Maccaroni

“ A keen and positive political intelligence emerged in the Italian race. The reports of Venetian and Florentine ambassadors at this epoch contain the first germs of an attempt to study politics from the point of view of science.
At this moment Machiavelli intervenes. He was conscious of the change which had come over Italy and Europe. He was aware that the old strongholds of medieval thought must be abandoned, and that the decaying ruins of medieval institutions furnished no basis for the erection of solid political edifices. ”

“ On the restoration of the Medici, in 1512, Macchiavelli was banished, and in the following year he was arrested and subjected to torture on the charge of conspiracy against the Medici, but was soon pardoned and liberated. The next eight years he spent
NICOLO MACCHIAVELLI
in retirement and literary labors, and was then again employed as ambassador. His principal works are: "Il Principe" (The Prince, 1532) ; "Storie Florentine" (Florentine History) ; "Discourses on the First Decate of Titus Livius"; "The Art of War;" ”

“ By his virtue and goodness, not only Rome and Italy, but every part of the western empire, freed from the continual troubles which they had suffered from the frequent influx of barbarians, acquired new vigor, and began to live in an orderly and civilized manner. For surely if any times were truly miserable for Italy and the provinces overrun by the barbarians, they were those which occurred from Arcadius and Honorius to Theodoric. If we only consider the evils which arise to a republic or a kingdom by a change of prince or of government ”

“ Machiavelli has drawn a shrewd caution to conspirators from the failure of the attack upon Lorenzo. “It is necessary, in undertakings of this kind, to make use of men that have been sufficiently hardened and tried, and to trust no others, how courageous soever they may be accounted: for no man can answer even for his own resolution, if he have not thoroughly proved it before; for the confusion he must naturally be in at such a time may either make him drop the dagger out of his hand, or say something which may have the same effect. ”

“ 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 initiated. 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. ”

“ He is correct in all the relations of life, and has not the least turn for writing comedies. Machiavelli, after all his experiences, still hopes like an enchanted maiden for the ideal prince. Guicciardini knows that there is none such, and that, even if there were, the barbarians would be too strong for him. He coldly accepts the situation and hires himself out to a bad Government, with this redeemng quality, that it is still a Government of Italians by Italians. It may be said that Machiavelli was willing to enter the service of the Medici, and such is the fact ”

“ 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 discourse 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 “roll stones” 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. ”

“ But however great may be the merit of this celebrated drama, it cannot boast of entire originality. Machiavelli left behind him three comedies, the fruits of a statesman’s leisure hours. In all three, the author has exhibited the hand of a master; he has painted mankind in the spirit of truth, and unmasked falsehood and hypocrisy in a tone of profound contempt. Two monks, a brother Timothy and a brother Alberico, are represented with too much wit and keenness of sarcasm to have been overlooked by Moliere in his working up of the third specimen. ”

“ Machiavelli writes thus to Vettori:—"I must give you some account of the proceedings of the Magnifico Lorenzo, which have hitherto been such as to fill the city with hope; so that every one begins to see his grandfather revived in him. He is diligent and affable, and causes himself to be loved and respected, rather than feared." Nor can it be believed that Machiavelli was so devoid of understanding, as to fancy that he could dupe men as intelligent as Leo X. and cardinal Julius, who were the heads of the family, by so barefaced an artifice. ”

“ His letters on public affairs in Italy and Europe, especially those which he meant Vettori to communicate to the Medici at Rome, are marked by extraordinary fineness of perception, combined, as usual in his case, with philosophical breadth. In retirement at his villa near Percussina, a hamlet of San Casciano, Machiavelli completed the Principe before the end of 1513. This famous book is an analysis of the methods whereby an ambitious man may rise to sovereign power. ”

“ The wish to acquire is no doubt a natural and common sentiment, and when men attempt things within their power, they will always be praised rather than blamed. But when they persist in attempts that are beyond their power, mishaps and blame ensue. If France, therefore, with her own forces could have attacked Naples, she should have done so. If she could not, she ought not to have divided it. And if her partition of Lombardy with the Venetians may be excused as the means whereby a footing was gained in Italy, this other partition is to be condemned as not justified by the like necessity. ”

“ When Castruccio heard of the enormous army which the Florentines were sending against him, he was in no degree alarmed, believing that the time had now arrived when Fortune would deliver the empire of Tuscany into his hands, for he had no reason to think that his enemy would make a better fight, or had better prospects of success, than at Pisa or Serravalle. He assembled 20,000 foot soldiers and 4000 horsemen, and with this army went to Fucecchio, whilst he sent Pagolo Guinigi to Pisa with 5000 infantry. ”

“ Machiavelli, the student of ancient Rome and modern Italy, riveted the creed of Bacon. It might be said that never has any modern people so influenced another in an equal space of time—and letters, here as ever, are only the voice, the symbol, of a whole life and culture—if we forgot the sway of French in the later 17th and 18th centuries. And the power of French was alive also in the 16th. The track of Marot, of Ronsard and the Pleiad and Desportes, of Rabelais and Calvin and Montaigne, is found in England. ”

