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The New Machiavelli Chapter 1 · The H. G. Wells Library

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  Speaker 1: Book one, Chapter one of The New Machiavelli. This is
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  Speaker 1: a librevox recording. All librevox recordings are in the public domain.
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  Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit librevox dot org.
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  Speaker 1: Recording by Antoniogos. The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells,
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  Speaker 1: Book one, Chapter one, concerning a book that was never written. One.
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  Speaker 1: Since I came to this place, I have been very restless,
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  Speaker 1: wasting my energies in the futile beginning of ill conceived books.
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  Speaker 1: One does not settle down very readily at two and
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  Speaker 1: forty to a new way of living. And I have
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  Speaker 1: found myself with the teeming interests of the life I
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  Speaker 1: have abandoned, still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees
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  Speaker 1: in my head. My mind has been full of confused
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  Speaker 1: protests and justifications. In any case, I should have found
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  Speaker 1: difficulties enough in exps pressing the complex thing I have
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  Speaker 1: to tell. But it has added greatly to my trouble
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  Speaker 1: that I have a great analogue that a certain Niccolomachiavelli
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  Speaker 1: chanced to fall out of politics at very much the
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  Speaker 1: age I have reached and wrote a book to engage
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  Speaker 1: the restlessness of his mind, very much as I have
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  Speaker 1: wanted to do. He wrote about the relation of the
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  Speaker 1: great constructive spirit in politics to individual character and weaknesses.
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  Speaker 1: And so far his achievement lies like a deep rut
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  Speaker 1: in the road of my intention. It has taken me
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  Speaker 1: far astray. It is a matter of many weeks, now
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  Speaker 1: diversified indeed by some long drives into the mountains behind us,
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  Speaker 1: and a memorable cell to Genoa across the blue and
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  Speaker 1: purple waters that drowned Shelley. Since I began a labored
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  Speaker 1: and futile imitation of the Prince, I sat up late
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  Speaker 1: last night with a jumbled accumulation, and at last made
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  Speaker 1: a little fire of olive twigs and burnt it all
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  Speaker 1: sheet by sheet, to begin again clear this morning. But incidentally,
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  Speaker 1: I have reread most of Machiavelli, not accepting those scandalous
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  Speaker 1: letters of his Tavetti, And it seems to me, now
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  Speaker 1: that I have released myself altogether from his literary precedent,
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  Speaker 1: that he still has his use for me. In spite
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  Speaker 1: of his vast prestige, I claimed kindred with him and
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  Speaker 1: set his name upon my title page. In partial intimation
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  Speaker 1: of the matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy,
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  Speaker 1: not only by reason of the dream he pursued and
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  Speaker 1: the humanity of his politics, but by the mixture of
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  Speaker 1: his nature. His vices come in essential to my issue.
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  Speaker 1: He is dead and gone. All his immediate correlations to
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  Speaker 1: party and faction have faded to insignificance, leaving only on
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  Speaker 1: the one hand his broad method and conceptions, and upon
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  Speaker 1: the other his intimate, living personality, exposed down to its
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  Speaker 1: salacious corners, as the soul of no contemporary can ever
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  Speaker 1: be exposed. Of those double strands. It is I have
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  Speaker 1: to write of the subtle, protesting, perplexing play of instinctive
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  Speaker 1: passion and desire against too abstract a dream of statesmanship.
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  Speaker 1: But things that seem to lie very apart in Machiavelli's
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  Speaker 1: time have come near to one another. It is no
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  Speaker 1: simple story of white passions struggling against the red that
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  Speaker 1: I have to tell. The state making dream is a
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  Speaker 1: very old dream. Indeed, in the world's history it plays
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  Speaker 1: too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucious are
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  Speaker 1: but the highest of a great host of minds that
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  Speaker 1: have had a kindred aspiration, have dreamt of a world
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  Speaker 1: of men better ordered, happier, finer, securer. They imagine cities
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  Speaker 1: grown more per powful, and peoples made rich and multitudinous
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  Speaker 1: by their efforts. They thought in terms of harbours and
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  Speaker 1: shining navies, great roads engineered marvelously, jungles cleared and deserts conquered,
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  Speaker 1: the ending of muddle and diseases and dirt and misery,
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  Speaker 1: the ending of confusions that waste human possibilities. They thought
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  Speaker 1: of these things with passion and desire, as other men
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  Speaker 1: think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women.
