The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  The book covers the period bounded by the birth of Dante (c. 1265) to the death of Michelangelo (1564). Although Burckhardt is best known as an art historian, visual artists do not feature prominently in his history. Raphael is mentioned almost in passing. The nature of Leonardo, the great universal genius of the period, is characterized as so rich that it “can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.” Benvenuto Cellini is considered more as an autobiographer than as a visual artist. Giorgio Vasari, the contemporary and indispensable chronicler of Renaissance artists, is appreciatively noted: Without his “all important work, we should perhaps to this day have no history of Northern art, or of the art of modern Europe, at all.” Michelangelo goes unmentioned.

  Ariosto, Boccaccio, Castiglione, Petrarch, Tasso, and most prominently, Dante weave in and out of Burckhardt’s pages. Savonarola, Cesare Borgia, Lorenzo Medici, Machiavelli put in cameo appearances. So, too, do minor figures such as Pietro Aretino, thought to be the father of modern journalism, and as such “not burdened with principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue.”

  Burckhardt is less interested in biographical portraiture than in trying to capture the spirit of Italians during the Renaissance and how the Italian character, in all its variety, helped create the modern state. He does not scant the villainy of Renaissance despots, governing without morals or principles. Some of the most minor were the most cruel. Among this group was one Pandolfo Petrucci, who exercised power in Siena toward the close of the 15th century. “His pastime in the summer months,” Burckhardt writes, “was to roll blocks of stone from the top of Monte Amiata, without caring what or whom they hit.”

  To grasp what marked off the Renaissance from all that came before, Burckhardt places heavy emphasis on the recovery of the literature and art of antiquity by the Renaissance Italians. “Aristotle,” he writes, “became the common property of educated Italians.” Cicero was the model among them for prose composition. Arabic and Hebrew texts were studied. The ideal Italian was l’uomo universale, the “all-sided man.”

  The diminished prestige of the church in Italy was a help in freeing men from concentration on the purely celestial. Machiavelli blamed the church for the irreligion and corruption of the Italians. This was a period when popes formed their own dynasties, and dealt in favors and pardons the way a Venetian merchant dealt in glass and silver. With their minds no longer solely on the drama of salvation, mankind, as Burckhardt writes, was “here first thoroughly and profoundly understood. This one single result of the Renaissance is enough to fill us with everlasting thankfulness.”

  Talent was esteemed more than high birth. Women emerged as more than helpmates. “To understand the higher forms of social intercourse at this period,” Burckhardt writes, “we must keep before our minds the fact that women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men.” The education afforded upper-class women was no different from that of men. The word “virago,” he notes, “then implied nothing but praise.”

  Burckhardt is splendid on the Italian penchant for vengeance. Honor, which ranked high in the Italian scheme of virtues, was always in peril during the Renaissance. Honor must never be outraged. Burckhardt stresses through his book the role imagination played among Italians of the Renaissance, and writes that “it was to the imagination of the Italians that the peculiar character of their vengeance was due.” Avenging of blood was considered a duty. Vendette were “handed down from father to son, and extended to friends and distant relations.” Revenge “was declared with perfect frankness to be a necessity of human nature.” But vengeance must be undertaken with art, and satisfaction achieved through both “the material injury and moral humiliation of the offender.” One can find in Burckhardt’s pages on vengeance the roots of the modern Mafia.

  A good part of the richness of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy derives from Burckhardt’s ability to hold in exquisite balance the corruption and the glory, the squalor and the grandeur, the cruelty and the beauty of Renaissance life. Toward the close of his book, he writes:

  But the Italian of the Renaissance had to bear the first mighty surging of a new age. Through his fits and his passions, he has become the most characteristic representative of all the heights and all the depths of his time. By the side of the profound corruption appeared human personalities of the noblest harmony, and an artistic splendor which shed upon the life of man a lustre which neither antiquity nor mediaevalism could or would bestow upon it.

