CHAPTER ........

THE RED ROMANTICS

Just as in literature the great movement of ideas that brought about
and accompanied the French Revolution was followed by the Romatic movement
in literature, so too in the field of politics and social reform it gave
rise to the Red Romantics, the Anarchists, whose fundamental conceptions
differed radically from the so-called "scientific" socialism which arose
in Germany with Karl Marx and Engels and has found its final expression in
Soviet Russia. The Red Romantics were essentially libertarian and indi-
vidualistic, eschewing the pseudo-scientific Marxian conceptions that
subordinate the individual to the State, crushing private enterprise and
denying individual freedom.

I have already made a passing reference to some of the forerunners
of the Anarchist movement, the French philosopher Proudhon, the Russian
Bakunin, the Englishman William Godwin. In France it was the reaction
that followed the execution of Robespierre and his closest followers in
1794 that had given rise to the first Communist movement, that of "Grac-
chus" Baboeuf and his Equalitarians. The working masses of Paris and the
other great French cities, without whose support the Revolution with its
heroisms and its crimes, would not have been possible, had been reduced
to the direst poverty. Unemployment was rife, and even when in work their
meagre wages paid in assignats (the devalued revolutionary currency) could
not provide the city workers with the bare necessities of life, for the
country folk refused to part with farm products for worthless paper money.
Meantime, the shameless turncoats of the Directoire - Barra, Taillen & Co

- 2 -

flaunted their luxury, based on the plunder acquired during the Terror
in the sacking of such cities as Lyons and Nantes.

Baboeuf and his followers, who loudly decried the social injustices
of the times and were preparing a popular rising, were betrayed, tried,
and executed in 1797, and their movement fizzled out. Then for a time,
France, saved from chaos and civil war by the administrative genius and
the military glories of the First Consul, Napoleon Buonaparte, forgot
Baboeuf, his friend and companion Buonarotti (descendent of; the great
Florentine, Michelangelo) and the Equalitarians.

But the seed had been sown which in the 1840's was to lead to the
libertarian Socialist parties, opposed to the Marxian philosophy which
was to lead nearly a century later to the Bolshevik revolution. Hence-
forth, the struggles of the oppressed peoples of Europe for political li-
berty and national independence were to be accompanied by the movement
of the proletariat for economic justice, a movement led, as usual; by
the intellectuals of the upper and middle classes.

Behind all the Continental movements was the materialistic philosophy
of the Encyclopaedists, but in England abstract theories on the consti-
tution of the Universe played a much smaller part in the evolution of
socialist thought than they did on the Continent. Metaphysical spe-
culation has never had a great hold on the English mind.

The XIXth century in England was indeed an age of intellectual op-
timism, ushered in perhaps by Shelley with his Prometheus Unbound. The

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progress of science had led many to believe that man was on the eve of
solving the riddle of the Universe. Pope had summed up the situation a
century earlier in his apt lines: "A little knowledge as a dangerous thing
drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring. There shall draughts intox-
icate the brain - and drinking deeply sobers it again".

Alas, alas, who can now have the optimistic conviction that an age of
universal peace and brotherhood is approaching when, to quote the typically
XIXth century poet, Tennyson, "the war drums throb no longer and the bat-
tle flags are furled - in the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the
world".

The founder of English socialism, the Welsh philanthropist Robert
Owen, based his work not on philosophical precepts but on the recognition
of social ills to which he tried to find practical remedies. Born in 1778
he had shown his exceptional business capacity by becoming manager of a
cotton mill at the early age of 19. His movement preceded the Continent-
al lines and was based on humanitarian considerations. Impressed by the
deplorable conditions under which the workers toiled, Owen laboured assid-
uously for the introduction of legislation to protect them. He himself set
the example by introducing reasonable working hours into his factory. His
insistence on the importance of small self-governing communities as the
units on which the economic and social life of the country should be
built, and the importance he gave to co-operation both in production and
distribution, differentiating his movement clearly from that founded by Marx
based on centralisation and State control of the land and all means of pro-

- 4 -

duction. Owen was a reformer and a philanthropist, not the creator of a
new social system, and the movement he had started led in the course of
time to the reforms introduced by factory legislation, but as a revolution-
are movement it gradually petered out.

The Owenist movement was followed by that of the Christian Socialists, of which the clergyman and theologian, John F. D. Maurice, and Charles Kingsley, poet, novelis and social reformer, were the leading figures.

They joined hands with the co-operative movement of the Rochdale Pioneers in the North of England which grew to vast proportions but had nothing revolutionary about it.

Standing apart from these, with a great reputation as writer, histor-
ian and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle, a rugged individualist, was also one
of the forces at work for social reform, showing up shams, false conven-
tions, and social injustices, and though he could never be counted as a
of the
socialist, he undoubtedly did more than any/others aft above mentioned to
pave the way for social changes of a revolutionary kind.

But in England there was another force at work which I think exerted
no influence in France or Germany, for it approached the social question
neither
nor from the manthatic political nor the economic side, but from the aes-
thetic.

It was in revolt against the ugliness, meanness and cruelty of his
day that the great prose writer and art critic of the 1850's-60's, John
Ruskin, attacked capitalistic industrialism. He has been the first to

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stand up for the young Pre-Raphaelite paonters - Holman Hunt, John Milais, D. G. Rossetti - for in their paintings - received with hoots of disappointment and aguse by the academicians and art critics of the day, he had seen a revolt against artistic shams and conventions, and an effort to return to sincerity and simplicity. Ruskin was a wealthy and exceedingly generous man, and became the centre of a movement which "chose art as the central background in a holy warfare against the age" to quote from E. P. Thompson's "William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary". It was this revolt against ugliness and injustice that gave rise to the English wing of the Red Romantics whose forerunners were Thomas Carlyle, hater of shams and lies, Charles Dickens with his ridicule of parliamentary procedure, his contempt for Podsnappery in all its forms, and his intimate knowledge of the sufferings of the poor, and John Ruskin, the champion of beauty no less in life than in the arts.

In England the Red Romantics were to receive a new and most valuable recruit in William Morris. "The idle singer of an empty day" as he had defined himself in the 1860's, when he was known and admired by poets as the author of the "Earthly Paradise", the "Defence of Guinevere", "The life and Death of Jason", he had come when a student at Oxford under the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose dominant personality and whose work in the twin arts of painting and poetry had made him the idol of a group of which Morris (known to his intimates among whom my Father, as Topsy) Edward Burne Jones, and the flaming young poet Algernon Charles

- 6 -

Swinburn, were the leading lights.

To what may rightly be called the "second wave" of the Pre-Raphaelite movement - of which Birne Jones was to be the painter, Philip Webb the architect, and Morris himself the poet - he made the contribution of his robust and forthright personality, his knowledge of the English Middle Ages and his love of the Arthurian legends.

But in Morris the cult of beauty was soon to take a practical and :re-volutionary turn; he left the arts for the crafts, and started in the 1870's a crusade to reform the architecture, decoration and furnishings of the English home which, under the influence of Podsnappery and the Victor-ian Convention had fallen to a low level of taste, workmanship and quality.

Morris was a wealthy man who could afford to take an independent stand, and when in 1867 he started the firm of Morris & Faulkner, Marshal & Co, of which the leading partners were Ford Madox Brown, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Burne Joen and Philip Webb; he set out on a crusade against "philistinism" in the decorative arts. The Firm undertook to design and execute stained glass windows for churches and colleges, to produce wallpapers, table glass, metal work, carpets, curtains and furnishings of all kinds. Morris was dictatorial and soon wanted to be a "committee of one". He bought out his partners, and many tales went around of his high-handed way with would be customers; how he had driven a Bishop from his shop who had come round to give a commission for stained glass windows for his Church, but whose ideas of colour and design outraged Morris's artistic canons.

But in Morris aestheticism was to lead to the revolt against the social

- 7 -

conditions in which he saw the cause of the decay of the arts and crafts
of England, and as this "idle dreamer" was also and above all a worker,
he soon passed from thought to action and in 1880 became to the surprise
and in many cases to the dismay of his friends of the art world - among
whom foremost Burne Jones - a militant Socialist. In 1883 he became a
regular member of the Social Democratic Federation founded by Henry M.
Hyndman.

In Hyndman - an incredible figure in any other country but England -
the Socialist cause had made a curious recruit. A wealthy stockbroker,
he had become, when over forty years of age, a convinced follower of the
doctrines of Karl Marx, taking part in the early Socialist rallies of the
1880's always attired in the top hat and frock coat of bourgeois respect-
ability. He combined the economic tents of Marx with out and out British
imperialism; he regarded the vast array of the British colonies of that
day as the "special heritage of our working classes" for the defence of
which he steadily advocated strengthening the then unchallenged supremacy
of the British navy.

Only England could have produced such a socialist leader who, as
Lenin - than an exile in England, - wrote was a bourgeois philistine be-
longing to the best of his class, a steady opponent of Home Rule for Ire-
land, a jingo who sold the social democratic paper, "Justice" in the Lon-
don streets and addressed open air meetings, always attired in his wearing
the top hat of bourgeois respectability, while earning a large income on
the stock-exchange.

- 8 -

It was inevitable that the Hyndman-Morris combination should be short-lived. The motive behind Morris's conversion of socialism was his devotion to beauty in all its forms; his conviction that art couldn't have "a real life under the present system of commercialism and profit-mongering" in a society which he described as "a counting-house on top of a kway cinder-heap with Podsnap's drawingroom in the offing".

For economic theory Morris cared nothing. On one occasion when at a political meeting he was heckled by a "comrade" who enquired: "Does Comrade Morris accept Marx's theory of value?" he replied: "I am asked if I believe in Marx's theory of value. To speak quite frankly I do not know what Marx's theory of value is, and I'm damned if I want to know"; and he went on: "It is enough political economy for me to know that the *kway* idle class is rich and the working class is poor, and the rich are rich because they rob the poor. That I know because I see it with my own eyes; I need read no blocks to convince me of it". (E.P. Thompson, *Lire of Wm. Morris*, pp.410-11)

Morris came to doubt, moreover, if the scientific socialism of the Hyndman variety would be any more conducive to beauty than the capitalist society it was to replace, and then there was his keen dislike of jingo-fism in all its forms, including that of Hyndman.

All this was to lead him and his group, among whom Edward Aveling and his wife Eleanor; daughter of Karl Marx, and Belfort Bax, who was to become a shining light of the Fabian Society, to secede from the Social

- 10 -

Anarchist club
bund condition) until 1892 when a small group of working men at
Welsall (Lancashire) victims of a plot worked up by a spy and agent
cataur, Coulon, were found in possession of a bomb planted on them by the
police. Alarm had been aroused by anarchist outrages on the Continent and
by the Fenian movement in Ireland, and this supposed plot afforded an op-
portunity for giving a salutary lesson to all and sundry who might be in-
clined to introduce "propaganda by deed" into the British Isles. For be-
ing in unlawful possession of explosives the men were tried and sentenced
to ten years of penal servitude. This savage sentence aroused the indig-
nation of all the libertarians and Nicoll published in the Commonweal an ill
judged article which laid him open to the charge of inciting to murder Chi-
Police Inspector Melville. He was arrested, tried, and given 18 months.
hard labor and the Commonweal came to an end. The printing-press, type,
etc., belonging to the paper were left derelict in the loft over a muse
off the Clerkenwell Road, where they were lodged, the only person in poss-
ession being a hanger-on of the former printing staff, a very grimy and
unattractive youth whose lazy inertia led him to remain on the spot "whenee
all but he had fled".

And here let me take up again the thread of my anecdotage, for it was
at this juncture that I myself and my sister Helen (ages respectively 17
and 14) entered the ranks of the Red Romantics.

