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THE WORKS
OF
LORD MORLEY
IN
FIFTEEN VOLUMES
VOLUME IV
POLITICS & HISTORY
BY
JOHN VISCOUNT MORLEY
O.M.
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1921
p
Mf
COPYRIGHT
CONTENTS
PAGE
POLITICS AND HISTORY . . . . . .- . . i
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN . . . . . 75
MACHIAVELU . . T . . . . . . 101
GUICCIARDINI . . • i « • • •-, • • J43
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY . \ . . . » . 183
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE . . . . . " . . 213
APPENDIX : NOTES TO MACHIAVELLI . » . . .241
POLITICS AND HISTORY1
UNIVERSITIES have been boldly ranked by com-
petent historians with trial by jury and parliaments,
among leading institutions of the Middle Ages. At
any rate in England the power of universities and the
public schools that feed them, has been immeasur-
able in the working of other institutions. They
have been main agents in moulding both our secular
and ecclesiastical politics. They have worked too
often for darkness as well as light. Too often and
too long have they been the mirror of stolid pre-
judice and childish convention; the appendages of
old social form and institution, rather than great
luminaries dispensing knowledge, and kindling that
ardent love of new truth for which youth is the
irrevocable season. Power of this high dimension
is not likely to be missing in our new universities,
though its forms are undergoing rapid revolution.
Well was it said, " C'est toujours le beau monde
qui gouverne le monde." That is still a great deal
more true than people think, even in countries like
our own where aristocratic polity has in large
degree gone down. But the privileges of the fine
world of social class must yield henceforth to the
forces that shape temper, judgment, and range of
public interest, in educational centres such as yours.
The infusion of their thought and temper is what
1 A version, amplified and recast, of an address delivered by the writer
as Chancellor of the University of Manchester in the summer of 1912.
1 B
2 POLITICS AND HISTORY
will impart its colour to the general discussion.
It will reduce the number of those who think
they have opinions, when in truth they have not.
Universities, besides imparting special knowledge,
are meant for reason's refuge and its fortress.
The standing enemies of reason, in spite of new
weapons, altered symbols, changing masks, are what
they have always been everywhere. I will spare
you the catalogue of man's infirmities. It is both
pleasanter and sounder to turn our eyes the other
way, to man's strength, and not his weakness—
towards equity, candour, diligence, application,
charity, disinterestedness for public ends, courage
without presumption, and all the other rare things
that are inscribed in epitaphs on men of whom
kind friends thought well. Wide and stirring is
the field.
There is no unkindness, and there is useful
truth, especially under popular governments, in
pressing people to realise the whole bearings of the
commonplace that time and mutations of political
atmosphere are incessantly attaching a different
significance to the same ideas and the same words.
We are so apt to go on with our manful battles as
if the flags and banners and vehement catchwords
all stood for old causes. This is only one side of all
the changing aspects of the time. I ventured to
speak of narrowness of vision. The vision would
indeed be narrow, that overlooked the reaction
on our own affairs of circumstances outside — the
new map of Europe, the shifting balances of
fighting strength, Hague tribunals, tariffs, the
Panama Canal, strange currents racing in full
blast through the rolling worlds of white men,
black men, brown men, yellow men.
The most dogmatic agree that truth is pro-
digiously hard to find. Yet what rouses intenser
anger than balanced opinion ? It would be the
ruin of the morning paper. It takes fire out of
POLITICS AND HISTORY 3
conversation. It may destroy the chance of a seat
in the Cabinet, and, if you are not adroit, may
weary constituents. The reason is simple. For
action, for getting things done, the balanced
opinion is of little avail or no avail at all. " He
that leaveth nothing to chance," said the shrewd
Halifax, " will do few things ill, but he will do
very few things." As King Solomon put it, " He
that considereth the wind shall not sow, and he
that looketh to the clouds shall not reap." Modera-
tion is sometimes only a fine name for indecision.
The partisan temperament is no gift in a judge, and
it is well for everybody to see that most questions
have two sides, though it is a pity in a practical world
never to be sure which side is right, and to remain
as " a cake that is not turned." You even need
the men of heroic stamp with whom " a hundred
thousand facts do not prevail against one idea."
Nations are lucky when the victorious idea happens
to have at its back three or four facts that weigh
more than the hundred thousand put together.
Some well-trained observers find history abounding
in volcanic outbreaks of fire and flame, seeming to
leave behind nothing but hardened lava and frozen
mud. Only too true. Only too familiar is the
exaggerated and mis-shapen rationalism that shuts
out imagination, distrusts sentiment, despises tradi-
tion, makes short work alike of the past and of
anything like collective or united faith and belief
in the present. But to be over-impatient with
what may prove by and by to be fertilising Nile
floods, is foolishness. They will subside, and a
harvest well worth saving remain for the hand of
the reaper.
Ardent spirits have common faults in an ex-
pectant age. They are so apt to begin where they
should end. Pierced by thought of the ills in the
world around them, they are overwhelmed by a
noble impatience to remove, to lessen, to abate.
4 POLITICS AND HISTORY
Before they have set sail, they insist that they
already see some new planet swimming into their
ken, they already touch the promised land. An
abstract a priori notion, formed independently of
experience and evidence, is straightway clothed with
all the sanctity of absolute principle. Generous
aspiration, exalted enthusiasm, are made to do
duty for reasoned scrutiny. They seize every fact
or circumstance that makes their way, they are
blind to every other. Inflexible preconceptions hold
the helm. Their sense of proportion is bad.
Nobody in any camp will quarrel with the view
that one of the urgent needs of to-day is a con-
stant attempt to systematise political thoughts,
and to bring ideals into closer touch with fact.
There can be no reason why that should turn brave
and hopeful men into narrow, dry, or cold-hearted.
The French Revolution has not realised its ideals.
Nor has the Reformation. Even as to Christianity
itself, one of the most famous sayings of the
eighteenth century — that "Christianity has been
tried and failed, the religion of Christ remains to be
tried," — is not even now quite out of date. In a
thousand forms, the Manichaean struggle between
Good and Evil, between Good and Better, persists.
About one-third of the inhabitants of our planet
are Christian, — the adherents of the Roman Com-
munion being put at 240 millions, the Protestant
Communions at 150, the Greek Church at 100
millions. The Jews, only 10 millions, — lowest in
number, but possessing a vast effective power of
various kinds in the politics of Europe. The rela-
tion of creeds to new phases of social idealism must
break into cardinal issues, and light may be thrown
upon the interesting question fwhat proportion of
the ideas that men live with and live upon, are held
open to discussion in their minds, and how many
of them are inexorable and sacrosanct. There is
good promise that the common temper of willing-
POLITICS AND HISTORY 5
ness to try all things, and hold fast that which is
good, will prevail.1
It will do us no harm to digest a sobering
thought from Locke : "If any one shall well
consider the errors and obscurity, the mistakes
and confusion, that are spread in the world by an
ill use of words, he will find some reason to doubt
whether language, as it has been employed, has
contributed more to the improvement or hindrance
of knowledge among mankind." Dismal as this
may be at any time, how especially perturbing to
people with such questions before them, as we are
called upon to face to-day. Now, if ever, what
mistakes and confusion are likely to follow an ill
use of political words, and of the ideas that words
stand for. What would become of a lawyer in the
Courts who argued his cases with the looseness in
point and language, the disregard of apt precedents,
the slack concatenation of premiss and conclusion,
the readiness to take one authority for as good
as another, — which even the best of us so often
find good enough for politics ? Is there any other
field where Bacon's hoary idols of Theatre, Tribe,
Market-Place, and Cave, keep such contented house
together ? Five-and-twenty centuries have passed
since one great Greek historian, perhaps casting a
stone at another, rebuked in famous words the
ignorant carelessness of mankind. " People do not
distinguish ; without a test they take things from
one another : even on things of their own day, not
dulled in memory by time, Hellenes are apt to be
all wrong. So little pains will most men take in
search for truth : so much more readily they turn to
what comes first." 2
To these hints of mine an American newspaper
1 For a remarkable consideration of Religion in respect of Politics,
see Lord Hugh Cecil's little volume, Conservatism (Williams & Norgate,
1912).
8 Thuc. i. 20 ; oSrws draXaiirwpoj rotj iroXXots ^ fijnj<rtj T?)J a\rj8elat, Kal
tirl TO. fTOlfM (M\\OV TptlTOVTCU.
6 POLITICS AND HISTORY
supplied an apt illustration. The number of ques-
tions, says the writer, now before the American
people, on which it is urgent that they should have
an intelligent opinion, is staggering. Take one of
the most intricate of them all, what to do with
Trusts. How are the masses going to know the
precise legal and financial effect of the decree of
the court dissolving the Tobacco Trust ? They
see eminent lawyers radically differing. They hear
politicians railing. Nobody can seriously argue that
the intricacies of Trust repression and regulation
can be mastered by " the wisdom of the people."
What the people can do is to form clear and strong
convictions upon the fundamental conceptions that
underlie the whole question. A sound public
opinion can be formed on the main questions,
whether we should try to maintain in trade and
industry the possibility of effective competition, or
whether combination and monopoly should be
undertaken, controlled, and supervised by the State.
Get these essentials settled, then legislative, execu-
tive, and tribunals can find proper and effective
form. Such is an American case.. It would be
easy, though more delicate, for us to find illustra-
tions quite as apt in the United Kingdom as in the
United States.
The ideas and words that seem simplest turn
out most complex. If anybody doubts, ask him
to try his hand, say on Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity.1 He will be very lucky if, besides being
complex, he does not find their contents and applica-
tions directly self - contradictory . Of liberty, we
have been told on the best authority, there are two
hundred definitions. Yet, said Lincoln in their
war, " the world has never had a good definition
of the word liberty, and the American people, just
1 Any one who seeks to explore this all-important field, should not
miss F. W. Maitland, Collected Papers, i. 1-161 ; nor Sir James Stephen's
three little volumes, Horae Sabbaticae (1892), full of hard close thinking,
needing answer and capable of answer.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 7
now, are much in want of one. We all declare for
liberty ; but in using the same word we do not all
mean the same thing. We assume the word liberty
may mean for each man to do as he pleases with
himself, and the product of his labour ; while with
others the same word may mean for some men to
do as they please with other men, and the product
of other men's labour."
Then men will not soon forget Cavour's memor-
able formula, " A free Church in a free State."
What could be simpler, what more direct, what
more pleasant and easy jingle to the politician's
ear ? Yet of what harsh and intractable discords
was that theme the prelude ? The erection of a
kingdom of Italy with Rome for its capital was too
momentous an event to be comprised in one political
formula. It is no hallucination to describe it as
the most important fact in European history for
two centuries,1 that is to say since the Peace of
Westphalia. One aspect of commanding signifi-
cance these two supreme landmarks present in
common. Each sets the seal upon a transmutation
as memorable for States as Churches : from each
of them, the system and relations between political
and spiritual authority emerge with changed founda-
tions and renovated ordering. The system of the
Middle Age is over, though ponderous links of the
broken chain still hang round the emancipated
ruler's neck.
The most living and familiar of all the phrases
in the controversy of our times is Religious Liberty :
in France and Italy a burning question ; in Ireland,
Scotland, and even England, by no means a mere
handful of dead historic ashes. Familiar as it is,
the designation covers entirely diverse meanings.
Leo XIII. found two of them in liberty of con-
science : one, liberty of the individual to follow
God's commands ; the other, freedom to prescribe
1 Lt Droit public et F Europe moderne, De la Guerronniere, i. 332.
8 POLITICS AND HISTORY
the divine precepts at his own discretion. Some-
times religious liberty stands for unfettered freedom
in uttering and advocating opinion on issues of
theology, — its foundations as recorded truth, its
interpretations of binding doctrine, its consistency,
or its complete and wholesale incompatibility, with
accepted standards and methods in the ever-
extending area of positive knowledge and intrepid
criticism. Sometimes it designates the claim of a
religious body to impose upon faithful and volun-
tary members, what rules as to marriage, educa-
tion, congregation, and the rest, its commanding
ecclesiastics may choose, with no regard either to
surrounding social prepossessions, or to the con-
venience of the State. Is the principle of religious
liberty violated when the police forbid a Catholic
procession through the streets of Westminster ?
Or when a congregation of French monks or nuns
is sent packing ? Or when an English court of law,
as happened only a few years ago, pronounces null
and void a bequest to a society holding opinions
contrary to Christianity ? What of all the strenu-
ous laws and unflinching executive acts in both
hemispheres, for a century and a half, against the
dreaded Society of Jesus ? Greeks and other
people in the seventh and eighth centuries, in their
struggle with imperial authority, were fond of using
religious watchwords that were really inspired by
political and racial resentments. And such mal-
practice has not even yet quitted highly civilised
communities not so remote from us as is Stamboul.
Still, we may fairly say that in our State at least,
within a single generation, a law of tolerance — not
indifference, not scepticism, not disbelief, but one
of those deep, silent transformations that make
history endurable — has really worked its way not
merely into our statutes and courts of justice, but
into manners, usage, and the common habits of
men's minds.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 9
In the vast field of questions connected with
Forms of Government, terms in the commonest
employment abound in confusion. Sir George
Lewis, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer in
1857, wrote a little book on what he styled the
use and abuse of political terms. He does not
really carry things much further than the primitive
debate of the seven Persian noblemen five centuries
before Christ.1 The book has little sap, but it puts
useful posers as to the exact classification, for
instance, of the varieties of republic and monarchy.
It is democracy where a majority of adult males
have direct legal influence in the formation of
the sovereign body. It is aristocracy where this
majority have no direct legal influence. Is de-
mocracy a system in which the many govern or,
as Aristotle supposed, a system in which the poor
govern ? Is it enough to despatch democracy as a
system where the career is open to the talents ?
And so forth, with a general suggestion of loose
and inapplicable terms being the links that chain
men to unreasonable practices. As if in fact, our
incurable trick of taking a word for a thing were
not the root of half the mischiefs of the world. A
new term has gained strong hold since Lewis's
time, but Sociocracy, the hybrid name sometimes
given to our still dubious accommodation between
democratic expansion and plutocracy, is not yet
acclimatised. Our own famous ruling assembly has
been called the mother of parliaments, and the
congenial image justly stirs our national pride.
Yet differences in power and the source of power
between parent and progeny, almost surpass re-
semblances. Take the House of Commons itself.
Even writers of the first rank speak of its doings,
and temper, and prerogative during the war with
the American Colonies, or the long war against
Napoleon, as if the House of Commons during
1 Herodotus, iii.
10 POLITICS AND HISTORY
either of those two momentous episodes was the
same as the House of Commons that rules over us
to-day — that is to say, was chosen by the popular
voice and national acclamation, instead of being,
as it was, the nominee of a handful of a privileged
order.
In all the vocabularies and catechisms of govern-
ment, no idea has fired such energy and devotion in
the human breast as the idolised name of Republic,
unless, to be sure, it may be the name and the idea
of Monarchy. In passionate enthusiasm, as well
as in cogent force of practical reason, Legitimist and
Republican have been many a time well matched.
Yet how profoundly diverse in essence, record, and
mechanism, the multiple systems that are labelled
by the common name of Republic. Cromwell was
dictator rather than republican. Venice was of
radically different type from Florence. The re-
public that emerged after the Swiss cantons had
thrown off the yoke of Austria, was in form and
foundation different from the Dutch system after
the overthrow of Spain. The first French Republic
was a very different structure from the second, and
the second from the third, and so are they both
from the United States of America. I need not
speak of the republics where in South America
Latin and Catholic civilisation follows a strange
and devious course, and where republic means
hardly more as a form of government than is meant
by monarchy in the distracted Balkans.
Take the Legitimist, — a name invented for the
Bourbon line when the first Republic and first
Empire were swept away at Vienna in 1815. If
we are to understand by legitimate a government
that has acquired possession and authority on the
ground of acknowledged title through regular suc-
cession, treaties, or conquest recognised as legiti-
mate,— which of the European monarchies of to-day
satisfy legitimist standards ? In England, as we
POLITICS AND HISTORY 11
all know, succession to the throne rests upon a
revolution, — the result of one of those political
expediencies that amount to a necessity — though
masters of reasoned eloquence, from Burke to
Macaulay, have put upon it a saving face of con-
tinuous law and order. In Italy, Belgium, Sweden,
Norway, the sovereign wears a revolutionary crown.
Even the consecrated name of Public Opinion,—
queen of the world, as it has been so chivalrously
called — has many values. One constitutional
writer in whom learning has been by no means
fatal to wit puts it that the opinion of Parliament
is the opinion of yesterday, and the opinion of
judges is that of the day before yesterday. That
is, the judges go by precedent and old canons of
interpretation, while Parliament makes laws, im-
poses taxes, regulates foreign relations, in response
to movements outside.
In arguing for or against an institution, who
draws due distinctions between its formal and legal
character, and its actual work in practice ? Or
makes allowance for the spirit of those who carry it
on ? Or for the weight of its traditional associa-
tions ? In politics, is it the voice of the electorate ?
Are there any better grounds for regarding either
a majority or a plurality of votes, than that it
is a good working political rule ? Does the rule
work well enough in general practice, to make
new expedients — Plebiscites, Referendums, and the
rest — pieces of supererogation, calculated to shred
away the concentrated force of a governing repre-
sentative assembly ? A very interesting writer of
our own time emphasises the non-rational element
in politics, — impulses, instinct, reaction. He insists
that the empirical art of politics consists largely in
the creation of opinion by the deliberate exploita-
tion of non-conscious non-rational inference. This
at least is true, that empirical practitioners find it
hard to forecast the decisive elements. The press
12 POLITICS AND HISTORY
is no safe barometer. In at least three remarkable
parliamentary elections since 1874, the result has
been an immense surprise to those who had regarded
only the line of the most widely read journals in
the most important areas : the journals went on
one side, the great majority of electors voted the
other. Lord Beaconsfield did not expect his sweep-
ing repulse in 1880. Of Palmerston it was said by
Clarendon that he mistook popular applause for
real opinion. Nothing is so hard either to reckon
or to identify. The idealist is angry or despondent
when he finds the public deaf. Literary satire likens
popular indifference towards new ideas to the dog
barking at a stranger. Or the satirist bethinks
himself of the ass who prefers a bundle of hay to
a dozen gold pieces. It would be easy to make
a good case both for the two honest animals and
for the public, and in truth the satire is idle. No
doubt ripe judgments and sensibly trained minds
are not always received with open arms. The hard
and strenuous preoccupations of life naturally first
bespeak the common eye. But the ripe temper, if
apt and patient, slowly soaks its way, and well-
stamped coins find their currency. Represen-
tative government exists to-day in a hundred
different forms, depending on a hundred differences
in social state and history, and nobody claims for
public opinion in all or any of them either sanctity
or infallibility. But to make a mock of it, is merely
to quarrel with human^life. We all know the
shortcomings in political opinion and character —
the fatal contentment with simple answers to com-
plex questions ; the readiness, as Hobbes put it,
to turn against reason, if reason is against you ;
violent over-estimate of petty things ; vehement
agitation one day, reaction as vehement the other
way the next ; money freely laid on a flashing
favourite this week, deep curses on what has proved
the wrong horse the week after ; haste ; moral
POLITICS AND HISTORY 13
cowardice ; futility. But if anybody supposes that
these mischiefs are peculiar to parliaments or
democracy, he must be strangely ill-read in the
annals of military despotism, absolute personal
power, centralised bureaucracy, exalted ceremonial
courts.
II
To-day,1 as it happens, is the anniversary of the
birth of Rousseau a couple of hundred years ago.
In the French Chamber, on a proposal last week
to vote public money for its celebration, one side
argued that it was absurd to magnify the father
of anarchist theories, at a moment when police
were shooting down anarchist bandits in the
suburbs of Paris. The other side insisted that
Rousseau was the precursor of modern conceptions
of social justice, and achieved for all time decisive
and persistent influence over French, German,
Russian literature. A dozen books in political
literature — Grotius, On the Rights of War and Peace
(1625), for instance, and Adam Smith's Wealth of
Nations (1776), — rank in history as wide-spreading
acts, not books. Whether a dozen or a hundred,
the Social Contract assuredly was one. The Institu-
tions of the Christian Religion, launched in Geneva
two centuries before Rousseau, was another. But
Calvin, the Protestant pontiff from France, was no
theorist as Rousseau was. The rock on which he
built his Church was his own unconquerable will and
unflinching power to meet occasion. This it was,
and not merely doctrines and forms of theologic
faith, that have made him one of the commanding
forces in the annals of the world. Let us note in
passing that our fashionable idolatry of great States
cannot blind us to the cardinal fact that self-
government, threatened with death when Pro-
testantism appeared upon the stage, was saved by
1 July 12, 1912.
14 POLITICS AND HISTORY
three small communities so little imperial in scope
and in ideals as Holland, Switzerland, and Scotland.
Taking Rousseau and Calvin together, Geneva
stands first of the three.
Burke scourged Rousseau's name and his work
with an energy only less savage than his onslaught
in the same page upon Charles II. He rejoiced
that Rousseau had none of the popularity here
that followed him over the continent of Europe.
Burke went on, as Wordsworth saw him, fore-
warning, denouncing, launching forth keen ridicule
against all systems built on abstract right, pro-
claiming the majesty of Institutes and Laws
hallowed by time, " with high disdain exploding
upstart theory." Yet Maine, the most eminent
English member of the Burkian school — I do not
forget Sir James Mackintosh — tells us that Rous-
seau, without learning, with few virtues, and with
no strength of character, has nevertheless stamped
himself ineffaceably on history by the force of a
vivid imagination and a genuine love for his fellow-
men, for which much will always have to be for-
given him. It was Bentham who so well put it, that
if you want to win mankind, you must make them
think you love them, and the best way to make
them think you love them, is to love them in reality.
Rousseau's idyll of the Savoyard Vicar that fas-
cinated the sensibilities of Europe, and struck a
new note in imagination and romance, came from
the same brain and heart as the political projectiles
that served the turn of Robespierre and a host of
greater and better men. So the storm of a fresh
world-battle opened. In essence it was not new :
it was a re-adjustment to new occasion of thoughts
and schemes that were very old. The names of
Hobbes, Filmer, Sidney, Milton, Harrington, are
enough to recall the controversies upon the roots
of government and law, jus naturae, jus gentium,
and so forth, all over Europe, a century before.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 15
The historian of political philosophy takes us back
to centuries earlier still. Tradition, custom, usage,
convention, established institutions — History on
one side, Law of Nature and Rights of Man on the
other. The feud reached not politics only ; it pene-
trated philosophy, art, letters, churches, education,
in countless forms ; for, we may be sure, the same
aspects and influences that strike deep on politics,
strike deep all round. Here is the stamp of one of
the great ages, whose alternation and succession in
history mark its lodestars, and signalise its title to
men's praise.
You know the electrifying sentence of Rousseau's
Social Contract : " Man is born free, and everywhere
he is in chains. One supposes himself the master
of others, who is none the less for that more of a
slave than they are." We need take no pains in
our later days of Heredity as one of the established
laws of animal existence, to analyse the description
of man as born free ; and for that matter the idea
was older and played its part in writers older and
more respectable than Rousseau. It is nearer the
mark, so far at any rate as the civilised European
of to-day is concerned, to say that he is born two
thousand years old. That is what history would
mean to our plain man, if he had time and patience
to meditate beyond the hour. And it is worth
observing as we pass the point of freedom, that
Rousseau himself insisted that everybody should
pledge himself to belief in the existence of an
omnipotent and beneficent divinity, in a life to
come where the just should be very happy, and
the wicked very miserable. To these and other
articles, he said, every citizen should adhere, not as
dogmas of religion, but as sentiments of sociability.
If he broke away from them, a man should be
punished by exile or death, and rationalistic heads
were actually struck off in 1794, strictly and
avowedly on Rousseau's principle, just as Servetus
16 POLITICS AND HISTORY
perished in flames that Calvin kindled, and Sir
Thomas More's head was cut off by King Henry
VIII., the Protestant Reformer. If, however, the
critic lets inconsistency detain him, he is lost.
Only let us add as a pendant to Rousseau's dictum,
a no less bold and much truer dictum, that man is
born intolerant, and of all ideas toleration would
seem to be in the general mind the very latest.
It is easy for the judicious observer of a later
day to riddle a book like the Social Contract with
shot and shell of logic, doctrine, figures, history ;
just as it was easy for Dr. Johnson to scold Gray's
Elegy, but none the less the poem remained an
eternal delight and solace for the hearts of wearied
men. More than one distinguished master of poli-
tical and legal philosophy in our own day and
generation has subjected it to searching analysis,
of weight and significance.1 But what matters
more than logic, or dialectic cut-and-thrust, is
history, — relations of present to past, leading ante-
cedents, continuous external forces, incidents, and
the long tale of consummating circumstance. How
often do miscalculations in the statesman, like
narrowness and blunder in the historian, spring
from neglect of the pregnant and illuminating truth
that deeper than men's opinions are the sentiment
and circumstances by which opinion is predeter-
mined. " What it is important for us to know
with respect to our own age, or every age, is not its
peculiar opinions, but the complex elements of that
moral feeling and character, in which as in their
congenial soil opinions grow." 2 Here you have a
truth, abounding in enrichment, power, insight, and
self-collection, for every patient student of mankind,
— such a student as in our better hours of the
diviner mind it is the business of us all to try to be.
The power of a political book, then, depends on
1 E.g. Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State, 1899.
* Mark Pattison's Essays, i. 264.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 17
aptness for occasion as occasions emerge. " What
wonderful things are events," cries somebody in
one of Disraeli's novels ; " the least are of greater
importance than the most sublime and comprehen-
sive speculations ! " Too widely and fantastically
said for cool philosophy, no doubt ; yet a fertile
truth for critics. Crop depends on soil as well as
seed. It is not abstract or absolute strength in
argument or conclusion, but the fact, half -accident,
of its happening to supply an exciting, impressive,
persuasive attack or defence, or some set of formulae
that the passion, need, or curiosity of the hour
supposes itself to demand. Books, doctrines, ideas
have been compared to the flowers in a garden.
'Tis not always the best argument that prevails,
and the gardener wins the prize who chooses his
season right. How much of their time do even
good writers pass in minting coin that has no
currency. And in passing from our glorious dome
of printed books in the British Museum to the
sepulchral monuments in another department, we
may sometimes think that in vitality there is not
much to choose between books that once shook the
world, and the mortuary figures of Egyptian kings.
No piece of literature ever had more instant and
wide - reaching power than Chateaubriand's Genie
du Christianisme (1802). As an argumentative
apology it is now counted worthless even by those
who most welcome its effect. A friend told him
that a picturesque stroke of memory from his
travels, a passionate phrase, a fine thought, would
win him more readers than a mountain of Bene-
dictine erudition. He took the hint, and his his-
toric knowledge is little better than decoration.
The Frenchmen who thought seriously about the
genius of Christianity would have found more of
what they wanted in half-a-dozen sermons of
Bossuet or half - a - dozen pages of Pascal, not to
name Augustine or the Imitatio, than in all that
c
18 POLITICS AND HISTORY
was to be found in Chateaubriand. But then, as
it happened, Bonaparte had just made his Con-
cordat with Pope Pius ; he had played his part in
solemn pomp at Notre Dame, once more formally
associating religion with the State ; he had signed
the peace with England at Amiens ; a rainbow for
the moment shone on storm- driven skies and the
dark tribulations of men. No book was ever
happier in its time, but to neither book nor in-
fluence could there be allotted length of days.
As with books, so with principles. Men, whether
as bodies or individuals, pick out as much from a
principle and its plainer corollaries as convenience
and their purpose need. The possible limitations
of logical inference are widened or narrowed or
thrust aside point-blank, just as actual necessity
dictates. The best syllogism is swept down by
trumpet - blasts of Public Safety, Social Order,
and other fair names for a Reign of Force.
A learned American judge found three great
instruments in human history — the Ten Com-
mandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the
Declaration of American Independence. This was
perhaps no more than a flash of obiter dictum, and
undoubtedly the bench exposed surface to a telling
cross-examination. Yet after all Mount Sinai, the
Mount of Olives, and State -House Yard in Phil-
adelphia hold commanding stations in the courses of
the sun. What we have to realise is the effulgence
with which hopeful words, glittering ideas, fervid
exhortations, and reforming instruments burst upon
communities oppressed by wrong, sunk and sodden
in care, fired by passions of religion, race, liberty,
property — those eternal fields of mortal struggle.
Nothing is easier than to expose fallacies in the
Declaration of Independence. The point is that,
as an American historian records with truth, it
was " the genuine effusion of the soul of the country
at the time."
POLITICS AND HISTORY 19
Yet what a sound instinct for politics addressed
to Englishmen of the stamp of the American
Colonists, inspired Thomas Paine when he fired the
revolutionary train by the most influential political
piece that ever was composed, and called it by
the wholesome, persuasive, and well-justified name
of Common Sense. Quarrels about the best form
of government, the balance of orders in the State,
even natural rights, were comparatively old stories.
Men are wont to use so much of such large oracular
deliverances as the moment asks. Moral issues, as
if almost by accident, suddenly take fire and set a
community in a blaze. Four score and seven years
passed, before a nobler President than Jefferson was
able to bring his country round to his faith that, if
slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. Thus it is
not abstract books that thrive in the day of trouble
on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Who cares to
criticise the words in the famous Gettysburg speech
about a nation u conceived in liberty and dedicated
to the proposition that all men are created equal " ?
It was, as Burke said, not on abstract politics, but
on the point of taxes, that the ablest pens and
most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the
stoutest spirits have acted and suffered. They
took infinite pains to set up as a fundamental
principle that in all monarchies the people must in
effect themselves mediately or immediately possess
the power of granting their own money, or no
shadow of liberty could subsist.1 Not that rates
and taxes are everything, or the tax-gatherer the
worst of our enemies. Of this, the most powerful
example was Burke himself. After his splendid
pieces on the contest with the American colonies,
the storm that the colonial victory had helped to
gather, broke violently over monarchical France.
Burke, with marvellous prescience, divined in de-
tail the havoc that would follow ; he became an
1 Speech on Conciliation, March 22, 1775.
20 POLITICS AND HISTORY
oracle of the emigrant French nobles on the Rhine,
and inspirer of the cogent pamphleteers like Gentz,
who served or led Metternich at Vienna. Not
unjust rates and taxes, but the overthrow of all
the high historic commonplaces, were what fired
the Reflections and the Regicide Peace. All the
reactionary forces of Europe found the voice they
needed. Only, in seeking cause and effect, let us
not confuse the voice with the force. Lamartine's
story of the Girondins on the eve of 1848, Thiers'
story of the First Empire on the eve of the Second,
Mrs. Stowe's picture of slavery, are all books that
suffused reason with passion, and turned passion
into tumult, but already in each case the train was
laid.
Ill
Especially easy is it in the present state of our
own country and the world, for the most rudi-
mentary of political observers to realise how possible
it is, — nay, now inevitable, — for tremendous political
consequences to flow from books and speculations
that seem to have nothing to do with politics. Who
can measure the influence on our contemporary
policies of Darwin and the other literature of
Survival of the Fittest ; and not only on practical
politics, but its decisive contributory influence
upon active and powerful schools of written
history ? It is no mere literary whim to count
Darwin and the prestige of Prince Bismarck as
twin factors in the change of public temper from
the nineteenth century to the twentieth. On the
other hand, it is blind error to forget how this
passing change on the great theatre of states and
government from a silver to a bronze age has been
accompanied by the spread, on a less resounding
stage, of an intenser humanity towards children,
animals, victims of cruel disease, men in prisons,
black men slaving in African jungles, and all else
POLITICS AND HISTORY 21
in need of pity, succour, and common human-
heartedness. It has not all been blood and iron,
nor has the rigour of political or social logic pre-
vailed unqualified. So complex, subtle, and im-
penetrable are the filaments that secretly bind
men's thoughts and moods together.
As with books and principles, so with famous
actors on the historic stage. When Victor Hugo
returned from exile some forty years ago, even
competent men who did hot much admire either
him or his art, felt and admitted that one whose
person was circled by the enthusiasm of three
generations must be possessed of qualities worthy
of honour and exaltation. Him, they said, who
knows how to awaken the noblest feelings and
impulses in men's breasts, whatever he may be
besides, — it is well that we should honour ; he is
the hearth at which the soul of the country is
kindled and kept alive. This diffusion of warm,
lofty, and stimulating interests may be better
worth the critic's attention than his book's specific
contents. Hugo's glory was due as much to the
politician as to the poet, and that was the secret
of an immense renown, almost to be compared with
Voltaire's : with both, the pen was sword.
It was said to a great English statesman of our
day, " You have so lived and wrought as to keep
the soul alive in England." This is something,
after all, apart from the clauses of his Bills. It is
a something that may be almost as good as any-
thing. To leave out or lessen personality would.be
to turn the record of social development into a
void. The genius of Comte produced a reasoned list
of the heroes and benefactors of mankind, of which
it has been justly said by the most eminent opponent
of Comte's constructive system, that a more com-
prehensive and catholic sympathy and reverence
towards every kind of service to mankind is not
to be met with in any other thinker. A calendar
22 POLITICS AND HISTORY
without Luther, Calvin, or Napoleon needs explana-
tion, but this was founded on his own elaborated
and peculiar estimate of positive contribution to the
well-being of human society. Each is connected
in place and work with the other. That is a very
different thing from the adoration of cloud -com-
pelling giants. It is very different, too, from that
attachment to the name and person of a teacher
and inspirer that is one of the most beautiful of
all traits in human character. Select them as you
will, in whatever realm of thought, action, or
creation, whether from five hundred or five, the
first question, and in one sense the last, is, What
does your hero personify ? Nothing, we may be
sure, is more fatal than turning history into idolatry.
The hero - worship that Carlyle's wayward genius
made so popular in our generation, too easily alike
in history and in politics, falsifies perspective.
Unity of ideas and interests, it is true, in a great
man of lofty plan and power of action, affects our
imagination with something of the symmetry and
attraction of the grandest art — drama, epic, sym-
phony, the figures in the Medicean chapel, the
Sistine frescoes. But the standards of art are bad
guides in choosing political heroes. Of Napoleon it
was said by one who knew, that he was all imagina-
tion : he created an imaginary Spain, an imaginary
England, an imaginary Catholicism, imaginary
finance, an imaginary France. And Carlyle in time
created an imaginary Napoleon for hero-worship.
Unwelcome as it must be to many a deep pre-
possession, we may as well realise that the doctrine
of " fortuitous variation," in which speculation
finds the key to new species, has bearings beyond
biology. The commanding man in a momentous
day seems only to be the last accident in a series ;
the unaccountable possessor of skill, talent, genius,
will, vision, fitted to create or to control emergencies,
or to make revolutions in both the machinery and
POLITICS AND HISTORY 23
commodities of life. " After all," said Alexander I.
of Russia to Madame de Stael, " I am only a happy
accident." "He speaks of me," once said
Napoleon, "as if I were a person : I am a thing."
Military history shows in a hundred cases some
odd turn of chance, fortune, wind and weather,
unforeseen and unforeseeable, on a given day
deciding battle or campaign. The greatest generals
have been the first to own the blind jeopardies of
their game, the hazards when men play with the
iron dice of war. Last accident or first, — states-
man, captain, thinker, inventor, — the precipitating
agent appears fortuitous ; comet, not great fixed
star — the accident of a peculiar individuality co-
inciding with opportunity or demand.
If any one should be scandalised by the proposi-
tion that the course of history can be deflected by
an accident, or should find in it an impious flavour,
we should remember that both devout churchmen
and deep statesmen, the loftiest champions of
adherence to the profoundest pieties of life and
time, have been the first and most constant to
enlarge upon the impenetrable mysteriousness that
hangs about the origin, the course, the working of
human societies and their governing institutions.
When the Russian Czar, a mystic of the purest
water, called himself an accident, he meant no
more than a mystery, a power of inscrutable
source. Why should we be more shocked at the
fortuitous in affairs of government, than in the
appearance of the Bachs and Beethovens in music,
or Newton, or Watt, or any other of the originat-
ing luminaries in art, or science, or productive
invention ? Of this great question of Progress as
spontaneous force or fixed historic law, I will say
more before I close.
Truly has it been said of the historic method,
that among other of its vast influences, it re-
duces the element of individual accident to its due
24 POLITICS AND HISTORY
proportions; it conceives of national character and
national circumstances as the creative forces that
they are. An ironical lawyer assures us that it
would be better to be convicted of petty larceny
than to be found wanting in " historic - minded-
ness." What is the historic method ? Its sway
is now universal in the field of social judgment and
investigation. It warns us that we cannot explain
or understand without allowing for origins and the
genetical side of the agents and conditions with
which we have all to deal. It substitutes for
dogmas deduced from abstract regions, search for
two things. The first, the correlation of leading
facts and social ideas with one another, in a given
community, at a given time. The second, the
evolution of order succeeding to order in common
beliefs, tastes, customs, diffusion of wealth, laws,
and all the arts of life. Stripped of formality, this
only expands the familiar truth that laws and
institutions are not made but grow, and what is
true of them is true of ideas, language, manners,
which are in effect their source and touchstone.
It is easy to see that the ascendancy of the
historic method has its drawbacks. Study of all
the successive stages in beliefs, institutions, laws,
forms of art, only too soon grows into a substitute
for direct criticism of all these things upon their
merits and in themselves. Inquiry what the event
actually was, vital and indispensable as that of
course must be, and what its significance and in-
terpretation, becomes secondary to inquiry how it
came about. Too exclusive attention to dynamic
aspects weakens the energetic duties of the static.
More than one school thus deem the predominance
of historic - mindedness excessive. It means, they
truly say, in its very essence, veto of the absolute,
persistent substitution of the relative. Your
method is non-moral, like any other scientific
instrument. So is Nature in one sense, red in tooth
POLITICS AND HISTORY 25
and claw, only careful for survival of the strongest.
There is no more conscience in your comparative
history than there is in comparative anatomy.
You arrange ideals in classes and series, but a
classified ideal loses its vital spark and halo.
Every page abounds in ironies. Even figures of
high mark turn out political somnambulists. Talk
of " eternal political truths," or " first principles of
government," has no meaning. Truths become
relative errors, and errors to-day were truths
yesterday. Stated summarily, is not your history
one prolonged " becoming " (fieri, werden), an end-
less sequence of action, reaction, generation, de-
struction, renovation, " a tale full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing " ? All is flux, said Heraclitus
long centuries ago ; no man goes twice down the
same stream ; new waters are in constant flow ;
they run down, they gather again ; all is overflow
and fall. Well, such argument as this, I know,
may be hard pressed, and it is in truth a protest
for the absolute that cannot be spared to many
active causes. But that relative tests and standards
are the keys both to real knowledge of history and
to fair measure of its actors, is a doctrine not likely
to lose its hold.
To-night is not the time for discussing whether
there is such a thing as political science. I need
not try, for the work has been incomparably well
done for our purposes in Sir Frederick Pollock's
short volume on the History of the Science of Politics.
Is there any true analogy between the body politic
and the body natural ; are the methods and pro-
cesses of politics to be brought within sight of the
methods and processes of biology ? The politician
may borrow phrases from the biologist, and talk of
embryos, germs, organisms, but surely those are
right who insist that we have not come near to the
definite creation of an inductive political science.1
1 Maitland, Collected Papers, iii. 288.
26
That is certainly no reason why the politician
should not reason, nor why the historian should
not explore, with the methodical energy, caution,
conscience, candour, and determined love of truth
that marked Darwin and the heroes of the natural
sciences.
Political science suffers from the same defect as
political economy in the earlier part of the nine-
teenth century. There is a strange rarefaction in
its atmosphere. The abstract political man wears
the same artificial character as the abstract man of
the economist. He was usually supposed by the
French thinker of Voltaire's day to dwell in China
or Persia, or any other chosen land of which, as it
actually was, they knew next to nothing ; any
more than they knew of Canada when they ridiculed
the war between England and France as a struggle
for thousands of square miles of perpetual snow.
We know better now, but the standards of human
motive are still applied in arbitrary fashion to what
is distant in time or place. Ethical considerations
pass for so much ornament. Matters are too
much confined to description of political mechanics,
without regard to all the varieties of social fuel on
which the driving force depends. The changing
growth of new opinion, the effectiveness of political
institutions in giving expression to new opinion, are
treated as secondary, or not treated at all. The
lines laid down by Professor Dicey, in his book on
the relation between law and opinion in the nine-
teenth century, deserve to be followed, and they
are sure to be. The science so conceived will
realise that the value of political forms is to be
measured by what they do. They must express
and answer the mind and purposes of a State, in
their amplest bearings. I hope all this is not
ungrateful to a group of writers in this country,
who in the last few years have filled a really im-
portant bookshelf in any library pretending to be
POLITICS AND HISTORY 27
on the highest level in this truly important sphere —
with Green, Pollock, Dicey, Hobhouse, Bosanquet,
Wallas, among them. Let nobody suppose that
speculations as to the State and its various relations
to the Individual are immaterial. It is held that
the attempts of certain French teachers to present
German theories of the State in French dress, are
directly responsible for Syndicalism in France.
Politics, in the sense that I am suggesting, are
different from law, because law tends to stereo-
type thought by forcing it into fixed categories,
but political science, rightly handled, is for ever
reopening these categories, to examine how they
answer to contemporary facts. Political science
is wider than law, because its work may be said
to begin where law ends. It is less wide than
sociology, because it starts from the assumption of
the State with all its rights, powers, and duties.
IV
Germans have in Weltanschauung a word for
which I know of no English equivalent. The
French find it no easier than do we, to convey it
in a single word or even in a free circumlocution.
It comes of the questions that haunt all ages, that
survive all philosophies, that defy continuous gener-
ations of chartered soothsayers, that mock rising
and sinking schools alike. Our literature possesses
at least one poetic presentation of its spirit, in the
two or three pages of inspiring prose that are the
proem to George Eliot's Romola. Technically mean-
ing a conception of the universe, Weltanschauung
covers a man's outlook upon the world and time and
human destinies ; the mental summary of experi-
ence, knowledge, duty, affections to his fellows ;
relations to mysterious Force and Will, invisible
but supreme, call it Providence, Moira, Fate, or by
what name we choose. Such an outlook on the
28 POLITICS AND HISTORY
world and its meanings varies with each historic
age, and marks it for what it is. This is what, if
we seek the roots of social existence, distinguishes
one period of civilisation from another. Men
in general are but vaguely conscious of Weltan-
schauung. For them, the World, in this wide com-
prehension of that commonest and most fluid of all
our daily words, is no object of their thoughts. Yet
all the time in some established creed, consecrated
form, or iron chain of silent habit, this is what fixes
vision, moulds judgment, inspires purpose, limits
acts, gives its shades, colour, and texture to common
language. Even for superior natures, narrow are the
windows of the mind ; no wide champaign, but nar-
row and restricted are the confines of our landscape.
| History, in the great conception of it, has often
been compared to a mountain chain seen far off in
a clear sky, where the peaks seem linked to one
another towards the higher crest of the group. An
ingenious and learned writer the other day amplified
this famous image by speaking of a set of volcanic
islands heaving themselves out of the sea, at such
angles and distances that only to the eye of a bird,
and not to a sailor cruising among them, would
they appear as the heights of one and the same
submerged range. The sailor is the politician.
The historian, without prejudice to monographic
exploration in intervening valleys and ascending
slopes, will covet the vision of the bird.
According to an instructive scholar, here we
come upon the great contrast between ancient
history and modern. For right comprehension of
Thucydides, he says, " the fundamental conception
which all our thought about the world implies,
must be banished — the conception, namely, that
the whole course of events of every kind, human
or non- human, is one enormous concatenation of
causes and effects stretching forward and back into
infinite time, and spreading outwards over im-
POLITICS AND HISTORY 29
measurable space. The world on which the Greek
looked out, presented no such spectacle as this.
Human affairs — the subject-matter of history -
were not to him a single strand in the illimitable web
of natural evolution ; their course was shaped solely
by one or both of two factors : immediate human
motives, and the will of gods and spirits, of Fortune
or of Fate." 1 All this is just as true of great
political historians like Machiavelli and Guicciardini ;
they looked out upon the Europe of the fifteenth
century from the walls of Florence with Livy,
Tacitus, Sallust, for their only models. They had
the experience of intelligent travel, no doubt, and
that is the best of substitutes for patterns of written
history. Still the mighty commander of a later
age, himself Italian in stock, declared that Machia-
velli wrote about battles as a blind man might write
about colours. \
So we might proceed through the " enormous
concatenation " of historical names and sweeping
change that was never conceived nor compre-
hensible until it came to pass. Think, for example,
of the strange new spectacle of world and life
that opened to men's minds and shaped their
days, after the spiritual struggle between Catholic
and Protestant confessions. Heresies had been
abundant during the Ages of Faith, but wide dis-
turbance of simple unquestioning acceptance had
been rare and superficial. The protracted battle
over the authority of Rome, over toleration, over
church government by bishops, over rite and
symbol, had been fought out. The rival creeds
identified themselves with political forces, and had
become definite and commanding ingredients in
organised States. Only then did the purple vision
of human societies in western Europe, united by a
universal faith, begin to fade. The standing conflict
that henceforth divided Christianity, and divided
1 Thueydides Mylhisioricus, by F. M. Cornford (1907), pp. 60-68.
30 POLITICS AND HISTORY
and subdivided Protestantism itself, by the mere
fact of its existence as a conflict, apart from its
merits and contents, extended, diverted, trans-
formed the outlook. Old worlds and systems dis-
appear, new arise, still men live but in a corner of
their own.
The temper of our present time is adverse to
generalisation. Harnack says that in 1700 the most
universal or encyclopaedic mind was Leibnitz, and
in 1800 it was Goethe. I suppose Leonardo da
Vinci for 1500, and nobody would dispute that in
1600 it was Bacon — the greatest intellect that ever
combined power in thought with responsible prac-
tice in affairs of state. Court affairs at Weimar
were little more than playground politics. To
whom would competent authorities give the palm
in 1900 ? If we are slow to answer, without dis-
respect to Herbert Spencer, the reason is that
advance of specialisation over the whole field of
knowledge has made the encyclopaedic mind an
anachronism. The day of the circumnavigator is
over — of men who strive to round the whole sphere
of mind, to complete the circuit of thought and
knowledge, and to touch at all the ports. We may
find comfort in the truth that though excess of
specialisation is bad, to make sciolism into a system
is worse. In reading history it is our common
fault to take too short measure of the event, to
mistake some early scene in the play as if it were
the fifth act, and so conceive the plot all amiss.
The event is only comprehended in its fullest
dimensions, and for that the historic recorder,
like or unlike the actor before him, needs insight
and imagination. French Revolution from Fall of
the Bastille to Waterloo ; English Revolution from
Eliot, Pym, Hampden, Oliver, to Naseby, and
from Naseby to William and Mary ; American
Union from the Philadelphia State House in 1776,
to the Appomattox Court House in 1865 ; Demo-
POLITICS AND HISTORY 31
cratic Ordering in England from the Reform Act
of 1832 to the Parliament Act in 1911 ; Ireland
from the enfranchisement of the Roman Catholics
in 1793 — to some date still lamentably and ruinously
uncertain. How desperately chimerical would the
end of all those immense transactions have seemed
to men who across long tracts of time had started
them. They are all political; but the same
observation would be just as true of the world's
march in the sphere of ideas, methods, moral
standards, religious creeds.
All agree that we have no business to seek more
from the past than the very past itself. Nobody
disputes with Cicero when he asks, " Who does not
know that it is the first law of history, not to dare
a word that is false ? Next not to shrink from
a word that is true. No partiality, no grudge." 1
Though nobody disputes the obvious answers, have
a majority of historical practitioners complied ?
To-day taste and fashion have for a season turned
away from the imposing tapestries of the literary
historian, in favour of the drab serge of research
among diplomatic archives, parish registers, private
muniments, and anything else, so long as it is not
print. As Acton put it, the great historian now
takes his meals in the kitchen. Even here we are
not quite at our ease. Bismarck, reading a book of
superior calibre, once came upon a portrait of an
eminent personage whom he had known well. " Such
a man as is described here," he cried, "never ex-
isted"; and he went on in graphic strokes to paint the
sitter as he had actually found him. " It is not in
diplomatic materials, but in their life of every day
that you come to know men." So does a singularly
good judge warn us of the perils of archivial research.
Nor can we forget the lament of the most learned
and laborious of all English historians of our time.
" I am beginning to think," said Freeman, " that
1 DC Oral. ii. 15.
32 POLITICS AND HISTORY
there is not, and never was any such thing as
truth in the world. At least I don't believe
that any two people ever give exactly the same
account of anything, even when they have seen
it with their own eyes, except when they copy
from one another." 1 This is to bring some sup-
port for Goethe, " that the only form of truth is
poetry."
