Part 17

More self-conscious a disciple of Machiavelli than Napoleon was our own Thomas Cromwell, who carried “The Prince” as his political enchiridion, and who within three years of its publication chopped off Sir Thomas More’s head as coolly as a knight captures a bishop on a chess-board. If you have to choose between love and fear, said the Master, then fear is the stronger weapon. With fear, Thomas the pupil hewed his way to the great ends he had set himself. Thomas Cromwell’s application of the system was, however, vitiated by one radical mistake. By a paradox, worthy of Machiavelli himself—and repeated in our own day by Bismarck—“the Prince” he worked for was not himself but his sovereign. Howsoever Thomas Crommay have appeared the true gerent, the final profit was to the suzerain, and the axe of despotism which he had forged for Henry VIII was turned against his own neck. Of his canon that traitors should be condemned unheard, he was the sole victim. Possibly he might have triumphed even over the flaw in his practice, had Anne of Cleves been more personable. It was essential to his game to queen this pawn, and queen her he did. But at what a cost! It has been said that if Cleopatra’s nose had been longer, the world’s history would have been other. Of the German princess’s nose it may be said that had it been prettier—or perchance had Holbein flattered it less before it was seen by the matrimonial agent—Thomas Cromwell would have continued to rule England, and Europe might have been spared the Thirty Years’ War. But even Supermen cannot change the shape of ladies’ noses, and in this surd of a world, where the best laid plans may “gang agley” over the tilt of a nostril, what avail your Supermen more than Supermice? The toasted cheese is but temporary, the end of Napoleon is the mouse-trap.

The phenomena of history are indeed too multifarious for consciousness, and the Machiavellian method of treating persons as things—in defiance of the moral maxim—shatters itself upon the impossibility of foreseeing all the permutations of the things. A bad prince is no more secure against assassination than a good prince. A religious reformer may arise and upset the snuggest peace. A failure of crops may precipitate rebellion. A child’s arm may plug up a dam. In brief, lacking the necessary omniscience, the shrewdest of Supermen is driving in the dark. The upshot of Napoleon’s career was to make Germany and mutilate France.

It is through lack of omniscience, too, that we cannot obey the frequent modern suggestion to breed the Superman—the Superman, that is, not as the cold-blooded manipulator of man, but as his moral superior and successor, Tennyson’s Superman, not Nietzsche’s. We are too abysmally ignorant for evolutionary eugenics. We breed horses and roses for higher types, but then we immeasurably transcend horses and roses. Who transcends us so immeasurably that he should breed us? In breeding we have a clear vision of our aim—to produce a thornless rose or a Derby winner. What clear vision has any one of the Superman? It is impossible to read even Nietzsche without seeing a spectral swarm of shifting types. Moreover we breed only for physical qualities. What experience have we of breeding for moral qualities? And what were all our breedings compared with Nature’s inexhaustible experimentation, her thousand million men and women of all shades and psychoses, her endless blendings and crossings that yield now Nietzsches, now Isaiahs; yesterday Platos, to-day Darwins and Wagners.

The Superman will come of himself: already man rises as imperceptibly into him as he fades into the orang-outang. “This was no man,” said Napoleon, reading the Sermon on the Mount—an involuntary admission by the Machiavellian of a finer species of Superman than his own.

And this brings us to the paradox that the defect in Machiavelli’s system was not in his morals but in his intellect. In the hive he examined were creatures greater than he, obeying motives beyond his ken. To him Princes ruled primarily for their own glory, for the pomp and pride of power. Of the small but infinitely important class of rulers who assume mastership only because they have the greatest power to serve, he has no adequate conception. That there has sometimes been a Pope who felt himself literally _servus servorum Dei_ passed his comprehension. This falsifies his treatment of history, this makes his vision imperfect, this throws his conclusions out of gear. The verse in St. Matthew, “he that is greatest among you shall be servant of all the rest,” represents a more scientific generalisation. As Chapman’s _Don Byron_ (Act 3, Scene 1) reminds us, in his denunciation of “the schools first founded in ingenious Italy,” the true

“Kings are not made by art But right of nature, nor by treachery propt But simple virtue.”

