Part 27
The instant that any man or woman accomplishes anything which is in any way remarkable, the curiosity of the public is roused and fastens on his or her private life to the neglect and detriment of his or her creations. The composer of the ‘Cavalleria Rusticana,’ an opera which, whatever may or may not be its artistic merit, has had charm and melody enough to run like a flame of fire across Italy, awakening the applause of the whole nation, had dwelt in obscurity and poverty up to the moment when his work aroused a fury of delight in his country people. Lo! the press immediately seizes on every detail of his hard and laborious life, and makes a jest of his long hair. What has his life or his hair to do with the score of the ‘Cavalleria Rusticana?’ What has the fact that he has written music which, if not original, or spiritual, has the secret of rousing the enthusiasm of the populace, to do with the private circumstances, habits, or preferences of his daily existence? It is an intolerable impudence which can presume to pry into the latter because the former has revealed in him that magic gift of inspiration which makes him momentarily master of the souls of others.
The human mind is too quickly coloured, too easily disturbed, for it to be possible to shake off all alien bias and reflected hues; and it is more just to the dead than to the living, because it is not by the dead moved either to that envy or detraction, that favour or adulation, which it unconsciously imbibes from all it hears and knows of the living.
Whoever else may deem that the phonograph, the telephone, and the photographic apparatus are beneficial to the world, every man and woman who has a name of celebrity in that world must curse them with deadliest hatred. Life is either a miserable and weak submission to their demands, or a perpetual and exhausting struggle against and conflict with their pretensions, in the course of which warfare enemies are made inevitably and continually by the tens of thousands. He who bends beneath the decrees of the sovereign spy is popular at the price of dignity and peace. Those who refuse to so stoop are marked out for abuse and calumny from all those who live by or are diverted by the results of the espionage. There is no middle way between the two; you must be the obedient slave or the irreconcilable opponent of all the numerous and varied forms of public inquiry and personal interference. The walls of Varzin have never been high enough to keep out the interviewer, and the trees of Faringford have never been so thickly planted that they availed to screen the study of the poet. The little, through these means and methods, have found out that they can annoy, harass, torment, and turn to profit, the great. Who that knows humanity could hope that the former would abstain from the exercise of such power?
The worst result of the literary clamour for these arrays of facts, or presumed facts, is that the ordinary multitude, who have not the talent of the original seekers, imitate the latter, and deem it of more importance to know what any famous person eats, drinks, and wears, in what way he sins, and in what manner he sorrows, than it does to rightly measure and value his picture, his position, his romance, or his poem. Journalistic inquisitiveness has begotten an unwholesome appetite, an impudent curiosity, in the world, which leaves those conspicuous in it neither peace nor privacy.
The press throughout the whole world feeds this appetite, and the victims, either from timidity or vanity, do not do what they might do to condemn and resist it. The interviewer too often finds his impertinent intrusion unresented for him, or the public which employs him, to reach any consciousness of his intolerable effrontery. He has behind him those many-handed powders of anathema, misrepresentation, and depreciation which are called the fourth estate, and almost all celebrity is afraid of provoking the reprisals in print which would follow on a proper and peremptory ejection of the unsought visitor.
Because a man or woman more gifted than the common multitude bestows upon the world some poem or romance, some picture, statue, or musical composition, of excellence and beauty, by what possible right can the world pry into his or her privacy and discuss his or her fortunes and character? The work belongs to the public, the creator of the work does not. The invasion of private life and character never was so great or so general as it is in the last years of this century. It is born of two despicable parents, curiosity and malignity. Beneath all the flattery, which too frequently covers with flowers the snake of inquisitiveness, the snake’s hiss of envy may be plainly heard by those who have ears to hear. It is the hope to find, sometime, some flaw, some moral or physical disease, some lesion of brain or decay of fortune, in the private life of those whom they profess to admire or adore, which brings the interviewer crawling to the threshold and peering through the keyhole. What rapture for those who cannot write anything more worthy than a newspaper paragraph to discover that the author of ‘Salammbo’ was an epileptic! What consolation for those who cannot string rhymes together at a child’s party to stand beside the bedside of Heine and watch ‘the pale Jew writhe and sweat!’
In Dalou’s monument to Eugene Delacroix he represents the great painter with his chin sunk in the _cache-nez_, which his chilly and fragile organisation led to his wearing generally, no matter whether the weather were fine or foul. Dalou has outraged art, but he has delighted his contemporaries and crystallised their taste; the _cache-nez_ about the throat of the man of genius enchants the common herd, which catches cold perpetually, but could not paint an inch of canvas or a foot of fresco, and feels jealously, restlessly, malignantly, grudgingly, that the creator of the ‘Entreé des Croises’ and the ‘Barque de Dante,’ who was so far above them in all else is brought nearer to them by that folded foulard. The monument in the gardens of the Luxembourg is an epitome of the sentiment of the age; time, glory and art bend before Delacroix and offer him the palms of immortality; Apollo throws his lyre away in sympathy and ecstasy; but what the mortal crowds see and applaud is the disfiguring neckerchief!
