I want to show a contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in relation to that man.
(The New Machiavelli, page 287)
All I have had to tell is the story of one man’s convictions and aims and how they reacted upon his life; and I find it too subtle and involved and intricate for the doing…
(page 210)
Executive summary
‘The New Machiavelli’ is a first-person narrative told by its protagonist, Richard Remington MP (sleek, tall and neat, p.216). He starts his story in exile in Italy, his promising political career in ruins and his marriage destroyed after he has eloped with pretty young Isabel River. The long rambling narrative that follows aims to explain how he came to this state of affairs.
Remington was a middle-class public schoolboy with a lifelong passion for ‘statecraft’ and dreams of reforming the social and political practices of England. He was a brilliant student at Cambridge, then came down to London where he won a reputation for his books and articles on political themes. He was matched off with an eligible heiress and entered parliament as a Liberal MP in the Liberal landslide of 1906. He was influenced by the gradualist socialism of Altiora and Oscar Bailey, a couple clearly based on Sidney and Beatrice Webb of the Fabian Society.
Once in Parliament, Remington mixes widely with members of the ruling class and of all political parties and slowly his political ideas shift away from the Liberals, as he develops a cult proposal for a kind of ideal aristocracy, one which will promote science and research and art and beauty, a cockamamie idea which eventually leads him to ‘cross the floor’ of the House and join the Conservatives.
He sets up and edits a new magazine, the ‘Blue Weekly’ (‘a little intellectual oasis of good art criticism and good writing’, p.282). In the 1910 general election triggered by the political crisis surrounding David Lloyd George’s Budget, Remington is returned to parliament. He has by now developed an entirely new idea, a version of eugenics suggesting state support for women to marry and raise children, his Endowment for Motherhood scheme, and his career is on the up.
But everything is wrecked when he begins a love affair with a brilliant, playful Oxford graduate, Isabel Rivers. When rumours of their affair begin to circulate, Remington tries to break the affair off but, after much soul searching, resolves to abandon wife, career, party and country to go and live with Isabel in Italy. And it is here that, as the opening chapter makes clear, he sits down to write this extended (380-page) autobiography and justification for his life and actions.
Why it’s titled The New Machiavelli
The narrator clearly states his aim in the opening chapter. After a (relatively short) intellectual life spent worrying about politics, he came to the conclusion that the main aim should be, not fussing about this or that piece of legislation, but the education of a new technocratic elite to properly plan and organise a modern 20th century society – and, on a deeper level, the problem of how to the politician or theorist can reconcile their theories and policies with their personal life.
To be honest, I found the details of this a little hard to nail down, but it’s clear that the overall shape of this long narrative is Remington’s attempt to reconcile his wish to improve society with his wish to be true to himself (i.e. his adulterous affair with a young woman).
Half way through the book, he ties this to the idea that we are just puppets floating on the tide of history, individual cells in the great global brain and that, somehow, by removing the public mask and acknowledging ourselves for what we are, we also connect ourselves to the deeper movements of history. I think.
Anyway, all this led him to reread Machiavelli’s complete works and what he found was a man after his own heart, a man who recorded in his writings his true, deeper self, warts and all. This is strikingly unlike other famous authors in the canon of political writing such as Plato or Confucius, who wrote profoundly about statecraft but left not a trace of their personal lives behind. They are fine statues on plinths but not real people. Hence Remington’s devotion to warts-and-all Machiavelli, and his conscious attempt to integrate the personal into his own policies.
Also, like Machiavelli, the narrator has been driven into exile.
Also, he tells us that, after the Florentine Republic which he supported had fallen, Machiavelli set about writing his famous guide to rulers, ‘The Prince’, but also wondering who in contemporary Italy (in the 1510s) he should be advising. In just the same way, Wells’s narrator tells us that he, to begin with, set out to write a modern-day version of The Prince and also pondered who to dedicate it to, who to set out to teach and instruct (as both Plato and Confucius are recorded as seeking rulers to instruct).
This opening chapter goes on to explain that Remington, in the end, abandoned the idea of writing a new ‘Prince’, and decided to go whole hog and integrate the lessons he had learned from politics into a total portrait of himself i.e. into his autobiography.
So: those are the three or four reasons why the name Machiavelli is in the title: because the author wants to copy the aim of writing a treatise on statecraft, but also to integrate it with an account of his own life, which ended up being so long and detailed that it swamped the theory and turned into an autobiography.
[This lengthy and rather convoluted introduction to the text is very reminiscent of Wells’s long, tortuous introduction to his 1905 novel, The Modern Utopia. In both Wells spends quite a long time sharing with the reader the struggle he had to order and structure his text. If you have a lot of time to disentangle his motives and the convolutions of narrative structure which they result in, it may be worth it. But I think it’s no accident that both books, with their long tortuous rationales leading to very long texts, are not much read, compared to Wells’s earlier, shorter, more focused and exciting works.]
Longer critique
Critics have criticised ‘The New Machiavelli’ for being a poor novel for at least five reasons: 1) It is hugely rambling and digressive, lacking the discipline to cut extraneous matter and concentrate on the plot, instead overflowing with Wells’s hobby horses including great digressions on his pet subjects (the shambolic state of education, urban planning, economic policy), far in excess of anything needed for either plot or characterisation.
2) Despite its promise to be about Edwardian politics (as indicated by the title and the opening chapter, and as Wells promised his publisher) it turns out, like all Wells’s social novels, to be about ‘love’, in this case with the element of sex more prominent than ever before. In fact it was the candid descriptions – not of sex itself, which is nowhere actually described – but of the dominating role the sex urge plays in a young man’s mental life and development, which led his usual publisher (Macmillans) to turn it down, and to widespread accusations of ‘immorality’ by the critics.