But Machiavelli, that crude biologist, treats Moses and Cyrus as creatures of the same species, would run together the Attilas and the Buddhas. Hence the hard metallic sheen of his style as of an old Latin prose-writer; of spiritual iridescence, of Jewish tenderness, of Christian yearning, of even the Nietzschean ecstasy there is no trace. It is not astonishing that he should have turned a scornful ear to Savonarola’s message, dismissed him as a compound of fraud and cunning. How dramatic is the picture of Mephisto listening to the preacher of San Marco that week of the Carnival of 1497! (What a pity “Romola” does not exploit that episode instead of using Machiavelli as a mere caustic conversationalist). But though Machiavelli’s flair for crouching Cæsars was not utterly at fault, though the Dominican did indeed aspire to be “The Prince” of the Church, and even the power behind the thrones of the Princes of Christendom, yet ’twas all _ad majorem Dei gloriam_ and for the greater confusion of the infidel, and George Eliot has understood this impersonal egotist infinitely better than his cynical contemporary understood him. And this intellectual limitation—this absence of the highest notes from his psychological gamut—must always keep Machiavelli out of the first rank of writers. He cannot rise above the notion that power is an end in itself and that those who can satisfy it “deserve praise rather than censure.” If the King of France—he tells us—was powerful enough to invade the kingdom of Naples, then he _ought_ to have done it. Though Machiavelli could see that the individual’s crimes “may lead to sovereignty but not to glory,” yet he did not question the right of a State to absorb or shatter another. He saw that the world went on

“The simple plan That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can,”

and he admitted that the rule was indispensable—if you went into politics. This was his crime—High Treason against Idealism. Humanity prefers to be guided by rules which it disavows. The splendid blonde beasts who practised the maxims of Machiavelli shuddered at the scribe who merely stated them. Nowhere probably was disgust with the Florentine writer more vehement than in Venice, which employed assassins as a principle of polity. Could that Turkish “Prince” who decreed that each new monarch of his house must safeguard the dynasty by massacring his swarm of brothers, or that Persian “Prince” who invented the principle of blinding them, have seen the printed “Prince” of Machiavelli, they with their correct Islamic or Zoroastrian principles would have shared in the universal opprobrium.

That the world shudders still is shown by the apologetic attitude of his commentators and even of his panegyrists. Not one but repudiates his system, charitably traces it to the unhappy circumstances of his day, to the welter of force and fraud amid which his lot was cast. Yet are these circumstances essentially changed? The small urban republics have vanished, but in their stead are the Great Powers. Cæsar Borgia and Ezzelino are gone, but we have the Congo Ruler and the Trust Magnate. “Every country hath its Machiavel,” says Sir Thomas Browne, and there is no spot on earth where the maxims of “The Prince” are not in daily operation. The voice may be the voice of Savonarola, but the hands are the hands of Machiavelli.

Nay, it is often the voice of Machiavelli even when it sounds like the voice of Savonarola. For, as Lord Acton subtly pointed out, Machiavellism lurks in many a seemingly innocent and even pious proposition. It is perhaps straining his point to find it in Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle,” but who shall doubt but that it is involved in the popular idea that “Time tries all,” and that everything happens for the best in the long run, and that history is, after all, the Will of God? What are all these nebulous notions but the acceptance of success—of the brute fact—as the moral standard? Less obvious than the proposition that “God is on the side of the biggest battalions,” they are substantially identical with it. They simply mean that God _was_ on the side of the biggest battalions. They imply that whichever party triumphed, God was with that party. So that many even of those who reject Machiavelli with loathing are found to be unconsciously Machiavellian.

