sat one hundred and seventy-eight galley-slaves, chained four to an oar; and here in this fuscous interior the benches are no longer of plush, but of rough deal; here is no play of Fancy—here in the hard seats we touch Reality. But not herein lies the supreme sordidness of the Bucentoro—the crowning touch is given by the oars, which, at the very point where they disappear over the rowlocks under the gay arches, turn from their red and gold into a plain dirty white, like shirt-cuffs that give on soiled sleeves. ’Tis the very magnificence of meanness! The horny-handed wretches, to the rhythm of whose tired muscles this golden vessel moved along in its music and sunshine, to whose caged gloom no glimpse came of the flags and the purple, the angels and the naiads, could not even be conceded the coloured end of an oar. But could there be an apter symbol of civilisation, ancient, mediæval, or modern, than this gilded oar, whose gaudiness fades as it passes from the bravery of the outer spectacle to the grimness of the inner labour? Upon such sweating slaves rested all the glitter and pageantry of the ancient world—not only Babylon and Carthage, but even the spiritual and artistic greatness of Greece. In hoc signo vinces—in the sign of slavery; in the sign of the lion and the cross—the lion for yourself and the cross for the people. And in every land of to-day the same State-Galley glides along in bannered pomp, parading its decorative images of Peace and Justice, and the radiant creations of its Art, while below are the hard bare benches and the labouring, groaning serfs. The serfs are below, even in another sense, for it is their unsightly hands that have built up every square inch of this splendour. Beatrice d’Este went to see a galley a-building, her velvet cap and her embroidered vest stuck full of jewels; complacently recording the ejaculations of admiration for her diamonds and rubies, while the Venetian women, and even children, were toiling at making the sails and the ropes. Yes, the social order too must be gazetted bankrupt. It has, indeed, never been solvent. It has never paid its real creditors, the slaves of the uncoloured oar.

Nor does our civilisation hold much hope of a change for the fairer. Despite prophets and poets, despite Socialists, dry-as-dust or dithyrambic, despite philanthropists and preachers, the revel on the top-deck amid the velvet and the mosaics grows ever wilder, the flutes ever more Dionysiac, the fantasies on prow and poop ever more grotesquely golden. America, shorn of monarchy and feudalism and rank, and all that the friends of man screamed against, divides with Russia the hegemony of hotels and outdoes the worst extravagances and debaucheries of the Renaissance. Where in the Cinquecento a few despots and “humanists” wallowed in lust and luxury, we have now ten thousand private tyrants and loose-livers, restrained hardly by the penal law. The deeds of the Cenci or the Baglioni must be done in a glass-house in the fierce light that beats upon local greatness. The ruffians of the Renaissance had no such free field for vagaries and vices as the vagrom son of a millionaire enjoys in this modern world, where property in growing fluid has become dissolved from duty; where in every pleasure-city palaces invite and women allure and slaves grovel; where every port swarms with white-winged yachts to bear his indolent irresponsibility to glamorous shores; where in a million halls of light his world-strewn flunkeys proffer unseasonable food cooked by unsurpassable artists, and rare champagnes, oscillated for months in a strange daily ritual by troops of underground elves.

They tell us that this New Year’s Eve in New York alone some three million pounds were spent in suppers in the flaring restaurants, where between eleven and twelve o’clock only champagne could be served. Such is the New Era ushered in by the New World—the Era of Champagne. For this the Red Indian was uprooted and the wilderness tamed. For this Washington lived and Lincoln died. By the flood of champagne all standards of life and letters are swept away, save the one standard of financial success, save the ability to dine in that wonderful culinary cathedral where in a dim irreligious light as of a submarine world of faery, to a melting liturgical music, a fashionable congregation follows with absorbing zeal the lengthy order of service. What an Agapemone!

And this epidemic of vulgarity, spreading to our own country, has made the England of 1802, which Wordsworth denounced for “glittering like a brook,” the England where “plain living and high thinking” were no more, appear like an island of pristine simplicity. Even the old families surrender to the new standard and—in the plaint of Dante—“non heroico more, sed plebeo sequuntur superbiam.”

