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 Title: Experiment in Autobiography. Discoveries and 
    Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866).
 Author: Wells, Herbert George (1866-1946)
 Date of first publication: 1934
 Edition used as base for this ebook:
    Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1967
 Date first posted: 27 May 2010
 Date last updated: 27 May 2010
 Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #539

This ebook was produced by: Chuck Greif
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




EXPERIMENT
IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

[Illustration: H. G. WELLS]




EXPERIMENT

_IN_

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

_DISCOVERIES AND CONCLUSIONS
OF A VERY ORDINARY BRAIN
(SINCE 1866)_

_BY_

H. G. WELLS

_WITH DRAWINGS BY THE AUTHOR_




CONTENTS


_Chapter the First_

INTRODUCTORY

 1. Prelude (1932)                                            _page_  1

 2. _Persona_ and Personality                                         8

 3. Quality of the Brain and Body Concerned                          13


_Chapter the Second_

ORIGINS

 1. 47 High Street, Bromley, Kent                                    21

 2. Sarah Neal (1822-1905)                                           25

 3. Up Park and Joseph Wells (1827-1910)                             32

 4. Sarah Wells at Atlas House (1855-1880)                           42

 5. A Broken Leg and Some Books and Pictures (1874)                  53


_Chapter the Third_

SCHOOLBOY

 1. Mr. Morley's Commercial Academy (1874-1880)                      59

 2. Puerile View of the World (1878-79)                              69

 3. Mrs. Wells, Housekeeper at Up Park (1880-1893)                   80

 4. First Start in Life--Windsor (Summer 1880)                       84

 5. Second Start in Life--Wookey (Winter 1880)                       96

 6. Interlude at Up Park (1880-81)                                  101

 7. Third Start in Life--Midhurst (1881)                            107


_Chapter the Fourth_

EARLY ADOLESCENCE

 1. Fourth Start in Life--Southsea (1881-1883)                      113

 2. The Y.M.C.A., the _Freethinker_; a Preacher and the
       Reading Room                                                  124

 3. Fifth Start in Life--Midhurst (1883-84)                         135

 4. First Glimpses of Plato--and Henry George                       140

 5. Question of Conscience                                          149

 6. Walks with My Father                                            153


_Chapter the Fifth_

SCIENCE STUDENT IN LONDON

 1. Professor Huxley and the Science of Biology (1884-85)           159

 2. Professor Guthrie and the Science of Physics (1885-86)          165

 3. Professor Judd and the Science of Geology (1886-87)             183

 4. Divagations of a Discontented Student (1884-1887)               188

 5. Socialism (without a Competent Receiver) and World
       Change                                                        196

 6. Background of the Student's Life (1884-1887)                    217

 7. Heart's Desire                                                  229


_Chapter the Sixth_

STRUGGLE FOR A LIVING

 1. Sixth Start in Life or Thereabouts (1887)                       237

 2. Blood in the Sputum (1887)                                      244

 3. Second Attack on London (1888)                                  255

 4. Henley House School (1889-90)                                   260

 5. The University Correspondence College (1890-1893)               274

 6. Collapse into Literary Journalism (1893-94)                     290

 7. Exhibits in Evidence                                            311


_Chapter the Seventh_

DISSECTION

 1. Compound Fugue                                                  347

 2. Primary Fixation                                                350

 3. _Modus Vivendi_                                                 361

 4. Writings about Sex                                              392

 5. Digression about Novels                                         410


_Chapter the Eighth_

FAIRLY LAUNCHED AT LAST

 1. Duologue in Lodgings (1894-95)                                  425

 2. Lynton, Station Road, Woking (1895)                             450

 3. Heatherlea, Worcester Park (1896-97)                            471

 4. New Romney and Sandgate (1898)                                  494

 5. Edifying Encounters. Some Types of _Persona_ and
       Temperamental Attitude (1897-1910)                            509

 6. Building a House (1899-1900)                                    544


_Chapter the Ninth_

THE IDEA OF A PLANNED WORLD

 1. _Anticipations_ (1900) and the "New Republic"                   549

 2. The Samurai--in Utopia and in the Fabian Society
       (1905-1909)                                                   560

 3. "Planning" in the _Daily Mail_ (1912)                           566

 4. The Great War and My Resort to "God" (1914-1916)                568

 5. War Experiences of an Outsider                                  578

 6. World State and League of Nations                               592

 7. World Education                                                 611

 8. World Revolution                                                625

 9. Cerebration at Large and Brains in Key Positions                643

 10. Envoy                                                          703

INDEX

FOOTNOTES




ILLUSTRATIONS


Portrait of H. G. Wells                                   _frontispiece_

                                                                  _page_

Letter dated July 4th, 1880                                        90-92

Undated Letter c. 1883                                            133-34

Drawing illustrating Letter: July 5th, 1890                          314

Drawing illustrating Letter: Sept. 21st, 1892                        316

Drawing illustrating Letter: May 26th, 1893                          321

Reproduction of Letter: late June or July, 1893                      325

Drawing illustrating Letter: Dec. 5th, 1894                          333

Drawing illustrating Letter: July, 1896                           338-39

Picshua: Four Studies of "It"                                        366

Picshuas: Academic Robes, Reading Glasses, Literary
  Composition, Frieze Design                                         367

Picshua: A Satirical Picshua                                         369

Picshua: Salutary Lesson. Determined behaviour of a Lady
  Horticulturist                                                     371

Reproduction of Fearful Pome                                      374-75

Picshua: Invasion of Table Space                                     377

Picshua: Tangerines                                                  379

Picshua: Removal to Arnold House                                     381

Picshua: J. M. Barrie, etc.                                       382-83

Picshua: Waiting for the Verdik. _Love and Mr. Lewisham_             385

Picshua: Xmas 1894                                                   448

Picshua: Cycling                                                     459

Picshua: Engaging a Servant                                          460

Picshua: We cut our first Marrow                                     468

Picshua: Letter from Authors' Syndicate                              469

Picshua: November 1895                                               470

Picshua: November 18th, 1896                                         472

Picshua: Letter from _Fortnightly Review_                            473

Picshua: New Vagabonds Club                                          474

Picshua: Gardening. Publication of _Invisible Man_,
  September 8th, 1897                                                476

Picshua: October 1897                                                478

Picshua: February 1898                                               480

Picshua: July 29th, 1898                                             495

Picshua: October 5th, 1898                                           499

Picshua: October 8th, 1898. Reminiscences of August 1898             501

Picshua: October 8th, 1898. Reminiscences of New
  Romney in September                                                503

Picshua: October 8th, 1898. Bits the Cow Girl. House
  Hunting                                                            505

Picshua: October 8th, 1898. Reminiscences of September
  24th, 1898                                                         507

Picshua: Royal Institution audience                                  543

Picshua: June 11th, 1901                                             545

Picshua: March 28th, 1901                                            547

Picshua: Title page of _Democracy under Revision_                    639




EXPERIMENT
IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY




CHAPTER THE FIRST

_INTRODUCTORY_


 1

_Prelude (1932)_

I need freedom of mind. I want peace for work. I am distressed by
immediate circumstances. My thoughts and work are encumbered by claims
and vexations and I cannot see any hope of release from them; any hope
of a period of serene and beneficent activity, before I am overtaken
altogether by infirmity and death. I am in a phase of fatigue and of
that discouragement which is a concomitant of fatigue, the petty things
of to-morrow skirmish in my wakeful brain, and I find it difficult to
assemble my forces to confront this problem which paralyses the proper
use of myself.

I am putting even the pretence of other work aside in an attempt to deal
with this situation. I am writing a report about it--to myself. I want
to get these discontents clear because I have a feeling that as they
become clear they will either cease from troubling me or become
manageable and controllable.

There is nothing I think very exceptional in my situation as a mental
worker. Entanglement is our common lot. I believe this craving for a
release from--bothers, from daily demands and urgencies, from
responsibilities and tempting distractions, is shared by an increasing
number of people who, with specialized and distinctive work to do, find
themselves eaten up by first-hand affairs. This is the outcome of a
specialization and a sublimation of interests that has become frequent
only in the last century or so. Spaciousness and leisure, and even the
desire for spaciousness and leisure, have so far been exceptional. Most
individual creatures since life began, have been "up against it" all the
time, have been driven continually by fear and cravings, have had to
respond to the unresting antagonisms of their surroundings, and they
have found a sufficient and sustaining interest in the drama of
immediate events provided for them by these demands. Essentially, their
living was continuous adjustment to happenings. Good hap and ill hap
filled it entirely. They hungered and ate and they desired and loved;
they were amused and attracted, they pursued or escaped, they were
overtaken and they died.

But with the dawn of human foresight and with the appearance of a great
surplus of energy in life such as the last century or so has revealed,
there has been a progressive emancipation of the attention from everyday
urgencies. What was once the whole of life, has become to an increasing
extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would
have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can
say, "Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate,
but--_what do you do?_"

Conceptions of living, divorced more and more from immediacy,
distinguish the modern civilized man from all former life. In art, in
pure science, in literature, for instance, many people find sustaining
series of interests and incentives which have come at last to have a
greater value for them than any primary needs and satisfactions. These
primary needs are taken for granted. The everyday things of life become
subordinate to these wider interests which have taken hold of them, and
they continue to value everyday things, personal affections and material
profit and loss, only in so far as they are ancillary to the newer
ruling system of effort, and to evade or disregard them in so far as
they are antagonistic or obstructive to that. And the desire to live as
fully as possible within the ruling system of effort becomes
increasingly conscious and defined.

The originative intellectual worker is not a normal human being and does
not lead nor desire to lead a normal human life. He wants to lead a
supernormal life.

Mankind is realizing more and more surely that to escape from individual
immediacies into the less personal activities now increasing in human
society is not, like games, reverie, intoxication or suicide, a
suspension or abandonment of the primary life; on the contrary it is the
way to power over that primary life which, though subordinated, remains
intact. Essentially it is an imposition upon the primary life of a
participation in the greater life of the race as a whole. In studies and
studios and laboratories, administrative bureaus and exploring
expeditions, a new world is germinated and develops. It is not a
repudiation of the old but a vast extension of it, in a racial synthesis
into which individual aims will ultimately be absorbed. We originative
intellectual workers are reconditioning human life.

Now in this desire, becoming increasingly lucid and continuous for me as
my life has gone on, in this desire to get the primaries of life under
control and to concentrate the largest possible proportion of my energy
upon the particular system of effort that has established itself for me
as my distinctive business in the world, I find the clue to the general
conduct not only of my own life and the key not only to my present
perplexities, but a clue to the difficulties of most scientific,
philosophical, artistic, creative, preoccupied men and women. We are
like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that
have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a
new fashion and emancipate ourselves from long accepted and long
unquestioned necessities. At last it becomes for us a case of air or
nothing. But the new land has not yet definitively emerged from the
waters and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon.

I do not now in the least desire to live longer unless I can go on with
what I consider to be my proper business. That is not to say that the
stuff of everyday life has not been endlessly interesting, exciting and
delightful for me in my time: clash of personalities, music and beauty,
eating and drinking, travel and meetings, new lands and strange
spectacles, the work for successes, much aimless play, much laughter,
the getting well again after illness, the pleasures, the very real
pleasures, of vanity. Let me not be ungrateful to life for its
fundamental substances. But I have had a full share of all these things
and I do not want to remain alive simply for more of them. I want the
whole stream of this daily life stuff to flow on for me--for a long time
yet--if, what I call my work can still be, can be more than ever the
emergent meaning of the stream. But only on that condition. And that is
where I am troubled now. I find myself less able to get on with my work
than ever before. Perhaps the years have something to do with that, and
it may be that a progressive broadening and deepening of my conception
of what my work should be, makes it less easy than it was; but the main
cause is certainly the invasion of my time and thought by matters that
are either quite secondary to my real business or have no justifiable
connection with it. Subordinate and everyday things, it seems to me in
this present mood, surround me in an ever-growing jungle. My hours are
choked with them; my thoughts are tattered by them. All my life I have
been pushing aside intrusive tendrils, shirking discursive consequences,
bilking unhelpful obligations, but I am more aware of them now and less
hopeful about them than I have ever been. I have a sense of crisis; that
the time has come to reorganize my peace, if the ten or fifteen years
ahead, which at the utmost I may hope to work in now, are to be saved
from being altogether overgrown.

I will explain later what I think my particular business to be. But for
it, if it is to be properly done, I require a pleasant well-lit writing
room in good air and a comfortable bedroom to sleep in--and, if the mood
takes me, to write in--both free from distracting noises and indeed all
unexpected disturbances. There should be a secretary or at least a
typist within call and out of earshot, and, within reach, an abundant
library and the rest of the world all hung accessibly on to that
secretary's telephone. (But it would have to be a one-way telephone, so
that when we wanted news we could ask for it, and when we were not in a
state to receive and digest news, we should not have it forced upon us.)
That would be the central cell of my life. That would give the immediate
material conditions for the best work possible. I think I would like
that the beautiful scenery outside the big windows should be changed
ever and again, but I recognize the difficulties in the way of that. In
the background there would have to be, at need, food, exercise and
stimulating, agreeable and various conversation, and, pervading all my
consciousness, there should be a sense of security and attention, an
assurance that what was produced, when I had done my best upon it, would
be properly significant and effective. In such circumstances I feel I
could still do much in these years before me, without hurry and without
waste. I can see a correlated scheme of work I could do that would, I
feel, be enormously worth while, and the essence of my trouble is that
the clock ticks on, the moments drip out and trickle, flow away as
hours, as days, and I cannot adjust my life to secure any such fruitful
peace.

It scarcely needs criticism to bring home to me that much of my work has
been slovenly, haggard and irritated, most of it hurried and
inadequately revised, and some of it as white and pasty in its texture
as a starch-fed nun. I am tormented by a desire for achievement that
overruns my capacity and by a practical incapacity to bring about for
myself the conditions under which fine achievement is possible. I pay
out what I feel to be a disproportionate amount of my time and attention
in clumsy attempts to save the rest of it for the work in hand. I seem
now in this present mood, to be saving only tattered bits of time, and
even in these scraps of salvage my mind is often jaded and preoccupied.

It is not that I am poor and unable to buy the things I want, but that I
am quite unable to get the things I want. I can neither control my
surroundings myself nor can I find helpers and allies who will protect
me from the urgencies--from within and from without--of primary things.
I do not see how there can be such helpers. For to protect me completely
they would have, I suppose, to span my intelligence and possibilities,
and if they could do that they would be better employed in doing my work
directly and eliminating me altogether.

This feeling of being intolerably hampered by irrelevant necessities,
this powerful desire for disentanglement is, I have already said, the
common experience of the men and women who write, paint, conduct
research and assist in a score of other ways, in preparing that new
world, that greater human life, which all art, science and literature
have foreshadowed. My old elaborate-minded friend, Henry James the
novelist, for example, felt exactly this thing. Some elements in his
character obliged him to lead an abundant social life, and as a result
he was so involved in engagements, acknowledgments, considerations,
compliments, reciprocities, small kindnesses, generosities, graceful
gestures and significant acts, all of which he felt compelled to do with
great care and amplitude, that at times he found existence more troubled
and pressing than many a sweated toiler. His craving for escape found
expression in a dream of a home of rest, _The Great Good Place_, where
everything that is done was done for good, and the fagged mind was once
more active and free. The same craving for flight in a less Grandisonian
and altogether more tragic key, drove out the dying Tolstoy in that
headlong flight from home which ended his life.

This fugitive impulse is an inevitable factor in the lives of us all,
great or small, who have been drawn into these activities, these
super-activities which create and which are neither simply gainful, nor
a response to material or moral imperatives, nor simply and directly the
procuring of primary satisfactions. Our lives are threaded with this
same, often quite desperate effort to disentangle ourselves, to get into
a Great Good Place of our own, and work freely.

None of us really get there, perhaps there is no _there_ anywhere to get
to, but we get some way towards it. We never do the work that we imagine
to be in us, we never realize the secret splendour of our intentions,
yet nevertheless some of us get something done that seems almost worth
the effort. Some of us, and it may be as good a way as any, let
everything else slide, live in garrets and hovels, borrow money
unscrupulously, live on women (or, if they are women, live on men),
exploit patronage, accept pensions. But even the careless life will not
stay careless. It has its own frustrations and chagrins.

Others make the sort of effort I have made, and give a part of their
available energy to save the rest. They fight for their conditions and
have a care for the things about them. That is the shape of my story. I
have built two houses and practically rebuilt a third to make that Great
Good Place to work in, I have shifted from town to country and from
country to town, from England to abroad and from friend to friend, I
have preyed upon people more generous than myself who loved me and gave
life to me. In return, because of my essential preoccupation, I have
never given any person nor place a simple disinterested love. It was not
in me. I have loved acutely, but that is another matter. I have attended
spasmodically to business and money-making. And here I am at sixty-five
(Spring 1932), still asking for peace that I may work some more, that I
may do that major task that will atone for all the shortcomings of what
I have done in the past.

Imperfection and incompleteness are the certain lot of all creative
workers. We all compromise. We all fall short. The life story to be told
of any creative worker is therefore by its very nature, by its
diversions of purpose and its qualified success, by its grotesque
transitions from sublimation to base necessity and its pervasive stress
towards flight, a comedy. The story can never be altogether pitiful
because of the dignity of the work; it can never be altogether dignified
because of its inevitable concessions. It must be serious, but not
solemn, and since there is no controversy in view and no judgment of any
significance to be passed upon it, there is no occasion for apologetics.
In this spirit I shall try to set down the story of my own life and
work, up to and including its present perplexities.

I write down my story and state my present problem, I repeat, to clear
and relieve my mind. The story has no plot and the problem will never be
solved. I do not think that in the present phase of human affairs there
is any possible Great Good Place, any sure and abiding home for any
creative worker. In diverse forms and spirits we are making over the
world, so that the primary desires and emotions, the drama of the
immediate individual life will be subordinate more and more, generation
by generation, to beauty and truth, to universal interests and mightier
aims.

That is our common rle. We are therefore, now and for the next few
hundred years at least, strangers and invaders of the life of every day.
We are all essentially lonely. In our nerves, in our bones. We are too
preoccupied and too experimental to give ourselves freely and honestly
to other people, and in the end other people fail to give themselves
fully to us. We are too different among ourselves to get together in any
enduring fashion. It is good for others as for myself to find, however
belatedly, that there is no fixed home to be found, and no permanent
relationships. I see now, what I merely suspected when I began to write
this section, that my perplexities belong to the mood of a wayside
pause, to the fatigue of a belated tramp on a road where there is no
rest-house before the goal.

That dignified peace, that phase of work perfected in serenity, of close
companionship in thought, of tactfully changing scenery and stabilized
instability ahead, is just a helpful dream that kept me going along some
of the more exacting stretches of the course, a useful but essentially
an impossible dream. So I sit down now by the reader, so to speak, and
yarn a bit about my difficulties and blunders, about preposterous hopes
and unexpected lessons, about my luck and the fun of the road, and then,
a little refreshed and set-up, a little more sprightly for the talk, I
will presently shoulder the old bundle again, go on, along the noisy
jostling road, with its irritations and quarrels and distractions, with
no delusion that there is any such dreamland work palace ahead, or any
perfection of accomplishment possible for me, before I have to dump the
whole load, for whatever it is worth, myself and my load together, on
the scales of the receiver at journey's end. Perhaps it is as well that
I shall never know what the scales tell, or indeed whether they have
anything to tell, or whether there will be any scales by which to tell,
of the load that has been my life.


 2

Persona _and Personality_

The preceding section was drafted one wakeful night, somewhen between
two and five in the early morning a year or more ago; it was written in
perfect good faith, and a criticism and continuation of it may very well
serve as the opening movement in this autobiographical effort. For that
section reveals, artlessly and plainly what Jung would call my
_persona_.

A _persona_, as Jung uses the word, is the private conception a man has
of himself, his idea of what he wants to be and of how he wants other
people to take him. It provides therefore, the standard by which he
judges what he may do, what he ought to do and what is imperative upon
him. Everyone has a _persona_. Self conduct and self explanation is
impossible without one.

A _persona_ may be very stable or it may fluctuate extremely. It may be
resolutely honest or it may draw some or all of its elements from the
realms of reverie. It may exist with variations in the same mind. We may
have single or multiple _personas_ and in the latter case we are charged
with inconsistencies and puzzle ourselves and our friends. Our
_personas_ grow and change and age as we do. And rarely if ever are they
the whole even of our conscious mental being. All sorts of complexes are
imperfectly incorporated or not incorporated at all, and may run away
with us in the most unexpected manner.

So that this presentation of a preoccupied mind devoted to an exalted
and spacious task and seeking a maximum of detachment from the cares of
this world and from baser needs and urgencies that distract it from that
task, is not even the beginning of a statement of what I am, but only of
what I most like to think I am. It is the plan to which I work, by which
I prefer to work, and by which ultimately I want to judge my
performance. But quite a lot of other things have happened to me, quite
a lot of other stuff goes with me and it is not for the reader to accept
this purely personal criterion.

A _persona_ may be fundamentally false, as is that of many a maniac. It
may be a structure of mere compensatory delusions, as is the case with
many vain people. But it does not follow that if it is selected by a man
out of his moods and motives, it is necessarily a work of self
deception. A man who tries to behave as he conceives he should behave,
may be satisfactorily honest in restraining, ignoring and disavowing
many of his innate motives and dispositions. The mask, the _persona_, of
the Happy Hypocrite became at last his true faces.

It is just as true that all men are imperfect saints and heroes as it is
that all men are liars. There is, I maintain, a sufficient justification
among my thoughts and acts from quite early years, for that pose of the
disinterested thinker and worker, working for a racial rather than a
personal achievement. But the distractions, attacks and frustrations
that set him scribbling distressfully in the night, come as much from
within as without; the antagonisms and temptations could do nothing to
him, were it not for that within him upon which they can take hold.
Directly I turn from the easier task of posing in an Apology for my
life, to the more difficult work of frank autobiography, I have to bring
in all the tangled motives out of which my _persona_ has emerged; the
elaborate sexual complexities, the complexes of ambition and rivalry,
the hesitation and fear in my nature, for example; and in the interests
of an impartial diagnosis I have to set aside the appeal for a
favourable verdict.

A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular
human being was made and worked; the directive _persona_ system is of
leading importance only when it is sufficiently consistent and developed
to be the ruling theme of the story. But this is the case with my life.
From quite an early age I have been predisposed towards one particular
sort of work and one particular system of interests. I have found the
attempt to disentangle the possible drift of life in general and of
human life in particular from the confused stream of events, and the
means of controlling that drift, if such are to be found, more important
and interesting by far than anything else. I have had, I believe, an
aptitude for it. The study and expression of _tendency_, has been for me
what music is for the musician, or the advancement of his special
knowledge is to the scientific investigator. My _persona_ may be an
exaggeration of one aspect of my being, but I believe that it is a
ruling aspect. It may be a magnification but it is not a fantasy. A
voluminous mass of work accomplished attests its reality.

The value of that work is another question. A bad musician may be none
the less passionately a musician. Because I have spent a large part of
my life's energy in a drive to make a practically applicable science out
of history and sociology, it does not follow that contemporary
historians, economists and politicians are not entirely just in their
disregard of my effort. They will not adopt my results; they will only
respond to fragments of them. But the fact remains that I have made that
effort, that it has given me a considerable ill-defined prestige, and
that it is the only thing that makes me conspicuous beyond the average
lot and gives my life with such complications and entanglements as have
occurred in it, an interest that has already provoked biography and may
possibly provoke more, and so renders unavoidable the thought of a
defensive publication, at some future date, of this essay in
autobiographical self-examination. The conception of a worker
concentrated on the perfection and completion of a work is its primary
idea. Either the toad which is struggling to express itself here, _has_
engendered a jewel in its head or it is nothing worth troubling about in
the way of toads.

This work, this jewel in my head for which I take myself seriously
enough to be self-scrutinizing and autobiographical, is, it seems to me,
a crystallization of ideas. A variety of biological and historical
suggestions and generalizations, which, when lying confusedly in the
human mind, were cloudy and opaque, have been brought into closer and
more exact relations; the once amorphous mixture has fallen into a lucid
arrangement and through this new crystalline clearness, a plainer vision
of human possibilities and the conditions of their attainment, appears.
I have made the broad lines and conditions of the human outlook distinct
and unmistakable for myself and for others. I have shown that human life
as we know it, is only the dispersed raw material for human life as it
might be. There is a hitherto undreamt-of fullness, freedom and
happiness within reach of our species. Mankind can pull itself together
and take that now. But if mankind fails to apprehend its opportunity,
then division, cruelties, delusions and ultimate frustration lie before
our kind. The decision to perish or escape has to be made within a very
limited time. For escape, vast changes in the educational, economic and
directive structure of human society are necessary. They are definable.
They are practicable. But they demand courage and integrity. They demand
a force and concentration of will and a power of adaptation in habits
and usages which may or may not be within the compass of mankind. This
is the exciting and moving prospect displayed by the crystal I have
brought out of solution.

I do not set up to be the only toad in the world that has this
crystallization. I do not find so much difference between my mind and
others, that I can suppose that I alone have got this vision clear. What
I think, numbers must be thinking. They have similar minds with similar
material, and it is by mere chance and opportunity that I have been
among the first to give expression to this realization of a guiding
framework for life. But I have been among the first. Essentially, then,
a main thread in weaving my autobiography must be the story of how I
came upon, and amidst what accidents I doubted, questioned and rebelled
against, accepted interpretations of life; and so went on to find the
pattern of the key to master our world and release its imprisoned
promise. I believe I am among those who have found what key is needed.
We, I and those similar others, have set down now all the specifications
for a working key to the greater human life. By an incessant toil of
study, propaganda, education and creative suggestion, by sacrifice where
it is necessary and much fearless conflict, by a bold handling of
stupidity, obstruction and perversity, we may yet cut out and file and
polish and insert and turn that key to the creative world community
before it is too late. That kingdom of heaven is materially within our
reach.

My story therefore will be at once a very personal one and it will be a
history of my sort and my time. An autobiography is the story of the
contacts of a mind and a world. The story will begin in perplexity and
go on to a troubled and unsystematic awakening. It will culminate in the
attainment of a clear sense of purpose, conviction that the coming
great world of order, is real and sure; but, so far as my individual
life goes, with time running out and a thousand entanglements delaying
realization. For me maybe--but surely not for us. For us, the undying us
of our thought and experience, that great to-morrow is certain.

So this autobiography plans itself as the crystallization of a system of
creative realizations in one particular mind--with various incidental,
good, interesting or curious personal things that happened by the way.


 3

_Quality of the Brain and Body Concerned_

The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a
particularly good one. If there were brain-shows, as there are cat and
dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize. Upon quite
a number of points it would be marked below the average. In a little
private school in a small town on the outskirts of London it seemed good
enough, and that gave me a helpful conceit about it in early struggles
where confidence was half the battle. It was a precocious brain, so that
I was classified with boys older than myself right up to the end of a
brief school career which closed before I was fourteen. But compared
with the run of the brains I meet nowadays, it seems a poorish
instrument. I won't even compare it with such cerebra as the full and
subtly simple brain of Einstein, the wary, quick and flexible one of
Lloyd George, the abundant and rich grey matter of G. B. Shaw, Julian
Huxley's store of knowledge or my own eldest son's fine and precise
instrument. But in relation to everyday people with no claim to mental
distinction I still find it at a disadvantage. The names of places and
people, numbers, quantities and dates for instance, are easily lost or
get a little distorted. It snatches at them and often lets them slip
again. I cannot do any but the simplest sums in my head and when I used
to play bridge, I found my memory of the consecutive tricks and my
reasoning about the playing of the cards, inferior to nine out of ten
of the people I played with. I lose at chess to almost anyone and though
I have played a spread-out patience called Miss Milligan for the past
fifteen years, I have never acquired a sufficient sense of the patterns
of 104 cards to make it anything more than a game of chance and feeling.
Although I have learnt and relearnt French since my school days and have
lived a large part of each year for the past eight years in France, I
have never acquired a flexible diction or a good accent and I cannot
follow French people when they are talking briskly--and they always talk
briskly. Such other languages as Spanish, Italian and German I have
picked up from a grammar or a conversation book sufficiently to serve
the purposes of travel; only to lose even that much as soon as I ceased
to use them. London is my own particular city; all my life I have been
going about in it and yet the certitude of the taxicab driver is a
perpetual amazement to me. If I wanted to walk from Hoxton to Chelsea
without asking my way, I should have to sit down to puzzle over a map
for some time. All this indicates a loose rather inferior mental
texture, inexact reception, bad storage and uncertain accessibility.

I do not think my brain has begun to age particularly yet. It can pick
up new tricks, though it drops them very readily again, more readily
perhaps than it used to do. I learnt sufficient Spanish in the odd
moments of three months to get along in Spain two years ago without much
trouble. I think my brain has always been very much as it is now, except
perhaps for a certain slowing down.

And I believe that its defects are mainly innate. It was not a good
brain to begin with, although certain physical defects of mine and bad
early training, may have increased faults that might have been corrected
by an observant teacher. The atmosphere of my home and early upbringing
was not a highly educative atmosphere; words were used inexactly, and
mispronounced, and so a certain timidity of utterance and a disposition
to mumble and avoid doubtful or difficult words and phrases, may have
worked back into my mental texture. My eyes have different focal lengths
and nobody discovered this until I was over thirty. Columns of figures
and lines of print are as a result apt to get a little dislocated and
this made me bad at arithmetic and blurred my impression of the form of
words. It was only about the age of thirteen, when I got away with
algebra, Euclid's elements and, a little later, the elements of
trigonometry, that I realized I was not a hopeless duffer at
mathematics. But here comes an item on the credit side; I found Euclid
easy reading and solved the simple "riders" in my text book with a
facility my schoolmaster found exemplary. I also became conceited about
my capacity for "problems" in algebra. And by eleven or twelve, in some
way I cannot trace, I had taken to drawing rather vigorously and
freshly. My elder brother could not draw at all but my other brother
draws exactly and delicately, if not quite so spontaneously and
expressively as I do. I know practically nothing of brain structure and
physiology, but it seems probable to me that this relative readiness to
grasp form and relation, indicates that the general shape and
arrangement of my brain is better than the quality of its cells, fibres
and blood-vessels. I have a quick sense of form and proportion; I have a
brain good for outlines. Most of my story will carry out that
suggestion.

A thing that has I think more to do with my general build than with my
brain structure is that my brain works best in short spells and is
easily fatigued. My head is small--I can cheer up nearly every one of my
friends by just changing hats; the borrowed brim comes down upon my ears
and spreads them wide--my heart has an irregular beat and I suspect that
my carotid arteries do not branch so freely and generously into my grey
matter as they might do. I do not know whether it would be of any
service after I am dead to prepare sections of my brain to ascertain
that. I have made an autopsy possible by my will, but my son Gip tells
me that all that tissue will have decayed long before a post mortem is
possible. "Unless," he added helpfully, "you could commit suicide in a
good hardening solution." But that would be difficult to arrange. There
may perhaps be considerable differences in mental character due to a
larger or smaller lumen of the arteries, to a rapid or sluggish venous
drainage, to variations in interstitial tissue, which affect the
response and interaction of the nerve cells. At any rate there is and
always has been far too ready a disposition in my brain to fag and fade
for my taste.

It can fade out generally or locally in a very disconcerting manner.
Aphasia is frequent with me. At an examination for a teaching diploma
which involved answering twenty or thirty little papers in the course of
four days I found myself on the last day face to face with a paper,
happily not of vital importance, of which the questions were entirely
familiar and entirely unmeaning. There was nothing to be done but go
out. On another occasion I undertook to give an afternoon lecture to the
Royal Institution. I knew my subject fairly well, so well that I had not
written it down. I was not particularly afraid of my audience. I talked
for a third of my allotted time--and came to a blank. After an awkward
silence I had to say; "I am sorry. That is all I have prepared to-day."

Psycho-analysts have a disposition to explain the forgetting of names
and the dissociation of faces, voices and so forth from their proper
context as a sub-conscious suppression due to some obscure dislike. If
so I must dislike a vast multitude of people. But why should
psycho-analysts assume a perfect brain mechanism and recognize only
psychic causes? I believe a physical explanation will cover a number of
these cases and that a drop in the conductivity of the associated links
due to diminished oxygenation or some slight variation in the blood
plasma is much more generally the temporarily effacing agent.

I was interested the other night, in a supper-room in Vienna, by a
little intimation of the poor quality of my memory. There came in a
party of people who sat at another table. One of them was a German young
lady who reminded me very strikingly of the daughter of an acquaintance
I had made in Spain. He had introduced himself and his family to me
because he was the surviving brother of an old friend and editor of
mine, Harry Cust, and he had heard all sorts of things about me. "That
girl," I said, "is the very image of----" The name would not come. "She
is the daughter of Lord B----." I got as far as the "B" and stuck. I
tried again; "Her name is---- Cust," I protested, "But I have known her
by her Christian name, talked to her, talked about her, liked and
admired her, visited her father's home at----." Again an absolute blank.
I became bad company. I could talk of nothing else. I retired inside my
brain and routed about in it, trying to recover those once quite
familiar names. I could recall all sorts of incidents while I was in the
same hotel with these people at Ronda and Granada and while I stayed at
that house, a very beautiful English house in the midlands, I could
produce a rough sketch of the garden and I remembered addressing a party
of girl scouts from the front door and even what I said to them. I had
met and talked with Lady B and on another occasion met her son within
the past year. But that evening the verbal labels seemed lost beyond
recovery. I tried over all the peers I had ever heard of whose names
began with "B." I tried over every conceivable feminine Christian name.
I took a gloomy view of my mental state.

Next morning, while I was still in bed, the missing labels all came
back, except one. The name of the house had gone; it is still missing.
Presently if it refuses to come home of its own accord I shall look it
up in some book of reference. And yet I am sure that somewhere in the
thickets of my brain it is hiding from me now. I tell this anecdote for
the sake of its complete pointlessness. The psychological explanation of
such forgetfulness is a disinclination to remember. But what conflict of
hostilities, frustrations, restrained desires and so forth, is here?
None at all. It is merely that the links are feeble and the printing of
the impressions bad. It is a case of second-rate brain fabric. And
rather overgrown and pressed upon at that. If my mental paths are not
frequently traversed and refreshed they are obstructed.

Now defects in the brain texture must affect its moral quite as much as
its intellectual character. It is essentially the same apparatus at work
in either case. If the links of association that reassemble a memory can
be temporarily effaced, so can the links that bring a sense of
obligation to bear upon a motive. Adding a column of figures wrongly and
judging incorrectly a situation in which one has to act are quite
comparable brain processes. So in my own behaviour just as in my
apprehension of things the outline is better than the detail. The more
closely I scrutinize my reactions, the more I find detailed
inconsistencies, changes of front and goings to and fro. The more I
stand off from the immediate thing and regard my behaviour as a whole
the more it holds together. As I have gathered experience of life, I
have become increasingly impressed by the injustice we do ourselves and
others by not allowing for these local and temporary faintings and
fadings of our brains in our judgment of conduct.

Our relations with other human beings are more full and intricate the
nearer they are to us and the more important they are in our lives. So,
however we may be able to pigeonhole and note this or that casual
acquaintance for treatment of a particular sort, when we come to our
intimates we find ourselves behaving according to immensely various and
complex systems of association, which in the case of such brains as mine
anyhow, are never uniformly active, which are subject to just the same
partial and irrational dissociations and variations as are my memories
of names and numbers. I can have a great tenderness or resentment for
someone and it may become as absent from my present thought as that
title or the name of that country house I could not remember in Vienna.
I may have a sense of obligation and it will vanish as completely. Facts
will appear in my mind quite clear in their form and sequence and yet
completely shorn of some moving emotional quality I know they once
possessed. And then a day or so after it will all come back to me.

Everyone, of course, is more or less like this, but I am of the kind, I
think, which is more so.

On the other hand, though my brain organization is so poor that
connexions are thus intermittently weakened and effaced and groups of
living associations removed out of reach, I do not find in this cerebrum
of mine any trace of another type of weakness which I should imagine
must be closely akin to such local failure to function, namely those
actual replacements of one system of associations by another, which
cause what is called double personalities. In the classical instances of
double personality psychologists tell of whole distinct networks of
memory and impulse, co-existing side by side in the same brain yet
functioning independently, which are alternative and often quite
contradictory one to the other. When one system is in action; the other
is more or less inaccessible and vice versa. I have met and lived in
close contact with one or two individuals of this alternating type; it
is, I think, more common among women than among men; I have had occasion
to watch these changes of phase, and I do not find that in my own brain
stuff there are any such regional or textural substitutions. There are
effacements but not replacements. My brain may be very much alive or it
may be flat and faded out or simply stupefied by sleepiness or apathy;
it may be exalted by some fever in the blood, warmed and confused by
alcohol, energized, angered or sexually excited by the subtle messages
and stimuli my blood brings it; but my belief is that I remain always
very much the same personality through it all. I do not think I delude
myself about this. My brain I believe is consistent. Such as it is, it
holds together. It is like a centralized country with all its government
in one capital, even though that government is sometimes negligent,
feeble or inert.

One other thing I have to note about this brain of mine and that is--how
can I phrase it?--an exceptional want of excitable "Go." I suspect that
is due not, as my forgetfulnesses and inconsistencies may be, to local
insufficiencies and failures in the circulation, but to some general
under-stimulation. My perceptions do not seem to be so thorough, vivid
and compelling as those of many people I meet and it is rare that my
impressions of things glow. There is a faint element of inattention in
all I do; it is as if white was mixed into all the pigments of my life.
I am rarely _vivid_ to myself. I am just a little slack, not wholly and
continuously interested, prone to be indolent and cold-hearted. I am
readily bored. When I try to make up for this I am inevitably a little
"forced" when dealing with things, and a little "false" and "charming"
with people. You will find this coming out when I tell of my failure as
a draper's assistant and of my relations to my intimate friends. You
will discover a great deal of evasion and refusal in my story.

Nature has a way of turning even biological defects into advantages and
I am not sure how far what may be called my success in life has not been
due to this undertow of indifference. I have not been easily carried
away by immediate things and made to forget the general in the
particular. There is a sort of journalistic legend that I am a person of
boundless enthusiasm and energy. Nothing could be further from the
reality. For all my desire to be interested I have to confess that for
most things and people I don't care a damn. Writing numbers of books and
articles is evidence not of energy but of sedentary habits. People with
a real quantitative excess of energy and enthusiasm become Mussolinis,
Hitlers, Stalins, Gladstones, Beaverbrooks, Northcliffes, Napoleons. It
takes generations to clean up after them. But what I shall leave behind
me will not need cleaning up. Just because of that constitutional apathy
it will be characteristically free from individual Woosh and it will be
available and it will go on for as long as it is needed.

And now, having conveyed to you some idea of the quality and defects of
the grey matter of that organized mass of phosphorized fat and
connective tissue which is, so to speak, the hero of the piece, and
having displayed the _persona_ or, if you will, the vanity which now
dominates its imaginations, I will try to tell how in this particular
receiving apparatus the picture of its universe was built up, what it
did and failed to do with the body it controlled and what the thronging
impressions and reactions that constituted its life amount to.




CHAPTER THE SECOND

_ORIGINS_


 1

_47 High Street, Bromley, Kent_

This brain of mine came into existence and began to acquire reflexes and
register impressions in a needy shabby home in a little town called
Bromley in Kent, which has since become a suburb of London. My
consciousness of myself grew by such imperceptible degrees, and for a
time each successive impression incorporated what had preceded it so
completely, that I have no recollection of any beginning at all. I have
a miscellany of early memories, but they are not arranged in any time
order. I will do my best however, to recall the conditions amidst which
my childish head got its elementary lessons in living. They seem to me
now quite dreadful conditions, but at the time it was the only
conceivable world.

It was then the flaxen head of a podgy little boy with a snub nose and a
long infantile upper lip, and along the top his flaxen hair was curled
in a longitudinal curl which was finally abolished at his own urgent
request. Early photographs record short white socks, bare arms and legs,
a petticoat, ribbon bows on the shoulders, and a scowl. That must have
been gala costume. I do not remember exactly what everyday clothes I
wore until I was getting to be a fairly big boy. I seem to recall a sort
of holland pinafore for everyday use very like what small boys still
wear in France, except that it was brown instead of black holland.

The house in which this little boy ran about, clattering up and down the
uncarpeted stairs, bawling--family tradition insists on the
bawling--and investigating existence, deserves description, not only
from the biographical, but from the sociological point of view. It was
one of a row of badly built houses upon a narrow section of the High
Street. In front upon the ground floor was the shop, filled with
crockery, china and glassware and, a special line of goods, cricket
bats, balls, stumps, nets and other cricket material. Behind the shop
was an extremely small room, the "parlour," with a fireplace, a borrowed
light and glass-door upon the shop and a larger window upon the yard
behind. A murderously narrow staircase with a twist in it led downstairs
to a completely subterranean kitchen, lit by a window which derived its
light from a grating on the street level, and a bricked scullery, which,
since the house was poised on a bank, opened into the yard at the ground
level below. In the scullery was a small fireplace, a copper boiler for
washing, a provision cupboard, a bread pan, a beer cask, a pump
delivering water from a well into a stone sink, and space for coal, our
only space for coal, beneath the wooden stairs. This "coal cellar" held
about a ton of coal, and when the supply was renewed it had to be
carried in sacks through the shop and "parlour" and down the staircase
by men who were apt to be uncivil about the inconveniences of the task
and still more apt to drop small particles of coal along the route.

The yard was perhaps thirty by forty feet square. In it was a brick
erection, the "closet," an earth jakes over a cesspool, within perhaps
twenty feet of the well and the pump; and above this closet was a
rain-water tank. Behind it was the brick dustbin (cleared at rare
intervals via the shop), a fairly open and spacious receptacle. In this
a small boy could find among the ashes such objects of interest as
egg-shells, useful tins and boxes. The ashes could be rearranged to
suggest mountain scenery. There was a boundary wall, separating us from
the much larger yard and sheds of Mr. Covell the butcher, in which pigs,
sheep and horned cattle were harboured violently, and protested
plaintively through the night before they were slaughtered. Some were
recalcitrant and had to be treated accordingly; there was an element of
Rodeo about Covell's yard. Beyond it was Bromley Church and its old
graveyard, full then of healthy trees, ruinous tombs and headstones
askew--in which I had an elder sister buried.

Our yard was half bricked and half bare earth, and an open cement gutter
brought the waste waters of the sink to a soak-away in the middle of the
space. Thence, no doubt, soap-suds and cabbage water, seeped away to
mingle with the graver accumulations of the "closet" and the waters of
the well from which the pump drew our supply. Between the scullery and
the neighbour's wall was a narrow passage covered over, and in this my
father piled the red earthenware jars and pans, the jam-pots and so
forth, which bulk so large in the stock of a crockery dealer.

I "played" a lot in this yard and learnt its every detail, because there
was no other open air space within easy reach of a very small boy to
play in. Its effect of smallness was enhanced by the erections in the
neighbours' yards on either side. On one hand was the yard of Mr.
Munday, the haberdasher, who had put up a greenhouse and cultivated
mushrooms, to nourish which his boys collected horse-droppings from the
High Street in a small wooden truck; and on the other, Mr. Cooper, the
tailor, had built out a workroom in which two or three tailors sat and
sewed. It was always a matter of uneasiness to my mother whether these
men could or could not squint round and see the necessary comings and
goings of pots and pans and persons to the closet. The unbricked part of
our yard had a small flower-bed in which my father had planted a bush of
Wigelia. It flowered reluctantly, and most things grew reluctantly in
that bed. A fact, still vividly clear in my mind across an interval of
sixty years, is that it was the only patch of turned up earth accessible
to the cats of Mr. Munday, Mr. Cooper and our own mnage. But my father
was a gardener of some resolution and, against the back of the house
rooting in a hole in the brickwork, he had persuaded a grape vine not
only to grow but to flourish. When I was ten, he fell from a combination
of short ladder, table and kitchen steps on which he had mounted to
prune the less accessible shoots of this vine, and sustained a compound
fracture of the leg. But of that very important event I will tell a
little later.

I dwell rather upon the particulars about this yard, because it was a
large part of my little world in those days. I lived mostly in it and in
the scullery and underground kitchen. We were much too poor to have a
servant, and it was more than my mother could do to keep fires going
upstairs (let alone the price of coal). Above the ground floor and
reached by an equally tortuous staircase--I have seen my father reduced
to a blind ecstasy of rage in an attempt to get a small sofa up it--were
a back bedroom occupied by my mother and a front room occupied by my
father (this separation was, I think, their form of birth control), and
above this again was a room, the boys' bedroom (there were three of us)
and a back attic filled with dusty crockery stock. But there was stock
everywhere; pots and pans invaded the kitchen, under the dresser and
under the ironing board; bats and stumps crept into the "parlour." The
furniture of this home had all been acquired second-hand at sales;
furniture shops that catered for democracy had still to appear in the
middle nineteenth century; an aristocratic but battered bookcase
despised a sofa from some housekeeper's room; there was a perky little
chiffonier in the parlour; the chairs were massive but moody; the wooden
bedsteads had exhausted feather mattresses and grey sheets--for there
had to be economy over the washing bills--and there was not a scrap of
faded carpet or worn oil-cloth in the house that had not lived a full
life of usefulness before it came into our household. Everything was
frayed, discoloured and patched. But we had no end of oil lamps because
they came out of (and went back into) stock. (My father also dealt in
lamp-wicks, oil and paraffin.)

We lived, as I have said, mostly downstairs and underground, more
particularly in the winter. We went upstairs to bed. About upstairs I
have to add a further particular. The house was infested with bugs. They
harboured in the wooden bedsteads and lurked between the layers of
wallpaper that peeled from the walls. Slain they avenge themselves by a
peculiar penetrating disagreeable smell. That mingles in my early
recollections with the more pervasive odour of paraffin, with which my
father carried on an inconclusive war against them. Almost every part of
my home had its own distinctive smell.

This was the material setting in which my life began. Let me tell now
something of my father and mother, what manner of people they were, and
how they got themselves into this queer home from which my two brothers
and I were launched into what Sir James Jeans has very properly called,
this Mysterious Universe, to make what we could of it.


 2

_Sarah Neal_ (_1822-1905_)

My mother was a little blue-eyed, pink-cheeked woman with a large
serious innocent face. She was born on October 10th, 1822, in the days
when King George IV was King, and three years before the opening of the
first steam railway. It was still an age of horse and foot transit,
sailing ships and undiscovered lands. She was the daughter of a Midhurst
innkeeper and his frequently invalid wife. His name was George Neal
(born 1797) and he was probably of remote Irish origin; his wife's
maiden name was Sarah Benham, which sounds good English. She was born in
1796. Midhurst was a little old sunny rag-stone built town on the road
from London to Chichester, and my grandfather stabled the relay of
horses for the stage coach as his father had done before him. An uncle
of his drove a coach, and one winter's night in a snowstorm, being alone
without passengers and having sustained himself excessively against the
cold and solitude of the drive, he took the wrong turning at the
entrance to the town, went straight over the wharf into the pool at the
head of the old canal, and was handsomely drowned together with his
horses. It was a characteristic of my mother's family to be easily lit
and confused by alcohol, but never subdued to inaction by it. And when
my grandfather died he had mortgaged his small property and was very
much in debt, so that there was practically nothing for my mother and
her younger brother John, who survived him.

The facts still traceable about my grandfather's circumstances are now
very fragmentary. I have a few notes my elder brother made from my
mother's recollections, and I have various wills and marriage and birth
certificates and a diary kept by my mother. George Neal kept the
Fountains Inn at Chichester I think, before he kept the New Inn at
Chichester; the New Inn he had from 1840 to his death in 1853. He
married Sarah Benham on October 30th, 1817. Two infant boys died, and
then my mother was born in 1822. After a long interval my uncle John was
born in 1836, and a girl Elizabeth in 1838. It is evident my grandmother
had very indifferent health, but she was still pretty and winning, says
my mother's diary, at the age of fifty-three, and her hands were small
and fine. Except for that one entry, there is nothing much now to be
learnt about her. I suppose that when she was well she did her best,
after the fashion of the time, to teach her daughter the elements of
religion, knowledge and the domestic arts. I possess quite a brave
sampler worked by my mother when she was in her eighth year. It says,
amidst some decorative stitching:

"Opportunity lost can never be recalled; therefore it is the highest
wisdom in youth to make all the sensible improvements they can in their
early days; for a young overgrown dunce seldom makes a figure in any
branch of learning in his old days. Sarah Neal her work. May 26, 1830. 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18."

After which it breaks off and resumes along the bottom with a row of
letters upside down.

When my grandmother was too ill to be in control, my mother ran about
the inn premises, laid the table for my grandfather's meals, and, as a
special treat, drew and served tankards of beer in the bar. There was no
compulsory schooling in those days. Some serious neighbours seem to have
talked to my grandfather and pointed out the value of accomplishments
and scholastic finish to a young female in a progressive age. In 1833 he
came into some property through the death of my great-grandfather and
thereupon my mother was sent off to a finishing school for young ladies
kept by a Miss Riley in Chichester. There in a year or so she showed
such remarkable aptitude for polite learning, that she learnt to write
in the clear angular handwriting reserved for women in those days, to
read, to do sums up to, but not quite including, long division, the
names of the countries and capitals of Europe and the counties and
county towns of England (with particular attention to the rivers they
were "on") and from Mrs. Markham's History all that it was seemly to
know about the Kings and Queens of England. Moreover she learnt from
Magnell's Questions the names of the four elements (which in due course
she taught me), the seven wonders of the world (or was it nine?), the
three diseases of wheat, and many such facts which Miss Riley deemed
helpful to her in her passage through life. (But she never really
mastered the names of the nine Muses and over what they presided, and
though she begged and prayed her father that she might learn French, it
was an Extra and she was refused it.) A natural tendency to Protestant
piety already established by her ailing mother, was greatly enhanced.
She was given various edifying books to read, but she was warned against
worldly novels, the errors and wiles of Rome, French cooking and the
insidious treachery of men, she was also prepared for confirmation and
confirmed, she took the sacrament of Holy Communion, and so fortified
and finished she returned to her home (1836).

An interesting thing about this school of Miss Riley's, which was in so
many respects a very antiquated eighteenth century school, was the
strong flavour of early feminism it left in her mind. I do not think it
is on record anywhere, but it is plain to me from what I have heard my
mother say, that among school mistresses and such like women at any
rate, there was a stir of emancipation associated with the claim,
ultimately successful, of the Princess Victoria, daughter of the Duke
and Duchess of Kent, to succeed King William IV. There was a movement
against that young lady based on her sex and this had provoked in
reaction a wave of feminine partisanship throughout the country. It
picked up reinforcement from an earlier trouble between George the
Fourth and Queen Caroline. A favourite book of my mother's was Mrs.
Strickland's _Queens of England_, and she followed the life of Victoria,
her acts and utterances, her goings forth and her lyings in, her great
sorrow and her other bereavements, with a passionate loyalty. The Queen,
also a small woman, was in fact my mother's compensatory personality,
her imaginative consolation for all the restrictions and hardships that
her sex, her diminutive size, her motherhood and all the endless
difficulties of life, imposed upon her. The dear Queen could command her
husband as a subject and wilt the tremendous Mr. Gladstone with awe. How
would it feel to be in that position? One would say this. One would do
that. I have no doubt about my mother's reveries. In her latter years in
a black bonnet and a black silk dress she became curiously suggestive of
the supreme widow....

For my own part, such is the obduracy of the young male, I heard too
much of the dear Queen altogether; I conceived a jealous hatred for the
abundant clothing, the magnificent housing and all the freedoms of her
children and still more intensely of my contemporaries, her
grandchildren. Why was my mother so concerned about them? Was not my
handicap heavy enough without my having to worship them at my own
mother's behest? This was a fixation that has lasted all through my
life. Various, desperate and fatiguing expeditions to crowded street
corners and points of vantage at Windsor, at Chislehurst near Bromley
(where the Empress Eugnie was living in exile) from which we might see
the dear Queen pass;--"She's coming. Oh, she's coming. If only I could
see! Take off your hat Bertie dear,"--deepened my hostility and wove a
stout, ineradicable thread of republicanism into my resentful nature.

But that is anticipating. For the present I am trying to restore my
mother's mental picture of the world, as she saw it awaiting her, thirty
years and more before I was born or thought of. It was a world much more
like Jane Austen's than Fanny Burney's, but at a lower social level. Its
chintz was second-hand, and its flowered muslin cheap and easily tired.
Still more was it like the English countryside of Dickens' _Bleak
House_. It was a countryside, for as yet my mother knew nothing of
London. Over it all ruled God our Father, in whose natural kindliness my
mother had great confidence. He was entirely confused in her mind,
because of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, with "Our Saviour" or "Our
Lord"--who was rarely mentioned by any other names. The Holy Ghost she
ignored almost entirely; I cannot recall any reference to him; he was
certainly never "_our_" Holy Ghost, and the Virgin Mary, in spite of
what I should have considered her appeal to feminist proclivities, my
mother disregarded even more completely. It may have been simply that
there was a papistical flavour about the Virgin; I don't know. Or a
remote suspicion of artistic irregularity about the recorded activities
of the Holy Spirit. In the lower sky and the real link between my mother
and the god-head, was the Dear Queen, ruling by right divine, and
beneath this again, the nobility and gentry, who employed, patronised,
directed and commanded the rest of mankind. On every Sunday in the year,
one went to church and refreshed one's sense of this hierarchy between
the communion table and the Free Seats. And behind everyone, behind the
Free Seats, but alas! by no means confining his wicked activities to
them, was Satan, Old Nick, the Devil, who accounted for so much in the
world that was otherwise inexplicable.

My mother was Low Church, and I was disposed to find, even in my tender
years, Low Church theology a little too stiff for me, but she tempered
it to her own essential goodness, gentleness and faith in God's
Fatherhood, in ways that were quite her own. I remember demanding of her
in my crude schoolboy revolt if she really believed in a hell of eternal
torment. "We _must_, my dear," she said. "But our Saviour died for
us--and perhaps after all nobody will be sent there. Except of course
the Old Devil."

And even he, being so to speak the official in charge, I think she would
have exempted from actual torture. Maybe Our Father would have shown him
the tongs now and again, just to remind him.

There was a picture in an old illustrated book of devotions, Sturm's
_Reflections_, obliterated with stamp paper, and so provoking
investigation. What had mother been hiding from me? By holding up the
page to the light I discovered the censored illustration represented
hell-fire; devil, pitchfork and damned, all complete and drawn with
great gusto. But she had anticipated the general trend of Protestant
theology at the present time and hidden hell away.

She believed that God our Father and Saviour, personally and through
occasional angels, would _mind_ her; she believed that he would not be
indifferent to her prayers; she believed she had to be good, carefully
and continually, and not give Satan a chance with her. Then everything
would be all right. That was what her "simple faith" as she called it
really amounted to, and in that faith she went out very trustfully into
the world.

It was decided that she should go into service as a lady's maid. But
first she had four years' apprenticeship as a dressmaker (1836-1840) and
she also had instruction in hair-dressing, to equip herself more
thoroughly for that state of life into which it had pleased God to call
her.

It was a world of other ladies'-maids and valets, of house stewards,
housekeepers, cooks and butlers, upper servants above the level of maids
and footmen, a downstairs world, but living in plentiful good air, well
fed and fairly well housed in the attics, basements and interstices of
great mansions. It was an old-fashioned world; most of its patterns of
behaviour and much of its peculiar idiom, were established in the
seventeenth century; its way of talking, its style of wit, was in an
unbroken tradition from the _Polite Conversation_ of Dean Swift, and it
had customs and an etiquette all its own. I do not think she had a bad
time in service; people poked fun at a certain simplicity in her, but no
one seems to have been malignant.

I do not know all the positions she filled during her years as a lady's
maid. In 1845, when her diary begins, she was with the wife of a certain
Captain Forde, I know, and in her company she travelled and lived in
Ireland and in various places in England. The early part of this diary
is by far the best written. It abounds in descriptions of scenery and
notes of admiration, and is clearly the record of an interested if
conventional mind. Ultimately (1850) she became maid to a certain Miss
Bullock who lived at Up Park near Petersfield. It was not so gay as the
Forde world. At Christmas particularly, in place of merriment, "Up Park
just did nothing but eat," but she conceived a great affection for Miss
Bullock. She had left the Fordes because her mother was distressed by
the death of her sister Elizabeth and wanted Sarah to be in England
nearer to her. And at Up Park she met an eligible bachelor gardener who
was destined to end her career as a lady's maid, and in the course of
time to be my father. He wasn't there to begin with; he came in 1851.
"He seems _peculiar_," says the diary, and offers no further comment.
Probably she encountered him first in the Servants' Hall, where there
was a weekly dance by candlelight to the music of concertina and fiddle.

This was not my mother's first love affair. Two allusions, slightly
reminiscent of the romantic fiction of the time, preserve the memory of
a previous experience.

"Kingstown railway," the diary remarks, "is very compact and pretty.
From Dublin it is short but the sea appears in view, and mountains,
which to one fond of romantic scenery, how dear does the country appear
when the views are so diversified by the changes of scene, to the
reflective mind how sweet they are _to one alas a voluntary exile_ from
her dear, her native land, to wander alone to brood over the unkindness,
the ingratitude, of a faithless, an absent, but not a forgotten lover.
Ah, I left a kind and happy home to hide from all dear friends _the
keen, bitter anguish_ of my heart. Time and the smiles of dear Erin's
hospitable people had made a once miserable girl comparatively happy,
but can man be happy who gains an innocent love and then trifles with
the girlish innocent heart. May he be forgiven as I forgive him!!!"

And again, some pages later: "I meet kindness everywhere, but there are
moments when I feel lonely, which makes me sigh for home, dear England,
happy shore, still I do not wish to meet again that _false wicked man_,
who gained my young heart and then trifled with a pure love. I hope this
early trial will work good in me. I feel it ordered for the best and
time will, I trust, prove it to me how mercifully has Providence watched
over me, and for a wise purpose taught me not to trust implicitly to
erring creatures. Oh, can I ever believe man again? _Burnt all his
letters._ I shall now forget quicker I hope, and may he be forgiven his
falsehoods."

So, but for that man's treachery, everything might have been different
and somebody else might have come into the world in my place, and this
biography have never seen the light, replaced by some other biography or
by no biography at all.

I know nothing of the earliest encounter of my father and mother. It
may have been in the convolutions of Hands Across and Down the Middle,
Sir Roger de Coverley, Pop Goes the Weasel, or some such country dance.
I like to think of my mother then as innocently animated, pretty and not
yet overstrained by dingy toil, and my father as a bright and promising
young gardener, son of a head gardener of repute, the head gardener of
Lord de Lisle at Penshurst. He was five years younger than she was, and
they were both still in their twenties. Presently she was calling him
"Joe" and he had modified her name Sarah to "Saddie."

He probably came to the house every day to discuss flowers and
vegetables, and so forth, with the cook and the housekeeper and steward
and perhaps there was a chance for a word or two then, and on Sundays,
when everybody walked downhill a mile and more through the Warren to
morning service in Harting Church, they may have had opportunities for
conversation. He was not a bad-looking young man, I gather, and I once
met an old lady in Harting who recalled that he wore the "most
gentlemanly grey trousers."

My parents' relationship had its serious side in those days. It was not
all country dances and smiling meetings. I still possess a letter from
him to her in which he explains that she has misunderstood an allusion
he had made to the Holy Sacrament. He would be the last, he says, to be
irreverent on such a topic. It is quite a well written letter.


 3

_Up Park and Joseph Wells (1827-1910)_

This Up Park is a handsome great house looking southward, with
beechwoods and bracken thickets to shelter the dappled fallow deer of
its wide undulating downland park. To the north the estate over-hangs
the village of South Harting in the triangle between Midhurst,
Petersfield and Chichester. The walled gardens, containing the
gardener's cottage which my father occupied, were situated three or four
hundred yards or more away from the main buildings. There was an
outlying laundry, dairy, butcher's shop and stables in the early
eighteenth century style, and a turfed-over ice-house. Up Park was built
by a Fetherstonhaugh, and it has always been in the hands of that
family.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the reigning Fetherstonhaugh
was a certain Sir Harry, an intimate of the Prince Regent who was
afterwards George IV. Sir Harry was a great seducer of pretty poorish
girls, milliners, tenants, singers and servant maids, after the fashion
of the time. An early mistress was that lovely young adventuress Emma,
who passed into the protection of Greville of the Memoirs, married Sir
William Hamilton, and became Romney's and Nelson's Lady Hamilton. In his
declining years Sir Harry was smitten with desire for an attractive
housemaid, Frances Bullock, and after a strenuous pursuit and a virtuous
resistance, valiant struggles on the back stairs and much heated
argument, married her. No offspring ensued. She brought her younger
sister with her to the house and engaged a governess, Miss Sutherland,
to chaperon her and it was after Sir Harry's death that my mother became
maid to this younger Miss Bullock.

Queen Victoria and Society never took very eagerly to this belated Lady
Fetherstonhaugh, nobody married Miss Bullock, and Sir Harry being duly
interred, the three ladies led a spacious dully comfortable life between
Up Park and Claridge's. They entertained house parties; people came to
them for their shooting and hunting. They changed so little of the old
arrangements that I find in a list of guests made by the housekeeper
forty years after his death, that "Sir H's bedroom" is still called by
his name and assigned to the principal guest. A Mr. Weaver, a bastard, I
believe, of Sir Harry's, occupied an ambiguous position in the household
as steward and was said--as was probably inevitable--to be Lady
Fetherstonhaugh's lover. It could not have been much in the way of
love-making anyhow, with everyone watching and disapproving.

In a novel of mine, perhaps my most ambitious novel, _Tono Bungay_, I
have made a little picture of Up Park as "Bladesover," and given a
glimpse of its life below stairs. (But the housekeeper there is not in
the least like my mother.) That is how I saw it in the 'eighties when
the two surviving ladies, Miss Bullock (who took the name of
Fetherstonhaugh after her sister's death) and Miss Sutherland, were very
old ladies indeed. But in the late 'forties when my mother came down
from her costumes and mending and hair-dressing to her lunch or tea or
supper in the housekeeper's room, or peeped, as I am sure she did at
times from some upstairs window towards the gardens, or beamed and
curtseyed and set to partners in the country dance, everyone was younger
and the life seemed perhaps more eventful. If it was not so gay and
various as that now vanished life below stairs in Ireland, it was bright
enough.

My father, Joseph Wells, was the son of Joseph Wells, who was head
gardener to Lord de Lisle at Penshurst Place in Kent. My father was one
of several brothers and sisters, Charles Edward, Henry, Edward, William,
Lucy, Elizabeth and Hannah, and although he bore his father's name, he
was the youngest of the sons. There were uncles and cousins in the
district, so that I suppose the family had been in Kent for at least
some generations. My great-grandfather's name was Edward; he had six
children and forty grandchildren, and the family is lost at last in a
mangrove swamp of Johns, Georges, Edwards, Toms, Williams, Harrys,
Sarahs and Lucys. The lack of originality at the Christenings is
appalling. The aunts and uncles were all as far as I can ascertain, of
the upper-servants, tenant-farmer class, except that one set of my
father's first cousins at Penshurst, bearing the surname of Duke, had
developed an industry for the making of cricket bats and balls, and were
rather more prosperous than the others.

My father grew up to gardening and cricket, and remained an
out-of-doors, open-air man to the day of his death. He became gardener
at Redleaf, nearby, to a Mr. Joseph Wells, who, in spite of the
identical name, was no sort of relation, and in the summer, directly the
day's work was over, my father would run, he told me once, a mile and
more at top speed to the pitch at Penshurst to snatch half an hour of
cricket before the twilight made the ball invisible. He learnt to swim
and to handle a muzzle-loading gun and so forth as country boys do, and
his schooling gave him reading and writing and "summing," so that he
read whatever he could and kept his accounts in a clear well-shaped
handwriting; but what sort of school imparted these rudiments I do not
know.

Joseph Wells, of Redleaf, was an old gentleman with liberal and sthetic
tastes, and he took rather a fancy to young Joseph. He talked to him,
encouraged him to read, and lent and gave him books on botany and
gardening. When the old man was ill he liked my father to take his arm
when he walked in the garden. My father made definite efforts to improve
himself. In our parlour when I was a small boy in search of reading
matter there was still the _Young Man's Companion_ in two volumes and
various numbers of Orr's _Circles of the Science_ which he had acquired
during this phase. He had an aptitude for drawing. He drew and coloured
pictures of various breeds of apple and pear and suchlike fruits, and he
sought out and flattened and dried between sheets of blotting paper, a
great number of specimen plants.

Old Wells was interested in art, and one of his friends and a frequent
visitor at Redleaf was Sir Edwin Landseer, the "animal painter," who
could put human souls into almost every sort of animal and who did those
grave impassive lions at the base of the Nelson monument in Trafalgar
Square. My father served as artist's model on several occasions, and for
many years he was to be seen in the National Gallery, peeping at a
milkmaid in a picture called _The Maid and the Magpie_. Behind him in
the sunshine was Penshurst Church. But afterwards the Landseers were all
sent to the Tate Gallery at Millbank and there a sudden flood damaged or
destroyed most of them and washed away that record of my father
altogether.

I do not know what employment my father found after he left Redleaf,
which he did when his employer died, before he came to Up Park and met
my mother. I think there was some sort of job as gardener or
under-gardener at Crewe. In these days he was evidently restless and
uneasy about his outlook upon life. Unrest was in the air. He talked of
emigrating to America or Australia. I think the friendliness of Joseph
Wells of Redleaf had stirred up vague hopes and ambitions in him, and
that he had been disappointed of a "start in life" by the old man's
death.

I wish I knew more than I do of my father's dreams and wishes during
those early years before he married. In his working everyday world he,
like my mother, was still very much in the tradition of the eighteenth
century when the nobility and gentry ruled everything under God and the
King, when common men knew nothing of the possibility of new wealth, and
when either Patronage or a Legacy was the only conceivable way for them
out of humdrum and rigid limitation from the cradle to the grave. That
system was crumbling away; strange new things were undermining it, but
to my mother certainly it seemed an eternal system only to be ended at
the Last Trump, and I think it was solely in rare moments of
illumination and transparency that my father glimpsed its instability.
He and his Saddie walking soberly through the Up Park bracken on a free
Sunday afternoon, discussing their prospects, had little more suspicion
that their world of gentlemen's estates and carriage-folk and villages
and country houses and wayside inns and nice little shops and horse
ploughs and windmills and touching one's hat to one's betters, would not
endure for ever, than they had that their God in his Heaven was under
notice to quit.

But if such was the limitation of his serious talk in the daylight,
there could be other moods when he was alone. I had one hint of that
which was as good I think as a hundred explicit facts. Once when I was
somewhen in my twenties and he was over sixty; as I was walking with him
on the open downs out beyond Up Park, he said casually: "When I was a
young man of your age I used to come out here and lie oh! half the
night, just looking at the stars."

I hadn't thought of him before as a star-gazer. His words opened a great
gulf of unsuspected states of mind to me. I wanted him to tell me more,
but I did not want to bother him with a cross-examination. I hesitated
among a number of clumsy leading questions that would tell me something
more of the feelings of that vanished young man of forty years ago who
had suddenly reappeared between us.

"What for?" I ventured to ask rather lamely.

"Wondering."

I left it at that. One may be curious about one's father, but prying is
prohibited.

But if he could look out of this planet and wonder about the stars, it
may be he could also look out of his immediate circumstances and
apprehend their triviality by stellar standards. I do not think my
mother ever wondered about the stars. God our Father had put them there
"for his glory," and that sufficed for her. My father was never at any
time in his life, clear and set in that fashion.

My mother's diary is silent about the circumstances of her marriage.
There is no mention of any engagement. I cannot imagine how it came
about. She left Up Park to be with her mother who was very seriously ill
in the spring of 1853. My father visited the inn at Midhurst, I should
think as her fianc, in the summer. He had left Up Park and was on his
way to stay with his brother, Charles Edward, in Gloucestershire until
he could find another place. Then suddenly she was in a distressful
storm. Her father was taken ill unexpectedly and died in August, and her
mother, already very ill, died, after a phase of dementia due to grief
and dismay, in November. That happened on the 5th, and on the 22nd my
mother was married to my father (who was still out of a situation) in
the City of London at St. Stephen's Church, Coleman Street. He seems to
have been employed a little later as an under gardener at Trentham in
Staffordshire, and for a time they could live together only
intermittently. She visited him at Trentham, she does not say precisely
how; and they spent a Sunday she did not like in "the gardener's
cottage" at Crewe. "No church, nothing." She paid visits to relations in
between and felt "very unsettled."

I guess they were married on his initiative, but that is only guessing.
He may have thought it a fine thing to do. There is nothing like
extravagance when one is down. He may have had a flash of imperious
passion. But then one should go on in the same key, and that he did not
do. My mother may have felt the need of a man to combat the lawyers whom
she suspected of making away with her father's estate. If so, my father
was very little good to her. Presently he got a job and a cottage at
Shuckburgh Park in the midlands. On April 5th, 1854, she is "very happy
and busy preparing for my new home." It was to be the happiest and most
successful home she ever had, poor little woman! In the diary my father
becomes "dearest Joe" and "my dear husband." Previously he had been
"Joe" or "J. W." "The Saturday laborious work I do not like, but still I
am very happy in my little home." And he did a little water-colour
sketch which still exists, of his small square cottage, and I suppose
one does not sketch a house unless one is reasonably happy in it. He
kept this place at Shuckburgh Park until a daughter had been born to him
(in 1855) and then he was at loose ends again.

There seems to have been no intimation of coming trouble until it came.
My mother's diary records: "July 17th 1855. Sir Francis gave Joe warning
to _leave_ (trebly underlined). Oh what a sorrow! It struck to my poor
heart to look at my sweet babe and obliged to leave my pretty _home_.
May it please God to bless us with another happy quiet home in His own
Good Time."

But it did not please God to do anything of the sort at any time any
more.

I do not know why my father was unsuccessful as a gardener, but I
suspect a certain intractability of temper rather than incapacity. He
did not like to be told things and made to do things. He was impatient.
Before he married, I gather from an old letter from a friend that has
chanced to be preserved, he was talking of going to the gold diggings in
Australia, and again after he left the cottage at Shuckburgh he was
looking round for some way out of the galling subordinations and
uncertainties of "service." He thought again of emigrating; this time to
America, there were even two stout boxes made for his belongings, and
then his schemes for flight abroad, which perhaps after all were rather
half-hearted schemes, were frustrated by the advent of my eldest
brother, his second child.

Perhaps it was as well that he did not attempt pioneering in new lands
with my mother. She had been trained as a lady's maid and not as a
housewife and I do not think she had the mental flexibility to rise to
new occasions. She was that sort of woman who is an incorrigibly bad
cook. By nature and upbringing alike she belonged to that middle-class
of dependents who occupied situations, performed strictly defined
duties, gave or failed to give satisfaction and had no ideas at all
outside that dependence. People of that quality "saved up for a rainy
day" but they were without the slightest trace of primary productive or
acquisitive ability. She was that in all innocence, but I perceive that
my father might well have had a more efficient help-mate in the struggle
for life as it went on in the individualistic nineteenth century.

He was at any rate a producer, if only as a recalcitrant gardener, but
he shared her incapacity for getting and holding things. They were both
economic innocents made by and for a social order, a scheme of things,
that was falling to pieces all about them. And looking for stability in
a world that was already breaking away towards adventure, they presently
dropped into that dismal insanitary hole I have already described, in
which I was born, and from which they were unable to escape for
twenty-four dreary years.

Since it was difficult to find a situation as a gardener and still more
tiresome to keep it, since there was no shelter or help in the world
while one was out of work but the scanty hospitality of one's family,
the idea of becoming one's own master and getting a home of one's own
even on an uncertain income became a very alluring one. An obliging
cousin, George Wells, with a little unsuccessful china and crockery shop
in the High Street of Bromley, Kent, offered it to my father on
extremely reasonable terms. It was called _Atlas House_ because of a
figure of Atlas bearing a lamp instead of the world in the shop window.
My father anticipated his inheritance of a hundred pounds or so, bought
this business and set up for himself. He spent all his available savings
and reserves, and my mother with one infant in arms moved into 47 High
Street, in time to bring my eldest brother into the world there. And so
they were caught. From the outset this business did not "pay," and it
"paid" less and less. But they had now no means of getting out of it and
going anywhere else.

"Took possession," says the diary on October 23rd 1855. On the 27th,
"very unsettled. No furniture sufficient and no capital to do as we
ought. I fear we have done wrong." On November 7th she says, "This seems
a horrid business, no trade. How I wish I had taken that situation with
Lady Carrick!" "November 8th. No customers all day. How sad to be
deceived by one's relations. They have got their money and we their old
stock."

They both knew they were caught.

And being caught like this was to try these poor things out to the
utmost. It grew very plain that my father had neither imagination nor
sympathy for the woman's side of life. (Later on I was to betray a
similar deficiency.) He had been brought up in a country home with
mother and sisters, and the women folk saw to all the indoor business. A
man just didn't bother about it. He lived from the shop outward and had
by far the best of things; she became the entire household staff, with
two little children on her hands and, as the diary shows quite plainly,
in perpetual dread of further motherhood. "Anxiety relieved," became her
formula. There is a pathetic deterioration in the diary, as infested,
impossible, exhausting Atlas House takes possession of her. There were
no more descriptions of scenery and fewer and fewer pious and
sentimental reflections after the best models. It becomes a record of
dates and comings and goings, of feeling ill, of the ill health of her
children, growing up, she realized, in unwholesome circumstances, of
being left alone, of triter and triter attempts to thank God for his
many mercies. "J. W."--he is "J. W." again now and henceforth--"playing
cricket at Chislehurst." "J. W. out all day." "J. W. in London." ...

"August 23rd, 1857. Church, morning, had a happy day. J. W. went to
church with me!!!"

"August 30th, 1857. Went to church. Mr. J. W. did not go all day, did
not feel quite so happy, how often I wish he was more serious."

"Dec. 1st, 1857. Joe resolved on going to New Zealand. Advertisement of
business to let or sold. 3rd. Please God to guide us whichever way is
for the best."

"Dec. 31st, '57. This year ends with extreme anxiety about the
business. How I wish we had never taken it. How unsuited for us. Not
half a living and dear parents have all gone. Oh Heavenly Father guide
and direct me."

"Jan. 4th. J. W. put a second advertisement in."

"Jan. 6th. Had an answer to advertisement."

These advertisements came to nothing. A "letting notice in the window"
came to nothing. "Several enquiries but nothing." More strenuous methods
were needed and never adopted. Day follows day in that diary and mostly
they are unhappy days. And so it went on. For twenty-four years of her
life, and the first thirteen years of mine, dingy old Atlas House kept
her going up and down its wearisome staircases in her indefatigable
hopeless attempt to recover something of the brightness of that little
cottage at Shuckburgh.

My mother used to accuse my father of neglecting the shop for cricket.
But it was through that excellent sport as it was then, that the little
mnage contrived to hold out, with an occasional bankruptcy, for so long
before it was finally sold up. He was never really interested in the
crockery trade and sold little, I think, but jampots and preserving jars
to the gentlemen's houses round about, and occasional bedroom sets and
tea-sets, table glass and replacements. But he developed his youthful
ability to play cricket which he had kept alive at Up Park, he revived
the local club and was always getting jobs of variable duration as a
professional bowler and cricket instructor in the neighbourhood. He
played for the West Kent Club from 1857 to 1869 and bowled for the
County of Kent in 1862 and 1863. On June 26th, 1862, he clean bowled
four Sussex batsmen in four successive balls, a feat not hitherto
recorded in county cricket. Moreover his cousin John Duke at Penshurst,
whom he had once got out of danger when they were swimming together, let
him have long and considerate credit for a supply of cricket goods that
ousted the plates and dishes from half the shop window. Among the
familiar names of my childhood were the Hoares and the Normans, both
banking families with places near Bromley, for whom he bowled; and for
some years he went every summer term to Norwich Grammar School as
"pro."


 4

_Sarah Wells at Atlas House (1855-1880)_

My Mother drudged endlessly in that gaunt and impossible home and the
years slipped by. Year after year she changed and the prim little
lady's-maid, with her simple faith and her definite views about the Holy
Sacrament, gave place to a tired woman more and more perplexed by life.
Twice more her habitual "anxiety" was not to be relieved, and God was to
incur her jaded and formal gratitude for two more "dear ones." She
feared us terribly before we came and afterwards she loved and slaved
for us intensely, beyond reason. She was not clever at her job and I
have to tell it; she sometimes did badly by her children through lack of
knowledge and flexibility, but nothing could exceed the grit and
devotion of her mothering. She wore her fingers to the bone working at
our clothes, and she had acquired a fanatical belief in cod liver oil
and insisted that we two younger ones should have it at any cost; so
that we escaped the vitamin insufficiency that gave my elder brother a
pigeon breast and a retarded growth. No one knew about vitamin D in
those days, but cod liver oil had been prescribed for my sister Fanny
and it had worked magic with her.

My mother brought my brother Freddy into the world in 1862, and had her
great tragedy in 1864, when my sister died of appendicitis. The nature
of appendicitis was unknown in those days; it was called "inflammation
of the bowels"; my sister had been to a children's tea party a day or so
before her seizure, and my mother in her distress at this sudden blow,
leaped to the conclusion that Fanny had been given something unsuitable
to eat, and was never quite reconciled to those neighbours, would not
speak to them, forbade us to mention them.

Fanny had evidently been a very bright, precocious and fragile little
girl, an indoor little girl, with a facility for prim piety that had
delighted my mother's heart. Such early goodness, says Dr. W. R.
Ackroyd (in _Vitamins and other Dietary Essentials_) is generally a sign
of some diet deficiency, and that, I fear is how things were with her.
Quite healthy children are boisterous. She had learnt her "collect"
every Sunday, repeated many hymns by rote, said her prayers beautifully,
found her "place" in the prayer book at church, and made many apt
remarks for my mother to treasure in her heart. I was born two years and
more after her death, in 1866, and my mother decided that I had been
sent to replace Fanny and to achieve a similar edification. But again
Fate was mocking her. Little boys are different in constitution from
little girls, and even from the outset I showed myself exceptionally
deficient in the religious sense. I was born blasphemous and protesting.
Even at my christening, she told me, I squalled with a vehemence
unprecedented in the history of the family.

And later she was to undermine her own teaching with cod liver oil.

My own beginnings were shaped so much as a system of reactions to my
mother's ideas and suggestions and feelings that I find some attempt to
realize her states of mind, during those twenty-five years of
enslavement behind the crockery shop, a necessary prelude to my account
of my own education. We had no servants; no nurse-maids and governesses
intervened between us; she carried me about until I could be put down to
trot after her and so I arose mentally, quite as much as physically, out
of her. It was a process of severance and estrangement, for I was my
father's as well as my mother's son.

I have tried to give an impression of the simple and confident faith
with which my mother sailed out into life. Vast unsuspected forces
beyond her ken were steadily destroying the social order, the horse and
sailing ship transport, the handicrafts and the tenant-farming social
order, to which all her beliefs were attuned and on which all her
confidence was based. To her these mighty changes in human life
presented themselves as a series of perplexing frustrations and
undeserved misfortunes, for which nothing or nobody was clearly to
blame--unless it was my father and the disingenuous behaviour of people
about her from whom she might have expected better things.

Bromley was being steadily suburbanized. An improved passenger and goods
service, and the opening of a second railway station, made it more and
more easy for people to go to London for their shopping and for London
retailers to come into competition with the local traders. Presently the
delivery vans of the early multiple shops, the Army and Navy
Co-operative Stores and the like, appeared in the neighbourhood to suck
away the ebbing vitality of the local retailer. The trade in pickling
jars and jam-pots died away. Fresh housekeepers came to the gentlemen's
houses, who knew not Joseph and bought their stuff from the stores.

Why didn't Joe do something about it?

Poor little woman! How continually vexed she was, how constantly tired
and worried to the limits of endurance, during that dismal half-lifetime
of disillusionment that slipped away at Bromley! She clung most
desperately to the values she had learnt at Miss Riley's finishing
school; she learnt nothing and forgot nothing through those dark years
spent for the most part in the underground kitchen. Every night and
morning and sometimes during the day she prayed to Our Father and Our
Saviour for a little money, for a little leisure, for a little kindness,
to make Joe better and less negligent--for now he was getting very
neglectful of her. It was like writing to an absconding debtor for all
the answer she got.

Unless taking away her darling, her wonder, her one sweet and tractable
child, her Fanny, her little "Possy," without pity or warning was an
answer. A lesson. Fanny was well and happy and then she was flushed and
contorted with agony and then in three days she was dead. My mother had
to talk to her diary about it. Little boys do not like lamenting
mothers; Joe was apt to say, "There, there, Saddie," and go off to his
cricket; except for Our Lord and Saviour, whose dumbness, I am afraid,
wore the make-believe very thin at times, my mother had to do her
weeping alone.

It is my conviction that deep down in my mother's heart something was
broken when my sister died two years and more before I was born. Her
simple faith was cracked then and its reality spilled away. I got only
the forms and phrases of it. I do not think she ever admitted to
herself, ever realized consciously, that there was no consolation under
heaven for the outrage Fate had done her. Our Lord was dumb, even in
dreams he came not, and her subconsciousness apprehended all the
dreadful implications of that silence. But she fought down that
devastating discovery. She went on repeating the old phrases of
belief--all the more urgently perhaps. She wanted me to believe in order
to stanch that dark undertow of doubt. In the early days with my sister
she had been able so to saturate her teaching with confidence in the
Divine Protection, that she had created a prodigy of Early Piety. My
heart she never touched because the virtue had gone out of her.

I was indeed a prodigy of Early Impiety. I was scared by Hell, I did not
at first question the existence of Our Father, but no fear nor terror
could prevent my feeling that his All Seeing Eye was that of an Old
Sneak and that the Atonement for which I had to be so grateful was
either an imposture, a trick of sham self-immolation, or a crazy
nightmare. I felt the unsoundness of these things before I dared to
think it. There was a time when I believed in the story and scheme of
salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as there was a time
when I believed there was a Devil, but there was never a time when I did
not heartily detest the whole business.

I feared Hell dreadfully for some time. Hell was indeed good enough to
scare me and prevent me calling either of my brothers fools, until I was
eleven or twelve. But one night I had a dream of Hell so preposterous
that it blasted that undesirable resort out of my mind for ever. In an
old number of _Chambers Journal_ I had read of the punishment of
breaking a man on the wheel. The horror of it got into my dreams and
there was Our Father in a particularly malignant phase, busy basting a
poor broken sinner rotating slowly over a fire built under the wheel. I
saw no Devil in the vision; my mind in its simplicity went straight to
the responsible fountain head. That dream pursued me into the day time.
Never had I hated God so intensely.

And then suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was
a lie.

I have a sort of love for most living things, but I cannot recall any
time in my life when I had the faintest shadow of an intimation of love
for any one of the Persons in the Holy Trinity. I could as soon love a
field scarecrow as those patched up "persons." I am still as unable to
account for the ecstasies of the faithful as I was to feel as my mother
wished me to feel. I sensed it was a silly story long before I dared to
admit even to myself that it was a silly story.

For indeed it is a silly story and each generation nowadays swallows it
with greater difficulty. It is a jumble up of a miscellany of the old
sacrificial and consolatory religions of the confused and unhappy
townspeople of the early Empire; its constituent practices were probably
more soothing to troubled hearts before there was any attempt to weld
them into one mystical creed, and all the disingenuous intelligence of
generation after generation of time-serving or well-meaning divines has
served only to accentuate the fundamental silliness of these synthesised
Egyptian and Syrian myths. I doubt if one person in a million of all the
hosts of Christendom has ever produced a spark of genuine gratitude for
the Atonement. I think "love" for the Triune God is as rare as it is
unnatural and irrational.

Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity? At the test of
war, disease, social injustice and every real human distress, it
fails--and leaves a cheated victim, as it abandoned my mother. Jesus was
some fine sort of man perhaps, the Jewish Messiah was a promise of
leadership, but Our Saviour of the Trinity is a dressed-up inconsistent
effigy of amiability, a monstrous hybrid of man and infinity, making
vague promises of helpful miracles for the cheating of simple souls, an
ever absent help in times of trouble.

And their Sacrament, their wonderful Sacrament, in which the struggling
Believers urge themselves to discover the profoundest satisfaction; what
is it? What does it amount to? Was there ever a more unintelligible mix
up of bad metaphysics and grossly materialistic superstition than this
God-eating? Was there anything more corrupting to take into a human mind
and be given cardinal importance there?

I once said a dreadful thing to my mother about the Sacrament. In her
attempts to evoke Early Piety in me, she worked very hard indeed to
teach me the answers in the English Church Catechism. I learnt them
dutifully but I found them dull. In one answer (framed very carefully to
guard me against the errors of the Church of Rome) I had to say what
were the elements in the sacred feast. "Bread and Wine," it ran, "which
our Lord hath ordained," etc., etc.

Bread and Wine seemed a strange foolish form of refreshment to me, the
only wines I knew were ginger wine at Christmas and orange wine, which I
took with cod liver oil, and port and sherry which were offered with a
cracknel biscuit to housekeepers who came to pay bills, and so it
occurred to me it would introduce an amusing element of realism into the
solemnity of the recital if I answered "Bread and Butter" and chuckled
helpfully....

My mother knew she had to be profoundly shocked. She was shocked to the
best of her ability. But she was much more puzzled than shocked. The
book was closed, the audition suspended.

She said I did not understand the dreadfulness of what I had said, and
that was perfectly true. And poor dear she could not convey it to me. No
doubt she interceded with God for me and asked him to take over the task
of enlightenment. "Forgive dear Bertie," she must have said.

And anyhow it was made evident to me that a decorative revision of the
English Church Catechism was an undesirable enterprise. I turned my
attention to the more acceptable effort to say it faster and faster.

My mother in my earliest memories of her was a distressed overworked
little woman, already in her late forties. All the hope and confidence
of her youth she had left behind her. As I knew her in my childhood, she
was engaged in a desperate single-handed battle with our gaunt and
dismal home, to keep it clean, to keep her children clean, to get them
clothed and fed and taught, to keep up appearances. The only domestic
help I ever knew her to have was a garrulous old woman of the quality of
Sairey Gamp, a certain Betsy Finch.

In opulent times Betsy would come in to char, and there would even be a
washing day, when the copper in the scullery was lit and all the nether
regions were filled with white steam and the smell of soapsuds. My
mother appears in these early memories, in old cloth slippers, a grey
stuff dress or a print dress according to the season, an apron of
sacking and a big pink sunbonnet--such as country-women wore in Old and
New England alike before the separation. There was little sun in her
life, but she wore that headdress, she explained, to keep the dust out
of her hair. She is struggling up or down stairs with a dust-pan, a
slop-pail, a scrubbing brush or a greasy dishclout. Long before I came
into the world her poor dear hands had become enlarged and distorted by
scrubbing and damp, and I never knew them otherwise.

Her toil was unending. My father would get up and rake out and lay and
light the fire, because she was never clever at getting a fire to burn,
and then she would get breakfast while he took down the clumsy shop
shutters and swept out the shop. Then came the business of hunting the
boys out of bed, seeing that they did something in the way of washing,
giving them breakfast and sending them off in time for school. Then
airing and making the beds, emptying the slops, washing up the breakfast
things. Then perhaps a dusty battle to clean out a room; there were no
vacuum cleaners in those days; or a turn at scrubbing--scrubbing the
splintery rotten wood of a jerry-built house. There was no O-Cedar mop,
no polished floor; down you went to it on all fours with your pail
beside you. If Joe was out delivering goods there might at any moment be
a jangle of the shop bell and a customer.

Customers bothered my mother, especially when she was in her costume for
housework; she would discard her apron in a hurry, wipe her wet hands,
pat her hair into order, come into the shop breathless and defensive,
and often my father had neglected to mark the prices on the things the
customer wanted. If it was cricket goods she was quite at sea.

My father usually bought the meat for dinner himself, and that had to be
cooked and the table laid in the downstairs kitchen. Then came a
clatter of returning boys through the shop and down the staircase, and
the midday meal. The room was dark and intermittently darker because of
the skirts and feet going by over the grating. It wasn't always a
successful meal. Sometimes there was not much to eat; but there were
always potatoes and there was too much cabbage for my taste; and
sometimes the cooking had been unfortunate and my father Pished and
Tushed or said disagreeable things outright. My mother in those days was
just the unpaid servant of everybody. I in particular was often peevish
with my food, and frequently I would have headaches and bad bilious
attacks in the afternoon. We drank beer that was drawn from a small cask
in the scullery, and if it went a little flat before the cask was
finished it had to be drunk just the same. Presently father lit his pipe
and filled the kitchen air with the fragrance of Red Virginia, the boys
dispersed quarrelling or skylarking or rejoicing, and there was nothing
left to do of the first half, the heavier half, of my mother's daily
routine but wash up the plates at the sink.

Then she could attend to appearances. Instead of the charlady ensemble
of the morning, she changed herself into a trim little lady with a cap
and lace apron. Generally she sat indoors. Perforce if my father was at
cricket, but mainly because there was nothing to do abroad and much to
do at home. She had a large confused work-basket--when I was small and
exceptionally good it was sometimes my privilege to turn it out--and she
had all our clothes to mend. She darned my heels and knees with immense
stitches. In addition she made all our clothes until such age as, under
the pressure of our schoolfellows' derision, we rebelled against
something rather nave in the cut. Also she made loose covers for the
chairs and sofa out of cheap chintz or cretonne. She made them as she
cooked and as she made our clothes, with courage rather than skill. They
fitted very badly but at least they hid the terrible worn shabbiness of
the fundamental stuff. She got tea, she got supper, she put her
offspring to bed after they had said their prayers, and then she could
sit a little while, think, read the daily-paper, write a line or so in
her diary, attend to her correspondence, before she lit her candle and
went up the inconvenient staircase for the last time to bed. My father
was generally out after supper, talking of men's affairs with men or
playing a friendly game of Nap, by which I believe, generally speaking,
he profited, in the bar parlour of the Bell.

I know very little about the realities of my father's life at this time.
Essentially he was a baffled unsuccessful "stuck" man, but he had a
light and cheerful disposition, and a large part of his waking energy
was spent in evading disagreeable realizations. He had a kind of
attractiveness for women, I think he was aware of it, but I do not know
whether he ever went further along the line of unfaithfulness than a
light flirtation--in Bromley at any rate. I should certainly have learnt
from my schoolfellows of any scandal or scandalous suspicion. He chatted
a great deal at the shop door to fellow tradesmen in a similar state of
leisure. The voices and occasional laughter came through the shop to my
mother alone within.

He read diversely, bought books at sales, brought them home from the
Library Institute. I think his original religious and political beliefs
were undergoing a slow gentle fading out in those days. Evidently he
found my mother, with her rigid standards and her curiously stereotyped
mind, less and less interesting to talk to. She was never able to master
the mysteries of cards or chess or draughts, so that alleviation of
their evenings was out of the question. He felt her voluminous unspoken
criticism of his ineptitude, he realized the justice of her complaints,
and yet for the life of him he could not see what was to be done. I will
confess I do not know what he could have done.

My mother's instinct for appearances was very strong. Whatever the
realities of our situation, she was resolved that to the very last
moment we should keep up the appearance of being comfortable members of
that upper-servant tenant class to which her imagination had been
moulded. She believed that it was a secret to all the world that she had
no servant and did all the household drudgery herself. I was enjoined
never to answer questions about that or let it out when I went abroad.
Nor was I to take my coat off carelessly, because my underclothing was
never quite up to the promise of my exterior garments. It was never
ragged but it abounded in compromises. This hindered my playing games.

I was never to mix with common children, who might teach me naughty
words. The Hoptons, the greengrocer's family over the way, were "rough"
she thought; they were really turbulently jolly; the Mundays next door
were methodists who sang hymns out of church which is almost as bad as
singing songs in it, and the Mowatts at the corner she firmly believed
had killed poor Possy and were not to be thought of. People who were not
beneath us were apt to be stuck-up and unapproachable in the other
direction. So my universe of discourse was limited. She preferred to
have me indoors rather than out.

She taught me the rudiments of learning. I learnt my alphabet from a big
sheet of capital letters pasted up in the kitchen, I learnt the nine
figures from the same sheet, and from her, orally, how to count up to a
hundred, and the first word I wrote was "butter," which I traced over
her handwriting against a pane of the window. Also I began to read under
her instructions. But then she felt my education was straining for
higher things and I went off with my brother Freddy (who was on no
account to let go of my hand) to a school in a room in a row of cottages
near the Drill Hall, kept by an unqualified old lady, Mrs. Knott, and
her equally unqualified daughter Miss Salmon, where I learnt to say my
tables of weights and measures, read words of two or more syllables and
pretend to do summing--it was incomprehensible fudging that was never
explained to me--on a slate.

Such was my mother in the days when I was a small boy. She already had
wrinkles round her eyes, and her mouth was drawn in because she had lost
some teeth, and having them replaced by others would have seemed a
wicked extravagance to her. I wonder what went on in her brain when she
sat alone in the evening by the lamp and the dying fire, doing some last
bit of sewing before she went to bed? I began to wonder what went on in
her brain when I was in my early teens and I have wondered ever since.

I believe she was profoundly aware of her uncomfortable
poverty-stricken circumstances, but I do not think she was acutely
unhappy. I believe that she took refuge from reality in a world of
innocent reverie. As she sewed, a string of petty agreeable fictions
were distracting her mind from unpleasant fears and anxieties. She was
meeting someone whom it was agreeable to meet; she was being
congratulated on this or that fancied achievement, dear Bertie was
coming home with prizes from school, dear Frankie or dear Freddie was
setting up in business and doing ever so well, or the postman was coming
with a letter, a registered letter. It was a letter to say she had been
left money, twenty-five pounds, fifty pounds--why not a hundred pounds?
All her own. The Married Woman's Property Act ensured that Joe couldn't
touch it. It was a triumph over Joe, but all the same, she would buy him
something out of it. Poor Possy should have that gravestone at last. Mr.
Morley's bill would be paid.

Should she have a servant? Did she really want a servant--except for
what the neighbours thought? More trouble than they are worth most of
the time. A silly girl she would have to train--and with boys about! And
Joe?... The boys were good as gold, she knew, but who could tell what
might not happen if the girl chanced to be a bad, silly girl? Better
have in a serious woman, Betsy Finch for example, more regularly. It
would be nice not to have to scrub so much. And to have new curtains in
the parlour.... Doctor Beeby coming in--just to look at Freddie's
finger, nothing serious. "Dear me, Mrs. Wells, dear me! How _pretty_ you
have made the room!" ...

Some such flow of fancy as that, it must have been.

Without reverie life would surely be unendurable to the greater
multitude of human beings. After all opium is merely a stimulant for
reverie. And reverie, I am sure, made the substance of her rare leisure.
Religion and love, except for her instinctive pride in her boys, had
receded imperceptibly from her life and left her dreaming. Once she had
dreamt of reciprocated love and a sedulously attentive God, but there
was indeed no more reassurance for her except in dreamland. My father
was away at cricket, and I think she realized more and more acutely as
the years dragged on without material alleviation, that Our Father and
Our Lord, on whom, to begin with, she had perhaps counted unduly, were
also away--playing perhaps at their own sort of cricket in some remote
quarter of the starry universe.

My mother was still a good Churchwoman, but I doubt if her reveries in
the lonely evenings at Atlas House ever went into the hereafter and
anticipated immortality. I doubt if she ever distracted herself by
dreaming of the scenery of the Life to Come, or of anything that could
happen there. Unless it was to have a vision of meeting her lost little
"Possy" again in some celestial garden, an unchanged and eternal child,
and hear her surprised bright cry of "Mummy Mummy!" and hold her in her
arms once more.


 5

_A Broken Leg and Some Books and Pictures (1874)_

My leg was broken for me when I was between seven and eight. Probably I
am alive to-day and writing this autobiography instead of being a
worn-out, dismissed and already dead shop assistant, because my leg was
broken. The agent of good fortune was "young Sutton," the grown-up son
of the landlord of the _Bell_. I was playing outside the scoring tent in
the cricket field and in all friendliness he picked me up and tossed me
in the air. "Whose little kid are you?" he said, and I wriggled, he
missed his hold on me and I snapped my tibia across a tent peg. A great
fuss of being carried home; a painful setting--for they just set and
strapped a broken leg tightly between splints in those days, and the
knee and ankle swelled dreadfully--and then for some weeks I found
myself enthroned on the sofa in the parlour as the most important thing
in the house, consuming unheard-of jellies, fruits, brawn and chicken
sent with endless apologies on behalf of her son by Mrs. Sutton, and I
could demand and have a fair chance of getting anything that came into
my head, books, paper, pencils, and toys--and particularly books.

I had just taken to reading. I had just discovered the art of leaving
my body to sit impassive in a crumpled up attitude in a chair or sofa,
while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new
scenes. And now my father went round nearly every day to the Literary
Institute in Market Square and got one or two books for me, and Mrs.
Sutton sent some books, and there was always a fresh book to read. My
world began to expand very rapidly, and when presently I could put my
foot to the ground, the reading habit had got me securely. Both my
parents were doubtful of the healthiness of reading, and did their best
to discourage this poring over books as soon as my leg was better.

I cannot recall now many of the titles of the books I read, I devoured
them so fast, and the title and the author's name in those days seemed a
mere inscription on the door to delay me in getting down to business.
There was a work, in two volumes, upon the countries of the world, which
I think must have been made of bound up fortnightly parts. It was
illustrated with woodcuts, the photogravure had still to come in those
days, and it took me to Tibet, China, the Rocky Mountains, the forests
of Brazil, Siam and a score of other lands. I mingled with Indians and
naked negroes; I learnt about whaling and crossed the drift ice with
Esquimaux. There was Wood's _Natural History_, also copiously
illustrated and full of exciting and terrifying facts. I conceived a
profound fear of the gorilla, of which there was a fearsome picture,
which came out of the book at times after dark and followed me
noiselessly about the house. The half landing was a favourite lurking
place for this terror. I passed it whistling, but wary and then ran for
my life up the next flight. And I was glad to think that between the
continental land masses of the world, which would have afforded an
unbroken land passage for wolves from Russia and tigers from India, and
this safe island on which I took my daily walks, stretched the
impassable moat of the English Channel. I read too in another book about
the distances of the stars, and that seemed to push the All Seeing Eye
very agreeably away from me. Turning over the pages of the Natural
History, I perceived a curious relationship between cats and tigers and
lions and so forth, and to a lesser degree between them and hyenas and
dogs and bears, and between them again and other quadrupeds, and curious
premonitions of evolution crept into my thoughts. Also I read the life
of the Duke of Wellington and about the American Civil War, and began to
fight campaigns and battles in my reveries. At home were the works of
Washington Irving and I became strangely familiar with Granada and
Columbus and the Companions of Columbus. I do not remember that any
story books figured during this first phase of reading. Either I have
forgotten them or they did not come my way. Later on, however, Captain
Mayne Reid, Fenimore Cooper and the Wild West generally, seized upon my
imagination.

One important element in that first bout of reading was the bound
volumes of _Punch_ and its rival in those days, _Fun_, which my father
renewed continually during my convalescence. The bound periodicals with
their political cartoons and their quaint details played a curious part
in developing my imaginative framework. My ideas of political and
international relations were moulded very greatly by the big figures of
John Bull and Uncle Sam, the French, the Austrian, and the German and
Russian emperors, the Russian bear, the British lion and the Bengal
tiger, Mr. Gladstone the noble, and the insidious, smiling Dizzy. They
confronted one another; they said heroic, if occasionally quite
incomprehensible things to one another. And across the political scene
also marched tall and lovely feminine figures, Britannia, Erin,
Columbia, La France, bare armed, bare necked, showing beautiful bare
bosoms, revealing shining thighs, wearing garments that were a
revelation in an age of flounces and crinolines. My first consciousness
of women, my first stirrings of desire were roused by these heroic
divinities. I became woman-conscious from those days onward.

I do not wish to call in question the accounts the masters of
psycho-analysis give us of the awakening of sexual consciousness in the
children they have studied. But I believe that the children who
furnished material for the first psycho-analysts were the children of
people racially different, and different in their conceptions of
permissible caresses and endearments from my family. What they say may
be true of Austrian Jews and Levantines and yet not true of English or
Irish. I cannot remember and I cannot trace any continuity between my
infantile physical reactions and my personal sexual life. I believe that
all the infantile sensuality of suckling and so forth on which so much
stress is laid, was never carried on into the permanent mental fabric,
was completely washed out in forgetfulness; never coagulated into
sub-conscious memories; it was as though it had never been. I cannot
detect any mother fixation, any Oedipus complex or any of that stuff in
my make up. My mother's kisses were significant acts, expressions not
caresses. As a small boy I found no more sexual significance about my
always decent and seemly mother than I did about the chairs and sofa in
our parlour.

It is quite possible that while there is a direct continuity of the
sexual subconsciousness from parent to child in the southern and eastern
Europeans, due to a sustained habit of caresses and intimacy, the
psycho-sexual processes of the northern and western Europeans and
Americans arise _de novo_ in each generation after a complete break with
and forgetfulness of the mother-babe reaction, and so are fundamentally
different in their form and sequence. At any rate I am convinced that my
own sexual life began in a nave direct admiration for the lovely
bodies, as they seemed, of those political divinities of Tenniel's in
_Punch_, and that my first inklings of desire were roused by them and by
the plaster casts of Greek statuary that adorned the Crystal Palace. I
do not think there was any sub-conscious contribution from preceding
events to that response; my mind was inherently ready for it. My mother
had instilled in me the impropriety of not wearing clothes, so that my
first attraction towards Venus was shamefaced and furtive, but the dear
woman never suspected the stimulating influence of Britannia, Erin,
Columbia and the rest of them upon my awakening susceptibilities.

It is true that I worshipped them at first in a quasi infantile fashion,
but that does not imply continuity of experience. When I went to bed I
used to pillow my head on their great arms and breasts. Gradually they
ceased to be gigantic. They took me in their arms and I embraced them,
but nevertheless I remained fundamentally ignorant and innocent until I
went to school after my accident. I found women lovely and worshipful
before I was seven years old, and well before I came down to what we
call nowadays the "facts of sex." But now that my interest was aroused I
became acutely observant of a print or a statuette in a shop window. I
do not think my interest at that time was purely hetero-sexual. My world
was so clothed and covered up, and the rules of decency were so
established in me, that any revelation of the body was an exciting
thing.

Now that I had arrived at knickerbockers and the reading of books, I was
sent to a little private school in the High Street, Bromley, for boys
between seven and fifteen, and from my schoolmates I speedily learnt in
the grossest way, imparted with guffaws and gestures, "the facts of
sex," and all those rude words that express them, from which my mother
had hitherto shielded me.

None of these boys came from bookish homes so that I had from the outset
a queer relative wideness of outlook. I knew all sorts of things about
lands and beasts and times of which they had never heard. And I had
developed a facility for drawing, which in them was altogether dormant.
So that I passed for an exceptionally bright and clever little boy and
the schoolmaster would invoke "Young Seven Years Old," to shame the
obtuseness of my elders. They were decent enough not to visit it upon
me. Among boys from more literate homes I should have had none of these
outstanding advantages, but I took them naturally enough as an intrinsic
superiority, and they made me rather exceptionally self-conceited and
confident.

The clash of these gross revelations about the apparatus of sex with my
secret admiration for the bodily beauty of women, and with this personal
conceit of mine, determined to a large extent my mental and perhaps my
physical development. It imposed a reserve upon me that checked a native
outspokenness. That a certain amount of masturbation is a normal element
in the emergence of sexual consciousness was in those days almost
passionately concealed by the English-speaking world. Yet probably no
normal individual altogether escapes that response to the stir of
approaching adolescence. To my generation it was allowed to come as a
horrifying, astounding, perplexing individual discovery. Without
guidance and recognition, and black with shame, it ran inevitably into a
variety of unwholesome channels. Upon many boys and girls it became
localized in the parts more immediately affected and exercised an
overwhelming fascination. The school had its exhibitionist and ran with
a dirty whispered and giggling undertow. Among the boarders, many of
whom slept two in a bed, there was certainly much simple substitutional
homosexuality. Personally I recoiled, even more than I cared to show,
from mere phallicism. I did not so much begin masturbation as have it
happen to me as a natural outcome of my drowsy clasping of my goddesses.
I had so to speak a one-sided love affair with the bedding.

I never told a soul about it because I was ashamed and feared ridicule
or indignant reproof. Very early I got hold of the idea, I do not know
how, that Venus could drain away my energy, and this kept my lapses from
ideal "purity" within very definite bounds indeed. There was also a
certain amount of superstitious terror to restrain me. Maybe this was
that sin against the Holy Ghost that could never be forgiven, that
damned inevitably. That worried a brother of mine more than it did me,
but I think it worried me also. I was eleven or twelve years old before
religion began to fall to pieces in my consciousness.

So at the age of seven (and, to be exact, three quarters), when I went
up the High Street to Morley's school for the first time, a rather
white-faced little boy in a holland pinafore and carrying a small green
baize satchel for my books, I had already between me and my bleak
Protestant God, a wide wide world of snowy mountains, Arctic regions,
tropical forests, prairies and deserts and high seas, cities and armies,
Indians, negroes and island savages, gorillas, great carnivores,
elephants, rhinoceroses and whales, about which I was prepared to talk
freely, and cool and strange below it all a cavernous world of nameless
goddess mistresses of which I never breathed a word to any human being.




CHAPTER THE THIRD

_SCHOOLBOY_


 1

_Mr. Morley's Commercial Academy (1874-1880)_

This march up the High Street to Mr. Thomas Morley's Academy begins a
new phase in the story of the brain that J. W. and his Saddie had
launched into the world. Bromley Academy was a school in the ancient
tradition, but the culmination of my schooling was to occur in the most
modern and advanced of colleges then in existence, the science schools
at South Kensington. It was a queer discontinuous series of educational
processes through which my brain was passed, very characteristic of the
continual dislocations of that time.

The germinating forces of that Modern World-State which is now
struggling into ordered being, were already thrusting destructively
amidst the comparative stabilities of the old eighteenth century order
before I was born. There was already a railway station on the Dover line
and this was supplemented, when I was about twelve years old, by a
second line branching off from the Chislehurst line at Grove Park. The
place which had been hardly more than a few big houses, a little old
market place and a straggling High Street upon the high road, with two
coaching inns and a superabundance of small "pull-up" beerhouses, was
stimulated to a vigorous growth in population. Steadily London drew it
closer and suburbanized it. No one foresaw its growth except a few
speculative jerry-builders; no one in the world prepared for even the
most obvious consequences of that growth. Shops and dwellings of the
type of my home were "run up" anyhow. Slum conditions appeared almost
at once in courts and muddy by-ways. Yet all around were open fields and
common land, Bromley Common, Chislehurst Common, great parks like
Sundridge Park and Camden, and to the south the wide heathery spaces
about Keston Fish Ponds and Down.

The new order of things that was appearing in the world when I was born,
was already arousing a consciousness of the need for universal
elementary education. It was being realized by the ruling classes that a
nation with a lower stratum of illiterates would compete at a
disadvantage against the foreigner. A condition of things in which
everyone would read and write and do sums, dawned on the startled
imagination of mankind. The British and the National Schools, which had
existed for half a century in order to make little Nonconformists and
little Churchmen, were organized into a state system under the
Elementary Education Act of 1871 and supplemented by Board Schools
(designed to make little Unsectarian Christians). Bromley was served by
a National School. That was all that the district possessed in the way
of public education. It was the mere foundation of an education. It saw
to the children up to the age of thirteen or even fourteen, and no
further. Beyond that the locality had no public provision for technical
education or the development of artistic or scientific ability whatever.
Even that much of general education had been achieved against
considerable resistance. There was a strong objection in those days to
the use of public funds for the education of "other people's children,"
and school pennies were exacted weekly from the offspring of everyone
not legally indigent.

But side by side with that nineteenth-century National School under the
Education Act, the old eighteenth-century order was still carrying on in
Bromley, just as it was still carrying on in my mother's mind. In the
eighteenth century the lower classes did not pretend to read or write,
but the members of the tenant-farmer, shopkeeper, innkeeper, upper
servant stratum, which was then, relatively to the labourers, a larger
part of the community, either availed themselves of the smaller endowed
schools which came down from the mental stir of the Reformation, or, in
the absence of any such school in their neighbourhood, supported little
private schools of their own. These private schools were struggling
along amidst the general dissolution, shuffling and reconstruction of
society that was already manifest in the middle nineteenth century, and
the Academy of Mr. Thomas Morley was a fairly well preserved specimen,
only slightly modernized, of the departing order of things.

He had opened school for himself in 1849, having previously filled the
post of usher at an old-established school that closed down in that
year. He was Scotch and not of eminent academic attainments; his first
prospectus laid stress on "writing in both plain and ornamental style,
Arithmetic logically, and History with special reference to Ancient
Egypt." Ancient Egypt and indeed most of the History except lists of
dates, pedigrees and enactments, had dropped from the school outlook
long before I joined it, for even Bromley Academy moved a little with
the times, but there was still great stress on copperplate flourishes,
long addition sums and book-keeping. Morley was a bald portly spectacled
man with a strawberry nose and ginger-grey whiskers, who considered it
due to himself and us to wear a top hat, an ample frock-coat, and a
white tie, and to carry himself with invariable dignity and make a
frequent use of "Sir." Except for a certain assistance with the little
ones from Mrs. Morley, a stout ringleted lady in black silk and a gold
chain, he ran the school alone. It was a single room built out over a
scullery; there were desks round the walls and two, of six places each,
in the centre, with a stove between which warmed the place in winter.
His bedroom window opened upon the schoolroom, and beneath it, in the
corner of the room, was his desk, the great ink bottle from which the
ink-wells were replenished, the pile of slates and the incessant cane,
with which he administered justice, either in spasmodic descents upon
our backs and hindquarters, or after formal accusations, by smacks
across the palm of the hand. He also hit us with his hands anywhere, and
with books, rulers and anything else that came handy, and his invective
and derision were terrific. Also we were made to stand on the rickety
forms and hold out books and slates until our arms ached. And in this
way he urged us--I suppose our numbers varied from twenty-five to
thirty-five--along the path of learning that led in the more successful
instances to the examinations, conducted by an association of private
schoolmasters, for their mutual reassurance, known as the College of
Preceptors, (with special certificates for book-keeping) and then to
jobs as clerks.

About half the boys were boarders drawn from London public houses or
other homes unsuitable for growing youth. There were a few day-boarders
from outlying farms, who took their dinner in the house. The rest were
sons of poorish middle-class people in the town. We assembled at nine
and went on to twelve and again from two to five, and between these
hours, except when the windows were open in warm weather, the atmosphere
grew steadily more foetid and our mental operations more sluggish and
confused.

It is very difficult to give any facts about this dominie and his
Academy which do not carry with them a quality of Dickens-like
caricature. He ranted at us from his desk in the quaintest fashion; he
took violent dislikes and betrayed irrational preferences; the
educational tradition from which he arose and which is so manifest in
that first prospectus already quoted, was in the same world with Miss
Riley's school at Chichester which did so much to shape my mother; it
was antiquated, pretentious, superficial and meagre; and yet there was
something good about old Morley and something good for me. I have an
impression that with a certain honesty he was struggling out of that
tradition and trying to make something of us. That "College of
Preceptors" was not only a confederation of private schools to keep up
appearances; it was a mutual improvement society, it was a voluntary
modernizing movement. It ran lectures on educational method and devised
examinations for teaching diplomas. Morley had learnt a lot between his
start in 1849 and the days when I was his pupil. He had become an
Associate, and then a Licentiate of this self-constituted college, by
examination, and each examination had involved a paper or so on teaching
method. I believe his teaching, such as it was, was better than that of
the crudely trained mechanical grant earners of the contemporary
National School which was the only local alternative, and that my
mother's instinct was a sound one in sending us all to this antiquated
middle-class establishment.

Yet if I describe a day's work in that dusty, dingy, ill-ventilated
schoolroom, there will not be a qualified teacher in the world beneath
the age of fifty who will not consider it frightful. A lifetime ago it
would have seemed perfectly normal schooling.

Few people realize the immense changes that the organization and
mechanism of popular teaching have undergone in the past century. They
have changed more than housing or transport. Before that dawn of a new
way of life, began that slow reluctant dawn in which we are still
living, the vast majority of people throughout the world had no
schooling at all, and of the educated minority, literate rather than
educated, by far the larger proportion--in India and China and Arabia
quite as much as in Europe--did their learning in some such makeshift
place as this outbuilding of Morley's, in the purlieus of a mosque, for
example, under a tree in India or beneath an Irish hedge, as members of
a bunch of twenty or so ill-assorted pupils of all ages and sizes and
often of both sexes, between six and sixteen. Schools large enough to
classify were the exception, and there were rarely more than one or two
teachers. Specially built school houses were almost unknown. A room
designed and equipped for teaching and containing a manageable class of
youngsters in the same phase of development, is comparatively a new
thing in human experience, even for the young of the privileged orders.
And necessarily under these old conditions teaching had to be
intermittent because the teacher's mind could not confront all that
diversity of reaction between childishness and adolescence at the same
time; necessarily he had to contrive exercises and activities to keep
this group and that quiet while he expounded to another. He was like
some very ordinary chess player who had undertaken to play thirty games
of chess simultaneously. He was an unqualified mental obstetrician doing
his work wholesale. Necessarily the phases and quality of his teaching
depended on his moods. At times Morley was really trying to get
something over to us; at others he was digesting, or failing to digest,
his midday meal; he was in a phase of accidie; he was suffering from
worry or grievance; he was amazed at life and revolted by his dependence
upon us; he felt the world was rushing past him; he had got up late and
omitted to shave and was struggling with an overwhelming desire to leave
us all and repair the omission.

So the primary impressions left upon my brain by that Academy are not
impressions of competent elucidation and guidance, of a universe being
made plain to me or of skills being acquired and elaborated, but of the
moods of Mr. Thomas Morley and their consequences. At times his
attention was altogether distracted; he was remote upon his throne in
the corner, as aloof almost as my mother's God, and then we would relax
from the tasks or exercises he had set us and indulge in furtive but
strenuous activities of our own. We would talk and tell each other
stories--I had a mind suitably equipped by my reading for boyish saga
telling and would go on interminably--draw on our slates, play marbles,
noughts and crosses and suchlike games, turn out our pockets, swap
things, indulge in pinching and punching matches, eat sweets, read penny
dreadfuls, do anything, indeed, but the work in hand. Sometimes it would
be whispered in the drowsy digestive first hour of the afternoon, "Old
Tommy's asleep," and we would watch him sink slowly and beautifully down
and down into slumber, terminated by a snore and a start. If at last he
got off completely, spectacles askew over his folded arms, a kind of
silent wildness would come upon us. We would stand up to make fantastic,
insulting and obscene gestures, leave our places to creep noiselessly as
far as we dared. He would awaken abruptly, conscience awake also,
inflict sudden punishment on some belated adventurer; and then would
come a strenuous hour of driving work.

Sometimes he would leave us altogether upon his private occasions. Then
it was our bounden duty to kick up all the row we could, to get out of
our places and wrestle, to "go for" enemies, to produce the secreted
catapult or pea-shooter, to pelt with chewed paper and books. I can
taste the dust and recall the din as I write of it. In the midst of the
uproar the blind of the bedroom window would be raised, silently,
swiftly. Morley, razor in hand and his face covered with soapsuds, would
be discovered glaring at us through the glass, marking down sinners for
punishment, a terrifying visage. Up would go the window. "You HOUNDS!
You Miserable Hounds!" Judgments followed.

The spells of intensive teaching came irregularly, except for Friday
afternoon, which was consecrated invariably to the breathless pursuit of
arithmetic. There were also whole afternoons of "book-keeping by double
entry" upon sheets of paper, when we pursued imaginary goods and cash
payments with pen and ruler and even red ink, to a final Profit and Loss
Account and a Balance Sheet. We wrote in copybooks and he came, peering
and directing, over our shoulders. There was only one way in which a pen
might be held; it was a matter of supreme importance; there was only one
angle at which writing might slope. I was disposed to be unorthodox in
this respect, and my knuckles suffered.

The production of good clerks (with special certificates for
book-keeping) was certainly one of the objectives of Mr. Thomas Morley's
life. The safety, comfort and dignity of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Morley and
Miss Morley were no doubt a constant preoccupation. But also there was
interest in wider and more fundamental things. There was a sense in him
that some things were righter than others, a disposition to assert as
much, and a real desire for things to be done well. His studies for the
diplomas of A.C.P. and L.C.P. (Associate and Licentiate of the College
of Preceptors), low though the requirements were, absurdly low by our
present standards, had awakened him to the pleasures of certain mental
exercises; a mathematical problem, a logical demonstration. When he
found that I could be interested by the grammatical analysis of a
complicated sentence or the solution of some elementary mathematical
problem, he took a liking to me and showed me much more attention than
he gave to the more obdurate material he had to deal with, minds stirred
to a high level of evasion and resistance by his clumsy, medieval,
impatient and aggressive methods of approach. He never gave me a
nickname and never singled me out for an abusive tirade.

When I left his school at the age of thirteen (bracketed with a fellow
pupil first in all England for book-keeping, so far, that is to say, as
England was covered by the College of Preceptors), whatever else I had
missed, I had certainly acquired the ability to use English with some
precision and delicacy, even if the accent was a Cockney one, and I had
quite as good a mathematical apparatus as most boys of the same age get
at a public school nowadays. I had read about as much of Euclid as it
was customary to read, made a fair start with trigonometry and was on
the verge of the calculus. But most of the other stuff I got was bad.
Old Tommy taught French out of a crammer's textbook, and, in spite of
the fact that he had on several occasions visited Boulogne, he was quite
unable to talk in that elusive tongue; so I learnt hardly anything about
it except its conjugations and long lists of "exceptions," so useful in
written examinations and so unimportant in ordinary life. He crippled my
French for life. He made me vowel-shy in every language.

I do not think he read much. He was not generally curious. My reading
habit I developed at home and do not recall that Morley ever directed my
attention to any book, unless it was some cheap school textbook used in
my work. But at times he would get excited by his morning paper and then
we would have a discourse on the geography of the North West Frontier
with an appeal to a decaying yellow map of Asia that hung on the wall,
or we would follow the search for Livingstone by Stanley in Darkest
Africa. He had traces of early Radicalism and a Republican turn of mind;
he would discourse upon the extravagant Parliamentary grants made in
those days to the various members of the Royal Family when they married,
and about the unnecessary costliness of the army and navy. He believed
that Mr. Gladstone really stood for "Peace, Retrenchment and Reform."
All sorts of Radical principles may have filtered into my receptive mind
from these _obiter dicta_.

Geoffrey West, in the exact and careful biography he wrote of me some
years ago, is unjust to this old-world pedagogue because he measures
him by his own twentieth-century standards with only the later
nineteenth century as a background. Against the eighteenth-century
background from which he derived, Thomas Morley was by no means so
contemptible. West says he favoured a few willing boys with his
instructions and let the rest drift. But that happened in all the
schools; it was an inevitable aspect of those small miscellaneous
schools with single untrained teachers. To-day every teacher still
"favours" the willing boy. That sort of favouritism will go on to the
end of time. That old gentleman (A.C.P., L.C.P.) walking with a portly
gravity that was all his own, hands clasped behind his back, at the tail
of the crocodile of ill-assorted undrilled boys, steering them to the
best of his ability into the future, taking them to church or for a walk
or to the cricket field, is by no means such a dismal memory of
inefficiency as West suggests. Bromley Academy had very little of the
baseness which pervaded Dotheboys Hall.

But Geoffrey West, in that same book, called my attention to an
interesting resemblance between Morley's school and the school of
Charles Dickens, a third of a century earlier, of which I should
otherwise be ignorant. There was a continual bickering between us and
the boys of the National School, bickering which rose occasionally to
the level of a pitched battle with staves and sticks upon Martin's Hill,
at that time a waste and now a trim recreation ground. For some unknown
reason we were called "Morley's Bull Dogs" and the elementary school
boys were called, by us at any rate, "Bromley Water Rats" and "Cads."
Now the Dickens parallel was "Baker's Bull Dogs" and "Troy Town Rats."
Evidently this hostility between the boys of the old type of private
schools and those of the new denominational schools, was of long
standing, and widespread and almost stereotyped in its expression.

Geoffrey West thinks the antagonism was "snobbish," but that is a loose
word to use for a very interesting conflict of divergent ideas and
social tendencies. He probably considers the National Schools were
"democratic" schools, like the common schools of the United States, "all
class" schools, but that is a mistaken view. In spirit, form and
intention they were inferior schools, and to send one's children to
them in those days, as my mother understood perfectly well, was a
definite and final acceptance of social inferiority. The Education Act
of 1871 was not an Act for a common universal education, it was an Act
to educate the lower classes for employment on lower-class lines, and
with specially trained, inferior teachers who had no university quality.
If Tommy Morley could not sport a university gown and hood, he could at
least claim to wear a gown and hood as an L.C.P. (by royal charter),
that was indistinguishable to the common eye from the real thing. He had
all the dignity, if little of the substance, of scholarship. The more
ancient middle-class schools, whatever their faults, were saturated with
the spirit of individual self-reliance and individual dignity, with an
idea, however pretentious, of standards "a little above the common,"
with a feeling (however vulgarized, debased and under-nourished) of
_Noblesse oblige_. Certain things we could not do and certain things
were expected of us because of our class. Most of the bickering of
Morley's Bull Dogs was done against odds, and on the whole we held our
own. I think it was a very lucky thing for me personally that I acquired
this much class feeling.

I have never believed in the superiority of the inferior. My want of
enthusiasm for the Proletarian ideal goes back to the Battle of Martin's
Hill. If I was in almost unconcealed revolt against my mother's
deferential attitude to royalty and our social superiors, it was because
my resentful heart claimed at least an initial equality with every human
being; but it was equality of position and opportunity I was after, and
not equality of respect or reward; I certainly had no disposition to
sacrifice my conceit of being made of better stuff, intrinsically and
inherently, than most other human beings, by any self-identification
with people who frankly took the defeated attitude. I thought the top of
the form better than the bottom of the form, and the boy who qualified
better than the boy who failed to qualify. I am not going to argue at
this point whether such a state of mind is desirable or creditable to
anyone; my biographical duty is to record that so it was with me. So far
as the masses went I was entirely of my mother's way of thinking; I was
middle-class,--"petty bourgeois" as the Marxists have it.

Just as my mother was obliged to believe in Hell, but hoped that no one
would go there, so did I believe there was and had to be a lower
stratum, though I was disgusted to find that anyone belonged to it. I
did not think this lower stratum merited any respect. It might arouse
sympathy for its bad luck or indignation for an unfair handicap. That
was a different matter. My thought, as I shall trace its development in
this history, has run very close to communist lines, but my conception
of a scientifically organized class-less society is essentially of an
expanded middle-class which has incorporated both the aristocrat and
plutocrat above and the peasant, proletarian and pauper below.

Trotsky has recorded that Lenin, after his one conversation with me,
said that I was incurably middle-class. So far Lenin was a sound
observer. He, and Trotsky also, were of the same vital social stratum;
they had indeed both started life from a far more advantageous level
than I had; but the discolouration of their stream of thought by Marxist
pretences and sentimentalities, had blinded them to their own essential
quality. My conversation with Lenin turned entirely on the "liquidation"
of the peasant and the urban toiler--by large-scale agriculture and
power machinery. Lenin was just as much for that as I was, we were
talking about the same thing in the same spirit; but we said the same
thing as though it was a different thing because our minds were tuned in
different keys.


 2

_Puerile View of the World (1878-79)_

(August 4th, 1933). I have been trying, for a day or so, to reconstruct
my vision of the world as I had it in those days, to restore the state
of my brain as it was about 1878 or 9 when I was in mid schoolboy stage.
I find it an almost impossible task. I find it impossible to disentangle
the things I saw and read before I was thirteen, from the things that
came afterwards. The old ideas and impressions were made over in
accordance with new material, they were used up to make the new
equipment. This reconstruction went on from day to day, and so, in order
and detail, they are lost beyond recovery. Yet impossible as it is to
get any focussed clearness and exactitude here, it is equally impossible
to ignore this phase of completed puerility. My formal education came to
a break at that date, was held up for two years and more before it
resumed, at a stage at which the brains of great multitudes of English
people halted for good, and at which (or at parallel levels) I believe
multitudes still halt all over the world. This mass of human beings
halting in puerility, is the determining factor in most of the alarming
political and social processes of to-day.

In the universe in which my brain was living in 1879 there was no
nonsense about time being space or anything of that sort. There were
three dimensions, up and down, fore and aft and right and left, and I
never heard of a fourth dimension until 1884 or there-about. Then I
thought it was a witticism. Space went on for ever in every direction,
good Newtonian space. I felt it must be rather empty and cheerless
beyond the stars, but I did not let my mind dwell on that. My God, who
by this time had become entirely disembodied, had been diffused through
this space since the beginning of things. He was already quite
abstracted from the furious old hell-and-heaven Thunder God of my
childish years. His personality had faded. My mind had been
unobtrusively taking the sense of reality out of the Trinity and the
Atonement and the other dogmas of official christianity. I felt there
must be some mistake about all that, but I had not yet sat down to make
any philosophy of my own by which these strange beliefs could be
arraigned. I had simply withdrawn my attention. If I had had a catholic
upbringing with intercessory individualized saints and local and special
Virgins, that tacit withdrawal might have been less easy. Yes or no
might have been forced upon me. I might have come earlier to positive
disbelief.

Occasionally I would find myself praying--always to God simply. He
remained a God spread all over space and time, yet nevertheless he was
capable of special response and magic changes in the order of events. I
would pray when I was losing a race, or in trouble in an examination
room, or frightened. I expected prompt attention. In my first
book-keeping examination by the College of Preceptors I could not get my
accounts to balance. I prayed furiously. The bell rang, the invigilator
hovered over my last frantic efforts. I desisted reluctantly, "All
right, God," I said, "catch me praying again." I was then about twelve.

Through this universe with its diffused Space-God spun the earth, moving
amidst the stars along paths that were difficult to understand and still
more difficult to remember. I was constantly reading that the earth was
a mere pin point in space; that if the sun was as big as St. Paul's
dome, the earth would be a strawberry pip somewhere in the suburbs, and
many similar illustrative facts, but directly I took my mind off these
explicit statements, the pip grew bigger and bigger and I grew even
faster. St. Paul's dome stuck where it was and the very Nebul came
within range again. My mind insisted on that. Just as it insisted that
God was always within range. Otherwise it had no use for them.

The earth, directly one let go of one's cosmic facts, expanded again
like a vehemently inflated soap bubble, until it filled the entire
picture. One did not see all round it in those days. It had mystery at
its North and South Poles and Darkest Africa on its equator. Poe's
_Narrative of A. Gordon Pym_ tells what a very intelligent mind could
imagine about the south polar regions a century ago. The poor old earth
in those days had a hard crust and a molten interior and naturally
suffered from chronic indigestion, earthquakes, rumblings, and
eruptions. It has since solidified considerably.

Moreover it already had a past which was rapidly opening out to men's
minds in those days. I first became aware of that past in the gardens of
the Crystal Palace at Sydenham; it came upon me as a complete surprise,
embodied in vast plaster reconstructions of the megatherium and various
dinosaurs and a toadlike labyrinthodon (for at first labyrinthodons were
supposed to have had toadlike bodies). I was having one of those acute
bilious attacks that always happened in the afternoons when I was taken
to the Crystal Palace, and that made the impression none the less
formidable. My mother explained that these were Antediluvian Animals.
They had been left out of the ark, I guessed, on account of their size,
but even then there seemed something a little wrong in the suggestion
that the ichthyosaurus had been drowned in a flood.

Somewhen later I pored over Humboldt's _Cosmos_ and began to learn
something of geological time. But by means of accepting the gloss that
the Days of Creation meant geological ages, nothing really essential was
changed in the past of my universe. There was merely an extension. The
Creation, though further off, remained still as the hard and fast
beginning of time, before which there was nothing, just as a very
pyrotechnic Day of Judgment "when time shall be no more" closed the
vista at the other end. Ultimate emptiness bounded my universe in space
and time alike. "Someday we shall know all," said my mother in response
to my questions about what lay beyond, and with that for a time I had to
be content.

Whatever else I doubted, I was incapable at that age of doubting my
immortality. I had never known the universe without my consciousness and
I could not imagine the universe without my consciousness. I doubt if
any young things can really do so. The belief in immortality is tacit
and formless in young animals, but it is there. The fear of death is not
fear of extinction but a fear of something unknown and utterly
disagreeable. I thought I was going on and on--when I thought of
continuance at all. I had passed the College of Preceptors' examination
very well, so why shouldn't I get through the Day of Judgment? But the
world was just then so immediately full of interesting things, that I
did not put in much time at the fundamental and eternal questions
beyond.

It was made a matter of general congratulation about me that I was
English. The flavour of J. R. Green's recently published (1874) History
of the English People had drifted to me either directly or at
second-hand, and my mind had leapt all too readily to the idea that I
was a blond and blue-eyed Nordic, quite the best make of human being
known. England was consciously Teutonic in those days, the monarchy and
Thomas Carlyle were strong influences in that direction; we talked of
our "Keltic fringe" and ignored our Keltic infiltration; and the defeat
of France in 1870-71 seemed to be the final defeat of the decadent Latin
peoples. This blended very well with the anti-Roman Catholic influence
of the eighteenth-century Protestant training, a distrust and hostility
that remained quite vivid when much else of that teaching had faded. We
English, by sheer native superiority, practically without trying, had
possessed ourselves of an Empire on which the sun never set, and through
the errors and infirmities of other races were being forced slowly but
steadily--and quite modestly--towards world dominion.

All that was quite settled in my head, as I carried my green-baize
satchel to and fro between Morley's school and my dismal bankrupt home,
and if you had suddenly confronted me with a Russian prince or a rajah
in all his glory and suggested he was my equal, I should either have
laughed you to scorn or been very exasperated with you about it.

I was taught no history but English History, which after some centuries
of royal criminality, civil wars and wars in France, achieved the
Reformation and blossomed out into the Empire; and I learnt hardly any
geography but British geography. It was only from casual reading that I
gathered that quite a number of things had happened and quite a number
of interesting things existed outside the world of English affairs. But
I looked at pictures of the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum and the Pyramids in
very much the same spirit as I listened to stories about the Wonders of
Animal Intelligence (beavers, bees, birds' nests, breeding habits of the
salmon, etc.). They did not shake my profound satisfaction with the
self, the township, the county, the nation, the Empire and the outlook
that was mine.

In those days I had ideas about Aryans extraordinarily like Mr.
Hitler's. The more I hear of him the more I am convinced that his mind
is almost the twin of my thirteen year old mind in 1879; but heard
through a megaphone and--implemented. I do not know from what books I
caught my first glimpse of the Great Aryan People going to and fro in
the middle plains of Europe, spreading east, west, north and south,
varying their consonants according to Grimm's Law as they did so, and
driving the inferior breeds into the mountains. But they formed a
picturesque background to the duller facts of ancient history. Their
ultimate triumphs everywhere squared accounts with the Jews, against
which people I had a subconscious dissatisfaction because of their
disproportionate share of Holy Writ. I thought Abraham, Isaac, Moses and
David loathsome creatures and fit associates for Our Father, but unlike
Hitler I had no feelings about the contemporary Jew. Quite a number of
the boarders in the Bromley Academy were Jewish and I was not aware of
it. My particular pal, Sidney Bowkett, was I think unconsciously Jewish;
the point never arose.

I had reveries--I indulged a great deal in reverie until I was fifteen
or sixteen, because my active imagination was not sufficiently
employed--and I liked especially to dream that I was a great military
dictator like Cromwell, a great republican like George Washington or
like Napoleon in his earlier phases. I used to fight battles whenever I
went for a walk alone. I used to walk about Bromley, a small rather
undernourished boy, meanly clad and whistling detestably between his
teeth, and no one suspected that a phantom staff pranced about me and
phantom orderlies galloped at my commands, to shift the guns and
concentrate fire on those houses below, to launch the final attack upon
yonder distant ridge. The citizens of Bromley town go out to take the
air on Martin's Hill and look towards Shortland across the fields where
once meandered the now dried-up and vanished Ravensbourne, with never a
suspicion of the orgies of bloodshed I once conducted there. Martin's
Hill indeed is one of the great battlegrounds of history. Scores of
times the enemy skirmishers have come across those levels, followed by
the successive waves of the infantry attack, while I, outnumbered five
to one, manoeuvred my guns round, the guns I had refrained so grimly from
using too soon in spite of the threat to my centre, to enfilade them
suddenly from the curving slopes towards Beckenham. "Crash," came the
first shell, and then crash and crash. They were mown down by the
thousand. They straggled up the steep slopes wavering. And then came the
shattering counter attack, and I and my cavalry swept the broken masses
away towards Croydon, pressed them ruthlessly through a night of
slaughter on to the pitiful surrender of the remnant at dawn by Keston
Fish Ponds.

And I entered conquered, or rescued, towns riding at the head of my
troops, with my cousins and my schoolfellows recognizing me with
surprise from the windows. And kings and presidents, and the great of
the earth, came to salute my saving wisdom. I was simple even in
victory. I made wise and firm decisions, about morals and customs and
particularly about those Civil Service Stores which had done so much to
bankrupt my father. With inveterate enemies, monarchists, Roman
Catholics, non-Aryans and the like I was grimly just. Stern work--but my
duty....

In fact Adolf Hitler is nothing more than one of my thirteen year old
reveries come real. A whole generation of Germans has failed to grow up.

My head teemed with such stuff in those days. But it is interesting to
remark that while my mind was full of international conflicts,
alliances, battleships and guns, I was blankly ignorant about money or
any of the machinery of economic life. I never dreamed of making dams,
opening ship canals, irrigating deserts or flying. I had no inkling of
the problem of ways and means; I knew nothing and, therefore, I cared
nothing of how houses were built, commodities got and the like. I think
that was because nothing existed to catch and turn my imagination in
that direction. There was no literature to enhance all that. I think
there is no natural bias towards bloodshed in imaginative youngsters,
but the only vivid and inspiring things that history fed me with were
campaigns and conquests. In Soviet Russia they tell me they have altered
all that.

For many years my adult life was haunted by the fading memories of those
early war fantasies. Up to 1914, I found a lively interest in playing a
war game, with toy soldiers and guns, that recalled the peculiar quality
and pleasure of those early reveries. It was quite an amusing model
warfare and I have given its primary rules in a small book "for boys
and girls of all ages" _Little Wars_. I have met men in responsible
positions, L. S. Amery for example, Winston Churchill, George Trevelyan,
C. F. G. Masterman, whose imaginations were manifestly built upon a
similar framework and who remained puerile in their political outlook
because of its persistence. I like to think I grew up out of that stage
somewhen between 1916 and 1920 and began to think about war as a
responsible adult should.

I recall no marked sexual or personal elements in my early reveries.
Until my adolescence, sex fancies came to me only in that dim phase
between waking and sleeping. I gave myself gladly and willingly to my
warfare, but I was shy of sex; I resisted any urge I may have had
towards personal romancing and sensuous fantasies.

My sexual trend was, I think, less marked or more under control when I
was twelve and thirteen, than it was when I was nine or ten. My primary
curiosities had been satisfied and strong physical urgencies were still
unawakened.

My two brothers played only a very small part in this early mental
development, my Hitler phase. One was nine years older than I and
already bound apprentice to a draper; the other was four years my senior
and presently suffered the same fate. They were too far away from me. My
elder brother Frank was one of those mischievous boys who mix much
natural ingenuity with an aggressive sense of humour. He was, said my
mother, a "dreadful tease." He took a lively interest in machinery and
fireworks and making people sit up. He fiddled with clocks and steam
engines until some accident ensued and with gunpowder until it exploded.
He connected all the bell wires in my Uncle Tom's hotel so that with no
great extra expenditure of labour, a visitor rang not only his own bell,
but every bell in the place. But Frank gained nothing but unpopularity
by this device. He haunted the railway station, worshipping the engines
and hoping for something to happen. One day at Windsor he got on to a
shunting engine standing in a siding and pulled at a lever and found
great difficulty in pulling it back. By that time he was half a mile
down the line--and no longer a _persona grata_ upon the South Western
Railway Company's premises. The pursuing driver had to think first of
his engine and so my brother got clean away and survived the adventure.
This disposition to fiddle with levers made Frank a leader in his
generation. A gang followed him to see what would happen next. He was
always in trouble. But he found trouble was less complicated if he kept
me out of it. I did not share these escapades. Freddy was a more orderly
youngster, but he was sent to a different private school for most of my
time at Morley's.

Later on I grew up to my brothers, so to speak, and had great talks with
them. With Frank, the eldest, indeed, I developed a considerable
companionship in my teens and we had some great holiday walks together.
But at the time of which I am writing all that had still to come.

Our home was not one of those where general ideas are discussed at
table. My mother's ready orthodox formul were very effective in
suppressing any such talk. So my mind developed almost as if I were an
only child.

My childish relations with my brothers varied between vindictive
resentment and clamorous aggression. I made a terrific fuss if my toys
or games were touched and I displayed great vigour in acquiring their
more attractive possessions. I bit and scratched my brothers and I
kicked their shins, because I was a sturdy little boy who had to defend
himself; but they had to go very easily with me because I was a delicate
little fellow who might easily be injured and was certain to yell. On
one occasion, I quite forget now what the occasion was, I threw a fork
across the dinner table at Frank, and I can still remember very vividly
the missile sticking in his forehead where it left three little scars
for a year or so and did no other harm; and I have an equally clear
memory of a smashed window behind the head of my brother Freddy, the
inrush of cold air and dismay, after I had flung a wooden horse at him.
Finally they hit upon an effectual method of at once silencing me and
punishing me. They would capture me in our attic and suffocate me with
pillows. I couldn't cry out and I had to give in. I can still feel the
stress of that suffocation. Why they did not suffocate me for good and
all, I do not know. They had no way of checking what was going on under
the pillow until they took it off and looked.

I got more mental stimulus from some of my schoolfellows who were of an
age with me. I felt the need of some companionship, some relief from
reading and lonely reverie. I used to stay on at school after lesson
time and go for walks or into the cricket field with the boarders, on
holiday afternoons. My cricket was always poor because of my unsuspected
astigmatism, but my participation was valued on account of my ready
access to stumps and bats and used balls. I had a curious sort of
alliance with the son of a London publican, Sidney Bowkett. We started
with a great fight at the age of eight, in which we whacked at each
other for the better part of an hour, and after that we conceived such a
respect for each other that we decided not to fall out again. We became
chums. We developed the tactics of combined attack upon bigger boys and
so established a sort of joint dominance long before we were the
legitimate seniors of the school.

We two talked a lot in and out of school, but what we talked about is
not very clear in my mind now. There was probably a lot of bragging
about what we meant to do with life. We were both very confident,
because we both outclassed all the other boys we knew of our age, and
that gave us an unjustified sense of distinctive ability. He was much
better looking, more attractive, quicker witted and more aggressive and
adventurous than I; his verbal memory was better and his arithmetic
quicker and more accurate, but he was quite out of the running with me
when it came to drawing, elementary mathematics or that mass of
partially digested reading which one may call general knowledge.
Sometimes we acted being explorers or great leaders in a sort of
dramatized reverie, wherein I supplied most of the facts. Sometimes we
helped each other out with long sagas about Puss the Cat, a sort of
puss-in-boots, invented by my brother Fred and me, or Ally Sloper, the
great comic character of cockneydom at that time, or the adventures of
Bert Wells and the Boker Boy. They went to Central Africa, to the Polar
regions, down the Maelstrom and up the Himalayas; they made much use of
balloons and diving suits, though aeroplanes were outside their
imaginations. A great deal of that romancing embodied our bright
receptiveness to things about us.

Bowkett's interest was more quickly aroused and livelier than mine, but
he had very little invention. He was one of those who see quickly and
vividly and say "Look," a sort of people to whom I owe much. Later on I
was to have a great friendship with Rebecca West who had that quality of
saying "Look" for me, in an even greater degree. I never knew anyone
else who could so light up and colour and intensify an impression.
Without such stimulus I note things, they register themselves in my
mind, but I do not actively notice them of my own accord. Together
Bowkett and I could get no end of fun out of a casually encountered rat
or an odd butterfly, a stray beetle or an easily climbed tree, which I
alone would have ticked off at a glance and passed. We would go through
private gardens and trespass together "for to see and to know."

I do not remember talking very much about sexual matters with Bowkett
and what we said was highly romanticized and unimportant. We were decent
and shy about all that. Yet we knew all the indecent words in the
language, we could be astonishingly foul-mouthed in moments of
exaltation and showing off; and we were in no way ignorant. But we were
not at that time acutely interested. It is only, I think, where small
boys in the early teens are in close contact with older youths, youths
of sixteen or seventeen whose minds are festering with desire, as they
are in English Public Schools, that they can be obsessed by gross
sexuality. And then they are not pleasantly obsessed. Naturally boys in
the earlier phase are instinctively afraid of intimate detail and avoid
it. At any rate, whether we were typical or exceptional, we two avoided
it. I have no doubt that Bowkett had his own secret incidental twilight
Venus-berg--I will not speculate about that--but sex did not loom large
in our ordinary conversation.

At one time we organized a secret society. Unhappily we could never find
a secret to put in it. But we had a tremendous initiation ceremony.
Among other things the candidate had to hold his fore-finger in a gas
jet for thirty seconds. Only two members ever qualified, Bert Wells and
the Boker Boy. I still remember the smell of singed flesh and the hard
painfulness of the scorched finger. We had a secret language of the
"Iway aysay olday anmay owhay areway ouyay" type. We warned a persistent
sniffer in the school, by a cabalistic communication, to sniff no more
or "incur the Vengeance of the Order" and we chalked up "beware" in the
lavatory, in the interests of public morality. How gladly we would have
adopted the swastika if we had known of it.

So much for the Hitlerite stage of my development, when I was a
sentimentalist, a moralist, a patriot, a racist, a great general in
dreamland, a member of a secret society, an immortal figure in history,
an impulsive fork thrower and a bawling self-righteous kicker of
domestic shins. I will now go on to tell as well as I can how this
pasty-faced little English Nazi escaped his manifest destiny of mean and
hopeless employment, and got to that broader view of life and those
opportunities that have at last made this autobiography possible.


 3

_Mrs. Wells, Housekeeper at Up Park (1880-1893)_

I have said that a cardinal stroke of good fortune was the breaking of
my leg when I was seven years old. Another almost as important was the
breaking of my father's leg in 1877, which made the dissolution of our
home inevitable. He set himself to prune the grape-vine one Sunday
morning in October, and, resolved to make a job of it and get at the
highest shoots, he poised a ladder on a bench and came a cropper. We
returned from church to find him lying in the yard groaning, and our
neighbours, Mr. Cooper and Mr. Munday helped to carry him upstairs. He
had a compound fracture of the thigh bone.

Before the year was out it was plain that my father was going to be
heavily lame for the rest of his life. This was the end of any serious
cricket, any bowling to gentlemen, any school jobs as "pro," or the like
for him. All the supplementary income was cut off by this accident which
also involved much expense in doctoring. The chronic insolvency of Atlas
House became acute.

Things were more tight and distressful than ever, for two years. An
increasing skimpiness distinguished our catering. Bread and cheese for
supper and half a herring each with our bread and butter at breakfast
and a growing tendency for potatoes to dominate the hash or stew at
midday in place of meat, intimated retrenchment. Mr. Morley's bill had
gone unpaid for a year. Frank who was earning 26 a year (and live in)
came home for a holiday and gave my mother half a sovereign to buy me a
pair of boots (at which she wept). I was growing fast and growing very
thin.

And then suddenly the heavens opened and a great light shone on Mrs.
Sarah Wells. Lady Fetherstonhaugh had been dead some years and Miss
Bullock, to whom my mother had been maid, either inherited or was given
a life tenure of Up Park, with not very plentiful means to maintain it.
She took the name of Fetherstonhaugh. Presently arose trouble with the
servants and about the household expenses, and Miss Fetherstonhaugh's
thoughts turned affectionately towards her faithful maid, between whom
and herself there had always been a correspondence of good wishes and
little gifts. My mother went to Up Park on a visit. There were earnest
conversations. It was still possible for her to find employment. But was
it right to leave Joe alone in Atlas House? What would become of the
boys? Frank's apprenticeship as a draper was already over and he was in
a situation. Freddy's time as a draper's apprentice was up also. He
could go out too. My five years of schooling were culminating in special
certificates in bookkeeping and hope. The young birds were leaving the
nest. Father could rub along by himself for a bit. My mother became
housekeeper at Up Park in 1880.

Now if this had not happened, I have no doubt I should have followed in
the footsteps of Frank and Freddy and gone on living at home under my
mother's care, while I went daily to some shop, some draper's shop, to
which I was bound apprentice. This would have seemed so natural and
necessary that I should not have resisted. I should have served my time
and never had an idea of getting away from the shop until it was too
late. But the dislocation that now occurred closed this easy path to
frustration. I was awakened to the significance of a start in life from
the outset, as my brothers had never been.

