H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,

For God still giveth His beloved sleep,

And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."

That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder

if my mother reallygrasped the import of what she had copied out.

It affected me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and

joined in a whispered conversation. It set me thinkinghow far a

mindin its general effectquite hopelessly limited, might range.

After that I went through all her diaries, trying to find something

more than a conventional term of tenderness for my father. But I

found nothing. And yet somehow there grewupon me the realisation

that there had been love… Her love for me, on the other hand,

was abundantly expressed.

I knewnothing of that secret life of feelingat the time; such

expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not

knowwhen I pleasedher and I did not knowwhen I distressed her.

Chiefly I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind

thorny with irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as

one believing quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things.

So I suppose it had to be; life was coming to me in new formsand

with new requirements. It was essential to our situation that we

should fail to understand. After this space of years I have come to

realisations and attitudesthat dissolve my estrangement from her, I

can pierce these barriers, I can seeher and feelher as a loving

and feelingand desiringand muddle-headed person. There are times

when I would have her alive again, if only that I might be kind to

her for a little while and give her some return for the narrow

intense affection, the tender desires, she evidently lavished so

abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I could make that

return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her demand

was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.

So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memoryas

I sawher last, fixed, still, infinitely intimate, infinitely

remote…

My own case with my mother, however, does not awakenthe same regret

I feelwhen I thinkof how she misjudged and irked my father, and

turned his weaknesses into thorns for her own tormenting. I wish I

could look back without that little twinge to two people who were

both in their different quality so good. But goodnessthat is

narrow is a pedestrian and ineffectual goodness. Her attitudeto my

father seems to me one of the essentially tragic things that have

come to me personally, one of those things that nothing can

transfigure, that REMAIN sorrowful, that I cannot soothe with any

explanation, for as I rememberhim he was indeed the most lovable of

weak spasmodic men. But my mother had been trained in a hard and

narrow system that made evil out of many things not in the least

evil, and inculcated neither kindliness nor charity. All their

estrangement followed from that.

These cramping cults do indeed take an enormous toll of human love

and happiness, and not only that but what we Machiavellians must

needs consider, they make frightful breaches in human solidarity. I

suppose I ama deeply religious man, as men of my quality go, but I

hatemore and more, as I growolder, the shadow of intolerance cast

by religious organisations. All my life has been darkened by

irrational intolerance, by arbitrary irrational prohibitions and

exclusions. Mahometanism with its fierce proselytism, has, I

suppose, the blackest record of uncharitableness, but most of the

Christian sects are tainted, tainted to a degree beyond any of the

anterior paganisms, with this same hatefulquality. It is their

exclusive claim that sends them wrong, the vain ambition that

inspires them all to teach a uniform one-sided God and be the one

and only gateway to salvation. Deprecation of all outside the

household of faith, an organised undervaluation of heretical

goodnessand lovableness, follows, necessarily. Every petty

difference is exaggerated to the quality of a saving grace or a

damning defect. Elaborate precautions are taken to shield the

believer's mindagainst broad or amiable suggestions; the faithful

are deterred by dark allusions, by sinister warnings, from books,

from theatres, from worldly conversation, from all the kindly

instruments that mingle human sympathy. For only by isolating its

flock can the organisation survive.

Every month there came to my mother a little magazine called, if I

rememberrightly, the HOME CHURCHMAN, with the combined authority of

print and clerical commendation. It was the most evil thing that

ever came into the house, a very devil, a thin little pamphlet with

one woodcut illustration on the front page of each number; now the

uninviting visage of some exponent of the realand only doctrine and

attitudes, now some coral strand in act of welcoming the

missionaries of God's mysterious preferences, now a new church in

the Victorian Gothic. The vile rag it was! A score of vices that

shun the policeman have nothing of its subtle wickedness. It was an

outrage upon the natural kindliness of men. The contents were all

admirably adjusted to keep a spiritin prison. Their force of

sustained suggestion was tremendous. There would be dreadful

intimations of the swift retribution that fell upon individuals for

Sabbath-breaking, and upon nations for weakening towards Ritualism,

or treating Roman Catholics as tolerable human beings; there would

be great rejoicings over the conversion of alleged Jews, and

terrible descriptions of the death-beds of prominent infidels with

boldly invented last words,-the most unscrupulous lying; there

would be the appallingly edifying careers of "early piety"

lusciously described, or stories of condemned criminals who traced

their final ruin unerringly to early laxities of the kind that leads

people to give up subscribing to the HOME CHURCHMAN.

Every month that evil spiritbrought about a slump in our mutual

love. My mother used to read the thing and become depressedand

anxious for my spiritualwelfare, used to be stirred to

unintelligent pestering…

A few years ago I met the editor of this same HOME CHURCHMAN. It

was at one of the weekly dinners of that Fleet Street dining club,

the Blackfriars.

I heardthe paper's name with a queer little shock and surveyed the

man with interest. No doubthe was only a successor of the purveyor

of discords who darkened my boyhood. It was amazing to find an

influenceso terrible embodied in a creature so palpably petty. He

was seated some way down a table at right angles to the one at which

I sat, a man of mean appearance with a greyish complexion, thin,

with a square nose, a heavy wiry moustache and a big Adam's apple

sticking out between the wings of his collar. He ate with

considerable appetite and unconcealed relish, and as his jaw was

underhung, he chummed and made the moustache wave like reeds in the

swell of a steamer. It gave him a conscientiouslook. After dinner

he a little forced himselfupon me. At that time, though the shadow

of my scandal was already upon me, I still seemed to be shaping for

great successes, and he was glad to be in conversation with me and

anxious to intimate political sympathy and support. I tried to make

him talk of the HOME CHURCHMAN and the kindred publications he ran,