THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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 mea

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 noblydreaming 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

ma

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 pla

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