Ford professed to be
concerned
wholly with commercial and manufacturing problems, though he has recently mentioned human rights in a garbled outbreak against technocracy.
Pound-Jefferson-and-or-Mussolini
andfor MUSSOLINI 73
track mind liked to show his authority (and didn't care a damn whether his authority was legal or not) and because pus in one part of a government system tends to produce pustulence throughout that system.
Back of Jefferson's embargo and of Mussolini's there was a will for the good of their nations.
In neither man of genius was preconception or theory strong enough to blind the leader to the immediate need.
Even the question o f the efficiency o f the measures doesn't arise.
Most historians seem to tend to believe that Jefferson's embargo may have done more good than harm, there is no shadow of a doubt whatsoever that Mussolini's embargo has done what the leader intended.
No one denies the material and immediate effect: grano, bonifica, reJtauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restor- ations, new buildings, and, I am ready to add off my own bat, AN A W AKENED INTELLIGENCE
in the nation and a new LANGUAGE in th~ debates in the Chamber.
? XVIII
A L L right, go to the House of Commons for a display of gas, evasion, incompetence, and then read the Stampa's rep<;>rt for 8th January or when- ever it was, of Italians getting up and saying what they meant with clarity and even with brevity, or at any rate not stalling and beating about the bush.
And even here is the hand or eye or ear of the Duce, the Debunker par excellence, for the deputies and ministers know that there is an EDITORIAL eye and ear-precisely-an editor, who will see through their bunkum and for whom they will go to the scrap-basket just as quickly as an incompetent reporter's c. opy will go to the basket in a live editorial office.
As personal testimony to PERSONAL feeling, I feel freer here than I ever did in London or Paris. I am willing to admit my capacity for illusion, but right or wrong, that is my feeling. And as an act or declaration of faith, I do NOT BELIEVE that any constructive effort has been ham-strung in this country since the Marcia su Roma.
As to thought and letters: the Bolsheviki have never been able to live up to the declaration that even they want to permit " fellow-passengers," they have proclaimed that literature is for the state, but they don't mean it as, let us say, I do. I believe that any precise use of words is bound in the long run to be useful to the state and the world at large.
74
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 7S
The Duce comes out to meet one in his puncturing of the pretences of party careerists.
Speaking to fascist writers: " A membership ticket in this party does not confer genius on the holder. " He was speaking in particular of literary and journalistic ability.
A decent concept of a twentieth century world is like the decent concept of a town or a family, you don't want your neighbour down with cholera; you don't want your family full of sickly members all yowling for help. You don't want the cells in your muscles all squshy and some so weak that one cell grips over and gets out of hand.
If anyone holds the long-distance record for common-sense, that man is Confucius. And the concept I have in mind is: benefit of the world by n;eans ofgood INTERNAL GOVERNMENT of the country.
A squshy and unstable state, particularly in the Italian peninsula, is not an aid to the health of Europe.
A state strung along the Atlantic sea-board in I Soo with an enormous unoccupied hinterland was a very different kettle of onions.
But the types of mind fitted to deal with either, and with unexpected situations in either, are types which may have a very deep kinship which you may perceive if you can but sort out the likenesses underlying.
The shortsighted squeal, they always squeal except when they are being diddled or hypnotized.
? XIX
D U R I N G the past twenty years the fundamental capacities of humanity for supplying itse~ with everything it wants have changed at a geometrical ratio outsoaring anything previous man had guessed at.
Just as the quantity of fertile available land had soared out of the previous bounds of human imagination when Europe had a new continent thrown into her silly lap, and proceeded to play the god-damned drivelling fool, first with a grab for metal that annihilated the Incas, then with a gamble for "colonies," i. e. , vast tracts that no nation in Europe at that time was organized to manage.
The putrid idiocy of eighteenth-century European governments is something no normal man can imagine until he has waded through a hundred volumes of the history of that period. The kings and ministers of that day were as idiotic as Otto Kahn or the last Czar of the several Russias, and they saw equally NOT AT ALL into the present.
TEMPERAMENT
I know why my friend the urbane and far more
than distinguished jurisconsult is worried, sincerely worried and distressed by fascismo. - He has the elegiac mind: as per his " the mistake of my genera. . tion was . . . " And he is worried because in his huge cases he don't from one day to another know what the law will be, and all his forty or fifty years
76
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 77
of patient diligent and exacting acute study are likely to go west at any moment as far as immediate utility is concerned.
Mussolini may at any moment find out that some laboured and ingenious device for securing a fair amount of justice in spme anterior period and under earlier states of society NO LONGER works, or is no longer capable of giving as much justice as some new rule made to fit the facts of the year ELEVEN, facts, i. e. that have been facts for a short time only.
This is of necessity distressing to a man at the head of his profession, who has got used to being comfortably at the head of his profession ; but it is a vastly different distress to that of my father-in-law in England when bothered by Mr. Lloyd George. He was bothered because Lloyd George's laws were framed in such sloppy and ambiguous language that NO ONE, positively no one, could make out what they intended: i. e. , they really took the legis- lativ:e power out of the h~ds of the legislators and left 1t for wanglers and pettifoggers, to be construed to the gang's greatest advantage.
There are more ways than one of diddling people, nations, organizations, out of power " by law possessed. "
? XX
JEFFERSON IN HIS GENERATION
PROBABLY no writer on American history has been more impartial than Woodward, author of Washington Image and Man, and certainly no one has had a greater knack for assessing the specific weight of the early notables, without heat, and with
insuperable fairness, the fairness of a man who isn't out to prove anything, who hasn't an axe to grind-! don't mean merely ~personal axe, but who is simply observer and not a protagonist or an advocate of some next thing to do or some " right course of action. "
And this is the fine flower and almost the justi- fication o f journalism in America. I t is the new ideal of being impartial, and marks the rise Qf a journalist who isn't taken sufficiendy seriously as an historian, who probably doesn't take himself for quite the historian that he is.
You will go far without finding any sounder estimates than his of Jefferson and John Adams, or a better summary than his so brief summary of Jefferson's view. I wonder i f i can compass as good a one before citing the letters.
? XXI
JEFFERSON didn't believe any nation had the right to contract debts that it couldn't pay off with reasonable effort within nineteen years.
This didn't come into practical politics in his time. He wanted to get rid of slavery, this didn't happen in his time though he took thought to prevent its spreading into the North and West.
He believed in keeping out of European affairs and America was kept out until 1812.
" The cannibals of Europe are eating each other again. " That's up-to-date (1932. ) all right enough. Read Corbaccio's edition of the volume on cannon- touts, it may indicate the spirit of Europe, or of North Europe as distinct from Mediterranean sanity.
For if Rorrie was a conquering empire, renais- sance Italy evolved the doctrine of the balance of power, first for use inside the peninsula. Italy produced notable peacemakers who based their glory on peace tho' it came by the sword, Nic. Este, Cosimo, Lorenzo Medici, even Sforza condottiero, all men standing for order and, when possible, for moderation.
The main line of American conflict for the first half of the last century was the fight between public interest and the interests. Not a showy theatrical shindy. And we end to-day with enlightenment o f a Jeffersonian fundamental, transposed, expanded, developed.
79
? So JEFFERSON
" The best place for keeping money is in the pockets of the people. "
That does not mean to say that we are to go back to Indian or Burmese hoarding. You must take the text and let time transpose it.
We have had the century of the " benefits of concentration of capital" (and the malefits).
We have come to . the point where money must be got into people's pockets if goods are to move and modern life to continue " the good life. " All of this is dynamic and mobile and the? furthest possible remove from static oriental burial of jewels and silver.
The Hindu buries his metal because he has no trust in public order or the dl! rability of a dynasty and because he wants to hide the money for safety. This course did NOT produce mechanical pro- gress.
But it is very different from the tying up of credit or paper money in banks.
Paper money in the popular pocket would {lOt breed stagnation and it would not stay there tor the reasons of oriental hoarding. The popolano would want to show it was there. Its distribution would mean greater mobility of goods.
La richezza elo scambio.
Prosperity comes from exchanging. Old com- mon-place but one that needs constaat re~advertis- ing. The French bas-de-laine never did any harm, or no harm by comparison with the double-locking and immobilization of credit.
Credit is or was immobilized in India by burial of metal. It is not the means but the end that matters.
Rephrase Jefferson's saying: "The best place for
? and/or MUSSOLINI 8I
a nation's reserve of credit is in as many individual pockets as possible. "
I think that will probably hold right through the coming change in the system.
If money is ever conceived as certificate of work done there will be no need of taxes. Work done for the state will be paid by state certificate, issued direct, without anyone's needing to cadge around and get it from Bill, Dick and William before paying it to Joe, Mike and Henry.
I have worried considerably over what appears to be the too great ease and simplicity of this proposition. For . every bit of DURABLE goods there {)ught certainly to be a ticket,_ so that instead of toting the block of rock or the arm-chair you could, with greater ease, tote the ticket and swap it for whatever you at the moment wanted.
But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is eaten, can you have spare tickets lying about with nothing. to correspond or be delivered, i. e. , depreciation in the value of the tickets?
Recorded time has dealt with the underlying equation and perishable goods, grain and food- stuffs have been in times of plenty extremely cheap lry comparison with permanent goods.
Still if the certificate of work done let us say for the government is only paid out by John to Joe WHEN Joe delivers, i. e. , if it only circulates when it moves for value received it could conceivably retain a true value. The unspent notes in John's pocket would not of necessity upset the whole working of a new system, or force people to sell
apples at. street comers. .
There is no reason why this reserve in every-
man? s pocket should be any more dangerous than
? 8z. JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
a reserve in a bank. It would be much less likely to freeze.
I suspect that the amount of money paid directly for necessary and desirable public works is about proportionate to that increase of circulating medium which Hume saw as needful for national welfare.
Obviously the minute you had such a system everyone and every gang and combine would run to your congress or your law-chamber howling for jobs, but everyone else would be vastly more alive to the . use and meaning of public work, and after the first fever even an elected government might be approved or improved.
At any rate ALL PERMANENT AUGMENTA- TIONS OF PLANT ought to be paid for in this manner.
(Pardon digru. rion. lhe 11111hor :~~Jill relra# 111hen proof lo lhe tonlrary is pruenled. )
? XXII
C'ESTTOUJOURS LEBEAU MONDEQUI GOUVERNE. .
ANYONE who has seen the furniture at Schon- brunn ought to understand the flop of the Austrian Empire, and anyone who saw it before the flop ought to have known that the flop was coming.
Frobenius has outstripped other archreologists and explorers
(a) because he does not believe things exist with- -out cause;
(b) as corollary, because he considered that the forms of pottery, etc. , had causes.
Franz Josef was one of the most schifoso figures of the period remembered by living people, he hadn't even the superficial and tricky brilliance ofthe unspeakable Hohenzollern. Nasty men have oc- curred without affecting the course of empire very much, but an age SHO\VS in its forms, in its material forms, you can't have the top of an empire stuck in that' congeries of an East Side brothel enriched to the n'th during a growing period of a nation.
When the court furnishings get to the level of Koster and Bial's music-hall stage parlour, the empire is on the? wane.
Pewk, artistically speaking, is distinguishable by the substitution of expensiveness for design in all
83
? JEFFERSON
material objects. The great age does not care for cost, it usually manifests at a minimum of material expense and a maximum of cerebral outlay.
However, dropping theory, the bolsheviki brought in a greater care for intellectual life and probably a greater respect for criteria than the Romanoff's supporters had had.
The last time I was in England I went to a party, a Labour Member's party, the mental life was more lively than that at Liberal parties.
When one beau monde gets too ditheringly silly or too besottedly ugly, a new and different beau monde rises to replace it.
As in a new art movemer~c, I think the vitality shows first in a greater exigence and precision with regard to antiquity, and a break with the conven- tionally recognized " classic," or accepted great works of the past, whereof the list has always been vitiated, and in the menu of which there are jumbled together the real works and the sham or the hokum.
The Italian awakening began showing itself in two ways.
I. The bookshop windows began to change. In place of the old line, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto, there began to appear slowly translations of Kipling and Dostoievsky and, as the hole in the dyke widened, the torrent of translations good, bad and indifferent, yellow literature, the best Wallace, the worst slop, Wodehouse, woodlouse, etc. , but also H. James, Hardy, and a discreet number of books worth reading, though not yet any real criteria nor any successful effort to get the best before the worst. As far as the public is concerned no such effort is apparent in France, England, or America either.
But no one who ever looks in a bookshop window
? andfor MUSSOLINI 85
and who has known such Italian windows for thirty years can fail to have seen the difference, the sign of hunger and curiosity.
II. The restauri. From Sicily up to Ascoli, from one end of the boot to the other, the blobby and clumsy stucco is pried loose from the columns; the pure lines of the romanesque are dug out, the old ineradicable Italian skill shows in the anony- mous craftsmen. Three whole columns, six frag- ments, a couple of capitals are scratched out of a rotten wall, and within a few months the graceful chiostro is there again as it had been in the time of Federigo Secondo.
Someone mentions the Senatore Corrado Ricci and no one knows who else or how many other sensibilities have been empl9yed.
Where other regimes would have haggled and niggled the fascist regime has just gone ahead, without any fireworks whatever. Apart from specialists employed I don't suppose there are ten men in Italy who know as much about these restorations as I do, simply from having dawdled about the peninsula looking at what was in front of me. It is not merely a matter of FILLING IN the old gaps with concrete. It is a reconquest of an ancient skill, such as I saw the head artisan using in Teramo or in Ascoli Piceno up in the mountains over there by the Adriatic "where nobody goes. "
The term " gerarchia , is perhaps the beginning of a critical sense, vide the four tiles and the dozen or so bits of insuperable pottery, pale blue on pale brownish ground, in the ante-rooni of the Palazzo "enezia. ?
? XXIII RESIST ANCE
JEFFERSON writing to Adams (or vice versa) noted that before their time hardly anyone had bothered to think about political organization or the organization of government. Same in our time re economics. It is a new subject. Bankers who control it de facto make no claims to be more than artisans, practising habits which have worked.
When there is a shindy they hire touts, either shallow or dishonest, to embroil and confuse discussion. Thelitderealthoughtofthepasttwenty years has been almost subterranean. When it does force itself into the light one jams against various sorts of inertia, the fighting inertia of those who've GOT the swag and are in panic terror of losing it, the indifferent, and the fellows who think half-way through and then stop.
Some can tell the root from the branch, the most common failure is the failure to dissociate necessity from habit.
Thus a correspondent re the book Mercanti di Cannoni:
" T o take a more immediate example, the STAMPA'S article shows that the French Gov- ernment at the behest ofinterested manufacturers, is squandering colossal sums on fortifications. It
86
? JEFFERSON a. ndfor MUSSOLINI 87
is not argued, I take it, that these fortifications are intended for offensive purposes, or that they con- stitute a menace of war against any neighbouring state. The most that can be said, so far as these particular armaments are concerned, is that they represent a gigantic waste of the French tax- payer's money. That is too bad for the French taxpayer, but seems no reason for alarm in other countries.
"On the contrary, holding as I do that the success (such as it is) of our present system of production and distribution is based upon waste, I cannot avoid concluding that the more waste the better, and that nothing could possibly be so beneficial to humanity as a whole (within the limits of our existing economic system) as the undertaking by all countries to build a ring of solid steel forts around their frontiers. It would provide work for the workless and huge profits for everybody concerned, with the consequence that we should have a wave of world prosperity alongside which the boom years of 1928-9 would look like a panic.
" You may say that the same result might be accomplished by building a great pumping system to . pump the water out of the Indian Ocean and carry it by steamers (or perhaps pipe lines) into the Atlantic. I agree. In fact this latter plan would have the advantage. The work would never be finished and therefore ? the pro- sperity would be endless.
