Studies of modern mind & character at several European epochs

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Cornell University Library D 210.W74

Studies of modern mind & character at se

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I. GUICCIAKDINI AND HIS ' GOLDKN MAXIMS ' . .1

II. Giordano Bruno and Galilbo 30 in. Jonathan Swift . 69

I. GUIQCIARBini AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.'

Oxyere, Inedite di Francesco ChAcdardini Illustrate da Giuseppe CanestHni e Piiblicate per cwra dei Conti Piero e Luigi Gmccia/i'dini. Volume Primo, Eicordi Politici e Civili. — Volume Decimo, Ricordi di Famiglia, Eicordi Autobiografici. Firenze, 1857-1"867.>

The family and autobiographical ' Ricordi ' of Guicciardini vividly reproduce in some of its last living examples, at the opening of the modern era, that singular type of merchant statesmanship which formed so important and predominant an element in mediaeval Italian republican politics. They afford us the same sort of vivid conception of that type as the ' Lives of the Norths ' do of the race of political lawyers and men of business who rose into eminence in the perturbed politics of the last Stuart reigns in England. The alternately conflicting and mingling aristocratical and commercial elements in Italian public life had produced between them something of the like sort of mixed character as they afterwards did in England. Even in the iron age of the Sforzas and Borgias, eminently respectable private and public characters were often the growth of the mingled influences which affected public life, so long as public life

' From the Quarterly Beviem, October 1871.

B

2 GUICCIAEDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEPT MAXIMS.'

was not yet stamped out in Italy. What was mucli more rare was anything approaching the heroic type in Italian public men. That type is rare indeed in all ages, but in the age and country of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, as in the succeeding age of Lord Keeper Guilford and Sir Dudley North in England, all aspirations after it, as well as all approach to it, seemed to have in a manner ceased.

The sixteenth century in Italy was an age of transition from spirited if ill-organised autonomy to a dull level of spiritual and secular despotism. It presents the spectacle of a country foremost in the opening of the march of modern civilisation suddenly finding itself the helpless object of rival rapacity to ruder but stronger states ; its leading men, whose minds and characters had been formed in the liberal school of world-wide commerce and uncontrolled self-government, suddenly compelled to transfer their political activity, if they were still bent on exerting it, from the councils of their country to the courts and cabinets of overbearing native or foreign princes.

The habit of writing ' Ricordi ' — for which the English word ' Records ' is not an exact equivalent — of noting down, not for immediate nor even ultimate publication, whatever, from day to day, seemed noteworthy in private or public, domestic or foreign transactions, was practised more methodically and systematically by the Italian public men of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and the first half of the sixteenth century, than perhaps it has been by those of any other age or country. It was a habit which came, as it were, naturally to those merchant-statesmen. These so-called ' Ricordi ' had no more literary design or pretension about them than any of the other business entries in their day-books or ledgers, amongst which, indeed, they were very commonly interspersed and intercalated, being made, like the rest for use and not for show, and forming, in fact, as observed by the editor of the volumes before us, a civil and domestic autobiographic chronicle, often begemmed with moral maxims and sentences, and Scripture texts. Some of these ' Ricordi,' including those of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and including, in tlieir integrity, those before us, have first seen the light in recent times.

' The Italian historians,' says Disraeli the Elder, in his ' Curiosities of Literature,' ' have proved themselves to be an extraordinary race, for they have devoted their days to the composition of historical works which they were certain could not see the light during their lives.'

