Part 6 (1/2)
Compared with the non-Latin peoples the lines of Italian development have been intellectual rather than on the side of character and conduct. The intellect of Italy has constantly spread a banquet before the spirit of Europe, as the beauty of the land from north to south has offered a feast of material beauty to every generation.
Italian quickness in appropriating an idea is matched by Italian open-mindedness; you never meet in Italy the wall of thick-headed self-righteous prejudice--that array of pre-judgments which an Italian has aptly called _idols_--which the Englishman never fails to brandish when confronted by a new idea. Perhaps it is the fact that the Italians are the least prejudiced people on the face of the earth which makes living in their country delightful to Northerners. Some of our countrymen have certainly reason to be pleased that this is so; but the Italian illimitable tolerance of the foibles and eccentricities of others does not mean that they acquit us of bad manners and provincialism.
Italian intellect, the familiarity with and the play of ideas in the Italian, is not the same thing as a lofty idealism; and when a Dane recently wrote that the Italians possess the highest humanistic qualities and therefore are also nearer the supernatural than other people, he made, I think, this mistake. He confused ideas with idealism. The Italian gift _par excellence_ is _le sens tres vif des realites_,[4] a vivid hold on the real; and this realism is the source at once of their qualities and their defects. The Italian has only one use for an idea, he must see it as it is. Hence he strips everything, tears away its drapery, exposes it to the garish pitiless light of fact. There is nothing which deserves in itself and always reverence--for him a spade is a spade, a fiasco a fiasco, a corpse a corpse. There is none of that prevenient idealism which in the north draws a veil over the crudities of sense, and helps to illuminate the half-truths they reveal. It is easy to see that such a quality as this is intellectually valuable, but morally disastrous. The special loveliness of the nature formed in the north is the persuasion that there are things one is not to see, not to hear. That northern ”custody of the senses” which is not an ascetical exercise, but an inner illumination thrown upon them.
[4] Gebhart, _L'Italie Mystique_.
The intellectual limitation ”thus far shalt thou go and no farther,”
which the Englishman willingly imposes on himself, is impossible to the Italian, whose moral qualities have to reckon with the intellectual liberty which is proper to his genius. The pa.s.sionate love of intellectual truth for its own sake is one of these moral qualities, and the people who do not possess it inevitably contract certain moral defects. These are not the defects of the Italian; he is not a hypocrite in his moral relations, not a sn.o.b in social concerns, not a prig in matters of intellect, and has no faculty for the mystical self-deceptions of the Northerner. His complete democracy of sentiment is shown in many pleasant ways. It is difficult for the average Englishman to imagine that rank should make no difference, to understand the dignified and simple relations which subsist between cla.s.ses in Italy. A man in a good coat is not ashamed to be seen talking with a friend in fustian; people of entirely different walks in life may be seen b.u.t.tonholing each other; and a Roman prince arm in arm with a man of the lower bourgeoisie is no infrequent spectacle.
”We are all people of consideration in this house,” said a Roman to me--”on the floor below there is a Senator, upstairs there is a teacher of languages, and I am a shopkeeper.” Sovereignty too, in spite of the heavy etiquette of the House of Savoy, is democratic in Italy. The King does not live in inaccessible _penetralia_, and the man of the people when he comes across the man to whom he invariably refers as _sua maesta_ will speak his mind to him. King Humbert a.s.sisted at the inauguration of Bocconi's big shop in the Corso and congratulated him on this new piece of commercial enterprise in the city; which is as though King Edward VII. should pay an inaugural visit to Whiteley's. Queen Margaret has always attended some Sunday lectures given in Rome by the a.s.sociation for the higher education of women--no Englishman could have imagined Queen Victoria attending, say, a university extension lecture at Bedford College. The Latin believes much more than we do in the principle of authority, and cares infinitely less about its representatives.
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ”SPANISH STEPS,” PIAZZA DI SPAGNA
Erected for the Romans at the expense of a Frenchman in the eighteenth century. The _Piazza_ takes its name from the Spanish Emba.s.sy to the Vatican which has its residence here. At the Sacred Heart Convent attached to the church of the Trinita de' Monti, at the top of the steps, generations of girls of Roman families have been educated. The Egyptian obelisk came from the gardens of Sall.u.s.t and was placed here by Pius VI. See page 141.]
Italian civilisation is imperialistic and social, not individualistic.
