker 1: and the seclusion of women are mutilating the dead on
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  Speaker 1: a battlefield, and all that sort of thing. Hathaly's mind
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  Speaker 1: progressed by huge leaps, leaps that were usually wildly inaccurate,
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  Speaker 1: and for a time we engaged hotly upon the topic
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  Speaker 1: of those alleged mutilations and the Semitic responsibility for decency.
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  Speaker 1: Hathalely tried hard to saddle the Semitic race with the
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  Speaker 1: less elegant war customs of the Soudan and the northwest
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  Speaker 1: frontier of India, and quoted Doughty, at that time a
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  Speaker 1: little known author and Cunningham Graham to show that the
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  Speaker 1: Arab was worse than a county town spinster in his
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  Speaker 1: regard for respectability. But his case was too preposterous. An Esmere,
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  Speaker 1: with his shrill, penetrating voice and his way of pointing
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  Speaker 1: with all four long fingers flat together, carried the point
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  Speaker 1: against him. He quoted Cato and Roman law and the
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  Speaker 1: monasteries of Tibet. Well, anyway, said Hathily, escaping from our
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  Speaker 1: hands like an intellectual frog, Sumitic or not, I've got
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  Speaker 1: no use for decency. We argued points, and Hathily professed
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  Speaker 1: an unusually balanced and tolerating attitude I don't mind a
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  Speaker 1: certain refinement and dignity, he admitted generously. What I object
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  Speaker 1: to is this spreading out of decency until it darkens
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  Speaker 1: the whole sky, until it makes a man's father afraid
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  Speaker 1: to speak of the most important things, until it makes
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  Speaker 1: a man afraid to look a frank book in the face,
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  Speaker 1: or think even think, until it leads to our coming
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  Speaker 1: to the business at last, with nothing but a few prohibitions,
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  Speaker 1: a few hints, a lot of dirty jokes, and and
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  Speaker 1: he waved a hand and seemed to seek and catch
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  Speaker 1: his image in the air. Oh, a confounded, buttered slide
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  Speaker 1: of sentiment to guide us. I tell you I'm going
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  Speaker 1: to think about it and talk about it until I
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  Speaker 1: see a little more daylight than I do at present.
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  Speaker 1: I'm twenty two. Things might happen to me anywhen you
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  Speaker 1: men can go out into the world. If you like
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  Speaker 1: to sin like fools and marry like fools, not knowing
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  Speaker 1: what you're doing and ashamed to ask, you'll take the
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  Speaker 1: consequences too. I expect pretty meekly sniggering, a bit sentimentalizing,
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  Speaker 1: a bit like like Cambridge humorists. I mean to know
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  Speaker 1: what I'm doing, he paused, to drink, and I think
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  Speaker 1: I cut in with ideas of my own. But one
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  Speaker 1: is apt to forget one's own share in a talk.
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  Speaker 1: I find more than one does the clear cut objectivity
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  Speaker 1: of other people's. And I do not know how far
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  Speaker 1: I can contributed to this discussion that followed. I am, however,
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  Speaker 1: pretty certain that it was then that ideal that we
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  Speaker 1: were pleased to call aristocracy, and which soon became the
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  Speaker 1: common property of our set, was developed. It was Esmere,
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  Speaker 1: I know, who laid down and maintained the proposition that,
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  Speaker 1: so far as minds went, there were really only two
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  Speaker 1: sorts of man in the world, the aristocrat and the
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  Speaker 1: man who subdues his mind to other people's. I couldn't
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  Speaker 1: think of it, sir, said Esmere, in his elucidatory tones.
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  Speaker 1: That's what a servant says. His mind even is broken
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  Speaker 1: in to run between fences, and he admits it. We've
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  Speaker 1: got to be able to think of anything, and such
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  Speaker 1: things aren't for the likes of us. That's another servant saying, well,
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  Speaker 1: everything is for the likes of us, if we see fit.
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  Speaker 1: That is, A small, fresh colored man in gray objected well,
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  Speaker 1: exploded hathily. If that isn't so. What the deuce we
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  Speaker 1: are up here four instead of working in minds if
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  Speaker 1: some things aren't to be thought about ever, we've got
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  Speaker 1: the privilege of all these extra years for getting things
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  Speaker 1: straight in our heads, and then we won't use them.
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  Speaker 1: Good God, what do you think a university is? Four?