  Burckhardt’s sophisticated prose, such as could be commanded only by a man of the deepest culture, brings this to life in the way that no contemporary academic could hope to do.

  No one who has read Jacob Burckhardt’s masterpiece will ever think to call, say, Woody Allen or Steve Jobs a Renaissance man.

  Montesquieu

  (2016)

  Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), a leading figure in the French Enlightenment, began his career studying and then practicing law. With the acquisition of his fortune through marriage and inheritance, he settled into the life of a man of letters. He wrote novels, essays (on taste and history among other large subjects), and two books that rendered him famous. Persian Letters (1721), a satire on the absurdities of contemporary French society as seen by a visiting Persian, made him a figure of great réclame in his own day; and his The Spirit of the Laws (1748), on the influence of forms of government and of climate on nations, remains a central work of political philosophy in ours.

  Between those two books, Montesquieu published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734), a lesser-known work but one deserving the highest acclaim. In it, Montesquieu combines the insights of the historian with those of the political philosopher, set out in brilliant aphoristic style. “At the birth of societies,” he writes early in this book, “the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that create the leaders of republics.” Everything Montesquieu wrote was against the background of his pervasive and persuasive views of human nature: “For the occasions which produce great changes are different but, since men have had the same passions at all times, the causes are always the same.” Notable among those passions are pride, greed, and the love of glory.

  To grasp the quality of Montesquieu’s Considerations, one has to imagine the 3,000-odd pages of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire condensed to a mere 220 pages and without losing much. Not that the views of the two men are everywhere congruent, but both are proficient in understanding the great sweep of events while simultaneously discerning the role of character in the play of history. Their art consists in balancing the effect of each upon the other.

  Of the letters of Cicero, that last Roman republican, Montesquieu writes: “we can see the dejection and despair of the foremost men of the republic at this sudden revolution [the monarchical-minded triumvirate of Caesar, Pompey and Crassus] depriving them of their honors and even their occupations.” He finds Cicero’s “genius was superb, but his soul was common.” Comparing him to Cato, he notes: “Cicero always thought of himself first, Cato always forgot about himself. The latter wanted to save the republic for its own sake, the former in order to boast of it.”

  Of Roman character in general, Montesquieu is most impressive. “Roman citizens,” he writes, “regarded commerce and the arts as the occupations of slaves . . . they knew only the art of war, which was the sole path to magistracies and honors.” Pillaging was the chief means of enrichment. Courage, he held, came to the Roman soldier naturally. The advantage the Romans had over the Carthaginians in their three wars was that “the Romans were ambitious from pride, the Carthaginians from avarice; the Romans wanted to command, the Carthaginians to acquire.”

  Pride lay behind the Roman penchant for suicide, a habit encouraged by the teaching of the Stoics, a philosophy whose first lesson was preparing on
e for the naturalness and ultimately the negligibility of death. Suicide became among the Romans a point of honor in the face of defeat or public disgrace, and a chance for a redeeming heroism. Suicide allowed each man to put “an end to the part he played in the world whenever he wished.” Self-love was the major motive for Roman suicide, for, according to Montesquieu, “such is the value we set on ourselves that we consent to cease living because of a natural and obscure instinct that makes us love ourselves more than our very life.”

  With the end of the republic ushered in by Augustus, Roman character itself changed. “In the days of the republic,” Montesquieu writes, “the principle was to make war continually; under the emperors the maxim was to maintain peace.” Political life became secretive. With the Emperor Tiberius, in whom the statesman too often yielded to the paranoid, “flattery, infamy, and crime were the arts necessary to succeed.” The march of Roman emperors, with pauses only for the true nobility of Trajan and the Antonines, was a dance of degradation. “All the Roman efforts of conquest ended by satisfying the happiness of five or six monsters,” and Roman “citizens were treated as they themselves treated conquered nations.”

