No More Learning

When a human being has an analogous com- pleteness of knowledge, or intelligence carried into
? .
a third or fourth dimension, capable of dealing with NEW circumstances, we call it genius.
This arouses any amount of inferiority complex. Coolidge never aroused ANY inferiority complex. Neither did Harding or Hoover.
Jefferson was one genit1s and Mussolini is another. I am not putting in all the steps of my argument but that don't mean to say they aren't there.
Jefferson guided a governing class. A limited number of the public had the franchise. So far as the first sixty or more years of United States history are concerned there was no need for Jefferson even to imagine a time when the more intelligent members of the public would be too stupid or too lazy to exercise their wit in the discharge of their "duty. "
I mean to say T. J. had a feeling of responsibility and he knew other men who had it, it didn't occur to him that this type of man would die out.
John Adams believed in heredity. Jefferson left no sons. Adams left the only line o ( descendants who have steadily and without a break felt their responsibility and persistently participated in Ameri- cangovernment throughout its x6o years.
In one case hereditary privilege would have been use! ess and in the other it hasn't been necessary.
Adanis lived to see an " aristocracy of stock- jobbers and land-jobbers " in action and predicted them . " into time immemorial " (which phrase an ingenious grammarian can by great ingenuity cata- logue and give a name to, by counting in a string of ellipses).
Old John teased Tom about his hyperboles, so he is1fair game for us in this instance.
As to the ratio of property to responsibility, Ben Franklin remarked that some of the worst rascals he had known had been some of the richest.
and/or MUSSOLINI 19
? zo JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
This concept has long since faded from American government and almost from the minds of the people. Hamilton didn't believe it, or at any rate both his Hebrew blood and his Scotch blood coursed violently toward the contrary view.
? IV
THEmodem American cheap sneers at demo- cracy and at some of Jefferson's slogans are based on the assumption that Jefferson's . ideas were idees
fixes.
Attacks on Jefferson's sincerity made during his lifetime were made by the same type of idiot, on precisely the opposite tack. I mean becau'Se they weren't ideuftxes, and because Jefferson was incap- able of just that form of stupidity.
A n idee fixe is a dead, set, stiff, varnished " idea " existing in a vacuum.
The ideas of genius, or of " men of intelligence" are ? organic and germinal, the " seed " of the scriptures.
You put one of these ideas somewhere, i. e. some- where in a definite space and time, and something begins to happen.
"All men are hom free and equal. "
Cheers, bands, band wagons, John stops licking the squire's boots, from the Atlantic strip of the British American colonies to the great port of Marseilles there is a record off-sloughing of inferior-
. ity complex.
The drivelling imbecility of the British and
French . courts ceases to hypnotize all the pore boobs. ? At any rate something gets going.
The idea is as old as ? sop, who said: " We are all sons of Zeus. "
21
? u. JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
Again a little grammar or a little medi::eval scholarship would be useful, Albertus Magnus or Aquinas or some fusty old scribbler passed on an age-old distinction between the verb and the noun.
The verb implies a time, a relation to time. Be Christian, go back to the newer part of your Bible. Be Catholic (not Anglo-Catholic), consider the " mystery of the incarnation. "
I really do not give an underdone damn about your terminology so long as you understand it and don't mess up the meaning of your words. And (we might add) so long as you, as reader, try to under- stand the meaning of the text (whatever text) you read.
As a good reader you will refuse to be bam- boozled, and when a text has no meaning or when it is merely a mess or bluff you will drop it and occupy yourself with good literature (either belles lettres, economic or political).
" What's this got to do with . . . ? "
If the gentle reader wants to think, he can learn how to start from Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese
Written Character.
AND he can learn how to put his thoughts
together in some sort of order from my translation of the Ta Hio (The Great Learning) of Confucius (32. pages and 2. 8 pages respectively).
? v
NOBODY can understand the juxtaposition of the two names Jefferson-Mussolini until they are willing to imagine the transposition:
What would Benito Mussolini have done in the American wilderness in I 770 to I 816?
