lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem

to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an

air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.

Those shapes and large inhuman places-for all of mankind that one

sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the

industrial monsters that snort and toil there-mix up inextricably

with my memories of my first days as a legislator. Black figures

drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a

motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat

has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.

"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon

me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber

museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives."…

Fruitless lives!-was that the truth of it all?…

Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of

the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet

close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins-and I prayed!

I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of

barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water

turned to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief

perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of

my thoughts. It was then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that

night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not

live in vain. I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous

blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me

back to futility and a meaningless acquiescence in existent things.

I knewmyself for the weakling I was, I knew that nevertheless it

was set for me to make such order as I could out of these disorders,

and my task cowed me, gave me at the thought of it a sense of

yielding feebleness.

"Break me, O God," I prayed at last, "disgrace me, torment me,

destroy me as you will, but save me from self-complacency and little

interests and little successes and the life that passes like the

shadow of a dream."

BOOK THE THIRD

THE HEART OF POLITICS

CHAPTER THE FIRST

THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN

1

I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this

next portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it

raw edged and ill joined. I have learnt something of the

impossibility of History. For all I have had to tell is the story

of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his

life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the

doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms

and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving

media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally

unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with

personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only

coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of

depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond

treatment multitudinous… For a week or so I desisted

altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit

through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this

little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with

Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the

effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.

Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this

confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This

main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have

looked to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young

couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's

auspices to make a career. You figure us well dressed and active,

running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses,

dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in

the lobby. Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must

have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.

We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I

thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten

thousand things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it,

as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes

occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible. Under

certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a

handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous

unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the

realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any

inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our

life. Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our

outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of

these so long-hidden developments.

That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of

these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether

broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the

cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the