But before I tell of the series of starts in life that now began, I must
say a little about my mother's achievements in housekeeping. Except that
she was thoroughly honest, my mother was perhaps the worst housekeeper
that was ever thought of. She had never had the slightest experience in
housekeeping. She did not know how to plan work, control servants, buy
stores or economize in any way. She did not know clearly what was wanted
upstairs. She could not even add up her accounts with assurance and kept
them for me to do for her. All this came to light. It dawned slowly upon
Miss Fetherstonhaugh; it became clearly apparent to her agent, who came
up periodically from Portsmouth, Sir William King; it was manifest from
the first to the very competent, if totally illiterate, head housemaid
Old Ann, who gave herself her own orders more and more. The kitchen, the
laundry, the pantry, with varying kindliness, apprehended this
inefficiency in the housekeeper's room. At length I think it dawned even
upon my mother.

Not at first. She was frightened, perhaps, but resolute and she believed
that with prayer and effort anything can be achieved. She knew at least
how a housekeeper should look, and assumed a lace cap, lace apron, black
silk dress and all the rest of it, and she knew how a housekeeper should
drive down to the tradespeople in Petersfield and take a glass of sherry
when the account was settled. She marched down to church every Sunday
morning; the whole downstairs household streamed down the Warren and
Harting Hill to church; and once a month she took the sacrament. The
distressful Atlas House look vanished from her face; she became rounder
and pinker, she assumed a tranquil dignity. She contrived that we should
have situations round about Up Park, and in our holidays and during
phases of being out of a situation, we infested the house. My father
came on a visit once or twice and at last in 1887 abandoned Atlas House
altogether and settled down on an allowance she paid him, in a cottage
at Nyewoods near Rogate Station about four miles away. So the servitude
of Atlas House was avenged and J. W. found his level.

She held on to her position until 1893 and I think Miss Fetherstonhaugh
was very forbearing that my mother held on so long. Because among other
things she grew deaf. She grew deafer and deafer and she would not admit
her deafness, but guessed at what was said to her and made wild shots in
reply. She was deteriorating mentally. Her religious consolations were
becoming more and more trite and mechanical. Miss Fetherstonhaugh was a
still older woman and evidently found dealing with her more and more
tiresome. They were two deaf old women at cross purposes. The rather
sentimental affection between them evaporated in mutual irritation and
left not a rack behind.

On several occasions Sir William was "very unpleasant" to my mother.
Economy and still more economy was urged upon her and she felt that
saving and pinching was beneath the dignity of a country house. The
original elation of being housekeeper at Up Park had long since passed
away. She began to gossip rather unwisely about some imaginary incidents
in the early life of Miss Fetherstonhaugh and her sister, and it came to
Miss Fetherstonhaugh's ears. I think that sealed her fate. My mother's
downfall came, a month's notice and "much unkindness," in January 1893.
The fallen housekeeper, with all her boxes and possessions, was driven
to Petersfield station on February 16th, 1893, and the hospitable refuge
of Up Park was closed to her and her needy family for ever.

A poor little stunned woman she must have been then, on Petersfield
platform, a little black figure in a large black bonnet curiously
suggestive now of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. I can imagine her as she
wound mournfully down the Petersfield road looking back towards Harting
Hill with tears in her blue eyes, not quite clear about why it had all
occurred in this fashion, though no doubt God had arranged it "for some
good purpose."

Why had Miss Fetherstonhaugh been so unkind?

But luckily, during my mother's thirteen years' sway at Up Park and
thanks largely to the reliefs and opportunity that came to me through
that brief interval of good fortune in her life, I had been able to do
all sorts of things. I was now twenty-six and a married man with a
household and I was in a position to arrange a home for her and prevent
the family bark from foundering altogether. I had become a Bachelor of
Science in the University of London and a successful university crammer
and I had published a textbook--a cram book to be exact--on biology as
it was understood by the University examiners. I had begun to write for
the papers. I had acquired a certain gravity of bearing, a considerable
cascade of fair moustache and incipient side whiskers. How these changes
had come about and what had happened to my brain and outlook in the
process, I will now go on to tell.


 4

_First Start in Life--Windsor (Summer 1880)_

My first start in life was rather hastily improvised. My mother had a
second cousin, Thomas Pennicott, "Uncle Tom" we called him, who had
always been very much in the margin of her world. I think he had admired
her and been perhaps helped by her when they were young folk at
Midhurst. He was one of the witnesses to her marriage. He was a fat,
round-faced, clean-shaven, black-haired man, illiterate, good humoured
and shrewd. He had followed the ruling tendency in my mother's family to
keep inns, and he had kept the Royal Oak opposite the South Western
Railway Station at Windsor to such good effect, that he was able to buy
and rebuild a riverside inn, called Surly Hall, much affected by the
Eton wet-bobs, during the summer term. He built it as a gabled house and
the gables were decorated with blue designs and mottoes glorifying Eton
in the Latin tongue, very elegant and correct. The wet-bobs rowed up in
the afternoons and choked the bar and swarmed over the lawn,
vociferously consuming squashed flies and other strangely named
refreshments. There was a ferry, a number of tethered punts and boats,
green tables under the trees, a decaying collection of stuffed birds,
ostrich eggs, wampum and sundries, in an outhouse of white plaster and
tarred weather boarding, called the Museum, an eyot and a
willow-bordered paddock for campers. Surly Hall has long since
disappeared from the banks of the Thames, though I believe that Monkey
Island, half a mile further up, still carries on.

It was Uncle Tom's excellent custom to invite Sarah's boys for the
holidays; it was not an invariable custom but it happened most years,
and we had a thoroughly healthy and expansive three weeks or a month,
hanging about his licensed premises in an atmosphere faintly flavoured
by sawdust and beer. My brothers' times fell into the Royal Oak days,
but my lot was to visit Surly Hall for the last three of my school
years. There I learnt to punt, paddle and row, but the current was
considered too swift for me to attempt swimming without anyone to teach
me. I did not learn to swim until I was past thirty.

My uncle was a widower, but he had two grown-up daughters in their early
twenties, Kate and Clara; they shared the duties of the one or two
barmaids he also employed. They all found me a very amusing temporary
younger brother. Kate was the serious sister, a blonde with intellectual
aspirations, and she did very much to stimulate me to draw and read.
There was a complete illustrated set of Dickens which I read in
abundantly, and a lot of bound up _Family Heralds_, in which I best
remember a translation of Eugene Sue's _Mysteries of Paris_, which
seemed to me at the time, the greatest romance in the world. All these
young women encouraged me to talk, because I said such unexpected
things. They pretended to flirt with me, they used me as a convenient
chaperon when enterprising men customers wanted to gossip on the lawn in
the twilight, and Miss King, the chief barmaid, and Clara became
competitive for my sentimental devotion. It all helped to educate me.

One day there appeared on the lawn a delightful vision in fluttering
muslin, like one of the ladies in Botticelli's _Primavera_. It was that
great actress, Ellen Terry, then in her full loveliness, who had come to
Surly Hall to study a part and presently be visited there by Mr. Henry
Irving. I ceased to consider myself engaged to Miss King forthwith; I
had pledged myself heedlessly; and later on I was permitted to punt the
goddess about, show her where white lilies were to be found and get her
a great bunch of wet forget-me-nots. There was an abundance of
forget-me-nots among the sedges, and in a bend above us were smooth
brown water surfaces under great trees and a spread of yellow (and some
white) water-lilies in which dragon-flies hovered. It was far finer, I
thought, than the Keston Fish Ponds, which had hitherto been the most
beautiful place in my world, and at Keston there was no boat with oars,
paddle and boat-hook complete, in which I could muck about for hours
together.

Often when I was going for walks along the rather trite and very pebbly
footpaths about Bromley, thirty miles away, I would let my imagination
play with the idea that round the next corner and a little further on
and then a bit more, I should find myself with a cry of delighted
recognition on the road that led immediately to Surly Hall in summer and
all its pleasantness. And how was I to suspect that Uncle Tom was losing
money and his temper over the place, having borrowed to rebuild it
rather too pretentiously, and that he was quarrelling with both his
daughters about their lovers and that dark-eyed Clara, dreadfully bored
and distressed temperamentally, was taking to drink? I knew nothing of
all that, nor how greyly and dismally the Thames sluices by these
riverside inns in the winter months.

But this is a mere glimpse of summer paradise on the way to my first
start in life. My mother, I think I have made it clear, was within her
limits a very determined little woman. Almost as unquestioning as her
belief in Our Father and Our Saviour, was her belief in drapers. I know
not whether that heartless trifler of her early years was a draper, but
she certainly thought that to wear a black coat and tie behind a counter
was the best of all possible lots attainable by man--at any rate by man
at our social level. She had bound my brother Frank, resisting weakly,
to Mr. Crowhurst in the Market Square, Bromley, for five years and she
had bound my brother Freddy to Mr. Sparrowhawk of the Pavement for four,
to obey those gentlemen as if they were parents and learn the whole art
and mystery of drapery from them, and she was now making a very resolute
attempt to incarcerate me and determine my future in the same fashion.
It did not dawn upon her that my queer gifts of drawing and expression
were of any value at all. But as poor father was to be all alone in
Atlas House now--the use he made of his eight years of solitude does not
concern this story--a Bromley shop was no longer a suitable soil in
which to pop me in order to grow up the perfect draper. She did not like
to send me away where there was no one to look after me, for she knew
there are dangers that waylay the young who are not supervised. So she
found a hasty solution to her problem by sending me on trial, with a
view to apprenticeship, to Messrs. Rodgers and Denyer of Windsor,
opposite the Castle. There my morals would be under the observation of
Surly Hall. And from Messrs. Rodgers and Denyer I got my first
impressions of the intensely undesirable life for which she designed me.
I had no idea of what I was in for. I went to my fate as I was told,
unquestioningly, as my brothers had done before me.

I am told that for lots of poor boys, leaving school and going into
employment about thirteen or fourteen is a very exhilarating experience.
But that is because they get pay, freedom in the evening and on Sundays,
and an enhanced dietary. And they are released from the irksomeness of
lessons and school tasks. But I had rather liked lessons and school
tasks and drapers' apprentices did not get pay. An immense fuss,
entirely unjustifiable, was made about the valuable trade apprentices
were going to learn, and in the past the parents of the victim, if he
"lived in," usually paid a premium of forty or fifty pounds or so for
his immolation. I knew that the new start meant a farewell to many
childish things. I had seen both my brothers pass into servitude, and I
can still remember my brother Freddy having a last game of "marble runs"
with toy bricks on the tilted kitchen table, a game of which he was
particularly fond, before he submitted to the yoke of Mr. Sparrowhawk
and began that ritual of stock-keeping, putting things away, tidying
things up, bending over the counter, being attentive and measuring off,
that lasted thereafter for forty-odd years of his life. He knew what he
was going to, did my brother Fred; and that game was played with
sacrificial solemnity. "I enjoyed that game," said Freddy, who has
always displayed a certain gentle stoicism. "It's supper time Bert.
...Let's put the things away."

Now it was my turn to put the things away, put the books away, give up
drawing and painting and every sort of free delight, stop writing
stories and imitations of _Punch_, give up all vain hopes and dreams,
and serve an employer.

I hated this place into which I had been put from the outset, but I was
far too childish, as yet, to make any real resistance to the closing in
of the prison about me. But I would not, I could not, give myself
satisfactorily to this strange restricted life. It was just by the luck
of that incapacity that the prison rejected me.

I was set down from Uncle Pennicott's dog-cart, with a small portmanteau
containing all my earthly goods, at the side door of the establishment
of Messrs. Rodgers and Denyer, I was taken up a narrow staircase to the
men's dormitory, in which were eight or ten beds and four miserable
wash-hand stands, and I was shown a dismal little sitting room with a
ground glass window opening on a blank wall, in which the apprentices
and assistants might "sit" of an evening, and then I was conducted
downstairs to an underground dining-room, lit by naked gas-jets and
furnished with two long tables covered with American cloth, where the
eating was to be done. Then I was introduced to the shop and
particularly to the cash desk, where it had been arranged for the first
year of my apprenticeship that I was to sit on a tall stool and receive
money, give change, enter the amount on a sheet and stamp receipts. I
was further instructed in a ritual of dusting and window cleaning. I was
to come down at half past seven in the morning, I learnt, without fail,
dust, clean windows, eat a bread-and-butter breakfast at half past
eight, prepare my cash sheet and so to the routine of the day. I had to
add up my cash at the end of the day, count the money in the till, make
sheet and cash agree, help to wrapper-up and sweep out the shop, and so
escape at half-past seven or eight to drink the delights of freedom
until ten, when I had to be in. Lights out at half past ten. And this
was to go on day after day--for ever it seemed to me--with an early
closing day once a week at five, and Sunday free.

I did not rise to these demands upon me. My mind withdrew itself from my
duties. I did my utmost to go on living within myself and leave my
duties to do themselves. My disposition to reverie increased. I dusted
abominably; whenever I could manage it I did not dust at all. I smuggled
books into my desk or did algebraic problems from my battered
Todhunter's Larger Algebra; I gave change absent-mindedly and usually I
gave inaccurate change, and I entered wrong figures on the cash sheet
out of sheer slovenliness.

The one bright moment during the day was when the Guards fifes and drums
went past the shop and up to the Castle. These fifes and drums swirled
me away campaigning again. Dispatch riders came headlong from dreamland,
brooking no denial from the shop-walker. "Is General Bert Wells here?
The Prussians have landed!"

I obeyed, I realize, all the impulses of a developing claustrophobia
during that first phase of servitude. I would abandon my desk to sneak
down into the warehouse, where I spent an unconscionable time seated in
a convenient place of reflection, reading. Or I just stood about down
there behind stacks of unpacked bales.

As the afternoon dragged on, the hour of reckoning when the cash sheet
was added up drew near. It never by any chance corresponded with the
money in the till. There had to be a checking of bills, a scrutiny of
figures. Wrong sums had been set down. The adding had been wild work. At
first the total error would be anything--more or less. After some weeks
it became constantly a shortage. The booking clerk, and one of the
partners who did the business correspondence and supervised things,
would stay late to wrestle with the problem. They were impatient and
reproachful. I had to stay too, profoundly apathetic. Either I was
giving change in excess, or in some way the money was seeping away. I
did not care a rap.

[Illustration: Hand-written note

Rodgers & Deuyers 25 High Street Sunday July 4th 1880

My dear Mother

Here I am sitting in my bed room after the fatigues of the day etc Cough
slightly better & I am tolerably comfortable

I give you an account of one days work to give you an idea what I have
to do.

Morning

We sleep 4 together very 3 apprentices & 1 of the hands in one room (of
course in separate beds)

We lay in bed until 7.30 when a bell rings & we jump up & put trousers
slippers socks & jacket on over nightgown & hurry down & dust the shop
etc

about 8.15 we hurry upstairs & dress & wash for breakfast.

At 8.30 we go into a sort of vault underground (lit by gas) & have
breakfast

After breakfast I am in the shop & desk till dinner at 1 (we have dinner
underground as well as breakfast) & then work till tea (which we have in
the same place) & then go on to supper at 8.30 at which time work is
done & we may then go out until 10.30 at which hour the apprentices are
obliged to be in the house

I don't like the place much, for it is not at all like home

Give love to Dad & give the Cat my best respects

I'm rather bored of being indoors but this morning]

[Illustration: Hand-written note

I went to Clewet Church & then on to Surly which I found much better
than I used to think it in fact it's a perfect heaven to R&DE

I'm rather bored so excuse further writing

Yours

H G Wells

NB Any washing will be 12/-a quarter]

I had always hated money sums and long additions and now I detested
them. I just wanted to get out of that shop before it was ten o'clock
and time to return to the house. I did not realize the dreadful
suspicions that were gathering above my head, nor the temptation my
inaccuracies were offering to anyone who had access to my desk while I
was at meals or otherwise absent. Nobody thought of that, unless perhaps
it was the booking clerk.

Every early closing night, every Sunday, at every opportunity I had, I
cut off to Surly Hall and took refuge with my cousins. I went with joy
and returned with heavy feet. I did not want to talk about business
there and when they asked me how I was getting on I said "Oh all right,"
and turned the talk to more agreeable topics. I did the long two miles
from Windsor to and fro after dark for the one or two bright hours I
spent there. My cousin Kate or Miss King would play the piano and sing.
They would talk to me as though I was not the lowest thing on earth.
There, I was still esteemed clever, and the queer things I said were
applauded. My cousins, delighted at my appreciation, sang "Sweet
Dreamland Faces," and "Juanita," to me and I sat on a little stool close
to the piano in a state of rapt appreciation--of the music, the shaded
lamp, the comfort and the ease of it.

In this world of gramophones, pianolas and the radio, it is worth noting
that at the age of thirteen I had heard no music at all except an
occasional brass band, the not very good music of hymn singing and organ
voluntaries in Bromley Church and these piano songs at Surly Hall.

Then came a terrible inquisition at the shop. I was almost charged with
pilfering. But my uncle Tom defended me stoutly. "You better not go
saying _that_" said my uncle Tom, and indeed, except that there was now
a continual shortage in the cash desk, there was no evidence against me.
I had no expensive vices; I had no criminal associates, I was extremely
shabby and untidy; no marked money--if they used marked money--or indeed
any money except the weekly sixpence allowed me for pocket money, had
ever been found upon me and my bearing was one of unconscious but
convincing rectitude. Indeed I never realized fully what all the fuss
was about until afterwards. Yet the fact remains that as a cash desk
clerk I had leaked abominably and somebody--I suppose--had got away with
the leakage.

It was plain also that I shirked all my other tasks. And while my start
in life was thus already faltering, I had some sort of difference with
the junior porter, which resulted in a conspicuous black eye for me. It
was a gross breach of social conventions for an apprentice to fight a
porter. I had great difficulty in explaining that black eye to my own
satisfaction at Surly Hall. Moreover the clothes I had come to Windsor
in were anything but stylish, and Mr. Denyer, the most animated of the
partners, liked the look of me less and less. I wore a black velvet cap
with a peak and that was all wrong. It became plain that my mother's
first attempt to give me a start in life had failed. I was not starting.
I was not fitted, said Messrs. Rodgers and Denyer, with perfect truth,
to be a draper. I was not refined enough.

I do not recall that at Windsor from first to last I made more than the
slightest effort to do what was expected of me. It was not so much a
resistance as an aversion. And it is a queer thing about that place that
though I stayed there a couple of months, I do not remember the name of
a single individual except one assistant named Nash, who happened to be
the son of a Bromley draper and wore a long moustache. But all the other
figures who sat with him at the downstairs dinner table are now blank
nameless figures. Did I look at them? Did I listen to them? Nor can I
remember the positions of the counters or the arrangement of the goods
in the shop. I made no friends. Mr. Denyer, young Mr. Rodgers and old
Mr. Rodgers left impressions, because they were like great pantomime
heads always looking for me and saying disagreeable things to me, and I
was always engaged in getting away from them. They disliked me; I think
everybody in that place came to dislike me as a tiresome boring little
misfit who made trouble and didn't do his share and was either missing
when he was wanted or in the way when he wasn't. My self-conceit, I
suppose, has blotted out all the other humiliating details from my
memory. I do not even remember whether I felt any chagrin at my failure.
All that seems effaced beyond recall. And yet that nocturnal tramp along
the Maidenhead Road, which I took whenever I could, is real and living
to me still. I could draw a map of the whole way down the hill and
through Clewer. I could show where the road was wider and where it
narrowed down.

Like most undernourished growing boys I was cowardly and I found the
last stretch from Clewer to the inn terrifyingly dark and lonely. It was
black on the moonless nights and eerie by moonlight and often it was
misty from the river. My imagination peopled the dark fields on either
hand with crouching and pursuing foes. Chunks of badly trimmed hedge
took on formidable shapes. Sometimes I took to my heels and ran. For a
week or so that road was haunted by a rumour of an escaped panther--from
Lady Florence Dixie's riverside home, the Fisheries. That phantom
panther waited for me patiently; it followed me like a noiseless dog,
biding its time. And one night on the other side of the hedge a sleeping
horse sighed deeply, a gigantic sigh, and almost frightened me out of my
wits.

But nothing of that sort kept me from going at every opportunity to
Surly Hall, where there was something to touch my imagination and
sustain my self-respect. I was hanging on subconsciously long before I
held on consciously, to that life of books and expression and creative
living from which the close exactions and economies of employment for
private profit were sucking me down. And nothing that my mother and
cousins could say to move and encourage me, could induce me to fix my
attention on the little flimsy bits of paper with carbon duplicates,
that were being slapped down at the guichet of the cash desk.

"One eleven half--two and six. Quick please."


 5

_Second Start in Life--Wookey (Winter 1880)_

The poor little family commander-in-chief--for that she had become--in
lace cap and apron in the housekeeper's room at Up Park had to deal with
the situation as her lights and limitations permitted. Joe at Bromley,
tied by the leg in insolvent Atlas House, had little to suggest. He had
had an idea, in view of my remarkable special certificates for
book-keeping that Messrs. Hoare's or Norman's, for whom he had bowled so
often, ought to have welcomed me as a bank clerk, but when it became
clear that Hoare's and Norman's were unresponsive, he made no further
effort to assist my mother in her perplexities. Shelter and nourishment
and justifying employment had to be found for the youngster somehow. And
at this point Uncle Williams came in with what seemed a hopeful
suggestion. He was going to be head of a little national school. I might
become a pupil teacher under him.

In those days a great deal of the teaching, such as it was, in
elementary schools was done by children scarcely older than the pupils.
Instead of leaving school for work they became "P.T.'s" and, after four
years, competent to enter a training college for a year or two, before
they went on grant earning for the rest of their lives. If an elementary
teacher in those days became anything more than a "trained" drudge, it
was due to his or her own exertions. My Uncle Williams, hearing of my
mother's difficulties, held out hopes that my College of Preceptors
achievements might be used to shorten my pupil teacher stage and get me
accepted as something which he called an "improver."

So I was packed off from Windsor to Wookey in Somerset, where my Uncle
Williams was installed in the school house--but precariously. For he was
never really qualified to teach in an English school. He had taught as a
young man in Jamaica with qualifications that did not satisfy the Board
of Education requirements. There had been a certain lack of
explicitness in his application for the post and when that came to
light, he had to get out of Wookey again. And the same lack of
explicitness extinguished the scholastic career he proposed for me in
the course of two or three months.

But it gave me the idea that there was something to be done in teaching
and that it was pleasanter to stand in front of a class and distribute
knowledge and punishments, than sit at a desk or hover behind a counter,
at the beck and call of a hierarchy of seniors.

My Uncle Williams was not my uncle at all; he had married the sister of
that "Uncle Tom Pennicott," my mother's cousin who had rebuilt Surly
Hall; he had been a teacher in the West Indies, and he was a bright and
adventurous rather than a truthful and trustworthy man. He had invented
and patented an improved desk for schools, with sunken inkpots that
could not upset and could be protected by rotating covers, and he had
left teaching to become the active partner of a firm of manufacturers of
school appliances, including his desks, at Clewer near Windsor. A
sanguine streak in his nature kept his expenses well above his income,
and he presently sank to the position of clerk and manager in his own
factory, and finally lost even that. Hence his attempt to establish
himself in the school house at Wookey by means of inaccuracies.

As I knew him, he was an active centrally bald yellow-faced man with
iron grey whiskers, a sharp nose, a chin like the toe of a hygienic
slipper, and glasses. Extraordinary quantities of hair grew out of his
ears. He had lost one arm, and instead he had a stump in which a hook
was screwed, for which a dinner fork could be substituted. He held his
food down vindictively and cut it up with a knife, and then put the
knife down and ate snappily with another fork in the free hand. He
instructed me in the arts and practices of his scholastic process and
together, sometimes with a curtain to divide the children between us and
sometimes in plenary session, we constituted the school staff. I found
teaching heavy going but far more interesting than work in a cash desk.
Discipline was difficult to maintain; some of the boys were as big as
myself and sturdier, and my cockney accent jarred on Somerset ears. But
it had the prestige of being English. Except for occasional hints from
Uncle Williams, I had to find out how and what to teach. I taught them
dates and geographical lists and sums and tables of weights and measures
and reading, as well as I could. I fought my class, hit them about
viciously and had altogether a lot of trouble with them. I exacted a
full performance of the penalties I imposed and on one occasion pursued
a defaulter headlong to his home, only to be routed ignominiously by his
indignant mother and chased by her and a gathering rabble of variously
sized boys back to the school house.

My Uncle Williams said I was wanting in tact.

My Uncle Williams was a man of derisive conversation with a great
contempt for religion and the clergy. His table talk was unrestrained.
He talked to me frankly and as if I were an adult; I had never in all my
life before had that sort of talk with any grown-up person. It braced me
up. He could talk very entertainingly about the church and its faith and
about the West Indies and the world as he had seen it. He gave me a new
angle from which to regard the universe; I had not hitherto considered
that it might be an essentially absurd affair, good only to laugh at.
That seemed in many ways a releasing method of approach. It was a fresh,
bright way of counter-attacking the dull imperatives of life about me,
and taking the implacable quality out of them.

A daughter kept home for him. His wife had remained in Clewer, where two
elder daughters had jobs as teachers. My cousin was only three or four
years older than I and she was in a phase of great enterprise and
curiosity about the business of sex. She pressed her investigations upon
me. The urge to experiment was upon her. We went for walks together over
the hills in our margin of time; we went one Saturday into Wells and I
saw my first cathedral; and generally speaking our talk was instructive
rather than what was then considered edifying. This phase in my
education was interrupted before it was completed. I took my first
lessons in sexual practice with a certain aversion. My mind was prepared
with a different formula. The real thing as it was thus presented to me,
seemed hot, uncomfortable, shamefaced stuff. But perhaps these
conversations at Wookey did something to bring me back from an
impracticable isolating dreamland.

I was growing up now. I was past fourteen; I was getting sturdier in my
body and less disposed to escape from reality to reverie. The youngster
who was returned rather apologetically by Uncle Williams to my mother,
may have looked very much like the youngster who went in by the side
door of Rodgers and Denyer to try and be a draper, but in fact he was
something far more alert and solid. He had heard one or two things
which, hitherto, he had avoided facing, spoken of very plainly and
directly. And he had been interested by a job. He had really tried to do
something instead of merely submitting to a boring routine in a business
machine he did not understand. He had come up against material fact with
a new nearness and vividness, and he had learnt that laughter was
perhaps a better way of dealing with reality than were the evasions of
reverie. He certainly owes a great deal more to this second start in
life than to the first. A facetious scepticism which later on became his
favourite pose may owe a great deal to Uncle Williams.

The collapse of the Wookey situation was so swift and unexpected that it
took me and my mother by surprise. There was hasty letter-writing again.
I do not know the particulars. I was to go from Wookey to Surly Hall,
either to wait there until she could speak to Miss Fetherstonhaugh about
me, or because the entire journey from Wookey to Harting was considered
too much for me. Even the journey to Windsor was a complicated one. My
Uncle Williams packed me off with instructions to catch a certain train,
the last possible train, at Maidenhead. There was a kink in the journey
between two railway systems. If I missed the connexion I was to stay the
night in a Temperance Hotel and then go on the next morning. But the
first train available on the next day departed towards midday. (I may
have got up late and missed an earlier train;--I cannot remember.) I
went for a walk in Maidenhead and came upon a marvellous shop where one
could be photographed and get a dozen tintypes for a shilling or a
shilling and sixpence. I had never heard of such a thing and the
temptation was irresistible. Money had been given me to cover my bill
at the Temperance Hotel and my fare on to Windsor, and I felt rich
beyond limit. But after the tintypes and a Bath bun and the Temperance
Hotel bill, I found myself at the booking-office at half-past eleven
with a dozen engaging portraits of myself in my pocket but short of the
fare demanded. I had to go round by Slough and change trains; it was a
longer journey than I had imagined. I emerged from the station, holding
my little portmanteau which had suddenly become very heavy in my hand.
"Please can you tell me the way to Windsor?" I asked.

I suppose the distance I covered was a little over four miles, because
Surly Hall was on the road between Windsor and Maidenhead. But I still
remember that walk as one of the longest in the world. When I had gone
fifty yards from Maidenhead station I changed my portmanteau from one
hand to the other. Before I had gone a quarter of a mile I put it down
and reflected. My reflections were unfruitful. It is muscle and not mind
that must carry portmanteaus. Before I had done a mile I was trying to
carry that leaden valise on my head for a change. It had to be carried
somehow to Surly Hall. I arrived after twilight with arms that felt like
limp strings of pain, extremely exhausted and sorry for myself.

And when I got to Surly Hall, I found Surly Hall had changed. It had
become cheerless and almost sinister.

The shadow of approaching tragedy hung over it. Dreadful things had
happened already. In the interval since my departure from Windsor, my
uncle had had a violent quarrel with his daughter Clara about her lover,
there had been bitter recriminations and she had gone off to London. How
she lived in London nobody knew. Miss King, the barmaid, had gone.
Cousin Kate was in a state of dismay and disapproval and threatening to
marry a man she had been engaged to for some time and "get away from it
all." The river was a swift flood of leaden silver; there were no
passing boats to pull up, the hotel was empty, the bar and taproom
desolate and the lawn with its green tables sodden and littered with
dead leaves. My uncle was greatly embittered at the swift darkening of
life about him. I think too he was intensely worried financially. He had
mortgaged himself deeply in his rebuilding of the place. He was
distressed by the undutifulness of his daughters. He would sit in the
taproom talking to a serious potman who had found religion....

Music and song, moonlight on the lawn, forget-me-nots in the sedges and
white water-lilies above the brown smooth water; all had become
incredible. My education was going on apace....

I did not see Surly Hall again for many years after that visit. But
cousin Kate married and went away and cousin Clara followed her
destinies in London and came back at last after four years, a broken
young woman. Her lover had abandoned her long ago. Uncle Tom, I fear,
received her unkindly. All light and hope had gone out of life for her
and late one night she flitted in her nightgown down the lawn from a
sleepless bed to the river and drowned herself in a deep hole under a
pollard willow. The old man died soon after. My cousin Kate died. The
place was annexed to an adjacent property and ultimately its license was
extinguished. The obliteration of Surly Hall was complete. I do not know
of anything that survives of it now except my memories, a passing
mention in some Old Etonian's Reminiscences and a fading photograph or
so.


 6

_Interlude at Up Park (1880-81)_

I am trying to recover the quality of those years between twelve and
sixteen or seventeen with as many particulars as I can recall, because I
think that the forces and influences in operation then were of primary
importance in determining all my subsequent reactions. I am impressed as
I look over such documents and records as I can find to revive these
days, by the extraordinarily rapid growth of my character and resolution
during my fourteenth and fifteenth years. I suppose this hardening and
toughening and clearing up of the will was the natural concomitant of
puberty. I was perhaps intellectually forward but morally I think I
followed an average curve.

But if I did, then I am convinced that this system of terminating the
education of an ordinary citizen before the age of fourteen is a wrong
one. I do not think that for the new civilization ahead of us education
will ever terminate, but certainly thirteen or fourteen is premature for
economic citizenship. That age is not a natural turning point in the
development of either male or female--at any rate so far as north
European races are concerned. The transfer from protected tutelage to
quasi responsible employment is premature. At earliest it should not
occur until a year or so later when the youngster has become able and
willing to take a directive interest in his or her own future. I was
relatively precocious, yet clearly thirteen-fourteen was too soon for
me. And even if whole-time education is to be prolonged for some years
more--as may presently be the case all over the world for
everyone--there should still be a break, not according to the present
practice in England about twelve or thirteen when a boy goes from a
preparatory to a public school, but about fifteen or sixteen. Then is
the best time for a change over from instruction and guidance to an
intelligent co-operation between teacher and disciple.

Both my brothers and myself, like nearly every boy in the British lower
and lower middle classes of that time, were "put to a trade" and bound,
before we could exercise any choice in the matter. In relation to any
such issue we were children still. If this had been the case only with
my brothers and myself, then this aspect of my story would hardly have
been worth discussing. It would have been an individual misfortune. It
would have been merely the story of three tadpoles who had chanced to be
taken out of the water before their legs and lungs would act properly.
But this transfer at the wrong age was and still is the common
experience. It has therefore had far reaching social consequences.
Because of this premature termination of the primary educational phase
in the closing years of the last century, a great proportion, perhaps a
majority, of British men and women were (and are) employed upon their
tasks against their will or at least without their willing assent. The
nation almost as a whole is taken out of its tadpole stage too soon.
Just as the civilizations of the ancients was based upon the labour of
serfs and slaves, so this industrial civilization in which we are still
living is based on the toil of masses of people mentally and morally
arrested before fourteen. The bulk of the population is neither
uneducated and quasi-animal as its servile predecessor was, nor educated
as the whole mass should be in a soundly conceived mechanized
civilization. It is incompletely metamorphosed; neither one thing nor
the other.

One miserable result, though not by any means the only one, is this:
that industrial life goes on in a spirit of boredom, with a demand
therefore for shorter hours and higher wages as the main expression of
the Labour mentality evoked under these conditions. An extraordinary
indifference to the amount and quality of the product or service
rendered is also manifest. Half Europe still watches the clock just as I
watched the clock in Rodgers and Denyer's establishment, and by an inner
necessity it tries in every possible way to scamp whatever tiresome task
has to be done. Its labour is spiritless labour because it is
essentially uninterested labour.

But our already highly mechanized and organized world community, if it
is to develop further and sustain an efficient common life requires
before everything else interested and participating workers. In this
respect as in so many others it has got off from the mark too soon and
started at too low a level.

It has taken three quarters of a century for this fact to dawn upon us.
Responsible people have still to realize as a class that a happy, stably
progressive human community can be made possible only if--among several
other necessary primary conditions--the new generation is held back
under education until it is at least sixteen years old, before its life
rles are determined and conscious specialized economic citizenship
begins. Although, as I have said, relatively precocious I was not fit to
have a decisive voice in my own destiny until I was sixteen. For want of
a breathing time at this crucial phase, my eldest brother became a
complete failure in life--for he did not stick to the shop--and my
brother Fred wasted upon haberdashery a fine conscientiousness and an
exceptional gift for sensitive meticulous artistic work. And I escaped
from becoming a wretched employee in an entirely uncongenial trade not
by any merit of my own but by sheer luck.

Against a background of such generalizations my little mother, you see,
becomes a symbol of the blind and groping parental solicitude of that
age, a solicitude which enslaved and hampered where it sought to aid and
establish; and my individual story merges into the story of the
handicapped intelligence of our species, blundering heavily towards the
realization and handling of vast changes and still vaster dangers and
opportunities. My mother becomes a million mothers and my brothers a
countless brotherhood. My life is a sample life and not an exceptional
one; its distinctive merit has been its expressiveness; its living
interest lies in that.

For some weeks after the retreat from Wookey, my mother did not know
what to do with me. She asked all sorts of people for information and no
doubt she took her troubles to her Heavenly Father, who remained, as
ever, speechlessly enigmatical. She spoke to Miss Fetherstonhaugh about
me and I was allowed to take refuge, from the gathering gloom of Surly
Hall, at Up Park. And there a great snowstorm snowed me up for nearly a
fortnight and I produced a daily newspaper of a facetious character,
_The Up Park Alarmist_--on what was properly kitchen paper--and gave a
shadow play to the maids and others, in a miniature theatre I made in
the housekeeper's room.

Now it is one of my firmest convictions that modern civilization was
begotten and nursed in the households of the prosperous, relatively
independent people, the minor nobility, the gentry, and the larger
bourgeoisie, which became visibly important in the landscape of the
sixteenth century, introducing a new architectural element in the towns,
and spreading as country houses and chateaux and villas over the
continually more orderly countryside. Within these households, behind
their screen of deer park and park wall and sheltered service, men could
talk, think and write at their leisure. They were free from inspection
and immediate imperatives. They, at least, could go on after thirteen
thinking and doing as they pleased. They created the public schools,
revived the waning universities, went on the Grand Tour to see and
learn. They could be interested in public affairs without being consumed
by them. The management of their estates kept them in touch with reality
without making exhaustive demands on their time. Many, no doubt,
degenerated into a life of easy dignity or gentlemanly vice, but quite a
sufficient number remained curious and interested to make, foster and
protect the accumulating science and literature of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Their large rooms, their libraries, their
collections of pictures and "curios" retained into the nineteenth
century an atmosphere of unhurried liberal enquiry, of serene and
determined insubordination and personal dignity, of established sthetic
and intellectual standards. Out of such houses came the Royal Society,
the _Century of Inventions_, the first museums and laboratories and
picture galleries, gentle manners, good writing, and nearly all that is
worth while in our civilization to-day. Their culture, like the culture
of the ancient world, rested on a toiling class. Nobody bothered very
much about that, but it has been far more through the curiosity and
enterprise and free deliberate thinking of these independent gentlemen
than through any other influences, that modern machinery and economic
organization have developed so as to abolish at last the harsh necessity
for any toiling class whatever. It is the country house that has opened
the way to human equality, not in the form of a democracy of insurgent
proletarians, but as a world of universal gentlefolk no longer in need
of a servile substratum. It was the experimental cellule of the coming
Modern State.

The new creative forces have long since overflowed, these first nests in
which they were hatched and for the most part the European country
houses and chateaux that were so alive and germinal, mentally, in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stand now mere empty shells,
resorts for week-end gatherings and shooting parties, but no longer real
dwelling places, gracefully and hospitably in decay. Yet there still
lingers something of that former importance and largeness in outlook, on
their walls and hangings and furnishings, if not in their attenuated
social life. For me at any rate the house at Up Park was alive and
potent. The place had a great effect upon me; it retained a vitality
that altogether overshadowed the insignificant ebbing trickle of
upstairs life, the two elderly ladies in the parlour following their
shrunken routines, by no means content with the bothered little
housekeeper in the white panelled room below.

During this visit and subsequent visits, when the weather did not permit
of my wandering in the park, I rummaged about in an attic next to my
bedroom which was full of odd discarded things. I found several great
volumes of engravings of the Vatican paintings of Raphael and
Michelangelo. I pondered immensely over the mighty loveliness of these
saints and sibyls and gods and goddesses. And there was a box, at first
quite mysterious, full of brass objects that clearly might be screwed
together. I screwed them together, by the method of trial and error, and
presently found a Gregorian telescope on a tripod in my hands. I carried
off the wonder to my bedroom. By daylight it showed everything upside
down, I found, but that did not matter--except for the difficulty of
locating objects--when I turned it to the sky. I was discovered by my
mother in the small hours, my bedroom window wide open, inspecting the
craters of the moon. She had heard me open the window. She said I should
catch my death of cold. But at the time that seemed a minor
consideration.

Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh, like many of his class and time, had been a
free-thinker, and the rooms downstairs abounded in bold and enlightening
books. I was allowed to borrow volumes and carry them off to my room.
Then or later, I cannot now recall when, I improved my halting French
with Voltaire's lucid prose, I read such books as _Vathek_ and
_Rasselas_, I nibbled at Tom Paine, I devoured an unexpurgated
_Gulliver's Travels_ and I found Plato's _Republic_. That last was a
very releasing book indeed for my mind, I had learnt the trick of
mocking at law and custom from Uncle Williams and, if anything, I had
improved upon it and added caricature to quaint words, but here was
something to carry me beyond mockery. Here was the amazing and
heartening suggestion that the whole fabric of law, custom and worship,
which seemed so invincibly established, might be cast into the melting
pot and made anew.


 7

_Third Start in Life--Midhurst (1881)_

I do not know how my mother hit upon the idea of making me a
pharmaceutical chemist. But that was the next career towards which I
(and my small portmanteau) were now directed. I spent only about a month
amidst the neat gilt-inscribed drawers and bottles of Mr. Cowap at
Midhurst, rolled a few score antibilious and rhubarb pills, broke a
dozen soda-water siphons during a friendly broom fight with the errand
boy, learnt to sell patent medicines, dusted the coloured water bottles,
the bust of Hahnemann (indicating homoeopathic remedies) and the white
horse (veterinary preparations), and I do not think I need here devote
very much space to him and his amusing cheerful wife, seeing that I have
already drawn largely upon this shop, and my experiences in it, in
describing aunt and uncle Ponderevo in _Tono Bungay_. Cowap, like uncle
Ponderevo, really did produce a heartening Cough Linctus, though he
never soared to my hero's feat of commercial expansion. But this time I
gave satisfaction, and it was upon my initiative and not upon that of my
prospective employer that pharmaceutical chemistry was abandoned as my
calling in life. I enquired into the cost of qualification as an
assistant and dispenser; the details have long since escaped me; but I
came to the conclusion that the fees and amount of study required, would
be quite beyond my mother's limited resources. I pointed this out to her
and she saw reason in the figures I gave her.

I was reluctant to abandon this start because I really liked the bright
little shop with its drawers full of squills and senna pods, flowers of
sulphur, charcoal and such like curious things, and I had taken to
Midhurst from the outset. It had been the home of my grandparents, and
that gave me a sense of belonging there. It was a real place in my mind
and not a morbid sprawl of population like Bromley. Its shops and
school and post office and church were grouped in rational
comprehensible relations; it had a beginning, a middle and an end. I
know no country to compare with West Sussex except the Cotswolds. It had
its own colour, a pleasant colour of sunlit sandstone and ironstone and
a warm flavour of open country because of the parks and commons and pine
woods about it. Midhurst was within three hours' sturdy walking from Up
Park. And I had recovered my self respect there very rapidly.

One manifest deficiency in my schooling came to light at the mere
suggestion that I should be a chemist. I knew no Latin and much of the
dignity of the qualified druggist at that time depended upon a
smattering of that tongue. He had to read and to copy and understand
prescriptions. Accordingly it was arranged that I should go to the
Headmaster of the local Grammar School and have lessons in Latin. I had,
I suppose, four or five hours of it before the project of my
apprenticeship was abandoned, but in that time I astonished my
instructor, accustomed to working against the resistances of Sussex
tradesmen's and farmer's sons and the like, by rushing through the
greater part of Smith's _Principia_ Part I and covering more ground than
he had been accustomed to get over with his boys in a year or more. I
found this fine structural language congenial just as I had found
Euclid's _Elements_ congenial. It was a new way of saying things. It was
like something I had been waiting for. It braced up my use of English
immediately.

The Midhurst Grammar School was an old foundation which had fallen into
decay and had been closed in 1859--after a fire which had destroyed the
school house. It had been revived by the Endowed Schools Commissioners
and the school had been re-opened in 1880, less than a year before my
essay in pharmacy. Mr. Horace Byatt, M.A., the new headmaster, was a not
very brilliant graduate of Dublin University, an animated and energetic
teacher resolved to make a success of his first headmastership. He was a
dark, semi-clerical man, plumply active, with bushy hair, side whiskers,
a cleft chin, and a valiant rotund voice, and he was quartered with his
wife and three small children in a comfortable old house near the South
Pond, until the commissioners could rebuild the school house, which was
still at that time a weedy heap of ruins.

I know nothing of Byatt's previous history and training, but I doubt if
his Latin went very far and I stumped him completely when, some years
later, I took some Greek quotation from Paley's _Evidences_ to him for
elucidation. He had evidently had a considerable experience in teaching
elementary science, geometrical drawing and the like, and his rle at
Midhurst was to build up a secondary school on comparatively modern
lines. At that time the British Education Department was spreading a
system of evening class instruction from which the organized science
schools of the next decade were developed. The classes ran through the
winter and were examined in May and the teacher received pay according
to his results, a pound or two pounds or four pounds for every pass,
according to its class and grade. Byatt, who was a university M.A., was
considered qualified to conduct classes and earn grants in any of the
thirty odd subjects scheduled by the Department, and in addition to his
day-time teaching, he was already running evening classes in freehand,
perspective and geometrical drawing and in electricity and magnetism, to
supplement his fundamental stipend. His interest in the classics was
therefore relatively less keen. Latin in such schools as his had ceased
to be a language; there was no real thought of either reading it or
writing it, much less of speaking it; it was an exercise directed to the
passing of various qualifying examinations.

Now Cowap had counted on my premium as an apprentice, and when he
realized that I did not intend to go on with that, he betrayed
considerable vexation and became urgent to clear me out to make way for
a more profitable aspirant. My mother had nowhere for me to go and she
arranged to put me as a boarder with the Grammar School headmaster until
she could organize a fourth start in life for me. I became the first
boarder of the renascent school. I spent about two months there,
returning by special request to sit for the May examinations in all the
subjects of Byatt's evening classes and so earn grants for him.

Now here again was a new phase in my very jumbled education, and one
that I still look back upon with pleasure. I liked Byatt, and he formed
an encouragingly high opinion of my grit and capacity. The amount of
mental benefit I derived from those few weeks as his pupil, cannot be
measured by the work actually done; the stimulus I got was far more
important. I went on with Latin but now at a reduced speed, for Byatt
preferred to direct me rather towards grant-earning subjects and put
text books in such subjects as physiology and physiography into my
hands, realizing that I was capable of learning very rapidly by reading
alone without any nursing in class. I could understand a book of my own
accord and write, and if necessary illustrate, a good answer to a
question, and that was something beyond the general capacity of his
Midhurst material. I think it was extraordinary good fortune for me,
that I had this drilling in writing things down at this time. It gave my
reading precision and accustomed me to marshal my knowledge in an
orderly fashion. There are many valid objections to a system of
education controlled by written examinations; it may tend very easily
towards a ready superficiality; but I am convinced that it has at any
rate the great merit of imposing method and order in learning. It
prevents the formation of those great cavities of vagueness, those
preferential obsessions, those disproportions between detail and
generalization which are characteristic of gifted people who have never
been "examinees."

This broadening out, bucking up and confirmation of my mind by the flood
of new experiences at Up Park and Midhurst, were immensely important in
my development. I dwell upon this phase because when I look back upon
1880 and early 1881 it seems to me as though these above all others were
the years in which the immediate realities about me began to join on in
a rational way to that varied world with which books had acquainted me.
That larger world came slowly within the reach of my practical
imagination. Hitherto it had been rather a dreamland and legend than
anything conceivably tangible and attainable. It had been no more
credible to me than my mother's imaginative escape to Our Father, Our
Saviour, celestial music and the blessedness of heaven. One let one's
mind stray away to such things when the rigid uncomfortable imperatives
of employment, the inescapable insufficiency and shabbiness of the daily
round became insupportable. But one had no belief in any possible escape
in fact, and sooner or later the mind had to return to its needy
habitation and its fated limitations. Temporary escape and alleviation
by reverie were the easier substitutes for positive effort to get out of
the imprisoning conditions. But now I was abandoning reverie and working
up towards a conscious fight for the positive enlargement of my life.

I wish I could set down with certainty all the main facts in this phase
of my adolescence. Then I should be able to separate the accidental
elements, the element of individual luck that is to say, from the normal
developmental phases. I realize that I was almost beyond comparison a
more solid, pugnacious, wary and alert individual in 1881 than I was in
1879, and as I have already suggested that a large factor in this may
have been the nervous and chemical changes that are associated with
puberty. So far my experience was the general experience. Puberty is
certainly a change in much more than the sexual life. The challenge to
authority, the release of initiative, the access of courage are at least
equally important. But added to this normal invigoration was the escape
from the meagre feeding and depressingly shabby and unlit conditions of
Atlas House. There I had a great advantage over my two brothers and I
think a quite unusual push forward. I was living in those crucial years
under healthier conditions; I was undergoing stimulating changes of
environment, and, what is no small matter, eating a more varied and
better dietary. Yet even when these more fortunate physical
circumstances have been allowed for, there remains over and above them,
the influence upon my perplexed and resentful mind for the first time,
at its most receptive age, of a sudden irruption of new ideas, ideas of
scientific precision and confirmation and ideas of leisure, culture and
social margin. If I had been the son of an instructive-minded astronomer
and had been bothered with early lessons about the stars when I wanted
to play with mud pies, I might not have made my first contact with the
starry heavens in a state of exaltation, nor pursued Jupiter with the
help of _Whitaker's Almanack_ until with my own eyes, I saw him and his
moons quivering in the field of my telescope, as though I were Galileo
come back to earth. Nor should I have realized with anything like the
same excitement, had geology been made easy for me in my childhood, that
when I stood on the brow of Telegraph Hill and looked across the weald
to the North Downs I was standing on the escarpment of a denuded
anticlinal, and that this stuff of the pale hills under my feet had once
been slime at the bottom of a vanished Cretaceous sea. And again this
definite estate of Up Park and the sharply marked out farms, villages
and towns of the countryside below, caught me just in the proper phase
to awaken a sense of social relationship and history that might never
have been roused if I had remained in the catastrophic multitudinousness
of suburban development.

The stuff accumulated by the discursive reading of my earlier years,
fell rapidly into place in the wider clearer vision of my universe that
was coming into being before my eyes. Science in those days insisted, if
anything, overmuch upon the reign of law. The march of progress was
still being made with absolute assurance, and my emancipation was
unqualified. It must be hard for intelligent people nowadays to realize
all that a shabby boy of fifteen could feel as the last rack of a
peevish son-crucifying Deity dissolved away into blue sky, and as the
implacable social barriers, as they had seemed, set to keep him in that
path unto which it had pleased that God to call him, weakened down to
temporary fences he could see over and presently perhaps hope to climb
over or push aside.

But before one breaks or climbs fences one must look over them or
through them for a time, and just then I was merely in the stage of
peeping with a wild surmise and daring nothing more. I was still a good
ten years from the reality of personal freedom.




CHAPTER THE FOURTH

_EARLY ADOLESCENCE_


 1

_Fourth Start in Life--Southsea (1881-1883)_

While I was making my first systematic acquaintance with modern science
at the Midhurst Grammar School, my mother was busy finding yet another
start in life for me. She had consulted Sir William King, who was Miss
Fetherstonhaugh's Agent and an important man in Portsmouth affairs, and
he had recommended her to Mr. Edwin Hyde, the proprietor of the Southsea
Drapery Emporium in Kings Road, Southsea. I learnt at Easter that I was
destined once again to try the difficult rle of a draper, this time
under the tutelage of this Mr. Hyde. I was still unprepared with any
alternative scheme. I expressed dissent, but my mother wept and
entreated. I promised to be a good boy and try.

But this time I went recalcitrant, not indeed against my mother, whose
simplicity and difficulties I was beginning to understand, but against a
scheme of things which marched me off before I was fifteen to what was
plainly a dreary and hopeless life, while other boys, no better in
quality than myself, were enjoying all the advantages--I thought they
were stupendous advantages in those days--of the public school and
university. I conveyed my small portmanteau to Southsea with a sinking
heart. I was left upstairs in the dormitory for a time until someone
could come to show me round, and I leant upon the window-sill and looked
out upon the narrow side street upon which the window gave, with no
illusion about what had happened to me. I can still feel the
unhappiness and dismay of that moment.

Retail trade, I thought, had captured me for good. I had now to learn to
work and to work faithfully for the profit and satisfaction of my
prospective employers to the end of my days. I had been at large for a
year and found no other way of living. The last chance had gone. At that
moment I could not discover in my mind or in my world, as represented by
the narrow side street into which I was looking, the little corner pub
or the blind alley below me or the strip of sky overhead, the faintest
intimation of any further escape.

I turned round from this restricted outer world to survey my dormitory
in much the same mood as a condemned prisoner surveying the fittings of
the cell he is to occupy for his allotted term....

It is an open question in my mind whether this dismay at the outset, is
the common experience of modern youth of the less fortunate classes, or
whether because of the enlightenment of my previous starts I happened to
see further and more clearly than most of my fellows. A considerable
number, I think, get that caught feeling rather later. My brother Frank,
after fifteen years of being good, said he could endure the life no
longer and broke away as I shall tell in due course. My brother Fred
held to the religion of submission longer; he was the good boy of the
three of us, and he did subdue himself to the necessary routines for the
best part of his life.

What percentage of those who are bound apprentices to drapers, go on to
comparative success I do not know, nor what their vital statistics are,
but it is beyond all question a meagre distressful life they lead and
exceptionally devoid of hope. Caradoc Evans, like myself, has been a
draper, and the scene he draws of a draper's existence in the meaner
shops of London in _Nothing to Pay_ is, I know, true in all substantial
particulars. He tells of the perpetual nagging and mutual irritation,
the petty "spiffs" and fines, the intrigues and toadyism, the long
tedious hours, the wretched dormitories, the insufficient "economized"
food, the sudden dismissals, the dreadful interludes of unemployment
with clothing growing shabby and money leaking away. There was no dole
behind the "swapped" shop assistant in those days. You swam for as long
as you could and then, if you could not scramble into some sort of shop,
down you went to absolute destitution, the streets and beggary. Hyde was
an exceptionally good employer; the place, from an assistant's point of
view, was infinitely superior to my previous "crib" at Rodgers and
Denyer's, yet still I recall those two years of incarceration as the
most unhappy hopeless period of my life. I was indentured for four
years, but after nearly two years of it I took matters into my own
hands. I rebelled and declared that come what might I would not go on
being a draper.

Yet I never got to the worst experiences of an assistant's life. I never
knew how it felt to be out of a crib or tasted the full sordidness of
the Caradoc Evans type of shop. I learnt about such matters chiefly from
my brothers and the assistants at Hyde's. What overwhelmed me
immediately was the incessancy of this employment and its lack of
compelling interest. I do not know how the modern state as it develops
will solve the problem of service in the distributing trades, but I am
convinced it will have to be made an employment for short periods, short
hours or alternative weeks and months with relays of workers, and that
such special education as may be provided for it will link up the mind
of the employee with the methods and novelties of manufacture on the one
hand and the ultimate use of the goods sold on the other. Then the
assistant would go behind the counter or into the stockroom with a sense
of function instead of a sense of routine, there would be a minimum of
shirking, resentment and lassitude, and he would do his job as a brisk
terminable job worth doing and would find it the more interesting the
better it was done. Nothing of that sort happened in my case.

It is remarkable how alien and incomprehensible the stuff I had to
handle was to me. I was put first into the Manchester department, and
there I found fixtures of wrappered blocks labelled incomprehensibly
Hard Book or Turkey Twill or the like, rolls of grey and black silesia,
flannels with a variety of names, a perplexing range of longcloths and
calicoes, endless packages of diaper table-cloths, serviettes, and so
forth, and rolls of crash, house cloth, ticking and the like. All that
stuff had no origin and no purpose for me, except that it seemed to have
been created to make my life burthensome. There were also in this
Manchester department cotton dress materials, prints, ginghams and
sateens, cretonne and kindred fabrics for covering furniture; stuffs
that were rather more understandable but equally irksome to handle. I
had to straighten all this stock and pack it up after it had been shown
and put it back into the proper fixtures; I had to measure and refold it
when the manufacturers delivered it, to block it or to roll it in rolls.
This blocking, rolling and folding was skilled work that needed a
watchful effort I gave grudgingly, and I never learnt to do it swiftly
and neatly. You cannot imagine how maliciously a folded piece of sateen
can get askew, how difficult it is to roll huckaback, how unruly a fat
blanket is to pack up and how heavy and unwieldy pieces of cretonne can
be when you have to carry a score or so of them up narrow folding steps
and adjust them neatly on a rising pile. My department also included
lace curtains. These had to be unfolded and held up by the junior
apprentice while the salesman discoursed to the customer. As the heap of
tumbled curtains grew and the customer still wanted to see something a
little different, storms of hatred and revolutionary fervour went on
behind the apathetic mask of the junior apprentice, doomed before
closing time to refold them all and put them away.

Stock keeping, showing goods and clearing up, were the middle duties of
the day. We apprentices were roused from our beds at seven,
peremptorily, by one of the assistants; he swept hortative through the
dormitory and on his return journey pulled the bed-clothes off anyone
still in bed. We flung on old suits, tucking our nightgowns into our
trousers, and were down in the shop in a quarter of an hour, to clean
windows, unwrapper goods and fixtures, dust generally, before eight. At
eight we raced upstairs to get first go at the wash basins, dressed for
the day and at half-past eight partook of a bread and butter breakfast
before descending again. Then came window dressing and dressing out the
shop. I had to fetch goods for the window dresser and arrange patterns
or pieces of fabric on the brass line above the counter. Every day or so
the costume window had to be rearranged and I had to go in the costume
room and fetch those headless effigies on which costumes are displayed
and carry them the length of the shop, to the window dresser, avoiding
gas brackets, chairs and my fellow creatures _en route_. Then I had to
see to the replenishing of the pin bowls and the smoothing out and
stringing up of paper for small parcels. The tediums of the day were
broken for an hour or so while I went out to various other shops in
Southsea, Portsmouth and Landport "matching" for the workroom, getting
lengths of ribbon and material that were needed and could not be
supplied out of stock, taking money from the cash desk to the bank or
gettings bags of small change. I loitered as much as I dared on these
blessed errands, but by half past eleven or twelve at latest, the shop
swallowed me up again and there was no more relief until after closing
time, which came at seven or eight according to the season. I had to
stand by ready for any helpful job. There were a hundred small fussy
things to do, straightening up, putting away, fetching and carrying. It
was not excessively laborious but it was indescribably tedious. If there
was nothing else to do I had to stand to attention at the counter, as
though ready for a customer, though at first I was not competent to
serve. The length of those days at Southsea were enormous until closing
time; then the last hour fell swiftly past me to "lights out" at half
past ten.

Half an hour before closing time we began to put away for the last time
and "wrapper up," provided no customer lingered in the department. And
as soon as the doors were shut and the last customer gone, the
assistants departed and we junior apprentices rushed from behind the
counters, scattered wet sawdust out of pails over the floor and swept it
up again with great zest and speed, the last rite of the day. By
half-past eight we were upstairs and free, supping on bread and butter,
cheese and small beer. That was the ritual for every day in the week,
thirteen hours of it, except that on Wednesday, Early Closing Day, the
shop closed at five.

There was an interval of five minutes at eleven o'clock in the morning
when we went upstairs in relays for bread and butter and--my memory is
not quite clear here but I think we had a glass of beer. Or it may have
been milk or tea. We had a mid-day meal about one for which we had half
an hour and we had ten minutes for tea. The dining room was airy, well
lit and upstairs, far more agreeable than the underground cellar at
Rodgers and Denyer's, and instead of the squalid rooms which
characterised the Windsor place, with truckle beds and no accommodation
for personal belongings, so that everyone had to keep his possessions in
a trunk or valise, high partitions between the beds divided the
dormitory into cubicles and everyone had a private chest of drawers,
looking glass, pegs, a chair and so forth. For his time and trade, Mr.
Edwin Hyde was a fairly civilized employer. He had even provided a
reading room, with a library of several hundred books, of which I shall
have a word to say in the next section.

Though I began this life of a draper's shopman at the best end, so to
speak, I found it insupportable. The unendurable thing about it was that
I was never master of my own attention. I had to be thinking continually
about pins and paper and packages. If there was nothing for me to do
then I had to find something to do and look sharp about it. But the
excitement of successful learning, which had come to me at Midhurst,
would not die down. For a time Latin was for me, as for Hardy's _Jude
the Obscure_, the symbol of mental emancipation. I tried to go on with
Latin; I wanted to prepare for more examinations. My mind no longer
escaped in reverie, but I was rarely without a book of some sort in my
pocket which I would try to read when I should have been combing and
grooming Witney blankets for the window, or when I was out of sight of
the shop-walker, as I imagined, behind a pile of cotton goods.

It became evident to those who were set in authority over me that I was
an inattentive and unwilling worker. This mattered most immediately to
Casebow the head of the Manchester department, and the "improver" and
senior apprentice who were between him and myself. Casebow was a good
sort, but he had to keep up a rain of "Come up!" "Oh, look _sharp_!"
"What in heaven are you doing now?" "What on earth are you doing here?"
Over him and me ruled the shop walker, Mr. John Key, a stately and
quasi-military figure with a good profile and a cherished moustache,
very gentlemanly and dreadfully brisk, who marshalled all the forces of
the shop together and did not for a moment intend that I or anyone under
his sway should sink into sloth and insignificance. When I reflect upon
him, I marvel at his all-seeing energy. He lurked watchfully in a little
desk in the middle of the main shop, from which he sallied to accost
customers, lead them to the appropriate department, summon the proper
assistant, "Merton forward!" "Ascough forward!" "Miss Quilter forward!"
hover to intervene if the sale did not go well, answer to the cry of
"Sign!" and check each transaction, introduce novelties to the departing
client,--"We are showing some very pretty sunshades just now Moddum.
This for example" (startlingly opened)--and see that no part of our
organization (and particularly, it seemed to me, myself) fell out of
action. He found me a responsibility, and after a time I got a little on
his nerves. He would remember me suddenly and inconveniently. "Wells?"
he would ask. "What is Wells doing? Where on earth is that boy now?"

"Jay-Kay's after you," Platt or Rodgers would say.

Wells would become virtuously active at a counter where he had been
invisible five minutes before. "Here Sir. I've just been straightening
up the longcloths."

"Eugh!"

My life went to the refrain of Mr. Key's disgusted "Eugh."

The proprietor, the "G. V.", I saw less of; he was snappy in his manner
and very terrifying. But he came into the department at irregular
intervals; he blew over. J. K. who was always about, always keeping me
up to the mark, observant of every untidiness in my dress or any
slackness in my bearing, an ever present "Eugh" of disapproval, was the
living sting of my servitude. At the time I hated him beyond measure.
And yet now, when I can pass judgment upon him across an interval of
half a century, I see that he was really an excellent man, most anxious
to guide my feet into the path of successful drapering and without a
grain of malice in his persecution. If he never let me alone for five
minutes, then he did me the immense service of bringing home to me in
time, just how slack, unsatisfactory and hopeless I was by nature for
the calling that had been chosen for me. I could do nothing right for
him from the moment when I came into the shop, with an unnecessarily
careless slam of the door three minutes late after breakfast, to the
time when, broom and pail in hand, I stared malevolently round the
corner of a fixture at the lingering customer. The parcels in my
department became more and more askew; until they might have been
packed, he said, by "old women."

He wasn't "finding fault." The faults obtruded. I wasn't doing things
right. Although I tried hard and tried to school myself, the humiliating
fact has to be faced by an honest autobiographer, I wasn't equal to the
job.

Now it is all claptrap to say that this was so because I was meant for
better things. But I was "meant," if I may use that expression, for
different things. I don't think I ever had any snobbishness in me about
the relative values of Latin and longcloth, but it was an immense
consolation to me in those days of drab humiliations, that after all I
had been able to race through Euclid's _Elements_, Smith's _Principia_
and various scientific text books at a quite unusual speed. That
consolation became brighter as my prospect of winning any of the prizes
in the trade or even holding my own as a satisfactory assistant,
darkened. Manifestly I had not the ghost of a chance of becoming a
buyer, a shop walker, a manager, a traveller or a partner. I listened to
the tales my seniors would unfold, of the long-drawn despair and
hardships of "crib hunting" and rotten shops and what it meant to lose
one's "refs," with a growing certitude that that was my part of it, that
was the way I should go. And, meditating on my outlook, it was
inevitable I should recall the nice authoritative feeling of dictating
knowledge to a class and wonder whether even for me with such an
appetite for learning as I possessed there might not be prizes and
scholarships in the world and some niche of erudition for me to fill.

Possibly my mind would have run naturally towards such ideas, but Mr.
Key's expostulating "I never saw such a boy! What do you think will
become of you?" was undoubtedly thought-provoking. What _would_ become
of me?

Might there not be some Wookey where the headmaster's certificates were
in order?

This question became more urgent in my mind as I got into my second
year. A fresh apprentice came and I was no longer junior; he took over
those pleasant errands of matching and so forth that had hitherto fallen
to me and I was kept more closely in the shop. (He had by the bye an
amusing simplicity of mind, a carelessness of manner, a way of saying
"Oo'er," and a feather at the back of his head that stuck in my memory,
and formed the nucleus which grew into _Kipps_ in my novel of that
name.) Junior apprentices wear short black coats, but afterwards they go
into black morning coats with tails, and now, at sixteen, I bore these
evidences of my increasing maturity. I began to serve small and easy
customers. I served them badly. Rodgers and Platt my immediate seniors
were far sharper at the job. And the parcels I packed were damnable.

"Get on with it Wells." "Wells Forward." "Has anyone seen Wells?"
"Sign!" "But you haven't shown the lady the gingham at six-three! The
young man has made a mistake Moddum; we have exactly what you require."
"A parcel like that will fall to pieces, man, before it gets home." And
at the back of my mind, growing larger and more vivid, until it was like
the word of the Lord coming to one of his prophets, was the injunction;
"Get out of this trade before it is too late. At any cost get out of
it."

For some time I did not tell anyone of this amazing urgency to
disentangle myself. Then I tried the idea on my brother Frank, who had
settled into a reasonably pleasant job at Godalming and was "living out"
in lodgings. I used to go to him at Easter and Whitsuntide to spend
hilarious friendly Bank Holidays. "But what else can you do?" he asked.
The second clerk in the booking desk, named West, was a man of some
education who had had dreams of entering the church and who took a
sympathetic interest in my spurts with the Latin grammar of an evening.
I talked to him. I may have got suggestions from him. Finally I had the
brilliant idea of writing to Mr. Horace Byatt at Midhurst. "Weren't
there such things as ushers? Might I not be useful in the school?"

He answered that he thought I might be quite useful.

But I was indentured for four years and I had not yet served two. My
mother had undertaken to pay a premium of fifty pounds and had already
paid forty. She was dismayed beyond measure to find that once again,
apparently, I was to come unstuck. She wept and prayed me to "try
again"; Freddy was "trying." If only I would "pray for help" in the
right quarter. I explained I didn't want help of that sort from any
quarter. I had discovered that the drapery business was a dismal trap
and I meant to get out of it. My father was invoked and first he
supported and then opposed my liberation.

Byatt made an offer. It was the salvation of my situation. It made my
revolt reasonable. I might go as a student assistant in the Grammar
School; at first he suggested without pay and then decided that he would
pay me twenty pounds a year and raise this to forty after a
twelve-month. He had a faith in my grant-earning capacity that I was to
justify beyond expectation and this inspired him.

I had reached a vital crisis of my life, I felt extraordinarily
desperate and, faced with binding indentures and maternal remonstrances,
I behaved very much like a hunted rabbit that turns at last and bites. A
hunted rabbit that turned and bit would astonish and defeat most
ordinary pursuers. I had discovered what were to be for me for some
years the two guiding principles of my life. "If you want something
sufficiently, take it and damn the consequences," was the first and the
second was: "If life is not good enough for you, change it; never endure
a way of life that is dull and dreary, because after all the worst thing
that can happen to you, if you fight and go on fighting to get out, is
defeat, and that is never certain to the end which is death and the end
of everything."

Among other things, during that dismal two years, I had thought out some
very fundamental problems of conduct. I had really weighed the
possibilities of the life before me, and when I used suicide as a threat
to shake my mother's opposition to my liberation, it was after a
considerable amount of meditation along the Southsea sea front and
Portsmouth Hard. I did not think suicide an honourable resort, but it
seemed to me a lesser evil than acquiescence. The cool embrace of
swift-running, black deep water on a warm summer night couldn't be as
bad as crib hunting or wandering about the streets with the last of
one's courage gone. There it was in reserve anyhow. Why should I torture
myself to earn a living, any old living? If the living isn't good
enough, why live?

Not perhaps with that much virility did I think at the time, but in that
fashion, I was beginning to think.

I do not remember now the exact order of events in my liberation nor
when it was I wrote to Byatt. But I know things were precipitated by
some row of which I have forgotten every particular. On some issue I had
been insubordinate, deliberately disobeyed orders. There had to be
trouble. The matter was something beyond J. K., and I should have to see
the G. V. At any rate I got up early one Sunday morning and started off
without breakfast to walk the seventeen miles to Up Park and proclaim to
my mother that things had become intolerable and this drapery experiment
had to end. I think that was the first intimation the poor little lady
had of my crisis.

I have told just how that happened in _Tono Bungay_ and how I waylaid
the procession of servants as they were coming up Harting Hill from
Harting Church. I appeared among the beeches and bracken on the high
bank. "Cooee Mummy," said I, white-faced and tired, but carrying it off
gaily.

The bad shilling back again!

I remember too an act of singular ungraciousness on my part. When at
length it had been arranged that my indentures should be cancelled, Mr.
Hyde bethought himself of the summer sale that was imminent, when every
hand, however incompetent, was welcome. "Would I at least stay on for
that?" It meant another month of shop, just four weeks more. I refused
obstinately, would not hear of it. There was no real need for me to go
to Midhurst for a month yet; the school would not reassemble until
September, but I had already anticipated a month of perfervid reading. I
felt I was already nearly two years behind those fellows who went to
public schools. I had to be after them without any further delay.

Still more vivid is my memory of being alone in a railway compartment
between Portsmouth and Petersfield junction, _en route_ for Midhurst. My
small but faithful portmanteau was on the seat before me. I could not
keep still, and after flitting restlessly from one window to another and
back again and trying to read, I found it necessary to express my
feelings by a staggering dance and a song, a song consisting, I seem to
remember, of disrespectful improvisations about the Southsea Drapery
Emporium, and more particularly about "old J. K." (Which Emporium was, I
insist, after all far above the average of drapers' shops and very
decently run, and J. K. an excellent man.) But this chant and breakdown
about my exodus from drapery, set to a railway rhythm, is now lost
beyond recovery.

    "Puff and rumble old J. K. old J. K. old J. K.
    "Damn-the-boy has got away, _got_ away, _got_ away
    "Damn-the-boy has got away, got away for ever."

Something in that fashion at any rate.


 2

_The Y. M. C. A., the Freethinker; a Preacher and the Reading Room_

This chapter in the history of the adventures of a sample human brain in
the latter phase of the Private Capitalist System, must go a little
deeper than the story of a misfit, a discontent and an escape, if it is
to do justice to the phases through which a clear and firm vision of a
world renewed, and a plain satisfying and sustaining objective in life,
were built up in it. The educational influence of Up Park was going on
during these two years and during the subsequent student period at
Midhurst and in London. And, in addition, this now hungry and excited
cortex was seizing upon and annexing whatever was relevant to the
matters that were becoming of primary importance in the scheme of things
it was making for itself. There was a clerk in the office at Southsea,
named Field, who had found religion and showed a certain interest in me.
He introduced me to the Young Men's Christian Association in Landport,
where there was a reading room and a circulating library. And another
clerk I have already mentioned, named West, prided himself upon his
theology and talked interestingly about religious services. I would
spend my Sunday evenings, especially in winter, in attending the various
religious services; there was a fashionable high Anglican in Southsea,
popular preachers to be heard in the Catholic cathedral, duller but
still tolerable entertainment in other chapels and churches. There was
also a secularist society in an upstairs room where a number of quiet
men rejoiced discreetly when a church was struck by lightning. My still
vague and instinctive disbelief in Christianity had now to be put
through a closer scrutiny.

Except for a deep resentment of social inequality and particularly of
the unfairness of letting those other fellows go to college, I had still
hardly the rudiments of social, economic or political ideas. I don't
remember any Socialism at this time. There was a "Parliament" which met
in the reading room of the Y.M.C.A. and I attended its sessions
regularly. It was one of those parodies of the House of Commons, similar
to the one in Camden Town wherein figured the parental Harmsworth, the
father of Northcliffe and Rothermere. Ambitious barristers, local
politicians and embryo journalists, familiarized themselves with the
current phrases of politics and the methods of debate, but I found the
pedantries of procedure confusing and I could not make head or tail of
most of the issues of the time: "Leasehold Enfranchisement" or Our
Foreign Policy or Egypt, an Extra Penny on the Income Tax, Licensing
Laws and so forth. It bothered me a lot to witness all this mental
excitement and not to have a clue to it. Where did it join on--to
theology for example?

My mind was still exploring fundamentals in a profoundly dissatisfied
mood, and it was working at a level that was too far down to establish
any contact between these fundamentals and the political issues of the
day. It still seemed to me to be of primary importance to find out if
there was, after all, a God, and if so whether he was the Christian God
and which sort of Christian God he was. In the absence of a God what
_was_ this universe and how was it run? Had it ever begun and had it any
trend? I knew now something of geology and astronomy and I had a crude
conception of Evolution. But the proposition that "somebody must have
made it all," had been stuck into my mind early in life and it was only
much later that I realized that there was a flaw in this assumption.
Such questions seemed to me already of far more importance than
satisfying J. K. or securing a satisfactory "ref" when my apprenticeship
was up, and they drove that mock Parliament stuff completely off the
stage.

I was still much exercised by what might happen when my earthly
apprenticeship as a whole, was over. It seemed to me much more important
to know whether or no I was immortal than whether or no I was to make a
satisfactory shop assistant. It might be a terrible thing to be out of a
crib on the Thames Embankment but it would be a far more terrible thing
to be out of a crib for ever in the windy spaces of nothingness. Jeering
at the Trinity did not dismiss the God idea, nor disbelief in hell the
idea of immortality. I realized that unless my memory was very bad
indeed I had had a comparatively recent beginning, but I found it
difficult to suppose I should ever have an end. I tried to imagine how
it would feel not to exist and my imagination failed me. I did all the
queer things that everyone, I suppose, does at this stage. I would sit
on my bed in my cubicle trying to withdraw my mind from all external
things and think through the universe to the Inner Reality. I would lie
quite still in my bed invoking the Unknown to "Speak now. Give me a
sign."

On my matching expeditions, when I had to go from Southsea to the
Landport Drapery Bazaar, I passed through some side streets in which an
obscure but spirited newspaper shop displayed a copy of a weekly called
the _Freethinker_. Each week had a cheerful blasphemous caricature,
which fell in very agreeably with my derisive disposition. I looked for
this very eagerly and when I could afford it I bought a copy. In regard
to the religions it confirmed my worst suspicions but it left me
altogether at a loss for some general statement of my relation to the
stars.

Field tried to save my soul. He was strongly evangelical. He took me
home to cold supper with his family on several Sunday nights and I
participated in some lusty hymn singing. He induced me as a personal
favour to pray for faith, but I doubt if I put much power into my
prayers. He induced me to read various theological books, but for the
most part these deepened my scepticism, by "answering" unconvincingly
various objections of which I had been previously unaware. The answer
faded and the objection remained. One of those apologetic works stands
out in my memory still; I read it with peculiar delight and shared my
glee with West. It was Drummond's _Natural Law in the Spiritual World_.
Drummond tried to make various leading Christian dogmas more acceptable
by instances drawn from natural history. The Virgin Birth for instance
was sustained by a dissertation on parthenogenesis and the prolific
summer generation of the green fly was invoked to justify the ways of
the Holy Ghost to man.

Somewhen during my stay at Portsmouth my mother wrote to me about my
confirmation as a Member of the Church of England. I did not take up the
suggestion. Then I was summoned to the inner office by Mr. Hyde, who
told me my mother had written to him about it, and that I was to go to
the Vicar of Portsmouth to be prepared. I remember one interview.
Perhaps it was towards the end of my truncated apprenticeship, because I
recall only one. I told the vicar that I believed in Evolution and that
I could not understand upon that hypothesis, when it was the Fall had
occurred. The vicar did not meet my objections but warned me against the
sin of presumption. But it seemed to me to be equally presumptuous to
affirm a scheme of salvation as to deny it. And if it was presumptuous
to set up my private judgment against all the divines of Christendom, it
is surely even more presumptuous to set up one's judgment against all
the philosophers of China, India, Islam and the Ancient World.

All of which points were subsequently argued with very great heat after
"lights out" in the dormitory, until Rodgers the apprentice next above
me, set up a great outcry and said he would listen to blasphemy no
longer. "Smut," said Rodgers, "I can stand. There's no harm as I can see
in a good smutty story. But this here Blasphemy!..."

One picture of this last phase of critical suspense about the quality
and significance of Christianity still stands out in my mind. It is a
memory of a popular preacher preaching one Sunday evening in the
Portsmouth Roman Catholic cathedral. It was in the course of a
revivalist mission and I had been persuaded to go with one of the
costume room assistants who played elder sister to me. The theme was the
extraordinary merit of Our Saviour's sacrifice and the horror and
torment of hell from which he had saved the elect. The preacher had a
fluting voice and a faintly foreign accent, a fine impassioned white
face, burning eyes and self conscious hands. He was enjoying himself
thoroughly. He spared us nothing of hell's dreadfulness. All the pain
and anguish of life as we knew it, every suffering we had ever
experienced or imagined, or read about, was as nothing to one moment in
the unending black despair of hell. And so on. For a little while his
accomplished volubility carried me with him and then my mind broke into
amazement and contempt. This was my old childish nightmare of God and
the flaming wheel; this was the sort of thing to scare ten year olds.

I looked at the intent faces about me, at the quiet gravity of my friend
and again at this gesticulating voluble figure in the pulpit, earnest,
intensely earnest--for his effect. Did this actor believe a word of the
preposterous monstrosities he was pouring out? Could anyone believe it?
And if not, why did he do it? What was the clue to the manifest deep
satisfaction, the fearful satisfaction of the believers about me? What
had got hold of them?

And from that my eyes and thoughts went, with all the amazement of new
discovery, about the crowded building in which I was sitting, its
multitudinous gas and candle flames, its aspiring columns, its glowing
altar, the dim arched roof, which had been made to house this spouting
fount of horrible nonsense. A real fear of Christianity assailed me. It
was not a joke; it was nothing funny as the _Freethinker_ pretended. It
was something immensely formidable. It was a tremendous human fact. We,
the still congregation, were spread over the floor, not one of us daring
to cry out against this fellow's threats. Most of us in some grotesque
way seemed to like the dreadful stuff.

So far the revolt of my mind had been against the God of Hell in his
most Protestant form, it had been as it were a duel; but now I perceived
myself in the presence of a different, if parallel attack upon my
integrity, the Catholic Church, a mass attack, the attack of an
organization, of a great following. I realized as if for the first time,
the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been
intoning, responding and going through ritual gestures at me. I realized
something dreadful about them. They were thrusting an incredible and
ugly lie upon the world and the world was making no such resistance as I
was disposed to make to this enthronement of cruelty. Either I had to
come into this immense luminous coop and submit, or, I had to declare
the Catholic Church, the core and substance of Christendom with all its
divines, sages, saints and martyrs, with successive thousands of
millions of believers, age after age, wrong.

In the mouth of the Vicar of Portsmouth "presumption" had seemed a light
word, but now I saw it as a grave, immense defiance. To deny was to
assert that error had ruled the world so far and wisdom was only
beginning--with scared little chaps like me. How could I dare?

That was the terrific alternative my friend presently put to me and
which West of the booking desk, sitting eloquent on my bed in the
dormitory after "lights out," enforced. I had not the wit to say then or
the clearness of mind to see, that wisdom begins again with every birth
and that there is no arrogance at all in perpetually putting the past on
trial.

It was, I think, the illuminated figure of that mellifluous preacher
which decided me in my recalcitrance. Cathedrals maintain their argument
best when they are beautifully silent or when they echo to music and
chanting in strange mysterious phrases. Catholicism should imply
everything and assert nothing, and generally it does, but this missioner
brought the issue down for me to concrete and personal terms. The
beautiful hands haunted me with an immense unconvincingness. Face and
voice appealed in vain. My perception was invincible; the man was an
actor; he was making the most of a part. At best he had had the will to
believe and not the will for truth.

Through him the Church and its authority, were laid bare to me. He had
feared and acquiesced where I had not feared and acquiesced, he found a
pleasure and excitement in imparting his fear and acquiescence, he had
fitted himself into the incredible and I despised him. I had to despise
him. I could no other. The thing he believed was so impossible to me
that I could not imagine it being believed in good faith. Could anyone
who had even tried for truth believe it? And if I despised him then it
was natural to proceed to despise all these like-minded individuals and
all who succumbed to him.

I found my doubt of his essential integrity, and the shadow of contempt
it cast, spreading out from him to the whole Church and religion of
which he with his wild spoutings about the agonies of hell, had become
the symbol. I felt ashamed to be sitting there in such a bath of
credulity.

It marks a new phase in mental development when one faces ideas not
simply as ideas but as ideas embodied in architecture and usage and
every-day material fact, and still resists. Hitherto I had taken
churches and cathedrals as being as much a part of indisputable reality
as my hands and feet. They had imposed themselves upon me as a necessary
part of urban scenery just as I had taken Windsor Castle and Eton
College as natural growths of the Thames valley. But somehow this
Portsmouth Cathedral, perhaps because it had been newly built and so
seemed more active than a time-worn building, took on the quality of an
engine rather than an edifice. It was a big disseminator; it was like
one of that preacher's gestures tempered and made into a permanent
implement; it was there to put hell and fear and submission into
people's minds. And from this starting apprehension, my realization that
all religious buildings are in reality kinetic, spread out more and more
widely to all the other visible things of human life. They were all, I
began to see dimly, ideas,--ideas clothed and armed with substance. It
was as impossible just to say that there was no hell and no divine
Trinity and no atonement, and then leave these things alone, as to
declare myself republican or claim a right to an equal education with
everyone else, without moving towards a clash with Windsor and Eton.
These things existed and there was no denying it. If I denied the ideas
they substantiated then I proposed to push them off my earth; no less.

The ideas I had on my side to pit against these great realized systems
seemed terribly bare and feeble from this point of view. But they
possessed me. I felt small and scared but obdurate.

I was still half a lifetime away from the full realization that if one
does not accept the general ideas upon which the existing world of men
is based, one is bound to set about replanning and reconstructing the
world on the ideas one finds acceptable. Ultimately I was to come to a
vision of a possible state of human affairs in which scarcely one
familiar landmark would remain. But revolution on that scale was beyond
the courage of my youthful imagination. I was definitely in opposition
to the structural concepts of this world into which I had come, and that
is as far as I went. I was almost cowed into conformity by the
realization of the magnitude of the structures involved. I was in
rebellion, but it was still quite impotent rebellion.

I have already mentioned that the Emporium boasted a library for its
assistants. This consisted mainly of popular novels. I had made a rule
for myself which I kept for several years, never to read a work of
fiction or play a game. This was not so priggish as it seems. I was
greedy to learn, I had the merest scraps of time to learn in, and I knew
the seduction of a good story and the disturbance of a game of skill. So
the novels in the bookcase I left alone. But there were also one or two
other books to which I owe a good deal. There was one of those
compilations for the mentally hungry that have played so important a
part in supplementing the deficiencies of formal education in the
British communities in the nineteenth century. I cannot trace it now. It
may have been Cassell's _Popular Educator_--I seem to have named that to
Geoffrey West and he has jumped to the conclusion that I bought that in
parts as it was issued. That was due to his natural desire for animating
detail. I never did. I hadn't the pocket money to buy anything in parts.
On the whole I think that the book I have in mind was more probably some
compact encyclopdic production of that sound hardheaded Edinburgh firm,
Chambers. It had long summaries of the views of various philosophical
schools and of the physical and biological sciences, made I should
imagine by competent and conscientious Scots.

I read these cautious and explicit summaries greedily. They cleared up
and put my ideas in order. I acquired a number of mental tools at that
time; I exercised my mind upon words and phrases and forms of thought. I
found myself balancing such oppositions as "subjective" and "objective"
and "pessimism" and "optimism." I meditated (with magnificently
insufficient data) upon the corpuscular and vibratory conception of a
light ray. I asked, what is health? It seems improbable that I did not
then encounter the opposition of socialism and individualism, but oddly
enough I cannot recall having thought at all about socialism until I
read Henry George at Midhurst. I waived my temperamental scepticism
before the Conservation of Energy and the sufficiency of Natural
Selection. I drew fine distinctions of no practical value between
pantheism and atheism.

I tried these new ideas upon West and Platt and others. West was always
good for discussion but Platt was uncertain.

"God may be everywhere," said Platt, "or God may be nowhere. That's
_His_ look out. It doesn't alter the fact we've got to stack these
bloody cretonnes before eleven."

[Illustration: Hand-written note

[number illegible] Kings Road, Southsea

My dear Mother,

By borrowing some money I was enable to go to Medhurst by Saturday, Mr.
Byatt received me very kindly, gave me a dinner & took me over his new
house.

He informs me that I am too old to enter the teaching profession in the
ordinary way as a pupil teacher in an elementary school and that my only
method would be to obtain a position as an assistant teacher in a middle
class school. In any case, for about nine or ten months I should have to
maintain myself

He offers to take me in his own school after the next holidays in
September I should have more instruction to receive than work to do for
a little while, and he could therefore give me no wages and I should
have to keep myself.

There is an assistant master there and he informs me that he pays an old
lady 3/-a week for a bed room share in her sitting room and to do his
cooking and he estimates his total expenses (including this 3/-) washing
& food to be under 10/-a week.

(Of course the cost of clothes for a schoolmaster is not half that of a
drapist)

Now I had a talk with this assistant master and he informs me that if I
chose to come I can share his room & old lady for 2/6 a week

This in other words means that for a little while you would have to pay
about 10/-a week for me or estimating clothes to cost 10 a year you
would have to pay for me about 35 in the year for one year more.

But then when the start is made there is every prospect of rising to a
good position in the world while in my present trade I am a drapers
assistant throughout life

But I must begin at once, if I start at all I must start next September
Which would you prefer?

I leave the matter in your hands

I remain

Your aff Son

HGWells

(upside down writing: 4 weeks course?)

Have you written to the [illegible] about the holidays.]


 3

_Fifth Start in Life--Midhurst (1883-84)_

Midhurst has always been a happy place for me. I suppose it rained there
at times but all my memories of Midhurst are in sunshine. The Grammar
School was growing, the school-house had been built and was now occupied
by Byatt and his family and filled up with a score or more of boarders;
there was already an usher named Harris and presently came a third man
Wilderspin who taught French and Latin. I lodged, and shared a bedroom
with Harris, over a little sweetstuff shop next to the _Angel_ Hotel.
For a time, until the school reassembled I had this room alone.

In a novel of mine called _Love and Mr. Lewisham_ which is about just
such a Grammar School teacher as I was, I have described how he had
pinned up on his wall a "Schema," planned to make the utmost use of his
time and opportunities. I made that _Schema_, even to the pedantry of
calling it that and not calling it plainly a scheme. Every moment in the
day had its task. I was never to rest while I was awake. Such
things--like my refusal to read novels or play games--are not evidence
of an intense and concentrated mind; they are evidence of an acute sense
of the need for concentration in a discursive and inattentive brain. I
was not attacking the world by all this effort and self-control; I was
making my desperate get-away from the shop and the street. I was bracing
myself up tremendously. Harris and I would go for one-hour walks and I
insisted on a pace of four miles an hour. During this pedestrianism we
talked in gasping shouts.

Mrs. Walton my landlady who kept the sweetstuff shop, was a dear little
energetic woman with a round friendly face, brown eyes and spectacles. I
owe her incalculable things. I paid her twelve shillings a week and she
fed me well. She liked cooking and she liked her food to be eaten. My
meals at Midhurst are the first in my life that I remember with
pleasure. Her stews were marvellously honest and she was great at
junket, custard and whortleberry and blackberry jam. Bless her memory.

I taught in the main classroom with Byatt and he kept an eye on what I
was doing and gave me some useful advice. He knew how to be lucid,
persuasive and helpful. A system of neatly written out homework held his
instruction together. I rather suspect he was a trained elementary
teacher before he took his Dublin degree and anyhow I learned a lot from
him in handling my class of small boys. I was disposed to be over
strenuous with them as I was over strenuous with myself, and my
discipline was hard at times; I pushed and shoved them about because
both I and they preferred that immediate treatment to impositions and
detention, but I helped them whenever I grasped their difficulties and I
got them along at a good pace.

The brightest and best of the bunch was "Master Horry," Byatt's eldest;
he was quick and plastic and my approval gave him just that confidence
in his personal quality that sent him right up the school ahead of his
age and won him an open scholarship at, I think, _Merchant Taylors_.
Half a century later he came to see me at Easton, a dried-up ex-colonial
official, Sir Horace Byatt, retired from Uganda and house-hunting in
Essex. He had become terribly my senior and terribly an Imperialist, and
though I knew Sir Harry Johnston and Sir James Currie well and had some
general ideas about African colonial conditions, I could not penetrate
his official reticence. It was all too evident that he thought the less
that radical fellows of my stamp, knew, said or did about high Imperial
matters the better. Mrs. Christabel McLaren had come down from London
for lunch that day and she pulled his leg by expressing an extravagant
admiration for Trotsky. Sir Horace seemed incapable of regarding a
Bolshevik as anything more human than a cuttle fish and his deepening
suspicion of her was very amusing. "And _that's_ the sort of boy you
made," said Mrs. McLaren when he had departed. We met once afterwards,
before his death in 1933, at a city dinner to the Colonial Premiers. He
still seemed puzzled about me. So far as I know, none of my other
Midhurst boys made any notable success in life.

But half the work I did for Byatt was done not as a teacher but as a
student. His university degree qualified him to organize evening classes
in any of the thirty-odd subjects in the science scheme of the Education
Department, and to earn grants on his examination results. Accordingly,
in addition to the three or four normal classes of a dozen or so evening
students which he had hitherto conducted, he now organized a number of
others for my especial benefit. They were, to put it plainly, bogus
classes; they included some subjects of which he knew little or nothing,
and in none did he do any actual teaching. The procedure was to get me a
good textbook, written for the examination in the subject in question,
and to set me to read it in the schoolroom, while he at his desk
attended to his correspondence. In this way I read up such subjects as
physiography (Huxley's revival of the subject-matter of my old friend
Humboldt's _Cosmos_), human physiology, vegetable physiology, geology,
elementary "inorganic" chemistry, mathematics and so forth. In May came
the examinations and, after that, if I got an "advanced" first class he
earnt four pounds, two pounds for a second "advanced" and so in
diminishing amounts for a first or second "elementary."

The immediate result, so far as my mind was concerned, was to make me
read practically the whole outline of physical and biological science,
with as much care and precision as the check of a written examination
imposes. I learnt a great deal very easily, but I also did a large
amount of strenuous "mugging up." I remember for example toiling
laboriously through the account of brain anatomy, illustrated by
puzzling woodcuts of sections, in an old edition of Kirk's _Anatomy_. To
understand the relations of ventricles, ganglion masses and commissures
is not by any means difficult if the knowledge is built up in successive
phases according to the embryonic development, but attacked at first
from the point of view of adult structure, without the help of models
and with no one to question upon the meaning of a difficult phrase, that
was pretty hard going. And I also remember struggling with diagrams and
paper models to grip the elusive demonstration of the earth's rotation
by Foucault's pendulum experiment. And after a pretty slick introduction
to electricity I got into heavy country, in Deschanel's textbook, where
the tubes of force were gathered together. My realization that I knew a
great deal more about things in general than most of the people about
me, was balanced by another, that there were people in the world whose
minds must be able to run and leap easily among these difficulties where
mine wriggled and crawled most painfully.

But anyhow my reading was good enough to produce a cluster of A I's when
the examination results came to hand.

Unfortunately for my headmaster, who had hoped to repeat this exploit on
a still larger scale next year, I passed these May examinations with
such a bang, that I was blown out of Midhurst altogether.

The Education Department of that period was not completely satisfied
with the quality of the science teaching it was disseminating about the
country, and it was trying to develop its scattered classes into
organized science schools and to produce a better type of teacher than
the classical graduates, clergymen and so forth, on whom it had at first
to rely. Accordingly it was circularizing its successful examinees, with
the offer of a certain number of free studentships, at the Normal School
of Science, South Kensington, carrying with them a maintenance grant of
a guinea a week during the session and second class railway fare to the
capital. I read the blue form with incredulity, filled it up secretly
and with trepidation, and presently found myself accepted as a "teacher
in training" for a year in the biological course under Professor
Huxley--the great Professor Huxley, whose name was in the newspapers,
who was known all over the world!

Byatt shared my surprise if not my elation.

I had come to Midhurst a happy but desperate fugitive from servitude; I
left it in glory. I spent my summer vacation partly at Up Park with my
mother and partly with my father at Bromley, and I was hardly the same
human being as the desperate, footsore, youngster who had tramped from
Portsmouth to Up Park, breathing threats of suicide. My mother did not
like to cast a shadow on my happiness, but yet she could not conceal
from me that she had heard that this Professor Huxley was a notoriously
irreligious man. But when I explained that he was Dean of the Normal
School, her fears abated, for she had no idea that there could be such
a thing as a lay Dean.

Later on my mother thought and learnt more about the Dean. I have
described the quaint simple faith in Providence, Our Father and Our
Saviour, by which to the best of her ability she guided her life and the
lives of her family. I have guessed at a failure of belief in her after
the trials of Atlas House and the loss of her "poor Possy." Whatever
reality her religion had had for her ebbed away after that. She wept
with dismay when I came blustering from Southsea to say I would not be
confirmed, but I think it was social rather than religious dismay. I
said I was an "Atheist," a frightful word for her to hear, as bad as
swearing. "My dear!" she cried. "Don't say such _dreadful_ things!" And
then, good little Protestant that she was, she found consolation.
"Better than being caught by those Old Priests," she said, "anyhow."

She could never talk about her religion except in set phrases, but
slowly the last vestiges of faith faded out. Towards the end of her life
her mind flattened and faded very much. She still went to church but I
doubt if she prayed with her will and thought any more. Her phases of
reverie flowed past with less and less circumstance and definition,
ceasing to ripple at last, smoothing down towards a silvery stream of
nothingness.

The idea of immortality lost its necessity for her and I think the
prospect of a Resurrection began to seem rather an unnecessary and
tiresome fuss ahead of her. And that is where Huxley came in. After her
death I found this in her little brass-footed work-box, copied out in
her old slow angular Italian handwriting on a browning piece of
notepaper:

"These lines, once written by Mrs. Huxley, have been placed over the
tomb of the late Professor Huxley at his own request:

    "And if there be no meeting past the grave,
    "If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest;
    "Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
    "For God still giveth his beloved sleep
    "And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."


 4

_First Glimpses of Plato--and Henry George_

Cramming myself with knowledge for examinations as my immediate
objective, was by no means the sole occupation of my mind at Midhurst.
Now that my theological turmoil was subsiding to a sort of Cause and
Effect Deism, I was waking up to the importance of the strands of
relationship that held me, though not inflexibly, in my place in the
social web. Just as it had dawned upon me with an effect of profound
discovery that the Roman Catholic cathedral at Portsmouth _need not be
there_, so now it was to become apparent that Up Park need not be there,
that the shops in the Midhurst street need not be there, nor the farmers
and labourers on the countryside. The world would still turn on its
axis, if all these things were replaced by different structures and
arrangements.

I have already said that I cannot clearly remember when it was that I
read Plato's _Republic_. But it was somewhen before I went to London and
it was in summer time, because I remember lying on the grass slope
before a little artificial ruined tower that, in the true spirit of the
eighteenth century, adorned the brow of the Up Park Down overlooking
Harting. The translation of the Dialogues, was all by itself in a single
green bound volume, happily free from Introduction or Analysis. I must
have puzzled over it and skipped and gone to and fro in it, before its
tremendous significance came through. A certain intellectual
snobbishness in me may have helped me to persevere. And associated with
it, because of its fermenting influence upon my mind, is a book of a
very different calibre, a six-penny paper-covered edition of Henry
George's _Progress and Poverty_ which I bought in a newspaper shop in
Midhurst. This last was, I suppose, published by some propagandist
Single Tax organization. These two books caught up and gave substance to
a drift of dispositions and desires in my mind, that might otherwise
have dispersed and left no trace.

Plato in particular, as I got to the mighty intention behind his (to me)
sometimes very tedious and occasionally incomprehensible characters, was
like the hand of a strong brother taking hold of me and raising me up,
to lead me out of a prison of social acceptance and submission. I do not
know why Christianity and the old social order permitted the name of
Plato to carry an intellectual prestige to my mind far above that of
Saint Paul or Moses. Why has there been no detraction? I suppose because
the Faithful have never yet been able to escape from a certain lurking
self-criticism, and because in every age there have been minds more
responsive to the transparent honesty and greatness of Plato and
Aristotle than to the tangled dogmatism of the Fathers. But here was a
man wearing the likeness of an Olympian God, to whom every scholarly
mind and every clerical back bowed down in real or imposed respect, who
had written things of a revolutionary destructiveness beyond my darkest
mutterings. Hitherto there had always been something insurgent,
inferior, doubtful and furtive in my objections to the religious, moral
and social systems to which my life had, it seemed, to be adapted. All
my thoughts leapt up now in open affirmation to the novel ideas he
opened out to me.

Chief of these was the conception of a society in which economic
individualism was overruled entirely in the common interest. This was my
first encounter with the Communist idea. I had accepted property as in
the very nature of things, just as my mother had accepted the Monarchy
and the Church. I had been so occupied with my mental rebellion against
the ideas of God and King, that hitherto I had not resented the way in
which the Owner barred my way here, forbade me to use this or enjoy
that. Now with Plato's picture of an entirely different social
administration before me, to make a comparison possible, I could ask
"_By what right_--is this for you and not for me?" Why are things
monopolized? Why was everything appropriated and every advantage secured
against me before I came into the world?

Henry George's book came in like a laboratory demonstration to revivify
a general theory, with his extremely simplified and plausible story of
the progressive appropriation of land, his attack upon the unearned
increment of private rents and his remedy of a single tax to make, in
effect, rents a collective benefit. His was an easy argument to
understand, as he put it, and I was able to modify it and complicate it
for myself by bringing in this or that consideration which he had
excluded. It was like working kindred mathematical problems of
progressive complexity under a common Rule. It was quite easy to pass
from the insistence of Henry George upon the inalienable claim of the
whole community to share in the benefit of land, to the simpler aspects
of interest and monetary appreciation. I became what I may call a
Socialist in the Resentful Phase, and what was happening to me was
happening to millions of the new generation in Europe and America.
Something--none of us knew how to define it but we called it generally
the Capitalist System--a complex of traditional usage, uncontrolled
acquisitive energy and perverted opportunities, was wasting life for us
and we were beginning to realize as much. But at that time in the whole
world there was really no explicit realization that this was due not to
a system but to an absence of system.

Now it happened to me that the chances, by which one meets or escapes
books, so worked at Midhurst that I scarcely heard the name of Karl Marx
until I came to London. My socialism was pre-Marxian. I had read
something about Robert Owen, I think, in that encyclopdic book in the
Southsea Emporium reading-room, and I must have met with some summary of
More's _Utopia_, though I do not remember reading it until much later,
and essentially my ideas were built on the "primitives" of socialism. I
was all for planning a new society. But it seemed plainly unnecessary to
clear the old confusion out of the way before the new order came. As a
planned order comes, the confusion disappears of itself. It was only
after a year and more of biological work at the Normal School of
Science, that I came full face upon Marxism and by that time I was
equipped to estimate at its proper value its plausible, mystical and
dangerous idea of reconstituting the world on a basis of mere
resentment and destruction: the Class War. Overthrow the "Capitalist
System" (which never was a system) was the simple panacea of that
stuffy, ego-centred and malicious theorist. His snobbish hatred of the
bourgeoisie amounted to a mania. Blame somebody else and be violent when
things go wrong, is the natural disposition of the common man in
difficulties all the world over. Marx offered to the cheapest and basest
of human impulses the poses of a pretentious philosophy, and the active
minds amidst the distressed masses fell to him very readily. Marxism is
in no sense creative or curative. Its relation to the inevitable
reconstruction of human society which is now in progress, is parasitic.
It is an enfeebling mental epidemic of spite which mankind has
encountered in its difficult and intricate struggle out of out-worn
social conditions towards a new world order. It is the malaria of the
Russian effort to this day. There would have been creative revolution,
and possibly creative revolution of a far finer type if Karl Marx had
never lived.

Still happily unaware of the immense frustrations that awaited the urge
towards a new social order, I walked about the russet lanes and green
shaded paths of Midhurst, talking over the stuff that was in my mind
with Harris, or dreaming of the new rational state that I supposed to be
at hand when what was plain to me had become plain to everybody. We were
a shabby-looking couple in ready-made clothes, going swiftly and talking
volubly. Harris had a grave Red Indian profile and his share in the
conversation was mostly nodding judiciously. Or he would say "That's all
right; that is," or "I don't see that." I was "shooting up" and growing
a little out of my garments, but our generally unkempt appearance was
redeemed by the fact that we wore "mortar boards" college caps like
those worn by Oxford or Cambridge undergraduates, to maintain about the
Grammar School a suggestion of erudition.

So, by way of Plato, I got my vision of the Age of Reason that was just
about to begin. Never did anyone believe more firmly in the promptitude
of progress than I. I had to learn even the elements of human behaviour
in those days and I had no sense of the immense variety of mind-build
and working conviction that was possible. I do not seem to have had a
suspicion that there was such a force as social inertia to be reckoned
with. I lived no longer in reverie, I looked at the world, but I saw it
as yet with a divine simplicity; all that was not simple about it was
speedily going to be; all its declensions and verbs were going to be
made regular almost immediately and everything conjugated in the
indicative mood. Socialism was plainly ahead of us all, when everyone
would be active and happy.

It was not only with regard to Economics that my mind had become
liberated and moved now with a sanguine simplicity. I was also filled
with strange and stimulating ideas about sexual life. Sexual urgencies
were becoming more insistent in me with enhanced health and courage.
There had been a great amount of smutty and indecent conversation behind
the counters at Southsea, but like the foul talk of my schoolfellows at
Bromley, it was curious and derisive rather than amorous. It dissipated
rather than stimulated desire. Almost completely disconnected in my mind
from that stream of not very harmful uncleanness there had been a
certain amount of superficial flirtatiousness with the girl apprentices
and women assistants, rather after the fashion of the posturing
politenesses and pretended devotions I had learnt from my cousins at
Surly Hall. The costume hands were by profession young ladies with
figures; they attracted the apprentices and professed a sisterly
affection for them in order to have them available as escorts and the
like, but this relationship never came to kisses or caresses. So far as
I was concerned the "good figure" of that period, with its tight long
stays, its padded bustle behind, its single consolidated bosom thrust
forward and its "Grecian bend" thrust back, had scarcely anything to
recall the deep breasted Venuses and Britannias who had first awakened
my sexual consciousness. The stark and easy generation of to-day can
scarcely realize how completely, from the whalebone-assisted collar
round its neck to the flounces round its feet, the body of woman was
withheld from masculine observation, and how greatly this contributed to
the practical effective resistance to "the nude" in art. Men went to
the music halls simply for the rare joy of seeing feminine arms, legs
and contours, but I had no money to go to a music hall.

Once, I suppose, that one had penetrated these complicated defences and
got to the live body inside, one could think of individualized physical
love, but at that I never arrived at Southsea or Midhurst. Mother Nature
did what she could to egg me on, and stripped a girl apprentice I
thought rather pretty and the costume lady who was my official Sister,
in my dreams, but the old harridan accompanied this display with so many
odd and unnecessary exaggerations and accessory circumstances, that it
made me rather more shy and unreal and decorous than ever when I
encountered her victims in my waking life. And moreover, at Southsea,
the women were in one wing of the premises and we youths and men in
another, inaccessible, dragons intervening. Short of a sort of rape of
the Sabines and general social dissolution, little was possible. Once or
twice at Southsea or Portsmouth a prostitute would make an alluring
gesture to me, but a shilling a week of pocket-money gives no scope for
mercenary love. At Midhurst I had no feminine associates at all. Mrs.
Walton had two grown-up daughters, but she was always alert about her
lodgers, and a playful scuffle with the eldest about a penny, sternly
suppressed and reprimanded by mother, was as far as passion went in that
direction. In vain did Nature intervene and amplify the scuffle in
dreamland.

On one occasion, however, I reached a stage nearer the desired reality.
It was at Christmas at Up Park and there was a dance in the Servants
Hall and the upper and lower servants mingled together. There was a
kitchen maid whom I suddenly discovered was pretty beyond words and I
danced and danced again with her, until my mother was moved to find
other partners for me. She was a warm-coloured girl with liquid brown
eyes and a quick pretty flush of excitement. Her name was Mary and that
is all the name I ever had for her. And afterwards in one of the
underground passages towards the kitchen, where perhaps I was looking
for her, she darted out of a recess and kissed and embraced me. No
lovelier thing had ever happened to me. Somebody became audible down the
passage and she made a last dash at me, pressed her lips to mine and
fled. And that is all. Next morning I trundled off in the dog-cart on
the frosty road to Rowlands Castle station for Portsmouth, before
sunrise, and when next I went to Up Park for a holiday, Mary had gone. I
never saw her again and I could not find her name nor where she had
gone. My mother who knew would not tell me. But I can feel her heart
beat against mine now, I can recall the lithe body in her flimsy yellow
dress, and for all I know I have driven my automobile past Mary--an
alert old lady I am certain--on some Hampshire road within the last few
weeks.

But after that I knew that love was neither filth nor flirtation and I
began to want more of it.

As my mind filled up and broadened out at Midhurst I began to resent the
state of sexual deprivation in which I was living, more and more
explicitly. All over Europe and America youths and maidens fretted under
the same deprivation. Not only were their minds being afflicted by that
nightmare story of the Ogre-God and his Hell, not only were they being
caught helplessly young and jammed for life into laborious, tedious,
uninteresting and hopeless employments, but they were being denied the
most healthy and delightful freedoms of mutual entertainment. They were
being driven down to concealed and debilitating practices and shameful
suppressions. Every year the age of marriage was rising and the
percentage of marriages was falling, and the gap of stress and vexation
between desire and reasonable fulfilment was widening. In that newspaper
shop on the way to Landport where I saw and sometimes bought the
_Freethinker_, I also found the _Malthusian_ displayed, and one or two
numbers had been the subject of a lively discussion with Platt and Ross.
The Bradlaugh Besant trial had occurred in 1876 and the light of sanity
was gradually breaking into the dark places of English sexual life.
There was perhaps a stronger belief current then that births were
completely controllable than the actual facts warranted. Now under the
stimulus of Plato's Utopianism and my quickening desires I began to ask
my imagination what it was I desired in women.

I desired and needed their embraces and so far as I could understand it
they needed and desired the embraces of men. It came to me as the
discovery of a fresh preposterousness in life as it was being lived
about me, that there were endless millions of young people in the world
in the same state of sexual suspense and unrest as myself, quite unable
to free themselves sweetly and honestly from these entangling
preoccupations. Quite enough, there was, of either sex to go round. But
I did not want an epidemic of marriages. I had not the slightest wish
for household or offspring at that time; my ambition was all for
unencumbered study and free movement in pursuit of my own ends, and my
mind had not the slightest fixation upon any particular individual or
type of individual. I was entirely out of accord with the sentimental
patterns and focussed devotions adopted by most people about me. In the
free lives and free loves of the guardians of the _Republic_ I found the
encouragement I needed to give my wishes a systematic form. Presently I
discovered a fresh support for these tentative projects in Shelley.
Regardless of every visible reality about me, of law, custom, social
usage, economic necessities and the unexplored psychology of womanhood,
I developed my adolescent fantasy of free, ambitious, self-reliant women
who would mate with me and go their way, as I desired to go my way. I
had never in fact seen or heard of any such women; I had evolved them
from my inner consciousness.

This was my preliminary fantasy of love, before I began love-making. It
exerted a ruling influence on my conduct for many years. It is
remarkable how much we frame our expectations upon such secret fantasies
and how completely we ignore the probability that the lovers we
encounter may have quite other systems of imagination. The women of the
"Samurai" in my _Modern Utopia_ (1905), the most Platonic of my books,
are the embodiment of these Midhurst imaginings.

So, before I was eighteen, the broad lines of my adult ideas about human
life had appeared--however crudely. I was following a road along which
at variable paces a large section of the intelligentsia of my generation
was moving in England, towards religious scepticism, socialism and
sexual rationalism. I had no idea of that general drift about me. I
seemed to be thinking for myself independently, but now I realize that
multitudes of minds were moving in precisely the same direction. Like
forces acting upon like organizations give like results. I suppose when
a flight of starlings circles in the air, each single bird feels it is
moving on its own initiative.

One glaring omission from my outlook, as I have sketched it here, will
be evident at once to the post-war reader. I had scarcely thought at all
and I have nothing to tell of my thoughts concerning the problem of war
and international relationship. My untravelled political mind was
confined within the limits of the Empire. Flags and soldiers,
battleships and big guns were already much in evidence in the European
landscape and seascape but, until the Boer War at the end of the
century, they had not challenged critical attention. I had no idea that
the guns went off--except when pointing right away from civilization, in
Afghanistan or Zululand or against remote inadequate batteries at
Alexandria. They had an air of being in the order of things, much as
mountains, earthquakes and sunsets were in the order of things. They
made a background. In England they did not invade the common personal
life until after 1914.

This was the most conspicuous blind patch in the English liberal outlook
at the close of the nineteenth century, but it was not the only one. I
was also blankly unaware of the way in which the monetary organization
of the world reflected its general economic injustices and ineptitudes.
But then I had never yet seen ten sovereigns together of my own in my
life, never touched any paper money except a five pound note, nor
encountered a cheque. (Bank of England notes were dealt with very
solemnly in those days; the water-mark was scrutinized carefully and the
payer, after a suspicious penetrating look or so was generally asked to
write his name and address on the instrument.) The bags of money and
slips of paper I carried to the Portsmouth bank had not aroused me to
any sense of significance. I did not suspect that there was anything
more treacherous about money than there was about weights and measures.
Either I did not know or it did not seem to matter to me that while a
yard was always so much of a metre, the pound and the franc and the
lira and the dollar were capable of slipping about in their relations to
each other, and that prices could execute the most remarkable and
disconcerting changes of level. They were not doing so at the time. In
those days they were just sinking very gently, and everything was
getting cheaper and cheaper.

There were, as I shall point out in due course, still other primary gaps
and disproportions in the radical outlook at the close of the nineteenth
century, but these were the chief among them. You will find them equally
evident in the autobiography of any labour leader of my generation.


 5

_Question of Conscience_

At Midhurst I had a queer little struggle between pride and practical
wisdom. I did something that wounded my private honour very deeply. I
knelt at the altar rail in the parish church and bowed my head to the
bishop's hand and was confirmed, meekly and submissively, a member of
the Church of England. You may regard that as a mere formality, but I
did not see it in that light. I felt as an early Christian may have felt
who for sound domestic and worldly reasons, had consented to burn a
pinch of incense to Divus Csar.

But I had found myself in an extremely tight corner. Byatt realized that
I had not yet been confirmed and that by the statutes of the Grammar
School, every member of the teaching staff had to be a communicant. If I
was to go on to our mutual benefit devouring and regurgitating
scientific fact, the matter had to be put right forthwith. I suggested
that I might have "doubts." "My dear Fel-low!" boomed Byatt. "My dear
Fel-low! You mustn't talk like that. Let me lend you Paley's
_Evidences_. That will put you all right about that.... And positively
you know you _must_." ...

Positively I knew I must. There was no visible job for me in the world
if I did not stick now to the Midhurst adventure. To abandon it now
would have been like jumping from a liner in mid-Atlantic. I ought to
have thought of this confirmation business before. If I refused, the
whole burthen of the situation would fall on my mother. The more I grew,
the smaller and weaker she seemed and the less I cared to hurt her. I
consented, to her great joy. For a time I am sure Our Father got some
heartfelt thanks and praises again. Byatt arranged for me to be prepared
specially and swiftly by the curate, for the approaching Confirmation
Service.

Under happier circumstances I might have had a certain amount of fun out
of that curate, but I was too mortified and bitter at my own
acquiescence. We sat by lamplight opposite one another at a table in his
lodgings. He was a fair aquiline sensitive young man, with a fine
resonant service voice, who did his best to keep our conversation away
from the business in hand as much as possible. But I was sullenly
resolved to make him say--all of it. I asked a string of questions about
the bearing of Darwinism and geology on biblical history, about the
exact date of the Fall, about the nature of Hell, about
Transubstantiation and the precise benefit of the communion service and
so forth. After each answer I would say "So that is what I have to
believe.... I see." I did not attempt to argue. He was one of those
people whose faces flush, whose eyes wander off from you and whose
voices get higher in pitch at the slightest need for elucidation.

"It's all a little _subtle_ you know----," he would begin.

"Still, people might make difficulties afterwards. I want to know what
to say to them."

"Oh--precisely." ...

"I suppose it's all right if I just believe this in--er--a spiritual
sense."

"It's much _better_ that way. It's ever so much better that way. I'm so
_glad_ you see that."

The organ played, the service proceeded. Side by side with a real young
gentleman of my own age I walked up the aisle and knelt. And afterwards
I communicated and consumed a small cube presenting my Redeemer's flesh
and had a lick of sweetish wine from the chalice which I was assured
contained his blood. I was reminded of a crumb of Trifle. Later to
please my mother I repeated this performance at Harting and after that I
made an end to Theophagy. I derived neither good or ill, so far as I
could trace, from these homoeopathic doses of divinity.

But the wound to my private honour smarted for a long time and it was
many years before I could forgive the Church for setting these barriers
of conformity in my way to social usefulness. I do not think that I have
forgiven her altogether even now.

I record that shame and resentment about my confirmation because it
seems to me that this queer little mood of obduracy was something very
important in my development. I do not understand it at all clearly
myself and still less can I explain it. What made me attach all that
importance to that public lie? I wasn't particularly a George Washington
for veracity. If I was never a fluent liar I could at any rate lie quite
effectively on occasion. And indeed there was a great deal of material
about in my conduct for an officious conscience to play upon, without so
entire a concentration on this particular lapse. There was no
alternative affirmation in mind. There was no sense of an onlooking
divinity in protest. I had no other God. I can only explain my feelings
by supposing that there was in my make-up a disinterested element, which
attached more importance to the denial of Christianity than to my merely
personal advantage. There was something in my brain, an impersonal self,
that contested my prior right to welfare at the price of lowering my
standard of veracity.

I did what I could to ease this conflict in my being by blasphemous
facetiousness, until old Harris became a little scared of me. He did not
"believe much" in God but he thought it well not to go too far with him.

Harris had no self-conceit; he had a prominent nose and a wary mouth and
he went discreetly and ironically through a world which he had found by
experience was apt to prove unexpectedly irascible. Something might be
fired at me, some thunderbolt he felt, and it would be like his luck if
it hit him. "Don't you _say_ such things," he said. "Don't you say it."
And presently came the distraction of the May examinations and the end
of the school term and after a short stay at Up Park I went off to Atlas
House to stay with my father until South Kensington was ready to receive
me.

My raw mind was so busy at Midhurst with the scramble to get a
comprehensive and consistent conception of the principal parts of the
universe, in the place of the orthodox interpretations I was rejecting,
that I paid very little attention to another mind-and-purpose drama that
was going on beside me. While I was making my thorny way out of
Protestantism in one direction, my senior colleague Wilderspin, who
lived in the school house, so that I saw very little of him, was _en
route_ for Rome. Midhurst is one of those places in England which has
retained a Catholic congregation from pre-reformation times and a little
proselytizing priest flitted about it, very ready to be friendly with
any casual young men he might encounter. He had a slightly lewd streak
in his conversation that I found repulsive; he pushed his joke at you
slily and laughed fatly first, he belonged to that "jolly" school of
propagandist which seeks to make it clear that there is none of your
damned Kill-Joy Puritanism about the dear old, merry old church; and
after a walk and a talk or so with him I avoided him. Among other
things, believing me to be a newly confirmed Anglican and having no idea
of my real state of mind, he wanted to dispute with me about the
validity of Protestant orders. But I did not care a curse about either
the Catholic or the Protestant brand of sacerdotalism, except to dislike
them both. I was a universe away from that. I was hampered in my talks
with him because I did not know what disconcerting use he might make of
any sweeping disavowal of Christianity on my part.

But he got Wilderspin and Wilderspin also vanished from Midhurst at the
same time as myself.

Years after, when I had a home at Woking, Wilderspin flickered back into
my life for a few days as a full fledged itinerant priest. He called to
see me and he seemed to be needy, hungry and uncomfortable. Evidently he
was working in a sweated industry. He told me he had to go into the
oddest of quarters among the faithful, and that recently he had found
the nest of a mouse in a bed he had been given. He gave me the
impression of being still slightly astonished at the life he was leading
and the mental and material disciplines to which he was subjected. We
fixed for him to come to dinner and he showed the keenest interest in
planning the menu. We chose a day unrestricted by any fasts or
disciplines. He came; we feasted, talked over Midhurst and the school
and the boys, laughed together more abundantly than we had ever done
before, drank, smoked and parted cordially. It was evidently a spree for
him. After which I never saw nor heard of him again. Perhaps my cheerful
house upset him, and possibly I was hardly the sort of friend a not very
austere and devout priest would be encouraged to frequent.


 6

_Walks with My Father_

I had not seen very much of my father for three years and it was
interesting to go back to him and stay with him alone, practically on
terms of equality. He had been a large person far above me as a
schoolboy, but now I was growing up to him at a great pace. We became
excellent friends and companions. Atlas House was extensively unscrubbed
and shabbier and more threadbare than ever, but my father camped, so to
speak, amidst its disorder very comfortably. He cooked very well, far
better than my mother had ever done, in the underground kitchen, and
made me wash up and look after my own bedroom, and we did not fuss about
the other aspects of housekeeping. He was very lame now and he was
getting heavy; he stumped about with the help of a thick cabbage stick
but he stumped about actively. He was bald and blue-eyed, with a rosy
cheerful face and a square beard like King David. He admired my
certificates and ambitions frankly and took a lively interest in the
elementary science and philosophy I unfolded to him at second-hand.

The shop was in a sort of coma and gave us very little trouble; the only
trade left was the sale of cricket goods. He did more business by
locking up the front door after teatime and going round to the cricket
field. If people were taken with a craving to buy crockery in the
evening they knocked and rattled at the door until the craving left
them. On Sundays we were free for a long walk and a bread and cheese
lunch--or even a cold meat lunch--miles away from home.

He had always been something of a reader and now he was reading widely
and freely. He read the _Daily News_--the _Daily News_ of Richard
Jeffries and Andrew Lang--and _Longman's Magazine_--in the R. L.
Stevenson and Grant Allen days; he got books from the Library Institute
and picked them up at sales. We gradually broke down the inhibitions
about religion and politics natural between father and son, and had a
fine various amount of talk and discussion.

In after years I grew away from my father mentally, though we always
remained good friends, but during these last years of his at Bromley, we
were very much on a level; if I had a lot of knowledge of one sort, he
had a lot of another sort and our conversation was a fair exchange. His
was a mind of inappeasable freshness, in the strangest contrast to my
mother's. I do not think my mother ever had a new idea after she left
Miss Riley's school; her ideas faded out, that was all. But my father
kept going to the last. He was playing chess, by correspondence, with my
mother-in-law when he was in the late seventies, and about that time he
unearthed some old school books of mine and started in upon Algebra and
the Elements of Euclid, an unknown world to him, acquiring considerable
facility in the solution of quadratic equations and the working of
"riders" before he desisted. He began now at Atlas House under the
stimulus of my studentship and the writings of W. H. Hudson and Grant
Allen, to brush up his gardener's botany anew and his countryman's
natural history.

Upon all sorts of counts my father was a better man than myself. He had
all the delicate nervous and muscular skill and the rapid hardly
conscious mental subtleties of a cricketer, he was an instinctive good
shot, and at every sort of game he was ripe good wary stuff. We began
chess together in these days but while he went on to a sound game I
found it too exacting and irritating and gave it up. At draughts I
battled with him incessantly, held my own at last but never established
a thorough ascendency. About fields and green things and birds and
beasts he had a real intimate knowledge that made my accumulation seem
bookish and thin. The country round Bromley was being fast invaded by
the spreading out of London; eruptions of new roads and bricks and
mortar covered lush meadows and, when I was about fifteen or sixteen,
that brown and babbling Ravensbourne between its overhanging trees was
suddenly swallowed up by a new drainage system, but my father managed to
see and make me see a hundred aspects of the old order of things, a
wagtail, a tit's nest, a kingfisher, an indisputable trout under a
bridge, sun-dew in a swampy place near Keston, the pollen of pine trees
drifting like a mist, the eagle in the bracken root (which I could tell
him in return was _Pteris aquilina_). "We'll be after them mushrooms at
Camden," he'd say. "They'll be just about right now. We'll take a screw
of salt for them, my boy, and eat them raw. Then we won't have any
bother about saying where we found them." And when we got to Camden
there were the mushrooms as though he had evoked them, white buttons
straining up out of the turf for us.

He had the knack of reviving the countryside amidst the deluge of
suburbanism, just as he had had the knack of growing a grape vine and
making a Wigelia bush flourish in that smutty backyard of ours.

One bank holiday, Whit-Monday no doubt, he took advantage of a cheap
fare to go back with me to his boyhood at Penshurst. We walked across
the park from Tonbridge. He wanted me to see and feel the open life he
had led before the shop and failure had caught him. He wanted to see and
feel it again himself. "We used to play cricket here--well, it was just
about here anyhow--until we lost sight of the ball in the twilight....
There's more bracken and less turf about here now." He talked of a
vanished generation of our cousins, the Dukes, and of a half-sister I
had never heard of before. She and he had gone fishing together through
the dew-wet grass between sunrise and the beginning of the day's work.
She was a tall strong girl who could run almost as fast as he could. He
repeated that. So I guess his first dreams of women were not so very
unlike mine. He showed me where she sat in Penshurst Church. Also he
discoursed very learnedly on the growing of willows to make cricket bats
and how long it took for a man to learn to make a first-class cricket
ball. That was a great day for my father and me.

All his days my father was a happy and appreciative man with a singular
distaste for contention or holding his own in the world. He liked to do
clever things with his brain and hands and body, but he was bored beyond
endurance by the idea of a continual struggle for existence. So was my
elder brother Frank. My brother Fred and I may have the same strain in
us, but the world made such ugly, threatening and humiliating gestures
at us at the outset that we pulled ourselves together and screwed
ourselves up for self-repression and a fight, and we fought and subdued
ourselves until we were free. Was that a good thing for us or a bad?

I am inclined to think bad. The disposition to acquire and keep hold and
accumulate, to work for a position, to secure precedences and advantages
was alien to all four of us. It isn't in our tradition; it isn't in our
blood; it isn't in our race. We can do good work and we are responsive
to team play, we can "play cricket" as the phrase goes, but we cannot
sell, bargain, wait, forestall and keep. In a world devoted to private
ownership we secure nothing. We get shoved away from opportunity. It was
distortion for us to keep our attention on that side of life. I was
lucky, as I shall tell, because quite accidentally I suddenly developed
extraordinary earning power, which I am still able to exercise, and for
thirty years I had my business looked after for me by an extremely
competent wife. But I think some very fine possibilities in my brother
Fred were diverted to mere saving and shop-keeping.

In a social order where all the good things go to those who
constitutionally and necessarily, watch, grab and clutch all the time,
the quality of my father, the rich humour and imagination of my brother
Frank, were shoved out of play and wasted altogether. In a world of
competitive acquisitiveness the natural lot of my sort of people is to
be hustled out of existence by the smarties and pushers. A very strong
factor in my developing socialism is and always has been the more or
less conscious impulses, an increasingly conscious impulse, to
anticipate and disarm the smarty and the pusher and make the world safe
for the responsive and candid mind and the authentic, artistic and
creative worker. In the _Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_ I have
written about "Clever Alec." He's "rats" to me and at the smell of him I
bristle. I set the highest value on people of my own temperament, which
is I suppose, a natural and necessary thing to do, and I believe in the
long run our sort will do better than their sort, as men do better than
rats. We shall build and what we build will stand at last.

But for thousands of generations yet, the bright-eyed, quick incessant
rats will infest our buildings, eat our food, get the better of us in
all sorts of ways and gnaw and scuttle and scamper. They will muck about
with our money, misrepresent our purpose and disposition, falsify
ownership and waste and frustrate millions of genial lives.

My father ended his days in a little house at Liss which I was able to
rent and afterwards to buy for him, and my mother and my elder brother
joined him there. As I began to prosper I was able to increase the
income of that mnage until they were quite comfortable by their not
very exacting standards; my brother Fred too, away in South Africa,
insisted upon paying his share. When I rebelled against the servitude of
the draper's shop, my yawps of liberation had been too much for my elder
brother and he had thrown up the yardstick also. He had conceived an
ideal of country existence from reading Washington Irving's _Bracebridge
Hall_, and he quartered himself with my father first at Rogate and then
at Liss, and wandered about the country repairing clocks, peddling
watches, appreciating character and talking nonsense. If it was not
particularly profitable, it was amusing--and free. There is a touch of
my brother about Mr. Polly,--the character I mean, not the story. My
father played nap at times and billiards often in the Liss Club Room.
My mother sat in reverie, peeped out of the window of the upstairs
parlour at passers-by, wrote prim little letters to Freddie and me,
dressed more and more like Queen Victoria and went to Church and Holy
Communion. (But she did not go to evening service at Liss because she
thought it rather "high," surplices, candles, intonation--"too much of
it".) My brother peddled his watches and went off on his bicycle,
sometimes for days together.

In 1905 my mother slipped and fell downstairs one evening and was hurt
internally and died a few weeks later. In her last illness her mind
wandered back to Midhurst and she would fuss about laying the table for
her father or counting the stitches as she learnt to crochet. She died a
little child again. In 1910 my father woke up very briskly one morning,
delivered a careful instruction on the proper way to make suet pudding
to his housekeeper Mrs. Smith, insisted that it should be chopped small,
protested against "lumps the size of my thumb," glanced over the _Daily
Chronicle_ she had brought him and prepared to get up. He put his legs
out of bed and slid down by the side of the bed a dead man. There is an
irregularity in our family pulse, it misses a beat ever and again and
sooner or later it misses more than one and that is the end of us. My
grandfather had leant over a gate to admire the sunset and then ceased
to live in the same fashion. This last spring as I write (1933) heart
stoppage came also to my elder brother and as he got up from his
breakfast, he reeled and fell down dead. But this was a little
premature; he was only seventy-seven and my father and grandfather were
both eighty-two. I shall hate to leave the spectacle of life but go I
must at last, and I hope when my time is fulfilled that I too may depart
in this apparently hereditary manner. It seems to me that whatever other
defects we have, we have an admirable way of dying.




CHAPTER THE FIFTH

_SCIENCE STUDENT IN LONDON_


 1

_Professor Huxley and the Science of Biology (1884-85)_

The day when I walked from my lodging in Westbourne Park across
Kensington Gardens to the Normal School of Science, signed on at the
entrance to that burly red-brick and terra-cotta building and went up by
the lift to the biological laboratory was one of the great days of my
life. All my science hitherto had been second-hand--or third or fourth
hand; I had read about it, crammed text-books, passed written
examinations with a sense of being a long way off from the concrete
facts and still further off from the living observations, thoughts,
qualifications and first-hand theorizing that constitute the scientific
reality. Hitherto I had had only the insufficient printed statements,
often very badly and carelessly written, of the text-books, eked out by
a few perplexing diagrams and woodcuts. Now by a conspiracy of happy
accidents I had got right through to contact with all that I had been
just hearing about. Here were microscopes, dissections, models, diagrams
close to the objects they elucidated, specimens, museums, ready answers
to questions, explanations, discussions. Here I was under the shadow of
Huxley, the acutest observer, the ablest generalizer, the great teacher,
the most lucid and valiant of controversialists. I had been assigned to
his course in Elementary Biology and afterwards I was to go on with
Zoology under him.

In a very carefully done short story, _A Slip under the Microscope_
(_Yellow Book_ 1893) and in an equally careful novel, _Love and Mr.
Lewisham_ (1900) I have rendered something of the physical and social
atmosphere of that early biological laboratory. These descriptions were
written so much nearer to the actual experience than I am now, that I
will not even attempt to parody them here, and it seems hardly fair to
quote them. But I must try, however unsuccessfully, to convey something
of my realization of an extraordinary mental enlargement as my mind
passed from the printed sciences within book covers to these intimate
real things and then radiated outward to a realization that the
synthesis of the sciences composed a vital interpretation of the world.

In those days both sides of descriptive biology, botany and zoology,
were in a parallel phase; they were passing on from mere classification
to morphology and phylogeny. Comparative physiology and genetics had
still to come within the scope of the ordinary biological student. It
was perhaps inevitable that they should wait upon the establishment and
confirmation of the phylogenetic tree, the family tree of life, before
they in their turn could take the centre of the stage. The phylogeny of
the invertebrata was still in a state of wild generalization, vegetable
morphology concerned itself with an elaborate demonstration of the
progressive subordination of the oophore to the sporophore, and even the
fact of evolution as such was still not universally conceded. The
mechanism of evolution remained therefore a field for almost
irresponsible speculation. Weismann and his denial of the inheritance of
acquired characteristics was in the ascendant. Our chief discipline was
a rigorous analysis of vertebrate structure, vertebrate embryology and
the succession of vertebrate forms in time. We felt our particular task
was the determination of the relationship of groups by the acutest
possible criticism of structure. The available fossil evidence was not a
tithe of what has been unearthed to-day; the embryological material also
fell far short of contemporary resources; but we had the same excitement
of continual discoveries, confirming or correcting our conclusions,
widening our outlook and filling up new patches of the great jig-saw
puzzle, that the biological student still experiences. The study of
zoology in this phase was an acute, delicate, rigorous and sweepingly
magnificent series of exercises. It was a grammar of form and a
criticism of fact. That year I spent in Huxley's class, was beyond all
question, the most educational year of my life. It left me under that
urgency for coherence and consistency, that repugnance from haphazard
assumptions and arbitrary statements, which is the essential distinction
of the educated from the uneducated mind.

I worked very hard indeed throughout that first year. The scene of my
labours was the upper floor of the Normal School, the Royal College of
Science as it is called to-day, a floor long since applied to other
uses. There was a long laboratory with windows giving upon the art
schools, equipped with deal tables, sinks and taps and, facing the
windows, shelves of preparations surmounted by diagrams and drawings of
dissections. On the tables were our microscopes, reagents, dissecting
dishes or dissected animals as the case might be. In our notebooks we
fixed our knowledge. On the doors were blackboards where the
demonstrator, G. B. Howes afterwards Professor Howes, a marvellously
swift draughtsman, would draw in coloured chalks for our instruction. He
was a white-faced, black bearded, nervous man, a sort of Svengali in
glasses; swift and vivid, never still, in the completest contrast with
the powerful deliberation of the master. Huxley himself lectured in the
little lecture theatre adjacent to the laboratory, a square room,
surrounded by black shelves bearing mammalian skeletons and skulls
displayed to show their homologies, a series of wax models of a
developing chick, and similar material. As I knew Huxley he was a
yellow-faced, square-faced old man, with bright little brown eyes,
lurking as it were in caves under his heavy grey eyebrows, and a mane of
grey hair brushed back from his wall of forehead. He lectured in a clear
firm voice without hurry and without delay, turning to the blackboard
behind him to sketch some diagram, and always dusting the chalk from his
fingers rather fastidiously before he resumed. He fell ill presently,
and after some delay, Howes, uneasy, irritable, brilliant, took his
place, lecturing and drawing breathlessly and leaving the blackboard a
smother of graceful coloured lines. At the back of the auditorium were
curtains, giving upon a museum devoted to the invertebrata. I was told
that while Huxley lectured Charles Darwin had been wont at times to
come through those very curtains from the gallery behind and sit and
listen until his friend and ally had done. In my time Darwin had been
dead for only a year or so (he died in 1882).

These two were very great men. They thought boldly, carefully and
simply, they spoke and wrote fearlessly and plainly, they lived modestly
and decently; they were mighty intellectual liberators. It is a pity
that so many of the younger scientific workers of to-day, ignorant of
the conditions of mental life in the early nineteenth century and
standing for the most part on the ground won, cleared and prepared for
them by these giants, find a perverse pleasure in belittling them. In a
thousand respects their work was incomplete and tentative and any little
Mr. Whippersnapper who chooses to use the vastly greater resources of
to-day against them can find statements made by them that were
insufficient or slightly erroneous, and theoretical suggestions that
have been abandoned and disproved, and he can catch a bit of personal
publicity from the pulpit or the reactionary press by saying that Darwin
has been discredited or Huxley superseded. Great joy for Mr. (and Mrs.)
Whippersnapper it is, naturally enough, to realize that he knows clearly
things that Darwin never heard of, and is able to tatter some hypothesis
of Huxley's. Little men will stand on the shoulders of giants to the end
of time and small birds foul the nests in which they were hatched.
Darwin and Huxley knew about one per cent of the facts about variation
and mutation that are accessible to Mr. Whippersnapper. That does not
alter the fundamental magnificence of Darwin's and Huxley's achievement.
They put the fact of organic evolution upon an impregnable base of proof
and demonstration so that even the Roman Catholic controversialists at
last ceased to vociferate, after the fashion of Bishop Wilberforce of
the Anglican church on a memorable occasion, "Yah! Sons of apes! You
_look_ it," and discovered instead that the Church had always known all
about Evolution and the place of man in Nature, just as it had always
known all about the place of the solar system in space. Only it had said
nothing about these things, because it was wiser so. Darwin and Huxley,
in their place and measure, belong to the same aristocracy as Plato and
Aristotle and Galileo, and they will ultimately dominate the priestly
and orthodox mind as surely, because there is a response, however
reluctant, masked and stifled, in every human soul to rightness and a
firmly stated truth.

This biological course of Huxley's was purely and strictly scientific in
its character. It kept no other end in view but the increase and the
scrutiny and perfection of the knowledge within its scope. I never heard
or thought of practical applications or business uses for what we were
unfolding in that year's work, and yet the economic and hygienic
benefits that have flowed from biological work in the past forty years
have been immense. But these aspects were negligible by the standards of
our study. For a year I went shabby and grew shabbier, I was under-fed
and not very well housed, and it did not matter to me in the least
because of the vision of life that was growing in my mind. I worked
exhaustively and spent an even happier year than the one I had had at
Midhurst. I was rather handicapped by the irregularity and unsoundness
of my general education, but nevertheless I was one of the three who
made up the first class in the examinations in zoology which tested our
work.

A first-class in the Normal School meant over 80 per cent of the
possible marks and the two others who took first-classes were Martin
Woodward, a scion of a well-known family of biologists, who was
afterwards drowned while dredging for marine zoological material on the
west coast of Scotland, and A. V. Jennings, the son of a London private
schoolmaster, for whom I formed a considerable friendship. All the rest
of the class tailed down through a second class to failure.

Jennings was the only close associate I made in that first year. He was
a year or so older than I, a slender grey-clad, red-faced young man with
close curly black hair; he had had a sound classical education, and if
he had not read as discursively as I he had read much more thoroughly.
He was a well-trained student. He liked the strain of blasphemy and
irreverence I had evolved for familiar conversational use, it startled
him into appreciative chuckles, and once we had surmounted the obstacle
of my shyness of sincere discussion, we got through an immense amount of
talking about religious, political and scientific ideas. I learnt a
great deal from him and polished much crudity and prejudice off my mind
against his. For the first time in my life I was coming into touch at
South Kensington with minds as lively as or livelier than my own and
much better equipped, minds interested as much as I was interested in
the significance of life. They saved me to a large extent from
developing a shell of defensive reserve about my self conceit.

Once or twice Jennings showed a personal concern for me that still glows
bright in my memory. The "Teachers in Training" at the Normal School
were paid a maintenance allowance of a guinea weekly, which even in
those days was rather insufficient. After I had paid for my lodgings,
breakfasts and so forth, I was left with only a shilling or two for a
week of midday meals. Pay day was Wednesday and not infrequently my
money had run out before Monday or Tuesday and then I ate nothing in the
nine-hour interval between the breakfast and the high-tea I had at my
lodgings. Jennings noted this and noted that I was getting perceptibly
thinner and flimsier, and almost by force he carried me off to a chop
house and stood me an exemplary square meal, meat, two vegetables, a
glass of beer, jam-roll pudding and a bit of cheese; a memorable
fraternal feast. He wanted to repeat this hospitality but I resisted. I
had a stupid sort of pride about unrequited benefits or I know he would
have done this frequently. "This makes competition fairer," Jennings
insisted.

At the end of this invigorating year I had had a vague hope that I
should be able to go right on with zoological work but there were no
facilities for research available. I cared so much for the subject then
that I think I could have sailed away to very sound and useful work in
it. I could have built up the full equipment of a professor of zoology
upon the basis I had secured, if I had been free to take my own where I
could find it. I should have filled up my gaps. I am convinced that for
college and university education, keenly interested students--and after
all they are the only students worth a rap; the others ought not to be
there--should have much more freedom to move about and choose their own
courses and teachers than is generally conceded them. However, my first
year's performance had impressed the board of selection sufficiently to
secure my reappointment as a Teacher in Training for a second and
afterwards for a third year in other departments of the school where
there were vacancies to be filled.


 2

_Professor Guthrie and the Science of Physics (1885-86)_

Unhappily for me there was only one Huxley in the Normal School of
Science and the course into which I was now thrown had none of the
stimulation and enlargement of that opening year. The process of
interest and curiosity was broken, and my mind was unable to turn itself
with any energy to the new work that was put before it. It suffered from
disruption and shock. I found myself almost at once at cross purposes
with my new professors and instructors.

I can see now much more clearly than I did at the time what it was that
turned me abruptly from the extravagantly greedy and industrious learner
I was in my first year, to the facetious, discontented, restless and
tiresome rebel I now became. It is a phase of my life I am only now
getting into perspective and seeing as a logical part of a whole.

There were extraordinary faults and inconsistencies in the teaching
machinery that had got hold of me. I had no idea of these faults and
inconsistencies when I blundered against them, I understood scarcely
anything either of the clumsiness of the educational forces to which I
was reacting or of the nature of my own reactions; and it was altogether
too much for my intelligence and will to get anything but perplexity and
a series of partial frustrations and humiliations from the encounters
that now lay before me. I am not complaining. Perplexity, frustration,
humiliation and waste of energy are the common lot of human beings in a
phase of blindly changing conditions, and what is exceptional in my
story is not the clumsy struggling that now began but the previous luck
of release and encouragement at Midhurst and under Huxley, that bright
run of luck between 1883 and 1885, which had invigorated and given me
self-confidence and a mulish persistence in the direction in which my
feet were set.

The Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines, to give it the
full title it bore in these days, stood with an air of immense
purposefulness four-square upon Exhibition Road. When I first took my
fragile, unkempt self and my small black bag through its portals, I had
a feeling of having come at last under definite guidance and protection.
I felt as I think a civilized young citizen ought to feel towards his
state education. If I worked hard, did what I was told and followed the
regulations, then I thought I should be given the fullest opportunity to
develop whatever fine possibilities were in me and also that I should be
used to the best advantage for the world and myself. I thought that the
Normal School of Science knew what it meant to do with me. It was only
after my first year that it dawned upon me that the Normal School of
Science, like most other things in the sliding, slipping civilization of
the time, was quite unaware even of what it meant to do with itself. It
was an educational miscellany. It had been hastily compiled. Only that
big red-brick and terra-cotta building, in which it was then assembled,
held it together.

It was a product of the irregular and convulsive thrusts made by the
embryonic modern world-state in its unconscious efforts to free itself
from the aristocratic national system of eighteenth century Europe.
Throughout the nineteenth century, one far-reaching dislocation after
another had emphasized the growing need for a general education of the
population and for a new type of education based upon the enlightenment
due to scientific discovery and a widening range of experience. Already
in the eighteen fifties Huxley was hammering away at the importance of
biology in education. The drive of this need was resisted by the
established religions, the ruling aristocracies and whatever remained
over of the "scholarly" mediaeval universities. The new educational
organizations essential to the proper working of the new order, had to
grow against these resistances and were greatly delayed, dwarfed,
distorted and crippled in the process.

The powers in possession conceded the practical necessity for technical
and scientific instruction long before they would admit the might and
value of the new scientific knowledge. Just as these conservative forces
permitted elementary education to appear only on the understanding that
it was to be a useful training of inferiors and no more, so they
sanctioned the growth of science colleges only on condition that their
technical usefulness was recognized as their sole justification.

The great group of schools at South Kensington which is now known as the
Imperial College of Science and Technology, grew therefore out of an
entirely technical school, born of the base panic evoked in England by
the revelation of continental industrial revival at the Great Exhibition
of 1851. The initial institution was situated in the Museum of Practical
Geology (note the minatory implication of that "Practical") in Jermyn
Street, and its original title was "The Government School of Mines and
Science applied to the Arts." To this a chemical school, a lecturer on
mineralogy and, later on, physical laboratories were added; it was
transferred to South Kensington bit by bit, and upon it a Normal School,
to train teachers for the science classes that were being spread
belatedly over the country, was rather incongruously imposed (1873 and
1881). It has continued to expand and absorb ever since. It is to-day, a
huge fungoid assemblage of buildings and schools without visible centre,
guiding purpose or directive brain. It has become a constituent of that
still vaster, still more conspicuously acephalic monster, the University
of London.

The thumby wisdom of the practical man, with a conception of life based
on immediate needs, unanalysed motives and headlong assumptions, and
with an innate fear of free and searching thought, is still manifest at
a hundred points in the structure and working of this great aggregation.
The struggle to blend technical equipment with a carefully cherished
illiteracy, an intact oafishness about fundamental things, has been well
sustained. South Kensington will still tell you proudly "we are not
literary" and explain almost anxiously that the last thing it wants to
impart is a liberal education. The ideal output of the Imperial College
remains a swarm of mechanical, electrical and chemical business
smarties, guaranteed to have no capacity for social leadership,
constructive combination or original thought. There is an ineradicable
tendency in sound technology to go on to purely scientific interest and
breadth of social thought, the higher centres will keep on breaking
through, and South Kensington, in spite of itself, does a great deal of
real University work and makes men of many of its technicians. But so
far the recognition of this tendency in any organized form has been
successfully resisted.

Happily for me it happened that the vigorous, persistent far-reaching
and philosophical mind of Huxley had become very influential with the
Department of Science and Art in the sixties and seventies and
particularly at South Kensington, and he had been able not only to
establish that general scientific survey, physiography, as a "subject"
in the evening class curriculum throughout the country, but he had had
also a practically free hand to teach the science of life in his own
fashion in the Normal School. This freedom involved, however, a similar
freedom for the other professors with whom he was associated and they
too without any consultation with their fellows, developed their courses
according to their own capacities and their ideas of what was required
of them.

Now Professor Guthrie, the Professor of Physics, into whose course I
toppled from the top-floor to the ground floor of the Normal School
building, was a man of very different texture from the Dean. He appeared
as a dull, slow, distraught, heavily bearded man with a general effect
of never having fully awakened to the universe about him. He seemed very
old to me but as a matter of fact he was fifty-two. It was only after
some years that I learnt what it was that made him then so slow and
heavy. He was ill, within a year of his death, a still unsuspected
cancer in his throat was dragging at his vitality, unknown to anyone.
This greatly enhanced the leaden atmosphere of his teaching.

But quite apart from that he was not an inspiring teacher. The
biological course from which I came had been a vivid, sustained attempt
to see life clearly and to see it whole, to see into it, to see its
inter-connexions, to find out, so far as terms were available, what it
was, where it came from, what it was doing and where it was going. And,
I take it, the task of a properly conceived elementary course in
Physics, would be to do the same thing with non-living matter, to
establish a fruitful description of phenomena, to clear up our common
terminology, dating mostly from mediaeval times, about space, time,
force, resistance, to explore the material universe with theory and
experiment and so to bring us at last to the real living edge of the
subject, the line of open questions on the verge of the unknown. But
Guthrie's mind, quite apart from its present sickness, was devoid of the
incessant interrogative liveliness necessary to a great man of science.
He is best remembered as the initiator of the Physical Society. His
original work was not of primary importance. The professorial scientist
is by no means inevitably a man of science, any more than your common
curate is inevitably a man of faith.

Guthrie, to put it plainly, maundered amidst ill-marshalled facts. He
never said a thing that wasn't to be found in a text book and his course
of lectures had to be supplemented by his assistant professor C. V.
Boys, then an extremely blond and largely inaudible young man, already
famous for his manipulative skill and ingenuity with soap bubbles,
quartz fibres and measuring mechanisms. Boys lectured on
thermo-dynamics. In those days I thought him one of the worst teachers
who has ever turned his back upon a restive audience, messed about with
the blackboard, galloped through an hour of talk and bolted back to the
apparatus in his private room.

His turn came late in the course when I had already developed to a very
high degree the habit of inattention to these physics lectures. I lost
him from the word Go. If Guthrie was too slow for me, Boys was too fast.
If Guthrie gave me an impression that I knew already most of what
constituted the science of physics and that, though pretty in places,
on the whole it was hardly worth knowing, Boys shot across my mind and
vanished from my ken with a disconcerting suggestion that there was a
whole dazzling universe of ideas, for which I did not possess the key. I
was still in a state of exasperation at this belated discovery when the
course came to an end, and in spite of a considerable loss of marks for
certain defects, to be described, in the apparatus I had made, I was put
in the examination list at the top of the second class. That did not
shake my newborn conviction that I had learnt practically nothing about
physics.

I do not know how the science of matter is taught to-day, but there is
no gainsaying the colossal ineptitude of that particular course of
instruction. We had half a school year to devote to our subject day
after day and that was none too much for the observations, the
demonstrations and the graphic and other mathematical analyses, which
would have built up a sound system of conceptions about physical
processes in our minds. But I doubt if there was any such system in
Professor Guthrie's mind, and if there was in the mind of Boys he was
either unable or too indolent to take it out, have a good look at it and
explain it to anyone else. And so, instead of being used in real work on
the science of physics, the time of the class was frittered away in the
most irrelevant and stupid "practical work" a dull imagination has ever
contrived for the vexation of eager spirits. Let me try and convey
something of my horror of that physics laboratory to the reader.

