Qui giace l"Aretin poeta tosco, Che disse mal d"ognun fuorche di Cristo, Scusandosi col dir: non lo conosco.
[Footnote 543: These lines have been, without authority, ascribed to Giovio; they may thus be rendered:
Here lieth Aretine, in prose and poem Who spake such ill of all the world but Christ, Pleading for this neglect, I do not know him.
Giovio, we may remember, styled Aretino _divino_, _divinissimo_, _unichissimo_, _precellentissimo_, in his letters.]
His features, though formed upon a large and not ign.o.ble type, bore in later life a mixed expression of the wolf and the fox; nor was it without oblique satire that the engraver of his portrait, Giuseppe Patrini, surrounded the medallion with a wolf"s hide, the grinning snarl and slanting eyes of the brute mimicking the man"s physiognomy.
It was a handsome face, no doubt, in youth, when, richly attired in the satin mantle cut for him by a bishop, and mounted on his white charger, he scoured the streets of Reggio at Giovanni de" Medici"s side, curling his blue-black beard, and fixing his bold bright eyes upon the venal beauties they courted in company. But the thick lips and open sensual mouth, the distended nostrils, and the wicked puckers of the wrinkles round his eyes and nose, show that the beast of prey and appet.i.te had been encouraged through a life of self-indulgence, until the likeness of humanity yielded to victorious animalism. The same face, at once handsome and b.e.s.t.i.a.l, never to be forgotten after a first acquaintance, leans out, in the company of Sansovino and t.i.tian, from the bronze door of the Sacristy in S. Mark"s Church.[544] The high relief is full of life and movement, one of Sansovino"s masterpieces. And yet it strikes one here with even greater strangeness than the myths of Ganymede and Leda on the portals of S.
Peter"s at Rome.
[Footnote 544: Among the many flatteries addressed to Aretino none is more laughable than a letter (_Lettere all"Aretino_, vol. iii. p. 175) which praises his physical beauty in most extravagant terms: "Most divine Lord Peter; if, among the many and so lovely creatures that swinish Nature sends into this worst of worlds, you alone are of such beauty and incomparable grace that you combine all qualities the human frame can boast of: for the which cause there is no need to wonder that t.i.tian, when he seeks to paint a face that has in it true beauty, uses his skilled brush in only drawing you," etc. etc. The period is too long to finish.]
Aretino is, in truth, not the least of the anomalies which meet us everywhere in the Italian Renaissance. Was he worse, was he not even in some respects better than his age? How much of the repulsion he inspires can be ascribed to altered taste and feeling? To what extent was the legend of the man, so far as this is separable from the testimony of his writings, made black by posthumous malevolence and envy? These are the questions which rise in our mind when we reflect upon the incidents of his extraordinary career, and calmly estimate his credit with contemporaries. The contradictions of the epoch were concentrated in his character. He was a professed Christian of the type formed by Rome before the Counter-Reformation. He helped the needy, tended the sick, dowered orphans, and kept open house for beggars. He was the devoted friend of men like t.i.tian, a sincere lover of natural and artistic beauty, an acute and enthusiastic critic. At the same time he did his best to corrupt youth by painting vice in piquant colors. He led a life of open and voluptuous debauchery. He was a liar, a bully, a braggart, venomous in the pursuit of private animosities, and the remorseless foe of weaker men who met with his displeasure. From the conditions of society which produced Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, Pier Luigi Farnese and Gianpaolo Baglioni, it was no wonder that a writer resolved on turning those conditions to account, should have arisen. The credit of originality, independence, self-reliant character--of what Machiavelli called _virtu_--does certainly belong to him. It is true that he extracted the means of a luxurious existence from patrons upon whom he fawned. Yet he was superior to the common herd of courtiers, in so far as he attached himself to no master, and all his adulation masked a battery of menaces. The social diseases which emasculated men of weaker fiber, he turned to the account of his rapacious appet.i.tes. His force consisted in the clear notion he had formed of his own aim in life, and the sagacity with which he used the most efficient means for attaining it.