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  Speaker 1: Esmeir's idea came with an effect of real emancipation to
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  Speaker 1: several of us. We were not going to be afraid
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  Speaker 1: of ideas any longer. We were going to throw down
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  Speaker 1: every barrier of prohibition and take them in and see
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  Speaker 1: what came of it. We became, for a time even
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  Speaker 1: intemperately experimental, and one of us, at the bare suggestion
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  Speaker 1: of an eminent psychic investigator, took hashish and very nearly
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  Speaker 1: died of it within a fortnight of our great elucidation.
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  Speaker 1: The chief matter of our interchanges was, of course, the
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  Speaker 1: discussion of sex. Once the theme had been opened, it
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  Speaker 1: became a sore place in our intercourse. None of us
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: seemed able to keep a away from it. Our imagination's
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  Speaker 1: got a stir with it. We made up for lost
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  Speaker 1: time and went round it and threw it and over
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  Speaker 1: it exhaustively. I recall prolonged discussion of polygamy on the
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  Speaker 1: way to Royston, muddy November tramps to maddingly when amidst
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  Speaker 1: much profanity from hathiy at the serious treatment of so
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  Speaker 1: obsolete a matter, we weighed the reasons, if any, for
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: the institution of marriage. The fine, dim night time spaces
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: of the Great Court are bound up with the inconclusive
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: finales of mighty hot eared wrangles. The narrows of Trinity
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: Street and petty Curian Market Hill have their particular associations
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  Speaker 1: for me with that spate of confession and free speech,
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  Speaker 1: that almost painful gold delivery of long pent and crappled
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: and sometimes crippled ideas. And we went on a reading
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: party that Easter to a place called Pulbur in Sussex,
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: where there is a fishing inn and a river that
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  Speaker 1: goes under a bridge. It was a late Eastern, a
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  Speaker 1: blazing one, and we boated and bathed and talked of
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: being hellenic and the beauty of the body, until at
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  Speaker 1: moments it seemed to us that we were destined to
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: restore the Golden Age by the simple abolition of tailors
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: and outfitters. Those undergraduate talks, how rich and glorious they seemed,
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: how splendidly new the ideas that grew and multiplied in
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  Speaker 1: our seething minds. We made long afternoon and evening raids
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: over the downs towards Arundel, and would come tramping back
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  Speaker 1: through the still keen moonlight, singing and shouting. We formed
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  Speaker 1: romantic friendships with one another, and grieved more or less
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: convincingly that there were no splendid women fit to be
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: our companions in the world. But Hathily, it seemed, had
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: once known a girl whose hair was gloriously red, My
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: God said, hathily to convey the quality of her just
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: simply and with projuctile violence. My God Benton had heard
• 17:04
  Speaker 1: of a woman who lived with a man, refusing to
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  Speaker 1: be married to him. We thought that splendid beyond measure.
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  Speaker 1: I cannot now imagine why she was like a tender goddess,
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: Benton said. A sort of shame came upon us in
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  Speaker 1: the dark in spite of our liberal intentions when Benton
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: committed himself to that. And after such talk we would
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: fall upon great pauses of emotional dreaming. And if by
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  Speaker 1: chance we passed a girl in a governess cart or
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: some farmer's daughter walking to the station. We became alertly
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  Speaker 1: silent or obstreperously indifferent to her, for might she not
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: be just that one exception to the banal decency, the
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: sickly pointless conventionality, the sham modesty of the times in
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: which we lived. We felt we stood for a new movement,
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: not realizing how perennially this same emancipation returns to those
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: ai ancient courts beside the cam We were the anti
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: decency party. We discovered a catch phrase that we flourished
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: about in the Union and made our watchword, namely stark fact.
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: We hung nude pictures in our rooms, much as if
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: there had been flags, to the earnest concern of our bedders.
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: And I disinterred my long kept engraving and had it
• 18:23
  Speaker 1: framed in fumed oak, and found for it a completer
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: and less restrained companion, a companion I never cared for
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  Speaker 1: in the slightest degree. This effel escence did not prevent
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: I think, indeed, it rather helped our more formal university work.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: For most of us took firsts, and three of us
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: got fellowships in one year or another. There was Benton
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: who had a research fellowship and went to Tubingen. There
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: was Zmir and myself, who both became residential fellows. I
• 18:53
  Speaker 1: had taken the Mental and Moral science tripos, as it
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: was then, and three years later I got a lectureship
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: in political science. In those days it was disguised in
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: the cloak of political economy. Two. It was our affectation
• 19:11
  Speaker 1: to be a little detached from the mainstream of undergraduate life.
