Part 3
And so this solitude more than any other was able to inspire the degree of enthusiasm and reasonableness necessary for an ambitious ascetic: an ascetic in the original meaning of the austere word, desiring, like the ancient antagonists, to prepare himself by rigid discipline for the struggles and the conquests of the earth.
“What pillar of fire, what burning desert, what lonely mountain top, what bottomless cave, what malarious pool, what solitary, barren, or tragic spot can be surpassed by this place, in the power of kindling the sacred spark of madness in one who believes himself destined to engrave on new tables of stone new laws for the religious guidance of the people?” Thus I used to think while presentiments of forms yet uncreated arose within me, fostered by that same silence in which so many extinct forms of our humanity were gathered together. Everything there is dead, but everything might suddenly come to life again in some spirit with enough superfluity of strength and heat to accomplish the prodigy. It is difficult to imagine the grandeur and terror of such a resurrection. He within whose consciousness it could be realised would appear to himself and others to be possessed by a mysterious and incalculable force greater far than that which used to assail the Pythia of old. Instead of the fury of a god present on the tripod, his mouth would express that very genius of the races which is the funereal guardian of innumerable destinies long ago fulfilled. His oracle would not be merely a chink opened into a world above the senses, but the sum of all human wisdom mingled with the breath of Earth, that highest of prophetesses, according to the message of Æschylus. And once again the multitudes would bend before the divine aspect of his madness; not as at Delphi, to implore the dark utterances of the ambiguous God, but to receive the clear answer given by previous existences, that answer which the Nazarene never gave. He was too illiterate, and the desert beneath the mountains of Judea on the western bank of the Dead Sea, in which he chose to find his revelation, was too stony: a place of rocks and precipices, destitute of foot-prints, blind to all thought. The solitary youth felt no fear of famishing jackals, but he feared thought. His pale hand had power to tame savage beasts, but thoughts as fiery and masterful as those which wander over the Latian desert would have devoured him. When the bad angel drove him to the top of the mountain and showed him the fertile land below, and pointed out the position of the different countries of the world and the deep and whirling currents of human desire, he closed his eyelids: he would not see, he would not know. But the great Revealer must extend the horizon of his consciousness beyond all limits, and embrace within it days and years, centuries and millenniums. The truth he sets forth must be the outcome of the whole life lived by men up to the present hour. It must be a fire in which the ascending powers of many generations may be absorbed; so that thus harmonised and multiplied, they may move onward in greater unison and with greater certainty towards an ever purer ideal.
Sometimes, too, I was haunted by the phantom of him, whom one day believed to have created King of Rome. “There was lacking,” I used to think, “even in this most admirable inspirer of heroic feeling, in this joyful revenger of youthful blood, there was lacking the ascetic discipline of the sepulchre of the nations. Had he been able even for a time to turn aside his spirit from the things which pressed upon him and bend it towards immutable things, he might have discovered some idea greater than his own mortal person, and might have chosen it to be ruler of his actions. Then his dream of Latin empire would have grown closer and weightier and more tenacious, so that the force of events and himself combined could not have finally dissipated and destroyed it as they did. But his idea, which was too much bound up with daily life, too human in fact, was to die with him. He never attained knowledge of the secret by which man prolongs the efficacy of his action into all time. The impulses given by the man were as vehement as they could be, but their propagation was brief and uncertain, because they originated in a centre of spontaneous powers which were not subject to any superior conception evolved from a severe order of meditation. And so his work was not higher than himself, and lasted no longer than the work of destruction. His destiny was controlled by the old oracles. The answer given by the Pythia as to the fate of Corinth might, after thousands of years, serve for him also:--_An eagle has conceived by a rock, and shall give birth to a fierce lion, greedy for human flesh, which shall work great slaughter._--He did but obey the prediction, like the petty tyrant Cypselus. And the King of Rome faded away into space like a column of smoke.”
Such was the colour of the thoughts awakened in me by the aspect of a place which--according to Dante’s words--seemed formed by nature herself for universal empire: _ad universaliter principandum_. And while Dante’s arguments to prove the divine right of the Roman power recurred to my memory, the summit of my intellect was occupied by that motto which the Latin races, if they wish to be born again, would do well to adopt in its exact and rigid form as the rule of their vital institutions:--_Maxima nobile, maxima præesse convenit._ It is meet that the noblest should also be the greatest.
