Only second to the impact of Napoleon on Europe was the impact of Byron. ’Tis CÆsar and Hamlet in contemporary antithesis, for Professor Minto has well said that Byron played Hamlet with the world for his stage. While Byron was soliloquising with his pen, Napoleon was energising with his sword, and whether the pen was really the mightier of the twain is a nice thesis for debating societies. But in Italy, and by the greatest modern Italian poet, Byron has been acclaimed as a man of action. In my hotel in Bologna the landlord had piously—or with an eye to custom—suspended a tablet, commissioned from Carducci, whereof a translation would run as follows:

An epigraph, I fear, involving some poetic licence. True, of course, that no modern poet’s life or work, save Browning’s, is so interpenetrated with Italy. But Byron’s amateur relation with the futile Italian conspirators of the generation before Garibaldi was a somewhat shadowy contact with action, however generous his impatient ardour for Italy’s resurrection. Vaporous, too, was the conspiracy of “The Liberal” to pour new wine into the old British beer-bottle. But even his membership of the Greek committee or the equipment of a bellicose brig against Turkey, or his abortive appointment as Commander-in-Chief in an expedition against Lepanto, scarcely brings Byron into the category of men of action. He had never the chance of sloughing Hamlet for CÆsar or even for the Corsair. It was not even given him to die in battle, as he so ardently desired in the last verse of his last poem. And though his Hellenic fervour redeemed his closing days from despair and degradation, still the fever which slew him at Missolonghi hardly warrants the claim that he gave his life for Greece. Had his microbe met him in marshy Ravenna instead of marshy Missolonghi, would it have been said that he died for Italy? For aught we know his sea voyage from Genoa to Greece may have lengthened his life.

Moreover it was as an ideologue that Byron plunged into affairs. For the Greeks whom he set out to deliver figured in his mind as direct, if degenerate, descendants of the great free spirits of old, the creators of Hellenic culture: the reality was a priest-ridden population debased by Slav stocks.

Byron had indeed an opulence of temperament which naturally spilt over into action. Like Sir Walter Scott, he was larger than a writing man, and he brought the Scott sanity rather than the Byronic ebullience into his three months’ work at Missolonghi, holding himself aloof from factions and thus reconciling them in him, throwing his weight on the side of humanity, and even rising beyond his disappointment in the Greeks to perceive that their very failings made their regeneration only the more necessary. There was certainly in him the making of a leader of men. Nevertheless cerebral ferment and not conspiring for liberty was his essential form of activity. That cerebral ferment was never more ebullient and continuous than in those years of Italy and the Countess Guiccioli. Ravenna was his favourite town, and action is not precisely the note of Ravenna at whose town-gate I read with my own eyes a fabulous prohibition against vehicular traffic in the streets.

But did we concede Carducci’s claim to the full, and even supplement it by Byron’s passing eagerness to mould British politics, the Italian poet’s characterisation of him as the most striking modern instance of the union of poetry and action, is a startling reminder of the poverty and vacuousness of the chronicle of singing men of affairs. If Byron be indeed Eclipse, truly the rest are nowhere. And the question arises, why the modern man should be so artificially bifurcated. Æschylus was both soldier and poet. CÆsar not only made history but wrote it. Dante was Prior of Florence.

“In rebus publicis administrans,” says the inscription on the absurd tomb of Ariosto, and we know that Duke Alfonso sent him to suppress bands of robbers in lawless Garfagnana as well as on that even more formidable expedition to the Terrible Pontiff who had excommunicated the ruler of Ferrara. Chaucer was a diplomatist and Government Official. The ethereal singer of “The Faerie Queene” shared in the bloody attempt at the Pacification of Ireland. Milton, that virulent pamphleteer, barely escaped the block. Goethe administered Weimar. Victor Hugo, like Dante, achieved exile. BjÖrnson contributed to the independence of Norway. The notion of a poet as aloof from life seems to be largely modern and peculiarly British. Shelley is probably responsible for this conception of the “beautiful and ineffectual angel,” and in our own day Swinburne has helped to carry on the legend. But Swinburne’s fellow-poet, the self-styled “Singer of an empty day,” was precisely the poet who had the largest relations with life, and whose wall-papers have spread to circles where his poetry is unknown or unread.

You may say that Virgil, who was neither modern nor British, practised the same attitude of detachment, the same exclusive self-consecration to letters as Wordsworth or Tennyson. But Virgil had a people to express, and Wordsworth and Tennyson were passionate politicians, if they made no incursions into action proper. You may urge that the bards, skalds, minstrels, troubadours, ballad-mongers, jongleurs, have always been a class apart from action, but these were at least lauders of action, laureates of lords, while even the Minnesingers celebrated less their own mistresses than those of the heroes. ’Tis a parasitism upon action, to which indeed the meek and prostrate Kipling would confine the rÔle of letters.

