by H. G. Wells
express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore
something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it
back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and
the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and
inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:-
"Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedience-
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"
And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my
mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about
An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been
born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South
Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain
the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that
time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt
with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle
that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are
justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and
assumption…
South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting
newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to
the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself
human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant
officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the
first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent
men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and
co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they
were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden
magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor
disgraceful were they,-just ill-trained and fairly plucky and
wonderfully good-tempered men-paying for it. And how it lowered
our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and
then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste
of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso-
Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in
Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long
unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching,
unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your
enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of
fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our
scheme of illusion.
All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the
rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and
the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses,
stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent
wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I had looked at
it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated
papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the
ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki,
the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great
lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses
and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless
miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last,
though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils.
If one's attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those
battle-fields.
And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of
yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker
of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the
doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate
rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than
defeats…
7
A book that stands out among these memories, that stimulated me
immensely so that I forced it upon my companions, half in the spirit
of propaganda and half to test it by their comments, was Meredith's
ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me.
In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the
first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever
encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years
when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to
the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our
people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a
book justified. The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined
each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered
against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe to
me, as watching and critical.
But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and
discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the
continent there were other peoples going ahead of us, mentally alert
while we fumbled, disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and
preparing to bring our Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely
novel and distasteful to me. It set me worrying of nights. It put
all my projects for social and political reconstruction upon a new
uncomfortable footing. It made them no longer merely desirable but
urgent. Instead of pride and the love of making one might own to a
baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a little forgotten the
continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious echo to our own
world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing sense as it
were of busy searchlights over the horizon…
One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was
an attempt to belittle his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow,"
I said.
The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity.
It professed to be a study of the English situation in the early
nineties, but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was
confused by the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to
vindicate the woman he had loved and never married. Now in the
retrospect and with a mind full of bitter enlightenment, I can do
Meredith justice, and admit
the conflict was not only essential but
cardinal in his picture, that the terrible inflexibility of the rich
aunts and the still more terrible claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the
"infernal punctilio," and Dudley Sowerby's limitations, were the
central substance of that inalertness the book set itself to assail.
So many things have been brought together in my mind that were once
remotely separated. A people that will not valiantly face and
understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing
whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
was altogether outside my range of comprehension…
8
As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension
of the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments
that found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out,
as if it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did
not happen until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and
the Peace of Vereeniging had just been signed.
I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to
myself, who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of
the Civil Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the
London School Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support
of the "advanced" people had placed him. He had, like myself, a
small independent income that relieved him of any necessity to earn
a living, and he had a kindred craving for social theorising and
some form of social service. He had sought my acquaintance after
reading a paper of mine (begotten by the visit of Chris Robinson) on
the limits of pure democracy. It had marched with some thoughts of
his own.
We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa
Maria Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno
(where, as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the
Val Maggia and over to Airolo and home.
As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness
and enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant
excitement of the boat train, the trampling procession of people
with hand baggage and laden porters along the platform of the
Folkestone pier, the scarcely perceptible swaying of the moored boat
beneath our feet. Then, very obvious and simple, the little emotion
of standing out from the homeland and seeing the long white Kentish
cliffs recede. One walked about the boat doing one's best not to
feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a movement of people
directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a cliff to the
east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan the
little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children
upon it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.
One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of
nearly three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with
pleasing little stimulations. The custom house examination excited
one, the strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the
French of City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and
then one was standing in the train as it went slowly through the
rail-laid street to Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world
in French, porters in blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers,
police officers in peaked caps instead of helmets and romantically
cloaked, big carts, all on two wheels instead of four, green
shuttered casements instead of sash windows, and great numbers of
neatly dressed women in economical mourning.
"Oh! there's a priest!" one said, and was betrayed into suchlike
artless cries.
It was a real other world, with different government and different
methods, and in the night one was roused from uneasy slumbers and
sat blinking and surly, wrapped up in one's couverture and with
one's oreiller all awry, to encounter a new social phenomenon, the
German official, so different in manner from the British; and when
one woke again after that one had come to Bale, and out one tumbled
to get coffee in Switzerland…
I have been over that route dozens of times since, but it still
revives a certain lingering youthfulness, a certain sense of
cheerful release in me.
