The most difficult problem, of course, was that of Eastern Europe. Mazzini evidently thought that, next to the unity of his own country, the Slav movement was the most important question in European politics. Here was a mighty people, awakening to life, proving its power by its literature,—for it, he believed, had produced the only living poetry since Goethe and Byron,—claiming its rightful place in the European commonwealth. Nothing could arrest the self-assertion of the Slavs, but the future of Europe largely depended on the direction which it took. If the other nations hailed it and guided it, it would enrich the life of Europe by the new elements it brought into it; if it went unfriended and undirected, it would be perverted into "Czarism," and cost Europe twenty years of bloodshed to check Muscovite ambitions. Two things Europe would do well to keep in mind. It was as useless as it was immoral to bolster up Austria and Turkey, for the Slav movement would be inevitably fatal to them both. And Europe must see that the Slavs became a barrier and not a help to Russian designs of domination. This could be done, and done only, by helping the non-Russian Slavs to organise themselves into powerful and independent nations. Czarism owed its strength not to Panslavist aspirations, but to the fact that the Czar was the only hope of the Christian populations of the Balkans. Mazzini's detailed forecast of the Slav national settlement varied from time to time; but his favourite plan was that Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs should form four separate nationalities. In curious and impossible inconsistency with his own principles, he seems to have thought that Hungary and Roumania would be annexed to or federated with one or other of these states; and he looked to a federal union of Serbs and Greeks, with Constantinople, as a free city, for the centre of the federation.

Out of the nationalities would grow "the United States of Europe, the republican alliance of the peoples," "that great European federation, whose task it is to unite in one association all the political families of the old world, destroy the partitions that dynastic rivalries have made, and consolidate and respect nationalities." Mazzini's ken, strange to say, was almost restricted to Europe. He scarcely mentions in this connection the American United States, though sometimes he seems perhaps to imply that they would enter the European commonwealth. He had no inkling that Eastern races might claim their own independent development. His forecast of European colonisation hardly extended beyond Asia and North Africa; he believed that Asia was destined to be "an appendix of Europe," and that the great stream of European colonisation would set towards it, chiefly through the agency of Russia and England. Thus he was concerned with Europe only; and for the Europe of the future, a federation of harmonious nationalities, he had a splendid prophecy. When nationality had triumphed, "all cause of war would disappear, and in its place arise a spirit of brotherhood and peaceful emulation on the road of progress." Revolutions would be no more, and "the slow, continuous, normal unfolding of activities and powers" would lead the nations ever onwards. We come again to his vision of a European authority, sitting at Rome to give guidance and harmony to the peoples. When the great day arrived, that brought the victory of liberty and nationality, the peoples would assemble their "true General Council." No doubt the Council was the same as that which would define the new religious faith. It would formulate the common national duties of the peoples, and secure their freedom to perform those duties, while the separate national councils defined the special duty of each country.

It would be Italy's glorious function to lead the nations to this unity. France had lost the opportunity in 1815; England, when she isolated herself from the life of Europe by her enslavement to non-intervention; the Slav countries were disqualified by their rivalries or obsequiousness to Russia. Italy had her unquestioned titles to the proud hegemony,—her geographical position, her character, her traditions, the universal looking for some great thing to come out of her new life. She was "the land destined by God to the great mission of giving moral unity to Europe, and through Europe to Humanity." She would be the armed apostle of nationality, the protectress of oppressed peoples, the instrument to destroy Austria and Turkey and give freedom to the Slavs. And when this part of her mission was fulfilled, and through her nationality was victorious, then the gratitude of the peoples, and the divine appointment of Providence, and her own essential fitness for the task, would make Rome the centre of the cause of peace, the seat of the Diet of the nations, fulfilling Dante's vision, that saw her "helmsman" of humanity, to steer it to its peace. It was a noble dream, much of it, it may be, fantastic and impossible, and yet, perhaps, with its seed of truth. The European Federation tarries behind Mazzini's eager prophecy, but its coming cannot be delayed for ever. The triumph of nationality, despite the evil deed of 1870, has advanced with mighty strides since his day. And though patriotism has often erred into ignoble paths, and international fraternity gone backward, yet the evil creates its own remedy, and disarmament becomes an ever more importunate desire. When the nations learn that arbitration and disarmament are necessary for their own self-preservation, when the European federation gradually evolves itself, Rome will be the natural seat of the High Court of Europe. Italy, which by her plebiscitary origin has given a rule to the nationalities,—a country practically without territorial ambitions or colonial empire, the natural mediator between the two great European alliances, with her ancient prestige and service to humanity to give her lustre, has paramount claims to the high prerogative.[44]

Chapter XVIII
Literary Criticism

The function of the critic—The function of the poet—Art must avoid 'art for the sake of art' and realism—It must be human, social, didactic—Poetry of modern life—The historical drama—Music—'Objective' and 'subjective' poets—Dante—Shakespeare—Goethe—Byron.

