“What pillar of fire, what burning desert, what lonely mountain top, what bottomless cave, what malarious pool, what solitary, barren, or tragic spot can be surpassed by this place, in the power of kindling the sacred spark of madness in one who believes himself destined to engrave on new tables of stone new laws for the religious guidance of the people?” Thus I used to think while presentiments of forms yet uncreated arose within me, fostered by that same silence in which so many extinct forms of our humanity were gathered together. Everything there is dead, but everything might suddenly come to life again in some spirit with enough superfluity of strength and heat to accomplish the prodigy. It is difficult to imagine the grandeur and terror of such a resurrection. He within whose consciousness it could be realised would appear to himself and others to be possessed by a mysterious and incalculable force greater far than that which used to assail the Pythia of old. Instead of the fury of a god present on the tripod, his mouth would express that very genius of the races which is the funereal guardian of innumerable destinies long ago fulfilled. His oracle would not be merely a chink opened into a world above the senses, but the sum of all human wisdom mingled with the breath of Earth, that highest of prophetesses, according to the message of Æschylus. And once again the multitudes would bend before the divine aspect of his madness; not as at Delphi, to implore the dark utterances of the ambiguous God, but to receive the clear answer given by previous existences, that answer which the Nazarene never gave. He was too illiterate, and the desert beneath the mountains of Judea on the western bank of the Dead Sea, in which he chose to find his revelation, was too stony: a place of rocks and precipices, destitute of foot-prints, blind to all thought. The solitary youth felt no fear of famishing jackals, but he feared thought. His pale hand had power to tame savage beasts, but thoughts as fiery and masterful as those which wander over the Latian desert would have devoured him. When the bad angel drove him to the top of the mountain and showed him the fertile land below, and pointed out the position of the different countries of the world and the deep and whirling currents of human desire, he closed his eyelids: he would not see, he would not know. But the great Revealer must extend the horizon of his consciousness beyond all limits, and embrace within it days and years, centuries and millenniums. The truth he sets forth must be the outcome of the whole life lived by men up to the present hour. It must be a fire in which the ascending powers of many generations may be absorbed; so that thus harmonised and multiplied, they may move onward in greater unison and with greater certainty towards an ever purer ideal.
Sometimes, too, I was haunted by the phantom of him, whom one day believed to have created King of Rome. “There was lacking,” I used to think, “even in this most admirable inspirer of heroic feeling, in this joyful revenger of youthful blood, there was lacking the ascetic discipline of the sepulchre of the nations. Had he been able even for a time to turn aside his spirit from the things which pressed upon him and bend it towards immutable things, he might have discovered some idea greater than his own mortal person, and might have chosen it to be ruler of his actions. Then his dream of Latin empire would have grown closer and weightier and more tenacious, so that the force of events and himself combined could not have finally dissipated and destroyed it as they did. But his idea, which was too much bound up with daily life, too human in fact, was to die with him. He never attained knowledge of the secret by which man prolongs the efficacy of his action into all time. The impulses given by the man were as vehement as they could be, but their propagation was brief and uncertain, because they originated in a centre of spontaneous powers which were not subject to any superior conception evolved from a severe order of meditation. And so his work was not higher than himself, and lasted no longer than the work of destruction. His destiny was controlled by the old oracles. The answer given by the Pythia as to the fate of Corinth might, after thousands of years, serve for him also:—An eagle has conceived by a rock, and shall give birth to a fierce lion, greedy for human flesh, which shall work great slaughter.—He did but obey the prediction, like the petty tyrant Cypselus. And the King of Rome faded away into space like a column of smoke.”
Such was the colour of the thoughts awakened in me by the aspect of a place which—according to Dante’s words—seemed formed by nature herself for universal empire: ad universaliter principandum. And while Dante’s arguments to prove the divine right of the Roman power recurred to my memory, the summit of my intellect was occupied by that motto which the Latin races, if they wish to be born again, would do well to adopt in its exact and rigid form as the rule of their vital institutions:—Maxima nobile, maxima præesse convenit. It is meet that the noblest should also be the greatest.
And in the company of that great and tyrannical spirit I used to think: “Oh, venerable father of our language, thou hadst faith in the necessity of hierarchies and differences between men; thou didst believe in the superiority of the virtue transmitted through heredity in the blood; thou didst firmly believe in a virtue of race which can by degrees, by one selection after another, elevate man to the highest splendour of his moral beauty. When thou didst expound the genealogy of Æneas, thou sawest a manner of divine predestination in the concourse of blood.” Now, what mysterious concourse of blood, what vast experience of culture, what propitious harmony of circumstances shall give birth to the new King of Rome? Natura ordinatus ad imperandum—ordained by nature unto empire—but, unlike any other monarch, his task will not be to reconfirm or raise the value which—under the influence of various teachings—the nations have been used to set upon the things of life; it will rather be to abolish or invert them. Conscious of the whole significance of those events which compose man’s history, and familiar with the essence of all the supreme wills which have directed important movements, he will be capable of the work of construction, and of throwing out towards the future that ideal bridge by which the privileged races will at last be able to cross the abyss now apparently separating them from the power of which they are ambitious.
And among all the images which the sacred soil suggested to my soul, this image of the king was the most vivid. Sometimes he almost seemed to me a created form; and I used to gaze on him eagerly, while sudden ideas of indescribable beauty flashed across my intellect and faded away, never perhaps to appear again.
Thus the Roman Campagna with its severe teaching strengthened me to follow out the perfection of my manhood, to assert my inward sovereignty, to trace with a firm hand that “line of circumference from which human beauty is generated,” according to Leonardo’s saying. And at the close of each day I asked myself: “By what new thoughts has my treasure been enriched? What new energies have been developed from my being? What new possibilities have I caught sight of?” And I wished that every day should bear the impress of my style, should be distinguished by some sign of vigorous art, by some proud emblem of victory. My familiarity with Thucydides set before me the example of those strategists of his, who are constantly making fine, pithy harangues to their soldiers, then fighting with all their might, and finally raising a trophy on the field.
Cui bono?—was the cry which came from far and wide out of the mouths of a twilight crowd with voices not unlike eunuchs’.—What is the meaning, what is the value of life? Why live? Why strive? All efforts are useless, all is vanity and sorrow. We ought to kill off our passions one after another, and then extirpate to the very roots the hope and desire which are the cause of life. Renunciation, complete unconsciousness, the vanishing away of dreams, absolute annihilation—that is the final liberation.
They were a miserable race stricken with leprosy reiterating their dreary complaint. The ancient Persians, as the ever-fresh Herodotus narrates, used to attribute this foul infirmity to offences committed against the Sun. And these slavish people had indeed offended against the Sun.
A certain number of them, hoping to be cleansed, had bathed in great fonts of piety, where they softened and anointed themselves with great contrition. But the sight of these was quite as repugnant.