The world of man centred for my imagination in London, it still centres there; the real and present world, that is to say, as distinguished from the wonder-lands of atomic and microscopic science and the stars and future time.I had travelled scarcely at all, I had never crossed the Channel, but I had read copiously and Ihad formed a very good working idea of this round globe with its mountains and wildernesses and forests and all the sorts and conditions of human life that were scattered over its surface.It was all alive, I felt, and changing every day; how it was changing, and the changes men might bring about, fascinated my mind beyond measure.
I used to find a charm in old maps that showed The World as Known to the Ancients, and I wish I could now without any suspicion of self-deception write down compactly the world as it was known to me at nineteen.So far as extension went it was, I fancy, very like the world I know now at forty-two; I had practically all the mountains and seas, boundaries and races, products and possibilities that Ihave now.But its intension was very different.All the interval has been increasing and deepening my social knowledge, replacing crude and second-hand impressions by felt and realised distinctions.
In 1895--that was my last year with Britten, for I went up to Cambridge in September--my vision of the world had much the same relation to the vision I have to-day that an ill-drawn daub of a mask has to the direct vision of a human face.Britten and I looked at our world and saw--what did we see? Forms and colours side by side that we had no suspicion were interdependent.We had no conception of the roots of things nor of the reaction of things.It did not seem to us, for example, that business had anything to do with government, or that money and means affected the heroic issues of war.There were no wagons in our war game, and where there were guns, there it was assumed the ammunition was gathered together.
Finance again was a sealed book to us; we did not so much connect it with the broad aspects of human affairs as regard it as a sort of intrusive nuisance to be earnestly ignored by all right-minded men.
We had no conception of the quality of politics, nor how "interests"came into such affairs; we believed men were swayed by purely intellectual convictions and were either right or wrong, honest or dishonest (in which ease they deserved to be shot), good or bad.We knew nothing of mental inertia, and could imagine the opinion of a whole nation changed by one lucid and convincing exposition.We were capable of the most incongruous transfers from the scroll of history to our own times, we could suppose Brixton ravaged and Hampstead burnt in civil wars for the succession to the throne, or Cheapside a lane of death and the front of the Mansion House set about with guillotines in the course of an accurately transposed French Revolution.We rebuilt London by Act of Parliament, and once in a mood of hygienic enterprise we transferred its population ENMASSE to the North Downs by an order of the Local Government Board.
We thought nothing of throwing religious organisations out of employment or superseding all the newspapers by freely distributed bulletins.We could contemplate the possibility of laws abolishing whole classes; we were equal to such a dream as the peaceful and orderly proclamation of Communism from the steps of St.Paul's Cathedral, after the passing of a simply worded bill,--a close and not unnaturally an exciting division carrying the third reading.Iremember quite distinctly evolving that vision.We were then fully fifteen and we were perfectly serious about it.We were not fools;it was simply that as yet we had gathered no experience at all of the limits and powers of legislation and conscious collective intention....
I think this statement does my boyhood justice, and yet I have my doubts.It is so hard now to say what one understood and what one did not understand.It isn't only that every day changed one's general outlook, but also that a boy fluctuates between phases of quite ***** understanding and phases of tawdrily magnificent puerility.Sometimes I myself was in those tumbrils that went along Cheapside to the Mansion House, a Sydney Cartonesque figure, a white defeated Mirabean; sometimes it was I who sat judging and condemning and ruling (sleeping in my clothes and feeding very simply) the soul and autocrat of the Provisional Government, which occupied, of all inconvenient places! the General Post Office at St.Martin's-le-Grand!...
I cannot trace the development of my ideas at Cambridge, but Ibelieve the mere physical fact of going two hours' journey away from London gave that place for the first time an effect of unity in my imagination.I got outside London.It became tangible instead of being a frame almost as universal as sea and sky.
