Part 30

You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor British, practised the same attitude of detachment, the same exclusive self-consecration to letters as Wordsworth or Tennyson. But Virgil had a people to express, and Wordsworth and Tennyson were passionate politicians, if they made no incursions into action proper. You may urge that the bards, skalds, minstrels, troubadours, ballad-mongers, jongleurs, have always been a class apart from action, but these were at least lauders of action, laureates of lords, while even the _Minnesingers_ celebrated less their own mistresses than those of the heroes. ’Tis a parasitism upon action, to which indeed the meek and prostrate Kipling would confine the rôle of letters.

But why should the power to feel and express the finer flavours of life and language paralyse the capacity for action? In the sanest souls both functions would co-exist in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand and trowel in the other, Ezra’s Jews rebuilt the Temple, and the new Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold both trowel and tablet. In that Platonic millennium poets must be kings and kings poets.

That fantastic, mutilated, myopic, and inefficient being, known as “the practical man,” sniffs suspiciously at all movements that have thought or imagination, or an ideal for their inspiration. It may be conceded to this crippled soul that action can never take the rigid lines of theory, and that the forces of deflection must modify, if not indeed prevail over, the _à priori_ pattern. But he is not truly a thinker whose thought cannot allow for these deviations in practice, which are as foreseeable (if not as exactly computable) as the retardation, acceleration or aberration of a planet by the pull of every other within whose attraction it rolls. Action is not pure thought but applied thinking—a species of engineering over, through, or around mountains, and opposing private domains. “Life caricatures our concepts,” a dreamer complained to me, after he had stepped down into politics. Is it not perhaps that our concepts caricature life? Life is too fluid and asymmetric to bear these fixed forms of constructive polity, and Lord Acton tells us that in the whole course of history no such rounded scheme has ever found fulfilment. I do not wonder.

But the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs is moving in a padded world of words, and the hero who has never sung, or at least thrilled with the music in him, is only sub-human. The divorce of life and letters tends to sterilise letters and to brutalise life. The British mistrust of poetry in affairs has a solid basis—of stupidity. Imagination, which is the essential factor in all science, is esteemed a Jack o’ Lantern to lure astray. And to tap one’s way along, inch by inch, without any light at all, is held the surest method of progression.

But Italy, which has known Mazzini, is, I trust, for ever saved from this Anglo-Saxon shallowness.

“A Revolution is the passing of an idea from theory into practice,” said Mazzini. And again, “Those who sunder Thought and Action dismember God and deny the eternal Unity of things.” _Pensiero e Azione_ was the significant title of the journal he founded to bring about the redemption of Italy. Garibaldi too was a dreamer, who even wrote poetry. Cavour, the most worldly of the trio of Italian saviours, owes his greatness precisely to the imagination which could use all means and all men to educe the foreseen end.

A sharp distinction should be drawn between those who dream with their eyes open, and those who dream with their eyes shut. What Cavour saw was in congruity with fact and possibility. Prevision is not perversion. As our modern watcher of the skies received the photograph of Halley’s Comet upon his plate half a year before it became visible to the eye, and months before it revealed itself to the farthest-piercing telescope, so upon the sensitised soul coming events cast their configurations before. This foresight of insight has naught in common with the nightmares and chimæras of sleep. “The prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come” admits the elect to glimpses of its dream. These be the prophets, conduits through which the universe arrives at self-consciousness, as the heroes are the conduits through which it arrives at self-amelioration.

THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY: A PARADOX AT PAVIA

In a room leading to the Senate in the Ducal Palace of Venice I was looking at a picture by Contarini of the conquest of Verona by the Venetians in 1405.

’Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl over the dead and wounded, men in armour driving their daggers home in the prostrate huddled forms, galloping chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights with swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling devilry. The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice, those two fairy sisters, each magically enthroned on beauty, members of the same Venetia, peopled with the same stock, speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be at each other’s throat? And this revelry of devilry might, I knew, equally serve for Venice’s conquest of any other of her neighbours in that wonderful fighting fifteenth century of hers, when she must needs set up her winged lion in every market place.

And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns, I recalled, were only part of the universal urban warfare—Genoa against Pisa, Siena against Florence, Gubbio against Perugia; these again breaking into smaller circles of contention, or intersected with larger, party against party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph against Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet, Oddi against Baglioni, _popolani_ against _grandi_, provinces against invaders, blood-feuds horrific, innumerable, the Guelph-Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200 revolutions and 700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is a reverse to the shield, and a iewelled scabbard to the sword.

