MACHIAVELLI AND THE PROSE WRITERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
Niccolò Machiavelli, the profoundest thinker and the keenest politician of his century, was born in Florence on the third of May, 1469. In 1498 he was made Secretary of State of the Florentine Republic. But this dignity was the cause of his subsequent adversity. When the Medici family was restored to power in Florence, he was imprisoned, fined, and even put to the torture. He profited by an amnesty issued by Leo X on his accession, but he was relegated to poverty and obscurity. Impatient of both, he curried favour with the reigning dynasty, but such was the ill-luck that steadily pursued him through life, that no sooner had he acquired a certain degree of favour than the Medici were again expelled from Florence, and he, as one of their adherents, was regarded by the triumphant party with suspicion and hostility. He did not long survive the wreck of all his hopes, dying on the twenty-second of June, 1527.
In his generation, Italy had fallen on evil days. The invasion of Charles VIII of France opened the flood-gates of a deluge of disasters; and the devastations of the King were succeeded by the crushing despotism of the Emperor. The immense wealth, accumulated during centuries of prosperity, was rapidly melting away. The Republic of Venice lost much of her trade owing to the rivalry of Holland and Portugal, and the stream of commerce was directed from the Adriatic by the discovery of the new passage to India round the Cape of Good Hope. The reckless extravagance of Leo X exhausted the Papal Treasury; a great religious schism cut off abundant supplies from distant countries; and the terrible sack of Rome, with the ruinous ransom demanded from Clement VII, completed, in the year of Machiavelli's death, a long series of disasters. Freedom was crushed by native tyrants and foreign oppressors. The present was ghastly with innumerable wounds, the future looked blacker than the grave. What wonder was it, therefore, that men sought refuge from such horrors in every finesse that diplomacy could suggest? This is the true explanation and the one excuse of Machiavelli's tortuous policy. He is utterly unscrupulous, but it is the unscrupulousness of a patriot at bay who has exhausted all other means of self-defence.
Still, it cannot be denied that Machiavelli is anything but a sympathetic figure. We admire the keenness of his intellect as we admire the keenness of a sharp-edged sword; but where is the love of humanity, the enthusiasm for great ideals, the indignation of a noble mind at the iniquities of an evil age? Wonderful is the penetration of his remarks; unrivalled his insight; above praise the clearness and precision of his thoughts. No historian has ever surpassed him in unrolling a panorama of past events. No politician has ever laid down more sagacious rules for attaining an object in view. No statesman has ever discerned with a keener eye the symptoms of the times.
But if we ask what profit has been derived from the exertions of this most acute and logical of minds, what is the answer? His name has become a byeword as the symbol of a heartless intriguer, and his works glare like a meteor of evil in the dark and troubled sky of his century.
Great praise is due to his History of Florence. In the first book, with a concise lucidity which later historians have emulated without surpassing, he surveys the events of ten centuries, and that noble introduction is followed by a work which displays to the fullest advantage the great powers of its author.
The Discourses on the First Decade of Livy and The Art of War both treat of the same subject; the necessity of a freedom-loving nation to attain and preserve a high standard of military efficiency. The system of hiring venal condottieri had profoundly demoralised the forces of Italy, indeed, it had paved the way for the invasion of France and the dominion of Spain, and its effects were felt even to the middle of the present century, for no other explanation suffices to account for the submission of a nation with such a history as Italy to the oppression of foreign garrisons. So clear-sighted a patriot as Machiavelli could not fail to see the evil and to point out the remedy. His despatches and correspondence are also invaluable for the history of his times.
But the work pre-eminently associated with his name is the treatise, entitled Il Principe, a manual for a ruler who desires to keep an unsteady throne and to outwit unscrupulous enemies. He advocates, it is true, a policy regardless of all mercy and morality in the pursuit of its object; but injustice to Machiavelli, we must bear in mind what his object was. He had seen his country desolated for years by cruel and rapacious invaders, and he thought, most justly, that the only chance of Italy against her enemies was the establishment of the dominion of one powerful and politic prince over the whole Peninsula, and it was to establish a standard of conduct for such a prince that he wrote his book.
His story, Belphegor, and his plays, among which the Mandragora stands pre-eminent, are witty and lively, but they frequently overstep the limits of decorum. All his works are interspersed with innumerable proofs of the keenness of his observation, and the style is clear and forcible, but somewhat wanting in colour. He wrote a few poems, but they are of no great value or interest.
Machiavelli is as undoubtedly the first prose writer of the age as Ariosto is the first poet, Second to him as an historian, though at a wide interval, we may place his friend and fellow-townsman, Francesco Guicciardini, born in 1480, died in 1540. He studied law to such good purpose at Florence, Ferrara and Padua, that at the early age of twenty-two he was chosen to lecture on the Institutes of Justinian, and at the age of thirty-one he was sent as Ambassador to Ferdinand of Aragon, which post he occupied for two years. With the help of that King, Julius the Second forced the Florentines to submit again to the rule of the Medici family. Guicciardini was suspected by the friends of liberty of having a hand in the negotiations between the Pope and the King, and of being a tool of that ambitious dynasty. Such, in truth, he proved himself; and harshness, rancour, and vindictiveness characterised his conduct towards his political opponents. When Leo X visited Florence in 1515, Guicciardini was sent by the Republic to receive him at Cortona. No circumstance could have proved more favourable to the historian's career. Leo X looked upon him with the utmost favour, and nominated him to high and important offices, which his successor, Adrian VI, continued, and to which Clement VII subsequently added others. When the "Holy League," headed by the Duke of Urbino, was formed against the Emperor Charles V, Guicciardini was one of its leading spirits. But the Imperial arms prevailed; Clement VII had to take refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo, and had the agony of seeing Rome stormed and plundered under his very eyes. Atrocious were the cruelties committed. St. Peter's itself was stained with the blood of the slaughtered. Huge contributions were levied on the citizens, and an enormous ransom exacted from the Pope. Seeing Clement, himself a Medici, deprived of liberty and even in danger of his life, the Florentines took to arms and expelled the obnoxious dynasty. But the unexpected happened. The injured Pope and the tyrannical Emperor became reconciled; and probably to atone for the atrocities committed by his forces, Charles V lent effective aid to Alexander de Medici in his endeavour to regain his lost dominion over Florence. Guicciardini became the instrument of Alexander, a cruel and relentless tyrant, who was subsequently assassinated by his kinsman Lorenzino. Guicciardini was an active agent in the election of Cosimo I, and when he was reproached for imposing another tyrant on his country, he answered that the more princes were assassinated, the more would arise. But Cosimo was ungrateful when Guicciardini demanded the reward of his services; bitter disappointment was in store for him; he withdrew from public affairs, and lived in retirement at Arcetri, where he died.
