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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS, VOLUME II

BY THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

CONTENTS OF VOLUME II


FOREIGN HISTORY

MACHIAVELLI
RANKE'S HISTORY OF THE POPES
WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION
FREDERIC THE GREAT

POLITICAL CONTROVERSY

SOUTHEY'S COLLOQUIES
CIVIL DISABILTIES OF THE JEWS
GLADSTONE ON CHURCH AND STATE

LITERARY CRITICISMS

BACON
JOHN BUNYAN
DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION
ADDISON
SAMUEL JOHNSON
MADAME D'ARBLAY
BYRON
MONTGOMERY

INDEX


MACHIAVELLI
(March 1827)

Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL, traduites par J. V. PERIER Paris:
1825.

Those who have attended to the practice of our literary tribunal
are well aware that, by means of certain legal fictions similar
to those of Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take
cognisance of cases lying beyond the sphere of our original
jurisdiction. We need hardly say, therefore, that in the present
instance M. Perier is merely a Richard Roe, who will not be
mentioned in any subsequent stage of the proceedings, and whose
name is used for the sole purpose of bringing Machiavelli into
court.

We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally
odious as that of the man whose character and writings we now
propose to consider. The terms in which he is commonly described
would seem to import that he was the Tempter, the Evil Principle,
the discoverer of ambition and revenge, the original inventor of
perjury, and that, before the publication of his fatal Prince,
there had never been a hypocrite, a tyrant, or a traitor, a
simulated virtue, or a convenient crime. One writer gravely
assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent
policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since it
was translated into Turkish, the Sultans have been more addicted
than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Lord
Lyttelton charges the poor Florentine with the manifold treasons
of the house of Guise, and with the massacre of St. Bartholomew.
Several authors have hinted that the Gunpowder Plot is to be
primarily attributed to his doctrines, and seem to think that his
effigy ought to be substituted for that of Guy Faux, in those
processions by which the ingenious youth of England annually
commemorate the preservation of the Three Estates. The Church of
Rome has pronounced his works accursed things. Nor have our own
countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his
merits. Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a
knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.

[Nick Machiavel had ne'er a trick,
Tho' he gave his name to our old Nick.

Hudibras, Part iii. Canto i.

But, we believe, there is a schism on this subject among the
antiquarians.]

It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well
acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read
without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise which has
brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a
display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool,
judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a
fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most
hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted
accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating
sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the
slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms
of all political science.

It is not strange that ordinary readers should regard the author
of such a book as the most depraved and shameless of human
beings. Wise men, however, have always been inclined to look with
great suspicion on the angels and daemons of the multitude: and
in the present instance, several circumstances have led even
superficial observers to question the justice of the vulgar
decision. It is notorious that Machiavelli was, through life, a
zealous republican. In the same year in which he composed his
manual of King-craft, he suffered imprisonment and torture in the
cause of public liberty. It seems inconceivable that the martyr
of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of
tyranny. Several eminent writers have, therefore, endeavoured to
detect in this unfortunate performance some concealed meaning,
more consistent with the character and conduct of the author than
that which appears at the first glance.

One hypothesis is that Machiavelli intended to practise on the
young Lorenzo de Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland
is said to have employed against our James the Second, and that
he urged his pupil to violent and perfidious measures, as the
surest means of accelerating the moment of deliverance and
revenge. Another supposition which Lord Bacon seems to
countenance, is that the treatise was merely a piece of grave
irony, intended to warn nations against the arts of ambitious
men. It would be easy to show that neither of these solutions is
consistent with many passages in The Prince itself. But the most
decisive refutation is that which is furnished by the other works
of Machiavelli. In all the writings which he gave to the public,
and in all those which the research of editors has, in the course
of three centuries, discovered, in his Comedies, designed for the
entertainment of the multitude, in his Comments on Livy, intended
for the perusal of the most enthusiastic patriots of Florence, in
his History, inscribed to one of the most amiable and estimable
of the Popes, in his public despatches, in his private memoranda,
the same obliquity of moral principle for which The Prince is so
severely censured is more or less discernible. We doubt whether
it would be possible to find, in all the many volumes of his
compositions, a single expression indicating that dissimulation
and treachery had ever struck him as discreditable.