3) The third reason is that Wells had recently ‘scandalised’ society by, in the glare of his role as public figure, commentator, novelist etc, having an affair with a much younger woman, Amber Reeves and abandoning his wife to run away with her. Well, the narrator of this long book is also a man prominent in public life who has an affair with a much younger woman and abandons his wife to run away with her. So it was easy to accuse ‘The New Machiavelli’ of being not a novel at all but (yet another) lightly fictionalised autobiography.
4) And not only that but this great long narrative (380 pages in the Everyman paperback edition) is tendentious, has an aim on us. It is cast in the form of a first-person apologia, an ‘apologia pro vita sua’, as Remington recounts in great detail his entire life story with a strong emphasis on sex. From the start he carefully seeds references to his sex urge, describes his first sexual experiences etc, all the while arguing that society needs to be more open and acknowledge the role the sex instinct plays in human life, so that by the time the narrative gets to the affair and elopement (the last quarter of the book) it’s difficult not to read the book as an extended justification of Well’s own behaviour.
5) Finally, Wells had recently ended his 5-year involvement with the Fabian Society (1903 to 1908), quitting the organisation in high dudgeon after a failed attempt to take it over for his own purposes, and the book contains extended and pretty negative portraits of the founders of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, lightly fictionalised as Oscar and Altiora Bailey. For those who knew the Webbs (and the other political figures Wells satirises) the book seemed like a cheap act of revenge. More broadly, this inclusion of public figures he had a grudge against reinforced the sense that Wells didn’t write ‘novels’ but fictionalised autobiographies stuffed with his hobby horse ideas.
For all these reasons it’s easy to dismiss ‘The New Machiavelli’ as less a novel than the latest fictionalising of the main events in Wells’s life which he had already used extensively in the plots of the preceding social novels – Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Mr Polly, Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica – to which he was now adding his latest scandalous sexual adventure and the Fabian fiasco.
But having said all that, there’s still a lot to redeem ‘The New Machiavelli’ and make it worth reading. Wells is always an interesting writer. I enjoy his prose style, I look forward to the occasional surprising simile, and – to turn the standard criticism on its head – it’s precisely because it’s not a carefully crafted, focused and honed work of art (cf The Good Soldier, The Great Gatsby) but instead a great rambling grab-bag of ideas and issues and memories and vividly imagined scenes and conversations – that it’s an enjoyable read. In some respects it’s like reading a series of articles about late-Victorian and Edwardian social history and I found it very readable on that level.
Muddle versus planning
Also it contains the most extensive statements of the key elements of Wells’s philosophy or politics (if either of them really deserve the name). This is that Wells, like the protagonist of the book, Richard Remington, grew up in a late-Victorian Britain characterised by laissez-faire economic policy and a minimal state devoted to interfering as little as possible in business or society, which had resulted, by the turn of the 20th century, in extraordinary and highly visible shambles in just about every sphere of English society. Six which Wells singles out for special criticism are:
- the brutally exploitative nature of unregulated industrial capitalism, 7 day weeks, 12 hour days etc
- the patchy, limited and regressive nature of the British educational ‘system’, which taught the ruling class nothing but Classics and cricket and taught the lower classes hardly anything at all
- the absolute shambles of urban development without any planning or supervision, which had created great sprawling slums
- the repressive and retarding influence of the Church on every aspect of society but especially through its network or Church schools
- the ruinous state of the British Army, badly trained soldiers led by bumbling officers, as revealed by the national humiliation of the Boer War
- the shameful, furtive, fumbling British attitude to sex which caused so much suffering and harm (disease, abortion, death)
The chaos in all these aspects and more of English society Wells sums up in the key word muddle, which recurs again and again, throughout the novel:
No, the Victorian epoch was not the dawn of a new era; it was a hasty, trial experiment, a gigantic experiment of the most slovenly and wasteful kind. I suppose it was necessary; I suppose all things are necessary. I suppose that before men will discipline themselves to learn and plan, they must first see in a hundred convincing forms the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods…
‘Muddle,’ said I, ‘is the enemy.’ That remains my belief to this day. Clearness and order, light and foresight, these things I know for Good. It was muddle had just given us all the still freshly painful disasters and humiliations of the war, muddle that gives us the visibly sprawling disorder of our cities and industrial country-side, muddle that gives us the waste of life, the limitations, wretchedness and unemployment of the poor. Muddle!
Against this muddle and shambles Wells sets the concepts of Planning and Order. And he associates these virtues with Science – which establishes the latest information about all aspects of the world – and Education – which disseminates this latest knowledge as widely as possible to the entire population.
[My father] gave me two very broad ideas in that talk and the talks I have mingled with it; he gave them to me very clearly and they have remained fundamental in my mind; one a sense of the extraordinary confusion and waste and planlessness of the human life that went on all about us; and the other of a great ideal of order and economy which he called variously Science and Civilisation… he led me to infer rather than actually told me that this Science was coming, a spirit of light and order, to the rescue of a world groaning and travailing in muddle for the want of it…
So the dichotomy in Wells’s mind isn’t between industrial capitalism and socialism or between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat or between the exploiting class and the exploited or between imperial colonists and colonised natives. It is between Muddle and Planning.
This fundamental dichotomy, or binary opposition, sheds light on Wells’s own personal version of ‘socialism’. By ‘socialism’ he doesn’t mean the political system whereby (to quote a dictionary) ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole’ – he simply means where there should be a carefully thought through and orchestrated plan. ‘Socialism’ is more a codeword for the new world of Order, Reason and Planning which he wished to see.
We were socialists because Individualism for us meant muddle, meant a crowd of separated, undisciplined little people all obstinately and ignorantly doing things jarringly, each one in his own way… Order and devotion were the very essence of our socialism, and a splendid collective vigour and happiness its end. We projected an ideal state, an organised state as confident and powerful as modern science, as balanced and beautiful as a body, as beneficent as sunshine, the organised state that should end muddle for ever; it ruled all our ideals and gave form to all our ambitions.