It would seem that Professor Guthrie, while he was incubating this
course, had been impressed with the idea that most of his students were
destined to be teachers or experimental workers and that they would find
themselves in need of apparatus. Unaware of the economic forces that
evoke supply in response to demand, he decided that it was a matter of
primary necessity that we should learn to make that apparatus for
ourselves. Then even upon desert islands or in savage jungles we should
not be at a loss if suddenly an evening class surrounded us. Accordingly
he concentrated our energies upon apparatus making. He swept aside the
idea that physics is an experimental science and substituted a confused
workshop training. When I had gone into the zoological laboratory
upstairs, I had been confronted by a newly killed rabbit; I had begun
forthwith upon its dissection and in a week or so I had acquired a
precise and ample knowledge of mammalian anatomy up to and including the
structure of the brain, based upon my dissections and drawings and a
careful comparison with prepared dissections of other types. Now when I
came into the physics laboratory I was given a blowpipe, a piece of
glass tubing, a slab of wood which required planing and some bits of
paper and brass, and I was told I had to make a barometer. So instead of
a student I became an amateur glass worker and carpenter.

After breaking a fair amount of glass and burning my fingers severely
several times, I succeeded in sealing a yard's length tube, bending it,
opening out the other end, tacking it on to the plank, filling it with
mercury, attaching a scale to it and producing the most inelegant and
untruthful barometer the world has ever seen. In the course of some days
of heated and uncongenial effort, I had learnt nothing about the
barometer, atmospheric pressure, or the science of physics that I had
not known thoroughly before I left Midhurst, unless it was the
blistering truth that glass can still be intensely hot after it has
ceased to glow red.

I was then given a slip of glass on which to etch a millimetre scale
with fluorine. Never had millimetre intervals greater individuality than
I gave to mine. Again I added nothing to my knowledge--and I stained my
only pair of trousers badly with acid.

Then, if I remember rightly, I was required to make a specific gravity
bottle, stopper and all, out of more glass tubing. It took days. But by
that time I was convinced that Professor Guthrie was playing the fool
with me and that he had no intention whatever of imparting whatever he
might know and think--if indeed he did know and think anything--about
the science of physics to me.

A wiser and more determined character than I, might have held firmly to
my initial desire to learn and know about this moving framework of
matter in which life is set, might have sought out books and original
literature, acquired whatever mathematical equipment was necessary, and
come round behind the slow obstructive Guthrie and the swift elusive
Boys, outflanking them so to speak, and getting to the citadel, if any,
at the centre of the thickets and wildernesses of knowledge they were
failing to guide me through. I did not realize it then, but at that time
the science of physics was in a state of confusion and reconstruction,
and lucid expositions of the new ideas for the student and the general
reader did not exist. Quite apart from its unsubstantial equipment and
the lack of time, my mind had not the strength and calibre to do so much
original exploration as was needed to get near to what was going on. I
made a kind of effort to formulate and approach these primary questions,
but my effort was not sustained.

In the students' Debating Society, of which I will tell more later, I
heard about and laid hold of the idea of a four dimensional frame for a
fresh apprehension of physical phenomena, which afterwards led me to
send a paper, "The Universe Rigid," to the _Fortnightly Review_ (a paper
which was rejected by Frank Harris as incomprehensible), and gave me a
frame for my first scientific fantasia, the _Time Machine_, and there
was moreover a rather elaborate joke going on with Jennings and the
others, about a certain "Universal Diagram" I proposed to make, from
which all phenomena would be derived by a process of deduction. (One
began with a uniformly distributed ether in the infinite space of those
days and then displaced a particle. If there was a Universe rigid, and
hitherto uniform, the character of the consequent world would depend
entirely, I argued along strictly materialist lines, upon the velocity
of this initial displacement. The disturbance would spread outward with
ever increasing complication.) But I discovered no way, and there was no
one to show me a way to get on from such elementary struggles with
primary concepts, to a sound understanding of contemporary experimental
physics.

Failing that, my mind relapsed into that natural protest of the
frustrated--malicious derision of the physics presented to us. I set
myself to guy and contemn Guthrie's instructions in every possible way,
I took to absenting myself from the laboratory and when I was recalled
to my attendances by the registrar of the schools, I brought in Latin
and German textbooks and studied them ostentatiously. In those days the
matriculation examination of the London University was open to all
comers; it was a discursive examination involving among other things a
superficial knowledge of French, Latin and either German or Greek and I
found German the easier alternative. I mugged it up for myself to the
not very exacting standard required. I matriculated in January 1886 as a
sort of demonstration of the insufficiency of the physics course to
occupy my mind.

My campaign to burlesque Guthrie's practical work was not a very
successful one, it was a feeble rebellion with the odds all against me,
but it amused some of my fellow students and made me some friends. Even
had I been trying to satisfy the requirements of the course, the
inattentive clumsiness that had already made me a failure as a shop
assistant, would have introduced an element of absurdity into the
barometers, thermometers, galvanometers, demonstration apparatus and so
forth that I manufactured, but I added to this by demanding a sound
scientific reason for every detail in the instructions given me and
contriving some other, and usually grotesque, way of achieving the
required result if such an imperative reason was not forthcoming. The
laboratory instructor Mitchell was not a very quick-minded or
intelligent man, bad at an argument and rather disposed to make a
meticulous adhesion to instructions a matter of discipline. That gave me
a great advantage over him because his powers of enforcement were
strictly limited. After a time he began to avoid my end of the
laboratory and when he found my bench littered with bits of stuff, a
scamped induction coil or such-like object in a state of scandalous
incompleteness and myself away, he thanked his private gods and no
longer reported my absence.

The decisive struggle which persuaded him to despair of me, turned upon
the measurement of the vibrations of a tuning fork giving the middle C
of an ordinary piano. We had to erect a wooden cross on a stand with
pins at the ends of the arms, and a glass plate, carefully blackened
with candle smoke, was hung by a piece of silk passing over these arms
in such a way as just to touch a bristle attached to a tuning fork. This
tuning fork was thrown into sympathetic vibration by another, the silk
thread was burnt in the middle, the plate as it fell rubbed against the
bristle and a trace of the vibrations was obtained. A careful
measurement of this trace and a fairly simple calculation (neglecting
the buoyant effect of the atmosphere) gave the rate of vibration per
second. I objected firstly to the neglect of the atmospheric resistance
and I tried to worry Mitchell into some definite statement of the extent
to which it vitiated the precision of the experiment. Poor dear! all
that he could say was that it "didn't amount to much." But we joined
issue more seriously upon the cross-piece. I alleged that as a
non-Christian I objected to making a cross if that was avoidable. I
declared that as a Deist I would prefer to hang my falling plate from
one single pin. Also I insisted that it was the duty of a scientific
worker always to take the simplest course to his objective. This
cross-piece with its two pins was, I argued, a needless elaboration
probably tainted by the theological prepossessions of Professor Guthrie.
In fact I refused to make it. I could get just as good results with a
Monotheistic upright. Mitchell fell into the trap by insisting that that
was "how it had to be done." Whereupon I asked whether I was a student
of physical science or a convict under discipline. Was I there to learn
or was I there to obey?

Obviously Mitchell had no case and as obviously I was making a
confounded nuisance of myself for no visible reason. He was acting under
direction. My retrospective sympathies are entirely with him.

One example is as good as a score of the silly bickering resistances I
put up to annoy my teachers during that futile course of instruction. In
the end when my apparatus was assembled for inspection and marking, it
was of such a distinguished badness that it drew an admiring group of
fellow students and some of it was preserved in a cupboard for several
years. As a comment on Professor Guthrie's conception of education it
was worth preserving. But I pretended to be prouder of that collection
than in my heart I was. Guthrie was taking life at an angle different
from mine and I had been betrayed into some very ungracious and
insulting reactions. Poor discipline goes with poor teaching. A lecture
theatre full of impatient undergraduate students is the least likely of
any audience to detect the presence of failing health. His husky voice
strained against our insurgent hum. He was irritable and easily "drawn."
There was a considerable amount of ironical applause and petty rowdiness
during his lectures and in these disturbances I had made myself
conspicuous.

I was bad and I was not able to explain why I was bad even to myself. I
was not sufficiently mature about the purport of my resistance to make
my case clear to anyone. I was not clear about it myself. It was plain I
hated and despised the superficialities of that so-called physics
course, but it was not at all plain that I was honestly fumbling about
to get hold of some clue to a real science of physics. I was. Confusedly
my mind was making an effort. I didn't realize that in that effort I was
rather in the position of a dwarf who seeks a drinking horn in order to
drink the ocean. The drinking horn was certainly not in the laboratory
task. The general effect upon the authorities and my contemporaries was
that after quite a brilliant start I lacked staying power. Nobody noted
anything relevant about the Universal Diagram. My performance in the
geological course to which I was now transferred did nothing to qualify
that reputation for instability.

       *       *       *       *       *

I return after fifty years to that old perplexing quarrel with my
subject and my teachers. I plead guilty at once to bad manners and a
lack of worldly wisdom. I admit I had neither understanding nor humanity
for any of my instructors. On the other hand I maintain that my judgment
on the kindergarten childishness of that practical course was
fundamentally sound. But these are really very superficial and personal
issues. There is more to be got out of that baffled phase in my mental
development. If, to coin a phrase, we can "de-individualize" what
happened, we are left with a fairly bright sample intelligence
completely thrown out, in its attempts to grasp what physics was up to.
To a certain point it had all been plain sailing, a pretty science,
with pretty sub-divisions, optics, acoustics, electricity and magnetism
and so on. Up to that point, the time-honoured terms which have
crystallized out in language about space, speed, force and so forth
sufficed to carry what I was learning. All went well in the customary
space-time framework. Then things became difficult.

I realize now that it wasn't simply that neither Guthrie nor Boys was a
good teacher. No man can be a good teacher when his subject becomes
inexplicable. The truth, of which I had no inkling then, was that beyond
what were (and are) the empirical practical truths of the conservation
of energy, the indestructibility of matter and force, and so forth, hung
an enigmatical fog. A material and experimental _metaphysics_ was
reached.

The science of physics was peering into this fog, aware that there was
some very fundamental misapprehension, getting glimpses of elusive
somethings and nothings, making trial guesses and gestures and not
getting much further. So far it had travelled upon the common
presumptions and now the common presumptions were failing it. Curiously
paradoxical facts were coming to light and making those common
presumptions seem unsubstantial. Why for instance should there be an
absolute zero of temperature? What happened to matter when it got there?
Our common presumption was that "more or less" went on for ever in
either direction. Why again should there be an invariable relative
velocity of light? The common presumption was that if one ran with the
light it should go relatively slower. Why was there a limited material
universe in apparently limitless space? In an infinitude of stars the
whole sky should glow with nebulous light.

There are more of these paradoxical riddles to-day. They have indeed
multiplied greatly. The science of physics is even more tantalizing than
it was half a century ago, and, above the level of an elementary
introduction, optics, acoustics and the rest, even less teachable. The
more brilliant investigators rocket off into mathematical pyrotechnics
and return to common speech with statements that are, according to the
legitimate meaning of words, nonsensical. The fog seems to light up for
a moment and becomes denser for these professorial fireworks. Space is
finite, they say! That is not space as I and my cat know it. It is
something else into which they are trying to frame the vague imperfect
concepts they labour to realize. The stars existed before the universe!
The universe is expanding into God knows what; and will presently
contract! Being is a discontinuous stipple of quanta! In normal everyday
language this is sheer nonsense. Ordinary language ought not to be
misused in this way. Clearly these mathematical physicists have not made
the real words yet, the necessary words that they can hold by, transmit
a meaning with and make the base of fresh advance.

How was I, only a year up from the country grammar school and elementary
text-books, to guess at that embarrassing fog on the other side of the
professor and his assistant?

Biological science can still get along because practically all its
questions and phenomena lie within the scope of normal experience. Its
subject matter is apparently confined to the earth and to a measurable
sphere of time. It frames human history and human life and is itself in
its turn completely framed. It can work on indefinitely within the
common presumptions. It is only when biology comes into contact with
physics and the question What is life? demands an answer in terms of
physics, that real mystery is broached. But physical science is far more
comprehensive, and in every direction it recedes beyond the scope of
experiential thinking and of language based on common experience. It has
to misuse and overstrain one familiar term after another. Its progress
becomes more and more departure until a degree of remoteness is attained
whereat definite consistent statement gives place altogether to
philosophical speculation.

Not only was Guthrie no Huxley, but in the whole world of physics at
that time there was nobody with the grasp and power of exposition
capable of translating the difficulties of material science into
language understandable by the eager student or the un-specialized
intelligent educated man. My subsequent occupations, interests and
limitations, have all stood in the way of my studying physical science
and my experience of it has remained that of an outsider trying to
adjust his general ideas to what he can overhear. I have never been able
to make that adjustment. I am still unable to realize what modern
Physics is up to. I do not find myself interrogative _with_ those who
are conducting research and speculation, but I find myself interrogative
about them. My impression is that the Darwin and Huxley of Physics have
still to come. There is a gap which has still to be bridged between the
ideology and phraseology of normal intelligent people and those
specialists who go out from the normal world into this great region of
experimental and mathematical exploration.

It is curious to find that to-day the professors of physics are, as a
body, still failing to be unanimously lucid upon even such old-world
questions as predestination and free-will. A number of them lunge back
ambiguously as if towards theological and spiritualistic suggestions.
Some have succumbed to the lure of journalism and, writing for the
general reader, have become not so much explanatory as popular and
sensational.

I have here lying on my writing desk a most interesting and a most
significant book. It is called _Where Is Science Going?_ It is
translated from the German of that indisputably great physicist and
innovator Max Planck; it is reinforced by Einstein and very ably edited
by a capable scientific journalist Mr. James Murphy. Its interest
centres upon the fact that these two cardinal figures in the world of
physical science are clearly so perturbed by the misrepresentation and
romantic treatment of the trends of physical science by some of the less
intellectually scrupulous of their contemporaries and colleagues, that
they feel the necessity for a clear statement of the bearing of that
work upon ordinary thought. Planck reiterates very clearly the
inseparability of the idea of causation from scientific work. He
restates the old distinction between the objective conception of events
as _caused_, on which all science rests, and our subjective conception
of our own personal actions (but not those of the people we observe
about us) as wilful and free. So far as our own conduct goes we have
free-will; that does not alter the fact that to an external observer our
acts are determinate.

But Planck is not as absolute in his insistence upon causation as a
universal external fact, as a Victorian man of science would have been.
He admits certain difficulties arising out of experimental experiences.
A completely comprehended system of causation, which is what I was
discussing in that paper the _Universe Rigid_ and caricaturing in that
Universal Diagram to which I have already alluded, should admit of exact
prophecy. In certain cases exact prophecy does not work and
consequences, until they occur, appear to be indeterminate. Here, says
Planck, we must fall back on our Faith that ultimately finer
measurements and a closer analysis will eliminate that quality of
indeterminateness.

But _will_ they?

I will not add my small yes or no to Planck's decisive Yes, but since I
am writing a mental autobiography there is no reason why I should not
supplement his repudiation of indeterminateness by a word or so about a
collateral line of thought of my own, which may help a little to explain
why this scepticism about the adequacy of causation has reappeared in
physical theory. I fell into this line of thought as the outcome of the
question "What is a species?" which is necessarily raised by the study
of organic evolution and much emphasised by classification work in
petrology and mineralogy. I happened to have to read a certain small
amount of logic and mental science to secure two teaching diplomas (the
L.C.P. 1889 and the F.C.P. 1891) and almost simultaneously I had to read
some inorganic chemistry for my intermediate examination for the degree
of B.Sc. (1889). The chemical, biological and logical conceptions of
what constitutes a species were thus thrown into a fruitful
juxtaposition. They fermented together.

The first result of this fermentation, was a very ill-written but
ingenious paper, _The Rediscovery of the Unique_, which was published in
the _Fortnightly Review_ in July 1891. It insisted upon the idea that
every phenomenon amenable to scrutiny was found to be unique; that
therefore there might be no such thing as an identical similarity among
outer realities but only approximate similarities, and that though the
mind found it necessary to classify in order to operate at all, there
was nevertheless a marginal fallacy lurking even in the statement that
two and two made four. One set of four would never be quite the same as
another set of four; no pair matched completely. Classification was a
convenient simplification of realities that would otherwise be
incomprehensible. We overlooked this in ordinary practice, though it was
plain before our noses if we chose to see it, and we allowed a
convenient habit of acquiescence in the identification of merely similar
things to harden into a fixed assumption that they were identical
repetitions of the same thing. This led us to make such unjustifiable
assumptions as that atoms of the same element were identical and to
confuse an average result with an unanimous result.

In 1891 this was an anticipation of what physicists now call
"statistical causation." The identical similarity of atoms and most
other physical units was then an almost universal persuasion. To concede
individuality to atoms seemed unnecessary and unprofitable.

Nobody took much notice of this article of mine at the time, but the
idea kept alive in my mind; I gave it another form in a _Saturday
Review_ article, _The Cyclic Delusion_, in 1893; and I revived it in a
paper I read before the Oxford Philosophical Society (Nov. 8th, 1903)
called _Scepticism of the Instrument_. This was reprinted in _Mind_,
vol. XIII N.S., No. 51, and, after revision, in the first edition of my
_Modern Utopia_ 1905. It insisted not only upon this loose play of the
logical process upon which I had already laid stress; "the forceps of
our minds are clumsy forceps and crush the truth a little in taking hold
of it"; but dwelt also upon the dangerous facility with which such
purely negative terms as "the absolute" and infinity could be used with
an air of positive significance.

I dug up this old bone of mine and gnawed it again, without getting
anything very fresh off it, in _First and Last Things_ (1908).

Through this insistence upon the unique individuality of every event, it
seems to me, you can arrive by another route at an understanding of that
appearance of inexactitude and spontaneity in minute observations which
has set some modern physicists talking about objective free-will--to the
distress not only of Max Planck and Einstein but of a great number of
other scientific workers. All phenomena escape a little from exact
statement and logical treatment. Classification is always a little
imprecise and every logical process slightly loose in its handle.

"The fact," says Sir James Jeans in a popular work, _The Mysterious
Universe_ quoted by James Murphy (_op. cit._), "that 'loose jointedness'
of any type whatever pervades the whole universe, destroys the case for
absolutely strict causation, the latter being the characteristic of
perfectly fitted machinery." But if one starts out with a perception of
the universality of uniqueness one never expects perfectly fitted
machinery and one demands no more than a consistency in similarity. The
fascinating thing about this material world outside our minds is that it
is always harmonious with itself, never crazy and anyhow, and yet at the
same time never pedantically exact. Like living individuals it has
"character"; it is at once true to itself and subtly unexpected. Every
time it startles us by breaking away from the assumptions we have made
about it, we discover in the long run that our assumptions have been
premature and that harmony is still there. Hence every scientific
generalization is tentative and every process of scientific reasoning
demands checking and adjustment by experiment. The further you go from
experimental verification the more sensible becomes the margin of error.
The most beautifully reasoned deductions in the world, the most
elaborate mathematical demonstrations collapse and must be made over
again before the absolute veto of a single contradictory fact, however
small this fact may be.

This pragmatical view of nature leaves a working belief in causation
intact. We can still believe that exactly the same cause would produce
exactly the same effect. We are sustained in that belief almost
invincibly by the invariable experience that the more similar the cause
the more similar the effect. Our minds seem to have been built up from
the beginning of time upon such experiences. Nevertheless we can
recognize that there is a quiver of idiosyncrasy in every sequence and
that nature never repeats herself. There never has been, it seems,
exactly the same cause and exactly the same effect.

Because the universe continues to be unique and original down to the
minutest particle of the smallest atom, that is no reason for supposing
it is not nevertheless after the pattern of the rational process it has
built up in the human mind. But was it not to be expected that the whole
of Being would be infinitely more subtle and intricate than any web of
terms and symbols our little incidental brains could devise to express
it?

We are compelled to simplify because of the finite amount of grey matter
we possess. The direct adequate dynamic causation of every event,
however minute, remains the only possible working hypothesis for the
scientific worker. There is no more need to abandon it than to abandon
counting and weighing because no two things are exactly alike. And we
may so far agree with Max Planck as to believe that we shall continually
approximate to it with increased precision of observation and analysis.
But also we may add a conviction that we shall never get to it. We shall
never get to it for the excellent reason that there is not the slightest
justification, outside the presumptions of our own brain, to believe
that it is really there.

This section on the elements of physics grows, I perceive, to an
inconvenient length. You see at any rate in what fashion I paddled on
the edge of the illimitable ocean of physical speculation and possible
knowledge, leaving the glass and stuff on my laboratory bench to take
care of itself. After a little paddling I came out of those waters again
and dried my feet and ran about on the shore.

In my book, the _Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_ (1932) there are
twenty pages (Chapter II.,  1-4 inclusive) which summarize all that I
know about the relations of the human mind to physical reality. Those
pages I wrote and rewrote with very great care, I got friends to
scrutinize them and make difficulties about them, and I can add nothing
to them as a general statement of what I believe. In brief I realize
that Being is surrounded east, south, north and west, above and below,
by wonder. Within that frame, like a little house in strange, cold, vast
and beautiful scenery, is life upon this planet, of which life I am a
temporary speck and impression. There is interest beyond measure within
that house; use for my utmost. Nevertheless at times one finds an
urgency to go out and gaze at those enigmatical immensities. But for
such a thing as I am, there is nothing conceivable to be done out there.
Ultimately those remote metaphysical appearances may mean everything,
but so far as my present will and activities go they mean nothing. The
science of physics shrinks to the infinitesimal in a little sparkling
flicker in a glass bulb or whirls away vastly with the extra-galactic
nebul into the deeps of space, and after a time I stop both
speck-gazing and star-gazing and return indoors.


 3

_Professor Judd and the Science of Geology (1886-87)_

Perhaps I had been spoilt by the soundness and beauty of the biological
course, but in geology again, I failed to find the inspiration that had
come to me under Huxley. Judd was a better teacher than Guthrie, but he
was a slow, conscientious lecturer with a large white face, small pale
blue eyes, a habit of washing his hands with invisible water as he
talked, and a flat assuaging voice; and he had the same lack of militant
curiosity as Guthrie in his make-up. His eye watched you and seemed to
take no interest in what his deliberate voice was saying. These were
superficial characteristics and I am told that not only was Judd's work
in stratigraphy sound and patient and excellent but that he was a very
good and pleasant man to know. But I never knew him and my antipathy was
immediate.

Geology is a badly assembled subject, anyhow. It is rather a lore than a
science. In the hands of no teacher who had to cover the whole ground,
could it be made as consecutive and exciting as biology and physics,
those two fundamental sciences, can be made.

Assuming that my mind is a fairly ordinary one it is worth while, from
the point of view of educational theory, trying to state just why it was
that while biology as it was taught to me interested and concentrated
me and physics interested me and tormented me as something fascinatingly
attractive (though withheld, inaccessible and unattainable), geology as
a whole failed to interest me at all. The work attracted me acutely in
bits but in such a way as to entangle and distract my attention from
most of the stuff put before me.

The explanation, I think, is that geology after the passing of that
great generation which included Lyell, Murchison and their peers, had
been allowed to accumulate great masses of new material without any
persistent intelligible application of this new material to its general
idea, which was to scrutinize the earth as a whole, say what it is and
what it was, ransack it for evidence of how it originated and what it
has gone through, focus the superficial evidence available upon the
condition of its inaccessible interior and so at last arrive at such a
power of ordered knowledge, that the geologist would know of any
sediment, rock, mountain or mineral, whence it came, where it was going
and what could be done with it and about it.

There is really no point at which good teaching ends and original
research begins. From first to last in a science the lash and spur of
interrogation must keep the mind alive. But--if I may vary the
image--that flame of interrogation which kept Huxley's biological course
molten and moving, burnt not at all in the geological course, and,
except for bright moments when our own individual curiosity lit up a
corner--and went out again, we were confronted by a great array of dark
cold assorted facts, lifelessly arranged and presented.

We had a course of stratigraphy; we studied the succession of igneous
rocks and of strata, more particularly as they occurred in the British
Isles. Now this is a subject that bristles with interrogative
possibilities. What is there in the composition of the rock to show the
conditions under which it was consolidated? What was the geography of
the world when it was made? What has happened to it since? What tale do
the organic remains in it tell of climate and change? What is happening
to it now? Under such questions there is not a feature about a deposit
which does not become significant and interesting.

But such questions were never followed up.

They were barely hinted at. We were confronted with a list of formations
and series of beds, with some indications of their local exposures and
with drawers of "characteristic" fossils which we had to sketch, handle
and learn to recognize. It was about as interesting as learning the
names of the streets, houses and residents, with their characteristic
articles of furniture, in due order as they were found in a provincial
town. That might be useful for certain business purposes, for
delivery-van work for example, and no doubt it was useful to a
prospector to know just where he was, geologically, and "spot" the
formation he was dealing with. But all that could have been learnt
_connectedly_ with far more ease.

We did neatly tinted cross-sections of country showing faults that were
never accounted for and thrusts of unknown origin. Then came mineralogy
and petrology and day after day we lifted and looked at lumps of mineral
and lumps of rock and put them down again. It was all rote learning; the
science that made the examination of a fragment of bone in the
comparative anatomy course a beautiful exercise in inference, was
entirely wanting. So far as we were taught, a lump of slate or a lump of
pitchblende was like it was _because it was_, and that was that. What
made the course so peculiarly exasperating was that we were pressed
along this training in recognition--at a pace that made it disastrous to
follow any incidental hares our own curiosity might start for us. Again
I reiterate my profound persuasion that for successful science teaching
the rule should be stimulation and a maximum of available information,
with a minimum of prescription.

Among other frustrated and crumpled enquiries I remember the flash of
excitement I found in crystallography. I learnt that in various series
of minerals, the felspar group for example, there were subtle changes in
the crystalline axis with changes of chemical composition. There were
fluctuations in colour and crystalline form through most of the main
mineral groups. What laws lurked in these fluctuations and why?

For petrography the school was at that date exceptionally well equipped.
Every student had the use of a petrographical microscope, with
polarizing prisms, and we examined a long series of representative rock
sections. It would be difficult to exaggerate the beauty and fascination
of some of these. They let one into the very heart of those specimen
chunks of rock one found so boring in a drawer, they lit them up with a
blaze of glorious colour. One saw the jumbled crystals thrust against
each other, distorted by unknown pressures, clouded and stained by
obscure infiltrations. In many there were odd inclusions of other
crystalline substances, and still more entrancingly enigmatical there
were often hollows in these crystals (although they had been formed
under enormous pressures) and in these hollows there were drops of fluid
and bubbles of gas. It was not simply an astounding loveliness, it was,
one felt, a profoundly significant loveliness that these sections
revealed. They were telling in this bright clear and glowing fashion, of
tensions, solutions, releases, the steady creeping of molecule past
molecule, age after age. And in their interpretation lay the history and
understanding of the Earth as a whole. But the geological course was not
out to pursue significance. It would tolerate no loitering for such
discursive purposes. Each day brought its drawer of specimens, its tale
of slides. That was and is my indictment of all that teaching.

I may perhaps be evolving all this adverse criticism of the courses of
science at South Kensington in an unconscious attempt to solace myself
for my manifest want of success there as a serious student, after my
first year. The reader is better able than I am to judge of that. There
can be no doubt of my failure--which led to some painful subsequent
years. But when all possible allowance has been made for such a bias on
my part, the facts remain that Professor Judd bored me cruelly and that
in his course just as in the physics course, my discontent preceded and
did not arise out of my failures.

Since those days I have given a reasonable amount of attention to
pedagogics and social organization generally. I find it more and more
remarkable that the old Normal School and Royal School of Mines, the
present Imperial College of Science and Technology, although an
important part of its work still consists in preparing teachers of
science, has never had, has not now and never seems likely to have, any
chair, lecturer or course in educational science and method. Much less
is there any study of social, economic and political science, any
enquiry as to objectives, or any attempt to point, control and
co-ordinate the teaching in the various departments. To the ruling
intelligences of South Kensington a course in geology is just a course
in geology. When you have gone through a course, any course, then you
_know_ geology. Isn't that useful for mining and metallurgy? Both
Guthrie and Judd were amateurs in science teaching, and neither of them
had sound ideas of how to inveigle students into their subjects. And
there was in the organization no supervising pedagogic philosopher with
the knowledge and authority to tell them as much.

The Imperial College, I realize in the retrospect, was and still is in
fact not a college but a sprawl of laboratories and class rooms.
Whatever ideas of purpose wrestled together in its beginnings are now
forgotten. It has no firm idea of what it is and what it is supposed to
do. That is to say it has no philosophy. It has no philosophical
organization, no social idea, no rationalized goal, to hold it
together.... I do not see how we can hope to arrest and control the
disastrous sprawling of the world's affairs, until we have first pulled
the philosophical and educational sprawl together.

I had come up to South Kensington persuaded that I should learn
everything. I found myself at South Kensington lost and dismayed at the
multitudinous inconsecutiveness of everything.

Judd had a disposition very common in conscientious teachers, to
over-control his students. He wanted to mess about with their minds.
Huxley gave us his science, but he did not watch us digesting it. He was
watching his science. Judd insisted not merely on our learning but
learning precisely in his fashion. We had to make note-books, after his
heart. We had to draw and paint and write down our facts just as a Judd
would have done. We had to go at his pace and in his footsteps. We had
to send in satisfactory note-books at the end. If not we lost marks in
the final examination. To be lopped and sketched to the mental
proportion of Judd in this fashion was almost as agonizing as being a
victim to Og, King of Bashan.

I made an effort to do what was required of me but an irresistible
boredom wrapped me about and bore me down. The habit I had acquired
during the physics course of vanishing from my place in the laboratory
and resorting to the Education Library or the Dyce and Foster Reading
Room presently returned with enhanced strength.

The still favourable opinion of the board of selection kept me at the
geological course, elementary and advanced, for an academic year and a
half. By that time my career as a science student was in ruins, and that
favourable opinion had evaporated. The path to research was closed to me
for ever. Academically I had gone to the bad. I had become notoriously
unruly. I got a second class at the end of 1886, but I failed the final
examination in geology in 1887.

But I carried something out of that geological course nevertheless, for
when, after various vicissitudes I presented myself to the London
University examiners in 1890 for my B.Sc. degree, I had still enough
geology to supplement my first class honours in zoology by taking the
first place in second class honours in geology. I doubt if I had read
very much in the interim. I think Professor Judd must have mingled
considerations of discipline with his estimate of any progress in that
final test which killed my scientific career.


 4

_Divagations of a Discontented Student (1884-1887)_

This criticism of the large indeterminateness of the educational bulks
and thrusts through which my brain dodged its way, is the outcome of a
life's experience. Such, I now realize, were the conditions about me.
But at the time I had no grasp of the huge movements and changes that
were going on in the world. I had no idea of how the Normal School or
the Educational Office or the teaching of science in any form had come
about; I did not understand the conflicting forces that had made that
teaching as good and as bad as it was, nor what it was had whipped me up
out of servitude to be a learner, and was now rather alarmingly losing
interest in me. I had been exalted at first and then I was puzzled and
dismayed. I acquit myself of blame now much more completely than I
acquitted myself at the time. Deep down in me a profound humiliation at
my want of outstanding success in physics and geology struggled against
the immense self-conceit I had brought up with me from Midhurst. My mind
had to find compensating reassurance to save me from the conviction of
entire inferiority. It found that reassurance in petty achievements and
triumphs in other directions. Blasphemy and the bold and successful
discussion of general ideas had already proved very sustaining to my
self respect in the drapery emporium. I now found the pose of a
philosophical desperado a very present help against my depression under
the teaching of Guthrie and Judd.

The startled guffaws of Jennings had already persuaded me that I was
something of a wit, and my rather unconventional contributions to the
discussions in the Debating Society were also fairly successful and
attracted one or two appreciative friends. There were three men, Taylor
and Porter and E. H. Smith in that early group, of whom I have lost
sight; there were also my life-long friends, A. T. Simmons and William
Burton, Elizabeth Healey and A. M. Davies. We loitered in the corridors,
made groups in the tea-shop at lunch-time, lent each other books and
papers and developed each other's conversational powers.

Curiously enough, though I remember the Debating Society very vividly, I
do not remember anything of the speeches I made. I did make speeches
because my friends remember them and say they were amusing. The meetings
were held in an underground lecture theatre used by the mining school.
It was lit by a gas jet or so. The lecturers' platform and the students'
benches were surrounded by big models of strata, ore crushers and the
like which receded into a profound obscurity, and austere diagrams of
unknown significance hung behind the chairman. The usual formula was a
paper, for half an hour or so, a reply and then promiscuous discussion.
Those who lacked the courage to speak, interjected observations, made
sudden outcries or hammered the desks. The desks indeed were hammered
until the ink jumped out of the pots. We were supposed to avoid religion
and politics; the rest of the universe was at our mercy.

I objected to this taboo of religion and politics. I maintained that
these were primary matters, best beaten out in the primary stage of
life. I did all I could to weaken and infringe those taboos, sailing as
close to the wind as possible, and one or two serious-minded fellow
students began to look out for me with an ever ready cry of "Or-der."
One evening somebody read an essay on _Superstitions_ and cited among
others the thirteen superstitions. I took up the origin of that. "A
certain itinerant preacher whom I am not permitted to name in this
gathering," I began, "had twelve disciples...."

The opposition was up in arms forthwith and we had a lovely dispute that
lasted for the better part of an hour. I maintained that the phrase
"itinerant preacher," was an exact and proper description of the founder
of Christianity, as indeed it was. But the vocabulary of the ordinary
Englishman is sticky with stereotyped phrasing and half dried secondary
associations. It seemed that "itinerant preacher" connoted a very low
type of minister in some dissenting bodies. So much the worse, I said,
for the dissenting bodies. The sense of the meeting was against me. Even
my close friends looked grave and reproachful. I was asked to "withdraw"
the expression. I protested that it was based on information derived
from the New Testament, "a most respectable compilation." This did not
mend matters. Apparently they could not have it that the New Testament
was "respectable" or "compiled." I was warned by the chair and persisted
in my insistence upon the proper meaning of words.

I was carried out struggling. To be carried out of an assembly in full
fight had recently been made splendid by Charles Bradlaugh. Irish
members of parliament were also wont to leave that assembly by the same
laborious yet exhilarating method of transport. Except that my hair was
pulled rather painfully by someone, a quite momentary discomfort, that
experience was altogether bright and glorious.

But I will not expand into this sort of anecdotage. That sample must
serve. The Debating Society was a constant source of small opportunities
for provocation and irreverence. And about the schools, in lecture
theatres, I became almost an expert in making strange unsuitable noises,
the wailing of a rubber blowpipe tube with its lips stretched, for
example, and in provoking bursts of untimely applause. We, subsidized
students, were paid every Wednesday by a clerk with a cash-box and a
portfolio, at whose tone when calling out our names we saw fit to take
offence. Mockery and ironical applause having failed to mend his
manners, a tumult ensued and developed to such riotous behaviour that he
fled to the registrar, professed to fear a raid on his tin box of
sovereigns, and refused to proceed without police protection.

It seems to me that I must have been a thoroughly detestable hobbledehoy
at this stage, a gaunt shabby candidate for expulsion, and it is not
anything that I can remember to my credit, but only the constant
friendship and loyalty of Jennings and these life-long friends I have
named and of R. A. Gregory (now Sir Richard, the Editor of _Nature_)
that makes me admit there may have been some qualification of my
detestableness which now escapes me. These faithful associates bolstered
up my self-respect and kept me from becoming a failure absolutely. They
stimulated me to make good in some compensatory way that would atone for
my apathy in the school work.

The Education Department had paid all of us scholars, exhibitionists,
teachers in training, to come to London, but it had no organization to
look after us when we were there. There were no provisions to lodge us
or see that we were properly lodged;--it was only in my second year that
provision was made in the form of a students' refreshment room to give
us midday food at reasonable prices--and except for the registrar, an
ex-army man, who noted when we "signed on" late repeatedly, and sent us
red underlined copies of the rules when we were observed to be smoking,
shouting or loitering in forbidden places, there was no effort to find
out what we were doing or how things were with us. No one bothered to
find out why I had got loose in my setting, much less did anyone attempt
to readjust me in any way. I was not the only straggler from the steady
pursuit of the ordained courses. I fainted only mentally, but twice in
my time undernourished men fainted altogether in the laboratories. I
paid in health for South Kensington all my life, as I shall tell. The
schools, I repeat, ignored pedagogics and had no shadow of a general
directive control even of our physical lives.

The natural pose to which I resorted to recover my self-esteem, was one
of critical hostility to mechanical science and an affectation of
literary ambition. I do not think I have ever had very much real
literary ambition. And I found in the advancing socialist movement, just
the congenial field for the mental energy that was repelled by those
courses in physics and geology. After I had matriculated as an
ex-collegiate student in London University, I did not go on at once to
work for my Intermediate Examination in Science, but I became an active
follower of the new propaganda.

I did not at first link the idea of science with the socialist idea, the
idea, that is, of a planned inter-co-ordinated society. The socialist
movement in England was under the aesthetic influence of Ruskin; it was
being run by poets and decorators like William Morris, Walter Crane,
Emery Walker and Cobden Sanderson, brilliant intellectual adventurers
like Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Annie Besant, teachers with a training in
classical philosophy like Graham Wallas, advanced high churchmen like
Stuart Headlam and a small group of civil servants like Sidney Webb and
Sydney Olivier. These leaders were generally ignorant of scientific
philosophy and they had been misled by Herbert Spencer's Individualism
into a belief that biological science was anti-socialist. I do not
recall any contributions on my part, in those early years, to correct
that misunderstanding. Probably there was a certain amount of
subconscious antagonism towards science, or at least towards men of
science, on my own part during those two latter years at South
Kensington.

William Burton, E. H. Smith and I declared ourselves to be out-and-out
socialists and signified the same with red ties. The rest of our set
came most of the way with us, but with a more temperate enthusiasm. We
trailed off to open meetings of the Fabian Society, which reminded me
not a little of that Parliament in Landport, and we went on Sunday
evenings to Kelmscott House on the Mall, Hammersmith, where William
Morris held meetings in a sort of conservatory beside his house. He used
to stand up with his back to the wall, with his hands behind him when he
spoke, leaning forward as he unfolded each sentence and punctuating with
a bump back to position. Graham Wallas, a very good looking young man
then with an academic humour, was much in evidence, and Shaw, a raw,
aggressive Dubliner, was a frequent speaker. There was a sprinkling of
foreigners, who discoursed with passion, and a tendency to length, in
what they evidently considered was the English tongue. None of our
little group had the confidence to speak at these gatherings, but our
applause was abundant, and on our way back to the Underground Railway at
Hammersmith, our repressed comments broke through.

My return to South Kensington, after the mediocre examination results of
my second year, was rather uncertain. There is a letter from myself to
Simmons in which I discuss the possibilities of getting a master's job
in a school. This letter recalls something which otherwise I might have
forgotten, how very definite my literary ambitions had already become.
(In that letter I made a rule sketch of myself with my prospective
"works" about me, including "All about God" and a "Design for a New
Framework of Society.") My apprehensions though justifiable were not
justified; I was given another chance and I did not after all, at that
time, write to the scholastic agents. My father arranged for me to stay
for a month with my uncle Charles, a small farmer at Minsterworth near
Gloucester. There, so soon as my anxiety about my return was dispelled,
I set myself to write a paper on Socialism with which to open the
autumn session of the Debating Society.

I made not the slightest attempt to get on with my geological reading. I
remember I took enormous pains with that paper. I wrote in and altered
until it became illegible and then I recopied it and started upon it all
over again. I went for a day over to Cheltenham, where E. H. Smith was
staying in the parental home, a greengrocer's shop, to plan a scheme for
"capturing" the committee of the society "in the socialist interest" and
to discuss the possibility of starting a college journal. We resolved
that we were going to develop the literary and political consciousness
of the Normal School whether the authorities liked it or not.

I do not know how far I may be considered to have cheated the Education
Department by drawing my weekly guinea throughout that third year. I was
at South Kensington to learn and I certainly learnt a lot, but I gave
the very minimum of time and attention possible to the substance of
Professor Judd's instructions. I had no sense of cheating at the time. I
was certainly working most strenuously in the Education Library, the Art
Library and the Dyce and Foster Reading Room, if not in the Advanced
Geological Laboratory and the Mineral and Rock collections of the
Natural History Museum. If I had relaxed in my efforts to learn about
the past, present and implicit future of the planet earth, I was making
the most strenuous efforts to get hold of all that was implicit in the
idea of Socialism. I was reading not only a voluminous literature of
propaganda but discursively in history, sociology and economics. I was
doing my best to find out what such exalted names as Goethe and Carlyle,
Shelley and Tennyson, Shakespeare, Dryden, Milton, Pope--or again
Buddha, Mahomet and Confucius--had had to say about the world and what
they mattered to me. I was learning the use of English prose and
sharpening my mind against anyone's with whom I could start a
discussion.

We got the _Science Schools Journal_ going, finding an unexpected ally
in A. E. Tutton, a tremendous swatter of chemistry, who hoped for a
scientific publication and worked hard for us until he realized that our
intentions were amateurish and literary and socialistic. I was the first
editor, but in April 1887, the registrar, roused to concern by Professor
Judd about the state of my work, made me resign control in favour of
Burton. That did not win me back to systematic petrography. I made an
effort to conform before it was too late and save my examination, but I
could not fix my interest on that stuff, even for a final cram in the
last fortnight.

I had just discovered the heady brew of Carlyle's _French Revolution_
and the prophetic works of William Blake. Every day I went off with my
note-books and textbooks to either the Dyce and Foster Reading Room or
the Art Library. I would work hard, I decided, for two hours,
abstracting notes, getting the stuff in order--and then as a treat it
should be (let us say) half an hour of Carlyle (whose work I kept at my
disposal in the Dyce and Foster) or Blake (in the Art Reading Room).
Then, perhaps an observant stroll among the Chantry pictures--they were
at Kensington for as yet there was no Tate Gallery to shelter those
Victorian masterpieces--the Majolica, the metal work and so forth for
ten minutes and then a renewed attack on those minerals. But long before
the two hours were up a frightful lassitude, a sort of petrographic
nausea, a surfeit of minerals, would supervene. Granite and gabbro and
gneiss became all one to me. There seemed no sense in their being
different. The extent to which I did not care what bases replaced what
in the acid felspars and how an increasing dose of potassium affected
their twinning, became boundless and uncontrollable. There, ready to
hand on the table, was a folder of Blake's strange tinted designs; his
hank-haired rugose gods, his upward whirling spirits, his strained,
contorted powers of light and darkness. What exactly was Blake getting
at in this stuff about "Albion?" He seemed to have everything to say and
Judd seemed to have nothing to say. Almost subconsciously, the
note-books and textbooks drew themselves apart into a shocked little
heap and the riddles of Blake opened of their own accord before me.

So I spent the last days that were left to me before the June
examination made an end for ever to my career as a serious student of
science.


 5

_Socialism (Without a Competent Receiver) and World Change_

In my opening chapters I have tried to put my personal origins into the
frame of human history and show how the phases and forces of the
education that shaped me, Tommy Morley's Academy, old-fashioned
apprenticeship, the newly revived Grammar School at Midhurst, the
multiplying colleges at South Kensington, were related to the great
change in human conditions that gathered force throughout the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. World forces were at
work tending to disperse the aristocratic estate system in Europe, to
abolish small traders, to make work in the retail trades less
independent and satisfactory, to promote industrial co-ordination,
increase productivity, necessitate new and better informed classes,
evoke a new type of education and make it universal, break down
political boundaries everywhere and bring all men into one planetary
community. The story of my father and mother and all my family is just
the story of so many individual particles in the great mass of humanity
that was driving before the sweep of these as yet imperfectly
apprehended powers of synthesis. Our mental reactions were as remarkable
as our physical and in the end, they were more important. What did my
sort of people make of what was happening to them?

Nowadays most intelligent people are getting a grasp upon the broad
character of the changes and imperatives amidst which we live. An
outburst of discovery and invention in material things and of innovation
in business and financial method, has, we realize, released so much
human energy that, firstly, the need for sustained toil from anyone has
been abolished, secondly, practically all parts of the world have been
brought into closer interaction than were York and London three
centuries ago and, thirdly, the destructive impulses of man have been so
equipped, that it is no longer possible to contemplate a planet in which
unconditioned war is even a remote possibility. We are waking up to the
fact that a planned world-state governing the complex of human
activities for the common good, however difficult to attain, has become
imperative, and that until it is achieved, the history of the race must
be now inevitably a record of catastrophic convulsions shot with mere
glimpses and phases of temporary good luck. We are, as a species, caught
in an irreversible process. No real going back to the old, comparatively
stable condition of things is possible; set-backs will only prolong the
tale of our racial disaster. We are therefore impelled to reconstruct
the social and economic organization until the new conditions are
satisfied. The sooner all men realize that impulsion, the briefer our
stresses and the better for the race. That is how an increasing number
of minds are coming to see that things are shaping. It is, we perceive,
as much a part of the frame in which our lives are set as the roundness
and rotation of the earth, as the pressure of the atmosphere or the
force of gravitation at the sea level.

But what is matter-of-fact to-day was matter of opinion yesterday and
matter for guess and suggestion the day before. What is so manifest
to-day was certainly not manifest to anyone in 1887 with the same
clearness and completeness. I do not mean simply that it was not
manifest to ordinary people, to people like me and my brothers and
school-fellows and my fellow students and teachers; it was equally
beyond the perceptions of all these clever people who made it their rle
to discuss politico-social questions in and about the Socialist
movement.

Perhaps these latter had a more vivid sense of the promise and
possibilities of change, some sort of change in our circumstances than
the generality, but they were--it is plain to-day--extraordinarily blind
to the shapes of whatever change they perceived. How blind they were to
the true proportions of things and particularly to the pace of change in
things, how blind we all were, I shall try to suggest in this section,
although in doing so my comments will carry me in some particulars far
beyond my mental states as a student.

I shall give the effect of Socialism as it impressed me at that time and
then, as I point out its limitations, I shall tell in what order they
dawned upon my own mind and how phase by phase they took the sense of
completeness out of the original project.

It is curious to go back now with all that one has since learnt and
thought in one's head, and sit in that little out-house at Hammersmith,
a raw student again, listening to a lean young Shaw with a thin
flame-coloured beard beneath his white illuminated face, or to Graham
Wallas, drooping, scholarly, and fastidiously lucid. It is impossible
alas! to recover my original nave participation. I can recall what I
saw but not how I felt. I have in that memory a sense of watching people
unawares. There they talked, unconscious of their destinies, and we
younger outsiders listened and interjected a very occasional word. We
were lively and critical disciples but we were disciples surely enough,
intensely excited. We listened as they planned their policies. They
seemed bold to us in spirit but they seemed extremely sage in method.
Morris had his wild moments--of sympathy with the martyred Chicago
anarchists for example--but then he was a poet. A vast revolution was
going on swiftly and irresistibly all about us, but with perfect
sincerity this Fabian group posed as a valiant little minority
projecting a revolution reduced to its minimum terms. It was to permeate
the existing order rather than change it. There was no real hope in
their revolutionary project. It was a protest rather than a plan.

There I think is the profoundest factor in my present sense of
remoteness, that vanished persuasion that we were up against essentially
immutable institutions. The prevalent sub-consciousness of the time was
not a perception of change but an illusory feeling of the stability of
established things. That Hammersmith gathering shared it to the full. It
needed such a jolt as the Great War to make English people realize that
nothing was standing still. There they all felt and spoke as if they
were in an absolutely fixed world, even if they thought that it was a
world in which stable social injustices called aloud for remonstrance,
resistance and remedies.

The Socialist movement was, one may say, a group of mental reaction
systems (with very great variations within the group) to the
disconcerting consequences of the new change of scale, and it had
appeared _pari passu_ with that new change. It did not fully understand
itself. Nobody troubled to ask why it had appeared when it did and not
before. A new movement does not begin by scrutinizing its origins. Its
various forms were all responsive adaptations disguised even in the
projectors' minds, as heroically revolutionary innovations. It proceeded
from men who did not realize they were being pushed towards adaptive
effort. It looked to its projectors like a purely constructive proposal,
a new thing altogether. Men asked fiercely why should things always be
thus and thus when as a matter of fact they had only just become thus
and thus and were bound to alter in any case. "Let us have a new world,"
they said and they called it Socialism. But they did not realize that
_some_ new world was bound to come and that a new world, new in scale
and power, was coming all about them.

Socialism developed at first in England and then in France because both
the industrial and the mechanical revolution had hit first England and
then France before it struck the rest of the world. From the time of
Robert Owen onward, scattered people under the general banner of
Socialism had been trying to make new plans for social and economic
relationships in the place of those that were being distorted out of
recognition or swept altogether away by blind new forces. But they had
no real apprehension of the truth that those old social and economic
relations would go anyhow without any pushing from them.

There was nothing essentially new in such pseudo-constructive efforts
and social stress. England had been the theatre of very profound
economic and social mutations from the Wars of the Roses onward, and the
influence of these changes upon her social history and literature is
very traceable. Long before Owen and the use of the word Socialism,
there had been individual socialistic schemers responding to the
stresses of the times. Sir Thomas More, for example, was such an early
socialistic schemer, deriving from the city-communism of Plato, and the
Elizabethan Poor Law was an important early essay in practical social
reorganization. Defoe and Fielding were fully conscious of the need to
set up new resistances and guiding embankments to the forces of social
disintegration. All history is adaptation and the only essential
difference between our time and past times is the immense difference in
the scale and pace of adaptive urgency.

Socialism, from its christening stage onward, betrayed its
incompleteness as a response to the social situation by a profound
diversity in its proposals and by that readiness to acquire qualifying
labels which is due to dissatisfaction with an original proposition.
Here and there it was discovered to be "practical Christianity," and
various outbreaks of Christian Socialism occurred, relapsing very
readily into mere medieval charitableness towards the poor. Ruskin and
Morris arrived at an anti-mechanical aesthetic socialism in recoil from
the early degradation of popular art by crude machine processes. The
early French socialisms were as partial and fragmentary as the early
English, if somewhat more logical. The flight tendency in the new
movement was strong: the tendency to get together a little band of the
elect and start a new humanity somewhere well out of this apparently
inflexible and incurable social system in which their discontents had
been engendered. Strong as is my disposition to deflate the reputation
of Marx I have to admit that he was the first to conceive of the
contemporary social process not as a permanent system of injustice and
hardship but as a changing and self-destroying order.

The organization for an effective interplay and criticism of social
ideas has still to be invented, and what happened (and what does still
to a considerable extent happen) was that each group of thinkers and
often each individual thinker, started in on the general problem of
readjustment in more or less complete unconsciousness or in contempt and
disregard of whatever other nuclei existed. All of them began at some
partial experience of the great change-complex in progress. None of them
saw their problem whole.

The history of pre-Fabian beginnings is outside my story; by the time I
came to London Fabianism was Socialism, so far as the exposition of
views and policy went. There was no other Socialist propaganda in
England worth considering. But the Fabian Society had gathered together
some very angular and incompatible fragments to secure its predominant
position, and at every meeting it stirred with mutterings beneath its
compromises. Some members denounced machinery as the source of all our
social discomfort, while others built their hopes on mechanization as
the emancipator of labour, some were nationalist and others
cosmopolitan, some were anti-Malthusian and others--with Annie
Besant--neo-Malthusian, some Christian and some Atheist (denouncing
religion as the opium of the people), some proposing to build up a
society out of happy families as units and some wanting to break up the
family as completely as did Plato. Many were believers in the capacity
of Everyman to control his affairs by universal suffrage, while others
had an acuter sense of the difficulties of the task and talked of
oligarchies, toryisms and benevolent autocrats.

It was open to the movement either to think out and fight out these
differences or to let them cancel each other out and take whatever was
left. And since Fabianism was from the first, politic rather than
scientific, it adopted the latter alternative. I will quote later on a
paragraph in which this deliberate renunciation of exhaustive
thoroughness is stated--aggressively. Foreign Socialism had little of
our British spirit of compromise. It did go on to think and fight out
differences. It rent itself with factions. But foreign Socialism also,
if it was less persuaded of the stability of the current order, was
under the sway of certain other obsessions which I will presently
discuss. It polished and elaborated doctrine much more than the Fabian
school, but unhappily not in a practically constructive direction.

Our little group of eager youth from the Kensington schools, going to
the new Fabian Society for instruction in this great movement of hope
and effort that was to put the world right again, discovered by degrees
that this Socialism of theirs was indeed as a whole, almost as planless
as the world outside. Anti-Socialists in those far off days used to
accuse the Socialists, just as pagans used to accuse the early
Christians, of having their wives in common. As a matter of fact the
Fabian Socialists did not even have their ideas in common. With a
solitary exception. There was one idea which united them all and did
indeed constitute them Socialists. This was the idea that the motive of
profit, which then dominated economic life, was wrong.

That condemnation of the profit motive was the G.C.M., the greatest
common measure of Socialists. There Owen, Ruskin, William Morris, Marx,
Webb, Shaw, Hyndmann, Maurice and Kingsley were unanimous. They were at
open war with the contemporary theory that the search for gain, the
desire to possess and to possess still more and the consequent
competition to possess, constituted the main driving force of human
association. Proudhon's _La proprit c'est le Vol_ was typical. The
main contribution made by Marx was a fairly convincing demonstration,
that a system of competitive production for profit could not be a
permanent system. Competition, he showed, argues the final victory of a
dominating competitor (or group of competitors) which will own
practically everything and attempt to hold all mankind in unendurable
subjection. Unendurable--and hence, he argued, the revolution. All
Socialists wished to eliminate profit from economic life and
consequently all of them wished to abolish private property in any but
the most immediately personal things. Following upon this arose the
question, "And then how will the economic life of the community be run?"
Thereupon they diverged (and continue to diverge) to all points of the
compass.

That paper I prepared so elaborately at Minsterworth, and read to the
Debating Society in 1886, was fairly representative of the common man's
socialism at that period. It was a statement of the waste arising out of
competition and the disproportionate development of what I called
"distribution." I was too innocent still about the things of this world
to develop any attack upon investment, stock-exchange gambling,
speculation and the money-credit system, as the major interceptors and
absorbers of "production" in the distributive system. I was thinking
rather of the overlapping rounds of competitive milk carts and the
needless multiplication of retail shops. I hailed the "stores," which
had done so much to overwhelm Atlas House, as the precursors of a state
distributing system. I had no use for the rle of small retailer for my
father or anyone else. I wanted distribution and production to be added
to the existing functions of the state which I lumped together with a
primitive simplicity under the word, "defence." "Production,
Distribution and Defence," that was my artless trio of social functions.
The state should control them all, I said, not simply confine itself to
"defence." I made no definition of the State; apparently I had not
become critical of the contemporary state as such.

This primitive Socialism of mine, in spite of my hard narrowness of
approach, was well received. In the subsequent debate Burton came in
with some quotations from the angle of Ruskin, A. M. Davies raised some
individualist objections and cited Herbert Spencer, while E. H. Smith
sounded the democratic note (which I had left silent) with considerable
emphasis. His sentimental belief in the masses was as near as anyone at
South Kensington in these early days came to mystical democratic
Marxism. This much I recall of that meeting; E. H. Smith with his foot
on a chair, rather harshly rhetorical, Davies slight and Iberian,
recalling an early portrait of J. S. Mill, precise and hesitant already
with that little cough of his, old Burton, Ruskinian, biblical, as
became a man from John Bright's Manchester, and very eloquent and
copious. Others spoke but I do not remember them so clearly.

We denounced individualism; we denounced _laissez-faire_. The ownership
of land and industrial capital was to be "vested in the community." We
did not say what we meant by the "community" because none of us knew--or
had even thought it might require knowing. But what we saw as in a
vision was a world without a scramble for possession and without the
motive of proprietary advantage crippling and vitiating every
intellectual and creative effort. A great light had shone upon us and we
could see no more.

Socialism was indeed a blinding thing then. It was so dazzled by the
profound discovery of itself, in that age of scramble and
go-as-you-please, that it seemed unable to get on with its job. It
feared to dispel the lovely vision it had conjured up. It remained in a
state of exalted paralysis refusing to think further--because that might
split the movement--and waiting for the world to come up to it. A
similar phase of exalted paralysis has occurred at times in various
sciences. After the demonstration of Evolution, biology marked time for
a generation, reiterating and elaborating that immense realization.
Physics for a period poised at the indivisible atom and the conservation
of energy. But Western Socialism has gone on poising, poising itself
unprogressively for longer than any science has done. It has been
marking time for the past half century.

There were special reasons for this exceptional unprogressiveness of
Socialist ideology. In the Fabian Society the desire for politic
compromise damped discussion, but there was more in it than that. It was
not any dread of dissension that kept continental Socialism
impracticable. It was the absence of an experimental and analytical
spirit. There had been a conspicuous absence from about the cradle-side
of Socialism, of men with the scientific habit of mind. Socialism was
essentially a pre-scientific product and it had just that bad
disposition to finality of statement which it is the task of
experimental science to dispel. Nobody sighed and said "And _now_ what?"
Nobody said, "Here is a great and inspiring principle which does in
general terms meet the stresses of our time, let us go on at once to
test it soundly and work out its necessary particulars and methods."
Instead Socialism was proclaimed as a completed panacea. It was
announced in strange, mystical and dogmatic phrases. The "Proletariat"
was to rise against the "Bourgeoisie" and "expropriate" them, etc., etc.

The old Calvinistic theologians, equally absolute and unprogressive,
announced Salvation by the Blood, and they would never explain what
exactly the Blood was, nor how Emmanuel's vein was to be identified, nor
anything more about it. Don't argue, don't make difficulties, they said,
believe in the Blood and repent. To take difficulties into consideration
was to go half way back to apostasy. In exactly the same spirit the
Bourgeoisie, industrial and financial leaders, contemporary statesmen,
were now exhorted by the Socialists not to ask questions, make
difficulties and so damn themselves further, but just repent and consent
to "socialization."

No! they were not to ask How.

Now the first difficulty in the way of expropriating the contemporary
landowner and capitalist for the common good is the absence of what I
have called (in a recent examination of the collectivist idea in the
_Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_ 1931) a "competent receiver."
The Fabian Socialists in their impatience for practical application, did
their utmost to ignore this blank in their outlook. They strove to think
that any contemporary administrative and governing body, a board of
guardians, a bench of magistrates, Parliament, Congress, was capable of
playing the rle of "the community" and "taking over" the most intricate
economic tasks. The Webbs (Beatrice and Sidney) whose unparalleled
industry and insistence did so much to keep British Socialism in the
narrow way, held apparently that almost any sort of administration could
be stiffened up and controlled by an "expert" or so, to the required
degree of specialized efficiency. They were quite prepared to accept and
Fabianize the Tzardom or the tribal chieftainships of the Gold Coast.

The Webb mentality was a peculiar one and it imposed itself with
paralysing effect upon the Socialist movement in Britain. Mrs. Webb had
been brought up a brilliant girl among politicians, and it took her many
years to realize that there could be any other sort of governing class
than the class she had seen so closely and intimately. Webb, a clever
civil servant by competitive examination, was all too disposed to accept
that same governing class, provided it left matters of detail to trusted
trained officials. But really the members of that governing class, with
its social traditions, its commercial liberalism and its highly
developed parliamentary technique of humbugging the new voting
democracy, were the last people to submit to their own socialization by
indefatigable little civil service officials. There was no autocratic
indolence about them when it came to business. They had their own use
for parliament. Still less were the existing public bodies elected by
the haphazard methods then in use, practicable instruments for the
Socialist. And as yet there was nothing else. But since no alternative
directorate was at once forthcoming, the discussion of these
difficulties seemed to many of the impatient and still exalted faithful,
not so much a practical step forward, as a mischievous move to sabotage
any progress towards an emancipated world.

There, it seemed to them, stood the aeroplane ready to soar and it was a
terrible pity not to get off at once, simply because no one had as yet
made even drawings of a possible controlling apparatus. It was hard to
wait for that controlling apparatus. "At this rate we shall never get
there" and so on. To complete the image, they tried therefore to use the
reins from the old gig.

Now I happened to be detached by my circumstances from political and
administrative associations and so perhaps I was able to see this hiatus
in the Fabian programme with more detachment than its more active
members. This problem of direction in a socialist state, this _search
for a competent receiver_, troubled my mind more and more throughout the
nineties. I cannot now recall what first turned my attention to it. But
as I shall tell in my concluding chapter it became at last a dominant
idea in my social philosophy.

The failure to develop a conception of organized directive types, a
development which is a necessary consequence of the primary socialist
assumption, is I believe, due to the association, at once unreasonable
and very natural, of Socialism with the opposition and insurrectionary
politics of mere temporary social conditions. In 1886, in common with
almost all Socialists at that time, I took that association for granted,
and it was only as my experience enlarged and as I came to think out the
theory of Socialism more thoroughly, that I realized how accidental and
in some respects how unfortunate this alliance was.

There was extremely little "democracy" in the original patriarchal
socialism of Robert Owen, and it was Marx who finally fettered the two
ideas of Socialism and Democracy together. His imagination intensified
the insurrectionary impulse in modern democracy and sought in the
resentment and discomfort of the disinherited, a sufficient driving
force for a revolutionary reconstruction of society. There was a certain
plausibility in the suggestion that the mass-losers in the struggle for
gain, would necessarily be in favour of the abolition of private
property. But it did not follow at all that they would be able to grasp
the idea of collectivized property and take an intelligent controlling
interest in its collective administration. Over that thin ice the
Marxists skated very swiftly and nimbly. Steadily and surely the idea of
the class-war was imposed upon the Socialist idea, until for many
Socialism ceased to be a movement for a more comprehensive organization
of economic life and took on the quality of a violent restitution of
stolen goods--to everybody in general and nobody in particular.

Even Socialists who did not adhere textually to the propositions of Marx
were carried unconsciously in the direction of his teaching. His
misconceptions of the character and possibilities of English Trade
Unions had been profound--and infectious. So in Britain and Russia and
Germany and everywhere Socialism was taken to the working masses as if
it were not simply their chance and hope but their vindication, which is
an altogether different matter; and it seemed the most reasonable thing
in the world for the Fabians to turn to the Trade Union officials,
exhorting them to enter Parliament as our natural leaders in the mighty
task of reconstruction before mankind. Though if you only looked at and
listened to a few of them----!

I fell in with this prevalent error as readily as most people. I am only
being wise after the event. My theoretical dissent from modern
democratic theory was contradicted very flatly by some of my actions. In
practice at any rate I was not in advance of my time. There was an
interesting duplicity in this matter between my persuasions which ran
far ahead, and my policy which lagged with the movement. It is only in
the retrospect that I perceive that in this matter I was like a
later-stage tadpole which has gills and lungs and legs and a tail all at
the same time. In 1906 I was responsible for a Fabian report
advocating, not indeed identification of the Fabian Society with the new
Labour Party, but "cordial co-operation," and in the general elections
of 1922 and 1923 I contested London University as an official Labour
candidate. Later on in my story I will return to these lapses towards
the class-war conception of Socialism. But for the present I am
concerned only with my own inconsistencies in so far as they are
representative of this curious entanglement of two fundamentally
divergent tendencies, which was everywhere apparent between 1880 and
1920. I am discussing the defects and mis-directions of late
nineteenth-century Socialism as a working project for world
reconstruction.

In another closely associated direction also, the leaders and makers of
Socialism misconceived the great problem before them. They did not
realize that a change in the size and nature of communities was going
on. They did not grasp that modern Socialism demands great
administrative areas. To this day many professed Socialists have still
to assimilate the significance of this change of scale. The local
Socialist parish or town councillor who is the typical unit politician
of the Labour Party, is the last person likely to understand and welcome
enlargements that will abolish all those parochial intimacies to which
he owes his position. Just as Mr. Ramsay Macdonald opposed proportional
representation with large constituencies, because the practical
impossibility of a poor adventurer working a constituency under such an
electoral method would banish Ramsay Macdonalds from political life, so
these Labour wardsmen, in close touch with the local builders and
contractors, found insuperable subconscious difficulties to the
substitution of any large scale administration for their local jobbery.
Necessarily theirs was the Socialism of the parish pump and not the
Socialism of a comprehensible control of water supply between watershed
and watershed. How could it have been otherwise?

I should probably have remained as blind as most other Socialists to
this second aspect of the directive difficulty if I had not chanced to
build myself a house in Sandgate in 1899 and 1900. I happened to choose
a site upon the boundary line between the borough of Folkestone and the
urban district of Sandgate, and the experiences I had in securing
electricity for my house across that boundary worked upon certain
notions I had picked up from Grant Allen about the sizes and distances
between villages and towns upon a countryside (which are determined
originally by the length of an hour's journey by horse or foot) and
started me off thinking in an extremely fruitful direction. I hit upon
the principle to which I had already given expression, that not only
must a genuine Socialist government be in the hands of a much more
closely knit body than were the party governments of our time, but that
having regard to the fact that we were no longer in a horse-and-foot
world, the proper administrative areas in a modern socialized community
must be altogether different in extent and contour from existing
divisions. I began to work out the now universally recognized truth that
one of the primary aspects of this period of change, is a change in
facility and speed of communications, and that among other things this
had made almost every existing boundary too small and tight. This truth
was not recognized thirty years ago. But it is of quite primary
importance. The applications of this principle of change of scale, once
it was stated, were, I discovered, unlimited. I was already making them
in my _Anticipations_ in 1900. Before I had done with this idea it had
led me to the realization of the inevitability of a comprehensive
world-state, overriding the sovereign governments of the present time.

In 1903, after I had joined the Fabian Society, I launched this
disturbing suggestion of the incompatibility of our extensive projects
for socialization with the existing local and municipal organizations,
in a paper entitled _The Question of Scientific Administrative Areas in
Relation to Municipal Undertakings_. (It was reprinted in an appendix to
_Mankind in the Making_ published in the same year.) I stated my case in
the subdued and enquiring manner of a young learner bringing a thesis to
his master for correction. I really thought I should tap a fount of
understanding. But there I flattered my Fabian audience. The Fabian
audience of that phase was not easily excited by ideas, it assembled for
edification, and the paper was received as though it did not matter in
the least. Graham Wallas made the most understanding comments. He
thought that the Fabian disregard of political reform might have been
carried too far.

Afterwards, at the Webbs' house in Grosvenor Road, I succeeded in
emphasizing my point in relation to the elaborate studies they were
making of local government in the eighteenth century. Finding them
disposed to take up the attitude of specialists towards a vexatious
pupil I was as rude as I could be about this work of theirs and insisted
that so far as contemporary problems of local government were concerned,
a study of the methods of Dogberry and Shallow was as likely to be as
valuable a contribution to contemporary problems as a monograph on human
sacrifice in Etruria. With the coming of electric trams and electric
lighting and universal elementary education, every problem of local
administration had been changed fundamentally.

And these changes were still going on. I became very emphatic for a time
in these and other talks and writings, on the difference between
"localized" and "delocalized" types of mind. I was quite sure I had come
upon something important that had been previously overlooked. I had.
Existing divisions, I argued, left everything in the hands of the
"localized" types, and so long as we divided up our administrative areas
on eighteenth century lines, the delocalized man with wider interests
and a wider range of movements, found himself virtually disenfranchised
by his inability to attend intensively to the petty politics about his
front door and garden. He might represent a strong body of opinion in
the world, but he was in a minority in any particular constituency. We
were in fact trying to modernize a world in which the modernized types
were deprived of any influence.

Later on the Fabian Society in belated response to these more vivid
personal representations of mine, produced the _New Heptarchy Series_
(No. 1 at least of it), in which my idea was Fabianized in a tract,
_Municipalisation by Provinces_ by W. Stephen Sanders. The association
of the rank and file of the Socialist movement with contemporary
political hopes and ambitions was however too close to admit of any
really bold and thorough pursuit of this idea, and after this sixteen
page effort by Mr. Sanders and an attempt, by a sort of afterthought, to
incorporate two earlier tracts, this _New Heptarchy Series_ damped off
and expired. It sank back to such obscurity that it is ignored in
Pease's official history of the society's achievements, and the
Socialist movement produced no further systematic enquiries either in
administrative psychology or in political geography. Such enquiries were
not "practical politics," the Webbs had administrative and not
scientific minds, and the necessary interrogative spirit was lacking.

I was baffled for a time by this tepid reception of my bright idea by my
Fabian teachers and perhaps rather too ready to be persuaded that there
were sound practical reasons, outside the range of my experience, why my
line of suggestion was not followed up with greater zest. I had many
other things to occupy me and I did not press my criticism in the
society beyond a certain point. When later I contrived a rebellion
against the Old Gang (as I shall tell in the proper place), it was upon
an entirely different score. Nevertheless the idea of a change in scale
as a matter of quite vital importance in human experience had gained a
footing in my brain and was stirring about there, and since it could
find no adequate outlet in any modification of Fabian policy, it
expressed itself in a fantastic story, _The Food of the Gods_ (1903-4)
which begins in cheerful burlesque and ends in poetic symbolism. And in
my _Modern Utopia_ (1905), I took the inevitability of a world-state for
granted.

Now I think a sedulous examination of the optimum areas for government
functions of various types leading up to a critical study of
sovereignty, was a line of investigation which Socialism, if it had
really shared with modern science the spirit of incessant research and
innovation, would have welcomed and followed up with vigour. If this
system of relationships had been worked out, it would now be of
incalculable benefit. But it never was worked out. The craving for
immediate political and practical application shortened the vision of
our Socialist leaders. In the discussion of _Fabianism and the Empire_
as early as 1900, lip service was paid to Tennyson's "Federation of the
World," but it was the contemptuous lip service of men convinced of
their own superior common-sense, and the tract itself, drafted by Shaw
and evidently revised and patched a great deal by warier minds, assumed
that the division of the whole planet amongst a small number of
imperialisms, each under the leadership of a Great Power, was destined
to be rapidly completed, that further synthesis was hopelessly remote,
and that making "our Empire" efficient was a fit and proper limit to the
outlook of British Socialism. Those were the days when "efficiency" was
a ruling catchword. It implied both the business and military efficiency
of the Empire regarded as a competing organization. Just as the Fabians
of thirty-odd years ago could not or would not or did not dare see
beyond parish councillors, parliaments, trade unions, constituencies of
people hardly able to read, and all the obdurate antiquated forms of
contemporary law, so they would not and probably could not see beyond
the Competing Great Empires of 1900-1914. The _New Statesman_, which was
started by the Webbs and their friends in 1913, as a Socialist weekly,
remained sedulously disdainful of the "World-State" up to the outbreak
of the Great War.... Then came rapid changes of opinion about the
permanence and desirability of those "Great Powers" and their imperial
systems, and the _New Statesman_ of to-day is as much for the
World-State as I am.

Let me turn now to another major item in my account-rendered of the
essentials that made the Socialism of the eighties and nineties so
deficient and ineffective as a key to human frustration.

Socialism was primarily a criticism of private possessiveness in the
common weal, and yet in no part of the Socialist movement in Britain or
abroad, was there any evidence of an awareness, much less an examination
of the connection between proprietary claims and monetary inflation and
deflation. The Socialist movement floated along in a happy
unconsciousness of the possible effect of inflation in releasing the
debtor and worker from the claims and advantage of ownership. Nowhere
was monetary control linked with the process of expropriating the
landowner and private capitalist. Yet many of our minds were playing
about quite close to that topic. In my _Modern Utopia_ (1905) I even
threw out the idea of a currency based on energy units. I could do that
and still be unaware that I was touching on another vital deficiency in
the Socialist project. The normal Fabian gathering had a real horror of
the "currency Crank," as it termed anyone who ventured to say that money
has ways and tricks of its own which no serious student of social
welfare can ignore. Platform and audience rose in revolt together at the
mere whisper of such disturbing ideas.

It was not merely that the Fabians refused to think about money; they
pushed the thought away from them. A paragraph from _Tract 70_ published
in 1896, dealing with the "Mission of the Fabians" is probably
unequalled in all literature for self-complacent stupidity. "The Fabian
Society ... has no distinctive opinions on the Marriage Question,
Religion, Art, abstract Economics, historic Evolution, Currency, or any
other subject than its own special business of practical Democracy and
Socialism." As one reads one can almost hear a flat voice, with a very
very sarcastic stress on the capitals, reciting this fatuous
declaration.

The same intellectual conservatism, the same refusal to expand its
interests beyond the elementary simplicity of its original assumptions,
is to be seen in the attitude of the Fabian Society towards education
and the instruction of people generally in the aims of the Socialist
reconstruction. In 1906 indeed I was already protesting to the Fabian
Society that in order to bring about Socialism we must "make
Socialists," but the still more searching and difficult proposition that
in order to carry on a Socialist state you must make a Socialist
population, was beyond even my imaginative courage. In _Mankind in the
Making_ (1902), I showed myself alive to the interdependence of general
education and social structure but my projected curriculum was extremely
sketchy and the political and educational propositions do not interlock
clinchingly. I attacked the monarchy as a centre of formalism and
insincerity. It was a mask and disguised the actual facts of government.
It is however only in quite recent works of mine such as the _Work,
Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_ (1932) and _The Shape of Things to
Come_, (1933) that I recognize that public education and social
construction are welded by the very nature of things into one
indivisible process.

Finally, as a fifth great imperfection of our nineteenth century
Socialism, and one that seems now the most incredible, was the
repudiation of planning. Socialism sought to make a new world and yet
resisted any attempt to scheme or even sketch what the world was to be.
In the retrospect this seems the most extraordinary of all the defects
of the movement and yet perhaps it was inevitable at the time.
Providentialism was in the spirit of the age. Belief in the necessity of
progress anyhow, was almost universal. Even Atheists believed in a sort
of Providence. The self-complacency of the Wonderful Century has already
become incredible to our unsafe, uneasy and critical generation. But the
nineteenth century Individualist said in effect, "give everybody the
maximum of personal initiative short of permitting actual murder and
robbery, and then free competition will give you the best possible
results for mankind." And the nineteenth century Socialist answered him,
"Destroy the capitalist system, take property out of the hands of
individuals and vest it in any old governing body you find about, and
all will be well." This belief in the final indulgence of fate was
universal.

But the influence of Marx had greatly intensified that general
disposition to a fundamental belief in immanent good luck. Marx was an
uninventive man with, I think, a subconscious knowledge of his own
uninventiveness. He collected facts, scrutinized them, analysed them and
drew large generalizations from them. But he lacked the imaginative
power necessary to synthesize a project. His exceptionally intense
egotism insisted therefore on a pose of scientific necessitarianism and
a depreciation of any social inventiveness. He fostered among his
associates a real jealousy of the creative imagination, imaginative
dullness masqueraded among them as sound common-sense, and making plans,
"Utopianism" that is, became at last one of the blackest bugbears in the
long lists dictated by Marxist intolerance. Any attempt to work out the
details of the world contemplated under Socialism was received by the
old Marxists with contemptuous hostility. At the very best it was
wasting time, they declared, on the way to that destructive revolution
which would release the mechanical benevolence latent in things. Then we
should see. They were all (before the Russian revolution knocked
practical sense into them) embittered anti-planners. The Faithful may
try to deny this nowadays, but their vast dull abusive literature,
stored away in the British Museum and elsewhere, bears it heavy witness.
Salvation could come only by the Class War and in the Class War, itself
inevitable, was all that sufficed for salvation. And their vehemence,
their immense pretensions to scientific method, overawed many a
Socialist who stood far outside their organization. They sterilized
Socialism for half a century. Indeed from first to last the influence of
Marx has been an unqualified drag upon the progressive reorganization of
human society. We should be far nearer a sanely organized world system
to-day if Karl Marx had never been born.

Contact with reality has since insisted upon the most remarkable
adjustments of his theories and the completest repudiations of his
essential intellectual conservatism and finality. It has obliged
Communist Socialism to become progressive and scientific in method, in
complete defiance of its founder and of its early evangelical spirit.
Lenin conjured government by mass-democracy out of sight, "vanished" it
as conjurors say, by his reorganization of the Communist Party so as to
make it a directive lite, and by his organization of the soviets in
successive tiers. The ultimate adoption of the Five Year Plan and its
successor has been the completest change over from the providentialism
of Marx to the once hated and despised method of the Utopists. Russia,
as we are all beginning to realize nowadays, is now no longer a
Communism nor a democratic Socialism, it has come out of these things as
a chick comes out of its egg and egg membranes. It is a novel
experimental state capitalism, growing more scientific in its methods
every year. It is the supposititious child of necessity in the household
of theory. Steadily now throughout the world the Socialist idea and its
communist intensification sink into subordination to the ampler
proposition of planning upon a planetary scale thrust upon mankind by
the urgent pressure of reality. World planning takes Socialism in its
stride, and is Socialism plus half a dozen other equally important
constructive intentions.

If anyone wants a real measure of the essential unfruitfulness of the
Socialist movement, if he wants to realize how like it was to the bag of
a hopeful but easily diverted collector into which nothing worth-while
was ever put, let him turn his mind for a moment to the adventure of
flying. Let him compare the amount of hard work and detailed invention,
the patient gathering and development of knowledge and experience, the
generous mutual help and mental exchange, that have brought flying in a
third of a century, from a dream infinitely less hopeful than the
original Socialist project, to the world animating reality it is to-day.
Side by side with that vigorous contemporary thrust of the human mind,
the literature of Socialism is a pitiful repetition of passing remarks
and ineffective promises. Is it any wonder that its name ceases to
kindle and its phrases are passing out of use?

But in the late eighties and for us students it was different. Socialism
was then a splendid new-born hope. How were we to tell it would decline
to grow up, become self-centred and self-satisfied and end as a
pervasive, under-developed, unconvincing doctrine? Wearing our red ties
to give zest to our frayed and shabby costumes we went great distances
through the gas-lit winter streets of London and by the sulphurous
Underground Railway, to hear and criticize and cheer and believe in
William Morris, the Webbs, Bernard Shaw, Hubert Bland, Graham Wallas and
all the rest of them, who were to lead us to that millennial world.

The students of to-day know that the way is harder and the road longer
than we supposed. But for one of us in those old days, there are now
dozens of keen youngsters in the world, more adventurous, better inured
to the habit of incessant enquiry, more obstinately industrious and more
persistent. The constructive movement to-day has no such picturesque,
brilliant and perplexing leaders as we had. It has no Shaw, no William
Morris, no galaxy of decorators and poets and speakers, it cannot evoke
such exciting meetings, but that is because it has far greater breadth
and self-reliance. Nineteenth century revolutionism was intellectual
ragging and boys'-play in comparison with the revolutionary effort now
required of us. The great changes continue and will yield to the control
only of adequately organized directive forces. It is only as I look back
to what we thought and knew at South Kensington half a century ago that
I realize the greatness of the world's imaginative expansion.


 6

_Background of the Student's Life (1884-1887)_

So far I have been telling of my life in London entirely from the
student's end, for that, during these crucial years, was the vitally
important end. A vision was being established, in the grey matter of my
brain, of the world in which I was to live for all the remainder of my
years. Every week-day we students converged from our diversified homes
and lodgings upon the schools in Exhibition Road to learn what the
gigantic dim beginnings of the new scientific world-order, which had
evoked those schools, had, gropingly and confusedly enough, to tell us.
That new world-order was saying immensely important things to us,
however indistinctly it was saying them as yet, fundamental things about
life and its framework of matter and about our planet; and among
ourselves we were awakening to our first perceptions of the drama of
human politics and economic affairs. The beds we slept in, the meals we
ate, the companionships we formed outside the college limits were
necessarily individual and secondary things.

They were not so secondary that they did not exercise a profound
influence on our personal destinies. In those days the organization of
the South Kensington student's life hardly extended beyond the class
rooms and laboratories; there were no students' hostels and our times
before ten and after five were entirely in our own hands. We dispersed
in the evening to the most various lodgings and the oddest of marginal
experiences.

My account of the systematic foundation I was given in biological and
physical science, of how that foundation was revised, strengthened and
extended in subsequent years, and of how I developed a system of social
and political concepts upon the framework of the socialism of the
period, has carried my story forward in these last respects far beyond
my student days. And indeed far away from myself. I must now bring the
reader back to the raw youngster of seventeen up from the country,
because there are still several things I want to tell of his particular
adolescence and of adolescence in general.

Neither my father, my mother nor I, had had the slightest idea of how I
could be put up in London, and we knew of no competent adviser. I had to
live on my weekly guinea, that was a primary condition. My mother had
perhaps an exaggerated idea of the moral dangers of the great city and
too little confidence in my innate chastity and good sense. She had had
an ancient friendship, dating from the Midhurst days, with the wife of a
milkman in the Edgware Road. They had carried on an intermittent and
pious correspondence until her friend died. The friend had had a
daughter who was married to an employee of a wholesale grocery firm and
to her my mother wrote, seeking a lodging for me, a dry pure spot, so to
speak, above the flooding corruption of London. She was happy to entrust
me to someone she knew--and she did not reflect how little she knew of
this daughter of the elect. As a matter of fact my landlady had relapsed
with great thoroughness from the austere standards of her Evangelical
upbringing. Piety was conspicuously absent from the crowded little house
in Westbourne Park to which I was consigned. The establishment was,
indeed, another of those endless petty jokes, always, I think in the
worst possible taste, which my mother's particular Providence seemed to
delight in playing upon her.

The house, though small, was extensively sublet. On the ground floor was
a lower-division civil service clerk and his wife, whose recent marriage
was turning out badly. On the first floor and upward one were my
landlady and her husband, two boys on the top floor, and I and another
man lodger each of us in a room of his own. I think my fellow lodger was
some sort of clerk, but I cannot now remember very much about him. We
got all our food out except breakfast and, in my own case, a meat tea on
week-days, and we shared a common Sunday repast. There was no servant. I
do not remember that there was any bathroom--a statement which is
perhaps best left in that simplicity.

From this lodging I set off with my little bag of books and instruments
by way of Westbourne Grove and Kensington Gardens to the vast mental
expansions of the schools and in the evening, before the gardens closed
at dusk, I hurried back, often having to run hard through the rustling
dead leaves, as the keepers whistled and shouted "All out." South of the
green spaces and heavy boughs of the Gardens were laboratories,
libraries, museums and astronomical observatories; north were the shops
of Queens Road and Westbourne Grove, the gas-lit windows of Whiteley's
stores and the intensely personal life of this congested houseful of
human beings to which my mother had consigned me. Never was there so
complete a transition from the general to the particular. There was a
small living-room on a half-landing which I shared with the two boys,
and where I wrote up my notes or read my textbooks, on an
American-cloth-covered table by the light of a gas jet, while they did
their school homework or scuffled with each other.

Both the wives in this double mnage were slatternly women entirely
preoccupied with food, drink, dress and sex. They were left alone in the
house during the day and during that middle period they "cleaned things
up" or gave way to lassitude or, when they were in the mood, dressed
themselves up in their smartest to go off to some other part of London,
to wander in the shops and streets and seek vague adventures. It was a
great triumph to be picked up by a man, perhaps treated to refreshment,
to play the great and mysterious lady with him, make a rendezvous with
him, which might or might not be observed, and talk about it all
afterwards excitedly--with anyone but one's husband. The sayings and
doings of the gallant were recalled minutely and searched for evidence
as to whether he was a gentleman or what manner of man he was. The prize
in this imaginative game was an ideal being, the clubman, the man about
town; but it always seemed uncertain whether he had been found. He might
have been just a chap up from the country on holiday, or some salesman
out of work.

Things livened up for these wives in the evening and at the week-end.
There were no "pictures" then but there were music-halls where drinks
were served in the auditorium and there they went with their husbands.
On Saturdays there was shopping for the Sunday dinner and most of the
two households went in a sort of band to the shops and stores and stalls
in the Edgware Road. I was invited to join in these rounds on several
occasions. We mingled in the human jam between the bawling shopkeepers
and the bawling barrow vendors. We stopped and stared, crowding up, at
any amusing incident. We bought shrewdly. We saluted acquaintances. We
refreshed ourselves in some saloon bar. I stood treat in my turn,
condemning myself to go lunchless on the following Monday and Tuesday.

Sunday had a ritual of its own. The men were given clean linen in the
morning and driven out to walk along the Harrow Road until by doing
three miles they could qualify as "travellers" for refreshment at an
inn. This they did with a doggish air. "Whaddleye-_ave_ Guv'ner?" Thence
home. Meanwhile the wives prepared a robust joint Sunday dinner. This
was consumed with cheerfulness and badinage. Then the boys were packed
off to Sunday school, and dalliance became the business of the
afternoon. The married couples retired to their apartments; the lodger
went off to a lady. I was left to entertain a young woman, who was I
think, a sister of my landlady's husband. I do not know how she came in,
but she was there. I have forgotten almost everything about her except
that she was difficult to entertain. I sat on a sofa with her and
caressed and was caressed by her, attempting small invasions of her
costume and suchlike gallantries which she resisted playfully but
firmly. Her favourite expressions were "Ow! _starp_ it" and "Nart that."
I remember I disliked her and her resistances extremely and I cannot
remember any definite desire for her. I am quite at a loss now to
explain why it was I continued to make these advances. I suppose because
it was Sunday afternoon, and I was too congested with unusual
nourishment to attempt any work, and there was nothing else to be done
with her. Or if there were I did not know how to set about doing it.

This manner of life was presently grossly animated by a violent quarrel
between the two wives. The Sunday dinners were divided; all
co-operations ceased. The precise offence I never knew, whether it
centred round the lodger, one or both of the husbands or some person or
persons unknown. But it involved unending recriminations in the common
passage and upon the staircase, and attempts to involve the husbands.
The husbands showed themselves lacking in the true manly spirit and came
home late with a hang-dog look. My landlady was very insistent upon some
defect in the health of her sub-tenant. "She's in a state when no man
ought to go near her," is an enigmatical sentence delivered from the
half landing, that has survived across the years.

One day my landlady came into my room to change the pillow case while I
was there and provoked me into a quasi-amorous struggle. She was wearing
a print dress carelessly or carefully unhooked at the neck. Then she
became reproachful at my impudence and remarked that I might be a man
already, the way I behaved. And afterwards the lodger who seems to have
been hovering in the passage, observed at supper in the tone of a
warning friend, that if she thought I was too young to bring trouble
upon her she might find herself mistaken.

Suchlike small things on the far side, the individual life side, of
Kensington Gardens, excited me considerably, bothered me with
contradictory impulses, disgusted me faintly and interfered rather
vexatiously with the proper copying out of my notes of Professor
Huxley's lectures.

It was certainly not the sort of pure safe life away from home that my
mother had desired for me, but it did not occur to me to tell her
anything about it and I should probably have begun my actual sexual life
very speedily, clumsily and grossly and slipped into inglorious trouble
if it had not been for the sensible action of a cousin on my father's
side, whom he had asked to keep an eye on me.

My father was the sort of man to like, admire and cultivate a friendly
niece and his opinion of Janie Gall was a particularly high one. She was
an assistant in the costume department at an establishment in Kensington
High Street which I see still flourishes, Messrs. Derry & Toms, and she
made me call upon her and take her out on several occasions. It was like
old times at Southsea to be the escort of an elegant lady from the
costumes; I knew the rle and we got on very well together. In response
to her frank enquiries I described to her the more seemly and impersonal
defects of my lodgings, considered as quarters for a studious spirit,
and she grasped the situation and acted with great promptitude.

A sister-in-law of my father's was letting lodgings in the Euston Road;
the situation at Westbourne Park was explained by my father to my
mother, who had perhaps allowed the natural jealousy of relations-in-law
to blind her to the merits of my Aunt Mary, and I and my small
portmanteau were promptly transferred--probably in a four-wheeled
"growler"--to my new quarters. A mile was added each way to my daily
journey to the schools, but now it was no longer necessary to run at
twilight because the new route lay diagonally across Hyde Park--and Hyde
Park stands open to our bolder citizens night and day.

It is queer that I do not remember the particulars of that move, nor can
I recall the address of that house in which I lodged in Westbourne Park,
nor the names of either my landlady, her sub-tenant or her lodger. The
few facts I have given and one or two other slightly salacious details
remain in my memory, but all the rest of that interlude is forgotten
beyond all recalling. It links to nothing else. I disliked it and put it
out of my mind. I cannot remember how long it was, whether it was a
matter of weeks or months that I lodged there before I went to Euston
Road. I looked, so to speak, through a hole in my life of some weeks
more or less, into a sort of humanity, coarser, beastlier and baser than
anything I had ever known before. None of the other people in my
experience before or since were quite so like simmering hot mud as that
Westbourne Park household. I cannot recall really pleasant things about
anybody in it, whereas there is scarcely any other group of people in
my past which had not its redeeming qualifications. I think the peculiar
unpleasantness of that episode lies in the fact that we were all too
close together. We were as congested as the Zoo monkeys used to be
before the benign reign of Sir Chalmers Mitchell. Crowded in that big
cage they seemed in those days the nastiest of created things. Now,
distributed spaciously under happier and less provocative conditions
even the baboons have become--practically--respectable.

I can recall very little about Janie Gall beyond this timely
intervention. She was a tall, blonde, sedate young woman whose life had
been divided hitherto between England and her father's ship in the far
east. She told me once that she was the first white woman ever to visit
the Pelew Islands, but she had nothing very much to tell me about those
distant scenes. She passed out of my world and afterwards I learnt she
had gone to Sweden and had married a Swede named Alsing. I have a
perfectly clear picture of myself walking along Knightsbridge and
talking with her, and nearly everything else about her is obliterated.
Did she go first, or afterwards, to a well-known mourning warehouse in
Regent Street? I cannot remember any of these details. They are after
all very trifling details.

But 181 Euston Road stands out very bleak and distinct in my memories.
In the eighties Euston Road was one of those long corridors of tall
gaunt houses which made up a large part of London. It was on the
northern boundary of Bloomsbury. Its houses were narrow and without the
plaster porticos of their hinterland and of Bayswater, Notting Hill,
Pimlico, Kilburn and suchlike regions. They had however, narrow strips
of blackened garden between them and the street, gardens in which at the
utmost grew a dying lilac or a wilted privet. One went up half a dozen
steps to the front door and the eyebrows of the basement windows were on
a level with the bottom step.

So far as I can puzzle out the real history of a hundred years ago,
there was a very considerable economic expansion after the Napoleonic
war, years before the onset of the railways. The steam railway was a
great stimulus to still further expansion, its political consequences
were tremendous, but it was itself a product of a general release of
energy and enterprise already in progress. Under a rgime of
unrestricted private enterprise, this burst of vigour produced the most
remarkable and lamentable results. A system of ninety-nine year building
leases was devised, which made vast fortunes for the ground landlords
and rendered any subsequent reconstruction of the houses put up almost
impossible until the ground lease fell in. Under these conditions
private enterprise spewed a vast quantity of extremely unsuitable
building all over the London area, and for four or five generations made
an uncomfortable incurable stress of the daily lives of hundreds of
thousands of people.

It is only now, after a century, that the weathered and decaying lava of
this mercenary eruption is being slowly replaced--by new feats of
private enterprise almost as greedy and unforeseeing. Once they were
erected there was no getting rid of these ugly dingy pretentious
substitutes for civilized housing. They occupied the ground. There was
no choice; people just had to do with them and pay the high rents
demanded. From the individualistic point of view it was an admirable
state of affairs. To most Londoners of my generation these rows of
jerry-built unalterable homes seemed to be as much in the nature of
things as rain in September and it is only with the wisdom of
retrospect, that I realize the complete irrational scrambling
planlessness of which all of us who had to live in London were the
victims.

The recklessly unimaginative entrepreneurs who built these great areas
of nineteenth century London and no doubt made off to more agreeable
surroundings with the income and profits accruing, seem to have thought,
if they thought at all, that there was an infinite supply of prosperous
middle-class people to take the houses provided. Each had an ill-lit
basement with kitchen, coal cellars and so forth, below the ground
level. Above this was the dining-room floor capable of division by
folding doors into a small dining-room and a bureau; above this again
was a drawing-room and above this a floor or so of bedrooms in
diminishing scale. No bathroom was provided and at first the plumbing
was of a very primitive kind. Servants were expected to be cheap and
servile and grateful, and most things, coals, slops, and so forth had to
be carried by hand up and down the one staircase. This was the London
house, that bed of Procrustes to which the main masses of the
accumulating population of the most swiftly growing city in the world,
including thousands and thousands of industrial and technical workers
and clerks, students, foreigners upon business missions, musicians,
teachers, the professional and artistic rank and file, agents, minor
officials, shop employees living out and everyone indeed who ranked
between the prosperous householder and the slum denizen, had to fit
their lives. The multiplying multitude poured into these moulds with no
chance of protest or escape. From the first these houses were cut-up by
sub-letting and underwent all sorts of cheap and clumsy adaptations to
the real needs of the time. It is only because the thing was spread over
a hundred years and not concentrated into a few weeks that history fails
to realize what sustained disaster, how much massacre, degeneration and
disablement of lives, was due to the housing of London in the nineteenth
century.

(But the autobiography of any denizen of any of the swelling great
cities of the nineteenth century who wished to place his story in regard
to the historical past and the future would have, I suppose, a similar
story to tell of housing conditions; the same tale of growth without
form--like a cancer. New York was almost as bad and St. Petersburg far
worse. There is a dreadful flavour of mortality about these city growths
of the past hundred years, so that one wonders at times whether the
world will ever completely recover from them. Nowhere was there, nowhere
is there yet, an intelligent preparation of accommodation for the
specialized civilians in the endless variety rendered inevitable by the
enlarging social body. Nowhere was there protection from those Smart
Alecs, the primary poison of the whole process, who piled up the rents.
Even when the tenants were people who did work of vital importance to
the community, the ground had been so sold under their feet that they
came back from work to needlessly restricted and devitalizing quarters
for their sleep and leisure.)

My uncle William had been no better business man than my father and he
had had no skill in cricket or any other earning power to fall back
upon. He had been a draper and, my mother said, extravagant. I had seen
him on one occasion, a dark shabby unhappy man clad in black, who came
to Atlas House one wintry afternoon, ate with us, talked apart with my
father, borrowed a half sovereign from our insufficiency and
departed--to die not long afterwards in a workhouse infirmary. He had
married one of two sisters named Candy, daughters of a small Hampshire
farmer; the other had remained unmarried and, after their father's
death, with a van load of furniture and a few pounds, she and my widowed
aunt had come to London to live by letting lodgings. They planned to
occupy the basement, cooking in the back kitchen and living in the front
and doing all the work up and down the house; the dining-room floor to
be let to one tenant and the drawing-room floor to another and all the
rest of the bedrooms to nice young men or respectable young ladies; and
thus they would get a living. They made no provision in their estimates
for the wear and tear of their furniture nor the wear and tear of
themselves, and so, year by year, their rooms and their services became
less and less attractive and desirable. That was what happened to
countless widows, old servants with a scrap of "savings," wives of
employees who wanted to help their husbands a bit and all that vast
miscellany of dim and dingy women, the London landladies, who were guyed
so mercilessly in the popular fiction of the time. The larger, more
successful, lodging houses had a "slavey," a poor drudge to do the
heavier carrying and scrubbing, but people like my aunt and her sister,
had to be their own slaveys.

When my cousin Janie Gall took me to tea at Euston Road the Saturday
afternoon before my removal, my aunt and her sister were in company
costume with caps and small aprons, like my mother at Up Park. But even
then I thought them grimy, and, poor dears! they _were_ grimy. They were
far grimier than my mother had ever been in the worst days at Atlas
House. How could they have been anything else, seeing that the house was
warmed throughout by coal-fires and that they were perpetually carrying
up scuttles of coal (at sixpence a scuttle) to their various lodgers,
and dusting and scrubbing and turning out rooms and dealing with slops
and ashes? My aunt Mary was a little bright-eyed woman and very
affectionate and lovable from the beginning; her sister was larger, with
a small eye and profile faintly suggestive of a parrot, judicious in her
manner and given to moods of gloom and disapproval. As we sat talking
politely, a dark-eyed girl of my own age, in the simple and pretty "art"
dress that then prevailed came shyly into the room and stood looking at
us. She had a grave and lovely face, very firmly modelled, broad brows
and a particularly beautiful mouth and chin and neck. This was my cousin
Isabel whom later I was to marry.

It was arranged that I should have a room upstairs and work at my notes
in the evening by the gas light in the underground front room. This was
a rather crowded room with hanging shelves for books, a what-not and a
piano upon which at times my cousin played not very skilfully the few
pieces of music she had learnt. My aunt would darn stockings and her
sister fret over accounts, or sometimes we would play whist, at which
Miss Candy, aunt Arabella, was as precise as Lamb's Mrs. Battle. She
found the way her sister Mary played particularly trying. "I'm silly,"
said my aunt Mary anticipating her reproof. "You _shouldn't_ be silly,
Mary," said auntie Bella. They had been saying that over and over again
since they were girls--far back in the eighteen fifties.

On occasion, when the upstairs lodgers were away or the rooms unlet, we
transferred our evenings to the drawing-room or dining-room. If I wanted
to concentrate I went to my own bedroom and there I would work by
candle-light, often in an overcoat, with my feet wrapped about with my
clean underlinen and stuck into the lowest drawer of my chest of drawers
to keep them out of the draught along the floor.

I forget most of the lodgers. There was a woman student at University
College who had the drawing-room floor for some years, and a German
woman in the dining-room whose visitors roused Auntie Bella's censorious
curiosity. Some of them were men, and foreigners at that. "We mustn't
come to that sort of thing," said Aunt Arabella darkly, but went no
further in the matter.

On the top floor was a poor old clergyman and his wife, who presently
died one after the other, the wife first. He had either never had a
vicarage or he had lost one, and he earned a precarious income by going
off to churches for a week-end or a week or so on "supply," to relieve
the regular incumbent. Until, one wintry week-end, some careless person
sent an open dog-cart to meet him at the railway station and gave him
pneumonia. Apparently he had no surviving friends or if he had they did
not come forward; he died intestate and practically penniless, and I
escorted my aunt one wet and windy morning to Highgate cemetery where we
were the only mourners at his funeral. Another old clerical derelict,
with a dewdrop at his nose-tip, hurried through the service. It was my
first funeral. I had never dreamt that a clergyman could end so
shabbily, or that the Establishment could discard its poor priests so
heartlessly. It was quite a new light on the church. My little aunt was
his sole creditor and executor and I doubt if, when the doctor was
satisfied, there was much left to set against the arrears of the poor
old fellow's bill.

I lodged at 181 Euston Road for all the rest of my student life. Every
day in the session, unless I got up too late, I walked to South
Kensington. I would go through the back streets as far as the top of
Regent Street with Isabel; she worked in Regent Street as a retoucher of
photographs; there we said good-bye for the day and I went on for all
the length of Oxford Street to the Marble Arch and thence across the
Park to Exhibition Road. If I was late however I left my cousin
unescorted and went by train from Gower Street Station (Euston Square
they call it now) to Praed Street at a cost of three half-pence, and
then ran across the Gardens. And as I went down Exhibition Road, Euston
Road passed out of my mind and my student life resumed again as if it
were a distinct and separate stream of experience. I thought again upon
the scale of astronomical distances and geological time and how, when
presently Socialism came, life would be valiant and spacious and there
would be no more shabbiness or darkness in the world.


 7

_Heart's Desire_

I want to make my physical presence at the time I left South Kensington,
as real as possible to the reader. I have given five sections to tell
how my picture of life in the universe was built up in my brain; I now
want to show what sort of body it was that carried this brain about and
supplied it with blood and obedient protection. By 1887, it had become a
scandalously skinny body. I was five foot five and always I weighed less
than eight stone. My proper weight should have been 9 st. 11 lbs., but I
was generally nearer to seven, and that in my clothes. And they were
exceedingly shabby clothes. It did not add to the charm of my costume
that frequently I wore a waterproof collar, an invention now happily
forgotten again. It was a glossy white rubber-covered thing that cost
nothing for laundry. That was the point of it. You washed it overnight
with soap and a sponge, and then it was ready in the morning. But after
a time it accumulated something rather like the tartar that discolours
teeth. It marks one difference that is worth noting between the eighties
and the present time, that never a Kensington student, however needy,
would have dreamed of appearing in the classroom or laboratory without
what could at least be considered a white collar. Now, I suppose, a good
half of the Kensington crowd wear open-necked shirts. A certain
proportion of us in those days, and all the staff, wore top hats.

I was as light and thin as I have said, because I was undernourished. I
ate a hastily poached egg and toast in the morning before going off for
my three mile tramp to the schools and I had a meat-tea about five when
I got back--and a bread and cheese supper. Most of my time I was so
preoccupied with my studies and my intellectual interests that I did not
observe what was happening to me, but occasionally and more especially
in my third year, I would become acutely aware of my bad condition. I
would survey my naked body, so far as my bedroom looking-glass
permitted, with extreme distaste, and compare it with the Apollos and
Mercuries in the Art Museum. There were hollows under the clavicles, the
ribs showed and the muscles of the arms and legs were contemptible. I
did not realize that this was merely a matter of insufficient food and
exercise. I thought it was an inferior body--perhaps past hope of
mending.

To me, in my hidden thoughts, the realization that my own body was thin
and ugly was almost insupportable--as I suppose it would be to most
young men or women. In the secret places of my heart I wanted a
beautiful body and I wanted it because I wanted to make love with it,
and all the derision and humour with which I treated my personal
appearance in my talking and writing to my friends, my caricatures of my
leanness and my unkempt shabbiness, did not affect the profundity of
that unconfessed mortification. Each year I was becoming much more
positively and urgently sexual and the desire to be physically strong
and attractive was intense. I do not know how far my psychology in these
matters is exceptional, but I have never been able to consider any sort
of love as tolerable except a complete encounter of two mutually
desirous bodies--and they have to be reasonably lovely bodies. The
circumstances must be beautiful or adventurous or both. I believe this
is how things are with nine people out of ten; as natural as hunger and
thirst.

The fact that I was slovenly to look upon and with hollows under my
collar-bones and with shoulder-blades that stuck out, could not alter
these insistent demands of the life in me. No doubt these realizations
reinforced those balancing inhibitions and that wariness and
fastidiousness which are as natural as the primary cravings, and made me
more than normally secretive; but to hold down an urgency is not to
diminish it. I had quite another set of motives, ambition, a desire for
good intellectual performance and that vague passion for service which
expressed itself in my socialism, and I tried, not always successfully,
to take refuge in these from my more vital and intimate imperatives.

Beautiful girls and women do not come the way of poor students in
London. One was nearer to such beings among the costume hands and
counter assistants of the draper's shop. There were a few friendly women
fellow-students in the laboratories, but they deliberately disavowed sex
in their dress and behaviour. Sex consciousness broke out to visibility
only among the Art students, and these we saw but rarely during brief
promenades in the Art Museum, which made a kind of neutral territory
between the Art Schools and ourselves. On my long march back to Euston
Road I would see women walking in the streets, especially along Oxford
Street and Regent Street, and sometimes in the light of the shops, one
would shine out with an effect of loveliness and set my imagination
afire. I would be reminded of Ellen Terry walking in the sunshine upon
the lawn at Surly Hall. Or I would see some handsome girl riding in the
Row or taking a dog for a run in the park. They were all as inaccessible
as the naked women in the Chantry pictures.

It was practically inevitable that all this suppressed and accumulating
imaginative and physical craving in me should concentrate upon the one
human being who was conceivable as an actual lover; my cousin Isabel.
She and I had from the outset a subtle sense of kindred that kept us in
spite of differences, marriage and divorce, friendly and confident of
one another to the end of her days, but I think that from the beginning
we should have been brother and sister to each other, if need, proximity
and isolation had not forced upon us the rle of lovers, very innocent
lovers. She was very pleasant to look upon, gentle mannered, kind and
firm, and about her I released all the pent up imaginations of my heart.
I was devoted to her, I insisted, and she was devoted to me. We were
passionate allies who would conquer the world together. In spite of all
appearances, there was something magnificent about us. She did her best
to follow me, though something uncontrollable in her whispered that this
was all nonsense. And whenever we could avoid the jealous eye of Auntie
Bella, we kissed and embraced. Aunt Mary did not embarrass us because
she had taken to me from the beginning.

Across a gulf of half a century I look with an extreme detachment and
yet with an intense sympathy upon these two young Londoners, walking
out together, whispering in a darkened staircase, hugging in furtive
silence on a landing. Isabel wore simple dresses after the
Pre-Raphaelite fashion. We should think them graceful to-day except that
the sleeves would seem big and puffy to us and the pretty neck
unaccountably hidden. Abroad she wore a cloak in winter and her hats
were usually those velvet caps that also came out of the Cinquecento.

Having stripped my youthful self for your edification I will now cover
up my worst physical deficiencies with my clothes again. They were
rather shabby but very respectable, a grey "mixture" suit and a grey
overcoat in winter. The collar was white even if it was waterproof and
the hat was a hard bowler. There were no soft felt hats until much later
and a cap, in London, would have been disgraceful behaviour. And we
lived in an age when everyone had best clothes. On Sunday we two walked
out together with a certain added seriousness; we walked in Regents Park
or we went to a church or a picture gallery, when there was a picture
gallery open, or to some public meeting, and then I wore a morning coat
and a top hat.

In my desire for correct particulars in this autobiography, I have spent
some time trying to trace the beginnings, the rise and fall of my
successive top hats. They mark periods in human history as surely as do
the ramshackle houses in which I spent the first half of my life and the
incoherent phases of my upbringing and education. In the mind of a
febrile psycho-analyst, these top hats might be made to show the most
curious and significant phases in the upward struggle of the human
intelligence. They were more voluntary and so more subtle in their
fluctuating intimations than were turbans, fezzes, pigtails and the like
which outlasted whole generations. But that history of the rise and fall
of the top hat has yet to be written. When I was born it had already
passed its zenith; cricketers no longer played the game in top
hats--though my father had begun in that fashion; but it still seemed
the most natural thing in the world for me to take out my cousin on
Sundays in this guise. Half the young men I met on that day sported
similar glossy cylinders. In the city and west-end, on a week day, you
rarely saw a man wearing anything else. The streets below repeated the
rhythms of the clustering chimney pots on the roofs above. I must have
acquired my first specimen, when I acquired my morning coat and its
tails, during the second year of my apprenticeship at Southsea. But was
that the one I wore in London? I think it was and if so it went right on
with me to 1891, when it died a natural death--as I shall tell in its
place--in the presence of Mr. Frank Harris, the editor of the
_Fortnightly Review_. After that I think I bought another to attend a
funeral and a third seems to have marked a phase of social acquiescence
before the War. I went to Bond Street picture shows, and the Academy, in
the latter. It ended as a charade property for my sons at Easton Glebe.
Since then I have had no more top hats.

But it is just that indication of social acquiescence which justifies
this digression and makes the top hat of my student days so significant.
It was the symbol of complete practical submission to a whole world of
social conventions. It was not, in my case at any rate, just a careless
following of the current fashion, for peace and quietness. That early
top hat in particular had been economized for, it expressed an effort,
it had _had_ to be worn.

Now as my cousin and I walked along the broad path between the flower
beds of Regents Park--bright and gay they were then but not nearly so
beautiful as they are now--I would be talking very earnestly of atheism
and agnosticism, of republicanism, of the social revolution, of the
releasing power of art, of Malthusianism, of free-love and such-like
liberating topics. In a tail coat and top hat. My mind was twenty years
ahead of my visible presence. It was indeed making already for the
gardens of Utopia.

But my cousin who was as direct and simple as she was sane, honest and
sweet, was just walking in her Sunday best in Regents Park.

In my eagerness to find in her the mate of my imaginings, I quite
overlooked the fact that while I had been reading and learning
voraciously since the age of seven, she had never broken a leg and so
had never been inoculated with the germ of reading. While I had gone to
school precociously equipped, she had begun just the other way about as
a backward girl, and she had never recovered from that disadvantage. It
was a purely accidental difference to begin with, I am sure her brain
was inherently as good as or better than mine, but an inalterable
difference in range and content was now established. Her world was like
an interior by a Dutch master and mine was a loose headlong panorama of
all history, science and literature. She tried valiantly to hang on to
what I was saying, but the gap was too wide. She thought I must be
dreadfully "clever" to talk such nonsense and she comforted her mind
with the reflection that it had not the slightest relation to things
about us. She liked me by nature and she did not like to irritate me,
but sometimes something I said was too much for her, and she "stood up
for" the old Queen, or the landlords, or business men, or Church;
whatever it was I happened to be abolishing. It was a fixed principle in
her broad and kindly mind that they were all "doing their best" and that
in their places we should do no better. Then, since what she said spoilt
the picture I wanted to make of her in my imagination, I would become
rude and over-bearing.

I tried to get her to read books and particularly the books of Mr. John
Ruskin, but like so many people who have had the benefit of a simple
English education she was book-shy. The language she met in books was
not the language of her speech and thoughts. I doubt if she read a
hundred books in all her life.

I was far too much in a ferment myself to reduce my ideas to terms that
would have persuaded her. I hadn't that much grasp of my own views.
"Everybody doesn't think alike," said my cousin. "But that's no earthly
reason why you shouldn't think at all," I bit, and after that the young
couple would go on their way in a moody silence, dimly aware that there
was something unjust and wrong about it all, but quite unable to find
out what was wrong or in any way set it right. Why was I always talking
of these queer and out-of-the-way things? Because otherwise and
particularly in my silk hat and so forth, I was quite a nice boy. And
again why was I sometimes so pressing about love-making--in a way that
one ought not to think about until one was in a position to marry? And
that might not be for years. A little love-making there might be, no
doubt, but one must not go too far.

My mind in those days refused absolutely to recognize the
incompatibility that is so plain as I state it here. I had laid hands on
Isabel, so to speak, to love her and I would not be denied. She was to
be my woman whether she liked it or not. I tethered my sexual and
romantic imagination to her so long as I was in London--and that, quite
as much as my poverty, saved me from the squalor of the street-walker.
With a devotion that was more than half jealousy, whenever work did not
hold me at South Kensington I used to devour my meat tea and then set
off out again down to Regent Street to meet her and bring her home, and
always when she was working in the evening at some art classes at the
Birkbeck Institute, I made my way through the dark Bloomsbury Squares to
meet her. These evening assiduities kept me exercised physically but
they made grave inroads upon the time I should have given to my proper
work. And I loved her smile, I loved her voice, I loved her feminity, I
loved to feel that--provided I did not go too far--she was mine. And
someday, somewhen, I should do something fine and successful and the
world would be at my feet; her tacit reservations would vanish and she
would realize that everything I said, did and wanted, was right.

I was always wanting to board and storm and subjugate her imagination so
that it would come out at last of its own accord to meet mine. It never
came out to meet me.

Through some mysterious instinct my little Aunt Mary understood and
believed in my heart's desire, but Auntie Bella was sterner stuff, with
a more sceptical disposition and an acuter sense of reality. She thought
it a pity that Isabel and I were so much together.

That was the nave intensely personal other side of my life, to which I
walked back daily across Hyde Park from that interplay of lectures room,
laboratory, debating society and student talk described in the earlier
sections of this chapter.

One of the queer things about us human beings is the way the obvious
consequences of our actions take us by surprise. I will not now apply
this to the large scale instances of the great wars of 1914 and, shall
we say?--1940. But I do remember very vividly how unprepared I was to
walk the plank as a condemned science student in the summer of 1887. I
had done practically everything necessary to ensure failure and
dismissal, but when these came they found me planless and amazed. I
suppose that is the way of youth--and all animals. Foresight is among
the latest and incompletest of the acquisitions of mankind.

Abruptly the self confidence which had never really failed me since my
escape from the Southsea Drapery Emporium, collapsed like a pricked
bladder. I had no outlook, no qualifications, no resources, no
self-discipline and no physique.

"And what is to become of me _now_?" I asked, in a real panic for the
first time since my triumphant exodus from the draper's shop.




CHAPTER THE SIXTH

_STRUGGLE FOR A LIVING_


 1

_Sixth Start in Life or Thereabouts (1887)_

I have to thank my lucky stars--and a faithful friend or so--that I did
not sink as a result of my insubordinations, inattentions, digressions
and waste of energy at South Kensington into absolute failure. Most of
the orderly students in my generation made good as professors and
fellows of the Royal Society, as industrial leaders, public officials,
heads of important science schools; knighthoods and the like are
frequent among them; I am probably the only completely unsatisfactory
student turned out by the Normal School, who did not go the pace there
and who yet came up again and made a comparative success in life. I was
now nearly of age and able to realize the dangers of my position in the
world, and I put up a fight according to my lights. But it was a wild
and ill-planned fight, and the real commander of my destinies was a
singularly facetious Destiny, which seemed to delight in bowling me over
in order to roll me through, kicking and struggling, to some new and
quite unsuspected opportunity. I have already explained how I became one
of the intelligentsia and was saved from a limited life behind a
draper's counter by two broken legs, my own first, and then my father's.
I have now to tell how I was guided to mental emancipation and real
prosperity by a smashed kidney, a ruptured pulmonary blood vessel, an
unsuccessful marriage and an uncontrollable love affair.

My very obstinate self-conceit was also an important factor in my
survival. I shall die, as I have lived, the responsible centre of my
world. Occasionally I make inelegant gestures of self-effacement but
they deceive nobody, and they do not suit me. I am a typical Cockney
without either reverence or a sincere conviction of inferiority to any
fellow creature. In building up in my mind a system of self-protection
against the invincible fact that I was a failure as a student and
manifestly without either the character or the capacity for a proper
scientific career, I had convinced myself that I was a remarkable wit
and potential writer. There must be compensation somewhere. I went on
writing, indeed, as a toy-dog goes on barking I yapped manuscript,
threateningly, at an inattentive world.

With every desire to be indulgent to myself I am bound to say that every
scrap of writing surviving from that period witnesses that the output
was copious rubbish, imitative of the worst stuff in the contemporary
cheap magazine. There was not a spark of imagination or original
observation about it. I made not the slightest use of the very
considerable reservoir of scientific and general knowledge already
accumulated in my brain. I don't know why. Perhaps I was then so vain
that I believed I could write _down_ to the public. Or so modest that I
thought the better I imitated the better I should succeed. The fact
remains that I scribbled vacuous trash. The only writing of any quality
at all is to be found in the extremely self-conscious letters I wrote to
my friends. Here I really did try to amuse and express myself in my own
fashion. These letters are adorned with queer little drawings and A. T.
Simmons and Elizabeth Healey among others, seem to have found them worth
keeping so that a number of them have been preserved to this day. There
is fun in them. I doubt if I could possibly have carried on and become a
writer without the support of those two people. They were my sole
"public" for years. No letters I wrote to my cousin Isabel survive. I
cannot remember writing to her though certainly I must have done so. I
doubt if I wrote to her with the same zest and certainty of
appreciation.

My plans for a rally against my richly deserved disaster as student, had
a certain reasonableness. I was now in a shocking state of bodily
unfitness, very thin, under-exercised and with no muscular dexterity,
loose in gesture, slow on the turn and feeble in the punch; and it
seemed to me that if I got a job as an assistant in a school deep in the
country, with good air, good food and good games, (I had my previous
invigoration at health-giving Midhurst in my mind) I might pick up the
neglected beginnings of my bodily manhood and at the same time get a
little leisure to learn, by the method of trial and error, what was the
elusive vital thing I didn't yet know about this writing business. I had
had, by the bye, one small success and earned a guinea. I had sent a
short story, now happily untraceable, to the most popular fiction weekly
of those days, the _Family Herald_. It was a very misleading success. It
was a sloppy, sentimental, dishonest, short story and its acceptance
strengthened me in my delusion that I had found the way to do it.

Meanwhile I had to live by teaching. In spite of my rather wilted
qualifications, there were plenty of residential school jobs at forty or
fifty pounds a year to be got; I had matriculated as an ex-collegiate in
London University, I was qualified to earn grants in a number of
subjects, and I had had teaching experience. The Holt Academy, Wrexham,
seemed, on paper, the most desirable of all the places offered me by the
agencies. It was a complex organization. A boys' school plus a girls'
school plus a college for the preparation of young men for the
Calvinistic Methodist ministry, promised variety of teaching and
possibilities of talk and exercise with students of my own age. I
expected a library, playing fields, a room of my own. I expected fresh
air and good plain living. I thought all Wales was lake and mountain and
wild loveliness. And the Holt Academy had the added advantage of
re-opening at the end of July and so shortening the gap of impecuniosity
after the College of Science dispersed.

But when I got to Holt I found only the decaying remains of a once
prosperous institution set in a dismal street of houses in a flat
ungainly landscape. Holt was a small old town shrunk to the dimensions
of a village, and its most prominent feature was a gasometer. The school
house was an untidy dwelling with what seemed to be a small whitewashed
ex-chapel, with broken and dirty windows and a brick floor, by way of
schoolroom. The girls' school was perhaps a score of children and
growing girls in a cramped little villa down the street. The candidates
for the ministry were three lumpish young men apparently just off the
fields, and the boys' school was a handful of farmers' and shopkeepers'
sons. My new employer presented himself as a barrel of a man with bright
eyes in a round, ill-shaven face, a glib tongue and a staccato Welsh
accent, dressed in the black coat, white tie and top hat dear to Tommy
Morley, the traditional garb of the dominie. He was dirty,--I still
remember his blackened teeth--and his wife was dirty, with a certain
life-soiled prettiness. He conducted me to a bedroom which I was to
share, I learnt, with two of the embryo Calvinistic ministers.

My dismay deepened as I went over the premises and discovered the
routines of the place. The few boarders were crowded into a room or so,
sleeping two and three in a bed with no supervision. My only colleague
was a Frenchman, Raut, of whom I heard years afterwards, because he
claimed to have possessed himself of the manuscript of a story by me
which he was offering for sale. (I found myself unable to authenticate
that manuscript.) Meals were served in a room upon a long table covered
with American cloth and the food was poor and the cooking bad. There was
neither time-table nor scheme of work. We started lessons just anyhow.
Spasmodic unexpected half-holidays alternated with storms of educational
energy, when we worked far into the evening. Jones had a certain gift
for eloquence which vented itself in long prayers and exhortations at
meals or on any odd occasion. He would open school with prayer. On
occasions of crisis he would pray. His confidence in God was remarkable.
He never hesitated to bring himself and us to the attention of an
Avenging Providence. He did little teaching himself, but hovered about
and interfered. At times, the tedium of life became too much for him and
his wife. He would appear unexpectedly in the schoolroom, flushed and
staggering, to make a long wandering discourse about nothing in
particular or to assail some casual victim with vague disconcerting
reproaches. Then for a day or so he would be missing and in his private
quarters, and Raut and I and the theological students would keep such
order as we found practicable and convenient.

These theological students aimed at some easy, qualifying examination
for their spiritual functions. The chief requirement for their high
calling was a capacity for intermittent religious feeling and its
expression in Welsh, and that they had by birth and routine. They were
instructed in "divinity" (poor God!) and the elements of polite learning
when it seemed good to Jones that this should happen. They were not
without ambitions. Their hopes, I learnt, were not bounded by their own
sect. A qualified minister of the Calvinistic Methodists might sometimes
be accepted as a recruit and further polished by--I think it was--the
Wesleyans. A Welsh-speaking Wesleyan again might have scruples of
conscience and get into the Anglican priesthood. The Anglican priesthood
had always openings for Welsh speakers and so, far up the vistas of
life, a living in the established church beckoned to my room-mates. I
know not how far this process of ratting might be carried. An unmarried
Anglican can, I believe, become a Roman Catholic priest. In Christendom
all roads lead to Rome, and so my room-mates were potential, if highly
improbable, popes.

I improvised lessons in the boys' school and in the girls' school, I
taught scripture on Sunday afternoons, played cricket and Association
football to the best of my ability, and made my first attendances at a
Calvinistic Methodist service. It was more vivid and personal than the
Anglican ritual and Rouse, the minister, was more copiously eloquent
even than Jones. I found some of the hymns very effective. I was
particularly fond of that frequent favourite which begins:

    _Not all the blood of goats_
    _Shall for my sins atone._

I liked the lusty voices singing together all out, and there was a
satisfying picturesqueness about the spiritual geography of Beulah Land
and Jordan's Stream, Hermon and Carmel, that let one out, in imagination
at least, from Holt.

    _Christian dost thou hear them_
    _On the Holy ground;_
    _How the Hosts of Midian_
    _Prowl and prowl around?_
    _Christian, up and SMITE them...._

But it was very plain to me, as a surviving letter to Miss Healey
testifies, that I realized my career had got into a very awkward
cul-de-sac. There was no getting away from this place that I could see,
however much I disliked it. I had no money to get away with. There was
nothing for me now but to stick it for at least a year, get some better
clothes, save a few pounds, hammer away at my writing, and hope for some
chance of escape. For a few weeks the weather was very good and I
developed a tendency to let things drift. I seem to have forgotten my
romantic devotion to my cousin very easily; I suppose her inability to
carry on a correspondence had something to do with that. For a time she
just went out of the scheme of happenings. I met the daughter of the
minister of an adjacent parish, Annie Meredith, a mistress in a high
school on holiday, we liked each other at sight and we carried on a
brisk and spirited flirtation. I find I boast about this in my
letters--not to Miss Healey but to A. M. Davies--say she is well read
and talk of spending "whole hours by shady river banks where I talk
grotesquely to her and she very intelligently to me." Had that summer
weather and my returning health and vigour lasted for ever, I suppose I
should have slackened slowly from my futile literary efforts and
reconciled myself altogether to the rle of a second rate secondary
teacher. I should have awakened one day to find myself thirty and still
in a school dormitory.

But this is where the peculiar humour of my Guardian Angel came in.
Annie Meredith went off to her school work leaving Holt remarkably dull
again, and the football season began. I played badly but with a
desperate resolve to improve. The lean shock-headed intellectual doing
his desperate tactless best in open-air games is never an attractive
spectacle. I had a rough time on the field because that was where the
bigger louts got back upon me for my English accent and my irritating
assumption of superior erudition. One bony youngster fouled me. He
stooped, put his shoulders under my ribs, lifted me, and sent me
sprawling.

I got up with muddy hands and knees to go on playing. But a strange
sickness seized upon me. There was a vast pain in my side. My courage
failed me. I couldn't run. I couldn't kick. "I'm going in," I said, and
returned sulkily to the house regardless of the game, amidst sounds of
incredulous derision.

In the house I was violently sick. I went to lie down. Then I was moved
to urinate and found myself staring at a chamber-pot half full of
scarlet blood. That was the most dismaying moment in my life. I did not
know what to do. I lay down again and waited for someone to come.

Nothing very much was done about me that evening, but in the night I was
crawling along the bedroom on all fours, delirious, seeking water to
drink. The next day a doctor was brought from Wrexham. He discovered
that my left kidney had been crushed.

He was a good doctor but he made one mistake which did very much to
restore my prestige at Holt. I had been shocked and sickened but I had
had no acute pain at all. He declared however that I must have suffered
and still be suffering the greatest agony. I did not care to dispute his
ruling. After all he was a specialist and I was an amateur. As it
impressed Jones and Mrs. Jones and seemed likely to raise the low
standard of nursing and sympathy in the place, I adopted the bearing of
a stoical Red Indian under torture, very successfully. I gave the whole
school a most edifying and inexpensive lesson in patient lip-biting
heroism.

I lay in bed in that bleakly furnished bedroom for as long as I could,
meditating on my future. I spent my coming of age in bed. I had, I
decided, to carry on at Holt. I had no money and practically nowhere to
go. My father at Bromley was being sold up. Up Park was wearying of Mrs.
Wells's family.

At intervals Mr. Jones came and looked at me and I regarded him with
that serenity which comes to men who know no alternatives. At first,
being afraid that I might die and under the spell of my heroic self
control, he was effusive for my comfort. "Would I like some books?" He
was going in to Wrexham. I said I had never read _Vanity Fair_. I had
always wanted to read _Vanity Fair_ and this might be my last chance.
"But in your state," protested Jones, sincerely shocked. "The vera name
of the book! It must be a vera vera baaad book."

I didn't get it.

In a few days his attentions faded away. I began to be hungry. The
doctor said I ought to lie some days longer and be kept warm and well
fed. Jones came to suggest I should go home to my friends--unpaid. I
explained that I proposed to get up and resume my duties. The weather
was turning cold and Jones would have no fires until the first of
October, but with a stiffness and ache in my side I got up and went on
with my classes in the brick-floored schoolroom. Presently I had a bad
cough which grew rapidly worse. Then I discovered that my lungs were
imitating my kidney and that the handkerchief into which I coughed was
streaked with blood. The Wrexham doctor, calling to see how I was
getting on, pronounced me consumptive. But consumptive or not, I meant
to see the half year out at least and pocket Jones's twenty pounds. I
had a faint malicious satisfaction in keeping Jones to that.


 2

_Blood in the Sputum (1887)_

In those days we knew very little about tuberculosis. People talked of
consumption. It was not understood to be infectious and since it
produced no symptoms of importance below the diaphragm, it was found
particularly suitable for the purposes of sentimental fiction. The
fragile sympathetic consumptive with his (or her) bright eyes, high
colour and superficially hopeful spirits, doomed to an untimely end--for
it was also supposed to be incurable--had unlimited encouragement to
brave self-pity and the most unscrupulous demands, for toleration and
sacrifice, upon the normal world. So even the intimations, as everyone
supposed them to be, of an early death, were not without their
compensations.

To a certain extent I fell in with the pattern of behaviour expected of
me. I played the interesting consumptive to the best of my ability. But
there were forces in both my body and mind that resented this graceful
cutting down of my sprawling expectations of life. I don't know how a
modern specialist would define my case but it certainly traversed all
the accepted medical science of the eighties. No tuberculous germs were
ever detected, but there was certainly some degenerative process at work
in my lung, breaking down tissue and breaching the walls of blood
vessels. This process went on for about five years, rising to a maximum
and then being arrested and ceasing, leaving a scarred lung. There was
an attack and there were resistances that finally won. But in my case,
as in so many cases, there was (and is) no medical science adequate to
define the evidently very complex tangle of stimulations and pro and
anti-functional forces at work. A degenerative adjustment of my damaged
kidney began in 1898 to complicate the hidden business still further.
Consequently, beginning with my condemnation by the Wrexham doctor as a
consumptive, there were a series of misleading diagnoses, each one
creating expectations and holding out prospects to which I tried to
adjust my plans of life, and each diagnosis failing in its turn to come
true. As late as 1900, I was building a house at Sandgate specially
facing towards the sun, with bedrooms, living rooms, loggia and study
all on one floor, because I believed I should presently have to live in
a bath-chair and be wheeled from room to room. And all the while an
essential healthiness was doing its successful utmost to bring me back
to physical normality.

Not only were my blood and tissues resisting the suggestion that I was
one of those transitory gifted beings too fine and fragile for ordinary
life, but my mind also was in active revolt against that idea. I had, I
will admit, some beautiful moments of exquisite self-pity, tender even
to tears, but they were rare. In my bones I disliked the idea of dying,
I disliked it hotly and aggressively. I was exasperated not to have
become famous; not to have seen the world. Still more deeply exasperated
was I at the nets of restraint about me that threatened that I should
die a virgin. I had an angry insurgence of sexual desire. I began to
accumulate a curious resentment against my cousin Isabel because she had
had no passion for me. I wanted to go out and pursue strange women. I
reproached myself with my discretion about the street walkers of London
during my student days. I make no apology for these moods; that is how
the thought of enfeeblement and death stirred my imagination. This
resentment at being cheated out of a tremendous crowning experience was
to survive into my later sexual life, long after the obsession with
death, from which it had arisen, had lifted. My imagination exaggerated
the joy of embracing a woman until it became maddeningly desirable.

There was also a considerable amount of pure fear in my mind, a sort of
claustrophobia, for though I disbelieved intellectually in immortality I
found it impossible to imagine myself non-existent. I felt I was going
to be stifled, frozen and shut up, but still I felt I should know of it.
I had a nightmare sense of the approach of this conscious nothingness.

In no respect I think does the mature mind differ so widely from the
youthful mind as in its fear of death. I doubt if a young mind is really
capable of grasping the idea of a cessation of experience, although it
may be acutely alive to defeat and deprivation. But as life unfolds into
realization, death loses that sting. For the past quarter of a century
at any rate my death, as death, has had no terror or distress for me. It
does not, I realize, concern me. I want to complete certain things, but
if death sees fit to come before I have done them, I shall never know of
it. Maybe I do not speak for all oldish men here. When I talked with
Sigmund Freud in Vienna this spring, he did not seem to feel as I do
about death. He is older than I and he was in bad health, but he seemed
to be clinging to life and to his reputation and teaching much more
youthfully than I do to mine. But then perhaps he was just drawing me
out.

Quite apart from the general fear of death, disappointment and
frustration which weighed so heavily upon my imagination at times during
my consumptive phase, there were unpleasant minor fears and anxieties
that I can still recall acutely. Every time I coughed and particularly
if I had a bout of coughing, there was the dread of tasting the peculiar
tang of blood. And I can remember as though it happened only last night,
the little tickle and trickle of blood in the lungs that preceded a real
hmorrhage. Don't cough too soon? Don't cough too much? There was always
the question how big the flow was to be, how long it would go on, what
was to be the end of it this time. And as one lay exhausted, dreading
even to breathe, there was still the doubt whether it was really over.

I can tell of these disagreeable and dismaying things now that they lie
so far behind me, but at the time I did not confess my states of dread
and dismay to any human being. Here again I can thank my Fate for my
sustaining vanity. I posed consistently as the gay consumptive. Indeed I
carried it off with Holt to the end that I was the invincible Spartan.
My letters to those loyal correspondents of mine, were cheerfully
fatalist and more blasphemous than ever.

My fellow student William Burton, who had followed me as editor of the
_Science Schools Journal_, had got a good job as chemist with Wedgwoods
the potters. The firm had lost many of its old recipes and his work was
to analyse old potsherds and rediscover how the original Wedgwoods used
to mix their more famous wares. He had just married, and he came out of
his honeymoon way with his brightly new little wife to see me. I had a
meal with them in the Holt Inn. It was a good and sustaining thing for
me to have them thus concerned about me. They excited me and cheered me
up, but they were secretly distressed to find me more fragile and
emaciated than ever. They departed, bless their friendly hearts!
scheming helpfully about me.

The magic word consumptive softened the heart of Up Park towards me. The
defences erected against any further invasions by Mrs. Wells's family
were lowered. I came to what I considered a fair arrangement with Jones
and set out upon my journey to Harting. I think I must have stopped the
night at 181 Euston Road but I cannot remember. I was installed in a
room next to my mother's at Up Park and celebrated my arrival by a more
serious hmorrhage than any I had had hitherto.

It chanced that a certain young Dr. Collins was staying in the house and
he was summoned to my assistance. I was put upon my back, ice-bags were
clapped on my chest and the flow was stopped. I was satisfying all the
conventional expectations of a consumptive very completely. I lay still
for a day or so and then began to live again in a gentle fashion in a
pleasant chintz-furnished, fire-warmed, sunlit room. My previous few
weeks at Holt assumed the quality of a bad dream, a quality it has never
quite lost. A few days later came a box of books from Burton, an
unforgettable kindness.

I must have stayed at Up Park for nearly four months. It was an
interlude not only of physical recovery but mental opportunity. I read,
wrote and thought abundantly. I got better and had relapses, but none
were so grave as the breakdown on arriving. Collins was a brilliant
young heretic in the medical world of those days, altogether more modern
than my Wrexham practitioner, and he rather dashed my pose as a
consumptive and encouraged my secret hope of life by refusing to
recognize me as a tuberculous case. He held--and events have justified
him--that with a year or so of gentle going I might make a complete
recovery. But he was rather distrustful of the stability of my damaged
kidney and there again he was right. And he spoke of the possibility of
diabetes and now I am diabetic. We had one or two interesting talks
about things in general. He was a leading Comtist and an Individualist,
as his father was before him, and a valiant man in the affairs of London
University. He is now Sir William Job Collins, as obstinately Positivist
as ever and only a few weeks ago I reminded him of his excellent
diagnosis in our Reform Club.

Geoffrey West, my indefatigable biographer, knows more about these
months I spent at Up Park in 1887-88 than I do, for he has exhumed
quite a remarkable number of letters written by me during that time. I
seem to have had alternations of recovery and hope with relapse and
stoicism. I seem to have hoped very readily and taken risks forthwith.
At one time I am confined to my room, at another I boast of a sunlit
seven mile walk in thawing snow. But that was followed by a "rustling
lung." Up Park below stairs was gay at Christmas and I was gay with it.
My father had been sold up and had come with the vestiges of that old
furniture in Atlas House to a small cottage at Nyewoods by Rogate
station, three miles from Up Park. He had relinquished the idea of
earning anything, modestly but firmly. My elder brother, who had fretted
as a draper's assistant from the glorious days of my revolt, had joined
him there. He proposed to make a new start in life as a watch and clock
peddler and repairer. Freddie came to this Rogate cottage for his
Christmas holiday and the whole family was shockingly in evidence for
the Christmas feast in the Servants Hall, in excellent appetite and the
most shameless and unjustifiable high spirits. A letter to Davies,
quoted by West, makes it apparent that I danced abundantly and larked
about and amused the company by some sort of performance with my brother
Frank; but what it was about I cannot now remember. I am sure my mother
chuckled with happiness to see her four menfolk so happy. I seem to have
been concealing from my mother the fact that there was still blood in my
sputum either to spare her feelings or else to escape excessive
coddling, but Heaven knows how much posing and exaggeration there is in
these letters to my friends.

What is however very plain in them is the gradual transition from the
forced courage of a genuine invalid to the restlessness and irritability
of a convalescent. I began to find my very comfortable quarters irksome
and unstimulating. I had no one to talk to except the Harting curate,
and that probably accounts for the voluminousness of these letters West
unearthed. Other frustrations were becoming more and more vexatious. I
fretted for some lovely encounter that never occurred. Yet, though I did
not realize it, I was getting through something of very great importance
in my education during these months of outward inaction. I was reading
and reading poetry and imaginative work with an attention to language
and style that I had never given these aspects of literature before. I
was becoming conscious of the glib vacuity of the trash I had been
writing hitherto. When I look back upon my life, there is nothing in it
that seems quite so preposterous as the fact that I set about writing
fiction for sale, after years of deliberate abstinence from novels or
poetry. Now, belatedly, I began to observe and imitate. I read
everything accessible. I ground out some sonnets. I struggled with
Spenser; I read Shelley, Keats, Heine, Whitman, Lamb, Holmes, Stevenson,
Hawthorne, and a number of popular novels. I began to realize the
cheapness and flatness of my own phrasing. I went on indeed with the
"novel" I had worked upon at Wrexham, but with a growing distaste. I
hadn't the vigour to scrap it forthwith and begin all over again. And I
dislike leaving things unfinished. But I began to write other stuff, I
aired the most extraordinary critical opinions in my letters to Miss
Healey and apparently I sent her some verse. Because I find West quoting
me to her: "You say my lines are lacking in metre--metres are used for
gas, not the outpourings of the human heart. You say my poem has no
feet! The humming bird has no feet, the cherubim round the Mater
Dolorosa have no feet. The ancients figured the poetic afflatus as a
horse _winged_ to signify the poet was sparing of his feet."

Later on in the year, with a quickened sense of what writing could be
and do, I read over with shame and contrition all that I had written and
I burnt almost all of it. That seemed the only proper way of finishing
it. I realized that I had still to learn the elements of this writing
business. I had to go back to the beginning, learn to handle short
essays, short stories and possibly a little formal verse, until I had
acquired the constructive strength and knowledge of things in general
demanded for any more ambitious effort. I had not, I saw, been _writing_
so far. I had just been playing at writing. I had been scribbling and
assuring myself and my friends that it signified something. I had been
covering my failure at South Kensington with these unfounded literary
pretensions. But it is very illuminating to note that I never showed
these copious scribblings to anyone. No human being, not even myself,
knows now what _Lady Frankland's Companion_ was supposed to be about. I
remember only sheets and sheets of boyish scrawl. I saw myself at last
with a rare and dreadful plainness. Should I always be too conceited to
learn? I knew I had a gift, a quality, but apparently I was too vain and
confident about that quality ever to make use of it. I chewed the bitter
cud of these reflections as I prowled through the beech-woods and
bracken-dells of Up Park or over the yew-dotted downs by Telegraph
House.

Every bit of strength I recovered, every ounce of weight I added,
deepened my dissatisfaction with the indolent life I was leading, and
the feebleness of my invalid efforts. I wanted to resume my attack upon
the world, but on a broader basis now and with more soundness and
deliberation. My idea of getting a job to keep me while writing had been
a sound one, even if it had chanced upon disaster at Holt. I realized
that I must insert in the place of "while writing" a preliminary stage
"while learning to write" but otherwise the plan of campaign was sound.
Better luck next time--if I was to have a next time.

And presently the Burtons, installed in a newly furnished new little
house conveniently close to the Wedgwood pot-bank at Etruria, wrote to
say that they had a visitor's room quite at my disposal. It was a most
enticing invitation and I accepted very eagerly. I found the Burtons and
their books and their talk, and the strange landscape of the Five Towns
with its blazing iron foundries, its steaming canals, its clay whitened
pot-banks and the marvellous effects of its dust and smoke-laden
atmosphere, very stimulating. As I went about the place I may have
jostled in the streets of Burslem against another ambitious young man of
just my age who was then clerk to a solicitor, that friendly rival of my
middle years, Arnold Bennett.

There is a letter I wrote in February 1888, to Dr. Collins, which shows
very clearly my conception of my position at that time. I lift it in its
entirety from West's book. It is interesting as a sample of my early
prose. There is something more than a little suggestive of Babu English
in the phrasing. I had not yet fused my colloquial with the literary
language which was still slightly foreign to me.

"You pointed out when you last did me the favour of examining my chest,
how difficult it would be to get any employment compatible with my
precarious health, without special concessions and personal influence.
Miss Fetherstonhaugh holds out very small hope of assisting me in this
way, and Sir William King, her agent, to whom she mentioned the matter,
spoke in an exceedingly depreciating way of the prospects of obtaining
anything of the kind required. I am very ignorant of social conditions
above my own level, but it appears to me that you, moving, as you are,
among people who as a class are engaged in more vigorous intellectual
employments and who are more intricately involved in the business of
life than those with whom Miss Fetherstonhaugh comes chiefly into
contact, would be far more influential in this present matter than she
is. A very large portion of the visitors here is of the three orders of
military gentry, clerical dignitaries, or that fortunate independent
class whose only business is to live happily, and it seems to me that
the only employment that such a connection could offer above the rank of
an unmitigated menial, is a private tutorship, for which I should, even
after a very unwholesome meal of my principles, be vastly less suitable
than the most rejected young gentleman that ever behaved himself at
Oxford. You, on the other hand, are acquainted with men like Harrison,
Bernard Shaw, the Huxleys, who must from the active and extensive nature
of their engagements of necessity employ numerous fags to assist in the
more onerous and less responsible portions of their duties. It was this
that I had especially in view when I mentioned my desire for employment
to you, but I am afraid that I failed to express myself with sufficient
definiteness on that occasion, and that I led you to understand that I
appreciated wine and oil above a consistent position and the prospects
of self-advancement. My constitutional tendencies all incline me to
prefer staking the preservation of my life on my utility, to
imperilling, as everyone counsels, my utility to preserve my life; I
would rather do what I wanted and felt was right to be done, and retire
soon with some faint irradiation of human dignity and self-applause,
than survive for a long period to my own discontent and the general
impoverishment. (This is applied Socialism.) This is my second and more
powerful reason for coming upon you in this way to help me to some work,
because I consider you are not only more able to assist me, but that you
are the only person who is willing and in a position to bring me into
contact with that world of liberal thought in which alone the peculiar
circumstances of my education render me capable of attaining to any
degree of success."

Collins replied kindly but nothing further ensued and I stayed at
Etruria for nearly three months waiting for opportunity to come and find
me. I think I must have been a handful as a guest though neither my host
or hostess betrayed any impatience. I was always on hand. I was very
untidy. I had a teasing habit of luring Burton after his day's work into
exasperating discussions. But, they say--for they are still alive and
good friends of mine--that I used to amuse them greatly by wild
caricatures of life at Holt and Up Park, and by sudden flights of
fantasy. And at Etruria my real writing began. I produced something as
good at least as my letters, something I could read aloud to people I
respected without immediate shame. It was good enough to alter and
correct and write over again.

I projected a vast melodrama in the setting of the Five Towns, a sort of
Staffordshire _Mysteries of Paris_ conceived partly in burlesque, it was
to be a grotesque with lovely and terrible passages. Of this a solitary
fragment survives in my collected short stories as _The Cone_. Moreover
I began a romance, very much under the influence of Hawthorne, which was
printed in the _Science Schools Journal_, the _Chronic Argonauts_. I
broke this off after three instalments because I could not go on with
it. That I realized I could not go on with it marks a stage in my
education in the art of fiction. It was the original draft of what later
became the _Time Machine_, which first won me recognition as an
imaginative writer. But the prose was over-elaborate and with that same
flavour of the Babu, to which I have called attention in my letter to
Dr. Collins. And the story is clumsily invented, and loaded with
irrelevant sham significance. The time traveller, for example, is
called Nebo-gipfel, though manifestly Mount Nebo had no business
whatever in that history. There was no Promised Land ahead. And there is
a lot of fuss about the hostility of a superstitious Welsh village to
this Dr. Nebo-gipfel which was obviously just lifted into the tale from
Hawthorne's _Scarlet Letter_. And think of "Chronic" and "Argonauts" in
the title! The ineptitude of this rococo title for a hard mathematical
invention! I was over twenty-one and I still had my business to learn. I
still jumbled both my prose and my story in an entirely incompetent
fashion. If a young man of twenty-one were to bring me a story like the
_Chronic Argonauts_ for my advice to-day I do not think I should
encourage him to go on writing.

But it was a sign of growing intelligence that I was realizing my
exceptional ignorance of the contemporary world and exploring the
possibilities of fantasy. That is the proper game for the young man,
particularly for young men without a natural social setting of their
own.

Spring passed into summer and I grew stronger every day. It became
manifest that I could not go on living upon the Burtons indefinitely.
One bright afternoon I went out by myself to a little patch of surviving
woodland amidst the industrialized country, called "Trury Woods." There
had been a great outbreak of wild hyacinths that year and I lay down
among them to think. It was one of those sun-drenched afternoons that
are turgid with vitality. Those hyacinths in their upright multitude
were braver than an army with banners and more inspiring than trumpets.

"I have been dying for nearly two-thirds of a year," I said, "and I have
died enough."

I stopped dying then and there, and in spite of moments of some
provocation I have never died since.

I went back to Burton. I had got the two halves of a five-pound note
from my mother against such an eventuality. (People sent divided
five-pound notes in separate letters in those days, for safety.) I told
Burton I was going to London the day after to-morrow.

"What for?" said Burton.

"To find a job."

"My dear chap!" cried Burton, but I think it must have been an immense
relief to him.

I posted letters to various scholastic and employment agencies that
night, and said I would call upon them in two or three days' time. I was
astonished that I had not done so a couple of months before.


 3

_Second Attack on London (1888)_

I have given up counting my starts in life. This return to London was, I
suppose, about the seventh or eighth in order.

When I read over my biography by Geoffrey West, I realize the peculiar
advantages of an autobiographer. For a year between June 1887 and June
1888 I had been an active volcano of letters--and letters that chanced
to be kept. Geoffrey West set about collecting these letters with great
ability and industry. He got more matter than he bargained for and it is
only the mercy of Heaven and my timely holocaust, that saved him from
the manuscript of _Lady Frankland's Companion_ (35,000 words) and other
unpublished outpourings. But in 1888 the eruption died down. Except for
a sketch I sent Simmons of myself very lean and unkempt standing at a
street corner considering an advertisement for sandwichmen, with the
pithy announcement, "I am in London seeking work but at present finding
none," there is very little documentation of the next six months, at the
end of which I turn up suddenly, with my epistolary vigour much
restored, as an assistant master in Henley House School, Kilburn. I even
find myself at a loss now to fix the dates and circumstances of that
intervening period. I have nothing to go upon but patchy memories with
the connecting events forgotten.

I did not want to bother my friends or be bothered by them until I got
that job. I knew that in the last resort I could get money from my
mother, but she had now to support my father at Nyewoods with very
little assistance from brother Frank, and I was ashamed to press on her
too heavily. It is doubtful if she had anything much in hand just at
that time. It was possible I might not find a job because among other
things I was extremely shabby. I arrived, with that old small
portmanteau of mine, at St. Pancras and found a lodging that night in
Judd Street, which I considered to be just within my means; a rather
disconcerting lodging. The room had three beds and one of my fellow
occupants, the lodging-house keeper told me, was "a most respectable
young man who worked at a butcher's." I forget him and I forget if the
third bed was occupied that night. I went to bed early because the
journey up had tired me. The next morning I breakfasted in a coffee
house--one could get a big cup of coffee, a thick slice of bread and
butter and a boiled or fried egg for fourpence or fivepence--and then
set out to find a room of my own in the streets between Grays Inn Road
and the British Museum.

