The New Lifetime Reading Plan

prefers republicanism, and anticipates several of the devices of modern parliamentary democracy. Yet the two may profitably be read in association. Together they help to explain the careers of such antimoralists as Richelieu, Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. Also they help to explain the con- tinuous though prettily disguised power struggle that goes on in ali democracies, including our own.

Machiavelli was a practical politician. Under the Florentine Republic he held office for fourteen years, serving efficiently as diplomat and army organizer. In The Prince he incorporated the concrete insights he had gained during his observation of the Italian city-states and the emergent nations of Western Europe, particularly France. When in 1512 the Medicis regained power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his. Unjustly imprisoned and even tortured, he was exiled, and retired to his farm. There—compare Thucydides [9]—he employed his time in writing. He achieved some reputation as a historian, play- wright, and all-round humanist man of letters. But it is as the author of The Prince, by which he hoped to regain political favor, that he is best known.

His reputation, an odd one, has given us the adjective "Machiavellian." During the Elizabethan era "Old Nick" was a term referring as much to his first name as to the Devil. lago and a dozen other Italianate Elizabethan villains are in part the consequence of a popular misconception of Machiavelli. He became known as a godless and cynical defender of force and fraud in statecraft.

Ali Machiavelli did was to cry out that the emperor had no clothes on. He told the truth about power as he saw it in actual operation, and if the truth was not pretty, he is hardly to be blamed for that. He himself seems to have been a reasonably vir- tuous man, no hater of humanity, neither devilish nor neurotic.

Also it should be remembered that The Prince is a descrip- tion of political means, not political ends. What Machiavelli seems really to have wanted (see his Chapter 26) was a united Italy, free of Spanish and French domination. Cavour and the nineteenth-century unifiers of Italy owe much to him; from a certain aspect he may even be considered a liberal. Yet there is no denying that his ideal Prince (he admired the ineffable Cesare Borgia) must separate himself from ali considerations of morality, unless those considerations are themselves expedi- ent. As for his view of the relationship between religion and the state: "Ali armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones failed." The Ayatollah Khomeini would have grinned approvingly.

The Prince is a manual. It tells the ambitious leader how to gain, maintain, and centralize power. Once this power is estab- lished there is nothing, in Machiavell^s view, to prevent the state from developing just and free institutions. What is involved here, of course, is the whole question of means and ends, and Machiavelli does not resolve the problem.

Because the politics of European nationalism have been in part guided by this icy, terrifyingly intelligent book of instruc- tion, it is well worth reading.

C.F.

35

FRANЗOIS RABELAIS

1483-1553

Gargantua and Pantagruel

This book, while it contains plenty of narrative, has no clear plot, is virtually formless, and eludes classification. It takes its place near the beginning of French literature, but the French novel does not descend from it. Nothing descends from it. Though it has had imitators, it stands by itself. It is a wild, sane, wonderful, exasperating, sometimes tedious extrava- ganza. Although it is open to a dozen interpretations, one thing at least can be said of it: It is the work of a supreme genius of language whose vitality and power of verbal invention are matched only by Shakespeare and Joyce.

About Rabelais's life we know little. He was a monk, a doc- tor, personal physician to the important Cardinal du Bellay, an editor, and of course a writer. At various times his books got him into trouble with the authorities. The more bigoted Catholics of his time attacked him; so did the Calvinists, whose bigotry one cannot qualify in any way. Still, despite his satiric view of the churchly obscurantism of his period, there is noth- ing to prove he was not a good, though hardly straitlaced, Catholic. Anatole France said that Rabelais "believed in God five days out of seven, which is a good deal." Fair enough.

The five books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (the fifth may not be entirely genuine) deal with two giants. The first book tells us about Gargantua, his birth, education, farcical war adventures, and the Abbey of Thйlиme he helped to build, whose only rule was: Do as you wish. The other four books are concerned with Gargantuas son, Pantagruel, that son's boon companion, the rascally, earthy, Falstaffian Panurge, and their wars, traveis, quests for wisdom.