1
Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my
energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does not
settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of living, and
I have found myself with the teeming interests of the life I have
abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in my head. My
mind has been full of confused protests and justifications. In any case
I should have found difficulties enough in expressing the complex thing
I have to tell, but it has added greatly to my trouble that I have a
great analogue, that a certain Niccolo Machiavelli chanced to fall out
of politics at very much the age I have reached, and wrote a book to
engage the restlessness of his mind, very much as I have wanted to do.
He wrote about the relation of the great constructive spirit in politics
to individual character and weaknesses, and so far his achievement lies
like a deep rut in the road of my intention. It has taken me far astray.
It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long drives
into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa across the
blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I began a laboured
and futile imitation of “The Prince.” I sat up late last night with the
jumbled accumulation; and at last made a little fire of olive twigs and
burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to begin again clear this morning.
But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting those
scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that I
have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he
still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred
with him and set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation of
the matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reason
of the dream he pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by the
mixture of his nature. His vices come in, essential to my issue. He is
dead and gone, all his immediate correlations to party and faction have
faded to insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his broad method
and conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living personality,
exposed down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can
ever be exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to
lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to one another;
it is no simple story of white passions struggling against the red that
I have to tell.
The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius
are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples
made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms
of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously,
jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and
diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human
possibilities; they thought of these things with passion and desire as
other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands
of men there are to-day almost mastered by this white passion of
statecraft, and in nearly every one who reads and thinks you could find,
I suspect, some sort of answering response. But in every one it presents
itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate
things.
It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano as he lived
in retirement upon his property after the fall of the Republic, perhaps
with a twinge of the torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking
in his limbs. Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was “The
Prince” was written. All day he went about his personal affairs,
saw homely neighbours, dealt with his family, gave vent to everyday
passions. He would sit in the shop of Donato del Corno gossiping
curiously among vicious company, or pace the lonely woods of his estate,
book in hand, full of bitter meditations. In the evening he returned
home and went to his study. At the entrance, he says, he pulled off his
peasant clothes covered with the dust and dirt of that immediate life,
washed himself, put on his “noble court dress,” closed the door on
the world of toiling and getting, private loving, private hating and
personal regrets, sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider
dreams.
I like to think of him so, with brown books before him lit by the light
of candles in silver candlesticks, or heading some new chapter of “The
Prince,” with a grey quill in his clean fine hand.
So writing, he becomes a symbol for me, and the less none because of his
animal humour, his queer indecent side, and because of such lapses
into utter meanness as that which made him sound the note of the
begging-letter writer even in his “Dedication,” reminding His
Magnificence very urgently, as if it were the gist of his matter, of the
continued malignity of fortune in his affairs. These flaws complete him.
They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol to Plato, of whose
indelicate side we know nothing, and whose correspondence with Dionysius
of Syracuse has perished; or to Confucius who travelled China in search
of a Prince he might instruct, with lapses and indignities now lost
in the mists of ages. They have achieved the apotheosis of individual
forgetfulness, and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty,
that bust of the Indian Bacchus which is now indissolubly mingled with
his tradition. They have passed into the world of the ideal, and every
humbug takes his freedoms with their names. But Machiavelli, more recent
and less popular, is still all human and earthly, a fallen brother--and
at the same time that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the
desk.
That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist in
my story. But as I re-read “The Prince” and thought out the manner of
my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir and whirl of
human thought one calls by way of embodiment the French Revolution, has
altered absolutely the approach to such a question. Machiavelli, like
Plato and Pythagoras and Confucius two hundred odd decades before him,
saw only one method by which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might
do the work of state building, and that was by seizing the imagination
of a Prince. Directly these men turned their thoughts towards
realisation, their attitudes became--what shall I call it?--secretarial.
Machiavelli, it is true, had some little doubts about the particular
Prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo,
but a Prince it had to be. Before I saw clearly the differences of our
own time I searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince. At
various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of
Wales, to the Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper
proprietor who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D.
Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances and
possibilities, princely. Yet in every case my pen bent of its own accord
towards irony because--because, although at first I did not realise it,
I myself am just as free to be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old
sort of Prince, the old little principality has vanished from the world.
The commonweal is one man's absolute estate and responsibility no more.
In Machiavelli's time it was indeed to an extreme degree one man's
affair. But the days of the Prince who planned and directed and was
the source and centre of all power are ended. We are in a condition of
affairs infinitely more complex, in which every prince and statesman is
something of a servant and every intelligent human being something of
a Prince. No magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world
for secretarial hopes.
In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense wonderful
how it has increased. I sit here, an unarmed discredited man, at a small
writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among the vines, and no
human being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self-immolation of
murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by theft and crime. No King,
no council, can seize and torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.
Such powers of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that
is not because power has diminished, but because it has increased and
become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and specialised.
It is no longer a negative power we have, but positive; we cannot
prevent, but we can do. This age, far beyond all previous ages, is full
of powerful men, men who might, if they had the will for it, achieve
stupendous things.
The things that might be done to-day! The things indeed that are being
done! It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the former. When
I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science, of medicine
and sanitation during the last century, when I measure the increase in
general education and average efficiency, the power now available
for human service, the merely physical increment, and compare it with
anything that has ever been at man's disposal before, and when I think
of what a little straggling, incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated
minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and organisers
has achieved this development of human possibilities, achieved it in
spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the
passionate resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy
with dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the heights
that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches at
thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the
old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a flattered
lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him.
The last written dedication of all those I burnt last night, was to no
single man, but to the socially constructive passion--in any man....
There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my world
and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if they had come
across a vast interval since his time, into the very chamber of the
statesman.
2
In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region of
life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the vehicle
of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-day have
ever had an inkling of the significance that might give them in the
state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed earth bears its
crops. Apart from their function of fertility they gave a humorous twist
to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the hours of Princes.
He left the thought of women outside with his other dusty things when
he went into his study to write, dismissed them from his mind. But
our modern world is burthened with its sense of the immense, now half
articulate, significance of women. They stand now, as it were, close
beside the silver candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he
stays his pen and turns to discuss his writing with them.
It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentous
that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is to be true
which has turned me at length from a treatise to the telling of my own
story. In my life I have paralleled very closely the slow realisations
that are going on in the world about me. I began life ignoring women,
they came to me at first perplexing and dishonouring; only very slowly
and very late in my life and after misadventure, did I gauge the power
and beauty of the love of man and woman and learnt how it must needs
frame a justifiable vision of the ordered world. Love has brought me
to disaster, because my career had been planned regardless of its
possibility and value. But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he
went into his study, left not only the earth of life outside but its
unsuspected soul.
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.