" The trouble is that most people would think the latter scheme was foolish. "
I send? this to A. R. Orage as encouragement,
and as sign of the progress of enlightenment. I get a further communique from the sender, and he falls
? 88 JEFFERSON
flop into catalogued fallacy, possibly from haste, confusion of office work, etc. From a discussion of effects . which of necessity follow certain causes he falls into a des<;ription of what has been, without apparently perceiving the difference in the nature of the two cases.
So far as political economy is concerned the modern world contains the work of Lenin and Henry Ford, of C. H. . Douglas and Mussolini, the somewhat confused results of Veblen and the technocrats, this latter, as I have indicated, is con- fused because it has been in large part surreptitious. Done under or near a subsidy it either has not had any moral force and direction, or the individuals who had any have had to conceal it and profess to be concerned WHOLL Y with mechanical pro- blems.
Ford professed to be concerned wholly with commercial and manufacturing problems, though he has recently mentioned human rights in a garbled outbreak against technocracy.
I suppose the term means to him merely putting an incompetent professor in control of his (Ford's) business.
Genius, as I had recently occasion to say apropos Francisci's work with a cine-camera, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
When the nit-wits complained of Jefferson's superficiality it merely amounted to their non- perception of the multitude of elements needed to start any decent civilization in the American wilder- ness: learning, architecture, art that registered con-
? andfor MUSSOLINI
temporary phenomena instead of merely distorting them into received convention, seed of the right sort, transportation, responsibility, resilience in the individual and in the local group.
Washington could see mathematics from the ground end, geometry in its initial sense, measuring of the earth. Quincy Adams took it as astronomy, furthest possible remove from all human contact or human " pollution," as I suppose all human quality may appear to a man suffering from puritan- ids.
Jefferson was polumetis, many-minded, and as literature wasn't his main job, this multiplicity is now recorded item by item in his letters, one interest at a time, and the unreflective reader gets simply the sense of leisure without perceiving the essential dynamism of the man who did get things DONE.
Suppose Jefferson had had to be both Jefferson and Pat Henry, or both John Adams and Jas. Otis? In the first place he probably couldn't have, and in the second, my phrase is only an attempt to make the far-distant reader understand at least some part of what Mussolini's job is and has been.
America had the luck to start with Sam and J. Adams, Franklin, etc. The liberation and the creation all occurred more or less in unbroken sequence. Italy had a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, a partial unification, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently, with only here and there a notable, perhaps a very temporary, assis- tance. -
There is an analogy, from 1 Soo onward America was Jefferson's work, Madison had been and con-
? 90 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
tinued to be very useful, Gallatin was helpful in his way, Van Buren went on in the ,3o,s.
Theodore Dentatus Roosevelt might have made up twenty per cent. of a fair Mussolini, but I can,t believe anybody was quite ready to go out and die for dear Theodore.
? XXIV
A . GOOD government is one that operates according to the best that is known and thought. And the best government is that which translates
the best thought most speedily into action.
Such translation is undoubtedly more swift and dramatic when a nation has slipped behind and has merely to catch up with the pacemakers. Thus the leaps of Russia and Italy in many matters of detail. Nevertheless 11ussolini has a more responsive instrument than any other I can think of, something does appear, to get started with "bewildering frequency," grain, swamps, birds, yes, gentle reader, birds, there are more birds in the olive-yards, "birds friendly to agriculture. " W. H. Hudson wrote a lot about the subject, the aged 11unthe wrote a book about Capri, but the BOSS does
something about it.
That is what makes him so simpatico. He is
simpatico as Picabia was simpatico, though Francis had apparently no sense of responsibility (which merely means that his sense of? responsibility was far far, oh very far, from normal human percep- tions, but at any rate Picabia had no sense of immediate social responsibility). .
I am now trying to get a personal point of departure. ?
I am not talking about Picabia's last show of paintings or about any exposition of painting but of a personal impression of the whole man whom I
91
? 92 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
knew in I 9zz and along then, a man intellectually dangerous, so that it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a cage full of leopards. As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this has often been hard to explain. He was the first man I ever met who seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or, still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it.
You do not wonder where a thing is when you can see it.
All genius worries the dud, I think, by reason of the overplus. You will not get another Gaudier- Brzeska because such a sculptor can not exist save when the lively general intelligence and the formal perception are combined with the drive to ceaseless animal action.
I think sitting still or reclining, and relax playing tennis. The sculptor concentrates all his intelligence WHILE in physical action. The mere stone-cutter, or worse, the modeller, hasn't any intelligence to
concentrate, and so forth.
Spectamur agendo. We know what the artist
does, we are, or at any rfl,te the author . is, fairly familiar with a good deal of plastic and verbal mani- festation.
Transpose such sense of plasticity or transpose your criteria to ten years of fascismo in Italy. And to the artifex. If you are engaged seriously in judgment or measurement.
We still respect the Code Napoleon and the architecture of Monticello, and those of us who know it probably respect the constitution of the University of Virginia, as it was before some of T. J. 's provisions were deleted.
? XXV
DuRING ten years I have heard attacks on fascismo, violent at first and then with continuing diminuendos, nearly always on what seemed to me irrelevant details, though occasionally I have met with a raking broadside, as for example the Russian's " BUT it belongs to them," meaning that the Russian state belongs to the people.
Only it don't, it belongs to the bolsheviki, and in any case I don't see the effect of such ownership. Secondly, Orage's admission that Italy was better run or more efficiently run than any other country, but he followed this by a claim that it was just being neatly tied up in a bag for delivery to the inter-
national sonzov.
Which I simply do not believe. Y ou can't prove
by Euclid what 1-fussolini intends to do the year after the year af'ter next but you can use some sort of common sense or general intuition. I see? no basis whatsoever for Orage's prediction. Everything perceptible to me appears to indicate the diametrical opposite. ?
In 192. 0 I saw nothing in Europe save unscrupu- lous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human).
Such things have happened before: I didn't then know so much about it, and the history of the American ? 183o's is not a popular subject. Italy was perhaps more openly menaced. Her peril may have been, ? probably was, greater than that of the
93
? ? 94
JEFFERSON
" stronger " countries where the infamy could pull with silk threads.
The first act of the fascio was to save Italy from people too stupid to govern, I mean the Italian communists, the Lenin-less communists. The second act was to free it from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern.
As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government.
In other countries they excuse inexplicable per- fidies by saying " These men are personally honest. " I am now quoting an admiral: " All I know is that all these men are my personal friends and I assure you that they are personallY honest. " The implica- tion being that they play the super-crooks' game because they are stupid and hoodwinked.
A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling.
It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective.
Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat's-paws.
The fascist hate of demo-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases they don't and have not.
My next analogy is very technical. The real life in regular verse is an irregular movement under- lying. Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of General Grant but the condition of
? ? andjor MUSSOLINI
95
their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men ofunder- standing are too lazy to impart the results of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn't the moral for~e to translate knowledge into action I don't bdieve it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.
? And any means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.
THE CIVIL WAR drove everything out of the American mind. Perhaps the worst_ bit o f damage was that it drove out of mind the first serious anti- slavery candidate, not because he was an anti- slavery candidate, but because he saved the nation and freed the American trea,sury. Jackson had the glory, let us say he got the glory because he already had a good deal, the aureole of New Orleans, and Van Buren caught the reaction. His autobiography didn't get printed until 1918 or 1920.
Whether by reason of villainy I know not. I suspect it was due more to stupidity and to the laziness and ineptitude of professors. You can't expect history professors to be connoisseurs of economic significance, at least they weren't to be trusted for it from 186o t0 1930. '
I have already started to put the bank war into a canto. I don't know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of" Van's " ~utobiography.
" I suppose they'll blame it on Van," said General Jackson. ?
Mr. -Van Buren pointed out the discrepancy between the funds at the president's disposal, and thefundsatthebank'sdisposal. Hepointedoutthe
? JEFFERSON
discrepancies of Dan'l Webster. And when he had really finished that job he quit writing.
