John Morley

“ Apart from this original selfishness of the politic man in search of his career, times of great public travail tend to harden the heart; and the Florentine publicists all write like men with hardish hearts. They have none of the geniality of Commynes, none of the cheerful good humour of Bacon, none of the amiability of Montesquieu, none of that deep insight into life and character as a whole, which made La Bruyère and some other Frenchmen of the seventeenth century, including more than one of their divines, so admirable and so fruitful. ”

“ II Guicciardini interests us somewhat as a political theorist about constitutions and the like; he interests us deeply as a historian; he interests us most of all as a shrewd observer of men, and a keen explorer of the secrets of managing them. Of the first of these three aspects of him we shall say nothing, except that his discussion of the government of Florence handles the everlasting question whether the rule by one, by a few, or by many, is the best, with extraordinary acuteness and vigour. It is too long, and it is all the longer for being in the form of dialogue. ”

“ Some defy, some whimper, some fall stunned, some break their hearts once for all, others silently obey the grim ordering of events and with courage gather up the shattered pieces. The ancient literature of consolation contains some famous pieces, from Seneca, the friend of Nero, down to Boethius, the friend of Theodoric. [6] If we would measure the differences of times and men, it is well worth while to turn to that grave and beautiful piece in our own literature, so full of enlightenment, liberality, wisdom, tenderness, and piety, where Bishop Burnet concludes his history. ”

“ What the critic means by saying that the Ricordi are Italian corruption reduced to a code, may be seen in such reflections as these: 'Always deny what you do not wish to have known, and affirm what you wish to have believed; for though there may be proofs and even certainty the other way, a bold affirmation or denial will perplex the listener.' In the cynic's vein is this: 'One of the greatest strokes of good fortune is for a man to have an opportunity of showing that in the things he does for his own interest, he was moved by the thought of the public good. ”

“ Be all this as it may, we must admit of Guicciardini's Counsels and Reflections, sage as they are on their own level and within their own limits, that they do not spring from a rich soil, do not seem as if they had grown in a nourishing air, have not the full savour of fruits ripened in the sun. He was sheer politician, and the cases are rare where politics do not rather contract than expand the range of human interest and feeling, do not check rather than promote the sap and juice of a living fecundity. ”

“ Or is it, again, the record of such growth among civil communities as the naturalist traces in the succession of organisms material and palpable, and is the historian's task to find and illustrate the laws by which the long process has been moulded? Is history, as Bossuet would persuade us, the long and solemn vindication of the mysterious purposes of God to man, the ordered working of the Unseen Powers as they raise up states and empires, then cast them headlong down again in stern and measured rhythm? ”

“ III On the whole, one must repeat, Guicciardini treats his kind with wise leniency. 'Men are all by nature more inclined to do good than ill; nor is there anybody who, where he is not by some strong consideration pulled the other way, would not more willingly do good than ill. But so frail is man's nature, and so frequent in this world are the occasions that invite to ill, that men easily let themselves stray from the good.' Is not this still, nearly four centuries later, the truth of the case? ”

“ One observer tells the disciple that in politics perseverance always wins; another that men who take the greatest trouble to succeed, are those most sure to miss. To-day, the one essential seems to be boldness of conception; to-morrow, the man of detail is master of the hour. To-day the turn of things inclines a man to say that in politics nothing matters; to-morrow some other turn teaches him that in politics everything matters. The instructor in statecraft and the guide to the Politic Man must be Janus and look more ways than one, and to this demand Guicciardini was equal. ”

“ For no man's fortune can be an end worthy of the gift of being, that has been given him by God; and often the worthiest men abandon their fortunes willingly, that they may have leisure for higher pursuits. But, nevertheless, fortune as an instrument of virtue and merit deserves its own speculation and doctrine.' This limitation would have been too hard for Guicciardini. The architecture of fortune in men meddling with government, went as high as his vision could carry. ”

“ He makes no foolish attempt to cure his wound either by a spurious rhetoric that places things out of perspective and proportion, or by a spurious philosophy that pretends to turn pain into pleasure by juggling with words as if they were things. Various are the attitudes of men towards the outside unseen divinity,—Fortune, Chance, Necessity, Force of Circumstance—when it overthrows them. ”

“ Abhor all the pretensions of the Pharisee as heartily as ever we will, there is something repulsive in the thought of a man starting every day with a dose of Ricordi, and coming forth from his chamber having given all the freshness of the morning hour to sharpening his rapier or charging his pistols for the daily duel with fortune and his fellow-creatures. ”

“ We must not expect any consideration of those deeper elements and aspirations in human nature that have led some to groan over the life of mankind as a hideous tragedy of waste and wrong, and others to laugh at history as 'a comedy in a hundred acts.' The stress of existence in unfortunate Italy was too desperate. 'In the sixteenth century, they analysed much less than they acted, in war, politics, religion. ”

