In the via Dante
by VINCENT SHEEAN
1
THERE are two streets in Bari, Italy, called Via Vittorio Veneto and Via Dante Alighieri. Vittorio Veneto is a main cross-street with a tramline on it; Dante Alighieri is a lengthwise street, one of those conceived as being parallel to the seashore, which, at some little distance towards the rising sun, gently curves and twists and returns to its main direction from north to south.
The Via Vittorio Veneto is lined with shops which still, at the coming of the Allied armies, contained wares not often seen in cities at war. There were cameras and watches, the two objects most insatiably desired by the Anglo-Saxon soldiery; there were silver plates and cockleshell china, Venetian glass and carved wood. All day long the soldiers come and go in the street, staring through the glass (the shining, unbroken glass) at what still remains to be sold, breaking off with their own sudden unreasoning laughter, with incomprehensible conjointed whim pursuing in pairs whatever momentary diversion the street has suggested, or, occasionally, going into the shop to buy, with signs and signals and a word or two of bad French, kickshaws to send home or to place, unused and unusable, on the crowded table in the cold barracks, littered already with the empty bottles and tattered magazines, the dried figs, the canteen cups, and the service caps of a dozen inmates.
The Via Dante Alighieri contains fewer shops along its greater length. There are, to be sure, the cafe and pastry shop at the top, near the Corso, and there are some baskets, corks, and sponges in a little hole-in-the-wall farther down, and there is a typewriter shop along there (with no typewriters), but most of the street is given over to the heavy stone “palazzi” of Italian city dwellers, apartment buildings which unsuccessfully imitate the façades, at least, of signorial establishments that are no more. It is a gloomy street in cold or cloudy weather because it is narrow and gives an effect of blank and sightless expanse with no windows to suggest an interior life beyond these heavy walls; the soldiers do not walk here; there is no dawdling; those with business to do in this street go about it hastily.
At the southwest corner of the crossing of the two streets is the bookshop of Giuseppe Laterza and Sons. Behind one of its plate-glass windows there is displayed a selection of the works of Benedetto Croce; in another window you can see some mystic literature, Buddhist and Christian, some desk furniture, and a beautifully printed Italian translation of H. A. L. Fisher’s History of Europe. But you will rattle the knob and tap on the glass in vain at the locked door between these two windows; nobody will come to open; the shop is shut.
When you know how, you can go around to the side, in the Via Dante, and by ringing a bell you will be admitted to the great hinterland of the shop, a region where thousands of volumes, old and new, fill the shelves and the tables, reminding you, with lavish and sudden emphasis, that the world is not all B-17’s and P-38’s, hunger and blood and ruins — that there has been peace and will be peace again. Here are the books which, along with the lovely hills and warm valleys, the painting and the music and the wine, have formed the Italian spirit in its specifically enduring, specifically Italian quality.
“Why,” you will be asking one of the Laterza brothers, “do you keep the shop locked up?”
“We tried having it open for a while,” they will tell you. “It didn’t work. A lot of soldiers bought books they obviously couldn’t read, just for the pictures, or for the look of them. It hurt us to see books going out when we knew they would not be read. And we haven’t enough left to waste books.
We can’t print anything more — our presses are fully occupied by Allied army needs — and our stocks would soon be exhausted. We’re taking an inventory now, and we’ll sell what we think we can afford to sell. But we prefer to sell only to those who really want or need the books.”
Fortunes are seldom made on such principles, and the Laterza brothers are not rich. But one soldier, at any rate, approached their door with deep respect, and ever revisits the silent and remembering poets in that vast interior with gratitude; none are exiles here, none strange or forlorn; all the stilled voices of the centuries make welcome the humble heart. In the half-light and the silence they come and go, those many men and women — Madonna Laura in her distant beauty, the sensuous laughter of the party at Fiesole, the haunted face of the grim Florentine; there the Venetian abbé trails a white hand in lagoon water, here the peasant lovers bid farewell to their lakes and mountains; what Italy has said, felt, loved, and suffered drifts through the air of the quiet room, suffuses, penetrates, interpenetrates, lives again in the mind as men’s dust does in the growing plants of the earth.
That sketch, so slight, so powerful, is from the long-stilled hand of Leonardo; the song that echoes, faint and far, came from the lusty young throat of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Here in the back room of the Laterza bookshop in Bari we see that time’s reality lies not in its extension, which manifestly must to all men be more apparent than real, since no man can see beyond the time limit of his own life, but rather in the concentration upon one aware moment of all that most powerfully speaks to the consciousness out of innumerable moments past, giving sense, direction, and organic continuity to what must otherwise be as fugitive as the single tick of a clock.
