Critical and Historical Essays, vol 1 | Page 4

horror and amazement
the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on the name
of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed,
such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a
fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most
hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or
avow, without the disguise of some palliating sophism, even to his own
mind, are professed without the slightest circumlocution, and assumed
as the fundamental axioms of all political science.
It is not strange that ordinary readers should regard the author of such a
book as the most depraved and shameless of human beings. Wise men,
however, have always been inclined to look with great suspicion on the
angels and daemons of the multitude: and in the present instance,
several circumstances have led even superficial observers to question
the justice of the vulgar decision. It is notorious that Machiavelli was,
through life, a zealous republican. In the same year in which he

composed his manual of King-craft, he suffered imprisonment and
torture in the cause of public liberty. It seems inconceivable that the
martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of
tyranny. Several eminent writers have, therefore, endeavoured to detect
in this unfortunate performance some concealed meaning, more
consistent with the character and conduct of the author than that which
appears at the first glance.
One hypothesis is that Machiavelli intended to practise on the young
Lorenzo de Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland is said to
have employed against our James the Second, and that he urged his
pupil to violent and perfidious measures, as the surest means of
accelerating the moment of deliverance and revenge. Another
supposition which Lord Bacon seems to countenance, is that the
treatise was merely a piece of grave irony, intended to warn nations
against the arts of ambitious men. It would be easy to show that neither
of these solutions is consistent with many passages in The Prince itself.
But the most decisive refutation is that which is furnished by the other
works of Machiavelli. In all the writings which he gave to the public,
and in all those which the research of editors has, in the course of three
centuries, discovered, in his Comedies, designed for the entertainment
of the multitude, in his Comments on Livy, intended for the perusal of
the most enthusiastic patriots of Florence, in his History, inscribed to
one of the most amiable and estimable of the Popes, in his public
despatches, in his private memoranda, the same obliquity of moral
principle for which The Prince is so severely censured is more or less
discernible. We doubt whether it would be possible to find, in all the
many volumes of his compositions, a single expression indicating that
dissimulation and treachery had ever struck him as discreditable.
After this, it may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted with
few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment, so pure and
warm a zeal for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and
rights of citizens, as those of Machiavelli. Yet so it is. And even from
The Prince itself we could select many passages in support of this
remark. To a reader of our age and country this inconsistency is, at first,
perfectly bewildering. The whole man seems to be an enigma, a
grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities, selfishness and
generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject

villainy and romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran
diplomatist would scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most
confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme
composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act of
dexterous perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call forth the
same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration. The moral
sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly obtuse and
morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar are united in him.
They are not merely joined, but interwoven. They are the warp and the
woof of his mind; and their combination, like that of the variegated
threads in shot silk, gives to the whole texture a glancing and
ever-changing appearance. The explanation might have been easy, if he
had been a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently
neither the one nor the other. His works prove, beyond all contradiction,
that his understanding was strong, his taste pure, and his sense of the
ridiculous exquisitely keen.
This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no reason
whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw anything
shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs remain