THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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.