chord of Schumann were born, horribly misplaced, into the garden
of Klingsor; but sometimes one came upon horsebreakers and heartbreakers
who could make the best of both worlds. As a rule, however, the two were
apart and knew little of one another; so the prime minister folk had
to choose between barbarism and Capua. And of the two atmospheres it is
hard to say which was the more fatal to statesmanship.

Revolution on the Shelf

Heartbreak House was quite familiar with revolutionary ideas on paper.
It aimed at being advanced and freethinking, and hardly ever went to
church or kept the Sabbath except by a little extra fun at weekends.
When you spent a Friday to Tuesday in it you found on the shelf in your
bedroom not only the books of poets and novelists, but of revolutionary
biologists and even economists. Without at least a few plays by myself
and Mr Granville Barker, and a few stories by Mr H. G. Wells, Mr Arnold
Bennett, and Mr John Galsworthy, the house would have been out of the
movement. You would find Blake among the poets, and beside him Bergson,
Butler, Scott Haldane, the poems of Meredith and Thomas Hardy, and,
generally speaking, all the literary implements for forming the mind of
the perfect modern Socialist and Creative Evolutionist. It was a curious
experience to spend Sunday in dipping into these books, and the Monday
morning to read in the daily paper that the country had just been
brought to the verge of anarchy because a new Home Secretary or chief of
police without an idea in his head that his great-grandmother might
not have had to apologize for, had refused to "recognize" some powerful
Trade Union, just as a gondola might refuse to recognize a 20,000-ton
liner.

In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The
barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front
bench in the House of commons, with nobody to correct their incredible
ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from
the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets
instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with
money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other
went; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the
medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business
going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as
Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep