Page 6 of 68

The Defence.

But from the first the defence was neither idle nor weak. The assault was on the morals of the man: the fortress held for the ideas of the thinker. He does not treat of morals, therefore he is immoral, cried the plaintiff. Has he spoken truth or falsehood? Is his word the truth and will his truth prevail? was the rejoinder. In Germany and Italy especially and in France and England in less degree, philosophers and critics have argued and written without stint and without cease. As history has grown wider and more scientific so has the preponderance of opinion leaned to the Florentine's favour.

It would be impossible to recapitulate the arguments or even to indicate the varying points of view. And indeed the main hindrance in forming a just idea of The Prince is the constant treatment of a single side of the book and the preconceived intent of the critic. Bacon has already been mentioned. Among later names are Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibnitz. Herder gives qualified approval, while Fichte frankly throws down the glove as The Prince's champion. 'Da man weiss dass politische Machtfragen nie, am wenigsten in einem verderbten Volke, mit den Mitteln der Moral zu lösen sind, so ist es unverständig das Buch von Fürsten zu verschreien. Macchiavelli hatte einen Herrscher zu schildern, keinen Klosterbruder.' The last sentence may at least be accepted as a last word by practical politicians. Ranke and Macaulay, and a host of competent Germans and Italians have lent their thought and pens to solve the riddle in the Florentine's favour. And lastly, the course of political events in Europe have seemed to many the final justification of the teaching of The Prince. The leaders of the Risorgimento thought that they found in letters, 'writ with a stiletto,' not only the inspirations of patriotism and the aspirations to unity, but a sure and trusted guide to the achievement. Germany recognised in the author a schoolmaster to lead them to unification, and a military instructor to teach them of an Armed People. Half Europe snatched at the principle of Nationality. For in The Prince, Machiavelli not only begat ideas but fertilised the ideas of others, and whatever the future estimation of the book may be, it stands, read or unread, as a most potent, if not as the dominant, factor in European politics for four hundred years.

The Discorsi.

The Discorsi, printed in Rome by Blado, 1537, are not included in the present edition, as the first English translation did not appear until 1680, when almost the entire works of Machiavelli were published by an anonymous translator in London. But some account and consideration of their contents is imperative to any review of the Florentine's political thoughts. Such Discorsi and Relazioni were not uncommon at the time. The stronger and younger minds of the Renaissance wearied of discussing in the lovely gardens of the Rucellai the ideas of Plato or the allegories of Plotinus. The politics of Aristotle had just been intelligibly translated by Leonardo Bruni (1492). And to-day the young ears and eyes of Florence were alert for an impulse to action. They saw glimpses, in reopened fields of history, of quarries long grown over where the ore of positive politics lay hid. The men who came to-day to the Orti Oricellarii were men versed in public affairs, men of letters, historians, poets, living greatly in a great age, with Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, Leonardo going up and down amongst them. Machiavelli was now in fair favour with the Medici, and is described by Strozzi as una persona per sorgere (a rising man). He was welcomed into the group with enthusiasm, and there read and discussed the Discorsi. Nominally mere considerations upon the First Decade of Livy, they rapidly encircled all that was known and thought of policy and state-craft, old and living.

Their Plan.

Written concurrently with The Prince, though completed later, the Discorsi contain almost the whole of the thoughts and intents of the more famous book, but with a slightly different application. 'The Prince traces the progress of an ambitious man, the Discorsi the progress of an ambitious people,' is an apt if inadequate criticism. Machiavelli was not the first Italian who thought and wrote upon the problems of his time. But he was the first who discussed grave questions in modern language. He was the first modern political writer who wrote of men and not of man, for the Prince himself is a collective individuality.

'This must be regarded as a general rule,' is ever in Machiavelli's mouth, while Guicciardini finds no value in a general rule, but only in 'long experience and worthy discretion.' The one treated of policy, the other of politics. Guicciardini considered specifically by what methods to control and arrange an existing Government. Machiavelli sought to create a science, which should show how to establish, maintain, and hinder the decline of states generally conceived. Even Cavour counted the former as a more practical guide in affairs. But Machiavelli was the theorist of humanity in politics, not the observer only. He distinguished the two orders of research. And, during the Italian Renaissance such distinction was supremely necessary. With a crumbled theology, a pagan Pope, amid the wreck of laws and the confusion of social order, il sue particolare and virtù, individuality and ability (energy, political genius, prowess, vital force: virtù is impossible to translate, and only does not mean virtue), were the dominating and unrelenting factors of life. Niccolò Machiavelli, unlike Montesquieu, agreed with Martin Luther that man was bad. It was for both the Wittenberger and the Florentine, in their very separate ways, to found the school and wield the scourge. In the naked and unashamed candour of the time Guicciardini could say that he loathed the Papacy and all its works. 'For all that, he adds, 'the preferments I have enjoyed, have forced me for my private ends to set my heart upon papal greatness. Were it not for this consideration, I should love Martin Luther as my second self.' In the Discorsi, Machiavelli bitterly arraigns the Church as having 'deprived Italians of religion and liberty.' He utterly condemns Savonarolà, yet he could love and learn from Dante, and might almost have said with Pym, 'The greatest liberty of the Kingdom is Religion. Thereby we are freed from spiritual evils, and no impositions are so grievous as those that are laid upon the soul.'

Religion.

The Florentine postulates religion as an essential element in a strong and stable State. Perhaps, with Gibbon, he deemed it useful to the Magistrate. But his science is impersonal. He will not tolerate a Church that poaches on his political preserves. Good dogma makes bad politics. It must not tamper with liberty or security. And most certainly, with Dante, in the Paradiso, he would either have transformed or omitted the third Beatitude, that the Meek shall inherit the earth. With such a temperament, Machiavelli must ever keep touch with sanity. It was not for him as for Aristotle to imagine what an ideal State should be, but rather to inquire what States actually were and what they might actually become. He seeks first and foremost 'the use that may be derived from history in politics'; not from its incidents but from its general principles. His darling model of a State is to be found where Dante found it, in the Roman Republic. The memory and even the substance of Dante occur again and again. But Dante's inspiration was spiritual: Machiavelli's frankly pagan, and with the latter Fortune takes the place of God. Dante did not love the Papacy, but Machiavelli, pointing out how even in ancient Rome religion was politic or utilitarian, leads up to his famous attack upon the Roman Church, to which he attributes all the shame and losses, political, social, moral, national, that Italy has suffered at her hands. And now for the first time the necessity for Italian Unity is laid plainly down, and the Church and its temporal power denounced as the central obstacles. In religion itself the Secretary saw much merit. 'But when it is an absolute question of the welfare of our country, then justice or injustice, mercy or cruelty, praise or ignominy, must be set aside, and we must seek alone whatever course may preserve the existence and liberty of the state.' Throughout the Discorsi, Machiavelli in a looser and more expansive form, suggests, discusses, or re-affirms the ideas of The Prince. There is the same absence of judgment on the moral value of individual conduct; the same keen decision of its practical effect as a political act. But here more than in The Prince, he deals with the action and conduct of the people. With his passion for personal and contemporary incarnation he finds in the Swiss of his day the Romans of Republican Rome, and reiterates the comparison in detail. Feudalism, mercenaries, political associations embodied in Arts and Guilds, the Temporal power of the Church, all these are put away, and in their stead he announces the new and daring gospel that for organic unity subjects must be treated as equals and not as inferiors. 'Trust the people' is a maxim he repeats and enforces again and again. And he does not shrink from, but rather urges the corollary, 'Arm the people.' Indeed it were no audacious paradox to state the ideal of Machiavelli, though he nominally preferred a Republic, as a Limited Monarchy, ruling over a Nation in Arms. No doubt he sought, as was natural enough in his day, to construct the State from without rather than to guide and encourage its evolution from within. It seemed to him that, in such an ocean of corruption, Force was a remedy and Fraud no sluttish handmaid. 'Vice n'est-ce pas,' writes Montaigne, of such violent acts of Government, 'car il a quitté sa raison à une plus universelle et puissante raison.' Even so the Prince and the people could only be justified by results. But the public life is of larger value than the private, and sometimes one man must be crucified for a thousand. Despite all prejudice and make-belief, such a rule and practice has obtained from the Assemblies of Athens to the Parliaments of the twentieth century. But Machiavelli first candidly imparted it to the unwilling consciences and brains of men, and it is he who has been the chosen scape-goat to carry the sins of the people. His earnestness makes him belie his own precept to keep the name and take away the thing. In this, as in a thousand instances, he was not too darkly hidden; he was too plain. 'Machiavelli,' says one who studied the Florentine as hardly another had done, 'Machiavelli hat gesündigt, aber noch mehr ist gegen ihn gesündigt worden.' Liberty is good, but Unity is its only sure foundation. It is the way to the Unity of Government and People that the thoughts both of The Prince and the Discorsi lead, though the incidents be so nakedly presented as to shock the timorous and vex the prurient, the puritan, and the evil thinker. The people must obey the State and fight and die for its salvation, and for the Prince the hatred of the subjects is never good, but their love, and the best way to gain it is by 'not interrupting the subject in the quiet enjoyment of his estate.' Even so bland and gentle a spirit as the poet Gray cannot but comment, 'I rejoice when I see Machiavelli defended or illustrated, who to me appears one of the wisest men that any nation in any age hath produced.'