us all together. I found the talk about Parliamentary procedure and
etiquette particularly trying. We dined with the elder Cramptons
one evening, and old Sir Edward was lengthily sage about what the
House liked, what it didn't like, what made a good impression and
what a bad one. "A man shouldn't speak more than twice in his first
session, and not at first on too contentious a topic," said Sir
Edward. "No."
"Very much depends on manner. The House hates a lecturer. There's
a sort of airy earnestness-"
He waved his cigar to eke out his words.
"Little peculiarities of costume count for a great deal. I could
name one man who spent three years living down a pair of
spatterdashers. On the other hand-a thing like that-if it catches
the eye of the PUNCH man, for example, may be your making."
He went off into a lengthy speculation of why the House had come to
like an originally unpopular Irishman named Biggar…
The opening of Parliament gave me some peculiar moods. I began to
feel more and more like a branded sheep. We were sworn in in
batches, dozens and scores of fresh men, trying not to look too
fresh under the inspection of policemen and messengers, all of us
carrying new silk hats and wearing magisterial coats. It is one of
my vivid memories from this period, the sudden outbreak of silk hats
in the smoking-room of the National Liberal Club. At first I
thought there must have been a funeral. Familiar faces that one had
grown to know under soft felt hats, under bowlers, under liberal-
minded wide brims, and above artistic ties and tweed jackets,
suddenly met one, staring with the stern gaze of self-consciousness,
from under silk hats of incredible glossiness. There was a
disposition to wear the hat much too forward, I thought, for a good
Parliamentary style.
There was much play with the hats all through; a tremendous
competition to get in first and put hats on coveted seats. A memory
hangs about me of the House in the early afternoon, an inhumane
desolation inhabited almost entirely by silk hats. The current use
of cards to secure seats came later. There were yards and yards of
empty green benches with hats and hats and hats distributed along
them, resolute-looking top hats, lax top hats with a kind of shadowy
grin under them, sensible top bats brim upward, and one scandalous
incontinent that had rolled from the front Opposition bench right to
the middle of the floor. A headless hat is surely the most soulless
thing in the world, far worse even than a skull…
At last, in a leisurely muddled manner we got to the Address; and I
found myself packed in a dense elbowing crowd to the right of the
Speaker's chair; while the attenuated Opposition, nearly leaderless
after the massacre, tilted its brim to its nose and sprawled at its
ease amidst its empty benches.
There was a tremendous hullaboo about something, and I craned to see
over the shoulder of the man in front. ''Order, order, order!"
"What's it about?" I asked.
The man in front of me was clearly no better informed, and then I
gathered from a slightly contemptuous Scotchman beside me that it
was Chris Robinson had walked between the bonourable member in
possession of the house and the Speaker. I caught a glimpse of him
blushingly whispering about his misadventure to a colleague. He was
just that same little figure I had once assisted to entertain at
Cambridge, but grey-haired now, and still it seemed with the same
knitted muffler he had discarded for a reckless half-hour while he
talked to us in Hatherleigh's rooms.
It dawned upon me that I wasn't particularly wanted in the House,
and that I should get all I needed of the opening speeches next day
from the TIMES.
I made my way out and was presently walking rather aimlessly through
the outer lobby.
I caught myself regarding the shadow that spread itself out before
me, multiplied itself in blue tints of various intensity, shuffled
itself like a pack of cards under the many lights, the square
backward; I found I was surveying this statesmanlike outline with a
weak approval. "A MEMBER!" I felt the little cluster of people that
were scattered about the lobby must be saying.
"Good God!" I said in hot reaction, "what am I doing here?"
It was one of those moments infinitely trivial in themselves, that
yet are cardinal in a man's life. It came to me with extreme
vividness that it wasn't so much that I had got hold of something as
that something had got hold of me. I distinctly recall the rebound
of my mind. Whatever happened in this Parliament, I at least would
attempt something. "By God!" I said, "I won't be overwhelmed. Iam
here to do something, and do something I will!"
But I felt that for the moment I could not remain in the House.
I went out by myself with my thoughts into the night. It was a
chilling night, and rare spots of rain were falling. I glanced over
my shoulder at the lit windows of the Lords. I walked, I remember,
westward, and presently came to the Grosvenar Embankment and
followed it, watching the glittering black rush of the river and the
dark, dimly lit barges round which the water swirled. Across the
river was the hunched sky-line of Doulton's potteries, and a kiln
flared redly. Dimly luminous trams were gliding amidst a dotted
line of lamps, and two little trains crawled into Waterloo station.