What is to be done? What is to be done about it all? We writing men, to whom the highest British manhood is still Wordsworth in that country cottage where visitors must pay for anything beyond bread and cheese, we to whom the greatest American personality is still Walt Whitman in his Camden shanty, must at least preserve our divine gift of laughter, our one poor power of laughing at these vulgarians, whom even the occasional smuggling of an Old Master out of Italy cannot redeem from barbarism.

The purple pomp of kings, blatant though it be in comparison with true grandeur, is at least the expression of a public dignity: it is an official costume like the judge’s wig and gown. But because greatness must accept office at the hands of its otherwise helpless inferiors, and office must be suitably apparelled, a certain confusion has been established between splendour and greatness, as though because greatness means splendour, splendour must mean greatness. Of this confusion those are promptest to take advantage to whom the high road to consideration is closed. Private pomp is a confession of personal pettiness. The little soul must needs inflate itself by a great house-shell, and protract itself by a long retinue of servants. ’Tis almost too pathetic a meekness, this humility of the Magnificent Ones.

Cannot I breathe into you—O Magnificent Ones—a little proper pride? Ye buy the Past, watching one another in jealous competition; will no one buy the Future? Why not buy with your millions an earth renewed and regenerated, a solvent social order? Why not build a true civilisation on this malarious marsh, that shall rise like the spires and domes of Venice from her swamps? Surely that were a dream worthy of Magnificence! Come, let us build together a State-Galley where the oars shall be red and gold from blade to handle, and every man shall take his turn at them, and the fantasies of Art shall adorn the hull of Righteousness, and Justice and Peace shall no longer be ironic images carved for the complacency of the top-deck. So shall there dawn an Ascension Day on which the Doge shall go out with banners and music, not to marry the sea with a ring, but to celebrate the nuptials of Earth with Heaven.

Private pomp is surely a questionable thing. Mediæval life centred round the Cathedral, the Castle, the Palace. And the masses touched the life at each and all. The Cathedral gave them their religion, their laws came from the Palace, their protection from the Castle. Dominating a feudal population, the towers of law and war uplifted and unified the people. The lowliest were of this greatness. To-day palaces flaunt themselves, divorced from moral meaning, magnificence without significance. The world, as I said, is full of private autocrats, without duties or dangers: an unhappy consequence of the fall of feudalism, ere a system as human was ready to replace it. And to-day the Cathedral is our one feudal relic, reconciling magnificence with morality: the light streaming through the rose-window haloes the grey head of the market-woman, and her prayer equals that of the Magnificent One himself. It is significant that no villa—whoever the architect—can attain the poetic quality of the simplest village church. The palace of Moses is nowhere mentioned, but we read many minute instructions concerning the Tabernacle and the Temple. In truth, art treasures are essentially public: the furniture of cathedrals, libraries, law-courts, market-places, and parks. The owners of collections do indeed often allow the public to visit them at inconvenient times, but that anybody should have exclusive rights is an absurdity. If Art were a form of property like any other, the owner could destroy it, and the righteous indignation of the world at the destruction of a Botticelli or a Velasquez would mark the boundaries of private property. Land comes under the same canon. Nothing, perhaps, should be owned which might not be destroyed at will.

In literature and music—which are more spirits than bodies, and which can be multiplied without loss—monopolies are unnecessary. If I write a book against Socialism, the world will applaud, and communistically possess itself thereof after a brief term. And this legal limitation of copyright which forcibly wrests epics, operas, and novels from the heirs might be extended to pictures and statues.

II

But if the galley of old Venice stimulates my Socialism, the cinematograph of modern Venice torpifies it again. For be it known that in Venice there are scores of halls and theatres devoted to delectable visions at prices to suit the poorest, and open to ragazzi for a couple of soldi. And in every city of Italy the fever rages; one performance follows on the heels of another, and the wretched manipulator of the magic lantern must subsist on sandwiches while the theatre is clearing and re-filling. Every unlet dancing-hall or decayed rink or bankrupt building has blossomed out into a hall of enchantment where even the words of the play are sometimes given by the cunning juxtaposition of gramophones. In this way I heard Amletto, or the Prince of Denmark, its too, too solid flesh melted into a meat extract. But the most wonderful spectacle of all was soundless, save for the flowing music. For twenty centesimi the Teatro S. Marco passed before my eyes an exquisite vision of Le Ore—the hours in ten “Quadri animati,” from the shiver of light that precedes the dawn to the last falling of night. In the Sala d’Aurora of the Castle of Ferrara, Dosso Dossi has depicted Tramonto, Notte, L’Aurora and Mezzogiorno, but not more poetically than the modern stage-manager who arranged these living pictures. As I watched these allegorical groupings of nymphs and fauns by their stream in the glade, I felt that the old pagan religion still lingered in the souls that could conceive and enjoy this nature-poetry.

