Great ideas create great peoples. Let your life be the living summary of one sole organic idea. Enlarge the horizon of the peoples. Liberate their conscience from the materialism by which it is weighed down. Set a vast mission before them. Rebaptize them.
Mazzini.
All parts array for the progress of souls: all religion, all solid things, arts, governments,—all that was or is apparent upon this globe, or any globe, falls into niches and comes before the procession of Souls along the grand roads of the universe. . . . Of the progress of the souls of men and women along the grand roads of the universe, all other progress is the needed emblem and sustenance.
VII
THE MAGIC LAND
More than five hundred years have passed over the country of Dante since the death of his mortal part—years of glory and of shame, of genius and intolerable mediocrity, of turbulent liberty and mortal servitude; but the name of Dante has remained, and the severe image of the poet still rules the destinies of Italian generations, now an encouragement and now a reproach. The splendor of no other genius has been able to eclipse or dim the grandeur of Dante; never has there been a darkness so profound that it could conceal this star of promise from Italian eyes; neither the profanations of tyrants and Jesuits, nor the violations of foreign invaders, have been able to efface it. “Sanctum Poetæ nomen quod nunquam barbaries violavit.”
Mazzini.
The true life of Italy is not read in any record of contemporary facts or statistics. Mazzini once said of Dante, in an essay on the immortal poet, that “the life, the true life of Dante does not lie in the series of the material facts of his existence. The life of Dante consists in the sufferings and aspirations of his soul; in its dominant impulses; in the ceaseless development of the idea which was at once his guide, inspiration, and consolation; in his belief as a man and as an Italian.” The real life of Italy is, by analogy, to be read in that atmosphere of aspiration and of noble purpose which characterizes the nation rather than in the material facts of its general progress at the present time. As a country Italy is young. It is still less than forty years since her unity was declared, and to merge the large number of separate States into one harmonious whole is a task requiring the evolutionary progress of time; for a nation, like a university, cannot be a matter of instantaneous creation. It must germinate and grow. The country that, previous to so comparatively a recent date as the year 1870, was, in the phrasing of Prince Metternich, “a geographical expression,” can hardly be judged by present national standards after an existence of only thirty-seven years, although it need be said in no spirit of apology; for Italy is advancing in scientific development, in manufactures, and in the problems involved in civil and hydraulic engineering to a notable degree in the northern part. Milan and Naples are separated by far more than geographical distance. In modern progress Milan is divided by centuries from all Southern Italy.
Between Italy and the United States the entente cordiale is not merely that of diplomatic and ceremonial courtesy, but of an exceptional degree of mutually sympathetic comprehensions. In noble ambitions and lofty purposes Americans and Italians are closely akin. In zeal for contemporary scientific progress, in an intense susceptibility to the glories of art, and in hospitality to all that makes for progress, both nations meet in mutual recognition. Of no people is it more deeply true than of Americans that “each man has two countries: his own and Italy.” The average traveller sees this fair land with a breadth and thoroughness seldom called into requisition elsewhere. In England he is usually content with London, the tour of the cathedral towns and the lake region of the poets. France is summed up to him in Paris and in the chateaux of outlying districts. But Italy beguiles the traveller into every lonely foot-trail in the mountains; to every “piazza grande” of lonely hamlets, isolated on a rocky hillside; to every “fortezza” that crowns a mountain summit. The unexplored byways of Italy are magnetic in their fascination, and one special source of congratulation on the part of those fortunate tourists who travel with their own motor car is that they are thus enabled to penetrate into untrodden byways in Italy in a manner impossible to those who must depend entirely on the regulation railroad service. All lovers of Italy are devoted to these original tours of private exploration. A recent trip to Saracinesco, in the region of Tivoli, was made by Mrs. Stetson (Grace Ellery Channing) with her husband, and in a descriptive record of the little journey into an unfrequented mountain region this paragraph occurs:—