Un magnanimo pensiero, indeed! And—like the chains of Pisa’s ancient harbour restored by Genoa—a pleasant sequel to the noble common struggle for Italian independence. And yet—the advocatus diaboli whispered me, or was it the shade of Boëthius in quest of “The Consolations of Phlebotomy”?—“What has become of Pavia, what of Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other’s blood? Where is the Pavia of a hundred towers, where is the Castello reared and enriched by generations of Visconti Dukes, and its University, once the finest in Italy, at which Petrarch held a chair; where is the opulence of life that flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean magnificence? Where is the Ravenna whose lawyers were as proverbial in the eleventh century as Philadelphia’s are to-day, where is that hotbed of heresy which nourished the great anti-Pope Guibert? Where is even the Ravenna of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to hold only Dante’s tomb. And its young men who bawl out choruses of a Sunday night till the small hours—do they even deserve the shrine of the poet of Christendom? And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the sixty galleys? What have they gained from their colourless absorption into a United Italy, compared with what they have lost—had indeed already lost—of peculiar and passionate existence? Are there two gentlemen of Verona now in whom we take a scintilla of interest? Is there a merchant of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is there a single Antonio with argosies bound for Tripolis and the Indies?” “Your Ben Jonson,” and by his wide posthumous reading I knew ’twas Boëthius speaking now, “said ‘in short measures life may perfect be.’ He should have said ‘in small circles’ and, perhaps, ‘only in small circles.’ All America—with its vasty breadths—stands to-day without a single man of the first order.”
“’Tis not even”—put in the advocatus diaboli, betrayed by his unphilosophic chuckle—“as if the destruction of small patriotisms meant the destruction of war. Pavia and Ravenna,” he pointed out mischievously, “must continue to fight—as part of the totality, Italy. And behold,” quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza Castello, “the significance of that old castle’s metamorphosis into a barrack—the poetry of war turned to prose, the frescoes of the old Pavian and Cremonese painters faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough Government soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall. Gone is that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated by its expansion into a national animosity; not insubstantial indeed under stress of invasion, but shadowy and unreal when the casus belli is remote, and by the manœuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the Pavian or Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of peoples with whom alliance is transitory and artificial.”
“But he will not find himself fighting so often,” I rejoined. “Countries do not join battle as recklessly as cities. The larger the bulk the slower the turning to bite.” “And meantime,” interposed the philosophic shade, “the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in war. And neither in war nor in peace can there be the joy of fighting that comes from personal keenness in the issue. The wars of town with town, of sect with sect, of neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. ’Tis only neighbours that can feel what they are fighting for, ’tis only brothers that can fight with unction. The very likeness of brothers, their intimate acquaintance with the points of community, gives them an acute sense of the points of difference, and provides their combat with a solid standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irrational of all internecion were the fratricide of twins. Save the war of self-defence, civil war is the only legitimate form of war. Military war—how monstrous the sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ‘The True Greatness of Kingdoms,’ when he compares civil war to the heat of a fever, and foreign war to the heat of exercise which serves to keep the body in health. For what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a home-born Briton ever fight a Russian? His boundaries are nowhere contiguous with the Russian’s, his very notion of a Russ is mythical. ’Tis a cold-blooded war-game into which he is thrust from above. What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? Other is it with warfare that is personal, profoundly felt. Civil war—how sacred, how close to men’s bosoms! When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war.”
“In religious wars, too,” eagerly interrupted the advocatus diaboli, “’tis nearness that is the justification—Homoousian versus Homoiousian. Why in heaven’s name,” he added with a spice of malice, “should a Mussulman cry haro against a Parsee, or a Shintoist against a Mormon? Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous; ’twere the duel of whale and elephant. ’Tis the Christian sects that must naturally torture and murder one another,” he wound up triumphantly.
“Ay indeed,” serenely assented the shade of Boëthius. “If fighting is to be done at all, let it be between brothers and not between strangers. Where ‘a hair perhaps divides the False and True’ ’tis of paramount importance to determine on which side of the hair we should stand. This rigid accuracy is the glory of Science—why should not our decimal be correct to nine places even in Religion? Why wave aside these sharp differences for which the men of my day were willing to pay with their lives? When your Alfred the Great translated my magnum opus, or even as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a modern version, these questions could vie in holy intensity, almost with your latter-day questions of Free Trade and Tariff Reform.”
“Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom,” sighed the advocatus diaboli, “when men were literally aflame for filioque or Immaculate Conception. O for the fiery Arians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians, Montanists, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophysites, Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses, Waldenses, Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists——”
“Surely you would not call Baptists fiery?” I interjected feebly. He had apparently no sense of humour, this advocatus, for he went on coldly: “How tame and disappointing these latter-day sectarians: these Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites, Christadelphians, ‘et hoc genus omne.’ I did have a flash of hope when your Methodists began to split up into Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists, Reformers, Primitives, Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly differences seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiæ of Truth and Practice. But no! no one believes nowadays, for nobody burns his fellow-Christian. Even the burning words of your King’s Declaration——!”
“August shade,” I interrupted, pointedly addressing myself to the last of the Roman philosophers, “I concede that when Christianity founded itself on texts, an infinite perspective of homicidal homiletics lay open to the ingenuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and Hell turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance attached to the difference between the theological tweedledum and the theological tweedledee, so that it is just dimly conceivable one might murder one’s neighbour for his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not tell me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed.”
“Immo vero,” cried the Roman shade emphatically. “Was I not clubbed to death because I believed in Justice and combated the extortions of the Goths? A belief for which we would not die or kill, what is it?”
“A bloodless belief,” chuckled the advocatus diaboli, who, I suddenly remembered, was more legitimately entitled the defensor fidei.