Generally speaking the middle-class youngster knew nothing and cared
less for the problems from the social conditions and movement I have out-
lined. But the young Rossettis of the 1890's had grown up in a different

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atmosphere, an atmosphere pervaded by Shelley, Victor Hugo, and the trum-
pet calls of the French Revolution, and they listened eagerly to the new
ideas that trickled through to them from the Socialist and Anarchist
speakers who held forth in the Sunday meetings held in the London Parks,
where the supporters of the most widely different views, ranging from the
Salvation Army (in those days the butt of rowdy cockney crowds), the se-
veral sects of Christian non-conformists, to Conservatives, Republicans,
Irish Home-Rulers, trade-unionists, and the aforesaid Socialists and Com-
munists who expanded their several and violently conflicting views under the
protection of the London policemen who looked on to maintain order and see
that the rules of the game were observed. As long as there was no breach
of the peace, no interference with traffic, and no direct incitement to
crime, all these varying theologians, economists and politicians were free
to express their opinions and give vent to their feelings. The English
of that day - and I think of this also - have always believed it unwise
to "sit on the safety valve".

It was at these Sunday morning meetings in Regent's Park, within a
 easy walking distance of our home, that I and my brother and sister came
 into contact with the revolutionary movements which had spread from the
 Continent to England. And this leads to another chapter in my "Anecdot-
age", that of "The Girl among the Anarchists", the title of a very popular
 book by me. I wrote in 1903 jointly with my sister Helen, which was published
 by Duckworth (London).

- 12 -

father was reading the newspaper account of hour Keir Hardy, the miner,
the first kahax working man elected by the Labor Party, had arrived at
Westminster to take his seat in the House of Commons accompanied by his
working-class pals, on a waggonette to the accompaniment of concertinas
and mouth-organs as typifying the entry of labour into the stronghold of
ascetic
capitalism. Sgields had a long, expressive face, ending in a
pointed beard, and he lifted his eyes to heaven, displaying a large space
of white, exclaiming in deep, dramatic tones: "Oh, the villains; the un-
utterable villain!" bringing down on himself from Madox Brown a loud,
emphatic "Don't be a damned fool, Sgields"! And poor Shields, shuddering
at his friend's profintaity, subsided into silence.

Madox Brown realised that "Work", celebrated by him on canvas some
forty years earlier, was taking its place with Keir Hardy in the Councils
of the State.

Shortly after this little incident I left London with my Mother, or-
dered abroad for her health, and it was on our arrival at Pallanza, on
the Lago Maggiore (Italy), that the news of my Grandfather's death
reached us. He was one of those men of whom one can truly say: "We shall
not look upon his like again".

============

CHAPTER XV

THE STORMY SUNSET - THE CURATIN FALLS.

Well, here I am at the end of my Anecdotaly and nearing the end of a long life. To say it with Walter Savage Landor : "I warmed both hands before the fire of life - it sinks, and I am ready to depart".

I have lived into a new and widely different world from that into which I was born. When I was a child I played with my brother at discovering the North Pole; now it is one of the stations on the flight from Europe to Japan; I read with amazement Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea"; now the Americans are starting a regular sub-marine route, serviced by an atomic-powered vessel, that passes under the Polar ice-pack. Man, having explored all parts of the globe - Arctic, Antarctic and Tropical - is now aiming at space-flight and his next destination should be the moon. When I was young the penny post, the 6d telegram, the 30-40 miles an hour train were looked upon as highly efficient services; now cars rush along the roads at 50 miles an hour, aip-planes fly at super-sonic speed, and a well-known italian lawyer here in Rome conducts a business he 开通了 in Brazil, where he went to live during the period of the racial laws, by speaking every morning with his secretary at Santos by wireless telephone and spending a week end there once a month.

Way back in the 1880's illiteracy was common in all European countries, but I doubt whether the people were less intelligent than they are today. In South Italy the cantastorie (ballad-singers) used to entertain the illiterate peasants and workers by reading out Tasso's Jerusalem Liberated of the History of the Kings

-3-

on the Supplement of such an orthodox paper as the London Times.

Perhaps a symptom of, this progressive de-Christianisation may be seen in the modern conduct of war. Before my day there had been in the XIXth century a whole series of wars on a great scale - revolutionary, Napoleonic, colonial, Russo-Ga- panese, etc. but they had been on the whole wars between opposing armies, con- ducted with some regard to decency and terminating with compromise peaces. Total warfare, waged more against the defenceless civilians than against the armed for-ces is a recent development, resulting from modern techniques - air-forces, sub-marines, atom-bombs, etc.