If Mazzini's busy life could have spared more time for literary study, he would probably have been among the greatest critics of the century; perhaps, even as it is, he may rank among them. He misses in his lack of accurate and detailed study; but he has a rare penetration and originality and gift of embracing synthesis. It was his ambition at one time to found an Italian school of criticism, whose mark should be constructive and sympathetic interpretation. Keenly sensitive though he was to beauty of expression, he detested mere criticism of form and the profitless microscopy, that pries for specks in a writer's life or work. He loved to read a great author reverently, hiding rather than exposing his blemishes, penetrating below uncouthnesses of form and casual lapses to the great informing thoughts, that had their lesson for the world. "At the present day," he wrote in an optimistic moment, "we neither worship a genius blindly, nor outrage him barbarously; we set ourselves to understand him, and we learn to love him. We regard forms as secondary and perishable phenomena; the idea alone is sacred, as a thing baptised to everlasting life, and we try how we may lift the veil that hides it." He compared genius to the fabled tree of Teneriffe, whose branches discharged showers of refreshing water. "Genius is like this tree, and the mission of criticism should be to shake the branches. At the present day it more resembles a savage striving to hew down the noble tree to the roots."

In his scheme of life the poet had a part of supreme importance. He regarded literature as a "moral priesthood." Poetry would "save the world in its despite," for it was the poet's prerogative to redeem it from doubt and base ideals, to "reveal duties and create affections," to lift men up above the trivial things of life to the eternal verities. "We have," he cries in the forties, "exiled poetry from life, and enthusiasm and faith have gone with it, and love, as I understand love, and constancy in sacrifice, and the worship of great deeds and great men." His own Italy had little of the throbbing national life, in which alone true poetry could flourish; and everywhere an age of faithlessness robbed the poet of his aliment. The time was for the critic,—the constructive, "philosophic" critic; he was the "literary educator," and he could at all events be precursor of the poet of the future, marking the lines on which a modern democratic poetry should travel, and preparing a public to understand him. "The critic," he says, "is unrelated to genius; but he stands as a link between great writers and the masses; he explores the conditions and literary needs of the time, and preaches them to the nations, that they may learn to feel them, and desire and demand them; in fine, his prophecies prepare a public for the writer:—a more important matter than some think, for very rarely do writers appear before their time."

As critic, then, Mazzini points out the deficiencies of contemporary literature, and the principles which must take it to a higher stage. True art, he lays down, has two great perils to avoid. First, there is the "atheist formula" of 'art for the sake of art';—a heresy he scourged with pontifical anathemas. His attack was not aimed at perfection of literary form. He loved a correct and classic diction, and never underrated style, so long as style was not an excuse for poverty of thought. His criticism went deeper. The artist may not live his own art-life, divorced from the moving world around and all its manifold activities, "floating bubble-like without support," finding his poor inspiration in his own fancies and caprices. There was no true individuality in that; invented though it was to guard the poet's independence, in reality it made him but a passive mirror of each passing impression. Instead of liberty, it brought anarchy and "wild, arbitrary intellectual display." It robbed art of touch with the great facts of life, all fruitful relationship to the struggling, ever learning, ever advancing race. It sent it wandering lawless, purposeless, like a sick man's dreams. The poet ceased to be a thinker and a teacher, and sank to a mere empty singer. "What I want," he said, "is not the Artist but the man-Artist; the High-Priest of the Ideal, not the worshipper of his own Fetishes." Literature must be "the minister of something greater and more valuable than itself."

He was almost equally condemnatory of realism, especially of realistic presentation of nature. It was a criticism that he brought alike against Monti and Victor Hugo and Wordsworth, that they "depicted but never transfigured nature," and thus their art was "useless." The real is the mantle of the true, but not the true; "high poetry is truth, because you cannot trace out or analyse its source." The poet is a "miner in the moral world"; his function is to hew beneath the symbol, beneath the real, to the idea shut in within; questioning nature alike in her beauties and deformities, to find and teach to men "that fragment of God's truth that must exist there." "One thing I know," he says, "that the phenomena of nature on their moral side and the inner life of man must be the field of modern literature, that physical nature and man's outer life will have their place only as symbols of the first." And nature's lessons must have a practical reference to man's lot and destiny. Even when nature was rightly used and interpreted, there might be too much of it, and he seems to have always given natural poetry a secondary place. "Poetry," he says, "is not in nature but in man."

This brings us to his conception of true art. It must be essentially human, not realistically so, but usefully, practically, didactically. He did not mean by this that it must confine itself to the obvious, outside facts of life. "In every powerful poetic impression the vague claims a full quarter, and the vague, which must not be confounded with the obscure, is the soul's own field." But poetry, however much it may concern itself with the spiritual and unseen, must have direct application to the problems of life. "Art lives of the world's life; the world's law is art's law." The poet must gather "the great voice of the world and God," and so interpret it, that men may listen and profit. He must contemplate man both in his individuality and as a social creature, "in his internal and external life, in his place and with his mission in creation." "Poetry,—great, ceaseless, eternal poetry,—exists only in the development, the evolution of life: only there, in life, understood and felt in its universality, can inexhaustible variety be found."

Thus the poet must find his inspiration, not in his own "incomplete, mutilated conceptions," not in the isolated individual, but in the great collective, democratic movements of the people, voicing their dim thoughts and aspirations, "their latent, slumbering, unconscious life." There can be no great poetry to-day, unless the poet identify himself with "the thought fermenting in the breast of the masses and impelling them to action." Poets are the priesthood of the social and political movement, which is the very blood of a modern people; and there is no place for individualist poetry in a social age. "True and sacred art aims at the perfection of society," and the art of the future will be "principally religious and political." He hated the aimless art, that busies itself with the mere picturesque and sentimental, which idealises ages, whose meaning and moral standard have passed. He applauded Schlegel's thesis that poetry must be "national, that is useful and related to the civil and political situation," no longer heedless of the great movements of to-day, but "standing in the centre and swaying the heart of the social impulse." The poet, who went to fight for Greece and died there, typified "the holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples."

This democratic art must have a practical use by being didactic and prophetic. It is not enough that its heart should beat with the people's life; it must help the progress of the race by pointing to the future. Though it may "grow among the ruins, art is ever coloured by the rising sun." "There can be no true poetry without a presentiment of the future"; it is, as said "the extraordinary man," who is the poet of all time,

"Art either sums up the life of a dying age or heralds one about to dawn; it is no caprice of this or that individual, but a solemn page of history or a prophecy; most powerful, when as in Dante, and occasionally in Byron, it is both." But there is no gift of prophecy without an ideal, and "literature, like politics, has no secure foundation without its fixed beliefs and principles,"—those beliefs which make the future and to which facts must bow. "The true European writer will be a philosopher, but with the poet's lyre in his hands." "Nature with her thousand voices cries to the poet, 'Soar, thou art King of earth.' And if we try to pen him down to realism, and rob him of his independent lordship over facts, the poets of the past will answer from their graves, 'We were great, because we created.' It is for poetry to take the creations of the philosopher and give them life and colour, to explore the truth that lies below the real and illumine it with the light of genius, to interpret the universal laws that rule over human history."

And the poet must not only lift men to his vision, but send them forth in quest of it. He is not only prophet but apostle. It is not enough that he should stimulate thought; he must "spur men to translate thought into action." "Contemplative" poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge for instance, are "incomplete." "The element of Action is inseparable from poetry. Poetry," he says, "is for me something like the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is action." "In order to be a religious poet," he writes in criticism of Lamartine, "it is not enough, in my eyes at least to say 'Lord, Lord'; it is necessary to feel his holy law, and to make others feel it in such sort, as that they shall constantly and calmly act in obedience to its precepts." Just as religion gives life and power to philosophy, so it is for art to grasp ideas, translate them by images and symbols, and make them passionate beliefs. "Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire, the angel of strong thoughts, the power that raises men to sacrifice, consumes them, stirs a tumult of ideas within them, puts in their hands a sword, a pen, a dagger." "Written poetry, like music performed, should be in some sense a prelude to other poetry, which the excited soul of the reader composes silently within itself." It will "teach the young all that is greatest in self-sacrifice, constancy, silence, the sense of solitude without despair, long years of torture or delusion unrevealed and dumb, faith in the things that are to be, the hourly struggle for that faith, though hope of victory there be none in this life." And therefore art must be ever brave and full of hope, "teaching man not his weakness but his strength, inspiring him not with faintheartedness but with energy and vigorous will." Its song must be always of steadiness and constancy, and "calmness radiate from the poet's brow, as the spirit of God radiated from the brow of Moses on the wandering Israelites." "The artist is either a priest or a more or less practised mountebank." Woe to him, if he teach spasmodic, evanescent effort, or "revolt and impotent despair, that dies cursing, ere it tries to fight, that says 'All things are evil,' because it finds itself unable to create good." Mazzini has no pity for the poet of pessimism, "whose sense of moral depression and languor" will, if he pose as a religious poet, make his readers "reject religion and him together."

Poetry, then, the modern poetry of action, being essentially related to politics and social life, the poet's themes are in the stir and passion of contemporary events or in national history. What field for literature like the mighty, moving pageant of the democratic world? To watch God's hand guiding the nations to their destinies, to probe the eager ferment of a modern society, to interpret all the dim, half-conscious yearning of the masses,—what inspiration for the poet here! "Popular poetry has invaded everything, the poetry whose epic is revolution, whose satire is revolt." How strong and living are the giants of the Revolution beside the nerveless men and women of the quietist novel. "Poetry has fled from old Europe to give life to the young, new, beautiful Europe of the peoples. Like the swallow, it has left a crumbling ruin to seek a purer air and a more verdant world. It has fled from the King's solitary throne to find its abode in the great arena of the peoples, in the ranks of martyrs for the fatherland, on the patriot's scaffold, in the prison of the brave betrayed." The armies of the Convention, the guerilla-bands of Spain, the German students chanting the songs of Körner on the march to battle, the patriot's anguished passion, the dreams of a liberty to be, the world-mission of European civilisation,—these are the modern poet's themes. "Think you that poetry, whose birth was ushered by such deeds as these, can die ere it has lived? Would you set up the poor, pale, narrow poetry of individuals, a poetry of forms, a poetry that lives and dies in the small circle of a palace or a chapel or a castle,—would you set up this against the grand social poetry, solemn and tranquil and full of hope, which knows none but God in heaven and the people upon earth?" An age of science and industry is no enemy to poetry, for the elements of poetry are eternal. "I tell you, in this Europe there is such life, such poetry in germ, the poetry of ages, of all the generations, that genius itself has not yet dared to attempt to develop it." "Here round you," so he speaks to the poet of the future, "here, before your eyes, there is poetry and movement and a European people waiting for you."

