CHAPTER VII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IN ITALY

It is not surprising that German philosophy found an adoptive country in Italy. Most of the speculative notions of Kant were formulated fourteen years before Kant was born in Vico’s _De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia_, and Hegel’s most original conception, forty-five years before Stuttgart had the honour of producing him, was acted upon in the _Scienza Nova_. Even if Vico had never been realised in his totality, people in Italy knew more or less that such ideas as those of the German philosophers were in the air and found them easier in Kant than in Vico since the former had brought them to systematic cogency. Vico, independent of any knowledge of Leibniz’s theories, had come to share several of his ideas merely because they faced the same problems and both had practical and synthetic speculative minds. Also Vico with his hostility for rationalism, his sympathy for empiricism and his criticism of both found himself very nearly in what was to be Kant’s position. His preparation, which was more legal and historical and archæological than Kant’s, closed the way to a clear and precise view; but it was superior in one sense inasmuch as that preparation provided him with a richer, a fuller view of reality, thus allowing him to foreshadow Hegel as well as Kant.

The greatest man who reacted against Rationalism and Empiricism in politics as factors of a sterilising Utilitarianism, reducing man to the most abject egoism, Mazzini, is an intuitive genius like Rousseau and like him a son of the eighteenth century, rising above his generation. But whilst the one showed little or no sense of history the other saw it as it really is, animated by ideas and created by the will of men. One writer had had a very great influence on the great Genoese, who never knew even as much as his name, Vincenzo Cuoco. He was what might be called a writer of political pedagogy, as the problems he faced are always practical and usually political. The education of which he was an ardent apostle was the civic education of the inhabitants of Italy; and like all men whose aim is practical he sets his ideal in life and not in science. He is the pedagogue of the first dawn of Italy’s national consciousness at the time of Napoleon. Born in 1770 in the Molise he died in Naples in 1823. Among the Neapolitan Jacobins he stood as an exception in the lack of enthusiasm with which he viewed the French Revolution. He had assimilated all the ideas of the French writers, but he was a student of all social, political and economical problems; so that it is no wonder that he should have come, through the influence of F. M. Pagano, to respect Vico and look askance at the new systems. His fundamental principle was that human reality is historical reality, that is to say the reality which is not, but for ever becomes, and goes on becoming and developing not through extrinsic causes, but through its own activity, intrinsic and autonomous; that such activity transcends the single activities and their historical determination; its source is identified by him as Divine Providence. Such was the principle from which moved all Vico’s philosophy, and though Cuoco could not even suspect the speculative value of it, he realised it practically, and it was to him a luminous beacon, more than sufficient to enable him to take his bearings in the political world and make out the right way to rid Italy of her troubles.

Thus he could not be satisfied with a French Constitution because Vico had taught that “governments must be drawn in conformity with the nature of the men who are to be governed....” The French Revolution seemed to him drawn for ideal men who did not exist. According to him a constitution must conform to the nature of the people and be produced by the people, through the few men who are fit to interpret its historical will and realise its particular requirements. Although Mussolini may not have read Cuoco’s articles it is greatly to his praise that he should so perfectly conform to the ideas of this first follower of Vico. Not that this fact is considered here as a coincidence—if Mussolini is the genius of Italy which he is hailed to be, it is but natural that he should realise in its practical application a theory which is so perfectly Italian. A constitution cannot be “good for every nation.” If it is supposed to be, it means it is good for nobody. Besides it must not be drawn like an abstract theory established once for all according to a philosophical notion of what is supposed to be the nature of man, and as such eternal; it is bound to be always temporary and historically determined, according to the vices and qualities, according to the ways and the history of the people.

In this brief exposition of what were Vincenzo Cuoco’s most important ideas on politics, we meet constantly with sentences that might be met from the pen or on the lips of Mussolini. Censure can do little to reform the moral and political life of man. Feasts and premiums are better means; and it is more likely that governments will improve the country by pulling the people to the good rather than by pushing them away from the bad. This is pure Fascism. The government must not act as a brake, but rather as a propeller or a helm. Public virtue must be nursed, not by diminishing the avidity of the lower classes, but by showing them the way to satisfy it. _The love of work_ is the one means of regenerating the lower classes. A good government must, therefore, destroy the callings that are unproductive; and to accomplish this the best way is to make it impossible for people to get as much money out of them as out of the productive callings. “Work,” writes Cuoco, just as a Fascist minister might, “will make us independent of the nations upon which we depend.” The Love of Man for his country must spring from self respect; and this, indeed, is as far as one could go more than a hundred years ago towards the identification of state and citizen, which is the basis of Fascism, and has been formulated in its speculative form by Giovanni Gentile in 1916. If a nation was to be created out of the patchwork Italy presented on the map it could only be through the education of the people, for the unification could only be attained by awakening national consciousness in the single consciences. Cuoco called this the formation of an Italian public spirit.

