Buch lesen: "Guicciardini"

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Born in 1482, he was a little younger than Machiavelli and Michelangelo, and he died in 1540. He was descended from a tolerably long line of respectable burghers, of whom he has left us a full account, including half a dozen vignettes that show in graphic style what manner of folk they were. They kept shops where they sold silk and other wares; they owned ships and were their own skippers; they went to the Levant and Flanders and wherever else in the narrower and simpler trade of that day money was to be picked up; and they filled at one time or another all the various public posts of secondary rank in Florence. A sort of family likeness is to be traced among them. The men were strong, good-looking, warm in temper yet cautious in politics, weighty, of good character according to the standard of time and place, and with a sharp eye to the main chance. The Guicciardini were not great people, but they were steady, well-to-do, respectable people, and the historian was proud of his stock. Two things in the world, he told his descendants, he cared about —one, the perpetual exaltation of the city and its freedom; the other, 'the glory of our house, not only for my life, but for always.'

It has been energetically said of 'the sombre and sublime Italy' of the sixteenth century, that life was a mortal combat, the house a fortress, the garment a cuirass, hospitality an ambush, the embrace a garotte, the proffered cup poison, the proffered hand a dagger-thrust.^[2] This, however, was not all, and in truth this fierce melodrama never can be all. Here is Guicciardini's vignette of his father, to whom he was to the end of his days deeply and tenderly attached:—

Peter was truly a wise man, and of as great judgment and insight as any man in Florence in his time; nobody had a better or a clearer conscience; he was a lover of his city and of the poor; and he never did a human creature the smallest wrong. For these things, as well as for the qualities of his house and his forefathers, he was from his youth upwards held in high esteem, and he carried himself in such a way that in brain and in weight there was no man in Florence to equal him. If only to his goodness and his prudence had been added a little more vivacity, he would have stood still higher. But either because nature made him so, or because it was due to the times, which were in truth strong times and strange, he went about his affairs with little boldness and much wariness; taking up few ventures, working at public things slowly and with great deliberation, never willing, save when necessity or conscience constrained him, to say outright in important matters what was his real mind and judgment. Though his carefulness not to put himself at the head of a party, or of novel schemes and undertakings, prevented his name from being on everybody's lips, yet it had this other effect, that in the midst of all the tumult and agitation that the city went through in his day, he always kept himself and his position out of reach of hurt. That was more than happened to anybody else of his degree, when all the other considerable people ran such risks in property or life.... These things made the city grieve sorely over his death, and all good men felt his loss, the people and citizens of every class— everybody knowing that a wise and good citizen was gone, and one from whom both in universal and particular no mischief could ever have come, but only good fruit and well-doing.[3]

Guicciardini was in important employment from 1512, when at the age of thirty he was sent to represent the Republic of Florence at the Court of Ferdinand of Aragon. He returned home in the following year. In 1515 he was appointed to meet Leo the Tenth on behalf of the Republic, and from 1516 to 1523 he was made papal officer in the Emilia. Then he was named the Pope's viceroy in the Romagna, and lieutenant-general in the papal army. He shared some of the responsibility for the disasters that are summed up in the Sack of Rome (1527), but this did not prevent his promotion, when the time came, to be the Pope's governor at Bologna (1531). He did his work with energy, tact, and capacity, until at last the death of Clement the Seventh (1534) put an end to his employment in the papal service.