I got one for four shillings a week, in Theobalds Road. It was not
really a whole room but a partitioned-off part of an attic; it had no
fireplace, and it was furnished simply with a truckle bed, a
wash-hand-stand, a chair and a small chest of drawers carrying a looking
glass. The partition was so thin, that audibly I was, so to speak, in
the next room. My neighbours were a young couple on whom I never set
eyes, but their voices became very familiar to me and I learnt much
about their intimate lives. When the intimacy seemed to be rising to a
regrettable level, I would cough vigorously, make my bed creak or move
my chair about, and the young couple would instantly sink out of
existence into a profound silence like a frightened fish in a deep pool.

In this lair I tried to do some writing and my correspondence, and from
it I sallied out to find that job that was to carry me and all my
fortunes until I had really mastered this writing business. I went the
round of the scholastic agents, I put myself on the lists of any
employment agency that did not attempt to exact a fee for registration,
and I answered many impossible and some possible advertisements. I ate
at irregular intervals and economically. There were good little
individual shops where sausages or fish sizzled attractively over gas
jets in the windows; the chops in chop houses were not bad, tea shops
were multiplying; a "cut from the joint and two vegs" in a public house
cost eightpence or ninepence. In Fleet Street I tried a very cheap
vegetarian restaurant once or twice, but it left me hungry in the night.
The scholastic agents said I was late in the field for a permanent job
that year, but they put me down for possible visiting teaching in
science. I did get a little special coaching in geology and mineralogy,
with an army crammer, but that was all. My first substantial employer
was my old fellow-student Jennings.

Jennings was trying to build up a position as a biological coach. He
found his pay as a junior demonstrator in geology at the Science Schools
insufficient, and he was using some of his capital to assemble teaching
equipment. He was also lecturing in biology at the Birkbeck Institute in
Chancery Lane. For these purposes he needed a collection of wall
diagrams and, knowing me to be a sufficient draughtsman for the purpose,
he commissioned me, so soon as he learnt I was in want of work, to make
him a set. His idea was to have these copied from textbooks and high
priced series of diagrams, mostly German, which I could sketch in the
British Museum Reading Room. He bought a piece of calico and paints for
me, I procured one of those now superseded, green, reader's tickets of
very soft card, which lasted a life-time, or until they fell to pieces,
and I made my sketches under the Bloomsbury dome and enlarged them as
diagrams in a small laboratory Jennings shared with a microscopist named
Martin Cole in 27, Chancery Lane. Cole, at the window, prepared, stained
and mounted the microscope slides he sold, while I sprawled over a table
behind him and worked at my diagram painting. Cole's slides were sold
chiefly to medical students and, neatly arranged upon his shelves were
innumerable bottles containing scraps of human lung, liver, kidney and
so forth, diseased or healthy, obtained more or less surreptitiously
from post-mortems and similar occasions.

My job with Jennings came none too soon, for my original five pounds had
ebbed away to nothing. Before I could draw upon him, I came to the
bottom of my resources. I had a sporting wish to carry the thing through
if I possibly could, without a further appeal to my mother. I did some
very fine computations outside small fried-fish shops and the like
during these last days before Jennings and I struck our bargain. At last
I came to an evening when I turned out my pocket and found a small piece
of indiarubber, a pocket knife and a halfpenny. Even in that cheaper
time there was nothing in the way of supper to be done on a halfpenny.
And since even a postcard cost three farthings I had cut myself off from
writing to anyone. I had cut it altogether too fine. I went to bed to
reflect upon the problem. Since I had no watch nor rings or anything of
that sort I had not yet discovered the routines of the pawnshop, and it
was difficult to fix upon anything in my possession that I felt would
appeal to a pawnbroker's appetite. I imagined in my innocence he would
only consider "valuables." I had a bone-handled cane that had originally
cost two and sixpence, some fine vestiges of surplus underclothing,
socks all worn into holes at the heel, two waterproof collars,
discoloured, and half a dozen normal linen ones, frayed, and so forth.

As I got up next morning I looked by chance at that halfpenny and
something unusual in the design and colour caught my eye. It was a
shilling, blackened by contact with the lump of ink eraser! You cannot
imagine the difference that sudden windfall of eleven pence ha'penny,
made to my world. And first I broke my fast.

My week-days during that period of stress were fully occupied by small
activities. The British Museum Reading Room and the Education Library at
South Kensington were good places for light, shelter and comfort. You
could sit in them indefinitely so long as they were open. And the
streets and shops were endlessly interesting. I loitered and watched the
crowds. It was encouraging to see how many people seemed able to get
food and clothing. But I found the Sundays terrible. They were vast,
lonely days. The shuttered streets were endless and they led nowhither
but to chapels and churches which took you in and turned you out at
inconvenient hours. Except in St. Paul's Cathedral there was nowhere to
sit and think. In the smaller places of worship one had to be sitting
down or standing up or kneeling and pretending to participate.
Loneliness weighed upon me more and more. I began to wonder what my
cousin Isabel was doing and whether I might not chance to meet her in
the street. At last she seemed round every corner.

When I got an advance from Jennings I gave way to a growing desire for
companionship and wrote to ask if I might come to tea with her on Sunday
afternoon. My cousin was now earning good money by retouching
photographs. The gaunt house in Euston Road had been abandoned, Auntie
Bella had found a situation as housekeeper to a Wiltshire farmer, and my
cousin and her mother were installed on the drawing-room floor of a
little house in Fitzroy Road near Regents Park. Thither I went and over
the tea-cups and hot buttered toast my aunt Mary, who loved me like a
son, rated me soundly in her earnest thin little voice for coming to
London without telling her, and pointed out the economies and advantages
of joining forces with them. There was a little bedroom on the landing
to let. She was longing to look after me.

Within a week I had left Theobalds Road and transferred most of my
paints and rolls of calico to Fitzroy Road, and something like the old
pattern of my life with Isabel was restored. Directly I was in her
presence again I forgot whatever I had forgotten about her. We were less
children than we had been and she was more self-reliant than in Euston
Road under the distrustful sway of Auntie Bella, but she had the same
restrained sweetness and gentleness, the same sound and limited wisdom,
the same withheld feminity to which my emotional life had been adjusted
during my student days. We resumed our old familiarity as though there
had been no interval. We went about again side by side with our thoughts
and reveries worlds apart.

The restored sense of home and care at the back of me gave fresh vigour
to my hunt for work and money. I went on with Jennings and his diagrams,
did a bit of coaching, arranged to share Cole's room and steer Simmons,
who had become an assistant schoolmaster, during his Christmas vacation
through the dissections for the biology of his Intermediate Science
examination, and also I picked up small but useful sums of money, if not
by journalism at least in the margin of journalism. At that time a
number of new penny weeklies were coming into existence to challenge the
ascendancy of the old _Family Herald_ with the new boardschool public.
There were _Tit Bits_, _Answers_ and a little later _Pearson's Weekly_.
I think it was _Tit Bits_ which first devised a page called "Questions
worth Answering" open to outside contributors. A dozen or so questions
appeared one week and the best answer to each question was published the
next. It was a popularization of _Notes and Queries_. For a question
accepted, one got half-a-crown; for an answer one was paid according to
length. If one were lucky, one might send in an acceptable answer to
one's own question. My copious reading and my special biological lore
came in very usefully here. Every week I contrived in this way to add
anything between two and sixpence and fourteen or fifteen shillings to
the Fitzroy Road budget.

My lungs stood the onset of winter fairly well. My aunt Mary kept her
bird-like eye upon me and knew I had a cough before I did, and did
something about it. By the end of the year I had arranged to begin a job
in Kilburn after Christmas, that was more like firm ground under my feet
than anything I had been upon for a year and a half.


 4

_Henley House School (1889-90)_

From my departure from Southsea in 1883 to my return to London in 1888,
the history of this brain of mine was mainly a story of growth and
learning things. It acquired as much, decided as much and was exercised
as much as if it had been inside the skull of a university scholar. It
developed a coherent picture of the world and learnt the use of the
English language and the beginnings of literary form. But from my
emergence from St. Pancras Station to find lodgings and a job, this
brain, for the better part of a year, was so occupied with the immediate
struggle for life, so near to hunger and exposure and so driven by
material needs, that I do not think it added anything very much to
either its content or power. It was only after a term or so at Henley
House School, that it began to take notice of external things again and
resume its criticism of, and its disinterested attack upon, existence in
general.

This Henley House School was, financially, a not very successful private
school in Kilburn. It was housed in a brace of semi-detached villas,
very roughly adapted to its educational needs. It drew its boys from the
region of Maida Vale and St. John's Wood; the parents were theatrical,
artistic, professional and business people who from motives of economy
or affection preferred to have their sons living at home. There were
only a few boarders. It was a privately owned school and J. V. Milne,
the proprietor, was responsible to no earthly authority for what he did
or did not teach. In one of the houses he lived with his family and in
the other were the various class-rooms and the assistants' room of the
school. The playground was a walled gravelly enclosure that had once
been two back gardens. It was too small for anything but the most
scuffling of games. Equipment was little better than it had been in
Morley's school; the desks were not so age-worn and there were more
blackboards and maps. But it remained--skimpy. When I entered upon my
duties, J. V. came to me and pressed a golden sovereign into my hand.
"Get whatever apparatus you require for your science teaching," he said.

"And if there is any change?" I asked with this fund, this endowment, in
my hand.

"You can give me an account later."

I had to administer this grant very carefully. The existing apparatus
was huddled into what had once been a small bedroom cupboard on the
second floor, and was in an extremely ruinous condition. My predecessor
had been a Frenchman and very evidently a man of great persistence of
character. His chemical teaching had apparently reached a climax in the
production of oxygen by heating potassium permanganate in a glass flask.
Young Roberts, the son of Arthur Roberts, the comedian, said it had been
a very great lesson indeed. Those were primitive times in glass
manufacture and the ordinary test-tube or Florentine flask was not of a
special refractory glass as it is now, and it cracked and flew at the
slightest irregularity in its heating. My predecessor had put his
permanganate in a flask, put the flask on a tripod, set a Bunsen burner
beneath it and made all the necessary arrangements for collecting his
oxygen. But before there was any oxygen worth mentioning to collect, the
flask flew with a loud crack and its bottom descended upon the flame. My
predecessor rallied his forces and put a second Florentine flask into
action, with exactly the same result. A certain joyousness invaded the
class as, with the spirit of the French at Waterloo, a third flask was
thrown into the struggle. And so on, _da capo_; joy increased and open
demonstrations had to be repressed. At the end there were no more
Florentine flasks and the applause broke out unhindered. The cupboard
was chiefly occupied by these shattered flasks neatly arranged, each
over its own proper detached bottom.

I meditated upon these vestiges of experimental science and upon what
seemed to me to be the evidence of an attempt to make carbon-dioxide out
of blackboard chalk--an attempt fore-ordained to failure because
blackboard chalk is not chalk and contains no carbon dioxide. And I
considered my still intact sovereign.

I discussed the matter with J. V. "Mr. Milne," I said, "I think
experimental demonstrations before a class are a great mistake."

"They certainly have a very bad effect on discipline," he remarked.

"I propose," I said, "with your permission, to draw all my experiments
upon the blackboard--in coloured chalks which I shall buy out of this
pound--to explain clearly and fully exactly what happens and to make the
class copy out these experiments in a note-book. I have never known an
experiment on a blackboard go wrong. On the other hand, these attempts
at an excessive realism----"

"I am quite of your mind," he said.

"Later on, however, I may dissect a rabbit bit by bit and make them draw
that. I may dissect it under water because that is cleaner and prettier
than a heap of viscera on a board, and I shall have to buy a large
baking-dish and cork and lead and pins."

"It will not be--indelicate?"

"It need not be. I will show them what to see on the blackboard."

"One never knows what parents will find to object to. However--if you
want to do it...."

In this way I contrived, without extravagance, to train my classes to
draw, write and understand about a great many things that would have
been much more puzzling for them if they had encountered them in all the
rich confusion of actuality. I never attempted to use the chemical
balance for example; chemical balances, especially if they have been
left to brood in the darkness of bedroom cupboards, will seize upon the
slightest pretext to confute the hasty experimentalist; and moreover my
predecessor had lost most of the weights. My boys therefore missed the
usual stinks and bangs of scientific instruction and acquired instead a
real grasp of scientific principles and scientific quantities, together
with a facility in illustrating examination answers that stood them in
good stead in the years immediately before them.

I found Milne a really able teacher, keen to do his best for his boys
and with a curious obstinate originality, and I learnt very much from
him about discipline and management. Finance, I knew, was worrying him a
good deal, but he watched his boys closely and would slacken, intensify
or change their work, with a skilled apprehension of their
idiosyncrasies. He would think of them at night. The boys had confidence
in him and in us and I never knew a better mannered school. He was
friendly and sympathetic with me from the outset. He was a little
grey-clad extremely dolichocephalic man with glasses, a pointed nose and
a small beard, rather shy in his manner; he had a phantom lisp and there
was a sort of confidential relationship between his head and his
shoulders. His original proposal was that I should be resident English,
science and drawing master at 60 a year. But I wanted to go on living
with my aunt and cousin at Fitzroy Road, I detested Sunday duty and I
wanted to write or to work at my preparation for the Intermediate
Examination in the London University, in all the spare time I could get.
So I offered to forego my residence and all my meals except the midday
one, if I could come at nine and vanish at or before five. And I
stipulated that I should do no scripture teaching, as I felt I could
not do it in good faith. The arrangement worked very well for us both.
He liked my putting in that conscience clause at the risk of not getting
a job I evidently wanted.

The midday meal was an excellent one, attended by a number of the
day-boys. With memories of Holt in my mind, I wrote to Simmons
effusively, praising the cleanliness, the table napkins and particularly
the flowers on the table. In my world hitherto there had been no flowers
on the meal table anywhere. And at the end of the table, facing me, sat
Mrs. Milne, rather concerned if I did not eat enough, because I was
still, she thought, scandalously thin.

I suppose the day is not so very remote when the last of these private
schools will have vanished from the earth. Fifty years ago they were
still responsible for the education, or want of education, of a
considerable fraction of the British middle-class. They were under no
public control at all. Anyone might own one, anyone might teach in one,
no standard of attainment was required of them; the parents dipped their
sons into them as they thought proper and took them out when they
thought they were done. Certain university and quasi-public bodies
conducted examinations to which a number of the brighter pupils were
submitted in order to enhance the prestige of the establishment, and
these examining bodies exerted a distinct influence upon the choice of
subjects. For the most part these private schools passed the
middle-class youth of England on to business or professional life
incapable of any foreign language, incapable indeed of writing or
speaking their own except in the clumsiest manner, unable to use their
eyes and hands to draw or handle apparatus, grossly ignorant of physical
science, history or economics, contemptuous of the board school boy and
with just enough consciousness of their deficiencies to make them
suspicious of, and hostile to, intellectual ability and equipment.

It is only when the nature of the English private school education is
grasped that it becomes possible to understand why the enormous
possibilities of world predominance and world control, manifest in the
British political expansion during the nineteenth century, wilted away
so rapidly under the stresses of the subsequent years. Its direction was
dull, ignorant, pretentious and blundering. I have given a glimpse of
the British private school at its worst in my brief account of Holt
Academy; J. V. Milne and Jones were almost at opposite poles of
conscience and intelligence; Milne was a man who won my unstinted
admiration and remained my friend throughout life; nevertheless it is
useless to pretend that Henley House was more than a sketch of good
intentions or that we stirred up a tithe of the finer possibilities of
the boys who passed under our hands. We taught them a few tricks, we got
them a few "certificates," we did something for their manners and
personal bearing, we dropped some fruitful hints into them, but we gave
them no coherent and sustaining vision of life. One or two of the Henley
House boys were destined to play a fairly conspicuous rle in English
affairs. Our prize boy, our whale so to speak, was Lord Northcliffe, who
did so much to create the modern newspaper and died controlling owner of
_The Times_. He can very well be studied as a sample of the limitations
of the English private school education--and indeed of English education
generally.

In making these criticisms I am not blaming J. V. Milne. In view of his
conditions and resources he did wonderfully. He could hardly pay his
way; the two rather battered villas and that one golden sovereign for
all the apparatus required for science teaching, give the measure of his
means. When later on an opportunity offered, he got out of Kilburn and
ran a more spaciously equipped school, Streete Court at Westgate-on-Sea.
But for Henley House, he could not pick and choose his assistants;
economies and compromises cramped his style, and in endless respects the
school made itself in spite of all his efforts to mould and direct it.

Nevertheless he had in operation an honour system of discipline that was
far in advance of the times. It is a little too complex to explain here,
but it was decidedly better than the discipline under Sanderson of
Oundle, which I was to study later. A cane hung in Milne's study, a
symbol of force as the ultimate sanction, but it was never used in my
time and I do not think it had been used for some years before. He was
understandingly interested by my abandonment of the worst pretences of
"practical" demonstration in my science teaching, he watched and
discussed my use of the note-book system of binding work together that I
had picked up from Byatt and seen misapplied by Judd, and when later I
innovated in the mathematical work, threw out all the muddling-about
with money sums, weights and measures, business "practice" and so forth
that cumbered the teaching (and examining) of arithmetic, and took a
class of small boys between six and eight straight away from the first
four rules to easy algebra, he was delighted. In those days that was a
new and bold thing to do. We got to fractions, quadratics and problems
involving quadratics in a twelvemonth and laid the foundations of two or
three university careers by way of mathematics. A. A. Milne, the
novelist and playwright, was one of that band of young hopefuls, and his
brother Ken and Batsford the publisher.

The sense of Milne's observation and interest quickened my teaching
greatly. I would prepare little stunts for him and the boys. It was
amusing to stroll up to the blackboard in an off-hand way and draw the
outline of England or Scotland or North America from memory. (One had to
be particularly wary about the relative latitude of the east and west
coasts and the rest followed.) One could stand with one's back to a
whole class and yet have every boy still and interested. The wickedest
would be following the chalk line and comparing it with his Atlas if
only in the hope of saying, "Please Sir," and making a correction.

Where Henley House was most defective from a modern point of view was in
its failure to establish any social and political outlook. But there J.
V. suffered not only from the limitations of a poorly financed private
adventurer who had to make his school "pay," but also from the lax and
aimless mentality of the period in which he was living. The old European
order, as I have pointed out already in the chapter on my origins, was
far gone in decay, and had lost sight of any conception of an object in
life. The new order had still to discover itself and its objectives. In
the eighteenth century, a school in Protestant England pointed every
life in it, either towards hell-fire or eternal bliss; its intellectual
and moral training was all more or less relevant to and tested by the
requirements of that pilgrimage; for that in the long run you were being
prepared. That double glow of gold and red had faded out almost
completely from the school perspectives of 1890, but nothing had taken
its place. The idea of the modern world-state must ultimately determine
the curriculum and disciplines of every school on earth, but even to-day
only a few teachers apprehend that, and in my Henley House days the idea
of that social and political necessity had hardly dawned. The schools
and universities just went on teaching things in what was called the
"general education"--because they had always been taught. "Why do we
learn Latin, Sir?" asked our bright boys. "What is the good of this
chemistry, Sir, if I am to go into a bank?" Or, "Does it really matter,
Sir, now, _how_ Henry VII was related to Henry IV?"

We were teaching some "subjects," as the times went, fairly well, we
were getting more than average results in outside examinations. But
collectively, comprehensively we were teaching nothing at all. We were
completely ignoring the primary function of the school in human society,
which is to correlate the intelligence, will and conscience of the
individual to the social process. We were unaware of a social process.
Not only were Henley House, and the private schools generally, imparting
this nothingness of outlook, but except for a certain gangster
esprit-de-corps in various of the other public schools and military
seminaries, "governing class" sentiment and the like, the same blankness
pervaded the whole educational organization of the community. We taught
no history of human origins, nothing about the structure of
civilization, nothing of social or political life. We did not make, we
did not even attempt to make participating citizens. We launched our
boys, with, or more commonly without, a university "local" or
matriculation certificate, as mere irresponsible adventurers into an
uncharted scramble for life.

And this is where our big specimen of output, our whale, Northcliffe,
comes in. His story is a very illuminating demonstration of the effects
of private school insufficiencies upon social development.

He was eldest of the numerous family of an adventurous barrister,
Harmsworth, from Dublin, who came to London with a capable and energetic
wife, to make a great career, and did not do so. He won only a moderate
measure of success; he was "Counsel to the Great Northern Railway" and
so forth; and his political activities never advanced beyond one of
those mock parliaments, the Camden Town equivalent of the Parliament of
the Landport Y. M. C. A., mentioned earlier in this book, in which
politically minded men displayed their quality and tempered themselves
for real political activities. Camden Town, like Landport, never got
down to any social or economic principles. It was a training in saying
"Mr, Speaker, Sir, the right honourable member for Little Ditcham," in
moving "the previous question" and such-like necessary superficialities
of the political game. He died in 1889 when his eldest son was
twenty-four years old, but the mother, a woman oddly reminiscent in her
vitality and character of Laetitia Bonaparte, survived to 1925, three
years after the death of Northcliffe.

Alfred was born in 1865, a little more than a year before me, and he
seems to have entered Henley House School when he was nine or ten years
old. He made a very poor impression on his teachers and became one of
those unsatisfactory, rather heavy, good-tempered boys who in the usual
course of things drift ineffectively through school to some second-rate
employment. It was J. V.'s ability that saved him from that. Somewhen
about the age of twelve, Master Harmsworth became possessed of a
jelly-graph for the reproduction of MS. in violet ink, and with this he
set himself to produce a mock newspaper. J. V. with the soundest
pedagogic instinct, seized upon the educational possibilities of this
display of interest and encouraged young Harmsworth, violet with copying
ink and not quite sure whether he had done well or ill, to persist with
the _Henley House Magazine_ even at the cost of his school work. The
first number appeared in 1878; the first printed number in 1881 "edited
by Alfred C. Harmsworth," and I possess all the subsequent issues up to
the end of 1893, when Milne transferred his school to Streete Court.
During my stay at Henley House, I contributed largely, and among others
who had a hand in the magazine was A. J. Montefiore, who was later to
edit the _Educational Review_ and A. A. Milne ("aged six"--at his first
appearance in print) the novelist, essayist and playwright.

Now neither Milne nor anyone in the Harmsworth family, as they scanned
the early issues of this little publication, had the faintest suspicion
of the preposterous thrust of opportunity that it was destined to give
its youthful editor. But in the eighties the first school generation
educated under the Education Act of 1871 was demanding cheap reading
matter and wanting something a little easier than _Chambers Journal_ and
a little less simply feminine than the _Family Herald_. A shrewd
pharmaceutical chemist named Newnes tried to make a modest profit out of
a periodical, originally of cuttings and quotations, _Tit Bits_, and
made a great fortune. Almost simultaneously our Harmsworth, pursuing
print as if by instinct, tried to turn a modest hundred or so, by
creating _Answers to Correspondents_ (1888) which, among other things,
provided me as I have told, with a few useful shillings a week during
its first year of issue. He had been ill for a brief period after
leaving school in 1882 and he had worked not so very successfully at
outside journalism. _Answers_ hung fire for a time until it dropped its
initial idea and set out to imitate and beat _Tit Bits_ at its own game,
with the aid of prize competitions.

Neither Newnes nor Harmsworth, when they launched these ventures, had
the slightest idea of the scale of the new forces they were tapping.
They thought they were going to sell to a public of at most a few score
thousands and they found they were publishing for the million. They did
not so much climb to success; they were rather caught by success and
blown sky high. I will not even summarize the headlong uprush of Alfred
C. Harmsworth and his brother Harold; how presently they had acquired
the _Evening News_, started the _Daily Mail_ and gone from strength to
strength until at last Alfred sat on the highest throne in British
journalism, _The Times_, and Harold was one of the richest men in the
world.

Only one item in this rocket flight is really significant here. The
second success of the Harmsworth brothers was a publication called
_Comic Cuts_. Some rare spasm of decency seems to have prevented them
calling this enormously profitable, nasty, taste-destroying appeal for
the ha'pence of small boys, _Komic Kuts_. They sailed into this business
of producing saleable letterpress for the coppers of the new public,
with an entire disregard of good taste, good value, educational
influence, social consequences or political responsibility. They were as
blind as young kittens to all those aspects of life. That is the most
remarkable fact about them from my present point of view and I think
posterity will find it even more astonishing. In pristine innocence,
naked of any sense of responsibility, with immense native energy, they
set about pouring millions of printed sheets of any sort of trash that
sold, into the awakening mind of the British masses. The "instantaneous
success" of _Comic Cuts_ was hailed by J. V. in _Henley House Magazine_
(May 1890) without a word of criticism or a sign of disapproval. He
tells the "Short History of A Henley House Boy" and writes that
_Answers_ returns to its proprietors close upon 10,000 per annum.

     "Mr. Alfred Harmsworth is now only twenty-four years of age," he
     writes. "He has written two successful books, _A Thousand Ways of
     Earning a Living_, of which 25,000 were sold, and _All About our
     Railways_. He attributes most of his success to--what do you
     think?--_downright hard work_. 'I usually spend twelve hours a day
     on the paper,' he writes me. I wanted him to give me some facts
     showing the magnitude of the work--the staff, the management, etc.,
     of his paper--and some facts about himself, but he writes, 'I
     really do not like biography. You can say this (what I have said to
     many other people), that the generous and thoughtful way in which I
     was educated at Henley House must have had a very great influence
     on my career. Though I was never much of a student, I did manage in
     those three years to pick up a vast amount of reasoning and fact,
     which often, even now, are useful. But there! I am ashamed to say
     any more. You can say what you like about my opinion of Henley
     House, and you cannot put it too strongly. Yours affectionately,
     Alfred C. Harmsworth.'

     "Now that you have just been reading of an old Henley House School
     boy, may I get in a word. If there is an idle boy in the school,
     let him take this lesson to heart--that sheer hard work is the
     magician's wand. Should there be any of you drifting along, and
     hoping, like Mr. Micawber, that something may turn up, let me tell
     you that the things that generally 'turn up' are disappointments,
     failure, poverty and remorse. May the last never be yours."

J. V. Milne could write like that and teach like that--in a vein of pure
competitive individualism. His own conscience and practice were happily
better than his theories.

In twenty years these two young ruffians (ruffians so far as any sense
of social obligations goes), these creators of _Comic Cuts_, had been
flung up to the working ownership of _The Times_, and peerages; they had
become immense factors in the chaos of English affairs, and with them
and under the controlling counsels of their magnificent mother, they had
carried their bunch of brothers to positions of importance and opulence
in our social disorder. My friend Geoffrey Harmsworth, the son of
Northcliffe's brother Lester, has planned to tell the story under the
title of the _Harmsworth Adventure_. It is absurdly like the Bonaparte
adventure. During my time at Henley House School, one last Harmsworth of
the original vintage remained, a sturdy and by no means brilliant
youngster, St-John. A year or so ago before he died I met him at Cannes,
a princely invalid, the proprietor of _Perrier_, preposterously wealthy,
surrounded by obsequious valets, male nurses, matres d'htel and so
forth.

With Northcliffe I maintained an intermittent friendship; I co-operated
with him for a time at Crewe House during the war and afterwards he came
over to Easton to lunch and talk with me when I returned from Russia in
1920. But my articles were already ear-marked for the _Daily Express_.
He was then in the grip of an obscure malady that distressed his mind,
arrested its development and prevented sustained work. The doctors
advised him to go for long wandering excursions by automobile or afoot,
watching the world go by him. He must learn to be idle. I met him for a
last encounter, walking alone in Westminster, "just looking at the shop
windows." That must have been in 1920 or 1921. Finally these doctors
sent him wandering round the world and he wandered right out of sanity.
I saw enough of him to see the extraordinary mental and moral conflict
created by the real vastness of the opportunities and challenges that
crowded upon him on the one hand and, on the other, the blank inadequacy
of his education at Henley House School for anything better than a
career of push and acquisition.

In an autobiography it is permissible to compare his mind with my own.
Mine--peace to its defects!--was a system of digested and assimilated
ideas; it was an assembled mind; his was a vast jumble into which fresh
experiences were for ever tumbling. I was educated--self-educated. He
was uneducated. He was blown up so rapidly that he was never free to
think out his rle in the world. He never had the chances for weeks and
months of reflection and readjustment given me by my various
disablements and set-backs. When he was ill--and ever and again he was
ill and took refuge with his mother at Totteridge--he was mentally
disordered and lost grip altogether. And he was prone to the easy
flattery of women. Nevertheless a certain admirable greatness of mind
appeared eventually and he travelled far from the mere headlong
vulgarity of his first drive into prosperity. He realized with a mixture
of astonishment, exaltation and dismay, that a big newspaper proprietor,
whether he liked it or not and whether or no the fact met with any
formal recognition, was an immensely responsible figure in the world. He
had vivid intimations that amidst the catastrophic shifts and changes of
Western life, a new social order was finding its way into existence.

He never had the time nor the mental coolness to get this clear. But
long before the Great War jolted the intelligence of Europe into a new
system of aims and understandings, he was trying to fill up the gap that
Henley House School--and all that went with it in tone and period--had
left in his equipment. He had an almost pathetic belief that somewhere,
just outside his world, were a lot of clever fellows who had better
knowledge and ideas than his. He did not understand the breadth and
slowness of the process by which the modern world-state has been and is
still coming to self-realization. It had not dawned upon him what a
heaving pretentious mess economic, social and educational science still
was, because he had never come to grips with the stuff as I had done.
But he felt the looseness and insecurity of things about him and he
tried in his impatient way to get something constructive and
stabilizing. He "ran" Norman Angell for a time and the question of world
peace and, after my _Anticipations_ and _Modern Utopia_, he wanted very
much to organize a following for me. He found me at once stimulating and
disappointing. I did not want to be organized; I did not even want to be
hurried. His experience had been that you only had to advertise a thing
well or offer a prize about it, to get all you wanted. And when you had
got it you rushed on to something else. If you wanted world peace, or a
cure for cancer or tuberculosis, or a machine to fly round the world,
you offered a prize for it, you made an enormous fuss about it and then,
he thought, some of those clever fellows at the back of things would set
to work upon it, as he had set to work upon the _Daily Mirror_, and win
it. He wanted to attack the economic riddles of the world long before
any diagnosis had been made, in precisely the same energetic fashion. I
shall mention later the articles upon "The Labour Unrest" that I wrote
for him in this phase.

The World War and the world peace was a tremendous strain upon him. It
was a forcible education for all of us and for him it brought both
growth and disorganization. A really intimate record of Northcliffe's
brain processes, his ambitions, his likes and dislikes, his general
motivation, is impossible; but in regard to his period it would be the
most illuminating historical document in the world. It would be as
typical a story as anyone could find of the stresses of transition from
that blind confidence in Providence, that implicit confidence in the
good intentions of the natural order of things, no matter what were our
mistakes and misdeeds, characterizing the human mind in the nineteenth
century, to that startled realization of the need for men to combine
against the cold indifference, the pitiless justice, if you will, of
nature, which is our modern attitude. The effort to achieve an adult
behaviour under the stresses of ulcerative endocarditis and after forty
odd years of triumphant puerility, shattered and killed him. Confounded
by the catastrophe of the Great War and its still more terrifying
sequels, spun giddily into the vortex of leadership and responsibility
without the restraints of a tradition or the preparation of a
philosophy, embittered into a clumsy personal feud by the way in which
he was jostled by Lloyd George out of any honourable participation in
the War Settlement--and so abruptly stranded, Northcliffe's mind was
shattered very much, indeed, as was Woodrow Wilson's. It was burst by
opportunity.

I shall have more to say of him when I tell at the proper time how my
sample mind, and the English mind of which it was a part, were put
through the mill of the Great War. But after this brief excursion
forward into consequences, let me return for the present to that little
ill-equipped private school in Kilburn from which it started, that
little school in which, with the best intentions in the world, Milne and
his staff taught neither human history, economics nor social duty, and
from which they launched boys into the gathering disaster of
civilization as though they were sending them into a keen but merciful
prize competition, in which "sheer hard work" was the "magician's wand,"
and so forth and so on.

Only now are we beginning to suspect there should be more in education
than that.


 5

_The University Correspondence College (1890-1893)_

During 1889 my efforts to "write," so far as I can remember or trace
them now, died down to hardly anything at all. My hope of an income from
that source had faded, and it seemed to me that such prospects in life
as remained open to me, lay in school teaching. They were not brilliant
prospects anyhow, because I was quite obstinately resolved not to
profess Christianity, but my self-conceit was in a phase of unwholesome
deflation and a mediocre rle seemed a good enough objective for my
abilities. Milne had interested me in teaching method, and I decided
that if I secured a teaching diploma and took up my degree in the London
University, I might, in spite of my religious handicap, get a
sufficiently good position to marry upon. I wanted to marry; I had
indeed a gnawing desire to marry, and my life in close proximity to my
cousin was distressing and humiliating me in a manner she could not
possibly comprehend. I was keen and eager and she was tepid and
rational. Plain risks dismayed her. It seemed the most obvious thing in
the world to her that I should first win my way to a fairly safe place
and the status of a householder before my devotion was rewarded. In
pursuance of this intensely personal objective, I took my Intermediate
Science Examination in July '89 with only second-class honours in
zoology, and I got the diploma of licentiate of the College of
Preceptors at the end of the year.

I have already said a word or two about this College of Preceptors in my
account of Morley's Academy. Its requirements were not very exacting,
and its diplomas were sought chiefly by teachers without university
degrees. It offered papers in a number of subjects, and it allowed
candidates to pass in one subject at one time and another later on, so
that the grade of competing examinee was a lowly one. I took the whole
range of subjects at a swoop, got what was called honours--80 per cent
of the maximum marks--in most of the subjects and secured the three
prizes for the theory and practice of education (10), mathematics (5)
and natural science (5). That itself was a useful accession of money,
but the greater benefit of this raid upon the college was that I was
obliged to read something of the history and practice of education, some
elementary psychology, (a mere rudiment of a science at that date) and
logic. I was greatly interested in these subjects and, superficial
though the standard was, they cleared up my mind upon various issues and
started some valuable trains of thought. I planned to go on with mental
and moral science and to take that, with zoology and geology, for my
degree examination in London University in 1890, but I did not do so
because I found that botany would be a more immediately marketable
commodity and so I went back to botany.

Armed with this L.C.P. diploma and my second class intermediate honours,
I became exacting with J. V. Milne. He raised my salary 10 a year and
agreed to cut down the hours I had to spend at Henley House. I looked
about for supplementary employment and presently found myself in
correspondence with a certain William Briggs, M.A., the organizer of a
University Correspondence College at Cambridge, an institution which I
still think one of the queerest outgrowths of the disorderly educational
fermentations of that time. It flourishes still. Briggs was able not
only to offer me just the additional work I wanted to keep me going
until I took my degree of B.Sc., but his peculiar requirements enabled
him to set a premium upon my taking honours in that examination. I went
down to Cambridge to see him; we fixed up an immediate arrangement for
me to earn at least 2 a week by doing his correspondence tuition in
biology which was in urgent need of attention, and we further agreed
that if I took my degree in October, I should leave Henley House School
and have a permanent appointment with him in a Tutorial College he was
developing in London, at a rate of pay to be determined by my class in
honours. He was to give me at least thirty hours' work a week all over
the year at 2_s._ 2_d._, 2_s._ 4_d._ or 2_s._ 6_d._ an hour, according
to whether I obtained third-, second-or first-class honours. Honours
were very important to him from the prospectus point of view. His list
of tutors displayed an almost unbroken front of Cambridge, Oxford and
London "firsts." High honours men in biology were rare in those days,
and it was characteristic of Briggs that he should decide to make one
out of me for himself.

I left Henley House at the end of the summer term, I took my degree with
first-class honours in zoology and second-class honours in geology. I
had already been working for some months in my surplus time with Briggs,
and I carried on first with classes in a small room above a bookshop in
that now vanished thoroughfare Booksellers Row, and afterwards in a
spacious well-lit establishment in Red Lion Square. There I had a
reasonably well furnished teaching laboratory, with one side all
blackboards and big billiard-room lamps for night teaching. Briggs gave
me enough work to make an average of nearly fifty hours a week, on a
system of piecework that enabled me at times to compress a number of
nominal half-crown hours into a normal one and so, by the middle of
1891, I found myself in a position to satisfy my cousin's requirements,
take a small house, 28 Haldon Road in East Putney, and release her from
her daily journey to that Regent Street workroom. She intended, however,
to retouch at home and to take pupils.

A word about our budget will be interesting to-day. We paid 30 a year
rent for our house, an eight-roomed house, (the eight included a
kitchen, a bathroom and a box-room); we estimated 10_s._ a head as a
maximum expenditure for food, and in January 1893 I opened a banking
account in Wandsworth, which endures to this day, with a cheque from
Briggs for 52 10_s._ 5_d._ Until then we had carried only a small
reserve of twenty pounds or less in the Post Office Savings Bank. This
Post Office Savings Bank account had been opened in the Fitzroy Road
days with my first instalment of salary from Milne. Before then our only
reserve for emergency money had been a few pawnable articles of silver
and an old watch belonging to my Aunt Mary....

We were married very soberly in Wandsworth Parish Church on October 3st,
1891. My cousin was grave and content but rather anxious about the
possibility of children, my aunt was very happy and my elder brother
Frank, who had come up for the ceremony, was moved by a confusion of his
affections and wept suddenly in the vestry.

But I will tell what matters about my domestic life later. What is of
much more general interest, is the peculiar organization of that
University Correspondence College of which I had now become a tutor.
Briggs in his way was as accidental and marvellous as Northcliffe, and
as illustrative of the planless casualness of our contemporary world.

To write an autobiography as the history and adventures of a brain,
involves the unfolding of an educational panorama in the background. In
what has gone before I have tried to display the strain upon and the
disorganization of the petty educational organizations of the
small-scale horse-foot, hand-industry civilizations that culminated in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the change of pace and
scale due to mechanical invention. In two swift centuries the material
structures of a single modern world-state came into being. Without any
correlated mental structure. Social and political adaptation dragged
further and further behind that headlong advance. Our world to-day is at
the climax of that discord. And not only were the illiterate
traditionalism of the general mass and the private schools and tutoring
of the better sort, exhibited as wildly inadequate to the demands of the
new occasions, but all the organization of professional training and the
colleges, universities, academies and so forth, which had served the old
order, were also tossed about, dwarfed and pressed upon by the huge dumb
necessities of a world metamorphosis.

Nowhere yet was there a really comprehensive apprehension of what was
happening. The gist of my individual story is the growth of that
apprehension, belatedly, in one fairly quick-witted but not very
powerful brain. But a partial and reluctant disposition to adaptation
became more and more operative in the nineteenth century and produced a
structure of universal elementary education throughout Europe, a great
multiplication of technical and secondary schools, a growth in the
numbers upon existing university rolls and the foundation of a great
number of new universities. This adaptation was more quantitative than
qualitative. The need for more and more widely extended education was
realized long before the need for a new sort of education. Schools and
universities were multiplied but not modernized. The spirit of the old
educational order was instructive and not constructive; it was a system
of conservation, and to this day it remains rather a resistance than a
help to the growing creative will in man.

So to the multitudinous demand of the advancing new generations for
light upon what they were, upon what was happening to them and whither
they were going, the pedagogues and professors replied in just as
antiquated and unhelpful forms as possible. They remained not only out
of touch themselves with new knowledge and new ideas, but they actually
intercepted the approach to new knowledge and new ideas, by purveying
the stalest of knowledge and the tritest, most exhausted ideas to these
hungry swarms of a new age groping blindly for imperfectly conceived
mental food. It is illuminatingly symbolical that everywhere the new
universities dressed themselves up in caps and gowns and Gothic
buildings and applied the degrees of the mediaeval curricula, bachelor,
master, doctor, to the students of a new time. I have already pointed
out the oddity--seeing that I had little Latin and no Greek--of my
calling my early plan of study at Midhurst a "Schema" and my first draft
of the _Time Machine_, the "Chronic Argonauts." But this snobbish
deference to the pomps, dignities and dialects of a vanishing age, ran
through the whole world of education. There was no possibility of
teaching (profitably and successfully), or indeed of practising any
profession, without a university degree embodying great chunks of that
privileged old learning. And when by means of clamour from without, such
subjects as physical science and biology were thrust into the curricula,
they underwent a curious standardization and sterilization in the
process.

Now the urge to spread new knowledge of the modern type widely through
the community, was so imperative, and the resistance of the established
respectable educational organization, the old universities and the
schools with prestige and influence, to any change and any adequate
growth, was so tough, that a vast amount of educational jerry-building
went on, precisely analogous to that jerry-built housing of London in
the nineteenth century on which I have already expatiated. London was
jerry-built because the ground landlords were in possession: English
national education was jerry-built because Oxford and Cambridge were in
possession. The British elementary teacher was an extremely hasty
improvisation and I have already given a glimpse of Horace Byatt, Esq.,
M.A. (Dublin) earning grants for teaching me "advanced" sciences of
which he knew practically nothing. Equally jerry-built and provisional
were the first efforts to create an urgently needed supply of teachers
and university graduates beyond the expensive limits of Oxford and
Cambridge. New degree-giving universities were brought into existence
with only the most sketchy and loosely connected colleges and
laboratories, or with evening classes or with no definite teaching
arrangements at all. Most typical of these was our London University.
This at first was essentially an examining board. It aimed primarily at
graduating the students in the great miscellany of schools and classes
that was growing up in London, but its examinations and degrees were
open to all comers from every part of the world. I for instance was
examined by my own professors in the South Kensington Science Schools,
but the examinations I passed to take my degree in London University,
were entirely independent of these college tests.

And this is where the great work of Mr. (afterwards Dr.) William Briggs
comes in. It was at once preposterous and necessary. The practice of
general examination boards is almost bound to be narrow and rigidly
stereotyped. They must never do the unexpected because that might be
unfair. The outside student working without direction or working under
teachers who had no regard for the requirements of an examining board,
was all too apt to wander into fields of interest that were not covered
by the syllabus or to fail to get up prescribed topics because his
attention had not been drawn to them. His tendency was to be as variable
as the examining board was invariable. All the more to the credit of the
intelligent student, you will say, but that is beside the present
explanation. The ambitious new outsider had to be standardized--because
for a time there was no other way of dealing with him. At that early
stage in the popularization of education and the enlargement of the
educational field, it is hard to see how the stimulus and rough
direction of these far flung Education Department, school certificate
and London University examinations could have been dispensed with. It
was the only way of getting any rapid diffusion of learning at all.
Quality had to come later. It was a phase of great improvisations in the
face of much prejudice and resistance.

Waste and absurdity stalk mankind relentlessly, and it is impossible to
ignore the triumphs of waste and absurdity occurring in that early
struggle to produce an entirely educated community. It was the most
natural thing for the human mind to transfer importance from the actual
learning of things, a deep, dark, intricate process, to the passing of
examinations, and to believe that a man who had a certificate in his
hand had a subject in his head. With only the facilities for teaching
at the utmost a few thousand men to experience chemical fact and know
chemical science, there were produced hundreds of thousands with
certificates in chemistry. When I matriculated in London University my
certificate witnessed that I had passed in Latin, German and French and
nevertheless I was quite unable to read, write or speak any of these
tongues. About a small and quite insufficient band of men who knew and
wanted to teach, seethed everywhere an earnest multitude of examinees.
Briggs began life as an examinee. He was a man of great simplicity and
honesty. To the end of his days I do not think he realized that there
was any possible knowledge but certified knowledge. He became almost a
king among examinees. All his life he was adding letters to the
honourable cluster at the end of his name; LL.D., D.C.L., M.A., B.Sc.,
and so forth and so on. He was a thick-set, shortish, dark, round-faced
earnest-mannered man with a tendency to plumpness. I never knew him
laugh. He was exactly five years older than myself, to a day. Having
passed some sort of teachers' examinations--I believe in Yorkshire--he
coached a few other candidates for the same distinction. But unlike most
coaches he was modest about his abilities and honest in delivering the
goods, and for some of the subjects he called in help. He employed
assistant tutors. He had organizing power. Presently he turned from
little teachers' qualifying examinations, to the widely sought after
London University Matriculation. His pupils multiplied and he engaged
more tutors. No doubt, like Northcliffe, he began with the ambition of
making a few hundred pounds and like Northcliffe he was blown up to real
opulence and influence. When I went down to Cambridge to interview him
about his biological work, he already had a tutorial staff with over
forty first-class honours men upon it, and he was dealing with hundreds
of students and thousands of pounds.

The Briggs tutorial method was broadly simple. It rested upon the real
absence of any philosophy or psychology in the educational methods of
the time. The ordinary professor knew hardly anything of teaching except
by rule of thumb and nothing whatever of the persistent wickedness of
the human heart and, when this poor specialized innocent became an
examiner in the university, almost his first impulse was to look over
the papers of questions set in preceding years. These questions he
parodied or if they had not turned up for some years he revived them.
Rarely did he ever look at the syllabus of his subject before setting a
paper, and still more rarely did he attempt any novelties in his
exploration of the way in which that syllabus had been followed.
Accordingly in almost every subject the paper set repeated various
combinations and permutations of a very finite number of questions.
Meditating upon these phenomena, Briggs was struck by the idea that if
his pupils were made to write out a hundred or so model answers and look
over these exercises freshly before entering the examination room, they
would certainly be fully prepared and trained to answer the six or seven
that would be put to them.

Accordingly he procured honours-men already acquainted with the
examination to be attacked, and induced them to divide the proper
textbook into thirty equal pieces of reading and further to divide up a
sample collection of questions previously set, so as to control the
reading done. The pupil after reading each of his thirty lessons sat
down and answered the questions assigned to that lesson in a special
copy-book supplied for the purpose and sent it in to the tutor, who
read, marked, criticized and advised in red ink. "You must read  35
again" he wrote or "You have missed the v.i. (vitally important)
footnote on p. 11." Or "the matter you have introduced here is not
required for a pass." This was a systemization of the note-book style of
teaching I have already described as a success at the Midhurst Grammar
School, and as, under circumstances of wider opportunity, a mental
torture in Professor Judd's geological work. A few University
Correspondence students, I believe, became insane, but none who pursued
the thirty lessons to the end, failed to pass the examination for which
they had been prepared. It was merely their thirty-first paper and
differed from its predecessors merely by containing no novel questions.

Now "elementary biology" had long been regarded as a difficult subject.
It was required for the Intermediate examination of all Bachelors of
Science and for the Preliminary Scientific examination for the medical
degrees, and it stood like a barrier in the way of a multitude of
aspirants to the London B.Sc., M.B. and M.D. There were no textbooks
that precisely covered the peculiar mental habits of the university
examiners, and the careless student ran very grave risks of learning
things outside the established requirements and becoming an intellectual
nomad. Moreover there was a practical examination which proved an
effectual "stumper" to men who had merely crammed from books. I set to
work under Briggs to devise the necessary disciplines and economies of
effort for making both the written and the practical examinations in
biology safe for candidates.

That was an absolutely different thing from teaching biological science.
I took over and revised a course of thirty correspondence instruction
papers and later on expanded them into a small _Textbook of Biology_ (my
first published book for which I arranged to charge Briggs four or five
hundred hours, I forget which), and I developed an efficient drilling in
the practical work to cover about forty hours or so of intensive
laboratory work. These forty odd hours could be spread over a session of
twenty or more evening classes of two hours each, or compressed, for the
convenience of students coming to London for the vacation or a last
revision, into a furious grind of five or six hours a day for a
fortnight. We met the demand for biological tutoring as it had never
been met before and if it was a strange sort of biology we taught, that
was the fault of the university examinations.

My classes varied in numbers from half a dozen to our maximum capacity
of about thirty-two. For the bigger classes I had an assistant, who was
my understudy in case of a breakdown. My students sat with their
rabbits, frogs, dogfish, crayfish or other material before them and I
stood at the black-board, showed swiftly and clearly what had to be done
and then went round to see that it was done. I had to organize the
supply and preparation of material and meet all sorts of practical
difficulties. For instance it was impossible in those days to buy a
student's microscope in London for less than five pounds; this was a
prohibitive price for many of our people until we discovered and
imported a quite practicable German model at half the price, and
arranged for its resale at second-hand after it had done its work for
its first owner. I carried the books of answers of my correspondence
students in buses and trains to and from the Red Lion Square
laboratories and marked them in any odd time, with a red-filled fountain
pen. Each book was a nominal twenty minutes' work for me, but I became
very swift and expert with them, swifter indeed than expert. My notes
and comments were sometimes more blottesque than edifying, but on the
whole they did their work.

I must confess that for a time I found this rapid development of an
examiner defeating mechanism very exciting and amusing, and it was only
later on that I began to consider its larger aspects. Briggs had a
bookshop in Booksellers Row, which also dealt with those microscopes,
his Tutorial College in Red Lion Square and a little colony of small
villas for his resident tutors and students, and postal distribution in
Cambridge. Later, I think, in the order of things was his printing plant
at Foxton and the workers' cottages and gardens. I liked the persistent
vigour with which he expanded his organization. My exploit with the
L.C.P. diploma and my success in honours for the B.Sc. had made me an
amateur examinee of some distinction and won his sympathetic respect. At
the end of 1891 I raided the College of Preceptors again, took its
highest diploma of Fellow and carried off a Doreck scholarship of 20.

Briggs hailed my marriage with warm approval. He liked his tutors to
marry young and settle down to his work. I cannot estimate how much the
early marriage of university honours men made his constellation of
first-classes possible, but it was indisputably a factor of some
importance. These prize boys, these climbers of the scholarship ladder,
trained to lives of decorum, found themselves in the course of nature,
as I found myself, the prey to a secret but uncontrollable urge towards
early marriage. Emerging at last as the certified triumphs of the
university process, missing immediate promotion to orthodox academic
posts and finding no other employment open to them except teaching at
schools, in which they were at a great disadvantage because of their
feebly developed skill at games, the offer from Briggs of a secure three
or four hundred pounds a year and probably more, seemed like the opening
of the gates of Paradise with Eve just inside. Hastily selecting wives
and suitable furniture for a villa, they entered the University
Correspondence organization, and found it extremely difficult thereafter
to return to legitimate academic courses. For there can be no denying
that at the outset both the University Correspondence College and the
Tutorial College had an extremely piratical air and awakened the
perplexed suspicion and hostility of more respectably constituted
educational organizations to a very grave extent. I was never under any
illusion that my classes would open up a way of return for me to genuine
scientific work and my spirit resounded richly to this piratical note.

The success of these classes of ours in satisfying the biological
requirements of the examiners in London University without incurring any
serious knowledge of biology, was great and rapid. We drew away a swarm
of medical students from the rather otiose hospital teaching in biology,
we got a number of ambitious teachers, engineering and technical
students who wanted the B.Sc. degree, and so forth, and in the school
holidays we packed our long black-boarded room with the cream of the
elementary teachers up from the country, already B.A.'s, and taking an
intensive course in order to add B.Sc. to their caudal adornments and
their qualifications for a headmastership. We passed them neatly and
surely. In one year, the entire first class in Preliminary Scientific
consisted of my men; we had so raised the examinee standard, that all
the papers from other competing institutions were pushed into the second
class. Harley Street is still dotted with men who found us useful in
helping them over an unreasonable obstacle, and I am continually meeting
with the victim-beneficiaries of my smudgy uncomplimentary corrections
and my sleight of hand demonstrations. Lord Horder was one, the late Rt.
Hon. E. S. Montagu, the Secretary of State for India (1917-22) another.
We put all sorts of competing coaches out of business. One of those for
whom we made life harder was Dr. Aveling, the son-in-law of old Karl
Marx, at Highgate, and I suppose I contributed, unaware of what I was
doing, to the difficulties my old friend A. V. Jennings encountered in
his efforts to establish a private laboratory of his own.

At various times I have thought of making a large rambling novel out of
William Briggs and his creations; _Mr. Miggs and the Mind of the World_,
or some such title. There were many technical difficulties in the way,
but the more serious one lay in the uniqueness of his effort. It would
have needed to be recognizably him and his staff because there was
nothing else in the world like them. And, quite apart from the
probability of blundering into libel, there was the impossibility of
varying the personalities and relationships sufficiently to alleviate a
touch of personal cruelty to the tutors and so forth in the foreground.
These of course could be invented, but whatever one invented, that type
of reader who insists upon reading between the lines would say "that is
old X" or "that is Mrs. Y. Now we know about her." Which is enormously
regrettable, because the whole Briggs adventure from start to finish,
done on a big canvas and with an ample background of education
ministries and immensely dignified university personages and
authorities, is fraught with comedy of the finest sort. Apart from the
endless quaintness of the detail there is the absurdity of the whole
thing. That general absurdity, at least, we can glance at here.

At one pole of the business, you have the remote persons and wills and
forces which are presumably seeking or tending to produce a soundly
educated community. That, if you will, is the spirit in things which
makes for the modern world-state, that is the something not ourselves
that makes for righteousness, or--the dawning commonsense of mankind. At
that pole it is realized that in the new activities of biological
science there is illumination and inspiration of a very high order.
Thence comes a real drive and effort to bring this powerful new
knowledge into effective relation to as much of the general mind as can
be reached by formal teaching.

But this drive towards biological education has to work not only against
passive resistances, but also against a great multitude of common
desires, impulses and activities, that are not so much plainly
antagonistic as running counter to the creative power. First the new
subject has to establish its claim to a leading place in education. It
is claiming space in a curriculum already occupied. Everyone in
authority who as yet knows nothing about it, and everyone teaching a
subject already established and already suffering from the progressive
overloading of curricula, will resist its claims. When they cannot
exclude it altogether they will try compromises, they will try to cut
down the share of time and equipment conceded to it, to a minimum.

They will accuse the new subject of being "revolutionary" and they will
do so with perfect justice. Every new subject involves a change in the
general attitude. Biology was and is a particularly aggressive and
revolutionary subject, and that is why so many of us are urgent to make
it a basal and primary subject in a new education. But in order to
attain their ends many of the advocates of the innovation, minimize its
revolutionary quality. To minimize that is to minimize its value. So
they are led to consent to an emasculated syllabus from which all
"controversial matters" are excluded by agreement. In our biological
syllabus for instance there was not a word about evolution or the
ecological interplay of species and varieties. Biology had indeed been
introduced to the London University examination, rather like a ram
brought into a flock of sheep to improve the breed, but under protest
and only on the strictest understanding and with the most drastic
precautions that there should be no breach of chastity.

The fact that biology as we examination-ruled teachers knew it, was a
severely _blinkered_ subject, might not in itself have prevented our
introducing scientific habits of interrogation and verification to our
students, if we had had any sort of linkage with, or intelligent backing
from, the men who were directly carrying on the living science and who
were also the university examiners. But we were thrust out of touch with
them. We never got to them, though we certainly got at them.

It is not always the professors, experts and researchers in a field of
human interest who are the best and most trustworthy teachers of that
subject to the common man. This is a point excessively ignored by men of
science. They do not realize their specialized limitations. They think
that writing and teaching come by nature. They do not understand that
science is something far greater than the community of scientific men.
It is a culture and not a club. The Royal Society resists the admission
that there is any science of public education or social psychology
whatever, and contemporary economists assembled at the British
Association are still reluctant to admit the possibility of a scientific
planning of public affairs.

Of all that I may write later. But here it has to be recorded that
biology, having got its foot into the door of the university education,
was wedged at that. It was represented only by a syllabus which
presented a sort of sterilized abbreviation of the first half year of
the exemplary biological course of Professor Huxley at Kensington. It
began and ended with the comparative anatomy of a few chosen animal and
vegetable types. It was linked with no other subject. Such reflection as
it threw upon the problems of life was by implication. The illuminating
structural identities and contrasts between the vertebrated types, were
the most suggestive points to seek, and such real teaching of biological
generalizations as was possible in my classes, was done in casual
conversation while I and my assistant went round the dissections. In
spite of such moments, the fact remains that when we had done with the
majority of our students and sent them up for their inevitable passes,
they knew indeed how to dissect out the ovary of an earthworm, the pedal
ganglion of a mussel or the recurrent laryngeal nerve of a rabbit, and
how to draw a passable diagram of the alimentary canal of a frog or the
bones of its pelvic girdle or the homologies of the angiosperm oophore,
but beyond these simple tricks they knew nothing whatever of biology.

My realization of what I was doing during my three years with Briggs was
gradual. The requirements for the diplomas of L.C.P. and F.C.P. were not
very exacting, but they involved a certain amount of reading in
educational theory and history; I had to prepare a short thesis on
Froebel for the former and on Comenius for the latter; and I presently
added to my income by writing, in conjunction with a colleague on
Briggs' staff, Walter Low, who was, until his untimely death in 1895, my
very close friend, most of a monthly publication called the _Educational
Times_. For the _Educational Times_ I reviewed practically every work
upon education that was being published at that time. Educational theory
was forced upon me. This naturally set me asking over again, what I had
already asked myself rather ineffectively during my time at Henley House
School: "What on earth am I really up to here? Why am I giving these
particular lessons in this particular way? If human society is anything
more than a fit of collective insanity in the animal kingdom, what _is_
teaching for?"

At intervals, but persistently, I have been working out the answer to
that all my life, and it will play an increasing rle in the story to
follow.

Later on, having perhaps that early _Textbook of Biology_, already
alluded to, on my conscience, I exerted myself to create a real textbook
of biology for the reading and use of intelligent people. I got Julian
Huxley and my eldest son Gip, both very sound and aggressive teachers of
biology, to combine with me in setting down as plainly and clearly as we
could everything that an educated man--to be an educated man--ought to
know about biological science. This is the _Science of Life_ (1929). It
really does cover the ground of the subject, and I believe that to have
it read properly, to control its reading by test writing and
examination, and to substantiate it by a certain amount of museum work
and demonstrations, would come much nearer to the effective teaching in
general biology which is necessary for any intelligent approach to the
world, than anything of the sort that is so far being done by any
university. Other interests would arrange themselves in relation to
it....

But I am moving ahead of my story. The main moral I would draw from this
brief account of these two remarkable growths upon the London
University, the University Correspondence College and the Tutorial
College, is this: that the progressive spirit must not only ask for
education but see that he gets it. And seeing that you get it is the
real job. We did not so much exploit London University as expose it. The
unsoundness was already there. We were its _reductio ad absurdum_. The
new expanded educational system was not yet giving a real education at
all, and Briggs' widely advertised and ever growing lists of graduated
examinees merely stripped the state of affairs down to its fundamental
bareness.

Could the organization of this correspondence and extra-collegiate
teaching have been made, could it even yet be made, of real educational
use to the community? I believe it could. It was the dream of Briggs'
later years to be formally incorporated in the English university
system. I believe the defects of our tuition were and are not so much in
the tuition itself as in the indolence and slovenly incompetence of the
University examiners and in the lack of full and able direction in the
university syllabuses. There is nothing inherently undesirable in the
direction and testing of reading by correspondence, and nothing harmful
in intelligent examining. But, as it was, we were, with the greatest
energy and gravity, just missing the goal. We went beside the mark. The
only results we produced were examination results which merely looked
like the real thing. In the true spirit of an age of individualistic
competition, we were selling wooden nutmegs or umbrellas that wouldn't
open, or brass sovereigns or a patent food without any nourishment in
it, or whatever other image you like for an unsound delivery of goods.
And our circumstances almost insisted upon that unsound delivery. We
could not have existed except as teachers who did not teach, but pass.


 6

_Collapse into Literary Journalism (1893-94)_

The first phase of all my resistances to the world about me has been
derision. I suppose I gathered my courage in that way for more definite
revolt. And now I began to be ironical and sarcastic about this job by
which I earned my living and sustained my household. The loss of genuine
keenness about my teaching, and a corresponding release of
facetiousness brightened my style in the _Educational Times_, and
presently Briggs asked me to edit (at so many hours per number) a little
advertising and intercommunicating periodical of his own, _The
University Correspondent_.

Both Walter Low and I were very sarcastic young men and we had excellent
reason so to be. The _Educational Times_ was the property of the College
of Preceptors. It paid Low 50 a year as editor and another 50 a year
for contributors. He and I found it convenient that I should be the
contributors--all of them. It saved him a great deal of correspondence.
He was older and more experienced in newspaper matters than I, and I
learnt a good deal of journalistic _savoir faire_ from him. I acquired
dexterity in swinging into a subject and a variety of useful phrases and
methods of reviewing. We went about together, prowling about London, two
passably respectable but not at all glossy young men, with hungry side
glances at its abounding prosperity, sharpening our wits with talk. I
was not so flimsy as I had been; I was beginning to look more compact
and substantial. Low was tall and dark, not the Jew of convention and
caricature, the ambitious and not the acquisitive sort, mystical and
deliberate. He had an extensive knowledge of foreign languages and
contemporary literature. He knew vastly more about current political
issues than I did. We argued endlessly about the Jewish question, upon
which he sought continually to enlighten me. But I have always refused
to be enlightened and sympathetic about the Jewish question. From my
cosmopolitan standpoint it is a question that ought not to exist. So,
though we never quarrelled, we had some lively passages and if we
convinced each other of nothing we considerably instructed each other.

Walter Low was one of a numerous and interesting family which came to
England, I think from Hungary, after the political disturbances of '48.
His father prospered at first and then lost his business flair without
losing his enterprise; and so the family fortunes were dissipated.
Consequently the elder children had greater advantages than the younger.
Sidney and Maurice both went to Oxford, became eminent journalists and
ended with knighthoods. One of the sisters married well, and an elder
one, Frances, became a prominent journalist. She wrote particularly in a
ladies' paper called the _Queen_ and scolded the girl of the
period--with the usual absence of result. The younger members of the
family had to fight for education by winning scholarships. The youngest
sister, Barbara, is a psycho-analyst and has written an excellent little
book on her subject. Walter's education fell into the trough of the
family depression and instead of going to Oxford or Cambridge he worked
in London and took a London M.A. degree, with exceptional distinction in
foreign languages. The difficulties he had experienced gave him much the
same discontented and disadvantaged feeling about life that pervaded my
thoughts. We were in our twenties now and still getting nowhere. It
wasn't that we were failing to climb the ladder of success. We had an
exasperating realization that we could not even get our feet on the
ladder of success. It had been put out of our reach.

We had both toiled hard for outside university distinctions and we found
they had led us into nothing but this fundamentally unsatisfactory
coaching. We had both worked strenuously at writing and discovered that
the more we learnt of that elusive art the less satisfaction we derived
from the writing we did, because of the haste with which we had to do it
and sell it. Both of us, following some shy dream of sensuous loveliness
and tender intimacy, had married and become householders, and neither
for our wives nor for ourselves, was married life, upon restricted
means, fulfilling the imaginations that romance and music had aroused in
us. At the back of our minds was a vague feeling that we would like to
begin life all over again and begin it differently; but although this
feeling may have coloured our subconsciousness and certainly deflected
our behaviour, it found no more definite expression. We did not own up
to it. We scoffed and assumed a confident air.

My guiding destiny was presently to wrench me round into a new beginning
again, but Walter Low never got away to good fortune. He caught a cold,
neglected it and died of pneumonia in 1895. He left a widow who
presently married again, and three bright little daughters. One of
them, Ivy, wrote two quite good short novels in her teens, _Growing
Pains_, and _The Questing Beast_, and then married a young Russian exile
and conspirator named Litvinoff, who is now the very able Foreign
Minister of the Russian government. We met at my home at Grasse and
afterwards in London, in the spring of 1933, and Ivy talked with great
affection and understanding about her father.

I did what I could to stifle my fundamental dissatisfaction with life
during this period as a correspondence tutor. There was no one about me
whom by any stretch of injustice I could blame for the insufficiencies
of my experience, and I tried not to grumble about them even to myself.
My correspondence fell away; I had quite enough correspondence without
writing personal letters. The zest may have gone out of my interest in
myself and there is little or no record of the moods of this time. But
between myself and Low there was a considerable mute understanding.
Under the influence of his efforts I was beginning to write again in any
scraps of time I could snatch from direct money-earning. I was resuming
my general criticism of life. I had already had one curious little gleam
of success. In the winter of 1890-91 after taking my degree, I had
broken down and had a hmorrhage, and Dr. Collins--who believed
steadfastly in my ultimate recovery--had got me nearly a month's holiday
at Up Park. This had given me a period of intellectual leisureliness in
which my mind could play with an idea for days on end, and I wrote a
paper _The Rediscovery of the Unique_ which was printed by Frank Harris
in the _Fortnightly Review_ (July 1891). I have already mentioned this
paper in  2 of Chapter V, in my account of the development of my
conception of the physical universe. This success whetted my appetite
for print and I sent Harris a further article, the _Universe Rigid_,
which he packed off to the printers at once and only read when he got it
in proof. He found it incomprehensible and his immediate staff found it
incomprehensible. This is not surprising, since it was a laboured and
ill-written description of a four dimensional space-time universe, and
that sort of thing was still far away from the monthly reviews in 1891.
"Great _Gahd_!" cried Harris, "What's the fellow up to?" and summoned me
to the office.

I found his summons disconcerting. My below-stairs training reinforced
the spirit of the times on me, and insisted that I should visit him in
proper formal costume. I imagined I must wear a morning coat and a silk
hat and carry an umbrella. It was impossible I should enter the presence
of a Great Editor in any other guise. My aunt Mary and I inspected these
vitally important articles. The umbrella, tightly rolled and with a new
elastic band, was not so bad, provided it had not to be opened; but the
silk hat was extremely discouraging. It was very fluffy and defaced and,
as I now perceived for the first time, a little brownish in places. The
summons was urgent and there was no time to get it ironed. We brushed it
with a hard brush and then with a soft one and wiped it round again and
again with a silk handkerchief. The nap remained unsubdued. Then,
against the remonstrances of my aunt Mary, I wetted it with a sponge and
then brushed. That seemed to do the trick. My aunt's attempt to restrain
me had ruffled and delayed me a little, but I hurried out, damply
glossy, to the great encounter, my dbut in the world of letters.

Harris kept me waiting in the packing office downstairs for nearly half
an hour before he would see me. This ruffled me still more. At last I
was shown up to a room that seemed to me enormous, in the midst of which
was a long table at which the great man was sitting. At the ends were a
young man, whom I was afterwards to know as Blanchamp, and a very
refined looking old gentleman named Silk who was Harris's private
secretary. Harris silently motioned me to a chair opposite himself.

He was a square-headed individual with very black hair parted in the
middle and brushed fiercely back. His eyes as they met my shabby and
shrinking form became intimidatory. He had a blunt nose over a vast
black upturned moustache, from beneath which came a deep voice of
exceptional power. He seemed to me to be of extraordinary size, though
that was a mere illusion; but he was certainly formidable. "And it was
_you_ sent me this Universe R-R-Rigid!" he roared.

I got across to the table somehow, sat down and disposed myself for a
conversation. I was depleted and breathless. I placed my umbrella and
hat on the table before me and realized then for the first time that my
aunt Mary had been right about that wetting. It had become a disgraceful
hat, an insult. The damp gloss had gone. The nap was drying irregularly
and standing up in little tufts all over. It was not simply a shabby top
hat; it was an improper top hat. I stared at it. Harris stared at it.
Blanchamp and Silk had evidently never seen such a hat. With an effort
we came to the business in hand.

"You sent me this Universe Gur-R-R-Rigid," said Harris, picking up his
cue after the pause.

He caught up a proof beside him and tossed it across the table. "Dear
Gahd! I can't understand six words of it. What do you _mean_ by it? For
Gahd's sake tell me what it is all _about_? What's the sense of it? What
are you trying to _say_?"

I couldn't stand up to him--and my hat. I couldn't for a moment adopt
the tone and style of a bright young man of science. There was my hat
tacitly revealing the sort of chap I was. I couldn't find words.
Blanchamp and Silk with their chins resting on their hands, turned back
from the hat to me, in gloomy silent accusation.

"Tell me what you _think_ it's about?" roared Harris, growing more
merciless with my embarrassment, and rapping the proof with the back of
his considerable hand. He was enjoying himself.

"Well, you see----" I said.

"I don't see," said Harris. "That's just what I don't do."

"The idea," I said, "the idea----"

Harris became menacingly silent, patiently attentive.

"If you consider time is space like, then---- I mean if you treat it
like a fourth dimension like, well then you see...."

"_Gahd_ the way I've been let in!" injected Harris in an aside to Gahd.

"I can't use it," said Harris at the culmination of the interview.
"We'll have to disperse the type again,"--and the vision I had had of a
series of profound but brilliant articles about fundamental ideas, that
would make a reputation for me, vanished. My departure from that room
has been mercifully obliterated from my memory. But as soon as I got
alone with it in my bedroom in Fitzroy Road, I smashed up that hat
finally. To the great distress of my aunt Mary. And the effect of that
encounter was to prevent my writing anything ambitious again, for a year
or more. If I did, I might get into the presence of another editor, and
clearly that was far worse than having one's MS. returned. It needed all
the encouragement and rivalry of Walter Low to bring me back to articles
once more and even then I confined myself mainly to the ill-paid and
consequently reasonably accessible educational papers. They paid so
badly that their editors had no desire whatever to look their
contributors in the face.

Harris broke up the type of that second article and it is lost, but one
or two people, Oscar Wilde was one, so praised to him the _Rediscovery
of the Unique_, that he may have had afterthoughts about the merits of
the rejected stuff. At any rate, when in 1894 he became proprietor
editor of the _Saturday Review_ and reorganized its staff, he remembered
and wrote to me and I became one of his regular contributors.

But before then there had been some violent convulsions in my affairs.
That humorous, that almost facetious Destiny that rules my life, seems
to have resented the possibility that I might settle down in the
position of one of Briggs' married, prize tutors, with occasional lapses
into journalism and aspiration, and proceeded to knock my solidifying
world to pieces again with characteristic emphasis.

Its course of action was threefold. It made its attack in three phases.
First it concentrated the diffused discontent and self-criticism in my
life into an acute emotional situation. I think I have already made
plain how incompatible was my outlook of things from that of my wife. I
want to make certain aspects of that relationship very clear. There is a
traditional disposition to import blame or sympathy into every breach
between a man and a woman. The people who tell the story about them say
that he was false to her or that she was unworthy of him or that he or
she made no effort and so forth and so on. But in most breaches between
men and women, the want of harmony was there from the beginning and the
atmosphere of a conflict and moral compulsions is imposed upon them by
laws and customs that exact an impossibly stereotyped universality of
behaviour from a world of unique personalities. My cousin and I had been
thrown closely together by the accidents of life, we had been honest
allies and we liked and admired innumerable things in each other. That
we should marry had seemed the logical outcome of our situation. We both
wanted now to be honest mates and adapt ourselves to each other
completely. We were both perplexed and distressed by our failure to do
that. We were in love with each other, quite honestly and simply
desirous of being "everything" to each other. But there was an
unalterable difference not only in our mental equipment and habits, but
in our nervous reactions. I felt and acted swiftly and variously and at
times very loosely and superficially, in the acutest contrast to her
gentler and steadier flow. There was no contact nor comparison between
our imaginative worlds, but within her range her quality was simpler and
nobler than mine. If we had not been under the obligation of our
marriage and our sentimental bias to agree in a hundred judgments and
act together upon some common interpretation of life, all would have
been well with us. But that need for a community of objective was the
impossible condition which separated us.

The ideas which made me more and more discontented with the cramming of
examinees by which we lived, were outside her world. She could not
understand why I mocked and fretted perpetually at Briggs' grave and
industrious organization of tutoring, because she had no inkling of the
ultimate futility of the whole process. Examinations to her were like
alarming but edible wild animals, they were in the order of nature, and
it was my business as the man to go out and overcome them and bring back
the proceeds. I on the other hand thought they were distortions of an
educational process for which I felt dimly responsible. Mentally she
lived inside a system, and I was not only in the system but also
consciously and responsibly a part of that system in which I lived. She
said, with perfect justice, that Briggs had always treated me very
fairly and that I ought not to make fun of him. In her gentle but
obstinate way she "stood up for him" when I talked about him. But indeed
we brought in such different data that with regard to everyone in our
world, her friends and my friends, we had hardly a judgment in common.
She was equally unable to see why some issues of the _University
Correspondent_ satisfied me and others overwhelmed me with strain and
fury because they wouldn't come right by certain impossible standards of
my own. Why did I sit at my desk getting more and more put out by my
work, while my dinner was getting cold? She thought I "fussed about
little things" too much. She was perplexed, seeing how much I had to do,
that I should want to do quite other writing besides. And again it
seemed to her on the verge of unreason that I could fly off from
something in the newspaper to scorn, bitterness and denunciation. I can
still see her dear brown eyes dismayed at some uncontrollable outburst.
Throughout our married life, with no sense of personal antagonism,
unconsciously, she became the gently firm champion of all that I felt
was suppressing me. Conversation between us died away as topic after
topic ceased to be a neutral topic. It shrank to occasional jests and
endearments or to small immediate things; to the sweet-peas in the
garden or the gift of a kitten. My unaccountable irritability was a
perpetual threat to our peace.

Meanwhile I talked outside my home and began to find an increasing
interest in the suggestions of personality in the girls and women who
flitted across the background of my restless, toilsome little world.
Then it was that my Destiny saw fit to bring a grave little figure into
my life who was to be its ruling influence and support throughout all my
most active years. When I came into my laboratory to meet the new
students who were assembling for the afternoon class of 1892-93 I found
two exceptionally charming young women making friends at the end table.
One of them was a certain Adeline Roberts, so dazzlingly pretty and so
essentially serious, that she never in all her life had time to fall in
love with a man before he was in a state of urgent and undignified
protestation at her feet. So that she is still Adeline Roberts, M.D.,
L.C.C., and a soundly conservative influence in the affairs of the
county of London. The other, Amy Catherine Robbins, was a more fragile
figure, with very delicate features, very fair hair and very brown eyes.
She was dressed in mourning, for her father had been quite recently
killed in a railway accident, and she wanted to get the London B.Sc.
degree before she took up high school teaching.

If either of these young ladies had joined my class alone I should
probably never have become very intimate with either. It would not have
been within my range of possibility to single out any particular student
for more than a due meed of instruction. It would have been
"conspicuous." But with two students capable of asking intelligent
questions, it was the most natural thing in the world to put a stool
between them, sit down instructively, and let these questions expand.
They were both in a phase of mental formation and student curiosity,
they were both reading widely, and it was the most natural thing in the
world that comparative anatomy should lead to evolutionary theory and
that again point the way to theological questions and social themes.
They revived the discursive interests of my Kensington days. The
disposition of Adeline Roberts was towards orthodoxy; her mind had been
built upon an unshaken and wholly accepted Christian faith; Catherine
Robbins had read more widely and had a bolder curiosity. She was
breaking away from the tepid, shallow, sentimental Church of England
Christianity in which she had been brought up. The snatches of talk for
four or five minutes at a stretch that were possible during the class
session were presently not enough for us, and we developed a habit of
meeting early and going on talking after the two hours of rigorous
biology were over. Little Miss Robbins was the more acutely interested
and she was generally more punctually in advance of her time than her
friend, so that we two became a duologue masked as a three-cornered
friendship.

This was a new outlet for my imagination. I was under no necessity here
of assuming the cynical tone I adopted with Walter Low, and I could talk
of my ideas and ambitions more freely than I had ever done before. I
could release old mental accumulations that had been out of action since
my student phase had ended. I posed as a man of promise and effort and,
as I posed, I began to believe in my pose. I cannot now retrace the easy
steps through interest to intimate affection. We lent each other books;
we exchanged notes; we contrived to walk together once or twice and to
have tea together. It was a friendship that assured itself with the most
perfect insincerity that it meant to go no further, and it kept on going
further.

It came to me quite suddenly one night that I wanted the sort of life
that Amy Catherine Robbins symbolized for me and that my present life
was unendurable. That was the realization of a state of affairs that had
been accumulating below the level of consciousness for some time. It did
not in the least prevent that present life continuing. And the sexual
element in this shift of desire was very small.

I became profoundly preoccupied with this realization of a better
companionship. I did not know how to state my situation, even to myself.
I did not clearly understand the fundamentals of my trouble. I tried
over all sorts of explanations for this sudden sense of insufficiency in
my cousin, whom nevertheless I still loved with pride, proprietorship
and jealousy, and this distressing and overpowering desire to be
together with a new companion. My habitual disposition to respect an
obligation, to accept my immediate world and respond to its urgencies
and imperatives was very strong. But almost equally strong was another
system of dispositions not so immediate, but begotten of reading and
thought and discussion, which denied the final claim of these immediate
imperatives to control and shape my life, a system of dispositions which
conformed to a code of right and wrong and duties--and excuses, that
could at times run absolutely counter to the primary set. Seen in the
perspective of forty-five years it is all clear enough. Indeed the
primary theme of this autobiography is this conflict between the primary
and the secondary values of life, and here it approached an acute phase.
But I had still to realize that. I found myself divided against myself,
contradicting myself, saying something that seemed on one day to be a
revelation of the profoundest truth and the next day a feat of humbug. I
had become inexplicable even on my own terms, and my humour and
expressiveness had deserted me.

Every convention required that I should regard the business as a simple
choice between two personalities, and I had not the acuteness to see
through that at the time. The formula imposed upon my mind was that I
had been "mistaken" in regarding myself as loving Isabel, which was not
in the least true, and that now I had found my "true affinity" and
fallen in love with her, which again was a misstatement. My
sub-conscious intelligence was protesting against this simplification
but it never struggled up to explicitness.

But I think it will be more convenient to postpone the dissection of
these emotional perplexities for another chapter and to go on here with
the odd tangle of associated accidents which now in little more than a
year transformed me from an industrious tutor into an ambitious writer.
My sentimental education is a story by itself and it shall have a
chapter to itself.

Having brought me to this phase of fluctuation between two conflicting
streams of motive, my peculiar Destiny set itself by a series of
decisive blows to change all the circumstances about me. The precarious
hold of my family upon a living had already been loosened in the case
both of my father, who was in that cottage at Nyewoods earning nothing,
and of my brother, who was with him repairing and trading watches on a
small scale. Now it was that Miss Fetherstonhaugh rebelled against my
mother's increasing deafness and inefficiency and dismissed her, and
almost simultaneously, my brother Freddy, who had seemed safely
established in the confidence of his firm at Wokingham, discovered that
he was presently to be replaced in his job by a son of his employer.

His heart burned within him. He had been happy at Wokingham and
satisfied with himself for some years; he had saved perhaps a hundred
pounds, and his head spun with schemes of getting in a little more
capital and credit and setting up for himself in the town and--just
showing them. He consulted me. I found myself forced into the position
of head of the family. My mother took refuge with me in February and I
learn from an undated letter preserved by my brother Frank, that I
actually went down to Wokingham, a trip I have completely forgotten,
probably in the early spring, to consider the prospects of Wells Bros.
Drapers (and Watchmakers) there. I did not find those prospects very
bright.

I had none of the Bonaparte-Northcliffe disposition to control and use
my family. My impression is that I was hasty, harsh and stupid about all
this tangle and almost uncouthly regardless of the humiliations and
distressed desires involved therein, I seem to have experimented with my
father and mother, possibly at my mother's suggestion, in giving them
sheets of lessons to copy out. Poor dears, they were about as qualified
to do that properly, as they were to make translations from Sanscrit. I
also discover, in letters my brother Freddy has kept, that I wanted him
to turn from drapery and try his luck for an art scholarship at South
Kensington. There were various unstable plans for partnerships and
business enterprises that vanished as they came, like summer snow. In
addition to all the other little jobs I had in hand I seem at that time
to have undertaken, to organize on the appearance of one or two possible
examinees, a special course in geology for the London degree
examination. This in itself was a complicated task needing close
attention, reading and a balanced judgment. I never carried it out.
Freddy was dislodged from Wokingham sometime in April or May. By that
time my mother had gone to join my father and my brother Frank at
Nyewoods and Freddy occupied the spare bedroom at Haldon Road, went into
London daily, dividing his time there between the dismal pursuit of
crib-hunting and, with a diminishing hopefulness, enquiries about the
possibility of setting up in business for himself with practically no
capital at all. Upon reflection he decided he could not work in
partnership with brother Frank and it became clearer and clearer to us
both that with so small a capital as we possessed, it would be
impossible to get goods at proper wholesale prices. We should fall into
the hands of intermediaries who specialize in eating up the hopeful
beginnings of would-be small retailers. We were both very innocent about
finance but not so innocent as all that.

I still have my old bank books. At the beginning of 1893 I opened the
account already noted at the Wandsworth Branch of what is now the
Westminster Bank, and from the first of these little volumes which
presently grow larger and fatter, I learn that in that year I earned
380 13_s._ 7_d._ My quarterly balance was usually round about 50. At
the end of the year however it fell to 25 15_s._ 1_d._ A pound meant
more then than it does now, but manifestly the fortunes of the Wells
family were still being carried within a very narrow margin of safety. I
seem to have paid out cheques to various Wellses, identities now
untraceable, to the amount of 109. Most, if not all of this, probably
went to my parents at Nyewoods.

One evening I gave a couple of hours to my new geological aspirant. I
have quite forgotten him now, but apparently I introduced him to a few
typical fossils. Where I procured these fossils, I do not know, but
possibly they were hired. At any rate I found myself about nine or ten
at night hurrying down the slope of Villiers Street to Charing Cross
Underground Station, with a heavy bag of specimens. I was seized by a
fit of coughing. Once more I tasted blood and felt the dismay that had
become associated with it and when I had got into the train I pulled out
my handkerchief and found it stained brightly scarlet. I coughed alone
in the dingy compartment and tried not to cough, sitting very still and
telling myself it was nothing very much, until at last I got to Putney
Bridge. Then it had stopped. I was hungry when I got home and as I did
not want to be sent to bed forthwith, I hid my tell-tale handkerchief
and would not even look at it myself because I wanted to believe that I
had coughed up nothing but a little discoloured phlegm, and I made a
hearty supper. It was unendurable to think that I was to have yet
another relapse, that I should have to stop work again. I got to bed all
right. At three o'clock in the morning I was trying for dear life not to
cough. But this time the blood came and came and seemed resolved to
choke me for good and all. This was no skirmish; this was a grand
attack.

I remember the candle-lit room, the dawn breaking through presently, my
wife and my aunt in nightgowns and dressing-gowns, the doctor hastily
summoned and attention focussed about a basin in which there was blood
and blood and more blood. Sponge-bags of ice were presently adjusted to
my chest but I kept on disarranging them to sit up for a further bout of
coughing. I suppose I was extremely near death that night, but I
remember only my irritation at the thought that this would prevent my
giving a lecture I had engaged myself to give on the morrow. The blood
stopped before I did. I was presently spread out under my ice-bags,
still and hardly breathing, but alive.

When I woke up after an indefinite interval it was as if all bothers and
urgencies had been washed out of my brain. I was pleasantly weary and
tranquil, the centre of a small attentive world. I had to starve for a
week except for a spoonful or so of that excellent stimulant,
Valentine's Extract. Much the same beautiful irresponsibility descended
upon me, as came to many of the men who were sent out of the Great War
to hospitals or England. There was nothing more for me to do, nothing I
could possibly attend to and I didn't care a rap. I had got out of my
struggle with honour and no one could ask me to carry on with those
classes any more. I was quit of them. I might write or I might die. It
didn't matter. The crowning event of this phase of my life came after
seven days, when I was given a thin slice of bread and butter.

Within a day or so of this disaster I was writing heroically indistinct
pencil notes to my friends and having a fine time of it. "I almost sent
in p.p.c. cards on Thursday morning, but it occurred to me in time that
they were out of fashion"--that was the style of it. "No more teaching
for me for ever," I write to Miss Healey. Sympathetic responses came to
hand. Adeline Roberts, honestly appalled at my situation, felt it her
duty to write me a letter, a most kind and affectionate letter of
religious exhortation. I do not remember how I answered her, but it was
something in the manner of a Cockney Voltaire. I'm sorry for that to
this day. Dr. Collins heard of my plight and wrote also. I detected a
helpful motive and wrote among other things to assure him that I had
"reserves" for a year or so.

As I grew stronger I found myself exceptionally clear-headed and
steady-minded. I amused myself in my convalescence by playing draughts
and chess with brother Fred. Hitherto he had always been the better
player and I had been hasty and inaccurate. Now for a time I found I saw
all round him and he hadn't a chance with me. And suddenly I grasped the
essentials of his problem. There came a demand from South Africa for an
assistant, the rate of pay sounded very good in comparison with English
salaries, and he was half alarmed and half attracted by the proposal.
This was the very thing for him. He was honest, sober, decent and
pleasant, he was trustworthy to the superlative degree and he lacked the
sort of push, smartness and self assertion needed to make any sort of
business success in England. In the colonies shop assistants do not run
as straight or as steadily as they are compelled to do at home, they
feel the breath of opportunity and the lure of personal freedom, so that
out there his assets of steadiness and trustworthiness would be a
precious commodity, and therefore I determined he must go. I had to
overbear a strong sentimental resistance on the part of my mother, but
Freddy was greatly sustained by my agreement with him, and in a week or
so the engagement was made and the adventurer was buying his outfit and
packing for the Cape,--to prosper, to acquire property and at last to
return to England on the verge of sixty "comfortably off," to marry a
first cousin on our maternal side, and present me with my one and only
niece. With Freddy thus provided for and having undertaken to carry a
share of the expenses of Nyewoods so soon as his first money came in, my
mind was liberated to go into the details of my own problem.

I was not without a solution. There had already been a set-back to my
earning power in the middle of 1891, when after a lesser hmorrhage I
had proposed to throw up my class teaching with Briggs. At that time he
had found no properly qualified substitute and I had taken on the class
work again after a rest. My classes had grown and multiplied steadily
since then and we had already added a permanent assistant, J. M. Lowson,
a very much better botanist than I, and a loyal and pleasant colleague.
We arranged for my friend and former fellow student A. M. Davies, now a
distinguished geologist, to relieve me of the rest of the class
teaching, while my name remained on Briggs' glittering list of
first-class honours men as the biological tutor, and I carried on with
the correspondence work and undertook a text book of geography that was
never completed. Fate was pushing me to the writing desk in spite of
myself. I decided that henceforth I must reckon class teaching in London
as outside the range of my possibilities and so we were free to move out
of town to some more open and healthy situation. But before doing that
we resolved, as my little aunt was now also in rather shaky health, to
take a fortnight's holiday, all three of us, and pick up our strength at
Eastbourne.

I see I drew a cheque for 30, payable to "self" in May, and I have no
doubt this gigantic withdrawal represents that Eastbourne expedition.

As I look over these yellowing old bank-books I see close to that
another item: May 19th Gregory 10. It recalls one of the brightest
incidents in my life and I cannot omit it here. My old fellow student R.
A. Gregory was in a tighter corner just then even than I was; he had no
ready money at all and I lent him that! (What courage and confidence we
had in those days!) In a week or so he had paid it back to me. Never in
all my days since has anyone returned me a borrowed fiver or tenner,
except Gregory. And after that he and I put our heads together and
arranged to collaborate in a small but useful cram-book to be called
_Honours Physiography_, which we sold outright to a publisher for
20--which we shared, fifty-fifty.

When I had been at Eastbourne for two or three days, I hit quite by
accident upon the true path to successful free-lance journalism. I found
the hidden secret in a book by J. M. Barrie, called _When a Man's
Single_. Let me quote the precious words through which I found
salvation. "You beginners," said the sage Rorrison, "seem able to write
nothing but your views on politics, and your reflections on art, and
your theories of life, which you sometimes even think original. Editors
won't have that, because their readers don't want it.... You see this
pipe here? Simms saw me mending it with sealing-wax one day, and two
days afterwards there was an article about it in the _Scalping Knife_.
When I went off for my holidays last summer I asked him to look in here
occasionally and turn a new cheese which had been sent me from the
country. Of course he forgot to do it, and I denounced him on my return
for not keeping his solemn promise, so he revenged himself by publishing
an article entitled 'Rorrison's Oil-Painting.' In this it was explained
that just before Rorrison went off for a holiday he got a present of an
oil-painting. Remembering when he had got to Paris that the painting,
which had come to him wet from the easel, had been left lying on his
table, he telegraphed to the writer to have it put away out of reach of
dust and the cat. The writer promised to do so, but when Rorrison
returned he found the picture lying just where he left it. He rushed off
to his friend's room to upbraid him, and did it so effectually that the
friend says in his article, 'I will never do a good turn for Rorrison
again!'"

"But why," asked Rob, "did he turn the cheese into an oil-painting?"

"Ah, there you have the journalistic instinct again. You see a cheese is
too plebeian a thing to form the subject of an article in the _Scalping
Knife_, so Simms made a painting of it. He has had my Chinese umbrella
from several points of view in three different papers. When I play on
his piano I put scraps of paper on the notes to guide me, and he made
his three guineas out of that. Once I challenged him to write an article
on a straw that was sticking to the sill of my window, and it was one of
the most interesting things he ever did. Then there was the box of old
clothes and other odds and ends that he promised to store for me when I
changed my rooms. He sold the lot to a hawker for a pair of flower-pots,
and wrote an article on the transaction. Subsequently he had another
article on the flower-pots; and when I appeared to claim my belongings
he got a third article out of that."

Why had I never thought in that way before? For years I had been seeking
rare and precious topics. _Rediscovery of the Unique!_ _Universe Rigid!_
The more I was rejected the higher my shots had flown. All the time I
had been shooting over the target. All I had to do was to lower my
aim--and hit.

I did lower my aim and by extraordinary good fortune I hit at once. My
friendly Destiny had everything ready for me. It had arranged that an
American millionaire, Mr. W. W. Astor, not very well informed about the
journalistic traditions of Fleet Street, should establish himself in
London and buy the _Pall Mall Gazette_. As soon as the transaction was
completed he called the Editor to him, and instructed him to change his
politics. The Editor and most of the staff resigned, to the extreme
surprise of Mr. Astor who, casting about for an immediate successor and
meeting at dinner, a handsome and agreeable young man, Harry Cust, heir
to the Earl of Brownlow, whose knowledge of literature and the world
were as manifest as his manners were charming, offered him the vacant
editorship, then and there. Cust was a friend of W. E. Henley, the
editor of the small, bright and combative _National Observer_, and to
him he went for advice and help. A staff was assembled on which
experienced journalists mingled with writers of an acuter literary
sensibility, and in the highest of spirits and with a fine
regardlessness of expenditure--for was not Astor notoriously a
multi-millionaire--Cust set out to make the _Pall Mall Gazette_ the most
brilliant of recorded papers. Large and extravagant offices were secured
in the West End near Leicester Square. Everyone available in Cust's
social circle and Henley's literary world, was invoked to help, advise,
criticize. Among other strange rules in the office was one that no
contribution offered should go unread. The rate of pay was exceptionally
good for the time, and there was less space devoted to news and politics
and more to literary matter than in any other evening paper.

Quite unaware of this burgeoning of generous intentions within the cold
resistances of the London press, I lay in the kindly sunshine beneath
the white headland of Beachy Head and read my Barrie. Reading him in the
nick of time. How easy he made it seem! I fell into a pleasant
meditation. I reflected that directly one forgot how confoundedly
serious life could be, it did become confoundedly amusing. For instance
those other people on the beach....

I returned to my lodgings with the substance of an article _On Staying
at the Seaside_ scribbled on the back of a letter and on its envelope.
My cousin Bertha Williams at Windsor was a typist and I sent the stuff
for her to typewrite. Then I posted this to the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and
received a proof almost by return. I was already busy on a second
article which was also accepted. Next I dug up a facetious paper I had
written for the _Science Schools Journal_ long ago, and rewrote it as
_The Man of the Year Million_. This appeared later in the _Pall Mall
Budget_. It was illustrated there and someone in _Punch_ was amused by
it and quoted it and gave another illustration. I had been learning the
business of writing lightly and brightly for years without understanding
that I was serving an apprenticeship. _The Science Schools Journal_, the
_University Correspondent_, the _Educational Times_, the _Journal of
Education_, had been, so to speak, my exercise books, and my endless
letters to such appreciative friends as Elizabeth Healey and even my
talks to quick-witted associates like Walter Low, had been releasing me
from the restricted vocabulary of my boyhood, sharpening my phrasing and
developing skill in expression. At last I found myself with the knack of
it.

I do not now recall the order of the various sketches, dialogues and
essays I produced in that opening year of journalism. They came pouring
out. Some of the best of them are to be found collected in two books,
still to be bought, _Certain Personal Matters_ and _Select Conversations
with an Uncle_. Much of that stuff was good enough to print but not
worth reprinting. Barrie was entertained by one of these articles and
asked Cust who had written it. When Cust expressed his approval of my
work to me and demanded more, I asked him to let me have some reviewing
and routine work to eke out my income when I was not in the mood to
invent, and he agreed. Books for review came to hand....

In a couple of months I was earning more money than I had ever done in
my class-teaching days. It was absurd. I forgot all the tragedy of my
invalidism and in August in a mood of returning confidence, we moved to
a house my wife had found in Sutton, 4 Cumnor Place. Nyewoods read the
articles, heard of the monthly cheques, participated, rejoiced and was
glad. Editors of other papers began to write to me. I still went on with
correspondence tuition, my textbook of geography and my collaboration
with Gregory.

I lived at Sutton until after Christmas, when as I will tell more fully
in the next chapter, I left my cousin. We parted and Catherine Robbins
joined me in London, in lodgings at 7 Mornington Place (January, 1894).
She was reading and making notes for her B.Sc. degree and we scribbled
side by side in our front room on the ground floor, prowled about London
in search of stuff for articles and had a very happy time together.

I continued to write with excitement and industry, I found ideas came to
hand more and more readily, and now the return of a manuscript was
becoming rare. Editors were beginning to look out for me and I was
learning what would suit them. But the particulars of these journeyman
years I will deal with later. Here I will give only the testimony of my
little bank books to show how the financial pressure upon me was
relieved and overcome. In 1893 I had made 380 13_s._ 7_d._ and it had
been extremely difficult to keep things going. I seem to have carried
off Catherine Robbins on a gross capital of less than 100. In 1894 I
earned 583 17_s._ 7_d._; in 1895 792 2_s._ 5_d._ and in 1896 1,056
7_s._ 9_d._ Every year for a number of years my income went on expanding
in this fashion. I was able to put Nyewoods on a satisfactory basis with
regular payments, pay off all the costs of my divorce, pay a punctual
alimony to Isabel, indulge comfortably in such diminishing bouts of ill
health as still lay ahead of me, accumulate a growing surplus and
presently build a home and beget children. I was able to move my father
and mother and brother from Nyewoods to a better house at Liss,
Roseneath, in 1896 and afterwards buy it for them. My wilder
flounderings with material fortune were over; my Destiny seemed
satisfied with my further progress and there were no more disastrous but
salutary kickings into fresh positions and wider opportunities. The last
cardinal turning point on the road to fortune had been marked by that
mouthful of blood in Villiers Street on the way down to Charing Cross.


 7

_Exhibits in Evidence_

This I think is the place for various documents, mostly letters written
between 1890 and 1900, which give the tone and quality of my relations
to my family and to one or two other people who were playing an
important part in my life at that period. I have had to pick them out
from a very considerable heap of material. One of the most difficult
things in my task of relating the development of an ordinary brain
during what I believe to be a very crucial phase in human history, has
been to select. I doubt if anybody reads collections of So and So's
letters right through and I doubt if many readers will go through this
section closely. Yet these scribbles set down for some particular
recipient without the remotest idea of publication and subsequent
judgment, do, I think, catch some subtle phases in mental transition. A
few sheets I have had reproduced in reduced facsimile, to get the still
puerile flavour of the handwriting and the still puerile habit of
facetious sketching. The rest have been transcribed and are given in
small print. As we used to say in our correspondence tuition: it is not
absolutely essential that this material should be read. They are for
expansion and confirmation of what has been related already. I wish I
could have had all of them done in facsimile. The browning old sheets
have a reality and veracity impossible to convey in any other fashion.
They add very few new facts; they are living substance rather than
record; there they are.

These letters are full of the little jokes and allusions of a
reluctantly dispersing household. None of us realized how we were
drifting apart, each one of us to new associations that the other would
never share. There is a sort of "listen to my wonders" in these letters
which I find now just a little pathetic, the desire to make the most of
any little success; behind the apparent egotism and vanity is a living
desire to keep up the old closeness of interest and the old intimacy of
humour. That impulse fades out steadily, and in still later
correspondence it has gone almost completely. The funny little inept
sketches become rare and die out at last--cropping up finally only when
Christmas or a birthday revives the fading family spirit. In the end the
last umbilical threads are severed and hardly anything remains but a
friendly memory of those vanished ties.

I suppose every biography, if fully told, would reveal this early
predominance of home affections and the successive weakening out and
subordination of one strand of sympathy after another, as new ones
replaced them. It is clear that up to my thirtieth year there was still
a very powerful web of feeling between me and the scattered remains of
my home group. I was at least half way through life before my emotional
release from that original matrix was completed. That, I think, must be
the normal way of the individual life. It is a pilgrimage from
familiarity to loneliness. I doubt whether any subsequent association
systems, the dependences upon those persons and groups to whom we turn
to replace that confirmation and reassurance our families gave us in the
beginning, have ever the same influence over us that our primary
audience exercised. It is not that we break away but that we are broken
away. We cling to friendships, social circles, cliques, clubs,
movements, societies, parties, descendants: but for all our clinging we
are forced towards the open. We lose the trick of easy clinging. In the
long run, if we live long enough, we find ourselves standing alone,
grown up at last altogether, in the face of the universe and life--and
what remains to us of death.

The strongest secondary system of reference I ever developed was to my
second wife, the moral background of half my life. For long years it
seemed as though many things had not completely happened until I had
told her of them. And even now, although she has been dead for seven
years I find myself thinking "This would amuse Jane." I write a bit of a
letter in my head or I think of a "picshua," before I remember.

Many of these letters were undated. These I have given an approximate
date in italics in square brackets. I have corrected some of the dating
by Ephgrave's useful calendar.

     College of Preceptors,

     Bloomsbury Square, W.C.

     July 5th, 1890.

     DEAR OLD FRED,

     Just a line to mention the fact that you _have_ a brother in London
     to whom your memory is a precious possession and _wild flowers very
     acceptable_.[1] Dog daisies, dandelions, violets, in fact anything
     in that way, the meanest flower that blows--a LARGE box.

     I hope you keep healthy and happy. I am overworked of course, but
     my appetite is still unimpaired and while that lasts, I will keep
     happy.

     "Our jokes are little but our hearts are great."

     Tennison

     Believe me,

     Very respectfully yours,

     BERTIE.

     What is this? Why do the people in the tram car shrink from his
     presence? Why, in this hot weather sit there in a heap together?
     Can it be--Satan? Or the Hangman? Or the Whitechapel Murder(er)?
     No--it is none of these things. It is simply a young biological
     demonstrator who has been dissecting with a large class that
     particular form of life known as the Dog Fish (scylla canicula).
     HE STINKS.

[Illustration: Drawing of a tram car and a hand-written note

What is this? Why do the people in the tram car shrink from his
presence? Why, in this hot weather sit there in a heap together?
Can it be--Satan? Or the Hangman? Or the Whitechapel Murder(er)?
No--it is none of these things. It is simply a young biological
demonstrator who has been dissecting with a large class that
particular form of life known as the Dog Fish (scylla canicula). He
Stinks.]

     46, Fitzroy Road, N.W.

     Monday 15/6/90 [? _91_]

     DEAR G. V.,

     I have sent you your glasses--they were done long ago but I could
     not forward them on account of my illness--they were forgotten in
     fact.

     I had influenza about three weeks ago, and congestion of the right
     lung on the top of it. I have had to resign my class work with
     Briggs, and so I am--now that I am a little stronger again--hunting
     round for work to do at home.

     I wrote to mother four or five days ago but she has not answered my
     letter.

     It is no good going into the details of the disaster. It is a
     smash. Still living is not so impossible now as it would be if I
     had not a degree. My thing is to come on in the next _Fortnightly_
     and if they send me copies I will send one to you. The editor has
     written for me to call on him, about a second paper they have taken
     and perhaps there is something in that.[2]

     Faithfully your son,

     BERTIE.

     I have had to pay a substitute for all my classes.

     Marriage postponed--for ever?

[Illustration: Hand-written note]

     Wednesday evening.

     [_Sep. 21st, 1892._]

     DEAR MOTHER,

     You observe a doubtless familiar figure above, keeping his 26th
     birthday. In the background are bookshelves recently erected by
     your eldest, who came up here Thursday and has been doing things
     like that ever since. He has laid hands upon all the available
     reading in the house and seems to be going at it six books at a
     time. Isabel is at work doing some---- (The rest of the letter is
     not to be found.)


     [_January ? 1893._]

     DEAR FRED,

     Of course mother can come here and live with us. She will not be
     happy, however, if Nyewoods is not kept on. If I keep her will you
     contribute 3/-a week or 12/-a month to that concern. I propose to
     leave things entirely in Frank's hands there and to pay all money
     to him. If you will do this I will see to all the rest myself. Let
     me hear. Very busy--excuse more.

     BUSS.

            *       *       *       *       *

     You stick where you are, my boy, and don't let this little affair
     upset you.

     Write and tell mother to come straight here, bag and baggage, and
     assure her it will be all right with the G.V.

            *       *       *       *       *

     May 22 (?) 1893

     MY DEAR MISS ROBBINS,

     When we made our small jokes on Wednesday afternoon anent the
     possible courses a shy man desperate at the imminence of a party
     might adopt, we did not realize that the Great Arch Humorist also
     meant to have his joke in the matter. For my own part I was so
     disgusted, when I woke in the dismal time before dawn on Thursday
     morning, to find myself the butt of _His_ witticism, that I almost
     left this earthly joking ground in a huff. However by midday on
     Thursday, what with ice and opium pills, and this soothing
     bitterness and that, my wife and the doctor calmed the internal
     eruption of the joker outjoked, and since that I have been lying on
     my back, moody but recovering. I _must_ say this for chest
     diseases; they leave one remarkably cheerful, they do not hurt at
     all and they clear the mind like strong tea. My poor wife has had
     all the pain of this affair, bodily and mental, fatigue and fear.
     For my share I shall take all the sympathy and credit.

     It was very kind of you to call this morning but my wife would have
     liked to have seen you. Next week--if I do not go to pieces
     again--I expect I shall be coming downstairs, and a visitor who
     would talk to me and take little in return, would be a charity.
     Will you thank Miss Roberts for the letter of condolence
     which--quite contrary, as she must be aware, to all etiquette,
     following your bad example--she wrote to my wife.

     I guess class teaching is over for me for good, and that whether I
     like it or not, I must write for a living now.

     With best wishes,

     Yours very faithfully,

     H. G. WELLS.

            *       *       *       *       *

     [_May 26th, 1893._]

     Thursday.


     OFFICIAL BULLETIN

     Mr. Wells tasted meat for the first time since Wednesday the 17th,
     yesterday, he also turned over on his side and sat up with
     assistance--cheerful. No recurrence of symptoms of hmorrhage, no
     fever. Slept well. To-day stronger. Has eaten an egg, some boiled
     mutton, and other trifles. Pulse quiet, no fever or inflammation.
     No blood or clot expectorated now for eighty-five hours. Much
     stronger, able to sit up and turn about without help. _Getting a
     trifle troublesome._ Insists on writing letters in ink to everybody
     he knows--quilt spoilt and two sheets ditto--also in preference to
     tinkling little bell, upsets table when he wishes to call
     attendance--also wants books to read and if those procured are not
     to his taste throws them at nurse--also plays Freddy at draughts
     and insists upon winning. Hopes are entertained that he may get up
     by Saturday. No definite plans. Possibly a month at Ventnor, and
     then if practicable remove from London.

     It is particularly requested that in all letters of condolence it
     shall _not_ be remarked that it may be for the best after all.

            *       *       *       *       *

     28, Haldon Road,

     Wandsworth, S.W.

     May 26th, 93.

     MY DEAR MISS ROBBINS,

     Your unworthy teacher of biology is still--poor fellow--keeping
     recumbent, though he knows his ceiling pretty well by this time,
     but no doubt he is a-healing and by Saturday he will be, he hopes,
     put out in the front parlour in the afternoon. But he will be an
     ill thing to see, lank and unshaven and with the cares of this
     world growing up to choke him as he sprouts out of his bed. However
     that is your affair, only you must not make it a matter of mockery.

     During my various illnesses I have derived much innocent amusement
     from letters of condolence but your Vice Principal Briggs thing
     capped it with a brief note written out by Miss Thomas and signed,

     John Briggs,

     S. T.

     After that I can believe the story of the typewritten love letter
     signed by a pardonable slip of the pen, Holroyd, Barker and Smith.

     Remember me kindly to Miss Roberts and Miss Taylor, especially Miss
     Roberts. Tell the girl not to trifle with Bronchitis, whatever
     other giddiness she may be guilty of. And believe me

     Yours very faithfully,

     H. G. WELLS.

     P.S. I think he will not be fit to see you before Sunday but I will
     write you before then.

     Yours faithfully,

     I. M. W.

[Illustration: Hand-written note]

     6, New Cottages,

     Meads Road.

     Eastbourne.

     Tuesday.

     MY DEAR MISS ROBBINS,

     Your humble servant has been at this gay place now for eight long
     days. He has been led out daily to an extremely stony beach and
     there spread out in the sun for three, four or five hours as it
     might be, and he has there inhaled sea air into such lung as
     Providence has spared him, sea air mingled with the taint of such
     crabs as have gone recently from here to that bourne from which no
     traveller returns. His evenings have passed in the marking of
     examination papers and correspondence tuiting, and his nights in
     uneasy meditations on Death and the Future Life, and Hope and
     Indeterminate Equations. Moreover I have sorrowed greatly over Miss
     Roberts. When I was near the lowest point of my illness she sent me
     a wicked book by some evangelist--a word I have long used as a
     curse--about how that Huxley will not look his (the evangelist's)
     substitutes for arguments in the face, how that geology supports
     the book of Genesis (which is a lie) how that the gospel of St.
     Mark was written before A.D. 38 (which is idiotic) and all those
     dismal things. Egged on by this wicked book I wrote two letters to
     Miss Roberts blaspheming her gods, saying I knew God was a
     gentleman and could not possibly have any connexion with her
     evangelist and the like painful things. I am sorry now because I
     certainly was uncivil, but this particular form of Religion arouses
     all the latent 'Arry in my composition. But I know Miss Roberts
     will never approve of me any more.

     This Providence has seen fit to increase the tale of my wife's
     troubles by sending her mother very ill. Of the two she is much
     worse than I am now, and I am still in a hectic unstable condition.
     A more serious man than myself would be horribly miserable at his
     inability to play his part of man in all these troubles. Everything
     is pressing on my wife's shoulders now, and I dare not exert myself
     to help for fear I shall give her a greater trouble still.

     I sincerely hope you are working hard for your examination. I shall
     take anything but a first class pass very much to heart, so that I
     hope you will out of consideration for a poor suffering soul who
     must not be depressed by any means, do your best. I am looking
     forward to visiting Red Lion Square next week and seeing you again
     and conversing diversely with you.

     Very faithfully yours,

     H. G. WELLS.

            *       *       *       *       *

     Concerning literature to which you would have directed me, I have
     done nothing. One dismal article full of jocularities like the
     rattling of peas in a bladder has seen the light in the _Globe_.
     Moreover I tried a short story for _Black and White_, which
     impressed me when I had done it as being unaccountably feminine and
     acid--much what a masculine old maid would write. What _Black and
     White_ thinks of it I do not know. I think my mind stagnates. It is
     blocked up with a lot of things. I shall come and talk to you a
     long time I think and deliver myself.

            *       *       *       *       *

     [_Late June or July 1893._]

     MY DEAR FREDDIE,

     I have nothing to tell you except to keep your courage up and work
     hard and bear in mind that there are plenty of sympathetic friends
     over here anxious to hear about you whenever you can write. Things
     are going very evenly with us. We have not found a house yet, but
     we have hardly hunted for it. I have been and am very busy. I have
     almost written my share of Gregory and Wells' Honours Physiography
     which I arranged for a day or two before you sailed and a lot of
     small coachings jobs have dropped in for me, and next week (which
     will be about the time of your landing at Cape Town) I shall be
     sitting in glory above my roomful of candidates.

     Izzums sends her love to you, Mummie is writing to you herewith.

     With love from us all and best wishes

     Your very affte brother

     BUSSUMS.

The "roomful of candidates" refers to either some London University or
College of Preceptors examination at which I earnt a guinea or so as
invigilator. My mother seems to have visited me in London again after my
brother's departure. The four figures in the illustration are myself, my
mother, my Aunt Mary and my cousin Isabel.

[Illustration: drawings and hand-written note.]

     [_No date of entry, probably early August 1893._]

     4, Cumnor Place, Sutton.

     DEAR MISS ROBBINS,

     I am in the tail end of the stream of congratulations, but I am
     happy to say I was the first person not in the confidence of the
     university to see that you were in the first division. And our
     Adeline has passed in Biology, she and her riotous school of boys,
     or at least Wells and Johns. Miss Saunders is in the second class,
     and one Miss Knight--you will remember a romantic young thing with
     expressive dark eyes, is, I am very sorry to see, missing.

     Everyone will be in superlatives about this success of yours but as
     a matter of fact it is a mere beginning and not at all beyond my
     expectation. I should have been secretly disappointed if anything
     else had happened. You must not touch degree grinding for two or
     three years yet, though it is time for you to select your subjects.
     You must take an honours degree--that is a mere debt you owe your
     disinterested teachers.

     This choice of degree subjects is a very serious one, and one you
     ought to make now. For mental greatness--such as mine--you must
     attack the biological group. I sincerely regard mathematics as on a
     lower level intellectually than biology. On the other hand you have
     done enough in mathematics to show you can get to brilliant things
     in that direction, while your biology is a brief growth of one
     year. However we must talk over this when you return. It will of
     course affect your attack upon South Kensington very considerably.
     I am glad your visit is to last another week. Putney for the last
     three days has been a melancholy oven. However I hope you will
     return before we leave here, because I would very much like to deal
     with this matter of the future at a greater length than is possible
     in a letter.

     My wife sends her sincerest congratulations on your success. How
     did Painter get on? They have let me sign an article in the _Pall
     Mall Gazette_, by the bye, and signed articles in dailies is a
     distinct advance for a poor wretch like me.

     Very faithfully yours,

     H. G. WELLS.

            *       *       *       *       *

     [_November ? 1893_]

     4, Cumnor Place,

     Sutton.

     MY DEAR FREDDIE,

     I suppose, if I write to you now, this letter will reach you about
     Christmas time, and I daresay you will like to have our good wishes
     in season, even if we have to send them off unseasonably early to
     reach you. But over here already we are beginning to think of
     Christmas, there is a hard frost to-day and the roads are all hard,
     and last Sunday there was the first fall of snow. All the
     bookstalls are bright with the Christmas numbers of the magazines,
     and the London shops are getting brilliant with cards and presents.
     My two books[3] have been published now, and I have been writing
     articles for all kinds of publications since you left. The stories
     I wrote do not seem to be a great success but I have found a good
     market for chatty articles, and I am doing more and more of these.
     I had a cheque of 14 13_s._ from the _Pall Mall Gazette_ the day
     before yesterday for _one month's_ contributions. Not bad is it?
     But that may be a lucky month. However I am not drawing upon my
     small savings, thank goodness, and I am keeping indoors, and I
     think pulling round steadily. How are things going with you? I hope
     everything glides along, and that you are striking root in South
     Africa. Do you ever play draughts or chess? If so I hope you are
     improving, for your play with me was simply abominable.

     Isabel and Mummie and the Cat are well, and we find ourselves very
     comfortable in our new home. We are only about twenty minutes walk
     from the downs, and we can go by Banstead and Epsom to Dorking over
     them all the way. We have had a lot of Sutton people call upon us,
     so that we already feel much more at home than we did in Putney,
     where the London custom of ignoring your neighbour is in fashion.

     I have not been to see either Father or Mother since you left us
     but I daresay I shall run down there some of these days. I judge
     they are all right. Neither have I seen Frank now for some months.

     I think now I am almost at the end of my news. It is not a very
     eventful record, but as someone has written, we are happiest when
     we have least history. Things have been going easily with us, and
     so I hope they may continue.

     With very many wishes for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New
     Year.

     Believe me my dear Freddie

     Your very affectionate Brother

     THE BUSSWHACKER.

     Isabel and Auntie send their love.

            *       *       *       *       *

     4, Cumnor Place,

     Sutton.

     Dec. 15th, 1893.

     MY DEAR MOTHER,

     I had hoped to run down to Rogate for a day or so before Xmas to
     settle my accounts with father and to wish you all a pleasant time,
     but I am afraid it will scarcely be possible now, so I am sending a
     little cheque (payable to father) to pay for what he has done for
     me and the balance I hope _you_ will dispense in making things
     festive on the great anniversary. As Frank has possibly told you I
     am still contriving to make both ends meet by writing articles.
     There are two more when the previous ones are returned. Did the
     G.V. notice that _To-day_ had a note and sketch about my million
     year man?

     I and Isabel are going off this afternoon to stop with Mrs. Robbins
     at Putney until Monday--you will remember Miss Robbins who came to
     tea one Sunday--and we are going to a concert to-night with them.
     My cold and so on it is needless to say are better, or I should not
     be doing this.

     We are looking forward to Frank's visit directly after Christmas.

     With love from all.

     Believe me dear Mother

     Your affectionate Son

     BERTIE.

     It is not all jam this book writing. Part II of my Biology has been
     slashed up most cruelly in this week's _Nature_ in a review.

            *       *       *       *       *

     7, Mornington Place,

     N.W.

     Feb. 8th, 1894.

     MY DEAR MOTHER,

     Do not be anxious about me. This trouble of ours is unavoidable,
     but I really do not care to go into details. Isabel and I have
     separated and she is at Hampstead and I am here. The separation is
     almost entirely my fault. I am with very nice people here and very
     busy. Yesterday I went over a microscope factory for an article for
     the _Pall Mall Gazette_ similar to the one I sent a proof of to the
     G.V. Did I tell you that they had made me one of their reviewers? I
     keep very well, no cough in the morning or any of those troubles. I
     hope Frank will run up soon to see me and reassure you. Let me know
     when he is coming as sometimes I am away all day. Love to the G.V.
     I will see to that Zoology soon. Ask him to send a letter card to
     Ellerington saying that no more B.Sc. Zoology will be sent for four
     weeks to give him an opportunity of getting the work up to date.

     Your loving son

     BERTIE.

     Will Father send me one copy each of the scheme for Zoology and for
     Biology and of the last lesson and test he has of each of those
     courses, please?

            *       *       *       *       *

     Tusculum Villa,

     Sevenoaks, KENT.

     August 10th, 94.

     MY DEAR FATHER,

     I had intended to come along this week but more delays have arisen
     and so I suppose I had better fill up the gap with a letter. I
     thought Frank who came up to see me a few weeks ago would have
     explained affairs to you. The matter is extremely simple. Last
     January I ran away with a young lady student of mine to London.
     It's not a bit of good dilating on that matter because the mischief
     is done and what remains now is to get affairs straight again.
     Isabel left the house at Sutton and went to Hampstead where she is
     now living (at my expense) and she has now got through about half
     the necessary divorce proceedings against me. I expect to be
     divorced early next year and then I shall marry Miss Robbins.

     The house at Sutton the landlord took off my hands upon my paying
     the rent up to June. Since then I have been in apartments with Miss
     Robbins (passing as my wife) but now Mrs. Robbins has joined us.
     She owns a house at Putney and has let that now on a twenty one
     years lease at a rent of 90. We think of taking a house down
     here--as we are not very comfortable in apartments--and settling
     down. My wife will take her degree of B.Sc. (of which one
     examination still remains) and go on with me with literary work.

     About my work. The _P.M.G._ is still my bread and cheese. I do from
     six to ten columns a month and get two guineas a column. I have
     been doing work for Briggs that brings in about 60 a year but it
     takes too much time and I am resigning that. I am also dropping the
     _Journal of Education_ which comes to about 12 a year and takes
     nearly a day a month. I do _Educational Times_ work from 2 to 5 or
     more cols. a month at half a guinea col. and in addition drop
     articles at _Black and White_ and the _National Observer_, when I
     get the time free. Then there are short stories which are difficult
     to plant at present, but I expect this series in _P. M. Budget_
     will get my name up. They are paid at a slightly higher rate than
     articles but are much more profitable in the end because they can
     be republished as a book. Besides this I have been writing a longer
     thing on spec and have been treating through an agent to get some
     of my _P.M.G._ articles published as a book.

     I think that is a pretty complete statement of my affairs.
     Naturally things are a little tight with me at present as the
     divorce business is heavy but after that bill is settled I see no
     reason why things should not go easily with all of us. I shall have
     to pay Isabel 100 a year or more, but my income by hook or by
     crook can always be brought up to 350 and it may be more in
     future. Mrs. Robbins is going to raise the ready money for our
     furniture by a small mortgage on her house and the interest on that
     with the ground rent will come to 30 out of her 90. Still I don't
     expect to be pinched and I have no doubt that I shall be able to do
     my filial duty by mother and yourself all right.

     My health hasn't given me any trouble, save for one cold and a bit
     of overwork this year.

     Give my love to mother and believe me,

     Yours ever,

     BERTIE.

     Of course I want you to hand this to mother to read as well. Mother
     will remember Miss Robbins--she came to tea one Sunday afternoon.

The letting of Mrs. Robbins' house was not a success. Her tenant
did not pay his rent and "flitted" at night with his furniture. The
house was then sold and the money invested.

            *       *       *       *       *


     12, Mornington Road, N.W.

     5/12/94.

     MY DEAR LITTLE MOTHER,

     I'm anticipating Christmas and sending you a little present (I wish
     it could be larger). I'm keeping very well this Christmas and at
     about the same level of prosperity. I don't do so much for the
     _P.M.G._ but I do stuff for the _Saturday_ which is rather better
     pay and I have some hope of the _New Review_....

     This day week I'm giving my lecture at the Coll of Preceptors.
     There's nothing settled about any of my books yet but I think there
     will be two if not three in March.

     Let me hear all about you. Have you heard from Fred?

     Yours ever affectionately

     BERTIE.

     Little Bertie writing away for dear life to get little things for
     all his little people--sends his love to Little Clock Man and
     Little Daddy and Little Mother.

[Illustration: Hand-written note]

     12 Mornington Road, N.W.

     5/2/95.

     MY DEAR FATHER AND MOTHER,

     Thanks very much for your letters in the last few days. It's very
     kind of the Father to say 40 a year will do to go on with. However
     I think I can manage 60, though just now is a tight time. Take 10
     of the 15 to go on with and put 5 by for next quarter, say, as an
     experiment. You know the method is to put the cheque I send into
     the Savings bank--which will take cheques now--and draw out
     whatever you want as you want it. Later on I hope to do better
     things for you if I can only get hold of a little money. It's a
     dream of mine to get you into rather a better house, either by
     buying one or leasing it but that can't happen this year and may
     never happen. Whatever success I have, you are responsible for the
     beginnings of it. However hard up you were when I was a youngster
     you let me have paper and pencils, books from the Institute and so
     forth and if I haven't my mother to thank for my imagination and my
     father for skill, where did I get these qualities?

     Believe me my dear Parents

     Your very affectionate son

     BERTIE.

            *       *       *       *       *

     12, Mornington Rd, N.W.

     Sunday October 13th. (1895)

     MY DEAR MOTHER,

     Just a line to tell you that I am back with my old landlady here
     for three weeks (getting married). We've been up about a week. My
     last book seems a hit--everyone has heard of it--and all kinds of
     people seem disposed to make much of me. I've told nobody scarcely
     that we were coming up and already I'm invited out to-night and
     every night next week except Monday and Friday. I've had letters
     too from four publishing firms asking for the offer of my next book
     but I shall, I think, stick to my first connexion. It's rather
     pleasant to find oneself something in the world after all the years
     of trying and disappointment.

     What is Fred's address at Johannesburg? I'm rather anxious to know.
     I sent a copy of the "Wonderful Visit" to him just before I had
     your letter, addressed to Messrs Garlick. I'd like to know all
     about him. There's no doubt that country is rising at an immense
     pace. I know one of the bank managers there and might be able to
     help Fred through him. He was my colleague at Milne's school. He's
     a Scotchman and bound to die rich, a long headed friendly man who
     might--if he chose--put Fred up a lot of good tips. His name is
     Johnston. I'm getting his address from Milne.

     Love to the Dad and Frank.

     Your very affectionate son,

     BERTIE.

            *       *       *       *       *

     Lynton, Maybury Rd.,

     Woking, Surrey.

     Friday, Jan. 24th, 1896.

     MY DEAR LITTLE BROTHER AT THE SEAT OF WAR,

     How goes it with you? For a day or two in the new year, while
     Jameson was astonishing the world, I was seriously anxious about
     your safety, and I should have cabled to know if all was well, had
     not the wires been choked with graver matter. I suppose we shall
     soon have a lengthy and vivid account of the whole business from
     you. Here things have been of the liveliest, war rumours, all the
     Music Halls busy with songs insulting the German Emperor, fleets
     being manned, and nobody free to attend to the works of a poor
     struggling author from Lands End to John o' Groats. Consequently a
     book I was to have published hasn't been published, and won't be
     until March. You see how far reaching your Uitlander bothers are?

     I'm going on very well altogether. I made between five and six
     hundred last year, and expect to make more rather than less, this
     year. I've married and ended all those troubles, and I've just
     taken a pretty little house at Liss with seven decent rooms and a
     garden and things all comfortable for the old folks. They are
     moving in next week. Frank is to expand his watchmaking business
     and altogether I think things are on the move towards comfort. I
     was down there about Christmas time and all three seemed very well
     and jolly. Frank's business seems picking up. The new home is one
     of a dozen or so decent little houses, and within comfortable reach
     of a church.

     I'm riding a bicycle now and went a few weeks ago to a place called
     Odiham, which may perhaps awaken old memories.

     Since I wrote the above I've received your letter. I'm glad to find
     you're all right. As you say, the Invasion was a Capitalistic
     enterprise, though Jameson himself is a gallant man enough. But the
     Transvaal has no business to intrigue with Germany for all that. Do
     you see any papers now? There's usually something about me in the
     _Review of Reviews_.

     Go and see Johnston if you possibly can. He's a first rate man
     you'll find. Some of these days I must come and see you out there.
     I hope your getting on all right with the Dutch language and your
     business. What are the chances of opening for yourself out there? I
     should think that if you could pick up Dutch and master the habits
     and requirements, you'd have a better chance than you had in this
     crowded country. Don't dream of any speculation in gold mines or
     that kind of thing. Stick tight to your savings. If you want to
     invest trust old Johnston. He's a first rate, square headed,
     thoroughly honest man. What do you think of your move out of
     England? It wasn't so bad for you altogether--was it?

     However time slips by. I've got to write a story before next week
     for a new monthly magazine, so I mustn't write any more now to you.

     With kindest regards

     Your very affectionate Brother

     THE BUSSWHACKER.

            *       *       *       *       *

     [_July:1896_]

     Brosley.


     Illustrated letter

     This does not represent a Dutchman but an elderly gentleman of
     distinguished manners who has recently been staying at Heatherlea,
     Worcester Park, Surrey. He plays chess with considerable skill,
     draughts and whist--croquet he learnt rapidly--and he answers to
     the names of "Gov'ner" "Dad" or the "Old Man" with equal facility.
     When returning to Liss he took away all the tobacco and a box of
     Brosley clay pipes. In the place of him a short lady of pleasing
     demeanour is shortly expected (as per accompanying illustration).
     She will probably be here on the birthday of her middle and
     favourite son, whom she speaks of variously as "Freddy" "Fezzy"
     "Fizzums" and "Master Freddie." Needless to say his health will be
     drunk on that anniversary both at Liss and Heatherlea with the
     warmest feelings. This person (illustration) it is scarcely
     necessary to explain is your long lost brother Buss. You will
     observe that he has with growing years and prosperity developed--a
     projection which he keeps in bounds only by the most strenuous
     bicycle riding. He rejoices to say that things go very well with
     him, books selling cheerfully and so forth, in spite of the
     Jubilee. And speaking of the Jubilee he saw nothing of it whatever,
     except that he went to see the ironclads--hundreds of 'em lying all
     along Spithead and the Solent for miles and miles and miles.--He
     went round the show twice in a steamboat accompanied by [symbol of
     right-pointing hand] that chap! And while he was going round the
     King of Siam in his yacht came out of Portsmouth Harbour and every
     blessed ironclad let off a gun (illustration). This is a sort of
     Birthday card really. I've heard from mother once or twice that
     things were going very well with you and I was very glad to get
     your own letter. May your good luck keep on for you deserve it
     richly. Many happy returns of the day and a light heart to you, old
     boy!

     From BUSS.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

     Heatherlea, Worcester Park.

     New Year's Eve. 1896.

     MY DEAR LITTLE BRUZZER FREDDY,

     I had your funny card for which, Bruzzer Freddy, there was one and
     a penny to pay! but I would have cheerfully paid much more than
     that rather than not have had it. And as it is New Year's Eve and I
     have been thinking over the past year and all that has happened, I
     don't think I can do better than write this letter to you before
     the New Year begins. And to begin with myself, I have been still on
     the rise of fortune's wave this year, and it seems as though I must
     certainly go on to still larger successes and gains next for my
     name still spreads abroad, and people I have never seen, some from
     Chicago, one from Cape Town, and one from far up the Yung Tse Kiang
     in China, write and tell me they find my books pleasant. So far it
     has meant more fame than money to me, but I hope next year that the
     gilt edge will come to my successes. This year I have made between
     eight hundred and a thousand and next year it will be more and
     after that still more, and then I hope to put in operation little
     plans I have. You know the old people are now pretty comfortable at
     Liss, and Frank's business really seems on the move. There were two
     packing cases of clocks and things in the passage of the house when
     I went down there yesterday. And next year I hope to be able
     (though I don't want him to know yet for fear of disappointment) to
     put him firmly on his legs. I think it will be possible to get him
     into a shop in a good position in Liss, and to let the old folks
     have a better cottage than they are in at present. But you know the
     old maxim--hasten slowly. I want everything safe and straight
     first. Then when Frank is a really efficient citizen again--we
     shall be seeing you back I expect, brown and strong I hope and with
     a little something in your pocket. And then we must see whether at
     Wokingham or Petersfield or some such place, it won't be possible
     for you to start with fair prospects. Eigh? The little old lady is
     rosy and active--fit for twenty years I shouldn't wonder, and
     before that time perhaps she will see all three of us flourishing
     in our own homes, and as cheerful as can be. The old man too is
     none so dusty a chap when you get him on the right side--and he
     seems hale enough for a century. So that this New Year's Eve I feel
     uncommonly cheerful and hopeful, not only for myself but for the
     whole blessed family of us.

     Good luck Bruzzer Freddy

     Yours ever,

     H. G. BUSSWHACKER.

     I don't know if you see _Pearson's Magazine_ out there--in April
     next a long story of mine will begin and go on until December, and
     I expect great things of it. _Pearson's Magazine_ mind!--not
     _Pearson's Weekly_.

     Remember me kindly to Johnston who's a nice old chap isn't he? When
     is he coming over? If ever he comes I shall expect him to come and
     stop here for a time to gossip about old times.

     Look out for the _Saturday Review_ if you get a chance of seeing
     it. You will see among the reviews every week now H. G. W. which is
     me.

     And don't forget to write to a chap and tell him all about
     yourself.


            *       *       *       *       *

     Beach Cottage,

     Granville Road.

     December 18th, 98.

     MY DEAR FATHER,

     I've been meaning to write to you all this past week and tell you
     about the work in hand. I don't know anything about the _Bookman_
     paragraph of which you speak--could I see it? Possibly Nicol got
     hold of something through Barrie (who came to see us). But the
     paragraphs in the _Academy_ were written by Hind the editor after a
     visit here in which we talked about our work. The serial about the
     year 2100 will appear very soon now in the _Graphic_ with coloured
     illustrations. I've altered it a good deal for the book which, will
     be published in April or May by Harper Bros., and then this long
     silence of a year and more will be over. It's rather in the vein of
     the _Time Machine_ but ever so much larger in every way. I don't
     think people will have forgotten me in the interval. The old books
     keep on selling--each at the rate of four to six copies a week
     bringing in little cheques for five pounds or so for the half year.
     The other book the _Academy_ spoke of, is now being put on the
     market by Pinker, it's a sentimental story in rather a new style,
     and I think he has offered it to _Harper's Magazine_. It's called
     _Love and Mr. Lewisham_. I'm also under a contract to do stories
     for the _Strand Magazine_ but I don't like the job. It's like
     talking to fools, you can't let yourself go or they won't
     understand. If you send them anything a bit novel they are afraid
     their readers won't understand. Two stories they have had, I
     consider bosh, but they liked them tremendously. Another I have
     recently done they don't like although it is an admirable story. So
     that will go elsewhere. Just now I am writing rather hard--though
     this is between ourselves--at a comic novel rather on the old
     fashioned Dickens line, a lot of entertaining characters doing
     ordinary things.[4] I keep better here than I've been since I was
     at South Kensington and get good work out of myself every day.
     There are more ideas in a day here than in a week of Worcester
     Park.

     Amy wants me to say there is a Turkey at Shoolbreds simply gobbling
     to get at you, and it has some minor luggage under its wing. Our
     love to you all. Perhaps we may travel your way next Spring. It
     seems ages since I saw you. Best wishes for a Merry Christmas,

     Yours ever,

     BERTIE.

     Our Fat Cat has fled. Break it gently to Frank.

     No colds I hope?

     No trouble with that liver?

(A little sketch shows a turkey _en route_ for Nyewoods.)

     Arnold House,

     Sandgate,

     Kent.

     June 7th, 1900.

     MY DEAR LITTLE MOTHER,

     As it is so near quarter day I am sending you on 15 and I hope
     that in another week I shall see you. It was very jolly was it not?
     getting that letter from Fred and by this time I daresay he is
     reading all the letters you have been writing him since the war
     began. What a budget it will be for him!

     But I don't like to hear you have "put by" 5. I don't want you to
     go pinching and saving out of the money I send you. It isn't any
     too much anyhow and you ought to spend it all upon things to make
     life pleasant.

     I am sending you a first review of _Love and Mr. Lewisham_. They
     have sold 1,600 copies in England and 2,500 in the colonies before
     publication, and I think the book is almost certain to beat any
     previous book I have written in the matter of sales.

     Give my love to Father and Frank. And believe me

     Your very affectionate son,

     BERTIE.

There survive scores of such letters, but these samples I think give the
quality of all of them and my texture at that time. As I look over them
I seem to realize for the first time the devitalization of relationship
that seems to be an inevitable consequence of an ever widening
divergence of experiences, associations and standards. And in turning
over the pages of the _Saturday Review_ (1894-97) in an attempt to
identify all my contributions, I found a queer little intimation that
this loss of dearness and nearness was troubling my mind at the time. It
has never been reprinted and I think it may very well come in as a rider
to these letters. It embalms a mood of over-work and doubt. There is
real nostalgia for the close warmth of the Family peeping out in it, and
an exaggerated sense of dislocation. Those forebodings of social
isolation and inaccessible intimacies have not been justified. I was
gradually learning an art, which I will call the Art of Modus
Vivendi--not quite the same thing as Arnold Bennett's "Savoir Faire,"
but a very similarly necessitated accomplishment. I cannot complain of
the share of friends and lovers life has given me or pose even to this
day as a lonesome man. And though I missed horsemanship and good sound
flannelled sport, most of what are called the good things of life, got
to me in time.


"EXCELSIOR

"To rise in the world, in spite of popular illusions, is by no means an
unmixed blessing. The young proletarian, playing happily in his native
gutter, scarcely realizes this. So soon as he begins to think at all
about himself, his teachers begin the evil lesson of ambition; he lifts
his eyes to the distant peaks, and the sun is bright upon them and they
seem very fair. The garrulous Smiles comes his way with his stories of
men who have "got on"--without a word of warning against the sorrows of
success. No one warns him of the penalties. Every one speaks of climbing
as though it were bliss unspeakable. And so the young proletarian,
finding his limbs are stout and the strength is in him, starts
confidently enough, by the way of book or barter as his tastes incline.

"Let the epic Smiles tell of the career of those who win. Let no one
tell of those who fall, who drop by the way with bodies enfeebled by
overstudy, underfed, who are lost amidst the mountain fogs of commercial
morality. Our concern is with those who win, to whom a day comes when
they can see their schoolmates far below them, still paddling happily in
the gutter, can look down on venerable heads to which they once looked
up, and, turning the other way, behold the Promised Land. One might
think it would be all exultation, this Nebo incident, the happiest of
all possible positions in the sad life of man. It may be even, that the
man from below tells himself as much. And then he looks round for some
sympathetic participator.

"With that he discovers, though perhaps not all at once, the peculiar
discomfort of worldly success. In his new stratum he finds pleasant
people enough, people who were born in that station, educated to keep in
it, and who regard it--perhaps correctly--as properly their own. To them
he is an intruder, and largely inexplicable. He knows that any allusion
to that steep pathway of broken heads over which he has clambered--for
all human success is relative, and if one man rises some other must
fall--and which he has found such excitement in ascending, any such
allusion he knows will be the mental equivalent to putting his thumbs in
the armholes of his waistcoat. Usually the man from below has a more
than average brain, and is sensitive enough to keep his Most Interesting
Topic, his Life, to himself. He knows, too, the legend of the Bounder,
knows that these people credit all men who rise from his class with an
aggressive ostentation, with hair-oil and at least one massive gold
chain if not two, besides a complete inversion of the normal aspirate.
He imagines that people expect breaches of their particular laws, and he
knows, too, that there is some ground for that expectation. He blunders
at times from sheer watchfulness.

"You begin to perceive the hair-shirt. To speak in the tongue of Herbert
Spencer, the man from below is not adapted to his environment. That is
not all; he is adapted to no environment. Though the language of the
people of the new stratum is not his mother tongue, though their manners
and customs fit him like a slop suit, he has acquired just enough of
these things to be equally out of his element below. He is a kind of
social miscellany, a book of short stories, a volume of reminiscences of
People I have Met. And that friend, that dear friend, who is the salt of
life, with whom he may let his mind run free, whose prejudices are the
same, whose habits coincide--the man from below knows him not. There was
A in the pound a week stage, 'tis true, and B at the three hundred
phase, and C in the early thousands; but in some mysterious way they
were all aggrieved. A time came when each remarked in a tone that rang
false, 'You're getting such a Swell now, you know,' and he saw a new
light in the erstwhile friendly eye, and therewith yawned a gulf. His
friends are not life companions but epochs, influences. And he has worse
troubles. One of two things happens to the man from below in his
marrying. Either he marries early some one down below there, and she
cannot keep pace with him, or he marries late up above--some one very
charming and young, and he cannot keep pace with her.

"For by the time he has risen to his highest stratum, and donned the
stiffest, prickliest hair-shirt of all, the man from below begins to
feel old. He has never been a youth at that level, and he does not know
how to begin. The perennial youthfulness of your retired general--who is
perhaps half his age again--appalls him. You see him watching cricket in
a puzzled way--he had no time for cricket--or hanging over the railings
of Rotten Row (in an attitude that he feels instinctively is a little
incorrect), and staring at the handsome, healthy, well-dressed people
who ride by. Theirs is the earth. _His_ means for horse exercise came
when his nerve for it had gone. The wine of life does not wait. After
all the man he has ousted had drunk the best of the cup. For the
conqueror, the dregs.

"That is the disillusionment of the successful proletarian. Better a
little grocery, a life of sordid anxiety, love, and a tumult of
children, than this Dead Sea fruit of success. It is fun to struggle,
but tragedy to win. Happy is the poor man who clutches that prize in
the grip of death and never sees it crumble in his hand."

To which betrayal of a mood I add thirty-nine years later only one word:
"Nonsense."

But let me get on with my story which this exhibition of documents has
delayed. This divorce put me askew to the usages and institutions of my
times in a very elementary, provocative and stimulating way. It affected
my attempts at fiction and my social and political reactions profoundly
and I must do my best now to dissect out the complex of motives and
suggestions that was determining my conduct at this crucial phase.




CHAPTER THE SEVENTH

_DISSECTION_


 1

_Compound Fugue_

If you do not want to explore an egoism you should not read
autobiography. If I did not take an immense interest in life, through
the medium of myself, I should not have embarked upon this analysis of
memories and records. It is not merely for the benefit of some possible
reader, but to satisfy my own curiosity about life and the world, that I
am digging down into these obscurities of forty years ago. The reader's
rle, the prospect of publication, is kept in view chiefly to steady and
control these operations, by the pervading sense of a critical observer.
The egoism is unavoidable. I am being my own rabbit because I find no
other specimen so convenient for dissection. Our own lives are all the
practical material we have for the scientific study of living; the rest
is hearsay.

The main theme of this book has been exposed in the Introductory Chapter
and recalled at intervals. Essentially this autobiography treats of the
steady expansion of the interests and activities of a brain, emerging
from what I have called a narrow-scope way of living, to a broader and
broader outlook and a consequent longer reach of motive. I move from a
backyard to Cosmopolis; from Atlas House to the burthen of Atlas. This
theme appears and reappears in varying forms and keys; in the story of
my early reading, in the story of my escape from retail trade, in the
story of my student perplexities and my attempts to make my geology
scientific and my physics philosophical, and so on. More and more
consciously the individual adventurer, as he disentangles himself from
the family associations in which he was engendered, is displayed trying
to make himself a citizen of the world. As his _persona_ becomes lucid
it takes that form. He is an individual becoming the conscious Common
Man of his time and culture. He is a specimen drop from the changing
ocean of general political opinion.

But the making of that world scheme is not the only driving force
present in the actual life as it has to be told. In many passages it has
not been even the dominant driving force. Other systems of feeling and
motive run across or with or against the main theme. Sometimes they seem
to have a definite relation to it; they enhance its colour and interest
or they antagonize it, but often there is no possibility of regularizing
their intervention. As in all actual fugues the rules are broken and,
judged by the strict standard, the composition is irregular.

The second main system of motive in the working out of my personal
destiny, has been the sexual system. It is not the only other system of
motive by any means. Certain fears and falterings, an undeniable
claustrophobia for example, run through the narrative. The phases of
disintegration and healing in my right lung, the resentment and slow
resignation of my squashed kidney, have interpolated themes of their
own, with their own irrelevant developments. Nevertheless the sexual
complexes constitute the only other great and continuing system. I
suspect the sexual system should be at least the second theme, when it
is not the first, in every autobiography, honestly and fully told. It
seizes upon the essential egoism for long periods, it insists upon a
prominent rle in the dramatizations of the _persona_ and it will not be
denied.

I realize how difficult an autobiography that is not an apology for a
life but a research into its nature, can become, as I deal with this
business of my divorce. I have already emphasised the widening contrast
between the mental range of myself and my cousin. I have shown a
disposition to simplify out the issue between myself and Catherine
Robbins and Isabel to an issue between how shall I put it?--wide-scope
lives and narrow-scope lives. That makes a fairly acceptable story of
it, with only one fault, that it is untrue. It is all the more untrue
because like a bad portrait there is superficial truth in it. The
reality was far more complicated. Much more was entangled in the story.
I confess that I feel that there are elements in it that I myself
apprehend only very imperfectly. Let me take up this fresh chapter, as
though I were a portrait painter taking a fresh canvas and beginning
over again. Let me alter the pose and the lighting of my experiences so
as to bring out in its successive phases the emotional and sensual
egoism rather than the intellectual egoism that has hitherto been the
focus of attention.

And as I turn over old letters, set date against date, and try and
determine the true inter-relation of this vivid memory with that, it
grows clearer and clearer to me that my personal unity, the consistency
of my present _persona_ has been achieved only after a long struggle
between distinct strands of motivation, which had no necessary rational
relation one to another and that, at the period of which I am writing,
this unity was still more apparent than real.

For the normal man, as we have him to-day, his personal unity is a
delusion. He is always fighting down the exposure of that delusion. His
first impulse is to rationalize his inconsistencies by telling himself
fanciful stories of why he did this and that. The tougher job, which all
men and women will ultimately be educated to undertake, is to recognize
the ultimately irreconcilable quality of these inconsistencies and to
make a deal between them.

It is because of this almost universal desire to impose a sort of
rational relationship upon the alternation of motives that I (and my
biographer Geoffrey West, following my promptings) have represented this
early divorce of mine, this first revelation of increasingly powerful
strands of sexual force at work in me, as if it were almost entirely a
part of my progressive detachment from my world of origin. But it merely
chanced to help detach me. Later on, this sexual drive was to hamper and
confuse my progress very considerably.

The simple attractive story I am half disposed to tell, of myself as an
ugly duckling who escaped from the limitations and want of understanding
of his cousin and of his family generally, to discover itself a swan in
Fleet Street and Paternoster Row, is made impossible by two things: an
awkward trick my memory has had of stowing away moments of intense
feeling and vivid action quite regardless of the mental embarrassment
their preservation may ultimately cause my _persona_, and an analogous
disposition already noted, on the part of my friends and family to keep
letters I have written. I am astonished at the multitude of my letters
that have never been destroyed. I have recovered now some thousand or so
of them; as I turn them over past events live again, vanished details
are restored, and insist upon a readjustment of the all too plausible
values I have long set upon them.

And now let me try to get a little nearer to Isabel's true rle in my
life.


 2

_Primary Fixation_

I have told what I know of my childish and boyish sexual development. It
was uncomplicated and I think very normal. There was only a very slight
slant towards homosexuality. Less I think than is usual. As a small boy
I had adorations for one or two big fellows and as a boy of twelve or
thirteen I had affection for one or two little chaps, who obviously
played the rle of girls in my unoriented imagination. These were
nothing more than early explorations of my emotional tentacles. All
this, as sexual knowledge and discrimination developed, dissolved away
to nothing, and by sixteen I was entirely heterosexual in my fantasies.
I had a bright strong vision of beautiful women, the sort of women
revealed by classical statuary and paintings, reciprocally worshipped
and beautifully embraced, which I connected only very remotely with the
living feminine personalities I met clothed and difficult, and with whom
I "flirted," at times, weakly and formally. I had one or two warning
experiences that the hidden happiness of sex was not easy of attainment.
My gleams of intimacy at Westbourne Park were not pretty; plainly my
Venus Urania did not live down that frowsty scuffling alley. Later on (I
cannot fix the date but it must have been while I was in my twenties and
a biological demonstrator) my secret shame at my own virginity became
insupportable and I went furtively and discreetly with a prostitute. She
was just an unimaginative prostitute. That deepened my wary apprehension
that round about the hidden garden of desire was a jungle of very
squalid and stupid lairs.

Now my cousin had a real sweetness and loveliness that our closeness did
nothing to abolish. All the cloudy drift of desire and romantic
imagination in my mind centred more and more upon her. I became so
persuaded and satisfied that with her I could get to this fundamental
happiness of love which now obsessed me, that for all the years between
my student days and our marriage my imagination never wandered very far
from her. I played the devoted impatient lover. There was a deep-seated
fixation of my mind upon her.

She loved me I knew, but with a more limited and temperate imagination
than mine. The jangle of our thoughts and outlooks, that difference in
scope, would not have mattered very much if our passions had been in
tune. We should have managed then. Our real discord was not mental but
temperamental. And she was afraid, and the worldly wisdom of that
retouching studio in Regent Street did not help her in the least. My
nature protested at having to wait for her so long, protested against
having to marry her in church instead of at a registry office. I didn't
believe in marriage anyhow, I insisted. The great thing was not marriage
but love. I invoked Godwin, Shelley, Socialism.

Streaks of vindictiveness crept into my passion. And I was a very
ignorant as well as an impatient lover. I knew nothing of the arts of
wooing. I should probably have thought that sort of thing dishonest. My
idea was of flame meeting flame.... We are so much wiser about that sort
of thing nowadays. It is rarer for avid and innocent young bridegrooms
to be flung upon shrinking and innocent brides.

It mattered nothing to me, then, that Isabel was manifestly fond of me,
cared greatly for me. It was a profound mortification to me, a vast
disappointment, that she did not immediately respond to my ardours. She
submitted. I had waited so long for this poor climax. "She does not love
me," I said in my heart. I put as brave a face as I could upon the
business, I dried her tears, blamed my roughness, but it was a secretly
very embittered young husband who went on catching trains, correcting
correspondence answer books, eviscerating rabbits and frogs and hurrying
through the crowded business of every day.

Here was something more organic than any difference in mental scope. And
I want to make it quite clear that for a long time my emotional pride,
my secret romanticism was still centred quite firmly in my cousin. It is
true that I was presently letting my desires wander away from her and
that I was making love to other people. I wanted to compensate myself
for the humiliation she had so unwittingly put upon me. I was in a phase
of aroused liveliness. That did not alter her unpremeditated and
unconscious dominance of my imagination, my deep-lying desire for
passionate love with her.

Quite soon after my marriage indeed came an adventure, that did much to
restore my baffled self confidence. There was a certain little Miss
Kingsmill who came to Haldon Road first as a pupil to learn retouching
and then as a helper with the work. She was cheerfully a-moral and
already an experienced young woman. She was about the house before and
after my marriage; the business stirred her; she may have had
confidences from my cousin and a quickening interest became evident in
her manner towards me. I found myself alone with her in the house one
day; I was working upon a pile of correspondence books, my aunt was out
shopping and my wife had gone to London with some retouched negatives. I
forget by what excuse Ethel Kingsmill flitted from her retouching desk
upstairs, to my study. But she succeeded in dispelling all the gloomy
apprehensions I was beginning to entertain, that lovemaking was nothing
more than an outrage inflicted upon reluctant womankind and all its
loveliness a dream. The sound of my returning aunt's latch-key separated
us in a state of flushed and happy accomplishment. I sat down with a
quickened vitality to my blottesque red corrections again and Ethel,
upstairs, very content with herself, resumed her niggling at her
negative. Sentimentally and "morally" this is a quite shocking incident
to relate; in truth it was the most natural thing in the world.

