LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.
The Italian Question. 1859.
(Three letters: June 6, June 15, and August 1.)
The Foreign Policy of England. 1863.
The Position of Denmark. 1864.
The Jamaica Insurrection. 1865.
The Franco-Prussian War. 1870.
(Two letters: October 6 and 7.)
Modern Warfare. 1876.
ARROWS OF THE CHACE.
LETTERS ON POLITICS AND WAR.
[From "The Scotsman," July 20, 1859.]
THE ITALIAN QUESTION.[1]
Berlin, June 6, 1859.
I have been thinking of sending a few lines about what I have seen of Austrians and Italians; but every time I took my pen and turned from my own work about clouds and leafage to think for a few minutes concerning political clouds and thickets, I sank into a state of amazement which reduced me to helpless silence. I will try and send you an incoherent line to-day; for the smallest endeavor at coherence will bring me into that atmosphere of astonishment again, in which I find no expression.
You northern Protestant people are always overrating the value of Protestantism as such. Your poetical clergymen make sentimental tours in the Vaudois country, as if there were no worthy people in the Alps but the Vaudois. Did the enlightened Edinburgh evangelicals never take any interest in the freedom of the Swiss, nor hear of such people as Winkelried or Tell? Not but that there is some chance of Tell disappearing one of these days under acutest historical investigation.
Still, he, or somebody else, verily got Switzerland rid of much evil, and made it capable of much good; and if you examine the influence of the battles of Morgarten and Sempach on European history, you will find they were good and true pieces of God's work.[2] Do people suppose they were done by Protestants? Switzerland owes all that she is—all that she is ever likely to be—to her stout and stern Roman Catholics, faithful to their faith to this day—they, and the Tyrolese, about the truest Roman Catholics in Christendom and certainly among its worthiest people, though they laid your Zuingli and a good deal of ranting Protestantism which Zuingli in vain tried to make either rational or charitable, dead together on the green meadows of Cappel, and though the Tyrolese marksmen at this moment are following up their rifle practice to good purpose, and with good will, with your Vaudois hearts for targets.
The amazement atmosphere keeps floating with its edges about me, though I write on as fast as I can in hopes of keeping out of it. You Scotch, and we English!! to keep up the miserable hypocrisy of calling ourselves Protestants! And here have been two of the most powerful protests (sealed with quite as much blood as is usually needed for such documents) that ever were made against the Papacy—one in 1848,[3] and one now—twenty thousand men or thereabouts lying, at this time being, in the form of torn flesh and shattered bones, among the rice marshes of the Novarrese, and not one jot of our precious Protestant blood gone to the signature. Not so much as one noble flush of it, that I can see, on our clay cheeks, besmirched, as they are, with sweat and smoke; but all for gold, and out of chimneys. Of sweat for bread that perishes not, or of the old Sinai smoke for honor of God's law, and revelation thereof—no drop nor shadow. Not so much as a coroner's inquest on those dead bodies in the rice fields—dead men who must have been murdered by somebody. If a drunken man falls in a ditch, you will have your Dogberry and Verges talk over him by way of doing justice; but your twenty thousand—not drunken, but honest, respectable, well-meaning, and serviceable men—are made rice manure of, and you think it is all right. We Protestants indeed! The Italians are Protestants, and in a measure the French—nay, even the Austrians (at all events those conical-hatted mountaineers), according to their understanding of the matter. What we are, Moloch or Mammon, or the Protestant devil make up of both, perhaps knows.
