De: ITALIAN FANTASIES
The journalism of the street-nomenclature keeps pace with the progress of anti-Clericalism. “Sons of an age which you foresaw,” the epitaph on Giordano Bruno’s tomb assures that victim of the Inquisition, and many a Via or Piazza Giordano Bruno in places apparently remote from the currents of thought—Pesaro, Perugia, Foligno, Urbino on its isolated rock—testifies that even a tombstone may speak the truth, provided that it is only posthumous enough. Urbino, indeed, lonely rugged Urbino, is compelled to put up in the Church of S. Francesco the significant warning: “The law punishes disturbers of religious functions.” And even more illuminating than the Giordano Bruno streets or the Giordano Bruno societies is the mushroom rapidity with which streets of Francesco Ferrer have sprung up all over Italy. Florence, with biting sarcasm, has made its Via Francesco Ferrer out of its Archbishop Street. Tiny San Gimignano of the many towers has inserted a tablet to Ferrer in the wall of an open loggia of a theatre, “in order that Thought should be fruitful and survive Death.” . . . “Victim,” it cries, “of the sacerdotal tyranny, inaugurating the not distant time when there shall be neither oppressed nor oppressors!”
Such millennial dreams in such mediæval cities prove that Mazzini was no sport of nature, but a true son of Italy; seed-plot of all the mysticisms and aspirations from St. Francis and Dante to Gioberti and David Lazzaretti.
IX
“ROME OF THE CÆSARS gave the Unity of Civilisation that force imposed on Europe. ROME OF THE POPES gave a Unity of Civilisation that Authority imposed on a great part of the human race. ROME OF THE PEOPLE will give, when you Italians are nobler than you are now, a Unity of civilisation accepted by the free consent of the nations for Humanity.” In this magnificent synthesis, written in 1844, Mazzini proclaimed the mission of Rome to the world. His mental outlook was infinitely broader than Lazzaretti’s, whose story is one of Life’s many plagiarisms of the Palestinian original, complete even to martyrdom and an awaited Resurrection. Yet Mazzini shared with the peasant-prophet of Monte Amiata the assurance of a not distant Millennium to be inaugurated by his followers. ’Twas a blindness due to standing in his own white light. The simplest observation of the facts reveals that humanity is only at its alphabet, that we are living in the mere infancy of our planet’s human history, in a Dark Age to which the millennial century will look back with incredulity, though a few Gissings will be anxious to live in it. The overwhelming majority of mankind to-day abides religiously in primitive autocosms, which have little resemblance to the cosmos as it is, and every variety of savagery from African cannibalism to European rubber-hunting and American negro-lynching is still in vogue. Half the land of the globe is still in undisturbed possession of our animal and insect inferiors. Canada, Australia and South America show a few human figures dotting the endless spaces—in Matto Grosso in Brazil a hundred thousand people occupy half a million square miles, in Patagonia each man may have a San Marino Republic to himself, in Alaska the population of a small English country town is spread over six hundred thousand square miles. Even the United States, which are sixty times as large as England, have only double its population. In Asia, the cradle of so-called civilisation, there are still nomad populations, and large tracts, as of Arabia and Tibet, have never been penetrated by the foot of an explorer. The bulk of Africa as of Russia—which is half Europe _plus_ half Asia—is still given over to barbarism. One third of the whole human race is packed into China, a land where torture is still legal. Decidedly there is plenty of scope for “the mission of Rome,” nor need the lover of the picturesque yet apprehend the monotony of the Millennium, as, girdled by stars and infinities, crossed by the tails of comets, rent and seamed by earthquakes, our planet continues its amazing adventure.
