politics. It was clear they were against the Lords-against
plutocrats-against Cossington's newspapers-against the brewers…
It was tremendously clear what they were against. The trouble
was to find out what on earth they were for!…
As I sat and thought, the streaked and mottled pillars and wall, the
various views, aspects, and portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone, the
partitions of polished mahogany, the yellow-vested waiters, would
dissolve and vanish, and I would have a vision of this sample of
miscellaneous men of limited, diverse interests and a universal
littleness of imagination enlarged, unlimited, no longer a sample
but a community, spreading, stretching out to infinity-all in
little groups and duologues and circles, all with their special and
narrow concerns, all with their backs to most of the others.
What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes
together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half
of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct
and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the
commonplace mind in "Let us do." That calls for the creative
imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call.
The other merely needs jealousy and bate, of which there are great
and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart…
I remember that vision of endless, narrow, jealous individuality
very vividly. A seething limitlessness it became at last, like a
waste place covered by crawling locusts that men sweep up by the
sackload and drown by the million in ditches…
Grotesquely against it came the lean features, the sidelong shy
movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at
hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold!
he was saying something about the "Will of the People…"
The immense and wonderful disconnectednesses of human life! I
forgot the smoke and jabber of the club altogether; I became a
lonelyspirit flung aloft by some queer accident, a stone upon a
ledge in some high and rocky wilderness, and below as far as the eye
could reach stretched the swarming infinitesimals of humanity, like
grass upon the field, like pebbles upon unbounded beaches. Was
there ever to be in human life more than that endless struggling
individualism? Was there indeed some giantry, some immense valiant
synthesis, still to come-or present it might be and still unseen by
me, or was this the beginning and withal the last phase of
mankind?…
I glimpsed for a while the stupendous impudence of our ambitions,
the tremendous enterprise to which the modern statesman is
implicitly addressed. I was as it were one of a little swarm of
would-be reef builders looking back at the teeming slime upon the
ocean floor. All the history of mankind, all the history of life,
has been and will be the story of something struggling out of the
indiscriminated abyss, struggling to exist and prevail over and
comprehend individual lives-an effort of insidious attraction, an
idea of invincible appeal. That something greater than ourselves,
which does not so much exist as seek existence, palpitating between
being and not-being, how marvellous it is! It has worn the form and
visage of ten thousand different gods, sought a shape for itself in
stone and ivory and music and wonderful words, spoken more and more
clearly of a mystery of love, a mystery of unity, dabbling meanwhile
in blood and cruelty beyond the common impulses of men. It is
something that comes and goes, like a light that shines and is
withdrawn, withdrawn so completely that one doubts if it has ever
been…
6
I would mark with a curious interest the stray country member of the
club up in town for a night or so. My mind would be busy with
speculations about him, about his home, his family, his reading, his
horizons, his innumerable fellows who didn't belong and never came
up. I would fill in the outline of him with memories of my uncle
and his Staffordshire neighbours. He was perhaps Alderman This or
Councillor That down there, a great man in his ward, J. P. within
seven miles of the boundary of the borough, and a God in his home.
Here he was nobody, and very shy, and either a little too arrogant
or a little too meek towards our very democratic mannered but still
livened waiters. Was he perhaps the backbone of England? He over-
ate himself lest he should appear mean, went through our Special
Dinner conscientiously, drank, unless he was teetotal, of unfamiliar
wines, and did his best, in spite of the rules, to tip. Afterwards,
in a state of flushed repletion, he would have old brandy, black
coffee, and a banded cigar, or in the name of temperance omit the
brandy and have rather more coffee, in the smoking-room. I would
sit and watch that stiff dignity of self-indulgence, and wonder,
wonder…
An infernal clairvoyance would come to me. I would have visions of
him in relation to his wife, checking always, sometimes bullying,
sometimes being ostentatiously "kind"; I would see him glance
furtively at his domestic servants upon his staircase, or stiffen
his upper lip against the reluctant, protesting business employee.