all that is in it by reading it mutely:
Mr. Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously
suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must
not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would
be judged. He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none
but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an
idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the
events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of
reverie. The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be
politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds
up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers.
What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder
in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt
without patriotism. When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon
the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent
quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior
of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking
for. Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the
diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he
extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order.
But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer,
while it is still Machiavelli’s hard fate to be so trammeled in
his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent
and perfidious in human nature.
You see how easy and flowing it is; how unvexed by ruggednesses,
clumsinesses, broken meters; how simple and–so far as you or I
can make out–unstudied; how clear, how limpid, how understandable,
how unconfused by cross-currents, eddies, undertows; how seemingly
unadorned, yet is all adornment, like the lily-of-the-valley;
and how compressed, how compact, without a complacency-signal
hung out anywhere to call attention to it.
There are twenty-three lines in the quoted passage. After reading
it several times aloud, one perceives that a good deal of matter
is crowded into that small space. I think it is a model
of compactness. When I take its materials apart and work them
over and put them together in my way, I find I cannot crowd the
result back into the same hole, there not being room enough. I
find it a case of a woman packing a man’s trunk: he can get the
things out, but he can’t ever get them back again.
The proffered paragraph is a just and fair sample; the rest
of the article is as compact as it is; there are no waste words.
The sample is just in other ways: limpid, fluent, graceful, and
rhythmical as it is, it holds no superiority in these respects
over the rest of the essay. Also, the choice phrasing noticeable
in the sample is not lonely; there is a plenty of its kin
distributed through the other paragraphs. This is claiming much
when that kin must face the challenge of a phrase like the one in
the middle sentence: “an idealist immersed in realities who
involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something
like the visionary issues of reverie.” With a hundred words to
do it with, the literary artisan could catch that airy thought
and tie it down and reduce it to a concrete condition, visible,
substantial, understandable and all right, like a cabbage; but
the artist does it with twenty, and the result is a flower.
The quoted phrase, like a thousand others that have come
from the same source, has the quality of certain scraps of verse
which take hold of us and stay in our memories, we do not
understand why, at first: all the words being the right words,
none of them is conspicuous, and so they all seem inconspicuous,
therefore we wonder what it is about them that makes their
message take hold.
The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.
It is like a dreamy strain of moving music, with no sharp
notes in it. The words are all “right” words, and all the same