The life of Mazzini
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Title: The life of Mazzini
Author: Bolton King
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Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
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EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS
BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF MAZZINI
BY BOLTON KING, M.A.
THIS IS NO. 562 OF _EVERYMAN'S
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ESSAYS · ORATORY
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BIOGRAPHY
REFERENCE
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THE LIFE
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_by_ BOLTON
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PUBLISHED BY J·M·DENT
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FIRST PUBLISHED IN THIS EDITION 1912
REPRINTED 1914, 1919, 1929
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Preface
This volume contains a life of Mazzini and a study of his thought. It
can hardly be said that any serious attempt has been made either in
England or Italy to deal with either. Hence the present volume,
however unequal to the subject, may have its use. The thirty years,
which have passed since Mazzini's death, make it possible now to place
him in his true perspective; and the author trusts that the supreme
admiration, which he feels for Mazzini as a man, has not prevented him
from viewing the politician with impartiality. There exists abundant
matter to allow us to judge Mazzini's political work, and it is
unlikely that anything yet to be published will seriously affect our
estimate of it. For the personal side of Mazzini's life, the moment is
not a very opportune one. Ten years ago it would have been possible to
glean reminiscences from many, who are now silent. It has been the
author's privilege, however, to obtain invaluable information from two
of the very few persons now living, who knew Mazzini intimately. While
it is nearly too late for personal reminiscences, it is too early to
avail oneself fully of Mazzini's correspondence. A good many of his
letters have indeed been published, and I have been able to use a
good many unpublished ones, especially his correspondence with Mr and
Mrs Peter Taylor, which I have found of the greatest value. But
unfortunately only one volume has as yet appeared of the collected
edition of his correspondence, and there are still probably many of
his letters, which have yet to come to light in Italy.
With regard to the study, which occupies the second part of this
volume, the author is very sensible of his limitations in dealing with
so vast and complex a system as Mazzini's ethical and political
thought. It is his hope that he may do something to stimulate more
competent writers to labour in a very fruitful field. He believes that
the more Mazzini's thought is disentangled, the more its essential
importance will appear.
I have to acknowledge gratefully the kindness of those who have helped
me in writing this book. Above all I am indebted to Mr and Mrs W. T.
Malleson, to whom I owe the loan of the Peter Taylor correspondence
and other invaluable help; to Miss Shaen for letting me see Mazzini's
letters to her father, Mr W. Shaen, and the MS. of the "Prayer for the
Planters," now first published; to Mr Milner-Gibson Cullum, Miss
Dorothea Hickson, Mr Mazzini Stuart, Mr P. S. King, and Miss Galeer
for the loan of unpublished letters from Mazzini. I have also to
acknowledge my grateful thanks to many others, who have assisted me,
among whom I would especially mention Miss Ashurst Biggs, Signor
Mario Borsa, Mr James Bryce, M.P., Mr W. Burnley, Signora Giuditta
Casali-Benvenuti (to whom I owe the portrait of her grandmother,
Giuditta Sidoli), Mr T. Chambers, Signor Felice Dagnino, Signor G.
Gallavresi, Mrs Goodwin, Miss Edith Harvey, Mr H. M. Hyndman, Dr
Courtney Kenny, Miss Lucy Martineau, Professor Masson, Mr C. E.
Maurice, Mademoiselle Dora Melegari, Mr D. Nathan, Mr T. Okey, Mr
Chas. Roberts, Mr J. J. Stansfeld, the Società Editrice Sonzogno (for
permission to reproduce some illustrations from Madame White Mario's
life of Mazzini), Mr W. R. Thayer, and Mr Remsen Whitehouse.
BOLTON KING.
_October 1902._
A reissue of the book has allowed me to revise it in the light of
recent publications referring to Mazzini. A good many more of his
letters have been printed since 1902 (including a second volume of the
_Epistolario_), but with the exception of Mademoiselle Melegari's
collection of his letters to her father, they are not important. Nor,
with the exception of Signor Cantimori's illuminating _Saggio_, have I
found any useful recent studies of his thought. I still adhere to the
view that subsequent research will add little to our knowledge of him.
I am glad, however, to be able now to take a different view of his
connection with the publication of Kossuth's manifesto in 1853, and of
Madame Sidoli's mission to Florence in 1833 (see pp. 68 and 169).
BOLTON KING.
WARWICK, _November 1911_.
_A complete Bibliography of Mazzini will be found on page 367._
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
THE HOME AT GENOA
1805-1831. Aetat 0-25
PAGE
Boyhood and Youth--University Life--Literary Studies--
Classicism and Romanticism--Joins the Carbonari--Arrest
and Exile 1-19
CHAPTER II
YOUNG ITALY
1831-1833. Aetat 25-27
Condition of Italy--The Revolution of 1831--Young
Italy--Its Principles: Belief in Italy; Inspiration of
Duty; Social Reform--Its Political System: Republicanism;
Italian Unity; War with Austria--Secret Societies 20-34
CHAPTER III
MARSEILLES
1831-1834. Aetat 25-28
At Marseilles--Spread of Young Italy--Letter to Charles
Albert--The Army Plot in Piedmont--At Geneva--The Savoy
Raid 35-50
CHAPTER IV
SWITZERLAND
1834-1836. Aetat 28-31
Life in Exile--Mental Crisis--Principles of the
Revolution--Young Switzerland--Young Europe--Literary
Work--Women Friends: Giuditta Sidoli; Madeleine de
Mandrot 51-72
CHAPTER V
LONDON
1837-1843. Aetat 31-38
Life in London--Spiritual Condition--English Friends--
The Carlyles--Lamennais and George Sand--Literary Work--
Decay of Young Italy--The Italian School at Hatton
Garden--Appeal to Working Men 73-99
CHAPTER VI
THE REVOLUTION
1843-1848. Aetat 38-43
Politics in Italy--The Bandieras--The Post-Office
Scandal--The People's International League--Life in
1845-47--Letter to Pio Nono--Attitude towards the
Royalists--The Revolution of 1848--At Milan 100-122
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
1848-1849. Aetat 43-44
The Collapse of the War--The People's War--At
Florence--The Mission of Rome--The Roman Republic--The
Triumvirate--Attitude to the Church--The French Attack 123-138
CHAPTER VIII
LONDON AGAIN
1849-1859. Aetat 44-54
In Switzerland--Life in London--English Friends--
English Politics and Literature--The "Friends of Italy" 139-153
CHAPTER IX
MAZZINI AND CAVOUR
1850-1857. Aetat 45-52
The Piedmontese School--Mazzini and Cavour--The French
Alliance--Mazzini and Manin--The Theory of the Dagger--
Conspiracies--The Genoese plot of 1857 154-175
CHAPTER X
UNITY HALF WON
1858-1860. Aetat 53-55
The War of 1859--At Florence--Plans for the South--
Garibaldi's Expedition--Projected Raid into Umbria--
At Naples 176-188
CHAPTER XI
FOR VENICE
1861-1866. Aetat 56-61
Policy after 1860--Disappointment in Italy--Rome and
Venice--Attitude towards the Monarchy--Life in England--
The Greco Plot--American and Irish Politics--Mazzini
and Garibaldi--Overtures from Victor Emmanuel--The War
of 1866 189-207
CHAPTER XII
THE LAST YEARS
1866-1872. Aetat 61-66
The Republican Alliance--Life at Lugano--Mentana--
Republican Movement in 1868-70--Intrigue with Bismarck
--Imprisonment at Gaeta, and Release--Attack on the
International--Death 208-221
CHAPTER XIII
RELIGION
Religion Essential to Society--Paramountcy of the
Spiritual--Criticism of Christianity; Catholicism;
Protestantism--Christ's Teaching: its Truths and
Imperfections--The Doctrines of the New Faith: God;
Progress; Immortality--The Criteria of Truth: the
Conscience; Tradition--Humanity--The Need of Unity;
Authority; Church and State; the New Church 222-248
CHAPTER XIV
DUTY
Morality Depends on an Ideal--Criticism of the Theory
of Rights and Utilitarianism--Happiness not the End of
Life--Life is a Mission--Work for the Sake of
Duty--Thought Useless without Action--Power of the
Principle of Duty--Duties to Self; Family; Country 249-266
CHAPTER XV
THE STATE
The Moral Law and the State--Duties of the State:
Liberty, Association, Education--Sovereignty is in
God--Democracy--The Ideal Government--The Republic--The
Ideal State 267-282
CHAPTER XVI
SOCIAL THEORIES
Importance of Social Questions--Their Moral Basis--
Attack on Socialism--Contrast between Mazzini's and its
Theories and Work--Social Programme--Cooperation 283-295
CHAPTER XVII
NATIONALITY
Country and Humanity--The Marks of Nationality: the
Will of the People; the Sense of National Mission--
Patriotism--International Solidarity--Ethics of Foreign
Policy; Non-Intervention; War; the Special Missions of
each Country--The Future of Europe--The Slavs--The
United States of Europe--Italy's International Function 296-311
CHAPTER XVIII
LITERARY CRITICISM
The Function of the Critic--The Function of the
Poet--Art must avoid 'Art for the sake of Art' and
Realism--It must be Human, Social, Didactic--Poetry of
Modern Life--The Historical Drama--Music--'Objective'
and 'Subjective' Poets--Dante--Shakespeare--Goethe--
Byron 312-328
CHAPTER XIX
THE MAN
Poetic Temperament--Defects as a Thinker--Greatness as a
Moral Teacher--Strength and Weakness as a Politician--The
Man 329-341
APPENDIX A
Some Unpublished (in one case privately published)
Letters and Papers, written by Mazzini 343-367
APPENDIX B
Bibliography of Mazzini's Writings 367-373
INDEX 374
"Where there is no vision, the people perish."
Chapter I
The Home at Genoa
1805-1831. AETAT 0-25
Boyhood and Youth--University Life--Literary
Studies--Classicism and Romanticism--Joins the
Carbonari--Arrest and Exile.
Joseph Mazzini was born in the Via Lomellina at Genoa on June 22,
1805. His father was a doctor of some repute and Professor of Anatomy
at the University, a democrat in creed and life, who gave much of his
time to unpaid service of the poor; at home affectionate and loved,
though sometimes hard and imperious. His mother, to whom in after life
he bore a strong resemblance, was a capable and devoted woman, who had
little of the weakness of an Italian mother, and brought up her
children to bear the brunt of life; with strong interest in the mighty
movements that were remoulding Europe at the time, a mordant critic of
governors and governments inside the four walls of her house. It was a
happy home, and "Pippo" grew up the darling of his parents and three
sisters, a delicate, sensitive, gentle child, quick and insistent to
learn despite his father's fears for his health, and giving precocious
proof of brilliant talents. He was nearly nine years old, when the
Napoleonic system was shattered, and the Emperor went to Elba.
Doubtless, Mazzini heard from his father that Napoleon was Italian
born and was going to exile in an Italian island. The shock of the
downfall was felt at Genoa, for the proud city, to which Lord William
Bentinck had promised in the name of England its ancient independence,
learnt that "republics were no longer fashionable," and saw itself
helplessly made over to the alien rule of Piedmont. Bitterly the
Genoese chafed at the traffic of their liberties, and we may be sure
that there was republican talk in Mazzini's home, which sank into the
mind of the thoughtful child. He himself mentions four influences that
turned his boyish mind to democracy: his parents' uniform courtesy to
every rank of life; the reminiscences of the French republican wars in
the talk at home; some numbers of an old Girondist paper, which his
father kept half hidden, for fear of the police, behind his medical
books; and--more than all these, probably--the classics that he read
under his Latin tutor. "The history of Greece and Rome," wrote a
fellow-student, "the only thing taught us with any care at school, was
little else than a constant libel upon monarchy, and a panegyric upon
the democratic form of government." Like many another boy of his time
who had for school exercises to declaim the praises of Cato and the
Bruti, he came to regard republics as the appointed homes of virtue.
It was the unintended fruit of the classical training, which the
despotic governments of the time fostered to keep their youth innocent
of any itch for innovation.
So he lived his quiet, studious home-life, till an incident one day,
when he was nearly sixteen, suddenly changed its tenor. The Carbonaro
revolutions of 1820 and 1821 had ended in deserved collapse; and the
Piedmontese Liberals, abandoned and defeated, crowded to Genoa and
Sampierdarena, while yet there was time to escape to Spain. Some had
fled penniless, and Mazzini, walking with his mother, noted their
despairing faces, and watched while a collection was made for them in
the streets. Their memory haunted him, and with a boy's enthusiasm for
his heroes, he longed to follow them. He neglected his lessons, and
sat moody and absorbed, interested only in gleaning news of the exiles
and learning the history of their defeat. In his boyish impatience,
which came near the truth, he felt "they might have won, if all had
done their duty," and the thought puzzled and obsessed him. He
insisted on dressing in black, and kept the habit to the end of life.
He brooded over Foscolo's _Jacopo Ortis_, till the morbid pessimism of
the book wrought on him, and his mother, apparently with good reason,
feared suicide.
In time he recovered his balance, and went back to his books with the
old zest. He was now studying medicine, intending to follow his
father's profession; but at his first attendance in the operation room
he fainted, and it was clear that he could never be a surgeon.[1] To
his father it must have been a sore disappointment, but he seems to
have at once recognised the inevitable, and allowed the lad to read
law. Mazzini had little heart in his new studies, for the arid,
perfunctory teaching of law current at the time had small attraction
for one who wanted to know the reason of things; but he persevered,
and did well in his examinations, though it is probable that he always
gave a big slice of his time to reading poetry and history. He was now
at the University. Probably he went to school, though there is some
doubt about it; at all events he seems to have escaped the brutality
and bad pedagogy, which generally made school life then one long
misery for a high-principled or sensitive lad. University life began
at an early age in Italy, and Mazzini had matriculated at Genoa, when
he was fourteen. So far as his fellow-students were concerned, he was
in happy surroundings. But he was a troublesome scholar, always ready
to rebel against the formalities that made a big part of University
life. To the last he refused to attend the compulsory religious
observances, not because he disliked them, but because they were
compulsory; and the authorities, tolerant for once, shut their eyes to
his insubordination. The University of Genoa did not possess a high
name for scholarship; and at this time it had its special drawbacks,
for the government was scared by the recent revolution, and fearful
that a few hundred lads might shake the pillars of the state. No one
could matriculate without a certificate that he had regularly attended
church and confession. Those whose parents did not possess a certain
quantity of landed property, had to pass a stiffer examination, though
at the worst, it is probable, not a very prohibitive one. Lecturers,
beadles, porters, all had the cue from government to make life
unpleasant for the students, and the better professors dared not be
detected in any leniency or considerateness. Moustaches were
forbidden, as a mark of the revolutionary mind, and if any student,
greatly daring, grew them, he was carried off between two carabineers
to a barber's shop.
[Illustration: HOUSE at GENOA in which MAZZINI Was BORN]
Mazzini soon became a leader among the clean-living, affectionate,
impetuous undergraduates. His appearance was now, as always, very
striking; he had a high and prominent forehead, black, flashing eyes,
fine olive features, set in a mass of thick black hair, a grave,
serious face, that could look hard at times, but readily melted in the
kindliest of smiles. He led a studious, retiring life, fond of
gymnastics and fencing, but with small taste for amusements, his
cigars and coffee his only indulgences; his days spent among his
books, his evenings with his mother, or in long solitary walks that
defied the weather, or in rare and stolen visits to the theatre, which
he had to leave after the first act, for the home was rigorously shut
at ten. But, though he was slow to make close friendships, he was no
misanthrope. He played much on the guitar and sang well to it; and his
musical talents and clever reciting made him in demand among his
middle-class and patrician friends. There was none yet of the
half-bitter sadness of after life; he had a shrewd sense of humour,
perhaps inherited from his mother; when warmed by enthusiasm or
indignation, he could speak with a fiery eloquence, that was
remarkable even among those declamatory Italian youths. "My soul," he
wrote afterwards, "was then a smile for all created things, life
showed to my virgin fancy as a dream of love, my warmest thoughts were
for nature's loveliness and the ideal woman of my youth." He revelled
in generous actions, sharing books and money, even clothes, with his
poorer friends. But it was sheer force of character that gave him his
ascendancy over them--the loyal, justice-loving nature that made him
champion of every victim of undergraduate or professorial spite, the
purity of thought, that checked each loose or coarse word from those
about him. That clear, high soul, untouched by self, not knowing fear,
passionate for righteousness, gave him even when a lad the power that
belongs only to the saints of God.