The unity of history is now orthodox doctrine,
though accepted, as orthodox doctrines are apt to
be, in various senses. Freeman protested with
almost tiresome iteration against division between
ancient history and modern, and summed up in
the heroic assurance that history deals not with
the rivalry, " but the brotherhood of all periods
and all subjects, of all nations and languages, at
least within the pale of Aryan Europe." Acton
put it that " History derives its best virtue from
regions beyond the sphere of State." Mr. Gooch,
a younger student, says more fully : " No pre-
sentation of history can be adequate which neglects
the growths of the religious consciousness, of
literature, of the moral and physical sciences, of
art, of scholarship, of social life." Another view
is that profitable knowledge of history consists less
in remembering events or characters of statesmen,
than in knowing what men were like in bygone days,
their aims, hopes, pleasures, beliefs, and how they
thought and felt. There can be little doubt that
this would best hit the common taste. Treitschke
will not have it so. The farther a man places
himself away from the State, as he maintains, the
farther he goes from historic life. To bring descrip-
tions of the soul of a people into history, is to deal
with last year's snow. Who, he asks, does not feel
Kulturgeschichte imperfect and unsatisfying, even
when handled by a master ? Even in Burckhardt's
famous book on the Italian Renaissance, who does
1 Life and Letters, i. 238.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 33
not feel a want, the want of active personalities ?
History, as Treitschke contends, is first of all the
presentation of res gestae, and of active statesmen.
The essential things in the statesman are strength
of will, courage, massive ambition, passionate joy
in the result.
It needs no wizard to see how such doctrine as
this lends a hand to the sinister school of political
historians, who insist that the event is its own
justification ; that Force and Right are one. Fact
and reason, they contend, are and must be one and
the same : the real and the rational are identic,
and it is waste of time to labour differences between
them. The disciples are thus led on to that exalta-
tion of the State, which stands for Force, into
supreme pre-eminence as master-conception in men's
minds and habits. Of this strong meat, you will let
me say a word later.
I have just quoted words about religious con-
sciousness, and regions beyond the sphere of State.
How constantly have the immense phenomena of
churches, Catholic and Protestant, so imposing
and so penetrating, made the gravest chapter in
the history of States.1 As if Churches were not
political realities. As if the Council of Constance
in the fifteenth century, the Council of Trent in the
sixteenth, the Assembly of Divines in the Jerusalem
Chamber at Westminster during the civil wars, the
Four Declarations of the French clergy in 1682, —
with all the array of pontiffs, church princes, saints,
doctors, congregations, presbyteries, preachers, friars,
inquisitors, missioners, creeds, symbols, bulls, canon
laws, catechisms, — were not in truth the very
essence and mainspring of the vast and subtle
political commotions that for age after age followed
in their perpetual train. Is it mere distortion to
say that " hardly a more momentous resolution can
be found in history " than the decision at Nicaea
1 See Ranke's Hist, of Servia.
34 POLITICS AND HISTORY
in the fourth century ? x If it be right to judge
that no false system ever struck more directly at
the very life of Christianity than Arianism, then the
proscription of Arius and the triumph of Athanasius
was an infinitely more potent thing in the history
of Western mankind, than the fall of the Bastille
and all the principles of either French or American
Revolution.
It may, if anybody likes to have it so, be a good
distinction that Force is the principle of the State,
while the life and principle of a Church is Belief.
For that matter both Church and State rest alike
upon a shifting Tertium Quid of Authority, — say,
an infallible Pope or an impregnable Book. The
political affinities of religious and ecclesiastic creeds
offer to the historic student some of his standing
puzzles. How comes it, for example, that the
fatalism implied in Calvinistic Protestantism has
been the nurse of some of the most strenuous,
active, energetic, and independent natures in politi-
cal history ? It was a caustic but a wise re-
minder to historians of France that Jansenism
was no trivial or transitory piece upon the great
theologic theatre, and that two Jansenist sisters,
Angelique and Euphemie, were more considerable
persons in the annals of their country than Madame
de Montespan and the other chosen and con-
spicuous companions of Louis XIV.2 There is
many another case of national temper and out-
ward circumstance bearing down the most stringent
of logical arguments.3
Our own day offers a singular kaleidoscope. Men
thought it a crushing scandal in the sixteenth
century when Francis I. was suspected of making
1 Gwatkin's Studies of Arianism, 43.
2 Lavisse, Hist, de France, vii. i. 87.
3 For many centuries, says Ranke, Islam and Christianity have been
in conflict, developing themselves in opposition to each other ; what is
the main political distinction of the institutions that have arisen under
their influence? (Ranke's Hist, of Servia, Trans, p. 38).
POLITICS AND HISTORY 35
terms for himself with the arch-enemy of Christian
mankind, the Khalif of Turkey. Richelieu, one of
the half-dozen sovereign names in the European
record, systematically worked with English and
Dutch against popish Spain for the same reason
that made him relentless against his own Huguenots,
namely, that they were the foes of monarchical
unity in France. The paradox is not absent in
our own time. We see Roman Catholic Austro-
Hungary the pledged confederate of what we are
assured by her own oracles is Protestant Prussia.
One third of Prussia, to be sure, is Catholic, but
Catholicism in standing contact with Protestant
culture and liberalised institutions, as the American
Union and our own Quebec are enough to show, is
not like the same communion in Latin systems.
Then the Sovereign who is head of the Church of
England, is the ally of non-Christian Japan. The
King-Emperor of India — the first European ruler
who has ever put on the crown in Asia — is
neutral and indifferent to the faiths and nearly
all the old consecrated practices of the myriads
of Hindus, Mahommedans, Parsees. Politics are
admittedly as if from the necessity of the thing,
or privately for the sake of decency, supreme ;
and, it may be, whether men wish the process well
or ill, such events do more to dissolve dogma and
sap its hold, than any number of infidel books.
Sympathy, again, in principles of government
and forms of government, is treated as no more
to the point in settling the friendship of States,
than sympathy in theology. The balance of
power is supposed just now in the diplomatic
chanceries to be maintained in Europe, by firm
co-operation between a secularised Republic in
France, and an absolutist Monarchy that is half
theocracy in Russia. Ecclesiastical historians
themselves have taught us how constantly church
machinery has been used as a source of power for
36 POLITICS AND HISTORY
the statesman's objects. They point to the war
against the Albigensians as having for its real pur-
pose the strengthening of French monarchy ; the
persecutions in Bohemia, as designed to fortify
German dominion over the Czechs ; the Spanish
Inquisition, as set up and worked to overcome the
disunion of race and history, for the sake of the
Spanish monarchy. In these and an untold host
of other cases the State was Force, and Belief was
not the only point. If we must quantify, it has
been said of the long religious wars in France, that
in one-fifth of them religion was the cause, in four-
fifths it was only the pretext. To search for the
secular politician behind an army of spiritual
crusaders is no cynicism. The enthusiasm, no
doubt, is the more attractive and exciting to
reflective minds. Yet policy, hidden or avowed,
may be a master-key.
According to some scientific historians * with a
right to speak, history does not solve questions ;
it teaches us to examine. We often hear that our
understanding of history is spoiled by knowledge
of the event. A great event, they say, is seldom
fully understood by those who worked for it. Our
vision is surer about the past ; there we have the
whole ; we see the beginning and the end ; we
distinguish essential from accessory ; time fore-
shortens. To contemporaries events are confused,
obscured by passing accidents, mixed with all sorts
of foreign elements. Even men of the compass
of Caesar, William the Silent, Cromwell, Chatham,
pursued resolute general aims, subject only like all
men's aims to the uncounted traverses of fortune,
and to " leadings " that were half out of sight.
Both contemporaries and historians, more often
than they suppose, miss a vital point because they
do not know the intuitive instinct that often goes
farther in the statesman's mind than deliberate
1 For instance, Fustel de Coulanges, Questions historiques, Preface (1893).
POLITICS AND HISTORY 37
analysis or argument. A visitor of Bismarck's
once reminded him that Schopenhauer used to sit
with him at dinner every day in the hotel at Frank-
furt. " No, I had no business with him, I had
neither time nor inclination for philosophy," said
Bismarck, " and I know nothing of Schopenhauer's
system." It was summarily explained to him as
vesting the primacy of the will in self-consciousness.
"I daresay that may be all right," he said; "for
myself at least, I have often noticed that my will
had decided, before my thinking was finished." *
Improvisation has far more to do in politics than
historians or other people think.
History's direct lessons are few, its specific morals
rare. To say this, is not to disparage the grand
inspiration that present may draw from past, or
the priceless value of old examples of lofty public
deeds and high-hearted men. Plutarch's Lives,
parallels and all, are the master proof, one of
the too few books that can never be out of date.
Heine said that when he read Plutarch, he felt a
vehement impulse instantly to take post-horses for
Berlin, and turn hero. This, however, is a very
different question. It is to working statesmen that
parallels may easily be a snare, and ludicrous
misapplications from Greece and Rome inspired
some of the worst aberrations both of the French
Revolution and of the Empire. The Old Testa-
ment was often made to play the same part in
our own Rebellion. They are convenient to the
politician. A plausible parallel makes him feel
surer of his ground. It is as refreshing as a broad
reflective digression in a close narrative. The
French Revolution is to this day a favourite
armoury for parallels, predictions, warnings, even
nicknames, and a harmless English politician finds
himself labelled Jacobin or Girondin, though he
really has no more in common with the Frenchman
1 Lebenserinnerungen von Julius v. Eckhardt, ii. 122-3.
38 POLITICS AND HISTORY
than he has with Adam or Noah. We may often
think of Napoleon's dictum, that " there will be
no real peace in history, till the whole generation
contemporary with the French Revolution is ex-
tinct to the very last man," and even later. Lord
Bryce holds that though usually interesting, and
often illuminating, what are called historian's
parallels are often misleading. He tells how,
during the great dispute in 1876 after the Bulgarian
massacres, between those who thought we ought
to back the Sultan, and those who were equally
convinced the other way, he met one day in the
street an eminent historical professor, who was fond
of descanting on the value of history as a guide
to politics. They talked of the crisis in the East.
" I said, ' Here is a fine opportunity for applying
your doctrines. Party politicians may be divided,
but no student of history can doubt which is the
right course for the Government to follow towards
Russia and the Turks.' ' Certainly,' he replied,
4 the teachings of history are plain.' ' You mean,
of course,' I said, scenting some signs of disagree-
ment, ' that we ought to warn the Sultan that he
is wholly in the wrong, and can have no support
from us.' ' No, indeed,' rejoined my friend, ' I
mean just the opposite.' :
A good-natured international smile may be for-
given at the ingenious parallel discovered by a
learned historian of Hellenism,1 between Macedonia
in the days of Alexander the Great, and Prussia
in the time of Prince Bismarck. The Greeks, it
seems, mastered by the spirit of the canton and
the city-state, thought nothing of their land as a
whole, until a barbarian from the north perceived
it, made " the synthesis of their civilisation," and
spread it over the world ; whereas if Demosthenes
had won the battle, a desperate state of things
1 Droysen, as cited in Guilland's ISAllemagne nouvelle et ses historiens,
p. 191.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 39
would have survived. So if Sadowa and Sedan
had gone amiss, the resplendent orb of German
radiance and intellectual power would never have
broken through the nebulous skies of a disunited
fatherland, and diffused its beams over the civilised
world. The same singular parallel finds still more
emphatic expression in that admirable man and
historic thinker, Dollinger. For once forgetting
the serene truth that sovereign gifts of thought,
imagination, discovery have not been quite un-
equally distributed among the modern nations of
the Western world, Dollinger, with strange excess
of emphasis, insists that Germany is the intellectual
centre from which proceed the great ideas that
sway the world. She attracts all thought within
her scope, shapes it, and sends it forth into the
universe clothed with a power that is her own.
No other nation, he proceeds, can approach the
German people in many-sidedness ; no other pos-
sesses in so great a measure, side by side with this
power of adaptation, the qualities of untiring re-
search and original creative genius. Out of all the
nations of the modern world, the German people
are most "like the Greeks of old." They "have
been called to an intellectual priesthood, and to
this high vocation they have done no dishonour." 1
Greeks or not, nobody will deny the magnificence
of German contribution, though much of that grand
contribution in Germany, as in Greece, is due to
small States. And can we escape an ironic start
after all this, on encountering the proposition that
4 vanity is the accepted characteristic of the
French nation " ? The force of the Macedonian
parallel, whatever it amounts to, is weakened, if it
is not shattered, by Mill's broad declaration that
the ascendancy of a ruder civilisation, and the
subjection by brute strength of a superior civilisa-
tion, is sheer mischief to the human race, and one
1 Conversations of Dr. Dollinger, Eng. Trans. (1892), p. 205.
40 POLITICS AND HISTORY
that civilised humanity with one accord should
rise in arms to prevent. The absorption of Greece
by Macedonia, he says, was one of the greatest
misfortunes that ever happened to the world.1 So
harshly may illustrious philosophic oracles fall out
of tune.
Leaving ancient history aside, I cannot but re-
call the Macedonian Goethe's generous recognition
of his debt to the supposed Graeculi of France ;
how he delighted in Diderot, and even translated
one of his famous dialogues, usually found far too
broad and tatterdemalion for English taste ; how
he admired the tone of good manners in French
translation of his own books, due, as he supposes,
to their habit of thinking and speaking for a great
public, whereas in Germany, he says, " the writer
speaks as if he were alone, and you only hear a
single voice." In other words, French literature is
so essentially sociable. We know its masters in
the seventeenth century — Pascal, La Fontaine,
Moliere, Bossuet, Fenelon, de Sevigne, La Bruyere,
Saint-Simon. We know the writers who stand for
main currents in the eighteenth — Bayle, Montes-
quieu, Voltaire, Encyclopaedists, Rousseau. In the
nineteenth, without ignoring the fame of Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, the French are not without some
reason for the vanity that is imputed to them.
French writers conspicuously engaged the attention
of mankind. They turned thought and interest
and curiosity and search for intellectual pleasure
into new channels. They led the great changes in
mood, standard, and point of view during the three
generations after Napoleon Bonaparte, and typified
ideals of an active and aspiring age. De Maistre,
Proudhon, Saint-Simon (not the famous diarist of
Versailles, but the earliest name in the socialistic
ferment a hundred years ago), and Comte, unap-
proached by any of them in the power, originality,
1 Representative Government, chap. xvi.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 41
and intellectual resource with which he wove
together the strands of knowledge into the web of
social duty — were all effective writers as well as
fresh thinkers. There was Guizot, founder of
new historic schools, and one of those who by
force of personality, apart from literary con-
tribution, exercise a potent influence on their
time. Renan brought wide learning and infinite
fascination of form to a theological dissolution
that science, and the widening of men's minds
by the widening of the known world, made so
inevitable. Victor Hugo, amid a thousand colossal
extravagances, sounded to an enormous public all
over the world a rolling thunderblast against
the barbarities of recorded time, and was inspired
by a glorious muse, the genius of Pity. It
would be easy to vindicate a claim for other
names, mirrors of the strong movements or strange
phantasies of their age — and of human nature in
all ages — Michelet, Lamartine, George Sand, Balzac,
Taine.
The last of these shining names prompts a word
of digression on a point in what I have already said
on the fortunes of books. Taine was a strenuous
worker and magnanimous man if ever man was.
His six volumes on the French Revolution, its ante-
cedents, and its sequel, are admirably attractive
as literature. But literary splendour did not
prevent it from being a marked case of the
fluctuations of men's verdicts on the causes and
significance of events, and the authority of their
interpreters. The book has enjoyed immense vogue
in Europe. It fell in with the reactionary mood
that followed the overthrow of the Second
Empire, and that desperate catastrophe, political
and moral, the Commune. Its claim to be history
has been almost painfully exposed by the more
authentic writer of another school. " The docu-
ment does not speak to Taine," says his critic ;
42 POLITICS AND HISTORY
"it is he who all the time is speaking to the
document." x
Every method has its own perils, and the perils
of Taine's method are plain. He tells us, Whether
the man be actor on the great stage of our world's
affairs, or an inspirer, creator, discoverer in the
realms of knowledge, truth, and beauty, character
and work flow from some master faculty within him,
in limits set by race, by surroundings, by the hour.
But then, alas, such unity is for art, and not for
history. As an achievement of literary ingenuity,
Taine's hundred pages upon Napoleon Bonaparte 2
are consummate. The elements are skilfully com-
pounded, the fusion in the furnace is perfect, the
molten stream runs truly into all the channels of
the mould, and a form of superhuman might is
reared upon its pedestal. This is not the way in
which things really happen. For that, it is no
wonder that the critic takes down a volume of
Cardinal de Retz, with the stir and spirit of affairs
in full circulation, and the actors, as Retz says,
" hot and smoking " with violence and faction. Or
he might take some strong pages of Clarendon,
Burnet, Bolingbroke, Bacon, Halifax, Swift.
Let me repeat : sovereign gifts of brain and
heart have not been so unequally distributed over
the Western world as fits of national vanity incline
men to suppose One of the drawbacks to the
great uprising of the spirit of Nationality for a
century past, has been the changed hold of the
cosmopolitan sense of human relations that sounded
a silver trumpet amid all the international piracies
of Silesia, Poland, and the rest. To this practical
declension of what has been called allegiance to
humanity, or the service of man, or over-ruling
altruism, one at any rate of the correctives is the
1 Taine, Historien de la Rev. Front;, par M, Aulard, p. 326. Faguet's
Questions politiques (1903), pp. 2, 19.
8 Origines de la France contemporaine, Regime Moderne, vol. i. chap. i.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 43
thought how in the glories of our common civilisa-
tion, each nation has its own particular share, how
marked the debt of all to each. How disastrous
would have been the gap if European history had
missed the cosmopolitan radiation of ideas from
France ; or the poetry, art, science of Italy ; or the
science, philosophy, music of Germany ; or the
grave heroic types, the humour, the literary force
of Spain ; the creation of grand worlds in thought,
wisdom, knowledge, — the poetic beauty, civil life,
humane pity, — immortally associated with the part
of England in the Western world's illuminated scroll.
It is not one tributary, but the co-operation of all,
that has fed the waters and guided the currents of
the main stream. We may ponder some national
trilogies or quartettes. Descartes, Voltaire, Mon-
taigne : Dante, Michelangelo, Galileo : Kant,
Goethe, Beethoven : Cervantes, Columbus,1 Las
Casas : Hume, Scott, Adam Smith, Burns : Eras-
mus, Grotius, Rembrandt : Franklin, Hamilton,
Washington, Lincoln : Shakespeare, Newton, Gib-
bon, Darwin. Choose, vary, amplify the catalogue
as we will and as we must, no nation nor nationality
counts alone or paramount among the forces that
have shaped the world's elect, and shared in
diffusing central light and warmth among the chil-
dren of mankind. To deride patriotism marks
impoverished blood, but to extol it as an impulse
above truth and justice, at the cost of the general
interests of humanity, is far worse. Even where
men admit as much as this, it is wonderful how
easily a little angry shouting makes them oblivious
1 Elaborate attempts are made to show that the discoverer of
America was no Genoese, but a Jew from Spanish Galicia ; and
President Grevy even did so unfriendly an act as to grant a decree
authorising a statue to him at Calvi in Corsica. Be all this as it may,
it was in Spain that the valiant adventurer produced his designs, and
found the means of executing them. Whether born at Pontevedra or
Genoa, he struck such root in Spain that he lost the Italian tongue, if it
was ever his. The controversies are exhaustively handled in Revue Critique,
May 3, 1913.
44 POLITICS AND HISTORY
of its sanctity. In spite of fair words and noble
and strenuous endeavour for peace by rulers,
statesmen, and most of those who have the public
ear in Europe, the scale of armament reveals the
unwelcome fact that we live in a military age.
[1913.]
Evolution, for reasons easily understood, is the
most overworked word in all the languages of the
hour. But we cannot do without it, and those
are right who say that in the evolution of politics
nothing has been more important than the suc-
cessive emergence into the practical life of States
and institutions, of such moral entities as Justice,
Freedom, Right. Of these glorious and sacred
aspirations in substantial form, history made the
English tongue the vernacular. Whether Burke in
his best pieces, or Aristotle in his Politics, shows
the wider knowledge of human nature, learned men
do not decide. At least the philosopher of small
city-states, even with the brain of an Aristotle,
could not be expected to have any idea of that
representative government which at home here is
the governing political fact of to-day, and in other
lands is the political ideal. It was Locke in the
seventeenth century who in connection with the
settlement of the monarchy that we are decorously
adjured to call a revolution and not a rebellion,
first set out constitutional government in terms of
thought, and furnished the mainspring of political
philosophy for long ages after.1 Frederick the
Great says that his illumination and emancipation
came from Locke, though we cannot be sure that
our careful and candid sage would have found the
career of his Prussian disciple a pattern for princes.
From him both Montesquieu and Rousseau, the
famous heads of two opposed schools and rival
methods, drew their inspiration. Countless are the
governing systems all over the globe that have
1 Prof. Sorley in Comb. Hist, of Eng. Lit. viii.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 45
found their model here, and we may record with no
ignoble pride that the tongue of our English masters
of political wisdom is spoken by 160 millions, as
against 130 of German, 100 of Russian, 70 of
French,1 and 50 of Spanish. Mark the change
from Bacon, who sent his Advancement of Learning
to Prince Charles in a new Latin dress, because a
book could only live in the " general language,"
and English books cannot be " citizens of the
world." Cromwell as Protector could only talk to
ambassadors in dog-Latin. I do not forget that
among 90 or 100 millions of our triumphant figure,
the King's writ does not run ; for these expanding
millions live, not under our bluff Union Jack, but
under Stars and Stripes. Still less can we forget
that French is the most oecumenical of all living
tongues ; so sociable, so exact, so refined, copious,
and subtle in its diversity of shades in every field,
grave and gay ; so apt alike for what is trivial, and
for high affairs of thought or business.
The only parallel to the boundless area of the
habitable globe conquered by our tongue, is held
by some to be Arabic. They tell us that though
Arabic in Islamic lands for some three or four
centuries became the medium for an active propa-
gation of ideas, and though it retains by the Koran
its hold in its own area, and keeps in its literary,
as distinct from its spoken form the stamp of
thirteen centuries ago, yet there is no real analogy
or comparison with the diffusion of English. Latin
is a better analogy. It was spoken pretty early in
the towns of Spain, Gaul, Britain, and somewhat
1 Here is the estimate of a competent authority as to the English-
speaking population of the globe — over forty-five millions in the United
Kingdom ; about twelve millions in Canada and Australia ; at least
five millions in various parts of British Africa ; in India 1,672,000 literate
in English, and rather less than half a million whose English is vernacular,
and it is the official language of the annual Congress ; say a million in
other British possessions. If we take into account the various forms of
pigeon English spoken in British possessions and elsewhere, we might
make the total sixty-five millions. Finally, the modest addition of some-
thing'under 100 millions in the United States.
46 POLITICS AND HISTORY
later in the provinces on the Danube. In the East
it spread more slowly, but by the Antonines and
onwards the use of Latin was pretty complete, even
in northern Africa. Greek was common through-
out the Empire as the language of commerce in the
fourth century. St. Augustine says, " Pains were
taken that the Imperial State should impose not
only its political yoke, but its own tongue, upon
the conquered peoples, per pacem societatis." This
is what is slowly coming to pass in India. Though
to-day only a handful, a million or so, of the popu-
lation use our language, yet English must tend to
spread from being the official tongue to be a general
unifying agent. Any Englishman who adds to the
glory of our language and letters, will deserve
Caesar's grand compliment to Cicero, declaring it a
better claim to a laurel crown to have advanced the
boundaries of Roman genius, than the boundaries
of Roman rule. Whether Caesar was sincere or
insincere, it is a noble truth for us as well as for
old Rome.
From reflections on the contributions of great
nations to various aspects and phases of general
civilisation, it is no abrupt transfer of thought to
turn to what is perhaps the most marked of all the
agitations of the nineteenth century, the political
movement for national autonomy. In the senti-
ment of Nationality there is nothing new. It was
one of the main keys of Luther's Reformation.
What is new is the transformation of the sentiment
into a political idea. Old history and fresh politics
worked a union that has grown into an urgent
and dominating force. Oppression, intolerable eco-
nomic disorder, governmental failure, senseless wars,
senseless ambitions, and the misery that was their
baleful fruit, quickened the instinct of Nationality.
First it inflamed visionaries, then it grew potent
POLITICS AND HISTORY 47
with the multitudes, who thought the foreigner the
author of their wretchedness. Thus Nationality
went through all the stages. From instinct it
became idea ; from idea abstract principle ; then
fervid prepossession ; ending where it is to-day, in
dogma, whether accepted or evaded.
A man who wishes to trace perplexities to their
source will not forget the history of the claims,
ambitions, and pretensions of Prussia, Austria,
Russia, when they partitioned Poland 140 years
ago. Well did Burke in 1772 warn Europe that
Poland was only a breakfast for the great armed
powers, but where would they dine ? " After all
our love of tranquillity," he exclaimed, " and all
our expedients to preserve it, alas ! poor Peace ! "
And well does the historian to-day 1 declare, in a
poignant sentence, the partition of Poland might
have been a statesmanlike performance if it could
have stopped in 1772. " But history never does stop
short," and in twenty years Europe found itself in
the whirlpool of the French revolutionary wars that
came to what was taken for a close at Waterloo.
We have spoken of senseless wars. It must be
confessed that the passion of Nationality has an
ample share in most of them for the last hundred
and twenty years, sometimes as cause, sometimes
as pretext.
Among the glowing spirits who have been pillars
of cloud by day and pillars of fire by night — agents
in transforming abstract social idealism into violent
political demand, — after Rousseau in date, Mazzini
came. What the first was from the fall of the
Bastille in 1789 until Napoleon's rise in 1800, this
was Mazzini in the era after Waterloo. Each
was main inspirer of the commanding impulse of
an epoch, each the fervid apostle of a driving
principle. We need not overlook Fichte's Addresses
to Germany, or the splendid utterances of all the
1 Sorel, La Question <T Orient au XVIII* Siecle (1878), p. 806.
48 POLITICS AND HISTORY
passion and all the reason that broke forth in the
ever-memorable uprising against Napoleon in 1813.
Spain had been earlier in the same protest, and in
a struggle no less victorious. Poland was destined
to bear the banner of Nationality for desperate
generation after generation, and Hungary shook
Western Europe with her story. But the Congress
of Vienna achieved a European settlement that set
Nationality at defiance, and the despots whom the
national spirit had enabled to overthrow the great
French captain, instantly took in hand the extinc-
tion of all the light and sacred fire of that very
spirit. It was this systematised defiance that out-
raged his whole nature in Mazzini.
Without forgetting the splendid elevation of
Channing, most eloquent of American divines, in
the struggles for human freedom in northern
America, the Italian was in wider range than
politics the most fervid moral genius of his time.
No other man of his century ever united intense
political activity with such affluence of moral
thought and social feeling. Prophets have a right
to be unreasonable, and in many a page, as in acts
not a few, Mazzini goes beyond unreason into the
flagrantly irrational. The genius of Cavour, more
characteristically positive, practical, and supple than
Mazzini's, was needed for Italian objects. Yet it
was fortunate for them that his rare spirit had its
ascendancy. He was loud and over-loud against
those whom he chose to deride as the busy race
of jugglers, petty Machiavels of the antechamber,
trading politicians, ready in all countries to swear
and to forswear, to launch out boldly or creep ashore
according to the wind. It is not such men as these,
he cried, with their crooked ways, court intrigues,
and false doctrines of expediency, that will create
a people. Do not think that men of that sort
will ever rise to such a spiritual heat for the nation,
as shall carry forward a cause like this ; as will meet
POLITICS AND HISTORY 49
all the oppositions that the devil and wicked men
can make. " Machiavelli," he cried, " has for long
ages prevailed over Dante. To save Italy and
awaken the soul in Europe, you must return to that
immortal spring of a people's noblest aspirations."
With penetrating eye he was alive to the saving
truth of " Italy a Nation." His argument was
inexorable. In other countries impatience of in-
equality and suffering had in 1848 driven men in
search of a new order. In Italy twenty-five millions
of men were rising for an idea ; what they sought was
a country. When they had conquered the foreigner,
freedom as well as independence would be won.
No aim but the creation of Italy, and Mazzini put
on his pamphlets an epigraph from Euclid, " The
right line is the shortest that can be drawn between
two points." No fallacy has ever wrought more
disastrous ravages. Euclid lived a good many hun-
dred years ago, but he must at any rate have had
far too clear a head not to be aware that geometry
is not politics. " The papacy," again, " now no
more than a symbol for absolutist government, must
be dethroned. While the idol stands, its shadow
will cast darkness around ; priests, Jesuits, and
fanatics will shelter themselves beneath its shade to
disturb the world ; while it stands, discord will exist
between moral and material society, between right
and fact, between the present and the imminent
future." It is at least certain that Mazzini 's
teaching was not merely the most direct attempt
to dethrone the temporal Pope and with him
dogmatic and secularised Churches, but to set up
a new spiritual gospel in their place, and to light
up human life and public duty with new and
i exalted meaning.
As men with instinct or reasoned feeling for
i emancipation even now turn over Mazzini's burning
pages, in spite of pungent reflections that cannot
be suppressed on what would have come of it
E
50 POLITICS AND HISTORY
all but for " political jugglers " like Cavour and
Napoleon III., and the guilty errors of expediency,
they may still find the passion of it irresistible.
How much more can we imagine the flame it
kindled in the breast of generations to whom the
hideous dungeons of Naples, and all the other
abominations and degradations of foreign rule in
Italy, were cruel haunting spectres of their own
days. Nationality became the deepest and most
powerful of revolutionary secrets. Of the Empire
and the Papacy, the two mighty forces of cohesion
through the Middle Age, it is truly said that they
were neither national nor international, but supra-
national. " Austria," said Gortchakov, " is not a
Nation ; she is not even a State : she is only a
Government." On their decline, and for other
causes, Nationality grew to be an unsuspected
sequel. Happily for the prophet, the time brought
a statesman. Four Italians played high parts in
modern history, and Cavour, endowed with the
union of force and brains that is named virtti, is
called as supple as Mazarin, as ingenious as Alberoni,
as swift and intrepid as Napoleon.
Though no term in politics is of more frequent
use than Nation, it is not easy to define. There
are almost as many accounts of it, as we have
found in other terms of the political dialect. John
Bright was thinking of kinder and humaner things
than definition, when he spoke his famous sentence
of such moving simplicity — the polar star of civil-
ised statesmen — that the nation in every country
dwells in the cottage. What constitutes a nation ;
what marks it from a Nationality, from a Society,
from a State ? The question is not idle or academic.
It generates active heat in senates and on platforms,
for example, at this moment, whether a particular
portion of our United Kingdom is either nation or
nationality. When the idea was mooted of France
seeking compensation after the Prussian victory at
POLITICS AND HISTORY 51
Sadowa, important men denounced it as blasphemy
against the principle of nationalities. Let us
theorise for a moment. Here is what the dictionary
has to tell us of a Nation : " An extensive aggregate
of persons, so closely associated with each other by
common descent, language, or history, as to form a
distinct race or people, usually organised as a
separate political state, and occupying a definite
territory." This is adequate enough, and consonant
with usage. But, then, Belgium is a political
State and yet its Walloon and Flemish provinces
are not common in descent, tongue, or history,
and their dissidence is at this very day something
of an active issue. Austria - Hungary is a great
State, though they speak twenty-four languages in
the Austrian army. Another authority finds in
usage, — quern penes arbitrium est el ius et norma
loquendi, — that " wherever a community has both
political independence and a distinctive character
recognisable in its members, as well as in the
whole body, we call it a nation." For a test to
be applied all over the world, this is perhaps too
vague. Freeman lays it down in his own impera-
tive way, that the question what language they
speak, goes further than any other one question
towards giving us an idea of what we call the
nationality of a people. We may say, again, that
the feeling of Nationality is due to identity of
descent, common language, common religion, com-
mon pride in past incidents. But no single element
in the list makes a decisive test. Language will
not answer the purpose ; for Switzerland has three
languages, yet is one nation. In South America
there are two kindred languages ; mostly common
i. descent, common pride in their wresting of in-
dependence from Europe, common religious faith.
Yet there are sixteen communities more or less
entitled to the rank of nations, and the traveller
tells us there is no sense of a common Spanish-
52 POLITICS AND HISTORY
American nationality. Is Nationality to be de-
cided by the political character of territory, or by
the people who inhabit it ? In older days the first
was the prevailing theory. The second prevails
to-day and is one of the marks of modern system,
as we may discern in Balkan perplexities. Devotion
to a dynasty has made nations. So has passion for
a creed. So, perhaps, most of all, that ingenita erga
patriam caritas, the natural fondness for the land
where we are born.
The lineal descent of national stocks, through
dim ages with no sure or intelligible chronicler, offers
a boundless opening for ethnologic disputation.
Learned men maintain, for instance, and men no
less learned deny, that the Hellenic race in Europe
has been exterminated, and that the modern Greeks
are a mixture of the descendants of Roman slaves
and Sclavonian colonists. Yet, however this may
be, the Greek name and all its glittering asso-
ciations, over the whole field of politics, ethics,
poetry, and art, seem enough to inspire Nationality
in its most evident sense. The absorption by a
population of new modifying elements appears an
obscure and mysterious process. The problem is
at this day presenting itself on a truly colossal
scale in the United States, where the old floods of
immigration from Ireland and Germany are now
replenished by swelling hosts from Southern and
Central Europe, Italians, Hungarians, Poles, Russian
Jews, and the rest, changing both racial and re-
ligious proportions, while the negro contingent,
imported in the old slave-holding days, though in-
creasing at a slower rate than the white, is still some
10 or 11 per cent of the whole. Yet the political
nationality of the United States, their high and
strong self-consciousness as a nation, is one of the
supreme factors in the modern world's affairs.
The resistance of Spain to Napoleon from 1808
to 1813 has been called the greatest European event
POLITICS AND HISTORY 53
since the French Revolution ; it showed Europe
that a conqueror may shake a State to pieces, and
yet the nation hold together. The machinery of
the Spanish State was violently overthrown, but
common religious passion, the inheritance of common
language, ferocious common pride in triumphant
warfare for ten long centuries against hated faith
and blood, all awoke and maintained in full blaze,
on Napoleon's uncalculating provocation, those in-
tense elements of national vitality in relation to
which the organised State is but secondary. Tyrol,
Moscow, Leipzig are names for immortal chapters
in the story of national uprisings, that lent their
new and overwhelming force to the soldiers and
rulers who worked the political systems of the
hour. Sicily has found a dwelling-place for many
nations, but as the most learned of our historians
truly assures us, a Sicilian nation there has never
been. Europe, Asia, Africa have all met in the
great central island of the Mediterranean. Greek,
Punic, Roman, Mussulman, Christian, Saracen,
Arab, Norman, Spaniard have all in strange turns
been ruling and subject inhabitants. Of the unity
of historical antecedents, supposed to be essential to
a nationality, there is little trace for a single decade
of Sicilian annals until 1859. Yet Sicily has played
a part of its own in the records of Nationality, from
the Sicilian Vespers in the thirteenth century down
to Garibaldi and Crispi in the nineteenth.
Let me venture on a parting observation as to
Nationality. It has been on the whole a com-
manding and accepted impulse for our era. Yet
it has been contemporary with a current tendency
of equal strength, but directly opposite. One chief
[ mark of the same time has been the advance of
i Science in all its branches and forms. But Science
works not at all for Nationality or its spirit. It
makes entirely for Cosmopolitanism. In multi-
farious congresses in every capital of the world
54 POLITICS AND HISTORY
Nationality is effaced. Parthians, Medes, Elamites
meet on common terms, and liberty, equality, and
fraternity all prevail, without intermixture from
diplomatic sophistries. Science, besides all else
that it is and does, is the strongest unifying agent
of the time, especially if we include the inventions
that science makes possible, and the commerce that
inventions stimulate and nourish. Even those who
are least disposed to share the common exultation
over the throng of new inventions due to new
scientific knowledge, may perceive that the respect
for scientific rules and methods bringing these fresh
conveniences to our doors, tends to spread itself
in the popular mind through the whole circle of
men's opinion, even in matters of daily talk and life
far remote from the atmosphere of science. This
respect marks the general advent and common
diffusion of a new intellectual force and spirit.
VI
To turn back to note the question of Progress
and its course. It has long had irresistible interest for
powerful minds. It could not be otherwise. Is the
track all upward ? That is not all. The question
strikes far deeper than merely social and political
interest. It goes to the very quick of modern
interpretation of the working of past history and
our present universe. There are, we may suppose,
three explanations, theories, or hypotheses of the
course of human things, and the power that guides
them, shapes them, and controls them. One assigns
this supreme mysterious control to Providence ; a
second to laws of Evolution ; a third to a beneficent
and steadfast necessity, in which we confidently trust
under the name of Progress. Such is the modern
aspect of an eternal riddle, — far too momentous
for us to confront here. But you will let me offer
one or two remarks upon the divinity of Progress,
POLITICS AND HISTORY 55
in its ordinary mundane acceptation. Progress,
like Toleration, or Equality, is one of the reigning
words most familiar in common use, yet having
significance extremely diverse. It stands for a
hundred different things. Whether we mean ad-
vance in material civilisation during historic time ;
or advance in the strength and wealth of human
nature ; or advance in ideals of human society —
and these are evidently neither identical nor always
contemporary — causes are assumed to be constantly
at work, tending both to raise the high- water mark
of civilisation and to spread its various successive
gains over a wider level. Do you mean progress
in talents and strength of mind ? Clear thinkers
have declared that they find no reason to expect
it, and that there is as much of these in an
ignorant as in a cultivated age, and often more.
But there is, they go on to say, great progress,
and great reason to expect progress, in feelings
and opinions.1 Close examination forces us to
be content with something far short of this
assumption. A universal law, for all times, all
States, all Societies, Progress is not. There is no
more interesting problem, for instance, in the
region of modern historic speculation, than the
decline of the Latin race in the southern half of the
American hemisphere, contrasted with the boundless
advance both in material prosperity and mental
vigour of the English, Scotch, Irish, and French
stocks among their northern neighbours. Progress,
says one grave thinker, not over-stating a plain
historic truth, " is the rare exception ; races may
remain in the lowest barbarism, or their develop-
ment be arrested at some more advanced stage ;
actual decay may alternate with progress, and even
true progress implies some admixture of decay." *
An extraordinarily copious elaboration of such a
1 Mill's Letters, ii. 859.
» Leslie Stephen.lEnglish Thought in the 18th Century, i. 17.
56 POLITICS AND HISTORY
line of thought is to be found in a work of twenty
years ago on National Life and Character, of which,
whatever we may decide about its central thesis
as a forecast, we may say that it opens, collects,
expounds, and illustrates vast issues in the evolu-
tion of States and races, better worth examining
and thinking about, than can be found in any
other book of the same period.1
From vast tracts and periods of literature, it is
almost startling to think that the idea of Progress,
which is the animating force of so much of the
thought, writing, and action of the civilised world
to-day, is wholly absent. You only find glimpses
of it here and there among Greeks and Romans.2
Early Christians could care little for a world which
they regarded as doomed to extinction at a near
date. The thought of retrogression is constant.
Sages and poets in every age have warned States
and their rulers of the inevitable decay that
awaits them, as it awaits each mortal man himself.
In some who were most alive to the decline in
standards of life and government, there burned a
fervid hope that somehow declension would be
arrested, though the conditions that produced it
were to be essentially unaltered. If the past had
been all wrong, what certainty of the same agencies
that had governed the past, being either dispersed,
or forced to prepare a future that should be all
right ? Bishop Berkeley, for example, the most
ardent philanthropist of his day, despaired of the
distempered civilisation of his country, and showed in
practice, by missionary emigration to Rhode Island,
his faith in a golden age after the decay of Europe,
and a new Fifth Empire in the American West —
The seat of innocence,
Where Nature guides and virtue rules,
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense,
The pedantry of courts and schools.
1 National Life and Character : a Forecast, by Charles H. Pearson, 1893.
8 See Martha's Lucretius, 322-4.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 57
He did not realise how many of the pedantic ele-
ments would inevitably be transplanted, and how
many of the impediments to virtue, truth, and sense
would survive change of scene and clime. Even
for ourselves, authority is not all one way. Angles
and distances make all the difference to the eagles
and falcons who survey history. We know more
and more of Nature in the world of matter ; we have
more power over its energies ; men have increased
and multiplied and spread out over the globe ;
life is longer ; vigour and endurance have waxed,
not waned. International law, though important
chapters are still to come, has made much way
since Grotius wrote one of the cardinal books in
European history, Forgive me for mentioning
what is at the moment a word of wrath. The
curse of industrial life is insecurity. The principle
of insurance, applied to risks of every kind, has
extended and ramified in a truly extraordinary
way during the last fifty years, until it is now
one of the subtlest international agencies, uniting
distant interests and creating perforce a thousand
mutual obligations. A portion of mankind has
access to higher standards of comfort and well-
being. For a thousand years, Michelet says,
Europe was unwashed. That at least is no longer
absolutely true. While these happy forward
motions please our eye and amuse thought, they
demonstrate no determined law of social history.
Towering States have vanished, like shooting stars.
Rome is not, in Byron's plangent line, the only
lone mother of dead empires. The desolation
of history at Paestum or Segesta, at Ephesus,
Olympia, Syracuse, is more awful than the sublime
desolation of Nature in tracts of Alpine ice.
You remember Gibbon's declaration that if a
man were called to fix the period in the history of
the world during which the condition of the human
race was most happy and prosperous, he would
58 POLITICS AND HISTORY
without hesitation name the period between the
death of Domitian and the accession of Commodus.
It is nearly a century and a half since Gibbon
wrote. The trenchant historian of Rome of our
own day and generation, with characteristic daring,
puts and answers the same question. " If an angel
of the -Lord," says Mommsen, " were to strike
the balance whether the domain ruled by Severus
Antoninus was governed with the greater intel-
ligence and the greater humanity then or now,
whether civilisation and general prosperity have
since then advanced or retrograded, it is very
doubtful whether the decision would favour the
present." That there is another side, we all
know. Slavery was the horrid base. Pagan
satirists and Christian apologists alike have drawn
dark pictures of the imperial world. From opposing
points, exaggeration of its wickedness was their
common cue. Long after the old stern and trium-
phant Rome had sunk, after the storm of barbaric
invasion had abated, after literature had been re-
covered, take an ensuing span of Italian history,
what and where was the progress ? Taine drew
a vivid picture of the memorable sixteenth century
in Italy, after reading Benvenuto Cellini, Boccaccio,
Machiavelli, Vasari. " This Italian society of the
sixteenth century," he says, in the literary undress
of a private letter, "is an assemblage of ferocious
brutes with passionate imagination. The footmen
of to-day would not endure the company of the
Duke and Duchess of Ferrari, of Paul III., Julius
II., Borgia, etc. No wit nor grace nor ease nor
amiability, no gentleness, no ideas, no philosophy.
Pedantry, gross superstition, risk of death at every
instant, the necessity of fighting at every street
corner for life or purse, harlotry and worse than
harlotry — all with a crudity and a brutality beyond
belief." And learned modern inquirers, competent
in wide range of knowledge, insist that, difficult as
POLITICS AND HISTORY 59
it must be to gauge the average morality of any
age, "it is questionable whether the average
morality of civilised ages has largely varied."
Evidence enough remains that there was in ancient
Rome, as in London or Manchester to-day, "a
preponderating mass of those who loved their
children and their homes, who were good neigh-
bours and faithful friends, who conscientiously
discharged their civil duties." * Even the Eastern
Roman Empire, that not many years ago was
usually dismissed with sharp contempt, is now
recovered to history, and many centuries in its
fluctuating phases are shown to have been epochs
of an established State, with well -devised laws
well administered, with commerce prosperously
managed, and social order conveniently worked
and maintained.
Mill puzzled us many years ago (1857) by what
seemed an audacious doubt. " Hitherto it is
questionable," he said, " if all the mechanical
inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil
of any human being. They have enabled a greater
population to live the same life of drudgery and
imprisonment, and an increased number to make
fortunes. But they have not yet begun to effect
those great changes in human destiny, which it is
in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish." 2
This doubt, when quickened into fervid activity of
mixed pity and anger, by its clash with new ideals
of the human lot, has bred a fresh Socialism, the
immense perplexity of ruling men to-day. Whether
Socialism in any of its multitudinous forms can
be the assured key to progress, is still a secret.
Meanwhile, it is unjust to history to overlook the
strenuous efforts that have softened the hardships
incident to spread of mechanical invention. The
1 Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church,
p. 138.
Who can forget the tender lines in stern Lucretius, iii. 894 ?
1 Polit. Econ. ii. 326.
60 POLITICS AND HISTORY
drudgery and imprisonment is not what it was.
Child labour has been abolished. The labour of
women is guarded. The hours of men are reduced.
I need not tell over again all that beneficent tale ;
it saved the nation. Its full effects are still un-
counted. Mill was not afraid of an economically
" stationary state," but then he appended the
emphatic proviso that the question of population
should always be held in due regard. He did not
live to see a Europe where the military rivalry of
divided nations has for the moment violently shifted
that vital question into unexpected bearings, because
ratio of population is one of the main elements in
all computations of fighting strength. The recruit-
ing sergeant now holds the international scales.
The decrepitude that ended in the Latin con-
quest of Constantinople at the beginning of the
thirteenth century, and the Mahometan conquest
in the middle of the fifteenth, is an awkward
reproof to the optimist superstition that civilised
communities are universally bound somehow or
another to be progressive. Whether that decrepi-
tude was due to Byzantine incompetence for work-
ing government on the vast imperial scale, or to the
misuse of intellectual energy in futile and exasperat-
ing polemics, or to the gross and crushing subjection
of spiritual power to temporal, — these are questions
of the first interest to all who seek philosophic
history. They are neighbours, too, to a wider
question that has no little actuality to-day. For
some observers, who know and have thought much
about it, pronounce it not clear that Western contact
with Eastern races will increase the sum of human
happiness. And what of evolution among Eastern
races themselves ? From time to time attempts
are made by reforming Moslems to discover a basis
for " liberalism " in the Koran itself. Only a few
years ago, for example, was published an address
from Moslems in Tunis to a French official, earnestly
POLITICS AND HISTORY 61
assuring him by an ingenious assortment of texts
that there was nothing in the Koran incompatible
in spirit, if not exactly in letter, with the immortal
principles of '89. Thence they argue that just as
Christianity has passed through slavery, intoler-
ance, and degrading incidents connected with the
seclusion of women, so the religion of Mahomet may
like Christianity make its way into a higher and
purer air. That Islamism is a marked advance
for backward races is generally admitted, and
that it is not incompatible with solid intelligence
and all manly virtues we know. We hardly find in-
stances to-day on any marked scale of its capacity
to adapt itself to all the modern requirements
of a civilised State. Some observers, however,
hold a more sanguine view. Whether Nation-
ality is likely to take the bond of religion in Moslem
countries, is another question not easy to answer.
There may be a tendency in that direction, and it
may be stimulated by the decline of Turkish power.1
After all, it is well to measure against the pro-
cession of changes that have swept through culture,
civilisation, and the modern world, some stupendous
fixities of human things. If we think, for example,
of all that Language means ; of the unplumbed
depths of mortal thought, mood, aim, appetite, right,
duty, kindness, savagery ; and yet how stable
language is, and how immutably the tongues of
leading stocks in the world seem to have struck their
roots. Then consider three great faiths — Christen-
dom, Judaism, Islam, — in spite of endless reforma-
tion, counter-reformation, internecine conflict within,
displacements by fire and sword from without. Yet
if we survey the far - stretching cosmorama of
religions in their vast history, how steadfastly the
name, the rites, the practices and traditions, and
intense attachment to them all, persist even after
1 On these points, see Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, i. 136-140 ; Bryce's
Studies in History and Jurisprudence, ii. Essay 13.
62 POLITICS AND HISTORY
reasoning and comparative methods seem to have
plucked up or worn away the dogmatic roots.
On one thing, at any rate, optimist and pessimist
agree, that Progress is no automaton, spontaneous
and self-propelling. It depends on the play of
forces within the community and external to it.
It depends on the room left by the State for the
enterprise, energy, and initiative of the individual.
It depends on the absence from the general mind at a
given time, of the sombre feeling, Quota pars omnium
sumus, how small a fraction is a man's share in the
huge universe of unfathomable things. It depends
on no single element in social being, but on the con-
fluence of many tributaries in a great tidal stream
of history ; and those tides, like the ocean itself,
ebbing and flowing in obedience to the motions of
an inconstant moon. Though Greek is not com-
pulsory with you here, we may go back for the
last poetic word on all this, to the ode in the Greek
play where the chorus recounts with glorious
enumeration how of all the many wonders of the
world, the most wondrous is Man ; he makes a
path across the white sea, works the land, captures
or tames animals and birds for his day's use ; he
has devised language and from language thought,
and all the moods that mould a State ; he finds a
help against every evil of his lot, save only death ;
against death and the grave he has no power. No
progress, at any rate, in harmony of words or
strength of imagination in the four - and - twenty
centuries since Sophocles, dims the force and beauty
of these ancient lines.1
VII
The Italian Machiavel of the fifteenth century
is applauded by a German Machiavel of the nine-
teenth, for disclosing and impressing the mighty
1 Antigone, 332-364 : Jebb, p. 76.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 63
fundamental that " the State is Force." We call
Treitschke and Machiavelli by a common name
without offence, because both writers have the signal
courage and rare merit to proclaim what each of
them takes for rigid and relentless truth. Rulers,
they say, may be shy of owning that the State is
Force, and the more respectable or the weaker
among them do their best to find a decent veil.
