Chapter V: Letter 2

Apropos of Mazzini. A few months ago the first volume of his collected works appeared. Instead of a preface or notes, Mazzini connected the articles written by him at various times, by means of a series of amplifications; there is a mass of the most living interest in these explanatory pages. The poem of his monastic life dedicated to one god and one service is unintentionally revealed in these disconnected jottings, possibly more fully than he meant.

An enthusiast, a fanatic with Ligurian blood in his veins, Mazzini was from youth up irrevocably devoted to the great cause of the freedom of Italy, and to that cause he remains faithful for ever—_ora e sempre_, as his motto says: he finds his youth, love, family, faith, duty, all in that. Espoused to one wife, he has not betrayed her, and grey-headed, emaciated, sick, he holds off death, he refuses to die before Rome is the capital of United Italy and the lion of Saint Mark tears to tatters the black-and-yellow rag which flies above him.

The testimony of such a man, one, too, who attacked scepticism, socialism, and materialism, a man who lived in every heart-throb of European life for forty years, is extremely important.

After the first schoolboy enthusiasm of every revolutionary career, after the romance of conspiracies, mysterious passwords, meetings at night, vows over bloodless daggers, the young man reconsiders things.

In spite of the fascination for a youthful Latin soul of the setting and ritual, the earnest and ascetic Mazzini soon discerned that there was in Carbonarism far more ceremony and empty form than action, far more meeting and preparing than doing. We, too, perceived long ago that the political liturgy of the priests of conspiracy, like the church liturgy, is only a dramatic performance; however much feeling and sincerity the priests sometimes bring to the service, still the Lamb is slain in bread and bleeds in wine. Mazzini noticed that thirty-five years ago.

Having reached that point, it was hard for the young Carbonaro to stop. Watching recent events in the crumbling Empire, an eye-witness of monarchical restorations, revolutions, constitutional attempts and republican failures, Mazzini reached the conclusion that contemporary European life had, as he expressed it, ‘no initiative of any sort,’ that the conservative idea and the revolutionary idea have only negative significance: one destroys, not knowing to what end, the other preserves, not knowing to what end; that in everything that was going on (and the revolution of 1830 was going on at that time) there was nothing inaugurating a new order of things.

In these words of the future rival of the Pope there are echoes of the funeral knell struck by the Pope’s friend, Maistre.

The void of which Mazzini was sensible may well be understood.

The flood-tide of the revolutionary sea rose triumphantly in 1789 and, untroubled by any doubts, drowned the old world. But when everything was covered by its waves, and when mitres, plumed hats, and heads without bodies (among them one wearing a crown) had bobbed up for a moment and sunk again to the bottom, then for the first time a fearful freedom and emptiness was felt. The forces set free attacked one another, then stopped, exhausted; they had nothing to do, they waited for the events of the day as casual labourers wait for work. Those standing armies of the Revolution boiled with martial energy, but there was no war to fight; above all, there was no clear aim to fight for. And when there is no aim, anything may become the aim. Napoleon assured them that he was the aim, that war was the aim, and set blood flowing faster than the revolutionary tide had flooded the world with ideas.

Mazzini saw that, and, before uttering his final verdict, he looked beyond the political walls. There he was met by the colossal egotism of Goethe, his serene callousness, his interest as of a naturalist in human affairs; there he was met by the self-consuming colossal egotism of Byron; the poetry of scorn beside the poetry of contemplation; lamentation, laughter, proud flight, and revulsion from the modern world beside the haughty satisfaction in it. The heroes of Byron impress Mazzini; he tries to discover the origin of these strange hermits with no religion and no monastery, these egoists, concentrated on themselves, useless, unhappy, without work, without fatherland, without interests, these ascetics, ready for sacrifices which they know not how to make, ready to despise themselves as human beings. And again Mazzini stumbles upon the same cause. Byron’s heroes are lacking in faith, in an objective ideal; the poet’s vision, turning aside from his barren, repellent surroundings, was reduced to the lyrical expression of states of feeling, to the impulses of activity turned inwards, to morbid nerves, to the spiritual abysses where madness and sense, vice and virtue, lose their limits and turn to phantoms, to gnawing remorse and, at the same time, morbid ecstasy.

Mazzini’s active spirit could not stop at this analysis of the malady. At all costs he longed to find motive for action, the word of a new faith,—and he found them.

