THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

because in the first place they used up time and gas for the Bunsen

burner and good material in a ruinous fashion, and in the second

they were, in his rather careless and sketchy hands, apt to endanger

the apparatus of the Institute and even the lives of his students.

Then thirdly, real experiments involved washing up. And moreover

they always turned out wrong, and sometimes misled the too observant

learner very seriously and opened demoralising controversies. Quite

early in life I acquired an almost ineradicable sense of the

unscientific perversity of Nature and the impassable gulf that is

fixed between systematic science and elusive fact. I knew, for

example, that in science, whether it be subject XII., Organic

Chemistry, or subject XVII., Animal Physiology, when you blow into a

glass of lime water it instantly becomes cloudy, and if you continue

to blow it clears again, whereas in truth you may blow into the

stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face

and painful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And

I knew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a

retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and

may be collected over water, whereas in real life if you do anything

of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium

chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says

"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady

student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite

understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own

undoing. And I can quite understand, too, my father's preference

for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an

arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing

whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,

and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it

when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond

illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you

did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in

this way he could make us see all he described. The class, freed

from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life

without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then

my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be

copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any

exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as

"empyreumatic" or "botryoidal."

Some words in constant use he rarely explained. I remember once

sticking up my hand and asking him in the full flow of description,

"Please, sir, what is flocculent?"

"The precipitate is."

"Yes, sir, but what does it mean?"

"Oh! flocculent! " said my father, "flocculent! Why-" he extended

his hand and arm and twiddled his fingers for a second in the air.

"Like that," he said.

I thought the explanation sufficient, but he paused for a moment

after giving it. "As in a flock bed, you know," he added and

resumed his discourse.

3

My father, Iam afraid, carried a natural incompetence in practical

affairs to an exceptionally high level. He combined practical

incompetence, practical enterprise and a thoroughly sanguine

temperament, in a ma

human being. He was always trying to do new things in the briskest

ma

spontaneous imagination, and as he had never been trained to do

anything whatever in his life properly, his futilities were

extensive and thorough. At one time he nearly gave up his classes

for intensive culture, so enamoured was he of its possibilities; the

peculiar pungency of the manure he got, in pursuit of a chemical

theory of his own, has scarred my olfactory memories for a lifetime.

The intensive culture phase is very clear in my memory; it came near

the end of his career and when I was between eleven and twelve. I

was mobilised to gather caterpillars on several occasions, and

assisted in nocturnal raids upon the slugs by lantern-light that

wrecked my preparation work for school next day. My father dug up

both lawns, and trenched and manured in spasms of immense vigour

alternating with periods of paralysing distaste for the garden. And

for weeks he talked about eight hundred pounds an acre at every

meal.

A garden, even when it is not exasperated by intensive methods, is a

thing as exacting as a baby, its moods have to he watched; it does

not wait upon the cultivator's convenience, but has times of its

own. Intensive culture greatly increases this disposition to

trouble mankind; it makes a garden touchy and hysterical, a drugged

and demoralised and over-irritated garden. My father got at cross

purposes with our two patches at an early stage. Everything grew

wrong from the first to last, and if my father's manures intensified

nothing else, they certainly intensified the Primordial Curse. The

peas were eaten in the night before they were three inches high, the

beans bore nothing but blight, the only apparent result of a

spraying of the potatoes was to develop a PENCHANT in the cat for

being ill indoors, the cucumber frames were damaged by the

catapulting of boys going down the lane at the back, and all your

cucumbers were mysteriously embittered. That lane with its

occasional passers-by did much to wreck the intensive scheme,

because my father always stopped work and went indoors if any one