Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and
tradition-worship of my political associates. None of these things
were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.
I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame. The
real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the
enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of
human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the
invigoration of research-and whatever one does in human affairs has
or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life
of politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still
against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to
their essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went
nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire
fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward
appearances whose ultimaterealities were jerry-built conclusions,
hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and
prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men. How are we through
politics to get at that confusion?
We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create
a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all
educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues,
and the evasion of life.
We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and
literature, and its exploration through research.
We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free
criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike
degenerate into tradition or imposture.
Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the
scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually
beautiful, become-EASY…
It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
engage would be those which most directly affected the Church,
public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature,
and the channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my
position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and
conduced to this essential work.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
SEEKING ASSOCIATES
1
I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions and habits
of party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy.
Regarding the development of the social and individual mental
hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on
very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may
call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the
changing unorganised medley of rich people and privileged people who
dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a
possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by
habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must have an
aristocracy-not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose-or
mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I
look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910.
I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and
the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and
finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far
beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively
invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale
than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very
much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys.
We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and
education, or we must abandon secular constructive hope. And here
my peculiar difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If
humanity at large is capable of that high education and those
creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and
more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and
leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot
be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of
humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has
become my general conception in politics, the conception of the
constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful
people, clever people, enterprising people, influential people,
amidst whom power is diffused to-day, to produce that self-
conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted aristocratic
culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the
development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the
spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary
needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human
interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated and
acting at leisure, of human passions and motives, modified and
redirected by literature and art…
But now the reader will understand how it came about that,
disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and
disillusioned about the representative quality of the professed
Socialists, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny of the big
people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism
pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all,
it was not my particular job to work through them and not against
them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-? Weren't
there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack,
and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were they really
the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible
new braveries of life?
2
The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The
conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile, the costly
errors of that struggle appalling, and the subsequent campaign of
Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff Reform seemed calculated to combine the
financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy against
the consumer. The cant of Imperialism was easy to learn and use; it
was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to
all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief,
and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion that
after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism
might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression
of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational
and philosophical movement such as no formula of Liberalism
supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed
to its stron
g popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness and
humbug of the movement there appeared a real regard for social
efficiency, a realspirit of animation and enterprise. There
suddenly appeared in my world-I saw them first, I think, in 1908-a
new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the
slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small
boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic bearing,
earnestly engaged in wholesome and invigorating games up to and
occasionally a little beyond his strength-the Boy Scout. I liked
the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it
mattered to me, with my growing bias in favour of deliberate
national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and
had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.
3
In those days there existed a dining club called-there was some
lost allusion to the exorcism of party feeling in its title-the
Pentagram Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir
Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling, Minns the poet, Gerbault the
big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya,
and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us. We were
men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was
to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested spirit. We
dined monthly at the Mermaid in Westminster, and for a couple of
years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen. The
dinner-time was given up to desultory conversation, and it is odd
how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering
became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the
waiters had swept away the crumbs and ceased to fret us, one of us
would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of
some specially prepared question, and after him we would deliver
ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one
present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare
we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my
house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me
and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three.
We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the
end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our
closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.
I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more
particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of
such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New
Imperialists who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey
Oxford men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all
mysteriously and inexplicably advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it
were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of
constructive policy. They seemed obsessed by the idea that streams
of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the
Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think
mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal.
They were also very keen on military organisation, and with a
curious little martinet twist in their minds that boded ill for that
side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were
disposed to spend money much more generously on education and
research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed
likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the
Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the
universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly afraid of
the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line with
these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's
sentimentalising evasions of definite schemes and Minns' trust in
such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of
Progress." It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than
their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time
are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that
I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important
to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them. By 1908 I had
already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a
transfer of my political allegiance.
These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory
of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy
bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed
central trophy of dessert, and scattered glasses and nut-shells and
cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda. I see old Dayton
sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had
while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and
Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for
confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the
Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and
round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths
of misery whenever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to
conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes
in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as
people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to speak at
me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly
He opened his heart to me.
"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-
handed sons of toil. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do
that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as
constructive a twist as we can. That's MY Toryism."
"Is it Kindling's-or Gerbault's?"
"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs
out. You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why
aren't we working together?"
"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.
"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.
"What are the Confederates after?"
"Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to
do."…
The Confederates were beingheard of at that time. They were at
once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose
membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff
Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In
the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately organised
power. I have no doubt the rumour of them greatly influenced my
ideas…
In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two
years I was hesitating. Hesitations were inevitable in such a
matter. I was not dealing with any simple question of principle,
but with elusive and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse
forces and of the nature of my own powers. All through that period
I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates
mere dreamers? How far-and th
is was more vital-are they rendering
lip-service to social organisations? Is it true they desire war
because it confirms the ascendency of their class? How far can
Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the
thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than a
mass of prejudice and conceit, cynical indulgence, and a hard
suspicion of and hostility to the expropriated classes in the
community?
That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like
asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon. The shadowy answer
varied with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the
people I was watching. How fine can people be? How generous?-not
incidentally, but all round? How far can you educate sons beyond
the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-
indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and
solicitors and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry in a class
possible?-was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible?
Is the progress that seems attainable in certain directions worth
the retrogression that may be its price?
4
It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached the new
conceptions that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of
my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY
and our wing of the present New Tory party. I do that without any
excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary man's
production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very
large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed
that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts to pop.
The atmospheric quality of the evening stands out very vividly in my
memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight
we went to finish our talk at my house.
We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and
so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced
Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now
the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember