BOOKS Machiavelli's forgotten friend
JOHN LARNER Francesco Guicciardini stands among the greatest of European historians, and his History of Italy (translated and edited by Sidney Alexander, Collier-Macmillan 75s) is the one narrative of contemporary events able to bear comparison with that of Thucydides. With great reluctance one of the most influential of nineteenth century critics conceded that: 'If we consider intellectual power, this is the most important work that has issued from an Italian mind.' Yet its fame, certainly here in Britain, is confined to the learned world. His friend and fellow Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli, is known to a large body of readers for whom Guic- ciardini is just a name. This is something which would have surprised their con- temporaries.
His life was passed amidst the great crisis and tragedy of Italian history. In 1494, when he was eleven years old, he saw the vic- torious French army pass through the streets of Florence during the first of those in- vasions of the peninsula which were to make Italy the battlefield of Europe and then, finally, the dependant of 'the barbarian na- tions'. He had been born into one of the great patrician families of Florence whi9h for generations had served the republic, and, following family tradition, he pursued a Om career of diplomacy and government in the service of the Medici. During these years he watched helplessly while the balance of power turned decisively against the Italian states. By 1540, the year of his death, Italy was enslaved. The History of Italy, written in his final years, was his attempt to explain what had happened: 'the events which have taken place in Italy within living memory, a most memorable subject, filled with appalling disasters'.
In part the neglect from which the work has suffered' is due to its immense bulk. Preaching before Charles I in 1629 on the subject of the Creation, John Donne observed that 'if a Livie or a Guicciardine or such extensive and voluminous authors had had this story in band God must have made another world, to have made them a library to hold their books'. In the leisured days of the Grand Tour such considerations did not matter so much; following the recom- mendation of Bolingbroke, the 'polite' Englishman might well devote his leisure to Guicciardini's volumes. As the era of the packaged tour approached he was very much less likely to do so. Yet among historians his is still a name to conjure with. Every elemen- tary study of historiography stresses Guic- ciardini's importance, points out that he was the first historian to research in depth among documents (indeed he stole the entire Floren- tine Archive of the Ten to do so), and ex- plains that he was the first who wrote a critical history of Italy as a whole. None the less, outside the ranks of Italian Renaissance specialists, historians themselves do not ac- tually sit down to read him. Even for them Guicciardini has name and fame, but his works Stand unopened.
Perhaps however the tide is beginning to turn. Recently there have appeared English translations of some selections from the
Storia d'Italia and the Storia fiorentina, while the Ricordi, Guicciardini's private pensies, which allow the easiest approach to his mind, have been published in their en- tirety. Now in this present book, Sidney Alexander, an American litterateur, gives the substance of the Storia d'Italia for modern English readers. The text has been cut to something over half its original length, but short bridging passages are inserted by the editor to preserve the continuity of the nar- rative. The work has been given a pleasant format and is illustrated by numerous plates from contemporary sources. Here then is a Guicciardini designed to enlist the sympathy not simply of the scholar but of the in- telligent general reader as well. Is it likely to succeed?
At first sight the chances look slight. Guic- ciardini is extremely difficult to translate. Whc zas Machiavelli's prose has the speed and orce of a violent and impatient man ban.. .1g a table to emphasise a point, Guic- clan.' i's has the care and deliberation of thew speeches given at the conciliar mec; es and statesmen's discussions at wh c i he himself had so many times pre Thoughts are no sooner expressed th:. i qualified or elaborated and the con- ti ual endeavour to express a complete truth pil up subordinate clauses until sentences o'ism reach the lengths of paragraphs and, not infrequently, pages. This style is the perfect mirror of Guicciardini's thought (as Machiavelli's is of his) and is a principal interest of his work, revealing as it does a mind constantly at grip with all the possibilities, realised and unrealised, of his story. But to render it well in English re- quires immense skill which the present translator lacks. A comparison with Cecil Grayson's version of some five years ago (which unfortunately extended to only the first three of the twenty books) shows the uniform inferiority of this new version.
This apart, can the modern reader really be persuaded to immerse himself in that im- mense mass of facts, all these obscure names and unknown or half-known places, in all that prolix detail in which Guicciardini delighted? Can he be caught up in the dis- tant story of a remote age and another coun- try? Perhaps Guicciardini is doomed inevitably to that role of 'historian's historian' to which he has so often been assigned.
Yet opening this translation with all its faults and meeting what is after all a severely truncated Guicciardini, how quickly is one seduced by his art! In describing an im- mensely complex interaction of events, the author has always a complete control over
his material. Here is a narrative in which the threads of the story are carried with supreme skill through a multiplicity of places, in. cidents, and persons. Here too is not just Ranke's 'what actually happened', but also what might have happened instead, what combination of conscious decisions and ac- cidents combined to produce events. It is a natural tendency of most historians to write `the history of the victors'. They are in- terested in success rather than failure, in the Bolsheviks rather than the inconsequent, ineffectual, and ultimately fruitless thoughts and deeds of the Mensheviks. Guicciardini is peculiarly fascinating because he himself wrote the history of the vanquished. At each point he is as interested in the actions which have been abandoned as those which hate been taken, in the processes of thought which have produced both disastrous and successful decisions, in men's motives as well as their actions. Again, as one reads on, one feels the intense contemporaneity of the story being told. Here the petty principalities have seen their own little world as the sum of political life and have spent their energies in unceasing minor squabbles. Suddenly, faced with the intrusion of outside powers, they have yielded hegemony to them, without at the same time being able to bring a halt to their own internecine conflicts. Lord Macaulay found this story boring. Are we. Europeans of the twentieth century, as like]) to do the same?
Above all in reading the History of hal) one meets Guicciardini himself. This is not just an historical compilation, it is the mind of one constantly active in politics brooding on events as he describes them. What one ad- mires here is the coolness, courage, and scep- tical intelligence of the thought. In discussion on the origins of the temporal power of the Church, he refers, for instance to Constantine's conversion to the faith of the Christians : 'Sb that through reverence for their way of life, the holy precepts which our religion contains in itself, and- the readiness with which mankind follows—either out of am- bition (most of the time) or fear—the ex- ample of their Prince, the name of Christian began to spread marvellously everywhere. and at the same time the poverty of the clerics began to diminish.'
In these words there is much of the man and his history : the sentence which becomes cumbersome in the effort to explain all. the frank acknowledgement of secular and self- interested motive, the pause to consid whether ambition or fear plays the greate part in human actions, and the irony of I last clause which looks forward to Voltai apd Gibbon. He• does not hold, with Machiavelli, Ox men are bad. But in his history he invariab shows men moved by ignoble passions: fear greed, ingratitude, vanity, spirit of reveng• and, above all, ambition. Long before Fre there were not lacking those- who suggest that he was projecting his own character to others. 'It could be', Montaigne. f instance, observed, 'that he judged others I. himself.' Could it really be true, he ask that virtue, religion, and conscience pla! no part at all in political action? Gus ciardini's own life, despite certain grow for criticism laboured heavily by ninetee century moralists, is sufficient answer. 11 was a sense of honour and a devotion duty and justice, which shows that all
not evil in his world. Yet as an historian his experiences led him always to stress the ag- gression and egoism of men and to cast aside facile and comfortable assumptions about their character.
The result is a sombre history, a tragic vision of human destiny as it appeared to the maturest judgment and most penetrating intellect of Renaissance Italy. Even for the academics of today Guicciardini's work may perform a service. It may convince them that history is something more than merely a branch of the social sciences, that in the ultimate analysis it should be an art, a criticism of life, a reflection upon the nature of man.
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