by H. G. Wells
it as an odd exceptional little wrangle.
At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the
aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine
for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved her. She said, I
know, that Champneys distressed her; made her "eager for work and
reality again."
"But aren't these people real?"
"They're so superficial, so extravagant!"
I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least
affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so
extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite
as much as any other woman's in the house.
"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale
and spirit of things."
I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before
her out of the window.
I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had
been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was
also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also
with us. "You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy
girl. Every one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He
seems-oh! like something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and
say little things to me."
"Offensive things?"
"No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are-quite
right. That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have
helped-all that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't
like him. But none of the others make the slightest objection to
him."
"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."
"That's just it," said Margaret.
"Charity," I suggested.
"I don't like that sort of toleration."
I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I
said. "No!…
But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation
displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's
their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class
conspiracy against the mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit
at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white
reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful
service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums
and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the
table."
I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned
increment.
"But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.
I was moved to question her. "Do you reallythink," I asked, "that
the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social
injustice as we have it to-day? Do you reallysee politics as a
struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
"They MUST know," said Margaret.
I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must
have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at
the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation of her view
and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest,
hardest lines that were possible. It was perfectly clear that she
saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs. The thing showed
in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion
with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library
at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously behind the
Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete citizen sucking
at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton
discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially
hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat
pegging out a sort of right in Socialism, were the centre and
wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put
the truth to her?
"I don't see things at all as you do," I said. "I don't see things
in the same way."
"Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
"Think of every one," I said. "We Liberals have done more mischief
through well-intentioned benevolence than all the selfishness in the
world could have done. We built up the liquor interest."
"WE!" cried Margaret. "How can you say that? It's against us."
"Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to
prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered with
industrial regularity-"
"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was
talking mere wickedness.
"That's it," I said.
"But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"
"Certainly. What right have I to dictate to other men and women?"
"But think of the children!"
"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-
cunning, half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout
fashion. If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an
offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and
restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some
cases lead to a neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence,
punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that
perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't intensify
the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit
for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the
public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real public-
house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently
want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt
men to forgery. We do already threaten the privacy of the post
because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of
thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous, stupid…"
I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty
fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of
yew. Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great
blaze of yellow flowers…
"But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our
work."
I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no
antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine,
make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better
people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains
of the piece? The real villain in the piece-in the whole human
drama-is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's
virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If
I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the
world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. It would matter
about as much as a slightly neglected dog-in an otherwise well-
managed home."
My thoughts had run away with me.
"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest
distress. "I can't understand how it is you are coming to see
things like this."
&
nbsp; 10
The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously evasive and
difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will
permit the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has
an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency
with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of
life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be
silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly in the
sight of all men. Those who have no real political experience can
scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is
between one's everyday acts and utterances on the one hand and the
"thinking-out" process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult
to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex,
to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under
jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the
platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs…
The most impossible of all autobiographies is an intellectual
autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the
elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record
of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations
between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the
bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…
And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,
to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,
experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is
to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to
feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to
choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent
questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use
dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap
haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the
whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a
poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get
something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to
put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement…
One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to
conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position
that this should happen. I was in such doubtmyself, that I had no
power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I
had stage-managed our "serious" conversations. Now I was too much
in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk
with her. Her serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and
sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic
apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes
distressing and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right,
and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling
to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I
could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing
ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation
fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had
nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big
people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were
temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous, than
our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be
reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the
finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and
disposed of them. It was our incurable differences in habits and
gestures of thought coming between us again.
The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon
myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone;
an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening,
a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and
more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I
maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during
that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow
acquisitions.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
SECESSION
1
At last, out of a vast accumulation of impressions, decision
distilled quite suddenly. I succumbed to Evesham and that dream of
the right thing triumphant through expression. I determined I would
go over to the Conservatives, and use my every gift and power on the
side of such forces on that side as made for educational
reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and
intellectual development. That was in 1909. I judged the Tories
were driving straight at a conflict with the country, and I thought
them bound to incur an electoral defeat. I under-estimated their
strength in the counties. There would follow, I calculated, a
period of profound reconstruction in method and policy alike. I was
entirely at one with Crupp in perceiving in this an immense
opportunity for the things we desired. An aristocracy quickened by
conflict and on the defensive, and full of the idea of justification
by reconstruction, might prove altogether more apt for thought and
high professions than Mrs. Redmondson's spoilt children. Behind the
now inevitable struggle for a reform of the House of Lords, there
would be great heart searchings and educational endeavour. On that
we reckoned…
At last we talked it out to the practical pitch, and Crupp and
Shoesmith, and I and Gane, made our definite agreement together…
I emerged from enormous silences upon Margaret one evening.
She was just back from the display of some new musicians at the
Hartsteins. I remember she wore a dress of golden satin, very rich-
looking and splendid. About her slender neck there was a rope of
gold-set amber beads. Her hair caught up and echoed and returned
these golden notes. I, too, was in evening dress, but where I had
been escapes me,-some forgotten dinner, I suppose. I went into her
room. I remember I didn't speak for some moments. I went across to
the window and pulled the blind aside, and looked out upon the
railed garden of the square, with its shrubs and shadowed turf
gleaming pallidly and irregularly in the light of the big electric
standard in the corner.
"Margaret," I said, "I think I shall break with the party."
She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
"I was afraid you meant to do that," she said.
"I'm out of touch," I explained. "Altogether."
"Oh! I know."
"It places me in a difficult position," I said.
Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself
in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of
stoppered bottles of tinted glass. "I was afraid it was coming to
this," she said.
"In a way," I said, "we've been allies. I owe my
seat to you. I
couldn't have gone into Parliament…"
"I don't want considerations like that to affect us," she
interrupted.
There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table,
lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
"I wish," she said, with something like a sob in her voice, "it were
possible that you shouldn't do this." She stopped abruptly, and I
did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making
to control herself.
"I thought," she began again, "when you came into Parliament-"
There came another silence. "It's all gone so differently," she
said. "Everything has gone so differently."
I had a sudden memory of her, shining triumphant after the
Kinghampstead election, and for the first time I realised just how
perplexing and disappointing my subsequent career must have been to
her.
"I'm not doing this without consideration," I said.
"I know," she said, in a voice of despair, "I've seen it coming.
But-I still don't understand it. I don't understand how you can go
over."
"My ideas have changed and developed," I said.
I walked across to her bearskin hearthrug, and stood by the mantel.
"To think that you," she said; "you who might have been leader-"
She could not finish it. "All the forces of reaction," she threw
out.
"I don't think they are the forces of reaction," I said. "I think I
can find work to do-better work on that side."
"Against us!" she said. "As if progress wasn't hard enough! As if
it didn't call upon every able man!"
"I don't think Liberalism has a monopoly of progress."
She did not answer that. She sat quite still looking in front of
her. "WHY have you gone over?" she asked abruptly as though I had
said nothing.
There came a silence that I was impelled to end. I began a stiff
dissertation from the hearthrug. "Iam going over, because I think
I may join in an intellectual renascence on the Conservative side.
I think that in the coming struggle there will be a partial and
altogether confused and demoralising victory for democracy, that
will stir the classes which now dominate the Conservative party into
an energetic revival. They will set out to win back, and win back.