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  Speaker 1: Thousands of men there are today were most mastered by
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  Speaker 1: this white passion of state craft. And in nearly everyone
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  Speaker 1: who reads and thinks, you could find I suspect some
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  Speaker 1: sort of answering response. But in everyone it presents itself
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  Speaker 1: extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other more intimate things.
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  Speaker 1: It was so with Machiavelli. I picture him at San Casciano,
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  Speaker 1: as he lived in retirement upon his property after the
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  Speaker 1: fall of the Republic, perhaps with a twinge of the
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  Speaker 1: torture that punished his conspiracy still lurking in his limbs.
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  Speaker 1: Such twinges could not stop his dreaming. Then it was
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  Speaker 1: the Prince was written. All day, he went about his
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  Speaker 1: personal affairs, saw homely neighbors, dealt with his family, gave
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  Speaker 1: vent to every day passions. He would sit in the
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  Speaker 1: shop of Donato del Corno, gossiping curiously among vicious company,
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  Speaker 1: or paced the lonely woods of his estate, book in
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  Speaker 1: hand full of bitter meditations. In the evening, he returned
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  Speaker 1: home and went to his study. At the entrance, he says,
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  Speaker 1: he pulled off his peasant clothes, covered with the dust
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  Speaker 1: and dirt of that immediate life, washed himself, put on
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  Speaker 1: his noble court dress, closed the door on the world
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  Speaker 1: of toiling and getting private, loving, private hating and personal regrets,
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  Speaker 1: sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.
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  Speaker 1: I like to think of him so with brown books
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  Speaker 1: before him, lit by the light of candles in silver candlesticks,
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  Speaker 1: or heading some new chapter of the Prince, with a
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  Speaker 1: gray quill in his clean, fine hand, so writing. He
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  Speaker 1: becomes a symbol for me, and none the less because
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  Speaker 1: of his animal humor, his queer, indecent side, and because
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  Speaker 1: of such lapses into what a meanness as that which
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  Speaker 1: made him sound the note of the begging letter writer.
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  Speaker 1: Even in his dedication, reminding his magnificence very urgently, as
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  Speaker 1: if it were the gist of his matter. Of the
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  Speaker 1: continued malignity of fortune in his affairs, these flaws complete him.
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  Speaker 1: They are my reason for preferring him as a symbol.
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  Speaker 1: To Plato, of whose indelicate side we know nothing, and
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  Speaker 1: whose correspondence with Dionysus of Syracuse has perished, or to Confucius,
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  Speaker 1: who traveled Chime in search of a prince he might
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  Speaker 1: instruct with lapses and indignities now lost in the mists
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  Speaker 1: of ages. They have achieved the apotheosis of individual forgetfulness,
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  Speaker 1: and Plato has the added glory of that acquired beauty,
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  Speaker 1: that bust of the Indian Bacchus, which is now indissolubly
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  Speaker 1: mingled with his tradition. They have passed into the world
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  Speaker 1: of the ideal, and every humbug takes his freedoms with
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  Speaker 1: their names. But Machiavelli, more recent and less popular, is
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  Speaker 1: still all human and earthly, a fallen brother. And at
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  Speaker 1: the same time, that nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer
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  Speaker 1: at the desk, that vision of the strengthened and perfected
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  Speaker 1: state is protagonist in my story. But as I re
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  Speaker 1: read The Prince and thought out the manner of my
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  Speaker 1: now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir
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  Speaker 1: and whirl of human thought, one called by way of embodiment,
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  Speaker 1: the French Revolution has altered absolutely the approach to such
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  Speaker 1: a question. Machiavelli, like Plato and Pythagoras and Confucious two
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  Speaker 1: hundred odd decades before him, saw only one method by
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  Speaker 1: which a thinking man, himself not powerful, might do the
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  Speaker 1: work of state building, and that was by seizing the
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  Speaker 1: imagination of a prince. Directly, these men turn their thoughts
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  Speaker 1: towards realization. Their attitudes became what shall I call it secretarial. Machiavelli,
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  Speaker 1: it is true, had some little doubts about the particular
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  Speaker 1: prince he wanted, whether it was Caesar, Borgia, or Juliano
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  Speaker 1: or Lorenzo. But a prince it had to be. Before
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  Speaker 1: I saw clearly the differences of our own time, I
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  Speaker 1: searched my mind for the modern equivalent of a prince.
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  Speaker 1: At various times I redrafted a parallel dedication to the
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  Speaker 1: Prince of Wales, to the Emperor William, to mister Evesham,
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  Speaker 1: to a certain newspaper proprietor who was once my schoolfellow
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  Speaker 1: at City Merchants, to mister J. D. Rockefeller, all of
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  Speaker 1: them men, in their several ways and circumstances and possibilities, princely.