His closest friends were three brothers, Jacopo, Giovanni, and
Agostino Ruffini. Jacopo, the eldest of the three, had perhaps more
influence on Mazzini's life than any other man. They were born on the
same day; and Jacopo's fine, sensitive, enthusiastic nature matched
well with Mazzini's own. The tragic fate, that afterwards brought his
life to an early close, only strengthened the influence; and the
memory of one so dear, who gave his life for their common cause,
remained a perennial inspiration to keep his faith alive in years of
weariness and failure. The other brothers had little of Jacopo's
temperament. Giovanni at this time was an even-tempered, humourous,
brilliant lad; Agostino was impressionable, impulsive, shallow, of
quick and artistic nature. Mazzini's closest companions for some
years, they proved how little they could rise to his high level, and
they repaid his devotion by a want of sympathy and an ingratitude,
which, in Agostino's case at all events, was gross. In later life both
attained in their small way; both were deputies in the Piedmontese
parliament, and Giovanni was minister at Paris. They long moved in
English society and had some reputation there. Agostino, who was for a
time a teacher at Edinburgh, is the "Signor Sperano" who tells the
story of _The Poor Clare_, in Mrs Gaskell's _Round the Sofa_.
Giovanni, who became as proficient in English as in his mother tongue,
wrote two notable but now half-forgotten tales, _Lorenzo Benoni_ and
_Doctor Antonio_, which stand among the best second-rate novels of his
time.
Under Mazzini's lead the group of friends at Genoa formed a society to
study literature and politics and smuggle in forbidden books. Half the
masterpieces of contemporary European literature came at this time
under the censor's ban; no foreign papers were admitted except two
ultra-monarchical French journals; and contraband was a necessity of
literary study. Mazzini's strongest interests took him to literature.
He read omnivorously in Italian and French and English and
translations from the German.[2] His favourite books, he tells us,
were the Bible and Dante, Shakespeare and Byron. His close knowledge
of the Gospels comes out in everything he wrote. He shed his orthodoxy
indeed as soon as he began to think; he went sometimes to mass, when a
lad, and read Condorcet's _Esquisse_ disguised as a missal; but he
refused to go to confession as soon as he understood its meaning,--the
one thing, apparently, in all his life which pained his mother. For a
short time he went through a phase of scepticism, but the Ruffinis'
mother soon rescued him from this, and a deep religious faith came to
him, to remain the spring of all his life. The poets he loved best
were Dante and Byron, and he always remained true to them. From Dante
he learnt many of the master-ideas of his mind, the conception of the
unity of man and unity of law, the fervid patriotism, the belief in
Italy and Rome predestined to be teachers of the world, the faith in
Italian Unity, the moral strength that makes life one long fight for
good. When only some twenty years old, he wrote an essay on Dante's
patriotism, which, however boyish in style, proves his close knowledge
of the master. Byron was then at the height of his fame, and then, as
always afterwards, Mazzini thought him the greatest of modern English,
perhaps of modern European poets. He was "completely fascinated" by
Goethe, and would often say that "to pass a day with him or a genius
like him would be the fairest day of life." How his admiration for
Goethe waned, while that for Byron grew, will be told in another
chapter.[3] He read Shakespeare, but always, apparently, with more
respect than enjoyment, and Shakespeare too came under the same ban as
Goethe. He thought very highly of Schiller, and placed him with
Æschylus and Shakespeare, as the third great dramatist of the world.
He read a good deal of English literature; at this time he was a
fervent admirer of Scott, but he seems afterwards to have lost his
interest in him; he knew something at least of Wordsworth and Shelley,
Burns and Crabbe. Modern French literature, except de Vigny's and some
of Victor Hugo's writings, did not now (nor, with the exception of
George Sand and Lamennais, at any time), appeal to him, for he
disliked the tendencies of French Romanticism, and already there were
the beginnings of his life-long prejudice against most things French.
Among his modern fellow-countrymen Alfieri and Foscolo were his
favourites; he read Manzoni and Guerrazzi, but largely to criticise
them, though he was ready to do justice to the strength of both. He
thought Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, "the most powerful
poetic nature of the time." The classics he no doubt read pretty
widely, as every educated lad was then bound to do, but none seem to
have made much impression on him, except Æschylus, for whom his
veneration was unbounded, and Tacitus. Both now and later he gave much
time to metaphysical and political writers. He read something of
Hegel, whom he detested for his political fatalism, of Kant and
Fichte; but the German who influenced him most was the now-forgotten
Herder. From him he learned or confirmed his spiritual conception of
life, his belief in immortality, his theory of the progress of
humanity and man's co-operation in the work of Providence. Among
Italian philosophers he studied Giordano Bruno and Vico; he rated the
latter at his real worth, and regarded him as the great luminary of an
Italian school of thought whose continuity he professed to trace from
Pythagoras. Among political writers Macchiavelli certainly impressed
him most, as a great Italian patriot, and he excused his morality as a
product of his time. He seems to have known a good deal of Voltaire
and Rousseau. Of recent political writers, he and his circle most read
Guizot and Victor Cousin, whose lectures at this time made them the
mentors of young liberalism; he records how the group at Genoa handed
on to one another manuscript copies of the lectures, and found their
inspiration in the men whom they were soon to regard as traitors.
Now and for long after, literature was the call that spoke sweetest
to Mazzini. Politics and conspiracy were constraining but unwelcomed
duties; he gave his love to literature. To be a dramatist or write
historical novels was at this time his plan of life. Many a time in
later years he was still looking for the day, when Italy would be
united and free, and, his political task accomplished, he could give
himself to the literary schemes he still cherished,--a history of
religious ideas, a popular history of Italy, and the editing of a
series of the great dramas of the world. But the burden of his
country's woe lay too heavily on him to be long forgotten. It was no
time now for Dante studies or play-writing. Sadly and unwillingly he
convinced himself that at such a time pure literature was no patriot's
first task, that the writer, who would not shirk his duty, must make
his work political. Not but what the literary critic still appears on
every page; but the whole gist of his teaching is that the value of a
book is in proportion to its power to inform the reader's soul to love
of country and mankind, and impel him to serve his fellows by
political action in the sight of God. He held it wasted effort to do,
what Manzoni had tried to do,--to school the individual to a smug life
of cloistered virtue, a life which in a vicious or torpid society was
impossible to the many. No religion, no morality, he taught, is worth
the writer's labours, unless it dedicates men to be workers in the
public cause, to hold comfort, and, if need be, home and life itself
as cheap, while oppression and wrong are stunting other lives, and men
and women round are crying to be freed.
He found his opportunity in the controversy between Romanticists and
Classicists, which then divided the literary world of Italy into hot
factions. Not that he held Romanticism to be any final or faultless
form of literature. But when a theory of literary servitude, like
Classicism, lent itself to political oppression and depressed the
vital and spiritual forces of the country, when a young and vigorous
movement was making literature free and stood for liberty all round,
he necessarily took his stand for the latter. There could be no
political or social regeneration for Italy, till she had a literature
that made for freedom and progress. "These literary disputes," he
urged, "are bound up with all that is important in social and civil
life"; "the legislation and literature of a people always advance on
parallel lines," and "the progress of intellectual culture stands in
intimate relationship with the political life of the country." It was
the aim of the Romanticists "to give Italians an original national
literature, not one that is as a sound of passing music to tickle the
ear and die, but one that will interpret to them their aspirations,
their ideas, their needs, their social movement." And thus, while
generously recognising Manzoni's worth, he looked rather to Alfieri
and Foscolo, who had scourged political wrong-doing and preached
resistance to tyranny; he praised the writers of the _Conciliatore_,
the short-lived Milanese journal of Silvio Pellico and Confalonieri,
which, like himself, had turned Romanticism to political purposes.
Here and there in his writings of this time a more or less direct
political allusion manages to escape the censor's eye. He speaks for
the first time of "Young Italy," a name soon to ring through Europe;
he pays his tribute to the political exiles; he slips in a remark
that the spirit of a state cannot be changed without recasting its
institutions. More than this he could not do in a censor-ridden press;
perhaps literature was struggling still with politics to command his
mind.
As it was, he had trouble enough with the censors. His first published
articles appeared in the _Indicatore Genovese_, a commercial paper
issuing at Genoa, whose editor was persuaded to admit short notices of
recent books, which gradually swelled into literary essays. Among his
later contributions were an article on the historical novel and
reviews of Friedrich Schlegel's History of Literature and Guerrazzi's
Battle of Benevento. They do not read very well. They are juvenile and
exaggerated, and it is amusing to find the twenty-three years' old
author telling his coeval Guerrazzi, the young Leghorn novelist, that
he had not drunk enough of the cup of life to be a pessimist. The
_Indicatore_ gradually became a literary paper, and for a few months
the censorship did not see what it was tending to. At the end of 1828,
however, about a year after Mazzini began to write in it, it was
suppressed. Mazzini easily transferred his energies. Guerrazzi had
founded another paper at Leghorn much on the same lines, the
_Indicatore Livornese_, and asked Mazzini to send contributions.
Mazzini readily responded; he wrote, besides minor papers, an article
on Faust, and attacked the defects of the Romanticist School in an
essay on _Some Tendencies of European Literature_. His writing is
still effusive, and generally dogmatic and sententious, but the style
has improved. The censorship was comparatively lenient in Tuscany,
and though the young writers were barred from direct reference to
politics, they were able to make the political allusions sufficiently
transparent. But the paper grew too daring even for the somnolent
Tuscan censors, and, like its predecessor, it was snuffed out after a
year of life. Mazzini and Guerrazzi parted, to go on very different
ways, and meet again nineteen years later when both were famous.
In the meantime Mazzini had with some difficulty got a footing on the
_Antologia_, the one Italian review of the time that ranked among the
great European periodicals. It had been founded some ten years before,
in the hope that it might become an Italian Edinburgh Review, by Gino
Capponi, the blind Florentine noble who traced his race from the
Capponi who bearded Charles VIII., and Vieusseux, a Swiss bookseller
who had settled at Florence and opened the one circulating library of
any note in Italy. Most of the leading Italian writers of the day
contributed to it; and though its aim was avowedly nationalist, and in
a sense Liberal, it had succeeded so far, thanks probably to its
influential patrons, in eluding the censor's ban. Mazzini wrote for it
three articles _On the Historical Drama_ and another _On a European
Literature_. His work had rapidly matured, and there is no trace now
of the juvenilities of his earlier efforts. Every page has the mark of
the strong, original thought, which made him one of the greatest
critics of the century.
Meanwhile he was practising at the bar in a desultory fashion.
Sometimes he pleaded in the lower courts as an "advocate of the poor,"
and was much in demand for his attention and skill. According to the
etiquette of the profession, he read in the rooms of a barrister, who
limited his interest to seeing that his pupils sat with a book in
front of them. The vacations were generally spent in a little country
villa at San Secondo, in the Bisagno valley, within sight of a house
which the Ruffinis occupied; and he shared in attentions to the
Ruffinis' mother, who was now his spiritual guide and dearest friend,
or went on botanical walks or shooting expeditions in the lovely hill
country. He did not do much of the shooting himself, and when he was
more than fifty, he remembered with remorse a thrush that he had
mangled when sixteen.
His interests became more and more absorbed by politics. His Genoese
home no doubt encouraged this, for the nobles and the working-classes
were still unreconciled to Piedmontese rule, while the liberals of the
middle classes looked on the annexation only as a step to some wider
Italian state. But the local environment was only a minor influence,
and Mazzini would doubtless have become a conspirator, had he lived in
any other town of Italy. About the time that he began to write in the
_Indicatore Genovese_, he was admitted into the Society of the
Carbonari. The Carbonari were at this time suffering from the
decadence, which sooner or later palsies every secret society. They
had grown out of Neapolitan Freemasonry in the days of the French
rule, and when, after Napoleon's fall, reaction came and the old
dynasties returned, they swept into their ranks the mass of
discontented men, who, with very varying political ideals, were at one
in resenting the small tyrannies, the bigotry and obscurantism of the
princes, who had come back from exile to misgovern and sometimes to
oppress. The high level of their tenets, their appeals to religion and
morality, the esoteric symbolism of their rites, the vague democratic
sentiment that was often only skin-deep, had made them a vast Liberal
organisation. Since they had made and wrecked the revolutions of
Naples and Piedmont seven years before, they had kept the skeleton of
their party together with considerable skill and persistency. But the
conspiracy had changed its character. It was no longer a purely
Italian society, for the exiles had carried it into France and Spain,
and the headquarters were now at Paris, where Lafayette and the
Orleanist conspirators were using it to upset the Legitimist monarchy
and dreamed of a league of Latin countries to balance the Holy
Alliance. In Italy the democratic sentimentalism had left it, it had
lost touch with the masses, and its leaders were mostly middle-aged
men of the professional classes, who discouraged young recruits, and
had no wish to step outside their meaningless small formalisms and
barren talk of liberty.
Mazzini had little stomach for their ritualism and lack of purpose,
their love of royal and noble leaders; and probably the subordinate
position, that as a young man he necessarily took, sat uncomfortably
on him. But at all events they were the only revolutionary
organisation in the country, and he admired the bravery of men, who
risked prison or exile for however inadequate an end. Though fitfully
in practice, he had a theoretic belief in subordination, which
prepared him for the moment to act under orders. But as soon as he
joined the Carbonari and swore the usual oath of initiation over a
bared dagger, he began to see the futility of it all. He found that
he was sworn only to obey his unknown chiefs, and he was allowed to
know the names of two or three only of his fellow-conspirators. He
suspected that their political programme, if they had any, was but a
thin one. All the Italian in him revolted against men, who talked
lightly of their country, and preached that salvation could only come
from France. The subscription to the Society's funds, of which,
needless to say, no account was rendered, was sufficiently heavy to
bear hardly on his slender purse. He was so sickened by a melodramatic
announcement, perhaps in bluff, that a member was to be assassinated
for criticising the chiefs, that he threatened to withdraw. His
unknown superiors, however, apparently thought well of him, and he was
commissioned to go on propagandist work to Tuscany, where he made a
few recruits. He seems to have returned in better spirits as to the
future of the Society; and if we may believe Giovanni Ruffini, he
began with a few young co-affiliates to organise on his own account,
nominally in the name of the Carbonari, but really to substitute a
more vigorous association. His plan was apparently to bring the
Carbonari of Tuscany and Bologna into closer touch with those of Genoa
and Piedmont. He asked for a passport for Bologna on the pretext that
he wanted to examine a Dante manuscript, but was told by the police,
that if he had no more important business, he could wait. Baffled in
this, he returned to his semi-independent conspiracy at home. The July
Revolution in France had raised the hopes of liberals everywhere; and
he and his friends enrolled affiliates, discarding the Carbonaro
lumber of oaths and secret signs, and simply pledging them to act, if
an insurrection proved possible. Bullets were cast, and other juvenile
preparations made. How far he succeeded in enlisting followers, we do
not know, for he himself has left hardly any record of the plan.
At all events, it was abruptly nipped. The government had its secret
agents among the Carbonari, and Mazzini was arrested on the charge of
initiating one of them. It is probable that the authorities had
suspected him for some time. He was, as the governor of Genoa told his
father, "gifted with some talent, and too fond of walking by himself
at night absorbed in thought. What on earth," asked the offended
officer, "has he at his age to think about? We don't like young people
thinking without our knowing the subject of their thoughts." Mazzini
was taken to the fortress of Savona, where he consoled himself by
watching the sea and sky, which made all the prospect from his cell
windows, and taming a serin finch, which would fly in through the
gratings, and to which he "became exceedingly attached." His case came
before the Senate of Turin, the highest court in the country. In the
eyes of the law he was supremely guilty; but, with an adroitness that
he afterwards recalled with pride, he managed to destroy all
compromising papers, and there was only one witness of the initiation,
whereas the law required two. Mazzini stoutly denied the fact. The
denial was more than a plea of not guilty in an English court; perhaps
he thought that a conspirator is bound to put his government outside
the pale of moral obligation. But whatever we may allow for his
position, the plain man will count his action as one of the
disingenuous lapses, that rarely, now and again, stain the clear
honour of his life.
The court had to acquit him, but the authorities had too much evidence
of his activity to leave him unmolested. They gave him the choice
between internment in a small town or exile. Contemporary events
decided him. The revolution had just broken out in Central Italy; the
French government had encouraged the Carbonari to expect direct or
indirect assistance, and Mazzini thought that he would serve the cause
best at Paris, whence, he confidently hoped, he would soon return to a
liberated Italy. In February 1831 he said his good-byes to his family,
who had hastened to Savona, and crossed the Apennines and, for the
first time, the Alps, afterwards so familiar and beloved. He watched
the sunrise from Mont Cenis, and has left a memorable description of
it, drawn with all the wealth of his artistic imagery. At Geneva he
made the acquaintance of Sismondi and his Scotch wife. While there, he
was advised to join the Italian exiles at Lyons, and, giving up the
projected journey to Paris, he made his way to them.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] So Madame Mario, who probably had it from Mazzini's mother, and
Madame Venturi on the authority of a college friend. The memoir by
another fellow-student in _Epistolario di G. Mazzini_, I. xxix. says
that he thought that a doctor was not free to express his opinions for
fear of offending his patients, and that he therefore never studied
medicine; so too Donaver, _Uomini e libri_, 70. But see his _Vita di
G. Mazzini_, 13, on apparently good evidence.
[2] He seems never to have learnt to read German easily; at all events
he could not do so till comparatively late in life.
[3] See pp. 325-327.
Chapter II
Young Italy
1831-1833. AETAT 25-27
Condition of Italy--The Revolution of 1831--Young Italy--Its
principles: belief in Italy; inspiration of duty; social
reform--Its political system: Republicanism; Italian Unity;
war with Austria--Secret societies.
The governor of the prison at Savona had allowed him to read the
Bible, Byron, and Tacitus, innocently thinking that they contained no
revolutionary material. Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy.
Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The
country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites
had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages
for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian
republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and
Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope,
the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca
divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for
unity. History and character sundered North and South; the great
medieval cities still cherished their independence too dearly to wish
to sink it in a common country. Napoleon, while he ruled, had gone far
to unite the land both in form and substance; and the aspirations he
did so much to create survived him. Weak though they still were,
practical grievances were ever enforcing the argument for unity; and
Italians were chafing more and more against the artificial barriers,
which stopped the circulation of the nation's life. The customs-lines,
that met the trader on the confines of each state, strangled commerce.
Literature circulated with difficulty, and the Genoese could hardly
get access to books published at Florence or Leghorn, a hundred miles
away. In the smaller states at all events, the area was too small to
offer any field for enterprise, and every lawyer and engineer and
civil servant was cribbed by the restrictions, that confined his
activities to a handful of towns. Through all the peninsula there was
a more or less intolerable misrule. Political disabilities allowed no
voice in legislation, no control of taxation or the executive, no
rights of public meeting or association, small liberty of speech or
writing. There were more present grievances in the discouragement of
education, in the clerical tyranny, in the obsolete and partial legal
system. And the misgovernment had its yet more evil and intimate
aspect in the power of the police, which threatened each man's home
and honour and career. Governments, that breathed and moved in chronic
dread of revolution, sought safety in a system of covert terrorism.
The police had their spies everywhere,--in the streets, in men's
households, in the churches, in the universities,--to scrape up any
idle word or act, that seemed to mark a possible critic of government.
There were mitigations of the misrule in Piedmont, Tuscany, and the
Austrian territories. But in the Pope's states and Naples there was
little or nothing to relieve the crying corruption and incompetency;
and everywhere there was more or less a vexatious intolerance and
oppression, that showed the blacker after the relative liberty and
progress of Napoleon's rule.
The Carbonari had voiced somewhat fitfully the national protest. And
just at this time they made their final attempt at revolution. Early
in February 1831,--just before Mazzini was released from Savona,--the
insurrection broke out in Modena, and spread at once to Parma and the
Papal province of Romagna. In three weeks the greater part of the
Pope's dominions were free, and the insurgent army was marching
towards Rome. The leaders knew that, however easy it was to upset the
rule of the Pope and Dukes, they could make no effective resistance to
an Austrian attack; but they counted on the promised backing of France
to ward off invasion. "Non-intervention,"--the European equivalent of
the Monroe Doctrine,--was one of the formulas of the July Monarchy,
and by it Austria had no right to interfere in the domestic concerns
of an Italian state. The French government had assured the Carbonari,
that, if she violated the principle, it would declare war against her.
But only a section of the ministry was sincere in the promise, and
Louis Philippe saw that a war in the name of nationality might easily
slide into a revolutionary movement, which would shake his own unsure
throne. His government let Metternich know that non-intervention was a
phrase that stopped at words. By the end of March, despite some fine
fighting by the Italian levies, the Austrians had stamped out the
ephemeral insurrection. Its feebleness courted failure. Not that the
programme of the leaders wanted breadth and boldness. Mazzini's after
criticism that it was neither nationalist nor democratic was
exaggerated and unjust. During their few weeks of rule, the chiefs had
showered projects of social reform. Some of them at all events wished
to make Romagna the centre of a great national rising, and aimed at an
independent federation of all Italy with Rome for its capital. But
they made two irreparable mistakes. They did not face the facts; they
failed to win the people. They were for the most part, like the rest
of the Carbonaro leaders, middle-aged professional men, out of touch
with the masses, possessed by the dread that popular imprudences might
scare the diplomatists, on whom they built their hopes. Under an
inspiring chief, the people would have fought perhaps, as they fought
seventeen years later, when they drove the Austrians in confusion from
Bologna. But the leaders were not the men to touch their enthusiasm.
They had, in fact, miscalculated what the movement meant. These
comfortable men of peace flinched from the fact that Austria must be
fought and beaten. They had no stuff for a desperate guerilla fight,
that meant the wasting of the country, privation and disease and
death, for an uncertain hope that France might come eventually to the
rescue. Still less were they prepared to launch on a forlorn
enterprise, where friends were none and immediate disaster certain,
that they might be precursors of their children's victories.
Their failure, so consonant with all the later Carbonaro policy,
confirmed Mazzini in his belief that a new organisation was needed and
new men to lead it. As usual, he saw only one set of facts. He
exaggerated the mistakes of the revolutionary governments, and left
out of his reckoning the unreadiness of the people. The insurrections
had failed, he convinced himself, simply because they had been badly
led. In the main, indeed, he was right. The revolution had been in the
wrong hands. The Carbonaro chiefs kept at arm's-length younger men,
whose energy might have made up for their own unforwardness. If the
next revolution was to fare better, it must have these younger men to
captain it, men of confidence and enthusiasm and fresh ideas, men with
a message that would nerve "those artisans of insurrection, the people
and the young." Mazzini had at this time a supreme faith in his
generation; he had already written in the _Antologia_ of "this young
Italy of ours," so vigorous and cultured and warm-hearted, that no new
movement, however bold and difficult, was beyond its powers. "Place,"
he said now, "the young at the head of the insurgent masses; you do
not know what strength is latent in those young bands, what magic
influence the voice of the young has on the crowd; you will find in
them a host of apostles for the new religion. But youth lives on
movement, grows great in enthusiasm and faith. Consecrate them with a
lofty mission; inflame them with emulation and praise; spread through
their ranks the word of fire, the word of inspiration; speak to them
of country, of glory, of power, of great memories." They had been
muzzled in the past; they must not be again. So rigidly did he insist
on this, that the rules of Young Italy excluded from membership,
except in special cases, all who were over forty years. Mazzini had no
diffidence to curb the magnificent egotism of a design, in which he
consciously destined for himself the leading part. As one of his
closest friends of those days said, "his confidence in men was great
and in himself unlimited." "All great national movements," he wrote in
later years, "begin with unknown men of the people, without influence
except for the faith and will, that counts not time or difficulties."
It is worth noting that Camillo Cavour, five years younger still, was
at this same time writing to a friend that "he would one fine morning
wake up Prime Minister of Italy."
When we disentangle Mazzini's ideas from the superfluous verbiage that
sometimes wraps them, two leading principles are found to
differentiate them from those of earlier movements,--the principles,
that, with his trick of making watchwords, he summed up in the phrase,
"God and the People." The new movement must have the inspiration and
power of a religion. Italy needed something that would shake her from
the hopelessness of disillusion and defeat, something that would prove
she "had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier
than destiny itself." Action must be roused by action, energy by
energy, faith by faith,--the faith that made Rome great and inspired
Christianity and sent forth the armies of the Convention, the faith
that makes the weak strong in the knowledge they are carrying out
God's will. Mazzini had two arguments to persuade his countrymen to
this believing and conquering patriotism. He hoped to fire them with
his own superb faith in Italy and her destinies. He called up "that
old name of Italy, hung round with memories and glory and majestic
griefs, that centuries of mute servitude could not destroy." Twice had
she been queen of the world; many times had she, the land of Dante and
Vico, of the Papacy and the Renaissance, inspired European thought.
"Italy," he said, "has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard
peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with
living weaklings and braggarts." Her task was not yet done; she had
still to speak to the nations "the gospel of the new age, the gospel
of humanity." He pointed Italians to "the vision of their country,
radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the
nations that thought her dead." Rightly he judged that men, who shared
his faith, would never despair of their country. But he had a more
sounding note to strike. He had the genius to see that he who would
have men rise to high endeavour, must appeal to their unselfish
motives, that only when some great principle calls, will they lift
themselves to heroism and sacrifice of all that makes life dear. The
effort to make Italy meant the loss of thousands of lives, meant exile
and imprisonment and poverty, the blighting of homes and the misery of
dear ones; and men would only face it at the call of duty. The
Carbonari had no call; they came of a school that appealed to
interested motives, and the appeal inevitably broke down in the day of
disappointment and defeat. Mazzini offered his countrymen "a national
religion"; Young Italy was no mere political party, but "a creed and
an apostolate"; it taught that victory came "by reverence for
principles, reverence for the just and true, by sacrifice and
constancy in sacrifice." As individuals and as a nation, they had a
mission given them by God. God's law of duty bade them follow it;
God's law of progress promised them accomplishment.
The other principle of Young Italy was social reform. Earlier liberal
movements had thought or attempted little for the masses, though at
all events the recent rising in Romagna aimed higher than Mazzini gave
it credit for, and had more of a democratic tendency than contemporary
movements in France and England. Mazzini exaggerated the revolutionary
impatience of the masses in 1821 and 1831; but it was true that such
enthusiasm as they had, had been cooled by the disappointment of their
hopes. Revolutions, as he said, had been Dead Sea apples to them. They
would be slow to stir again, till they saw that the liberation of
their country had tangible social results in store. The gospel of duty
would rouse the cultured middle classes, but at this time he seems to
have thought that the uneducated, down-trodden, priest and
official-ridden masses could not respond to the higher call, and must
be won by some visible prospect of relief from present evils. Pope
Julius' cry of "Out with the barbarian" would not touch men, who did
not see how every social injustice leant in the last resort on
Austria, how dear food, conscription, all the petty tyranny, were
fruits of the foreign domination, that sheltered the princes who
misgoverned them. Till the masses felt this, there was no hope of a
successful war of liberation. "Revolutions," he said, "must be made
for the people and by the people, and so long as revolutions are, as
now, the inheritance and monopoly of a single class, and lead only to
the substitution of one aristocracy for another, we shall never find
salvation." The cry of the poor, unheard by most Italian statesmen
from his time, down to yesterday, was ever with him. "I see the people
pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political
subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that
wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the
intoxication of a brutish, angry, savage joy; and I remember that
those brutalised faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the
same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and
behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one
bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows
in beauty and might; the people of the future, unspoilt by luxury,
ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and
duties. And in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish
for the present and glorying for the future." That they would rise in
insurrection, he had no doubt. Once make them see whence sprang their
wretchedness, where stood its remedies, once make them feel that "God
is on the side of the down-trodden," the people of Italy would be
again what they had been in the days of the Lombard League and the
Sicilian Vespers.
Out of these principles,--social reform as the immediate end of
revolution and duty as its inspiration,--Mazzini built up an elaborate
political programme. He loved system-making and hardly apologised for
it. You cannot have unity or harmony without it, he urged, and to a
certain extent he had practical justification. It were better, as he
said and as subsequent events proved, that the nationalists should
argue out their differences before the time for action came, and not
paralyse themselves by quarrels in front of the enemy. It was this
want of a positive programme, that was, he thought, largely
responsible for the failure of the Carbonari. Their policy had hardly
gone beyond the overthrow of the existing governments; and they had
mustered under their flag royalists and republicans, conservatives and
liberals, with the inevitable result that after their first successes
they split their ranks and fell an easy prey. It were wiser, so
Mazzini pleaded, to be few but united. "The strength of an association
depends not on its numbers but on its homogeneity." But the principle
was necessarily an intolerant one. It barred many a true patriot, who
could not swear to the whole Mazzinian doctrine. For such he had no
pity. In his view it was only fear, "the Almighty God of most
politicians," that prevented the Moderates from accepting his
position. "There can be no moderation," he said at a later date,
"between good and evil, truth and error, progress and reaction."
Unluckily truth to him too often meant adhesion to his own theories;
and he could never forgive men, who, starting from his premisses,
could not follow his logic to the end, though, like most men who pride
themselves on being logical, he was often singularly incapable of
accurate reasoning. It was this intolerance that wrecked so much of
his after life, that made him waste his splendid powers in fighting
men, by whose side he ought to have been working.
However, for better or worse, Mazzini required from his
fellow-workers implicit acceptance of his theories,--theories which
embraced every sphere of national life, religion and politics,
literature and art. His chief political doctrines were republicanism
and Italian Unity. How he pieced republicanism on his general theory
of things, is the subject of another chapter. It is sufficient here to
note that he was a republican, chiefly because he thought that
democratic legislation was impossible under any form of monarchy. The
belief was natural enough at the time. Few had been the popular
reforms under any European crown, while the one genuine series of
democratic laws had been passed by the French Republic or while the
French monarchy was tottering to its fall. Mazzini may be pardoned, if
at that time he sharply sundered monarchies and republics, and failed
to see how imperfect was the classification. In Italy, Mazzini saw
special circumstances that made for a republic. Her great memories
were republican, though even he must have recognised how little the
republics of medieval Italy had in common with his ideal polity. At
Venice and his own Genoa the republican tradition was still dear.
Italian republicanism was free from any recent memory of outrage and
proscription, such as tarnished the name in France. And above all, he
urged, there was no possible king for a united Italy. Each prince was
pledged to Austria, each had proved his sympathy with reaction.
Monarchy in Italy had "no splendid annals, no venerable traditions,"
no powerful nobility to buttress it. Two princes only had an army,
which could help in the war of liberation; and neither the King of
Piedmont nor the King of Naples would submit to the other without a
bitter civil struggle. And the antipathies of North and South, though
they might bow to the principle of a common republic, would never
allow the Neapolitan to take a king from Piedmont. History has proved
how wrong was his diagnosis, and temporarily and reluctantly he had
glimpses of his error. More than once in after life, as we shall see,
he alternated his republicanism with fits of half-belief in the
Piedmontese monarchy.