What would Tom Jefferson do and say in a narrow Mediterranean peninsula containing Foge;ia, Milan, Siracusa, Firenze, with a crusted conservat1sm that no untravelled American can even suspect of existing.
There are in Volterra houses . z. ,ooo years old, and there are in those houses families who have BEEN IN those houses, father to son to grandson, from the time of C:esar Augustus.
And there are Italian intellectuals, and from the time of Tiberius the Italian intelligentzia has been talking about draining the swamps.
AND there are in Italy fascist officials who are trying their best NOT to govern one whit more than is necessary.
Do I find my Podesta trying to be modern? That is to say do I find him trying to get the peasants from two miles up the hill. to behave like American citizens? I mean to say to come to his office or to whatever office they should come to for their particular. business INSTEAD of bringing eggs to his door at six o'clock in the morning in order to render their feudal superior propitious to their views or their miseries or their wangles?
23
? 14 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
Have I gone up and down the by-ways and crannies of this country for more than a decade observing the picturesque overhang of memories and tradition and the idiotic idees fixes of the edu- cated Italian?
And I remark again that the cultured Italian has been talking about draining those god-damned marshes since the time of Tiberius Cesar. And there once was a man named Cola or Nicola da Rienzi.
ANY ass could compare HIM to Tom Jefferson. Or, more justly, to Pat Henry.
A simpatico and most charming seventy-year-old Italian University President said to me, with eulogy in his voice : " The error of my generation was the underestimation of Marx. "
The Italian intelligentsia was amongst the last sections of the public to understand fascism.
Thefascist revolution is inftnite! J more INTEREST- ING than the Russian revolution because it is not a revolution according to preconceived type.
The Italian intelligentsia, like every other incom- petent intelligentsia lived with a lot of set ideas, 1n a vacuum.
Aragon in the best political propagandist poem of our time cheers loudly for the Bolsheviki.
" There are no brakes on the engine. " Banzai. Eljen, etc.
NO brakes on the engine. HOW splendid, how perfectly rippingI
? VI INTELLIGENTSIAS
LENIN did not have the Vatican in his front garden. He knew his Russia and dealt with the Russia he had before him. By comparison a simple equation. I mean by comparison with the States of Italy, the duchies and kingdoms, etc. , united much more recently than our own, and the clotted con- glomerate of snobbisms, sectional feelings and dis- crepancies of cultural level, for on the whole the gap between the old civilization, the specialized cultural heritage of the educated Italian and the uncultured Italian? is probably greater than exists anywhere else or at least, one finds it in sharper contrast.
In one sense they've all got some sort of culture, rnilieniar, forgotten, stuck anywhere from the time of Odysseus to the time of St. Dominic, to the time ofMazzini.
Mrs. B. 's cook is taken to the " mountains," that is to say she is taken uphill about a mile and a quarter, and she weeps with nostalgia for the sea, said sea being clearly visible from the kitchen window.
In twenty minutes I can walk into a community with a different language, the uphills speaking something? nearer Tuscan and the downhills talking Genovesh. IhaveheardanexcitedMilanesecursing the Neapolitan for an African.
25
? z6 JEFFERSON
You may say that this isn't serious or that one can't take it in the literal sense. But under it lies the fact that truth in Milan is anything but truth down in Foggia.
There is the Latin habit of discussing abstract ideas. In America this habit is restricted to the small undesirable class who write for the New Republic and analogous nuisances. In England it is confined to Fabians.
This habit has nothing to do with knowledge or a desire to learn. It is more or less allied to the. desire for eloquence.
I have seen the Italian small shopkeeper in the midst of a verbal soar, utterly unable to attend to a waiting customer until he has delivered his " opinione," rounded out his paragraph for a custo- mer already served.
Language for many of them seems to disgorge itself in huge formed blobs, and nothing but violent shock can impede the disgorgement of, let us say, a three-hundred-word blob, once its emission is started.
