I have told of my gradual abandonment of the pretensions1 and habits of party Liberalism. In a sense I was moving towards aristocracy. Regarding the development of the social and individual mental hinterland as the essential thing in human progress, I passed on very naturally to the practical assumption that we wanted what I may call "hinterlanders." Of course I do not mean by aristocracy the changing unorganised medley3 of rich people and privileged people who dominate the civilised world of to-day, but as opposed to this, a possibility of co-ordinating the will of the finer individuals, by habit and literature, into a broad common aim. We must have an aristocracy--not of privilege, but of understanding and purpose--or mankind will fail. I find this dawning more and more clearly when I look through my various writings of the years between 1903 and 1910. I was already emerging to plain statements in 1908.
I reasoned after this fashion. The line of human improvement and the expansion of human life lies in the direction of education and finer initiatives. If humanity cannot develop an education far beyond anything that is now provided, if it cannot collectively invent devices and solve problems on a much richer, broader scale than it does at the present time, it cannot hope to achieve any very much finer order or any more general happiness than it now enjoys. We must believe, therefore, that it CAN develop such a training and education, or we must abandon secular5 constructive6 hope. And here my peculiar7 difficulty as against crude democracy comes in. If humanity at large is capable of that high education and those creative freedoms our hope demands, much more must its better and more vigorous types be so capable. And if those who have power and leisure now, and freedom to respond to imaginative appeals, cannot be won to the idea of collective self-development, then the whole of humanity cannot be won to that. From that one passes to what has become my general conception in politics, the conception of the constructive imagination working upon the vast complex of powerful people, clever people, enterprising people, influential8 people, amidst whom power is diffused9 to-day, to produce that self-conscious, highly selective, open-minded, devoted10 aristocratic culture, which seems to me to be the necessary next phase in the development of human affairs. I see human progress, not as the spontaneous product of crowds of raw minds swayed by elementary needs, but as a natural but elaborate result of intricate human interdependencies, of human energy and curiosity liberated12 and acting13 at leisure, of human passions and motives14, modified and redirected by literature and art....
But now the reader will understand how it came about that, disappointed by the essential littleness of Liberalism, and disillusioned15 about the representative quality of the professed16 Socialists17, I turned my mind more and more to a scrutiny18 of the big people, the wealthy and influential people, against whom Liberalism pits its forces. I was asking myself definitely whether, after all, it was not my particular job to work through them and not against them. Was I not altogether out of my element as an Anti-? Weren't there big bold qualities about these people that common men lack, and the possibility of far more splendid dreams? Were they really the obstacles, might they not be rather the vehicles of the possible new braveries of life?
2
The faults of the Imperialist movement were obvious enough. The conception of the Boer War had been clumsy and puerile20, the costly21 errors of that struggle appalling22, and the subsequent campaign of Mr. Chamberlain for Tariff23 Reform seemed calculated to combine the financial adventurers of the Empire in one vast conspiracy24 against the consumer. The cant25 of Imperialism26 was easy to learn and use; it was speedily adopted by all sorts of base enterprises and turned to all sorts of base ends. But a big child is permitted big mischief27, and my mind was now continually returning to the persuasion28 that after all in some development of the idea of Imperial patriotism29 might be found that wide, rough, politically acceptable expression of a constructive dream capable of sustaining a great educational and philosophical30 movement such as no formula of Liberalism supplied. The fact that it readily took vulgar forms only witnessed to its strong popular appeal. Mixed in with the noisiness and humbug31 of the movement there appeared a real regard for social efficiency, a real spirit of animation32 and enterprise. There suddenly appeared in my world--I saw them first, I think, in 1908--a new sort of little boy, a most agreeable development of the slouching, cunning, cigarette-smoking, town-bred youngster, a small boy in a khaki hat, and with bare knees and athletic33 bearing, earnestly engaged in wholesome34 and invigorating games up to and occasionally a little beyond his strength--the Boy Scout35. I liked the Boy Scout, and I find it difficult to express how much it mattered to me, with my growing bias36 in favour of deliberate national training, that Liberalism hadn't been able to produce, and had indeed never attempted to produce, anything of this kind.
3
In those days there existed a dining club called--there was some lost allusion38 to the exorcism of party feeling in its title--the Pentagram Circle. It included Bailey and Dayton and myself, Sir Herbert Thorns, Lord Charles Kindling39, Minns the poet, Gerbault the big railway man, Lord Gane, fresh from the settlement of Framboya, and Rumbold, who later became Home Secretary and left us. We were men of all parties and very various experiences, and our object was to discuss the welfare of the Empire in a disinterested40 spirit. We dined monthly at the Mermaid41 in Westminster, and for a couple of years we kept up an average attendance of ten out of fourteen. The dinner-time was given up to desultory42 conversation, and it is odd how warm and good the social atmosphere of that little gathering43 became as time went on; then over the dessert, so soon as the waiters had swept away the crumbs44 and ceased to fret45 us, one of us would open with perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes' exposition of some specially46 prepared question, and after him we would deliver ourselves in turn, each for three or four minutes. When every one present had spoken once talk became general again, and it was rare we emerged upon Hendon Street before midnight. Sometimes, as my house was conveniently near, a knot of men would come home with me and go on talking and smoking in my dining-room until two or three. We had Fred Neal, that wild Irish journalist, among us towards the end, and his stupendous flow of words materially prolonged our closing discussions and made our continuance impossible.
I learned very much and very many things at those dinners, but more particularly did I become familiarised with the habits of mind of such men as Neal, Crupp, Gane, and the one or two other New Imperialists who belonged to us. They were nearly all like Bailey Oxford48 men, though mostly of a younger generation, and they were all mysteriously and inexplicably49 advocates of Tariff Reform, as if it were the principal instead of at best a secondary aspect of constructive policy. They seemed obsessed50 by the idea that streams of trade could be diverted violently so as to link the parts of the Empire by common interests, and they were persuaded, I still think mistakenly, that Tariff Reform would have an immense popular appeal. They were also very keen on military organisation51, and with a curious little martinet52 twist in their minds that boded53 ill for that side of public liberty. So much against them. But they were disposed to spend money much more generously on education and research of all sorts than our formless host of Liberals seemed likely to do; and they were altogether more accessible than the Young Liberals to bold, constructive ideas affecting the universities and upper classes. The Liberals are abjectly54 afraid of the universities. I found myself constantly falling into line with these men in our discussions, and more and more hostile to Dayton's sentimentalising evasions56 of definite schemes and Minns' trust in such things as the "Spirit of our People" and the "General Trend of Progress." It wasn't that I thought them very much righter than their opponents; I believe all definite party "sides" at any time are bound to be about equally right and equally lop-sided; but that I thought I could get more out of them and what was more important to me, more out of myself if I co-operated with them. By 1908 I had already arrived at a point where I could be definitely considering a transfer of my political allegiance.
These abstract questions are inseparably interwoven with my memory of a shining long white table, and our hock bottles and burgundy bottles, and bottles of Perrier and St. Galmier and the disturbed central trophy58 of dessert, and scattered59 glasses and nut-shells and cigarette-ends and menu-cards used for memoranda60. I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes61 of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind. Thorns lounges, rolling his round face and round eyes from speaker to speaker and sounding the visible depths of misery62 whenever Neal begins. Gerbault and Gane were given to conversation in undertones, and Bailey pursued mysterious purposes in lisping whispers. It was Crupp attracted me most. He had, as people say, his eye on me from the beginning. He used to speak at me, and drifted into a custom of coming home with me very regularly for an after-talk.
He opened his heart to me.
"Neither of us," he said, "are dukes, and neither of us are horny-handed sons of toil63. We want to get hold of the handles, and to do that, one must go where the power is, and give it just as constructive a twist as we can. That's MY Toryism."
"Is it Kindling's--or Gerbault's?"
"No. But theirs is soft, and mine's hard. Mine will wear theirs out. You and I and Bailey are all after the same thing, and why aren't we working together?"
"Are you a Confederate?" I asked suddenly.
"That's a secret nobody tells," he said.
"What are the Confederates after?"
"Making aristocracy work, I suppose. Just as, I gather, you want to do."...
The Confederates were being heard of at that time. They were at once attractive and repellent to me, an odd secret society whose membership nobody knew, pledged, it was said, to impose Tariff Reform and an ample constructive policy upon the Conservatives. In the press, at any rate, they had an air of deliberately64 organised power. I have no doubt the rumour65 of them greatly influenced my ideas....
In the end I made some very rapid decisions, but for nearly two years I was hesitating. Hesitations66 were inevitable67 in such a matter. I was not dealing68 with any simple question of principle, but with elusive69 and fluctuating estimates of the trend of diverse forces and of the nature of my own powers. All through that period I was asking over and over again: how far are these Confederates mere70 dreamers? How far--and this was more vital--are they rendering71 lip-service to social organisations? Is it true they desire war because it confirms the ascendency of their class? How far can Conservatism be induced to plan and construct before it resists the thrust towards change. Is it really in bulk anything more than a mass of prejudice and conceit72, cynical73 indulgence, and a hard suspicion of and hostility74 to the expropriated classes in the community?
That is a research which yields no statistics, an enquiry like asking what is the ruling colour of a chameleon75. The shadowy answer varied76 with my health, varied with my mood and the conduct of the people I was watching. How fine can people be? How generous?--not incidentally, but all round? How far can you educate sons beyond the outlook of their fathers, and how far lift a rich, proud, self-indulgent class above the protests of its business agents and solicitors77 and its own habits and vanity? Is chivalry78 in a class possible?--was it ever, indeed, or will it ever indeed be possible? Is the progress that seems attainable79 in certain directions worth the retrogression that may be its price?
4
It was to the Pentagram Circle that I first broached80 the new conceptions that were developing in my mind. I count the evening of my paper the beginning of the movement that created the BLUE WEEKLY and our wing of the present New Tory party. I do that without any excessive egotism, because my essay was no solitary81 man's production; it was my reaction to forces that had come to me very large through my fellow-members; its quick reception by them showed that I was, so to speak, merely the first of the chestnuts82 to pop. The atmospheric83 quality of the evening stands out very vividly84 in my memory. The night, I remember, was warmly foggy when after midnight we went to finish our talk at my house.