So, on the one hand you had the actual condition of Britain in the 1880s and ’90s, dominated by a reactionary church and two political parties led by idiotic aristocrats who could quote Latin and Greek tags till the cows came home but knew little else, parties which both believed in keeping state intervention to the absolute minimum, in not making any overarching social plans but responding to events in a chaotic manner…
…And on the other hand, Wells’s belief in total state intervention, in drawing up an all-encompassing, long-term plan to abolish waste and muddle, with religious obscurantism replaced by the latest scientific knowledge, and squabbling petty party politics replaced by a unified ruling elite of technocrats, engineers and scientists acting in the best interests of the whole country, promoting:
educational reorganisation, scientific research, literature, criticism, and intellectual development. (p.273)
What appealed to Wells about ‘socialism’ wasn’t the overthrow of the grotesquely rich ruling class and landed aristocracy in the name of the urban proletariat, but the replacement of the laissez-faire approach which dominated the entire Victorian era with massive, indeed total state control, but a state run by modern scientifically minded elite.
‘Monstrous muddle of things we have got,’ I said, ‘jumbled streets, ugly population, ugly factories —’
‘And you’d do a sight better if you had to do with it?’ said my uncle, regarding me askance.
‘Not me. But a world that had a collective plan and knew where it meant to be going would do a sight better, anyhow. We’re all swimming in a flood of ill-calculated chances —’
Grasp this fundamental dichotomy and you’ve more or less grasped everything Wells had to say and wrote about continuously for over 40 years (from the early 1900s to 1945). ‘The New Machiavelli’ is a realistic novel and so the protagonist – politician Richard Remington – sets out on his crusade to end muddle and impose order, within a relatively realistic setting. Whereas in the numerous science fiction and utopian novels he wrote, Wells looked forward to Order not being imposed by this or that local government but by a World Government made up of a technocratic elite of scientists, engineers and the like, devising 5-, 10-, 50-year plans to reform and rationalise all aspects of human life. Planning. Order. Science. Education. All aspects of the same fundamental vision.
That’s why he dwells at such length, in an early section, on the destruction of the small, self-contained and harmonious community of Bromstead when it was overrun by developers and hack builders and property speculators and the rest of the crooks involved in housing who turned the place into a polluted slum. It’s both an evocative and sad description in itself, but also a microcosm of the national problem: laissez-faire speculation run rampant, unsupervised, uncontrolled, with no guiding plan, leads to slums, dirt, pollution, poverty, bad houses which fall down or rot. It’s a powerful symbol of everything wrong with the British state.
The real villain in the piece – in the whole human drama – is the muddle-headedness, and it matters very little if it’s virtuous-minded or wicked. I want to get at muddle-headedness.
And all this explains why the real battleground for Wells was and remained education. That’s why he gives such a long account of Remington’s education at a public school (strikingly unlike the wretched educational experiences of Arthur Kipps and Alfred Polly). Because even here, at a top public school, the education is shockingly bad, with Wells dwelling on the utter fatuousness of making teenage boys waste thousands of hours learning Latin and ancient Greek, instead of modern science and engineering. Not only does it explain why Britain was, by the 1890s, falling behind America and Germany on every economic measure, but why it produced such strikingly dim and obtuse leaders.
The real scandal, as his long digression about education makes clear, is that it’s yet another aspect of English life which is the result of centuries of muddle and bodging and compromise and a complete lack of a centrally co-ordinated, rational plan.
Modern scientific central planning run by technocrats versus chaotically fragmented muddling through, managed by Latin-quoting buffoons – that is the dichotomy which underpins Wells’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, articles, encyclopedias, novels, pamphlets, the lot.
Free Love
That and Free Love. During the Edwardian decade Wells became notorious for the many affairs he had while still married to long-suffering Amy Catherine Robbins (always referred to as ‘Jane’). This novel was scandalous in its day because the plotline of the married male protagonist, Richard Remington, having a passionate affair with a much younger woman before running off abroad, was so obviously an only lightly fictionalised autobiographical account of Wells’s own recent affair with the young Amber Reeves who he eloped with.
It wasn’t just that Wells cast the book in the form of a first-person narrative by Remington and so takes us directly into the passions and saucy descriptions of the affair. But that the entire huge narrative is a massive apologia, exemplifying the dictionary definition of ‘a formal written defence of the narrator’s opinions or conduct’.
But it wasn’t just that the entire novel was widely seen as a thinly disguised piece of special pleading by Wells trying to explain and justify what, by the standards of the day, was seen as utterly reprehensible behaviour. More than this, Wells went on to turn his immoral behaviour into a kind of social and political crusade, insisting that society needed to be more tolerant of lovers who breached narrow social rules. And – what alienated many – was that he went further and associated the reform of sexual morality with all the other social reforms he postulated. He in effect insisted that if you wanted to see this better future of Order and planned government by an oligarchy of technocrats, you also had to buy into his crusade for sex reform. In fact at various points the narrator insists that a reformed sexual morality is central to any attempt to reform this muddle-headed nation.
A people that will not valiantly face and understand and admit love and passion can understand nothing whatever.
It was this yoking of his personal (scandalous and ‘immoral’) behaviour to his notions of social, economic and educational reform, his insistence that if you were to follow his political ideals you also had to accept his shameless philandering – which set people against Wells, and which certainly put the prissy Fabians off him.
