the new zealand graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY,SEPTEMBER 10, 1892.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 37, 10 September 1892, Page 904

the new zealand graphic AND LADIES’ JOURNAL. SATURDAY,SEPTEMBER 10, 1892.

Aptek a rest of two months or mon Mazzini comes forward once more as the subject of our notes. No excuse is, we imagine, required for reverting to so magnificent a personality as the master, so rich a subject as his teaching. The necessity for a promulgation of Mazzini’s doctrines in a young democracy such as New Zealand, must be selfevident to alt To look into the life of this man, to try and understand him and emulate him, cannot but be beneficial. The time we would first look up Mazzini again is in 1836, when, after the failure of the first armed expedition in support of the freedom and unity of Italy, misfortunes poured in upon him from every side. He was persecuted by his enemies, deserted, and calumniated by those whom he had regarded as his friends, and as in fact was the ease almost all his life, he was himself in exile, and under sentence of death. At this time he underwent a crisis of moral suffering which reveals mneh of his soul, and enables us better to realize the principles which made it possible for him to pass safely- through it. It should be described in his own words : * When I felt that I was indeed alone in the world—alone but for my poor mother, far away and unhappy also for my sake—l drew back in terror at the void before me. Then, in that moral desert, doubt came upon me. Perhaps I was wrong and the world right ? Perhaps my idea was indeed a dream ? Perhaps I had been led, not by an idea, but by my idea; by the pride of my oizm conception ; the desire of victory rather than the purpose of victory ; an intelligent egotism, drying up and withering the spontaneous and innocent impulses of my heart, which would have led me to the modest virtues of a limited sphere, and to duties near at hand and easy of fulfilment. * The day on which my soul was furrowed by these doubts, I felt myself not only unutterably and supremely wretched ; I felt myself a criminal—conscious of guilt, yet incapable of expiation. The forms of those shot at Chambery rose before me like the phantom of a crime and its unavailing remorse. I could not recall them to life. How many mothers bad I caused to weep I How many more must learn to weep should I persist in the attempt to rouse the youth of Italy to noble action—to awaken in them the yearning for a common country I And if that country were indeed an illusion, if Italy, exhausted by two epochs of civilisation, were condemned by Providence henceforth to remain subject to younger and more vigorous nations, without a name or a mission of her own, whence bad I derived the rights of judging the future, and urging hundreds, thousands of men to the sacrifice of themselves and of all that they held most dear ? * I will not dwell upon the effect of these doubts upon my spirit. I will simply say that I suffered so much as to be driven to the confines of madness. At times I started frtffii my sleep at night, and ran to the window in delirium, believing that I heard the voice of Jacopo Ruffini calling to me. At times I felt myself irresistibly impelled to arise and go trembling into the room next my own, fancying that I should see some friend whom I really knew to be at that time in prison, or hundreds of miles away. The slightest incident, a word, a tone, moved me to tears. Nature, covered with snow ss it then was about Grenchen, appeared to me to wear a funereal shroud, beneath which it invited me to sink. I fancied I traced in the faces of those who surrounded me, looks, sometimes of pity, but more often of reproach. Had that state of mind lasted but a little longer, I must either have gone mad, or ended it with the selfish death of the suicide. Whilst I was struggling and sinking beneath my cross, I beard a friend, whose room was a few doors distant from mine, answer a young girl, who, having some suspicion of my unhappy condition, waa urging him to break

