H. Wells: THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I seethe

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 heardalready 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 wisdomas I can, as Machiavelli in his

exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and feltduring

the career that has ended now in my divorce.

I climbed high and fast from small beginnings. I had the mindof my

party. I do not knowwhere I might not have ended, but for this red

blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for

ever.

I dreamtfirst of statesand cities and political things when I was

a little boy in knickerbockers.

When I thinkof how such things began in my mind, there comes back

to me the memoryof 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

thinkof 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 rememberwith 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 dreamsof 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 reallyadequate 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 myselfwith 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 seensuch soldiers since-and for these my father

helpedme 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 doubtthrough 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.

My games upon the floor must have spread over several years and

developed from small beginnings, incorporating now this suggestion

and now that. They stretch, I suppose, from seven to eleven or

twelve. I played them intermittently, and they bulk now in the

retrospect far more significantly than they did at the time. I

played them in bursts, and then forgot them for long periods;

through the spring and summer I was mostly out of doors, and school

and classes caught me early. And in the retrospect I seethem all

not only magnified and transfigured, but fore-shortened and confused

together. A clockwork railway, I seem to remember, came and went;

one or two clockwork boats, toy sailing ships that, beingkeeled,

would do nothing but lie on their beam ends on the floor; a

detestable lot of cavalrymen, undersized and gilt all over, given me