The poet has another field in history. Mazzini prophesied a great future for the historical drama. He was inclined to think that drama would be the accepted form of modern poetry, seeing doubtless that drama is the true communion between poet and people, the natural vehicle of the artist, who has a message to deliver. It would be "a kind of popular pulpit, a chair of the philosophy of humanity"; and he looked forward to the day when the great dramas, such as those of "divine Schiller," would be produced on the stage without mutilations or curtailments to a reverent and patient audience. The function of the historical dramatist, as indeed he thought it was the function of the prose historian, was not so much to make minute research of facts, as to disentangle the lessons hidden under every page of history, to interpret the law of human duty and the mystery of existence. Like every other poet, he must start with a philosophy of life, judging all things by his own law, meting out praise and blame, drawing guidance for the future from the past. The dramatist "may call up the shadows of the past, but like the Witch of Endor, in order to constrain them to reveal the future." His personages must be types, each with its social significance; he must not, as Victor Hugo did, overload them with individual traits, till they lose their message for society, but rather, as Schiller with his Marquis di Posa, so "re-create" them, that they may illustrate some general law of life. Mazzini did not see how pale such characters would be; how difficult it was to reconcile them with biographical accuracy, how likely therefore they were to falsify any induction of historical laws.

His theory of music was a very similar one. Music, like poetry, he thought, was nought without a moral intention, without practical teaching and power to inspire. It should be "the purest and most general and most sympathetic expression of a social faith." He pitilessly criticised the music of the thirties, imitative, exhausted, artificial, clever but without creative power. A faithless and corrupt generation asked for music to amuse it; and music had listened and forgotten its mission. There was melody and good instrumentation, but no soul or thought in it. It was "laughter without peace, weeping without virtue." Operas had no unity, no great passionate note; they were ingenious mosaics, much of them mere noise and extravagance, inferior for all their technique to the chants of the medieval Church, when music had a religious work to do. Rossini had done something; he had broken from the old canons and given liberty to music; but he had the defects of the Romanticist school, he had freed but could not create; he had prepared the way for the music of the future, but it was not his to write it. Mazzini however saw indications that the new music was not far off, and its dawn, he believed, would be in Italy. But Italian melody must wed itself to German harmony. Italian music was "lyrical, impassioned, volcanic, artistic," but without unity or soul. German music knew God, but it was mystical and impersonal, out of touch with everyday human life. It dulled men's impulses to action; it stirred them, but to no useful end, left the soul full of great emotion, but uninspired to perform plain duties.[45] Mazzini was assured that Italy would produce the master, who would unite the strength of both schools, keep the religion of the German school, but point it to practical, human ends. At one time he hoped that perhaps Donizetti might live to do this; afterwards he thought that Meyerbeer was "the precursor spirit of the music of the future." He was always thinking of Opera. When he insists that the music should be in keeping with the subject and its period, when he pleads for the symbolic use of the orchestra, for the wider employment of motives, for the development of the chorus on the model of Greek tragedy, for the large use of recitative, for the entire disuse of cadences and flourishes, he is looking to Opera to be the highest form of music, as he looked to the historical drama to be the highest form of poetry. Apparently he wished to wed them, and looked for the day, when great poets would write librettos for great composers.

Mazzini's criticism of music is for its time so fresh, so full of suggestion and prophecy, that it is matter for regret that his knowledge of it was not more extensive. He knew opera and little beyond it; he had some acquaintance with Beethoven, but he does not seem to have been very strongly attracted by him, or to have made much study of him. He wasted on Donizetti and Meyerbeer the enthusiasm, which should have been reserved for greater men. It is unfortunate that he lived before Wagnerian opera appeared in London. It would be possible to show in detail to what a remarkable extent he anticipated Wagner's theories.[46] Wagner, it is true, rejected the historical drama, because he believed the requirements of art to be incompatible with historical accuracy. But his main doctrines are the same as Mazzini's,—the ethical intention of music, the intimate relationship of art to public life, the belief in the people as the fountain of true art, the value of the folk-song, the reconciliation of harmony and melody, the poet and musician stretching hands to one another and giving 'moral will' to music, by uniting 'word' to 'tone' in Opera. It is permitted to think that, Wagner's nationality notwithstanding, Mazzini would have recognised in him the master of the new music, whose dawn he heralded.

Mazzini had a favourite classification of poets into "objective" and "subjective." The objective artist sinks his own beliefs, and merely reflects and transmits external impressions, neither judging them by his own conception of right and wrong, nor supplying any inspiration or rule of action for mankind. The subjective artist stamps his themes with the imprint of his own individuality; he sits in the seat of judgment and measures out praise and blame; and thus he helps others to form a moral law, and creates the future. The former series, men who excite our admiration but not our love, passes from the Greek poets, all save one, through Shakespeare to Goethe; the latter from Aeschylus through Dante and Michelangelo to Byron and, apparently, Schiller. Dante was Mazzini's highest type of the subjective poet. Something has already been said of his influence on Mazzini's thought,—an influence far greater than that of any other writer. There are few, indeed, of Mazzini's doctrines, which are not found in germ in the Convito or the De Monarchiâ. Mazzini revered him as the strong intellect, which took so little from other men and gave so much; the hero, whose life was one long fight, who "wrote for country, conspired for country, held the pen and sword"; the patriot, "neither Catholic nor Ghibelline nor Guelf, but Christian and Italian," who believed in 'the holy Roman people,' and foretold for Italy the spiritual mastery of the world; the thinker who taught the unity and common task of all mankind; the one true poet of love, to whom the love of man and woman was a spiritual thing, wherein self entered not. He contrasted him with Shakespeare "the lord of individuality," the supreme dramatist who created individuals as no man else has created them, giving his creatures choice of good and evil, and pursuing the lesson of their fates, the choice once made, to the end; who in Hamlet had of pure creative genius made a prophetic type, that belonged to two centuries after him, and had no contemporary original. But Shakespeare was a man who took life as he found it, untouched by strong moral sympathies, without sense of the race or glimpse of duty or looking to the future; therefore a cynic and a "sceptic," obsessed by the feeling of life's nothingness, with no illuminating faith in man's predestined glory.

