May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy’s War and Peace?

    When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old
    general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to
    Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his
    purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general,
    speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he
    spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped
    listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and
    begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a
    cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly
    understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the
    system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the
    Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real
    system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a
    purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain
    like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like
    Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the
    official system but by this other unwritten system.

When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I
must conclude, however unlikely the conclusion seems, that you have a
taste for middle-aged moralising. I shall do my best to gratify it. I
shall in fact, give you advice about the world in which you are going
to live. I do not mean by this that I am going to talk on what are
called current affairs. You probably know quite as much about them as
I do. I am not going to tell you—except in a form so general that you
will hardly recognise it—what part you ought to play in post-war
reconstruction.

It is not, in fact, very likely that any of you will be able, in the
next ten years, to make any direct contribution to the peace or
prosperity of Europe. You will be busy finding jobs, getting married,
acquiring facts. I am going to do something more old-fashioned than
you perhaps expected. I am going to give advice. I am going to issue
warnings. Advice and warnings about things which are so perennial that
no one calls them “current affairs.”

And of course everyone knows what a middle-aged moralist of my type
warns his juniors against. He warns them against the World, the Flesh,
and the Devil. But one of this trio will be enough to deal with
today. The Devil, I shall leave strictly alone. The association
between him and me in the public mind has already gone quite as deep
as I wish: in some quarters it has already reached the level of
confusion, if not of identification. I begin to realise the truth of
the old proverb that he who sups with that formidable host needs a
long spoon. As for the Flesh, you must be very abnormal young people
if you do not know quite as much about it as I do. But on the World I
think I have something to say.

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second
lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two
different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little
red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A
general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a
captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally
organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be
told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and
explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost
indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then
later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

There are what correspond to passwords, but they are too spontaneous
and informal. A particular slang, the use of particular nicknames, an
allusive manner of conversation, are the marks. But it is not so
constant. It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside
and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are
obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline. And if
you come back to the same Divisional Headquarters, or Brigade
Headquarters, or the same regiment or even the same company, after six
weeks’ absence, you may find this secondary hierarchy quite altered.

There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in
it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have
been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are
really inside. It has no fixed name. The only certain rule is that the
insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may
be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called
“You and Tony and me.” When it is very secure and comparatively stable
in membership it calls itself “we.” When it has to be expanded to meet
a particular emergency it calls itself “all the sensible people at
this place.” From outside, if you have dispaired of getting into it,
you call it “That gang” or “they” or “So-and-so and his set” or “The
Caucus” or “The Inner Ring.” If you are a candidate for admission you
probably don’t call it anything. To discuss it with the other
outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention talking
to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present
conversation goes well, would be madness.

Badly as I may have described it, I hope you will all have recognised
the thing I am describing. Not, of course, that you have been in the
Russian Army, or perhaps in any army. But you have met the phenomenon
of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before
the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere
near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that
within the ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was
the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only
satellites. It is even possible that the school ring was almost in
touch with a Masters’ Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce
through the skins of an onion. And here, too, at your University—shall
I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me,
there are several rings—independent systems or concentric
rings—present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever
hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you
arrive after going down, you will find the Rings—what Tolstoy calls
the second or unwritten systems.

All this is rather obvious. I wonder whether you will say the same of
my next step, which is this. I believe that in all men’s lives at
certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between
infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the
desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left
outside. This desire, in one of its forms, has indeed had ample
justice done to it in literature. I mean, in the form of
snobbery. Victorian fiction is full of characters who are hag-ridden
by the desire to get inside that particular Ring which is, or was,
called Society. But it must be clearly understood that “Society,” in
that sense of the word, is merely one of a hundred Rings, and snobbery
therefore only one form of the longing to be inside.

People who believe themselves to be free, and indeed are free, from
snobbery, and who read satires on snobbery with tranquil superiority,
may be devoured by the desire in another form. It may be the very
intensity of their desire to enter some quite different Ring which
renders them immune from all the allurements of high life. An
invitation from a duchess would be very cold comfort to a man smarting
under the sense of exclusion from some artistic or communistic
côterie. Poor man—it is not large, lighted rooms, or champagne, or
even scandals about peers and Cabinet Ministers that he wants: it is
the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of
tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we—we four or five all
huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.

Often the desire conceals itself so well that we hardly recognize the
pleasures of fruition. Men tell not only their wives but themselves
that it is a hardship to stay late at the office or the school on some
bit of important extra work which they have been let in for because
they and So-and-so and the two others are the only people left in the
place who really know how things are run. But it is not quite true. It
is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside
and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination
somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this
committee.” A terrible bore… ah, but how much more terrible if you
were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday
afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is
much worse.

