H. Wells - THE NEW MACHIAVELLI

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

energies in the futile beginning of ill-conceived books. One does

not settle down very readily at two and forty to a new way of

living, and I have found myselfwith the teeming interests of the

life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in

my head. My mindhas been full of confusedprotests 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

relationof the great constructive spiritin politics to individual

characterand 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 memorablesail 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 myselfaltogether 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 dreamhe 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 soulof 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 dreamof 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 dreamis a very old dreamindeed 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 mindsthat have had a kindred

aspiration, have dreamtof a world of men better ordered, happier,

finer, securer. They imagined cities grownmore 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 thoughtof these things with

passion and desireas other men thinkof 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 thinksyou 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

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, sawhomely 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 lonelywoods 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 " noblecourt dress," closed the door on the world of toiling

and getting, private loving, private hatingand personal regrets,

sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.

I like to thinkof 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 meanness as that which made him sound the note of

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 knownothing, 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 noblydressed and nobly dreamingwriter at the

desk.

That vision of the strengthened and perfected stateis protagonist

in my story. But as I re-read "The Prince" and thoughtout the

manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceivehow that stir

and whirl of human thoughtone 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, sawonly one method by which a thinkingman,

himselfnot powerful, might do the work of statebuilding, and that