in upon my solitude, by saying: * Leave him alone ; he is in his element, conspiring and happy.' Ah 1 how little can men guess the state of mind of others, unless they regard it—and this is rarely doos—by the light of a deep aflbetion.’ Then Mawini goes on to describe how he came, as it were, to his right mind, and how he arrived at the conclusion that his doubt and mental sufferings had arises from his not having fully comprehended the true definition of life, and his having unconsciously allowed himself to be influenced by the materialistic view which regards life as a search after happiness. * In my own case,’ he says, * and as if the better to seduce me, that false definition of life had thrown off every baser stamp of material desires, and had centred itself in the affections, as in an inviolable sanctuary. I ought to have regarded them as blessings of God, to be accepted with gratitude whenever they descended to irradiate or eheermyexistence, not demanded them either as a right or as a re ward. I bad unconsciously made them the condition of the fulfilment of my duties ; I had been unable to realise the true ideal of love, and had unknowingly worshipped not love itself, but the joys of love. When these vanished I had despaired of all things ; as if the joys and sorrows I encountered on the path of life could alter the aim I had aspired to reach ; as if the darkness and serenity ot heaven could change the purpose or necessity of the journey s’ or, as Mazzini most beautifully puts the same thought in another passage : — * God has given us love, that the weary soul may give and receive support upon the way of life. It is a flower springing up upon the path of duty, but it eafihot change its course.' HU discouragement and despair had arisen from bis not having fully comprehended and believed in the indissoluble co-partnership of all generations, and all individuals in the human race. He had unconsciously allowed himself to be influenced by the theory of which Thomas Carlyle is the champion, and which regards the human face as an aggregate of individuals, and looks upon history, to use Carlyle’s own words, as only the essence of innumerable biographies. It is in the fulness with which he comprehended the collective idea of mankind, and the clearness with which he has explained to us its practical bearing on our life, that the greatness of Mazzini as a teacher lies. By substituting the collective for the individual view of life, the spirit of humanity for the spirit of man, he has changed the starting point of human activity. Hitherto the reformer has looked at everything from the point of view of the individual, and bydoing so hasgained the idea of individual rights, which in England has won for us individual liberty, liberty of conscience, political securities, freedom of the Press, and Free Trade; bub is this enough ? As Mazzini rightly says ‘The prolorg»d plaint of millions crushed beneath the wheels of comp tition has warned us that freedom of labour does not suffice to render industry what it ought to be, the source of material life to the State in all its members; the intellectual anarchy to which we are a prey has shown us that liberty of conscience does not suffice to render religion the source of moral life to the State in all its members.’ The theory of individual rights has achieved much for us, but these conquests are not the end, they are but the means to enable us to attain the end. As Mazzini says in another passage : * Whoever examines things at all seriously, will perceive that the doctrine of individual rights is essentially and in principle only a great and holy protest in favour of humfiti liberty against oppression of every kind. Its value, therefore, is purely negative. It is able to destroy; it is impotent to construct, ft is mighty to break chains; it has no power to knit bonds of co-operation and love.* The theory of individualism is moreover insufficient; by breaking the bond ot continuity between ourselves and the generations who have preceded and will follow us upon earth.it has made devotion to noble ideas, which can never be realised in our existence, but a sublime folly, by annihilating the connecting link between all human ties, and effacing the idea of the progression of collective mankind, it has made martyrdom but a suicide without an object. We wish for more truth and higher ideals than can possibly be realised-in our lives. We desire to advance further than is possible for the individual private creature if he relies on his own powers doos It is because they did not sufficiently identify themselves with humanity that so many of even the greatest intellects have been startled at the disproportion between the object and the means, and have ended by seeing nought but death and annihalation on every side, and have lost all courage

for the eonfliek The ideal has appeared to them like a tremendous irony, and they have therefore contented themselves with pointing out the evil calmly and wisely, and then resigning themselves to trust and wait, or have, as Carlyle, eensured bitterly, and often violently, all those who endeavoured to transform the social state as it exists. What la, is, they say, and all our endeavours will not alter it before the time decreed- that time God alone determines. They «attain ealmness,’ perhaps, • but it is the calm of inaction, of contemplation, and contemplation here on earth is the selfishness of genius.* But if we start from the point ot view ot the collective existence of humanity and regard social life aa the development of an idea by the life of all its Individuals, if we regard history aa the record of the continuous development of humanity in time and space through the works of individuals ; if we believe In the co-partnership and mutual responsibility of all people and of all generations, never losing sight of the feet tint the life of the individual is his development in a tocdium fashioned by the labours of all the individuals who have preceded him, and that the powers of the individual are hie powers grafted upon those of all foregoing humanity—our conception of life will change—and we shall learn that it is not only our right but our duty to incarnate our thought in action. For it matters little that our individual powers be of the smallest amount in relation to the object to be attained ; it matters little that the result of our action be loot in a distance which is beyond our calculation. We know that the powers of millions of men, our bret hen, will succeed to the work after us in the same track—we know that the object attained, be it what it may, will be the result of all our efforts combined. If we regard life from the point of view of the collective existence of humanity we see that we are all responsible to and for one another, that we all live for others, the individual for bis family, the family for its country, and the country for humanity. We are all climbing a pyramid, whose base embraces the earth and whose point rises to God. The ascent is slow and painful, and we can accomplish it only by joining hands, by aiding ourselves with our united strength, by closing up our ranks like the Macedonian Phalanx when any of ns fall exhausted by fatigue. Regarding it from this point of view, Mazzini came to the conclusion that * Life is immortal; but the method and time of evolution through which it progresses is in our own hands. Each of ns is,* he says, * bound to purify his own soul M a temple, to free it from egotism ; to set it before himself, with a religious sense of the importance of the study the problem of bis own life; to search out what is the most striking, the most urgent need of the men by whom he is surrounded, then to interrogate his own faculties and capacity, and resolutely and unceasingly apply them to the satisfaction of that need. And that examination is not to be undertaken in a spirit of mere analysis, which is incapable of revealing life, and is ever impotent save when assisting or subserving some ruling synthesis; but by hearkening to the voice of his own heart, concentrating all the faculties of bis mind to bear upon the point; by the intuition, in short, of a loving soul, fully impressed with the solemnity of life. Young brothers, when once you have conceived and determined your mission within your soul, let nought arrest your steps. Fulfil it with all your strength ; fulfil it, whether blesfed by love or visited by hate; whether strengthened by association with others, or in the sad solitude that almost always surrounds the martyrs of thought. The path is clear before you: you are cowards, unfaithful to your own future, if, in spite of sorrows and delusions you do not pursue it to the end.* As possibly there may be some to whom such a prospect may appear too cheerless, I trust I shall be excused if I conclude by quoting the advice given by Rornola to little Lillo. The last page but one of Rornola begins :— * It is only a poor sort of happiness. ... if I had never been born.’