‘There is a good deal in what you say,’ I was rather surprised to hear the Poet reply. ‘But perhaps we have all, and myself most of all, drifted into a vein of exaggeration. I was betrayed into it by the excessive claim which it seems to me many nowadays advance for Science, as compared with other sources of instruction and helps to life. Our debt to Science is great. At the same time, it has its limits, and I cannot think it is the greatest of our obligations. Do you remember that profound saying of Pascal, “La science des choses extérieures ne me consolera pas de l’ignorance de la morale au temps d’affliction, mais la science des mœurs me consolera toujours de l’ignorance des sciences extérieures”? Such a line, for instance, as that of Shakespeare,
“In Nature there’s no blemish but the mind,”
is more deeply and enduringly helpful than steam-engines, electric lights, or anæsthetics. One can, in case of necessity, dispense with tramways and telephones; but we cannot dispense with right thinking and right feeling. The material discoveries of the Age do it much honour; but man’s triumph over matter is most nobly displayed when he triumphs over the matter of which he is himself composed; when he ignores physical pain, and tramples on his non-spiritual passions. Science is the language of the Intellect, Literature of the Soul; and Poetry, the highest expression of Literature, does for language, and sometimes for life, what the Soul does for the body, and what this glorious Italian sun does for mountain and plain: it spiritualises matter. Let me add, lest I should seem too partial to the particular art I practise so imperfectly, that this is true of all imaginative Art; and, far from fearing lest Science should sap and supersede it, I trust and believe that Art will ever remain its complement, and, where necessary, its corrective.‘
‘Do you consider Italians,’ asked Lamia, ‘artistic or scientific, material or spiritual?’
‘They are both, surely,’ he replied. ‘But, if we took the modern Florentine as the Italian type, I fear we would have to reply they are rather too prone to worship material science. The artistic faculty in them seems almost extinct, save for purposes of imitation; and, even when they imitate the art of the past, they do so without any discrimination between the good and the bad. But in railways, telegraphs, telephones, tramways, they take inexhaustible delight. They have disfigured much of Florence, and most of Rome, in their determination not to lag behind in the general march of what is termed material progress.’
‘Is it not,’ suggested Veronica, ‘that they are essentially a practical race? When the world first took to commerce, the Florentines became great merchants and great bankers. When Popes and Princes posed as patrons of architecture, sculpture and painting, they produced palaces, statues, and pictures.’
‘Just so,’ said Lamia; ‘and now that the whole world has taken to travelling, Representative Institutions, and Music Halls, they have Circular Tours and a popular Parliament, both of which they work exceedingly badly, and a Caffè Savonarola Spettacolo Diverso, a piece of profanation for which I confess I should like to smack them.’
‘There is a good deal of vulgarity,’ I ventured to plead, ‘in modern life, and in compliance with the theory you have all been pressing, they are vulgar accordingly. But would it not be more indulgent, and equally true, to say that Italy is the one country, and the Italians are the one race, whose vitality is inexhaustible? They have been well before the world, if you will pardon that expression, for more than two thousand five hundred years; and, during all that period, they have never altogether dropped out of sight. Neither do they now appear in the least disposed to retire into private life, or to preserve their ruins, however much some of us would like them to do so, for the satisfaction of our romantic feelings. Who would have believed, asked Saint Jerome fifteen hundred years ago, that Rome would ever be sunk so low that, at the very seat of its Empire, it would be reduced to fight, not for glory, but for self-preservation. Yet what do we see to-day? Rome, not only safe against foreign assault, but, with the aid of railways and Maxim guns, meditating new triumphs and new glories.’
‘That,’ said the Poet, and I felt much flattered by his approval, ‘is the more generous, and therefore the more just way of putting it. The Italians have a great Past, which they refuse to forget. It still continues to animate their ambition, and forbids them to rest satisfied with that dolce far niente with which they once were reproached. When the period of the Renaissance came to an end, Italy might have seemed to say, in the words of Nero, Qualis artifex pereo, and to perish most artistically. But Italy was not dead, as she has shown so clearly during the last thirty years. One’s only regret is that the existing type of national greatness is so costly, that Italians have to pay a desperately heavy price for refusing to exist without it.‘
‘People,’ said Lamia, ‘frequently complain of the excessive loads Italian carters expect their horses and their mules to draw. But the whole of Italy seems to me to be suffering from the same infliction.’