The Life of Mazzini Part 11

The law of Duty, man's bounden service to humanity, goes on beyond the individual and the state to be the rule of international relations.

Man's end, so runs Mazzini's argument, is to serve the progress of humanity. But the individual, in his isolated impotence, would shrink from the immensity of the burden. And for most men, humanity excites no effective sense of obligation; they will give for country what they will not give for the wider and remoter circle of mankind. The cosmopolitan, who talks of duty to humanity and neglects the nation, is as one who bids men climb a ladder and takes away the rungs.

Therefore Providence, once again applying the law of a.s.sociation, has placed the individual among men of like feelings and aspirations, that serving his country he may serve humanity, that through the nation and its common strength he may have power to help the progress of the world. Thus a nation is a G.o.d-appointed instrument for the welfare of the race, and in this alone its moral essence lies. "Nationality is sacred to me," he says, "because I see in it the instrument of labour for the good and progress of all men." "Countries are the workshops of humanity"; "a nation is a living task, her life is not her own, but a force and a function in the universal Providential scheme." "Humanity is a great army, marching to the conquest of unknown lands, against enemies both strong and cunning. The peoples are its corps, each with its special operation to carry out, and the common victory depends on the exactness, with which they execute the different operations."

This "division of European labour" is essential to the progress of Europe, and, through it, of the world. But each group of humanity's workmen, if it is to be efficient, must be organised, not by coercion, but by free acceptance of their obligations; they must be impelled by duty and the sense of a great common work to do. Each nation must be a living, h.o.m.ogeneous ent.i.ty, with its own faith and consciousness of self. Europe, in Mazzini's lifetime, had little of this. He condemned its existing divisions as answering to no principle, since for the most part they were agglomerations of territory, made in the interests of a royal dynasty or in the name of some artificial principle, as the balance of power; and therefore they were powerless to inspire a common national effort for an intelligent and useful end. Fact.i.tious and immoral ends filled up the void; unsatisfied national yearnings burst imperiously through diplomatic schemes of peace; there was little of the burning love of independence, that alone safeguarded from designs of aggressive empire, from France in the past, from Russia in the present. The map of Europe must be drawn afresh, and states be made conterminous with nationalities.

What, then, are the inherent, essential marks of nationality? Are race and geographical features, language and literature, customs and traditions? None of these, Mazzini replied, are more than secondary elements, race least of all. Wiser and juster than Bismarck and his school, he saw that race, even if it were discoverable, has small connection with the facts of to-day. He did not investigate the dark problem of race characteristics, he did not even ask whether race affinities are among the physical causes that create a national feeling. But, none the less, his argument is indestructible against the theory that makes race the chief base of nationality. He was saved from ethnological fancies by his sensible conclusion, that races are too intimately compounded to be a cause of national character. "There is not a single spot in Europe," he declared, "where an unmixed race can be detected." "France, the most powerful nationality of the modern world, is a mixture of Germans, Celts, and Romans." There is one aspect however of the race question, that he did not sufficiently recognise. However imaginary the original ethnological basis of a country may be and generally is, yet some races have been fixed for several centuries; and this has generated a belief in a common racial origin, which, however false historically, may none the less, when supported by a common language, become an important and sometimes a dominant factor in creating a sense of nationality.

He gave his fancy play in determining the influence of geography. He loved geographical study, and as usual sought for a spiritual purpose underlying the physical facts. "By the courses of the great rivers, by the lines of the high mountains, and other geographical features G.o.d has marked the natural borders of the nations." "Nationalities," he said, "appear to me to have been traced long ago by the finger of Providence on the map of Europe"; and Italy, for instance, had her "sublime, irrefutable boundary marks." He left this transcendentalism for safer ground, when he came to language and literature, and recognised what potent factors they had been in the making of nations.

The importance of language was sufficiently obvious. Literature had sometimes, as in the case of his own Italy, remained the one surviving sign of nationality, when all else was lost. He knew how great had been the influence of Dante in forming the national sense of his own country; how much the Polish poets of the century had done to feed the Slav national spirit; how intimate is the power of national melodies; what the common possession of a great poet may do to knit a people. He realised too, though perhaps insufficiently, how history has helped to form nations; how a common government draws a people together in common loyalty or common revolt; how war may be a welding influence; how men, living for generations under the same law, acquire from it common habits and customs and traditions.

