Part 16
As for land, it is the one thing that I can conceive nationalised even under our present form of Socialism, nay, which is already nationalised to the extent that the private owners of British land may not sell it to Germany or Japan, as they may sell anything else of theirs. Every new State should doubtless begin by trying to nationalise its land. I say “trying,” because it is by no means certain that it would succeed, since so far from the increment in land values being unearned, it is the very possibility of earning it that induces the pioneer to suffer peril, privation and isolation. Were Canada, for example, not to give away its land, the many adventurers who have flowed in from the United States would probably have remained at home, and all this Canadian territory have been still empty. And once you have made land quasi-private property, it cannot justly be subjected to any peculiar tax, since colossal as is the rise of land values in growing towns, the value of land is controlled by the same factors of luck and judgment as rule all other property values, and may be depreciated as well as enhanced by the operation of social forces beyond the owner’s control or prevision. Wherefore all increments in value—in stocks and shares, copyrights, patents, &c. &c.—should be treated as potential matter for taxation equally with the so-called “unearned increment” on land.
One would imagine from the war cries in our latest political campaign that Socialism was already upon us, and that the only refuge from it lay in Tariff Reform. But it is precisely Tariff Reform which is Socialism; a taxation of the entire community in the interests of this or that industry. Nor should the entire community be averse from taxation for any provably good object; a moralised community would even be always looking round for fresh methods of self-taxation. Budget Day would be a national festival, a day of solemn joy, tense with the hope that new ways would be found of making England the Kingdom of God. Alas! it is a day of sick anxiety, with a sequel of farcical unfailingness, in which every section taxed sends a deputation to show that it is the one section that should have been left unburdened, while from the bloated gluttons and swillers at the great hotels arises the cry of “Red ruin and the breaking-up of laws.” And the poor philanthropist we have always with us—he who threatens to stop his charity contributions. As if the abolition of charity was not the very object of social reform! Every benevolent activity means a sore in the social system, and charity covers indeed a multitude of our sins.
Strange that these sordid questions of money should so fever this mighty England of Shakespeare and Milton. Ship-money cost Charles the First his head, and a petty land tax changes the House of Peers. Poor humanity, so deluded as to the essential values of life, so peculiarly demented in all that concerns Property! But I bid you cast away your fears. I repeat to you my good tidings of great joy. Socialism is impossible. A perfect and just distribution of the goods and labours of life—“to each according to his needs, from each according to his powers”—is Utopian. Moreover envy, hatred and all uncharitableness prevent it: stupidity, sloth, selfishness, treachery and tyranny preclude it. Rejoice, therefore, and let us cry Hosanna!
Nor are these evil qualities confined to the capitalist, they are found in even uglier forms in the working man, who is merely a capitalist without means, and through his Trade Unions talks equally of rights and even less of duties and ideals.
But if Socialism is impossible, and Socialist parties consequently deficient in constructive potency, they yet perform in every country a critical and regulative function of the first importance. Our own Labour members are the only gentlemen in British politics. To all questions, national or international, they bring a broad spirit and a quixotic ideal, and while our Howards and our Percys cower in craven terror of Germany, or make prudent alliance with Holy Russia, or handle with correlative despotism India, Ireland or the woman question, our men from the pits and the factories sit free and fearless, the sole guardians of England’s ancient glory.
THE SUPERMAN OF LETTERS: OR THE HYPOCRISY OF POLITICS
Arrestive was it in an aisle of Santa Croce—the Florentine Church of the Holy Cross—to come upon a monument to Niccolò Machiavelli, anathema alike for Catholicism and Protestantism, the “Old Nick” of the Hudibras rhyme. ’Twas as if Mephisto had managed not only to slip into the Cathedral, but to achieve canonisation. But even a devil is not given his due at the hands of his own countrymen: it was reserved for an English earl, more than two and a half centuries after Mephisto’s passing, to provide his works with a splendid setting and his remains with a massive monument. And so, in the dim religious light, I pondered over the stately inscription:
“Tanto Nomini nullum par Elogium.”
How, indeed, equate eulogy to so great a name? Machiavelli was our first modern—the first to exhibit the reign of law in human affairs, to read history as the play of human forces and not as the caprice of a cloudy Providence, modified by the stars. What an epic sweep in the opening sentences of his “History of Florence”—Gibbon in a nutshell, the whole “Decline and Fall,” summarised as the economic emigration southward of the surplus population of the Goths into an Italy weakened by the removal of the seat of Empire to Constantinople. Vagarious chance, indeed, he admits, as a complication (to be minimised by prudence), but Providence is mentioned in “The Prince,” only to be dropped, and astrology is not even mentioned. Machiavelli would have agreed that “the fault’s in ourselves, not in our stars, that we are underlings,” and for those who wished to prince it, he was prepared to point the conditions of success. And this indifference to the stars—to quadrangles and hexagons, sigils, conjunctions, and configurations—is not his least amazing merit.
Pico della Mirandola had, indeed, refuted astrology before him, but it was in the interests of that conventional theory of Providence and free-will which leaves the chaos of history irreducible to order. Machiavelli not only ignores astrology, but substitutes causation for the chaos.
’Tis true Comte suggested that astrology was, likewise, an attempt to reduce to law the chaos of human phenomena, but the remark is over-ingenious. Where there is no rational connection between causes and effects there is no science. The planetary conjuncture one was born under might, indeed, not impossibly affect temperament or internal destiny, just as the climate one was born under, but the notion that it could shape external destiny belongs to the mediæval megalomania. Galileo’s discovery of new stars must have shaken it, falsifying as it did all previous horoscopes—indeed, Sir Henry Wotton, our ambassador to Venice, was more impressed by Galileo’s injuriousness to astrology than to theology. “For the virtue of these new planets must needs vary the judicial part, and why may there not yet be more?” But Machiavelli belongs to the pre-telescope period; he wrote a whole century before Galileo, and thirty years ere Copernicus unsettled the ancient heavens by his Nuremberg treatise. True, even in the twelfth century, Maimonides had denounced astrology as “a disease, not a science,” and the great Jew’s letter “to the Men of Marseilles” had evoked papal applause. But not even Popes could arrest the disease. A century before Machiavelli was born Petrarch poured scorn on the astrologers. But the mockeries of this pioneer of humanism did not save a prince of the Renaissance like Lodovico from employing an astrologer advisory, under whose calculations he went from disaster to disaster. There were even Professors of Astrology at the Universities. Bodin, the next great political philosopher after Machiavelli, though half a century later, still dallies with astrology, still coquets with the theory of a connection between the planetary motions and the world’s history, while Copernicus he regards as a fantast unworthy of serious refutation.
Earlier in the sixteenth century Luther had denounced astrology as “framed by the devil,” and in his Table Talk had challenged the astrologers to answer him why Esau and Jacob, who were “born together of one father and one mother, at one time and under equal planets” were yet “wholly of contrary natures, kinds and morals.” Nevertheless in the next century, Milton in “Paradise Regained” makes Satan predict truly to Jesus on the strength of
“What the stars, Voluminous or single characters, In their conjunction met,”
give him to spell, and throughout the whole seventeenth century, as “Guy Mannering” reminds us, nativities continued to be cast. The child’s horoscope in some parts of Europe hung side by side with his baptismal certificate. Even to-day such phrases as “Thank your lucky stars,” conserve a shadow of the ancient belief, and the sidereal influence survives even more subtly in the word “consider.” Through such banks of fog pierces the searchlight of the great Florentine, it turns its powerful beam even upon Church history. The Princes of ecclesiastical principalities, he remarks drily, are the only ones who can possess States and subjects without governing and defending them, but it would be presumptuous in him to discuss these matters, as they are under the superintendence and direction of an Almighty Being, whose dispensations are beyond our weak understandings. But the Church has likewise attained temporal power, and here Mephisto may intrude without blasphemy. Secular triumphs demand secular explanations. One is reminded of the dialogue on Julius II attributed to Erasmus. Our Mephisto notes grimly that no prophet has ever succeeded unless backed by an armed force. Hence the collapse of “brother Jerome Savonarola when the multitude ceased to have faith in him.” In short, in the making of history Might and Right are partners.
Not in the exposition of this commonplace lay Machiavelli’s offensiveness for his contemporaries. Had he remained the passionless observer of the pitiful human breed, the explicator of the tangled threads of history, he would have been acclaimed as a moralist, unveiling with ruthless hand the hypocrisies of princes. What changed angel to devil was that instead of fulminating against the partnership of Might and Right, he found that only by this firm could history be made. He wrote not science but art—the _ars usurpandi_. Not only had the Princes of the past combined Might with Right, guile with goodness, but whoso wished now to be a Prince must needs go and do likewise. The ethics springing from the social relations of citizen to citizen no longer holds in the relation of ruler to subjects.
It is true “The Prince” might also be regarded as an elaborate Swiftian irony—a negative Pulcinellian advice to those about to usurp—an exposition of Princedom as the service of the devil. “A New Prince cannot with impunity exercise all the virtues, because his own self-preservation will often compel him to violate the laws of charity, religion and humanity.” But this Swiftian supposition does not tally with the dedication to Lorenzo de’ Medici and his overt encouragement to the Most Magnificent to seize the reins. Machiavelli plainly believes in the sense he alleges hidden by the ancients in the myth of Chiron the Centaur, who was the educator of rulers because he had the double qualification of the brute and the man. In high politics crimes are only crimes when they are blunders. Unsuccessful cruelty is unpardonable. Wickedness should be pursued with an economy of means to end: like the causes in Occam’s canon, crimes should not be multiplied _præter necessitatem_. Politics is a sort of bee-keeping, and the master of the hive will use the instincts and ethics of the little creatures for his own purposes, his kindness will be as cold-blooded as his cruelty. Thus, some three and a half centuries before Nietzsche, was expounded the doctrine of the Superman, the splendid blonde beast who had passed _Jenseits von Gut und Böse_. “The despised virtues of patience and humility have abased the spirits of men, which Pagan principles exalted.” It is in such precisely Nietzschean terms that Sir Thomas Browne sums up, albeit unapplausively, “the judgment of Machiavel.” But as a treatise on apiculture, “The Prince” is not rigidly scientific. The Superman, alone upon his dizzy height, Diabolists and neo-Dionysians as yet unborn to cheer him, has his moments of human weakness. Before the crimes of Agathocles he falters, and remarks with delicious gravity, “Still it must not be called virtue to murder one’s fellow-citizens or to sacrifice one’s friends, or be insensible to the voice of faith, pity or religion. These qualities may lead to sovereignty but not to glory.” And there is a more general apologia in the concession that the times are out of joint—in the grim Tacitean explanation that “he who deviates from the common course of practice, and endeavours to act as duty dictates, necessarily ensures his own destruction.” Super-morality lapses here into morality.
Moreover, Machiavelli did not himself play the Superman. He wrote the part—or founded it on Cæsar Borgia—but he did not act it. The Rubicon ’twixt thought and action he never crossed. His own morals appear to have been conventionally excellent. Like Helvetius, who traced virtue to the lowest roots of self-interest, he was of a rare magnanimity. As a scientific observer he advises the Tyrant, if he cannot live in the Republic he has conquered, to destroy it root and branch, but as a man he bore torture and imprisonment for the cause of liberty. Indeed, in his later years something of the _sæva indignatio_ of Swift seems to have possessed his breast. It was Napoleon who was destined to incarnate the maxims of Machiavelli, though on a far grander stage than even Cæsar Borgia ever dreamed of: it was Napoleon who gave the greatest performance of “The Prince.” And by a hitherto unnoted coincidence Napoleon was born exactly three centuries after Machiavelli. Exactly three hundred years (1469-1769) divided the nativities of the Superman of Letters and the Superman of Action—’tis almost enough to revive faith in the potency of planetary conjunctures. True, Nietzsche regards Napoleon as but “half-Superman,” the other half being beast, but we have seen that the bestial portion is a necessary factor of the Machiavellian Superman, who is nothing if not super-dominant. What Nietzsche’s Superman was to be, Nietzsche did not precisely know, though we may well suspect that the direction in which he strained his vision for him was not the horizon but the looking glass. Nietzsche has not even the credit of inventing the Superman, for when Nietzsche was six years old, Tennyson published “In Memoriam,” with its prophetic peroration:
“A closer link Between us and the crowning race. . . .
No longer half akin to brute, For all we thought and loved and did, And hoped, and suffered, is but seed Of what in them is flower and fruit.”
Tennyson pressed home this idea of the further evolution of our race in his very last volume, in a poem called “The Making of Man.”
“Man as yet is being made, and ere the crowning Age of ages, Shall not æon after æon pass and touch him into shape?”
And again in “The Dawn.”
“Ah, what will _our_ children be, The men of a hundred thousand, a million summers away?”
More self-conscious a disciple of Machiavelli than Napoleon was our own Thomas Cromwell, who carried “The Prince” as his political enchiridion, and who within three years of its publication chopped off Sir Thomas More’s head as coolly as a knight captures a bishop on a chess-board. If you have to choose between love and fear, said the Master, then fear is the stronger weapon. With fear, Thomas the pupil hewed his way to the great ends he had set himself. Thomas Cromwell’s application of the system was, however, vitiated by one radical mistake. By a paradox, worthy of Machiavelli himself—and repeated in our own day by Bismarck—“the Prince” he worked for was not himself but his sovereign. Howsoever Thomas Crommay have appeared the true gerent, the final profit was to the suzerain, and the axe of despotism which he had forged for Henry VIII was turned against his own neck. Of his canon that traitors should be condemned unheard, he was the sole victim. Possibly he might have triumphed even over the flaw in his practice, had Anne of Cleves been more personable. It was essential to his game to queen this pawn, and queen her he did. But at what a cost! It has been said that if Cleopatra’s nose had been longer, the world’s history would have been other. Of the German princess’s nose it may be said that had it been prettier—or perchance had Holbein flattered it less before it was seen by the matrimonial agent—Thomas Cromwell would have continued to rule England, and Europe might have been spared the Thirty Years’ War. But even Supermen cannot change the shape of ladies’ noses, and in this surd of a world, where the best laid plans may “gang agley” over the tilt of a nostril, what avail your Supermen more than Supermice? The toasted cheese is but temporary, the end of Napoleon is the mouse-trap.
The phenomena of history are indeed too multifarious for consciousness, and the Machiavellian method of treating persons as things—in defiance of the moral maxim—shatters itself upon the impossibility of foreseeing all the permutations of the things. A bad prince is no more secure against assassination than a good prince. A religious reformer may arise and upset the snuggest peace. A failure of crops may precipitate rebellion. A child’s arm may plug up a dam. In brief, lacking the necessary omniscience, the shrewdest of Supermen is driving in the dark. The upshot of Napoleon’s career was to make Germany and mutilate France.
It is through lack of omniscience, too, that we cannot obey the frequent modern suggestion to breed the Superman—the Superman, that is, not as the cold-blooded manipulator of man, but as his moral superior and successor, Tennyson’s Superman, not Nietzsche’s. We are too abysmally ignorant for evolutionary eugenics. We breed horses and roses for higher types, but then we immeasurably transcend horses and roses. Who transcends us so immeasurably that he should breed us? In breeding we have a clear vision of our aim—to produce a thornless rose or a Derby winner. What clear vision has any one of the Superman? It is impossible to read even Nietzsche without seeing a spectral swarm of shifting types. Moreover we breed only for physical qualities. What experience have we of breeding for moral qualities? And what were all our breedings compared with Nature’s inexhaustible experimentation, her thousand million men and women of all shades and psychoses, her endless blendings and crossings that yield now Nietzsches, now Isaiahs; yesterday Platos, to-day Darwins and Wagners.
The Superman will come of himself: already man rises as imperceptibly into him as he fades into the orang-outang. “This was no man,” said Napoleon, reading the Sermon on the Mount—an involuntary admission by the Machiavellian of a finer species of Superman than his own.
And this brings us to the paradox that the defect in Machiavelli’s system was not in his morals but in his intellect. In the hive he examined were creatures greater than he, obeying motives beyond his ken. To him Princes ruled primarily for their own glory, for the pomp and pride of power. Of the small but infinitely important class of rulers who assume mastership only because they have the greatest power to serve, he has no adequate conception. That there has sometimes been a Pope who felt himself literally _servus servorum Dei_ passed his comprehension. This falsifies his treatment of history, this makes his vision imperfect, this throws his conclusions out of gear. The verse in St. Matthew, “he that is greatest among you shall be servant of all the rest,” represents a more scientific generalisation. As Chapman’s _Don Byron_ (Act 3, Scene 1) reminds us, in his denunciation of “the schools first founded in ingenious Italy,” the true
“Kings are not made by art But right of nature, nor by treachery propt But simple virtue.”
But Machiavelli, that crude biologist, treats Moses and Cyrus as creatures of the same species, would run together the Attilas and the Buddhas. Hence the hard metallic sheen of his style as of an old Latin prose-writer; of spiritual iridescence, of Jewish tenderness, of Christian yearning, of even the Nietzschean ecstasy there is no trace. It is not astonishing that he should have turned a scornful ear to Savonarola’s message, dismissed him as a compound of fraud and cunning. How dramatic is the picture of Mephisto listening to the preacher of San Marco that week of the Carnival of 1497! (What a pity “Romola” does not exploit that episode instead of using Machiavelli as a mere caustic conversationalist). But though Machiavelli’s flair for crouching Cæsars was not utterly at fault, though the Dominican did indeed aspire to be “The Prince” of the Church, and even the power behind the thrones of the Princes of Christendom, yet ’twas all _ad majorem Dei gloriam_ and for the greater confusion of the infidel, and George Eliot has understood this impersonal egotist infinitely better than his cynical contemporary understood him. And this intellectual limitation—this absence of the highest notes from his psychological gamut—must always keep Machiavelli out of the first rank of writers. He cannot rise above the notion that power is an end in itself and that those who can satisfy it “deserve praise rather than censure.” If the King of France—he tells us—was powerful enough to invade the kingdom of Naples, then he _ought_ to have done it. Though Machiavelli could see that the individual’s crimes “may lead to sovereignty but not to glory,” yet he did not question the right of a State to absorb or shatter another. He saw that the world went on
“The simple plan That they should take who have the power, And they should keep who can,”
and he admitted that the rule was indispensable—if you went into politics. This was his crime—High Treason against Idealism. Humanity prefers to be guided by rules which it disavows. The splendid blonde beasts who practised the maxims of Machiavelli shuddered at the scribe who merely stated them. Nowhere probably was disgust with the Florentine writer more vehement than in Venice, which employed assassins as a principle of polity. Could that Turkish “Prince” who decreed that each new monarch of his house must safeguard the dynasty by massacring his swarm of brothers, or that Persian “Prince” who invented the principle of blinding them, have seen the printed “Prince” of Machiavelli, they with their correct Islamic or Zoroastrian principles would have shared in the universal opprobrium.
That the world shudders still is shown by the apologetic attitude of his commentators and even of his panegyrists. Not one but repudiates his system, charitably traces it to the unhappy circumstances of his day, to the welter of force and fraud amid which his lot was cast. Yet are these circumstances essentially changed? The small urban republics have vanished, but in their stead are the Great Powers. Cæsar Borgia and Ezzelino are gone, but we have the Congo Ruler and the Trust Magnate. “Every country hath its Machiavel,” says Sir Thomas Browne, and there is no spot on earth where the maxims of “The Prince” are not in daily operation. The voice may be the voice of Savonarola, but the hands are the hands of Machiavelli.