The Power that Uplifts
(August
21, 1909, On
Nationalism, pp.455-459)
OF
ALL the great
actors who were in the forefront of the Italian Revolution, Mazzini and
Cavour were the most essential
to the Italian regeneration. Of the two Mazzini was undoubtedly the
greater. Cavour was the statesman and organiser, Mazzini the prophet
and creator. Mazzini was busy with the great and eternal ideas which
move masses of men in all countries and various ages, Cavour with the
temporary needs and circumstances of modern Italy. The one was an acute
brain, the other a mighty soul. Cavour belongs to Italy, Mazzini to all
humanity. Cavour was the man of the hour, Mazzini is the citizen of
Eternity. But the work of Mazzini could not have been immediately
crowned with success if there had been no Cavour. The work of Cavour
would equally have been impossible but for Mazzini. Mazzini summed up
the soul of all humanity, the idea of its past and the inspiration of
its future in Italian forms and gave life to the dead. At his breath
the dead bones clothed themselves with flesh and the wilderness of
poisonous brambles blossomed with the rose. Mazzini found Italy
corrupt, demoralised, treacherous, immoral, selfish, wholly divided and
incapable of union; he gave her the impulse of a mighty hope, a lofty
spirituality, an intellectual impulse which despising sophistry and
misleading detail went straight to the core of things and fastened on
the one or two necessities, an ideal to live and die for and the
strength to live and die for it. This was all he did, but it was
enough. Cavour brought the old Italian statesmanship, diplomacy,
practicality and placed it at the service of the great ideal of liberty
and unity which Mazzini had made the overmastering passion of the
millions. Yet these two deliverers and lovers of Italy never understood
each other. Mazzini hated Cavour as a dishonest trickster and
Machiavellian, Cavour scorned Mazzini as a fanatic and dangerous
firebrand. It is easy to assign superficial and obvious causes
for the undying misunderstanding and to say
that the monarchist and practical statesman and the utopian and
democrat were bound to misunderstand and perpetually distrust and
dislike each other. But there was a deeper cause.
The
one thing which
Mazzini most hated and from which he strove to deliver the hearts and
imaginations of the young men of Italy was what he summed up in the
word Machiavellianism. The Machiavellian is the man of pure intellect
without imagination who, while not intellectually dead to great
objects, does not make them an ideal but regards them from the point of
view of concrete interests and is prepared to use in effecting them
every means which can be suggested by human cunning or put into motion
by unscrupulous force. Italian patriotism previous to the advent of
Mazzini was cast in this Machiavellian mould. The Carbonari movement
which was Italy's first attempt to live was permeated with
it.
Mazzini lifted up the
country from this low and ineffective level and gave
it
the only force which
can justify the hope of revival, the force of the
spirit within, the strength to disregard immediate interests and
surrounding circumstances and, carried away by the passion for an
ideal, trusting oneself to the impetus and increasing velocity of the
force
it
creates, to scorn
ideas of impossibility and improbability and to fling
life, goods arid happiness away on the cast.of dice already clogged
against one by adverse Fortune and unfavourable circumstance. The
spiritual force within not only creates the future but creates the
materials for the future. It is not limited to the existing materials
either in their nature or in their quantity. It can trans form bad
material into good material, insufficient means into abundant means. It
was a deep consciousness of this great truth that gave Mazzini the
strength to create modern Italy. His eyes were always fixed on the mind
and heart of the nation, very little on the external or internal
circumstances of Italy. He was not a statesman but he had a more than
statesmanlike insight. His plan of a series of petty, local and
necessarily abortive insurrections strikes the ordinary practical man
as the very negation of common sense and political wisdom. It seems
almost as futile as the idea of some wild brains, if indeed the idea be
really cherished, that by random
assassinations the freedom of this country can be vindicated. There is,
however, a radical difference. Mazzini knew well what he was about. His
eyes were fixed on the heart of the nation and as the physician of the
Italian malady his business was not with the ultimate and perfect
result but with the creation of conditions favourable to complete cure
and resurgence. He knew final success was impossible without the
creation of a force that could not be commanded for sometime to come.
But he also knew that even that force could not succeed without a great
spiritual and moral strength behind its action and informing its
aspirations. It was this strength that he sought to create. The
spiritual
force he created by the promulgation of the mighty and uplifting ideas
which pervade his writings and of which Young Italy was the
organ. But moral force cannot be confirmed merely by ideas,
it
can only be forged
and tempered in the workshop of action. And
it
was the habit of
action, the habit of strength, daring and initiative
which Mazzini sought to recreate in the torpid heart and sluggish limbs
of Italy. And with
it
he sought to
establish the sublime Roman spirit of utter self-sacrifice
and self-abnegation, contempt of difficulty and apparent impossibility
and iron insensibility to defeat. For his purpose the very
hopelessness of the enterprises he set on foot was more favourable than
more possible essays. And when others and sometimes his own heart
reproached him with flinging away so many young and promising lives
into
the bloody trench of his petty yet impossible endeavours, the faith
and wisdom in him upheld him in the face of every discouragement.