I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where, tradition says, the imprisoned Boëthius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy,” and here in a vestibule my eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung aloft, and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found it—in translation—as follows:

“These Remnants of the Old Gates of Pavia Thrice Trophies in Civil Wars By a Magnanimous Thought Restored by Ravenna Are To-day an Occasion for Rejoicing Betwixt the Two Cities Desirous Of Changing the Vestiges of the Old Discords Into Pledges of Union & Patriotic Love The XIII day of September MDCCCLXXVIII”

_Un magnanimo pensiero_, indeed! And—like the chains of Pisa’s ancient harbour restored by Genoa—a pleasant sequel to the noble common struggle for Italian independence. And yet—the _advocatus diaboli_ whispered me, or was it the shade of Boëthius in quest of “The Consolations of Phlebotomy”?—“What has become of Pavia, what of Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other’s blood? Where is the Pavia of a hundred towers, where is the Castello reared and enriched by generations of Visconti Dukes, and its University, once the finest in Italy, at which Petrarch held a chair; where is the opulence of life that flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean magnificence? Where is the Ravenna whose lawyers were as proverbial in the eleventh century as Philadelphia’s are to-day, where is that hotbed of heresy which nourished the great anti-Pope Guibert? Where is even the Ravenna of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to hold only Dante’s tomb. And its young men who bawl out choruses of a Sunday night till the small hours—do they even deserve the shrine of the poet of Christendom? And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the sixty galleys? What have they gained from their colourless absorption into a United Italy, compared with what they have lost—had indeed already lost—of peculiar and passionate existence? Are there two gentlemen of Verona now in whom we take a scintilla of interest? Is there a merchant of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is there a single Antonio with argosies bound for Tripolis and the Indies?” “Your Ben Jonson,” and by his wide posthumous reading I knew ’twas Boëthius speaking now, “said ‘in short measures life may perfect be.’ He should have said ‘in small circles’ and, perhaps, ‘_only_ in small circles.’ All America—with its vasty breadths—stands to-day without a single man of the first order.”

“’Tis not even”—put in the _advocatus diaboli_, betrayed by his unphilosophic chuckle—“as if the destruction of small patriotisms meant the destruction of war. Pavia and Ravenna,” he pointed out mischievously, “must continue to fight—as part of the totality, Italy. And behold,” quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza Castello, “the significance of that old castle’s metamorphosis into a barrack—the poetry of war turned to prose, the frescoes of the old Pavian and Cremonese painters faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough Government soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall. Gone is that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated by its expansion into a national animosity; not insubstantial indeed under stress of invasion, but shadowy and unreal when the _casus belli_ is remote, and by the manœuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the Pavian or Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of peoples with whom alliance is transitory and artificial.”

“But he will not find himself fighting so often,” I rejoined. “Countries do not join battle as recklessly as cities. The larger the bulk the slower the turning to bite.” “And meantime,” interposed the philosophic shade, “the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in war. And neither in war nor in peace can there be the joy of fighting that comes from personal keenness in the issue. The wars of town with town, of sect with sect, of neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. ’Tis only neighbours that can feel what they are fighting for, ’tis only brothers that can fight with unction. The very likeness of brothers, their intimate acquaintance with the points of community, gives them an acute sense of the points of difference, and provides their combat with a solid standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irrational of all internecion were the fratricide of twins. Save the war of self-defence, civil war is the only legitimate form of war. Military war—how monstrous the sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ‘The True Greatness of Kingdoms,’ when he compares civil war to the heat of a fever, and foreign war to the heat of exercise which serves to keep the body in health. For what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a home-born Briton ever fight a Russian? His boundaries are nowhere contiguous with the Russian’s, his very notion of a Russ is mythical. ’Tis a cold-blooded war-game into which he is thrust from above. What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? Other is it with warfare that is personal, profoundly felt. Civil war—how sacred, how close to men’s bosoms! When Greek meets Greek, _then_ comes the tug of war.”

“In religious wars, too,” eagerly interrupted the _advocatus diaboli_, “’tis nearness that is the justification—Homoousian versus Homoiousian. Why in heaven’s name,” he added with a spice of malice, “should a Mussulman cry haro against a Parsee, or a Shintoist against a Mormon? Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous; ’twere the duel of whale and elephant. ’Tis the Christian sects that must naturally torture and murder one another,” he wound up triumphantly.

