CHAPTER II

HUMANISM AND RENAISSANCE SHAPING THE HISTORICAL MIND OF ITALY

The spirit of Humanism—the veneration for antiquity which animated it—was quite obviously different in Italy from what it was elsewhere. That the difference consisted in the closer affinity of the scholars to the world they studied is obvious also. No greater proof is needed than the difference between the architecture of the twelfth, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Western Europe and in Italy. Art, as conceived by modern æsthetics, is that degree of mind, the function of which is neither theoretical nor practical, but consists in expressing through intuition the whole life of the mind. We can, therefore, rightly appeal to art as the most faithful witness to the spirit that animates an epoch. Ample documents illustrating the difference between the spirit of Humanism in France and in Italy can be found in the works of Emile Mâle on the Gothic art of France, and in any illustrated book of Italian mediæval Art, such as the small but excellent album of Ojetti.

Romanic architecture flourished in both countries between the eighth and twelfth centuries, and its monuments in France, such as St. Sernin of Toulouse, leave no doubt as to the debt of the country to its Roman conquerors. Even at that time, when the South of France had not yet altogether lost its traditions as the Roman Province, we can see new tendencies at work. In Italy, the contemporary buildings, pieced together with fragments of ancient columns, capitals, architraves, employed as simple building material, point to the more intimate co-existence in Italy of the old and new elements. It is sufficient to recall two churches of the ninth century in Rome, St. Maria _in Domnica_ and St. Prassede, both following the model of the great Constantinian Basilicas. While their architecture is inspired by the classic age of Christian art, and the materials are stolen from Pagan monuments, their mosaics evince a healthy realism that asserts the living tradition of local art, despite the obvious and predominant influence of the East. But this persistence of Roman influences does not exclude those of the North; Carolingian art greatly influenced Italy, especially in certain forms of decorative work. The golden altar of St. Ambrogio in Milan, the canopy above it, and some of the stuccoes at Cividale, prove the force of these influences in districts ethnically and historically favourable to their reception.

By the eleventh century feudal society had either lost or assimilated the pre-Christian elements, legacy of the ancient world, which at first had cemented together the various racial tendencies extant in Europe at the close of the Roman Empire, thereby preparing the way for new thoughts and ways of living. The Northern world had fully realised a new social order, developing a new spiritual life and consequently a new art to express it. Although this art contains numerous and important classical and Eastern elements its originality is manifest. We are confronted with a new world with its own idealistic and naturalistic tendencies. The boldness of the architecture, together with the minute rendering of nature in the decoration testify to that union of abstract speculation and close study of reality that will characterise all the subsequent developments of Northern thought. Mâle has clearly shown how the artists have drawn upon all the theology, the philosophy and the literature of the age to express at the same time both the highest spiritual and the plainest practical life.

Italian architecture of the same period, following more faithfully the old tradition, stands in great contrast to this originality. St. Ambrogio in Milan is an excellent example of this traditional growth of Italian art in the days that witnessed the full development of communal liberty. Very different from the Constantinian Basilica, even as the Commune was not the exact counterpart of the Roman _Municipium_, its heavy structure, so eloquent in its massiveness, must have appealed to its middle-class builders. In other Lombard churches we meet with the same attempt to create a new style with classical elements. In seeking to harmonise traditional disposition with the new needs, they tried to avoid the extreme novelties of the North, too alien to the Roman well-balanced and unlyrical mentality. The style of such buildings is present to every mind and reveals better than any description the unbroken descent from Imperial Rome. Indeed, from Lombardy to Sicily, from Venice to Genoa, various are the styles flourishing in the Peninsula; yet it is easy to detect everywhere strong traces of such descent. The Baptistery of Florence is a very good instance of this traditionalism and recalls faithfully that of the Lateran of the time of Constantine. In entering San Miniato in Florence, where the fanciful details of the decoration follow and are subordinate to the severely classical architecture, we almost feel on the threshold of the Renaissance, although still in the eleventh century. In the monuments of Pisa, Lucca and Pistoia we find the same classical qualities in the architectural scheme, united to the more poetic fancies displayed in the decoration. There is thus a conscious dependence on antiquity in the main architectural features, together with the utmost readiness to accept foreign accessories. St. Mark’s in Venice displays, even as the history of the amphibious Republic, all the sumptuousness of the East, but even in such an exotic scheme the architecture still relies on Imperial Rome, which had itself absorbed many Eastern elements. Torcello, Trieste, Murano, show as clearly as the Lombard communes the slow process of evolution that was to lead to the Renaissance. Byzantine elements are not as alien as Gothic to Roman tradition. The contemporary jurists had shown the great contribution of Byzantium to the development of Roman law, and Byzantine motives were assimilated more easily than those from the North.