After that one adventure I looked the world in the eye again. But it
did nothing to change my attachment to Isabel. Our separation did not
alter the fact that still for many years she retained the dominant place
among my emotional possibilities. I do not know what might have happened
if at any time in the course of our estrangement she had awakened and
turned upon me with a passionate appeal.

I can see to-day, as I dissect the dead rabbit of my former self, what I
never saw before, why it was that after years of complete orientation to
my cousin, now that she was my wife, my eye and fancy wandered. Less
consciously than instinctively I was trying to undo the knot I had tied
and release myself from the strong, unsatisfying bond of habit and
affection between us. I still wanted to keep her, if only she would
quicken and come alive to me; and quite as strongly I wanted to escape
from the pit of disappointment into which I had fallen with her.

As I sit over this specimen of human life, pickled now in correspondence
and ineffaceable memories for forty years, I find this replacement, in
the course of a few weeks, of a very real simple honesty of sexual
purpose by duplicity quite the most interesting fact about my early
married life. After six "engagement" years of monogamic sincerity and
essential faithfulness, I embarked, as soon as I was married, upon an
enterprising promiscuity. The old love wasn't at all dead, but I meant
now to get in all the minor and incidental love adventures I could.

I am disposed to think, on the strength I admit, of my one only personal
experiences, that for the normally constituted human being there must be
two contrasted types of phase, fixation upon an individual as one end of
the series and complete promiscuity of attention and interest as the
other. Anyone, at any time, may be in one or other phase, or moving from
one to the other. We are not monogamic by nature, or promiscuous by
nature, but some of us happen to get _fixed_ for longer or shorter
periods. There is a general desire to concentrate. We tend towards
attachment but a shock or a mounting subconscious resistance may
suddenly interfere. It is like the accumulation of a sediment, in a test
tube which may at any time happen to be heated or shaken. We become
dispersed then, perhaps for an indefinite time, until a new trend
towards fixation appears. These are matters not within the control of
will or foresight, they happen to us before willing begins. That, I
think, gives some expression to these alternations of fairly strict
loyalty, such as I observed before my marriage, with my subsequent
infidelities, which phase again gave place to a second, less powerful,
fixation and that to a second discursiveness.

But as I sit and speculate about what really happened to me more than
half a life-time ago in 1892 and 1893, I begin to suspect that I am
still simplifying too much and that there was another independent strand
of motive playing among the others. Is there a strain of evasion in my
composition? Does the thought of being bound and settling down, in
itself, so soon as it is definitely presented, arouse a recalcitrant
stress in me? And how far is that fugitive impulse exceptional, and how
far is its presence an ordinary thing in the human make-up? Is this
string also tugging at everybody? Is there potential flight as well as
attraction in every love affair? I remember clearly how much I desired
my cousin to become my mistress before I married her and how much I
wished to go on living in lodgings for a time even after we were
married, instead of taking a house.

In my case the break between the pull and the drive came to a climax
very abruptly. I find I was writing from my home in Sutton in
mid-December 1892 as though I intended to live on there indefinitely;
and I find myself living in Mornington Place with Catherine Robbins
early in the following January! The circumstances of that very abrupt
change defeat my memory. Something happened which I cannot recall. I
have been inclined to suppose a fit of claustrophobia. Did I perhaps
wake up suddenly in the night and say "I must get out of this"? I may
have had one of those spasmodic resolutions that do come up sometimes
out of the welter of the half-conscious and the subconscious! If so I do
not remember it. But I do find indications of precisely the opposite
thing, a considerable amount of shilly-shally. Even after I had eloped I
was, I know, trying very earnestly to persuade my cousin not to divorce
me. Having got away from her I wanted to keep her. It is only now, in
this cold and deliberate retrospect, that I admit even to myself how
disingenuous, how confused and divided in purpose I was at that time.

Isabel and I paid a visit to the Robbins' household on December 15th and
stayed until December 18th. This probably brought on the crisis. Isabel
may have given way to a fit of jealousy. My brother Freddy, who was
always greatly attached to her and who talked the affair over with her
years afterwards, tells me now that she ascribed our separation to her
own initiative. She told him she had put it to me that either I must end
this continually more intimate and interesting friendship altogether or
part from her. She had had a similar phase of possessiveness during my
student days at South Kensington. She felt at a disadvantage with these
people who could "talk." I do not now recall any such ultimatum, but in
the circumstances it was a very natural and probable one and the visit
to Putney may have precipitated it. The retort, "Very well, if you can
let me go like this, I will go," was equally natural and obvious. There
we have exactly the pride and resentment on either side necessary for a
sudden separation. She made what is otherwise an unaccountable decision,
easy for me.

Brother Freddy comes in very usefully here. Later on, he tells me, she
regretted our parting profoundly. I too regretted it. She reproached
herself, he says, for failing to "understand" me and for having broken
before I was ready to break. She said she had been headstrong and
selfish; she had said her say, I had taken her at her word, and she
found there was no going back upon it. There was certainly a deep bond
of dearness between us still, we realized that as our anger abated, but,
once we were launched upon our several courses, there was no return.

Perhaps it was well that there was no return. There was a superficial
volatility and a profound impatience in my make-up that would have taxed
her ultimately beyond the limit of her adaptability. We might have gone
on dragging out the estrangement. A later breach might have been a less
generous one.

My little Aunt Mary, who died two years later, was distressed and
perplexed beyond measure by our divorce and, as Isabel told me long
afterwards, her opinion of the whole affair expressed itself in a "good
scolding" for "losing" me. My mother too was so amazed at Isabel
"letting me go," and so near to indignation about it, that she quite
forgot to be shocked at the immorality of my situation. I cannot make up
my mind how far this disposition on the part of women to make their own
sex wholly responsible for the infirmity of purpose of their menfolk is
due to deep seated and ancient traditions, and how far it is innate. But
that was how my aunt and my mother behaved.

When my second wife was dying in 1927, she said to me, "I have never
destroyed a single letter of yours, I cannot destroy them now. There
they are in my bureau, with all my own letters that you have asked me to
keep. You must do as you please with them." So that I am able, after a
little trouble with some undated letters, to check back every main phase
in our reactions throughout our long married life. The record is even
fuller than a mere keeping of letters would imply. Not only did we write
to each other daily when we were apart, but for all our time when we
were together, I had a queer little custom of drawing what we called
"picshuas" to amuse her and myself, little sketches of fancy, comment or
caricature. I began this in Mornington Place in 1893. These picshuas
carried on the tradition of those scratchy odd little drawings with
which I used to decorate my letters to my family and friends. Many were
destroyed as they were done, but many were thrust into drawers and
survived. The growth and changes of tone in our relations is, I say,
traceable by means of this accumulation over thirty-five years. And it
is quite evident that these letters are those of two loving friends and
allies, who are not and never had been passionate lovers. That is the
point of importance here.

The earliest of all my letters, the ones written before matters came to
a crisis, were the ordinary letters of a self-conscious young man
putting his best foot forward in a friendly correspondence. They were
letters that might have to be shown to "mother" and eminently discreet.
There is no essential change of tone right up to the breach with Isabel.
But then came letters written during our crisis, and I find a curiously
false and unconvincing note sounding through them. They are plainly the
attempts of an extremely perplexed mind to make a fair story out of a
muddle of impulses. They are not straightforward, they pose and flatter,
they exaggerate. The ring of simple and honest passion is not there; I
would hate to quote a line of them. Fortunately that is not only
unnecessary but impossible. They vary so much that no quotations would
be really representative.

The resort to heroics in these letters is frequent and facile. I was
acting a part. I may have been acting in good faith, to the best of my
ability, but I was acting. It is plain that I resolved suddenly at any
cost to get my little student to come away and give herself to me, but
there is not the slightest indication that I was really possessed by her
personality or that at that time I had the smallest apprehension of its
sterling quality. Sifting over all my evidence now, not as my apologist
but as my scientific historian, I am inclined to think that the most
powerful drive at work in me was the longing to relieve my imagination
not of the real Isabel but of that Venus Urania, that torment of high
and beautiful desire, who had failed to embody herself in Isabel and yet
had become so inseparable from her. My mind was seizing upon Amy
Catherine Robbins to make her the triumphant rival of that elusive
goddess.

On my new mistress, in her turn, I was trying to impose a rle. Like so
many other desperate young love affairs, ours was to be such a love
affair as the world had never seen before. Other people were different.
We were by mutual agreement two beings of an astonishing genius with an
inherent right to turn accepted morality upside down. It was an
explosion of moral light....

There was some coming and going between Mornington Place and the
Robbins' home in Putney after our first departure. The mother declared
herself to be dying of grief, she wept continuously and incredibly, and
the daughter went back to her home for some days. Attempts were then
made to delay her return to me. Various men friends of the family were
invoked to remonstrate and threaten. I stuck to my purpose grimly. Miss
Amy Catherine Robbins stuck to my purpose. Vast arguments unfolded about
us. She was consumptive; I was consumptive; we were launching on a
desperate experiment. We replied magnificently that if we were going to
die so soon, the more reason there was that we should spend all that was
left of our brief time on earth together. But let her at any rate remain
in the shelter of her home until I was divorced, they argued. I answered
that I was not sure I wanted to be divorced. We did not believe in the
Institution of Marriage and we did not intend to marry. We were both
very sure that we did not intend to marry.

The resolve to get the best of an argument may link two people as
closely as inherent mutual desire. We hadn't our backs to the wall;
there was indeed nothing in the nature of a wall behind us; we had only
each other. We saw the thing through in spite of immense secret
disillusionments. I found this fragile delicate little being of Dresden
china, was altogether innocent and ignorant of the material realities of
love, it was impossible to be rough or urgent with her and so the deep
desired embraces of Venus Urania were now further off from me than ever.
But not a soul in the world about us knew anything of that for some
years. We stuck to each other stoutly and forged the links of a chain of
mutual aid, tolerance and affection that held us close to each other to
the day of her death. We got over the worst of our difficulties; we
established a _modus vivendi_. Insensibly the immense pretentiousness of
our first beginning evaporated and we began to jest and mock at
ourselves very cordially. The "picshuas" began. We worked in close
association and sympathy. But there arose no such sexual fixation
between us, as still lingered in my mind towards my cousin.

If I am to tell this story at all I must tell here of two illuminating
incidents that happen to be known now to no one in the whole world but
myself. They seem to me to be profoundly illuminating; but the reader
must judge for himself whether I am disposed to exaggerate their
significance. They show at any rate how little I had really finished
with my cousin when I separated myself from her and how much of that
separation was concerned with her and not with her successor. The first
of these incidents occurred when I visited her somewhen about 1898 or 99
at a poultry farm she was running, not very profitably, at Twyford
between Maidenhead and Reading. I think the pretext of our meeting again
was the discussion of some extension of that enterprise. I bicycled to
the place and found her amidst green things and swarming creatures
depending upon her, in the rustic setting to which by nature she
belonged. We spent a day together at Virginia Water, a day without
tension, with an easy friendliness we had never known before. We used
our old intimate names for each other. Suddenly I found myself overcome
by the sense of our separation. I wanted fantastically to recover her. I
implored her for the last time in vain. Before dawn the house had become
unendurable for me. I got up and dressed and went down to find my
bicycle and depart. She heard me moving about, perhaps she too had not
slept, and she came down, kindly and invincible as ever, and as amazed
as ever at my strangeness.

Because you see it was all so unreasonable.

"But you cannot go out at this hour without something to eat," she said,
and set about lighting a fire and boiling a kettle.

Her aunt could be heard moving about upstairs, for they occupied
adjacent rooms. "It's all right Auntie," she said, and prevented her
from coming down to witness my distress.

All our old mingling of intense attraction and baffling reservation was
there unchanged. "But how can things like that be, now?" she asked. I
gave way to a wild storm of weeping. I wept in her arms like a
disappointed child, and then suddenly pulled myself together and went
out into the summer dawn and mounted my bicycle and wandered off
southward into a sunlit intensity of perplexity and frustration, unable
to understand the peculiar keenness of my unhappiness. I felt like an
automaton, I felt as though all purpose had been drained out of me and
nothing remained worth while. The world was dead and I was dead and I
had only just discovered it.

After that I set myself to forget my imaginations about her, by
releasing my imaginations for other people. But in that I was
unsuccessful for a long time. Five or six years afterwards she married;
I do not know the exact date because for more than a year she kept this
from me. And then came a still more illuminating incident. When at last
I heard of it, I was overwhelmed by a storm of irrational organic
jealousy. It took the form of a deliberate effacement of her. I
destroyed all her photographs and letters and every souvenir I possessed
of her; I would not have her mentioned to me if I could avoid it; I
ceased all communications. The portraits I have reproduced here I have
had to borrow. That bitterness again is quite incompatible with the
plausible and conventional theory that she was nothing more to me than
an illiterate young woman whom I "dropped" because she was unequal to a
rle in the literary world. I burnt her photographs. That was a
symbolization. If we had lived ten thousand years ago I suppose I should
have taken my axe of stone and set out to find and kill her.

And to complete this history here, the still stranger thing is that in
another five years all this fixation had vanished. It had been
completely swept out of my mind by other disturbances of which I must
tell at some later date. The sting had vanished. I was able to meet her
again in 1909 in a mood of limitless friendliness, free from all the
glittering black magic of sex; and so things remained with us until the
end of her life. Some friend we had in common mentioned her to me,
brought us into communication again, and we met and continued to meet at
intervals after that. Following her marriage, the order for her alimony
had been discharged but now, realizing she had to practice many
economies, I arranged an income for her, exactly as one might do for a
married sister. In quite the same mood of brotherliness I bought a
laundry for her when the fancy took her to possess a business of her
own. That enterprise was crippled by an operation for appendicitis; she
had no great facilities for being nursed in her own house and she came
to mine and stayed through her convalescence with my wife and myself
until she was well again. No one about us knew her story; she was my
cousin and that sufficed; we were in a world far removed from the
primitive jealousies, comparisons and recriminations of our early years.
We walked about the garden discussing annuals and perennials and roses
and trees. When she was growing stronger I took her for my favourite
round through the big gardens of Easton Lodge. She was particularly
pleased by the lily tank before the house, and by the golden pheasants
Lady Warwick had turned loose in the wood behind the ponds.

That was the last walk we ever had together.

She wrote to me in her simple gentle fashion when my wife died, praising
and lamenting her. Afterwards she wanted to build a house of her own and
asked me to help her. When I saw that her heart was set upon it I agreed
to that, though it did not seem to me to be what Americans call a sound
proposition. We inspected the site and she showed me the plans. But the
house was barely begun before she died and it was abandoned. She died
quite unexpectedly. She had been diabetic and making use of insulin for
some years. I had just discovered that I too was diabetic and I was
looking forward to her coming to a lunch with me, at which I would
surprise her by an admirable menu of all the best permissible things. I
thought it was a cousinly touch that we should share the same diathesis.
But something went wrong with her insulin injections and one day in
France I got a letter from her husband saying that she was dead. She had
been well on Saturday and she became comatose on Monday and died without
recovering consciousness.

So ends this history of the rise and fall and sequel of that primary
fixation that began when my cousin came downstairs to meet me in that
basement tea-party in the Euston Road forty-seven years before. I offer
no moral lesson. I have tried to tell things as they happened.


 3

Modus Vivendi

The mixture of high-falutin with sincere determination on the part of
this Miss Amy Catherine Robbins and myself in the early stages of our
joint adventure, deserves a little more attention. We were both in
reality in flight from conditions of intolerably narrow living. But we
did not know how to state that properly, we were not altogether clear
about it, and we caught at the phrasing of Shelley and the assumption
of an imperative passion. She was the only daughter of an extremely
timid and conventional mother with no ideas for her future beyond
marriage to a safe, uneventful _good_ man, and her appearance in my
mixed classes was already an expression of her struggle and revolt. My
own recalcitrance to the life fate had presented to me I have already
dealt with. My intimations of freedom and social and intellectual
enterprise (on the noblest scale) went to her head very readily and it
was an overwhelming desire for emancipation from consuming everyday
obligations for both of us rather than sexual passion, that led to our
wild dash at opportunity.

That alliance for escape and self development held throughout our lives.
We never broke it. As our heroics evaporated we found ourselves with an
immense liking and respect for each other and a great willingness to
turn an awkward corner with a jest and a caricature. We discovered a way
of doing that. We became and remained the best companions in the world.
But our alliance never became an intense sexual companionship, which
indeed is why my primary fixation upon my cousin remained so powerful in
my mind for ten years, or more, and why, later on, as we emerged to
success and freedom I was in a phase of imaginative dispersal and began
to scandalize the whisperers about us.

Here again it would be easy to dress up my story in a highly logical and
creditable manner. But I have never quite succeeded in that sort of
dressing-up. A few tactful omissions would smooth out the record
beautifully. And if the record is not beautifully smoothed out it is not
for want of effort. Between the ages of thirty and forty I devoted a
considerable amount of mental energy to the general problem of men and
women. And never with any real disinterestedness. I wanted to live a
consistent life, I wanted a life that would stand examination, I hated
having to fake a front to the world, and yet not only were my thoughts
and fancies uncontrollable, but my conduct remained perplexingly
disingenuous. I did my best to eliminate my sense of that
disingenuousness by candid public theorizing. I spoke out for "Free
Love." I suppose I was going through phases roughly parallel with those
through which Shelley had passed eighty years before. Hundreds of
thousands have passed that way. I did my best to maintain that
love-making was a thing in itself, a thing to thank the gods for, but
not to be taken too seriously and carried into the larger constructive
interests of life.

The spreading knowledge of birth-control,--Neo-Malthusianism was our
name for it in those days--seemed to justify my contention that love was
now to be taken more lightly than it had been in the past. It was to be
refreshment and invigoration, as I set out quite plainly in my _Modern
Utopia_ (1905) and I could preach these doctrines with no thought of how
I would react if presently my wife were to carry them into effect, since
she was so plainly not disposed to carry them into effect, and what is
much more remarkable, with my recent storm of weeping in that little
farm kitchen at Twyford, very conveniently--but quite honestly--forgotten.
This again I think is after the common fashion. We are not naturally
aware of our two-phase quality. We can all think in the liberal
fashion in our phases of dispersal; there is always a Free Love
contingent in any community at any time; but its membership varies and
at any time any of its members may lapse towards a fixation and
towards its attendant exclusiveness and jealous passion. People drop
out of the contingent or return to it. At one time love is the happy
worship of Venus, the goddess of human loveliness, the graceful mutual
complement of two free bodies and spirits; at another it is the sacred
symbol of an intense and mystical personal association, a merging of
identities prepared to live and die for one another. It is this
variation of phase that plays havoc with every simple dogmatic ruling
upon sexual behaviour.

Advocates of free love, in so far as they aim at the liberation of
individual sexual conduct from social reproach and from legal controls
and penalties, are, I believe, entirely in the right. Nevertheless, with
such a liberation, very little is attained. Circumstances are
simplified, but the problem itself remains unchanged. We are still
confronted with the essential riddle of our own phases of development as
we pass from youth to maturity and, as I have already insisted, with
this other, more persistent, alternation of phase between dispersal and
intensification. The tangle is further complicated by the absolute right
of society to intervene directly the existence of children is involved,
and by a third mass of difficulties due to the fact that emotionally
and physically, and thence to an increasing degree in its secondary
associations and implications, love is a different thing for men and
women. In a universe of perfect adaptations these differences would
reciprocate; in this world they do nothing of the sort.

But here I approach questions and experiences that will be better
deferred until I come to that phase of my middle years during which I
produced various hesitating yet enterprising love novels. Then, almost
in spite of myself, I was forced by my temperament and circumstances to
face the possibility that men and women as such, when it comes to
planning a greater world order, may be disposed to desire incompatible
things. Feminine creativeness and feminine devotion may differ from
their masculine parallels and though women radicals and men radicals are
members of the same associations and speak to the same meetings, their
ends may lie far apart. There may have to be a new treaty of mutual
tolerance between the sexes.

But in the early days of my second marriage I did not even suspect the
possibility of these fundamental disagreements in the human project. My
wife and I had still to win the freedom to think as we liked about our
world. What we were then going to think about it, lay some years ahead
of us. While we struggled we liked each other personally more and more,
we dropped our heroics and laughed and worked together, we made do with
our physical and nervous incompatibilities and kept a brave face towards
the world.

We dropped our disavowal of the Institution of Marriage and married, as
soon as I was free to do so, in 1895. The behaviour of the servants of
that period and the landladies and next-door neighbours, forced that
upon us anyhow. Directly the unsoundness of our position appeared,
servants became impertinent and neighbours rude and strange. How well we
came to know the abrupt transition from a friendly greeting "passing the
time of day" to a rigid estrangement. Were they really horrified when
they "heard about it," or is there a disposition to hate and persecute
awaiting release in every homely body? I believe that there has been a
great increase in tolerance in the last forty years but in our period,
if we had not married, half our energy would have been frittered away in
a conflict of garden-wall insults and slights and domestic exactions.
We had no disposition for that kind of warfare.

And having got together and found how evanescent were our heroics, and
having discovered that our private dreams of some hidden splendour of
loving were evaporating, we were nevertheless under both an inner and an
outer obligation to stand by one another and pull our adventure through.
We refrained from premature discussion and felt our way over our
situation with tentatives and careful understatement. We could each wait
for the other to take on an idea. She, even less than I, had that
terrible fluidity of speech that can swamp any situation in garrulous
justification and headlong ultimatums. And our extraordinary isolation,
too, helped us to discover a _modus vivendi_. Neither of us had any
confidants to complicate our relations by some potent divergent
suggestion, and there was no background of unsympathetic values that
either of us respected. Neither of us bothered in the least about what
so and so would think. In many matters we were odd and exceptional
individuals but in our broad relations to each other and society we may
have come much nearer to being absolute and uncomplicated sample man and
woman, than do most young couples. The research for a _modus vivendi_ is
a necessary phase of the normal married life to-day.

Now in this research for a _modus vivendi_ certain apparently very
trivial things played a really very important part. Although I have
published only four lines of verse in my life, I used to be in the habit
of making endless doggerel as I got up in the morning, and when we were
sitting together in the evening, with my writing things before me I
would break off my work to do "picshuas," these silly little sketches
about this or that incident which became at last a sort of burlesque
diary of our lives and accumulated in boxes until there were hundreds of
them. Many--perhaps most--are lost but still there remain hundreds. I
invented a queer little device in a couple of strokes to represent her
head, and it somehow seemed to us to resemble her; also a kindred
convention, with a large nose and a wreath of laurel suggestive of
poetic distinction and incipient baldness, for myself. Like so many
couples, we found it necessary to use pet names; she became Bits or
Miss Bits or Snitch or It, with variations, and I was Bins or Mr. Bins.
A burlesque description I gave, after a visit to the Zoological Gardens,
of the high intelligence and remarkable social life of the gopher,
amused us so much that we incorporated a sort of gopher chorus with the
picshuas. Whatever we did, whatever was going on in the world, the
gophers set about doing after their fashion. Into this parallel world of
burlesque and fancy, we transferred a very considerable amount of our
every-day life, and there it lost its weight and irksomeness. We
transferred our own selves there also. Miss Bits became an active
practical imperious little being and Mr. Bins a rather bad, evasive
character who went in great awe of her. He was frequently chastised with
an umbrella or "Umbler pop." All this funny-silly stuff is so much of
the same quality that I find it hard to pick out specimens, but I do not
see how I can tell of it without reproducing samples. Here for instance
are various "tudes," some very early sketches of Miss Robbins in her
academic gown, done before our elopement, a very characteristic figure
of her engaged in literary effort, from about 1896, four later studies
of the conventional head of Miss Bits, It usually, It at the slightest
hint of impropriety, It sad and It asleep, a treatment of the advent of
reading glasses, and a sort of frieze of every-day; the Same, Yesterday,
To-day and for Ever. These may seem at the first glance to be the most
idle of scribblings but in fact they are acute statements in personal
interpretation. Mostly they were done on sheets of manuscript paper, so
that here they suffer considerable reduction and compression. This, says
my publisher was unavoidable.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.

Here is a Satirical Picshua, on one side of the paper is "Bits as she
_finks_ she is" and on the other, "the real Bits, really a very dear
Bits indeed." She writes, sleeps, eats and rides a bicycle with me.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings

LYNTON,
MAYBURY ROAD,
WOKING.]

Here again is the text of a sympathetic but relentless poem, undated but
probably about 1898, showing still more clearly how she was being, to
use Henry James's word "treated," for mental assimilation:


                CHANSON
    _It was called names_
    _Miss Furry Boots and Nicketty and Bits,_
    _And P.C.B., and Snitterlings and Snits,_
    _It was called names._

    _Such names as no one but a perfect 'Orror_
    _Could ever fink or find or beg or borror_
    _Names out of books or names made up to fit it_
        _In wild array_
    _It never knew when some new name might hit it_
        _From day to day_
      _Some names it's written down and some it 'as forgotten_
      _Some names was nice and some was simply ROTTEN._
      _Sometimes they made it smile, sometimes they seemed to flatter_
      _Sometimes they made it weep--it really did not matter._
      _Some made it pine quite fin, but fin or fat or fatter_
          _It was called names._

       *       *       *       *       *

Here again is a gardening picture from either Woking or the early
Worcester Park days, representing an encounter with a slug. The Wreath
on my head "dates" the picture as an early one, probably 1895 or 1896.
This wreath was my symbol for literary ambitions; it appears constantly
in my earlier student's letters to A. T. Simmons and Miss Healey, and it
becomes infrequent after 1898.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings]

Here you have a "Fearful Pome" intended to bring home to an insolent
woman her dependence on her lord. This doggerel variant of Lear's
nonsense rhyme, brings out the queer little fact that even in these
early days at Heatherlea, Worcester Park, the money of the alliance was
already under her control. We were living indeed exactly like an honest
working-class couple and the man handed over his earnings to his
"missus" and was given out his pocket money.


    _Fearful Pome to Scare and Improve a Bits_

    _The Pobble who has no Toes_
    _Had once as many as Ten_
    _(Now here is a Strange and Horrible Thing_
    _All of his Toes were Men)_
    _Some there are who wrongly hold_
    _His toes did number eleven_
    _But none dare count the Hairs of his Head_
    _(Though the Stars in his Hair are Seven)_
    _Such as would count the Hairs of His Head_
    _Speedily Painfully Die_
    _(Aunt Jobiska he never had_
    _All that tale is a Lie)._
    _All who meet the Pobble abroad_
    _Come to infinite Harm_
    _May you never meet him (Pray the Lord),_
    _Clothed in his Sinister Charm_
    _(Softly (yet dreadfully fast) He goes_
    _That Terrible Pobble who has no Toes)_
    _(It's no good saying you do not care_
    _This Awful Pobble goes everywhere)_
    _Should you meet him, cover your face_
    _Leave your shoes in that Terrible Place_
    _The Pobble--the Foe of the Human Race--and Flee_
    _Your only shelter from his Clutch_
    _Your only Refuge he dare not Touch_
    _The only Being he cares for Much is Me (H.G.)_
    _Me what you fink is simply Fungy_
    _Me what you keep so short of Mungy_
    _Me what you keep so short of Beer_
    _Is your only chance when the Pobble is near_
    _Nex time you go for your Umbler Pop_
    _Fink of that Terrible Pobble and Stop._

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

Here is a gentle protest against an unfair invasion of table space. The
lamp dates it as before 1900 and the spectacles as after 1898.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

Here is a much later sketch, dated 1911, celebrating the return of the
Tangerine season. We had enjoyed tangerines together at Mornington
Place, seventeen years before. I thought we might enjoy them again in
seventeen years' time--but in 1911 there were only sixteen years left to
us; she died in 1927. And note the "some day" at the bottom.... That
picshua has become the oddest little epitome of our third of a century
together.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

Here is an earlier picshua again (March 31st, 1899). It commemorates a
removal from Beach Cottage, Sandgate, to Arnold House. The helplessness
of the male on these occasions of domestic upheaval is contrasted with
the ruthless energy of the female. The first thing is "Gup! Movals!",
i.e. "Get up--removal!" Then the embarrassed master of the house misses
his trousers. He finds himself being carried from house to house and
protests, "But Bits why can't I walk like I usually does?" He is crushed
by the stern reply "Cos it's Movals". And so on.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the following two pages is a casual specimen for 1898. The reader may
do his best to interpret it. A lens may be needed, but that is due to
the unavoidable reduction in printing. By this time the reader has
either given up looking at these picshuas or he has learnt their
peculiar language. The idea of building a house was already under
discussion. We had had a visit from J. M. Barrie (of which a word may be
said later) and he and Jane are represented measuring heights
(Mezzerinites). There had been trouble over a building site, with a Mr.
Toomer. The gophers appear in full cry in pursuit of the said Toomer.
The Atom reflects upon her diminutive size. Other points may be guessed
at.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.

This rather more ambitious attempt commemorates the completion of _Love
and Mr. Lewisham_. What the little figures rocketing across the left
hand corner of the picture intimate I do not know. They are, I think,
just a decorative freak.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

Finally let me quote a hymn, celebrating our first seven years together.
"Mr. Boo" I may explain was a cat that ran away, and the "Bites" were
Harvesters, which we had gathered unwittingly on the Downs behind
Folkstone.

             Lines written on this piece of paper
                   Oct. 11th, 1900.

    _Our God is an Amoosing God. It is His Mercy that
    This Bins who formerly was ill is now quite well and Fat
    And isn't going Bald no more nor toofaking and such
    For all of which This Bins who writes congratulates_ Him _much.

    Our God is an Amoosing God, although he let that site,
    What first we chose, be Toomerized, he more than made things right
    By getting us a better site, a more amoozing chunk
    And finding us the Voysey man and Honest Mr. Dunk.

    Our God is an Amoosing God. Although he stole our Boo.
    (A rather shabby sort of fing for any God to do)
    Although he persecuted us for several orful nights
    With fings which I can only name by calling of em--Bites.
    Although he made me orful ill when I came back from Rome.
    Although he keeps the windows back, what's ordered for our mome,
    Although, if I aint precious sharp, he gets my socks on odd
    And blacks my flangle trowsers. Still--
            He's an Amoosing God.

    Yes God is an Amoozing God, and that is why I am
    By way of Compliment to Him, so much the Woolly Lamb.
    He gives me little woolly Momes and little Furry Bits
    He's lately added to my store a Mackintosh that fits.
    He gives me Tankards full of Beer and endless pleasant Fings
    And so to show my Gratitude to God I sits and sings.
    I sits and sings to Lordy God with all my little wits.
    (But all the same I don't love 'Im not near what I love Bits.)_

But altogether many hundreds of these sketches and scribblings have
escaped the dustbin and the fireplace; and they are all at about the
same level of skill and humour. There is no need to reproduce more of
them. What matters here is the way in which they wrapped about the facts
of life and created for us a quaint and softened atmosphere of
intercourse. They falsified our relations to the pitch of making them
tolerable and workable. The flow of this output was a little interrupted
when I took to drawing Good Night Pictures for our children, but it
never really ceased. I was drawing picshuas for her within a few weeks
of her death, and one day during those last months we had together, we
turned the whole collection out and looked them over together,
remembering and reminding.

The reader may think I have wandered away from the subject of dispersal
and fixation with which I began this section. But indeed it is essential
to that subject that I should explain how it was that we two contrived
in the absence of a real passionate sexual fixation, a binding net of
fantasy and affection that proved in the end as effective as the very
closest sexual sympathy could have been in keeping us together. And we
were linked together also by our unreserved co-operation in work and
business affairs. At first I sent my MSS. to be typed by a cousin, (the
daughter of that cousin Williams who kept school for a time at Wookey),
but later on my wife learnt to typewrite in order to save the delay of
posting and waiting to correct copy, which latter process often
necessitated retyping. She not only typed, she scrutinized my text,
watched after my besetting sin of verbal repetitions, and criticized and
advised. Quite early in our life together, so soon as I had any money, I
began handing over most of it to her, and for the greater part of our
married life, we had a joint and several banking account on which either
of us could draw without consulting the other, and she had complete
control of my investments. She spent exactly what she thought proper,
she made up my income tax returns without troubling me, I ceased more
and more to look into things, satisfied when she told me that everything
was "all right," and, when she died, I found myself half as much again
better off than I had ever imagined myself to be. Another thing between
us that seems extremely significant to me as I look back upon it, was
this, that I disliked both of her names, Amy and Catherine, and avoided
using either. The reader may have noticed that there has been a curious
awkwardness hitherto in alluding to her. That is because in actual fact
I spoke of her only by the current nickname. Then on the heels of a
string of nicknames, I was suddenly moved to call her "Jane" and Jane
she became and remained. I do not know exactly when I did this, but very
rapidly it became her only name, for me and our friends. "Amy" she
dropped altogether; she disliked it as much as I did. Her mother used it
abundantly, and perhaps too much, for remonstrance and advice.

But Catherine she liked and as I have told in _The Book of Catherine
Wells_ she kept it for her literary work. In that volume I have gathered
together almost every piece of writing that she completed and in the
preface I have given an account of her rather overshadowed but very
distinctive literary personality. Her literary initiatives were of a
different order and quality from mine, and she insisted upon that and
would never avail herself of my name or influence in publishing her own
none too abundant writing. We belonged to different schools. Her
admiration for Katherine Mansfield, for instance, was unbounded while my
appreciation was tempered by a sense of that young woman's limitations;
and she had a leaning towards Virginia Woolf, whose lucubrations I have
always regarded with a lack-lustre eye. She liked delicate fantasy after
the manner of Edith Sitwell, to whom I am as appreciatively indifferent
as I am to the quaint patterns of old chintzes, the designs on dinner
plates or the charm of nursery rhymes. Again, she found great interest
in Proust who for me is far less documentary and entertaining than, let
us say, Messrs. Shoolbred's catalogue of twenty years ago, or an old
local newspaper, which is truer and leaves the commentary to me.

Catherine Wells was indeed not quite one of us, not quite one with Jane
and me, I mean; she was a quiet, fine spirited stranger in our
household; she was all that had escaped from the rough nick-naming and
caricaturing and compromise that would have completely imposed upon her
the rles of Miss Bits and Jane. Our union had never incorporated her. I
had glimpses of her at times; she would look at me out of Jane's brown
eyes, and vanish. All I know of her I have let appear in that book. Much
later, after the war, when our accumulating means afforded it, Catherine
Wells took rooms of her own in Bloomsbury, rooms I never saw; she
explained what she wanted and I fell in with her idea, and in this
secret flat, quite away from all the life that centred upon me, she
thought and dreamt and wrote and sought continually and fruitlessly for
something she felt she had lost of herself or missed or never attained.
She worked upon a story in that retreat, a fastidious elusive story that
she never brought to any shape or ending; some of it she polished and
retyped many times. It was a dream of an island of beauty and sensuous
perfection in which she lived alone and was sometimes happy in her
loneliness and sometimes very lonely. In her dream there was a lover who
never appeared. He was a voice heard; he was a trail of footsteps in the
dewy grass, or she woke and found a rosebud at her side....

A year or so before her last illness she gave up that flat and ceased to
work upon her unfinished book.

It is evident that this marriage of ours had some very distinctive
features. Its originality did not end at that perfect business
confidence and that queer play of silly humorous fantasy, mental
caressing and imposed interpretations already described. At the back of
all that, two extremely dissimilar brains were working very
intelligently at the peculiar life problem we had created for each
other. We came at last to a very explicit understanding about the
profound difference in our physical and imaginative responses.

Jane thought I had a right to my own individual disposition and that
luck had treated me badly in mating me first to an unresponsive and then
to a fragile companion. About that she was extraordinarily dispassionate
and logical and much more clearheaded than I was. She faced the matter
with the same courage, honesty and self-subordination with which she
faced all the practical issues of life. She suppressed any jealous
impulse and gave me whatever freedom I desired. She knew as well as I
did that for all its elements of artificiality, our alliance was
indissoluble; we had intergrown and become parts of each other, and she
realized perhaps sooner than I, how little that alliance demanded a
monopoly of passionate intimacy. So long as we were in the opening phase
of our struggle for a position and worldly freedom, this question was
hardly a practical issue between us. There was neither time nor energy
to indulge any form of wanderlust. But with the coming of success,
increasing leisure and facility of movement, the rapid enlargement of
our circle of acquaintance, and contact with unconventional and exciting
people, there was no further necessity for the same rigid
self-restraint. The craving, in a body that was gathering health and
strength, for a complete loveliness of bodily response, was creeping up
into my imagination and growing more and more powerful. This craving
dominated the work of D. H. Lawrence altogether. For my own part, I
could never yield it that importance. I would justify it if I could, but
not at the price of that joint attack upon the world to which I was
committed with Jane.

My compromise with Jane developed after 1900. The _modus vivendi_ we
contrived was sound enough to hold us together to the end, but it was by
no means a perfect arrangement. That escape of the personality of
Catherine Wells from our unison was only one mark of its imperfection.
Over against that are to be set the far more frequent escapades of a Don
Juan among the intelligentsia. I record our understanding, as I want to
record all the material facts of my life; it was an experiment in
adjustment, but there was nothing exemplary about it. All life is
imperfect: imperfection becomes a condemnation only when it reaches an
intolerable level. Our imperfections we made quite tolerable and I do
not believe that in making them tolerable we injured anybody else in the
world. Compromises of some sort between ill-fitted yet congenial people
must, I suppose, become more frequent in our advancing world as
individuality intensifies. The more marked the individuality the more
difficult is it to discover a complete reciprocity. The more difficult
therefore is it to establish an exclusive fixation.

Yet the normal human being gravitates naturally towards an exclusive and
complete fixation, with its keen possessiveness and its irrational
infinitude of jealousy. What I have called the discursive phase of a
human being is the unstable and transitory phase; there is no such thing
as complete promiscuity; there is always preference and there is no
limit set to the possible swift intensifications of preference; the
casual lover loves always on a slippery slope. The French with their
absurd logicality distinguish between the _passade_, a stroke of mutual
attraction that may happen to any couple, and a real love affair. In
theory, I was now to have _passades_.

But life and Latin logic have always been at variance, and it did not
work out like that. There is no such distinction to be drawn. There are
not small preferences that do not matter and big ones that do; there are
all sizes and grades of preferences. For women even more than for men,
the frequent _passade_ seems unattractive. A woman understands much more
than a man the undesirability of inconsequent discursive bodily love.
She gives her Self, there is personality as well as her person in the
gift; she may reckon on a greater return than she gets, but indeed it is
a poor sort of lovemaking on either side in which, at the time at any
rate, there is not the feeling that selves are being given. Otherwise it
would be the easiest thing in the world to solve all this riddle of
incompatible temperaments by skilled prostitution.

Clearly Jane and I were persuaded of the possibility of some such
solution, though presumably in terms rather less brutally simple. I do
not think we could have made our treaty if we had not thought so. On
either side, we supposed, there were men and women with an excess of
sexual energy and imagination. On either side there were restless
spirits with a craving for variety. What could be more rational than for
such super-animated men and women to find out and assuage one another?

And everything else would remain as it was before.

But as a matter of fact, short of some rare miracle of flatness, nothing
does remain as it was before. Two worlds are altered every time a man
and woman associate. The alterations may vary widely in extent but an
alteration is always there. It would indeed be a very remarkable thing
if Nature, for all her general looseness and extravagance, had contrived
it otherwise. Jane's humour and charity, and the fundamental human love
between us, were to be tried out very severely in the years that lay
ahead. Suffice it here to say that they stood the test.


 4

_Writings about Sex_

And here, I think, and not later, is the place for a compact account of
my writings so far as they concern the relations of men and women. These
books and papers arose very directly out of my own personal
difficulties. They were essentially an eversion, a generalization, an
attempt to put my case in the character of Everyman.

In my earlier writings the topic of sex is conspicuously absent, I felt
then that I knew nothing about it that could possibly be communicated. I
muddled with my own problems in my own fashion, shamefacedly. Then,
because I still felt I knew nothing about it, I began asking questions.

I think that as the waters of oblivion swallow up my writings bulk by
bulk, the essays and booklets and stories and novels I wrote about love
and sex-reactions will be the first section to go right out of sight and
memory. If any survive they will survive as a citation or so, as
historical sidelights for the industrious student. They had their
function in their time but their time has already gone by. They were
essentially negative enquiries, statements of unsolved difficulties,
protests against rigid restraints and suppressions; variations of "Why
not?" They helped to release a generation from restriction and that is
about all they achieved. Aesthetically they have no great value. No one
will ever read them for delight.

_Love and Mr. Lewisham_ was published in 1900. The "love" in it is the
most nave response of youth and maiden imaginable, and the story is
really the story of the "Schema" of a career and how it was torn up. The
conflict and disharmony between the two main strands in what I have
called my "Compound Fugue," was troubling my mind. Mr. Lewisham was a
teacher and science student as I had been, and his entanglement is quite
on all fours with mine. But he has a child. Because he loved his Ethel,
Mr. Lewisham had to tear up his Schema and settle down. Domestic
claustrophobia, the fear of being caught in a household, which I have
suggested may have played a part in my departure from Sutton, is evident
in this book. At the time of writing it (1898-99), I did not consciously
apply the story of Mr. Lewisham to my own circumstances, but down below
the threshold of my consciousness the phobia must have been there. Later
on, in 1910, it had come to the surface and I sold Spade House
deliberately, because I felt that otherwise it would become the final
setting of my life.

The _Sea Lady_ (published in 1902 and planned two years earlier) is a
parallel story of the same two main strands of motive, but it is told
under quite a different scheme of values. Something new comes to light;
a sensuous demand. There is an element of confession in the tale but it
is a confession in motley. And love, instead of leading to any settling
down, breaks things up. But the defeat of the disinterested career is
just as complete. Chatteris, the lover, plunges not into domesticity but
into the sea, glittering under a full moon. A craving for some lovelier
experience than life had yet given me, is the burthen in this second
phase. Not only Catherine Wells but I too could long at times for
impossible magic islands. Chatteris is a promising young politician, a
sort of mixture of Harry Cust and any hero in any novel by Mrs. Humphry
Ward, and he is engaged to be married to a heroine, quite deliberately
and confessedly lifted, gestures, little speeches and all, from that
lady's _Marcella_. All the hopes of this heroine are shattered by a
mermaid who comes ashore as the Bunting family, the heroine's hosts, are
bathing from the end of their garden at Sandgate. For at Sandgate
people's gardens go right down to the beach. The mermaid is--beauty. And
the magic of beauty. She drives Chatteris into a madness of desire for
"other dreams," for a life beyond reason and possibility. The book ends
as lightly as it began--in a "supreme moment"--of moonshine.

The next book of mine in which unsolved sexual perplexities appear is _A
Modern Utopia_ (1905). Plato ruled over the making of that book, and in
it I followed him in disposing of the sexual distraction, by minimizing
the differences between men and women and ignoring the fact of personal
fixation altogether. That is and always has been the intellectual's way
out. My Samurai are of both sexes, a hardy bare-limbed race, free lovers
among themselves--and mutually obliging. Like the people of the original
Oneida community in New York State they constituted one comprehensive
"group marriage." Possibly among such people fixations would not be
serious; that is hypothetical psychology. I may have stressed the mutual
civility of the order. The book was popular among the young of our
universities; it launched many of them into cheerful adventures that
speedily brought them up against the facts of fixation, jealousy and
resentment. It played a considerable part in the general movement of
release from the rigid technical chastity of women during the Victorian
period.

So far as there can be any general theory of sexual conduct and law, the
_Modern Utopia_ remains my last word. Within that comprehensive freedom,
individuals, I believe, must work out their problems of fixation and
co-operation, monopolization, loyalty and charity, each for himself and
herself. For everyone and every couple there is a distinctive discord
and perhaps in most cases a solution. The key to the progressive thought
of our time is the frank realization of this immense variety in reaction
and the repudiation of the rigid universal solutions of the past. We do
not solve anything by this realization, but we liberate and
individualize the problem. It is an interesting paradox that Socialism
should involve extreme sexual individualism and Competitive
Individualism clip the individual into the rigid relationships of the
family.

_A Modern Utopia_ was leading up to _Ann Veronica_ (1909) in which the
youthful heroine was allowed a frankness of desire and sexual
enterprise, hitherto unknown in English popular fiction. That book
created a scandal at the time, though it seems mild enough reading to
the young of to-day. It is rather badly constructed, there is an
excessive use of soliloquy, but Ann Veronica came as near to being a
living character as anyone in my earlier love stories. This was so
because in some particulars she was drawn from life. And for that and
other reasons she made a great fuss in the world.

The particular offence was that Ann Veronica was a virgin who fell in
love and showed it, instead of waiting as all popular heroines had
hitherto done, for someone to make love to her. It was held to be an
unspeakable offence that an adolescent female should be sex-conscious
before the thing was forced upon her attention. But Ann Veronica wanted
a particular man who excited her and she pursued him and got him. With
gusto. It was only a slight reflection of anything that had actually
occurred, but there was something convincing about the behaviour of the
young woman in the story, something sufficiently convincing to impose
the illusion of reality upon her; and from the outset Ann Veronica was
assailed as though she was an actual living person.

It was a strenuous and long sustained fuss. The book was banned by
libraries and preached against by earnest clergymen. The spirit of
denunciation, latent in every human society, was aroused and let loose
against me. I have turned over my memories and records of that fuss and
I find it so abundant and formless an accumulation of pettiness that I
cannot put it together into a narrative. It is a jumble of slights,
injustices and hasty condemnations, plus a considerable amount of
exacerbated resentment and ineffective reprisal on my own part. I do not
make a good or dignified martyr. There was not only a "bad press" and a
great deal of public denunciation of me but there was an attempt, mainly
on the part of people who did not know me, to ostracize me socially. The
head and front of the public attack was Mr. St. Loe Strachey, the
proprietor of the _Spectator_. A reviewer in his columns rallied the
last resources of our noble language, made no bones about it, pulled
himself together as men must do when the fundamentals of life are at
stake, and said in so many words that Ann Veronica was a whore. It was
I think an illegitimate extension of the term.

He was a fine fellow, that reviewer. "The muddy world of Mr. Wells's
imaginings," said he, was "a community of scuffling stoats and ferrets,
unenlightened by a ray of duty and abnegation." That was rough on the
Samurai of my _Modern Utopia_. He writhed with "loathing and
indignation" and so on and so on, mounting and shouting, up to that last
great manly word.

That denotes the quality of the fuss and gives the clue to my
resentment. Strachey's hostility, if a little clumsy and heavy, was
perfectly honest, and before he died we met--as witnesses in defence of
a birth-control pamphlet--and became very good friends. I was indignant
and expostulatory at the time, but on the whole I really had very little
to complain of. The social attack did me no harm. It made no perceptible
difference in my life that we two were sent to Coventry by people we had
never met. The people who had met us did not send us to Coventry. Most
of my friends stood the proof very delightfully; people as various as G.
K. Chesterton, C. F. G. Masterman, Sydney Olivier and his family, Ray
Lankester, Shaw, Harry Cust, and Lady Mary Elcho, came out stoutly for
me and would have nothing to do with any social boycott. Altogether it
was no sort of martyrdom, as martyrdoms go nowadays, and its general
ineffectiveness amounted to a victory. My ostracism had its use as a
filter to save me from many dull and dreary people. And my ultimate
victory was no mere personal one. Mr. Fisher Unwin had bought the book
outright and did very well by it. It sold and went on selling in a
variety of editions. After _Ann Veronica_, things were never quite the
same again in the world of popular English fiction; young heroines with
a temperamental zest for illicit love-making and no sense of an
inevitable Nemesis, increased and multiplied not only in novels but in
real life.

But for a time the uproar about _Ann Veronica_ put me quite out of focus
with the public and the literary world. The fact that the great bulk of
my work displayed an exceptional want of reference to sex or
love-making, or the position of woman, was ignored; and if I had been a
D. H. Lawrence, with every fig leaf pinned aside, I could not have been
considered more improper than I was. This brought me a quite new type of
reader, and books like _Kipps_, _The War of the Worlds_, _The First Men
in the Moon_ and _The Wonderful Visit_ were bought by eager seekers
after obscenity--to their extreme disillusionment. They decided after a
baffled perusal that I was dreadfully overrated and superficial, and my
brief reputation in the cloacal recesses of the bookish world evaporated
speedily enough.

In 1911 this conflict was revived upon a broader basis, if with less
intensity, over my _New Machiavelli_. I would not drop the subject of
the passionate daughter, and there was, I admit, considerable defiance
of manner if not of matter, both in the _New Machiavelli_ and in
_Marriage_ which followed it. Quite manifestly I had refused to learn my
lesson and, this time, I was to be squashed for good. But this final
attack was delivered two years too late. Many people were beginning to
be ashamed of the violence of their reactions to _Ann Veronica_ and
others were plainly bored by the demands of my more persistent
antagonists for a fresh effort to erase me, and the result of this
second attempt to end Wells was on the whole distinction rather than
destruction. Instead of being made an outcast, finally and conclusively,
I was made a sort of champion.

The _New Machiavelli_ was first printed as a serial in Ford Madox
Hueffer's _English Review_ and persistent rumours that no publisher
would consent to issue it led to a considerable sale of the back numbers
of that periodical at enhanced prices--with the usual disappointment for
the purchasers. "What is all the fuss about?" the poor dears demanded.
"There is nothing in it!" There was indeed furtive work with the
publishers on the part of what are called influential people, but I
neither know nor care who were these influential people, and I do not
know what was said and done. The respectable firm of Macmillan was
already under contract to publish the book and could not legally or
honourably back out, but it presently appealed to me in a state of great
embarrassment, for permission to publish in this particular case under
the imprint of John Lane, who was less squeamish about his reputation
for decorum. I consented to that, and so the gentility of Macmillan, or
whatever else was threatened by those influential people, was preserved.

The _New Machiavelli_ is all the world away from overt eroticism. The
theme is simply a fresh variant upon the theme of _Love and Mr.
Lewisham_ and the _Sea Lady_; it stressed the harsh incompatibility of
wide public interests with the high, swift rush of imaginative
passion--with considerable sympathy for the passion. The Marcella-like
heroine of the _Sea Lady_ is repeated, but the mermaid has become a much
more credible young woman, and it is to exile in Italy and literary
effort, and not to moonshine and death, that the lovers go. There is
some good characterization in it, one or two well-written passages and
an amusing description of a fire at an actual dinner-party, given by
Cust, at which I was present. But it is nothing outstanding in the way
of a novel.

I was not indulging myself and the world in artistic pornography or
making an attack upon anything I considered moral. I found nothing for
self reproach in my private conduct, I did not know for some time that
the imaginations of the back benches of the Fabian Society and the
riff-raff of the literary world were adorning my unwitting and
undeserving head with a rakish halo. I did not realize how readily my
simple questionings could be interpreted as the half confessions of a
sort of Fabian Casanova, an inky Lovelace, the satyr-Cupid of Socialism.
I was asking a "Why not?" that had been accumulating in my mind all my
life, and the intensity of my questioning had no doubt been greatly
enhanced by the peculiar inhibitions of my first wife and the innocent
fragility of my second. I was releasing, in these books, a long
accumulation of suppression. So far as I can remember my phases,
however, the influence of my particular experiences was quite
subconscious at the time and I think I should have come to that
particular "Why not?" in some fashion--anyhow. I was asking my question
in perfect good faith and I went on asking it.

I was working out the collateral problems with an ingenuous
completeness, and I did not mean to relinquish that enquiry. I had come
to the conclusion that sex-life began with adolescence, which after all
was only discovering what "adolescence" means, and that when it
began--it ought to begin. I thought it preposterous that any young
people should be distressed by unexplained desires, thwarted by
arbitrary prohibitions and blunder into sexual experiences, blindfold.
The stories of Isabel and my wife and myself were plainly stories of an
excessive, artificial innocence. I contemned that "chastity" which is
mere abstinence and concealment more and more plainly. I believed and
said that a normal human being was not properly balanced, physically and
mentally, without an active sexual life; that this was as necessary and
almost as urgently necessary, as fresh air and free movement, and I have
never found any reason to change that opinion.

But a propaganda of more and franker and healthier love-making was not,
I found,--as Plato found before me--a simple proposition. It carried
with it certain qualifying conditions. Some of these, but not all of
them, I brought into the discussion. In a world where pressure upon the
means of subsistence was a normal condition of life, it was necessary to
compensate for the removal of traditional sexual restraints, and so my
advocacy of simple and easy love-making had to be supplemented by an
adhesion to the propaganda of the Neo-Malthusians. This I made in my
_Anticipations_ (1900) and I continued to write plainly on that subject
in a period when Neo-Malthusianism was by no means the respectable
movement it has since become.

In some of these earlier essays on sexual liberation, I seem now, to be
skirmishing about on the marginal conventions of the business and
failing to come to grips with its more intimate realities. I was
condemning a great system of suppressions and prohibitions as
unreasonable; but at first I did not face up steadily to the fact that
they were as natural as they were unreasonable. I was giving a fair
hearing to one set of instincts and not allowing another set to come
into court. I had not examined by what necessary processes the net of
restraints I was denouncing had been woven to entangle pleasure and
happiness. In spite of my own acute experience, I was ignoring that
gravitation towards fixation in love, with its intense possessiveness,
dominance, jealousy and hatred of irresponsible indulgence, which lies
at the heart of the problem. I had been suppressing it in myself and I
was ignoring it in my arguments.

Gradually as my disputes and controversies went on, my attention was
forced back, almost in spite of myself, towards these profounder
elements in the human make-up which stand in the way of a cheerful
healthy sexual go-as-you-please for mankind. I was obliged to look
jealousy in the face. All this tangle of restriction, restraint,
opposition and anger, could be explained as so much expansion,
complication and organization of jealousy. Jealousy may not be a
reasonable thing, but it lies at least as close to the springs of human
action as sexual desire. Jealousy was not merely a trouble between
competitive lovers. Parents, onlookers, society could be jealous.

I set myself to examine the credentials of jealousy. At some time I had
read Lang and Atkinson's _Human Origins_, probably under the influence
of Grant Allen, and the book illuminated me very greatly. I realized the
rle played by the primitive taboos in disciplining and canalizing the
dominant jealousy of the more powerful males so as to make possible the
development of tribal societies. I saw the history of expanding human
associations as essentially a successive subjugation of the patriarchal
group to wider collective needs, by jealousy-regulating arrangements.
Continually civilization had been developing, by buying off or
generalizing, socializing and legalizing jealousy and possessiveness, in
sex as in property. We were debarred from sexual ease, just as we were
debarred from economic ease, by this excessive fostering in our
institutions of the already sufficiently strong instinct of ownership.
The Family, I declared, was the inseparable correlative of private
proprietorship. It embodied jealousy in sexual life as private ownership
embodied jealousy in economic life. And to the very great dismay of the
strategists and tacticians of the Fabian Society, and to the immense
embarrassment of the Labour Party socialists, I began to blurt out these
ideas and attempt to sexualise socialism.

I should naturally like to present my mental process in this matter as
completely lucid, consistent and far-seeing from the beginning, and if
it were not for that family habit of filing letters and accumulating
records to which I have already alluded, I think I should have been able
to do that. Nobody now would remember my tergiversation if my files did
not. But it is clear that though my association with Labour Socialism
had very little effect upon my stories and romances, it did affect
various pamphlets, discussions and letters I wrote upon the subject.

Let me deal with the novels first. They do follow a fairly consistent
line. The topic of jealousy dominated _In the Days of the Comet_ (1906).
The swish of a comet's tail cools and cleanses the human atmosphere, and
jealousy, and with it war and poverty, vanish from the world. Jealousy
is also the dominant trouble in the _Passionate Friends_ (1913) and _The
Wife of Sir Isaac Harman_ (1914), while _Marriage_ (1912), once more
presents the old conflict between broad intentions and passionate
urgencies, that had furnished the motif of three earlier tales, _Love
and Mr. Lewisham_, _The New Machiavelli_ and the _Sea Lady_. In all
these novels the interest centres not upon individual character, but
upon the struggles of common and rational motives and frank enquiry
against social conditions and stereotyped ideas. The actors in them are
types, therefore, rather than acutely individualized persons. They could
not be other than types. For reasons that will become plainer as I
proceed, my output of this "discussion-fiction" between men and women
became relatively much less important after the outbreak of the war.
Christina Alberta in _Christina Alberta's Father_ (1925) is a much more
living figure than Ann Veronica and her morals are far easier; but times
had changed and not a voice was raised against her. That _Spectator_
reviewer, and much else, had died since 1909. That particular liberation
had been achieved.

Apart from these, only three of my stories can be put into the category
of sex-discussion,--_The Secret Places of the Heart_ (1922) in which I
was thinking not so much of the problem of jealousy, as of love-making
considered as a source of waste of energy, and, to a lesser degree and
interwoven with quite other ideas, _Meanwhile_ (1927) which betrays a
similar trend. I may be able to return later to the rather different
issue of these more recent books. They are raising the question whether
after all a woman can be a good citizen and if she can, in what way, a
problem also appearing _inter alia_ in _The World of William Clissold_
(1926). In the last "book" of the latter, there is also a sketch of a
feminine personality "Clementina" which stands by itself, an incidental
lark, because it is so manifestly objective and interrogative.

Turning from my novels to the various papers, pamphlets and letters I
was putting out through this same period, I discover a much less candid
display of view and attitude. I began well, but I found I was speedily
entangled and bemused by various political and propagandist issues. I
find a quite straightforward statement of my ideas in a paper I read to
the Fabian Society in October 1906, under the title of _Socialism and
the Middle Classes_. Therein I say plainly that I "no more regard the
institution of marriage as a permanent thing than I regard a state of
competitive industrialism as a permanent thing" and the whole paper
sustains this attitude. But subsequently I published this, bound-up with
a second article which had appeared in the _Independent Review_
(_Socialism and the Family_ 1906) and, in this last, the phrasing is, to
say the least of it, more discreet. I am advocating in both what is
plainly a correlative of the break-up of the family, the public
endowment of motherhood. But the question as to whether this endowment
is to be confined to women under some sort of marriage contract
recognized by the state, or extended to all mothers indiscriminately is
not distinctly stated. The issue was vague in my own mind; there were
questions of fatherly influence and of eugenics to consider, and I had
still to think them out. It is regrettable that those perplexities still
clouded my attitude; otherwise I find the record satisfactory up to this
point.

But then came an ingenious misstatement by Mr. Joynson-Hicks (as he was
then) while campaigning against Labour Socialism in the Altrincham
division (Lancashire), and a more or less deliberate misquotation by Mr.
J. H. Bottomley, a conservative election agent for the Newton division,
which lured me into an excess of repudiation. Joynson-Hicks had declared
that Socialists would part husband and wife, and subject every woman to
a sort of communal prostitution. Challenged to justify this statement,
which greatly shocked the rank and file of the Labour battalions, he
defended himself by an appeal to my works. "He was not in the habit of
making a statement without some kind of justification, and one had only
to read Mr. Wells' book, where it clearly stated that 'Wives no less
than goods, were to be held in common'; and 'Every infant would be taken
away from the mother and father and placed in a State nursery.' (_Daily
Dispatch._ Oct. 12th, 1906.)"

Mr. Bottomley had put it in this way, in a pamphlet for local
circulation: "Essentially the Socialist position is a denial of property
in human beings; not only must land and the means of production be
liberated, but women and children, just as men and things must cease to
be owned. _So in future it will be not my wife or your wife, but our
wife._" The words in italics were his own addition but, somehow, they
got inside the quotation marks.

Two quotations, one from _The Times Literary Supplement_, in a review of
_In the Days of the Comet_, and one from the _Spectator_ for October
19th, 1907, in an article on _Socialism and Sex Relations_, also got
into the dispute. _The Times Literary Supplement_ said: "Socialistic
men's wives, we gather, are, no less than their goods, to be held in
common. Free love, according to Mr. Wells, is to be of the essence of
the new social contract." And the words of the _Spectator_ were as
follows: "For example we find Mr. Wells in his novel, _In the Days of
the Comet_, making Free Love the dominant principle for the regulation
of sexual ties in his regenerated State. The romantic difficulty as to
which of the two lovers of the heroine is to be the happy man is solved
by their both being accepted. Polyandry is 'the way out' in this case,
as polygamy might be in another."

Now the proper reply to this sort of attack was to stick to the phrase
Free Love, insist that this did not mean indiscriminate love, point out
that the words supposed to be quoted had not been used, and explain with
patience and lucidity, that personal sexual freedom and collective
responsibility for the family, did not mean "having wives in common" or
taking children away from their parents or practising polyandry or
polygamy or anything of that sort. But instead of explaining, I
spluttered into exaggerated indignation at the dishonesty of those
misplaced inverted commas of Mr. Bottomley's, I repudiated "Free Love,"
which was obviously wrong of me, simply because, like the word atheist,
the phrase had acquired an unpopular flavour, and unsaid, more or less
distinctly, much that I had been saying during the previous half a dozen
years. I was entangling myself with politics, and I found my socialistic
associates were embarrassed by my speculations. I did not want them to
reproach me. In _New Worlds for Old_ (1908) first published as a serial
in the _Grand Magazine_ in 1907, I went still further along the line of
self-repudiation, and I read with contrition to-day, this dreadful
passage of quite Fabian understatement:

"Socialism has not even worked out what are the reasonable conditions of
a State marriage contract, and it would be ridiculous to pretend it had.
This is not a defect in Socialism particularly, but a defect in human
knowledge. At countless points in the tangle of questions involved, the
facts are not clearly known. Socialism offers no theory whatever as to
the duration of marriage, as to whether, as among the Roman Catholics,
it should be absolutely for life, or, as some hold, for ever; or, as
among the various divorce-permitting Protestant bodies, until this or
that eventuality; or even, as Mr. George Meredith suggested some years
ago, for a term of ten years. In these matters Socialism does not
decide, and it is quite reasonable to argue that Socialism need not
decide. Socialism maintains an attitude of neutrality."

This is a false attitude. Socialism, if it is anything more than a petty
tinkering with economic relationships is a renucleation of society. The
family can remain only as a biological fact. Its economic and
educational autonomy are inevitably doomed. The modern state is bound to
be the ultimate guardian of all children and it must assist, replace, or
subordinate the parent as supporter, guardian and educator; it must
release all human beings from the obligation of mutual proprietorship,
and it must refuse absolutely to recognize or enforce any kind of sexual
ownership. It cannot therefore remain neutral when such claims come
before it. It must disallow them. But in these incriminatory documents I
find myself being as vague, tactful and reassuring about sentimental
interpretations--as if I had set out in life to become a Nationalist
Prime Minister.

These skirmishes with politicians and pamphleteers occurred in 1906-7
and 8 and I touched my nadir of compromise and understatement in that
last year. Later on, when I tell of my relations to accepted religious
forms and beliefs I shall have to deal again with this politic,
conciliatory strain in me. It can be excused. It can be explained as the
deference of modesty and as a civilized inclination to conformity; it
has its amiable aspects. But whatever may be possible in larger brains,
mine is not clever and subtle enough to be disingenuous to that extent;
my proper rle is to say things plainly and still more plainly, to be
aggressive and derisive and let persuasion go hang. It is better to
offend rather than mislead. When I am diplomatic I am lost. It was
really an extraordinarily good thing for me that circumstances conspired
with my innate impulse, when I am at the writing desk, to let statement
and story rip, to put me quite openly where I was, with the _Ann
Veronica_ shindy in 1909 and the subsequent campaign, in 1910 and 1911,
against the _New Machiavelli_. After that it was plain where I stood,
and that in spite of our pretty, orderly home and the general decorum of
our industrious lives, Jane and I were not to be too hastily accepted as
a nice, deserving young couple respectfully climbing the pleasant
stairway of English life from quite modest beginnings, to social
recognition, prosperity, and even perhaps "honours."

It was not only that the Fabian and Labour politician found my
persistent development of "Why not?" in regard to the family and
marriage, inconvenient, but also that I was at cross purposes upon the
same score with the feminist movement in the new century. My realization
of how far away I was to the left of the official left movements of my
time had something to do, I think, with these lapses towards compromise
I am now deploring.

The old feminist movement of the early nineteenth century had undergone
a sort of rejuvenation in the eighties and nineties. It had given up
its bloomers and become smart, energetic and ambitious. There was a
growing demand on the part of women for economic and political
independence, and at first it seemed to me that here at last advancing
upon me was that great-hearted free companionship of noble women of
which I had dreamed from my earliest years.

As the hosts of liberation came nearer and could be inspected more
accurately I found reason to qualify these bright expectations. If women
wanted to be free, the first thing was surely for them to have complete
control of their persons, and how could that happen unless Free Love and
Neo-Malthusianism replaced directed and obligatory love and involuntary
child-bearing, in the forefront of their programme. Their inferiority
was a necessary aspect of the proprietary, patriarchal family, and there
was no way of equalizing the economic disadvantage imposed upon them by
the bearing and care of children, short of the public endowment of
motherhood. These things and not any petty political enfranchisement, I
reasoned, must surely constitute the real Magna Charta of Women, and I
set myself to explain this with the same tactless simplicity and
lucidity that had already caused such inconvenience to the politicians
of the Labour Party.

But the leaders of the feminist revival were no more willing than were
the socialists to realize where they were going. They were alive to the
wrongs that set them moving but not to the ends towards which their
movement would take them. Confronted by the plain statement of the Free
Citizen Woman as opposed to the Domesticated Woman their hearts failed
them. It became increasingly evident that a large part of the woman's
suffrage movement was animated less by the desire for freedom and
fullness of life, than by a passionate jealousy and hatred of the
relative liberties of men. For one woman in the resuscitated movement
who wanted to live generously and nobly, a score were desirous merely of
making things uncomfortable for the insolent, embarrassing, oblivious
male. They did not want more life; their main impulse was vindictive.

They wanted to remain generally where they were and what they were, but
to have it conceded that they were infinitely brighter and better and
finer than men, that potentially they were finer poets, musicians,
artists, social organizers, scientific investigators and philosophers
than men could ever be, that a man owed everything to his mother and
nothing to his father and so forth and so on; that women therefore ought
to be given unlimited control over the goods and actions of their lawful
partners, be empowered to impose upon these gross creatures complete
chastity, or otherwise, as the fancy might take them, and, instead of
establishing a free and liberal equality, entirely reverse the
ascendency of the sexes. This was a very wholesome tu quoque for ages of
arrogant masculine bad manners, but it was not practical politics and it
did not penetrate to the more fundamental realities of the sexual
stress.

That feminism had anything to do with sexual health and happiness, was
repudiated by these ladies with flushed indignation so soon as the
suggestion was made plain to them. Their modesty was as great as their
boldness. Sex--what was sex? Get thee behind me Satan! They were not
thinking of it. They were good pure women rightly struggling for a Vote,
and that was all they wanted. The Vote was to be their instrument of
dominance. They concentrated all the energy of their growing movement
upon that claim. The new Feminist Movement had no more use for me
therefore than the Labour Socialists. To both these organizations I was
an _enfant terrible_ and not to be talked about.

It is no part of the plan of this book to tell the tale of that nagging,
ignoble campaign which ended abruptly with the Declaration of War in
1914, to detail once again the window-smashing, the burning of country
houses, churches and the contents of letter boxes, the squawking at
meetings, "votes for women" until the discussion of public affairs
became impossible, the consequent expulsion of the struggling heroines
with all kinds of ignoble and indelicate reprisals, the ensuing
discovery by indignant young women of good family, of the unexpected
dirtiness and nastiness of police cells and prisons--one good by-product
anyhow--and all the rest of it. In _The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman_ (1914)
I tried to explain to myself and my readers the suppressions and
resentments that might lead a gentle woman to smash a plate-glass
window. I studied my model carefully and I think the figure lives, but
no suffragette saw herself in my mirror. Nor will I relate here how as
Europe collapsed into war, the Vote was flung to women simply to keep
them quiet, and how the only traceable consequence has been the further
enfeeblement of the waning powers of Democracy.

In those gentler days before the return towards primitive violence
began, it was possible for girls and women to pester mankind and presume
upon the large protective tolerance of civilization. Since then, the
progressive disintegration of social order, the increasing amount of
gangsterism and terrorism in political life, has made the atmosphere too
grim and heavy for the definite organization of women as such, for
social and political aggression. Their understanding of the
disintegrative forces at work seems to be a feeble one, and in the
conscious constructive effort of to-day they count as a sex for
remarkably little. There has been no perceptible woman's movement to
resist the practical obliteration of their freedoms by Fascists or
Nazis. The sex war has died away and in England only the gentle sarcasms
and grumblings of Lady Rhondda and her group of clever ladies in _Time
and Tide_ remain to remind us of it. Over most of the world it has died
down altogether.

I can look back now with sympathetic amusement upon the encounter of my
former self, that rising and decidedly over-confident young writer of
half my age with this new and transitory being: the Militant
Suffragette. What a surprise and perplexity she was! The young man's
disposition to lump all the feminity in the world, in its infinite
variety, into a class, to indict it and judge it as a class, after
having felt a strong disposition to adore it--as a class, was perfectly
natural, superficially reasonable and fundamentally absurd. Still
heavily under the sway of organic illusion he prepared to welcome these
goddesses, at last in splendid revolt, and to do his utmost for them,
and, instead of goddesses escaping, he encountered a fluttering swarm of
disillusioned and wildly exasperated human beings, all a little
frightened at what they were doing, and with no clearer conception than
any other angry crowd of what had set them going and what was to be done
about it. Helpfully and with the brightest hopes he produced his
carefully reasoned diagnosis of their grievances; he spread his
ingenious arrangement of Neo-Malthusianism, Free Love ("ton corps est 
toi"), economic independence, the endowment of motherhood and the
systematic suppression of jealousy as an animal vice, and he found his
lucid and complete statement thrust aside, while the riot passed on,
after the manner of riots, vehemently loudly and vacuously, to a purely
symbolic end--the Vote in this case--and essential frustration and
dispersal.

Slowly as the blaze of antagonism created by the open sex-war of 1900-14
has died down, men and women under an inexorable need for each other and
an imperative necessity for co-operation, have returned again to the
commanding and infinitely varied problems of mutual adjustment, to the
million and one perennial problems of man and woman. I do not know how
far the main attack and the capture of the actual Vote was of value to
humanity but I have no doubt of the service done by that slower and
wider campaign of "Why not?" in which I played my little part. A
tiresome and obstructive accumulation of obsolete restraints,
conventions and pretences, was cleared out of the way for a new
generation. That did not put an end to the facile self-deceptions of sex
because these are of the very stuff of life, nor could it abolish the
see-saw between the chronic mutual need and the chronic resistance to
entanglement, but it did clear the way for an individual management of
the glamour and its ensuing centrifugal strain. It put the glamour in
its place and made the fugitive impulse controllable and tolerable. When
goddesses and Sea Ladies vanish and a flash back to the ancestral
chimpanzee abolishes the magic caverns of Venus, human beings arrive.
Instead of a rigid system of obligations and restrictions which would
solve, for everyone, the Woman Problem, in one simple universal fashion,
we are left with an almost infinite series of variations of the problem
of association between men and women, and an infinitude of opportunities
for mutual charity.


 5

_Digression about Novels_

I find before me a considerable accumulation of material first assembled
together in a folder labelled "Whether I am a Novelist." It has been
extremely difficult to digest this material into a presentable form. It
refuses to be simplified. It is like a mental shunting yard in which
several trains of thought have come into collision and I feel now that
the utmost I can do with it is not so much to set these trains going
again as to salvage some few fragmentary observations from the wreckage.

One of these trains comes in from the previous section. It is an
insistence upon the importance of individuality and individual
adjustment in life; "Problems of association between men and women and
an infinitude of opportunities for mutual charity." That carries on very
obviously towards the idea of the novel as an expanding discussion of
"How did they treat each other? How might they have treated each other?
How should they treat each other?" I set out to write novels, as
distinguished from those pseudo-scientific stories in which imaginative
experience rather than personal conduct was the matter in hand, on the
assumption that problems of adjustment were the essential matter for
novel-writing. _Love and Mr. Lewisham_ was entirely a story about a
dislocation and an adjustment.

But across the track of that train of thought came another in which the
novel presented itself not as an ethical enquiry but as the rendering of
a system of impressions. In this distended and irregularly interesting
folder, which I find so hard to reduce to straightforward explicitness,
I find myself worrying round various talks and discussions I had with
Henry James a third of a century ago. He was a very important figure in
the literary world of that time and a shrewd and penetrating critic of
the technique by which he lived. He liked me and he found my work
respectable enough to be greatly distressed about it. I bothered him and
he bothered me. We were at cross purposes based as I shall show later
on very fundamental differences, not only of temperament but training.
He had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct.
His mind had turned away from any such idea. From his point of view
there were not so much "novels" as The Novel, and it was a very high and
important achievement. He thought of it as an Art Form and of novelists
as artists of a very special and exalted type. He was concerned about
their greatness and repute. He saw us all as Masters or would-be
Masters, little Masters and great Masters, and he was plainly sorry that
"Cher Matre" was not an English expression. One could not be in a room
with him for ten minutes without realizing the importance he attached to
the dignity of this art of his. I was by nature and education
unsympathetic with this mental disposition. But I was disposed to regard
a novel as about as much an art form as a market place or a boulevard.
It had not even necessarily to get anywhere. You went by it on your
various occasions.

That was entirely out of key with James's assumptions. I recall a talk I
had with him soon after the publication of _Marriage_. With tact and
circumlocution, James broke it to me, that he found a remarkable
deficiency in that story. It was a deficiency that he had also observed
in a vast proportion of contemporary fiction, it had exercised him very
fruitfully, and his illuminating comments spread out from that starting
point to a far-reaching tentacular discussion of what a novel should do
and be.

The point he was stressing was this: _Marriage_ is the story of a young
man of science, Trafford, who, apparently without much previous
experience, pilots a friend's aeroplane (in 1912!) and crashes, he and
the friend together, into a croquet party and the Pope family and the
life of Marjorie Pope. Thereupon there is bandaging, ambulance work and
much coming and going and Marjorie, who is already engaged to a Mr.
Magnet, falls deeply in love with Trafford. She drives to the village in
a donkey cart to do some shopping and meets the lamed Trafford, also
driving a donkey cart and their wheels interlock and they fall talking.
All that--except for the writing of it--was tolerable according to
James. But then, in order to avoid the traffic in the high road the two
young people take their respective donkey carts into a side lane and
remain there talking for three hours. And this is where James's
objection came in. Of the three hours of intercourse in the lane the
novel tells nothing, except that the young people emerged in open and
declared love with each other. This, said James, wasn't playing the
game. I had cut out an essential, after a feast of irrelevant
particulars. Gently but firmly he insisted that I did not myself know
what had happened and what was said in that lane; that there was even a
touch of improbability about their staying there so long and that this
lack of information and probability at a crucial point was due to the
fact that I had not thought out the individualities concerned with
sufficient care and thoroughness. I had not cared enough about these
individualities. Moreover in the conversations between the two
principals, the man in particular supplied information about himself and
his position in life in such a way as to talk at the reader instead of
to the girl. The talk was in fact more for the benefit of the former.
Trafford had to supply this information because I had been too inept or
hasty to convey it in any other way. Or because there was too much to
convey in any other way. Henry James was quite right in saying that I
had not thought out these two people to the pitch of saturation and that
they did not behave unconsciously and naturally. But my defence is that
that did not matter, or at least that for the purposes of the book it
did not matter very much.

Now I do not exactly remember the several other points he made in that
elaborate critical excursion, nor did I attempt any reprisals upon his
own work, but his gist was plain. If the Novel was properly a
presentation of real people as real people, in absolutely natural
reaction in a story, then my characters were not simply sketchy, they
were eked out by wires and pads of non-living matter and they stood
condemned. His discourse, which had evidently been maturing against my
visit, covered not only my work but that of several of my contemporaries
whom he had also read with interest and distaste. And the only point
upon which I might have argued but which I did not then argue, was this,
that the Novel was not necessarily, as he assumed, this real through
and through and absolutely true treatment of people more living than
life. It might be more and less than that and still be a novel.

To illustrate with what lovely complication of veracity and
disingenuousness, with what curious intricate suavity of intimation he
could develop his point I will quote from a letter of his, also bearing
upon the same book _Marriage_. His intricate mind, as persistent and
edentate as a pseudopodium, was still worrying round and about the
question raised by that story. "I have read you," he says, "as I always
read you, and as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all
those 'principles of criticism,' canons of form, preconceptions of
felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of
composition, with which I roam, with which I totter, through the pages
of others attended in some dim degree by the fond yet feeble theory of,
but which I shake off, as I advance under your spell, with the most
cynical inconsistency. For under your spell I do advance--save when I
pull myself up stock still in order not to break it even with so much as
the breath of appreciation; I live with you and in you and (almost
cannibal-like) _on_ you, on you H. G. W., to the sacrifice of your
Marjories and your Traffords, and whoever may be of their company; not
your treatment of them, at all, but, much more, their be-fooling of you
(pass me the merely scientific expression--I mean your fine high action
in view of the red herring of lively interest they trail for you at
their heels) becoming thus of the essence of the spectacle for me, and
nothing in it all 'happening' so much as these attestations of your
character and behaviour, these reactions of yours as you more or less
follow them, affect me as vividly happening. I see you 'behave' all
along much more than I see them even when they behave, (as I'm not sure
they behave _most_ in _Marriage_) with whatever charged intensity or
accomplished effect; so that the ground of the drama is somehow most of
all in the adventure for _you_--not to say _of_ you, the moral,
temperamental, personal, expressional, of your setting it forth; an
adventure in fine more appreciable to me than any of those you are by
way of letting _them_ in for. I don't say that those you let them in for
don't interest me too, and don't 'come off' and people the scene and
lead on the attention, about as much as I can do with; but only, and
always, that you beat them on their own ground and that your 'story,'
through the five hundred pages, says more to me than theirs. You'll find
this perhaps a queer rigmarole of a statement; but I ask of you to allow
for it just now as the mumble, at best, of an invalid; and wait a little
till I can put more of my hand on my sense. Mind you that the
restriction I may seem to you to lay on my view of your work, still
leaves that work more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood
than any it is given me nowadays to meet. The point I have wanted to
make is that I find myself absolutely unable, and still more unwilling,
to approach you, or to take leave of you, in any projected light of
criticism, in any judging or concluding, any comparing, in fact in any
aesthetic or 'literary' relation at all...."

Tried by Henry James's standards I doubt if any of my novels can be
taken in any other fashion. There are flashes and veins of character
duly "treated" and living individuals in many of them, but none that
satisfy his requirements fully. A lot of _Kipps_ may pass, some of _Tono
Bungay_, _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ and _Joan and Peter_ and let me
add, I have a weakness for Lady Harman and for Theodore Bulpington
and---- But I will not run on. These are pleas in extenuation. The main
indictment is sound, that I sketch out scenes and individuals, often
quite crudely, and resort even to conventional types and symbols, in
order to get on to a discussion of relationships. The important point
which I tried to argue with Henry James was that the novel of completely
consistent characterization arranged beautifully in a story and painted
deep and round and solid, no more exhausts the possibilities of the
novel, than the art of Velasquez exhausts the possibilities of the
painted picture.

The issue exercised my mind considerably. I had a queer feeling that we
were both incompatibly right. I wrote one or two lectures and critical
papers on the scope of the novel, and I argued with myself and others,
that realism and exhaustive presentation were not its only objectives. I
think I might have gone further and maintained that they were not even
its proper objectives but at best only graces by the way, but at the
time I was not clear enough to say that. I might have made a good case
by asserting that fiction was necessarily fictitious through and
through, and that the real analogy to Velasquez who painted straight
from dwarfs and kings, would be biography, character drawn straight from
life and not an invented story. James was very much against the idea
that there was a biographical element in any good novel, and he and his
brother William were very severe upon Vernon Lee when she produced a
character in a short story (_Lady Tal_ 1892) markedly like Henry. But it
is beyond the power of man to "create" individuals absolutely. If we do
not write from models then we compile and fabricate. Every "living"
character in a novel is drawn, frankly or furtively, from life--is
filched from biography whole or in scraps, a portrait or a patch-up, and
its actions are a reflection upon moral conduct. At whatever number of
"removes" from facts we may be, we are still imputing motives to
somebody. That is the conclusion I am coming to now, but I did not have
it ready at that time. I allowed it to be taken for granted that there
was such a thing as The Novel, a great and stately addendum to reality,
a sort of super-reality with "created" persons in it, and by implication
I admitted that my so-called novels were artless self-revelatory stuff,
falling far away from a stately ideal by which they had to be judged.

But now I ask when and where has that great ideal been realized--or can
it ever be realized?

Competent critics have since examined this supreme importance of
individualities, in other words of "character" in the fiction of the
nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Throughout that period
character-interest did its best to take the place of adjustment-interest
in fiction. With a certain justice these authorities ascribe the
predominance of individuation to the example of Sir Walter Scott. But
more generally it was a consequence of the prevalent sense of social
stability, and he was not so much a primary influence as an exponent. He
was a man of intensely conservative quality; he accepted, he accepted
wilfully, the established social values about him; he had hardly a doubt
in him of what was right or wrong, handsome or ungracious, just or
mean. He saw events therefore as a play of individualities in a rigid
frame of values never more to be questioned or permanently changed. His
lawless, romantic past was the picturesque prelude to stability; our
current values were already potentially there. Throughout the broad
smooth flow of nineteenth century life in Great Britain, the art of
fiction floated on this same assumption of social fixity. The Novel in
English was produced in an atmosphere of security for the entertainment
of secure people who liked to feel established and safe for good. Its
standards were established within that apparently permanent frame and
the criticism of it began to be irritated and perplexed when, through a
new instability, the splintering frame began to get into the picture.

I suppose for a time I was the outstanding instance among writers of
fiction in English of the frame getting into the picture.

I did not see this clearly in those opening years of this century, but
in 1912 I made a sort of pronouncement against the "character" obsession
and the refusal to discuss values, in a paper on _The Contemporary
Novel_ delivered to The Times Book Club, in which I argued for an
enlarging scope for the novel. My attack upon the creation-of-character
idea was oblique and subconscious rather than direct. "We (novelists)
are going to deal with political questions and religious questions and
social questions. We cannot present people unless we have this free
hand, this unrestricted field. What is the good of telling stories about
people's lives if one may not deal freely with the religious beliefs and
organizations that have controlled or failed to control them? What is
the good of pretending to write about love, and the loyalties and
treacheries and quarrels of men and women, if one must not glance at
those varieties of physical temperament and organic quality, those
deeply passionate needs and distresses, from which half the storms of
human life are brewed? We mean to deal with all these things, and it
will need very much more than the disapproval of provincial librarians,
the hostility of a few influential people in London, the scurrility of
one paper," (one for St. Loe Strachey and that bold bad word) "and the
deep and obstinate silences of another, to stop the incoming tide of
aggressive novel-writing. We are going to write about it all. We are
going to write about business and finance and politics and precedence
and pretentiousness and decorum and indecorum, until a thousand
pretences and ten thousand impostures shrivel in the cold, clear draught
of our elucidations. We are going to write of wasted opportunities and
latent beauties until a thousand new ways of living open to men and
women. We are going to appeal to the young and the hopeful and the
curious, against the established, the dignified, and defensive. Before
we have done, we will have all life within the scope of the novel."

These are brave trumpetings. In effect in my hands the Novel proved like
a blanket too small for the bed and when I tried to pull it over to
cover my tossing conflict of ideas, I found I had to abandon questions
of individuation. I never got "all life within the scope of the novel."
(What a phrase! Who could?)

In the criticism of that time there was a certain confusion between this
new spreading out of the interest of the novel to issues of custom and
political and social change, and the entirely more limited "Novel with a
Purpose" of the earlier nineteenth century. This examined no essential
ideas; its values were established values, it merely assailed some
particular evil, exposed some little-known abuse. It kept well within
the frame. The majority of the Dickens novels were novels with a
purpose, but they never deal with any inner confusion, any conflicts of
opinion within the individual characters, any subjective essential
change. A much closer approximation to the spread-out novel I was
advocating is the propaganda novel. But I have always resented having my
novels called propaganda novels, because it seems to me the word
propaganda should be confined to the definite service of some organized
party, church or doctrine. It implies direction from outside. If at
times I have been inclined to thrust views upon my readers, they were at
any rate my own views and put forward without any strategic aim.

To return to this novel _Marriage_, the story tells how masculine
intellectual interest met feminine spending and what ensued. Trafford is
not so much a solid man as a scientific intelligence caught in the
meshes of love, and Marjorie Pope's zest in buying and arrangement is
emphasized to the exclusion of any minor tricks and turns. But the
argument of the book would not have stood out, if there had been any
such tricks and turns. Marjorie's father is an intrusion of character
drawing who really had no business in the book at all. Mr. Magnet also
is a slightly malicious irrelevance; the humourless speech he makes in
London on humour is, for example, transcribed verbatim from a reported
speech by a distinguished contemporary.

Indisputably the writing is scamped in places. It could have been just
as light and much better done. But that would have taken more time than
I could afford. I do not mean by that I could have earned less money and
been a more conscientious writer, though that consideration very
probably came in, but I mean that I had very many things to say and that
if I could say one of them in such a way as to get my point over to the
reader I did not worry much about finish. The fastidious critic might
object, but the general reader to whom I addressed myself cared no more
for finish and fundamental veracity about the secondary things of
behaviour than I. I did not want to sweep under the mat for crumbs of
characterization, nor did he want me to do so. What we wanted was a
ventilation of the point at issue.

It required some years and a number of such experiments and essays in
statement as the one I have quoted, before I got it really clear in my
own mind that I was feeling my way towards something outside any
established formula for the novel altogether. In the established novel,
objective through and through, the characteristic exterior reactions of
the character were everything and the conflicts and changes of ideas
within his brain were ignored. (That according to the jargon of the time
would have been to "introduce controversial matter.") But I was becoming
more and more interested in the interior conflict, this controversial
matter stewing and fermenting in all our brains, and its ventilation in
action. There is no satisfactory device I knew for exhibiting a train of
reasoning in a character unless a set of ideas similar to those upon
which the character thinks exists already in the reader's mind.
Galsworthy's Soames Forsyte _thinks_ for pages, but he thinks along
recognized British lines. He does not grapple with ideas new and
difficult both for the reader and himself. I could not see how, if we
were to grapple with new ideas, a sort of argument with the reader, an
explanation of the theory that is being exhibited, could be avoided. I
began therefore to make my characters indulge in impossibly explicit
monologues and duologues. As early as 1902, Chatteris in the _Sea Lady_
talks a good deal more than is natural. Ann Veronica soliloquises
continually. In _Marriage_ (1912), Trafford and Marjorie go off to
Labrador for a good honest six months' talk about their mutual reactions
and argue at the reader all the time. Mr. Brumley in _The Wife of Sir
Isaac Harman_ (1914) exercises a garrulous pressure upon the flow of the
story throughout. _The Research Magnificent_ (1915) is largely talk and
monologue. I try in that book the device of making the ostensible writer
speculate about the chief character in the story he is telling. The
ostensible writer becomes a sort of enveloping character, himself in
discussion with the reader. Still more expository is the _Soul of a
Bishop_ (1917).

Incidentally I may complain that _The Research Magnificent_ is a book
deserving to be remembered and yet seems to be largely forgotten. I
liked it when I re-read it and I find it remarkably up to date with my
present opinions. It was blotted out by the war. But Amanda is alive and
Benham has his moments of vitality.

By 1919, in _The Undying Fire_, I was at last fully aware of what I was
doing and I took a new line. I realized I had been trying to revive the
Dialogue in a narrative form. I was not so much expanding the novel as
getting right out of it. _The Undying Fire_ is that great Hebrew
imitation of the Platonic Dialogue, the Book of Job, frankly modernized.
The arrangement of the ancient book is followed very closely; the
speakers even to their names are recognizably the same. The man of Uz is
Mr. Job Huss; Eliphaz the Temanite becomes Sir Eliphaz Burrows,
manufacturer of a new building material called Temanite; Bildad is Mr.
William Dad and Elihu becomes Dr. Elihu Barrack. They parallel their
ancient arguments; even their speeches in their order correspond closely
with the pattern of the ancient book. In many ways I think _The Undying
Fire_ one of the best pieces of work I ever did. I set great store by it
still.

But after all these protests of the excellence and intelligence of my
intentions, I have to admit that the larger part of my fiction was
written lightly and with a certain haste. Only one or two of my novels
deal primarily with personality, and then rather in the spirit of what
David Low calls the caricature-portrait, than for the purpose of such
exhaustive rendering as Henry James had in mind. Such
caricature-individualities are Hoopdriver in _The Wheels of Chance_
(1896), _Kipps_ (1905) and Mr. Polly in _The History of Mr. Polly_
(1910). My uncle and aunt in _Tono Bungay_ (1909), one or two minor
characters in _The Dream_ (1924), _Christina Alberta's Father_ (1925)
and _The Bulpington of Blup_ (1932), are also caricature-individualities
of which I am not ashamed. Theodore Bulpington is as good as Kipps.
Please. But I doubt if any of these persons have that sort of vitality
which endures into new social phases. In the course of a few decades
they may become incomprehensible; the snobbery of Kipps for example or
the bookish illiteracy of Mr. Polly may be altogether inexplicable. _The
Dream_ is an attempt to show how our lives to-day may look to our
happier descendants. It is in the same class as _In the Days of the
Comet_.

My experimentation with what I may call the Dialogue Novel, was only one
of the directions in which I have wandered away from the uncongenial
limitations of the novel proper. The plain fact is that I have never
been willing to respect these limitations or to accept the Novel as an
art form. _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ is a circumstantial story, but
it ends in Dialogue and Monologue. _Joan and Peter_ (1918) again starts
respectably in large novel form and becomes dialogue only towards the
end. It is as shamelessly unfinished as a Gothic cathedral. It was to
have been a great novel about Education but it grew so large that
Peter's public-school experiences, among other things, had to be left
out. He just jumps from the preparatory school to the War and the flying
corps. The missing public-school stage is to be found in _The Story of a
Great School-master_. Joan I like as a character; A. A. Milne has said
nice things about her, but nobody else has had a good word for her--or
indeed a bad one. _The Dream_ (1924) has some good minor characters, but
it is plainly a social criticism from a new angle, rather than a novel
proper. A young man of the great world of the future on a holiday walk
in the mountains, injures his hand, falls into a fever and dreams
"through a whole life" of our present world. _The World of William
Clissold_ (1926) again is quite unorthodox in shape and approach. It is
an attempt to present a thesis upon contemporary life and social
development, in the form of a fictitious autobiography. A young chemist,
like Trafford in _Marriage_, gives up pure research for industrial
organization, grows rich, finds his successful life boring and retires
to a house in Provence to think things out and find a better use for
himself. He writes the one book that every man has it in him to write.
The main strand of the earlier novels reappears in this, the perplexity
of the man with general ideas and a strong constructive impulse when he
finds that the women he meets do not enter into this stream of motive,
but, except for the odd concluding "book," this obsession of so much of
my fiction sits lightly here because of the predominance of economic and
political questioning. I shall return to _The World of William Clissold_
when I deal with my political ideas and later on I may be free to
discuss its autobiographical significance. It anticipated a more serious
attempt at social analysis, _The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_
(1931), _The Open Conspiracy_ (1928) and _The Shape of Things to Come_
(1933).

_The Autocracy of Mr. Parham_ (1930) is a rather boisterous caricature
not of the personality but of the imaginations of a modern British
imperialist of the university type. It might have been dedicated to Mr.
L. S. Amery. It amuses me still, but few people share my liking. Reality
has outdone fiction since and Mosley fooling it in the Albert Hall with
his black shirts (1934) makes Parham's great dream-meeting there seem
preposterously sane and sound. _Men Like Gods_ frankly caricatures some
prominent contemporaries. Another breach of established literary
standards with which, in spite of its very tepid reception, I am mainly
content, was _Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_ (1928). I laughed
when writing both it and _Men Like Gods_ and _The Autocracy of Mr.
Parham_. The gist of Rampole Island is a caricature-portrait of the
whole human world. I wish I could hear at times of people still reading
these three stories. They got, I think, a dull press.

Exhaustive character study is an adult occupation, a philosophical
occupation. So much of my life has been a prolonged and enlarged
adolescence, an encounter with the world in general, that the
observation of character began to play a leading part in it only in my
later years. It was necessary for me to reconstruct the frame in which
individual lives as a whole had to be lived, before I could concentrate
upon any of the individual problems of fitting them into this frame. I
am taking more interest now in individuality than ever I did before. As
mankind settles down into the security of that modern world-state with
which contemporary life is in labour, as men's minds escape more and
more from the harsh urgencies and feelings of a primary struggle, as the
conception of the modern world-state becomes the common basis of their
education and the frame of their conduct, the discussion of primary
issues will abate and the analysis of individual difference again become
a dominating interest. But then surely people will be less round-about
in their approach to expression and the subterfuge of fiction will not
be so imperative as it is to-day.

Our restraints upon the written discussion of living people are
antiquated. Why should David Low say practically what he likes about
actual people with his pencil, while I must declare every character in a
novel is fictitious? So I am disposed to question whether the Novel will
have any great importance in the intellectual life of the future because
I believe we are moving towards a greater freedom of truthful comment
upon individuals; if it survives I think it will become more frankly
caricature-comment upon personalities and social phases than it is at
present, but it seems equally probable to me that it will dwindle and
die altogether and be replaced by more searching and outspoken biography
and autobiography. Stories, parables, parodies of fact will still be
told, but that is a different matter. The race of silly young men who
announce that they are going to write The Novel may follow the race of
silly young men who used to proclaim their intention of writing The
Epic, to limbo. In my time The Novel, as projected, was usually a
"Trilogy." Perhaps in 1965 the foolish young men will all be trailing in
the wake of Lytton Strachey and Philip Guedalla and announcing colossal
biography-sequences. They will produce vast mosaics of pseudo-reality,
galleries of portraits, presenting contemporary history in a state of
exaltation.

Who would read a novel if we were permitted to write biography--all out?
Here in this autobiography I am experimenting--though still very mildly,
with biographical and auto-biographical matter. Although it has many
restraints, which are from the artistic point of view vexatious, I still
find it so much more real and interesting and satisfying that I doubt if
I shall ever again turn back towards The Novel. I may write a story or
so more--a dialogue, an adventure or an anecdote. But I shall never come
as near to a deliberate attempt upon The Novel again as I did in _Tono
Bungay_ (1909).

Next to _Tono Bungay_, _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ and _Joan and
Peter_ come as near to being full-dress novels as anything I have
written. They are both fairly sound pictures of contemporary conditions.
_Mr. Britling Sees It Through_ was a huge success more particularly in
America, where it earnt about 20,000; _Tono Bungay_ did well; but _Joan
and Peter_ never won the recognition I think it deserved. To me it seems
a far finer piece of work than _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_.

Even _Tono Bungay_ was not much of a concession to Henry James and his
conception of an intensified rendering of feeling and characterization
as the proper business of the novelist. It was an indisputable Novel,
but it was extensive rather than intensive. That is to say it presented
characters only as part of a _scene_. It was planned as a social
panorama in the vein of Balzac. That vein has produced some physically
and mentally great books, and it continues to this day to produce
evidences of the nervous endurance of ambitious writers, vast canvasses,
too often crude or conventional in interpretation, superficial in
motivation and smeary and wholesale in treatment. I cannot imagine it
holding out against a literature of competent historical and
contemporary studies. _The Forsyte Saga_, as a broadly conceived picture
of prosperous British Philistia by one of its indigenes, is not so good
and convincing as a group of untrammelled biographical studies of
genteel successful types might be. An industrious treatment of early
nineteenth century records again would make Balzac's _Comdie Humaine_
seem flighty stuff. Yet in _War and Peace_ one may perhaps find a
justification for the enhancement and animation of history by fictitious
moods and scenes.

I will confess that I find life too short for many things I would like
to do. I do not think I am afraid of death but I wish it had not to come
so soon. In the natural course of things I shall be lucky, I suppose, if
I live a dozen years more, and beyond measure fortunate if I last as a
fully living brain for another twenty years. This is barely time to turn
round in. Good biography requires more time than that--let alone that I
have other things to do. Yet I have known some intensely interesting
people whom it would be delightful and rewarding to treat! It is a pity.
If I could have forty good years or so more of vigour, I could find a
use for every day of it, and then I would write those copious intimate
character studies, character in relation to changing values and
conditions, that now I fear I shall never be able to do. They would have
to be copious. Impermanent realities are not to be rendered without an
abundance of matter. In a changing world there cannot be portraits
without backgrounds and the source of the shifting reflected light upon
the face has to be shown. Here at page 424 of this experiment in
autobiography I have to assure the possibly incredulous reader that my
attempt to compress it and reduce it to a quintessence, has been
strenuous and continual.




CHAPTER THE EIGHTH

_FAIRLY LAUNCHED AT LAST_


 1

_Duologue in Lodgings (1894-95)_

This is an experiment in autobiography and again, I insist, I am writing
for myself quite as much as for my reader. In turning over my memories
of my early marriage and divorce and the documents that preserve the
facts of the case, I learned in the sight of the reader, a great deal
about myself and I found it natural to carry on from those early and
determining thoughts and experiences to their reflection in my novels
and my public discussion of personal relationships. I brought that
account of my novels and pseudo-novels down to the present time. These
discursive sections have served a useful purpose, they have functioned
as a siding, so to speak, into which it has been possible to shunt a
number of things that would otherwise have turned up later to complicate
the main story of this brain with which I am dealing. That main story,
is the development, the steady progressive growth of a modern vision of
the world, and the way in which the planned reconstruction of human
relationships in the form of a world-state became at last the frame and
test of my activities. It is as much the frame and test of my activities
as the spread of Islam was the frame and test of an early believing
Moslem and the kingdom of God and salvation, of a sincere Christian. My
life in the fact that it has evolved a general sustaining idea has
become, at least psychologically a religious life; its _persona_ is
deoriented from the ego. My essential purpose is that world-vision. I
shall try to express it, as fully and effectively as I can, in a last
culminating chapter, a sort of testamentary chapter, which I shall call
_The Idea of a Planned World_.

But before I can get on to this a further amount of anecdotage and
incident is needed to make this development clear. My struggle for a
footing is still only half told. I come back now to the point from which
I launched out into a dissection of my sexual impulses and conduct, when
at the beginning of 1894, at the age of twenty-seven and a half, I left
my house, 4 Cumnor Place, Sutton and went to live in sin and social
rebellion first at Mornington Place and then in Mornington Road.

The last decade of the nineteenth century was an extraordinarily
favourable time for new writers and my individual good luck was set in
the luck of a whole generation of aspirants. Quite a lot of us from
nowhere were "getting on." The predominance of Dickens and Thackeray and
the successors and imitators they had inspired was passing. In a way
they had exhausted the soil for the type of novel they had brought to a
culmination, just as Lord Tennyson (who died as late as 1892), Tennyson
of the Arthurian cycle, had extracted every poetical possibility from
the contemporary prosperous bourgeoisie. For a generation the prestige
of the great Victorians remained like the shadow of vast trees in a
forest, but now that it was lifting, every weed and sapling had its
chance, provided only that it was of a different species from its
predecessors. When woods are burnt, it is a different tree which
reconstitutes the forest. The habit of reading was spreading to new
classes with distinctive needs and curiosities. They did not understand
and enjoy the conventions and phrases of Trollope or Jane Austen, or the
genteel satire of Thackeray, they were outside the "governing class" of
Mrs. Humphry Ward's imagination, the sombre passions and inhibitions of
the Bront country or of Wessex or Devonshire had never stirred them,
and even the humours of Dickens no longer fitted into their everyday
experiences.

The Education Act of 1871 had not only enlarged the reading public very
greatly but it had stimulated the middle class by a sense of possible
competition from below. And quite apart from that, progress was
producing a considerable fermentation of ideas. An exceptional wave of
intellectual enterprise had affected the British "governing class."
Under the influence of such brilliant Tories as Arthur Balfour and
George Wyndham, a number of people in society were taking notice of
writing and were on the alert for any signs of literary freshness. Such
happy minor accidents as the invasion of England by the Astor family
with a taste for running periodicals at a handsome loss, contributed
also in their measure to the general expansion of opportunity for new
writers. New books were being demanded and fresh authors were in
request. Below and above alike there was opportunity, more public, more
publicity, more publishers and more patronage. Nowadays it is relatively
hard for a young writer to get a hearing. He (or she) plunges into a
congested scramble. Here as everywhere production has outrun consuming
capacity. But in the nineties young writers were looked for. Even
publishers were looking for them.

For a time the need to be actually new was not clearly realized.
Literary criticism in those days had some odd conventions. It was still
either scholarly or with scholarly pretensions. It was dominated by the
mediaeval assumption that whatever is worth knowing is already known and
whatever is worth doing has already been done. Astonishment is
unbecoming in scholarly men and their attitude to newcomers is best
expressed by the word "recognition." Anybody fresh who turned up was
treated as an aspirant Dalai Lama is treated, and scrutinized for
evidence of his predecessor's soul. So it came about that every one of
us who started writing in the nineties, was discovered to be "a
second"--somebody or other. In the course of two or three years I was
welcomed as a second Dickens, a second Bulwer Lytton and a second Jules
Verne. But also I was a second Barrie, though J. M. B. was hardly more
than my contemporary, and, when I turned to short stories, I became a
second Kipling. I certainly, on occasion, imitated both these excellent
masters. Later on I figured also as a second Diderot, a second Carlyle
and a second Rousseau....

Until recently this was the common lot. Literature "broadened down from
precedent to precedent." The influence of the publisher who wanted us to
be new but did not want us to be _strange_, worked in the same direction
as educated criticism. A sheaf of secondhand tickets to literary
distinction was thrust into our hands and hardly anyone could get a
straight ticket on his own. These secondhand tickets were very
convenient as admission tickets. It was however unwise to sit down in
the vacant chairs, because if one did so, one rarely got up again. Pett
Ridge for instance pinned himself down as a second Dickens to the end of
his days. I was saved from a parallel fate by the perplexing variety of
my early attributions.

Of course Jane and I, starting life afresh in our guinea-a-week ground
floor apartments in Mornington Place, had no suspicion how wise we had
been in getting born exactly when we did. We did not realize we were
like two respectable little new ordinary shares in a stock-exchange
boom. We believed very gravely in the general sanity of things and we
took the tide of easy success which had caught us up, as the due reward
of our activity and efforts. We thought this was how things had always
been and were always going to be. It was all delightfully simple. We
were as bright and witty as we knew how, and acceptance, proofs and a
cheque followed as a matter of course. I was doing my best to write as
other writers wrote, and it was long before I realized that my
exceptional origins and training gave me an almost unavoidable freshness
of approach and that I was being original in spite of my sedulous
efforts to justify my discursive secondariness.

Our life in 1894 and 95 was an almost continuous duologue. In Mornington
Place and in Mornington Road we occupied a bedroom with a double bed and
came through folding doors to our living room. All our clothing was in a
small chest of drawers and a wardrobe and I did my work at a little
table with a shaded paraffin lamp in the corner or, when it was not
needed for a meal, at the table in the middle of the living room. All my
notes and manuscripts were in a green cardboard box of four drawers. Our
first landlady in Mornington Place was a German woman, Madame Reinach,
and her cooking was so emphatic, her sympathy with our romantically
unmarried state so liberally expressed, her eagerness for intimate
mutual confidences so pressing, and her own confidences so
extraordinary, that presently Jane went off by herself to Mornington
Road and found another lodging for us.

Here our landlady, whose name by some queer turn I have forgotten,
mothered us very agreeably. She was a tall, strong-faced, Scotswoman.
For a London landlady she was an exceptionally clean, capable, silent
and stoical woman. She had been housemaid, if I remember rightly, in the
household of the Duke of Fife, and she began to approve of me when she
found I worked continuously and never drank. I think that somewhere
between the housemaid stage and this lodging house of hers, someone may
have figured who lacked my simple virtues. (An old friend with a better
memory than mine tells me her name was Mrs. Lewis. But I still do not
remember.)

We would wake cheerfully and get up and I would invent rhymes and
"pomes" of which I have already given sufficient samples, as we washed
and dressed and avoided collisions with each other. We had no bathroom
and our limited floor space was further restricted by a "tub," a shallow
tin bird-bath in which we sponged and splashed. Perhaps we would peep
through the folding doors and if the living room was empty, one of us, I
in trousers and nightshirt--those were pre-pyjama days--or Jane in her
little blue dressing gown and her two blonde pigtails reaching below her
waist, would make a dash for the letters. Usually they were cheering
letters. Perhaps there was a cheque; perhaps there was an invitation to
contribute an article or maybe there was a book for review. As we read
these, a firm tread on the stairs, a clatter and an appetizing smell and
at last a rap-rap on the folding doors announced our coffee and eggs and
bacon.

How vividly I remember the cheerfulness of that front room; Jane in her
wrapper on the hearthrug toasting a slice of bread; the grey London day
a little misty perhaps outside and the bright animation of the coal-fire
reflected on the fireirons and the fender!

After breakfast I would set to work upon a review or one of the two or
three articles I always kept in hand, working them up very carefully
from rough notes until I was satisfied with them. Jane would make a fair
copy of what I had done, or write on her own account, or go out to
supplement our landlady's catering, or read biology for her final B.Sc.
degree examination. After the morning's work we might raid out into
Regents Park or up among the interesting shops and stalls of the
Hampstead Road, for a breath of air and a gleam of amusement before our
one o'clock dinner. After dinner we would prowl out to look for
articles.

This article hunt was a very important business. We sought unlikely
places at unlikely times in order to get queer impressions of them. We
went to Highgate Cemetery in the afternoon and protested at the
conventionality of the monumental mason, or we were gravely critical,
with a lapse into enthusiasm in the best art-critic manner, of the
Parkes Museum (sanitary science), or we went on a cold windy day to
Epping Forest to write "Bleak March in Epping Forest." We nosed the Bond
Street windows and the West End art and picture shows to furbish forth
an Uncle I had invented to suit the taste of the _Pall Mall Gazette_--a
tremendous man of the world he was, the sort of man who might live in
the Albany. (_Select Conversations with an Uncle_, is the pick of what
we got for him.) I was still a fellow of the Zoological Society
(afterwards my subscription went into abeyance) and we sought articles
and apt allusions from cage to cage. Whenever we hit upon an idea for an
article that I did not immediately write, it was put into the topmost of
my nest of green drawers for future use.

On wet afternoons or after supper when we could work no more we played
chess (which yielded an article) and bzique, which defied even my
article extracting powers. Bzique was introduced to us by my old fellow
student Morley Davies, who had taken on my Correspondence Classes and
was working for his B.Sc. He lodged near by and he would come in after
supper and gravely take down a triple pack with us.

We went very little to concerts, theatres or music-halls for the very
sound reason that we could not afford it. Our only exercise was "going
for a walk." And for a time except for occasional after-supper visitors
like Davies, or my distant cousin Owen Thomas, who was arranging my
divorce upon the most economical lines, or a tea at Walter Low's, we had
no social life at all. But then I never had had any social life and
Jane's experience had been chiefly of little dances, tea parties,
croquet parties and lawn tennis in the villadom of Putney, formal
entertainments of which she was now disposed to be very scornful.

It is perhaps not surprising that as the Spring came on, Jane and I, in
spite of our encouraging successfulness, displayed signs of being run
down. I had something wrong with a lymphatic gland under my jaw and when
I called in a Camden Town doctor to clean it up for me, he insisted that
Jane was in a worse state than I and that she ought to be much more in
the fresh air and better nourished if she was not to become tuberculous.
He ordered her Burgundy and we went out and bought an entire bottle at
once,--Gilbey's Burgundy, Number--something or other--and Jane consumed
it medicinally, one glass per meal. We decided to transfer ourselves to
country lodgings for the summer. Except for the facilities of getting
books and the advisability of being near one's editors, there seemed to
be no particular reason why we should be tied to London. Moreover Jane's
mother, Mrs. Robbins, had let her house at Putney; she had been lodging
with some friends in North London and she too was ailing and in need of
the open air. She had accepted our irregular situation by this time and
was quite ready to join us. And while we were hesitating on the verge of
this necessity came an accession of work that seemed to make an
abandonment of London altogether justifiable.

I was invited one day to go and see my editor, Cust of the _Pall Mall
Gazette_--either that or I had asked to see him, I forget which. I went
down to the office for my second encounter with an editor but this time
I wore no wetted top-hat to shame me by its misbehaviour and no tail
coat. I was evidently wearing quite reasonable clothes because I have
forgotten them. I was learning my world. The _Pall Mall Gazette_ was
installed in magnificent offices in the position now occupied by the
Garrick Theatre. I was sent up to the editor's room. I remember it as a
magnificent drawing-room; Fleet Street hath not its like to-day. There
was certainly one grand piano in it, and my memory is inclined to put in
another. There was a vast editor's desk, marvellously equipped, like a
desk out of Hollywood. There were chairs and sofas. But for the moment I
saw nobody amidst these splendours. I advanced slowly across a space of
noiseless carpet. Then I became aware of a sound of sobbing and realized
that someone almost completely hidden from me lay prostrate on a sofa
indulging in paroxysms of grief.

In the circumstances a cough seemed to be the best thing.

Thereupon the sound from the sofa ceased abruptly and a tall blond man
sat up, stared and then stood up, put away his pocket handkerchief and
became entirely friendly and self-possessed. Whatever emotional crisis
was going on had nothing to do with the business between us and was
suspended. Yes, he wanted to see me. He liked my stuff and it was
perfectly reasonable that I should want to make up my income by doing
reviewing. There wasn't any job he could give me on the staff just now.
So soon as there was he would think of me. Did I know W. E. Henley? I
ought to go and see him.

He asked me where I got my knowledge and how I had learnt to write and
what I was and I told him to the best of my ability. He put me at my
ease from the beginning. There was none of the Olympian balderdash of
Frank Harris about him. He combined the agreeable manners of an elder
brother with those of a fellow adventurer. It wasn't at all Fleet Street
to which he made me welcome but a Great Lark in journalism. I suppose he
knew hardly more of Fleet Street than I did. I must certainly go and see
Henley, but just now there was someone else I must meet.

He touched a bell and presently across the large spaces of the room
appeared Mr. Lewis Hind. Hind was a contrast to Cust in every way,
except that he too was an outsider in the journalistic world. He was
tall, dark and sallow, with a reserved manner and an impediment in his
speech. He had begun life in the textile trade and at one time he had
gone about London with samples of lace. He had been an industrious
student, with Clement K. Shorter and W. Pett Ridge at the Birkbeck
Institute and he had adventured with them into the expanding field of
journalism. He had been taken up and influenced in the direction of
catholicism by Mrs. Alice Meynell and he had found a permanent job as
sub-editor of the _Magazine of Art_ under Henley and, through his
introduction and that of Mrs. Meynell he had come aboard Mr. Astor's
_Pall Mall_ adventure. The _Gazette_ had thrown off a weekly satellite,
the _Pall Mall Budget_, which was at first merely a bale of the less
newsy material in the _Gazette_. My _Man of the Year Million_ had
appeared in it, with some amusing illustrations, and had made a little
eddy of success for me. Hind edited this budget and it was proposed to
expand it presently into an independent illustrated weekly with original
matter, all its own. He was looking for "features." He carried me off
from Cust's room to his own less palatial quarters and there he broached
the idea of utilizing my special knowledge of science in the expanded
weekly, in a series of short stories to be called "single sitting"
stories. I was to have five guineas for each story. It seemed quite good
pay, then, and I set my mind to imagining possible stories of the kind
he demanded.

We left Cust in his office. Whether he went on with his crisis or forgot
about it I cannot say, but from my later acquaintance with him, I think
he most probably forgot about it.

The first of the single sitting stories I ground out was the _Stolen
Bacillus_ and after a time I became quite dexterous in evolving
incidents and anecdotes from little possibilities of a scientific or
quasi-scientific sort. I presently broadened my market and found higher
prices were to be got from the _Strand Magazine_ and the _Pall Mall
Magazine_. Many of these stories, forty perhaps altogether, have been
reprinted again and again in a variety of collections and they still
appear and reappear in newspapers and magazines. Hind paid me 5 for
them, but the normal fee I get nowadays for republication in a
newspaper, is 20, and many have still undeveloped dramatic and film
possibilities. I had no idea in those energetic needy days of these
little tips I was putting aside for my declining years.

At about the same time that Hind set me writing short stories, I had a
request from the mighty William Ernest Henley himself for a contribution
to the _National Observer_. I went to see the old giant whose "head was
bloody but unbowed" at his house upon the riverside at Putney. He was a
magnificent torso set upon shrunken withered legs. When I met President
Franklin Roosevelt this spring I found the same big chest and the same
infirmity. He talked very richly and agreeably and, as he talked, he
emphasized his remarks by clutching an agate paper weight in his big
freckled paw and banging it on his writing table. Years afterwards when
he died his wife gave me that slab of agate and it is on my desk before
me as I write. I resolved to do my very best for him and I dug up my
peculiar treasure, my old idea of "time-travelling," from the _Science
Schools Journal_ and sent him in a couple of papers. He liked them and
asked me to carry on the idea so as to give glimpses of the world of the
future. This I was only too pleased to do, and altogether I developed
the notion into seven papers between March and June. This was the second
launching of the story that had begun in the _Science Schools Journal_
as the _Chronic Argonauts_, but now nearly all the traces of Hawthorne
and English Babu classicism had disappeared. I had realized that the
more impossible the story I had to tell, the more ordinary must be the
setting, and the circumstances in which I now set the Time Traveller
were all that I could imagine of solid upper-middle-class comfort.

With these _Time Traveller_ papers running, with quite a number of
stories for Hind germinating in my head, with a supply of books to
review and what seemed a steady market for my occasional, my frequent
occasional, articles in the _Gazette_, it seemed no sort of risk to
leave London for a lodging at Sevenoaks, and thither we went, all three
of us, as London grew hot and dusty and tiring. For awhile things were
very pleasant at Sevenoaks. We went for long walks and Jane recovered
rapidly in health and energy. We explored Knole Park and down the long
hill to Tunbridge and away to the haunts of my grandfather, Penshurst
Park. Jane was still working for her final degree, though she never
actually sat for the examination; botany was to be one of her three
subjects and we gathered and brought home big and various bunches of
flowers so that she might learn the natural orders.

At first Mrs. Robbins was not with us. When she joined us she was in ill
health; she had recovered only very partially from her disapproval of
our unmarried state, and her presence was a considerable restraint upon
our jests and "picshuas" and daily ease. At times the tension of her
unspoken feelings would oblige her to take to her room and eat her meals
there. This slight and retreating shadow upon our contentment was
presently supplemented by graver troubles. There was a sudden fall in my
income. Abruptly the _National Observer_ changed hands. This was quite a
sudden transaction; the paper had never paid its expenses and its chief
supporter decided to sell it to a Mr. Vincent who also took over the
editorial control from Henley. Mr. Vincent thought my articles queer
wild ramblings and wound them up at once. At the same time the _Pall
Mall Gazette_ stopped using my articles. The literary editor, Marriott
Watson, always a firm friend of mine, was away on holiday and his
temporary successor did not think very much of my stuff. I did not know
of this, and I was quite at a loss to account for this sudden withdrawal
of support. I thought it might be a permanent withdrawal. For the first
time we found our monthly expenditure exceeding our income. A certain
dismay pervaded our hitherto cheerful walks. And then an equally
unexpected decision by Mr. Astor announced an approaching end to the
brief bright career of the _Pall Mall Budget_ and with it my sure and
certain market and prompt pay for a single-sitting story.

Just then came an emissary from the divorce court with a writ, couched
in stern uncompromising phrases, and instead of locking this securely
away, Jane put it in a drawer accessible to the curiosity of our
landlady. There had been some little trouble with her already; she
wanted to charge an extra sixpence for every meal Mrs. Robbins took in
her own room, she said we littered up the place with our wild flowers,
and she thought I consumed an unconscionable amount of lamp-oil by
writing so late. She was faintly irritated about Jane's disinclination
for womanly gossiping with her, she felt we were "stuck-up" in some
way, and when she realized that we had no marriage lines, her
indignation flared. She could not immediately tax us with our flagrant
immorality, for that would have been to admit her own prying, but she
became extremely truculent in her bearing and negligent in her services.
Dark allusions foreshadowed the coming row. We were not the sort of
people everybody would want to take in. There were people who were right
and you could tell it, and people who were not. Life assumed a harsh and
careworn visage.

It seemed rather useless to go on writing articles. All the periodicals
to which I contributed were holding stuff of mine in proof and it might
be indiscreet to pour in fresh matter to such a point that the tanks
overflowed and returned it. But I had one thing in the back of my mind.
Henley had told me that it was just possible he would presently find
backing for a monthly. If so, he thought I might rewrite the _Time
Traveller_ articles as a serial story. Anyhow that was something to do
and I set to work on the _Time Machine_ and rewrote it from end to end.

I still remember writing that part of the story in which the _Time
Traveller_ returns to find his machine removed and his retreat cut off.
I sat alone at the round table downstairs writing steadily in the
luminous circle cast by a shaded paraffin lamp. Jane had gone to bed and
her mother had been ill in bed all day. It was a very warm blue August
night and the window was wide open. The best part of my mind fled
through the story in a state of concentration before the Morlocks but
some outlying regions of my brain were recording other things. Moths
were fluttering in ever and again and though I was unconscious of them
at the time, one must have flopped near me and left some trace in my
marginal consciousness that became a short story I presently wrote, _A
Moth, Genus Novo_. And outside in the summer night a voice went on and
on, a feminine voice that rose and fell. It was Mrs.---- I forget her
name--our landlady in open rebellion at last, talking to a sympathetic
neighbour in the next garden and talking through the window at me. I was
aware of her and heeded her not, and she lacked the courage to beard me
in my parlour. "Would I _never_ go to bed? How could she lock up with
that window staring open? Never had she had such people in her house
before,--never. A nice lot if everything was known about them. Often
when you didn't actually know about things you could feel them. What she
let her rooms to was summer visitors who walked about all day and went
to bed at night. And she hated meanness and there were some who could be
mean about sixpences. People with lodgings to let in Sevenoaks ought to
know the sort of people who might take them...."

It went on and on. I wrote on grimly to that accompaniment. I wrote her
out and she made her last comment with the front door well and truly
slammed. I finished my chapter before I shut the window and turned down
and blew out the lamp. And somehow amidst the gathering disturbance of
those days the _Time Machine_ got itself finished. Jane kept up a
valiant front and fended off from me as much as she could of the trouble
that was assailing her on both sides. But a certain gay elasticity
disappeared. It was a disagreeable time for her. She went and looked at
other apartments and was asked unusual questions.

It was a retreat rather than a return we made to London, with the tart
reproaches of the social system echoing in our ears. But before our
ultimate flight I had had a letter from Henley telling me it was all
right about that monthly of his. He was to start _The New Review_ in
January and he would pay me 100 for the _Time Machine_ as his first
serial story. One hundred pounds! And at the same time the mills of the
_Pall Mall Gazette_ began to go round and consume my work again. Mrs.
Robbins went back to stay with friends in North London and Jane and I
found our old rooms with our Scotch landlady at 12, Mornington Road,
still free for us.

We seem to have stuck it in London for the rest of the year. Somewhen
that Autumn Frank Harris, who was no longer editing the _Fortnightly
Review_, obtained possession of the weekly _Saturday Review_. He
proceeded to a drastic reconstruction of what was then a dull and
dignified periodical. He was mindful of those two early articles of
mine, the one he had published and the one he had destroyed, and he
sent for me at once. He sent also for Walter Low and a number of other
comparatively unknown people. The office was in Southampton Street, off
the Strand, and it occupied the first and second floors. I found people
ascending and descending and the roar of a remembered voice told me that
Harris was on the higher level. I found Blanchamp in a large room on the
drawing-room floor amidst a great confusion of books and papers and
greatly amused. Harris was having a glorious time of it above. He had
summoned most of the former staff to his presence in order to read out
scraps from their recent contributions to them and to demand, in the
presence of his "Dear Gahd" and his faithful henchman Silk, why the hell
they wrote like that. It was a Revolution,--the twilight of the
Academic. But Professor Saintsbury, chief of that anonymous staff, had
been warned in time by Edmund Gosse and so escaped the crowning
humiliation.

Clergymen, Oxford dons, respectable but strictly anonymous men of
learning and standing, came hustling downstairs in various phases of
indignation and protest, while odd newcomers in strange garments as
redolent of individuality as their signatures, waited their turn to
ascend. I came late on the list and by that time Harris was ready for
lunch and took Blanchamp, Low and myself as his guests and audience to
the Caf Royal, where I made the acquaintance of Camembert of the ripest
and a sort of Burgundy quite different from the bottle I had bought for
Jane in her extremity. I don't think we talked much about my prospective
contributions. But I gathered that our fortunes were made, that Oxford
and the Stuffy and the Genteel and Mr. Gladstone were to be destroyed
and that under Harris the _Saturday Review_ was to become a weekly
unprecedented in literary history.

It did in fact become a very lively, readable and remarkable
publication. It was never so consciously and consistently "written" as
Henley's defunct _National Observer_, but it had a broader liveliness
and a far more vigorous circulation. Among other rising writers Harris
presently had at work upon it was a lean, red-haired Irishman named
Shaw, already known as a music critic and a Socialist speaker, who so
far broke through its traditional anonymity as to insist upon his
initials appearing after his dramatic criticisms, D. S. McColl (also
presently initialled), J. F. Runciman (ditto), Cunninghame Graham (full
signature), Max Beerbohm, Chalmers Mitchell, Arthur Symons, J. T.
Grein.... I cannot remember half of them. Signed articles increased and
multiplied and all sorts of prominent and interesting people made
occasional contributions. A "Feature," a series of articles on "The Best
Scenery I know" was begun and a "Correspondence" section broke out. No
man, it seems, had ever been stirred to write letters to the old
"Saturday" or he had been snubbed when he did. Now some were invited and
others were stung to contribute the most interesting letters. What
Saintsbury thought of it all has never, I think, been recorded. But then
Saintsbury very rarely brought his critical acumen to bear upon
contemporary writing.

Our City articles also, I gathered, were developing a vigour all their
own under the immediate direction of Harris. "I'm a blackmailer," he
announced, time and again, and represented himself as a terrible wolf
among financiers. Possibly he did something to justify his boasts, in
later life he seems to have told Hugh Kingsmill some remarkable stories
of cheques extorted and bundles of notes passing from hand to hand but
manifestly in the long run it came to very little and he died a year or
so ago at Nice in anything but wealthy circumstances.

England in my time has been very liable to adventurous outsiders;
Bottomley and Birkenhead, Ramsay Macdonald and Loewenstein, Shaw and
Zaharoff, Maundy Gregory and me--a host of others; men with no
legitimate and predetermined rles, men who have behaved at all levels
of behaviour but whose common characteristic it has been to fly across
the social confusion quite unaccountably, scattering a train of
interrogations in their wake. Only the court, the army and navy, banking
and the civil service have been secure against this invasion. Such men
are inevitable in a period of obsolete educational ideas and decaying
social traditions. Whatever else they are they are not dull and formal.
They quicken, if it is only quickening to destroy. Harris was certainly
a superlative example of the outside adventurer. He was altogether
meteoric.

Nobody seemed to know whence Harris had come. He was supposed to be
either a Welsh Jew or a Spanish Irishman; he spoke with an accent, but
he had done so much to his accent that I doubt whether Shaw could place
it precisely. It had a sort of "mega-celtic" flavour--if I may coin a
word. His entirely untrustworthy reminiscences give Galway as his
birth-place. The meticulous student may find these matters fully
discussed in the _Life_ by A. I. Tobin and Elmer Gertz and in Hugh
Kingsmill's _Frank Harris_. He emerged as a bright pressman in Chicago,
made his way to London, pushed into journalism, and when he was sent to
write up the bad treatment of the tenants on the Cecil estates, achieved
a reputation for vigour and mental integrity by praising instead of
cursing. He was taken notice of. He clambered to the editorship of the
_Evening News_. From that, before it fell away from him, he leapt still
higher. Legend has it that he went to Chapman, the proprietor of the
_Fortnightly Review_, and told him his paper was dull because he did not
know enough prominent people and then to one or two outstanding people
and pointed out the value of publicity in this democratic age, and
particularly the value of the publicity to be got through a personal
acquaintance with Mr. Chapman; that he invited him to meet them and them
to meet him, to the great social gratification of Mr. Chapman, and
emerged triumphantly from the resultant party as editor of the
_Fortnightly Review_. He infused a certain amount of new life into it
and challenged the established ascendency of the _Nineteenth Century_.
He married a wealthy widow, a Mrs. Clayton, who had a small but charming
house in the then socially exalted region of Park Lane. There he reached
his zenith. He saw himself entering parliament; he cultivated the
constituency of Hackney, he aspired, he told Hugh Kingsmill, to become
the "British Bismarck" (whatever he imagined that to mean. He may have
been thinking of his moustache) and all sorts of prominent and
interesting people went to the dinner parties at Park Lane. But he
could not stay the course. His sexual vanity was overpowering, he not
only became a discursive amorist but he talked about it, and there
ensued an estrangement and separation from his wife and her income and
Park Lane. His dominating way in conversation startled, amused and then
irritated people, and he felt his grip slipping. The directors of the
_Fortnightly_ became restive and interfering. He began to drink heavily
and to shout still louder as the penalties of loud shouting closed in on
him. When I met him for the second time as the editor with a controlling
interest in the _Saturday Review_, he had already left his wife and lost
her monetary support, but he was still high in the London sky. He was
still a star of the magnitude of Whistler or Henley or Oscar Wilde and
we, his younger contributors, were little chaps below him.

I think his blackmailing in the _Saturday Review_ period was almost pure
romancing, for he achieved neither the wealth nor the jail that are the
alternatives facing the serious blackmailer. He was far too loud and
vain, far too eager to create an immediate impression to be a proper
scoundrel. I have been hearing about him all my life and I have never
heard convincing particulars of any actual monetary frauds; the
_Saturday Review_, I can witness, paid punctually to the end of his
proprietorship. His claims to literary flair, if not to literary
distinction, were better founded. He read widely and confusedly but
often with vivid appreciation, and he pretended to great learning. He
was the sort of man who will prepare a long quotation in Greek for a
dinner party. Kingsmill says he sported an Eton tie at times and talked
of the "old days" at Rugby. Also he insisted that he had been a cowboy,
a foremast hand and a great number of other fine romantic things, as
occasion seemed to demand. I never saw him do anything more adventurous
than sit and talk exuberantly in imminent danger of unanswerable
contradiction.

That was what he lived for, talking, writing that was also loud talk in
ink, and editing. He was a brilliant editor for a time and then the
impetus gave out and he flagged rapidly. So soon as he ceased to work
vehemently he became unable to work. He could not attend to things
without excitement. As his confidence went he became clumsily loud.

His talk was most effective at the first hearing; after some experience
of it, it began to bore me so excessively that I avoided the office when
I knew he was there. There was no variety in his posing and no fancy in
his falsehoods. I do not remember that he said a single good thing in
all that uproar; his praise, his condemnations, his assertions, his
pretensions to an excessive villainy and virility, have all dissolved in
my memory into a rich muddy noise. Always he was proclaiming himself the
journalistic Robin Hood, bold yet strangely sensitive and
tender-hearted--with the full volume of his voice. The reader may get
the quality of it best in his book _The Man Shakespeare_.

I went on writing for him until 1898, but with diminishing frequency.
Throughout that period he shrank in my mind from his original dimensions
of Olympian terror to something in retreating perspective that kept on
barking. Sometimes I relented towards him and did my best to restore him
to his original position in my esteem as a Great Character, or at least
a Great Lark. But really he had not the versatility and detachment for
the Great Lark. He could never get sufficiently away from his ugly self.
He had nothing of the fresh gaiety of Harry Cust who was everything a
Great Lark should be.

After 1898 I saw Harris only intermittently. He left London. Something
obscure happened to the _Saturday Review_ and he sold his interest in it
and went to France.

Thereafter I heard him rumbling about, for the most part below the
horizon of my world, a distant thunder. He came up to visibility again
for a time as the editor of an old and long respectable monthly called
_Hearth and Home_. He desecrated the Hearth and got rid of the Homelike
quality very rapidly and thoroughly. Before or after that (I forget
which) he was editor of a periodical with menace even in the title, _The
Candid Friend_, which was abusive rather than candid, and faded out.
Afterwards he worked his mischief upon _Vanity Fair_ and then upon a
publication called _Modern Society_. But he did nothing extraordinarily
or gallantly wicked though he did much that was noisily offensive.

We had a quarrel during the _Vanity Fair_ phase. He sent me a book
called _The Bomb_. I thought the first part good and the second tawdry
and bad and I asked him which part of it was really his. I had touched a
tender spot. His idea of a retort was to publish terrific "slatings" of
my _Tono Bungay_, which for reasons still obscure to me he called
Tono-the-Bungay. That did not alter the fact that _The Bomb_ is
curiously unequal.

_Modern Society_ got him into prison but only on the score of contempt
of court. He commented on the private character of the defendant in a
divorce case that was _sub judice_. His "martyrdom," as he called it
later, lasted a month. Then for a time I heard no more of him.

One morning in war time, somewhen in 1915, my neighbour Lady Warwick
came sailing down from Easton Lodge to Easton Glebe, my house on the
edge of her park. It is not her way to beat about the bush. "Why does
Frank Harris say I am not to tell you he is here?" she asked.

Was he here? He was at Brook End with his wife--in fear of prosecution.
He had found reason for bolting from Paris and he had thrown himself
upon her never-failing generosity. Brook End was a furnished house just
beyond the far gates of the park which she was in the habit of lending
to all and sundry who appealed to her. He had been boasting too much in
Paris about his German sympathies and his influence with the Indian
princes, and the French who are a logical people and take things said
far too seriously, made themselves disagreeable and inquisitive. They
are quite capable of shooting a man on his own confession. He gave way
to panic. He fled to England with Mrs. Harris and a couple of valises.
He still saw denunciation in every tree and the rustle of the summer
leaves outside the windows at Brook End seemed the prelude to arrest.

I explained that he and I had been exchanging abusive letters and I
supposed that he was expecting me to behave as he would have behaved if
our positions had been reversed. Jane came in and we agreed that it was
a case for cordial and even effusive hospitality. Mrs. Harris is a very
pleasant and loyal lady and there was little need for effort in our
welcome to her. Harris--a very subdued Harris it was--brightened up and
we did what we could to make his stay in Essex pleasant until he could
get a passage to America. He sat at my table and talked of Shakespeare,
Dryden, Carlyle, Jesus Christ, Confucius, me and other great figures; of
poetry and his own divine sensitiveness and the execrable cooking in
Brixton jail.

Presently they got a passage for America and departed.

He had been gone some days when I had another visit from Lady Warwick.
This time she did not come to the point so directly. As we walked in my
rose garden she asked me what I really thought of Frank Harris. Didn't
she know?

You see, she had had a number of letters--quite interesting letters from
a certain royal personage.

"And you gave them to him?"

"Oh _no_! But he asked to look through them. He thought he might advise
me about them. One doesn't _care_ to destroy things like that. They have
historical importance."

"And they are now in his valise on their way to America?"

"Yes. How did you know that?"

It seemed to me, I am afraid, an altogether amusing situation. "Even if
the ship is torpedoed," I said, "Harris will stick to those letters."

It was a lengthy and costly business to recover and place those
carelessly written and very private documents in the hands most likely
to hold them discreetly. Meanwhile Harris took over _Pearson's Magazine_
in America and ran it as a pro-German organ until America came into the
war. He reduced a circulation of 200,000 to 10,000. He published a
hostile and quite imaginary interview with me to show how entirely
ignorant and foolish was my attitude in the struggle.

But this is my autobiography and not a biography of Harris. I never saw
him again. I found myself very near him when I made a winter home for
myself near Grasse, but I kept any craving I had to hear his voice once
more, well under control. Messages passed between us and I promised to
go and see him--when I could manage it. But I never did manage and I am
rather sorry now. He died in 1932 and after all, by that time, he was an
old man of seventy-seven or seventy-eight, and it would have done me no
harm to have gone over and listened to him for an hour or so.

Shaw was far kinder to him. When he was staying at Antibes in the summer
of 1928 he went over to Nice on several occasions, and renewed the old
acquaintance. It was an odd friendship. Harris never wearied and bored
Shaw as he wearied and bored me. Shaw found something attractive in all
those boastings of sentimentalized villainy and passionate virility. And
moreover he could hold his own with Harris in a way that I could not do.
In his earlier years he had been wont to face and sway the uproar of
excited public meetings. Talking to Harris must have seemed almost like
old times come again. But Harris in talk went over me like a steam
roller and flattened me out completely.

Very generously Shaw allowed Harris to write a _Life_ of himself. It is
the work of an ego-centred, sex-crazy old man. And it reveals more than
anything else the profound resentment of Harris at the relative success
of his former contributor. Shaw, he says, was a miracle of impotence in
art, in affairs and in love. That is the main thesis. The analysis is
pseudo-physiological throughout. Shaw took these outpourings with an
admirable good humour and helped the book greatly by adding elucidatory
contributions of his own. But so far as I and my autobiography are
concerned, the latter years of Harris at Nice are no more than "noises
heard off." I know nothing of that redoubtable suppressed _Life and
Loves_ of his, in four volumes, which is sought after by collectors of
"curious" books, except that it must certainly be tumultuous and
unveracious.

So much for that hot, vehement brain which went roaring past my own less
audible hemispheres of grey matter on their way through this world. I am
told that _The Life and Loves of Frank Harris_ is a warning to all
autobiographers, and I can quite believe it. Apparently it is a hotch
potch of lies, self-pity, vain pretensions and exhibitionism and the end
is unhappiness and despair. Nevertheless I do not feel urged, even for
my own good, to go to the pains needed to procure and read a
surreptitious copy of it. I do not think I should learn anything more
about this awful example of undisciplined egoism than I know and have
told already. The core of the matter is this, that this man drank and
shouted and had to go on drinking and shouting all through his life
because the tireless pursuit of self-discovery upon his heels gave him
no peace; he never had the courage to face round at his reality and he
was never sufficiently stupefied to forget it. He was already in flight
before the horror of The Man Frank Harris, before ever he came to
London. And yet, perhaps, if he had turned, he might have made something
quite tolerable of his repudiated and falsified self. I cannot tell. It
would have been a stiff job anyhow with that dwarfish ill-proportioned
body, that ugly dark face and with lust-entangled vanity and greediness
of overpowering strength.

       *       *       *       *       *

I return from this digression to the years 1894-95 and my visits to
Southampton Street to get books for review from Frank Harris and
Blanchamp and to carry them off, whole armfuls, in a hansom cab to 12
Mornington Road. There I sat down and Jane and I mugged up our reviews
of them, whenever the light of invention burnt low and an original
article seemed out of the question.

I was now in a very hopeful and enterprising mood. Henley had accepted
the _Time Machine_, agreed to pay 100 for it, and had recommended it to
Heinemann, the publisher. This would bring in at least another 50. I
should have a book out in the spring and I should pass from the status
of journalist--"occasional journalist" at that, and anonymous--to
authorship under my own name. And there was talk of a book of short
stories with Methuen. Furthermore John Lane was proposing to make a book
out of some of my articles, though for that I was to get only 10 down.
The point was that my chance was plainly coming fast. I should get a
press--and I felt I might get a good press--for the _Time Machine_
anyhow. If I could get another book out before that amount of publicity
died away I should be fairly launched as an author and then I might be
able to go on writing books. This incessant hunt for "ideas" for
anonymous articles might be relaxed and the grind of book-reviewing
abated.

I find in my archives a "picshua" commemorating my Christmas dinner for
1894. Very few picshuas survive from the first year of my life with
Jane. I did not draw so very many then, and she did not begin
methodically to save what I drew until we had a house and storage. The
early pictures were not nearly so neat and dexterous as the later. But
this one shows our tall landlady (bless her!) giving a last glance at
the table she has laid for myself and Jane and Mrs. Robbins. The fare is
recognizably a turkey. Detail however is hasty and inadequate. The
interested reader will note the folding doors. He will note too a queer
black object on the table to the left of Jane. That represents, however
inadequately, a black glass flagon. In this flagon there was a wine--I
do not know if it is still sold by grocers--a golden wine, called
"Canary Sack." I am not at all sure if it was the same as Falstaff's
sack; it was a sweetish thin sherry-like wine.

That wine on the table, even more than the turkey and the presence of
Mrs. Robbins, marks the fact that already in the first year Jane and I
felt we were winning our queer little joint fight against the world, for
the liberty of our lives and the freedom of our brains. We had had a
serious talk about our social outlook. People, often strange people,
were beginning to ask us out. All sorts of unfamiliar food and drink
might be sprung upon us, for the dietary Jane had been brought up upon
was scarcely less restricted than my own. We knew no wines but port and
sherry. Accordingly we decided to experiment with food and drink so far
as the resources of the Camden Town and Tottenham Court Road luxury
trade permitted. We tried a bottle of claret and a bottle of hock and so
forth and so on, and that is why we "washed down" our Christmas fare
with Canary Sack. So that if anyone asked us to take Canary Sack we
should know what we were in for. But nobody ever did ask us to take
Canary Sack. My knowledge of Canary Sack is still waste knowledge.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings

Xmas 1894.]

And we discussed whether we would go out to a dinner or so in a
restaurant in preparation for our social emergence. There was the
Holborn Restaurant and there were restaurants in Soho which offered
dinners from 1_s._ 6_d._ upwards, where we might acquire the elements of
gastronomic _savoir faire_.

I had already been to one formidable dinner party, the "Wake" of
Henley's _National Observer_. It was perhaps not in the best possible
taste to call it a wake, seeing that the new editor proprietor who had
undertaken to carry on the life of the deceased, was present as a guest.
George Wyndham, Nathaniel Curzon, Walter Sickert, Edgar Vincent (better
known nowadays as Lord D'Abernon), G. S. Street, Arthur Morrison, Bob
Stevenson, Charles Baxter (R. L. S.'s business manager), H. B. Marriott
Watson and other contributors to the paper were present. I am not sure
whether J. M. Barrie and Rudyard Kipling were there, but both had been
among Henley's men. I sat at the tail of a table, rather proud and
scared, latest adherent to this gallant band. And because I was there at
the end I was first to be served with a strange black blobby substance
altogether unknown to me. I was there to enjoy myself and I helped
myself to a generous portion. My next door neighbour--I rather fancy it
was Basil Thomson--eyed the black mound upon my plate.

"I see you _like_ caviar," he remarked.

"Love it," I said.

I didn't, but I ate it all. I had my proper pride.

That dinner was at Verrey's in Regent Street and I remember walking very
gravely and carefully along the kerb of the pavement at a later hour, to
convince myself that the exalted swimming in my head which had ensued
upon the festival, was not in the nature of intoxication. If there had
been a tight-rope handy leading straight out over the bottomless pit I
suppose that in that mood of grave investigation I should have tried it.
I decided that I was not drunk, but that I was "under the influence of
alcohol." My literary ambitions were bringing me into a quite
unanticipated world, full of strange sorts of food and still more
various sorts of drink. A certain discretion might, I decided with a
wary eye on the kerb, be necessary.

It was a good thing for me that behind the folding doors at 12
Mornington Road slept a fine and valiant little being, so delicate and
clean and so credulous of my pretensions, that it would have been
intolerable to appear before her unshaven or squalid or drunken or base.
I lived through my Bohemian days as sober as Shaw if not nearly so
teetotally.

Which reminds me of a bitter complaint I once heard in the _Saturday
Review_ office from one of Harris's satellites. "When we're here'n
the'vning all com'fly tight tha' fella Shaw comes in--dishgrashful
shtate shobriety--talks and _talks_ ... AND TALKS."


 2

_Lynton, Station Road, Woking (1895)_

I began the new year with my first and only regular job on a London
daily. Cust had promised that I should have the next vacancy, whatever
it was, on the _Pall Mall_, and the lot fell upon the dramatic
criticism. I was summoned by telegram. "Here," said Cust and thrust two
small pieces of coloured paper into my hand.

"What are these?" I asked.

"Theatres. Go and do 'em,"

"Yes," I said and reflected. "I'm willing to have a shot at it, but I
ought to warn you that so far, not counting the Crystal Palace pantomime
and Gilbert and Sullivan, I've been only twice to a theatre."

"Exactly what I want," said Cust. "You won't be in the gang. You'll make
a break."

"One wears evening dress?"

It was not in Gust's code of manners to betray astonishment. "Oh yes.
To-morrow night especially. The Haymarket."

We regarded each other thoughtfully for a moment, "Right O," said I and
hurried round to a tailor named Millar in Charles Street who knew me to
be solvent. "Can you make me evening clothes by to-morrow night?" I
asked, "Or must I hire them?"

The clothes were made in time but in the foyer I met Cust and George
Steevens ready to supply a criticism if I failed them and nothing came
to hand from me. But I did the job in a fashion and posted my copy
fairly written out in its bright red envelope before two o'clock in the
morning in the Mornington Road pillar box. The play was "_An Ideal
Husband_, a new and original play of modern life by Oscar Wilde."

That was on the third of January 1895, and all went well. On the fifth I
had to do _Guy Domville_, a play by Henry James at the St. James's
Theatre. This was a more memorable experience. It was an extremely weak
drama. James was a strange unnatural human being, a sensitive man lost
in an immensely abundant brain, which had had neither a scientific nor a
philosophical training, but which was by education and natural aptitude
alike, formal, formally sthetic, conscientiously fastidious and
delicate. Wrapped about in elaborations of gesture and speech, James
regarded his fellow creatures with a face of distress and a remote
effort at intercourse, like some victim of enchantment placed in the
centre of an immense bladder. His life was unbelievably correct and his
home at Rye one of the most perfect pieces of suitably furnished
Georgian architecture imaginable. He was an unspotted bachelor. He had
always been well off and devoted to artistic ambitions; he had
experienced no tragedy and he shunned the hoarse laughter of comedy; and
yet he was consumed by a gnawing hunger for dramatic success. In this
performance he had his first and last actual encounter with the theatre.

Guy Domville was one of those rare ripe exquisite Catholic Englishmen of
ancient family conceivable only by an American mind, who gave up the
woman he loved to an altogether coarser cousin, because his religious
vocation was stronger than his passion. I forget the details of the
action. There was a drinking scene in which Guy and the cousin, for some
obscure purpose of discovery, pretended to drink and, instead, poured
their wine furtively into a convenient bowl of flowers upon the table
between them. Guy was played by George Alexander, at first in a mood of
refined solemnity and then as the intimations of gathering disapproval
from pit and gallery increased, with stiffening desperation. Alexander
at the close had an incredibly awkward exit. He had to stand at a door
in the middle of the stage, say slowly "Be keynd to Her.... _Be_ keynd
to Her" and depart. By nature Alexander had a long face, but at that
moment with audible defeat before him, he seemed the longest and
dismallest face, all face, that I have ever seen. The slowly closing
door reduced him to a strip, to a line, of perpendicular gloom. The
uproar burst like a thunder-storm as the door closed and the stalls
responded with feeble applause. Then the tumult was mysteriously
allayed. There were some minutes of uneasy apprehension. "Au-thor" cried
voices. "Au-thor!" The stalls, not understanding, redoubled their
clapping.

Disaster was too much for Alexander that night. A spasm of hate for the
writer of those fatal lines must surely have seized him. With incredible
cruelty he led the doomed James, still not understanding clearly how
things were with him, to the middle of the stage, and there the pit and
gallery had him. James bowed; he knew it was the proper thing to bow.
Perhaps he had selected a few words to say, but if so they went unsaid.
I have never heard any sound more devastating than the crescendo of
booing that ensued. The gentle applause of the stalls was altogether
overwhelmed. For a moment or so James faced the storm, his round face
white, his mouth opening and shutting and then Alexander, I hope in a
contrite mood, snatched him back into the wings.

That was my first sight of Henry James with whom I was later to have a
sincere yet troubled friendship. We were by nature and training
profoundly unsympathetic. He was the most consciously and elaborately
artistic and refined human being I ever encountered, and I swam in the
common thought and feeling of my period, with an irregular abundance of
rude knowledge, aggressive judgments and a disposition to get to close
quarters with Madame Fact even if it meant a scuffle with her. James
never scuffled with Fact; he treated her as a perfect and
unchallengeable lady; he never questioned a single stitch or flounce of
the conventions and interpretations in which she presented herself. He
thought that for every social occasion a correct costume could be
prescribed and a correct behaviour defined. On the table (an excellent
piece) in his hall at Rye lay a number of caps and hats, each with its
appropriate gloves and sticks, a tweed cap and a stout stick for the
Marsh, a soft comfortable deer-stalker if he were to turn aside to the
Golf Club, a light-brown felt hat and a cane for a morning walk down to
the Harbour, a grey felt with a black band and a gold-headed cane of
greater importance, if afternoon calling in the town was afoot. He
retired at set times to a charming room in his beautiful walled garden
and there he worked, dictating with a slow but not unhappy
circumspection, the novels that were to establish his position in the
world of discriminating readers. They are novels from which all the
fiercer experiences are excluded; even their passions are so polite that
one feels that they were gratified, even at their utmost intimacy, by a
few seemly gestures; and yet the stories are woven with a peculiar
humorous, faintly fussy, delicacy, that gives them a flavour like
nothing else in the language. When you want to read and find reality too
real, and hard story-telling tiresome, you may find Henry James good
company. For generations to come a select type of reader will brighten
appreciatively to the _Spoils of Poynton_, _The Ambassadors_, _The
Tragic Muse_,_ The Golden Bowl_ and many of the stories.

