THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

BOOK THE THIRD
THE HEART OF POLITICS
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
1

I have been planning and replanning, writing and rewriting, this

next portion of my book for many days. I perceive I must leave it

raw edged and ill joined. I have learnt something of the

impossibility of History. For all I have had to tell is the story

of one man's convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his

life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the

doing. I find it taxes all my powers to convey even the main forms

and forces in that development. It is like looking through moving

media of changing hue and variable refraction at something vitally

unstable. Broad theories and generalisations are mingled with

personal influences, with prevalent prejudices; and not only

coloured but altered by phases of hopefulness and moods of

depression. The web is made up of the most diverse elements, beyond

treatment multitudinous… For a week or so I desisted

altogether, and walked over the mountains and returned to sit

through the warm soft mornings among the shaded rocks above this

little perched-up house of ours, discussing my difficulties with

Isabel and I think on the whole complicating them further in the

effort to simplify them to manageable and stateable elements.

Let me, nevertheless, attempt a rough preliminary analysis of this

confused process. A main strand is quite easily traceable. This

main strand is the story of my obvious life, my life as it must have

looked to most of my acquaintances. It presents you with a young

couple, bright, hopeful, and energetic, starting out under Altiora's

auspices to make a career. You figure us well dressed and active,

running about in motor-cars, visiting in great people's houses,

dining amidst brilliant companies, going to the theatre, meeting in

the lobby. Margaret wore hundreds of beautiful dresses. We must

have had an air of succeeding meritoriously during that time.

We did very continually and faithfully serve our joint career. I

thought about it a great deal, and did and refrained from doing ten

thousand things for the sake of it. I kept up a solicitude for it,

as it were by inertia, long after things had happened and changes

occurred in me that rendered its completion impossible. Under

certain very artless pretences, we wanted steadfastly to make a

handsome position in the world, achieve respect, SUCCEED. Enormous

unseen changes had been in progress for years in my mind and the

realities of my life, before our general circle could have had any

inkling of their existence, or suspected the appearances of our

life. Then suddenly our proceedings began to be deflected, our

outward unanimity visibly strained and marred by the insurgence of

these so long-hidden developments.

That career had its own hidden side, of course; but when I write of

these unseen factors I do not mean that but something altogether

broader. I do not mean the everyday pettinesses which gave the

cynical observer scope and told of a narrower, baser aspect of the

fair but limited ambitions of my ostensible self. This "sub-

careerist" element noted little things that affected the career,

made me suspicious of the rivalry of so-and-so, propitiatory to so-

and-so, whom, as a matter of fact, I didn't respect or feel in the

least sympathetic towards; guarded with that man, who for all his

charm and interest wasn't helpful, and a little touchy at the

appearance of neglect from that. No, I mean something greater and

not something smaller when I write of a hidden life.

In the ostensible self who glowed under the approbation of Altiora

Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised and depreciated, in

the House and in smoking-room gossip, you really have as much of a

man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary notice. But Iam

tremendously impressed now in the retrospect by the realisation of

how little that frontage represented me, and just how little such

frontages do represent the complexities of the intelligent

contemporary. Behind it, yet struggling to disorganise and alter

it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less

personal, less individualised, and broader in its references. Its

aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different

system of demands and satisfactions. It was critical, curious, more

than a little unfeeling-and relentlessly illuminating.

It is just the existence and development of this more generalised

self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more

subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its

relations to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental

and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,

from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the

window, to others who, like myself, come to regard the ostensible

existence more and more as a mere experimental feeder and agent for

that greater personality behind. And this back-self has its history

of phases, its crises and happy accidents and irrevocable

conclusions, more or less distinct from the adventures and

achievements of the ostensible self. It meets persons and phrases,

it assimilates the spirit of a book, it is startled into new

realisations by some accident that seems altogether irrelevant to

the general tenor of one's life. Its increasing independence of the

ostensible career makes it the organ of corrective criticism; it

accumulates disturbing energy. Then it breaks our overt promises

and repudiates our pledges, coming down at last like an overbearing

mentor upon the small engagements of the pupil.

In the life of the individual it takes the role that the growth of

philosophy, science, and creative literature may play in the

development of mankind.