{"id":1040,"date":"2013-07-13T01:32:12","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=1040"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:32:12","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:32:12","slug":"27-the-power-that-uplifts-vol-02-karmayogin-volume-02","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/02-karmayogin-volume-02\/27-the-power-that-uplifts-vol-02-karmayogin-volume-02","title":{"rendered":"-27_The Power that Uplifts.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

 The Power that Uplifts<\/font><\/b><\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n                O<\/font>F <\/font>
\n<\/span>ALL <\/font>
\n<\/b>the great actors who were in the
\nforefront of the Italian Revolution, Mazzini and Cavour were
\nthe most essential to Italian regeneration. Of the two Mazzini
\nwas undoubtedly the greater. Cavour was the statesman and
\norganiser, Mazzini the prophet and creator. Mazzini was busy
\nwith the great and eternal ideas which move masses of men in all
\ncountries and various ages, Cavour with the temporary needs
\nand circumstances of modern Italy. The one was an acute brain,
\nthe other a mighty soul. Cavour belongs to Italy, Mazzini to all
\nhumanity. Cavour was the man of the hour, Mazzini is the
\ncitizen of Eternity. But the work of Mazzini could not have
\nbeen immediately crowned with success if there had been no
\nCavour. The work of Cavour would equally have been impossible but for Mazzini. Mazzini summed up the soul of all humanity, the idea of its past and the inspiration of its future in
\nItalian forms and gave life to the dead. At his breath the dead bones clothed
\nthemselves with flesh and the wilderness of poisonous brambles blossomed with the rose. Mazzini found Italy
\ncorrupt, demoralised, treacherous, immoral, selfish, wholly
\ndivided and incapable of union; he gave her the impulse of a
\nmighty hope, a lofty spirituality, an intellectual impulse which
\ndespising sophistry and misleading detail went straight to the
\ncore of things and fastened on the one or two necessities, an ideal
\nto live and die for and the strength to live and die for it. This
\nwas all he did, but it was enough. Cavour brought the old Italian
\nstatesmanship, diplomacy, practicality and placed it at the service of the great ideal of liberty and unity which Mazzini had
\nmade the overmastering passion of the millions. Yet these two
\ndeliverers and lovers of Italy never understood each other.
\nMazzini hated Cavour as a dishonest trickster and Machiavellian, Cavour scorned Mazzini as a fanatic and dangerous firebrand. It is easy to assign superficial and obvious causes for the
\nundying misunderstanding and to say that the monarchist and<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

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\npractical statesman and the Utopian and democrat were bound to
\nmisunderstand and perpetually distrust and dislike each other.
\nBut there was a deeper cause.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe one thing which Mazzini most hated and from which
\nhe strove to deliver the hearts and imaginations of the young men
\nof Italy was what he summed up in the word Machiavellianism.
\nThe Machiavellian is the man of pure intellect without imagination who, while not intellectually dead to great objects, does not
\nmake them an ideal but regards them from the point of view of
\nconcrete interests and is prepared to use in effecting them every
\nmeans which can be suggested by human cunning or put into
\nmotion by unscrupulous force. Italian patriotism previous to the
\nadvent of Mazzini was cast in this Machiavellian mould. The
\nCarbonari movement which was Italy’s first attempt to live
\nwas permeated with it. Mazzini lifted up the country from this
\nlow and ineffective level and gave it the only force which can
\njustify the hope of revival, the force of the spirit within, the strength to
\ndisregard immediate interests and surrounding circumstances and, carried away by
\nthe passion for an ideal, trusting oneself to the impetus and increasing velocity of the force it
\ncreates, to scorn ideas of impossibility and improbability and to
\nfling life, goods and happiness away on the cast of dice already clogged against
\none by adverse Fortune and unfavourable circumstance. The spiritual force within not only creates the future
\nbut creates the materials for the future. It is not limited to the
\nexisting materials either in their nature or in their quantity.
\nIt can transform bad material into good material, insufficient
\nmeans into abundant means. It was a deep consciousness of this
\ngreat truth that gave Mazzini the strength to create modern Italy.
\nHis eyes were always fixed on the mind and heart of the nation,
\nvery little on the external or internal circumstances of Italy. He
\nwas not a statesman but he had a more than statesmanlike
\ninsight. His plan of a series of petty, local and necessarily abortive insurrections strikes the ordinary practical man as the very
\nnegation of common sense and political wisdom. It seems almost
\nas futile as the idea of some wild brains, if indeed the idea be
\nreally cherished, that by random assassinations the freedom of
\nthis country can be vindicated. There is, however, a radical<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\ndifference. Mazzini knew well what he was about. His eyes were
\nfixed on the heart of the nation and as the physician of the
\nItalian malady his business was not with the ultimate and perfect
\nresult but with the creation of conditions favourable to complete
\ncure and resurgence. He knew final success was impossible without the creation of a force that could not be commanded for
\nsometime to come. But he also knew that even that force could
\nnot succeed without a great spiritual and  moral strength behind
\nits action and informing its aspirations. It was this strength
\nthat he sought to create. The spiritual force he created by the
\npromulgation of the mighty and uplifting ideas which pervade
\nhis writings and of which Young Italy<\/i> was the organ. But moral
\nforce cannot be confirmed merely by ideas, it can only be forged
\nand tempered in the workshop of action. And it was the habit of
\naction, the habit of strength, daring and initiative which Mazzini
\nsought to recreate in the torpid heart and sluggish limbs of
\nItaly. And with it he sought to establish the sublime Roman
\nspirit of utter self-sacrifice and self-abnegation, contempt of
\ndifficulty and apparent impossibility and iron insensibility to
\ndefeat. For his purpose the very hopelessness of the enterprises
\nhe set on foot was more favourable than more possible essays.
\nAnd when others and sometimes his own heart reproached him
\nwith flinging away so many young and promising lives into the
\nbloody trench of his petty yet impossible endeavours, the faith and wisdom in
\nhim upheld him in the face of every discouragement. Because he had that
\nsuperhuman strength, he was permitted to uplift Italy. Had it been God’s purpose that Italy
\nshould become swiftly one of the greater European powers, he
\nwould have been permitted to free her also. He would have done
\nit in a different way from Cavour’s, \u2014 after a much longer lapse
\nof time, with a much more terrible and bloody expense of human
\nlife but without purchasing Italy’s freedom in the French market
\nby the bribe of Savoy and Nice and with such a divine output of
\nspiritual and moral force as would have sustained his country
\nfor centuries and fulfilled his grandiose dream of an Italy spiritually, intellectually and politically leading Europe.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe work was given to Cavour precisely because he was a
\nlesser man. Mazzini saw in him the revival of Machiavellianism<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n\u2013 164<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