The social comedies
‘The New Machiavelli’ was in one sense the climax of the series of ‘social comedies’ which started with ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, ‘Kipps’, ‘Mr Polly’, ‘Tono-Bungay’ and ‘Ann Veronica’. But at the same time it can be seen as the first of his ‘discussion novels’ (although that title probably belongs to ‘Ann Veronica’. It was the most ambitious of them in several respects. 1) It’s by far the longest. 2) It tries to not only define the social and political challenges facing Edwardian England but to show how an intelligent man developed his understanding of them, became aware of them, felt his way into them, and came to develop possible solutions. 3) The hero, Richard Remington, is a distinct class above all the previous protagonists (Lewisham, Kipps, Polly) and enjoys a vastly better education (at public school and Cambridge) than figures like Kipps (dim, left school at 14) or Polly, and so the account of his boyhood, teenage years and schooling is that more thoughtful and considered.
This and the fact that Wells is almost always a very vivid writer. If the book contains numerous digressions or passages about his hobby horses which are too long for ‘artistic’ effect (as his friend and critic Henry James was always pointing out) they are often interesting – especially for someone like me interested in social history as much as the ‘artistic’ effects. In fact you could accurately describe it as a series of magazine articles and features on various subjects gathered together and put into the voice of the narrator to create the appearance of a novel. I liked lots of bits of it.
Interesting passages
On his boyhood
As with the other social novels, arguably the best part is the first part, about his childhood and boyhood, school days and early student years (the first 100 or so pages of this 378-page-long Everyman edition). As with the comparable sections of Kipps, Mr Polly and Tono-Bungay, he writes vividly about childhood and boyhood, with a freshness that mostly disappears when his protagonist becomes a boring grown-up.
On his parents
I enjoyed the characterisation of Remington’s parents. His persuasive portrait of a mother who is a dogmatic low Christian, stern, humourless, anxious and dogmatic leads into passages lamenting the repressive impact of the Church of England on all aspects of English life.
And the portrait of his father, Arthur, as an amiably incompetent science teacher and frustrated gardener. The couple of pages about his father’s persistent failures in every aspect of trying to grow vegetables both struck a chord with me and made me laugh out loud.
At last with the failure of the lettuces came the breaking point. I was in the little arbour learning Latin irregular verbs when it happened. I can see him still, his peculiar tenor voice still echoes in my brain, shouting his opinion of intensive culture for all the world to hear, and slashing away at that abominable mockery of a crop with a hoe. We had tied them up with bast only a week or so before, and now half were rotten and half had shot up into tall slender growths. He had the hoe in both hands and slogged. Great wipes he made, and at each stroke he said, ‘Take that!’ The air was thick with flying fragments of abortive salad. It was a fantastic massacre. It was the French Revolution of that cold tyranny, the vindictive overthrow of the pampered vegetable aristocrats. After he had assuaged his passion upon them, he turned for other prey; he kicked holes in two of our noblest marrows, flicked off the heads of half a row of artichokes, and shied the hoe with a splendid smash into the cucumber frame…
On boyhood memories of Bromley as a village overcome by development
There’s a long digression on the history of Bromstead, the name Wells rather pointlessly gives to what is transparently the real London suburb of Bromley where he grew up. In his entertaining book about Wells, ‘The Culminating Ape’, Peter Kemp uses this passage about Bromstead as an example of Wells’s obsession with muddle, bad planning and environmental degradation. But first and foremost it is a vivid and very enjoyable description of the delights of boyhood, nearly as good as the boyhood sections of ‘Kipps’.
On monkey parades
It was in that phase of an urban youth’s development, the phase of the cheap cigarette, that this thing happened. One evening I came by chance on a number of young people promenading by the light of a row of shops towards Beckington, and, with all the glory of a glowing cigarette between my lips, I joined their strolling number. These twilight parades of young people, youngsters chiefly of the lower middle-class, are one of the odd social developments of the great suburban growths—unkindly critics, blind to the inner meanings of things, call them, I believe, Monkeys’ Parades—the shop apprentices, the young work girls, the boy clerks and so forth, stirred by mysterious intimations, spend their first-earned money upon collars and ties, chiffon hats, smart lace collars, walking-sticks, sunshades or cigarettes, and come valiantly into the vague transfiguring mingling of gaslight and evening, to walk up and down, to eye meaningly, even to accost and make friends. It is a queer instinctive revolt from the narrow limited friendless homes in which so many find themselves, a going out towards something, romance if you will, beauty, that has suddenly become a need — a need that hitherto has lain dormant and unsuspected. They promenade.
This is set in the 1880s but it reminded me of the Mods of the 1960s or the nattily dressed followers of ska at the end of the 1970s, similarly style-conscious, nattily dressed working class boys.
On public school
He gives an interesting portrait of the public school his hero goes to, the City Merchants which, in the absence of any notes in this Everyman edition, I presume refers to the Merchant Tailors School. He gives a satirical account of his hero faking an interest in cricket, the number one focus of a public school education, as well as withering criticism of the obsessive study of Classics, a subject completely and utterly useless for life in the modern world.
On Cambridge
The conversations between his student friends are staggeringly banal and dim, unformed, lacking any depth or data, they refute each other by simply saying ‘What rot old chap’ and so on.
On Kipling
The prevailing force in my undergraduate days was not Socialism but Kiplingism. Our set was quite exceptional in its socialistic professions. And we were all, you must understand, very distinctly Imperialists also, and professed a vivid sense of the ‘White Man’s Burden’.
It is a little difficult now to get back to the feelings of that period; Kipling has since been so mercilessly and exhaustively mocked, criticised and torn to shreds;—never was a man so violently exalted and then, himself assisting, so relentlessly called down. But in the middle nineties this spectacled and moustached little figure with its heavy chin and its general effect of vehement gesticulation, its wild shouts of boyish enthusiasm for effective force, its lyric delight in the sounds and colours, in the very odours of empire, its wonderful discovery of machinery and cotton waste and the under officer and the engineer, and ‘shop’ as a poetic dialect, became almost a national symbol. He got hold of us wonderfully, he filled us with tinkling and haunting quotations, he stirred Britten and myself to futile imitations, he coloured the very idiom of our conversation. He rose to his climax with his ‘Recessional’ while I was still an undergraduate.