And as I sat here, amid Venetian washerwomen and street boys, it was further borne in upon me that no State Bureau would ever have begotten this marvel for the joy and uplifting of the people, and that in the present imperfection of human nature individual initiative under the spur of gold or hunger could alone work these miracles of Socialism. “La propriété c’est la vol,” said Proudhon, but “vol” in his sense implies a bullish acceptance of the very conception he is combating. Let us translate it by “flight.” Property is the impulse of the aeroplane.

Therefore pray do not count my aspiration for a solvent social order as an adhesion to any cut and dried theory of the State owning and administering all social resources. For that sort of Socialism is—like science—bankrupt, even before it begins. It fails, not merely because it would substitute an external arrangement for a change of heart—and Socialism will either be a religion or will not be—but because no external arrangement is possible. The collective ownership of land and capital is feasible in Juan Fernandez so long as Robinson Crusoe and Friday continue exiled from civilisation, but impossible in our world of international finance, where private ownership extends to countries which the property holder will never even visit. Unless, therefore, every country in the world simultaneously adopted Socialism, there would be an inextricable tangle of Socialism and Individualism. Not to mention that capital—as every shareholder knows—means men as much as money. But even in Juan Fernandez, as soon as it became thickly populated, Socialism would be unmanageable, because the stock of concentrable human consciousness is insufficient to arrange a social order from a central bureau. Omniscience alone would be equal to the task, not to mention All Goodness and All Wisdom. Despite the vast loss by friction and absence of organisation, despite the vast suffering, the struggle for existence is the only agency capable of fitting the pegs into the holes. Shall the State, for example, select which man shall write poetry? And still more vital, which poetry the State Press shall print? We have already had experience of the State as a selector of Laureates and a censor of drama, and Milton knew it as a censor of literature. Our most brilliant Socialists, an they had their way, would be reduced to pasting pasquinades on the pedestals of our street statues.

But in a looser connotation, “we are all Socialists now,” if indeed we ever were anything else. From the day of the first human grouping for co-operation and common defence, Socialism has been the rule of life, and the question of how the common work and the common products are to be apportioned is a mere question of organised distribution. That we have hitherto left this cumbrous and infinitely complex problem of distribution to solve itself by natural selection does not make society less socialistic. Nor would the discovery of a more excellent way of dividing up the labour and its results make society more socialistic. For compared with the assets of civilisation in which we share equally—the museums, picture galleries, libraries, parks, roads, schools, life-boat and fire-engine services, armies, navies, light-houses, weather-bureaus, asylums, hospitals, observatories—the assets in which we share unequally are relatively unimportant, and without sacrificing to a machine the zest and stimulus of liberty, and the fine flavour of individuality, it is a comparatively simple matter to minimise the waste and suffering produced by the struggle for existence, and to arrange that talent shall rise to the top, not for its sake but our own. It is no evil that one man should live in a palace and another in a cottage; these differences even add to the colour and joy of life. The evil is solely that any man willing to work should lack a cottage, or that the cottage should be a malarious hovel. Levelling up is the only reform necessary, as it is the only reform possible. For if the gradual consolidation of railways, land, mines, and a few leading industries in the hands of the State is not beyond practical politics, this would still be very far from “Socialism,” and it is vastly amusing to witness the agony of apprehension with which respectable society looks forward to the advent of a social order which cannot possibly materialise, and which menaces us less than the flaming tail of a comet. Only less amusing is the awe with which society regards Property as something sacrosanct in quality and immutable in quantity. Why, even the King’s shilling is as nimble and elusive as mercury, will buy you mutton to-day and only tripe to-morrow, and scarcely run to dog-sausage in a siege. Property is a Proteus, a shadow, a transient and generally embarrassed phantom. Property merely means a potential call upon human service—past or future—and if human service is unwilling or absent, Property shrinks or collapses, like the bag of pearls found by the thirsting Arab in the desert. Finance—like all other branches of science—has been treated as though its subject-matter had absolute existence. But the assets of the world’s bankers incalculably outrun the world’s power of service, and Property is merely a promissory note which can only be redeemed if there is not too great a run upon the labour bank at which it is presented. Still more elastic is the service that produces this right to call upon the service of others. A hundred thousand readers buy this book—instead of borrowing it—and I am a Crœsus; a hundred, and I am free of income tax. Motor cars are invented, and my house in Ascot falls to half its former value because the smart set need no longer stay overnight during the Ascot week. My unknown aunt remembers me in her will and I am a thousand pounds the richer. The Seine rises and my Paris flat is a ruin. I die and my land dwindles to six feet. Where in this foolish flux is room for holiness? And why may not society—the only source of values—mould Property as it will for society’s ends? Why—among the many vicissitudes with which Property must reckon—should not social reform count equally with bad harvests, wars of conquest and Stock Exchange manœuvres?