Hence the rules of the American Senate, the oriental secular tradition of leisure, etc.
Humanity, Italian and every other segment of it, is not given to seeing the FACT, man sees his own preconception of fact.
It takes a genius charged with some form of dynamite, mental or material, to blast him out of these preconceptions.
" NOI CI FACCIAMO SCANNAR PER MUSSOLINI," said my hotel-keeper in Rimini years ago, thinking I knew nothing about the revolution and wanting to get it into my head. Nothing happens without efficient cause. My hotel-keeper was also Comandante della Piazza,
? andfor MUSSOLINI 1. 7
we had got better acquainted by reason of his sense of responsibility, or his interest in what I was doing. The local librarian had shut up the library, and the Comandante had damn well decided that if I had taken the trouble to come to Romagna to look at a manuscript, the library would cut the red tape.
" Scannar ,, is a very colloquial word meaning to get scragged. It has none of the oratorical quality of " we will die for," but that's what it means. And my friend M. was expressing a simple fact.
This kind of devotion does not come from merely starting a boy-scout movement. It doesn't come to a man like myself for analysing a move- ment with an historical perspective or with a dozen historic perspectives.
" Can't move 'em with a cold thing like econo- mics " said Arthur Griffiths to the undersigned when Griffiths was engaged in getting his unspeakable and reactionary island out of the control of the ineffably witless British.
Aproposito, an Italian anti-fascist, pure-hearted idealist stood in this room a year or so ago and orated for forty-five minutes in the vein of colonial oratory of I 76o-76, with no trace what so bloody ever in his discourse of anything that had been thought in the interim.
When he left an almost inaudible chink or loop- hole between one clause and another, I interjected: " And what? about economics? "
" 0 wowowowowo ah o, I don't understand any- thing about eh, such matters. "
It is n()w generally conceded by the Italian non- enthusers that fascism was necessary and that there was no other way.
The communists had NOT the sense, they simply
? 2. 8 JEFFERSON
had not the simple arithmetic and executive ability needed to run a village of five hundred inhabitants. As to the socialists, a liberal or something of that sort. said to me: " They had the chance and per vigliaccheria . . . p~r VIGLiaccheria refused to take it. " Which we may translate that they merely howled and put their tails between their legs: They hadn't the courage to govern or even to come
into power.
On the other hand a minister (cabinet minister)
said to me of the Capo del Governo: " Once of the left, always left. " Uomo di sinistra, sempre sinistra. " THE CONTINUING REVOLUTION " of the more recent proclamations, is almost a refrain
out of Jefferson.
I am not putting these sentences in monolinear
syllogistic arrangement, and I have no intention of using that old form of trickery to fool the reader, any reader, into thinking I have proved anything, or that having read a paragraph of my writing he KNOWS something that he can only know by examining a dozen or two dozen facts and putting them all together.
There are no exact analogies in history. Henry Adams thought about constructing a stience of history and found himself in hot water.
Lenin had luck and had one set of obstacles. He had not the Italian obstacles, and it is perfectly useless to seek the specific weight of one. man's achievement on the false supposition that he was solving a different problem from that with which he was, or is, actually concerned.
THE OLDER CULTURE, "Patine. "
I have, you may say, lived among the more refined spirits of my epoch, not for the purpose of writing memoirs to the effect that " on this brilliant
? and/or MUSSOLINI z9
occasion there were present . . . etc. . . . " but because . stupidity bores me and I have never yet found the intellectual pace too swift or the mental dynamite too high for my still unsatisfied appetite.
Book leamin' has little or nothing to do with intelligence, nevertheless. until I came to Italy I never sat down to a lunch table where there was a good three-cornered discussion of the respective merits of Horace and Catullus. That is simply a measure of the desuetude into which classic studies have fallen; especially among practising writers.
It so happens that in the case I have in mind one of the disputants was a professor (not of Latin) and the other had translated some William Blake into Italian; though very few . of his compatriots have discovered it. Naturally neither of them had heard of economics. ?
