THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Page 42

  and responsible guardian of her children.

  It is no use pretending that this is not novel and revolutionary; it

  is. The Endowment of Motherhood implies a new method of social

  organization, a rearrangement of the social unit, untried in human

  expericnce-as untried as electric traction was or flying in 1800.

  Of course, it may work out to modify men's ideas of marriage

  profoundly. To me that is a secondary consideration. I do not

  believe that particular assertion myself, because Iam convinced

  that a practical monogamy is a psychological necessity to the mass

  of civilised people. But even if I did believe it I should still

  keep to my present line, because it is the only line that will

  prevent a highly organised civilisation from ending in biological

  decay. The public Endowment of Motherhood is the only possible way

  which will ensure the permanently developing civilised state at

  which all constructive minds are aiming. A point is reached in the

  life-history of a civilisation when either this reconstruction must

  be effected or the quality and MORALE of the population prove

  insufficient for the needs of the developing organisation. It is

  not so much moral decadence that will destroy us as moral

  inadaptability. The old code fails under the new needs. The only

  alternative to this profound reconstruction is a decay in human

  quality and social collapse. Either this unprecedented

  rearrangement must be achieved by our civilisation, or it must

  presently come upon a phase of disorder and crumble and perish, as

  Rome perished, as France declines, as the strain of the Pilgrim

  Fathers dwindles out of America. Whatever hope there may be in the

  attempt therefore, there is no alternative to the attempt.

  6

  I wanted political success now dearly enough, but not at the price

  of constructive realities. These questions were no doubt

  monstrously dangerous in the political world; there wasn't a

  politician alive who didn't look scared at the mention of "The

  Family," but if raising these issues were essential to the social

  reconstructions on which my life was set, that did not matter. It

  only implied that I should take them up with deliberate caution.

  There was no release because of risk or difficulty.

  The question of whether I should commit myself to some open project

  in this direction was going on in my mind concurrently with my

  speculations about a change of party, like bass and treble in a

  complex piece of music. The two drew to a conclusion together. I

  would not only go over to Imperialism, but I would attempt to

  biologise Imperialism.

  I thought at first that I was undertaking a monstrous uphill task.

  But as I came to look into the possibilities of the matter, a strong

  persuasion grew up in my mind that this panic fear of legislative

  proposals affecting the family basis was excessive, that things were

  much riper for development in this direction than old-experienced

  people out of touch with the younger generation imagined, that to

  phrase the thing in a parliamentary fashion, "something might be

  done in the constituencies" with the Endowment of Motherhood

  forthwith, provided only that it was made perfectly clear that

  anything a sane person could possibly intend by "morality" was left

  untouched by these proposals.

  I went to work very carefully. I got Roper of the DAILY TELEPHONE

  and Burkett of the DIAL to try over a silly-season discussion of

  State Help for Mothers, and I put a series of articles on eugenics,

  upon the fall in the birth-rate, and similar topics in the BLUE

  WEEKLY, leading up to a tentative and generalised advocacy of the

  public endowment of the nation's children. I was more and more

  struck by the acceptance won by a sober and restrained presentation

  of this suggestion.

  And then, in the fourth year of the BLUE WEEKLY'S career, came the

  Handitch election, and I was forced by the clamour of my antagonist,

  and very willingly forced, to put my convictions to the test. I

  returned triumphantly to Westminster with the Public Endowment of

  Motherhood as part of my open profession and with the full approval

  of the party press. Applauding benches of Imperialists cheered me

  on my way to the table between the whips.

  That second time I took the oath I was not one of a crowd of new

  members, but salient, an event, a symbol of profound changes and new

  purposes in the national life.

  Here it is my political book comes to an end, and in a sense my book

  ends altogether. For the rest is but to tell how I was swept out of

  this great world of political possibilities. I close this Third

  Book as I opened it, with an admission of difficulties and

  complexities, but now with a pile of manuscript before me I have to

  confess them unsurmounted and still entangled.

  Yet my aim was a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing

  realisation that the essential quality of all political and social

  effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay

  of individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the

  basis of morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must

  be given, from that will come the perpetual fresh release and

  further ennoblement of individual lives…

  I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this

  book the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have

  called it the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a

  dominating truth and rightness which must force men's now sporadic

  motives more and more into a disciplined and understandingrelation

  to a plan. And I have tried to indicate how I sought to serve this

  great clarification of our confusions…

  Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal,

  and how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of

  mine, a mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as

  it pleases them.

  BOOK THE FOURTH

  ISABEL

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  LOVE AND SUCCESS

  1

  I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is

  to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint

  lives.

  It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was

  a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at

  this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our

  destruction-for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if

  we had been shot dead-in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected

  and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two

  friends and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to

  our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The

  thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of

  thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive

  effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two

  men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a

  consi
derable time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable

  to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.

  Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of

  friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.

