becomes accessible to a new series of solutions. He wants no longer
to "fix up," as people say, human affairs, but to devote his forces
to the development of that needed intellectual life without which
all his shallow attempts at fixing up are futile. He ceases to
build on the sands, and sets himself to gather foundations.
You see, I began in my teens by wanting to plan and build cities and
harbours for mankind; I ended in the middle thirties by desiring
only to serve and increase a general process of thought, a process
fearless, critical, real-spirited, that would in its own time give
cities, harbours, air, happiness, everything at a scale and quality
and in a light altogether beyond the match-striking imaginations of
a contemporary mind. I wanted freedom of speech and suggestion,
vigour of thought, and the cultivation of that impulse of veracity
that lurks more or less discouraged in every man. With that I felt
there must go an emotion. I hit upon a phrase that became at last
something of a refrain in my speech and writings, to convey the
spirit that I felt was at the very heart of real human progress-
love and fine thinking.
(I suppose that nowadays no newspaper in England gets through a week
without the repetition of that phrase.)
My convictions crystallised more and more definitely upon this. The
more of love and fine thinking the better for men, I said; the less,
the worse. And upon this fresh basis I set myself to examine what I
as a politician might do. I perceived I was at last finding an
adequate expression for all that was in me, for those forces that
had rebelled at the crude presentations of Bromstead, at the
secrecies and suppressions of my youth, at the dull unrealities of
City Merchants, at the conventions and timidities of the Pinky
Dinkys, at the philosophical recluse of Trinity and the phrases and
tradition-worship of my political associates. None of these things
were half alive, and I wanted life to be intensely alive and awake.
I wanted thought like an edge of steel and desire like a flame. The
real work before mankind now, I realised once and for all, is the
enlargement of human expression, the release and intensification of
human thought, the vivider utilisation of experience and the
invigoration of research-and whatever one does in human affairs has
or lacks value as it helps or hinders that.
With that I had got my problem clear, and the solution, so far as I
was concerned, lay in finding out the point in the ostensible life
of politics at which I could most subserve these ends. I was still
against the muddles of Bromstead, but I had hunted them down now to
their essential form. The jerry-built slums, the roads that went
nowhere, the tarred fences, litigious notice-boards and barbed wire
fencing, the litter and the heaps of dump, were only the outward
appearances whose ultimaterealities were jerry-built conclusions,
hasty purposes, aimless habits of thought, and imbecile bars and
prohibitions in the thoughts and souls of men. How are we through
politics to get at that confusion?
We want to invigorate and reinvigorate education. We want to create
a sustained counter effort to the perpetual tendency of all
educational organisations towards classicalism, secondary issues,
and the evasion of life.
We want to stimulate the expression of life through art and
literature, and its exploration through research.
We want to make the best and finest thought accessible to every one,
and more particularly to create and sustain an enormous free
criticism, without which art, literature, and research alike
degenerate into tradition or imposture.
Then all the other problems which are now so insoluble, destitution,
disease, the difficulty of maintaining international peace, the
scarcely faced possibility of making life generally and continually
beautiful, become-EASY…
It was clear to me that the most vital activities in which I could
engage would be those which most directly affected the Church,
public habits of thought, education, organised research, literature,
and the channels of general discussion. I had to ask myself how my
position as Liberal member for Kinghamstead squared with and
conduced to this essential work.