The Unacceptable Face of The English Face of Machiavelli?

I notice that Routledge have reprinted Felix Raab’s 1964 The English Face of Machiavelli – at a price that only the best-heeled institutions could afford. Its republication is testimony to its status as a classic, frequently cited as required reading in scholarly footnotes and undergraduate bibliographies. It is also, of course, a classic tinged with the tragic.

The English Face began life as Raab ended his. He had come to Oxford from Melbourne, the son of Jewish emigrés from Nazi Austria, as a graduate student. Late in 1962, he submitted his doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Machiavelli and secular political thought in England during the seventeenth century’, and went off for a walking holiday in Italy. It took a month for his body to be found after he fell fatally into a ravine. He could not, then, defend his thesis at a viva – we can only imagine what the conversation might have been – but he was posthumously awarded a doctorate. Raab’s name was kept alive in his first university by his father’s donation of his son’s book collection and by the establishing of a prize named after him; in Oxford, his thesis received what was, at the time, the unusual honour of being seen quickly into print, with a foreword by his former supervisor, Hugh Trevor-Roper. The adjective often used for the foreword is ‘affectionate’. It is a memoir of Raab, describing, for instance, the time that he arrived at a supervision and sat down opposite Trevor-Roper: the latter pushed across the table Raab’s latest piece of work and said ‘You know this won’t do’; Raab responded by pushing it back across the table and declaring ‘Yes, it bloody well will!’.

Knowledge of the author’s fate impinged on the minds of reviewers, who felt the need to resort to an elegiac tone. The comment of an historian of a similar surname, Theodore Rabb, can stand as an example:

Few books have illuminated major changes in intellectual history, as this one does, by exploring a strictly limited subject. Even fewer have been, like this one, a doctoral thesis, written with skill, grace, and wit, and published without revision. The tragic mountaineering accident which ended Dr. Raab’s life shortly after the thesis was finished has deprived intellectual history of a penetrating scholar. [Renaissance News, xix (1966), p. 41]

The published volume, he concluded, was ‘a fitting monument to a fine mind’. The English Face was, in short, quickly accepted as a significant work, in both the learned community and in the wider press.

There was one discordant voice: a long review appeared in the Italian journal, Il Politico, by Sydney Anglo. It can be called nothing other than a merciless demolition of Raab’s work. It derides the book’s refusal to look more broadly than English-born writers, giving no space, for example, to Alberico Gentili’s writings, produced while in London (and now, incidentally, being studied by Diego Pirillo) – a ‘national’ methodology that, Anglo insisted, is simply unacceptable in the study of intellectual history. The review also picks apart, time and again, some of the specific interpretations of texts. But what we would consider most damning comes in its first pages when Anglo points out that Raab had been ungenerous in his brief acknowledgement of his debt to a 1908 London D.Litt dissertation by J. W. Horrocks when ‘well over a third of Raab’s material comes straight out of Horrocks’s thesis’. He points out how English Face picks up quotations from primary sources second-hand via Horrocks’ work. The most excoriating line comes next:

However, plagiarism is by no means wholly to be condemned, for a borrower can often put another’s material to better use – as Raab himself has claimed. It is then even more unfortunate that the material so painstakingly collected by Horrocks has been marred in the reworking [S. Anglo, ‘The Reception of Machiavelli in Tudor England: a re-assessment’, Il Politico, xxxi (1966), pp. 127 – 38 at p. 129]

Anglo does not return to the accusation in his text, though his footnotes include other examples of what he sees as unacknowledged copying in, for instance, Raab’s claim that Innocent Gentillet’s anti-Machiavellian writings had little influence in England.

Anglo’s review was brought to my mind by a conversation I had the other week in which I could not remember where it was published. In hunting it down, I was struck by how difficult it was to find references to it. It is a review that, in many quarters, has suffered a strange death. In 1990, an Annotated Bibliography on Machiavelli scholarship appeared, but, as one reviewer noted, it did not mention Anglo’s article (the reviewer does not give a full citation). It is symptomatic that an important recent piece reconsidering the ‘Myth of Gentillet’ [N. W. Bawcutt in The Modern Language Review, xcix (2004)] takes question with Raab on an issue previously raised by Anglo, but without reference to the latter. It is only very recently, with Sydney Anglo’s own volume on Machiavelli’s reception (2005) and mention of the matter in Alessandra Petrina’s Machiavelli in the British Isles (2009), that the article and the issues it raises have been resurrected; many, meanwhile, continue to make uncomplicated reference to The English Face. Most often, the book has been cited on its own, without mention of the early, trenchant and potentially utterly destructive criticism. On a some occasions, the book and the review are mentioned alongside each other but rarely with any sign that the former should be read with consideration of the latter’s criticisms. That could be done by a simple ‘but see’, as was the case in the Pelican Guide for Readers edited in 1984 by Boris Ford. Geoffrey Elton found another mode of expression. He had been part of the chorus of praise for The English Face when it appeared; in his 1970 Modern Historians on British History, Elton tempered that with the comment that the book ‘provides many insights but also some bad slips’ [p. 177], elliptically mentioning the review in the footnote.

