’Tis true Comte suggested that astrology was, likewise, an attempt to reduce to law the chaos of human phenomena, but the remark is over-ingenious. Where there is no rational connection between causes and effects there is no science. The planetary conjuncture one was born under might, indeed, not impossibly affect temperament or internal destiny, just as the climate one was born under, but the notion that it could shape external destiny belongs to the mediæval megalomania. Galileo’s discovery of new stars must have shaken it, falsifying as it did all previous horoscopes—indeed, Sir Henry Wotton, our ambassador to Venice, was more impressed by Galileo’s injuriousness to astrology than to theology. “For the virtue of these new planets must needs vary the judicial part, and why may there not yet be more?” But Machiavelli belongs to the pre-telescope period; he wrote a whole century before Galileo, and thirty years ere Copernicus unsettled the ancient heavens by his Nuremberg treatise. True, even in the twelfth century, Maimonides had denounced astrology as “a disease, not a science,” and the great Jew’s letter “to the Men of Marseilles” had evoked papal applause. But not even Popes could arrest the disease. A century before Machiavelli was born Petrarch poured scorn on the astrologers. But the mockeries of this pioneer of humanism did not save a prince of the Renaissance like Lodovico from employing an astrologer advisory, under whose calculations he went from disaster to disaster. There were even Professors of Astrology at the Universities. Bodin, the next great political philosopher after Machiavelli, though half a century later, still dallies with astrology, still coquets with the theory of a connection between the planetary motions and the world’s history, while Copernicus he regards as a fantast unworthy of serious refutation.
Earlier in the sixteenth century Luther had denounced astrology as “framed by the devil,” and in his Table Talk had challenged the astrologers to answer him why Esau and Jacob, who were “born together of one father and one mother, at one time and under equal planets” were yet “wholly of contrary natures, kinds and morals.” Nevertheless in the next century, Milton in “Paradise Regained” makes Satan predict truly to Jesus on the strength of
“What the stars,
Voluminous or single characters,
In their conjunction met,”
give him to spell, and throughout the whole seventeenth century, as “Guy Mannering” reminds us, nativities continued to be cast. The child’s horoscope in some parts of Europe hung side by side with his baptismal certificate. Even to-day such phrases as “Thank your lucky stars,” conserve a shadow of the ancient belief, and the sidereal influence survives even more subtly in the word “consider.” Through such banks of fog pierces the searchlight of the great Florentine, it turns its powerful beam even upon Church history. The Princes of ecclesiastical principalities, he remarks drily, are the only ones who can possess States and subjects without governing and defending them, but it would be presumptuous in him to discuss these matters, as they are under the superintendence and direction of an Almighty Being, whose dispensations are beyond our weak understandings. But the Church has likewise attained temporal power, and here Mephisto may intrude without blasphemy. Secular triumphs demand secular explanations. One is reminded of the dialogue on Julius II attributed to Erasmus. Our Mephisto notes grimly that no prophet has ever succeeded unless backed by an armed force. Hence the collapse of “brother Jerome Savonarola when the multitude ceased to have faith in him.” In short, in the making of history Might and Right are partners.
Not in the exposition of this commonplace lay Machiavelli’s offensiveness for his contemporaries. Had he remained the passionless observer of the pitiful human breed, the explicator of the tangled threads of history, he would have been acclaimed as a moralist, unveiling with ruthless hand the hypocrisies of princes. What changed angel to devil was that instead of fulminating against the partnership of Might and Right, he found that only by this firm could history be made. He wrote not science but art—the ars usurpandi. Not only had the Princes of the past combined Might with Right, guile with goodness, but whoso wished now to be a Prince must needs go and do likewise. The ethics springing from the social relations of citizen to citizen no longer holds in the relation of ruler to subjects.
It is true “The Prince” might also be regarded as an elaborate Swiftian irony—a negative Pulcinellian advice to those about to usurp—an exposition of Princedom as the service of the devil. “A New Prince cannot with impunity exercise all the virtues, because his own self-preservation will often compel him to violate the laws of charity, religion and humanity.” But this Swiftian supposition does not tally with the dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and his overt encouragement to the Most Magnificent to seize the reins. Machiavelli plainly believes in the sense he alleges hidden by the ancients in the myth of Chiron the Centaur, who was the educator of rulers because he had the double qualification of the brute and the man. In high politics crimes are only crimes when they are blunders. Unsuccessful cruelty is unpardonable. Wickedness should be pursued with an economy of means to end: like the causes in Occam’s canon, crimes should not be multiplied præter necessitatem. Politics is a sort of bee-keeping, and the master of the hive will use the instincts and ethics of the little creatures for his own purposes, his kindness will be as cold-blooded as his cruelty. Thus, some three and a half centuries before Nietzsche, was expounded the doctrine of the Superman, the splendid blonde beast who had passed Jenseits von Gut und Böse. “The despised virtues of patience and humility have abased the spirits of men, which Pagan principles exalted.” It is in such precisely Nietzschean terms that Sir Thomas Browne sums up, albeit unapplausively, “the judgment of Machiavel.” But as a treatise on apiculture, “The Prince” is not rigidly scientific. The Superman, alone upon his dizzy height, Diabolists and neo-Dionysians as yet unborn to cheer him, has his moments of human weakness. Before the crimes of Agathocles he falters, and remarks with delicious gravity, “Still it must not be called virtue to murder one’s fellow-citizens or to sacrifice one’s friends, or be insensible to the voice of faith, pity or religion. These qualities may lead to sovereignty but not to glory.” And there is a more general apologia in the concession that the times are out of joint—in the grim Tacitean explanation that “he who deviates from the common course of practice, and endeavours to act as duty dictates, necessarily ensures his own destruction.” Super-morality lapses here into morality.
Moreover, Machiavelli did not himself play the Superman. He wrote the part—or founded it on Cæsar Borgia—but he did not act it. The Rubicon ’twixt thought and action he never crossed. His own morals appear to have been conventionally excellent. Like Helvetius, who traced virtue to the lowest roots of self-interest, he was of a rare magnanimity. As a scientific observer he advises the Tyrant, if he cannot live in the Republic he has conquered, to destroy it root and branch, but as a man he bore torture and imprisonment for the cause of liberty. Indeed, in his later years something of the sæva indignatio of Swift seems to have possessed his breast. It was Napoleon who was destined to incarnate the maxims of Machiavelli, though on a far grander stage than even Cæsar Borgia ever dreamed of: it was Napoleon who gave the greatest performance of “The Prince.” And by a hitherto unnoted coincidence Napoleon was born exactly three centuries after Machiavelli. Exactly three hundred years (1469-1769) divided the nativities of the Superman of Letters and the Superman of Action—’tis almost enough to revive faith in the potency of planetary conjunctures. True, Nietzsche regards Napoleon as but “half-Superman,” the other half being beast, but we have seen that the bestial portion is a necessary factor of the Machiavellian Superman, who is nothing if not super-dominant. What Nietzsche’s Superman was to be, Nietzsche did not precisely know, though we may well suspect that the direction in which he strained his vision for him was not the horizon but the looking glass. Nietzsche has not even the credit of inventing the Superman, for when Nietzsche was six years old, Tennyson published “In Memoriam,” with its prophetic peroration:
“A closer link