ITALY'S INTELLECTUAL CONTRIBUTION TO THE WAR.
A RMA virumque cane." The song of Italy is to-day • ...01s. the tramp of armed men, and her singer is among them. But D'Annunzio's clarion note of war echoes "from the abode where the Eternal are." It is of her " eternal " 'Vivi that we write. The voice of Petrarch rings perhaps first through D'Annunzio's call to arms. Yet there are other voices of bygone Italy which an attentive ear will catch to-day through the tumult of arms, and two of these Yeti compel attention, though their ideals lie as far asunder as the poles. One is Machiavelli, the other Dante. We make bold to say that they concern Europe and even England more than Italy, and the man in the street more than the man of letters. D'Annunzio and Petrarch the British public may well leave to the world of Italy and letters. Of Machiavelli's and of Dante's utterances it will be wise to take stock, simply because they are part of this great war's intellectual capital— either realized already or (as we shall try to show) hereafter to be realized. That is the point. Our object is to call the attention of those whom it has escaped to this fact— not to discourse upon a literary theme, however fascinating that might prove in other circumstances than the present urgency. Dante and Machiavelli were both masters of style, but they were also creators respectively of totally diverse policies—the latter of the policy which at this moment is making the enemy so formidable, the former of the policy which has yet to shape the action of the Allies.
We must deal first with Machiavelli. It is Machiavelli who has demonstrably made, to borrow an expression of the German Chancellor's, "this mad war." The Germans have appropriated whole pages out of Machiavelli's famous treatise on The Prince, which Frederick the Great mastered so care- fully and condemned so unblushingly. The Examen du Prince which Voltaire published for him as the work of "his young friend" is a curious study to-day. William of Orange slept with The Prince under his pillow. Napoleon took it openly as his model. But it has poured its poison still more dangerously into the ears of the waking yet secretive Kaiser. The Kaiser has the advantage of last century's German scholarship, when German scholars of very different schools, Gervinus among them, drew attention to many things which had escaped the "young" scholar in his truly golden days, and showed that Prussia hail subconsciously forestalled many pages from other works than The Prince,—notably Machia- velli's far-seeing counsels to Nations as well as Princes in his Art of Tar. It is these two sources of Machiavellian state- craft from which the soldier.statesmen of Germany have furnished their intellectual armoury. The mind of the Germans is kin to the mind of Machiavelli, and more than kind to his memory because in these pieces jastifteativeg (so to speak) of their "just and necessary war" he, better than any man who ever lived, promises to lead them through the Inferno of War and the Purgatorial Stair of Diplomacy (I) to their Paradise of Power. He is to them what Virgil was to Dante through the dolorous abyss and the cloud-swept terraces of wisdom's mountain :—, Tu signor e to ducs e to maestro."
We wrap in words the fact of Machiavelli's moral lordship, political leadership, and intellectual ascendancy in Germany • to-day because space compels us to symbolize. But we mean something quite definite and actual. The name of Machia- velli suggests to the English mind merely some such nebulous idea as this, "that the end justifies the means." Probably Sir Edward Grey knows and cares little about Machiavelli; but it is not so with the German Chancellor, who "examines " him ostentatiously before the Reichstag, as Sir Edward Grey, we may suppose, explored the deeper wisdom of Aristotle at Oxford. What the British public has to face at the present moment is the fact that behind the panoply of the German Pallas is the mind of the Machiavellian Athene—a web of finest sophistry from the loom of all the Chancelleries of Europe, embroidered with the Prussian pattern devised by Frederick the Great in his later and un-golden years. One glance at Machiavelli's prestige in Germany will tell us why and how he still holds the field there, politically and in- tellectually as well as morally ;—for this is our single point about- his sinister ascendancy in the German mind to-day, Morally there can be no question about the cause. Tolle mores is Machiavelli's watchword,—" Away with scruples." He absolved the statesman from all compunction as regards honour and the moral law. The statesman must lose his soul to save the State. This master of statecraft foresaw the price and demanded its payment. To him the power of the State seemed the only gospel for mankind. The statesman who put his hand to the plough and turned back was unworthy and incapable of success, the sole standard of statesmanship. All else would come to him if only he would serve that gospel at all cost to his own soul and to every skin but his own. Machiavelli was quite serious and absolutely candid in his idolatry of the State. German scholars were the first to divine that fact. And German statesmen to-day simply take their stand upon his "new commandment." Our mistake has been failure to grasp the fact that, if the single State is the statesman's only moral goal, the Germans are right and we are wrong. Modern diplomacy has been too much inclined " to serve God and Mammon," heedless of the hopeless incon- sistency. The German diplomatic balloon has out that stupid knot of political morality and soared into the intellectual empyrean l Certainly the Germans are wise with Machiavelli " in their generation." Theirs is the intellectual capital which has been already realized in the making of the war. We have nothing to compare with it. We should have to go far back in English history to find its like. On a national scale we might find it in the scheme which Went- worth submitted to Charles I., labelled "Thorough." That policy of " Thorough " was an inspiration from Machiavelli, but in every sense it is with us " ancient history." German, has adopted it and is trying to make "modern history" with it on the European scale.