A lot of economics that mankind (the tiny advance guard of mankind) has learned in the last twenty years with toil, sorrow, and persistence, they might have lapped up from that unprinted manuscript of Van Buren's.
(Autobiography of Martin Van Buren. Annual report of the American Historical Association, 19I 8, Vol. 2, Washington, Government Printing Office,
I920. )
" Forty millions had been the average amount
of the loans of the bank. In October I 830 they stood at S4o,527,532. Between January I 83I and May 1832 they were increased to S7o,428,oo7; the highest figure ever reached. The amount of its qutstanding discounts between the periods men- tioned was thus increased about 30 millions, saying nothing of the increase which took place between May, the date to which the report of the Bank was extended, and July when the veto was interposed. This extraordinary and reckless step was taken without even a pretence of a change in the business of the country to justify, much less to require, so great a change in the extent of its credits. "
There is a good deal of such statement in the autobiography, all Chaldaic to the man in the street, but taken in its place, context, relations, very good reading to the modern economist, and marvellously convincing testimony to the clear-headedness of Jefferson's most notable pupil.
Step by step the story of the recent American crisis can be read in last century's story, simple transposition serving mosdy for parallel. Read "land" where you now read "industry," the finance is the same. Inflation, deflation, boobs
? andfor MUSSOLINI 97
buying on the inflate and getting crunched by the deflate.
In one sense American history or the history of American development runs from Jefferson through Van Buren and then takes a holiday; or is broken by a vast parenthesis, getting rid of the black chattel slavery, and then plunging fairly into unconscious- ness.
We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us. The real power just oozed away fromtheelectorate. Thedefactogovernmentbecame secret, nobody cared a damn about the dejure. The people grovelled under Wilson and Harding, then came the nit-wit and the fat-face.
Wilson betrayed whatever was left of the original ideals of our government. The most typical story of the Woodrovian spirit as it permeated from the chief stench through the lesser crannies of adminis- tration is the tale ofVan Dine, a long Hollander who had drifted into Chicago a bit before I9I7, and had applied for American citizenship ; he got a tax form, describing him as an alien, subject to certain im- posts, and he got called up for army service. He said to the judge: " I am perfectly willing to serve in the army, but if I am citizen enough to serve in the army I've got a right not to be taxed as a foreigner. "
The judge (or jedge) leaned over his desk and whinnied: "Seay, yeng feller, deon't yew know thet in THIS KENTRY there ain't naowbody that'z got enny garr' DAMN rights whotsoever1"
Is it a crisis IN the system, or is the svstem in crisis? ?
How does the Jeffersonian answer the fascist in a. d. 1933, I57ofAmericanindependence, I44ofthe republic, XI of the era fascista?
? 98 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOUNI
This is not to say I " advocate " fascism in and for . America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini, any more than I or any enlightened bolshevik thinks communism is possible in America without Lenin.
I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 5oo men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.
? XXVI
POWER
T H E millenniar habit of slavery and the impulse toward enslaving others is very strong in the race. By the time chattel-slavery was driven out by the American Civil War, it had been discovered that paid labour probably cost less to the employer.
Some men are now struggling to convince the mob that the machine is ready to replace the slave. The greatest obstacle may? well be just simple bossiness, bos, bovis, the bull, likes to order some
fellow-human about.
The " will to power " (admired and touted by the
generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ? ill-balanced hysterical teuto-pollak. Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the word, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia.
Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power.
The great man is filled wth? a very different passion, the will toward order.
Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.
The superior passion is incompatible with Dog- berry and the local bully. The second line of inferiority? complex (professorial) toddles . in with its twaddle about insanity and genius, and "the man must be mad. "
99
? 1 0 0 JEFFERSON
Five or six years ago the Roman barflies and social idiots were waiting for Mussolini to go mad.
The brittle mind, living on prejudice or privilege, as a last refuge plays ostrich. Something is N O T what it's mamma or schoolmarm told it, and it simply can't readjust itself.
When Mussolini has expressed any satisfaction it has been with the definite act performed, the art- work in the civic sense, the leading the Romans back to the sea, for example, by the wide new road into Ostia.
So Shu, king of Soku, built roads. What sort of shouting would the Chinese have raised for the release of the Lake of Abano, an exhilaration that might perfectly well have upset a considerable equanimity?
FREUD OR
As one of the Bloomsbury weepers once re- marked, "Freud's writings may not shed much light on human psychology but they tell one a good deal about the private life of the Viennese. "
They are flower of a deliquescent society ? going to pot. The average human head is less in need of having something removed from it, than of having something inserted.
The freudized ex-neurasthenic, oh well, pass it for the neurasthenic, but the general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.
I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited
? andfor MUSSOLINI IOI
periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.
That which makes a man forget his bellyache (physical or psychic) is probably as healthy as con- centration of his attention on the analysis of the products or educts of a stomach-pump.
Modern ignorance, fostered and intensified by practically all university systems has succeeded in obliterating or in dimming the old distinction in Rodolpho Agricola's. De Dialectica.
Verbal composition is committed, " ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet. "
Verbal composition exists to three ends, to teach, to move and to please. You do not aid either literary or philosophical discussion by criticizing one sort with criteria properly applied to the other.
\Y/e know that the German university system was perverted from the search for truth (material truth in natural research) into a vast machine for conduct- ing the mental segment of the nation A W A Y from actual problems, getting them embedded and out of the way of the tyrants.
American subsidized universities have become anodyne in the departments that " don't matter," i. e. those where the subject has not or need not have any direct incidence on life.
\Y/hen it comes to economic study the interference of the controllers is less covered.
I am no longer " in touch. " I know that pro- fessors are occasionally " fired. " I have heard that the ladies' Vassar once had a curiosity in the form of a heavy endowment " for as long as nothing con- trary to protective tariffwas taught there. "
The instinct of self-preservation, obviously THE great passion in the bureaucratic booZUM, leads
? 1 0 2 JEFFERSON
often towards the anodyne. Such is the nature of bureaucracy. Once IN, it is hardly possible to b~ ousted for incompetence. So long as you aren't noticed you STAY there, promotion is in any case slow. Soft paws, quiet steps, look and listen.
This has even bred the careerist in scholarship, the man who carefully studies WHAT KIND of anodyne bunk will lead him upward in the system, or best assure hi& income.
I have met various specimens, one definitely pro- ducing bunk to " get ahead," another mildly dis- contented with the dullness of work which was at any rate safe, and couldn't by any stretch of fancy lead one into an opinion on anything save its own dullness and, by comparison with any intellectual pursuit, its lack of use. Naturally he felt the need of his income.
Thus ultimately the makers of catalogues, etc. , undeniably useful but undeniably giving a very low YIELD in intellectual life, or to the intellectual life of the nation.
In fact the idea of intellectual life IN an American University is usually presented as a joke by people with what is called a sense of humour.
When an experiment is made or advocated it is usually attributed (often correctly) to "cranks. "
A crank in " this pragmatical pig of a world '' as Wm. Yeats has ultimately come to designate the Celto-Saxon segments of the planet, is any rpan having ANY other ambition save that of saving his own skin from the tanners.
An inventor stops being a crank when he has made, i.
track mind liked to show his authority (and didn't care a damn whether his authority was legal or not) and because pus in one part of a government system tends to produce pustulence throughout that system.
Back of Jefferson's embargo and of Mussolini's there was a will for the good of their nations.
In neither man of genius was preconception or theory strong enough to blind the leader to the immediate need.
Even the question o f the efficiency o f the measures doesn't arise.
Most historians seem to tend to believe that Jefferson's embargo may have done more good than harm, there is no shadow of a doubt whatsoever that Mussolini's embargo has done what the leader intended.
No one denies the material and immediate effect: grano, bonifica, reJtauri, grain, swamp-drainage, restor- ations, new buildings, and, I am ready to add off my own bat, AN A W AKENED INTELLIGENCE
in the nation and a new LANGUAGE in th~ debates in the Chamber.
? XVIII
A L L right, go to the House of Commons for a display of gas, evasion, incompetence, and then read the Stampa's rep<;>rt for 8th January or when- ever it was, of Italians getting up and saying what they meant with clarity and even with brevity, or at any rate not stalling and beating about the bush.