Still things are what they are, and the politic augur
does not deceive himself. Political right and wrong
depends on the practice of your age, and on what is
done by other people. Machiavelli did not go beyond
common sense when he " saw no reason for fighting
with foils against men who fight with poniards."
We all know, to be sure, that in one vital sense
the State is Force. Yet as a bare primordial law of
social existence, experience shows how easily it falls
into frightfully misleading disproportion. Carlyle
brought it to a startling point, when he declared
that after all the fundamental question between
any two human beings is, " Can I kill thee, or canst
thou kill me ? " But is the main truth actually
this, that brutality, whether naked or in uniform
and peruke, is the fundamental postulate between
rulers and ruled, or between governments and
nations on the two sides of a frontier ? The
judge, the constable, the sheriff, as we know well
enough, are indispensable against foes within, and
the soldier with his rifle for foes across the frontier.
Still the principle is no beacon - fire, until we have
vigilantly explored it. What sort of State, what
sort of Force ? What is to be the place of the
Minister of Police in internal government ? Is
there to be a jury of twelve honest men in a box,
and a writ of habeas corpus, and no privilege
conceded to an official of the State against the
civil rights of ordinary citizens ? The formula of
Force would not have been rejected, so far as it
goes, by William the Silent, Cromwell, Turgot,
64 POLITICS AND HISTORY
Washington, Lincoln, or any other of the small host
who pass for mankind's political deliverers. It would
have been silently accepted, if they had stooped to
theorise, by the most barbarous tyrants in modern
history, from Ezzelino in the thirteenth century,
down to King Bomba in the nineteenth. There
is no more revolting chapter in the annals of
Christendom than the Spanish Inquisition. Yet it
was in fact a definite branch of the State, and at an
auto-da-fe any Familiar with a conscience might
have murmured, as he heaped the faggots round his
firm-souled victim, that after all the State is Force.
So, too, the Jacobin with his guillotine.
Manifold are the types of State and the condi-
tions of the Force, — by whom, for instance, and on
what terms it is wielded. The maxim does not
harden into a doctrine fit for use, until in a given
case we know of the Force, what are its instruments
and origins, the nature of its energies. What is the
power of its action for social stability on the one
hand, and social motion, whether forward or back-
ward, on the other ? How stands it towards opinion
and law, the two great agencies of government ?
Above all, let us know what price it costs, when the
full and final balance has been* struck. Cavour, to
whom a foremost place is not denied by any of the
writers of this school of Force, used to talk of " people
like me who have more faith in ideas than in cannon
for mending the lot of humanity." l The ideas in
which he had faith, were ideas with practical aims
tested by open discussion. Bureaucracy has not
to persuade, to compromise, to give and take, to
prove and win its case in the course of free per-
sonal debate in face of rival ideas and antag-
onistic interests. Relieved from these wholesome
exigencies, it may carry and enforce measures
efficiently, but with too little security that time
will prove them right.
1 Scritti, ii. 225.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 65
Bismarck was a giant of the older well-
known type, working through imposed authority
and armed force. Before he made war, first on
Austria, next on France, he declared war upon his
parliament. That the maxim of the State being
Force does not carry us magisterially through the
more subtle and delicate branches of national
business, this powerful man was rapidly to learn
from his rude encounter with the Church from
1875 to 1878. The famous Kulturkampf, or fight
for modern civilisation, for obvious reasons is no
favourite topic in Germany, but it is one of the most
striking episodes in the deepest conflict of our time.
The motives of its author are obscure, — whether,
like France and Belgium, he meant it for a counter
to the Vatican Council ; or a stroke against the
Poles and Catholic particularismus in southern
Germany ; or a searching test of imperial unity ; or
an iron-handed sequel to Luther and Germanism
against the Tiara beyond the mountains. Be this
as it may, after a grand parliamentary drama the
repulse was severe. " To Canossa," he said, re-
calling the mighty struggle between the Emperor
and Hildebrand, " I will not go either in flesh or
spirit." Yet in five years to Canossa Bismarck
figuratively went, though without the three peni-
tential days under falling snows in the Canossa
courtyard, where a German prince eight hundred
years before had bent before an ecclesiastic as
daring, immovable, and potent as Prince Bismarck
himself.
Though the Middle Age is over, though no
Hildebrand nor Innocent can now survive, yet
Influence retains a share of the power so long
upheld by the bolder pretensions of Authority.
Well may the Roman Church be described as the
most wonderful structure that " the powers of
human mind and soul, and all the elemental forces
at mankind's disposal have yet reared " (Acton).
F
66 POLITICS AND HISTORY
Here we meet a branch of politics that only too
plainly deserves attention from those who care in
the fullest sense to comprehend the problems of
their time. History has brought the relation of
spiritual power and temporal into many aspects
and bearings all over Europe. It touches vivid
controversies on schools, religious congregations,
endowments, churches, " exalting their mitred
front in court and parliament," and is not likely
soon to disappear. It is not for me here to do
more than glance at it. I will not linger on Erastus,
the Heidelberg doctor of ill-omened name, who
in the sixteenth century propounded (or did not
propound) the doctrine of the supremacy of the
civil magistrate in things ecclesiastical, that raises
many violent disputations in relation to English
and Scotch establishment.1 The Erastian prin-
ciple has been greatly transformed in the United
Kingdom in the last sixty years, and further trans-
formations await it. The internal temper and
spirit of the Church of England has undergone
immense changes within the same period, and to
what extent these internal changes have altered
the value set upon secular privilege, either by her
members or in external opinion, remains an active
issue.
However that may stand, the Roman Church,
for good or for evil, has in itself qualities of a State
that do not belong even to the most vigorous and
exclusive of Protestant communions. A famous
French writer, a Piedmontese statesman of the
Napoleonic age, wrote a book in 1817 upon the
Pope, denning and vindicating the papal sove-
reignty, in the same temper and on the same lines
as the Machiavellian school in the area of State.
Treitschke's doctrine provoked plenty of antagonism
in the temporal world, and the corresponding way
1 See The Thesis of Erastus touching Excommunication, by the Rev.
Robert Lee, Edinburgh, 1844.
POLITICS AND HISTORY 67
of dealing with spiritual sovereignty has not been
approved by all who find repose or shelter within
the Roman fold. Nothing, say eminent men among
them, can be more remote from the political notions
of monarchy than pontifical authority. That author-
ity is not the will of the rulers, but the law of the
Church, binding those who have to administer it as
strictly as those who have to obey. Arbitrary power
is made impossible by that prodigious system of
canon law, which is the ripe fruit of the experience
and inspiration of eighteen hundred years.1 So
be it. Yet the attempt by theocratic partisans,
from the majestic Bossuet down to the meagre
Pobedonostzeft in our own day, to insist upon a
difference, whether the government be legitimate
or revolutionary, Prince, Pope, or Demos, between
absolute and arbitrary, tested by demands of
practice is little more than sophistry. You will
be glad to escape to safer and more secular ground,
but these topics are by no means out of date, and
they deserve the interest of intelligent readers of
the newspapers.
" How vague and cloudy," we are told by good
readers, " were many of the German treatises of the
last 60 years on the theory of the State." Even those
who insist most strongly that the abstract paves the
way for the concrete, that the transcendental is the
only secure basis for order by government, and
that evolution of the Absolute is the right precursor
of Sadowa and Sedan, cannot but admit that in
Germany at least it was the dynasty of historians,
and not the abstract men, who supplied the final
clenchers for public opinion and national resolution.
Treitschke, the most brilliant of the dynasty,
one day fell upon a volume of the letters of
Cavour. Admiring Cavour's clearness of mind,
cheerful simplicity, common sense and measure, he
goes on : " Nothing for a long time has chained my
1 Acton, History of Freedom and other Essays, 1907, p. 192.
68 POLITICS AND HISTORY
attention so fast. This intensely practical genius
is of course different by a whole heaven's-breadth
from the great poets and thinkers that are so
trusted by us Germans. Yet he stands in his own
way before the riddles of the world as great as Goethe
or Kant." After Sadowa Treitschke pronounced
any dragoon who struck down a Croat to have done
more at that moment for the German cause than
the subtlest political head with the best cut quill.
To such lengths do brilliant men push things in their
humour for Real-Politik and hurrying to be quit of
the abstract. With this writer, reaction went far.1
In an iron age, he urges, — and our age is iron, — to
make peace your steadfast aim, is not only a dream,
but a blind resistance to the supreme law of life that
the strong must overcome the weak. It is a futile
attempt to evade stern facts, it nurses selfishness,
intrigue, material greed, coarse egotism. War is the
greatest school of duty, and to preach against it is
not only foolish, but immoral. Frederick the Great
is right, that war opens the most fruitful field for
all the virtues ; for steadfastness, compassion, for
the lofty soul, the noble heart, for charity ; every
moment in war is an opportunity for one or other
of these virtues. Even duelling is manly discipline
in courage, self-respect, and the principle of honour.
These sanguinary sophistries find resounding
echoes. One recent writer of the school inscribes
for motto on his title-page — " War and brave spirit
have done more great things than love of your neigh-
bour. Not your sympathies, but your stout-hearted
prowess, is what saves the unfortunate." 2 All this
glorification of war, although shining poets of our own
lent to it the genius of their music not so many
years ago, is surely as disastrous an outcome for the
school that presents it, as was Machiavelli's choice of
Caesar Borgia to be the grand example of his Prince.
1 Politik : Vorlesungen, 2 vols. (1899).
* Bernhardi, Deutschland und der ndchsle Krieg,
POLITICS AND HISTORY 69
Let us refresh ourselves by recalling the plea
for perpetual peace that came from the pen of
Kant, the great German, who died at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, leaving behind him a
fame and influence both as metaphysician and
moralist, that place him among the foremost of all
his countrymen. Outside of philosophy, he owed
rkuch to Bayle, Rousseau, St. Pierre, above all to
Montesquieu. But he watched the two great affairs
of his time, the revolt of the American Colonies,
and the overthrow of the French monarchy, with
an interest hardly less keen than that of Burke
himself, with whose later views he warmly sym-
pathised. Though supreme in the region of the
abstract, he had mind left for man as a political
creature in the concrete. His tracts on Cosmo-
political History, inspired from French sources,
in their own day missed fire, nor is his setting of
good ideas attractive in its form. It is too dog-
matic, abstract, geometric. That notwithstanding,
the principles of common sense applied to his
ideal of permanent peace in a European federation,
are stated with admirable effect. He points to
the immoderate exhaustion of incessant and long
preparation for war. He presses the evil conse-
quence at last entailed by war, even through the
midst of peace, driving nations to all manner of
costly expedients and experiments. When war
ends, after infinite devastation, ruin, and universal
exhaustion of energy, comes a peace on terms that
plain reason would have suggested from the first.
The remedy is a federal league of nations in which
even the weakest member looks for protection
to the united power, and the adjudication of the
collective will. States, Kant predicts, must of
necessity be driven at last to the very same
resolution to which the savage man of Nature was
driven with equal reluctance ; namely, to sacrifice
brutish liberty, and to seek peace and security in
70 POLITICS AND HISTORY
a civil constitution founded upon law. This civil
constitution must in each State be republican, —
a point that may have alienated opinion in mon-
archical Germany, but in fact it was not meant
to go beyond some one or more of the many pos-
sible shapes of representative government. As
it has unfortunately happened, neither republic
nor parliament has yet found itself able to walk
in Kant's way, but he marks a bright patch in
dubious skies.
VIII
Statesmen are supposed not to take a high view
of their fellow- creatures. Mazzini says of the his-
torian of the Council of Trent, " Like most states-
men, Sarpi had no great faith in human nature."
Too narrow a reading of famous Italians of the
age before Sarpi, like Machiavel and Guicciardini,
gives them a worse reputation in this respect than
they deserve. In England, save in bad periods,
our most politic princes and rulers, though circum-
spect and shrewd, have been no cynics. They took
human nature with wise leniency, though George
III., himself a consummate politician by no means
in the best sense, declared politics a trade for a
rascal, not for a gentleman. " How goes our educa-
tion business ? " Frederick the Great asked of an
official. " Very well," was the answer ; "in old
days, when the notion was that men were naturally
inclined to evil, severity prevailed in schools, but
now when we realise that the inclination of men is
good, schoolmasters are more generous." " Alas,
my dear Sulzer," was Frederick's reply, " you
don't know that damned race as I do." Even those
who would with truth deny that they looked on
great politics as no more than a game of skill, do
not flatter their human material. Tocqueville, for
instance, was philosopher, member of parliament,
POLITICS AND HISTORY 71
and foreign secretary. His experience was ample ;
he saw public business and its agents at first hand.
His autobiographic pages are liberally strewn with
allusions to the volatility of men, and to the
emptiness of the great words with which they
cover up their petty passions. Nations are like
men, he said ; they prefer what flatters their
passions to what serves their interests. "I do
not despise the mediocre, but I keep out of their
way, I treat them like commonplaces : I honour
commonplaces, for they lead the world, but they
weary me profoundly." Of Napoleon III. : " It
was his flightiness, rather than his reason, that,
thanks to circumstance, made his success and his
power ; for the world is a curious theatre, and there
are occasions where the worst pieces succeed best."
" 1 found that it is with the vanity of men you do
most good business, for you often gain very sub-
stantial things from their vanity, while giving little
substance back. You will not" do half so well with
their ambition or their cupidity. But then it is
true that to make the best of the vanity of other
people, you must take care to lay aside all your
own."
Tocqueville, however, we must remember,
though in his earlier day he was the approving
critic and skilful analyst of certain forms of demo-
cracy, was well described as an aristocrat who
accepted his defeat. And far less conscientious,
careful, and well-trained thinkers than he, can with
very little trouble lay their hands on weaknesses
of human nature, and therefore of democratic
systems, since they depend for their success on
human nature's strength. As if autocracy, which
had twice ruined the French State in his own life-
time, was free from the duperies that democracy,
still less either landed or plutocrat oligarchy, is not
able wholly to escape. In any system, is not what
Burke said the real truth ? " The true lawgiver
72 POLITICS AND HISTORY
ought to have a heart full of sensibility. He ought
to love and respect mankind, and to fear himself.
. . . Political arrangement, as it is a work for social
ends, is only to be wrought by social means. Mind
must combine with mind. Time is required to
produce that union of minds which alone can
produce all the good we aim at." This was in
keeping with the same great man's dictum, that
in any large public connection of men love of
virtue and detestation of vice always prevail.
To the general truth so broadly stated, history
may demand some qualification, but the manful
proclamation that the true lawgiver ought to love
and respect mankind and fear himself, sets a
cardinal mark of division between two schools
of modern government. Men like Rousseau,
Fichte, Mazzini, Burke, whose eloquence has
wielded supreme influence in the political sphere
within the last 150 years ; or men like Byron,
Shelley, Burns, and the poets of freedom in con-
tinental Europe, had not much in common with
the sword-bearer of English Puritanism, though
what they had in common was the root of the
matter. Cromwell set the case in famous words :
" What liberty and prosperity depend upon are the
souls of men and the spirits — which are the men.
The mind is the man." Yes, and the historic
epochs that men are most eager to keep in living
and inspiring memory, are the epochs where the
mind that is the man approved itself unconquerable
by force.
What a withering mistake it is if we let indolence
of mood tempt us into regarding all ecclesiastical or
theological dispute as barren wrangles, all political
dispute as egotistic intrigues. Even the common
shades and subdivisions of party — Right, Left,
Right Centre, Left Centre and the rest — are more
than jargon of political faction. They have their
roots, sometimes deep, sometimes very shallow, in
POLITICS AND HISTORY 73
varying sorts of character. In forms hard and
narrow, still if we have candour and patience to dig
deep enough, they mark broad eternal elements in
human nature ; sides taken in the standing quarrels
of the world ; persistent types of sympathy, passion,
faith, and principle, that constitute the fascination,
instruction, and power of command in history.
Everybody who knows anything knows that
it is waste of our short lives to insist on ideal
perfection. Popular government, or any other for
that matter, is no super-exact chronometer, with
delicate apparatus of springs, wheels, balances, and
escapements. It is a rough heavy bulk of machinery,
that we must get to work as we best can. It goes
by rude force and weight of needs, greedy interests
and stubborn prejudice ; it cannot be adjusted in
an instant, or it may be a generation, to spin and
weave new material into a well-finished cloth. There
is a virtuous and not uninfluential school, and Mill
leaned in their direction, who think that there exists
in every community a grand reserve of wise, thought-
ful, unselfish, long-sighted men and women, who, if
you could only devise electoral machinery ingenious
enough, if they had only parliamentary chance and
power enough, would save the State. That such
a reserve should exist, should acquire and exert its
influence, should spread the light, is felicity indeed.
More than felicity, it is an essential. It must be
the main text of every exhortation to a university.
But this is not to say that the State will be fortified
in its tasks by special electoral artifices, with a
scent of algebra and decimal fractions about them.
Bismarck was fond of an iron ring from St.
Petersburg, with a favourite Russian word inscribed
upon it, nitchevo, — like the corresponding Irish
word that pleased Sir Walter Scott, nabochlish,—
"What does it matter ? ': His table-talk, like
Luther's, or Lincoln's, or Cavour's, was coloured by
a satiric humour that it would be foolish to count
74 POLITICS AND HISTORY
for cynicism, scepticism, pessimism, or any other
of that ill-omened family. It was only one of
the cheerful tricks of fortitude. Such moods have
nothing in common with Leopardi's poetic gloom
over the hypocrisies of destiny ; or the dare-devil
wit of Don Juan ; or the mockeries of Heine ; least
of all with Swift, — a born politician, if ever there
was one, but one who had no political chance, and
avenged himself by letting irony blacken into savage
and impious misanthropy. Without making the
mistake of measuring the stature of rulers and
leaders of men by the magnitude of transactions in
which they found themselves engaged, none at least
of those who bear foremost names in the history of
nations, ever worked and lived, we may be sure, in
the idea that it was no better than solemn comedy
for which a sovereign demiurgus in the stars had
cast their parts.
There are points of view from which, if you will,
you may liken history to an exhibition of wax-work,
or a picture gallery with few originals and many
copies. But history without portraits in it is both
meagre and misleading. At least to turn history
into idolatry is worse.
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN1
EVEN those competent students who thought most
ill of Comte's attempt to transform his philosophy
into a religion, have agreed to praise the Positivist
Calendar. This remarkable list of between five and
six hundred worthies of all ages and nations, classi-
fied under thirteen main heads, from Theocratic
Civilisation down to Modern Science and Modern
Industry, was drawn up with the design of sub-
stituting for the saints of the Catholic Calendar
the men whose work marks them out in history as
leaders and benefactors in the gradual development
of the human race. On Comte's effort to erect a
new polity and a new religion, with himself as its
high priest and pontiff, nobody has brought to bear,
I will not say merely so much hostile criticism, but
such downright indignation, as John Stuart Mill.
His pages on the later speculations of Comte are
the only instance in all his works in which he
treats a philosopher from whom he differs with the
bitterness felt by the ordinary carnal man for the
perversities of an opponent, or, what are more pro-
voking still, the aberrations of a friend. Yet Mill
has little but praise for the profound and compre-
hensive survey of the past progress of human society
which is the basis of the Calendar, and guides its
author's choice of the names to which we are to
dedicate the days of the secular year.
"While Comte sets forth," says Mill, ;t the
1 The New Calendar of Great Men. Edited by Frederic Harrison.
London : Macmillan & Co.
75
76 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
historical succession of systems of belief and forms
of political society, and places in the strongest light
those imperfections in each which make it impos-
sible that any of them should be final, this does
not make him for a moment unjust to the men
or to the opinions of the past. He accords with
generous recognition the gratitude due to all who,
with whatever imperfections of doctrine or even
of conduct, contributed materially to the work of
human improvement. . . . His list of heroes and
benefactors of mankind includes not only every
important name in the scientific movement, from
Thales of Miletus to Fourier the mathematician and
Blainville the biologist, and, in the aesthetic, from
Homer to Manzoni, but the most illustrious names
in the annals of the various religions and philo-
sophies, and the really great politicians in all states
of society. Above all, he has the most profound
admiration for the services rendered by Christianity
and by the Church of the Middle Ages. ... A more
comprehensive, and, in the primitive sense of the
term, more catholic sympathy and reverence to-
wards real worth and every kind of service to
humanity, we have not met with in any thinker.
Men who would have torn each other to pieces,
who even tried to do so, if each usefully served
in his own way the interests of mankind, are all
hallowed to Comte.
" Neither is his a cramped and contracted notion
of human excellence, which cares only for certain
forms of development. He not only personally
appreciates, but rates high in moral value, the
creations of poets and artists in all departments,
deeming them, by their mixed appeal to the senti-
ments and the understanding, admirably fitted to
educate the feelings of abstract thinkers, and en-
large the intellectual horizon of the people of the
world."
An even weightier judgment than Mill's upon
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 77
such a question is that of Littre. For Littr6,
while inferior to Mill in speculative power, as well
as in taste and aptitude for actual affairs as they
go past us, both travelled more widely over vast
fields of human knowledge, and possessed in
important departments of it a closer and more
special acquaintance with detail. Littre, like Mill,
at a critical moment in the growth of his opinions,
and about the same time of life, conceived an
ardent admiration for Comte's exposition of the
positive philosophy, and he became, and remained
to the end, its firm adherent. " Employed," he
says, " upon very different subjects - - history,
language, physiology, medicine, erudition — I con-
stantly used it as a sort of instrument to trace out
for me the lineaments, the origin, and the outcome
of each question. It suffices for all, it never mis-
leads, it always enlightens." Like Mill — though
less provoked than Mill by Comte's arrogance, his
pontifical airs, and his hatred of Liberty — Littre
rejected utterly and without qualification the later
speculations, in which he held Comte to have
thrown overboard the method and the principles
on which he had built up the system of positive
philosophy. Yet Littre declares that the Positivist
Calendar deserves a place in the library of every-
body who studies history ; though we may discuss
this admission or that exclusion, yet we must admire
the sureness of judgment applied to so many men
and over such diversity of matter ; finally, it is
a powerful means of developing the historic spirit
and the sentiment of continuity ; it is a luminous
manual of meditation and instruction.
The English disciples of Comte have rendered
good service to literature and to knowledge by
introducing to public attention a performance so
commended by such authorities. They have taken
their teacher's elaborate list of those who have
played an effective part in Western civilisation, and
78 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
they have clothed each of these five hundred and
fifty-eight names with an apparel of biographical
and historical fact, which informs the reader who
they were, and what is their title to a place in a
great concrete picture of human evolution. If the
Calendar itself be worth anything, this illustration
of the Calendar was well worth supplying. If, as
Littre promises, the picture itself is to quicken
meditation and to serve for instruction, then this
explanation of each figure in the picture is an
indispensable guide, commentary, and handbook.
Mr. Harrison tells us with lucidity and precision in
his preface what it is that he and his companions
have done. The book is not a dictionary, for the
names are placed, not in alphabetical order, but in
historic sequence. They are selected again not with
a view to the space they fill in common fame or
in literary discussion, but in relation to a definite
principle of grouping — namely, the contribution
made by the given individual to the progress of
mankind. These little biographies constitute, like
the skeleton Calendar on which they are built up,
" a balanced whole, constructed, with immense care,
to mark the relative importance of different move-
ments, races, and ages."
How much diligent and conscientious trouble
must have been taken, can only be realised by
those who are practised in literary workmanship.
Condensation is the hardest of all the requirements
of composition of this kind ; and these lives are
marvels of condensation. Let anybody try to
write about Fenelon or the Architects of the Middle
Ages in a single small page ; or Mozart, or Roger
Bacon, or Bossuet, or Saint Louis in two ; or Des-
cartes in three ; or Julius Caesar or Pope Hildebrand
in four ; or Aristotle in five : he will then be able
to measure the industry, perspicacity, discrimina-
tion, and let us not forget also the self-denial and
self-control, which have gone to the production
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 79
of these vignettes. The writers make no attempt
at literary display, though at least three of them
are masters of the arts of style and expression.
Some of them may seem to share the just regret
expressed by a great historian, that history cannot
be treated apart from literature and style, like
geometry or chemistry ; still as a whole the writing
is excellent. The merit could not be expected to
be absolutely equal in a team of fifteen ; but one
can only admire the skill and success with which
the unity of the central idea has been preserved,
and a real, not a mechanical, harmony attained in
bringing into a single fabric under one roof the
shrines of the great servants of mankind in science
and in philosophy ; in painting, sculpture, music,
romance, history ; lyric, elegiac, and dramatic
poetry ; in government and religion. The field is
enormous ; so is the number of individual facts,
names, dates, in all languages and all branches ; so
is the quantity of separate estimates, appreciations,
verdicts, and judgments. It is not too much to
say — so far as a critic like myself can judge — that a
high level of general competency has been attained,
though, of course, in a survey of this encyclopaedic
magnitude, there are a thousand points for remark,
deduction, and objection. In one respect every-
body will concur. Even those who are most ready
to find Positivism as a creed hard, frigid, repulsive,
and untrue, will still recognise and admire the
genuine and devoted enthusiasm for purity, no-
bility, beauty, in art, literature, character, life, and
service, that has inspired the present enterprise and
marks every page of it.
Nobody must suppose that the book is to be
skimmed, or merely dipped into, or even once
read through and then dismissed. It is extremely
readable, for that matter, but it demands and is in-
tended for digestion and rumination. Two of the
most important principles that are now established
80 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
in all contemporary minds with any pretence to
call themselves educated, are, first, the unity of
history and the ordered continuity of European
civilisation and science ; second, that the place
and quality of a contribution to thought, feeling,
or art is relative to the social conditions of time
and place, of country and generation. Unless
guided and illuminated by these two ideas, the
study of anything like general history is impossible,
and for purposes of that popular education which
is every day all over the world becoming more
and more a leading circumstance of our time,
general history is seen to be of growing value and
importance, both for its own sake as knowledge, and
as a corrective to the crude and narrow tendencies
incident to the ever- waxing rule of numbers.
Hardly any collected view of the history of the
world is so bad, as not to be better than to have no
view at all. Decisively as we may object to much
in Comte's spirit and teaching — to the stifling pre-
dominance, for instance, which he allowed Order
to obtain in his mind over Progress, though he
incessantly professed to value Progress and Order
alike — still, even his chart, imperfect and avowedly
provisional as it is and must be, is better than
drifting in a boat over the sea of history without
a helmsman or a course. Great minds have felt
this. Bossuet, in his famous Discourse on Uni-
versal History, insists on " the concatenation of the
universe," and urges that the true object of history
is to observe in connection with each epoch the
secret dispositions of events that prepared the way
for great changes, as well as the momentous con-
junctures which more immediately brought them to
pass ; and, though Bossuet's history is arbitrary
and one-sided enough, he launched effectually a
fertile idea. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, Turgot,
Condorcet, Hegel, and many others all felt the
same intellectual necessity, and made more philo-
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 81
sophic attempts to meet it. Comte went far more
elaborately and systematically to work than any of
them, in uniting concrete to abstract examination
of the long movement that ends in the modern
world.
Among the competing theories of human history,
men will choose their own, or rather in most cases
they will let accident choose for them. There is
less difference between them for this particular
object, than controversial passion might suppose.
Bossuet found the key to events in a Divine Provi-
dence, controlling and overruling the course of
human destinies by a constant exercise of super-
human will. Comte ascribed a hardly less resistible
power to a Providence of his own construction,
directing present events along a groove cut ever
more and more deeply for them by the past, and
even pushing the influence of past over present to
the singular and soul-destroying paradox that the
living are ruled by the dead. Whether you accept
Bossuet's theory or Comte's theory of the law and
governance of the world, of the social union, of
change, progress, and the ebb and flow of civilisa-
tion, in either case, whether men be their own
Providence, or no more than instruments and
secondary agents in the hands and for the purposes
of die unbekannten hoheren Wesen, die wir ahnen,1
i4 the unknown higher beings that we yearn for "
this classification of the operations of either
Providence equally deserves study and medita-
tion. Earthly fame, says the poet, is nothing else
but a breath of wind ; and, as the wind is called
Scirocco, Tramontana, Libeccio, Greco, according
as it blows from one point or another, so Fame
picks out her diverse names to celebrate, and the
same wind has different power and is differently
1 Heil den unbekannten
Htthern Wesen,
Die wir ahnen.
GOETHE'S Das Gottliche.
6
82 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
known in diverse lands. The merit of such an
attempt as this is that it supplies principles by
which to bring order into the Aeolian confusion, to
measure famous names, to restrain random incon-
tinence of praise and blame, and at the same time
in a systematic scheme " to impress on the mind
of our age the characteristic qualities of various
types of civilisation and of human energy and
thought."
Its writers will not expect, and do not intend, the
present volume to fill the space in men's minds that
was once for so many ages occupied by the Meno-
logies and Hagiologies of the Christian Church.
Saints crowded into the ecclesiastical calendar with
dangerous profusion, and the legends of their lives
were worked up into a gigantic system of popular
mythology, which, as Gibbon says, so obscured the
simple theology of primitive believers as visibly to
tend to a restoration of the old reign of polytheism.
Yet these legendary biographies, calculated as they
were to impair the sublime austerity of monotheism,
still had a good side. " In contrast with the rude-
ness and selfishness which generally prevailed, they
presented examples which taught a spirit of gentle-
ness and self-sacrifice, of purity, of patience, of love
to God and man, of disinterested toil, of forgive-
ness of enemies, of kindness to the poor and the
oppressed. The concluding part of the legend
exhibited the saint triumphant after his earthly
troubles, yet still interested in his brethren, who
were engaged in the struggle of life, and manifesting
his interest by interpositions in their behalf." *
We may doubt whether any such place will ever
be taken by these new heroes. Nor can one wish
the book to be so effective as to induce the general
public to date its letters, for example, 38 Descartes
(Hume) 103, instead of November 4, 1891. Life is
too short for these innovations. Then the competi-
1 Robertson's History of the Christian Church, bk. iv. chap. ix.
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 83
tion of the secular romance, as has been caustically
remarked, which came in with the seventeenth cen-
tury, threw hagiography and martyrology into the
shade ; and we cannot suppose that the rationalised
and scientific hagiography of the present volume
will compete on equal terms with the vast and
exuberant growth of modern fiction. Yet the
wonderful spectacle offered by such a narrative, of
all the toil, wisdom, love, faith, illumination of
intellect and of soul, that have gone to building the
social home of the most forward portions of our
race, will not be found without an edification and
inspiration of its own.
It is -not to be expected that everybody will be
satisfied with the distribution of the honours of
canonisation. Mr. Harrison thinks that, as to at
least five hundred names in the whole list, com-
petent authorities would probably agree ; and as to
the remainder, critics and objectors would differ as
much from one another as from Comte. It may be
so. The opening division, Theocratic Civilisation,
will strike some as being what Cromwell is sup-
posed to have called the law of England — a tortuous
and ungodly jumble ; but the field is in its nature
obscure, and has been opened mainly since Comte's
time. This is not the place for discussing the
large question whether Comte was right or wrong
in excluding the Protestant reformers from his
list. To many of us it has always appeared a
disastrous omission that the form of faith which
has directed, and to this day, in spite of the change
in the ancient theological spirit, still directs the
lives of so many communities all over the world,
should be passed by as a mere solvent and an aber-
ration. " Protestant theologians, such as Luther
and Calvin," we are told (p. 247), " are not in this
Calendar ; since the positive and even the negative
results of the Intellectual Revolution in Protestant
countries are best exhibited by systematic thinkers
84 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
like Bacon and Hobbes, and practical statesmen
like William the Silent and Cromwell." We may
notice in passing that William Penn and George
Fox have a place, and nobody will grudge to either
of them his canonisation, or deny the principle on
which they are admitted — namely, that the Quaker
faith has " rendered eminent temporary service in
England and America." Even Voltaire, after his
memorable visit to England in 1725, did handsome
justice to the graces and virtues of Quakerism.
But taking the Positivist point of view, can we
hold that the Quakers are the only Protestants who
have rendered eminent temporary service to society
and mankind in Great Britain and in America ? If
George Fox has a good title, why not John Wesley ?
A principal claim made for Catholicism throughout
this volume is that over many ages, even amid the
decline of theology, it has had charge of morals.
Perhaps, in any such claim, Catholicism is used in
its larger sense for Christianity as a whole ; still, in
any case, the assertion that the Protestant form of
Christianity has had charge of morals, is just as true
in the same sense as the same assertion about the
Romish form. If that task, whatever it may
amount to, has fallen to one church in Catholic
countries, it has fallen in the same sense to other
churches in Protestant countries. The precise
value of the service may be different, and the exact
degree of success may be unequal, if anybody
chooses to say so ; but the service is in aim and
quality the same. Whatever may be the relations
of such a doctrine as Justification by Faith to
the intellectual revolution of modern times, what
is not to be denied is that, with all its divisions
and all its defects, the evangelical movement, in
which Wesley is the greatest name, unquestionably
effected a great moral revolution in England.1
Surely to wage war against the slave-trade was to
1 Lecky, Eighteenth Century, vol. ii. ch. ix.
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 85
render a pretty " eminent service to England and
America." Wesley was one of its earliest and
strongest opponents, and the historian must record
that both the onslaught upon the slave-trade, and
the other remarkable philanthropic efforts towards
the last quarter of the last century, arose in, and
owed their importance to, the great evangelical
movement, of which this Calendar fatally omits to
take any account. If Catholicism is to be judged,
not as a body of doctrines but as a social force, why
not Protestantism also ?
To omit Calvin from the forces of Western evolu-
tion is to read history with one eye shut. To say
that Hobbes and Cromwell stand for the positive
results of the intellectual revolution in Protestant
countries, and that Calvin does not, is to ignore
what the Calvinistic churches were, and what they
have done for moral and social causes in the old
world and in the new. Hobbes and Cromwell were
giants in their several ways, but if we consider
their powers of binding men together by stable
association and organisation, their permanent influ-
ence over the moral convictions and conduct of vast
masses of men for generation after generation, the
marks that they have set on social and political
institutions wherever the Protestant faith prevails,
from the country of John Knox to the country of
Jonathan Edwards, can we fail to see that, compared
with Calvin, not in capacity of intellect, but in
power of giving formal shape to a world, Hobbes
and Cromwell are hardly more than names writ in
water ? As a learned man with a right to be heard
has put it : " The Protestant movement was saved
from being sunk in the quicksands of doctrinal dis-
pute chiefly by the new moral direction given to it
in Geneva. The religious instinct of Calvin dis-
cerned the crying need of human nature to be a
social discipline rather than a metaphysical correct-
ness. The scheme of polity which he contrived,
86 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
however mixed with the erroneous notions of his
day, enforced at least the two cardinal laws of
human society — viz. self-control as the foundation of
virtue, self-sacrifice as the condition of the common
weal. ... It was a rude attempt, indeed, but then
it was the first which the modern times had seen,
to combine individual and equal freedom with strict
self-imposed law ; to found society on the common
endeavour after moral perfection. The Christianity
of the Middle Ages had preached the base and
demoralising surrender of the individual ; the sur-
render of his understanding to the Church ; of his
conscience to the priest ; of his will to the prince.
Protestantism, as an insurrection against this sub-
jugation, laboured under the same weakness as all
other revolutions. It threw off a yoke and got rid
of an exterior control, but it was destitute of any
basis of interior life. The policy of Calvin was a
vigorous effort to supply that which the revolution-
ary movement wanted — a positive education of the
individual soul. The power thus generated was too
expansive to be confined to Geneva. It went forth
into all countries. From every part of Protestant
Europe eager hearts flocked hither to catch some-
thing of the inspiration. The Reformed Com-
munions, which doctrinal discussion was fast split-
ting up into ever-multiplying sects, began to feel in
this moral sympathy a new centre of union. This,
and this alone, enabled the Reformation to make
head against the terrible repressive forces brought
to bear by Spain, the Inquisition, and the Jesuits.
Sparta against Persia was not such odds as Geneva
against Spain. Calvinism saved Europe." 1
Yet Loyola and Dominic, forsooth, are to count
among the great saving forces of the Western
world, and Calvin is to be banished into limbo.
Surely this is too hard for any canon of historic
equity. For my own part, if I may not date my
1 Pattison's Essays, ii. 31.
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 87
letters Luther, I positively decline to date them
Innocent the Third.
The same deliberate limitation of vision — for it
would be altogether unjust to ascribe it to constitu-
tional narrowness of mind — that thrusts out even
the social services of Protestant heretics in the
West, excludes all mention of the services rendered
to civilisation by the heretical heirs of the Roman
Empire in the East. Mr. Harrison, for instance,
describes it as the great glory of Charles Martel
that he saved Europe from Islam, and stemmed
the torrent of invasion both in North and South
from Mussulman and heathen. But this is to leave
out of sight what was the real and effective bulwark
for many ages against Mussulman invasion. What
says a profound and learned historian whose auth-
ority our author will be the first to recognise ?
44 The vanity of Gallic writers has magnified the
success of Charles Martel over a plundering expedi-
tion of the Spanish Arabs (A.D. 732) into a marvel-
lous victory, and attributed the deliverance of
Europe from the Saracen yoke to the valour of
the Franks. But it was the defeat of the great
army of the Saracens before Constantinople by Leo
the Third (718) which first arrested the torrent of
Mohammedan conquest, although Europe refuses her
gratitude to the iconoclast hero who averted the
greatest religious, political, and ethnological revolu-
tion with which she has ever been threatened." *
Nothing but a settled prejudice against the
Orthodox Church can explain the exclusion of all
reference to the share of the Eastern Empire in
saving Western civilisation. Hannibal is admitted,
on what principle I do not profess to understand,
for the victory of Carthage over Rome would have
transformed the face of the world, and ruined that
process of civilising incorporation which in Comte's
eyes makes the name of Rome blessed for ever in
1 Finlay's History of Greece, ii. 19.
88 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
the history of mankind. Why should Hannibal,
who would have destroyed this great work, have
his day in the Calendar, and Leo and Basil, who
sheltered and saved the work, be left to perish
from commemoration like the shadow of smoke ?
' Without the history of the Eastern Empire of
Rome," says Freeman, to whom the doctrine of
the unity of history as a living truth of daily appli-
cation owes so much more than to anybody else
in England, " without the Eastern Empire, the"
main story of the world becomes an insoluble riddle.
If there had been Turks at Constantinople in the
ninth and tenth centuries, the names Europe and
Christendom could never have had so nearly the
same meaning as they have had for ages." 1
It may be said that Comte expressly designed
his scheme for Western Europe. But then, why
insert Haroun-al-Raschid, the immortal caliph of
Baghdad, and Abd-al- Rahman, the greatest of the
caliphs of Cordova ? Because, we are told, the
Arabian culture that flourished in their reigns
excited a powerful reaction in the whole progress
of Western thought, and because much of the
learning, the arts, and the mechanical knowledge of
the ancient world was preserved in the Arab uni-
versity of Cordova. That is quite true, but nobody
knows better than some of the writers of this volume
how much more was preserved at Constantinople.
The mighty Gibbon did less than justice to the part
played by the Byzantine Emperors in saving Chris-
tian civilisation for so long from the arms of the
Turks, yet he " trembles at the thought that Greece
might have been overwhelmed, with her schools
and libraries, before Europe had emerged from the
deluge of barbarism, and that the seeds of science
might have been scattered on the winds before the
Italian soil was prepared for their cultivation "
(Decline and Fall, chap. Ixvi.). The Byzantine
1 Freeman, Methods of Historical Study, p. 111.
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 89
system of government may have been essentially
retrograde, and it may have been so from the cause
that it had the fundamental vice of uniting tem-
poral and spiritual power in the same hands. That
is no reason, however, why the services of the
Byzantines should be left out, nor would they have
been left out, as one must suspect, if they had not
been schismatic in the eyes of the Pope of Rome,
and if the founder of Positivism had not felt bound
to take up the Pope's quarrels along with the re§t
of his pontifical attributes.
Among the names which Englishmen will be
prompt to miss are Elizabeth and Chatham. Yet
Elizabeth, by the practice of a patient and long-
headed sagacity in which she has not many rivals
among statesmen, saved the independence of Eng-
land, and Englishmen at least may be excused for
thinking that such achievement ought to count for
something in an oecumenical survey like the book
before us. Beesly's volume on Elizabeth 1 is a
masterly vindication — and vindication cannot really
be needed in the eyes of his associates — of her
claim to as high a place as Blanche of Castile,
and to one considerably higher than her namesake,
Saint Elizabeth of Hungary. Then, as to Chatham,
it seems hard measure to exalt Frederick the Great
to the lofty pinnacle of the presiding genius over
a whole month, and yet to grudge even a day of
a week to the English minister who prevented
Frederick from being cut into mincemeat — not to
mention sundry other performances that in their
ultimate effects have decided " the general course
of civilisation," of which our Calendar here is the
biographical manual, over the greater part of the
habitable globe. Without Chatham the appearance
of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin in the
Calendar is robbed of half its meaning ; and it may
be worth adding that Jefferson would have been
1 Twelve English Statesmen.
90 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
very much surprised to find himself admitted to
Paradise, while the unlucky French philosophers who
inspired him with the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and all the rest of his principles, are cast
without name, without fame, down into the Inferno
as negatives, destructives, and revolutionaries.
Few selections are so hard to swallow as that
of Frederick the Great as patron saint of Modern
Statesmanship. Comte extols Frederick as a
practical genius who in capacity comes nearest to
Caesar and Charlemagne. This in itself will seem a
gross exaggeration to anybody who, with Napoleon's
exploits in his mind and the volumes of Napoleon's
correspondence before him, has ever realised the
incomparable magnitude and strength of practical
genius in that colossal man. Baleful as were
the purposes to which he put it, who will place
Napoleon's practical genius on a level with
Frederick's ? The best modern opinion of Frederick
on this side of his career is that, though a great
soldier and an intrepid and skilful diplomatist,
he possessed little originality in the fields of ad-
ministration and organisation. Mirabeau said of
Frederick that he was a great character in a great
position, rather than a great genius raised by Nature
high above the common level. To take this measure
of him is not to deny that Frederick carried out
with heroic courage, persistency, insight, resource,
and labour, the work that was then appointed by
circumstances for the ruler of the Prussian State.
44 He maintained with invincible tenacity his father's
idea of defending Prussia by the sustained energy
of its people, called out and stimulated by the un-
sparing rigour of the government " (Seeley's Stein,
i. 175). All that is true enough. But admire this
performance as we may, high as we may place the
qualities exhibited in the course of it, yet it was
but a small task compared with the stupendous and
world-embracing achievements, alike of statesman-
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 91
like conception and of execution, which justify the
writers of the present volume in saying of Caesar
that Shakespeare was not wrong in calling him the
foremost man of all the world ; and of Charlemagne,
that he formed the course of human civilisation, re-
cast a world shattered by barbarian incursion, and
founded Europe as an organic whole. Frederick
had not been twenty years in his grave before the
work of his life was in ruins. Arbitrary energy
is always superficially attractive ; men overlook
the confusion that it mostly leaves behind it.
Frederick's duty was to preserve the independence
of a very poor country without a frontier, and
he succeeded. But it was Frederick's bad civil
administration, and the abuses and defects of his
military system, that left Prussia open to the
humiliation and overthrow of Jena and Tilsit.
Apart from the question of Frederick's practical
genius, which assuredly was not second-rate, Comte
gives him his prominent place in the Calendar as
a dictator who furnishes the best model of modern
statesmanship, and who, in accordance with the
ideal of Hobbes — a very bad ideal it was from
any liberal point of view — " reconciled power and
liberty." If we turn from these rose-coloured ab-
stractions to the actualities of Frederick's govern-
ment, we can find no proof of any such reconciliation.
His rigours may have been justified by the exigencies
of his kingdom, but it is idle to cover with fair words
the harshness of a government that was in the
strictest sense military and despotic. I cannot see
how Napoleon was not as good an illustration of the
bad ideal of Hobbes as Frederick, nor why Napoleon
is to be excluded if Frederick is to be admitted, and
not only admitted, but raised to the same high
and special eminence as Aristotle, Charlemagne,
Descartes, and St. Paul. Dictators have their place
in the universal scheme, no doubt ; but one can only
hold up one's hands in amazement when Frederick,
92 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
who is more responsible than any one other European
ruler of the eighteenth century for the spread of
those principles of violence, fraud, and robbery
which were only carried farther by Napoleon, and
were not begun by him, is held up as " a precious
and shining example of what purely human motives
can effect when they are not weighted and warped
by the rival claims of an imaginary object of love
and adoration." The more highly we appreciate
Beesly's remarkably acute and masculine historic
judgment, the harder is this particular eulogy to
comprehend.
A very different figure from Frederick is Francia,
the dictator of Paraguay, whom Carlyle, carrying
his idolatry of force and brute -will to its most
perverse height, made the hero of an only too well-
known essay. Even the defenders of this execrable
personage have, I believe, been obliged to plead
insanity in extenuation of some of his most atro-
cious doings ; and, sane or insane, it would be hard
to find a man known to history less worthy of
admiration, and he is least worthy of all, exactly
from the Positivist point of view. Yet Francia,
one of the cruellest of despots, figures in the week
of Cromwell along with Algernon Sidney and
George Washington ! Rather than dedicate a day
of the week to Francia, I shall decidedly stick to
my old friends the Sun and the Moon, to Wodin
and to Thor.
One of the most admirable of these little bio-
graphies is that of Byron. Mr. Harrison deals with
a justice, courage, generosity, eloquence, and judg-
ment that are more common in foreign than in
English critics of this powerful man :
To judge Byron truly, we must look on him with
European and not with insular eyesight. His power, his
directness, his social enthusiasm, fill the imagination of
Europe, which is less troubled than we are to-day about
his metrical poverty and conventional phrase. To Italians
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 93
he is almost more an Italian than an English poet ; to
Greeks he is the true author and prophet of their patriotic
sentiments ; and in France and in Germany he is now more
valued and studied than by his countrymen, in a generation
when subtle involution of idea and artful cadence of metre
are the sole qualifications for the laurel crown. When this
literary purism is over, Byron will be seen as the poet of
the revolutionary movement which, early in the nineteenth
century, awoke a new Renascence. (Page 362.)
I have not a word to say against this estimate,
nor a word to add. Yet it makes one wonder
why, if Byron is to be admitted to our pantheon,
Rousseau should be excluded. Comte has used some
bad language about Rousseau, and some of it is
thoroughly deserved. But when you have exposed
his sophistries, his delusions, his sentimentalism,
his mischievous rhetoric, it still remains at least as
true of him as it ever was of Byron, that his glow,
his fervour, his power of effective inspiration, his
feeling for nature, his sense of the true dignity of
man, awoke new aspirations and kindled a purer
flame in the life of the affections and the heart. To
treat Rousseau as all negative or destructive is to
leave out one-half of the sources, and one-half of
the results, of his social and popular influence. It
is true that he was a revolutionary in Comte's sense,
but then nobody could dream of denying, and Mr.
Harrison does not deny, that the new element of
lyric emotion represented by Byron is " revolu-
tionary in its origin and in its sympathies." If
Byron then is to have a day of the week to himself,
why not Rousseau ?
It is curious that, as Rousseau is shut out, the
great man who despised Rousseau so intensely, and
combated his theories with such persistency and
power, should not be allowed to come in. One can
see possible grounds in framing a calendar for
the exclusion of either Rousseau or Burke, but not
of both. We can well suppose that Burke would
94 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
never have found a day in the terrible months of
Ventose, Nivose, and Pluviose. But why not in a
Calendar for Positivists ? The headless shades of
Danton, Robespierre, and the rest of them may
find some solace in knowing that their exclusion
is shared by the author of the Reflections on the
French Revolution ; but that Comte, of all men,
should have neglected the greatest conservative
force in the literature of the revolutionary crisis,
is indeed a surprise and a puzzle.
The equally striking omission of Wordsworth is,
I suppose, to be explained by the decision to include
no contemporaries. Comte framed his Calendar
between 1845 and 1849, and Wordsworth did not
die until 1850. Exception, however, was made in
favour of Rossini, who died in 1868, and Manzoni,
who did not die until 1873 ; and Wordsworth is
certainly a more indispensable name than either.
No modern poet has more of the ideas that are in
the Comtist scheme religious, and Comte, though
his admiration for Dante shows him to have known
fine poetry when he could get it, was tolerant even
of mediocrity when it expressed his own thought —
witness his admiration for the unmelodious oracle of
Eliza Mercoeur, " ISoubli c*est le neant ; la gloire est
Vautre vie," which, being interpreted, is that "to be
forgotten is the true annihilation ; man's future
life lies in being remembered with honour."
