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 noblydreaming 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
science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I
measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,