His advocacy of Italian Unity rests on a surer bottom. That the
country was fated to stagnate till the foreigner had gone, was common
ground with every school of patriots. But when the Austrians had been
driven out, was Italy to be a federation of states or one united
country? Mazzini pleaded that the point at issue between him and the
federalists was mainly one of practicability. This hardly took
sufficient account of the school, which looked to Switzerland and
America for its types, and preferred a federation on its own merits.
But on the whole his contention was right. Every argument that told
for federation, told yet more forcibly for unity. The strength of the
federalist movement lay in the belief that unity was impossible. As
yet, though Napoleon had foretold that unity must come, only a handful
of Italians had dared to speak of it as a possible ideal. The great
majority doubted whether Italy even wished to be united, whether, if
she did, the facts of the European polity made it possible, whether
unity could permanently stand the strain of the old provincial
animosities. It was easy for them to adduce a host of facts,--the
differences of race and temperament and tradition, the various habits
formed by dissimilar systems of law and land tenure and education,
the jealousies, still far from dead, that sundered province from
province and city from city. Mazzini himself had felt the force of
their arguments, and there was a moment, when even he had been shaken
in his faith. He had little tangible reasoning to back his confidence.
But he had the prophetic assurance of a great possibility, and his
contagious faith made it a reality. He saw, when hardly another of his
contemporaries saw it, that Italian Unity was a practicable ideal; his
teaching informed the national resolve, that changed the seemingly
impossible into a fact. To few men has it been given to create a great
political idea; to fewer still to be not only the creator, but the
chief instrument in realising it. Mazzini was both, and it gives him
title to rank among the makers of modern Europe.
But there could be no unity, no republic, no political advance of any
kind, till the inevitable war with Austria had been fought and won.
She would not surrender her Italian provinces, unless by force of
arms. She could not tolerate free institutions side by side with her
own despotic rule. She had crushed the Neapolitan and Piedmontese
risings ten years before; she had done the same in Modena and Romagna
yesterday. "She robs us," said Mazzini, "of life and country, name,
glory, culture, material well-being." As Giusti said more pointedly a
few years later, the Italians "ate Austria in their bread." Mazzini
and many another patriot knew that any peaceful solution was utopian.
"The destinies of Italy," he preached, "have to be decided on the
plains of Lombardy, and peace must be signed beyond the Alps."
Mazzini rather welcomed war in a just cause. It would redeem the
torpid, disillusioned Italian, who was brave enough, as Napoleon's
campaigns had proved, but required much to nerve him to effort. It
would give Italy again her national self-respect, her claim to the
esteem of other peoples. "War," he said, "is the eternal law, that
stands between the master and the slave who breaks his chains." But
Mazzini in his saner moods saw the futility of any local or
ill-prepared rising. In words, that condemn only too eloquently much
of his after action, he declared that only victory could justify a
rising against Austria. It was only when the great mass of the people
had been won to the nationalist cause, that the patriots "might
stretch their hand to Lombardy and say, 'There are the men who
perpetuate your servitude,' towards the Alps and say, 'There stand
your confines.'" Mazzini's plan of campaign was guerilla fighting. It
was, as he said, the natural resource of an insurgent people, that had
to win its freedom against disciplined armies,--the method chosen by
the Dutch against Philip II., by the American colonists against
England, by the Spaniards and Greeks in more recent times. Had he
lived now, he might have added another illustrious example. Italy,
with her long chain of mountains that no enemy could hold in force,
had special fitness for the strategy. "Italians," he cried, "look to
your mountains, there stand strength and infallible victory."
In the meantime the work of Young Italy was to organise and educate;
and the only possible organisation was that of the secret society.
Mazzini did not see its inherent weaknesses. Young Italy soon became
as much the quarry of the spy and police agent as the Carbonari had
been; and to the end of life Mazzini was the victim of informers, who
won his easy confidence. The society developed an uncontrolled and
irresponsible leadership, and its chief, eager as he was and sincerely
eager to disclaim any desire to dictate, was too impatient, too
self-confident to allow fair play to other men's convictions. As a
means of preparing for war, it failed disastrously; and it proved an
ill school for the parliamentary politics of later days. But in a
country, where any open expression of liberal sentiment meant prison
or exile, if not the scaffold, there was no alternative; and as an
educating influence it came to be the greatest of the forces that made
Italy. Its writings, smuggled into every corner of the land, moved
many a young thinker to a passionate resolve, that bore its fruit in
after times. At this stage, however, Mazzini was hardly looking to the
slow results of political education. The hour of insurrection, he
confidently believed, was near; the European revolution was
threatening, and Italy must not be behind the sister nations. He was
certain of success. Whatever difficulties might come to a nationalist
movement without a backing from the native governments, however much
Italians might distrust their own unaided strength, there was "no real
obstacle for twenty-six millions of men, who wished to rise and fight
for their country." Austria, he calculated, could at the best put two
hundred thousand men into the field; he fondly counted on four million
Italian volunteers. A people, that even under the leading of the
Carbonari had made three revolutions in ten years, would rise again
more readily and more victoriously at the inspiration of a nobler
faith.
Chapter III
Marseilles
1831-1834. AETAT 25-28
At Marseilles--Spread of Young Italy--Letter to Charles
Albert--The Army Plot in Piedmont--At Geneva--The Savoy
Raid.
When Mazzini arrived at Lyons, he found an unhopeful plan in
preparation for raiding Savoy. Some 2000 Italian refugees, many of
them Piedmontese who had fled through Genoa ten years before and
stirred his boyish enthusiasm, were ready to march under the hardly
concealed protection of the French government. It was still in the
early days of the July monarchy, when it had yet not quite forgotten
its revolutionary origin. But before the expedition could start, Louis
Philippe's swift lapse into conservatism, which had already made him
break his promises to the Romagnuols, abruptly ended the patronage of
the authorities. The would-be raiders were scattered, and Mazzini
joined a small party of republicans, who were starting for Corsica, on
their way to join the insurgents in Romagna. The Corsicans were still
Italian in sentiment as well as race, and the Carbonaro influence was
strong in the island. Two thousand men offered themselves for service
with the insurgents, but no funds were forthcoming to pay their
passage, and before arrangements could be made the news arrived that
the rising had collapsed.
Mazzini returned to Marseilles, and found himself among the refugees
who had escaped from Central Italy. He recruited a few young patriots
among them, and with their help he began to give body to his schemes.
In a small room at Marseilles the young Titans started, with nothing
but their own sincerity and daring, to revolutionise Italy. "We had no
office, no helpers," he wrote of them in after years. "All day, and a
great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles
and letters, getting information from travellers, enlisting seamen,
folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between
literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti
corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to
save the expense of distributing the papers. We lived as equals and
brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence.
The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and
unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were
light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the
future."
In later life Mazzini looked back longingly to the freshness and
enthusiasm of those days, before failure had disillusioned him or
misunderstanding estranged him from his friends. When he was well and
happy, all the charm of his nature--his radiant idealism, his
warm-hearted friendship, his contagious unselfishness--made him the
beloved inspirer of the little band that worked under his orders. "He
was," said an Italian of him at this time, "about 5 feet 8 inches high
and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large
"republican" hat; his long, curling black hair, which fell upon his
shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the
chiselled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his
very youthful look and sweetness and openness of expression, would
have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for
his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was
mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his
dark eyes and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with
his small and beautiful moustachios and beard. Altogether he was at
that time the most beautiful being, male or female, that I had ever
seen, and I have not since seen his equal."[4] But sometimes even now
overwork and impatience told on him, and he felt ill and exhausted. In
such moods he must have been a trying man to be much with--irritable,
exacting, requiring absolute submission from his fellow-workers, angry
if they thought well of men whom he disliked.
For two years the little band worked on, sowing the seeds of
revolution. It was a heroic enterprise. A few young men, without birth
or wealth to help them, and, except for their leader, of no great
ability, were planning to change the future of their country and
preparing for war with a great military empire. To an outsider it must
have seemed a madman's dream. But their masterful chief had taught
them his own faith; and they, and thousands of their countrymen after
them, found in it the power, to which few things are impossible. They
worked with remorseless energy, month after month, corresponding with
sympathisers all over the peninsula, planting lodges of Young Italy
wherever a chance opened, drawing together the threads of conspiracy.
They found abundant backing in Italy. Mazzini appealed to his
followers there to work among the people by every road that the
despotism left open, to bring children to school and teach them, to
hold classes for men in the country districts, to circulate pictures
and pamphlets and almanacs, which would insinuate patriotic ideas
without exciting the suspicions of the police, to carry the cross of
fire from town to town and village to village. "Climb the hills," he
asked of them, "sit at the farmer's table, visit the workshops and the
artisans, whom you now neglect. Tell them of their rightful liberties,
their ancient traditions and glories, the old commercial greatness
which has gone; talk to them of the thousand forms of oppression,
which they ignore, because no one points them out." His appeal found a
ready response. Hundreds of young Italians, fired by his own passion,
gave themselves to the dangers and toils and the thousand small
annoyances of a conspirator's life. It was no light call. "I know of
no existence," said one of them in later life, "which requires such
continual self-abnegation and endurance. A conspirator has to listen
to all sorts of gossip, to soothe every variety of vanity, discuss
nonsense seriously, feel sick and stifling under the pressure of empty
talk, idle boasting, and vulgarity, and yet maintain an unmoved and
complacent countenance. A conspirator ceases to belong to himself, and
becomes the toy of anyone he may meet; he must go out when he would
rather stay at home, and stay at home when he would rather go out; he
has to talk when he would be silent, and to hold vigils when he would
rather be in bed." And behind these petty vexations, which meant more
to the Italians of that day than to a generation trained in
strenuousness, lay the knowledge that discovery meant prison or exile,
perhaps death. But they faced it with the courage of men who believed
that the "wear and tear was smoothing the way, inch by inch, towards a
noble and holy end," who looked to the day when through their labours
their country would be lifted from the slough of misgovernment and low
ideals. Life and everything they were ready to give for that. "Here
are we," said Jacopo Ruffini to his fellow-conspirators at Genoa,
"five young, very young men, with but limited means, and we are called
on to do nothing less than overthrow an established government. I have
a presentiment that few of us will live to see the final results of
our labours, but the seed we have sown will shoot forth after us, and
the bread we have cast upon the waters will be found again."
Mazzini might well be sanguine, with men like these behind him. He
looked to his literature to do the rest. The journal of Young Italy
was, as he described it, "a collection of political pamphlets," each
of the infrequent and irregular numbers consisting of a hundred to two
hundred pages, badly printed on bad paper. Later on, it was set up by
French compositors, who knew no Italian, and whose misprints gave him
infinite concern. He himself did most of the writing. It was terribly
diffusive often and wanting in precision, but his articles redeem
their literary defects by the glow of noble purpose, that made them
thrill their readers, and gave them a potency, that perhaps no other
political writings of the century attained to. Most of the remaining
articles came from his fellow-workers. Mazzini tried to persuade
Sismondi to contribute, but the historian, though sympathetic, was too
opposed to some of his teaching to respond. Louis Napoleon, drawn by a
fellow-feeling for conspiracy and scenting a chance to preach
Bonapartism, sent an essay on Military Honour, with the thesis that
soldiers are not bound by their oath to act against a revolution.
Mazzini consented to insert it with many emendations, which apparently
left little of its Bonapartist intention; but for some reason that
does not appear, it was not published. The journal had a small
circulation, and only reached a limited number of young educated men;
it was indeed too literary for popular consumption. There seems to
have been a larger demand for rules and instructions and popular
tracts written by Gustavo Modena, afterwards to become one of the most
famous Italian tragedians of his day. At all events there was a
considerable contraband of printed matter, smuggled to Genoa or
Leghorn or across the passes into Piedmont, inside barrels of pitch
and pumice stone or bales of drapery or packages of sausages. So great
became the demand, that secret presses were set up in Italy and the
Ticino to supplement the output from Marseilles.
The results surpassed even Mazzini's sanguine hopes. The first lodges
of Young Italy were planted at Genoa and Leghorn, and they spread
thence to a good many towns of North and Central Italy. The chief
strength of the society lay at Genoa, where the nationalist and
anti-Piedmontese parties made common cause, and men of every class
came in--nobles and commoners, lawyers and civil servants and priests,
seamen and artisans. Outside Genoa the working men seem to have kept
aloof as a rule; years had yet to pass before Mazzini's social
teaching reached them. The recruits came chiefly from the young men of
the middle classes, sons of the men who had had their importance under
the French rule and had been cribbed and kept under since the
restoration. Here and there a young noble joined; in Piedmont and at
Genoa at all events there was a sprinkling of older professional and
business men; a few priests welcomed a movement, which bore so strong
a religious imprint. Everywhere the scattered remnants of the
Carbonari enrolled themselves. Buonarrotti, _doyen_ of the
conspirators, descendant of Michelangelo, friend of Robespierre and
Baboeuf and Napoleon, attached his society of the _Veri Italiani_.
Early in 1833 Mazzini, it is impossible to say with what accuracy, put
the number of affiliates at fifty or sixty thousand. Many a man, who
came to the front in the later nationalist movement or in the first
Italian parliaments, began his political life as a member of Young
Italy. Garibaldi, a young sailor who wrote verses, just promoted to be
captain in the Genoese mercantile marine, whose fearlessness and charm
of manner made him the idol of the men under him, and who had already
learnt from Foscolo a belief in the destinies of Italy as ardent as
Mazzini's own, met the chief at Marseilles and joined the society.
Gioberti, who was teaching a transcendental and literary patriotism to
the novices in the Archbishop's seminary at Vercelli, sent warm words
of encouragement to the cause of God and the People.
All Mazzini's preparations centred round Piedmont and Genoa. He
realised, with the bulk of patriots of whatever school, that though
the other provinces might play a secondary part, Piedmont must take
the lead. It was the only state that possessed the military training
and traditions, essential in a war; it was the natural base for an
invasion of Lombardy; Alessandria and Genoa were two all-important
strategic points, and if the Italians were defeated in the plains,
they could fall back on the Alps and Apennines. There were few
republicans among the Piedmontese, but they were nationalists with all
their race's tenacity of purpose. The Genoese were zealots for the
cause, all the more if it were under a republican flag; in Savoy there
was a strong strain of liberalism, and its position made it a
connecting link with sympathisers in France. Mazzini's first public
act--some three or four months after he left Italy--was to write an
open letter to the king. Charles Albert had just ascended the throne
of Piedmont; and expectation ran high, as it had run ten years before,
that he would lead the nationalists. This time there was small bottom
for the hope. Charles Albert had had his phase of liberalism; in his
youth he had relations with the Carbonari, and encouraged the
Piedmontese conspirators of 1821 to look to him to lead the army to a
war for Lombard independence. Had he had the courage, he would have
stood by his word. But as he was then, so was he now, a moral coward,
buffeted by irreconcilable ambitions. He was still a nationalist, but
no liberal. Liberalism had come to loom before him as a spectre of
Revolution, to be fought and crushed without pity. But priest-ridden
absolutist as he was, he never quite forgot his patriotic faith, he
always had some vision, faint though it often was, of an Italy
untrodden by the foreign soldier. It is probable that even now, in his
worst years, he was waiting dubiously for the distant day, when he
would measure himself with the enemy. But he knew that as yet this was
impossible. He had a saner view than Mazzini of the possibilities of
the time, when France--on the high road to the _juste-milieu_--would
give no help, and a single-handed fight with Austria was foredoomed to
defeat. He would have scorned an offer of Mazzini's guerilla bands;
but had he been as ready to welcome the volunteers, as his son was
twenty-eight years later, they had little prospect of existence at
this time outside Mazzini's visionary hopes.
