Machiavelli, Volume I | Page 5

talking,
and playfully embraced him--to discover if he wore armour under his
clothes. Then they killed him at the moment appointed.
[Sidenote: Pagan influence.]
Nor were there any hills from which salvation might be looked for.
Philosophy, poetry, science, expressed themselves in terms of
materialism. Faith and hope are ever the last survivors in the life of a
man or of a nation. But in Italy these brave comforters were at their
latest breath. It is perhaps unfair to accept in full the judgment of
Northern travellers. The conditions, training, needs of England and
Germany were different. In these countries courage was a necessity,
and good faith a paying policy. Subtlety could do little against a
two-handed sword in the hands of an angry or partially intoxicated
giant. Climate played its part as well as culture, and the crude pleasures
and vices of the North seemed fully as loathsome to the refined Italian
as did the tortuous policy and the elaborate infamies of the South to
their rough invaders. Alone, perhaps, among the nations of Europe the
Italians had never understood or practised chivalry, save in such select
and exotic schools as the Casa Gioiosa under Vittorino da Feltre at
Mantua. The oath of Arthur's knights would have seemed to them mere
superfluity of silliness. Onore connoted credit, reputation, and prowess.
_Virtù_, which may be roughly translated as mental ability combined
with personal daring, set the standard and ruled opinion. 'Honour in the
North was subjective: Onore in Italy objective.' Individual liberty,

indeed, was granted in full to all, at the individual's risk. The love of
beauty curbed grossness and added distinction. Fraud became an art
and force a science. There is liberty for all, but for the great ones there
is licence. And when the day of trial comes, it is the Churchmen and
the Princes who can save neither themselves nor man, nor thing that is
theirs. To such a world was Machiavelli born. To whom should he turn?
To the People? To the Church? To the Princes and Despots? But hear
him:--
'There shall never be found any good mason, which will beleeve to be
able to make a faire image of a peece of marble ill hewed, but verye
well of a rude peece. Our Italian Princes beleeved, before they tasted
the blowes of the outlandish warre, that it should suffice a Prince to
know by writinges, how to make a subtell aunswere, to write a goodly
letter, to shewe in sayinges, and in woordes, witte and promptenesse, to
know how to canvas a fraude, to decke themselves with precious stones
and gold, to sleepe and to eate with greater glory then other: To kepe
many lascivious persons about them, to governe themselves with their
subjects, covetously and proudely: To roote in idlenes, to give the
degrees of the exercise of warre for good will, to dispise if any should
have shewed them any laudable waie, minding that their wordes should
bee aunswers of oracles: nor the sely wretches were not aware that they
prepared themselves to be a pray to whome so ever should assaulte
them. Hereby grew then in the thousand fowre hundred and nintie and
fowre yere, the great feares, the sodaine flightes and the marveilous
losses: and so three most mighty states which were in Italie, have bene
dievers times sacked and destroyed. But that which is worse, is where
those that remaine, continue in the very same errour, and liev in the
verie same disorder and consider not, that those who in olde time
would keepe their states, caused to be done these thinges, which of me
hath beene reasoned, and that their studies were, to prepare the body to
diseases, and the minde not to feare perills. Whereby grewe that Cæsar,
Alexander, and all those men and excellent Princes in olde time, were
the formost amongst the fighters, going armed on foote: and if they lost
their state, they would loose their life, so that they lievd and died
vertuously.'
Such was the clay that waited the moulding of the potter's hand.
'Posterity, that high court of appeal, which is never tired of eulogising

its own justice and discernment,' has recorded harsh sentence on the
Florentine. It is better to-day to let him speak for himself.
[Sidenote: The Prince.]
The slender volume of The Prince has probably produced wider
discussion, more bitter controversy, more varied interpretations and a
deeper influence than any book save Holy Writ. Kings and statesmen,
philosophers and theologians, monarchists and republicans have all and
always used or abused it for their purposes. Written in 1513, the first
year of Machiavelli's disgrace, concurrently with part of the _Discorsi_,
which contain the germs of it, the book represents the fulness of its
author's thought and experience. It was not till