The Roman legions had brought the great expanses of the North into the orbit of history, but though they left deep and undying traces behind them, they were unable to destroy the virile qualities of the Northern races. So when Christianity brought a new intuition of life to the Western world it developed locally according to the tendencies of the various nations. The result was bound to be more original where men were less influenced by the old Pagan culture and further from the mentality that had produced it, among peoples who “_a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt_.” Even though their growth was to be slower in some respects, such as the cultural, such peoples were bound to absorb more completely the full import of the new faith and thus produce a thoroughly original civilisation. It was, therefore, necessary in order to glorify the new religion to produce an art as novel as the civilisation which inspired it. In contrast to this affirmation of an entirely new mentality Italy was influenced by the Roman traditions that weighed upon her; they stimulated a premature efflorescence that exhausted her virility for centuries. Her people were not forced to elaborate afresh all the elements of life; the Church had preserved for them the framework of Roman life and law. Thus the energy expanded in France and in England in working out a radically new society and civilisation, in Italy drifted partly into adapting the old formulas to the new necessities and partly into acquiring a deeper consciousness of the intimate relations with the past.

In all the struggles from the twelfth to the fifteenth century with the Empire and with the Church, the Italians invariably appealed to the traditions of Ancient Rome; and their appeal was not to a remote civilisation, but to a living tradition of their own, opposed to the feudal institutions of the barbarians. At the time of the Communes this attitude is particularly striking. The peasantry had taken shelter from feudal oppression in towns protected by the authority of a bishop, and there with the developments of commerce they grew in wealth and political power. We thus find a new social class, the burgher, that contributed immensely to the growing importance of the cities. These strong practical men were distinguished by that common sense and pride that to-day distinguishes the sturdy and self-assertive Fascists. Having established their institutions, they considered them a living part of their own persons, and brought into political life their sense of personal dignity and the energy of the mediæval Christian, ready to die for the ideas represented by his Corporation, even as the Fascist is ready to die for his symbolic Black Shirt.

The Communes, in spite of their novelty, perhaps indeed in consequence of the novelty of their self-assertion, were responsible for one of the strongest historical bonds with the past. For in their opposition to the feudal rights acknowledged by mediæval law, they appealed to Roman jurisprudence in order to prove the legal grounds of their liberties. They instinctively conformed to the past, creating forms of government rich in future possibilities, and such conformity was not, according to Professor Reggio, a mere question of high-sounding names. The Communes reproduced of the actual and essential features of the City-State, all those that could be revived. Their classicism was by no means artificial, it was intimately felt as the surest means of destroying feudalism, at that time the most assertive form of individualism. Even the present Fascist appeal to Rome is far from being mere rhetoric; Rome is considered the one force antagonistic to that anti-historical mentality due to illuminism, that has given rise to abstract demagogy and individualism.

The burghers, backed by the recently liberated peasantry, formed the strength of the Commune, and upheld the memories of Roman municipal organisation against the prevalently Germanic nobility. The Government of the Communes consisted of a college of Rectors with an Assembly of Elders, very much like the Senate of old, with various dependent _clientele_ that recall the _gentes_; the heads of the various Guilds were called Consuls and took command of their men in any emergency. Their defence of civic liberties was essentially the defence of freedom to attend to their trades and occupations. Here again they anticipated Mussolini. What matters to the Commonweal is not the individual but the interest he represents. They considered that this freedom of work was incompatible with the dependence of the Commune on any superior temporal authority. This was so deeply felt that the city was placed under the protection of a Patron Saint, who, according to Ercole Reggio, was not unlike the eponymous Hero of an ancient city.

