One of the best books issued this year is the thin pamphlet, you
might call it, which contains Mr. John Morley's lecture on
Machiavelli. It will repay any reader from what standpoint soever
he may approach the character. "The veering gusts of public
judgment have carried incessantly along, from country to country,
and from generation to generation, with countless mutations of
aspect and of inuendo, the sinister renown of Machiavelli."
Truly this man of all men, since Judas, has attained an
immortality of infamy. Long was it thought that the common
domestic title of the devil, "Old Nick," was an abbreviation of
Machiavelli's Christian name. Hudibras fathered that myth, but
now we know, Mr. Morley says, that the familiar appellation of
the Evil One is a remnant of Norse mythology, deriving from Nyke,
the water- goblin.
For three centuries all the evils of all political systems and
policies have been attributed to the evils of Machiavelli's
logic. Church and State alike have claimed he was the champion of
the other's cause. He was Jesuit and atheist as it suited the
turn of any vituperative polemist. He was Reformer and "Romanist"
as the advocates of Rome or Reformation happened to interpret
him. His is, certainly, an unique greatness. There has been in
his work, as in all great works, something for all men; but that
something has been always, for three centuries, something bad. It
is no wonder, therefore, that there prevailed once, a belief that
the Devil himself had written his chief book. I have always had
an idea that Goethe in drawing Mephistopheles, glanced from the
tail of his mind's eye at Machiavelli for a model. Machiaveli
appears to come nearer than any human being to realizing the
Goethe conception of Intellectual Evil.
The man, still, may be infamous, but--he is intensely human. The
baseness of him has its basal strength in his founding upon man.
He is the only realist philosopher. Besides him Bacon is a
dreamer. Machiavelli was and is the master misanthrope, and,--God
help us!--we must admit that his misanthropy only too well is
founded on fact. He seems to have been the most perfect
incarnation of that "accomplished and infamous Italy," which
gave us the Borgias and the terrible Elizabethan plays of
Tourneur, Webster and Ford, with their plots of incest and
murder, that Italy which was a veritable Hell out of which rose
the Renaissance. He was the philosophy of that Italy. He first
said, in effect, that nothing succeeds like success. He first
cast aside Plato and his dreaming and Aristotle and his elements.
He was the father of the philosophy of "practical politics."
Francis Bacon learned of Machiavelli, who "wrote what men do and
not what they ought to do." This is the philosophy of fact. He
dealt with men as he found them. He was a sublime, almost a
diabolical opportunist I have often thought Benjamin Franklin,
with his "honesty is the best policy," is another Machiavelli,
only touched a little with the pharisaism of the Puritan. With
the Italian anything that would win is the best policy, and this
is his honest estimate of men. The best policy was the policy
adopted, after looking the facts of life and of human nature
squarely in the face and finding that the end was to be attained
easiest either by honesty or dishonesty. To "get there," as we
say, was the faith of Machiavelli.
Idea and ideal meant nothing to the author of "The Prince." What
we know as "moral forces" this Italian ignored. He judged
humanity by its lowest average of motive or intelligence. There
was but one general law, for him, and that was that it was right
to deceive, if force were of dubious effect, in affairs of State.
It were well to be honest, if one could, as a ruler of the State,
but it was his duty to rule and triumph by any means between the
extremes of simple lying on the one hand, and poisons or other
assassination on the other.
Machiavelli was born in 1469. He was a governmental secretary in
Florence and met many of the strangely fine and fiendish
characters of that time. He went on four missions to the King of
France; was an intimate of Caesar Borgia; was an emissary of the
Florentine republic to Pope Julius II, and was with Maximilian to
Innsbruck. Those were stormy times, and Machiavelli studied the
storms. He belonged to the popular party--and his masterpiece is
a manual for tyrants. After 1512, with the return of the Medici,
he lost his place, was imprisoned, was put to the torture, was
amnestied by Leo X and withdrew to San Casciano, where he lived a
life almost idyllic in its manner, to judge by a description from
his own pen which Mr. Morley has incorporated in his lecture. It
was there he wrote the book "The Prince," at forty- five,
dedicating it to Lorenzo the Magnificent. The dedication was a
bit of palaver to the tyrant who had destroyed Florentine
freedom. It was several years before he was rewarded by a small
employment and then he was commissioned to write the history of
Florence which he finished and dedicated to Leo X, in 1527. Here,
also, it is supposed, he wrote a comedy, much praised and
unremembered. He was a shrewd man, as his writings aver, yet he
made a failure of his own life, to a large extent. He was
cheerful in his ill-fortune, however, and he "clung to public
things," and, after his comedy, wrote the dialogues of the "Art
of War," to induce his countrymen to substitute for mercenary
armies a national militia--to-day one of the organic ideas of
the European system. Just as Machiavelli entered public life
Savonarola had gone to the stake for an idea. The spirit of Dante
touched him not at all. He was a man of his time, but not of the
very best of his time. And yet he wrote that he loved his country
with his whole soul. Mr. Morley says, "and one view of
Machiavelli is that he was always the lion masquerading in the
fox's skin, an impassioned patriot, under all his craft and jest
and bitter mockery. Even Mazzini, who explained the ruin of Italy
by the fact that Machiavelli prevailed over Dante, admits that he
had 'a profoundly heart.' " Machiavelli died in 1527.
He was a man of affairs. He had read the ancients who dealt with
politics, and he assimilated what he read, Mr. Morley says that
it was as true of Florence in the Sixteenth Century as of Athens,
Corinth, Corcyra in the Fifth Century before Christ, as set forth
in Thucydides, that it was a prey to intestine faction and the
ruinous invocation of foreign aid. "These terrible calamities,"
says Thucydides, "always have been and always will be, while
human nature remains the same. Words cease to have the same
relations to things, and their meanings are changed to suit the
ingenuities of enterprise and the atrocities of revenge. Frantic
energy is the quality most valued, and the man of violence is
always trusted. That simplicity which is a chief ingredient of a
noble nature is laughed to scorn. Inferior intellects succeed
best. Revenge becomes dearer than self-preservation, and men even
have a sweeter pleasure in the revenge that goes with perfidy
than if it were open." If any reader of the ICONOCLAST desires a
splendid picture of this Italy, I refer him to Vernon Lee's
"Euphorion," which pictures the land as an inferno. Mr. Morley,
too, gives a vivid picture of the time, saying that Italy of that
date "presents some peculiarities that shed over her civilization
a curious and deadly irridescence." How one thinks of Ingalls and
his "honesty in politics is an iridescent dream." To resume our
Morley. "Passions moved it in strange orbits. Private depravity
and political debasement went with one of the most brilliant
intellectual awakenings in the history of the western world.
Another dark element is the association of merciless selfishness,
violence, craft and corruption with the administration of sacred
things. If politics were divorced from morals, so was theology."
Hired crime, stealthy assassination, especially by poison,
prevailed. Contempt of human life, the fury of private revenge
and the spirit of atrocious perfidy were characteristic of the
luxurious Italian renaissance. Genius, according to John
Addington Symonds, it was assumed, "released man from the
shackles of ordinary mortality." These Italian tyrants were
touched with the Neronian malady. They were mad with power, with
luxury, with ennui. Flowers of Evil bloomed profusely. In Italy,
fair as it was, with the poets singing everlastingly of Spring,
it seemed God has forgotten the world. The demonaic fascination
of the land, then, is something the reader finds difficult to
shake off. You move among and hold converse with splendid
cultured monsters. The church alone kept alive purity, though it
did not escape corruption. I think Dante and Michael Angelo
proved that the pure religious spirit was not dead in a time when
it was proclaimed that "it is best to sleep and be of stone, not
to see and not to feel, while such misery and shame endure."
There was a spirit recognizing the "misery and shame," and that
spirit was in the church. Mr. Morley admits that Michael Angelo
was such a spirit and Dante wrote in "La Vita Nuova" the first,
pure, spiritual love-poem of the world.
Environed thus, and with a peculiarly Italian morbidezza, or
plasticity we find Machiavelli. Others before had written of
politics, but Machiavelli "had the better talent of writing." He
wrote to tell things clearly. Imagination he had none, as an
historian, and his comedy is in Limbo. He is all intellectual
strength, but the moral influence is missing. He is, says Mr.