To say that Property is sacred is to confuse the means with the end, like the miser who hoards his gold and forgets its uses. Society is sacred, not Property, and whatever sanctitude or stability has been attached to Property has been attached entirely for socialistic purposes; not that the individual may be enriched, but that he may not lose the spur that drives him to enrich society. Individual property is merely a by-product of labour for society. He who demands overmuch for his labour is under-moralised. The true citizen is anxious to be taxed for the general good, provided his taxes are used for social service. He is anxious that some form of distribution of the common products shall be organised to supplement natural selection and correct its over-harshness. Experience might prove that interference with natural selection saps the stamina and initiative of society more than it benefits the “submerged tenth,” in which case we should reluctantly return to the present form of Socialism.

As for land, it is the one thing that I can conceive nationalised even under our present form of Socialism, nay, which is already nationalised to the extent that the private owners of British land may not sell it to Germany or Japan, as they may sell anything else of theirs. Every new State should doubtless begin by trying to nationalise its land. I say “trying,” because it is by no means certain that it would succeed, since so far from the increment in land values being unearned, it is the very possibility of earning it that induces the pioneer to suffer peril, privation and isolation. Were Canada, for example, not to give away its land, the many adventurers who have flowed in from the United States would probably have remained at home, and all this Canadian territory have been still empty. And once you have made land quasi-private property, it cannot justly be subjected to any peculiar tax, since colossal as is the rise of land values in growing towns, the value of land is controlled by the same factors of luck and judgment as rule all other property values, and may be depreciated as well as enhanced by the operation of social forces beyond the owner’s control or prevision. Wherefore all increments in value—in stocks and shares, copyrights, patents, &c. &c.—should be treated as potential matter for taxation equally with the so-called “unearned increment” on land.

One would imagine from the war cries in our latest political campaign that Socialism was already upon us, and that the only refuge from it lay in Tariff Reform. But it is precisely Tariff Reform which is Socialism; a taxation of the entire community in the interests of this or that industry. Nor should the entire community be averse from taxation for any provably good object; a moralised community would even be always looking round for fresh methods of self-taxation. Budget Day would be a national festival, a day of solemn joy, tense with the hope that new ways would be found of making England the Kingdom of God. Alas! it is a day of sick anxiety, with a sequel of farcical unfailingness, in which every section taxed sends a deputation to show that it is the one section that should have been left unburdened, while from the bloated gluttons and swillers at the great hotels arises the cry of “Red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And the poor philanthropist we have always with us—he who threatens to stop his charity contributions. As if the abolition of charity was not the very object of social reform! Every benevolent activity means a sore in the social system, and charity covers indeed a multitude of our sins.

Strange that these sordid questions of money should so fever this mighty England of Shakespeare and Milton. Ship-money cost Charles the First his head, and a petty land tax changes the House of Peers. Poor humanity, so deluded as to the essential values of life, so peculiarly demented in all that concerns Property! But I bid you cast away your fears. I repeat to you my good tidings of great joy. Socialism is impossible. A perfect and just distribution of the goods and labours of life—“to each according to his needs, from each according to his powers”—is Utopian. Moreover envy, hatred and all uncharitableness prevent it: stupidity, sloth, selfishness, treachery and tyranny preclude it. Rejoice, therefore, and let us cry Hosanna!