  In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in

  steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the

  telling. In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my

  sins with a penitence Iam very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have

  got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel

  unquenchable regrets, but Iam not sure whether, if we could be put

  back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two

  years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over

  again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do not want to

  justify the things we have done. We are two bad people-if there is

  to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted

  badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely

  wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer

  humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again

  and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as

  unpremeditated as it is insincere. When Iam a little tired after a

  morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every

  other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the

  fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel

  so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my

  book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may

  read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric

  and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this

  business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely

  formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell

  you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were

  this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or

  account for its extreme intensity.

  I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of

  wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that

  eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the

  real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and

  menageries of human reason…

  We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find

  myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.

  But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of

  Eugenics between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive

  passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,

  but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising

  afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us

  whatever-at that the story must stand.

  But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective

  excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that

  passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of

  morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious

  compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of

  anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our

  literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-

  headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous

  possibilities of destruction and little effectivehelp. They find

  themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly

  commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up

  Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,

  scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any

  possibility of faith behind the plea of goodtaste. A god about

  whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are

  FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is

  inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more

  initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that

  can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial

  and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster

  as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,

  many more than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all

  our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest

  open scandal ends a career. England in the last quarter of a

  century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,

  I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it

  wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the

  cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary

  social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It

  not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an

  enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I

  am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.

  2

  Ever since the Kinghamstead election I had maintained what seemed a

  desultory friendship with Isabel. At first it was rather Isabel

  kept it up than I. Whenever Margaret and I went down to that villa,

  with its three or four acres of garden and shrubbery about it, which

  fulfilled our election promise to live at Kinghamstead, Isabel would

  turn up in a state of frank cheerfulness, rejoicing at us, and talk

  all she was reading and thinking to me, and stay for all the rest of

  the day. In her shameless liking for me she was as natural as a

  savage. She would exercise me vigorously at tennis, while Margaret

  lay and rested her back in the afternoon, or guide me for some long

  ramble that dodged the suburban and congested patches of the

  constituency with amazing skill. She took possession of me in that

  unabashed, straight-minded way a girl will sometimes adopt with a

  man, chose my path or criticised my game with a motherly solicitude

  for my welfare that was absurd and delightful. And we talked. We

  discussed and criticised the stories of novels, scraps of history,

  pictures, social questions, socialism, the policy of the Government.

  She was young and most unevenly informed, but she was amazingly

  sharp and quick and good. Never before in my life had I known a

  girl of her age, or a woman of her quality. I had never dreamt

  there was such talk in the world. Kinghamstead became a lightless

  place when she went to Oxford. Heaven knows how much that may not

  have precipitated my abandonment of the seat!

  She went to Ridout College, Oxford, and that certainly weighed with

  me when presently after my breach with the Liberals various little

  undergraduate societies began to ask for lectures and discussions.

  I favoured Oxford. I declared openly I did so because of her. At

  that time I think we neither of us suspected the possibility of

  passion that lay like a coiled snake in the path before us. It

  seemed to us that we had the quaintest, most delightful friendship

  in the world; she was my pupil, and I was her guide, philosopher,

  an
d friend. People smiled indulgently-even Margaret smiled

  indulgently-at our attraction for one another.

  Such friendships are not uncommon nowadays-among easy-going,

  liberal-minded people. For the most part, there's no sort of harm,

  as people say, in them. The two persons concerned are never

  supposed to think of the passionate love that hovers so close to the

  friendship, or if they do, then they banish the thought. I think we

  kept the thought as permanently in exile as any one could do. If it

  did in odd moments come into our heads we pretended elaborately it

  wasn't there.

  Only we were both very easily jealous of each other's attention, and

  tremendously insistent upon each other's preference.

  I remember once during the Oxford days an intimation that should

  have set me thinking, and I suppose discreetly disentangling myself.

  It was one Sunday afternoon, and it must have been about May, for

  the trees and shrubs of Ridout College were gay with blossom, and

  fresh with the new sharp greens of spring. I had walked talking

  with Isabel and a couple of other girls through the wide gardens of

  the place, seen and criticised the new brick pond, nodded to the

  daughter of this friend and that in the hammocks under the trees,

  and picked a way among the scattered tea-parties on the lawn to our

  own circle on the grass under a Siberian crab near the great bay

  window. There I sat and ate great quantities of cake, and discussed

  the tactics of the Suffragettes. I had made some comments upon the

  spirit of the movement in an address to the men in Pembroke, and it

  had got abroad, and a group of girls and women dons were now having

  it out with me.

  I forget the drift of the conversation, or what it was made Isabel

  interrupt me. She did interrupt me. She bad been lying prone on

  the ground at my right hand, chin on fists, listening thoughtfully,

  and I was sitting beside old Lady Evershead on a garden seat. I

  turned to Isabel's voice, and saw her face uplifted, and her dear

  cheeks and nose and forehead all splashed and barred with sunlight

  and the shadows of the twigs of the trees behind me. And something-