Italian Renaissance. John Addington Symonds

vicissitudes all the republics of Italy, with the exception of Venice, were subject. In like manner, they shared in common the belief that constitutions could be made at will, that the commonwealth was something plastic, capable of taking the complexion and the form impressed upon it by speculative politicians. So firmly rooted was this conviction, and so highly self-conscious had the statesmen of Italy become, partly by the experience of their shifting history, and partly by their study of antiquity, that the idea of the State as something possessed of organic vitality can scarcely be said to have existed among them. The principle of gradual growth, which gives its value, for example, to the English Constitution, was not recognized by the Italians. Nor again had their past history taught them the necessity, so well defined and recognized by the Greek statesmen, of maintaining a fixed character at any cost in republics, which, in spite of their small scale, aspired to permanence.[1] The most violent and arbitrary changes which the speculative faculty of a theorist could contrive, or which the prejudices of a party could impose, seemed to them not only possible but natural.

[1] The value of the [Greek: êthos] was not wholly unrecognized by political theorists. Giannotti (vol. i. p. 160, and vol. ii. p. 13), for example translates it by the word 'temperamento.'

A very notable instance of this tendency to treat the State as a plastic product of political ingenuity, is afforded by the annals of Genoa. After suffering for centuries from the vicissitudes common to all Italian free cities—discords between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, between the nobles and the people, between the enfranchised citizens and the proletariat—after submitting to the rule of foreign masters, especially of France and Milan, and after being torn in pieces by the rival houses of Adorni and Fregosi, the Genoese at last received liberty from the hands of Andrea Doria in 1528. They then proceeded to form a new Constitution for the protection of their freedom; and in order to destroy the memory of the old parties which had caused their ruin, they obliterated all their family names with the exception of twenty, under one or other of which the whole body of citizens were bound to enroll themselves.[1] This was nothing less than an attempt to create new gentes by effacing the distinctions established by nature and tradition. To parallel a scheme so artificial in its method, we must go back to the history of Sicyon and the changes wrought in the Dorian tribes by Cleisthenes.

[1] See Varchi, St. F. lib. vii. cap. 3.

Short of such violent expedients as these, the whole history of towns like Florence reveals a succession of similar attempts. When, for example, the Medici had been expelled in 1494, the Florentines found themselves without a working constitution, and proceeded to frame one. The matter was at first referred to two eminent jurists, Guido Antonio Vespucci and Paolo Antonio Soderini, who argued for and against the establishment of a Grand Council on the Venetian model, before the Signory in the Palazzo. At this juncture Savonarola in his sermon for the third Sunday in Advent[1] suggested that each of the sixteen Companies should form a plan, that these should be submitted to the Gonfaloniers, who should choose the four best, and that from these four the Signory should select the most perfect. At the same time he pronounced himself in favor of an imitation of the Venetian Consiglio Grande. His scheme, as is well known, was adopted.[2] Running through the whole political writings of the Florentine philosophers and historians, we find the same belief in artificial and arbitrary alterations of the state. Machiavelli pronounces his opinion that, in spite of the corruption of Florence, a wise legislator might effect her salvation.[3] Skill alone was needed. There lay the wax; the scientific artist had only to set to his hand and model it.

[1] December 12, 1494.

[2] Segni (pp. 15, 16) says that Savonarola deserved to be honored for this Constitution by the Florentines no less than Numa by the Romans. Varchi (vol. i. p. 169) judges the Consiglio Grande to have been the only good institution ever adopted by the Florentines. We may compare Giannotti (Sopra la Repubblica di Siena p. 346) for a similar opinion. Guicciardini, both in the Storia d' Italia and the Storia di Firenze, gives to Savonarola the whole credit of having passed this Constitution. Nardi and Pitti might be cited to the same effect. None of these critics doubt for a moment that what was theoretically best ought to have been found practically feasible.

[3] St. Fior. lib. iii. 1. 'Firenze a quel grado è pervenuta che facilmente da uno savio dator di leggi potrebbe essere in qualunque forma di governo riordinata.'

This is the dominant thought which pervades his treatise on the right ordering of the State of Florence addressed to Leo X.[1] A more consummate piece of political mechanism than that devised by Machiavelli in this essay can hardly be imagined. It is like a clock with separate actions for hours, minutes, seconds, and the revolutions of the moon and planets. All the complicated interest of parties and classes in the state, the traditional pre-eminence of the Medicean family, the rights of the Church, and the relation of Florence to foreign powers, have been carefully considered and provided for. The defect of this consummate work of art is that it remained a mere machine, devised to meet the exigencies of the moment, and powerless against such perturbations as the characters and passions of living men must introduce into the working of a Commonwealth. Had Florence been a colony established in a new country with no neighbors but savages, or had it been an institution protected from without against the cupidity of selfish rivals, then such a constitution might have been imposed on it with profit. But to expect that a city dominated by ancient prejudices, connected by a thousand subtle ties not only with the rest of Italy but also with the states of Europe, and rotten to the core in many of its most important members, could be restored to pristine vigor by a doctrinaire however able, was chimerical. The course of events contradicted this vain expectation. Meanwhile a few clear-headed and positive observers were dimly conscious of the instability of merely speculative constitution-making. Varchi, in a weighty passage on the defects of the Florentine republic, points out that its weakness arose partly from the violence of factions, but also in a great measure from the implicit faith reposed in doctors of the law.[2] The history of the Florentine Constitution, he says, is the history of changes effected by successions of mutually hostile parties, each in its own interest subverting the work of its predecessor, and each in turn relying on the theories of jurists, who without practical genius for politics make arbitrary rules for the control of state-affairs. Yet even Varchi shares the prevailing conviction that the proper method is first to excogitate a perfect political system, and then to impress that like a stamp upon the material of the commonwealth. His criticism is directed against lawyers, not against philosophers and practical diplomatists.

[1] The language of this treatise is noteworthy. After discoursing on the differences between republics and principalities, and showing that Florence is more suited to the former, and Milan to the latter, form of government, he says: 'Ma perchè fare principato dove starebbe bene repubblica,' etc. … 'si perche Firenze è subietto attissimo di pigliare questa forma,' etc. The phrases in italics show how thoroughly Machiavelli regarded the commonwealth as plastic. We may compare the whole of Guicciardini's elaborate essay 'Del Reggimento di Firenze' (Op. Ined. vol. ii.), as well as the 'Discourses' addressed by Alessandro de' Pazzi, Francesco Vettori, Ruberto Acciaiuoli, Francesco Guicciardini, and Luigi Guicciardini, to the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, on the settlement of the Florentine Constitution in 1522 (Arch. Stor. vol. i.). Not one of these men doubted that his nostrum would effect the