“EVEN GOD HIMSELF HAS NO AUTHORITY… OVER THE HUMAN REASON”: MARK TWAIN’S OWN ANNOTATED COPY OF THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

(TWAIN, Mark) VILLARI, Pasquale. The Life and Times of Niccolo Machiavelli. Translated by Linda Villari. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892. Two volumes. Thick octavo, original maroon cloth gilt, top edges gilt. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

Later edition in English of Villari’s two-volume study of Machiavelli and the political and social environment in which he wrote, with frontispiece portraits and 30 full-page illustrations. This copy is wonderfully annotated in Mark Twain’s hand on ten pages, with such side comments as “the social world of Europe revealed under a lightning flash,” “we have the barnstormers in place of this,” and “a use for aristocracy.”

In his 1906 essay on William Dean Howells (Harper’s, volume 113, number 674), Twain observed, “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.” In making these remarks, Twain undoubtedly relied upon this, his own copy of Villari’s Life and Times of Machiavelli. In the margin, Twain highlights the passage, “This rich, industrious, intelligent people, before whom all Europe stood, as it were, in ecstasy of admiration— this people was rapidly becoming corrupt. Everywhere liberty was disappearing, tyrants were springing up.” A few pages later he writes, “Here is the social world of Europe revealed under a lightning flash.” And again later, “Here was a Pope & a Church claiming authority to dictate to men what they should think, whereas even God himself has no authority (in that sense) over the human reason.” This set was originally sold at the Clara Clemens Samossoud sale in 1951.

Inner hinges expertly reinforced. An extraordinary Twain item in near-fine condition.