I was going up to San Marino, before the new road was made, ? and on the wooden seat opposite me sat the Pope Hildebrand or someone who could have sat for Hildebrand's portrait, a solid and magnificent figure, a knut among ecclesiastics, not a filbert or a table nut, but hickory, native hickory with ? a gold ? chain weighing I should have said about half a Troy pound, and with a most elegant green silk cord round his hat, and an umbrella that would have held up half Atlas, and with bright imperial purple, red purple silky? saucers under his ecclesiastical buttons.
To the left was San Leo and he began to tell me about the cathedral, quoted Dante, drew a ground plan of the church, best pure Romanesque . . . and so forth.
I said: u You are the head of the church in these parts? "
Yes, he was the head of the church and CON-
? 30 JEFFERSON
found it what had they done to him, they had taken him down OUT of that magnificent architectural monument and put him in a place with (the voice went acid with ineffable contempt and exasperation) "a place with a POP-U-L A TION! "
This is the spirit that filled the Quattrocento cathedrals with the slabs of malachite, porphyry, . lapis lazuli. And his dad must have ploughed his own field.
Put nim into the picture along with the refined archreological Monsignori whom I have met in the libraries, or the irreconcilables who were still howling for the restoration of temporal power, or the old " black" families who shut their doors in '7o when the Pope shut himself into the Vatican and kept 'em shut until Mussolini and the Pope signed their concordat. Subject matter for two dozen Italian Prousts, who don't exist because each seg- ment of the country is different.
YOU CAN'T CONQUER A MAP
Down in Foggia an hysterical female, displeased, or rather distressed, that I should leave a monstrous and horrible church, I mean the interior, a composite horror of stucco, dragged me to look at " their Madonna," plaster, from the Rue St. Sulpice or some other factory, void of decency and void of tradition. The pained painted horror had . lifted up its eyes six years ago when the town had cholera or measles or something and the faithful were saved by the miracle.
At Terracina the sacristan showed me a little marble barocco angel on the floor of the sacristy, the bishop had had to have it taken out of the church because the peasants insisted on " wor-
? andfor MUSSOLINI
shipping IT as Santa? Lucia. " L'adoravano come Santa Lucia.
AGAINST WHICH
Line Steffens came back from Russia. Mussolini saw him, and Steff in his autobiography reports the Duce as asking him: " YO\l've seen all that. Haven't you learned anything? "
I also saw Steff at that time. Steff was thinking.
There are early fascist manifestos, or at least one that is highly anti-clerical. I also was anti- clerical. I've seen Christians in England, I've seen French Catholics at Amiens and at Rocamadour, and I don'twant to see anymore. French bigotry is as dis- pleasing a spectacle as modern man can lay eyes on.
The Christian corruptions have never been able to infect the Italian, he takes it easy, the Mediter- ranean sanity subsists.
My anti-clericalism petered out in Romagna. I recall a country priest guying the sacristan in the Tempio Malatestiano because the foreigner knew more about the church, " his " church, than the sacristan.
I recall also the puzzled expression of the same priest a few days later as he saw me making my farewells to the stone elephants. I asked him if he considered this form of devotion heretical.
He grinned and seemed wholly undisturbed by fears for my indefinite future. ?
An old nun in hospital had a good deal of trouble in digesting the fact that I wasn't Christian, no I wasn't; thank God, I? wasn't a Protestant, but I wasn't a Catholic either, and I wasn't a Jew, I believed in a more ancient and classical system with a place for Zeus and Apollo. To which with infinite gentleness, "Z'e tutta una religione. " "Oh well it's all a religion. "
? 32 JEFFERSON
Hence the moderation in the decree: These ser- vices will continue because it is the custom of the great majority of the people.
I find F. in the Piazza San Marco chuckling over " Hanno bastinato il becco! " A bit of pure Goldoni that he had just seen in the Venetian law courts.