And in the company of that great and tyrannical spirit I used to think: “Oh, venerable father of our language, thou hadst faith in the necessity of hierarchies and differences between men; thou didst believe in the superiority of the virtue transmitted through heredity in the blood; thou didst firmly believe in a virtue of race which can by degrees, by one selection after another, elevate man to the highest splendour of his moral beauty. When thou didst expound the genealogy of Æneas, thou sawest a manner of divine predestination in the concourse of blood.” Now, what mysterious concourse of blood, what vast experience of culture, what propitious harmony of circumstances shall give birth to the new King of Rome? _Natura ordinatus ad imperandum_--ordained by nature unto empire--but, unlike any other monarch, his task will not be to reconfirm or raise the value which--under the influence of various teachings--the nations have been used to set upon the things of life; it will rather be to abolish or invert them. Conscious of the whole significance of those events which compose man’s history, and familiar with the essence of all the supreme wills which have directed important movements, he will be capable of the work of construction, and of throwing out towards the future that ideal bridge by which the privileged races will at last be able to cross the abyss now apparently separating them from the power of which they are ambitious.
And among all the images which the sacred soil suggested to my soul, this image of the king was the most vivid. Sometimes he almost seemed to me a created form; and I used to gaze on him eagerly, while sudden ideas of indescribable beauty flashed across my intellect and faded away, never perhaps to appear again.
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Thus the Roman Campagna with its severe teaching strengthened me to follow out the perfection of my manhood, to assert my inward sovereignty, to trace with a firm hand that “line of circumference from which human beauty is generated,” according to Leonardo’s saying. And at the close of each day I asked myself: “By what new thoughts has my treasure been enriched? What new energies have been developed from my being? What new possibilities have I caught sight of?” And I wished that every day should bear the impress of my style, should be distinguished by some sign of vigorous art, by some proud emblem of victory. My familiarity with Thucydides set before me the example of those strategists of his, who are constantly making fine, pithy harangues to their soldiers, then fighting with all their might, and finally raising a trophy on the field.
_Cui bono?_--was the cry which came from far and wide out of the mouths of a twilight crowd with voices not unlike eunuchs’.--What is the meaning, what is the value of life? Why live? Why strive? All efforts are useless, all is vanity and sorrow. We ought to kill off our passions one after another, and then extirpate to the very roots the hope and desire which are the cause of life. Renunciation, complete unconsciousness, the vanishing away of dreams, absolute annihilation--that is the final liberation.
They were a miserable race stricken with leprosy reiterating their dreary complaint. The ancient Persians, as the ever-fresh Herodotus narrates, used to attribute this foul infirmity to offences committed _against the Sun_. And these slavish people had indeed offended against the Sun.
A certain number of them, hoping to be cleansed, had bathed in great fonts of piety, where they softened and anointed themselves with great contrition. But the sight of these was quite as repugnant.
I turned away my eyes and ears elsewhere; and my heart-strings throbbed with proud joy, because my eyes were undimmed by tears, and could perceive all lines and all colours, because my healthy, watchful ears could hear all sounds and all rhythms, because my spirit could rejoice boundlessly in fugitive appearances and know how to cultivate within itself very different forms of melancholy, how to find the sweetest value of life in the rapidity of its metamorphoses and in the denseness of its mysteries. “Oh manifold Beauty of the World,” I used then to pray, “not to thee alone do my praises ascend; not to thee alone, but also to my forefathers, to those also who, remote ages ago, understood how to enjoy thee, and transmitted their fervid and rich blood to me. Praised be they now and for ever, for the beautiful wounds which they inflicted, for the beautiful fires they kindled, for the beautiful goblets they emptied, for the beautiful garments which clothed them, for the beautiful palfreys they caressed, for the beautiful women they enjoyed, for all their slaughter, their intoxication, their magnificence, their luxury, let them be praised; because thus did they form in me those senses in which thou canst widely and deeply reflect thyself, oh Beauty of the World, as in five wide and deep seas!”
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In the meantime, the poets, discouraged and erring, having exhausted their store of rhymes in evoking images of other days, in weeping over their own dead illusions, and in counting the colours of the dying leaves, were asking, some ironically, some seriously: “What can be our function now? Are we to exalt universal suffrage in senile rhymes? Are we to hasten with the breathlessness of hexameters the fall of the king, the advent of republics, the accession of the people to power? Is there no demagogue Cleophontes who manufactures _lire_ in Rome, as in Athens of old? For a modest sum we might persuade the incredulous, on his very instruments tuned by himself, that power, right, thought, wisdom, light, are to be found in the masses....”