Morley, simple, unaffected, direct, vivid, rational. He is as
literal as a woman. His literal statement is his finest effect of
irony. Mr. Morley's analysis of the Machiavellian style is itself
a masterpiece of serene expression, rising with a solemn sense of
the fearful absence of all principle, as we understand it, in the
work, to a richly eloquent, and even tender, tribute to the moral
beauty of life. I wish I might transcribe it and I hope that many
will read it. It is rarer than anything you may remember of
Macaulay's essay upon the everlastingly execrable Florentine.
"Men are a little breed" might have been Machiavelli's motto. Or
he might have said "the more I see of men the better I like
dogs." He is remorseless in seeing only that men are ungrateful,
fickle, deceivers, greedy of gain, run-aways before peril,
readier to pay back injury than kindness. "Worst of all they take
middle paths." Upon these, his observations, he proceeds to tell
a story of a State and he tells it icily. He lays bare the
foulness of man. He doesn't lecture, he does not preach, he never
laughs, never scolds, is never surprised. He shows, says Mr.
Morley about "as good a heart as can be made out of brains." In
my opinion, that sentence is the most terrible indictment in the
book. It marks him as a monster worse than Frankenstein.
Machiavelli has no opinion to argue about; nothing but men's
passions as they were and are. He is alive, always and
everywhere, because he shows us men. He maintains, according to
Mr. Morley, that the world grows no better and no worse. There is
for him no "one far-off, divine event to which the whole creation
moves." Nothing for him but Power. Good and evil concern him not.
He recited what we call a crime as impassively as he recited a
virtue. So-and-so did such and such. This followed. That is all.
He is a fatalist with no more sound philosophy than this: "It is
better to be adventurous than cautious, for Fortune is a woman,
and to be mastered must be boldly handled. He was a republican,
but he believed that strength was the secret of
government--strength in itself and in mastery of those who make
up the State. No half-measures for him. The State is his idol, if
he have one. The State must be supreme in will, in vigor, in
intelligence; unflinching, unsparing, remorseless. The humility
of Christ has no part in his scheme. He knows no mercy and no
justice. One almost can admire his inhuman disregard of men. He
cared as little for them as Napoleon. He scorns all gentleness.
And yet he thought well of the people, of their prudence and
stability. He deemed them liable to err as to generalities but
apt to be right as to particulars. Our experience, I dare say, is
otherwise--no matter how we stand on the financial question.
"Better far," he repeats an hundred times, "than any number of
fortunes is not to be hated by your people." Not to be hated!
That was as near as he could come to love. He is opposed to
dictators and he speaks out plainly enough, in his discourses,
about the unwisdom of slaying fellow-citizens, betraying friends,
being without mercy, without religion. He is conventional enough
in all this. When he comes to describe the Prince, who is to save
the divided State, he does so in lines that make a picture at
once to fascinate and affright mankind.
The Prince must save the State. He must be as good as he can be;
at least, he must have no vices that will hurt the State, i. e.
endanger his government. There are but two ways to govern, by law
or force. The Prince must rule by one or the other, as necessity
may dictate. He must mingle the lion and the fox. A Prince cannot
keep faith, if keeping faith will hurt the State. Why? Because
others will not keep faith with him. "It is frequently
necessary--and here is the sentence that has done so much to damn
its writer--for the upholding of the State, to go to work against
faith, against Charity, against humanity, against religion; and a
new Prince cannot observe all the things for which men are
reckoned good." Reason of State is the only universal test for an
action. Anything that may preserve the State is right. I wonder
what Professor Felix Adler would think of this, with his proposal
to make the State "take the place of the personal deity that is
passing out of men's lives. Machiavelli was a fetich worshipper
of the State. Preserve the State, say Machiavelli regardless of
justice, or pity, or honor! As Diderot, quoted by Mr. Morley,
said of this, it is an argument which should be headed, "The
Circumstances under which it is right for a Prince to be a
Scoundrel."
Caesar Borgia, the fiend, was Machiavelli's model, a man who
rivalled all the atrocities of the worst Roman emperors. But
Borgia failed. That matters not to Machiavelli. His failure was
"due to the extreme malignity of fortune." Mr. Morley's rapid
sketch of Caesar Borgia, ferocious, lustful in insane ways,
treacherous, splendidly vile, is a glance into the Hell that was
Italy. Machiavelli was in this man's train and frankly admired
him and his methods. All the men of the times seemed to be wild
beasts, and Borgia was as courageous, supple and sly as those
with whom he dealt. Machiavelli, to do him justice, thought that
Caesar Borgia and his father, the Pope, had design to pacify and
to unify Italy. They worked with the material and with the tools
to hand. Men did not shudder at treachery and assassination in
those days. We must judge men by their surroundings. And it is
difficult, even now, vide Turkey and Greece, "to govern the world
by paternosters." As Mr. Morley says, "It is well to take care
lest in blaming Machiavelli for openly prescribing hypocrisy, men
do not slip unperceived into something like hypocrisy of their
own. Each age has its own hypocrisy. Mr. Morley traces the
influences of Machiavelli, and finds them strong in William the
Silent, Henry of Navarre, and Good Queen Bess. All these rulers
dallied with creeds and were diplomats to the Machiavellian limit
of duplicity. They burned and hanged and tortured on the plea of
the strong State. Frederick, the Great, too, Mr. Morley classes
as a pupil of Machiavelli, though, once, the "crank" on tall
grenadiers threatened to write a refutation of "The Prince" and
thereby drew from Arouet de Voltaire a characteristic mot.
Napoleon, with his "reasons of State," was Machiavellian.
Machiavelli presided at the shooting of D'Engheim. It was one of
the last things which showed "what reason of State may come to,
in any age, in the hands of a logician with a knife in his
grasp."
From the influence of Machiavelli upon the Absolutists, Mr.
Morley comes down to his influence in the Republican camp.
Mazzini, he says "could not curse the dagger" and yet Mazzini was
"in some respects the loftiest moral genius of the century." Mr.
Morley does not believe that Machiavellism has pervaded party
politics in Europe or America. I wonder if this be not a sample
of Mr. Morley's Machiavellism--a reason of state at this time. If
not Machiavellism, what, in God's name, are our platform
straddles, our expediency candidates, our deals and dickers in
tariff-bills, our endeavors to catch all kinds of votes from all
kinds of "interests." I am not a silverite, but the regular
Democrats made and out-and-out platform and did not hedge. I am a
Democrat and glad that, though it "split us wide open," we fought
out the issue just as we fought out the slavery issue. True
Democrats, gold or silver, despise only the Machiavellists who
talk of compromise. Machiavelli seems to have seen but one side
of life--the worse. He knew but one kind of men--Italians of the
sixteenth century. They were not normal. It is true that Nature
is not moral, but if Machiavelli be right it were just as well
that we should return to the conditions of life in Stanley
Waterloo's "Story of Ab." Whether Nature be moral or not, at
least men are. We must look at the facts. We have civilized our
code of warfare. The greatest living diplomat is Leo XIII, and no
one deems that he succeeds by deceit. Bismark says there is no
success in lying, in diplomacy. Reasons of State are not, in the
common consent of mankind, good reasons per se. "Talleyrand was
false to every one but true to France." He was an avatar of
Machiavelli, and he is despised, universally.
The Roman State has passed away. The Venetian and the Florentine
States have passed. All the supreme States have vanished and they
begun to fade just as soon as the Machiavellian idea began to
prevail. The State is not the end of the existence of people. The
State must grow broader and broader until, let us hope, we shall
see "the parliament of man, the federation of the world." Our
sympathy with Cuba, with the Armenians, with Ireland, with
Poland, rises up to refute Machiavelli and his right of the State
to crush for mere pleasure of power. "If Machiavelli had been at
Jerusalem two thousand years ago, he would have found nobody of
importance save Pontius Pilate and the Roman legionaries," says
Mr. Morley. He forgot the moral force of the world. Machiavelli's
fault is the Renaissance fault. The Renaissance turned to the
past to reconstruct everything, and it copied, save in its
architecture, only Antiquity's faults. It became diseased, trying
to adjust itself to dead things. Life itself became corrupted;
the Renaissance was to a large extent a birth out of
degeneration.
Machiavelli was a scientist--a vivisectionist I should say. He
preached, with a vengeance, the survival of the fittest. He is
vital in his books today because he stands for the vitality of
men's passions. He saw them and studied them and knew them. But
upon passions nothing ever was builded. They shift and change.