It was in the leisure hours of this retirement that he wrote the history on which his literary reputation is founded. It embraces the period from the invasion of Charles VIII to the year 1532. It is a valuable and important work; but, as may be gathered from the details of his life, the author shows no elevation or purity of mind. His view of human nature is low; his estimate of his fellow-creatures harsh and cynical. But if the colours are unpleasing, the picture is valuable, and it would have been a great loss had it not been preserved for posterity.
Guicciardini is often heavy and prolix, and many ludicrous stories have been told of the sufferings of those readers who conscientiously plodded through the entire work. Thus it is related of the jocular Governor of a Province, that he promised a free pardon to a convict if he would read Guicciardini's History from the first page to the last. The prisoner gladly embraced this opportunity of regaining his liberty. He little knew the task that was imposed upon him. As he turned over page after page of the ponderous tomes, a deadly weariness overpowered him, until at last the endless details of the Siege of Pisa exhausted his patience. "Take me back to the galleys," he exclaimed. "Rather that than the misery of toiling through this awful book."
Agnolo Firenzuola was a good prose writer, out a very inferior poet; indeed, so great is the contrast between the two classes of his works, that it is difficult to believe that they can emanate from the same pen. The most striking of his works is a Dialogue on the Beauty of Women.
Pier Francesco Giambullari wrote a History of Europe from the accession of Charlemagne to the year 913. The history is unfinished, the author dying in 1555. He was one of the founders of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca. He has been highly praised for the dignity and finish of his style.
Vasari and Cellini are names renowned in the annals of Art, the former for his invaluable biographies of painters, and the latter as a sculptor and a worker in gold and bronze. His biography is a striking memorial of the man and the age.
Benedetto Varchi had many qualities of an able historian, but as he was in the pay of the Grand Duke Cosimo I, his independence may be more than suspected.
In contrast to him, Jacopo Nardi was a bitter opponent of the Medici family, and in his History of Florence from 1494 to 1531 he paints them in the blackest colours. So determined an adversary of the ruling dynasty could not be suffered to remain in Florence. He was driven into banishment, and took refuge in Venice, where he died after the middle of the Century. As a biographer he distinguished himself by his life of Antonio Giacomini.
The Sixteenth Century was fertile in historians, for we have to chronicle the name of another in Bernardo Segni. He wrote the History of Italy from 1527 to 1555, or three years before his death. Dealing with contemporary events, he could not treat his subject with the requisite independence, and living a quiet and studious life, it is difficult to see how he could gather reliable information, or have access to important documents.
Vincenzo Borghini was a laborious antiquarian, who wrote a book on the Origin of the City of Florence.
Giambattista Adriani professed to continue Guicciardini's work in his History of his Own Times, but it is complete in itself, and has many merits, both of style and subject. Adriani was celebrated in his day as a public speaker, and his Latin Orations were so much admired that they were translated into Italian as soon as they were held. He died in 1579.
Camillo Porzio who survived until 1603, wrote several historical monographs concerning the Kingdom of Naples.
Skilful as they were in all the arts of composition, the writers of the Sixteenth Century too frequently indulged in redundant prolixity. Conscious of this defect, Bernardo Davanzati determined to cultivate the opposite quality of laconic conciseness. He was brilliantly successful. He translated Tacitus, that great model of brevity, and boasted that his rendering contained fewer words than the original without sacrificing a particle of the sense. He wrote a book on the Reformation in England, a Funeral Oration on Cosimo I, and several treatises on finance and agriculture.
In reviewing the writers of this Epoch, we are struck with the number and merit of the historians. The other Prose Writers appeal but faintly to modern readers. With the exception of Baldassare Castiglione, who, in his Cortegiano gives us a pleasing picture of the more refined circles of Italian society, and of Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini, they do not disclose much of the manners and customs of their age. No Boccaccio arose to portray for future times the men and women of his day.
The stories of Bandello and of Luigi Da Porto have but little to recommend them except the fact that they supplied Shakespeare with some of his plots. Bandello, however, is by no means destitute of vivacity. Straparola, the author of Tredici Piacevoli Notti, and Fiorentini, the author of Il Pecorone, also had the honour of furnishing hints to the great dramatist. Too often it happens that the extreme prolixity of the writers of the Sixteenth Century drowns their thoughts in an ocean of words. It is strange that the great convulsion of the Reformation did not produce any theological work written in the Italian language. The controversies were all carried on in Latin, but even in Latin nothing was produced in the Peninsula that is now remembered. Indeed, the great Catholic reaction had the effect of making writers fearful of giving offence. It restricted them more and more within academic grooves, thus unhappily fostering that tendency to conventionality and unreality which immersed Italian literature deeper and deeper into a morass of mediocrity.