It is the habit of scholars to lament that so little is known of the private life of Shakespeare. It is, rather, most fortunate that we know so little, and that little but vaguely. What can we want to know more than the plays tell us? Why should we desire to have records which, drawing earthwards the man, might draw us also downwards from that high empyrean of thought where we can dwell through the magic of the poet’s incantations?
It may be a natural instinct which leads the crowd to crave and seek personal details of the lives of those who are greater than their fellows, but it is an instinct to be discouraged and repressed by all who care for the dignity of art. The cry of the realists for _documents humains_ is a phase of it, and results from the poverty of imagination in those who require such documents as the scaffolding of their creations. The supreme gift of the true artist is a rapidity of perception and comprehension which is totally unlike the slow piecemeal observations of others. As the musician reads the page of a score at a glance, as the author comprehends the essence of a book by a flash of intelligence, as the painter sees at a glance the points and lines and hues of a landscape, whilst the ordinary man plods through the musical composition note by note, the book page by page, the landscape detail by detail, so the true artist, whether poet, painter, or dramatist, sees human nature, penetrating its disguises and embracing all its force and weakness by that insight which is within him. The catalogues, the classifications, the microscopic examinations, which are required to make up these ‘_documents_,’ are required by those who have not that instantaneous comprehension which is the supreme gift of all supreme talent. The man who takes his notebook and enumerates in it the vegetables, the fish, the game, of the markets, missing no bruise on a peach, no feather in a bird, no stain on the slab where the perch and trout lie dying, will make a painstaking inventory, but he will not see the whole scene as Teniers or Callot saw it.
When the true poet or artist takes up in his hand a single garden pear or russet apple, he will behold, through its suggestions, as in a sorcerer’s mirror, a whole smiling land of orchard and of meadow; he will smell the sweet scent of ripe fruit and wet leaves; he will tread a thousand grassy ways and wade in a thousand rippling streams; he will hear the matin’s bell and the even song, the lowing kine and the bleating flocks; he will think in a second of time of the trees which were in blossom when Drake and Raleigh sailed, and the fields which were green when the Tudor and Valois met, and the sunsets of long, long ago, when Picardy was in the flames of war, and all over the Norman lands the bowmen tramped and the fair knights rode.
The phrasing of modern metaphysics calls this faculty assimilation; in other days it has been called imagination: be its name what it will, it is the one essential and especial possession of the poetic mind, which makes it travel over space, and annihilate time, and behold the endless life of innumerable forests as suggested to it by a single green leaf. When the writer, therefore, asks clamorously for folios on folios of _documents humains_, he proves that he has not this faculty, and that he is making an inventory of human qualities and vices rather than a portrait of them.
THE LEGISLATION OF FEAR
To any one convinced of what seems to be a supreme truth, that the happiness of humanity can only be secured by the liberty of the individual, the tendency of opinion in Europe in this present year must be a matter of grave anxiety. The liberty of the public is everywhere suffering from the return to reaction of their governments. The excesses of a few are made the excuse for the annoyance and restriction of the many. Legislation by fear is everywhere replacing legislation by justice, and is likely to continue to do so. The only statesman who has spoken of anarchy in any kind of philosophic spirit is Lord Rosebery, who called it ‘that strange sect of which we know so little.’ All other political speakers have treated of it only with blind abuse. In truth we do know almost nothing of it; we do not know even who are its high priests and guiding spirits. We know that it is a secret society, and we know that secret societies have always had, in all climes and for all races, the most singular and irresistible fascination. To meet it, ordinary society has only its stupid and brutal police system; its armies of spies, who, as the journey of Caserio from Cette to Lyons proves, are hopelessly useless, even when they are truthful.
