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PARTISAN REVIEW
own sincerity. Any catharsis, provided
it
would free him from the
atrocious anarchic individualism into which his very coherence
plunged him; provided it re-admitted him to the warmth of humanity.
A catharsis, in short, which would calm the feelings of excess and
extravagance which the writing of the
Prince
could not have failed
to arouse in him.
This catharsis could not, given the premises, be religious. A
Machiavelli who, at the close of the
Prince,
looked forward like
Savonarola to the coming of a new Christianity which would purify
the Italians from below would have been not only inconceivable but
really inconsistent. So instead the catharsis was found in patriotism.
By a characteristic transfer of his decadence into rhetoric, Machia–
velli tried to manage the impossible transmutation of a vast sum of
negative values into one single positive value: the
patria.
For all these reasons I believe that in the lyrical exhortation of
the final chapter one should see neither a premeditated conclusion
nor a political act, but merely the sigh for liberation and redemption
of a man who had been driven throughout the whole book to the
most remorseless and unbearable conclusion. In this light certainly
the accusations of immorality which have always been raised against
Machiavelli will have to fall. The last chapter, in short, is nothing
but the collapse of an exhausted runner at the end of the relay, a
kind of plea for pity and rest.
Rest, above all. For Machiavelli did not realize, as I have
already said, that he had created in the Prince a figure fully as
beautiful and literary as, say, Iago. Going over his thoughts, too
blood-soaked for further action, he must have felt the impossibility
of concluding the book in the same mood in which he had begun it.
The accusation of immorality which posterity later made against
Machiavelli he himself, in short, with understandable scruples, was
the first to make against himself. All this perhaps was not wholly
conscious; and yet, looking at the last chapter, it is legitimate to
think that such was the chain of events. But the operation was psy–
chological, and could not be political; or rather, if it had been poli–
tical it could only have failed. Think about it: Machiavelli's Prince,
with the skepticism, violence, ambitions, means which we know, sud–
denly at a certain point-as though tired and filled with repugnance
toward his own being-decides to sublimate this ensemble of negative
qualities through the positive quality of love of country. We may be
