Critical Studies Part 17

There are two periods in the life of a woman when she is almost omnipotent for good or ill. These are when men are in love with her; and, again, when her children are young enough to be left entirely to her and to those whom she selects to control them. How many women in ten thousand use this unlimited power which they then possess to breathe the quality of mercy into the souls of those who for the time are as wax in their hands? They will crowd into the Speaker's Box to applaud debates which concern them in no way. They will impertinently force their second-hand opinions on Jack and Jill in the village or in the City alleys. They will go on to platforms and sing comic songs, or repeat temperance plat.i.tudes, and think they are a great moral force in the improvement of the ma.s.ses. This they will do, because it amuses them and makes them of importance. But alter their own lives, abandon their own favourite cruelties, risk the sneer of society, or lead their little children to the love of nature and the tenderness of pity; these they will never do. Mercy is not in them, nor humility, nor sympathy.

Can written words do anything to touch the hearts of those who read? I fear not.

On how many do written words, even dipped in the heart's blood and burning with the soul's fire, produce any lasting effect? Is not the most eloquent voice doomed to cry without echo in the wilderness? And what wilderness is there so barren as the desert of human indifference and of human egotism?

Pity is only awakened in those who are already pitiful. We cannot sow mustard seed on granite. The whole tendency of the age is towards cynicism, indifference, self-engrossment. The small children sneer much more often than they smile.

From Plutarch to Voltaire, from Celsus to Sir Arthur Helps, the finest and most earnest pleading against cruelty has been made by the finest and most logical minds. But the world has not listened; the majority of men and women are neither just nor generous, neither fine nor logical.

In a few generations more, there will probably be no room at all allowed for animals on the earth: no need of them, no toleration of them. An immense agony will have then ceased, but with it there will also have pa.s.sed away the last smile of the world's youth. For in the future the human race will have no tenderness for those of its own kind who are feeble or aged, and will consign to lethal chambers all those who weary it, obstruct it, or importune it: since the quality of mercy will day by day be more derided, and less regarded, as one of the moral attributes of mankind.

XII

THE DECADENCE OF LATIN RACES

I have read with the attention due to the author's name the essay of Professor Sergi on the decadence of the Latin nations. It seems to me, when reflecting on it, that the esteemed author gives to every slight change, the much-used, and much-abused, name of progress; and considers mere change as an indisputable betterment. He also considers that the Latin races cannot exist under modern conditions unless they form themselves on the models and follow the examples of non-Latin races; if, that is to say, they do not imitate what is foreign and alien to them.

It is clear that he does not for a moment doubt that the non-Latin are infinitely superior to the Latin peoples, and he rebukes the latter for remaining immovable, although, somewhat oddly, he excepts France from his censure on account of her great commerce, and only includes in his ban his own country and Spain.

With Spain I do not occupy myself, as I am not sufficiently well acquainted with her to do so; indeed, Professor Sergi himself says very little about her; but of Italy I cannot consider that his condemnation is merited. If she do merit it, why does she do so?

Both questions are interesting. Professor Sergi, like too many writers of the present time, a.s.sumes as an indisputable fact that the mere innovation, the mere alteration of a thing, is of necessity improvement, advancement, amelioration; and this being his rooted conviction, he considers Great Britain and the United States the models and ideals of modern life. For this reason he would force Italy to abandon entirely her traditions, her instincts, and her natural genius, and subst.i.tute for them an exact and servile imitation of these two foreign peoples who have tastes in common with her. Unfortunately he does not inform us to what point he carries this desire, and if the immense changes he advises are to be dynastic and political, or merely social and intellectual. He prints in capital letters his chief advice to the Latin nations to _move on new lines_; but he does not explain whether he means to move to a new Const.i.tution, to a new Representation, to a new theory and practice of Government; and he does not even say whether he thinks or does not think that the Church is the greatest enemy of national progress in Latin nations. It would be interesting to know in what proportions he holds the two antagonistic forces of Church and State to be guilty of opposing progress; that each is an obstacle to the higher forms of progress there can be no question in the mind of any dispa.s.sionate thinker. But he is careful not to commit himself to this view. Since he gives us so little information on this head, and limits himself to the counsel, somewhat meagre in its expression, to _move on new lines_, we may endeavour to find out for ourselves how far his advice goes: if Italy do actually merit his contempt for her inertia, and if the non-Latin races deserve or do not deserve the admiration with which he p.r.o.nounces on their superiority.