There is a greater sense of public decorum (as distinguished, however, from private decency) than among us, and more sacrifice of the individual to the society. One consequence of this is that there is less of that eccentricity, which is the individualism of the poorly endowed, less personal initiative, less enterprise, and nothing of that spirit of adventure which is the Anglo-Saxon's romance. The Italian would always, in spite of loud complainings to a just heaven, rather ”bear the ills he has than fly to others that he knows not of.”
Just now it is the fas.h.i.+on in Italy to regard the ”individualism” of modern Italians as the reason for their failure to co-operate. But a want of cohesion (mental and moral) is mistaken for individualism. It is certain that the Englishman is an ”individualist” yet he achieves everything by co-operation; it is certain that he possesses that sign-manual of individualism--initiative, and certain that the Italian does not. Italy is not suffering from an orgy of individualism in her people but from an orgy of egotism--which is quite a different matter.
It is a fact worth noting that every nation believes its own family life to be the purest and most solid. The truth is that family life plays a more important part in Italy than in England, and Latin parents everywhere sacrifice themselves more for their children than we do. So strong is the blood tie that it has been said that there is nothing at the back of the Italian character but the love of family.
Children make far more difference in the life of an Italian than in the life of an Englishman; and when love and devotion and obedience are required of them, they have already seen in their parents as in a mirror how life and personal comfort and personal ambition can be squandered for love. An English parent can leave all he has away from his children, and he frequently leaves the elder provided for and the younger not provided for at all. A Latin parent cannot do this, and it is a signal witness to the sense of obligation towards those they bring into the world which subsists among the Latin races.
If the blood tie is strong in Italy, friends.h.i.+p is very rare. As in the family relations so here it is the lack of marked individualism which is the determinant. It requires little effort to come up to the family standard; such effort, too, while it may lead to self-repression seldom brings about self-development. To come up to the standard of your peers outside the home requires on the contrary an exercise of all the individual powers; and friends.h.i.+p belongs to the individualistic peoples, those who prize personal rather than tribal and family character; to a people with no moral indolence, with the initiative and the power to become something on their own account, and to stand by themselves. The one ”provincialism” of the Italian is--perhaps--his suspicion of all who stand without the blood tie: the adventurous spirit of the Anglo-Saxon which has colonised three continents has led him to a very different estimate of reliance on and co-operation with his fellow-men, and the capacity for genuine friends.h.i.+p outside the blood tie may claim to have always acted as an anti-barbaric note in Anglo-Saxon civilisation.
The Italians have another strongly distinctive feature. They are a more pa.s.sionate but a less sentimental people than we. I suppose the Germans are the most sentimental people of Europe, and we come next.
But in Italy the Englishman is not credited with sentiment. According to the Italian press, for example, he has ”the patriotism of the pound sterling.” For my part I regard the Italian as the least sentimental man in Europe; we, on the contrary, both as individuals and as crowds, are governed by our sentimentality. The whole British middle cla.s.s would make war to-morrow to satisfy a sentimentalism which the Latin peoples regard as exclusively their own. Those who recollect that the reception accorded to Garibaldi put into the shade the entry into London of the bride of our future King, ought not to accuse the English of lack of disinterested sentiment. The Italians have the sentiment of the beautiful the grandiose and the fit--but they are the last people in the world to be put out of their course by a scruple or an _elan_. On the other hand there is a real sense in which the Englishman is devoid of a quality which is allied to the Latin graciousness. England shows a want of pride in and sentiment towards dependencies like the Channel Islands or Ireland which we should not find in France or Italy. She forgets, neglects, has no grip, and takes no hold on the imagination. Other nations have exploited their colonies and dependencies and the British suzerain is not appealed to in vain for protection under his flag--but something lacks, and so it comes about that the foreigner frequently likes our justice but not ourselves.
[Ill.u.s.tration: AT THE FOOT OF THE SPANISH STEPS, PIAZZA DI SPAGNA, ON A WET DAY]
That sentiment which comes of a certain n.o.ble graciousness in peoples is shown in other ways in Italy. It is a moving thing to see the sons bear the coffin of father or mother, to see men of all cla.s.ses follow the dead _on foot_; and then there is the Latin gracious treatment of birthdays and anniversaries, the Latin power of making a fete, of ”feteing you,” surrounding you with the feeling that you are of importance for the moment, that content is really reigning round you; the many ways in which the sentiments of piety to the hearth and piety to the dead are expressed; the power of handling life lightly and of expressing feeling appropriately.
The Italian though he is not so ”intense,” in the slang sense, as we, and gives way to less emotional sentiment, is far more impressionable.