After this, it may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted
with few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment,
so pure and warm a zeal for the public good, or so just a view of
the duties and rights of citizens, as those of Machiavelli. Yet
so it is. And even from The Prince itself we could select many
passages in support of this remark. To a reader of our age and
country this inconsistency is, at first, perfectly bewildering.
The whole man seems to be an enigma, a grotesque assemblage of
incongruous qualities, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and
benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject villainy and romantic
heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran diplomatist would
scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most
confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme
composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act
of dexterous perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call
forth the same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration.
The moral sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly
obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar
are united in him. They are not merely joined, but interwoven.
They are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their
combination, like that of the variegated threads in shot silk,
gives to the whole texture a glancing and ever-changing
appearance. The explanation might have been easy, if he had been
a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently neither
the one nor the other. His works prove, beyond all contradiction,
that his understanding was strong, his taste pure, and his sense
of the ridiculous exquisitely keen.

This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no
reason whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw
anything shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs
remain of the high estimation in which both his works and his
person were held by the most respectable among his
contemporaries. Clement the Seventh patronised the publication of
those very books which the Council of Trent, in the following
generation, pronounced unfit for the perusal of Christians. Some
members of the democratical party censured the Secretary for
dedicating The Prince to a patron who bore the unpopular name of
Medici. But to those immoral doctrines which have since called
forth such severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been
taken. The cry against them was first raised beyond the Alps, and
seems to have been heard with amazement in Italy. The earliest
assailant, as far as we are aware, was a countryman of our own,
Cardinal Pole. The author of the Anti-Machiavelli was a French
Protestant.

It is, therefore, in the state of moral feeling among the
Italians of those times that we must seek for the real
explanation of what seems most mysterious in the life and
writings of this remarkable man. As this is a subject which
suggests many interesting considerations, both political and
metaphysical, we shall make no apology for discussing it at some
length.

During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the
downfall of the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far
greater degree than any other part of Western Europe, the traces
of ancient civilisation. The night which descended upon her was
the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to reappear before
the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the
horizon. It was in the time of the French Merovingians and of the
Saxon Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity seemed to have done
their worst. Yet even then the Neapolitan provinces, recognising
the authority of the Eastern Empire, preserved something of
Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome, protected by the sacred
character of her Pontiffs, enjoyed at least comparative security
and repose, Even in those regions where the sanguinary Lombards
had fixed their monarchy, there was incomparably more of wealth,
of information, of physical comfort, and of social order, than
could be found in Gaul, Britain, or Germany.

That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring
countries was the importance which the population of the towns,
at a very early period, began to acquire. Some cities had been
founded in wild and remote situations, by fugitives who had
escaped from the rage of the barbarians. Such were Venice and
Genoa, which preserved their freedom by their obscurity, till
they became able to preserve it by their power. Other cities seem
to have retained, under all the changing dynasties of invaders,
under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses and Alboin, the municipal
institutions which had been conferred on them by the liberal
policy of the Great Republic. In provinces which the central
government was too feeble either to protect or to oppress, these
institutions gradually acquired stability and vigour. The
citizens, defended by their walls, and governed by their own
magistrates and their own by-laws, enjoyed a considerable share
of republican independence. Thus a strong democratic spirit was
called into action. The Carlovingian sovereigns were too imbecile
to subdue it. The generous policy of Otho encouraged it. It might
perhaps have been suppressed by a close coalition between the
Church and the Empire. It was fostered and invigorated by their
disputes. In the twelfth century it attained its full vigour,
and, after a long and doubtful conflict, triumphed over the
abilities and courage of the Swabian princes.

The assistance of the Ecclesiastical power had greatly
contributed to the success of the Guelfs. That success would,
however, have been a doubtful good, if its only effect had been
to substitute a moral for a political servitude, and to exalt the
Popes at the expense of the Caesars. Happily the public mind of
Italy had long contained the seeds of free opinions, which were
now rapidly developed by the genial influence of free
institutions. The people of that country had observed the whole
machinery of the Church, its saints and its miracles, its lofty
pretensions and its splendid ceremonial, its worthless blessings
and its harmless curses, too long and too closely to be duped.
They stood behind the scenes on which others were gazing with
childish awe and interest. They witnessed the arrangement of the
pulleys, and the manufacture of the thunders. They saw the
natural faces and heard the natural voices of the actors. Distant
nations looked on the Pope as the Vicegerent of the Almighty, the
oracle of the All-wise, the umpire from whose decisions, in the
disputes either of theologians or of kings, no Christian ought to
appeal. The Italians were acquainted with all the follies of his
youth, and with all the dishonest arts by which he had attained
power. They knew how often he had employed the keys of the Church
to release himself from the most sacred engagements, and its
wealth to pamper his mistresses and nephews. The doctrines and
rites of the established religion they treated with decent
reverence. But though they still called themselves Catholics,
they had ceased to be Papists. Those spiritual arms which carried
terror into the palaces and camps of the proudest sovereigns
excited only contempt in the immediate neighbourhood of the
Vatican. Alexander, when he commanded our Henry the Second to
submit to the lash before the tomb of a rebellious subject, was
himself an exile. The Romans apprehending that he entertained
designs against their liberties, had driven him from their city;
and though he solemnly promised to confine himself for the future
to his spiritual functions, they still refused to readmit him.