In attempting to justify these forms of political and professional life the citizens of the Commune came still more to consider themselves the lawful descendants of the Romans. Studies of Roman Law were pursued with as much zeal and vigour as any other form of practical or religious life. As long as Pisa, Milan, Cremona, Pavia, preserved their municipal liberties their whole life was imbued with a strong sense of classicism which expressed itself both in the intensified study of Roman Law, as Professor Solmi has clearly pointed out, and in the art of Niccolò Pisano. Such Roman and classical qualities were to disappear when the towns lost their municipal autonomy, only to reappear at the present day in the idealism of Gentile, whose _Filosofia del Diritto_ is as much impressed by the seal of their realism as it is influenced by the thought of Hegel. They reappear in the Reform of the Italian Constitution, tending to substitute actual interest as the dynamic basis of the State in the place of the static and naturalistic foundation it has had up till now. They reappear above all in Mussolini, who told the author he did not wish that a theoretical legislation should regulate or rather paralyse the development of the new corporations, but that, following the example of the Romans, he wished the legislation to grow out of the minutes of every single case submitted to the Corporation Court. Before they disappeared they had pervaded all Italian life to such a degree that scholars could say _we_ in talking of the ancient Romans, and consider Latin as their own language. Ricordano Malespini says that Frederick II spoke “_la nostra lingua latina e il nostro volgare_.” They had two national languages, Latin and the vernacular, the latter itself a degenerate offspring of Latin, known as the “_romano rustico_,” to which could be traced all the various dialects in spite of their local corruptions. The Communes had also a great influence on the formation of the Italian language, and this influence tended to unification not to differentiation, as many historians have taken for granted in consequence of their political individualism.

Francesco de Sanctis says that intellectual culture necessarily stimulates new ideas, far superior to the material necessities of man, and thereby calls into existence a more educated and refined class of citizens, putting it in communication with foreign intellectual life. The ultimate consequence is a closer connection of languages that develops not their local, but their common elements. According to him the first effects of renewed Italian intellectual life were both to restore the purity of Latin and favour the formation of the vernacular. Thus we see how the classical revival started at the very moment when the new Italian consciousness should have been born. This revival was aided by the establishment of great international centres such as the Court of Palermo at first, and later the cities of Tuscany and Lombardy. As the studies of Latin improved, the local dialects became purer and more refined. The weakness of the contemporary writers for rhetoric, for verbosity, their exaggerated love for the mere word, to which they attributed an almost religious value, seems very often the naïve pleasure of reasserting a family claim on a cherished property.

Both Guelphs and Ghibellines are followers of Rome, the former, as we have seen, finding in Roman Law the legality of their municipal institutions, the latter appealing to the traditions of Imperial Rome to justify the sovereign rights of Cæsar. The whole public life assumes a religious character as in all constructive periods of history and as is the case in Italy to-day, where the previous lack of seriousness has been considered by the greatest thinkers to have been the product of religious scepticism. At that time the object of the common veneration, the one universal feeling of the most factious of peoples in the most factious period of its history was the cult of Rome. And as Religion played such an immense part in their whole life, the Italians were obliged to christianise Rome and associate it with Christian idealism. For Dante, Christ, and Rome dominate the history of a thousand years. He views history as a vast moral and religious evolution, as an indissoluble whole, each portion of which converges irresistibly to its pre-ordained end. The Birth of Our Lord at the moment when Cæsar Augustus ordained that all the world should be taxed testified to God’s approval of the Empire. Christ, in submitting His Godhead to the judgment of a Roman magistrate, gave Divine sanction to Roman Law. Dante does not consider the miraculous origin of the Seven-Hilled City as the only proof of the privileges it holds from God, nor does he ascribe to it the more important favour of a special historical process. Rome for Dante is equivalent to Catholicity, to conformity to the plans of the Divine Providence, and the history of Rome raises the Roman State almost to Divine rank. Guelphs and Ghibellines find in the Roman Jurists and the Roman Legions arguments in support of their opposite claims, and when the advent of the _Signorie_ involved them in a common downfall, the consciousness of an unbroken descent from Rome could never after be erased from Italian mentality.