A row in the Venetian fish market is reported in the? daily paper with almost the same phrase as that used in the shindy between Sigismund Malatesta and Count Federico Urbino, Ferrara, 1 4 0 0 and something.
No American who hasn't lived for years in Italy has the faintest shade of a shadow of a conception of the multiformity and diversity of wholly separate and distinct conservatisms that exist in this country.
All of 'em carved in stone, carpentered and varnished into shape, built in stucco, or organic in the mind of the people.
" Bombe, bombe, bombe per svegliare questi dormiglioni di ' pensatori ' Italiani, che credono di essere ancora al tempo del Metastasio," citation from letter received this morning, February 8, anno XI, headed Rome. A letter from a man I met a few years ago still carrying Austrian shell frag- ments in his system and still crushed. The nitro- glycerine he wants is purely verbal nitroglycerine. " Bombs, bombs, bombs to wake up these slug- gards, these eyetalian ' thinkers ' who still think they're in the time of Metastasio. "
FROBENIUS
The intelligent Teuton said a few bright words,
in a recent interview, about the difficulty of com- munication between civilized men of different races. "It is not what you tell a man but the part ofit that he thinks important that determines the ratio
? andfor MUSSOLINI
of what is ' communicated ' to what is misunder- stood. "
Hang up what I've said in these chapters. We come to
THE PROBLEM OF ITALY
at the time of the Peace Conference: a number of official men or political figures in Paris, no one of whom could be trusted with a fountain pen or a pocket-knife.
Stef says, or repeats, a story that Clemenceau sketched out the bases of lasting peace, for the fun of seeing how quickly ALL of the delegates would refuse to consider such bases. .
I take it the only point the Allies at large were, on arrival, agreed on, was that they should not keep their agreements with Italy.
As to the " atmosphere ": I saw Arabian Law- rence in London one evening after he had been with Lloyd George and, I think, Clemenceau or at any rate one of the other big pots of the congeries. He wouldp. 't talk about Arabia, and quite naturally he wouldn't talk about what had occurred in the afternoon. But he was like a man who has been chucked in a dungheap and is furtively trying to flick the traces of it off his clothing.
Any thorough judgment of MUSSOLINI will be in a measure an act of faith, it will depend on what you believe the man means, what you believe that he wants to. accomplish.
I have never believed that my grandfather put a bit of railway across Wisconsin simplyor chiefly to make money or even with the illusion that he would make money, or make more money in that way than in some. other.
I don't believe any estimate of Mussolini will be
? JEFFERSON
valid unless it starts from his passion for construc- tion. Treat him as artifex and all the details fall into place. Take him as anything save the artist and you will get muddled with contradictions. Or you will waste a lot of time finding that he don't fit your particular preconceptions or your particular theories.
The Anglo-Saxon is particularly inept at under. - standing the Latin clarity of " Qui veut la fin veut les moyens. " Who wills the end wills the means.
There is Lenin's calm estimate of all other Russian parties : They are very clever, yes, they can do EVERYTHING except act.
If you don't believe that Jefferson was actuated by a (in the strict quaker sense) " concern " for the good of the people, you will quibble, perhaps, over details, perhaps over the same details that worried his old friend John Adams.
If you don't believe that Mussolini is driven by a vast and deep " concern " or will for the welfare of Italy, not Italy as a bureaucracy, or Italy as a state machinery stuck up on top of the people, but for Italy organic, composed of the last ploughman and the last girl in the olive-yards, then you will have a great deal o f trouble about the un-Jeffersonian details of his surfaces.
put my cards and beliefs on good years in London and kinds of Frenchmen, and I
As fast as possib1e I
the table. I have had
Paris and I like some
greatly admire at least
being what it is, the Hun hinterland epileptic, largely stuck in the bog of the seventeenth century, with lots of crusted old militars yelling to get back siph'litic Bill and lots more wanting pogroms, and with France completely bamboozled by La Comite des Forges, and, in short, things being what they are in Europe as Europe, I believe in a
one German, but EUROPE
? andfor MUSSOLINI 35
STRONG ITALY as the only possible foundation or anchor or whatever you want to call it for the good life in Europe.
