My impression is that it consisted of about eighteen or twenty
people. They had had to come upstairs to me and they were
manifestly full of indignation and a little short of breath. There
was Parvill himself, J.P., dressed wholly in black-I think to mark
his sense of the occasion-and curiously suggestive in his respect
for my character and his concern for the honourableness of the
KINGHAMPSTEAD GUARDIAN editor, of Mark Antony at the funeral of
Cesar. There was Mrs. Bulger, also in mourning; she had never
abandoned the widow's streamers since the death of her husband ten
years ago, and her loyalty to Liberalism of the severest type was
part as it were of her weeds. There was a nephew of Sir Roderick
Newton, a bright young Hebrew of the graver type, and a couple of
dissenting ministers in high collars and hats that stopped halfway
between the bowler of this world and the shovel-hat of heaven.
There was also a young solicitor from Lurky done in the horsey
style, and there was a very little nervous man with a high brow and
a face contracting below as though the jawbones and teeth had been
taken out and the features compressed. The rest of the deputation,
which included two other public-spirited ladies and several
ministers of religion, might have been raked out of any omnibus
going Strandward during the May meetings. They thrust Parvill
forward as spokesman, and manifested a strong disposition to say
"Hear, hear!" to his more strenuous protests provided my eye wasn't
upon them at the time.
I regarded this appalling deputation as Parvill's apologetic but
quite definite utterances drew to an end. I had a moment of vision.
Behind them I saw the wonderful array of skeleton forces that stand
for public opinion, that are as much public opinion as exists indeed
at the present time. The whole process of politics which bulks so
solidly in history seemed for that clairvoyant instant but a froth
of petty motives above abysms of indifference…
Some one had finished. I perceived I had to speak.
"Very well," I said, "I won't keep you long in replying. I'll
resign if there isn't a dissolution before next February, and if
there is I shan't stand again. You don't want the bother and
expense of a bye-election (approving murmurs) if it can be avoided.
But I may tell you plainly now that I don't think it will be
necessary for me to resign, and the sooner you find my successor the
better for the party. The Lords are in a corner; they've got to
fight now or never, and I think they will throw out the Budget.
Then they will go on fighting. It is a fight that will last for
years. They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't. You
Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely
indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in
the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British
constitution up-to-date. Anything may happen, provided only that it
is sufficiently absurd. If the King backs the Lords-and I don't
see why he shouldn't-you have no Republican movement whatever to
fall back upon. You lost it during the Era of GoodTaste. The
country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give
it. I don't see what you will do… For my own part, I mean to
spend a year or so between a window and my writingdesk."
I paused. "I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all
this with very great regret…"
4
My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something
that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor
Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits. I went to and
fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms
and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new
developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation,
in the nascent state, as a chemist would say. I was free now, and
greedy for fresh combination. I had a tremendous sense of released
energies. I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to
the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.
Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial. We
meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and
life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a
revised and renovated ruling culture.
For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted
to do. Shoesmith responded to my first advances. We decided to
create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work
forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including
Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which
should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about
me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co-
operations. We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of
our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue
Weeklies. But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our
deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in
my editorial decisions. My only influential councillor at first was
old Britten, who became my sub-editor. It was curious how we two
had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give
and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the
necessary instincts for the business. We meant to make the paper
right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at
this with extraordinary zeal. It wasn't our intention to show our
political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust
storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we
made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good
writing. It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords
were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the
longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and
tumult of that immediate conflict were over. Meanwhile we had to
get into touch with just as many goodminds as possible.
As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly