Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/169

Rh MACHIAVELLI 151 Pfincipe and the Discorsi, since Machiavelli held it for a funda mental axiom that states are powerless unless completely armed in permanence. The peroration contains a noble appeal to the Italian liberator of his dreams, and a parallel from Macedonian history, which, read by the light of this century, sounds like a prophecy of Piedmont. The Vita di Castruccio was composed at Lucca, whither Machiavelli had been sent on a mission. This so-called biography of the medieval adventurer who raised himself by personal ability and military skill to the tyranny of several Tuscan cities must be regarded in the light of an historical romance. Dealing freely with the outline of Castruccio s career, as he had previously dealt with Cesare Borgia, he sketched his own ideal of the successful prince. Cesare Borgia had entered into the Principe as a representative figure rather than an actual personage ; so now conversely the theories of the Principe assumed the outward form and semblance of Castruccio. In each^case history is blent with speculation in nearly the same proportions. But Castruccio, being farther from the writer s own experience, bears weaker traits of personality. In the same year, 1520, Machiavelli, at the instance of the cardinal Oiulio de Medici, received commission from the officers of the Studio Pnbblico to write a history of Florence. They agreed to pay him an annual allowance of 100 florins while engaged upon the work. The next six years were partly employed in its composition, and he left a portion of it finished, with a dedication to Clement VII., when he died in 1527. In the Istoric Florentine Machiavelli quitted the field of political speculation for that of history. But, having already written the Discorsi and the Principe, he carried with him to this new task of historiography the habit of mind proper to political philosophy. In his hands the history of Florence became a text on which at fitting seasons to deliver lessons in the science he ini tiated. _ This gives the work its special character. It is not so much a chronicle of Florentine affairs, from the commencement of modern history to the death of Lorenzo de Medici in 1492, as a critique of that chronicle from the point of view adopted by Machiavelli in his former writings. Having condensed his doctrines in the Principe and the Discorsi, he applies their abstract principles to the example of the Florentine republic. His favourite topics reappear the dismemberment of Italy by the papacy (bk i. 9, 23) ; the ruin of her national militia (bk. i. 34, 38 ; bk. v. 1 ; bk. vi. 1) ; the enervation of her commonwealths by commerce (bk. i. 39 bk. ii. 42) ; her corrupt morality (bk. iii. 1) ; the reference of Italian circumstances to IJoman precedents (bk. iii. 1); the theory of the intervenient &quot;nomothetes&quot; in states (bk. iv. 1); and the theory of human vicissitudes (bk. v. 1). This gives to his history a deductive and illustrative quality which men of less imaginative mind, like Guicciardini, or the exact students of our own days may criticize. But the History of Florence is not a mere political pamphlet. It is the first example in Italian literature of a national biography, the first attempt in any literature to trace the vicissitudes of a people s life in their logical sequence, deducing each successive phase from passions or necessities inherent in pre ceding circumstances, reasoning upon them from general principles, and inferring corollaries for the conduct of the future. In his procemium Machiavelli taxes Poggio and Lionardo Bruni with having neglected civic affairs for the record of wars and alliances. It is to the analysis of the republic s inner life that he directs attention, showing how her acts were the phenomena of this organic force. At the same time he does not omit the narrative of external events, but places the portrait of Florence in the centre of an animated group of pictures drawn from Italian history. Approach ing his own times, he enlarges on the part played by the Medici; for it was one of the conditions of the task imposed on him that he should celebrate the ancestors of Giulio. This portion of the work is executed in no servile spirit, and the subsequent destiny of Florence fully justified the prominence here given to the elder Cosuno and Lorenzo. In point of form the Florentine History is modelled upon Livy. In contains speeches in the antique manner, which may be taken as partly embodying the author s commentary upon situations of importance, partly as expressing what he thought dramatically appropriate to prominent personages. The styleof the whole book is nervous, vivid, free from artifice and rhetoric, obeying the writer s thought with absolute plasticity. Machiavelli had formed for himself a prose style, equalled by no one but by Guicciardini in his minor works, which was far removed from the emptiness of the Latinizing humanists and the trivialities of the Italian purists. Words in his hands have the substance, the self- evidence of things. It is an athlete s style, all bone and sinew, nude, without superfluous flesh or ornament. It would seem that from the date of Machiavelli s dis course to Leo on the government of