Jefferson was super-wise in his non-combatancy, but John Adams was possibly right about frigates. Unpreparedness and sloppy pacifism are not neces- sarily the best guarantees of peace.
As to actual pacifism; there are plenty of people who think it merely a section ofwar propaganda, and until there is at least one peace society that will look at the facts, one may suspect the lot of corruption.
If they are not all cheats and liars they are too dumb to face contemporary economics, and the safety of to-morrow cannot be entrusted whol1y to morons.
The DUCE sits in Rome calling five hundred bluffs (or thereabouts) every morning. Some bright lad might present him to our glorious fatherland under- the title of MUSSOLINI DEBUNKER.
An acute critic tells me I shall never learn to write for the public because I insist on citing other books.
How the deuce is one to avoid it? Several ideas occurred to humanity before I bought a portable typewriter.
De Gourmont wrote a good deal about breaking up cliches, both verbal and rhythmic.
There is possibly some trick of handing out Confucius, Frobenius, Fenollosa, Gourmont, Dante, etc. , as if the bright lad on the platform had done all of their jobs for himself, with the express aim of
delighting hi~ public.
I shall go on patiently trying to explain a complex
. of phenomena, without pretending that its twenty- seven elements can with profit to the reader be considered as five.
? VII
T A K I N G it by and large the Russian revolution seems to me fairly simple by comparison. If I am wrong it is probably because I haven't been ten years in Russia.
At any rate, as I see it, the Russian revolution is the end of the Marxian cycle, that is to say Marxian economics were invented in a time when labour was necessary, when a great deal of labour was still necessary, and his, Marx's, values are based on labour.
The new economics bases value on the cultural heritage, that is to say on labour PLUS the complex of inventions which make it possible to get results, which used to be exclusively the results of labour, with very little labour, and with a quantity of labour that tends steadily to diminish.
If the indulgent reader will consider not ONE revolution but the successive revolutions, violent and quiet, political, economic, social, he will see that none of them start from the same point, and that none of them arrive at identical destinations, and that a nation two hundred years behind the rest gives a jump which may carry it further in a given direction than any one has gone, but that the next nation to jump from, let us say, a higher, a more advanced level of culture lands in a different place on a still higher level, or into a still greater com- plexity.
I find no metaphor for the bathos of those 36
? .
denizens of developed countries who kneel and ask Russia to save 'em. I am only reminded of the story about George Moore and his braces.
Russian Bolshevism is the outcome of centuries of historic determinism, Russian habit of having a town council or mir where all the moonheads used to go and jaw about it. Russia full of tribal super- stitions, by which I mean " left-overs. "
There is no use in thinking about shoving this state of things suddenly onto a totally different people with utterly different habits. Results would be just as funny as the first trials by jury among the Hungarian peasantry.
As to communism, the frontier between private and public affairs is NOT fixed, it varies from one state of society to another. The Anglo-Saxons had a certain amount of common land, vide the name " Boston Common," which is still in Massachus- etts.
The English boob was done out of most of his common land some time or other, probably under whiggery and the earlier Georges.
Quincy Adams was a communist in so far as he wanted to hold a lot of unsettled land " for the nation. "
The idea was unseasonable and would have held back the settlement of the continent for who knows how many decades.
If Adams hadn't been deficient in capacity for human contacts he might, however, have saved "for the nation," enough land to be useful in a number of conjectural ways. It did " belong to the nation. "
A bolshevik friend, attacking fascism, said that Russia" belongs to them," meaning that it belongs to the people, yet it is very difficult to see how the
JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI H
? 38 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
plural or singular Russian owns his country, any more than I own the gulf of Tigullio. I can see it, I can swim in it when it is warm enough.
Besides, a Russian who? isn't a member of the party is certainly less a proprietor, than is a member. I have no doubt that the idea of a sovereign people gave the buff-and-blue hefties a great sensation.