What did he give me exactly? He helped to broaden my geographical sense immensely, and he provided phrases for just that desire for discipline and devotion and organised effort the Socialism of our time failed to express, that the current socialist movement still fails, I think, to express. The sort of thing that follows, for example, tore something out of my inmost nature and gave it a shape, and I took it back from him shaped and let much of the rest of him, the tumult and the bullying, the hysteria and the impatience, the incoherence and inconsistency, go uncriticised for the sake of it:
Keep ye the Law—be swift in all obedience—
Clear the land of evil, drive the road and bridge the ford,
Make ye sure to each his own That he reap where he hath sown
By the peace among Our peoples let men know we serve the Lord!
On the Boer War
South Africa seems always painted on the back cloth of my Cambridge memories. How immense those disasters seemed at the time, disasters our facile English world has long since contrived in any edifying or profitable sense to forget! How we thrilled to the shouting newspaper sellers as the first false flush of victory gave place to the realisation of defeat. Far away there our army showed itself human, mortal and human in the sight of all the world, the pleasant officers we had imagined would change to wonderful heroes at the first crackling of rifles, remained the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been, failing to imagine, failing to plan and co-operate, failing to grip. And the common soldiers, too, they were just what our streets and country-side had made them, no sudden magic came out of the war bugles for them. Neither splendid nor disgraceful were they — just ill-trained and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men — paying for it. And how it lowered our vitality all that first winter to hear of Nicholson’s Nek, and then presently close upon one another, to realise the bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg, Colenso — Colenso, that blundering battle, with White, as it seemed, in Ladysmith near the point of surrender! and so through the long unfolding catalogue of bleak disillusionments, of aching, unconcealed anxiety lest worse should follow. To advance upon your enemy singing about his lack of cleanliness and method went out of fashion altogether! The dirty retrogressive Boer vanished from our scheme of illusion.
All through my middle Cambridge period, the guns boomed and the rifles crackled away there on the veldt, and the horsemen rode and the tale of accidents and blundering went on. Men, mules, horses, stores and money poured into South Africa, and the convalescent wounded streamed home. I see it in my memory as if I had looked at it through a window instead of through the pages of the illustrated papers; I recall as if I had been there the wide open spaces, the ragged hillsides, the open order attacks of helmeted men in khaki, the scarce visible smoke of the guns, the wrecked trains in great lonely places, the burnt isolated farms, and at last the blockhouses and the fences of barbed wire uncoiling and spreading for endless miles across the desert, netting the elusive enemy until at last, though he broke the meshes again and again, we had him in the toils. If one’s attention strayed in the lecture-room it wandered to those battle-fields.
And that imagined panorama of war unfolds to an accompaniment of yelling newsboys in the narrow old Cambridge streets, of the flicker of papers hastily bought and torn open in the twilight, of the doubtful reception of doubtful victories, and the insensate rejoicings at last that seemed to some of us more shameful than defeats….
The British Empire
I think of St. Stephen’s tower streaming upwards into the misty London night and the great wet quadrangle of New Palace Yard, from which the hansom cabs of my first experiences were ousted more and more by taxicabs as the second Parliament of King Edward the Seventh aged; I think of the Admiralty and War office with their tall Marconi masts sending out invisible threads of direction to the armies in the camps, to great fleets about the world. The crowded, darkly shining river goes flooding through my memory once again, on to those narrow seas that part us from our rival nations; I see quadrangles and corridors of spacious grey-toned offices in which undistinguished little men and little files of papers link us to islands in the tropics, to frozen wildernesses gashed for gold, to vast temple-studded plains, to forest worlds and mountain worlds, to ports and fortresses and lighthouses and watch-towers and grazing lands and corn lands all about the globe. Once more I traverse Victoria Street, grimy and dark, where the Agents of the Empire jostle one another, pass the big embassies in the West End with their flags and scutcheons, follow the broad avenue that leads to Buckingham Palace, witness the coming and going of troops and officials and guests along it from every land on earth… Interwoven in the texture of it all, mocking, perplexing, stimulating beyond measure, is the gleaming consciousness, the challenging knowledge: ‘You and your kind might still, if you could but grasp it here, mould all the destiny of Man!’ (p.220)
On his Staffordshire uncle
Remington has an uncle who runs a successful business in the Potteries. When his father dies, this uncle appears, sells off the properties his dad tried and failed to maintain and rent out, and collates the capital into a pension for Remington and his mother and him. When his mother dies, this uncle appears again and becomes Remington’s guardian. By the time he’s a student, Remington has begun to see his limitations and Wells gives a funny caricature of him:
Essentially he was simple. Generally speaking, he hated and despised in equal measure whatever seemed to suggest that he personally was not the most perfect human being conceivable. He hated all education after fifteen because he had had no education after fifteen, he hated all people who did not have high tea until he himself under duress gave up high tea, he hated every game except football, which he had played and could judge, he hated all people who spoke foreign languages because he knew no language but Staffordshire, he hated all foreigners because he was English, and all foreign ways because they were not his ways. Also he hated particularly, and in this order, Londoner’s, Yorkshiremen, Scotch, Welch and Irish, because they were not ‘reet Staffordshire,’ and he hated all other Staffordshire men as insufficiently ‘reet.’ He wanted to have all his own women inviolate, and to fancy he had a call upon every other woman in the world. He wanted to have the best cigars and the best brandy in the world to consume or give away magnificently, and every one else to have inferior ones. (His billiard table was an extra large size, specially made and very inconvenient.) And he hated Trade Unions because they interfered with his autocratic direction of his works, and his workpeople because they were not obedient and untiring mechanisms to do his bidding.
