on 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