We must turn to that other voice from the shores of time in Italy—the voice of Dante. Dante has nothing to tell us about the war, so far as it has gone. Germany "has nothing in him"; neither even has Italy as yet. Nevertheless, it is from his voice that there will come one clear call to the Allied Cause, when the war is over. It is a relief to listen for it through the tumult of revengeful passions justly stirred within us by Germany's unspeakable atrocities.
If Italy is responsible for having tutored European diplo- macy for four hundred years through Macbiavelli'a "Devil's Catechism" and for having taught Germany his infernal wisdom, Italy can also claim to have forestalled that wisdom. Dante's conception of the principle and operation of the Inter- national State as a true World-Power contains an intellectual capital which awaits realization (if we may appropriate one of his daring expressions about his greater vision) in un model tutio fuor dell' use moderno—" in fashion quite beyond all modern use." Dante's conception of an International Power, like all else that issued from this soul "born out of due time," is totally independent of his age. Only the perverse misunderstanding which has dogged his steps can confound it with mere advocacy of the Holy Roman Empire. Dante built his political ideal of the Universal State which he styled Monarenia on his vision in the Commedia of an "Emperor to come "—that "Hound of Heaven" who should hunt to a bottomless abyss of Nothingness every form of the wolf-spirit. The De Monarehia contemplates the international problem with an illuminated statesmanship; Dante has before his eyes great principles, of which the first was "one goal of human civilization." This phrase is no mere echo from his ancient master, Aristotle,—" maestro di colon" die sanno." " Civilization " he surveys with a sweep which far transcends that of canonist or jurist who had already enlarged the ancient master's wisdom by their rival schemes respectively of Church and State. The pregnant sentences of his famous tract on Empire prove that he was facing some problems, then in their infancy, which Europe to-day must meet in their maturity. One of these was the assurance of a standard of liberty and justice between governors and governed within the circle of single States, as the basis of any larger political system. Another was the satisfaction of the passion for nationality as the force which must ultimately shape on its political side the destiny of mankind. Yet another was the necessity for the control and co-operation of national and dynastic units within the orbit of Universal Empire. Dante looked for a solution of these problems after a fashion peculiar to himself. He per- ceived clearly the pitfalls which surround all theories of an International State. Mere " balance of power," the figment of unstable equilibrium, he refused to consider. Again, be puts aside the idea of a Power supreme only in name, however august the form it might assume. He desired a real "Monarehia." The idea of an international Tribunal such as the Hague, without the sanction of armed force to execute its decrees, he would have dismissed as a farce. Once more he freely concedes the danger of the only practical alternative— an actual Power responsible tone will higher or stronger than its own. But be divines the existence of another force which he believes to be inherent in such an actual Power when once that Power has emerged into self-existence.
World-power will create, he argues, in the soul of those who wield such a Universal Empire, a new sense of responsi- bility towards mankind as regards its exercise. It is not only that a great demand strangely evokes a great response. The very motive for ambition has gone in the Monarch, for there is no -world left to conquer, and that instinct takes in him a new direction. The true Imperator without a human rival will desire, like God Himself, to become curator orbis, whose "care is the whole world." Dante believes, not -without reason, that history supports his contention. His example is the course of the ancient Roman Empire. He is no champion of its mediaeval shadow. He faces the practical problems raised by the high demand which he makes on human nature. He too, like Machiavelli, pushes his principle to its logical conclusion. He is very candid and serious about his daring conception of an International State which should possess the substance of world-power. Is there no capital in such an ideal on which the Allied Cause may call, when that other intellectual capital of Machiavelli is exhausted? Germany cannot draw on it. The same fountain will not give bitter and sweet water. Her conception of " world-power," wrung by force, is the antithesis of this conception of an international power yielded by consent. Dante's story of bow the Romans challenged other world-powers in what be calls the "duel of God" has no feature in common with her denial and defiance of the "one goal of civili- zation " which he rightly or wrongly ascribes to them. Her very conception of a national Maur cuts at the root of Dante's ideal of an international culture which be demands as the complement of Monarchia, and of which be discourses in ' his Banquet of Life—the link between his Vision in the Corn- media and his tract on Empire. To pursue Dante's ideal and demonstrate the full significance of his International State is altogether beyond our present scope. The British Empire has certainly a peculiar stake in Dante's conception of the " Roman " destiny. The British Empire, in fact, fulfils from many points of view the very conditions which Dante posits for his ideal International State. Our object has simply been to point out that Italy's contribution to the issues of the Great War is larger than the arms of her gallant sons, whose co- operation in the field may yet mean so much to the common cause—larger even than her own national and traditional stakes in this Armageddon. If one of her great sons has helped, more than the man in the street knows, to make the war, the greatest of them all flashes to us a signal of the only form which peace should take, if there is to be any hope of its duration.
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