THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

CHAPTER THE FOURTH
THE BESETTING OF SEX
1

Art is selection and so is most autobiography. But Iam concerned

with a more tangled business than selection, I want to show a

contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the

social organism in relation to that man. To tell my story at all I

have to simplify. I have given now the broad lines of my political

development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to

the conception of a constructive aristocracy. I have tried to set

that out in the form of a man discovering himself. Incidentally

that self-development led to a profound breach with my wife. One

has read stories before of husband and wife speaking severally two

different languages and coming to an understanding. But Margaret

and I began in her dialect, and, as I came more and more to use my

own, diverged.

I had thought when I married that the matter of womankind had ended

for me. I have tried to tell all that sex and women had been to me

up to my married life with Margaret and our fatal entanglement,

tried to show the queer, crippled, embarrassed and limited way in

which these interests break upon the life of a young man under

contemporary conditions. I do not think my lot was a very

exceptional one. I missed the chance of sisters and girl playmates,

but that is not an uncommon misadventure in an age of small

families; I never came to know any woman at all intimately until I

was married to Margaret. My earlier love affairs were encounters of

sex, under conditions of furtiveness and adventure that made them

things in themselves, restricted and unilluminating. From a boyish

disposition to be mystical and worshipping towards women I had

passed into a disregardful attitude, as though women were things

inferior or irrelevant, disturbers in great affairs. For a time

Margaret had blotted out all other women; she was so different and

so near; she was like a person who stands suddenly in front of a

little window through which one has been surveying a crowd. She

didn't become womankind for me so much as eliminate womankind from

my world… And then came this secret separation…

Until this estrangement and the rapid and uncontrollable development

of my relations with Isabel which chanced to follow it, I seemed to

have solved the problem of women by marriage and disregard. I

thought these things were over. I went about my career with

Margaret beside me, her brow slightly knit, her manner faintly

strenuous, helping, helping; and if we had not altogether abolished

sex we had at least so circumscribed and isolated it that it would

not have affected the general tenor of our lives in the slightest

degree if we had.

And then, clothing itself more and more in the form of Isabel and

her problems, this old, this fundamental obsession of my life

returned. The thing stole upon my mind so that I was unaware of its

invasion and how it was changing our long intimacy. I have already

compared the lot of the modern publicist to Machiavelli writing in

his study; in his day women and sex were as disregarded in these

high affairs as, let us say, the chemistry of air or the will of the

beasts in the fields; in ours the case has altogether changed, and

woman has come now to stand beside the tall candles, half in the

light, half in the mystery of the shadows, besetting, interrupting,

demanding unrelentingly an altogether unprecedented attention. I

feel that in these matters my life has been almost typical of my

time. Woman insists upon her presence. She is no longer a mere

physical need, an aesthetic bye-play, a sentimental background; she

is a moral and intellectual necessity in a man's life. She comes to

the politician and demands, Is she a child or a citizen? Is she a

thing or a soul? She comes to the individual man, as she came to me

and asks, Is she a cherished weakling or an equal mate, an

unavoidable helper? Is she to be tried and trusted or guarded and

controlled, bond or free? For if she is a mate, one must at once

trust more and exact more, exacting toil, courage, and the hardest,

most necessary thing of all, the clearest, most shameless,

explicitness of understanding…