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 indissolubly 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.