The future, whether of reputation or of literary fame, had no influence over his imagination. He resolved to enjoy the present, and he succeeded beyond expectation. Corruption is itself a kind of superiority, when it is consummate, cynical, self-conscious. It carries with it its own clairvoyance, its own philosophy of life, its own good sense. More than this, it imposes on opinion and fascinates society. Aretino did not suffer from a divided will. He never halted between two courses, but realized the ideal of the _perfettamente tristo_. He lived up to Guicciardini"s conception of the final motive, which may be described as the cult of self. Sneering at all men less complete in purpose than himself, he disengaged his conduct from contemporary rules of fashion; dictated laws to his betters in birth, position, breeding, learning, morals, taste; and vindicated his virility by unimpeded indulgence of his personal proclivities. He was the last, the most perfect, if also the most vitiated product of Renaissance manners. In the second half of the sixteenth century, when hypocrisy descended like a cloud upon the ineradicable faults of Italy, there was no longer any possibility for the formation of a hero after Aretino"s type.
Thus at the close of any estimate of Aretino, we are forced to do justice to the man"s vigor. It is not for nothing that even a debased society bows to a dictatorship so autocratic; nor can eminence be secured, even among the products of a decadent civilization, by undiluted defects. Aretino owed his influence to genuine qualities--to the independence which underlay his arrogance, to the acute common sense which almost justified his vanity, to the outspokenness which made him satirize the vices that he shared and ill.u.s.trated.[545] We have abundant and incontrovertible testimony to the fact that his _Dialoghi_, when they were first published, pa.s.sed for powerful and drastic antidotes to social poisons[546]; and it is clear that even his religious works were accepted by the pious world as edifying. The majority of his contemporaries seem to have beheld in him the fearless denouncer of ecclesiastical and civil tyrants, the humble man"s friend, and the relentless detective of vice. The indescribable nastiness of the _Dialoghi_, the false feeling of the _Vita di S. Catherina_, which makes us turn with loathing from their pages, did not offend the taste of his century. While, therefore, he comprehended and expressed his age in its ruffianism and dissoluteness, he stood outside it and above it, dealing haughtily and like a potentate with evils which subdued less hardened spirits, and with personages before whom his equals groveled. We must not suffer our hatred of his mendacity, uncleanliness, brutality, and arrogance to blind us to the elements of strength and freedom which can be discerned in him.[547]
[Footnote 545: I should not be surprised to see an attempt soon made to whitewash Aretino. Balzac, in his _Catherine de Medicis_, has already indicated the line to be followed: "L"Aretin, l"ami de t.i.tien et le Voltaire de son siecle, a, de nos jours, un renom en complete opposition avec ses oeuvres, avec son caractere, et que lui vaut une debauche d"esprit en harmonie avec les ecrits de ce siecle, ou le drolatique etait en honneur, ou les reines et les cardinaux ecrivaient des contes, dits aujourd"hui licentieux."]
[Footnote 546: I will only refer to a very curious epistle (_Lettere a P. Aretino_, vol. iii. p. 193), which appears to me genuine, in which Aretino is indicated as the poor man"s friend against princely tyrants; and another from Daniello Barbaro (_ibid._ p. 217), in which the Dialogue on Courts is praised as a handbook for the warning and instruction of would-be courtiers. The p.o.r.nographic Dialogues made upon society the same impression as Zola"s _Nana_ is now making, although it is clear to us that they were written with a licentious, and not an even ostensibly scientific, intention.]
[Footnote 547: While these sheets are pa.s.sing through the press, I see announced a forthcoming work by Antonio Virgili, _Frances...o...b..rni con nuovi doc.u.menti_. We may expect from this book more light upon Aretino"s relation to the Tuscan poet.]
CHAPTER XVI.
HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY.