Nor are these evil qualities confined to the capitalist, they are found in even uglier forms in the working man, who is merely a capitalist without means, and through his Trade Unions talks equally of rights and even less of duties and ideals.

But if Socialism is impossible, and Socialist parties consequently deficient in constructive potency, they yet perform in every country a critical and regulative function of the first importance. Our own Labour members are the only gentlemen in British politics. To all questions, national or international, they bring a broad spirit and a quixotic ideal, and while our Howards and our Percys cower in craven terror of Germany, or make prudent alliance with Holy Russia, or handle with correlative despotism India, Ireland or the woman question, our men from the pits and the factories sit free and fearless, the sole guardians of England’s ancient glory.

Arrestive was it in an aisle of Santa Croce—the Florentine Church of the Holy Cross—to come upon a monument to Niccolò Machiavelli, anathema alike for Catholicism and Protestantism, the “Old Nick” of the Hudibras rhyme. ’Twas as if Mephisto had managed not only to slip into the Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But even a devil is not given his due at the hands of his own countrymen: it was reserved for an English earl, more than two and a half centuries after Mephisto’s passing, to provide his works with a splendid setting and his remains with a massive monument. And so, in the dim religious light, I pondered over the stately inscription:

How, indeed, equate eulogy to so great a name? Machiavelli was our first modern—the first to exhibit the reign of law in human affairs, to read history as the play of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy Providence, modified by the stars. What an epic sweep in the opening sentences of his “History of Florence”—Gibbon in a nutshell, the whole “Decline and Fall,” summarised as the economic emigration southward of the surplus population of the Goths into an Italy weakened by the removal of the seat of Empire to Constantinople. Vagarious chance, indeed, he admits, as a complication (to be minimised by prudence), but Providence is mentioned in “The Prince,” only to be dropped, and astrology is not even mentioned. Machiavelli would have agreed that “the fault’s in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are underlings,” and for those who wished to prince it, he was prepared to point the conditions of success. And this indifference to the stars—to quadrangles and hexagons, sigils, conjunctions, and configurations—is not his least amazing merit.

Pico della Mirandola had, indeed, refuted astrology before him, but it was in the interests of that conventional theory of Providence and free-will which leaves the chaos of history irreducible to order. Machiavelli not only ignores astrology, but substitutes causation for the chaos.

’Tis true Comte suggested that astrology was, likewise, an attempt to reduce to law the chaos of human phenomena, but the remark is over-ingenious. Where there is no rational connection between causes and effects there is no science. The planetary conjuncture one was born under might, indeed, not impossibly affect temperament or internal destiny, just as the climate one was born under, but the notion that it could shape external destiny belongs to the mediæval megalomania. Galileo’s discovery of new stars must have shaken it, falsifying as it did all previous horoscopes—indeed, Sir Henry Wotton, our ambassador to Venice, was more impressed by Galileo’s injuriousness to astrology than to theology. “For the virtue of these new planets must needs vary the judicial part, and why may there not yet be more?” But Machiavelli belongs to the pre-telescope period; he wrote a whole century before Galileo, and thirty years ere Copernicus unsettled the ancient heavens by his Nuremberg treatise. True, even in the twelfth century, Maimonides had denounced astrology as “a disease, not a science,” and the great Jew’s letter “to the Men of Marseilles” had evoked papal applause. But not even Popes could arrest the disease. A century before Machiavelli was born Petrarch poured scorn on the astrologers. But the mockeries of this pioneer of humanism did not save a prince of the Renaissance like Lodovico from employing an astrologer advisory, under whose calculations he went from disaster to disaster. There were even Professors of Astrology at the Universities. Bodin, the next great political philosopher after Machiavelli, though half a century later, still dallies with astrology, still coquets with the theory of a connection between the planetary motions and the world’s history, while Copernicus he regards as a fantast unworthy of serious refutation.