Do not think I dislike the Austrians. I have great respect and affection for them, and I have seen more of them in familiar intercourse than most Englishmen. One of my best friends in Venice in the winter of 1849-50 was the Artillery officer who had directed the fire on the side of Mestre in 1848. I have never known a nobler person. Brave, kind, and gay—as gentle as a lamb, as playful as a kitten—knightly in courtesy and in all tones of thought—ready at any instant to lay down his life for his country or his Emperor. He was by no means a rare instance either of gentleness or of virtue among the men whom the Liberal portion of our English press represent as only tyrants and barbarians. Radetzky himself was one of the kindest of men—his habitual expression was one of overflowing bonhommie, or of fatherly regard for the welfare of all around him. All who knew him loved him. In little things his kindness was almost ludicrous. I saw him at Verona run out of his own supper-room and return with a plate of soup in his hand, the waiters (his youngest aides-de-camp) not serving his lady guests fast enough to please him; yet they were nimble enough, as I knew in a race with two of them among the fire-flies by the Mincio, only the evening before. For a long time I regarded the Austrians as the only protection of Italy from utter dissolution (such as that which, I see to-day, it is reported that the Tuscan army has fallen into, left for five weeks to itself), and I should have looked upon them as such still, if the Sardinian Government had not shown itself fit to take their place. And the moment that any Italian Government was able to take their place, the Austrians necessarily became an obstacle to Italian progress, for all their virtues are incomprehensible to the Italians, and useless to them. Unselfish individually, the Austrians are nationally entirely selfish, and in this consists, so far as it is truly alleged against them, their barbarism. These men of whom I have been speaking would have given, any of them, life and fortune unhesitatingly, at their Emperor's bidding, but their magnanimity was precisely that of the Highlander or the Indian, incognizant of any principle of action but that of devotion to his chief or nation. All abstract grounds of conscience, all universal and human hopes, were inconceivable by them. Such men are at present capable of no feeling towards Italy but scorn; their power was like a bituminous cerecloth wrapping her corpse—it saved her from the rottenness of revolution; but it must be unwound, if the time has come for her resurrection.
I do not know if that time has come, or can come. Italy's true oppression is all her own. Spain is oppressed by the Spaniard, not by the Austrian. Greece needs but to be saved from the Greeks. No French Emperor, however mighty his arm or sound his faith, can give Italy freedom.
"A gift of that which is not to be given
By all the associate powers of earth and heaven."
But the time is come at least to bid her be free, if she has the power of freedom. It is not England, certainly, who should forbid her. I believe that is what it will come to, however—not so much because we are afraid of Napoleon, as because we are jealous of him. But of him and us I have something more to say than there is time for to-night. These good, stupid, affectionate, faithful Germans, too (grand fellows under arms; I never imagined so magnificent a soldiery as 15,000 of them which I made a shift to see, through sand clouds, march past the Prince Frederick William[4] on Saturday morning last). But to hear them fretting and foaming at the French getting into Milan!—they having absolutely no other idea on all this complicated business than that French are fighting Germans! Wrong or right, why or wherefore, matters not a jot to them. French are fighting Germans—somehow, somewhere, for some reason—and beer and Vaterland are in peril, and the English in fault, as we are assuredly, but not on that side, for I believe it to be quite true which a French friend, high in position, says in a letter this morning—"If the English had not sympathized with the Austrians there would have been no war." By way of keeping up the character of incoherence to which I have vowed myself, I may tell you that before that French letter came, I received another from a very sagacious Scotch friend (belonging, as I suppose most Scotch people do, to the class of persons who call themselves "religious"), containing this marvellous enunciation of moral principle, to be acted upon in difficult circumstances, "Mind your own business." It is a serviceable principle enough for men of the world, but a surprising one in the mouth of a person who professes to be a Bible obeyer. For, as far as I remember the tone of that obsolete book, "our own" is precisely the last business which it ever tells us to mind. It tells us often to mind God's business, often to mind other people's business; our own, in any eager or earnest way, not at all. "What thy hand findeth to do." Yes; but in God's fields, not ours. One can imagine the wiser fishermen of the Galilean lake objecting to Peter and Andrew that they were not minding their business, much more the commercial friends of Levi speaking with gentle pity of him about the receipt of Custom. "A bad man of business always—see what has come of it—quite mad at last."
And my astonishing friend went on to say that this was to be our principle of action "where the path was not quite clear"—as if any path ever was clear till you got to the end of it, or saw it a long way off; as if all human possibility of path was not among clouds and brambles—often cold, always thorny—misty with roses occasionally, or dim with dew, often also with shadow of Death—misty, more particularly in England just now, with shadow of that commercially and otherwise valuable smoke before spoken of.
However, if the path is not to be seen, it may be felt, or at least tumbled off, without any particular difficulty. This latter course of proceeding is our probablest, of course.—But I can't write any more to-night. I am, etc.,
J. Ruskin.
Note to p. [6].—The lines quoted are from Wordsworth's "Poems dedicated to National Independence and Liberty," Part II., Sonnet i. The second line should read, "By all the blended powers of earth and heaven."