His morality is of the most primitive kind; or rather, he has none
whatever, no more than has a South-Sea islander lying in the sun under a
cocoa-nut tree whilst the surf bathes his naked limbs. It would be
absurd to accuse him of immorality because the indulgence of the senses
is as natural and as legitimate in his estimation, as Favetta's song
amongst the golden furze, or the reapers' welcome of the purple wine.
Yet by a not rare anomaly, this demand for perfect freedom of the
passions is accompanied by a tendency to desire tyranny in political
matters. He is disposed to deify force. In one or two expressions there
is an echo of Carlyle which sounds oddly and jarringly amongst the
amorous liberties and artistic debaucheries of the rest; and is not
worthy of a writer who has so much courage in opposing scientific
pharisaism and the thraldom of the schools. He is disposed to admire
what is strong simply because it is strong, forgetful that such strength
is sustained and nourished by the suffering of the weak. It is true that
he has lived in an atmosphere in which the verities embodied in the
aspirations, abortive but always noble, of the higher efforts of
revolution have been received with fear and misunderstanding. The
tendencies and training of the _Codini_ are visible through the
eloquence of the poet and the conclusions of the philosopher. The entire
lack in him of all altruism comes from this. Mazzini must be as
unintelligible to him as Tolstoi. The mass of humanity is always to him
the filthy, surging, bestial multitudes of the crowd at Casalbordino.
But even this absence of benevolence is better than the pitiful
sycophancy of writers who are as fulsome in their flattery to Demos as
to kings; is manlier than the nauseating self-worship of a Humanity at
once its own pimp and pander, its own adorer and assassin.
In his scorn of the human flocks of sheep, he forgets, I admit, too
entirely the justice to which the humblest unit amongst these flocks has
right, but that scorn, even when misdirected, is fresh and bracing as
the dash of his own Adriatic waves, when the east wind drives them
hurrying on to the shingle beach. He has no fear; and he never stoops to
that base flattery of his own species which is the most nauseous feature
of modern politics and of modern science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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