“ As though character were like the fingers of a clock to be moved at will backwards and forwards, independently of the wheels and springs, balances and escapements, that regulate its daily action and make it what it is. The grievous failings and frantic inconsistencies and dire lapses of human nature are only too familiar. ”

“ Bacon in the famous eighth book of the De Augmentis, that masterpiece of the secondary arts of wisdom of life, sets down some heads or passages of what he calls the Architect of Fortune or the Knowledge of Advancement in Life. The things necessary for the acquisition of fortune, he says, and the formation of the truly Politic Man, are a part of human knowledge which he reports as deficient, and we may doubt whether anybody has done much to advance it since. ”

“ What is always thoroughly to be blamed is slowness in action after decision taken. Whatever your decision and whatever your plan, there is always a reason to the contrary. Whence it comes that so many people stand in suspense, because every small difficulty disturbs them. These are they whom we call over-scrupulous, because they stumble on a scruple at every turn. This is all wrong. We ought to weigh the drawbacks on every side, and then to make up our minds for the course where drawbacks are fewest ' (191, 213) .
A lottery after all.—'In human things it is fortune that has the mastery. ”

“ In that age nobody saw any harm or heard a cynic's voice in Guicciardini's remark upon Ferdinand of Aragon, that 'no reproach attaches to him, save his lack of generosity and faithlessness to his word.' It may or may not be true in literature that 'it is the mark of finesse of mind not to come to a conclusion' (Renan) . It is less true in history. 'In politics,' one critic of our Italian has said, 'compromise may often be an excellent course; but in a history what we want are clear-out judgments; the human conscience insists upon it.' That is not Guicciardini's view. ”

“ Eminent place, La Bruyère said, makes the great man greater than he is, the small man it makes less. Some hold in our own day, that if you would know the real qualities of a public man, you must find out—if you can—what is thought of him, not by his constituents, not by his fellow-members, but by the permanent officials who have served under him. ”

“ When the waking hour arrives, one man may still have grace enough to go out and weep bitterly; another only mocks. There is no sign that Guicciardini ran through all these stages of the political Sceptic's Progress. He was man of the world from first to last. Dreams and visions such as make for some the charmed part of life, were never anything to him. In a series of extraordinarily suggestive considerations on Machiavelli's Discorsi, [8] he gravely exposes that vivid writer's excess of severity in logic, excess of colour in his ideals, excess of eloquence in description ”

“ Prudential counsels by code and system can hardly ever be in the highest sense attractive. A modern who in his studies came across the private notebooks and reflections of Mazarin (one of the two great Italians who have governed France, and deeply marked by the characteristics of Italian genius a century before his time) is driven to say of them that all this political cookery rather takes away one's appetite, and indeed would make one sick if only one did not remember that everything has its kitchen side. ”

“ Without ascending to these pure and exalted heights, we may refresh ourselves by thinking of such a man as Turgot. The contrast may help to show the Politic Man where he stands. Turgot, says his biographer, would not endure that any mixture of falseness, or the least appearance of charlatanry, should soil the purity or the conduct of a public man. He knew the means, he scorned to use them. They taxed him with ignorance of men. This is what they called maladresse. Few philosophers have had a better founded knowledge of man. ”

“ Pitiless cruelty never in history went further than the systematic ferocities of Spaniard and German in Italy in the sixteenth century. The Ottoman was not more ruthless in all the arts of violence, lust, and torture than the soldiers of the Catholic King; and the soldiers of the Most Christian King were not far behind. Guicciardini stamps these abominations as they pass, without excitement, but with a steady hand. ”

“ Hence a citizen who finds himself watching the dissolution of his country, need not so much groan over this disgrace, as over his own lot. His country only suffers what in any case it was bound to suffer. The true unhappiness is that of the man who chances to have been born in an age when the moment of his country's doom has struck.' This has been called a sublime stoicism. ”

“ The wizard is he who divines the moment that is neither too soon nor too late. History, since Guicciardini's day, abounds in cases where statesmen have made shipwreck from forgetting that time and the moment are all, and mistaking the pace at which opportunity ripens. ”

“ We can imagine Cavour on his estates at Leri, in the years before he was called to take the helm at Turin, brooding intently over such a passage as this:—'No two popes were more unlike than Julius the Second and Clement the Seventh; the one of great and even dauntless spirit, impatient, impulsive, open, frank; the other of a middling temperament, perhaps even timid, infinitely patient, moderate, a dissembler. Yet from natures so opposed, men look for the same results in large exploits. For with great masters patience and impetuosity are alike fit to bring forth great things ”