When this follower of Vico in 1802 reached Milan, capital of the Cisalpine Republic, Melzi realised his value and entrusted him with the foundation and direction of the first _Giornale d’Italia_. Four articles written in 1804 are probably those read and meditated upon by Mazzini and are of such a quality that they could be written to-day. To the men who did not see the point in so much zeal for the formation of public spirit he answers by a most coherent demonstration that political reality is spiritual reality. The spiritual building up of the citizen is the real conquest of political autonomy. To achieve such a task it was necessary to foster the love of agriculture, and of the militia—compare Mussolini—and to replace self-love and personal vanity with the love of the country and national pride. The “City” to Cuoco is not one thing and the citizens another, the prosperity of the former depends on the moral and practical efficiency of the latter. He was full of contempt for the dreamers who thought that everything may be expected from the laws. But the men who roused him to real passion were those who argued that the Army, the navy, commerce, were cares that should be left to the great nations, to England and France for instance. To this he objected that those countries had been small, smaller than the Italian states, and had grown through the steadiness and efficiency of their national will. Such efficiency and steadiness of national will he called “public spirit.” The regions whose inhabitants did not think of being or becoming a great country, would never be nations. For the small states there was one law; either to become great or perish. It may be timely to observe that this dependence of a country’s greatness on the conscience and the will of its citizens was asserted by Mussolini when he was still the head of the Socialist party in Forli in 1911.

Again in 1804, reviewing in his _Giornale d’Italia_ a philosophical work, Cuoco expresses the desire to see philosophy flourishing in Italy, for the development of speculative thought was in close relation with the political state of society, and it was important that a nation should not be theoretically sterile. “It is a long time since we received it,” he writes, “first from France with the works of Descartes, then from England with those of Locke. The periods of political greatness of each nation always coincide with those of its philosophical greatness. The first strength is Mind; weak is the arm of those who lack it or think they do.” Doubtless this is pointing the way to Gentile’s affirmation of the impossibility of having the theoretical and practical activities of mind separate from each other just as the last quotation was pointing to Mussolini’s policy of “heroicising” the people of his country through giving them an heroic will and a national conscience.

No wonder that Mazzini should have realised what Rousseau could never see. The ethical nature of what goes under the name of “Nation” is a Mazzinian concept. When Hegel speculatively proclaimed this it had been already intuitively conceived, artistically expressed and religiously observed by the men to whom Mazzini’s ardent faith was like an electric current. The Mazzinian articles of faith were few, and had never been theoretically worked out. This helped their adoption by people who would never have grasped the import of a huge system. Whilst Rosmini and Gioberti were read by the few, Mazzini was on the lips and throbbed in the hearts of the many, so that the war he waged against materialism and individualism was effective. His mystic feeling spreads in young hearts as easily now as it did then. Lads take to sacrifice far more easily than men of a more mature age and Mazzini’s declarations all proclaimed self-sacrifice, self-effacement, even his idea of liberty.

At the very time in which the Anglo-French idea of political reality was introduced in Italy, to rouse the country once more into life with the magic word liberty, this young man, a poet, an inspired prophet, was ready with a new meaning for that word. According to Mazzini the individual is merely the representation we have of our own self when we look at it as one amongst many and see it limited to the short span of time between the birth and the death of its body, whereas the self which can conceive of liberty, and therefore realise it, is the self everyone of us feels when in the silent recess of Mind we have a right to claim, a feeling to express, an intuition to cast into sound or colour, and a faith through which we link ourselves to the political, family, artistic and religious reality that has given us the consciousness of such right or aroused in us such family, artistic, or religious sense. To him political liberty could only mean for Italians the liberty of shaking off foreign rule and creating the nation. It was not and could not be the liberty to attend one’s private affairs as one wished, for this last meaning of the word had been elaborated in his country through Humanism and the Renaissance, and it was not only obsolete, but was the cause of Italy’s corruption and decay.