Such was Charles Albert, when Mazzini appealed to him to lead the
nationalist movement. What was the exact purpose of the letter, will
probably never be known. In after life Mazzini denied that there was
any serious intention in it; he pleaded that he expressed the hopes of
others rather than his own, and wrote it in the certainty that its
appeal would not be heard. At the time he disclaimed, though not so
emphatically, any hope of a response, and suggested that its object
was to disillusion the Piedmontese of any belief in their king. There
is some reason for thinking that the disclaimers must not be taken
quite literally. When he wrote twenty years and more afterwards, he
was anxious to prove that he had never lapsed from his republican
faith. His earlier commentary was in a letter to a man, whom he did
not know, and to whom he was not likely to express himself
unreservedly. There are indications that he had not quite escaped the
glamour that Charles Albert threw over the liberals, had not entirely
abandoned all hope of winning him. The secret instructions of Young
Italy, written a few months later, accepted the possibility of a
monarchy as a "system of transition"; and in the subsequent army plot
Mazzini intended to offer the King the leadership of the revolution.
One would fain believe that his own interpretations do him injustice,
that he did not write his glowing prose in utter insincerity. Were it
otherwise, we must bow the head and sadly own a stain upon that noble
life.
The letter, it must be confessed, was hardly calculated to make a
convert. Threats alternate with overdone praise; the assumption of
political omniscience, the claim of the young exile to speak for
Italy, the magniloquent parade of the obvious, must have, like much
else of his earlier writings, offended Italian common-sense and been
extremely irritating. Much of it reads like a declamatory school essay
on the duties of a constitutional king. But the lesson was true enough
on its negative side. Charles Albert could find no safe foothold
outside popular government; coercion, administrative reform, the
support of Austria or France--none would permanently content or
overawe his people. And if Charles Albert had retorted that to grant a
constitution meant war with Austria, Mazzini would have welcomed the
corollary. The King was right and Mazzini was wrong as to the
inopportuneness of a national rising at the moment. But for the policy
of another day, the letter has passages that speak like a trumpet
call. "Sire, there is another road, leading to true power and a
glorious immortality; another ally, safer and more strong than
Austria or France. There is a crown more brilliant and sublime than
that of Piedmont, a crown that waits the man, who dares to think of
it, who dedicates his life to winning it, and scorns to dull its
splendour with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have you never cast an
eagle glance upon this Italy, so fair with nature's smile, crowned by
twenty centuries of noble memory, the land of genius, strong in the
infinite resources that only want a common purpose, girt round with
barriers so impregnable, that it needs but a firm will and a few brave
breasts to shelter it from foreign insult? Place yourself at the head
of the nation, write on your flag, 'Union, Liberty, Independence.'
Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of
Italian freedom. Do this and we will gather round you, we will give
our lives for you, we will bring the little states of Italy under your
flag. Your safety lies on the sword's point; draw it and throw away
the scabbard. But remember, if you do it not, others will do it
without you and against you."
The letter was published in May or June 1831, and a few copies found
their way into Italy. Mazzini thought he had evidence that the King
read it. At all events his police did, and ordered the writer whose
anonymity did not conceal him, to be seized, if he crossed the
frontier. Whatever Mazzini's hopes may have been, this proved that the
letter had failed in its ostensible object, and he threw himself
feverishly into his preparations for a revolt in Piedmont. His
detailed scheme shows that he had not yet planned or had abandoned for
the time the strategy of guerilla fighting, and intended to rely on
the Piedmontese army. Charles Albert was, if possible, to be
persuaded to lead the revolution, and the army was to be mobilised for
an immediate advance on Lombardy. Should the King decline the offer, a
provisional directorate at Genoa would assume the government. Mazzini
had better ground for his hopes than often afterwards. The army had
not forgotten that it had led the constitutional and nationalist
movement ten years before. Many a soldier, who had served in the
_Grande Armée_, cherished the democratic sentiment that clung to it
all through, and was eager to avenge himself on the enemy, whom he had
routed in old days. These feelings were especially strong among the
non-commissioned officers. Many of them were men of the middle classes
of good standing and education, for in many, if not all, of the
regiments commissions could be held only by those of noble birth, and
no bourgeois, whatever his capacities, could rise above the ranks. A
few officers joined the society, and a general or two promised to
throw in his lot, if the movement proved successful. At Alessandria
and Genoa, the two chief garrison towns, the society had a
considerable strength. The government, though quietly tracking the
civilian conspirators, seems to have had no suspicion of the army
plot; and had the revolt broken out early in 1833, it would have had
its chance of success at home, though the inevitable disaster must
have come, when the little army faced the Austrians.
But the conspirators waited too long, and late in the spring an
accident led to the discovery of the plot. The government cautiously
followed up the clue, till it possessed itself of every detail of the
conspiracy. Then it threw itself on its prey with a savage vengeance,
that outside the Austrian provinces has had no parallel in Italy since
the days of Fra Diavolo. Charles Albert, pitiless with fright,
surrendered himself to the reactionary court party and fed their
thirst for blood. Moral, sometimes physical, torture was inflicted on
the victims to extort confession of their own or their confederates'
guilt. Jacopo Ruffini, given the choice between execution and the
betrayal of his friends, committed suicide in prison. Ten soldiers and
two civilians were shot; fourteen more only escaped by flight; numbers
were sent to longer or shorter imprisonment. Italy still execrates
those courts-martial. Not all Charles Albert's later patriotism has
purged his memory from their indelible shame; and while yet he
reigned, the Genoese erased from their city every record of the brutal
general who was his worst instrument. The humble lawyers and sergeants
whom he shot, have a deathless homage from their country. "Ideas ripen
quickly," said Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." It
was the memory of these and other victims of tyranny, that helped to
nerve Italian arms and send Italians to die in the battles that won
their country's liberty.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, since the previous August, Mazzini had been driven into
hiding at Marseilles. The French government decreed his banishment and
broke up his press. Mazzini eluded both blows. He started a secret
press and got French compositors to work it. He himself found refuge
in the house of a French sympathiser, Démosthène Ollivier, father of
Louis Napoleon's last premier, under whose roof he remained "a
voluntary prisoner." Twice only in the year he passed its threshold,
and then only at night, disguised as a woman or a _garde national_. It
was at this time that the French government, whether maliciously or
itself deceived, brought against him a false charge of encouraging
assassination, for repeating which in after years Sir James Graham
wore sackcloth.[5] Mazzini was still at Marseilles, when the news of
the Genoese executions came; and so terrible was his anguish, for in
Jacopo Ruffini he had lost his dearest friend, that his health and
mind nearly broke down. The devotion of a noble woman, whom he
loved,[6] saved him from insanity or death.
About the beginning of July 1833 he moved to Geneva. He came there to
be on the spot for a new plan of insurrection. The failure of the army
plot only impelled him more feverishly into his fixed idea of a rising
in Piedmont. He wished no doubt to punish Charles Albert, and well may
he have been maddened by the savagery, which had sickened Europe. He
wanted to "moralise" his party by proving that the terrorism had no
fears for him and striking back at the victorious and brutal enemy. He
thought that, if he was to keep his following together, he must make
his cast now or never. Once allow the fire to slack down, and it would
be beyond his power to rekindle it. He believed that half Europe was
on the brink of revolution, that a republican movement in Italy would
be the signal for republican risings in France and Spain and Germany.
It was probably a fantastic dream; but he had surer ground for
thinking that a revolt would fire the tinder throughout Italy.
Exaggerated as his hopes were even here, the revolutionary spirit,
that Young Italy created, had sunk deep. In the Genovesate and Savoy,
in the Papal States and parts of Naples there was a good deal of
material ready for an insurrection; and Mazzini had assured himself
that on the appointed day guerilla bands would take to the mountains
in several districts. The chances of success, indeed, were not bright
at the best; but the raid was not quite the unpardonable playing with
brave lives, that it seems at first sight. Mazzini, taking up a plan
of the Carbonari at Paris, chose Savoy for the starting-point of the
insurrection. He expected that the troops there would join the
insurgents, and the revolutionary army would cross the Alps into
Piedmont, while another band would land in the Riviera and rouse the
Genoese country.[7]
By the autumn of 1833 several hundred exiles had been enrolled in
Switzerland. Many of them were Poles and Germans, a few were French;
and Mazzini welcomed assistance, which he hoped might cement an
international alliance of democrats, and develop into a "Young
Europe," which would do elsewhere what Young Italy was doing for his
own country. He had the help of several officers, Bianco di San
Jorioz, author of a clever book on guerilla warfare, which had much
influenced him, and Manfredo Fanti, the future organiser of the
Italian army. They saw the importance of giving the command to an
experienced officer, and the Savoyard conspirators insisted that the
choice should fall on a certain General Ramorino, a cosmopolitan
adventurer of Savoyard birth, who had fought under Napoleon, and had
an undistinguished command in the Polish rising of 1831. Mazzini's
slender preparations were completed by October, and about eight
hundred men were armed and ready to march. There were plans of
simultaneous risings at Genoa and Naples, in the Marches and the
Abruzzi; and Garibaldi enlisted in the Piedmontese navy in the
quixotic hope of bringing it over to the revolution. But what chance
there was of success was spoilt by Ramorino. He had no real interest
in the expedition; perhaps he was paid by the French government to
wreck it. At all events he lingered at Paris, squandering much of the
war-fund, that Mazzini had collected with infinite labour. Every week
added to the difficulties. The foreign governments put pressure on the
Swiss to break up the volunteers. Buonarrotti, suspicious of the whole
design, did his best to discredit Mazzini among his own men. When
Mazzini at last insisted that the volunteers must wait no longer, the
conspirators in Savoy refused to cooperate unless Ramorino came.
Mazzini worked desperately to undo the mischief, and at last, in
January, Ramorino arrived. It was too late. The Swiss authorities
harassed the volunteers, and on February 1 only a small body of the
raiders could gather on the frontier near St Julien. Ramorino marched
them aimlessly about. Probably he saw from the first how desperate
were the chances, and wished to spare a useless loss of life. On the
4th, before hardly a shot had been exchanged, he disbanded his men,
and the insurrection was still-born.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] This description was given to, and published by Mr W. Shaen. There
is reason for thinking it was written by Enrico Mayer, the Tuscan
educationalist.
[5] See below, p. 104.
[6] See below, p. 68.
[7] For Gallenga's plot to assassinate the King, see below, c. ix.
Chapter IV
Switzerland
1834-1836. AETAT 28-31
Life in exile--Mental crisis--Principles of the
revolution--Young Switzerland--Young Europe--Literary
work--Women friends: Giuditta Sidoli--Madeleine de Mandrot.
During the raid Mazzini's health collapsed. The strain of work and
anxiety might have broken down a stronger man; he had not touched his
bed for a week, and fatigue and cold and the crushing responsibility
brought on fever. There was a false alarm one night, and a patrol
fired; and Mazzini, hurrying up excitedly with his musket, lost
consciousness and did not regain it till the volunteers had recrossed
the frontier. The collapse unstrung him for the time, and perhaps it
was only the letters of the woman he loved, that kept him from a worse
fate. "I have moral convulsions," he writes to her; "there are moments
when I could roll on the ground and bite myself. I have fits of rage
at every human face and voice." When he recovered, he found his
residence in Switzerland threatened. The foreign governments rained
threats on the Federal Diet to make it expel the refugees. The Diet
was easily frightened, but even had it been braver, it could not
tolerate acts contrary to international law, or allow Switzerland to
be a recruiting ground for raids upon a neighbouring power. The Swiss
could not be expected to risk foreign complications for the sake of
men who, from any ordinary standpoint, had abused their hospitality.
After what had happened, it was difficult for the raiders to plead at
once even the traditional right of asylum for political refugees; and
though after a lapse of time a stronger government would have reverted
to the more generous policy, and though some of the cantons were
restive at its continued deference to foreign pressure, it is not easy
to blame the Diet, even at a later date, for its unwillingness to
shelter the raiders.
Many of them were sent at once across the frontier; others succeeded
in hiding themselves. Mazzini was determined not to leave Switzerland.
It was essential to his plans that he should be near Italy, and he
dreaded moving further from the beloved land. He grew fond of
Switzerland, and came to "love the Alps almost as one loves a mother."
England and America were the only other countries open to him, and he
feared that if a Tory government came into power in England, he would
find no shelter even there. "Besides," he said, in words to be
recanted later, "there is no sympathy there, no help, no anything."
For nearly three years he led a more or less hunted life--at Lausanne,
at Berne, at Soleure and Bienne and Grenchen, in the house of a
Protestant pastor at Langnau; sometimes hotly sought by the police,
sometimes with the connivance of the government, but generally a
virtual prisoner in the houses where he found a refuge. For seven
months, at one time, he fled from place to place, living in
apparently untenanted houses, with mats at the windows, never setting
foot outside, except in his fugitive removes by night across the
mountains. Exhausted in body and soul, he had to taste an exile's life
in all its bitterness; "the existence mournful and dull as a stormy
sky or the ashes of a dead fire; the suffering that has no name, that
finds no vent in tears or words, that has no poetry save for the
distant sentimentalist; the suffering that makes a man wan and
hollow-cheeked but kills not, that bows but does not break; while the
weary eyes follow the driven clouds, that the wind wafts away to the
skies of fatherland, beyond the everlasting Alps, those icy cherubim
that guard the gate of the heart's Eden."
There was little interruption to his desolate solitude. Save for
occasional glimpses, he was parted from his old comrades, except the
Ruffinis; and though he found a few sympathetic friends in Switzerland
and caught greedily at their affections, it could not make up for the
loss. He had few books; "I could well live all my life shut up in one
room," he wrote wearily, "if I had all my books at hand, but without
books, or guitar, or view, it is too much." The sedentary life told on
his health, and he obstinately declined the medicines his mother sent
him. Toothache wore him down, though sometimes he welcomed it as a
diversion from his sickness of heart. Money difficulties came, with
their sordid complications. His mother sent what she could spare;
friends helped him with loans. But he could never refuse an exile in
need, and they importuned him, till even he rebelled against their
exigencies. The organisation of Young Italy--such of it as still was
left--and expenses of publishing and postage absorbed most of the
rest, for there were few subscribers to the party funds. He denied
himself all but bare necessities and cigars, even the two small
luxuries he valued--scent and good writing paper. He borrowed what few
books he had. He went short of clothes, and sends his mother lean
inventories of his wardrobe, which she and his old nurse did their
best to replenish. Sometimes he found himself in absolute want, and
writes "with a blush on his face" to the mother who never refused him.
Aching fits of home-sickness came on him, "a physical craving for
home, for Italian clouds and winds and sea." "The other day," he
writes to a little girl friend, "I was looking at the Alps in the
distance--beyond them is my country, my poor country that I love so
much, where my father and mother are, and my two sisters, and another
sister who has been dead many years, and the tomb of the best friend
of my youth, who died for liberty, and meadows and hills and beautiful
lakes like your own, and flowers and oranges and a beautiful sky--all
that one needs to make one die happy, and I thought sadly on it all."
He had more pungent thoughts to trouble him. The disastrous raid
demoralised his party. From Italy came news of discouragement and
desertion. The exiles loaded him with the responsibility of the
fiasco; he found himself the centre of a miserable cross-fire of
recrimination, and he repaid the criticism with scorn and suspicion.
The want of response in Italy made him at times very bitter against
his countrymen. "Oh, how cold those Italians are, and how they hunt
for excuses for their apathy. They will not see that they are slaves,
without a name, accursed by God, and mocked among the nations." The
human sweetness in him was half dried up, and a misanthropy, so new
and alien to him, made him querulous and captious. Friends were cold,
or at all events seemed so to his sick mind. He wrote peevishly to the
best of them; probably he talked more peevishly still. The society,
even of those who were dearest, worried and distressed him, and he
preferred to be left alone with a favourite cat. "I am inclined to
love men at a distance," he writes; "contact makes me hate them." The
sorest pain, one that obsessed him and dragged him to the abyss, was
the thought of his suffering friends, suffering because of him, though
for a cause for which he too had given all. It was the Gethsemane of
every true-hearted man, who calls his fellows forth to sacrifice and
battle. The friends of his youth were in exile. Men who had loved him
and whom he had loved, were laying their misery to his charge. The
Ruffinis' home was desolate--one son the victim of his own hand, two
more in exile, the mother, whom of all women he reverenced most,
sitting in loneliness and mourning. Another woman, to whom he had
given his love, but to whom a fugitive exile could not give a home,
was hunted by the Italian police, worn and desperate. "What gives me
pain and very sad moments," he writes to his mother, "is the past and
present and future of the few beings who love me and whom I really
love, you, and the Ruffinis, their mother, my sisters, and Her. If I
could see you all and my few other friends, I will not say happy, for
that we can never be again, but tranquil, quiet, smiling, and united,
I would die that day with rapture." "I wanted to do good," he writes
to a friend, "but I have always done harm to everybody, and the
thought grows and grows till I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I fancy
I am hated by those I love most." Once, at all events, it made him
doubt of all that he had done. "I think over it from morning to night,
and ask pardon of my God for having been a conspirator; not that I in
the least repent the reasons for it, or recant a single one of my
beliefs, which were, and are, and will be a religion to me, but
because I ought to have seen that there are times, when a believer
should only sacrifice himself to his belief. I have sacrificed
everybody."
The black misery settled on him. "I felt alone in the world, except
for my poor mother, and she too was away and unhappy for my sake, and
I stopped in terror at the void. In that wilderness I met Doubt." The
men whom he had sent to a patriot's death, had they died in vain? Was
it all a frightful error, an empty dream born of ambition and pride of
intellect? Was it for some grandiose, impossible chimera, that he had
taken men from quiet useful lives and the simple round of kindliness?
What authority had he still to preach a creed, which meant the
sacrifice of thousands more, the unhappiness of many another mother?
In his nightly terrors, in his little lonely room, while the wind
howled round, he heard Jacopo Ruffini's voice calling to him. He was
of course verging on insanity, and thoughts of suicide passed through
his mind. His strong moral nature and the influence of two
women--Madame Ruffini and one unknown--saved him. Characteristically,
mental health returned in the shape of a philosophy of life. It was
his theory of Duty, expanded till it penetrated every cranny of the
individual soul. His old enemy, the utilitarian theory, had taken
subtle root in his affections. "I should have thought of them, as of a
blessing from God, to be accepted with thankfulness, not as of
something to be expected and exacted as a right and a reward. Instead
of this, I had made them a condition of fulfilling my duties. I had
not reached the ideal of love, love that has no hope in this life. I
had worshipped not love but the joys of love." And so he put away that
last infirmity of the true man, took to himself not only toil and
danger and opprobrium, but unloved solitude of soul, the desert life
of him who has no friend but God. He, who ached for sympathy and love,
took duty for his hard task-master--duty, "an arid, bare religion,
which does not save my heart a single atom of unhappiness, but still
the only one that can save me from suicide." "There are four lines of
Juvenal," he said, "that sum up all we ought to ask of God, all that
made Rome the mistress and the benefactress of the world:--
'Pray for the soul, that has no fear of death,
That holds life's end among kind nature's gifts,
Brave to endure each pain and labour; nought
Vexes it, nought it covets.'"
"When a man," he writes to a friend, "has once said to himself in all
seriousness of thought and feeling, I believe in liberty and country
and humanity, he is bound to fight for liberty and country and
humanity, fight long as life lasts, fight always, fight with every
weapon, face all from death to ridicule, face hatred and contempt,
work on because it is his duty and for no other reason."
Long indeed before his mental crisis, the light and joy had gone out
of his work. There were times when he felt he had neither strength nor
time nor capacity for it, when his theories became cold, emotionless
abstractions, far other than the passionate beliefs of other days. God
was "a geometrical solution," his own task "a fated mission." All life
seemed drab and purposeless. "There is so much agony in life," he
writes, "that when I see a baby quiet, smiling, at peace, I can only
wish for death for it." Perhaps though such moods were the exception.
"He is almost always good-tempered and sometimes gay," wrote Giovanni
Ruffini. Certainly during these three years he wrote some of his
warmest and humanest pages. At times he was even hopeful of his
immediate political schemes. He was strong in the sense of his
mission. "I know," he said, "there is the future in this life of mine,
little matter if I see it." "We have made," he writes, "the cause of
the people our own, we have voluntarily taken on ourselves the sorrows
of all a generation. We have snatched a spark from the Eternal God,
and placed ourselves between Him and the people; we have taken on
ourselves the part of the emancipator, and God has accepted us."
Alike in hours of insight and of gloom he remained ever constant to
his work. His friends advised him to retire. His father threatened,
his mother entreated. To the latter he "would have yielded, if he
could." He would gladly have withdrawn, at least he thought so, if
anyone else had come forward to take up the work; but this of course
was impossible. He would have liked to fall back on the Manzonian
policy, and devote himself to quiet moral and literary education. But
this seemed an impossible solution in a country, where there was no
freedom of speech or writing. The only way, he thought, to rouse his
countrymen was to give them the example of a life, that no adversity
could turn back, no want of response dishearten, ever labouring and
suffering for their sake and the ideal's. There must be no folding of
the hands, because others were slow to follow.
He set himself to think why the revolutions of the last five years had
failed, why the people, whether in Italy or France or elsewhere, had
been so deaf to the call to liberty. He was always asking himself why
it was that Christianity had succeeded, and why a movement, that had
so much in common with it, the movement for the social and political
redemption of the people, had failed. He found his answer in the fact
that the Revolution had missed the spiritual power, that made
Christianity triumphant. It was the substance of his Marseilles
teaching, but informed with a more mystical, transcendental spirit,
due no doubt to the apocalyptic results of his depression, and partly
too to the influence that Lamennais had over him at this time. The
French Revolution had appealed to men's selfish and personal
interests, their rights, their desire for happiness. It had been a
rebellion against evil, not a mission in search of good. It had had
its use, but now it had done its work. The principle of liberty and
human dignity was accepted everywhere in theory, however much
realisation lagged. The nineteenth century was plagiarising the
eighteenth, and following precedents whose day was past. A new
principle was needed to carry progress one step further, and that
principle must be a spiritual one. "We fell as a political party, we
must rise again as a religious party." The new revolution must find
its strength in "the enthusiasm, which alone begets great things"; it
must appeal to men's sense of duty, it must bid them work not for
themselves but for humanity. Then and not till then, the pettiness and
party feeling and want of earnestness, which had wrecked the movements
of 1831 and his own Italian schemes, would vanish in the light of a
great faith, and that same light would be a beacon, which would draw
the masses after.
He was still, in spite of disappointment and the scepticism of his
friends, convinced that Europe was ripe for revolution, if only one
country showed the way. He was equally convinced that Italy would be
that country. France, he thought, had disqualified herself by her
adherence to the traditions of her Revolution. The strong dislike of
France, which marked him all through life, was now especially
prominent, and he declared that popular progress throughout Europe
depended on emancipation from her political and literary influence.
Why he appropriated for Italy the revolutionary hegemony, he would
have found it difficult to give a convincing reason. At bottom,
probably, with the sublime prophetic confidence that went hand in hand
with all his searchings of heart and absence of personal ambition, he
claimed the primacy for his country, because he hoped to inform her
with his own principles.
His Italian programme remained almost unaltered. He was indeed
prepared, though regretfully, to support a royalist movement, if it
declared for Italian Unity. But he would not countenance a royalist
programme with any lesser goal. He still believed in the Republic,
both for Italy's own sake and for the example it would give to other
democracies. And he still believed in insurrection as the only
possible road to reformation in a country, where there were no
constitutional liberties to make constitutional progress possible.
Gioberti urged to him in vain that unsuccessful insurrections only
discouraged the patriots and intensified the oppression. Mazzini,
though he promised that he would not again encourage an
insurrectionary movement, unless it started inside the country and
independently of the exiles, argued that insurrection was the only
means to rouse the masses. It mattered little if the first risings
failed; they would keep alive the spirit, that one day would lead to
victory. His hopes of the early triumph of the revolution grew slowly
fainter; he began to see that time, perhaps a generation, was needed
to quicken the inertia, that ages of despotism had instilled. But
every effort brought them nearer to the goal; every slackening made it
more remote. He would not believe that sacrifice and struggle could go
unrewarded, or quiet waiting spring from ought but cowardice. He
still, though fitfully--for want of money and the need of secrecy and
his own deepening gloom hampered him at every turn--went on with his
preparations. The sixth number of _Young Italy_ appeared in July 1834;
this was its last issue, but he persevered in the thankless work of
organisation, carrying on a voluminous correspondence, raking in
sympathisers from every quarter, sending agents to Italy, who brought
back the same monotonous tale of discouragement and unreadiness.
He found time meanwhile to interest himself in Swiss politics, and
tried to organise a party to do for Switzerland, what Young Italy had
been doing for his own country. Many of the Swiss naturally resented
the intrusion of a stranger. Mazzini brushed away the objection,
though he would perhaps have been the first to criticise a foreigner,
who had preached to the Italians, as he preached to the Swiss.
Switzerland, he urged, played so important a part in the European
polity, that no one could be indifferent to its destiny. At this time,
certainly, Swiss politics offered abundant scope for a reformer. The
Federal Pact of 1815 had undone Napoleon's comparatively liberal
constitution. The cantons were connected by the loosest of ties; many
of them were governed by small oligarchies; class privileges depressed
the artisans and peasants. The return of the Jesuits stirred a bitter
religious struggle, which from time to time threatened to blaze into
civil war. A vigorous reform movement had indeed recently swept away
the worst abuses inside some of the cantons; but, nothing had been
done to strengthen the bonds between them, and the narrow cantonal
life threatened to smother the country in a "mud-death." It was
impossible for Switzerland to assert her independence or maintain her
traditions, when she had no central authority worthy of the name. To
Mazzini it meant too the absence of any real national life, the
adhesion to a policy of neutrality, which prevented the one republican
state of Europe from throwing its weight into the European balance.
Mazzini's ideal for Switzerland was to include it with the Tyrol and
Savoy in a federation of republics, and substitute for the settlement
of 1815 a true federal authority, representing and responsible to the
whole people and not to the separate cantons. He founded a "Young
Switzerland" society, and published a paper, _La Jeune Suisse_, which
appeared twice a week in French and German, till after a year's
existence (the usual life of Mazzini's journalistic ventures) the Diet
suppressed it and decreed Mazzini's perpetual banishment. In some of
its articles Mazzini appears at his best,--more tolerant, less
dogmatic and theoretical. The movement does not seem to have found any
great measure of success, though it attracted a certain number of the
finer spirits among the younger men and Protestant clergy. But,
whatever may have been the immediate fruits of Mazzini's work, at all
events his ideas triumphed. The Swiss constitution of 1848 embodied
their essentials, and it is worth noting that Druey, one of its two
draughtsmen, was his personal friend.
Italy and Switzerland together were not enough to occupy his energies.
Two months after the collapse of the Savoy raid, seventeen of the
exiles, Italians, Germans, Poles, signed a "pact of Young Europe,"
which was intended to be an alliance on Mazzinian principles of the
republicans of the three countries. When one remembers that its vast
scheme of transformation was the work of a few young exiles, it reads
like pure rhodomontade. Mazzini himself recognised afterwards that the
plan was too embracing to lead to practical results. But at the time
he seems to have expected a good deal from it. It was to be a kind of
"college of intellects," which would watch and give information on
the popular and nationalist movements of the Continent, and at the
same time be an organised propagandism with its machinery of agents
"and countless other means." One thing in particular he hoped from it,
that it would assist towards "the emancipation from France," and
encourage another country, Italy of course by preference, to initiate
the new age of religion and the republic. As a matter of fact, nothing
seems to have been done beyond the despatch of a few agents to France
and Spain, and an attempt to organise meetings in England. But it
loomed large in the public eye, and did something to teach democracy
that its interests are international.
Meanwhile, in addition to his political correspondence and journalism,
he found time for literary writing. It was partly in the vain hope of
earning a little money for himself and his political work. "I think
over schemes day and night, as every man in want does." It was partly
too to encourage "a religious and poetic sentiment" in Italy, and
combat the dominant scepticism and materialism. For literary fame he
cared nothing. Friends, who wished him to retire from political work,
advised him to "honour Italy with his pen." "Excuse me," he answered,
"but this has no meaning for me. I don't know what or where Italy is.
We must try to regenerate and create her, and honour her afterwards."
His articles on _Byron and Goethe_ and _The Philosophy of Music_ date
from this period. He collected materials for the edition of Foscolo's
works, which was so near his heart now as at a later time. He wished
to edit a collection of translated dramas, and wrote introductions to
Werner's _Der vierundzwanzigste Februar_ and De Vigny's _Chatterton_.
"No other critic," says a recent Italian writer, "has written at such
length or so profoundly on Werner as did Mazzini." The essay was
published later at Brussels with Agostino Ruffini's translation,--the
only instalment of the projected series. He planned a _Foreign
Review_, to be published at Genoa, but an indiscreet friend betrayed
his editorship, and the censorship promptly withdrew its sanction.
Another scheme for a _Review of European Literature_, to be issued in
the freer air of Lugano, broke down, apparently for want of funds.
Another venture, which had a brief life, was the _Italiano_, a
literary and scientific magazine, which appeared at Paris for a few
months in 1836, to which he and Tommaseo and some of the best Italian
writers of the day contributed, and where Guerrazzi published the
first chapters of his _Siege of Florence_. Mazzini, who drafted the
prospectus, seems to have been especially anxious to include novels
and poetry. "It must be remembered," he writes, "that fancy and the
affections make up at least four-fifths of man. Poetry is not the gift
and privilege of a few, the masses are full of a living and speaking
poetry." He urged too that women's questions should have adequate
attention.
* * * * *
It is to this period chiefly that belong the only love-episodes of
Mazzini's life. He had a lofty conception of womanhood. "Love and
respect woman," he once wrote. "Look to her not only for comfort, but
for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and
moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you
have none. There is no inequality between man and woman; but as often
is the case between two men, only different tendencies and special
vocations. Woman and man are the two notes, without which the human
chord cannot be struck." "Marriage," he wrote to a young wife many
years afterwards, "is sacred, because it is one of the most potent
means of accomplishing life's mission. It gives the almost superhuman
strength that comes of love, the supreme comfort that makes sacrifice
a joy, the dew that tempers the scorching heat upon the flower." But
"now, as a rule," he says, "we do not love. Love, the most holy thing
that God has given to man, has become a febrile need, a brutish
instinct; the family is perverted into a denial of all vocation and
social duty; male and female have cancelled man and woman." He himself
was a man, not likely to be easily in love. His work absorbed his
vital force, and he had no pity for men who forgot public work in
domestic happiness. And though his unsoiled purity and gentleness,
together with the sympathy that allowed him to understand women as few
men can do, won him the devotion and affection of many women,
especially Englishwomen, the sentiment, on his side at least, was,
save in two cases, one of "intense friendship" only.
He had two or three boyish passions, one for an English girl who lived
near his home at Genoa, another for a Genoese, Adele Zoagli, who
afterwards became the mother of the patriot-poet Mameli. When he went
into exile, the only women who had a place in his heart were his own
mother and Madame Ruffini. His affection for his mother was very
serious and deep, more masculine and less sentimental than in the
common course of Italian filial love. Perhaps after his boyhood she
did not influence him in details, and intellectually there was some
lack of sympathy between them. But her strong pride in him, that made
her "thank God day and night for having given her that son," her faith
in his political, though not in his religious beliefs, the love that
watched year after year over the son she saw not, the courage that
made her bear long years of parting rather than ask him to deny his
call, made the most lasting human inspiration of his life. In time of
deep trouble a man will turn to his mother and his God, and he looked
to her, as to one whose love would never change, to whom he could pour
out, not indeed his spiritual misery, but all the little material
worries which a man tells only to his mother and his wife, certain
that her sympathy would never fail. His love for Madame Ruffini was of
another kind. She was a very noble woman, with intense and unconcealed
sympathies, wise with the experience of age and motherhood and sorrow;
and Mazzini was not the only one in the circle of friends at Genoa,
who loved her with the reverential affection, that an elderly woman of
saintly life and understanding will call forth from young men. It was
she, whose own deep religious faith had saved him in youth from his
short episode of scepticism. Another woman would have reproached him
with Jacopo's death; to her the common memory of one so dear only fed
the affection, that many memories and the same intense religious,
almost mystical, beliefs had already made so strong. He calls her
"mother, friend, and all that is more sacred," "the purest, whitest,
holiest soul he had ever met on earth." As far as we can tell, it was
from no fault of his that their friendship closed afterwards in
misunderstanding and silence.