In every other part of Europe, a large and powerful privileged
class trampled on the people and defied the Government. But in
the most flourishing parts of Italy, the feudal nobles were
reduced to comparative insignificance. In some districts they
took shelter under the protection of the powerful commonwealths
which they were unable to oppose, and gradually sank into the
mass of burghers. In other places they possessed great influence;
but it was an influence widely different from that which was
exercised by the aristocracy of any Transalpine kingdom. They
were not petty princes, but eminent citizens. Instead of
strengthening their fastnesses among the mountains, they
embellished their palaces in the market-place. The state of
society in the Neapolitan dominions, and in some parts of the
Ecclesiastical State, more nearly resembled that which existed in
the great monarchies of Europe. But the Governments of Lombardy
and Tuscany, through all their revolutions, preserved a different
character. A people, when assembled in a town, is far more
formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over a wide extent
of country. The most arbitrary of the Caesars found it necessary
to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldy capital at
the expense of the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more
than once besieged their sovereign in his own palace, and
extorted from him the most humiliating concessions. The Sultans
have often been compelled to propitiate the furious rabble of
Constantinople with the head of an unpopular Vizier. From the
same cause there was a certain tinge of democracy in the
monarchies and aristocracies of Northern Italy.

Thus liberty, partially indeed and transiently, revisited Italy;
and with liberty came commerce and empire, science and taste, all
the comforts and all the ornaments of life. The Crusades, from
which the inhabitants of other countries gained nothing but
relics and wounds, brought to the rising commonwealths of the
Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas a large increase of wealth, dominion,
and knowledge. The moral and geographical position of those
commonwealths enabled them to profit alike by the barbarism of
the West and by the civilisation of the East. Italian ships
covered every sea. Italian factories rose on every shore. The
tables of Italian moneychangers were set in every city.
Manufactures flourished. Banks were established. The operations
of the commercial machine were facilitated by many useful and
beautiful inventions. We doubt whether any country of Europe, our
own excepted, have at the present time reached so high a point
of wealth and civilisation as some parts of Italy had attained
four hundred years ago. Historians rarely descend to those
details from which alone the real state of a community can be
collected. Hence posterity is too often deceived by the vague
hyperboles of poets and rhetoricians, who mistake the splendour
of a court for the happiness of a people. Fortunately, John
Villani has given us an ample and precise account of the state of
Florence in the early part of the fourteenth century. The revenue
of the Republic amounted to three hundred thousand florins; a sum
which, allowing for the depreciation of the precious metals, was
at least equivalent to six hundred thousand pounds sterling; a
larger sum than England and Ireland, two centuries ago, yielded
annually to Elizabeth. The manufacture of wool alone employed two
hundred factories and thirty thousand workmen. The cloth annually
produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred thousand
florins; a sum fully equal in exchangeable value to two millions
and a half of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were
annually coined. Eighty banks conducted the commercial
operations, not of Florence only but of all Europe. The
transactions of these establishments were sometimes of a
magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the
Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward the
Third of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a
time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of
the present day, and when the value of silver was more than
quadruple of what it now is. The city and its environs contained
a hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants. In the various
schools about ten thousand children were taught to read; twelve
hundred studied arithmetic; six hundred received a learned
education.

The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was
proportioned to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic
successors of Augustus, all the fields of intellect had been
turned into arid wastes, still marked out by formal
boundaries, still retaining the traces of old cultivation, but
yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge of barbarism came.
It swept away all the landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of
former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When it
receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on
every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in
spontaneous abundance, everything brilliant, or fragrant, or
nourishing. A new language, characterised by simple sweetness and
simple energy, had attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished
more gorgeous and vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before a
poet appeared who knew how to employ them. Early in the
fourteenth century came forth the Divine Comedy, beyond
comparison the greatest work of imagination which had appeared
since the poems of Homer. The following generation produced
indeed no second Dante: but it was eminently distinguished by
general intellectual activity. The study of the Latin writers had
never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a
more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, and communicated
to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the
history, and the antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart
with a frigid mistress and a more frigid Muse. Boccaccio turned
their attention to the more sublime and graceful models of
Greece.