His life by this time 'became a series of expedients, in which he loses personal consideration, his reputation for honour, and at last his whole credit and power.'^[4] Though always free from direct corruption, and according to his own account a believer rather in politic clemency than in rigour, yet when he was sent by the Pope in 1530 to punish the Florentines for their rising, he showed himself merciless and vindictive, and repaid the revolutionary party in their own coin for the fierce rancour with which, when they were uppermost, they had handled the friends of Clement the Seventh.^[5] By conviction he was in favour of an oligarchy, and his private writings prove that he estimated the Medici and their tyranny at what they were worth. But neither fools nor wise, he said, 'can in the end resist that which has to be.' 'All states and cities are mortal; everything, either by its nature or by accident, comes to a close. Hence a citizen who finds himself watching the dissolution of his country, need not so much groan over this disgrace, as over his own lot. His country only suffers what in any case it was bound to suffer. The true unhappiness is that of the man who chances to have been born in an age when the moment of his country's doom has struck.' This has been called a sublime stoicism. It is perhaps nearer to that fatalism, not sublime, with which in times of political confusion men excuse a secret surrender to self-interest. An ancient traveller found on the Acrocorinthus a mysterious shrine dedicated to Necessity and Force. These two are potent divinities indeed, and well deserve a temple; still, sublime stoic is hardly the name for him who bows down humbly within their walls, and seeks to propitiate them in his own favour at any price in burnt offerings.

In one of his Reflections Guicciardini inculcates the perilous doctrine that it is the duty of a good citizen to do his best to live on such terms with a tyrant, as to be able to counsel good courses and dissuade from bad ones. 'How disastrous,' he cries, 'would the Government of the Medici have been, if they had been surrounded only by fools and knaves.' Acting on this principle, which in various applications has been the undoing of many a better man in cabinets and parties since—say from Falkland and Colepeper in the seventeenth century down to Prévost Paradol in the nineteenth— Guicciardini became servant of the most odious of the Medici. Finally, he was the means of raising Cosimo to be head of the State. Cosimo was only eighteen, he was fond of pleasure, aud Guicciardini took care that he should have a handsome income. When the sum was fixed, Guicciardini at the council table, lowering his face and raising his eyebrows, said dryly, 'Twelve thousand golden florins are fine spending.' But craft is not confined to greybeards, and young Cosimo was no sooner secure, than he discarded his mentor. Guicciardini went off to his villa (1534); he was fifty-two; he had abundant material to his hand; he had ever been an indefatigable penman; and he now spent the six years of life that were left in the composition of his great work on the history of Italy. Clarendon was seven years older when he too in exile and disgrace 'betook himself to his books,' and with indomitable activity of mind and pen completed the famous story of his own time.

Guicciardini was reasonably free from the discouragement and dejection, with which satiety of life is apt to affect men's judgment and temper. He was nearing that period of his age, 'dove ciascum dovrebbe Calar le vele, e raccoglier le sarte'—when every lofty soul, like the mariner drawing near the port, should lower sails and gather in the ropes. Though men are often spoiled by success in the world, still more are spoiled by failure. Guicciardini was wise enough to look to what he had done, rather than at what he had missed. What he seeks, and what he attains, is rather a reasoned fortitude than that serenity, that 'great lesson of suavity,' as Dante calls it, which brings a man to face his end without grief or bitterness. He did not pretend to like the falling of the curtain, but he consoled himself by thinking for how many important parts he had been cast by Fortune, and how well he had played them all. He was without that morbid ambition, as it has been called, and a very morbid ambition it is, which pretends to treat all grief, anger, mortification, chagrin, as weaknesses to be ashamed of. He makes no foolish attempt to cure his wound either by a spurious rhetoric that places things out of perspective and proportion, or by a spurious philosophy that pretends to turn pain into pleasure by juggling with words as if they were things. Various are the attitudes of men towards the outside unseen divinity,—Fortune, Chance, Necessity, Force of Circumstance—when it overthrows them. Some defy, some whimper, some fall stunned, some break their hearts once for all, others silently obey the grim ordering of events and with courage gather up the shattered pieces. The ancient literature of consolation contains some famous pieces, from Seneca, the friend of Nero, down to Boethius, the friend of Theodoric.^[6] If we would measure the differences of times and men, it is well worth while to turn to that grave and beautiful piece in our own literature, so full of enlightenment, liberality, wisdom, tenderness, and piety, where Bishop Burnet concludes his history. 'I have,' he says, 'considering my sphere, seen a great deal of all that is most shining and tempting in this world: the pleasures of sense I did soon nauseate; intrigues of state and the conduct of affairs have something in them that is more specious, and I was for some years deeply immersed in these, though still with hopes of reforming the world, and of making mankind wiser and better; but I have found that which is crooked cannot be made straight.' And then he goes on his way to his devout and lofty moral. So at a moment when all his counsels had come to nought, when his patron, the Holy Father, was a prisoner in the castle of Saint Angelo, and Rome was suffering all the violence and horror of prolonged sank at the hands of ferocious Spaniard and barbaric German, Guicciardini tried his hand at self-consolation.^[7]