That the Italian nation is immovable is not true: for good or evil it moves as its great son Gallileo said of the earth. The fault, the peril, lie the other way. It is to be feared that the Italian people run the risk of losing their finest instincts, and their most gracious characteristics, through the exaggerated and obsequious imitation of foreign peoples, and by a too ready adoration of new things merely because they are new. They are the ideals of many a modern Italian.

Guglielmo Ferrero has dedicated many hundreds of pages to the celebration of their perfections. I believe that such worship is chiefly founded on illusion, for it is as easy to cherish illusions about a steam mill as about a mediaeval saint.

Let us look at the actual situation of Great Britain, setting aside her imperialist swagger, and regarding only facts. The English themselves admit that if a European naval coalition succeeded in preventing grain reaching their sh.o.r.es from America and the colonies, the nation in a fortnight would want bread. Is that an ideal or a safe position? If, in a sea-war, the British fleet would be successful is wholly uncertain, since no one can say how the metal battleships would behave in any distress; the manoeuvres have not shed much light upon this question, and many of the marine monsters, as regards their utility in active warfare, are still unknown quant.i.ties. Equally uncertain is what would be the conduct of the Indian population were Great Britain vanquished in any great war, for the majority of the peoples of Hindostan most unwillingly endure through coercion the yoke of the British rule.

In Ireland there is a racial hatred which nothing can extinguish, and only demands a favourable occasion to show itself. Canada may any day embroil England with the United States; and so may the West Indies, and the Nebraskan and Nicaraguan questions; and so may Newfoundland with France, and East or West Africa with Germany. In every part of the globe Great Britain has on her hands conquests, colonies, intrigues, enemies, open questions, and concealed questions, of every kind. Her greed is great, and her entanglements are innumerable. There are many weak points in her fortifications. To meet her obligations she is obliged to use legions of Asiatics, or Africans, or employ as mercenaries men from her distant colonies, or send the soldiers of one vanquished nation to help vanquish another. Thus did Imperial Rome, and so went to her undoing.

Doubtless Great Britain is rich, powerful, strong, proud, and vain. So was Rome; so was Spain. It is possible, even probable, that at some, perhaps not distant day, Great Britain also will give way under the enormous weight of her self-sought responsibilities, and the still more ponderous weight of her many enemies.

Internally, also, England is not what she used to be. The old n.o.bility is elbowed out of prominent place by a new aristocracy which has been created entirely on a money basis. Every ministry, when going out of office, creates a new batch of t.i.tled rich men, lifted into the Lords in return for political or financial service. Wealth is now the dominant factor of English social life; and a commerce, wholly unscrupulous, is the sole scope of the tawdry and noisy empire of which Joseph Chamberlain is the standard-bearer.

What is there in all this to admire or to imitate?

Again we have seen that in the United States, since they abandoned their wise policy of non-intervention in external affairs, the national life resembles the English, is vain, boastful, hypocritical, cruel, and bellicose. The thirst of gain devours the nation. There is no other land in which the contrast between rich and poor is so sharp and terrible; none in which millions are thrown away with more frightful indifference and conceited display. Lynch law in all its horror reigns over many provinces, and unblushing corruption mounts into the highest places and poisons all the sources of national life. Guglielmo Ferrero stands stupefied before their innumerable newspaper offices, which he says use up every day as much paper as would go round the circ.u.mference of the earth! But he forgets, or ignores, that the literary quality of those journals is usually of the poorest and vulgarest kind, and that the chief part of their columns is filled by advertis.e.m.e.nts. He is also transfixed with rapture before the colossal houses which Americans call sky-sc.r.a.pers, and sees the revelation of a stupendous genius in their pa.s.sion for what is big, costly, eccentric; nor does he hesitate to compare it with the Florentine and Venetian genius!

Actually there was never on earth two more different kinds of creation than these; never one more absolutely soulless, and one more n.o.bly penetrated by the soul. The genius of the Italian masters was lofty, generous, at once humble and sublime, never interested, always consecrated to Art and Country; the skill of the American constructors has no other scope than that of getting money, of making the world stare, of producing the huge, the gross, the extravagant, the enormous, and labours for only one G.o.d, the venal Mercury of the market-place. In these new cities, so vehemently extolled, with their towering constructions which hide the smoke-obscured clouds, and their network of electric wires, of railways in the air, and trams running across each other, there is not the faintest spark of that divine light which is called Liberty. Americans boast of their freedom, but it only exists in words; it has no abiding place outside a boisterous rhetoric. The old Puritanism still exists in religious bigotry and persecution; office is bought and sold; justice is a matter of money; private life suffers from conventionalities and social tyrannies innumerable; political and munic.i.p.al elections are the work of a Caucus. A man cannot drink, or stir, or do aught without his neighbour knowing and judging what he does; even marriage is to be made a matter for doctors to allow or disallow; the whole press is but a gigantic Paul Pry, a vast Holy Office where the persecution by the pen ends in the execution by the revolver.