Mazzini's favourite contrast was between Goethe and Byron. For Goethe's intellect he had the profoundest admiration; he seems to have studied Faust carefully, and had some acquaintance at all events with his other works. "Goethe," he says, "is an intellect, that receives, elaborates, and reproduces every possible form of human emotion and aspiration. He dwells aloft, alone, a mighty Watcher in the midst of creation, scrutinizing with equal penetration and interest the depths of ocean and the calyx of the flower, ... laying bare in Faust the problem of the age in all its terrible nakedness, ... the most representative poet that Europe has produced since Shakespeare." But great intellect as he is, he misses the highest; for he loses the man in the artist, he has no moral standard of his own, no sense of the unity of life; he is the poet of detail and analysis, "feeling everything but never feeling the whole," living aloof from religion and politics, a cold spectator of the world-moving deeds around him, "learning neither to esteem men nor to better them, nor even to suffer with them," "without need of doing or sacred sorrow or any deep and ardent love." "The poet of the bourgeoisie, he counsels calm and contemplation, order and resignation, tells men to fit themselves to their environment, fulfil their little duties, plant themselves comfortably, do good around them, always provided that the risks are not too great, and that they do not disturb the harmony and balance of the faculties of sight."

Turn from Goethe, he says, to Byron; "there is the man himself, who hopes and strives and suffers for the race, as Dante did, and as Aeschylus did before Dante." Like Goethe, he too is "a poet of individuality," "a type of power without an aim"; but, unlike Goethe's, his verse is no mere reflection of other men's thoughts and actions. He stamps his portraitures with his own personality, surveying the world "from a single, comprehensive point of view," and interpreting and judging it by his own inner light; more deep, as Goethe is more vast, seeking the sublime rather than the beautiful, ever a worshipper of force and action. "In Byron the ego is revealed in all its pride of power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled plenitude of all its faculties, aspiring to rule the world around him solely for dominion's sake, to exercise upon it the Titanic force of his will." It is this power of will, necessarily propelled to seek an outlet in action, that appealed so strongly to Mazzini. Byron bears his part in the political and social conflicts round him, "wandering through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet, wounded and bearing the arrow in his wound"; loving and understanding Italy and Rome, dying for a nation's cause in Greece. And Mazzini found in his verse a great social lesson, such as Goethe never tried to teach. Consciously or unconsciously Byron foretold the doom of individualism and aristocracy. His characters are moulded on "a single type—the individual; free, but nothing more than free; iron souls in iron frames, who climb the alps of the physical world as well as the alps of thought"; but all bearing in their faces the stamp of failure, "a gloomy and ineffaceable sadness." "Gifted with a liberty they knew not how to use; with a power and energy they knew not how to apply; with a life, whose purpose and aim they comprehend not;—they drag through their useless and convulsed existences. Byron destroys them one after the other. The emptiness of the life and death of solitary individuality has never been summed up so powerfully as in his pages."

But Byron, no more than Goethe, wrote the poetry of Mazzini's ideal. In a generation without religion or pity or enthusiasm, amid "English cant and French levity and Italian stagnation," Byron was driven to passionate, tumultuous cursings of a false society. But it was a note of rebellion and despair. Neither poet had the sense of the race, of man redeemed by love and social service, of the new hope and power that would come, as men learned to work together for the common end. Mazzini gives no indication that he ever found the art that he looked for. He seems to have thought that some of the modern Slav poetry came nearest to it. The new English literature does not appear to have attracted him; there is no evidence that he read Browning, and if he had, he would probably have condemned him as "objective." Historical drama has conspicuously failed to do what he expected of it. The poetry of social problems is still for the most part analytic and destructive. The poet of his vision, the constructive, prophetic, apostolic poet, with his message for humanity, whose songs will reach the workshop and the cottage and inspire a nation's policy, is yet to come.

Chapter XIX
The Man

Poetic temperament—Defects as a thinker—Greatness as a moral teacher—Strength and weakness as a politician—The man.

