Page:Machiavelli, Romanes Lecture, 2 June 1897.djvu/22

18 is not. What distinguishes the Italian Renaissance from such epochs of luxury and corruption as the French Regency, is this contempt of human life, the fury of private revenge, the spirit of atrocious perfidy and crime. 'Italian society admired the bravo almost as much as Imperial Rome admired the gladiator: it assumed that genius combined with force of character released men from the shackles of ordinary morality' (Symonds).17 Only a giant like Michelangelo escaped this deadly climate. We see the violence of Michelangelo's sublime despair in the immortal marbles of the Medicean chapel, executed while Machiavelli was still alive—Lorenzo, to whom the Prince is dedicated, silent, pensive, meditating under his helmet, with finger upon lip, some stroke of dubious war or craft, and the sombre superhuman figures of Night and Dawn and Day, proclaiming 'it is best to sleep and be of stone, not to see and not to feel, while such misery and shame endure.'

Machiavelli's merit in the history of political literature is his method. We may smile at the uncritical simplicity with which he discusses Romulus and Remus, Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus, as if they were all astute politicians of Florentine faction. He often recalls the orator in the French Constituent Assembly who proposed to send to Crete for an authentic copy of the laws of Minos. But he withdrew politics from scholasticism, and based their consideration upon observation and experience. It is quite true that he does not classify his problems; that he does not place them in their proper subordination to one another;