THE NEW MACHIAVELLI Read online

  "The Japanese did." Which was absurd.

  I went on to some other reply, I forget exactly what, and the talk

  of the whole table drew round me. It was an extraordinary

  revelation to me. Every one was unusually careless and outspoken,

  and it was amazing how manifestly they echoed the feeling of this

  old Tory spokesman. They were quite friendly to me, they regarded

  me and the BLUE WEEKLY as valuable party assets for Toryism, but it

  was clear they attached no more importance to what were my realities

  than they did to the remarkable therapeutic claims of Mrs. Eddy.

  They were flushed and amused, perhaps they went a little too far in

  their resolves to draw me, but they left the impression on my mind

  of men irrevocably set upon narrow and cynical views of political

  life. For them the political struggle was a game, whose counters

  were human hate and human credulity; their real aim was just every

  one's aim, the preservation of the class and way of living to which

  their lives were attuned. They did not know how tired I was, how

  exhausted mentally and morally, nor how cruel their convergent

  attack on me chanced to be. But my temper gave way, I became tart

  and fierce, perhaps my replies were a trifle absurd, and Tarvrille,

  with that quick eye and sympathy of his, came to the rescue. Then

  for a time I sat silent and drank port wine while the others talked.

  The disorder of the room, the still dripping ceiling, the noise, the

  displaced ties and crumpled shirts of my companions, jarred on my

  tormented nerves…

  It was long past midnight when we dispersed. I remember Tarvrille

  coming with me into the hall, and then suggesting we should go

  upstairs to see the damage. A manservant carried up two flickering

  candles for us. One end of the room was gutted, curtains, hangings,

  several chairs and tables were completely burnt, the panelling was

  scorched and warped, three smashed windows made the candles flare

  and gutter, and some scraps of broken china still lay on the puddled

  floor.

  As we surveyed this, Lady Tarvrille appeared, back from some party,

  a slender, white-cloaked, satin-footed figure with amazed blue eyes

  beneath her golden hair. I remember how stupidly we laughed at her

  surprise.

  2

  I parted from Panmure at the corner of Aldington Street, and went my

  way alone. But I did not go home, I turned westward and walked for

  a long way, and then struck northward aimlessly. I was too

  miserable to go to my house.

  I wandered about that night like a man who has discovered his Gods

  are dead. I can look back now detached yet sympathetic upon that

  wild confusion of moods and impulses, and by it I think I can

  understand, oh! half the wrongdoing and blundering in the world.

  I do not feel now the logical force of the process that must have

  convinced me then that I had made my sacrifice and spent my strength

  in vain. At no time had I been under any illusion that the Tory

  party had higher ideals than any other party, yet it came to me like

  a thing newly discovered that the men I had to work with had for the

  most part no such dreams, no sense of any collective purpose, no

  atom of the faith I held. They were just as immediately intent upon

  personal ends, just as limited by habits of thought, as the men in

  any other group or party. Perhaps I had slipped unawares for a time

  into the delusions of a party man-but I do not think so.

  No, it was the mood of profound despondency that had followed upon

  the abrupt cessation of my familiar intercourse with Isabel, that

  gave this fact that had always been present in my mind its quality

  of devastating revelation. It seemed as though I had never seen

  before nor suspected the stupendous gap between the chaotic aims,

  the routine, the conventional acquiescences, the vulgarisations of

  the personal life, and that clearly conscious development and

  service of a collective thought and purpose at which my efforts

  aimed. I had thought them but a little way apart, and now I saw

  they were separated by all the distance between earth and heaven. I

  saw now in myself and every one around me, a concentration upon

  interests close at hand, an inability to detach oneself from the

  provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy

  timidities that touched one at every point; and, save for rare

  exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter

  possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as

  unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer

  will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable

  planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted

  across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought

  too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the

  uttermost dear reality of life for a theoriser's dream.

  All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads

  of thought interwove; now I was a soul speaking in protest to God

  against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angry man,

  scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate

  pride of his soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his

  box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of

  flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch. I realised for

  the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mind and faith

  of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little

  strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished

  from my life. She had been the incarnation of those great

  abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.

  There was no support that night in the things that had been. We

  were alone together on the cliff for ever more!-that was very

  pretty in its way, but it had no truth whatever that could help me

  now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no

  sentiment or memory of her, but Isabel alive,-to talk to me, to

  touch me, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky

  gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.

  We were alone together on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman

  into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and

  characteristic sentimentality. What a lie it was, and how

  satisfying it had been! That was just where we shouldn't remain.

  We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is

  to forget. We should go out to other interests, new experiences,

  new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious

  understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the

  first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross

  memories of sights and sounds, and trivial incidental excitements…

  I had a curious feeling that night that I had lost touch with life

  for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That

  infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, "Hate and coarse

  thinking," stuck in my thoughts like a poisoned dart, a centre
of

  inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the

  vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis

  of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his

  emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was

  overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all

  possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;

  you lock it away jealously and watch, and well you may; hate and

  aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine

  thinking is, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a

  balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a

  justice and a defect on each disputing side. "Good honest men," as

  Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinking out

  decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast

  pleasure in hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists

  "blaggards and scoundrels"-it justified his opposition-the Lords

  were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all

  Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to think of jails

  and justice being done. His public spirit was saturated with the

  sombre joys of conflict and the pleasantthought of condign

  punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I

  perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was

  fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happy politician…

  Hate and coarse thinking; how the infernal truth of the phrase beat

  me down that night! I couldn't remember that I had known this all

  along, and that it did not really matter in the slightest degree. I

  had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seen how

  all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in

  life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product

  of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always known that

  science and philosophy elaborate themselves in spite of all the

  passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness

  of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of

  contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that

  greater mind in men, in which we are but moments and transitorily

  lit cells?" Hadn't I known that the spirit of man still speaks like

  a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere

  effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I known that we

  who think without fear and speak without discretion will not come to

  our own for the next two thousand years?

