MACHIAVELLI AND GUICCIARDINI
We have now traversed nearly three centuries of Italian literature
without encountering one really great prose-writer, Boccaccio only
excepted. Unquestionably the development of Italian prose was
retarded by the cultivation of Latin, which deprived it of ornaments
in Petrarch, Pontano, and Æneas Sylvius--to say nothing of the
buried talent which the example of such writers would have called
into activity. With every allowance on these accounts, it is still
remarkable how generally the path of the historian of early Italian
literature lies amid the flowers of poetry and fiction. But the time
had now come when, as in Greece, the national genius was about to
assert itself in prose, and, also as in Greece, the movement was
heralded by historians. After a long interval, due to the exclusive
cultivation of ancient models, the Italian Herodotus, Giovanni Villani,
was to be followed by two men who might dispute the character of the
Italian Thucydides, who at all events belonged to that invaluable class
of historians who, like Thucydides, in the events of which they are the
narrators and the judges. This advantage was possessed in an eminent
degree by FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI, the historian of contemporary times;
and though NICCOLÓ MACHIAVELLI did not write his principal work as
a contemporary, his knowledge of the Florentine constitution was so
intimate as almost to invest him with the authority of an eye-witness
of the Florentine revolutions of the past.
Niccolò Machiavelli, the first Italian and almost the first modern to
display eminent genius as an historical and political writer, was born
at Florence, May 3, 1469. His family had been illustrious for public
services; his father, whom he lost at sixteen, was a jurist; his mother
was a poetess. Little is known of his life until we find him in 1494
secretary to Marcello Virgilio, a learned man who four years afterwards
became head of the chancery of the Republic, a post somewhat resembling
Milton’s Latin Secretaryship under the Commonwealth, but allowing more
active participation in the business of diplomacy. Machiavelli rose
along with his patron, and in 1500 was entrusted with a mission to
France. In the following year he had a more arduous part to play as
envoy to Cæsar Borgia, then consolidating his power in the Romagna, but
for the moment pressed with great difficulties. Machiavelli’s reports
of his mission have been preserved, and attest the impression made upon
him by Cæsar’s supremacy in ability and villainy, which continued to
fascinate him when years afterwards he composed his manual of political
statecraft.
Judged in the sinister light which his writings have seemed to throw
back upon his actions, he has been accused of having counselled and
devised the coup by which Cæsar destroyed his treacherous condottieri
at Sinigaglia, as if the Borgia needed any tuition for an exploit of
this nature. He is also censured for recording it without disapproval;
but if Cæsar had never done anything worse than rid the Romagna of its
vermin, history would not be severe with him. Two years later, employed
upon a mission to Rome, he beheld Cæsar’s fall, and the elevation of
Pope Julius, whom he accompanied on yet another mission to the conquest
of Bologna. He was also despatched about this time on embassies to
Germany and France, and his observations on the circumstances and
characteristics of both nations exhibit great sagacity. Soon afterwards
the affairs of the Republic became troubled, hemmed in as she was
between the transalpine powers and the Pope and the exiled Medici.
Machiavelli was actively engaged in organising her military resources,
but his efforts were fruitless. The restoration of the Medici was
effected in September 1512. Machiavelli lost his employments, and soon
afterwards, upon suspicion of participation in a conspiracy, was thrown
into prison, tortured, and owed his deliverance to an amnesty granted
as an act of grace by the Medicean Pope Leo upon his election in 1513.