Earlier in the sixteenth century Luther had denounced astrology as “framed by the devil,” and in his Table Talk had challenged the astrologers to answer him why Esau and Jacob, who were “born together of one father and one mother, at one time and under equal planets” were yet “wholly of contrary natures, kinds and morals.” Nevertheless in the next century, Milton in “Paradise Regained” makes Satan predict truly to Jesus on the strength of

give him to spell, and throughout the whole seventeenth century, as “Guy Mannering” reminds us, nativities continued to be cast. The child’s horoscope in some parts of Europe hung side by side with his baptismal certificate. Even to-day such phrases as “Thank your lucky stars,” conserve a shadow of the ancient belief, and the sidereal influence survives even more subtly in the word “consider.” Through such banks of fog pierces the searchlight of the great Florentine, it turns its powerful beam even upon Church history. The Princes of ecclesiastical principalities, he remarks drily, are the only ones who can possess States and subjects without governing and defending them, but it would be presumptuous in him to discuss these matters, as they are under the superintendence and direction of an Almighty Being, whose dispensations are beyond our weak understandings. But the Church has likewise attained temporal power, and here Mephisto may intrude without blasphemy. Secular triumphs demand secular explanations. One is reminded of the dialogue on Julius II attributed to Erasmus. Our Mephisto notes grimly that no prophet has ever succeeded unless backed by an armed force. Hence the collapse of “brother Jerome Savonarola when the multitude ceased to have faith in him.” In short, in the making of history Might and Right are partners.

Not in the exposition of this commonplace lay Machiavelli’s offensiveness for his contemporaries. Had he remained the passionless observer of the pitiful human breed, the explicator of the tangled threads of history, he would have been acclaimed as a moralist, unveiling with ruthless hand the hypocrisies of princes. What changed angel to devil was that instead of fulminating against the partnership of Might and Right, he found that only by this firm could history be made. He wrote not science but art—the ars usurpandi. Not only had the Princes of the past combined Might with Right, guile with goodness, but whoso wished now to be a Prince must needs go and do likewise. The ethics springing from the social relations of citizen to citizen no longer holds in the relation of ruler to subjects.

It is true “The Prince” might also be regarded as an elaborate Swiftian irony—a negative Pulcinellian advice to those about to usurp—an exposition of Princedom as the service of the devil. “A New Prince cannot with impunity exercise all the virtues, because his own self-preservation will often compel him to violate the laws of charity, religion and humanity.” But this Swiftian supposition does not tally with the dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and his overt encouragement to the Most Magnificent to seize the reins. Machiavelli plainly believes in the sense he alleges hidden by the ancients in the myth of Chiron the Centaur, who was the educator of rulers because he had the double qualification of the brute and the man. In high politics crimes are only crimes when they are blunders. Unsuccessful cruelty is unpardonable. Wickedness should be pursued with an economy of means to end: like the causes in Occam’s canon, crimes should not be multiplied præter necessitatem. Politics is a sort of bee-keeping, and the master of the hive will use the instincts and ethics of the little creatures for his own purposes, his kindness will be as cold-blooded as his cruelty. Thus, some three and a half centuries before Nietzsche, was expounded the doctrine of the Superman, the splendid blonde beast who had passed Jenseits von Gut und Böse. “The despised virtues of patience and humility have abased the spirits of men, which Pagan principles exalted.” It is in such precisely Nietzschean terms that Sir Thomas Browne sums up, albeit unapplausively, “the judgment of Machiavel.” But as a treatise on apiculture, “The Prince” is not rigidly scientific. The Superman, alone upon his dizzy height, Diabolists and neo-Dionysians as yet unborn to cheer him, has his moments of human weakness. Before the crimes of Agathocles he falters, and remarks with delicious gravity, “Still it must not be called virtue to murder one’s fellow-citizens or to sacrifice one’s friends, or be insensible to the voice of faith, pity or religion. These qualities may lead to sovereignty but not to glory.” And there is a more general apologia in the concession that the times are out of joint—in the grim Tacitean explanation that “he who deviates from the common course of practice, and endeavours to act as duty dictates, necessarily ensures his own destruction.” Super-morality lapses here into morality.

