One could admit science in that larger sense that sweeps in History, or Philosophy.Beyond that whatever work there is is work for which men are paid.Art? Art is nothing aristocratic except when it is a means of scientific or philosophical expression.Art that does not argue nor demonstrate nor discover is merely the craftsman's impudence.
He pulled up at this and reflected for a time with some distinguished instances in his mind.They were so distinguished, so dignified, they took their various arts with so admirable a gravity that the soul of this young man recoiled from the verdicts to which his reasoning drove him."It's not for me to judge them," he decided, "except in relation to myself.For them there may be tremendous significances in Art.But if these do not appear to me, then so far as I am concerned they do not exist for me.They are not in my world.So far as they attempt to invade me and control my attitudes or my outlook, or to judge me in any way, there is no question of their impudence.Impudence is the word for it.My world is real.I want to be really aristocratic, really brave, really paying for the privilege of not being a driven worker.The things the artist makes are like the things my private dream-artist makes, relaxing, distracting.What can Art at its greatest be, pure Art that is, but a more splendid, more permanent, transmissible reverie! The very essence of what I am after is NOT to be an artist...."After a large and serious movement through his mind he came back to Science, Philosophy or Politics as the sole three justifications for the usurpation of leisure.
So far as devotion to science went, he knew he had no specific aptitude for any departmentalized subject, and equally he felt no natural call to philosophy.He was left with politics....
"Or else, why shouldn't I go down there and pick up a shovel and set to work? To make leisure for my betters...."And now it was that he could take up the real trouble that more than anything else had been keeping him ineffective and the prey of every chance demand and temptation during the last ten months.He had not been able to get himself into politics, and the reason why he had not been able to do so was that he could not induce himself to fit in.Statecraft was a remote and faded thing in the political life of the time; politics was a choice of two sides in a game, and either side he found equally unattractive.Since he had come down from Cambridge the Tariff Reform people had gone far to capture the Conservative party.There was little chance of a candidature for him without an adhesion to that.And he could find nothing he could imagine himself working for in the declarations of the Tariff Reform people.He distrusted them, he disliked them.They took all the light and pride out of imperialism, they reduced it to a shabby conspiracy of the British and their colonies against foreign industrialism.They were violent for armaments and hostile to education.They could give him no assurance of any scheme of growth and unification, and no guarantees against the manifest dangers of economic disturbance and political corruption a tariff involves.
Imperialism without noble imaginations, it seemed to him, was simply nationalism with megalomania.It was swaggering, it was greed, it was German; its enthusiasm was forced, its nobility a vulgar lie.
No.And when he turned to the opposite party he found little that was more attractive.They were prepared, it seemed, if they came into office, to pull the legislature of the British Isles to pieces in obedience to the Irish demand for Home Rule, and they were totally unprepared with any scheme for doing this that had even a chance of success.In the twenty years that had elapsed since Gladstone's hasty and disastrous essay in political surgery they had studied nothing, learnt nothing, produced no ideas whatever in the matter.They had not had the time.They had just negotiated, like the mere politicians they were, for the Nationalist vote.They seemed to hope that by a marvel God would pacify Ulster.Lord Dunraven, Plunkett, were voices crying in the wilderness.The sides in the party game would as soon have heeded a poet....But unless Benham was prepared to subscribe either to Home Rule or Tariff Reform there was no way whatever open to him into public life.He had had some decisive conversations.He had no illusions left upon that score....
Here was the real barrier that had kept him inactive for ten months.
Here was the problem he had to solve.This was how he had been left out of active things, a prey to distractions, excitements, idle temptations--and Mrs.Skelmersdale.
Running away to shoot big game or explore wildernesses was no remedy.That was just running away.Aristocrats do not run away.
What of his debt to those men down there in the quarry? What of his debt to the unseen men in the mines away in the north? What of his debt to the stokers on the liners, and to the clerks in the city?
He reiterated the cardinal article of his creed: The aristocrat is a privileged man in order that he may be a public and political man.
But how is one to be a political man when one is not in politics?
Benham frowned at the Weald.His ideas were running thin.
He might hammer at politics from the outside.And then again how?
He would make a list of all the things that he might do.For example he might write.He rested one hand on his knee and lifted one finger and regarded it.COULD he write? There were one or two men who ran papers and seemed to have a sort of independent influence.Strachey, for example, with his SPECTATOR; Maxse, with his NATIONAL REVIEW.But they were grown up, they had formed their ideas.He had to learn first.
He lifted a second finger.How to learn? For it was learning that he had to do.
When one comes down from Oxford or Cambridge one falls into the mistake of thinking that learning is over and action must begin.
But until one perceives clearly just where one stands action is impossible.
