Italian intellect, the familiarity with and the play of ideas in the Italian, is not the same thing as a lofty idealism; and when a Dane recently wrote that the Italians possess the highest humanistic qualities and therefore are also nearer the supernatural than other people, he made, I think, this mistake. He confused ideas with idealism. The Italian gift par excellence is le sens très vif des réalités,[4] a vivid hold on the real; and this realism is the source at once of their qualities and their defects. The Italian has only one use for an idea, he must see it as it is. Hence he strips everything, tears away its drapery, exposes it to the garish pitiless light of fact. There is nothing which deserves in itself and always reverence—for him a spade is a spade, a fiasco a fiasco, a corpse a corpse. There is none of that prevenient idealism which in the north draws a veil over the crudities of sense, and helps to illuminate the half-truths they reveal. It is easy to see that such a quality as this is intellectually valuable, but morally disastrous. The special loveliness of the nature formed in the north is the persuasion that there are things one is not to see, not to hear. That northern "custody of the senses" which is not an ascetical exercise, but an inner illumination thrown upon them.
THE "SPANISH STEPS," PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
Erected for the Romans at the expense of a Frenchman in the eighteenth century. The Piazza takes its name from the Spanish Embassy to the Vatican which has its residence here. At the Sacred Heart Convent attached to the church of the Trinità de' Monti, at the top of the steps, generations of girls of Roman families have been educated. The Egyptian obelisk came from the gardens of Sallust and was placed here by Pius VI. See page [141].
The intellectual limitation "thus far shalt thou go and no farther," which the Englishman willingly imposes on himself, is impossible to the Italian, whose moral qualities have to reckon with the intellectual liberty which is proper to his genius. The passionate love of intellectual truth for its own sake is one of these moral qualities, and the people who do not possess it inevitably contract certain moral defects. These are not the defects of the Italian; he is not a hypocrite in his moral relations, not a snob in social concerns, not a prig in matters of intellect, and has no faculty for the mystical self-deceptions of the Northerner. His complete democracy of sentiment is shown in many pleasant ways. It is difficult for the average Englishman to imagine that rank should make no difference, to understand the dignified and simple relations which subsist between classes in Italy. A man in a good coat is not ashamed to be seen talking with a friend in fustian; people of entirely different walks in life may be seen buttonholing each other; and a Roman prince arm in arm with a man of the lower bourgeoisie is no infrequent spectacle. "We are all people of consideration in this house," said a Roman to me—"on the floor below there is a Senator, upstairs there is a teacher of languages, and I am a shopkeeper." Sovereignty too, in spite of the heavy etiquette of the House of Savoy, is democratic in Italy. The King does not live in inaccessible penetralia, and the man of the people when he comes across the man to whom he invariably refers as sua maestà will speak his mind to him. King Humbert assisted at the inauguration of Bocconi's big shop in the Corso and congratulated him on this new piece of commercial enterprise in the city; which is as though King Edward VII. should pay an inaugural visit to Whiteley's. Queen Margaret has always attended some Sunday lectures given in Rome by the association for the higher education of women—no Englishman could have imagined Queen Victoria attending, say, a university extension lecture at Bedford College. The Latin believes much more than we do in the principle of authority, and cares infinitely less about its representatives.
Italian civilisation is imperialistic and social, not individualistic. There is a greater sense of public decorum (as distinguished, however, from private decency) than among us, and more sacrifice of the individual to the society. One consequence of this is that there is less of that eccentricity, which is the individualism of the poorly endowed, less personal initiative, less enterprise, and nothing of that spirit of adventure which is the Anglo-Saxon's romance. The Italian would always, in spite of loud complainings to a just heaven, rather "bear the ills he has than fly to others that he knows not of." Just now it is the fashion in Italy to regard the "individualism" of modern Italians as the reason for their failure to co-operate. But a want of cohesion (mental and moral) is mistaken for individualism. It is certain that the Englishman is an "individualist" yet he achieves everything by co-operation; it is certain that he possesses that sign-manual of individualism—initiative, and certain that the Italian does not. Italy is not suffering from an orgy of individualism in her people but from an orgy of egotism—which is quite a different matter.
It is a fact worth noting that every nation believes its own family life to be the purest and most solid. The truth is that family life plays a more important part in Italy than in England, and Latin parents everywhere sacrifice themselves more for their children than we do. So strong is the blood tie that it has been said that there is nothing at the back of the Italian character but the love of family. Children make far more difference in the life of an Italian than in the life of an Englishman; and when love and devotion and obedience are required of them, they have already seen in their parents as in a mirror how life and personal comfort and personal ambition can be squandered for love. An English parent can leave all he has away from his children, and he frequently leaves the elder provided for and the younger not provided for at all. A Latin parent cannot do this, and it is a signal witness to the sense of obligation towards those they bring into the world which subsists among the Latin races.
If the blood tie is strong in Italy, friendship is very rare. As in the family relations so here it is the lack of marked individualism which is the determinant. It requires little effort to come up to the family standard; such effort, too, while it may lead to self-repression seldom brings about self-development. To come up to the standard of your peers outside the home requires on the contrary an exercise of all the individual powers; and friendship belongs to the individualistic peoples, those who prize personal rather than tribal and family character; to a people with no moral indolence, with the initiative and the power to become something on their own account, and to stand by themselves. The one "provincialism" of the Italian is—perhaps—his suspicion of all who stand without the blood tie: the adventurous spirit of the Anglo-Saxon which has colonised three continents has led him to a very different estimate of reliance on and co-operation with his fellow-men, and the capacity for genuine friendship outside the blood tie may claim to have always acted as an anti-barbaric note in Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
The Italians have another strongly distinctive feature. They are a more passionate but a less sentimental people than we. I suppose the Germans are the most sentimental people of Europe, and we come next. But in Italy the Englishman is not credited with sentiment. According to the Italian press, for example, he has "the patriotism of the pound sterling." For my part I regard the Italian as the least sentimental man in Europe; we, on the contrary, both as individuals and as crowds, are governed by our sentimentality. The whole British middle class would make war to-morrow to satisfy a sentimentalism which the Latin peoples regard as exclusively their own. Those who recollect that the reception accorded to Garibaldi put into the shade the entry into London of the bride of our future King, ought not to accuse the English of lack of disinterested sentiment. The Italians have the sentiment of the beautiful the grandiose and the fit—but they are the last people in the world to be put out of their course by a scruple or an élan. On the other hand there is a real sense in which the Englishman is devoid of a quality which is allied to the Latin graciousness. England shows a want of pride in and sentiment towards dependencies like the Channel Islands or Ireland which we should not find in France or Italy. She forgets, neglects, has no grip, and takes no hold on the imagination. Other nations have exploited their colonies and dependencies and the British suzerain is not appealed to in vain for protection under his flag—but something lacks, and so it comes about that the foreigner frequently likes our justice but not ourselves.