Hallam in his “Introduction to the Literature of Europe” palliates the darker features of the Machiavellian teaching by the nature of the times, yet in his own “Europe during the Middle Ages,” writing of the rapid decay of Charlemagne’s Empire under his son Louis, “called by the Italians the Pious, and by the French the Debonair or Good-natured,” he says “the fault lay entirely in his heart; and this fault was nothing but a temper too soft and a conscience too strict. It is not wonderful that the Empire should have been speedily dissolved.” And Charlemagne, its peerless founder, is described as having divorced nine wives, beheaded four thousand Saxons in a single day, and executed all who ate flesh during Lent!

It is when I hear the words of Church or Press, Parliaments or Royal Proclamations, that I fall into a rage against language, and even as Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, I curse the man who invented speech. In the beautiful dumb days the strong rent the weak in sacred simplicity. Now the strong make pious speeches to show that the eupepsia of the universe is their appetite’s aim, and the weak must listen to proofs that they are being eaten for their own good. Happily the serpent no longer talks, else were his slow slimy deglutition of the living rabbit accompanied by a sermon. The State has not only killed Christ but stolen his words. At the Hague the lion and the lamb lie down together, and the concordial words flow on like music, till the lamb suggests that the lion should pare his claws. And the lamb himself—is he anything but a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is he not at heart envious of claws, always feeling his paws for talons of his own?

“And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them: thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” Where outside Machiavelli shall you find a clean strong sentence like this of Moses? The Destroying Angel’s sword shall be sharp and antiseptic as a surgeon’s knife; he shall leave no writhing torsoes, no half-sawn limbs and festering wounds littering the purlieus of life. But this utterance is too strong for Christian stomachs, it belongs to the fee-fo-fum eye-for-eye period of the Old Testament: with the New entered the reign of ethereal mildness, lilies showering from full hands, festal fountains spouting the milk of human kindness. Well might Wordsworth cry out:

“Earth is sick, And Heaven is weary, of the hollow words Which States and Kingdoms utter when they talk Of truth and justice.”

But even the Old Testament is comparatively sophisticated. This extinction of the native tribes of Palestine is enjoined, not on political grounds but on religious. It is not that Palestine, which offers the most convenient territory for the refugees from Egypt, happens unfortunately to be densely populated. No, virtue must be vindicated, not brute force. But one cannot too much admire that the Biblical historian chose the less nauseous of the two morals open to him. “Not for thy righteousness, or for the uprightness of thine heart, dost thou go to possess their land; but for the wickedness of these nations the Lord thy God doth drive them out from before thee.” By a remarkable exception in epics, Israel is the villain, not the hero, of his own story. But all the same, the story has to be coloured in the interests of righteousness. His successors in invasion have not been content to blacken the autochthones, they have brightened themselves. It is for their own uprightness that the Lord casts out the tribes before them or sets them to rule over the heathen. The Lord calls them to spread His word in countries closed to their commerce. He ordains they should bear the White Man’s burden—the Black Man’s ivory and gold are indeed no light weight. Pah! let us talk of politics like Machiavelli or forever hold our peace.

And yet something can be said for the world’s hypocrisy. It is the homage which the Relative pays to the Absolute, part of that yearning of mankind for indefectible ideals, for Luther’s “pearl of certainty.” Its Right must be Right in all circumstances under the stars, nay, before the stars were born. Ethics shall not be a child of conditions; what holds between man and man, must obtain equally between ruler and ruled, even between State and State. But what is to be done when ethics demands one thing and necessity the opposite? Necessity wins of course, but on condition of not blazoning its victory. The Church, forbidden to shed blood, exacts an expiation from its indispensable warriors, or gravely invents the bloodless stake for its heretics, or with an even more humorous preference of the letter to the spirit forbids its priests to practise surgery. The negro, enfranchised by the Quixotic theory of the American constitution, is disestablished by the Sancho Panzas who miscount his votes. The Jew, commanded to rid himself of leaven during Passover, sells his stock of groceries to an accommodating Christian till the Festival be over. The Christian, to whom money-lending is a sin against nature, hands over the necessary function to the accursèd Jew with the sanction of St. Thomas Aquinas, or founds the Monte di Pietà which Leo X permits to exact a fee on its loans to cover the cost of its officials. Ethics, like the old astronomy, complicates itself with the cycles and epicycles of practice, but the theory of the perfect circle of planetary motion remains immutable. In Lombardy, in Florence, under the very eye of the Pope, the industrial system of modern Europe founds itself on money-lending, but no Encyclical removes the prohibition or condones the sacrilege, or grants Christian burial to the impenitent financier. The irresistible force of facts comes into collision with the immovable body of principles, but the crash is soundless, and by a delicate instinct Society looks the other way. The immortal principle is buried silently—not a drum is heard, not a funeral note. For later generations its deadness is a matter of course.

