PORTRAIT OF MACHIAVELLI
371
allowed to imagine that this desire for sublimation will remain an
intention, and rather than express itself in action will be expressed
by rhetoric.
Here one touches upon one of the most delicate and secret aspects
of the personality of Machiavelli: the discrepancy between the ener–
getic, realistic, exact observer of political affairs and the literary
humanist of certain passages of the
Discourses
and the
Prince.
We
know that Machiavelli was not a rhetorician nor an empty and formal
man of letters like so many of his contemporaries; and yet rhetoric,
without his realizing it, swells many of his pages and leaves them
empty. Now rhetoric, that alluding to the Romans every few words,
is, as Guicciardini says, the result of an inadequate and imperfect
sublimation of the decadent in Machiavelli--of
his
unsatisfied desire
for a catharsis which would renew and purify him.
If
Machiavelli
had been, like Guicciardini, a mediocre man who was perfectly con–
scious of his own limitations and balanced and ordered within them,
then he would not have alluded to the Romans; nor would he have
done so if he himself had been sufficiently Roman not to feel the
need of talking about them. Instead, he has neither enough medi–
ocrity nor enough greatness. He does not accept his state of exhaus–
tion, and at the same time he does not have the strength (and how
could he?) to convert it into a positive and truly energetic state.
The result is the Humanism and the literariness which conspicuously
mark his more lofty tones.
As
though, to use the words of Machiavelli
himself, he is speaking of something he would like to be and is not.
And yet, something he would like to be. The seriousness of Ma–
chiavelli's humanistic rhetoric lies in this strenuous aspiration, in
the service of which he desperately puts all the best, the most alive
qualities he has to offer. In short,
his
is a tragic humanism, which
rests on a twisted and anxious psychological basis. This distinguishes
Machiavelli both from the cold and jesuitical political thinkers and
from the literary rhetoricians who followed him. It also explains the
contradiction in him; and at the same time it furnishes a proof of
the slight interest there can be in his thought, and justifies the stub–
born diffidence of all those who, even without knowing why, have
doubts about the basis of his theories in the
Prince,
and about the
validity of the chapter which closes the book.
(Translated from the Italian by Gertrude Hooker)
