The office of the Tocsin was the constant scene of debate and dispute between the two rival camps in the Anarchist party—the organisationists and the individualists. Bonafede and Gnecco belonged to the former, while most of the active staff of the Tocsin—myself among others—adhered to the latter section. A curious feature of the matter—and I fancy it is not exclusively characteristic of the Anarchist party—was the amount of invective and hatred, which both factions ought properly to have expended on the common enemy, but which instead they spent most of their time in levelling at one another. A casual witness of these internal strifes might have imagined that the two parties were at the antipodes in their ideas and objects, rather than comrades and participators in a common belief. Their dissensions were alone forgotten in a common hatred of government and existing society. And even in their efforts to upraise the social revolution—the great upheaval to which all Anarchists aspired—I doubt whether there lurked not some secret hope that the detested rival faction might be demolished in the fray. Bonafede and Giannoli were warm friends personally, and held one another in great esteem. Yet I can clearly recollect Giannoli one evening, with tears in his eyes, assuring me that his first duty when the Revolution broke out would be to disembowel his dear friend.
"He is my friend," Giannoli said to me, "and I love him as such, and as a man I admire him. But his doctrines are noxious; in time of Revolution they would prove fatal to our Cause; they would be the undoing of all the work for which we have suffered and fought. Organise a Revolution, indeed! You might as well attempt to organise a tempest and to marshal the elements into order! I know Bonafede to be above personal ambition, but, take my word for it, most of these organisationists hope to organise themselves into comfortable places when their time comes! It is our duty to destroy them."
CHAPTER X. — A FLIGHT
No man, having once thrown himself into an idea, was ever more sincerely convinced of the truth of his beliefs or more strenuous in his efforts to propagandise them than Giannoli. To destroy utterly the fabric of existing society by all possible means, by acts of violence and terrorism, by expropriation, by undermining the prevailing ideas of morality, by breaking up the organisations of those Anarchists and Socialists who believed in association, by denouncing such persons and such attempts, by preaching revolution wherever and whenever an opportunity occurred or could be improvised, to these objects he had blindly devoted the best years of his life. His was a gospel of destruction and negation, and he was occupied rather in the undoing of what he had come to regard as bad than with any constructive doctrines.
All existing and established things were alike under his ban: art no less than morals and religion. He nourished a peculiar hatred for all those links which bind the present to the past, for ancient customs and superstitions, for all tradition. Had it been in his power he would have destroyed history itself. "We shall never be free," he used to say, "so long as one prejudice, one single ingrained belief, remains with us. We are the slaves of heredity, and of all manner of notions of duties, of the licit and the illicit."
One day I took him to the National Gallery. I was quite unprepared for the effect of this step. He walked about nervously for some time, looking from one picture to another with evident displeasure. At last he stopped in front of Leonardo's "Madonna delle Roccie," and remained gazing at it for some minutes in silence, while a heavy frown gathered round his brows. "I hate art," he exclaimed at last. "I consider it one of the most noxious influences in the world. It is enervating and deteriorating. Art has always been the slave of religion and superstition, from the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians to our own times. You see something beautiful, perhaps, in these pictures, in these saints and Madonnas and Immaculate Conceptions? Well, when I look at them, all the darkest pages of history seem to open before me, and generations upon generations of superstitious slaves, toiling on and suffering with the ever-present terror of hell-fires and chastisement, pass before my mental vision. I should love to burn them all, to raze all these galleries and museums to the ground, and libraries with them. For what are libraries but storehouses of human superstition and error? We must free ourselves from the past, free ourselves utterly from its toils, if the future is to be ours. And we shall never free ourselves from the past until we have forgotten it. Let us leave here. I cannot stand it any longer! I do not know which is most repugnant to me, the asceticism of these early Christians or the senseless fantasies of the Greeks," and without further ado he fled.
Fired by this gospel of destruction, he spent his life wandering about Europe, never resting for a month together, wrenching himself free from all those ties which might curtail the freedom of his actions. Although not fashioned by nature for enduring hardships, he alternately suffered cold, hunger, heat, fatigue, privations, and dirt. In Paris one week, making a brief sojourn in Spain the next, fleeing thence under warrant of arrest to find himself some days later in hiding in Italy; at times in prison, always in danger and uncertainty; starving one day, in fairly flourishing conditions the next, never certain what fortune the morrow might bring: thus the years went by, until, escaping from domicilio coatto, or worse, in Italy, he had at length made his way to London and the office of the Tocsin, quite broken down in health after the long winter tramp. As I knew him, among his few personal friends, Giannoli was loyal and honourable in the extreme, independent and proud. Like many other Anarchists he entertained an almost maniacal prejudice against plots and conspiracies of any kind, maintaining that such organisations were merely police traps and death-gins. "Propaganda by deed"—outrage, in short—they maintained should, and could, be the outcome only of entirely individual activity. Never, indeed, did police or press make a greater blunder than when they attributed deeds of violence to associations and large conspiracies, and sought for or denounced accomplices. Every one of those outrages and assassinations which startled Europe was the act of a single man, unaided by, and frequently unknown to other Anarchists.
This horror of plots and associations was, when I first met him, one of the most noticeable traits about Giannoli. He was beginning to lose his earlier assurance, worn out by the roving life he had led, and was growing suspicious in the extreme. "Such-a-one is a police emissary," or "So-and-so is not to be trusted" were words constantly on his lips.