a final simplicity. I have sought to show my growing
realisation that the essential quality of all political and social
effort is the development of a great race mind behind the interplay of
individual lives. That is the collective human reality, the basis of
morality, the purpose of devotion. To that our lives must be given, from
that will come the perpetual fresh release and further ennoblement of
individual lives....

I have wanted to make that idea of a collective mind play in this book
the part United Italy plays in Machiavelli's PRINCE. I have called it
the hinterland of reality, shown it accumulating a dominating truth and
rightness which must force men's now sporadic motives more and more into
a disciplined and understanding relation to a plan. And I have tried
to indicate how I sought to serve this great clarification of our
confusions....

Now I come back to personality and the story of my self-betrayal, and
how it is I have had to leave all that far-reaching scheme of mine, a
mere project and beginning for other men to take or leave as it pleases
them.

BOOK THE FOURTH: ISABEL

CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ LOVE AND SUCCESS

1

I come to the most evasive and difficult part of my story, which is to
tell how Isabel and I have made a common wreck of our joint lives.

It is not the telling of one simple disastrous accident. There was a
vein in our natures that led to this collapse, gradually and at
this point and that it crept to the surface. One may indeed see our
destruction--for indeed politically we could not be more extinct if we
had been shot dead--in the form of a catastrophe as disconnected and
conclusive as a meteoric stone falling out of heaven upon two friends
and crushing them both. But I do not think that is true to our situation
or ourselves. We were not taken by surprise. The thing was in us and
not from without, it was akin to our way of thinking and our habitual
attitudes; it had, for all its impulsive effect, a certain necessity. We
might have escaped no doubt, as two men at a hundred yards may shoot at
each other with pistols for a considerable time and escape. But it isn't
particularly reasonable to talk of the contrariety of fate if they both
get hit.

Isabel and I were dangerous to each other for several years of
friendship, and not quite unwittingly so.

In writing this, moreover, there is a very great difficulty in steering
my way between two equally undesirable tones i