They cannot give a foundation of permanency to a State. They were
the essence of that chaos out of which he thought to bring order
in anarchic Italy, working on them and on them alone. Cunning,
jealousy, perfidy, ingratitude, dupery were the instruments with
which he would fashion out a State. And he knew that the State so
wrought could not last, for he said the world grew no better;
what made his State destroyed it, inevitably. Machiavelli ignored
charity, which is in itself, justice, fidelity, gratitude,
honesty and all the virtues. He was a man without hope and a man
without love. What a great sad mad man he was, indeed. St. Louis,
November 15.
* * *
THE AMATEUR EDITOR.
The country appears to be overrun at present with amateur
editors. When a man learns by sad experience that he hasn't
sufficient sense to successfully steer a blind mule through a
cotton patch, where the rows are a rod apart, he exchanges his
double-shovel plot for the editorial tripod and begins "moulding
public opinion" and industriously exchanging advertising acreage
for something to eat. When Will Carleton's old farmer discovered
that his son Jim was good for nothing else on God's earth he
concluded to "be makin' an editor outen o' him." That practice
prevails throughout the country to a very considerable extent
to-day--the sanctum divides with the pulpit and the stage those
incompetents who aspire to mount above the plow, yet lack the
necessary brains to succeed in business, in medicine or at the
bar. When a man fails at everything else he is apt to be seized
with a yearning ambition to become an editor. He gets trusted for
a shirt-tail full o' pied type, a pre-Raphaelite press, lays in a
job-lot of editorial "we's" and a sawdust cuspidore, girds up his
loins and begins to commence. His first task is to reform the
currency system and instruct the universe in the esoteric science
of economics. He may not be able to successfully float a
butcher's bill, but he writes of finance with all the assurance
of Alexander Hamilton. He may not know whether Adam Smith or
Tommy Watson wrote the "Wealth of Nations"; but he doesn't
hesitate to take issue with every economist from Quesnay to
Walter--to utilize his paste-pot for arc light and play at
Liberty Enlightening the World. These amateur editors are the
curse of the country. They Guldensuppe John Stuart Mill and play
Leutgert to Lindley Murray. It is some consolation, however, to
reflect that they seldom last long. They unfold their wing-like
ears and make a frantic flutter at the sun, only to come down
beam first on some rocky islet in the Icarian sea. Their
creditors do not have even the mournful satisfaction of
contemplating the hole--the amateur editor invariably pulls it in
after him. But until his first notes fall due he is an iridescent
glory. He adores himself with a long-tailed hand-me-down Albert
Edward and carries the universe in his arms. He pokes his
meddlesome proboscis into everything and gives oodles of advice,
unasked. He may not have as much principle as a tomcat in
rutting time, but he poses before all men as a "guardian of
public morals." When he places the awful seal of his disapproval
upon a fellow mortal he expects to see him shrivel ups like a fat
angle-worm on a sea-coal fire. He's a modern Balaam, peddling
God's blessings and curses--for the long green. He imagines that
an eager multitude sit up every night to catch the first dank
copy of his little matutinal mistake--to see what he's got to
SAY. He's garrulous as a toothless gran dam at a sewing circle,
as busy as a canine eunuch when his kind do congregate. He
discourses of everything, from the creation of the universe to
Farmer Brown's visit to Bugleville. He fairly riots in editorial
"leaders." He gives his "moral support"--and nothing else--to
those local enterprises whose promoters jack him up with gobs of
taffy on the mistaken hypotheses that his "flooence" may be
useful. He has an idea that his miserable little journalistic
misfit is "making the town" and is entitled to great wads of
gratitude--that should his towline break the whole community
would go awhooping to hades, the bottom would fall out of realty
values and the streets be overgrown with Johnson grass. So he
toils and sweats and stinks--imagines that he is roosting on the
top rung of the journalistic ladder when he hasn't even learned
his trade. Finally he falls through the bosom of his pantalettes.
