THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

space. The only literary contribution in the first number was a

column by Topham in faultless stereotyped English in depreciation of

some fancied evil called Utilitarian Studies and ending with that

noble old quotation:-

"To the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome."

And Flack crowded us out of number two with a bright little paper on

the "Humours of Cricket," and the Head himself was profusely

thoughtful all over the editorial under the heading of "The School

Chapel; and How it Seems to an Old Boy."

Britten and I found it difficult to express to each other with any

grace or precision what we felt about that magazine.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH

ADOLESCENCE

1

I find it very difficult to trace how form was added to form and

interpretation followed interpretation in my ever-spreading, ever-

deepening, ever-multiplying and enriching vision of this world into

which I had been born. Every day added its impressions, its hints,

its subtle explications to the growingunderstanding. Day after day

the living interlacing threads of a mind weave together. Every

morning now for three weeks and more (for to-day is Thursday and I

started on a Tuesday) I have been trying to convey some idea of the

factors and early influences by which my particular scrap of

subjective tapestry was shaped, to show the child playing on the

nursery floor, the son perplexed by his mother, gazing aghast at his

dead father, exploring interminable suburbs, touched by first

intimations of the sexual mystery, coming in with a sort of confused

avidity towards the centres of the life of London. It is only by

such an effort to write it down that one realises how marvellously

crowded, how marvellously analytical and synthetic those ears must

be. One begins with the little child to whom the sky is a roof of

blue, the world a screen of opaque and disco

a thing eternal, and "beinggood" just simple obedience to

unquestioned authority; and one comes at last to the vast world of

one's adult perception, pierced deep by flaring searchlights of

partial understanding, here masked by mists, here refracted and

distorted through half translucent veils, here showing broad

prospects and limitless vistas and here impenetrably dark.

I recall phases of deep speculation, doubts and even prayers by

night, and strange occasions when by a sort of hypnotic

contemplation of nothingness I sought to pierce the web of

appearances about me. It is hard to measure these things in

receding perspective, and now I ca

succeeded and overlaid and obliterated mood, the phases by which an

utter horror of death was replaced by the growing realisation of its

necessity and dignity. Difficulty of the imagination with infinite

space, infinite time, entangled my mind; and moral distress for the

pain and suffering of bygone ages that made all thought of

reformation in the future seem but the grimmest irony upon now

irreparable wrongs. Many an intricate perplexity of these

broadening years did not so much get settled as cease to matter.

Life crowded me away from it.

I have confessed myself a temerarious theologian, and in that

passage from boyhood to manhood I ranged widely in my search for

some permanently satisfyingTruth. That, too, ceased after a time

to be urgently interesting. I came at last into a phase that

endures to this day, of absolutetranquillity, of absolute

confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which

must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT,

feeling BY IT, I ca

clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days

were done. Iam sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite

like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father

and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must

needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but

failure, no promise but pain…

But while I was fearless of theology I must confess it was

comparatively late before I faced and dared to probe the secrecies

of sex. I was afraid of sex. I had an instinctive perception that

it would be a large and difficult thing in my life, but my early

training was all in the direction of regarding it as an irrelevant

thing, as something disco

life, as hostile and disgraceful in its quality. The world was

never so emasculated in thought, I suppose, as it was in the