The treatment of Ancient Poetry leaves some-
thing to be desired ; and the days of the month of
Homer are not nearly so genial as the days and
weeks of Dante and Shakespeare. If there is a
man in all the world who deserves a gracious,
gentle, and affectionate hand, it is Horace. One is
shocked to find this true-hearted and delightful
poet sniffed at and scolded almost as if he were one
of the impostors of letters. " Having smothered
his republican zeal with a hollow enthusiasm for
the triumphant empire, his purely Roman work was
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 95
reduced to opening the doors of the Pantheon to
the cults and philosophies of all the world. He
emphasised the eclecticism which was the ground-
work of the imperial sociocracy." This is surely no
way of writing about a lyric poet. He is " the
polished poet of expediency for all ages " ; smooth
and shallow is his poetry of love ; his code is one
of harmless selfishness ; his love, " like the rest of
his faculties, lacked the fire of a devotion welding
the fragments of morality into religion." All this
sermonising makes but a stale and weedy chaplet
to adorn a poet's bust, and such a poet as Horace
too — the very genius of friendship, of gaiety, of
pleasant dalliance, of those social delights which
Milton declared to be not unwise if we but spare
to interpose them oft ; and who, besides these
infinitely graceful effusions of a lighter muse, yet
could strike a grave and thrilling note when he
praised Regulus or the just and tenacious man, and
who, in his Satires and Epistles, takes a place
among the first of those who have set forth the
wisdom of life, including that vitally important
part of wisdom which consists in not expecting too
much either from life or from your fellow-creatures.
How could it ever be the business of such a poet
as this to " weld the fragments of morality into
religion " ?
The same writer, one must add, who is so un-
genial in raising Horace to his pedestal, does
excellently by Ovid and Tibullus. But why did
Comte make no room for Catullus in this most
agreeable week ? He is a far finer poet than
Tibullus. Half a dozen pieces of Catullus are the
very gems of the lyric muse in the ancient world,
if we may not add the modern world as well. The
omission may have been a slip, and after all, I am
much more inclined to wonder at the completeness
and comprehensiveness of Comte's lists than to
complain of an exclusion.
96 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
Virgil receives a fine and glowing tribute, alike
for his merits as a master of the poet's art and
instrument, and for his vast influence over the
mind and imagination of Europe during the whole
of the Catholic period. But Lucretius, on the
other hand, gets in comparison a somewhat curt
and frigid portion ; though, in sublimity, in bold-
ness, in strength and sweep of imagination, and, I
must even say, notwithstanding Mr. Harrison's
talk of Virgil's "matchless hexameters" — and
matchless they are in finish, grace, and elaboration
— yet in grand and solemn majesty of verse, and,
above all, in penetrating insight into the awful
realities of things through all time and all creation,
Lucretius seems in many a passage to be as far
above Virgil as Milton is above Spenser.
Some will be struck by the large number of
names in the three months dedicated to poetry ;
but under the general head of " Poetry " are in-
cluded all modes in which the creative faculty
of man expresses imaginative thought. Poetry
covers epic, lyric, and romantic poetry ; romances,
chronicles, or meditations ; even painting and
sculpture. This wide comprehension explains the
fact that the Calendar contains no fewer than 127
names in the sphere of creative art, or very little
short of one-quarter of the whole 559. " Such
is the large part which Comte assigned to the
imagination in the evolution of human society."
This shows a far wiser appreciation of the true
proportion among the shaping influences of the
world, than the ordinary political historian, or even
the actual politician, is wont to dream of. Comte
himself, as it happens, was not conspicuously en-
dowed with imagination, though in this we cannot
expect all his disciples to agree.
On this head, by the way, it is not easy to
see why Froissart and Joinville should be placed
under Modern Poetry, while Herodotus goes not
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 97
into Ancient Poetry, but into Ancient Philosophy.
Nor do I understand why Saint-Simon is left out,
while Guicciardini is put in. Voltaire is admitted,
but only to a subordinate place, as the author of
plays like Zaire and Mahomet. Nothing is said of
his Essai sur les Mceurs, though it was not merely
negative, but a truly positive contribution to the
conception of history, and nothing is said of his
sleepless humanity, or of his strenuous, lifelong
protest against intolerance. So, in the case of
Locke, surely we should have heard more about
his writings on civil government and toleration.
Locke's political or social liberalism was a more
important factor in " the concrete evolution of
humanity " than his Essay. Hallam truly says,
whatever we may think of Locke's doctrine on
government, it opened a new era of political
opinion in Europe. " While silently spreading the
fibres from its root over Europe and America, it
prepared the way for theories of political society
from which the great revolutions of the past and
present age have sprung " (Literary History, pt. iv.
ch. 4). Of course Comte had a right to frame his
Calendar in his own way ; still it is perplexing to
find the principles of tolerance and freedom on
which the modern world, and in an extending
degree, subsists, coolly despatched as mere solv-
ents, just as if they had made no positive differ-
ence, and no difference for good, in the elements
of moral and social life.
It was almost inevitable, considering the purpose
and inspiration of the work, that it should often
have a note sounding rather like a note of excess.
The object is naturally to magnify and to exalt, not
to be balanced, measured, or merely judicious. The
Divine Comedy, for instance, is hailed as " the
foundation of the Bible that is to be," and we have
no right to wonder, therefore, that Comte should
extol it as " the incomparable epic, which still forms
H
98 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
the highest glory of human art." In the region of
Taste wise men should not waste time in quarrelling
with other people's superlatives. But to those who
know Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare,
the sentence just quoted will prove a terribly hard
saying. When Mr. Harrison pronounces Dante to
be the peer of all poets in profound insight into
character and life ; to stand supreme in the
" sublime range of his theme, the sum-total of
humanity and nature, the past, the present, and
the future — in the profound synthesis of all know-
ledge, and the ideal co-ordination of human society
as a whole " — I cannot but remember that even so
admiring and competent a student of Dante as Mr.
Symonds finds it necessary to admit the presence
of "an irreducible element of prose in the very
essence of the poem," and to say, in irreverent
language, that the great poet was terribly limited
by " the exigencies of his frostbitten allegory and
his rigid methodistical theology." Why not be
content to love Dante for his exquisite observation
of the most beautiful things in Nature ; for the
incomparable directness and intensity that enables
him to make " his verse hold itself aright by mere
force of noun and verb without an epithet " ; for the
sort of geometric reality with which, as Sainte-
Beuve says, he renders the invisible, and by which
he recalls some of the austere genius of Pascal ; for
his sublimity ; his mixture of tenderness and pity,
with a rhadamanthine severity, not seldom deserv-
ing to be called by a harsher name ; for his ethical
integrity ? For all this mankind, who may be said
in this century to have rediscovered Dante, will
take care not to lose him again from among the
objects of their perpetual gratitude and affection.
But if we praise him above all other men and poets
for his insight " into the sum-total of humanity,"
what is there left for us to say about Shakespeare ?
This demurrer to an aesthetic over-estimate is not
A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN 99
presumptuously to disparage Dante's supreme place
as the noblest monument of the Middle Age.
Shelley puts Homer as the first, Dante as the
second, of epic poets ; " that is, the second poet the
series of whose creations have a defined and intelli-
gible relation to the knowledge and sentiment and
religion of the age in which he lived and of the
ages which followed it." This defined and intelli-
gible relation undoubtedly exists in the work of
Dante, and amply warrants Mr. Harrison's descrip-
tion of the " Vision " as summing up the spirit, the
knowledge, the religion of the mediaeval epoch, and
bringing the whole range of Catholic Feudalism
before our eyes.
In connection with Dante's " Vision " a remark
may be made on another work of fame as wide, and
of far more nearly universal popularity and accept-
ance, the Imitatio Christi. This memorable product
of the piety of some devout, strong, and sincere
soul in the fifteenth century is one of the sacred
books of the Positivist library. " The conclusive
test of experience," said Comte, " induces us to
recommend above all the daily reading of the
sublime, if incomplete, effort of a Kempis, and
the incomparable epic of Dante. More than seven
years have passed since I have read each morning
a chapter of the one, each evening a canto of the
other, never ceasing to find new beauties previously
unseen, never ceasing to gather new fruits, intel-
lectual or moral."
It is true, as is said here, that the Imitatio is a
book available for all men ; but does the reason
given quite accurately hit the mark ? It partly
depends on our definition of Religion. Mr. Harrison
has said somewhere that " the substance and crown
of religion is to answer the question, What is my
duty in the world ? Duty, moral purpose, moral
improvement is the last word and deepest word of
Religion. Religion is summed up in Duty." One
100 A NEW CALENDAR OF GREAT MEN
could not undertake to examine this overwhelming
little sentence in less than a volume. Meanwhile
Goethe appears to come nearer the truth. " All
religions have one aim : to make man accept the
inevitable." Resignation and Renunciation — not
sullen nor frigid, nor idle nor apathetic, but open,
benign, firm, patient, very pitiful and of tender
mercy — is not this what we mean by piety ? Duty
does not cover nor comprehend it. Duty is more,
and it is less. We are told that, historically con-
sidered, the Imitatio is to be viewed as a final
summary of the moral wisdom of Catholicism ; that
it is a picture of man's moral nature ; that it continu-
ally presents personal moral improvement as the
first and constant aim for every individual. I do
not say that any of this is untrue, but is moral the
right word ? Is not the sphere of these famous
meditations the spiritual rather than the moral life,
and their aim the attainment of holiness rather
than moral excellence ? As, indeed, another writer
under the same head better expresses it, is not
their inspiration " the yearning for perfection — the
consolation of the life out of self " ? By Holiness do
we not mean something different from virtue ? It
is not the same as duty ; still less is it the same as
religious belief. It is a name for an inner grace of
nature, an instinct of the soul, by which, though
knowing of earthy appetites and worldly passions,
the spirit, purifying itself of these, and independent
of all reason, argument, and the fierce struggles of
the will, dwells in living, patient, and confident
communion with the seen and the unseen Good.
In this region, not in ethics, moves the Imitatio.
But we are being drawn into matters that are too
high for a mere causerie like this, and far too high
for the present writer either here or anywhere.
MACHIAVELLI
THE greatest of the Florentines has likened worldly
fame to the breath of the wind that blows now one
way and now another, and changes name as it
changes quarter. From every quarter and all the
points of the historical compass, veering gusts of
public judgment have carried incessantly along
from country to country and from generation to
generation, with countless mutations of aspect and
of innuendo, the sinister renown of Machiavelli.
Before he had been dead fifty years, his name had
become a byword and a proverb. From Thomas
Cromwell and Elizabeth ; from the massacre of St.
Bartholomew, through League and Fronde, through
Louis XIV., Revolution, and Empire, down to the
third Napoleon and the days of December ; from
the Lutheran Reformation down to the blood and
iron of Prince Bismarck ; from Ferdinand the
Catholic down to Don Carlos ; from the Sack of
Rome down to Gioberti, Mazzini, and Cavour : in
all the great countries all over the West, this
strange shade is seen haunting men's minds ; ex-
citing, frightening, provoking, perplexing, like some
unholy necromancer bewildering reason and con-
science by paradox and riddle. So far from wither-
ing or fading, his repute and his writing seem to
* THE ROMANES LECTURE, DELIVERED IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE
AT OXFORD, June 2, 1897. Some notes to this lecture will be found in
the Appendix. The references to them in the text are given in small
Arabic numerals.
101
102 MACHIAVELLI
attract deeper consideration as time goes on, and
they have never been objects of more copious atten-
tion throughout Europe than in the half-century
that is now closing.1
In the long and fierce struggle from the fifteenth
century onwards, among rival faiths and between
contending forces in civil government, Machiavelli
was hated and attacked from every side. In the
great rising up of new types of life in the Church,
and of life in the State, his name stood for some-
thing that partisans of old and new alike abhorred.
The Church at first tolerated, if it did not even
patronise, his writings ; but soon, under the double
stress of the Reformation in Germany on the one
hand, and the pagan Renaissance in Italy on the
other, it placed him in that Index of forbidden books
which now first (1557), in dread of the new art of
printing, crept into formal existence. Speedily he
came to be denounced as schismatical, heretical,
perverse, the impious foe of faith and truth. He
was burnt in effigy. His book was denounced as
written with the very fingers of Satan himself.
The vituperation of the sixteenth century in the
whole range of its controversies has never been
surpassed in any age either among learned or un-
learned men, and the dead Machiavelli came in for
his full share of unmeasured words. As Voltaire
has said of Dante that his fame is secure because
nobody reads him, so in an inverse sense the bad
name of Machiavelli grew worse, because men
reproached, confuted, and cursed, but seldom read.
Catholics attacked him as the enemy of the Holy
See, and Protestants attacked him because he
looked to a restoration of the spirit of ancient
Rome, instead of a restoration of the faith and
discipline of the primitive Church. While both
of them railed against him, Catholic and Protest-
ant each reviled the other as Machiavellist. In
France national prejudice against the famous Italian
MACHIAVELLI 103
queen-mother hit Machiavelli too, for his book
was declared to be the oracle of Catherine dei
Medici, to whose father it was dedicated ; it was
held responsible for the Huguenot wars and the
Bartholomew massacre. In Spain opposite ground
was taken, and he who elsewhere was blamed as
the advocate of persecution, was abominated here
as the enemy of wars of religion, and the advocate
of that monstrous thing, civil toleration. In Eng-
land, royalists called him an atheist, and round-
heads called him a Jesuit. A recent German writer
has noted three hundred and ninety-five references
to him in our Elizabethan literature, all fixing him
with the craft, malice, and hypocrisy of the Evil
One.2 Everybody knows how Hudibras finds in his
Christian name the origin of our domestic title
for the devil, though scholars have long taught us
to refer it to Nyke, the water-goblin of Norse
mythology.8
Some divines scented mischief in the comparative
method, and held up their hands at the impudent
wickedness that dared to find a parallel between
people in the Bible and people in profane history,
between King David and Philip of Macedon.
Whenever a bad name floated into currency, it
was flung at Machiavelli, and his own name was
counted among the worst that could be flung at
a bad man. Averroes for a couple of centuries
became a conventional label for a scoffer and an
atheist ; and Machiavelli, though he cared no more
for the abstract problems that exercised the Moslem
thinker, than he would have cared for the inward
sanctities of Thomas a Kempis, was held up to
odium as an Averroist. The Annals of Tacitus
were discovered : his dark ironies on Tiberius and
the rest did not prevent one school of politicians
from treating his book as a manual for tyrants,
while another school applied it against the Holy
Roman Empire ; his name was caught up in the
104 MACHIAVELLI
storms of the hour, and Machiavellism and Tacitism
became convertible terms.
It is not possible here to follow the varying fates
of Machiavelli's name and books.* The tale of
Machiavellian criticism in our own century is a
long one. That criticism has followed the main
stream of political events in continental Europe ;
for it is events, after all, that make the fortune of
books. Revolution in France, unification in Italy,
unification in Germany, the disappearance of the
Temporal Power, the principle of Nationality, the
idea of the Armed People, have all in turn raised
the questions to which Machiavelli gave such daring
point. On the medallion that commemorates him
in the church of Santa Croce at Florence, are the
words, Tanto nomini nullum par elogium, " So great
a name no praise can match." We only need to
think of Michelangelo and Galileo reposing near
him, in order to realise the extravagance of such
a phrase, and to understand that reaction in his
favour has gone almost as intolerably far as the old
diatribes against him.4
It may be doubted whether in this country
Machiavelli has ever been widely read, though
echoes have been incessant. Thomas Cromwell,
the powerful minister of Henry VIII., the malleus
monachorum, told Cardinal Pole that he had better
fling aside dreamers like Plato, and read a new
book by an ingenious Italian who treated the arts
of government practically. Cromwell in his early
wanderings had been more than once in Italy, and
he was probably at Florence at the very time when
Machiavelli was writing his books at his country
farm.6 But a more shining figure in English history
/* The edition of the Prince, published by the Clarendon Press, with
Jtfr. Surd's most competent and copious critical apparatus, and Lord
Acton's closely packed introduction, supplies all that is wanted. The
same Press has republished the English translation of the Prince by N. H.
Thomson, who has also executed a translation of the Discourses (1883),
and now (1906) of the Florentine History.
MACHIAVELLI 105
than Cromwell, was even more profoundly attracted
by the genius of Machiavelli ; this was Bacon. It
was natural for that vast and comprehensive mind
to admire the extension to the sphere of civil
government of the same method that he was ad-
vocating in the investigation of external nature.
" We are much beholden," Bacon said, "to Machiavel 0
and others that wrote what men do, and not what
they ought to do." The rejection of a priori and \
abstract principles, and of authority as the test of
truth ; the substitution of chains of observed fact
for syllogism with major premiss unproved — such a
revolution in method could not be reserved for one
department of thought. Bacon's references are
mainly to the Discourses and not to the Prince, but
he had well digested both.6 The Essays bear the
impress of Machiavelli's positive spirit, and Bacon's
ideal of history is his. " Its true office is to repre-
sent the events themselves, together with the
counsels, and to leave the observations and con-
clusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of
every man's judgment." His own history of
Henry VII. is a good example of such a life as
Machiavelli would have written of such a hero.7
The most powerful English thinker of Machia- 1 /
velli's political school is Hobbes. He drew similar'
lessons from a similar experience — the distractions
of civil war at home, and the growth, which he
watched during many years of exile, of centralised
monarchy abroad. Less important is Harrington,
whose Oceana or model of a commonwealth was
once so famous, and is in truth one of the most
sensible productions of that kind of literature.
Harrington travelled in Italy, was much at home
with Italian politics and books on politics, and per-
haps studied Machiavelli more faithfully than any
other of his countrymen. He tells us, writing after
the Restoration, that Machiavelli's works had then
fallen into neglect.8 Clarendon has a remarkable
^
106 MACHIAVELLI
passage (Hist. bk. x. § 169) vindicating Machiavelli
against the ill name that he had got from people
who did not well consider his words and his drift,
and applying judicially enough the Italian's view
of Borgia to our great Oliver and his counsellors.
Scattered through the Patriot King and other
writings of Bolingbroke are half-a-dozen references
to Machiavelli,* but they have the air, to use a
phrase of Bacon's, of being but cloves stuck in to
spice the dish ; the Italian's pregnant thinking has
no serious place in an author whose performances
are little more than splendid beating of the wind.
Hume had evidently read the Discourses, the
Prince, and the History of Florence, with attention ;
and with his usual faculty for hitting the nail on
the head, he avows a suspicion that the world is
still too young to fix many general truths in
politics. We have not as yet had experience of
three thousand years. We do not know, says
Hume, of what great changes human nature may
show itself susceptible, nor what great revolutions
may come about in men's customs and principles.9
Benjamin Constant said there were only two
books that he had read with pleasure since the
Revolution, the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz and
Machiavelli's History of Florence. It would take a
long chapter to draw a full comparison between
Machiavelli and Montesquieu, who was undoubtedly
set by him on some trains of thinking both in his
short book on the Romans and his more memorable
one on Laws. It may be too much to say, as some
critics have said, that all the great modern ideas
have their beginning in Montesquieu. But this at
least is true among other marked claims to be
made for him, that in spite of much looseness of
definition and a thousand imperfections in detail,
he launched effectually on European thought the
* E.g. Patriot King, pp. 106, 118. On the Policy of the Athenians,
p. 243.
MACHIAVELLI 107
conception of social phenomena as being no less
subject to general laws than all other phenomena.
Of a fundamental extension of this kind Machia-
velli was in every way incapable, nor did the state
of any of the sciences at that date permit it. As
for secondary differences, it is enough to say that
Machiavelli put the level of human character low,
and Montesquieu put it high ; that one was always
looking to fact, the other to idea ; that one was
sombre, the other buoyant, cheerful, and an opti-
mist ; Montesquieu confident in the moral forces of
mankind, Machiavelli leaving moral forces vague,
nor knowing where to look for them. Finally,
" Montesquieu's book is a study, Machiavelli's is a
political act, an attempt at political resurrection." 10
II
Machiavelli was born in 1469 (two years later
than Erasmus), and when he turned to serious
writing he was five-and-forty. His life had been
interesting and important. For fifteen years he
held the post of secretary of one of the depart-
ments in the government of Florence, where he was
brought into close relations with some of the most
remarkable personages and events of his time. He
went four times on a mission to the King of
France ; he was with Caesar Borgia in the ruthless
campaign of 1502 ; he did the business of his
republic with Pope Julius II. at Rome, and with
the Emperor Maximilian at Innsbruck. The
modern practice of resident ambassadors had not
yet established itself in the European system, and ^
Machiavelli was never more than an envoy of
secondary rank.11 But he was in personal com-
munication with sovereigns and ministers, and he
was a watchful observer of all their ways and
motives. We need not here concern ourselves with
the thousand chances and changes of Italian policies
108 MACHIAVELLI
in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the
long struggle between freedom and tyranny in his
native Florence, Machiavelli belonged to the popular
party. When they fell in 1512, and the Medici
came back, he was turned out of his post, thrown
into prison, put to the question with ropes and
pulleys, according to the hard fashion of the time,
shared the benefit of the amnesty accorded when
Leo X. ascended the papal throne, and then with-
drew to San Casciano. This was the time when he
composed most of the writings that have made him
famous. Here is his picture of himself, in a letter
to a friend (December 10, 1513) :
I am at my farm ; and, since my last misfortunes, have
not been in Florence twenty days. I rise with the sun, and
go into a wood of mine that is being cut, where I remain
two hours inspecting the work of the previous day and
conversing with the woodcutters, who have always some
trouble on hand among themselves or with their neighbours.
When I leave the wood, I proceed to a well, and thence to
the place which I use for snaring birds, with a book under
my arm — Dante, or Petrarch, or one of the minor poets,
like Tibullus or Ovid. I read the story of their passions,
and let their loves remind me of my own, which is a
pleasant pastime for a while. Next I take the road, enter
the inn door, talk with the passers-by, inquire the news of
the neighbourhood, listen to a variety of matters, and make
note of the different tastes and humours of men. This
brings me to dinner-time, when I join my family and eat
the poor produce of my farm. After dinner I go back to
the inn, where I generally find the host and a butcher, a
miller, and a pair of bakers. With these companions I
play the fool all day at cards or backgammon : a thousand
squabbles, a thousand insults and abusive dialogues take
place, while we haggle over a farthing, and shout loud
enough to be heard from San Casciano. But when evening
falls, I go home and enter my writing-room. On the thresh-
old I put off my country habit, filthy with mud and mire,
and array myself in royal courtly garments ; thus worthily
attired, I make my entrance into the ancient courts of the
men of old, where they receive me with love, and where I
feed upon that food which only is my own, and for which I
MACHIAVELLI 109
was born. I feel no shame in conversing with them and
asking them the reason of their actions. They, moved by
their humanity, make answer ; for four hours space I feel
no annoyance, I forget all care ; poverty cannot frighten, nor
death appal me. I am carried away to their society. And
since Dante says " that there is no science unless we retain
what we have learned," I have set down what I have gained
from their discourse, and composed a treatise, De Princi-
patibus, in which I enter as deeply as I can into the science
of the subject, with reasonings on the nature of principality,
its several species, and how they are acquired, how main-
tained, how lost. If you ever liked any of my scribblings,
this ought to suit your taste. To a prince, and especially
to a new prince, it ought to prove acceptable. Therefore I
am dedicating it to the Magnificence of Giuliano.*
Machiavelli was not meant either by tempera-
ment or principle to be a willing martyr. Not for
him was the stern virtue of Dante, who accepted
lifelong exile rather than restoration with dis-
honour, content from any corner of the earth to
wonder at the sun and the stars, and under any sky
to meditate all sweetest truths (le dolcissime veritd).
Not for the ambitious and practical politician was
the choice of Savonarola, who at the moment when
Machiavelli was crossing the threshold of public life,
had taken death by its savage hand, rather than
cease from his warnings that no good could come
to Florence, were it not from the fear of God and
the reform of manners. Nobody had in him less of ^
the Stoic than Machiavelli ; his character was no
more austere than the Italian morality of his day ;
his purse was painfully lean ; his active and rest-
less mind suffered from that " malady of lost power "
which is apt to afflict members of Opposition, and
he longed to be back in the business of the State.
So he dedicated his book to Lorenzo, in the hope
that such speaking proof of experience and capacity
would induce those who had destroyed the freedom
of his city to give him public employment. His
* Symonds's translation, Age of the Despots, 244-246. y
7
110 MACHIAVELLI
suppleness did not pay. Nothing came of the
dedication for several years. Then some trivial
duties were found for Machiavelli, and one import-
ant literary task was entrusted to him, the history
of Florence. This he completed and dedicated to
Clement VII. in 1525. To the same period belongs
a comedy, which some have described as worthy
of Aristophanes and hardly second to Moliere's
Tartuffe. Like Bacon and some others who have
written the shrewdest things on human conduct and
5 the arts of success, he had made but a sorry mess of
his own chances and gifts. It must always interest
us to watch how men take ill usage from the world,
and sad ironical miscarriages of life. Machiavelli's
was one of those grave intellects, apt for serious
thought, yet that easily turn to levity ; console
themselves for failure by mockery of themselves,
and repay Fortune with her own banter. This is
the vein of the brilliant burlesque and satire, with
which this versatile genius diversified his closing
days. Still, with indomitable perseverance he
clung to public things, and he now composed the
dialogues on the Art of War, to induce his country-
jmen to substitute for mercenary armies a national
A militia — to-day one of the organic ideas of the
/' European system. Amo la patria mia piu del-
V anima, he wrote to a friend just before his death,
and one view of Machiavelli is that he was ever the
lion masquerading in the fox's skin, an impassioned
patriot, under all his craft and all his bitter
mockery. Even Mazzini — so little a disciple of
his that he explained the ruin of Italy by the
disastrous fact of Machiavelli having prevailed over
Dante — admits that he had " a profoundly Italian
heart." In 1527 he died. The Prince was not
printed and published until five years later.
Machiavelli's active life, then, was passed in
council - chambers, camps, courts. He pondered
MACHIAVELLI 111
over all that he had seen in the light of such
antique books as he had read, — Livy, Polybius,
Tacitus, some portion of Aristotle's Politics, Dante,
Petrarch, Cicero's Offices, Caesar, Latin Poets, ex-
tracts from Thucydides (probably in Latin versions).
He owns his debt to ancient writers, and in a
sense nobody borrowed more, yet few are more
original. If he had mastered Thucydides, he would
have recalled that first great chapter in European
literature, still indeed the greatest in its kind, of
reflections on a revolution, where with incompar-
able insight arid fidelity the historian analyses the
demoralisation of the Hellenic world as it lay, like
the Italian world long ages after, a prey to intestine
faction and the ruinous invocation of foreign aid.*
These terrible calamities, says Thucydides (iii. 82-
84), always have been and always will be, so long
as human nature remains the same. Words cease
to have the same relations to things, and their
meanings are changed to suit the ingenuities of
enterprise and the atrocities of revenge. Frantic
energy is the quality most valued, and the man of
violence is the man who is trusted. The simplicity
that is a chief ingredient of a noble nature, men
laugh to scorn. Inferior intellects succeed best.
Revenge becomes dearer than self-preservation, and
men actually have a sweeter pleasure in the
revenge that goes with perfidy, than if it were
open. All this was just as true of Florence in the
sixteenth century as it was of Athens, Corinth,
and Corcyra in the fifth century before Christ.
The postulate of Thucydides, that human nature
should remain the same, still held good, as it has
indeed held good at many a stormy period since,
the social progress of the ages notwithstanding.
Whether the moral state of Italy was intrinsic-
* Thucydides was translated by Laurentius Valla in 1452, and a revised
version of the translation was produced thirty years later. One of the
fullest of the few references to Thucydides is Disc. m. xvi.
112 MACHIAVELLI
ally and substantially worse than that of other
European nations, is a question which those who
know most are least disposed to answer offhand.12
Machiavelli was as little capable of the fine and
true saying of the Greek historian about Simplicity,
as he was of the Greek poet's famous lines about
love of power against right.* Still Italy presents
some peculiarities that shed over her civilisation
at this time a curious and deadly iridescence.
Passions moved in strange orbits. Private de-
pravity and political debasement went with one
of the most brilliant intellectual awakenings in
the history of the Western world. Selfishness,
violence, craft, and corruption darkened and defiled
the administration of sacred things. If politics
were divorced from morals, so was theology.
Modern conscience is shocked by the resort to hired
crime and stealthy assassination, especially by
poison. Mariana, the famous Spanish Jesuit, tells
us (De Rege, i. 7) that when he was teaching theology
in Sicily (1567), a certain young prince asked him
whether it was lawful to slay a tyrant by poison.
The theologian did not find it easy to draw a dis-
tinction between poison and steel, but at last he fell
upon a reason (and a most absurd reason it was)
for his decision that a poniard is permitted and
white powder is forbidden. What distinguishes the
Italian Renaissance from such epochs of luxury and
corruption as the French Regency, is this contempt
of human life, the fury of private revenge, the
spirit of atrocious faithlessness and crime. " Italian
society admired the bravo almost as much as
Imperial Rome admired the gladiator : it assumed
that genius combined with force of character
released men from the shackles of ordinary
morality." Only a giant like Michelangelo escaped
the deadly climate. We see the violence of
Michelangelo's sublime despair in the immortal
* Phoenissae, 524.
MACHIAVELLI 113
marbles of the Medicean chapel, executed while
Machiavelli was still alive — Lorenzo, nephew of Pope
Leo X., and father of Catherine dei Medici, silent,
pensive, finger upon lip, seeming to meditate under
the shadow of his helmet some stroke of dubious
war or craft, while the sombre superhuman figures
of Night and Dawn and Day proclaim " it is best to
sleep and be of stone, not to see and not to feel,
while such misery and shame endure."
Machiavelli's merit in the history of political I ^
literature is his method. We may smile at the
uncritical simplicity with which he discusses
Romulus and Remus, Moses, Cyrus, and Theseus,
as if they were all astute politicans of Florentine
faction. He recalls the orator in the French Con-
stituent Assembly who proposed to send to Crete
for an authentic copy of the laws of Minos. But/
he withdrew politics from scholasticism, and based! ^
• their consideration upon observation and experi-i
ence. It is quite true that he does not classify
his problems ; he does not place them in their
proper subordination to one another ; he often
brings together facts that are not of the same order
and do not support the same conclusion.* Nothing,
again, is easier than to find contradictions in
Machiavelli. He was a man of the world reflect- j
ing over the things that he had seen in public
life ; more systematic than observers like Retz or
Commynes — whom good critics call the French
Machiavelli — but not systematic as Hobbes is.
Human things have many sides and many aspects,
and an observant man of the world does not confine
himself to one way of looking at them, from fear of
being thought inconsistent. To put on the blinkers
i of system was alien to his nature and his object.
i Contradictions were inevitable, but the general
L texture of his thought is close enough.18
Machiavelli was not the first of his countrymen
* Janet's Hist, de la science politique, i. 589 (3rd ed.).
I
114 MACHIAVELLI
to write down thoughts on the problems of the
time, though it has been observed that he is the first
writer, still celebrated, " who discussed grave ques-
tions in modern language " (Mackintosh). Apart
from Dante and Petrarch, various less famous men
had theorised about affairs of state. Guicciardini,
the contemporary and friend of Machiavelli, like
him a man of public business and of the world,
composed observations on government, of which
Cavour said that they showed a better comprehen-
sion of affairs than did the author of the Prince
and the Discourses. But then the latter had the
better talent of writing. One most competent
Italian critic calls his prose " divine," * and a
foreigner has perhaps no right to differ ; only what
word is then left for the really great writers,
who to intellectual strength add moral grandeur ?
Napoleon hated a general who made mental pic-
tures of what he saw, instead of looking at the
thing clearly as through a field-glass. Machiavelli's
£ is the style of the field-glass. " I want to write
/ something," he said, " that may be useful to the
understanding man ; it seems better for me to go
behind to the real truth of things than to a fancy
picture." Every sentence represents a thought
or a thing. He is never open to the reproach
thrown by Aristotle at Plato : " This is to talk
poetic metaphor." As has been said much less
truly of Montesquieu, reflection is not broken by
monuments and landscapes. He has the highest
of all the virtues that prose-writing can possess —
save the half-dozen cases in literature of genius
with unconquerable wings, — he is simple, unaffected,
direct, vivid, and rational. He possesses that truest
of all forms of irony, which consists in literal state-
ment, and of which you are not sure whether it
is irony or naivete. He disentangles his thought
from the fact so skilfully and so clean, that it looks
* De Sanctis, Storia delta Let. Ital. ii. 82.
MACHIAVELLI 115
almost obvious. Nobody has ever surpassed him
in the power of throwing pregnant vigour into a
single concentrated word. Of some pages it has
been well said that they are written with the point
of a stiletto. He uses few of our loud easy words
of praise and blame, he is not often sorry or glad,
he does not smile and he does not scold, he is
seldom indignant and he is never surprised. He
has not even our mastering human infirmity of
trying to persuade. His business is that of the
clinical lecturer, explaining the nature of the
malady, the proper treatment, the chances of re-
covery. He strips away the flowing garments ofl
convention and commonplace ; closes his will againsu /
sympathy and feeling ; ignores pity as an irrelej
vance, just as the operating surgeon does. In the
phrase about Fontenelle, he shows as good a heart
as can be made out of brains. What concerns
Machiavelli, the Italian critic truly says, " is not
a thing being reasonable, or moral, or beautiful,
but that it is." Yet at the bottom of all the con-
fused clamour against him, people knew what they
meant, and their instinct was not unsound. Man-
kind, and well they know it, are far too profoundly
concerned in right and wrong, in mercy and cruelty,
in justice and oppression,- to favour a teacher who,
even for a scientific purpose of his own, forgets the
awful difference. Commonplace, after all, is exactly
what contains the truths that are indispensable.
Ill
Like most of those who take a pride in seeing i
human nature as it is, Machiavelli only saw naff p
i of it. We must remember the atmosphere of craft,
, ( suspicion, fraud, violence, in which he had moved,
i with Borgias, Medici, Pope Julius, Maximilian,
Louis XII., and the reckless factions of Florence.
His estimate was low. Mankind, he says, are more
116 MACHIAVELLI
prone to evil than to good. We may say this of
them generally, that they are ungrateful, fickle,
deceivers, greedy of gain, runaways before peril.
While you serve them, they are all yours — lives,
goods, children — so long as no danger is at hand :
when the hour of need draws nigh, they turn
their backs. They are readier to seek revenge
for wrong, than to prove gratitude for service : as
Tacitus says of people who lived in Italy long ages
before, readier to pay back injury than kindness.
Men never do anything good, unless they are
driven ; and where they have their choice, and
can use what licence they will, all is filled with
disorder and confusion. They are taken in by
appearances. They follow the event. They easily
become corrupted. Their will is weak. They know
not how to be either thoroughly good or thoroughly
bad ; they vacillate between ; they take middle
paths, the worse of all. Men are a little breed.*
All this is not satire, it is not misanthropy ; it
is the student of the art of government, thinking
over the material with which he has to deal.
These judgments of Machiavelli have none of the
wrath of Juvenal, none of the impious truculence
of Swift. They cut deeper into simple reality
than polished oracles from the moralists of the
boudoir. They have not the bitterness that hides
in the laugh of Moliere, nor the chagrin and dis-
dain with which Pascal broods over unhappy man
and his dark lot. Least of all are they the voice
. of the preacher calling sinners to repentance. The
tale is only a rather grim record, from inspection,
of the foundations on which the rulers of states
must do their best to build.
Goethe's maxim that, if you would improve a
man, it is no bad thing to let him suppose that
you already think him that which you would have
* " However we brave it out, we men are a little breed." — Tennyson's
Maud, i. 5.
MACHIAVELLI 117
him to be, would have seemed to Machiavelli as
foolish for his purpose as if you were to furnish
an architect with clay and bid him to treat it as
if it were iron. He will suffer no abstraction toj/
interrupt positive observation.14 Man is what he
is, and so he needs to be bitted and bridled with
laws, and now and again to be treated to a stiff
dose of " mtdecine forte," in the shape of fire, bullet, _
axe, halter, and dungeon. At any rate, Machiavelli
does not leave human nature out, and this is one
secret of his hold. It is not with pale opinion that
he argues, it is passions and interests in all the flush
of action. It is, in truth, in every case, — Burke,
Rousseau, Tocqueville, Hobbes, Bentham, Mill, and
the rest — always the moralist who interests men most
within the publicist. Machiavelli was assuredly a O
moralist, though of a peculiar sort, and this is what
makes him, as he has been well called, a contem-j '
porary of every age and a citizen of all countries. ),U*'
To the question whether the world grows better, s
or worse, Machiavelli gave an answer that startles^
an age like ours, subsisting on its faith in progress.
The world, he says, neither grows better nor worse ;
it is always the same. Human fortunes are never j £
still ; they are every moment either going up or
sinking down. Yet among all nations and states,
the same desires, the same humours prevail ; they
are what they always were. Men are for travelling
on the beaten track. Diligently study bygone
things, and in every State you will be able to
discover the things to come. All the things that
have been, may be again. Just as the modern
physicist tells us that neither physical nor chemical
transformation changes the mass or the weight
of any quantity of matter, so Machiavelli judged
the good and evil in the world to be ever identical.
" This bad and this good shift from land to land,"
he says, '* as we may see from ancient empires ;
they rose and fell with the changes of their usage,
118 MACHIAVELLI
but the world remained as it was. The only
difference was that it concentrated its power (virtu)
in Assyria, then in Media, then in Persia, until at
last it came to Italy and Rome."
In our age, when we think of the chequered
course of human time, of the shocks of irreconcil-
able civilisation, of war, trade, faction, revolution,
empire, laws, creeds, sects, we look for a clue to the
vast maze of historic and pre-historic fact. Machia-
velli seeks no clue to his distribution of good and
evil. He seeks no moral interpretation for the
mysterious scroll. We obey laws that we do riot
know, but cannot resist. We can only make an
effort to seize events as they whirl by ; to extort
from them a maxim, a precept, or a principle, that
may serve our immediate turn. Fortune, he says,
— that is, Providence, or else Circumstance, or the
Stars, — is mistress of more than half we dp. What
is her deep secret, he shows no curiosity to fathom.
He contents himself with a maxim for the prac-
tical man (Prince, xxv.), — that it is better to be
adventurous than cautious, for Fortune is a woman,
and to master her, she must be boldly handled.
Whatever force or law may control this shifting
distribution of imperial destinies, nothing, said
Machiavelli, could prevent any native of Italy or
of Greece, unless the Greek had turned Turk,
or the Italian Transalpine, from blaming his own
time and praising the glories of time past. " What,"
he cries, " can redeem an age from the extremity
of misery, shame, reproach, where there is no
regard to religion, to laws, to arms, where all is
tainted and tarnished with every foulness? And
these vices are all the more hateful as they most
abound in those who sit in the judgment-seat, are
men's masters, and seek men's reverence. I, at
all events," he concludes, with a glow that almost
recalls the moving close of the Agricola, " shall
make bold to say how I regard old times and new,
MACHIAVELLI 119
so that the minds of the young who shall read
these writings of mine, may shun the new examples
and follow old. For it is the duty of a good man,
at least to strive that he may teach to others those
sound lessons which the spite of time or fortune
hath hindered him from executing, so that many
having learned them, some better loved by heaven
may one day have power to apply them."
What were the lessons ? They were in fact only 7
one, that the central secret of the ruin and dis-
traction of Italy was weakness of will, want of
fortitude, force, and resolution. The abstract
question of the best form of government — perhaps
the most barren of all the topics that have ever
occupied speculative minds — was with Machiavelli
strictly secondary. He saw small despotic states
harried by their petty tyrants ; he saw republics
worn out by faction and hate. Machiavelli himself
had faith in free republics as the highest type of
government ; but whether you have republic or \
tyranny matters less, he seems to say, than that ]
the governing power should be strong in the force I
of its own arms, intelligent, concentrated, resolute.
We might say of him that he is for half his time)
engaged in examining the fitness of means to other I V
people's ends, himself neutral. But then, as Nature '
used to be held to abhor a vacuum, so the im-
patience of man is loth to tolerate neutrality. He
has been charged with inconsistency, because in
the Prince he lays down the conditions on which
an absolute ruler, rising to power by force of genius
backed by circumstance, may maintain that power
with safety to himself and most advantage to his
subjects ; while in the Discourses he examines the
rules that enable a self-governing State to retain
its freedom. The cardinal precepts are the same. »
In either case, the saving principle is one : self- 1
sufficiency, military strength, force, flexibility, |
address, — above all, no half-measures. In either
120 MACHIAVELLI
case, the preservation of the State is equally the
one end, reason of State equally the one adequate
test and justification of the means. The Prince
deals with one problem, the Discourses with the
other, but the spring of Machiavelli's political in-
spirations is the same, to whatever type of rule
they are applied — the secular State supreme ; self-
interest and self-regard avowed as the single prin-
ciples of State action ; material force the master-
key to civil policy. Clear intelligence backed by
unsparing will, unflinching energy, remorseless
vigour, the brain to plan and the hand to strike —
here is the salvation of States, whether monarchies
or republics. The spirit of humility and resignation
that Christianity had brought into the world, he
contemns and repudiates. That whole scheme of
the Middle Ages in which invisible powers rule
all our mortal affairs, he dismisses. Calculation,
courage, fit means for resolute ends, human force, —
only these can rebuild a world in ruins.*
Some will deem it inconsistent that, with so few
illusions about the weaknesses of human nature,
he should yet have been so firm in what figures
in current democracy as trust in the people. Like
Aristotle, he held the many to be in the long run
the best judges ; but, unlike Goethe, who said that
the public is always in a state of self-delusion about
details though scarcely ever about broad truths,
Machiavelli declared that the public may go wrong
about generalities, while as to particulars they are
usually right.15 The people are less ungrateful than
a prince, and where they are ungrateful, it is from
less dishonourable motive. The multitude is wiser
and more constant than a prince. Furious and
uncontrolled multitudes go wrong, but then so do
furious and uncontrolled princes. Both err when
not held back by fear of consequences. The people
* See Ferrari's Hist, de la raison (TJsltat, p. 260 ; de Sanctis, Storia deUa
left, italiana, ii. 74-89 ; Quinet, Revolutions d1 Italic, ii. 122.
MACHIAVELLI 121
are fickle and thankless, but so are princes. " As
for prudence and stability, I say that a people is
more prudent, more stable, and of better judgment
than a prince." Never let a prince, he said — and
perhaps we might say, never let a parliament —
complain of the faults of a people under his rule,
for they are due either to his own negligence, or
else to his own example, and if you consider a
people given to robbery and outrages against law,
you will generally find that they only copy their
masters. Above all and in any case the ruler,
whether hereditary or an usurper, can have no
safety unless he founds himself on popular favour
and goodwill. This he repeats a hundred times.
4 Better far than any number of fortresses, is not
to be hated by your people."
It is then to the free Roman commonwealth that
Machiavelli would turn his countrymen. In that
strong respect for law, that devotion to country, i
that unquailing courage, that energy of purpose,
which has been truly called the essence of free/
Rome, he found the pattern that he wanted.
Modern Germans, for good reasons of their own,
have taken to praise him, but Machiavelli has
nothing to do with that most brilliant of German
scholars, who idolises Julius Caesar, then despatches
Cato as a pedant and Cicero as a coxcomb. You
will hardly find in Machiavelli a good word for
any destroyer of a free government. Let nobody,
he says, be cheated by the glory of Caesar. His-
torians have been spoiled by his success, and by
the duration of the empire that continued his name.
If you will only follow the history of the empire,
then will you soon know, with a vengeance, what is
the debt of Rome, Italy, and the world, to Caesar.
Nobody has stated the argument against the
revolutionary dictator more clearly or tersely than
Machiavelli. He applauded the old Romans because
their policy provided by a regular ordinance for an
122 MACHIAVELLI
emergency, by the institution of a constitutional
dictator for a fixed term, and to meet a definite
occasion. " In a republic nothing should be left
to extraordinary modes of government ; because
though such a mode may do good for the moment,
still the example does harm, seeing that a practice
of breaking the laws for good ends lends a colour to
breaches of law for ends that are bad." Occasions
no doubt arise when no ordinary means will pro-
duce reform, and then you must have recourse to
violence and arms : a man must make himself
supreme. But then, unfortunately, if he make
himself supreme by violence, he is probably a bad
man, for by such means a good man will not
consent to climb to power. No more will a
bad man who has become supreme in this way
be likely to use his ill-gotten power for good
ends. Here is the eternal dilemma of a State in
convulsion (Disc. i. 34, 18, 10 ; ii. 2).
He forbids us in any case to call it virtue to slay
fellow - citizens, to betray friends, to be without
faith, without mercy, without religion ; such prac-
tices may win empire, but not fair fame. A prince
who clears out a population — here we may think
of James I. and Cromwell in Ireland, and the
authors of many a sweeping clearance since — and
transplants them from province to province, as a
herdsman moves his flock, does what is most cruel,
most alien, not only to Christianity, but to common
humanity. Far better for a man to choose a private
life, than be a king on the terms of making havoc
such as this with the lives of other men Disc.
i. 26).
IV
It may be true, as Danton said, that 'twere
better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with
the government of men. Yet nations and men find
themselves inexorably confronted by the practical
MACHIAVELLI 123
question. Government they must find. Given a
corrupt, a divided, a distracted community, how
are you to restore it ? The last chapter of the
Prince is an eloquent appeal to the representative,
of the House of Medici to heal the bruises and bind\
up the wounds of his torn and enslaved country. \
The view has been taken 16 that this last chapter
has nothing to do with the fundamental ideas of
the book ; that its glow is incompatible with the
iron harshness of all that has gone before ; that it
was an afterthought, dictated partly Jby Machia-
velli's personal hopes, and then picked up later by
his defenders as whitewashing guilty maxims by
ascribing them to large and lofty purpose. The
balance of argument seems on the whole to lean
this way, and Machiavelli for five - and - twenty
chapters was thinking of new princes generally,
and not of a great Italian deliverer. Yet he was
not a man cast in a single mould. It may be
that on reviewing his chapters, his heart became
suddenly alive to their frigidity, and that the
closing words flowed from the deeps of what was
undoubtedly sincere and urgent feeling.
However this may be, whether the whole case of
Italy, or the special case of any new prince, was in
his contemplation, the quality of the man required
is drawn in four chapters (xv.-xviii.) with piercing
eye and a hand that does not flinch. The ruler's
business is to save the State. He cannot practise
all virtues, first because he is not very likely to
possess them, and next because, where so many
people are bad, he would not be a match for the
world if he were perfectly good. Still he should
be on his guard against all vices, so far as possible ;
he should scrupulously abstain from every vice that
might endanger his government. There are two
ways of carrying on the fight — one by laws, the
other by force. The first is the proper and peculiar
distinction of man ; the second is the mark of the
124 MACHIAVELLI
brute. As the first is not always enough, you
must sometimes resort to the second. You must
be both lion and fox, and the man who is only lion
cannot be wise. A wise prince neither can, nor
ought to, keep his word, when to keep his word
would injure either himself or the State, or when
the reasons that made him give a promise have
passed away. If men were all good, a maxim like
this would be bad ; but as men are inclined to evil,
and would not all keep faith with you, why should
you keep faith with them ? Nostra cattivitd, la lor
-our badness, their badness (Mandrag. ii. 6).
There are some good qualities that the new ruler
need not have ; yet he should seem to have them.
It is well to appear merciful, faithful, religious, and
it is well to be so. Religion is the most necessary
of all for a prince to seek credit for. But the new
prince should know how to change to the contrary
of all these things, when they are in the way of the
public good. For it is frequently necessary for the
upholding of the State — and here is the sentence
that has done so much to damn its writer — to go
to work against faith, against charity, against
humanity, against religion. It is not possible for
a new prince to observe all the rules for which men
are reckoned good.
The property of his subjects he will most carefully
leave alone ; a man will sooner forgive the slaying
of his father than the confiscation of his patrimony.
He should try to have a character for mercy, but
this should never be allowed to prevent severity on
just occasion. He must bear in mind the good
saying reported in Livy, that many people know
better how to keep themselves from doing wrong,
than how to correct the wrong-doing of others.
Never ought he to let excess of trust make him
careless, nor excess of distrust to make him in-
tolerable. He would be lucky if he could make
himself both loved and feared ; but if circumstance
MACHIAVELLI 125
should force a choice, then of the two he had better
be feared. To be feared is not the same as to be
hated, and the two things to be most diligently
avoided of all are hatred on the one hand, and
contempt on the other.
