THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

3

Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one

step further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to

me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered

and ended for ever.

I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a

stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides

are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of

Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains

hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving

on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet

with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from

Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the

splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to

and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of

that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.

It is difficult to think we have left that-for many years if not

for ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the

clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I

go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit

again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars

below the House-dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I

think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that

electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I see the

stencilled names and numbers go up on the green baize, constituency

after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting…

It is over for me now and vanished. That opportunity will come no

more. Very probably you have heard already some crude inaccurate

version of our story and why I did not take office, and have formed

your partial judgement on me. And so it is I sit now at my stone

table, half out of life already, in a warm, large, shadowy leisure,

splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper

before me to distil such wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his

exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during

the career that has ended now in my divorce.

I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mind of my

party. I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red

blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for

ever.