"Yes," said Margaret, looking into the fire."That is just what Ifelt about them all the evening....Particularly Dr.Tumpany.""We mustn't confuse Socialism with the Socialists, I said; "that's the moral of it.I suppose if God were to find He had made a mistake in dates or something, and went back and annihilated everybody from Owen onwards who was in any way known as a Socialist leader or teacher, Socialism would be exactly where it is and what it is to-day--a growing realisation of constructive needs in every man's mind, and a little corner in party politics.So, I suppose, it will always be....But they WERE a damned lot, Margaret!"I looked up at the little noise she made."TWICE!" she said, smiling indulgently, "to-day!" (Even the smile was Altiora's.)I returned to my thoughts.They WERE a damned human lot.It was an excellent word in that connection....
But the ideas marched on, the ideas marched on, just as though men's brains were no more than stepping-stones, just as though some great brain in which we are all little cells and corpuscles was thinking them!...
"I don't think there is a man among them who makes me feel he is trustworthy," said Margaret; "unless it is Featherstonehaugh."I sat taking in this proposition.
"They'll never help us, I feel," said Margaret.
"Us?"
"The Liberals."
"Oh, damn the Liberals!" I said."They'll never even help themselves.""I don't think I could possibly get on with any of those people,"said Margaret, after a pause.
She remained for a time looking down at me and, I could feel, perplexed by me, but I wanted to go on with my thinking, and so Idid not look up, and presently she stooped to my forehead and kissed me and went rustling softly to her room.
I remained in my study for a long time with my thoughts crystallising out....
It was then, I think, that I first apprehended clearly how that opposition to which I have already alluded of the immediate life and the mental hinterland of a man, can be applied to public and social affairs.The ideas go on--and no person or party succeeds in embodying them.The reality of human progress never comes to the surface, it is a power in the deeps, an undertow.It goes on in silence while men think, in studies where they write self-forgetfully, in laboratories under the urgency of an impersonal curiosity, in the rare illumination of honest talk, in moments of emotional insight, in thoughtful reading, but not in everyday affairs.Everyday affairs and whatever is made an everyday affair, are transactions of the ostensible self, the being of habits, interests, usage.Temper, vanity, hasty reaction to imitation, personal feeling, are their substance.No man can abolish his immediate self and specialise in the depths; if he attempt that, he simply turns himself into something a little less than the common man.He may have an immense hinterland, but that does not absolve him from a frontage.That is the essential error of the specialist philosopher, the specialist teacher, the specialist publicist.They repudiate frontage; claim to be pure hinterland.That is what bothered me about Codger, about those various schoolmasters who had prepared me for life, about the Baileys and their dream of an official ruling class.A human being who is a philosopher in the first place, a teacher in the first place, or a statesman in the first place, is thereby and inevitably, though he bring God-like gifts to the pretence--a quack.These are attempts to live deep-side shallow, inside out.They produce merely a new pettiness.To understand Socialism, again, is to gain a new breadth of outlook; to join a Socialist organisation is to join a narrow cult which is not even tolerably serviceable in presenting or spreading the ideas for which it stands....
I perceived I had got something quite fundamental here.It had taken me some years to realise the true relation of the great constructive ideas that swayed me not only to political parties, but to myself.I had been disposed to identify the formulae of some one party with social construction, and to regard the other as necessarily anti-constructive, just as I had been inclined to follow the Baileys in the self-righteousness of supposing myself to be wholly constructive.But I saw now that every man of intellectual freedom and vigour is necessarily constructive-minded nowadays, and that no man is disinterestedly so.Each one of us repeats in himself the conflict of the race between the splendour of its possibilities and its immediate associations.We may be shaping immortal things, but we must sleep and answer the dinner gong, and have our salt of flattery and self-approval.In politics a man counts not for what he is in moments of imaginative expansion, but for his common workaday, selfish self; and political parties are held together not by a community of ultimate aims, but by the stabler bond of an accustomed life.Everybody almost is for progress in general, and nearly everybody is opposed to any change, except in so far as gross increments are change, in his particular method of living and behaviour.Every party stands essentially for the interests and mental usages of some definite class or group of classes in the exciting community, and every party has its scientific-minded and constructive leading section, with well-defined hinterlands formulating its social functions in a public-spirited form, and its superficial-minded following confessing its meannesses and vanities and prejudices.No class will abolish itself, materially alter its way of life, or drastically reconstruct itself, albeit no class is indisposed to co-operate in the unlimited socialisation of any other class.In that capacity for aggression upon other classes lies the essential driving force of modern affairs.The instincts, the persons, the parties, and vanities sway and struggle.The ideas and understandings march on and achieve themselves for all--in spite of every one....