Mind-conditioning is also a modern development made possible by the cinema ra- dio, the cinema, the TV. Propaganda was a word associated in my day with the peaceful efforts of missionaries; now it is a recognized weapon of offence. Used first for selling goods by advertising, it is now used for selling - or imposing - ideas. In olden times Nero could kill his enemies; the inquisition could burn or torture; and fear or suffering might wring confession or fecantation from the vic- tims; but no external action could be brought to bear on their inner convictions. Now, modern "brain-washing" storms the inner citadel of the mind, and can reduce human beings to abject and supine slaves.

When I read of such developments and reflect on what I see and hear, a fan-
tastic notion haunts me. I read in elementary science books of the great ante-
diluvian animals that once lived on the earth and how, in the course of millen-
niums they died out, their brains being disproportionately small as compared to
their bulk, while the smaller, weaker, but more intelligent forms of animal life
came into possession of the globe. May it not be, I ask myself, that the ante-

- 8 -

innocent doves". "Doves, indeed", replied the Pope" they are starlings".

A humbug does not go down with him.

Looking down the long vista of the years the old familiar faces rise up before me, almost all gone, but I cannot say alas! for faith and hope open/prospects in which I seem to see all that was great or good, loving or tender surviving and progressing in the life to come.

Among those dear faces I see the undimmed image of my loved sister, Mary. A handsome, active girl, af crippled when barely 22 by the inexorable advance of rheumatoid arthritis in a virulent form, she was unable to do the many things she might otherwise have done, but she made of herself her own great masterpiece, bearing the great suffering, the cruel disappointments, not only with uncomplaining fortitude, but becoming for all privileged to know her a centre of cheerful happiness; sympathising with all in their troubles or difficulties; quick to seize the humourless side of life; the best company I have known. She and I would often sit together and laugh over Pickwick, to whom we were both devoted, and thoroughly enjoy ourselves. She was in London all through the bombardments, and the old home to which she was deeply attached with its all its dear family associations, wrecked over her head by a German bomb. Her last years were years of moral and physical suffering and discomfort, but she never gave way to self-pity. The thought of Mary brings to my mind lines by William Ernest Henley which I have heard her read: "Out of the night that covers me - black as the pit from pole to pole - I thank whatever gods may be - for my unconquerable soul. - In the fell clutch of circumstance - I have not winced nor cried aloud. - Under the bludgeonings of chance -

-9-

my head is bloody but unbowed". She was one of the few who can say "I am the
master of my fate;— I am the captain of my soul". Proud lines, but fully applicable
to Mary Elizabeth Madox Rossetti.

Among those whom memory summons up are the humble and faithful whose services
made it possible for me to engage in the activities which filled my active years:
old Charlotte of the London days; Valinta, Marietta to whom I owe so much. Then
there are the friends of a generation older than my own who made my working years
both interesting and pleasurable; the dear American friends who made my visits to
their great country, bathing in the, and making its memories which now cheer my old
age. If I were a poet I could make of all these memories something beautiful and
worth-while, but alas, I am not, and if I were to follow on the line it would be
more like an address book than a poem, and I should be that least lovable of per-
sons, an intollerable bore.

But among the friends of the last stage of my life, two stand out and call for
mention.

Daniele Varè, half Venetian, half English, loyal to both great national herit-
ages, equally at home in both languages, a skilled diplomat who learnt in his many
years of service as Italian Miniter to China to know and love that country, while
also doing Italy yeoman's service in the United States. Devoted to his family —
mother, wife, daughters — whom he introduces to his readers and makes them love —
tender-hearted under a rather gruff exterior, fond of animals — he had a parrot
who had appropriated him to such an extent that no one could go near his owner,—I
will not say master, for that title belonged perhaps to Poll rather than to Daniele—

