He stayed with us for several months—from the beginning of November till February or March, I think—and during that period I saw him very nearly every day, and heard him accomplish a tremendous deal of talk.
I tried, besides, to read some of his books, an effort, however, from which I retired, baffled and bewildered: they were a thousand miles above the apprehension of a nineteen-year-old potache; and I did actually read to its end a book about him: Augustus Ambrose, the Friend of Man: an Account of his Life, and an Analysis of his Teachings. By one of his Followers. Turin: privately printed, 1858. Of the identity of that “Follower,” by-the-bye, I got an inkling, from a rather conscious, half sheepish smile, which I detected in the face of my own father, when he saw the volume in my hands. I read his Life to its end; and I tried to read The Foundations of Mono-pantology, and Anthropocracy: a Remedy for the Diseases of the Body Politic, and Philarchy: a Vision ; and I listened while he accomplished a tremendous deal of talk. His talk was always (for my taste) too impersonal; it was always of ideas, of theories, never of concrete things, never of individual men and women. Indeed, the mention of an individual would often only serve him as an excuse for a new flight into the abstract. For example, I had learned, from the Life, that he had been an associate of Mazzini’s and Garibaldi’s in ’48, and that it was no less a person than Victor Emmanuel himself, who had named him—in an official proclamation, too—“the Friend of Man.” So, one day, I asked him to tell me something about Victor Emmanuel, and Mazzini, and Garibaldi. “You knew them. I should be so glad to hear about them from one who knew them.”
“Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, Mazzini, Cavour—I knew them all; I knew them well. I worked with them, fought under them, wrote for them, spoke for them, throughout the long struggle for the unification of Italy. I did so because unification is my supreme ideal, the grandest ideal the human mind has ever formed. I worked for the unification of Italy, because I was and am working for the unification of mankind, and the unification of Italy was a step towards, and an illustration of, that sublime object. Let others prate of civilisation; civilisation means nothing more than the invention and multiplication of material conveniences—nothing more than that. But unification—the unification of mankind—that is the crusade which I have preached, the cause for which I have lived. To unify the scattered nations of this earth into one single nation, one single solidarity, under one government, speaking one language, professing and obeying one religion, pursuing one aim. The religion—Christianity, with a purified Papacy. The government—anthropocratic philarchy, the reign of men by the law of Love. The language—Albigo. Albigo, which means, at the same time, both human and universal—from Albi, pertaining to man, and God, pertaining to the whole, the all. Albigo: a language which I have discovered, as the result of years of research, to exist already, and everywhere, as the base, the common principle, of all known languages, and which I have extracted, in its original simplicity, from the overgrowths which time and separateness have allowed to accumulate upon it. Albigo: the tongue which all men speak unconsciously: the universal human tongue. And, finally, the aim—the common, single aim—the highest possible spiritual development of man, the highest possible culture of the human soul.”
That is what I received in response to my request for a few personal reminiscences of Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, and Mazzini.
You will infer that Mr. Ambrose lacked humour. But his most conspicuous trait, his preponderant trait—the trait which, I think, does more than any other to explain him, him and his fortunes and his actions—was the trait I had vaguely noticed in our first five minutes’ intercourse, after my re-introduction to him; the trait which, I have conjectured, perhaps gave its unsympathetic quality to his face: abstraction from his surroundings and his company, inattention, indifference, to them.
On that first evening, you may remember, he had asked me certain questions; but I had felt that he was thinking of something else. I had answered them, but I had felt that he never heard my answers.
That little negative incident, I believe, gives the key to his character, to his fortunes, to his actions.
The Friend of Man was totally deaf and blind and insensible to men. Man, as a metaphysical concept, was the major premiss of his philosophy; men, as individuals, he was totally unable to realise. He could not see you, he could not hear you, he could get no “realising sense” of you. You spoke, but your voice was an unintelligible murmur in his ears; it was like the sound of the wind—it might annoy him, disturb him (in which case he would seek to silence it with a hist-hist), it could not signify to him. You stood up, in front of him; but you were invisible to him; he saw beyond you. And even when he spoke, he did not speak to you, he spoke to the walls and ceiling—he thought aloud. He took no account of his auditor’s capacities, of the subject that would interest him, of the language he would understand. You asked him to tell you about Mazzini, and he discoursed of Albigo and the Unification of Mankind. And then, when he ceased to speak, directly he fell silent and somebody else took the word, the gates of his mind were shut; he withdrew behind them, returned to his private meditations, and so remained, detached, solitary, preoccupied, till the time came when he was moved to speak again. He was the Friend of Man, but men did not exist for him. He was like a mathematician busied with a calculation, eager for the sum-total, but heedless of the separate integers. My father—my mother—I—whosoever approached him—was a phantasm: a convenient phantasm, possibly, with a house where he might be lodged and fed, with a purse whence might be supplied the funds requisite for the publication of his works; or possibly a troublesome phantasm, that worried him by shouting at its play: but a phantasm, none the less.
Years ago, my downright Aunt Elizabeth had disposed of him with two words: a charlatan, an impostor. My Aunt Elizabeth was utterly mistaken. Mr. Ambrose’s sincerity was absolute. The one thing he professed belief in, he believed in with an intensity that rendered him unconscious of all things else; his one conviction was so predominant as to exclude all other convictions. What was the one thing he believed in, the one thing he was convinced of? It would be easy to reply, himself; to declare that, at least, when she had called him an egotist, my Aunt Elizabeth had been right. It would be easy, but I am sure it would be untrue. The thing he believed in, the thing he was convinced of, the only thing in this whole universe which he saw, was his vision. That, I am persuaded, is the explanation of the man. It explains him in big and in little. It explains his career, his fortunes, his failure, his table-manners, his testiness, and the queerest of his actions.
He saw nothing in this universe but his vision; he did not see the earth beneath him, nor the people round him. Is that not enough to explain everything, almost to justify anything? Doesn’t it explain his failure, for example? The fact that the world ignored him, that his followers dropped away from him, that nobody read his books? For, since he was never convinced of the world, how could he convince the world? Since he had no “realising sense” of men, how could he hold men? Since, in writing his books, he took no account of human nature, no account of human taste, endurance—since he wrote his books, as he spoke his speeches, not to you or me, not to flesh and blood, but to the walls and ceiling, to space, to the unpeopled air—how was it possible that he should have human readers? It explains his failure, the failure of a long life of unremitting labour. He was learned, he was in earnest, he was indefatigable; and the net product of his learning, his earnestness, his industry, was nil, because there can be no reciprocity established between something and nothing.