“Ay indeed,” serenely assented the shade of Boëthius. “If fighting is to be done at all, let it be between brothers and not between strangers. Where ‘a hair perhaps divides the False and True’ ’tis of paramount importance to determine on which side of the hair we should stand. This rigid accuracy is the glory of Science—why should not our decimal be correct to nine places even in Religion? Why wave aside these sharp differences for which the men of my day were willing to pay with their lives? When your Alfred the Great translated my _magnum opus_, or even as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a modern version, these questions could vie in holy intensity, almost with your latter-day questions of Free Trade and Tariff Reform.”

“Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom,” sighed the _advocatus diaboli_, “when men were literally aflame for _filioque_ or Immaculate Conception. O for the fiery Arians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians, Montanists, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophysites, Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses, Waldenses, Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists——”

“Surely you would not call Baptists fiery?” I interjected feebly. He had apparently no sense of humour, this _advocatus_, for he went on coldly: “How tame and disappointing these latter-day sectarians: these Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites, Christadelphians, ‘et hoc genus omne.’ I did have a flash of hope when your Methodists began to split up into Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists, Reformers, Primitives, Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly differences seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiæ of Truth and Practice. But no! no one believes nowadays, for nobody burns his fellow-Christian. Even the burning words of your King’s Declaration——!”

“August shade,” I interrupted, pointedly addressing myself to the last of the Roman philosophers, “I concede that when Christianity founded itself on texts, an infinite perspective of homicidal homiletics lay open to the ingenuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and Hell turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance attached to the difference between the theological tweedledum and the theological tweedledee, so that it is just dimly conceivable one might murder one’s neighbour for his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not tell me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed.”

“_Immo vero_,” cried the Roman shade emphatically. “Was I not clubbed to death because I believed in Justice and combated the extortions of the Goths? A belief for which we would not die or kill, what is it?”

“A bloodless belief,” chuckled the _advocatus diaboli_, who, I suddenly remembered, was more legitimately entitled the _defensor fidei_.

RISORGIMENTO: WITH SOME REMARKS ON SAN MARINO AND THE MILLENNIUM

“Il Calavrese abate Giovacchino Di spirito profetico dotato.” DANTE: _Paradiso_, Canto xii.

“Pater imposuit laborem legis, qui timor est; filius imposuit laborem disciplinæ, qui sapientia est; spiritus sanctus exhibet libertatem, quæ amor est.”

JOACHIM OF FLORA: _Liber Concordiæ_, ii.

I

“Italy is too long,” said the Italian. We were coming into Turin in the dawn, amid burning mountains of rosy snow, and the train was moving slowly, in hesitation, with pauses for reflection. “The line is single in places,” he explained. “Italy is too narrow, too cramped by mountain-chains, and above all too long. It is the trouble behind all our politics. There are three Italies, three horizontal strata, that do not interfuse—the industrial and intelligent North, the stagnant and superstitious South, and the centre with Rome which is betwixt and between.”

“But there is far more clericalism in the North than the South,” I said. “The Church party is a political force.”

“Precisely what proves my case. In the North everything is more efficient, even to the forces of reaction. The clericals are better organised, and are, moreover, supported by the propertied atheists in the interests of order. But the North is Europe—Germany, if you will—the South is already Africa.” The train stopped again. He groaned. “No unity possible.”

“No unity?” I exclaimed. “And what about Garibaldi and Mazzini and United Italy?”

“It is a phrase. Italy is too long.”

I pondered over his words, and in imagination I saw again all the Risorgimento museums, all the tablets in all the _loggias_ and town halls recording those who had died for the Union of Italy, all the statues of all the heroes, all the streets and piazzas dedicated to them, while in my ears resounded all the artillery of applause booming at that very moment throughout the length and narrowness of Italy in celebration of the Jubilee of the Departure of the Thousand from Quarto.