“ Human enterprises are ever apt to miscarry; he knew this when he embarked upon the voyage; the wreck was no special fault of his, for popes, kings, and emperors were the principals, and he no more than an instrument; his arguments for the war against the Emperor may have been an error of judgment, but it is not fair to expect a man to carry into the council-chamber, besides merely human reasonings, the prognosticating judgments of astrologers and sooth-sayers; in fine, 'tis time mends all, and men will see that he was blameless. ”

“ If one link in your reasoning is weak, all the rest may snap. We may write maxims in books, but exceptions in circumstance are for ever arising, and these can only find a place on the tablets of discretion. This comes to what is reported to have been said by Prince Bismarck: 'Politics are less a science than an art. They cannot be taught. ”

“ To some of us, the most tiresome dissertation is not more afflicting than the sprightliest, courtliest, demurest, or archest of all these polemical dialogues. Plato is of course the grand exception, as on a lower plane is Cicero's brilliant and skilful dialogue on the Orator. But if men could be quite honest about Olympian names, perhaps a fraction even of Plato would fall under the same remark. One critic, and a French critic, strange to say, is reminded by our Italian's Reggimento di Firenze, in respect of elegance and grace of the opening of the Phædrus. ”

“ The blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church, and the man driven by weakness of the flesh into full flight from peril, may well be stricken by a secret envy of those brave heroic hearts, that noble army of witnesses, those spirits of fire, who in all ages and for many causes that seemed forlorn have fought the fight, run the course, and kept the faith. ”

“ Only the permanent official can tell you for certain whether his chief is quick or slow, idle or diligent; whether he allows himself to see two sides to a question; how far he is free from the vanity of supposing that he knows everything, and how far he has the fine talent of the good learner ”

“ It is hardly an accident that so many of the most valued histories that have survived in literature are so deeply tinged with gloom, and labour so much upon adverse things, the spite of evil generations, the frowardness of men, and all the inscrutable ironies of dark fate. We may recall the quaint chapter in Commynes that contains his 'discourse upon the miserie of man's life,' by the example of those princes that lived in the author's time, and first of King Louis the Eleventh ”

“ Nevertheless at the end of it perhaps an impartial person would commend to statesmen in misfortune not all this argumentation, explanation, consolation, sophistication, but the simple concision of Thucydides—'It befell me to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis.' And no more.
In every age cases meet us where experience changes the idealist and the reformer, first to doubter, then to indifferent, next to pure egotist, at last to hard cynic. ”

“ Guicciardini is less unkind to his fellow-mortals, man for man, than observers of his stamp usually are. He is not blind to the weaknesses of our poor species as a whole; but he sees them redeemed by the worth of the elect. ”

“ Yet the writer of the history thus despatched for the inexpiable sin of dulness, just as if life and circumstance were never dull, is one of the acutest, weightiest, most vigorous and observant of European publicists in ancient times or modern. ”

“ He who applies himself to the former takes heed of his own ways, foreseeing dangers, preparing remedies, employing the assistance of the good, guarding himself against the wicked, cautious in entering upon a work, not unprepared for a retreat, watchful to seize opportunities, strenuous to remove impediments, and attending to many other things which concern the government of his own actions and proceedings. ”

“ Then, not afraid of something like a contradiction, Guicciardini swings round in the other quarter:—'It may seem a harsh and suspicious thing to say—and would to heaven it were not true: there are more bad men than good, especially where interests of property or politics (di Stato) are concerned. Therefore, except with those whom either by your own experience, or thoroughly trustworthy report, you know to be good, you cannot go wrong in dealing with everybody else with your eyes well open. ”

“ Many will regard the Reformation as even more stupendous an event in the history of mankind, than either the growth of national monarchies or the discovery of new continents. For the speculative reasoner upon human progress, that is a question pregnant with issues of absorbing interest; but whatever we may think about this, it was impossible for Guicciardini to judge a drama of which in 1530 not more than the first act had yet been played. ”

“ One must be born with a gift for them. The best advice is of no value, if you do not know how to carry it out in the right way, and with due regard to the circumstances of each case.' And that again brings politics very near to the same point at which Logic was placed by an eminent head of a college at Oxford. He ended a discussion on the old question whether Logic is a science or an art, by the decision that 'it is neither a science nor an art; it is a dodge.'
In the same spirit Guicciardini offers wholesome counsel to such as are tempted to fashion modern policies on ancient history. ”

“ When we find ourselves safe and sound at the thirtieth line, we have really crossed a broad piece of ground. His phrase is heavy, and yet, as Thiers says, he moves along like a man of lively spirit, only with indifferent legs. ”

“ A free-spoken Pope is reported to have said on the death of Richelieu, 'If there is a God, the Cardinal will have to smart for what he has done; but if there is no God, he was certainly an excellent man.' Our historian also leaves these delicate questions open. ”