I once saw James quarrelling with his brother William James, the
psychologist. He had lost his calm; he was terribly unnerved. He
appealed to me, to me of all people, to adjudicate on what was and what
was not permissible behaviour in England. William was arguing about it
in an indisputably American accent, with an indecently naked
reasonableness. I had come to Rye with a car to fetch William James and
his daughter to my home at Sandgate. William had none of Henry's
passionate regard for the polish upon the surfaces of life and he was
immensely excited by the fact that in the little Rye inn, which had its
garden just over the high brick wall of the garden of Lamb House, G. K.
Chesterton was staying. William James had corresponded with our vast
contemporary and he sorely wanted to see him. So with a scandalous
directness he had put the gardener's ladder against that ripe red wall
and clambered up and peeped over!

Henry had caught him at it.

It was the sort of thing that isn't done. It was most emphatically the
sort of thing that isn't done.... Henry had instructed the gardener to
put away that ladder and William was looking thoroughly naughty about
it.

To Henry's manifest relief, I carried William off and in the road just
outside the town we ran against the Chestertons who had been for a drive
in Romney Marsh; Chesterton was heated and I think rather swollen by the
sunshine; he seemed to overhang his one-horse fly; he descended slowly
but firmly; he was moist and steamy but cordial; we chatted in the road
for a time and William got his coveted impression.

But reminiscence is running away with me. I return to the raw young
dramatic critic standing amidst the astonished uneasy stallites under
the storm that greeted _Guy Domville_. That hissing and booing may have
contributed something to the disinclination I have always felt from any
adventure into The Theatre.

On that eventful evening I scraped acquaintance with another interesting
contemporary, Bernard Shaw. I had known him by sight since the
Hammersmith days but I had never spoken to him before. Fires and civil
commotions loosen tongues. I accosted him as a _Saturday Review_
colleague and we walked back to our respective lodgings northward while
he talked very interestingly about the uproar we had left behind us and
the place of the fashionable three-act play amidst the eternal verities.
He laid particular stress on the fact that nobody in the audience and
hardly any of the cast, had realized the grace of Henry James's
language.

Shaw was then a slender young man of thirty-five or so very hard-up, and
he broke the ranks of the boiled shirts and black and white ties in the
stalls, with a modest brown jacket suit, a very white face and very red
whiskers. (Now he has a very red face and very white whiskers, but it is
still the same Shaw.) He talked like an elder brother to me in that
agreeable Dublin English of his. I liked him with a liking that has
lasted a life-time. In those days he was just a brilliant essayist and
critic and an exasperating speaker in Socialist gatherings. He had
written some novels that no one thought anything of, and his plays were
still a secret between himself and his God.

From that time onward I saw him intermittently, but I did not see very
much of him until I went into the Fabian Society, six or seven years
later. Then he was a man in the forties and a much more important
figure. He was married and he was no longer impecunious. His opinions
and attitudes had developed and matured and so had mine. We found
ourselves antagonistic on a number of issues and though we were not
quite enough in the same field nor near enough in age to be rivals,
there was from my side at any rate, a certain emulation between us.

We were both atheists and socialists; we were both attacking an
apparently fixed and invincible social system from the outside; but this
much resemblance did not prevent our carrying ourselves with a certain
sustained defensiveness towards each other that remains to this day. In
conversational intercourse a man's conclusions are of less importance
than his training and the way he gets to them, and in this respect
chasms of difference yawned between Shaw and myself, wider even than
those that separated me from Henry James. I have tried to set out my own
formal and informal education in a previous chapter. Shaw had had no
such sustained and constructive mental training as I had been through,
but on the other hand he had been saturated from his youth up in good
music, brilliant conversation and the appreciative treatment of life.
Extreme physical sensibility had forced him to adopt an austere teetotal
and vegetarian way of living, and early circumstances, of which Ireland
was not the least, had inclined him to rebellion and social protest; but
otherwise he was as distinctly over against me and on the aesthetic side
of life as Henry James. To him, I guess, I have always appeared heavily
and sometimes formidably facty and close-set; to me his judgments,
arrived at by feeling and expression, have always had a flimsiness. I
want to get hold of Fact, strip off her inessentials and, if she behaves
badly put her in stays and irons; but Shaw dances round her and weaves a
wilful veil of confident assurances about her as her true presentment.
He thinks one can "put things over" on Fact and I do not. He philanders
with her. I have no delusions about the natural goodness and wisdom of
human beings and at bottom I am grimly and desperately educational. But
Shaw's conception of education is to let dear old Nature rip. He has got
no further in that respect than Rousseau. Then I know, fundamentally,
the heartless impartiality of natural causation, but Shaw makes
Evolution something brighter and softer, by endowing it with an
ultimately benevolent Life Force, acquired, quite uncritically I feel,
from his friend and adviser Samuel Butler. We have been fighting this
battle with each other all our lives. We had a brisk exchange of letters
after the publication of the _Science of Life_.

But let me return to those theatrical first nights of mine. None of the
criticism I wrote was ever anything but dull. I did not understand the
theatre. I was out of my place there. I do not think I am made to
understand the theatre but at any rate, I never sat down to ask myself,
"What is all this stage stuff about? What is the gist of this complex
unreality?" If I had done so, then I should have emerged with a point of
view and data for adequate critical writing--even if that writing had
turned out to be only a denunciation of all the existing methods and
machinery.

Shaw like James and like his still more consciously cultivated disciple,
Granville Barker, believed firmly in The Theatre as a finished and
definite something demanding devotion; offering great opportunities to
the human mind. He perceived indeed there was something very wrong with
it, he demanded an endowed theatre, a different criticism, a different
audience than the common "Theatre-goer" we knew, but in the end he could
imagine this gathering of several hundred people for three hours'
entertainment on a stage becoming something very fine and important and
even primary in the general life. I had no such belief. I was forming a
conception of a new sort of human community with an unprecedented way of
life, and it seemed to me to be a minor detail whether this boxed-up
performance of plays, would occur at all in that ampler existence I
anticipated. "Shows" there will certainly be, in great variety in the
modern civilization ahead, very wonderful blendings of thought, music
and vision; but except by way of archaeological revival, I can see no
footlights, proscenium, prompter's box, playwright and painted players
there.

Of course this wasn't clear in my mind in the nineties, but I did fail
to find The Theatre sufficiently important adequately to stir my wits
and so if for no other reason my work as a dramatic critic was flat and
spiritless. Yet I saw some good plays. In Wilde's _Importance of Being
Earnest_ Alexander did a magnificent piece of work that completely
effaced his Guy Domville from my mind, and in Pinero's _Notorious Mrs.
Ebbsmith_ I saw and heard young Mrs. Pat Campbell, with her flexible
body and her delightful voice, for the first time.

After the wear of a month or so for my new dress clothes my rough but
essentially benevolent personal Providence appreciated the listlessness
of this forced uncongenial work and intervened to stop it. I caught a
bad cold, streaks of blood appeared again, and once more the
impossibility of my moving about in London in all weather was
demonstrated. I resigned The Theatre into better hands, those of G. S.
Street, who was later to be a gentle and understanding Censor of Plays,
and I set about finding a little house in the country, where I could
follow up with another book the success that I felt was coming to the
_Time Machine_ and my short-story volume.

Our withdrawal to Woking was a fairly cheerful adventure. Woking was the
site of the first crematorium but few of our friends made more than five
or six jokes about that. We borrowed a hundred pounds by a mortgage on
Mrs. Robbins' house in Putney and with that hundred pounds, believe it
or not, we furnished a small resolute semi-detached villa with a minute
greenhouse in the Maybury Road facing the railway line, where all night
long the goods trains shunted and bumped and clattered--without serious
effect upon our healthy slumbers. Close at hand in those days was a
pretty and rarely used canal amidst pine woods, a weedy canal, beset
with loose-strife, spira, forget-me-nots and yellow water lilies, upon
which one could be happy for hours in a hired canoe, and in all
directions stretched open and undeveloped heath land, so that we could
walk and presently learn to ride bicycles and restore our broken contact
with the open air. There I planned and wrote the _War of the Worlds_,
the _Wheels of Chance_ and the _Invisible Man_. I learnt to ride my
bicycle upon sandy tracks with none but God to help me; he chastened me
considerably in the process, and after a fall one day I wrote down a
description of the state of my legs which became the opening chapter of
the _Wheels of Chance_. I rode wherever Mr. Hoopdrive rode in that
story. Later on I wheeled about the district marking down suitable
places and people for destruction by my Martians. The bicycle in those
days was still very primitive. The diamond frame had appeared but there
was no free-wheel. You could only stop and jump off when the treadle was
at its lowest point, and the brake was an uncertain plunger upon the
front wheel. Consequently you were often carried on beyond your
intentions, as when Mr. Polly upset the zinc dust-bins outside the shop
of Mr. Rusper. Nevertheless the bicycle was the swiftest thing upon the
roads in those days, there were as yet no automobiles and the cyclist
had a lordliness, a sense of masterful adventure, that has gone from him
altogether now.

Jane was still a very fragile little being and as soon as I had
sufficiently mastered the art of wheeling I got a tandem bicycle of a
peculiar shape made for us by the Humber people and we began to wander
about the south of England, very agreeably. But here I think a
photograph and a selection of picshuas may take up the story again. The
first picshua shows us starting out upon an expedition that carried us
at last across Dartmoor to Cornwall and the second shows Jane engaging
her first domestic servant.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

[Illustration]

We lived very happily and industriously in the Woking home for a year
and a half and then my mother-in-law fell ill and for a time it was
necessary that she should live with us, so that we had to move to a
larger house at Worcester Park. We had married as soon as I was free to
do so. By the time of our removal, our circle of acquaintances and
friends had increased very considerably. I will not catalogue names but
one friendly figure stands out amidst much other friendliness, that once
much reviled and now rather too much forgotten writer, Grant Allen. I do
not think I have ever made a fair acknowledgment of a certain mental
indebtedness to him. Better thirty-five years late than never.

He was about twenty years older than I. He had been a science teacher in
the West Indies and he was full of the new wine of aggressive Darwinism.
He came back to England and, in that fresh illumination, began writing
books for the general reader and essays in natural history. He was a
successful popularizer and he had a very pronounced streak of
speculative originality. But he had the schoolmaster trick of dogmatism
and a rash confidence in every new idea that seized upon him. In these
days no editor paid very much for scientific contributions and James
Payne, the editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_, showed him that the better
way to prosperity was to travel abroad and write conventional novels
about places of interest to British tourists. The middle-class British
and Americans who were beginning to travel very freely in Europe were
delighted to read easy stories of sentiment and behaviour introducing
just the places they had visited and the sights they had seen. With this
work Grant Allen achieved a reasonable popularity and prosperity. But he
was uneasy in his prosperity. He had had an earlier infection of that
same ferment of biology and socialism that was working in my blood. He
wanted not merely to enjoy life but to do something to it. Social
injustice and sexual limitation bothered his mind, and he was critical
of current ideas and accepted opinions. I myself was destined to go
through roughly parallel phases of uneasiness and to fall even more
definitely under the advancing intimations of the different life of the
coming world-state.

Like myself Grant Allen had never found a footing in the professional
scientific world and he had none of the patience, deliberation--and
discretion--of the established scientific worker, who must live with a
wholesome fear of the Royal Society and its inhibitions before his eyes.
Grant Allen's semi-popular original scientific works such as his _Origin
of the Idea of God_ (1897) and his _Physiological Aesthetics_ (1877)
were at once bold and sketchy, unsupported by properly verified
quotations and collated references, and regardless or manifestly
ignorant of much other contemporary work. They were too original to be
fair popularization and too unsubstantiated to be taken seriously by
serious specialists, and what was good in them has been long since
appropriated, generally without acknowledgment, by sounder workers,
while the flimsy bulk of them moulders on a few dusty and forgotten
shelves. His anthropology became an easy butt for the fuller scholarship
and livelier style of Andrew Lang.

His attempt to change himself over from a regularly selling, proper
English "purveyor of fiction" to the novelist with ideas and initiative
and so contribute materially to vital literature was equally
unfortunate. In that also he was, so to speak, an undecided amphibian,
an Amblystoma, never quite sure whether he had come out of the water for
good or not. He had always to earn a living, and the time left over from
that, just as it had not been enough either for the patient and finished
research needed to win respect in the scientific world, was now not
enough for the thorough and well thought-out novel of aggressive
reality.

Later on I was to be in much the same case. In his spare time, so to
speak, and unaware that the devices and methods of the ordinary trade
novel are exactly what cannot be used for fresh matter, he wrote what
was really a sentimental novelette, _The Woman Who Did_. He tried (I am
sure with a hurried pen) to present a woman who deliberately broke the
rigid social conventions of the period and bore an illegitimate child as
"her very own," and, without any intensive effort to conceive her
personality, he tried to tell the story so that she should be
sympathetic for the common-place reader. That was a most dangerous and
difficult thing to attempt, and since, later on, I was to try out
something of a kindred sort in _Ann Veronica_, _The New Machiavelli_ and
_The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman_, I can bear my expert witness to the
difficulty of the technical miracle he was so glibly setting about to
perform. My mature persuasion is that the distance a novel can carry a
reader out of his or her moral and social preconceptions is a very short
one. I think a novel can do more than a play in this way; I don't
believe an audience in a theatre has ever budged a bit from its
established standards of conduct for anything that has been put on the
stage; but in either case what principally occurs is recognition and
response. The most fatal thing that can be done is to "assume" the
Tightness of the new standard you are putting over. This was done
excessively in _The Woman Who Did_. Stupid people will never read
anything with which they do not agree, so what is the good of trying to
write down to them? And even quite intelligent people will read and
consider an account of strange defiant behaviour only if it is neither
glorified nor extenuated but put before them simply as a vitalized
statement. "Look here!" you must say, "What do you think of this?" So
long as they are interested, judging freely, and not bristling with
resentful resistance, you are doing the job. But everybody bristled at
_The Woman Who Did_.

I bristled. I was infuriated. I was the more infuriated because I was so
nearly in agreement with Grant Allen's ideas, that this hasty, headlong,
incompetent book seemed like a treason to a great cause. It was, I felt,
opening a breach to the enemy. So I slated him with care and intensity,
in this style:

     "We have endeavoured to piece this character together, and we
     cannot conceive the living woman. She is, he assures us with a
     certain pathos, a 'real woman.' But one doubts it from the outset.
     'A living proof of the doctrine of heredity' is her own idea, but
     that is scarcely the right effect of her. Mr. Grant Allen seems
     nearer the truth when he describes her as 'a solid rock of ethical
     resolution." Her solidity is witnessed to by allusions to her
     'opulent form' and the 'lissom grace of her rounded figure.' Fancy
     a girl with an 'opulent' form! Her 'face was, above all things, the
     face of a free woman,' a 'statuesque' face, and upon this Mr. Grant
     Allen has chiselled certain inappropriate 'dimples,' which mar but
     do not modify that statuesque quality. 'She was too stately of mien
     ever to grant a favour without granting it of pure grace and with a
     queenly munificence'--when Alan kissed her. She dresses in a
     'sleeveless sack embroidered with arabesques,' and such-like
     symbolic garments. So much goes to convey her visible presence. The
     reader must figure her sackful of lissom opulence and her dimpled,
     statuesque features for himself--the picture eludes us. She had a
     'silvery voice.' The physical expression of her emotions was of two
     kinds, a blush, and a 'thrill to the finger-tips.' This last phrase
     is always cropping up, though we must confess we can attach no
     meaning to it ourselves and cannot imagine Mr. Grant Allen doing
     so. Her soul is 'spotless.' Never did she do anything wrong. (And
     this is a 'real woman'!) When Alan called to see her on some
     trivial business 'she sat a lonely soul, enthroned amid the halo of
     her own perfect purity'--a curious way of receiving visitors. She
     is 'pure' and 'pellucid' and 'noble,' and so forth on every page
     almost. And at the crisis she 'would have flaunted the open
     expression of her supreme moral faith before the eyes of all
     London,' had not Alan, the father of the baby in question, with
     'virile self-assertion' restrained her.

     "Clearly this is not a human being. No more a human being than the
     women twelve hands tall of the fashion magazines. Had her author
     respected her less he might have drawn her better. Surely Mr. Grant
     Allen has lived long enough to know that real women do not have
     spotless souls and a physical beauty that is invariably
     overpowering. Real women are things of dietary and secretions, of
     subtle desires and mental intricacy; even the purest among them
     have at least beauty spots upon their souls. This monstrous
     Herminia--where did he get her? Assuredly not of observation and
     insight. She seems to us to be a kind of plaster-cast of 'Pure
     Womanhood' in a halo, with a soul of abstractions, a machine to
     carry out a purely sentimental principle to its logical conclusion.
     Alan, her lover, is a kind of ideal prig, 'a pure soul in his way,
     and mixed of the finer paste' from which the heroes of inferior
     novels are made. The Dean, her father, is the sympathetic but
     prejudiced cleric of modern comedy. The source of Ethel Waterton is
     acknowledged: she 'was a most insipid blonde from the cover of a
     chocolate-box.' Dolores, for whom Mr. Grant Allen feels least, for
     or against, is far and away the best character in the book. She is
     so, we think, for that very reason.

     "Now the book professes to be something more than an artistic
     story, true to life. It is, we are led to infer, an ethical
     discussion. But is it? The problem of marriage concerns terrestrial
     human beings, and the ingratitude of the offspring of a
     plaster-cast, though wonderful enough, bears no more on our moral
     difficulties than the incubation of Semele, or the birth of the
     Minotaur. In these problem novels at least, truth is absolutely
     essential. But to handle the relation of the sexes truly needs a
     Jean Paul Richter, or a George Meredith. It is not to be done by
     desiring.

     "And the gospel Mr. Grant Allen--who surely knows that life is one
     broad battlefield--is preaching: what is it? It is the emancipation
     of women. He does not propose to emancipate them from the
     narrowness, the sexual savagery, the want of charity, that are the
     sole causes of the miseries of the illegitimate and the
     unfortunate. Instead he wishes to emancipate them from monogamy,
     which we have hitherto regarded as being more of a fetter upon
     virile instincts. His proposal is to abolish cohabitation, to
     abolish the family--that school of all human gentleness--and to
     provide support for women who may have children at the expense of
     the State. We are all to be foundlings together, and it will be an
     inquisitive child who knows its own father. Now Mr. Grant Allen
     must know perfectly well that amorous desires and the desire to
     bear children are anything but overpowering impulses in many of the
     very noblest women. The women, who would inevitably have numerous
     children under the conditions he hopes for, would be the
     hysterically erotic, the sexually incontinent. _Why_ he should make
     proposals to cultivate humanity in this direction is not apparent.
     We find fine handsome sayings about Truth and Freedom, but any
     establishment for his proposition a reviewer much in sympathy with
     him on many of his opinions fails altogether to discover in his
     book. A fellowship of two based on cohabitation and protected by
     jealousy, with or without the marriage ceremony, seems as much the
     natural destiny of the average man as of the eagle or the tiger.

     "And we have a quarrel, too, with the style of the book. Had Mr.
     Grant Allen really cared, as he intimates he cared, for truth and
     beauty, had he really loved this Herminia of his creation, would he
     have put her forth in such style as he has done? 'Ordinary,'
     'stereotyped,' 'sordid,' 'ignoble,' are among the adjectives he
     applies to the respectable villadom he identifies with the English
     people. Yet every one of them fits the workmanship he has
     considered worthy of his heroine."

And so on. Twenty years later I was, by the bye, to find myself in a
position almost parallel to that of Grant Allen with my _Passionate
Friends_, which in its turn was slated furiously and in much the same
spirit by the younger generation in the person of Rebecca West. But I
have never been able to persuade myself that I deserved that trouncing
quite as much as Grant Allen merited his.

He behaved charmingly. He wrote me a very pleasant invitation to come
and talk to him and I ran down by train one Sunday, walked up from
Haslemere station and lunched with him in Hindhead. In these days
Hindhead was a lonely place in a great black, purple and golden
wilderness of heath; there was an old inn called The Huts and a score of
partly hidden houses. Tyndall had built a house there, Conan Doyle was
close by, Richard Le Gallienne occupied a cottage as tenant, motor cars
and suburbanism were still a dozen years away. Le Gallienne came in
after lunch. His sister was staying in the house with her husband, James
Welsh, the actor. We sat about in deck chairs through a long sunny
summer afternoon under the pines in the garden on the edge of the
Devil's Punch Bowl.

Across the interval of years I do not recall that wandering conversation
with any precision. Probably we talked a lot about writing and getting
on in the world of books. I was a new and aggressive beginner in that
world and I was being welcomed very generously. And also I suppose we
must have talked of the subject of _The Woman Who Did_ and its related
issues. Grant Allen and I were in the tradition of Godwin and Shelley.
Its trend was to force a high heroic independence on women--even on
quite young women. But Grant Allen who had something in him--I will not
say like a Faun or a Satyr, but rather like the earnest Uncle of these
woodland folk, was all for the girls showing spirit. I was rather
enwrapped then in my private situation. Le Gallienne was an Amorist and
he trailed a flavour of Swinburne and Renascence Italy--Browning's
Renascence Italy, across our talk.

When history is properly written, it will be interesting to trace the
Amorist through the ages. There have been phases when the Amorist has
dominated manners and costume and decoration and phases when he has been
rather shamefaced and occasional in the twilight and the bushes and the
staircase to the ballroom. The Amorist just then was in the ascendant
phase, and Richard Le Gallienne was the chief of our Amorists. He was
busy then with prose fancies in which roses and raptures and restaurants
were very attractively combined, and he was inciting the youth of our
period to set out upon the Quest of the Golden Girl. He was long and
slender with a handsome white half-feminine face, expressive hands and a
vast shock of black hair. I found him an entertaining contrast to myself
and we got on very well together until suddenly he went out of the
literary world of London to America.

I add three other picshuas from the Woking period here. They will amuse
some readers. Others will find them detestable, but after all, this is
my autobiography. One records a horticultural triumph not uncommon in
suburban gardens. The other two are vain-glorious to the ultimate
degree. The last of the three reeks with the "shop" of authorship; one
observes also the pride of Jane, the author's family in a state of
wonder, the envious hostile reviewer with a forked tail, press cutting
(from Romeike), much sordid exultation about royalties and cheques. But
we were very young still, we had had a hard and risky time and it was
exciting to succeed.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.

The Author's Syndicate.

14th March 1896

Dear Mr. Wells,

Mr. Pearson is anxious to see the remainder of your story "The War of
the Worlds" as soon as possible. As far as he has read he likes it very
much, but says that a great deal depends on the finish of the story. I
shall be glad If you will let me know when you think you can send me the
remainder.

Faithfully yours,]

[Illustration]


 3

_Heatherlea, Worcester Park (1896-97)_

I think I have sufficiently conveyed now the flavour of my new way of
life and I will not go with any great particularity into the details of
my history after we had moved to Worcester Park. I will trust a few
picshuas to carry on the tale. This Worcester Park house had two fairly
big rooms downstairs, a visitor's room and a reasonably large garden and
we started a practice of keeping open house on Saturday afternoons which
improved our knowledge of the many new friends we were making. Among
others who stayed with us was Dorothy Richardson, a schoolmate of
Jane's. Dorothy has a very distinctive literary gift, acute intensity of
expression and an astonishingly vivid memory; her "_Pilgrimage_" books
are a very curious essay in autobiography; they still lack their due
meed of general appreciation; and in one of them, _The Tunnel_, she has
described our Worcester Park life with astonishing accuracy. I figure as
Hypo in that description and Jane is Alma.

The first picshua here shows our daily routine and our domestic humour
in full swing. This is documentary evidence of Jane's participation in
my early work and of the punishments and discipline alleged to prevail
during the writing of _When the Sleeper Awakes_ and _Love and Mr.
Lewisham_. The next records my return to the _Fortnightly Review_ and
what I think must have been a dinner at the _New Vagabonds Club_ at
which I seem to have been the guest of honour. The third records details
of this glorious occasion. The waiter seems to have missed me for ice
pudding; the figures who bow before Jane are J. K. Jerome, Sidney Low,
Douglas Sladen and Kenneth Grahame (of the immortal _Wind in the
Willows_). Vain-glory is again offensively evident.

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

[Illustration: Hand-written note with drawings.]

The next picshua records our industry in our Heatherlea garden under the
direction of our jobbing gardener (one day a week) Mr. Tilbury. The date
of this particular picshua, as the small figure in the corner indicates,
was the day of publication of the _Invisible Man_, a tale, that thanks
largely to the excellent film recently produced by James Whale, is still
read as much as ever it was. To many young people nowadays I am just the
author of the _Invisible Man_. The writing on Jane's foot, by the bye,
is "gloshers," which is so to speak, idiotic for galosh. But why I wrote
that word in that fashion, is--like the mating cry of the pterodactyl
and the hunting habits of the labyrinthodon, lost in the mist of the
past.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

Next comes a picshua full of self-congratulations. "The improvement of a
certain person's mind" has been resumed. Jane made a brief attempt to
take up her B.Sc. degree work again, but that was presently abandoned.
The shelf of our books is filling up. At an Omar Khayyam dinner I had
met George Gissing and he was very anxious for us to go with him to
Italy in the spring. We study a guide to Italy.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

The next picshua shows the Italian project maturing. Jane was still far
from strong and she had been ordered an iron tonic. We brace ourselves
to face the danger of malaria and austerities of a Roman breakfast.
Neither of us had ever been across the channel before; Jane had some
French and German, but my knowledge of languages was limited to the
decaying remains of my swift matriculation cramming of exceptions. All
that had been written work and I did not so much pronounce as block out
rude masses of misconceived sound. "Abroad" was a slightly terrifying
world of adventure for us. And we were not going to just nibble at the
continent. We were going straight through, at one bite, to Rome.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

We did go to Rome in the spring of 1898. We spent a month there with
Gissing and then went on by ourselves to Naples, Capri, Pompeii, Amalfi
and Paestum. Capri and Paestum cropped up a little later in a short
story, _A Vision of Armageddon_. We acquired a traveller's smattering of
Italian, a number of photographs, some glowing memories and brighter
ideas about diet and wine. We returned by way of Switzerland and Ostend.
The uneasy social life of nineteenth century Europe was in a phase of
inflammation. In Naples people were rioting for "Pane e Lavoro!" and in
the square outside our hotel in Brussels there was a demonstration, and
the crowd was singing the Marseillaise and fired a revolver or so.

George Gissing was a strange tragic figure, a figure of internal
tragedy, and it is only slowly that I have realized the complex of his
misfortunes. There is a novel about him by Morley Roberts _The Private
Life of Henry Maitland_ (1912) which tells the substance of his tale
with considerable inaccuracy, and there is an admirable study of his
life and work by Frank Swinnerton, so good that it would be officious
and impertinent for me to parallel it, however briefly, here. The
portrait by Sir William Rothenstein which figures in Swinnerton's book
could hardly be bettered. I had read and admired Gissing's _In the Year
of Jubilee_ and his _New Grub Street_ before I met him and I began our
first conversation by remarking upon the coincidence that Reardon, in
the latter book, lived like myself as a struggling writer in Mornington
Road with a wife named Amy. This was at an Omar Khayyam dinner whither I
had gone as the guest of either Grant Allen or Edmund Clodd (I forget
which). Gissing was then an extremely good-looking, well-built man,
slightly on the lean side, blond, with a good profile and a splendid
leonine head; his appearance betraying little then of the poison that
had crept into his blood to distress, depress and undermine his vitality
and at last to destroy him. He spoke in a rotund Johnsonian manner, but
what he had to say was reasonable and friendly. I asked him to come over
to us at Worcester Park and his visit was the beginning of a long
intimacy.

He talked very much of ill health and I tried to make him a cyclist,
for he took no exercise at all except walking, and I thought it might be
pleasant to explore Surrey and Sussex with him, but he was far too
nervous and excitable to ride. It was curious to see this well-built
Viking, blowing and funking as he hopped behind his machine. "Get on to
your ironmongery," said I. He mounted, wabbled a few yards, and fell off
shrieking with laughter. "Iron-mongery!" he gasped. "Oh! riding on
ironmongery!" and lay in the grass at the roadside, helpless with mirth.
He loved laughter and that was a great link between us--I liked to
explode him with some slight twist of phrase. He could be very easily
surprised and shocked to mirth, because he had a scholar's disposition
to avoid novel constructions and unusual applications of words. In the
summer of 1897, Jane and I spent some weeks or so at Budleigh Salterton
near to a lodging he had taken and then it was that our daring adventure
"abroad" was conceived.

I knew nothing in those days of his early life, of how in his precocious
teens he had wrecked his career as a scholar by a liaison with a young
street-walker, a liaison which had led to some difficulties about money
and a police court. Friends appeared to rescue him but nobody seems to
have troubled about her. He was sent to America for a fresh start and
the effect of a fresh start under conditions of sexual deprivation in
Boston, had been to send him in flight to Chicago and then bring him
back in a recoil to England, to hunt out and marry his mistress. They
lived dismally in lodgings while he tried to write great novels. For her
it was an intolerable life. She left him and died in hospital.

Clearly there was for him something about this woman, of which no record
remains, some charm, some illusion or at any rate some specific
attraction, for which he never had words. She was his Primary Fixation.
For him she had been Woman. All this was past, but he had created a new
situation for himself by picking up a servant girl in Regents Park one
Sunday afternoon and marrying her. Told thus baldly the thing is almost
incredible, and an analysis of his motives here would take an
extravagant amount of space. His home training had made him repressive
to the explosive pitch; he felt that to make love to any woman he could
regard as a social equal would be too elaborate, restrained and tedious
for his urgencies, he could not answer questions he supposed he would be
asked about his health and means, and so, for the second time, he flung
himself at a social inferior whom he expected to be easy and grateful.
This second marriage was also a failure; failure was inevitable; the new
wife became a resentful, jealous scold. But we never saw her and I
cannot judge between them. To us Gissing was just himself. "I cannot ask
you to my home," he said. "Impossible--quite impossible. Oh quite
impossible. I have to dismiss any such ideas. I have no home."

He did not always keep such ideas dismissed, but for the most part they
were out of the picture. He kept his own family also, the custodians of
those strangling early standards, out of our way, just as he kept his
wife out of our way. He was terrified at the prospect of
incompatibility. His sensitiveness to reactions made every relationship
a pose, and he had no natural customary _persona_ for miscellaneous use.

The Gissing I knew, therefore, was essentially a specially posed
mentality, a personal response, and his effect upon me was an
extraordinary blend of a damaged joy-loving human being hampered by
inherited gentility and a classical education. He craved to laugh, jest,
enjoy, stride along against the wind, shout, "quaff mighty flagons." But
his upbringing behind the chemist's shop in Wakefield had been one of
repressive gentility, where "what will the neighbours _think_ of us?"
was more terrible than the thunder of God. The insanity of our
educational organization had planted down in that Yorkshire town, a
grammar school dominated by the idea of classical scholarship. The head
was an enthusiastic pedant who poured into that fresh and vigorous young
brain nothing but classics and a "scorn" for non-classical things.
Gissing's imagination, therefore escaped from the cramping gentilities
and respectability of home to find its compensations in the rhetorical
swagger, the rotundities and the pompous grossness of Rome. He walked
about Wakefield in love with goddesses and nymphs and excited by ideas
of patrician freedoms in a world of untouchable women. Classics men
according to their natures are all either "Latins" or "Hellenes."
Gissing was a Latin, oratorical and not scientific, unanalytical,
unsubtle and secretly haughty. He accepted and identified himself with
all the pretensions of Rome's triumphal arches.

His knowledge of classical Rome was extraordinarily full. We found him,
there, an unsparing enthusiastic guide. With a sort of a shamed
hostility indeed he recognized the vestiges of mediaevalism and the
Renascence that cumbered the spectacle. But that was just a subsequent
defilement, like mud on the marble of a submerged palace. At the back of
his mind, a splendid Olympus to our Roman excursions, stood noble
senators in togas, marvellous matrons like Lucrece, gladiators proud to
die, Horatiuses ready to leap into gulfs _pro patria_, the finest fruit
of humanity, unjudged, accepted, speaking like epitaphs and epics, and
by these standards also he measured the mundane swarm he pictured _In
the Year of Jubilee_. For that thin yet penetrating juice of shrewd
humour, of kindly stoicisms, of ready trustfulness, of fitful
indignations and fantastic and often grotesque generosities, which this
dear London life of ours exudes, he had no palate. I have never been
able to decide how much that defect of taste was innate or how far it
was a consequence partly of the timid pretentiousness of his home
circumstances, and partly of that pompous grammatical training to which
his brain was subjected just in his formative years. I favour the latter
alternative. I favour it because of his ready abundant fits of laughter.
You do not get laughter without release, and you must have something
suppressed to release. "Preposterous!" was a favourite word with him. He
told me once of how he was awakened at three in the morning in a London
hotel by a clatter of milk cans under his window. He lay in bed helpless
with laughter that civilization should produce this marvel of a chamber
designed for sleeping, just over a yard where the rattling of milk cans
was an inevitable nightly event.

At the back of my mind I thought him horribly mis-educated and he hardly
troubled to hide from me his opinion that I was absolutely illiterate.
Each of us had his secret amusement in the other's company. He knew the
Greek epics and plays to a level of frequent quotation but I think he
took his classical philosophers as read and their finality for granted;
he assumed that modern science and thought were merely degenerate
recapitulations of their lofty and inaccessible wisdom. The transforming
forces of the world about us he ascribed to a certain rather regrettable
"mechanical ingenuity" in our people. He thought that a classical
scholar need only turn over a few books to master all that scientific
work and modern philosophy had made of the world, and it did not
disillusion him in the least that he had no mastery of himself or any
living fact in existence. He was entirely enclosed in a defensive
phraseology and a conscious "scorn" of the "baser" orders and "ignoble"
types. When he laughed he called the world "Preposterous," but when he
could not break through to reality and laughter then his word was
"Sordid." That readiness to call common people "base" "sordid" "mean,"
"the vulgar sort" and so forth was less evident in the man's nature than
in his writings. Some of his books will be read for many generations,
but because of this warping of his mind they will find fewer lovers than
readers. In Swinnerton's book one can see that kindly writer starting
out with a real admiration and sympathy for his subject and gradually
being estranged by the injustice, the faint cruelty of this mannered
ungraciousness towards disadvantaged people.

Through Gissing I was confirmed in my suspicion that this orthodox
classical training which was once so powerful an antiseptic against
Egyptian dogma and natural superstitions, is now no longer a city of
refuge from barbaric predispositions. It has become a vast collection of
monumental masonry, a pale cemetery in a twilight, through which new
conceptions hurry apologetically on their way to town, finding neither
home nor sustenance there. It is a cemetery, which like that churchyard
behind Atlas House, Bromley, can give little to life but a certain
sparkle in the water and breed nothing any more but ghosts, _ignes
fatui_ and infections. It has ceased to be a field of education and
become a proper hunting ground for the archologist and social
psychologist.

So, full of friendly antagonisms, Gissing, Jane and I went about Rome
together, our brains reacting and exchanging very abundantly. It was
Rome before the mischiefs of Mayor Nathan, before the vast vulgarity of
the Vittorio Emmanuele monument had ruined the Piazza Venezia, and when
the only main thoroughfare was the Corso. The Etruscan tombs still slept
undiscovered in the Forum and instead of Boni's flower beds there were
weeds and wild flowers. Walking through some fields near Tivoli the
_Story of Miss Winchelsea's Heart_ came into my head--and I remember
telling it to Gissing.

Gissing, like Gibbon, regarded Christianity as a deplorable disaster for
the proud gentilities of classicism and left us to "do" the Vatican and
St. Peter's by ourselves. In many of the darkened, incense-saturated
churches, I felt old Egypt and its mysteries still living and muttering,
but the papal city and its swarming pilgrims, its libraries and
galleries, its observatory, its Renascence architecture, filled me with
perplexing impressions. Much more than pomp, tradition and decay was
manifest in these activities. The Scarlet Woman of my youthful
prejudices was not in evidence. Protestantism, I perceived, had not done
justice to Renascence Rome.

Here, quite plainly, was a great mental system engaged in a vital effort
to comprehend its expanding universe and sustain a co-ordinating
conception of human activities. That easy word "superstition" did not
cover a tithe of it.

It dawned upon me that there had been a Catholic Reformation as drastic
as and perhaps profounder than the Protestant Reformation, and that the
mentality of clerical Rome, instead of being an unchanged system _in
saecula saeculorum_ had been stirred to its foundations at that time and
was still struggling--like everything else alive--in the grip of
adaptive necessity. In spite of my anti-Christian bias I found
something congenial in the far flung cosmopolitanism of the Catholic
proposition. Notwithstanding its synthesis of decaying ancient
theologies and its strong taint of other-worldishness, the Catholic
Church continues to be, in its own half-hearted fashion, an Open
Conspiracy to reorganize the whole life of man. If the papal system had
achieved the ambitions of its most vigorous period, it would have been
much more in the nature of that competent receiver for human affairs,
the research for which has occupied my mind so largely throughout my
life, than that planless Providentialism which characterized almost all
the political and social thought of the nineteenth century. Catholicism
is something greater in scope and spirit than any nationalist
protestantism and immeasurably above such loutish reversions to hate as
Hitlerism or the Ku-Klux-Klan. I should even hesitate to call it
"reactionary" without some qualification.

I have lived for many years in open controversy with Catholicism and
though, naturally enough, I have sometimes been insulted by indignant
zealots, I have found the ordinary Catholic controversialist a fair
fighter and a civilized man--worthy of that great cultural system within
which such minds as Leonardo and Michelangelo could develop and find
expression. He has an antiquated realist philosophy which too often
gives him a sort of pert hardness, but that is another matter. It is a
question too fine for me to discuss whether I am an outright atheist or
an extreme heretic on the furthest verge of Christendom--beyond the
Arians, beyond the Manichaeans. But certainly I branch from the Catholic
stem.

Let me however return from this Vatican excursion to George Gissing.
That disposition to get away from entangling conditions which is
manifest in almost every type of imaginative worker, accumulated in his
case to quite desperate fugitive drives. In Italy with us he was in
flight from his second wife. The dreadful intimacy of that isolated life
at Ewell, without a thought in common, an intimacy of perpetual
recrimination, had become intolerable. A well-known educationist, a
woman who had evidently a very great admiration for Gissing, had
proposed to take in Mrs. Gissing and the children and try to establish
tolerable relations with her, to "educate" her in fact, while Gissing
recovered his mental peace in his beloved Italy. But the experiment was
not working well; the helpful lady was meddling with things beyond her
experience and the poor wife, perplexed and indignant beyond measure by
this strange man who had possessed himself of her life, was progressing
through scenes and screams towards a complete mental breakdown; she was
behaving very badly indeed, and letters would arrive at the Hotel
Aliberti in Rome, that left Gissing white and shaking between anger and
dismay for the better part of a day. The best thing then was to go off
with him outside Rome to some wayside albergo, to the Milvian bridge, or
towards Tivoli or along the Appian Way, drink rough red wine, get him
talking Italian to peasants, launch out upon wild social, historical and
ethnological discussions, and gradually push the gnawing trouble into
the background again.

This poor vexed brain--so competent for learning and aesthetic
reception, so incompetent, so impulsive and weakly yielding under the
real stresses of life--went on from us into Calabria and produced there
_By the Ionian Sea_ and, later on, after returning to England, _The
Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_. The interest of these books, with
their halting effort to pose as a cultivated leisurely eighteenth
century intelligence, is, I think, greatly intensified by the
realization that beneath the struggle to sustain that _persona_, the
pitiless hunt of consequences, the pursuit of the monstrous penalties
exacted for a false start and a foolish and inconsiderate decision or
so, was incessant. Perhaps Gissing was made to be hunted by Fate. He
never turned and fought. He always hid or fled.

Presently we were back at Worcester Park and he was established with a
"worthy housekeeper," a cook general in fact, in a cottage in Dorking.
The wife was still being hushed up by the friend in London and did not
know of his whereabouts. He was intensely solitary and miserable at
Dorking. One day he came to us with a request. There was a proposal from
a Frenchwoman to translate his novels into French. He wished to confer
with her. Impossible for a lone man to entertain a strange lady at
Dorking; would we arrange a meeting?

They lunched with us and afterwards they walked in our garden
confabulating. She was a woman of the intellectual bourgeoisie, with
neat black hair and a trim black dress, her voice was carefully musical,
she was well read, slightly voluble and over-explicit by our English
standards, and consciously refined and intelligent. To Gissing she came
as the first breath of Continental recognition, and she seemed to embody
all those possibilities of fine intercourse and one-sided understanding
for which he was craving. For Gissing carried the normal expectancy of
the male, which I have already dealt with in my own dissection, to an
extravagant degree. Never did a man need mothering more and never was
there a less sacrificial lover.

Presently we learnt from a chance remark that the lady had visited him
one day at Dorking. She had become "Thrse." He made no further
confidences. Then he broke up his Dorking establishment and left for
Switzerland, where he was joined by Thrse and her mother. He confided
that there was to be a joint mnage and to ease things with the French
relations, the mother carried the relationship so far towards a
pseudo-marriage as to circulate cards with the surname of Thrse erased
in favour of "Gissing." All this had, of course, to be carried out with
absolute secrecy towards his actual wife and most of his English
friends. Those of us who knew, thought that if he could be put into such
circumstances as would at last give his very fine brain a fair chance to
do good work, connivance in so petty a deception was a negligible price
to pay.

Presently he published a novel called _The Crown of Life_. It is the
very poorest of his novels but it is illuminating as regards himself.
The "crown of life" was love--in a frock coat. This was what Gissing
thought of love or at any rate it was as much as he dared to think of
love. But after all, we argued, something of the sort had to happen and
now perhaps he would write that great romance of the days of
Cassiodorus.

But things did not work out as we hoped. When, a year or so later, Jane
and I, returning from an excursion to Switzerland, visited him in
Paris, we found him in a state of profound discontent. The apartment was
bleakly elegant in the polished French way. He was doing no effective
work, he was thin and ailing, and he complained bitterly that his pseudo
mother-in-law, who was in complete control of his domestic affairs, was
starving him. The sight of us stirred him to an unwonted Anglo-mania, a
stomachic nostalgia, and presently he fled to us in England. An old
school friend of his, Henry Hick, a New Romney doctor, of whom I shall
have a word or so to say later, came over to look at him, and declared
he was indeed starved, and Jane set to work and fed him up--weighing him
carefully at regular intervals--with marvellous results.

I was glad to have him in our house, but it carried a penalty. For
suddenly Thrse began to write me long, long, wonderfully phrased
letters--on thin paper and crossed--informing me that she could not
bring herself to write to him directly and demanding my intervention. I
had still to realize the peculiar Latin capacity for making copious
infusions of simple situations. Presently when Gissing went off for some
days to Hick, he too began to write at Thrse to me--long letters in
his small fine handwriting.

But I was busy upon work of my own and after one or two rather hasty
attempts at diplomacy I brutalized the situation. I declared that the
best thing for Gissing to do would be to decide never to return to
France, since there was an evident incompatibility of appetite between
him and the lady, or alternatively if there was any sort of living
affection still between them, which I doubted, he must stipulate as a
condition of his return that the catering should be taken out of the
hands of the mother and put in those of the daughter under his own
direction, and finally I announced that in no circumstances would I read
through, much less paraphrase, consider or answer any further letters
from Thrse. Whatever she wrote to me, I should send to him for him to
deal with directly. And with that I washed my hands of their immediate
troubles.

He went back to her on the terms I had suggested, so I suppose there was
still some sort of tenderness between them. Then these three poor
troubled things full of the spirit of mute recrimination, perplexed and
baffled by each other's differences, went down to a furnished house at
St. Jean-de-Luz and, afterwards, to St. Jean-Pied-de-Port in the
mountains above, and there he set to work writing what was to have been,
what might have been under happier circumstances, a great historical
picture of Italy under the Gothic kings, _Veranilda_. He had had this
book in mind almost all the time I had known him. He had been reading
Cassiodorus for it in 1898. Towards Christmas 1903 some of Thrse's
relations came to visit them. On some excursion with them he caught a
cold, which settled on his chest. Neither Thrse nor her mother was the
nursing type of woman. A sudden hatred seized him of the comfortless
house he was in, of the misty mountain village, of economized French
food and everything about him and a sudden fear fell upon him of the
crackling trouble in his lungs and the fever that was gathering in his
veins. He had been writing with deepening distress to Morley Roberts in
November. Just on the eve of Christmas came telegrams to both of us:
"George is dying. Entreat you to come. In greatest haste."

I had private bothers of my own and I was supposed to be nursing a cold,
but as Roberts did not seem to be available and made no reply to a
telegram I sent him, I decided to go. It was Christmas Eve. I had no
time to change out of my garden clothes and I threw some things into a
handbag and went off in a fly to Folkestone Pier to catch the afternoon
boat. I made my Christmas dinner of ham at Bayonne station.

I found the house a cheerless one. I saw nothing, or at least I remember
seeing nothing of Thrse's mother; I think she had retired to her own
room. Thrse was in a state of distress and I thought her extremely
incompetent. The visitors were still visiting but I insisted upon their
departure. There was however a good little Anglican parson about, with
his wife, and they helped me to get in a nurse (or rather a
"religieuse," which is by no means the same thing) and made some
beef-tea before they departed for their home in St. Jean-de-Luz.

Gissing was dying of double pneumonia and quite delirious all the time
I was there. There was no ice available and his chest had to be kept
cool by continually dipping handkerchiefs in methylated spirit and
putting them on him. Also his mouth was slimy and needed constant
wiping. I kept by him, nursing him until far into the small hours while
the weary religieuse recuperated, dozing by the fire. Then I found my
way back to my inn at the other end of the place through a thick fog.
St. Jean-Pied-de-Port is a lonely frontier town and at night its
deserted streets abound in howling great dogs to whom the belated
wayfarer is an occasion for the fiercest demonstrations. I felt like a
flitting soul hurrying past Anubis and hesitating at strange misleading
turnings on the lonely Pathway of the Dead. I forget every detail of the
inn but I still remember that sick-room acutely.

It is one of the many oddities of my sheltered life that until the death
of Gissing I had never watched a brain passing through disorganization
into a final stillness. I had never yet seen anyone dying or delirious.
I had expected to find him enfeebled and anxious and I had already
planned how we could get a civil list pension from Mr. Balfour, to
educate his boys and how I would tell him of that and what other
reassurances I might give him. But Gissing aflame with fever had dropped
all these anxieties out of his mind. Only once did the old Gissing
reappear for a moment, when abruptly he entreated me to take him back to
England. For the rest of the time this gaunt, dishevelled, unshaven,
flushed, bright-eyed being who sat up in bed and gestured weakly with
his lean hand, was exalted. He had passed over altogether into that
fantastic pseudo-Roman world of which Wakefield Grammar School had laid
the foundations.

"What are these magnificent beings!" he would say. "Who are these
magnificent beings advancing upon us?" Or again, "What is all this
splendour? What does it portend?" He babbled in Latin; he chanted
fragments of Gregorian music. All the accumulation of material that he
had made for _Veranilda_ and more also, was hurrying faster and brighter
across the mirrors of his brain before the lights went out for ever.

The Anglican chaplain, whose wife had helped with the beef-tea, heard of
that chanting. He allowed his impression to develop in his memory and it
was proclaimed later in a newspaper that Gissing had died "in the fear
of God's holy name, and with the comfort and strength of the Catholic
faith." This led to some bitter recriminations. Edward Clodd and Morley
Roberts were particularly enraged at this "body-snatching" as they
called it, and among other verbal missiles that hit that kindly little
man in the full publicity of print were "crow," "vulture" and
"ecclesiastical buzzard." But he did not deserve to be called such
names. He did quite honestly think Gissing's "Te Deums" had some sort of
spiritual significance.

Another distressful human being in the sick chamber that night was
Thrse. I treated her harshly. She annoyed me because I found a
handkerchief was being used to wipe his mouth that had been dipped in
methylated spirit, and her thrifty soul resisted me when I demanded
every clean handkerchief he possessed. Her sense of proportion was
inadequate and her need for sympathy untimely. As I was hurrying across
the room to do him some small service, I found her in my way. She
clasped her hands and spoke in her beautifully modulated voice. "Figure
to yourself Mr. Wells, what it must mean to me, to see my poor Georges
like this!"

I restrained myself by an effort. "You are tired out," I said. "You must
go to bed. He will be safe now with the nurse and me."

And I put her gently but firmly out of the room....

So ended all that flimsy inordinate stir of grey matter that was George
Gissing. He was a pessimistic writer. He spent his big fine brain
depreciating life, because he would not and perhaps could not look life
squarely in the eyes,--neither his circumstances nor the conventions
about him nor the adverse things about him nor the limitations of his
personal character. But whether it was nature or education that made
this tragedy I cannot tell.


 4

_New Romney and Sandgate (1898)_

I came back from Italy to Worcester Park in the summer of 1898, on the
verge of the last bout of illness in my life before my health cleared
up, quite unaware of the collapse that hung over me. I ascribed a
general sense of malaise, an inability to stick to my work--I was then
writing _Love and Mr. Lewisham_--to want of exercise and so the greater
my lassitude the more I forced myself to exertion. What was happening
was a sort of break-up of the scars and old clotted accumulations about
my crushed kidney, and nothing could have been worse for me than to
start, as we did, upon a cycling journey to the south coast. I was
ashamed of my bodily discomfort--until I was over forty the sense of
physical inferiority was a constant acute distress to me which no
philosophy could mitigate--and I plugged along with a head that seemed
filled with wool and a skin that felt like a misfit. Somewhere on the
road I caught a cold.

We struggled to Lewes and then on to Seaford. We decided I must really
be overdoing this exercise and we went into lodgings for a rest. All
this is brought back to me by the hieroglyphics of the picshuas. Here
under date of July 29th is one of them. Our sitting-room was evidently
furnished with unrestrained piety. We were physically unhappy and our
discomfort breaks out in hatred of our fellow visitors to Seaford. Jane
has complained that she is dull. Some forgotten joke about a hat is
traceable; I fancy I may have used her hat as a waste-paper basket; and
noises (buniks) upstairs are afflicting me. By way of rest I am
struggling to complete _Love and Mr. Lewisham_. Whenever I felt ill I
became urgent to finish whatever book I was working on, because while a
book unfinished would have been worth nothing, a finished book now meant
several hundred pounds. Before going to Rome I had already scamped the
finish of _When the Sleeper Wakes_ (which afterwards I rechristened in
better English _When the Sleeper Awakes_) and I came near to scamping
_Love and Mr. Lewisham_. But the suppuration that was going on in my now
aching side, was too rapid to allow that. _Love and Mr. Lewisham_ was
finished with much care and elaboration some months later. My erring
kidney began apparently to secrete ink. Jane, after brooding over my
condition, was struck by an idea and went out and bought a clinical
thermometer. We found my temperature had mounted to 102 F.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

We had no established doctor but I had met a friend of Gissing's, Henry
Hick, who was medical officer of health for Romney Marsh and who had
asked us to stay a night with him in the course of our cycling tour. New
Romney seemed close at hand, we exchanged telegrams and I went to him at
once by little cross country lines and several changes of train. I was
now in considerable pain, the jolting carriages seemed malignantly
uncomfortable, I suffered from intense thirst, I could get nothing to
drink and the journey was interminable. With an unfaltering gentleness
and no sign of dismay, Jane steered this peevish bundle of suffering
that had once been her "Mr. Binder" to its destination. Hick was a good
man at diagnosis and he did me well. An operation seemed indicated and
he put me to bed and starved me down to make the trouble more accessible
to the scalpel, but when the surgeon came from London it was decided
that the offending kidney had practically taken itself off and that
there was nothing left to remove. Thereupon I began to recover and after
a few years of interrogative suspense and occasional pain not even a
reminiscent twinge remained of my left kidney.

I find the picshuas resume after a couple of months. Before October I
did some little drawings as I lay in bed, and amused myself by colouring
them and these I think prevented the immediate resumption of the picshua
diary. Mrs. Hick had just presented the world with a daughter; I became
her godfather and began an elaborate illustrated story dedicated to this
young lady called _The Story of Tommy and the Elephant_. This little
book was preserved, and years afterwards when my god-daughter needed
some money to set up as a medical practitioner she sold it and the
copyright with my assent, and it was published in facsimile. It had an
artless quaintness that pleased people and it did well and still sells
as a Christmas present book.

On October 5th the picshuas testify that I hatched out a new project
called _Kipps_, and completed _Love and Mr. Lewisham_. By this time I
had left Hick's helpful home and was, in a rather invalidish fashion,
taking up my work again. I had been driven in a comfortable carriage to
Sandgate and after a week or so in a boarding house we had installed
ourselves in a little furnished house called Beach Cottage. Hick did not
think it advisable for me to go back to Worcester Park and I never
entered that house again.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

On October 8th there seems to have been a bout of drawing to put all the
momentous events of the previous two months on record. The picshuas
recall a score of particulars that I should otherwise have forgotten
completely. I am reminded of a "horrid medicine," and that I began to
drink Contrexeville water, and there is a vivid rendering of Jane's
dismay at a possible operation, while Hick and the specialist discuss my
case. I think that Jane looking at the knife and saying "Wow" marks one
of the high points of my peculiar artistic method. I assume my first
dressing gown, I get up, leaning heavily on Jane, I gambol (galumph) to
her great alarm, and she takes me out to the sea front in a bath chair.
Then as my strength returns and I can run alone, Jane takes to sea
bathing (in a costume that "dates") and I buy a new cotton hat--"not a
halo this time after all."

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

The next drawing records merely the interruption of a picnic by
intrusive cows during the period of recovery. Jane was never afraid of
death, I have seen her twice when she thought she would be killed and
she was quite steady, but she was town bred and she did not like cows.
She distrusted these kind fragrant animals.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

The next picshua records that we amused ourselves by shooting with an
air gun, and then there began the serious business of finding a new
home. According to the best advice available, a long period of
invalidism was before me. I had to reconcile myself to complete exile
from London, and contrive to live in dry air with no damp in the subsoil
and in as much sunshine as possible.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

Beach Cottage was a temporary refuge and so close to the sea that in
rough weather the waves broke over the roof. Jane planted me there and
then went off to pack up the furniture in Heatherlea and bring it down
to an unfurnished house, Arnold House, into which we presently moved on
a short lease, until we could find something better suited to our needs.
That was difficult. Already in the picshuas given we are manifestly
thinking of having to build a house and at last we decided to set about
that adventure. I have already given a picshua of our removal from Beach
Cottage to Arnold House in  3 of Chapter Seven.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

A queer little incident in my illness which it would be ungrateful to
omit, was the sudden appearance of Henry James and Edmund Gosse at New
Romney, riding upon bicycles from the direction of Rye. They took tea
with Dr. Hick and us and were very charming and friendly, and Jane and I
were greatly flattered by their visit. It never dawned upon me that they
had any but sociable motives in coming over to see me. And later on,
when I was in Beach Cottage, J. M. Barrie came in to see me. I gathered
he had taken it into his head to spend a day at the seaside and visit
me. (There is a picshua in  3 of Chapter Seven commemorating his
visit.) Barrie talked slowly and wisely of this and that, but
particularly of his early struggles and the difficulties of young
writers. There were times when a little help might do much for a man who
was down. It never entered my head that I myself might be considered
"down" just then, and I argued the matter with him. Once a man borrowed
or was subsidized, I said, the "go" went out of his work. It was a
dangerous and perhaps a fatal thing to deprive a man's cheques of the
sharp freshness of an unencumbered gain. "Perhaps you're right,"
meditated Barrie, and went on after a pause to tell of how when he first
came to London he did not understand the nature of a cheque. "I just put
them in a drawer and waited for the fellow to send me the real money,"
he said. "I didn't see the sense of them."

He helped himself to a buttered bun. "When first I came to London," he
remarked, "I lived almost entirely on boons...."

The experience of later years has made me realize that in this way the
Royal Literary Fund was making its enquiries about me, and that I was
not so completely outside the range of assistance as I imagined. But I
never had any assistance of that kind and at that time I did not want
it. I was now some hundreds of pounds on the solvent side and thinking
of building a house with my balance. I knew nothing of investment and
having a house of my own seemed as good a use for savings as I could
imagine.


 5

_Edifying Encounters. Some Types of Persona and Temperamental Attitude
(1897-1910)_

I had a three years' agreement for Arnold House and I stayed out my full
time in it, gradually rebuilding my overstrained body and recovering
resisting power to colds and suchlike infections. It was a semi-detached
villa and it had a long narrow strip of grass which ended in a hedge of
tamarisk along the sea wall. Upon the beach one day the _Sea Lady_
appeared, very lovely in a close fitting bathing dress and with the
sunlight in her hair, and took possession of my writing desk.

Our next door neighbours were a very pleasant couple named Popham, small
rentiers with cultivated tastes who read well and thought of doing
something to mend the world. They were the children of that serious
Nonconformity which founded so many sound businesses in the mid
Victorian epoch, turned them into honest joint-stock companies and left
its children just independent enough to travel, trifle with the Arts and
supply the backbone of the new British intelligentsia. The Pophams were
always handy to play with. They taught me to swim, so far as I have ever
learnt to swim, we moored a raft twenty or thirty yards from shore and I
struggled out to it, and I found Popham as good a companion as Bowkett
for long bicycle rides into Kent. Mrs. Popham was a sister-in-law of
Graham Wallas whom I had already heard speaking in the old days in
William Morris's greenhouse meetings. Presently he came down to Sandgate
with his wife and we found we had a lot to talk about together.

Wallas was a rather slovenly, slightly pedantic, noble-spirited man and
I cannot measure justly the influence of the disinterested life he led
on my own. It was I think very considerable. The Wallases, the Oliviers
and the Webbs were quite the best of the leading Fabians--Shaw I refuse
to count as a typical Fabian; they lived lives devoted to the Res
Publica right out to the end of their days. They took the idea of
getting a living as something by the way; a sort of living was there for
them anyhow; and the real business of life began for them only after
that had been settled and put on one side.

From what I have told of myself it must be plain that in those days I
was full of mercenary _go_; "price per thousand" and "saleable copy"
were as present in my mind as they are in the picshuas I have shown. My
commercialism is not, I think, innate, but my fight with the world for
Jane and myself and my family, had set a premium upon money making. I
was beginning to like the sport. I was beginning to enjoy being able to
pay for things. I was getting rather keen on my literary reputation as a
saleable asset. It was as good for my mind as uninfected mountain air in
an early case of tuberculosis to go for walks with Wallas, worlds away
from any thought of prices, agents, serializations, "rights." We even
went off to Switzerland together for a couple of weeks and walked among
the passes of Valais, over the Gemmi, over the Aletsch Glacier to Bel
Alp, up to Zermatt, up the Furka, over the St. Gotthard, talking.

Essentially Wallas was a talker and a lecturer. He liked picking a case
to pieces with a quiet fastidious deliberation far more than he liked
the labour of putting things together. My journalistic experiences since
my student days had bitten into me the primary need of sending in copy
in time or even a little in advance of time. All my life I have been
"delivering the goods" even if the packing has been hasty and the
execution scampered at any rate, if not actually _scamped_. The habit is
ingrained. I had meant to loiter over this autobiography for years--and
perhaps not publish it in the end. I sketched an opening for it two
years ago. And here it is being pressed to a finish. But the bad side of
Wallas's rentier unworldliness was that he was under no inner compulsion
to get things positively done. If he had not had very definite academic
ambitions and a real joy in answering questions, he might have sunken
altogether into sterile erudite wisdom. As it is, the London School of
Economics will testify how much the personal Graham Wallas outdid the
published Graham Wallas. Alfred Zimmern and Walter Lippmann were among
his particular pupils and there is scarcely any considerable figure
among the younger generation of publicists who does not owe something to
his slow, fussy, mannered, penetrating and inspiring counsels. He was a
classical scholar, but Hellenic rather than Roman--in contrast to
Gissing--a Platonist and not a Homerist. His grasp upon modern
scientific philosophy was a firm one.

Our Swiss conversations centred upon our common feeling that there had
to be some firmer basis, a better thought-out system of ideas, for
social and political activities than was available at that time. He had
been greatly impressed by the book of Professor Ostrogorski on
_Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties_ (1902). It was an
early break towards realism in political science. It swept aside legist
conceptions of government by a frank treatment of parliamentary
actuality. It was plain to Wallas that realistic acid might be made to
bite still deeper into political conventionality. He wanted to make a
psychological examination of mass-political reactions the new basis for
a revision of governmental theory, and he thought of calling this study
"A Prolegomenon to Politics." Finally he produced it as _Human Nature in
Politics_ (1908). Walter Lippmann, under his inspiration, produced _A
Preface to Politics_, and the Alpine sunlight of that mental hike of
ours is also very evident in my own _Modern Utopia_ (1905). We were all
branching out in characteristic directions from the Ostrogorski
stimulus.

Wallas and I never lost contact completely. Within a few months of his
death (1932) he was in my study reading and commenting very
illuminatingly and usefully upon the political chapters of my _Work,
Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_. He had been reading a good deal of
Bentham at that time, digging out long forgotten books, and I remember
his glasses gleaming appreciatively as he squatted in my lowest easy
chair and dilated on the "old boy's" abundance and breadth of range.
Bentham, too, had been a sort of encyclopdist. I do not think Wallas
wrote anything about this aspect of Bentham, though I know he dealt with
him largely in his lectures on local government; he was just going over
him for pleasure, gathering a bright nosegay of characteristic
ideas--to be presently dropped by the wayside.

Somewhere between my own tendency to push on to conclusions and Wallas's
interminable deliberation, lies I suppose the ideal method of the
perfect student working "without haste and without delay."

My opinion of the texture and mental forms of the brain of Graham Wallas
was very high, and I formed an almost equal respect for the intelligence
of another of those early Fabians, Sydney Olivier who became Lord
Olivier. Both the Webbs also I found very good, if antagonistic, stuff.
Beatrice had (and has) a delightful way that is all her own, of throwing
out bold general propositions about things in the most aggressive manner
possible. I should call her style of talk experimental dogmatism. If you
disagree, you say "Oh Nonsense!" and restate her proposition in a
corrected form. Then she fights with unscrupulous candour and invincible
good temper. Sidney is not nearly so exploratory; his convictions are
less vivid and plastic; his aim is rather persuasion than truth, he is
politic rather than philosophical. Of Shaw's mind I have already given
an impression.

In my account of _fin-de-sicle_ socialism I have criticized the
peculiar limitations of pseudo "practicality" and anti-Utopianism that
went with the academic and civil-service associations of the Fabian
group. In particular I have shown how they shirked and delayed the
problem of the competent receiver. Here I am dealing not so much with
these ideological limitations with which I presently fell foul, as with
their pervading sense of the importance of social service as the frame
of life, and the way in which Jane and I were probably influenced by
them. We may have had that in us from the beginning, Jane particularly,
but they brought it out in us. They may have done much to deflect me
from the drift towards a successful, merely literary career into which I
was manifestly falling in those early Sandgate days. I might have become
entirely an artist and a literary careerist and possibly a distinguished
one, and then my old friend Osborn of the _National Observer_, the
_Morning Post_ and "Boon" would never have had occasion to call my
books "sociological cocktails."

A much more tawdry brain in the Fabian constellation which played its
part in teaching me about human reactions was that of Hubert Bland. As
my personal acquaintances with the Fabians extended we found the Blands
had a house at Dymchurch, within an easy bicycle ride of us, to which
they came in summer-time. They were the strangest of couples and they
played a large part in the Fabian comedy. Doris Langley Moore has
recently given a very frank account of them in her excellent life of
Mrs. Bland (_E. Nesbit_ 1933), to which I make my acknowledgments. E.
Nesbit was a tall, whimsical, restless, able woman who had been very
beautiful and was still very good-looking; and Bland was a thick-set,
broad-faced aggressive man, a sort of Tom-cat man, with a tenoring voice
and a black ribboned monocle and a general disposition to dress and live
up to that. The two of them dramatized life and I had as yet met few
people who did that. They loved scenes and "situations." They really
enjoyed strong emotion. There was no such persistent pursuit of truth
and constructive ends in them as in their finer associates. It was not
in their imaginative scheme.

Much of her activity went into the writing of verse, rather insincere
verse, rather sentimental stories for adults and quite admirable tales
for children. The Bastable family she created is still a joy to little
people between ten and seventeen. She earned the greater part of the
joint income. She ran a great easy-going hospitable Bohemian household
at Well Hall, Eltham, an old moated house with a walled garden. Those
who loved her and those who wished to please her called her royally
"Madame" or "Duchess," and she had a touch of aloof authority which
justified that. A miscellany of people came and went there and to
lodgings handy-by the smaller house at Dymchurch; the Chesterton
brothers, Laurence Housman, Enid Bagnold, Horace Horsnell, Arthur Watts,
Oswald Barren, Edgar Jepson, Alfred Sutro, Berta Ruck, Jack Squire,
Clifford Sharp, Monseigneur Benson, Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo), a
multitude of young writers, actors and aspirants in an atmosphere of
talk, charades, mystifications and disputes. And there also I and Jane
visited and learnt to play Badminton and gossip and discuss endlessly.

At first it seemed to be a simple agreeable multitudinousness from which
literary buds and flowers sprang abundantly, presided over by this tall,
engaging, restless, moody, humorous woman. Then gradually the visitor
began to perceive at first unsuspected trends and threads of
relationship and scented, as if from the moat, a more disturbing
flavour. People came to Well Hall and went, and some of them went for
good. There had been "misunderstandings."

I thought at first that Well Hall was a new group for us and now in the
retrospect I realize that it was a new sort of world. It was a world of
rles and not of realities. Perhaps that is the more usual type of
world, the sort of world in which people do not say "I am thus and
thus," but "I will be thus and thus." From what I have told in the
earlier part of this autobiography it is plain that my own people, my
parents, brothers, aunt, cousin and so forth, and the people with whom I
came in contact, were either very simple-minded people indeed or else
they were people with the sustained and developed simplicity and
coherence of scientific training or people with whom my contacts were
simple and unrevealing. But the Blands were almost the first people I
met at all intimately, who were fundamentally intricate, who had no
primary simple idea. They had brains as active and powerful as most
other brains in my world, but--as I began to realize only after some
disconcerting experiences--they had never taken them down to any sort of
philosophy; they had never focussed them on any single objective, and
they started off at all sorts of levels from arbitrarily adopted
fantasies and poses.

The incongruity of Bland's costume with his Bohemian setting, the
costume of a city swell, top-hat, tail-coat, greys and blacks, white
slips, spatterdashes and that black-ribboned monocle, might have told
me, had I had the ability then to read such signs, of the general
imagination at work in his _persona_, the myth of a great Man of the
World, a Business Man (he had no gleam of business ability) invading for
his own sage strong purposes this assembly of long-haired
intellectuals. This myth had, I think, been developed and sustained in
him, by the struggle of his egoism against the manifest fact that his
wife had a brighter and fresher mind than himself, and had subtler and
livelier friends. For many years, says Miss Moore, she carried on a long
correspondence with Laurence Housman and I guess that Bland had had to
protect his self-esteem against many such intimations of insufficiency
in his own equipment. He could not pervade her. That particular
correspondence, the biographer relates, was ended when E. Nesbit,
against her character and disposition, followed Bland on the
anti-feminist side of the suffrage dispute.

In the end she became rather a long-suffering lady, but her restless
needle of a mind, her quick response, kept her always an exacting and
elusive lady. It was I am convinced because she, in her general drift,
was radical and anarchistic, that the pose of Bland's self-protection
hardened into this form of gentlemanly conservatism. He presented
himself as a Tory in grain, he became--I know of no confirmation--a man
of good old family; he entered the dear old Roman Catholic church. These
were all insistencies upon soundness and solidity as against her
quickness and whim. He was publicly emphatic for social decorum,
punctilio, the natural dependence of women and the purity of the family.
None of your modern stuff for _him_. All this socialism he assured you,
so far as it was any good, was a reaction from nineteenth century
liberalism to the good old social organization that flourished in
England before the days of Adam Smith.

She acquiesced in these posturings. If she had not, I suppose he would
have argued with her until she did, and he was a man of unfaltering
voice and great determination. But a gay holiday spirit bubbled beneath
her verbal orthodoxies and escaped into her work. The Bastables are an
anarchistic lot. Her soul was against the government all the time.

This discordance of form and spirit lay on the surface of their lives.
Most of us who went to them were from the first on the side of the
quicksilver wife against the more commonplace, argumentative, cast-iron
husband. Then gradually something else came into the _ensemble_. It came
first to the visitor at Well Hall as chance whisperings, as flashes of
conflict and fierce resentment, as raised voices in another room, a rush
of feet down a passage and the banging of a door.

Miss Langley Moore in her careful and well informed book lays the whole
story bare with many particulars I never knew before. There was a more
primitive strand in Bland's make-up. He was under an inner compulsion to
be a Seducer--on the best eighteenth century lines. That, and not
Tory-Socialism, was his essential preoccupation; that was what he talked
to himself about when he was in his own company. His imaginations may
have been running into this mould before he met her, it is not a very
rare mould, but the clash of their personalities confirmed the tendency.
That I suppose was where he really got even with her wit and freaks and
fantasies and with a certain essential physical coldness in her. And in
return he gave her some romantically difficult situations. The
astonished visitor came to realize that most of the children of the
household were not E. Nesbit's but the results of Bland's conquests,
that the friend and companion who ran the household was the mother of
one of these young people, that young Miss so and so, who played
Badminton with a preoccupied air was the last capture of Hubert's
accomplished sex appeal. All this E. Nesbit not only detested and
mitigated and tolerated, but presided over and I think found exceedingly
interesting.

Everywhere fantastic concealments and conventions had been arranged to
adjust these irregularities to Hubert's pose of ripe old gentility. You
found after a time that Well Hall was not so much an atmosphere as a
web.

In company, in public, Bland talked and wrote of social and political
problems and debated with a barrister-like effectiveness, but when I was
alone with him, the fundamental interest insisted upon coming to the
surface. He felt my unspoken criticisms and I could not check his
assertive apologetics. He would talk about it. He would give hints of
his exceptional prowess. He would boast. He would discuss the social
laxities of Woolwich and Blackheath, breaking into anecdotes, "simply
for the purpose of illustration." Or he would produce a pocket-worn
letter and read choice bits of it--"purely because of its psychological
interest." He did his utmost to give this perpetual pursuit of furtive
gratification, the dignity of a purpose. He was, he claimed to me at
least, not so much Don Juan as Professor Juan. "I am a student, an
experimentalist," he announced, "in illicit love."

"Illicit love"! It had to be "illicit" and that was the very gist of it
for him. It had to be the centre of a system of jealousies,
concealments, hidings, exposures, confrontations, sacrifices, incredible
generosities--in a word, drama. What he seemed most to value was the
glory of a passionate triumph over openness, reason and loyalty--and
getting the better of the other fellow. The more complex the situation
was, the better it was fitted for Bland's atmosphere.

It is curious how opposed this mentality of what I may call, the
seventeenth and eighteenth century "Buck," is to the newer, rationalist,
go-as-you-please of the Shelley type, to which my own mind was being
attracted in those days. I wanted to abolish barriers between the sexes
and Bland loved to get under or over or through them. The more barriers
the better. In those days I would have made illicit love impossible--by
making almost all love-making _licit_. There was no real inconsistency
therefore between Bland's private life and his enthusiasm for formal
conventionality and it was perfectly logical that though we were both
disposed to great freedoms by the accepted standards, we were in
diametrically antagonistic schools. He thought it made a love affair
more exciting and important if one might be damned for it and I could
not believe these pleasant intimacies could ever bring real damnation to
anyone. He exalted chastity because so it meant a greater sacrifice, and
I suppose he would have thought it a crowning achievement to commit
incest or elope with a nun. He was sincerely disgusted at my disposition
to take the moral fuss out of his darling sins. My impulses were all to
get rid of the repressions of sexual love, minimize its importance and
subordinate this stress between men and women as agreeably as possible
to the business of mankind.

So now, with the detachment of half a lifetime, I define the forces that
first attracted me to Well Hall and then made Well Hall jar upon me; but
at that time I did not see so clearly and I found these two people and
their atmosphere and their household of children and those who were
entangled with them, baffling to an extreme degree. At the first
encounter it had seemed so extraordinarily open and jolly. Then suddenly
you encountered fierce resentment, you found Mrs. Bland inexplicably
malignant; doors became walls so to speak and floors pitfalls. In that
atmosphere you surprised yourself. It was like Alice through the Looking
Glass; not only were there Mock Turtles and White Queens and Mad Hatters
about, but you discovered with amazement that you were changing your own
shape and stature.

The web of concealments and intrigue that radiated from the Bland mnage
and met many other kindred if less intricate strands among that
miscellany of enquiring and experimenting people which constituted the
Fabian Society, spread like the mycelium of a fungus throughout that
organization. The Blands were among the earliest founders of that
"Fellowship of the New Life" from which the Fabian Society sprang. They
were original members of the latter, and Bland, because he was neither
the chief bread winner of his family nor restrained by any fundamental
mental consistency nor preoccupied with any really ordered creative
aims, was able to devote all the time and energy that could be spared
from fluttering the Blackheath dovecotes, to Fabian manoeuvres. He was
always there, just as dry old Quaker-trained Edward Pease, the salaried
trustworthy secretary, was always there, and Pease was by nature a very
honest desiccating pedant and Bland by nature a politician. Bland was as
loose internally as Pease was rigid and they were inspired by a natural
antagonism. The little society was setting out upon the most gigantic
enterprise that humanity has ever attempted, a New Life (Think of it!)
and even if that new life was restricted by subsequent provisos to
economic reconstruction only, it still meant a vast long trying game of
waiting and preparation; the society was not only poor, small and with
everything to learn about its job, but from the very beginning it had
these two personalities, like the germs of a congenital disease,
vitiating and diverting its energies.

Long before my innocence came into the society, some deep feud between
Pease and the Blands had established itself when Pease and not Bland
became the salaried secretary; and the mysterious concealments,
reservations, alliances, imputations, schemes and tactics of these
obscure issues played havoc with the affairs of our middle-class
socialist propaganda. The larger purposes of the Wallases, Webbs and
Shaw had to defer continually to the dark riddle of "what the Blands
will do about it." There was no reckoning without them for they turned
up, excited and energetic, with satellites, dependents, confederates and
new associates at every meeting. In the dusty confusion of personalities
and secondary issues created by them, rumour moved darkly and anonymous
letters flittered about like bats at twilight. By the time I came into
the society Bland, the able politician, was established in the mind of
Shaw, for example, as a necessary evil and Pease as an unavoidable ally.
When Shaw faced towards social and political problems, this implacable
animosity loomed so large for him that at times it blotted out the
stars.

The topic of _Human Nature in Politics_ (to borrow a title from Graham
Wallas) is a vast one, and here was a hard specimen for my frustration
and education. Following Ostrogorski, Wallas dealt with this trouble
from the point of view of mass reactions, but now here I am approaching
it--or rather blundering into it--from the opposite direction, by way of
biography. What are we to do with these energetic vital types who will
not subdue themselves to a broad and consistent aim; who choose a pose,
stage situations, fly off at a tangent and never table their objectives?
Shall we never be able to keep secondary issues and idiosyncrasies in
their place? How far is it inevitable that we should live in a world of
personal "misunderstandings"? How far is directive simplicity possible?
What can be done to keep our public and social objectives untangled and
simple and clear?

Before it had existed half a dozen years, the Fabian Society was in
urgent need of a searching psycho-analysis, and there has never yet been
a government or party, an educational directorate, or a religion that
has not presently diverged into morasses of complication and
self-contradiction. How far is that to be the case with us for ever?

How far might some more universal and more efficient education, more
penetrating, better planned and better administered, have started and
sustained our Fabian Society--every one of us well meaning--in a better
understanding and a less wasteful co-operation? Were the complexities of
Bland and his wife, the intellectual freakishness of Shaw, the intricate
cross-purposes of that bunch of animated folk, unavoidable and
incurable?

The Federation of the New Life passed like a dreamer's sigh, but within
some fated term of years, unless mankind is to perish, there must be a
real Federation of the New Life. I find myself on the verge here of
slipping away from my already sufficiently copious autobiographical
purpose into what might prove a limitless dissertation on human
behaviour, a sort of outline, a digest, of all available biography. It
is time to recall my enquiring pen--as one calls a roving dog to
heel--and return to my personal story, to return from cosmo-biography to
autobiography, and to go on telling how I, at any rate, in spite of all
those deflections and entanglements, found at last a satisfactory
simplification and orientation of my own existence in the idea of an
educational, political and economic world unification.

Of that mental and moral consolidation my last chapter must tell. In the
early Sandgate days not only was I being attracted more and more
powerfully towards the civil service conception of a life framed in
devotion to constructive public ends _ la_ Webb, but I was also being
tugged, though with less force, in a quite opposite direction, towards
the artistic attitude. I have never been able to find the artistic
attitude fundamentally justifiable but I understand and sympathize with
the case for it. It was expressed in varying modes and very engagingly
by a number of brains through whose orbits my own was travelling.
Professor York Powell had come to know me, through the Marriott Watsons
and the _Pall Mall Gazette_ group, and he was very strong in his
assertion that the "artist" lived in a class apart, having a primary and
over-riding duty to his "gift." He might be solvent if he liked and
political in his off time, but his primary duty was to express the
divine juice that was in him.

York Powell, a big bearded man with a deep abundant chuckle, came very
frequently to Sandgate, where he had an old gnarled boatman friend, who
was something of a character, Jim Payne. I did my best to be initiated
by York Powell into the charms of sea-fishing and a sort of tarry wisdom
peculiar to Jim Payne, but the inoculation never really took. York
Powell was always trying to draw Jim out for my benefit and Jim was
harder to draw out than a badger. I never saw him drawn.

To a lodging in Sandgate also came Bob Stevenson, the "Spring-Heeled
Jack" of his cousin Robert Louis' _Talk and Talkers_, after a stroke,
for the ending of his days. I had known him before his illness and had
heard him do some marvellous talks; a dissertation upon how he would
behave if he was left nearly two millions, still lingers in my mind. One
million was just to keep--one could never bear to break a single
million--but all the rest was to be spent and distributed magnificently.
He described his dinner before his benefactions began. He was particular
about a large deed-box full of cheque books to be brought to him by bank
messengers "in scarlet coats with _new_ gold bands round their top
hats." He chose among his friends those whose presence and advice would
be most conducive to wise and generous giving. He planned the most
ingenious gifts and the most remarkable endowments. I have tried to give
a faint impression of his style of imaginative talking in Ewart's talk
about the City of Women in _Tono Bungay_. But Ewart is not even a
caricature of Bob; only Bob's style of talk was grafted on to him. Bob
Stevenson, like York Powell, was all on the side of aesthetic
concentration and letting the rest go hang. He could not imagine what
these Fabians were up to. They were not real in his universe.

Henry James, too, had developed expressionism into an elaborate
philosophy; it is a great loss to the science of criticism that he
should have died before his slowly unfolding autobiography reached a
point where he could state his mature attitude. In several talks we
hovered on the abundant verge of it but even the evenings at Lamb House
were too short for anything but intimations and preliminaries.

Another very important acquaintance of my early Sandgate time, now too
little appreciated in the world, was the American Stephen Crane. He was
one of the earliest of those stark American writers who broke away from
the genteel literary traditions of Victorian England and he wrote an
admirable bare prose. One or two of his short stories, _The Open Boat_,
for example, seem to me imperishable gems. He made his reputation with a
short book about the Civil War, _The Red Badge of Courage_. It was an
amazing feat of imaginative understanding. It was written, as Ambrose
Bierce said, not with ink but blood. And forthwith the American
newspapers pounced upon him to make him a war correspondent. He was
commissioned to go to Cuba, to the Spanish-American war and to the
Turko-Greek war of 1897. He was a lean, blond, slow-speaking,
perceptive, fragile, tuberculous being, too adventurous to be temperate
with anything and impracticable to an extreme degree. He liked to sit
and talk, sagely and deeply. How he managed ever to get to the seats of
war to which he was sent I cannot imagine. I don't think he got very
deeply into them. But he got deeply enough into them to shatter his
health completely.

In Greece he met and married an energetic lady who had been sent out by
some American newspaper as the first woman war correspondent. With,
perhaps, excessive vigour she set out to give her ailing young husband a
real good time. Morton Frewen (the wealthy father of Clare Sheridan)
lent them a very old and beautiful house, Brede House near Rye and there
they inaugurated a life of gay extravagance and open hospitality. I
forget the exact circumstances of our first meeting but I remember very
vividly a marvellous Christmas Party in which Jane and I participated.
We were urged to come over and, in a postscript, to bring any bedding
and blankets we could spare. We arrived in a heaped-up Sandgate cab,
rather in advance of the guests from London. We were given a room over
the main gateway in which there was a portcullis and an owl's nest, but
at least we got a room. Nobody else did--because although some thirty or
forty invitations had been issued, there were not as a matter of fact
more than three or four bedrooms available. One of them however was
large and its normal furniture had been supplemented by a number of
hired truckle-beds and christened the Girls' Dormitory, and in the attic
an array of shake-downs was provided for the men. Husbands and wives
were torn apart.

Later on we realized that the sanitary equipment of Brede House dated
from the seventeenth century, an interesting historical detail, and such
as there was indoors, was accessible only through the Girls' Dormitory.
Consequently the wintry countryside next morning was dotted with
wandering melancholy, preoccupied, men guests.

Anyhow there were good open fires in the great fireplaces and I remember
that party as an extraordinary lark--but shot, at the close, with red
intimations of a coming tragedy. We danced in a big oak-panelled room
downstairs, lit by candles stuck upon iron sconces that Cora Crane had
improvised with the help of the Brede blacksmith. Unfortunately she had
not improvised grease guards and after a time everybody's back showed a
patch of composite candle-wax, like the flash on the coat of a Welsh
Fusilier. When we were not dancing or romping we were waxing the floor
or rehearsing a play vamped up by A. E. W. Mason, Crane, myself and
others. It was a ghost play, and very allusive and fragmentary, and we
gave it in the School Room at Brede. It amused its authors and cast
vastly. What the Brede people made of it is not on record.

We revelled until two or three every night and came down towards mid-day
to breakfasts of eggs and bacon, sweet potatoes from America and beer.
Crane had a transient impulse to teach some of the men poker, in the
small hours, but we would not take it seriously. Mason I found knew my
old schoolfellow Sidney Bowkett and had some anecdotes to tell me about
him. "In any decent saloon in America," said Crane, "you'd be shot for
talking like that at poker," and abandoned our instruction in a pet.

That was the setting in which I remember Crane. He was profoundly weary
and ill, if I had been wise enough to see it, but I thought him sulky
and reserved. He was essentially the helpless artist; he wasn't the
master of his party, he wasn't the master of his home; his life was
altogether out of control; he was being carried along. What he was still
clinging to, but with a dwindling zest, was artistry. He had an intense
receptiveness to vivid work; he had an inevitably right instinct for the
word in his stories; but he had no critical chatter. We compared our
impressions of various contemporaries. "That's Great," he'd say or
simply "_Gaw!_" Was so and so "any good"? So and so was "no good."

Was he writing anything now?

His response was joyless. Pinker the agent had _fixed_ some stories for
him. "I got to do them," he said, "I got to do them."

The tragic entanglement of the highly specialized artist had come to
him. Sensation and expression--and with him it had been well nigh
perfect expression--was the supreme joy of his life and the
justification of existence for him. And here he was, in a medley of
impulsive disproportionate expenditure, being pursued by the worthy
Pinker with enquiries of when he could "deliver copy" and warnings not
to overrun his length. The good thing in his life had slipped by him.

In the night after the play Mrs. Crane came to us. He had had a
haemorrhage from his lungs and he had tried to conceal it from her. He
"didn't want anyone to bother." Would I help get a doctor?

There was a bicycle in the place and my last clear memory of that
fantastic Brede House party is riding out of the cold skirts of a wintry
night into a drizzling dawn along a wet road to call up a doctor in Rye.

That crisis passed, but he died later in the new year, 1900. He did his
utmost to conceal his symptoms and get on with his dying. Only at the
end did his wife wake up to what was coming. She made a great effort to
get him to Baden-Baden. She conveyed him silent and sunken and stoical
to Folkestone by car, regardless of expense, she had chartered a special
train to wait for him at Boulogne and he died almost as soon as he
arrived in Germany.

Two other important men of letters were also close at hand to present
the ideal of pure artistry to me rather less congenially. These were
Ford Madox Hueffer and Joseph Conrad, of whom the former--through
certain defects of character and a copious carelessness of
reminiscence--is, I think, too much neglected, and the latter still
placed too high in the scale of literary achievement. Joseph Conrad was
really Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski. He had very wisely dropped his
surname and was content to be Joseph Conrad to English readers. He had
been excited by a review I wrote of his _Almayer's Folly_ in the
_Saturday Review_; it was his first "important" recognition and he
became anxious to make my acquaintance.

At first he impressed me, as he impressed Henry James, as the strangest
of creatures. He was rather short and round-shouldered with his head as
it were sunken into his body. He had a dark retreating face with a very
carefully trimmed and pointed beard, a trouble-wrinkled forehead and
very troubled dark eyes, and the gestures of his hands and arms were
from the shoulders and very Oriental indeed. He reminded people of Du
Maurier's Svengali and, in the nautical trimness of his costume, of
Cutliffe Hyne's Captain Kettle. He spoke English strangely. Not badly
altogether; he would supplement his vocabulary--especially if he were
discussing cultural or political matters--with French words; but with
certain oddities. He had learnt to read English long before he spoke it
and he had formed wrong sound impressions of many familiar words; he had
for example acquired an incurable tendency to pronounce the last _e_ in
these and those. He would say, "_Wat_ shall we do with _thesa_ things?"
And he was always incalculable about the use of "shall" and "will." When
he talked of seafaring his terminology was excellent but when he turned
to less familiar topics he was often at a loss for phrases.

Yet he wove an extraordinarily rich descriptive English prose, a new
sort of English of his own, conspicuously and almost necessarily free
from stereotyped expressions and hack phrases, in which foreign turns
and phrases interlaced with unusual native words unusually used. And I
think it was this fine, fresh, careful, slightly exotic quality about
his prose, that "foreign" flavour which the normal Anglo-Saxon mind
habitually associates with culture, that blinded criticism to the
essentially sentimental and melodramatic character of the stories he
told. His deepest theme is the simple terror of strange places, of the
jungle, of night, of the incalculable sea; as a mariner his life was
surely a perpetual anxiety about miscalculations, about the hidden
structural vices of his ship, about shifting cargo and untrustworthy
men; he laid bare with an air of discovery what most adventurers,
travellers and sailors habitually suppress. Another primary topic with
him--best treated in that amazingly good story _Amy Foster_, a sort of
caricature autobiography, was the feeling of being incurably "foreign."
He pursued a phantom "honour"--in _Lord Jim_ for instance; his humour in
_The Nigger of the Narcissus_, is dismal, and you may search his work
from end to end and find little tenderness and no trace of experienced
love or affection. But he had set himself to be a great writer, an
artist in words, and to achieve all the recognition and distinction that
he imagined should go with that ambition, he had gone literary with a
singleness and intensity of purpose that made the kindred concentration
of Henry James seem lax and large and pale. _The Mirror of the Sea_ was
his favourite among his own writings, and I think that in that he showed
a sound critical judgment.

He came into my ken in association with Ford Madox Hueffer and they
remain together, contrasted and inseparable, in my memory. Ford is a
long blond with a drawling manner, the very spit of his brother Oliver,
and oddly resembling George Moore the novelist in pose and person. What
he is really or if he is really, nobody knows now and he least of all;
he has become a great system of assumed _personas_ and dramatized
selves. His brain is an exceptionally good one and when first he came
along, he had cast himself for the rle of a very gifted scion of the
Pre-Raphaelite stem, given over to artistic purposes and a little
undecided between music, poetry, criticism, The Novel, Thoreau-istic
horticulture and the simple appreciation of life. He has written some
admirable verse, some very good historical romances, two or three books
in conjunction with Conrad, and a considerable bulk of more or less
autobiographical--unreality. As a sort of heir to Pre-Raphaelitism, he
owned among other things a farm called the Pent at the foot of the Downs
above Hythe; it had been occupied previously by Christina Rossetti and
Walter Crane the artist; and he had let it to Conrad; Conrad wrote about
_The Heart of Darkness_ and _The Secret Agent_ on a desk that may have
creaked to the creative effort of _Goblin Market_; and thither Hueffer
and I walked to our meeting.

One goes downhill to the Pent, the windows of the house are low and my
first impression of Conrad, was of a swarthy face peering out and up
through the little window panes.

He talked with me mostly of adventure and dangers, Hueffer talked
criticism and style and words, and our encounter was the beginning of a
long, fairly friendly but always rather strained acquaintance. Conrad
with Mrs. Conrad and his small blond haired bright-eyed boy, would come
over to Sandgate, cracking a whip along the road, driving a little black
pony carriage as though it was a droshky and encouraging a puzzled
little Kentish pony with loud cries and endearments in Polish, to the
dismay of all beholders. We never really "got on" together. I was
perhaps more unsympathetic and incomprehensible to Conrad than he was to
me. I think he found me Philistine, stupid and intensely English; he was
incredulous that I could take social and political issues seriously; he
was always trying to penetrate below my foundations, discover my
imaginative obsessions and see what I was really up to. The frequent
carelessness of my writing, my scientific qualifications of statement
and provisional inconclusiveness, and my indifference to intensity of
effect, perplexed and irritated him. Why didn't I _write_? Why had I no
care for my reputation?

"My dear Wells, what is this _Love and Mr. Lewisham about_?" he would
ask. But then he would ask also, wringing his hands and wrinkling his
forehead, "What is all this about Jane Austen? What is there _in_ her?
What is it all _about_?"

I remember a dispute we had one day as we lay on the Sandgate beach and
looked out to sea. How, he demanded, would I describe how that boat out
there, sat or rode or danced or quivered on the water? I said that in
nineteen cases out of twenty I would just let the boat be there in the
commonest phrases possible. Unless I wanted the boat to be important I
would not give it an outstanding phrase and if I wanted to make it
important then the phrase to use would depend on the angle at which the
boat became significant. But it was all against Conrad's over-sensitized
receptivity that a boat could ever be just a boat. He wanted to see it
with a definite vividness of his own. But I wanted to see it and to see
it only in relation to something else--a story, a thesis. And I suppose
if I had been pressed about it I would have betrayed a disposition to
link that story or thesis to something still more extensive and that to
something still more extensive and so ultimately to link it up to my
philosophy and my world outlook.

Now here perhaps--if I may deal with Conrad and others and myself as
hand specimens--is something rather fundamental for the educationist. I
have told in my account of my school days (Ch. 3 1) how I differed from
my schoolmate Sidney Bowkett, in that he felt and heard and saw so much
more vividly, so much more emotionally, than I did. That gave him
superiorities in many directions, but the very coldness and flatness of
my perceptions, gave me a readier apprehension of relationships, put me
ahead of him in mathematics and drawing (which after all is a sort of
abstraction of form) and made it easier for me later on to grasp general
ideas in biology and physics. My education at Kensington was very broad
and rapid, I suggest, because I was not dealing with burning and glowing
impressions--and when I came to a course where sense impressions were of
primary importance, as they were in the course in mineralogy (see Ch. 5
3), I gave way to irrepressible boredom and fell down. My mind became
what I call an educated mind, that is to say a mind systematically
unified, because of my relative defect in brightness of response. I was
easy to educate.

These vivid writers I was now beginning to encounter were, on the
contrary, hard to educate--as I use the word educate. They were at an
opposite pole to me as regards strength of reception. Their abundant,
luminous impressions were vastly more difficult to subdue to a
disciplined and co-ordinating relationship than mine. They remained
therefore abundant but uneducated brains. Instead of being based on a
central philosophy, they started off at a dozen points; they were
impulsive, unco-ordinated, wilful. Conrad, you see, I count uneducated,
Stephen Crane, Henry James, the larger part of the world of literary
artistry. Shaw's education I have already impugned. The science and art
of education was not adequate for the taming and full utilization of
these more powerfully receptive types and they lapsed into arbitrary
inconsistent and dramatized ways of thinking and living. With a more
expert and scientific educational process all that might have been
different. They lapsed--though retaining their distinctive scale and
quality--towards the inner arbitrariness and unreality of the untrained
common man.

Not only was I relatively equipped with a strong bias for rational
associations but, also, accident threw me in my receptive years mostly
among non-dramatizing systematic-minded people. My mother dramatized
herself, indeed, but so artlessly that I rebelled against that. My
scientific training and teaching confirmed and equipped all my inherent
tendency to get things ruthlessly mapped out and consistent. I suspected
any imaginative romancing in conduct. I defended myself against
romancing by my continual self-mockery and caricature--what you see in
this book therefore as a sort of bloom of little sketches is not really
an efflorescence but something very fundamental to this brain-story. I
am holding myself down from pretentious impersonations. But they were
there, trying to get me. A man is revealed by the nature of his
mockeries.

Such mentalities as my wife, Graham Wallas and the Webbs, and the
general Socialist proposition, did much to sustain the educational
consolidation that was going on in me. So that by the time I
encountered such vigorously dramatizing people as the Blands and such
vivid impressionists as Conrad I was already built up and set in the
most refractory and comprehensive forms of conviction. I had struggled
with a considerable measure of success against the common vice of
self-protective assumptions. I had, I have, few "complexes." I would
almost define education as the prevention of complexes. I was seeing
myself as far as possible without pretences, my _persona_ was under
constant scrutiny, even at the price of private and secret sessions of
humiliation, and not only was I trying to avoid posing to myself but I
kept up as little pose as possible to the world. I eschewed dignity. I
found therefore something as ridiculous in Conrad's _persona_ of a
romantic adventurous un-mercenary intensely artistic European gentleman
carrying an exquisite code of unblemished honour through a universe of
baseness as I did in Hubert Bland's man-of-affairs costume and simple
Catholic piety.

When Conrad first met Shaw in my house, Shaw talked with his customary
freedoms. "You know, my dear fellow, your books won't _do_"--for some
Shavian reason I have forgotten--and so forth.

I went out of the room and suddenly found Conrad on my heels, swift and
white-faced. "Does that man want to _insult_ me?" he demanded.

The provocation to say "Yes" and assist at the subsequent duel was very
great, but I overcame it. "It's humour," I said, and took Conrad out
into the garden to cool. One could always baffle Conrad by saying
"humour." It was one of our damned English tricks he had never learnt to
tackle.

Later on he wanted Ford Madox Hueffer to challenge me. If Conrad had had
his way, either Hueffer's blood or mine would have reddened Dymchurch
sands. I thought an article Hueffer had written about Hall Caine was
undignified and I said that he had written it as if he was a discharged
valet--or something equally pungent. Hueffer came over to tell me about
it. "I tried to explain to him that duelling isn't done," said Hueffer.

In those days Hueffer was very much on the rational side of life; his
extraordinary drift towards self-dramatization--when he even changed
his name to Captain Ford--became conspicuous only later, after the
stresses of the war. In the light of that his last book, _It Was the
Nightingale_, is well worth reading. I think Conrad owed a very great
deal to their early association; Hueffer helped greatly to "English" him
and his idiom, threw remarkable lights on the English literary world for
him, collaborated with him on two occasions, and conversed interminably
with him about the precise word and about perfection in writing.

They forced me to consider and define my own position in such matters.
Did I really care for these things? I like turning a phrase as well as
any man, I try my utmost to achieve precision of statement where
precision is important, and some passages of mine, the opening sections
(1-4) in the chapter on "How Man Has Learnt to Think" in the _Work,
Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_ for instance, I rewrote a dozen times.
But I have a feeling that the happy word is the gift, the momentary
capricious gift of the gods a flash of mother-wit. You cannot _train_
for it; you cannot write well and forcibly without at times writing
flatly, and the real quality of a writer is, like divinity, inalienable.
This incessant endeavour to keep prose bristling up and have it "vivid"
all the time defeats its end. I find very much of Conrad oppressive, as
overwrought as an Indian tracery, and it is only in chosen passages and
some of his short stories that I would put his work on a level with the
naked vigour of Stephen Crane. I think Tomlinson's more loosely written
_By Sea and Jungle_ is more finely felt and conveys an intenser vision
than most of Conrad's sea and jungle pieces.

All this talk that I had with Conrad and Hueffer and James about the
just word, the perfect expression, about this or that being "written" or
not written, bothered me, set me interrogating myself, threw me into a
heart-searching defensive attitude. I will not pretend that I got it
clear all at once, that I was not deflected by their criticisms and that
I did not fluctuate and make attempts to come up to their
unsystematized, mysterious and elusive standards. But in the end I
revolted altogether and refused to play their game. "I am a journalist,"
I declared, "I refuse to play the 'artist.' If sometimes I am an artist
it is a freak of the gods. I am journalist all the time and what I
write _goes now_--and will presently die."

I have stuck to that declaration ever since. I write as I walk because I
want to get somewhere and I write as straight as I can, just as I walk
as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there. So I
came down off the fence between Conrad and Wallas and I remain
definitely on the side opposed to the aesthetic valuation of literature.
That valuation is at best a personal response, a floating and
indefinable judgment. All these receptive critics pose for their work.
They dress their souls before the glass, add a few final touches of
make-up and sally forth like old bucks for fresh "adventures among
masterpieces." I come upon masterpieces by pure chance; they happen to
me and I do not worry about what I miss.

Throughout my life, a main strand of interest has been the endeavour to
anchor _personas_ to a common conception of reality. That is the
structural idea of my _Research Magnificent_. I shall tell more of that
endeavour in the next chapter. But this theme of the floating _persona_,
the dramatized self, recurs at various levels of complexity and
self-deception, in Mr. Hoopdriver in _The Wheels of Chance_, in the
dreams of Mr. Parham, in _Christina Alberta's Father_, and most
elaborately of all, in _The Bulpington of Blup_. This last is a very
direct caricature study of the irresponsible disconnected aesthetic
mentality. It is friendship's offering to the world of letters from the
scientific side. E. Nesbit, by the bye, did some short stories in which
she dealt with this same unreality in the world as she knew it. She saw
through herself enough for that. They are collected together under the
title of _The Literary Sense_.

So far in this section I have tried to show the pull of two main groups
of divergent personalities and two main sets of tendency upon my
character, during those still plastic days at Sandgate, and to indicate
something of the quality of my response. These brains passed so to speak
to the right of me and the left of me; I felt their gravitational
attraction. The scientific pull was the earlier and stronger. I moved
more and more away from conscious artistry and its exaltations and
chagrins; I was strengthened against self-dramatization and confirmed
in my disposition to social purposiveness. This definition and
confirmation of my mind was the principal thing that was happening to me
in those early Sandgate years. But I should be simplifying my story over
much if I left that chapter in my life merely as a sort of
straightforward tug-of-war in my brain, in which the systematizing,
politically directed impulse won. There were other thrusts and drifts,
interests and attractions, quite outside this particular conflict as to
whether I should keep my mental effort based on an objective or float
off into cloudland.

For instance at an entirely different level from these issues of poise
and aim in my development, something else was going on,--I was busy
"getting on in the world." One does not get on without giving a
considerable amount of one's waking time to it. It is plain from the
letters home already quoted and the "picshuas" here reproduced, that
this was a very constant and lively interest in our early days. Jane and
I were concerned in questions of "rights" and royalties and "price per
thou" in a manner that was altogether ungenteel. We affected no
innocence about "publicity" and we welcomed a large bundle of
press-cuttings and felt anxious if the little blue packets were
unpunctual and meagre. And somehow it is here and not in relation to
whether writing was an end or an implement that the figure of Arnold
Bennett with his bright and busy brain seething in a fashion all its
own, comes in. We two, he and I, got on in the world abreast--and it was
extremely good fun for both of us. Later on we diverged.

He wrote to me first, in September 1897, on the notepaper of a little
periodical he edited, called _Woman_, to ask how I came to know about
the Potteries, which I had mentioned in the _Time Machine_ and in a
short story, and after that we corresponded. In a second letter he says
he is "glad to find the Potteries made such an impression" on me, so I
suppose I had enlarged upon their scenic interest, and adds "only during
the last few years have I begun to see its possibilities." In a further
letter he thanks me for telling him of Conrad. He had missed _Almayer's
Folly_ in a batch of other novels for his paper and I had discovered it.
That was one up for me. Now under my injunction he is rejoicing over
_The Nigger of the Narcissus_. "Where did the man pick up that style and
that synthetic way of gathering up a general impression and flinging it
at you?... He is so consciously an artist. Now Kipling isn't an artist a
bit. Kipling doesn't know what art is--I mean the art of words; _il ne
se proccupe que de la chose raconte_." Follow praises of George Moore.
That unnecessary scrap of French is very Bennett. He was already
deliberately heading for France and culture, learning French, learning
to play the piano, filling up the gaps of a commonplace middle-class
education with these accomplishments--and all with the brightest
efficiency. Presently he came to Sandgate to see us and his swimming and
diving roused my envy.

Never have I known anyone else so cheerfully objective as Bennett. His
world was as bright and hard surfaced as crockery--his _persona_ was, as
it were, a hard, definite china figurine. What was not precise, factual
and contemporary, could not enter into his consciousness. He was
friendly and self assured; he knew quite clearly that we were both on
our way to social distinction and incomes of several thousands a year. I
had not thought of it like that. I was still only getting something
between one and two thousand a year, and I did not feel at all secure
about getting more. But Bennett knew we couldn't stop there. He had a
through ticket and a timetable--and he proved to be right.

Our success was to be attained straightforwardly by writing sound clear
stories, lucidly reasonable articles and well constructed plays. His
pride was in craftsmanship rather than in artistic expression,
mystically intensified and passionately pursued, after the manner of
Conrad. Possibly his ancestors had had just the same feel about their
work, when they spun the clay of pots and bowls finely and precisely. He
was ready to turn his pen to anything, provided it could be done well.
He wrote much of the little weekly paper, _Woman_, he was
editing--including answers to correspondents--often upon the most
delicate subjects--over the signature, if I remember rightly, of "Aunt
Ellen." He did it as well as he knew how. He declared he did it as well
as it could be done. His ancestors on the potbanks had made vessels for
honour or for dishonour. Why should not he turn out whatever was
required? Some years ago he and Shaw and I were all invited by an
ingenious advertisement manager to write advertisements for Harrods'
Stores, for large fees. We all fell into the trap and wrote him letters
(which he used for his purposes) for nothing. Shaw and I took the high
attitude. We were priests and prophets; we could not be paid for our
opinions. Bennett frankly lamented the thing could not be done because
it "wasn't _done_." But he could see no reason why a writer should not
write an advertisement as an architect builds a shop.

We were both about of an age; to be exact he was six months younger than
I; we were both hard workers, both pushing up by way of writing from
lower middle-class surroundings, where we had little prospect of
anything but a restricted salaried life, and we found we were pushing
with quite surprising ease; we were learning much the same business,
tackling much the same obstacles, encountering similar prejudices and
antagonisms and facing similar social occasions. We both had a natural
zest for life and we both came out of a good old English radical
tradition. We were liberal, sceptical and republican. But beyond this we
were very different animals indeed. While I was becoming more and more
set upon changing my world and making it something entirely different
and while Conrad was equally set upon wringing an unprecedented
intensity of phrasing out of his, Bennett was taking the thing that is,
for what it was, with a nave and eager zest. He saw it brighter than it
was; he did not see into it and he did not see beyond it. He was like a
child at a fair. His only trouble was how to get everything in in the
time at his disposal, music, pictures, books, shows, eating, drinking,
display, the remarkable clothes one could wear, the remarkable stunts
one could do, the unexpected persons, the incessant fresh oddities of
people; the whole adorable, incessant, multitudinous lark of it.

There it was. What more could you want?

Since I have just been writing about educated and uneducated types I
perceive I am exposed to the question whether Bennett was an educated
type. I would say that in my sense of the word he was absolutely immune
to education and that he did not need it. He was impermeable. He learnt
with extraordinary rapidity and precision. He was full of skills and
information. The bright clear mosaic of impressions was continually
being added to and all the pieces stayed in their places. He did not
feel the need for a philosophy or for a faith or for anything to hold
them together. One of the most characteristic, if not the best of his
books, is _Imperial Palace_, a most competent assemblage of facts, but
told with an exultation, a slight magnification. His
self-explanation--explanation rather than analysis--is the _Card_. In
that book he shows that he could see himself as plainly and directly as
he saw anything else. It is not a self dramatization; it is pleased
recognition, even of his own absurdities. _A Great Man_ again is
delighted self-caricature--even to his youthful bilious attacks. If
there was any element of self-deception in his _persona_ it was a belief
in the luck that comes to men who are "Cards"--Regular Cards. His
investments for example were too hopeful. When he died--and he died a
well spent man--he left a holding of Russian securities, which he had
bought for a rise that never came.

His work was extraordinarily unequal. Working with cultivated and
conscious craftsmanship upon things intimately known to him, he produced
indubitable masterpieces. There are few novels in our period to put
beside _The Old Wives Tale_ and _Riceyman Steps_ and few stories to
equal _The Matador of the Five Towns_. And yet he could write a book
about death and eternity like _The Glimpse_--a glimpse into an empty
cavern in his mind. He wrote a vast amount of efficient yet lifeless
fiction from which his essential work is slowly being disinterred.

After his first visit to Sandgate, we never lost touch with each other.
We never quarrelled, we never let our very lively resolve to "get on"
betray our mutual generosity; we were continually interested in one
another and continually comparing ourselves with each other. He thought
me an odd card; I thought him an odd card. I became more and more
involved in the social and political issues I shall describe in the
next chapter, I made all sorts of contacts outside literary circles, I
broadened and spread myself; and maybe I spread myself thin; while he
retracted and concentrated. The boundaries of my personality became less
definite and his more and more firmly drawn. I have told already how I
put my banking account under the control of my wife, did not know of my
own investments, allowed matters of furnishing, house-building,
invitations and so forth to go right out of my control. I have never had
any household in which my rle has not been essentially that of the
paying guest. But Bennett's control of the particulars of his life
remained always (the word was one of his favourite ones) meticulous. He
loved the direction of organization; the thing breaks out in his
_Imperial Palace_. His home at Thorpe le Soken; his home in Cadogan
Square were beautifully managed--by himself. His clothes were carefully
studied. At the Reform Club we used to note with all respect the
accordance of shirt and tie and sock and handkerchief, and draw him out
upon the advisability of sending our laundry to Paris. I would ask him
where to buy a watch or a hat. "Do you mind," he would say to me, "if I
just arrange that tie of yours?"

The difference between Bennett and myself, particularly in our later
developments, is perhaps interesting from a psychological point of view,
though I do not know how to put it in psychological language. We
contrasted more and more in our contact with the external world as our
work unfolded. He developed his relation to the external world and I
developed the relation of the external world to myself. He increased in
precision and his generalizations weakened; I lost precision and my
generalizations grew wider and stronger. This is something superficially
parallel but certainly not identical with the comparison I have been
making between the systematized mental life of those who are both
scientifically disposed and trained and those who are moved to the
unco-ordinated vivid expressiveness of the artist.

I will venture here to throw out a wild suggestion to the brain
specialist. The artistic type relative to the systematizing type may
have a more vigorous innervation of the cortex, rather more volume in
the arteries, a richer or more easily oxygenated blood supply. But the
difference between the meticulous brain and the loose _sweeping_ brain
may be due not to any cortical difference at all, but to some more
central ganglionic difference. Somewhere sorting and critical operations
are in progress, concepts and associations are called up and passed
upon, links are made or rejected, and I doubt if these are cortical
operations. The discussion of mind working is still in the stage of
metaphor, and so I have to put it that this "bureau" of co-ordination
and censorship, is roomy, generous and easy going in the Bennett type,
and narrow, centralized, economical and exacting in my own. I believe
that, corresponding to these mental differences, there was a real
difference in our cerebral anatomy.

It was perhaps a part of his competent autonomy that Bennett was so
remarkably free from the normal infantilism of the human male. He was
not so dependent upon women for his comfort and self-respect as most of
us are; he was not very deeply interested in them from that point of
view. And he had not that capacity for illusion about them which is
proper to our sex. The women in his books are for the most part good
hard Staffordshire ware, capable, sisterly persons with a tang to their
tongues. He seemed always to regard them as curious, wilful
creatures--to be treated with a kind of humorous wariness. There were
pleasures in love but they had their place among other pleasures. To
have a mistress in France was, he felt, part of the _ensemble_ of a
literary artist, and afterwards it seemed to him right that the
household of a rapidly rising novelist should have a smart, attractive
wife, a really well-dressed wife. So that he set about marrying rather
as he set about house-hunting. For him it was as objective a business as
everything else. Marriage wasn't by any means that organic life
association at once accidental and inevitable, that ingrowing intimacy,
that it is for less lucidly constituted minds.

Yet he was not cold-hearted; he was a very affectionate man. Indeed he
radiated and evoked affection to an unusual degree, but in some way that
I find obscure and perplexing his sexual life did not flood into his
general life. His personality never, so to speak, fused with a woman's.
He never gave the effect of being welded, even temporarily, with the
woman he was with. They did not seem really to have got together.

I think there was some obscure hitch in his make-up here, some early
scar that robbed him of the easy self-forgetfulness, that "egoism
expanded out of sight," of a real lover. I associate that hitch with the
stammer that ran through his life. Very far back in his early years
something may have happened, something that has escaped any record,
which robbed him of normal confidence and set up a lifelong awkwardness.

He experienced certain chagrins in that search for a wife, he was not
able to carry it through with complete detachment, and when he came to
the English home he had chosen at Thorpe le Soken, he brought with him a
French wife who had previously been his close friend, a lady of charm
and lucidity but with a very marked personality which failed to accord
in every particular with his realization of what the wife of a
successful London novelist should be. I will not go into the particulars
of their gradual disagreement and legal separation, his abandonment of
Thorpe le Soken for Cadogan Square, nor of his subsequent
pseudo-marriage, at which "all London" connived, to the mother of his
one child. I think these affairs bothered him a lot but they did not
trouble him fundamentally. He reflected on this and that, and laughed
abruptly. And anyhow this part of his story is outside this present
autobiography.

He left a tangle behind him full of possibilities of recrimination and
misadjustment. There have been post-testamentary proceedings, and one
lady has taken to journalistic reminiscences about him, reminiscences
which, it seems to me, show chiefly how little a woman may understand a
man in spite of having lived with him. But perhaps I am prejudiced in
this matter. The real Arnold Bennett who is cherished in the memories of
his friends, was remarkably detached from this matrimonial and
quasi-matrimonial byplay.

Having been more than a little frustrated in his ambitions to run a
well-managed wife in two brilliantly conducted establishments in London
and the country, he fell back upon the deliberate development of his own
personality. It was no self-dramatization he attempted; no covering up
of defects by compensatory assumptions; it was a cool and systematic
exploitation of his own oddities. He was as objective about himself and
as amused about himself as about anything else in the world. He improved
a certain swing in his movements to a grave deliberate swagger; he
enriched his gestures. He brushed up his abundant whitening hair to a
delightful cocks-comb. The stammer he had never been able to conquer was
utilized for a conversational method of pauses and explosions. He
invented a sort of preliminary noise like the neigh of a penny trumpet.
He dressed to the conception of an opulent and important presence. He
wore a fob. He made his entry into a club or a restaurant an event. It
pleased his vanity no doubt, but why should pleasing one's vanity by
evoking an effusive reception in a room or restaurant be any different
from pleasing one's palate with a wine? It was done with a humour all
his own. Deep within him the invincible Card rejoiced. He knew just how
far to carry his mannerisms so that they never bored. They delighted
most people and offended none.

I wish Frank Swinnerton who was his frequent associate during his last
phase would Boswellize a little about him before the memories fade. Only
Swinnerton could describe Bennett calling up the chef at the Savoy to
announce the invention of a new dish, or describe him dressing a salad.
And Swinnerton could tell of his water-colour painting and his yacht. He
ran a yacht but he never let me see it. It was a bright and lovely toy
for him, and I think he felt I might just look at it and then at him,
with the wrong expression. He was a member of the Yacht Club. I have it
on my conscience that I said an unkind thing about his water colours.
"Arnold," I said, "you paint like Royalty."

       *       *       *       *       *

Let me return from Arnold Bennett to the tale of how Jane and I "got on"
in the years between 1895 and 1900. In the beginning of this Chapter I
brought the history of our social education up to my first encounter
with caviar and our tentative experiments with Canary Sack and the
various vintages of Messrs. Gilbey available in Camden Town. We soon got
beyond such elementary investigations. The enlargement of our lives,
once it began, was very rapid indeed, but we found the amount of
_savoir-faire_ needed to meet the new demands upon us, not nearly so
great as we had supposed.

I think my glimpses of life below stairs at Up Park helped me to meet
fresh social occasions with a certain ease. A servant in a big household
becomes either an abject snob or an extreme equalitarian. At Up Park
there was a footman who kept a diary of the bad English and the
"ignorance" he heard while he was waiting at table; he would read out
his choice items with the names and dates exactly given, and he may have
helped importantly to dispel any delusion that social superiority is
more than an advantage of position. I never shared the belief, which
peeps out through the novels of George Meredith, Henry James, Gissing
and others, that "up there somewhere" there are Great Ladies, of a
knowledge, understanding and refinement, passing the wit of common men.
The better type of social climbers seek these Great Ladies as the
Spaniards sought El Dorado. And failing to find them, invent them.

Jane and I never started with that preoccupation. We did not so much
climb as wander into the region of Society. We found ourselves lunching,
dining and week-ending occasionally with a very healthy and easy-minded
sort of people, living less urgently and more abundantly than any of the
other people we knew; with more sport, exercise, travel and leisure than
the run of mankind; the women were never under any compulsion to wear an
unbecoming garment, and struck Jane as terribly expensive; and everybody
was "looked after" to an enviable degree. They had on the whole easier
manners than we had encountered before. But they had very little to show
us or tell us. The last thing they wanted to do was to penetrate below
the surface of things on which they lived so agreeably.

Among the interesting parties I remember in those early days, were
several at Lady Desborough's at Taplow Court, and Lady Mary Elcho's at
Stanway. There I used to meet people like Arthur Balfour, various Cecils
and Sedgwicks, George Curzon, George Wyndham, Sir Walter Raleigh, Judge
Holmes, Lady Crewe, Mrs. Macguire, Maurice Baring.... But never mind all
that. Samples must serve for a catalogue. There was sometimes good talk
at dinner and after dinner, but mostly the talk was allusive and
gossipy. Balfour for the most part played the rle of the receptive,
enquiring intelligence. "Tell me," was a sort of colloquial habit with
him. He rarely ventured opinions to be shot at. He had the lazy man's
habit of interrogative discussion. Close at hand to us at Sandgate was
the house of Sir Edward Sassoon. Lady Sassoon was a tall witty woman, a
Rothschild, very much preoccupied with speculations about a Future Life
and the writings of Frederic W. H. Myers. Philosophers like McTaggart,
who were expected to throw light on her curiosity about the Future Life,
mingled with politicians like Winston Churchill, trying over perorations
at dinner, and Edwardians like the Marquis de Soveral. Most of these
week-end visits and dinner parties were as unbracing mentally, and as
pleasant, as going to a flower show and seeing what space and care can
do with favoured strains of some familiar species. In these days there
were also such persistent lunch givers as Mrs. Colefax (now Lady
Colefax) and Sir Henry Lucy (Toby M.P.) of _Punch_, who gathered large
confused tables of twenty or thirty people. There one met "celebrities"
rather than people in positions; the celebrities anyhow were the salt of
the feast; and as Jane and I were much preoccupied with our own game
against life, the chief point of our conversation was usually to find
out as unobtrusively as possible who we were talking to and why. And by
the time we were beginning to place our neighbours, the lunch party
would break up and sweep them away.

We would compare notes afterwards. "I met old So and So." "And what did
he say?" "Oh, just old nothing."

None of these social experiences had anything like the same formative
impressions upon my mind as the encounters with the politico-social
workers and with the writers in earnest, and the artists, upon which I
have enlarged. The best thing that these friendly glimpses of the
prosperous and influential did for us was to remove any lurking feeling
of our being "underneath" and to confirm my natural disposition to
behave as though I was just as good as anybody and just as responsible
for our national behaviour and outlook.

[Illustration: Drawings.]

We were "getting on." At first it was very exciting and then it became
less marvellous. We still found ourselves rising. I remember about this
time--to be exact in January 24th, 1902--I was asked to read a paper to
the Royal Institution and I wrote and read _The Discovery of the
Future_, about which I shall have more to say in my concluding chapter.
An impression I sketched at the time of a Royal Institution audience may
very fitly conclude this chapter. I regard this picshua as a masterpiece
only to be compared to the Palolithic drawings in the Caves of
Altamira. It marks our steady invasion of the world of influential and
authoritative people. I remember that Sir James Crichton-Browne (who was
about as young then as he is now; he was born in 1840) was very kind and
polite to us on this occasion and that after the lecture was delivered I
met Mrs. Alfred and Mrs. Emile Mond, long before there was any Lord
Melchett, when Brunner Mond and Co. was only the embryo of I.C.I. They
wanted to collect us socially, and it was suddenly borne in upon us that
we had become worth collecting--eight years from our desperate start in
Mornington Place.


 6

_Building a House (1899-1900)_

In the present section there is little need for writing. Two photographs
and two picshuas will serve to tell the tale. We found a site for the
house we contemplated, we found an architect in C. F. A. Voysey, that
pioneer in the escape from the small snobbish villa residence to the
bright and comfortable pseudo-cottage. Presently we found ourselves with
all the money we needed for the house and a surplus of over 1,000. And
my health was getting better and better.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

The house was still being built when it dawned upon us as a novel and
delightful idea that we were now justified in starting a family. A
picture of the pretty little study in which I was to work for ten years
finishing _Kipps_, producing _Anticipations_, _A Modern Utopia_,
_Mankind in the Making_, _Tono Bungay_, _Ann Veronica_, _The New
Machiavelli_ and various other novels, may very well be included in this
picture chapter.

Voysey wanted to put a large heart-shaped letter plate on my front door,
but I protested at wearing my heart so conspicuously outside and we
compromised on a spade. We called the house Spade House. The men on the
lift beside my garden, which used to ascend and descend between
Folkestone and Sandgate, confused my name with that of another Wells,
"the Man who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo"--and they told their
passengers that it was "on the ace of spades" that the trick was done. I
was no longer lean and hungry-looking (as the second picshua shows), I
was "putting on weight" and in order to keep it down I pulled a roller
about my nascent garden in the sight of the promenaders on the Leas,
unconscious at first of my sporting fame. But soon I went about Sandgate
and Folkestone like a Wagnerian hero with a motif of my own--whenever
there was a whistling errand boy within ear shot.

Spade House faced the south with a loggia that was a suntrap. The
living-rooms were on one level with the bedrooms so that if presently I
had to live in a wheeled chair I could be moved easily from room to
room. But things did not turn out in that fashion. Before the house was
finished, Voysey had revised his plans so as to have a night and day
nursery upstairs, and presently I was finishing _Kipps_ and making notes
for what I meant to be a real full-length novel at last, _Tono Bungay_,
a novel, as I imagined it, on Dickens-Thackeray lines, and I had got a
bicycle again and was beginning the exploration of Kent. I became a
Borough magistrate and stability and respectability loomed straight
ahead of us. I might have been knighted; I might have known the glories
of the O.M.; I might have faced the photographer in the scarlet of an
honorary degree.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.]

Such things have nestled in the jungle beside my path. But Ann Veronica
(bless her!) and my outspoken republicanism saved me from all that.
There is only one honour I covet, and I will say nothing about it
because it will never come my way, and there is only one disappointment
I have ever had in this field, and that was when Jane was not put upon
the Essex county bench--for which she was all too good.




CHAPTER THE NINTH

_THE IDEA OF A PLANNED WORLD_


 1

Anticipations _(1900) and the "New Republic"_

In this newly built Spade House I began a book _Anticipations_ which can
be considered as the keystone to the main arch of my work. That arch
rises naturally from my first creative imaginations, _The Man of the
Year Million_ (written first in 1887) and _The Chronic Argonauts_ (in
the _Science Schools Journal_ 1888), and it leads on by a logical
development to _The Shape of Things to Come_ (1933) and to the efforts I
am still making to define and arrange for myself and for a few other
people who inhabit my world, the actual factors necessary to give a
concrete working expression to a world-wide "Open Conspiracy" to rescue
human society from the net of tradition in which it is entangled and to
reconstruct it upon planetary lines.

Necessarily this main arch, the structural frame of my life, is of
supreme importance to me, and naturally it is of supreme importance in
this picture of my world. It is unavoidable therefore that at times I
should write as if I imagined that--like that figure of Atlas which
stood in my father's shop window--I sustained the whole world upon my
shoulders.

That is the necessary effect of an autobiographical perspective. Every
man who has grown out of his infantile faith in the sanity of things
about him and developed a social consciousness, carries his whole world
upon his shoulders. In an autobiography he is bound to tell about that.
He cannot pretend to be unaware of what his mind is doing. He becomes
perforce the judge of all the world. He cannot add, "in my opinion" or,
"though it is not for me to judge," to every sentence. If he is afraid
to appear self-important and an arrogant prig, he had better leave out
the story of his brain altogether. But then, what will remain?

I once met a very eminent American who regaled me with an anecdote. He
said, "I once saw Abraham Lincoln."

"Yes?" I said eagerly.

"He was as close to me as you are. Closer."

"Well?"

"I saw him."

"And _what_ did you see?"

"Abraham Lincoln of course. Surely you've heard of Abraham Lincoln?"

That was really modest autobiography, a _locus_ and, beyond that,
nothing. But the alternative would have been to pronounce a judgment on
Abraham Lincoln.

I should probably romance about it, fill in gaps and simplify unduly, if
I tried to give an orderly account of how preoccupation with the future
became dominant in my conscious life. But I think my contact with
evolutionary speculation at my most receptive age played a large part in
the matter. I cannot judge, I do not know how to judge, whether the
accident of writing those two early pieces about the remote future and
mankind and time-travelling gave me a bias in this matter, and whether,
having once made a little success in forecasting, it seemed natural to
give the public more from the same tap, or whether on the other hand
there was an innate disposition to approach things in general from that
unusual side. The idea of treating time as a fourth dimension was, I
think, due to an original impulse; I do not remember picking that up.
But I may have picked it up, because it was in the air. If I did not
then the bias was innate.

The future depicted in the _Time Machine_ (1894) was a mere fantasy
based on the idea of the human species developing about divergent lines,
but the future in _When the Sleeper Awakes_ (1898) was essentially an
exaggeration of contemporary tendencies: higher buildings, bigger
towns, wickeder capitalists and labour more down-trodden than ever and
more desperate. Everything was bigger, quicker and more crowded; there
was more and more flying and the wildest financial speculation. It was
our contemporary world in a state of highly inflamed distension. Very
much the same picture is given in _A Story of the Days to Come_ (1899)
and _A Dream of Armageddon_ (1903). I suppose that is the natural line
for an imaginative writer to take, in an age of material progress and
political sterility. Until he thinks better of it. Michael Arlen
betrayed the same tendency in his _Man's Mortality_ as recently as 1932.
But in 1899 I was already beginning to realize there might be better
guessing about the trend of things.

Along came the end of the century, just apt to my thoughts, and I
arranged with W. L. Courtney, who had succeeded Frank Harris as editor
of the _Fortnightly Review_, to publish a series of papers discussing
what was likely to happen in the new century.

Now _Anticipations_ was not only a new start for me, but, it presently
became clear, a new thing in general thought. It may have been a feeble
and vulnerable innovation, but it was as new as a new-laid egg. It was
the first attempt to forecast the human future as a whole and to
estimate the relative power of this and that great system of influence.
Partial forecasts and forebodings existed in abundance already; we had
estimates for instance, of the length of time it would take to exhaust
the world's coal supply, of the prospects of population congestion if
the birth-rate remained stable, of the outlook for this planet as the
solar system cooled, as it was then supposed to be doing, very rapidly;
but most of these conclusions were based on such narrowly conditioned
calculations that they could be dismissed quite easily by challenging
the validity of the assumptions. A comprehensive attempt to state and
weigh and work out a general resultant for the chief forces of social
change throughout the world, sober forecasting, that is to say, without
propaganda, satire or extravaganza, was so much a novelty that my book,
crude though it was and smudgily vague, excited quite a number of
people. Macmillan, my English publishers, were caught unawares by the
demand and had sold out the first edition before they reprinted. It
sold as well as a novel.

Among other people who were excited by _Anticipations_ was myself. I
became my own first disciple. Perhaps at the outset of this series I was
inspired chiefly by the idea of producing some timely interesting
articles. But before I was half way through the series I realized that
this sort of thing could not remain simply journalistic. If I was not
doing something widely and profoundly important I was at least sketching
out something widely and profoundly important. I was carrying on the
curves instead of the tangents of history. I was indicating, even if I
was not to some extent providing, new data of quite primary importance
for rationalized social political and economic effort. I was writing the
human prospectus.

One of the things I would like to see done in the world is the
foundation of a number of chairs for the teaching of an old subject in a
new spirit. If I belonged to the now rapidly vanishing class of
benevolent multi-millionaires I would create Professorships of
Analytical History. Instead of presenting the clotted masses of
un-digested or ill-digested fact which still encumber academic history
to-day, my Professors would be doing fully, systematically and soundly,
just what I did, though in the flimsiest way, in these _Anticipations_.
From the biological point of view my Professors would be human
ecologists; indeed Human Ecology would be a good alternative name for
this new history as I conceive it. Then there need be no challenge to
those who are still in endowed possession of "history" as such. My new
men and the students under them would be working out strands of
biological, intellectual, economic consequences. Periods, nations and
races they would consider only in so far as these provided them with
material facts. They would be related to the older school of historians
much as vegetable physiologists ecologists and morphologists are related
to the old plant-flattening, specimen-hunting, stamen-counting
botanists. The end of all intelligent analysis is to clear the way for
synthesis. The clearer their new history became the nearer they would be
to efficient world-planning. All this is very obvious to-day but it was
by no means clear in 1900. It took me some years to grasp the magnitude
of my own realization.

Sooner or later Human Ecology under some name or other, will win its way
to academic recognition and to its proper place in general education--in
America sooner than in Europe, I guess--but the old history made up of
time-worn gossip and stale and falsified politics, is deeply embedded in
literature and usage. The invasion of the field of history by the
scientific spirit is belated and slow. The old history, barbarically
copious and classically fruitless, is strongly entrenched in the centres
of learning throughout the world; it is closely interwoven with the
legal profession and the current politico-social organization, and has
all the resistant vigour of hierarchic dignity on the defensive. For
years yet, I am afraid, the young will still have to learn the more
significant facts about Queen Elizabeth's doubtful virginity, memorize
such legal documents as the Constitutions of Clarendon and the Bill of
Rights and discuss those marvellous world policies invented for
examination purposes by dons addicted to self-identification with Julius
Csar or Napoleon Bonaparte or Charles the Fifth or Disraeli or some
other of the many exaggerated and inflammatory figures about which
history has festered. But this material has no more educational value
than the reading of detective stories, until a sound analytical
treatment brings it right into the texture of contemporary affairs and
points on through their confusion to the broad lines of probability
ahead.

I made a first attempt to formulate this idea in my Royal Institution
lecture in January 1902. I called this lecture the _Discovery of the
Future_ and I drew a hard distinction between what I called the legal
(past-regarding) and the creative (future regarding) minds. I insisted
that we overrated the darkness of the future, that by adequate analysis
of contemporary processes its conditions could be brought within the
range of our knowledge and its form controlled, and that mankind was at
the dawn of a great change-over from life regarded as a system of
consequences to life regarded as a system of constructive effort. I did
not say that the future could be foretold but I said that its conditions
could be foretold. We should be less and less bound by the engagements
of the past and more and more ruled by a realiazation of the creative
effect of our acts. We should release ourselves more and more from the
stranglehold of past things.

An attack upon the assumption that history is made by "Great Men" is
clearly implied in this view. Napoleon and Csar were typical "Great
Men." I hold they were as much an outcome of systemic processes as are
the pustules that break out through the skin of many growing young
people. Just now we are living in a world where such boils are breaking
out everywhere; everywhere there are dictators and "leaders"; everywhere
there are "movements" festering about anything from the highly distended
Mussolini to our own little black-head, Mosley. It is a spotty stage in
the adolescence of mankind, a spotty stage that will pass. It is the
Great Man idea and method in final pathological decay.

My lecture was printed in _Nature_ (February 6th, 1902) and afterwards
reprinted as a pamphlet. I find it, when I re-read it now and measure it
by the present certainties of my mind, vague, inexact and rhetorical,
but that is the measure of the progress in definition that has been
going on in the intervening third of a century. When it was read, that
lecture was well abreast of its time.

In 1902 I returned to the _Fortnightly Review_ in which _Anticipations_
had appeared and contributed a second series of papers under the general
title of _Mankind in the Making_, which was published as a book in 1903.
This is less in the vein of Analytical History and more in the nature of
a general prospectus for the human enterprise. In 1905, I published _A
Modern Utopia_, also after a serialization in the _Fortnightly_, and in
this I presented not so much my expectations for mankind as my desires.

Let me however return to _Anticipations_ for a while. The full title of
the book is _Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific
Progress upon Human Life and Thought_. It begins with a statement of
what is now a matter of world-wide recognition, the fundamental change
in the scale of human relationships and human enterprises brought about
by increased facilities of communication. It goes on to apply this
generalization to one after another of the fundamental human interests,
to show how it affects the boundaries of political divisions, the scope
and nature of collective organisations, working loyalties and
educational necessities. I had discovered no new principle here. It was
too obvious a thing to be a discovery, and it had already been applied
most illuminatingly by Grant Allen in an unpretending essay on the
distances between country towns. I never read anything more germinal in
my life, unless it was Lang and Atkinson's _Primal Law and Social
Origins_, than this particular magazine article. It woke me up to the
reciprocal relationship between facilities of locomotion and
community-size, and so to a realization of what was happening to the
world. I was, I think, the first to apply this relationship
comprehensively to historical analysis. If I did not discover this
principle I was certainly among the first to call attention to its
far-reaching implications.

_Anticipations_ begins with two papers on land-traction and the
redistribution of population through the evolution of transport. Then
follows an examination of the way in which the change of scale is
destroying a long established social order and creating a social
confusion in which no new classifications are yet apparent. Here again I
was in a region of possible knowledge which was then immensely
unexplored. There are two chapters on this social flux, and some
guessing at its possible recrystallization, and these lead on naturally
to a "Life History of Democracy." Modern Democracy is shown to be not an
organic method of social organization but the political expression of a
phase of social liquefaction. This chapter on Democracy, the chapter
called the "Great Synthesis" and the concluding chapter on "Faith,
Morals and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century" are from my present
point of view, the most imperfect and the most interesting parts of
_Anticipations_. The forecasts of modern war, striking as their partial
fulfilment has been, of the interplay of languages, of the probability
of defeat for Germany in the war that was then already threatening us,
the renascence of Poland and the prospective movements of boundaries and
predominances, though they show a considerable amount of shrewdness,
have now been so much overtaken by events and proved or disproved, that
they need not concern me here. My great miss in these early shots at
forecasting was that I never guessed at the possibility of a modernized
planning rgime arising in Russia--of all countries. I saw the
approaching decivilization of Ireland but I wrote that Russia would be
only another and vaster Ireland. I was quite out about Russia.

The fact that in 1900 I had already grasped the inevitability of a World
State and the complete insufficiency of the current parliamentary
methods of democratic government is of more than merely autobiographical
interest. Everybody in 1900 was shirking the necessity for great
political reconstructions everywhere. Even the raising of the question
carried my book outside the sphere of "practical politics" as they were
then understood.

At that early date I was somehow already alive to the incompatibility of
the great world order fore-shadowed by scientific and industrial
progress, with existing political and social structures. I was already
searching about in my mind, and in the facts about me, for ideas about
the political and social will and mentality that were demanded by these
inevitable material developments. The fact that I regarded myself as a
complete outsider in public affairs, and that I felt debarred from any
such conformity as would have given me a career within the established
political and educational machinery, probably helped importantly in the
liberation of my mind to these realizations, and supplied the
disinterested vigour with which I worked them out. I could attack
electoral and parliamentary methods, the prestige of the universities
and the ruling class, the monarchy and patriotism, because I had not the
slightest hope or intention of ever using any of these established
systems for my own advancement or protection. For a scientific treatment
of the theory of government my political handicap was a release. I had
the liberty of that irresponsible child in the fable of the Emperor's
Clothes. I could say exactly what I thought because it was inconceivable
that I could ever be a successful courtier.

In _Anticipations_, I take up the contemporary pretensions of democracy
and state the widely unspoken thought of the late Victorians: "This will
not work." I then consider existing governments and ruling influences
and say as plainly, "These do not work." What most active people were
saying was, "They will work well enough for a few years more." And so,
through circumstances and simplicity rather than through any exceptional
intelligence, I arrived ahead of everyone at the naked essential
question, which everyone about me was putting off for to-morrow, "What,
then, will work?" And the attempt to answer that has been the cardinal
reality of my thought and writing ever since.

The first tentative answer, as I made it in _Anticipations_, was
something I called "The New Republic." It was an answer in the most
general terms and it was given in a thoroughly Nineteenth Century
spirit. I have written already, in Chapter the Fifth,  5 of the
peculiar fatuous hopefulness of the Nineteenth Century and here I
am--true to my period.

This New Republic was to consist of all those people throughout the
world whose minds were adapted to the demands of the big scale
conditions of the new time.

     "I have sought to show" I wrote "that in peace and war alike a
     process has been and is at work, a process with all the
     inevitableness and all the patience of a natural force, whereby the
     great swollen, shapeless, hyper-trophied social mass of to-day must
     give birth at last to a naturally and informally organized,
     educated class, an unprecedented sort of people, a New Republic
     dominating the world. It will be none of our ostensible governments
     that will effect this great clearing up; it will be the mass of
     power and intelligence altogether outside the official state
     systems of to-day that will make this great clearance, a new social
     Hercules that will strangle the serpents of war and national
     animosity in his cradle.... It will appear first, I believe, as a
     conscious organization of intelligent and quite possibly in some
     cases wealthy men, as a movement having distinct social and
     political aims, confessedly ignoring most of the existing apparatus
     of political control, or using it only as an incidental implement
     in the attainment of these aims. It will be very loosely organized
     in its earlier stages, a mere movement of a number of people in a
     certain direction, who will presently discover with a sort of
     surprise the common object towards which they are all moving."

After the fatalistic optimistic fashion of the time, you see, I assumed
that this "New Republic" would appear of its own accord, would "emerge."
This was Liberalism--after the Tennysonian pattern. But even then some
doubt was lurking at the back of my mind whether it might not prove
necessary to _assist_ the process of emergence. That there was something
to be done about it, and that waiting for the great civilization of the
future to arrive was not enough, grew clearer and clearer in my mind,
year after year. Destiny, like the God of the Jews, gives no
unconditional promises.

In  5 of Chapter Five of this book I have already made a general
criticism of the Socialism of the opening century and told, as one of
the newer generation at that time, of my reactions to the assumptions
and limitations of the Socialist movement. In several of my books my
dawning sense that both Marxism and Fabian Socialism were failing to
complete their first intentions and beginning to "date," found
expression. Here I have to touch again upon the issues of that section,
but from a new angle. What concerns me now is the story of my own
disentanglement and the curious way in which I was using my prestige and
possibilities as an imaginative writer, to do the thinking-out of this
problem of human will and government, under fantastic forms. Just as
Pope found it easier to discuss natural theology in verse, so at this
stage, I found it more convenient to discuss sociology in fable. While
in the Fabian Society I was raising _The Question of Scientific
Administrative Areas_ (1903), I was also writing a story based on
exactly the same idea, _The Food of the Gods_ (serialized in 1903 and
published as a book in 1904), which began with a wild burlesque of the
change of scale produced by scientific men and ended in the heroic
struggle of the rare new big-scale way of living against the teeming
small-scale life of the earth. Nobody saw the significance of it, but it
left some of its readers faintly puzzled. They were vastly amused and
thrilled by my giant wasps and rats, but young Caddies was beyond them.
And later on in the same way the research for some means of changing the
collective drive of human motives threw off the fable of _In the Days of
the Comet_ (1906), when an impalpable gas from a comet's tail sweeps
into our atmosphere, does the work of centuries of moral education in
the twinkling of an eye, and makes mankind sane, understanding and
infinitely tolerant.

The more formal research for the realization of the New Republic was
pursued in _Mankind in the Making_. I was realizing that the correlative
of a new republic was a new education and this book is a discursive
examination, an all too discursive examination of the formative elements
in the social magma. The best part is the criticism and the rejection of
selective breeding as giving any immediate hope of human improvement.
Much of the rest shirks the harder task of scrutinizing the "man-making
forces in society," in favour of a series of sketchy suggestions and
rhetorical passages. Sometimes the text degenerates into mere scolding.
Here is the conclusion of this, the most completely forgotten of my
books. This stuff, you will observe, is not really getting on with the
business at all; it is revivalism, field preaching. It is the
exhortation of a man who has not yet been able to establish, at any
point, working contacts for the realization of his ideas. Plainly he is
exhorting himself as well as others. Just to keep going.

     "Assuredly youth will come to us, if this is indeed to be the dawn
     of a new time. Without the high resolve of youth, without the
     constant accession of youth, without recuperative power, no
     sustained forward movement is possible in the world. It is to
     youth, therefore, that this book is finally addressed, to the
     adolescents, to the students, to those who are yet in the schools
     and who will presently come to read it, to those who, being still
     plastic, can understand the infinite plasticity of the world. It is
     those who are yet unmade who must become the makers.... After
     thirty there are few conversions and fewer fine beginnings; men and
     women go on in the path they have marked out for themselves. Their
     imaginations have become firm and rigid, even if they have not
     withered, and there is no turning them from the conviction of their
     brief experience that almost all that is, is inexorably so.
     Accomplished things obsess us more and more....

     "With each year of their lives they come more distinctly into
     conscious participation with our efforts. Those soft little
     creatures that we have figured grotesquely as dropping from an
     inexorable spout into our world; those weak and wailing lumps of
     pink flesh, more helpless than any animal, for whom we have planned
     better care, a better chance of life, better conditions of all
     sorts; those larval souls, who are at first helpless clay in our
     hands, presently, insensibly, have become helpers beside us in the
     struggle. In a little while they are beautiful children, they are
     boys and girls and youths and maidens, full of the zest of new
     life, full of an abundant, joyful receptivity. In a little while
     they are walking with us, seeking to know whither we go, and
     whither we lead them, and why.... In a little while they are young
     men and women, and then men and women, save for a fresher vigour,
     like ourselves. For us it comes at last to fellowship and
     resignation. For them it comes at last to responsibility, to
     freedom, and to introspection and the searching of hearts.... To
     know all one can of one's self in relation to the world about one,
     to think out all one can, to take nothing for granted except by
     reason of one's unavoidable limitations, to be swift, indeed, but
     not hasty, to be strong but not violent, to be as watchful of one's
     self as it is given one to be, is the manifest duty of all who
     would subserve the New Republic. For the New Republican, as for his
     forerunner the Puritan, conscience and discipline must saturate
     life. He must be ruled by duties and a certain ritual in life.
     Every day and every week he must set aside time to read and think,
     to commune with others and himself; he must be as jealous of his
     health and strength as the Levites of old. Can we in this
     generation make but a few thousands of such men and women, men and
     women who are not afraid to live, men and women with a common faith
     and a common understanding, then, indeed, our work will be done.
     They will in their own time take this world as a sculptor takes his
     marble, and shape it better than all our dreams."

That I think is my style at its worst and my matter at its thinnest, and
quoting it makes me feel very sympathetic with those critics who, to put
it mildly, restrain their admiration for me. But it is a proper part of
the story to record a phase when I did come to the surface and spout
like that, before I took breath and went down into things again.


 2

_The Samurai--in Utopia and in the Fabian Society (1905-1909)_

_A Modern Utopia_ goes half way towards the fantastic story for its
form, in a fresh attack upon the problem of bringing the New Republic
into existence. It is fairly plain to me that I felt I was going
ineffectively nowhere, in those discursive utterances in _Mankind in the
Making_, where the only tolerable stuff was the plain and simple
squashing of "Positive Eugenics." But I had still to discover how to get
at a fruitful presentation of New Republican organization. I now tried
an attack upon my difficulties, so to speak, from the rear, by dropping
the study of existing conditions and asking first, "What is it that has
to be done? What sort of world do we want?" I took a leaf; in fact I
took a number of pages; from Plato in that. Only after the answer to
that question had begun to appear, would it be possible to take up the
consideration of how to get there with any hope of success.

Of course, as I have already explained in my criticism of Fabian
Socialism and classical Marxism, this was flying in the face of potent
and sacred dogmas. Both schools were so ignorant of the use of the
imagination in scientific exploration, that they thought Utopianism
"unscientific"--and their snobbish terror of that word "unscientific"
had no limits. That does not alter the fact that my Utopian attack upon
the problem of socialist administration was thoroughly worth the making.

In February 1906, I find that I was defending my method of approach to
the problem of administration, at a meeting of the Sociological Society,
in a paper entitled "The so-called Science of Sociology." This was
afterwards reprinted in _An Englishman Looks at the World_ (1914). In
this paper I insisted that in sociology there were no units for
treatment, but only one single unit which was human society, and that in
consequence the normal scientific method of classification and
generalization breaks down. "We cannot put Humanity into a museum, or
dry it for examination; our one, single, still living specimen is all
history, all anthropology, and the fluctuating world of men. There is no
satisfactory means of dividing it, and nothing else in the real world
with which to compare it. We have only the remotest ideas of its
'life-cycle' and a few relics of its origin and dreams of its
destiny.... Sociology must be neither art simply, nor science in the
narrow meaning of the word at all, but knowledge rendered imaginatively
and with an element of personality, that is to say, in the highest sense
of the term, literature."

There were, I argued, two literary forms through which valid
sociological work may be carried on; the first, the fitting of "schemes
of interpretation" to history and the second, smaller in bulk and
"altogether under-rated and neglected," the creation and criticism of
Utopias. This I maintained should be the main business of a sociological
society. This essay was a little excursion by the way and the subsequent
discussion was entirely inconclusive. Mr. Wilfred Trotter thought it was
an "Attack on Science" and Mr. Swinny defended Comte from my
ingratitude.

(Probably I am unjust to Comte and grudge to acknowledge a sort of
priority he had in sketching the modern outlook. But for him, as for
Marx, I have a real personal dislike, a genuine reluctance to concede
him any sort of leadership. It is I think part of an inherent dislike of
leadership and a still profounder objection to the subsequent
deification of leaders. Leaders I feel should guide as far as they
can--and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have
lit.)

Although it has never had any great popular sale, _A Modern Utopia_
remains to this day one of the most vital and successful of my books. It
is as alive to-day as _Mankind in the Making_ is dead. It was the first
approach I made to the dialogue form, and I am almost as satisfied with
its literary quality as I am with that of _The Undying Fire_. The trend
towards dialogue like the basal notion of the Samurai, marks my debt to
Plato. _A Modern Utopia_, quite as much as that of More, derives frankly
from the _Republic_.

In this _Modern Utopia_ I made a suggestion for a temperamental
classification of citizens as citizens. For the purposes of the state I
proposed a division into four types of character, the poietic, the
kinetic, the dull and the base. A primary problem of government was to
vest all the executive and administrative work in the kinetic class,
while leaving the poietic an adequate share in suggestion, criticism and
legislation, controlling the base and giving the dull an incentive to
kinetic effort.

The device of the order of the Samurai, as I worked it out in this book,
does I think solve this problem better than any other method that has
ever been suggested. Membership of the Samurai was voluntary, but was
made difficult by qualifications and severe disciplinary tests and, on
the principle that the bow need not always be strung, could be abandoned
and resumed, under proper safeguards, according to the way of living
desired by the individual at any time. In the Utopian constitution,
free-speech and great fields of initiative were jealously guarded from
repressive controls. The kinetic were trained to respect them. The
"base" were merely those who had given evidence of a strong anti-social
disposition and were the only individuals inalterably excluded from the
Samurai. Membership of either of these four classes, was regulated by
the filtering processes of education and of the tests of social life,
and was never hereditary.

