The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎103v] (211/244)

696
THE NINETEENTH
April
4.
ME. BUED'S MACHIAVELLL 1
T he Clarendon edition of tlie Prince closes a long vista of conjecture
and controversy. Coming after so many ingenious interpreters, Mr,
Burd's plan lias been to illustrate his text with every available passage
from the authors known to Machiavelli and every fact from the history
of his times. There is not an allusion, not a literary or historical remi
niscence, which he has not traced, not a curve in that bewildering line
of thought which he leaves unaccounted for. Having supplied us to
excess with the means of judging for ourselves, he does not press his
own psychology 5 for, when all elements have been considered, and all
circumstances brought to bear, the character of the dubious Florentine
will continue to be estimated individually according to the allowance
each man is in the habit of making for mixture of motive, for
religion and policy, for tradition and environment. Mr. Burd is
careful not to allow the later development of Machiavellism to divert
him from the study of Machiavelli; but he follows the history of
interpretation through two centuries, showing how many com
mentators have been unintelligent and unjust. Better days have
dawned long since; and a dozen years ago the soberest of aca
demicians, St. Eene Taillandier, affirmed in the weightiest of reviews
that impartial criticism finally pronounces Machiavelli a martyr and
a patriot, whose accuser must be an impostor or a fool. The time
has passed to which Darwin's words apply, that false views do little
harm, as every one takes a salutary pleasure in proving their falseness.
The torrent of prejudice no longer threatens the footstep of the
student, and without effort he makes himself clear of the irritation of
one epoch and the apologies of another.
Machiavelli wrote in the midst of disaster to himself and the
nation, when his party was ruined and the foreigner predominated,
north and south. The constellation under which the chief states of
central Italy were governed by one family offered chances of achieving
the work in which Csesar Borgia, by the accident which disabled him
at the crisis of his fate, had lamentably failed. The lesson of his
career might yet be made to bear auspicious fruit if the Medici, with
twice the resources of the Borgias, could produce a warrior fit to
understand it, and cautious in the use of poison. The best thing was
an independent republic; the next was a vigorous monarchy. Whether
pleading for Csesarism or a Commonwealth, whether thinking of his
1 II Principe. By Niccolo Machiavelli. Edited by L.Arthur Burd. Oxford;
Clarendon Press. 1891.