The sheriff levies on his stock of editorial "we's" the paste
sours, the office cat starves, spiders festoon the sawdust
cuspidore and the dust settles like a pall on his collection of
worn type and wood-base railway cuts. The second-hand engine
ceases to snort, the rat printers disperse and the wheezy old
cylinder press no longer alarms the neighborhood. But in a little
while another yap scraps up $40 in cash, catches a sucker to
endorse his note and there's a renascence of the old plant. It is
from shyster lawyers without clients, quack doctors without
patients and peanut politicians without pulls that the ranks of
amateur journalism are constantly recruited. Such people always
imagine it dead easy to "run" a paper--that it is only necessary
to grab the editorial stylus and pour forth their inexhaustible
fund of misinformation to set the woods on fire. Such papers
usually manage to wiggle through the fall and winter, for they
can then sell advertising space at a dollar an acre, take pay in
soft-soap and second-hand sad-irons and still make a reasonable
profit--the time of their manipulators being worth nothing a
week; but when the long dull summer dawns they go "up agin it"
with a dull hollow groan. Every town between Sunrise and Last
Chance has had experience galore with the amateur editor. He is
one of those unhung idiots who rush in where angels fear to
tread. He is an incorrigible but an unabateable nuisance. He
never succeeds in making money for himself; he always manages to
lose it for somebody else. You may mark this; The quack cannot
achieve permanent success in any profession, in journalism least
of all, for there his shortcomings cannot be concealed. To become
a successful newspaper man one must begin at the bottom and climb
by pure strength through long days of labor and nights of agony.
It is the most exacting profession in the world today. It is true
that some so-called yellow journals succeed in making money; but
while they employ perverts they have no use for Smart Alecs and
amateurs. Amateur journalists, like dog-fennel and jimson weeds,
usually blossom in Jayville. Most Southern towns have suffered
from their reckless depredations and will hail their excoriation
with delight; still it is a wicked waste of nervo-muscular
energy--the amateur journalist, like the poor, and the
megalophanous jackass, we have ever with us.
* * *
SPEAKING FOR MYSELF.
The ICONOCLAST receives thousands of letters to which it is
impossible for me personally to reply. Many of them refer to the
attempts made to forcibly suppress the ICONOCLAST, and to the
terrible tragedy resulting from those attacks. I take this
opportunity of thanking my friends for their kindly interest, and
to assure them that I have stood from the first solely upon the
defensive. I have made a decent attempt to set an example of
Christian forbearance for my religious brethren. To the kindly
offers of other cities to afford the ICONOCLAST an asylum and
protect its editor from outrage, I will simply say that I do not
consider either my property or person in the slightest danger. A
majority of the Texas people are both broad gauged and
law-abiding. We probably have our proportion of intolerant bigots
and splenetic-hearted little blatherskites who preach mob
violence from the pulpit; but such people are not dangerous so
long as they are well watched. My forbears helped make Texas a
republic; they helped make it a state of the American union. I
like the climate, and most of the people, and am in no hurry to
move. I may have to seek a better distributing point for my
publications, as they are already too extensive to be properly
handled from any Texas town; but I shall not pull my tent stakes
for a day or two. If I do move--sometime within the next
twelve-month--it will be bruited throughout the universe that I
was driven out of Waco,--just as my brethren in Christ say I was
driven out of San Antonio; but that won't worry my soul a cent's
worth. I've been lied about so d----n much, that I feel ill at
ease and neglected unless the target of vindictive mendacity by
tearful souls who fail to pay their debts. I've been kept so
badly frightened all month by threats to drag me out of my home
and hang me, or otherwise measure me up for a crop of angelic
pin-feathers that I've been unable to write anything worth
reading. But as soon as I can swallow my heart and quit shivering
I will grab the English language by the butt-end and make it
crack like a new bull-whip about the ears of hypocrites and
humbugs. Meanwhile I desire to state that there is nothing the
matter with the ICONOCLAST's contributors. They are a bouquet
of pansy blossoms of whom any publisher might well be proud.
Should the editor chance to swallow too much water the next time
he is baptized, they can be depended upon to keep the flag of the
ICONOCLAST afloat until the red headed heir-apparent learns to
write with one hand and shoot with the other. Let it go at that.
BRANN.
. . .
Princeton, N. J., is dreadfully disappointed because the "Stuffed
Prophet" didn't call his kid Grover Cleveland. It is really
pitiful to contemplate the agony of Princeton; but the average
tax-payer is likely to conclude that one Grover Cleveland is
quite enough in any country. It is to be hoped that the son will
not resemble the sire--that he will not have the beefy mug of the
booze-sodden old beast who disgraced the presidency by playing
that high office for his personal profit. Let it never be
forgotten that G. Cleveland was the only man to enter the
presidency a pauper and leave it a plutocrat. And he managed to
do this at a time when millions of better men were going hungry
to bed.