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  Speaker 1: Yet in every case my pen bent to its own
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  Speaker 1: accord towards irony, because because although at first I did
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  Speaker 1: not realize it, I myself am just as a free
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  Speaker 1: to be a prince. The appeal was unfair. The old
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  Speaker 1: sort of prince, the old little principality, has vanished from
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  Speaker 1: the world. The common weal is one man's absolute, ast
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  Speaker 1: state and responsibility no more. In Machiavelli's time, it was, indeed,
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  Speaker 1: to an extreme degree, one man's affair. But the days
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  Speaker 1: of the prince, who planned and directed, and was the
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  Speaker 1: source and center of all power, are ended. We are
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  Speaker 1: in a condition of affairs infinitely more complex, in which
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  Speaker 1: every prince and statesman is something of a servant, and
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  Speaker 1: every intelligent human being something of a prince. No magnificent,
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  Speaker 1: pensive lorenzos remain any more in this world for secretarial hopes.
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  Speaker 1: In a sense, it is wonderful how power has vanished,
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  Speaker 1: in a sense, wonderful how it has increased I sit here,
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  Speaker 1: an unarmed, discredited man, at a small writing table, in
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  Speaker 1: a little defenseless dwelling among the vines, and no human
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  Speaker 1: being can stop my pen except by the deliberate self
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  Speaker 1: immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits except by
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  Speaker 1: theft and crime. No king, no counsel can seize and
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  Speaker 1: torture me, no church, no nation silence me. Such powers
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  Speaker 1: of ruthless and complete suppression have vanished. But that is
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  Speaker 1: not because power has diminished, but because it has increased
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  Speaker 1: and become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself in special
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  Speaker 1: It is no longer a negative power we have, but
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  Speaker 1: positive we cannot prevent, but we can do. This age,
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  Speaker 1: far beyond all previous ages, is full of powerful men,
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  Speaker 1: men who might, if they had the will for it,
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  Speaker 1: achieve stupendous things. The things that might be done today,
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  Speaker 1: the things indeed that are being done. It is the
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  Speaker 1: latter that give one so vast a sense of the former.
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  Speaker 1: When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical science,
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  Speaker 1: of medicine and sanitation during the last century, When I
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  Speaker 1: measure the increase in general education and average efficiency, the
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  Speaker 1: power now available for human service, the merely physical increment,
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  Speaker 1: and compare it with anything that has ever been at
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  Speaker 1: man's disposal before. And when I think of what a little, straggling, incidental,
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  Speaker 1: undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors, experimenters, educators, writers and
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  Speaker 1: organizers has achieved this development of human possibilities achieved it
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  Speaker 1: in spite of the disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority,
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  Speaker 1: and the passionate resistance of the active dull. My imagination
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  Speaker 1: grows giddy with dazzling intimations of the human splendors. The
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  Speaker 1: justly organized state may yet attain. I glimpse for a
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  Speaker 1: bewildering instant, the heights that may be scaled. The splendid
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  Speaker 1: enterprise is made possible. But the appeal goes out now
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  Speaker 1: in other forms, in a book that catches at thousands
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  Speaker 1: of readers, for the eye of a prince di fused.
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  Speaker 1: It is the old appeal, indeed, for the unification of
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  Speaker 1: human effort, the ending of confusions. But instead of the
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  Speaker 1: Machiavelian deference to a flattered lord, a man cries out
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  Speaker 1: of his heart to the unseen fellowship about him, the
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  Speaker 1: last written dedication of all those I burnt, last night
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  Speaker 1: was to no single man, but to the socially constructive
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  Speaker 1: passion in any man. There is moreover, a second great
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  Speaker 1: difference in kind between my world and Machiavellis we are
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  Speaker 1: discovering women. It is as if they had come across
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  Speaker 1: a vast interval since his time into the very chamber
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  Speaker 1: of the statesmen. Two. In Machiavelli's outlook, the interest of
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  Speaker 1: womanhood was in a region of life almost infinitely remote
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  Speaker 1: from his state craft. They were the vehicle of children.
