Let the nation of Mazzini take heed before it loses its own soul to gain the world.
XI
No, it was a road of quagmires and quicksands into which Depretis and Crispi led Italy. The less she knows and thinks of Empire the better for her and for mankind. Latin self-consciousness, if it has its faults of rhetoric, at least enables Young Italy to see that Empire is not to be bought without an ethic of blood and iron, which is foreign to the home ethic. Imperialism is only for races strong or stupid enough to run a double standard. Italy has given her blood prodigally enough for the right to be Italy, but she has given it of her own free will. And volunteer armies, self-inspired, are the only sort that a true civilisation can tolerate. Despicable is the nation which sends mercenaries to do its fighting. The soldier like the priest—whose black robe makes the eternal ground-bass of Italy—is one of the unfortunate differentiations of humanity—a type that should never have been evolved. Specialisation—division of labour—is all very well when it gives us doctors, carpenters, engineers, lawyers, but every man must do his own praying and his own fighting. It is comforting to find Young Italy as set against soldiers as against priests.
Though United Italy has followed the normal path of nationhood—large army, large navy, large taxes, and my country right or wrong—there is still a saving remnant to justify Mazzini’s prophetic faith in his people. And, indeed, one does not know where else to look for “the saviours of the world.” The French—once the favourites in the rôle—have too hobbledehoyish a devotion to the sex-joke, the Germans are too tamed, the Americans too untamed, the Spaniards and Russians too brutalised by bull-fights or pogroms, the English too inconsequent. Possibly the New Zealanders may be the first to build the model State, possibly some people of Latin America, that land of sociology and secular education. But these are too remote for their results to leaven the Old World, and on the whole the Italians with their ancient civilisation and their renewed youth appear least unfitted to lead humanity onwards.
But the notion that the Millennium can be reached through a people with a mission, inspiring as it may yet prove to Italy, is a notion not without its limitations and drawbacks. It may easily degenerate into aggression as with the English or into inactive vanity as with the Jews.
True that the Jews—the original missionary people, in whom the families of the earth were to be blessed—have made the Millennium possible by their creation of the Bourse. In their Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609 by the refugees from Spain and Portugal, the infinitely complex system of international finance took its rise. Professor Sombart, the German professor of economics, credits the Jews with the entire invention of the apparatus of the Stock Exchange. And the Stock Exchange, in criss-crossing with threads of gold all these noisy nationalities, is turning war into a ridiculous destruction of one’s own wealth. In the security necessary for international investments lies the prime hope of the world’s peace. But it was an evolution whose form was not foreseen by the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah predicted that the peoples would beat their swords into ploughshares; he should have said shares in ploughs.
The success of Esperanto—likewise invented by a Jew—the spread of World Congresses, and even of World Sports, constitute, like Science and Art, a valuable corrective to the excesses of Nationalism, which has been sadly overdone in the reaction against the cosmopolitanism of the eighteenth century. Nationality, born as it is of historical, biological, and geographical differences, is a natural division of human groups, though a division devoid of the rigidity which patriots pretend, inasmuch as all nationalities are constantly intermarrying both physically and spiritually. But Nationalism—as Bernard Shaw has pointed out—is a disease. It is a morbid state due to defect of the organs of Nationality—to wit, territory and liberty. In health we are not conscious of our organs, it is dyspepsia not digestion that forces itself upon our attention. Nationalism rages in Poland or in Ireland as it once raged in Italy. But for Italy, which has won back territory and liberty, to continue at fever heat would be sickness, not health. Even too much self-admonition to do noble things for national reasons rather than for their own sakes is a morbid self-consciousness. To make history too consciously is to make histrionics.
XII
Neither the reformed Vatican of Gioberti nor the kingless Quirinal of Mazzini can provide the next phase in human evolution. Profound was that teaching of Jesus—you cannot put the new wine in the old bottles. It was not unnatural that an Italian should look to Rome for the third mission. Rome of the Cæsars, Rome of the Popes, Rome of the People! What a fascinating trinity! The conception of a Rome that having lived twice as a world-force must live again, seized Mazzini in his youth, enthralled his maturity, and was the key-note of his speech to the Roman Assembly in the brief hour of his glory. “After the Rome of conquering soldiers, after the Rome of the triumphant Word, the Rome of virtue and of example.” And he repeated it, not yet disillusioned, in the very last years of his life; founding a journal to bring Roma del Popolo into being. And yet he had in the interim published “From the Council to God,” that wonderful sketch of the new religion for which the world is thirsting, had added one of the grandest pages to the unclosed Bible of humanity. That page, indeed, is perhaps still theology rather than theonomy, still too saturated with the old optimism—humanity may have to part even with the assurance of personal immortality, and go, starred with sorrows and sacrifices, to its obscure doom. But this optimism, this burning conviction of a new heaven and a new earth, is the very stuff of which great religions are made, and Mazzini appears like the mighty prophet of the next phase of the spirit, the divine iconoclast whose fuller faith was to give the death-blow to the old theology. And the real miscarriage of Mazzini’s career is not that he laboured for a Republic and begot a Monarchy, not that he sowed for a new social order and reaped stones and statues, but that he spent himself on the doubtful means instead of the certain end, on the creation of a United Italy which was to be the organon of the new spirit, but which is only a nation like the others. The great soul that might have kindled the new faith wore itself out in futile political conspiracies and vain exiles. How much grander, how much worthier of his genius and saintliness, might have been Mazzini’s achievement, had he not been obsessed, like the Middle Ages, by the figment of the Holy Roman Empire; had he, instead of working through Nationalism, gone straight for the foundation of a new international Church. Moses, a greater than Mazzini, had failed in this dream of a prophet-people, nor is there any more assurance that the Law will go forth from Rome than from Zion. Mazzini himself protested against the notion that the French continued to be the chosen people; after 1814 their initiative ended, he urged. He protested, too, against the notion that an instrument created for one purpose can be used for another. Why, then, did he, whose organising powers might have found supreme scope in establishing the religion of the future, throw away his life for Nationalism? Valuable instrument of world-progress as nationality within sane limits may be, alluring as is the idea of working through one’s own nation, perfecting a model people, in whom all the families of the earth shall be blessed, the instruments of the new order exist insufficiently in any one people, if indeed they exist sufficiently in the whole population of the globe. More insistently even than nationalities the world needs a new Church. By giving up to Italy what was meant for mankind, Mazzini missed creating what he prophesied, missed fulfilling and purging of its monastic and mediæval limitations that earlier prophecy of the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot whom Dante placed in Paradise. “The Kingdom of the Father has passed, the Kingdom of the Son is passing,” taught Joachim of Flora. “The Third Kingdom will be the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost.”