THE NEW MACHIAVELLI
by H. G. Wells

CONTENTS

BOOK THE FIRST

THE MAKING OF A MAN

I.   CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN
II.  BROMSTEAD AND MY FATHER
III. SCHOLASTIC
IV.  ADOLESCENCE

BOOK THE SECOND

MARGARET

I.   MARGARET IN STAFFORDSHIRE
II.  MARGARET IN LONDON
III. MARGARET IN VENICE
IV.  THE HOUSE IN WESTMINSTER

BOOK THE THIRD

THE HEART OF POLITICS

I.   THE RIDDLE FOR THE STATESMAN
II.  SEEKING ASSOCIATES
III. SECESSION
IV.  THE BESETTING OF SEX

BOOK THE FOURTH

ISABEL

I.   LOVE AND SUCCESS
II.  THE IMPOSSIBLE POSITION
III. THE BREAKING POINT

BOOK THE FIRST

THE MAKING OF A MAN

CHAPTER THE FIRST

CONCERNING A BOOK THAT WAS NEVER WRITTEN

1

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 myself with the teeming interests of the 
life I have abandoned still buzzing like a swarm of homeless bees in 
my head.  My mind has been full of confused protests 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 
relation of the great constructive spirit in politics to individual 
character and 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 memorable sail 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 myself altogether 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 dream he 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 soul of 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 dream of 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 dream is a very old dream indeed 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 minds that have had a kindred 
aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier, 
finer, securer.  They imagined cities grown more 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 thought of these things with 
passion and desire as other men think of 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 thinks you 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, saw homely 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 lonely woods 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 "noble court dress," closed the door on the world of toiling 
and getting, private loving, private hating and personal regrets, 
sat down with a sigh of contentment to those wider dreams.

I like to think of 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 know nothing, 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 nobly dressed and nobly dreaming writer at the 
desk.

That vision of the strengthened and perfected state is protagonist 
in my story.  But as I re-read "The Prince" and thought out the 
manner of my now abandoned project, I came to perceive how that stir 
and whirl of human thought one 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, saw only one method by which a thinking man, 
himself not powerful, might do the work of state building, and that 
was by seizing the imagination of a Prince.  Directly these men 
turned their thoughts towards realisation, their attitudes became--
what shall I call it?--secretarial.  Machiavelli, it is true, had 
some little doubts about the particular Prince he wanted, whether it 
was Caesar Borgia of Giuliano or Lorenzo, but a Prince it had to be.  
Before I saw clearly the differences of our own time I searched my 
mind for the modern equivalent of a Prince.  At various times I 
redrafted a parallel dedication to the Prince of Wales, to the 
Emperor William, to Mr. Evesham, to a certain newspaper proprietor 
who was once my schoolfellow at City Merchants', to Mr. J. D. 
Rockefeller--all of them men in their several ways and circumstances 
and possibilities, princely.  Yet in every case my pen bent of its 
own accord towards irony because--because, although at first I did 
not realise it, I myself am just as free to be a prince.  The appeal 
was unfair.  The old sort of Prince, the old little principality has 
vanished from the world.  The commonweal is one man's absolute 
estate and responsibility no more.  In Machiavelli's time it was 
indeed to an extreme degree one man's affair.  But the days of the 
Prince who planned and directed and was the source and centre of all 
power are ended.  We are in a condition of affairs infinitely more 
complex, in which every prince and statesman is something of a 
servant and every intelligent human being something of a Prince.  No 
magnificent pensive Lorenzos remain any more in this world for 
secretarial hopes.

In a sense it is wonderful how power has vanished, in a sense 
wonderful how it has increased.  I sit here, an unarmed discredited 
man, at a small writing-table in a little defenceless dwelling among 
the vines, and no human being can stop my pen except by the 
deliberate self-immolation of murdering me, nor destroy its fruits 
except by theft and crime.  No King, no council, can seize and 
torture me; no Church, no nation silence me.  Such powers of 
ruthless and complete suppression have vanished.  But that is not 
because power has diminished, but because it has increased and 
become multitudinous, because it has dispersed itself and 
specialised.  It is no longer a negative power we have, but 
positive; we cannot prevent, but we can do.  This age, far beyond 
all previous ages, is full of powerful men, men who might, if they 
had the will for it, achieve stupendous things.

The things that might be done to-day!  The things indeed that are 
being done!  It is the latter that give one so vast a sense of the 
former.  When I think of the progress of physical and mechanical