by H. G. Wells
but much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for
instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent
presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering
blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and
chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane chair with wraps
and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue
and hard, and her accent and intonation were exactly what you would
expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be
aristocratic. I was, Iam afraid, posing a little as the
intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the
great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She
affected a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the
governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all
a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained.
"That's my remedy."
In my new role of theoretical aristocrat I felt a little abashed.
"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic
theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet
unformulated intentions.
"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady
Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get
a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's
what we're all after, isn't ut?
"It's not an ideal arrangement."
"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in
education, Lady Forthundred scored.
We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington,
my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair
of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap
of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group
of daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile
to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any
nonsense about nobility."
She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a
practical people. We assimilate 'um."
"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
"Then they don't give trouble."
"They learn to shoot?"
"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on.
Sometimes better than others, but they go on-somehow. It depends
very much on the sort of butler who pokes 'um about."
I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty
thousand a year by at least detrimental methods-socially speaking.
"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred,
courageously…
Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in
the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and
fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing
themselves finely, against a background of deft, attentive maids and
valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to
them?
7
Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham
with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face,
his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing
oratory. He led all these people wonderfully. He was always
curious and interested about life, wary beneath a pleasing
frankness-and I tormented my brain to get to the bottom of him.
For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the
throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the
Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants
of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break
against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed
he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the
last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that
he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early
papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered
liking for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed.
He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in
British political life. Some men one sees through and understands,
some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque clay,
but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth
and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. No
other contemporary has had that effect upon me. I've sat beside him
at dinners, stayed in houses with him-he was in the big house party
at Champneys-talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat
beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a
rare sense of beingunderstood. Other men have to be treated in a
special manner; approached through their own mental dialect,
flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done.
Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of
stuffy little rooms looking out upon the sea.
And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with
Mankind? That I thought worth knowing.
I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a
dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost
forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive
purpose in politics.
"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party
converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do,
and people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion
become matters of science-and cease to be party questions."
He instanced education.
"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
"Apart from the religious question."
He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his
general theme that political conflict was the outcome of
uncertainty. "Directly you get a thing established, so that people
can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people
can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no
more to be said. The thing has to be done…"
And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely
tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily developing
constructive conviction, there are other memories.
Have I not seen him in the House, persistent, persuasive,
indefatigable, and by all my standards wickedly perverse, leaning
over the table with those insistent movements of his hand upon it,
or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a
diabolical skill t
o preserve what are in effect religious tests,
tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate and injure the
consciences of a quarter-and that perhaps the best quarter-of the
youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?
In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham
displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his
subtle mind. I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and
listen to his urbane voice, fascinated by him. Did he really care?
Did anything matter to him? And if it really mattered nothing, why
did he trouble to serve the narrowness and passion of his side? Or
did he see far beyond my scope, so that this petty iniquity was
justified by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?
They accused him of nepotism. His friends and family were certainly
well cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate
intimacy; he pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think
at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily
circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics.
And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight
of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond
question he was great! No other contemporary politician had his
quality. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great
contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of
statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only
interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the
conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at
times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the
reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own
thoughts, who waits behind a lesser master's chair…
8
Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state
becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as
to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke
quite after my heart. Had he really embodied the attempt to realise
that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly. But
neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist of my story.
And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and
Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was
possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of
constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely accept
the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to
make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
There were some very fine personalities among them: there were the
great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa,
Framboya-Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So
far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they
had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the
perplexing and exacting problem of the home country, a little
glorious, a little too simply bold. They wanted to arm and they
wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate necessity made them
far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of
heterogeneous controls made them overrate the need for obedience in
a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained
men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the
things that matter in England… There were also the great
business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord
Paddockhurst). My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the
scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the
perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar
competitiveness, and a mere habitual persistence in the pursuit of
gain. For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington-I wish I had kept
a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day
to day between a POSEUR, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and
wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity of sweeping
actions, motor car pounces, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent
ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting
pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed
him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed the folly in
him-but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day
after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound
meditation over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem
to light the whole interior being of a man. "Some day," he said
softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing-"some
day I will raise the country."
"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the
little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette…
Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and
again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and
their big lawyers, accustomed to-well, qualified statement. And
below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods,
young, adventurous men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen
service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers,
keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation.
Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious to ideas outside
the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their
chaffeurs, and of the quality of English people than welt-
politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the
Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-
hearted, patriotic at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude for
bullying. They varied in insensible gradations between the noble
sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our
Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man might exercise
his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public
serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed
up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary, whose
predominant idea was that the village schools should confine
themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying,
and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request…
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the
figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the
library of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of
those things-I think they are called gout stools. He had been
playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he
had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted
to irascible important men whose insteps are painful. Among other
things he had flouted the idea that women would ever understand
statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly
that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in
population, regretted he could not censor picture galleries and
circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters were people who
pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of
upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established
Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue
about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered
his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to
the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an
appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable,
responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a
number of classical anecdotes of those blighting snubs, vindictive
retorts and scandalous miscarriages of justice that are so dear to
the forensic mind. Now he reposed. He was breathing heavily with
his mouth a little open and his head on one side. One whisker was
turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump strong hands
gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged.
How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence,
respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his
unguarded expression!
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake
him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
9
One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days
was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised
that slowly and with a mild astonishment. It set me, indeed, even
then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last
incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as
nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative
side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that
witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly,
I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it
is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more
vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite
beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and
the dressing bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned,
chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden…
Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember
