Arrestive was it in an aisle of Santa Croce—the Florentine Church of
the Holy Cross—to come upon a monument to Niccolò Machiavelli, anathema
alike for Catholicism and Protestantism, the “Old Nick” of the Hudibras
rhyme. ’Twas as if Mephisto had managed not only to slip into the
Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But even a devil is not given
his due at the hands of his own countrymen: it was reserved for an
English earl, more than two and a half centuries after Mephisto’s
passing, to provide his works with a splendid setting and his remains
with a massive monument. And so, in the dim religious light, I pondered
over the stately inscription:
“Tanto Nomini nullum par Elogium.”
How, indeed, equate eulogy to so great a name? Machiavelli was our first
modern—the first to exhibit the reign of law in human affairs, to read
history as the play of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy
Providence, modified by the stars. What an epic sweep in the opening
sentences of his “History of Florence”—Gibbon in a nutshell, the whole
“Decline and Fall,” summarised as the economic emigration southward of
the surplus population of the Goths into an Italy weakened by the
removal of the seat of Empire to Constantinople. Vagarious chance,
indeed, he admits, as a complication (to be minimised by prudence), but
Providence is mentioned in “The Prince,” only to be dropped, and
astrology is not even mentioned. Machiavelli would have agreed that “the
fault’s in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are underlings,” and for
those who wished to prince it, he was prepared to point the conditions
of success. And this indifference to the stars—to quadrangles and
hexagons, sigils, conjunctions, and configurations—is not his least
amazing merit.
Pico della Mirandola had, indeed, refuted astrology before him, but it
was in the interests of that conventional theory of Providence and
free-will which leaves the chaos of history irreducible to order.
Machiavelli not only ignores astrology, but substitutes causation for
the chaos.
’Tis true Comte suggested that astrology was, likewise, an attempt to
reduce to law the chaos of human phenomena, but the remark is
over-ingenious. Where there is no rational connection between causes and
effects there is no science. The planetary conjuncture one was born
under might, indeed, not impossibly affect temperament or internal
destiny, just as the climate one was born under, but the notion that it
could shape external destiny belongs to the mediæval megalomania.
Galileo’s discovery of new stars must have shaken it, falsifying as it
did all previous horoscopes—indeed, Sir Henry Wotton, our ambassador to
Venice, was more impressed by Galileo’s injuriousness to astrology than
to theology. “For the virtue of these new planets must needs vary the
judicial part, and why may there not yet be more?” But Machiavelli
belongs to the pre-telescope period; he wrote a whole century before
Galileo, and thirty years ere Copernicus unsettled the ancient heavens
by his Nuremberg treatise. True, even in the twelfth century, Maimonides
had denounced astrology as “a disease, not a science,” and the great
Jew’s letter “to the Men of Marseilles” had evoked papal applause. But
not even Popes could arrest the disease. A century before Machiavelli
was born Petrarch poured scorn on the astrologers. But the mockeries of
this pioneer of humanism did not save a prince of the Renaissance like
Lodovico from employing an astrologer advisory, under whose calculations
he went from disaster to disaster. There were even Professors of
Astrology at the Universities. Bodin, the next great political
philosopher after Machiavelli, though half a century later, still
dallies with astrology, still coquets with the theory of a connection
between the planetary motions and the world’s history, while Copernicus
he regards as a fantast unworthy of serious refutation.
Earlier in the sixteenth century Luther had denounced astrology as
“framed by the devil,” and in his Table Talk had challenged the
astrologers to answer him why Esau and Jacob, who were “born together of
one father and one mother, at one time and under equal planets” were yet
“wholly of contrary natures, kinds and morals.” Nevertheless in the next
century, Milton in “Paradise Regained” makes Satan predict truly to
Jesus on the strength of
“What the stars,
Voluminous or single characters,
In their conjunction met,”
give him to spell, and throughout the whole seventeenth century, as “Guy
Mannering” reminds us, nativities continued to be cast. The child’s
horoscope in some parts of Europe hung side by side with his baptismal
certificate. Even to-day such phrases as “Thank your lucky stars,”
conserve a shadow of the ancient belief, and the sidereal influence
survives even more subtly in the word “consider.” Through such banks of
fog pierces the searchlight of the great Florentine, it turns its
powerful beam even upon Church history. The Princes of ecclesiastical
principalities, he remarks drily, are the only ones who can possess
States and subjects without governing and defending them, but it would
be presumptuous in him to discuss these matters, as they are under the
superintendence and direction of an Almighty Being, whose dispensations
are beyond our weak understandings. But the Church has likewise attained
temporal power, and here Mephisto may intrude without blasphemy. Secular
triumphs demand secular explanations. One is reminded of the dialogue on
Julius II attributed to Erasmus. Our Mephisto notes grimly that no
prophet has ever succeeded unless backed by an armed force. Hence the
collapse of “brother Jerome Savonarola when the multitude ceased to have
faith in him.” In short, in the making of history Might and Right are
partners.
Not in the exposition of this commonplace lay Machiavelli’s
offensiveness for his contemporaries. Had he remained the passionless
observer of the pitiful human breed, the explicator of the tangled
threads of history, he would have been acclaimed as a moralist,
unveiling with ruthless hand the hypocrisies of princes. What changed
angel to devil was that instead of fulminating against the partnership
of Might and Right, he found that only by this firm could history be
made. He wrote not science but art—the _ars usurpandi_. Not only had
the Princes of the past combined Might with Right, guile with goodness,
but whoso wished now to be a Prince must needs go and do likewise. The
ethics springing from the social relations of citizen to citizen no
longer holds in the relation of ruler to subjects.
It is true “The Prince” might also be regarded as an elaborate Swiftian
irony—a negative Pulcinellian advice to those about to usurp—an
exposition of Princedom as the service of the devil. “A New Prince
cannot with impunity exercise all the virtues, because his own
self-preservation will often compel him to violate the laws of charity,
religion and humanity.” But this Swiftian supposition does not tally
with the dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and his overt encouragement to
the Most Magnificent to seize the reins. Machiavelli plainly believes in
the sense he alleges hidden by the ancients in the myth of Chiron the
Centaur, who was the educator of rulers because he had the double
qualification of the brute and the man. In high politics crimes are only
crimes when they are blunders. Unsuccessful cruelty is unpardonable.
Wickedness should be pursued with an economy of means to end: like the
causes in Occam’s canon, crimes should not be multiplied _præter
necessitatem_. Politics is a sort of bee-keeping, and the master of the
hive will use the instincts and ethics of the little creatures for his
own purposes, his kindness will be as cold-blooded as his cruelty. Thus,
some three and a half centuries before Nietzsche, was expounded the
doctrine of the Superman, the splendid blonde beast who had passed
_Jenseits von Gut und Böse_. “The despised virtues of patience and
humility have abased the spirits of men, which Pagan principles
exalted.” It is in such precisely Nietzschean terms that Sir Thomas
Browne sums up, albeit unapplausively, “the judgment of Machiavel.” But
as a treatise on apiculture, “The Prince” is not rigidly scientific. The
Superman, alone upon his dizzy height, Diabolists and neo-Dionysians as
yet unborn to cheer him, has his moments of human weakness. Before the
crimes of Agathocles he falters, and remarks with delicious gravity,
“Still it must not be called virtue to murder one’s fellow-citizens or
to sacrifice one’s friends, or be insensible to the voice of faith, pity
or religion. These qualities may lead to sovereignty but not to glory.”
And there is a more general apologia in the concession that the times
are out of joint—in the grim Tacitean explanation that “he who deviates
from the common course of practice, and endeavours to act as duty
dictates, necessarily ensures his own destruction.” Super-morality
lapses here into morality.