If that indefatigable literary chiffonnier had had before him these ten volumes of remains of the most eminent of Italian historians, he might have found additional reason for ascribing an extraordinary character to that race of men which had in Guicciardini its most memorable representative. No part of the biographical or autobiographical matter contained in these volumes was designed, in the ordinary sense of this publishing age, to see the light at all, but simply to be preserved in the fa.mily archives of the Casa Guicciardini for the private instruction of the descendants of that house. 'As I shall in these family memorials,' says their author, ' tell the truth, I pray our descendants, into whose hands they will come, not to show them to anyone out of the family, but keep them for their own use, since I have written them solely for that end, as one who desires two things more than any other things in the world — first, the perpetual exaltation of this city [Florence] and of its liberty ; secondly, the glory of our house, not during my own life only, but in perpetuity. May it please God to preserve and increase both one and the other ! '

The present representatives of the house of Guicciardini, by whom these volumes are published, slightly apologise for revealing family secrets which had been kept for three centuries. Truly we know not any party in this nineteenth century, unless that of the Temporal Papacy, likely to feel scandalised at the publication of these imperii arcana of a bygone age. There is, indeed, enough in this long-deferred posthumous publication of the confidential communications of the favoured civil and military minister of two successive Popes to claim a place in the Papal index, if the present conductors of that organ of ecclesiastical criticism can

B 2 summon up courage to put it there. If they do, they will only give additional prominence to the fact that one of the most trusted and trustworthy servants of the Papacy, at the greatest ecclesiastical crisis, till that of our own times, confessed that, but for his personal position, he should have heartily wished Martin Luther all success against the ' scellerati preti.'

Guicciardini opens his ' Ricordi di Pamiglia' by saying that he had been able to acquire no certain knowledge as to the origin of his family, but tha,t the first notice he finds of it in Florence is as taking part in the exercise of the magistracy called the priorato about a.d. 1300. ' Our house,' he says, ' remained for a good while, that is to say, about eighty years afterwards, in a middling condition, and might be described, according to the common way of speaking, as huoni popolani. Prom that time it has grown so much in wealth and station, that it has become, and still continues at this day, one of the first families of the city, and has shared abundantly in all its honours and dignities.'

The first of his ancestors named by Guicciardini, Piero, assumed the rank of knighthood; by whom or on what account conferred his descendant could not tell. He acquired wealth in the management of large estates of a Neapolitan noble in Tuscany, and acquired, moreover, in the sharp eyes of the Church, the character of an usurer, since his son Luigi, on the death of his father, was compelled, for fear his body should be seized at the suit of the bishop, to come to a composition with that holy inquisitor, and to tax himself on a conjectural estimate of the so-called usurious gains of the deceased ; which done, he was fully assured by an Augustinian friar — a grandissimo teologo— that the satisfaction thus given was sufficient etiam inforo conscientiw. Luicri became afterwards a very rich man, arrived at high dio-nities and was several times employed in important embassies to the Pope, to Giovanni Galeazzo Duke of Milan, and to Louis Duke of Anjou, when he entered Italy to contest the crown of Naples with King Charles of Arragon. He was three times Gonfalionere of Justice, and in that capacity would seem to have cut rather a poor figure, on occasion of a serious popular tumult, in the course of which the Gonfalionere got driven from the palace or Town Hall — the seat of municipal administration — ousted from his office, and his house demolished, the invariable accompaniment of popular triumph over parties in power in Italy of the olden time (revived under citizen Assi's Italianising auspices against the house of M. Thiers) as torture was the invariable accompaniment of the first proceedings against anyone accused of political crimes or misdemeanours. Besides being bullied (and afterwards invested with hnighthood) by the populace and their leaders, he was continually getting surcharged in his taxes by the popular magistrates, and the greatest and most constant trouble of his life was in seeking redress from these fiscal surcharges. He died, says his descendant, to the great concern of the people, who seem to have found him a good easy executive functionary, a diplomatist disposed for peace at all price, and fiscally a good milch cow ; a man of good property, on whom the municipal democracy found it convenient to throw more than his share of the public burthens.

