I have read with the attention due to the author's name the essay of
Professor Sergi on the decadence of the Latin nations. It seems to me,
when reflecting on it, that the esteemed author gives to every slight
change, the much-used, and much-abused, name of progress; and considers
mere change as an indisputable betterment. He also considers that the
Latin races cannot exist under modern conditions unless they form
themselves on the models and follow the examples of non-Latin races; if,
that is to say, they do not imitate what is foreign and alien to them.
It is clear that he does not for a moment doubt that the non-Latin are
infinitely superior to the Latin peoples, and he rebukes the latter for
remaining immovable, although, somewhat oddly, he excepts France from
his censure on account of her great commerce, and only includes in his
ban his own country and Spain.
With Spain I do not occupy myself, as I am not sufficiently well
acquainted with her to do so; indeed, Professor Sergi himself says very
little about her; but of Italy I cannot consider that his condemnation
is merited. If she do merit it, why does she do so?
Both questions are interesting. Professor Sergi, like too many writers
of the present time, assumes as an indisputable fact that the mere
innovation, the mere alteration of a thing, is of necessity improvement,
advancement, amelioration; and this being his rooted conviction, he
considers Great Britain and the United States the models and ideals of
modern life. For this reason he would force Italy to abandon entirely
her traditions, her instincts, and her natural genius, and substitute
for them an exact and servile imitation of these two foreign peoples who
have tastes in common with her. Unfortunately he does not inform us to
what point he carries this desire, and if the immense changes he advises
are to be dynastic and political, or merely social and intellectual. He
prints in capital letters his chief advice to the Latin nations to _move
on new lines_; but he does not explain whether he means to move to a new
Constitution, to a new Representation, to a new theory and practice of
Government; and he does not even say whether he thinks or does not think
that the Church is the greatest enemy of national progress in Latin
nations. It would be interesting to know in what proportions he holds
the two antagonistic forces of Church and State to be guilty of opposing
progress; that each is an obstacle to the higher forms of progress there
can be no question in the mind of any dispassionate thinker. But he is
careful not to commit himself to this view. Since he gives us so little
information on this head, and limits himself to the counsel, somewhat
meagre in its expression, to _move on new lines_, we may endeavour to
find out for ourselves how far his advice goes: if Italy do actually
merit his contempt for her inertia, and if the non-Latin races deserve
or do not deserve the admiration with which he pronounces on their
superiority.
That the Italian nation is immovable is not true: for good or evil it
moves as its great son Gallileo said of the earth. The fault, the peril,
lie the other way. It is to be feared that the Italian people run the
risk of losing their finest instincts, and their most gracious
characteristics, through the exaggerated and obsequious imitation of
foreign peoples, and by a too ready adoration of new things merely
because they are new. They are the ideals of many a modern Italian.
Guglielmo Ferrero has dedicated many hundreds of pages to the
celebration of their perfections. I believe that such worship is chiefly
founded on illusion, for it is as easy to cherish illusions about a
steam mill as about a mediaeval saint.
Let us look at the actual situation of Great Britain, setting aside her
imperialist swagger, and regarding only facts. The English themselves
admit that if a European naval coalition succeeded in preventing grain
reaching their shores from America and the colonies, the nation in a
fortnight would want bread. Is that an ideal or a safe position? If, in
a sea-war, the British fleet would be successful is wholly uncertain,
since no one can say how the metal battleships would behave in any
distress; the manoeuvres have not shed much light upon this question,
and many of the marine monsters, as regards their utility in active
warfare, are still unknown quantities. Equally uncertain is what would
be the conduct of the Indian population were Great Britain vanquished
in any great war, for the majority of the peoples of Hindostan most
unwillingly endure through coercion the yoke of the British rule.
In Ireland there is a racial hatred which nothing can extinguish, and
only demands a favourable occasion to show itself. Canada may any day
embroil England with the United States; and so may the West Indies, and
the Nebraskan and Nicaraguan questions; and so may Newfoundland with
France, and East or West Africa with Germany. In every part of the globe
Great Britain has on her hands conquests, colonies, intrigues, enemies,
open questions, and concealed questions, of every kind. Her greed is
great, and her entanglements are innumerable. There are many weak points
in her fortifications. To meet her obligations she is obliged to use
legions of Asiatics, or Africans, or employ as mercenaries men from her
distant colonies, or send the soldiers of one vanquished nation to help
vanquish another. Thus did Imperial Rome, and so went to her undoing.
