“In order to furnish the mind of his prince, Machiavelli does what poor courtiers have always done, since the wealthy have no need ever to go beyond allegory: he describes with cold incisiveness, passionately, as if writing detective fiction, what his eyes see in the life of his times. A superficial summing up of Machiavelli: life and history are stripped of any transcendent meaning; they are but a struggle between forms, a struggle that is always, necessarily, won by the strongest. The world has no purpose or endpoint. Men have been the same in every era. The march of humanity through history is mainly expressed in the ebbs and eddies around the struggle for power, that many desire and few attain — the wiliest and the strongest. Man is simply a combination of passions and self-interest and the government of State is government over individual passions and interests. Family, Municipality, Principality, and State are forms emptied of content within which individuals give rein to their aggressive drives. Ancient history (the Discourses on Livy) is exactly the same as modern history, and one only has to recreate its victories and eliminate its failures to be right about everything and wield might and right over everyone. The Prince, the coda to his political science, is a selection of maxims to enable one to control all eventualities and fulfill all one’s aims, by manipulating, duping, subjecting, and killing individuals. He examines the facts by isolating them in a vacuum and as the product of man’s wiles or ineptitude. Morality doesn’t exist. It is a fantasy dreamed up by sensitive souls. The people do not believe, the prince thinks for everyone when he thinks on his own behalf. Government is the relationship between one lucid, egotistical consciousness and a universal lack of consciousness.
“What does Machiavelli’s conception of the world mean? It is a very complex issue. Is it a description of the world as it is, forged by the diktat of a steely observer’s eye, incisive and genuine for the same reasons that we now consider Dostoyevsky’s psychological observation to be infinitely more real and genuine than anything produced in this respect by previous literature? If that’s how things are, as they seem to be, something that is hardly in dispute in terms of the Italy of his time, what was he trying to do when he wrote his books? Did he do it to rid history and psychology of all the falsehoods, infantile nonsense, and conventional thinking scribes had poured into them over so many centuries? To replace the previous weight of paper fictions with a description of the free play of human passions, thus earning fame and glory time could never erase? Or perhaps in the name of patriotic duty was he trying to eliminate all futile, dangerous and impractical fantasies from the minds of princes? These questions have been answered, though very diversely. According to Burckhardt, apart from being a great writer, something nobody denies, Machiavelli was a discreet, sharp-witted adviser, and his conception of history is plausible. Conversely, Alfredo Oriani, in the first volume of his Political Struggle in Italy, reckons he is a complete idiot.
“Because it is a curious fact that Machiavelli, who established himself as the maestro of the cynic in politics, was one of the most gullible men of his age. He never understood, foresaw, or achieved any positive outcomes. His public life was a succession of disappointments and disasters. He always wanted to give the orders, and rarely managed to be obeyed by anyone. He always backed the wrong horse — I mean prince. He supported Soderini’s Republic, just before the Medicis were restored to power. He put himself forward as a strategist, worked out a battle plan and an army built along his lines was decisively destroyed in Prato. He advised the legate of Leo X to establish the Republic in Florence while simultaneously dedicating The Prince to Julian of Medicis in order to equip him as a despot. He joined Boscoli’s conspiracy and then abandoned him, thus losing all dignity and decency. Depressed by this catastrophe he crawled before the Medicis like the lowest of servants. He put all his hatred into his sardonic struggle against religion and the clergy. He never understood the spirit of religion or its latent or real strength. He appreciated Savonarola’s lunacy but not his reforms. Sent to Germany he didn’t see the reformation — the Reformation! — that was being born before his eyes. He didn’t see the beginning of Italy’s decline in the huge error made by Ludovico il Moro with the subsequent crossing of the Alps by Charles VIII and Louis XII of France. His ideas about Julius II, Venice, the League of Cambray make no sense. He died a lonely man, cursed by everyone and a mystery to himself.
“His Letters are total confirmation of his hopelessness as a man of government. Machiavelli’s politics consisted purely and simply in being anti-Machiavellian. Unless one interprets Machiavelli as a poor, ambitious courtier, his figure is a complete mystery.
“Oh! Even so, the secretary’s goose quill ought to figure on Florence’s coat-of-arms!”
One day Llimona and I were roaming in the vicinity of Santa Maria Novella, very near the central station, when we saw a an old man we thought was Auguste Renoir sitting on the terrace of a small bar in the area. Strangely enough, it was really him. Many years have passed since — so many that when I try to recall the day precisely I see only a blur in a murky haze. Nevertheless it’s a fact that this slight, rather tired, little old man with a yellowing beard, exhausted, bloodshot eyes, and a straw boater was Renoir, the great Impressionist painter.
He’d arrived in Florence only a few days before. He’d fetched up in a cheap inn. He could have afforded something much better because his life of poverty was long past, but the painter maintained his modest habits from those lean times. He’s now come to Italy but he’s no ordinary tourist. A tourist inevitably likes whatever the guidebook recommends. That is: he must like everything. He must be so curious that finally he feels curious about nothing. It’s a path that leads nowhere. When one is lucky enough to have been born with a degree of passion, one must play a card, one must choose a path. Select! That’s the lesson of Florence.
Renoir is staying in Florence. I give him the occasional glance. He looks totally insignificant. He is the typical vine-grower from Languedoc: a rather short, thin, fairish, gray-haired, blue-eyed, pink-skinned fellow with the tired, lethargic ways of an old countryman. He wears a thick shirt and pale blue tie that’s carelessly knotted. He arrived in Florence late that evening at the end of the long summer twilight. He eats a snack and can’t resist the temptation. Who can resist the temptation of Florence?
Years ago, in the era of gas lamps and leg-of-mutton sleeves, an acquaintance of ours arrived in Florence from Paris: Don Santiago Russinyol. A friend of his walked by his side: Zuloaga. Like Renoir, these two painters arrived in Florence at dusk. But they too were unable to resist the temptation; after dinner, they penetrated the totally unknown labyrinth of the city. It was a dark, murky night, and lighting must have been deficient. What could they see? As soon as Russinyol returned to his tavern in the early hours, he nevertheless wrote a long, lyrical hymn of praise to Florence. He described a Florence by night you can read in one of his first books. Which Florence does Russinyol refer to in this piece? The one he couldn’t see because it was submerged in the shadows of night or the one that had been floating in his mind for some time? It doesn’t matter. Illusion is all in life. We could say it is almost everything. A dream is as objective a reality as the movement of a pendulum.