And even here is the hand or eye or ear of the Duce, the Debunker par excellence, for the deputies and ministers know that there is an EDITORIAL eye and ear-precisely-an editor, who will see through their bunkum and for whom they will go to the scrap-basket just as quickly as an incompetent reporter's c. opy will go to the basket in a live editorial office.
As personal testimony to PERSONAL feeling, I feel freer here than I ever did in London or Paris. I am willing to admit my capacity for illusion, but right or wrong, that is my feeling. And as an act or declaration of faith, I do NOT BELIEVE that any constructive effort has been ham-strung in this country since the Marcia su Roma.
As to thought and letters: the Bolsheviki have never been able to live up to the declaration that even they want to permit " fellow-passengers," they have proclaimed that literature is for the state, but they don't mean it as, let us say, I do. I believe that any precise use of words is bound in the long run to be useful to the state and the world at large.
74
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 7S
The Duce comes out to meet one in his puncturing of the pretences of party careerists.
Speaking to fascist writers: " A membership ticket in this party does not confer genius on the holder. " He was speaking in particular of literary and journalistic ability.
A decent concept of a twentieth century world is like the decent concept of a town or a family, you don't want your neighbour down with cholera; you don't want your family full of sickly members all yowling for help. You don't want the cells in your muscles all squshy and some so weak that one cell grips over and gets out of hand.
If anyone holds the long-distance record for common-sense, that man is Confucius. And the concept I have in mind is: benefit of the world by n;eans ofgood INTERNAL GOVERNMENT of the country.
A squshy and unstable state, particularly in the Italian peninsula, is not an aid to the health of Europe.
A state strung along the Atlantic sea-board in I Soo with an enormous unoccupied hinterland was a very different kettle of onions.
But the types of mind fitted to deal with either, and with unexpected situations in either, are types which may have a very deep kinship which you may perceive if you can but sort out the likenesses underlying.
The shortsighted squeal, they always squeal except when they are being diddled or hypnotized.
? XIX
D U R I N G the past twenty years the fundamental capacities of humanity for supplying itse~ with everything it wants have changed at a geometrical ratio outsoaring anything previous man had guessed at.
Just as the quantity of fertile available land had soared out of the previous bounds of human imagination when Europe had a new continent thrown into her silly lap, and proceeded to play the god-damned drivelling fool, first with a grab for metal that annihilated the Incas, then with a gamble for "colonies," i. e. , vast tracts that no nation in Europe at that time was organized to manage.
The putrid idiocy of eighteenth-century European governments is something no normal man can imagine until he has waded through a hundred volumes of the history of that period. The kings and ministers of that day were as idiotic as Otto Kahn or the last Czar of the several Russias, and they saw equally NOT AT ALL into the present.
TEMPERAMENT
I know why my friend the urbane and far more
than distinguished jurisconsult is worried, sincerely worried and distressed by fascismo. - He has the elegiac mind: as per his " the mistake of my genera. . tion was . . . " And he is worried because in his huge cases he don't from one day to another know what the law will be, and all his forty or fifty years
76
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 77
of patient diligent and exacting acute study are likely to go west at any moment as far as immediate utility is concerned.
Mussolini may at any moment find out that some laboured and ingenious device for securing a fair amount of justice in spme anterior period and under earlier states of society NO LONGER works, or is no longer capable of giving as much justice as some new rule made to fit the facts of the year ELEVEN, facts, i. e. that have been facts for a short time only.
This is of necessity distressing to a man at the head of his profession, who has got used to being comfortably at the head of his profession ; but it is a vastly different distress to that of my father-in-law in England when bothered by Mr. Lloyd George. He was bothered because Lloyd George's laws were framed in such sloppy and ambiguous language that NO ONE, positively no one, could make out what they intended: i. e. , they really took the legis- lativ:e power out of the h~ds of the legislators and left 1t for wanglers and pettifoggers, to be construed to the gang's greatest advantage.
There are more ways than one of diddling people, nations, organizations, out of power " by law possessed. "
? XX
JEFFERSON IN HIS GENERATION
PROBABLY no writer on American history has been more impartial than Woodward, author of Washington Image and Man, and certainly no one has had a greater knack for assessing the specific weight of the early notables, without heat, and with
insuperable fairness, the fairness of a man who isn't out to prove anything, who hasn't an axe to grind-! don't mean merely ~personal axe, but who is simply observer and not a protagonist or an advocate of some next thing to do or some " right course of action. "
And this is the fine flower and almost the justi- fication o f journalism in America. I t is the new ideal of being impartial, and marks the rise Qf a journalist who isn't taken sufficiendy seriously as an historian, who probably doesn't take himself for quite the historian that he is.
You will go far without finding any sounder estimates than his of Jefferson and John Adams, or a better summary than his so brief summary of Jefferson's view. I wonder i f i can compass as good a one before citing the letters.
? XXI
JEFFERSON didn't believe any nation had the right to contract debts that it couldn't pay off with reasonable effort within nineteen years.
This didn't come into practical politics in his time. He wanted to get rid of slavery, this didn't happen in his time though he took thought to prevent its spreading into the North and West.
He believed in keeping out of European affairs and America was kept out until 1812.
" The cannibals of Europe are eating each other again. " That's up-to-date (1932. ) all right enough. Read Corbaccio's edition of the volume on cannon- touts, it may indicate the spirit of Europe, or of North Europe as distinct from Mediterranean sanity.
For if Rorrie was a conquering empire, renais- sance Italy evolved the doctrine of the balance of power, first for use inside the peninsula. Italy produced notable peacemakers who based their glory on peace tho' it came by the sword, Nic. Este, Cosimo, Lorenzo Medici, even Sforza condottiero, all men standing for order and, when possible, for moderation.
The main line of American conflict for the first half of the last century was the fight between public interest and the interests. Not a showy theatrical shindy. And we end to-day with enlightenment o f a Jeffersonian fundamental, transposed, expanded, developed.
79
? So JEFFERSON
" The best place for keeping money is in the pockets of the people. "
That does not mean to say that we are to go back to Indian or Burmese hoarding. You must take the text and let time transpose it.
We have had the century of the " benefits of concentration of capital" (and the malefits).
We have come to . the point where money must be got into people's pockets if goods are to move and modern life to continue " the good life. " All of this is dynamic and mobile and the? furthest possible remove from static oriental burial of jewels and silver.
The Hindu buries his metal because he has no trust in public order or the dl! rability of a dynasty and because he wants to hide the money for safety. This course did NOT produce mechanical pro- gress.
But it is very different from the tying up of credit or paper money in banks.
Paper money in the popular pocket would {lOt breed stagnation and it would not stay there tor the reasons of oriental hoarding. The popolano would want to show it was there. Its distribution would mean greater mobility of goods.
La richezza elo scambio.
Prosperity comes from exchanging. Old com- mon-place but one that needs constaat re~advertis- ing. The French bas-de-laine never did any harm, or no harm by comparison with the double-locking and immobilization of credit.
Credit is or was immobilized in India by burial of metal. It is not the means but the end that matters.
Rephrase Jefferson's saying: "The best place for
? and/or MUSSOLINI 8I
a nation's reserve of credit is in as many individual pockets as possible. "
I think that will probably hold right through the coming change in the system.
If money is ever conceived as certificate of work done there will be no need of taxes. Work done for the state will be paid by state certificate, issued direct, without anyone's needing to cadge around and get it from Bill, Dick and William before paying it to Joe, Mike and Henry.
I have worried considerably over what appears to be the too great ease and simplicity of this proposition. For . every bit of DURABLE goods there {)ught certainly to be a ticket,_ so that instead of toting the block of rock or the arm-chair you could, with greater ease, tote the ticket and swap it for whatever you at the moment wanted.
But what about perishable goods, stuff that rots and is eaten, can you have spare tickets lying about with nothing. to correspond or be delivered, i. e. , depreciation in the value of the tickets?