The influence of Rome on all the mediæval institutions of Italy is obvious to anyone familiar with the period. But the Italians, at the dawn of modern history, were led by this unbroken tradition of Rome into a habit of going to Roman history and law for a solution of contemporary problems, and this, while it secured their supremacy in the field of jurisprudence, kept their mentality from developing on original and modern lines. Even when Italy seemed almost to have withdrawn from all competition in theoretical research, her jurists and historians stood out to proclaim the immortality of the national genius. The intimate relations of the past with the present could never be lost sight of by people who found in the political and legal activities of ancient Rome the principles from which arose their chief political idea, the dignity of man as a citizen. They overlooked the fact that such wonderful citizenship had never been bestowed on man as man, that the municipal liberties, the privileges of the _Collegia_, the rule over the barbarians, were the reward of the Romans, not the pre-ordained lot of Rome. Italian scholars felt with the deepest conviction that her genealogy alone endowed Italy with a primacy which they could not renounce. Even had they so wished they could not have been a modern nation in a modern world. The more they studied, the more did they convince themselves like Petrarch that they descended in an unbroken line from Marius and Sulla. Their historical mentality was already formed and they could not consider the human world otherwise than as a narrow collaboration of successive generations.

Dante, in his preface to the _De Monarchia_, has stated his idea of this historical succession. “All men whom a loftier nature leads to the love of truth seem to be most greatly concerned to hand down to posterity the fruits of their efforts so that, even as they themselves have been enriched by the labours of their ancestors, they may to the same degree endow their successors. Indeed, he who is steeped in the knowledge of public affairs is certainly far from fulfilling his duty should he not trouble to bestow the fruit of his studies on the Republic, not like unto ‘a tree by the rivers of water that bringeth forth his fruit in his season,’ but rather unto a baneful whirlpool that swalloweth up all things nor ever restoreth what it hath once swallowed.” Here we find the empirical expression of what Giordano Bruno was to conceive theoretically three hundred years later, thus foreshadowing the Immanentist doctrine of history and society that Vico was to develop some hundred and fifty years later still. Vico had, in his turn, to wait until the second half of the nineteenth century in order to be properly understood. His ideas in 1916 formed the basis of Giovanni Gentile’s Philosophy of Law, and at the present day are realised in the Italian Constitution as elaborated by the Government of Mussolini. But Dante’s scholastic training could not allow him to have the least inkling of the doctrine of Immanentism; his ideal Monarch is merely a magistrate appointed and endowed by God. For Dante all political power could only be lawfully derived from the Divine law. Scholastic philosophy could not conceive a law that should not be dependent upon a superior will or a pre-existing law. None the less, this empirical statement, such as it is, shows already how no speculation could satisfy the Italian mind unless it avoided the unhistorical position more natural in those countries that had themselves evolved an original form of society.

The removal of the Papal court to Avignon gave Italy a rude shock in affecting the good fame of the whole country. The humiliation of the Papacy is resented all over the Peninsula, and the eclipse of the Papal dignity diminishes the prestige not only of Rome but of Italy. A new religion, the cult of Rome, spreads in all Italian hearts, and its ruined monuments are scarcely less venerated than the relics of the Apostles. The glorious memories of the Roman Republic, the pride of the Roman name, give rise both to the unfortunate statesmanship of Arnold of Brescia and, a hundred and fifty years later, to the rash adventure of Cola di Rienzo. All those who cannot boast such an illustrious descent are contemptuously designated as barbarians, and this distinction gives rise to the feeling of the unity of the Italian races. The mystical and religious fervour with which the men of the Risorgimento felt for Rome, so strong that it led them to trample on their religion, was not stronger than that of the first humanists. Petrarch and Boccaccio were already preparing the way for the Renaissance, of which they are rightly considered as the first pioneers. These enthusiasts, who brought such inestimable benefits to the intellectual life of the whole world, nevertheless introduced into their own country the germ of many ills.