2
THE Laterza brothers, as a firm of publishers (“Gius. Laterza e Figli, Tipografi-Editori-Librai”), have been the institution most worthy of respect in Italy since 1922. Their course has been undeviating, their courage and fortitude equal to the task. The task itself, in its scope and its limits so wisely defined, must, I think, have been set out for them by the genius of their house, the august and venerable Benedetto Croce. They are themselves the first to claim Croce’s wisdom as their guide; they have been known most of all as his publishers, and have for years prefaced their catalogue with a paragraph ending as follows: —
“Our house, which owes its rapid development to the authoritative advice and assiduous coöperation of Croce, is proud to have contributed towards diffusing the entire work of this great Italian thinker, whom foreign authorities have judged ‘master of literary and philosophical criticism.’”
But even to have made this claim, to have acknowledged this allegiance, required courage and fortitude in the era which ended July 25, 1943. Croce himself was at no time safe from Fascist malevolence, which surrounded his house, family, and friends with unfriendly attentions; his mail was always read, his correspondence abroad interrupted, his finances made difficult. When the young Fascist ruffians broke into his house in Naples, the police made no effort to protect him, and it was the fearless, indignant protest of Signora Croce which shamed them into going away after only minor violence. Every word Croce wrote was scrutinized with the utmost care by the Fascist authorities, but the essence of the matter always escaped them; they allowed Laterza to publish, again and again, matter which, if they had understood it, outraged every rule and fetish of their regime.
Laterza as a publisher carried out a task which was analogous to that of Croce as a writer. That is, he set rigorous standards of purely literary excellence, remained aloof from contemporary politics, gave thought and love to the Italian past, and approached all subjects in a mood of liberal-socialist idealism which was the precise antithesis of the Fascist mood and temper. Whether this mood was indeed Laterza’s or was Croce’s own does not affect the result. In the result, clear and beautiful, a shield of honor on the long record of the printing of books, what happened was this: for twenty years the house of Laterza in Bari never ceased to publish work which was animated by the love of justice and liberty, which denied in every line the ignorant assumptions and anti-historic claims of Fascism, reminded Italians that they had not always worn bondage willingly, and called upon them in the voices of Dante and Leopardi to come into their heritage.
This was done, of course, by indefatigable attention to the letter of the law. Laterza father and sons were none of them politicians or conspirators; they never published clandestinely; the books they published did not (they could not) openly attack Fascism. Croce’s principle appears to have been to appear to ignore Fascism — not to mention its ugly name or those of its leaders, but to address himself to the Italian mind on terms which tacitly involved the recognition of Fascism as a monstrous aberration from the historic continuity of Italy’s development.
No other principle would have worked. Thus in Croce’s books for twenty years past there has sung out — whatever the subject — a sort of hymn to liberty which echoed in hearts that did not dare acknowledge it. And so with time’s revenges the kings and the marshals wait on the doorstep of the old philosopher who is too wise to serve them, as he was too noble to serve their discredited master.
Do you know what book Laterza was most carefully seeing through the press during the month of July, 1943 — the month when the Fascist despotism at last collapsed? It was the fifth revised edition of Croce’s superb essay on Dante (La Poesia di Dante).
The house of Laterza did not, in these twenty years, escape the notice of the Fascists. Even though the police were often unable to understand the danger, there were plenty of quite literate persons in the Fascist ranks who knew that such books as those published by Laterza were attacking the foundations of the regime. Why Laterza continued to exist, why Croce was permitted to go on publishing, why the review La Critica, produced by Croce and Laterza, was never wholly suppressed, are questions which agitated Fascist writers again and again, and sometimes the magnitude of the exception to an otherwise tyrannical rule seemed inexplicable even to its beneficiaries.
The reasons, I think, may be explored — when cold evidence is available — in the character of the Duce del Fascismo and some of his earlier advisers. Like all self-educated men, Mussolini had a great respect at one time for the masters of thought and expression. He took pains in his autobiography to say that no book had ever influenced him, but at other times and places he owned a debt to Sorel and to Pareto — both of whom would have acknowledged Croce as a master, and did.