Recorded time has dealt with the underlying equation and perishable goods, grain and food- stuffs have been in times of plenty extremely cheap lry comparison with permanent goods.
Still if the certificate of work done let us say for the government is only paid out by John to Joe WHEN Joe delivers, i. e. , if it only circulates when it moves for value received it could conceivably retain a true value. The unspent notes in John's pocket would not of necessity upset the whole working of a new system, or force people to sell
apples at. street comers. .
There is no reason why this reserve in every-
man? s pocket should be any more dangerous than
? 8z. JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
a reserve in a bank. It would be much less likely to freeze.
I suspect that the amount of money paid directly for necessary and desirable public works is about proportionate to that increase of circulating medium which Hume saw as needful for national welfare.
Obviously the minute you had such a system everyone and every gang and combine would run to your congress or your law-chamber howling for jobs, but everyone else would be vastly more alive to the . use and meaning of public work, and after the first fever even an elected government might be approved or improved.
At any rate ALL PERMANENT AUGMENTA- TIONS OF PLANT ought to be paid for in this manner.
(Pardon digru. rion. lhe 11111hor :~~Jill relra# 111hen proof lo lhe tonlrary is pruenled. )
? XXII
C'ESTTOUJOURS LEBEAU MONDEQUI GOUVERNE. .
ANYONE who has seen the furniture at Schon- brunn ought to understand the flop of the Austrian Empire, and anyone who saw it before the flop ought to have known that the flop was coming.
Frobenius has outstripped other archreologists and explorers
(a) because he does not believe things exist with- -out cause;
(b) as corollary, because he considered that the forms of pottery, etc. , had causes.
Franz Josef was one of the most schifoso figures of the period remembered by living people, he hadn't even the superficial and tricky brilliance ofthe unspeakable Hohenzollern. Nasty men have oc- curred without affecting the course of empire very much, but an age SHO\VS in its forms, in its material forms, you can't have the top of an empire stuck in that' congeries of an East Side brothel enriched to the n'th during a growing period of a nation.
When the court furnishings get to the level of Koster and Bial's music-hall stage parlour, the empire is on the? wane.
Pewk, artistically speaking, is distinguishable by the substitution of expensiveness for design in all
83
? JEFFERSON
material objects. The great age does not care for cost, it usually manifests at a minimum of material expense and a maximum of cerebral outlay.
However, dropping theory, the bolsheviki brought in a greater care for intellectual life and probably a greater respect for criteria than the Romanoff's supporters had had.
The last time I was in England I went to a party, a Labour Member's party, the mental life was more lively than that at Liberal parties.
When one beau monde gets too ditheringly silly or too besottedly ugly, a new and different beau monde rises to replace it.
As in a new art movemer~c, I think the vitality shows first in a greater exigence and precision with regard to antiquity, and a break with the conven- tionally recognized " classic," or accepted great works of the past, whereof the list has always been vitiated, and in the menu of which there are jumbled together the real works and the sham or the hokum.
The Italian awakening began showing itself in two ways.
I. The bookshop windows began to change. In place of the old line, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto, there began to appear slowly translations of Kipling and Dostoievsky and, as the hole in the dyke widened, the torrent of translations good, bad and indifferent, yellow literature, the best Wallace, the worst slop, Wodehouse, woodlouse, etc. , but also H. James, Hardy, and a discreet number of books worth reading, though not yet any real criteria nor any successful effort to get the best before the worst. As far as the public is concerned no such effort is apparent in France, England, or America either.
But no one who ever looks in a bookshop window
? andfor MUSSOLINI 85
and who has known such Italian windows for thirty years can fail to have seen the difference, the sign of hunger and curiosity.
II. The restauri. From Sicily up to Ascoli, from one end of the boot to the other, the blobby and clumsy stucco is pried loose from the columns; the pure lines of the romanesque are dug out, the old ineradicable Italian skill shows in the anony- mous craftsmen. Three whole columns, six frag- ments, a couple of capitals are scratched out of a rotten wall, and within a few months the graceful chiostro is there again as it had been in the time of Federigo Secondo.
Someone mentions the Senatore Corrado Ricci and no one knows who else or how many other sensibilities have been empl9yed.
Where other regimes would have haggled and niggled the fascist regime has just gone ahead, without any fireworks whatever. Apart from specialists employed I don't suppose there are ten men in Italy who know as much about these restorations as I do, simply from having dawdled about the peninsula looking at what was in front of me. It is not merely a matter of FILLING IN the old gaps with concrete. It is a reconquest of an ancient skill, such as I saw the head artisan using in Teramo or in Ascoli Piceno up in the mountains over there by the Adriatic "where nobody goes. "
The term " gerarchia , is perhaps the beginning of a critical sense, vide the four tiles and the dozen or so bits of insuperable pottery, pale blue on pale brownish ground, in the ante-rooni of the Palazzo "enezia. ?
? XXIII RESIST ANCE
JEFFERSON writing to Adams (or vice versa) noted that before their time hardly anyone had bothered to think about political organization or the organization of government. Same in our time re economics. It is a new subject. Bankers who control it de facto make no claims to be more than artisans, practising habits which have worked.
When there is a shindy they hire touts, either shallow or dishonest, to embroil and confuse discussion. Thelitderealthoughtofthepasttwenty years has been almost subterranean. When it does force itself into the light one jams against various sorts of inertia, the fighting inertia of those who've GOT the swag and are in panic terror of losing it, the indifferent, and the fellows who think half-way through and then stop.
Some can tell the root from the branch, the most common failure is the failure to dissociate necessity from habit.
Thus a correspondent re the book Mercanti di Cannoni:
" T o take a more immediate example, the STAMPA'S article shows that the French Gov- ernment at the behest ofinterested manufacturers, is squandering colossal sums on fortifications. It
86
? JEFFERSON a. ndfor MUSSOLINI 87
is not argued, I take it, that these fortifications are intended for offensive purposes, or that they con- stitute a menace of war against any neighbouring state. The most that can be said, so far as these particular armaments are concerned, is that they represent a gigantic waste of the French tax- payer's money. That is too bad for the French taxpayer, but seems no reason for alarm in other countries.
"On the contrary, holding as I do that the success (such as it is) of our present system of production and distribution is based upon waste, I cannot avoid concluding that the more waste the better, and that nothing could possibly be so beneficial to humanity as a whole (within the limits of our existing economic system) as the undertaking by all countries to build a ring of solid steel forts around their frontiers. It would provide work for the workless and huge profits for everybody concerned, with the consequence that we should have a wave of world prosperity alongside which the boom years of 1928-9 would look like a panic.
" You may say that the same result might be accomplished by building a great pumping system to . pump the water out of the Indian Ocean and carry it by steamers (or perhaps pipe lines) into the Atlantic. I agree. In fact this latter plan would have the advantage. The work would never be finished and therefore ? the pro- sperity would be endless.
" The trouble is that most people would think the latter scheme was foolish. "
I send? this to A. R. Orage as encouragement,
and as sign of the progress of enlightenment. I get a further communique from the sender, and he falls
? 88 JEFFERSON
flop into catalogued fallacy, possibly from haste, confusion of office work, etc. From a discussion of effects . which of necessity follow certain causes he falls into a des<;ription of what has been, without apparently perceiving the difference in the nature of the two cases.
So far as political economy is concerned the modern world contains the work of Lenin and Henry Ford, of C. H. . Douglas and Mussolini, the somewhat confused results of Veblen and the technocrats, this latter, as I have indicated, is con- fused because it has been in large part surreptitious. Done under or near a subsidy it either has not had any moral force and direction, or the individuals who had any have had to conceal it and profess to be concerned WHOLL Y with mechanical pro- blems.
Ford professed to be concerned wholly with commercial and manufacturing problems, though he has recently mentioned human rights in a garbled outbreak against technocracy.
I suppose the term means to him merely putting an incompetent professor in control of his (Ford's) business.
Genius, as I had recently occasion to say apropos Francisci's work with a cine-camera, is the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, PLUS the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art.
