THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

BOOK THE FOURTH
ISABEL
CHAPTER THE FIRST
LOVE AND SUCCESS
1

I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is

to tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint

lives.

It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was

a vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at

this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our

destruction-for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if

we had been shot dead-in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected

and conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two

friends and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to

our situation or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The

thing was in us and not from without, it was akin to our way of

thinking and our habitual attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive

effect, a certain necessity. We might have escaped no doubt, as two

men at a hundred yards may shoot at each other with pistols for a

considerable time and escape. But it isn't particularly reasonable

to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both get hit.

Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of

friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.

In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in

steering my way between two equally undesirable tones in the

telling. In the first place I do not want to seem to confess my

sins with a penitence Iam very doubtful if I feel. Now that I have

got Isabel we can no doubt count the cost of it and feel

unquenchable regrets, but Iam not sure whether, if we could be put

back now into such circumstances as we were in a year ago, or two

years ago, whether with my eyes fully open I should not do over

again very much as I did. And on the other hand I do not want to

justify the things we have done. We are two bad people-if there is

to be any classification of good and bad at all, we have acted

badly, and quite apart from any other considerations we've largely

wasted our own very great possibilities. But it is part of a queer

humour that underlies all this, that I find myself slipping again

and again into a sentimental treatment of our case that is as

unpremeditated as it is insincere. When Iam a little tired after a

morning's writing I find the faint suggestion getting into every

other sentence that our blunders and misdeeds embodied, after the

fashion of the prophet Hosea, profound moral truths. Indeed, I feel

so little confidence in my ability to keep this altogether out of my

book that I warn the reader here that in spite of anything he may

read elsewhere in the story, intimating however shyly an esoteric

and exalted virtue in our proceedings, the plain truth of this

business is that Isabel and I wanted each other with a want entirely

formless, inconsiderate, and overwhelming. And though I could tell

you countless delightful and beautiful things about Isabel, were

this a book in her praise, I cannot either analyse that want or

account for its extreme intensity.

I will confess that deep in my mind there is a belief in a sort of

wild rightness about any love that is fraught with beauty, but that

eludes me and vanishes again, and is not, I feel, to be put with the

real veracities and righteousnesses and virtues in the paddocks and

menageries of human reason…

We have already a child, and Margaret was childless, and I find

myself prone to insist upon that, as if it was a justification.

But, indeed, when we became lovers there was small thought of

Eugenics between us. Ours was a mutual and not a philoprogenitive

passion. Old Nature behind us may have had such purposes with us,

but it is not for us to annex her intentions by a moralising

afterthought. There isn't, in fact, any decent justification for us

whatever-at that the story must stand.

But if there is no justification there is at least a very effective

excuse in the mental confusedness of our time. The evasion of that

passionately thorough exposition of belief and of the grounds of

morality, which is the outcome of the mercenary religious

compromises of the late Vatican period, the stupid suppression of

anything but the most timid discussion of sexual morality in our

literature and drama, the pervading cultivated and protected muddle-

headedness, leaves mentally vigorous people with relatively enormous

possibilities of destruction and little effectivehelp. They find

themselves confronted by the habits and prejudices of manifestly

commonplace people, and by that extraordinary patched-up

Christianity, the cult of a "Bromsteadised" deity, diffused,

scattered, and aimless, which hides from examination and any

possibility of faith behind the plea of goodtaste. A god about

whom there is delicacy is far worse than no god at all. We are

FORCED to be laws unto ourselves and to live experimentally. It is

inevitable that a considerable fraction of just that bolder, more

initiatory section of the intellectual community, the section that

can least be spared from the collective life in a period of trial

and change, will drift into such emotional crises and such disaster

as overtook us. Most perhaps will escape, but many will go down,

many more than the world can spare. It is the unwritten law of all

our public life, and the same holds true of America, that an honest

open scandal ends a career. England in the last quarter of a

century has wasted half a dozen statesmen on this score; she would,

I believe, reject Nelson now if he sought to serve her. Is it

wonderful that to us fretting here in exile this should seem the

cruellest as well as the most foolish elimination of a necessary

social element? It destroys no vice; for vice hides by nature. It

not only rewards dullness as if it were positive virtue, but sets an

enormous premium upon hypocrisy. That is my case, and that is why I

am telling this side of my story with so much explicitness.