The men of France and England could never feel at home in the ample folds of Cicero’s toga as the Italians did. It was for them, indeed, a useful garment worn with perfect ease of manners as a ceremonial robe donned on state occasions, or a protective covering unfurled in their intellectual battles. Despite its assimilation and survival as late as the eighteenth century in the ample periods of Dr. Johnson or in the well-balanced sentences of Bossuet, it did not modify to any degree the mentality of countries with which it did not have a close affinity, although it left in the minds a certain number of ideas distinctly pagan, such as that of birthright. French and English scholars looked upon Rome as something definitely outside their own world, like the moon or the sun, and just as illuminating to them as the former is to the night wanderer and the latter to all the labours of mankind. This transcendental quality rendered Rome indeed semi-divine in their eyes, but fortunately kept them from considering themselves the lineal progeny of Marius or Cæsar. Their cult of antiquity was just as profoundly religious as that of the Italian scholars with whom they were often in the closest relations, only their attitude was more detached. They were thus able to cut themselves adrift from their masters with perfect ease when they had assimilated all that was needful to develop their own natural gifts. An abyss stood between them and antiquity; they were unable to appreciate their real connection with antiquity. Their historical information as to the intervening centuries could only be drawn from mediæval chronicles which, full of detail though they were, did not offer any comprehensive view even of a reign and much less of a century. They failed to understand the essential continuity of the history of all countries, and, while not making the mistake of considering the Romans as their ancestors, they could not conceive history and society as immanent in man.

Petrarch, on the contrary, considers himself perfectly Roman, although his lyrics are almost the first assertion of modern individualism. His familiarity with Livy, Cicero, Virgil, gave him an appreciation of classical Latin that led him to consider that of Dante barbarous. What matters to him is the form in which thoughts are expressed, not the thoughts themselves; he wanted art for art’s sake. Fortunately, his genius and the fervour of his cult for Rome sometimes animates his consciousness of the continuity of the past with the present. In the _Canzone di Signori d’Italia_ the new Italy that was trying to recover her Roman and Latin tradition appears as a fully grown personality. Guelphs and Ghibellines, Romans and Florentines have disappeared, and Italy speaks the proud language of the Queen of Civilisation. As Francesco De Sanctis puts it, the poet is an Italian, conscious of the superiority of his race. Marius is mentioned as if he were an almost contemporary person. So deeply does the young poet feel the classical world that henceforth he considers the heroes of Greece and Rome as his ancestors. With personal pride he assumes the military glories of Marius and Cæsar no less than the ample rhetoric of Cicero. And in this assumption of a ready-made glory as Italy’s inherent right, cause of much subsequent political and moral weakness, we may find the first signs of the contribution that modern Italy is perhaps now on the verge of bringing to civilisation. It is therefore natural that Fascism should attack with energy the negative side of the legacy of Humanism, the Italian fondness for rhetoric, union of lofty words and mean deeds, while accepting and proclaiming the historical conception that links man to the generations past and future.

The Italians of the fifteenth century continued to revel in the glory of Rome and gradually forgot that there was an actual and living reality, hardly consistent with their superior attitude as the sons of Cæsar and Augustus. Prose and verse improved so long as the cult of antiquity retained its initial mystic fervour, that provided the religious element indispensable to all creative art. But when devotion to classical studies became a question of interest or vanity, it was only from the very greatest artists, from men whose real religion was the worship of art, that one could expect sincerity. All the others were only extraordinarily adept at the clever wording of other people’s ideas. They could never fail to deck any subject, no matter how mean, no matter how repulsive, in the full pomp of a Ciceronian oration, rich in beautiful sentences and displaying the careful study of all the figures of speech to be found in the classics. Fraccastorius describes a loathsome disease in the finest of post-classical hexameters. Politicians could act as meanly as they pleased, sure that the glory of Rome would raise them above the rest of mankind. Even their real superiority in historical feeling and in the interpretation of antiquity was a source of weakness. For when beaten in war they could always express contempt for the victors and call them barbarians, consoling themselves with their real intellectual and artistic superiority for their political humiliation.

