tray.
It is a matter of many weeks now--diversified indeed by some long drives
into the mountains behind us and a memorable sail to Genoa across the
blue and purple waters that drowned Shelley--since I began a laboured
and futile imitation of "The Prince." I sat up late last night with the
jumbled accumulation; and at last made a little fire of olive twigs and
burnt it all, sheet by sheet--to begin again clear this morning.

But incidentally I have re-read most of Machiavelli, not excepting those
scandalous letters of his to Vettori, and it seems to me, now that I
have released myself altogether from his literary precedent, that he
still has his use for me. In spite of his vast prestige I claim kindred
with him and set his name upon my title-page, in partial intimation of
the matter of my story. He takes me with sympathy not only by reason
of the dream he pursued and the humanity of his politics, but by the
mixture of his nature. His vices come in, essential to my issue. He is
dead and gone, all his immediate correlations to party and faction have
faded to insignificance, leaving only on the one hand his broad method
and conceptions, and upon the other his intimate living personality,
exposed down to its salacious corners as the soul of no contemporary can
ever be exposed. Of those double strands it is I have to write, of the
subtle protesting perplexing play of instinctive passion and desire
against too abstract a dream of statesmanship. But things that seemed to
lie very far apart in Machiavelli's time have come near to one another;
it is no simple story of white passions struggling against the red that
I have to tell.

The state-making dream is a very old dream indeed in the world's
history. It plays too small a part in novels. Plato and Confucius
are but the highest of a great host of minds that have had a kindred
aspiration, have dreamt of a world of men better ordered, happier,
finer, securer. They imagined cities grown more powerful and peoples
made rich and multitudinous by their efforts, they thought in terms
of harbours and shining navies, great roads engineered marvellously,
jungles cleared and deserts conquered, the ending of muddle and
diseases and dirt and misery; the ending of confusions that waste human
possibilities; they thought of these things with passion and desire as
other men think of the soft lines and tender beauty of women. Thousands
of men there are to-day almost mastered by this white passio