But not one among them, more generous and more eager than the rest, arose to answer: “Defend Beauty! That is your only function. Defend the vision that is within you. Since mortals have now ceased to bear honour and reverence to the singer scholars of the Muse that favours them, as Odysseus said, defend yourselves with all your weapons, even with jests, if such are of more use than invectives. Be careful to sharpen the point of your scorn with the bitterest poison. Let your sarcasm have such corrosive strength that it may reach to the very marrow and destroy it. Brand to the very bone the stupid brows of those who would put an exact mark on each soul, as on a household utensil, and would make human heads alike as the heads of nails under the blow of the hammer. Let your frenzied laughter rise to the very heaven, when you hear the stablemen of the Great Beast vociferating in the Assembly. For the sake of the glory of Mind proclaim and demonstrate that their sayings are not less ignoble than the groans of the flatulent peasant. Proclaim and demonstrate that their hands--to which your father Dante would give the same epithet as he gave to the nails of Thais--may be fit to gather manure, but are not worthy of being raised to sanction a law in the Assembly. Defend the Thought which they threaten, the Beauty which they outrage! A day will come when they will attempt to burn the books, shatter the statues, rip up the canvases. Defend the ancient generous work of your masters and the future work of your disciples against the rage of these drunken slaves. Do not despair because ye are few. Ye possess the supreme knowledge and the supreme power of the world--the Word. Words may have more murderous power than a chemical formula. Oppose destruction resolutely with destruction.”
And the patricians, stripped of their authority in the name of equality, and looked upon as ghosts from a world which has disappeared for ever; unfaithful, the greater part of them at least, to their lineage, and ignorant or forgetful of the art of mastery professed by their forefathers, were also asking: “What can be our function now? Are we to deceive the age and ourselves by attempting to revive some slender hope among faded memories of the past, under those vaulted roofs storied with sanguine mythology, which are too vast for our restricted breathing? Or must we recognise the great dogma of Eighty-nine, and open the porticoes of our courts to popular applause, illuminate our travertine balconies for State festivals, associate with Jewish bankers, exercise our small share of sovereignty by filling up the voting ticket with the names of men of the middle classes, of our tailors, our hatters, our bootmakers, our money-lenders, and our lawyers?”
A few among them--ill-inclined for peaceful renunciation, elegant boredom, and barren irony--answered: “Train yourselves as you train your race-horses, and wait for the opportunity. Learn the method of asserting yourselves and strengthening your own persons, as you have learned that of winning on the turf. By strength of will force all your energies, even your stormiest passions and darkest vices, into a straight line and towards a definite aim. Be assured that the essence of personality far exceeds all accessory attributes in value, and that inward sovereignty is the chief mark of the aristocrat. Believe only in force tempered by long discipline. Force is the first law of nature; it is indestructible, not to be abolished. Discipline is the supreme virtue of the freeman. The world can be based only on force, as truly in civilised ages as in the epochs of barbarism. If all the races of the earth were destroyed by another deluge, and new generations were to arise from the stones, as in the old fable, men would begin to fight amongst themselves as soon as they had issued from their mother earth, until one of them the strongest, should succeed in mastering the others. Wait, therefore, and prepare for your opportunity. Fortunately, the State built on foundations of popular suffrage and equality, cemented by fear, is not only an ignoble, but also a precarious structure. The State ought to be nothing less than an institution perfectly adapted to promote the gradual elevation of a privileged class towards an ideal form of existence. Therefore, upon the economic and political equality to which democracy aspires, you must go on forming a new oligarchy, a new realm of force; and before long, sooner or later, you will succeed in taking the reins into your own hands again, so as to rule the multitude for your own profit. Indeed, you will have little difficulty in bringing back the common herd to its obedience. The masses always remain slaves; they have a natural impulse to stretch out their wrists to the fetters. The sense of liberty will never to the end of time exist in them. Do not be deceived by their vociferations and their hideous contortions; but always remember that the soul of the Multitude is in the power of Panic. It will be your policy, therefore, when the opportunity comes, to provide yourselves with cutting whips, to assume an imperious mien, to plan some humorous stratagem. When the cunning Ulysses was ranging the field to call in every one to the council, if he came across a noisy plebeian, he used to chastise him with his sceptre, scolding him thus: 'Silence, silence, coward, pusillanimous one, thing of naught in the council.’ The noble demagogue Alcibiades, who was more versed than any in the government of the Great Beast, began one of his orations on the expedition into Sicily thus: 'This command, oh Athenians--this command belongs to me rather than to any one else, and I hold myself worthy of this command.’ But truly there is no teaching more profound and more suitable for you than that given by Herodotus in the beginning of the book of Melpomene. Here it is: 'The Scythians, having spent twenty-eight years away from their own country in ruling over Upper Asia, and desirous, after such a long interval, to return home, found that to do so involved hardships no less great than those they had suffered in the Median war. A great and hostile army barred their entrance. And this came to pass because the Scythian women, having been left so long without men of their own race, had given themselves to their slaves. And from the slaves and the women had sprung a generation of young men who, conscious of their origin, had set themselves against those who were returning from Media; and in order to hold the pass, had first of all made an entrenchment stretching from the mountains of Taurus to the Mæotian marsh, which is very wide. They then proceeded to repulse the attempted assault of the Scythians, defending themselves with many deeds of valour; and as, after various conflicts, the Scythians found they could make no advance by fighting, one of them began to speak thus: Oh Scythians, why do we labour thus? By fighting against our slaves we weaken ourselves by the number of our deaths, and by killing them we only reduce the number of our future subjects. Wherefore it seems to me fitting that we should put aside our spears and darts, and that each of us should be armed only with his horsewhip, and thus we should confront these slaves. Because up till now, seeing us march against them in arms, they have no doubt thought themselves our equals, and sons of equals; but when they see us coming against them wielding whips instead of arms, they will feel at once that they are our slaves, and they will not dare to resist us any longer. The Scythians followed this advice; and their adversaries, thunderstruck by the change, ceased fighting and took to flight. Thus did the Scythians win back their country.’ Oh ye masters without mastery, think upon it.”
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Perhaps in my busy solitude--although I feared neither sickness, nor madness, nor death, having within me that tutelary flame of pride, of thought, and of faith--perhaps there lay hidden beneath my melancholy a real need for communion with some kindred spirit as yet unknown, or with some circle of minds disposed to care sincerely and passionately for those things for which I so passionately cared. It seemed to me that this need was betrayed by a mental habit I had of casting my theory of ideas and images into a concrete oratorical or lyrical form, almost as if for an imaginary audience. Warm bursts of eloquence and poetry would suddenly flood my being, and silence was at times a burden to my overflowing soul.
Then, to comfort my solitude, I thought of giving corporeal form to that _dæmon_ in whom, according to my first master’s teaching, I believed as the infallible pledge which was to lead me to achieve the integrity of my moral being. I thought of committing to a noble, masterful mouth, red with the same blood as mine, the duty of repeating to me, “Oh thou, be what thou oughtest to be.”
Among the figures of my ancestors one above all others is most dear to me, and sacred as a votive image. He is the noblest and the most brilliant flower of my race, represented by the brush of a divine artist. It is the portrait of Alessandro Cantelmo, Count of Volturara, painted by Da Vinci between the years 1493 and 1494, at Milan, where Alessandro, attracted by the unheard-of magnificence of that Sforza who wished to turn the Lombard city into a _New Athens_, had taken up his abode with a company of men-at-arms.
There is nothing in the world that I prize so much, nor was treasure ever guarded with more passionate jealousy. I am never weary of thanking fortune for having caused such a noble figure to brighten my life, and for having granted me the incomparable luxury of such a secret. “If thou possess a beautiful object, remember that every glance cast on it by another is a usurpation of thy possession. The joy of possession is diminished when it is divided, therefore do thou refuse to share it. They say that some one declined to enter a public museum lest his glance should be mingled with that of strangers. Now, if thou do indeed possess a beautiful object, enclose it within seven doors, and cover it with seven veils.” And a veil hangs over the magnetic face; but the dream in it is so profound, the fire in it is so powerful, that at times the woven stuff trembles with the vehemence of the breathing.
And so I gave my _dæmon_ the form of this familiar genius, and in my solitude I felt him alive with a life far more intense than my own. Had I not before me by means of the lasting miracle of one of the world’s greatest revealers--had I not before me an heroic spirit, sprung from my own stock, and constituted of all the distinctive characteristics of that lineage which I was so eagerly striving to manifest in myself, and which in him appeared in such fierce relief as to be almost terrible?