It is a noticeable fact of family character or fortune, that wise or foolish, magnanimous or pusillanimous, well or less well governed in life and conversation, the Guicciardini family seem to have possessed the feline faculty of always falling upon their feet, and always adding something to that advance in substance and station which their famous descendant states them to have continued making down to his own time. Piero, second son of the last-named ancestor, had been, from his youth till the death of his father, disobedient and devious in his courses to such a degree that his father always prophesied he would end badly, and, having been robbed of certain sums of money and articles of value in his house, never could be persuaded, while the culprit remained undetected, that the culprit was not his son Piero. This scapegrace of the family was nearly becoming its scapegoat; since Piero, having set out against his father's will, in the suite of some embassy, was captured on his route

6 GUICCIAHDINI AND HIS ' GOLDEN MAXIMS.'

by the free company of a certain Otto Buonterzo of Parma, and, while the others were suffered to proceed on their journey, was alone detained for ransom, on the strength of his father's reputation for riches. The ransom of Piero was set at so high a rate that his father delayed paying it, hoping that, in course of time, a less sum would be exacted. However, in his last illness he could think of no one but his son Piero, and gave orders that he should be redeemed from captivity forthwith, at the cost of three thousand ducats. Returning to Florence, Piero's next achievement within the year was a mercantile failure, mainly owing, says our historian, to his being a ' magnificent man,' and never looking into his accounts. Adversity, however, brought out the bright side of his nature, for, in his arrangements with his creditors, he stuck firmly to paying twenty shillings in the pound [solidi venti per lira] , only asking for time, and at the time agreed upon actually paid up the full amount by means of sales of his property. This high and generous nature of his recommended him to the friendship of men of rank and distinction, and he attained all the public honours and dignities his city had to give.

Thus aft a ragged cowte's been known To mak' a noble aiver.

The formerly suspected domestic thief was notably free from all taint of pecuniary rapacity or corruption ; and if he had not ' put off the old man ' altogether, his failings were in a different direction. He was rather high and rather shorttempered, and even in his old age, when he got angry with anyone, was quite capable of proceeding from words to blows. Even in his old age he was vecchio lussurioso efeminacciolo forte, leaving lots of love-letters, exchanged with the last mistress of his mature affections.

Another hereditary quality in the Guicciardini family may be considered as connected with that feline faculty, already noticed in them, of always falling upon their feet ; the quality, namely, which we find, modified by individual differences, in our historian's paternal grandfather, his father and himself, of marked aversion from extreme counsels and extreme courses. In the grandfather, Jacopo Guicciardini, born in 1422, this quality shows itself in very amiable as well as statesmanlike shape.

' Among his other properties,' says his grandson, the historian, ' he had that of saying freely what he thought ; for which Lorenzo (de' Medici) sometimes manifested anger towards him, but most times bore with him, as knowing that it proceeded from goodness of nature. One of the public functions in Florence, of which he held many in succession, was that of Gonfalionere of Justice, in the earlier period of Lorenzo's real though dissembled sovereignty. In that capacity he had to lend his formal and ministerial offices to carry through the new law regarding testaments, passed at the instance of Lorenzo de' Medici — a law which was in effect in the nature of a privilegium, solely designed to repress the ambition by crippling the means of his formidable rivals the Pazzi family. Jacopo Guicciardini, says his grandson, acted in this matter much against his own will, and had strongly dissuaded the passing of any such law, ' not only as a friend of the Pazzi family, but because the process seemed to him dishonest in itself, and likely to sow the seeds of mischief — as the event proved.' After the explosion of the conspiracy of the Pazzi, and the tra.gical fate of all who had taken part in it and some who had taken no part in it, Lorenzo, says our historian, being mercilessly disposed against the whole family, either from natural temper or exasperation at the violent death of his brother, the wound he had himself received, and the narrow escape he had himself made from destruction, had thrown into prison the innocent sons of the Pazzi, who had no complicity in the plot ; and had decreed that their daughters, who were left with small dowries, should form no matrimonial connections in Florence. Jacopo Guicciardini was incessant in his solicitations to Lorenzo to release these innocent youths, and at the utmost to ' confine ' them, as it was called, from entering Florentine territory, and to relieve the daughters from the prohibition of marrying in their own country. After some years lie finally persuaded Lorenzo to yield on both . points.