Doubtless Great Britain is rich, powerful, strong, proud, and vain. So
was Rome; so was Spain. It is possible, even probable, that at some,
perhaps not distant day, Great Britain also will give way under the
enormous weight of her self-sought responsibilities, and the still more
ponderous weight of her many enemies.
Internally, also, England is not what she used to be. The old nobility
is elbowed out of prominent place by a new aristocracy which has been
created entirely on a money basis. Every ministry, when going out of
office, creates a new batch of titled rich men, lifted into the Lords in
return for political or financial service. Wealth is now the dominant
factor of English social life; and a commerce, wholly unscrupulous, is
the sole scope of the tawdry and noisy empire of which Joseph
Chamberlain is the standard-bearer.
What is there in all this to admire or to imitate?
Again we have seen that in the United States, since they abandoned their
wise policy of non-intervention in external affairs, the national life
resembles the English, is vain, boastful, hypocritical, cruel, and
bellicose. The thirst of gain devours the nation. There is no other land
in which the contrast between rich and poor is so sharp and terrible;
none in which millions are thrown away with more frightful indifference
and conceited display. Lynch law in all its horror reigns over many
provinces, and unblushing corruption mounts into the highest places and
poisons all the sources of national life. Guglielmo Ferrero stands
stupefied before their innumerable newspaper offices, which he says use
up every day as much paper as would go round the circumference of the
earth! But he forgets, or ignores, that the literary quality of those
journals is usually of the poorest and vulgarest kind, and that the
chief part of their columns is filled by advertisements. He is also
transfixed with rapture before the colossal houses which Americans call
sky-scrapers, and sees the revelation of a stupendous genius in their
passion for what is big, costly, eccentric; nor does he hesitate to
compare it with the Florentine and Venetian genius!
Actually there was never on earth two more different kinds of creation
than these; never one more absolutely soulless, and one more nobly
penetrated by the soul. The genius of the Italian masters was lofty,
generous, at once humble and sublime, never interested, always
consecrated to Art and Country; the skill of the American constructors
has no other scope than that of getting money, of making the world
stare, of producing the huge, the gross, the extravagant, the enormous,
and labours for only one God, the venal Mercury of the market-place. In
these new cities, so vehemently extolled, with their towering
constructions which hide the smoke-obscured clouds, and their network of
electric wires, of railways in the air, and trams running across each
other, there is not the faintest spark of that divine light which is
called Liberty. Americans boast of their freedom, but it only exists in
words; it has no abiding place outside a boisterous rhetoric. The old
Puritanism still exists in religious bigotry and persecution; office is
bought and sold; justice is a matter of money; private life suffers from
conventionalities and social tyrannies innumerable; political and
municipal elections are the work of a Caucus. A man cannot drink, or
stir, or do aught without his neighbour knowing and judging what he
does; even marriage is to be made a matter for doctors to allow or
disallow; the whole press is but a gigantic Paul Pry, a vast Holy Office
where the persecution by the pen ends in the execution by the revolver.
Such is American liberty.
What can Italy learn from such a model?
Amongst the maladies of the brain known in this day is one which is
called the mania of grandeur. It seems to me that not only individuals,
but entire nations, are possessed by it. It is perilous and contagious.
Italy has already been inoculated by its virus.
There is also everywhere a fatal tendency to open the door of Italy to
every foreign syndicate, and every foreign speculation, which puts
forward a prospectus or launches shares on the market. The preponderance
of Jews is enormous as owners of ground rents and estates in Italy; the
chief part of Italian cities and towns is owned by Jews; and the greater
number of the industries of all kinds in the country are in the hands of
foreigners, like the newly-projected mining enterprise in Elba. If these
mines be worth the working, why does not Italy work them herself, and
take all the profits?
These facts are not due to any immovability; but to a dangerously lax
tendency to run into foreign roads. The Italian Faust is only too
susceptible to the invitations of the foreign Mephistopheles.
On the other hand a very marked inclination in the Italian is towards
the modern forms of co-operation and communism. This tendency is not due
in any way to the influence of the past, but to that mixture of jealousy
and envy, of hatred of the rich, and detestation of labour, and of
humble ways and of poor means, which is as general in Italy as it is
everywhere else in our time, and which is the modern translation of the
old classic clamour for Panem et Circenses. Is it towards this already
popular communism that Professor Sergi would direct the Italian nation?
The direction is already taken, and does not need his propulsion. If
there be one thing more certain than another in the Italy of to-day it
is the preference of a large proportion of the people for different
forms of socialism and collectivism; and the persecution these doctrines
receive lends them a dangerous force. At the same time as it persecutes
them, the State, with strange self-stultification, recognises and grants
one of the largest and most insolent of socialistic and communistic
demands, _i.e._, that for the expropriation of private land in the Agro
Romano, and in the various latifundi in Sicily and elsewhere; and thus
opens the door either to a most high-handed and unjust spoliation, or to
an agrarian civil war in a not distant future.
Again, the most terrible disease of modern society--corruption--is not
due to the past in Italy or anywhere else; it exists wherever men exist,
and is as general in the republic of France or of the United States as
under the autocracy of Russia or of Persia. The Italian disasters of
Eritrea were due rather to corruption than to incapacity. When the mules
were bought in Naples for 100 lire per head, and sold to the State at
500 lire per head, the battle of Abba-Garima, called by English people
the battle of Adowa, was lost before it was fought.
Professor Sergi speaks of the defeat of Abba-Garima as a proof of the
decay of the Italian race; but this is a very unfair deduction. As well
might the continual defeats of the British in the first months of the
present war in South Africa be held as a proof of British poltroonery.
Any shortcomings which may have existed in the Italian army in
Abyssinia, and exist at home, are, moreover, certainly not to be traced
to old-world influences; or to any emasculating tenderness for
tradition. There is no reverence for the armies of the past in the
actual Italian army, for it is unlike any of them; it does not resemble
the armies of the Duchies, or of the Republics, or of the Florentine
Carraccio, or of the Lombard trained bands, or of the levies of the
Neapolitan Bourbons, or of the legions of Varus. The only model it
resembles is that idol of its commanders, the German Army, on which it
is shaped and governed, in all the cut-and-dried narrowness and hardness
inseparable from the German system. All this may be considered to be
inevitable now, but modern militarism is unsuited to the character of
Italians, and reacts injuriously on the genius and temper, and physical
and mental life, of the people.
Unhappily militarism is the most conspicuous and the most tenacious of
all modern influences, and the failure of the Conference of the Hague so
immediately followed by the war of aggression in South Africa, is a sad
and irrefutable proof that the nations are not in the least likely to
free themselves from its yoke.
Taking the modern temper in its civil systems, as in its military, it
does not seem to me any better adapted to the Italian idiosyncrasies;
and all its worst features already exist in all which is here called
government. Italian legislation confounds perpetually regulations with
laws; is fidgeting, irritating, inquisitorial, insolent, harassing; its
tyranny spoils the lives of the populace; by means of its agents it
penetrates into all the privacies of family life; its perpetual
interference between father and son, between master and man, between
mother and child, between buyer and seller, between youth and free
choice, between marriage and celibacy, between the man who takes a walk
and the dog who goes with him, constitutes incessant causes of
irritation, and is a perpetual menace which lowers over the popular life
from sunrise to sunset, and scarcely even leaves in peace the hours of
the night.[13]
[Footnote 13: The other evening, in a theatre in Messina, a young
gentleman expressed aloud his disapprobation of the performance; a
person near bade him hold his tongue; the young man answered the
rudeness with a blow; the person immediately produced a pair of
handcuffs and clapped them on; he was a detective in plain clothes! The
Italian of whatever rank he be can never be sure that he is not
shadowed. The apprehension poisons existence to the most innocent.]
