“Kings are not made by art But right of nature, nor by treachery propt But simple virtue.”
But Machiavelli, that crude biologist, treats Moses and Cyrus as creatures of the same species, would run together the Attilas and the Buddhas. Hence the hard metallic sheen of his style as of an old Latin prose-writer; of spiritual iridescence, of Jewish tenderness, of Christian yearning, of even the Nietzschean ecstasy there is no trace. It is not astonishing that he should have turned a scornful ear to Savonarola’s message, dismissed him as a compound of fraud and cunning. How dramatic is the picture of Mephisto listening to the preacher of San Marco that week of the Carnival of 1497! (What a pity “Romola” does not exploit that episode instead of using Machiavelli as a mere caustic conversationalist). But though Machiavelli’s flair for crouching Cæsars was not utterly at fault, though the Dominican did indeed aspire to be “The Prince” of the Church, and even the power behind the thrones of the Princes of Christendom, yet ’twas all _ad majorem Dei gloriam_ and for the greater confusion of the infidel, and George Eliot has understood this impersonal egotist infinitely better than his cynical contemporary understood him. And this intellectual limitation—this absence of the highest notes from his psychological gamut—must always keep Machiavelli out of the first rank of writers. He cannot rise above the notion that power is an end in itself and that those who can satisfy it “deserve praise rather than censure.” If the King of France—he tells us—was powerful enough to invade the kingdom of Naples, then he _ought_ to have done it. Though Machiavelli could see that the individual’s crimes “may lead to sovereignty but not to glory,” yet he did not question the right of a State to absorb or shatter another. He saw that the world went on
“The simple plan That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can,”
and he admitted that the rule was indispensable—if you went into politics. This was his crime—High Treason against Idealism. Humanity prefers to be guided by rules which it disavows. The splendid blonde beasts who practised the maxims of Machiavelli shuddered at the scribe who merely stated them. Nowhere probably was disgust with the Florentine writer more vehement than in Venice, which employed assassins as a principle of polity. Could that Turkish “Prince” who decreed that each new monarch of his house must safeguard the dynasty by massacring his swarm of brothers, or that Persian “Prince” who invented the principle of blinding them, have seen the printed “Prince” of Machiavelli, they with their correct Islamic or Zoroastrian principles would have shared in the universal opprobrium.