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 goodminds 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.

That, indeed, was the peculiar virtue and characteristic of the BLUE

WEEKLY. I was now very definitely convinced that much of the

confusion and futility of contemporary thought was due to the

general need of metaphysical training… The great mass of

people-and not simply common people, but people active and

influential in intellectual things-are still quite untrained in the

methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of

method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy

patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by

a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to

their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that

minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general

terms and a certain use for generalisations. They are-to fall back

on the ancient technicality-Realists of a crude sort. When I say

Realist of course I mean Realist as opposed to Nominalist, and not

Realist in the almost diametrically different sense of opposition to

Idealist. Such are the Baileys; such, to take their great

prototype, was Herbert Spencer (who couldn't read Kant); such are

whole regiments of prominent and entirely self-satisfied