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: We worked pretty hard, but by virtue of our bier,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: our socialism and such like heterodoxy, held ourselves to be
• 19:22
  Speaker 1: differentiated from the swatting reading man. None of us, except Baxter,
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: who was a rowing blue, a rather abnormal blue with
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: an appetite for ideas, took games seriously enough to train.
• 19:35
  Speaker 1: And on the other hand, we intimated contempt for the
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: rather mediocre, deliberately humorous, consciously gentlemanly, and consciously wild undergraduate
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: men who made up the mass of Cambridge life. After
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: the manner of youth. We were altogether too hard on
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  Speaker 1: our contemporaries. We battered our caps and tore our gowns
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: lest they should seem new, and we despised these others
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: ex extremely for doing exactly the same things we had
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: an idea of ourselves and resented beyond measure a similar
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: weakness in these our brothers. There was a type, or
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: at least there seemed to us to be a type.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: I'm a little doubtful at times now whether, after all,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: we didn't create it, for which Haaviily invented the nickname
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: the pinky Dinkies, intending thereby both contempt and abhorrent in
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: almost equal measure. The pinky dinky summarized all that we
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: particularly did not want to be, and also I now
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: perceive much of what we were and all that we
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: secretly dreaded becoming. But it is hard to convey the
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: pinky dinky idea, for all that it meant so much
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  Speaker 1: to us. We spent one evening at least during that
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  Speaker 1: reading party, upon the pinky dinky. We sat about our
• 20:50
  Speaker 1: one fire after a walk in the rain it was
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: our only wet day, smoked our excessively virile pipes, and
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: elaborated the natural history of the pinky dinky. We improvise
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: the sort of pinky dinky littany, and Hathily supplied deep
• 21:06
  Speaker 1: notes for the responses. The pinky Dinky extracts a good
• 21:10
  Speaker 1: deal of amusement from life, said someone damn prig, said hathily.
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  Speaker 1: The pinky dinky rises in the union and treats the
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: question with a light gay touch. He makes the weird
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: ones mad, but sometimes he cannot go on because of
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: the amusement he extracts. I want to shy books at
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: the giggling swine, said hathily. The pinky dinky says, suddenly,
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: while he is making the tea, we're all being frightfully funny.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: It's time for you to say something now. The pinky
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: dinky shakes his head and says, I'm afraid I shall
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: never be a responsible being. And he really is frivolous.
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: Frivolous but not vulgar, said Esmere. Pinky dink is are
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: chaps who have had their buds nipped, said Hathily. They're
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: plebs and they know it. They haven't the guts to
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: get hold of things, and so they worry up all
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: those silly little jokes of theirs to carry it off.
• 22:04
  Speaker 1: We tried bad ones for a time. Viciously flavored pinky
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: dinkies are due to overproduction of the type that ought
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: to keep outfitters shops. Pinky dinkies would like to keep
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: outfitter shops with whimsy scriptions on the boxes, and make
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: your bill out funny, and not be snobs to customers. No,
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: not even if they had titles. Every Pinky Dinky's people
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: are rather good people, and better than most Pinky dinkies people.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: But he does not put on side pinky Dinkies became
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: playful at the sight of women. Croak is my game,
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: said the pinky Dinky, and felt a man condescended. But
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: what the devil do they think they're up to? Anyhow,
• 22:45
  Speaker 1: roared old Hathily, suddenly dropping plump into bottomless despair. We
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: felt we had still failed to get at the core
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: of the mystery of the pinky Dinky. We tried over
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: things about his religion. The pinky Dinky goes to King's
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: chin Apple and sits and feels in the dusk solemn things.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: Oh hush, he wouldn't tell you. He couldn't tell you.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Religion is so sacred to him. He never talks about it,
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: never reads about it, never thinks about it, just feels.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: But in his heart of hearts, oh ever so deep.
• 23:19
  Speaker 1: The pinky Dinky has a doubt, someone protested, not a
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: vulgar doubt. Esmea went on, but a kind of hesitation
• 23:28
  Speaker 1: whether the ancient of days is really exactly what one
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: would call good form. There's a lot of horrid coarseness
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: got into the world somehow, somebody put it there, and
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: anyhow there's no particular reason why man should be seen
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: about with him. He's jolly awful, of course, and all that.
