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PARTISAN REVIEW
superstructure; the contradictions are real and his analysis of them
is competent, but the roots of the crisis and the solution of the
crisis lie beneath them. Ferrero's preachings resemble the custom,
formerly prevalent in some Catholic countries, of ringing the
church-bells in times of pestilence in order to ward off the disease.
Ferrero's fate has been that of the "disarmed prophet" of
whom Machiavelli spoke. The inefficacy of his apostolate came
in
the end to steep his soul in bitterness and steel his spirit towards
the extreme consequences of his innate pessimism. In the end, the
substance of history appeared to him as being, under different
forms, always one and the same. Man is incapable of reconciling
force with righteousness, matter with spirit, quantity with quality,
measure with progress. In vain does culture seek to dam the onrush
of innate human folly; its dikes are too fragile to stem the impetus
of the forces tending to chaos. To what end does man exist? What
are we doing here on earth? In his novels:
The Two Truths,
The
Revolt of the Soul, Blood
mul
Sweat, Liberation,
Ferrero sought
to give artistic form to this anguish of his. Here man is shown as
a sort of prisoner and human life as a sort of prison. From the
narrow windows of his prison man sees a limited horizon, but he
knows that beyond there lies a vast, an infinite world, "his" world,
the world from which he has been exiled and which he longs to
know, but cannot. The torment of man is therefore the typical
torment of the prisoner. He sets himself problems which he can·
not solve, he aspires to a justice which is not of this world, to a
perfection which eludes him, but which leaves him with a linger·
ing nostalgia. The tragedy is that he is condemned for life to this
prison and can leave it only as a corpse.
There is, I think, no need to say that in an epoch when thought
is dominated by propaganda and optimism is obligatory even
in
cemeteries, the life of a man like Ferrero is inevitably hard. Fer·
rero has died in exile, but if the truth must be told, even
in
Italy
he was already an eXile. All his life Ferrero was alone. It can
almost be said that he was a man born in exile, a man of a bygone
age. He was the pathetic and mournful reincarnation, in our epoch,
of an eighteenth-century moralist, with a few "scientific" notions
borrowed from Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. He won for him·
self a certain renown as a historian in France and the South Ameri·
can republics, countries in which historiography is still largely
influenced by nineteenth-century ideas; but in Italy, after 1900,
