FERRERO AND THE DECLINE OF CIVILIZATIONS
383
after Antonio Labriola, Benedetto Croce, and Giovanni Gentile, he
was a solitary wanderer in the world of culture. Stripped of its
outdated theories, the real and undying value of Ferrero's work
remains in the testimony of his own human destiny. He lived his
life within the closed circle of his dreams. In Geneva he found
asylum in an eighteenth-century mansion built by Italian artists in
the old aristocratic and Calvinist quarter of the ramparts, whet;e
in former times there lived the families of refugees hunted from
Italy by the Counter-Reformation. His house was always crowded
with visitors. He usually sat in a corner, his arms folded, his face
sad, remote, overcast; when he began to speak, everyone else was
3ilent, and then he would pronounce grave sentences and peremp–
tory judgment. He never failed to make a deep impression; the
impression of a man absorbed by a sombre vision and living in
that vision and seeing in it the passage of the centuries. The proud
tenor and the integrity of his life inspired everyone with respect,
but.few even among the Italian emigrants were convinced by his
ideas. Even in the opposition he was without a home.
The same criticism may be made of Ferrero as of the con–
servative humanism of Ortega y Gasset, Borgese, Huizinga; the
criticism of all those who seek the Living among the dead. A
society is renewed, on the contrary, when its humblest element
acquires a value. Today the Living is to be found among the
Negroes, in the Polish ghettos, among the Chinese coolies, among
the peons, among the cafoni, among the proletarians. But for the
aritsocratic Ferrero, all this was sordid materialism. He was fond
of quoting the invective of the dying Orlando from his son Leo's
play "Angelica": "Interest, ignoble filthy crust of the world. Men,
why have you no longer faith in anything? Because you are noth–
ing and you would measure the world by the yardstick of your–
selves. You will always be unhappy if you persist in cherishing so
mean a conception of happiness." He derived, as befitted his role,
a certain satisfaction from his exile and his isolation, hut it needed
no great power of insight to see that, like the dying Orlando, he
was tortured by homesickness for the great sun of his country,
for its blond vineyards, for its twilights steeped in an immemorial
~anguor,
for its sea shimmering in a haze beyond the plains, for
1ts
gentle and devoted women, for its marble ruins, for its silences,
for the desperate splendor of its cities. He loved his country, but
in secret, like a lover that has been rejected.
Translated by Darina Laracy.