• 23:46
  Speaker 1: The Pinky Dinky, for all his fun and levity, has
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: a clean mind, a thoroughly clean mind, not like esmire
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: as the pig. If once he began to think about sex,
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: how could he be comfortable at croquy. It's there, damn modesty,
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: said hathily Suddenly, that's what's the matter with Pinky Dinkie.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: It's mental cowardice dressed up as virtue and taking the
• 24:09
  Speaker 1: poor deers in Cambridge is soaked with it. It's some
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: confounded local basilus, like the thing that gives a flavor
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: to Harvana's cigars. He comes up here to be made
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: into a man and a rule of the people, and
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: he thinks it shows a nice disposition not to take
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: on the job. How the devil is a great empire
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: to be run with men like him. All his little
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: jokes and things said Esmere, regarding his feet on the fender.
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: It's just a nervous sniggering because he's afraid Oxfords know better.
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: What's he afraid of? Said I God knows, exploded hathily
• 24:48
  Speaker 1: and stared at the fire life, said Esmere. And so
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: in a way are we? He added, and made a
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: thoughtful silence for a time, I say, began car who
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: is doing the natural science tripos? What is the adult
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: form of the pinky dinkie? But there we were checked
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: by our ignorance of the world. What is the adult
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: form of any of us? Asked Benton, voicing the thought
• 25:14
  Speaker 1: that had arrested our flow. Three. I do not remember
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: that we ever lifted our criticism to the dons and
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: the organization of the university. I think we took them
• 25:27
  Speaker 1: for granted. When I look back at my youth, I'm
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: always astonished by the multitude of things that we took
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: for granted. It seemed to us that Cambridge was in
• 25:38
  Speaker 1: the order of things for all the world, like having
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: eyebrows or a vermiform appendix. Now, with the larger skepticism
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: of middle age, I can entertain very fundamental doubts about
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: these old universities. Indeed, I had a scheme. I do
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: not see what harm I can do now by laying
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: bare the purpose of the political combinations I was trying
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: to affec My educational scheme was indeed the starting point
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: of all the big project of conscious public reconstruction at
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: which I aimed. I wanted to build up a new
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: educational machine altogether for the governing class, out of a
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: consolidated system of special public service schools. I meant to
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: get to work upon this. Whatever office I was given
• 26:23
  Speaker 1: in the new government, I could have begun my plan
• 26:27
  Speaker 1: from the Admiralty or the War Office quite as easily
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: as from the Education Office. I am firmly convinced it
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: is hopeless to think of reforming the old public schools
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: and universities to meet the needs of a modern state.
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: They send their routes too deep and far. The cost
• 26:43
  Speaker 1: would exceed any good that could possibly be effected, and
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: so I have sought a way round this invincible obstacle.
• 26:51
  Speaker 1: I do think it would be quite practicable to sidetrack,
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: as the Americans say, the whole system by creating hard working,
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: hard living, modern and scientific boys' schools, first for the
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: Royal Navy, and then for the public service generally, and
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: as they grew, opening them to the public without any
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: absolute obligation to subsequent service. Simultaneously with this, it would
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: not be impossible to develop a new college system with
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: strong faculties in modern philosophy, modern history, European literature and criticism,
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: physical and biological science, education, and sociology. We could in
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: fact create a new liberal education in this way and
• 27:35
  Speaker 1: cut the umbilicus of the classical languages for good and all.
• 27:40
  Speaker 1: I should have set this going and trusted it to
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: correct or kill the old public schools and the Oxford
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: and Cambridge traditional together. I had men in my mind
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: to begin the work, and I should have found others.
• 27:52
  Speaker 1: I should have aimed at making a hard, trained, capable,
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: intellectually active, proud type of man. Everything else would have
• 28:01
  Speaker 1: been made subservient to that. I should have kept my
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: grip on the men through their vocation, and somehow or
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: other I would have contrived a young woman to match them.
