Art. 4.-MACHIAVELLI AND THE PRESENT TIME.

WHEN Robert Mohl published, some sixty years ago, his admirable 'History of Political Literature,' the bibliography of comment upon Machiavelli was already ample enough to occupy therein some ninety pages; and the succeeding period has shown no diminution in volume. The paradox embodied by the great Italian has, indeed, been made far more intelligible to-day by the labours of subsequent historians; though the issues he raised are no more susceptible of a final solution than they were in his own time. For the relation of ethics to politics is not a simple problem capable of definition without regard to time and space. It involves an attitude to fundamental questions-the meaning of historic experience, the nature of man, the purpose of the State. These will present themselves differently to thinkers according to the conditions they confront. For political philosophy is, by its very nature, pragmatic. Its practitioners do not sit down to write a treatise as dispassionate and universal as an exposition of geometry. In a real sense, what they attempt is autobiography, the reaction upon themselves of a special environment individually interpreted. After all, what we call the great political thinkers are only those whose reactions have been most coincident with the eternal experience of mankind.

No thinker has so suffered at the hands of his interpreters as Machiavelli. Most generally, it has been assumed that he made a Moloch of success; and, regardless either of his assumptions or of his environment, such critics have set themselves to show that, despite him, honesty can be made to pay. Or it has been urged that he was a great satirist, and that his book is a veiled attack, the more keenly made because of its disguise, upon the methods of the Italian tyrant; by revealing, it is said, the logic of remorseless tyranny, Machiavelli demonstrated its final wickedness. Or, once more, it has been argued that the doctrines he seemed to preach are, in fact, the simple truth about human nature in politics; and we are bidden, as Catherine de' Medici is said to have enjoined upon her children, to

instruct ourselves by reading surtout des traictz de cet athée Machiavel. Another school prefers the theory of Machiavelli the patriot; and we are then urged to regard him as the far-sighted precursor of Mazzini and Cavour. Two things, at least, are certain. To understand Machiavelli we must regard him essentially as an Italian of the 16th century; and, further, we must read the 'Prince,' not as a summary of his creed, but as a fragment of a larger whole, of which, for instance, the far more profound Discourses' are at least of equal significance. In this ample context, there emerges a Machiavelli essentially human, even if less simple than most critics would make him. The complexity is important; for Machiavelli was a great man, and, save in the sphere of religion, great men have rarely the character of simplicity.

Machiavelli, indeed, is peculiarly unintelligible save in the context of the feverish and decadent brilliance of Italy at the end of the 15th century. A man of ambition, an ardent lover of his country, bitten, like most of that hard-living and passionate generation, with the hunger for power and fame, he differs mainly from the mass of his contemporaries in his capacity to digest the experience he encountered. Nor must we fail to emphasise the degree in which he was of his age. Like it, he sought to specialise in universality. The diplomat is the administrator; the historian is also the strategist; the political philosopher wrote poetry which, without distinction, is at least not contemptible, and one comedy which competent judges have declared at least equal to Goldoni and hardly inferior to the best of Congreve.

To exhaust the potentialities of human nature, to dare all by experiencing all, was the keynote of the time. A new world had come into being. The old landmarks had been swept away; religion had ceased, at least for ambitious men, to be a canon of conduct, and had become an instrument of control. Birth counted less than capacity as the avenue to position. Status had vanished before the subtle brain and the iron will of the new men. Careers like those of the Medici and the Sforza had shown the immense opportunities laid open to men careless of tradition and willing to make all things new. This febrile spaciousness was true not

merely of Italy alone. Machiavelli saw it there, indeed, at its most intense degree; but he might have experienced it also in Spain and France, in Germany and England. Few statesmen of the 16th century, pope or emperor, Secretary of State or Reformation leader, but accounted means little in comparison with mighty ends. What Machiavelli did was to write with dexterity especially skilful the philosophy of the experience he had known and felt more intimately than most. The men whom he had intimately known were the Iagos and Othellos, the Macbeths and Iachimos of life; it is not then astonishing that his conclusions should have been built upon his sense of their habits as these worked in the environment most suited to their expression. To the hunter who sets out for the jungle, it is useless to offer a text-book on the ways of the domestic animal.