Moreover, Machiavelli did not himself play the Superman. He wrote the
part—or founded it on Cæsar Borgia—but he did not act it. The Rubicon
’twixt thought and action he never crossed. His own morals appear to
have been conventionally excellent. Like Helvetius, who traced virtue to
the lowest roots of self-interest, he was of a rare magnanimity. As a
scientific observer he advises the Tyrant, if he cannot live in the
Republic he has conquered, to destroy it root and branch, but as a man
he bore torture and imprisonment for the cause of liberty. Indeed, in
his later years something of the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift seems to
have possessed his breast. It was Napoleon who was destined to incarnate
the maxims of Machiavelli, though on a far grander stage than even Cæsar
Borgia ever dreamed of: it was Napoleon who gave the greatest
performance of “The Prince.” And by a hitherto unnoted coincidence
Napoleon was born exactly three centuries after Machiavelli. Exactly
three hundred years (1469-1769) divided the nativities of the Superman
of Letters and the Superman of Action—’tis almost enough to revive
faith in the potency of planetary conjunctures. True, Nietzsche regards
Napoleon as but “half-Superman,” the other half being beast, but we have
seen that the bestial portion is a necessary factor of the Machiavellian
Superman, who is nothing if not super-dominant. What Nietzsche’s
Superman was to be, Nietzsche did not precisely know, though we may well
suspect that the direction in which he strained his vision for him was
not the horizon but the looking glass. Nietzsche has not even the credit
of inventing the Superman, for when Nietzsche was six years old,
Tennyson published “In Memoriam,” with its prophetic peroration:
“A closer link
Between us and the crowning race. . . .
No longer half akin to brute,
For all we thought and loved and did,
And hoped, and suffered, is but seed
Of what in them is flower and fruit.”
Tennyson pressed home this idea of the further evolution of our race in
his very last volume, in a poem called “The Making of Man.”
“Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages,
Shall not æon after æon pass and touch him into shape?”
And again in “The Dawn.”
“Ah, what will _our_ children be,
The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?”
More self-conscious a disciple of Machiavelli than Napoleon was our own
Thomas Cromwell, who carried “The Prince” as his political enchiridion,
and who within three years of its publication chopped off Sir Thomas
More’s head as coolly as a knight captures a bishop on a chess-board. If
you have to choose between love and fear, said the Master, then fear is
the stronger weapon. With fear, Thomas the pupil hewed his way to the
great ends he had set himself. Thomas Cromwell’s application of the
system was, however, vitiated by one radical mistake. By a paradox,
worthy of Machiavelli himself—and repeated in our own day by
Bismarck—“the Prince” he worked for was not himself but his sovereign.
Howsoever Thomas Crommay have appeared the true gerent, the final profit
was to the suzerain, and the axe of despotism which he had forged for
Henry VIII was turned against his own neck. Of his canon that traitors
should be condemned unheard, he was the sole victim. Possibly he might
have triumphed even over the flaw in his practice, had Anne of Cleves
been more personable. It was essential to his game to queen this pawn,
and queen her he did. But at what a cost! It has been said that if
Cleopatra’s nose had been longer, the world’s history would have been
other. Of the German princess’s nose it may be said that had it been
prettier—or perchance had Holbein flattered it less before it was seen
by the matrimonial agent—Thomas Cromwell would have continued to rule
England, and Europe might have been spared the Thirty Years’ War. But
even Supermen cannot change the shape of ladies’ noses, and in this surd
of a world, where the best laid plans may “gang agley” over the tilt of
a nostril, what avail your Supermen more than Supermice? The toasted
cheese is but temporary, the end of Napoleon is the mouse-trap.
The phenomena of history are indeed too multifarious for consciousness,
and the Machiavellian method of treating persons as things—in defiance
of the moral maxim—shatters itself upon the impossibility of foreseeing
all the permutations of the things. A bad prince is no more secure
against assassination than a good prince. A religious reformer may arise
and upset the snuggest peace. A failure of crops may precipitate
rebellion. A child’s arm may plug up a dam. In brief, lacking the
necessary omniscience, the shrewdest of Supermen is driving in the dark.
