A Manual of Italian Literature

by Francis Henry Cliffe

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.