Carlyle said that Mazzini was "by nature a little lyrical poet." The implication was contemptuous, but it had a bottom of truth. Mazzini, indeed, save for his early aspirations to the drama, never dreamed of being a poet. His conception of the poet's function was so high, the qualities he demanded of him so exacting, that, if he ever felt the call, he put it away, no doubt, as something to which he could not reach. It is doubtful even whether he wrote more than one poem when a youth. He aspired only to be critic, to do something to prepare the way for the poet of the future. But he had qualities, that would have made of him a poet of no mean order. There are many passages in his writings, which show his deep communion with nature. When he writes of "the vast ocean, dashing, like a wave of eternal poetry, against the barren rocks of Brittany," or describes a sunrise from the Alps,—"the first ray of light trembling on the horizon, vague and pale, like a timid, uncertain hope; then the long line of fire cutting the blue heaven, firm and decided as a promise,"—truly the consecration and the poet's dream are his. His critical essays prove with what spiritual insight he would have touched the poetry of man and society. We have seen how marvellous for an outsider was his presentiment of the future of music. And his whole intellectual make, alike in strength and weakness, is that of the artist,—of the artist, that is, as he conceived him, God's messenger to the heart of man. He had little power of scientific thought, of accurate reasoning or careful arrangement and analysis of facts. It led to a curious misconception of scientific method. "Science," he says,—"the true, great, fruitful science,—is as much intuition as experiment." He generalises with a hazardous confidence. Sometimes he uses words, that are no more than words, to push difficulties into a corner and stand in front of them. In spite of his allegiance to "tradition," he generally prefers deductive to inductive reasoning. "Principles prevail over facts," as he says; but he often does not see, in spite of his own cautions, how, without a supreme respect for facts, a principle may hang not on the eternal truths, but on the fancy of a solitary brain. His own scientific studies were small; save for some acquaintance with astronomy and geography,—the former to feed his sense of the infinite, the latter for its relationship to nationality,—he seems to have given no attention to any branch of science. He accepted without question the Genesis story of the creation of man. At a time when Darwinism was bringing a sword into the intellectual world, he lived apparently uninterested and untouched by it.

The same defect of method appears in his other studies. Keen as was his interest in social questions, he evidently had no grasp of economic science; beyond Adam Smith, it is doubtful whether he read any of the great economists, and at a later date he entirely failed to understand the economic side of Karl Marx. His theories of history, again, so subordinate everything to his desire to make it didactic, that he regarded research and accuracy as comparatively unimportant. He thought,—rash man,—that facts had already been accumulated in sufficient abundance and certainty. Greatly indeed he conceived the historian's ultimate function—to discover the laws of human progress, and be "prophet of a higher social end"; but he slurred over the difficulty of reading facts aright, and was ever prone to let fancy take their place. He would have made the historian's method deductive to a dangerous degree, and had him fill the gaps of history from an abstract study of human nature; he apparently approved the Thucydidean method of invented speeches.

Here and everywhere he was apt to look down on erudition. He believed that Genius,—a kind of mystic, God-inspired faculty, that lived on intuition and not on painfully acquired knowledge,—discovers at a glance the secrets of nature and ethics and history. "Where we see only the confused light of the Milky Way, they see stars." Though he would have himself disclaimed the title to genius, he had a supreme confidence in his own thought. It was difficult for him to own an error, and hence he never learnt from his mistakes. It was true of him, as Renan said of Lamennais, that "when a man believes that he possesses all truth, he naturally disdains the painful, humble path of research, and regards the investigation of details as a pure dilettante fancy." This was no doubt the chief cause why his mind so soon stopped growing. We find in his early writings, when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the germ, and generally the developed form of every doctrine that he preached. His character developed normally, but not his intellect. Religion, ethics, politics, social theories, literary canons,—all issued forth at once from his early-ripened brain, and fixed themselves once for all. He was always reluctant to enquire for or admit new knowledge. It is strange, lover of books though he was, how restricted sometimes was his range of reading. His poets were the poets of his youth and early manhood, and he read few that wrote after 1840. Closely as he studied the Gospels, he seems to have given little or no attention to exegesis. In spite of his keen interest in Utilitarianism, there is no trace that he read the later writers of the school. Though so long in intimate touch with English political thought, he does not seem to have known Burke or Ricardo or the Mills or Herbert Spencer.

As a thinker, therefore, his defects are great. His thought, indeed, always has its value, coming as it does from a man of very great intellectual power and large experience of life, one who fearlessly penetrated to the heart of things, and was therefore in the true sense original. Its range is wonderful for one who led so strenuous a life of action. Faulty as his argument often is, obvious as are the gaps, he wrote comparatively few pages, that are not stamped with great and stimulating thought. But his mind was too loosely organised, too often out of touch with contemporary knowledge. He has left an imposing and suggestive system, and yet perhaps it somehow fails to add greatly to the sum of human knowledge. But it is just the qualities, that depreciate him as a thinker, which make him great as a moral teacher. His want of logic, his loose use of words hurt not here. The involved and rushing language, like a tumbling mountain stream, becomes a strength. That very rigidity, that lifelong iteration of a few dominant ideas, carry force and conviction, that a more agile intellect were powerless to give. His warm and palpitating generalisations, for all the flaws in their reasoning, bear the irrefutable mark of moral reality. He had that union of real intellectual force and spiritual fervour, that gives the insight into moral truth, and learns the secrets of heaven and hell. He was able to be a great moralist, because in a rare degree he had himself the moral sense, because the passion for righteousness had so penetrated all his being, that he could speak and be understood on the deep things of God, had something in his own soul that found its way to other souls. And, above all, he spoke with authority. Absolute confidence in his own beliefs was joined to truest personal humility, and made the prophet. Humblest and least ambitious of men, he felt his call from God; and in God's name he was assertive, dogmatic, sometimes seemingly egotistic. If he spoke authoritatively and intolerantly, it was that a duty was laid upon him, and woe to him if he preached it not. His principles were living and victorious certainties to him. "If a principle is true," he said, "its applications are not only possible but inevitable." And this unquestioning conviction made him as fearless morally as he was intellectually,—fearless with the supreme bravery of one who never shrinks from duty,—fearless not only for himself but others, bridling all the impulsive tenderness within him, and requiring of his fellow-workers the same readiness for sacrifice, which he exacted of himself. And so his words, aflame from a pure and passionate heart, come with the intensity of prophetic power. Beyond the words of any other man of modern times, they bring counsel and comfort to those who have drunk of the misery and stir and hope of the age. They have the greater virtue, that impels their hearers to do likewise. Mazzini is one of the small band, who have the strength as well as the love of Christ, not only the unselfishness that draws, but the conviction and the power that command, who impose their own beliefs and make disciples.