Now the lever is in his hands. He will turn the world upside-down, he will re-create Europe, he will exchange the coffin for the cradle, will turn the demolishers into architects, will solve the problem of society and the individual, of freedom and authority, will give faith to the heart without robbing the mind of reason.... What, you may wonder, is this _magnum ignotum_? _The unity and freedom of Italy with ancient Rome for its centre._

In all this, of course, there is no place for analysis nor for criticism. Was it not because Mazzini had found a new revelation, a new redemption of the world, and an Italian _resorgimiento_, that he failed to foresee one thing—Cavour? He must have hated Cavour more than Antonelli. Cavour was the prose translation of his poem, he fulfilled the prosaic part of Mazzini’s programme, _à la longue_ Rome and Venice will follow suit. Cavour is the Italian Martha, thwarting the all-absorbing dream of the Italian Mary with household trivialities; and while Mary, with tender ecstasy, saw the redemption of the world in liberated Italy, Martha was cutting out a Belgian dress for Italy, and the country, pleased that the new garment did not pinch her, went along the beaten European track, the great trade route, though there is no reaching a regeneration of the world without risking a more perilous path.

The fanatic Mazzini was mistaken; the immensity of his error made Cavour and United Italy possible. But for us it matters little how Mazzini solved the question; what is of interest to us is that as soon as a Western European stands on his own feet and shakes off ready-made formulas, as soon as he begins to look at the state of contemporary Europe, he is conscious of something amiss, he feels that things are not going the right way, that progress has taken the wrong turning. Revolutionaries and conservatives can easily cheat this feeling by replacing what they lack with the principle of nationalism, especially if, luckily for them, their native country is under foreign rule. But what comes next? What are they to do when they have established the independence of their people? Or what are they to do if it is already independent?

Mazzini, conscious of the emptiness of the democratic idea, points to the emancipation of Italy from the ‘Tedeschi.’ Stuart Mill sees that everything around him is growing vulgar and petty; he looks with despair at the overwhelming myriads of petty bourgeois massed together like pressed caviare, with no initiative, no understanding, but in England they have no Austrian yoke, no Pope, no Neapolitan Bourbon. What is to be done there?

I foresee the wrath of our bond-slaves of the factories of learning and the foundries of scholasticism; I can see how malignantly in the light of day they will look at me with their night-owls’ eyes and say: ‘What nonsense is he talking? As though historical development could turn aside, as though it did not move according to its laws, like the planets which never turn aside, and never break away from their orbits.’

To this last contention it may be said that anything may happen, and that there is no reason why a planet should not sometimes break away from its orbit. Saturn’s ring has been preserved and revolves with it, while Jupiter’s necklace has broken into separate beads, and the earth has one moon like a cataract in the eye. But one has but to glance into a hospital instead of an observatory to see how the living _go off the track_, develop in their abnormality and carry it to comparative perfection, distorting and sometimes destroying the whole organism. The delicate equilibrium of every living creature is uncertain and to some extent adapts itself to abnormalities: but one step too far in that direction, and the overstrained knot is broken and the elements released form into new combinations.

The general laws, of course, remain the same, but they may vary in their particular applications, till they appear absolutely opposite in their manifestations. Fluff flies and lead falls in obedience to the same law.

In the absence of a set plan and fixed date, of a yard-measure and a clock, development in nature and in history, far from not being able to turn aside, is bound to be continually turning aside, in accordance with every influence and by virtue of its irresponsible passivity and lack of definite aim. In the individual organism the deviation reveals itself by pain, and the warning of pain often comes too late. Complex, composite organisms fly off at a tangent and are carried downhill, unconscious of the road or the danger, owing to the constant change of generations. There is very little possibility of stopping the deviation, arresting the downward flight or overtaking it, and there is little desire to do so; such a desire would in every case presuppose consciousness and aim.

Consciousness is a very different thing from practical application. Pain does not cure, but calls for treatment. The diagnosis may be correct, but the treatment may be bad; one may have no knowledge of medicine, yet clearly perceive the disease. To demand a cure from a man who points out some evil is exceedingly rash. The Christians who wept over the sins of this world, the socialists who exposed the sores of the social order, and we, dissatisfied, ungrateful children of civilisation, we are not the physicians, we are the pain; what will come of our moaning and groaning we do not know; but the pain is recorded.

