8
THE BATTALION
The Library Page
S. C. GIESEY Editor
R. L. HERBERT Asso. Editor
P. A. RODGERS Asso. Editor
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THE NEW MACHIAYELLI
By H. G. Wells
Reviewed by R. L. Herbert
There are those who intend that
literature should have but one pur
pose, that of entertainment. There
are others who say that literature
should not only entertain, but that
between the lines and passages
written purely for entertainment,
between the direct action passages,
there should be philosophy, thought,
teaching and similar subjects for
digressions.
People who hold the former view
should not read The New Michiav-
elli. In writing it, H. G. Wells evi
dently had the desire to write a book
of philosophy, sociology and politics,
between the teaching passages of
which was to be a story.
Had I written the book, I would
have entitled it The Biology of a
Politician, for that is exactly what
Wells presents in the book—the biol
ogy of a political reformer, his re
actions to various situations, his
growth from childhood through
statesmanship to downfall.
The New Machiavelli has no char
acters. Richard Remington, the pol
itician about whom the book centers,
is really an idea, a muddle of social
and political views. One never feels
he knows Remington. If asked to do
so, it would be most difficult for
the reader to sketch, ever so briefly,
his idea of the man. Margaret, Rem
ington’s wife, is even more difficult
to grasp, and Isabel, for whom Rem
ington gives up his wife and politi
cal and social ambitions, is almost
as hard to reach.
The only person in the book of
Whom one carries away a picture is
Remingtons father, an irascable,
misplaced tutor and school teacher
who fits nowhere and is understood
by no one, not even by himself. Some
of, the best thoughts in the book, and
certainly all of the humor, come from
him, and the reader is just contem
plating more than a little pleas
ure from this source, when Wells,
as if to rid his work of the only
tangible character in it, has him
break his neck while pruning a vine
in the yard, falling off an ill-con
trived apparatus consisting of a
rickety old kitchen table, a step-
ladder, and a garden roller, which
rolled at the wrong moment.
“He was lying close by the garden
door with his head queerly bent
back against a broken and twisted
rain water pipe, an expressio of pa
cific content on his face, a bamboo
curtain rod with a table knife tied
to the end of it, still gripped in his
hand.
“Arthur!’ I remember my mother
crying with the strangest break in
her voice, ‘What are you doing
there? Arthur—and Sunday!”
Here we have told so simply that
it is emphatic—one of the most ad
mirable of Well’s characteristics—
the death of the father. From it,
also, we get a small portion of the
father’s character, and also a bit—
all that there is—of the mother’s
as well.
Richard Remington is an idealist,
a dreamer who through “Love and
Fine Thinking” hopes to bring the
world to the end of its turmoil and
strife, to an eternity of peace and
orderliness, a millenium. But though
“Love and fine thinking” is his fav
orite catch phrase and forms the
keynote of his teaching, Remington is
no saint. Though he lacks the quan
tity of escapades of Sinclair Lewis’
hero, he is there with the quality.
He is in truth the Elmer Gantry of
socialism and statesmanship, of Brit
ish literature.
It is this “animal humor,” his
queer indecent side, that forms the
romantic element of the story. Little
time is spent with romance. Well’s
merely bares Remington’s sex views
and lets them dominate him, forc
ing him out of public life when it
seems as though he is on the road
to achievement in everything but
romance.
Remington at first attempts to re
form the world as a liberal, groom
ed by Altiora Bailey and her hus
band. What these people were one
can imagine from Well’s description
of Altiora: “Altiora thought trees
were hopelessly irregular and sea
cliffs a great mistake.” It is easily
seen that a temperament like Rem
ington’s would tire of such grooming
and soon he finds himself drifting
to the Tories. Through his writing
he soon reaches an important pin
nacle of statesmanship with this
group, and it is here that Isabel
Rivers comes in.
Isabel was, to say the least, attrac
tive, and she was intelligent. Rem
ington is attracted—or fools him
self into believing so—by her in
telligence, and when she leaves Ox
ford he gives her a place on his
weekly magazine. Close contact leads
to intimacy, and “love will out,” par
ticularly when there are political
enemies to search out scandal. It is
up to Remington to choose between
Isabel and fame, statesmanship and
the world. He chooses Isabel.
It may not have been the main
point intended by Wells—but if not,
he devoted too much space to it—
to show that the present system of
education in England, the practice
of leaving sex and things sexual to
be discovered by contast and nature,
is wrong. Throughout the book
Remington bewails the fact that his
parents failed to instruct him in
sex, and that his school and college
instructors utterly ignored the sex
factor. There is no doubt that Wells
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