We had recently changed the rules of the club to admit visitors, and so it happened that I had brought Britten, and Crupp introduced Arnold Shoesmith, my former schoolfellow at City Merchants, and now the wealthy successor of his father and elder brother. I remember his heavy, inexpressively handsome face lighting85 to his rare smile at the sight of me, and how little I dreamt of the tragic86 entanglement87 that was destined88 to involve us both. Gane was present, and Esmeer, a newly-added member, but I think Bailey was absent. Either he was absent, or he said something so entirely89 characteristic and undistinguished that it has left no impression on my mind.
I had broken a little from the traditions of the club even in my title, which was deliberately a challenge to the liberal idea: it was, "The World Exists for Exceptional People." It is not the title I should choose now--for since that time I have got my phrase of "mental hinterlander" into journalistic use. I should say now, "The World Exists for Mental Hinterland."
The notes I made of that opening have long since vanished with a thousand other papers, but some odd chance has preserved and brought with me to Italy the menu for the evening; its back black with the scrawled91 notes I made of the discussion for my reply. I found it the other day among some letters from Margaret and a copy of the 1909 Report of the Poor Law Commission, also rich with pencilled marginalia.
My opening was a criticism of the democratic idea and method, upon lines such as I have already sufficiently92 indicated in the preceding sections. I remember how old Dayton fretted93 in his chair, and tushed and pished at that, even as I gave it, and afterwards we were treated to one of his platitudinous94 harangues95, he sitting back in his chair with that small obstinate96 eye of his fixed97 on the ceiling, and a sort of cadaverous glow upon his face, repeating--quite regardless of all my reasoning and all that had been said by others in the debate--the sacred empty phrases that were his soul's refuge from reality. "You may think it very clever," he said with a nod of his head to mark his sense of his point, "not to Trust in the People. I do." And so on. Nothing in his life or work had ever shown that he did trust in the people, but that was beside the mark. He was the party Liberal, and these were the party incantations.
After my preliminary attack on vague democracy I went on to show that all human life was virtually aristocratic; people must either recognise aristocracy in general or else follow leaders, which is aristocracy in particular, and so I came to my point that the reality of human progress lay necessarily through the establishment of freedoms for the human best and a collective receptivity and understanding. There was a disgusted grunt98 from Dayton, "Superman rubbish--Nietzsche. Shaw! Ugh!" I sailed on over him to my next propositions. The prime essential in a progressive civilisation99 was the establishment of a more effective selective process for the privilege of higher education, and the very highest educational opportunity for the educable. We were too apt to patronise scholarship winners, as though a scholarship was toffee given as a reward for virtue100. It wasn't any reward at all; it was an invitation to capacity. We had no more right to drag in virtue, or any merit but quality, than we had to involve it in a search for the tallest man. We didn't want a mere process for the selection of good as distinguished90 from gifted and able boys--"No, you DON'T," from Dayton--we wanted all the brilliant stuff in the world concentrated upon the development of the world. Just to exasperate101 Dayton further I put in a plea for gifts as against character in educational, artistic102, and legislative103 work. "Good teaching," I said, "is better than good conduct. We are becoming idiotic104 about character."
Dayton was too moved to speak. He slewed105 round upon me an eye of agonised aversion.
I expatiated106 on the small proportion of the available ability that is really serving humanity to-day. "I suppose to-day all the thought, all the art, all the increments108 of knowledge that matter, are supplied so far as the English-speaking community is concerned by--how many?--by three or four thousand individuals. ('Less,' said Thorns.) To be more precise, by the mental hinterlands of three or four thousand individuals. We who know some of the band entertain no illusions as to their innate109 rarity. We know that they are just the few out of many, the few who got in our world of chance and confusion, the timely stimulus110, the apt suggestion at the fortunate moment, the needed training, the leisure. The rest are lost in the crowd, fail through the defects of their qualities, become commonplace workmen and second-rate professional men, marry commonplace wives, are as much waste as the driftage of superfluous111 pollen112 in a pine forest is waste."
"Decent honest lives!" said Dayton to his bread-crumbs, with his chin in his necktie. "WASTE!"
"And the people who do get what we call opportunity get it usually in extremely limited and cramping113 forms. No man lives a life of intellectual productivity alone; he needs not only material and opportunity, but helpers, resonators. Round and about what I might call the REAL men, you want the sympathetic cooperators, who help by understanding. It isn't that our--SALT of three or four thousand is needlessly rare; it is sustained by far too small and undifferentiated a public. Most of the good men we know are not really doing the very best work of their gifts; nearly all are a little adapted, most are shockingly adapted to some second-best use. Now, I take it, this is the very centre and origin of the muddle114, futility115, and unhappiness that distresses117 us; it's the cardinal118 problem of the state--to discover, develop, and use the exceptional gifts of men. And I see that best done--I drift more and more away from the common stuff of legislative and administrative119 activity--by a quite revolutionary development of the educational machinery120, but by a still more unprecedented121 attempt to keep science going, to keep literature going, and to keep what is the necessary spur of all science and literature, an intelligent and appreciative122 criticism going. You know none of these things have ever been kept going hitherto; they've come unexpectedly and inexplicably."
"Hear, hear!" from Dayton, cough, nodding of the head, and an expression of mystical profundity123.
"They've lit up a civilisation and vanished, to give place to darkness again. Now the modern state doesn't mean to go back to darkness again--and so it's got to keep its light burning." I went on to attack the present organisation of our schools and universities, which seemed elaborately designed to turn the well-behaved, uncritical, and uncreative men of each generation into the authoritative124 leaders of the next, and I suggested remedies upon lines that I have already indicated in the earlier chapters of this story....
So far I had the substance of the club with me, but I opened new ground and set Crupp agog125 by confessing my doubt from which party or combination of groups these developments of science and literature and educational organisation could most reasonably be expected. I looked up to find Crupp's dark little eye intent upon me.
There I left it to them.
We had an astonishingly good discussion; Neal burst once, but we emerged from his flood after a time, and Dayton had his interlude. The rest was all close, keen examination of my problem.
I see Crupp now with his arm bent126 before him on the table in a way we had, as though it was jointed127 throughout its length like a lobster's antenna128, his plump, short-fingered hand crushing up a walnut129 shell into smaller and smaller fragments. "Remington," he said, "has given us the data for a movement, a really possible movement. It's not only possible, but necessary--urgently necessary, I think, if the Empire is to go on."
"We're working altogether too much at the social basement in education and training," said Gane. "Remington is right about our neglect of the higher levels."
Britten made a good contribution with an analysis of what he called the spirit of a country and what made it. "The modern community needs its serious men to be artistic and its artists to be taken seriously," I remember his saying. "The day has gone by for either dull responsibility or merely witty130 art."
I remember very vividly how Shoesmith harped131 on an idea I had thrown out of using some sort of review or weekly to express and elaborate these conceptions of a new, severer, aristocratic culture.
"It would have to be done amazingly well," said Britten, and my mind went back to my school days and that ancient enterprise of ours, and how Cossington had rushed it. Well, Cossington had too many papers nowadays to interfere132 with us, and we perhaps had learnt some defensive133 devices.
"But this thing has to be linked to some political party," said Crupp, with his eye on me. "You can't get away from that. The Liberals," he added, "have never done anything for research or literature."
"They had a Royal Commission on the Dramatic Censorship," said Thorns, with a note of minute fairness. "It shows what they were made of," he added.
"It's what I've told Remington again and again," said Crupp, "we've got to pick up the tradition of aristocracy, reorganise it, and make it work. But he's certainly suggested a method."
"There won't be much aristocracy to pick up," said Dayton, darkly to the ceiling, "if the House of Lords throws out the Budget."
"All the more reason for picking it up," said Neal. "For we can't do without it."
"Will they go to the bad, or will they rise from the ashes, aristocrats135 indeed--if the Liberals come in overwhelmingly?" said Britten.
"It's we who might decide that," said Crupp, insidiously136.
"I agree," said Gane.
"No one can tell," said Thorns. "I doubt if they will get beaten."
It was an odd, fragmentary discussion that night. We were all with ideas in our minds at once fine and imperfect. We threw out suggestions that showed themselves at once far inadequate137, and we tried to qualify them by minor138 self-contradictions. Britten, I think, got more said than any one. "You all seem to think you want to organise2 people, particular groups and classes of individuals," he insisted. "It isn't that. That's the standing4 error of politicians. You want to organise a culture. Civilisation isn't a matter of concrete groupings; it's a matter of prevailing139 ideas. The problem is how to make bold, clear ideas prevail. The question for Remington and us is just what groups of people will most help this culture forward."
"Yes, but how are the Lords going to behave?" said Crupp. "You yourself were asking that a little while ago."
"If they win or if they lose," Gane maintained, "there will be a movement to reorganise aristocracy--Reform of the House of Lords, they'll call the political form of it."
"Bailey thinks that," said some one.
"The labour people want abolition," said some one. "Let 'em," said Thorns.
He became audible, sketching140 a possibility of action.
"Suppose all of us were able to work together. It's just one of those indeterminate, confused, eventful times ahead when a steady jet of ideas might produce enormous results."
"Leave me out of it," said Dayton, "IF you please."
"We should," said Thorns under his breath.
I took up Crupp's initiative, I remember, and expanded it.
"I believe we could do--extensive things," I insisted.
"Revivals141 and revisions of Toryism have been tried so often," said Thorns, "from the Young England movement onward142."
"Not one but has produced its enduring effects," I said. "It's the peculiarity143 of English conservatism that it's persistently145 progressive and rejuvenescent."
I think it must have been about that point that Dayton fled our presence, after some clumsy sentence that I decided146 upon reflection was intended to remind me of my duty to my party.
Then I remember Thorns firing doubts at me obliquely147 across the table. "You can't run a country through its spoilt children," he said. "What you call aristocrats are really spoilt children. They've had too much of everything, except bracing148 experience."
"Children can always be educated," said Crupp.
"I said SPOILT children," said Thorns.
"Look here, Thorns!" said I. "If this Budget row leads to a storm, and these big people get their power clipped, what's going to happen? Have you thought of that? When they go out lock, stock, and barrel, who comes in?"