The singular combination of mercantile with public business which occupied the active life of most of the statesmen of the Italian republics was remarkably exemplified in Jacopo Guieciardini, of whom his grandson says that, though he started on a small patrimony, he received a considerable dowry with his wife, which he turned to good account as commercial capital, as appears from a book kept by him, in which the net results of all his commercial transactions are briefly noted, as well as of all legitimate emoluments derived from his diplomatic and other public appointments, which, with his gains from commerce, made up, says his grandson, ' to a quattrino ' the amount of property which he left behind him at his death, and made it manifest that he had abused none of his official opportunities to usurp the property of others or to procure for himself exemptions from public taxation. He acted as captain of a commercial galley of his own in a voyage to the Levant, and as military commander, at a pinch, in the little wars of the Florentine Eepublic. It is added that he always applied his best efforts to disperse ill-humours in the commonwealth, and never chose to play the part of public informer or State inquisitor. His descendant adds, for the edification of the Guieciardini family of the future, that he was exceedingly well endowed by nature, being tall, fair and handsome — as fine a man as any of his time in Florence. The only drawbacks from his natural and acquired good gifts were that he was totally illiterate ; we must understand our historian to mean in the 'humane letters' of universities, since Jacopo Guieciardini must have had work-day letters enough at least to keep his ledgers and carry on correspondence with his employers in his vai-ious missions. His good natural capacity, his courageous, liberal, friendly, and serviceable spirit, seem to have fully compensated with his contemporaries for his lack of polite literature ; and his freedom from all malignant vices made them wink hard at certain dulcia vitia which did attach to him. According to his grandson's unreserved testimony.

he was somewhat more licentious in his amours, and, moreover, somewhat more studious of his eating and drinking, than might have been expected of a man of his otherwise distinguished qualities.

Piero, the father of our historian, sustained the character of the Guicciardini family, though rather in a negative than positive manner, for sagacity and sound judgment in affairs private or public, and avoidance of all extreme parts, which led him to the other extreme of taking no part at all. Whether, says his son, he was so formed by nature, or whether the course of events, which indeed was violent and extraordinary in the times he lived in, seemed to require corresponding caution and circumspection, so it was that he proceeded in his affairs with little spirit and much suspiciousness, undertaking few enterprises, acting in the affairs of State with great slowness and deliberation, and never, except when constrained by conscience or necessity, distinctly declaring his sentiments on matters of importance. Hence it happened that, never putting himself forward as the head of a party or any new movement, he did not keep himself so currently as he might have done in the mouths of the many. His son, however, admits that this mode of action or inaction served one purpose at least : that through all the turbulent movements which took place in his time he preserved his dignity and tranquillity, more fortunate in that respect than any other man of his standing and eminence, all of whom incurred in those times dangers either of life or property.

Our historian says for himself that he wished to enter the Church, not to participate, ' like most other priests,' in its fat slumbers, but because he calculated, with great colour of reason, that a young man like himself, well grounded by study and practice in jurisprudence (a species of lore then much more in request at the Court of Eome than theology), had a fair foundation for rising high in the Church, and might very well hope to be one day a Cardinal. His father, however, was conscientiously indisposed to see any of his sons in the priesthood, ' though,' says our historian, with a touch of pathos, ' he had five sons ' — ' considering the disordered condition of the Church in those times ' — and pretei-red to sacrifice the present profit of rich benefices, as well as the future prospect of seeing a son of his in high rank in the Church, rather than soil his conscience by making that son a priest from motives of cupidity or ambition. ' Such,' says our historian, ' was the real cause which decided him ; and I had to content myself the best 1 could with his decision.'

It may be thought that our historian here makes posterity as much the confidants of the character of his own ambition as of his father's conscience. His youth had no dreams — or rather the one dream of his youth was advancement in public life, under whatever auspices, an advancement which he attained in early manhood, and lost, when public life itself was lost in Italy. Guiceiardini's practical political motto throughout his public career was ' I serve.' His best apology is that the sword in his day in Italy no longer gave place to the gown, and that independent public action had ceased to be possible in Italian public affairs. To have any hand in the administration of those affairs it had become necessary to have some footing in the Courts of Popes or Princes. It is curious to observe how, in a different form and by a circuitous course, Guiceiardini's young ambition to mix himself with ecclesiastical politics was at length gratified. If he had dutifully submitted to exclusion by paternal authority from the prospect of himself becoming one day a Cardinal — perhaps a Pope — he did the next best thing for himself, in his keen pursuit of the main chance in politics, by attaching himself to the political service of Popes and Cardinals.

To the young Guicciardini — who seems, in the sense of romance or sentiment, never to have been young — his choice of a consort was as mere a selection of a stepping-stone for ambition as had been his choice of a profession. Any consideration of personal preference seems to have had as little weight with him in that matter as with his father. In this instance, however, as concerned money at least, the son had more elevated views than the father. His ambition was that of eminence, not mere wealth, and lie did not allow paternal authority to dissuade him from fixing his choice on a family (the lady seems to have been a quite immaterial element in the transaction) whose head was a personage of political importance in the Florentine commonwealth, and might be able to push forward his son-in-law in the path of promotion. This consideration was paramount with him over his father's prudential suggestions that a larger dowry would be desirable, and could be had with other damsels of good houses. Perhaps such suggestions might have had more weight with the son, if he could have foreseen the disappointment, by the premature death of his father-in-law, of the hopes he had formed of getting a start in public life by the connection. Our historian concludes his ingenuous narrative of his matrimonial doings in the following strain of evidently sincere if not refined piety : ' Please God the affair may have been for the health of my soul and body, and God pardon me if I have used too much importunity with Piero [his father] in the matter, since though as yet I am satisfied with having made the connection, I cannot help some scruple and doubt whether I may not have offended God, especially considering the qualities of a father such as mine is.'

Guicciardini's ' Eicordi Politici e Civili ' are now for the first time published, as the present editor states, in their original integrity, free from additions or mutilations. Alloyed and clipped as they had been by the timidity or iU-taste of previous editors, Guicciardini's civil and political 'yv&f/.ai, first published about the middle of the sixteenth century, under the title of ' Avverfcimenti di Messer Francesco Guicciardini,' had won the epithet ' aurei ' from subsequent Italian writers. Signor Canestrini, the present editor, says of them 'that these "Eicordi" appear truly marvellous, whether by the incomparable acuteness of the sentences on men and things, the vast learning, or the elegantissima simplicity and natural spontaneity of the style.' Without echoing Italian superlatives, we may be able to show by our extracts that the praise of simplicity and spontaneity is well deserved by the style of Guicciardini in undress, and that the natural acuteness and acquired knowledge exhibited in his estimates of events and persons deserve no less ungrudging, if less enthusiastic, recognition than that accorded them by the editor of the volumes before us.

The first of these ' Eicordi ' which occurs for citation has reference to those earlier yeais of their author, some characteristic traits of which have already been placed before our readers, and curiously completes our idea of that very marked trait of character, the constant aim at advancement, rather than at any sort of pleasure or acquirement, for its own sake. There is a remark recorded in Lady Minto's 'Memoirs of Hugh Elliot,' that, while continental nations (the writer of the remark had been conversant mostly with Germans and Italians) seek social intercourse chiefly for the pleasure it affords, the English cultivate society chiefly with a view to advantage in one shape or other. Exactly in a like spirit we find Guieciardinij the man, regretting that Guicciardini, the youth, had not bestowed more attention on the amusing and social accomplishments of his age : —

I made light when I was young of knowing how to play, dance, sing, and other like levities — or of writing well, riding well, dressing well, and all such things which seem to give men more of ornament than substance. I have since, however, wished it had been otherwise, since if indeed it is inconvenient that youths should lose too much time on such things, I have seen nevertheless by experience that these ornaments, and the knowing how to do everything well, add dignity and reputation to men even otherwise well qualified, so that it may be said that he who lacks them lacks something. Besides which, abounding in all such accomplishments opens the way to favour with princes, and is sometimes the principle or source of great profit and exaltation — the world and princes not being constituted as they should be, but as they are.'

Guicciardini's first important public employment was his embassy to Spain from the Florentine Eepublic in 1512, when he had only attained the age of twenty-eight, that is, two years short of the age prescribed by law in that republic for diplomatic appointments. This embassy was not the first inevitably fruitless mission of the tottering Florentine democracy to that astute monarch Ferdinand the Catholic, whose character the young diplomatist appreciated with equal astuteness, and has placed vividly on record. Two ' orators ' from Florence had been commissioned to Ferdinand and Isabella in 1498 to justify their Government for not having entered into the league formed three years previously between the Pope, the Venetians, and the Emperor Maximilian against Charles VIII. of France, and to defend it from the charge of espousing the cause of France in Italy against Spain. At both epochs the defence was necessarily a lame one, since at both the charge was so far well-founded, that the Florentine democracy, at first under the influence of the fervid and enthusiastic eloquence of Savonarola, and afterwards under the feebly popular administration of Soderini, clung persistently to the French alliance in preference to that of Spain, Venice, and the Pope, and refused to join the so-called santissima lega formed under their auspices. The Florentine democracy played its cards so badly as never to oblige France sufficiently by its adhesion to obtain any equivalent support from that power, while it disobliged the Italian powers in league with Spain sufficiently to incur their more than probable hostility. This hostility it was Gaicciardini's Spanish mission to avert ' by art and prudence ; ' but as he came empty-handed of powers to conclude any convention whatever with King Ferdinand, he could naturally expect nothing but good words in exchange for those he brought. The following passage from Guicciardini's ' Eicordi ' has pointed reference to the fatal policy of the Florentine Government in this respect at the time when it sent him on his first fruitless diplomatic mission : —

Neutrality in the wars of others is good for him who is powerful in such a degree that he has nothing to fear from the one who remains superior, since he preserves himself without trouble, and may hope for gain from the disorders of others. Otherwise it is inconsiderate and injurious, since he remains the prey of the conqueror or the conquered. And worst of all is that which is preserved not by judgment but by irresolution — that is to say, when, without coming to a resolution whether you will be neutral or no, you conduct yourself in such a manner that you do not satisfy even that party who would be content at the time if you would assure him that you would be neutral. And into this last species of neutrality republics are more apt to fall than princes, since it often proceeds from those being divided who have to deliberate ; so that, one counselling this, another that, enough of them never agree together to eifect a decision for one opinion any more than another — and this was just the case with the Plorentine Government of 1512.

Tlie following remarks, which Guicciardini was led to mate by his observation of Ferdinand's character, bequeathed at least one result, for the instruction of after ages, of his otherwise resultless mission to that reputed paragon of kingcraft: —

Even if one has the name of a dissembler and deceiver, it is seen nevertheless that sometimes his deceits find dupes. It seems strange to say so, and yet it is very true and within my own memory, that the Catholic King Ferdinand of Spain was beyond all other men of that reputed character, and yet in his artifices he never wanted those who believed him more than he deserved, and it needs must be that this proceeds either from men's simplicity or cupidity — some being duped by easily believing what they desire, others by lack of knowledge.

I observed when I was ambassador in Spain to King Ferdinand of Arragon, a wise and glorious prince, that, whenever he desired to engage in a new enterprise, or other affair of importance, he did not first publish and then justify his intention, but he governed himself just contrariwise, artfully contriving in such a manner that, before it was understood publicly what he had in his mind, it was published that the king ought to do such a thing for such or such reasons, and therefore when it was afterwards published that he intended to do that which had first been made to appear to every one to be just and necessary, it is incredible with what favour and what praise his decisions were received.