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 poor show. The weakness of his attacks is that the ideal with which he would illuminate his background is shifty, uncertain, ill-realised; being undetermined, the function that is allotted to the human ideal is actually left to chance, to accidental impulse rather than to conscious will--to human frailty rather than to human strength. Hence it is that he declares the rights of sex where its claims are weakest; now applauds the conduct of Remington, now apologises for it; now explains elaborately that his mere sensual side would assert itself, now that sex never appealed to him without an admixture of the ideal; now cries out for discussion and public enlightenment on this subject, and now acknowledges that Remington, who had discussed it for years, acted on impulse, in the dark. How uncertain it all is, how mixed in its motives, how brilliantly bewildering in its conclusions--and yet how clever!