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 Iburnt 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.Ibegan 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; Igo 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, Ithink 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.
I climbed high and fast from small beginnings.I had the mind of my party.I do not know where I might not have ended, but for this red blaze that came out of my unguarded nature and closed my career for ever.