The experience of the thirty years that have passed since I launched
this scheme, and particularly the appearance of such successful
organizations as the Communist party and the Italian fascists has
greatly strengthened my belief in the essential soundness of this
conception of the governing order of the future. A Samurai Order
educated in such an ideology as I have since tried to shape out, is
inevitable if the modern world-state is ever to be fully realized. We
want the world ruled, not by everybody, but by a politically minded
organization open, with proper safeguards, to everybody. The problem of
world revolution and world civilization becomes the problem of
crystallizing, as soon as possible, as many as possible of the right
sort of individuals from the social magma, and getting them into
effective, conscious co-operation.

Before working out my sketch _A Modern Utopia_, I was disposed to think
that this ruling order, which I had called at first the New Republic,
would appear of its own accord. After I had published and seen something
of the effect of _A Modern Utopia_, I realized that an Order of the
Samurai was not a thing that comes about of itself and that if ever it
were to exist, it must be realized as the result of very deliberate
effort. After publishing _A Modern Utopia_ in 1906, I went to America
and wrote a series of impressions, _The Future in America_ in which I
dwelt upon the casual and chaotic elements in American development,
noted the apparent absence of any "sense of the State" and speculated on
the possibility of supplying that deficiency. Then I returned to begin a
confused, tedious, ill-conceived and ineffectual campaign to turn the
little Fabian Society, wizened already though not old, into the
beginnings of an order, akin to these Samurai in _A Modern Utopia_,
which should embody for mankind a sense of the State.

I envisaged that reconditioned Fabian Society as becoming, by means of
vigorous propaganda, mainly carried on by young people, the directive
element of a reorganized socialist party. We would attack the coming
generation at the high school, technical college and university stage,
and our organization would quicken into a constructive social stratum.

The idea was as good as the attempt to realize it was futile. On various
occasions in my life it has been borne in on me, in spite of a stout
internal defence, that I can be quite remarkably silly and inept; but no
part of my career rankles so acutely in my memory with the conviction of
bad judgment, gusty impulse and real inexcusable vanity, as that storm
in the Fabian tea-cup. From the first my motives were misunderstood, and
it should have been my business to make them understandable. I
antagonized Shaw and Beatrice Webb for example, by my ill-aimed
aggressiveness, yet both these people have since shown by their
behaviour towards Fascism and Communism respectively, that their trend
of mind is all towards just such a qualification of crude democracy as
in 1906 I was so clumsily seeking. I was fundamentally right and I was
wrong-headed and I left the Society, at last, if possible more
politically parliamentary and ineffective than I found it. If I were to
recount the comings and goings of that petty, dusty conflict beginning
with my paper _The Faults of the Fabian_ (February 1906) and ending with
my resignation in September 1908, the reader would be intolerably bored.
Fortunately for him it would bore me far more to disinter the
documents, fight my battles over again and write it all down. And nobody
else will ever do it.

I can but mention in passing the crowded meetings in Cliffords Inn, the
gathered "intelligentsia"--then so new in English life--the old radical
veterans and the bubbling new young people; the fine speeches of Shaw;
Sidney Webb, with his head down talking fast with a slight lisp,
terribly like a Civil Servant dispensing information; the magnificent
Bland in a frock-coat and a black ribboned monocle, debating, really
debating Sir, in a rococo variation of the front bench parliamentary
manner; red-haired Haden Guest, being mercurial, and Edward Pease, the
secretary, invincibly dry; myself speaking haltingly on the verge of the
inaudible, addressing my tie through a cascade moustache that was no
sort of help at all, correcting myself as though I were a manuscript
under treatment, making ill-judged departures into parenthesis; the
motions, the amendments, the disputes with the chairman, the shows of
hands, the storms of applause; the excited Socialists disgorging at
last, still disputing, into philistine Fleet Street and the Strand,
swirling into little eddies in Appenrodt's, talking a mixture of
politics and personalities. Our seriousness was intense. We typed and
printed and issued Reports and Replies and Committee Election Appeals
and Personal Statements, and my original intentions were buried at last
beneath a steaming heap of hot secondary issues.

The order of the Fabian Samurai perished unborn. I went, discoursing to
undergraduate branches and local branches, to Oxford, Cambridge,
Glasgow, Manchester and elsewhere pursuing the lengthening threads of
our disputes. The society would neither give itself to me to do what I
wished with it, nor cast me out. It liked the entertainment of its
lively evenings. And at last I suddenly became aware of the
disproportionate waste of my energy in these disputes and abandoned my
attack. Now there was the New Republic to be discovered. By me at any
rate.

Reflections of that queer conflict are to be found in _The New
Machiavelli_ (1911). For some time I was a baffled revolutionary. I did
not know what to do next. My Theory of Revolution by Samurai hung in
the air and I could not discover any way of bringing it down to the
level of reality. At the very time when I was failing, Lenin, under the
stresses of a more pressing reality, was steadily evolving an
extraordinarily similar scheme, the reconstructed Communist Party.
Whether there was any genetic connection between his scheme and mine I
have never been able to ascertain. But the in-and-out arrangement
whereby a man or woman could be a militant member of the organization
and then drop out of its obligations and privileges, the imposition of
special disciplines and restrictions upon the active members and the
recognition that there are types of good citizens who will live best and
work best outside the responsible administrative organization, are
common alike to my project and the Russian reality. Moreover they
resemble each other in insisting upon a training in directive ideas as
part of the militant qualification. If Russia has done nothing else for
mankind, the experiment of the Communist Party is alone sufficient to
justify her revolution and place it upon an altogether higher level than
that chaotic emotional release, the first French Revolution.


 3

_"Planning" in the_ Daily Mail (_1912_)

If for a time I could not get on with the project of an organized "New
Republic" as such, this did not prevent my making an occasional attack
upon the general problem of social reconstruction. In 1912 Northcliffe
asked me to write a series of articles for his _Daily Mail_ on the
Labour Unrest. Here again I displayed a certain prophetic quality. I got
a year or so ahead of the general movement. "Planning" is a world-wide
idea nowadays, but in 1912 this that follows was strange stuff for the
readers of the leading half-penny daily to find upon their breakfast
tables:

     "No community has ever yet had the will and the imagination to
     recast and radically alter its social methods as a whole. The idea
     of such a reconstruction has never been absent from human thought
     since the days of Plato, and it has been enormously reinforced by
     the spreading material successes of modern science, successes due
     always to the substitution of analysis and reasoned planning for
     trial and the rule of thumb. But it has never yet been so believed
     in and understood as to render any real endeavour to reconstruct
     possible. The experiment has always been too gigantic for the
     available faith behind it, and there have been against it the fear
     of presumption, the interests of all advantaged people, and the
     natural sloth of humanity. We do but emerge now from a period of
     deliberate happy-go-lucky and the influence of Herbert Spencer, who
     came near raising public shiftlessness to the dignity of a national
     philosophy. Everything would adjust itself--if only it was left
     alone.

     "Yet some things there are that cannot be done by small
     adjustments, such as leaping chasms or killing an ox or escaping
     from the roof of a burning house. You have to decide upon a certain
     course on such occasions and maintain a continuous movement. If you
     wait on the burning house until you scorch and then turn round a
     bit or move away a yard or so, of if on the verge of a chasm you
     move a little in the way in which you wish to go, disaster will
     punish your moderation. And it seems to me that the establishment
     of the world's work upon a new basis--and that and no less is what
     this Labour Unrest demands for its pacification--is just one of
     those large alterations which will never be made by the
     collectively unconscious activities of men, by competitions and
     survival and the higgling of the market. Humanity is rebelling
     against the continuing existence of a labour class as such, and I
     can see no way by which our present method of weekly wages
     employment can change by imperceptible increments into a method of
     salary and pension--for it is quite evident that only by reaching
     that shall we reach the end of these present discontents. The
     change has to be made on a comprehensive scale or not at all. We
     need nothing less than a national plan of social development if the
     thing is to be achieved.

     "Now that, I admit, is, as the Americans say, a large proposition.
     But we are living in a time of more and more comprehensive plans,
     and the mere fact that no scheme so extensive has ever been tried
     before is no reason at all why we should not consider one. We think
     nowadays quite serenely of schemes for the treatment of the
     nation's health as one whole, while our fathers considered illness
     as a blend of accident with special providences; we have
     systematized the community's water supply, education, and all sorts
     of once 'chaotic services, and Germany and our own infinite
     higgledy-piggledy discomfort and ugliness have brought home to us
     at last even the possibility of planning the extension of our towns
     and cities. It is only another step upward in scale to plan out
     new, more tolerable conditions of employment for every sort of
     worker and to organize the transition from our present disorder."

And again:

     "I have attempted a diagnosis of this aspect of our national
     situation. I have pointed out that nearly all the social forces of
     our time seem to be in conspiracy to bring about the disappearance
     of a labour class as such and the rearrangement of our work and
     industry upon a new basis. That rearrangement demands an
     unprecedented national effort and the production of an adequate
     National Plan. Failing that, we seem doomed to a period of chronic
     social conflict and possibly even of frankly revolutionary
     outbreaks that may destroy us altogether or leave us only a dwarfed
     and enfeebled nation...."

(But all this was complicated with an advocacy of "proportional
representation" and one or two other minor reforms which I now find
myself less willing to revive. Not so much because I have lost faith in
them as because I realize that they are of such secondary importance
that any insistence upon them distorts the proportions of the general
proposition. If ever they are mentioned people say: "So _that's_ your
panacea!" and everything else is ignored.)


 4

_The Great War and My Resort to "God" (1914-1916)_

The onset of the Great War hung portentously over us all throughout the
three years between the Agadir incident (July 1911) and the invasion of
Belgium in August 1914. The inevitability of a crash was more and more
manifest, and my reluctant attention was swung round to this continually
more immediate threat to the structure of civilization. In 1913, in a
short series of articles in the _Daily Mail_, I was writing about the
modernization of warfare. (They are reprinted together with the Labour
Unrest series and other articles in _An Englishman Looks at the World_,
1914) and early in 1914 I published a futuristic story _The World Set
Free_, in which I described the collapse of the social order through the
use of "atomic bombs" in a war that began, prophetically and obviously
enough, with a German invasion of France by way of Belgium.

After this collapse there was to be a wave of sanity--a disposition to
believe in these spontaneous waves of sanity may be one of my besetting
weaknesses--and a wonderful council at Brissago (near Locarno!) was to
set up the new world order. Yet, after all, the popular reception of
President Wilson in 1919 was more like a wave of sanity than anything
that had ever occurred in history before. Already in 1908 in _The War in
the Air_, written before any practicable flying had occurred, I had
reasoned that air warfare, by making warfare three dimensional, would
abolish the war front and with that the possibility of distinguishing
between civilian and combatant or of bringing a war to a conclusive end.
This I argued, must not only intensify but must alter the ordinary man's
attitude to warfare. He can no longer regard it as we did the Boer War
for example as a vivid spectacle in which his participation is that of a
paying spectator at a cricket or base-ball match.

No intelligent brain that passed through the experience of the Great War
emerged without being profoundly changed. Our vision of life was revised
in outline and detail alike. To me, as to most people, it was a
revelation of the profound instability of the social order. It was also
a revelation of the possibilities of fundamental reorganization that
were now open to mankind--and of certain extraordinary weaknesses in the
collective mentality. I was intensely indignant at the militarist drive
in Germany and, as a convinced Republican, I saw in its onslaught the
culminating expression of the monarchist idea. This, said I, in shrill
jets of journalism, is the logical outcome of your parades and uniforms!
Now to fight the fighters!

People forget nowadays how the personal imperialism of the Hohenzollerns
dominated the opening phase of the war. I shouted various newspaper
articles of an extremely belligerent type. But my estimate of the moral
and intellectual forces at large in the world, was out. I would not face
the frightful truth. I anticipated an explosion of indignant commonsense
that would sweep not simply the Hohenzollerns but the whole of the
current political system, the militant state and its symbols, out of
existence, leaving the whole planet a confederated system of socialist
republics. Even in _In the Fourth Year_ (1918) I denounced the
"Krupp-Kaiser" combination and took it almost as a matter of course that
such a thing as a private-profit armament industry could not survive the
war. Perhaps in the long run its cessation may be the tardy outcome of
the cataclysm, but that outcome, I must admit, is still being most
tragically delayed. It is being delayed by the general inability to
realize that a "sovereign state" is essentially and incurably a
war-making state. My own behaviour in 1914-15 is an excellent example of
that inability.

The fount of sanguine exhortation in me swamped my warier disposition
towards critical analysis and swept me along. I wrote a pamphlet, that
weighed, I think, with some of those who were hesitating between
participation and war resistance, "_The War that will end War_." The
title has become proverbial. The broken promise of the phrase is still
used as a taunt by the out-and-out pacificist against anyone who does
not accept the dogma of non-resistance in its entirety. But in some
fashion armed forces that take action have to be disarmed and I remain
persuaded that there will have to be a last conflict to inaugurate the
peace of mankind. Rather than a war between sovereign governments,
however, it is far more likely to be a war to suppress these wherever
they are found.

Anatole France in regard to the war was in much the same case as myself.
We had met several times before 1914 and formed a very friendly estimate
of each other, and when _The Book of France_ was compiled and published,
for relief funds in the devastated regions, he contributed an article
_Debout pour la Dernire Guerre_, which he insisted I should translate.
I did so under the title of _Let Us Arise and End War_.

As I reassemble all that I can of my hasty, discursive and copious
writings during the early stages of the war, and do my utmost to recover
my actual states of mind, it becomes plain to me that for a time--in
spite of my intellectual previsions--the world disaster, now that it had
come, so overwhelmed my mind that I was obliged to thrust this false
interpretation upon it, and assert, in spite of my deep and at first
unformulated misgivings, that here and now, the new world order was in
conflict with the old. Progress was arrested, its front was shattered
under my eyes, so shattered that even to this day (1934) it has not
reformed, and I convinced myself that on the contrary it was the old
traditional system falling to pieces, and the world state coming into
being (as the world alliance) under my eyes. The return to complete
sanity took the greater part of two years. My mind did not get an
effective consistent grip upon the war until 1916.

I remember distinctly when the first effectual destructive tap came to
my delusion. It was a queer and a very little, but, at the same time,
very arresting, incident. For some British readers there will be a
shock, when they read of it, quite different in its nature from the
shock that came to me. But I have given fair warning in this book that I
am a Republican, and that the essential disavowals of my soul go deeper
than the merely theological beliefs of my fellow country-men. Perhaps
they do not get enough of this sort of shock.

I was walking from my flat in St. James's Court to lunch and talk at the
Reform Club. Upon the wall at the corner of Marlborough House as it was
then, I saw a large bill; it was an unusual place for an advertisement
and I stopped to read it. It was a Royal Proclamation. I forget what
matter it concerned; what struck me was the individual manner of the
wording. King George was addressing "my people." There was no official
"we" and "our" about it.

I had been so busy with the idea of civilization fighting against
tradition, I had become so habituated to the liberal explanation of the
monarchy as a picturesque and harmless vestigial structure, that this
abrupt realization that the King was placing himself personally at the
head of his people, was like a bomb bursting under my nose. My mind hung
over that fact for a moment or so.

"Good God!" I said in the greatest indignation, "what has _he_ got to do
with our war?"

I went my way digesting it.

"_My_ people"--me and my sort were _his_ people!

So long as you suffer any man to call himself your shepherd sooner or
later you will find a crook round your ankle. We were not making war
against Germany; we were being ordered about in the King's war with
Germany.

It took me some months of reluctant realization to bring my mind to face
the unpalatable truth that this "war for civilization," this "war to end
war" of mine was in fact no better than a consoling fantasy, and that
the flaming actuality was simply this, that France, Great Britain and
their allied Powers were, in pursuance of their established policies,
interests, treaties and secret understandings, after the accepted manner
of history and under the direction of their duly constituted military
authorities, engaged in war with the allied central powers, and that
under contemporary conditions no other war was possible. The World-State
of my imaginations and desires was presented hardly more by one side in
the conflict than by the other. We were fighting for "King and Country"
and over there they were fighting for "Kaiser and Fatherland"; it was
six of one and half a dozen of the other, so far as the World-State was
concerned.

The efforts of my brain to grasp the vast possibilities of human
violence, feebleness and docility that I had neglected and ignored so
long in my eagerness to push forward to the modern State, and further to
adjust my guiding _persona_ to these reluctant realizations, were, I
suppose, paralleled in hundreds of thousands of brains. We couldn't get
out of it for a time and think it out--and, the young men, particularly
were given no time to think. They thought it out in the trenches--and in
No Man's Land. And I, exempt from service and free to express myself,
had offered them nothing better than the "War to end War"!

Naturally, in my autobiography, my mind must occupy the central position
of this story of disillusionment, as a rabbit on the table represents
its species, but the conscious and subconscious conflicts I tell on my
own behalf were general and not particular to me. I documented the
process with exceptional abundance; that is my only distinction. Before
the end of 1914, I had already set to work upon a record of my mental
phases, elaborated in a novel, _Mr. Britling Sees It Through_. It is
only in the most general sense autobiographical--and I lost no son. But
the story of Mr. Britling's son and Mr. Britling's grey matter could be
repeated with ten thousand variations. Mr. Britling is not so much a
representation of myself as of my type and class, and I think I have
contrived in that book to give not only the astonishment and the sense
of tragic disillusionment in a civilized mind as the cruel facts of war
rose steadily to dominate everything else in life, but also the
passionate desire to find some immediate reassurance amidst that
whirlwind of disaster.

Mr. Britling after much tribulation "found God." He has lost his son and
he sits in his study late at night trying to write to the parents of his
boy's German tutor who is also among the dead.

     "'_These boys, these hopes, this war has killed._'

     "The words hung for a time in his mind.

     "'No!' said Mr. Britling stoutly. 'They live!'

     "And suddenly it was borne in upon his mind that he was not alone.
     There were thousands and tens of thousands of men and women like
     himself, desiring with all their hearts to say, as he desired to
     say, the reconciling word. It was not only his hand that thrust
     against the obstacles.... Frenchmen and Russians sat in the same
     stillness, facing the same perplexities; there were Germans seeking
     a way through to him. Even as he sat and wrote. And for the first
     time clearly he felt a Presence of which he had thought very many
     times in the last few weeks, a Presence so close to him that it was
     behind his eyes and in his brain and hands. It was no trick of his
     vision; it was a feeling of immediate reality. And it was Hugh,
     Hugh that he had thought was dead, it was young Heinrich living
     also, it was himself, it was those others that sought, it was all
     these and it was more, it was the Master, the Captain of Mankind,
     it was God, there present with him, and he knew that it was God. It
     was as if he had been groping all this time in the darkness,
     thinking himself alone amidst rocks and pitfalls and pitiless
     things, and suddenly a hand, a firm strong hand, had touched his
     own. And a voice within him bade him be of good courage. There was
     no magic trickery in that moment; he was still weak and weary, a
     discouraged rhetorician, a good intentioned ill-equipped writer;
     but he was no longer lonely and wretched, no longer in the same
     world with despair. God was beside him and within him and about
     him.... It was the crucial moment of Mr. Britling's life. It was a
     thing as light as the passing of a cloud on an April morning; it
     was a thing as great as the first day of creation. For some moments
     he still sat back with his chin upon his chest and his hands
     dropping from the arms of his chair. Then he sat up and drew a deep
     breath....

     "For weeks his mind had been playing about this idea. He had talked
     to Letty of this Finite God, who is the king of man's adventure in
     space and time. But hitherto God had been for him a thing of the
     intelligence, a theory, a report, something told about but not
     realized.... Mr. Britling's thinking about God hitherto had been
     like some one who has found an empty house, very beautiful and
     pleasant, full of the promise of a fine personality. And then as
     the discoverer makes his lonely, curious explorations, he hears
     downstairs, dear and friendly, the voice of the Master coming
     in....

     "There was no need to despair because he himself was one of the
     feeble folk. God was with him indeed, and he was with God. The King
     was coming to his own. Amidst the darknesses and confusions, the
     nightmare cruelties and the hideous stupidities of the great war,
     God, the Captain of the World Republic, fought his way to empire.
     So long as one did one's best and utmost in a cause so mighty, did
     it matter though the thing one did was little and poor?

     "'I have thought too much of myself,' said Mr. Britling, 'and of
     what I would do by myself. I have forgotten _that which was with
     me_....'"

But the exact truth of the matter is that he had forgotten that which
was _in_ him, the impersonal, the man in general, which is as much our
inheritance as our human frame. He was trying to project his own innate
courage so as to feel it external to himself, independent of himself and
eternal. Multitudes were doing the same thing at this time.

I went to considerable lengths with this attempt to deify human courage.
I shocked many old friends and provoked William Archer's effective
pamphlet _God and Mr. Wells_. In the long run I came to admit that by
all preceding definitions of God, this God of Mr. Britling was no God at
all. But before I returned to that completeness of sincerity, there had
to be some ingenious theological contortions. I was perhaps too aware of
the numbers of fine-minded people who were still clinging not so much to
religion as to the comfort of religious habits and phrases. Some
lingering quality of childish dependence in them answered to this lapse
towards a "sustaining faith" in myself. What we have here is really a
falling back of the mind towards immaturity under the stress of dismay
and anxiety. It is a very good thing at times to hear such words as "Let
not your Heart be troubled; neither let it be afraid" spoken as if with
authority. It is a good thing to imagine the still companionship of an
understanding Presence on a sleepless night. Then one can get to sleep
again with something of the reassurance of a child in its cot.
Everywhere in those first years of disaster men were looking for some
lodestar for their loyalty. I thought it was pitiful that they should
pin their minds to "King and Country" and suchlike claptrap, when they
might live and die for greater ends, and I did my utmost to personify
and animate a greater, remoter objective in _God the Invisible King_. So
by a sort of _coup d'tat_ I turned my New Republic for a time into a
divine monarchy.

I cannot disentangle now, perhaps at no time could I have disentangled,
what was simple and direct in this theocratic phase in my life, from
what was--_politic_. I do not know how far I was being perfectly
straightforward in this phase, how far I was--as the vulgar have
it--"codding myself," and how far I was trying to make my New
Republicanism acceptable in a different guise to that multitude which
could not, it seemed, dispense with kingship. But what these God-needing
people require is the sense of a Father on whom they can have the most
perfect reliance. They are straining back to the instinctive faith of
"little children," that ultimately everything is all right. They are
frightened people who want to be told that they need not brace up to the
grimness before them. With all the will in the world I could not bring
myself to present my God as that sort of God. I could invent a
heartening God but not a palliating God. At his best my deity was far
less like the Heavenly Father of a devout Catholic or a devout Moslem or
Jew than he was like a personification of, let us say, the Five Year
Plan. A Communist might have accepted him as a metaphor. No mystic could
have used him because of the complete lack of miraculous aid or
distinctive and flattering personal response. As he is presented in _God
the Invisible King_ he is no better than an inspiring but extremely
preoccupied comrade, a thoroughly hard leader.

At no time did my deistic phrasing make any concessions to doctrinal
Christianity. If my gestures were pious, my hands were clean. I never
sold myself to organized orthodoxy. At its most artificial my
religiosity was a flaming heresy and not a time-serving compromise. I
never came nearer to Christianity than Manicheism--as Sir John Squire
pointed out long ago.

I followed up _God the Invisible King_, with _The Soul of a Bishop_
(also 1917)--in which I distinguish very clearly between the God of the
Anglican Church and this new personification of human progressiveness--and
both _Joan and Peter_ (1918) and _The Undying Fire_ (1919) are
strongly flavoured with deified humanism. Another God indeed, God the
Creator, appears for a brief interview with Peter in the hospital--and
a very strange untidy God he is. He is evidently the male equivalent,
humorous and self exculpatory, of what I have called elsewhere "that
old harridan, Dame Nature." And in the last meditation of Joan and
Peter's Uncle Oswald, "God," he feels, is "a name battered out of all
value and meaning."

_The Undying Fire_ is artistically conceived and rather brilliantly
coloured; I have already expressed my satisfaction with it as the best
of my Dialogue-Novels; and it crowns and ends my theology. It is the
sunset of my divinity. Here is what Mr. Huss got from his God when at
last he met him face to face.

     "It was as if the dreamer pushed his way through the outskirts of a
     great forest and approached the open, but it was not through trees
     that he thrust his way but through bars and nets and interlacing
     curves of blinding, many-coloured light towards the clear promise
     beyond. He had grown now to an incredible vastness so that it was
     no longer earth upon which he set his feet but that crystalline
     pavement whose translucent depths contain the stars. Yet though he
     approached the open he never reached the open; the iridescent net
     that had seemed to grow thin, grew dense again; he was still
     struggling, and the black doubts that had lifted for a moment swept
     down upon his soul. And he realized he was in a dream, a dream that
     was drawing swiftly now to its close.

     "'Oh God!' he cried, 'answer me! For Satan has mocked me sorely.
     Answer me before I lose sight of you again. Am I right to fight? Am
     I right to come out of my little earth, here above the stars?'

     "'Right if you dare.'

     "'Shall I conquer and prevail? Give me your promise!'

     "'Everlastingly you may conquer and find fresh worlds to conquer.'

     "'_May_--but _shall_ I?'

     "It was as if the torrent of molten thoughts stopped suddenly. It
     was as if everything stopped.

     "'Answer me,' he cried.

     "Slowly the shining thoughts moved on again.

     "'So long as your courage endures you will conquer....

     "'If you have courage, although the night be dark, although the
     present battle be bloody and cruel and end in a strange and evil
     fashion, nevertheless victory shall be yours--in a way you will
     understand--when victory comes. Only have courage. On the courage
     in your heart all things depend. By courage it is that the stars
     continue in their courses, day by day. It is the courage of life
     alone that keeps sky and earth apart.... If that courage fail, if
     that sacred fire go out, then all things fail and all things go
     out, all things--good and evil, space and time.'

     "'Leaving nothing?'

     "'_Nothing._'

     "'Nothing,' he echoed, and the word spread like a dark and
     darkening mask across the face of all things."

But before that, Mr. Huss following in the footsteps of Job had said:

     "'I will not pretend to explain what I cannot explain. It may be
     that God is as yet only foreshadowed in life. You may reason,
     Doctor Barrack, that this fire in the heart that I call God, is as
     much the outcome of your Process as all the other things in life. I
     cannot argue against that. What I am telling you now is not what I
     believe so much as what I feel. To me it seems that the creative
     desire that burns in me is a thing different in its nature from the
     blind Process of matter, is a force running contrariwise to the
     power of confusion.... But this I do know, that once it is lit in a
     man, then his mind is alight--thenceforth. It rules his conscience
     with compelling power. It summons him to live the residue of his
     days working and fighting for the unity and release and triumph of
     mankind. He may be mean still, and cowardly and vile still, but he
     will know himself for what he is.... Some ancient phrases live
     marvellously. Within my heart _I know that my Redeemer
     liveth_....'"

Is not that very like prevarication? But I prevaricate in the footsteps
of a famous exemplar. Have you ever thought over St. Paul's ambiguities
in his Epistle to the Corinthians (I., xv. 35)? Could the resurrection
of the body be more ingeniously evaded and "spiritualized" and adapted
to all tastes?

After _The Undying Fire_, God as a character disappears from my work,
except for a brief undignified appearance, a regrettable appearance,
dressed in moonshine and armed with Cupid's bow and arrows in _The
Secret Places of the Heart_ (1922). My phraseology went back
unobtrusively to the sturdy atheism of my youthful days. My spirit had
never left it. If I have used the name of God at all in the past ten
years it has been by way of a recognized metaphor as in "God forbid,"
or, "At last God wearied of Napoleon." I have become more and more
scrupulous about appropriating the prestige of this name for my own
ends.

In _What Are We to Do with Our Lives?_ (1932) I make the most explicit
renunciation and apology for this phase of terminological
disingenuousness. In spite of the fact that it yielded Peter's dream of
God Among the Cobwebs and _The Undying Fire_ I wish, not so much for my
own sake as for the sake of my more faithful readers, that I had never
fallen into it; it confused and misled many of them and introduced a
barren dtour into my research for an effective direction for human
affairs.


 5

_War Experiences of an Outsider_

That theological excursion of mine was not the only dtour I made. I
made a still longer dtour through the tangle of international
politics. I attempted amateurish diplomacies, so to speak, in my
writings, and they also need explanation. Everyman almost was imagining
diplomacies and treaties in those days, but mine, to a quite exceptional
degree, were documented.

Let me return first to the disillusionment about the beneficence of our
war-making (1915-16-17) that followed my first attempt in 1914 to find a
justifying purpose in "our" war. I did not become "anti-war." I found
the simple solution of the conscientious objectors and war resisters
generally, too simple for me altogether. My brain was quite prepared for
conflict on behalf of the law and order of the world-state. I believe
that is necessary to this day. Peace will have to be kept--forcibly. For
ages. The distinction people draw between moral and physical force is
flimsy and unsound. Life is conflict and the only way to universal peace
is through the defeat and obliteration of every minor organization of
force. Carrying weapons individually or in crowds, calls for vigorous
suppression on the part of the community. The anti-war people made me
the more impatient because of the rightness of much of their criticism
of the prevailing war motives. I was perhaps afraid, if I yielded to
them, of being carried back too far towards the futility of a merely
negative attitude. What they said was so true and what they did was so
merely sabotage, I lost my temper with them.

And with less stress upon the "perhaps" I was reluctant to admit how
gravely I had compromised myself by my much too forward belligerence and
my rash and eager confidence in the liberalism, intelligence and good
faith of our foreign office and war office in the first month or so of
the war. My pro-war zeal was inconsistent with my pre-war utterances and
against my profounder convictions. As I recovered consciousness, so to
speak, from the first shock of the war explosion and resumed my habitual
criticism of government and the social order, I found myself suspect to
many of my associates who had become pacificists of the left wing. They
regarded me as a traitor who was betraying them to the "war-mongers,"
while the reactionists in a position of authority, with equal
justification and perhaps a nicer sense of my fundamental quality, were
extremely suspicious of me as an ally. The hardest line to take is the
middle way, especially if one is not sure-footed oneself, and there can
be no doubt my staggering course was perplexing to many a friendly
observer. Whatever I wrote or said went to an exasperating accompaniment
of incredulity from the left, and I felt all the virtuous indignation
natural to a man who has really been in the wrong. I was in the wrong
and some of the things I wrote about conscientious objectors in _War and
the Future_ were unforgivable. I turned on the pacificists in _Joan and
Peter_, savaged them to the best of my ability, imputed motives, ignored
honourable perplexities and left some rankling wounds. Some of those
war-time pacificists will never forgive me and I cannot complain of
that. I made belated amends in the _Bulpington of Blup_. But that is a
minor matter. The thing that occupied most of my mind was the problem of
getting whatever was to be got for constructive world revolution out of
the confusion of war, and being pro-German and non-combatant, finding
endless excuses for the enemy and detracting from the fighting energy of
the allies, seemed to me of no use at all towards my end.

I turn over a number of faded and forgotten writings as I try to judge
and summarize my behaviour in these crucial years. There is an
illuminating sketch of a story "The Wild Asses of the Devil" in _Boon_
(1915). In 1915 I find I was already writing about the _Peace of the
World_ and the _End of the Armament Rings_. In 1916 I produced _What Is
Coming?_ made up of a number of 1915 newspaper articles. The leaves of
my copy of this book are already carbonized, copies of it would be hard
to find, if anyone wanted to find them, and if I were to put my
reputation before my autobiographical rectitude, I think I should just
let this little volume decay and char and disappear and say nothing
about it. Most of it is very loose-lipped indeed. In it I am feeling my
way about not only among ideas but among what I then thought were
insurmountable popular prejudices, in a very blind and haphazard
fashion. My propagandist and practical drive was still all too powerful
for my scientific and critical disposition. I wanted something done and
I did not want to seem to propose extravagant and impossible things.

Most of these 1915 articles were written with a curious flavour of
clumsy propitiation or still clumsier menace, with an evident sense that
they might be quoted in Germany, and there is a powerful flavour of
ignorance, inexperience and self-importance about them. But I felt it
was better to blurt out some things badly than not have them put about
at all. I insist in this book that Germany will lose the struggle
through exhaustion and that in the final settlement Britain must work
closely with the United States (not then in the war). I also forecast
the repudiation of the Hohenzollerns by Germany and the establishment of
a German republic, but I did not anticipate that this would happen as
soon as it actually did. There are some flashes of intuition. It was
less widely recognized then than it is now that the way to liquidate a
bankrupt world is through a rise in prices and a revaluation of gold. In
some way I have got at that in this early war-book, and I am also clear
that for any conclusive settlement there must be a grouping of states in
larger systems. I talk of some hypothetical combination, which I call
the "Pledged Allies," which must pursue a policy in common after the
war, and I insist that a republican Germany will be altogether more
capable of an understanding with such a combination than a monarchy. The
Allies--pledged already not to make a separate peace--ought, I argue, to
define a policy _now_ before the war ends and pledge themselves to
insist upon its realization. The idea of an ultimate Peace Conference
becoming a sort of permanent world control is foreshadowed. The boldest
paper of all in this amateurish collection of suggestions is a
discussion of the possibility of pooling the tropical possessions of the
great powers in order to end imperialist rivalries. This particular
paper closes with this adumbration of the League of Nations idea, and it
shows how far constructive liberal thought had got at that date (1916):

     "And so the discussion of the future of the overseas 'empires'
     brings us again to the same realization to which the discussion of
     nearly every great issue arising out of this war has pointed, the
     realization of the imperative necessity of some great council or
     conference, some permanent overriding body, call it what you will,
     that will deal with things more broadly than any 'nationalism' or
     'patriotic imperialism' can possibly do. That body must come into
     human affairs. Upon the courage and imagination of living statesmen
     it depends whether it will come simply and directly into concrete
     reality or whether it will materialize slowly through, it may be,
     centuries of blood and blundering from such phantom anticipations
     as this, anticipations that now haunt the thoughts of all
     politically-minded men."

So I was already trying to get the World State recognized as a war
objective in 1916.

In the late summer of 1916 I visited the Italian, French and German
fronts. There was a fashion in that year of inviting writers and artists
to go and see for themselves what the war was like and to report their
impressions. I was kept loafing about in Paris for some week or so, I
had a talk with Papa Joffre and was presented solemnly with a set of
coloured postcards of all the chief French generals, and very good
postcards they made. I went through North Italy by Gorizia to the Carso,
returned to France to the front near Soissons and then went at my own
request to the British front about Arras, to compare the British and
French organizations for aerial photography.

It was an interesting but rather pointless trip. At Arras I met and went
about with O. G. S. Crawford, whose ingenious readings of the air
photographs delighted me very much--he is now largely responsible for
that interesting periodical _Antiquity_, and he has applied all that he
learnt in warfare to the nobler uses of scientific survey. At Amiens I
was under the wing of C. E. Montague, the author of _A Hind Let Loose_,
_Disenchantment_ and _Rough Justice_. Montague was a curious mixture of
sixth-form Anglican sentimentality (about dear old horses, dearer old
doggies, brave women, real gentlemen, the old school, the old country
and sound stock: Galsworthyissimus in fact), with a most adventurous
intelligence. He was a radical bound, hide bound, in a conservative
hide. He was a year younger than I, he had concealed his age and dyed
his silvery hair to enlist at the outbreak of the war, he had accepted a
commission with reluctance and I had been warned he was not the safest
of guides. We got on very well together. I remember vividly walking with
him across the shell-hole-dotted, wire-littered open towards the front
line trenches. The sun was shining brightly and there was just the
faintest whiff of freshness and danger in the air. I doubt if anything
was coming over; what shelling was audible overhead was British. We had
agreed that blundering up the wet and narrow communication trench was
intolerable in such sunshine and we walked bare-headed and carried our
shrapnel helmets, like baskets, on our arms. We had confessed to each
other what a bore the war had become to us, how its vast inconsequence
weighed us down, and we talked as we trudged along very happily of the
technical merits of Laurence Sterne.

In the front line although he insisted on my keeping my head below the
parapet, he was exposing himself freely, standing up and craning his
neck in the hope of seeing a German "out there."

"At twilight sometimes you can see them hopping about from one shell
hole to another."

But there was nothing doing that day, there had been some "strafing"
overnight but that was over, everyone in the trenches was sleeping and
we returned through the tranquil desolation disputing whether there was
any reason for anticipating a great outburst of literary activity as a
result of the war. He thought that there ought to be and I thought that
outbursts of literary activity were due to such secondary conditions as
to have no directly traceable relation to the great events of
history....

At the time of this pointless sight-seeing I might have been doing
extremely useful war-work at home. I was still convinced that the war
had to be won by the Allies and I was only too eager to give my time and
risk my life and fortune in any task that used me effectively. But I
meant to be used effectively. I refused absolutely to volunteer and
drill and acquire the saluting habit for the protection of railway
bridges and culverts against imaginary nocturnal Germans in the byways
of Essex, or for sentinel-go in prisoners' camps or anything of that
sort. But an old notion of mine, the _Land Ironclads_ (published in the
_Strand Magazine_ in 1903) was being worked out at that time in the
form of the Tanks, and it is absurd that my imagination was not
mobilized in scheming the structure and use of these contrivances. These
obvious weapons were forced upon the army by Winston Churchill against
all the conservative instincts of the army; Kitchener had turned them
down as "mechanical toys," and when at length they were put into action,
it was done so timidly and experimentally and with so inadequate an
estimate of their possibilities that their immense value as a major
surprise that might have ended the war, was altogether wasted. Later
some were bogged in Flanders mud, to the great delight of the
contemporary military mind. If the tanks could not be prevented, the
next best thing from the old army point of view was to spoil them.
"Can't use the damned things. Look at _that_!" Nowadays things have
altered in form but not in essence and the British military
intelligence, with its unerring instinct for being two decades out of
date, is plainly and dangerously tank-mad.

When I heard about the tanks I felt bitter and frustrated, but that did
not save me from getting into conflict later with the rigid intelligence
of the professional soldiers.

I was lying snug in bed one night and I could not sleep. My window was
open and the rain was pouring down outside and suddenly in an
imaginative flash I saw the communication trenches swamped and swimming
in mud and a miserable procession of overloaded "Tommies" struggling up
to the front line along the wet planks. Some stumbled and fell. I knew
men were often drowned in this dismal pilgrimage and that everyone who
got to the front line arrived nearly worn out and smothered in mud.
Moreover the utmost supplies these men could carry were insufficient.
Suddenly I saw that this was an entirely avoidable strain. I tumbled out
of bed and spent the rest of the night planning a mobile telpherage
system. My idea was to run forward a set of T shaped poles with an
erector wire, so that they could be all pulled up for use or allowed to
lie flat and that two tractor wires could then work on the arms of the
T. Power could be supplied by a motor lorry at the base of this line.

Either just before this or just after it I met Winston Churchill at
lunch in Clare Sheridan's studio in St. John's Wood. I think it was just
before. I had aired my grievance about the tanks and so I was able to
get going with him about this telpherage project forthwith. He saw my
points and put me in touch with capable men to supplement my mechanical
insufficiency. Upon his instructions, E. V. Haigh, who was at the
Ministry of Munitions, set the Trench Warfare Department in motion, and
a temporary lieutenant Leeming--I think from Lancashire--worked out the
apparatus with a group of men and made a reality of my dream.

We invented a really novel war accessory--I contributed nothing except
the first idea and a few comments--and it was available as a perfected
pattern before the end of the war, though never in sufficient quantity
to produce perceptible effects. The "tin hats" did not like it. It would
have saved multitudes of casualties and greatly facilitated the opening
phases of the Allied offensive in 1918.

This telpherage of ours was no mere static transport system. It could be
run forward almost as fast as infantry could advance; any part could be
carried by a single man, it could be hauled up for action and lie when
not in use; an ordinary lorry, the lorry that had brought up the poles
and wire, could work it from a protected emplacement and it could carry
an endless string of such loads as a wounded man on a stretcher or an
equivalent weight of food or ammunition. We worked a rough trial length
on Clapham Common and then installed, in Richmond Park, more than a mile
which behaved admirably. If the line were disabled by a shell it was
easy to repair and replace, and it was extremely light to bring up. It
was practically invisible from the air, since its use wore no track and
it could be shifted laterally and dismantled as easily as it was
erected. (A description of the "Leeming" Portable and Collapsible Aerial
Ropeway is documented with prints and photographs, under date November
26th 1917, in the archives of the Ministry of Munitions.)

This work brought me into closer touch with the military caste than I
had ever been before. I had known plenty of men, politicians and so
forth, who had been in regular regiments for brief periods, but these
men I now encountered were the real army and nothing else. They were
the quintessence of Service mentality. They impressed me
extraordinarily--excessively. My memories of them I am persuaded must be
exaggerated. They remain in my memory as an incredible caricature.

I remember vividly a conference we had in a shed upon the Thames
embankment. The soldiers came "well groomed" as the phrase goes, in
peculiarly beautiful red-banded peaked caps, heavy with gold braid.
Crowns and stars, ribbons, epaulettes, belts and bands of the utmost
significance, adorned their persons. War was the most important function
in life for them and they dressed for it. They sat down, like men who
had given some thought to sitting down in the best possible manner. They
produced their voices; they did not merely emit audible turbid thoughts
as we did. If you had listened only to the sounds they made, you would
have felt they were simple clear-headed men, speaking with a sane
determination, and yet the things they said were by my standards almost
inconceivably silly. Over against them sat my civilian colleagues, and
only David Low could convey to you how comparatively ignoble we looked
in our untidy every-day costumes, our bowler hats, our wilted collars,
our carelessly chosen and carelessly tied war-time cravats. Judged by
the way we carried ourselves we might almost as well have had no chests
at all. And though our vocabulary was much more extensive there was no
click about it. The noises we made came in shambling loose
formation--from Scotland and Lancashire and Cockney London.

That contrast stuck in my mind and haunted me. It exercised me
profoundly. It set me thinking of the implacable determination of so
many types of life--and perhaps of all types of life--not to over-adapt,
to make concessions indeed up to a certain extent, but not to make too
fundamental concessions,--to perish rather. It made me waver towards the
dogma of the class war. Here were these fine, handsome, well-groomed
neighing gentlemen, the outcome of some century or so of army tradition,
conscientiously good to look at but in no way showy or flashy, and they
had clear definite ideas of what war was, what was permissible in war,
what was undesirable about war, what was seemly, what was honourable,
how far you might go and where you had to leave off, the complete
etiquette of it. We and our like with our bits of stick and iron-pipe
and wire, our test tubes and our tanks and our incalculable
possibilities, came to these fine but entirely inconclusive warriors
humbly demanding permission to give them victory--but victory at the
price of all that they were used to, of all they held dear. It must have
been obvious to them for instance, that we hated saluting; we were the
sort that might talk shop at mess; we had no essential rigidities, no
style; our loyalties were incomprehensible; our effect on "the men" if
men had to be instructed, might be deplorable. We had therefore in plain
English to be outwitted, cheated, discredited and frustrated; and we
were.

It was not a plot against us; it was an instinct. Not one of those
soldiers would have admitted, even in his secret heart, that that was
what he meant to do. But it was what he did. Damn these contrivances! It
was far easier to understand a fellow officer from Berlin or Vienna than
these Inventors. It was fundamentally more important for those finished
products of our militant sovereign state system to beat us than to beat
the Germans; they felt that, even if they did not recognize it clearly.
We were trying to get hold of their war and carry it God knows where--it
would be the story of those beastly tanks over again. It was a fresh
encroachment. At any cost it must not become our war; it must remain
theirs. Or it might really turn out to be "the war to end war"--and end
all sorts of associated things.

In the behaviour of the War Office and Foreign Office and in the
strenuous and intelligent resolve of the Crown to keep itself
authoritatively in the limelight, the struggle to keep things in their
places and resist novelties became more and more manifest as the war
continued. The history of the Great War, regarded as an intensifying
clash between old forms and new forces, still remains to be written. And
yet that is perhaps the most interesting aspect of all. The war between
the Allied Powers and the Central Powers was a war between similars; it
was the established proper vertical aspect of the war; it was like any
old war except that it was bigger. War had been declared; one side had
taken the offensive and the other the defensive according to rule. But
within the fighting body of each combatant state, there speedily began
this more novel struggle, a horizontal struggle, between class tradition
and the insistent need for decisive original inventions and new methods.
The soldiers could not invent; it had been drilled out of them. And this
struggle again was complicated by the progressive disillusionment of the
common man who had neither social nor technical standing. He displayed a
deepening dislike to being killed either in the old style or the new. At
first he had been fiercely patriotic everywhere and then, as the wilting
discipline of 1917 and 1918, the mutinies and refusals showed, more and
more desperately recalcitrant. These three elements interacted in
different proportions and with varying results in every combatant
country, and to trace their interplay would carry me far beyond the
region of autobiography into an essay in recent history.

In Britain, as in France, the old order contrived to keep in the saddle
and its obstinate loyalty to itself prolonged the struggle through two
years of intensified and totally unnecessary waste and slaughter.
Radical critics obsessed by Marxist suggestions are apt to ascribe this
prolongation of the war simply to the wickedness of armament and
financial interests. That is only partially true. It is so much easier
to denounce "capitalism" than to denounce real categories and specific
governmental institutions capable of reprisal. War industry and
financial influences, though unquestionably they were evil influences,
could not have worked except through the legal forms of the old order.
The steel framework of the obstruction was, everywhere, the
self-protective obstinacy of the formal government in control, which
would not accept even compromise, much less admit defeat. The profiteers
no doubt flattered and used the formal government for their own ends but
they were never the masters of it. Much more were they its by-products.
They sheltered and did their mischief behind its implacable resistance
to efficiency.

To the very end of the war not one of all the generals who prance
across the page of history developed the ability to handle the vast
armies and mechanisms under his nominal control. Nor was any flexible
and effective method of collaboration ever brought into being. The Great
War was an All Fools' War. But there was no admission of this fact. The
system just went on with the witless slaughter until discipline
dissolved, first in Russia and then--luckily for us and the immobilized
French--in Germany. And instantly upon the German collapse our populace
forgot its gathering doubts. The monarchy, lest there should be any
question about the way in which the War to End War had ended, went in
state through the beflagged streets of London, unashamed amidst a blaze
of uniforms and a great blare of military music, to thank our dear old
Anglican Trinity, Who had been, it seems, in control throughout, in St.
Paul's Cathedral.

Girls, children, women, schoolboys, undergraduates, unfit, middle-aged
and elderly men, indispensables and soldiers from the home front,
thronged the streets rejoicing; glad that the national martyrdom was
over and quite uncritical already of either Army, Navy or Crown. There
were a million of us dead of course, and half of those deaths, even from
the military point of view had been sheer waste, but after all _we_ had
won. And the dead were dead. A Grand Inquest on those dead would have
been a more reasonable function, but how disagreeable that would have
been!

I remember starting out with Jane during one of these pompous, swarming
occasions to get from our flat in Whitehall Court to Liverpool Street
Station and so escape to the comparative disloyalty of our home at
Easton Glebe. Our cab was held up and we had to abandon it and struggle
with our bags through the press as well as we could. We squeezed through
at last and caught a later train than we intended. It was one of those
occasions when my love for my fellow man deserts me. The happy
complacency of survivorship shone on every face in that vast crowd. What
personal regrets appeared were richly sentimental and easily tearful.
"Poor dear Tommy! How he would have _loved_ all this!"

We were going to hang the Kaiser and make the Germans pay. The country
was now to be made a country "fit for heroes." God save the King!

"And this," thought I, "is the reality of democracy; this is the
proletariat of dear old Marx in being. This is the real people. This
seething multitude of vague kindly uncritical brains is the stuff that
old dogmatist counted upon for his dictatorship of the proletariat, to
direct the novel and complex organization of a better world!"

The thought suddenly made me laugh aloud, and after that it was easier
to push along and help steer Jane through the crowd about the Royal
Exchange....

But I am digressing and telling things out of their proper order.

Aldershot, I presently realized, was resolved not to have anything to do
with this telpherage of ours--at least as we had devised it. It was bad
enough for soldiers and gentlemen to be bothered with tanks, but this
affair of sticks and string was even worse. After mechanical toys--cat's
cradle. It was the sort of contraption any one might make mistakes
about--and then where were you? However, in its earnest desire to keep
the business in professional hands, Aldershot produced alternative
systems. They were much heavier and clumsier than ours and one, much in
favour, required men to walk along the track, so--as we had to explain
to these professional soldiers--exposing the system to air photography
and air-directed fire. A bugbear we could never banish from these
inflexible minds was the dread that our lines--which could be lowered in
an instant and cleared away in an hour--would interfere with "lateral
movements."

This in no-man's land with its shell holes and old trenches and jungle
thickets of cut wire! The thought of a "line," any line, hypnotized
these warriors, just as a chalk line will hypnotize a hen.

I was baffled and worried beyond measure by these perverse difficulties.
I felt my practical incompetence acutely. I did not know whom to get at
and how to put the thing through. I had only a dim apprehension of the
forces and instincts that were holding back not merely our little
contrivance, but a multitude of other innovations that might have
changed the face of the war. Meanwhile on every wet night so many poor
lads fell and choked in the mud, and the little inadequate offensives
squittered forward beyond their supports and succumbed to the
counter-attack. I could not sleep for it. I was so worried and my nerves
were so fatigued that I was presently afflicted with _allopecia areata_,
well known in the flying corps of those days as an anxiety disease, in
which the hair comes out in patches. Ridiculous patches of localized
shiny baldness appeared and did not vanish for a year or so, when first
they sprouted a down of grey hair and then became normally hairy again.
It was not much in the way of a war wound, but in all modesty I put it
on record.

I returned from the western front in 1916 with, among other things, a
very clear conviction that cavalry was a useless nuisance there. I wrote
some disagreeable things about the fodder waggons that choked the roads,
about spurs and about our military efficiency generally, in a series of
articles which became a book, _War and the Future_ (1917). But there was
a war Censorship in existence, and an excellent gentleman, Colonel
Swettenham--or General I forget which--who had for some obscure reason
been put in authority over the mind of England, presently summoned me to
his presence and remonstrated with me over the galley proofs of my book.
I went home with these proofs considerably emasculated, blue-pencilled
and amended in the Colonel's handwriting. I meditated over his
alterations. They seemed to me to be intended to save rather the
prestige of the military authorities than the country, for if people
like I were not to chide the military authorities and tell the public
about them, who would? These soldiers would go on with their bloody
muddle. Muddle until disaster was assured.

I took another set of proofs, made no material changes in what I had
said, sent them to my publisher with my explicit assurance that the
Censor had seen a set, and then, though it hurt me greatly to destroy
many of the painstaking improvements he had made, I burnt the Colonel's
set. The book appeared and he must have read it with a certain
astonishment. After some consideration of the situation he wrote me a
very nice letter asking me to return the set of proofs that he had
corrected. I wrote him an even nicer letter, explaining that that set
was not now to be found, and assuring him of my utmost esteem. With
quite exemplary civility our correspondence ceased at that point and the
censorship troubled me no more.

The chief point of permanent value in that book was my insistence on the
fact that the progressive mechanization of war was making war impossible
for any countries that did not possess a highly developed industrial
organization and adequate natural resources. Five or six countries at
most had it in their power to make modern war, and it needed only an
intelligent agreement among these powers to end war, if they so wished
it, for ever. This is a reality I have never ceased to press upon the
attention of people in general. From 1916 to 1933 I have been sprinkling
the world with repetitions of this important truth. I was stressing it
in the _Daily Herald_ in March 1930, in a series of articles "The A.B.C.
of World Peace," reprinted in _After Democracy_ (1933). The consent of
all the sovereign powers of the world to world pacification is quite
unnecessary. Indeed, as I point out in the latter series of articles,
three or four powers alone could impose an enduring World Pax. This idea
will be found very frankly expressed in the Crewe House memorandum I
shall presently quote.

_War and the Future_, however, is a very mixed bag. There is a gusto in
some of its war descriptions that suggests that that mighty
statesman-strategist, that embryo Hitler-Cromwell (aged 13) who won the
various Battles of Martin's Hill, Bromley, was by no means dead in me,
even in 1916.


 6

_World State and League of Nations_

To return to my education by the Great War; 1917 is marked in my records
by a letter published in the _Daily Chronicle_ for June 4th, entitled
"Wanted a Statement of Imperial Policy," by a paper in the _Daily News_
August 14th, "A Reasonable Man's Peace" and by a third article, in the
_Daily Mail_, which I was invited to write by the editor, "Are we
sticking to the Point? A Discussion of War Aims."

These writings show a very considerable consolidation of my ideas and in
that respect they followed the movement that was going on in the general
mind. They are collected together in a book called _In the Fourth Year_
(May 1918) which is an immense advance upon _What Is Coming?_,
uncompromising, bolder and more forcible. And in these the idea of a
League of _Free_ Nations, a plain anticipation of a federal world-state,
is stated with the greatest explicitness. One of these papers, "A
Reasonable Man's Peace" was twice reprinted as a pamphlet and had an
issue, in that form, of about a quarter of a million.

The idea of some supernational Union of States for the preservation of
peace is a very old one indeed and its history quite beyond my present
range, but the way in which it came into my purview has to be told. The
origin of the term "League of Nations" is obscure. Theodore Marburg's
_Development of the League of Nations Idea_ (1932), is concerned rather
with the voluminous participation of that gentleman in the world's
affairs than with history--and so the precise facts are difficult to
disentangle. His book is essentially an autobiography in the form of
letters, and as a general history it over-emphasizes the importance of
Theodore Marburg in developing what one may call the Wilsonian notion of
a League. A "League to enforce Peace" was certainly begotten in the
Century Club in New York in January 1915 and it seems to have owed
something to the private propaganda of Sir George Paish. But the term
"League of Nations" is of English origin and it seems to have been first
used by a small group of people meeting in the house of Mr. Walter Rea
and including Sir Willoughby (now Lord) Dickinson, G. Lowes Dickinson,
Raymond Unwin, J. A. Hobson, Mrs. Claremont and Aneurin Williams. (E. M.
Forster in his life of Lowes Dickinson (1934) gives reasons for
ascribing the term to that writer, who may have used it for the two
possible "leagues" he sketched in the first fortnight of the war.) These
people founded a League of Nations Society, with Lord Shaw as
president, early in 1915. L. S. Woolf also was associated with this
group but not, I think, at the beginning.

The world was ripe for the lead embodied in such a phrase and it caught
on very rapidly. I was late in recognizing its value. I do not seem to
have used the term before the end of 1916, but then I seem to have taken
it up abruptly and noisily; it is all over my war writings in 1917, with
a very characteristic emendation for which I think I was wholly
responsible, the insertion of the word "Free." I put in that word Free
because I hoped then for republics in Russia and Germany and possibly in
Great Britain. I did not believe in world peace without revolution and
my efforts to keep the revolutionary impulse in touch with the
peace-making movement were very persistent. Early writings to which I
make acknowledgment in _In the Fourth Year_ are Marburg's _League of
Nations_ (1917-18), Andr Mater's _Socit des Nations_ (an excellent
French comment first published, I think, about 1917 and translated in
its entirety in Sir George Paish's excellent collection of early
projects, _The Nations and the League_, 1920), and H. N. Brailsford's _A
League of Nations_ (1917). Several organizations using the term, "League
of Nations" in their titles, were active in 1917 on both sides of the
Atlantic. I joined the London society in 1917 and was later associated
with a League of Free Nations Association formed in 1918. My mind fixed
upon this word League, as being just the needed formula that might give
a World State its first concrete form. It helped pull my outlook
together and point it. _In the Fourth Year_ is a crystallization of all
the incoherent aspirations of _What Is Coming?_ and of my past
generally. It contained a few outspoken phrases about such matters as
"The Future of Monarchy," which were at that time considered extremely
indelicate. English people have still to brace themselves up to the
obvious fact that there can be no world pax without a practical
retirement of monarchy, graceful or graceless as royalty may choose.

During these war years my always friendly relations with Lord
Northcliffe became closer. I have told already in Chapter the Sixth  4
how we first came to know each other and explained how much this
remarkable intruder into the British peerage and British public life,
had to improvise to meet the colossal opportunities that were thrust
upon him. Whenever I met him I talked plainly to him and he respected
even when he did not agree with my ideas. He was never at his ease in
the old system; his peerage had not bought him; he knew the old social
order accepted him, and his newly titled brothers, by duress and with
furtive protest and he felt the continual danger of treacheries and
obstructions. There were times when he reminded me of a big bumble bee
puzzled by a pane of glass. The court, the army people, the Foreign
Office treated him with elaborate civility but regarded him with hard,
defensive eyes. When the first Russian revolution (March 1917) occurred,
I created a small scandal by inducing him to print a letter in _The
Times_ in favour of a more explicit appeal to the Republican sentiment
in the world. This gave great offence in the highest quarters. "There
goes my earldom," said Northcliffe to me, with a gleam from the
ineradicable schoolboy in his make-up. One had a sense of fuss behind
the scenes, and the young subalterns of the Third Army, who had been in
the habit of playing hockey and taking baths and teas and supper at my
house at Easton every Sunday, were suddenly forbidden my now leprous
neighbourhood by their superior officers. "King and country" had got
them surely enough; it was "_his_ war"--it was the war of the "tin
hats." The war for world civilization had vanished. But one or two of
these young men wrote me pleasant notes of apology for this uncivil
loyalty imposed upon them.

The government had created two new ministries for the sake of keeping
the inquisitive noses of Northcliffe, and his younger competitor Lord
Beaverbrook, out of the ancient mysteries of the Foreign Office. This
could be done most unobtrusively by busying them elsewhere. The Ministry
of Information was devised to prevent Lord Beaverbrook from becoming too
well-informed and the Ministry of Propaganda served a similar purpose in
occupying and disordering the always rather febrile mind of Lord
Northcliffe. Northcliffe asked me to visit him in Crewe House, where the
new Ministry of Propaganda was installed, and discussed the general
idea of his activities with me.

We sat together in the drawing-room of Crewe House, hastily adapted to
the new requirements of ministerial headquarters. "You want a social
revolution," he said. "Isn't our sitting here social revolution enough
for you?"

I might have replied that that depended on the use we made of our time
while we were there.

The upshot of our conversation was that in May 1918 in collaboration
with that excellent scholar, Dr. J. W. Headlam, (who afterwards became
by knighthood and a change of name Sir J. W. Headlam Morley), I became
responsible for the preparation of propaganda literature against
Germany. This was almost simultaneous with the publication of _In the
Fourth Year_ and its exposition of such still admirable common-sense as
this that follows:

     "The League of Free Nations must, in fact, if it is to be a working
     reality, have power to define and limit the military and naval and
     aerial equipment of every country in the world. This means
     something more than a restriction of state forces. It must have
     power and freedom to investigate the military and naval and aerial
     establishments of all its constituent powers. It must also have
     effective control over every armament industry. And armament
     industries are not always easy to define. Are aeroplanes, for
     example, armament? Its powers, I suggest must extend even to a
     restraint upon the belligerent propaganda which is the natural
     advertisement campaign of every armament industry. It must have the
     right, for example, to raise the question of the proprietorship of
     newspapers by armament interests. Disarmament is, in fact, a
     necessary factor of any League of Free Nations, and you cannot have
     disarmament unless you are prepared to see the powers of the
     council of the League extend thus far. The very existence of the
     League presupposes that it and it alone is to have and to exercise
     military force. Any other belligerency or preparation or incitement
     to belligerency becomes rebellion, and any other arming a threat of
     rebellion, in a world League of Free Nations.

     "But here, again, has the general mind yet thought out all that is
     involved in this proposition? In all the great belligerent
     countries the armament industries are now huge interests with
     enormous powers. Krupp's business alone is as powerful a thing in
     Germany as the Crown. In every country a heavily subsidized
     'patriotic' press will fight desperately against giving powers so
     extensive and thorough as those here suggested to an international
     body. So long, of course, as the League of Free Nations remains a
     project in the air, without body or parts, such a press will sneer
     at it gently as 'Utopian,' and even patronize it kindly. But so
     soon as the League takes on the shape its general proposition makes
     logically necessary, the armament interest will take fright. Then
     it is we shall hear the drum patriotic loud in defence of the human
     blood trade. Are we to hand over these most intimate affairs of
     ours to 'a lot of foreigners?' Among these 'foreigners' who will be
     appealed to to terrify the patriotic souls of the British will be
     the 'Americans.' Are we men of English blood and tradition to see
     our affairs controlled by such 'foreigners' as Wilson, Lincoln,
     Webster and Washington? Perish the thought! When they might be
     controlled by Disraelis, Wettins, Mountbattens and what not! And so
     on and so on. Krupp's agents and the agents of the kindred firms in
     Great Britain and France will also be very busy with the national
     pride of France. In Germany they have already created a colossal
     suspicion of England.

     "Here is a giant in the path....

     "But let us remember that it is only necessary to defeat the
     propaganda of this vile and dangerous industry in four great
     countries....

     "I am suggesting here that the League of Free Nations shall
     practically control the army, navy, air forces, and armament
     industry of every nation in the world. What is the alternative to
     that? To do as we please? No, the alternative is that any malignant
     country will be free to force upon all the rest just the maximum
     amount of armament it chooses to adopt. Since 1871 France, we say,
     has been free in military matters. What has been the value of that
     freedom? The truth is, she has been the bond-slave of Germany,
     bound to watch Germany as a slave watches a master, bound to launch
     submarine for submarine and cast gun for gun, to sweep all her
     youth into her army, to subdue her trade, her literature, her
     education, her whole life to the necessity of preparations imposed
     upon her by her drill-master over the Rhine. And Michael, too, has
     been a slave to his imperial master for the self-same reason, for
     the reason that Germany and France were both so proudly sovereign
     and independent. Both countries have been slaves to Kruppism and
     Zabernism--_because they were sovereign and free_! So it will
     always be. So long as patriotic cant can keep the common man
     jealous of international controls over his belligerent
     possibilities, so long will he be the helpless slave of the foreign
     threat, and 'Peace' remain a mere name for the resting-phase
     between wars....

     "The plain truth is that the League of Free Nations, if it is to be
     a reality, if it is to effect a real pacification of the world,
     must do no less than supersede Empire; it must end not only this
     new German imperialism, which is struggling so savagely and
     powerfully to possess the earth, but it must also wind up British
     imperialism and French imperialism, which do now so largely and
     inaggressively possess it. And, moreover, this idea queries the
     adjective of Belgian, Portuguese, French, and British Central
     Africa alike, just as emphatically as it queries 'German.' Still
     more effectually does the League forbid those creations of the
     futurist imagination, the imperialism of Italy and Greece, which
     make such threatening gestures at the world of our children. Are
     these incompatibilities understood? Until people have faced the
     clear antagonism which exists between imperialism and
     internationalism, they have not begun to suspect the real
     significance of this project of the League of Free Nations. They
     have not begun to realize that peace also has its price."

With this much on record I went to Crewe House. I think that Northcliffe
knew something of what I had in mind. Or to be more accurate I think
that at times--in exceptional gleams of lucidity--he knew something of
what I had in mind and sympathized with it and wanted to forward it. But
his undoubtedly big and undoubtedly unco-ordinated brain was like a
weather-chart in stormy times, phases of high and low pressure and moral
gradients and depressions chased themselves across his mental map. His
skull held together, in a delusive unity, a score of flying fragments of
purpose. He was living most of his time in the Isle of Thanet and
rushing to and fro between that house of refuge and the excitements of
London. I put it to him that we had no clear idea of the work his
Ministry of Propaganda had to do, as a whole, and that to make our
exertions effective it was necessary that our objectives should be
defined.

Before the creation of the ministry, such propaganda as existed had been
a business of leaflet distribution by secret agents and by the air, the
forging of pseudo-German newspapers with depressing suggestions and the
like, and this was already being expanded very energetically when I took
up my duties. Descriptions and details are to be found in the _Secrets
of Crewe House_. I did what I could to forward all that and to make such
modifications as occurred to me, but these activities did not seem to
me to exhaust the possibilities of our organization. Telling lies--and
occasionally revealing the concealed truth of the situation--to the
German rank and file and the Germans behind the front, "attacking
morale" as it was termed, was perhaps a necessary operation in this new
sort of warfare we were waging, but it was really much more important
now to get to something in the nature of a common understanding between
the combatant populations if a genuine peace were to be achieved. The
best counter-check to the very vigorous war propaganda sustained by the
enemy governments, was honest peace propaganda, and I did my utmost to
make Crewe House an organization not merely for bringing the war to a
victorious end, but also for defining that end with an explicitness
equally binding upon us, our Allies and the enemy.

I had no illusions left about the fundamental wisdom of the British and
French Foreign Offices. They were, I realized, in the hands of men of
limited outlooks and small motives, whose chief control was their
servitude to tradition. They had far less grasp of the world situation
than an average intelligent man, and the duty of everyone who had a
chance, was to help force their hands towards such a "Reasonable Man's
Peace" as was now everywhere defining itself in the liberal mind.

One great desideratum was that there should be a plain statement of "War
Aims" to the whole world. Then the combatants would realize the
conditions of cessation. I persuaded Crewe House that our work
necessitated such a statement of what we were fighting for, properly
endorsed by the Foreign Office and in conjunction with Headlam Morley a
memorandum was prepared, submitted to an Advisory Committee and fully
discussed. This Committee, by the bye, consisted of the Earl of Denbigh,
Mr. Robert Donald (then Editor of the _Daily Chronicle_), Sir Roderick
Jones, Sir Sidney Low, Sir Charles Nicholson, Mr. James O'Grady, Mr. H.
Wickham Steed (foreign Editor and later Editor-in-Chief of _The Times_),
Dr. Headlam Morley, Mr. H. K. Hudson (Secretary) and myself, and the
memorandum to which we agreed said among other things:

     "It has become manifest that, for the purposes of an efficient
     pro-Ally propaganda in neutral and enemy countries, a clear and
     full statement of the war aims of the Allies is vitally necessary.
     What is wanted is something in the nature of an authoritative text
     to which propagandists may refer with confidence and which can be
     made the standard of their activities. It is not sufficient to
     recount the sins of Germany and to assert that the defeat of
     Germany is the Allied war aim. What all the world desires to know
     is what is to happen _after_ the war. The real war aim of a
     belligerent, it is more and more understood, is not merely victory,
     but a peace of a certain character which that belligerent desires
     shall arise out of that victory. What, therefore, is the peace
     sought by the Allies?

     "It would be superfluous even to summarize here the primary case of
     the Allies, that the war is on their part a war to resist the
     military aggression of Germany, assisted by the landowning Magyars
     of Hungary, the Turks, and the King of Bulgaria, upon the rest of
     mankind. It is a war against belligerence, against aggressive war
     and the preparation for aggressive war. Such it was in the
     beginning, and such it remains. But it would be idle to pretend
     that the ideas of the Governments and peoples allied against
     Germany have not developed very greatly during the years of the
     war.... There has arisen in the great world outside the inner lives
     of the Central Powers a will that grows to gigantic proportions,
     that altogether overshadows the boasted _will to power_ of the
     German junker and exploiter, _the will to a world peace_. It is
     like the will of an experienced man set against the will of an
     obstinate and selfish youth. The war aims of the anti-German Allies
     take more and more definitely the form of a world of States leagued
     together to maintain a common law, to submit their mutual
     differences to a conclusive tribunal, to protect weak communities,
     to restrain and suppress war threats and war preparations
     throughout the earth.... The thought of the world crystallizes now
     about a phrase, the phrase 'The League of Free Nations.' The war
     aims of the Allies become more and more explicitly associated with
     the spirit and implications of that.

     "Like all such phrases, 'The League of Free Nations' is subject to
     a great variety of detailed interpretation, but its broad
     intentions can now be stated without much risk of dissent. The
     ideal would, of course, include all the nations of the earth,
     including a Germany purged of her military aggressiveness; it
     involves some sort of International Congress that can revise,
     codify, amend and extend international law, a supreme Court of Law
     in which States may sue and be sued, and whose decision the League
     will be pledged to enforce, and the supervision, limitation, and
     use of armaments under the direction of the international
     congress. ...The constitution of this congress remains indefinite;
     it is the crucial matter upon which the best thought of the world
     is working at the present time. But given the prospect of a
     suitable congress there can be little dispute that the Imperial
     Powers among the Allies are now prepared for great and generous
     limitations of their sovereignty in the matter of armaments, of
     tropical possessions and of subject peoples, in the common interest
     of mankind.... Among the Allies, the two chief Imperial Powers,
     measured by the extent of territory they control, are Britain and
     France, and each of these is more completely prepared to-day than
     ever it has been before to consider its imperial possessions as a
     trust for their inhabitants and for mankind, and its position in
     the more fertile and less settled regions of the world as that of a
     mandatory and trustee....

     "But in using the phrase 'The League of Nations,' it may be well to
     dispel certain misconceptions that have arisen through the
     experimental preparation, by more or less irresponsible persons and
     societies, of elaborate schemes and constitutions of such a league.
     Proposals have been printed and published, for example, of a Court
     of World Conciliation, in which each sovereign State will be
     represented by one member--Montenegro, for example, by one, and the
     British Empire by one--and other proposals have been mooted of a
     Congress of the League of Nations, in which such States as Hayti,
     Abyssinia, and the like will be represented by one or two
     representatives, and France and Great Britain by five or six. All
     such projects should be put out of mind when the phrase 'League of
     Free Nations' is used by responsible speakers for the Allied
     Powers. Certain most obvious considerations have evidently been
     overlooked by the framers of such proposals. It will, for example,
     be a manifest disadvantage to the smaller Powers to be at all
     over-represented upon the Congress of any such League; it may even
     be desirable that certain of them should not have a _voting_
     representative at all, for this reason, that a great Power still
     cherishing an aggressive spirit would certainly attempt, as the
     beginning of its aggression, to compel adjacent small Powers to
     send representatives practically chosen by itself. The coarse fact
     of the case in regard to an immediate world peace is this, that
     only five or six great Powers possess sufficient economic resources
     to make war under modern conditions at the present time, namely,
     the United States of America, Great Britain, France, Germany,
     Japan, and doubtfully, Austria-Hungary. Italy suffers under the
     disadvantage that she has no coal supply. These five or six Powers
     we may say, therefore, permit war and can prevent it. They are, at
     present, necessarily the custodians of the peace of the world, and
     it is mere pedantry not to admit that this gives them a practical
     claim to preponderance in the opening Congress of the World
     League...."

This memorandum was sent, with a covering letter from Lord Northcliffe,
to Lord Balfour for the endorsement of the Foreign Office. We had all
been kept in the dark as to the cramping secret engagements which had
been made by our diplomatists, and we had no suspicion that our broad
and reasonable proposals were already impossible. We were not
enlightened. Dr. Headlam Morley and I were invited for a conversation
with Lord Tyrrell who was then Sir William Tyrrell. Possibly he intended
to give us a hint about the secret treaties but, if so, he never did as
he intended or the hint was too feeble to register upon our minds.
Tyrrell was a compact self-assured little man, who tacitly put our
memorandum on one side, rested his elbow on it, so to speak, and
delivered a discourse on our relations to France and Germany and on the
"characters" of these countries, that would have done credit to a bright
but patriotic school-boy of eight, and so having told us exactly where
we were, he dismissed biologist and historian together unheard. I
suppose he had learnt that stuff for gospel from his governess at his
knickerbocker stage, and had never had the wit to doubt it. Most
upper-class mentality is founded on governesses. According to such
lights as he had acquired in his tender years, he was perfectly honest
and patriotic--if a little "pro-French."

It is terrifying to think that these vast powers, the Foreign Offices of
the world, are being run to a very large extent by little undeveloped
brains such as Tyrrell's, that they are immensely protected from
criticism and under no real control from educated opinion. And what they
do affects and endangers hundreds of millions of lives.

That conversation was the utmost Crewe House got out of the Foreign
Office. We assumed rather rashly that our memorandum had been tacitly
accepted and pursued our propaganda activities on those lines. That,
from the diplomatic point of view was admirable, because in our
quasi-official rle we gave assurances to doubtful Germans, that could
afterwards be repudiated. We were in fact decoys. Just as T. E. Lawrence
of the "Seven Pillars" was used all unawares as a decoy for the Arabs.
And all for nothing! Plainly I had not learnt the A.B.C. of diplomacy.

There were at that time several small organizations promoting the League
of Nations idea. I took part in a successful attempt to consolidate
these into one League of Nations Union, which would not merely spread
but develop the idea. I put the stress upon the development. It was
conspicuously evident that, so far, the idea was lacking in detail and
definition; it was like a bag into which anything might still be put and
there were a number of things that I felt were very undesirable as
occupants of that bag and others that were vitally important. I was
already alive, as that Crewe House memorandum shows, to the danger of a
pseudo-parliamentary organization, with an enfeebling constitution, and
I felt we had to get ahead of that by working out some clearer statement
of the possibilities of the occasion. We evolved therefore a "Research
Committee" which could press on with this necessary preliminary work. It
consisted of the following members, most of whom, I must admit, did no
work whatever upon it; Mr. Ernest Barker, Mr. Lionel Curtis, Mr. G.
Lowes Dickinson, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Mr. John Hilton, Professor
Gilbert Murray, Mr. H. Wickham Steed, Mr. J. A. Spender, Mr. L. S.
Woolf, Mr. A. E. Zimmern, and myself, with Mr. William Archer as
secretary. It produced only two pamphlets "The Idea of a League of
Nations" and "The Way to the League of Nations" before events superseded
it.

The former of these pamphlets ends with this passage:

     "Negative peace is not our aim. It is something, of course, to have
     a rest from suffering and the infliction of suffering; but it is a
     greater thing to be set free, and peace sets people free. It sets
     them free to live, to think, to work at the work that is best worth
     doing, to build instead of destroying, to devote themselves to the
     pursuit or the creation of the things that seem highest, instead of
     having to spend all their time in trying to avoid being killed.
     Peace is an empty cup that we can fill as we please; it is an
     opportunity which we can seize or neglect. To recognize this is to
     sweep out of one's mind all dreams of a world peace contrived by a
     few jurists and influential people in some odd corner of the
     world's administrative bureaux. As well might the three tailors of
     Tooley Street declare the millennium in being. Permanent world
     peace must necessarily be a great process and state of affairs,
     greater indeed than any war process, because it must anticipate,
     comprehend, and prevent any war process, and demand the conscious,
     the understanding, the willing participation of the great majority
     of human beings. We, who look to it as a possible thing, are bound
     not to blind ourselves to, or conceal from others, the gigantic and
     laborious system of labours, the immense tangle of co-operations,
     which its establishment involves. If political institutions or
     social methods stand in the way of this great good for mankind, it
     is fatuous to dream of compromises with them. A world
     peace-organization cannot evade universal relationships.

     "It is clear that if a world league is to be living and enduring,
     the idea of it and the need and righteousness of its service must
     be taught by every educational system in the world. It must either
     be served by or be in conflict with every religious organization;
     it must come into the life of every one, not to release men and
     women from loyalty, but to demand loyalty for itself. The answer to
     the criticism that world peace will release men from service is,
     that world peace is itself a service. It calls, not as war does for
     the deaths, but for that greater gift, for the lives, of men. The
     League of Nations cannot be a little thing: it is either to be a
     great thing in the world, an overriding idea of a greater state, or
     nothing. Every state aims ultimately at the production of a sort of
     man, and it is an idle and a wasteful diplomacy, a pandering to
     timidities and shams, to pretend that the World League of Nations
     is not ultimately a State aiming at that ennobled individual whose
     city is the world."

We got as far as that. And then President Wilson essentially
ill-informed, narrowly limited to an old-fashioned American conception
of history, self-confident and profoundly self-righteous, came to Europe
and passed us by on the other side. Men of my way of thinking were left
helpless, voiceless and altogether baffled outside the fiasco of
Versailles. What had seemed to be the portal of a World Control standing
wide open to us, was shut and slammed in our faces.

My friend Philip Guedalla, discussing this period of memorandum-writing
with me the other day, recalled a letter which he declared I had sent to
President Wilson, at the President's request, through the hands of Mr.
Bainbridge Colby in November 1917. He alleged that through this letter
I had contributed materially to the President's "Fourteen Points." I
think very poorly of the Fourteen Points and at the time I was unable to
recall any communication justifying this accusation. A search was made,
however, and finally a copy of the following letter was disinterred. The
original was conveyed, with Mr. Guedalla's assistance, past any risks of
war-time censorship to Mr. Colby who had gone on to Paris.

I doubt whether this letter was ever actually read by President Wilson
though we have Colby's word for it that it reached his hands. I never
heard from President Wilson in the matter. Colonel House came to Easton
Glebe while the President was in England, but he and Mrs. House were so
anxious to hurry on to "see over" Hatfield, the historical mansion of
the Cecils, that there was no possibility of any political talk. A
chance to see Hatfield might not recur. My letter therefore has no grain
of historical importance, but in the light of the concluding passage of
the preceding section it has considerable autobiographical significance.

It runs:--

     Dear Mr. Bainbridge Colby,

     You asked me, after our conversation at the Reform Club on the
     evening of November the fourteenth, to set down on paper my views
     upon the part America might and should play in this war. It was not
     the military side of the matter that engaged us, though I feel very
     strongly that by a bold use of scientific inventions the American
     intelligence, accustomed to a large handling of economic problems
     and the free scrapping of obsolescent material and methods, may yet
     be of enormous service and stimulus to the Allied effort; it was
     rather the political rle of America about which we talked. I
     warned you that I was perhaps not to be taken as a representative
     Englishman, that I was scientifically trained, a republican, and
     "pro-American." I repeat that warning now. Here are my views for
     what they are worth.

     They are based on one fundamental conviction. There is no way out
     of this war process--there may be a peace of sorts but it will only
     lead to a recrudescence of war--except by the establishment of a
     new order in human affairs. This new order is adumbrated in the
     phrase, _A League of Nations_. It lies behind that vaguer, more
     dangerous because less definite, phrase, "a Just Peace." We have, I
     am convinced, to set our faces towards that order, towards that
     just peace, _irrespective of the amount of victory that falls to
     us_. We may achieve it by negotiations at any point when the German
     mind becomes open to the abandonment of militant imperialism. If by
     a sudden change and storm of fortune we found Germany deserted by
     her allies, prostrate at our feet, our troops in Berlin and her
     leaders captive, we could do no more, we should do ourselves and
     the whole future of mankind a wrong if we did more, than make this
     same "Just Peace" or set up this League of Nations. There is, I
     hold, a definable _Right Thing_ for most practical purposes in
     international relations; there are principles according to which
     boundaries can be drawn and rights of way and privileges of trade
     settled and apportioned (under the protection of the general
     League) as dispassionately as a cartographer makes a contour line.

     This I believe is the conviction to which a scientific training
     leads a man. It is the conviction, _more or less_ clearly
     developed, of rational-minded people everywhere. It is manifestly
     the idea of President Wilson. It is the conviction that has to be
     made to dominate the world.

     And this conviction of a possible dispassionate settlement is one
     for which the world is now ready. I am convinced that in no country
     is there even one per cent of the population anxious to prolong the
     war. The ninety and nine are seeking helplessly for a way out such
     as only a dispassionate settlement can give. But they are kept in
     the war by fear. And by mental habit. Few men have the courage to
     reach their own convictions. They must be led to them or helped to
     them. They fear the greed of their antagonists, fresh wars, fresh
     outrages, and an unending series of evil consequences, if they seem
     to accept anything short of triumph. No one can read the newspapers
     of any belligerent country without realizing the overwhelming share
     of fear in now prolonging the struggle. Germany as much as any
     country fights on and is helpless in the hands of her military
     caste, _because there is no confidence in Germany in the
     possibility of a Just Peace_. There is an equal want of confidence
     in London and Paris and New York. To create a feeling of confidence
     in that possibility of a Just Peace everywhere is as necessary a
     part of our struggle for a right order in the world as to hold the
     German out of Calais or Paris.

     It is easy to underrate the pacific impulse in men and to overrate
     their malignity. All men are mixed in their nature and none without
     a certain greed, baseness, vindictiveness. After the strain and
     losses of such a struggle as this it is "only in human nature" to
     prepare to clutch and punish whenever the scales of victory seem
     sagging in our favour. Too much importance must not be attached to
     the aggressive patriotism of the Press in the belligerent
     countries. Let us keep a little humour in our interpretation of
     enemy motives and remember that though a man has still much of the
     ape in his composition, that does not make him an irredeemable
     devil. The same German who will read with exultation of the
     submarining of a British passenger ship, or pore over a map of
     Europe to plan a giant Germany reaching from Antwerp to
     Constantinople, founded on blood and dreadfulness and ruling the
     earth, will, in his saner moments, be only too ready to accept and
     submit himself to a scheme of general good will, provided only that
     it ensures for him and his a tolerable measure of prosperity and
     happiness. The belligerent element is present in every man, but in
     most it is curable. The incurably belligerent minority in any
     country is extremely small. There is a rational pacifist in nearly
     every man's brain, and the right end of the war can come only by
     evoking that.

     It is here that the peculiar opportunity of America and of
     President Wilson comes in. America is three thousand miles from the
     war; she has no lost provinces to regain, no enemy colonies to
     capture; she is, in comparison with any of our Allies except China,
     a dispassionate combatant. (If China can be called a combatant.) No
     other combatant except America can talk of peace without
     relinquishing a claim or accepting an outrage. America alone can
     stand fearlessly and unembarrassed for that rational settlement all
     men desire. It is from America alone that the lead can come which
     will take mankind out of this war. It is to America under President
     Wilson that I look as the one and only medium by which we can get
     out of this jangling monstrosity of conflict.

     What is wanted now is a statement of the Just Peace, a statement
     without reservations. We want something more than a phrase to bind
     the nations together. America has said "League of Nations" and
     everywhere there has been an echo to that. But now we want America
     to take the next step and to propose the establishment of that
     League, to define in general terms the nature of the League, to
     press the logical necessity of a consultative, legislative, and
     executive conference, and to call together so much of that
     conference as exists on the Allied side. _There will never be such
     a conference until America demands it._ There will never be a
     common policy for the Allies or a firm proposal of peace
     conditions, unless America insists. This war may drag on for
     another year of needless bloodshed and end in mutual recriminations
     through the sheer incapacity of any Ally but America to say plainly
     what is in fact acceptable to all.

     In addition to the moral advantage of its aloofness, America has a
     second advantage in having a real head, representative and
     expressive. Possessing that head, America can talk. Alone in our
     system America is capable of articulate speech. Russia is now
     headless, a confusion; Italy is divided against herself; in France
     and Britain politicians and party leaders make speeches that are
     welcomed here and abused there. No predominant utterance is
     possible. It will be no secret to an observant American such as you
     are, that Britain and France are divided in a quarrel between
     reactionary and progressive, between aggressive nationalism and
     modern liberalism. All the European allies are hampered by secret
     bargains and pacts of greediness. They have soiled their minds with
     schemes of annexation and exploitation in Syria, in Albania, in
     Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Russia was to have had Constantinople,
     and so forth and so forth. This ugly legacy of the old diplomacy
     entangles our public men hopelessly to-day. Even where they are
     willing to repudiate these plans to-day for themselves they are
     tied by loyalty to the bright projects of their allies, and
     silenced. Their military operations have had no real unity because
     their policy, their war aims, have been diverse. The great alliance
     against the Central Powers has been a bargain system and not a
     unification. The allied statesmen, challenged as to their war aims,
     repeat time after time the same valiant resolution to "end
     militarism," free small nations, and the like, standing all the
     time quite resolutely with their backs to the real issues which are
     the control of the Tropics, the future of the Ottoman Empire, and
     international trade conditions. So it seems likely to go on. Any
     voice that is raised to demand a lucid statement of the Allied aims
     in these matters is drowned in a clamour of alarmed interests. In
     Britain and France "hush" in the interests of diplomacy is being
     organized with increasing violence. Only America can help us out of
     the tangle by asserting its own interpretation of the common war
     purpose, and demanding a clear unanimity on the part of the Allies.
     The war was begun to defeat German imperialist aggression. It is
     with extreme reluctance that the European powers will accept the
     one way to salvation, which is the abandonment of all imperialist
     aggression and the acceptance of a common international method. The
     League of Nations is a mere phrase until it is realized by a body
     whose authority is supreme, overriding every national flag in the
     following spheres, in Africa between the Sahara and the Zambesi, as
     a trustee in Armenia, Syria and all the regions of the earth whose
     political status has been destroyed by the war, and permanently
     upon the high seas and vital channels (such as the Dardanelles) of
     the world.

     America in the last three years has made great strides from its
     traditional isolation towards a responsible share in framing the
     common destinies of mankind. But America has to travel further on
     the same road. The future of America is now manifestly bound up
     with the peace of Europe, for that peace cannot be secured unless
     these sources of contention in the supply of tropical raw material
     and in the transport and trading facilities of the world are so
     controlled as to be no longer sources of contention. It is easy to
     argue that America has "no business" in Central Africa or Western
     Asia, that these are matters for the "powers concerned" to decide.
     But it is just because America has no "business" in Central Africa
     and Western Asia that it is necessary that America should have a
     definite will about Africa and Western Asia. Her aloofness gives
     her her authority. The "powers concerned" will never of their own
     initiative decide. They are too deeply concerned, and they will
     haggle. It is, I fear, altogether too much to expect a generous
     scheme for the joint settlement of regions by powers who have for a
     century cultivated a scheming habit of appropriation. But none of
     these powers can afford to haggle against the clear will for order
     of America at the present time.

     What is suggested here is not a surrender of sovereignty nor a
     direct "international control" of tropical Africa, but the setting
     up of an over-ruling board composed of delegates from the powers
     concerned: Frenchman, Englishman, Africander, Portuguese, Belgian,
     Italian and (ultimately) German, to which certain functions can be
     delegated, as powers are delegated to the government of the United
     States of America by those states. Among these functions would be
     transport control, trade control, the arms and drink trades, the
     revision of legislation affecting the native and his land, the
     maintenance of a supreme court for Central Africa, the
     establishment of higher education for the native, and the
     systematic disarmament of all the African possessions. A similar
     board, a protectorate board, could take charge of the transport,
     waterways, customs, and disarmament of the former Ottoman empire.
     Only by the establishment of such boards can we hope to save those
     regions from becoming at the end of this war, fields of the
     bitterest international rivalry, seed-beds of still direr
     conflicts. It is in the creation and support of such special
     boards, and of other boards for disarmament, international health,
     produce control and financial control, that the reality of a League
     of Nations can come into being. But Europe is tied up into a
     complexity of warring and jostling interests; without an initiative
     from America it is doubtful whether the world now possesses
     sufficient creative mental energy to achieve any such synthesis,
     obvious though its need is and greatly as men would welcome it. In
     all the world there is no outstanding figure to which the world
     will listen, there is no man audible in all the world, in Japan as
     well as Germany and Rome as well as Boston--except the President of
     the United States. Anyone else can be shouted down and will be
     shouted down by minor interests. From him, and from him alone, can
     come the demand for that unity without which the world perishes,
     and those clear indications of the just method of the League of
     Nations for which it waits.

     There is another area, an area beyond the scope of international
     controls, which remains an area of incalculable chances because no
     clear _dominant idea_ has been imposed upon the world. This is
     Eastern Europe from Poland to the Adriatic. The Allies have no
     common idea, and they never have had a common idea and do not seem
     to be capable of developing a common idea about this region. They
     do not even know whether they wish to destroy or enlarge the
     Austro-Hungarian system. Vague vapourings about the rights of
     nationality conceal a formless confusion of purposes. Yet if the
     Allies have no intention of rending the Austro-Hungarian empire
     into fragments, if they do not propose to cripple or dismember
     Bulgaria, it is of the extremest importance that they should say so
     now. There is no occasion to make the Austrian and Bulgarian fight,
     as if he fought for his national existence, when he is really only
     fighting for Germany. All liberal thought is agreed upon the
     desirability of a practically independent Poland, of a Hungary
     intact and self-respecting, of a liberated Bohemia, of a Yugo-Slav
     autonomous state. None of these four countries are so large and
     powerful as to stand alone, and there are many reasons for
     proposing to see them linked into a league of mutual protection,
     mutual restraint and mutual guarantees. Add only to this system the
     present German states of the Austrian empire, and such a league
     would be practically a continuation of that empire. But the
     European Allies lack the collective mental force, lack the
     mouthpiece, lack the detachment and directness of purpose necessary
     for the declaration of their intentions in this matter, and they
     will probably go into the peace conference unprepared with a
     decision, a divided and so an enfeebled crowd, unless America for
     her own good and theirs, before the end of the war, gives the lead
     that will necessitate a definite statement of war aims. Only
     President Wilson and America can get that statement. To us in
     Europe our statesmen have become no better than penny-in-the-slot
     gramophones, who at every challenge for their war aims, say
     "Evacuate Belgium, restore Alsace-Lorraine to France and Italia
     Irredenta to Italy, abandon militarism and--_Gurrrrr_!" The voice
     stops just when it is beginning to be interesting. And because it
     stops the war goes on. The war goes on because nothing can be
     extracted from the Allies that would induce any self-respecting
     Bulgarian, Austrian or democratic-minded German to regard peace as
     a practicable proposition. They have their backs up against the
     wall, therefore, side by side with the German militarist--who is
     the real enemy--because we will not let them have any alternative
     to a fight to the death.

     There, my dear Mr. Bainbridge Colby, are the views you ask for. You
     have brought them on yourself. You see the rle I believe America
     could play under President Wilson's guidance, the rle of the
     elucidator, the rle of advocate of the new order. Clear speech and
     clear speech alone can save the world. Nothing else can. And
     President Wilson alone of all mankind can speak and compel the
     redeeming word.


 7

_World Education_

My awakening to the realities of the pseudo-settlement of 1919 was
fairly rapid. At first I found it difficult to express my indignant
astonishment at the simulacrum of a Peace League that was being thrust
upon Europe. I was embarrassed and rather puzzled to find that men I had
reckoned upon surely as associates, Gilbert Murray for instance,
Zimmern, Ernest Barker and J. A. Spender and that dignified figurehead
Grey, were all, it seemed, content with this powerless pedantic bit of
stage scenery. In spite of the fact that they had committed their names
to the most explicit denunciation of a sham world parliament, of an
uncontrolled armament trade and of a weaponless league from which the
former enemy states were to be indefinitely excluded, they not only
accepted this incredibly defective organization, but became eager
apologists for it. I clung to the original demands and promises of Crewe
House and the League of Nations Union. This I insisted was not the thing
that had to be.

What looked like everyday commonsense but was, in effect, sheer
imaginative destitution was all against me. I was rather in the position
into which a man would have been put by Dr. Johnson if he had talked to
him of the possibility of electric lights and air liners. The fact that
in the violent passage that would no doubt have ensued, he would have
been right and the great Doctor altogether wrong, would not have
prevented him from looking and feeling like an egregious fool. I was
invited most urgently to feel that my ideas were preposterous and
unacceptable. My futile voice mingled feebly with the feeble protests of
a few other intelligent men behind the wainscot while the conference
rooms reverberated to the feet of the "statesmen" and the pompous
expressions of their "policies." I think the first intelligent man to
emerge from behind the wainscot and make himself really audible was J.
M. Keynes in his _Economic Consequences of the Peace_ (1919).

I will not here enter into any discussion of Woodrow Wilson, I never met
him, and the quintessence of what I have to say about him is to be found
in Book V  6 of that most discursive novel, _The World of William
Clissold_, in which I contrast his triumphant reception in Rome in
January 1919 with the funeral of David Lubin, forced to travel obscurely
and circuitously to the cemetery through side streets because of the
Wilson parade. Nor will I expatiate again upon the strange phase of
docility and expectation in the world at the end of 1918, which mocked
the limitations of Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau. That I have
conveyed (chiefly by quotations from Dr. Dillon and J. M. Keynes) in the
_Outline of History_ (Chapter XXXIX  3 and 4 in the 1932 Edition).
Slowly I realized the full significance of that passage cited from _The
Idea of the League of Nations_ about the "gigantic and laborious system
of labours, the immense tangle of co-operations" demanded of us, and set
about seeking how among the new conditions, the still non-existent
foundations of a real and enduring World State might yet be planned and
laid.

During the various discussions, committee meetings and conferences that
occurred in the course of the consolidation of the earlier League of
Nations organizations into the League of Nations Union, I had been very
much impressed by the perpetually recurring mental divergences due to
the fact that everyone seemed to have read a different piece of history
or no history at all, and that consequently our ideas of the methods and
possibilities of human association varied in the wildest manner. The
curious fact dawned upon me that because I was not a "scholar" and had
never been put under a pedant to study a "period" intensely and
prematurely, and because I had a student's knowledge of biology and of
the archological record, I had a much broader grasp of historical
reality than most of my associates in this mixture of minds which, as
the League of Nations Union, was trying to fuse itself into a directive
and controlling public opinion. I began to talk more and more decisively
of the need for "general history" and to express opinions such as I
embodied finally in a pamphlet "_History Is One_" (1919). I proposed
that our Research Committee should organize the writing and publication
of a history of mankind which should show plainly to the general
intelligence, how inevitable, if civilization was to continue, was the
growth of political, social and economic organizations into a world
federation.

My idea was at first an outline of history beginning with an account of
the Roman and Chinese empires at the Christian era, and coming up to
contemporary conditions. It was to be a composite Gibbon, with Eastern
Asia included and brought up to date. But it became very speedily plain
to me that no such broad but compact historical synthesis by
authoritative historians was possible. They lived in an atmosphere of
mutual restraint. They would not dare to do anything so large, for fear
of incidental slips and errors. They were unused to any effective
co-operation and their disposition would be all towards binding together
a lot of little histories by different hands, and calling the binding a
synthesis; and even if they could be persuaded to do anything of the
sort it would certainly be years before it became available. I was
already making a note-book for my own private edification and for use in
the controversies that I felt were gathering ahead, and the idea of
writing up this note-book of how the present human situation had come
about and publishing it--if only to demonstrate that there was some
other method possible in history than that of sheer indiscriminate
aggregation--became more and more attractive.

It did not occur to me that this Note-Book or Outline of History would
be a particularly saleable production. I wanted to sketch out how the
job might be done rather than to do it. Before I began it I had a very
serious talk with my wife about our financial position. The little
parcel of securities we had accumulated before 1914 had been badly
damaged by the war. Its value had fallen from about 20,000 to less
than half that amount. But the success of Mr. Britling had more than
repaired that damage and my position as a journalist had improved. We
decided that I could afford a year's hard work on this _prcis_ of
history, although it might bring in very little and even though I risked
dropping for a time below the habitual novel reader's horizon. As a
matter of fact I dropped below that horizon for good. I lost touch with
the reviewers and the libraries, I never regained it, and if I wrote a
novel now it would be dealt with by itself by some special critic, as a
singular book, and not go into the "fiction" class. I set to work,
undeterred by my burning boats, with the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ at
my elbow, to get the general shape of history sketched out. It planned
itself naturally enough as a story of communications and increasing
interdependence. It became an essay on the growth of association since
the dawn of animal communities. Its beginning was carried right back
before the appearance of viviparous types of life, to those reptiles
which shelter their eggs and protect their offspring, and it came on in
one story of expanding relationship to the aeroplane-radio-linked human
world of to-day. The essay grew beyond expectation, but that stress upon
continually more effective communications, upon the gathering
co-ordination of lives, is still, as even the reader of the _Outline's_
List of Contents can see, the gist of it all.

I will not here detail how with the _Outline_, as with _Anticipations_,
my sense of the importance of my subject grew as I worked upon it. I saw
more and more plainly that this was the form, the only right form, in
which history should be presented to the ordinary citizen of the modern
state, this, and not "King and Country" stuff, was the history needed
for general education, and I realized too that even my arrangement of
notes, if it was properly "vetted" by one or two more specialized and
authoritative helpers, might be made to serve, provisionally at least,
for just that general review of reality of which we stood in such
manifest need if any permanent political unity was to be sustained in
the world. I persuaded Sir Ray Lankester, Sir Harry Johnston, Gilbert
Murray, Mr. Ernest Barker, Sir Denison Ross, Philip Guedalla and various
other men of knowledge among my friends, to go over my typescript for
me, I got J. F. Horrabin, who makes charts that talk, to help me with
some exceptionally eloquent maps, and I suggested to Newnes and Co. the
possibility of a publication in parts prior to the publication of the
_Outline_ in book form by Cassells. In America, Mr. G. P. Brett of The
Macmillan Co., was very doubtful about the prospects of the book, but
finally he brought it out at the rather odd price of 10 dollars and 10
cents.

The public response was unexpectedly vigorous, both in Britain and
America. Edition after edition was sold on both sides of the Atlantic.
It made a new and wider reputation for me and earned me a considerable
sum of money. Over two million copies of the _Outline_ in English have
been sold since 1919, it has been translated into most literary
languages except Italian--it is proscribed in Italy because it detracts,
they say, from the supreme grandeur of Mussolini's Rome--and it
continues to sell widely. _A Short History of the World_ (1922) has also
had an extensive sale. The ordinary man had been stimulated by the war
to a real curiosity about the human past; he wanted to be told the story
of the planet and of the race, plainly and credibly, and since the
"historians" would not or could not do it, he turned to my book. It was
quite open to those worthy teachers to do the job over again and do it
beyond measure better, but until they could manage to do that, people
had either to remain in ignorance of this exciting subject, as one
whole, or else go on reading me, or Van Loon, or some other such
outsider who had not been sterilized by an excess of scholastic
pretension.

Unhappily, though the professional teachers of history could not bar the
reading public from access to the new history of all mankind that was
now unfolding itself, they were much more successful in keeping it out
of the schools. To this day, in school and syllabus, King and Country
and Period still prevail and it is still just a matter of luck whether
or no an intelligent boy or girl ever comes to the newer rendering of
historical fact. Yet beginning history point-blank with medival England
is as logical and sensible as it would be to begin chemistry with the
study of cookery recipes or patent medicines.

The immense popularity of the _Outline of History_ was a very exciting
success for me. My self-conceit has always had great recuperative power;
it revived bravely now; and I saw a still wider possibility behind the
_Outline_, the possibility of giving Mr. Everyman an account not merely
of past events, but of the main facts about the processes of life in
general and the social, economic and political state of the world. I
gave this possibility a preliminary airing in some lectures I wrote but
never delivered--they were intended for America--and which I reprinted
in a book _The Salvaging of Civilization_.

Therein I developed a scheme which I called the "Book of Necessary
Knowledge" or the "Bible of Civilization." That idea was first broached
by Comenius, and, some time before me, Dr. Beattie Crozier was insisting
that every culture needed its "Bible." I owe the phrase to him. My
League of Nations Union experience had enforced my conviction that for a
new order in the world there must be a new education and that for a real
world civilization there must be a common basis of general ideas, that
is to say a world-wide common-school education presenting the same
vision of reality. Someone had to begin upon that restatement of
educational ideas. I was in no way qualified for such a beginning, yet
no one else was stirring, and presently I found myself casting about for
colleagues and collaborators in order to complete that first sketch of a
world citizen's ideology of which my _Outline of History_ was a part.
Instead of arguing endlessly about what had to be done, it seemed
simpler and more effective to demonstrate, however roughly, what had to
be done.

I should have liked to call these books that were taking shape in my
mind an _Outline of Biology_ and an _Outline of Social and Economic
Science_. But following the success of the _Outline of History_ a number
of so-called "Outlines" of Art--of Literature--of Science--of this and
that, had been put upon the market and widely advertised and
distributed. They were not really outlines at all; they were
miscellanies of articles by various hands with hardly any common thread
of interest, but they exhausted the meaning of the word so completely
that when at last after much toil and tribulation I got the books I
wanted done, I called them _The Science of Life_ and _The Work, Wealth
and Happiness of Mankind_ respectively.

In organizing the writing of the _Science of Life_ I was greatly helped
by my early association with biological work and by the facts that my
eldest son was a biological teacher and that the able grandson of my
teacher Huxley, Julian Huxley, was my friend. He has an extraordinary
full and detailed knowledge of the whole biological field. We three got
together in 1927 and we made a scheme that covered every division of our
immense subject. We worked very harmoniously throughout and, after a
part publication, produced the book in 1930.

I had already been casting about for suitable helpers to collaborate in
the same fashion upon a summary of social, political and economic
science, but in this I was less successful. I entangled my scheme with
an inconvenient associate and it had to be disentangled. I need not go
into the particulars of my troubles here. The plan I had in mind for
this work was bold and more novel than that of either of its
predecessors; it was nothing less than an attempt to fuse and recast all
this group of "subjects" into one intelligible review of Man upon his
planet. It was to begin with a description of his material life and its
evolution and it was then to describe the social, legal, political and
educational organizations that had grown up as necessary concomitants of
developments. Just as the _Outline of History_ was an experiment in
analytical history, so this was to be an experiment in synthetic,
descriptive economics and politics. The exactest name for such a
synthesis would be the Outline of Human Ecology. But I did not call it
that because the word Ecology was not yet widely understood.

Hendrik Van Loon, I may note, has done three books which, in an entirely
different manner, approach much the same popular conspectus as my own.
They are called _The Story of Mankind_, _The Liberation of Mankind_ and
_The Home of Mankind_; and if presently he does _The Work of Mankind_,
he will have covered practically all my territory, outside the _Science
of Life_, and with a very useful and desirable extension into the field
of topographical geography. I do my work in my own style and so does he,
and for many readers his type of survey may prove to be more attractive
and stimulating than mine. _The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_,
I have felt for some time, might very well be supplemented by a broad
geographical survey.

My trouble with my hastily selected assistant wasted most of my working
time for half a year. Two privately printed pamphlets distributed to the
members of the committee of the Authors' Society embalmed that tiresome
dispute. In the end I brought in a number of fresh advisers and helpers
and did the _Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_ as I had done the
_Outline of History_ by "mugging up" the material and writing or
rewriting practically all of it myself, and then getting the various
parts vetted and revised and, in one part, rewritten by specialists. It
appeared in 1931 and it has sold very well, but not at all on the scale
of the _Outline of History_. It is only now appearing in a popular
edition. On the whole considering the greater novelty of the design, I
am quite as well satisfied with it as I am with its two companions.

These three works taken together do, I believe, still give a clearer,
fuller and compacter summary of what the normal citizen of the modern
state should know, than any other group of books in existence. They
shape out something that will presently be better done. Clearly there
must be some factor, in the relative unsuccessfulness of the latter two
thirds of the trilogy, which escapes me. They must need further
simplification and consolidation. I have not, I think any extravagant
delusions about their quality, but I have perhaps too high an estimate
of the value of their general conception.

I am convinced that the informative framework of a proper education
should be presented as the three sides of the triangle I have drawn in
them; Biology, History and Human Ecology. A child should begin with
Natural History, a History of Inventions, Social Beginnings and
Descriptive Geography, that should constitute its first world picture,
and the treatment of these subjects should broaden and intensify before
specialization. I believe that minds resting on that triple foundation
will be equipped for the rle of world citizens, and I do not believe
that a world community can be held together in a common understanding
except upon such a foundation. This is not to say that my books are
anything more than first exploratory experiments in this foundation
work. But they do constitute a very serious first experiment and they
foreshadow a new education as it was not foreshadowed until I wrote
them.

       *       *       *       *       *

In this account rendered of the purpose and substance of my life-work I
must here insert in a sort of parenthesis one or two other subsidiary
books which will otherwise find no place in this story. In 1920 I made a
brief visit to Russia, talked to a number of Communist leaders,
including Lenin, and published my impressions in a book, _Russia in the
Shadows_, and in 1921 I went to Washington to report upon the
Disarmament Conference of that year, in a series of newspaper articles
which became _Washington and the Hope of Peace_. Since these books were
incidents in my development they must be mentioned here, but I need not
expatiate upon them.

Here too I must mention, though I need not enter at length into the
particulars of it, the Decks Case which came to an end, after five years
of legal proceedings, in 1933. Miss Deeks was a Canadian spinster who
conceived the strange idea that she held the copyright in human history.
She was permitted and encouraged to sue me, as the author of the
_Outline of History_, for infringement of copyright and to produce a
manuscript, which she alleged had existed in the form in which she
produced it before the publication of my Outline, in support of her
claim for 100,000 and the suppression of my book. No evidence of the
prior existence of her manuscript, as produced, was ever exacted from
her, and she was allowed to carry this silly case from court to
court--each court dismissing it contemptuously with costs against
her--up to the Privy Council. When finally that court disposed of her
conclusively, with costs, she declared her inability to pay a penny of
the 5,000-worth of fees and charges that these tedious and vexatious
proceedings had entailed upon me. And there the matter ended. Life is
too short and there is too much to do in it for me to spend time and
attention in hunting out whatever poor little assets Miss Deeks may have
preserved from her own lawyers and expert advisers. She has to go on
living somehow and her mischief is done. I hope she is comfortable and
that she is still persuaded she is a sort of intellectual heroine. I saw
her once in court, when I had to give sworn evidence in my own defence,
and I found her rather a sympathetic figure. She impressed me as quite
honest but vain and foolish, with an imagination too inflamed with the
idea of being a great litigant for her to realize what an unrighteous
nuisance she was making of herself; there was something faintly
pathetic, something reminiscent of Dickens' Miss Flyte, in the way in
which she fussed about with her lawyers, with much whispering and
rustling of papers, giving her profound and subtle instructions for the
undoing of our dire conspiracy; and it is not against her, but against
those who encouraged and egged her on, that I am disposed to be
resentful.

Since 1914 I had been on very friendly terms with F. W. Sanderson, the
headmaster of Oundle, to whom I sent my boys at the outbreak of the war.
Sanderson was an original and vigorous teacher, who was feeling his way
in a manner all his own, towards a modernized education. He was at the
practical end of the business in immediate contact with boys, parents
and school governors and I was at the other end in contact with public
affairs and the League of Nations, and we converged very interestingly
in our talks. My boys, as children at home, had acquired very good
French and German and I, just back from my first visit to Russia in 1914
(see _Joan and Peter_), persuaded him to add a Russian teacher to his
staff for their benefit, the first Russian teacher, I believe, in any
English public school.

Sanderson was a ruddy plethoric man, with his voice in his throat, and
always very keen to talk. His mind found its best expression in his very
characteristic school sermons; the actual practice of his school and the
ideas of his staff lagged far behind his ambitions. He was greatly
occupied with the development of a special building at Oundle when he
died, The House of Vision, in which boys were to go and think out life.
It was to be a sort of museum displaying universal history and the world
as a whole; it was to give very much what my three outline books were
designed to give, a unified conception of the world drama in which they
had to play their parts.

Sanderson was growing mentally and his reach and boldness were
increasing to the very day of his death. That came very suddenly and
shockingly to me, for I was in the chair at a lecture at University
College in the summer of 1922 when--at the end of a rather wandering
discourse, his overtaxed and neglected heart stopped beating and he fell
dead on the platform beside me.

This lecture was to have opened new ground and he had made great
preparations for it. He had added the toil of a sort of mission to
Rotarians and people of that sort, to his already heavy work as a
headmaster, and this lecture was to have been a key utterance. Apart
from my keen sense of the loss of his intimacy and co-operation I was
greatly distressed at this abrupt truncation of his work; he was only
sixty-five and he seemed full of a panting vitality that might have gone
on for years.

I did all I could to put him on record before his prestige faded. I got
together an official _Life_ (1923) and, finding myself hampered by the
reserves and suppressions customary in such compilations, I also wrote
my own impression of him in _The Story of a Great Schoolmaster_ (1924).
It is so personal and affectionate an impression and it is so expressive
of my own educational conceptions as well as his, that if I could I
would incorporate it, just as I would like to incorporate my
introduction to _The Book of Catherine Wells_, in this already greatly
distended autobiography. His successor had none of his distinctive
spirit and understanding, and the light of that House of Vision was
never lit. In _The Story of a Great Schoolmaster_, I have described how
I visited it and found that lantern for the imagination, empty and
abandoned six months after his death. Oundle lacked and still lacks the
understanding or the piety to carry out his scheme.

I will merely mention here such other incidental books of mine as _A
Year of Prophesying_, 1924, and _The Way the World Is Going_, 1929. They
are collections of newspaper articles in which I hammer away at my
leading ideas, not always very tactfully, and the rare, curious reader
who may wander into these volumes will find variations perhaps in the
method of approach but nothing of essential novelty.

With this I round off my account of another main mass of my work, my own
personal attempt to shape out the informative content of a modern
education. Necessarily it is a lopsided account, almost Marburgesque in
the way in which the parallel work and thought of other people fall into
the background. I have for instance got through this section with no
mention of such a book as James Harvey Robinson's _Mind in the Making_
or the New History movement in America. But I am not writing a history
of modern ideas in the world. I am writing the story of modern ideas in
the mind of one sample person, H. G. Wells.

And as I look at the table in my study piled up with my own books and
with correspondence and controversial books and pamphlets--quite a
little heap for example, including Hilaire Belloc's _Companion to the
Outline of History_ and _Some Errors of H. G. Wells_ by Dr. Downey the
Roman Catholic Bishop of Liverpool, I have, except for a passing
allusion to Catholic controversialists in Chapter the Eighth,  3,
passed over altogether--I am quite unable to make up my mind how far
these millions of printed words are already dead litter and how much is
still touching and moving minds. Is all this, and the kindred stuff of
similar writers, producing any sensible and permanent effect upon
education throughout the world? Much of it has certainly failed, because
it was written hastily or just badly, because it was directed at the
wrong brains, because it was alloyed with baser metal, prejudices or
brief angers that let in corruption. But is it mostly going to be
missed? Never in this world will it be possible to make a just estimate
of what it has done.

There is a queer little twist in my private vanity, a streak of snobbish
imitativeness, which disposes me at times to parallel my lot with Roger
Bacon's. I dress up my _persona_ in his fashion. This disposition is in
evidence in the opening chapter of _The Work, Wealth and Happiness of
Mankind_. When I am most oppressed by the apparent lack of direct
consequence to all my voluminous efforts, when I doubt whether the
modernization of the content of education upon the lines I have drawn in
my triple outlines can possibly be done in time to save our present
social order, then is it most comforting to me to compare myself with
Bacon in his cell scribbling away at those long dissertations of his
about a new method of knowledge, which never even reached, much less
influenced, the one sole reader, his friend the Pope, in whom he had
hope for the realization of his dream. Which nevertheless in the course
of a few centuries came to the fullest fruition. I play at being such a
man as he was, a man altogether lonely and immediately futile, a man lit
by a vision of a world still some centuries ahead, convinced of its
reality and urgency, and yet powerless to bring it nearer.

But this is just an imaginative indulgence, a private vice I nurse, and
directly I set it down here in plain black and white its absurd
unreasonableness is plain. It is only my present preoccupation with my
own work that gives me that single-handed feeling. Inflammation of the
ego, I began to realize, is inevitable to any autobiographer in action,
and that intensifies this disposition. In truth I am neither solitary
nor suppressed. I merely happen to be the one I know best among a number
of people who are all thinking very closely upon the same lines. Instead
of writing manuscripts that will rest unread or be merely glanced at for
centuries, we are printing and scattering our ideas by the million
copies.

As I write here there must be between two and three million copies of my
own books scattered about the world, and many more millions of other
books and newspaper articles, lectures and discourses by other hands,
all driving in the same direction. Every day several thousands of fresh
minds respond to some part of the suggestions we are making; a teacher
here alters his teaching a little; a reader thinks over a point and
argues with his friend; a journalist gets a new idea of things and
echoes it in an article; an orthodox parson suddenly feels insecure. It
was not to be expected that all at once all the schools would experience
a change of heart, have a great burning of textbooks and start off at a
tangent towards the new learning; nor is it reasonable to complain that
even among those who advocate a fresh education for citizenship the
apprehension of what we are driving at is usually very inadequate. If
the Eric Yarrow Memorial, that House of Vision, stands, misused and
abortive, at Oundle, it is only like some gun that has been hit by a
shell on the road to victory.

There is no proof that the seed we have already sown has died. On the
contrary, the signs of vitality increase. Now it is a series of lessons
in some elementary school; now it is a string of broadcast talks like
those of Commander King-Hall; now it is a book for children or the
newspaper report of a provincial lecture, that comes reassuringly,
another fresh green blade forcing its way to the light. The new ideology
creeps upon the world _now_. There is nothing in our circumstances
to-day to justify this comparison with the spiritual and imaginative
isolation of that untimely man who first proclaimed the strange
possibilities of experimental science. Our period is far more like the
seventeenth than the thirteenth century in its realization of mutation
and progressive possibility.

The thoughts of Roger Bacon were like a dream that comes before dawn and
is almost forgotten again. The sleeper turns over and sleeps on. All
that Roger Bacon wrote was like humanity talking in its sleep. What is
happening now is by comparison an awakening. In a dream we can in a
flash of time see things complete because what is happening is happening
without resistance in a single brain--and then they pass; but the
realization of a new day comes to thousands before it comes to millions;
at first the illumination is almost imperceptible, everything is touched
by it while nothing stands out; there is a slow leisureliness in its
manner of approach that belies its steady and assured incessancy.


 8

_World Revolution_

Concurrently with those laborious and troubled efforts to anticipate the
necessary informative content of a modern education, my brain was also
returning to the problem I had first raised as that New Republic of
_Anticipations_ which fructified in my _Modern Utopia_, the problem of
organizing the coming world-order, in the body and out of the existing
substance of the order of things as they are.

The temptation for active men eager for results to shirk this problem,
or to stave it off with some immediately workable but essentially
evasive formula, has always been very great. The first French Revolution
was conducted upon an assumption of "natural" virtue and the American
Revolution was essentially a political change and an economic release
from an alleged and grossly caricatured "tyranny," a change and release
which brought with it scarcely any modification in the liberated system.
But Marx did not shirk this fundamental problem. My habitual polemical
disposition to disparage Marx does not blind me to the fact of his
pioneer awareness of this forest of difficulties in the theory of
revolution. He did realize that a movement to reconstruct a society is
unlikely to receive the immediate enthusiastic support of the majority
of those who fit into and profit by its existing arrangements.

Such people may of course produce profound changes without intending it,
as the curiosity of the gentlemen of the Royal Society or the excitement
of the South Sea speculators evoked inventions, discoveries and
developments of the most world-shaking sort, but they did these things
quite unaware of the dangerous dragons they were releasing. It is
necessary to find discontent before conscious revolutionary effort is
possible; and, in insisting upon that point, Marx was leading his
generation. But it has been the refrain of my lifetime that Marx
antagonized property and the expropriated too crudely, and that he
confused mere limitation and unhappiness with the rarer and more
precious motive of creative discontent. He was himself too energetic and
self-centred to realize how meekly human beings can be put upon if they
are caught young, how susceptible they are to mass as well as to
individual self-flattery and how unwilling to admit and struggle against
disadvantages. Most men are ready to sympathize with the under-dog but
few will allow they are themselves under-dogs. Nor did Marx realize how
acutely people who have wealth and position can be bored and distressed
by the existing state of affairs. He looked therefore to the Indignant
Proletarian evolved by his own imagination as the sole driving force of
his revolution and he stamped the theory of the Class War upon human
affairs with immense and fatal determination.

I have pointed out already that the dead impracticability of the
Socialism of the opening twentieth century was due to the want of any
realizable conception of a Competent Receiver for collectivized property
and enterprises. The untutored masses of expropriated people are
obviously unable to discharge the functions of an administrative
receiver. Something had to be done about it. The "Dictatorship of the
Proletariat" of the Communists, is a jerry-built Competent Receiver run
up in a hurry to meet this objection. It is not good enough for its job.
It is a controversial answer and not a practical solution. But Lenin's
reconstructed Communist Party was a much more effective step towards an
organized receivership.

To abandon the Class War theory of revolution is to give up the use of a
very sustaining opiate and to face an intricate riddle. For many rough
immediate purposes, drugged fighters may do better than clear-headed
ones, but not in the long run.

One is forced to admit that in periods of tolerable general prosperity
(as in America up to 1927) or stabilized repression (as in Hanoverian
England), there is little hope for direct revolutionary effort. The
illusion of stability must have been undermined in some way before the
human intelligence will brace itself up to the stresses and vexations of
constructive work. In the past the driving discontent has often appeared
as a conflict between oppressed and oppressors, either as a class or as
a race conflict, and it is still insufficiently realized that the
peculiar discontents and instabilities of the present time do not follow
that time-honoured formula. The issues are polygonal, they are not
two-sided. And it is to mental and not to social classes that we have to
appeal.

The other day at the Film Society show (March 11th, 1934) I saw
Eisenstein's stirring film _October_, in which noble and enthusiastic
proletarians chase corrupt and over-fed imperialists and capitalists and
their parasites out of the Winter Palace. The peculiar rle of a third
party in the fight, the Russian Navy, is understressed throughout. Never
have I encountered a statement more obstinately misleading. Navies have
played a large part in revolutionary history, in Turkey and Germany,
notably, as well as in Russia. Every armed technical force is a living
weapon with a solidarity of its own, that may turn upon a mentally
feeble government which does not use it effectively. The real
unorganized proletarians were in fact, if not in film, merely the chorus
in the October revolution. That will be their lot in any revolution
still to come.

A constructive revolution under modern conditions must begin
fragmentarily, it must begin here and there, and it will have associated
with it a considerable riff-raff of merely eccentric, extravagant,
disgruntled and discredited individuals. These have to be handled with
care and discrimination. Revolution begins with the misfits. Every
revolutionary process arises out of developing dislocations and
disproportions. And the interesting thing about our present situation is
the fact that there is no social stratum, no organization, state,
nation, school, army, navy, air force, bank, law, industry where the
realization among the personnel that things are out of adjustment is not
becoming acute. It is a ridiculous travesty of the situation to deal
with our western world as a self-complacent "Capitalist System,"
squatting ruthlessly on masses of enslaved victims who have merely to
revolt and evoke a millennium. Russia, after overthrowing the Capitalist
System as it manifested itself under the Tzar, has floundered back
through several experimental stages to state capitalism, and except that
she has rid herself of some very encumbering traditions and types and
broached some important experiments, she is still confronted by
essentially the same riddles as the western world.

Now, if this is sound, then, I submit, it follows that _everywhere_ in
the social complex we shall find certain main types of mental reaction
dependent upon innate or very intimate personal characteristics. We
shall find an originally preponderating number of people carrying on
from the phase of apparent stability, hanging on to the current usages
to which they are accustomed and trying to the very last to believe that
things will go on according to precedent, we shall find an increasing
proportion, the resentfully defensive type, disposed to resist, by
violence, any change in their habits and we shall also have a number of
the open-minded innovating types who will be ready to recognize that
something has to be done in the way of adaptation and rearrangement,
even if this involves a sacrifice of old customs and privileges and
preconceived ideas. As the sense of instability grows, the numbers of
both these latter sorts of people, the revolutionaries and the violent
reactionaries, will increase at the expense of the first, the contented
sort which wants to escape bothers, and the intelligence and
will-for-change of the third kind, in particular, will be quickened. In
certain social groups dependent largely upon the general liveliness of
mind prevailing in them, the tendency to become either viciously
defensive or alertly innovating may vary. Such an artificial occupation
as that of a stockbroker or a professional betting man naturally
attracts people of a narrow-minded smart type and is not likely to turn
the mind to any social rearrangements that may threaten the technique of
the stock-exchange or the turf, and fewer retired rentiers are likely to
give their minds to revolutionary reconstruction than public health
officials or hydraulic engineers. But in most spheres of interest, in
law, public administration, medicine, engineering, industry, education
and even the compulsive services, intensifying dislocation is likely to
call an increasing proportion of questioning and planning brains into
constructive activity. These are the only brains to which we can look
for creative drive. For the purposes of revolutionary theory the rest
of humanity matters only as the texture of mud matters when we design a
steam dredger to keep a channel clear.

These questioning, planning and executive brains which will be
stimulated by the realization of social impermanence and insecurity,
will start, every one of them, from some fixed system of ideas. Their
immediate reactions and activities will be determined at first by the
established routines out of which they awaken, and so the early stages
of their activities, at any rate, are likely to be not only extremely
diverse and chaotic but conflicting. On the other hand the violent
reactionaries will have a natural solidarity about the Thing that Is.
The primary problem in revolutionary theory is to discover the general
formulae, which will reduce the waste through diversity and imperfect
apprehension to a minimum, and evoke the most rapid and efficient
co-ordination of creative effort.

I have told already of my conception of a New Republic (in 1900) and of
my elaboration of this idea in _A Modern Utopia_ (1906) and how I tried
to make the Fabian Society into an order of the Samurai--to the great
excitement of Pease, Shaw, Bland and Sidney Webb, and, to my own
effectual discomfiture. I tried to put an acceptable face on my retreat
from the Fabian conflict, but that was by no means easy. I had to
swallow the dose that I had attempted to do something and failed
completely. I had to realize that I had no organizing ability and no
gift for leading or directing people. To make up for that, I told myself
I would write all the better. But _The New Machiavelli_ (1911) with its
pose of the deflated publicist in noble retirement is obviously a
compensatory production. _The Research Magnificent_ (1914) betrays a
mind still looking for some method of effective public action. Before it
was half written, the livid glares and deepening shadows of the Great
War fell across its pages and a new grade in my education began.

I have traced already how the war process stormed across my mind and how
my attention was shifted from social structure to international affairs
and so to the relation between popular education and international
feeling. The idea of doing all I could for the reconstruction of the
content of education became so dominant with me that it ruled my
intellectual life and shaped my activities for some years. For a time I
was so busied with the production of those three books embodying a
modern general ideology, that I gave little attention, far too little
attention, to the question whether my general idea was being put over to
any large number of people. Then I began to feel that I was going on "in
the air," that at the best I was producing fairly saleable but, it might
be, essentially ineffective books. I might be shooting beside the mark
altogether. I became impatient for palpable results.

In some manner the new education had to be got into the education office
and the syllabuses and the schools, and since no one else seemed to be
doing it, I felt under an obligation to try, however ineffectively, to
do something about it myself. I turned my reluctant face towards
meetings and committee-rooms again. I had had nothing to do with such
things since my Fabian withdrawal. I heard with dislike and a sinking
heart my straining voice once more beginning speeches. I dislike my
voice in a meeting so much that it gives me an exasperated manner and I
lose my thread listening to it. I still thought the Labour Party might
be the party most responsive to constructive ideas in education, and in
order to secure a footing in its councils I stood as Labour candidate
for the London University at the 1922 and 1923 elections. I had no
prospect of being returned, but I thought that by writing and publishing
election addresses and such leaflets as _The Labour Ideal of Education_
(1923) I might impose a modernization of the schools curriculum, upon
the party policy and so get general history at least into its proper
place as elementary school history.

In a speech at the University of London Club, in March 1923, reprinted
as _Socialism and the Scientific Motive_, I find I was trying to
persuade myself and my liberal-minded hearers of the essential identity
of these two things. But I was not really persuaded. I was declaring
what ought to be was fact. I was poking about in this political stuff
not because I believed it to be the way to my ends, but because I did
not certainly know any way to my ends, and this seemed to hold out
possibilities. But the older men in control of the Labour Party at that
time were quite impervious to the idea of changing education. They did
not know that there could be different kinds and colours of education. A
school, any school, was a school to them and a college a college. They
thought there was something very genteel and desirable about education,
just as there was about a municipal art gallery, and they wanted the
working classes to have the best of everything. But they did not
consider education as a matter of primary importance. They had
themselves managed very well with very little.

A phase of great restlessness and discontent came upon me in 1923-24. I
was doing what I felt to be good work in making a digest of modern
knowledge and ideas available for the general reader, but this did not
fully engage my imagination. I could not subdue myself to the idea that
this was the limit of my effectiveness. I made speeches and when I read
the reports of them I could not believe I had said so little. I gave
interviews and was overwhelmed by a sense of fatuity when they came home
to roost. I wrote articles and they seemed to me more and more like the
opening observations to something that was never really said. I was
oppressed by a sense of encumbrance in my surroundings and of misapplied
energy and time running to waste.

In the introduction to this autobiography I have already remarked upon
the fugitive element in most intellectual lives, but it is only now as I
bring facts and dates together that I realize the importance of fugitive
impulses throughout my own story. At phase after phase I find myself
saying in effect: "I must get out of this. I must get clear. I must get
away from all this and think and then begin again. These daily routines
are wrapping about me, embedding me in a mass of trite and habitual
responses. I must have the refreshment of new sights, sounds, colours or
I shall die away."

My revolt against the draper's shop was the first appearance of this
mood. It was a flight--to a dream of happy learning and teaching in
poverty. To a minor extent and with minor dislocation this fugitive mood
no doubt recurred but it did not come back again in full force until my
divorce. Then it is quite clear that it clothed itself in the form of a
dream of a life of cheerfully adventurous writing. The concealed element
was that my work with Briggs was boring me. That divorce was not simply
the replacement of one wife by another; it was also the replacement of
one way of living by another. It was a break away to a new type of work.

I detect all the symptoms of the same flight impulse again about 1909,
but then there was not the same complete material rupture with my
established life. But _The New Machiavelli_ (published in 1911) is quite
plainly once more the release of the fugitive urgency, a release
completed in imagination if not in fact. I realize now (and the queer
thing is that I do realize only now) that the idea of going off
somewhere--to Italy in the story--out of the tangle of Fabian disputes,
tiresomely half-relevant politics and the routines of literary life,
very nearly overwhelmed me in my own proper person, and the story of
Remington and Margaret and Isabel is essentially a dramatized wish. I
relieved my tension vicariously as Remington. He got out of my world on
my behalf--and wrote in lofty tranquillity of politics in the abstract,
_ la Machiavelli_, as I desired to do.

We shifted house from Sandgate to London (1909) and from London to
Easton Glebe (1910) and there I settled down again. All that is quite
sufficiently told in _The Book of Catherine Wells_. The huge issues of
the War and the Peace held my mind steady and kept it busy for some
years. But in 1924 the same mood returned, so recognizably the same,
that I am surprised to realize how little I apprehended the connection
at the time. If I did not get to writing in Italy in the pose of _The
New Machiavelli_, I got to the south of France. It was much the same
thing. It was the partial realization of my own fantasy after twelve
years. What I did I did with the connivance and help of my wife, who
perceived that I was in grave mental distress and understood how things
were with me. I did not immediately head for France. I went by air first
to the Assembly of the League of Nations at Geneva with the idea of
going on thence to wander round the world. It was at Geneva that I
changed my plans and turned southward to Grasse. I found it was quite
possible to get out of things, for some months at least, much as
Remington did, establish myself in a quiet corner among the hills, stay
there cut off from the daily urgencies of England, sift my thoughts and
purposes in peace and presently write.

I began a life in duplicate. The main current of my ostensible life
still flowed through my home at Little Easton in Essex; there the mass
of my correspondence was dealt with and all my business done, but at the
_mas_ known as Lou Bastidon near Grasse, I dramatized myself as William
Clissold, an industrialist in retreat,--the prophet Hosea could not have
been more thorough in his dramatization--and I set this Mr. William
Clissold to survey and think out how the world looked to him. For three
winters I lived intermittently in that pleasant sunlit corner, living
very plainly and simply, sitting about in the sun, strolling on the
flowery olive terraces about me, going for long walks among the hills
behind, seeing hardly anything of the fashionable life of the Riviera
that went on so near to me. And the main thread of my thought and
writing for all that time was how to realize the New Republic and bring
it into active existence.

I wish that seasonal retirement to Lou Bastidon could have gone on to
the end, but obscure difficulties and complications; a craving for an
efficient bathroom, electric light and a small car, it may be, presently
undid me. I attempted to reproduce Lou Bastidon on a firmer foundation
and behold! the foundation became a pitfall. I began to play with
house-building and garden-planning. There is a vividness, an immediate
gratification of the creative instinct in this amusement, which can
distract the mind very readily from reality. Men and women take to
building and gardening as they take to drink, in order to distract their
minds from the whole round world and its claim upon them, and all the
Riviera is littered with villas that testify to the frequency of this
impulse. I acquired some land with a pretty rock, vines, jasmin and a
stream close by, and I planned and built a house which I called _Lou
Pidou_, and after that rash act the cares of house-holding and
car-owning and gardening began to grow up about me. The Riviera also got
wind of me and reached up sociable tentacles towards my retreat. Lou
Pidou was an amateurish, pretty house with a peculiar charm of its own
but it insisted upon growing and complicating itself; it became less
and less of a refuge and more and more of an irksome entanglement with
its own baffling bothers and exactions. I worked there with dwindling
zest and energy and stayed less and less willingly and for briefer
periods, as those good long sunlit hours in which I could think became
rare and ragged and the necessity for management and attention more
clamorous, until presently a time came, in May 1933, when I realized I
could work there effectively no more.

It was early in 1933 that the opening section of this autobiography was
written and the mood of this phase is fully described in that section.

I cast Lou Pidou at last as a snake casts its skin. It needed an effort,
but once more the liberating impulse was the stronger. I resolved that I
would sell it, or if necessary give it away, and have done with it. I
took a farewell stroll in my olive orchard up the hill, said good-bye to
my new and promising orange-trees and rose-beds, gave my parental
benediction to the weeping-willows and the banks of iris I had planted
by my stream, sat for awhile on my terrace with a grave black cat beside
me, to which I was much attached, and then went down the familiar road
to Cannes station for the last time.

I returned to London by way first of a stormy but entertaining
International P.E.N. Congress at Ragusa, over which I presided, and then
a holiday in what was altogether new country for me, the fresh green
loveliness of Austria in early summer. My flat in London is now my only
home. The two small boys who figure at the end of Chapter the Eighth are
parents to-day with pleasant households and sons and daughters of their
own, and Easton Glebe which is described in _The Book of Catherine
Wells_ was sold after her death in 1927. It had become too large for me
and too empty altogether. I have indeed seen family life right round now
from beginning to end. That stage is over. A flat above the rumble of
Baker Street and Marylebone Road is as good a place as any to work in
and easy to maintain; I can go away when I please and where I please for
as long as I please; and London, for all my outrageous radicalism, is a
very friendly and pleasant city to me. If I have no garden of my own,
Regents Park just outside my door grows prettier every year; there are
no gardens like Kew Gardens and no more agreeable people in the world
than the people in the London streets.

_The World of William Clissold_, the book I wrote in Lou Bastidon, has a
rambling manner but it seems to ramble more than it actually does from
my main preoccupation. Its gist, to which, after four Books mostly of
preparatory novel writing to get the Clissold brothers alive, I came in
Book Five, is the possibility of bringing the diffused creative forces
of the world into efficient co-operation as an "Open Conspiracy." I am
supposing myself to be in the position of an intelligent industrialist
with a sound scientific training and this is how I make him see it:

     "It is absurd to think of creative revolution unless it has power
     in its hands, and manifestly the chief seats of creative power in
     the world are on the one hand modern industry associated with
     science and on the other world finance. The people who have control
     in these affairs can change the conditions of human life
     constructively and to the extent of their control. No other people
     can so change them.

     "All other sorts of power in our world are either contributory or
     restrictive or positively obstructive or positively destructive.
     The power of established and passive property, for example, is
     simply the power to hold up for a price. The power of the masses is
     the strike, it embodies itself in the machine-breaking,
     expert-hunting mob.... It is only through a conscious, frank and
     world-wide co-operation of the man of science, the scientific
     worker, the man accustomed to the direction of productive industry,
     the man able to control the arterial supply of credit, the man who
     can control newspapers and politicians, that the great system of
     changes they have almost inadvertently got going can be brought to
     any hopeful order of development.

     "Such men, whether they mean to be or not, are the actual
     revolutionaries in our world.... I believe that we industrials and
     the financiers are beginning to educate ourselves and broaden our
     outlook as our enterprises grow and interweave. I believe that if
     we can sufficiently develop the consciousness of contemporary
     business and associate with it the critical co-operation and the
     co-operative criticism of scientific and every other sort of able
     man, we can weave a world system of monetary and economic
     activities, while the politicians, the diplomatists, and the
     soldiers are still too busy with their ancient and habitual antics
     to realize what we are doing.... We can build up the monetary and
     economic world republic in full daylight under the noses of those
     who represent the old system. For the most part I believe that to
     understand us will be to be with us, and that we shall sacrifice no
     advantage and incur no risk of failure in talking out and carrying
     out our projects and methods quite plainly.

     "That is what I mean by an Open Conspiracy.... Many things that now
     seem incurably conflicting, communism and international finance for
     example, may so develop in the next half-century as to come to
     drive side by side, upon a parallel advance. At present big
     distributing businesses are firmly antagonistic to co-operative
     consumers' associations; yet one or two of the big distributors
     have already made important deals with these large-scale economic
     organizations from the collectivist side. Both work at present upon
     very crude assumptions about social psychology and social justice.
     Both tend to internationalize under the same material stresses.

     "I find it hard to doubt the inevitability of a very great
     improvement in the quality and intellectual solidarity of those who
     will be conducting the big business of the world in the next
     century, an extension and an increased lucidity of vision, a
     broadened and deepened morale. Possibly my temperament inclines me
     to think that what should be must be. But it is patently absurd to
     me to assume that the sort of men who control so much of our
     banking to-day, limited, traditional, careless or doctrinaire, are
     the ultimate types of banker. It seems as irrational to suppose
     that such half-educated, unprepared adventurers as Dickon and
     myself and our partners and contemporaries are anything but
     makeshift industrial leaders, and that better men will not follow
     us. Dickon and I are, after all, at best early patterns, 1865 and
     1867 models...."

All this was written before anyone was thinking of such an American
President as Franklin Roosevelt and his astonishing effort so to
regulate a loose capitalist system as to thrust it rapidly towards State
Socialism. Where the Clissold version of the Open Conspiracy is least
defensible is in its easy disregard of the fact that though privately
created productive, industrial and distributive organization is to a
large extent capable of direct socialization, _private finance is
something absolutely and incurably different in its spirit and conduct
from any conceivable sort of public finance_. It is an attempt to
extract profit out of what should be a public service, the exchange
machinery. It is as anti-social as it would be to attempt to get profits
by falsifying the standard yard. That, we have since found out. The
industrious reader will find it in course of being found out in the
_Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_. The public control of credit
and a scientific reorganization of the world's monetary system is the
necessary preliminary stage in carrying out a planned world economy.
Like myself and our English labour leaders and indeed practically
everybody in 1926, William Clissold was still in need of some hard
thinking about the relations of money and credit to private ownership.

Furthermore--in an exaggeration of my own aversion from the class-war
doctrine--too wide a gap was set by Clissold in his world between the
industrial organizer and the technological assistant and skilled
artisan. The workers were dismissed as being just workers and the
political possibilities and capacity of their better equipped stratum
was ignored. I was identifying myself with my imaginary business man
almost too thoroughly. I was evidently still sore about the Labour Party
as I had found it. In my reaction against the mass democracy that had
produced Macdonald, Snowden, Thomas, Clynes and the like as its
representative heads, I underrated the steadily increasing intelligence
of the more specialized workers and of the ambitious younger
working-men. To them at any rate William Clissold is an impersonation to
apologize for.

_The World of William Clissold_ was published in 1926. It was published
as an important book and it received a very considerable amount of
useful destructive criticism. So that I reconsidered this Open
Conspiracy almost as soon as it was launched. It was a sound instinct
which made me do that book not in my own first person but in the form of
a trial personality. I was soon struggling to disentangle myself from
various rash commitments of Clissold's and get on to a revised view. I
had had this first exercise in general political statement handed back
to me with ample corrections--mostly in red ink,--and I wanted to profit
by them.

In the spring of 1927, I was asked to lecture in the Sorbonne and I
chose as my subject _Democracy under Revision_, in which I insisted on
the necessity for some such organization as my Samurai to replace the
crude electoral methods of contemporary politics. This was, so to speak,
Open Conspiracy propaganda adapted to the peculiarly narrow French
outlook. My wife, I may note here, was with me in that Paris journey, we
were fted and entertained and very happy together, and neither of us
realized that death was already at work in her and that in six months we
should be parted for ever. The title page of that printed lecture is the
last of all the title pages on which I ever drew a "picshua" for her. I
reproduce it here as a reminder of the life-long companionship and the
persistent, unassertive help that underlies all this tale of work. Our
last half year together I have described in _The Book of Catherine
Wells_.

After her death I sat down to alter and explain my conception of the
Open Conspiracy more exactly--to myself first and then to others. I
wrote a little book The _Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World
Revolution_ (1929) and I was so convinced of its unavoidably tentative
quality that I arranged its publication so as to be able to withdraw it,
revise it completely and republish it again after a lapse of two years.
I did this under the new title of _What Are We to Do with Our Lives?_
(1931). In this, the third version of the Open Conspiracy plan, I began
to feel I was really settling down to definitive detail. _The Work,
Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_, which was launched after many
difficulties in 1932, also contained in its political and educational
chapters, and based on a description of current conditions, an even more
explicit statement of the Open Conspiracy plan. The definition was still
clearer; and the touch surer.

In all this work I was really only cleaning up, working out, and
sharpening the edges, dotting the i's and crossing the t's of the
problem of the New Republic. The Open Conspiracy was my New Republic
plus a third of a century of experience. It was a working plan in the
place of Anticipations. I was moving with my generation from a
speculative dreamland towards a specific project.

[Illustration: Drawings with writings by hand.

DEMOCRACY UNDER REVISION

Marianne asks Dadda to tell her all about it]

In _After Democracy_ (1932) I collected together a number of diverse
papers, a lecture given in the Reichstag building in Berlin (1928), a
lecture given to the Residencia des Estudiantes in Madrid (1932), a
memorandum on the world situation prepared at the request of one or two
influential people in America in 1932, and at first privately
circulated, a lecture to the Liberal Summer School at Oxford (1932) and
arising out of the latter, a paper, _A Liberal World Organisation_, in
which I gave still further definition from this point of view and that
of the same conception. I also tried out my general idea, with very
little response, in the _Daily Herald_ (December 1932) under the title
_There Should Be a Common Creed for Left Parties Throughout the World_.
This has been reprinted as an Introduction to the _Manifesto_ of the new
Fellowship of Progressive Societies--which is a sort of Fellowship of
the New Life fifty years later. The exploratory note in these papers
diminished to a minimum as my ideas grew more precise. Each successive
change was smaller than the one that went before.

_The Shape of Things to Come_ (1933) is the last important book I have
written. It is as deliberate and laborious a piece of work as anything I
have ever done and I took great pains to make it as exciting and
readable as I could without any sacrifice of matter. There are one or
two episodes of quite lively story-telling. I was becoming sufficiently
sure of my ground to let my imagination play upon it. The device of a
partially deciphered transcription of a fragmentary manuscript got over
a multitude of the technical difficulties that arise in an anticipatory
history. I think I have contrived to set out in it my matured theory of
revolution and world government very plainly.

_The World of William Clissold_ was written during a "boom" phase in the
world's affairs, the profound rottenness of the monetary-credit system
was still unrealized, and so Clissold turned to social boredom and the
irritation of seeing industrial and mechanical invention misused, in
order to evoke the discontent necessary for a revolutionary project. But
by the time _The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_, which was, so
to speak, the workshop in which was built _The Shape of Things to Come_,
was in hand, the artificiality and unsoundness of those boom conditions
had become glaringly obvious. The realization was spreading through all
the modern categories of workers, the men of science, the men of
invention, the big-scale industrial organizers, the engineers, the
aviators, the teachers and writers, the social workers, the mass
producers, every sort of skilled artisan, every honest and
creative-minded man, indeed, everywhere, that if the new mechanical
civilization by which they lived was to carry on, they had to be up and
stirring. The Open Conspiracy of William Clissold was essentially
speculative, optional and amateurish; the Open Conspiracy of De Windt
which took possession of a derelict world, was presented as the logical
outcome of inexorable necessity. Only through personal disaster or the
manifest threat of personal disaster can normal human beings be
sufficiently stirred to attempt a revolutionary change of their
conditions.

Step by step through that logic in events, the new pattern of revolution
has been brought from Utopia and from the vague generalizations of the
New Republic, towards contact with contemporary movements and political
actuality. I have moved with my class and type, to more and more precise
intentions. Small groups and societies to explain and realize the
Competent Receiver are springing up; periodicals are being started in
relation to it; its phraseology is appearing in actual political
discussion. Independent beginnings of a kindred spirit are coming into
relations with one another. They are giving and taking. These people are
not merely propagandists of an idea. Every one of them according to his
or her abilities or opportunities is in training for the Civil Service,
and the industrial teaching and compulsive services of the new order of
things. It is from the skilled artisans, the technically educated
middle-class, the fraternity of enlightened minds, rather than from the
proletarian masses that its energy will come. But it cannot be pretended
that constructive revolutionary organization is anything like as
advanced as yet even as educational modernization and the spread of
cosmopolitan ideas. It is still in the phase of germination. For the
reorientation of revolution, just as for the modernization of education,
one must accept what the Webbs have called so aptly "the inevitability
of gradualness."

Remembering always that "gradual" need not mean slow.

Of the reality of our progress towards constructive world revolution I
have no doubt. All revolutionary organizations are snowball
organizations. The Open Conspiracy whether under that name or under some
other name, or as a protean spirit, will in the long run win schools and
colleges to its ends; it will get the worth-while young men, the skilled
men and women, the simple and straightforward, the steadfast and
resolute. That is to say that ultimately it will get mankind. It
supplies the form and spirit of that "competent receiver," the lack of
which made the frustration of the earlier socialism inevitable. It is
law and order modernized and ennobled. It will find a job for everybody;
the sacrifices it demands are temporary and conditional. When it is
fully and fairly displayed it is a handsome and hopeful loyalty; the
better it is known the finer it appears, the nature of man necessitates
loyalty of some sort and there is no other loyalty now that can stand
comparison with it.

And there, for a time at any rate, the description of the main arch of
my work must end. My brain has been the centre of the story throughout,
but just as with the new education, so here also in this conception of
the idea of world revolution as the ruling and directive interest in
life, similar things have happened and are happening to myriads of
brains. I tell how I in particular travelled upon a road along which
more and more people are travelling, but my egoism is far more apparent
than real. There used to be a popular recitation in my young days
telling how Bill Adams won the Battle of Waterloo. Except for a
transitory appearance of the "Dook," the victory seemed all the work of
Bill. Nevertheless the Battle of Waterloo _was_ won by Bill Adams
multiplied by some score thousands, and it is small discredit to Bill
Adams that he was too busy on his personal front to take much note of
what the other fellows were doing.

What is plain to me is that the modern world-state which was a mere
dream in 1900 is to-day a practicable objective; it is indeed the only
sane political objective for a reasonable man; it towers high over the
times, challenging indeed but rationally accessible; the way is
indicated and the urgency to take that way gathers force. Life is now
only conflict or "meanwhiling" until it is attained. Thirty-four years
ago the world-state loomed mistily across a gulf in dreamland. My arch
of work has bridged the gulf for me and my swinging bridge of ropes and
planks and all the other ropes and wires that are being flung across,
are plainly only the precursors of a viaduct and a common highway. The
socialist world-state has now become a to-morrow as real as to-day.
Thither we go.


 9

_Cerebration at Large and Brains in Key Positions_

The particular brain whose ups and downs and beatings about in the world
you have been following in this autobiography, has arrived at the
establishment of the socialist world-state as its directive purpose and
has made that its religion and end. This, it has been abundantly
apparent, has involved for it very definite and distinctive standards of
judgment upon both individual conduct and the conduct of public affairs.
It had been perpetually meeting and jostling against other brains,
brains in crowds and brains apart, summing them up, learning from them
what to attempt and what to avoid; and so it seems worth while to
conclude this elaborate description of my own mental growths and
reactions, with a few comments upon other mentalities I have encountered
at work upon these same intricate challenges and problems that have
taken possession of and unified my own.

Social life has presented itself to me at last as a vast
politico-educational problem. It is, as it were, a sea of active brains.
My individual life is a participating unit in this multitudinous
brain-life, the mind of the species. Its general problem is vastly
simple, though its individual variations are infinite. It is required to
orient all this diverse multitude of brains, about two thousand millions
of them at present, in one particular direction so as to bring about a
new morale and government of life. It is under penalty to do that. In a
measurable time mankind has to constitute itself into one state and one
brotherhood, or it will certainly be swept down cataracts of disaster to
an ultimate destruction.

It is no novelty that life should present itself in this form of a
problem of unification. Men have been seeing it more and more plainly so
for at least five-and-twenty centuries. Every one of the universal
religions, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, every one in its valiant
beginnings, set out to do as much for mankind. All, it is true, failed
to attain that universality. They rose like floods and after a time they
rose no further. The whole world over never became Buddhist, Christian
or Moslem. At first in every case, the onset of the new faith was like
the magnetising of an iron bar in an electric coil and many millions of
the little individual particles, originally pointing higgledy-piggledy
in the general mass, were swung round towards a common objective.
Hitherto there has always been a limit set to this process of
conversion; the bar was too big for the induction, much of it stretched
beyond the influence of the coil, or the inducing current diminished and
died out too soon. But that is no reason for declaring that it is
impossible to achieve a general peace and a common faith and law for
mankind. On the contrary, the success of these pioneer faiths, in spite
of philosophical inadequacy and the handicap of local theological
associations and unjustifiable miraculous pretensions, started as they
were under conditions of tremendous disadvantage by weak individuals and
a feeble initial group of disciples, is an extraordinary manifestation
of the power of a unifying appeal and of the receptivity of common men
to such an appeal. The human animal is more disposed than not for a
universal social life, for peace and co-operation, and what has been
done during the relatively brief space of twenty-five centuries and a
few score generations of men, is merely a first demonstration of what
will yet be achieved.

