Duty
Morality depends on an Ideal--Criticism of the theory of
Rights and Utilitarianism--Happiness not the end of
life--Life is a mission--Work for the sake of Duty--Thought
useless without action--Power of the principle of
Duty--Duties to self; family; country.
On this religious foundation Mazzini constructed his code of
ethics,--Christian, very Christian in its spirit, essentially modern
in its application; the noblest morality that has sought to answer to
the needs of a democratic society. The law of Progress judges all
action by the Ideal, and the sole standard of conduct lies in what a
man does that the Ideal may be better realised in himself and others.
Without the recognition of such a universal law, demanding their
cooperation and conformity, there can be no common rule for men; life
becomes the resultant of clashing interests; its line of advance, if
advance there be, depends upon mere chance. True education is
impossible, because there is no consensus on its aim; we come to value
character, as he complained that Carlyle did, not by its goodness, but
by its energy and persistence, whether it be to good or evil ends.
Everywhere in actual life, the neglect of the Ideal means worship of
brute force, cowardly acquiescence in the existing fact, the absence
of all striving for a better state. But with the apprehension of the
Ideal and of the Divine law, three things follow, incentive to
progress. Every man has a rule to guide his individual actions; men of
good will will associate their efforts for a common end; and they can
appeal to a supreme, positive law against those who break it. "In the
consciousness of your law of life, which is the law of God, stands the
foundation of your morality, the rule of your actions and your duties,
the measure of your responsibility." "If there be no Mind supreme over
all human minds, who can save us from the caprice of our fellows,
should they chance to be stronger than ourselves? If there be no law,
sacred and inviolable, not created by man, what standard can we find
to judge whether an act be just or not? In the name of whom or what
can we protest against oppression and inequality? Without God, we have
no other law but Fact."
Mazzini lived too soon to have to meet a school that denied morality,
as that school is developed to-day. But he found a numerous and
powerful school, that built morality on what he believed to be
radically wrong foundations. The theory of Rights, since the
precursors of the French Revolution popularized it, had dominated
Liberal thought, except for a handful of thinkers,--Lamennais,
Carlyle, Emerson. It had had, he owned, its temporary value, as the
necessary rebellion against fatalism and immobility and privilege. "It
destroyed the empire of necessity"; it finally asserted the dignity of
the individual, so that "God's creature might appear, ready to work,
radiant with power and will." "Only, it stopped short of God," for the
ideal was hidden from it. Its work was to destroy, and it was unfitted
for an age that needed a constructive code of ethics. Mazzini included
Utilitarianism in his condemnation, as a mere variant of the principle.
He knew that Bentham repudiated the connection; but Bentham's
criticism, he thought, was aimed at Blackstone and the theorists of an
imaginary compact, not at a system, which based itself on the _à
priori_ claims of the individual. The spirit and the consequences were
the same in both schools. Bentham and the French alike appealed to the
getting side of man and not the giving; both thought of the individual
in his self-regarding rather than in his social aspect; neither had an
ideal or any imperative binding law for men; both neglected the
strongest impulses to right action,--enthusiasm and love and sense of
duty. They supplied no guide for conduct; they gave no definition of
happiness, nor therefore of what men's rights should be, and left each
individual to interpret them by his own fancy. They gave no answer to
the question, For what are men to use their liberty? though on the
answer depended the whole value of rights. Thus happiness, left
without a theory of life's purpose to define it, slided easily into
the satisfaction of man's lower part. "Any theory of happiness will
make men fall, soon or late, into the suicide of the noblest elements
of human nature, will make them go, like Faust, to seek life's elixir
in the witch's kitchen." Man's material interests must indeed be cared
for, but not for their own sake; they were only instruments to higher
ends; they must be satisfied because, only when men have leisure and
education and a decent home, the moral life has room to grow. If they
became the end and not the means, they led to torpor of the nation's
soul, to the paralysis that comes, when men care for power and money
only, and a country measures its greatness by its riches and brute
strength. The whole position was a false one. No moral theory could
work, that made happiness the end of life. The Utilitarians mistook
the incident of the journey for the end. The spiritual side of
man,--his social instincts, his yearnings after righteousness, the
pure uncalculating love that gives up life for duty,--all were outside
their scheme. "Martyrdom! Your theory has no inheritance in it. Jesus
escapes your logic; Socrates, if you are consistent, must seem to you,
as Plato did to Bentham, a sublime fool." Why should men die for their
fellows, why suffer prison, exile, poverty, if happiness be the end of
life? Why should they toil on, knowing they would not see their
labour's fruits, to make life better for a future generation?
Thus the theory supplied no principle of moral action. You cannot, he
would say, by any theory of rights make men unselfish. He knew that
when a man thinks of happiness, he will not be impartial between his
own happiness and other men's, that directly he balances his rights
against those of his fellows, he will, however unconsciously, weight
the scales in his own favour. It was impossible, he thought, on
utilitarian principles to make men work for the happiness of the many.
The principle at once sets men thinking on the selfish side, and makes
them dole their good deeds with a thrifty hand. "You have taught the
rich man," he said, "that society was constituted only to assure his
rights, and you ask him then to sacrifice them all for the advancement
of a class, with which he has no ties either of affection or custom.
He refuses. Will you call him bad? Why should he consent? He is only
logical." Mazzini often quoted the fate of fellow-revolutionists, who
began life with generous impatience to fight the wrong, but when
failure came and disillusion, could not say farewell to joy, and
balanced self and duty, till "scepticism twined its serpent coils
around them," and he "saw that saddest of all things, the slow death
of a soul." "For God's sake," he wrote to an English friend on the
education of his son, "do not teach him any Benthamite theory about
happiness either individual or collective. A creed of individual
happiness would make him an egotist: a creed of collective happiness
will reach the same result soon or late. He will perhaps dream
Utopias, fight for them, whilst young; then, when he will find that he
cannot realise rapidly the dream of his soul, he will turn back to
himself and try to conquer his own happiness: sink into egotism."
Christ taught another way. "When he came and changed the face of the
world, he did not speak of rights to the rich, who had no need to win
them, nor to the poor, who would perhaps have imitated the rich and
abused them. He did not speak of utility or self-interest to a race
corrupted by self-interest and utility. He spoke of Duty; he spoke of
Love and Sacrifice and Faith; he said that he only should be first,
who had helped all men by his works. And when these words were
whispered in the ear of a dead society, they gave it life, they won
the millions, they won the world, and advanced the education of
mankind one step onward."
And,--as a final criticism,--the theory of rights solved nothing.
Mazzini did not waste argument on the automatic identity of public
and private interests. Rights jostled against rights, the happiness of
one man or one class against another's. The theory could not reconcile
them or make peace between the jarring interests; rather, it made
war,--"war not of blood but of gold and trickery; less manly than the
other kind of war but equally destructive; a ruthless war, in which
the strong inevitably crush the weak and inexperienced." He attacked
the whole economy of free contract, which made the workman's condition
depend not on equity, but on the mere brute conflict of opposing
rights, and resulted, he believed, of necessity in the workman's
defeat. What good were rights to men, who were too poor or ignorant to
use them? "Why do I speak to you of your duties before I speak to you
of your rights?" he said to Italian working men in 1847. Because, he
answered, the theory of rights has triumphed for half a century,
liberty has increased, wealth has multiplied, but the condition of the
people grows steadily worse in almost every country.
Mazzini's criticism was aimed at Bentham; had he read the later
Utilitarians, as apparently he never did, he would no doubt have owned
that some of his arguments had no application to them. Happiness
implies a definition of happiness, and therefore an ideal; and that
ideal may be as high as was Mazzini's own. He made a theoretical
mistake in not distinguishing between the object and the motive of
life; though, apart from this, he would have said that the desire of
others' good must be, not, as in the Utilitarian theory, one of life's
motives, but _the_ motive. But he was always essentially a moralist,
whose business was to find a practical, popular, effective rule of
conduct. He knew that the search for happiness meant the search for
pleasure, and that the search for pleasure ends in "impotence and
nothingness"; that the difficulty is not so much to make men know the
good, as to make them in actual conduct rate the higher good above the
lower; and that they will not do this if happiness is their object,
since the average man will then prefer the immediate and easy
happiness to the remoter and more difficult, still less will sacrifice
his own happiness for that of others. "I should like," he says, "to
look for the answer to the problem in a good mother's advice to her
child. There you would certainly find utility condemned as a basis of
education. Mothers know that, if happiness were made the object of
life down here, life almost always would be only too much a bitter
irony." As for the individual, so for the many; and to bid the masses
seek for pleasure without reference to the higher ends of life, was to
lay up bitterness and vanity for them and evil for the nation. And no
hedonism, no theory of rights, could supply an operating rule for
conduct. Perhaps he underrated the value of the sense of individual
rights, and did not see how in an imperfect society, where nobler
rules are faint or wanting, it may give strength to human dignity and
kill the slave and coward in men. But he knew that it could not make
them live and work for others. He had gone through it all in his own
experience; he had had unsurpassed opportunities for judging the
springs of action in other men, and he knew that there was nothing
here to inspire to steady, strenuous social service.
And so he met the theory with an uncompromising repudiation of it
all. "Man has one right only, to be free from obstacles that prevent
the unimpeded fulfilment of his duties." Life is no search for
happiness, whether "by railway shares, selfishness, contemplation," or
otherwise. "Our aim is not the greatest possible happiness, but, as
Carlyle said, the greatest possible nobleness." "Pain and happiness,
ill fortune and good are incidents of the journey. When the wind blows
and the rain falls, the traveller draws his cloak closer round,
presses his hat on his head, and prepares to fight the storm. Anon the
storm leaves him, the sunshine breaks the clouds, and warms his frozen
limbs; the traveller smiles and blesses God. But do rain or sunshine
change his journey's end?" The end was something other far than
happiness. Mazzini looked for a principle that would rate the moral
above the material, altruism above selfishness, humanity above the
individual; something that would reconcile where Rights divided, that
would make men reach to an ideal, and by it live and die for others.
"We must find an educative principle, to guide men to better things,
to teach them constancy in sacrifice, to bind them to their brothers
without making them dependant on any one man's theory or on the brute
force of the community. This principle is Duty. We must convince men
that they, sons of one God, have here on earth to carry out one
law,--that each of us must live not to himself but others,--that the
end of life is not to have more or less of happiness but to make
ourselves and others better,--that to fight injustice and error,
everywhere, for our brothers' good, is not a right only but a
duty,--duty we may not without sin neglect, duty that lasts long as
life." "Life is a mission," the call that comes to every man to make
the ideal real. "Life was given you by God, that you might use it for
the profit of Humanity; that you might so direct your individual
faculties, that they will develop your brothers' faculties, that by
your work you might add something to the collective work of bettering
men and finding Truth." Life is a war with evil; "we cannot root it
out down here, but we can wage undying battle with it, and
everlastingly weaken its dominion." To such God's Providence has
called us. The divine plan needs our conscious efforts to assist it,
and the law, that rules the Universe, becomes a positive binding law
of conduct. Man's bounden duty is everywhere and in all things to
forward the progress of humanity, which is written in God's law. "The
supreme virtue is sacrifice,--to think, work, fight, suffer, where our
lot lies, not for ourselves but others, for the victory of good over
evil."
God demands the whole of man. Negative, inactive goodness is nothing
by itself. Our duty lies on earth, among our fellow-men, in the busy,
throbbing life around us, not in some vain selfish search for
spiritual satisfaction. "Rest is immoral. There is here-down and there
ought to be no rest." Our business is to make men and their
surroundings better, not live for ourselves in self-absorption or
æsthetic ecstasy or solitary thought and prayer. That is none other
than the search for happiness in subtle shape. "The earth is our
workshop; we may not curse it, we must hallow it." "God has placed you
here on earth; he has set around you millions of beings like
yourselves, whose march keeps pace with yours, whose life finds
sustenance in your life. He willed to save you from the perils of
solitary existence, and therefore gave you needs, which by yourselves
you cannot satisfy,--mastering social instincts, which are only latent
in the brute creation and which distinguish you from it. He has placed
this world around you,--this world, that you call Matter, glorious in
its beauty, teeming with life, life, which, remember, everywhere
displays God's finger, but expects your work upon it and multiplies
its powers according as your activities are multiplied. He has planted
in you inextinguishable sympathies, pity for them that mourn, joy for
them that laugh, wrath against the oppressors of God's creatures, the
importunate searching for the truth. And you," he is addressing the
pietists, "deny and despise those marks of your mission that God has
lavished round you, you lay a curse upon his manifestations, when you
bid us concentrate our strength in a work of inward purification,--a
work imperfect and impossible to the man who is alone." There is no
virtue in the cloistered life. There is "nothing worse than
depression, nothing more enervating than self-contemplation." "We are
here not to contemplate but to transform nature; and self almost
always lies at the bottom of contemplation. The world is not a
spectacle, it is a field of battle, where all, who love the Just, the
Holy, the Beautiful, must bear their part, be they soldiers or
generals, conquerors or martyrs." "Do not analyse," he once wrote; "do
not light Psyche's lamp to examine and anatomise life. Do good around
you: preach what you believe to be the truth and act accordingly; then
go through life, looking forward."
Nor will God's servants take thought for their own salvation. "God
will not ask us, 'What hast thou done for thy own soul?' but 'What
hast thou done for the souls of others, the sister-souls I gave
thee?'" "We cannot rise to God save by our brothers' souls, and we
must make them better and more pure, even though they ask us not."
"When I hear men say, 'There is a just man,' I ask, 'How many souls
are saved by him?'" And again, the mere passive love and apprehension
of the truth are no fulfilling of God's law. Even the preaching of
truth avails not, unless the preacher strive for it in his daily life.
"Thought and action," so he never wearied of insisting, must go hand
in hand. "What good are ideas," he asked, "unless you incarnate them
in deeds?" "It is not enough that thought be grounded on truth; the
thinker's life must visibly express it in his acts; there must be an
ever living harmony between mind and morals, between the idea and its
application." "Every thought, every desire of good, which we do not,
come what may, seek to translate into action, is a sin. God thinks in
working, and we must, at a distance, copy him." The great men of
earth, of whom Jesus was the prototype, were those who wrought as well
as thought,--missionaries, politicians, martyrs, as well as poets and
philosophers;--such men as Aeschylus and Dante, Pythagoras and
Savonarola and Michelangelo,--most of them, he loved to think,
Italians. The great nation was that, whose thought was fruitful in
great action, which to high ideals linked noble deeds and taught its
sons to work and die. "He who sunders faith from works, thought from
action, the moral man from the practical or political man, is not in
truth religious. He breaks the chain that binds earth and heaven."
Therefore are we called to work, work without ceasing and with all our
power, putting behind us fear and thought of self and looking for
results or praise of men; work all the more, when evil is strong
around us and the way of truth is dark; work, if need be, even unto
death. The law of sacrifice, which Christ left us for our heritage,
finds its highest, best expression in martyrdom. "Life and death," he
replied, when attacked for sending young Italians to their doom in
insurrection, "are both sacred: two angels of God, ministering alike
to a higher end, the victory of truth and justice." Men may do more by
their deaths than by their lives, and the memory of those, who die in
the service of their fellows, may inspire generations and win a
country's freedom. "It is not enough to follow the instincts of the
heart," he wrote to an impulsive youth, "not enough to let the
enthusiasm of a good nature impel you to a good deed now and again.
This is the career of 'men of an impulse,' who are one degree lower
than 'men.' The admiration of the Beautiful, the Great, the Divine,
that I ask of you, must be constant in every hour, in every act." We
may work from love, while it is given us; but when love grows cold and
enthusiasm fails and the damp night of doubt and disappointment
settles down, "the simple knowledge of duty" must be there, to bid us
work and for ever work. "You must do good," he told another, "for the
sake of goodness only." Nor may we ask to see our work's results.
Results will come to the race, if not to the individual. Men may see
little fruit of their labours; the individual's struggles may end in
vanity and disappointment. But the race profits from the seeming
waste. The individual, who is left by himself "face to face with
infinity," loses courage, as he complained that Carlyle did, and
slides into "scepticism and misanthropy." But he will not faint, if he
remembers that all Humanity is working to one end; he will know that
it is not success that matters, but effort in the right direction.
"God measures not our strength but our intentions." "Where you cannot
have victory, salute and bless martyrdom. The angels of Martyrdom and
Victory are brothers, and both spread their wings above the cradle of
your future life." "You may succeed or not," he wrote to a
parliamentary candidate;[38] "that is not the vital question. The
question is to work manfully; to stand on the ground of a principle,
whilst almost everybody makes life a thing of tactics and
compromises."
But, when a man has listened to the call of God, and purged his soul
of self, and given himself to duty,--sober, persistent, fearless
duty,--his is the power that nothing else can give. For duty "borrows
from the Divine nature a spark of its omnipotence." Men will not die
for rights; they will for duty. They will not give up all that makes
life pleasant, brave toil and danger and opprobrium, for
self-interest; they will do it for a principle. Only a sense of duty
makes a people fight through all a generation for a freedom, that only
their children can enjoy. Therefore he, who would rouse men to noble
deeds, and lift them to sacrifice and heroism, whether it be in the
small things of commonplace citizenship or in the fiery trial of a
revolution, must call them in the name of duty. Again he appealed to
the great example. "Jesus sought not to save a dying world by
criticism. He did not speak of interests to men whom the worship of
interests had poisoned with selfishness. He asserted in God's holy
name principles unknown before; and those few principles, which we,
eighteen centuries after, are still seeking to translate into facts,
changed the face of the world. One spark of faith accomplished what
all the sophisms of philosophers had had no glimpse of,--a step
forward in the education of mankind."
Mazzini probably never asked himself what was the ultimate sanction of
his code; and, if he had been pushed to it, it is not easy to surmise
what answer he would have given. He could hardly have found the
sanction in the positive commandment of the Deity, for he held that
the will of God was revealed only through humanity, and this transfers
the sanction to another ground. Nor, even had he been familiar with
them, would he have based the principle on evolutionary
arguments,--that altruism is necessary to the race, that that
community will survive, which contains the greatest number of
self-sacrificing individuals. He would have assented to the facts, but
he would probably have said that no theory of heredity or race
selection can explain the origin of altruism, which is a personal,
conscious, self-generated sense, which therefore cannot come from any
'natural,' unconscious source. Nor, again, would he have said, as a
Utilitarian might say, that the life of duty is the highest form of
happiness, that there is a sense in which altruism and egoism are
identical, because he most tastes fruition, who loses himself in love
and work for other men. There is a truth in this, that Mazzini
neglected; he sometimes forgot that Christianity was an Evangel, good
tidings of great joy,--that, so long as love and enthusiasm and the
martyr's passion possess a man, so far as he has attained to the
glorious liberty of the children of God, the life of duty is the
highest happiness. But he knew only too well that gloom and depression
will come, that, when the light fails, duty becomes a stern
taskmaster, and that no principle of happiness (in any acceptation of
the word) will keep a man always faithful to his mission. And so he
would almost certainly have fallen back on the conscience, as the
ultimate moral sanction. "Life," he says, "is a march onwards to Self,
through collective Perfecting to the progressive realisation of an
Ideal." Whether he had called it 'self-realisation' or any less
ambiguous name, he would have come to the position that a man feels
that he owes it to himself to strive for the best he knows, to 'do his
duty for duty's sake,' that he must justify his thoughts and actions
to himself--his unsophisticated self,--that, if not, he will feel
remorse and guilt. The practical value of any system of ethics depends
on whether it appeals to 'the sanction in the mind itself,' to
feelings familiar to the mass of would-be moral men. To such the
direct appeal to conscience has more weight than all the arguments of
theologians or utilitarians.
* * * * *
In his essay on _The Duties of Man_ and elsewhere Mazzini enumerates
the various spheres of duty. A man's duties begin with himself, not
from any self-regarding motive, but because as is a man's own
worthiness, so is his power to help his country or mankind. Never was
one more passionate for personal holiness. 'Be good, be good,' is the
recurring theme that runs through all his writings and political
aspirations. "There is only one end, the _moral_ progress of man and
humanity." "You must labour all your life," he wrote to a young
Italian, "to make your own self a temple to the Ideal, to God." "To
draw near to God, purifying our conscience as a temple, sacrificing
self for love,--this is our mission. To make ourselves better,--this
is the order of the day, which must be the rule and consecration of
our work." All his labours for his country had the supreme end in
view, that Italian men and women should lead godly lives. "Make
yourselves better," he said to Italian working men in words, that show
how little of the demagogue there was in him, "this must be the object
of your life. Preach virtue, sacrifice, and love to the classes above
you; and be yourselves virtuous and prepared for sacrifice and love.
You must educate and perfect yourselves as well as educate and perfect
others."
A man's next duties are to his family. Dear, very dear, to him was the
life of family, which he in his self-forgetfulness had put aside. "The
only pure joys, unmixed with sadness, that it is given men to enjoy on
earth, are the joys of Family." Outside it "men may find brief joys
and comforts, but not the supreme comfort, the calm as of a peaceful
lake, the calm of trustful sleep, the child's sleep on its mother's
breast." The family is an eternal element of human life, more durable
even than country; and the true man will make his family the centre of
his life, never wandering from it, never neglecting it. True love is
"tranquil, resigned, humble," as Dante's love for Beatrice. The wife
will be the equal of her husband, she who is "the reflex for the
individual of the loving Providence that watches over humanity."
Mazzini repudiated any artificial assimilating of the sexes; but their
differing functions were equally sacred and necessary. There must be
therefore no superiority of man over woman, no inequality, domestic or
political. A man must make his wife his comrade, not only in his joys
and sorrows, but in his thoughts and work. He must love his children
with "a true, deep, severe love." "Before Humanity and God children
are the most awful responsibility that a human being can have." "It
depends on us," so he quoted from Lamennais, "whether our children
turn out men or brutes."
But the family, that shuts itself within its own small circle, betrays
its God-appointed function. It was made to be a school of service for
humanity, and teach men to be citizens. The _égoisme à deux_, that
forgets country and mankind, the "blind, nerveless, unreasoning love
of children, that is selfishness in the parents and destruction for
them," betray the family's glorious prerogative. "Few mothers or
fathers, in this irreligious age of ours, and especially among the
well-to-do classes, understand the gravity and sacredness of their
educational duties." Terrible to their country are the fruits of "the
selfishness taught by weak mothers and careless fathers, who let their
children regard life not as a duty and mission, but as a search for
pleasure and a study of their own well-being." The true parent will
teach his children not only to be good, but to be patriots, loving
their country, honouring its great men; will teach them "not hatred of
oppressors but an earnest looking forward to fight oppression," will
make them reverent to true authority, but rebels against false. There
is danger, he says, in Goethe's maxim: 'do the duty that lies nearest
thee.' As him, so it may lead others into a moral solitude, where the
cry of humanity comes not. It is so easy in happy life of family, in
absorption in one's special work, to forget the duties of a citizen,
to avoid the fret and stress, may-be the hardships and the danger, of
politics and social duty. But it is not enough for men to be "kind
towards their friends, affectionate in their families, inoffensive
towards the rest of the world." The true man knows that he may not
decline responsibility for those, whom God has made his
fellow-citizens. And higher still, higher than family or country,
stands Humanity; and no man may do or sanction aught for either, which
will hurt the race. Ever before Mazzini stood the vision of the cross,
Christ dying for all men, not from utilitarian calculation of the
greatest number, but because love embraces all.
FOOTNOTE:
[38] Mr Peter Taylor in the Newcastle election, 1859.