The idea of empirical and transcendental self, implicit in this conception of liberty, came to produce the second article of faith in the Mazzinian doctrine. If man were to try creating a new natural kingdom and add it to the animal, vegetable and mineral offered to us by Nature, his attempt would be a vain endeavour. But political reality does not belong to the world of Nature but to the world of Mind, in which man is a Creator, and where nothing is really impossible to him that believeth. This most Christian view of the point frees the nation from natural contingencies and frees the citizens besides from the lazy excuse that man must accept the political and economic position of his country as determined by Nature. Thereby it forbids any idea of its being static. No one can find at his birth his nation ready-made for him; everyone must work to the best of his moral, intellectual, and bodily power to create it; since the moment the citizens cease to work at this, their political task, the country starts ceasing to be a nation and becomes a region whilst the citizens become inhabitants. The nation is not a geographical unit, it is not even history empirically understood, but it is history as far as history is process, development, programme, mission and sacrifice; in a word, human life.

In Mazzini’s insistency on the point one detects the desire to react against the negative side of the mentality which has been traced as a consequence of Humanism. The Italians had identified themselves with ancient Rome, and this had brought them to think of their national glory and history as a ready-made affair. In their country they saw the Temple of the past, and exploited their ruins morally as well as financially. Whilst the other countries of the western world had been fighting and labouring, for the conquest of their political and financial status, Italy had sat on her past glories and proudly wrapping herself in Cicero’s or Cæsar’s toga had taken tips from the whole world. Mazzini had grasped enough of Vico’s notion of man as creator of the historical world to bring to the fore, in the average man’s mind, the idea that was the import of all the historical philosophy of Italy and, therefore, the positive side of his country’s historical mentality.

Neither Cuoco nor Mazzini were philosophers, their task was, so to speak, to realise philosophy, to introduce other people’s theories into life, and this they did uncommonly well both of them, although Mazzini played in the Risorgimento so eminent a part that his gigantic historical figure overshadows that of Cuoco. But Cuoco, through his _Giornale d’Italia_ and his subsequent writings had the greatest influence on the best poets and writers of the period, to begin with on Foscolo and Manzoni. For the first time since Savonarola’s days intellectual life in Italy beheld a spontaneous revival of Catholic thinking, and this, strong enough since it counted men as great as Gioberti, Rosmini and Manzoni, was not due to the initiative of the Church. It was spontaneous, intellectually so, and Vico may be considered as its forerunner. What was paramount was perhaps the moral system of Rosmini. He started out to fight Kant’s moral system as unfit for use on account of the subjective ground of the Kantian imperative, and meaning to fight it he developed it and found new ground for it. The moral, pedagogic and even pedantic spirit which spread in the intellectual classes of Italy during the last century has indeed a good deal in common with the moral movement which had accompanied in Germany the development of a national conscience. We have in both cases a reaction against the foreign ways of the aristocracy—but with a great difference since in Italy the aristocracy had very little of the feudal character and was so open to intellectual life that it responded to the call sooner and better than any other class—preluding a reaction against the atomistic political life of the country. To pass from Rosmini and Gioberti to Croce and Gentile, the thinkers who herald the coming of Italy as a modern nation, as much was needed as to pass from Leibniz, living in the days in which German intellectual life and national conscience could be at best the object of a mystical worship, to Kant’s time, when Europe realised that there were actually such things as German metaphysics and a German nation.

In both cases the philosophy has to be, and is, synthetic, for in both cases the exigency that opens life with the pungency of need, of deficiency, of negativeness, is the thirst for national assertion and foreign recognition. Obviously in both cases also it is the assimilation of foreign contributions that has enabled the scholars to realise the negative position of their respective countries.