When the nit-wits complained of Jefferson's superficiality it merely amounted to their non- perception of the multitude of elements needed to start any decent civilization in the American wilder- ness: learning, architecture, art that registered con-
? andfor MUSSOLINI
temporary phenomena instead of merely distorting them into received convention, seed of the right sort, transportation, responsibility, resilience in the individual and in the local group.
Washington could see mathematics from the ground end, geometry in its initial sense, measuring of the earth. Quincy Adams took it as astronomy, furthest possible remove from all human contact or human " pollution," as I suppose all human quality may appear to a man suffering from puritan- ids.
Jefferson was polumetis, many-minded, and as literature wasn't his main job, this multiplicity is now recorded item by item in his letters, one interest at a time, and the unreflective reader gets simply the sense of leisure without perceiving the essential dynamism of the man who did get things DONE.
Suppose Jefferson had had to be both Jefferson and Pat Henry, or both John Adams and Jas. Otis? In the first place he probably couldn't have, and in the second, my phrase is only an attempt to make the far-distant reader understand at least some part of what Mussolini's job is and has been.
America had the luck to start with Sam and J. Adams, Franklin, etc. The liberation and the creation all occurred more or less in unbroken sequence. Italy had a risorgimento, a shaking from lethargy, a partial unification, then a forty-year sleep, from which the next heave has been the work of one man, pre-eminently, with only here and there a notable, perhaps a very temporary, assis- tance. -
There is an analogy, from 1 Soo onward America was Jefferson's work, Madison had been and con-
? 90 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
tinued to be very useful, Gallatin was helpful in his way, Van Buren went on in the ,3o,s.
Theodore Dentatus Roosevelt might have made up twenty per cent. of a fair Mussolini, but I can,t believe anybody was quite ready to go out and die for dear Theodore.
? XXIV
A . GOOD government is one that operates according to the best that is known and thought. And the best government is that which translates
the best thought most speedily into action.
Such translation is undoubtedly more swift and dramatic when a nation has slipped behind and has merely to catch up with the pacemakers. Thus the leaps of Russia and Italy in many matters of detail. Nevertheless 11ussolini has a more responsive instrument than any other I can think of, something does appear, to get started with "bewildering frequency," grain, swamps, birds, yes, gentle reader, birds, there are more birds in the olive-yards, "birds friendly to agriculture. " W. H. Hudson wrote a lot about the subject, the aged 11unthe wrote a book about Capri, but the BOSS does
something about it.
That is what makes him so simpatico. He is
simpatico as Picabia was simpatico, though Francis had apparently no sense of responsibility (which merely means that his sense of? responsibility was far far, oh very far, from normal human percep- tions, but at any rate Picabia had no sense of immediate social responsibility). .
I am now trying to get a personal point of departure. ?
I am not talking about Picabia's last show of paintings or about any exposition of painting but of a personal impression of the whole man whom I
91
? 92 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI
knew in I 9zz and along then, a man intellectually dangerous, so that it was exhilarating to talk to him, as it would be exhilarating to be in a cage full of leopards. As he is not initially either a writer or a painter this has often been hard to explain. He was the first man I ever met who seemed to me to have ANY capacity for dealing with abstract ideas, or, still better, his mind moved instantly from a given phenomenon to the general equation under which one would ultimately have to group it.
You do not wonder where a thing is when you can see it.
All genius worries the dud, I think, by reason of the overplus. You will not get another Gaudier- Brzeska because such a sculptor can not exist save when the lively general intelligence and the formal perception are combined with the drive to ceaseless animal action.
I think sitting still or reclining, and relax playing tennis. The sculptor concentrates all his intelligence WHILE in physical action. The mere stone-cutter, or worse, the modeller, hasn't any intelligence to
concentrate, and so forth.
Spectamur agendo. We know what the artist
does, we are, or at any rfl,te the author . is, fairly familiar with a good deal of plastic and verbal mani- festation.
Transpose such sense of plasticity or transpose your criteria to ten years of fascismo in Italy. And to the artifex. If you are engaged seriously in judgment or measurement.
We still respect the Code Napoleon and the architecture of Monticello, and those of us who know it probably respect the constitution of the University of Virginia, as it was before some of T. J. 's provisions were deleted.
? XXV
DuRING ten years I have heard attacks on fascismo, violent at first and then with continuing diminuendos, nearly always on what seemed to me irrelevant details, though occasionally I have met with a raking broadside, as for example the Russian's " BUT it belongs to them," meaning that the Russian state belongs to the people.
Only it don't, it belongs to the bolsheviki, and in any case I don't see the effect of such ownership. Secondly, Orage's admission that Italy was better run or more efficiently run than any other country, but he followed this by a claim that it was just being neatly tied up in a bag for delivery to the inter-
national sonzov.
Which I simply do not believe. Y ou can't prove
by Euclid what 1-fussolini intends to do the year after the year af'ter next but you can use some sort of common sense or general intuition. I see? no basis whatsoever for Orage's prediction. Everything perceptible to me appears to indicate the diametrical opposite. ?
In 192. 0 I saw nothing in Europe save unscrupu- lous bankers, a few gangs of munitions vendors, and their implements (human).
Such things have happened before: I didn't then know so much about it, and the history of the American ? 183o's is not a popular subject. Italy was perhaps more openly menaced. Her peril may have been, ? probably was, greater than that of the
93
? ? 94
JEFFERSON
" stronger " countries where the infamy could pull with silk threads.
The first act of the fascio was to save Italy from people too stupid to govern, I mean the Italian communists, the Lenin-less communists. The second act was to free it from parliamentarians, possibly worse, though probably no more dishonest than various other gangs of parliamentarians, but at any rate from groups too politically immoral to govern.
As far as financial morals are concerned, I should say that from being a country where practically everything and anything was for sale, Mussolini has in ten years transformed it into a country where it would even be dangerous to try to buy out the government.
In other countries they excuse inexplicable per- fidies by saying " These men are personally honest. " I am now quoting an admiral: " All I know is that all these men are my personal friends and I assure you that they are personallY honest. " The implica- tion being that they play the super-crooks' game because they are stupid and hoodwinked.
A capacity for being hoodwinked is not in itself a qualification for ruling.
It is, let us admit, often a means of getting office in countries where office is elective.
Jefferson thought the live men would beat out the cat's-paws.
The fascist hate of demo-liberal governments is based on the empiric observation that in many cases they don't and have not.
My next analogy is very technical. The real life in regular verse is an irregular movement under- lying. Jefferson thought the formal features of the American system would work, and they did work till the time of General Grant but the condition of
? ? andjor MUSSOLINI
95
their working was that inside them there should be a de facto government composed of sincere men willing the national good. When the men ofunder- standing are too lazy to impart the results of their understanding, and when the nucleus of the national mind hasn't the moral for~e to translate knowledge into action I don't bdieve it matters a damn what legal forms or what administrative forms there are in a government. The nation will get the staggers.
? And any means are the right means which will remagnetize the will and the knowledge.
THE CIVIL WAR drove everything out of the American mind. Perhaps the worst_ bit o f damage was that it drove out of mind the first serious anti- slavery candidate, not because he was an anti- slavery candidate, but because he saved the nation and freed the American trea,sury. Jackson had the glory, let us say he got the glory because he already had a good deal, the aureole of New Orleans, and Van Buren caught the reaction. His autobiography didn't get printed until 1918 or 1920.
Whether by reason of villainy I know not. I suspect it was due more to stupidity and to the laziness and ineptitude of professors. You can't expect history professors to be connoisseurs of economic significance, at least they weren't to be trusted for it from 186o t0 1930. '
I have already started to put the bank war into a canto. I don't know whether to leave it at that, or to quote sixty pages of" Van's " ~utobiography.
" I suppose they'll blame it on Van," said General Jackson. ?
Mr. -Van Buren pointed out the discrepancy between the funds at the president's disposal, and thefundsatthebank'sdisposal. Hepointedoutthe
? JEFFERSON
discrepancies of Dan'l Webster. And when he had really finished that job he quit writing.
