s pocket should be any more
dangerous
than
?
?
Pound-Jefferson-and-or-Mussolini
.
so I was modest and wellbehaved .
.
.
?
oratanyrateactedthatway .
.
.
I also looked at the audience and couldn't see any- one there who was the least likely to understand what I had ready to tell 'em.
? XVI
W H O IS worth meeting?
A decade or so ago when I was settling into
Paris I more or less unconsciously drifted on to, you can't say this question, but I was talking to Bran~usi with the undefined aim of ascertaining more or less . . . etc. . . .
And he said of Leger, we weren't talking of anyone's painting, but he said: "11 sait vivre. "
And years later he said ofa group ofunsatisfactory people: "Ils sont empoisonnes de la gloire. " Which I suppose you can translate, " poisoned by
a desire to get reputations. "
"C'est toujours le beau monde qui gouvenie. " The people who know how to live are, so far as
my personal existence and contacts have been con- cerned, mainly great artists (writers, any kind of constructors) or else artists of conspicuous honesty who go their road with that sincerity which is supposed to govern all the work of the scientists.
That is to say they are interested in the WORK being done and the work TO DO, and not in personal considerations, personal petty vanities and so on.
Such impersonality seems to me implicit in fascism, in the idea statale.
Given the technical advance, the modem 1933 world of anno XI dell'era Jascista, the known facts and equations of economics, the known results of certain actions and restrictions of currency, etc.
68
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 69
I have this morning (February I rth) tried to make a " law " or equation covering the new drive in politics or to state the enlightened aim of the differently labelled INTELLIGENT drives and drifts of the present.
I. When enough exists, means should be found to distribute it to the people who need it.
(I would very nearly say: " and even to those who merely want to use or consume it, with the emphasis on the last pair of verbs. )
II. It is the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their share before worrying about the rest of the world.
(This is akin to the Confucian idea that you achieve the good of the world by FIRST achieving good government IN your own country. )
III. When potential production (possible pro- duction) of anything is sufficient to meet everyone's needs it is the business of the government to see that both production and distribution are achieved.
Note that in America when there was plenty and more than plenty of land, our government handed it out despite Quincy Adams's protests.
This third idea becomes an " idea statale " when I say "it is the business of the government. "
But note that Mussolini is NOT a fanatical statalist wanting the state to blow the citizen's nose and monkey with the individual's diet. IF, when and whenever the individual or the industry can and will attend to its own business, the fascist state
WANTS the industry and the individual to DO it, and it is only in case of sheer idiocy, incapacity or simple greed and dog-in-the-mangerness that the state . intervenes to protect the unorganized PEOPLE; public; you me and the other fellow.
The rest is political "machinery," bureaucracy,
? 70 JEFFERSON and/or MUSSOLINI
flummyd. iddle. Jefferson, Mussolini, Lenin, all hated or hate it. Lenin wanted to get rid of it: "All this is political machinery, want to get rid of it," as Stef reported Lenin's opinion in 1918.
Jefferson started to clean up the social flummy- d. iddle, etiquette, precedence, etc. ?
In a hide-bound Italy, fascism meant at the start DIRECT action, cut the cackle, if a man is a mere s. o. b. don't argue.
Get it into your head that Italy was, even in 1900, immeasurably ahead of England in so far as land laws and the rights of the man who works on the soil are concerned. Some of the follies and cruelties of great English owners would not now be permitted in Italy. Certain kinds of domestic enemy would be shipped to the conjino.
You can buy and own pretty villas and ancient architectural triumphs, but you can't cut down olive- trees just when you like and you can't drive the " co,lonno " off his fields. He can, I think, still be your " colonno " instead of the " colonno " of the former proprietor, but you don't by any means own him despite the feudal decorations or courtesy.
Secular habit, picturesque, etc. , as in the case of "the sailor. '~ There is, near here, an ancient villa, and a nabob therein, and "the sailor" just came and sat in the kitchen where there was plenty of room, he adopted the villa, and he ulti- mately adopted the chauffeur's seat, etc. That don't prove anything about anything except certain phases of mentality. Servants ask twice as much from people with big houses as from people with cottages and small flats. Primitive sense of equity and justice or Latin common-sense.
? XVII
AS TO THE PARTICULAR SITUATION AND THE VIOLA TION OF LIBERTIES, TRADI- TIONAL LIBERTIES, "RIGHTS," ETC.