Frivolity of Renaissance Literature--The Contrast presented by Machiavelli--His Sober Style--Positive Spirit--The Connection of his Works--Two Men in Machiavelli--His Political Philosophy--The _Patria_--Place of Religion and Ethics in his System--Practical Object of his Writings--Machiavellism--His Conception of Nationality--His Relation to the Renaissance--Contrast between Machiavelli and Guicciardini--Guicciardini"s Doctrine of Self-interest--The Code of Italian Corruption--The Connection between these Historians and the Philosophers--General Character of Italian Philosophy--The Middle Ages in Dissolution--Transition to Modern Thought and Science--Humanism counterposed to Scholasticism--Petrarch--Pico--Dialogues on Ethics--Importance of Greek and Latin Studies--Cla.s.sical subst.i.tuted for Ecclesiastical Authority--Platonism at Florence--Ficino--Translations--New Interest in the Problem of Life--Valla"s Hedonism--The Dialogue _De Voluptate_--Aristotle at Padua and Bologna--Arabian and Greek Commentators--Life of Pietro Pomponazzi--His Book on Immortality--His Controversies--Pomponazzi"s Standpoint--Unlimited Belief in Aristotle--Retrospect over the Aristotelian Doctrine of G.o.d, the World, the Human Soul--Three Problems in the Aristotelian System--Universals--The First Period of Scholastic Speculation--Individuality--The Second Period of Scholasticism--Thomas Aquinas--The Nature of the Soul--New Impulse given to Speculation by the Renaissance--Averroism--The Lateran Council--Is the Soul Immortal?--Pomponazzi reconstructs Aristotle"s Doctrine by help of Alexander Aphrodisius--The Soul is Material and Mortal--Man"s Place in Nature--Virtue is the End of Man--Pomponazzi on Miracles and Spirits--His Distinction between the Philosopher and the Christian--The Book on Fate--Pomponazzi the Precursor--Coa.r.s.e Materialism--The School of Cosenza--Aristotle"s Authority Rejected--Telesio--Campanella--Bruno--The Church stifles Philosophy in Italy--Italian Positivism.
The literature which has occupied us during the last nine chapters, is a literature of form and entertainment. Whether treating chivalrous romance, or the Arcadian ideal, or the conditions of contemporary life, these poets, playwrights and novelists had but one serious object--the perfection of their art, the richness and variety of their pictures. In the conscious pursuit of beautiful form, Poliziano and Ariosto, Bembo and Berni, Castiglione and Firenzuola, Il Lasca and Molza, were alike earnest. For the rest, they sought to occupy their own leisure, and to give polite society the pastime of refined amus.e.m.e.nt. The content of this miscellaneous literature was of far less moment to the authors and their audience than its mode of presentation. Even when they undertook some theme involving the realities of life, they dwelt by preference upon externals. In the _Cortegiano_ and _Galateo_, for example, conduct is studied from an aesthetical far more than from a moral point of view. The questions which stirred and divided literary coteries, were questions of scholarship, style, language. Matter is everywhere subordinated to expression; the writer"s interest in actuality is slight; the power or the inclination to think is inferior to the faculty for harmonious construction. These characteristics of literature in general, render the exceptions noticeable, and force me, at some risk of repet.i.tion, to devote a chapter to those men in whom the speculative vigor of the race was concentrated. These were the historians and a small band of metaphysicians, who may be fitly represented by a single philosopher, Pietro Pomponazzi. Of the Florentine historiographers, from Villani to Guicciardini, I have already treated at some length in a previous portion of this work.[548] I shall therefore confine myself to resuming those points in which Machiavelli and Guicciardini uttered the reflections of their age on statecraft and the laws that govern political life.
[Footnote 548: _Age of the Despots_, chaps. v. and vi.]
When we compare Machiavelli with his contemporaries, we are struck by his want of sympathy with the prevalent artistic enthusiasms. Far from being preoccupied with problems of diction, he wrote with the sole object of making what he had to say plain. The result is that, without thinking about expression, Machiavelli created Italian prose anew, and was the first to form a monumental modern style. Language became, beneath his treatment, a transparent and colorless medium for presenting thoughts to the reader"s mind; and his thoughts were always removed as little as possible from the facts which suggested them. He says himself that he preferred in all cases the essential reality of a fact to its modification by fancy or by theory.[549] His style is, therefore, the reverse of that which the purists cultivated. They uttered generalities in ornamented and sonorous phrases. Machiavelli scorned ornament, and ignored the cadence of the period. His boldest abstractions are presented with the hard outline and relief of concrete things. Each sentence is a crystal, formed of few but precise words by a spontaneous process in his mind. It takes shape from the thought; not from any preconceived type of rhythm, to which the thought must be accommodated. It is perfect or imperfect according as the thinking process has been completely or incompletely victorious over the difficulties of language. It is figurative only when the fact to be enforced derives new energy from the imagination. Beauty is never sought, but comes unbidden, as upon the limbs and muscles of an athlete, whose aim has been to gain agility and strength. These qualities render Machiavelli"s prose a model worthy of imitation by all who study scientific accuracy.
[Footnote 549: "Mi e parso piu conveniente andare dietro alla verita effettuale della cosa che all"immagin.a.z.ione di essa" (_Principe_, cap.
xv.).]
