world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains
and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that I
have now. But its intension was very different. All the interval
has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing
crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.
In 1895-that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to
Cambridge in September-my vision of the world had much the same
relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a
mask has to the direct vision of a human face. Britten and I looked
at our world and saw-what did we see? Forms and colours side by
side that we had no suspicion were interdependent. We had no
conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things. It
did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do
with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues
of war. There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were
guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.
Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it
with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of
intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.
We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests"
came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely
intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or
dishonest (in which ease they deserved to be shot), good or bad. We
knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a
whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition. We
were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of
history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and
Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or
Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set
about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed
French Revolution. We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once
in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population EN
MASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.
We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of
employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed
bulletins. We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing
whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and
orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St. Paul's
Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,-a close and
not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading. I
remember quite distinctly evolving that vision. We were then fully
fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it. We were not fools;
it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of
the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective
intention…
I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my
doubts. It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one
did not understand. It isn't only that every day changed one's
general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of
quite adult understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent
puerility. Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along
Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white
defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning
and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul
and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all
inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St. Martin's-le-
Grand!…
I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but I
believe the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from
London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my
imagination. I got outside London. It became tangible instead of
being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.
At Cambridge my ideas ceased to live in a duologue; in exchange for
Britten, with whom, however, I corresponded lengthily, stylishly and
self-consciously for some years, I had now a set of congenial
friends. I got talk with some of the younger dons, I learnt to
speak in the Union, and in my little set we were all pretty busily
sharpening each other's wits and correcting each other's
interpretations. Cambridge made politics personal and actual. At
City Merchants' we had had no sense of effective contact; we
boasted, it is true, an under secretary and a colonial governor
among our old boys, but they were never real to us; such
distinguished sons as returned to visit the old school were allusive
and pleasant in the best Pinky Dinky style, and pretended to be in
earnest about nothing but our football and cricket, to mourn the
abolition of "water," and find a shuddering personal interest in the
ancient swishing block. At Cambridge I felt for the first time that
I touched the thing that was going on. Real living statesmen came
down to debate in the Union, the older dons had been their college
intimates, their sons and nephews expounded them to us and made them