H. Wells: THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

provocations, tendernesses, instinctive hates, dumb lusts and shy

timidities that touchedone at every point; and, save for rare

exalted moments, a regardlessness of broader aims and remoter

possibilities that made the white passion of statecraft seem as

unearthly and irrelevant to human life as the story an astronomer

will tell, half proven but altogether incredible, of habitable

planets and answering intelligences, suns' distances uncounted

across the deep. It seemed to me I had aspired too high and thought

too far, had mocked my own littleness by presumption, had given the

uttermost dear realityof life for a theoriser's dream.

All through that wandering agony of mine that night a dozen threads

of thoughtinterwove; now I was a soulspeaking in protest to God

against a task too cold and high for it, and now I was an angryman,

scorned and pointed upon, who had let life cheat him of the ultimate

pride of his soul. Now I was the fool of ambition, who opened his

box of gold to find blank emptiness, and now I was a spinner of

flimsy thoughts, whose web tore to rags at a touch. I realised for

the first time how much I had come to depend upon the mindand faith

of Isabel, how she had confirmed me and sustained me, how little

strength I had to go on with our purposes now that she had vanished

from my life. She had been the incarnation of those great

abstractions, the saving reality, the voice that answered back.

There was no support that night in the things that had been. We

were alonetogether on the cliff for ever more!-that was very

pretty in its way, but it had no truthwhatever that could helpme

now, no ounce of sustaining value. I wanted Isabel that night, no

sentiment or memoryof her, but Isabel alive,-to talk to me, to

touchme, to hold me together. I wanted unendurably the dusky

gentleness of her presence, the consolation of her voice.

We were alonetogether on the cliff! I startled a passing cabman

into interest by laughing aloud at that magnificent and

characteristicsentimentality. What a lie it was, and how

satisfyingit had been! That was just where we shouldn't remain.

We of all people had no distinction from that humanity whose lot is

to forget. We should go out to other interests, new experiences,

new demands. That tall and intricate fabric of ambitious

understandings we had built up together in our intimacy would be the

first to go; and last perhaps to endure with us would be a few gross

memoriesof sightsand sounds, and trivial incidental excitements…

I had a curious feelingthat night that I had lost touchwith life

for a long time, and had now been reminded of its quality. That

infernal little don's parody of my ruling phrase, " Hateand coarse

thinking," stuck in my thoughtslike a poisoned dart, a centre of

inflammation. Just as a man who is debilitated has no longer the

vitality to resist an infection, so my mind, slackened by the crisis

of my separation from Isabel, could find no resistance to his

emphatic suggestion. It seemed to me that what he had said was

overpoweringly true, not only of contemporary life, but of all

possible human life. Love is the rare thing, the treasured thing;

you lock it away jealouslyand watch, and well you may; hateand

aggression and force keep the streets and rule the world. And fine

thinkingis, in the rough issues of life, weak thinking, is a

balancing indecisive process, discovers with disloyal impartiality a

justice and a defect on each disputing side. " Goodhonest men," as

Dayton calls them, rule the world, with a way of thinkingout

decisions like shooting cartloads of bricks, and with a steadfast

pleasurein hostility. Dayton liked to call his antagonists

"blaggards and scoundrels"-it justified his opposition-the Lords

were "scoundrels," all people richer than be were "scoundrels," all

Socialists, all troublesome poor people; he liked to thinkof jails

and justice beingdone. His public spiritwas saturated with the

sombre joysof conflict and the pleasant thoughtof condign

punishment for all recalcitrant souls. That was the way of it, I

perceived. That had survival value, as the biologists say. He was

fool enough in politics to be a consistent and happypolitician…

Hateand coarse thinking; how the infernal truthof the phrase beat

me down that night! I couldn't rememberthat I had knownthis all

along, and that it did not reallymatter in the slightest degree. I

had worked it all out long ago in other terms, when I had seenhow

all parties stood for interests inevitably, and how the purpose in

life achieves itself, if it achieves itself at all, as a bye product

of the war of individuals and classes. Hadn't I always knownthat

science and philosophy elaborate themselvesin spite of all the

passion and narrowness of men, in spite of the vanities and weakness

of their servants, in spite of all the heated disorder of

contemporary things? Wasn't it my own phrase to speak of "that

greater mindin men, in which we are but moments and transitorily

lit cells?" Hadn't I knownthat the spiritof man still speaks like

a thing that struggles out of mud and slime, and that the mere

effort to speak means choking and disaster? Hadn't I knownthat we

who thinkwithout fearand speak without discretion will not come to

our own for the next two thousand years?

It was the last was most forgotten of all that faithmislaid.

Before mankind, in my vision that night, stretched new centuries of

confusion, vast stupid wars, hastily conceived laws, foolish

temporary triumphs of order, lapses, set-backs, despairs,

catastrophes, new beginnings, a multitudinous wilderness of time, a

nigh plotless drama of wrong-headed energies. In order to assuage

my parting from Isabel we had set ourselvesto imagine great rewards

for our separation, great personal rewards; we had promised

ourselvessuccess visible and shining in our lives. To console

ourselvesin our separation we had made out of the BLUE WEEKLY and

our young Tory movement preposterously enormous things-as though

those poor fertilising touchesat the soil were indeed the

germinating seeds of the millennium, as though a million lives such

as ours had not to contribute before the beginning of the beginning.

That poor pretence had failed. That magnificent proposition

shrivelled to nothing in the black lonelinessof that night.

I sawthat there were to be no such compensations. So far as my

realservices to mankind were concerned I had to live an

unrecognised and unrewarded life. If I made successes it would be

by the way. Our separation would alter nothing of that. My scandal

would cling to me now for all my life, a thing affecting

relationships, embarrassing and hampering my spirit. I should

follow the common lot of those who live by the imagination, and

follow it now in infinite lonelinessof soul; the one good

comforter, the one effectualfamiliar, was lost to me for ever; I

should do goodand evil together, no one caring to understand; I

should produce much weary work, much bad-spirited work, much

absoluteevil; the goodin me would be too often ill-expressed and

missed or misinterpreted. In the end I might leave one gleaming

flake or so amidst the slag heaps for a moment of postmortem

sympathy. I was afraid beyond measure of my derelict self. Because

I believed with all my soulin love and fine thinkingthat did not

mean that I should necessarily either love steadfastly or think