THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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

reallythink 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

flat, she was with the Balfes-she was to have been married from the

Balfes-and I sent my letter there. And I went out into the silent

square and posted the note forthwith, because I knew quite clearly

that if I left it until morning I should never post it at all.