X
But if spiritual Imperialism has made little progress in the land of Mazzini, Rome does not lack its party of material Imperialism, ever egging on Italy to deeds of derringdo and to the fulfilment of its “manifest destiny” in Tripoli and Cyrenaica, whose arid deserts flow with milk and honey under the imperialistic pen. More in sorrow than in anger a writer in the _Tribuna_ rebukes these hotheads as merely literary: conquistadors by fury of metaphor and prosopopœia, whereas real Imperialism—Francesco Coppola perceives with envy—is the irresistible instinct of an imperial race, whose expansion is unconscious or even anti-conscious, and which is rich in strong silent Kiplingesque heroes. Italy, a young nation, whose bones are not yet set, whose teeth are not yet sprouted, is falling, he laments, into the senile decay of socialistic rhetoric, and pacifical and humanitarian doctrine. The degenerate Italians have pulled up the railway lines to prevent the soldiers going off to the wars of expansion, have made a pother about “slavery,” and have diverted the world by setting Civil and Military Governors cock-fighting before Commissions of Inquiry. “And then we call ourselves the heirs of Rome!”
But, prithee, good Signor Coppola, is it not enough to be the heirs of Italy? Is it not enough to inhabit the most beautiful land in the world, the richest-dyed in historic tints, the greatest breeder of great men, the garden of the arts, the temple of religion? Is there no such thing as Intensive Imperialism? To produce the highest life per square mile is surely infinitely more Imperial than to multiply Saharas of mediocrity, to follow Stock Exchange adventures in Abyssinia or to decimate the dervishes of Benadir? In the village of my home there is only a single shop, and it writes over its windows the proud legend: “To lead in every department is our ambition.” But Italy, in open competition with the world, achieved the hegemony of civilisation in every department. What, beside this, is the military heirship of Rome?
And has England, the heir of Rome, so enviable a position? Far from it, alas! That unconscious or anti-conscious instinct of hers has landed her in the gravest situation of which consciousness was ever called upon to take stock. Holding nearly a quarter of the globe with a white population—outside these islands—of only ten millions; with a heterogeneous empire of Colonies, Crown Colonies, and Possessions, incapable of being brought under a single constitution or concept but that of force and tending to destroy such constitutions or ethical concepts as survive at home; with manifold subject races which she is too proud to make freemen of the Empire as Rome did; threatened and troubled in Europe by Germany, in Asia by India, in Africa by Egypt, in America by the States, in Australia by the Chinese and Japanese, the heir of Rome has seen her palmy days. The equilibrium is too unstable, and the part that came with the sword must perish with the sword. The Russo-Japanese war—the most important event in history since the fall of Rome—by destroying the glamour of the white man and showing that Christianity is not essential to success in slaughter—has shaken the foundations of her Indian and Egyptian Empire. The old apprehension that Russia was the menace to India is justifying itself, but it is Russia’s weakness, not her strength, that has provided the menace. Britain’s only future—no mean one indeed—lies in Canada, Australia and South Africa, and even here it is impossible for her to fill these great continents or sub-continents with the emigrating surplus of her decaying population, especially as her emigrants prefer the United States and are often excluded from her own Colonies. Her utmost hope is to keep these colonies British in constitution. They cannot be British in language—French Canada and Dutch South Africa forbid that; they cannot even be predominantly white, for North Australia is tropical and South Africa is not a white man’s country but a whited sepulchre—an aristocracy exploiting the coloured labour it despises, a society poised perilously on its apex. How unwieldy such an Empire at its best beside the United States—one continuous area, one language, one constitution, and but for the hereditary curse of the negro problem, one free and equal brotherhood! But how cumbrous even the United States, only kept from breaking into separate States with separate dialects by the modern network of railways, telegraphs and newspapers! How much more favourable to intensive and exalted living, a compact little country like Italy, rich in all the essentials of greatness and happiness!
There was the epic sweep of a statesman in Chamberlain’s vision of a true British Empire of federated freemen, but even with him Ireland was incongruously excluded, and the first fine prophetic rapture has chilled into commercialism under the British incapacity for imaginative synthesis. What was originally a consummation _devoutly_ to be desired, and to be achieved only by sacrifice, is now presented as a policy that will pay, and even pay immediately. In the same breath we have an heroic trumpet-call and an estimate of the profits. It would, indeed, be strange if the good coincided so closely with the lucrative. But that is the trickery of all forms of Protectionist teaching, to dazzle with two alternative advantages simultaneously. Matilda is the heiress and Madge is beautiful—who would remain a bachelor when wealth and beauty are to be had for the asking?
