prime minister-"
I looked at Chris Robinson, bright-eyed and his hair a little
ruffled and his whole being rhetorical, and measured him against the
huge machine of government muddled and mysterious. Oh! but I was
perplexed!
And then we took him back to Hatherleigh's rooms and drank beer and
smoked about him while he nursed his knee with hairy wristed hands
that protruded from his flannel shirt, and drank lemonade under the
cartoon of that emancipated Worker, and we had a great discursive
talk with him.
"Eh! you should see our big meetings up north?" he said.
Denson had ruffled him and worried him a good deal, and ever and
again he came back to that discussion. "It's all very easy for your
learned men to sit and pick holes," he said, "while the children
suffer and die. They don't pick holes up north. They mean
business."
He talked, and that was the most interesting part of it all, of his
going to work in a factory when he was twelve-" when you Chaps were
all with your mammies "-and how he had educated himself of nights
until he would fall asleep at his reading.
"It's made many of us keen for all our lives," he remarked, "all
that clemming for education. Why! I longed all through one winter
to read a bit of Darwin. I must know about this Darwin if I die for
it, I said. And I couldno' get the book."
Hatherleigh made an enthusiastic noise and drank beer at him with
round eyes over the mug.
"Well, anyhow I wasted no time on Greek and Latin," said Chris
Robinson. "And one learns to go straight at a thing without
splitting straws. One gets hold of the Elementals."
(Well, did they? That was the gist of my perplexity.)
"One doesn't quibble," he said, returning to his rankling memory of
Denson, "while men decay and starve."
"But suppose," I said, suddenly dropping into opposition, "the
alternatve is to risk a worse disaster-or do something patently
futile."
"I don't follow that," said Chris Robinson. "We don't propose
anything futile, so far as I can see."
6
The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but
Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic
professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly
Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the "White Man's
Burden."
It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that
period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively
mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;-never was a man so violently
exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down.
But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little
figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement
gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective
force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very
odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton
waste and the under officer and the engineer, and "shop" as a poetic
dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us
wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he
stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the
very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his
"Recessional," while I was still an undergraduate.
What did he give me exactly?
He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he
provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion
and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express,
that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to
express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore
something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it
back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and
the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and
inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:-
"Keep ye the Law-be swift in all obedience-
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own
That he reap where he hath sown;
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!"
And then again, and for all our later criticism, this sticks in my
mind, sticks there now as quintessential wisdom:
The 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awfuclass="underline" 'e leaves 'em all about
An' then comes up the regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.
All along o' dirtiness, all along o' mess,
All along o' doin' things rather-more-or-less,
All along of abby-nay, kul, an' hazar-ho,
Mind you keep your rifle an' yourself jus' so!"
It is after all a secondary matter that Kipling, not having been
born and brought up in Bromstead and Penge, and the war in South
Africa being yet in the womb of time, could quite honestly entertain
the now remarkable delusion that England had her side-arms at that
time kept anything but "awful." He learnt better, and we all learnt
with him in the dark years of exasperating and humiliating struggle
that followed, and I do not see that we fellow learners are
justified in turning resentfully upon him for a common ignorance and
assumption…
South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge
memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters
our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or
profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting
newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to
the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself
human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant
officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the
first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent
men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and
co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they
were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden
magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor
disgraceful were they,-just ill-trained and fairly plucky and
wonderfully good-tempered men-paying for it. And how it lowered
our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson's Nek, and
then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste
of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso-
Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in