He retired to a small estate, where, as he tells us in a most
interesting letter which has reached our times, he consoled himself
with the study of the ancients, familiar intercourse with his rustic
neighbours, and the composition of his _Prince_. The chief purpose of
this famous work certainly was not to recommend himself to the Medici,
but he would willingly have made it subservient to that end. They
neglected him, however, until 1519, when Cardinal Medici, afterwards
Pope Clement VII., called upon him for a memoir on the best method of
administering the Florentine government, in which Machiavelli showed
much dexterity in reconciling the interests of the house of Medici
with the interests of his country. His advice was not followed; but
the Cardinal commissioned him to write the history of Florence. He had
previously employed his leisure in the production of his memorable
discourses on Livy, his comedy the _Mandragola_, and his life of
Castruccio Castracani. In 1527 he was employed in fortifying Florence
against an apprehended attack of the Imperial army, which fell upon
Rome, and he afterwards accompanied the forces sent to make a show
of delivering the Pope. During his absence the Medicean government
was overthrown, an event highly agreeable to his secret wishes; but
his compliances had rendered him odious to the patriotic party, and
he returned to his native city to find himself the object of general
aversion and suspicion. His mortification probably hastened his death,
which took place on June 21, 1527.
Of all Machiavelli’s writings the _Prince_ is the most famous, and
deservedly, for it is the most characteristic. Few subjects of literary
discussion have occasioned more controversy than the purpose of this
celebrated book. Some have beheld in it a manual for tyrants, like the
memoirs of Tiberius, so diligently perused by Domitian; others have
regarded it as a refined irony upon tyranny, on the sarcastic plan of
Swift’s Directions to Servants, if so humble an analogy be permissible.
From various points of view it might alternately pass for either,
but its purpose is accurately conveyed by neither interpretation.
Machiavelli was a sincere though too supple a republican, and by no
means desired the universal prevalence of tyranny throughout Italy.
If he had written with the sole view of ingratiating himself with the
Medici--probably in fact a subordinate motive with him, and the rather
as there actually was a project for investing Giuliano de’ Medici
with the sovereignty of the Romagna, the theatre of Cæsar Borgia’s
exploits--he would have been much more earnest in pressing it upon
their attention. If, on the other hand, satire had been his chief
object, this would have been more mordant and poignant; his power of
contemptuous irony is only revealed in the short chapter on the Papal
monarchy. His aim probably was to show how to build up a principality
capable of expelling the foreigner and restoring the independence of
Italy. But this intention could not be safely expressed, and hence his
work seems repulsive, because the reason of state which he propounds
as an apology for infringing the moral code appears not patriotic, but
purely selfish.
In our day we have seen Italian independence won by appeals to the
patriotism of the nation at large. This was impossible in Machiavelli’s
time; nor, had it been otherwise, would his lips have been touched with
the live coal of a Mazzini. He could only speak as a politician to
politicians, and addressing himself as it were to a body of scientific
experts, he designedly excludes all considerations of morality. His
treatise appears antiquated in our day, when the national conscience
is as easily manipulated as the conscience of the individual; in
oligarchical ages it passed not unreasonably for a perfect manual of
statecraft, and exercised great influence upon the statesmen of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Frederick the Great assailed it
vehemently in his youth, but lived to compliment it by what has been
described as the sincerest form of flattery. In Frederick’s century,
when public affairs actually were in the hands of a few able rulers,
it was worth attacking and defending; in the present democratic age,
when a statesman who squared his conduct by its maxims would soon
find himself the object of popular odium, its interest, except as
regards its weighty plea for a popular army, is mainly historical and
psychological. There is an intimate connection between the _Prince_
and the seven books on the _Art of War_, written about 1520. In the
_Prince_ Machiavelli insists particularly upon the part which the
habit of relying upon treacherous and mutinous mercenaries, and the
consequent decay of public spirit among the citizens, had had in
bringing about the ruin of the Italian states. In the _Art of War_
he shows how the citizen army he recommends is to be organised and
led in battles and sieges. His experience of military affairs as an
eye-witness, as well as an administrator, had been considerable, and he
is by no means to be slighted as a tactical writer; but the military
art was on the eve of great changes, which rendered much of his wisdom
obsolete.