On his first marriage to an unsuitable woman
The text is divided into four ‘books’ and the second one (pages 117 to 205) is devoted to his wooing and marriage to the lovely Margaret Seddon. Exactly as in ‘Lewisham’, ‘Polly’ etc, this is closely based on Wells’s own life in which he married young and naively to his cousin, projecting onto her all the qualities he wanted in a woman (namely intelligence and sensuality) which, unfortunately, she turned out to completely lack, being a very mundane unintellectual person and sexually unresponsive. Hence Wells’s affairs, hence the eventual running off with a younger, more sensual woman. In various permutations the same basic plot is recycled in all the social novels, and here again.
‘The New Machiavelli’ is a longer, deeper book than the previous ones, and consciously set in a higher social class than previously – so the wooing of Margaret Seddon is not pitched in the comic mode of Kipps or Polly and, as a result, feels all the more sad. Both figures are pathetic, the narrator not concealing the fact that he desperately wanted this beautiful ‘dropping’ woman to have all the qualities he projected onto her, hiding from himself what he already knew, namely that she has no ideas and nothing to say for herself,
Her mind had a curious want of vigour, “flatness” is the only word…a beautiful, fragile, rather ineffective girl…I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism…
But then they go on honeymoon to Venice and Richard realises, for the first time, her lack of sensual passion and her dim, conforming mediocrity.
It was entirely in my conception of things that I should be very watchful not to shock or distress Margaret or press the sensuous note. Our love-making had much of the tepid smoothness of the lagoons. We talked in delicate innuendo of what should be glorious freedoms. (p.176)
I haven’t got round to mentioning yet that Margaret was an heiress. Remington meets her on one of his periodic visits to his uncle, the successful businessman in the Potteries, where Margaret is a friend of the uncle’s daughters i.e. his cousins. A few years later he bumps into her at a little dinner given by the ‘Baileys’ and quickly realises that Altiora Bailey is pushing her on him. Margaret is young and attractive, wealthy and looking for a cause. Remington is a clever young man on the way up. Hence Altiora’s match-making.
Sex
This has brought us to what the book is ultimately about, which is sex – and on this subject, possibly the one closest to Wells’s heart and groin, he has much to say. Just to repeat, there is nowhere any description of actual sex, no nudity even. What we’re talking about is the character’s descriptions of sexual relationships.
The subject is broached when Remington is still a schoolboy. There’s nothing about the perils of puberty, about his first orgasm, about masturbation and so on, there’s no graphic detail. The subject is approached in a much more roundabout, euphemistic way. But nonetheless, it is mentioned as becoming an issue at school.
In his entertaining book about Wells, ‘The Culminating Ape’, Peter Kemp sheds light on an unusual aspect of Wells’s sexual education, which is that he had some of his first erotic feelings standing before the huge statues of bare-breasted female figures displayed at the Crystal Palace (representing Greek gods or the continents of the world etc) and the same again with the naked statues in the Victoria and Albert Museum. And some of the main source passages Kemp uses are from this book.
Then, at Cambridge, sex is one among many topics these bright but vague and inexpressive undergraduates discuss.
It’s only when he goes on a walking holiday in Italy with a friend, that Remington, to his amazement, finds himself having a fling with an older, married woman in their hotel. She and he hit it off, come to a quick understanding, and then he’s pulling her into his room, kissing her and… the rest is glossed over, but you get the idea. Four afternoons of ‘passion’ introduce him to sex. Not only are there no descriptions of any kind, but nothing about the actual problems and mechanics of sex – female arousal and lubrication, the problem of contraception and so on. It is his introduction to a kind of sex which goes undescribed and assumed.
After he leaves university, five years pass while he makes his way in London and, he tells us, becomes an expert in sordid affairs. I think he’s saying that he has several affairs, with married women (it was more feasible to have affairs with married women because single women were more tightly chaperoned and/or tightly protected their virginity). But he also, apparently, goes with prostitutes.
It’s not really the relationships, it’s Wells’s polemical way with the subject that’s eye-catching. He insists that sex is the great taboo subject, that it isn’t discussed or written about – and yet every adult knows it is a major part of adult life and is also a major part of the urban scene, especially in London whose streets all eye witnesses describe as being packed with prostitutes. His insistence that we give the subject its proper weight and importance, both in any account of the development of a character, and also in any description of London, both of these are surely laudable aims.
(All this candour echoes the prominence of sex as a theme in Ann Veronica, particularly the memorable passage of Ann innocently arriving in London only to be followed and propositioned by men on the street or wandering by accident into an obvious prostitute neighbourhood near Covent Garden; and the scenes of her being harassed and eventually almost raped by Ramage.)
Sex and Margaret
Anyway, the narrator is very aware that he has ‘descended’ into sordid affairs and sleeping with hookers, a world he characteristically doesn’t describe in terms of boobs and willies, but in moralising psychological terms:
I would feel again with a fresh stab of remorse, that this was not a flash of adventure, this was not seeing life in any permissible sense, but a dip into tragedy, dishonour, hideous degradation, and the pitiless cruelty of a world as yet uncontrolled by any ordered will.
He has an affair with a married woman, a Mrs Larrimer, and feels immensely guilty about it, assailed by a sense that it is not so much morally ‘wrong’ (as all the moralists of his age insisted) so much as the purely utilitarian sense that it is a waste of his time, mind and intellect.