Such is American liberty.

What can Italy learn from such a model?

Amongst the maladies of the brain known in this day is one which is called the mania of grandeur. It seems to me that not only individuals, but entire nations, are possessed by it. It is perilous and contagious.

Italy has already been inoculated by its virus.

There is also everywhere a fatal tendency to open the door of Italy to every foreign syndicate, and every foreign speculation, which puts forward a prospectus or launches shares on the market. The preponderance of Jews is enormous as owners of ground rents and estates in Italy; the chief part of Italian cities and towns is owned by Jews; and the greater number of the industries of all kinds in the country are in the hands of foreigners, like the newly-projected mining enterprise in Elba. If these mines be worth the working, why does not Italy work them herself, and take all the profits?

These facts are not due to any immovability; but to a dangerously lax tendency to run into foreign roads. The Italian Faust is only too susceptible to the invitations of the foreign Mephistopheles.

On the other hand a very marked inclination in the Italian is towards the modern forms of co-operation and communism. This tendency is not due in any way to the influence of the past, but to that mixture of jealousy and envy, of hatred of the rich, and detestation of labour, and of humble ways and of poor means, which is as general in Italy as it is everywhere else in our time, and which is the modern translation of the old cla.s.sic clamour for Panem et Circenses. Is it towards this already popular communism that Professor Sergi would direct the Italian nation?

The direction is already taken, and does not need his propulsion. If there be one thing more certain than another in the Italy of to-day it is the preference of a large proportion of the people for different forms of socialism and collectivism; and the persecution these doctrines receive lends them a dangerous force. At the same time as it persecutes them, the State, with strange self-stultification, recognises and grants one of the largest and most insolent of socialistic and communistic demands, _i.e._, that for the expropriation of private land in the Agro Romano, and in the various latifundi in Sicily and elsewhere; and thus opens the door either to a most high-handed and unjust spoliation, or to an agrarian civil war in a not distant future.

Again, the most terrible disease of modern society--corruption--is not due to the past in Italy or anywhere else; it exists wherever men exist, and is as general in the republic of France or of the United States as under the autocracy of Russia or of Persia. The Italian disasters of Eritrea were due rather to corruption than to incapacity. When the mules were bought in Naples for 100 lire per head, and sold to the State at 500 lire per head, the battle of Abba-Garima, called by English people the battle of Adowa, was lost before it was fought.

Professor Sergi speaks of the defeat of Abba-Garima as a proof of the decay of the Italian race; but this is a very unfair deduction. As well might the continual defeats of the British in the first months of the present war in South Africa be held as a proof of British poltroonery.

Any shortcomings which may have existed in the Italian army in Abyssinia, and exist at home, are, moreover, certainly not to be traced to old-world influences; or to any emasculating tenderness for tradition. There is no reverence for the armies of the past in the actual Italian army, for it is unlike any of them; it does not resemble the armies of the Duchies, or of the Republics, or of the Florentine Carraccio, or of the Lombard trained bands, or of the levies of the Neapolitan Bourbons, or of the legions of Varus. The only model it resembles is that idol of its commanders, the German Army, on which it is shaped and governed, in all the cut-and-dried narrowness and hardness inseparable from the German system. All this may be considered to be inevitable now, but modern militarism is unsuited to the character of Italians, and reacts injuriously on the genius and temper, and physical and mental life, of the people.

Unhappily militarism is the most conspicuous and the most tenacious of all modern influences, and the failure of the Conference of the Hague so immediately followed by the war of aggression in South Africa, is a sad and irrefutable proof that the nations are not in the least likely to free themselves from its yoke.