Politely despatching with summary mention the comforting assurances of theologians and philosophers, as physic that no patient would voluntarily choose to take, 'I will speak to thee,' he says to himself, 'in a lower key than all that, and more according to the nature of men and the world.' It comes to this after all. Human enterprises are ever apt to miscarry; he knew this when he embarked upon the voyage; the wreck was no special fault of his, for popes, kings, and emperors were the principals, and he no more than an instrument; his arguments for the war against the Emperor may have been an error of judgment, but it is not fair to expect a man to carry into the council-chamber, besides merely human reasonings, the prognosticating judgments of astrologers and sooth-sayers; in fine, 'tis time mends all, and men will see that he was blameless. Such is the strain of his autobiographic meditation. Then he recovers the self-respect of which he is in search, by appeal to his past: 'Ask all the places where thou hast been, the peoples over whom thou hast been set to rule, the armies that have been under thy orders. They will own that thou art a man of talent, resolute in taking decisions, abundant in resource, expeditious in act.' Wholly free from the insincerities and inflations of the professing cynic, stoic, or anchorite, Guicciardini's consolation is rational and worth reading. Nevertheless at the end of it perhaps an impartial person would commend to statesmen in misfortune not all this argumentation, explanation, consolation, sophistication, but the simple concision of Thucydides—'It befell me to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis.' And no more.

In every age cases meet us where experience changes the idealist and the reformer, first to doubter, then to indifferent, next to pure egotist, at last to hard cynic. The process may be gradual, but it is apt to be implacable, and the fallen man one day awakes to find his sensibility gone, his moral pulse at a stand, and a once ardent soul burnt down to ashes. When the waking hour arrives, one man may still have grace enough to go out and weep bitterly; another only mocks. There is no sign that Guicciardini ran through all these stages of the political Sceptic's Progress. He was man of the world from first to last. Dreams and visions such as make for some the charmed part of life, were never anything to him. In a series of extraordinarily suggestive considerations on Machiavelli's Discorsi,^[8] he gravely exposes that vivid writer's excess of severity in logic, excess of colour in his ideals, excess of eloquence in description; and teaches us the lesson of which the publicist in all times seems to stand so much in need, that in politics, your proposition should be guarded by temperance, reserve, common sense, and all the qualifications of practice. This prudence did not at all spring in Guicciardini from the trait noted by Aristotle in elderly men,—a fondness for only saying 'I think,' never 'I know';^[9] and for larding their argument with 'perhaps' and 'possibly.' Experience had taught him that government is the most complex of subjects, and general maxims about it the most in need of caution. He had not even ambition of the ravening sort. He was not of those who must be Premier, President, Commander-in-Chief, or Admiral of the Fleet. Yet he had much honourable public spirit. 'Three things,' he said, 'I would willingly see before I die: a well-ordered republic in my native Florence; the barbarian invaders driven from Italy; the world freed from the rascal priests.' These objects he honestly desired, but he did not much expect them, and he was not the man to make a fight for them. He had a passion for the transaction of public business, he wished to see it well done with a view to ends well ordered, and he had a strong capacity for it. We should in charity and sense remember that it is a natural infirmity, even of noble minds, to identify their own personality with the furtherance of the common good.