The style is the man; and Machiavelli"s style was the mirror of his mind and character. While the literary world echoed to the cry of Art for Art, he followed Science for the sake of Science. Occupied with practical problems, smiling at the supra-mundane aspirations of the middle ages, scorning the aesthetical ideals of the Renaissance, he made the political action of man, _l"homme politique_, the object of exclusive study. His resolute elimination of what he considered irrelevant or distracting circ.u.mstances from this chosen field of research, justifies our placing him among the founders or precursors of the modern scientific method. We may judge his premises insufficient, his conclusions false; but we cannot mistake the positive quality of his mind in the midst of a rhetorical and artistic generation.
There is a strict link of connection between Machiavelli"s works.
These may be divided into four cla.s.ses--official, historical, speculative and literary. To the first belongs his correspondence with the Florentine Government; to the second, his Florentine History and several minor studies, the _Vita di Castruccio_, the _Ritratti_, and the _Metodo tenuto dal Duca Valentino_; to the third, his _Discorsi_, _Principe_, _Arte della Guerra_ and _Discorso sopra la Riforma di Firenze_; to the fourth, his comedies, poems, novel of _Belf.a.gor_, and _Descrizione della Peste_. The familiar letters should be used as a key to the more intimate understanding of his character. They ill.u.s.trate some points in his political philosophy, explain his personal motives, and throw much light upon his purely literary compositions. We learn from them to know him as a friend, the father of a family, the member of a little social circle, and finally as the ever-restless aspirant after public employment. Valuable as these letters are for the student of Machiavelli"s writings, his private reputation would have gained by their destruction. They show that the man was inferior to the thinker. In spite of his logical consistency of intellect, we become convinced, while reading them, that there were two persons in Machiavelli. The one was a faithful servant of the State, a student of books and human nature, the inaugurator of political philosophy for modern Europe. The other was a boon companion, stooping to low pleasures, and soiling his correspondence with gossip which breathes the tainted atmosphere of Florentine vice.
These letters force us to reject the theory that he wrote his comedies with any profound ethical purpose, or that he personally abhorred the moral corruption of which he pointed out the weakening results for Italy. The famous epistle from San Casciano paints the man in his two aspects--at one moment in a leathern jerkin, playing games of hazard with the butcher, or scouring the streets of Florence with a Giuliano Brancaccio; at another, attired in senatorial robes, conversing with princes, approaching the writers of antiquity on equal terms, and penning works which place him on a level with Ariosto and Galileo. The second of these Machiavellis claims our exclusive attention at the present moment. Yet it is needful to remember that the former existed, and was no less real. Only by keeping this in mind can we avoid the errors of those panegyrists who credit the _Mandragola_ with a didactic purpose, and refuse to recognize the moral bluntness betrayed in Machiavelli"s theorization of human conduct. The man who thought and felt in private what his familiar letters disclose, was no right censor of the principles that rule society. We cannot trust his moral tact or taste.
Machiavelli was not a metaphysician. He started with the conception of the State as understood in Italy. His familiarity with the Latin cla.s.sics, and his acquaintance with the newly-formed monarchies of Europe, caused him, indeed, to modify the current notion. But he did not inquire into the final cause of political communities, or present to his own mind a clear definition of what was meant by the phrase _patria_. We are aware of a certain hesitancy between the ideas of the Commune and the race, the State and the Government, which might have been removed by a more careful preliminary a.n.a.lysis. Between the Roman Republic, on the one hand, and the modern nation, on the other, we always find an Italian city. From this point of view, it is to be regretted that he did not appropriate Plato"s _Republic_ or Aristotle"s _Politics_.[550] He might by such a course of study have avoided the severance of politics from ethics, which renders his philosophy unnatural. We must, however, remember that he did not propose to plan a scientific system. His works have a practical aim in view. They are directed toward the grand end of Italy"s restoration from weakness and degeneracy to a place among the powerful peoples of the world. This purpose modifies them in the most minute particulars.
It is ever present to Machiavelli"s mind. It makes his philosophy a.s.sume the form of a critique. It explains the apparent discord between the _Discorsi_ and the _Principe_. It enables us to comprehend the nature of a patriotism which subordinates the interests of the individual to the body politic, even though the State were in the hands of an unscrupulous autocrat. The salvation of Italy, rather than any metaphysical principle, is the animating motive of Machiavelli"s political writings. Yet we may note that if he had laid a more solid philosophical basis, if he had striven more vigorously to work out his own conception of the _patria_, and to understand the laws of national health, instead of trusting to such occasional remedies as the almost desperate state of Italy afforded, he would have deserved better of his country and more adequately fulfilled his own end.