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: I think I could have seen to it effectually enough
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: that they didn't get at croquer in tennis with the
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: vicarage daughters and discover sex in the peeping tom fashion
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: I did, and that they realized quite early in life
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: that it isn't really virile to reek of tobacco. I
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: should have had military maneuvers, training ships, aeroplane work, mountaineering,
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: and so forth in the place of the solemn trivialities
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: of games. And I should have fed and housed my
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: men clean and very hard, where there wasn't any audit ale,
• 28:44
  Speaker 1: no credit tradesmen, and plenty of high pressure douches. I
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: have revisited Cambridge and Oxford time after time since I
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: came down, and so far as the empire goes, I
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: want to get clear of those two places. Always I
• 29:00
  Speaker 1: renew my old feelings, a physical oppression, a sense of
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: lowness and dampness, almost exactly like the feeling of an
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: underground room where paper molders and leaves the wall. A
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: feeling of ineradicable contagion in the gothic buildings, in the
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: narrow ditch like rivers, in those roads and roads of
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: stuffy little villas. Those little villas have destroyed all the
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: good of the old monastic system and none of its evil.
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Some of the most charming people in the world live
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: in them, but their collective effect is below the quality
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: of any individual among them. Cambridge is a world of
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: subdued tones, of excessively subtle humors, of prim conduct and
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: free thinking. It fears the parent, but it has no
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: fear of God. It offers amid surroundings that vary between disguises,
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: an antiquarian charm, the inflammation of literature's purple draft. When
• 29:58
  Speaker 1: hears there a peculiar thin s scandal like no other
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: scandal in the world, a covetous scandal, so that I
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: am always reminded of Ibsen in Cambridge. In Cambridge and
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: the plays of Ibsen alone, does it seem appropriate for
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: the heroine, before the great crisis of life to enter,
• 30:15
  Speaker 1: take off her overshoes, and put her wet umbrella upon
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: the writing desk. We have to make a new academic
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: mind for modern needs, and the last thing to make
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: it out of, I am convinced is the old academic mind.
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: One might as soon try to fake the old victory
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: at Portsmouth into a line of battleship again. Besides which,
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: the old academic mind, like those old, bathless, damp Gothic colleges,
• 30:42
  Speaker 1: is much too delightful in its peculiar and distinctive way
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: to damage by futile patching. My heart warms to a
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old Codger,
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: surely the most unleaderly of men, No more than from
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: the old schoolman his kindred could one get from him
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: a school for princes. Yet apart from his teaching, he
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: was as curious and adorable as a good netsuki. Until
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: quite recently he was a power in Cambridge. He could make,
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: and bar and destroy, and in a way he has
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: become the quintessence of Cambridge. In my thoughts, I see
• 31:20
  Speaker 1: him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly nonprehensile fat
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: hand carrying his cap, his gray trousers braced up much
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: too high, his feet a trifle interned, and going across
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: the Great Court with a queer tripping pace that seemed
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I see
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: him lecturing. He lectured, walking up and down between the desks,
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: talking in a fluting, rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity.
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: If he could not walk up and down, he could
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: not lecture. His mind and voice had precisely the fluid
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: quality of some clear, subtle liquid. One felt it could
• 32:05
  Speaker 1: flow round anything and overcome nothing, and its nimble eddies
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: were wonderful. Or again I recall him drinking port with
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: little muscular movements in his neck and cheek and chin,
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: and his brows knit very judicial, very concentrated, preparing to
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: say the act just thing. It was the last thing
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: he would have told a lie about. When I think
• 32:30
  Speaker 1: of Codure, I am reminded of an inscription I saw
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: on some occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: more limpidly innocent than his born in the menagerie. Never
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: once since Cojure began to display the early promise of
• 32:46
  Speaker 1: scholarship at the age of eight or more, had he
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: lecture here and lecture there. His student face had culminated
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: in papers of quite exceptional brilliandiance, and he had gone
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: mannerism that had made him a success. From the beginning.
• 33:08
  Speaker 1: He has lectured ever since. He lectures still year by
• 33:13
  Speaker 1: year he has become plumper, more rubicund, and more and
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: more of an item for the intelligent visitor to see.
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: Even in my time, he was pointed out to people
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it.