All these, however, are but the formative elements of nationality; they are not its essence. Mazzini's clear democratic faith kept him from confusing the justification of the fact with its causes.

Nationality was independent of any of them. Centuries of divided government had not destroyed the national sense of Italy; Switzerland was a nation for all its diversity of languages; difference of tongues did not prevent Poland and Lithuania from sharing the same national aspirations; Alsace belonged to France, however German it might be by race and history. Nationality is a sentiment, a moral phenomenon, which may be generated by material causes, but exists by virtue of moral facts. On any theory of freedom or democracy it can have no positive, meaning basis but the popular will; and it is a parody of nationality that unites by coercion. "Nationalities can be founded only for and upon and by the people"; and it follows that when the inhabitants of a territory desire to be a nation, provided that behind their desire there lies a moral purpose, they have the right to be one. This, despite slight and rare inconsistencies, he made the broad clear principle of modern, democratic nationality, a principle "invincible as conscience," whose triumph no hostility of kings or statesmen, no artificial counterfeits can permanently hinder.

Still, he held, the mere fact of the popular will is not enough.

Nationality, like every political phenomenon, must have a moral aim to justify it. A mere momentary reaction against misgovernment, for instance, gave no sufficient claim to independence. "In questions of nationality, as in every other question, the end alone is sovereign"; and a true nation must have its moral intention, its clear and understood mission to accomplish for itself and for humanity, its conscious part in realising the divine idea on earth. It is only in its homage to the moral law, that a nation finds its "baptism and consecration." "A community of men drawn together by a selfish principle for a purely material purpose is not thereby a nation. To const.i.tute a nation, its informing principle and purpose and right must be grounded on eternal bases. The purpose must be essentially a moral one, since a material interest by itself is by its nature finite, and can therefore form no basis of perpetual union." "Country is not a territory; territory is only its base; country is the idea that rises on that base, the thought of love that draws together all the sons of that territory."

This love is patriotism. "O my brothers," he says, "love your country.

Country is our house, the house that G.o.d has given us, setting therein a populous family, to love us and be loved by us, to understand us and be understood by us better and more readily than others are." It was by such burning patriotism he saved his country and was first to practise it himself. But he detested the sentimental and emotional patriot. His patriotism was a silent, manly thing, that hated display and braggart talk; it was as a steady spiritual flame, that never roared to heaven and never sank to ashes. He tested it by its fruit in the individual life. No ill-living man was true patriot. "Let country," he said, "be incarnated in each one of you; each one of you feel and make himself responsible for his brothers; each of you so act that in yourselves men may respect and love your country." "Where the citizen does not know that he must give l.u.s.tre to his country, not borrow l.u.s.tre from it, that country may be strong but never happy."

Real patriotism will not fear to speak the truth. "Flattery will never save a country, nor proud words make us less abject." "The honour of a country depends much more on removing its faults than on boasting of its qualities." One can imagine what would have been his scorn for the degenerate imperialism of latter days. The patriot's supreme desire is that his country's true honour may be untarnished; he thinks more of duty than of victory. His own Roman Republic, that glorious and illuminating example of patriotism, had small hope of success, but its honour stood entire, and therefore morally it triumphed. Success, empire, military glory may be a country's lot; so may failure and defeat and poverty; neither this nor that fate touches its real being.

True national dignity and glory lie in right doing, and humiliation comes only from public dishonour and a mendacious diplomacy. "You must keep your country pure of selfishness," was his maxim of patriotism for Italian working men.

Patriotism, then, is intense regard for a country's moral greatness; and it expresses itself in that sense of national duty, which he held to be the only justification of a country's national existence. This duty has two objects, the community itself and all humanity. We have seen what he conceived to be a nation's duty to its members; there is no true country, he said, without a national education, or where men starve for want of work. Here we are more concerned with that forwardness to serve humanity, which he made the other mark of the true nation. "National life and international life should be two manifestations of the same principle, the love of good." Above the separate nations stands the European brotherhood, the late-born child of Christianity. Sir Thomas More, he says, first formulated the new law of peace; literature and trade and travel are ever drawing the nations together by "a law of moral gravitation"[43]; the French Revolution echoed through the democracies of Europe; the struggle with Napoleon renewed the common understanding of the nations. The cause of the people is the same the whole world over, and the democracies must join hands to fight the battle of them all, as he had tried to make them do, when he founded Young Europe. Humanitarian movements,--the abolition of the slave trade, the cause of Greece and Italy,--were European. "There exists then in Europe a harmony of needs and wishes, a common thought, a universal mind, which directs the nations by convergent paths to the same goal." No country may be isolated, economically or intellectually; and it is a poor and counterfeit patriotism, that despises other countries. That way lies destruction.

