THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

4

There was a tendency, even on the part of its sympathisers, to treat

the whole suffrage agitation as if it were a disconnected issue,

irrelevant to all other broad developments of social and political

life. We struggled, all of us, to ignore the indicating finger it

thrust out before us. "Your schemes, for all their bigness," it

insisted to our reluctant, averted minds, "still don't go down to

the essential things…"

We have to go deeper, or our inadequate children's insufficient

children will starve amidst harvests of earless futility. That

conservatism which works in every class to preserve in its

essentials the habitual daily life is all against a profounder

treatment of political issues. The politician, almost as absurdly

as the philosopher, tends constantly, in spite of magnificent

preludes, vast intimations, to specialise himself out of the reality

he has so stupendously summoned-he bolts back to littleness. The

world has to be moulded anew, he continues to admit, but without, he

adds, any risk of upsetting his week-end visits, his morning cup of

tea…

The discussion of the relations of men and women disturbs every one.

It reacts upon the private life of every one who attempts it. And

at any particular time only a small minority have a personal

interest in changing the established state of affairs. Habit and

interest are in a constantly recruited majority against conscious

change and adjustment in these matters. Drift rules us. The great

mass of people, and an overwhelming proportion of influential

people, are people who have banished their dreams and made their

compromise. Wonderful and beautiful possibilities are no longer to

be thought about. They have given up any aspirations for intense

love, their splendid offspring, for keen delights, have accepted a

cultivated kindliness and an uncritical sense of righteousness as

their compensation. It's a settled affair with them, a settled,

dangerous affair. Most of them fear, and many hate, the slightest

reminder of those abandoned dreams. As Dayton once said to the

Pentagram Circle, when we were discussing the problem of a universal

marriage and divorce law throughout the Empire, "Iam for leaving

all these things alone." And then, with a groan in his voice,

"Leave them alone! Leave them all alone!"

That was his whole speech for the evening, in a note of suppressed

passion, and presently, against all our etiquette, he got up and

went out.

For some years after my marriage, I too was for leaving them alone.

I developed a dread and dislike for romance, for emotional music,

for the human figure in art-turning my heart to landscape. I

wanted to sneer at lovers and their ecstasies, and was uncomfortable

until I found the effective sneer. In matters of private morals

these were my most uncharitable years. I didn't want to think of

these things any more for ever. I hated the people whose talk or

practice showed they were not of my opinion. I wanted to believe

that their views were immoral and objectionable and contemptible,

because I had decided to treat them as at that level. I was, in

fact, falling into the attitude of the normal decent man.

And yet one cannot helpthinking! The sensible moralised man finds

it hard to escape the stream of suggestion that there are still

dreams beyond these commonplace acquiescences,-the appeal of beauty

suddenly shining upon one, the mothlike stirrings of serene summer

nights, the sweetness of distant music…

It is one of the paradoxical factors in our public life at the

present time, which penalises abandonment to love so abundantly and

so heavily, that power, influence and control fall largely to

unencumbered people and sterile people and people who have married

for passionless purposes, people whose very deficiency in feeling

has left them free to follow ambition, people beautyblind, who don't

understand what it is to fall in love, what it is to desire children

or have them, what it is to feel in their blood and bodies the

supreme claim of good births and selective births above all other

affairs in life, people almost of necessity averse from this most

fundamental aspect of existence…