Machiavelli, in fact, wrote a grammar of power for the use of 16th-century Italy. Building upon the world about him, he explained, with a pungency and incisiveness which only Bacon and Hobbes can claim to equal, the way in which alone, as he knew contemporary Italy, the State could be made strong and enduring. He did not inquire whether it was right to attain position in that way; nor did he suggest that other and better ways did not exist. He sought, the evidence seems to show, two essential things: first, the rules which govern the individual's ability to realise his will in a world where such realisation was, without regard to its moral substance, the highest ambition recognised by men; and, second, how, in a world of fraud and force and passion, to keep what one has gained. He made entire abstraction of moral argument for obvious reasons. In the world about him, in any case, they had no place; and, moreover, by making power the highest good, he was a priori, ruling out the discussion of moral argument in the accepted sense of the term. He asked himself how, in a world where Cesare Borgia could be ardently admired, the rules which govern the attainment of power are to be formulated; and he set them down as he found them.

Let it be added that there is evidence and to spare that Machiavelli was alive to the extraordinary nature of the conditions he was discussing. The Prince' is not a code of conduct for every-day life; it is a text-book

for the house of Medici set out in the terms their own history would make them appreciate and, so set out, that its author might hope for their realisation of his insight into the business of government. Like every heart-sick exile, Machiavelli sought the terms of compromise with the power by which he had been defeated. No one, indeed, can seriously read the Prince' without seeing that, for Machiavelli himself, it was partial, and incomplete as an expression of his total outlook. It is the essay of an advocate who will not, of set purpose, go beyond the facts of his brief. The Medici seek to know how they may perpetuate their power. The 'Prince' is at once an effort to enlighten them and a self-contributed testimonial to its author's quality.

But it must be read in the context of the 'Discourses'; and it then becomes obvious how much a livre de circonstance it is. For if the 'Discourses' have any lessons, they teach the nobility of republican Rome, the worth of democracy, the viciousness of Cæsarism. No ruler, says Machiavelli, can ever hope for safety, save as he builds upon the favour of the people. Popular affection is stronger than fortresses-it is always an evil thing to destroy a free government. It is bad not to provide against extra-legal action by constitutional forms. It is never virtuous to betray one's friends or to kill one's fellow-citizens. A people is always more grateful and less avaricious than a prince. Power is poisonous only where it is usurped; for where it is given by the free suffrage of a commonwealth it is rarely exercised without responsibility. Most of the evils from which a people suffers are traceable to faults in its governors. Treaties enforced by the sword lack that consent which is the essence of obligation. These are not the maxims of Machiavellianism as that term is usually understood. And they enforce the point that, at heart, Machiavelli was always loyal to the Florentine Republic as to that greater Italy beyond of which he permitted himself to dream. Utopia is inscribed upon his map; and for all the brave show of Realpolitik' we catch his glance straying with a sense of longing in its direction.

Behind all this, doubtless, there is a low view of men, and a firm disbelief in the idea, or even possibility of progress. For Machiavelli, history shows no eternal

laws; its events are the outcome of capricious fortune, and change occurs as the relentless men bend institutions to their will. The lesson, then, is clear. If you would be master of your fate, you must not shrink from what the events demand. Choose kindness, charity, justice, if in them are the seeds of success. But show, above all, resolution, the inflexible determination which makes obstacles opportunities, the hypocrisy of the fox, and the courage of the lion. These are the qualities that bring the leader to his goal. For when Machiavelli emphasises the evil nature of men, when, too, he insists upon the cyclic character of history, what he has in mind is that those who are destined to lead in politics are, for the most part, evil men, driven by their fate to seek authority. It is the pervasive atmosphere of all he wrote that government, even at its best, is a grim business. He seems to add that, grim as it is, government there must be; and he sought to depict, within the range of his special experience, the conditions of its maintenance in the sort of world amidst which he moved.

It would be easy to show that Machiavelli's underlying assumptions about men are as unwarranted and inadequate as those Rousseau made in an opposite direction. Theories which build upon the over-simple faith that men are either wholly good or wholly bad are bound to result in a distorted political philosophy. The facts are more complex; and it is only as we take account of their formidable intricacy that we are likely to arrive at adequate canons of conduct. All that Machiavelli said is doubtless true of a world composed wholly of men such as those he chiefly knew; and, amid kindred historic surroundings, his insistence that means will count as little in comparison with ends has been verified again and again in the subsequent generations. But any reader of his book will be convinced that, its over-simple psychology apart, it has two great flaws from which permanent error was bound to result.

It fails, in the first place, to relate effect to cause. By its exaltation of Fortune as the master-clue to historic change, it abandons altogether the prospect of Vol. 249.-No. 493,

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