It is true that, in the long run, secret societies have always been conquered and dispersed by ordinary society, but they are constantly reappearing in new forms, and it is certain that they have an extreme attraction for certain minds and classes of men, that they exact and receive an universal obedience which is never given to ordinary laws. They constitute a phase, a phenomenon, of human nature which is in itself so strange that it ought to be examined with the most calm and open-minded philosophy, instead of being judged by the screams of frightened crowds and the coarse invective of such politicians as Crispi. The curious power which can induce young men to risk their lives, and give them willingly to the scaffold, cannot be worthily examined and met by a rough classification of these men amongst monsters and wretches. That they have been brought, in their youth, to entire insensibility to personal danger and absolute indifference to death, whether to suffer it or cause it, is an indisputable fact; but no one seems to care to investigate the means by which they are brought to this state of feeling, nor the social causes by which this doctrine of destruction has been begotten. They are classed amongst criminals and sent to the scaffold. But it is certain that they are different to ordinary criminals; they may be much worse than they, but they are certainly different, and are in a sense entirely free from egotism, which is the usual motive of common crimes, except so far as they are seduced by the egotism of vanity.
It is impossible not to recognise great qualities allied to great cruelties in anarchists and nihilists, and, in the former, to great follies. When we remember the ghastly punishment of even the slightest political offences in Russia, yet see continually that some one is found who dares place on the Tsar’s dressing-table or writing-table a skull, a threatening letter, a dagger, or some other emblem and menace of death; that to do this, access is obtained into the most private and carefully-guarded apartments of imperial palaces; that who it is that does this can never be ascertained (_i.e._, there is no traitor who betrays the secret), and that the most elaborate and constant vigilance which terror can devise and absolutism command is impotent to trace the manner in which entrance is effected, we must admit that no common organisation can be at work, and that no common qualities must exist in those affiliated to it. There is no doubt that anarchism is a much more vulgar and much more guilty creed than nihilism. The latter has the reason of its being in the most brutal government that the world holds; it lives in a hell and only strives to escape from that hell, and liberate from it its fellows. Anarchy, with no such excuse, strikes alike at the good and the bad; strikes indeed at the good by preference. Yet there are qualities in it which we have been accustomed to consider virtues; there are resolution, patience, _sang froid_ and absolute indifference to peril; it is these which make it formidable. It also cannot be doubted that behind its Caserios and its Vaillants there must be some higher intelligence, some calm, trained, dominant minds. It has grown up in the dark, and by stealth; unsuspected, unseen, until it is strong enough to shake like an earthquake the existing institutions of the world. We see the bomb, the pistol, the knife; but we do not see the power which directs these, any more than we see that volcanic stratum which makes the solid earth divide and crumble.
The existing clumsy machinery of tribunals and police offices will not have more faculty to detect it than has the public in general. There are no seismographic instruments in the political world. There are only a scaffold and a house of detention. This age, which is squeamish about execution, has invented the infernal torture of solitary confinement. It need not surprise us if there be a return to rack and thumbscrew, these primitive agencies being refined and intensified by the superior resources of science. It is, I believe, proved that Stambuloff tortured his political prisoners with the old-fashioned forms of torture. These can scarcely be worse than the solitary confinement in humid underground cells in which Francesco Crispi causes those who displease him to be confined. Men in the freshness of youth, in the full promise of talent, are shut up in these infernal holes in solitude for a score of years, their health ruined and their minds distraught. Many of these men have no fault whatever except that the authorities are afraid of their political doctrines and of the sympathy the populace feel for them. Where is the regard for ‘life’ in these fell sentences? Death would be a thousand times more merciful.
A youth of twenty-one was in the second week of July condemned at Florence to fifteen months’ imprisonment for having called the _pretore_ of a petty court and his subordinate _vigliacchi_ (scoundrels); an expression so appropriate to the officials of these vicious and corrupt little tribunals that it was unpardonable. If at the end of the fifteen months this lad comes out of prison at war with society, a second Caserio, a second Vaillant, whose will be the fault?
A young lady of good family saved a little dog from the guards in Paris, and when she had seen it safely up its staircase turned in righteous indignation on the men. ‘Are you not ashamed to persecute innocent little animals?’ she said to them. ‘You would be better employed in catching thieves.’ This just remark so infuriated them, as a similar observation did the Florentine _pretore_, that they seized her, cuffed her, dragged her along under repeated blows, tearing some of her clothes off her back, and, reaching the police-station, locked her up with the low riff-raff of the streets. This took place in a fashionable quarter of Paris. If the male relatives of the young gentlewoman had lynched the guards who thus outraged her they would only have done their duty; but we know that the Parisian tribunals would have condemned them had they done so, and absolved the rascally myrmidons of the law. There is no justice anywhere if police are compromised by it.
At Mantua, in the month of August of this year, a poor woman, who has five children to maintain by her daily labour, was arrested by a guard for bathing in a piece of water outside the town (she ought to have been rewarded for her unusual cleanliness); and being taken before the tribunal she was sentenced to a fine. She exclaimed as she heard the sentence, ‘And the brigadier who brought this misery on me has his decoration!’ She was condemned to further punishment for the rebellious utterance; her defender, a young lawyer, in vain protested, and, for thus protesting, was himself arrested and charged with the misdemeanour of endeavouring ‘to withdraw a prisoner from just authority’! Can anything be more infamous?