Meantime the British Empire—so envied of the Italian Imperialist—is fast being conquered by Germany. For what is the mere absence of the German flag from our shores to our Germanisation in ideas, our transformation to German notions of conscription, our permeation by the doctrine of blood and iron? Already a pamphleteer calls for Lord Kitchener to “take away that bauble.” Whether the new German province which is replacing the old land of freedom continues to be called British or not, is a secondary matter. The formal consummation of the conquest would even relieve England of nightmares of unmanly terror and mountains of taxation. I like to think that it was this German province, and not the England of Edward VII which, ensuing Peace before Honour, made a compact with the Power of Darkness and put back the clock of Europe. It could not surely be the old Colossus of Freedom, whose untold millions fertilise every soil on earth and whose ships outnumber overwhelmingly the united vessels of the world—it could not surely be “the England of our dreams” which grasped the hand of Russia and sent Finland and Persia to their dooms, and now trembles to stir a finger for any cause, however forlorn, and any ideal, however British.
Let the nation of Mazzini take heed before it loses its own soul to gain the world.
XI
No, it was a road of quagmires and quicksands into which Depretis and Crispi led Italy. The less she knows and thinks of Empire the better for her and for mankind. Latin self-consciousness, if it has its faults of rhetoric, at least enables Young Italy to see that Empire is not to be bought without an ethic of blood and iron, which is foreign to the home ethic. Imperialism is only for races strong or stupid enough to run a double standard. Italy has given her blood prodigally enough for the right to be Italy, but she has given it of her own free will. And volunteer armies, self-inspired, are the only sort that a true civilisation can tolerate. Despicable is the nation which sends mercenaries to do its fighting. The soldier like the priest—whose black robe makes the eternal ground-bass of Italy—is one of the unfortunate differentiations of humanity—a type that should never have been evolved. Specialisation—division of labour—is all very well when it gives us doctors, carpenters, engineers, lawyers, but every man must do his own praying and his own fighting. It is comforting to find Young Italy as set against soldiers as against priests.
Though United Italy has followed the normal path of nationhood—large army, large navy, large taxes, and my country right or wrong—there is still a saving remnant to justify Mazzini’s prophetic faith in his people. And, indeed, one does not know where else to look for “the saviours of the world.” The French—once the favourites in the rôle—have too hobbledehoyish a devotion to the sex-joke, the Germans are too tamed, the Americans too untamed, the Spaniards and Russians too brutalised by bull-fights or _pogroms_, the English too inconsequent. Possibly the New Zealanders may be the first to build the model State, possibly some people of Latin America, that land of sociology and secular education. But these are too remote for their results to leaven the Old World, and on the whole the Italians with their ancient civilisation and their renewed youth appear least unfitted to lead humanity onwards.
But the notion that the Millennium can be reached through a people with a mission, inspiring as it may yet prove to Italy, is a notion not without its limitations and drawbacks. It may easily degenerate into aggression as with the English or into inactive vanity as with the Jews.
True that the Jews—the original missionary people, in whom the families of the earth were to be blessed—have made the Millennium possible by their creation of the Bourse. In their Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609 by the refugees from Spain and Portugal, the infinitely complex system of international finance took its rise. Professor Sombart, the German professor of economics, credits the Jews with the entire invention of the apparatus of the Stock Exchange. And the Stock Exchange, in criss-crossing with threads of gold all these noisy nationalities, is turning war into a ridiculous destruction of one’s own wealth. In the security necessary for international investments lies the prime hope of the world’s peace. But it was an evolution whose form was not foreseen by the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah predicted that the peoples would beat their swords into ploughshares; he should have said shares in ploughs.
