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Part I
Part I
Introductory Note
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was the son of Zachary Macaulay, a
Scotsman whose experience in the West Indies had made him an ardent
Abolitionist. Thomas was an infant prodigy, and the extraordinary memory which
is borne witness to in his writings was developed at an early age. He was
educated at Cambridge, studied law, and began to write for the "Edinburgh
Review" at twenty-five, his well-known style being already formed. He
entered the House of Commons in 1830, and at once made a reputation as an
orator. In 1834 he went to India as a member of the Supreme Council, and
during his three and a half years there he proved himself a capable and
beneficent administrator. On his return, he again entered Parliament, held
cabinet office, and retired from political life in 1856.
Until about 1844 Macaulay`s writings appeared chiefly in the "Edinburgh
Review," the great organ of the Whig Party, to which he belonged. These
articles as now collected are perhaps the most widely known critical and
historical essays in the language. The brilliant antithetical style, the
wealth of illustration, the pomp and picturesqueness with which the events of
the narrative are brought before the eyes of the reader, combine to make them
in the highest degree entertaining and informing. His "History of England,"
which occupied his later years, was the most popular book of its kind ever
published in England, and owed its success to much the same qualities. The
"Lays of Ancient Rome" and his other verses gained and still hold a large
public, mainly by virtue of their vigor of movement and strong declamatory
quality.
The essay on Machiavelli belongs to Macaulay`s earlier period, and
illustrates his mastery of material that might seem to lie outside of his
usual field. But here in the Italy of the Renaissance, as in the England or
the India which he knew at first hand, we have the same characteristic
simplification and arrangement of motives and conditions that make his clear
exposition possible, the same dash and vividness in bringing home to the
reader his conception of a great character and a great epoch.
Machiavelli^1
[Footnote 1: Originally published as a review of a translation of the complete
works of Machiavelli by J. V. Peries.]
Those who have attended to this practice of our literary tribunal are
well aware, that, by means of certain legal fictions similar to those of
Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take cognizance of cases lying
beyond the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly say, therefore,
that, in the present instance, M. Perier is merely a Richard Roe, who will not
be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the proceedings, and whose name is
used for the sole purpose of bringing Machiavelli into court.
We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as
that of the man whose character and writings we now propose to consider. The
terms in which he is commonly described would seem to impart that he was the
Tempter, the Evil Principle, the discoverer of ambition and revenge, the
original inventor of perjury, and that, before the publication of his fatal
"Prince," there had never been a hypocrite, a tyrant, or a traitor, a
simulated virtue, or a convenient crime. One writer gravely assures us that
Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent policy from that execrable
volume. Another remarks, that, since it was translated into Turkish, the
sultans have been more addicted than formerly to the custom of strangling
their brothers. Lord Lyttelton charges the poor Florentine with the manifold
treasons of the house of Guise, and with the Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Several authors have hinted that the Gunpowder Plot is to be primarily
attributed to his doctrines, and seem to think that his effigy ought to be
substituted for that of Guy Fawkes, in those processions by which the
ingenuous youth of England annually commemorate the preservation of the Three
Estates. The Church of Rome has pronounced in works accursed things. Nor have
our own countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his merits.
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his
Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with
the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and amazement the
celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name of
Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool,
judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the
most depraved of men. Principles which the most hardened ruffian would
scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of
some palliating sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the
slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all
political science.
It is not strange that ordinary readers should regard the author of such
a book as the most depraved and shameless of human beings. Wise men, however,
have always been inclined to look with great suspicion on the angels and
demons of the multitude; and, in the present instance, several circumstances
have led even superficial observers to question the justice of the vulgar
decision. It is notorious that Machiavelli was, through life, a zealous
republican. In the same year in which he composed his manual of "Kingcraft,"
he suffered imprisonment and torture in the cause of public liberty. It seems
inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the
apostle of tyranny. Several eminent writers have, therefore, endeavored to
detect in this unfortunate performance some concealed meaning, more consistent
with the character and conduct of the author than that which appears at the
first glance.
