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

real to us. They invited us to entertain ideas; I found myself for

the first time in my life expected to read and think and discuss, my

secret vice had become a virtue.

That combination-room world is at last larger and more populous and

various than the world of schoolmasters. The Shoesmiths and Naylors

who had been the aristocracy of City Merchants' fell into their

place in my mind; they became an undistinguished mass on the more

athletic side of Pinky Dinkyism, and their hostility to ideas and to

the expression of ideas ceased to limit and trouble me. The

brighter men of each generation stay up; these others go down to

propagate their tradition, as the fathers of families, as mediocre

professional men, as assistant masters in schools. Cambridge which

perfects them is by the nature of things least oppressed by them,-

except when it comes to a vote in Convocation.

We were still in those days under the shadow of the great

Victorians. I never saw Gladstone (as I never set eyes on the old

Queen), but he had resigned office only a year before I went up to

Trinity, and the Combination Rooms were full of personal gossip

about him and Disraeli and the other big figures of the gladiatorial

stage of Parlimentary history, talk that leaked copiously into such

sets as mine. The ceiling of our guest chamber at Trinity was

glorious with the arms of Sir William Harcourt, whose Death Duties

had seemed at first like a socialist dawn. Mr. Evesham we asked to

come to the Union every year, Masters, Chamberlain and the old Duke

of Devonshire; they did not come indeed, but their polite refusals

brought us all, as it were, within personal touch of them. One

heard of cabinet councils and meetings at country houses. Some of

us, pursuing such interests, went so far as to read political

memoirs and the novels of Disraeli and Mrs. Humphry Ward. From

gossip, example and the illustrated newspapers one learnt something

of the way in which parties were split, coalitions formed, how

permanent officials worked and controlled their ministers, how

measures were brought forward and projects modified.

And while I was getting the great leading figures on the political

stage, who had been presented to me in my schooldays not so much as

men as the pantomimic monsters of political caricature, while I was

getting them reduced in my imagination to the stature of humanity,

and their motives to the quality of impulses like my own, I was also

acquiring in my Tripos work a constantly developing and enriching

conception of the world of men as a complex of economic,

intellectual and moral processes…