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Diplomacy and the
I see a man commit one capital error, I have a right to assume he may commit a thousand; for names do not impose on me, and in such cases I never yield except to the authority of reason.’
We may recall Bacon’s protest against those who object too much, consult too long, adventure too high, and seldom drive business home.[1] Add to that the following from The Jew of Malta:[2]
- ↑ It should not be necessary to say that Bacon’s worldly wisdom for example, in the Essays (in part, even as Montaigne, ‘ie suis moy mesme la matière de mon livre’), in the second book of The Advancement of Learning, and in his Commentarius Solutus—is saturated with the influence of Machiavelli. ‘Concerning government, it is a part of knowledge secret and retired in both these respects in which things are deemed secret; for some things are secret because they are hard to know, and some because they are not fit to utter.’—Adv. of L., II. xxiii. 47. ‘And experience showeth, there are few men so true to themselves and so settled, but that, sometimes upon heat, sometimes upon bravery, sometimes upon kindness, sometimes upon trouble of mind and weakness, they open themselves; specially if they be put to it with a counter-dissimulation, according to the proverb of Spain, “Di mentira, y sacaras verdad: Tell a lie and find a truth”.’—ii. xxiii. 18.
- ↑ Written between 1588 and 1592. In the Prologue Machiavelli speaks: ‘I count religion but a childish toyShakespeare, in Henry the Sixth, twice, by anachronism, makes use of the conception of Machiavelli current in his age: in Part i, Act v, sc. 4, York: ‘Alençon, that notorious Machiavel’; in Part III, Act iii, sc. 2, Gloucester (soliloquising):
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.’‘Why, I can smile, and murder while I smile,
And cry, “Content“, to that which grieves my heart,
of the modern spirit.’ 192. ‘Machiavelli’s real life was all in his intellect; there lay the true source of his greatness. His predominating mental gift and that in which he outstripped his contemporaries, was a singular power of piercing to the innermost kernel of historical and social facts.’ Ibid. iv. 434.