More or less there is too much of this in all modern nations, but in
Italy it is especially odious, being in such absolute antagonism to the
courtesy and gaiety, and warm domestic affections, natural to the
Italian public, and a source of continual fret and friction to it both
in pleasure and in pain.[14]
[Footnote 14: At Palermo in the April of this year it has been decreed
by municipal edict that, as it is contrary to hygiene for the petticoats
of women to sweep up the dust of the streets in which the spittal of the
sufferers from tuberculosis may have fallen and dried in the sun, all
women who walk in Palermo are to shorten their skirts! Health, it is
austerely added, is more important than fashion!]
There is certainly no necessity to incite Italians to admiration of
foreign products and inventions. Such enthusiasm is only too general,
and too blind, at least in that portion of the nation which is under the
influence of the schools, the press, and the universities. An electrical
machine has many more admirers than the bell-tower of Giotto, and a
shop-window of a Bon Marche than the Palace of the Doges. The modern
temper, cynical, trivial, avaricious, vulgar, which now discolours human
life as the _oidium_ discolours the leaves of the vines, has affected
too deeply the Italian mind, and has dried up its natural sense of, and
capacity for, beauty. The glorious cities of Italy have been ruined by
scandalous disembowelling; its ancient small towns are made ridiculous
by electric light and steam tramways; the useful and picturesque dress
of its peasantry is abandoned for the ugly and stupid clothes of modern
fashion, cut out of the shoddy cloths furnished by English
manufacturers; and this want of good sense, of good taste, of all true
instincts towards form and colour, is a moral and mental malady due to
that contagion of foreign influence which has poisoned Italy as it has
poisoned Japan and India, Africa and Asia.
Therefore every counsel to her to follow modern impulses is pernicious.
She is but too ready to do so, believing that, by this way, riches lie.
Moreover, the advice to the Italians to rise, and change, and follow new
paths, seems to me at the present time a cruel derision; because the
Italian who gives it must be well aware that the nation is not free to
do anything or make any change. It is not even allowed to speak. No
public meeting can gather together without intervention of the police.
The press cannot publish any opinions which are disapproved of by the
Government without incurring sequestration of the journal, perhaps
imprisonment of editor, writer, and printer. Where, then, can any fresh
field be found in which to plant any flowers of thought with any hope
to see them root and blossom in action? The hand of the Public
Prosecutor would pluck them up before they could stretch out a single
fibre.
Take that question so dear to the country; the question of Italia
Irredenta. Where could it be discussed in public without 'authority'
intervening and silencing the speakers? Professor Sergi forgets, or
avoids, to say that in Italy the first conditions of a 'movement on new
lines' are wanting; civil liberty is wanting, and free speech and free
acts are forbidden. Who can walk out into the country when barriers
block up the end of every street? On the man, as on the dog, under
pretence of public safety, the muzzle is fastened, and by its enforced
use all health is destroyed.
The Italian of our time is too quickly intimidated, forgets too soon,
wears the rosette in his button-hole when he should put crape round his
arm, dances with too ready an indifference on the grave of his hopes and
of his friends. To form a virile character there is no education so good
as the exercise of political and civil liberty; this education is but
little given anywhere; it is not given at all between Monte Rosa and
Mount Etna. The Italian is by nature too ready to be over-anxious and
over-distressed at trifles; he thinks too much of trifling difficulties
and the petty troubles of the hour; he is quickly discouraged, he is
soon overwhelmed with despair, he has small faith in his own star, and
he has not the elasticity and rebound of the Gaulois temper. Nothing
therefore can possibly be worse for him than the kind of galling public
tutelage and the perpetual molestation in which he is condemned to live;
always esteemed guilty, or likely to be guilty, however harmless he may
be. It is illogical to condemn a nation for having no virility of
character, when the systems under which it is reared, and forced to
dwell, destroys its manhood, and forbid all independence of thought,
speech, and action.
Let us take for instance that uninteresting person, a small tradesman,
native and citizen of any Italian town; in all his smallest actions
relative to his little shop, such, for instance, as altering or
re-painting his signboard, he must obtain the permission of his
Municipality. If he venture to clean or refurbish his board without
authorisation, he will receive a summons and be compelled to pay a fine.
The same kind of torment occurs in a dozen other daily trifles,
magnified into crimes and visited with condign punishment; and,
inevitably, the worried citizen becomes timid, nervous, and either
afraid or incapable of judging or acting for himself. You cannot keep a
man in the swaddling clothes of infancy and expect him to walk erect and
well.