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: He has become now almost the leading character in a
• 33:31
  Speaker 1: little donish world of much too intensely appreciated characters. He
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: boasted he took no exercise. And also of his knowledge
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: of port wine of other wines, he confessed, quite frankly,
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: he had no special knowledge. Beyond these things. He had
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: little pride, except that he claimed to have read every
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: novel by a woman writer that had ever entered the
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: Union Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable rather
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: than illobling, and such boasts as he made of it
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: were tinged with playfulness. Certainly, he had a scholar's knowledge
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: of the works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: Elizabeth Glynn, and Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: and flattered those ladies enormously. And he loved nothing so
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: much in his hours of relaxation as to propound and
• 34:21
  Speaker 1: answer difficult questions upon their books. Tasha of Kings was
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: his ineffectual rival in this field. Their bouchs were memorable
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: and rarely other than glorious. For codger. But then Tasha
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: spread himself too much. He also undertook to her whole
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: pages out of Bradshaw and tell you, with all the changes,
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: how to get from any station to any station in
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: Great Britain by the nearest and cheapest routes. Qunter lodged
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: with a little deaf, innocent old lady missus Arraminta Myrgle,
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable character
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: in the Gyp Bedder class. About her he related quietly
• 35:02
  Speaker 1: absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvelous invention in ascribing to
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: her plausible expressions of opinion, entirely identically in import with
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: those of the Oxford and Harvard pragmatists, against whom he
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: waged a fierce obscure war. It was conscious function to
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: teach me philosophy, philosophy, the intimate wisdom of things. He
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: dealt in a variety of her Galian stuff, like nothing
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: else in the world, but marvelously consistent with itself. It
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer, big, active,
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: childish brain that had never lusted, nor hated, nor grieved,
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: nor feared, nor passionately loved awab of iridescent threads. He
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: had luminous final theories about love and death and immortality,
• 35:54
  Speaker 1: odd matters they seemed for him to think about, And
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: all his woven thoughts lay cross my perception of the
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: realities of things, as flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful,
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: oh as a dew wet spider's web slung in the
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: morning sunshine across the black mouth of a gun. Four.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: All through those years of development, I perceive now there
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: must have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to
• 36:25
  Speaker 1: itself all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: religious impulses, utilizing my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: statesman's idea, that idea of social service, which is the
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: protagonist of my story, that real, though complex passion for
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: making making widely and greatly cities, national order, civilization, whose
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: into play with all those other factors in life I
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: have set out to present. It was growing in me
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: as one's bones grow, no man intending it. I have
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: tried to show how, quite early in my life, the
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: fact of disorderliness, the conception of social life as being
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: a multitudinous confusion out of hand came to me. One always,
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: of course, simplifies these things in the telling. But I
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: do not think I ever saw the world at large
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: in any other terms. I never, at any stage entertained
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: the idea which sustained my mother, and which sustained so
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: many people in the world, the idea that the universe,
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: whatever superficial discords it may present, is, as a matter
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: of fact, all right, is being steered to definite ends
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: by a serene and unquestionable God. My mother thought that
• 37:44
  Speaker 1: order prevailed, and that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: I feel, and have always felt, that order rebels against
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: and struggles against disorder. That order has an uphill job
• 37:58
  Speaker 1: in gardens. Experience suburbs everything alike. From the very beginnings
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: of my experience, I discovered hostility to order, a constant
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: escaping from control. The current of living and contemporary ideas
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: in which my mind was presently swimming made all in
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: the same direction. In place of my mother's attentive, meticulous
• 38:22
  Speaker 1: but occasionally extremely irascible providence, the talk was all of
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: the struggle for existence and the survival, not of the
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: best that was nonsense, but of the fittest to survive.
• 38:35
  Speaker 1: The attempts to rehabilitate faith in the form of the
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: individualist's lays fair never won upon me. I disliked Herbert
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: Spencer all my life until I read his autobiography, and
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: then I laughed a little and loved him. I remember,
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: as early as the City Merchants days, how Britain and
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: I scoffed at that pompous question begging word evolution, having,
• 38:58
  Speaker 1: so to speak, found out evolution. Some illuminating talk had
• 39:03
  Speaker 1: remarked at the Britain lunch table, had led not only
• 39:06
  Speaker 1: to man, but to the liver, fluke and skunk. Obviously
• 39:10
  Speaker 1: it might lead anywhere. Order came into things only through
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: the struggling mind of man that licked things wonderfully for us.
• 39:20
  Speaker 1: When I went up to Cambridge, I was perfectly clear
• 39:23
  Speaker 1: that life was a various and splendid disorder of forces
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: that the spirit of man sets itself to tame. I
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: have never since fallen away from that persuasion. I do
• 39:35
  Speaker 1: not think I was exceptionally precocious in reaching these conclusions,
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: and a sort of religious finality for myself. By eighteen
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: or nineteen, I know men and women vary very much
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: in these matters, just as children do in learning to talk.