The upshot of Napoleon’s career was to make Germany and mutilate France.
It is through lack of omniscience, too, that we cannot obey the frequent
modern suggestion to breed the Superman—the Superman, that is, not as
the cold-blooded manipulator of man, but as his moral superior and
successor, Tennyson’s Superman, not Nietzsche’s. We are too abysmally
ignorant for evolutionary eugenics. We breed horses and roses for higher
types, but then we immeasurably transcend horses and roses. Who
transcends us so immeasurably that he should breed us? In breeding we
have a clear vision of our aim—to produce a thornless rose or a Derby
winner. What clear vision has any one of the Superman? It is impossible
to read even Nietzsche without seeing a spectral swarm of shifting
types. Moreover we breed only for physical qualities. What experience
have we of breeding for moral qualities? And what were all our breedings
compared with Nature’s inexhaustible experimentation, her thousand
million men and women of all shades and psychoses, her endless blendings
and crossings that yield now Nietzsches, now Isaiahs; yesterday Platos,
to-day Darwins and Wagners.
The Superman will come of himself: already man rises as imperceptibly
into him as he fades into the orang-outang. “This was no man,” said
Napoleon, reading the Sermon on the Mount—an involuntary admission by
the Machiavellian of a finer species of Superman than his own.
And this brings us to the paradox that the defect in Machiavelli’s
system was not in his morals but in his intellect. In the hive he
examined were creatures greater than he, obeying motives beyond his ken.
To him Princes ruled primarily for their own glory, for the pomp and
pride of power. Of the small but infinitely important class of rulers
who assume mastership only because they have the greatest power to
serve, he has no adequate conception. That there has sometimes been a
Pope who felt himself literally _servus servorum Dei_ passed his
comprehension. This falsifies his treatment of history, this makes his
vision imperfect, this throws his conclusions out of gear. The verse in
St. Matthew, “he that is greatest among you shall be servant of all the
rest,” represents a more scientific generalisation. As Chapman’s _Don
Byron_ (Act 3, Scene 1) reminds us, in his denunciation of “the schools
first founded in ingenious Italy,” the true
“Kings are not made by art
But right of nature, nor by treachery propt
But simple virtue.”
But Machiavelli, that crude biologist, treats Moses and Cyrus as
creatures of the same species, would run together the Attilas and the
Buddhas. Hence the hard metallic sheen of his style as of an old Latin
prose-writer; of spiritual iridescence, of Jewish tenderness, of
Christian yearning, of even the Nietzschean ecstasy there is no trace.
It is not astonishing that he should have turned a scornful ear to
Savonarola’s message, dismissed him as a compound of fraud and cunning.
How dramatic is the picture of Mephisto listening to the preacher of San
Marco that week of the Carnival of 1497! (What a pity “Romola” does not
exploit that episode instead of using Machiavelli as a mere caustic
conversationalist). But though Machiavelli’s flair for crouching Cæsars
was not utterly at fault, though the Dominican did indeed aspire to be
“The Prince” of the Church, and even the power behind the thrones of the
Princes of Christendom, yet ’twas all _ad majorem Dei gloriam_ and for
the greater confusion of the infidel, and George Eliot has understood
this impersonal egotist infinitely better than his cynical contemporary
understood him. And this intellectual limitation—this absence of the
highest notes from his psychological gamut—must always keep Machiavelli
out of the first rank of writers. He cannot rise above the notion that
power is an end in itself and that those who can satisfy it “deserve
praise rather than censure.” If the King of France—he tells us—was
powerful enough to invade the kingdom of Naples, then he _ought_ to have
done it. Though Machiavelli could see that the individual’s crimes “may
lead to sovereignty but not to glory,” yet he did not question the right
of a State to absorb or shatter another. He saw that the world went on
“The simple plan
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can,”
and he admitted that the rule was indispensable—if you went into
politics. This was his crime—High Treason against Idealism. Humanity
prefers to be guided by rules which it disavows. The splendid blonde
beasts who practised the maxims of Machiavelli shuddered at the scribe
who merely stated them. Nowhere probably was disgust with the Florentine
writer more vehement than in Venice, which employed assassins as a
principle of polity. Could that Turkish “Prince” who decreed that each
new monarch of his house must safeguard the dynasty by massacring his
swarm of brothers, or that Persian “Prince” who invented the principle
of blinding them, have seen the printed “Prince” of Machiavelli, they
with their correct Islamic or Zoroastrian principles would have shared
in the universal opprobrium.
