THE JESUIT
down not to facts so much as to details and details of details. They
care infinitely about the tangible world. One should not forget the
sense in which Leonardo and Galileo can be called realists, and which
also is Italian. In any case, the most lonely Italian is certainly the
"idealist," the man who is seized by one idea and carried away by it,
heedless of consequences, because he wants a real "change."
Italy has not changed. The rich have become richer; the poor,
poorer. The pitiless law according to which it is natural that those
who are at the bottom should be miserable and good, and those who
are on top satisfied and wicked, still dominates Italian life. In the
collapse of Fascism, only Fascism has been refuted. Fascist author–
ity and state structure are not there any longer. But, if the
fa~ade
has crumbled, everything that was behind the
fa~ade
before
is still there, very much the same. Except that everything looks like
the scattered fragments of a scattered society. Everything is in a state
of suspension: conservatism together with the need for change; authori–
tarian habits along with libertarian impulses; nationalism and the
natural cosmopolitanism of the Italians. Political freedom, as it
exists today in Italy,
is
a state of suspension. But still it makes a
difference. The simple fact of free speech has given the country an
animation which looks like a new life. Misfortune has made the
Italians feel united .as they never felt before. The country is far from
inert.
Yet the apparent immutability of Italian society weighs every–
body down. On the large-scale level of politics, everything that has
happened could have been predicted by the most commonplace imagi–
nation: the strength of the Communists, the dominating role of the
Catholics, the practical inexistence of the "liberals." In fact, anybody
who has tried to concoct something new
in
Italian politics has finally
come to grief: the intellectuals of the Action Party, who thought they
had to offer a new synthesis of liberalism and socialism; and the
demagogues of the Common Man Front, who tried a peculiar mixture
of the old fashioned and the colloquial.
It is true that the war and foreign occupation left the Ital–
ians with a limited, and somewhat prearranged, number of choices.
It is even truer that Italy, like all Europe, has been thrown on a
rock bottom of hard facts. Against hard facts, as everybody knows,
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