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: Some will chatter at eighteen months, and some will hardly
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: speak until three, And the thing has very little to
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: do with their subsequent mental quality. Oh it is with
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: young people. Some will begin their religious, their social, their
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: sexual interests at fourteen, some not until far on in
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: the twenties. Britain and I belonged to one of the
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: precocious types, and Cossington very probably to another. It wasn't
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: that there was anything priggish about any of us. We
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: should have been prigs to have concealed our spontaneous interests
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: and aped the theoretical boy. The world of man centered
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: for my imagination in London. It still centers there, the
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: from the wonderlands of atomic and microscopic science and the
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: stars and future time. I had traveled scarcely at all.
• 40:45
  Speaker 1: I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously,
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: and I had formed a very good working idea of
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: this round globe, with its mountains and wildernesses and forests,
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: and all the sorts and conditions of human life that
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: were scattered over its surface. It was all alive, I
• 41:03
  Speaker 1: felt and changing every day. How it was changing and
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: the changes men might bring about fascinated my mind beyond measure.
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: I used to find a charm in old maps that
• 41:14
  Speaker 1: showed the world as known to the ancients, and I
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: wish I could now, without any suspicion of self deception,
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: right down compactly the world as it was known to
• 41:24
  Speaker 1: me at nineteen So far as extension went, it was
• 41:28
  Speaker 1: I fancy very like the world I know now. At
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: forty two, I had practically all the mountains and seas,
• 41:36
  Speaker 1: boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I have now,
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: but its intention was very different. All the interval had
• 41:45
  Speaker 1: been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing crude and
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: secondhand impressions by felt and realized distinctions. In eighteen ninety five,
• 41:57
  Speaker 1: that was my last year with Britain, for I went
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: up to care Ambridge in September. My vision of the
• 42:02
  Speaker 1: world had much the same relation to the vision I
• 42:05
  Speaker 1: have to day that an ill drawn daub of a
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: mask has to the direct vision of a human face.
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: Brittain and I looked at our world and saw what
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: did we see? Forms and colors side by side that
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no conception
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: of the roots of things, nor of the reaction of things.
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: It did not seem to us, for example, that business
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: had anything to do with government, or that money and
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: means affected the heroic issues of war. There were no
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: wagons in our war game, and where there were guns
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together. Finance, again,
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: was a sealed book to us. We did not so
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: much connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: as regarded as a sort of intrusive nuisance to be
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: earnestly ignored by all right minded men. We had no
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: conception of the quality of politics, nor how interests came
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: into such affairs. We believed men were swayed by purely
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: intellectual convictions, and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: in which case they deserved to be shot good or bad.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: We knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid and
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: convincing exposition. We were capable of the most incongruous transfers
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: from the scroll of history to our own times. We
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: could suppose Brexton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil wars
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: for the succession to the throne, or cheapside a lane
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: of death, and the front of the mansion house set
• 43:45
  Speaker 1: about with guillotines. In the course of an accurately transposed
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: French revolution, we rebuilt London by act of Parliament, and
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: once in a mood of hygienic enterprise, we transferred its
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: popular en mass to the North Downs by an order
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: of the Local Government Board. We thought nothing of throwing
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: religious organizations out of employment, or superseding all the newspapers
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: by freely distributed bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: laws abolishing whole classes. We were equal to such a
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: dream as the peaceful and orderarly proclamation of communism from
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: the steps of Saint Paul's Cathedral, after the passing of
• 44:29
  Speaker 1: a simply worded bill a closer, not unnaturally and exciting
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: division carrying the third reading, I remember quite distinctly evolving
• 44:39
  Speaker 1: that vision. We were then fully fifteen, and we were
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: perfectly serious about it. We were not fools. It was
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at
• 44:50
  Speaker 1: all of the limits and powers of legislation, and conscious
• 44:53
  Speaker 1: collective intention. I think that this statement does my boyhood justice,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: and yet I have my doubts. It is so hard
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: now to say what one understood and what one did
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: not understand. It isn't only that every day change one's
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases
• 45:14
  Speaker 1: of quite adult understanding and phases of tordily magnificent purility.