Even so mankind founds its social systems upon beautiful ideals and averts its eyes from the rotten places of the fabric. It will concede almost anything to practice, if practice will only remain under the rose. This Social Conspiracy is sub-conscious. In war or in religion, in sex or even the smaller animal functions, it works towards a harmony of seeming, an artistic selection of the beautiful or the perfect with rejection of the ugly or the jarring. Is not this indeed our highest art, this art of civilisation, which, out of the raw stuff we are, fashions us into the figures of an heroic and poetic masque? Costumed in the skins of our fellow beasts or in the spoils of our vegetable contemporaries, our dames pranked in the web of a worm, we ruffle it in drawing-rooms as gods and spirits, no terrestrial weakness bewrayed. Our true superiority to the brutes is that we are artists, and they are naturals. Man _will_ not be a creature of Nature, as Coleridge noted. All the world’s a stage and all the men and women players, or—to say it in Greek—hypocrites. It is for bad manners that Machiavelli has been boycotted.

LUCREZIA BORGIA: OR THE MYTH OF HISTORY

I

It was with a thrill that I came upon a holograph of Lucrezia Borgia in the library of the University of Ferrara. I had already seen in a little glass case at Milan, in the Ambrosian library, a lock of her notorious yellow hair, and this wishy-washy tress, so below the flamboyance of its fame, should have prepared me for the Ferrara relic. For the document was—of all things in the world—a washing list! The lurid lady—the heroine of Donizetti’s opera, the Medea of Victor Hugo’s drama—checked, perhaps mended, her household linen! It has been sufficiently washed in public since her day. But this list alone should serve to cleanse her character. Indeed Pope Alexander’s daughter does not lack modern whitewashers—what ancient disrepute is safe from them? Roscoe, Gilbert and Gregorovius defend her, and even in her lifetime she had her circle of court laureates that included Ariosto himself. Her platonic friendship with Cardinal Bembo is rather in her favour. The copiously grey-bearded ecclesiast in cap and robe, whose portrait may be seen at Florence in the corridor between the Pitti and the Uffizi, does not look like a man who would consort with the legendary Lucrezia. Yet even a man of letters of Bembo’s status is liable to colour-blindness when the Scarlet Woman is a reigning duchess. Bembo, we know, was afraid to read the Epistles of St. Paul, for fear of contaminating his Latin; we are less certain that any fear of contaminating his character would keep him from reading the epistles of Lucrezia. But it seems fairest to accept the view that once freed by her third marriage from the vicious influences of the Vatican and the company of the Pope’s concubines, she became _rangée_, steadying herself into an admirable if pleasure-loving consort of the ruler of Ferrara! Nevertheless even in Ferrara rumour connected her with the murder of the poet Ercole Strozzi, and the guides used to count among their perquisites the blood-flecked wall of the Palace in which, by way of revenge for her extrusion from a respectable Venetian ball-room, she poisoned off at a supper-party eighteen noble Venetian youths, including a natural son of her own whom she poignarded in the frenzy of the discovery.