  It was the last was most forgotten of all that faith mislaid.

  Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of

  confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish

  temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,

  catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a

  nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to assuage

  my parting from Isabel we had set ourselves to imagine great rewards

  for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised

  ourselves success visible and shining in our lives. To console

  ourselves in our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and

  our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though

  those poor fertilising touches at the soil were indeed the

  germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such

  as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.

  That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition

  shrivelled to nothing in the black loneliness of that night.

  I saw that there were to be no such compensations. So far as my

  real services to mankind were concerned I had to live an

  unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be

  by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal

  would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting

  relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should

  follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and

  follow it now in infinite loneliness of soul; the one good

  comforter, the one effectual familiar, was lost to me for ever; I

  should do good and evil together, no one caring to understand; I

  should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much

  absolute evil; the good in me would be too often ill-expressed and

  missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming

  flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem

  sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because

  I believed with all my soul in love and fine thinking that did not

  mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think

  finely. I remember how I fell talking to God-I think I talked out

  loud. "Why do I care for these things?" I cried, "when I can do so

  little! Why am I apart from the jolly thoughtless fighting life of

  men? These dreams fade to nothingness, and leave me bare!"

  I scolded. "Why don't you speak to a man, show yourself? I thought

  I had a gleam of you in Isabel,-and then you take her away. Do you

  really think I can carry on this game alone, doing your work in

  darkness and silence, living in muddled conflict, half living, half

  dying?"

  Grotesque analogies arose in my mind. I discovered a strange

  parallelism between my now tattered phrase of "Love and fine

  thinking" and the "Love and the Word" of Christian thought. Was it

  possible the Christian propaganda had at the outset meant just that

  system of attitudes I had been feeling my way towards from the very

  beginning of my life? Had I spent a lifetime making my way back to

  Christ? It mocks humanity to think how Christ has been overlaid. I

  went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I

  had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with

  hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to

  a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public

  satisfaction in His fate…

  It's curious to think that hopeless love and a noisy disordered

  dinner should lead a man to these speculations, but they did. "He

  DID mean that!" I said, and suddenly thought of what a bludgeon

  they'd made of His Christianity. Athwart that perplexing, patient

  enigma sitting inaudibly among publicans and sinners, danced and

  gibbered a long procession of the champions of orthodoxy. "He

  wasn't human," I said, and remembered that last despairing cry, "My

  God! My God! why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

  "Oh, HE forsakes every one," I said, flying out as a tired mind

  will, with an obvious repartee…

  I passed at a bound from such monstrous theology to a towering rage

  against the Baileys. In an instant and with no sense of absurdity I

  wanted-in the intervals of love and fine thinking-to fling about

  that strenuously virtuous couple; I wanted to kick Keyhole of the

  PEEPSHOW into the gutter and make a common massacre of all the

  prosperous rascaldom that makes a trade and rule of virtue. I can

 
still feel that transition. In a moment I had reached that phase of

  weakly decisive anger which is for people of my temperament the

  concomitant of exhaustion.

  "I will have her," I cried. "By Heaven! I WILL have her! Life

  mocks me and cheats me. Nothing can be made good to me again…

  Why shouldn't I save what I can? I can't save myself without

  her…"

  I remember myself-as a sort of anti-climax to that-rather

  tediously asking my way home. I was somewhere in the neighbourhood

  of Holland Park…

  It was then between one and two. I felt that I could go home now

  without any risk of meeting Margaret. It had been the thought of

  returning to Margaret that had sent me wandering that night. It is

  one of the ugliest facts I recall about that time of crisis, the

  intense aversion I felt for Margaret. No sense of her goodness, her

  injury and nobility, and the enormous generosity of her forgiveness,

  sufficed to mitigate that. I hope now that in this book Iam able

  to give something of her silvery splendour, but all through this

  crisis I felt nothing of that. There was a triumphant kindliness

  about her that I found intolerable. She meant to be so kind to me,

  to offer unstinted consolation, to meet my needs, to supply just all

  she imagined Isabel had given me.

  When I left Tarvrille's, I felt I could anticipate exactly how she

  would meet my homecoming. She would be perplexed by my crumpled

  shirt front, on which I had spilt some drops of wine; she would

  overlook that by an effort, explain it sentimentally, resolve it

  should make no difference to her. She would want to know who had

  been present, what we had talked about, show the alertest interest

  in whatever it was-it didn't matter what… No, I couldn't

  face her.

  So I did not reach my study until two o'clock.

  There, I remember, stood the new and very beautiful old silver

  candlesticks that she had set there two days since to please me-the

  foolish kindliness of it! But in her search for expression,

  Margaret heaped presents upon me. She had fitted these candlesticks

  with electric lights, and I must, I suppose, have lit them to write

  my note to Isabel. "Give me a word-the world aches without you,"

  was all I scrawled, though I fully meant that she should come to me.

  I knew, though I ought not to have known, that now she had left her