It does not appear that Ariosto had the intention of writing a strictly epic poem. He had rejected the advice of Bembo, who wished him to compose his poem in Latin, the only language, in the opinion of the cardinal, worthy of a serious subject. Ariosto thought, perhaps, that an Italian poem should necessarily be light and sportive. He scorned the adopted rules of poetry, and proved himself sufficiently powerful to create new ones. His work may, indeed, be said to possess an unity of subject; the great struggle between the Christians and the Moors, which began with the invasion of France, and terminated with her deliverance. This was the subject which he had proposed to himself in his argument. The lives and adventures of his several heroes, contributed to this great action; and were so many subordinate episodes, which may be admitted in epic poetry, and which, in so long a work, cannot be considered as destroying the unity.
The poem of Ariosto is, therefore, only a fragment of the history of the knights of Charlemagne and their amours; and it has neither beginning nor end, further than any particular detached period may be said to possess them. This want of unity essentially injures the interest and the general impression which we ought to derive from the work. But the avidity with which all nations, and all ages, have read Ariosto, even when his story is despoiled of its poetic charms by translation, sufficiently proves that he had the art of giving to its individual parts an interest which it does not possess as a whole.
Machiavelli
From Ariosto we turn to his great contemporary, the illustrious secretary of the Florentine republic, Niccolo Machiavelli, a man of profound thought, and the most eloquent historian and most skilful politician that Italy has produced. But a distinction less enviable has attached his name to the infamous principles which he developed, though probably with good intentions, in his treatise, entitled Il Principe; and his name is, at the present day, allied to everything false and perfidious in politics.
Machiavelli was born at Florence, on the 3rd of May, 1469, of a family which had enjoyed the first offices in the republic. We are not acquainted with the history of his youth; but at the age of thirty he entered into public business as chancellor of the state, and from that time he was constantly employed in public affairs, and particularly in embassies. He was sent four times, by the republic, to the court of France; twice to the imperial court; and twice to that of Rome. Among his embassies to the smaller princes of Italy, the one of the longest duration was to Cæsar Borgia, whom he narrowly observed at the very important period when this illustrious villain was elevating himself by his crimes, and whose diabolical policy he had thus an opportunity of studying at leisure. In the midst of these grave occupations his satiric gaiety did not forsake him; and it was at this period that he composed his comedies, his novel of Belfagor, and some stanzas and sonnets which are not deficient in poetical merit. He had a considerable share in directing the councils of the republic as to arming and forming its militia; and he assumed more pride to himself from this advice, which liberated the state from the yoke of the Condottieri, than from the fame of his literary works. The influence to which he owed his elevation in the Florentine Republic was that of the free party which contested the power of the Medici and at that time held them in exile. When the latter were recalled in 1512 Machiavelli was deprived of all his employs and banished. He then entered into a conspiracy against the usurpers, which was discovered, and he was put to the torture, but without wresting from him, by extreme agonies, any confession which could impeach either himself or those who had confided in his honour. Leo X, on his elevation to the pontificate, restored him to liberty.
Machiavelli has not, in any of his writings, testified his resentment of the cruel treatment he experienced. He seems to have concealed it at the bottom of his heart; but we easily perceive that torture had not increased his love of princes, and that he took a pleasure in painting them as he had seen them, in a work in which he feigned to instruct them. It was, in fact, after having lost his employs that he wrote on history and politics, with that profound knowledge of the human heart which he had acquired in public life, and with the habit of unweaving, in all its intricacies, the political perfidies which then prevailed in Italy. He dedicated his treatise of the Principe, not to Lorenzo the Magnificent, but to Lorenzo, duke of Urbino, the proud usurper of the liberties of Florence, and of the estates of his benefactor, the former duke of Urbino, of the house of Rovere. Lorenzo thought himself profound when he was crafty, and energetic when he was cruel; and Machiavelli, in showing, in his treatise of the Principe, how an able usurper, who is not restrained by any moral principle, may consolidate his power, gave to the duke instructions conformable to his taste. The true object, however, of Machiavelli could not be to secure on his throne a tyrant whom he hated, and against whom he had conspired. Nor is it probable that he only proposed to himself to expose to the people the maxims of tyranny in order to render them odious; for an universal experience had, at that time, made them known throughout all Italy, and that diabolical policy which Machiavelli reduced to a system was, in the sixteenth century, that of all the states.
It was also at this period of his life that Machiavelli wrote his History of Florence, dedicated to Pope Clement VII, and in which he instructed the Italians in the art of uniting the eloquence of history with depth of reflection. He has attached himself, much less than his predecessors in the same line, to the narration of military events. But his work, as a history of popular passions and tumults, is a masterpiece. He was again employed in public affairs by the pope, and was charged with the direction of the fortifications, when death deprived his country of his further services, on the 22nd of June, 1527, three years before the termination of the Florentine Republic.[c]
FOOTNOTES
[20] [Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452; he lived till 1519, when he died in France at the court of Francis I.]