We are confronted with a civilisation which has developed consistently on the basis of a landless proletariat and the unlimited right of the owner over his property. What Sieyès prophesied has come to pass: the middle class has become all-important because it possesses property. Whether we know how to emerge from petty-bourgeois rule to the rule of the people or not, we have the right to regard bourgeois rule as a one-sided development, a monstrosity.

By the word monstrosity, disease, we commonly understand something unnatural, exceptional, not reflecting that abnormality and disease are more _natural_ than the normal, which is merely the algebraical formula of the organism, an abstraction, a generalisation, an ideal formed from different particulars by the exclusion of what is accidental. The deviation and the abnormality follow the same law as the organisms; if they were not subjected to it, the organism would die. But, in addition to that, they rest on their peculiar rights, they have their private laws, the consequences of which we have again the right to deduce, apart from any ability to correct them. Seeing that the forepart of the giraffe has acquired a one-sided development, we could surmise that this development was at the expense of the hind part, and that in consequence there would infallibly be a series of defects in his organism corresponding with his one-sided development, but for him natural and comparatively normal.

Bourgeoisie makes up the forepart of the European camelopard; that might be disputed, if the fact were not so obvious; but, once that is accepted, we cannot overlook all the consequences of this supremacy of the shop and trade. It is clear that the man at the helm of this world will be the tradesman, and that he will set his trademark on all its manifestations. The ineptitude of an aristocracy by birth and the misery of a proletariat by birth are equally helpless against him. The government must die of hunger or become his menial; its comrades in unproductivity, the guardians of the human race in its immaturity, the lawyers, notaries, judges and such, are equally under his yoke. Together with his supremacy, the whole of moral life is degraded, and Stuart Mill, for instance, did not exaggerate when he talked of the narrowing of men’s minds and energies, the filing down of individuality, life continually becoming more shallow, and wide human interests being continually more excluded from it by its being confined to the interests of the counting-house and bourgeois prosperity. Mill says plainly that, going by that road, England will become a second China; to which we would add, and not England alone.

Perhaps some crisis will save us from the Chinese decay. But whence and how will it come, and will the aged body survive it? That I cannot tell, nor can Stuart Mill. Experience has taught us; more cautious than Mazzini, we humbly adhere to the point of view of the dissector. We know of no remedies and have little faith in surgery.

I have been particularly fortunate, I have lived next door to the hospital and have had a first-rate seat in the anatomical theatre; I had not to look in the atlas, nor to attend lectures on parliamentary therapeutics, nor theoretical pathology; disease, death, and dissolution were taking place before my eyes.

The death agony of the July monarchy, the fever of the Papacy, the premature birth of the Republic and her death, the June days following on the February twilight, all Europe in a fit of somnambulism falling from the roof of the Pantheon into the muddy pond of the police! And then ten years in the spacious museum of pathological anatomy, the London Exhibition of specimens of all the progressive parties in Europe, side by side with the indigenous specimens of every form of conservatism from the times of the Judean high priests to the Puritans of Scotland.

Ten years!

I had leisure to look deeply into that life, into what was going on around me; but my opinion has not changed since in 1848 I ventured, not without horror, to decipher on the brow of those men the _Vixerunt_ of Cicero!

With every year I struggle more and more against the lack of comprehension of men here, their indifference to every interest, to every truth, the trivial frivolity of their senile intellects, the impossibility of persuading them that routine is not the infallible criterion, and that habit proves nothing. Sometimes I stop short, I fancy that the worst time is over, I try to be inconsistent: I fancy, for instance, that suppressed speech in France is growing into thought.... I expect, I hope.... Exceptions do happen sometimes.... Something seems to be dawning.... No, nothing!

And no one feels this.... People look at you with a sort of pity as at one deranged.... But I have happened to meet with old, old men who shake their heads very mournfully. Evidently these old men are ill at ease with the strangers of their household, that is, with their sons and grandsons....

Yes, _caro mio_, there is still in the life of to-day a great type for a poet, a type altogether untouched.... The artist who would look intently at the grandfathers and grandsons, at the fathers and children, and fearlessly, mercilessly embody them in a gloomy, terrible poem, would be the laureate at the graveside of this world.

That type—the type of the Don Quixote of the Revolution, the old man of 1789, living out his old age on the bread of his grandsons, French petty bourgeois grown rich—has more than once moved me to horror and depression. Think of him a little and your hair will stand on end.

ISLE OF WIGHT, COWES.

_July 20, 1862._