Would he, had he had the opportunity, have done what he held higher than to teach through books, and been the missionary of a religion? Had Italy been freed in 1848, we may be sure he would have left his desk, forsaken politics, and gone about the land, preaching faith in God and Progress and Humanity. Probably no other man, since the Reformation, has had such apostolic power. Would his mission have found an answer or ended in pitiable collapse? He would probably have had no better fate than others, who have tried to found new churches. There may be room for new faiths, but there is little for new churches in the world to-day. But this does not necessarily mean failure. His church might have been empty, his state religion proved a soulless husk; but in the communion of scattered men and women, who are groping for the truth, he might have laid a cornerstone of that church, which is neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem, which without forms or unity of doctrine, spreads the unity of spiritual truth. Something, even as it is, he has done for this. His creed may fail to content the knowledge of to-day, but he stands a convincing witness to the spiritual, to the eternal needs of the soul, to religion as the master fact of life, though creeds may fail and systems perish.

How does he rank as a politician? Our estimate must be a mixed one. As a political thinker he stands high. He has left a theory of the state, that is priceless because informed by a great moral ideal. And apart from this, it has its value from his wide and profound knowledge of modern politics and the practical sense that almost always keeps his idealism in touch with facts. His faith in democracy, the optimism which came of his trust in Providence, his cautious handling of economic tendencies saved him from the mistakes of Carlyle and Ruskin. His conviction that the common-sense of the people was feeling out its way independently of any theory or school, kept him from the short-lived formulas of the individualists. His deeper knowledge of men and deeper reading of history gave him a saner and completer view than that of the collectivists. None of them, not even Ruskin, can match the warmth and inspiration of a conception, that raises politics to be the instrument of the divine plan,—an instrument not only to destroy injustice and poverty, but to redeem the highest part of man and bring the rule of brotherhood and unity and social peace. In the detailed application of his political doctrines he often failed from that same inaccessibility to facts, which marred him otherwise. His republic missed the essential; his theories of democratic government are vague and hardly satisfy. But even here he is the prophet of one great enduring principle. Among the statesmen of the century, he is almost the only one, who understood what nationality meant, saw its essential relationship to democracy, and put it on an unassailable foundation. It was this that made him teacher of Italian Unity, and therefore maker of modern Italy. Whether without him Italy would be united to-day, we cannot tell; but at all events it was he who gave the impulse, his bold vision that saw that the hard consummation was attainable, and gave others too the faith to see it.

As a political thinker, then, he is great; as a practical political worker, he largely failed. True, he had many of a statesman's qualities. He often read character acutely, though his confidence in men sometimes deceived him, and again and again he was the victim of informers. He had rare industry and considerable organising power; though, owing to his solitary work, he had learned to bury himself too much in details,—in the mass of correspondence and the immense labour he put out to scrape together little funds,—and in them he sometimes neglected the survey of the whole. Above all, as he proved at Rome, he had the true statesman's gift of leadership and inspiration. But it is more than doubtful whether, even under happier circumstances, he would have been an effective politician. His knowledge of human nature was more subtle in the abstract than in the concrete; individuals were to him too much wholly good or wholly bad, and he did not recognise how complex are the motives that sway puzzled humanity. He could rarely take a sane, unprejudiced view of a situation. It amazes us that he expected Pio Nono to respond to his appeal in 1847, and thought that, if the republic came at Rome in 1870, it would found a state religion. His misconception of Piedmontese policy throughout the fifties is a yet stronger illustration of distorted vision. This was one of the reasons why he found it so difficult to compromise. He could not distinguish non-essentials from essentials, and it was nearly as hard for him to give way on the one as on the other. Compromise in small or great seemed cowardice, and there was no doubt a strain of egotism in his obstinacy. It humiliated him to surrender any detail of the theories, which he preached with such undiscriminating confidence.

But one would fain close not with the thinker or the moral teacher or the politician, but the man. Mazzini's personal life was one of a very rare purity and beauty, that stands out in his generation noblest and faithfullest and most inspired. Its only serious flaw lies in those few lapses from public candour, which have been noted in these pages. Sometimes he was bitter and intolerant, but the provocation was great. In earlier life he was often querulous and self-absorbed, but it may be counted to him, that, with his sensitive nature, he came through loneliness and poverty with his moral strength unbroken. Except for these, the critic's microscope can find no specks. Brave, earnest, true, without trace of affectation, he bore the stamp of whitest sincerity. Gentle, affectionate, pure as few are pure, he was friend and counsellor and inspirer to those who knew him, gripping and subduing them with that wondrous sympathy of his, that came of burning love of goodness and made the saving of a soul the highest thing in life. That generosity, which made him share purse and clothes with others perhaps less destitute than himself, and give half his scanty income to help a woman and children that he hardly knew, made him lavish out of his busy days time and thought to help struggling souls. Ever intense in his affections, grateful for any act of kindness, yearning for friendship with the yearning of the homeless man, he was one to draw others with bonds of love.