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: cheap side to the mansion house, a Sydney Cartonesque figure,
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: a white defeated Mirrabean. Sometimes it was I who sat
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: judging and condemning and ruling, sleeping in my clothes and
• 45:36
  Speaker 1: feeding very simply, and the sole and autocrat of the
• 45:39
  Speaker 1: provisional government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places, the general
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: post office at Saint Martin's La Grande. I cannot trace
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I believe
• 45:53
  Speaker 1: the mere physical fact of going two hours journey away
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: from London gave that place for the first time an
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: effect of unity in my imagination I got outside London,
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: it became tangible, instead of being a frame almost as
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: universal as sea and sky. At Cambridge, my ideas ceased
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: to live in a duelogue in exchange for Britain, with whom, however,
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and self consciously. For some years.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: I had now a set of congenial friends. I got
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: talk with some of the younger dons, I learned to
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: speak in the Union, and in my little set we
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: were all pretty busily sharpening each other's wits and correcting
• 46:36
  Speaker 1: each other's interpretations. Cambridge made politics personal and actual. At
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: city merchants, we had had no sense of effective contact.
• 46:46
  Speaker 1: We boasted, it is true and under secretary and a
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: colonial governor among our old boys, but they were never
• 46:53
  Speaker 1: real to us. Such distinguished sons, as returned to visit
• 46:57
  Speaker 1: the old school, were elusive and pleasant in the best
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: pinky dinkie style, and pretended to be in earnest about
• 47:04
  Speaker 1: nothing but our football and cricket. To mourn the abolition
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: of water and find a shuddering personal interest in the
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: ancient swishing block at Cambridge, I felt for the first
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: time that I touched the thing that was going on.
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: Real living statesmen came down to debate in the Union.
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: The older dons had been their college intimates, their sons
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: and nephews expounded them to us and made them real
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: to us. They invited us to entertain ideas. I found myself,
• 47:34
  Speaker 1: for the first time in my life, expected to read,
• 47:37
  Speaker 1: and think and discuss. My secret vice had become a virtue.
• 47:43
  Speaker 1: That combination room world is at last large and more
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: populous and various than the world of schoolmasters. The shuesmiths
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: and nailers, who had been the aristocracy of city merchants,
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: fell into their place in my mind. They became an
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: undistinguished man on the more athletic side of pinky dinkyism,
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: and their hostility to ideas and to the expression of
• 48:06
  Speaker 1: ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The brighter men
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: of each generation stay up. These others go down to
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: propagate their tradition as a fathers of families, as mediocre
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: professional men, as assistant masters in schools Cambridge. Which perfects
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: them is, by the nature of things last oppressed by them,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: except when it comes to a voting convocation. We were
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: still in those days under the shadow of the great Victorians.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: I never saw Gladstone, as I never set eyes on
• 48:39
  Speaker 1: the old Queen, but he had resigned office only a
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: year before I went up to Trinity, and the combination
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: rooms were full of personal gossip about him and Disraeli
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: and the other big figures of the gladiatorial stage of
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: parliamentary history, talk that leaped copiously into such sets as mine.
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: The seeling of our guests chamber at Trinity was glorious,
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose death duties
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mister Evesham.
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: We asked to come to the Union every year, Masters
• 49:12
  Speaker 1: Chamberlain and the old Duke of Devonshire. They did not come, indeed,
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: but their polite refusals brought us all, as it were,
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: within personal touch of them. One heard of cabinet councils
• 49:25
  Speaker 1: and meetings at country houses. Some of us, pursuing such interests,
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: went so far as to read political memoirs and the
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: novels of Disraelian Missus Humphrey Ward. From gossip, example, and
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: the illustrated newspapers, one learnt something of the way in
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: which parties were split, coalitions formed, how permanent officials worked
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: and controlled their ministers, how measures were brought forward and
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: projects modified. And while I was getting the great leading
• 49:56
  Speaker 1: figures on the political stage, who had been presented to
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: me my school days, not so much as men as
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: the pantomimic monsters of political caricature. While I was getting
• 50:07
  Speaker 1: them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity,
• 50:11
  Speaker 1: and their motives to the quality of impulses like my own,
• 50:15
  Speaker 1: I was also acquiring in my tripos work a constantly developing,
• 50:20
  Speaker 1: an enriching conception of the world of men as a
• 50:23
  Speaker 1: complex of economic, intellectual, and moral processes. End of Chapter four,
• 50:31
  Speaker 1: Section one