"Nature abhors149 a Vacuum," said Crupp, supporting me.
"Bailey's trained officials," suggested Gane.
"Quacks150 with a certificate of approval from Altiora," said Thorns. "I admit the horrors of the alternative. There'd be a massacre151 in three years."
"One may go on trying possibilities for ever," I said. "One thing emerges. Whatever accidents happen, our civilisation needs, and almost consciously needs, a culture of fine creative minds, and all the necessary tolerances153, opennesses, considerations, that march with that. For my own part, I think that is the Most Vital Thing. Build your ship of state as you will; get your men as you will; I concentrate on what is clearly the affair of my sort of man,--I want to ensure the quality of the quarter deck."
"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, suddenly--his first remark for a long time. "A first-rate figure," said Shoesmith, gripping it.
"Our danger is in missing that," I went on. "Muddle isn't ended by transferring power from the muddle-headed few to the muddle-headed many, and then cheating the many out of it again in the interests of a bureaucracy of sham154 experts. But that seems the limit of the liberal imagination. There is no real progress in a country, except a rise in the level of its free intellectual activity. All other progress is secondary and dependant155. If you take on Bailey's dreams of efficient machinery and a sort of fanatical discipline with no free-moving brains behind it, confused ugliness becomes rigid156 ugliness,--that's all. No doubt things are moving from looseness to discipline, and from irresponsible controls to organised controls--and also and rather contrariwise everything is becoming as people say, democratised; but all the more need in that, for an ark in which the living element may be saved."
"Hear, hear!" said Shoesmith, faint but pursuing.
It must have been in my house afterwards that Shoesmith became noticeable. He seemed trying to say something vague and difficult that he didn't get said at all on that occasion. "We could do immense things with a weekly," he repeated, echoing Neal, I think. And there he left off and became a mute expressiveness157, and it was only afterwards, when I was in bed, that I saw we had our capitalist in our hands....
We parted that night on my doorstep in a tremendous glow--but in that sort of glow one doesn't act upon without much reconsideration, and it was some months before I made my decision to follow up the indications of that opening talk.
5
I find my thoughts lingering about the Pentagram Circle. In my developments it played a large part, not so much by starting new trains of thought as by confirming the practicability of things I had already hesitatingly entertained. Discussion with these other men so prominently involved in current affairs endorsed158 views that otherwise would have seemed only a little less remote from actuality than the guardians159 of Plato or the labour laws of More. Among other questions that were never very distant from our discussions, that came apt to every topic, was the true significance of democracy, Tariff Reform as a method of international hostility, and the imminence160 of war. On the first issue I can still recall little Bailey, glib161 and winking162, explaining that democracy was really just a dodge163 for getting assent164 to the ordinances165 of the expert official by means of the polling booth. "If they don't like things," said he, "they can vote for the opposition166 candidate and see what happens then--and that, you see, is why we don't want proportional representation to let in the wild men." I opened my eyes--the lids had dropped for a moment under the caress167 of those smooth sounds--to see if Bailey's artful forefinger168 wasn't at the side of his predominant nose.
The international situation exercised us greatly. Our meetings were pervaded169 by the feeling that all things moved towards a day of reckoning with Germany, and I was largely instrumental in keeping up the suggestion that India was in a state of unstable170 equilibrium171, that sooner or later something must happen there--something very serious to our Empire. Dayton frankly172 detested173 these topics. He was full of that old Middle Victorian persuasion that whatever is inconvenient175 or disagreeable to the English mind could be annihilated176 by not thinking about it. He used to sit low in his chair and look mulish. "Militarism," he would declare in a tone of the utmost moral fervour, "is a curse. It's an unmitigated curse." Then he would cough shortly and twitch177 his head back and frown, and seem astonished beyond measure that after this conclusive178 statement we could still go on talking of war.
All our Imperialists were obsessed by the thought of international conflict, and their influence revived for a time those uneasinesses that had been aroused in me for the first time by my continental179 journey with Willersley and by Meredith's "One of Our Conquerors181." That quite justifiable182 dread183 of a punishment for all the slackness, mental dishonesty, presumption184, mercenary respectability and sentimentalised commercialism of the Victorian period, at the hands of the better organised, more vigorous, and now far more highly civilised peoples of Central Europe, seemed to me to have both a good and bad series of consequences. It seemed the only thing capable of bracing English minds to education, sustained constructive effort and research; but on the other hand it produced the quality of a panic, hasty preparation, impatience185 of thought, a wasteful186 and sometimes quite futile187 immediacy. In 1909, for example, there was a vast clamour for eight additional Dreadnoughts--
"We want eight
And we won't wait,"
but no clamour at all about our national waste of inventive talent, our mean standard of intellectual attainment188, our disingenuous189 criticism, and the consequent failure to distinguish men of the quality needed to carry on the modern type of war. Almost universally we have the wrong men in our places of responsibility and the right men in no place at all, almost universally we have poorly qualified190, hesitating, and resentful subordinates, because our criticism is worthless and, so habitually192 as to be now almost unconsciously, dishonest. Germany is beating England in every matter upon which competition is possible, because she attended sedulously193 to her collective mind for sixty pregnant years, because in spite of tremendous defects she is still far more anxious for quality in achievement than we are. I remember saying that in my paper. From that, I remember, I went on to an image that had flashed into my mind. "The British Empire," I said, "is like some of those early vertebrated monsters, the Brontosaurus and the Atlantosaurus and such-like; it sacrifices intellect to character; its backbone194, that is to say,--especially in the visceral region--is bigger than its cranium. It's no accident that things are so. We've worked for backbone. We brag195 about backbone, and if the joints196 are anchylosed so much the better. We're still but only half awake to our error. You can't change that suddenly."
"Turn it round and make it go backwards," interjected Thorns.
"It's trying to do that," I said, "in places."
And afterwards Crupp declared I had begotten197 a nightmare which haunted him of nights; he was trying desperately198 and belatedly to blow a brain as one blows soap-bubbles on such a mezoroic saurian as I had conjured199 up, while the clumsy monster's fate, all teeth and brains, crept nearer and nearer....
I've grown, I think, since those days out of the urgency of that apprehension200. I still think a European war, and conceivably a very humiliating war for England, may occur at no very distant date, but I do not think there is any such heroic quality in our governing class as will make that war catastrophic. The prevailing spirit in English life--it is one of the essential secrets of our imperial endurance--is one of underbred aggression201 in prosperity and diplomatic compromise in moments of danger; we bully202 haughtily203 where we can and assimilate where we must. It is not for nothing that our upper and middle-class youth is educated by teachers of the highest character, scholars and gentlemen, men who can pretend quite honestly that Darwinism hasn't upset the historical fall of man, that cricket is moral training, and that Socialism is an outrage204 upon the teachings of Christ. A sort of dignified205 dexterity206 of evasion57 is the national reward. Germany, with a larger population, a vigorous and irreconcilable207 proletariat, a bolder intellectual training, a harsher spirit, can scarcely fail to drive us at last to a realisation of intolerable strain. So we may never fight at all. The war of preparations that has been going on for thirty years may end like a sham-fight at last in an umpire's decision. We shall proudly but very firmly take the second place. For my own part, since I love England as much as I detest174 her present lethargy of soul, I pray for a chastening war--I wouldn't mind her flag in the dirt if only her spirit would come out of it. So I was able to shake off that earlier fear of some final and irrevocable destruction truncating208 all my schemes. At the most, a European war would be a dramatic episode in the reconstruction209 I had in view.
In India, too, I no longer foresee, as once I was inclined to see, disaster. The English rule in India is surely one of the most extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant, and doesn't know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens he remains210. Our functions in India are absurd. We English do not own that country, do not even rule it. We make nothing happen; at the most we prevent things happening. We suppress our own literature there. Most English people cannot even go to this land they possess; the authorities would prevent it. If Messrs. Perowne or Cook organised a cheap tour of Manchester operatives, it would be stopped. No one dare bring the average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers, every one who might be supposed to know what India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were up to there. I am not writing without my book in these matters. And beyond a phrase or so about "even-handed justice"--and look at our sedition211 trials!--they told me nothing. Time after time I have heard of that apocryphal212 native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee nor a virgin213 would be left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification214. But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins215 of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder216 than paralysis217, better fire and sword than futility. Our flag is spread over the peninsula, without plans, without intentions--a vast preventive. The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for themselves. But that does not arrest the resentment218 of men held back from life. Consider what it must be for the educated Indian sitting at the feast of contemporary possibilities with his mouth gagged and his hands bound behind him! The spirit of insurrection breaks out in spite of espionage219 and seizures220. Our conflict for inaction develops stupendous absurdities221. The other day the British Empire was taking off and examining printed cotton stomach wraps for seditious emblems222 and inscriptions223....
In some manner we shall have to come out of India. We have had our chance, and we have demonstrated nothing but the appalling dulness of our national imagination. We are not good enough to do anything with India. Codger and Flack, and Gates and Dayton, Cladingbowl in the club, and the HOME CHURCHMAN in the home, cant about "character," worship of strenuous224 force and contempt of truth; for the sake of such men and things as these, we must abandon in fact, if not in appearance, that empty domination. Had we great schools and a powerful teaching, could we boast great men, had we the spirit of truth and creation in our lives, then indeed it might be different. But a race that bears a sceptre must carry gifts to justify225 it.
It does not follow that we shall be driven catastrophically from India. That was my earlier mistake. We are not proud enough in our bones to be ruined by India as Spain was by her empire. We may be able to abandon India with an air of still remaining there. It is our new method. We train our future rulers in the public schools to have a very wholesome respect for strength, and as soon as a power arises in India in spite of us, be it a man or a culture, or a native state, we shall be willing to deal with it. We may or may not have a war, but our governing class will be quick to learn when we are beaten. Then they will repeat our South African diplomacy226, and arrange for some settlement that will abandon the reality, such as it is, and preserve the semblance227 of power. The conqueror180 DE FACTO will become the new "loyal Briton," and the democracy at home will be invited to celebrate our recession--triumphantly. I am no believer in the imminent228 dissolution of our Empire; I am less and less inclined to see in either India or Germany the probability of an abrupt229 truncation230 of those slow intellectual and moral constructions which are the essentials of statecraft.