"A nation's growth depends on the trust that other peoples place in it"; a country guided by a moral principle "finds everything open readily to it from markets to political alliances," but one that stands for an unjust policy has mistrust and jealousy for its portion.

Hence the country, that does injury to another, sins against itself.

"I hate," he said, "the monopolist, usurping nation, that sees its own strength and greatness only in the weakness and poverty of others."

That is a poor and stunted people, whose foreign policy is "one of aggrandis.e.m.e.nt and selfishness, whether it seeks them basely or buys glory at other men's expense." Countries, that cherish liberty at home and outrage it abroad, "are fated to expiate their error through long years of isolation and oppression and anarchy." So far he preached familiar doctrine, but he carried it into regions of his own.

International duty does not stop at non-aggression. Every country has its positive duty to humanity; and while evil is enthroned, and right can hardly hold its own, and the eternal battle rages round, it may not stand aside in cowardly forgetfulness. Mazzini abhorred the doctrine of non-intervention--the principle that no country may interfere in the domestic matters of another,--a doctrine which the Americans and Canning introduced for the protection of freedom, but which less hardy statesmen in France and England had perverted to excuse their own faint-heartedness. If the principle had been generally accepted, if it had meant for instance that France could not intervene at Rome or Russia restore despotism in Hungary, it might have worked successfully. But practically it meant that "intervention was all on the wrong side," that only England observed the principle, and therefore the one Great Power, which in some degree stood for liberty, tied its own hands, while the Powers that stood for despotism worked "their unhallowed ends when, where, and how they thought fit"

over three-fourths of Europe. As Mazzini pointed out, the theory took for granted a system based on nationality; and where nationality was non-existent, as in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, it had no rightful application. At the best it was a "poor and incomplete" doctrine. A country has its "bonds of international duty," obligatory in proportion to its strength. "The absolute doctrine of non-intervention in politics corresponds to indifference in religion; it is a masked atheism, a negation of all belief, of every general principle, of any mission of a nation in humanity's behalf." "Neutrality in a war of principles is mere pa.s.sive existence, forgetfulness of all that makes a people sacred, the negation of the common law of nations, political atheism. On one side," he was speaking to Englishmen in 1859, "stands the flag of liberty and right, of the true and good; on the other the flag of tyranny and ambition, of the false and evil. And you, a free nation and strong, you who profess belief in truth and justice, would you say, 'Between evil and good we will remain neutral, impa.s.sive spectators'? It is the word of Cain. No people, that chooses to teach that policy, may dare to call itself Christian, for it is practically a people of atheists or cowards. Sooner or later a tremendous expiation will visit the cowardly desertion of the duty which G.o.d lays on peoples as on individuals." "Can it be that England," he wrote twelve years earlier, "the England of the Reformation, the England of Elizabeth and of Cromwell, self-centred in immoral indifference, gives up Europe to the dictatorship of force?"

Hence he was no believer in peace at any price. Sternly, indeed, he condemned war, when it was not fought for a right principle; it was "fratricide," if not imperative in the interests of the race. But it was "sacred as peace, when the triumph of good is to be its issue." He attacked the Manchester School for perverting the sense of human solidarity. "Peace," he wrote to the Geneva Congress of 1867, "cannot become a law of human society, except by pa.s.sing through the struggle, which will ground life and a.s.sociation on foundations of justice and liberty, on the wreck of every power which exists not for a principle but for a dynastic interest." Europe, he held, could not have lasting peace, till Austria and Turkey made way for the nationalities, which they held down; it would ever be perturbed by fears of Russian aggression, till Poland was restored to be its bulwark; and only war could free the Poles and Southern Slavs. "When you have subst.i.tuted justice for tyranny, truth for falsehood, duty for selfish interests, the republic for monarchy, then you will have peace, but not till then."

Mazzini, unluckily, was not content with the broad human principle that a country must use its strength for right and freedom everywhere.

