Westminster want you to put in fans here and fans there-the Longton
fools have… And then eating their dinners out of it all the
time!"…
At high tea that night-my uncle was still holding out against
evening dinner-Sibyl and Gertrude made what was evidently a
concerted demand for a motorcar.
"You've got your mother's brougham," he said, that's good enough for
you." But he seemed shaken by the fact that some Burslem rival was
launching out with the new invention. "He spoils his girls," he
remarked. "He's a fool," and became thoughtful.
Afterwards he asked me to come to him into his study; it was a room
with a writing-desk and full of pieces of earthenware and suchlike
litter, and we had our great row about Cambridge.
"Have you thought things over, Dick?" he said.
"I think I'll go to Trinity, Uncle," I said firmly. "I want to go
to Trinity. It is a great college."
He was manifestly chagrined. "You're a fool," he said.
I made no answer.
"You're a damned fool," he said. "But I suppose you've got to do
it. You could have come here-That don't matter, though, now…
You'll have your time and spend your money, and be a poor half-
starved clergyman, mucking about with the women all the day and
afraid to have one of your own ever, or you'll be a schoolmaster or
some such fool for the rest of your life. Or some newspaper chap.
That's what you'll get from Cambridge. I'm half a mind not to let
you. Eh? More than half a mind…"
"You've got to do the thing you can," he said, after a pause, "and
likely it's what you're fitted for."
4
I paid several short visits to Staffordshire during my Cambridge
days, and always these relations of mine produced the same effect of
hardness. My uncle's thoughts had neither atmosphere nor mystery.
He lived in a different universe from the dreams of scientific
construction that filled my mind. He could as easily have
understood Chinese poetry. His motives were made up of intense
rivalries with other men of his class and kind, a few vindictive
hates springing from real and fancied slights, a habit of
acquisition that had become a second nature, a keen love both of
efficiency and display in his own affairs. He seemed to me to have
no sense of the state, no sense and much less any love of beauty, no
charity and no sort of religious feeling whatever. He had strong
bodily appetites, he ate and drank freely, smoked a great deal, and
occasionally was carried off by his passions for a "bit of a spree"
to Birmingham or Liverpool or Manchester. The indulgences of these
occasions were usually followed by a period of reaction, when he was
urgent for the suppression of nudity in the local Art Gallery and a
harsh and forcible elevation of the superficial morals of the
valley. And he spoke of the ladies who ministered to the delights
of his jolly-dog period, when he spoke of them at all, by the
unprintable feminine equivalent. My aunt he treated with a kindly
contempt and considerable financial generosity, but his daughters
tore his heart; he was so proud of them, so glad to find them money
to spend, so resolved to own them, so instinctively jealous of every
man who came near them.
My uncle has been the clue to a great number of men for me. He was
an illuminating extreme. I have learnt what not to expect from them
through him, and to comprehend resentments and dangerous sudden
antagonisms I should have found incomprehensible in their more
complex forms, if I had not first seen them in him in their feral
With his soft felt hat at the back of his head, his rather heavy,
rather mottled face, his rationally thick boots and slouching tweed-
clad form, a little round-shouldered and very obstinate looking, he
strolls through all my speculations sucking his teeth audibly, and
occasionally throwing out a shrewd aphorism, the intractable
unavoidable ore of the new civilisation.
Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and
despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he
personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He
hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education
after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until
he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except
football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people
who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but
Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and
all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated
particularly, and in this order, Londoner's, Yorkshiremen, Scotch,
Welch and Irish, because they were not "reet Staffordshire," and he
hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently "reet." He
wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a
call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the
best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away
magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His
billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very
inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered
with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople
because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his
bidding. He was, in fact, a very naive, vigorous human being. He
was about as much civilised, about as much tamed to the ideas of
collective action and mutual consideration as a Central African
negro.
There are hordes of such men as he throughout all the modern
industrial world. You will find the same type with the slightest
modifications in the Pas de Calais or Rhenish Prussia or New Jersey
or North Italy. No doubt you would find it in New Japan. These men
have raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained,
uncultured, poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle.
To drive others they have had first to drive themselves. They have
never yet had occasion nor leisure to think of the state or social