nd, and a great
majority in the Commons, and the discontents and intrigues that are the
concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as
waves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it
seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to
the last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical
aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he
remained a commoner to the end of his days.

I had met him at the beginning of my career; he read some early papers
of mine, and asked to see me, and I conceived a flattered liking for him
that strengthened to a very strong feeling indeed. He seemed to me to
stand alone without an equal, the greatest man in British political
life. Some men one sees through and understands, some one cannot see
into or round because they are of opaque clay, but about Evesham I had a
sense of things hidden as it were by depth and mists, because he was so
big and atmospheric a personality. No other contemporary has had that
effect upon me. I've sat beside him at dinners, stayed in houses with
him--he was in the big house party at Champneys--talked to him,
sounded him, watching him as I sat beside him. I could talk to him with
extraordinary freedom and a rare sense of being understood. Other men
have to be treated in a special manner; approached through their own
mental dialect, flattered by a minute regard for what they have said and
done. Evesham was as widely and charitably receptive as any man I have
ever met. The common politicians beside him seemed like rows of stuffy
little rooms looking out upon the sea.

And what was he up to? What did HE think we were doing with Mankind?
That I thought worth knowing.

I remember his talking on one occasion at the Hartsteins', at a dinner
so tremendously floriferous and equipped that we were almost forced into
duologues, about the possible common constructive purpose in politics.

"I feel so much," he said, "that the best people in every party
converge. We don't differ at Westminster as they do in the country
towns. There's a sort of extending common policy that goes on under
every government, because on the whole it's the right thing to do, and
people know it. Things that used to be matters of opinion become matters
of science--and cease to be party questions."

He instanced education.

"Apart," said I, "from the religious question."

"Apart from the religiou