“ His letters from Florence contain the gossip of their acquaintance,—amusing anecdotes that paint the manners, while they give us no exalted idea of the morals, of the Italians of those days. Machiavelli himself had no poetry nor delicacy of imagination: his feelings were impetuous, and his active mind required some passion or pursuit to fill it. He bitterly laments the inaction of his life, and expresses an ardent desire to be employed. ”

“ Machiavelli, the renowned Italian statesman, philosopher, and dramatist, whose picturesque history of Florence alone would have entitled him to fame, was entirely misconstrued by the times in which he lived, suffering imprisonment, torture, and banishment in the cause of public liberty. Macaulay says of him: "The name of a man whose genius has illumined all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people owed their last chance of emancipation, passed into a proverb of infamy." The victim of one age often becomes the idol of the next. ”

“ And on the other hand, she has not been so weak that the fear of losing her dominion of temporal things has made her unable to call in a power that could defend her against those who had become too powerful in Italy, as was seen anciently by many experiences, when through the medium of Charles the Great she drove out the Lombards who already were the kings of almost all Italy, and when in our times she took away the power of Venetians with the aid of France ”

“ Thou hast for neighbours the offended Florentines, injured by us in a thousand ways, but not utterly destroyed, who will hail the news of my death with more delight than they would the acquisition of all Tuscany. In the emperor and in the princes of Milan thou canst place no reliance, for they are far distant, slow, and their help is very long in coming. Therefore, thou hast no hope in anything but in thine own abilities, and in the memory of my valour, and in the prestige which this latest victory has brought thee ”

“ At length Machiavelli in his Florentine history (down to 1492) represents his native city as a living organism and its development as a natural and individual process; he is the first of the moderns who has risen to such a conception. It lies without our province to determine whether and in what points Machiavelli may have done violence to history, as is notoriously the case in his life of Castruccio Castracani--a fancy picture of the typical despot. ”

“ Their fear of a powerful person caused them to increase the influence of one previously weak; his becoming great caused him also to be feared, and his being feared made them seek the means of destroying him. This mode of thinking and operation occasioned the kingdom of Naples to be taken from Manfred and given to Charles, but as soon as the latter became powerful his ruin was resolved upon. ”

“ And to-day the young ears and eyes of Florence were alert for an impulse to action. They saw glimpses, in reopened fields of history, of quarries long grown over where the ore of positive politics lay hid. The men who came to-day to the Orti Oricellarii were men versed in public affairs, men of letters, historians, poets, living greatly in a great age, with Raphael, Michael Angelo, Ariosto, Leonardo going up and down amongst them. Machiavelli was now in fair favour with the Medici, and is described by Strozzi as una persona per sorgere (a rising man) . ”

“ Whoever was to accomplish the salvation of Italy must be ready to sacrifice his private convictions and to ignore the rights of conscience. The methods which Machiavelli advocated were, he readily admitted, opposed to the life of a Christian, perhaps even to the life of a human being. Were the morally good to be set side by side with the morally evil, no one would ever be so mad or so wicked, that if asked to choose between the two, he would not praise that which deserved praise and blame that which deserved blame. ”

“ 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 play in the Italian language. ”

“ This advantage was possessed in an eminent degree by Francesco Guicciardini, the historian of contemporary times; and though Niccolo Machiavelli did not write his principal work as a contemporary, his knowledge of the Florentine constitution was so intimate as almost to invest him with the authority of an eye-witness of the Florentine revolutions of the past.
Niccolò Machiavelli, the first Italian and almost the first modern to display eminent genius as an historical and political writer, was born at Florence, May 3, 1469. His family had been illustrious for public services ”

“ But they reveal no less acumen combined with imaginative penetration into the very essence of national existence.
Machiavelli returned from Germany in June 1508. The rest of that year and a large part of 1509 were spent in the affairs of the militia and the war of Pisa. Chiefly through his exertions the war was terminated by the surrender of Pisa in June 1509. Meanwhile the league of Cambray had disturbed the peace of Italy, and Florence found herself in a perilous position between Spain and France. Soderini’s government grew weaker. ”

“ It cannot be doubted, however, that the imagination of Machiavelli was strongly impressed, and his speculations on government coloured, by the observations which he made on the singular character and equally singular fortunes of a man who under such disadvantages had achieved such exploits; who, when sensuality, varied through innumerable forms, could no longer stimulate his sated mind, found a more powerful and durable excitement in the intense thirst of empire and revenge; who emerged from the sloth and luxury of the Roman purple the first prince and general of the age ”

“ Prosper, you have never set eyes on the macchia, the glory of your kingdom. But you shall behold it soon, lad, and smell it—for its fragrance spreads around the island and far out to sea. It belts Corsica with verdure and a million million flowers—cistus and myrtle and broom and juniper; clematis and vetch and wild roses run mad. Deeper than the tall forests behind it the macchia will hide two lovers, and under the open sky hedge off all the world but their passion . . . In the macchia we roamed together, day after day, and forgot the world; forgot all but honour ”