Force and necessity, not written promises and obligations, make princes keep faith (VIII. xxii. 198).
But most of his exposition is not added; it is welded. The narrative itself is made expository by a constant chain of cause and effect. It is clear both in its events and in their significance for policy. We learn at every turn not only what Florence did, but why; and we forecast the result. Stefano Porcari, lamenting the decay of the Church (VI. xxix. 101), is inspired by Petrarch’s “Spirto gentil.” The account of the conspiracy nipped by the Pope is rather a story plot than a story. Macchiavelli is content to suggest that it was operatic. He is not concerned to work out its story values; he is bent on its historical significance. The spectacles at the wedding of Lorenzo to Clarice (VII. xxi. 148) are not elaborated descriptively; they are summed up as indicative of the habit of the time. So is handled (VII. xxxiii. 162) Professor Cola Montano’s doctrinaire enthusiasm for republics and scorn of tyrants. His pupils find the issue in assassination. The splendid audience of the Pope (VIII. xxxvi. 218) to the ambassadors of Florence for reconciliation is at once description and argument. Thus the progress of the Istorie fiorentine is simultaneously of facts and of ideas. It is analyzed narrative.
Fused also is the style. Heightened for the orations (II. xxxiv; III. v, xi, xiii, xxiii; IV. xxi; V. viii, xi, xxi, xxiv; VI. xx; VII. xxiii; VIII. x), it is never decorated, never diffused, so ascetically conformed to its message as never to obtrude. This is not negatively the art that knows how to conceal itself, but positively the art that is devoted singly. True in the choice of words, it is expert in the telling emphasis of sentences. Its reasoned balances suffice without the empty iteration of English euphuism. They are played never for display, always for point. The Latin period, welcome to the habit of Macchiavelli’s mind, is rarely pushed to a conformity that would in the vernacular have seemed artificial. Macchiavelli’s sentences are in logic fifty years ahead of the French and the English; but they do not force his own vernacular.
Chapter IX
ESSAYS
1. DISCUSSIONS ON POLITICS AND SOCIETY
Two Italian books of the early sixteenth century became so famous as to be almost proverbial. Written about the same time, Macchiavelli’s Principe (1513) and Castiglione’s Cortegiano (1514) are complementary. Macchiavelli expounds princely policy in war and in the truces between wars; Castiglione leads princely leisure into culture. The policy and the culture are parts of the same Italian world; but the two books are in sharpest contrast. Macchiavelli’s facts are strictly analyzed; Castiglione’s are habitually idealized. Macchiavelli’s style is stripped and so fused with the message as to be inseparable; Castiglione’s is ample, manipulating the decorative diffuseness of its time and its setting to elegance. Macchiavelli’s economy is insistent, urgent; Castiglione’s is gracious, deliberate, suggestive, rising to oratory. Both men used their thorough control of Latin to shape their writing of Italian prose; but Macchiavelli was applying rather such compression as that of Tacitus, Castiglione the composition of Cicero.
It is Macchiavelli’s triumph that consideration of his doctrine has quite submerged his style.
I have not adorned nor distended this book with ample cadences, nor with precious or magnificent words or any other extrinsic charm or ornament, such as many are wont to use for descriptive decoration; for I have wished that nothing might win it praise, in other words that it should be acceptable only for the truth of its matter and the gravity of its subject (Dedication to Lorenzo).