Croce’s international fame has never reached into the masses in any country, because it is based on a system of thought deliberately maintained at the difficult level of speculative idealism, but in spite of this restriction it has, in each country, achieved validity. His work is translated into all languages of the East and West, and there are few persons now living who have given much thought to either history or philosophy who have not had to reckon with his devastating eclecticism, either to reject it (as any true believer, Christian or Buddhist or Marxist, must) or to accept it and to modify belief by its light.
The universality of this prestige is what influenced Mussolini to lenience towards Croce and his publisher — that and a feeling, which those who had the honor of the Duce’s acquaintance say he often expressed, that Croce’s ideas made no difference among the people. This latter reason exempted La Critica from any but the most cursory censorship, and so long as the review did not openly attack Mussolini by name, it was allowed to print critical studies which destroyed the whole intellectual basis (such as it was) of Fascism. The distinction made here by the Fascist authorities was that La Critica, which had a small international circulation, was “read by nobody,” whereas the same studies, in more popular form, would have been accessible to the masses and therefore dangerous.
The gross ignorance of history’s processes revealed by this reasoning is obvious. The Synoptic Gospels, written in Greek, could have been read by very few of the poor Jews and Latins who made up a large part of the early Christian community; yet the influence of these writings upon the Christian revolution was direct. Sorel was inaccessible to the multitude, but Lenin read him; Clausewitz means nothing to the masses, but the German general staff has studied him.
And what of Hegel? His books belong to a category which neither Hitler nor Mussolini would have considered politically important enough to be banned; and yet is it not partially true that the dead hand of Hegel is today hurling immense armies against the eastern front of Germany? A philosophical writer who, like Hegel or Sorel or Croce, is read by “only a few ” is more to be feared by tyrants than any deliberate polemicist, because that “few” will one day include a Lenin.
3
THE association of Laterza with Croce dates from the year 1901, when Giovanni Laterza, son of the original “Gius. Laterza e Figli” of the firm’s name, went to Naples to present his plan for a new publishing house. Croce gave him advice but no books; it was five more years before the philosopher finally linked himself with the new publishing house for good. The relationship between Croce and Giovanni Laterza was intimate, and on important questions, the sons say, the two men “ thought as one.”
Giovanni Laterza died on August 21, 1943, having lived just long enough to see the downfall of the Fascist regime. Of his two sons, Giuseppe and Franco, Giuseppe had been in the Bari jail from June until Mussolini’s fall on July 25, along with Professor De Ruggiero, the philosopher, who was another friend of the house. In Giovanni Laterza’s forty-two years of publishing he had brought his firm from the status of a paper mill and bookshop with publishing ambitions into the front rank of Italian publishers, with a special character which made it unique in the field.
Indeed, it was too clearly unique for comfort under Fascist rule. Roma Fascista on May 28, 1933, expressed the opinion of most Fascists when it called for “A Publishing House to the Stake!” Recalling that the Nazis had brought “anti-national” printed matter to the bonfire in trucks and wagons, Roma Fascista said: —
“We are luckier, because at present, with or without the stake, the production of anti-national printed work has been reduced to almost nothing and, what is better, has been concentrated. In fact it can be found, all or nearly all, in the catalogue of the publishing house of Laterza in Bari.” With this exordium the Fascist paper proceeded to review the catalogue and proclaim that “tolerance should have a limit.”
In the Via Dante such tributes from the enemy of humanity are treasured; one or the other of the Laterza brothers can produce the precious clippings upon demand, relics of a time when such words might easily have brought them prison or exile. They explain that the bookshop, under the rule and practice of Fascist Italy, was obliged to sell the books of all publishers, including the Fascist works; but that no power could ever compel the house of Laterza to issue such works under its own imprint.
What they did publish during the era of delusion constitutes a claim to immortality in the history of their profession. Aside from the whole work of Croce in a uniform edition, they undertook important new translations from English, French, and German, such as Professor G. F. Moore’s History of Religions, Karl Vossler’s monumental work on Dante, H. A. L. Fisher’s profoundly liberal and liberalizing History of Europe, A. G. Baumgarten’s Aesthetics; they collected or reissued neglected works by the best of the Italian liberals and socialists (Labriola, De Sanctis); they issued two small philosophical libraries, one of the ancients and one of the moderns, which are models of editing and bookmaking; they made a series of “esoteric and religious studies” which goes from Buddha to Rudolf Steiner; they became the Italian publisher for the Carnegie Peace Foundation; they instituted a “library of modern culture” which includes the widest variety of enlightened thought on literature, philosophy, and history.
