You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor British, practised the same attitude of detachment, the same exclusive self-consecration to letters as Wordsworth or Tennyson. But Virgil had a people to express, and Wordsworth and Tennyson were passionate politicians, if they made no incursions into action proper. You may urge that the bards, skalds, minstrels, troubadours, ballad-mongers, jongleurs, have always been a class apart from action, but these were at least lauders of action, laureates of lords, while even the Minnesingers celebrated less their own mistresses than those of the heroes. ’Tis a parasitism upon action, to which indeed the meek and prostrate Kipling would confine the rôle of letters.
But why should the power to feel and express the finer flavours of life and language paralyse the capacity for action? In the sanest souls both functions would co-exist in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand and trowel in the other, Ezra’s Jews rebuilt the Temple, and the new Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold both trowel and tablet. In that Platonic millennium poets must be kings and kings poets.
That fantastic, mutilated, myopic, and inefficient being, known as “the practical man,” sniffs suspiciously at all movements that have thought or imagination, or an ideal for their inspiration. It may be conceded to this crippled soul that action can never take the rigid lines of theory, and that the forces of deflection must modify, if not indeed prevail over, the à priori pattern. But he is not truly a thinker whose thought cannot allow for these deviations in practice, which are as foreseeable (if not as exactly computable) as the retardation, acceleration or aberration of a planet by the pull of every other within whose attraction it rolls. Action is not pure thought but applied thinking—a species of engineering over, through, or around mountains, and opposing private domains. “Life caricatures our concepts,” a dreamer complained to me, after he had stepped down into politics. Is it not perhaps that our concepts caricature life? Life is too fluid and asymmetric to bear these fixed forms of constructive polity, and Lord Acton tells us that in the whole course of history no such rounded scheme has ever found fulfilment. I do not wonder.
But the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs is moving in a padded world of words, and the hero who has never sung, or at least thrilled with the music in him, is only sub-human. The divorce of life and letters tends to sterilise letters and to brutalise life. The British mistrust of poetry in affairs has a solid basis—of stupidity. Imagination, which is the essential factor in all science, is esteemed a Jack o’ Lantern to lure astray. And to tap one’s way along, inch by inch, without any light at all, is held the surest method of progression.
But Italy, which has known Mazzini, is, I trust, for ever saved from this Anglo-Saxon shallowness.
“A Revolution is the passing of an idea from theory into practice,” said Mazzini. And again, “Those who sunder Thought and Action dismember God and deny the eternal Unity of things.” Pensiero e Azione was the significant title of the journal he founded to bring about the redemption of Italy. Garibaldi too was a dreamer, who even wrote poetry. Cavour, the most worldly of the trio of Italian saviours, owes his greatness precisely to the imagination which could use all means and all men to educe the foreseen end.
A sharp distinction should be drawn between those who dream with their eyes open, and those who dream with their eyes shut. What Cavour saw was in congruity with fact and possibility. Prevision is not perversion. As our modern watcher of the skies received the photograph of Halley’s Comet upon his plate half a year before it became visible to the eye, and months before it revealed itself to the farthest-piercing telescope, so upon the sensitised soul coming events cast their configurations before. This foresight of insight has naught in common with the nightmares and chimæras of sleep. “The prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come” admits the elect to glimpses of its dream. These be the prophets, conduits through which the universe arrives at self-consciousness, as the heroes are the conduits through which it arrives at self-amelioration.
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHLEBOTOMY: A PARADOX AT PAVIA
In a room leading to the Senate in the Ducal Palace of Venice I was looking at a picture by Contarini of the conquest of Verona by the Venetians in 1405.
’Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl over the dead and wounded, men in armour driving their daggers home in the prostrate huddled forms, galloping chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights with swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling devilry. The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice, those two fairy sisters, each magically enthroned on beauty, members of the same Venetia, peopled with the same stock, speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be at each other’s throat? And this revelry of devilry might, I knew, equally serve for Venice’s conquest of any other of her neighbours in that wonderful fighting fifteenth century of hers, when she must needs set up her winged lion in every market place.