Test there is none, save reason of State. We
should never condemn a man for extraordinary acts
to which he has been compelled to resort in estab-
lishing his empire or founding a republic. In a case
where the safety of a country is concerned, whether
it be princedom or republic, no regard is to be paid
to justice or injustice, to pity or severity, to glory
or shame ; every other consideration firmly thrust
aside, that course alone is to be followed which may
preserve to the country its existence and its free-
dom. Diderot pithily put the superficial impression
of all this, when he said that you might head these
chapters as " The circumstances under which it is
right for a Prince to be a Scoundrel." A profounder
commentary of a concrete kind is furnished by
Mommsen's account of Sulla * — an extraordinary
literary masterpiece, even in the view of those who
think its politics most perverse. Such a Sulla was
the real type of Machiavelli's reformer of a rotten
State.
It has been a commonplace of reproachful criticism
that Machiavelli should have chosen for his hero
Caesar Borgia.f Not only was Borgia a monster, it
is said, but he failed. For little more than four
years the baleful meteor flamed across the sky, then
vanished. If only success should command admira-
tion, Borgia and his swiftly shattered fortunes
might well be indifferent to Machiavelli and the
world for which he was writing. What Machiavelli
says is this — " I put him forward as a model for
such as climb to power by good fortune and the
help of others. He did everything that a long-
• Hist, of Rome, iv. x. vol. iii. 380-391 (Eng. Trans.)-
f E.g. Scherer, Etudes crit. vi. 102, etc.
126 MACHIAVELLI
headed and capable man could do, who desires to
strike root. I will show you how broad were the
foundations that he laid for the fabric of his future
power. I do not know what better lessons I could
teach a new prince (i.e. an usurper) than his
example. True, what he~dicT failed in the end ;
that was due to the extreme malignity of fortune."
He makes no hero of him, except as a type of
character well fitted for a given task. ;
Machiavelli knew him at close quarters.* He
was sent on a mission to Borgia in the crisis of
his fortunes, and he thought that he discerned in
Caesar those very qualities of action, force, combat,
calculation, resolution, that the weakness of the
age required. Machiavelli was in his train when
terrible things were done. Caesar was close, solitary,
secret, quick. When any business is on foot, said
Machiavelli, he knows nothing of rest or weariness
or risk. He no sooner reached a place, than you
heard that he had left it. He was loved by his
troopers, for though he meted stern punishment for
an offence against discipline, he was liberal in pay
and put little restraint on freedom. Though no
talker, yet when he had to make a case he was so
pressing and fluent, that it was hard to find an
answer. He was a great judge of occasion. Bold,
crafty, resolute, deep, and above all well known
never to forget or forgive an injury, he fascinated
men with the terror of the basilisk. His firm
maxim was to seek order by giving his new subjects
a good and firm government, including a civil
tribunal with a just president. Remiro was his
first governor in the Romagna. It is uncertain
how Remiro incurred his master's displeasure, but
one morning Machiavelli walked out into the
market-place at Cesena, and saw Remiro, as he puts
it, in two pieces, his head on a lance, and his body
* See Tommasini, i. 242-265 ; VUlari, bk. i. ch. v. i. 392. For M.'s
picture of the Italian princes, see Arte delta guerra, bk. vii.
MACHIAVELLI 127
still covered with his fine clothes, resting on a block
with a blood-stained axe by the side of it. His
captains, beginning to penetrate Caesar's designs, and
fearing that he would seize their petty dominions
one by one — like the leaves of an artichoke, as
he said — revolted. Undaunted, he gathered new
forces. Fresh bands of mercenaries flocked to the
banners of a chief who had money, skill, and a
happy star. The conspirators were no match for
him in swiftness, activity, or resource ; they
allowed him to sow the seeds of disunion ; he
duped them into making a convention with him
which they had little thought of keeping. Every-
body who knew his revengeful and implacable
spirit was sure that the conspirators were doomed.
When Machiavelli came near one of them he felt,
he says, the deadly odour of a corpse. With many
arts, the duke got them to meet him at Sinigaglia.
He received their greetings cordially, pressed their
hands, and gave them the accolade. They all rode
into the town together, talking of military things.
Caesar courteously invited them to enter the palace,
then he quitted them and they were forthwith
seized. " I doubt if they will be alive to-morrow
morning," the Florentine secretary wrote without
emotion to his government. They went through
some form of trial, before daybreak two of them
were strangled, and two others shared the same fate
as soon as Caesar was sure that the Pope had carried
out his plans for making away by poison with the
Cardinal who headed the rebellious faction at Rome.
Let us pause for a moment. One of the victims
of Sinigaglia was Oliverotto da Fermo. His story
is told in the eighth chapter of the Prince. He
had been brought up from childhood by an uncle ;
he went out into the world to learn military
service ; in course of time, one day he wrote to his
uncle at Fermo that he should like once more to
see him and his paternal city, and, by way of
128 MACHIAVELLI
showing his good compatriots that he had won
some honour in his life, he proposed to bring a
hundred horsemen in his company. He came, and
was honourably received. He invited his uncle
and the chief men of Fermo to a feast, and when
the feast was over, his soldiers sprang upon the
guests and slew them all, and Oliverotto became
the tyrant of the place. We may at any rate for-
give Caesar for making sure work of Oliverotto a
year later. When his last hour came, he struggled
to drive his dagger into the man with the cord.
Here indeed were lions, foxes, catamounts.
This is obviously the key to Machiavelli's admira-
tion for Borgia's policy. -The men were all bandits
together. Romagna is not and never was, said
Dante two hundred years before, without war in the
hearts of her tyrants (Inf. xxvii. 37). So it was
now. It was full, says Machiavelli, of those who
are called gentlemen, who live in idleness and abun-
dance on the revenues of their estates, without any
care of cultivating them, or of incurring any of the
fatigue of getting a living; such men are per-
nicious anywhere, most of all when they are lords
of castles, and have subjects under obedience to
them. These lords, before the Pope and his terrible
son took them in hand, were poor, yet had a
mind to live as if they were rich, and so there was
nothing for it but rapine, extortion, and all iniquity.
Whether Caesar and the Pope had wider designs than
the reduction of these oppressors to order, we can
never know. Machiavelli and most contemporaries
thought that they had, but the various historians of
to-day differ. Probably the contemporaries knew
best, but nothing can matter less.
We may as well finish Caesar's story, because we
never know until a man's end, whether the play has
been tragedy or comedy. He seemed to be lord of
the ascendant, when in the summer after the trans-
action of Sinigaglia (1503) the Pope and he were
MACHIAVELLI 129
one evening both stricken with malarious fever at
Rome. There was talk of poison, but the better
opinion seems to be that this is fable.17 Alexander
VI. died ; Caesar, in the prime of his young man's
strength, made a better fight for it, but when he
at last recovered his star had set. Machiavelli
saw him and felt that Fortune this time had
got the better of virtii,. His subjects in the
Romagna stood by him for a time, and then
tyranny and disorder came back. The new Pope,
Julius II., was not his friend; for though Caesar
had made the Spanish cardinals support his elec-
tion, Julius had some old scores to pay, and as
Machiavelli profoundly remarked, anybody who
supposes that new services bring great people to
forget old injuries, makes a dire mistake. So
Caesar found his way to Naples, with a safe-conduct
from Gonsalvo, the Great Captain. He reaped as
he had sown. Once he had said, "It is well to
cheat those who have been masters in treachery."
He now felt the force of his maxim. At Naples he
was cordially received by Gonsalvo, dined often at
his table, talked over all his plans, and suddenly
one night as he was about to pass the postern, in
spite of the safe -conduct an officer demanded his
sword in the name of the King of Aragon.* To
Spain he was sent. For some three years he went
through strange and obscure adventures, fighting
fortune with the aid of his indwelling demon to the
very last. He was struck down in a fight at Viana
in Navarre (1507), after a furious resistance ; was
stripped of his fine armour by men who did not
know who he was ; and his body was left naked,
bloody, and riddled with wounds, on the ground.
He was only thirty -one. His father, who was
* quite as desperate an evil -doer, died in his bed
\ at seventy-two. So history cannot safely draw a
moral.18
* Prescott, Hist. Ferd. and Isabella, ii. p. 498.
K
130 MACHIAVELLI
From this digression let us return to mark some
of the problems that Machiavelli raises, noting as
we pass how, besides their profound effect upon
active principles of statesmanship and progress,
they lie at the very root of historic judgment on
conspicuous men and memorable movements in
bygone times. In one sense we are shocked by his
maxims in proportion to our forgetfulness of history.
There have been, it is said, only two perfect
\ princes in the world — Marcus Aurelius and Louis IX.
of France. If you add to princes, even presidents
and prime ministers, the percentage might still be
low. Among the canonised saints of the Roman
Church there have only been a dozen kings in eight
centuries, and no more than four popes in the same
period. So hard has it been " to govern the world
by paternosters." 19 It is well to take care lest in
blaming Machiavelli for openly prescribing hypo-
crisy, men do not slip unperceived into something
like hypocrisy of their own.
Take the subordination of religious creed to
policy. In the age that immediately followed
Machiavelli, three commanding figures stand out,
and are cherished in the memories of men — William
the Silent, Henry of Navarre, and Elizabeth of
England. It needs no peevish or pharisaic memory
to trace even in these imposing personalities some
of the lineaments of Machiavelli's hated and scan-
dalous picture. William the Silent changed from
Lutheran to Catholic, then back to Lutheran,
and then again from Lutheran to Calvinist. His
numerous children were sometimes baptized in one
of the three communions, sometimes in another,
just as political convenience served. Henry of
Navarre abjured his Huguenot faith, then he
returned to it, then he abjured it again. Our
MACHIAVELLI 131
great Elizabeth, of famous memory, notoriously
walked in tortuous and slippery paths. Again, the
most dolorous chapter in all history is that which
recounts how men and women were burned, hanged,
shot, and cruelly tormented, for heresy ; and there
is a considerable body of authors, who through the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries used against
heretics Machiavelli's arguments for making short
work with rebels, and asked with logical force why
their reason of Church was not just as good as
his reason of State.20 What is the real difference
between the practices tolerated in the Prince for \
the self-preservation of a 'secular State, and all the \
abominations perpetrated in the name and for the
sake of religious unity ? Again, how many of the
wars of faith, from Monophysite, Arian, Iconoclast,
downwards, have been at bottom far less concerned .
with opinion than with conflicts of race, nationality, I
property, and policy, and have been conducted on '
maxims of purely secular expediency ?
Frederick the Great is the hero of the most
picturesque of modern English historians. That
strong ruler, as we all know, took it into his head
to write a refutation of the Prince. " Sir," said
Voltaire, " I believe the very first advice that
Machiavelli would have given to a disciple, would
have been that he should begin by writing a refu-
tation of his book." Carlyle contemptuously regrets
that his hero should have taken any trouble about
the Italian's " perverse little book " and its in-
credible sophistries ; pity he was not refuted by a
kick from old Frederick William's jackboot ; he
deserved no more. Thus Carlyle does not let us
forget that nobody so quickly turns cynic as your
high-flying transcendentalist, just as nobody takes
wickedness so easily as the Antinomian who holds
the highest doctrine about the incorruptibility of
man's spiritual nature. The plain truth is that
Frederick, alike on his good side and his bad side,
132 MACHIAVELLI
alike as the wise law-maker, the thrifty steward, the
capable soldier, and as the robber of Silesia, and a
leading accomplice, if not the inspirer, of the parti-
tion of Poland, was the aptest of all modern types
of the perverse book.21 It was reserved for the
following century to see even that type depraved
and distorted by the mighty descendant of a
fugitive family from Tuscany, who found their way
to Corsica about the time of Machiavelli's death.22
The most imposing incarnation of the doctrine
that reason of State covers all, is Napoleon.
Tacitus, said Napoleon, writes romances ; Gibbon is
no better than a man of sounding words ; Machia-
velli is the only one of them worth reading. No
wonder that he thought so. All those maxims that
have most scandalised mankind in the Italian writer
of the sixteenth century, were the daily bread of the
Italian soldier who planted his iron heel on the
neck of Europe in the nineteenth. Yet Machiavelli
at least sets decent limits and conditions. The ruler
may under compulsion be driven to set at naught
pity, humanity, faith, religion, for the sake of the
State ; but though he should know how to enter
upon evil when compelled, he should never turn
from what is good when he can avoid it. Napoleon
sacrificed pity, humanity, faith, and public law,
less for the sake of the State than to satisfy
an exorbitant passion for personal domination.
Napoleon, Charles IX., the Committee of Public
Safety, would all have justified themselves by
reason of State, and the Bartholomew massacre, the
September massacres, and the murder of the Due
d'Enghien only show what reason of State may
come to in any age, in the hands of practical
logicians with a knife in their grasp.23
Turn from the Absolutist camp to the Republican.
Mazzini is in some respects the loftiest moral genius
of the century, and he said that though he did not
approve the theory of the dagger, nay he deplored
MACHIAVELLI 188
it, yet he had not the heart to curse the fact of the
dagger. " When a man," he says, " seeks by every
possible artifice to betray old friends to the police
of the Foreign Ruler, and then somebody arises and
slays the Judas in broad daylight in the public
streets — I have not the courage to cast the first
stone at one who thus takes upon himself to repre-
sent social justice and hatred of tyranny." *
Even in modern democracy, many a secret and
ugly spring works under decorous mechanism, and
recalls Machiavelli's precept to keep the name
and take away the thing. Salvagnoli, minister for
religion and public instruction in a liberal govern-
ment of modern Italy, laid it down broadly to the
scandal, real or affected, of reactionary opponents,
Colla verita non si governa. What shall we say
of two great rival Powers, each professing with no
little sincerity its earnest desire to spread all the
boons of civilisation, yet adjusting their own quarrel
by solemn bargain and mutual compact that binds
down some weak buffer-state in backwardness and
barbarism ? Yet such inconsistency between practice
and profession may be detected in the newspaper
telegrams any month by a reader who keeps his
eye upon the right quarter. Is our general standard
really so far removed at last from Sir Walter
Raleigh's description, which has a Machiavellian
twang about it, — " Know ye not, said Ahab, that
Ramoth Gilead is ours ? He knew this before,
and was quiet enough, till opinion of his forces
made him look unto his right. Broken titles to
kingdoms or provinces, maintenance of friends and
partisans, pretended wrongs, and indeed whatso-
ever it pleaseth him to allege, that thinks his
own sword sharpest." An eminent man endowed
with remarkable compass of mind, not many years
ago a professor in this university, imagined a
modern writer with the unflinching perspicacity of
* Lift and Writings of Mazzini (ed. 1891), vi. 275-276.
134 MACHIAVELLI
Machiavelli, analysing the party leader as the Italian
analysed the tyrant or the prince.24 Such a writer,
he said, would find that the party leader, though
possessed of every sort of private virtue, yet is
debarred by his position from the full practice of
^the great virtues of veracity, justice, and moral
intrepidity ; he can seldom tell the full truth ; can
never be fair to anybody but his followers and
his associates ; can rarely be bold except in the
, interests of his faction. This hint of Maine's
is ingenious and may perhaps be salutary, but we
must not overdo it. Party government is not the
Reign of the Saints, but we should be in no
hurry to let the misgivings of political valetudi-
narianism persuade us that there is not at least
as good a stock of veracity, justice, and moral
intrepidity inside the world of parliament or
congress, as there is in the world without. But
these three or four historic instances may serve to
illustrate the airopLai, and awkward points that
Machiavelli' s writings have propounded for men
capable of political reflection in Europe, for many
generations past.
If one were to try to put the case for the Machia-
vellian philosophy in a modern way, it would, I
suppose, be something of this kind : — Nature does
not work by moral rules. Nature, " red in tooth
and claw," does by system all that good men by
system avoid. Is not the whole universe of sentient
being haunted all day and all night long by the
haggard shapes of Hunger, Cruelty, Force, Fear ?
War again is not conducted by moral rules. To
declare war is to suspend not merely habeas corpus
but the Ten Commandments, and some other good
commandments besides. A military manual, by an
illustrious hand of our own day, warns us : " As a
nation we are brought up to feel it a disgrace even
to succeed by falsehood. We keep hammering along
with the conviction that honesty is the best policy,
MACHIAVELLI 135
and that truth always wins in the long run. Theses
sentiments do well for a copy-book, but a man who
acts upon them had better sheathe his sword for
ever." This, by the way, may be one reason among
others why we should keep the sword sheathed as
long as we can.
Why should the ruler of a State be bound by a
moral code from which the soldier is free ? Why
should not he have the benefit of what has been
called the evolutionary beatitude, — Blessed are the
strong, for they shall prey on the weak ? Right
and wrong, cause and effect, — are they not two
sides of one question ? Has it not been well said
that " morality is the nature of things " ? We must
include in the computation the whole sum of con-
sequences, and consider acts of State as worked
out to their furthest results. Bishop Butler tells
you that we cannot give the whole account of any
one single thing whatever, — not of all its causes,
its ends, its necessary adjuncts. In short, means
and end are only one transaction. You must regard
policy as a whole. The ruler as an individual is,
like other men, no more than the generation of
leaves, fleeting, a shadow, a dream. But the State
lives on after he shall have vanished. He is a
trustee for times to come. He is not shaping his
own life only ; he guides the distant fortunes of
a nation. Leaves fall, the tree stands. | s
Such, I take it, is the defence of reason of State,
of the worship of nation and empire. Everything
that policy requires, justice sanctions. Success is
the test. There are no crimes in politics, only | \^
blunders. " The man of action is essentially con-
scienceless " (Goethe). " Praised be those," said one,
in words much applauded by Machiavelli, " who love
their country rather than the safety of their souls."
4 Let us be Venetians first," said Father Paul, " and
Christians after."
We see now the deep questions that lie behind
136 MACHIAVELLI
these sophistries, and all the alarming propositions
in which they close. How are we to decide the
constant question in national concerns, when and
whether one duty overrules another that points the
contrary way ? It is easy to assert that the auth-
ority of moral law is paramount, but who denies that
cases may arise of disputable and conflicting moral
obligations ? Do you condemn Prussia for violating
in 1813 the treaties imposed by Napoleon after
Jena ? Does morality apply only to end and not
to means ? Is the State means or end ? What
does it really exist for ? For the sake of the indi-
' \ vidual, his moral and material well-being, or is he
I mere cog or pinion in the vast thundering machine ?
How far is it true that citizenship dominates all
TI other relations and duties, and is the most important
of them ? Are we to test the true civilisation of a
State by anything else than the predominance of
justice, right, equality, in its laws, its institutions,
its relations to neighbours ? Is one of the most
important aspects of national policy its reaction
upon the character of the nation itself, and can
States enter on courses of duplicity and selfish
violence, without paying the penalty in national
demoralisation ? What are we to think of such
sayings as d'Alembert's motto for a virtuous man,
" I prefer my family to myself, my country to my
family, and humanity to my country " ? Is this the
true order of honourable attachments for a man of
self-respect and conscience ? To Machiavelli all
these questions would have been futile. Yet the
world, in spite of a thousand mischances, and at
tortoise-pace, has steadily moved away from him
and his Romans.
The modern conception of a State has long made
it a moral person, capable of right and wrong, just
as are the individuals composing it. Civilisation is
taken to advance, exactly in proportion as com-
munities leave behind them the violences of external
MACHIAVELLI 137
nature, and the unspeakable brutalities of man in a
state of war. The usages of war are constantly
undergoing mitigation. The inviolability of treaties
received rude shocks between the first Napoleon
and Prince Bismarck. " You are always talking to
me of principles," said Alexander I. to Talleyrand,
" as if your public law were anything to me. I do
not know what it means. What do you suppose
that all your parchments and your treaties signify
to me ? ' Yet the sanctity of national faith has \
gained ground rather than lost, and even nakedly
invasions of it seek the decorum of a diplomatic/
fig-leaf. Though it is said even now not to be
wholly purged of lying, fraud, and duplicity, diplo-
macy still is conscious of having a character to keep
up for truth and plain dealing, so far as circum-
stances allow. Such conferences, again, as those
at Berlin and Brussels in our own day, imperfectly
as they have worked, mark the recognition of duty
towards inferior races. All these improvements in
the character of nations were in the minds of the
best men in Machiavelli's day. Reason of State
has always been a plea for impeding and resisting
them. Las Casas and other churchmen, Machia-
velli's contemporaries, fought nobly at the Spanish
court against the inhuman treatment of Indians in
the New World, and they were defeated by argu-
ments that read like maxims from the Prince.™
Grotius had forerunners in his powerful contribu-
tion towards assuaging the abominations of war,
but both letter and spirit in Machiavelli made all
the other way.26 Times have come and gone since
Machiavelli wrote down his deep truths, but in the
great cycles of human change he can have no place
among the strong thinkers, the orators, the writers,
who have elevated the conception of the State, have
humanised the methods and maxims of government,
have raised citizenship to be " a partnership in every
virtue and in all perfection." He turned to the
138 MACHIAVELLI
past, just as scholars, architects, sculptors, turned
to it ; but the idea of reconstructing a society that
had once been saturated with the great ruling con-
ceptions of the thirteenth century — as seen and
symbolised in Dante, for example — by trying to
awaken the social energy of ancient Rome, was just
as much of an anachronism as Julian the Apostate.
14 Our religion," said Machiavelli of Christianity,
" has glorified men of humble and meditative life,
and not men of action. It has planted the chief
good in lowliness and contempt of mundane things ;
paganism placed it in highmindedness, in bodily
force, in all the other things that make men strong.
If our religion calls for strength in us, it is for
strength to suffer rather than to do. This seems
to have rendered the world weak." This "dis-
carding the presuppositions of Christianity," as it
has been well described, marks with exactitude the
place of Machiavelli in the development of modern
European thought. The Prince — the most direct,
concentrated, and unflinching contribution ever
made to the secularisation of politics — brings into
a full light, never before shed upon it, the awful
Manichaeism of human history, the fierce and
unending collision of , type, ideal, standard, and
endeavour.
Machiavelli has been supposed to put aside the
question of right and wrong, just as the political
economist or the analytical jurist used to do.
Truly has it been said that the practical value of
all sciences founded on abstractions, depends on
the relative importance of the elements rejected
and the elements retained in the process of abstrac-
tion. The view that he rejected moral elements
of government for a scientific purpose and as a
hypothetical postulate, seems highly doubtful. Is
he not more intelligible, if we take him as follow-
ing up the divorce of politics from theology, by a
divorce from ethics also ? He was laying down
MACHIAVELLI 189
certain maxims of government as an art ; the end \
of that art is the security and permanence of they
ruling power ; and the fundamental principle from\
which he silently started, without shadow of doubt \
or misgiving as to its soundness, was that the \
application of moral standards to this business is
as little to the point as it would be in the naviga-
tion of a ship.
The effect was fatal even for his own purpose,
for what he put aside, whether for the sake of
argument or because he thought them in substance
irrelevant, were nothing less than the living forces
by which societies subsist and governments aret
strong. A remarkable illustration occurred in his
own century. Three or four years before all this
on secular and ecclesiastical princedoms was written,
John Calvin was born (1509). With a union of
fervid religious instinct and profound political
genius, almost unexampled in European history,
Calvin did in fact what Machiavelli tried to do
on paper; he actually created a self -governed
state, ruled it, defended it, maintained it, and
made that little corner of Europe the centre of a
movement that shook France, England, Scotland,
America, for long days to come, and at the same
time he set up a bulwark against all the forces
of Spanish and Roman reaction in the pressing
struggles of his own immediate day. In one sense,
Florence, Geneva, Holland, hold as high a place
as the greatest States of Europe in the develop-
ment of modern civilisation ; but anybody with a
turn for ingenious or idle speculation might ask
himself whether, if the influence of Florence on
European culture had never existed, the loss to
mankind would have been as deep as if the little
republic of Geneva had been wiped out by the dukes
of Savoy. The unarmed prophet, said Machiavelli,
thinking of Savonarola, is always sure to be de-
stroyed, and his institutions must come to naught.
140 MACHIAVELLI
If Machiavelli had been at Jerusalem two thousand
years ago, he might have found nobody of any
importance in his eyes, save Pontius Pilate and
the Roman legionaries. He forgot the potent arms
of moral force, and it was with these that, in
the main, Calvin fought his victorious battle. We
need not, however, forget that Calvin never scrupled
to act on some of these Italian maxims that have
been counted most hateful. He was as ready to
resort to carnal weapons as other people. In spite
of all the sophistries of sectarian apologists, Calvin's
vindictive persecution of political opponents, and
his share in the crime of burning Servetus, can
only be justified on principles that are much the
same as, and certainly not any better than, those
prescribed for the tyrant in the Prince. Still, the
republic of Geneva was a triumph of moral force.
So was the daughter system in Scotland. It is true
that tyrannical theocracy does not in either case by
any means escape the familiar reproaches addressed
by history to Jesuits and Inquisitors.
In Italy Savonarola had attempted a similar
achievement. It was the last effort to reconcile
the spirit of the new age to the old faith, but
Italy was for a second time in her history in the
desperate case of being able to endure nee vitia
nee remedia, neither ills nor cure. In a curious
passage (Disc. hi. 1), Machiavelli describes how
Dominic and Francis in older days kindled afresh
an expiring flame. He may have perceived that
for Italy in this direction all was by his time over.
The sixteenth century in Italy in some respects
resembles the eighteenth in France. In both, old
faiths were assailed and new lamps were kindled.
But the eighteenth century was a time of belief in
the better elements of mankind. An illusion, you
may say. Was it a worse illusion than disbelief
in mankind ? Machiavelli and his school saw only
cunning, jealousy, perfidy, ingratitude, dupery ; and
MACHIAVELLI
141
yet on such a foundation as this they dreamed that |
they could build. What idealist or doctrinaire ever
fell into a stranger error ? Surrounded by the
ruins of Italian nationality, says a writer of genius,
" Machiavelli organises the abstract theory of the
country with all the energy of the Committee of
Public Safety, supported on the passion of twenty-
five millions of Frenchmen. He carries in him the
genius of the Convention. His theories strike like
acts " (Quinet). Yet after all has been said, energy
as an abstract theory is no better than a bubble.
" The age of Machiavel," it has been said,
" was something like ours, in being one of religious
eclipse, attended by failure of the traditional foun-
dation of morality. A domination of self-interest
without regard for moral restriction was the re-
sult " (Goldwin Smith). We may hope to escape
Nthis capital disaster. Yet it is true to say that
Machiavelli represents certain living forces in our
actual world ; that Science, with its survival of
the fittest, unconsciously lends him illegitimate
aid ; that " he is not a vanishing type, but a con-
stant and contemporary influence " (Acton). This
is because energy, force, will, violence, still keep
alive in the world their resistance to the control
of justice and conscience, humanity and right. In
so far as he represents one side in that unending
struggle, and suggests one set of considerations
about it, he retains a place in the literature of
modern political systems and of Western 'morals.
GUICCIARDINI
IN a short piece lately written upon Machiavelli, I
mentioned how Cavour used to say that the author
of the Prince had not so good a grasp of the
realities of public things as Guicciardini, his con-
temporary and friend. Here was a man, said
Cavour, who really knew affairs, and knew them
far better than Machiavelli. To most even decently
well-read persons who have had no special occasion
to look into his pages, he is little more than a name,
known only by the old jest of an enemy, transferred
to the dazzling page of Macaulay, that a certain
criminal in Italy was suffered to make his choice
between Guicciardini and the galleys ; he chose the
History, but the war of Pisa was too much for
him ; he changed his mind, and went to the oar.
Yet the writer of the history thus despatched for
the inexpiable sin of dulness, just as if life and cir-
cumstance were never dull, is one of the acutest,
weightiest, most vigorous and observant of European
publicists in ancient times or modern.
Cavour is not the only personage of authority who
has given Guicciardini a place among great names.
Bolingbroke, for instance, audaciously declares that
he does not scruple to prefer him in every respect
to Thucydides. Thiers calls him one of the most
clear-sighted men that ever lived, and declares
that his breadth of narrative, the vigour of his
pencil, and his depth of judgment, rank his History
among the finest monuments of the human mind.
Macaulay, in his later days, said that he admired
143
144 GUICCIARDINI
no historians much except Herodotus, Thucydides,
arid Tacitus, and perhaps in his own peculiar way
Father Paul Sarpi : the historian of the Council of
Trent he always placed first among the Italians ;
then came Davila, whose story of the battle of Ivry
was worthy of Thucydides himself ; next to Davila
he put Guicciardini, and Machiavelli last. An
accomplished critic in his own country calls their
historic school one of the most original creations of
the Italians of the Renaissance, and Guicciardini
stands first within that school. An accomplished
English critic calls him one of the most consummate
historians of any nation or of any age. A German
critic applauds the grasp and mastery with which
he explains events, motives, plans, reasons for and
against. Ranke describes his book as the founda-
tion of all the later works upon the beginning of
modern history, and as one of our great historical
possessions.1 Charles the Fifth knew Guicciardini
well. There is a story that when courtiers remon-
strated at the long hours that he spent with the
Italian while they were kept waiting, Charles
replied : " In a single instant I can create a hun-
dred grandees of Spain ; not in a hundred years
could I make a Guicciardini."
Born in 1482, he was a little younger than
Machiavelli and Michelangelo and he died in 1540.
He was descended from a tolerably long line of
respectable burghers, of whom he has left us a full
account, including half a dozen vignettes that show
in graphic style what manner of folk they were.
They kept shops where they sold silk and other
wares ; they owned ships and were their own
1 Villari, Machiavelli, iii. 205 ; Symonds, Renaissance, Age of Despots,
230 ; Gaspary, Italien. Lit. der Renaissancezeit, ii. 391 ; Ranke, Zur
Kritik netierer Geschichtsschreiber (1874), Stimmtl. Werke, xxxiv.
GUICCIARDINI 145
skippers ; they went to the Levant and Flanders
and wherever else in the narrower and simpler
trade of that day money was to be picked up ; and
they filled at one time or another all the various
public posts of secondary rank in Florence. A sort
of family likeness is to be traced among them. The
men were strong, good-looking, warm in temper
yet cautious in politics, weighty, of good char-
acter according to the standard of time and place,
and with a sharp eye to the main chance. The
Guicciardini were not great people, but they were
steady, well - to - do, respectable people, and the
historian was proud of his stock. Two things in
the world, he told his descendants, he cared about
—one, the perpetual exaltation of the city and its
freedom ; the other, " the glory of our house, not
only for my life, but for always."
It has been energetically said of "the sombre
and sublime Italy " of the sixteenth century, that
life was a mortal combat, the house a fortress,
the garment a cuirass, hospitality an ambush, the
embrace a garotte, the proffered cup poison, the
proffered hand a dagger-thrust.1 This, however,
was not all, and in truth this fierce melodrama
never can be all. Here is Guicciardini 's vignette
of his father, to whom he was to the end of his days
deeply and tenderly attached :
Peter was truly a wise man, and of as great judgment
and insight as any man in Florence in his time ; nobody
had a better or a clearer conscience ; he was a lover of his
city and of the poor ; and he never did a human creature
the smallest wrong. For these things, as well as for the
qualities of his house and his forefathers, he was from his
youth upwards held in high esteem, and he carried himself
in such a way that in brain and in weight there was no
man in Florence to equal him. If only to his goodness and
his prudence had been added a little more vivacity, he
would have stood still higher. But either because nature
1 Saint- Victor, Anciena et Modernes, p. 31.
146 GUICCIARDINI
made him so, or because it was due to the times, which were
in truth strong times and strange, he went about his affairs
with little boldness and much wariness ; taking up few
ventures, working at public things slowly and with great
deliberation, never willing, save when necessity or conscience
constrained him, to say outright in important matters what
was his real mind and judgment. Though his carefulness
not to put himself at the head of a party, or of novel schemes
and undertakings, prevented his name from being on every-
body's lips, yet it had this other effect, that in the midst of
all the tumult and agitation that the city went through in
his day, he always kept himself and his position out of
reach of hurt. That was more than happened to anybody
else of his degree, when all the other considerable people
ran such risks in property or life. . . . These things made
the city grieve sorely over his death, and all good men felt
his loss, the people and citizens of every class — everybody
knowing that a wise and good citizen was gone, and one
from whom both in universal and particular no mischief
could ever have come, but only good fruit and well-doing.1
Guicciardini was in important employment from
1512, when at the age of thirty he was sent to
represent the republic of Florence at the court of
Ferdinand of Aragon. He returned home in the
following year. In 1515 he was appointed to meet
Leo the Tenth on behalf of the republic, and from
1516 to 1523 he was made papal officer in the
Emilia. Then he was named the Pope's viceroy in
the Romagna, and lieutenant-general in the papal
army. He shared some of the responsibility for the
disasters that are summed up in the Sack of Rome
(1527), but this did not prevent his promotion,
when the time came, to be the Pope's governor at
Bologna (1531). He did his work with energy,
tact, and capacity, until at last the death of
Clement the Seventh (1534) put an end to his
employment in the papal service.
His life by this time " became a series of ex-
pedients, in which he loses personal consideration,
his reputation for honour, and at last his whole
1 Op. ined. x. 90-91.
GUICCIARDINI 147
credit and power." l Though always free from
direct corruption, and according to his own account
a believer rather in politic clemency than in rigour,
yet when he was sent by the Pope in 1530 to
punish the Florentines for their rising, he showed
himself merciless and vindictive, and repaid the
revolutionary party in their own coin for the fierce
rancour with which, when they were uppermost,
they had handled the friends of Clement the
Seventh.2 By conviction he was in favour of an
oligarchy, and his private writings prove that he
estimated the Medici and their tyranny at what
they were worth. But neither fools nor wise, he
said, " can in the end resist that which has to be."
" All states and cities are mortal ; everything, either
by its nature or by accident, comes to a close.
Hence a citizen who finds himself watching the
dissolution of his country, need not so much groan
over this disgrace, as over his own lot. His country
only suffers what in any case it was bound to suffer.
The true unhappiness is that of the man who
chances to have been born in an age when the
moment of his country's doom has struck." This
has been called a sublime stoicism. It is perhaps
nearer to that fatalism, not sublime, with which
in times of political confusion men excuse a secret
surrender to self-interest. An ancient traveller
found on the Acrocorinthus a mysterious shrine
dedicated to Necessity and Force. These two
are potent divinities indeed, and well deserve a
temple ; still, sublime stoic is hardly the name for
him who bows down humbly within their walls,
and seeks to propitiate them in his own favour at
any price in burnt offerings.
In one of his Reflections Guicciardini inculcates
the perilous doctrine that it is the duty of a good
citizen to do his best to live on such terms with a
tyrant, as to be able to counsel good courses and
1 Benoist's Guichardin, p. 101. * Varchi, Stor. ftor. bk. xii.
148 GUICCIARDINI
dissuade from bad ones. " How disastrous," he
cries, " would the government of the Medici have
been, if they had been surrounded only by fools and
knaves." Acting on this principle, which in various
applications has been the undoing of many a better
man in cabinets and parties since — say from Falk-
land and Colepeper in the seventeenth century
down to Prevost - Paradol in the nineteenth -
Guicciardini became servant of the most odious of
the Medici. Finally, he was the means of raising
Cosimo to be head of the State. Cosimo was only
eighteen, he was fond of pleasure, and Guicciardini
took care that he should have a handsome income.
When the sum was fixed, Guicciardini at the
council table, lowering his face and raising his
eyebrows, said dryly, " Twelve thousand golden
florins are fine spending." But craft is not con-
fined to greybeards, and young Cosimo was no
sooner secure than he discarded his mentor.
Guicciardini went off to his villa (1534) ; he was
fifty-two ; he had abundant material to his hand ;
he had ever been an indefatigable penman ; and
he now spent the six years of life that were
left in the composition of his great work on the
history of Italy. Clarendon was seven years older
when he too in exile and disgrace " betook him-
self to his books," and with indomitable activity
of mind and pen completed the famous story of his
own time.
Guicciardini was reasonably free from the dis-
couragement and dejection with which satiety of
life is apt to affect men's judgment and temper.
He was nearing that period of his age, dove ciascun
dovrebbe Calar le vele, e raccoglier le sarte — when
every lofty soul, like the mariner drawing near the
port, should lower sails and gather in the ropes.
Though men are often spoiled by success in the
world, still more are spoiled by failure. Guicciar-
dini was wise enough to look to what he had done,
GUICCIARDINI 149
rather than at what he had missed. What he
seeks, and what he attains, is rather a reasoned
fortitude than that serenity, that " great lesson of
suavity," as Dante calls it, which brings a man to
face his end without grief or bitterness. He did
not pretend to like the falling of the curtain, but
he consoled himself by thinking for how many
important parts he had been cast by Fortune, and
how well he had played them all. He was without
that morbid ambition, as it has been called, and a
very morbid ambition it is, which pretends to treat
all grief, anger, mortification, chagrin, as weaknesses
to be ashamed of. He makes no foolish attempt to
cure his wound either by a spurious rhetoric that
places things out of perspective and proportion, or
by a spurious philosophy that pretends to turn pain
into pleasure by juggling with words as if they
were things. Various are the attitudes of men
towards the outside unseen divinity, — Fortune,
Chance, Necessity, Force of Circumstance — when
it overthrows them. Some defy, some whimper,
some fall stunned, some break their hearts once for
all, others silently obey the grim ordering of events
and with courage gather up the shattered pieces.
The ancient literature of consolation contains some
famous pieces, from Seneca, the friend of Nero,
down to Boethius, the friend of Theodoric.1 If we
would measure the differences of times and men, it
is well worth while to turn to that grave and
beautiful piece in our own literature, so full of
enlightenment, liberality, wisdom, tenderness, and
piety, where Bishop Burnet concludes his history.
" I have," he says, " considering my sphere, seen a
great deal of all that is most shining and tempting
in this world : the pleasures of sense I did soon
nauseate ; intrigues of state and the conduct of
affairs have something in them that is more
1 See M. Martha's Consolations dans VAntiquite — a chapter in his admir-
able Etudes morales sur FAntiquite.
150 GUICCIARDINI
specious, and I was for some years deeply immersed
in these, though still with hopes of reforming the
world, and of making mankind wiser and better ;
but I have found that which is crooked cannot
be made straight." And then he goes on his way
to his devout and lofty moral. So at a moment
when all his counsels had come to naught, when
his patron, the Holy Father, was a prisoner in
the castle of Saint Angelo, and Rome was suffering
all the violence and horror of prolonged sack at the
hands of ferocious Spaniard and barbaric German,
Guicciardini tried his hand at self-consolation.1
Politely despatching with summary mention the
comforting assurances of theologians and philo-
sophers, as physic that no patient would voluntarily
choose to take, " I will speak to thee," he says to
himself, " in a lower key than all that, and more
according to the nature of men and the world."
It comes to this after all. Human enterprises are
ever apt to miscarry ; he knew this when he em-
barked upon the voyage ; the wreck was no special
fault of his, for popes, kings, and emperors were
the principals, and he no more than an instrument ;
his arguments for the war against the Emperor
may have been an error of judgment, but it is not
fair to expect a man to carry into the council-
chamber, besides merely human reasonings, the
prognosticating judgments of astrologers and sooth-
sayers ; in fine, 'tis time mends all, and men will
see that he was blameless. Such is the strain of
his- autobiographic meditation. Then he recovers
the self-respect of which he is in search, by appeal
to his past : " Ask all the places where thou hast
been, the peoples over whom thou hast been set
to rule, the armies that have been under thy
orders. They will own that thou art a man of
talent, resolute in taking decisions, abundant in
resource, expeditious in act." Wholly free from
1 September 1527. Op. ined. x. 103-133.
GUICCIARDINI 151
the insincerities and inflations of the professing
cynic, stoic, or anchorite, Guicciardini's consolation
is rational and worth reading. Nevertheless at
the end of it perhaps an impartial person would
commend to statesmen in misfortune not all this
argumentation, explanation, consolation, sophisti-
cation, but the simple concision of Thucydides —
4 It befell me to be an exile from my country for
twenty years after my command at Amphipolis."
And no more.
In every age cases meet us where experience
changes the idealist and the reformer, first to
doubter, then to indifferent, next to pure egotist,
at last to hard cynic. The process may be gradual,
but it is apt to be implacable, and the fallen man
one day awakes to find his sensibility gone, his
moral pulse at a stand, and a once ardent soul
burnt down to ashes. When the waking hour
arrives, one man may still have grace enough to
go out and weep bitterly ; another only mocks.
There is no sign that Guicciardini ran through all
these stages of the political Sceptic's Progress. He
was man of the world from first to last. Dreams
and visions such as make for some the 4 charmed
part of life, were never anything to him. In a
series of extraordinarily suggestive considerations
on Machiavelli's Discorsl? he gravely exposes that
vivid writer's excess of severity in logic, excess of
colour in his ideals, excess of eloquence in descrip-
tion ; and teaches us the lesson of which the pub-
licist in all times seems to stand so much in need,
that in politics, your propositions should be guarded
by temperance, reserve, common sense, and all the
qualifications of practice. This prudence did not
at all spring in Guicciardini from the trait noted
by Aristotle in elderly men, — a fondness for only
saying " I think," never " I know " ; 2 and for lard-
ing their argument with " perhaps " and " possibly."
1 Op. ined. i. » Rhet. ii. 13.
152 GUICCIARDINI
Experience had taught him that government is
the most complex of subjects, and general maxims
about it the most in need of caution. He had
not even ambition of the ravening sort. He was
not of those who must be Premier, President, Com-
mander-in-Chief, or Admiral of the Fleet. Yet he
had much honourable public spirit. " Three things,"
he said, " I would willingly see before I die : a
well-ordered republic in my native Florence ; the
barbarian invaders driven from Italy ; the world
freed from the rascal priests." These objects he
honestly desired, but he did not much expect them,
and he was not the man to make a fight for them.
He had a passion for the transaction of public
business ; he wished to see it well done with a view
to ends well ordered, and he had a strong capacity
for it. We should in charity and sense remember
that it is a natural infirmity, even of noble minds,
to identify their own personality with the further-
ance of the common good.
Guicciardini in fine was a grave, long-headed man
of affairs, of a type well known in the public service
of kings and peoples from his day to ours. He
was sharply alive to the truth set out by Machia-
velli, that the thing of importance in this world
is not only to know one's self in a general way,
but to have skill enough rightly to measure the
forces of one's own mind and character with the
forces and needs of the State. As much as that,
to be sure, would have been heartily admitted by
anybody in the Rogue's Camp, from Verres to
Jonathan Wild. Apart from this original selfish-
ness of the politic man in search of his career,
times of great public travail tend to harden the
heart ; and the Florentine publicists all write like
men with hardish hearts. They have none of the
geniality of Commynes, none of the cheerful good
humour of Bacon, none of the amiability of Montes-
quieu, none of that deep insight into life and char-
GUICCIARDINI 153
acter as a whole which made La Bruyere and some
other Frenchmen of the seventeenth century, in-
cluding more than one of their divines, so admirable
and so fruitful. The same is true even of Paruta,
the Venetian, who hated the Machiavellian school
and all its works, and wrote some admirable things
in his dialogue on the Perfection of the Political
Life. Neither Venetian publicist nor Florentine,
for instance, was capable of any such saying as that
exquisite one of Bacon, that the nobler a soul is, the
more objects of compassion it hath. Nothing of this
kind was in their vein. They would have set down
as mere monkery Pascal's celestially ordered hier-
archy— Kings, captains, the rich, all the great men
of the flesh, as lowest down in the scale of grandeur.
Then the men of genius, with their empire, their
conquests, and their lustre, with no need of outer
carnal splendours. Third, above both these, the
saints, inventing nothing, ruling no kingdom, but
humble, patient, holy before God, terrible to
demons. This, the grandeur of wisdom, is invisible
to the eyes of carnal and of intellectual greatness.1
Savonarola, who stood for the same unworldly
scheme of human things, was put to an ignoble
death in 1498, and Guicciardini, then a boy of
sixteen, may have watched the flames. In his
dialogues on the government of Florence,2 Guic-
ciardini makes one interlocutor say to another :
" This advice may seem cruel and unconscientious,
and so in truth it is. That is why thy great grand-
father Gino wrote in his Ricordi that the Council
of Ten for War should consist of such as loved their
country better than their souls, because it is not
possible to rule governments and states according to
the precepts of Christian law" It is when we
compare the school of Machiavel and Guicciardini
with Dante, that we discern the two widely parted
1 Pensfes, xvii. 1 (ed. Havet), vol. iii. 230 (Grands ficrivains).
8 Op. ined. ii.
154 GUICCIARDINI
currents into which the main stream of political
thought and sentiment in Europe was now formally
dividing itself.
II
Guicciardini interests us somewhat as a political
theorist about constitutions and the like ; he
interests us deeply as a historian; he interests
us most of all as a shrewd observer of men,
and a keen explorer of the secrets of managing
them. Of the first of these three aspects of him
we shall say nothing, except that his discussion
of the government of Florence handles with extra-
ordinary acuteness and vigour the everlasting
question whether the rule by one, by a few, or
by many, is the best. It is too long, and it is all the
longer for being in the form of dialogue. This was
a favourite device of the century. To some of us
the most tiresome dissertation is not more afflict-
ing than the sprightliest, courtliest, demurest, or
archest of all these polemical dialogues. Plato is
of course the grand exception, as on a lower plane
is Cicero's brilliant and skilful dialogue on the
Orator. But if men could be quite honest about
Olympian names, perhaps a fraction even of Plato
would fall under the same remark. One critic,
and a French critic, strange to say, is reminded
by our Italian's Reggimento di Firenze, in respect
of elegance and grace, of the opening of the
Phaedrus. This belongs to the disputable region of
taste. A more important and less questionable
point is that, in its arguments and considerations
on the merits, difficulties, and dangers of popular
government, and in the light it sheds on our actual
problem of the choice between power concentrated
and power checked and counterbalanced, Guic-
ciardini's dialogue is as modern as if it had been
written yesterday, and it has even been enthusi-
GUICCIARDINI 155
astically described as one of the strongest and most
vivid in the history of political writing.1 Or why
say modern ? As if the insoluble theme of the re-
spective merits of government by many, by a few,
by one, had not been opened by the seven Persian
conspirators in old Herodotus (iii. 80), worshipful
father of history, five centuries before Christ.
Far more interesting, alike as historic document,
and as a kind of literature in which the world is
not any too well off, are the Ricordi or Civil and
Political Counsels. These are a body of aphorisms
or reflections on political wisdom, and the arts of
the Politic Man ; and it is mainly on their account
that the ordinary reader of to-day will think it
worth while to take a volume of Guicciardini down
from his shelf. They did not appear in a full and
authentic shape until the year 1857. Some of
them are scattered through the History of Italy
and other of the author's writings, and these
judicious sentences were collected from the History
and published apart before the end of the sixteenth
century. Guicciardini evidently took great pains
in pointing and polishing them, though it is doubt-
ful whether he ever meant the whole of them for
the public eye. He was the most circumspect of
men, and very unlikely to be willing to hand over to
the profane crowd all the secrets of empire and all
the wisdom of the domus Socratica of Rome and
Florence.2 Many of the four hundred are repeti-
tions, but when due deduction is made for these,
a large body of observation and admonition is left
that both instructs us about standards of judicious
conduct in the sixteenth century, and suggests some
sidelights for the twentieth.
We must not expect any consideration of those
1 Janet, Hist, de la science politique, i. 546.
* The Ricordi are in the first of the ten volumes of Opere inedile. They
have been rendered into English by Mr. Thompson (Kegan Paul, 1890),
the translator of Machiavelli's Prince and Discourses. See also Dean
Church's Occasional Papers, vol. i.
156 GUICCIARDINI
deeper elements and aspirations in human nature
that have led some to groan over the life of man-
kind as a hideous tragedy of waste and wrong, and
others to laugh at history as " a comedy in a hundred
acts." The stress of existence in unfortunate Italy
was too desperate. " In the sixteenth century, they
analysed much less than they acted, in war, politics,
religion. Everything was done by coups de main
and coups d'Etat." x Be all this as it may, we must
admit of Guicciardini's Counsels and Reflections,
sage as they are on their own level and within their
own limits, that they do not spring from a rich soil,
do not seem as if they had grown in a nourishing
air, have not the full savour of fruits ripened in the
sun. He was sheer politician, and the cases are
rare where politics do not rather contract than
expand the range of human interest and feeling,
do not check rather than promote the sap and juice
of a living fecundity.
Bacon in the famous eighth book of the De
Augmentis, that masterpiece of the secondary arts
of wisdom of life, sets down some heads or pass-
ages of what he calls the Architect of Fortune or
the Knowledge of Advancement in Life. The things
necessary for the acquisition of fortune, he says,
and the formation of the truly Politic Man, are a
part of human knowledge which he reports as
deficient, and we may doubt whether anybody has
done much to advance it since. " Not, however,
that Learning admires or esteems this architecture
otherwise than as an inferior work. For no man's
fortune can be an end worthy of the gift of being,
that has been given him by God ; and often the
worthiest men abandon their fortunes willingly,
that they may have leisure for higher pursuits.
But, nevertheless, fortune as an instrument of
virtue and merit deserves its own speculation and
doctrine." This limitation would have been too
1 Benoist, p. 127.
GUICCIARDINI 157
hard for Guicciardini. The architecture of fortune
in men meddling with government, went as high as
his vision could carry.