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  Speaker 1: But only Imperial Rome and the new world of to
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  Speaker 1: day have ever had an inkling of the significance that
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  Speaker 1: might give them. In the state they did their work,
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  Speaker 1: he thought, as the plowed earth bears its crops. Apart
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  Speaker 1: from their function of fertility, they gave a humorous twist
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  Speaker 1: to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and wasted the
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  Speaker 1: hours of princes. He left the thought of women outside
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  Speaker 1: with his other nasty things when he went into his
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  Speaker 1: study to write, dismiss them from his mind. But our
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  Speaker 1: modern world is burthened with its sense of the immense,
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  Speaker 1: now half articulate significance of women. They stand now, as
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  Speaker 1: it were, close beside the silver candlesticks speaking as Machiavelli writes,
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  Speaker 1: until he stays his pen and turns to discuss his
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  Speaker 1: writing with them. It is this gradual discovery of sex
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  Speaker 1: as a thing collectively portentous that I have to mingle
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  Speaker 1: with my statecraft if my picture is to be true,
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  Speaker 1: which has turned me at length from a treatise to
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  Speaker 1: the telling of my own story. In my life, I
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  Speaker 1: have paralleled very closely the slow realizations that are going
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  Speaker 1: on in the world about me. I began life ignoring women.
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  Speaker 1: They came to me at first perplexing and dishonoring. Only
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  Speaker 1: very slowly and very late in my life, and after
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  Speaker 1: misadventure did I gauge the power and beauty of the
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  Speaker 1: love of man and woman and learnt how it must
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  Speaker 1: needs frame a justifiable vision of the ordered world. Love
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  Speaker 1: has brought me to disaster because my career had been planned,
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  Speaker 1: regardless of its possibility and value. But Machiavelliot seems to me,
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  Speaker 1: when he went into his study, left not only the
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  Speaker 1: earth of life outside, but its unsuspected soul. Three. Like Machiavelliot, Sankaskiano.
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  Speaker 1: If I may take this analogy one step further, I
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  Speaker 1: too am an exile office and leading are closed to me.
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  Speaker 1: The political career that promised so much for me is
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  Speaker 1: shattered and ended forever. I look out from this vine,
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  Speaker 1: wreathed verandah under the branches of a stone pine. I
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  Speaker 1: see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides
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  Speaker 1: are terraced and set with houses of pink and ivory,
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  Speaker 1: the of Liguria, gleaming sapphire, blue and cloudlike baseless mountains
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  Speaker 1: hanging in the sky. And I think of lank and
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  Speaker 1: coali steamships heaving on the gray rollers of the English Channel,
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  Speaker 1: and darkening streets wet with rain. I recall, as if
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  Speaker 1: I were back there, the busy exit from Charing Cross,
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  Speaker 1: the cross and the money changer's offices, the splendid grime
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  Speaker 1: of giant London, and the crowds going perpetually to and
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  Speaker 1: fro the lights by night, and the urgency and eventfulness
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  Speaker 1: of that great rain swept heart of the modern world.
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  Speaker 1: It is difficult to think we have left that for
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  Speaker 1: many years, if not forever. In thought. I walk once
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  Speaker 1: more in Palace Yard and hear the clink and clatter
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  Speaker 1: of hansoms and the quick quiet whir of motors. I
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  Speaker 1: go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies.
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  Speaker 1: I sit again as the ventful dinners in those old
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  Speaker 1: dining rooms like cellars below the house, dinners that ended
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  Speaker 1: with shrill division bells. I think of huge clubs swarming
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  Speaker 1: and excited by the bulletins of that electoral battle that
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  Speaker 1: was for me the opening opportunity. I see the stenciled
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  Speaker 1: names and numbers go up on the Green Bays constituency
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  Speaker 1: after constituency, amidst murmurs or loud shouting. It is over
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  Speaker 1: for me now and vanished that opportunity will come no more.
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  Speaker 1: Very probably you have heard already some crude, inaccurate version
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  Speaker 1: of our story and why I did not take office,
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  Speaker 1: and have formed your partial judgment on me. And so
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  Speaker 1: it is. I sit now at my stone table, half
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  Speaker 1: out of life, already in a warm, large, shadowy leisure,
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  Speaker 1: splashed with sunlight and hung with vine tendrils, with paper
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  Speaker 1: before me, to distill such wisdom as I can, as
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  Speaker 1: machiavellian is exiles sought to do from the things I
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  Speaker 1: have learnt and felt during the career that has ended
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  Speaker 1: now in my divorce, I climbed high and fast from
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  Speaker 1: small beginnings. I had the mind of my party. I
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  Speaker 1: do not know where I might not have ended but
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  Speaker 1: for this red blaze that came out of my unguarded
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  Speaker 1: nature and closed my career forever. End of Chapter one