THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

  H. G. Wells

  H. G. Wells

  THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

  by

  CONTENTS

  BOOK THE FIRST

  THE MAKING OF A MAN

  I. CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

  II. BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER

  III. SCHOLASTIC

  IV. ADOLESCENCE

  BOOK THE SECOND

  MARGARET

  I. MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE

  II. MARGARET IN LONDON

  III. MARGARET IN VENICE

  IV. THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER

  BOOK THE THIRD

  THE HEART OF POLITICS

  I. THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN

  II. SEEKING ASSOCIATES

  III. SECESSION

  IV. THE BESETTING OF SEX

  BOOK THE FOURTH

  ISABEL

  I. LOVE AND SUCCESS

  II. THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION

  III. THE BREAKING POINT

  BOOK THE FIRST

  THE MAKING OF A MAN

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

  1

  Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my

  energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does

  not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of

  living, and I have found myself with the teeming interests of the

  life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in

  my head. My mind has been full of confused protests and

  justifications. In any case I should have found difficulties enough

  in expressing the complex thing I have to tell, but it has added

  greatly to my trouble that I have a great analogue, that a certain

  Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out of politics at very much the

  age I have reached, and wrote a book to engage the restlessness of

  his mind, very much as I have wanted to do. He wrote about the

  relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual

  character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies like a

  deep rut in the road of my intention. It has taken me far astray.

  It is a matter of many weeks now-diversified indeed by some long

  drives into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa

  across the blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley-since I

  began a laboured and futile imitation of "The Prince." I sat up

  late last night with the jumbled accumulation; and at last made a

  little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all, sheet by sheet-to

  begin again clear this morning.

  But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting

  those scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now

  that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent,

  that he still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I

  claim kindred with him and set his name upon my title-page, in

  partial intimation of the matter of my story. He takes me with

  sympathy not only by reason of the dream he pursued and the humanity

  of his politics, but by the mixture of his nature. His vices come

  in, essential to my issue. He is dead and gone, all his immediate

  correlations to party and faction have faded to insignificance,

  leaving only on the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and

  upon the other his intimate living personality, exposed down to its

  salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can ever be

  exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the

  subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire

  against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that

  seemed to lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to

  one another; it is no simple story of white passions struggling

  against the red that I have to tell.

  The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's

  history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius

  are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred

  aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,

  finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and

  peoples made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought

  in terms of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered

  marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of

  muddle and diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions

  that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things with

  passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender

  beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered

  by this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly every one who

  reads and thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering

  response. But in every one it presents itself extraordinarily

  entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate things.

  It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he

  lived in retirement upon his property after the fall of the

  Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the torture that punished his

  conspiracy still lurking in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop

  his dreaming. Then it was "The Prince" was written. All day he

  went about his personal affairs, saw homely neighbours, dealt with

  his family, gave vent to everyday passions. He would sit in the

  shop of Donato del Corno gossiping curiously among vicious company,

  or pace the lonely woods of his estate, book in hand, full of bitter

  meditations. In the evening he returned home and went to his study.

  At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his peasant clothes covered

  with the dust and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put

  on his "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling

  and getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets,

  sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.

  I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the

  light of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter

  of "The Prince," with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.

  So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of

  his animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such

  lapses into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of

  the begging-letter writer even in his "Dedication," reminding His

  Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of

  the continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws

  complete him. They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to

  Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and whose

  correspondence with Dionysius of Syracuse has perished; or to

  Confucius who travelled China in search of a Prince he might

  instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists of ages.

  They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness, and

  Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty, that bust of the

  Indian Bacchus which is now i
ndissolubly mingled with his tradition.

  They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every humbug takes

  his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and

  less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother-and

  at the same time that nobly dressed and noblydreaming writer at the

  desk.

  That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist

  in my story. But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the

  manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir

  and whirl of human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French

  Revolution, has altered absolutely the approach to such a question.

  Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd

  decades before him, saw only one method by which a thinking man,

  himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that

  was by seizing the imagination of a Prince. Directly these men

  turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became-

  what shall I call it?-secretarial. Machiavelli, it is true, had

  some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it

  was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.

  Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my

  mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At various times I

  redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the

  Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor

  who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.

  Rockefeller-all of them men in their several ways and circumstances

  and possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its

  own accord towards irony because-because, although at first I did

  not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal

  was unfair. The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has

  vanished from the world. The commonweal is one man's absolute

  estate and responsibility no more. In Machiavelli's time it was

  indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair. But the days of the

  Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all

  power are ended. We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more

  complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a

  servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince. No

  magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for

  secretarial hopes.

  In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense

  wonderful how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited

  man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among

  the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the

  deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits

  except by theft and crime. No King, no council, can seize and

  torture me; no Church, no nation silence me. Such powers of

  ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is not

  because power has diminished, but because it has increased and

  become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and

  specialised. It is no longer a negative power we have, but

  positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond

  all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they

  had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.

  The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are

  being done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the

  former. When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical

  science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I

  measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,

  the power now available for human service, the merely physical

  increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's

  disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling,

  incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,

  experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this

  development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the

  disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate

  resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with

  dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised

  state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the

  heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.

  But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches

  at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the

  old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of

  confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a

  flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen

  fellowship about him. The last written dedication of all those I

  burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially

  constructive passion-in any man…

  There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my

  world and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if

  they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very

  chamber of the statesman.

  2

  In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region

  of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the

  vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-

  day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give

  them in the state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed

  earth bears its crops. Apart from their function of fertility they

  gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and

  wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought of women outside

  with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write,

  dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world is burthened

  with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of

  women. They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver

  candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen

  and turns to discuss his writing with them.

  It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively

  portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is

  to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the

  telling of my own story. In my life I have paralleled very closely

  the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me. I

  began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and

  dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after

  misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man

  and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of

  the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my

  career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.

  But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left

  not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.

  3

  Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one

  step further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to

&nb
sp; me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered

  and ended for ever.

  I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a

  stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides

  are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of

  Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains

  hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving

  on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet

  with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from

  Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the

  splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to

  and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of

  that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.

  It is difficult to think we have left that-for many years if not

  for ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the

  clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I

  go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit

  again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars

  below the House-dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I

  think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that

  electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I see the

  stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency

  after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting…