ONE OF OUR CONQUERORS. It is one of the books that have made me.
In that I got a supplement and corrective of Kipling. It was the
first detached and adverse criticism of the Englishman I had ever
encountered. It must have been published already nine or ten years
when I read it. The country had paid no heed to it, had gone on to
the expensive lessons of the War because of the dull aversion our
people feel for all such intimations, and so I could read it as a
book justified. The war endorsed its every word for me, underlined
each warning indication of the gigantic dangers that gathered
against our system across the narrow seas. It discovered Europe to
me, as watching and critical.

But while I could respond to all its criticisms of my country's
intellectual indolence, of my country's want of training and
discipline and moral courage, I remember that the idea that on the
continent there were other peoples 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.