He had a large and loving view of life. Pettiness and malice and jealousy had very little place in it. Passionate though he was for morality, he was, outside his political work and controversies and an occasional touch of cynicism in his talk, a very tolerant man. No person has, he said, "a right to judge a special case without positive data on the nature of the fact." He was angry and impatient with the "cavilling spirit of mediocrity," that takes pleasure in the lapses of "the mighty-souled." Among his friends he never sermonised, and he had no desire to bend their private life to his own pattern. Ever more or less sad himself, he rejoiced in their happiness. "You are a happy mortal," he writes to one of them on his marriage. "I am, notwithstanding my dislike for happiness, truly glad that you are so." Never man had more joy in others' home felicity. It was only among his fellow-revolutionists, whom he thought of as partners in his own high call, that he was exacting and sometimes ungenerous, though he pleaded earnestly with them that public work should leave room for the inner life of love and friendship. In his political controversies, it must be confessed, his equanimity deserted him, and he is often intolerant and unfair. He was too ready to think that bad politics implied bad morals, and his hatred of Louis Napoleon and Cavour made him pen pages, that one would gladly not remember. But even in politics he could sometimes do justice to an opponent, who obviously acted from high convictions; and he was one of the few Italian nationalists, who could appreciate the motives of the Catholic Volunteers.

But his essential greatness lies on the active side. Above all else he shines out white in that consuming love of humanity, that accepted poverty and weariness and danger, that made him forego home and love, comfort and congenial work, and give himself to one long, self-forgetting service for the good of men. Duty was no abstract precept with him, but part of his very being. In adversity and trial he had schooled himself to follow her, till disobedience to her call became almost impossible, and he did not wait for her to speak but sought her out. It was nearly allied to his almost superstitious fear of personal happiness. Those miserable years in Switzerland and London wrought on him, till melancholy grew to a habit. He lost something of it afterwards in the society of his English friends, but it never left him; and it tinted all his life with the gentle sadness, which is near akin to spiritual yearnings and large-hearted love. Sunless and unwholesome as it seems at times, after all, as with the Man of sorrows, it purged him to the same forgetfulness of self. It was no enervating grief; "do not allow yourself to be weakened and self-absorbed by your trouble" was his perennial lesson to friends, who had lost dear ones. His was the "other part of grief, the noble part, which makes the soul great and lifts it up." "By dint of repeating to myself," he once wrote to Mrs Carlyle, "that there is no happiness under the moon, that life is a self-sacrifice meant for some higher and happier thing; that to have a few loving beings, or if none, to have a mother watching you from Italy or from Heaven (it is all the same) ought to be quite enough to preserve us from falling." He, to a degree that few have done, trod self victoriously under; habitually and systematically year by year, untempted by failure or success, by misery or comparative happiness, he denied himself even the little indulgences and relaxations and declensions from the strait hard path, by which most good men make their compromise with the world and flesh. So remorselessly was duty law to him, that sometimes work and sacrifice became ends in themselves; and he laboured painfully on in the path which he had chosen, when it would have served his cause better to have rested or turned to other activities. And the unbending labour had its fruit in that wonderful sum of his life's work, that, beyond all the exacting details of his political organisation, has left its stamp on modern Europe, has left so vast a body of thought in half the provinces of the human mind, has its yet richer legacy in the example of a life given perfectly and wholly to the cause of men.

He was not the mere conscientious worker only; he lived in the light of a spiritual vision, and that light radiated in almost every page he wrote, on every man and woman whom he touched. Besides the sense of duty he had faith. "He was," writes a living English statesman, "perhaps the most impressive person I have ever seen, with a fiery intensity of faith in his own principles and in their ultimate triumph, which made him seem inspired; a man to waken sleeping souls, and fill them with his own fervour." He loved to commune with those of his own spiritual kin,—Dante, Savonarola, Cromwell,—men who had the same undoubting faith in the righteousness of their cause and their fellow-work with God,—men, it may be, one-sided and intellectually incomplete, but gifted with the power to do great things and lift up life. And so great principles and nobleness of aim carried him through a series of practical mistakes, and left his life to be a permanent enriching of the race. What if he dreamed dreams, that for generations yet may be no more than dreams? What if his mental ken reached not to all the knowledge of the age? What if he marred his work by mistakes and miscalculations? His errors have passed; his intellectual limitations can be supplied. His was the rarer and the greater part, to lift men out of the low air of common life up to the heights, where thought is larger, and life runs richer, and the great verities are seen, undimmed by self and sophistry. The idealist is still mankind's best friend; and he does most for the race, who purges its spiritual vision, and breathes into cold duty, till it becomes a thing of life and passion and power. Greater still is he, who is not idealist only, but saint and hero, and in his life bears witness to the truth he teaches. Such saint and hero and idealist Mazzini was; and while men and women live, who would be true to themselves and to their call, who value sacrifice and duty above power and success, so long will there be those, who will love him and be taught by him.