JEFFERSON had no difficulty about keeping MEN in his country, in fact he found it difficult to imagine A N Yone leaving America for Europe (Napoleonic and Royal Europe). When a particular emergency arose he showed no regard for liberties in the declaration of EMBARGO.
Mussolini found himself faced with the inverse situation. Italians had for decades been going abroad to work, they sent back " money " but that did NOT tidy up Italy, it did not drain swamps, improve crops, restore buildings that had been knocked cock-eyed by Napoleon, by the Austrians, and by nature the gradual destroyer ofroofs.
In particular France was sucking in the best blood of Italy. Germany noticed it, Germany naturally. thought France might as well fill up on more or less consanguineous Germans, rather than on Italians who were wanted at home and on natives from the African continent.
Mussolini saw labour going out of Italy to rebuild France and, still worse, to provide soldiers who would, as soon as the Comite des Forges could wangle it, be ready to provide a home-market for Creusot cannon to shoot no matter whom so long
7I
? 72 JEFFERSON
as they created consumption of metallurgical pro- ducts.
Gents who make guns like to sell 'em; such is the present state of the world, in the bourgeois demo- liberal anti-Marxian anti-fascist anti-Leninist system.
And as the Stampa correspondent has indicated, the selling of guns and powder differs from ALL other industries in that the more you sell the greater the demand for the product. The more goes to consumer A the greater the demand of the other consumers. Hence the love, the loving and tender love of banks for munition works.
France by the so-called peace got a lot of nice iron, nicely there in the ground, to be dug up for profit, and nobody in the Schneider family con- sidered it wrong to want to sell iron, as quickly and as extensively as possible.
Hence the Italian embargo on the Italian popu- lation which has for ten years been improving the olde home yard.
Nobody loathes passports more than the present writer, but passports for a purpose are a vastly different matter from passports shoved on to the American people with no shadow of justification whatsoever at an enormous cost to the American public and as, indirectly, a means of presenting American millions of dollars to foreign and often unfriendly nations for NO cause save the funda- mental nastiness of several disreputable or half- witted presidents one ? of whom was THE record- breaking destroyer o f the best American institutions ; and with no excuse save the half-wittedness of an unthinking and incompetent bureaucracy. ?
They weren't meant to keep Americans at home for the good of America, they were just a useless annoyance because a diseased president with a one-
? 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.
? XVI
W H O IS worth meeting?
A decade or so ago when I was settling into
Paris I more or less unconsciously drifted on to, you can't say this question, but I was talking to Bran~usi with the undefined aim of ascertaining more or less . . . etc. . . .
And he said of Leger, we weren't talking of anyone's painting, but he said: "11 sait vivre. "
And years later he said ofa group ofunsatisfactory people: "Ils sont empoisonnes de la gloire. " Which I suppose you can translate, " poisoned by
a desire to get reputations. "
"C'est toujours le beau monde qui gouvenie. " The people who know how to live are, so far as
my personal existence and contacts have been con- cerned, mainly great artists (writers, any kind of constructors) or else artists of conspicuous honesty who go their road with that sincerity which is supposed to govern all the work of the scientists.
That is to say they are interested in the WORK being done and the work TO DO, and not in personal considerations, personal petty vanities and so on.
Such impersonality seems to me implicit in fascism, in the idea statale.
Given the technical advance, the modem 1933 world of anno XI dell'era Jascista, the known facts and equations of economics, the known results of certain actions and restrictions of currency, etc.
68
? JEFFERSON andfor MUSSOLINI 69
I have this morning (February I rth) tried to make a " law " or equation covering the new drive in politics or to state the enlightened aim of the differently labelled INTELLIGENT drives and drifts of the present.
I. When enough exists, means should be found to distribute it to the people who need it.
(I would very nearly say: " and even to those who merely want to use or consume it, with the emphasis on the last pair of verbs. )
II. It is the business of the nation to see that its own citizens get their share before worrying about the rest of the world.
(This is akin to the Confucian idea that you achieve the good of the world by FIRST achieving good government IN your own country. )
III. When potential production (possible pro- duction) of anything is sufficient to meet everyone's needs it is the business of the government to see that both production and distribution are achieved.
Note that in America when there was plenty and more than plenty of land, our government handed it out despite Quincy Adams's protests.