‘Some bad slips’. My point is not about whether Anglo was right or wrong to condemn Raab for plagiarism – I have not done the checking to corroborate or deny the accusation. What interests me is what the frequent ignoring or overlooking of that claim tells us about our own standards or ethics. We now teach undergraduates that plagiarism is one of the most heinous of academic crimes, though we also debate the relevance of the concept to previous centuries. We also collude with a wider inflation in use of the term, which can see it stretched to include so much that it can end up meaning so little. That inflation — or perhaps it is deflation — could allow for some charges of plagiarism to be dismissed as trivial – but that can not be with Anglo’s examples which would suggest a heavy unpaid debt. A defence perhaps could be that Anglo’s comments focus on the Tudor period, when Raab’s main interest lay in the seventeenth century – but does that mean our culture would accept a breaking of the rules in one part of a work if it is offset by genius shown elsewhere in the same volume? Considering our society’s preoccupation with a work’s originality – and honesty – surely an accusation of largescale unacknowledged copying demands some response, some rebuttal or acceptance, rather than the silence it usually receives. As the claims, readily available, stand unchallenged, does that mean those who continue to refer to The English Face without a blush complicit in an act of plagiarism? Or should we conclude that we expect higher standards from our students than we would set for ourselves?

Modern publishing practice demands that when an article is found to be cribbed, it is not removed or destroyed; it remains available, but with each page stamped ‘retracted’. I doubt Routledge considered doing that when they reprinted The English Face of Machiavelli.

Duke Humfrey’s in Fashion

I must admit it had not occurred to me until my wife mentioned it yesterday that this October sees the 620th anniversary of the birth of Humfrey, duke of Gloucester. In my defence, the six centuries and one score years is not necessarily the most memorable occasion which requires celebrating but this autumn does see the Duke having his own little local renaissance.

First of all, on 10th and 11th September, there is going to be a small conference on Humfrey, at which I am speaking alongside such luminaries at Alessandra Petrina and Derek Pearsall.  Then, just under a month later, the Bodleian is having what it has dubbed ‘Duke Humfrey’s Night’ as a fund-raising event. One can sponsor an object or its conservation, though not one of the few Humfrey manuscripts now in the Library’s possession. The event is explicitly advertised as commemorating the anniversary of:

the birth of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester, whose generous donation in the mid-15th century of a large collection of classical manuscripts transformed the original University Library established by Thomas Cobham, Bishop of Worcester, and led to the construction of the beautiful reading room now known as Duke Humfrey’s Library.

My eye was caught by the description of his ‘donation’ — in fact, at least four donations, with the two most significant being in 1439 and 1444, and with a total of about 300 books being given to the  University. The range of manuscripts included biblical commentaries, some scholastic texts, some legal works, a notable assortment of medical texts, some classical works, a few of them rare, and a smattering of new humanist writings. It is interesting to see, in Oxford, his gifts remembered for being a ‘collection of classical manuscripts’ — a partial recollection of the collection that perhaps says more about our generation’s interests than about his eclectic library. Humfrey is most celebrated for his patronage of humanists like Pier Candido Decembrio (though he claimed not to have received his dues from him) and Tito Livio Frulovisi, biographer of Henry V (though Tito Livio soon left the duke’s employ). It was via the Milanese Decembrio that Humfrey gained most of the rare classical works in his collection — refound texts like the Panegyrici latini. This, though, is in danger of overlooking the range of activities going on at his court around the duke, if not always with his close involvement. Then again, I can hardly complain about a concentration of interest in his ‘classical manuscripts’ — my own work, I suppose, is stoking that tradition. I must remember to make amends.

How should we read Xenophon’s Hiero?

Xenophon’s Hiero is a small work with a large Renaissance reputation. Translated at the beginning of the quattrocento by Leonardo Bruni, it was one of the first pagan Greek texts to receive a rendering into humanist Latin; it circulated widely across Europe, becoming the standard version until Erasmus’ re-translation. Bruni’s text now survives in nearly two hundred manuscripts, as the estimable David Marsh has shown [Catalogus Translationum, vii (1992)]. It also has a significant place within the humanist’s oeuvre: it is one of what I would call Bruni’s manifestoes – four remarkably assured works produced in a remarkably fruitful period of his early thirties, presenting his agenda for study and for action. The manifestoes include two original compositions: the Laudatio Florentinae urbis, a celebration of republican Florence; and the Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, heralding a reform of literary scholarship, in which Bruni’s mentor, Coluccio Salutati, is presented as both the arbiter and the previous generation, while Niccolò Niccoli is given the role of radical firebrand. Alongside them are two translations, each dedicated to one of the figures in the Dialogi: to Salutati is sent a translation of St Basil on the use of reading the pagans – a highly appropriate tract considering the immediately contemporary attacks on Salutati for his ‘unchristian’ studies. To Niccoli Bruni thought it suitable to send Xenophon’s short dialogue on tyranny, the Hiero – but why? In what way is that apt? That is the question at issue.

