The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎105r] (214/244)

1892
NOTICEABLE
699
the art of government are invested with an extraordinary prerogative.
Therefore, while Machiavelli's early defenders were the men who made
politics a science, Grentilis, who detected irony in the and
Harrington, who calls its author the Hippocrates of political pathology,
at Rome, earnest churchmen like Cardinal Baronius and Pope Paul
the Fifth declared politicians professing allegiance to their own
scientific system the most perverse of misbelievers: ' La secta de
los Politicos, que era la mas contraria heregia que jamas huvo.' When,
in the Espritdes Lois, Montesquieu disparages the Inquisition, the
great Dominican moralist Concina exclaims: ' Machiavellismus iste
non minus politico-civili quam sacro regimini perniciosissimus est.'
Although Mr. Burd guards against the mistake by which Villari
has overstated the part of Father Possevino in turning opinion against
Machiavelli, he is impatient with the Jesuits for their zeal against
doctrines which he likens to the morality of their rule. The passage
inopportunely quoted, and often quoted heretofore as the signal of
later casuistry, the passage with the idiomatic mantrap ' obligare ad
peccatum,' does not bear the interpretation assigned ; and the root of
those things which Mariana reverently terms the Infirmities of the
Society must be looked for elsewhere than in the original Constitutions
of the Order. When we are told that nobody could think of morality
in the days of Ferdinand the Fifth and Lewis the Twelfth, and that
a public conscience did not exist, the hyperbole is intended to rouse
sluggish minds to the consideration that society is answerable for its
members, and that a character can better be judged by the examples
and opinions amid which it was formed than by any fixed principle.
The intelligent interest which Machiavelli excites to-day is not due
so much to political or religious tendency as to this maxim of recent
philosophies. It has done much to moderate judgments, and to make
history rational, at some risk to the notions of conscience, responsibihty,
and freedom, which apply with greatest fitness to men whose ability
and power raise them above their fellows and beyond their age.
In the enumeration of the classics who were known to Machiavelli
and determined his views of society and state, one or two sentences
are indicated as inspired by Thucydides. One of our authorities in
this obscure labyrinth of political thought, Leo, couples the two men
together as the keenest of all observers, and Daunou approves the
opinion that Thucydides influences not isolated passages in Machiavelli,
but the entire conformation of his mind: ' Ces observations ne
laissent du moins aucun doute sur le soin extreme avec lequel
rhistorien modeme avait etudie I'ancien.' The point has scarcely
been followed up, even in commenting on the terrible eighteenth
chapter. According to Mr. Burd, the low estimate of human nature
has more than anything else distorted his judgment; and Mr.
Symonds means the same thing when he says that indifference to
personal ethics vitiated his political writings with philosophical error.