Taking the modern temper in its civil systems, as in its military, it does not seem to me any better adapted to the Italian idiosyncrasies; and all its worst features already exist in all which is here called government. Italian legislation confounds perpetually regulations with laws; is fidgeting, irritating, inquisitorial, insolent, hara.s.sing; its tyranny spoils the lives of the populace; by means of its agents it penetrates into all the privacies of family life; its perpetual interference between father and son, between master and man, between mother and child, between buyer and seller, between youth and free choice, between marriage and celibacy, between the man who takes a walk and the dog who goes with him, const.i.tutes incessant causes of irritation, and is a perpetual menace which lowers over the popular life from sunrise to sunset, and scarcely even leaves in peace the hours of the night.[13]

[Footnote 13: The other evening, in a theatre in Messina, a young gentleman expressed aloud his disapprobation of the performance; a person near bade him hold his tongue; the young man answered the rudeness with a blow; the person immediately produced a pair of handcuffs and clapped them on; he was a detective in plain clothes! The Italian of whatever rank he be can never be sure that he is not shadowed. The apprehension poisons existence to the most innocent.]

More or less there is too much of this in all modern nations, but in Italy it is especially odious, being in such absolute antagonism to the courtesy and gaiety, and warm domestic affections, natural to the Italian public, and a source of continual fret and friction to it both in pleasure and in pain.[14]

[Footnote 14: At Palermo in the April of this year it has been decreed by munic.i.p.al edict that, as it is contrary to hygiene for the petticoats of women to sweep up the dust of the streets in which the spittal of the sufferers from tuberculosis may have fallen and dried in the sun, all women who walk in Palermo are to shorten their skirts! Health, it is austerely added, is more important than fashion!]

There is certainly no necessity to incite Italians to admiration of foreign products and inventions. Such enthusiasm is only too general, and too blind, at least in that portion of the nation which is under the influence of the schools, the press, and the universities. An electrical machine has many more admirers than the bell-tower of Giotto, and a shop-window of a Bon Marche than the Palace of the Doges. The modern temper, cynical, trivial, avaricious, vulgar, which now discolours human life as the _oidium_ discolours the leaves of the vines, has affected too deeply the Italian mind, and has dried up its natural sense of, and capacity for, beauty. The glorious cities of Italy have been ruined by scandalous disembowelling; its ancient small towns are made ridiculous by electric light and steam tramways; the useful and picturesque dress of its peasantry is abandoned for the ugly and stupid clothes of modern fashion, cut out of the shoddy cloths furnished by English manufacturers; and this want of good sense, of good taste, of all true instincts towards form and colour, is a moral and mental malady due to that contagion of foreign influence which has poisoned Italy as it has poisoned j.a.pan and India, Africa and Asia.

Therefore every counsel to her to follow modern impulses is pernicious.

She is but too ready to do so, believing that, by this way, riches lie.

Moreover, the advice to the Italians to rise, and change, and follow new paths, seems to me at the present time a cruel derision; because the Italian who gives it must be well aware that the nation is not free to do anything or make any change. It is not even allowed to speak. No public meeting can gather together without intervention of the police.

The press cannot publish any opinions which are disapproved of by the Government without incurring sequestration of the journal, perhaps imprisonment of editor, writer, and printer. Where, then, can any fresh field be found in which to plant any flowers of thought with any hope to see them root and blossom in action? The hand of the Public Prosecutor would pluck them up before they could stretch out a single fibre.

Take that question so dear to the country; the question of Italia Irredenta. Where could it be discussed in public without 'authority'

intervening and silencing the speakers? Professor Sergi forgets, or avoids, to say that in Italy the first conditions of a 'movement on new lines' are wanting; civil liberty is wanting, and free speech and free acts are forbidden. Who can walk out into the country when barriers block up the end of every street? On the man, as on the dog, under pretence of public safety, the muzzle is fastened, and by its enforced use all health is destroyed.

The Italian of our time is too quickly intimidated, forgets too soon, wears the rosette in his b.u.t.ton-hole when he should put c.r.a.pe round his arm, dances with too ready an indifference on the grave of his hopes and of his friends. To form a virile character there is no education so good as the exercise of political and civil liberty; this education is but little given anywhere; it is not given at all between Monte Rosa and Mount Etna. The Italian is by nature too ready to be over-anxious and over-distressed at trifles; he thinks too much of trifling difficulties and the petty troubles of the hour; he is quickly discouraged, he is soon overwhelmed with despair, he has small faith in his own star, and he has not the elasticity and rebound of the Gaulois temper. Nothing therefore can possibly be worse for him than the kind of galling public tutelage and the perpetual molestation in which he is condemned to live; always esteemed guilty, or likely to be guilty, however harmless he may be. It is illogical to condemn a nation for having no virility of character, when the systems under which it is reared, and forced to dwell, destroys its manhood, and forbid all independence of thought, speech, and action.

Let us take for instance that uninteresting person, a small tradesman, native and citizen of any Italian town; in all his smallest actions relative to his little shop, such, for instance, as altering or re-painting his signboard, he must obtain the permission of his Munic.i.p.ality. If he venture to clean or refurbish his board without authorisation, he will receive a summons and be compelled to pay a fine.

The same kind of torment occurs in a dozen other daily trifles, magnified into crimes and visited with condign punishment; and, inevitably, the worried citizen becomes timid, nervous, and either afraid or incapable of judging or acting for himself. You cannot keep a man in the swaddling clothes of infancy and expect him to walk erect and well.

A shopkeeper, a tailor in Florence, known to me, cut the cord with which a munic.i.p.al dog-catcher had throttled his dog; he did no more; he was immediately arrested, dragged off to prison, and kept there for months without trial: when tried he was condemned to four months of prison and a heavy fine.

Herbert Spencer has said, 'Govern me as little as you can'; _i.e._, leave me to regulate my existence as I please, which is clearly the right of every man not a criminal. The Italian is, however, 'governed to death,' and tied up in the stifling network of an infinity of small ordinances and wearisome prohibitions. In the sense, therefore, in which the sufferer from tuberculosis may be said to want health, the Italian may be accused of wanting spirit; but this is not the sense of the reproach of Professor Sergi. Professor Sergi, like so many others of his teachers and masters, desires to propel him along a road which has already cost him dear. How many millions has it not cost in the last score of years, that fatal weakness of Italians for imitating others?

The rural communes of the country have more than a milliard of debts, almost all due to the senseless mania for demolition, for novelty, for superfluous alterations and imitations, works worse than useless, commended or proposed by the Government, and eagerly accepted by the communal and provincial councils, since each member of these hoped to rub his share of gilding off the gingerbread as it pa.s.sed through his hands. All the vast sums thus expended are all taken out of the enormous local and imperial taxation, are divided between contractors, engineers, members of the town and county councils, lawyers, go-betweens, and all the innumerable middlemen who swarm in every community like mites in cheese, at the same time that the poor peasant is taxed at the gates for a half-dozen of eggs, or a bundle of gra.s.s, and the poor washerwoman carrying in her linen has her petticoats pulled up over her head by a searcher to ascertain if she have nothing saleable or taxable hidden on her person. These are new ways, no doubt; but they are ways on which walk the ghost of ruin and the skeleton of famine.

If it be true, as Professor Sergi considers, that Italy can never hope to extend her conquests and her commerce as northern and western nations will do, then it is surely all the more needful to hold her own place in the world by the culture and development of her own natural genius. A nation, like a person, should be always natural; to be fashioned on others is to be without any confidence in oneself, and lose one's equilibrium in the stress of every difficulty. The rigid and indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to the Italian temperament, which is _prime-sautier_, subtle but inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.'

Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of modern habits. Good taste pa.s.ses away with good manners; and pigeon-shooting, sleeping-cars, automobiles, bicycles and tramway crowds bring with them the breeding suitable to them; and the modern monuments, the modern squares, the modern houses, the whitewash daubed on old walls, the cast-iron bridges spanning cla.s.sic waters, the straight, featureless, glaring, dusty streets, the electric trolleys cutting across ancient marbles, all conduce to make ign.o.ble what was n.o.ble, and belittle all which was great.

All this is not the fault of a too reverent admiration for an incomparable Art, for a glorious history; it is a much worse thing; it is an oblivion of both history and art, ingrate, unworthy, and ruinous.

Many say that Italians are unfit for freedom; it is certain that they have never been tried by it. Whatever their government is called, freedom is unheard of under its rule. Year after year, century after century, all the Italian provinces, however differently governed, have been held down under an absolutism more or less disguised. The general character, with heroic exceptions, has been inevitably weakened. The man of easy temper and pleasure-loving disposition consoles himself with amus.e.m.e.nt; the serious man seeks refuge in study or in science; one and all accept inaction as their lot. A political _camorra_ guides the chariot of the State, and the people draw aside, and stand silent, only hoping to escape being crushed under its wheels. Professor Sergi must be well aware of this sad truth; then why speak to Italy as if she were a free country, why speak to her of expansion and vitality when he sees her without power to purge herself of the fiscal and const.i.tutional disease which is in her blood?

With as much reason might he chain up a greyhound, and bid him course the hare; clip the wings of a skylark, and bid it mount to the clouds.