The _Discourses on Livy’s Decades_ occupy a middle position between
political and historical science. They are entirely grounded on the
study of Livy; but their main importance consists not in the commentary
upon the transactions Livy has related, but in the application of these
to the general principles of politics and to the circumstances of the
writer’s own country. They may be defined as in some sort the _Prince_
rewritten on a larger scale, and copiously illustrated by historical
examples; but the effect is much more pleasing. In the other book
Machiavelli appears as the mere scientific analyst of politics, and his
real purpose might be reasonably questioned; but the _Discourses_ leave
no doubt of his genuine patriotism and of his preference of morality to
obliquity, except where, as it seems to him, the interest of the state
interferes. The problem of the permissibility of an act reprehensible
in the abstract, but required by the safety of the stale--as, for
example, Mohammed Ali’s massacre of the Mamelukes--is a very difficult
one, and Machiavelli cannot be fairly judged from the standpoint of the
nineteenth century. He had not seen the trial and failure of his ideal
prince on a colossal scale in the person of Napoleon. It was a cardinal
error of his to deny a capacity of improvement to human nature and to
assume that mankind would be essentially the same in all ages. We see,
on the contrary, that the general standard of righteousness has been
greatly raised since his time; and that, even if this were not so, the
conditions of modern society are adverse to Machiavellian policy: to
import this perception, however, into the criticism of his work would
be but to reverse his own mistake. Many other criticisms might be
addressed to him: he did not, for example, foresee that another set of
patriots, from their own point of view, might arise, whose conception
of the _summum bonum_ in polity would be entirely different from his
own; and that within a few years his maxims might serve as an arsenal
for the Jesuits, whose objects would have been his utter abomination.
With all his faults and oversights, nothing can deprive Machiavelli of
the glory of having been the modern Aristotle in politics, the first,
or at least the first considerable writer who derived a practical
philosophy from history, and exalted statecraft into science.
Machiavelli’s _History of Florence_ is not, like his _Discourses_, a
work of profound thought, nor is it authoritative in any respect. It
rather exhibits him as the elegant and accomplished man of letters,
and is perhaps the first successful restoration of the classical
style of history to a European vernacular. His great contemporary
Guicciardini had indeed anticipated him with a fragment on the same
subject, but this long remained unpublished, and it is not likely that
Machiavelli ever saw it. Machiavelli has not delved deep for materials;
much of the early part of his history is taken almost literally from
Flavio Biondo and other predecessors. He has sometimes departed
unjustifiably from strict matter of fact, not by invention or serious
misrepresentation, but by accentuating and slightly modifying actual
incidents to give them the particular colour he desires. In the main,
however, his work is a faithful as well as an animated picture of the
public life of a community in its characteristics more nearly akin to
the ancient commonwealth of Athens than any the earth has seen since
this disappeared from her face. The quality which will preserve even a
bad history, and without which a good one will only live as a book of
reference, is never absent from Machiavelli’s--he entertains while he
instructs. His work, which was composed after 1520 by order of Cardinal
Giulio de’ Medici, is divided into eight books, and extends from the
beginning of Florentine history to the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in
1492. The intimate connection of Florence with the general course of
Italian politics leads to frequent digressions and copious notices of
neighbouring states. Another historical work of Machiavelli’s, the Life
of Castruccio Castracani, Prince of Lucca in the fourteenth century, is
little more than a romance, in which he has endeavoured to depict the
ideal soldier and statesman.
Machiavelli’s plays and poems will be noticed elsewhere. They in
no respect detract from his reputation. He came nearer than any
contemporary, except Leonardo da Vinci, to approving himself a
universal genius. No man of his time stands higher intellectually, and
his want of moral elevation is largely redeemed by his ample endowment
with the one virtue chiefly needful to an Italian in his day, but of
which too many Italians were destitute--patriotism.
Patriotism cannot be denied to Machiavelli’s great counterpart,
Francesco Guicciardini, and if it seems colder and more stained by
unworthy subserviency and political cynicism, it must be remembered
that these defects are the defects of the qualities in which
Guicciardini surpassed his rival. Machiavelli was a genius of the
creative order, and hence, with all his astuteness, occasionally
somewhat Utopian; his life was free, and his muse licentious.