6
I sit writing in this little loggia to the sound of dripping water--this morning we had rain, and the roof of our little casa is still not dry, there are pools in the rocks under the sweet chestnuts, and the torrent231 that crosses the salita is full and boastful,--and I try to recall the order of my impressions during that watching, dubious232 time, before I went over to the Conservative Party. I was trying--chaotic task--to gauge233 the possibilities inherent in the quality of the British aristocracy. There comes a broad spectacular effect of wide parks, diversified234 by woods and bracken valleys, and dappled with deer; of great smooth lawns shaded by ancient trees; of big facades235 of sunlit buildings dominating the country side; of large fine rooms full of handsome, easy-mannered people. As a sort of representative picture to set off against those other pictures of Liberals and of Socialists I have given, I recall one of those huge assemblies the Duchess of Clynes inaugurated at Stamford House. The place itself is one of the vastest private houses in London, a huge clustering mass of white and gold saloons with polished floors and wonderful pictures, and staircases and galleries on a Gargantuan236 scale. And there she sought to gather all that was most representative of English activities, and did, in fact, in those brilliant nocturnal crowds, get samples of nearly every section of our social and intellectual life, with a marked predominance upon the political and social side.
I remember sitting in one of the recesses237 at the end of the big saloon with Mrs. Redmondson, one of those sharp-minded, beautiful rich women one meets so often in London, who seem to have done nothing and to be capable of everything, and we watched the crowd--uniforms and splendours were streaming in from a State ball--and exchanged information. I told her about the politicians and intellectuals, and she told me about the aristocrats, and we sharpened our wit on them and counted the percentage of beautiful people among the latter, and wondered if the general effect of tallness was or was not an illusion.
They were, we agreed, for the most part bigger than the average of people in London, and a handsome lot, even when they were not subtly individualised. "They look so well nurtured," I said, "well cared for. I like their quiet, well-trained movements, their pleasant consideration for each other."
"Kindly238, good tempered, and at bottom utterly239 selfish," she said, "like big, rather carefully trained, rather pampered241 children. What else can you expect from them?"
"They are good tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered242, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty243. I confess I admire them. Oh! I like them. I wouldn't at all mind, I believe, giving over the country to this aristocracy--given SOMETHING--"
"Which they haven't got."
"Which they haven't got--or they'd be the finest sort of people in the world."
"That something?" she inquired.
"I don't know. I've been puzzling my wits to know. They've done all sorts of things--"
"That's Lord Wrassleton," she interrupted, "whose leg was broken--you remember?--at Spion Kop."
"It's healed very well. I like the gold lace and the white glove resting, with quite a nice awkwardness, on the sword. When I was a little boy I wanted to wear clothes like that. And the stars! He's got the V. C. Most of these people here have at any rate shown pluck, you know--brought something off."
"Not quite enough," she suggested.
"I think that's it," I said. "Not quite enough--not quite hard enough," I added.
She laughed and looked at me. "You'd like to make us," she said.
"What?"
"Hard."
"I don't think you'll go on if you don't get hard."
"We shan't be so pleasant if we do."
"Well, there my puzzled wits come in again. I don't see why an aristocracy shouldn't be rather hard trained, and yet kindly. I'm not convinced that the resources of education are exhausted244. I want to better this, because it already looks so good."
"How are we to do it?" asked Mrs. Redmondson.
"Oh, there you have me! I've been spending my time lately in trying to answer that! It makes me quarrel with"--I held up my fingers and ticked the items off--"the public schools, the private tutors, the army exams, the Universities, the Church, the general attitude of the country towards science and literature--"
"We all do," said Mrs. Redmondson. "We can't begin again at the beginning," she added.
"Couldn't one," I nodded at the assembly in general, start a movement?
"There's the Confederates," she said, with a faint smile that masked a gleam of curiosity.... "You want," she said, "to say to the aristocracy, 'Be aristocrats. NOBLESSE OBLIGE.' Do you remember what happened to the monarch245 who was told to 'Be a King'?"
"Well," I said, "I want an aristocracy."
"This," she said, smiling, "is the pick of them. The backwoodsmen are off the stage. These are the brilliant ones--the smart and the blues246.... They cost a lot of money, you know."
So far Mrs. Redmondson, but the picture remained full of things not stated in our speech. They were on the whole handsome people, charitable minded, happy, and easy. They led spacious247 lives, and there was something free and fearless about their bearing that I liked extremely. The women particularly were wide-reading, fine-thinking. Mrs. Redmondson talked as fully240 and widely and boldly as a man, and with those flashes of intuition, those startling, sudden delicacies248 of perception few men display. I liked, too, the relations that held between women and men, their general tolerance152, their antagonism249 to the harsh jealousies250 that are the essence of the middle-class order....
After all, if one's aim resolved itself into the development of a type and culture of men, why shouldn't one begin at this end?
It is very easy indeed to generalise about a class or human beings, but much harder to produce a sample. Was old Lady Forthundred, for instance, fairly a sample? I remember her as a smiling, magnificent presence, a towering accumulation of figure and wonderful shimmering251 blue silk and black lace and black hair, and small fine features and chins and chins and chins, disposed in a big cane252 chair with wraps and cushions upon the great terrace of Champneys. Her eye was blue and hard, and her accent and intonation253 were exactly what you would expect from a rather commonplace dressmaker pretending to be aristocratic. I was, I am afraid, posing a little as the intelligent but respectful inquirer from below investigating the great world, and she was certainly posing as my informant. She affected254 a cynical coarseness. She developed a theory on the governance of England, beautifully frank and simple. "Give 'um all a peerage when they get twenty thousand a year," she maintained. "That's my remedy."
In my new role of theoretical aristocrat11 I felt a little abashed255.
"Twenty thousand," she repeated with conviction.
It occurred to me that I was in the presence of the aristocratic theory currently working as distinguished from my as yet unformulated intentions.
"You'll get a lot of loafers and scamps among 'um," said Lady Forthundred. "You get loafers and scamps everywhere, but you'll get a lot of men who'll work hard to keep things together, and that's what we're all after, isn't ut?
"It's not an ideal arrangement."
"Tell me anything better," said Lady Forthundred.
On the whole, and because she refused emphatically to believe in education, Lady Forthundred scored.
We had been discussing Cossington's recent peerage, for Cossington, my old schoolfellow at City Merchants', and my victor in the affair of the magazine, had clambered to an amazing wealth up a piled heap of energetically pushed penny and halfpenny magazines, and a group of daily newspapers. I had expected to find the great lady hostile to the new-comer, but she accepted him, she gloried in him.
"We're a peerage," she said, "but none of us have ever had any nonsense about nobility."
She turned and smiled down on me. "We English," she said, "are a practical people. We assimilate 'um."
"Then, I suppose, they don't give trouble?"
"Then they don't give trouble."
"They learn to shoot?"
"And all that," said Lady Forthundred. "Yes. And things go on. Sometimes better than others, but they go on--somehow. It depends very much on the sort of butler who pokes256 'um about."
I suggested that it might be possible to get a secure twenty thousand a year by at least detrimental257 methods--socially speaking.
"We must take the bad and the good of 'um," said Lady Forthundred, courageously258....
Now, was she a sample? It happened she talked. What was there in the brains of the multitude of her first, second, third, fourth, and fifth cousins, who didn't talk, who shone tall, and bearing themselves finely, against a background of deft259, attentive260 maids and valets, on every spacious social scene? How did things look to them?
7
Side by side with Lady Forthundred, it is curious to put Evesham with his tall, bent body, his little-featured almost elvish face, his unequal mild brown eyes, his gentle manner, his sweet, amazing oratory261. He led all these people wonderfully. He was always curious and interested about life, wary262 beneath a pleasing frankness--and I tormented263 my brain to get to the bottom of him. For a long time he was the most powerful man in England under the throne; he had the Lords in his hand, and a great majority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues264 that are the concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he remained a commoner to the end of his days.
I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking265 for him that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me to stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in British political life. Some men one sees through and understands, some one cannot see into or round because they are of opaque266 clay, but about Evesham I had a sense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was so big and atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had that effect upon me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with him--he was in the big house party at Champneys--talked to him, sounded him, watching him as I sat beside him. I could talk to him with extraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other men have to be treated in a special manner; approached through their own mental dialect, flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and done. Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffy267 little rooms looking out upon the sea.
And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with Mankind? That I thought worth knowing.
I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a dinner so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced into duologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics.
"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party converge268. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, and people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion become matters of science--and cease to be party questions."
He instanced education.
"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."
"Apart from the religious question."
He dropped that aspect with an easy grace, and went on with his general theme that political conflict was the outcome of uncertainty269. "Directly you get a thing established, so that people can say, 'Now this is Right,' with the same conviction that people can say water is a combination of oxygen and hydrogen, there's no more to be said. The thing has to be done...."
And to put against this effect of Evesham, broad and humanely270 tolerant, posing as the minister of a steadily271 developing constructive conviction, there are other memories.
Have I not seen him in the House, persistent144, persuasive272, indefatigable273, and by all my standards wickedly perverse274, leaning over the table with those insistent275 movements of his hand upon it, or swaying forward with a grip upon his coat lapel, fighting with a diabolical276 skill to preserve what are in effect religious tests, tests he must have known would outrage and humiliate277 and injure the consciences of a quarter--and that perhaps the best quarter--of the youngsters who come to the work of elementary education?
In playing for points in the game of party advantage Evesham displayed at times a quite wicked unscrupulousness in the use of his subtle mind. I would sit on the Liberal benches and watch him, and listen to his urbane278 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 iniquity279 was justified280 by greater, remoter ends of which I had no intimation?
They accused him of nepotism281. His friends and family were certainly well cared for. In private life he was full of an affectionate intimacy282; he pleased by being charmed and pleased. One might think at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight. Oh, beyond question he was great! No other contemporary politician had his quality. In no man have I perceived so sympathetically the great contrast between warm, personal things and the white dream of statecraft. Except that he had it seemed no hot passions, but only interests and fine affections and indolences, he paralleled the conflict of my life. He saw and thought widely and deeply; but at times it seemed to me his greatness stood over and behind the reality of his life, like some splendid servant, thinking his own thoughts, who waits behind a lesser283 master's chair....