It was a stimulant, a tonic, it may have washed off a lot of inferiority complex, tho' I can't believe that the sense of being a feudal underling was very strong in Connecticut in 1770.
Perhaps the greatest work of a political genius is to correct the more flagrant disproportions of his epoch. If the reader will peruse any record of the utterly drivelling idiocy of the Prench Court from the time of Henri IV to fat Louis, or the annals of any European country in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries he will find himself growing more and more rabidly Jeffersonian.
It is probable that a reader in 2133 looking over the record of nineteenth-century villainy will feel a revulsion from "irresponsibility," growing more acute as he comes down into the debauch of Hatrys, Kreugers and other unconvicted financiers whose tropisms conform.
? VIII
FROBENIUS, in the interview referred to, said that Mussolini's miracle had been that of reawaken- ing the sense of responsibility. I cite Frobenius merely to have my own opinion independently delivered by another man who knows enough of the facts to form an intelligent judgment.
By taking more responsibility than any other man (save possibly Lenin) has dared to assume in our time Mussolini has succeeded. in imparting here and there a little of this sense to some others.
The cheery and relatively irresponsible "ought" of the eighteenth-century doctrinaires and enthusi- asts has been weighed out and measured by 1 6o years of experiment. Jefferson thought people would feel responsible, or didn't think, let us say, didn't foresee or clearly think the contrary.
A limited electorate was in being. He, T. J. , had enough to do with his present, the conservation of the U. S. , the gaining of time for its growth, etc. , the problem of slavery which he gradually found was beyond his time. As well to be clear that he was "agriculturalist" FOR his time and his locus, but that he did see industry coming.
Ultimately our factories, which we needed for independence, were shoved on to us by wars and embargoes, and chiefly by British fat-headedness.
A hundred and more years later Russia knows enough to WANT factories and to want 'em in a hurry.
39
? 40 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
There will be no clear thinking until you under- stand that Italy is NOT Russia. Racially, geograph- ically and with all the implications of both words Italy is not Russia, nor is America Italy, nor is Russia America, etc. , and I do not " advocate " America's trying to be either Russia or Italy, und so weiter.
The most I could DO would be to try to per- suade a few of the more intelligent people in all three countries to try to find out, within the limits of the possible, where and what are the others, and what are the relations between them, or the cordial- ities possible, or at any rate the possible compre- hensions.
All of which won't be helped by holding up a false " artificial horizon," or ? painting distorted backgrounds for falsified effigies.
As to Jefferson's interests, let us say his practical interests: he was interested in rice, he believed in feeding the people, or at least that they ought to be fed, he wasn't averse from pinching a bit of rice or at least from smuggling a sack of a particularly :fine brand out of Piedmonte. With the moral aim of improving all the rice in Virginia.
Mussolini has persuaded the Italians to grow better wheat, and to produce Italian colonial bananas.
This may explain the " Dio ti benedica " scrawled on a shed where some swamps were.
? IX
N0 W what about prejudice? Censorship of the Press!
I had read so much about this in foreign papers, particularly in the Chicago Tribune, that I had taken it for granted. A few weeks ago the editor of the village local paper was vastly surprised when apropos of a fairly strong expression of opinion, I asked him if he could print it. Of course he could print it, he could print anything he liked. There was no censorship of that sort. If he made an ass of himself someone would tell him. I have seen several cheery Italians, fascists, bearing up after a series of reprimands.
As the Duce has pithily remarked: " Where the Press is 'free' it merely serves special interests. "
The kind of intellectual respiration where you print a thing and get spoken to afterward is vastly different from London stuffiness. Honest thought, I mean serious sober thought intended to be of public utility is, in England, merely excluded from all the Press. Statement o f undenied and undeniable fact is merely blanketed for five years, for a decade, for longer. They don't dare publish the reports of their own medical officers on the state of the population, let alone economic thinking.