The critic goes uncharitably far when he says
that Guicciardini's Reflections are Italian corrup-
tion reduced to a code, and raised into a rule of
life.1 But life to him was no more than what
Bacon calls an " incessant, restless, and as it were
Sabbathless chase of fortune" — a game to be keenly
played with the world's dice-box. From the first
he resolved to master all its arts, expedients, and
rules, without prejudice to a little silent cozening
at a pinch. For if Fortune is free to palm an ace
or cog a die, why may not we try to make the
match more equal ? The Italian's Politic Man has
none of Bacon's large and open brow, his wide
horizons, his magisterial ease and bonhomie. Nor
had he more than half mastered the distinction
set out by Bacon in one of those pithy and sapid
comments on Solomon's Proverbs, which are worth
many long hours of sermon-preaching. " A wise
man," said King Solomon, " looketh well to his ways,
but a fool turneth to deceit." On which, Bacon :
There are two kinds of wisdom, the one true and sound,
the other degenerate and false, which Solomon does not
hesitate to term folly. He who applies himself to the
former takes heed of his own ways, foreseeing dangers, pre-
paring remedies, employing the assistance of the good,
guarding himself against the wicked, cautious in entering
upon a work, not unprepared for a retreat, watchful to seize
opportunities, strenuous to remove impediments, and attend-
ing to many other things which concern the government of
his own actions and proceedings. But the other kind is
entirely made up of deceits and cunning tricks, laying all
its hopes in the circumventing of others, and moulding
them to its pleasure ; which kind the proverb denounces as
being not only dishonest, but also foolish.
Prudential counsels by code and system can
hardly ever be in the highest sense attractive. A
1 De Sanctis, Lett. ital. ii. 115.
158 GUICCIARDINI
modern who in his studies came across the private
notebooks and reflections of Mazarin (one of the
two great Italians who have governed France, and
deeply marked by the characteristics of Italian
genius a century before his time) is driven to say
of them that all this political cookery rather takes
away one's appetite, and indeed would make one
sick if only one did not remember that everything
has its kitchen side.1 Abhor all the pretensions of
the Pharisee as heartily as ever we will, there is
something repulsive in the thought of a man start-
ing every day with a dose of Ricordi, and coming
forth from his chamber having given all the fresh-
ness of the morning hour to sharpening his rapier
or charging his pistols for the daily duel with
fortune and his fellow- creatures. The world has
more liking for one who practises the pregnant
maxim, Seekest thou great things, seek them not ; and
it often looks as if this lofty heedlessness, in spite
of what Guicciardini may say, were as politic as it
is certainly wise in wisdom's sense.
It may move a friendly smile to notice that
nobody has so many biting things to say about the
selfishness and duplicity of mankind, as one who
has made it the whole business of his life to use
mankind as the ladder for his own advancement.
Nobody in all the world is so ready to play wounded
benefactor as the self-seeker out of luck. Guicciar-
dini is less unkind to his fellow-mortals, man for
man, than observers of his stamp usually are. He
is not blind to the weaknesses of our poor species
as a whole ; but he sees them redeemed by the
worth of the elect. Like Goethe, he would say
that " in their faults one recognises Mankind, in
excellences the Individual ; shortcomings and the
chances and changes of life have we all in common,
but virtues belong to each man in particular." " Do
not be afraid of benefiting men," says Guicciardini,
1 Palais Mazarin, par le Comte de Laborde, ii. 124.
GUICCIARDINI 159
" simply because you see ingratitude so common ;
for besides that a temper of kindness in itself, and
without any other object, is a generous quality and
in a way divine, you now and again find somebody
exhibiting such gratitude as richly to make up for
the ingratitude of all the rest."
The worst of maxims, aphorisms, and the like,
from the sayings of Solomon and Sirach the son of
Jesus downward, is that for every occasion in life,
or perplexity in conduct, there is a brace of them ;
and of the brace, one points one way and the other
down a path exactly opposite. The fingerpost of
experience has many arms at every cross-road.
One observer tells the disciple that in politics per-
severance always wins ; another that men who take
the greatest trouble to succeed, are those most sure
to miss. To-day, the one essential seems to be
boldness of conception ; to-morrow, the man of
detail is master of the hour. To-day the turn of
things inclines a man to say that in politics nothing
matters ; to-morrow some other turn teaches him
that in politics everything matters. The instructor
in statecraft and the guide to the Politic Man must
be Janus and look more ways than one, and to this
demand Guicciardini was equal.
As an aristocrat by birth, by temper, and by
observation, Guicciardini did not allow his general
benevolence to make him a Friend of the People in
the political sense of to-day. " Who says people
says in truth a foolish animal, full of a thousand
errors, a thousand confusions, without taste, with-
out discernment, without stability. They are like
the waves of the sea, driven by the winds now here,
now there, without rule, without coherency (140).
Their vain opinions are as far from the truth as
Ptolemy makes Spain from the Indies " (345). In
the following century, in his dungeon in the Castle
of Saint Elmo, the valiant and unfortunate Cam-
panella, in one of the sonnets with which he
160 GUICCIARDINI
beguiled a whole weary generation of captivity,
used similar figures, though on his lips such
language was passionate remonstrance rather than
contempt.1 II popolo e una bestia —
The people is a beast of muddy brain,
That knows not its own force, and therefore stands
Loaded with wood and stone.
The implication is the contradictory of Guicciardini's.
It is not merely the multitude on whose wisdom
you cannot count. " Said Messer Antonio of Vena-
fro, and he said well — Place seven or eight clever
men together, and they become so many fools. The
reason is that when they do not agree, they are
keener to argue than to decide " (112). You may
see it any day in the case of doctors ; when several
are called in, they easily come to controversy, and
very often with their discords they kill the patient
(ii. 86). It may be that this is the secret why, in
days nearer to our own, Cabinets of all the Talents
have sometimes been cabinets of all the blunders.
Chamfort, the cynical wit of the Revolution, asked
how many fools it takes to make a public ; Guicci-
ardini, on the other hand, would have told us that
it takes very few clever men to make a fool.
Voltaire put the saying of Messer Antonio with
more piquancy and more widely, if less reasonably,
in his remark that, Quand les hommes s' attroupent,
leurs oreilles s'allongent — " When men get into a
flock their ears grow long." Cato took it differently
when he used to say of the Romans, that " they
were like sheep, for a man had better drive a flock
of them than one of them ; for in a flock if you can
but get some few to go right, the rest will follow." 2
Perhaps Burke comes nearest to the mark : " Man
is a most unwise and a most wise being. The
1 Sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanetta, translated by J. A. Symonds,
p. 143.
8 " Contio, quae ex imperitissimis constat, tamen iudicare solet quid
intersit inter popularem, id est assentatorem et levem civem, et inter
constantem et severum et gravem." — Cicero, De amic. xxv. 95.
GUICCIARDINI 161
individual is foolish. The multitude for the moment
is foolish, when they act without deliberation ; but
the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as
a species it almost always acts right."
Ill
On the whole, one must repeat, Guicciardini
treats his kind with wise leniency. " Men are all
by nature more inclined to do good than ill ; nor is
there anybody who, where he is not by some strong
consideration pulled the other way, would not more
willingly do good than ill. But so frail is man's
nature, and so frequent in this world are the occa-
sions that invite to ill, that men easily let them-
selves stray from the good." Is not this still,
nearly four centuries later, the truth of the case ?
Not ferocity but distraction, not vileness but in-
coherency, mistakes about cause and effect, short
sight, bad memory, wavering will, that which
Bishop Butler groaned over as the " immoral
thoughtlessness " of men. Then, not afraid of
something like a contradiction, Guicciardini swings
round in the other quarter : " It may seem a harsh
and suspicious thing to say — and would to heaven
it were not true : there are more bad men than
good, especially where interests of property or
politics (di Stato) are concerned. Therefore, except
with those whom either by your own experience,
or thoroughly trustworthy report, you know to be
good, you cannot go wrong in dealing with every-
body else with your eyes well open. It needs
cleverness to contrive this, without getting a bad
name for being distrustful. But the point is not to
t trust, wherever you are not sure it is safe " (201).
We can imagine Cavour on his estates at Leri,
in the years before he was called to take the helm
at Turin, brooding intently over such a passage
M
162 GUICCIARDINI
as this : " No two Popes were more unlike than
Julius the Second and Clement the Seventh ; the
one of great and even dauntless spirit, impatient,
impulsive, open, frank ; the other of a middling
temperament, perhaps even timid, infinitely patient,
moderate, a dissembler. Yet from natures so
opposed, men look for the same results in large
exploits. For with great masters patience and
impetuosity are alike fit to bring forth great things ;
the one dashes swiftly upon men, and forces circum-
stance ; the other wears men and things out, and
conquers by time and opportunity. Hence where
one hurts, the other helps, and conversely. If a
man could join both characters, and use each at the
right time, he would be divine. As that is impos-
sible, I believe that, everything considered, patience
and moderation do greater things than impetuosity
and hurry " (381). On the morrow of the peace of
Paris in 1856, Cavour, then the little-known Minister
of the Sardinian Kingdom, had a conversation with
Lord Clarendon. He talked hardily of war to the
death with Austria. Lord Clarendon told him,
truly enough, that the moment had not yet come
for saying this aloud. Cavour replied : " I have
given you proofs of my moderation and prudence ;
I believe that in politics you should be exceedingly
reserved in words, and exceedingly decided in act.
There are positions where there is less danger in
taking an audacious line, than in an excess of
prudence." He was himself a master example of
the rare men who could join both characters, and
use each at the right time.
Guicciardini is always pressing us to stick to the
particular case with which we deal. " 'Tis a great
mistake to talk of the things of the world absolutely,
without discriminating, and as it were by rule. For
in nearly everything there are distinctions and
exceptions, due to variety of circumstances. These
circumstances you cannot treat by one and the
GUICCIARDINI 163
same standard. Such distinctions and exceptions
are not to be found in books ; you must learn them
from your own discretion " (6). Take care, he says,
how you judge by examples, for if they are not
exactly on all fours, the least diversity in ante-
cedent conditions becomes the widest diversity in
conclusion. If one link in your reasoning is weak,
all the rest may snap. We may write maxims
in books, but exceptions in circumstance are for
ever arising, and these can only find a place on
the tablets of discretion. This comes to what is
reported to have been said by Prince Bismarck:
" Politics are less a science than an art. They
cannot be taught. One must be born with a gift
for them. The best advice is of no value, if you do
not know how to carry it out in the right way,
and with due regard to the circumstances of each
case." And that again brings politics very near to
the same point at which Logic was placed by an
eminent head of a college at Oxford. He ended a
discussion on the old question whether Logic is a
science or an art, by the decision that " it is neither
a science nor an art ; it is a dodge."
In the same spirit Guicciardini offers wholesome
counsel to such as are tempted to fashion modern
policies on ancient history. " How vastly do those
deceive themselves who at every word bring up
the Romans ! You should have a city in the con-
ditions under which they existed, and then you
might have a government after their pattern. For
those who have not the qualities to match, this
is as extravagant as to expect an ass to go as
fast as a horse " (110). Then, with the apparent
self-contradiction that is common with all these
masters of sentences : " Past throws light on
Future because the world was ever of the same
make ; and all that is or will be in another day,
has already been, and the same things return,
only with different names and colours. 'Tis not
164 GUICCIARDINI
everybody who knows them under the new face, but
the wise know them " (336).
All this comes very much to what our excellent
English Selden says, in words that have many
applications, and are well worth remembering by
all teachers in press and pulpit even in our own
day of perfect light : " Aye or No never answered
any question. The not distinguishing where things
should be distinguished, and the not confounding
where things should be confounded, is the cause
of all the mistakes in the world."
Sleepless circumspection, minute, particular,
patient, intense, in act and word and plan, — this
is the master key. Treat everything as laden with
a serious possibility. " I do not believe there is
a worse thing in all the world than levity. Light
men are the very instruments for anything that
is bad, dangerous, and hurtful. Flee from them
like fire " (147).
" Make as many friends as ever you can, for you never
know in what contingency a man may be able to serve
you. Hide displeasure ; I have often had to seek the aid
of those against whom I was at heart thoroughly ill-disposed;
and they, believing the contrary of me, or at any rate not
being aware of this, have served me as readily as possible "
(133, 266).
" Unperceived beginnings often open the way either to
great mischiefs, or to great success ; therefore note every-
thing, and weigh even trifles well. On your doing, or not
doing, what seems at the moment a mere trifle, often hang
things of first importance ; so be sure to consider well "
(82, 247).
" Never hold a future thing so certain, however positively
certain it may seem, as not, if you can possibly do it with-
out upsetting your plan, to keep in reserve some course to
follow, in case the contrary should turn up. I often see
really long-headed men, when they have to make up their
minds upon some weighty business, set about it by con-
sidering two or three cases that are most likely to happen,
and come to a decision on the assumption that one of these
GUICCIARDINI 165
cases is sure to come. This is dangerous, for often, and
even usually, there arises some third or fourth case that has
been overlooked, and which your decision will not fit. You
had much better keep your decision strictly to what the
actual necessity of the matter compels " (81, 182).
In politics nothing tragic, everything serious. — " The ruler
of a State must not be frightened at dangers, however
great, near, and actual they look. As the proverb goes,
The devil is not so black as he is painted. Often things
happen that melt the dangers away ; and even when the
evils come, you find some cure or some mitigation that you
had never imagined " (116).
So, then, look out for chance and surprise.
Leave all doors open. Never tie your hands.
Give plenty of room for the chapter of accidents,
good or bad. Yet you should never drift. Occa-
sion is everything. The wizard is he who divines
the moment that is neither too soon nor too late.
History, since Guicciardini's day, abounds in cases
where statesmen have made shipwreck from for-
getting that time and the moment are all, and
mistaking the pace at which opportunity ripens.
Here are some miscellaneous hints for any date,
some sensible, some cunning, some a little odious.
The Politic Man will appropriate the epithets at
his choice.
False as a bulletin. — " A man who is carrying on great
affairs is wont to cover up the things that are unpleasant,
and to exaggerate what is favourable. 'Tis a kind of
charlatanry, and entirely contrary to my nature. But as
success depends more often on the opinions of people than
on actual results, to spread the story that things are going
well helps you, and the contrary does you harm " (86).
Character the real treasure. — " Do not place popularity
before reputation, because with lost reputation popularity
is lost. But he who keeps up reputation will never find
friends, favour, popularity wanting " (42).
No general indictments. — " Be careful in your conversa-
tion never needlessly to say things which, if they were
166 GUICCIARDINI
reported, might displease others ; because such things, in
times and ways you never thought of, often turn up to do
you vast mischief. When occasion drives you to say what
must be offensive to somebody else, at least be sure that it
only offends the individual. Do not speak ill of his country,
or of his family or connections ; it is folly, while you only
wish to strike one, to affront many " (42).
Fast bind, fast find. — " My father, when praising thrift,
used to say that one ducat in the purse brings more honour
than ten ducats spent " (44).
To put to sea without constancy, a voyage that ends in
nothing. — " Persistency is everything. It is not enough to
set business going, to give it a direction and a start. You
must follow it up, and never take your hand off until the
very end " (192).
Circumspection the golden rule, only we must never let
it paralyse us. — " Though we should enter upon all our
undertakings with deliberation, we must not therefore con-
jure up so many obstacles as to make success seem desperate.
Rather it concerns us to remember that as we go on, knots
will often untie themselves and difficulties vanish."
A commonplace for political captains. — " In war often
have I seen news come that made our business look bad ;
then at a stroke would come other news that looked like
victory ; or it would be the other way about. And these
contradictions would constantly happen. So a good captain
should not too easily be either cast down or lifted up " (127).
The Righteous man begging his bread, and the Wicked
flourishing as the green bay -tree. — "Never say, God has
helped such an one because he was good, or hindered such
another because he was bad. For we often see things go
just the other way. Nor for all that ought we to say that
divine justice halts, God's counsels being so deep that
rightly do men talk of abyssus multa — we cannot fathom
them " (92).
No dilettantism : nothing for " a cake that is not turned." l
— " With him who is in his very soul bent on fame, all
1 Hosea vii. 8.
GUICCIARDINI 167
succeeds, for he spares no pains nor money nor risks.
I have proved this in my own person, and so I can write
it. Dead and empty are the doings of men that lack this
pricking spur " (118).
Mediocrity the best. — " Too keen wits mean unhappiness
and torment ; they only bring on a man perplexity and
trouble, from which those with heads of the positive sort
are quite free. He who has sound judgment can make far
more use of the man with only clever brains, than the
clever man can make use of him. The man with the
positive head has a better time in the world, lives longer,
and in a certain fashion is happier, than the man with high
intellect, for a noble intellect carries with it toil and fret.
At the same time one partakes more of the brute than the
man, while the other transcends humanity and approaches
the divine " (60, 232, 337).
He that regards the winds does not sow, and he that regards
the clouds does not reap. — " We cannot blame men for being
slow to resolve. For though occasions come when it is
necessary to decide quickly, yet for the most part he who
decides quickly more often goes wrong than he who decides
slowly. What is always thoroughly to be blamed is slow-
ness in action after decision taken. Whatever your decision
and whatever your plan, there is always a reason to the
contrary. Whence it comes that so many people stand
in suspense, because every small difficulty disturbs them.
These are they whom we call over-scrupulous, because they
stumble on a scruple at every turn. This is all wrong.
We ought to weigh the drawbacks on every side, and then
to make up our minds for the course where drawbacks are
fewest " (191, 213).
A lottery after all. — " In human things it is fortune that
has the mastery. Every hour we see mighty results due
to accidents that nobody could either foresee or divert.
Penetration and care may temper the force of things, still
you need good fortune. A fool will sometimes come better
out than a wise man ; for the one will trust much to Reason,
and little to Fortune, while the other trusts much to
Fortune, and little to Reason " (30, 186).
168 GUICCIARDINI
IV
Guicciardini is fond of that saying of the ancients,
Magistratus virum ostendit, office shows the man.
" Nothing reveals the quality of men like giving
them authority and things to do. Place discovers
a man's capacity and his character. How many
people know how to talk, and do not know how
to act ; how many on benches and in the market-
place seem excellent, yet when put into employ-
ment turn out mere phantoms (riescono ombre) "
(163, 258).
The political path is thickly strewn with these
historic humiliations, the men whom everybody
would have thought capaces imperil, nisi impe-
rassent. Eminent place, La Bruyere said, makes
the great man greater than he is, the small man
it makes less. Some hold in our own day, that
if you would know the real qualities of a public
man, you must find out — if you can — what is
thought of him, not by his constituents, not by
his fellow-members, but by the permanent officials
who have served under him. The general estimate
formed of him in the House of Commons is no
doubt unerring, but the House does not see him
at such close quarters, and in a popular assembly
the plausible may go further than the substantial.
Only the permanent official can tell you for certain
whether his chief is quick or slow, idle or diligent ;
whether he allows himself to see two sides to a
question ; how far he is free from the vanity of
supposing that he knows everything, and how far
he has the fine talent of the good learner ; whether
he has the indispensable gift of making up his
mind and holding to it ; what sort of a judge he
is of probabilities ; whether he is sure in hand and
foot, cool or flurried, considerate or selfish, straight-
forward or tortuous, a man of initiative and resource.
GUICCIARDINI 169
It may be that not only does office, as Guicciardini
says, show the man to others ; it may possibly, if
he has time in which to think of such things, reveal
him to himself, to his own lively surprise. Such
is the modern confirmation of the ancient saying,
dp^r) avSpa Seitcvwi, which made so deep a mark
on Guicciardini that he winds up the last page of
his History with it.
What the critic means by saying that the Ricordi
are Italian corruption reduced to a code, may be
seen in such reflections as these : " Always deny
what you do not wish to have known, and affirm
what you wish to have believed ; for though there
may be proofs and even certainty the other way, a
bold affirmation or denial will perplex the listener."
In the cynic's vein is this : " One of the greatest
strokes of good fortune is for a man to have an
opportunity of showing that in the things he does
for his own interest, he was moved by the thought
of the public good. This is what shed glory on the
enterprises of the Catholic King ; what he did for
his own security or aggrandisement, often looked as
if it were done for the advancement of the Christian
faith or the defence of the Church."
" What is sincere and free and generous is always
pleasing, but sometimes it does you harm. On the
other hand, to dissemble may be useful, and on
occasions even necessary, owing to the evil char-
acter of other people ; but it is odious and ugly.
Hence I do not know which one should choose.
I should suppose that a man might use the one
in an ordinary way, yet without abandoning the
other ; I mean in common practice, to use the
first so as to earn the name of a liberal person,
and yet in certain important and rare cases to use
dissimulation, which in a man who generally lives
as I have said, is all the more successful, because,
from having the opposite character, you are the
more readily believed " (26). As though character
170 GUICCIARDINI
were like the fingers of a clock, to be moved at
will backwards and forwards, independently of the
wheels and springs, balances and escapements, that
regulate its daily action and make it what it is.
The grievous failings and frantic inconsistencies
and dire lapses of human nature are only too
familiar. But to suppose that a man shall
sedulously train himself to walk in straight paths,
yet with freedom deliberately reserved to run off at
a tangent into crooked ways whenever convenience
requires, argues an eccentric psychology indeed.
" To save yourself," says Guicciardini (101),
" from a cruel and brutal tyrant, there is no rule or
physic that avails, except what you advise for the
plague ; flee from him as fast as ever you can."
Selden puts this point in the old homely apologue :
" Wise men say nothing in dangerous times. The
lion, you know, called the sheep, to ask her if his
breath smelt ; she said Aye ; he bit off her head for
a fool. He called the wolf and asked him ; he said
No ; he tore him in pieces for a flatterer. At last
he called the fox and asked him : Truly he had got
a cold and could not smell." Still, vulpine is vulpine,
and while we do not grudge the fox his chance, the
old truth remains. The blood of martyrs is the seed
of the Church, and the man driven by weakness of
the flesh into full flight from peril, may well be
stricken by a secret envy of those brave heroic
hearts, that noble army of witnesses, those spirits
of fire, who in all ages and for many causes that
seemed forlorn have fought the fight, run the
course, and kept the faith.
Without ascending to these pure and exalted
heights, we may refresh ourselves by thinking of
such a man as Turgot. The contrast may help to
show the Politic Man where he stands. Turgot,
says his biographer, would not endure that any
mixture of falseness, or the least appearance of
charlatanry, should soil the purity or the conduct
GUICCIARDINI 171
of a public man. He knew the means, he scorned
to use them. They taxed him with ignorance of
men. This is what they called maladresse. Few
philosophers have had a better-founded knowledge
of man. But he concerned himself little with the
art of knowing particular men, of knowing the
small details of their interests, of their passions, of
the fashion in which they hide or reveal them, of
the springs of their intrigues and their quackery.1
The Florentine or the Venetian School would
have mocked at a reformer such as this. Whether
France could have escaped the abyss, if instead of
Turgot's her affairs at that decisive moment had
fallen into the hands of some supple and vigilant
Cavour nourished on Guicciardini, is a question
which we may put if we like. What is certain is
that the Directory, whose incompetency and rotten-
ness opened the way for Bonaparte, were the very
type that the maxims of our Florentine are fitted
to produce.
It remains to say something of Guicciardini
as historian. Early in his career he had shown
his taste in this direction. In 1509 he wrote his
History of Florence, comprising the period between
Cosmo de' Medici and the repulse of the Venetians
at the Ghiaradadda (1434-1508). None of Guic-
ciardini's writings saw the light in his lifetime, and
this was not given to the world until our own day
(1859). Sallust, in a good phrase, says that when
he made up his mind to leave public affairs, non
fuit consilium socordia atque desidia bonum otium
conterere, he had no mind to wear out his good
leisure in listlessness and sloth, or in such things
as farming or hunting. Whether Sallust was little
better, as some illustrious scholars say, than an
1 Condorcet's Vie de Turgol (CEuv. v. 152-154).
172 GUICCIARDINI
adroit pamphleteer or clever literary artificer, at
least we might wish that Guicciardini had striven
to imitate the terseness and compression of his
countryman, who had written chapters of Roman
history fifteen centuries before him. Like Voltaire
and others, Guicciardini had the habit of the pen,
and would rather be writing than not. He lived
until 1540. It is said that he thought of com-
posing commentaries on his own life, and this must
always be the most interesting thing that any
public man on his final retirement can undertake,
if only he allows himself to speak the truth. A
wise friend warned him how much ill-will he would
be sure to stir up, and set him upon a history of
Italy instead. Yet Guicciardini knew the impossi-
bilities of every historic task. Walpole, according
to a well-worn legend, begged them not to read
history to him, " for that I know must be false."
Our Italian said something very like it : " Do not
wonder that you are ignorant of things of past ages,
and of things done in distant places. For if you
well consider it, there is no real information as to
the present, or as to what is done from day to day
in the same city. Often between palace and market-
place is a cloud so thick or a wall so big that the
people know as little of what is done by those who
rule them, or of the reason for doing it, as they
know of what they do in India. So it comes about
that the world easily fills itself with wrong and
empty notions " (Ric. 141).
In the deeper problems of political philosophy
he shows no interest. Is the key to great move-
ments in history nothing more subtle or mysterious
than the inborn restlessness of men ? Had Machia-
velli found this secret when he declared, <c What
throws empires down is that the powerful are never
satisfied with their power ; one rises, another dies ;
the ruler is for ever pining with fresh ambitions and
new apprehension." Can this be as true of demo-
GUICCIARDINI 173
cracy as of oligarchs and autocrats ? Is history an
unmeaning procession across a phantom scene, a
fantastic cycle of strange stage-plays, where con-
querors, pontiffs, law-givers, saints, jesters, march
in pomp or squalor, in ephemeral triumphs and
desperate reverse ? Or is it, again, the record of
such growth among civil communities as the
naturalist traces in the succession of organisms
material and palpable, and is the historian's task
to find and illustrate the laws by which the long
process has been moulded ? Is history, as Bossuet
would persuade us, the long and solemn vindication
of the mysterious purposes of God to man, the
ordered working of the Unseen Powers as they
raise up states and empires, then cast them head-
long down again in stern and measured rhythm ?
How far have great events sprung from small
occasions, and vast public catastrophes from puny
private incidents ? The extraordinary individual,
an Alexander or a Caesar, how far is he the agent,
how far the master, of circumstance ? Is he, in the
broad aspect, only the instrument of forces viewless
as the winds, a strenuous helmsman on a blind and
driving tide, or is he himself the force that shapes,
resists, controls, compels ? All this, Guicciardini
would have said, is not history, but the interpreta-
tion of history ; I am historian, not interpreter ; my
task is to narrate a given series of events, to show
their connection with one another, to set out the
character of political men, to describe parties and
personal ambitions, to tell the story, and then leave
you to draw your own moral, if you can find one.
His work embraces a period of rather less than
forty years, from 1494 to 1532, from the memor-
able expedition of Charles the Eighth of France
into Italy, down to the death of Pope Clement the
Seventh. It comprises a long series of events that
compose one of the most marked stages, transitions,
or revolutions in the history of the Western world.
174 GUICCIARDINI
If the Middle Ages bridge five hundred years from
1000 to 1500, modern history begins where Guic-
ciardini begins ; and when he ends, a chain of forces,
powers, interests, policies, nationalities, dynasties
and states, territorial rights and claims, had taken
on those definite forms whose conflict, relations,
distribution, make up European annals down to the
time of Napoleon. Statesmen strive with varying
gifts of vision to penetrate and guide the immediate
tasks of their own particular time and country, but
even the most far-sighted of them do but dimly
grope after the broad historic significance of their
age as a whole. It would have been a miracle if
Guicciardini had seized the full meaning of his
period, easy as it may seem for us four hundred
years later. Still he was well aware that the
European system was undergoing a profound
change, and he comprehended how the old Italian
system was overthrown within his two dates.
All over the West, dictatorship was rising on the
ruins of feudalism. Great territorial unions and
strong monarchies were covering Europe. It was
the era of concentration. When Guicciardini went
on his embassy to Ferdinand, he found what in
Ferdinand's youth had been the three rival king-
doms of Castile, Aragon, and Granada practically
welded into a single power. France under Louis
the Eleventh had already marched a long way
towards that establishment of autocratic power,
which it still took a century more for Richelieu
fully to complete. Henry the Seventh and Henry
the Eighth between them had firmly built up the
Tudor monarchy, and found for England a place in
the new European scheme. The Hapsburgs had
achieved the most wonderful union of all, for in
their hands at last was united, besides the Austrian
States, supremacy in the Netherlands, in Spain, in
Sicily, in Bohemia, in Hungary. Growing inti-
macies sprang up between European countries. As
GUICCIARDINI 175
nations became consolidated, their relations with
one another spread over a more extensive field.
High projects of international policy, which have
filled so much space in Western history ever since,
started on their chequered and shifting course.
The practice of sending resident ambassadors took
definite shape, and sovereigns sought to gain their
ends by substituting diplomacy for force. Now
first began the long struggle between France and
the House of Austria. For Guicciardini the most
important thing was the opening of that invasion of
Italy by foreigners — that appointment, as it has
been described, by nearly all the nations of Europe
of a rendezvous for a sanguinary tournament in
Italy — which ended in the definite preponderance
of the House of Austria in the Peninsula, and in
the coronation of Charles the Fifth at Bologna
(1530). Not less momentous than these vast
political transformations was the discovery of the
New World. Many will regard the Reformation
as even more stupendous an event in the history
of mankind, than either the growth of national
monarchies or the discovery of new continents.
For the speculative reasoner upon human progress,
that is a question pregnant with issues of absorbing
interest ; but whatever we may think about this, it
was impossible for Guicciardini to judge a drama of
which in 1530 not more than the first act had yet
been played. Though always a Catholic both in
practice and conviction, he hated the clergy and
the papal court. He says nobody can think so ill
of the Roman Court as it deserves, for it is an
infamy, and an example of all the shame and
reproach in all the world (Op. ined. i. 27). " I do
not know a man," he says elsewhere, " more dis-
gusted than I am at the ambition, the greed, the
unmanliness of the priests, partly because every
one of these vices is hateful in itself, partly because
each by itself and all of them together are specially
176 GUICCIARDINI
unbecoming in one who professes a life dedicated
to God. Yet the position that I held under more
than one Pope has compelled me for my own
interest to desire their aggrandisement. But for
that, I should have loved Martin Luther as myself,
not that I might throw off the laws laid down in
the Christian religion as it is commonly interpreted
and understood, but in order to see this gang of
scoundrels brought within due bounds — that is,
either rid of their vices or stripped of their
authority " (Ric. 28).1 When Guicciardini comes
to the full dress of history, his voice sounds in
a slightly different key, but the substance is the
same.
In style, sorry as he would have been to know it,
he is in truth not more than a plain, steady writer,
with no large general power over the noble organ of
language ; and when he tries to be more, the result
is not diapason but drone. He cultivates the long
sentence, and constantly runs to twenty lines,
without prejudice to a frequent extension to five-
and- thirty. This makes hard reading, but it is not
the same thing as prolixity, for he does not repeat
himself, nor wander from the point, nor overload
with qualifications. When we find ourselves safe
and sound at the thirtieth line, we have really
crossed a broad piece of ground. His phrase is
heavy, and yet, as Thiers says, he moves along like
a man of lively spirit, only with indifferent legs.
He has little dramatic power, and the notable
discourses that he puts into the mouths of leading
characters are not always marked by salient feature
of person and occasion.
The introduction of fictitious discourses at all
would be an outrage on modern standards, but for
some time after the revival of learning, historians
followed the example set by survivors from antique
1 See a reference to this passage in La Contre-Rtvolution relig., par
Martin Philippson (Brussels, 1884).
GUICCIARDINI 177
times, headed by the magisterial authority of
Thucydides.1 In his battles we do not hear the
clash of arms in charge and repulse, the clatter of
the guns and the horsemen, the trumpets, the
shouting, the din, and the trampling. In his sieges
and sacks we are not shaken by the fury of the
assault, by shriek and crash, red flames, horrors of
rape and murder, and all the grisly squalor of war
and man turned demon. Pitiless cruelty never in
history went further than the systematic ferocities
of Spaniard and German in Italy in the sixteenth
century. The Ottoman was not more ruthless in
all the arts of violence, lust, and torture than the
soldiers of the Catholic King ; and the soldiers
of the Most Christian King were not far behind.
Guicciardini stamps these abominations as they
pass, without excitement, but with a steady hand.
The sack of Prato by the Spaniards (1512), the
sack of Brescia by the French (1512), the more
memorable sack by Spanish and German adven-
turers of eternal Rome itself (1527), are not, after
our modern fashion, made to crowd large canvases
with apocalyptic detail. But then the worth of
political and civil history does not, like romance
and melodrama, depend on stirred sensations. The
historian's account of the murderous battle of
Ravenna (1512) (x. 4), where the French, under
the youthful Gaston de Foix, routed the hosts of
Spain and the Pope, is precise and intelligible,
not without impressive touches, and the reader
who seeks knowledge, and not merely a horrified
imagination, need ask for nothing better. Those
who want more would find Caesar's Commentaries
bald, though some judges think them the best
historical style that ever was written. The story
of the memorable encounter of French and Swiss at
1 See on the practice of introducing imaginary speeches into history,
an interesting collection of cases and comments in Sir George Lewis's
Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, ii. 282-243.
N
178 GUICCIARDINI
Marignano (1515) (xii. 5), has not only Guicciardini's
general merits, but is full of warmth and energy ;
how the Swiss in Milan, excited by the words of
their leaders, suddenly grasped their arms in fury,
formed up in marching order, and though not a
couple of hours of daylight were left, sallied forth
with exultant cries and flung themselves against
the French battery ; how the fierce battle raged till
long after dark, when each side, without sound of
trumpet or word of command, in silent truce ceased
perforce from the struggle until the next day's sun
should dawn ; how when the day broke the implac-
able conflict began afresh ; and how at last, when
20,000 men lay dead upon the ground, the remnant
of the beaten Swiss made their way back to Milan
in dogged order, unquenched ferocity still blazing
in their eye and mien. The historian does not
often show such glowing colour.
His reflections are sometimes trite, but they are
natural and sincere. Ludovic Sforza after his
defeat was sent a prisoner by the French King to
the dreary castle of Loches, and there for the last
thirteen years of his life was locked up with no
better company than the faded shadows of his own
restless and passionate ambition. " So fleeting,
various, and miserable is the lot of man," says
Guicciardini. Only the commonplace refrain of all
the ages, it is true ; yet what more is to be said ?
It is hardly an accident that so many of the most
valued histories that have survived in literature are
so deeply tinged with gloom, and labour so much
upon adverse things, the spite of evil generations,
the frowardness of men, and all the inscrutable
ironies of dark fate. We may recall the quaint
chapter in Commynes that contains his " discourse
upon the miserie of man's life," by the example of
those princes that lived in the author's time, and
first of King Louis the Eleventh ; how he con-
sidered the case of Charles the Bold of Burgundy,
GUICCIARDINI 179
and Edward of England, Matthias King of Hungary,
and Mahomet the Ottoman. He only chants the
ancient chorus, but can the pomp of Bossuet carry
the moral further ?
After all, the vital question about the historian
is whether he tells the truth. He ought to be
statesman, reasoner, critic, drudge. His gifts are
sagacity, clearness, order. These he needs,
whether he be historic artist, seeking to delight
great audiences, or scientific student, content to
explore, to disentangle, to clear the ground. What
we require, says Ranke, is naked truth without
ornament ; thorough exploration of detail, no
inventions, no brain-spinnings (Hirngespinnst). In
other words, History is to descend from her place
among the Muses. The illustrious German does
not acquit Guicciardini. He complains that the
Italian's observance of strict and minute chrono-
logical order, as in Ariosto, destroys the interest ;
that much of his work is compiled from other books
without special investigation ; that weighty facts
are wholly misrepresented ; that the speeches which
make up no small part of the work have no claim
to a place among historic monuments.1
The secondary charge of some unavowed debt to
other historians must here be left in the backwoods
of antiquarian controversy. It is certain, more-
over, that inasmuch as half of his work concerns
events in which he was neither actor nor eye-
witness, though he was a contemporary, it does not
stand throughout in the very highest class of original
and first-hand monuments, which must be reserved
for those who are not only contemporaries but
more. On this side, it may well be that Guicci-
ardini, like others of his school, falls before that
general scepticism which has been well described
as undermining all narrative history, certainly not
l. Werke, xxxiv. p. 24. Villari does his best to defend his
countryman against the charge of borrowing (Machiavelli, iii. 481-496).
180 GUICCIARDINI
excepting history written by contemporaries, inevit-
ably moved as they are by turbid passions of the
hour. A valuable field still lies open in Guicciardini.
Motivierung, the exploration of men's motives, the
opening out of what seemed inexplicable, the pre-
sentation of diverse aspects of a case as they
showed themselves to those who had to choose and
to act — here was Guicciardini 's true art. And so
it was recognised as being in the generation after
his death. From the first, the competent public
throughout Europe admired the acuteness and
comprehension with which he tracks out a political
situation in root and in branch, views it on every
side, exposes all the alternatives, and hits upon
deciding elements in complex transactions. This it
is which explains the remarkable fact that before
the end of the sixteenth century his History ran
through ten editions in Italian, three in Latin, and
three in French, and was translated into English,
German, Dutch, and three times into Spanish.
Nobody so aptly satisfied the vigorous curiosity of
that age as to motives and characters in the age
before it. Nobody offered estimates of leading
actors more excellent in that uncommon quality
which the French call justesse. There are few
better portraits in written history, for instance,
than his of Lorenzo (Stor. fior. ix.), and no subtler
appreciations than those of Leo the Tenth and
Clement the Seventh (Stor. cT Ital. xvi. 5).
Montaigne tells us that when he finished a book,
he had a habit of writing in it the general idea he
had formed of the author as he read it. Among
these books was Guicciardini's History of Italy.
He praises the historian's diligence ; his freedom
from the bias of hatred, favour, or vanity ; his
exactitude ; the fine strokes with which he enriches
his digressions and discourses. Then he proceeds
to a deeper criticism. " I have also remarked this,
that of so many characters and results on which he
GUICCIARDINI 181
pronounces judgment, of such divers counsels and
movements, he never refers a single one to virtue,
to religion, or to conscience ; just as if such
things were gone clean out of the world. Of all
the acts that he describes, however fair they may
look in themselves, he always traces back the cause
to some vicious source, or to some hope of selfish
advantage." l That was no more than the brand
of Guicciardini's time and school. His abstention
from definite judgments of right or wrong in the
actions that he describes is systematic. A free-
spoken Pope is reported to have said on the death
of Richelieu, " If there is a God, the Cardinal
will have to smart for what he has done ; but if
there is no God, he was certainly an excellent man."
Our historian also leaves these delicate questions
open. We feel in him the force of Gibbon's remark,
that the tone of history will rise or fall with the
spirit of the age. In that age nobody saw any
harm or heard a cynic's voice in Guicciardini's
remark upon Ferdinand of Aragon, that " no re-
proach attaches to him, save his lack of generosity,
and faithlessness to his word." It may or may not
be true in literature that "it is the mark of finesse
of mind not to come to a conclusion " (Renan). It
is less true in history. " In politics," one critic of
our Italian has said, " compromise may often be an
excellent course ; but in a history what we want
are clear - cut judgments ; the human conscience
insists upon it." That is not Guicciardini's view.
He would never have allowed conscience, like a
barbarian Brennus, to fling its heavy keen-edged
sword into the scale of complex, dim, awkward, and
nicely balanced facts. Of him, as of Thiers, it may
be said that " he does not trouble himself to judge,
but to seize." The only need of which he is con-
scious is to see as clearly as he can what men
did, and why they did it. If we add to this the
1 Essais de Montaigne, n. x., " Des Livres."
182 GUICCIARDINI
great advance that he made in historic conception
when he substituted a general for merely local
or provincial history, and if we consider his
accurate presentation of the political and moral
thought of his age, we may understand his place
in literature, and the impression he has made upon
important minds.
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY1
Religious and moral sympathy with the historical life of man is
the larger half of culture. — GEORGE ELIOT.
I SHALL not attempt to take a part, though as a
constant learner I cannot but take an interest, in
the various controversial points connected with
English teaching that figure in your Transactions.
They are important, they are full of life, of experi-
ence, and of real enthusiasm. They open new
problems for what is, after all, if we look at it in
all its bearings, the most responsible of professions.
Whether the teaching of English is over-methodised ;
whether grammatical terminology should be uni-
form ; whether in English grammar gender should
cease to be recognised, or, at any rate, should not
be emphasised ; whether a sentence containing a
subordinate clause is to be called a simple sentence ;
whether future perfect in the past is the right name
for a certain tense — of all these and many other
questions I am sure that they touch points of real
significance both for scientific analysis of language,
and for teaching habits of accurate distinction
which mark the difference between slovenly and
orderly minds.
I have heard of one singularly attractive writer
of my generation, now dead, who used to teach his
pupils that the true test of good writing lay in the
adverbs. Adjectives, he said, usually take you
1 The Presidential Address before the English Association at the
Annual General Meeting on January 28, 1911. Some pieces have been
taken from an Address at the Mansion House, February 26, 1887.
183
184 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
little further than the expression of broad charac-
teristics ; it is the adverb that displays the delicacy
of the thing, and a precise use of the adverb is the
sure sign of a truth-loving mind. This, I admit,
strikes me as rather a subtle flavour, but such
matters are for experts, and for this afternoon you
will allow me to let them be. An observation of
your secretary's struck me as hitting the real mark
of your proceedings. She says of a certain author
that he takes us into that atmosphere of beauty,
more or less frequent excursions into which are
necessary to help us to endure what she calls the
rush of life and the enforced ugliness of much of
our surroundings. Grammar, philology, rules of
rhetoric, are indispensable apparatus. They are
a worthy exercise for careful, ingenious, and erudite
minds. But all this technique is only a means of
access to those treasures of our literature that, in
the old famous words, are with us in the night, and
in the hurry of the prime, stir youth and refresh
age, adorn success, and to failure furnish shelter
and consolation.
I was asked the other day how many members
of Parliament had ever read a page of Milton's
Areopagitica. I wonder. I would not too con-
fidently answer even for another place. Your
object is to get both parents and teachers to shake
off this indifference, whatever it amounts to, for
it may be that even teachers are not always
animated by delight, which among the elect falls
little short of passion, for the glorious literature
they have to teach. I do not mean that people do
not care for books and libraries. The evidence is all
decisively the other way. But the library without
the school is of as little avail as schools would be
without the library. A library is a labyrinthine
maze without a clue to one who has never been
trained, I will not say systematically, but even in
the elements of English language and literature.
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 185
English is one of the most widespread of living
tongues. Surely not the least stupendous fact in
our British annals is the conquest of a boundless
area of the habitable globe by our English language.
There are those who say there are several languages
in the East more widely spoken, among them Chinese,
with the striking illustration that occasionally a
monosyllabic word has ninety different meanings.
You have been told here, I see, that Arabic is or
has been our rival. This is a proposition that needs
far deeper limitations and qualifications than I can
either set forth or examine. Arabic scholars assure
me that though Arabic in Islamic lands for some
three or four centuries became the medium for an
active propagation of ideas, and though by the
Koran it retains its hold in its own area, and keeps
in its literary as distinct from its spoken form the
stamp of thirteen centuries ago, yet there is no real
analogy or comparison with the diffusion of English.
If I may repeat a passage from a piece of my own
(p. 45), Latin is a better analogy. Latin was uni-
versally spoken pretty early in Gaul, Britain, Spain,
and somewhat later in the provinces on the Danube.
In the East it spread more slowly, but by the Anto-
nines and onwards the spread of Latin was pretty
complete, even in Africa. Greek was common
throughout the empire as the language of commerce
in the fourth century. St. Augustine tells us that
pains were taken that the Imperial state should im-
pose not only its political yoke but its own tongue
upon the conquered peoples, per pacem societatis.
Looking at contemporary conditions, what is
there to strike us ? We cannot miss the leading
fact that two enormous changes have come to
pass within the last two generations. One is the
rise of physical science and invention into reigning
power through the whole field of intellectual activity
and interest. The other is the huge augmentation
of those who know how to read and who have come
186 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
under the influence of books. Or shall we say of
printed matter ? For if we were to judge from
the legions who travel by rail, literature means too
often books that are no books and only a more or
less respectable provision for wasting time. The
Head Master of Eton a year ago told you boldly
that we live in an age when there is the greatest
abundance of bad literature that ever was known
in any country in the world, the cheapest and most
accessible bad literature. On the other hand, it
is quite true, and much to the point, masterpieces
are now, in cheap form, finding a market in over-
whelming numbers. One well-known series, now
numbering 500 volumes, has in five years had a
gross sale of seven million copies, with no sign of
decrease. The World's Classics from Oxford count
for many of their heroes a sale of 100,000 and an
average between 50,000 and 60,000. Let us add
that even in the cheapest daily journals no book
of serious worth ever goes without a notice, handling
it with a degree of competence that not so many
years ago was only to be found in half a dozen
expensive weeklies. Add on the same side the
extension, popularity, and success of public libraries.
Encouraging as these facts are in every way, still
let us face the unpleasant reflection that if one of
the main objects of education must always be to
strengthen the faculty of continuous and coherent
attention against the tendency to futile and ignoble
dispersion which confuses the brain and enervates
the will, then are we sure that the printing press,
mighty blessing as it is, can be counted a blessing
without alloy ?
The great need in modern culture, which is
scientific in method, rationalistic in spirit, and
utilitarian in purpose, is to find some effective
agency for cherishing within us interest in ideals.
That is the business and function of literature.
Literature alone will not make a good citizen ; it
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 187
will not make a good man. History affords too
many proofs that scholarship and learning by no
means purge men of acrimony, of vanity, of arro-
gance, of a murderous tenacity about trifles. Mere
scholarship and learning and the knowledge of
books do not by any means arrest and dissolve
all the travelling acids of the human system. Nor
would we pretend for a moment that literature can
be any substitute for life and action. Burke said,
4 What is the education of the generality of the
world ? Reading a parcel of books ? No ! Re-
straint and discipline, examples of virtue and of
justice, these are what form the education of the
world." It is life that is the great educator. But
the parcel of books, if they are well chosen, reconcile
us to this discipline ; they interpret this virtue and
justice ; they awaken within us the diviner mind,
and rouse us to a consciousness of what is best.
The numbers of the books that are taken out
from public libraries are not all that we could wish.
In one great town in the North prose fiction forms
76 per cent of all the books lent. In another great
town prose fiction is 82 per cent ; in a third 84 per
cent ; and in a fourth 67 per cent. I had the
curiosity to see what happens in the libraries of the
United States ; and there — supposing the system of
cataloguing and enumeration to be the same — they
are a trifle more serious in their taste than we are ;
where our average is about 70 per cent, at a place
like Chicago it is only about 60 per cent. In
Scotland, too, it ought to be said that they have a
better average in respect to prose fiction. There
is a larger demand for books called serious than in
England. Do not let it be supposed that I at all
underrate the value of fiction. On the contrary,
when a man has done a hard day's work, what can
he do better than fall to and read the novels of
Walter Scott, or the Brontes, or Mrs. Gaskell, or
some of our living writers ?
188 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
Mark Pattison, who was a book-lover if ever
there was one, complained that the bookseller's
bill in the ordinary English middle -class family is
shamefully small. It appeared to him to be
monstrous that a man who is earning £1000 a year
should spend less than £1 a week on books — that is
to say, less than a shilling in the pound per annum.
I know that Chancellors of the Exchequer take
from us 8d. or 6d. in the pound [1886], and I am not
sure that they always use it as wisely as if they
left us to spend it on books. Still, a shilling in the
pound to be spent on books by a clerk who earns
a couple of hundred pounds a year, or by a workman
who earns a quarter of that sum, is rather more than
can be reasonably expected. A man does not really
need to have a great many books. Pattison said
that nobody who respected himself could have less
than 1000 volumes. He insisted that you can stack
1000 octavo volumes in a bookcase 13 feet by 10
feet, and 6 inches deep, and that everybody has
that small amount of space at disposal. We may
all agree in lamenting that there are so many houses
— even some of considerable social pretension—
where you will not find a decent atlas, a good
dictionary, or a good cyclopaedia of reference. What
is still more lamentable, in a good many more houses
where these books are, they are never referred to or
opened.
No sensible person can suppose for a single
moment that everybody is born with the ability
for using books, for reading and studying literature.
Certainly not everybody is born with the capacity
of being a great scholar. All human beings are no
more born great scholars like Gibbon and Bentley,
than they are all born great musicians like Handel
and Beethoven. What is much worse than that,
many go through the world with the incapacity
of reading, just as they go through it with the
incapacity of distinguishing one tune from another.
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 189
Even the morning paper is too much for them.