  The gradual but sure debilitation of Roman character ended in the reduction and ultimate defeat of Roman power. Difficult to read Montesquieu on Rome without thinking of the US in our time, as when, for one example among many, he writes that “more states have perished by the violation of their moral customs than by the violation of their laws.”

  A work of genius, one definition of a masterpiece, makes us see the world differently.

  Machiavelli

  (2016)

  Surely no reputation is more locked in, at least in the public mind, than that of Niccolo Machiavelli (1469–1527). Sometimes referred to as the founder of modern political science, he is better known as the progenitor of a policy that everywhere places expediency over morality. As a result, Machiavellism has come to mean immoral actions, and a Machiavel a cunning, utterly self-regarding person, evil incarnate.

  The Prince, Machiavelli’s most famous—some might say infamous—work, is a manual of instruction to princes on how to capture and retain power. In this manual, a single criterion obtains: what succeeds. The instructions are unstinting in their specificity, often unflinching in their brutality. Apropos of such great leaders as Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus, Machiavelli writes: “Hence it comes about that all armed prophets have been successful, and all unarmed prophets have been destroyed.” Only Machiavelli could hold up the cruel regime of Cesare Borgia as worthy of emulation. As Isaiah Berlin, in his essay “The Originality of Machiavelli,” wrote: “He seems wholly unworried by, indeed scarcely aware of, parting company with traditional western morality.”

  Yet there is another Machiavelli, and he is to be discovered in a less read, more complexly textured work called Discourses on Livy. Livy (c. 59 BCE–ce 17) was the first Roman historian without an earlier career in public office; his history began with the founding of Rome. Machiavelli’s purpose in this book is to bring readers to “a right understanding of ancient and modern affairs; so that any who shall read these remarks of mine, may reap from them that profit for the sake of which a knowledge of History is to be sought.” Machiavelli restricted his comments in The Prince to principalities; here he also considers republics.

  The richness of Machiavelli’s classical learning is on display throughout the Discourses. Early in the book, he sets out the reasons why the laws of the Spartan Lycurgus had a permanence, while those of the Athenian Solon were transient. The chief reason is that laws not supported by good customs are fragile, while good customs stand in need of strong laws for their support. Customs and laws both are required to stay the avarice and rapaciousness of men, who “are, by nature, more prone to evil than to good.”

  One can scarcely read Machiavelli’s Discourses without reflecting on their significance for our day. When he writes that “no kingdom can stand when two feeble princes follow in succession,” one thinks of recent American history and its string of poor presidents. His explanation of how good men were excluded from office, owing to the valuation of wealth over honor and the insidious influence of corruption, so that men of merit gave way to those with ambition merely, makes one think of current American politics.

  The Discourses tend to be wider-angled, less instructive and more cautionary than The Prince. “A lost freedom,” Machiavelli writes, “is defended with more ferocity than a threatened freedom is defended.” On the subject of soldiers, he thinks little of mercenaries, and avows “it is not gold, as it is vulgarly supposed, that is the sinews of war, but good soldiers”—iron, in other words, everywhere defeats gold. Evidence of Machiavelli’s dazzling mind is shown in his ability to draw useful distinctions. In The Prince, he distinguishes between necessary and unnecessary cruelty; in the Discourses, between accusations and calumnies, between wars fought for mastery and those fought for life itself (this borrowed from Sallust), and many more.

  Machiavelli’s great model in the Discourses is Rome in its republican years. “For if no commonwealth has ever been found to grow like the Roman, it is because none was ever found so well fitted by its institutions to make that growth.” Athens and Sparta may have been governed by better laws, but Rome, by the steady increase of its population through conquest and by admitting strangers to the rights of citizenship, all the while maintaining its military spirit under steady discipline and the need to strive for glory, endured longer than either.