- 10 -

he was a man of moods. He could be as brilliant a conversationalist as he was a delightful writer; witty, observant, critical; now a man who would "suffer fools gladly", and yet none kinder or more willing than he to help a lame dog over a stile. As a rule generous in word and deed, he could be tart and contemptsuous when occasion called for it. Shabbily treated by his Government which cut short his diplomatic career, he never nursed a grudge but used his freedom from official duties to take up his pen and make for himself a brilliant reputation as a writer. "The Maker of Heavenly Trousers", "The Laughing Diplomat", "The two Impostors" and half a dozen other works have made his name familiar and popular with readers in the U.S., Great Britain and Germany as well as Italy, and enabled him in an easy, pleasurable style, to entirely free from preaching or humbug of any kind, to "point a moral or adorn a tale".

When he reminisc'd, none could be more entertaining than Varè, for his field was a wide one; sometimes it would deal with prominent figures in Roman society, sometimes it would just be some anecdote touching himself or family. One of these has lodged in my memory: his daughters had had a dog sent out to them when he was in Copenhagen as Italian Minister Plenpotentiary to Denmark. The animal was not in good condition, and Varè sent it to the local canine hospital where each of the patients had his own little room with bath attached. The next day he looked in to see how it was getting on and was given the number of the cubicle to which he went. On the door, clearly written out, he read: "His Exc. Daniele Varè, Minister of Italy. Lice". The dog had acquired the name and title of his master.

He left us suddenly, unexpectedly; I think we may truly say happily, for he went out one morning in good spirits and apparently good health, to see a friend

- 13 -

came my last appearance as an interpreter when the then Prime Minister, Alcide de Gasperi, asked me to accompany him to London where he was summoned _ad audiendum_ Verbatim before the Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Allied Powers meeting in St. James's Palace to consider the preliminaries of peace.

This was the last occasion on which I was to sit at the table with Ministers of Foreign Affairs of many countries to interpret their words and ideas, and I think it must have been one of the last occasions of which the business of interpreting was still unmechanised. Now the interpreters, one for each language, sit excluded in little boxes, translating into a telephone-receiver the speech transmitted to them through the ear-capes they wear, and those who need the translations to understand the proceedings sit in the hall and through their ear-capes hear the steady undertone of the interpreter. Of course this system saves time - a very important consideration - but the interpretation must inevitably lose the spirit and characteristics of the original.

At St. James's Palace I was sitting between De Gasperi on my left and the British Foreign Secretary, the Labor member Edward Bevin, on my right. Bevin struck me as typical of the good-sense and good-nature that characterise the British working class to which he belonged. The meeting was presided over by the American Under-Secretary of State, markedly courteous to the Italian delegates; and mid-way up the table to my left was the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotoff, who made a very disagreeable impression on me. When De Gasperi had delivered his address and I had translated it into English a few comments were made, but the agenda did not provide for discussion, and the Italians were politely requested to withdraw. I remember that in the adjoining room to which we retired the Yugoslav delegate came and

-artixxx - 16 -

got rig of, - but of beauty, beauty which is love. Modern life must be functional in all its aspects, which does not only mean that the things that surround us must be suited to the purposes for which they are intended - that indeed is an essential feature of all beautiful things - but they must be hard, arid, loveless, and thus in contrast with the plan on which nature works.

I look around me, and from the star-spangled sky to the snow crystal, from the glorious canyon of Arizona, to the wing of a butterfly, from the forest tree to the tiny flower that grows at its foot, from the mighty ocean to the delicate beauty of the shell, I see love lavished on creation in the form of beauty, and I give thanks to the Creator that he is not "functional" in the sense that I mean. What need had the mussel for that wondrous shell with its exquisite coloring and delicate shape. Its need of protection and warmth could have been met by lodging it in a bare little box. What need was there for the tender loveliness of the wings of my little love-bird, with each little pearl-gray feather bordered with a hair-breadth line of deep blue? All his needs could have been met by clothing him in a little suit of sober brown. Even the domestic fly - whom I barely tolerate - if the light catches its wing shows lovely iridescent colors. But the modern human his work prefers downright ugliness, and the objects placed in the hands of young children, the dolls they play with, the comics they look at, are intentionally ugly. And so are most of the pictures and sculpture of our day. It may display intellect but it certainly does not aim at beauty. These works represent a lovless world, a world of hatreds, atomic bombs, usury in its many forms draining the lifeblood of the people; shams and humbugs; demagogy parading as democracy.

