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
conceived and consistent political attitude. As I will explain
later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused
Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's
House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic
virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow
excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had
been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb. In addition,
without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and
Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself
to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE
WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the
confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the
general need of metaphysical training… The great mass of
people-and not simply common people, but people active and
influential in intellectual things-are still quite untrained in the
methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of
method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy
patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by
a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to
their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that
minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general
terms and a certain use for generalisations. They are-to fall back
on the ancient technicality-Realists of a crude sort. When I say
Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not
Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to
Idealist. Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great
prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are
whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied
contemporaries. They go through queer little processes of
definition and generalisation and deduction with the completest
belief in the validity of the intellectual instrument they are
using. They are Realists-Cocksurists-in matter of fact;
sentimentalists in behaviour. The Baileys having got to this
glorious stage in mental development-it is glorious because it has
no doubts-were always talking about training "Experts" to apply the
same simple process to all the affairs of mankind. Well, Realism
isn't the last word of human wisdom. Modest-minded people, doubtful
people, subtle people, and the like-the kind of people William
James writes of as "tough-minded," go on beyond this methodical
happiness, and are forever after critical of premises and terms.
They are truer-and less confident. They have reached scepticism
and the artistic method. They have emerged into the new Nominalism.
Both Isabel and I believe firmly that these differences of
intellectual method matter profoundly in the affairs of mankind,
that the collective mind of this intricate complex modern state can
only function properly upon neo-Nominalist lines. This has always
been her side of our mental co-operation rather than mine. Her mind
has the light movement that goes so often with natural mental power;