[Footnote 550: The section on the types of commonwealths in the _Discorsi_ (cap. ii.) comes straight from Polybius. But I am not aware of any signs in Machiavelli of a direct study of the elder Greek philosophical writings.]
Though Machiavelli had not worked out the conception of a nation as an organic whole, he was penetrated with the thought, familiar to his age, that all human inst.i.tutions, like men, have a youth, a manhood, and a period of decline. Looking round him, he perceived that Italy, of all the European nations, had advanced farthest on the path of dissolution. He calls the Italians the reproach and corruption of the world--_la corruttela, il vituperio del mondo_. When he inquires into the causes of this ruin, he is led to a.s.sign (i) the moral debas.e.m.e.nt of his country to the Roman Church; (ii) her sloth and inefficiency in warfare to the despots and the mercenaries; (iii) her inability to cope with greater nations to the want of one controlling power in the peninsula. A nation, he argues, cannot be a nation while divided into independent and antagonistic States. It needs to be united under a monarch like France, reduced beneath the sway of a presiding commonwealth like ancient Rome, or connected in a federation like the Swiss. This doctrine of the nation, or, to use his own phrase, of the _patria_, as distinguished from the Commune and the Empire, was highly original in Italy at the time when Machiavelli gave it utterance. It contained the first logically reasoned aspiration after that independence in unity, which the Italians were destined to realize between the years 1858 and 1871. He may be said to have formed it by meditating on the Roman historians, and by comparing Italy with the nascent modern nations. The notion of ethnology did not enter into it so much as the notion of political and social cohesion. Yet nationality was not excluded; for he conceived of no power, whether Empire or Church, above the people who had strength to define themselves against their neighbors. To secure for the population of the Italian peninsula that unity which he rightly considered essential to the _patria_, and the want of which const.i.tuted their main inferiority, was the object of all his speculations.
The word _patria_ sounds the keynote of his political Army, and a patriot is synonymous for him with a completely virtuous man. All energies, public and private, are only valuable in so far as they build up the fabric of the commonwealth. Religion is good because it sustains the moral fiber of the people. It is a powerful instrument in the hands of a wise governor; and the best religion is that which develops hardy and law-loving qualities. He criticises Christianity for exalting contemplative virtues above the energies of practical life, and for encouraging a spirit of humility. He sternly condemns the Church because she has been unfaithful even to the tame ideal of her saints, and has set an example of licentious living. Religion is needed as the basis of morality; and morality itself must be encouraged as the safeguard of that discipline which const.i.tutes a nation"s vigor. A moralized race is stronger than a corrupt one, because it has a higher respect for law and social order, because it accepts public burdens more cheerfully, because it is more obedient to military ordinances. Thus both religion and morality are means to the grand end of human existence, which is strenuous life in a united nation. I need hardly point out how this conception runs counter to the transcendentalism of the Middle Ages.
Machiavelli admires the Germans for their discipline and sobriety, which he ascribes to the soundness of their religious instincts.
France and Spain, he says, have been contaminated by the same corrupting influence as Italy; but they owe their present superiority to the fact of their monarchical allegiance. This opens a second indictment against the Church. Not only has the Church demoralized the people; but it is chiefly due to the ambition of the Popes that Italy has never pa.s.sed beyond the stage of conflict and disunion.
An important element in this conception of the _patria_ is that it should be militant. Races that have ceased from war, are on the road to ruin; and only those are powerful which train the native population to arms. The feebleness of Italy can be traced to the mercenary system, introduced by despots adopted by commercial republics, and favored by ecclesiastics. If the Italians desire to recover freedom, they must form a national militia; and this can best be done by adapting the principles of the Roman army to modern requirements. The _Art of War_ is a development of this theme. At its close, Machiavelli promises the scepter of Italy, together with the glory of creating Italian nationality, to any State clear-sighted and self-denying enough to arm its citizens and take the lead in the peninsula. That State, he says, shall play the part of Macedon. Reading the peroration of the _Art of War_ by the light of recent history, its paragraphs sound like a prophecy. What Machiavelli there promised, has been achieved, much in the way he indicated, by Piedmont, the Macedon of United Italy.
