Critical Studies

by Ouida

Again we have seen that in the United States, since they abandoned their wise policy of non-intervention in external affairs, the national life resembles the English, is vain, boastful, hypocritical, cruel, and bellicose. The thirst of gain devours the nation. There is no other land in which the contrast between rich and poor is so sharp and terrible; none in which millions are thrown away with more frightful indifference and conceited display. Lynch law in all its horror reigns over many provinces, and unblushing corruption mounts into the highest places and poisons all the sources of national life. Guglielmo Ferrero stands stupefied before their innumerable newspaper offices, which he says use up every day as much paper as would go round the circumference of the earth! But he forgets, or ignores, that the literary quality of those journals is usually of the poorest and vulgarest kind, and that the chief part of their columns is filled by advertisements. He is also transfixed with rapture before the colossal houses which Americans call sky-scrapers, and sees the revelation of a stupendous genius in their passion for what is big, costly, eccentric; nor does he hesitate to compare it with the Florentine and Venetian genius!

Actually there was never on earth two more different kinds of creation than these; never one more absolutely soulless, and one more nobly penetrated by the soul. The genius of the Italian masters was lofty, generous, at once humble and sublime, never interested, always consecrated to Art and Country; the skill of the American constructors has no other scope than that of getting money, of making the world stare, of producing the huge, the gross, the extravagant, the enormous, and labours for only one God, the venal Mercury of the market-place. In these new cities, so vehemently extolled, with their towering constructions which hide the smoke-obscured clouds, and their network of electric wires, of railways in the air, and trams running across each other, there is not the faintest spark of that divine light which is called Liberty. Americans boast of their freedom, but it only exists in words; it has no abiding place outside a boisterous rhetoric. The old Puritanism still exists in religious bigotry and persecution; office is bought and sold; justice is a matter of money; private life suffers from conventionalities and social tyrannies innumerable; political and municipal elections are the work of a Caucus. A man cannot drink, or stir, or do aught without his neighbour knowing and judging what he does; even marriage is to be made a matter for doctors to allow or disallow; the whole press is but a gigantic Paul Pry, a vast Holy Office where the persecution by the pen ends in the execution by the revolver.

Such is American liberty.

What can Italy learn from such a model?

Amongst the maladies of the brain known in this day is one which is called the mania of grandeur. It seems to me that not only individuals, but entire nations, are possessed by it. It is perilous and contagious. Italy has already been inoculated by its virus.

There is also everywhere a fatal tendency to open the door of Italy to every foreign syndicate, and every foreign speculation, which puts forward a prospectus or launches shares on the market. The preponderance of Jews is enormous as owners of ground rents and estates in Italy; the chief part of Italian cities and towns is owned by Jews; and the greater number of the industries of all kinds in the country are in the hands of foreigners, like the newly-projected mining enterprise in Elba. If these mines be worth the working, why does not Italy work them herself, and take all the profits?

These facts are not due to any immovability; but to a dangerously lax tendency to run into foreign roads. The Italian Faust is only too susceptible to the invitations of the foreign Mephistopheles.

On the other hand a very marked inclination in the Italian is towards the modern forms of co-operation and communism. This tendency is not due in any way to the influence of the past, but to that mixture of jealousy and envy, of hatred of the rich, and detestation of labour, and of humble ways and of poor means, which is as general in Italy as it is everywhere else in our time, and which is the modern translation of the old classic clamour for Panem et Circenses. Is it towards this already popular communism that Professor Sergi would direct the Italian nation? The direction is already taken, and does not need his propulsion. If there be one thing more certain than another in the Italy of to-day it is the preference of a large proportion of the people for different forms of socialism and collectivism; and the persecution these doctrines receive lends them a dangerous force. At the same time as it persecutes them, the State, with strange self-stultification, recognises and grants one of the largest and most insolent of socialistic and communistic demands, i.e., that for the expropriation of private land in the Agro Romano, and in the various latifundi in Sicily and elsewhere; and thus opens the door either to a most high-handed and unjust spoliation, or to an agrarian civil war in a not distant future.

Again, the most terrible disease of modern society—corruption—is not due to the past in Italy or anywhere else; it exists wherever men exist, and is as general in the republic of France or of the United States as under the autocracy of Russia or of Persia. The Italian disasters of Eritrea were due rather to corruption than to incapacity. When the mules were bought in Naples for 100 lire per head, and sold to the State at 500 lire per head, the battle of Abba-Garima, called by English people the battle of Adowa, was lost before it was fought.

Professor Sergi speaks of the defeat of Abba-Garima as a proof of the decay of the Italian race; but this is a very unfair deduction. As well might the continual defeats of the British in the first months of the present war in South Africa be held as a proof of British poltroonery. Any shortcomings which may have existed in the Italian army in Abyssinia, and exist at home, are, moreover, certainly not to be traced to old-world influences; or to any emasculating tenderness for tradition. There is no reverence for the armies of the past in the actual Italian army, for it is unlike any of them; it does not resemble the armies of the Duchies, or of the Republics, or of the Florentine Carraccio, or of the Lombard trained bands, or of the levies of the Neapolitan Bourbons, or of the legions of Varus. The only model it resembles is that idol of its commanders, the German Army, on which it is shaped and governed, in all the cut-and-dried narrowness and hardness inseparable from the German system. All this may be considered to be inevitable now, but modern militarism is unsuited to the character of Italians, and reacts injuriously on the genius and temper, and physical and mental life, of the people.