"I thought you cared for Mrs…" she said as we walked back together to our home. "I think she is clever." She had never even noticed that Kate had been tongue-tied, probably out of nervousness; she suspected the clever woman, yet the girl was to the mother, in my opinion, as a divinity to an ordinary mortal.
We went round Sicily, and came back by Taormina, and my wife was charmed with the natural beauty of the place; she thought it the most entrancing scene in the world; but she cared nothing for the remains of the Greek theatre, which interested me intensely.
After six months of this sort of honeymoon we returned to London and as friends lived together in Park Lane. The six months had done this for me: they convinced me that there was something in the English character that I never could be in sympathy with. The snobbishness, not only of the titled but of gentle-folk of good breeding, began to exasperate me. Lunching in the house in Park Lane with the Duke of Cambridge and half a dozen people of good position taught me that I should always be an outsider, alien to them in imagination and in sympathy. When I went to the House of Commons and took my seat under the gallery I had a confirmation of the same feeling.
Everyone now was nicer to me than they had been. I was not only the editor of the Fortnightly Review, but I had a house in Park Lane and entertained royalty, and was altogether better worth knowing. I resented the whole thing!
It has happened several times in my life that apparent success has shown me inner failure. As long as I had not won, the struggle obsessed me; but as soon as I saw victory in sight and began to count the spoils, I became discontented, conscious that I was not on the right road. And so now, having won a secure position in the best English life, I found I was out of place. Many factors combined to disillusion me.
I have already told how the English mistake themselves: they believe that they are the most frank and honest race in the world, whereas in reality they are the most cunning, adroit, and unscrupulous diplomatists; their chief quality, as I am always saying, for it came to me with a shock of surprise, is a love of physical beauty in pigs and cattle and barn-yard fowl, as in men and women. They know without the teaching of Montaigne that the only beauty of man is height, and I was rather below the average stature. You may smile at this, gentle reader, but the full significance of it may escape you. In my experience, all the men who have succeeded in England have had height to help them: Kitchener and Duller were preferred before Roberts, who had more brains in his head than both of them put together, or multiplied by each other. Sir Richard Burton with his six feet was at once accepted as a personality, while little Stanley was treated with scant respect; Parnell, Randolph Churchill, Dilke, Chamberlain, and Hicks Beach were all far above middle height. Tennyson with his noble presence was accepted everywhere, while the far greater poet and man, James Thomson, being small, was altogether ignored. If Swinburne had been tall and strong he would have been Poet Laureate, but his magnificent forehead was spoiled to the English by his low stature. Oscar Wilde owed at least as much of his renown to his great height as to his wit.
I saw that the road to parliamentary success would be hard for me.
Englishmen distrust good talkers and have an absolute abhorrence of new ideas. When Cecil Rhodes (another tall man) was praised in The Times for his high ideals, my comment was: "True, he had ideals, but his ideals were all 'deals' with an T before them." Again, my socialistic leanings were anathema in England: I saw that they had degraded the best men of the common people, but they hated to have a doubt cast on their complacent optimism.
True, I had certain advantages: I had had an English education and knew how to dress, my table manners, too, were English of the best; but I was small and self-assured, and worst of all, obsessed by new ideas which ran counter to the interests of the English governing class. Sooner or later on my way to power I should be denounced and betrayed or boycotted. Strange to say, my sense of isolation grew with my success. It became more and more clear to me that I was not on the right road.
This conviction grew with the months. One incident occurs to me. I was doing all I could to make my election in Hackney sure. I was spending three or four thousand a year in the constituency, keeping up the club and speaking every week. The poverty in the district, or rather the destitution of the poor, appalled me; I was resolved to do what I could to better the dreadful conditions of their existence.
When the Parnell scandal came up and Gladstone took sides with his accusers as if he had known nothing before of Parnell's intrigue with Mrs.
O'Shea, I went down to Hackney and told the whole truth as I knew it. I said that Gladstone had known of the intrigue with Mrs. O'Shea for years and had smiled over it, and now to pretend to be outraged was a shameful concession to nonconformist prejudice. I made fun of the whole thing and declared that Kitty O'Shea's petticoats could hardly be turned into the oriflamme of English liberty. I was enthusiastically applauded, everyone left in the best of humor, and next day eighty out of the hundred of my committee resigned.
They sent me a letter, telling me that making fun of adultery had offended every one of them. There was a notice, too, in several of the daily papers of their resignations, and I saw at once that the matter was serious: my seat was imperiled and one or two of my friends told me I would have to take back what I had said.
Accordingly, I gave a dinner to my committee, sending special letters to the eighty, asking them to be present, and at the end of the dinner I admitted that I had treated the matter too lightly and was sorry; and my eighty critics retracted their resignations and all was pleasant as before. But I had had my lesson. I now knew that if I went into the House of Commons I should have to walk gingerly. I became conscious of the fact that I was walled in on all sides by English middle-class prejudice and mired in shallow Puritanism.
And the roof of snobbishness over me scarcely gave me air to breathe. I began to wonder what was the best way out. I felt as if I were in a prison and must escape. Moreover, Randolph Churchill, who was my chief backer, had already come to grief and would not be able to help me as he had promised.
My first wife was a great friend of Lord Abergavenny, who was known as the "wire-puller" of the Tory party. He had us down to Bridge Castle, his country seat in Kent, and got me to address a Conservative meeting on imperial federation.
I had been one of the first founders of the Imperial Federation League. From away back, I wanted to bring about a confederation of the English colonies, and I saw plainly that the holding by England of India and Egypt worked against this ideal; but when I spoke to influential people about giving up India and Egypt and founding an Imperial Senate to take the place of the House of Lords, and giving political power to the colonies through colonial senators, I found that ninety-nine people out of a hundred thought I was crazy. "Why should we give up Egypt and India," they said, "the twin stars in the English crown?"
"Machiavelli pointed out," I used to say in reply, "that every possession owned by the Romans, but not colonized by Romans, was found to be a weakness in time of war. If you are put to any severe war test, you may find that having to defend India and Egypt will lessen your chances of success.
Your heritage in colonies of your own race is surely large enough; why not content yourselves with that? You already possess more than half of the temperate zone."
Lord Abergavenny said to me frankly, "Leave out that talk of Egypt and India and I'll see that you are asked to speak at all the great meetings, and I'll get you a life seat in Parliament to boot."