After the unfortunate war of ’48–’49, Gioberti went into exile and philosophy was overtaken according to Prof. G. de Ruggiero by an invincible drowsiness. Drowsy, obscure, unconscious of their own positions, are epithets which can be justly bestowed on the thinkers of the time, for eclecticism prevails without the historical culture that alone can make it fertile. And of the most eminent philosopher of the time the best that can be said is that he did his best to lull to sleep his countrymen’s newborn consciousness. Among the Positivists, inferior followers of foreign tendencies, several remain first-rate historians, thanks to a few sentences of Vico kept like the seeds in Noah’s ark, and sufficient to prevent them from falling into a materialist metaphysic which would have been a sterilising curse to the newborn nation. Materialism was far more logical and coherent in France when the historians simply excluded the ideologies which were left hovering through the historical works—for instance, of as good an historian as Villari; but this was not unconscious. After the efforts which they had made to get rid of pseudo-idealistic metaphysic they did not want to entangle themselves in another metaphysic, were it to be materialist. On the other hand, they did not want, or were not able, to make theirs the position of English positivists. Ardigo, for instance, although he is the best Italian thinker that upheld Positivism, cannot be compared to a Spencer or a Mill.

But speculative voices are never silenced, although they may be hushed, and the spiritual exigencies which had produced Gioberti and Rosmini were slowly working themselves out in other minds. Neo-Kantianism gave birth in Italy to a series of historical studies in the field of philosophy, so that it became impossible for any decent professor to misrepresent the development of speculative thought as these two great exponents of Italy’s mind had done. Whilst Neo-Kantians achieve little theoretically, they do so much historically that one may say that the works of such men as Fiorentino, Tocco, and others prepared the ground for Spaventa and de Sanctis who in their turn have given us Croce and Gentile. All read German, English and French, besides Latin and Greek; so that we can say that the speculative theories of the whole western world were studied in their schools; and that, like the child who becomes self-conscious as he gradually realises the worth and importance of the people surrounding him, Italy has grown to speculative self-consciousness through the close study of universal speculation and of the history of her national political life, national art, national literature, national speculative theories, until her historians came to the idea of history as the co-ordination of all the different branches.

Bertrando Spaventa taught in the university of Napoli, and, a staunch Hegelian, he criticised Hegel in the same creative way as Vico had criticised Descartes and Locke. He developed and continued the intuition which is at the basis of all Hegelian system as Hegel could not have done, inasmuch as Spaventa realises Hegel’s logic in its historical position, that is to say as the fulfilment of Descartes’ claim. Thinking means causing to the French mind, whilst to Hegel it is not merely causing it is creating. But Gioberti had not only expressed the Hegelian intuition; he had completed it; thinking is creating, but to him proving also is creating. And Spaventa, rich with all the history of speculative thought, realised Hegel’s logic and prepared it to enter life, thanks to Gioberti’s contribution, although Gioberti himself had been far from realising it. The speculative possibilities of the Cartesian _Cogito_ are exploited to the full; whereas they had been left aside by Hegel. Vico’s _factum et verum convertuntur_, pragmatically understood by the Positivists, is here realised as a process. But, as is the wont of Italian thinkers, the original part of his intuition remains at an intuitive stage and has to wait for the speculative genius of Gentile to work it out and modify it into the _fieri et verum convertuntur_ which is the adequate expression of the historical dialectic.

Hegel’s most original and fecund motive was thus nearing its theoretical realisation at the hands of Spaventa, whilst Vico’s conception of life was practically illustrated by Francesco de Sanctis, whose important part in the shaping out of Italy’s present mentality cannot be overstated. The process of dissolution of Hegel’s and Vico’s theories was accomplished and the passage from dissolution to re-elaboration was done by de Sanctis. In his _Storia della letteratura Italiana_ the philosophy of mind receives more than a perfect illustration, an æsthetic rendering that makes the most abstruse notion of dialectic a tangible object of meditation to the average reader. Æsthetic rendering is here used as excluding anything like theoretic exposition; and such æsthetic quality is insured by the great critic’s own gifts as an artist. His reading and philosophic preparation are incredible, not to be gauged; they are, however, assimilated by him very much in the way in which a great artist assimilates his technique and intellectual experience.