His devotion to these two women had a deeper and more lasting
influence on him than any lover's passion. There was, however, at
least one other, whom he loved in another way, one to whom he gave his
troth and whom he would have married, had an exile's life allowed it.
Giuditta Sidoli was the daughter of a noble Lombard family, where she
had been brought up in a school of patriotism. Her brother, Carlo
Bellerio, was a follower of Young Italy, and was banished for his
faith. She had been married, when a mere girl, to Giovanni Sidoli, a
wealthy Reggian, a patriot and an exile too; and he swore her on his
death-bed to be true to the cause to which he had given his life. She
was one year older than Mazzini, a quiet-moving, gracious woman,
almost beautiful, with a gentle, blonde Venetian face, warm, golden
hair, and dark, thoughtful eyes; sober and unemotional in her manner,
but with deep springs of enthusiasm and devotion. Mazzini first met
her, a five years' widow, at Marseilles and afterwards in Switzerland;
their liking and common interests soon deepened into love, and he was
engaged to her before he left France. A few months before the Savoy
Expedition, her yearning for her children, who were left at Reggio,
drove her to Florence in the hope that with or without the
Government's consent she might see them. Thanks to the Tuscan police,
who opened and copied Mazzini's letters to her, we have some fragments
of their correspondence. "There are words in your letter," he writes,
"which make me still thrill with joy. In these last days I have
learnt the strength of my love. I have covered your lock with kisses.
Oh, that I could sleep for once with my head resting on your knees."
To a common friend he writes, probably a little later, "I love her
more than she thinks, much more than she loves me. I dream of her day
and night, and it becomes more and more a fixed idea with me; and yet
I know with absolute certainty I shall never live with her, not even
if Italy were free."
Up to a point they doubtless loved; but, especially when one remembers
Mazzini's emotional epistolary style of this time, one is tempted to
question whether their love had very much passion in it. It was the
tender, strong affection of two absolutely good and kindred souls, and
with neighbourhood it might have ripened into more. But long
separation cooled it, and neither was inconsolable. To Giuditta
probably at bottom her children were dearer than her lover, and
Mazzini felt this. She seems to have made no effort to join him
afterwards in England; she went to Parma to be near her children and
importune the ducal brute, who forbade her access to them, at last
going to Reggio in his despite and apparently seeing them for a
moment. Mazzini for his part was wrapped up in his work and the
struggle with exacting poverty. In England he hardly corresponds with
her, partly because his letters might have brought fresh persecution
on her, but partly, one is forced to conclude, because there was no
lover's ardour to find out a way. But he still considered himself as
in honour bound to her, and in a sense no doubt he loved her still. He
writes in the summer of 1838, "Giuditta loves me, I love her, and have
promised to love her," but he speaks as if he feared a rupture rather
for its effects on her than on himself. Two years later he writes as
if his love were dead. But, if love was dead, friendship, and a very
strong and true one, remained to the end. It is probable that they
never ceased entirely to correspond. In the fifties, when she was
living in the Valle dei Salici, near Turin, a grey-haired woman, with
all the gracious gentleness and culture of her earlier days, Mazzini
would come to see her in his secret visits to Piedmont, and she was
still the tolerant but ardent believer in his policy. When she was on
her death-bed, a year before he died himself, he wrote "as an old
friend" to "one of the best spirits he had ever met."
In a sense Giuditta had a rival. During his Swiss wanderings, the
daughter of de Mandrot, a friendly _avocat_ at Lausanne, whom he had
met casually,[8] became strongly attracted to him. And what was at
first a woman's pity and a disciple's adoration, changed to passionate
love. She was a girl of some sixteen years, of rich, emotional nature
and spiritual yearnings, that echoed to his own. When he went to
London, and she saw no more of him and heard of his uncared-for
loneliness, her hopeless love and pity worked on her, till she pined
into melancholy and illness, and her friends begged him to return and
save her by his presence. What response he made to her love, it is not
easy to say. If one may judge from the meagre references in his
letters, he felt at first no more than affectionate gratitude for the
rich gift he could not take. But later, as he learnt more of her
constancy and unhappiness, and his love for Giuditta wore away, and he
ached for a woman's loving hand, his affection ripened into something
that was probably nearer passionate love than anything he felt before
or after. Not that his permanent, reasoning self was disloyal to
Giuditta. "Am I free?" he writes to a friend, who would gladly have
seen him and the girl united; "before society and men, who recognise
only actual bonds, I am; but before my own heart and God, who watches
over promises, I am not." Sometimes indeed he balanced the results to
the two women, and was tempted for the moment to think that "the
imperious duty" of saving the one from death or life-long misery might
justify the breaking of his promise to Giuditta. But he knew that it
would be a cruel blow to the woman to whom he had pledged himself; he
felt he would gladly escape from an attachment, which stained his
loyalty to her; and his common sense told him that his gloomy
companionship and the privations of an exile's life would never make a
young girl permanently happy. And so he never seriously faltered in
crushing down the rising love within him or trying to crush it out in
her. He steadily declines to admit more than a brother-and-sisterly
relationship; he prays she may forget him and begs his friends to do
their best to kill her love by painting him in his defects; he refuses
to correspond with her, and though at last at the earnest prayer of
her friends he promises to come, if he can find the money, it was only
to save her from the pining that was bringing her to her grave. But
though he put her aside as a beautiful and impossible dream, he could
not stop the yearning. "Do you think," he writes, "that I easily give
up having near me one like her, a creature of God, young, pure,
religious, enthusiastic, into whose heart I could pour all the world
of feelings and dreams and beliefs and love that is in me?" He finds
his comfort in the thought that theirs is "a mystical, spiritual
union," that she will meet and make him happy in another world. In
this world he never saw her again, and it seems that her passion soon
fretted her frail life away. Love of wife and love of family were not
for him, and bitterly he felt it. "He, who through fatality of
circumstances," he wrote long after, "cannot live the serene life of
family, has a void in his heart, that nothing fills; and I who write
these pages, well I know it."
FOOTNOTE:
[8] Her niece, Mademoiselle Dora Melegari, tells me that her aunt's
real name was not Madeleine, as given in the _Lettres Intimes_; what
it was, Mademoiselle Melegari does not at present feel justified in
disclosing.
Chapter V
London
1837-1843. AETAT 31-38
Life in London--Spiritual condition--English friends--The
Carlyles--Lamennais and George Sand--Literary work--Decay of
Young Italy--The Italian School at Hatton Garden--Appeal to
working men.
Early in 1837 Mazzini and the Ruffinis came to London. The determining
cause was the inability of the latter to bear the privations of a life
of hiding. They travelled by slow diligence stages through France, the
French government, which was only glad to get them out of Switzerland,
giving them every facility for the journey. In London at all events
they were free men, able to live under their own names and move where
they liked, untroubled by the police. But the change from the snows
and sunsets and silences of Switzerland to the squalor and noise of a
back street in London added to Mazzini's desolation. In this "sunless
and musicless island," with the dreary stretches of houses and the
wearing din, he pined for the peace of the Alps, where nature had
brought him an occasional respite from his heart-ache. "We have lost,"
he writes, "even the sky, which the veriest wretch on the Continent
can look at"; and in time the desolate walls across the street worried
him, till he would not go to the window. The one thing in London that
appealed to him was the fog. "When you look up, the eye loses itself
in a reddish, bell-shaped vault, which always gives me, I don't know
why, an idea of the phosphorescent light of the Inferno.[9] The whole
city seems under a kind of spell, and reminds me of the Witches' Scene
in Macbeth or the Brocksberg or the Witch of Endor. The passers-by
look like ghosts,--one feels almost a ghost oneself." The
half-glimpses of the buildings, harmonising with their sombre
colouring, gave him a sense of mystery and indefiniteness, that
redeemed London of "the positive and finite" of a Southern town, and
responded to his growing faith in the poetic and unseen.
For a few weeks he lived at 24 Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road,
with the Ruffinis and two other exiles, who had helped him in the
Marseilles days. In March the quintet moved to 9 George Street, near
the Euston Road, where they suffered many things from the
maid-of-all-work, who no doubt did much as she liked with the five
inexperienced males, only two of whom could speak English at all well.
Here they lived for three years, on the whole a very miserable
household. Mazzini himself was "an angel of kindness and good-temper
and enthusiasm," ever ready to sacrifice himself to others' whims and
comforts. But the unhappy mystic was no cheerful companion, he was
unpractical and dogmatic, probably sometimes peevish, half-lost in the
empyrean of his ideals, beyond the ken or sympathy of the others.
Agostino Ruffini's petty selfishness and ungovernable tongue were the
source of frequent scenes, which one day brought Mazzini to tears,
"tears which nothing else could have drawn from him," as he writes
plaintively to Agostino's mother. At bottom young Ruffini recognized
Mazzini's worth and devotedness, and swore himself on paper to keep
his temper, with other salutary resolutions, to be read over three
times a week; but he was quite incapable of reaching to Mazzini's
mind, and he longed to enjoy himself in a freer life, where the gospel
of duty was never heard. Giovanni was more equable, and knew Mazzini
better, but he too had small belief in the gospel, and there was
little except old associations and the common love of his mother to
bind him to his transcendental friend. The general irresponsiveness at
home bitterly hurt and saddened Mazzini. "I love no one and want to
love no one," he writes of his English surroundings; and in his
letters to his friends in Italy and Switzerland, he returns again and
again to the lack of sympathy around him, as the heaviest trial of
those unhappy days.
There was nothing to distract him from the sordidness of the bickering
household in George Street. He seldom went out of doors, except to the
British Museum. He had no money to buy books and complains that nobody
would lend them. He saw few besides a few exiles, as poor and perhaps
as unhappy as himself. He was "lost in a vast crowd of strangers, in a
country where want, especially in a foreigner, is a reason for a
distrust, which is often unjust and sometimes cruel." In common with
his companions, he was miserably poor, often living on potatoes or
rice. His father advanced him money to speculate in olive oil;
naturally he lost it, and after an angry letter from the hard old man,
refused for several years to accept help from home. He tried to find
employment as a proof-reader, but in vain. He had an offer of work at
Edinburgh, but the Ruffinis would not leave London, and he felt
himself tied to them. Literary work came in very slowly, and for a
year or two his articles in the English reviews brought in little
profit, when the translator had been paid. The income of the rest of
the household was not much larger, and the bad house-keepers found
that in England "francs were little better than sous." Mazzini, as
ever, could not shut his purse to the needy exiles, who importuned him
and, as Agostino grumbled, "in the name of this chimera of human
brotherhood thought they had a right to make themselves at home in his
house." His few possessions soon found their way to the pawn-shop. He
pledged his mother's ring, his watch and books and maps; his cloak
went to buy cigars, "the one thing I don't think I can do without." On
one black Saturday he pawned a pair of boots and an old waistcoat to
find food for the Sunday. One winter he risked his health by giving
away his only overcoat. His mother, finding that good clothes got sold
at once to buy suits for his friends, thought it better to send
several suits of cheaper garments, so that he could keep one at least
for himself. Sometimes his wardrobe was so depleted, that he had to
stay at home, and could not go to the British Museum to carry on his
literary work. His generosity was well-known to his better-off
friends, and it is not surprising that their patience in lending him
money was exhausted. He tried a few years later to negotiate a loan on
the security of yet unwritten manuscripts; but the ingenuous scheme
met with no better success. Once some friends at Paris lent him £120;
another by a ruse persuaded him to accept what was practically a
gift;[10] but when towards the end of his first residence in England a
proposal was made at Turin to raise a subscription for him, he
obstinately declined it, partly because, if it reached his mother's
ears, she "would have died of shame." There were thus only two roads
open to him, suicide or the money-lenders. The thought of suicide came
to him again and again, but he put it away as a coward's act and for
his mother's sake. So more and more he fell into the money-lenders'
hands, borrowing at thirty or forty or sometimes nearly one hundred
per cent. from loan societies, that "rob the poor man of his last drop
of blood and sometimes his last rags of self-respect." Year after year
he plunged desperately in the morass, and though £320 seems to have
been the limit of his indebtedness, it was a crushing sum for one so
utterly destitute. It was the common lot of the exiles, and some of
them fared worse. In the midst of wealthy London, with men of means
all round them, who shared their political views and made speeches for
their cause, Karl Stolzmann, the Polish leader, one of Mazzini's
nearest friends, went sometimes literally without food, and Stanislaus
Worcell, born a rich Polish noble, was saved from a pauper's burial by
an English acquaintance.
Apart, however, from money troubles, Mazzini's external life gradually
brightened. In 1840, after a short stay at 26 Clarendon Square, not
far from their George Street house, where happily Agostino left them
for work in Edinburgh, he and Giovanni moved to 4 York Buildings,
which then stood in the angle between King's Road, Chelsea, and Riley
Street. He came there to be near the Carlyles, and escape from London
gloom and noise and importunate visitors. An Italian artisan, an exile
from Perugia, kept house with his English wife, who proved an
excellent housekeeper and saved them from servant-girl worries. In
those days there was a hay-field on one side of the house and
market-gardens on another, some trees in view "of a very sombre green,
but still trees," and not far off the Thames, "equally sombre with its
muddy dirty-yellow water, but beautiful at night, when its colour is
lost in the dark, and the water shines silver in the moonlight, and
the barges go down, black, silent, mysterious as ghosts." After a year
Giovanni left him after a violent quarrel, and went to Paris. They
were never really reconciled again, and Giovanni repaid his friend's
devotion with a coldness and contempt almost as unworthy as his
brother's, though he did something to atone for it by the sympathetic
picture of his old comrade as the Fantasio of his _Lorenzo Benoni_.
Uncomfortable as his relations with them had been, Mazzini felt the
loss of the Ruffinis. With them or without them, the early years of
his English life were, if anything, more utterly forlorn and miserable
than his worst days in Switzerland. His intellect, indeed, was safe
now, though there are indications still of a mental weariness and
strain, that bordered on hallucination. There was no longer any fear
of a spiritual collapse, like that which had threatened a year or two
ago to wreck his moral faith. But he was more wedded to his misery,
more desolate, alone in "the solitude of a damned soul." "A man cannot
live alone," he writes, "and I have nobody who cares to know what I am
thinking of and what I want." His heart sank, when he came home from
the British Museum to his bare, dark room, where there was no friend
or woman to welcome him, and Agostino's querulous temper to add to the
loneliness of it all. More and more the want of response around him
made him seal up his thoughts and aspirations. His friends'
ingratitude, the desertion of his followers added to the "terrors" of
his spiritual solitude. It seemed to him "an age of moral dissolution
and unbelief, an age like that in which Christ died." The sense of
failure still lay heavy on him, a brooding, unhealthy feeling that his
work had been in vain, that it was his doom to bring ill-fortune to
his friends, that he had sacrificed himself and made no one happier by
it. He felt like "one irrevocably condemned, though without fault."
"Pray for me," he writes to one of his best friends, "that, before I
die, I may be good for something."
Two things saved him from despair, perhaps from suicide. In the crisis
in Switzerland he had put away, once for all, any thought of personal
happiness. Sometimes still the natural man rebelled. "Do you think,"
he writes of Madeleine, "that in my hours of desolation I would not,
if I could, seek a breast on which to lay my brow, a loving hand to
place upon my head." But he knew that to look for happiness led
imperceptibly but certainly to selfishness, that "sacrifice was the
one real virtue," that duty "to God, and humanity, and country, and
all men" was the only law of life for the true man. And what he had
worked out once in cold philosophy, now mellowed into religion,
mystical sometimes, but beautiful and saving. Jacopo Ruffini and his
own dead sister were praying for him, watching over him, inspiring him
with strength and love. Life was an expiation, to purify the soul for
another stage, where friends would meet again, and misunderstandings
pass, and love reign over all. And even in this world, though sorrow
might be the portion of the individual man, Humanity, the great
collective being, would go ever forward to new knowledge, and new
hopes, and nobler rules of life.