And Addington Symonds, even after the huge monograph of Gregorovius in her favour, can only exchange the idea of “a potent and malignant witch” for “a feeble woman soiled with sensual foulness from the cradle,” a woman who could look on complaisantly at orgies devised for her amusement, applauding even when Cesare chivied prisoners to death with arrows.

But it was reserved for the latest biographer of the Borgias (Frederick Baron Corvo) to write of her: “She was now the wife of royalty, with a near prospect of a throne, worshipped by the poor for her boundless and sympathetic charity, by the learned for her intelligence, by her kin for her loving loyalty, by her husband for her perfect wifehood and motherhood, by all for her transcendent beauty and her spotless name. Why it has pleased modern writers and painters to depict this pearl among women as a ‘poison-bearing mænad,’ a ‘veneficous Bacchante’ stained with revolting and unnatural turpitude, is one of those riddles to which there is no key.” As for there being no key to it, that is nonsense, for naturally Lucrezia Borgia would share in the opprobrium due to the pravity of Cesare Borgia and Pope Alexander VI, and Corvo himself claims that Gregorovius proves that these calumnious inventions came from the poisoned pens of her father’s enemies. This judgment of a reckless writer may however be discounted, for Corvo throughout defends that papal Antichrist, Lucrezia’s father, in a spirit which Machiavelli, to whom “virtù” and “magnanimità” meant efficiency whether for good or evil, could not possibly better. And he gaily announces in his preface that he does not write to whitewash the House of Borgia, “his present opinion being that all men are too vile for words to tell.” In such a darkness, in which all cats are grey, Lucrezia Borgia might well seem as white as a blue-eyed Persian. But the paradox remains that Corvo may not impossibly be right. As, but for superhuman strainings, Dreyfus might have gone down to history as a traitor to France, so may the Borgian Lucrezia have been as blameless as the Tarquinian to whom indeed Ariosto boldly compares her. The woman who protected the Jews during a famine, provided poor girls with dowries, passed evenings over her embroidery frame and held the esteem of the greatest poet and the greatest stylist of her day, may really have lived up to that washing list. _Chose jugée_ is never absolutely true in history, and there is no trial but is liable to revision. Even the saints are not safe; the devil’s advocate may always appeal. Sir Philip Sidney himself has been sadly toned down in his latest biography, and _per contra_ it may well be that Lucrezia Borgia has innocently shared in the blackness of the Borgias. But how shall we ever know? How is it possible—especially considering the public and private conspiracy of falsification and suppression—to uncover the truth even about our contemporaries? Our very housemates elude us. The simplest village happening is recounted by the onlookers in a dozen different ways; an historic episode varies according to the politics of the recording newspaper. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John recount their great story, each after his own fashion, so that even “gospel truth” is no synonym for objective veracity. Letters are taken as invaluable evidence in past history, yet every letter involves a personal relation between the writer and the receiver, is written in what the logicians in a narrower sense call “the universe of discourse,” so that words written to one man differ from the same words written to another man, and still more from the same words written to a woman. Facetiousness, exaggeration, under-statement, pet-words, words in special meanings, are the note of intimate intercourse. ’Tis a cipher to which nobody else has the key, and which can never be read by the chronicler. “Our virtuous and popular Gloster” might mean “our vicious and universally odious Gloster.” How shall the peering student of musty records behold the wink in the long-vanished eye of the writer, the smile on the skull of the reader? A frigid note may veil a burning love; a tropic outburst disguise a dying passion. Who has the clue to these things? And in the literature of an age the things that are understood are exactly the things that are not written down, and thus the things that are written down are the things that are not understood. What would we not give for a little realistic description of houses, clothes and furniture in the Bible! But such information only drifts into the text indirectly and by accident. Official documents are the bed-rock of history, yet even such formal things as birth-certificates are unreliable, for did not the wife of my dearest friend momentarily forget where her own baby was born? Suppose Peggy grows up a celebrity, an Academician or even a Prime Minister, what is to prevent her birth-plaque being affixed to the wrong house?