One hypothesis is, that Machiavelli intended to practice on the young
Lorenzo de` Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland is said to have
employed against our James II, and that he urged his pupil to violent and
perfidious measures, as the surest means of accelerating the moment of
deliverance and revenge. Another supposition, which Lord Bacon seems to
countenance, is that the treatise was merely a piece of grave irony, intended
to warn nations against the arts of ambitious men. It would be easy to show
that neither of these solutions is consistent with many passages in "The
Prince" itself. But the most decisive refutation is that which is furnished by
the other works of Machiavelli. In all the writings which he gave to the
public, and in all those which the research of editors has, in the course of
three centuries, discovered; in his comedies, designed for the entertainment
of the multitude; in his "Comments on Livy," intended for the perusal of the
most enthusiastic patriots of Florence; in his history, inscribed to one of
the most amiable and estimable of the popes; in his public despatches; in his
private memoranda - the same obliquity of moral principle for which "The
Prince" is so severely censured is more or less discernible. We doubt whether
it would be possible to find, in all the many volumes of his compositions, a
single expression indicating that dissimulation and treachery had ever struck
him as discreditable.
After this, it may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted with few
writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment, so pure and warm a zeal
for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and rights of citizens,
as those of Machiavelli. Yet so it is. And even from "The Prince" itself we
could select many passages in support of this remark. To a reader of our age
and country, this inconsistency is, at first, perfectly bewildering. The whole
man seems to be an enigma, a grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities,
selfishness and generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity,
abject villany and romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran
diplomatist would scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most
confidential spy: the next seems to be extracted from a theme composed by an
ardent school-boy on the death of Leonidas. An act of dexterous perfidy and
an act of patriotic self-devotion call forth the same kind and the same
degree of respectful admiration. The moral sensibility of the writer seems at
once to be morbidly obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether
dissimilar are united in him. They are not merely joined, but interwoven. They
are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their combination, like that of the
variegated threads in shot silk, gives to the whole texture a glancing and
ever-changing appearance. The explanation might have been easy if he had
been a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently neither the one
nor the other. His works prove, beyond all contradiction, that his
understanding was strong, his taste pure, and his sense of the ridiculous
exquisitely keen.
This is strange, and yet the strangest is behind. There is no reason
whatever to think that those amongst whom he lived saw anything shocking or
incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs remain of the high estimation in
which both his works and his person were held by the most respectable among
his contemporaries. Clement VII patronized the publication of those very books
which the Council of Trent, in the following generation, pronounced unfit for
the perusal of Christians. Some members of the democratical party censured the
secretary for dedicating "The Prince" to a patron who bore the unpopular name
of Medici. But, to those immoral doctrines which have since called forth such
severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been taken. The cry against
them was first raised beyond the Alps, and seems to have been heard with
amazement in Italy. The earliest assailant, as far as we are aware, was a
countryman of our own, Cardinal Pole. The author of the "Anti-Machiavelli"
was a French Protestant.
It is, therefore, in the state of moral feeling among the Italians of
those times that we must seek for the real explanation of what seems most
mysterious in the life and writings of this remarkable man. As this is a
subject which suggests many interesting considerations, both political and
metaphysical, we shall make no apology for discussing it at some length.
During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfall of
the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater degree than any other
part of western Europe, the traces of ancient civilization. The night which
descended upon her was the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to
reappear before the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the
horizon. It was in the time of the French Merovingians and of the Saxon
Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity seemed to have done their worst. Yet
even then the Neapolitan provinces, recognizing the authority of the Eastern
Empire, preserved something of Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome,
protected by the sacred character of her pontiffs, enjoyed at least
comparative security and repose. Even in those regions where the sanguinary
Lombards had fixed their monarchy, there was incomparably more of wealth, of
information, of physical comfort, and of social order, than could be found in
Gaul, Britain, or Germany.
That which most distinguished Italy from the neighboring countries was
the importance which the population of the towns, at a very early period,
began to acquire. Some cities had been founded in wild and remote situations,
by fugitives who had escaped from the rage of the barbarians. Such were Venice
and Genoa, which preserved their freedom by their obscurity, till they became
able to preserve it by their power. Other cities seem to have retained, under
all the changing dynasties of invaders, under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses
and Alboin, the municipal institutions which had been conferred on them by the
liberal policy of the Great Republic. In provinces which the central
government was too feeble either to protect or to oppress, these institutions
gradually acquired stability and vigor. The citizens, defended by their walls,
and governed by their own magistrates and their own by-laws, enjoyed a
considerable share of republican independence. Thus a strong democratic spirit
was called into action. The Carlovingian sovereigns were too imbecile to
subdue it. The generous policy of Otho encouraged it. It might perhaps have
been suppressed by a close coalition between the Church and the empire. It was
fostered and invigorated by their disputes. In the twelfth century it attained
its full vigor, and, after a long and doubtful conflict, triumphed over the
abilities and courage of the Swabian princes.
