“THE NEW MACHIAVELLI”

[2 Feb. ’11]

A pretty general realization of the extremely high quality of “The New Machiavelli” has reduced almost to silence the ignoble tittle-tattle that accompanied its serial publication in the English Review.  It is years since a novel gave rise to so much offensive and ridiculous chatter before being issued as a book.  When the chatter began, dozens of people who would no more dream of paying four-and-sixpence for a new novel that happened to be literature than they would dream of paying four-and-sixpence for a cigar, sent down to the offices of the English Review for complete sets of back numbers at half a crown a number, so that they could rummage without a moment’s delay among the earlier chapters in search of tit-bits according to their singular appetite.  Such was the London which calls itself literary and political!  A spectacle to encourage cynicism!  Rumour had a wonderful time.  It was stated that not only the libraries but the booksellers also would decline to handle “The New Machiavelli.”  The reasons for this prophesied ostracism were perhaps vague, but they were understood to be broad-based upon the unprecedented audacity of the novel.  And really in this exciting year, with Sir Percy Bunting in charge of the national sense of decency, and Mr. W.T.  Stead still gloating after twenty-five years over his success in keeping Sir Charles Dilke out of office—­you never can tell what may happen!

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However, it is all over now.  “The New Machiavelli” has been received with the respect and with the enthusiasm which its tremendous qualities deserve.  It is a great success.  And the reviews have on the whole been generous.  It was perhaps not to be expected that certain Radical dailies should swallow the entire violent dose of the book without kicking up a fuss; but, indeed, Mr. Scott-James, in the Daily News, ought to know better than to go running about after autobiography in fiction.  The human nose was not designed by an all-merciful providence for this purpose.  Mr. Scott-James has undoubted gifts as a critic, and his temperament is sympathetic; and the men most capable of appreciating him, and whose appreciation he would probably like to retain, would esteem him even more highly if he could get into his head the simple fact that a novel is a novel.  I have suffered myself from this very provincial mania for chemically testing novels for traces of autobiography.  There are some critics of fiction who talk about autobiography in fiction in the tone of a doctor who has found arsenic in the stomach at a post-mortem inquiry.  The truth is that whenever a scene in a novel is really convincing, a certain type of critical and uncreative mind will infallibly mutter in accents of pain, “Autobiography!” When I was discussing this topic the other day a novelist not inferior to Mr. Wells suddenly exclaimed:  “I say!  Supposing we did write autobiography!"...  Yes, if we did, what a celestial rumpus there would be!