That the world shudders still is shown by the apologetic attitude of his
commentators and even of his panegyrists. Not one but repudiates his
system, charitably traces it to the unhappy circumstances of his day, to
the welter of force and fraud amid which his lot was cast. Yet are these
circumstances essentially changed? The small urban republics have
vanished, but in their stead are the Great Powers. Cæsar Borgia and
Ezzelino are gone, but we have the Congo Ruler and the Trust Magnate.
“Every country hath its Machiavel,” says Sir Thomas Browne, and there is
no spot on earth where the maxims of “The Prince” are not in daily
operation. The voice may be the voice of Savonarola, but the hands are
the hands of Machiavelli.
Nay, it is often the voice of Machiavelli even when it sounds like the
voice of Savonarola. For, as Lord Acton subtly pointed out,
Machiavellism lurks in many a seemingly innocent and even pious
proposition. It is perhaps straining his point to find it in Jeremy
Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle,” but who shall doubt but that
it is involved in the popular idea that “Time tries all,” and that
everything happens for the best in the long run, and that history is,
after all, the Will of God? What are all these nebulous notions but the
acceptance of success—of the brute fact—as the moral standard? Less
obvious than the proposition that “God is on the side of the biggest
battalions,” they are substantially identical with it. They simply mean
that God _was_ on the side of the biggest battalions. They imply that
whichever party triumphed, God was with that party. So that many even of
those who reject Machiavelli with loathing are found to be unconsciously
Machiavellian.
Hallam in his “Introduction to the Literature of Europe” palliates the
darker features of the Machiavellian teaching by the nature of the
times, yet in his own “Europe during the Middle Ages,” writing of the
rapid decay of Charlemagne’s Empire under his son Louis, “called by the
Italians the Pious, and by the French the Debonair or Good-natured,” he
says “the fault lay entirely in his heart; and this fault was nothing
but a temper too soft and a conscience too strict. It is not wonderful
that the Empire should have been speedily dissolved.” And Charlemagne,
its peerless founder, is described as having divorced nine wives,
beheaded four thousand Saxons in a single day, and executed all who ate
flesh during Lent!
It is when I hear the words of Church or Press, Parliaments or Royal
Proclamations, that I fall into a rage against language, and even as
Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, I curse the man who
invented speech. In the beautiful dumb days the strong rent the weak in
sacred simplicity. Now the strong make pious speeches to show that the
eupepsia of the universe is their appetite’s aim, and the weak must
listen to proofs that they are being eaten for their own good. Happily
the serpent no longer talks, else were his slow slimy deglutition of the
living rabbit accompanied by a sermon. The State has not only killed
Christ but stolen his words. At the Hague the lion and the lamb lie down
together, and the concordial words flow on like music, till the lamb
suggests that the lion should pare his claws. And the lamb himself—is
he anything but a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is he not at heart envious
of claws, always feeling his paws for talons of his own?
“And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt
smite them and utterly destroy them: thou shalt make no covenant with
them, nor show mercy unto them.” Where outside Machiavelli shall you
find a clean strong sentence like this of Moses? The Destroying Angel’s
sword shall be sharp and antiseptic as a surgeon’s knife; he shall leave
no writhing torsoes, no half-sawn limbs and festering wounds littering
the purlieus of life. But this utterance is too strong for Christian
stomachs, it belongs to the fee-fo-fum eye-for-eye period of the Old
Testament: with the New entered the reign of ethereal mildness, lilies
showering from full hands, festal fountains spouting the milk of human
kindness. Well might Wordsworth cry out:
“Earth is sick,
And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words
Which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk
Of truth and justice.”