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\nand the frustration of his own moral work. He was wrong, but
\nnot wholly wrong. The temper and methods of Cavour were
\npredominatingly Machiavellian. He resumed that element in
\nItalian character and gave it a triumphant expression. Like the
\nCarbonari he weighed forces, gave a high place to concrete material interests, attempted great but not impossible objects and by
\nmeans which were bold but not heroic, used diplomacy, temporising and shuffling with a force of which they were incapable and
\nunlike them did not shrink from material sacrifices. He succeeded where they failed, not merely because he was a great
\nstatesman, but because he had learnt to cherish the unity and
\nfreedom of Italy not as mere national interests but as engrossing
\nideals. The passion greater than a man’s love for child and wife
\nwhich he put into these aspirations and the emotional fervour
\nwith which he invested his Liberal ideal of a free Church in a free
\nState, measure the spiritual gulf between himself and the purely
\nMachiavellian Carbonari. It was this that gave him the force
\nto attempt greatly and to cast all on the hazard of a single die.
\nHe had therefore the inspiration of a part of the Mazzinian
\ngospel and he used the force which Mazzini created. Without
\nit he would have been helpless. It was not Cavour who saved
\nItaly, it was the force of resurgent Italy working through
\nCavour. History often misrepresents and it formerly represented
\nthe later part of the Revolution as entirely engineered by his statecraft, but it is now recognised that more than once in the greatest
\nmatters Cavour planned one way and the great Artificer of nations planned in another. But Cavour had the greatest gift of a
\nstatesman, to recognise that events were wiser than himself
\nand throwing aside his attachment to the success of his own
\nschemes to see and use the advantages of a situation he had not
\nforeseen. This gift Mazzini, the fanatic and doctrinaire, almost
\nentirely lacked. Still the success of Cavour prolonged in the
\nItalian character and political action some of the lower qualities
\nof the long-enslaved nation and is responsible for the reverses, retardations, and deep-seated maladies which keep back
\nItaly from the fulfilment of her greatness. Mazzini, with his
\nsuperior diagnosis of the national disease and his surgeon’s
\npitilessness, would have probed deeper, intensified and pro-<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\nlonged the agony but made a radical cure.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe circumstances in India forbid the use of the same means
\nas the Italians used. But the general psychological laws which
\ngovern nations in their rise, greatness, decline and resurgence are
\nalways the same. The freedom we seek in India may be different
\nin its circumstances from Italian freedom, the means to be used
\nare certainly different, but the principle is the same. The old
\npatriotism of the nineteenth century in India was petty, unscrupulous, weak, full of insincerities, concealment, shufflings, concerned
\nwith small material interests, not with great ideals, though not
\naverse to looking intellectually and from far-off at great objects.
\nIt had neither inspiration nor truth nor statesmanship. Nationalism has done part of the work of a Mazzini by awakening a great
\nspiritual force in the country and giving the new generation great
\nideals, a wide horizon of hope and aspiration, an intense faith
\nand energy. It has sought like Mazzini to raise up the moral
\ncondition of the nation to the height of love, strength, self-sacrifice, constancy under defeat, unwearied and undaunted perseverance, the habit of individual and organised action, self-reliance and indomitable enterprise; but it has rejected the old
\nmethods of insurrectionary violence and replaced them by self-help and passive resistance. That work is not yet complete and
\nonly when it is complete will it be possible for a strength to be
\ngenerated in the country which the past represented by the
\nbureaucracy will consent to recognise as the representative of
\nthe future and to abdicate in its favour by a gradual cessation of powers. It is
\nour hope that as the work has begun, so it will continue in the spirit of
\nNationalism and not only the political circumstances of India be changed but her deeper disease be cured
\nand by a full evocation of her immense stores of moral and spiritual strength that be accomplished for India which Mazzini
\ncould not accomplish for Italy, to place her in the head and forefront of the new world whose birth-throes are now beginning
\nto convulse the Earth.<\/font><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\n
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\n\u2013 166<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\n


\n HOME<\/font><\/span><\/a><\/b><\/p>\n

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