When Machiavelli discusses the forms of const.i.tutions, he is clearly thinking of cities rather than of nations as we understand them. He has no conception of representative government, but bases all his observations on the principle of burghership. There is no sound intermediate, he says, between a commonwealth and a princ.i.p.ality. In the former, the burghers have equal rights. In the latter there will be a hierarchy of cla.s.ses. Though his sympathies are with the former (since he holds that the equality of the citizens is the best safeguard for the liberties and law abiding virtues of the State), he is yet by no means unfavorable to despotism. The decadence of Italy, indeed, had gone so far that her best chance of restoration depended on a prince. Therefore, while he suggests measures for converting despotic States into republics by crushing the aristocracy, and for creating princ.i.p.alities out of free commonwealths by inst.i.tuting an order of n.o.bles, he regards the latter as the easier task of the two.
Upon such topics we must always bear in mind that what he says is partly speculative, and partly meant to meet the actual conditions of Italian politics. The point of view is never simply philosophical nor yet simply practical. So long as the great end could be achieved, and a strong military power could rise in Italy, he is indifferent to the means employed. The peroration of the _Art of War_ is an appeal to either prince or republic. The peroration of the _Riforma di Firenze_ is an appeal to a patriotic Nomothetes. He there says to Clement: You have one of those singular opportunities offered to you, which confer undying glory on a mortal; you may make Florence free, and, by wise regulations, render her the bulwark of renascent Italy. The peroration of the _Principe_ is an appeal to an ambitious autocrat. Follow the suggestions of ancient and contemporary history, which all point to the formation of a native army. Comprehend the magnitude of the task, and use the right means for executing it; and you will earn the fame of restoring your country to her place among the nations.
The case of Italy is almost desperate. Yet there is still hope. A prudent lawgiver may infuse life into the decaying commonwealth of Florence. A spirited despot may succeed in bringing the whole peninsula by force of arms beneath his sway. Machiavelli will not scrutinize the nature of the remedy too closely. He is ready to sacrifice his republican sympathies, and to welcome the saviour who comes even in the guise of Cesare Borgia. When the salvation of the _patria_ is at stake, none but precisians can hesitate about the choice of instruments.
This indifference to means, provided the end be secured, is characteristic of the man. Machiavelli"s Machiavellism consists in regarding politics as a game of skill, where all ways are justified, and fixity of purpose wins. He does not believe in Fortune, though he admits the favorable circ.u.mstances which smoothed the way for men like Cesare. With Juvenal, he says: _Nos te, nos facimus, Fortuna, deam_.
Again, he does not believe in Providence. Though a prophet speak with the voice of G.o.d, he will not succeed unless, like Moses, he be provided with a sword to ratify his revelation. History is a logical sequence of events, the sole intelligible nexus between its several links being the human will. Virtue is decision of character, accompanied by intellectual sagacity; it is the strong man"s subordination of his pa.s.sions, prejudices, predilections, energies, to the chosen aim. We all admit that it is better to be good than bad.
Yet morality has little to do with political success. What lies in the way of really great achievement, is the mediocrity of human nature.
Men will not be completely bad or perfectly good. They spoil their best endeavors by vacillation and incompetence to guide their action with regard to the sole end in view.
Enough has been said in different portions of this book about the morality of Machiavelli"s political essays. Yet this much may be here repeated. Those who wish to understand it, must not forget the Medieval background of the despots--Ezzelini, Visconti, Scaligeri, Estensi, Carreresi--which lay behind Machiavelli. The sinfulness, treason, masterful personality, Thyestean tragedies, enormous vices and intolerable mischief of the Renaissance--all this was but a pale reflex of the middle ages. In those earlier tyrants, the Centaur progenitors of feebler broods, through generations in which men gradually discriminated the twy-formed nature of their ancestry, the l.u.s.t and luxury of sin had been at their last apogee. _In istis peccandi voluptas erat summa._ What followed in Machiavelli"s age, was reflection succeeding to action--evil philosophized in place of evil energetic.