Mysterious black figures came by me and were suddenly changed to the
commonplace at the touch of the nearer lamps. It was a big confused
world, I felt, for a man to lay his hands upon.
I remember I crossed Vauxhall Bridge and stood for a time watching
the huge black shapes in the darkness under the gas-works. A shoal
of coal barges lay indistinctly on the darkly shining mud and water
below, and a colossal crane was perpetually hauling up coal into
mysterious blacknesses above, and dropping the empty clutch back to
the barges. Just one or two minute black featureless figures of men
toiled amidst these monster shapes. They did not seem to be
controlling them but only moving about among them. These gas-works
have a big chimney that belches a lurid flame into the night, a
livid shivering bluish flame, shot with strange crimson streaks…
On the other side of Lambeth Bridge broad stairs go down to the
lapping water of the river; the lower steps are luminous under the
lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem
to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an
air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.
Those shapes and large inhuman places-for all of mankind that one
sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the
industrial monsters that snort and toil there-mix up inextricably
with my memories of my first days as a legislator. Black figures
drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a
motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Emb
ankment, every seat
has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.
"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon
me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber
museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives."…
Fruitless lives!-was that the truth of it all?…
Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of
the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet
close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins-and I prayed!
I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water
turned to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief
perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of
my thoughts. It was then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that
night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not
live in vain. I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous
blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me
back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent things.
I knewmyself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it
was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders,
yielding feebleness.
"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me,
destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little
interests and little successes and the life that passes like the
shadow of a dream."
BOOK THE THIRD
THE HEART OF POLITICS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
1
I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this
next portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it
raw edged and ill joined. I have learnt something of the
impossibility of History. For all I have had to tell is the story
of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his
life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the
doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms
and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving
media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally
unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with
personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only
coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of
depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond
treatment multitudinous… For a week or so I desisted
altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit
through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this
little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with
Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the
effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.
Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this
confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This
main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have
looked to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young
couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's
auspices to make a career. You figure us well dressed and active,
running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses,
dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in
the lobby. Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must
have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.
We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I
thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten
thousand things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it,
as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes
occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible. Under
certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a
handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous
unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the
realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any
inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our
life. Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our
outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of
these so long-hidden developments.
That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of
these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether
broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the
cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the
fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This "sub-
careerist" element noted little things that affected the career,
made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-
and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the
least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his
charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the
appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean something greater and
not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.
In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora
Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in
the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a
man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But Iam
tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of
how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such
frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent
contemporary. Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter
it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less
personal, less individualised, and broader in its references. Its
aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different
system of demands and satisfactions. It was critical, curious, more
than a little unfeeling-and relentlessly illuminating.
It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more
subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its
relations to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental
and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,
from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the
window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible
existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for
that greater personality behind. And this back-self has its history
of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable
conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and
achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons and phrases,
it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new
realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to
the general tenor of one's life. Its increasin
g independence of the
ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it
accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises
and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing
mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.
In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of
philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the
development of mankind.
2
It is curious to recall how Britten helped shatter that obvious,
lucidly explicable presentation of myself upon which I had embarked
with Margaret. He returned to revive a memory of adolescent dreams
and a habit of adolescent frankness; he reached through my shallow
frontage as no one else seemed capable of doing, and dragged that
back-self into relation with it.
I remember very distinctly a dinner and a subsequent walk with him
which presents itself now as altogether typical of the quality of
his influence.
I had come upon him one day while lunching with Somers and Sutton at
the Playwrights' Club, and had asked him to dinner on the spur of
the moment. He was oddly the same curly-headed, red-faced
ventriloquist, and oddly different, rather seedy as well as untidy,
and at first a little inclined to make comparisons with my sleek
successfulness. But that disposition presently evaporated, and his
talk was good and fresh and provocative. And something that had
long been straining at its checks in my mind flapped over, and he
and I found ourselves of one accord.
Altiora wasn't at this dinner. When she came matters were apt to
become confusedly strenuous. There was always a slight and
ineffectual struggle at the end on the part of Margaret to
anticipate Altiora's overpowering tendency to a rally and the
establishment of some entirely unjustifiable conclusion by a COUP-
DE-MAIN. When, however, Altiora was absent, the quieterinfluence
of the Cramptons prevailed; temperance and information for its own
sake prevailed excessively over dinner and the play of thought…
Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured
them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait