M MACHIAVELLI MARCH, 1827 NOTE ON THE ESSAY ACAULAY'S essay upon Machiavelli is, according to Professor Villari, the first attempt towards a serious and comprehensive criticism of Machiavelli's character and writings. During the last seventy years much has been written about Machiavelli, yet Macaulay's essay is still worth reading. Machiavelli had been reviled for three centuries, but had been little read and less understood. Macaulay had read not only The Prince, but all Machiavelli's writings, and sought to interpret the seeming paradoxes and contradictions which they offer by reference to the history of those times and to the political condition of Italy. As he was well grounded in Italian literature and could derive from books sensations more vivid than ordinary men derive from travel, he wrote about Italian life and politics with a freshness and vivacity truly surprising in one who had never visited Italy. Professor Villari remarks that Macaulay was the first to appreciate the pictures of individual and national character, and the wealth of historical information to be found in Machiavelli's official despatches, the first also to recognise Machiavelli's originality in trying to create for the Florentine Republic a native militia. Even more remarkable in a foreigner appears to him Macaulay's keen perception of Machiavelli's literary excellence. When we pass from Macaulay's literary and historical criticism of Machiavelli to his psychological analysis of the Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Signor Villari finds less to praise. Macaulay, he thinks, was an incomparable narrator but a superficial philosopher. The moral contradiction which runs through Machiavelli's writings Macaulay seeks to explain by tracing a similar contradiction in the character of the Italians of that age generally. Signor Villari calls in doubt Macaulay's description of the national character, although if we look chiefly to those classes which took part in public affairs and allow for Macaulay's trick of emphatic statement much might be said in his defence. Even were Macaulay's general estimate of the Italians just, we should be left, Signor Villari observes, with two enigmas to resolve instead of one. This is hardly fair to Macaulay, who does offer a plausible explanation of the peculiar moral type then so common in Italy. Signor Villari also complains that Macaulay has allotted too little space to the examination of the works upon which Machiavelli's fame and influence are based. He has run through four-fifths of his essay before touching upon The Prince, the Discourses, on The Art of War, and has to crowd his remarks upon them into a few paragraphs. The History of Florence he regards as having a merely literary value, whereas it stands in close connection with those works as an original attempt to trace the natural growth of political parties and the influence which they exert upon the form of the political constitution. Here again we might, without wholly absolving Macaulay, plead that he had to bring before readers mostly ill acquainted with Italian history the conditions under which Machiavelli wrote and had no space for minute examination of separate writings. Much, very much of course, has to be added to Macaulay's swift sketch of the peculiarities of Italian politics in the age of the Renaissance. Professor Villari has shown that the Italian States of that time were weak, not merely because they were small, but because they were ill organised. When the overthrow of the imperial power in the thirteenth century left the cities virtually independent, it also left them unprotected, so that each had to fight for its own freedom, and if possible to secure itself by enlarging its territory. But inasmuch as the persons having political power in an Italian city exercised it like the citizens of a Greek republic, not through representatives but directly, unity and order required that the ruling class should be kept small, a necessity which had nothing disagreeable to those who were in possession. The enlargement of the territory was never followed by the wider diffusion of political power. A great part of the inhabitants of each free city, all the peasants in the surrounding country and all the citizens of the subject towns were entirely debarred from political activity, which in Venice was reserved to a few hundred and even in Florence to a few thousand persons, Even this comparatively small part of the commonwealth everywhere save in Venice was divided against itself by the jealousy between guild and guild, by the rancour between kindred and kindred, by factions none the less bitter and unscrupulous because the matter of contention out of which they first arose had long been unmeaning or forgotten. Under such unstable conditions liberty was often suppressed and absolute monarchy established by bold adventurers who rose even from the lowest station, and by means of terror or self-interest obtained obedience although they could scarcely ever inspire loyalty. The internal history of many cities was but a series of revolutions whilst their external relations were for ever changing. Meantime traditional beliefs and primitive virtues were weakened by the growth of riches and of a new intellectual life. Patriotism very generally dwindled whilst all things seemed possible to the clever and unscrupulous. When, therefore, Italy was assailed by foreigners its only hope of safety lay in concentration, and concentration seemed possible only by the agency of some great individual. The old republics were incapable of absorbing those whom they had conquered or of lasting union with each other. The Popes were always hostile to the rise of a really strong power in Italy which must have ended their own temporal dominion. Under these conditions Machiavelli wrote. He saw that the disorder of Italy exposed it to be overrun, pillaged and enslaved by every warlike neighbour, and that this disorder was too inveterate to be remedied save by force. Machiavelli held that popular government was the best for settled times, but that the reconstruction of a decrepit society must be the work of a man of genius. He was, therefore, a partisan in one sense of despotism, in another of democracy. The choice of political forms must be determined by the political end. With regard to morality, Machiavelli, as Macaulay has well insisted, is far from uniformly cynical. Often he writes with a moral enthusiasm which seems to have been quite honest. The prince should entrust his safety to national troops, not to mercenaries, should administer economically, cherish the poor, respect the honour and the property of all his subjects and practice as much good faith and humanity as can consist with self-preservation. Machiavelli thinks indeed that even a man of genius cannot fulfil his task as ruler without occasional violations of the moral law, but if his end is the public good these are to be forgiven, in so far as they are necessary. In this respect Machiavelli is near akin to Carlyle who mentions him with contempt. Carlyle's doctrine of hero-worship appears to mean that the great man who really aims at the common good is morally justified in all that he does for that end. Machiavelli says that what he does will sometimes be immoral, but that it cannot be helped. Machiavelli's reputation for wickedness appears to have arisen from his candour in writing that which statesmen have too often acted. In the long list of worthies who have reformed or aggrandised states we shall find few who have not sometimes employed such means as in private life no noble mind would deign to use, and even adventurers would at least affect to condemn. A good many public men have thought that although honesty may generally be the best policy, great crimes are sometimes the truest wisdom. And when we turn from practice to theory Lord Acton will tell us in his preface to The Prince that an almost unbroken chain of theologians and moralists have for many centuries justified the worst crimes which Machiavelli allows to a ruler in difficult circumstances. Machiavelli, he tells us, "is the earliest conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces in the present world. Religion, progressive enlightenment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion have not reduced his empire, or disproved the justice of his conception of mankind. He obtains a new lease of authority from causes that are still prevailing and from doctrines that are apparent in politics, philosophy and science. Without sparing censure, or employing for comparison the grosser symptoms of the age, we find him near our common level and perceive that he is not a vanishing type, but a constant and contemporary influence. Where it is impossible to praise, to defend, or to excuse, the burden of blame may yet be lightened by adjustment and distribution, and he is more rationally intelligible when illustrated by lights falling not only from the century he wrote in, but from our own, which has seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted by actual or attempted crime." Niccolo Machiavelli was born at Florence on the 3rd of May, 1469. Very little is known of his early years or education, but in 1492 he entered the public service and in 1498 he became secretary to the administrative body known as The Ten of Liberty and Peace, a position which he continued to hold during the next fourteen years, the period of his greatest political activity. During these years he went on the various embassies mentioned by Macaulay. In 1506 he began to organise a native Florentine militia which failed under the test of actual war in 1512. After the restoration of the Medici in that year, Machiavelli would have been glad to have remained secretary, but was dismissed and soon afterwards imprisoned and tortured on suspicion of having conspired against the new Government. For fifteen years he was chiefly employed in study and in writing, although the friendship of Clement VII. at length opened a new prospect of political action. After the sack of Rome in 1527 and the consequent downfall of the Medici at Florence, Machiavelli interested himself in the restoration of the republic, but died at Florence on the 22nd of June before he had time to achieve anything. Those who wish to pursue the suggestions given by Macaulay in the following essay will find in Professor Villari's Life and Times of Machiavelli and Mr. Burd's edition of The Prince not only an immense store of information, but copious notices of the ample literature which has been heaped upon Machiavelli and his works. MACHIAVELLI Euvres complètes de MACHIAVEL, traduites par J. V. PÉRIER. Paris: 1825. TH HOSE who have attended to the practice of our literary tribunal are well aware that, by means of certain legal fictions similar to those of Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take cognisance of cases lying beyond the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly say, therefore, that in the present instance M. Périer1 is merely a Richard Roe, who will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the proceedings, and whose name is used for the sole purpose of bringing Machiavelli into court.2 We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as that of the man whose character and writings we now propose to consider. The terms in which he is commonly described would seem to import that he was the Tempter, the Evil Principle, the discoverer of ambition and revenge, the original inventor of perjury, and that, before the publication of his fatal Prince, there had never been a hypocrite, a tyrant, or a traitor, a simulated virtue, or a convenient crime. One writer gravely assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since it was translated into Turkish, the Sultans have been more 3 1 It should be Périès. Jean Vincent Périès, 1785-1829, was an official in the French Department of Fine Arts. Besides this version of Machiavelli's works he translated the Orlando Furioso and wrote some original verse. The old action of ejectment began with a declaration of the party suing that he had leased the land in question to John Doe who had been ousted by Richard Roe, and a notice by Richard Roe to the party really sued that as he, Richard Roe, had no title to the land the party sued must appear and defend his right, otherwise judgment would go by default. *Maurice, 1521-1553, cousin of John Frederic the Elector of Saxony, although a Protestant, took part with the Emperor Charles V. against his fellow-Protestants, and was rewarded with the electorate which John Frederic had forfeited. Then, as the emperor did not gratify all his wishes, Maurice returned to the Protestant side, very nearly captured the emperor at Innsbruck and forced him to accept the Treaty of Passau which guaranteed freedom to the Protestants. VOL. I.-5 |