Though Machiavelli perceived that the decadence of Italy was due to bad education, corrupt customs, and a habit of irreligion, he did not insist on the necessity of reformation. He was satisfied with invoking a Dictator, and he counseled this Dictator to meet the badness of his age with fraud and violence. Thus he based his hope of national regeneration upon those very vices which he indicated as the cause of national degeneracy. Whether we ascribe this error to the spirit of the times in which he lived, or to something defective in his own character, it is clear he had not grasped the fundamental principle of righteousness, as that which can alone be safely trusted by a people or its princes. Perhaps he thought that, for practical purposes, the method of radical reformation was too tardy. Perhaps he despaired of seeing it attempted. Of all Italian inst.i.tutions, the Church, in his opinion, was the most corrupted. Yet the Church held religious monopoly, and controlled education. And the Church had severed morality from religion, religion from the State; making both the private concern of individuals between their conscience and their G.o.d.
Just as Machiavelli proved himself incapable of transcending the corruption of his age, though he denounced it; so, while he grasped the notion of a _patria_ superior to the commune, he was not able to disengage his mind from the a.s.sociations of Italian diplomacy. He perceived that the _debris_ of medieval society in Italy--the Papacy, the n.o.bles, the _condottieri_--afforded no foundation for the State he dreamed of building. He relied on the ma.s.ses of the people as the only sound const.i.tuent of his ideal _patria_. He foresaw a united nation, to which the individual should devote himself, and which should absorb the dispersed forces of the race. And yet he had not conceived of the nation as a living whole, obeying its own laws of evolution and expansion. He regarded the State as a mechanical or artificial product, to be molded by the will of a firm ruler. In his theory there is always a Nomothetes, a Dictator, the intervenient skill of a constructor, whom he imagines capable of altering the conditions of political existence by a _coup d"etat_ or by a readjustment of conflicting rights and interests. Even while praising the French monarchy for its stability, in words that show a just appreciation of const.i.tutional government, he hypothesizes a lawgiver in the past.
_Chi ordin quello stato, volle che quelli re_--he who organized that State, willed that those kings, etc. The _ordin_ and _volle_ are both characteristic of his habitual point of view. Probably this faith in manipulation arose from his lifelong habit of regarding small political communities, where change was easily effected. In his works we do not gain any broad prospect from the vantage-ground of comprehensive principles, but a minutely a.n.a.lytical discussion of statecraft, based in the last resort upon the observation of decadent Italian cities. The question always presents itself: how, given certain circ.u.mstances, ought a republic or a prince to use them to the best advantage? The deeper problem, how a nation stirred by some impulse, which combines all cla.s.ses in a common heroism or a common animosity, must act, hardly occurs to his mind. England, with forces intellectual, emotional and practical at fullest strain, in combat with the Spanish tyranny, adopting a course of conduct which reveals the nation to itself by the act of its instinctive will--such a phase of the larger, more magnetic life of peoples, which Milton compared to the new youth of the eagle, had not been observed by Machiavelli. The German Reformation, the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, might have taught him to understand that conception of the modern nation which he had divined, but which the conditions of his experience prevented his appropriating. Had he fully grasped it, we can scarcely believe that the _Principe_ would have been written.
The good faith of that essay depends upon a misconception.
In like manner Machiavelli discerned the weaknesses of the Renaissance without escaping from its enthusiasms. He despised the aesthetical ideal of his age. He was willing to sacrifice form, beauty, rhythm, the arts of culture and learned leisure, to stern matters of fact and stringent discipline. Yet he believed as firmly as any humanist, that the regeneration of his country must proceed from a revival of the past. It is the loss of antique virtues that has enervated our character, he cries. It is the neglect of historical lessons that renders our policy so suicidal. We need to recover the Roman military system, the Roman craft of conquest, the Roman pride and poverty, the Roman subordination of the individual to the State. What we want is a dictator or a lawgiver after the Roman fashion--a Romulus, a Numa, a Camillus, a Coriola.n.u.s. The _patria_, as he imagines it, is less the modern nation than the Roman Commonwealth before the epoch of the Empire. This unquestioning belief in the efficacy of cla.s.sical revival finds vent, at the close of the _Arte della Guerra_, in a sentence highly characteristic of the Renaissance. "This province, Italy," he says, "seems made to give new birth to things dead, as we have seen in poetry, in painting, and in sculpture." Hence, he argues, it may be her vocation to bring back the military system and supremacy of ancient Rome.