A great deal of yawp about free Press proves on examination to be a mere howl for irresponsibility. American journalism has built up an ideal of impartiality. A syndicate official writes me that as
41
? 42. JEFFERSON
" a news writer he can't afford the luxury of having opinions. "
That is in part practical, it is in part the result of an ideal, the ideal of being the impartial observer; of not colouring your report of fact by an " idea " or by a conviction.
But say that a given situation has ten com- ponents and that the reporter sees one? It is his duty to report it? TO WHOM?
If we had a perfect organ of public opinion or a perfect newspaper earnestly trying to tell thoughtful readers the truth, that would be lovely.
The paper discovering an error of its own would report it and so forth.
As it is, even our supposedly seriou,s quarterlies do not correct misstatements. My mind go~s back to Col. Harvey who was an editor before he wore short pants in 1;. -ondon.
Then there is the unavoidable difference in truth itself, which arises from the different predisposition and from the different intention and the different capacity of the beholder.
A field is one thing to the strolling by-passer, another to the impressionist painter, yet another to the farmer determined to plant seed in it, and get a return.
There are some things which should be reported to " the authorities " first; and to the public only when the authorities are wilfully inattentive, incom- petent or dishonest.
English free speech, the privilege of Hyde Park oratory, etc. , is mostly a mark of contempt for thought in any form whatsoever. Britain believes that the talk is a safety valve to let off steam, or that, at any rate this form of cerebral secretion is incom- prehensible.
? andfor MUSSOLINI 43
The Latin can't help believing that an idea IS something or other. Put an idea into a Latin and it makes him think, or at least talk, if not act.
WHERE DOES THIS LEAD?
As far as the present author is concerned it leads to the fact I prefer a de facto freedom to theoretical freedom. I don't care a damn about a free Press if it means that every time I have anything to say that appears to me to be of the least interest or " of exceptional interest " some nincompoop keeps me from printing it. I don't care whether the nincom- poop is Professor Carus or Col. Harvey or some snob in London, or a lying and obsequious British politician who dislikes "colloquial language" be- cause the reader might understand it.
The motive or motives of an act comprise one of its dimensions. The journalist has often no greater motive than a desire to make the front page or any page, and, at one remove, the lesser literary journalist may merely want to stir up a shindy, as has been the case recently re Mr. Hemingway.
A NODS LA LIBERT?
Liberty is defined in the declaration of the Droits de J'homme, as they are proclaimed on the Aurillac monument, as the right to do anything thatnenuitpasauxautres. Thatdoesnotharmothers. This is the concept of liberty that started the
enthusiasms in 1776 and in 1790.
I see a member of the Seldes family giving half
an underdone damn whether their yawps do harm or have? any other effect save that of getting them- selves advertised.
Ifyou were talking about the liberty ofa respons-
? 44
JEFFERSON
ible Press that is a different kettle of onions, and is something very near to the state of the Press in Italy at the moment.
The irresponsible may be in a certain sense " free " though not always free of the consequences of their own irresponsibility, whatever the theo- retical government, or even if there be no govern- ment whatsoever, but their freedom is NOT the ideal liberty of eighteenth-century preachers.
A defect, among others, of puritanism, or of protestantism or of Calvin the damned, and Luther and all the rest of these blighters whom we Ameri- cans have, whether we like it or not, on our shoul- ders, is that it and they set up rigid prohibitions which take no count whatsoever of motive.
Thou shalt not this and that and the other. This is a shallowness, it is the thought of inexperienced men, it is thought in two dimensions only.
What you want to know about the actions of a friend or mistress is WHY did he or she do it?
If the act was done for affection you forgive it. It is only when the doer is indifferent to us that we care most for the effect.
Doc Shelling used to say that the working man (American or other) wanted his rights and all of everybody else's.
" The party " in Russia has simplified things too far, perhaps? too far?
We have in our time suffered a great clamour from those who ask to be " governed," by which they mean mostly that they want to run yammering to their papa, the state, for jam, biscuits, and per- sistent help in every small trouble.