THE MAKING OF ITALY.* THIS book has appeared at a
most opportune moment. Italy is passing through a crisis of which we English, to judge by the comments in our newspapers, fail entirely to grasp the significance. It is to be hoped that those who have written in an unfriendly and scornful spirit of the present Italian Government will read, mark, learn and inwardly digest this fascinating story of the birth and growth of a nation.
Italians are singularly unlike Englishmen—I am speaking, of course, of the masses in each country ; the moneyed classes being, in these cosmopolitan days, very much alike in all countries. The population of Italy, still chiefly rural, is rooted in the land to a degree that is inconceivable in a country of town-dwellers and shifting wage-earners. The more primitive instincts of the land-lover—the impulse to make with one's own hands the things one stands in need of, to work with and for one's neighbours—such instincts, unimpaired by industrialism and canalized by intelligence, go far to account for Italian Patriotism and Italian Co-operation which arc the two chief factors of Mussolini's policy. On the former of these, Italian Nationalism—fostered by centuries of struggle and oppression—every chapter of this book throws light, but it does scanty justice to that which is Italy's great contribution to post-War Social reconstruction. Few people in this country have any idea of the extent to which production has already passed, in Italy, into the hands of the workers themselves. Side by side with Capitalist undertakings, and more than rivalling them in importance, is to be found a vast network of
• TM Nations of So-Day: Italy. London: Hodder and Stoughton. II Os.)
co-operative enterprise of which the new Government is making every effort to avail itself.
Any history of Italy is bound to include passages of drab and confused nar. ative, but when one closes this book such passages fade from one's memory and give place to those brilliant stories of Italian achievement that can never be forgotten. The scheme of the book unfortunately forbids any adequate statement of Italy's magnificent contribution to European culture. The art of Ravenna, offspring of the contact of East and West, which modern critics are inclined to claim as prototype of all great plastic art in Europe, is not even mentioned ; while the later result of that contact, the sudden and marvellous efflorescence of the Renaissance, is condensed into a few pages—pages, however, that are alive with suggestion and will send many a reader to browse in the pleasant fields opened up by a bibliography whose completeness, however, is marred by the omission of Mr. G. M. Trevelyan's Study of the Italian Risorgimento.
When we come to the actual thesis of the book, the growth of modern Italy, there is no inadequacy of statement nor lack of detail. The wonderful story of the Risorgimento is told with a vivid and direct touch that recalls the intense sympathy with which English men and women watched those 'romantic events and listened to the glowing words of Mazzini. Italian history is apt to live in our minds as a series of glorious medallions with but little to connect them. The chapter, however, on the influence of the French Revolution and on the effect of Napoleon's high-handed rearrangement of pieces on the chess-board of Europe throws light on that sudden and surprising insurgence of National feeling out of the chaos of warring States, crystallized into a new unity by the shock of a common foe. " Nationalism had sprung into life as a re- action to the Imperialism of Napoleon. With the downfall of the Conqueror, the conception of Nationality expanded and allied itself with that of popular sovereignty."
The chapters, however, which will probably attract most attention arc those which refer to the Great War. The
story of the endless ncgothtions before Italy finally decided to throw in her lot w.--th the Allies has never before been clearly and succinctly told in English. It was during that period of
heated discussion and argument between " Interventionists " and " Non-interventionists " that the germ of Fascism sprang to life, a new growth destined to transform the future of Italy. Mr. McClure, to whom we owe these illuminating chapters, gives a thrilling account of the Caporetto disaster, an account far less damaging to the character of the Italian troops than that commonly accepted in England.
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