8
Of course, when Evesham talked of this ideal of the organised state becoming so finely true to practicability and so clearly stated as to have the compelling conviction of physical science, he spoke47 quite after my heart. Had he really embodied284 the attempt to realise that, I could have done no more than follow him blindly. But neither he nor I embodied that, and there lies the gist285 of my story. And when it came to a study of others among the leading Tories and Imperialists the doubt increased, until with some at last it was possible to question whether they had any imaginative conception of constructive statecraft at all; whether they didn't opaquely286 accept the world for what it was, and set themselves single-mindedly to make a place for themselves and cut a figure in it.
There were some very fine personalities287 among them: there were the great peers who had administered Egypt, India, South Africa, Framboya--Cromer, Kitchener, Curzon, Milner, Gane, for example. So far as that easier task of holding sword and scales had gone, they had shown the finest qualities, but they had returned to the perplexing and exacting288 problem of the home country, a little glorious, a little too simply bold. They wanted to arm and they wanted to educate, but the habit of immediate289 necessity made them far more eager to arm than to educate, and their experience of heterogeneous290 controls made them overrate the need for obedience291 in a homogeneous country. They didn't understand raw men, ill-trained men, uncertain minds, and intelligent women; and these are the things that matter in England.... There were also the great business adventurers, from Cranber to Cossington (who was now Lord Paddockhurst). My mind remained unsettled, and went up and down the scale between a belief in their far-sighted purpose and the perception of crude vanities, coarse ambitions, vulgar competitiveness, and a mere habitual191 persistence292 in the pursuit of gain. For a time I saw a good deal of Cossington--I wish I had kept a diary of his talk and gestures, to mark how he could vary from day to day between a POSEUR293, a smart tradesman, and a very bold and wide-thinking political schemer. He had a vanity of sweeping294 actions, motor car pounces295, Napoleonic rushes, that led to violent ineffectual changes in the policy of his papers, and a haunting pursuit by parallel columns in the liberal press that never abashed him in the slightest degree. By an accident I plumbed296 the folly297 in him--but I feel I never plumbed his wisdom. I remember him one day after a lunch at the Barhams' saying suddenly, out of profound meditation298 over the end of a cigar, one of those sentences that seem to light the whole interior being of a man. "Some day," he said softly, rather to himself than to me, and A PROPOS of nothing--"some day I will raise the country."
"Why not?" I said, after a pause, and leant across him for the little silver spirit-lamp, to light my cigarette....
Then the Tories had for another section the ancient creations, and again there were the financial peers, men accustomed to reserve, and their big lawyers, accustomed to--well, qualified statement. And below the giant personalities of the party were the young bloods, young, adventurous299 men of the type of Lord Tarvrille, who had seen service in South Africa, who had travelled and hunted; explorers, keen motorists, interested in aviation, active in army organisation. Good, brown-faced stuff they were, but impervious300 to ideas outside the range of their activities, more ignorant of science than their chauffeurs301, and of the quality of English people than welt-politicians; contemptuous of school and university by reason of the Gateses and Flacks and Codgers who had come their way, witty, light-hearted, patriotic302 at the Kipling level, with a certain aptitude303 for bullying304. They varied in insensible gradations between the noble sportsmen on the one hand, and men like Gane and the Tories of our Pentagram club on the other. You perceive how a man might exercise his mind in the attempt to strike an average of public serviceability in this miscellany! And mixed up with these, mixed up sometimes in the same man, was the pure reactionary305, whose predominant idea was that the village schools should confine themselves to teaching the catechism, hat-touching and courtesying, and be given a holiday whenever beaters were in request....
I find now in my mind as a sort of counterpoise to Evesham the figure of old Lord Wardingham, asleep in the largest armchair in the library of Stamford Court after lunch. One foot rested on one of those things--I think they are called gout stools. He had been playing golf all the morning and wearied a weak instep; at lunch he had sat at my table and talked in the overbearing manner permitted to irascible important men whose insteps are painful. Among other things he had flouted306 the idea that women would ever understand statecraft or be more than a nuisance in politics, denied flatly that Hindoos were capable of anything whatever except excesses in population, regretted he could not censor134 picture galleries and circulating libraries, and declared that dissenters307 were people who pretended to take theology seriously with the express purpose of upsetting the entirely satisfactory compromise of the Established Church. "No sensible people, with anything to gain or lose, argue about religion," he said. "They mean mischief." Having delivered his soul upon these points, and silenced the little conversation to the left of him from which they had arisen, he became, after an appreciative encounter with a sanguinary woodcock, more amiable308, responded to some respectful initiatives of Crupp's, and related a number of classical anecdotes309 of those blighting310 snubs, vindictive311 retorts and scandalous miscarriages312 of justice that are so dear to the forensic313 mind. Now he reposed314. He was breathing heavily with his mouth a little open and his head on one side. One whisker was turned back against the comfortable padding. His plump strong hands gripped the arms of his chair, and his frown was a little assuaged315. How tremendously fed up he looked! Honours, wealth, influence, respect, he had them all. How scornful and hard it had made his unguarded expression!
I note without comment that it didn't even occur to me then to wake him up and ask him what HE was up to with mankind.
9
One countervailing influence to my drift to Toryism in those days was Margaret's quite religious faith in the Liberals. I realised that slowly and with a mild astonishment316. It set me, indeed, even then questioning my own change of opinion. We came at last incidentally, as our way was, to an exchange of views. It was as nearly a quarrel as we had before I came over to the Conservative side. It was at Champneys, and I think during the same visit that witnessed my exploration of Lady Forthundred. It arose indirectly317, I think, out of some comments of mine upon our fellow-guests, but it is one of those memories of which the scene and quality remain more vivid than the things said, a memory without any very definite beginning or end. It was afternoon, in the pause between tea and the dressing318 bell, and we were in Margaret's big silver-adorned, chintz-bright room, looking out on the trim Italian garden.... Yes, the beginning of it has escaped me altogether, but I remember it as an odd exceptional little wrangle319.
At first we seem to have split upon the moral quality of the aristocracy, and I had an odd sense that in some way too feminine for me to understand our hostess had aggrieved320 her. She said, I know, that Champneys distressed321 her; made her "eager for work and reality again."
"But aren't these people real?"
"They're so superficial, so extravagant322!"
I said I was not shocked by their unreality. They seemed the least affected people I had ever met. "And are they really so extravagant?" I asked, and put it to her that her dresses cost quite as much as any other woman's in the house.
"It's not only their dresses," Margaret parried. "It's the scale and spirit of things."
I questioned that. "They're cynical," said Margaret, staring before her out of the window.
I challenged her, and she quoted the Brabants, about whom there had been an ancient scandal. She'd heard of it from Altiora, and it was also Altiora who'd given her a horror of Lord Carnaby, who was also with us. "You know his reputation," said Margaret. "That Normandy girl. Every one knows about it. I shiver when I look at him. He seems--oh! like something not of OUR civilisation. He WILL come and say little things to me."
"Offensive things?"
"No, politenesses and things. Of course his manners are--quite right. That only makes it worse, I think. It shows he might have helped--all that happened. I do all I can to make him see I don't like him. But none of the others make the slightest objection to him."
"Perhaps these people imagine something might be said for him."
"That's just it," said Margaret.
"Charity," I suggested.
"I don't like that sort of toleration."
I was oddly annoyed. "Like eating with publicans and sinners," I said. "No!..."
But scandals, and the contempt for rigid standards their condonation323 displayed, weren't more than the sharp edge of the trouble. "It's their whole position, their selfish predominance, their class conspiracy against the mass of people," said Margaret. "When I sit at dinner in that splendid room, with its glitter and white reflections and candlelight, and its flowers and its wonderful service and its candelabra of solid gold, I seem to feel the slums and the mines and the over-crowded cottages stuffed away under the table."
I reminded Margaret that she was not altogether innocent of unearned increment107.
"But aren't we doing our best to give it back?" she said.
I was moved to question her. "Do you really think," I asked, "that the Tories and peers and rich people are to blame for social injustice324 as we have it to-day? Do you really see politics as a struggle of light on the Liberal side against darkness on the Tory?"
"They MUST know," said Margaret.
I found myself questioning that. I see now that to Margaret it must have seemed the perversest carping against manifest things, but at the time I was concentrated simply upon the elucidation325 of her view and my own; I wanted to get at her conception in the sharpest, hardest lines that were possible. It was perfectly326 clear that she saw Toryism as the diabolical element in affairs. The thing showed in its hopeless untruth all the clearer for the fine, clean emotion with which she gave it out to me. My sleeping peer in the library at Stamford Court and Evesham talking luminously327 behind the Hartstein flowers embodied the devil, and my replete328 citizen sucking at his cigar in the National Liberal Club, Willie Crampton discussing the care and management of the stomach over a specially hygienic lemonade, and Dr. Tumpany in his aggressive frock-coat pegging329 out a sort of copyright in Socialism, were the centre and wings of the angelic side. It was nonsense. But how was I to put the truth to her?
"I don't see things at all as you do," I said. "I don't see things in the same way."
"Think of the poor," said Margaret, going off at a tangent.
"Think of every one," I said. "We Liberals have done more mischief through well-intentioned benevolence330 than all the selfishness in the world could have done. We built up the liquor interest."
"WE!" cried Margaret. "How can you say that? It's against us."
"Naturally. But we made it a monopoly in our clumsy efforts to prevent people drinking what they liked, because it interfered331 with industrial regularity--"
"Oh!" cried Margaret, stung; and I could see she thought I was talking mere wickedness.
"That's it," I said.
"But would you have people drink whatever they pleased?"
"Certainly. What right have I to dictate332 to other men and women?"
"But think of the children!"
"Ah! there you have the folly of modern Liberalism, its half-cunning, half-silly way of getting at everything in a roundabout fashion. If neglecting children is an offence, and it IS an offence, then deal with it as such, but don't go badgering and restricting people who sell something that may possibly in some cases lead to a neglect of children. If drunkenness is an offence, punish it, but don't punish a man for selling honest drink that perhaps after all won't make any one drunk at all. Don't intensify333 the viciousness of the public-house by assuming the place isn't fit for women and children. That's either spite or folly. Make the public-house FIT for women and children. Make it a real public-house. If we Liberals go on as we are going, we shall presently want to stop the sale of ink and paper because those things tempt37 men to forgery334. We do already threaten the privacy of the post because of betting tout's letters. The drift of all that kind of thing is narrow, unimaginative, mischievous335, stupid...."