A shopkeeper, a tailor in Florence, known to me, cut the cord with which
a municipal dog-catcher had throttled his dog; he did no more; he was
immediately arrested, dragged off to prison, and kept there for months
without trial: when tried he was condemned to four months of prison and
a heavy fine.
Herbert Spencer has said, 'Govern me as little as you can'; _i.e._,
leave me to regulate my existence as I please, which is clearly the
right of every man not a criminal. The Italian is, however, 'governed to
death,' and tied up in the stifling network of an infinity of small
ordinances and wearisome prohibitions. In the sense, therefore, in which
the sufferer from tuberculosis may be said to want health, the Italian
may be accused of wanting spirit; but this is not the sense of the
reproach of Professor Sergi. Professor Sergi, like so many others of his
teachers and masters, desires to propel him along a road which has
already cost him dear. How many millions has it not cost in the last
score of years, that fatal weakness of Italians for imitating others?
The rural communes of the country have more than a milliard of debts,
almost all due to the senseless mania for demolition, for novelty, for
superfluous alterations and imitations, works worse than useless,
commended or proposed by the Government, and eagerly accepted by the
communal and provincial councils, since each member of these hoped to
rub his share of gilding off the gingerbread as it passed through his
hands. All the vast sums thus expended are all taken out of the enormous
local and imperial taxation, are divided between contractors, engineers,
members of the town and county councils, lawyers, go-betweens, and all
the innumerable middlemen who swarm in every community like mites in
cheese, at the same time that the poor peasant is taxed at the gates for
a half-dozen of eggs, or a bundle of grass, and the poor washerwoman
carrying in her linen has her petticoats pulled up over her head by a
searcher to ascertain if she have nothing saleable or taxable hidden on
her person. These are new ways, no doubt; but they are ways on which
walk the ghost of ruin and the skeleton of famine.
If it be true, as Professor Sergi considers, that Italy can never hope
to extend her conquests and her commerce as northern and western nations
will do, then it is surely all the more needful to hold her own place in
the world by the culture and development of her own natural genius. A
nation, like a person, should be always natural; to be fashioned on
others is to be without any confidence in oneself, and lose one's
equilibrium in the stress of every difficulty. The rigid and
indigestible character of modern education is not adapted, I repeat, to
the Italian temperament, which is _prime-sautier_, subtle but
inflammatory, impressionable but unresisting, and loses enormously when
it is shut down in the hot stove of the so-called 'highest studies.'
Even the national manners, naturally so graceful and charming in all
ranks of Italian society, lose their suavity, their ease, their
elegance, under the influence of the foreigner and the vulgarity of
modern habits. Good taste passes away with good manners; and
pigeon-shooting, sleeping-cars, automobiles, bicycles and tramway crowds
bring with them the breeding suitable to them; and the modern monuments,
the modern squares, the modern houses, the whitewash daubed on old
walls, the cast-iron bridges spanning classic waters, the straight,
featureless, glaring, dusty streets, the electric trolleys cutting
across ancient marbles, all conduce to make ignoble what was noble, and
belittle all which was great.
All this is not the fault of a too reverent admiration for an
incomparable Art, for a glorious history; it is a much worse thing; it
is an oblivion of both history and art, ingrate, unworthy, and ruinous.
Many say that Italians are unfit for freedom; it is certain that they
have never been tried by it. Whatever their government is called,
freedom is unheard of under its rule. Year after year, century after
century, all the Italian provinces, however differently governed, have
been held down under an absolutism more or less disguised. The general
character, with heroic exceptions, has been inevitably weakened. The man
of easy temper and pleasure-loving disposition consoles himself with
amusement; the serious man seeks refuge in study or in science; one and
all accept inaction as their lot. A political _camorra_ guides the
chariot of the State, and the people draw aside, and stand silent, only
hoping to escape being crushed under its wheels. Professor Sergi must be
well aware of this sad truth; then why speak to Italy as if she were a
free country, why speak to her of expansion and vitality when he sees
her without power to purge herself of the fiscal and constitutional
disease which is in her blood?
With as much reason might he chain up a greyhound, and bid him course
the hare; clip the wings of a skylark, and bid it mount to the clouds.