Because he had that superhuman strength, he was permitted to uplift
Italy. Had
it
been God's purpose
that Italy should become swiftly one of the greater
European powers, he would have been permitted to free her also. He
would have done
it
in a different way
from Cavour's, after a much longer lapse of time,
with a much more terrible and bloody expense of human life but without
purchasing Italy's freedom in the French market by the bribe of Savoy
and Nice and with such a divine output of spiritual and moral force as
would have sustained his country for centuries and fulfilled his
grandiose dream of an Italy spiritually, intellectually and politically
leading Europe.
The work was given to
Cavour precisely because he was a lesser man. Mazzini saw in him the
revival of Machiavellianism and the frustration of his own moral work.
He was wrong, but not wholly wrong. The temper and methods of Cavour
were predominatingly Machiavellian. He resumed that element in Italian
character and gave
it
a triumphant
expression. Like the Carbonari he weighed forces, gave a high place to
concrete material interests, attempted great but not impossible objects
and by means which were bold but not heroic, used diplomacy,
temporising and shuffling with a force of which they were incapable and
unlike them did not shrink from material sacrifices. He succeeded where
they failed, not merely because he was a great statesman, but because
he had learnt to cherish the unity and freedom of Italy not as mere
national interests but as engrossing ideals. The passion greater than a
man's love for child and wife which he put into these aspirations and
the emotional fervour with which he invested his Liberal ideal of a
free Church in a free State, measure the spiritual gulf between himself
and the purely Machiavellian Carbonari. It was this that gave him the
force to attempt greatly and to cast all on the hazard of a single die.
He had therefore the inspiration of a part of the Mazzinian gospel and
he used the force which Mazzini created. Without
it
he would have been
helpless. It was not Cavour who saved Italy,
it
was the force of
resurgent Italy working through Cavour. History often misrepresents and
it
formerly represented
the later part of the Revolution as entirely engineered by his
state-craft, but
it
is now recognised
that more than once in the greatest matters Cavour planned one way and
the great Artificer of nations planned in another. But Cavour had the
greatest gift of a states man, to recognise that events were wiser than
himself and throwing aside his attachment to the success of his own
schemes to see and use the advantages of a situation he had not
foreseen. This gift Mazzini, the fanatic and doctrinaire, almost
entirely lacked. Still the success of Cavour prolonged in the Italian
character and political action some of the lower qualities of the long
enslaved nation and is responsible for the reverses, retardations, and
deep-seated maladies which keep back Italy from the fulfilment of her greatness. Mazzini, with
his superior diagnosis of the national disease and his surgeon's
pitilessness, would have probed deeper, intensified and prolonged the
agony but made a radical cure.
The
circumstances in India forbid the use of the same means as the Italians
used. But the general psychological laws which govern nations in their
rise, greatness, decline and resurgence are always the same. The
freedom we seek in India may be different in its circumstances from
Italian freedom, the means to be used are certainly different, but the
principle is the same. The old patriotism of the nineteenth century in
India was petty, unscrupulous, weak, full of insincerities,
concealment, shufflings, concerned with small material interests, not
with great ideals, though not averse to looking intellectually and from
far-off at great objects. It had neither inspiration nor truth nor
statesmanship. Nationalism has done part of the work of a Mazzini by
awakening a great spiritual force in the country and giving the new
generation great ideals, a wide horizon of hope 'and aspiration, an
intense faith and energy. It has sought like Mazzini to raise up the
moral condition of the nation to the height of love, strength,
self-sacrifice, constancy under defeat, unwearied and undaunted
perseverance, the habit of individual and organised action,
self-reliance and indomitable enterprise; but
it
has rejected the old
methods of insurrectionary violence and replaced them by self-help and
passive resistance. That work is not yet complete and only when
it
is complete will
it
be possible for a
strength to be generated in the country which the past represented by
the bureaucracy will consent to recognise as the representative of the
future and to abdicate in its favour by a gradual cessation of powers.
It is our hope that as the work has begun, so
it
will continue in the
spirit of Nationalism and not only the political circumstances of India
be changed but her deeper disease be cured and by a full evocation of
her immense stores of moral and spiritual strength that be accomplished
for India which Mazzini could not accomplish for Italy, to place her in
the head and forefront of the new world whose birth-throes are now
beginning to convulse the Earth.