I stopped short and walked to the window and surveyed a pretty fountain, facsimile of one in Verona, amidst trim-cut borderings of yew336. Beyond, and seen between the stems of ilex trees, was a great blaze of yellow flowers....
"But prevention," I heard Margaret behind me, "is the essence of our work."
I turned. "There's no prevention but education. There's no antiseptics in life but love and fine thinking. Make people fine, make fine people. Don't be afraid. These Tory leaders are better people individually than the average; why cast them for the villains338 of the piece? The real villain337 in the piece--in the whole human drama--is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's virtuous339-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness. If I could do that I could let all that you call wickedness in the world run about and do what it jolly well pleased. It would matter about as much as a slightly neglected dog--in an otherwise well-managed home."
My thoughts had run away with me.
"I can't understand you," said Margaret, in the profoundest distress116. "I can't understand how it is you are coming to see things like this."
10
The moods of a thinking man in politics are curiously340 evasive and difficult to describe. Neither the public nor the historian will permit the statesman moods. He has from the first to assume he has an Aim, a definite Aim, and to pretend to an absolute consistency341 with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of life which plague us all so relentlessly342 nowadays are supposed to be silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly343 in the sight of all men. Those who have no real political experience can scarcely imagine the immense mental and moral strain there is between one's everyday acts and utterances344 on the one hand and the "thinking-out" process on the other. It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially345 complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs....
The most impossible of all autobiographies346 is an intellectual autobiography347. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean348 values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations349, the bleak350 lucidities of sleepless351 nights....
And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and, to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled352, experimenting way. To go into a study to think about statecraft is to turn your back on the realities you are constantly needing to feel and test and sound if your thinking is to remain vital; to choose an aim and pursue it in despite of all subsequent questionings is to bury the talent of your mind. It is no use dealing with the intricate as though it were simple, to leap haphazard353 at the first course of action that presents itself; the whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a poker354 to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get something done," but the only sane355 thing to do for the moment is to put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement356....
One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a curious irritability357 towards Margaret that I found difficult to conceal358. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position that this should happen. I was in such doubt myself, that I had no power to phrase things for her in a form she could use. Hitherto I had stage-managed our "serious" conversations. Now I was too much in earnest and too uncertain to go on doing this. I avoided talk with her. Her serene359, sustained confidence in vague formulae and sentimental55 aspirations360 exasperated361 me; her want of sympathetic apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes distressing362 and futile. It wasn't that I was always thinking right, and that she was always saying wrong. It was that I was struggling to get hold of a difficult thing that was, at any rate, half true, I could not gauge how true, and that Margaret's habitual phrasing ignored these elusive elements of truth, and without premeditation fitted into the weaknesses of my new intimations, as though they had nothing but weaknesses. It was, for example, obvious that these big people, who were the backbone of Imperialism and Conservatism, were temperamentally lax, much more indolent, much more sensuous363, than our deliberately virtuous Young Liberals. I didn't want to be reminded of that, just when I was in full effort to realise the finer elements in their composition. Margaret classed them and disposed of them. It was our incurable364 differences in habits and gestures of thought coming between us again.
The desert of misunderstanding widened. I was forced back upon myself and my own secret councils. For a time I went my way alone; an unmixed evil for both of us. Except for that Pentagram evening, a series of talks with Isabel Rivers, who was now becoming more and more important in my intellectual life, and the arguments I maintained with Crupp, I never really opened my mind at all during that period of indecisions, slow abandonments, and slow acquisitions.
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1
pretensions
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| 自称( pretension的名词复数 )； 自命不凡； 要求； 权力 | |
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organise
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| vt.组织，安排，筹办 | |
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medley
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| n.混合 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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secular
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| n.牧师，凡人；adj.世俗的，现世的，不朽的 | |
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constructive
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| adj.建设的，建设性的 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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influential
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| adj.有影响的，有权势的 | |
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diffused
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| 散布的，普及的，扩散的 | |
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devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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aristocrat
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| n.贵族，有贵族气派的人，上层人物 | |
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liberated
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| a.无拘束的，放纵的 | |
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acting
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| n.演戏，行为，假装；adj.代理的，临时的，演出用的 | |
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motives
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| n.动机，目的( motive的名词复数 ) | |
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disillusioned
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| a.不再抱幻想的，大失所望的，幻想破灭的 | |
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professed
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| 公开声称的，伪称的，已立誓信教的 | |
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socialists
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| 社会主义者( socialist的名词复数 ) | |
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scrutiny
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| n.详细检查，仔细观察 | |
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anti-
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| pref.[前缀]表示反抗，排斥 | |
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puerile
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| adj.幼稚的，儿童的 | |
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costly
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| adj.昂贵的，价值高的，豪华的 | |
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appalling
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| adj.骇人听闻的，令人震惊的，可怕的 | |
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tariff
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| n.关税，税率；(旅馆、饭店等)价目表，收费表 | |
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conspiracy
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| n.阴谋，密谋，共谋 | |
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cant
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| n.斜穿，黑话，猛扔 | |
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imperialism
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| n.帝国主义，帝国主义政策 | |
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mischief
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| n.损害，伤害，危害；恶作剧，捣蛋，胡闹 | |
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persuasion
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| n.劝说；说服；持有某种信仰的宗派 | |
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patriotism
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| n.爱国精神，爱国心，爱国主义 | |
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philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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humbug
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| n.花招，谎话，欺骗 | |
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animation
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| n.活泼，兴奋，卡通片／动画片的制作 | |
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athletic
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| adj.擅长运动的，强健的；活跃的，体格健壮的 | |
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wholesome
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| adj.适合；卫生的；有益健康的；显示身心健康的 | |
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scout
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| n.童子军，侦察员；v.侦察，搜索 | |
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bias
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| n.偏见，偏心，偏袒；vt.使有偏见 | |
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tempt
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| vt.引诱，勾引，吸引，引起…的兴趣 | |
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allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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kindling
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| n. 点火, 可燃物 动词kindle的现在分词形式 | |
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disinterested
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| adj.不关心的，不感兴趣的 | |
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mermaid
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| n.美人鱼 | |
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desultory
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| adj.散漫的，无方法的 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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44
crumbs
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| int. (表示惊讶)哎呀 n. 碎屑 名词crumb的复数形式 | |
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45
fret
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| v.(使)烦恼；(使)焦急；(使)腐蚀，(使)磨损 | |
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46
specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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47
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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48
Oxford
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| n.牛津（英国城市） | |
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49
inexplicably
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| adv.无法说明地，难以理解地，令人难以理解的是 | |
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obsessed
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| adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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51
organisation
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| n.组织，安排，团体，有机休 | |
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52
martinet
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| n.要求严格服从纪律的人 | |
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53
boded
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| v.预示，预告，预言( bode的过去式和过去分词 )；等待，停留( bide的过去分词 )；居住；（过去式用bided）等待 | |
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54
abjectly
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| 凄惨地； 绝望地； 糟透地； 悲惨地 | |
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sentimental
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| adj.多愁善感的，感伤的 | |
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56
evasions
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| 逃避( evasion的名词复数 )； 回避； 遁辞； 借口 | |
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57
evasion
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| n.逃避，偷漏(税) | |
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58
trophy
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| n.优胜旗，奖品，奖杯，战胜品，纪念品 | |
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59
scattered
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| adj.分散的，稀疏的；散步的；疏疏落落的 | |
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60
memoranda
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| n. 备忘录, 便条 名词memorandum的复数形式 | |
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61
platitudes
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| n.平常的话，老生常谈，陈词滥调( platitude的名词复数 )；滥套子 | |
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62
misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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63
toil
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| vi.辛劳工作，艰难地行动；n.苦工，难事 | |
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deliberately
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| adv.审慎地；蓄意地；故意地 | |
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rumour
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| n.谣言，谣传，传闻 | |
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66
hesitations
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| n.犹豫( hesitation的名词复数 )；踌躇；犹豫（之事或行为）；口吃 | |
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67
inevitable
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| adj.不可避免的，必然发生的 | |
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dealing
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| n.经商方法，待人态度 | |
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69
elusive
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| adj.难以表达(捉摸)的；令人困惑的；逃避的 | |
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70
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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71
rendering
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| n.表现，描写 | |
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conceit
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| n.自负，自高自大 | |
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73
cynical
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| adj.(对人性或动机)怀疑的，不信世道向善的 | |
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hostility
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| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
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chameleon
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| n.变色龙，蜥蜴；善变之人 | |
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76
varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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solicitors
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| 初级律师( solicitor的名词复数 ) | |
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78
chivalry
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| n.骑士气概，侠义；（男人）对女人彬彬有礼，献殷勤 | |
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attainable
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| a.可达到的，可获得的 | |
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broached
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| v.谈起( broach的过去式和过去分词 )；打开并开始用；用凿子扩大（或修光）；（在桶上）钻孔取液体 | |
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81
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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82
chestnuts
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| n.栗子( chestnut的名词复数 )；栗色；栗树；栗色马 | |
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atmospheric
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| adj.大气的，空气的；大气层的；大气所引起的 | |
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vividly
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| adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地 | |
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lighting
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| n.照明，光线的明暗，舞台灯光 | |
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tragic
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| adj.悲剧的，悲剧性的，悲惨的 | |
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entanglement
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| n.纠缠，牵累 | |
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destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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distinguished
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| adj.卓越的，杰出的，著名的 | |
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91
scrawled
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| 乱涂，潦草地写( scrawl的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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sufficiently
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| adv.足够地，充分地 | |
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fretted
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| 焦躁的，附有弦马的，腐蚀的 | |
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platitudinous
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| adj.平凡的，陈腐的 | |
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harangues
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| n.高谈阔论的长篇演讲( harangue的名词复数 )v.高谈阔论( harangue的第三人称单数 ) | |
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obstinate
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| adj.顽固的，倔强的，不易屈服的，较难治愈的 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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grunt
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| v.嘟哝；作呼噜声；n.呼噜声，嘟哝 | |
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civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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100
virtue
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| n.德行，美德；贞操；优点；功效，效力 | |
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exasperate
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| v.激怒，使（疾病）加剧，使恶化 | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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legislative
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| n.立法机构，立法权；adj.立法的，有立法权的 | |