They can only skim the surface even of that. I go
further, and frankly admit that the habit and power
of reading with reflection, comprehension, and
memory all alert and awake, does not come at once
to the natural man any more than many other
sovereign virtues. What I do venture to press
upon you is, that it requires no preterhuman force
of will in any young man or woman — unless house-
hold circumstances are more than usually vexatious
and unfavourable — to get at least half an hour out
of a solid busy day for disinterested reading. Some
will say that this is too much to expect, and the
first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be
those who waste their time most. At any rate, if
I cannot get half an hour, I will be content with a
quarter. Now, in half an hour I fancy you can
read fifteen or twenty pages of Burke ; or you can
read one of Wordsworth's masterpieces — say the
lines on Tintern ; or say, one-third — if a scholar,
in the original, and if not, in a translation — of a
book of the Iliad or the Aeneid. I do not think
that I am filling the half-hour too full. But try
for yourselves what you can read in half an hour.
Then multiply the half-hour by 365, and consider
what treasures you might have laid by at the end
of the year ; and what happiness, fortitude, and
wisdom they might give you during all the days of
your life.
The wise student will not shrink from the useful
toil of making abstracts and summaries of what he
is reading. Sir William Hamilton was a strong
advocate for underscoring books of study. " In-
telligent underlining," he said, " gives a kind of
abstract of an important work, and by the use of
different - coloured inks to mark a difference of
contents, and discriminate the doctrinal from the
historical or illustrative elements of an argument
or exposition, the abstract becomes an analysis very
190 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
serviceable for ready reference." x This assumes,
as Hamilton said, that the book to be operated
on is your own, and perhaps is rather too elaborate
a counsel of perfection for most of us. Again,
some great men — Gibbon was one, and Daniel
Webster was another, and the great Lord Strafford
was a third — always before reading a book made a
short, rough analysis of the questions which they
expected to be answered in it, the additions to be
made to their knowledge, and whither it would
take them.
" After glancing my eye," says Gibbon, " over the
design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal
until I had finished the task of self-examination ; till I
had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew or believed
or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of
some particular chapter : I was then qualified to discern
how much the author added to my original stock ; and if
I was sometimes satisfied by the agreement, I was some-
times armed by the opposition, of our ideas." 2
Another practice is that of keeping a common-
place-book, and transcribing into it what is striking
and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep
it wisely, you will put every entry under a head,
division, or subdivision. This is an excellent practice
for concentrating your thought on the passage and
making you alive to its real point and significance.
Here, however, the high authority of Gibbon is
against us. He refuses " strenuously to recom-
mend." " The action of the pen," he says, " will
doubtless imprint an idea on the mind as well as
on the paper ; but I much question whether the
benefits of this laborious method are adequate to
the waste of time ; and I must agree with Dr.
Johnson (Idler, No. 74) that 4 what is twice read
is commonly better remembered than what is
transcribed.' " 8
1 Veitch's Life of Hamilton, pp. 314, 392.
* Dr. Smith's Gibbon, i. 04. 3 Dr. Smith's Gibbon, i. 51.
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 191
Various correspondents have asked me to say
something about those lists of a hundred books
that have been circulating through the world. Qn
the whole, they do not seem to me to be calculated
either to create or satisfy a wise taste for literature
in any very worthy sense. To fill a man with a
hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps from the
Mahabharata, and the She-king, down to Pickwick
and White's Selborne, may pass the time, but I
cannot perceive how it would strengthen or instruct
or delight. For instance, it is a mistake to think
that every book that has a great name in the history
of books or of thought is worth reading. Some of
the most famous books are least worth reading.
Their fame was due to their doing something that
needed in their day to be done. The work done,
the virtue of the book expires. Again, I agree
with those who say that the steady working down
one of these lists would end in the manufacture of
that obnoxious product — the prig. A prig has
been defined as an animal that is overfed for its
size. I think that these bewildering miscellanies
would lead to an immense quantity of that kind of
overfeeding. The object of reading is not to dip
into everything that even wise men have ever
written. In the words of one of the most winning
writers of English that ever existed — Cardinal
Newman — the object of literature in education is
to open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable
it to comprehend and digest its knowledge, to give
it power over its own faculties, application, flexi-
bility, method, critical exactness, sagacity, address,
and expression. These are the objects of the
intellectual perfection that a literary education is
destined to give, I will not venture on a list of a
hundred books, but will recommend you instead
to one book well worthy of your attention. Those
who are curious as to what they should read in
the region of pure literature will do well to peruse
192 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
Frederic Harrison's admirable volume, called The
Choice of Books. You will find there as much wise
thought, eloquently and brilliantly put, as in any
volume of its size and on its subject, whether it be
in the list of a hundred or not.
Let me pass to another topic. We are often
asked whether it is best to study subjects, or
authors, or books. Well, I think that is like most
of the stock questions with which the perverse
ingenuity of mankind torments itself. There is
no universal and exclusive answer. My own answer
is a very plain one. It is sometimes best to study
books, sometimes authors, and sometimes subjects ;
but at all times it is best to study authors, subjects,
and books in connection with one another. Whether
you make your first approach from interest in an
author or in a book, the fruit will be only half
gathered if you leave off without new ideas and
clearer lights both on the man and the matter.
One of the noblest masterpieces in the literature
of civil and political wisdom is to be found in
Burke's three performances on the American war
— his speech on Taxation in 1774, on Conciliation
in 1775, and his letter to the Sheriffs of Bristol in
1777. " They are an example," as I have said
before now, " an example without fault of all the
qualities which the critic, whether a theorist or an
actor, of great political situations should strive
by night and by day to possess. If their subject
were as remote as the quarrel between the Corin-
thians and Corcyra, or the war between Rome and
the Allies, instead of a conflict to which the world
owes the opportunity of one of the most important
of political experiments, we should still have every-
thing to learn from the author's treatment ; the
vigorous grasp of masses of compressed detail, the
wide illumination from great principles of human
experience, the strong and masculine feeling for
the two great political ends of Justice and Freedom,
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 193
the large and generous interpretation of expediency,
the morality, the vision, the noble temper."
Another question we are constantly asked is,
whether desultory reading is among things lawful
and permitted. May we browse at large in a
library, as Johnson said, or is it forbidden to open
a book without a definite aim and fixed expecta-
tions ? I am for a compromise. If a man has
once got his general point of view, if he has striven
with success to place himself at the centre, what
follows is of less consequence. If he has in his
head a good map of the country, he may ramble
at large with impunity. If he has once well and
truly laid the foundations of a methodical, system-
atic habit of mind, what he reads will find its way
to its proper place. If his intellect is in good order,
he will find in every quarter something to assimilate
and something that will nourish.
What is literature ? This is yet another question
that has been often asked and defined. Emerson
says it is a record of the best thoughts. " By
literature," says another author, " we mean the
written thoughts and feelings of intelligent men and
women arranged in a way that shall give pleasure
to the reader." A third account is that " the aim
of a student of literature is to know the best that
has been thought in the world." Definitions of
these things are in the nature of vanity. I feel
that the attempt to be compact in the definition
pf literature ends in something that is rather
meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfactory. I
turn to the answer given by a great French writer
to a question not quite the same, viz. " What is a
classic ? " Literature consists of a whole body of
, classics in the true sense of the word, and a classic,
* as Sainte-Beuve defines him, is an " author who
1 has enriched the human mind, who has really
added to its treasure, who has got it to take a
step further ; who has discovered some unequivocal
o
194 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
moral truth, or penetrated to some eternal passion,
in that heart of man where it seemed as though all
were known and explored, who has produced his
thought, or his observation, or his invention under
some form, no matter what, so it be great, large,
acute, and reasonable, sane and beautiful in itself ;
who has spoken to all in a style of his own, yet a
style which finds itself the style of everybody, — in
a style that is at once new and antique, and is the
contemporary of all the ages."
Literature consists of all the books — and they
are not so many — where moral truth and human
passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity,
and attraction of form. The literary student is
one who through books explores the strange voyages
of man's moral reason, the impulses of the human
heart, the chances and changes that have over-
taken human ideals of virtue and happiness, of
conduct and manners, and the shifting fortunes
of great conceptions of truth and virtue. Poets,
dramatists, humorists, satirists, masters of fiction,
the great preachers, the character-writers, the
maxim-writers, the great political orators — they
are all literature in so far as they teach us to know
man and to know human nature. This is what
makes literature, rightly sifted and selected and
rightly studied, not the mere elegant trifling that
it is so often and so erroneously supposed to be,
but a proper instrument for a systematic training
of imagination, sympathies, and genial and varied
moral sensibility.
From this point of view let me remind you that
books are not the products of accident and caprice.
Goethe said, if you would understand an author,
you must understand his age. The same thing
is just as true of a book. If you would fully com-
prehend it, you must know the age. There is an
order ; there are causes and relations between
great compositions and the societies in which they
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 195
have emerged. Just as the naturalist strives to
understand and to explain the distribution of plants
and animals over the surface of the globe, to connect
their presence or their absence with the great
geological, climatic, and oceanic changes, so the
student of literature, if he be wise, undertakes an
ordered and connected survey of ideas, of tastes,
of sentiments, of imagination, of humour, of inven-
tion, as they affect and as they are affected by the
ever -changing experiences of human nature, and
the manifold variations that time and circumstances
are incessantly working in human society.
Those who are possessed, and desire to see others
possessed, by that conception of literary study
must watch with eager sympathy and admiration
the efforts of those who are striving so hard, and,
I hope, so successfully, to bring the systematic and
methodical study of our own literature, in connec-
tion with other literatures, among subjects for
teaching and examination in the Universities of
Oxford and Cambridge. Everybody agrees that
an educated man ought to have a general notion
of the course of the great outward events of Euro-
pean history. So, too, an educated man ought to
have a general notion of the course of all those
inward thoughts and moods which find their ex-
pression in literature. I think that in cultivating
the study of literature, as I have perhaps too
laboriously endeavoured to define it, you will be
cultivating the most important side of history.
Knowledge of it gives stability and substance to
character. It furnishes a view of the ground we
stand on. It builds up a solid backing of precedent
and experience. It teaches us where we are. It
protects us against imposture and surprise.
One word upon the practice of composition. I
have suffered, by the chance of life, many things
from the practice of composition. It has been my
lot, I suppose, to read more unpublished work than
196 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
any one else in this room. There is an idea, and,
I venture to think, a very mistaken idea, that you
cannot have a taste for literature unless you are
yourself an author. I demur to that proposition.
It is practically most mischievous, and leads scores
and even hundreds of people to waste their time
in the most unprofitable manner that the wit of
man can devise, on work in which they can no
more achieve even the most moderate excellence
than they can compose a Ninth Symphony or
paint a Transfiguration. It is a terrible error to
suppose that because one is happily able to relish
" Wordsworth's solemn-thoughted idyll, or Tenny-
son's enchanted reverie," therefore a solemn mission
calls you to run off to write bad verse at the Lakes
or the Isle of Wight. I beseech you not all to turn
to authorship. I will even venture, with all respect
to those who are teachers of literature, to doubt
the excellence and utility of the practice of over-
much essay- writing and composition. I have very
little faith in rules of style, though I have an un-
bounded faith in the virtue of cultivating direct
and precise expression. But you must carry on
the operation inside the mind, and not merely by
practising literary deportment on paper. It is not
everybody who can command the mighty rhythm
of the greatest masters of human speech. But
every one can make reasonably sure that he knows
what he means, and whether he has found the
right word. These are internal operations, and
are not forwarded by writing for writing's sake.
Everybody must be urgent for attention to ex-
pression, if that attention be exercised in the right
way. It has been said a million times that the
foundation of right expression in speech or writing
is sincerity. That is as true now as it has ever been.
Right expression is a part of character. As some-
body has said, by learning to speak with precision,
you learn to think with correctness ; and the way to
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 197
firm and vigorous speech lies through the cultiva-
tion of high and noble sentiments. So far as my
observation has gone, men will do better if they
seek precision by studying carefully and with an
open mind and a vigilant eye the great models of
writing, than by excessive practice of writing on
their own account.
Much might here be said on what is one of the
most important of all the sides of literary study. I
mean its effect as helping to preserve the dignity
and the purity of the English language. That noble
instrument has never been exposed to such dangers
as those which beset it to-day. Domestic slang,
scientific slang, pseudo-aesthetic affectations, hideous
importations from American newspapers, all bear
down with horrible force upon the glorious fabric
which the genius of our race has reared. I will say
nothing of my own on this pressing theme, but will
read to you a passage of weight and authority from
the greatest master of mighty and beautiful speech.
;t Whoever in a state," said Milton, " knows how wisely
to form the manners of men and to rule them at home and
in war with excellent institutes, him in the first place,
above others, I should esteem worthy of all honour. But
next to him the man who strives to establish in maxims
and rules the method and habit of speaking and writing
received from a good age of the nation, and, as it were,
to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring
to overleap which let a law only short of that of Romulus
be used to prevent. . . . The one, as I believe, supplies
noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy
invading the territory. The other takes to himself the
task of extirpating and defeating, by means of a learned
detective police of ears, and a light band of good authors,
that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds
of men, and is a destructive intestine enemy of genius.
Nor is it to be considered of small consequence what
language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their
customary degree of propriety in speaking it. ... For,
let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and
offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear and
198 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
wrongly uttered, and what do they declare, but, by no light
indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an
indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already long
prepared for any amount of servility ? On the other
hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state,
did not at least flourish in a middling degree as long as
its own liking and care for its language lasted." *
The probabilities are that we are now coming to
an epoch of a quieter style. There have been in our
generation three strong masters in the art of prose
writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was
Macaulay, and there was Ruskin. These are all
giants, and they have the rights of giants. But I
do not believe that a greater misfortune can befall
the students who attend classes here, than that they
should strive to write like any one of these three
illustrious men. They can never attain to the high
mark which they have set before themselves. It
is not everybody who can bend the bow of Ulysses,
and most men only do themselves a mischief by
trying to bend it. If we are now on our way to a
quieter style, I am not sorry for it. Truth is quiet.
Milton's phrase ever lingers in our minds as one
of imperishable beauty — where he regrets that he
is drawn by I know not what, from beholding the
bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still
air of delightful studies. Moderation and judgment
are, for most purposes, more than the flash and the
glitter even of the genius. I hope that your pro-
fessors of rhetoric will teach you to cultivate that
golden art — the steadfast use of a language in which
truth can be told ; a speech that is strong by natural
force, and not merely effective by declamation ; an
utterance without trick, without affectation, without
mannerisms, without any of that excessive ambition
which overleaps itself as disastrously in prose writing
as in so many other things.
I hope that I have made it clear that we
1 Letter to Bonmattei, from Florence, 1638.
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 199
conceive the end of education on its literary side
to be to make a man and not a cyclopaedia, to
make a citizen and not an album of elegant
extracts. Literature does not end with knowledge
of forms, with inventories of books and authors,
with finding the key of rhythm, with the varying
measure of the stanza, or the changes from the
involved and sonorous periods of the seventeenth
century down to the staccato of the nineteenth, or
all the rest of the technicalities of scholarship.
Literature is one of the instruments, and one of the
most powerful instruments, for forming character,
for giving us men and women armed with reason,
braced by knowledge, clothed with steadfastness
and courage, and inspired by that public spirit and
public virtue of which it has been well said that they
are the brightest ornaments of the mind of man.
Bacon is right when he bids us read not to contradict
and refute, nor to believe and take for granted,
nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and
to consider. In the times before us that promise
or threaten deep political, economical, and social
controversy, what we need to do is to induce our
people to weigh and consider. We want them to
cultivate energy without impatience, activity with-
out restlessness, inflexibility without ill -humour.
I am not going to preach to you any artificial
stoicism. I am not going to preach to you any
indifference to money, or to the pleasures of social
intercourse, or to the esteem and good-will of our
neighbours, or to any other of the consolations and
necessities of life. But, after all, the thing that
matters most, both for happiness and for duty, is
that we should strive habitually to live with wise
thoughts and right feelings. Literature helps us
more than other studies to this most blessed com-
panionship of wise thoughts and right feelings, and
so I have taken this opportunity of earnestly
commending it to your interest and care.
200 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
What is to be the effect upon the great, the
noble, the difficult art of writing ? The writer
of either prose or verse is not, and cannot be,
independent of surrounding atmosphere and a
responsive audience. Even the sublimest genius,
whose dawn upon the world seems like an accident
out of all range of knowable cause or condition-
even he is carried upon the stream of time and cir-
cumstance. We all know how French was shaped
into its extraordinary perfection in the social
influences of the greatest of French Courts. How
Will our own English fare amid the swelling tides
of democracy ? So far, if anybody thinks that
some oddities of diction, or tricks of affectation in
construction, or invention of ugly words, or revival
of worn-out and inappropriate old ones, show signs
of creeping in, it is, unfortunately, rather from
above than below — from those who ought to know
better than those who have had little chance of
knowing.
This wholesale admission, then, of the principle
of universal franchise, male and female, into the
world of letters is one mark of our new time.
Now let me offer a few words on the effects of the
relations of letters and science. We may obviously
date a new time from 1859, when Darwin's Origin
of Species appeared, and, along with two or three
other imposing works of that date, launched into
common currency a new vocabulary. We now
apply in every sphere, high and low, trivial or
momentous, talk about evolution, natural selection,
environment, heredity, survival of the fittest, and
all the rest. The most resolute and trenchant of
Darwinians has warned us that new truths begin
as rank heresies and end as superstitions, and if
he were alive to see to-day all the effects of his
victory on daily speech, perhaps he would not
withdraw his words. That great controversy has
died down, or at least takes new shape, leaving,
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 201
after all is said, one of the master contributions to
knowledge of Nature and its laws, and to man's
view of life and the working of his destinies.
Scientific interest has now shifted into new areas
of discovery, invention, and speculation. Still the
spirit of the time remains the spirit of science,
r4nd fact, and ordered knowledge. What has been
the effect of knowledge upon form, on language,
on literary art ? It adds boundless gifts to human
conveniences. Does it make an inspiring public
for the master of either prose or verse ? Darwin
himself made no pretensions in authorship. He
once said to Sir Charles Lyell that a naturalist's
life would be a happy one if he had only to observe
and never to write. Yet he is a writer of excellent
form for simple and direct description, patient
accumulation of persuasive arguments, and a noble
and transparent candour in stating what makes
against him, which, if not what is called style, is
better for the reader than the finest style can be.
One eminent literary critic of my acquaintance finds
his little volume on earth-worms a most fascinating
book, even as literature. Then, although the con-
troversial exigencies of his day affected him with
a relish for laying too lustily about him with his
powerful flail, I know no more lucid, effective,
and manful English than you will find in Huxley.
What more delightful book of travel than the
Himalaya Journals of the great naturalist Hooker,
who carried on his botanical explorations some
sixty years ago, and happily is still among us ?
Buffon, as man of science, is now, I assume,
little more than a shadow of a name, and probably
even the most highly educated of us know little
more about him than his famous pregnant saying
that the style is the man — a saying, by the way,
which really meant no more than that, while
Nature gave the material for narrative, it is man
who gives the style. Yet the French to this day
202 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
count him among the greatest of their writers for
order, unity, precision, method, clearness in scien-
tific exposition of animated nature, along with
majestic gifts of natural eloquence. And anybody
who as orator, preacher, professor, seeks guide and
stimulus for trying the grander effects upon an
audience, might do much worse than read Buffon'c
long renowned and influential Discourse on Style.
Even less ambitious people will find in it much
that is useful and admirable, provided only that
we are not drawn to imitate. May I note that
Buffon keeps clear of the mortal sin of trying to
produce with the instrument of prose effects that
are by all the natural laws of language reserved
for the domain of poetry, or, in other words, of
asking from any art, whether words, colour, or
form, effects that are beyond its resources ?
Then comes the greatest of all. Whatever the
decision may be as to the value of Goethe's scientific
contribution, this, at least, is certain, that his is
the most wondrous ; the unique case of a man who
united high original scientific power of mind with
transcendent gifts in flight, force, and beauty of
poetic imagination.
As for science and the poets, an attractive little
book published by Sir Norman Lockyer shows
how Tennyson, the composer of verse unsur-
passed for exquisite music in our English tongue,
yet followed with unflagging interest the prob-
lems of evolution and all that hangs upon them.
Whether astronomy or geology — " terrible muses,"
as he well might call them — inspired the better
elements of his beautiful work, we may doubt.
An English critic has had the courage to say that
there is an insoluble element of prose in Dante,
and Tennyson has hardly shown that the scientific
ideas of an age are soluble in musical words.
Browning, his companion poet, nearly universal
in his range, was too essentially dramatic, too
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 203
independent of the scientific influences of his day,
too careless of expression, to be a case much in
point. Tennyson said of him, he had power of
intellect enough for all of them, " but he has not
the glory of words." Whether he had or not,
science was not responsible.
I should like to name, in passing, the English
poet who, in Lowell's words, has written less and
pleased more than any other. Gray was an in-
cessant and a serious student in learned tongues ;
and his annotations on the System of Nature,
by Linnaeus, his contemporary, bear witness to
his industry and minute observation as naturalist.
On a page of the first volume he has transcribed
some Greek words about our dumb friends. 4 We
ought to feel," says Aristotle, " no childish dislike
at inspecting even the humblest living creatures,
for in them, too, dwells something marvellous ; I
bid you enter with confidence, for even here is the
divine." It is pleasant to associate these humanities
with the author of the poem, of which I am still
bold enough, with your leave, to say that it has for
a century and a half given to greater multitudes of
men more of the exquisite pleasure of poetry than
any other single piece in all the glorious treasury
of English verse.
Now let me take a contemporary the other way.
Gabriel Rossetti, a true poet, if not a great one,
very firmly declared himself not at all sure that
the earth really revolved round the sun. He even
aggravated this scandalous position by asking,
what, after all, did it matter whether it moved or
not. But then Rossetti was not like other poets,
painters, or plain men. I once happened to meet
him on the evening of a General Election, and was
thunderstruck to find that he was not aware of the
immense event shaking the world around us. He
added by and by that he did not suppose it made
much difference whether Whig or Tory won. A
204 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
greater poet than himself was with us, and shared
his Laodicean humour : I forget who won the
election, nor do I recollect exactly what difference
it did make, if any.
In prose fiction was one writer of commanding
mind, saturated with the spirit of science. Who
does not feel how George Eliot's creative and literary
art was impaired, and at last worse than impaired,
by her daily associations with science ? Or would
it be truer — I often thought it would — to say that
the decline was due to her own ever-deepening sense
of the pain of the world and the tragedy of sentient
being ? She never looked upon it all as ludibria
rerum humanarum, the cruel sport of human things.
Nor could she dismiss it in the spirit of Queen
Victoria's saying to Dr. Benson, about the follies
and frivolities of Vanity Fair : " Archbishop, I some-
times think they must all be mad." The theatre was
too oppressive for George Eliot. The double stress
of emotion and thought, of sympathy and reason,
wrought upon her too intensely for art. She could
not, as virile spirits should, reconcile herself to
Nature. It needed all her native and well-trained
strength of soul to prevent her, science or no science,
from being crushed by the thought in Keats's lines
how " men sit and hear each other groan," how
earth is " full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs."
Let us look at the invasion of another province
by the spirit of the time. The eager curiosity of
all these years about the facts of biology, chemistry,
physics, and their laws, has inevitably quickened
the spread both of the same curiosity and the same
respect, quickened by German example, for ascer-
tained facts into the province of history. We live
in the documentary age. New sources emerge and
new papers are daily dragged to light. In the
history of Great Britain alone documents are every
year brought almost in barrow-loads to the grateful
student's door. Sacred archives everywhere are
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 205
being unsealed. Whether all this be new truth or
old falsehood not every explorer can be quite sure.
But the dilemma is now fixed by fate and literary
fashion, which is itself a kind of fate. A fabric of
inspiring narrative built on foundations of quick-
sand, on the one side ; on the other a fearsome jungle
of minute detail, every regiment in every battle
numbered, every hour accounted for, every turn of
diplomatic craft tracked. Is this over-burden of
recorded fact a misfortune for modern history ?
How hard to move with freedom under it ! Is the
pure scientific impulse — to tell the exact truth with
all the necessary reservations — easy to combine
with regard for artistic pleasure ?
I have been reminded that Renan, who possessed
both scientific and artistic instinct, somewhere
wishes that he could use polychromatic ink, so that
he might indicate the subtle shades of doubt that
belong to each adjective and adverb. How dis-
tracting to the ordinary reader, who loves firm line
and bold colour ! What would have become of the
splendours of Carlyle's French Revolution if he had
followed the scale and method of his Frederick the
Great ? It is an interesting guess that a good
scholar, familiar with the two ancient languages
and with French, could read Gibbon's authorities
in five years. The actual mass of print and manu-
script through which Ranke, or Gardiner, must
have fought his way can hardly have been less than
five or six times as bulky. This is the labour of a
lifetime. Form as form is buried alive.
Some critics insist that the rarest beauty a style
can have is to resemble speech. Others put it in
another way, that if you are content to give exacti-
tude to the spontaneous thought, then power and
grace enough will follow. Taine says the disappear-
ance of style is the perfection of style. If these
schools are right, Gibbon's writing will hardly
please, and there have been many whom as style
206 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
it does not please. Be that as it may, Gibbon's
unsurpassed greatness as historian lies not at all
in his selection of words or the fall of his sentence,
but in majesty of historic conception, in superb
force of imagination, in the sustained and sym-
metric grandeur of his design. And here is the peril
of the documentary age.
The English writer of our own immediate time,
with the fullest knowledge and deepest under-
standing of the fact and spirit of history, would,
I think, be pronounced by most critics with a right
to judge to be Lord Acton. His learning has been
called by learned men a marvel. Nor did it ever
loosen his hold on practical life, for he was one
of the fortunate beings who are all of one piece.
His mind, notwithstanding a rather puzzling union,
within the reserved precincts of theology, of sub-
mission to authority with his vehement passion
for individual freedom, was still a complete whole.
May I read to you how Mr. Bryce in 1883 once
heard him late at night in his library at Cannes
explain in what wise a history of liberty might be
made the central thread of all history ? " He spoke
for six or seven minutes only ; but he spoke like
a man inspired, seeming as if from some mountain
summit high in air he saw beneath him the far-
winding path of human progress from dim Cim-
merian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller
yet broken and fitful light of the modern time.
The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the
eloquence was the penetrating vision that discerned
through all events and in all ages the play of those
moral forces, now exciting, now destroying, always
transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded
institutions, and had given to the human spirit its
ceaselessly changing forms of energy. It was as
if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly
lit up by a burst of sunlight."
Acton's was a leading case where knowledge
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 207
and profundity were not matched by form. His
page is overloaded, he is often over-subtle, he has
the fault, or shall I call it the literary crime, of
allusiveness and indirect reference — he is apt to
put to his reader a riddle or a poser, and then to
leave him in the lurch. But when all this is said,
even in his severest chapter you will find some of
the pregnant, luminous, and stimulating things
that are the very heart and soul of good literature.
It sometimes occurs to me that if those faithful
disciples of his were to make a selection of the
deep sayings of their master, they would produce an
anthology of historic wisdom that might well deserve
a favourite place even with the reader whose whole
library does not go beyond a couple of shelves.
Meanwhile, here is Acton's own account of the
historian's direct debt to the methods of science :
" If men of science owe anything to us," he says,
" we may learn much from them that is essential.
For they can show how to test proof, how to secure
fulness and soundness in induction, how to restrain
and employ with safety hypothesis and analogy.
It is they who hold the secret of the mysterious
property of the mind by which error ministers to
truth, and truth irrecoverably prevails."
I find in Sir James Murray's Dictionary — a
splendid triumph for any age — that I am respon-
sible for having once called literature the most seduc-
tive, deceiving, and dangerous of professions. That
text demands a longer sermon than your time
allows. If any of you reject my warning, impatient
as I confess myself of overdoing precepts about
style, let me urge you, besides the fundamental
commonplaces about being above all things simple
and direct, lucid and terse, not using two words
where one will do — about keeping the standard of
proof high, and so forth — let me commend two
qualities — for one of which I must, against my will,
use a French word — Sanity and JiLstesse. Sanity
208 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
you know well, at least by name. Justesse is no
synonym for justice ; it is more like equity, balance,
a fair mind, measure, reserve. Voltaire, who,
whatever else we may think of him, knew how to
write, said of some great lady : "I am charmed
with her just and delicate mind ; without jusiesse
of mind there is nothing." You must curb your
ambition of glory, of writing like Carlyle, Macaulay,
Ruskin. You must take your chance of being
called dry, flat, tame. But one advantage of these
two qualities is that they are within reach, and
grandeur for most of us is not. And with this
temper it is easier to see the truth, what things
really are, and how they actually come to pass.
I had noted one further admonition, but opening
Mr. Ker's two little volumes of Dryden's prefaces,
for which we owe the editor a debt, I came on
Johnson's account of Dryden's prose, far better
worth your pondering than anything I could say :
Dryden's prefaces " have not the formality of a
settled style. . . . The clauses are never balanced,
nor the periods modelled : every word seems to
drop by chance, though it falls into its proper place.
Nothing is cold or languid ; the whole is airy,
animated, and vigorous ; what is little is gay ;
what is great is splendid. . . . Everything is ex-
cused by the play of images and the spriteliness of
expression. Though all is easy, nothing is feeble ;
though all seems careless, nothing is harsh ; and
though since his earlier works more than a century
has passed, they have nothing yet uncouth or
obsolete." This contains both true criticism and
good guidance.
A graceful French description of what literature
means in certain of its types is worth hearing :
" The man of letters is a singular being ; he does not
look at things exactly with his own eyes ; he is not
the creature of his own impressions ; he is a tree
on which you have grafted Horace, Virgil, Dante,
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 209
Milton, Shakespeare, and the rest, and hence grow
flowers not natural, yet not artificial. Of all the
mixed colours he makes for himself a colour of his
own ; from all the glasses through which his eyes
pass to the real world, there is fused a peculiar
tint, and that is the imagination of the man of
letters. If he has genius, all these memories are
dissipated by the energy of his personal gift." 1
You will think this too fastidious, too enervating,
too dilettante. So it is, if it were taken for the
whole story. We must add the saving counsel
of Cicero — who has himself been called the greatest
of all men of letters. You must always take care
to end by exposing yourself to contact with men,
and trying your strength in the struggles of life.
Yes, that is the end of books and everything. You
remember the jest in one of Goethe's verses : how
a stubbornly secluded student was once induced
to go to a grand evening party. They asked him
how he had enjoyed himself. " If they had been
books," he answered, " I would not have read one
of them." Without being sworn devotees of even-
ing parties, we are sure the gruff sage, if he ever
existed, must have been so out of touch with his
fellow-creatures and their action, votum, timor, ira,
voluptas, that he had read his books to little purpose
after all.
There were some interesting and good-natured
observations in The Times a few days ago about the
decline in the eloquence of our modern prose. It
is unhappily impoverished, the writer says ; it is
not rich in expressing some of the noblest experi-
ences of the human mind and heart. Grand prose,
it may be true, is not heard in debate or in the
pulpits, and hardly abounds in the exercises of
historian, critic, or biographer. Assuredly we can-
not envy the man whom high passages of our
classic prose — Sir Thomas Browne, Raleigh, Bacon,
1 Doudan.
210 WORDS AND THEIR GLORY
Hooker, Burke, the last of them notably in the
Address to the King — do not affect with something
of the same swell of emotion as comes from soul-
inspiring verse. But grand prose comes from
supreme issues, earnest convictions, eager desire to
convert and persuade, sublime events, passionate
beliefs — these are what move to eloquence at its
highest. Lincoln was no scholar, but the Second
Inaugural is not to be surpassed, and I remember
a passage of Cobden's about the Irish famine that
is a masterpiece of eloquent feeling on that fateful
tragedy.
Where the themes and issues are those of scientific
truth, that prose should be unemotional is natural.
Everybody knows Darwin's own account, how, as
the laborious years passed, he so lost his taste for
poetry that he could not endure to read a word of
it, Shakespeare became so dull it nauseated him,
and music set him thinking too energetically on
what he had been working at, instead of giving
him pleasure. If all this loss was the price of years
of fruitful concentration in the master, who can
wonder if the scientific and documentary age is
an age of prose ? Still I hope it is not too pontifical
of me to say that I believe I see in the room to-night
men who write prose as firm, as delicate, as easy,
as pure, as the heart of man could wish.
After what has been said of its spread over the
globe, we cannot be indifferent to the fate of our
language across the Atlantic. Emerson, that most
lovable of our teachers, once said : " We have
listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe."
But I remember an afternoon long ago at Washing-
ton with Walt Whitman, when he made particularly
light of Emerson, and was all for packing off the
courtly muses, European or Bostonian, bag and
baggage. America has not followed this felonious
purpose. George Meredith used to say that the
high-water mark of English prose in our day was
WORDS AND THEIR GLORY 211
to be found in some pages of Charlotte Bronte, and
some of Hawthorne's Marble Faun. It will be no
hard labour to seek out such pages for yourselves.
I need not mention Lowell, and a dozen more
Americans, grave and gay, who are the living
delight of English readers. American novelties
in the way of picturesque and unexpected diction,
so piquant and effective in colloquial use, have not
yet lowered the standard of writing or oratory.
There is, we must admit, to-day no monarch in
any tongue upon the literary throne, no sovereign
world-name in poetry or prose, in whom — as has
happened before now not so many generations ago,
in royal succession, to Scott, Byron, Goethe, Victor
Hugo, Tolstoy — all the civilised world, Teuton,
Latin, Celt, Slav, Oriental, is interested, for whose
new works it looks, or where it seeks the gospel
of the day. Nabochlish, if I may use an Irish
word that became a favourite with Sir Walter
Scott ; it does not matter. Do not let us nurse
the humour of the despondent editor, who mourn-
fully told his readers, " No new epic this month."
Nobody can tell how the wonders of language
are performed, nor how a book comes into the world.
Genius is genius. The lamp that to-day some may
think burns low will be replenished. New orbs
will bring light. Literature may be trusted to
take care of itself, for it is the transcript of the
drama of life, with all its actors, moods, and strange
flashing fortunes. The curiosity that meets it is
perpetual and insatiable, and the impulses that
inspire it can never be extinguished.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
THE last occasion when I made bold to write about
a literary achievement of Mr. Harrison's, was on
the appearance of that remarkable volume, the
New Calendar of Great Men, in 1892. I ven-
tured at some length to question the omission from
the list of those heirs of the Roman Empire in
the East who, on any sound estimate, must be held
to have performed in more ways than one services
of the first magnitude in saving civilisation in the
West. The omission was Comte's fault — so far as
fault it was — and not that of his distinguished
adherent. Hannibal has a place in this famous
calendar ; so have Haroun-al-Raschid, the caliph
of Baghdad, and Abd-al-Rahman, the caliph of
Cordova. Charles Martel had a place for the glory
of stemming the torrent of Mussulman invasion at
Tours. Yet the battle of Tours (732) was only a
victory over a plundering expedition of Spanish
Arabs, whereas the repulse of the Saracens before
Constantinople by Leo the Third (718) was what
first drove back the tide. Still Leo and the other
great champions at Byzantium were held unworthy
of canonisation. Of course the heroes of New
Rome were schismatic in the eyes of the Popes of
Old Rome, and it is not disrespectful to the great
name of Comte to suppose it natural for him to take
1 Theophano : the Crusade of the Tenth Century. A Romantic Mono-
graph. By Frederic Harrison. London : Chapman & Hall.
213
214 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
up the Pope's grievances against the Greek schism,
along with some other pontifical attributes. In
truth, Comte had broad reasons of his own. The
dominant fact in the mediaeval West was in his
eyes the separation of spiritual from temporal
power. In the Eastern Rome the two powers were
essentially one ; military concentration was a neces-
sity of existence ; and the Church was, as it is in
Russia to-day (1904), and as Napoleon intended it to
be in France a century ago, the instrument of the
State. The other vital element, again, in Comte's
view of the normal evolution of the Middle Ages,
was feudalism, and feudalism was inconsistent with
the military requirements of Byzantine power. In
consideration, therefore, of these two ruling factors,
the series of events dealt with in Theophano was
regarded by Comte as moving outside of the main
stream of the progress of mankind.
Whatever defect there may have been in his
master's appreciation of Byzantine influence on our
world, Mr. Harrison has, at any rate, in his new
volume as well as in other pieces, made it strenu-
ously good. His Rede lecture at Cambridge four
years since is a singularly comprehensive, just, and
eloquent statement and vindication of the modern
case. The chapters upon Constantinople in his
volume on the meaning of history abound in
brilliant description and in reflections at once deep
and precise. The scholar, the politician, and the
general reader who happens to be little of either
politician or scholar, will find both pleasure and
food for thought in those sixty admirable pages.1
His present story Mr. Harrison describes as an
attempt, under the form of romance, to give the
history of one of the most striking episodes in the
annals of what used to be called the Dark Ages.
His aim is to paint a general picture of the South
1 The Meaning of History, and other Historical Pieces (Macmillan,
1894) ; Byzantine History in the Early Middle Ages (Macmillan. 1900).
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 215
and East of Europe, and of the relations of that
portion of Christendom to the advancing power of
Islam, in the tenth century. His first design was
a prose narrative, with no larger use of imagination
than is as truly indispensable in history, as it is
declared to be in the fields of natural science.
Some of his readers may possibly wish that to
this design he had adhered, for the mixture of
history with romance, of real actors and known
events with avowed fiction, has not always been a
successful experiment. No novelist has ever had
so much of the genius of history as Scott, that
famous writer and true-hearted man ; and if it be
unluckily true that Scott is no longer widely read,
we may be quite sure that it is so much the worse
for the common knowledge of history. Apart from
the stimulating contribution to historic knowledge
in Ivanhoe, it may be suspected in the palace of
truth that a majority of people who would fairly
pass for cultivated, owe all they know of such
figures as Louis the Eleventh and Charles the Bold
to Quentin Durward. Scott tried his hand at a
Byzantine story, but he made nothing of it : he
knew little of the ground, for not even Gibbon
had perceived the full bearing of the stupendous
events of which Constantinople was the centre be-
tween the time of Justinian and the time of Richard
Coeur de Lion. When Scott wrote Count Robert
of Paris (1830), the noble brain that had peopled
the gallery of the world's imagination with so
many incomparable figures, such vivid scenes, such
moving interests, was at last outworn, and the
gallant man could only liken himself in a mourn-
ful image to a leaking vessel out at sea in the
pitch-dark.
If anybody chooses to say that Theophano is old-
fashioned, assuredly a fashion set by Ivanhoe and
Quentin Durward has something to say for itself.
In Hypatia the genius of Kingsley, who had less
216 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
of the historic sense than any other professor that
ever sat in a chair of history, brought out some
aspects of the fifth century with enchanting success.
None, again, of Bulwer's romances stood higher
in popularity than Rienzi, and to this day some
foreign writers do justice to his admirable mixture
of intrigue proper for a story with historic narrative,
his animated description — among other things of
the plague of Florence — though less scrupulous in
respect for his authorities than might have been
expected from his severe treatment of the errors
of some other writers.1 Catherine the Second of
Russia might appear a theme of grand promise, and
the experiment has been in a certain fashion tried,
but with indifferent result.2 Lucrezia Borgia, as
we all know, has been set to music, but the libretto
is sadly unhistoric, for Lucrezia, it now seems, if
not absolutely blameless, was still an excellent
woman, and died in an entirely respectable con-
finement. Chateaubriand's once famous Martyrs
(1802-9) was a romance of the persecutions of
Diocletian and Galerius. Though without verse,
it is poetry and not history. Its prose has the
melody of plaintive song, and a fluent harmony
that prose has never surpassed. The emotions with
which it so deeply stirred a generation early in our
last century, arose, as Aristotle said they should,
not merely from scenery and spectacle, but from the
inner structure of the piece. They arose, too, from
the burning association, in the minds of the readers
of the time, of the sufferings of the Church at the
hands of Galerius, with the fresh persecution of
the children of the same Church at the hands of
Chaumette and the firebrands of revolution. All
this gives a pathos and poetic tenderness to the
tale of Eudore and Cymodocee that is hardly
to be conceived in dealing with Theophano and
1 See Rodocanachi's Cola di Rienzo, p. xi., 1888.
2 Le Roman cTune Impcratrice, K. Waliszewski, 1893.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 217
Nicephorus. Here warm thoughts and free spirits
must give way to
The Iron-pointed pen
That notes the Tragic Doomes of men.
In this dire conflict of faith and race and rival
empires, we need a firmer and sterner chord. Mr.
Harrison has naturally felt an artistic compulsion
to introduce the relief of gentler episodes. Some
may find these episodes less suited to his silver
trumpet of a style, than pageant, landscape, battle,
fervid councils, stirring scenes of high historic fate.
In the works that I have named, history is
secondary to romance. In Theophano this is re-
versed. It is primarily and really history, an
attempt to relate authentic facts in deep colour,
not verifiable in every detail out of written docu-
ments, yet wholly true to the historic tones. No
piece of dilettantism, it is the production of one,
now long well known as an accomplished scholar, a
traveller, a powerful writer, who has kept himself
well abreast of the acquisitions of new learning
and new culture, and who, in this case, has both
thoroughly worked the contemporary records at
first hand, and laboriously mastered the mass of
elucidation and dissertation due to an army of
specialists.
Most people would admit the noblest piece of
tragedy in all written history to be the retreat
of the beaten Athenians from Syracuse. ' Is it
or is it not," wrote Gray to Wharton, " the finest
thing you ever read in your life ? " Macaulay said :
" I do assure you that there is no prose composition
in the world that I place so high as the seventh
book of Thucydides. . . . Tacitus was a great man,
but he was not up to the Sicilian expedition." l
But it would be absurd to compare the original his-
tory of Thucydides, Herodotus, Caesar, Machiavelli,
1 Trevelyan, i. 440, 449.
218 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Guicciardini, with the composite narrative of even
the greatest of literary historians. Gibbon's descrip-
tion of the capture of Constantinople is indeed
magnificent, but the gorgeous art of that splendid
panorama is fatal to the most searching kind of
dramatic effect upon our inmost minds ; it con-
veys none of the tragic impression that stirs us
not less deeply than even the grandest of stage-
plays, and makes the reader, now more than two
thousand years since those events, hold his breath
in that profoundest pity which is pity without
tears, as he watches the agony of the sea-fight in
the great harbour, the panic and misery of the
march, the horrors by the river, the death of Nicias
— of all Hellenes least deserving of an end so
wretched — the dreadful sufferings of the prisoners
in the stone - quarries, fleet and army perishing
from the face of the earth, and of the many who
had gone forth few ever returning home. Here is
indeed the supreme model of tragic prose.
It was inevitable that a story of Byzantium in
the tenth century should take a shape not so much
of tragedy as of melodrama, and the author has
thrown himself into the melodramatic elements of
his tale with extraordinary force and spirit. He
has not always resisted the temptation to overdo
these elements, and to push animation to vehemence.
Still, the temper of the age was in essence barbaric,
and any narrative without a sort of violence would
be untrue to local and historic colour, just as it
would be in a romance of Petersburg or Belgrade
at certain moments of the nineteenth century.
Every competent judge will admire the energy with
which the high and strenuous pitch is from
beginning to end swiftly and unfalteringly sus-
tained. Mr. Harrison is a recognised master of
language ; not always wholly free from excess, but
direct, powerful, plain, with none of our latter-day
nonsense of mincing and posturing, of elliptic
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 219
brevities, cryptic phrase, vapid trick, and the
hundred affectations and devices of ambitious
insincerity. He has the signal merit of looking
his readers in the eye ; his periods, even when we
most dissent from their substance, are alive with
the strong and manly pulse of the writer's own
personality. Whether Theophano and Nicephorus
and Otto and Gerbert and Luitprand and the rest
will be found " convincing " or not, heaven knows ;
I have never been able to attach definite signifi-
cance to that favourite word in our new critical
vocabulary. Let this be as it may, the result of*
the author's industry, skill, and many talents is
a book abundant at once in dramatic interest, in
sound knowledge, and in historical instruction :
a fine panorama of the long secular strife between
East and West, between Islam and the two rival
and mutually infuriated forms of Christian faith.
II
I should like to be allowed a single moment of
digression on an issue that requires hours or days.
With graceful propriety, the book is dedicated to the
Professor of History at Cambridge, whose studies
of the Byzantine period " so greatly inspired and
enlarged " our monograph. We may be sure that
Professor Bury will both appreciate the compliment
thus paid to him, and will enjoy the illumination
diffused by these flashing pages over the sombre
landscape that he has himself so diligently ex-
plored. I even permit myself for an instant to
wonder whether it may not melt the learned and
accomplished professor to soften a little of the
severity with which, in his memorable introductory
lecture at Cambridge last year, he spoke of the
time-honoured association of literature with history
acting " as a sort of vague cloud, half concealing
from men's eyes the new position in the heavens."
220 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
So long as history, he told his hearers, was regarded
as an art, the sanctions of truth and accuracy would
not be severe. Why ? He reminded them that
" history is not a branch of literature." He adjured
them to observe that Ranke's famous saying that
"he would only say how a thing actually was,"
ought to be even more widely accepted as "a
warning against transgressing the province of facts."
Perhaps some of Professor Bury's more youthful
listeners, with the presumption of their years, may
have asked themselves whether the historian is to
present all the facts of his period or his subject ; if
not, whether he will not be forced to select ; if he
must select, then how can he do it, how can he group,
how can he fix the relations of facts to one another,
how weigh their comparative importance, without
some sort of guiding principle, conception, or pre-
conception ? In short, he will find himself outside
of " the province of facts " before he knows where
he is, and this is what actually happens to some
of the most eminent members of the school. The
lecturer himself in truth speedily abated the rigour
of his limitation, and added to the collection, dis-
covery, and classification of facts the further duty
of interpreting them. But when does not the
historian's interpretation govern from first to last
his collection and his classification ? Take what
case you will. Father Paul tells the facts of the
Council of Trent one way, Pallavicino tells them in
another way. The annals of the Papacy — in some
respects the most fascinating and important of all
the chapters of modern history — are one thing in
the hands of Pastor the Catholic, another thing to
Creighton the Anglican, a third thing to Moller the
Lutheran, and something again quite different to
writers of more secular stamp like Gregorovius and
Reumont. It is not merely difference in documents
that makes the history of the French Revolution
one story to Thiers or Mignet, and a story wholly
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 221
different to Louis Blanc or to Taine. Talk of history
being a science as loudly as ever we like, the writer
of it will continue to approach his chests of archives
with the bunch of keys in his hand. When examined,
all these adjurations really mean little more — and
this is a great deal — than that sources, documents,
authorities are sometimes good and sometimes bad,
sometimes first - rate and sometimes second - rate ;
that the student should know the difference ; that
he should be systematic and minute and definite and
precise ; that he should not regard a statement as
certain unless he has scrutinised the evidence. All
admirable and indispensable and scientific rules,
but hardly constituting a brand-new science ; or
banishing " the time-honoured association of history
with literature," from which the reflective or ethical
writer is warned off ; or reducing Clio, the Muse, to
the level of the kitchen drudge who supplies her
meals, and then cashiering the architect in favour
of the honest bricklayer and the stonemason. A
science means a good deal more than this, and even
something different from this. Dumas wittily said
that Lamartine's famous book on the Girondins
raised history to the dignity of romance. Lamartine
doubtless exalted the arts of literature rather high,
as did the illustrious Dumas himself ; but after
all it does a book no harm to be readable ; and
I believe Byzantine students, including Professor
Bury — the most eminent and thorough of them all,
and (if I may say so without offence) the most
readable and enjoyable — will be grateful to Mr.
Harrison for attracting interest to a field whither
Heyd, Kopf, Hirsch, Schlumberger, Salzenberg,
Paspates, Van Millingen, and Dr. Krumbacher have
hitherto failed to allure more than the esoteric and
the elect.
222 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
III
What we may call the reclamation of the low-
lying lands of the Byzantine period, is in some
respects the most remarkable literary (or scientific)
event of our day. Voltaire called Byzantine history
" a repertory of declamation and miracles, disgrace-
ful to the human mind." Our literary rationalist,
Lecky, talks of it as the most thoroughly base
and despicable form that civilisation has yet
assumed. Then Hegel says " the history of the
highly civilised Eastern Empire — where, as we might
suppose, the Spirit of Christianity could be taken
up in its truth and purity — exhibits to us a mil-
lennial series of uninterrupted crimes, weaknesses,
basenesses, and want of principle ; a most repulsive,
and consequently a most uninteresting picture."
De Maistre, the ultra- Catholic, was as bitter as
Voltaire, the ultra non-Catholic. " Byzantium," he
cries with characteristic energy, " would make us
believe in the system of climates, or in exhalations
peculiar to certain spots. . . . Ransack universal
history, nowhere can you find a dynasty more
wretched. Either feeble or furious, or both at the
same time, these insupportable princes especially
turned their demented interests on the side of
theology, of which their despotism took possession
to overthrow it. One would say that the French
language meant to do justice on their empire by
styling it as Bas Empire. It perished as it had
lived, in the thick of a disputation. Mahomet the
Second burst open the gates of the capital while
sophists were wrangling about the glory of Mount
Tabor." 1 On a lower level than Voltaire, Hegel,
and De Maistre, — during the frenzy of the Crimean
War — a writer in a patriotic periodical exulted over
the time " when the last of the Byzantine historians
was blown into the air by our brave allies the Turks."