What we have seen in the course of my one brief lifetime has been a
great development of our biological and psychological knowledge, and
this last science in particular carries still with it almost untouched
possibilities of self-restraint, self-direction, mutual sympathy and
group and mass co-operation. The art of conduct is in its infancy.
Concurrently the advance of physical technique has carried our
facilities of mental exchange to undreamt-of levels. We can tell each
other and show each other with unprecedented ease. When we consider the
beginnings of the great world faiths; the weak voice of the Founder
talking in some small dusty market-place to casually assembled crowds,
the going to and fro of the undistinguished disciples, the faint and
feeble records, the faulty gospels, the obscure epistles, the
mis-hearings, the misunderstandings, the distortions of rumour, the
heretical blunderings, the difficulties of correction and verification,
and compare the ease and clarity with which to-day statements can be
made, consistency sustained and co-operation ensured, then the wide
prevalence and partial success of these former disseminations become the
surest augury for the rapid and conclusive establishment of the new way
of living to which not one Founder but myriads of quickening
intelligences are awakening to-day. They are not now the disciples of
this man or that. This time they are the disciples and apostles of the
logic of human necessity. It is not that one man alone has received a
revelation and realized the substance of a new and necessary education
and planned reconstruction of economic and political relations. The
revelation has been prepared by the scientific work and invention of a
century, and the call has been broadcast by events.

I have already described some intimate encounters which very importantly
affected the final shaping of my _persona_ and ideas. Here in a
concluding section I think I will set down what I have seen at close
quarters and what I have thought of one or two brains which seemed to be
exceptionally placed in the world, so that they had apparently unusual
directive opportunities. Their conduct was just as much a resultant of
innate impulse and suggestion and circumstance as the lives of Gissing
or Crane or Bennett or myself, but because relatively they happened to
occupy key positions, their reaction on great multitudes of other brains
was much more powerful and immediate. Leadership was their rle. All of
them belong to my own generation, the generation of disillusionment,
perplexity and mental reconstruction, and all of them are far less
lucid, assured and decisive than the men of to-morrow are likely to be.

An outstanding figure in my middle years was Theodore Roosevelt. He had
a tremendous effort in his time of masterful direction. He was the Big
Noise of America. He was a great release. Political life in America
seemed to have become a wholly base technique, and the American outlook
upon world affairs, narrowly patriotic, sentimental and selfish, when he
broke through and became, by sheer accident, President. He made the
liveliest use of his opportunities. His personality became more visible
and his voice more audible about the planet than those of any of his
predecessors since Lincoln. It was natural for me in my Spade House
days, when I seemed only to be talking unheeded beside the flow of
events, and quite unable to affect them, to exaggerate the Power he
could exercise and to want to meet him. I had still to realise what an
obscure and elusive thing political Power is. I had still to doubt
whether there are really any powerful individuals now at all.

I went to America to write a series of articles for the London _Tribune_
in 1906 and I lunched with the President and walked about the grounds of
the White House with him while he talked. He talked easily and frankly,
as Mr. Arthur Balfour used to talk. He "stuck through" the formulated
politicians of his time. He betrayed none of the uneasiness of the
normal politician that any phrase of his might be quoted unfairly
against him, and he interested me enormously. I asked him, though in
less direct phrases, what he imagined he was "up to" and I think he did
his best to tell me.

In those days mental adaptation to the idea of a change of scale in
human affairs was still in its opening phases. Nobody had got the thing
in its full immensity but everywhere its disturbance was in evidence.
His talk was tremendously provisional and speculative. In my book I
called him "a complex of will and critical perplexity."

At that time hardly anyone had dared to face up to the conception of a
planned world-state. Roosevelt was round about where Cecil Rhodes had
been when he died; he probably owed a great deal to the
Milner-Kipling-Rhodes school of thought, he was thinking vaguely of a
loose combine, an understanding rather than an alliance, of the liberal
northern powers to control the next phase of human affairs. He was
sceptical of continental Europe, contemptuous of Asia, and oblivious, as
we all were then, of the revolutionary possibilities of Russia. And
neither of us as we talked that day had the remotest suspicion of the
earthquakes that were latent in the monetary system of our world.

Though he had heard of socialism he evidently could not imagine it as an
organised reality, as anything more practical than a legal modification
of the baronial freedoms of big business by government control. You must
remember that in those days there was no such striking evidence as we
now possess of the self-terminating nature of the private capitalist
system. That possibility was indeed cardinal in Marxist theory but only
a very few people knew about it and still fewer understood and believed
it. The current system was generally supposed to get along in a looping
sort of way by trade cycles of depression and recovery, it had the air
of a going concern that might jar perhaps at times but could not fail to
go; and it was only after 1928 that any considerable number of people
could be made to realize that these alleged trade cycles were not
necessarily cycles at all and that there was no reason to suppose that a
depression might not go on indefinitely with no effectual recovery at
any point. That was outside his imaginative scheme. Such being the
limitation of his ideas, it was natural that he should be a hearty
individualist, convinced that no man who sought work could fail to find
it, that there was room for an unlimited multitude of healthy workers
everywhere (so that he passionately opposed "race suicide") and that all
that was needed to keep the world going was strenuous "go." The utmost
danger he would admit as threatening the glorious torrent of
individualistic life as he saw it about him, was the restraint and
choking of competition by the growth of monopolistic combinations, and
this could be checked first by very vigorous anti-trust legislation and
secondly by a greater wariness in granting public utility and other
franchise for the exploitation of natural resources to private lessees.
He was in particular the champion of an imaginary citizen farmer, the
legendary pioneer western farmer,--and his power of overriding doubts in
a sort of mystical exaltation was very great. I tried to insinuate my
still not very completely formulated criticism of the current order. I
tried to convey my persuasion that all competitive systems must be
self-terminating systems....

But here let me quote my very own book:

"It is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in the
garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that
undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After
all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings, which is America,
convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment
whatever?... Is America a giant childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere
latest phase of that long succession of experiments which has been and
may be for interminable years--may be, indeed, altogether until the
end--man's social history? I can't now recall how our discursive talk
settled towards this, but it is clear to me that I struck upon a
familiar vein of thought in the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an
effectual disproof of a pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one
chose to say America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that
she and all mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively
deny that possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.

"That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort
of apology for his life, against the doubts and scepticisms that, I
fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man who
is intellectually alive. He mentioned my _Time Machine_ ...He became
gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying the
pessimism of that book as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one
of those sudden movements of his he knelt forward in a garden-chair--we
were standing, before our parting, beneath the colonnade--and addressed
me very earnestly over the back, clutching it and then thrusting out his
familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.

"'Suppose, after all,' he said slowly, 'that should prove to be right,
and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. _That doesn't matter
now._ The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's
worth it--even so.' ...

"I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying, 'The effort--the
effort's worth it,' and see the gesture of his clenched hand and
the--how can I describe it?--the friendly peering snarl of his face,
like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind at that, as a
very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations, its
doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence, amidst perplexities and
confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting--and his
setting is the White House with a background of all America.

"I could almost write, with a background of all the world; for I know of
no other a tithe so representative of the creative purpose, the
_goodwill_ in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his
limitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just
as much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open
intelligence, he stands for his people and his kind."

I might have written that to-day. "Teddy" was an interesting brain to
come up against and it gives a measure of just how much of a
constructive plan for the world's affairs there was in the current
intelligence of the world twenty-eight years ago. By our modern
standards it was scarcely a plan at all. It was a jumble of
"progressive" organization and "little man" democracy. Afforestation,
"conservation of national resources," legislation against any
"combination in restraint of trade" were the chief planks of the
platform and beyond that "woosh!" the emotional use of the "big stick,"
a declaration of the satisfying splendour of strenuous effort--which,
when one comes to think it over, was, on the intellectual side, not so
very strenuous after all.

That I suppose was the most vigorous brain in a conspicuously
responsible position in all the world in 1906--when I was turning forty.
Radical speculative thought was ahead of this, but that was as far as
any ruling figure in the world had gone.

A man I never met, who must have been a very curious mixture of large
conceptions and strange ignorances, was Cecil Rhodes. Of
ignorances--Sir Sidney Low told me once that he never learnt properly to
pronounce the name of his protagonist "Old Krooger." I would have liked
to have known more about the operations of his cerebral hemispheres, as
they rolled about South Africa. Much the same ideas that were running
through my brain round about 1900, of a great English-speaking
English-thinking synthesis, leading mankind by sheer force of numbers,
wealth, equipment and scope, to a progressive unity, must have been
running through his brain also. He was certainly no narrow worshipper of
the Union Jack, no abject devotee of the dear Queen Empress. The
institution of the Rhodes scholarships which transcended any existing
political boundaries and aimed plainly at a sort of common understanding
and co-operation between all the western peoples and more particularly
between all the "Nordic" peoples--he was at just about the level of
ethnological understanding to believe in Nordic superiority--indicates a
real greatness of intention, though warped by prejudices and uncritical
assumptions.

I wish I knew much more about that brain and still more would I like to
know about the brain history of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, whom also I have
never met. He is to me the most incomprehensible of my contemporaries,
with phases of real largeness and splendour and lapses to the quality of
those mucky little sadists, Stalky and Co. I do not understand his
relation to Rhodes nor Rhodes's attitude to him. He has an immense vogue
in the British middle-class and upper-class home; he is the patron saint
of cadet corps masters, an in-exhaustive fount of sham manly sentiment,
and one of the most potent forces in the shrivelling of the British
political imagination during the past third of a century.

The only representative of that Boer War Imperialist group I ever met
was Lord Milner. He seemed to me a bold-thinking man, hampered by
politic reservations. In 1918 he wrote a preface for a little pamphlet I
published, _The Elements of Reconstruction_. I came against him in a
curious little talking and dining club, the "Coefficients," which met
monthly throughout the session between 1902 and 1908 to discuss the
future of this perplexing, promising and frustrating Empire of ours.
These talks played an important part in my education. They brought me
closer than I had ever come hitherto to many processes in contemporary
English politics and they gave me juster ideas of the mental atmosphere
in which such affairs are managed.

In certain respects our club represented something that seems now, I
think, to have faded out from contemporary English life. It had the
gestures if not the spirit of free interrogation. It had an air of
asking "What are we doing with the world? What are we going to do?" Or
perhaps I might put it better by saying: "What is being done to our
world? And what are we going to do about it?"

The club included the queerest diversity of brains. Its foundation was,
I believe, suggested by Mrs. Sidney Webb. It was inaugurated by a
meeting in the flat of Sir Edward Grey and Mr. Haldane (neither as yet
peers) in Whitehall Court and the first assembly included such
incongruous elements as Bertrand Russell (now Earl Russell), Sidney Webb
(who is now Lord Passfield), Leo Maxse, (already in 1902 denouncing the
German Peril and demanding the Great War), Clinton Dawkins, who linked
us to finance, Carlyon Bellairs, a Big Navy man, Pember Reeves, a New
Zealand progressive settled in England, W. A. S. Hewins, L. S. Amery and
H. J. Mackinder, all three on the verge of revolt under Joseph
Chamberlain against Free Trade. Later on we were joined by Lord Robert
Cecil, Michael Sadler, Henry Newbolt (of "Drake's Drums"), J.
Birchenough, to strengthen the financial side, Garvin who helped remove
the last traces of Encyclopaedism from the _Encyclopdia Britannica_,
Josiah Wedgwood the Single Taxer, Lord Milner, John Hugh Smith, Colonel
Repington, F. S. Oliver, C. F. G. Masterman and others. We found our
talks interesting and we kept up a quite high average of attendances.
For some years we met in the St. Ermin's Hotel, Westminster, and later
in a restaurant which has now given way to a theatre in Whitehall.

Most of these men were already committed to definite political rles,
and Russell and I were by far the most untied and irresponsible members.
I had much more to learn than anyone from those conversations and less
tradition and political entanglement to hamper my learning. The earlier
discussions were the most general and, from my point of view, the best.
Could the British Empire be made a self-sustaining system, within a
Zollverein? That was at first an open question for most of us. I argued
against that idea. The British Empire, I said, had to be the precursor
of a world-state or nothing. I appealed to geography. It was possible
for the Germans and Austrians to hold together in their Zollverein
because they were placed like a clenched fist in the centre of Europe.
But the British Empire was like an open hand all over the world. It had
no natural economic unity and it could maintain no artificial economic
unity. Its essential unity must be a unity of great ideas embodied in
the English speech and literature.

I was very pleased with that metaphor of the fist and the open hand--but
I did not find it a very contagious suggestion.

As I look back now across a gap of two and thirty years upon that talk
among the coffee cups and the liqueur glasses, I see England at a
parting of the ways. I was still clinging to the dear belief that the
English-speaking community might play the part of leader and mediator
towards a world commonweal It was to be a free-trading, free-speaking,
liberating flux for mankind. Russell, Pember Reeves and Webb and
possibly Haldane and Grey had, I think, a less clearly expressed
disposition in the same direction. But the shadow of Joseph Chamberlain
lay dark across our dinner-table, the Chamberlain who, upon the
"illimitable veldt" of South Africa, had had either a sunstroke or a
Pauline conversion to Protection and had returned to clamour
influentially for what he called Tariff Reform, but what was in effect
national commercial egotism. He was impatient with what he felt to be
the impracticable world-liberalism of Balfour, the Cecils and the
Liberals. Foreign powers, he thought, were taking an immediate advantage
of our longer views. He had no long views. He began a struggle to impose
the crude commonsense and hard methods of a monopolistic Birmingham
hardware-manufacturer upon international relations. More and more did
his shadow divide us into two parties. Year by year at the Coefficient
gatherings, I saw the idea of the British commonweal being decivilized
and "Imperialized." I was in at the very beginning of the English recoil
from our pretensions--and with many they were more than pretensions--to
exceptional national generosity, courage and world leadership.

The undeniable contraction of the British outlook in the opening decade
of the new century is one that has exercised my mind very greatly, and I
fear it would produce an immense bulge in this present already bulging
bale of a book if I were to attempt a complete analysis. Gradually the
belief in the possible world leadership of England had been deflated, by
the economic development of America and the militant boldness of
Germany. The long reign of Queen Victoria, so prosperous, progressive
and effortless, had produced habits of political indolence and cheap
assurance. As a people we had got out of training, and when the
challenge of these new rivals became open, it took our breath away at
once. We did not know how to meet it. We had educated our general
population reluctantly; our universities had not kept pace with the
needs of the new time; our ruling class, protected in its advantages by
a universal snobbery, was broad-minded, easy-going and profoundly lazy.
The Edwardian monarchy, court and society were amiable and slack.
"Efficiency"--the word of Earl Roseberry and the Webbs was felt to be
rather priggish and vulgar. Our liberalism was no longer a larger
enterprise, it had become a generous indolence. But minds were waking up
to this. Over our table at St. Ermin's Hotel wrangled Maxse, Bellairs,
Hewins, Amery and Mackinder, all stung by the small but humiliating tale
of disasters in the South Africa war, all sensitive to the threat of
business recession and all profoundly alarmed by the naval and military
aggressiveness of Germany, arguing chiefly against the liberalism of
Reeves and Russell and myself, and pulling us down, whether we liked it
or not, from large generalities to concrete problems.

These Young Imperialists, as they were then, found it impossible to
distinguish between national energy and patriotic narrowness. Narrowing
the outlook is a cheap immediate way of enhancing the effect of energy
without really increasing it. They were all for training and armament
and defensive alliances, and they were all careless or contemptuous of
that breadth and vigour of education in which the true greatness of a
people lies. I tried to be more fundamental, to trace the secret springs
of our inertness. I talked--it was considered a barely pardonable
eccentricity--of the crippling effect of the monarchy, of the cultivated
suspicion of real capacity in high quarters, and of the monopolization
of educational direction by Oxford and Cambridge. I was of opinion that
if Great Britain had become a Republic early in the nineteenth century
and set up an adequate modern university organization centering in
London and extended throughout the Empire, in the place of those
privileged mediaeval foundations and the intensely domestic personal
loyalties it has cherished, it would have drawn the United States back
into a closer accord and faced the world with an altogether greater
spirit than it was now displaying. Our mentality, I reasoned, was still
in the great-estate, gentlemen's servants tradition of the eighteenth
century because we had missed our revolution. These are all if's and
and's, but that was the disposition of my mind.

Presently Bertrand Russell flung out of the club. There was an argument
at which unfortunately I was not present. Hewins, Amery and Mackinder
declared themselves fanatical devotees of the Empire. "My Empire, right
or wrong," they said. Russell said that there were a multitude of things
he valued before the Empire. He would rather wreck the Empire than
sacrifice freedom. So if this devotion was what the club meant----! And
out he went--like the ego-centred Whig he is--without consulting me.
Later the discussion was summarized to me. I said I was quite of his
mind. The Empire was a convenience and not a God. Hewins in protest was
almost lyrical. He loved the Empire. He could no more say why he loved
the Empire than a man could say why he loved his wife. I ought to
resign. I said I had no taste for exile; I never have had a taste for
exile; and so I would not follow Russell unless they threw me out. The
more this Imperialist nonsense was talked in the club, the more was it
necessary that one voice at least should be present to contradict it.
And so nailing my colours to the mast and myself to the dinner table, I
remained--and we all continued to get on very well together.

Milner, oddly enough, I found the most satisfactory intelligence among
us. He knew we had to make a new world, but he had nothing of my
irresponsible constructive boldness. So that he fell into Imperialist
Monarchist forms--which a partly German education may have made easier
for him. But upon many minor issues we were apt to agree.

Haldane on the contrary I found intellectually unsympathetic, although
his general political attitude was nearer to mine. He was a
self-indulgent man, with a large white face and an urbane voice that
carried his words as it were on a salver, so that they seemed good even
when they were not so. The "Souls," the Balfour set, in a moment of
vulgarity had nicknamed him "Tubby." He was a copious worker in a
lawyer-like way and an abundant--and to my mind entirely
empty--philosopher after the German pattern. He had a cluster of
academic distinctions which similar philosophers had awarded him. I used
to watch him at our gatherings and wonder what sustained him. I think he
floated on strange compensatory clouds of his own exhalation. He
rejoiced visibly in the large smooth movements of his mind. Mostly he
was very busy on his immediate activities; his case, his exposition, his
reply, his lecture, and it was probably rare for him to drop down to
self-scrutiny. When other men lie awake in the small hours and
experience self-knowledge, remorse and the harsher aspects of life,
crying out aloud and leaping up to pace their rooms, Haldane I am sure
communed quite serenely with that bladder of nothingness, the Absolute,
until he fell asleep again.

When Einstein came to England and was lionized after the war, he was
entertained by Haldane. Einstein I know and can converse with very
interestingly, in a sort of Ollendorffian French, about politics,
philosophy and what not, and it is one of the lost good things in my
life, that I was never able to participate in the mutual exploration of
these two stupendously incongruous minds. Einstein must have been like
a gentle bright kitten trying to make friends with a child's balloon,
very large and unaccountably unpuncturable.

Haldane found time to produce various books on philosophy. They are
still spoken of with profound respect and a careful avoidance of
particulars in academic circles, but they mark no turning point in the
history of the human mind. They move far away from any vulgar reality in
a special universe of discourse. _The Pathway to Reality_ was not
actually written; it was poured out from notes as the Gifford Lectures
in that mellifluous voice, taken down in shorthand and corrected for
publication. It is like a very large soap bubble that for some
inexplicable reason fails to be iridescent. He also produced a
translation of Schopenhauer, omitting an indelicate but vitally
important discussion of perversion.

His abundant methodical mind was at its best in formal organization. It
is generally admitted that it was his reform of the army in 1905 which
made possible the prompt dispatch of the British Expeditionary Force to
France in August 1914. His intelligence was certainly better trained and
more abundant than that of any of the British professional military
authorities, and he might have done great service during the actual
struggle. But in a moment of enthusiasm for Teutonic metaphysics he had
declared that Germany was his "spiritual home" and Northcliffe, in an
access of spy mania, hunted him from office at the outbreak of the war.
It was a great disappointment for him, for he was acutely conscious of
strategic capacity. But measured against such brains as those of
Kitchener and French, almost anyone might be forgiven an acute
consciousness of strategic capacity.

I will not speculate about what might have happened if we had had
Haldane as war-director instead of the fuddled dullness of Kitchener,
the small-army cleverness of French, Haig's mediocrity and the stolid
professionalism of the army people throughout. It would lead me far away
from this wandering lane of autobiography into a wilderness of
entertaining but futile hypothesis, and I have already made some
heartfelt observations about the army caste in an earlier section.
Moreover after a section on "If Haldane had been at the War Office in
1914," it would be impossible not to go on to what might have happened
if we had had Winston Churchill for our war lord--brilliant, I feel sure
he would have been, if unsound--and so on to even stranger
possibilities. My concern here is simply with Lord Haldane as a man with
a voice in human destiny. How was this undeniably big brain concerned
with change and the incessant general problem of mankind? I have told
how Theodore Roosevelt was touched by that problem. Was Lord Haldane
really touched by it at all?

I do not think that between contemporary practicality and the Absolute
there was any intermediate level at which the mind of Haldane halted to
ask himself what he was doing with the world. His mind was unquickened
by any serious knowledge of biology or cosmology, his idea of science
was of a useful technical cleverness and not of a clearer vision, and I
think it improbable that he brought the conception of unlimited
fundamental change into his picture of the universe at all. A legal
training directs the mind to equity and settlement rather than progress.
And the Absolute is very constipating to the mind. I imagine he just
thought that "history goes on--much as ever" and left it at that.

Another of our Coefficients who certainly found a belief in the steady
continuity of conventional history a full and sufficient frame for his
political thoughts was Sir Edward Grey (who became Viscount Grey of
Fallodon). Here again was a brain that I found almost incredibly fixed
and unaware of the violent mutability of things. His air of grave and
responsible leadership was an immense delusion, for who can lead unless
he be in motion? Never had a human being less stimulus for getting on to
anywhere or anything. He was a man born to wealth and prominence; he
inherited his baronetcy and estates at the age of twenty and he entered
parliament with the approval of everyone, the nicest of nice young men,
at the age of twenty-three. He was tall and of a fine immobile
handsomeness; he played tennis very well and he was one of the most
distinguished of British fly-fishers. At the age of thirty-seven in the
full tide of his gifts, he wrote an excellent book on the latter art. He
was never very deeply interested in internal politics for naturally
enough he could see very little to complain of in the condition of the
country, but as a matter of public and party duty he was made
under-secretary for foreign affairs when he was thirty, and an opinion
grew about him and within him that he understood them. He understood
them about as much as Lord Tyrrell, upon whose outlook I have already
animadverted in my account of my Crewe House experiences.

I have already said that Tyrrell's mind was governess-made. I would
almost extend that to the whole Foreign Office personnel. People of this
class are caught young before any power of defensive criticism has
developed in them and told stories of a series of mythical beings,
France, Germany, England, Spain, with such assurance that they become
more real than daddy and mummy. They are led to believe that "Spain" is
cruel, "Holland" little and brave, "Germany" industrious and protestant
and "Ireland" tragic, priest-led and unforgetting. They think that there
are wicked countries and good countries. Once a modernized education has
cleared up the human mind in this matter, such widespread delusions will
be inconceivable. Readers in those days to come will not believe what I
am writing here. But the minds of these people are set in that shape, as
the bandaged skulls of the Mangbetu of the Belgian Congo are set in the
shape of a sugar loaf, and few so formed ever come round to a sane
scepticism about these foolish simplifications. In my _Outline of
History_ I have done my best to show plainly how the belief in these
plausible inventions, as unreal as Baal or Juggernaut, has warped all
human life and slaughtered countless millions in the past two centuries.
Slowly a clearer vision of the human complex is spreading, but Grey in
his grave solemn way talked, just as Tyrrell chattered, of "What France
feels in the matter" or "If Germany does so and so, the time will come
for us to act."

He would not even disperse these personifications to the extent of
saying "They."

I thought Grey a mentally slow, well-mannered, not unpleasantly
dignified person until after August 1914. Then I realized what a danger
such blinkered firmness of mind as his could be to mankind.

I think he wanted the war and I think he wanted it to come when it did.
Sooner or later, on the international chequerboard which he saw in place
of reality, Germany would attack. It was better she should attack while
her navy was still quantitatively inferior to ours and while the web of
precautionary alliances we had woven against her held firm. He would
never have taken part in an attack on Germany, a preventive war as they
call it in France nowadays, because that was not in accordance with the
rules of the game, not at all the sort of thing a gentlemanly country
does, but if Germany saw fit to attack first, then, well and good, the
Lord had delivered her into our hands.

It is charged against him that he did not definitely warn Germany that
we should certainly come into the war, that he was sufficiently
ambiguous to let her take a risk and attack, and that he did this
deliberately. I think that charge is sound.

His faith in the reality of national personifications outlived the war.
When I was working for the creation of a League of Nations Union, it was
with a sort of despair that I found that everyone in the movement was
insisting on the necessity of having Grey for our figurehead. For him a
League of Nations was necessarily a League of Foreign Offices. His
intelligence was as incapable of thinking multitudinously of the human
beings under the shadow of "France" or "Russia" as a Zoo bear is of
thinking of the atoms in a bun.

Another of these governess-moulded minds I encountered was Lord Curzon
who was at the Foreign Office in 1920, when I returned from a visit to
Soviet Russia. I went to him to suggest a working understanding with the
new rgime. I tried to explain first that it was now the only possible
rgime in Russia and that if it was overthrown Russia would come as near
to Chaos as a human population can; secondly that it was a weak rgime
in sore need of manufactured material, scientific apparatus and
technical help of every sort and thirdly, that however strong our
objection to Marxist theory might be and however intransigeant their
Marxism, a certain generosity and understanding now, a certain manifest
readiness to help must inevitably force reciprocal concessions. The new
Soviet Russia was the best moral and political investment that had ever
been offered to Britain. And our Foreign Office turned it down--like a
virtuous spinster of a certain age refusing a proposal to elope and bear
ten children. Most of this is said quite plainly in my _Russia in the
Shadows_.

Lord Curzon listened to me as a man listens to a language he does not
understand, but which he is unwilling to admit is strange to him. For
him Russia was something as unified and personally responsible as Aunt
Sally or the defendant in the dock. When it came to his turn to speak,
he began, incorrigibly and with a slight emphasis on his master words,
in this fashion; "But so long as _Russia_ continues to sustain a
_propaganda_ against us in _Persia_, I do not see how we can possibly do
anything of the sort you suggest...."

I declare that the greatest present dangers to the human race are these
governess-trained brains which apparently monopolize the Foreign Offices
of the World, which cannot see human affairs in any other light than as
a play between the vast childish abstractions we call nations. There are
people who say the causes of war, nowadays at least, are economic. They
are nothing so rational. They are hallucinatory. Men like Grey, Curzon
and Tyrrell present a fine big appearance to the world, but the bare
truth is that they are, by education and by force of uncritical
acceptance, infantile defectives, who ought to be either referred back
to a study of the elements of human ecology or certified and secluded as
damaged minds incapable of managing public affairs.

Another outstanding man, of that period before the Great War, with whom
I had some mental exchanges was Mr. Balfour--"Mr. Arthur." I used to
meet him at Stanway and Taplow Court and in various London houses. He at
any rate was high above the governess-made level. There was always an
odour of intelligence about him that made his average Conservative
associates uncomfortable. He had a curious active mind, he had been
attracted by my earlier books and, through him and through Cust, I came
to know something of the group of people who centred round him and Lady
Mary Elcho, the "Souls." That too was a vague Open Conspiracy, an
attempt to get away from the self-complacent dullness and furtive small
town viciousness of _fin-de-sicle_ England, and to see life freshly. He
had grown up in an atmosphere of scientific thought; Francis Balfour,
his younger brother, was a brilliant biologist and his _Text Book of
Embryology_ had been my first introduction to the Balfour family. Arthur
Balfour had none of the forceful energy of Theodore Roosevelt; he was a
long-limbed, simple-living but self-indulgent, bachelor man. He was a
greater British private gentleman even than Sir Edward Grey. He was so
comfortably wealthy, so well connected and so secure that a certain
aloofness from the dusty sweaty conflict of life, was in his habit of
living.

It is hard to say where, in aloofness, is set the boundary between
divinity and cowardice. He could show such courage as he did when as
Irish Secretary he was continually under a threat of assassination,
because he could not believe that anything of that sort could really
happen to him; but when his essential liberalism came face to face with
this new baseness of commercialized imperialism, with all its push and
energy, he made a very poor fight for it. He allowed himself to be
hustled into the background of affairs by men with narrower views and
nearer objectives.

He argued sceptically on behalf of religion. His way of defending the
Godhead was by asking, What can your science know for certain? and
escaping back to orthodoxy under a dust-cloud of philosophical doubts.
He anticipated my own remark that the human mind is as much a product of
the struggle for survival as the snout of a pig and perhaps as little
equipped for the unearthing of fundamental truth. But while that enabled
him to accord a graceful support to the Church of England--which might
be just as right or wrong about ultimates as anything else--I used my
release from rigid conviction for a systematic common-sense
interpretation of my world.

In the smooth-water years before 1914 and the subsequent cataracts, I
had a great admiration for Balfour. In that queer confused novel, _The
New Machiavelli_, one of my worst and one of my most revealing, I have a
sort of caricature-portrait of him as Evesham in which I magnify him
unduly. (There is also, by the bye, in the same book a remote sketch of
the Coefficients as the "Pentagram Club.") I put various discourses into
Evesham's mouth, of which the matter is clearly my own. Here is a
vignette, which shows also my own phase of development about 1912.

"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 to 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 young teachers 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.... 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."

There is something very youthful in that passage. I have hardened and
grown wiser since then. It is easier to be taken that way when one is
thirty-eight than in the cooler longer perspective of sixty-eight. Later
on I realized that Balfour was letting one thing after another be
wrested from his hands by lesser men. He allowed _The Times_ when it was
sold, go to the highest bidder; it fell to Northcliffe and it might have
fallen into far worse hands; Balfour would have done nothing disturbing
to himself to prevent it. None of our richer aristocrats seem to have
risked any money at that time to keep this public organ in
public-spirited hands. Yet the control of that paper was quite essential
to their predominance. They trusted to the snobbishness of some _nouveau
riche_. So they got Northcliffe who was anything but a snob--and in due
course a new mercantile conservatism arose which adopted B.M.G. (Balfour
Must Go) as its animating slogan. He could not control these new people
but he hampered them and so they turned upon him.

Balfour might perhaps have been a very great man indeed if his passions
had been hotter and his affections more vivid. The lassitudes of these
fine types, their fastidiousness in the presence of strong appeals,
leave them at last a prey to the weak gratifications of vanity and a
gentle impulse to pose. He posed. He was aware of himself and he
posed--as Mr. Humbert Wolfe has recently told in the _English Review_
(June 1934). As the war went on his poses became more and more
self-protective.

Amidst the clamour and riot of the war he faded away from power to
eminence. I had one queer glimpse of some struggle going on in him and
about him. We were at the house of Lady Wemyss in Cadogan Square,
talking about the early reactions of the various classes to the war. He
had an impulse to tell me something. "The worst behaviour," he began,
"has been on the part of our business men." Emphasis. "The _very_
worst."

He thought better of it and I was not clever enough or resolute enough
to make him say more.

After the war, power left him altogether. He was merely a very eminent
person, at last indeed almost the most eminent person in Britain. His
last flare of charm and activity was at the Washington Conference of
1924. He helped make it the most amiable conference imaginable and the
fund of sympathy between Washington and Westminster was greatly
enhanced. There I saw and talked with him but nothing he said has
remained in my memory. No doubt he and Grey were very fine gentlemen,
but they were expensive to produce and they did not give back to human
society anything like an adequate return in mental toil and directive
resolution, for its expenditure upon them, for their great parks and
houses and the deference that was shown them.

One day--in 1920 or 1921 I think, I went with Jane to the Institute of
International Affairs and saw Balfour speaking on the platform. The
light fell on his skull and I had a queer impression that quite recently
I had seen an almost exactly similar cranium, similarly lit. My mind
flashed back to Moscow. I whispered to Jane: "He's got a brain box that
is the very pair to Lenin's.... It's incredible."

Perhaps it was only a matter of lighting and I will not embark upon any
systematic search for correlated resemblances. Lenin by all his
circumstances was as insecure, active and aggressive as Balfour was
assured and indolent, but both had curious brains with a live edge of
scepticism that put them on a far higher level than the blinkered
stupidity of Grey and Curzon or the elaborate unreality of Haldane.
Neither I think were orthodox minded and Lenin believed in the dogmas of
Marx about as much as Balfour believed in the Holy Trinity and both were
capable of the most destructive conformity. But while Lenin was using
Marxism to make things happen because he was under the urgency of
change, Balfour was using Christianity and Christian organization, to
resist changes that, whatever else they did, were bound to disturb the
spacious pleasantness of his life. I went to Russia as I have recounted
in _Russia in the Shadows_, and I had a long talk with Lenin and a
number of talks about him.

Now here was a fresh kind of brain for me to encounter and it was in
such a key-position as no one had dreamt of as possible for anyone
before the war. He appeared to be the complete master of all that was
left of the resources of Russia. He was not by any means the master he
seemed to be; he had a difficult team of supporters to handle and such
an instrument as the Ogpu, which could twist round in his grip and wound
him--as it did when it executed the Grand Dukes after his reprieve. And
above all he was tied very closely to the sacred text of Marx. A real or
assumed reverence for that was what held his following together, and his
modification of the sacred Word to meet the great emergencies before him
had to be subtle and propitiatory to an extreme degree. He had all these
checks and entanglements to hinder him. But the authoritative effect of
him was very great indeed.

He had a personal prestige based on his sound advice and lucid vision
during the revolutionary crisis. He became then the man to whom everyone
ran in fear or doubt. He had the strength of simplicity of purpose
combined with subtlety of thought. By imperceptible changes, to an
extent that only began to be measured and recognized after his death, he
changed Marxism into Leninism. He changed the teachings of a fatalistic
doctrinaire into a flexible creative leadership. So long as it was the
substance of Lenin, he did not care in the least if it bore the label of
Marx. But this year I have seen that his portrait and image in Russia
everywhere are quietly elbowing his bearded precursor out of the way.
His was by far the more vigorous and finer brain.

Like everybody else he belonged to his own time and his own phase. We
met and talked each with his own preconceptions. We talked chiefly of
the necessity of substituting large scale cultivation for peasant
cultivation--that was eight years before the first Five Year Plan--and
of the electrification of Russia, which was then still only a dream in
his mind. I was sceptical about that because I was ignorant of the
available water power of Russia. "Come back and see us in ten years'
time," he said to my doubts.

When I talked to Lenin I was much more interested in our subject than in
ourselves. I forgot whether we were big or little or old or young. At
that time I was chiefly impressed by the fact that he was physically a
little man, and by his intense animation and simplicity of purpose. But
now as I look over my fourteen year old book and revive my memories and
size him up against the other personalities I have known, in key
positions I begin to realize what an outstanding and important figure he
is in history. I grudge subscribing to the "great man" conception of
human affairs, but if we are going to talk at all of greatness among our
species, then I must admit that Lenin at least was a very great man.

If in 1912 I could call Balfour "beyond question great," it seems almost
my duty here to put that flash of enthusiasm in its proper proportion to
what I think of the Russian. So let me say with all deliberation that
when I weigh the two against each other it is not even a question of
swaying scale-pans; Balfour flies up and kicks the beam. The untidy
little man in the Kremlin out-thought him--outdid him. Lenin was alive
to the last, whereas Balfour ended in an attitude. Lenin was already
ailing when I saw him, he had to take frequent holidays, early in 1922
the doctors stopped his daily work altogether and he became partly
paralysed that summer and died early in 1924. His days of full influence
therefore, extended over less than five crowded years. Nevertheless in
that time, he imposed upon the Russian affair, a steadfastness of
constructive effort against all difficulties, that has endured to this
day. But for him and his invention of the organized Communist party, the
Russian revolution would certainly have staggered into a barbaric
military autocracy and ultimate social collapse. But his Communist party
provided, crudely no doubt but sufficiently for the survival of the
experiment, that disciplined personnel for an improvised but loyal Civil
Service without which a revolution in a modern state is doomed to
complete futility. His mind never became rigid and he turned from
revolutionary activities to social reconstruction with an astonishing
agility. In 1920, when I saw him, he was learning with the vigour of a
youth about the possible "electrification of Russia." The conception of
the Five Year Plan--but as he saw it, a series of successive provincial
Plans--a Russian grid system, the achievements of Dnepropetrovsk, were
all taking shape in his brain. He went on working, as a ferment, long
after his working days had ended. He is still working perhaps as
powerfully as ever.

During my last visit to Moscow, in July 1934, I visited his Mausoleum
and saw the little man again. He seemed smaller than ever; his face very
waxy and pale and his restless hands still. His beard was redder than I
remembered it. His expression was very dignified and simple and a little
pathetic, there was childishness and courage there, the supreme human
qualities, and he sleeps--too soon for Russia. The decoration about him
was plain and noble. The atmosphere of the place was saturated with
religious feeling and I can well believe that women pray there. Outside
down the Square there still stands the inscription: "Religion"--which in
Russia it must be remembered always means Orthodox Christianity--"is the
opium of the people." Deprived of that opium Russia is resorting to new
forms of dope. In Moscow I was shown one evening Dziga Vertov's new
film: _Three Songs for Lenin_. This is a very fine and moving apotheosis
of Lenin. It is Passion Music for Lenin and he has become a Messiah. One
must see and hear it to realize how the queer Russian mind has
emotionalized Socialism and subordinated it to the personal worship of
its prophets, and how necessary it is that the west wind should blow
through the land afresh.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the spring of 1934 I took it into my head to see and compare
President Franklin Roosevelt and Mr. Stalin. I wanted to form an opinion
of just how much these two brains were working in the direction of this
socialist world-state that I believe to be the only hopeful destiny for
mankind.

In what has gone before I have done my best to set out before the
persevering reader as precisely and plainly as possible the foundations
and nature of this picture of the world problem that has been painted
bit by bit on my own brain tissues since I played in the back-yard of
Atlas House, and I have tried to show the successive phases through
which my belief has grown definite, until at last it has become
altogether clear to me (as to many others) that the organization of this
that I call the Open Conspiracy, the evocation of a greater sounder
fellow to the first Communist essay, an adequately implemented Liberal
Socialism, which will ultimately supply teaching, coercive and directive
public services to the whole world, is the immediate task before all
rational people. I believe this idea of the planned world-state is one
to which all our thought and knowledge is tending. It is an idea that is
quietly pervading human mentality because facts and events conspire in
its favour. It is appearing partially and experimentally at a thousand
points. It does not dismay me in the least that no specific political
organization to realize this idea, has yet appeared. By its very nature
the formal conflicts of politics will be almost the last thing in the
world to be affected by it. When accident finally precipitates it, its
coming is likely to happen very quickly. We shall find ourselves almost
abruptly engaged in a new system of political issues in, which the
socialist world-state will be plainly and consciously lined up against
the scattered vestigial sovereignties of the past.

I am quite unable to form an opinion how long it will be before this
happens and the socialist world-state enters the field of political
actuality. Sometimes I feel that it may be imminent. Sometimes I feel
that generations of propaganda and education may have to precede it. The
war danger and economic stress are both forcing men's minds towards it
as the one way out for them. These grim instructors may do much to make
up for the negligence and backwardness of the schoolmaster. Plans for
political synthesis and economic readjustment seem to grow bolder and
more extensive. It was natural therefore, if a little impulsive and
premature, that I should go to America and Russia with the question, Is
this it already? What is the relation of the New Plan in America to the
New Plan in Russia and how are both related to the ultimate World-State?

Some readers will object that this is political discussion and not
autobiography. It is political discussion but also it is autobiography.
The more completely life is lived the more political a man becomes. My
democratic reading of the rights of man is not so much a matter of
voting--usually for candidates put up for me by other people--as asking
questions, getting answers and passing judgments on my own behalf. I
ask my questions. These two visits are essential events in my life and
telling about them is as intimate and personal a rounding off of my
story as I can imagine. Modern life is expansion and then effacement. We
do not round off, we open out. We do not end with valedictions; we open
doors and then stand aside.

Just before I sailed for America I went to a queer exhibition of
futility in the Albert Hall. It was a gathering of Mosley's blackshirts
and it would be hard to imagine anything sillier--from the slow pompous
entry of this queer crazy creature, dressed up like a fencing instructor
with a waist fondly exaggerated by a cummerbund and chest and buttocks
thrust out, stalking gravely and alone down the central gangway, to the
last concerted outburst confined entirely, I remarked, to his
disciplined following, of boyish shouting and hand-lifting: "We _want_
Mosley."

I have met Mosley intermittently for years, as a promising young
conservative, a promising young liberal, a promising new convert to the
Labour party, with Communist leanings, and finally as the thing he is.
He has always seemed to me dull and heavy, imitative in his politics and
platitudinous in his speeches, and so I was not greatly interested in
what he had to say to this meeting. As his banalities boomed about the
hall, without a single flicker of wit or wisdom, their dullness vastly
exaggerated by loud speakers, we noted how the habit of mouthing his
words was growing upon him--he has for some obscure reason invented a
sort of dialect of his own--and then we discussed particulars of his
Sandhurst days and his war-record which were new to me. What chiefly
held my attention were his supporters and the audience generally. The
audience was miscellaneous, curious and little moved, and it did not
fully fill the hall. Quite a quantity of pleasant boys and nice young
men, and quite a number of others who were not so nice, dressed up in
black shirts and grey trousers, were acting as ushers, selling idiotic
songs about their glorious Leader, supplying the applause, pervading the
meeting, and generally keeping the affair from becoming a complete
slump. They seemed drawn chiefly from the middle and upper class. There
was something shy about many of them, something either desperately
grave and assertive, or faintly apologetic. They were not throwing
themselves into their parts as the hairy young Italians they were aping
would have done. There was no romantic conviction about them. The thing
that really intrigued me was why they did this. What sort of feeble
imaginations, I asked, could be flicking about in their nice young
cerebral cortices to bring them to this pass?

That question went with me across the Atlantic. Is there really anything
we can call education in England at the present time? Or is what passes
for education only a sort of systematic softening of the brain? What
history had been put before these young men, what vision of life had
been given them, that they should start out upon their political life
"wanting"--of all conceivable desiderata!--Mosley?

Only after a huge cultural struggle can we hope to see the world-state
coming into being. The Open Conspiracy has to achieve itself in many
ways, but the main battle before it is an educational battle, a battle
to make the knowledge that already exists accessible and assimilable and
effective. The world has moved from the horse-cart and the windmill to
the aeroplane and dynamo but education has made no equivalent advance.
The new brains that are pouring into the world are being caught by
incompetent and unenlightened teachers, they are being waylaid by the
marshalled misconceptions of the past, and imprisoned in rigid narrow
historical and political falsifications. We cannot do with such a world
population. We cannot build a new civilization out of two thousand
million pot-bound minds. It is all poor, damaged material we have to
deal with. Such cramped and crippled stuff might serve well enough for
the comparatively unshattered social and political routines of the
nineteenth century but it will not serve to-day. It is as dangerous, as
catastrophically inert, as loose sand piled high, and always rising
higher, over the excavation for a highway.

I prowled round the promenade deck at night thinking how little we were
doing for education and how little I had done. I wished I had some virus
with which one might bite people and make them mad for education. I was
going from one dismally miseducated country to another, and when all was
said and done these two were the most enlightened countries as yet in
all the world. And I was hoping against my better knowledge to find the
seeds of a new way of life already germinating and sending out green
shoots.

It is not spring of the world's great year yet.

    _The world's great age begins anew,_
    _The golden years return,_
    _The earth doth like a snake renew_
    _Her winter weeds outworn._

That was written a hundred years ago and it is still prophetic.

Coming into New York harbour there was fog, a quite appropriate and
disturbing fog, with fog-horns about us so like political leaders that
you could not in the least ascertain their direction, and the
_Washington_ in which I was a passenger was as nearly as possible run
down by the _Balin_ in the Ambrose Channel. The German liner jumped out
of the fog abruptly, and passed within ten yards of us on the wrong
side. I heard a babble of voices close at hand and looked out of my
port-hole into the astonished faces of a group of passengers on the
_Balin's_ deck within spitting distance of me. She swept by and vanished
in the fog and I went up on deck to hear what other people thought of
the occurrence. Opinions differed as to how near we had been to a smash;
the estimates varied from six feet to twenty yards. The two boats had
sucked in towards each other as they passed. Some of us tried to imagine
just what a touch would have meant. Nobody was very much upset about it;
it seemed to be just a part of the general large dangerousness of human
affairs at the present time.

When I arrived in New York I began to hear opinions of the "New Deal"
from every point of view. I wanted to sample the atmosphere in which the
President was working before I went to see him. Various good friends had
gathered talk parties of the most diverse composition, and I had written
to one or two men I knew would give me first-hand information. Everyone
talked freely and it is not for me to document what was said by this
individual or that. I found myself sitting next to an unassuming young
man whose name I had not quite caught and he began to unfold a view of
the world to me which seemed to contain all I had ever learnt and
thought, but better arranged and closer to reality. This I discovered
was A. A. Berle of the so-called Brains Trust. "And how many more of
_you_ are there?" I wanted to ask him--and didn't.

And then, by way of contrast, I heard across the table the distinguished
head of a big corporation, a fine grey-headed, rotund-voiced gentleman,
denouncing every new thing in America from the President down to the
last man in the queue of unemployed, and demanding to be put back
forthwith to the happy days of 1924. Or was it 1926? He had observed
nothing material since then. "And how many," thought I, "are there of
_you_?" His faith in economic anarchism and the eternal succession of
trade-cycles was unshaken. Since the present depression was particularly
intense and prolonged he argued, the recovery would be all the brighter.
He was like a strong infusion of Herbert Spencer and Harriet Martineau
in the tradition of that valiant optimist, Ambassador Choate--whom I
described as Mr. Z, "Pippa's rich uncle" in _The Future in America_.

Between these extremes of understanding and resistance to reality, was
an extraordinary variety of types. I had a brush with a delightful
couple of New York "Reds," pure Communists, as pure and intolerant as
their Puritan forebears. They were of quite wealthy origin, and they
recited their belief in Karl Marx, his philosophy, his psychology, his
final divine wisdom, as though Lenin had lived in vain, and they were in
just as complete and effective an opposition to the New Deal as my
grey-haired corporation president. Roosevelt they said was just
"bolstering up capitalism." He was trying to sneak past a social
catastrophe and cut out their dear dictatorship of the proletariat
altogether--contrariwise to Holy Writ. The better he did the worse it
would be, for there could be no real blessing on it, said these real
bright Reds.

In the New Willard, in Washington, I found myself in contact with those
fine flowers of American insurrectionism, my old friends Clarence Darrow
and Charles Russell. They had been summoned to the capital to report on
the working of various codes and they were reporting as unhelpfully and
destructively as they knew how. They were "agin the government" all the
time and the wildfire of freedom shone in Darrow's eyes.

I have a great affection and sympathy for Clarence Darrow. It is deep in
my nature also to be restive under government and hostile to dogma. But
he is, by ten years or more, of an older generation, and the American
radicalism in which he grew up was very different from the early
formative influences I have described in my own case. I believe in the
free common intelligence, in freely criticized commonsense, but Darrow
believes superstitiously in the individual unorganized free common man.
That is to say he is a sentimental anarchist. He is for an imaginary
"little man"--against monopoly, against rule, against law--any law.

It is remarkable how widespread among American brains is this fantasy of
the sturdy little independent "healthy" competitive man, essentially
righteous: the Western farmer, the small shop-keeper, the struggling,
saving, hard-working entrepreneur. To this first onset of publicly
directed large-scale economic organization in Washington, that New York
corporation president I have described and Clarence Darrow, the extreme
radical, responded in almost identical terms. "Leave us alone," they
said--with passion. The same ideal, of perpetuating a fundamental
individualism of small folk, was manifest in the anti-trust legislation
of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a dream. The problem of personal freedom is
not to be solved by economic fragmentation; that Western farmer lost his
independence long since and became the grower of a single special crop,
the small shop-keeper either a chain-store minder or a dealer in branded
goods, and the small entrepreneur a gambler with his savings, and a
certain bankrupt in the end; nevertheless the dream survives. To borrow
a phrase from Russia: it is a kulak ideal. I found it still living even
among the directors of the A.A.A. in Washington.

In their report upon the codes, Darrow and Russell went so far as to
impute motive. That heroic small man of their imaginations was, they
said, being deliberately sacrificed to big business--_sold_ to big
business. But it is not the New Deal and the N.R.A. which are
sacrificing the small man to large-scale operations. The stars in their
courses are doing that. Nevertheless in this fashion these two
anarchistic Old Radicals were able to line up with our wealthy young
Communists, who thought Roosevelt was "bolstering up capitalism" and
that angry public utility exploiter who declared the New Deal was
smashing it. There are manifestly common subconscious elements
underlying this amazing unanimity.

What struck me most about the New York atmosphere, and the impression
was intensified in Washington, was the mixture of praise and detraction
with which the President was mentioned. It had become almost a ritual.
There would be a prelude upon his courage, his integrity, his personal
charm and then "but----". The varied contexts to that "but," taken
altogether, made me realize that Franklin Roosevelt is one of the
greatest shocks that has ever happened to the prevalent mental
assumptions of the United States. A man's formulated and expressed
opinions may be one thing, we have to remember, and his tacit or
subconscious assumptions quite another. Premonitions of a new social and
economic order which have hitherto seemed the harmless talk of an
ineffectual intelligentsia have been broadcast abruptly over vast
surfaces of conventional business and political expression. The
time-honoured crust of pompous insincerity characteristic of the old
order has been broken and has revealed the underlying capacity of the
American mind for stark reality. With an air of just giving the old deck
of cards a new deal for the century-old game of political poker, the
President seems to have taken up a new deck altogether, with strange new
suits and altered values, and to be playing quietly and resolutely a
different game. What game is he playing? Does he know himself? Does he
realize he is a revolution? Imaginative answers to these perplexing
questions, often highly imaginative and experimental answers, furnished
the material for all those "buts."

Were they trying to pull him down or trying to make him out? I listened
undecided. Principally, I think, they were puzzled about him and, being
puzzled, they were alarmed. They did not want to have him--with all due
acknowledgments--and they did not know what else they could have. The
world of American wealth and enterprise has been so sure of its
freedoms, so convinced of its boundless areas and possibilities and so
uncritically assured of its own essential goodness and necessity, that
it has received the onset of even a certain scrutiny of its operations
with a kind of exaggerated claustrophobia. It is disposed to fight and
embarrass any form of regulation. It had got itself into the most
hideous economic and industrial mess; only a year ago it was scared
white and helpless with the terror of immediate catastrophe, but already
it is recovering its ancient confidence and declaring, now that the
immediate danger is past, that there was never any danger at all. It
means to be carping and obstructive--and to the best of its power and
ability it will be. In 1906 in my _Future in America_ I emerged with the
obvious reflection that Americans rich and radical alike had no "sense
of the state." Now they are getting a sense of the state put over them
rather rapidly, and they are taking it very ungraciously.

This disposition to detract from the President's effort to reconstruct
the American front and to hamper him in every possible way, is
unaccompanied by any real alternative policy. It is an irresponsible
instinctive opposition, a mulish pulling back. There is no going back
now for America. If Roosevelt and his New Deal fail altogether, there
will be further financial and business collapse, grave sectional social
disorder, political gangsterism and an extensive decivilization of wide
regions. And these still wealthy and influential people who are carping
and making trouble will be the first to suffer.

The absence of any sense of the state in America, the irresponsible
habit of mind fostered by beginning the teaching of history with a
rebellion and carrying it on to a glorification of individual push and
the mystical democracy of the "Peepul" is the essential difficulty ahead
of this eleventh-hour attempt to salvage the immense material
accumulations of the past century before they topple over, and to set
up an ordered and disciplined direction for the new powers of mankind
before it is too late. Order and collective direction means an efficient
and devoted Civil Service. The doubt whether America will succeed in
making the great adjustments it is facing in time to escape catastrophe,
turns largely upon the manifest inadequacy of its present Civil Service
to the immense tasks that will necessarily be thrust upon it. Can this
Civil Service be supplemented rapidly and effectively? The most
momentous question before the United States community is the possibility
of improvising ministers, officials and functionaries sufficiently
honest and public-spirited, sufficiently clear-headed, courageous and
competent to carry through the inevitable reconstruction.

Now outside the limits of the undermanned and underpaid Federal Civil
Service there has long been considerable speculative activity in
intellectual circles, among the university professoriate, among writers,
scientific and technical workers and mentally active men of leisure,
about the constructive defects that were becoming more and more patent
in the American community. An intelligentsia has developed--much more
considerable altogether than the corresponding strata on the British
side. It thinks as a whole more _roughly_ than its British equivalents,
but more boldly and less deferentially. American business has hitherto
ticked these people off as "long-haired Radicals" or "parlour
socialists" or "cranks" and turned its back on their extending
influence. Then, when the crisis was at its blackest, it discovered that
these "cranks" might perhaps prove to be "experts." With very mixed
feelings it realized that the new President, instead of entrusting
himself to the grave and dignified advice of tried "Experience" to
heal--or at any rate to go through the motions of healing--at eight per
cent let us say, until the ultimate smash--the disaster its routines had
made inevitable, was calling these new brains into consultation. Some
journalist, not quite sure whether the suggestion of intellectual
activity was a curse or a blessing invented the phrase the "Brains
Trust," and the report of it went about the world.

It was inevitable after all my broodings upon a possible world-wide
Open Conspiracy of clear-headed people, that this report should stir my
interest profoundly. I wanted to know just what integrating forces this
talk about the Brains Trust might imply, and how they could be brought
into relationship with the steady growth of creative revolutionary
thought upon the European side.

I have seen enough of this Brains movement to realize that it is no sort
of conspiracy; that it is not a body of men formally associated by a
concerted statement of ideas. It represents nothing so much in agreement
as the radicals who made the republic in Madrid, nothing nearly so
close-knit as the pre-revolutionary Bolshevik party. It has indeed
scarcely anything to hold it in any sort of unity except that in this
miscellany of widely scattered men there is a common determination to
bring scientific analysis to bear upon financial and industrial
processes, and to make a practical application of the results in the
common interest. Its members are miscellaneous both in tradition and in
character. It is the President who has drawn them together and it is
necessarily from their ranks and associates, rather than from the rascal
heelers of the party politicians, grafters by profession, that the
supplementing and extension of the Civil Service must be drawn if there
is to be any hope for the salvaging of America.

Raymond Moley has interested himself in the history of this Brains Trust
movement, and he spread it out very intelligibly to me in a long talk we
had in the Hangar Club in New York. He distinguished three main groups
of mental influences, the monetary realists, such as Professor Irving
Fisher and Professor Rogers, who constitute the rudiments of a
scientific monetary control, the economic organizers such as Johnson,
Tugwell and Berle, who stand chiefly for an extension of employment and
exploitation by the State, and the lawyers--of whom only Felix
Frankfurter is known to me personally--who are concerned with the
development of legal restraints upon socially destructive speculative
enterprise, and upon the use of large scale organization for private
aggrandizement. Many of these people have never met each other. The link
between them all was first the Executive Mansion at Albany, when
Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York State and is now the White
House. It is the President's notes of interrogation that have drawn them
all together into a loose constructive co-operation.

That is the outstanding difference--so far as form goes--between the
constructive effort in Washington and Moscow. The one is a receptive and
co-ordinating brain-centre; the other is a concentrated and personal
direction. The end sought, a progressively more organized big-scale
community, is precisely the same.

I have been four times to the White House, and twice to the Kremlin, to
see the man in occupation. But I have never been, and I am never likely
to go, inside the gates of Buckingham Palace. Very early impressions may
have something to do with that; I have told of my resistance to my
mother's obsession about the dear Queen and my jealousy of the royal
offspring; but the main reason for my obstinately republican life, as I
see it in my own mind, is my conviction that here in England something
has been held on to too long, and that nothing is doing here. A
constitutional monarchy substitutes a figure-head for a head and
distributes leadership elusively throughout the community. This gives
the British system the resisting power of an acephalous invertebrate,
and renders it equally incapable of concentrated forward action. In
war-time the Crown resumes, or attempts to resume, a centralized
authority--with such results as I have already glanced at in my account
of my war experiences. Quite in accord with the tenacity of an
acephalous invertebrate, the empire can be cut to pieces legally, have
its South Ireland amputated, see half its shipping laid up and its heavy
industries ruined, reconcile itself to the chronic unemployment and
demoralization of half its young people, and still, on the strength of a
faked budget and a burst of sunny summer weather, believe itself to be
essentially successful and invulnerable. So it came about that, almost
without thinking it over, as the various League of Nations documents I
have quoted bear witness, I had become accustomed to looking westward
for the definitive leadership of the English speaking community--and
anywhere but in London for the leadership of mankind.

I have told already of my visit to Theodore Roosevelt. It was like
visiting any large comfortable, leisurely, free-talking country house.
Seeing President Harding had been like attending a politicians'
reception in an official building, all loud geniality and hand-shaking
and the protean White House, had taken on the decoration and furniture
of a popular club. My call upon President Hoover was a sort of intrusion
upon a sickly overworked and overwhelmed man, a month behind in all his
engagements and hopeless of ever overtaking them, and the White House,
in sympathy, had made itself into a queer ramshackle place like a nest
of waiting-rooms with hat-stands everywhere, and unexpected doors, never
perceptible before or since, through which hurrying distraught officials
appeared and vanished. President Hoover did not talk with me at all; he
delivered a discourse upon the possible economic self-sufficiency of
America that was, I imagine, intended for M. Laval from Paris, who had
left Washington a week or so before. I did not find it interesting.
After the Harding days there had been a foolish development of etiquette
in Washington and instead of going to the President as man to man, the
foreign visitor during the Coolidge and Hoover rgimes was led--after
due enquiries--down to the White House by his ambassador. Henceforth
America and the English, it had been decided, were to talk only through
a diplomatic pipette. Sir Ronald Lindsay took me down, apologetically,
and sat beside me during the encounter, rather like a gentleman who
takes a strange dog out to a tea-party, and is not quite sure how it
will behave. But I respected the trappings of government and nothing
diplomatically serious occurred. I just listened and contained myself.
Diplomatic usage, will I suppose, prevent Sir Ronald from ever producing
his memories of Men I have Chaperoned to the White House.

All this had been swept away again in 1934, I had had some slight
correspondence with the President already, I went to him on my own
credentials, and found that this magic White House had changed back
again to a large leisurely comfortable private home. All the Hoover
untidiness had vanished. Everything was large, cool, orderly and
unhurried. Besides Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt, his daughter Mrs. Dall, Miss
Le Hand his personal secretary, and another lady, dined with us and
afterwards I sat and talked to him and Mrs. Roosevelt and Miss Le Hand
until nearly midnight, easily and pleasantly--as though the world crisis
focused anywhere rather than upon the White House.

As everyone knows, the President is a crippled man. He reminded me of
William Ernest Henley. He has the same big torso linked to almost
useless legs, and he lacked even Henley's practised nimbleness with
stick and crutch. But when we sat at dinner and when he was in his study
chair, his physical disablement vanished from the picture. Mrs.
Roosevelt I found a very pleasant, well-read lady; I had been warned she
was a terrible "school marm," but the only trait of the schoolmistress
about her was a certain care for precision of statement. There was no
pose about either of them. They were not concerned about being what was
expected of them, or with the sort of impression they were making; they
were just interested in a curious keen detached way about the state of
the world. They talked about that, in the manner of independent people
who had really not so very much to do with it. We were all in it and we
had to play our parts, but there was no reason because one was in a
responsible position that one should be mystical or pompous or darkly
omniscient about it.

Even if my memory would serve for the task, I would not report the drift
and shifting substance of our talk. Only one thing need be recorded, the
President's manifest perplexity at some recent turns of British
diplomacy, and the wonder that peeped out--a wonder we all share--over
the question as to what Sir John Simon imagines he is up to, whether he
represents any obscure realities of British thought and, if not, why on
earth, in the far east and elsewhere, the two big English-speaking
communities seem perpetually discordant and unexpected to each other. My
own fixed idea about world peace came naturally enough to the fore. If
it were not, I said, for questions of mere political mechanism, stale
traditions, the mental childishness of our British Foreign Office and
what not, it would be perfectly possible even now for the English
speaking masses and the Russian mass, with France as our temperamental
associate, to be made to say effectively that Peace shall prevail
throughout the earth. And it would prevail. Whatever dreams of conquest
and dominion might be in a few militant and patriotic brains outside
such a combination, would burn but weakly in the cold discouragement of
so great a unison. And what was it--prevented that unison?

But that was only one of the topics we touched upon. What concerns me
here is not what was said, but the manner in which it was thought about
and advanced. I am not thinking primarily of policies and governmental
actions here, but of an encounter with a new type of mind. My own ideas
about the coming socialist world-state are fixed and explicit. But they
are, I am persuaded, implicit in every mind that has been opened to the
possibility of unrestricted change. I do not say that the President has
these revolutionary ideas in so elaborated and comprehensive a form as
they have come to me; I do not think he has. I do not think he is
consciously what I have called an Open Conspirator and it is quite clear
his formula are necessarily limited by the limitations of the popular
understanding with which he has to come to terms. But these ideas are
sitting all round him now, and unless I misjudge him, they will
presently possess him altogether. Events are reinforcing them and
carrying him on to action. My impression of both him and of Mrs.
Roosevelt is that they are _unlimited_ people, entirely modern in the
openness of their minds and the logic of their actions. I have been
using the word "blinkered" rather freely in this section. Here in the
White House, the unblinkered mind was in possession.

The Roosevelts are something more than open-minded. Arthur Balfour was
greatly open-minded, but he lacked the slightest determination to
realize the novel ideas he entertained so freely. He was set in the
habitual acceptance of the thing that is, church, court, society,
empire, and he did not really believe in the new thoughts that played
about in his mind. President Roosevelt does. He has a brain that is
certainly as receptive and understanding as Balfour's but, with that, he
has an uncanny disposition for action and realization that Balfour
lacked altogether. This man who can sit and talk so frankly and freely
is also an astute politician and a subtle manager of masses and men. As
the President thinks and conceives, so forthwith, he acts. Both he and
his wife have the simplicity that says, "But if it is right we ought to
do it." They set about what they suppose has to be done without
exaltation, without apology or any sense of the strangeness of such
conduct. Such unification of unconventional thought and practical will
is something new in history, and I will not speculate here about the
peculiar personal and the peculiar American conditions that may account
for it. But as the vast problems about them expose and play themselves
into their minds, the goal of the Open Conspiracy becomes plainer ahead.
Franklin Roosevelt does not embody and represent that goal, but he
represents the way thither. He is being the most effective transmitting
instrument possible for the coming of the new world order. He is
eminently "reasonable" and fundamentally implacable. He demonstrates
that comprehensive new ideas can be taken up, tried out and made
operative in general affairs without rigidity or dogma. He is
continuously revolutionary in the new way without ever provoking a stark
revolutionary crisis.

Before I visited Washington, I was inclined to the belief that the
forces against such a replanning of the American social and political
system as will arrest the present slant towards disaster, the
individualistic tradition, the individual lawlessness, the intricate
brutal disingenuousness of political and legal methods, were so great
that President Franklin Roosevelt was doomed to an inevitable defeat. I
wrote an article _The Place of Franklin Roosevelt in History_ (Liberty
Magazine, October, 1933) in which I made my bet for his over-throw. But
I thought then he was a man with a definite set of ideas, fixed and
final, in his head, just as I am a man with a system of conclusions
fixed and definite in my head. But I perceive he is something much more
flexible and powerful than that. He is bold and unlimited in his
objectives because his mental arms are long and his courage great, but
his peculiar equipment as an amateur of the first rank in politics,
keeps him in constant touch with political realities and possibilities.
He never lets go of them and they never subdue him. He never seems to
go so far beyond the crowd as to risk his working leadership, and he
never loses sight of pioneer thought. He can understand and weigh
contemporary speculative economics, financial specialism and
international political psychology, and he can talk on the radio--over
the heads of the party managers and newspaper proprietors and so
forth--quite plainly and very convincingly to the ordinary voting man.

He is, as it were, a ganglion for reception, expression, transmission,
combination and realization, which I take it, is exactly what a modern
government ought to be. And if perhaps after all he is, humanly, not
quite all that I am saying of him here, he is at any rate enough of what
I am saying of him here, for me to make him a chief collateral exhibit
in this psycho-political autobiography.

       *       *       *       *       *

On July the 21st I started from London for Moscow in the company of my
eldest son, who wished to meet some Russian biologists with whose work
he was acquainted, and to see their laboratories. We left Croydon in the
afternoon, spent the night in Berlin and flew on by way of Danzig, Kovno
and Welilikje Luki, reaching Moscow before dark on the evening of the
22nd. We flew in clear weather as far as Amsterdam, then through a
couple of thunderstorms to Berlin. We were late in reaching the glitter
of illuminated Berlin; the raining darkness was flickering with
lightning flashes and our plane came down to make its landing with
flares burning under its wings along a lane of windy yellow flame
against the still red and white lights of the aerodrome. The flight next
day from Welilikje Luki to Moscow, flying low and eastward in afternoon
sunshine, was particularly golden and lovely.

In 1900, when I wrote _Anticipations_, this would have been as
incredible a journey as a trip on Aladdin's carpet; in 1934 it was
arranged in the most matter of fact way through a travel agency, it was
a little excursion that anyone might make; and the fare was less than
the railway fare would have been a third of a century before. In a
little time such a visit will seem as small a matter as a taxi-cab call
does now. It is our antiquated political organization and our
retrograde imaginations that still hold back such a final abolition of
distance.

Moscow I found greatly changed--even from the air this was visible; not
set and picturesque, a black-and-gold barbaric walled city-camp about a
great fortress, as I had seen it first in 1914; nor definitely shabby,
shattered and apprehensive as it had been in the time of Lenin, but
untidily and hopefully renascent. There was new building going on in
every direction, workers' dwellings, big groups of factories and, amidst
the woods, new _datchas_ and country clubs. No particular plan was
apparent from the air; it looked like a vigorous, natural expansion such
as one might see in the most individualistic of cities. We came down
over a patchwork of aerodromes and saw many hundreds of planes parked
outside the hangars. Russian aviation may be concentrated about Moscow,
but this display of air force was certainly impressive. Twenty-two years
ago, in my _War in the Air_, I had imagined such wide fields of air
fleet, but never then in my boldest cerebrations did I think I should
live to see them.

I confess that I approached Stalin with a certain amount of suspicion
and prejudice. A picture had been built up in my mind of a very reserved
and self-centred fanatic, a despot without vices, a jealous monopolizer
of power. I had been inclined to take the part of Trotsky against him. I
had formed a very high opinion perhaps an excessive opinion, of
Trotsky's military and administrative abilities, and it seemed to me
that Russia, which is in such urgent need of directive capacity at every
turn, could not afford to send them into exile. Trotsky's Autobiography,
and more particularly the second volume, had modified this judgment but
I still expected to meet a ruthless, hard--possibly doctrinaire--and
self-sufficient man at Moscow; a Georgian highlander whose spirit had
never completely emerged from its native mountain glen.

Yet I had had to recognize that under him Russia was not being merely
tyrannized over and held down; it was being governed and it was getting
on. Everything I had heard in favour of the First Five Year Plan I had
put through a severely sceptical sieve, and yet there remained a growing
effect of successful enterprise. I had listened more and more greedily
to any first-hand gossip I could hear about both these contrasted men. I
had already put a query against my grim anticipation of a sort of
Bluebeard at the centre of Russian affairs. Indeed if I had not been in
reaction against these first preconceptions and wanting to get nearer
the truth of the matter, I should never have gone again to Moscow.

This lonely overbearing man, I thought, may be damned disagreeable, but
anyhow he must have an intelligence far beyond dogmatism. And if I am
not all wrong about the world, and if he is as able as I am beginning to
think him, then he must be seeing many things much as I am seeing them.

I wanted to tell him that I had talked to Franklin Roosevelt of the new
prospect of world co-operation that was opening before mankind. I wanted
to stress the fact upon which I had dwelt in the White House, that in
the English-speaking and Russian-speaking populations, and in the
populations geographically associated with them round the temperate
zone, there is a major mass of human beings ripe for a common
understanding and common co-operation in the preparation of an organised
world-state. Quite parallel with that double basis for a world plan, I
wanted to say, there is a third great system of possible co-operation in
the Spanish-speaking community. These masses, together with the Chinese,
constitute an overwhelming majority of mankind, anxious--in spite of
their so-called governments--for peace, industry and an organized
well-being. Such things as Japanese imperialism, the national egotism of
the Quai d'Orsay and of Mussolini, the childish disingenuousness of the
British foreign office, and German political delirium, would become
quite minor obstacles to human unity, if these common dispositions could
be marshalled into a common understanding and a common method of
expression. The militancy of Japan was not so much a threat to mankind
as a useful reminder for us to sink formal differences and spread one
explicit will for peace throughout the world. Japan, with a possible but
very improbable German alliance, was the only efficient reactionary
menace left for civilization to deal with. France was inaggressive in
spirit; Great Britain incurably indeterminate. I wanted to find out how
far Stalin saw international matters in this shape and, if he proved to
be in general agreement, to try and see how far he would go with me in
my idea that the present relative impotence of the wider masses of
mankind to restrain the smaller fiercer threats of aggressive
patriotism, is really due not to anything fundamental in human nature
but to old inharmonious traditions, bad education and bad explanations;
to our failure, thus far, to get our populations clearly told the true
common history of our race and the common objective now before mankind.
That objective was the highly organized world community in which service
was to take the place of profit. The political dialects and phrases
which were directed towards that end were needlessly and wastefully
different. Creative impulses were being hampered to the pitch of
ineffectiveness by pedantries and misunderstandings.

Was it impossible to bring general political statements up to date, so
that the real creative purpose in the Russian will should no longer be
made alien and repulsive to the quickened intelligence of the Western
World, by an obstinate insistence upon the antiquated political jargon,
the class-war cant, of fifty years ago? All things serve their purpose
and die, and it was time that even the passing of Karl Marx,
intellectually as well as physically, was recognised. It was as absurd
now to cling to those old expressions as it would be to try to electrify
Russia with the frictional electric machines or the zinc and copper
batteries of 1864. Marxist class-war insurrectionism had become a real
obstacle to the onward planning of a new world order. This was
particularly evident in our English-speaking community.

This ancient doctrine that the proletariat or the politician temporarily
representing him, can do no wrong, estranged the competent technologist,
who was vitally essential to the new task, and inculcated a spirit of
mystical mass enthusiasm opposed to all disciplined co-operation. I
wanted to bring it plainly into our talk that Russia was now paying only
lip service to human unity and solidarity; that she was in actual fact
drifting along a way of her own to a socialism of her own, which was
getting out of touch with world socialism, and training her teeming
multitudes to misinterpret and antagonize the greater informal forces in
the West making for world socialization and consolidation. Was it not
possible, before opportunity slipped away from us, to form a general
line of creative propaganda throughout the earth?...

It was typical of the way in which mental interchanges lag behind the
swift achievements of material progress, that Stalin and I had to talk
through an interpreter. He speaks a Georgian language and Russian and he
does not even smatter any Western idiom. So we had to carry on our
conversation in the presence of a foreign-office representative, Mr.
Umansky. Mr. Umansky produced a book in which he made a rapid note in
Russian of what each of us said, read out my speeches in Russian to
Stalin and his, almost as readily, to me in English, and then sat
alert-eyed over his glasses ready for the response. Necessarily a
certain amount of my phraseology was lost in the process and a certain
amount of Mr. Umansky's replaced it. And our talk went all the slowlier
because I was doing my best to check back, by what Stalin said, that he
was getting the substance at least, if not the full implications, of
what I was saying.

All lingering anticipations of a dour sinister Highlander vanished at
the sight of him. He is one of those people who in a photograph or
painting become someone entirely different. He is not easy to describe,
and many descriptions exaggerate his darkness and stillness. His limited
sociability and a simplicity that makes him inexplicable to the more
consciously disingenuous, has subjected him to the strangest inventions
of whispering scandal. His harmless, orderly, private life is kept
rather more private than his immense public importance warrants, and
when, a year or so ago, his wife died suddenly of some brain lesion, the
imaginative spun a legend of suicide which a more deliberate publicity
would have made impossible. All such shadowy undertow, all suspicion of
hidden emotional tensions, ceased for ever, after I had talked to him
for a few minutes.

My first impression was of a rather commonplace-looking man dressed in
an embroidered white shirt, dark trousers and boots, staring out of the
window of a large, generally empty, room. He turned rather shyly and
shook hands in a friendly manner. His face also was commonplace,
friendly and commonplace, not very well modelled, not in any way "fine".
He looked past me rather than at me but not evasively; it was simply
that he had none of the abundant curiosity which had kept Lenin watching
me closely from behind the hand he held over his defective eye, all the
time he talked to me.

I began by saying that Lenin at the end of our conversation had said
"Come back and see us in ten years". I had let it run to fourteen, but
now that I had seen Franklin Roosevelt in Washington I wanted to meet
the ruling brain of the Kremlin while my Washington impressions were
still fresh, because I thought that the two of them between them
indicated the human future as no other two men could do. He said with a
quite ordinary false modesty that he was only doing little things--just
little things.

The conversation hung on a phase of shyness. We both felt friendly, and
we wanted to be at our ease with each other, and we were not at our
ease. He had evidently a dread of self-importance in the encounter; he
posed not at all, but he knew we were going to talk of very great
matters. He sat down at a table and Mr. Umansky sat down beside us,
produced his note book and patted it open in a competent, expectant
manner.

I felt there was heavy going before me but Stalin was so ready and
willing to explain his position that in a little while the pause for
interpretation was almost forgotten in the preparation of new phrases
for the argument. I had supposed there was about forty minutes before
me, but when at that period I made a reluctant suggestion of breaking
off, he declared his firm intention of going on for three hours. And we
did. We were both keenly interested in each other's point of view. What
I said was the gist of what I had intended to say and that I have told
already; the only matter of interest here is how Stalin reacted to these
ideas.

I do not know whether it illuminated Stalin or myself most
penetratingly, but what impressed me most in that discussion was his
refusal to see any sort of parallelism with the processes and methods
and aims of Washington and Moscow. When I talked of the planned world to
him, I talked in a language he did not understand. He looked at the
proposition before him and made nothing of it. He has little of the
quick uptake of President Roosevelt and none of the subtlety and
tenacity of Lenin. Lenin was indeed saturated with Marxist phraseology,
but he had a complete control of this phraseology. He could pour it into
new meanings and use it for his own purposes. But Stalin was almost as
much a trained mind, trained in the doctrines of Lenin and Marx, as
those governess-trained minds of the British Foreign Office and
diplomatic service, of which I have already written so unkindly. He was
as little adaptable. The furnishing of his mind had stopped at the point
reached by Lenin when he reconditioned Marxism. His was not a free
impulsive brain nor a scientifically organized brain; it was a trained
Leninist-Marxist brain. Sometimes I seemed to get him moving as I wanted
him to move, but directly he felt he was having his feet shifted, he
would clutch at some time-honoured phrase and struggle back to
orthodoxy.

I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these
qualities it is, and to nothing occult and sinister, that he owes his
tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia. I had thought before I saw
him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I
realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of
him and everybody trusts him. The Russians are a people at once childish
and subtle, and they have a justifiable fear of subtlety in themselves
and others. Stalin is an exceptionally unsubtle Georgian. His unaffected
orthodoxy is an assurance to his associates that whatever he does would
be done without fundamental complications and in the best possible
spirit. They had been fascinated by Lenin, and they feared new
departures from his talismanic directions. And Stalin's trained obduracy
to the facts of to-day in our talk simply reflected, without the
slightest originality, the trained and self-protective obduracy of his
associates.

I not only attacked him with the assertion that large scale planning by
the community, and a considerable socialization of transport and staple
industries, was dictated by the mechanical developments of our time, and
was going on quite as extensively outside the boundaries of Sovietdom as
within them, but also I made a long criticism of the old-fashioned
class-war propaganda, in which a macdoine of types and callings is
jumbled up under the term bourgeoisie. That is one of the most fatal of
the false simplifications in this collective human brain-storm which is
the Russian revolution. I said that great sections in that mixture, the
technicians, scientific workers, medical men, skilled foremen, skilled
producers, aviators, operating engineers, for instance, would and should
supply the best material for constructive revolution in the West, but
that the current communist propaganda, with its insistence upon a
mystical mass directorate, estranged and antagonised just these most
valuable elements. Skilled workers and directors know that Jack is not
as good as his master. Stalin saw my reasoning, but he was held back by
his habitual reference to the proletarian mass--which is really nothing
more than the "sovereign Peepul" of old fashioned democracy, renamed.
That is to say it is nothing but a politician's figment. It was amusing
to shoot at him, with a lively knowledge of the facts of the October
revolution, an assertion equally obvious and unorthodox, that "All
Revolutions are made by minorities." His honesty compelled him to admit
that "at first" this might be so. I tried to get back to my idea of the
possible convergence of West and East upon the socialist world state
objective, by quoting Lenin as saying, after the Revolution, "Communism
has now to learn Business," and adding that in the West that had to be
put the other way round. Business had now to learn the socialization of
capital--which indeed is all that this Russian Communism now amounts to.
It is a state-capitalism with a certain tradition of cosmopolitanism.
West and East starting from entirely different levels of material
achievement, had each now what the other lacked, and I was all for a
planetary rounding off of the revolutionary process. But Stalin, now
quite at his ease and interested, sucked thoughtfully at the pipe he had
most politely asked my permission to smoke, shook his head and said
"Nyet" reflectively. He was evidently very suspicious of this suggestion
of complemental co-operation. It might be the thin end of a widening
wedge. He lifted his hand rather like a schoolboy who is prepared to
recite, and dictated a reply in party formulae. The movement of
socialization in America was not a genuine proletarian revolution; the
"capitalist" was just saving himself, pretending to divest himself of
power and hiding round the corner to come back. That settled that. The
one true faith was in Russia; there could be no other. America must have
her October Revolution and follow her Russian leaders.

Later on we discussed liberty of expression. He admitted the necessity
and excellence of criticism, but preferred that it should be home-made
by the party within the party organization. There, he declared,
criticism was extraordinarily painstaking and free. Outside criticism
might be biased....

I wound up according to my original intention by insisting upon the
outstanding positions of himself and Roosevelt, and their ability to
talk to the world in unison. But that came lamely because my hope for
some recognition, however qualified, on the part of the man in control
of Russia, of the present convergence towards a collective capitalism in
the East and West alike, was badly damaged. He had said his piece to all
my initiatives and he stayed put. I wished I could have talked good
Russian or had an interpreter after my own heart. I could have got
nearer to him then. Normal interpreters gravitate inevitably towards
stereotyped phrases. Nothing suffers so much in translation as the
freshness of an unfamiliar idea.

As I saw one personality after another in Moscow, I found myself more
and more disposed to a psycho-analysis of this resistance which is
offered to any real creative forces coming in from the West. It is very
marked indeed. In a few years, if it is sustained, we may hear Moscow
saying if not "Russia for the Russians," then at least "Sovietdom for
the followers of Marx and Lenin and down with everyone who will not bow
to the Prophets," which, so far as the peace and unity of the world is
concerned, will amount to the same thing. There is a strong incorrigible
patriotism beneath this Russian situation, all the more effective
because it is disguised, just as there was an incorrigible French
patriotism beneath the world-fraternisation of the first French
revolution.

A day or so later I discussed birth control and liberty of expression at
considerable length with Maxim Gorky and some of the younger Russian
writers, in the beautiful and beautifully furnished house the government
places at his disposal. Physically Gorky has changed very little since
1906 when I visited him, an amazed distressful refugee, upon Staten
Island. I have described that earlier meeting in _The Future in
America_. I stayed with him again in 1920 (_Russia in the Shadows_).
Then he was a close friend of Lenin's but disposed nevertheless to be
critical of the new rgime. Now he has become an unqualified Stalinite.
Between us also, unhappily, an interpreter had to intervene, for Gorky,
in spite of his long sojourn in Italy, has lapsed back to complete
mono-lingualism.

Some years ago John Galsworthy helped to create an international net of
literary societies called P.E.N. Clubs. At first they served only for
amiable exchanges between the writers of the same and different
countries, but the violent persecution of Jewish and leftish writers in
Germany, and an attempt to seize and use the Berlin Pen Club for Nazi
propaganda, raised new and grave issues for the organization. Just at
that time Galsworthy died and I succeeded him as International
President. I was drawn in as President and chairman to two stormy
debates in Ragusa and Edinburgh respectively. The task of championing
freedom of expression in art and literature was practically forced upon
this weak but widespread organization. It had many defects, but it had
access to considerable publicity, and in these questions publicity is of
primary importance. Local battles to maintain the freedom and dignity of
letters were fought in the Berlin, Vienna and Rome P.E.N. Clubs, and I
now brought to these new Russian writers the question whether the time
had not come to decontrol literary activities in Russia, and form a free
and independent P.E.N. Club in Moscow. I unfolded my ideas about the
necessity of free writing and speech and drawing in every highly
organized state; the greater the political and social rigidity, I
argued, the more the need for thought and comment to play about it.
These were quite extraordinary ideas to all my hearers, though Gorky
must have held them once. If so, he has forgotten them or put them
behind him.

We wrangled for an hour or so at a long tea table, which had been set in
a high sunny white portico, with fluttering swallows feeding their young
above the capitals of the columns. About half a dozen of the younger
Russian writers were present and the Litvinoffs came in from their
equally beautiful villa on the far side of Moscow to join in the
discussion. To me the most notable things by far about this talk were
the set idea of everyone that literature should be under political
control and restraint, and the extraordinary readiness to suspect a
"capitalist" intrigue, to which all their brains, including Gorky's, had
been _trained_. I did not like to find Gorky against liberty. It wounded
me.

I must confess indeed to a profound discontent with this last phase of
his. Something human and distressful in him, which had warmed my
sympathies in his fugitive days, has evaporated altogether. He has
changed into a class-conscious proletarian Great Man. His prestige
within the Soviet boundaries is colossal--and artificial. His literary
work, respectable though it is, does not justify this immense fame. He
has been inflated to a greatness beyond that of Robert Burns in Scotland
or Shakespeare in England. He has become a sort of informal member of
the government, and whenever the authorities have a difficulty about
naming a new aeroplane or a new avenue or a new town or a new
organization, they solve the difficulty by calling it Maxim Gorky. He
seems quietly aware of the embalming, and the mausoleum and apotheosis
awaiting him, when he too will become a sleeping Soviet divinity.
Meanwhile he criticizes the younger writers and gathers them about him.
And he sat beside me, my old friend, the erstwhile pelted outcast
dismally in tears whom I tried to support and comfort upon Staten
Island, half deified now and all dismay forgotten, looking sidelong at
me with that Tartar face of his, and devising shrewd questions to reveal
the spidery "capitalist" entanglement he suspected me of spinning. One
sails westward and comes at last to the east, and here in Russia after
the revolution, just as in Russia before the revolution, all round the
world to the left, we have come to the worst vice of the right again,
and literary expression is restricted to acceptable opinions.

It does not matter to Gorky, it seems, that our poor little P.E.N.
organization has fought for a hearing for left extremists like Toller,
and that all its battles so far have been to liberate the left. In this
new-born world of dogmatic communism, he insisted, there was to be no
recognition for White or Catholic or any sort of right writer, write he
ever so beautifully. So Maxim Gorky, in 1934, to my amazement made out a
case for the Americans who had hounded him out of New York in 1906.

I argued in vain that men had still the right to dispute the final
perfection of Leninism. Through the media of art and literature, it was
vital that they should render all that was in their minds, accepted or
unorthodox, good or bad. For political action and social behaviour there
must be conventions and laws, but there could be no laws and conventions
in the world of expression. You could not lock up imaginations. You
could not say, "thus far you may imagine and no further." Socialism
existed for the dignity and freedom of the soul of man, and not the soul
of man for socialism. There were sceptical smiles as the translator did
his best to render this queer assertion. Perhaps I made things too
difficult for him by speaking of the soul of man.

Gorky, the reformed outcast, wagged his head slowly from side to side
and produced excuses for this control of new thought and suggestion by
officials. The liberty I was demanding as an essential in any Russian
P.E.N. that might be founded, might be all very well in the stabler
Anglo-Saxon world; we could afford to play with error and heresy; but
Russia was like a country at war. It could not tolerate opposition. I
had heard this stuff before. At Ragusa, Schmidt-Pauli, speaking for the
Nazis, and at Edinburgh, Marinetti, the Fascist, had made precisely the
same apologies for suppression.

I was inspired to produce an argument in the Hegelian form. I asserted
that nothing could exist without the recognition of its opposite and
that if you destroyed the opposite of a thing altogether the thing
itself went dead. Life was reaction, and mental processes could achieve
clear definition only by a full apprehension of contraries. From that I
argued that if they suppressed men who sang or painted or wrote about
the glories of individual freedom, the picturesqueness of merchandising,
the mysteries of the religious imagination, pure artistry, caprice,
kingship, sin or destruction and the delights of misbehaviour, then
their Leninism also would lose its vitality and die. This was I think
translated correctly to these exponents of the orthodox Russian
temperament but they contrived no sort of reply.

Litvinoff cut across their indecision with a question whether I wanted
to have the exiled White writers come to Moscow. I said that was for him
to decide, it might do them and Russia a lot of good to have them back
and listen to what they had to say, but anyhow the principle of the
P.E.N. club was that no genuine artist or writer, whatever his social or
political beliefs and implications might be, should be excluded from its
membership. I had brought them my proposal and I promised I would leave
a written version of it to put before the approaching Congress of Soviet
Writers. If they chose to enter into the liberal brotherhood of the
P.E.N. Clubs, well and good. If they did not, I should do my best to
make their refusal known to the world. In the long run it would be the
Russian intellectual movement that would suffer most by this insistence
upon making its cultural relations with the outside world a one-way
channel, an outgoing of all that Russia thought fit to tell the world
and the refusal of any critical return. Mankind might even grow bored at
last by a consciously heroic and unconsciously mystical Soviet Russia
with wax in its ears.

Later on I found a rather different atmosphere in the household of
Alexis Tolstoy at Detskoe Selo (which is Tsarskoe Selo rechristened).
There too I met a number of writers and propounded this idea of a thin
web of societies about the world associated to assert the freedom and
dignity of art and literature. There has always been very marked mental,
temperamental and political contrast between Leningrad and Moscow. The
bearing of the two populations is very different and the former place
has a large cold seventeenth century dignity and a northern quality
which compares very vividly with the disorderly crowded street bustle,
the bazaar animation of Moscow. Even the religiosity of the new faith
has a different quality. There is nothing in the northern city with the
emotional value of Lenin's tomb, and the anti-God museum in the great
church of St. Isaac opposite the Astoria Hotel is a mere argumentative
brawl within the vast cold magnificence of that always most unspiritual
fane. Christianity never was alive in Leningrad as it was at the shrine
of the Black Virgin in Moscow and neither is the new Red religion as
alive.

Perhaps I put my case to the Leningrad writers with better skill after
my experience in Gorky's villa, but I encountered none of the suspicion
and rigid preconceptions of that first meeting. They were quite ready to
accept the universalism of the P.E.N. proposal, and to assert the
superiority of free scientific and artistic expression to considerations
of political expediency. They promised to support my memorandum to the
approaching Congress of Soviet Writers, proposing the constitution of a
Russian P.E.N. centre, open to every shade of opinion, and I shall await
the report of their clash with the definite intolerance of the Moscow
brains with a very keen interest. But at the time of writing this
Congress has still to meet.

I argued with Gorky also about birth control, because he, with many
others of these Russian leaders, in a confusion between subconscious
patriotism and creative optimism, is all for a Russia of four hundred or
five hundred millions, regardless of how the rest of mankind may be
faring. Russia may want soldiers to defend its Russianism, which is
exactly on the level of Mussolini's reasons for damning the thought of
birth control in Italy. In the old days Gorky was a dire pessimist with
a taste for gloomy colours, but now his optimism has become boundless.
Under the red ensign the earth can support an increasing population, he
seemed to argue, until standing room is exhausted. To the Proletariat
under the new rgime, as to God under the old, nothing is impossible.
Where it gives mouths it will give food. The Soviet men of science, he
imagines, can always be instructed and, if necessary, disciplined to
that effect.

In Gorky's study was a great book of plans which he thrust upon me. They
were the plans of an almost incredibly splendid palace of biological
science. It outdid the boldest buildings of the Czardom. Five hundred
(or was it a thousand?) research students from abroad were always to be
working there. Among other activities. Where _is_ this? I asked. He
produced a plan of Moscow and indicated the exact spot. I said I would
like to go and see it. But, he smiled, it was not yet completed for me
to see. I had a flash of understanding. I would like to go and see the
foundations. But they have not yet begun the foundation! You shall see
it, said Gorky, when you come again. It is only one of a group of vast
research and educational establishments we are making. You need have no
anxiety about the quality of scientific work in Soviet Russia or of its
capacity to meet whatever calls are made upon it. In view of these
plans.

From Gorky evoking biology in a land of controlled literature by waving
an architect's drawing at it, it was an immense relief to go and see
some of the most significant biological work in the world actually in
progress, in Pavlov's new Institute of Psychological Genetics outside
Leningrad. This is already in working order and still being rapidly
enlarged under its founder's direction. It is the least grandiose and
most practicable group of research buildings in the world. Pavlov's
reputation is an immense asset to Soviet prestige and he is now given
practically everything he asks for in the way of material. That much is
to the credit of this government. I found the old man in vigorous
health, and he took me and my biological son from one group of buildings
to another at a smart trot, expounding his new work upon animal
intelligence with the greatest animation as he did so. My son who has
always followed his work closely, plied him with lively questions.
Afterwards we sat in the house over glasses of tea and he talked on for
a couple of hours. He is ruddy and white-haired; if Bernard Shaw were to
trim and brush his hair and beard they would be almost indistinguishable.
He is eighty-five and he wants to live to a hundred-and-five just to
see how the work he has in hand will turn out.

My son and I had visited him in 1920 (in _Russia in the Shadows_), when
Gip was still a Cambridge undergraduate, and so it was natural that a
comparison of Russia in 1920 and Russia in 1934, should get into the
stream of the discourse. He talked down his two Communist assistants who
were at the table with us. He talked indeed as no other man in Russia
would be permitted to talk. So far, he said, the new rgime had produced
no results worth considering. It was still a large clumsy experiment
without proper controls. It might be a success in time, it was certainly
a considerable nuisance to decent people with old-fashioned tastes, but
at present there was neither time nor freedom in which to judge it. He
seemed to see very little advantage in replacing the worship of the
crucified by the worship of the embalmed. For his own part he still went
to church. It was a good habit, he thought. He delivered a discourse
quite after my heart on the need for absolute intellectual freedom, if
scientific progress, if any sort of human progress, was to continue. And
when I asked him what he felt about dialectical materialism, he
exchanged derisive gestures with me, and left it at that. He will not be
bothered by minor observances; he sticks to dating by the old weekday
names, and his always very simple way of living has carried over, just
as his magnificent researches have carried over, with scarcely a
modification, from the days before the great change. There was by the
bye a nursery with a real governess for his two grandchildren! I doubt
if there is another governess in Soviet territory. As we came away my
son said to me; "Odd to have passed a whole afternoon outside of Soviet
Russia."

That I thought was a good remark. But if we had been outside Soviet
Russia, where had we been? That was not so easy. It wasn't the Past. It
was a little island of intellectual freedom? It was a scrap of the world
republic of science? It was a glimpse of the future? But in the end we
decided that it was just Pavlov.

If I had to talk to Stalin and Gorky and Alexis Tolstoy and Pavlov
through a sort of verbal grille, there were other people about who could
talk English, and who wilfully or inadvertently exposed some acutely
interesting minor aspects of the new Russia. It seems beyond disputing
that while the political controls incline to be excessive and
oppressive, the lay-out of the material scheme, as one sees it in Moscow
at least,--for I saw nothing whatever of the planning of Leningrad--is
hasty, amateurish and often shockingly incompetent. Disproportion is
visible everywhere and all sorts of ineffectivenesses forced themselves
on my attention during my ten-day stay quite without my looking for
them; there is for instance still a shortage of paper to print even the
books in greatest demand, and the paper used is often like thin packing
paper; vitally important educational work is held up in consequence; the
street traffic again in Moscow, although it has nothing like the volume
of the traffic in London or Paris, is disorganised and dangerous, and if
one does not belong to the automobile-using class--there are still
classes of that sort--getting about is toilsome and tediously slow; the
distribution of goods through a variety of shops with different prices
and using different sorts of money is preposterously inconvenient.
Moscow is growing very rapidly and the re-planning and rebuilding seemed
to me poorly conceived. Since other great cities have their tube system,
Moscow also is making an imitative tube system, although its alluvial
water-bearing soil is highly unsuitable for the tubes they are making at
the inadequate depth of thirty feet or so. It will be the least stable
"Metropolitan" in the world, and it is plain the problem should have
been approached from some other and more original direction. I was told
by various apologists that what is being done in Moscow is not
representative of the real Russian effort; that at different points,
usually they are remote points, marvellous things are being achieved.
But I suppose there are the same sort of people there as here in Moscow,
and in Moscow, as planners and constructors, they are anything but
marvellous.

The outstanding achievement of the new rgime, when all is said and
done, is the great change in the bearing of the new generation, which
has cast off altogether the traditions of serfdom and looks the world
bravely in the eye. Coupled with this, an integral part of it indeed, is
the "liquidation of illiteracy." But are either of these advances
unprecedented? The common folk of the United States of America were as
free, equal and confident in the days of simplicity a hundred years
ago. And they had their common schools. It is really nothing so very
miraculous to be almost the last country in Europe to respond to the
need for a common citizen who can read. These people do not know
anything of the rest of the world. But wait and see what _these_ young
people will _do_, interpolates my Bolshevik guide. A hundred years ago
America was just such a land of promise.

Still more similar to this Russian change in manners, was the swift
establishment of equalitarian phrases and attitudes after the first
French Revolution. Neither American nor French democracy prevented a
subsequent development of inequalities of power and fortune. Plutocracy
succeeded Aristocracy. "This time," say the Bolsheviks, "we have guarded
against any similar relapse." But though they may have abolished
profiteering and speculation they have not abolished other sorts of
advantage. Their defensive obscurantism makes just the shadows in which
fresh infringements of human dignity can occur. As the initial
revolutionary enthusiasm dies away, officialdom, protected from
independent criticism, is bound to find its way to self-indulgence and
privilege. All over Moscow and Petersburg you can bribe with foreign
currency because of the absurd Torgsin system, and the population
everywhere is learning to hop quickly and deferentially out of the way
of an aggressively driven Lincoln car. The Communist propaganda is
altogether too self-satisfied about the intensity and uniqueness of its
revolution.

The perpetual reference of those who showed me about to something away
over there or coming to-morrow, recalled the Spanish _maana_. "Come and
see us again in ten years' time," they say, at every revelation of
insufficiency. If you say that a new building is ramshackle or flimsy
they assure you that it is merely a temporary structure. "We don't mind
tearing things down again," they explain. The impulse to shift things
and pull them about seems to be stronger than the impulse to make. They
are transferring the Academy of Sciences from Leningrad to Moscow for no
reason that I can understand. Possibly it is to render the control of
general scientific thought more effective. One Pavlov is enough for
them; they do not want any revival of that old world radical mentality
with its unrestrained criticism, its scepticism and its ridicule. They
want their men of science to be industrious bees without stings and live
in Gorky's hive.

When Bubnov, the Commissar of Public Education, parted from me outside a
charming exhibition of original paintings by little children, very like
the original paintings by little children exhibited in every other
country in the world, he broke out into happy anticipations of the lives
this new generation would lead in a reconstructed Russia. "All this," he
said, pointing to a disorderly heap of builders' muck which had
submerged a little garden before us, "is temporary." The constructors of
the new Metropolitan had, it seems, just made this dump and then gone
away for a bit. "This used to be a pretty park," said Bubnov. But it
would be all right ten years hence.

Bubnov and Stalin are now among the last survivors of the leaders who
did the actual fighting of the revolution, and he said they both meant
to live to be a hundred just to see the harvest of Russian prosperity
coming in at last. But besides the children in the model schools there
are plenty of unaccountable little ragamuffins flitting about the
streets. If Stalin and Bubnov live to be two hundred, I feel, Russia
will still remain the land of half fulfilled promises and erratic
wanderings off to new beginnings.

I came out of Russia acutely frustrated and disappointed in my dream of
doing anything worth while to define an understanding between the
essentially revolutionary drives towards an organized socialism in
America and Russia respectively. They will certainly go on apart and
divergent with a maximum of mutual misunderstanding, at least until
there is a new type of intelligence dominating the intellectual life of
Communism. If I could have talked Russian, or if I had been clever
enough to pervert the Marxist phraseology in Lenin's fashion, I might
perhaps have come near to my intention. I might have got into real
contact with a mind here or there, if not the leading mind. I was fairly
beaten in an enterprise too big for me.

As I thought it over in the homeward aeroplane, I felt that Russia had
let me down, whereas I suppose the truth of what has happened is that I
had allowed my sanguine and impatient temperament to anticipate
understandings and lucidities that cannot arrive for many years. I shall
never be able to imagine that what is plain to me is not plain to
everyone. I had started out to find a short cut to the Open Conspiracy
and discovered that, by such abilities as I possess, there is no short
cut to be found to the Open Conspiracy.

I had expected to find a new Russia stirring in its sleep and ready to
awaken to Cosmopolis, and I found it sinking deeper into the dope-dream
of Sovietic self-sufficiency. I found Stalin's imagination invincibly
framed and set, and that ci-devant radical Gorky, magnificently
installed as a sort of master of Russian thought. There are no real
short-cuts perhaps, in the affairs of men, everyone lives in his own
world and between his blinkers, whether they be wide or narrow, and I
must console myself, I suppose, as well as I can, for my failure to get
any response out of Russia, with such small occasional signs of
spreading contemporary understanding as may appear in our own western
life. There has always been a certain imaginative magic for me in
Russia, and I lament the drift of this great land towards a new system
of falsity as a lover might lament estrangement from his mistress.

The truth remains that to-day nothing stands in the way to the
attainment of universal freedom and abundance but mental tangles,
egocentric preoccupations, obsessions, misconceived phrases, bad habits
of thought, subconscious fears and dreads and plain dishonesty in
people's minds--and especially in the minds of those in key positions.
That universal freedom and abundance dangles within reach of us and is
not achieved, and we who are Citizens of the Future wander about this
present scene like passengers on a ship overdue, in plain sight of a
port which only some disorder in the chart room, prevents us from
entering. Though most of the people in the world in key positions are
more or less accessible to me, I lack the solvent power to bring them
into unison. I can talk to them and even unsettle them but I cannot
compel their brains to see.


 10

_Envoy_

I went by the train called the "Red Arrow," the Soviet echo of the
_Flche d'Or_, from Moscow to Leningrad and thence I flew to Tallin. I
am finishing this autobiography in a friendly and restful house beside a
little lake in Esthonia....

I have done my best now to draw the outline and development of a
contemporary mind reacting freely to the disintegrating and the
synthetic forces of its time. Copious as this book has become I have
still omitted a great bulk of comment and detail that did not seem to me
to be of primary importance in this story of the awakening of world
citizenship in a fairly normal human intelligence. It has not always
been easy to disentangle irrelevant matter without desiccating the main
argument. But in a life of eight-and-sixty years there accumulates so
great a miscellany of memories and material that, but for some such
check upon discursiveness as my design has given me, my flow of
reminiscence might have gone on for ever. I confess to an uneasy
realization now as I draw to my conclusion that I have not done any sort
of justice to the keen interest of countless subsidiary happenings, to
the fun of life and the loveliness of life and to much of the oddity of
life, beyond the scope of its main essentials. I feel I have been so
intent on my thesis, particularly in this very long concluding chapter,
that I may have failed to convey my thankfulness to existence for being
all else that it so incessantly and generously is. My generalizing
impulses have perhaps ruled too much and made my picture of life bony
and bare. In my effort to combine the truthful self-portrait of a very
definite individual with an adequate reflection of the mental influences
of type and period and to keep my outlines firm and clear, I have
deliberately put many vivid memories and lively interludes aside,
ignored a swarm of interesting personalities I have encountered, cut out
great secondary systems of sympathy and said nothing whatever about all
sorts of bright, beautiful and pleasant things that have whirled about
me entertainingly for a time and then flown off at a tangent. I could
write gaily of travels, mountain tramps, landfalls, cities, music,
plays, gardens that have pleased me....

What remains is the story of one of the most pampered and irresponsible
of "Advanced Thinkers," an uninvited adventurer who has felt himself
free to criticize established things without restraint, who has spent
his life planning how to wind up most of them and get rid of them, and
who has been tolerated almost incredibly during this subversive career.
Exasperation there has been, bans and boycotts from Boots to Boston;
public schoolmasters and prison chaplains have intervened to protect
their charges from my influence, Nazis have burnt my works, the Catholic
Church and Italian Fascism have set their authority against me, and dear
old voluble indignant Henry Arthur Jones in _My Dear Wells!_ and many
better equipped writers--Hilaire Belloc and Archbishop Downey for
example--have been moved to write vehement controversial books. But
refusals to listen and cries of disagreement are not suppression, and it
would ill become an advanced thinker to complain of them. They are
recognition. If they are not recognition of the advanced thinker
himself, they are recognition of his supports and following, and of the
greater forces of which he is the expression. I take it, therefore as a
fair inference from the real immunity I have enjoyed, that such
revolutionary proposals as mine are anything but unique and outstanding
offences. What I have written openly and plainly is evidently in the
thoughts of many people. In spite of much sporadic repressive activity,
this new ferment of world-state ideas is spreading steadily throughout
the world. Repression, even violent and murderous repression, there is,
no doubt, in Germany, in Italy and elsewhere but, where it occurs, it
has a curiously forced and hysterical quality; it is no longer
whole-hearted repression by assured authority, it is indeed not so much
the result of intolerant counter-conviction as resistance to conviction.
It is on the defensive against itself. Its violence, in more cases than
not, is the convulsive tightening of a slipping grip. The supporters of
the thing that is, seem everywhere touched by doubt. Even more plainly
is that the case with reactionaries. We advanced thinkers owe our
present immunity, such as it is, very largely to the fact that even
those of our generation who are formally quite against us, have
nevertheless been moving, if less rapidly and explicitly, in the same
direction as ourselves. In their hearts they do not believe we are
essentially wrong; but they think we go too far,--dangerously and
presumptuously too far. Yet all we exist for,--our sort,--is to go too
far for the pedestrian contingent....

I began this autobiography primarily to reassure myself during a phase
of fatigue, restlessness and vexation, and it has achieved its purpose
of reassurance. I wrote myself out of that mood of discontent and forgot
myself and a mosquito swarm of bothers in writing about my sustaining
ideas. My ruffled _persona_ has been restored and the statement of the
idea of the modern world-state has reduced my personal and passing
irritations and distractions to their proper insignificance. So long as
one lives as an individual, vanities, lassitudes, lapses and
inconsistencies will hover about and creep back into the picture, but I
find nevertheless that this faith and service of constructive world
revolution does hold together my mind and will in a prevailing unity,
that it makes life continually worth living, transcends and minimizes
all momentary and incidental frustrations and takes the sting out of the
thought of death. The stream of life out of which we rise and to which
we return has been restored to dominance in my consciousness, and though
the part I play is, I believe, essential, it is significant only through
the whole. The Open Conspirator can parallel--or, if you prefer to put
it so, he can modernize--the self-identification of the religious
mystic: he can say, "personally when I examine myself I am nothing"; and
at the same time he can assert, "The Divinity and I are One"; or
blending divinity with democratic kingship, "The World-State, c'est
Moi."

There is a necessary parallelism in the matured convictions of all
intelligent people, because brains are made to much the same pattern and
inevitably follow similar lines of development. Words, colourings and
symbols can change very widely but not the essential forms of the
psychological process. Since first man began to think he has been under
a necessity to think in a limited number of definable shapes. He has to
travel by the roads his ancestry made for him and their fences are well
nigh insurmountable. So mystical Christianity, Islamic mysticism,
Buddhist teaching, in their most refined and intense efforts towards
distinctive penetration, have produced almost identical and quite easily
interchangeable formulae for their mysteries. The process of
generalization by which the mind seeks an escape from individual
vexations and frustrations, from the petty overwhelming pains, anxieties
and recriminations of the too acutely ego-centred life, is identical,
whatever labels it is given and whatever attempts are made to establish
exclusive rights in it. All these religions and every system of
sublimation, has had to follow the same route to escape, because there
is no other possible route. The idea of creative service to the
World-State towards which the modern mind is gravitating, differs widely
in its explicitness, its ordered content and its practical urgency, from
the All of Being, the Inner Life, the Ultimate Truth, the Personal
Divinity, the Friend who sticketh closer than a brother, who is nearer
than breathing and closer than hands and feet, and all those other
resorts of the older religions, but its releasing and enveloping
relation to the individual _persona_ is, in spite of all that difference
in substance, almost precisely the same.

The difference between our modern consolation systems on the one hand
and their homologues in the religions and conduct-philosophies of the
past on the other, lies almost entirely in the increasingly monistic
quality of the former. They imply an abandonment, more or less tacit or
explicit, of that rash assumption of matter-spirit dualism, which has
haunted human thought for thousands of generations. The change from
egoism to a larger life is consequently now entirely a change of
perspective; it can no longer be a facile rejection of primary
conditions and a jump into "another world" altogether. It is still an
escape from first-hand egoism and immediacy, but it is no longer an
escape from fact. And the modern escape to impersonality is all the
more effective and enduring because of this tougher, unambiguous
adhesion to exterior factual reality. The easy circuitous return through
shadowy realms of abstract unreality to egoism on a higher plane is
barred; the Life of Contemplation and receptive expressionism, are no
longer possible refuges. The educated modern mind, constrained to face
forward is systematized but not abstracted. For all his devotion to
larger issues, for all his subordination of lesser matters, the Open
Conspirator like the Communist or the positivist man of science, remains
as consistently _actual_ as blood or hunger, right down to the ultimates
of his being.

So ends this record of the growth and general adventure of my brain
which, first squinted and bubbled at the universe and reached out its
feeble little hands to grasp it, eight and sixty years ago, in a shabby
bedroom over the china shop that was called Atlas House in High Street,
Bromley, Kent.




THE END




INDEX


Ackroyd, Dr. W. R., 43

_After Democracy_, 592, 638

Alexander, Sir George, 452, 457

Allen, Grant, 154, 400, 461 _et seq._, 555

America, present-day politics in, 648

Amery, Rt. Hon. L. S., 76, 421, 651, 653, 654

Angell, Sir Norman, 273

_Ann Veronica_, 394, 405, 419, 463, 546

_Answers to Correspondents_, 260, 269

_Anticipations_, 273, 399, 546, 548, 614, 625, 683

Archer, William, 574, 603

Arlen, Michael, 551

Arnold House, 506, 509

Astor, W. W., 308, 433, 435

Atlas House, Bromley, 39, 40 _et seq._, 81, 153

Austen, Jane, 28, 426

_Autocracy of Mr. Parham, The_, 421

Aveling, Dr., 285


Bacon, Roger, 623

Bagnold, Enid, 513

Balfour, Francis, 660

Balfour, Lord, 427, 542, 602, 646, 652, 660
  _et seq._, 666

Balzac, Honor, 423

Baring, Maurice, 542

Barker, Ernest, 603, 611, 614

Barker, Granville, 456

Barrie, Sir J. M., 309, 427, 449
  visit to Wells, 380, 508
  _When a Man's Single_, 306

Barron, Oswald, 513

Baxter, Charles, 449

Beaverbrook, Lord, 595

Beerbohm, Max, 439

Bellairs, Carlyon, 651, 653

Belloc, Hilaire, 622, 704

Benham, Sarah, 25, 26, 37

Bennett, Arnold, 251, 343
  books of, 536
  correspondence with Wells, 533
  source of success of, 534
  personality of, 537

Benson, Mgr. R. H., 513

Bentham, Jeremy, 511

Berle, A. A., 672, 677

Besant, Mrs. Annie, in the socialist movement, 192, 201

Bierce, Ambrose, 522

_Biology, Textbook of_, 283, 289

Birchenough, J., 651

Birkenhead, Lord, 439

Blake, William, 195

Blanchamp, Mr., 294, 438

Bland, Hubert, 216, 513 _et seq._, 565

Bland, Mrs. Hubert, 513 _et seq._, 532

_Bleak House_, 28

_Bomb, The_ (Harris), 443

_Book of Catherine Wells_, 388, 621, 632, 638

_Boon_, 580

Bottomley, H., 439

Bottomley, J. H., 402

Bowkett, Sidney, 74, 78, 509, 523

Boys, Prof. C. V., 169

Bradlaugh, Charles, 190

Bradlaugh-Besant trial, 146

Brailsford, H. N., 594

Brett, G. P., 615

Briggs, Dr. William, 276 _et seq._, 280 _et seq._

Brownlow, Earl of, 308

Bubnov, 701

Bullock, Miss, 30, 33, 81 _et seq._, 104

_Bulpington of Blup, The_, 420, 532, 580

Burney, Fanny, 28

Burton, William, 189, 203, 251
  as analytical chemist, 248
  declares himself a socialist, 193
  edits _Science Schools Journal_, 195

By the Ionian Sea (Gissing), 488

Byatt, Horace, 108 _et seq._, 122, 135 _et seq._, 141, 279


Campbell, Mrs. Patrick, 457

Candy, Arabella, 226, 227, 231, 235, 259

_Card, The_ (Arnold Bennett), 536

Carlyle, Thomas, 73, 195

Caroline, Queen, 27

Casebow, Mr., 118

Cassell's _Popular Educator_, 132

Causation, Wells on, 178, 179

Cecil, Lord Robert, 651

_Certain Personal Matters_, 309

Chamberlain, Rt. Hon. Joseph, 651, 652

Chambers' _Encyclopdia_, 132

Chapman, Mr., 440

Chesterton, Cecil, 513

Chesterton, G. K., 396, 454, 513

Choate, Ambassador, 672

Christian Socialism, 200

_Christina Alberta's Father_, 401, 420, 532

_Chronic Argonauts, The_, 253, 279, 434, 549

Churchill, Rt. Hon. Winston, 76, 542, 584

Claremont, Mrs., 593

Clayton, Mrs., 440

Clodd, Edmund, 481

Clynes, Rt. Hon. J. R., 637

Coefficients Club, 650

Colby, Bainbridge, 604, 605

Cole, Martin, 257

Colefax, Lady, 542

College of Preceptors, 62, 66, 275

Collins, Sir William J., 248, 249, 251, 293, 305

_Comdie Humaine_, 424

_Comic Cuts_, 270, 271

Communist Socialism, 215

_Cone, The_, 253

Conrad, Joseph, 525 et seq., 533 _et seq._

_Contemporary Novel, The_, 416

Cooper, Mr., 23, 80

Cooper, Fenimore, 55

Courtney, W. L., editor of _Fortnightly Review_, 551

Covell, Mr., 22

Cowap, Mr., 107

Crane, Cora, 522 _et seq._

Crane, Stephen, 522 _et seq._, 529, 531

Crane, Walter, 192, 527

Crawford, O. G. S., 582

Crewe, Lady, 542

Crichton-Browne, Sir James, 544

Crowhurst, Mr., 87

_Crown of Life_ (Gissing), 489

Crozier, Dr. Beattie, 616

Currie, Sir James, 136

Curtis, Lionel, 603

Curzon, Lord, 449, 542, 659, 660

Cust, Harry, 16, 396, 398, 442, 660
  appoints Wells dramatic critic, 431
  edits _Pall Mall Gazette_, 303, 309, 431

_Cyclic Delusion, The_, 180


D'Abernon, Lord, 449

_Daily Mail_, the, 269

Dall, Mrs., 680

Darrow, Clarence, 673

Darwin, Charles, 162

Davies, A. M., 189, 203, 242

Davies, Morley, 430

Dawkins, Clinton, 651

Deeks Case, 619

de Lisle, Lord, 32, 34

Denbigh, Earl of, 599

Desborough, Lady, 541

Deschanel, 138

de Soveral, Marquis, 542

Dickens, Charles, 28, 67, 426

Dickinson, G. Lowes, 593, 603

Dickinson, Lord, 593

_Discovery of the Future_, 544, 553

Dixie, Lady Florence, 95

Donald, Robert, 599

Downey, Archbishop, 622, 704

Doyle, Sir A. Conan, 466

_Dream, The_, 420, 421

_Dream of Armageddon, A_, 551

Drummond's _Natural Law in the Spiritual World_, 127

Duke, John, 41


Education Act of 1871, 66, 68, 269, 426

_Educational Times_, 289, 291, 309

Einstein, Prof. Albert, 13, 178, 655

Elcho, Lady Mary, 396, 542, 660

_Elements of Reconstruction_, 650

_Englishman Looks at the World, An_, 561, 569

Euclid's _Elements_, 108, 120

Evans, Caradoc, 114

_Evening News_, the, 269


Fabian Society, 193, 201 _et seq._, 204 _et seq._, 564
  association with Labour Party, 208
  attitude towards education, 213
  mission of, 213
  _New Heptarchy Series_ of, 210
  Wells' efforts to reorganize, 564
  Wells resigns from, 564

_Fabianism and the Empire_, 211

_Faults of the Fabian, The_, 564

Fetherstonhaugh, Lady, 33, 34, 81

Fetherstonhaugh, Miss, _see_ Bullock, Miss

Fetherstonhaugh, Sir Harry, 33, 106

Fellowship of Progressive Societies, 640

Field, Mr., 125, 127

_First Men in the Moon, The_, 397

Fisher, Prof. Irving, 677

Five Year Plan in Russia, 215, 665 _et seq._, 684

_Food of the Gods_, 211, 558

Forde, Captain, 30

Forster, E. M., 593

_Forsyte Saga, The_ (Galsworthy), 424

Foucault, Lon, 137

France, Anatole, 570

_Freethinker, The_, 126, 129, 146

French, Lord, 656

Freud, Sigmund, 246

Frewen, Morton, 522

_Future in America_, 675, 692


Gall, Janie, 222, 223, 226

Galsworthy, John, 418, 692

Garvin, J. L., 651

Geology, Wells on, 182

George IV, King, 25, 27, 33

George, Henry, 132, 140, 142

Gertz, Elmer, 440

Gissing, George, 477, 541
    career and work of, 481 _et seq._
    death of, 493

Gladstone, Rt. Hon. W. E., 28, 55, 66

_Glimpse, The_ (Arnold Bennett), 536

_God and Mr. Wells_ (Archer), 574

_God the Invisible King_, 575, 576

Gorky, Maxim, 692 _et seq._

Gosse, Edmund, 438, 508

Graham, Cunninghame, 439

Grahame, Kenneth, 471

_Great Good Place, The_, 6

Green, J. R., _History of the English People_, 72

Gregory, Maundy, 439

Gregory, Sir Richard, 191, 306

Grein, J. T., 439

Grey of Fallodon, Viscount, 603, 611, 651, 652, 657, 658, 659, 660

Guedalla, Philip, 423, 604, 614

Guest, Haden, 565

_Gulliver's Travels_, 106

Guthrie, Professor, 168 _et seq._, 177, 183, 189


Haig, Earl, 656

Haigh, E. V., 585

Haldane, Lord, 651, 652, 655 _et seq._

Hamilton, Lady Emma, 33

Hamilton, Sir William, 33

Harding, President, 679

Hardy, Thomas, 118

Harmsworth, Alfred, 268

Harmsworth, Alfred C., _see_ Northcliffe, Lord

Harmsworth, Geoffrey, 271

Harmsworth, Harold, _see_ Rothermere, Lord

Harmsworth, Lester, 271

Harris, Frank, 172, 233, 432, 551
   career of, 440 _et seq._
   takes over _Saturday Review_, 438
   Wells visits, 293

Harris, Mrs. Frank, 443, 444

Harris, usher, 135, 143, 151

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 250, 253

Headlam, Dr. J. W., _see_ Morley, Sir J. W. H.

Headlam, Stuart, in the socialist movement, 192

Healey, Elizabeth, 189, 238, 242, 250, 309, 370

Henley, W. E., 308, 432, 434, 449, 680

Henley House School, Kilburn, 260

Hewins, W. A. S., 651, 653, 654

Hick, Henry, 490, 496, 497, 498

Hilton, John, 603

Hind, Lewis, 432, 433

_History is One_, 613

_History of Mr. Polly_, 420

Hitler, Adolf, 73, 74

Hobson, J. A., 593

Holmes, Judge, 542

Holt Academy, Wrexham, 239

_Honours Physiography_, 306

Hoover, President, 679

Horder, Lord, 285

Horrabin, J. F., 615

Horsnell, Horace, 513

House, Colonel, 605

Housman, Laurence, 513

Howes, Prof. G. B., 161

Hudson, H. K., 599

Hudson, W. H., 154

Hueffer, Ford Madox, 397, 525, 526, 530

Hueffer, Oliver Madox, 526

_Human Origins_, 400

Humboldt's _Cosmos_, 72, 137

Huxley, Mrs., 139

Huxley, Prof. Julian, 13, 289, 617

Huxley, Prof. T. H., 137, 161, 162, 168, 183, 184, 288

Hyde, Edwin, 113, 118

Hyndman, H. M., 202


Imperial College of Science and Technology, 167, 187
  Debating Society of, 172, 189

_Imperial Palace_ (Arnold Bennett), 536, 537

_In the Days of the Comet_, 401, 403, 420, 558

_In the Fourth Year_, 570, 593, 594

_Invisible Man, The_, 458, 475

Irving, Sir Henry, 86

Irving, Washington, _Bracebridge Hall_, 157


James, Henry, 410 _et seq._, 423, 453, 508, 525, 541
  activities of, 20
  and expressionism, 522
  character of, 451
  novels of, 453

James, William, 415, 453

Jeans, Sir James, 25
  on causation, 181

Jefferies, Richard, 154

Jennings, A. V., 163, 172, 257, 286

Jepson, Edgar, 513

Jerome, J. K., 471

_Joan and Peter_, 414, 420, 423, 576, 580

Joffre, Marshal, 582

Johnston, Sir Harry, 136, 614

Jones, Mr., of Wrexham, 240 _et seq._, 265

Jones, Henry Arthur, 703

Jones, Sir Roderick, 599

Joynson-Hicks, Mr., 402

Judd, Professor, 183, 186, 187

_Jude the Obscure_, 118

Jung, definition of _persona_, 9


Key, John, 119 _et seq._

Keynes, J. M., 612

King, Miss, 85, 93, 100

King, Sir William, 82, 83, 146

Kingsley, Charles, 202

Kingsmill, Ethel, 352

Kingsmill, Hugh, 439, 440, 534

Kipling, Rudyard, 427, 449, 534, 650

_Kipps_, 121, 397, 414, 420, 498, 546

Kirk's _Anatomy_, 137

Kitchener, Lord, 656

Knott, Mrs., 51


_Labour Ideal of Education_, 630

Labour Party, association with socialism, 208

_Lady Frankland's Companion_, 251, 255

_Land Ironclads_, 583

Landseer, Sir Edwin, 35

Lang, Andrew, 154, 462

Lankester, Sir Ray, 396, 614

Laval, M., 679

Lawrence, D. H., 390

Lawrence, T. E., 602

League of Nations, Wells on, 593 _et seq._

Lee, Vernon, 415

Leeming, Lieut., 585

Le Gallienne, Richard, 466

Le Hand, Miss, 680

Lenin, Nicolai, 69
  comparison with Balfour, 664;
  with Stalin, 689
  reorganization of Communist Party, 215

_Let Us Arise and End War_, 570

_Liberal World Organisation_, 640

_Life and Loves of Frank Harris_, 445

_Life of Bernard Shaw_ (Harris), 445

Lindsay, Sir Ronald, 679

Lippmann, Walter, 510

_Little Wars_ (Wells), 76

Litvinov, 695

Lloyd George, Rt. Hon. David, 13, 274

Loewenstein, 439

_Love and Mr. Lewisham_, 135, 159, 160, 341, 342, 384, 392, 398, 401,
471, 494, 498

Low, Barbara, 292

Low, David, 420, 422, 586

Low, Frances, 292

Low, Ivy, 293

Low, Sir Maurice, 291

Low, Sir Sidney, 291, 471, 599, 650

Low, Walter, 289, 291, 293, 300, 431, 438

Lowson, J. M., 306

Lucy, Sir Henry, 542

Lyell, Sir Charles, 184

Lytton, Bulwer, 427


Maccoll, D. S., 439

Macdonald, Rt. Hon. Ramsay, 208, 439, 637

Macguire, Mrs., 542

Mackinder, H. J., 651, 653

McLaren, Mrs. Christabel, 136

McTaggart, 542

_Man of the Year Million_, 433, 549

_Mankind in the Making_, 209, 213, 546, 554, 559

Mansfield, Katherine, 388

Marburg, Theodore, 593, 594

_Marriage_, 411, 417, 419, 421

Martineau, Harriet, 672

Marx, Karl, 143, 200, 202
  and English Trade Unionism, 207
  and problem of revolution, 625
  association of socialism and democracy, 207
  unimaginativeness of, 214

Mason, A. E. W., 523

Masterman, Rt. Hon. C. F. G., 76, 396, 651

Mater, Andr, 594

Maurice, F., 202

Maxse, Leo, 651, 653

_Meanwhile_, 401

_Men Like Gods_, 421

Meredith, Annie, 156

Meredith, George, 404, 541

Meynell, Alice, 433

Midhurst Grammar School, 108, 135, 196

Mill, John Stuart, 203

Milne, A. A., 266, 269, 420

Milne, J. V., 261 _et seq._, 271

Milner, Lord, 650, 652, 655

Mitchell, laboratory instructor, 173, 174

Mitchell, Sir Chalmers, 223, 439

_Modern Utopia_, 147, 211, 213, 273, 363, 546, 554, 560, 625, 629

Moley, Raymond, 677

Mond, Mrs. Alfred, 544

Mond, Mrs. Emile, 544

Monkey Island, 85

Montagu, Rt. Hon. E. S., 285

Montague, C. E., 582

Montefiore, A. J., 269

Moore, Doris Langley, 513, 515, 516

Moore, George, 526, 534

More, Sir Thomas, 200

More's _Utopia_, 142

Morley, Sir J. W. Headlam, 596, 599, 602

Morley, Miss, 65

Morley, Mrs., 61, 65

Morley, Thomas, 240
  Geoffrey West on, 66
  school of, 59, 61, 196

Morris, William, in the socialist movement, 192, 198, 200, 202, 216, 509

Morrison, Arthur, 449

Mosley, Sir Oswald, 554, 669

_Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, 421

_Mr. Britling Sees It Through_, 414, 420, 423, 573

Munday, Mr., 23, 80

Municipalisation by Provinces, 210

Murchison, Sir Roderick I., 184

Murphy, James, 178, 181

Murray, Prof. Gilbert, 603, 611, 614

Mussolini, Signor, 554

Myers, F. W. H., 542

_Mysterious Universe, The_ (Jeans), 181


Nash, Mr., 94

Neal, Elizabeth, 26, 30

Neal, George, 25, 26, 37

Neal, John, 25, 26

Neal, Sarah, _see_ Wells, Mrs. Joseph, 25

Nelson, Lord, 33, 35

Neo-Malthusianism, 363, 399, 406

Nesbit, E., _see_ Bland, Mrs. Hubert

_New Machiavelli_, 397, 398, 401, 405, 463, 546, 565, 629, 632, 661

_New Statesman_ started, 212

New Vagabonds Club, 471

_New Worlds for Old_, 404

Newbolt, Henry, 651

Nicholson, Sir Charles, 599

Northcliffe, Lord, 265, 566, 602
  buys _The Times_, 663
  career of, 269, 270
  friendship with Wells, 271, 594, 595
  mentality of, 272
  on his success, 270
  produces school magazine, 260
_Nothing to Pay_, 114

Novels, "character" in, 415
  dialogue, 420
  Henry James on, 411 _et seq._
  objectives of, 414
  of the future, 422
  Wells on, 410
  with a purpose, 417


_Old Wives Tale, The_ (Arnold Bennett), 536

Oliver, F. S., 651

Olivier, Lord, 396, 512
  as a Fabian, 509
  in the socialist movement, 192

_Origin of the Idea of God_ (Allen), 461

Orr's _Circles of the Science_, 35

Ostrogorski, Professor, 511

Oundle School, 265, 621, 624

_Outline of History_, 612 _et seq._

Owen, Robert, 142, 199, 202


Paine, Tom, 106

Paish, Sir George, 593, 594

Paley's _Evidences_, 149

_Pall Mall Gazette_, 308

Passfield, Lord and Lady, _see_ Webb, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney

_Passionate Friends_, 401, 465

Pavlov's Physiological Institute, 697

Payne, James, 461

Payne, Jim, 521

Pease, Edward, 518, 565

P.E.N. Clubs, 692

Pennicott, Clara, 85, 86, 100

Pennicott, Kate, 85, 93, 130

Pennicott, Thomas, 76, 84 _et seq._, 93, 101

Petrography at South Kensington, 186

Physical Society, 169

Physics, riddles of science of, 176

_Physiological Aesthetics_ (Allen), 462

Pinero, Sir Arthur, 457

Pinker, J. B., 341, 524

Planck, Max, 178, 179, 182

Plato's _Republic_, 106, 140, 147

Platt, Mr., 119, 121, 132

Poe's _Narrative of A. Gordon Pym_, 71

Popham, Mr. and Mrs., 509

Porter, Mr., 189

Powell, Professor York, 520, 521

_Private Life of Henry Maitland_ (Roberts), 481

_Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ (Gissing), 488

Proudhon, _La Proprit c'est le Vol_, 202

Proust, Marcel, 388


Raleigh, Sir Walter, 542

_Rasselas_, 106

Raut, M., 240, 241

Rea, Sir Walter, 593

_Rediscovery of the Unique_, 179, 293

Reeves, Pember, 651

Reid, Capt. Mayne, 55

Reinach, Madame, 428

Repington, Colonel, 651

_Research Magnificent_, 419, 532, 629

Rhodes, Cecil, 646, 649

Rhondda, Lady, 408

_Riceyman Steps_ (Arnold Bennett), 536

Richardson, Dorothy, 471

Ridge, W. Pett, 428, 432

Riley, Miss, 27, 44

Robbins, Amy Catherine, at Woking, 457
  at Worcester Park, 471
  in Italy, 481, 482
  joins Wells in London, 310, 354
  life with Wells, 387 _et seq._, 428
  literary work of, 388
  marries H. G. Wells, 364
  Wells' letters to, 318, 320 _et seq._, 326
  death of, 634, 635

Robbins, Mrs., 328, 329, 431, 435

Roberts, Adeline, 298, 299, 320, 322

Roberts, Morley, 481, 491

Robinson, James Harvey, 622

Rodgers and Denyer, Messrs., 87, 88, 94, 118

Rogers, Professor, 677

Rolfe, Frederick, 513

Romney, George, 33

Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin, 679, 680

Roosevelt, President Franklin, 434, 636, 667
  policy of, 672 _et seq._

Roosevelt, President Theodore, 646 _et seq._, 679

Rosebery, Earl, 653

Ross, Sir Denison, 614

Rossetti, Christina, 527

Rothenstein, Sir William, 481

Rothermere, Lord, 269

Rouse, Mr., 241

Royal College of Science, 138, 161, 166 _et seq._

Ruck, Berta, 513

Runciman, J. F., 439

Ruskin, John, 234
  as socialist, 192, 200, 202

Russell, Bertrand, 651, 654

Russell, Charles, 673

Russia, experimental state capitalism in, 215
  Wells' visits to, 620, 659, 667, 683

_Russia in the Shadows_, 619


Sadler, Michael, 651

Saintsbury, Professor, 438

Salmon, Miss, 51

_Salvaging of Civilization, The_, 616

Samurai Order, 562 et seq., 629, 637

Sanders, W. Stephen, 210

Sanderson, Cobden, in the socialist movement, 192

Sanderson, F. W., 265, 620, 621

Sassoon, Sir Edward and Lady, 542

_Saturday Review_ under Harris, 437

_Scepticism of the Instrument_, 180

_Science of Life_, 281, 617

_Science Schools Journal_, 194, 247, 253, 309

_Sea Lady_, 393, 398, 401, 419, 509

_Secret Places of the Heart, The_, 401, 578

_Secrets of Crewe House_, 598

_Select Conversations with an Uncle_, 309, 430

_Shape of Things to Come_, 214, 421, 549, 640, 641

Sharp, Clifford, 513

Shaw, G. Bernard, 396, 439, 529
  and the theatre, 456
  at the Fabian Society, 193, 564
  brain of, 13
  contributes to _Saturday Review_, 438
  first meeting with Wells, 454
  friendship with Frank Harris, 445
  in the socialist movement, 193, 198, 202, 216
  meeting with Conrad, 530

Shaw, Lord, 594

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 147, 194, 250

Sheridan, Clare, 522, 585

_Short History of the World_, 615

Shorter, Clement K., 432

Sickert, Walter, 449

Silk, Mr., 294, 438

Simmons, A. T., 189, 193, 238, 264

Simon, Sir John, 680

Sitwell, Edith, 388

Sladen, Douglas, 471

_Slip under the Microscope, A_, 159

Smith, E. H., 189, 193, 194, 203

Smith, John Hugh, 651

Smith's _Principia_, 108, 120

Snowden, Philip, 637

Socialism, as practical Christianity, 200
  association with democracy, 206
  condemnation of profit motive, 202
  defects in nineteenth-century, 204, 558
  development of, 199
  early adherents to, 192
  essential unfruitfulness of, 216
  foreign, 201
  influence of Marx on, 214
  marriage under, 404
  progressiveness of Communist, 215
  repudiation of planning by, 213
  unprogressiveness in Western, 204
  Webb theory of, 205
  Wells' impression of, as student, 198
  Wells' Utopian, 561
  without a competent receiver, 206, 626

_Socialism and Sex Relations_, 403

_Socialism and the Family_, 402

_Socialism and the Middle Classes_, 402

_Socialism and the Scientific Motive_, 630

_Soul of a Bishop_, 419, 576

Sparrowhawk, Mr., 87

Spencer, Herbert, 192, 203, 344, 567, 672

Spender, J. A., 603, 611

Squire, Sir John, 513, 576

Stalin compared with Franklin Roosevelt, 667;
    with Lenin, 687
  Wells' interview with, 683 _et seq._

Steed, H. Wickham, 599, 603

Stevenson, Bob, 449, 521

Stevenson, R. L., 154, 250, 521

_Stolen Bacillus_, 433

_Story of a Great Schoolmaster_, 420, 621

_Story of Days to Come_, 551

_Story of Tommy and the Elephant_, 496

Strachey, Lytton, 423

Strachey, St. Loe, 396, 416

Street, G. S., 449, 457

Sturm's _Reflections_, 29

Sue, Eugene, _Mysteries of Paris_, 85

Surly Hall, 85 _et seq._, 101

Sutherland, Miss, 33, 34

Sutro, Alfred, 513

Sutton, Mrs., 53, 54

Symons, Arthur, 439

Swettenham, Colonel, 591

Swinnerton, Frank, 481, 540


Taylor, Miss, 320

Taylor, Mr., 189

Tennyson, Lord, 426

Terry, Ellen, at Surly Hall, 86, 231

Thackeray, W. M., 426

Thomas, Rt. Hon. J. H., 637

Thomas, Owen, 431

Thomson, Sir Basil, 449

Tilbury, Mr., 561

_Time Machine_, 172, 253, 279, 436, 446, 533, 550, 648

_Times, The_, 269, 271

Times Book Club, lecture to, 416

_Tit Bits_, 260, 269

Tobin, A. I., 440

Tolstoy, Alexis, 695

Tolstoy, Count Leo, fugitive impulse of, 6

Tomlinson, H. M., 531

_Tono Bungay_, 33, 123, 414, 420, 423, 546, 640

Trevelyan, Rt. Hon. Sir George, 76

Trollop, Anthony, 426

Trotsky, Leon D. B., 69, 136

Trotter, Wilfred, 562

Tutton, A. E., 194

Tyndall, 466

Tyrrell, Lord, 602, 658, 660


Umansky, Mr., 687

_Undying Fire, The_, 420, 562, 576, 577

_Universe Rigid, The_, 172, 179, 293

University Correspondence College, 276 _et seq._

_University Correspondent, The_, 291, 298

Unwin, Raymond, 593

_Up Park Alarmist_, 104


Van Loon, Hendrik, 615, 617

_Vathek_, 106

_Veranilda_ (Gissing), 491

Verne, Jules, 427

Vertov, Dziga, 667

Victoria, Queen, 27

Vincent, Edgar, _see_ D'Abernon, Lord

Vincent, Mr., 435

_Vision of Armageddon, A_, 481

Voltaire's books, 106

Voysey, C. F. A., 544, 546


Walker, Sir Emery, in the socialist movement, 192

Wallas, Graham, 192, 198, 209, 216, 509

Walton, Mrs., 135, 145

_War and Peace_, 424

_War and the Future_, 580, 591, 592

_War in the Air_, 569

_War of the Worlds_, 397, 458

Ward, Mrs. Humphry, 426

Warwick, Lady, 361, 443, 444

_Washington and the Hope of Peace_, 619

Watson, H. B. Marriott, 435, 449

Watts, Arthur, 513

_Way the World is Going, The_, 622

Webb, Sidney, 509, 512, 651, 652
  at the Fabian Society, 565
  in the socialist movement, 192, 202, 205, 210, 216

Webb, Mrs. Sidney, 205, 210, 216, 509, 512, 564
  originates Coefficients Club, 651

Wedgwood, Josiah, 651

Weismann, 160

Wells, Charles Edward, 34, 37

Wells, Edward, 34

Wells, Elizabeth, 34

Wells, Fanny J., 63, 64

Wells, Francis Charles, 156, 255
  apprenticeship of, 87
  at Nyewoods, 302
  in boyhood, 76
  in employment, 81, 82

Wells, Frederick Joseph, 156, 157, 249
  birth of, 42
  boyhood of, 77
  apprenticeship of, 87
  goes to South Africa, 305
  loses his job, 301
  on Wells' divorce, 355
  school of, 51
  starts work, 81
  Wells' letters to, 313, 318, 324, 325, 327, 335, 336, 340

Wells, G. P., brain of, 13
  collaborates with his father, 289, 617
  visits Russia, 683, 698

Wells, Hannah, 34

Wells, Henry, 34

Wells, Herbert George, birth of, 43
  accident to, 53
  apprenticeship of, 87 _et seq._
  as a lover, 351
  as a teacher, 136
  as dramatic critic, 450
  at Bromley Academy, 59
  at Henley House School, Kilburn, 260
  at Holt Academy, 239
  at Midhurst Grammar School, 109, 135
  at the New Vagabonds Club, 471
  at Up Park, 104, 138, 145, 248
  at Worcester Park, 471
  attends the Y.M.C.A., 125
  becomes a pupil teacher, 96
  believed to be consumptive, 245
  builds Spade House, 544
  class feeling of, 67-69
  comparison with Roger Bacon, 623
  conception of the world in youth, 69
  confirmation in Church of England, 149;
    preparation for, 150
  contributes to Debating Society, 189;
    to the _Daily Mail_, 566, 568;
    to the Fabian Society, 402;
    to the _Saturday Review_, 296
  declares himself a socialist, 192
  description of his mother, 26 _et seq._;
    of his father, 34 _et seq._, 153
  early ideas on religion, 125 _et seq._
  early reading of, 53, 106, 131
  early years of, 21, 43
  edits _Science Schools Journal_, 194
  efforts to reorganize the Fabian Society, 564
  Fabian report of, 207, 208
  failure as science student, 186, 188
    in drapery trade, 122
  first schools of, 51
  first start in life, 84
  first-class pass in zoology, 163
  friendship with A. V. Jennings, 163;
    with Catherine Robbins, 299;
    with Northcliffe, 271, 594;
    with Rebecca West, 79
  friendships in boyhood, 78
  health undermined as a student, 192
  idea of a planned world, 550 _et seq._
  impressions of socialism as student, 198
  in Italy, 481, 486
  in literary journalism, 290
  in love with Isabel Wells, 231
  in Southern France, 683
  in Woking, 457
  interest in Henry George, 142;
    in Plato, 140, 141
  interview with Cust, 431;
    with Stalin, 684 _et seq._
  invents telpherage system, 585
  is joined by Catherine Robbins, 310, 354
  lack of sympathy with his first wife, 297
  leaves his first wife, 310, 354
  leaves school, 66
  leaves Wookey, 99
  letters to his brother, 313, 318, 324, 325, 327, 335, 336, 340;
    to his father, 315, 329, 334, 349;
    to his mother, 90, 133, 317, 328, 329, 332, 334, 342;
    to Miss Robbins, 318, 320 _et seq._, 326
  life as a student in London, 217 _et seq._
  life with Catherine Robbins, 387 _et seq._, 428
  liking for Latin, 108, 118
  marriage, first, 277; second, 364
  matriculates, 173
  meeting with his first wife, 358, 359, 360
  obtains diploma of College of Preceptors, 275, 284
  obtains Doreck scholarship, 284
  on acquisitiveness, 157
  on adolescence, 111
  on Allen (Grant), 461;
    on Allen's _Woman Who Did_, 463
  on America's part in the war, 605
  on apprentices, 114
  on Aryans and Jews, 73
  on Balfour, 660
  on Bennett (Arnold), 533 _et seq._
  on biographies, 10
  on biological education, 285, 287 _et seq._
  on biological science, 177
  on Boys (Prof.), 169
  on Catholicism, 129, 486
  on Conrad, 525, 527
  on constructive revolution, 625 _et seq._, 635
  on Curzon, 659
  on Darwin, 162
  on educational methods at College of Science, 166
  on emancipation of women, 406
  on fear of death, 246
  on Foreign Office personnel, 658
  on free love, 362, 363, 403, 406
  on Gissing (George), 481 _et seq._
  on Grey (Viscount), 657
  on Haldane, 655
  on Harris (Frank), 439 _et seq._
  on higher education, 279 _et seq._
  on his _Anticipations_, 552
  on his _Discovery of the Future_, 553
  on his early writings, 238, 250
  on his letters, 311
  on his _Modern Utopia_, 560
  on his _Outline of History_, 613 _et seq._
  on his _persona_, 9
  on his visit to President Franklin Roosevelt, 679 _et seq._
  on Hitler, 73, 75
  on Hueffer (Ford Madox), 526
  on Huxley, 161
  on individuality in causation, 178 _et seq._
  on James (Henry), 410 _et seq._, 451
  on jealousy, 400
  on Judd (Prof.), 183
  on Lenin, 664
  on Leningrad and Moscow, 683, 685
  on life as a draper, 115
  on literary criticism, 427
  on literary style, 530
  on literature in the nineties, 426
  on London houses, 223
  on making of scientific apparatus, 170
  on measuring vibrations of a tuning fork, 173
  on Montague (C. E.), 582
  on Northcliffe, 271
  on novels, 410
  on origin of modern culture, 105
  on private school education, 264
  on psycho-analysis, 14, 55
  on quality of brains, 13, 643
  on reason for leaving his wife, 351 _et seq._
  on relations of the human mind to physical reality, 182
  on reverie, 52
  on Roosevelt (Theodore), 646
  on Sanderson of Oundle, 620
  on school system, 60
  on science in relation to the world, 160
  on science of physics, 175, 176
  on sex consciousness in children, 55, 56
  on sexual awakening, 144
  on Shaw (G. B.), 454
  on social life, 643
  on socialization in relation to municipal organization, 209
  on stopping education at, 14, 102
  on the Blands, 513
  on the "Brains Trust" in America, 677
  on the British Empire, 652
  on the Coefficients Club, 650 _et seq._
  on the Communist idea, 141
  on the educated mind, 528, 529, 535
  on the Fabian Society, 193, 200 _et seq._
  on the failure of socialism, 558
  on the framework of education, 618
  on the Harmsworths, 268 _et seq._
  on the Imperial College of Science, 166, 167, 187, 191
  on the Jewish question, 291
  on the League of Nations, 593 _et seq._, 612 _et seq._
  on the "New Deal" in America, 672
  on "the New Republic," 557, 566
  on the "Open Conspiracy," 635 _et seq._
  on the theatre, 456
  on the World State, 556
  on top hats, 232
  on use of tanks in war, 583
  on value of work accomplished, 11
  on Wallas (Graham), 510
  on war, 568 _et seq._, 570 _et seq._
  on Wilson's "Fourteen Points," 605
  on world change, 196 _et seq._
  on written examinations, 110
  ostracized owing to _Ann Veronica_, 396
  physical appearance of, 229
  pre-Marxian socialism of, 142
  prepares propaganda literature against Germany, 596
  present home of, 634
  President of P.E.N. Clubs, 692
  produces _Up Park Alarmist_, 104
  reading in sociology and economics, 194
  reads the _Freethinker_, 126, 129
  relations with his brothers, 76;
    with his father, 154
  religious views of, 44, 45
  resigns from Fabian Society, 564
  rewrites the _Time Machine_, 436
  school holidays, 85
  source of success of, 534
  stands as Labour candidate, 208
  studies under Huxley, 138, 159;
    under Guthrie, 168
  study of geology, 183;
    of German, 173;
    of Marxism, 142;
    of physics, 168;
    of science, 137;
    of zoology, 160
  sued for infringement of copyright, 619
  takes B.Sc. degree, 188
  talk with Lenin, 69
  theological views of, 573 _et seq._
  University career, 84
  Utopian theories of, 561 _et seq._
  visit to America, 646, 669;
    to the Burtons, 251;
    to Frank Harris, 294;
    to Russia in 1914, 620,
  in 1920, 619, 659,
  in 1934, 667, 683 _et seq._;
    to the war zones, 582
  war game of, 75
  works in chemist's shop, 107;
    in draper's shop, 113;
    for University Correspondence College, 276
  writes for _Pall Mall Gazette_, 309
  writings about sex, 392 _et seq._

Wells, Isabel Mary (Mrs. H. G.), 228, 231, 259, 275
  lack of sympathy with Wells, 297, 355
  marriage of, 277
  runs a poultry farm, 358
  second marriage of, 359
  death of, 361

Wells, Joseph, as a reader, 154
  as cricketer, 41
  at Atlas House, 153
  at Liss, 157, 310
  early years of, 34 _et seq._
  first meets Sarah Neal, 31, 32
  is lamed for life, 80
  marriage of, 37
  moves to Nyewoods, 83, 249
  sets up in business, 39
  Wells' letters to, 321, 329, 334, 341
  death of, 158

Wells, Joseph, senr., 34

Wells, Joseph, of Redleaf, 34, 35

Wells, Mrs. Joseph (Wells' mother), 25
  becomes housekeeper at Up Park, 81
  early years of, 26
  first meets her husband, 32
  is dismissed from Up Park, 301
  love affairs of, 31
  marriage of, 37
  moves to Nyewoods, 302;
    to Liss, 310
  plans for her son, 87, 107, 113
  religious beliefs of, 29, 139
  Wells' letters to, 90, 133, 317, 328, 329, 332, 334, 342
  death of, 158

Wells, Lucy, 34

Wells, William, 34, 226

Wells, Mrs. William, 222, 226, 231, 235, 259, 294, 355

Welsh, James, 466

Wemyss, Lady, 663

West, Geoffrey, 132
  biography of Wells, 67, 68 _et seq._, 255, 349
  on Morley's school, 67, 68

West, Rebecca, 465, 466

Whale, James, 475

_What Are We to Do with Our Lives?_, 578, 638

_What Is Coming?_, 580, 593, 594

_Wheels of Chance, The_, 420, 458, 532

_When the Sleeper Awakes_, 471, 496, 550

_Where is Science Going?_, 178

_Wife of Sir Isaac Harman, The_, 401, 407, 419, 463

Wilberforce, Bishop, 162

Wilde, Oscar, 296, 441, 457

Wilderspin, Mr., 135, 152

William IV, King, 27

Williams, Aneurin, 593

Williams, Bertha, 309, 387

Williams, Cousin, 98

Williams, "Uncle," 97 _et seq._

Wilson, President Woodrow, 274, 569, 604, 612

Wolfe, Humbert, 663

_Woman Who Did, The_ (Allen), 462

_Wonderful Visit, The_, 97

Wood's _Natural History_, 54

Woodward, Martin, 163

Wookey, Wells at, 96

Woolf, L. S., 594, 603

Woolf, Virginia, 388

_Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind_, 157, 182, 205, 213, 421, 511,
531, 617 _et seq._, 623, 637, 638, 640

_World of William Clissold, The_, 402, 421, 612, 633, 635, 637

_World Set Free, The_, 569

Wyndham, George, 427, 449, 542


_Year of Prophesying, A_, 622

_Young Man's Companion_, 35


Zaharoff, 439

Zimmern, Alfred, 510, 603, 611



FOOTNOTES:

[1] I wanted these flowers for teaching botany in Milne's school.

[2] What there was in that has already been told. See p. 293.

[3] The Textbooks of Biology.

[4] Kipps.




[End of _Experiment in Autobiography_ by H. G. Wells]
