THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

H. G. Wells

THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

by

CONTENTS

BOOK THE FIRST

THE MAKING OF A MAN

I. CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

II. BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER

III. SCHOLASTIC

IV. ADOLESCENCE

BOOK THE SECOND

MARGARET

I. MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE

II. MARGARET IN LONDON

III. MARGARET IN VENICE

IV. THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER

BOOK THE THIRD

THE HEART OF POLITICS

I. THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN

II. SEEKING ASSOCIATES

III. SECESSION

IV. THE BESETTING OF SEX

BOOK THE FOURTH

ISABEL

I. LOVE AND SUCCESS

II. THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION

III. THE BREAKING POINT

BOOK THE FIRST

THE MAKING OF A MAN

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

1

Since I came to this place I have been very restless, wasting my

energies in the futile begi

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