But why should the power to feel and express the finer flavours of life and language paralyse the capacity for action? In the sanest souls both functions would co-exist in almost equal proportions. Sword in one hand and trowel in the other, Ezra’s Jews rebuilt the Temple, and the new Jerusalem will not rise till we can hold both trowel and tablet. In that Platonic millennium poets must be kings and kings poets.

That fantastic, mutilated, myopic, and inefficient being, known as “the practical man,” sniffs suspiciously at all movements that have thought or imagination, or an ideal for their inspiration. It may be conceded to this crippled soul that action can never take the rigid lines of theory, and that the forces of deflection must modify, if not indeed prevail over, the À priori pattern. But he is not truly a thinker whose thought cannot allow for these deviations in practice, which are as foreseeable (if not as exactly computable) as the retardation, acceleration or aberration of a planet by the pull of every other within whose attraction it rolls. Action is not pure thought but applied thinking—a species of engineering over, through, or around mountains, and opposing private domains. “Life caricatures our concepts,” a dreamer complained to me, after he had stepped down into politics. Is it not perhaps that our concepts caricature life? Life is too fluid and asymmetric to bear these fixed forms of constructive polity, and Lord Acton tells us that in the whole course of history no such rounded scheme has ever found fulfilment. I do not wonder.

But the poet who has never acted on the stage of affairs is moving in a padded world of words, and the hero who has never sung, or at least thrilled with the music in him, is only sub-human. The divorce of life and letters tends to sterilise letters and to brutalise life. The British mistrust of poetry in affairs has a solid basis—of stupidity. Imagination, which is the essential factor in all science, is esteemed a Jack o’ Lantern to lure astray. And to tap one’s way along, inch by inch, without any light at all, is held the surest method of progression.

But Italy, which has known Mazzini, is, I trust, for ever saved from this Anglo-Saxon shallowness.

“A Revolution is the passing of an idea from theory into practice,” said Mazzini. And again, “Those who sunder Thought and Action dismember God and deny the eternal Unity of things.” Pensiero e Azione was the significant title of the journal he founded to bring about the redemption of Italy. Garibaldi too was a dreamer, who even wrote poetry. Cavour, the most worldly of the trio of Italian saviours, owes his greatness precisely to the imagination which could use all means and all men to educe the foreseen end.

A sharp distinction should be drawn between those who dream with their eyes open, and those who dream with their eyes shut. What Cavour saw was in congruity with fact and possibility. Prevision is not perversion. As our modern watcher of the skies received the photograph of Halley’s Comet upon his plate half a year before it became visible to the eye, and months before it revealed itself to the farthest-piercing telescope, so upon the sensitised soul coming events cast their configurations before. This foresight of insight has naught in common with the nightmares and chimÆras of sleep. “The prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come” admits the elect to glimpses of its dream. These be the prophets, conduits through which the universe arrives at self-consciousness, as the heroes are the conduits through which it arrives at self-amelioration.

In a room leading to the Senate in the Ducal Palace of Venice I was looking at a picture by Contarini of the conquest of Verona by the Venetians in 1405.

’Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl over the dead and wounded, men in armour driving their daggers home in the prostrate huddled forms, galloping chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights with swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling devilry. The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice, those two fairy sisters, each magically enthroned on beauty, members of the same Venetia, peopled with the same stock, speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be at each other’s throat? And this revelry of devilry might, I knew, equally serve for Venice’s conquest of any other of her neighbours in that wonderful fighting fifteenth century of hers, when she must needs set up her winged lion in every market place.

And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns, I recalled, were only part of the universal urban warfare—Genoa against Pisa, Siena against Florence, Gubbio against Perugia; these again breaking into smaller circles of contention, or intersected with larger, party against party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph against Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet, Oddi against Baglioni, popolani against grandi, provinces against invaders, blood-feuds horrific, innumerable, the Guelph-Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200 revolutions and 700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is a reverse to the shield, and a iewelled scabbard to the sword.

I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where, tradition says, the imprisoned BoËthius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy,” and here in a vestibule my eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung aloft, and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found it—in translation—as follows:

Un magnanimo pensiero, indeed! And—like the chains of Pisa’s ancient harbour restored by Genoa—a pleasant sequel to the noble common struggle for Italian independence. And yet—the advocatus diaboli whispered me, or was it the shade of BoËthius in quest of “The Consolations of Phlebotomy”?—“What has become of Pavia, what of Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other’s blood? Where is the Pavia of a hundred towers, where is the Castello reared and enriched by generations of Visconti Dukes, and its University, once the finest in Italy, at which Petrarch held a chair; where is the opulence of life that flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean magnificence? Where is the Ravenna whose lawyers were as proverbial in the eleventh century as Philadelphia’s are to-day, where is that hotbed of heresy which nourished the great anti-Pope Guibert? Where is even the Ravenna of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to hold only Dante’s tomb. And its young men who bawl out choruses of a Sunday night till the small hours—do they even deserve the shrine of the poet of Christendom? And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the sixty galleys? What have they gained from their colourless absorption into a United Italy, compared with what they have lost—had indeed already lost—of peculiar and passionate existence? Are there two gentlemen of Verona now in whom we take a scintilla of interest? Is there a merchant of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is there a single Antonio with argosies bound for Tripolis and the Indies?” “Your Ben Jonson,” and by his wide posthumous reading I knew ’twas BoËthius speaking now, “said ‘in short measures life may perfect be.’ He should have said ‘in small circles’ and, perhaps, ‘only in small circles.’ All America—with its vasty breadths—stands to-day without a single man of the first order.”