This third idea becomes an " idea statale " when I say "it is the business of the government. "
But note that Mussolini is NOT a fanatical statalist wanting the state to blow the citizen's nose and monkey with the individual's diet. IF, when and whenever the individual or the industry can and will attend to its own business, the fascist state
WANTS the industry and the individual to DO it, and it is only in case of sheer idiocy, incapacity or simple greed and dog-in-the-mangerness that the state . intervenes to protect the unorganized PEOPLE; public; you me and the other fellow.
The rest is political "machinery," bureaucracy,
? 70 JEFFERSON and/or MUSSOLINI
flummyd. iddle. Jefferson, Mussolini, Lenin, all hated or hate it. Lenin wanted to get rid of it: "All this is political machinery, want to get rid of it," as Stef reported Lenin's opinion in 1918.
Jefferson started to clean up the social flummy- d. iddle, etiquette, precedence, etc. ?
In a hide-bound Italy, fascism meant at the start DIRECT action, cut the cackle, if a man is a mere s. o. b. don't argue.
Get it into your head that Italy was, even in 1900, immeasurably ahead of England in so far as land laws and the rights of the man who works on the soil are concerned. Some of the follies and cruelties of great English owners would not now be permitted in Italy. Certain kinds of domestic enemy would be shipped to the conjino.
You can buy and own pretty villas and ancient architectural triumphs, but you can't cut down olive- trees just when you like and you can't drive the " co,lonno " off his fields. He can, I think, still be your " colonno " instead of the " colonno " of the former proprietor, but you don't by any means own him despite the feudal decorations or courtesy.
Secular habit, picturesque, etc. , as in the case of "the sailor. '~ There is, near here, an ancient villa, and a nabob therein, and "the sailor" just came and sat in the kitchen where there was plenty of room, he adopted the villa, and he ulti- mately adopted the chauffeur's seat, etc. That don't prove anything about anything except certain phases of mentality. Servants ask twice as much from people with big houses as from people with cottages and small flats. Primitive sense of equity and justice or Latin common-sense.
? XVII
AS TO THE PARTICULAR SITUATION AND THE VIOLA TION OF LIBERTIES, TRADI- TIONAL LIBERTIES, "RIGHTS," ETC.
JEFFERSON had no difficulty about keeping MEN in his country, in fact he found it difficult to imagine A N Yone leaving America for Europe (Napoleonic and Royal Europe). When a particular emergency arose he showed no regard for liberties in the declaration of EMBARGO.
Mussolini found himself faced with the inverse situation. Italians had for decades been going abroad to work, they sent back " money " but that did NOT tidy up Italy, it did not drain swamps, improve crops, restore buildings that had been knocked cock-eyed by Napoleon, by the Austrians, and by nature the gradual destroyer ofroofs.
In particular France was sucking in the best blood of Italy. Germany noticed it, Germany naturally. thought France might as well fill up on more or less consanguineous Germans, rather than on Italians who were wanted at home and on natives from the African continent.
Mussolini saw labour going out of Italy to rebuild France and, still worse, to provide soldiers who would, as soon as the Comite des Forges could wangle it, be ready to provide a home-market for Creusot cannon to shoot no matter whom so long
7I
? 72 JEFFERSON
as they created consumption of metallurgical pro- ducts.
Gents who make guns like to sell 'em; such is the present state of the world, in the bourgeois demo- liberal anti-Marxian anti-fascist anti-Leninist system.
And as the Stampa correspondent has indicated, the selling of guns and powder differs from ALL other industries in that the more you sell the greater the demand for the product. The more goes to consumer A the greater the demand of the other consumers. Hence the love, the loving and tender love of banks for munition works.
France by the so-called peace got a lot of nice iron, nicely there in the ground, to be dug up for profit, and nobody in the Schneider family con- sidered it wrong to want to sell iron, as quickly and as extensively as possible.
Hence the Italian embargo on the Italian popu- lation which has for ten years been improving the olde home yard.
Nobody loathes passports more than the present writer, but passports for a purpose are a vastly different matter from passports shoved on to the American people with no shadow of justification whatsoever at an enormous cost to the American public and as, indirectly, a means of presenting American millions of dollars to foreign and often unfriendly nations for NO cause save the funda- mental nastiness of several disreputable or half- witted presidents one ? of whom was THE record- breaking destroyer o f the best American institutions ; and with no excuse save the half-wittedness of an unthinking and incompetent bureaucracy. ?
They weren't meant to keep Americans at home for the good of America, they were just a useless annoyance because a diseased president with a one-
? 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.