If the greatness of art consists - as I believe it does - in truthfully re-

- 18 -

sophical and spiritual.

On the one hand are those who believe that in man there is a spark of the divinity; that he has been created with an immortal soul; that his destiny does not end here on earth. On the other hand are those who see in man nothing but a compound of elements whose destiny is limited to this world; an instrument of which those in power can make use as the material means for attaining material ends.

They see in man the green manure to be ploughed into the earth in view of a future - very dubious - millennium.

These two conceptions are irreconcilable; they determine conflicting lines of action. In antiquity the materialistic view of life found its practical expression in slavery, incompatible for the higher conception of human personality. Today it finds its most definite expression in the Marx-Lenin ideology.

But, as in the days of Augustin, so again now the barbarians are not all beyond the frontiers of the Empire; they are to be found within it.

This materialistic conception of human destiny finds expression also in the excessive mechanisation and standardisation of life, which, when carried too far, makes man the slave of his own inventions, the machines, new idols before which he prostrates himself.

Most dangerous is the use so generally made of the marvellous discoveries of modern science; the cinema, the radio, television, which are used as means for acting on the subliminal mind and conditioning human thought.

Victims of ceaseless suggestion set going in certain quarters, we lose the most sacred of all freedoms, which is not that of expressing our thoughts, but that of

- 20 -

in Italy.

Should I cope again into this world I would choose to be an archaeologist,
for the past is not dead; it contains the germs of the future. It lives in us
with all its good and its bad. And all the temporary manifestations of life
lead us back to the one Eternal, Infinite, Uncreate Love that moves the Sun and
the other Stars - "L'Amor che muove il Sole e le altre Stelle".

FINIS.

Agresti, p. 2

among those whose culture is universal has been suffering in an insane asylum
for the last ten years. But at long last the momentous publication by the
U. S. Government confirms the accusations Esra Pound dared to utter at the risk
of life and liberty in the attempt, however useless, to make the plot at Yalta
abortive.

He spoke the truth, and let us hope that of him it will also be said: "et
veritas liberabit vos."

trans. from the Italian of Olivia Rossetti Agresti

Rome, 22 March 1955

In these days when so much is said about left-wing tendencies, the courageous and timely action of the U. S. Government has exposed what happened backstage at Yalta. We now see the ruthless tyrant of the Kremlin, in company with the "infamous image of fraud" (Inferno XVII) from the White House and the reluctant in-cubus from London, contriving amid witticisms and toasts the plan of a massacre surpassing the bloodiest dreams of a maniac, a plan of action that has placed the most famous capitals of eastern Europe--Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna, Bucharest, Berlin-- at the mercy of the hordes of a new Genghis Khan.

When confronting this picture the mind turns to Ezra Pound the poet--a seer as all true poets are--who is punished in a criminal asylum for the crime of having seen clearly while everyone, or at least many, let themselves be deceived: "so benign an aspect, and all else a reptile's form" (Inferno XVII). Ezra Pound saw clearly. And with the disinterestedness and resolute courage that distinguish him he tried, by the only means then had, to warn his fellow citizens against the evil which was being secretly planned.

In his language, sentiments, and outlook Ezra Pound is wholly American, but of the America of the Founding Fathers, of the Jeffersons, Adams, and Bentons-- of the American which fought a long battle, unfortunately lost, against monetary power that became the master instead of the servant of the nation. The seer saw clearly.

In the allegedly incriminating radio speeches now available in microfilm at the Library of Congress, he cried out that "the President has no legal power to enter into serious and secret agreements with foreign powers. The U. S. treaties are valid when ratified by the Senate and not before...Not even as Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces does he have the right to determine the political policies Americans must follow--certainly not to the extent of inviting bolshevik Russia to the destruction of eastern Europe and imposing on American citizens the approval of such destruction. I do not think it is an auspicious action."

