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 villains
of the piece? The real villain in the piece-in the whole human
drama-is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it's
virtuous-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
distress. "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 curiously 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 consistency
with that. Those subtle questionings about the very fundamentals of
life which plague us all so relentlessly nowadays are supposed to be
silenced. He lifts his chin and pursues his Aim explicitly 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 utterances 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 essentially 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 autobiographies is an intellectual
autobiography. 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 Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the
bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…
And yet these things I have struggled with must be thought out, and,
to begin with, they must be thought out in this muddled,
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
haphazard at the first course of action that presents itself; the
whole world of politicians is far too like a man who snatches a
poker to a failing watch. It is easy to say he wants to "get
something done," but the only sane thing to do for the moment is to
put aside that poker and take thought and get a better implement…
One of the results of these fundamental preoccupations of mine was a
curious irritability towards Margaret that I found difficult to
conceal. It was one of the incidental cruelties of our position
that this should happen. I was in such doubtmyself, 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 serene, sustained confidence in vague formulae and
sentimental aspirations exasperated me; her want of sympathetic
apprehension made my few efforts to indicate my changing attitudes
distressing 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 sensuous, 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 incurable 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