In 1494 Charles VIII of France invaded Italy, meeting with no resistance worth mentioning. It is not surprising, since the despairing cry of Boiardo

_“Mentre che io canto, O Dio Redentore. Vedo l’Italia tutta a fiamma e a foco”_

is almost the swan-song of mediæval Italy. At the same time a twenty-year-old youth, destined to become the greatest poet of the age, Lodovico Ariosto, could sing with perfect Horatian art and with an equally perfect indifference for his country

_“asperi furore militis tremendo Turribus ausoniis ruinam”_

and with all the selfishness of unconscious indifference

_“Rursus quid hostis prospiciat sibi Me nulla tangat cura, sub arbuto Iacentem aquae ad murmur cadentis.”_

He has adopted the measures and harmonies of Horace and Virgil and, wrapped up in his pride in the glory of Rome, goes on singing his classical bucolic loves in complete indifference to the fate of his country:

_“Est mea nunc Glycerae, mea nunc est cura Lycoris, Lyda modo meus est, est modo Phyllis amor.”_

Reality is a horrible dream, “_improba seclis conditio!_” he is shocked that

_“nuper ab occiduis illatum gentibus, olim pressa quibus nostro colla fuere iugo.”_

Such a perfect Latinist could but seek to dismiss this hideous reality by ignoring it and to find refuge in the glorious memories of the past or in the creation of a world of fanciful chivalry.[5]

The sixteenth century witnesses the final divorce of Italian culture from real life, so that for two subsequent centuries, instead of developing the moral and social qualities of the individual citizen, as in England, in France and in the Netherlands, it tended rather to the atrophy of all real patriotism. But at this very moment, in opposition to this dissolving and negative influence of Italian Humanism, one of the greatest men produced by a land ever “_magna parens virum_” stands forth to proclaim that man alone is the creator of the historical world and arbiter of his own destiny. The public life and the posthumous fame of the Florentine Secretary are equally unfortunate, but the present age is better prepared to appreciate the truths contained in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli.

He, like all the intellectuals of the period, would have said “_we_” in speaking of the Romans, and he might have used the phrase of Leonardo Aretino, “_Graecos ΠΟΛΙΣ, NOSTROS CIVITAS appellavisse_,” had he desired to trace the etymology of that political reality so dear to his heart. But this identification was not sentimental; he analyses closely the differences between past glory and present shame. Strictly speaking, he is not a Humanist at all; like Galileo, he repudiates Neoplatonism and follows, rather, the experimental method. He carefully dissects the past for the benefit of the present, and deftly probes the wounds of the body politic. This empirical standpoint indeed would be a grave defect, did not his genius and sense of history as a living reality often lead him to intuitions that transcend both his method and outlook. The intuitions, the proof of the truth of which was to be one of the chief conquests of modern thought, are clouded by his prejudices or obscured by the inevitable limitations of his knowledge of facts. His conception of “virtue” is perhaps the most characteristic of those intuitions that allowed him to foresee ideas only to be understood by the end of the nineteenth century, and only to be acted on by the present day.

Of course, the idea in itself was not entirely new. One of the ablest historians of the fifteenth century, Philippe Monnier, has clearly pointed out that already in the twelfth century the centre of reality had been lowered from the celestial heights and firmly planted in the breast of man. The polemics on Frederick II’s definition of nobility are an assertion of the part played by man’s individuality in the formation of the world. After two centuries of Humanism, noble birth is an absurdity. For Piccolomini, Ficino, Landino, man cannot be born noble, he can only become noble through his own exertions. The Stoic precept of the absolute autonomy of the human will is frequently alluded to in discussion on the power of Fortune, against which Leone Battista Alberti strenuously asserts the power of man to forge his own destiny. Alberti, typical representative of the Renaissance, in all his moral works, emphasises the freedom of man from all external influences and above all from the dominion of Chance, and for him man’s life is a consequence of man’s actions. Neither Fate nor Chance are a cause of the varying circumstances of individuals.

