PORTRAIT OF MACHIAVELLI
359
man than he, more wary and prudent, would have known how to
round out certain angles, to hide certain parts, in short, not to write
the
Prince
at all. With the
Discourses
alone Machiavelli's fame as the
creator of political science would have been just as well assured. We
would have had a Machiavelli no less profound, perspicacious, exact,
systematic, new. A M.achiavelli without Machiavellianism; or with
so little Machiavellianism that no one would have noticed it. We owe
the
Prince
to Machiavelli's sincerity. A poetic book, the
Prince
not
only crowns and closes the work of Machiavelli, but above all adds
clearly the note of Machiavellianism. Illuminated by the
Prince,
the
other writings of Machiavelli reveal in their turn whatever Machiavel–
lianism they contain.
And we know very well that Machiavellianism has always
existed and always will exist. Yet the fact remains that it was the
choice and the vocation of Machiavelli; that it was Machiavelli and
not someone else who discovered its scattered fragments in history
and put them together in a single vigorous and terrible mold. Similar–
ly sadism existed before De Sade; but it was De Sade who first
described it and gave it a name. I think that if there had not been a
sympathetic attraction such as fire has for things that are very dry or
oily, Machiavelli would never have discovered, built into a system,
and given a name to the type of moral attitude which is called
Machiavellianism.
Many people have thought they discovered in the
M andragola
the original source of a supposed Italian theater which then, nobody
knows why, never did come into being (Goldoni is something quite
different from Italian theater). In my opinion, the
M andragola
is
not a beginning, but the most exhausted and lifeless of endings. I
am not alluding here to the crudities, the corruption, the cynicism
which one notes in the comedy. Let us say at once that if these were
real crudities, corruption, cynicism, if they were felt by the author as
such, the
M andragola
would be much more alive, and indeed might
have been a beginning of an Italian theater. But in the
M andragola
there is cynicism, corruption, crudity only because we-modern
readers living in an entirely different world with entirely different
conventions-see them there, not because Machiavelli intended to
put them in. In other words, Machiavelli intended to compose a kind
