"Sentimentality," said Britten. "No Good Will is anything but
dishonesty unless it frets and burns and hurts and destroys a man.
That lot of yours have nothing but a good will to think they have
good will. Do you think they lie awake of nights searching their
hearts as we do? Lewis? Crampton? Or those neat, admiring,
satisfied little wives? See how they shrank from the probe!"
"We all," I said, "shrink from the probe."
"God help us!" said Britten…
"We are but vermin at the best, Remington," he broke out," and the
greatest saint only a worm that has lifted its head for a moment
from the dust. We are damned, we are meant to be damned, coral
animalculae building upward, upward in a sea of damnation. But of
all the damned things that ever were damned, your damned shirking,
temperate, sham-efficient, self-satisfied, respectable, make-
believe, Fabian-spirited Young Liberal is tbe utterly damnedest."
He paused for a moment, and resumed in an entirely different note:
"Which is why I was so surprised, Remington, to find YOU in this
set!"
"You're just the old plunger you used to be, Britten," I said. "
You're going too far with all your might for the sake of the damns.
Like a donkey that drags its cart up a bank to get thistles.
There's depths in Liberalism-"
"We were talking about Liberals."
"Liberty!"
"Liberty! What do YOOR little lot know of liberty?"
"What does any little lot know of liberty?"
"It waits outside, too big for our understanding. Like the night
and the stars. And lust, Remington! lust and bitterness! Don't I
know them? with all the sweetness and hope of life bitten and
trampled, the dear eyes and the brain that loved and understood-and
my poor mumble of a life going on! I'm within sight of being a
drunkard, Remington! I'm a failure by most standards! Life has cut
me to the bone. But I'm not afraid of it any more. I've paid
something of the price, I've seen something of the meaning."
He flew off at a tangent. "I'd rather die in Delirium Tremens," he
cried, "than be a Crampton or a Lewis…"
"Make-believe. Make-believe." The phrase and Britten's squat
gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room
and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and
Margaret's admirable equipment of me.
I perceived in the lurid light of Britten's suggestions that so it
was Mr. George Alexander would have mounted a statesman's private
room…
3
I was never at any stage a loyal party man. I doubt if party will
ever again be the force it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Men are becoming increasingly constructive and
selective, less patient under tradition and the bondage of initial
circumstances. As education becomes more universal and liberating,
men will sort themselves more and more by their intellectual
temperaments and less and less by their accidental associations.
The past will rule them less; the future more. It is not simply
party but school and college and county and country that lose their
glamour. One does not hear nearly as much as our forefathers did of
the "old Harrovian," "old Arvonian," "old Etonian" claim to this or
that unfair advantage or unearnt sympathy. Even the Scotch and the
Devonians weaken a little in their clannishness. A widening sense
of fair play destroys such things. They follow freemasonry down-
freemasonry of which one is chiefly reminded nowadays in England by
propitiatory symbols outside shady public-houses…
There is, of course, a type of man which clings very obstinately to
party ties. These are the men with strong reproductive imaginations
and no imaginative initiative, such men as Cladingbowl, for example,
or Dayton. They are the scholars-at-large in life. For them the
fact that the party system has been essential in the history of
England for two hundred years gives it an overwhelming glamour.
They have read histories and memoirs, they see the great grey pile
of Westminster not so much for what it is as for what it was, rich
with dramatic memories, populous with glorious ghosts, phrasing
itself inevitably in anecdotes and quotations. It seems almost
scandalous that new things should continue to happen, swamping with
strange qualities the savour of these old associations.
That Mr. Ramsay Macdonald should walk through Westminster Hall,
thrust himself, it may be, through the very piece of space that once
held Charles the Martyr pleading for his life, seems horrible
profanation to Dayton, a last posthumous outrage; and he would, I
think, like to have the front benches left empty now for ever, or at
most adorned with laureated ivory tablets: "Here Dizzy sat," and "On
this Spot William Ewart Gladstone made his First Budget Speech."
Failing this, he demands, if only as signs of modesty and respect on
the part of the survivors, meticulous imitation. "Mr. G.," he