Note 1079 — Chapter V · REVIVALS AND COMMENCEMENTS.

One famous person may be noted exceptionally. A critic who held political and other views contrary to Mazzini’s, and who thought (as too many critics have apparently thought) that it is lawful to wreak vengeance in the literary sphere for sins committed elsewhere, would have a considerable opportunity with Mazzini himself, as a critic. He has written not a little apparently of the kind, and about very important persons—Dante, Goethe, Byron, Mr Carlyle, papers on all of whom will be found in Mr William Clarke’s useful English edition of Mazzini’s selected Essays (London, n.d.) He has said things for which, if one were a Veuillot, one could, in Veuillot’s own phrase, “promise him sensations.” But this is not our way. One soon sees (in fact, I think, he frankly confesses it in more than one place) that the writer is not thinking of these great writers as writers at all, nor of their books as books. He is thinking of their relation, actual or by ingenuity representable, towards his idol of “Collective Humanity,” and he is talking, as he is thinking, of nothing else. We have nothing here to do with Collective Humanity, but much with the Humanities, which are different: and so he escapes our jurisdiction. Perhaps a good many more modern Italians would do the same, that influence of Vico, which we noted in Signor Croce, being very strong in them.