“’Tis not even”—put in the advocatus diaboli, betrayed by his unphilosophic chuckle—“as if the destruction of small patriotisms meant the destruction of war. Pavia and Ravenna,” he pointed out mischievously, “must continue to fight—as part of the totality, Italy. And behold,” quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza Castello, “the significance of that old castle’s metamorphosis into a barrack—the poetry of war turned to prose, the frescoes of the old Pavian and Cremonese painters faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough Government soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall. Gone is that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated by its expansion into a national animosity; not insubstantial indeed under stress of invasion, but shadowy and unreal when the casus belli is remote, and by the manoeuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the Pavian or Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of peoples with whom alliance is transitory and artificial.”

“But he will not find himself fighting so often,” I rejoined. “Countries do not join battle as recklessly as cities. The larger the bulk the slower the turning to bite.” “And meantime,” interposed the philosophic shade, “the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in war. And neither in war nor in peace can there be the joy of fighting that comes from personal keenness in the issue. The wars of town with town, of sect with sect, of neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. ’Tis only neighbours that can feel what they are fighting for, ’tis only brothers that can fight with unction. The very likeness of brothers, their intimate acquaintance with the points of community, gives them an acute sense of the points of difference, and provides their combat with a solid standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irrational of all internecion were the fratricide of twins. Save the war of self-defence, civil war is the only legitimate form of war. Military war—how monstrous the sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ‘The True Greatness of Kingdoms,’ when he compares civil war to the heat of a fever, and foreign war to the heat of exercise which serves to keep the body in health. For what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a home-born Briton ever fight a Russian? His boundaries are nowhere contiguous with the Russian’s, his very notion of a Russ is mythical. ’Tis a cold-blooded war-game into which he is thrust from above. What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? Other is it with warfare that is personal, profoundly felt. Civil war—how sacred, how close to men’s bosoms! When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of war.”

“In religious wars, too,” eagerly interrupted the advocatus diaboli, “’tis nearness that is the justification—Homoousian versus Homoiousian. Why in heaven’s name,” he added with a spice of malice, “should a Mussulman cry haro against a Parsee, or a Shintoist against a Mormon? Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous; ’twere the duel of whale and elephant. ’Tis the Christian sects that must naturally torture and murder one another,” he wound up triumphantly.

“Ay indeed,” serenely assented the shade of BoËthius. “If fighting is to be done at all, let it be between brothers and not between strangers. Where ‘a hair perhaps divides the False and True’ ’tis of paramount importance to determine on which side of the hair we should stand. This rigid accuracy is the glory of Science—why should not our decimal be correct to nine places even in Religion? Why wave aside these sharp differences for which the men of my day were willing to pay with their lives? When your Alfred the Great translated my magnum opus, or even as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a modern version, these questions could vie in holy intensity, almost with your latter-day questions of Free Trade and Tariff Reform.”

“Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom,” sighed the advocatus diaboli, “when men were literally aflame for filioque or Immaculate Conception. O for the fiery Arians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians, Montanists, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophysites, Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses, Waldenses, Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists——”

“Surely you would not call Baptists fiery?” I interjected feebly. He had apparently no sense of humour, this advocatus, for he went on coldly: “How tame and disappointing these latter-day sectarians: these Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites, Christadelphians, ‘et hoc genus omne.’ I did have a flash of hope when your Methodists began to split up into Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists, Reformers, Primitives, Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly differences seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiÆ of Truth and Practice. But no! no one believes nowadays, for nobody burns his fellow-Christian. Even the burning words of your King’s Declaration——!”

“August shade,” I interrupted, pointedly addressing myself to the last of the Roman philosophers, “I concede that when Christianity founded itself on texts, an infinite perspective of homicidal homiletics lay open to the ingenuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and Hell turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance attached to the difference between the theological tweedledum and the theological tweedledee, so that it is just dimly conceivable one might murder one’s neighbour for his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not tell me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed.”

“Immo vero,” cried the Roman shade emphatically. “Was I not clubbed to death because I believed in Justice and combated the extortions of the Goths? A belief for which we would not die or kill, what is it?”

“A bloodless belief,” chuckled the advocatus diaboli, who, I suddenly remembered, was more legitimately entitled the defensor fidei.