Moreover, Machiavelli did not himself play the Superman. He wrote the part—or founded it on Cæsar Borgia—but he did not act it. The Rubicon ’twixt thought and action he never crossed. His own morals appear to have been conventionally excellent. Like Helvetius, who traced virtue to the lowest roots of self-interest, he was of a rare magnanimity. As a scientific observer he advises the Tyrant, if he cannot live in the Republic he has conquered, to destroy it root and branch, but as a man he bore torture and imprisonment for the cause of liberty. Indeed, in his later years something of the sæva indignatio of Swift seems to have possessed his breast. It was Napoleon who was destined to incarnate the maxims of Machiavelli, though on a far grander stage than even Cæsar Borgia ever dreamed of: it was Napoleon who gave the greatest performance of “The Prince.” And by a hitherto unnoted coincidence Napoleon was born exactly three centuries after Machiavelli. Exactly three hundred years (1469-1769) divided the nativities of the Superman of Letters and the Superman of Action—’tis almost enough to revive faith in the potency of planetary conjunctures. True, Nietzsche regards Napoleon as but “half-Superman,” the other half being beast, but we have seen that the bestial portion is a necessary factor of the Machiavellian Superman, who is nothing if not super-dominant. What Nietzsche’s Superman was to be, Nietzsche did not precisely know, though we may well suspect that the direction in which he strained his vision for him was not the horizon but the looking glass. Nietzsche has not even the credit of inventing the Superman, for when Nietzsche was six years old, Tennyson published “In Memoriam,” with its prophetic peroration:

Tennyson pressed home this idea of the further evolution of our race in his very last volume, in a poem called “The Making of Man.”

And again in “The Dawn.”

More self-conscious a disciple of Machiavelli than Napoleon was our own Thomas Cromwell, who carried “The Prince” as his political enchiridion, and who within three years of its publication chopped off Sir Thomas More’s head as coolly as a knight captures a bishop on a chess-board. If you have to choose between love and fear, said the Master, then fear is the stronger weapon. With fear, Thomas the pupil hewed his way to the great ends he had set himself. Thomas Cromwell’s application of the system was, however, vitiated by one radical mistake. By a paradox, worthy of Machiavelli himself—and repeated in our own day by Bismarck—“the Prince” he worked for was not himself but his sovereign. Howsoever Thomas Crommay have appeared the true gerent, the final profit was to the suzerain, and the axe of despotism which he had forged for Henry VIII was turned against his own neck. Of his canon that traitors should be condemned unheard, he was the sole victim. Possibly he might have triumphed even over the flaw in his practice, had Anne of Cleves been more personable. It was essential to his game to queen this pawn, and queen her he did. But at what a cost! It has been said that if Cleopatra’s nose had been longer, the world’s history would have been other. Of the German princess’s nose it may be said that had it been prettier—or perchance had Holbein flattered it less before it was seen by the matrimonial agent—Thomas Cromwell would have continued to rule England, and Europe might have been spared the Thirty Years’ War. But even Supermen cannot change the shape of ladies’ noses, and in this surd of a world, where the best laid plans may “gang agley” over the tilt of a nostril, what avail your Supermen more than Supermice? The toasted cheese is but temporary, the end of Napoleon is the mouse-trap.

The phenomena of history are indeed too multifarious for consciousness, and the Machiavellian method of treating persons as things—in defiance of the moral maxim—shatters itself upon the impossibility of foreseeing all the permutations of the things. A bad prince is no more secure against assassination than a good prince. A religious reformer may arise and upset the snuggest peace. A failure of crops may precipitate rebellion. A child’s arm may plug up a dam. In brief, lacking the necessary omniscience, the shrewdest of Supermen is driving in the dark. The upshot of Napoleon’s career was to make Germany and mutilate France.

It is through lack of omniscience, too, that we cannot obey the frequent modern suggestion to breed the Superman—the Superman, that is, not as the cold-blooded manipulator of man, but as his moral superior and successor, Tennyson’s Superman, not Nietzsche’s. We are too abysmally ignorant for evolutionary eugenics. We breed horses and roses for higher types, but then we immeasurably transcend horses and roses. Who transcends us so immeasurably that he should breed us? In breeding we have a clear vision of our aim—to produce a thornless rose or a Derby winner. What clear vision has any one of the Superman? It is impossible to read even Nietzsche without seeing a spectral swarm of shifting types. Moreover we breed only for physical qualities. What experience have we of breeding for moral qualities? And what were all our breedings compared with Nature’s inexhaustible experimentation, her thousand million men and women of all shades and psychoses, her endless blendings and crossings that yield now Nietzsches, now Isaiahs; yesterday Platos, to-day Darwins and Wagners.

The Superman will come of himself: already man rises as imperceptibly into him as he fades into the orang-outang. “This was no man,” said Napoleon, reading the Sermon on the Mount—an involuntary admission by the Machiavellian of a finer species of Superman than his own.