Guicciardini had a great practical genius, infallible within a narrow
sphere. He does not invent or generalise; his wisdom comes mainly by
experience, and he accepts things for what they are. “His originality,”
says Signor Villari, “though doubtless considerable, was devoted to
giving an exact and most lucid shape to the current doctrines of his
day.” “A sound judgment,” he himself says in his _Ricordi_, “is better
than a pregnant wit.” He is correct in all the relations of life, and
has not the least turn for writing comedies. Machiavelli, after all
his experiences, still hopes like an enchanted maiden for the ideal
prince. Guicciardini knows that there is none such, and that, even
if there were, the barbarians would be too strong for him. He coldly
accepts the situation and hires himself out to a bad Government, with
this redeeming quality, that it is still a Government of Italians by
Italians. It may be said that Machiavelli was willing to enter the
service of the Medici, and such is the fact; but Florence had owed
glorious days to Cosmo and Lorenzo, and Machiavelli could never have
thought or written of them as Guicciardini did of his Papal employers:
“_No one can have a stronger detestation than mine for the avarice,
ambition, and sloth of the priesthood. Nevertheless, the position I
have always held with several pontiffs has compelled me to love them
for mine own advantage; and but for this consideration I should have
loved Martin Luther as myself, not for the purpose of freeing myself
from the laws introduced by the Christian religion, as it is generally
interpreted and understood, but in order to see this herd of wretches
reduced to their proper condition, namely, that of their being left
either without vices or without authority._”
It had not always been so. The Papal satellite had been a trusted
envoy of the Florentine Government. Born in 1483, he had studied law
at Ferrara and Padua, become an advocate on his return to Florence,
married advantageously, and in 1512 discharged a mission to Spain,
where he graduated in diplomacy under the eye of the most crafty and
faithless prince of the Age of Perfidy, Ferdinand the Catholic. The
revolution which restored the Medici occurred in his absence. He
accepted the situation, but instead of serving the Government at home,
passed into the employment of the Medicean Pope, Leo X., to whom he
must have been highly recommended, for he immediately received the
government of Modena, Reggio, and Parma, recently added to the states
of the Church, in which he showed the utmost energy and sagacity in
suppressing malefactors and preserving order. From 1524 to 1527 he was
President of the Romagna, and until 1534, when he retired from the
Pope’s service, Governor of Bologna, and all evidence goes to show that
the Papal power was never more faithfully served than by the man who
held it in such abhorrence. He cannot be acquitted of having favoured
the overthrow of Florentine liberty in 1530, and is accused of acts of
cupidity and vengeance which do not seem in harmony with his general
character. He returned to his native city in 1534, hoping to play
an important part under the restored dynasty; but the youthful Duke
Cosmo, who needed no tutor in the arts of intrigue and dissimulation,
gently thrust him aside, and the disappointed politician solaced his
latter years with the composition of his history. Six years of literary
leisure gave him a renown which his twenty years of active concern with
the world’s business would never have procured him. He died in 1540,
leaving his history still in want of the last touches.
It is, nevertheless, the leading fault of this very great book to
have had too many touches already. Guicciardini, like Gibbon, thought
much of his dignity, and assumed his historical as poets are said to
assume their singing robes. He dropped the easy and vigorous style
in which his fragment upon Florentine history had been composed in
his youth, and wrote in a dignified and ambitious manner for which
nature did not qualify him. Hence he is tedious, and the impression of
tameness is enhanced by the unsatisfactory character of the incidents
narrated, and the author’s general deficiency in enthusiasm. With all
these defects it is still one of the most valuable histories ever
written. It might be entitled the History of the Decline and Fall of
Italy, from the French invasion in 1494. For us the sadness of the
picture is relieved by our knowledge of the splendour of literature and
art in an age of complete dissolution of the body politic; but these
redeeming circumstances do not enter into Guicciardini’s view: he can
only write as Polybius wrote of the downfall of Greece. He has much in
common with this historian: both men of affairs; both largely concerned
with the events they describe; both embittered by public calamities
and contemptuous of the capacity of their countrymen; both patriotic
children of a ruined state, while compelled, and not wholly averse,
to adopt intimate association with the conqueror; neither of them the
master of a good style, but compensating this defect by good sense and
the invaluable political lessons they derive from the transactions they
record.
Another statesman-historian, Ranke, has brought heavy charges against
Guicciardini, both of plagiarism and of wilful manipulation of facts,
but he seems to have been successfully answered by Signor Villari in
his Life of Machiavelli. Villari, who has had access to the archives
of Guicciardini’s family, is able to show the extent to which he
availed himself of MS. materials, and his care in working them up into
his history. Many of his statements which have since been shown to be
erroneous, were in conformity with the general belief of his time.
Guicciardini’s literary glory was enhanced, though his moral character
suffered some injury, by the publication of his inedited writings
in ten volumes in 1857 and following years. These include, with
other important matter, the fragment of Florentine history to which
reference has been made; his official correspondence as diplomatist
and governor, full of historical information and practical sagacity;
the considerations on Machiavelli, his friend and fellow-expert in
politics, characteristic of the natures of the two men, so eminent
respectively in theory and in practice; the _Dialogue on the Government
of Florence_, avowing this ostensible partisan of the Medici’s secret
preference for a republic, though an oligarchical one; most important
of all, the _Ricordi politici e civili_, maxims and memoranda of a
statesman. These are purely aphoristic, without system or unity beyond
that which they necessarily derive from the constitution of the mind
upon which they have been impressed by experience and reflection.
“He fully understood,” says Villari, “that by this plan his counsels
and political maxims became nothing more than simple observations,
palliatives and tricks for the wiser or less wise guidance of the
social machine, apart from all radical reform or the creation of any
new system of political science or moral philosophy, and still less
of any new state or new people. But he neither hoped nor desired to
entertain hopes of so lofty a nature. System he did not seek, daring
hypotheses were not to his taste; he merely gathered the fruit of
his own and others’ daily experience.” In a word, Guicciardini was a
realist; Machiavelli, for all his worldly wisdom, an idealist. As the
Bishop of London has remarked: “It is the weakness of Machiavelli’s
political method that, while professing to deal with politics in
a practical spirit, he is not practical enough.” It would seem
Guicciardini’s chief fault to have taken too limited a view of human
affairs, and to have judged too exclusively from what was happening
in his own corner. The imperfection of historical materials, however,
rendered any attempt at a philosophy of history extremely difficult,
and Guicciardini’s time was too much occupied by administrative labours
for profound investigation. Notwithstanding his opportunism and
political pessimism, he had an ideal, and he tells us plainly what it
was:
“_I desire to see three things before my death--but I doubt I may live
long enough without seeing any of them--a well-ordered republican mode
of life in our own city, the deliverance of Italy from all barbarians,
and the world freed from the tyranny of these execrable priests._”
The mutability of the world might almost seem to justify
Guicciardini’s hand-to-mouth method of getting through it. We have seen
Petrarch two centuries earlier calling for the Pope’s return to Rome as
the panacea for all the ills of Italy. Guicciardini would have sided
with him in that age; in his own the same genius of liberty which spoke
by Petrarch’s mouth to demand the Pope’s restoration speaks by his to
demand the Pope’s expulsion. It was not given to him to see the great
value in evil times of the temporal power--in good times monstrous--as
an asylum for what little of independence could still subsist in
Italy, and a testimony, however feeble, to a moral and spiritual unity
destined to develop into a national unity. But against the Papal sway
on its own merits, apart from the accidental circumstances of the time,
Guicciardini and Machiavelli prophesy like the two witnesses of the
Apocalypse.