Freud would say, no doubt, that the whole thing is a subterfuge of the
sexual impulse. I wonder whether the shoe is not sometimes on the
other foot. I wonder whether, in ages of promiscuity, many a virginity
has not been lost less in obedience to Venus than in obedience to the
lure of the caucus. For of course, when promiscuity is the fashion,
the chaste are outsiders. They are ignorant of something that other
people know. They are uninitiated. And as for lighter matters, the
number of people who first smoked or first got drunk for a similar
reason is probably very large.

I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the
existence of Inner Rings is an Evil. It is certainly
unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not
only a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal
friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is
perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organisation
should coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most
energetic people held the highest spots, it might coincide; since they
often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really
deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than
their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. It is necessary:
and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us
into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and
yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous. As Byron has said:

Sweet is a legacy, and passing sweet

The unexpected death of some old lady

The painless death of a pious relative at an advanced age is not an
evil. But an earnest desire for her death on the part of her heirs is
not reckoned a proper feeling, and the law frowns on even the gentlest
attempts to expedite her departure. Let Inner Rings be unavoidable and
even an innocent feature of life, though certainly not a beautiful
one: but what of our longing to enter them, our anguish when we are
excluded, and the kind of pleasure we feel when we get in?

I have no right to make assumptions about the degree to which any of
you may already be compromised. I must not assume that you have ever
first neglected, and finally shaken off, friends whom you really loved
and who might have lasted you a lifetime, in order to court the
friendship of those who appeared to you more important, more
esoteric. I must not ask whether you have derived actual pleasure from
the loneliness and humiliation of the outsiders after you, yourself
were in: whether you have talked to fellow members of the Ring in the
presence of outsiders simply in order that the outsiders might envy;
whether the means whereby, in your days of probation, you propitiated
the Inner Ring, were always wholly admirable. I will ask only one
question—and it is, of course, a rhetorical question which expects no
answer. IN the whole of your life as you now remember it, has the
desire to be on the right side of that invisible line ever prompted
you to any act or word on which, in the cold small hours of a wakeful
night, you can look back with satisfaction? If so, your case is more
fortunate than most.

My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this
desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It
is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this
whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft,
disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent
mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take
measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief
motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your
profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be
the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own
accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of
conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you
drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t
say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by
pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by
passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you
will be that kind of man.

I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not
to be that kind of man. But you may have an open mind on the
question. I will therefore suggest two reasons for thinking as I
do. It would be polite and charitable, and in view of your age
reasonable too, to suppose that none of you is yet a scoundrel. On the
other hand, by the mere law of averages (I am saying nothing against
free will) it is almost certain that at least two or three of you
before you die will have become something very like scoundrels. There
must be in this room the makings of at least that number of
unscrupulous, treacherous, ruthless egotists. The choice is still
before you: and I hope you will not take my hard words about your
possible future characters as a token of disrespect to your present
characters.

And the prophecy I make is this. To nine out of ten of you the choice
which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no
very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or
bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of
coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from
the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to
know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the
moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a
prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the
public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand:
something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to
make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and
at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we
always do.”

And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain
or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near
your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer
world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that
genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly
cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner
Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be
something a little further from the rules, and next year something
further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end
in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a
peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a
scoundrel.

That is my first reason. Of all the passions, the passion for the
Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad
man do very bad things. My second reason is this. The torture allotted
to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill
sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It
is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be
had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this
rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get
what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there
will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider,
an outsider you will remain.

This is surely very clear when you come to think of it. If you want to
be made free of a certain circle for some wholesome reason—if, say,
you want to join a musical society because you really like music—then
there is a possibility of satisfaction. You may find yourself playing
in a quartet and you may enjoy it. But if all you want is to be in the
know, your pleasure will be short lived. The circle cannot have from
within the charm it had from outside. By the very act of admitting you
it has lost its magic.

Once the first novelty is worn off, the members of this circle will be
no more interesting than your old friends. Why should they be? You
were not looking for virtue or kindness or loyalty or humour or
learning or wit or any of the things that can really be enjoyed. You
merely wanted to be “in.” And that is a pleasure that cannot last. As
soon as your new associates have been staled to you by custom, you
will be looking for another Ring. The rainbow’s end will still be
ahead of you. The old ring will now be only the drab background for
your endeavor to enter the new one.

And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very
well know. You yourself, once you are in, want to make it hard for the
next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for
you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together
for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or
four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work
exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the
others can’t in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its
numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your
genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there
were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless
most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident; it
is the essence.

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break
it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your
working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find
yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that
really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other
sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means
coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in
the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that
professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole
against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and
crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things
which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be
responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys
and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain.

And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like,
you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that
you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen
from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the
difference is that the secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a
by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric:
for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do
things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among
the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world,
and no Inner Ring can ever have it.

We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in
senses I can’t now explore. But in another sense there is much truth
in the schoolboy’s principle “them as asks shan’t have.” To a young
person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of
“insides,” full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he
desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no
“inside” that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another
direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass.