PORTRAIT OF MACHIAVELLI
361
I have said that the
M andragola
is the mirror of a soul which
is profoundly dried up in what concerns private emotions, religion,
and the ethical conscience. The
Prince
and the other political works
are an attempt, magnificently successful, to galvanize this soul by
means of the only passion which was any longer entertained there:
the political passion.
One could accept Machiavelli's political passion as an obvious
factual reality. Machiavelli was in politics, he cherished political
ambitions, he did not spend time on anything else: what wonder
if he had a passion for it? But it seems to me that the thing is not so
simple. Guicciardini was also a professional in politics on a par with
Machiavelli; and yet the passion does not exist in him, or if it does
it is subordinated to a serene and sad clarity of vision. The problem
of Machiavelli's political passion is basically the same as that of his
political science: when is it legitimate to subordinate every other
value and sentiment to politics; why does this happen; and when it
happens, up to what point can politics take the place of other de–
ficiencies which are implicit in its supremacy? To clarify this, the
comparison with Guicciardini is again useful. Guicciardini had a
temperament rather different from that of Machiavelli. A less vehe–
ment man of genius, less imaginative, less artistic, he still had, none–
theless, and perhaps because of the difference in temperament, a
moral personality of greater integrity, a more acute conscience, a
more balanced intelligence. Even
his
cult of the
particulare
1
attests
basically to a respect for human freedom which it would be impos–
sible to find in Machiavelli. It is true that the
particulare
does not
seem to be more than the totality of the material interests of the
individual; but nothing forbids one's thinking that
in
more favorable
conditions the
p'articulare
might signify the development of the moral
personality. That Guicciardini falls back on individual happiness
is at bottom an act of optimism; the
particulare
at first sight may
appear to be nothing more than an egoist; but on further examina–
tion one sees that he is at any rate a man, whereas the subject of the
prince is not a man but inert matter. And therefore from the subject
one may expect nothing; but from the
particulare-whenever
the
1 "Private man," as distinguished from
l'homme engage,
a term used
by
Guicciardini for which there is no exact English equivalent.