Doubtless Michelangelo, moving to sketch the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or the last panel of it, is carrying in himself the experience, the artistic experience of eighteen centuries. Yet he must have forgotten it all, at least as objective knowledge, to find it in himself flesh of his flesh, marrow of his bones, soul of his soul; so that he could move freely as an artist, in all the spontaneity and, therefore, liberty of creation. The character of his work is personal, so highly personal that it includes all the determinations which single out Buonarroti as a man of that land, of that religion and even of that particular moment of his religion, of that time, of such and such temperament and inclination, and singles out the whole of his production as belonging to that particular moment of the Italian Renaissance. The greater is the artist’s personality, the better he discharges his twofold function of microcosm and macrocosm of his world. It is an illusion of the nineteenth century to believe that personality in art makes for atomistic individualism. Just as it is an absurd error of the people who judge Mussolini and Fascism to believe that they have grown without roots. They would then be superposed to history, superfluous, unnecessary; whereas the great artist and the great politician belong to life, and in fact are historical life working itself out to expression or political realisation.

The _Storia della letteratura Italiana_, like an immense relief, unfurls the development of the life of Mind in Italy from the dawn of the Italian mentality right up to the days of the critic. For de Sanctis, Art is Mind individualising itself through the senses in the transparency of intuition; Art in other words, is life reaching the luminosity of form. This blending, this perfectly intimate welding of reason and sense, of universal and particular is Art. It is, therefore, individuality, not individuality taken as it is too often—as the contrary of universality, but as its realisation in the particular. For this relation of the universal and particular is constitutive of art, which is, therefore, neither individual arbitrariness, nor the mere reflection of life in the artist’s fancy, but life itself coming through its own development to intuitive transparency. Life cannot be a matter of which art would be the form; and religion, politics, science as elements of life are not alien to art or indifferent to it. None of this element can exist without art, and history leaves no doubt on the point—each new religion, new political system, new scientific progress is not to be parted from the artistic production of the time.

De Sanctis, like a medical student, follows step by step the corruption of Italy, gradually growing with the decay of religious and political consciousness, above all when Humanism, having reached its climax in the works of Poliziano, stopped providing a sincere feeling to the scholars who ceased to worship antiquity some fifty years after him. De Sanctis was a man of the Risorgimento he had laboured and suffered for the independence of his country, hoped and despaired of the future greatness of his countrymen. He was aware that in spite of Machiavelli, of Vico, of Alfieri, of Cuoco, of Mazzini, the greatest number of his countrymen had, so to speak, no souls. Knowing as he did that religion was the basis of all relation and the first cause of all real social progress, seeing in it the keystone of man’s recognition of the exterior world, he refrained in all his books from attacking not only religion, but the Church as well; although he was a staunch anti-clerical in politics until Rome was taken from the Pope. He drew such a graph of the development of Italy’s mind that from Dante’s onwards it shows all the forces of corruption preparing the series of invasions that made of his countrymen’s shame a byword, and the forces of reconstruction from Machiavelli onward. To the reading public he presented it as a mirror, in the transparency of Art showing the whole spiritual life of the people with its political consequences. He bade them realise that corruption had been the cause of foreign rule and tyranny, not foreign rule and tyranny the cause of corruption.

This was new indeed, too new for a generation which had achieved the political independence of the country with the belief that bad government and foreign rule were the cause of the people’s corruption. No wonder, therefore, that de Sanctis’ masterpiece, published in 1871, should have been practically laid aside for more than twenty-five years awaiting Croce and Gentile to take it up. The public that responded to their call when it came was exactly the one which de Sanctis would have wished to reach. The boys took de Sanctis up, and what is more curious they took him as their idea-provider; inasmuch as the big volumes, which could not be included in the schools’ syllabus, were turned to in the hour of need, when they had to write essays and found themselves short of ideas. No method of popularising and assimilation could match this, for the ideas thus borrowed by the young had to be exposed, proved and illustrated. The school lads and university men who enlisted as volunteers in the war, were mostly spiritual sons of de Sanctis, one of them being Mussolini, who told the author that he was a worshipper of that work. In the same way the idea of Croce and Gentile have spread even among people unfit to realise their theoretical import. Never, however, could they spread like those of de Sanctis, but he is so much so completely their spiritual father that most of their speculative notions can be found as intuitions in de Sanctis’ pages. There the boys get so familiar with them that when they come to a Gentilian theory, and the teacher takes the trouble to introduce to them the fundamental intuition, they grasp it at once as a matter of course and wonder why the teacher should think it so difficult to explain, for instance, the intimate relation of thought and action, the necessity of religion and the like.