Having these doctrines before him, Machiavelli was able to apply to the life of nations the ideas that governed the life of the individual. Rome had been powerful and glorious; Italy is weak and contemptible: the cause is the moral corruption of the Italians. Machiavelli does not always consider Italy’s invaders as barbarians; he is always ready to study their institutions and ways of living in order to discover the reasons for their military superiority. He firmly believes that Fortune can only display her power where no “virtue” has prepared a resistance. Italy, “_vituperio del mondo_,” will certainly return to her former strength could the Italians be aroused from their torpor. His attitude is identical with that of Mussolini’s government: Italy is slighted by the Allies, she is financially weak, the cause is the scepticism and self-indulgence of the people, the remedy a stricter conception of life for adults and a more religious education for children. Fortune, however, is not quite identified with Fate, and, while the latter is unhesitatingly rejected, the former is retained as a kind of background against which man can display more efficiently his will and “virtue.” This background, which he calls Fortune or Opportunity, is no less a conception than Croce’s “situation of facts.” His “verità effettuale delle cose” is the objective knowledge of the Crocian “situazione de fatto” and must be ascertained anew before embarking on any new action, for, according to the shrewd Florentine, “sono le cose umane sempre in moto.” It is, therefore, necessary to take one’s bearings before embarking on any course to realise one’s will. The best type of will is that which draws its strength from an intimate knowledge of actual circumstances and is consequently steady and resolute. Hence the profound morality of such will-power, pursuing its end without hesitation or incertitude, disdainful of half measures, its moral value immanent in the very act of volition.

It is no longer possible to continue to identify Machiavelli with immorality or amorality, now that his doctrines have been profoundly analysed by philosophers, jurists, and critics of the value of Ercole, Croce or Gentile. We only find in his works a transposition of the fundamental principles of ethics. What he calls “virtue” is not to be understood in its Christian sense. It is closely allied to efficiency but is an efficiency displayed in the accomplishment of the common good, in the realisation of a strong State. Hunger and necessity can render men industrious but only wise laws can make them good. Indeed the laws bring people to realise the necessity of justice; social intercourse gives rise to all the various conditions of life, including education, religion, habit, law, and ultimately to the standard of goodness. As Gentile points out, for Machiavelli as for Spinoza the common good is a product of society; the distinction between good and evil presupposes society, that is to say a system of laws. Hence the saying put into the mouth of Rinaldo degli Albizzi: “No good man will ever find fault with anyone trying to defend his country, whatever the means he may employ.” In commenting upon this passage Gentile rightly says that those who extend the common good from the country to the whole of mankind do not expand but rather restrict the meaning of the writer. Machiavelli by “Patria” understands the entirety of social and civilised life, that is to say that the State is the only historical and concrete form of mankind. He is fundamentally opposed to any indefinite, unsubstantial idea of man that would strip him of all the historical influences that determine his social and political life, and that would make of mankind a shadowy abstraction. Such ideologies could mean nothing to the sixteenth century Florentine, but they do not mean much more to the modern Italian, and this is the reason why Socialism in Italy never developed its nobler side. Men who, like Andrea Costa, were real idealists of the Marxian school were devoid of any influence, despite the respect due to their high standard of personal life. If the whole of mankind is to be the object of the duties of every individual, one might as well abolish those duties; what is the business of everybody is the business of nobody. Therefore, Italian Socialism was obliged to adopt not the high, if impractical, ideals of Northern Socialism, but an entirely materialistic form of propaganda, harping constantly on higher wages and shorter hours, in order to arouse the interest and secure the support of the masses.

Machiavelli was obviously too much a man of his age to be able to surpass the theory of man as an individual attempting to realise his personality in a world in which he could expand as freely as possible. He could not conceive the objectivity and consequent importance of the State as moral reality, and still less the intimate subjectivity of the objective world in which man realises his will. The very word “Fortune” kept to indicate actuality was misleading, and veiled his real notion of freedom; he severed liberty from law and by only retaining the former he gave the careless or ignorant an opportunity for the vulgar interpretation of his doctrines.

Time and the works of Bruno and Campanella, stripped of their heretical outlook, were to further in the mind of Vico the first maturity of the fruits of which the seed was to be found in the Florentine statesman’s ideas of “virtue” and political morality. Thus, while the other modern nations were necessarily getting more deeply embogged in their anti-historical attitude towards life, Italy, in the political idleness of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was slowly elaborating those doctrines that may yet prove to be the ballast needed by all countries to weather the present political and social storms.