Then they will go on fighting.It is a fight that will last for years.They have a sort of social discipline, and you haven't.You Liberals will find yourselves with a country behind you, vaguely indignant perhaps, but totally unprepared with any ideas whatever in the matter, face to face with the problem of bringing the British constitution up-to-date.Anything may happen, provided only that it is sufficiently absurd.If the King backs the Lords--and I don't see why he shouldn't--you have no Republican movement whatever to fall back upon.You lost it during the Era of Good Taste.The country, I say, is destitute of ideas, and you have no ideas to give it.I don't see what you will do....For my own part, I mean to spend a year or so between a window and my writingdesk."I paused."I think, gentlemen," began Parvill, "that we hear all this with very great regret...."4
My estrangement from Margaret stands in my memory now as something that played itself out within the four walls of our house in Radnor Square, which was, indeed, confined to those limits.I went to and fro between my house and the House of Commons, and the dining-rooms and clubs and offices in which we were preparing our new developments, in a state of aggressive and energetic dissociation, in the nascent state, as a chemist would say.I was free now, and greedy for fresh combination.I had a tremendous sense of released energies.I had got back to the sort of thing I could do, and to the work that had been shaping itself for so long in my imagination.
Our purpose now was plain, bold, and extraordinarily congenial.We meant no less than to organise a new movement in English thought and life, to resuscitate a Public Opinion and prepare the ground for a revised and renovated ruling culture.
For a time I seemed quite wonderfully able to do whatever I wanted to do.Shoesmith responded to my first advances.We decided to create a weekly paper as our nucleus, and Crupp and I set to work forthwith to collect a group of writers and speakers, including Esmeer, Britten, Lord Gane, Neal, and one or two younger men, which should constitute a more or less definite editorial council about me, and meet at a weekly lunch on Tuesday to sustain our general co-operations.We marked our claim upon Toryism even in the colour of our wrapper, and spoke of ourselves collectively as the Blue Weeklies.But our lunches were open to all sorts of guests, and our deliberations were never of a character to control me effectively in my editorial decisions.My only influential councillor at first was old Britten, who became my sub-editor.It was curious how we two had picked up our ancient intimacy again and resumed the easy give and take of our speculative dreaming schoolboy days.
For a time my life centred altogether upon this journalistic work.
Britten was an experienced journalist, and I had most of the necessary instincts for the business.We meant to make the paper right and good down to the smallest detail, and we set ourselves at this with extraordinary zeal.It wasn't our intention to show our political motives too markedly at first, and through all the dust storm and tumult and stress of the political struggle of 1910, we made a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing.It was the firm belief of nearly all of us that the Lords were destined to be beaten badly in 1910, and our game was the longer game of reconstruction that would begin when the shouting and tumult of that immediate conflict were over.Meanwhile we had to get into touch with just as many good minds as possible.
As we felt our feet, I developed slowly and carefully a broadly conceived and consistent political attitude.As I will explain later, we were feminist from the outset, though that caused Shoesmith and Gane great searching of heart; we developed Esmeer's House of Lords reform scheme into a general cult of the aristocratic virtues, and we did much to humanise and liberalise the narrow excellencies of that Break-up of the Poor Law agitation, which had been organised originally by Beatrice and Sidney Webb.In addition, without any very definite explanation to any one but Esmeer and Isabel Rivers, and as if it was quite a small matter, I set myself to secure a uniform philosophical quality in our columns.