The success of Esperanto—likewise invented by a Jew—the spread of World Congresses, and even of World Sports, constitute, like Science and Art, a valuable corrective to the excesses of Nationalism, which has been sadly overdone in the reaction against the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century. Nationality, born as it is of historical, biological, and geographical differences, is a natural division of human groups, though a division devoid of the rigidity which patriots pretend, inasmuch as all nationalities are constantly intermarrying both physically and spiritually. But Nationalism—as Bernard Shaw has pointed out—is a disease. It is a morbid state due to defect of the organs of Nationality—to wit, territory and liberty. In health we are not conscious of our organs, it is dyspepsia not digestion that forces itself upon our attention. Nationalism rages in Poland or in Ireland as it once raged in Italy. But for Italy, which has won back territory and liberty, to continue at fever heat would be sickness, not health. Even too much self-admonition to do noble things for national reasons rather than for their own sakes is a morbid self-consciousness. To make history too consciously is to make histrionics.
XII
Neither the reformed Vatican of Gioberti nor the kingless Quirinal of Mazzini can provide the next phase in human evolution. Profound was that teaching of Jesus—you cannot put the new wine in the old bottles. It was not unnatural that an Italian should look to Rome for the third mission. Rome of the Cæsars, Rome of the Popes, Rome of the People! What a fascinating trinity! The conception of a Rome that having lived twice as a world-force must live again, seized Mazzini in his youth, enthralled his maturity, and was the key-note of his speech to the Roman Assembly in the brief hour of his glory. “After the Rome of conquering soldiers, after the Rome of the triumphant Word, the Rome of virtue and of example.” And he repeated it, not yet disillusioned, in the very last years of his life; founding a journal to bring _Roma del Popolo_ into being. And yet he had in the interim published “From the Council to God,” that wonderful sketch of the new religion for which the world is thirsting, had added one of the grandest pages to the unclosed Bible of humanity. That page, indeed, is perhaps still theology rather than theonomy, still too saturated with the old optimism—humanity may have to part even with the assurance of personal immortality, and go, starred with sorrows and sacrifices, to its obscure doom. But this optimism, this burning conviction of a new heaven and a new earth, is the very stuff of which great religions are made, and Mazzini appears like the mighty prophet of the next phase of the spirit, the divine iconoclast whose fuller faith was to give the death-blow to the old theology. And the real miscarriage of Mazzini’s career is not that he laboured for a Republic and begot a Monarchy, not that he sowed for a new social order and reaped stones and statues, but that he spent himself on the doubtful means instead of the certain end, on the creation of a United Italy which was to be the organon of the new spirit, but which is only a nation like the others. The great soul that might have kindled the new faith wore itself out in futile political conspiracies and vain exiles. How much grander, how much worthier of his genius and saintliness, might have been Mazzini’s achievement, had he not been obsessed, like the Middle Ages, by the figment of the Holy Roman Empire; had he, instead of working through Nationalism, gone straight for the foundation of a new international Church. Moses, a greater than Mazzini, had failed in this dream of a prophet-people, nor is there any more assurance that the Law will go forth from Rome than from Zion. Mazzini himself protested against the notion that the French continued to be the chosen people; after 1814 their initiative ended, he urged. He protested, too, against the notion that an instrument created for one purpose can be used for another. Why, then, did he, whose organising powers might have found supreme scope in establishing the religion of the future, throw away his life for Nationalism? Valuable instrument of world-progress as nationality within sane limits may be, alluring as is the idea of working through one’s own nation, perfecting a model people, in whom all the families of the earth shall be blessed, the instruments of the new order exist insufficiently in any one people, if indeed they exist sufficiently in the whole population of the globe. More insistently even than nationalities the world needs a new Church. By giving up to Italy what was meant for mankind, Mazzini missed creating what he prophesied, missed fulfilling and purging of its monastic and mediæval limitations that earlier prophecy of the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot whom Dante placed in Paradise. “The Kingdom of the Father has passed, the Kingdom of the Son is passing,” taught Joachim of Flora. “The Third Kingdom will be the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost.”
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