II

Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find the Risorgimento a discordant obsession; flaunting itself as it does in brand new statues and monuments whose incongruity of colour or form destroys the mellow unity of old Cathedral-Piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or unobtrusive tablets, and Venice with her abundance of _Campi_ has stowed it out of sight, though Victor Emmanuel ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge of Sighs, and “three youths who died for their country” intrude among the tombs of the Doges. The essence of Pisa is preserved by its isolation from life, leaving Mazzini to dominate the city of his death. But the majority of the old towns are devastated by the new national heroes—admirable and vigorous as the sculpture sometimes is—even as the old historic landmarks are obliterated by the new street names. And in addition to the pervasive quartette—Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Mazzini—local heroes aggravate the ruin of antiquity. Daniele Manin thrones in Venice over a winged lion sprawling beneath a triton; Ricasoli, “the iron Baron,” rules in Tuscany; Pavia is sacred to the Cairoli; Minghetti runs through the Romagna; Crispi through the South; Genoa devotes a street, a square, and a bronze statue to Bixio, the Boanerges of the epic; Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand; even Rubattino—patriot in his own despite—has his statue in Genoa harbour, on the false ground that he put his shipping line at Garibaldi’s disposal. ’Tis a very shower of stones, falling on the just and the unjust alike. And sometimes—as at Asti—all the Heroes are United beneath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions.

And even the ubiquitous heroes have peculiar glory in their peculiar haunts. Cavour is gigantic at Ancona (probably because the town was freed by Piedmontese troops); he stands in the castle of Verona, over-brooded by snow mountains: at Turin, his birthplace, Fame wildly clasps him to her breast in a mammoth monument, crying, “Audace, prudente, libero Italia.”

A Vanity Fair without a hero I have never chanced on. Little Chiavari has its grandiose angel-strewn monument to Victor Emmanuel, whom Parma likewise exhibits flourishing his sword; Pesaro breaks out in tablets to those who died fighting “the hirelings of the Theocracy”; Rimini has a Piazza Cavour; priest-ridden Vicenza shelters a statue of Mazzini; Assisi itself, waking from its saintly slumber, consecrates a Piazzetta to Garibaldi, and a street to the Twentieth of September on which Italian troops broke into Rome!

Ah, Garibaldi, Garibaldi, how thou didst weigh on my wanderings! From Mantua to Ferrara, from Spoleto to Perugia, Garibaldi, always Garibaldi. I fled to dead Ravenna, lo! thou didst tower in the very Piazza of Byron; to Parma, and rugged, imposing, in thy legendary cap, leaning on thy sword, thou didst obsess the Piazza Garibaldi; to Rome itself, and twenty feet high, thou impendedst in bronze, with battle pieces and allegories around thee; I retreated to the extremest point of the Peninsula, and found myself in the Corso Garibaldi of Reggio; I crossed to Sicily, only to stumble against thy great horse in Palermo and the monument to thy valour in Calatafimi. For of the statesman, the monarch, the prophet and the soldier who combined to redeem Italy, it is naturally the soldier that is stamped most vividly on the popular imagination, the noble freelance whom the mob deemed divine even before his death, whose memory the people has rescued from the anti-climax of his end, selecting away his follies and mistakes and idealising his virtues, under the artistic law of mythopoiesis, till, shaped and perfected for eternal service, the national hero shines immaculate in his sacred niche.

And yet, as the streets show, even the popular imagination has realised that the soldier would not have sufficed. Thrice blessed, indeed, was Italy to possess Cavour and Mazzini at the same hour as Garibaldi. It is a fallacy to suppose that the hour always finds the man, or the man the hour, or that “il n’y a pas d’homme indispensable.” Many an hour passes away without its man, as many a man without his hour. Great men perish, wasted, because there are no forces for them to synthetise: great forces remain inarticulate, unorganised and ineffective, because they have found no leader to be their conduit. All the more marvellous that Italy should have produced simultaneously three indispensable men, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, each of whom had something of the other two, yet something unique of his own. None of the three quite understood the others, and Mazzini, who was much like Ibsen’s Brand, was even more intolerant than Garibaldi of the Machiavellian policies of Cavour, and had to be swept aside as a visionary. For one heroic, impossible moment, indeed, the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human history. But with the disappearance of the Republic, Mazzini might have disappeared too, for all his influence upon the political Risorgimento; did indeed practically disappear by acquiescing in the battle-flag of Monarchy. Garibaldi and Cavour sufficed to create the combination of Force and Fraud by which political history is made. For though, if any sword might ever bear the words I saw on a sword graven by Donatello—“Valore e Giustitia”—that sword was Garibaldi’s, and if ever passion was patriotic it was Cavour’s, nevertheless the liberation of Italy did not escape being achieved by the usual factors of Force and Fraud.

III