H. G. Wells
The New Machiavelli
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Table of contents
BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN
CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SCHOLASTIC
CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ ADOLESCENCE
BOOK THE SECOND: MARGARET
CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ MARGARET IN LONDON
CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ MARGARET IN VENICE
CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER
BOOK THE THIRD: THE HEART OF POLITICS
CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ SEEKING ASSOCIATES
CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ SECESSION
CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE BESETTING OF SEX
BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL
CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ LOVE AND SUCCESS
CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ THE BREAKING POINT
BOOK THE FIRST: THE MAKING OF A MAN
CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
1Since
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.2In
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.3Like
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.
CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
1
I
dreamt first of states and cities and political things when I was a
little boy in knickerbockers.
When
I think of how such things began in my mind, there comes back to me
the memory of an enormous bleak room with its ceiling going up to
heaven and its floor covered irregularly with patched and defective
oilcloth and a dingy mat or so and a “surround” as they call it,
of dark stained wood. Here and there against the wall are trunks and
boxes. There are cupboards on either side of the fireplace and
bookshelves with books above them, and on the wall and rather
tattered is a large yellow-varnished geological map of the South of
England. Over the mantel is a huge lump of white coral rock and
several big fossil bones, and above that hangs the portrait of a
brainy gentleman, sliced in half and displaying an interior of
intricate detail and much vigour of coloring. It is the floor I think
of chiefly; over the oilcloth of which, assumed to be land, spread
towns and villages and forts of wooden bricks; there are steep square
hills (geologically, volumes of Orr’s CYCLOPAEDIA OF THE SCIENCES)
and the cracks and spaces of the floor and the bare brown surround
were the water channels and open sea of that continent of mine.
I
still remember with infinite gratitude the great-uncle to whom I owe
my bricks. He must have been one of those rare adults who have not
forgotten the chagrins and dreams of childhood. He was a prosperous
west of England builder; including my father he had three nephews,
and for each of them he caused a box of bricks to be made by an
out-of-work carpenter, not the insufficient supply of the toyshop,
you understand, but a really adequate quantity of bricks made out of
oak and shaped and smoothed, bricks about five inches by two and a
half by one, and half-bricks and quarter-bricks to correspond. There
were hundreds of them, many hundreds. I could build six towers as
high as myself with them, and there seemed quite enough for every
engineering project I could undertake. I could build whole towns with
streets and houses and churches and citadels; I could bridge every
gap in the oilcloth and make causeways over crumpled spaces (which I
feigned to be morasses), and on a keel of whole bricks it was
possible to construct ships to push over the high seas to the
remotest port in the room. And a disciplined population, that rose at
last by sedulous begging on birthdays and all convenient occasions to
well over two hundred, of lead sailors and soldiers, horse, foot and
artillery, inhabited this world.
Justice
has never been done to bricks and soldiers by those who write about
toys. The praises of the toy theatre have been a common theme for
essayists, the planning of the scenes, the painting and cutting out
of the caste, penny plain twopence coloured, the stink and glory of
the performance and the final conflagration. I had such a theatre
once, but I never loved it nor hoped for much from it; my bricks and
soldiers were my perpetual drama. I recall an incessant variety of
interests. There was the mystery and charm of the complicated
buildings one could make, with long passages and steps and windows
through which one peeped into their intricacies, and by means of
slips of card one could make slanting ways in them, and send marbles
rolling from top to base and thence out into the hold of a waiting
ship. Then there were the fortresses and gun emplacements and covered
ways in which one’s soldiers went. And there was commerce; the
shops and markets and store-rooms full of nasturtium seed, thrift
seed, lupin beans and suchlike provender from the garden; such stuff
one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks of old
glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along the
great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian
frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there
were battles on the way.
That
great road is still clear in my memory. I was given, I forget by what
benefactor, certain particularly fierce red Indians of lead—I have
never seen such soldiers since—and for these my father helped me to
make tepees of brown paper, and I settled them in a hitherto desolate
country under the frowning nail-studded cliffs of an ancient trunk.
Then I conquered them and garrisoned their land. (Alas! they died, no
doubt through contact with civilisation—one my mother trod on—and
their land became a wilderness again and was ravaged for a time by a
clockwork crocodile of vast proportions.) And out towards the
coal-scuttle was a region near the impassable thickets of the ragged
hearthrug where lived certain china Zulus brandishing spears, and a
mountain country of rudely piled bricks concealing the most devious
and enchanting caves and several mines of gold and silver paper.
Among these rocks a number of survivors from a Noah’s Ark made a
various, dangerous, albeit frequently invalid and crippled fauna, and
I was wont to increase the uncultivated wildness of this region
further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden hedge and box from
the garden borders. By these territories went my Imperial Road
carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the oilcloth,
tunnelling through Encyclopaedic hills—one tunnel was three volumes
long—defended as occasion required by camps of paper tents or brick
blockhouses, and ending at last in a magnificently engineered ascent
to a fortress on the cliffs commanding the Indian reservation.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!