He appended a theory, which has its germ of truth, but defies definition, and is easily twisted to save a special argument. Each nation had, he thought, some distinct and specialised service to render to humanity. "G.o.d has written one line of his thought on the cradle of each people." "Special interests, special apt.i.tudes, and before all special functions, a special mission to fulfil, a special work to be done in the cause of the advancement of humanity, seem to me the true, infallible characteristics of nationalities." The theory escapes any exact precision; but it offers a rich field for poetry, and Mazzini's imagination was at home in it. England's function was "industry and colonies," Russia's was the civilisation of Asia, Poland's "the Slav initiative." Germany's mark was thought, France's was action, Italy's thought in unison with action. "While the German walks earth with his sight lost in the depths of heaven, and the Frenchman's eye rarely looks aloft but scours earth's surface with its restless penetrating glance, the Genius, that guards the destinies of Italy, has been ever wont to pa.s.s swiftly from the ideal to the real, seeking from of old how earth and heaven may be joined together." We have seen what curious use he made of this theory of special missions to rebut Irish claims.

Such were the principles of nationality, and nations built on them would make the Europe of the future. Mazzini believed that democracy would tend towards large nations. He repudiated any love of administrative centralisation and urged the widest local government; but the bigger the nation, the more perfect, he thought, would be the development of a.s.sociation within it, and the greater therefore its momentum on the road of progress. And, as the larger nations would be approximately equal in territory or population, a new and natural balance of power would arise to safeguard peace. This liking for large countries sometimes nearly led him into inconsistencies with his own principles, and made him question the national basis of most small states. He made a confident forecast of the future European settlement. (He was writing, of course, prior to 1870.) England and France (apart from Savoy and Nice) were the only countries, whose territory marched with their natural borders, and they alone would remain unchanged. Italy would be united, and include the border districts and islands that spoke the Italian tongue, except, apparently, the Canton of the Ticino. Germany, including the German-speaking provinces of Austria, would also achieve its unity, but be divided into two or three "great administrative sections."

Spain and Portugal would form a single country. Greece would expand over all territories with a Greek-speaking population. Switzerland would be the nucleus of an Alpine Federation, embracing Savoy and the Tyrol. Holland was, apparently, to keep its independence; Belgium, on the other hand, had no future as a nation, though he does not indicate its destiny. In early life he seems to have thought that Denmark would remain a separate state; afterwards he believed that the three Scandinavian states were inevitably destined to unity.

The most difficult problem, of course, was that of Eastern Europe.

Mazzini evidently thought that, next to the unity of his own country, the Slav movement was the most important question in European politics. Here was a mighty people, awakening to life, proving its power by its literature,--for it, he believed, had produced the only living poetry since Goethe and Byron,--claiming its rightful place in the European commonwealth. Nothing could arrest the self-a.s.sertion of the Slavs, but the future of Europe largely depended on the direction which it took. If the other nations hailed it and guided it, it would enrich the life of Europe by the new elements it brought into it; if it went unfriended and undirected, it would be perverted into "Czarism," and cost Europe twenty years of bloodshed to check Muscovite ambitions. Two things Europe would do well to keep in mind.

It was as useless as it was immoral to bolster up Austria and Turkey, for the Slav movement would be inevitably fatal to them both. And Europe must see that the Slavs became a barrier and not a help to Russian designs of domination. This could be done, and done only, by helping the non-Russian Slavs to organise themselves into powerful and independent nations. Czarism owed its strength not to Panslavist aspirations, but to the fact that the Czar was the only hope of the Christian populations of the Balkans. Mazzini's detailed forecast of the Slav national settlement varied from time to time; but his favourite plan was that Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs should form four separate nationalities. In curious and impossible inconsistency with his own principles, he seems to have thought that Hungary and Roumania would be annexed to or federated with one or other of these states; and he looked to a federal union of Serbs and Greeks, with Constantinople, as a free city, for the centre of the federation.

Out of the nationalities would grow "the United States of Europe, the republican alliance of the peoples," "that great European federation, whose task it is to unite in one a.s.sociation all the political families of the old world, destroy the part.i.tions that dynastic rivalries have made, and consolidate and respect nationalities."

Mazzini's ken, strange to say, was almost restricted to Europe. He scarcely mentions in this connection the American United States, though sometimes he seems perhaps to imply that they would enter the European commonwealth. He had no inkling that Eastern races might claim their own independent development. His forecast of European colonisation hardly extended beyond Asia and North Africa; he believed that Asia was destined to be "an appendix of Europe," and that the great stream of European colonisation would set towards it, chiefly through the agency of Russia and England. Thus he was concerned with Europe only; and for the Europe of the future, a federation of harmonious nationalities, he had a splendid prophecy. When nationality had triumphed, "all cause of war would disappear, and in its place arise a spirit of brotherhood and peaceful emulation on the road of progress." Revolutions would be no more, and "the slow, continuous, normal unfolding of activities and powers" would lead the nations ever onwards. We come again to his vision of a European authority, sitting at Rome to give guidance and harmony to the peoples. When the great day arrived, that brought the victory of liberty and nationality, the peoples would a.s.semble their "true General Council." No doubt the Council was the same as that which would define the new religious faith. It would formulate the common national duties of the peoples, and secure their freedom to perform those duties, while the separate national councils defined the special duty of each country.

It would be Italy's glorious function to lead the nations to this unity. France had lost the opportunity in 1815; England, when she isolated herself from the life of Europe by her enslavement to non-intervention; the Slav countries were disqualified by their rivalries or obsequiousness to Russia. Italy had her unquestioned t.i.tles to the proud hegemony,--her geographical position, her character, her traditions, the universal looking for some great thing to come out of her new life. She was "the land destined by G.o.d to the great mission of giving moral unity to Europe, and through Europe to Humanity." She would be the armed apostle of nationality, the protectress of oppressed peoples, the instrument to destroy Austria and Turkey and give freedom to the Slavs. And when this part of her mission was fulfilled, and through her nationality was victorious, then the grat.i.tude of the peoples, and the divine appointment of Providence, and her own essential fitness for the task, would make Rome the centre of the cause of peace, the seat of the Diet of the nations, fulfilling Dante's vision, that saw her "helmsman" of humanity, to steer it to its peace. It was a n.o.ble dream, much of it, it may be, fantastic and impossible, and yet, perhaps, with its seed of truth. The European Federation tarries behind Mazzini's eager prophecy, but its coming cannot be delayed for ever. The triumph of nationality, despite the evil deed of 1870, has advanced with mighty strides since his day. And though patriotism has often erred into ign.o.ble paths, and international fraternity gone backward, yet the evil creates its own remedy, and disarmament becomes an ever more importunate desire. When the nations learn that arbitration and disarmament are necessary for their own self-preservation, when the European federation gradually evolves itself, Rome will be the natural seat of the High Court of Europe. Italy, which by her plebiscitary origin has given a rule to the nationalities,--a country practically without territorial ambitions or colonial empire, the natural mediator between the two great European alliances, with her ancient prestige and service to humanity to give her l.u.s.tre, has paramount claims to the high prerogative.[44]

FOOTNOTES:

[43] The first address of the People's International League, from which these words are quoted, was written by W. J. Linton, but was based on Mazzini's rough draft.

[44] M. Novicow in his _Missione d'Italia_ has recently expressed the same belief, almost in Mazzini's words. [But the Tripoli business has changed all this.--1911.]

Chapter XVIII

Literary Criticism

The function of the critic--The function of the poet--Art must avoid 'art for the sake of art' and realism--It must be human, social, didactic--Poetry of modern life--The historical drama--Music--'Objective' and 'subjective'

poets--Dante--Shakespeare--Goethe--Byron.

If Mazzini's busy life could have spared more time for literary study, he would probably have been among the greatest critics of the century; perhaps, even as it is, he may rank among them. He misses in his lack of accurate and detailed study; but he has a rare penetration and originality and gift of embracing synthesis. It was his ambition at one time to found an Italian school of criticism, whose mark should be constructive and sympathetic interpretation. Keenly sensitive though he was to beauty of expression, he detested mere criticism of form and the profitless microscopy, that pries for specks in a writer's life or work. He loved to read a great author reverently, hiding rather than exposing his blemishes, penetrating below uncouthnesses of form and casual lapses to the great informing thoughts, that had their lesson for the world. "At the present day," he wrote in an optimistic moment, "we neither worship a genius blindly, nor outrage him barbarously; we set ourselves to understand him, and we learn to love him. We regard forms as secondary and perishable phenomena; the idea alone is sacred, as a thing baptised to everlasting life, and we try how we may lift the veil that hides it." He compared genius to the fabled tree of Teneriffe, whose branches discharged showers of refreshing water.

"Genius is like this tree, and the mission of criticism should be to shake the branches. At the present day it more resembles a savage striving to hew down the n.o.ble tree to the roots."

In his scheme of life the poet had a part of supreme importance. He regarded literature as a "moral priesthood." Poetry would "save the world in its despite," for it was the poet's prerogative to redeem it from doubt and base ideals, to "reveal duties and create affections,"

to lift men up above the trivial things of life to the eternal verities. "We have," he cries in the forties, "exiled poetry from life, and enthusiasm and faith have gone with it, and love, as I understand love, and constancy in sacrifice, and the worship of great deeds and great men." His own Italy had little of the throbbing national life, in which alone true poetry could flourish; and everywhere an age of faithlessness robbed the poet of his aliment. The time was for the critic,--the constructive, "philosophic" critic; he was the "literary educator," and he could at all events be precursor of the poet of the future, marking the lines on which a modern democratic poetry should travel, and preparing a public to understand him. "The critic," he says, "is unrelated to genius; but he stands as a link between great writers and the ma.s.ses; he explores the conditions and literary needs of the time, and preaches them to the nations, that they may learn to feel them, and desire and demand them; in fine, his prophecies prepare a public for the writer:--a more important matter than some think, for very rarely do writers appear before their time."

As critic, then, Mazzini points out the deficiencies of contemporary literature, and the principles which must take it to a higher stage.

True art, he lays down, has two great perils to avoid. First, there is the "atheist formula" of 'art for the sake of art';--a heresy he scourged with pontifical anathemas. His attack was not aimed at perfection of literary form. He loved a correct and cla.s.sic diction, and never underrated style, so long as style was not an excuse for poverty of thought. His criticism went deeper. The artist may not live his own art-life, divorced from the moving world around and all its manifold activities, "floating bubble-like without support," finding his poor inspiration in his own fancies and caprices. There was no true individuality in that; invented though it was to guard the poet's independence, in reality it made him but a pa.s.sive mirror of each pa.s.sing impression. Instead of liberty, it brought anarchy and "wild, arbitrary intellectual display." It robbed art of touch with the great facts of life, all fruitful relationship to the struggling, ever learning, ever advancing race. It sent it wandering lawless, purposeless, like a sick man's dreams. The poet ceased to be a thinker and a teacher, and sank to a mere empty singer. "What I want," he said, "is not the Artist but the man-Artist; the High-Priest of the Ideal, not the worshipper of his own Fetishes." Literature must be "the minister of something greater and more valuable than itself."

He was almost equally condemnatory of realism, especially of realistic presentation of nature. It was a criticism that he brought alike against Monti and Victor Hugo and Wordsworth, that they "depicted but never transfigured nature," and thus their art was "useless." The real is the mantle of the true, but not the true; "high poetry is truth, because you cannot trace out or a.n.a.lyse its source." The poet is a "miner in the moral world"; his function is to hew beneath the symbol, beneath the real, to the idea shut in within; questioning nature alike in her beauties and deformities, to find and teach to men "that fragment of G.o.d's truth that must exist there." "One thing I know," he says, "that the phenomena of nature on their moral side and the inner life of man must be the field of modern literature, that physical nature and man's outer life will have their place only as symbols of the first." And nature's lessons must have a practical reference to man's lot and destiny. Even when nature was rightly used and interpreted, there might be too much of it, and he seems to have always given natural poetry a secondary place. "Poetry," he says, "is not in nature but in man."

This brings us to his conception of true art. It must be essentially human, not realistically so, but usefully, practically, didactically.

He did not mean by this that it must confine itself to the obvious, outside facts of life. "In every powerful poetic impression the _vague_ claims a full quarter, and the vague, which must not be confounded with the obscure, is the soul's own field." But poetry, however much it may concern itself with the spiritual and unseen, must have direct application to the problems of life. "Art lives of the world's life; the world's law is art's law." The poet must gather "the great voice of the world and G.o.d," and so interpret it, that men may listen and profit. He must contemplate man both in his individuality and as a social creature, "in his internal and external life, in his place and with his mission in creation." "Poetry,--great, ceaseless, eternal poetry,--exists only in the development, the evolution of life: only there, in life, understood and felt in its universality, can inexhaustible variety be found."

Thus the poet must find his inspiration, not in his own "incomplete, mutilated conceptions," not in the isolated individual, but in the great collective, democratic movements of the people, voicing their dim thoughts and aspirations, "their latent, slumbering, unconscious life." There can be no great poetry to-day, unless the poet identify himself with "the thought fermenting in the breast of the ma.s.ses and impelling them to action." Poets are the priesthood of the social and political movement, which is the very blood of a modern people; and there is no place for individualist poetry in a social age. "True and sacred art aims at the perfection of society," and the art of the future will be "princ.i.p.ally religious and political." He hated the aimless art, that busies itself with the mere picturesque and sentimental, which idealises ages, whose meaning and moral standard have pa.s.sed. He applauded Schlegel's thesis that poetry must be "national, that is useful and related to the civil and political situation," no longer heedless of the great movements of to-day, but "standing in the centre and swaying the heart of the social impulse."

The poet, who went to fight for Greece and died there, typified "the holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples."

This democratic art must have a practical use by being didactic and prophetic. It is not enough that its heart should beat with the people's life; it must help the progress of the race by pointing to the future. Though it may "grow among the ruins, art is ever coloured by the rising sun." "There can be no true poetry without a presentiment of the future"; it is, as said "the extraordinary man,"

who is the poet of all time,

The prophetic soul Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.

"Art either sums up the life of a dying age or heralds one about to dawn; it is no caprice of this or that individual, but a solemn page of history or a prophecy; most powerful, when as in Dante, and occasionally in Byron, it is both." But there is no gift of prophecy without an ideal, and "literature, like politics, has no secure foundation without its fixed beliefs and principles,"--those beliefs which make the future and to which facts must bow. "The true European writer will be a philosopher, but with the poet's lyre in his hands."

"Nature with her thousand voices cries to the poet, 'Soar, thou art King of earth.' And if we try to pen him down to realism, and rob him of his independent lordship over facts, the poets of the past will answer from their graves, 'We were great, because we created.' It is for poetry to take the creations of the philosopher and give them life and colour, to explore the truth that lies below the real and illumine it with the light of genius, to interpret the universal laws that rule over human history."

And the poet must not only lift men to his vision, but send them forth in quest of it. He is not only prophet but apostle. It is not enough that he should stimulate thought; he must "spur men to translate thought into action." "Contemplative" poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge for instance, are "incomplete." "The element of Action is inseparable from poetry. Poetry," he says, "is for me something like the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is action." "In order to be a religious poet," he writes in criticism of Lamartine, "it is not enough, in my eyes at least to say 'Lord, Lord'; it is necessary to _feel_ his holy law, and to make others feel it in such sort, as that they shall constantly and calmly act in obedience to its precepts."

Just as religion gives life and power to philosophy, so it is for art to grasp ideas, translate them by images and symbols, and make them pa.s.sionate beliefs. "Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire, the angel of strong thoughts, the power that raises men to sacrifice, consumes them, stirs a tumult of ideas within them, puts in their hands a sword, a pen, a dagger." "Written poetry, like music performed, should be in some sense a prelude to other poetry, which the excited soul of the reader composes silently within itself." It will "teach the young all that is greatest in self-sacrifice, constancy, silence, the sense of solitude without despair, long years of torture or delusion unrevealed and dumb, faith in the things that are to be, the hourly struggle for that faith, though hope of victory there be none in this life." And therefore art must be ever brave and full of hope, "teaching man not his weakness but his strength, inspiring him not with faintheartedness but with energy and vigorous will." Its song must be always of steadiness and constancy, and "calmness radiate from the poet's brow, as the spirit of G.o.d radiated from the brow of Moses on the wandering Israelites." "The artist is either a priest or a more or less practised mountebank." Woe to him, if he teach spasmodic, evanescent effort, or "revolt and impotent despair, that dies cursing, ere it tries to fight, that says 'All things are evil,' because it finds itself unable to create good."

Mazzini has no pity for the poet of pessimism, "whose sense of moral depression and languor" will, if he pose as a religious poet, make his readers "reject religion and him together."

Poetry, then, the modern poetry of action, being essentially related to politics and social life, the poet's themes are in the stir and pa.s.sion of contemporary events or in national history. What field for literature like the mighty, moving pageant of the democratic world? To watch G.o.d's hand guiding the nations to their destinies, to probe the eager ferment of a modern society, to interpret all the dim, half-conscious yearning of the ma.s.ses,--what inspiration for the poet here! "Popular poetry has invaded everything, the poetry whose epic is revolution, whose satire is revolt." How strong and living are the giants of the Revolution beside the nerveless men and women of the quietist novel. "Poetry has fled from old Europe to give life to the young, new, beautiful Europe of the peoples. Like the swallow, it has left a crumbling ruin to seek a purer air and a more verdant world. It has fled from the King's solitary throne to find its abode in the great arena of the peoples, in the ranks of martyrs for the fatherland, on the patriot's scaffold, in the prison of the brave betrayed." The armies of the Convention, the guerilla-bands of Spain, the German students chanting the songs of Korner on the march to battle, the patriot's anguished pa.s.sion, the dreams of a liberty to be, the world-mission of European civilisation,--these are the modern poet's themes. "Think you that poetry, whose birth was ushered by such deeds as these, can die ere it has lived? Would you set up the poor, pale, narrow poetry of individuals, a poetry of forms, a poetry that lives and dies in the small circle of a palace or a chapel or a castle,--would you set up this against the grand _social_ poetry, solemn and tranquil and full of hope, which knows none but G.o.d in heaven and the people upon earth?" An age of science and industry is no enemy to poetry, for the elements of poetry are eternal. "I tell you, in this Europe there is such life, such poetry in germ, the poetry of ages, of all the generations, that genius itself has not yet dared to attempt to develop it." "Here round you," so he speaks to the poet of the future, "here, before your eyes, there is poetry and movement and a European people waiting for you."

The poet has another field in history. Mazzini prophesied a great future for the historical drama. He was inclined to think that drama would be the accepted form of modern poetry, seeing doubtless that drama is the true communion between poet and people, the natural vehicle of the artist, who has a message to deliver. It would be "a kind of popular pulpit, a chair of the philosophy of humanity"; and he looked forward to the day when the great dramas, such as those of "divine Schiller," would be produced on the stage without mutilations or curtailments to a reverent and patient audience. The function of the historical dramatist, as indeed he thought it was the function of the prose historian, was not so much to make minute research of facts, as to disentangle the lessons hidden under every page of history, to interpret the law of human duty and the mystery of existence. Like every other poet, he must start with a philosophy of life, judging all things by his own law, meting out praise and blame, drawing guidance for the future from the past. The dramatist "may call up the shadows of the past, but like the Witch of Endor, in order to constrain them to reveal the future." His personages must be types, each with its social significance; he must not, as Victor Hugo did, overload them with individual traits, till they lose their message for society, but rather, as Schiller with his Marquis di Posa, so "re-create" them, that they may ill.u.s.trate some general law of life. Mazzini did not see how pale such characters would be; how difficult it was to reconcile them with biographical accuracy, how likely therefore they were to falsify any induction of historical laws.

His theory of music was a very similar one. Music, like poetry, he thought, was nought without a moral intention, without practical teaching and power to inspire. It should be "the purest and most general and most sympathetic expression of a social faith." He pitilessly criticised the music of the thirties, imitative, exhausted, artificial, clever but without creative power. A faithless and corrupt generation asked for music to amuse it; and music had listened and forgotten its mission. There was melody and good instrumentation, but no soul or thought in it. It was "laughter without peace, weeping without virtue." Operas had no unity, no great pa.s.sionate note; they were ingenious mosaics, much of them mere noise and extravagance, inferior for all their technique to the chants of the medieval Church, when music had a religious work to do. Rossini had done something; he had broken from the old canons and given liberty to music; but he had the defects of the Romanticist school, he had freed but could not create; he had prepared the way for the music of the future, but it was not his to write it. Mazzini however saw indications that the new music was not far off, and its dawn, he believed, would be in Italy.

But Italian melody must wed itself to German harmony. Italian music was "lyrical, impa.s.sioned, volcanic, artistic," but without unity or soul. German music knew G.o.d, but it was mystical and impersonal, out of touch with everyday human life. It dulled men's impulses to action; it stirred them, but to no useful end, left the soul full of great emotion, but uninspired to perform plain duties.[45] Mazzini was a.s.sured that Italy would produce the master, who would unite the strength of both schools, keep the religion of the German school, but point it to practical, human ends. At one time he hoped that perhaps Donizetti might live to do this; afterwards he thought that Meyerbeer was "the precursor spirit of the music of the future." He was always thinking of Opera. When he insists that the music should be in keeping with the subject and its period, when he pleads for the symbolic use of the orchestra, for the wider employment of motives, for the development of the chorus on the model of Greek tragedy, for the large use of recitative, for the entire disuse of cadences and flourishes, he is looking to Opera to be the highest form of music, as he looked to the historical drama to be the highest form of poetry. Apparently he wished to wed them, and looked for the day, when great poets would write librettos for great composers.