Thus, to resume what has been said, Machiavelli ascribed the weakness of the Italians to their loss of morality; but he was not logical enough to insist that their regeneration must begin with a religious revolution. He foresaw the modern nation; but he attempted to construct it on the outlines of antiquity. Believing that States might be formed or reformed by ingenious manipulation of machinery, he acquired no true notion of const.i.tutional development or national evolution. His neglect to base his speculations on a thorough-going definition of the State and its relation to man as a social being, caused him to a.s.sume a severance between ethics and politics, which no sound philosophy of human life will warrant.
On what, then, if these criticisms are just, is founded his claim to rank among the inaugurators of historical and political science? The answer has been already given. It was not so much what he taught, as the spirit in which he approached the problems of his inquiry, which was scientific in the modern sense. Practical, sincere and positive, Machiavelli never raises points deficient in actuality. He does not invite us to sympathize with the emotions of a visionary, or to follow the vagaries of a dreamer. All that he presents, is hard, tangible fact, wrought into precise uncompromising argument, expressed in unmistakably plain language. Not only do his works cast floods of light upon Italian history; but they suggest questions of vital importance, which can still be discussed upon the ground selected by their author. They are, moreover, so penetrated with the pa.s.sion of a patriot, however mistaken in his plan of national reconst.i.tution, that our first sense of repulsion yields to a warmer feeling of admiration for the man who, from the depths of despair, could thus hope on against hope for his country.
Studying Guicciardini, we remain within the same sphere of conceptions, limited by the conditions of Italian politics in the beginning of the sixteenth century. There is no less stringency of minute a.n.a.lysis, an even sharper insight into motives, an equal purity and precision of language.[551] But the moral atmosphere is different.
The corruption which Machiavelli perceived and criticised, is now accepted. In the place of desperate remedies suggested by the dread of certain ruin, Guicciardini has nothing to offer but indifference and self-adjustment to the exigencies of the moment. Machiavelli was a visionary and an idealist in spite of his positive bias. Guicciardini is a practical diplomatist, bent on saving his own State and fortune from the wreck which he contemplated. What gives grandeur to Machiavelli"s speculation is the conception of the _patria_, superior to the individual, demanding unlimited self-sacrifice, and repaying the devotion of the citizens by strength in union. This idea has disappeared in Guicciardini"s writings. In its stead he offers us self-interested egotism. Where Machiavelli wrote _patria_, he subst.i.tuted _il particolare_. It follows from this cold acquiescence in a base theory of public conduct, adapted to a recognized state of social anarchy, that Guicciardini"s philosophy is far more immoral than Machiavelli"s. The _Ricordi_, in which, under the form of aphorisms, he condensed the results of his experience and observation, have been well described as the "code of Italian corruption."
Resistance has to be abandoned. Remedies are hopeless. Let us sit down and calmly criticise the process of decay. A wise man will seek to turn the worst circ.u.mstances to his own profit; and what remains for political sagacity is the acc.u.mulation of wealth, honors, offices of power on the ambitious individual.
[Footnote 551: I refer to the _Opere Inedite_. In the _Isteria d"Italia_, Guicciardini"s style is inferior to Machiavelli"s.]
Machiavelli and Guicciardini had this in common, that their mental att.i.tude was a.n.a.lytical, positive, critically scientific. It negatived the _a priori_ idealism of medieval political philosophy, and introduced a just conception of the method of inquiry. This quality connects them on the one hand with the practical politicians of their age, and on the other with its representative thinkers in the field of metaphysics.
It is no part of my plan to attempt a general history of Italian philosophy during the Renaissance period, or even to indicate its leading moments. On the scale of my present work, any such endeavor would of necessity be incomplete; for the material to be dealt with is obscure, and the threads of thought to be interwoven are scattered, requiring no little patience and no slight expenditure of exposition on the part of one who seeks to place them in their proper relations.
Of philosophy, in the strict sense of the term, the Italian Renaissance had not much to offer. We do not revert to that epoch, expecting to meet with systematic theories of the universe, plausible a.n.a.lyses of the laws of thought, or ingenious speculations upon the nature of being. It is well known that the thinkers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries can scarcely claim to have done more than lead the revolt of reason against scholastic tyranny and obsolete authorities, appealing with often misdirected enthusiasm to original sources, and suggesting theories and methods which, in the hands of abler speculators, at a more fortunate epoch, generated the philosophies of modern Europe. Yet even so the movement of thought in Italy was of no slight moment, and the work accomplished deserves to be recorded with more honor than it has. .h.i.therto received from the historians of philosophy.