On the other hand he is not ashamed to betray emotion, or to speak of his _agitazione_; and it will astonish the Englishman to be told that although the Italian is so quick of feeling that one may think he is at the death grip with a man in the street to whom he is only narrating his unexpected meeting with a relative from the country, he studiously avoids those sentimental ”scenes” which are so dear to the Anglo-Saxon. The hot-blooded Italian speaks of the ”_furor francese_”--that unmatched capacity for summing the intellectual points of a case and exhausting its emotional possibilities in one lightning moment,--and it is a fact that they judge the French people to be far more mobile and inconstant than themselves.
In common with other Latins, they have more vanity than we, but less self-consciousness, more simplicity, and none of that _mauvaise honte_ which betrays that the Englishman has not got his emotions under control. But there is in the best Englishman an excellent sort of simplicity which frees him from attending to the _personal point_ which is always present to the Italian whether he is dealing with matters public or private. On the other hand the Italians are completely free of the French _bete noir_, _chauvinisme_. And they have another great moral superiority: in America every one brags on his own account; in England we plump for national brag--there is a howling blast of the national trumpet always chilling the air round an Englishman. But the Italians do not brag; they have, indeed, no reason at all to act as _parvenus_. Their scepticism applies to themselves even more than to others, and no people are so ready for self-depreciation. According to them A, B, and C--the other nations of the earth--can accomplish this or that, while ”_un italiano non e buono a niente_.” In nothing, I believe, would Italians achieve greater distinction than in medicine, where a distinguished tradition of the art of healing goes hand in hand not only with the intellectual gifts of the people, but with an unrivalled delicacy of intuition. In no country are there better doctors, men armed at all points with the science of their age; yet as an Italian has remarked ”Among us the physician counts as less than nothing while in France he takes rank as a scientific authority.”
The Italian and the Irishman are the only amiable men in Europe--we must go as far as j.a.pan to find their equals. Both people have the desire to please--or is it a mark of ancient breeding?--the self-effacement, the courteous absence of self-a.s.sertion so difficult to the Englishman. The Italian will offer you the reins of his horses, and any and all of those privileges and advantages which the English owner regards as inalienably his. The traditional hospitality of cold climates is indeed nowhere greater than in England, but there is no more entirely hospitable host than the Italian when he admits you to his house.
Nowhere are crowds so good-natured or so well-behaved. Yet the Italians complain louder than any other people, and have not French buoyancy in the troubles and tragedies of life. Who will believe it if we add that they have an admirable patience? The Englishman makes his holiday miserable by his indignation if the train is late, if some one steps on his toes, if he has to wait an hour while his dinner is cooking. The Italian takes all these things as part of the day's work or play, and finds his amus.e.m.e.nt in them besides. That is another great distinction--he cares for life for its own sake. The Englishman cares for it for some end he has in view, and the end may be n.o.ble or mean. With quicker sympathy and much quicker response than ours, they are a less kindly people; and what is it in the Italians that allows you to find them all at once in undress, the veneer gone, and the raw material left? The Englishman would find it hard, too, to understand a certain terrible outsideness, something callous and pitiless in the uneducated Italian: self-interest looms too large, and an apparent want of power of self-sacrifice--outside the blood tie--I take to be the great moral weakness of the Italian character.
We shall already have understood that the Italian does not wait to be told these things by others--he is the first to judge himself; he has no illusions. In England we are fond of throwing a veil over our national defects or of calling them by some fine name, but the Italian of all ranks has put the defects of his qualities over and over again in the crucible of his terrible love of reality with its quick perception of shams; and to understand the defects of Italians one has only to read their own masterly appreciations of national character.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ROMAN PEASANT CARRYING COPPER WATER POT]
The Italian race is, I believe, prepotent in mixed marriages. In marriages between German and Italian or English and Italian the child shares indeed some of the mental characteristics of Angle or Teuton, but the _personality_ is an Italian personality. This prepotence of the Latin people I take to be the effect of what some one has called ”a great temperament”--the one quality which we may be quite sure has belonged to every remarkable man. Of all the great races the men of modern Germany leave least trace of themselves. It is noteworthy that the instances of mixed marriages are nearly all instances of women of the English German and American races intermarrying with Italian men; but whichever way it is, it remains as true of Italy as of France that ”the _menage_ is always in the country of the Latin partner.”
The Italians say: ”_inglese italianizzato diavolo incarnato_,” and this is also true of Americans and may be true of Teutons. Two Italian girls who spent a season in London described to me their attempts to imitate what they called ”_lo stiff_,” the stiff reserved manner of the Englishman of breeding. They failed, it seems, woefully, for they could not acquire ”_lo stiff_” and they lost their own pretty manners.