Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/165

Rh experience of the Venetian oligarchy will add a lively hope to the expectations of civic reform which the spirit if not the letter of his municipal administration has already awakened. A philosopher who has so intimately acquainted himself with the evils of a machine on the national scale may not unjustly be supposed to have his misgivings of the final beneficence of a party machine.

But this is something apart from our real business, which is with his admirable book. This seems to us not only a careful legal scrutiny of the subject, but a very judicial inquiry. Like the author of The Signorie of Venice the author of The Venetian Oligarchy had evidently "not adventured upon this remote Outlandish subject had he not bin himself upon the place." The subject, indeed, is not so remote or so outlandish as it was in the time when Howell felt obliged to excuse it to his "reder," and Mr. McClellan has rendered it indefinitely less so. As we have already noted, he has taken the American view of it; and without losing the dignity of a scholarly inquirer, he has given us a familiar picture, a very personal sense of the Venetian patriciate acting as a syndicate. We do not know how much he intended to distinguish the oligarchy of Venice from the people of Venice in the reader's mind, but he has distinguished it we think, with a finality which will not allow him to be confused about it again. Hereafter, no reader of his will have any excuse for conceiving of the Venetian oligarchy as the Venetian commonwealth, and will hardly be able to justify himself in the belief that the oligarchy was a political necessity. It was no more a political necessity than the second empire in France, and it was no less a usurpation. If the English Parliament which Howell addresses as "the supreme authority of the nation" had succeeded in perpetuating itself as political England, instead of degenerating into the Rump Parliament, we should have had in English terms a fairly literal version of the Venetian oligarchy which eventuated from the closing of the Grand Council.

After that causeless and excuseless coup d'état, the history of Venice, though a record of splendid achievements, ceases to have the highest human interest. It will always be from beginning to end a fascinating study, but it will from the middle of the fourteenth century, down to the end of the eighteenth, be without instruction for those who would learn the lessons of an unselfish patriotism. The greatest heroes and the greatest deeds of Venice were of the days and years before Pietro Gradenigo. After him there were, almost to the end, great politicians, great captains, great logicians, great artists (though there never was any great author in Venice), but her annals were without the charm of the personality which is the soul of history. Never, in the long life of a state which rose from the waters after the ravage of Attila, and sank before the fear of Napoleon, was there any such sublime moment as that in the life of Florence when Savonarola heard the dying confession of Lorenzo de' Medici, and bade him make restitution of her liberties to the republic. There is, indeed, a sort of businesslike dryness in the story of Venice, curiously compatible with its fascination as a study, but inseparable apparently from its nature, and perhaps inalienable from that of any people bent constantly upon their material aggrandizement. She had no ideals but her safety first and her prosperity afterwards; she was without real poetry in her aspirations, and after the first period of industry, when she was strengthening her foundations amidst the shifting islands of the lagoon, she was purely commercial, in principle as in practice, whether she made money out of the crusades, or constituted herself the bulwark of Christendom against the Turk, or fought the Pope with priest against priest, or mercenary against mercenary. What she might have been if the spirit of a generous patriotism could have prevailed in her evolution as a real commonwealth can now never be known, but it cannot be claimed that her involution as an oligarchy was not the logic of her prevailing motives and endeavors.