In July at Ravenna eight young lads were flung into prison for singing the Hymn of Labour.
Yet more absurd still. In Florence a band of young men were arrested for singing the choruses from the _Prophète_, which sounded revolutionary to the ears of the police. At the same time, the indulgence shown to the crimes of the police is boundless.
A poor man named Pascia was, in the same city, last week condemned to thirty-five days’ imprisonment for having said an impudent word to the guards. On hearing the sentence his wife, a young woman with a baby in her arms, expostulated, asking who would now earn her own and her child’s bread. She was arrested, and locked up for the night on the charge of ‘outraging authority.’
On the twenty-second of April of this year, Alfredo Ghazzi, Customs-house guard on the Italian border of the Tresa, fired into a fishing-boat on the Tresa, having received no provocation whatever, and maimed two men, named Zennari and Zannori, of whom the former died; the latter, after a long illness recovered. The military tribunal of Milan _entirely_ absolved the guard Ghazzi.
For an offence of the kind (_reanto arbitrario in servizio_), even though ending in its victim’s death, the legal maximum of punishment is only two years’ imprisonment; but in this instance not even a fine was levied.
In Prussia the murder of men, women and children is frequent by the bayonets and the bullets of guards and sentinels. The other day a little boy was on the grass of a square in Berlin; the guard tried to arrest him; the child, frightened, ran away; the guard shot him dead. Such occurrences are frequent. If a newspaper condemns them the editor is imprisoned. It is wholly illogical to tell anarchists that human life is sacred when its sanctity can be disregarded at will by any soldier or police officer. The public was convulsed with horror before the assassination of Carnot; quite rightly; but why is it wholly unmoved at the assassination of the fishermen of Tresa, or of the child of Berlin?
The English nation has not perhaps been greatly interested in the fate of the conscript Evangelisto; has perhaps never heard of him. Briefly, he was, in the spring of this year, a young trooper, a peasant who had recently joined at Padua, could not learn to ride and had weak health; he was bullied to death by the officer immediately over him; he was made to ride with his feet tied beneath his horse, when he fell he was pulled up into the saddle and beaten, his hands being tied; once again he fell, and then never rose again; they swore at him and flung water over him in vain; he was dead. The officer who killed him is still at large and retains his position in the cavalry; being young, rich, and of rank, he drives four-in-hand about Udine, where he is now quartered, and when he is hissed and hooted by the country people they are arrested. Now, if the Italian press were to say what it has not said about this disgraceful affair under the new law, such lawful and proper censure would be called calumny of the army, and would be visited with fine and imprisonment.
The soldier is to be inviolable and revered as a god, when his bayonet or his sabre are the instruments of oppression of the government; but at other times he is considered as carrion with which his superiors may do whatever they choose.
It is constantly stated that the officer who tortured Evangelisto to death will be brought to trial, but months have elapsed since the tragedy and the young man is still enjoying himself[P] in full possession of his military rank. How could any public writer, who does his duty to the public, castigate too severely such atrocities as these?
Footnote P:
Since this was written, the officer, Blanc-Tassinari, has been tried by a _civil tribunal_, found guilty of ‘culpable homicide and abuse of authority,’ and condemned to five months’ detention in a fortress, and a fine of £20 (500 fr.). This punishment will entail no privation, as he is rich, and will live as he pleases in the fortress, and when the five months have expired, will rejoin his regiment as if nothing had happened. De Felice, Molinari, Garibaldi-Bosco, Barbato, and hundreds of intelligent and disinterested patriots are brought before military courts, are sentenced to twenty, twenty-five, thirty years’ imprisonment, are condemned to prison diet, to shaved heads, to forced labour, to solitary cells, whilst this young brute, who made the lives of his soldiers a martyrdom, and is found guilty of culpable homicide, receives practically no chastisement whatever. And the English Press upholds and justifies the Government under which such enormities are possible.
Yet even to hint at the brutality which goes on in the barracks is considered almost treason in Italy even as in Germany.
The legislation of fear goes hand in hand with a military despotism. The one is the outcome of the other.
The commercial world, the financial world, and the world of pleasure are beside themselves with terror. In Italy this passion of fear is being used to secure the passing of laws which will completely paralyse the press and enable the government on any pretext to carry away its foes out of the Chambers, and to confine to _domicilio coatto_ any person, male or female, in whom it may suspect any danger to itself, or who may be merely personally disliked by the men in office.