And this brings us to the paradox that the defect in Machiavelli’s system was not in his morals but in his intellect. In the hive he examined were creatures greater than he, obeying motives beyond his ken. To him Princes ruled primarily for their own glory, for the pomp and pride of power. Of the small but infinitely important class of rulers who assume mastership only because they have the greatest power to serve, he has no adequate conception. That there has sometimes been a Pope who felt himself literally servus servorum Dei passed his comprehension. This falsifies his treatment of history, this makes his vision imperfect, this throws his conclusions out of gear. The verse in St. Matthew, “he that is greatest among you shall be servant of all the rest,” represents a more scientific generalisation. As Chapman’s Don Byron (Act 3, Scene 1) reminds us, in his denunciation of “the schools first founded in ingenious Italy,” the true

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

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.

That the world shudders still is shown by the apologetic attitude of his commentators and even of his panegyrists. Not one but repudiates his system, charitably traces it to the unhappy circumstances of his day, to the welter of force and fraud amid which his lot was cast. Yet are these circumstances essentially changed? The small urban republics have vanished, but in their stead are the Great Powers. Cæsar Borgia and Ezzelino are gone, but we have the Congo Ruler and the Trust Magnate. “Every country hath its Machiavel,” says Sir Thomas Browne, and there is no spot on earth where the maxims of “The Prince” are not in daily operation. The voice may be the voice of Savonarola, but the hands are the hands of Machiavelli.

Nay, it is often the voice of Machiavelli even when it sounds like the voice of Savonarola. For, as Lord Acton subtly pointed out, Machiavellism lurks in many a seemingly innocent and even pious proposition. It is perhaps straining his point to find it in Jeremy Bentham’s “greatest happiness principle,” but who shall doubt but that it is involved in the popular idea that “Time tries all,” and that everything happens for the best in the long run, and that history is, after all, the Will of God? What are all these nebulous notions but the acceptance of success—of the brute fact—as the moral standard? Less obvious than the proposition that “God is on the side of the biggest battalions,” they are substantially identical with it. They simply mean that God was on the side of the biggest battalions. They imply that whichever party triumphed, God was with that party. So that many even of those who reject Machiavelli with loathing are found to be unconsciously Machiavellian.

Hallam in his “Introduction to the Literature of Europe” palliates the darker features of the Machiavellian teaching by the nature of the times, yet in his own “Europe during the Middle Ages,” writing of the rapid decay of Charlemagne’s Empire under his son Louis, “called by the Italians the Pious, and by the French the Debonair or Good-natured,” he says “the fault lay entirely in his heart; and this fault was nothing but a temper too soft and a conscience too strict. It is not wonderful that the Empire should have been speedily dissolved.” And Charlemagne, its peerless founder, is described as having divorced nine wives, beheaded four thousand Saxons in a single day, and executed all who ate flesh during Lent!

It is when I hear the words of Church or Press, Parliaments or Royal Proclamations, that I fall into a rage against language, and even as Sancho Panza blessed the man who invented sleep, I curse the man who invented speech. In the beautiful dumb days the strong rent the weak in sacred simplicity. Now the strong make pious speeches to show that the eupepsia of the universe is their appetite’s aim, and the weak must listen to proofs that they are being eaten for their own good. Happily the serpent no longer talks, else were his slow slimy deglutition of the living rabbit accompanied by a sermon. The State has not only killed Christ but stolen his words. At the Hague the lion and the lamb lie down together, and the concordial words flow on like music, till the lamb suggests that the lion should pare his claws. And the lamb himself—is he anything but a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is he not at heart envious of claws, always feeling his paws for talons of his own?

“And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee, thou shalt smite them and utterly destroy them: thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” Where outside Machiavelli shall you find a clean strong sentence like this of Moses? The Destroying Angel’s sword shall be sharp and antiseptic as a surgeon’s knife; he shall leave no writhing torsoes, no half-sawn limbs and festering wounds littering the purlieus of life. But this utterance is too strong for Christian stomachs, it belongs to the fee-fo-fum eye-for-eye period of the Old Testament: with the New entered the reign of ethereal mildness, lilies showering from full hands, festal fountains spouting the milk of human kindness. Well might Wordsworth cry out: