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 noble 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 masses; 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 classic 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 passive mirror of each
passing 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 analyse 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 God'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 God," 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 masses 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 "principally 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 passed. 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
passionate 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 God 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
passion of contemporary events or in national history. What field for
literature like the mighty, moving pageant of the democratic world? To
watch God'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 masses,--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 Körner on the march to
battle, the patriot's anguished passion, 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 God 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 illustrate 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 passionate 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, impassioned, volcanic, artistic," but without unity or
soul. German music knew God, 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
assured 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.
Mazzini's criticism of music is for its time so fresh, so full of
suggestion and prophecy, that it is matter for regret that his
knowledge of it was not more extensive. He knew opera and little
beyond it; he had some acquaintance with Beethoven, but he does not
seem to have been very strongly attracted by him, or to have made much
study of him. He wasted on Donizetti and Meyerbeer the enthusiasm,
which should have been reserved for greater men. It is unfortunate
that he lived before Wagnerian opera appeared in London. It would be
possible to show in detail to what a remarkable extent he anticipated
Wagner's theories.[46] Wagner, it is true, rejected the historical
drama, because he believed the requirements of art to be incompatible
with historical accuracy. But his main doctrines are the same as
Mazzini's,--the ethical intention of music, the intimate relationship
of art to public life, the belief in the people as the fountain of
true art, the value of the folk-song, the reconciliation of harmony
and melody, the poet and musician stretching hands to one another and
giving 'moral will' to music, by uniting 'word' to 'tone' in Opera. It
is permitted to think that, Wagner's nationality notwithstanding,
Mazzini would have recognised in him the master of the new music,
whose dawn he heralded.
Mazzini had a favourite classification of poets into "objective" and
"subjective." The objective artist sinks his own beliefs, and merely
reflects and transmits external impressions, neither judging them by
his own conception of right and wrong, nor supplying any inspiration
or rule of action for mankind. The subjective artist stamps his themes
with the imprint of his own individuality; he sits in the seat of
judgment and measures out praise and blame; and thus he helps others
to form a moral law, and creates the future. The former series, men
who excite our admiration but not our love, passes from the Greek
poets, all save one, through Shakespeare to Goethe; the latter from
Aeschylus through Dante and Michelangelo to Byron and, apparently,
Schiller. Dante was Mazzini's highest type of the subjective poet.
Something has already been said of his influence on Mazzini's
thought,--an influence far greater than that of any other writer.
There are few, indeed, of Mazzini's doctrines, which are not found in
germ in the _Convito_ or the _De Monarchiâ_. Mazzini revered him as
the strong intellect, which took so little from other men and gave so
much; the hero, whose life was one long fight, who "wrote for country,
conspired for country, held the pen and sword"; the patriot, "neither
Catholic nor Ghibelline nor Guelf, but Christian and Italian," who
believed in 'the holy Roman people,' and foretold for Italy the
spiritual mastery of the world; the thinker who taught the unity and
common task of all mankind; the one true poet of love, to whom the
love of man and woman was a spiritual thing, wherein self entered not.
He contrasted him with Shakespeare "the lord of individuality," the
supreme dramatist who created individuals as no man else has created
them, giving his creatures choice of good and evil, and pursuing the
lesson of their fates, the choice once made, to the end; who in Hamlet
had of pure creative genius made a prophetic type, that belonged to
two centuries after him, and had no contemporary original. But
Shakespeare was a man who took life as he found it, untouched by
strong moral sympathies, without sense of the race or glimpse of duty
or looking to the future; therefore a cynic and a "sceptic," obsessed
by the feeling of life's nothingness, with no illuminating faith in
man's predestined glory.
Mazzini's favourite contrast was between Goethe and Byron. For
Goethe's intellect he had the profoundest admiration; he seems to have
studied Faust carefully, and had some acquaintance at all events with
his other works. "Goethe," he says, "is an intellect, that receives,
elaborates, and reproduces every possible form of human emotion and
aspiration. He dwells aloft, alone, a mighty Watcher in the midst of
creation, scrutinizing with equal penetration and interest the depths
of ocean and the calyx of the flower, ... laying bare in Faust the
problem of the age in all its terrible nakedness, ... the most
representative poet that Europe has produced since Shakespeare." But
great intellect as he is, he misses the highest; for he loses the man
in the artist, he has no moral standard of his own, no sense of the
unity of life; he is the poet of detail and analysis, "feeling
everything but never feeling the whole," living aloof from religion
and politics, a cold spectator of the world-moving deeds around him,
"learning neither to esteem men nor to better them, nor even to suffer
with them," "without need of doing or sacred sorrow or any deep and
ardent love." "The poet of the bourgeoisie, he counsels calm and
contemplation, order and resignation, tells men to fit themselves to
their environment, fulfil their little duties, plant themselves
comfortably, do good around them, always provided that the risks are
not too great, and that they do not disturb the harmony and balance of
the faculties of _sight_."
Turn from Goethe, he says, to Byron; "there is the man himself, who
hopes and strives and suffers for the race, as Dante did, and as
Aeschylus did before Dante." Like Goethe, he too is "a poet of
individuality," "a type of power without an aim"; but, unlike
Goethe's, his verse is no mere reflection of other men's thoughts and
actions. He stamps his portraitures with his own personality,
surveying the world "from a single, comprehensive point of view," and
interpreting and judging it by his own inner light; more deep, as
Goethe is more vast, seeking the sublime rather than the beautiful,
ever a worshipper of force and action. "In Byron the _ego_ is revealed
in all its pride of power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled
plenitude of all its faculties, aspiring to rule the world around him
solely for dominion's sake, to exercise upon it the Titanic force of
his will." It is this power of will, necessarily propelled to seek an
outlet in action, that appealed so strongly to Mazzini. Byron bears
his part in the political and social conflicts round him, "wandering
through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet, wounded and bearing the
arrow in his wound"; loving and understanding Italy and Rome, dying
for a nation's cause in Greece. And Mazzini found in his verse a great
social lesson, such as Goethe never tried to teach. Consciously or
unconsciously Byron foretold the doom of individualism and
aristocracy. His characters are moulded on "a single type--the
individual; free, but nothing more than free; iron souls in iron
frames, who climb the alps of the physical world as well as the alps
of thought"; but all bearing in their faces the stamp of failure, "a
gloomy and ineffaceable sadness." "Gifted with a liberty they knew not
how to use; with a power and energy they knew not how to apply; with a
life, whose purpose and aim they comprehend not;--they drag through
their useless and convulsed existences. Byron destroys them one after
the other. The emptiness of the life and death of solitary
individuality has never been summed up so powerfully as in his pages."
But Byron, no more than Goethe, wrote the poetry of Mazzini's ideal.
In a generation without religion or pity or enthusiasm, amid "English
cant and French levity and Italian stagnation," Byron was driven to
passionate, tumultuous cursings of a false society. But it was a note
of rebellion and despair. Neither poet had the sense of the race, of
man redeemed by love and social service, of the new hope and power
that would come, as men learned to work together for the common end.
Mazzini gives no indication that he ever found the art that he looked
for. He seems to have thought that some of the modern Slav poetry came
nearest to it. The new English literature does not appear to have
attracted him; there is no evidence that he read Browning, and if he
had, he would probably have condemned him as "objective." Historical
drama has conspicuously failed to do what he expected of it. The
poetry of social problems is still for the most part analytic and
destructive. The poet of his vision, the constructive, prophetic,
apostolic poet, with his message for humanity, whose songs will reach
the workshop and the cottage and inspire a nation's policy, is yet to
come.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] _Cf._ Richard Wagner's Prose Works (Eng. trans.), pp. 122-123.
[46] Mazzini's _Philosophy of Music_ was written in 1836; Wagner's
_Artwork of the Future_ in 1849.