But even the Old Testament is comparatively sophisticated. This
extinction of the native tribes of Palestine is enjoined, not on
political grounds but on religious. It is not that Palestine, which
offers the most convenient territory for the refugees from Egypt,
happens unfortunately to be densely populated. No, virtue must be
vindicated, not brute force. But one cannot too much admire that the
Biblical historian chose the less nauseous of the two morals open to
him. “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart,
dost thou go to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these
nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” By a
remarkable exception in epics, Israel is the villain, not the hero, of
his own story. But all the same, the story has to be coloured in the
interests of righteousness. His successors in invasion have not been
content to blacken the autochthones, they have brightened themselves. It
is for their own uprightness that the Lord casts out the tribes before
them or sets them to rule over the heathen. The Lord calls them to
spread His word in countries closed to their commerce. He ordains they
should bear the White Man’s burden—the Black Man’s ivory and gold are
indeed no light weight. Pah! let us talk of politics like Machiavelli or
forever hold our peace.
And yet something can be said for the world’s hypocrisy. It is the
homage which the Relative pays to the Absolute, part of that yearning of
mankind for indefectible ideals, for Luther’s “pearl of certainty.” Its
Right must be Right in all circumstances under the stars, nay, before
the stars were born. Ethics shall not be a child of conditions; what
holds between man and man, must obtain equally between ruler and ruled,
even between State and State. But what is to be done when ethics demands
one thing and necessity the opposite? Necessity wins of course, but on
condition of not blazoning its victory. The Church, forbidden to shed
blood, exacts an expiation from its indispensable warriors, or gravely
invents the bloodless stake for its heretics, or with an even more
humorous preference of the letter to the spirit forbids its priests to
practise surgery. The negro, enfranchised by the Quixotic theory of the
American constitution, is disestablished by the Sancho Panzas who
miscount his votes. The Jew, commanded to rid himself of leaven during
Passover, sells his stock of groceries to an accommodating Christian
till the Festival be over. The Christian, to whom money-lending is a sin
against nature, hands over the necessary function to the accursèd Jew
with the sanction of St. Thomas Aquinas, or founds the Monte di Pietà
which Leo X permits to exact a fee on its loans to cover the cost of its
officials. Ethics, like the old astronomy, complicates itself with the
cycles and epicycles of practice, but the theory of the perfect circle
of planetary motion remains immutable. In Lombardy, in Florence, under
the very eye of the Pope, the industrial system of modern Europe founds
itself on money-lending, but no Encyclical removes the prohibition or
condones the sacrilege, or grants Christian burial to the impenitent
financier. The irresistible force of facts comes into collision with the
immovable body of principles, but the crash is soundless, and by a
delicate instinct Society looks the other way. The immortal principle is
buried silently—not a drum is heard, not a funeral note. For later
generations its deadness is a matter of course.
Even so mankind founds its social systems upon beautiful ideals and
averts its eyes from the rotten places of the fabric. It will concede
almost anything to practice, if practice will only remain under the
rose. This Social Conspiracy is sub-conscious. In war or in religion, in
sex or even the smaller animal functions, it works towards a harmony of
seeming, an artistic selection of the beautiful or the perfect with
rejection of the ugly or the jarring. Is not this indeed our highest
art, this art of civilisation, which, out of the raw stuff we are,
fashions us into the figures of an heroic and poetic masque? Costumed in
the skins of our fellow beasts or in the spoils of our vegetable
contemporaries, our dames pranked in the web of a worm, we ruffle it in
drawing-rooms as gods and spirits, no terrestrial weakness bewrayed. Our
true superiority to the brutes is that we are artists, and they are
naturals. Man _will_ not be a creature of Nature, as Coleridge noted.
All the world’s a stage and all the men and women players, or—to say it
in Greek—hypocrites. It is for bad manners that Machiavelli has been
boycotted.