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idiotic
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| adj.白痴的 | |
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105
slewed
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| adj.喝醉的v.杀死，宰杀，杀戮( slay的过去式 )( slew的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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106
expatiated
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| v.详述，细说( expatiate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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107
increment
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| n.增值，增价；提薪，增加工资 | |
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increments
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| n.增长( increment的名词复数 )；增量；增额；定期的加薪 | |
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innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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stimulus
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| n.刺激，刺激物，促进因素，引起兴奋的事物 | |
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111
superfluous
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| adj.过多的，过剩的，多余的 | |
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112
pollen
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| n.[植]花粉 | |
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113
cramping
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| 图像压缩 | |
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114
muddle
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| n.困惑，混浊状态；vt.使混乱，使糊涂，使惊呆；vi.胡乱应付，混乱 | |
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115
futility
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| n.无用 | |
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116
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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117
distresses
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| n.悲痛( distress的名词复数 )；痛苦；贫困；危险 | |
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118
cardinal
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| n.(天主教的)红衣主教；adj.首要的，基本的 | |
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119
administrative
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| adj.行政的，管理的 | |
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120
machinery
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| n.(总称)机械，机器；机构 | |
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121
unprecedented
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| adj.无前例的，新奇的 | |
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122
appreciative
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| adj.有鉴赏力的，有眼力的；感激的 | |
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123
profundity
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| n.渊博；深奥，深刻 | |
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124
authoritative
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| adj.有权威的，可相信的；命令式的；官方的 | |
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125
agog
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| adj.兴奋的，有强烈兴趣的； adv.渴望地 | |
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126
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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127
jointed
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| 有接缝的 | |
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128
antenna
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| n.触角，触须；天线 | |
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129
walnut
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| n.胡桃，胡桃木，胡桃色，茶色 | |
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130
witty
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| adj.机智的，风趣的 | |
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131
harped
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| vi.弹竖琴（harp的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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132
interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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133
defensive
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| adj.防御的；防卫的；防守的 | |
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134
censor
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| n./vt.审查，审查员；删改 | |
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135
aristocrats
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| n.贵族( aristocrat的名词复数 ) | |
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136
insidiously
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| 潜在地，隐伏地，阴险地 | |
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137
inadequate
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| adj.(for,to)不充足的，不适当的 | |
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138
minor
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| adj.较小(少)的，较次要的；n.辅修学科；vi.辅修 | |
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139
prevailing
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| adj.盛行的；占优势的；主要的 | |
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140
sketching
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| n.草图 | |
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141
revivals
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| n.复活( revival的名词复数 )；再生；复兴；（老戏多年后）重新上演 | |
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142
onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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143
peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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144
persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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145
persistently
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| ad.坚持地；固执地 | |
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146
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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147
obliquely
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| adv.斜； 倾斜； 间接； 不光明正大 | |
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148
bracing
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| adj.令人振奋的 | |
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149
abhors
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| v.憎恶( abhor的第三人称单数 )；（厌恶地）回避；拒绝；淘汰 | |
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150
quacks
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| abbr.quacksalvers 庸医，骗子(16世纪习惯用水银或汞治疗梅毒的人)n.江湖医生( quack的名词复数 )；江湖郎中；（鸭子的）呱呱声v.（鸭子）发出嘎嘎声( quack的第三人称单数 ) | |
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151
massacre
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| n.残杀，大屠杀；v.残杀，集体屠杀 | |
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152
tolerance
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| n.宽容；容忍，忍受；耐药力；公差 | |
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153
tolerances
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| n.宽容( tolerance的名词复数 )；容忍；忍耐力；偏差 | |
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154
sham
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| n./adj.假冒(的)，虚伪(的) | |
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155
dependant
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| n.依靠的，依赖的，依赖他人生活者 | |
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156
rigid
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| adj.严格的，死板的；刚硬的，僵硬的 | |
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157
expressiveness
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| n.富有表现力 | |
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158
endorsed
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| vt.& vi.endorse的过去式或过去分词形式v.赞同( endorse的过去式和过去分词 )；在（尤指支票的）背面签字；在（文件的）背面写评论；在广告上说本人使用并赞同某产品 | |
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159
guardians
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| 监护人( guardian的名词复数 )； 保护者，维护者 | |
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160
imminence
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| n.急迫，危急 | |
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161
glib
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| adj.圆滑的，油嘴滑舌的 | |
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162
winking
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| n.瞬眼，目语v.使眼色( wink的现在分词 )；递眼色（表示友好或高兴等）；（指光）闪烁；闪亮 | |
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163
dodge
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| v.闪开，躲开，避开；n.妙计，诡计 | |
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164
assent
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| v.批准，认可；n.批准，认可 | |
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165
ordinances
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| n.条例，法令( ordinance的名词复数 ) | |
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166
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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167
caress
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| vt./n.爱抚，抚摸 | |
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168
forefinger
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| n.食指 | |
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169
pervaded
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| v.遍及，弥漫( pervade的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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170
unstable
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| adj.不稳定的，易变的 | |
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171
equilibrium
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| n.平衡，均衡，相称，均势，平静 | |
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172
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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173
detested
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| v.憎恶，嫌恶，痛恨( detest的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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174
detest
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| vt.痛恨，憎恶 | |
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175
inconvenient
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| adj.不方便的，令人感到麻烦的 | |
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176
annihilated
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| v.（彻底）消灭( annihilate的过去式和过去分词 )；使无效；废止；彻底击溃 | |
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177
twitch
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| v.急拉，抽动，痉挛，抽搐；n.扯，阵痛，痉挛 | |
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178
conclusive
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| adj.最后的，结论的；确凿的，消除怀疑的 | |
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179
continental
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| adj.大陆的，大陆性的，欧洲大陆的 | |
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180
conqueror
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| n.征服者，胜利者 | |
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181
conquerors
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| 征服者，占领者( conqueror的名词复数 ) | |
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182
justifiable
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| adj.有理由的，无可非议的 | |
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183
dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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184
presumption
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| n.推测，可能性，冒昧，放肆，[法律]推定 | |
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185
impatience
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| n.不耐烦，急躁 | |
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186
wasteful
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|
| adj.（造成）浪费的，挥霍的 | |
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187
futile
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| adj.无效的，无用的，无希望的 | |
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188
attainment
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| n.达到，到达；［常pl.］成就，造诣 | |
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189
disingenuous
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| adj.不诚恳的，虚伪的 | |
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190
qualified
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| adj.合格的，有资格的，胜任的，有限制的 | |
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191
habitual
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| adj.习惯性的；通常的，惯常的 | |
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192
habitually
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| ad.习惯地，通常地 | |
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193
sedulously
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| ad.孜孜不倦地 | |
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194
backbone
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| n.脊骨，脊柱，骨干；刚毅，骨气 | |
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195
brag
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| v./n.吹牛，自夸；adj.第一流的 | |
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196
joints
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| 接头( joint的名词复数 )； 关节； 公共场所（尤指价格低廉的饮食和娱乐场所） （非正式）； 一块烤肉 （英式英语） | |
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197
begotten
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| v.为…之生父( beget的过去分词 )；产生，引起 | |
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198
desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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199
conjured
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| 用魔术变出( conjure的过去式和过去分词 )； 祈求，恳求； 变戏法； （变魔术般地） 使…出现 | |
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200
apprehension
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| n.理解，领悟；逮捕，拘捕；忧虑 | |
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201
aggression
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| n.进攻，侵略，侵犯，侵害 | |
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202
bully
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| n.恃强欺弱者，小流氓；vt.威胁，欺侮 | |
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203
haughtily
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| adv. 傲慢地, 高傲地 | |
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204
outrage
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| n.暴行，侮辱，愤怒；vt.凌辱，激怒 | |
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205
dignified
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| a.可敬的，高贵的 | |
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206
dexterity
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| n.(手的)灵巧，灵活 | |
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207
irreconcilable
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| adj.（指人）难和解的，势不两立的 | |
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208
truncating
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| v.截面的( truncate的现在分词 )；截头的；缩短了的；截去顶端或末端 | |
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209
reconstruction
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| n.重建，再现，复原 | |
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210
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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211
sedition
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| n.煽动叛乱 | |
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212
apocryphal
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| adj.假冒的，虚假的 | |
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213
virgin
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| n.处女，未婚女子；adj.未经使用的；未经开发的 | |
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214
justification
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| n.正当的理由；辩解的理由 | |
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215
virgins
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| 处女，童男( virgin的名词复数 )； 童贞玛利亚（耶稣之母） | |
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216
plunder
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| vt.劫掠财物，掠夺；n.劫掠物，赃物；劫掠 | |
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217
paralysis
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| n.麻痹(症)；瘫痪(症) | |
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218
resentment
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| n.怨愤，忿恨 | |
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219
espionage
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| n.间谍行为，谍报活动 | |
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220
seizures
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| n.起获( seizure的名词复数 )；没收；充公；起获的赃物 | |
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221
absurdities
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| n.极端无理性( absurdity的名词复数 )；荒谬；谬论；荒谬的行为 | |
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222
emblems
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| n.象征，标记( emblem的名词复数 ) | |
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223
inscriptions
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| （作者）题词( inscription的名词复数 )； 献词； 碑文； 证劵持有人的登记 | |
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224
strenuous
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| adj.奋发的，使劲的；紧张的；热烈的，狂热的 | |
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225
justify
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| vt.证明…正当(或有理)，为…辩护 | |
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226
diplomacy
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| n.外交；外交手腕，交际手腕 | |
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227
semblance
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| n.外貌，外表 | |
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228
imminent
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| adj.即将发生的，临近的，逼近的 | |
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229
abrupt
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| adj.突然的，意外的；唐突的，鲁莽的 | |
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230
truncation
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| n.切断；截短；缺棱；截尾 | |
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231
torrent
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| n.激流，洪流；爆发，(话语等的)连发 | |
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232
dubious
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| adj.怀疑的，无把握的；有问题的，靠不住的 | |
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233
gauge
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| v.精确计量；估计；n.标准度量；计量器 | |
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234
diversified
