eoples going ahead of us, mentally alert while we fumbled,
disciplined while we slouched, aggressive and preparing to bring our
Imperial pride to a reckoning, was extremely novel and distasteful to
me. It set me worrying of nights. It put all my projects for social and
political reconstruction upon a new uncomfortable footing. It made them
no longer merely desirable but urgent. Instead of pride and the love
of making one might own to a baser motive. Under Kipling's sway I had a
little forgotten the continent of Europe, treated it as a mere envious
echo to our own world-wide display. I began now to have a disturbing
sense as it were of busy searchlights over the horizon....

One consequence of the patriotic chagrin Meredith produced in me was an
attempt to belittle his merit. "It isn't a good novel, anyhow," I said.

The charge I brought against it was, I remember, a lack of unity. It
professed to be a study of the English situation in the early nineties,
but it was all deflected, I said, and all the interest was confused by
the story of Victor Radnor's fight with society to vindicate the woman
he had loved and never married. Now in the retrospect and with a mind
full of bitter enlightenment, I can do Meredith justice, and admit the
conflict was not only essential but cardinal in his picture, that the
terrible inflexibility of the rich aunts and the still more terrible
claim of Mrs. Burman Radnor, the "infernal punctilio," and Dudley
Sowerby's limitations, were the central substance of that inalertness
the book set itself to assail. So many things have been brought together
in my mind that were once remotely separated. A people that will not
valiantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understand
nothing whatever. But in those days what is now just obvious truth to me
was altogether outside my range of comprehension....

8

As I seek to recapitulate the interlacing growth of my apprehension of
the world, as I flounder among the half-remembered developments that
found me a crude schoolboy and left me a man, there comes out, as if
it stood for all the rest, my first holiday abroad. That did not happen
until I was twenty-two. I was a fellow of Trinity, and the Peace of
Vereeniging had just been signed.

I went with a man named Willersley, a man some years senior to myself,
who had just missed a fellowship and the higher division of the Civil
Service, and who had become an enthusiastic member of the