From this time, the admiration of learning and genius became
almost an idolatry among the people of Italy. Kings and
republics, cardinals and doges, vied with each other in honouring
and flattering Petrarch. Embassies from rival States solicited
the honour of his instructions. His coronation agitated the Court
of Naples and the people of Rome as much as the most important
political transaction could have done. To collect books and
antiques, to found professorships, to patronise men of learning,
became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of
literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise.
Every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended
their gigantic traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the
monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and
manuscripts. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, were
munificently encouraged. Indeed it would be difficult to name an
Italian of eminence, during the period of which we speak, who,
whatever may have been his general character, did not at least
affect a love of letters and of the arts.

Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together.
Both attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the
Magnificent. We cannot refrain from quoting the splendid passage,
in which the Tuscan Thucydides describes the state of Italy at
that period. "Ridotta tutta in somma pace e tranquillita,
coltivata non meno ne' luoghi piu montuosi e piu sterili che
nelle pianure e regioni piu fertili, ne sottoposta ad altro
imperio che de' suoi medesimi, non solo era abbondantissima d'
abitatori e di ricchezze; ma illustrata sommamente dalla
magnificenza di molti principi, dallo splendore di molte
nobilissime e bellissime citta, dalla sedia e maesta della
religione, fioriva d' uomini prestantissimi nell' amministrazione
delle cose pubbliche, e d'ingegni molto nobili in tutte le
scienze, ed in qualunque arte preclara ed industriosa." When we
peruse this just and splendid description, we can scarcely
persuade ourselves that we are reading of times in which the
annals of England and France present us only with a frightful
spectacle of poverty, barbarity, and ignorance. From the
oppressions of illiterate masters, and the sufferings of a
degraded peasantry, it is delightful to turn to the opulent and
enlightened States of Italy, to the vast and magnificent cities,
the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries,
the marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the
factories swarming with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich
cultivation up to their very summits, the Po wafting the harvests
of Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, and carrying back the
silks of Bengal and the furs of Siberia to the palaces of Milan.
With peculiar pleasure, every cultivated mind must repose on the
fair, the happy, the glorious Florence, the halls which rang with
the mirth of Pulci, the cell where twinkled the midnight lamp of
Politian, the statues on which the young eye of Michael Angelo
glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration, the gardens in
which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-day dance
of the Etrurian virgins. Alas for the beautiful city! Alas for
the wit and the learning, the genius and the love!

"Le donne, e i cavalier, gli affanni, e gli agi,
Che ne 'nvogliava amore e cortesia
La dove i cuor son fatti si malvagi."

A time was at hand, when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse
were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant
countries, a time of slaughter, famine, beggary, infamy, slavery,
despair.

In the Italian States, as in many natural bodies, untimely
decrepitude was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early
greatness, and their early decline, are principally to be
attributed to the same cause, the preponderance which the towns
acquired in the political system.

In a community of hunters or of shepherds, every man easily and
necessarily becomes a soldier. His ordinary avocations are
perfectly compatible with all the duties of military service.
However remote may be the expedition on which he is bound, he
finds it easy to transport with him the stock from which he
derives his subsistence. The whole people is an army; the whole
year a march. Such was the state of society which facilitated the
gigantic conquests of Attila and Tamerlane.

But a people which subsists by the cultivation of the earth is in
a very different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil
on which he labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him.
Still his pursuits are such as give to his frame both the active
and the passive strength necessary to a soldier. Nor do they, at
least in the infancy of agricultural science, demand his
uninterrupted attention. At particular times of the year he is
almost wholly unemployed, and can, without injury to himself,
afford the time necessary for a short expedition. Thus the
legions of Rome were supplied during its earlier wars. The season
during which the fields did not require the presence of the
cultivators sufficed for a short inroad and a battle. These
operations, too frequently interrupted to produce decisive
results, yet served to keep up among the people a degree of
discipline and courage which rendered them, not only secure, but
formidable. The archers and billmen of the middle ages, who, with
provisions for forty days at their backs, left the fields for the
camp, were troops of the same description.

But when commerce and manufactures begin to flourish a great
change takes place. The sedentary habits of the desk and the loom
render the exertions and hardships of war insupportable. The
business of traders and artisans requires their constant presence
and attention. In such a community there is little superfluous
time; but there is generally much superfluous money. Some members
of the society are, therefore, hired to relieve the rest from a
task inconsistent with their habits and engagements.

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