THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

that had made him a success from the begi

ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has become plumper,

more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent

visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to people as

part of our i

has become now almost the leading Character in a little do

world of much too intensely appreciated Characters.

He boasted he took no exercise, and also of his knowledge of port

wine. Of other wines he confessed quite frankly he had no "special

knowledge." Beyond these things he had little pride except that he

claimed to have read every novel by a woman writer that had ever

entered the Union Library. This, however, he held to be remarkable

rather than e

with playfulness. Certainly he had a scholar's knowledge of the

works of Miss Marie Corelli, Miss Braddon, Miss Elizabeth Glyn and

Madame Sarah Grand that would have astonished and flattered those

ladies enormously, and he loved nothing so much in his hours of

relaxation as to propound and answer difficult questions upon their

books. Tusher of King's was his ineffectual rival in this field,

their bouts were memorable and rarely other than glorious for

Codger; but then Tusher spread himself too much, he also undertook

to rehearse whole pages out of Bradshaw, and tell you with all the

changes how to get from any station to any station in Great Britain

by the nearest and cheapest routes…

Codger lodged with a little deaf i

Mergle, who was understood to be herself a very redoubtable

Character in the Gyp-Bedder class; about her he relatedquietly

absurd anecdotes. He displayed a marvellous invention in ascribing

to her plausible expressions of opinion entirely identical in import

with those of the Oxford and Harvard Pragmatists, against whom he

waged a fierce obscure war…

It was Codger's function to teach me philosophy, philosophy! the

intimate wisdom of things. He dealt in a variety of Hegelian stuff

like nothing else in the world, but marvellously consistent with

itself. It was a wonderful web he spun out of that queer big active

childish brain that had never lusted nor hated nor grieved nor

feared nor passionately loved,-a web of iridescent threads. He had

luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd

matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven

thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as

flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!-as a dew-wet

spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of

a gun…

4

All through those years of development I perceive now there must

have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself

all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious

impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the

statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the

protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for

Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order,

civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I

have set out to present. It was growing in me-as one's bones grow,

no man intending it.

I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of

disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a

multitudinous confusion out of hand, came to me. One always of

course simplifies these things in the telling, but I do not think I

ever saw the world at large in any other terms. I never at any

stage entertamed the idea which sustained my mother, and which

sustains so many people in the world,-the idea that the universe,

whatever superficial discords it may present, is as a matter of fact

"all right," is being steered to definite ends by a serene and

unquestionable God. My mother thought that Order prevailed, and

that disorder was just incidental and foredoomed rebellion; I feel

and have always felt that order rebels against and struggles against

disorder, that order has an up-hill job, in gardens, experiments,

suburbs, everything alike; from the very begi

I discovered hostility to order, a constant escaping from control.

The current of living and contemporary ideas in which my mind was

presently swimming made all in the same direction; in place of my

mother's attentive, meticulous but occasionally extremely irascible