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| adj.多样化的，多种经营的v.使多样化，多样化( diversify的过去式和过去分词 )；进入新的商业领域 | |
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235
facades
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| n.（房屋的）正面( facade的名词复数 )；假象，外观 | |
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236
gargantuan
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| adj.巨大的，庞大的 | |
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237
recesses
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| n.壁凹( recess的名词复数 )；（工作或业务活动的）中止或暂停期间；学校的课间休息；某物内部的凹形空间v.把某物放在墙壁的凹处( recess的第三人称单数 )；将（墙）做成凹形，在（墙）上做壁龛；休息，休会，休庭 | |
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238
kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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239
utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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240
fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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241
pampered
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| adj.饮食过量的，饮食奢侈的v.纵容，宠，娇养( pamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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242
bad-tempered
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| adj.脾气坏的 | |
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243
modesty
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| n.谦逊，虚心，端庄，稳重，羞怯，朴素 | |
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244
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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245
monarch
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| n.帝王，君主，最高统治者 | |
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246
blues
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| n.抑郁，沮丧；布鲁斯音乐 | |
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247
spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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248
delicacies
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| n.棘手( delicacy的名词复数 )；精致；精美的食物；周到 | |
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249
antagonism
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| n.对抗，敌对，对立 | |
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250
jealousies
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| n.妒忌( jealousy的名词复数 )；妒羡 | |
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251
shimmering
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| v.闪闪发光，发微光( shimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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252
cane
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| n.手杖，细长的茎，藤条；v.以杖击，以藤编制的 | |
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253
intonation
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| n.语调，声调；发声 | |
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254
affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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255
abashed
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| adj.窘迫的，尴尬的v.使羞愧，使局促，使窘迫( abash的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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256
pokes
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| v.伸出( poke的第三人称单数 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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257
detrimental
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| adj.损害的，造成伤害的 | |
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258
courageously
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| ad.勇敢地，无畏地 | |
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259
deft
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| adj.灵巧的，熟练的（a deft hand 能手） | |
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260
attentive
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| adj.注意的，专心的；关心(别人)的，殷勤的 | |
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261
oratory
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| n.演讲术；词藻华丽的言辞 | |
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262
wary
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| adj.谨慎的，机警的，小心的 | |
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263
tormented
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| 饱受折磨的 | |
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264
intrigues
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| n.密谋策划( intrigue的名词复数 )；神秘气氛；引人入胜的复杂情节v.搞阴谋诡计( intrigue的第三人称单数 )；激起…的好奇心 | |
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265
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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266
opaque
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| adj.不透光的；不反光的，不传导的；晦涩的 | |
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267
stuffy
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| adj.不透气的，闷热的 | |
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268
converge
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| vi.会合；聚集，集中；(思想、观点等)趋近 | |
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269
uncertainty
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| n.易变，靠不住，不确知，不确定的事物 | |
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270
humanely
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| adv.仁慈地；人道地；富人情地；慈悲地 | |
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271
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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272
persuasive
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| adj.有说服力的，能说得使人相信的 | |
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273
indefatigable
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| adj.不知疲倦的，不屈不挠的 | |
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274
perverse
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| adj.刚愎的；坚持错误的，行为反常的 | |
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275
insistent
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| adj.迫切的，坚持的 | |
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276
diabolical
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| adj.恶魔似的，凶暴的 | |
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277
humiliate
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| v.使羞辱，使丢脸[同]disgrace | |
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278
urbane
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| adj.温文尔雅的，懂礼的 | |
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279
iniquity
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| n.邪恶；不公正 | |
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280
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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281
nepotism
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| n.任人唯亲；裙带关系 | |
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282
intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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283
lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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284
embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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285
gist
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| n.要旨；梗概 | |
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286
opaquely
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| adv.不透明地，无光泽地 | |
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287
personalities
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| n. 诽谤，（对某人容貌、性格等所进行的）人身攻击； 人身攻击；人格, 个性, 名人( personality的名词复数 ) | |
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288
exacting
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| adj.苛求的，要求严格的 | |
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289
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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290
heterogeneous
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| adj.庞杂的；异类的 | |
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291
obedience
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| n.服从，顺从 | |
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292
persistence
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| n.坚持，持续，存留 | |
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293
poseur
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| n.装模作样的人 | |
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294
sweeping
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| adj.范围广大的，一扫无遗的 | |
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295
pounces
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| v.突然袭击( pounce的第三人称单数 )；猛扑；一眼看出；抓住机会（进行抨击） | |
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296
plumbed
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| v.经历( plumb的过去式和过去分词 )；探究；用铅垂线校正；用铅锤测量 | |
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297
folly
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| n.愚笨，愚蠢，蠢事，蠢行，傻话 | |
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298
meditation
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| n.熟虑，（尤指宗教的）默想，沉思，（pl.）冥想录 | |
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299
adventurous
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| adj.爱冒险的；惊心动魄的，惊险的，刺激的 | |
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300
impervious
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| adj.不能渗透的，不能穿过的，不易伤害的 | |
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301
chauffeurs
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| n.受雇于人的汽车司机( chauffeur的名词复数 ) | |
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302
patriotic
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| adj.爱国的，有爱国心的 | |
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303
aptitude
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| n.(学习方面的)才能，资质，天资 | |
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304
bullying
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| v.恐吓，威逼( bully的现在分词 )；豪；跋扈 | |
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305
reactionary
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| n.反动者，反动主义者；adj.反动的，反动主义的，反对改革的 | |
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306
flouted
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| v.藐视，轻视( flout的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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307
dissenters
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| n.持异议者，持不同意见者( dissenter的名词复数 ) | |
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308
amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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309
anecdotes
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| n.掌故，趣闻，轶事( anecdote的名词复数 ) | |
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310
blighting
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| 使凋萎( blight的现在分词 )； 使颓丧； 损害； 妨害 | |
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311
vindictive
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|
| adj.有报仇心的，怀恨的，惩罚的 | |
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312
miscarriages
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| 流产( miscarriage的名词复数 ) | |
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313
forensic
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|
| adj.法庭的，雄辩的 | |
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314
reposed
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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315
assuaged
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| v.减轻( assuage的过去式和过去分词 )；缓和；平息；使安静 | |
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316
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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317
indirectly
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|
| adv.间接地，不直接了当地 | |
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318
dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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319
wrangle
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| vi.争吵 | |
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320
aggrieved
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|
| adj.愤愤不平的，受委屈的；悲痛的；（在合法权利方面）受侵害的v.令委屈，令苦恼，侵害( aggrieve的过去式)；令委屈，令苦恼，侵害( aggrieve的过去式和过去分词) | |
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321
distressed
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| 痛苦的 | |
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322
extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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323
condonation
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| n.容忍，宽恕，原谅 | |
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324
injustice
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| n.非正义，不公正，不公平，侵犯（别人的）权利 | |
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325
elucidation
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| n.说明，阐明 | |
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326
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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327
luminously
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| 发光的； 明亮的； 清楚的； 辉赫 | |
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328
replete
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| adj.饱满的，塞满的；n.贮蜜蚁 | |
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329
pegging
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| n.外汇钉住，固定证券价格v.用夹子或钉子固定( peg的现在分词 )；使固定在某水平 | |
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330
benevolence
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| n.慈悲，捐助 | |
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331
interfered
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| v.干预( interfere的过去式和过去分词 )；调停；妨碍；干涉 | |
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332
dictate
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| v.口授；(使)听写；指令，指示，命令 | |
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333
intensify
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| vt.加强；变强；加剧 | |
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334
forgery
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| n.伪造的文件等，赝品，伪造（行为） | |
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335
mischievous
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| adj.调皮的，恶作剧的，有害的，伤人的 | |
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336
yew
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| n.紫杉属树木 | |
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337
villain
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| n.反派演员，反面人物；恶棍；问题的起因 | |
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338
villains
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| n.恶棍( villain的名词复数 )；罪犯；（小说、戏剧等中的）反面人物；淘气鬼 | |
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339
virtuous
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| adj.有品德的，善良的，贞洁的，有效力的 | |
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340
curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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341
consistency
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| n.一贯性，前后一致，稳定性；(液体的)浓度 | |
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342
relentlessly
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| adv.不屈不挠地；残酷地；不间断 | |
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343
explicitly
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| ad.明确地，显然地 | |
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344
utterances
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| n.发声( utterance的名词复数 )；说话方式；语调；言论 | |
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345
essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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346
autobiographies
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| n.自传( autobiography的名词复数 )；自传文学 | |
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347
autobiography
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| n.自传 | |
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348
protean
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| adj.反复无常的；变化自如的 | |
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349
meditations
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| 默想( meditation的名词复数 )； 默念； 沉思； 冥想 | |
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350
bleak
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| adj.(天气)阴冷的；凄凉的；暗淡的 | |
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351
sleepless
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| adj.不睡眠的，睡不著的，不休息的 | |
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352
muddled
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|
| adj.混乱的；糊涂的；头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱，弄糟( muddle的过去式)；使糊涂；对付，混日子 | |
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353
haphazard
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|
| adj.无计划的，随意的，杂乱无章的 | |
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354
poker
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| n.扑克；vt.烙制 | |
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355
sane
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| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
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356
implement
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| n.(pl.)工具，器具；vt.实行，实施，执行 | |
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357
irritability
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| n.易怒 | |
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358
conceal
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| v.隐藏，隐瞒，隐蔽 | |
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359
serene
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| adj. 安详的，宁静的，平静的 | |
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360
aspirations
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|
| 强烈的愿望( aspiration的名词复数 )； 志向； 发送气音； 发 h 音 | |
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361
exasperated
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| adj.恼怒的 | |
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362
distressing
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| a.使人痛苦的 | |
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363
sensuous
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| adj.激发美感的；感官的，感觉上的 | |
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364
incurable
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| adj.不能医治的，不能矫正的，无救的；n.不治的病人，无救的人 | |
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