She was at once unfaithful and jealous and full of whims about our meetings; she was careless of our secret, and vulgarised our relationship by intolerable interpretations; except for some glowing moments of gratification, except for the recurrent and essentially vicious desire that drew us back to each other again, we both fretted at a vexatious and unexpectedly binding intimacy. The interim was full of the quality of work delayed, of time and energy wasted, of insecure precautions against scandal and exposure. Disappointment is almost inherent in illicit love. I had, and perhaps it was part of her recurrent irritation also, a feeling as though one had followed something fine and beautiful into a net – into bird lime! These furtive scuffles, this sneaking into shabby houses of assignation, was what we had made out of the suggestion of pagan beauty; this was the reality of our vision of nymphs and satyrs dancing for the joy of life amidst incessant sunshine. We had laid hands upon the wonder and glory of bodily love and wasted them….
I like Wells’s way of writing about human nature. The overall shape of the novels is rambling, entire subjects are dragged in yes yes, but I like the way he writes about human relationships and feelings, it’s with a subtlety and insight I enjoy. And this oppressed sense of failing in life is connected with Wells’s central idea of muddle and confusion:
I felt that these great organic forces were still to be wrought into a harmony with my constructive passion. I felt too that I was not doing it. I had not understood the forces in this struggle nor its nature, and as I learnt I failed. I had been started wrong, I had gone on wrong, in a world that was muddled and confused, full of false counsel and erratic shames and twisted temptations.
Anyway, part of the naivety and mistakenness which leads him to woo and marry Margaret, is the misconceived idea that she will save him from the dark and sordid world which his (pretty basic, male) desires have led him into, will save him from himself.
Margaret shone at times in my imagination like a radiant angel in a world of mire and disorder, in a world of cravings… (p.169)
He projects onto her an entire narrative of salvation from squalor by a shining angel which she, of course, is both unaware of and completely unqualified to perform.
I suppose it was because I had so great a need of such help as her whiteness proffered, that I could ascribe impossible perfections to her, a power of intellect, a moral power and patience to which she, poor fellow mortal, had indeed no claim. (p.169)
Politics
Some reviewers criticised it for the incoherence of its politics. What they meant was that on the few occasions when Wells makes any attempt to state Remington’s political ideas or policies, they appear an incoherent mish-mash of Tory Liberal ideas. I think I can explain that.
The real-life Tories and Liberals were divided by very real political philosophies, which came into sharper contrast as the radical Liberals (David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill) took forward their policies to sanction trade union rights, to set up a welfare state and so on. The Edwardian political class was riven by divisions over Ireland, protectionism i.e. imperial tariffs, legislation around the nascent trade union movement and much more. None of this appears in Wells’s account. I don’t think Wells is interested in actual politics at all because he is fixated on his utopian vision of a world run by a technocratic elite. So that when he gets involved in political discussions as a young MP, he or his supporters repeat the same (boring, limited, impractical) Wellsian mantra:
‘Mr Remington has published a programme… Mr Remington stands for constructing a civilised state out of this muddle.’
Politics is a) speeches and manifestos setting out principles and plans, and b) the art of cobbling together acts and whipping enough support to get them passed through Commons and Lords. Wells’s novel deals with neither of those. There are descriptions of political conversations over dinner party tables which are heroic in their vagueness and uselessness.
The chapter titled ‘The Riddle For The Statesman’ ostensibly summarises the evolution of Remington’s political sympathies. This largely consists of him explaining why he grew disillusioned with the Liberal party, partly for its ‘essential littleness’, and came to realise that what he was seeking was a king of aristocracy, but not one ruled by the descendants of William the Conqueror’s lieutenants or other lackeys of monarchs, but the brightest and best, technocrats and engineers etc. In other words, a restatement of his fundamental idea that society needs to be guided by a technocratic elite in order to become the New Republic (a concept already treated in in his books ‘Anticipations’, 1902, ‘Mankind in the Making’, 1903 and ‘A Modern Utopia’, 1905).
[I was disconcerted when he identified this idea with the best of contemporary imperialism, a benevolent imperialism, and astonished when he writes enthusiastically about the Boy Scout movement as a model for what he intends (p.243)]
In this chapter he explains how his idea is to educate everyone up to appreciate the finest things in life and how this led him to admire the breadth and confidence of the actual aristocrats he now met with at grand London mansions and country houses.
I have given now the broad lines of my political development, and how I passed from my initial liberal-socialism to the conception of a constructive aristocracy.
His conversion to Conservative aristocracy is not in the slightest bit believable. Maybe it was a fundamental structural part of the plot, that the man abandons not only his wife but his party and the two are intimately linked because she believed in (and funded) his work for the Liberal Party with complete trust. So it’s a twofold breach of faith, a double betrayal. I can see the structural neatness. I just don’t believe the reasons Wells gives his protagonist.
Why so much political discourse is abuse
Remington hangs out at the Liberal Club and is amazed at its extraordinary diversity of beliefs and opinions (including the black and brown members who hale from distant parts of the empire). Anyway, he wonders at how you manage to keep so many disparate groups together and concludes you do so by attacking the enemy:
What but a common antagonism would ever keep these multitudes together? I understood why modern electioneering is more than half of it denunciation. Let us condemn, if possible, let us obstruct and deprive, but not let us do. There is no real appeal to the commonplace mind in ‘Let us do.’ That calls for the creative imagination, and few have been accustomed to respond to that call. [Denunciation] merely needs jealousy and hate, of which there are great and easily accessible reservoirs in every human heart… (p.224)
Wells’s way with conversations
Wells is very good at describing the ebb and flow of conversations, and their sub-texts and hidden meanings and implications, as well as the simple common experience of running out of things to say, or someone saying something too earnest and serious to be processed in dinner party chitchat, or a casual flirtation between a young couple taking an unexpectedly deep and serious turn.