The assistance of the ecclesiastical power had greatly contributed to the
success of the Guelfs. That success would, however, have been a doubtful good,
if its only effect had been to substitute a moral for a political servitude,
and to exalt the popes at the expense of the Caesars. Happily the public mind
of Italy had long contained the seeds of free opinions, which were now rapidly
developed by the genial influence of free institutions. The people of that
country had observed the whole machinery of the Church, its saints and its
miracles, its lofty pretensions, and its splendid ceremonial, its worthless
blessings and its harmless curses, too long and too closely to be duped. They
stood behind the scenes on which others were gazing with childish awe and
interest. They witnessed the arrangement of the pulleys, and the manufacture
of the thunders. They saw the natural faces, and heard the natural voices, of
the actors. Distant nations looked on the Pope as the vicegerent of the
Almighty, the oracle of the All-Wise, the umpire from whose decisions, in
the disputes either of theologians or of kings, no Christian ought to appeal.
The Italians were acquainted with all the follies of his youth, and with all
the dishonest arts by which he had attained power. They knew how often he had
employed the keys of the Church to release himself from the most sacred
engagements, and its wealth to pamper his mistresses and nephews. The
doctrines and rites of the established religion they treated with decent
reverence. But, though they still called themselves Catholics, they had ceased
to be papists. Those spiritual arms which carried terror into the palaces and
camps of the proudest sovereigns excited only contempt in the immediate
neighborhood of the Vatican. Alexander, when he commanded our Henry II to
submit to the lash before the tomb of a rebellious subject, was himself an
exile. The Romans, apprehending that he entertained designs against their
liberties, had driven him from their city; and, though he solemnly promised to
confine himself for the future to his spiritual functions, they still refused
to readmit him.
In every other part of Europe, a large and powerful privileged class
trampled on the people, and defied the government. But, in the most
flourishing parts of Italy, the feudal nobles were reduced to comparative
insignificance. In some districts they took shelter under the protection of
the powerful commonwealths which they were unable to oppose, and gradually
sank into the mass of burghers. In other places, they possessed great
influence; but it was an influence widely different from that which was
exercised by the aristocracy of any trans-Alpine kingdom. They were not
petty princes, but eminent citizens. Instead of strengthening their fastnesses
among the mountains, they embellished their palaces in the market-place. The
state of society in the Neapolitan dominions, and in some parts of the
ecclesiastical State, more nearly resembled that which existed in the great
monarchies of Europe. But the governments of Lombardy and Tuscany, through all
their revolutions, preserved a different character. A people, when assembled
in a town, is far more formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over a
wide extent of country. The most arbitrary of the Caesars found it necessary
to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldy capital at the expense of
the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more than once besieged their
sovereign in his own palace, and extorted from him the most humiliating
concessions. The sultans have often been compelled to propitiate the furious
rabble of Constantinople with the head of an unpopular vizier. From the same
cause, there was a certain tinge of democracy in the monarchies and
aristocracies of northern Italy.
Thus liberty, partially indeed and transiently, revisited Italy; and with
liberty came commerce and empire, science and taste, all the comforts and all
the ornaments of life. The Crusades, from which the inhabitants of other
countries gained nothing but relics and wounds, brought to the rising
commonwealths of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas a large increase of wealth,
dominion, and knowledge. The moral and the geographical position of those
commonwealths enabled them to profit alike by the barbarism of the West and by
the civilization of the East. Italian ships covered every sea. Italian
factories rose on every shore. The tables of Italian money-changers were set
in every city. Manufactures flourished. Banks were established. The operations
of the commercial machine were facilitated by many useful and beautiful
inventions. We doubt whether any country of Europe, our own excepted, has at
the present time reached so high a point of wealth and civilization as some
parts of Italy had attained 400 years ago. Historians rarely descend to those
details from which alone the real estate of a community can be collected.
Hence posterity is too often deceived by the vague hyperboles of poets and
rhetoricians, who mistake the splendor of a court for the happiness of a
people. Fortunately, John Villani has given us an example and precise account
of the state of Florence in the early part of the fourteenth century. The
revenue of the republic amounted to 300,000 florins, a sum which, allowing for
the depreciation of the precious metals, was at least equivalent to pounds
600,000 sterling - a larger sum than England and Ireland, two centuries ago,
yielded annually to Elizabeth. The manufacture of wool alone employed 200
factories and 30,000 workmen. The cloth annually produced sold, at an average,
for 1,200,000 florins - a sum fully equal, in exchangeable value, to pounds
2,500,000 of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were annually coined.
Eighty banks conducted the commercial operations, not of Florence only, but of
all Europe. The transactions of these establishments were sometimes of a
magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the Barings and the
Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward III of England upwards of 300,000
marks, at a time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of
the present day, and when the value of silver was more than quadruple of what
it now is. The city, and its environs contained 170,000 inhabitants. In the
various schools about 10,000 children were taught to read, 1,200 studied
arithmetic, 600 received a learned education.
The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was proportioned
to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic successors of Augustus
all the fields of the intellect had been turned into arid wastes, still marked
out by formal boundaries, still retaining the traces of old cultivation, but
yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge of barbarism came. It swept
away all the landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of former tillage. But,
it fertilized while it devastated. When it receded, the wilderness was as the
garden of God, rejoicing on every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring
forth, in spontaneous abundance, everything brilliant or fragrant or
nourishing. A new language, characterized by simple sweetness and simple
energy, had attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished more gorgeous and
vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before a poet appeared who knew how to
employ them. Early in the fourteenth century came forth "The Divine Comedy,"
beyond comparison the greatest work of imagination which had appeared since
the poems of Homer. The following generation produced indeed no second Dante,
but it was eminently distinguished by general intellectual activity. The study
of the Latin writers had never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch
introduced a more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, had communicated
to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the
antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress and a
more frigid muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and
graceful models of Greece.
From this time, the admiration of learning and genius became almost an
idolatry among the people of Italy. Kings and republics, cardinals and doges,
vied with each other in honoring and flattering Petrarch. Embassies from rival
States solicited the honor of his instructions. His coronation agitated the
Court of Naples and the people of Rome as much as the most important political
transaction could have done. To collect books and antiques, to found
professorships, to patronize men of learning, became almost universal fashions
among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of
commercial enterprise. Every place to which the merchant princes of Florence
extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the
monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts.
Architecture, painting, and sculpture were munificently encouraged. Indeed, it
would be difficult to name an Italian of eminence, during the period of which
we speak, who, whatever may have been his general character, did not at least
affect a love of letters and of the arts.
Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together. Both
attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. We cannot
refrain from quoting the splendid passage in which the Tuscan Thucydides
describes the state of Italy at that period. "Ridotta tutta in somma pace e
tranquillita coltivata non meno ne luogti piu montusoi e piu sterili che nelle
pianure e regioni piu fertili, ne sottoposta ad altro imperio che de suoi
medesimi, non solo era abbondantissima d` abitatori e di ricchezze; ma
illustrata sommamente dalla magnificenza di molti principi, dallo splendore di
molte nobilissime e bellissime citta, dalla sedia e maesta della religione,
fioriva d` uomini prestantissimi nell` amministrazione delle cose pubbliche, e
d` ingegni molto nobili in tutte le scienze, ed in qualunque arte preclara ed
industriosa."^2 When we peruse this just and splendid description, we can
scarcely persuade ourselves that we are reading of times in which the annals
of England and France present us only with a frightful spectacle of poverty,
barbarity, and ignorance. From the oppressions of illiterate masters, and the
sufferings of a degraded peasantry, it is delightful to turn to the opulent
and enlightened States of Italy, to the vast and magnificent cities, the
ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled
with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories swarming with artisans,
the Apennines covered with rich cultivation up to their very summits, the Po
wafting the harvests of Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, and carrying back
the silks of Bengal and the furs of Siberia to the palaces of Milan. With
peculiar pleasure every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy,
the glorious Florence, the halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell
where twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young
eye of Michael Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration, the
gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-day dance
of the Etrurian virgins. Alas for the beautiful city! Alas for the wit and the
learning, the genius and the love!
[Footnote 2: "Enjoying the utmost peace and tranquillity, cultivated as well
in the most mountainous and barren places as in the plains and most fertile
regions, and not subject to any other dominion than that of its own people, it
not only overflowed with inhabitants and with riches, but was highly adorned
by the magnificence of many princes, by the splendor of many renowned and
beautiful cities, by the abode and majesty of religion, and abounded in men
who excelled in the administration of public affairs and in minds most eminent
in all the sciences and in every noble and useful art." - Guicciardini,
"History of Italy," Book I., trans. Montague.]
"Le donne, e i cavalieri, gli affanni e gli agi,
Che ne`nvogliava amore e cortesia
La dove i cuor son fatti si malvagi."^3
[Footnote 3: "The ladies and the knights, the toils and sports to which love
and courtesy stirred our desire there where all hearts have grown so evil." -
Dante, "Purgatorio," Canto 14, ll. 109-111.]
A time was at hand when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse were to be
poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant countries - a time of
slaughter, famine, beggary, infamy, slavery, despair.
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