I remember that I and Willersley became very sociological as we ran
on to Spiez, and made all sorts of generalisations from the steeply
sloping fields on the hillsides, and from the people we saw on
platforms and from little differences in the way things were done.
The clean prosperity of Bale and Switzerland, the big clean
stations, filled me with patriotic misgivings, as I thought of the
vast dirtiness of London, the mean dirtiness of Cambridgeshire. It
came to me that perhaps my scheme of international values was all
wrong, that quite stupendous possibilities and challenges for us and
our empire might be developing here-and I recalled Meredith's
Skepsey in France with a new understanding.
Willersley had dressed himself in a world-worn Norfolk suit of
greenish grey tweeds that ended unfamiliarly at his rather
impending, spectacled, intellectual visage. I didn't, I remember,
like the contrast of him with the drilled Swiss and Germans about
us. Convict coloured stockings and vast hobnail boots finished him
below, and all his luggage was a borrowed rucksac that he had tied
askew. He did not want to shave in the train, but I made him at one
of the Swiss stations-I dislike these Oxford slovenlinesses-and
then confound him! he cut himself and bled…
Next morning we were breathing a thin exhilarating air that seemed
to have washed our very veins to an incredible cleanliness, and
eating hard-boiled eggs in a vast clear space of rime-edged rocks,
snow-mottled, above a blue-gashed glacier. All about us the
monstrous rock surfaces rose towards the shining peaks above, and
there were winding moraines from which the ice had receded, and then
dark clustering fir trees far below.
I had an extraordinary feeling of having come out of things, of
being outside.
"But this is the round world!" I said, with a sense of never having
perceived it before; "this is the round world!"
9
That holiday was full of big comprehensive effects; the first view
of the Rhone valley and the distant Valaisian Alps, for example,
which we saw from the shoulder of the mountain above the Gemmi, and
the early summer dawn breaking over Italy as we moved from our
night's crouching and munched bread and chocolate and stretched our
stiff limbs among the tumbled and precipitous rocks that hung over
Lake Cingolo, and surveyed the winding tiring rocky track going down
and down to Antronapiano.
And our thought
s were as comprehensive as our impressions.
Willersley's mind abounded in historical matter; he had an
inaccurate abundant habit of topographical reference; he made me see
and trace and see again the Roman Empire sweep up these winding
valleys, and the coming of the first great Peace among the warring
tribes of men…
In the retrospect each of us seems to have been talking about our
outlook almost continually. Each of us, you see, was full of the
same question, very near and altogether predominant to us, the
question: "What am I going to do with my life?" He saw it almost as
importantly as I, but from a different angle, because his choice was
largely made and mine still hung in the balance.
"I feel we might do so many things," I said, "and everything that
calls one, calls one away from something else."
Willersley agreed without any modest disavowals.
"We have got to think out," he said, "just what we are and what we
are up to. We've got to do that now. And then-it's one of those
questions it is inadvisable to reopen subsequently."
He beamed at me through his glasses. The sententious use of long
words was a playful habit with him, that and a slight deliberate
humour, habits occasional Extension Lecturing was doing very much to
intensify.
"You've made your decision?"
He nodded with a peculiar forward movement of his head.
"How would you put it?"
"Social Service-education. Whatever else matters or doesn't
matter, it seems to me there is one thing we MUST have and increase,
and that is the number of people who can think a little-and have "-
he beamed again-" an adequate sense of causation."
"You're sure it's worth while."
"For me-certainly. I don't discuss that any more."
"I don't limitmyself too narrowly," he added. "After all, the work
is all one. We who know, we who feel, are building the great modern
state, joining wall to wall and way to way, the new great England
rising out of the decaying old… we are the real statesmen-I
like that use of 'statesmen.'…"
"Yes," I said with many doubts. "Yes, of course…"
Willersley is middle-aged now, with silver in his hair and a
deepening benevolence in his always amiable face, and he has very