I’ll never forget the scene in ‘Mr Polly’ where the hero is visiting his friends the Larkins sisters and suddenly, in the course of a page, finds himself coming to the verge of proposing to one of them, purely as a result of bravado and daring, suddenly realising the brink to which his playful banter has taken him. I think he’s very good at capturing all the unintended overtones and implications of conversations, as well as capturing very common problems and experiences. So, in no particular order:
There came that kind of pause that happens when a subject is broached too big and difficult for the gathering. Margaret’s blue eyes regarded the speaker with quiet disapproval for a moment, and then came to me in the not too confident hope that I would snub him out of existence with some prompt rhetorical stroke… (p.194)
Good Lord! what bores the Cramptons were! I wonder I endured them as I did. They had all of them the trick of lying in wait conversationally; they had no sense of the self-exposures, the gallant experiments in statement that are necessary for good conversation. They would watch one talking with an expression exactly like peeping through bushes. Then they would, as it were, dash out, dissent succinctly, contradict some secondary fact, and back to cover… (p.212)
I had the experience that I suppose comes to every one at times of discovering oneself together with two different sets of people with whom one has maintained two different sets of attitudes.
Similes
I mentioned the way Wells’s prose is always alive, there are unexpected phrases on every page, and sometimes he leaps out in vivid similes.
I see old Dayton sitting back and cocking his eye to the ceiling in a way he had while he threw warmth into the ancient platitudes of Liberalism, and Minns leaning forward, and a little like a cockatoo with a taste for confidences, telling us in a hushed voice of his faith in the Destiny of Mankind.
One might think at times there was no more of him than a clever man happily circumstanced, and finding an interest and occupation in politics. And then came a glimpse of thought, of imagination, like the sight of a soaring eagle through a staircase skylight.
Thin to non-existent philosophy
I enjoyed reading about Remington’s boyhood, about his mismatched parents, his father’s comic mishaps at market gardening, his mother’s addiction to vengeful Christian booklets; about running free in the countryside around Bromstead, his vivid description of its destruction by the cancer of London; the extended passages about the hero’s boyish attachment to toy soldiers and playing ‘war’; and the interesting descriptions of the private school he attends, right in the heart of London, the importance attached to Classics and cricket and very little else.
But apart from the conviction that education needs to be given a complete overhaul and the country run by a planful elite, the protagonist (and, you feel, Wells himself) doesn’t have an idea in his head. For example, as Remington hits his later teens he tells us he always had an interest in theology and talked the big issues through with his best friend at school, Britten. What does this mean? That he has deeply considered the doctrine of the atonement, pondered the nature of the trinity, considered the heresies surrounding the incarnation of God in man, has wondered about the justice of the doctrine of original sin, has weighed whether the linear descent of Catholic Christianity from St Peter outweighs its dismal track record and frequent absurdities, or whether Martin Luther’s grim doctrine of predestination is outweighed by the social benefits of the Reformation (namely mass literacy)? No, it means this:
I came at last into a phase that endures to this day, of absolute tranquillity, of absolute confidence in whatever that Incomprehensible Comprehensive which must needs be the substratum of all things, may be. Feeling OF IT, feeling BY IT, I cannot feel afraid of it. I think I had got quite clearly and finally to that adjustment long before my Cambridge days were done. I am sure that the evil in life is transitory and finite like an accident or distress in the nursery; that God is my Father and that I may trust Him, even though life hurts so that one must needs cry out at it, even though it shows no consequence but failure, no promise but pain… (p.68)
This is, to be frank, pitiful, and he claims to have reached this Great Conclusion at Cambridge. No. This isn’t theology, it’s just his personal psychology. This is much the same level as those soul music classics which assure us ‘it’s gonna be alright’. Most of Wells’s thinking is like this, whether it be this ridiculously simple-minded ‘theology’ or his thinking about ‘socialism’ which just amounts to better social planning. For a man with such a reputation as a ‘thinker’ it’s remarkable how most of his ‘ideas’ lackiany definition or precision or value, are little more than wordy feel-good mottos.
Thoughts
Wells rails against ‘muddle’ and makes ‘muddle’ the central enemy of his critique. And yet he himself is hopelessly confused and muddled about the solution. The very fact that his hero crosses from Fabian socialism, through Liberalism and onto the Conservative Party indicates how confused and shambling his thought is. Wells tries to dignify it by having his hero explain how hard it is to come up with a coherent philosophical and political position:
It is perplexingly difficult to keep in your mind, fixed and firm, a scheme essentially complex, to keep balancing a swaying possibility while at the same time under jealous, hostile, and stupid observation you tread your part in the platitudinous, quarrelsome, ill-presented march of affairs… I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak lucidities of sleepless nights…
But this fools no-one. His protagonist preaches against muddle but, in the end, is the most muddle-headed and confused person in the story. There’s no way Remington could have written anything as clever and consistent as The Prince. He’s too confused and incoherent.
Then again, this is a novel not a treatise, and so it is possible that Wells intended us to find Remington a well-meaning but long-winded rambling fool. Was that his aim?
Conclusion
‘The New Machiavelli’ was Wells’s sixth and final attempt to write a Proper Novel (following ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, ‘Kipps’, ‘Mr Polly’, ‘Tono-Bungay’ and ‘Ann Veronica’) and, having worked my way through it, I can see what a huge effort he made to give it far more intellectual and psychological depth than its predecessors, to create a kind of Summa of all his life experiences and profoundest beliefs to date.
So that when it was so widely criticised and when, eventually, Wells himself came to see it as flawed in its basic conception, as more an encyclopedia rather than a novel – stung and mortified, he gave up trying to write serious literary fiction and gave himself more and more to thinly-fictionalised screeds and manifestos, increasingly based on repetitive plots and situations. Most critics and readers regard everything that followed as a long 30-year decline in quality.
Credit
The New Machiavelli by H.G. Wells was published by Bodley Head in 1911. References are to the 1994 Everyman paperback edition edited by Norman Mackenzie.
Related links
- The New Machiavelli online
- A withering critique: ‘The English Utopia’ by AL Morton (1952)
Books & Boots 