In latter-day scholarship on Bruni’s ‘manifestoes’, interest has characteristically been concentrated on the original works. The significance of the translations produced alongside them has only recently begun to be explored. The Hiero is presently the subject of what we can be sure will be a stimulating doctoral thesis, and it is also central to a piece by Brian Jeffrey Maxson in the most recent issue of Renaissance Studies. It is an article which has left me waking up early in the morning pondering the question with which I opened. You see, Maxson describes the Hiero, without reservation, as ‘pro-monarchical’, while I have always taken the work to be subtly critical of one-man rule. My understanding perhaps owes something to Leo Strauss’s suspicious reading of the text; Strauss’s analysis, in turn, has been dismissed as being ‘as perverse as one can be’ by one classicist who would see the dialogue as an endorsement of rule over willing subjects, as is developed more fully in the Cyropaedia [V. J. Gray in Classical Quarterly, new series, xxxvi (1986)]. But, more recently, other classicists have wondered whether the Cyropaedia is as straightforwardly positive as has usually been thought [eg Y. L. Too in Pedagogy and Power (Cambridge, 1998)]; if that work can be read with suspicion, it leads us back to wondering about the Hiero. How can such a small text be subject to such diverse views?

The dialogue is deceptively simple. In a moment of leisure, the tyrant Hieron sits down with the poet Simonides, who asks his interlocutor to teach him from his experience who is happier, the tyrant or the private man. Hieron responds bemoaning his lot, enumerating how at every point his pleasure is thwarted by his status. This takes up the main part of the work. When he has finished, Simonides offers him advice on how to improve his situation and make his subjects be willing to be ruled by him – he should treat his country as his fatherland, and surpass all others in generosity and in kindness. If he does that, he will be happy and no one will be jealous of his happiness. The End. The dialogue stops there, with Hieron given no chance to respond or to thank the poet. It stops but does not conclude: this is a work which is artfully open-ended.

Xenophon’s refusal to close off the work, to declare a ‘victor’ in the debate (if it can be called that) allows and perhaps encourages the multiple meanings that have been given to the work. We could, then, simply finish here and get up from the table: the point of it is that its point is hard to define. But that still leaves two questions: why Xenophon should have wanted his work to be so open to interpretation? And if there are several ways of reading the work, what was Bruni’s? Let me focus on that second question.

The humanist dedication is itself a work of art which can often frame the text that follows and establish its relationship with the dedicatee. Leonardo Bruni does that in the preface to his translation of St Basil or in his later Plutarch dedications. In the contexts of those, the preface to the Hiero might seem odd: it has hardly anything to say about the work. Instead, it provides a brief biography of its author, praising Xenophon for his mastery of both arms and letters, describing how, after a successful military career, he was forced into exile by envious citizens and then turned his hand to philosophy. Niccoli could not but want, Bruni says, to embrace Xenophon. There is no mention in this preface of the subject-matter of the Hiero or of its characters. They are presented without introduction, as it were – except that the dialogue has been placed in a context in which what matters is the relationship between philosophy and political fortunes. In other words, Bruni does not hint at a particular political reading – either pro-monarchical or pro-republican – but does imply that reading is about politics.

It may be more usual to have a more forceful direction provided by a preface, rather than the gentle steering that Bruni masters here. But this is not unique in his literary career: take, for instance, his wonderful jeu d’ésprit, the Oratio Heliogabali, a speech placed into the mouth of a fictitious Roman emperor, exhorting the prostitutes of Rome to lasciviousness. That travelled without a preface – to the perplexity of some readers, it must said. On occasion, you will find copies with an added scribal note, explaining to the reader that this is to be read ironically and that Bruni was not, in fact, promoting vice. In contrast, it must be said, you would very rarely find such guidance notes in a copy of the Hiero – readers may not have had the same difficulty in understanding the purpose of that dialogue.

We have still not pinned down a particular meaning, a specific reading, to Bruni’s Xenophon – and that, I would suggest, is how Bruni would want it to be. He had, I suspect, no intention of closing down the open-ended nature of the dialogue. That said, he does re-weight the text somewhat by a simple act of translation. I am not thinking of his ‘straightening out’ of the text – at the point when Simonides teases Hieron about his catamite, in the Latin the young lover becomes a girl – but rather his emphasis on the word ‘tyrant’. Latin is notoriously a less supple language than Greek: the word ‘tyrannos’ could have connotations of rule that was either despotic or something less negative – the Latin ‘tyrannus’ has no such ambivalence. Perhaps a translator should consider using a different term to render ‘tyrannos’; Bruni did not. And what is more, he changes the title of the work so that it circulated not, primarily, as Hiero but more often as Tyrannus.

Bruni’s translation, then, comes in three parts: the short work itself, preceded by the shorter preface, itself preceded by the shortest, laconic (I nearly said Tacitean) part, the title. That title announces the dialogue to be about the tyrant, the evil monarch – an implicit contrast with the good citizen, Xenophon, who was its author. And yet this still does not tell us how to understand the dialogue; it does not reveal a straightforward message. But, then, how could it: if one were truly sitting in front of a tyrant, as Simonides was and as we might see ourselves as his successors, can we trust a word our interlocutor says? And can we, in turn, trust ourselves to be honest in his presence? Would we leave our conversation open-ended because we could not be open?