the power now available for human service, the merely physical
increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's
disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling,
incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,
experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this
development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the
disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate
resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with
dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
state may yet attain. I glimpse for a bewildering instant the
heights that may be scaled, the splendid enterprises made possible.
But the appeal goes out now in other forms, in a book that catches
at thousands of readers for the eye of a Prince diffused. It is the
old appeal indeed for the unification of human effort, the ending of
confusions, but instead of the Machiavellian deference to a
flattered lord, a man cries out of his heart to the unseen
fellowship about him. The last written dedication of all those I
burnt last night, was to no single man, but to the socially
constructive passion-in any man…
There is, moreover, a second great difference in kind between my
world and Machiavelli's. We are discovering women. It is as if
they had come across a vast interval since his time, into the very
chamber of the statesman.
2
In Machiavelli's outlook the interest of womanhood was in a region
of life almost infinitely remote from his statecraft. They were the
vehicle of children, but only Imperial Rome and the new world of to-
day have ever had an inkling of the significance that might give
them in the state. They did their work, he thought, as the ploughed
earth bears its crops. Apart from their function of fertility they
gave a humorous twist to life, stimulated worthy men to toil, and
wasted the hours of Princes. He left the thought of women outside
with his other dusty things when he went into his study to write,
dismissed them from his mind. But our modern world is burthened
with its sense of the immense, now half articulate, significance of
women. They stand now, as it were, close beside the silver
candlesticks, speaking as Machiavelli writes, until he stays his pen
and turns to discuss his writing with them.
It is this gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively
portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is
to be true which has turned me at length from a treatise to the
telling of my own story. In my life I have paralleled very closely
the slow realisations that are going on in the world about me. I
began life ignoring women, they came to me at first perplexing and
dishonouring; only very slowly and very late in my life and after
misadventure, did I gauge the power and beauty of the love of man
and woman and learnt how it must needs frame a justifiable vision of
the ordered world. Love has brought me to disaster, because my
career had been planned regardless of its possibility and value.
But Machiavelli, it seems to me, when he went into his study, left
not only the earth of life outside but its unsuspected soul.
3
Like Machiavelli at San Casciano, if I may take this analogy one
step further, I too am an exile. Office and leading are closed to
me. The political career that promised so much for me is shattered
and ended for ever.
I look out from this vine-wreathed veranda under the branches of a
stone pine; I see wide and far across a purple valley whose sides
are terraced and set with houses of pine and ivory, the Gulf of
Liguria gleaming sapphire blue, and cloud-like baseless mountains
hanging in the sky, and I think of lank and coaly steamships heaving
on the grey rollers of the English Channel and darkling streets wet
with rain, I recall as if I were back there the busy exit from
Charing Cross, the cross and the money-changers' offices, the
splendid grime of giant London and the crowds going perpetually to
and fro, the lights by night and the urgency and eventfulness of
that great rain-swept heart of the modern world.
It is difficult to think we have left that-for many years if not
for ever. In thought I walk once more in Palace Yard and hear the
clink and clatter of hansoms and the quick quiet whirr of motors; I
go in vivid recent memories through the stir in the lobbies, I sit
again at eventful dinners in those old dining-rooms like cellars
below the House-dinners that ended with shrill division bells, I
think of huge clubs swarming and excited by the bulletins of that
electoral battle that was for me the opening opportunity. I see the
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 heard already 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 wisdom as I can, as Machiavelli in his
exile sought to do, from the things I have learnt and felt during
the career that has ended now in my divorce.