Florence the Medici had taken him into consideration. Writing to Vettori in 1513, he had expressed his eager wish to &quot; roll stones&quot; in their service; and this desire was now gratified. In 1521 he was sent to Carpi to transact a petty matter with the chapter of the Franciscans, the chief known result of the embassy being a burlesque correspondence with Francesco Guicciardini. Four years later, in 1525, he received a rather more important mission to Venice. But Machiavelli s public career was virtually closed ; and the interest of his biography still centres in his literary work. We have seen that already, in. 1504, he had been engaged upon a comedy in the manner of Aristophanes, which is now unfortunately lost. A translation of the Andria, and three original comedies from his pen are extant, the precise dates of which are uncertain, though the greatest of them was first printed at Rome in 1524. This is the Mandragola, which may be justly called the ripest and most powerful single play in the Italian language. The plot is both improbable and unpleasing. But, having granted this, literary criticism is merged in admiration of the wit, the humour, the vivacity, the satire of a piece which brings before us the old life of Florence in a succession of brilliant scenes. If Machiavelli had any moral object when he composed the Mandragola, it was to paint in glaring colours the corruption of Italian society. It shows how a bold and plausible adventurer, aided by the profligacy of a parasite, the avarice and hypocrisy of a confessor, and a mother s complaisant familiarity with vice, achieves the triumph of making a gulled husband bring his own unwilling but too yielding wife to shame. The whole comedy-is a study of stupidity and baseness acted on by roguery. About the power with which this picture of domestic immorality is presented there can be no question. But the perusal of the piece obliges us to ask ourselves whether ths author s radical conception of human nature was not false. The same suspicion is forced upon us by the Principe. Did not Machiavelli leave good habit, as an essential ingredient _of character, out of account ? Men are not such absolute fools as Nicia, nor such compliant catspaws as Ligurio and Timoteo ; women are not such weak instruments as Sostrata and Lucrezia. Somewhere, in actual life, the stress of craft and courage acting on the springs of human vice and weakness fails, unless the hero of the comedy or tragedy, Callimaco or Cesare, allows for the revolt of healthier instincts. Machiavelli does not seem to have calculated the force of this recoil. He speculates a world in which Virtu, unscrupulous strength of character, shall deal successfully with frailty. This, we submit, was a deep-seated error in his theory of life, an error to which may be ascribed the numerous stumbling- blocks and rocks of offence in his more serious writings. Some time after the Mandragola, he composed a second comedy, entitled Clizia, a portion of the plot of which is borrowed from the Casina. Though modelled on the art of Plautus, the Clizia is even homelier and closer to the life of Florence than its predecessor. It contains incomparable studies of the Florentine housewife and her husband, a grave business-like citizen, who falls into the senile folly of a base intrigue. The device by which Nicomaco is brought back to a sense of duty is presented in scenes of solid humour which recall the manner of Ben Jonson. On the whole, the Clizia is a pleasanter and wholesomer play than the Mandragola. It served as model to a school of later playwrights. There remains a short piece without title, the Corn-media in Prosa, which, if it be Machiavelli s, as inter nal evidence of style sufficiently argues, might be accepted as a study for both the Clizia and the Mandragola. It seems written to ex pose the corruption of domestic life in Florence, and especially to satirize the friars in their familiar part of go-betweens, tame cats, confessors, and adulterers. The Fra Alberigo of this comedy is a vigorous piece of realistic portraiture, anticipating, if not surpass ing, the Fra Timoteo of the Mandragola. Of Machiavelli s minor poems, sonnets, capitoli, and carnival songs, there is not much to say. Powerful as a comic playwright, he was not a poet in the proper sense of the term. The little novel of Bclfagor claims a passing word, if only because of its celebrity. It is a good-humoured satire upon marriage, the devil being forced to admit that hell itself is preferable to his wife s company. That Machiavelli invented it to express the irritation of his own domestic life _is a jnyth without foundation. The story has a mediaeval origin, and it was almost simultaneously treated in Italian by Machiavelli, Straparola, and Giovanni Brevio. In the spring of 1526 Machiavelli was employed by Clement VIE. to inspect the fortifications of Florence. He presented a report upon the subject, aad in the summer of the same year received orders to attend Francesco Guicciardini, the pope s commissary of war in Lombardy. Guicciardini sent him in August to Cremona, to transact business with the Venetian provveditori. Later on. in the autumn we find him once more with Guicciardini at Bologna. Thus the two great Italian historians of the