The man recognized everywhere as the master in modern poetry and as eminent

Agresti, 2

among those whose culture is universal has been suffering in an insane asylum
for the last ten years. But at long last the momentous publication by the
U. S. government confirms the accusations Eza Pound dared to utter at the risk
of life and liberty in the attempt, however useless, to make the plot at Yalta
abortive.

Translated from the Italian of Olivia Rossetti Agresti

Rome, 22 March 1955

(Olivia Rossetti Agresti is the daughter of William Michael Rossetti who appraised, in The Chronicle for 6 July 1867, the value of Whitman with an acumen which had no parallel on this side of the Atlantic, and in 1868 edited Whitman for British readers.)

In these days when so much is said about left-wing tendencies, the courageous and timely action of the U. S. Government has exposed what happened backstage at Yalta. We now see the ruthless tyrant of the Kremlin, in company with the "infamous image of fraud" (Inferno XVII) from the White House and the reluctant in-cubus from London, contriving amid witticisms and toasts the plan of a massacre surpassing the bloodiest dreams of a maniac, a plan of action that has placed the most famous capitals of eastern Europe--Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna, Bucharest, Berlin--at the mercy of the hordes of a new Genghis Khan.

In the allegedly inderminating radio speeches now available in microfilm at the Library of Congress, he cried out that "the President has no legal power to enter into serious and secret agreements with foreign powers. The U. S. treaties are valid when ratified by the Senate and not before...Not even as Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces does he have the right to determine the political policies Americans must follow--certainly not to the extent of inviting bolshevik Russia to the destruction of eastern Europe and imposing on American citizens the approval of such destruction. I do not think it is an auspicious action."

Agresti, 2

among those whose culture is universal has been suffering in an insane asylum
for the last ten years. But at long last the momentous publication by the
U. S. government confirms the accusations Ezra Pound dared to utter at the risk
of life and liberty in the attempt, however useless, to make the plot at Yalta
abortive.

Rome, 22 March 1955

(Olivia Rossetti Agresti is the daughter of William Michael Rossetti who appraised, in *The Chronicle* for 6 July 1867, the value of Whitman with an acumen which had no parallel on this side of the Atlantic, and in 1868 edited Whitman for British readers.)

- 14 -

mention a few names that come at once to my mind - had been replaced by "yes" men. Driving through Italy one saw great inscriptions written up: "Mussolini is never mistaken", as silly as it was blasphemous; he lost touch with the rank and file of the country, and was unaware of much that was going on behind the scenes.

Had he been able to follow the example set by the Oriental despot, Haroun-el-Raschid of Arabian Nights fame, whose habit it was to disguise himself and mix with the common people, accompanied by the Grand Vizir and by the Executioner to do summary justice, many of the defects of the regime might have been avoided... But we are not living in the days of the Arabian Nights.

Oh, the pity of it all! The story shows the disastrous results of compromise with evil for the sake of the supposed good that may come of such a policy. It led the great Interventionist of 1914-15, driven by resentment at the anti-Italian policy of the Western Powers, to side in with Hitler who had been privy to the murder of his friend, Dolfus, and had seized Austria; it led Mussolini who, like almost all Italians, was entirely free from racial prejudices and who, until 1938, had faithfully followed all Italian precedents in this matter, to enact the disgraceful racial laws to meet Hitler's views; it led to the disastrous campaign in Greece; it led to the downfall of the Regime which had done so much to raise the national and international status of Italy.

The fact that in 1943 the war was practically lost, and Italy occupied in the North by German armed forces and in the South by the Allied armies had brought about a situation of extreme danger, external and internal and Mussolini at last on 25th July, 1943, summoned the Fascist Grand Council, a body consisting of the members of the Government, some of the Under-Secretaries, and some appointed members, vested with advisory powers and entitled to be consulted by the Head of the Government on decisions of national importance such as that which it was now summoned to consider.

Dino Grandi, one of Mussolini's Black Shirts of the March on Rome, who had played a foremost part in the Government as Minister of Corporations, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Ambassador to the Great Britain, then introduced, on July 25, 1943, a Resolution requesting "the Head of the Government to beg His Majesty the King