Hardly a line in all these books could be of any use to the Fascist regime, and most of the work was profoundly at variance with the concept of dictatorship. But the greatest achievement of the Laterza house (aside from its steady diffusion of Croce’s writing) was its library of Italian literature under the name of “I Scrittori dTtalia.” This collection, which will eventually include four hundred titles and now has about half as many, is one of the most admirable efforts any publisher has made in our time. It involved the preparation of pure texts by the greatest academic specialists in each case — texts which have become definitive for almost every writer, dislodging the variants; and it involved printing these texts clearly, beautifully, on good paper with impeccable proofreading.
There must be hundreds of men who obscurely and devotedly have given their lives to this work, putting into the hands of many Italians just those masterpieces (Dante, Leopardi, Foscolo, Vico) which the Fascist despotism was impotent to suppress even though they constituted the most relentless and ultimately invincible charge against it. It has been Croce’s idea that a man who really reads Dante could not possibly be a Fascist; and the house of Laterza has applied this idea, in its “Scrittori d’Italia,” to all that is best in the Italian past.
Croce’s own work has, year by year, been the most important new material offered to the public by Laterza, and its influence has grown. Those who never lived under a dictatorship cannot easily imagine the effect of these austere and lofty criticisms, these Bach-like contradictions to the operatic melodrama of Fascism.
Croce was never read by the masses, it is true, but he was read by thoughtful Italians, no matter how difficult they found the task, because his was the only voice in Italy which steadily maintained that justice and liberty were the permanent aim of mankind, despotism a temporary phenomenon, and the judgment of history inexorable. His History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century and his History of Italy from 1871 to 1915 are perhaps his nearest approach to “popular” writing; in both of these books, although he always assumes his reader to be already in possession of the historic facts and himself therefore free for interpretation and analysis, — an assumption which automatically denies him a wide public, — he has abandoned the philosophic vocabulary and the Hegelian frame of mind enough to devote some magnificent writing, a cold and haughty passion of great writing, to the idea of liberty.
It is in this, the writing itself, that Croce indisputably takes his place in the long line that started with the Florentine exile centuries ago. He is one of that company which made, sustained, and will perpetuate the soul of Italy, whatever merely extrinsic and instrumental phenomena afflict its body. The heritage of Dante is Ghibelline but spiritual (Croce calls his basic work in logic, aesthetics, economics, ethics, and historiography The Philosophy of the Spirit) and interacts with the Italian mind by means of a certain penetrating and irresistible beauty in the resources of the language itself. To command those resources nobly is to be, as Croce is, a great writer; to have done so all alone in an era of tyranny is an act of civic heroism.
These things are well understood in the Via Dante. The Laterza family, through all the difficulties of the past twenty years, have never regretted their course. Fevers come and go, but the main stream of life survives them. D’Annunzio was such a fever; and what is so dead today as D’Annunzio? Fascism, deriving in part from the sensual and decadent rhodomontade of D’Annunzio, was unable in its twenty years of life to produce so much as one good writer; the essence of falsehood is its sterility. Croce had already influenced the mind of Europe (with his book on historic materialism, for instance) before D’Annunzio had even celebrated his first Black Mass, and Croce will do so today and tomorrow because he belongs to the main stream of life and thought on the European continent and not to any of its aberrations.
The Laterza brothers are proud to have served for these twenty years, by good workmanship and loving care, the whole Italian spirit and its principal living representative. But what good fortune was his! Every writer, of whatever kind, knows that the rarest and most valuable collaboration is that of a publisher who fully understands and loyally carries out the purposes of the work. This rare good fortune came to Croce abundantly, for the Laterza brothers have not only given his own writing to the public in exact and harmonious form, but have suffused their whole publishing enterprise, the choice and treatment of other books, with the luminous honorability of a kindred purpose.
As we come out into the Via Dante from the bookshop, the early winter night of the Adriatic, sharp and cold, lies along the deserted street like a shroud. It is just as well that we have stored up the promise of spring from those eternal voices, for here, in the cold and dark, there is none. Yet we do know, with a certainty which no external event can alter, that those who have loved Italy and hated Fascism connect, and they alone do connect, surviving the wintry season as best they may, the haunted immemorial past and the unknowable future. They stretch out their hands through the darkness to the time that is coming, when in Italy, too, there shall be hearts at peace under the starry sky.