ndividuality behind it--the "hinterland." The whole was a brilliant
analysis of England in macrocosm and microcosm welded into the
life-story of Remington. And his hero is not like one of Mrs. Humphry
Ward's puppets, set up to be a great politician. Remington as a
thinker is almost a great man; he is a profound analyst of society on
its human side; he _is_ a gifted critic of public institutions; even
his absurd perversity in trying to invent a constructive,
motherhood-endowing Toryism is the perversity of a versatile and
clever man whose action is precipitated by bitterness or pique.

But the extraordinary thing about _The New Machiavelli_ is, that this
envisaging of England in her social, political, and intellectual life,
this acutely and almost diabolically observed crowd of _real_
persons, this minute psychology, this exact history, this elaborate
philosophy--all are subservient to the purpose of explaining how it
was that Remington was driven into the net of sex, and Isabel was
enabled to "darn his socks." _Parturiunt montes_. Is it thus that
Remington will make himself immortal in literature, the
twentieth-century Benvenuto Cellini, swaggering, in a self-conscious,
twentieth-century way, through the tale of his glorious peccadilloes?
Or is it to be a Jonathan Wild, memorable as the hero of a hundred
magnificent felonies with which a Fielding or a Wells could glorify a
sturdy vagabond? But Remington writes in bitterness. His pen is
steeped in the gall of Swift. He feels rancour against Altiora,
against the Cramptons, against all the "Pinky-Dinkies" who prescribe
morals for a genius erratic in his desires.

The successive mental stages by which Remington emerges had been set
forth before in other books. They are here brought together and surveyed
in a comprehensive whole. He is anxious to strip off the disguises of
human nature, and to expose, in each of the persons arrayed before us,
the "self-behind-the-frontage." "In the ostensible self who glowed under
the approbation of Altiora Bailey, and was envied and discussed, praised
and depreciated, in the House and in smoking-room groups, you really
have as much of a man as usually figures in a novel or an obituary
notice." His ideal is the individual who lives and acts in the full light
of that "self-behind-the-frontage"--the "hinterland," as he calls him;
and his literary method in this book is to expose the emptiness of the
shop-window, to cast his satire upon the po