  In the Discourses, Brutus, Appius Claudius, the Decemvirs, and Julius Caesar play cameo roles. Of Caesar, Machiavelli notes that he was “able to so blind the multitude that it saw not the yoke under which it was to lay its neck.” Machiavelli’s mastery of Roman history is buttressed by his steady view of human nature with its inability to curb either its ambition or its envy and its need to gratify the desire of the moment. Such, he held, is the general perversity of men, “a sorry lot,” that they “may aid fortune but never withstand her.”

  In the 24th chapter of the Discourses, Machiavelli wrote:

  When it is absolutely a question of the safety of one’s country, there must be no question of just or unjust, of merciful or cruel, of praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, setting aside every scruple one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep her liberty.

  His stringent view of human nature combined with his originality and penetration made Niccolo Machiavelli, in his day and still in ours, the pre-eminent political philosopher of the world not as it ought to be but as it is.

  Gogol

  (2013)

  One of the enduring mysteries of literary history is the appearance in nineteenth-century Russia, that vast and barbarous country, of the greatest writers of fiction in all of literature. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are supreme among the novelists of all nations, with Turgenev not far behind. Then there is Chekhov, master of the short story, and Ivan Goncharov, author of Oblomov and The Same Old Story. Among the Russians, the purest artist is Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), author of the play The Inspector General, some unforgettable stories, and a single novel, Dead Souls, which, even though unfinished, is nonetheless a masterpiece.

  Gogol is the comic genius among Russian writers, always playful but never shallow. He had a magnificent eye for the bizarre, for the madcap, above all for what was extraordinary in the ordinary. In his story “The Nose” he wrote about a barber who wakes one morning to discover a nose stuffed into his morning loaf of bread. The nose turns out to belong to one of his customers, Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov. How the nose got into the barber’s bread and how one morning a few weeks later it reappeared on the face of its owner is never explained. Plots are not Gogol’s strong point. Nor was he much interested in ideas.

  Dead Souls is a story about Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, who travels the provincial countryside buying up dead serfs from small landowners. These serfs remain on the landowners’ books until the next
census, and, even though dead, are still taxable. Chichikov offers to relieve the landowners of their tax burden. His plan is to install these dead serfs on the tax rolls of a faraway estate, on which he will then be able to get a generous government mortgage, and come away with a small fortune.

  The great Russian poet Pushkin was Gogol’s friend and supporter, and the man who gave him the idea for Dead Souls. Gogol refers to the book not as a novel but as a poem. Dead Souls is a poem about Russia, its provincial backwaters, its secondary characters (clerks, minor officials, small landowners), its heartbreaking squalor. “Russia! Russia!” Gogol exclaims midway through the book, “. . . Everything in you is open, desolate and level; your squat towns barely protrude in the midst of the plains like dots, like counters; there is nothing to tempt or enchant the onlooker’s gaze. But what is this inscrutable, mysterious force that draws me to you?”

  What gives Dead Souls its poetic quality is its author’s exuberant passion for the detail—one might even say the irrelevant detail—of provincial Russian life. Gogol’s eye for such detail is matchless. In his brief, brilliant study Nikolai Gogol, Vladimir Nabokov accounts for Gogols’s artistry through this and what he calls Gogol’s “four dimensional” prose, a sinuous style that captures characters in their inner being. Through his subtle selection of detail and his dazzling prose, Gogol’s scenes light up, his characters flame into life, his tragi-comic vision touches the reader’s heart.

  I write “tragi-comic,” for Gogol was far from the mere humorist he is sometimes advertised as being. “I am fated to journey hand in hand with my strange heroes and to survey the surging immensity of life,” he wrote in Dead Souls, “to survey it through the laughter that all can see and through unknown invisible tears.” The book’s characters might be thought stock—the miser, the spendthrift, the bearish Russian, and the rest—but for their creator’s ability to bring them to life with a shimmering individuality. When Gogol digresses—as he does at nearly every opportunity, sometimes in the middle of a sentence—it is invariably into the realm of comic observation, as in his charming little disquisition on fat men “being better able to conduct their affairs in this world than the thin.”