A lot of economics that mankind (the tiny advance guard of mankind) has learned in the last twenty years with toil, sorrow, and persistence, they might have lapped up from that unprinted manuscript of Van Buren's.
(Autobiography of Martin Van Buren. Annual report of the American Historical Association, 19I 8, Vol. 2, Washington, Government Printing Office,
I920. )
" Forty millions had been the average amount
of the loans of the bank. In October I 830 they stood at S4o,527,532. Between January I 83I and May 1832 they were increased to S7o,428,oo7; the highest figure ever reached. The amount of its qutstanding discounts between the periods men- tioned was thus increased about 30 millions, saying nothing of the increase which took place between May, the date to which the report of the Bank was extended, and July when the veto was interposed. This extraordinary and reckless step was taken without even a pretence of a change in the business of the country to justify, much less to require, so great a change in the extent of its credits. "
There is a good deal of such statement in the autobiography, all Chaldaic to the man in the street, but taken in its place, context, relations, very good reading to the modern economist, and marvellously convincing testimony to the clear-headedness of Jefferson's most notable pupil.
Step by step the story of the recent American crisis can be read in last century's story, simple transposition serving mosdy for parallel. Read "land" where you now read "industry," the finance is the same. Inflation, deflation, boobs
? andfor MUSSOLINI 97
buying on the inflate and getting crunched by the deflate.
In one sense American history or the history of American development runs from Jefferson through Van Buren and then takes a holiday; or is broken by a vast parenthesis, getting rid of the black chattel slavery, and then plunging fairly into unconscious- ness.
We were diddled out of the heritage Jackson and Van Buren left us. The real power just oozed away fromtheelectorate. Thedefactogovernmentbecame secret, nobody cared a damn about the dejure. The people grovelled under Wilson and Harding, then came the nit-wit and the fat-face.
Wilson betrayed whatever was left of the original ideals of our government. The most typical story of the Woodrovian spirit as it permeated from the chief stench through the lesser crannies of adminis- tration is the tale ofVan Dine, a long Hollander who had drifted into Chicago a bit before I9I7, and had applied for American citizenship ; he got a tax form, describing him as an alien, subject to certain im- posts, and he got called up for army service. He said to the judge: " I am perfectly willing to serve in the army, but if I am citizen enough to serve in the army I've got a right not to be taxed as a foreigner. "
The judge (or jedge) leaned over his desk and whinnied: "Seay, yeng feller, deon't yew know thet in THIS KENTRY there ain't naowbody that'z got enny garr' DAMN rights whotsoever1"
Is it a crisis IN the system, or is the svstem in crisis? ?
How does the Jeffersonian answer the fascist in a. d. 1933, I57ofAmericanindependence, I44ofthe republic, XI of the era fascista?
? 98 JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOUNI
This is not to say I " advocate " fascism in and for . America, or that I think fascism is possible in America without Mussolini, any more than I or any enlightened bolshevik thinks communism is possible in America without Lenin.
I think the American system de jure is probably quite good enough, if there were only 5oo men with guts and the sense to USE it, or even with the capacity for answering letters, or printing a paper.
? XXVI
POWER
T H E millenniar habit of slavery and the impulse toward enslaving others is very strong in the race. By the time chattel-slavery was driven out by the American Civil War, it had been discovered that paid labour probably cost less to the employer.
Some men are now struggling to convince the mob that the machine is ready to replace the slave. The greatest obstacle may? well be just simple bossiness, bos, bovis, the bull, likes to order some
fellow-human about.
The " will to power " (admired and touted by the
generation before my own) was literatureifyed by an ? ill-balanced hysterical teuto-pollak. Nothing more vulgar, in the worst sense of the word, has ever been sprung on a dallying intelligentsia.
Power is necessary to some acts, but neither Lenin nor Mussolini show themselves primarily as men thirsting for power.
The great man is filled wth? a very different passion, the will toward order.
Hence the mysteries and the muddles in inferior minds.
The superior passion is incompatible with Dog- berry and the local bully. The second line of inferiority? complex (professorial) toddles . in with its twaddle about insanity and genius, and "the man must be mad. "
99
? 1 0 0 JEFFERSON
Five or six years ago the Roman barflies and social idiots were waiting for Mussolini to go mad.
The brittle mind, living on prejudice or privilege, as a last refuge plays ostrich. Something is N O T what it's mamma or schoolmarm told it, and it simply can't readjust itself.
When Mussolini has expressed any satisfaction it has been with the definite act performed, the art- work in the civic sense, the leading the Romans back to the sea, for example, by the wide new road into Ostia.
So Shu, king of Soku, built roads. What sort of shouting would the Chinese have raised for the release of the Lake of Abano, an exhilaration that might perfectly well have upset a considerable equanimity?
FREUD OR
As one of the Bloomsbury weepers once re- marked, "Freud's writings may not shed much light on human psychology but they tell one a good deal about the private life of the Viennese. "
They are flower of a deliquescent society ? going to pot. The average human head is less in need of having something removed from it, than of having something inserted.
The freudized ex-neurasthenic, oh well, pass it for the neurasthenic, but the general results of Freud are Dostoievskian duds, worrying about their own unimportant innards with the deep attention of Jim drunk occupied with the crumb on his weskit.
I see no advantage in this system over the ancient Roman legion, NO individual worth saving is likely to be wrecked by a reasonable and limited obedience practised to given ends and for limited
? andfor MUSSOLINI IOI
periods. So much for commandments to the militia as superior to psychic sessions for the debilitated.
That which makes a man forget his bellyache (physical or psychic) is probably as healthy as con- centration of his attention on the analysis of the products or educts of a stomach-pump.
Modern ignorance, fostered and intensified by practically all university systems has succeeded in obliterating or in dimming the old distinction in Rodolpho Agricola's. De Dialectica.
Verbal composition is committed, " ut doceat, ut moveat, ut delectet. "
Verbal composition exists to three ends, to teach, to move and to please. You do not aid either literary or philosophical discussion by criticizing one sort with criteria properly applied to the other.
\Y/e know that the German university system was perverted from the search for truth (material truth in natural research) into a vast machine for conduct- ing the mental segment of the nation A W A Y from actual problems, getting them embedded and out of the way of the tyrants.
American subsidized universities have become anodyne in the departments that " don't matter," i. e. those where the subject has not or need not have any direct incidence on life.
\Y/hen it comes to economic study the interference of the controllers is less covered.
I am no longer " in touch. " I know that pro- fessors are occasionally " fired. " I have heard that the ladies' Vassar once had a curiosity in the form of a heavy endowment " for as long as nothing con- trary to protective tariffwas taught there. "
The instinct of self-preservation, obviously THE great passion in the bureaucratic booZUM, leads
? 1 0 2 JEFFERSON
often towards the anodyne. Such is the nature of bureaucracy. Once IN, it is hardly possible to b~ ousted for incompetence. So long as you aren't noticed you STAY there, promotion is in any case slow. Soft paws, quiet steps, look and listen.
This has even bred the careerist in scholarship, the man who carefully studies WHAT KIND of anodyne bunk will lead him upward in the system, or best assure hi& income.
I have met various specimens, one definitely pro- ducing bunk to " get ahead," another mildly dis- contented with the dullness of work which was at any rate safe, and couldn't by any stretch of fancy lead one into an opinion on anything save its own dullness and, by comparison with any intellectual pursuit, its lack of use. Naturally he felt the need of his income.
Thus ultimately the makers of catalogues, etc. , undeniably useful but undeniably giving a very low YIELD in intellectual life, or to the intellectual life of the nation.
In fact the idea of intellectual life IN an American University is usually presented as a joke by people with what is called a sense of humour.
When an experiment is made or advocated it is usually attributed (often correctly) to "cranks. "
A crank in " this pragmatical pig of a world '' as Wm. Yeats has ultimately come to designate the Celto-Saxon segments of the planet, is any rpan having ANY other ambition save that of saving his own skin from the tanners.
An inventor stops being a crank when he has made, i.