1 Du Pape, bk. iv. ch. ix.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 223
It was Finlay with whom, among serious students,
the reaction began. In 1843 — one of the three or
four continuous decades in which the new era of
intellectual life of the nineteenth century in England
was most active — Finlay published the first of the
works that came to an end eighteen years later,
presenting twenty centuries of the life of the Greek
nation " in Roman subjection, Byzantine servitude,
and Turkish slavery." He brought a great mass of
new knowledge, and he lighted up new knowledge
with fresh reflections and considerations that con-
stituted one of the most striking chapters in the
history of European civilisation on history's amplest
scale. Finlay's case is interesting and significant.
He did not hunt for a literary subject. He was
the purchaser of a landed estate in Attica,
endeavoured to improve it, lost his money and
his labour, and then in a philosophic spirit turned
to study the conditions of the country and its
people, tracing back link by link the long chain
of political, social, ecclesiastical, racial, and above
all economic events, that explained the Attic peasant
of to-day and of all the ages intervening since the
peasant of Alexander the Great. Of this vast
operation, what the world will pretty surely persist
in calling the Byzantine Empire soon became the
dominating centre ; he could not tell the Greek
story without the Byzantine story, and it was Finlay
who first unfolded what the Byzantine Empire was,
and first vindicated its share in the growth of
Western civilisation and the forms of the modern
world.
These volumes kindled the ardent admiration of
Freeman (1855). He called them the greatest work
that British historical literature had produced since
the days of Gibbon, and even the most thoroughly
original history in our language. No work, he said,
from either an ordinary scholar or an ordinary
politician, could ever come near to the native
224 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
strength and originality of the work of the solitary
thinker, studying, musing on, and recording the
events of two thousand years, in order to solve
the problems that he saw at his own door. Nobody
has ever grasped more effectively than Freeman the
truth that is the mainspring of Mr. Harrison's mono-
graph : "If there had been Turks at Constantinople
in the ninth and tenth centuries, the names Europe
and Christendom could never have had so nearly
the same meaning as they have had for ages." This
truth, first derived from Finlay, corroborated and
fitted in with the two cardinal principles that
Freeman never wearied of preaching to the studious
minority of mankind : the unity of history, and the
fatal error of drawing lines between ancient and
modern. The doctrine about the Byzantine Empire,
which he propagated with characteristic tenacity
and an iteration that was almost tiresome, became
the inspiration of a new school in this country,
and in that school there has been no such diligent
and fruitful worker as Professor Bury.
Even those who discern most clearly the title of
the more important of the many various stages of
Byzantine power to a marked place in history,
discern also some of the reasons why the tale of
them has been found, until our last half-century, so
unattractive or even repellent, so darkly tarnished,
so remote from the ordinary track of literary or
historic curiosity. Mr. Harrison's own vivid and
energetic presentation itself helps to explain. It
is hard either to produce or feel the charm, emotion,
sentiment, of romance, where scene and personage
are on a plane of civilisation so alien to our own.
Flaubert's story of Salammbo was thought by
French critics to find comparatively few friends,
for this among other good reasons, that readers in
Paris or in London could have no sympathy, and
could be conscious of no affinity, with a world where
the cruel abominations imputed to Carthage made
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 225
the normal life of the community.1 Christian
Constantinople in the tenth century was certainly
not so far off in ways of life and modes of thought
as Carthage is supposed to have been. Yet, if
not wholly Eastern, it certainly was not Western.
A fierce controversy raged in the ninth century
between Slav and German clergy, whether God
could be adored in any language save Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin, these being the three sacred
tongues of the inscription placed upon the Cross.2
Whatever we may think of the right or wrong of
the trilingual heresy, it is certain that alike by the
long stream of Western institutions, and by all our
unbroken systems of literary education, it is with
Hebrew things and notions, and Greek and Roman
things and notions, in the antique world that we
are most at home. If into the antique world we
must be taken at the close quarters that a romance
requires, the Byzantine State presented old practice
and idea in such unfamiliar association as to hide any
sense of affinity and to shut out either sympathy
or charm. The author of Theophano faces this,
and valiantly makes head against it. The signal
peculiarities that account for the alienation of
common curiosity or feeling from Byzantine history,
which he has so boldly confronted, are pretty
obvious. They have been often enumerated before
now. The Eastern Empire was a conservative
State, not a progressive State. It is the story of
administration and law, not of letters, philosophy,
or liberty ; in spite of Hellenic vanities, it is the
story of a government, not of a nation. The lead-
ing exercises of mind lay in fields from which all
intellectual interest has long ebbed away. It was a
Christian Father who said of Constantinople in the
fourth century : " This city is full of handicraftsmen
1 Francis W. Newman, with his turn for siding with minorities (see
vol. i. of his Miscellanies, pp. 278-304), once delivered what was thought
an effective lecture entitled Punicae Vindiciae.
• Cyrilie el Methode, par Louis Leger, 1868, p. 90.
Q
226 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
and slaves, who are all profound theologians, and
preach in their workshops and in the streets.
If you want a man to change a piece of silver,
he instructs you in what consists the distinction
between the Father and the Son ; if you ask the
price of a loaf of bread, you get for answer that
the Son is inferior to the Father ; and if you ask
whether the bread is ready, the rejoinder is that
the genesis of the Son is from Nothing." Just as
the religious fanaticism inspired by the Koran put
out in the twelfth century the light of intellectual
development among the Spanish Arabs, so the
odious disputes of superstition at Constantinople
arrested all progressive movements of either Greek
or Roman genius. What Professor Bury himself
says l of the seventh century at Byzantium was
not less true of many other centuries : " Men who
professed to be educated believed in the most
ridiculous miracles ; and the law of natural cause
and effect, which, however inadequately recognised,
has generally maintained some sort of ascendancy
in human reason, became at this period practically
obsolete." By such periods men will never be
attracted. These futile and sanguinary wrangles,
in spite of the social and political problems involved
in some of them, make us wonder whether Comte,
Voltaire, Hegel, and De Maistre were not in the
right after all.
In one of the most brilliant of his pieces 2
Mr. Harrison has described what he truly calls
the painful majesty of the first sight of Athens ;
has reminded us that Attica is hardly bigger than
the Isle of Wight, and that the city of the violet
crown itself would easily stand in the area of Hyde
Park and Kensington Gardens ; yet what undying
dramas were played upon that narrow stage ! One
main reason why these dramas can never die is
that, as Pericles and Nicias boasted, in Athenian
1 Later Rotnan Empire, ii. 387. 2 Meanings of History, ch. x.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 227
polity every man was free to lead his daily life,
and free to think his own thoughts. In Byzantium
the stream never purified itself or flowed clear. No
fresh tributary of living water flowed into it from
the main currents of intellectual life in Europe.
The service, on the other hand, of Byzantium to
Europe — without approaching the vexed questions
of architecture and secondary decorative arts — was
in the first place military and defensive ; secondly,
it was preservative of the fruits of an intellectual
life supremely different from its own. Nobody has
described this second service more justly than our
present author in a passage of his Rede lecture :
The peculiar, indispensable service of Byzantine litera-
ture was the preservation of the language, philology, and
archaeology of Greece. It is impossible to see how our
knowledge of ancient literature or civilisation could have
been recovered if Constantinople had not nursed through
the early Middle Ages the vast accumulations of Greek
learning in the schools of Alexandria, Athens, and Asia
Minor ; ... if indefatigable copyists had not toiled in
multiplying the texts of ancient Greece. Pedantic, dull,
blundering as they are too often, they are indispensable.
We pick precious truths and knowledge out of their garru-
lities and stupidities, for they preserve what otherwise
would have been lost for ever. . . . Dunces and pedants
as they were, they servilely repeated the words of the
immortals. Had they not done so the immortals would
have died long ago.1
Besides this great service in the capacity of
" librarian to the human race," a more important
claim is made, that Byzantium was for the Slav
world what Rome was for the Germanic world.
It was Byzantium that out of Bulgarian, Magyar,
Croat hordes made Servia, Croatia, Bulgaria,
Hungary. It transmitted or imposed the Christian
i religion from Hungary to Armenia and Abyssinia.
It initiated a literary language among Slavs and
1 See also Dr. Sandys' extremely interesting History of Classical
Scholarship, 1903, p. 427.
228 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Goths. It established the first centres of literary
civilisation. It gave them ideas and methods of
government.1 In comparison with the more highly
organised States of the Western world, the result
may seem only a moderate improvement upon
anarchy, but in comparison with what went before,
even the South-Eastern lands of Europe are cosmos.
If it be true that an epic ought to have a begin-
ning and an end, we may say on the other hand,
without paradox, that history is most interesting
when it is part of a tale that is continuous and has
no end. The close of the Eastern Empire, on a
superficial glance, has the look of a dark, squalid,
and sanguinary cul-de-sac. When the Latins and
the Turks together brought it to its doom, Europe
was indeed conscious of a tremendous shock ; but
it was not the shock of tragedy, for the Westerns
felt little pity or sympathy for the immediate
victims, though Europe was not without fear for
herself, and not without some belated indignation
or remorse at a catastrophe due to the bigotry,
cupidity, and selfishness masked under Western
Christianity. It was Rome that gave Constan-
tinople to Mahound. Yet the overthrow of Con-
stantinople by the Ottoman Turk in the middle
of the fifteenth century was not really the end of
the Byzantine system. In the tenth century the
faith of the Cross passed into Russia. It came
from Byzantium, not from Rome, bringing Russia
over the frontier of Christendom in one sense, yet,
by reason of the great Christian schism, at the
same time cutting Russia off from Christendom in
another. The earlier type of civilisation in Russia
is Byzantine, an autocratic State, without political
rights, ruled by imperial omnipotence with the aid
of a hierarchy of functionaries.2 The huge waves
of Mongol invasion did not sweep away the deep
1 Rambaud's Empire Grec au Xteme stick, p. 10.
1 See Leroy-Beaulieu's ISEmpire des Tsars, i. 214.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 229
impress of Byzantine influence. From Vladimir
to Peter the Great, Russia has never entirely
escaped the Byzantine ascendancy exercised over
it by the clergy, the schools, the laws, the litera-
ture. The Mongols gave an Asiatic colour to
Czarism which grew up in their shadow, yet it was
from Byzantium and from the Greeks of the Lower
Empire that the Russian princes borrowed the type
and the model, along with the forms, the etiquette,
and even the very name, of autocracy, as after the
fall of Constantinople Ivan the Third borrowed
from the Palaeologi the imperial eagle and arms.1
When Bishop Creighton witnessed the coronation
of the Russian Czar at Moscow, he describes how
the stranger from the West felt that he had passed
outside the circle of European experience, Euro-
pean ideas and influences, and entered upon a new
phase of culture to be judged by canons of its own.
The Bishop's vivid story of that strange barbaric
scene is the counterpart of Mr. Harrison's picture
of the coronation of Romanus and Theophano in
the Church of the Holy Wisdom at Constantinople
in 960.2 How far that peculiar prolongation of the
Byzantine Empire through the Orthodox Church
has been an elevating force, this is not the place
to inquire ; any more than it is the place to inquire
into the connected question how far the correspond-
ing ascendancy of the Catholic Church elevated
government or people in the Spanish Peninsula.
IV
Having said this much on the subject of our
monograph, let us rapidly sketch its outline.
Theophano, the daughter of a Greek in obscure
circumstances, by her singular beauty and fascina-
tions caught the fancy of Romanus, the youthful
1 See Leroy-BeauHeu's L'Empire des Tsars, i. 227.
1 See Creighton's Historical Essays and Reviews, 1902.
230 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
son of Constantine (Porphyrogenitus), seventh of
that name in the list of Byzantine emperors.
Constantine consented to their union — a piece of
kindness which, according to some chroniclers,
probably mendacious, the young people repaid by
a murderous palace plot. Romanus mounted the
imperial throne, and with him Theophano rose to
the august rank of Basilissa.
The pleasure-loving prince was no more changed
by elevation to supreme power than was Louis the
Fifteenth ; but from one high task of empire at
least he did not shrink. Crete was in the hands
of the Saracens, and Saracen corsairs harassed the
islands of the Archipelago, cut off the commerce of
Constantinople, and even interrupted the supply
of provisions to the mighty capital. Romanus
fitted a great expedition to root out so grave a
mischief to his people, and to wipe off a dark
disgrace from Christian fame.
A glorious July morning in the year of our Lord 960 was
irradiating the shores of the Propontis and the porticoes
and domes of Byzantium ; and already the city and Palace
of the Caesars were crowded with brilliant throngs and gala
trappings of expectant triumph. All the terraces which
commanded a view of the sea were full of eager sightseers.
The walls that girdled the city on the seaside were covered
with dense groups ; and the sea itself, from the Golden
Horn to the Princes Islands, was alive with thousands of
vessels of every description as far as the eye could reach.
The mighty expedition to recover Crete from the Infidel
was at last about to sail. In the Sacred Palace itself a
throng of courtiers and high officials were gathered in the
Tzykanisterion, or polo-ground, and in the gardens, por-
ticoes, and arcades that adjoined it, waiting for their
Majesties and the great ministers of State, who were to
watch the fleet at its departure and wish Godspeed to its
illustrious commander. In the corridors and cloisters of
the Palace all was animation and a hubbub of greetings,
inquiries, and ardent anticipations. A group of gentlemen
of the wardrobe, grooms of the chamber, and a silentiary
were discussing the exact constitution of the vast expedition.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 231
Nicetas, the Paphlagonian, a vestiarius, or gentleman of
the wardrobe, was loudly exclaiming that so powerful an
armament had never left the Golden Horn since the age of
the great Heraclius.
The conquest of Crete was both a triumphant
feat of arms and a triumph of patriotic policy. A
new and greater expedition (962) was mustered for
a still mightier march.
Through seven different passes of the Taurus, mainly
through that known as the " Cilician Gates," the various
corps debouched down upon the Saracen province that had
once been the Cilicia of Augustus and Trajan. The different
armies had separate objectives, but were kept in close touch
with each other, and each was preceded by an outer screen
of light cavalry, which pressed on in front and scoured the
whole country. As the parallel forces poured down like a
deluge on the rich plains, the miserable people fled before
them or crowded into the forts ; the Saracen troops of all
arms were seized with panic, and made no effort to stem
the torrent.
The plunge was irresistible ; the Byzantine
general forced his way into Aleppo, and, " with
fierce exultation, he surveyed the annihilation of
the terrible enemy who had made the Roman
Empire reel to its foundations, and he saw that
the frontiers of Rome were destined to extend
again to the Euphrates."
At Constantinople, meanwhile, feud and intrigue
within the palace had prepared the way for revolu-
tion, when the youthful emperor was removed by
death. Though Nicephorus was not the man to
play the part assigned to Bothwell, the reader,
with a feeling that most stories have really been
told before with different names and changed
costumes, may perhaps bethink him of Mary
Stuart, and Bothwell, and Darnley, and the explo-
sion of the Kirk -o'- Field. That Theophano was
actively concerned in the death of her first husband
is not proved, and Mr. Harrison takes the other
232 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
view, though either her fierce ambition or a lawless
passion for the military hero of the hour, made the
removal of Romanus necessary to her designs. She
brought him back to Constantinople ; by her craft
and resolution baffled the schemes of a powerful
minister fighting to retain authority ; and, finally,
with the aid of the Patriarch, succeeded in making
Nicephorus Autocrat and her husband. Intrigues
within the palace, factions and bloody fights,—
for Armenian massacres the other day were by no
means the first or the worst of such scenes in Con-
stantinople, whether Christian or Mahometan,—
gorgeous pageants, conflicts between Emperor and
Patriarch, the election of Theophano, the moral fall
and remorse of Nicephorus, make vivid master-
pieces of description, while the historic significance
of it all is graphically brought out in eager debate
and eloquent argument in council and in camp.
One of the main historic facts is the cosmopolitan
character of Constantinople in these ages ; it was,
let us repeat, the seat of a government, not the
central home of a nationality ; and, above all, the
incessant strife within its walls and without its
walls was cosmopolitan strife. A reception of
foreign envoys in one of the vast courts of the
imperial palace brings vividly home to the reader
of to-day, as it was intended to bring home to the
envoys themselves, the world-wide relations of the
Empire and its claim to be the centre of universal
power.
Like the actual scene, and like Gibbon's history
of it, Theophano makes a crowded canvas. It could
not be otherwise ; but one effect is partially to
deprive Nicephorus of the position of isolated relief
that the full interest of his moral catastrophe seems
to require. The throng of incident and figure in
some degree disperses our attention, and prevents
its concentration on the hero, who was not only
hero but saint. Still, the author is writing history,
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 283
not a modern psychological romance. In its
elements the case is old enough — the crash of a
stern and lofty nature before the wiles of Eve and
the solicitations of appetite. Nicephorus in one
stage is full of the monastic enthusiasm of the
early centuries of Christian faith, despising the
Christianity of the common world, regardless of the
State, eager for flight from all carnal and secular
things into a life of solitary communion with the
unseen God. Even when he has been forced,
against the loud whispers of conscience and the
leanings of his inner will, into campaigns for the
deliverance of the State from the inroads of
Mahometan blasphemers, after he has assumed the
crown of autocrat, he is still haunted by the old
visions of asceticism. Under the purple robe he
still wears the hair shirt of the penitent and the
recluse, and at banquets of savoury meats and
exquisite wines he prefers water and lentils. The
struggle within the breast of Nicephorus was but
a type of one of the greatest of the conflicts that
perplexed and tore that Eastern world, and not
the Eastern world alone.
The rule of Nicephorus marked a few years of
failure and disappointment, mixed with transient
military success. From armed anchorite, in spite of
his sedulous performance of the ceremonial offices
of his Church, he relapsed into the ordinary habits
of the Byzantine autocrat. The cost of the levies of
men, drawn from the Italian coasts across Greece
and Asia as far as the source of the Euphrates,
strained the finances to the uttermost. Heavy
taxes and debased coinage broke down his popu-
larity, and his fulminations against weakening the
military resources of the Empire by the multipli-
cation of monasteries brought him into disfavour
with the Patriarch and the ecclesiastics. What
Mr. Harrison truly calls the eternal quarrel about
"investitures," that well-known chapter in the
234 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
Western history of Popes and Kings, led to fierce
remonstrances from the Patriarch. He joined the
opposition organised within the palace by Theo-
phano. Whether from discontent at a temperament
less ardent than her own, or from politic desire to
separate her lot from that of a falling potentate, or
from a new-born passion for Tzimiskes, a soldier
as heroic as Nicephorus himself, the empress was
plotting treason with formidable confederates. The
long and exciting episode is told with admirable
vigour, and the end arrived in the chapter headed
" Clytemnestra." The author spares us none of
the horrors of the murder of Nicephorus — in some
details very like a similar transaction in the same
quarter of Europe not long ago. Theophano took
little by crimes that have given her a place, though
a secondary one, among the names of evil women
in high places, Theodora, Irene, and the others.
The Patriarch refused to recognise Tzimiskes, her
accomplice in the murder of his uncle, unless he
put her away. So, with her beauty, her ambition,
her passion for intrigue, she was banished to a
solitary island, where our present author is content
to leave her. When her sons came to the throne,
they are said to have recalled her to the imperial
palace. For history the curtain of her drama and
its stage had fallen.
Such is the central outline of our romance, and
into it the author has wrought a rich store of
episodic material, well incorporated into the main
tissue and design, extremely picturesque and strik-
ing, as well as true to such records as survive. We
have from time to time the relief of being trans-
ported westward of Byzantium to the more familiar
ground of Spain and Old Rome. The glory of
Rome had departed indeed, for the tenth century
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 235
was the nadir, and Mr. Harrison does not paint the
scene in darker colours than really belonged to it.
In one fascinating chapter we see the Caliph of
the West at Cordova, the great Caliph, the Charle-
magne of Saracen Spain, now at the close of his
long rule of half a century — " the greatest ruler of
his age and the noblest of the Saracen race. In
fifty years he had reduced the rebels and traitors
within his own dominion, had made vassals of the
Christian princelets of North Spain, and had driven
back the Mauritanian invaders from Africa. He
possessed a magnificent fleet, a powerful army, and
a treasury of 20,000,000 gold pieces. The police
of his realm secured perfect order and peace ;
the state of agriculture was in the highest degree
thriving ; commerce and manufactures were equally
advanced." His days come to their close in this
chapter, and we read the moving words attached
by him to his last testament : " Fifty years have
I been on this throne. Riches, honours, pleasures
have been poured on me, and I have drained them
all to the dregs. The sovereigns who are my rivals
respect me, or fear me — both envy me ; for all that
men desire has been showered on me by Allah, the
Bountiful, the All-merciful. But in all these years
of apparent felicity I can only count fourteen days
wherein I have been truly happy. My son, medi-
tate on this, and judge at their true value human
grandeur, this world, and man's life."
It was his son, Hakem the Second, who, as
Renan has described, had the glory of opening that
brilliant series of studies which, by the influence
that they exercised upon Christian Europe, hold
so important a place in the history of civilisation.
Two centuries later the brilliant Arab- Spanish era
closed. Meanwhile, says Renan, the taste for know-
ledge and for beautiful things had established in
that privileged corner of the world a tolerance of
which modern times can hardly offer us an example.
236 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
" Christians, Jews, Moslems spoke the same tongue,
sang the same poetry, shared the same literary and
scientific studies. All the barriers that separate
men had fallen, all worked with one accord at the
task of common civilisation." l Mr. Harrison has
ascribed a mood like this to his Fatima in her
home among the mountains of the Sierra Morena,
north of Cordova :
" There is but one God," she said, with profound earnest-
ness : " I know but one God, and I care not if He be
named the Trinity or Allah. I have lived so long in this
Andalusian Caliphate ; I have seen enough of the Romans
of the Empire." She sighed as she uttered that name. " I
have seen and heard enough to know that Christendom
and Islam have each much that is God-like and good, and
much that is of Sheitan and evil. This splendid capital of
Cordova is in many things, in most things, the counterpart
of Byzantium — as rich, as luxurious, as corrupt, as elegant,
as turbulent. These Ommeyades here execrate the Fatim-
ites : Abbasides from the first contend with Kharijis.
There are as many sects amongst Mussulmans as there are
amongst Christians — as many dynasties, as many wars.
Bagdad, Damascus, Heleb, Antioch, Edessa, Fostat,
Kairouan, Andalusia, war on each other as often as Byzan-
tine, Bulgarian, Lombard, Calabrian, Frank, or Saxon.
Whether it be Allah and His Prophet, or Christ and His
Mother, who inspire these rivalries and combats, I know
not. All that I know is that it is not the one God."
It was eight centuries after this that a like thought
inspired the beautiful apologue of the Three Rings, as
adopted and extended by Lessing from Boccaccio,
and coming to him through the Hundred Old
Novels, from some tongue in some corner of the
Mediterranean that, as scholars tell us, can never
now be known.2 Everybody knows it, in or out
of Lessing's noble dramatic setting, how Saladin,
1 Averroes et f Averroisme, p. 4.
1 See Burckhardt's Renaissance in Italy, Eng. trans., ii. 302 note.
Anywhere else but in Florence this " impious thought of parallel between
the three religions would have lighted the fires of the stake." — Renan,
Averroes, p. 389.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 287
the great Saracen, wishing to lay a trap for Nathan,
the wise and rich Jew, asked him, " Honest man,
I would gladly know from thee which religion thou
judgest to be the true one, Jewish, Mahometan,
or Christian." Then Nathan, in answer, tells him
of a certain family owning a ring of much beauty
and worth, and endowed with the magical virtue
of making every wearer of it beloved by God and
men. The possessor of it became thereby head of
the family and owner of the estate. This the
father in successive generations always gave to
whomsoever of his descendants he deemed the
worthiest. At length a father had three sons, all
of whom he loved alike. In his perplexity to
whom to give the ring, he sent for a craftsman,
and had two more rings made of such exact resem-
blance that even he himself could hardly tell the
true one. Being now very old, he privately gave
a ring to each of his three sons. When he was
dead, each of them produced his ring, and claimed
the honour and the estate. They brought the case
before the judge. " I hear," said the judge, " that
the true ring has the power of making its wearer
pleasing in the sight of God and of man. Let each
of you believe that his ring is the true one. Let
each of you strive to make known the virtue of
his ring, by gentleness, by hearty peacefulness, by
well-doing, by the utmost inward devotion to God.
And then, if this power of the gems reveals itself
with your children's children, I invite you again,
thousands and thousands of years hence, before this
tribunal. Then one wiser than I will sit in the
judgment-seat and will decide." 1
1 Nathan der Weise, in. vi., whither the wise reader will betake himself
for one of the grand passages in literature.
238 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
VI
The speculative bearings of the phantasmagoria
that he unfolds before his readers scarcely fall
within the scope of Mr. Harrison's monograph.
His business here is spectacle, and not philoso-
phising. The genius of Montesquieu early divined
that the poisoned source of all the misfortunes
of the Byzantines was that they never knew the
nature, or the respective boundaries, of ecclesi-
astical and secular power. " This great distinction,
that is the foundation on which reposes the tran-
quillity of nations, springs not only from religion,
but also from nature and reason, that insists on
things essentially separate never being confounded." 1
Here, indeed, as in so many other relations,
Montesquieu clearly came near the possession of
the master-key. Of all the manifold aspects of
human history, the central and most commanding
of them is the spirit of man, as we see and consider
it, working in creeds and institutions, working
against them, piercing them, transforming them,
ever striving to coerce the concrete into more and
more harmony with the abstract. The military
system that was rendered necessary in the Eastern
Empire by the pressure of enemies outside, re-
duced abstract Christianity, in its doctrines and its
organisation, into a fatal, though often mutinous,
subjection to temporal institutions. The records
of the Churches, alike in East and West, have
many a dismal and depressing page, but none
more depressing than the forms with which abstract
Christianity clothed itself in the Eastern Empire,
or the feuds of policy and nationality that blazoned
the mysteries of faith in letters of blood upon rival
banners.
With marked power Mr. Harrison has depicted
1 Grandeur et Decadence des Ramains, ch. xxii.
A HISTORICAL ROMANCE 289
the exterior and political force and momentum of
Eastern monasticism ; that wonderful ideal of con-
templation and renunciation as a means of saving
the soul ; the attempt to realise ideals outside of
the world ; the protest in solitude against the
weight of injustice that had become unbearable.
" The Byzantine code of laws," says Harnack, now
reputed greatest theologian of our time — " our own
social and moral views, too, have not yet emanci-
pated themselves from its bonds — is in part a
strange congeries of pitiless Roman craft and of
the monastic view of the world." Tolstoi, says
Harnack, is in his writings a genuine Greek monk,
to whom the only chance of Church reform lies in
a radical breach with culture and history.1 Here,
for an instant in our day, two strangely diverse
schools unexpectedly meet, for Socialism that is
now so alarming to the rulers of the world, springs
in its root from the same intolerable sense of the
world's wrong, and insists on the same breach with
culture and with history. In some at least of its
types and its ideals, Socialism comes nearer to
what is called Byzantinism than either professors
or opponents seem well to know. Yet history-
standing forces, institutions founded on social needs
transient or abiding, forms and conventions — all
hold their ground with tremendous grip. However
violent the supposed breach, the old Manichaean tale
will still go on.
" When you see," cried Bossuet, " the old and
the new Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the
Greeks, the Romans, present themselves successively
before you and fall, so to say, one upon the ruin
of the other ; all this frightful turmoil makes you
feel that there is nothing solid among mankind,
and that inconstancy and agitation is the peculiar
lot of human things." But then he detects or
manufactures a chain. The parts of so great a
1 Monaslicism. By Adolph Harnack. Pp. 55, 00-61, Eng. trans. (1001).
240 A HISTORICAL ROMANCE
whole are linked together, he says. With the
reserve of " certain extraordinary strokes in which
God intended that His hand alone should be
manifest," no great change has ever taken place
that had not its causes in ages that went before.
These " extraordinary strokes," if they exist, and if
he had pondered their significance, it must have
puzzled Bossuet to reconcile with his theory of the
chain — with what in modern language we should
call the reign of law in history — which it was his
express object to set forth. William of Tyre, the
twelfth- century historian of the Crusades, hit this
when he wrote : " To no one should the things done
by our Lord be displeasing, for all His works are
right and good. But according to the judgment
of men, it was marvellous how our Lord permitted
the Franks (the people in the world who honour
Him most) to be thus destroyed by the enemies of
the faith." Mr. Harrison's book, with no deliberate
intention of his, for he is here a writer of neutral
history, will give people of a reflective turn of
mind, whether Jew, Mahometan, Christian, or
Agnostic, if they be in the humour, many deep
things to ruminate upon.
APPENDIX
NOTES TO MACHIAVELLI
1 The most complete account of the voluminous litera-
ture about Machiavelli up to 1858 is given in Robert Mohl's
Geschichte und Literatur der Staatswissenschaften, iii. 521, etc.
A later list is given by Tommasini, La Vita el gli scritti
di N. M., i. 56-8. See also Villari ; Lord Acton's learned
Introduction to the Prince ; and especially the bibliography
attached to Mr. Burd's valuable chapter in vol. i. of the Cambridge
Modern History, pp. 719-26.
Of the French contributions, Nourrisson's Machiavel (edition
of 1888) seems much the most vigorous, in spite of occasional
outbreaks of the curious feeling between Frenchmen and
Italians. Among political pamphlets may be named Dialogue
aux enfers, entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ; ou la politique
de Machiavel au 19" siecle : par un Contemporain (1864)—
an energetic exposure of the Second Empire. — Machiavel, et
Vinfluence de sa doctrine, sur les opinions, les mceurs, et la politique
de la France pendant la Revolution : par M. de Mazeres ; Paris,
1816 — a royalist indictment of Machiavelli, as the inspirer alike
of Jacobins and Bonaparte. M. Tassin's Gianotti, sa vie, son
temps, et ses doctrines (1869), published on the eve of the over-
throw of the Second Empire, and seeming to use the Italian
publicist mainly as a mask for condemning the French govern-
ment of the day. Gianotti (1492-1572) was of Savonarola's
school, and M. Tassin uses him as a foil for Machiavelli. Others
of less quality are : Dante, Michel- Ange, Machiavel. Par
C. Calemard de Lafayette. Paris, 1852. — Essai sur les ceuvres
et la doctrine de Machiavel. Par Paul Deltuf. Paris, 1867.—
Machiavel, Montesquieu, Rousseau. Von Jacob Venedey. Berlin,
1850. — Written after the events of 1848 in Germany, the
author's object being to show that the three writers named
were the representatives of the only three possible systems of
government, and of these three Machiavelli stands for all that
is wicked and reactionary, Rousseau for progress and humanity.
The book is composed, not from any scientific point of view,
241 R
242 APPENDIX
but to illustrate contemporary politics. Louis Philippe is said
(p. 66) to be the greatest scholar that Machiavelli ever had,
and there are a good many remarks on the death of
" Machiavellismus " in France and Germany, which have hardly
been borne out by history since 1850.
2 Machiavelli and the Elizabethan Drama. Von Edward
Meyer (Weimar, 1897), p. xi. Mr. Courthope, History of
English Poetry (ii. ch. 12), has shown how much Marlowe had
studied Machiavelli, and states his view of the effect of this
study as follows : " What we find in Marlowe is Seneca's exalta-
tion of the freedom of the human will, dissociated from the
idea of Necessity, and joined with Machiavelli's principle of the
excellence of virtii. This principle is represented under a great
variety of aspects ; sometimes in the energy of a single heroic
character, as in Tamburlaine ; sometimes in the pursuit of un-
lawful knowledge, as in Faustus : again, in The Jew of Malta, in
the boundless hatred and revenge of Barabas ; in Guise plotting
the massacre of the Huguenots out of cold-blooded policy ; and
in Mortimer planning the murder of Edward II. from purely
personal ambition. Incidentally, no doubt, in some of these
instances, the indulgence of unrestrained passion brings ruin in
its train ; but it is not so much for the sake of the moral that
Marlowe composed his tragedies, as because his imagination
delighted in the exhibition of the vast and tremendous con-
sequences produced by the determined exercise of will in
pursuit of selfish objects." — P. 405.
The reader will remember that Machiavelli speaks the
prologue to The Jew of Malta, with these two lines :
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.
It is not denied by Herr Meyer or others, that Marlowe had
studied Machiavelli in the original, and Mr. Courthope seems
to make good his contention that it was Marlowe's conception
of M.'s principle of virtii, that revolutionised the English drama.
3 " Old Nick is the vulgar name for the Evil Being in the
north of England, and is a name of great antiquity. We
borrowed it from the title of an evil genius among the ancient
Danes," etc. etc. On the line in Hudibras, " We may observe
that he was called Old Nick many ages before the famous,
or rather infamous, Nicholas Machiavel was born." — Brand's
Popular Antiquities, ii. 364. (Ed. 1816.)
* See Tommasini, i. 27-30. Our excellent Ascham declares
that he honoured the old Romans as the best breeders and
bringers up for well-doing in all civil affairs that ever were in the
NOTES 243
world, but the new Rome was the home of devilish opinions and
unbridled sin, and one of the worst patriarchs of its impiety was
Machiavelli.— Schoolmaster (1568-8), Mayor's Edition, 1868, p.
86. Fuller, quoted in Mayor's note, expresses a better opinion
of Machiavelli, and says that " that which hath sharpened the
pens of many against him is his giving so many cleanly wipes to
the foul noses of the pope and the Italian prelacy " (1642).
" At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Venetian
senate was asked to permit the publication of Boccalini's Com-
mentaries on Tacitus. The request was referred to five of
the senators for examination. It is the teaching of Tacitus,'
they said, ' that has produced Machiavelli, and the other bad
authors who would destroy public virtue. We should replace
Tacitus by Livy and Polybius — historians of the happier and
more virtuous times of the Roman republic, and by Thucydides,
the historian of the Greek republic, who found themselves in
circumstances like those of Venice.' " — Sclopis, Revue hist, de
droit franqais el etranger (1856), ii. 25.
For the literary use made of Tacitus against the Spanish
domination in Italy, see Ferrari, Hist, de la raison d'fitat,
p. 815.
6 An interesting article appeared in the Nineteenth Century
(December 1896), designed to show the effect of Machiavelli on
the English statesmen of the Reformation. The writer admits
that there is no evidence to prove that the action of Elizabeth
was consciously based on a study of the Prince, but he finds, as
he thinks, proof positive that Burleigh had studied Machiavelli
in a paper of advice from the Lord Treasurer to the Queen.
The proof consists in such sentences as these : " Men's natures
are apt to strive not only against the present smart, but in
revenging bypast injury, though they be never so well contented
thereafter " ; — " no man loves one the better for giving him the
bastinado, though with never so little a cudgel " ; — " the course
of the most wise estates hath ever been to make an assurance of
friendship, or to take away all power of enmity " ; and so forth.
Burleigh very likely may have read the Prince, but it is going
too far to assume that a sage statesman must have learned the
commonplaces of political prudence out of a book.
" Cecil asked English ambassadors abroad to procure him
copies, and even that harmless gossip, Sir Richard Morison,
wiled away his leisure hours at the Emperor's Court in perusing
it, making frequent reference to it in his correspondence
(see State Papers, Foreign Series, Edward VI. passim ; Sloane
MSS. 1528 ; and Harleian MSS. 353, ff. 130-9)."— Pollard's
England under Protector Somerset, p. 284.
• Dr. Abbott, attacking Bacon with the same bitterness with
which Machiavelli was attacked for three centuries (Francis
244 APPENDIX
Bacon, 1885, pp. 325 and 457-60), insists that the Florentine
secretary was the chancellor's master ; but such criticism seems
to show as one-sided a misapprehension of one as of the other.
Dr. Fowler, once President of Corpus Christi College, has dealt
conclusively, as I judge, with Dr. Abbott's case, in the preface
to his second edition of the Novum Organum (1889), pp. xii-xx,
and in his excellent short monograph on Bacon (1881), pp. 41-5.
7 Mackintosh reproached Bacon for this way of treating
history. Spedding stoutly defends it, rather oddly appealing
to the narrative of the New Testament, as an example of the
most wicked of all judgments, recounted four times " without
a single indignant comment or a single vituperative expression."
— Works, Spedding and Heath, vol. vi. pp. 8-16.
On this last point Pascal says : " The style of the gospel is
admirable among other ways in this, that there is not a word of
invective against the murderers or foes of Jesus Christ. For
there is none against Judas, Pilate, or any of the Jews ; and so
forth." — Pensees, Art. xix. 2. ed. Havet, ii. 39. See also Havet's
note, p. 44.
Bacon says M. made a wise and apt choice of method for
government — " namely, discourse upon histories or examples ;
for knowledge drawn freshly, and in our view, out of particulars,
findeth its way best to particulars again ; and it hath much
greater life in practice when the discourse attendeth upon
the example than when the example attendeth upon the
discourse."
8 Harrington's view is expressed in such a sentence as this :
" Corruption in government is to be read and considered in
Machiavel, as diseases in a man's body are to be read and con-
sidered in Hippocrates. Neither Hippocrates nor Machiavel
introduced diseases into man's body, nor corruption into govern-
ment which were before their time ; and seeing they do but
discover them, it must be confessed that so much as they have
done tends not to the increase but to the cure of them, which
is the truth of these two authors." — System of Politics, ch. x.
Elsewhere he compares the Italian to one who exposes the
tricks of a juggler.
9 Essays, i. 156 ; ii. 391, where he remarks that historians
have been almost always friends of virtue, but that the poli-
tician is much less scrupulous as to acts of power.
10 This sentence is Treverret's, L'ltalie au IGidme si&cle, i.
179. Sainte-Beuve has a short comparison between the two
in Causeries, vii. 67-70. " Machiavem attached himself to par-
ticular facts, and proposed expedients. Montesquieu tried to
NOTES 245
ascend to general principles, and drew from them consequences
that were capable of explaining a long series of social phenomena.
The Florentine secretary was a man of action, and reproduced
in his writings the impressions that he had received from his
intercourse with men and business. Montesquieu is always a
man of the closet ; he studies men in books. — Sclopis, Revue
hist, de droit franqais el etranger (1856), ii. p. 18.
Comte has worked out the place of Montesquieu and of
Machiavelli, Philos. pos. iv. 178-85, and Pol. pos. iii. 539.
11 La Diplomatic au temps de Machiavel. Par Maulde-La
Claviere (1892, 3 vols.), i. 306, etc. The French gave the
signal for the inevitable attack upon the ancient privileges of
Latin as the language of diplomacy. At the beginning of the
sixteenth century Spain strove to displace French, but did not
succeed even when the Spanish power was at its meridian. In
the East, the Turk would have nothing to do with Latin. A
Turkish envoy to Venice in 1500, though acquainted with
Latin, made it a point of honour only to speak Greek. Charles
VIII. did not know Italian, and Louis XII. understood it with
difficulty. Machiavelli preferred Italian to Latin. — Maulde-La
Claviere, ch. ii. and ch. vi.
12 See Jacob Burckhardt's admirable work on the Civilisation
of the Renaissance in Italy (English translation by Middlemore),
ii. 211. " Was Germany in the fifteenth century so much
better with its godless wars against the Hussites, the crimes of
Vehmgericht, the endless feuds of the temporal princes, the
shameless oppression of the wretched peasant ? " — Thudiehum,
p. 68.
18 The contradictions were noted very early. Bodin's
Republic appeared in 1576, and there he says : " Machiavelli s'est
bien fort meconte, de dire que 1'estat populaire est le meilleur ;
et neanmoins ayant oublie sa premiere opinion, il a tenu en un
autre lieu, que pour restituer 1'Italie en sa liberte, il faut qu'il
n'y ait qu'un prince ; et de fait, il s'est efforce de former un
estat le plus tyrannique du monde ; et en outre lieu il confesse
que 1'estat de Venise est le plus beau de tous, lequel est une
pure aristocratie, s'il en fut oncques : tellement qu'il ne scait a
quoi se tenir " (vi. ch. 4).
The argument that the Prince and Discourses are really one
work is best stated by Nourrisson, ch. viii. 187-44.
" The modern study of politics, however, begins with Machia-
velli. Not that he made any definite or permanent contribution
to political theory which can be laid hold of as a principle
fertile of new consequence. His works are more concerned
with the details of statecraft than with the analysis of the state.
246 APPENDIX
But we find in him, for the first time since Aristotle, the pure,
passionless curiosity of the man of science." — Sir Frederick
Pollock in the History of the Science of Politics, ch. ii.
Tocqueville says : " I have been reading Machiavelli's
History of Florence very attentively. The Machiavelli of the
history is to me the Machiavelli of the Prince. I do not con-
ceive how the reading of the first can leave the least doubt as
to the author of the second. In his history he sometimes praises
great and fine actions, but we see that it is with him only an
affair of imagination. The bottom of his thought is that all
actions are indifferent in themselves, and must be judged by the
skill and the success that they exhibit. For him the world is a
great arena from which God is absent, where conscience has
nothing to do with it, and where everybody gets on with things
as best he can." — Tocqueville, Correspond, i. 326-7.
As for Tocqueville, when he came to handle public business
in difficult times, some notions with a slightly Machiavellian
flavour began to lodge in his mind. For instance : " As if you
could ever satisfy men, by only busying yourself with their
general good, without taking account of their vanity and of
their private and personal interests." — Souvenirs, p. 343.
" The versatility of men, and the vanity of these great words
of patriotism and right, with which the small passions cover
themselves."— Ib. 347.
" My secret consisted in flattering their self-love [Members
of Parliament and Cabinet Colleagues], while I took good care
to neglect their advice. ... I had discovered that it is with
the vanity of men that you can do the best business, for you
often get from it very substantial things, while giving very
little substance in return. You will never make as good a
bargain with their ambition or their greed. Yet it is true that
to deal profitably with the vanity of others, you must lay aside
your own and look only to the success of your scheme ; and
this is what will always make that kind of trade very difficult."
—Ib. 361-2.
" Nations are like men ; they are still prouder of what flatters
their passions, than of what serves their interests." — Ib. 394.
14 Sainte-Beuve has pointed out (Port-Royal, iii. 362-3, ed.
1860) how Machiavelli is here related to Pascal. Pascal's
reason allows no sort of abstraction to mix itself up with social
order. He had seen the Fronde at close quarters, for he was a
man of the world at that epoch. He had meditated on Crom-
well. The upshot of it was to place man at the mercy of
custom, and at the same time to condemn those who shake off
the yoke of custom. " Custom ought to be followed only
because it is custom, and not because it is reasonable or just.
People follow it because they think it is reasonable, and take
NOTES 247
antiquity for the proof that it is so," etc. etc. — Pensees, Art. vi.
40. Ed. Havet, L 82.
15 Disc. i. 47. Aristotle, Politics, iii. 11 ; Jowett (Notes,
p. 129) has an uneasy note upon the point. On the whole,
Machiavelli seems to take broader and sounder ground than
anybody else.
18 Baumgarten's view is elaborately stated in his Geschichtc
Karls V. i. ; Anhang, 522-86, and Signer Villari's answer in his
Niccold Machiavelli, ii. 496-502.
Guido da Montefeltro says in the Inferno (xxvii. 75) : L' opere
mie nonfurono leonine, ma di volpe — " My deeds were those of the
fox, and not of the lion." Bacon, in a well-known passage, uses
a more common figure : " It is not possible to join serpentine
wisdom with the columbine simplicity, except men know all the
conditions of the serpent." — Advancement of Learning, ii. 21, 9.
17 Gregorovius thinks that there are too many arguments
both ways, for us to form a decided opinion. — Lucrezia Borgia
II. c. v. Pastor is confident that it was Roman fever, and goes
fully into the medical question. — Gesch. der Pdpste, iii. 471-2.
Dr. Garnett argues strongly against poison, English Historical
Review, 1894, ix. 335-9. — Creighton, iv. 43-4.
18 See Cesar Borgia. Par Charles Yriarte. Paris, 1889.
The Borgian policy is set out with much reason and force in
Bishop Creighton 's History of the Popes, bk. v. ch. xi. vol. iv. pp.
44-58. Also the character of Caesar Borgia, pp. 64-6. Dr.
Pastor, writing from the catholic point of view, does not shrink
from a completely candid estimate of Alexander VI. — See Gesch.
der Pdpste, iii.
19 The saying of Cosmo de' Medici, 1st. fior. lib. vii., where
Machiavelli reports others of his sayings, and gives a vivid
account of Cosmo.
Bacon tells us in characteristic language that Henry VII.
desired to bring celestial honour into the house of Lancaster,
and begged Pope Julius to canonise Henry VI. ; but Julius
refused, as some said, because the king would not come to his
rates, more probably, however, because he knew that Henry VI.
was a very simple man, and he did not choose to let the world
suppose that saint and simpleton were the same thing. — History
of Henry VII. ; Works, vi. 233 (Spedding and Heath).
20 Ferrari, Hist, de la raison d'fitat, 300. "Perlafe il tutto
lice," Ger. Lib. iv. 26.
248 APPENDIX
21 " Frederick the Great of Prussia, in November 1760, pub-
lished military instructions for the use of his generals, which
were based on a wide, practical knowledge of the matter. . . .
When he could not procure himself spies among the Austrians,
owing to the careful guard which their light troops kept around
their camp, the idea occurred to him, and he acted on it with
success, of utilising the suspension of arms that was customary
after a skirmish between hussars, to make these officers the
means of conducting epistolary correspondence with the officers
on the other side. * Spies of compulsion,' he explained in this
way. When you wish to convey false information to an enemy,
you take a trustworthy soldier and compel him to pass to the
enemy's camp to represent there all that you wish the enemy
to believe. You also send by him letters to excite the troops
to desertion ; and in the event of its being impossible to
obtain information about the enemy, Frederick prescribes the
following : Choose some rich citizen who has land and a wife
and children, and another man disguised as his servant or
coachman, who understands the enemy's language. Force the
former to take the latter with him to the enemy's camp to com-
plain of injuries sustained, threatening him that if he fails to
bring the man back with him after having stayed long enough
for the desired object, his wife and children shall be hanged
and his house burnt. * I was myself,' he adds, ' constrained
to have recourse to this method, and it succeeded.' " — Maine,
International Law, 150-51.
22 " A monarch's promises," Alva writes to Philip II. (1753),
" were not to be considered so sacred as those of humbler
mortals. Not that the king should directly violate his word,
but at the same time," continued the Duke, " I have thought all
my life, and I have learned it from the Emperor, your Majesty's
father, that the negotiations of kings depend upon different
principles from those of us private gentlemen who walk the
world ; and in this manner I always observe that your Majesty's
father, who was so great a gentleman and so powerful a prince,
conducted his affairs." — Motley, Dutch Republic, pt. 3, ch. 9.
More than one historian has pointed out as a merit of Louis
XI. (1461-83), that it was he who substituted in government
intellectual means for material means, craft for force, Italian
policy for feudal policy. There was plenty of lying and of
fraud, but it was a marked improvement in the tactics of power
to put persuasion, address, skilful handling of men, into the
place of impatient, reckless resort to naked force. Since the
days of Louis XL, so it is argued, we have made a further
advance ; we have introduced publicity and open dealing
instead of lies, and justice instead of egotism. — Guizot's Hist,
de la civilisation en Europe, xi. p. 307.
NOTES 249
23 The late Lord Lytton delivered a highly interesting
address, on National and Individual Morality Compared, when he
was Lord Rector at Glasgow, and he said this about the case of
the Due d'Enghien : " The first Napoleon committed many such
offences against private morality. But the language of private
morality cannot be applied to his public acts without limita-
tions. The kidnapping of the Due d'Enghien, and his sum-
mary execution after a sham trial, was aoout as bad an act
as well could be. But I should certainly hesitate to describe
it as a murder in the ordinary sense. Morally, I think, it was
worse than many murders for which men have been tried and
punished by law. But I do not think that the English
Government in 1815 could, with any sort of propriety, have
delivered up Napoleon to Louis XVIII., to be tried for that
offence like a common criminal."
24 Popular Government. By Sir Henry Maine (1885), p. 99.
A recent German pamphlet (Promachiavell, von Friedrich
Thudichum : Stuttgart, 1897) hopes for a second Machiavelli,
who will trace out for us, " with rich experiences and a genial
artistic hand," the inner soul of the Jesuit and of the Dema-
gogue.— P. 107.
26 See an interesting chapter by Professor Nys of Brussels,
Les Publicistes espagnols du IGtime siecle (1890).
26 Nys, Les Precurseurs de Grotius, p. 128.
During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries Machia-
velli's maxims became the centre of a large body of literature, of
which the reader will find a full account in Ferrari's Hist, de la
raison d'Etat, part ii. Some interesting points on the Neo-
Machiavellism of the nineteenth century are marked by
Henry Sidgwick, in his little volume Practical Ethics (1898),
pp. 52-83.
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