Perhaps, even more than by his faith, he was saved by his intense
affections. True that they centred on ever fewer persons. He had
hardly a real friend left among his old political associates. For the
men and women, whom he was coming to know in England, he felt as yet
gratitude but little more. His love for Giuditta Sidoli was fading
into a sincere but unpassionate esteem. Madeleine was an impossible
dream, that he resolutely shook away. But the dear ones of his
boyhood,--Madame Ruffini, his mother, his unmarried sister, even his
dour father,--were loved with an affection that was pitifully, almost
morbidly sad, but ever more intense. It was the only sunshine in his
clouded life. "I feel God's power and law more every day," he wrote to
Madame Ruffini, "but He cannot weep with me or fill my soul's void
for I am a man still and tied to earth. I worship Him more than I love
Him, but you I love." And he pours out, in words that read extravagant
but came in truth from his inmost being, all that reverential love,
which he felt for her, who had been more than mother, but whose
affection for her devotee was cooling all too quickly. Agostino did
his best to damage his friend in her eyes; there seems to have been
friction between her and Madame Mazzini; and no doubt she sided with
her own sons, when the estrangement with them came. At the beginning
of 1841 Mazzini's correspondence with her appears to have abruptly
ceased.
To his parents he turned yearningly in a new sorrow, that was bowing
them down. His one surviving unmarried sister died. She had been his
favourite, the one of the family who had sympathized most with his
political schemes, and encouraged him in his work, and pleaded for him
with his father. Her death obsessed him with an unhealthy depression;
but he felt most for his parents, left in the solitude of old age,
bereft of the one who had been a needed link between them, for the
father had grown morose, and there was evidently some want of harmony
between the old people. Then the father himself fell very ill and
recovered with difficulty. His son brooded over the thought that he
had not been enough to his parents while he was with them, that the
life he had chosen for himself had been the cause of all their
trouble. Plans for their comfort worked in his mind "like a
never-resting wheel." He would have risked the death-sentence that
still hung over him, and gone to live with them in hiding, but he knew
that the dread of discovery would only have added to their cares. It
seems indeed that in 1844 he paid a visit to them in disguise.[11]
* * * * *
The gloom lifted somewhat, as he began to make friends in England. He
was not yet, it is true, in sympathy with English life. He found
little liking here for his transcendentalisms, his big indeterminate
generalizations; and English love of facts and suspicion of theories
seemed to him "materialism incarnate, pure critical analysis," fatal
to spiritual or philosophic thought. "Here," he writes, "everybody is
a sectarian or a materialist"; and now, as always, he never understood
or valued Protestantism. He had a poor opinion of English statesmen,
especially of the Whigs, who irritated him by the folly of their
attempts to put down Chartism. Nor did he think much better of the
Chartist leaders, who were "Englishmen, which means materialists,
utilitarians, Benthamists _par excellence_, with no principle except
that of the greatest possible happiness." The severance between the
middle and working classes portended, he thought, an imminent and
terrible revolution. But he came by degrees to recognize the better
side of English life. He admired its tolerance, its insistency and
tenacity, the "unity of thought and action, which never rests till it
has carried each new social idea into practice, and when it has taken
a step, never retraces it." He watched the Chartist movement
sympathetically, and contrasted its great following with the scanty
disciples of the French socialists. Though he cared little for its
doctrines, he saw in it something that rose above "the narrow egotism,
which characterizes English politics," and he especially approved,
when the Chartists put aside national prejudices and sent their good
wishes to the Canadian rebels.
Gradually he came to feel more at home in England. "There," he says,
"friendships develop slowly and with difficulty, but nowhere are they
so sincere and lasting." "Never," he wrote in after days, "shall I
forget, never without a throb of gratitude shall I mention the land,
which became a kind of second country to me, where I found friendships
that brought an enduring balm to my weary and unhappy life." After a
year or two his circle widened almost too rapidly, for clothes and bus
fares and the drain upon his time made society an expensive matter to
him. One of the first English persons who took an interest in him, was
Mrs Archibald Fletcher of Edinburgh. A few months after he came to
England, she met him, "a young, slim, dark man of very prepossessing
appearance," who could not speak English and wanted admission to a
public library. So profoundly unhappy he seemed, that the kind old
lady feared suicide and wrote to gently warn him. Mazzini replied that
no one but "a man, who wished only to enjoy and has made that his
chief thought, will destroy his life as a child does its play-thing."
His first close English friendship was with the Carlyles. "They love
me as a brother," he wrote in 1840, "and would like to do me more good
than it is in their power to do." For Carlyle he had for several years
a very sincere liking. "He is good, good, good; and still, I think, in
spite of his great reputation, unhappy." He respected Carlyle's
sincerity, his freedom from insular narrowness, his outspokenness. "He
may preach the merit of 'holding one's tongue';--to those, in truth,
who do not agree with him, are such words addressed,--but 'the talent
of silence' is not his." He welcomed him as one "who served the same
God" as himself, "though with a different worship"; his ally in the
attack on utilitarianism, in the exaltation of the spiritual. "His
motive is the love of his fellow-men, a deep and active feeling of
duty, for he believes this to be the mission of man on earth." Their
common love of Dante, no doubt, too, helped to draw them together. But
in his criticisms of his books he condemned, however gently and
respectfully, his individualism, his hero-worship, his depreciation of
the great common march of the race, his ineffectiveness and timidity,
when he came to practical political applications. And the antagonism
grew on him, till in time they seemed to be "diametrically opposed."
"Why," he said long afterwards to a girl, who had been reading and
admiring Carlyle, "you are fast drifting down the road to materialism.
You are lost. Carlyle worships force, I combat it with all my might.
Carlyle is the sceptic of sceptics. He is grand, when he pulls down,
but incapable of reconstructing something [anything] fresh. If instead
of loving and admiring nations and humanity, you only love, admire,
and reverence individuals, you must end by being an advocate of
despots." Carlyle on his side had little sympathy with Mazzini's
opinions, which to him were "incredible and (at once tragically and
comically) impossible in this world." He was impatient with his
"Republicanisms, his 'Progress' and other Rousseau fanaticisms."[12]
He valued him none the less for "a most valiant, faithful,
considerably gifted and noble soul." Once the Piedmontese minister
spoke lightly of Mazzini in his presence. "Sir, you do not know
Mazzini at all, not at all, not at all," Carlyle angrily replied and
left the house. At the time of the Bandiera episode, though they had
recently been quarrelling, he wrote to the _Times_, "Whatever I may
think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, I can
with great freedom testify to all men, that he, if I have ever seen
such, is a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity,
humanity, and nobleness of mind, one of those rare men, numerable
unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called
martyr souls; who in silence, piously in their daily life, understand
and practise what is meant by that." Mazzini, mindful of their late
coolness, was much touched by the defence. "That I call noble," he
said of it to a friend.
For Mrs Carlyle Mazzini had a warmer feeling; and she reciprocated it
not only with an intense personal confidence, but for a time at all
events by sharing his political beliefs. Gradually she came more to
her husband's view of these; and Mazzini and she had "warm
dialogues," when he unfolded some wild design of throwing away his
life in Italy. "Are there not things more important than my head?" he
asked her. "Certainly," she replied, "but the man, who has not sense
enough to keep his head on his shoulders till something is to be
gained by parting from it, has not sense enough to manage any
important matter." But "to the last," says Carlyle, "she had always an
affection for him"; in 1846 she came to him for advice on her troubled
married life, and he appeals to her to "send her ghosts and phantoms
back to nothingness" and make it bearable by communion with her dead
parents and work and love. "Get up and work. When the Evil One wanted
to tempt Jesus, he led Him into a solitude."
Mazzini was a frequent caller at their house; coming in all weathers,
"his doe-skin boots oozing out water in a manner frightful to behold"
upon her carpets. Sometimes he would come with any story that he could
think of to amuse her; sometimes he would discuss Dante with John
Carlyle, who was then writing his translation of the _Divina
Commedia_, till Carlyle grew weary of the talk and reminded both that
the last bus was starting. Margaret Fuller has left a description of
an evening spent with the trio; how Mazzini turned the conversation
"to progress and ideal subjects, and Carlyle was fluent in invectives
on all our 'rose-water imbecilities,'" how his flippancy saddened
Mazzini, and Mrs Carlyle said to Margaret, "these are but opinions to
Carlyle, but to Mazzini, who has given his all and helped bring his
friends to the scaffold in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of
life and death." On another occasion Carlyle, after monopolizing the
talk while he passed in long review the silent great ones of earth,
turned to Mazzini, saying, "You have not succeeded yet, because you
have talked too much." The contests between them became more frequent
and painful. They would argue, so the tradition has been handed down,
the one courteous, deeply moved, pleading with his whole heart,
eloquent in his rather broken English; the other exaggerative,
splenetic, scornful in the wild flow of his language. All the time
Mazzini would sit pale and quiet in his chair, sometimes excited
almost to tears, nervously smoking his small cigar; while Carlyle with
his long clay pipe shifted restlessly, as he stormed out his
sentences.[13] None the less Mazzini's intimacy with them went on
unbroken, at all events as far as Mrs Carlyle was concerned, through
all his first stay in England. When he left for Milan in 1848, he told
her with a kiss to be "strong and good until he returned"; and when he
came back aged and worn, she sadly stroked his grey beard. She found
lodgings for him; she went to comfort him, when prostrated by his
mother's death. But the severance between him and her husband
gradually widened, till two or three years later they completely
parted, to respect each other's character and detest each other's
opinions to the end. Once more they met, years afterwards, and "talked
in a cordial and sincere way with real emotion on both sides."
"Mazzini," Carlyle noted at the time, "is the most _pious_ living man
I now know." Even for his politics he had at last some tolerance. "The
idealist has conquered," he confessed, "and transformed his utopia
into a patent and potent reality."
With the Carlyles, however, even in the days of his closest
acquaintanceship, he was never at home as he came to be in other
English households. His best friends in the forties were the Ashursts
of Muswell Hill. They were, he says, "a dear, good, holy family, who
surrounded me with such loving care as sometimes to make me forget I
was an exile." W. H. Ashurst was a solicitor, who had been a friend of
Robert Owen, and who made Mazzini's acquaintance at the time of the
letter-opening episode. To Mrs Ashurst Mazzini, forgetful of Madame
Ruffini's expired title, gave the name of "second mother." One
daughter married James Stansfeld; the other, at this time "the
favourite of his English sisters," afterwards became Madame Venturi,
and has left the best English memoir of him. Both they and their
brother for long years after gave him much quiet help in his work.
Through the Ashursts he came to know the Stansfelds and Peter Taylors,
but his intimate friendship with them belongs rather to the time of
his second residence in England. Among his other friends were William
Shaen, whom the Italian refugees knew as their _angelo salvatore_,
Joseph Toynbee, the father of Arnold Toynbee, Joseph Cowen, afterwards
member for Newcastle, and George Jacob Holyoake. J. S. Mill wrote of
him as "one of the men he most respected." Margaret Fuller, who had
come to England prepossessed against him, lost her prejudices when she
visited his school for organ-boys, and began the friendship which was
to be renewed in the days of the Roman Republic. "She is," he writes
of her to a friend, "one of the rarest of women in her love and
active sympathy with everything that is great, beautiful, and holy."
He had some intercourse with the two, next to himself, most notable
Italian exiles in London at that time, Gabriel Rossetti and Antonio
Panizzi. Mazzini interested Rossetti in his school, and they had
common acquaintances among the exiles; but they never came into close
touch, and Mazzini tried in vain to persuade him to help in his
patriotic work. At a later date political differences completely
sundered them. Panizzi was already Keeper of Printed Books at the
British Museum. He had been a Carbonaro in his Italian days, and he
and Mazzini had common ground in their cult of Dante and Foscolo. He
backed Mazzini warmly in the incident of the letter-opening a few
years later; but they disagreed on Italian politics, and they saw
little of one another, though they seem to have been never entirely
estranged. Among other foreigners that he met were Prince Napoleon
("Plon-Plon"), then busily conspiring against the Orleanists, and
Conneau, afterwards Louis Napoleon's doctor and a general go-between
for the Emperor and the Italian patriots. But he hated anything that
tasted of fashionable society. The mistress of a famous London salon
once persuaded him to come to her house, but when he found that she
wanted him to adorn her society and not from any interest in his
cause, he refused to go again.
He came at this time much under the influence of Lamennais. They began
to correspond soon after the _Words of a Believer_ were published, and
once at least they met. Mazzini saw a kindred soul in this "priest of
the Church Universal," who "preached God, the people, love, and
liberty"; this man "whom I saw but lately," so he writes in 1839, "so
full of sweetness and love, who weeps like a child at a symphony of
Beethoven, who will give his last franc to the poor, who tends flowers
like a woman, and steps out of his path rather than crush an ant." He
recognised how much Lamennais' teaching had in common with his own in
its reaction against the sceptical, destructive school of the
Revolution, in its belief in tradition and humanity, in its appeal to
duty as the principle of life. In some degree, perhaps, Lamennais'
_Words of a Believer_ inspired his own _Duties of Man_. He had his own
plans for him. He saw in him "a Luther of the nineteenth century"; he
hoped, though not very confidently, that he would come frankly forward
as a teacher of the religion of humanity, and he urged him to "do
something better than write books," and become the missionary of the
new faith. Lamennais replied, that though Christ could preach in the
highways, four persons could not meet now in a field to speak of God
and humanity without being taken up by a policeman. Mazzini was
grievously disappointed at the refusal, and he felt that Lamennais
regarded him with some diffidence, as indeed was natural enough. He
"loved him as a friend and revered him as a saint"; but he felt that
Lamennais returned his love "as it were in spite of himself." "This
good Mazzini, one cannot help loving him," Lamennais once said in his
hearing; and the phrase left an unhappy sense in Mazzini's mind.
Lamennais and "George Sand" were in his judgment "the two first living
writers of France" at this time, and he looked to the latter too as
one of his own faith. At the time of his mental crisis in Switzerland
he read her _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ (he always thought it her best
production), and the book was "sweet to him as is the cradle song to a
weeping child." He corresponded with her, and in 1847 visited her in
the Vallée Noire. She impressed him above all, as she did Matthew
Arnold the year before, by her simplicity. "Madame Sand," he wrote
back to England, "is just as we wanted her to be; good, noble, candid,
simple, calmly suffering, even more than can be seen in her books." He
warmly defended her in England; not that he thought that all her books
were to be lightly put into everybody's hand; but "the evil she has
portrayed is not _her_ evil, it is ours," and her realism was informed
by a passionate moral purpose. Genius, he said, can in the long-run do
nothing but good, and it is bound to make itself heard. "You may sound
your alarm against her in your old _Quarterly_, and forbid your youth
to read her: you will find some day, without well knowing how, the
best places in your library usurped by her volumes." He saw in her "an
apostle of religious democracy"; he responded to her sense of the
Divine, her belief that the decay of the old creeds restored
allegiance to the true Godhead, her faith in a future which should be
built on love. He delighted to repeat her words, "there is but one
virtue, the eternal sacrifice of self." And he saw in her, too, the
voice of down-trodden womanhood; "thank God," he says, "she is a
woman," and her books were a revelation of the "inward life of woman,"
a woman's pleading for justice and equality. At this time few writers
appealed to him more; but her later works and her acceptance of the
Empire alienated him, and afterwards he "sadly and unwillingly"
convinced himself that what he had hailed as the sincere and conscious
"utterance of a high priestess," was but the artist's passive echo of
a faith that was not hers.
* * * * *
Slowly, besides making friends, Mazzini began to find work. The
difficulties were great. He was at first too worn-out and unhappy to
care to write. He could not yet write in English, and the expenses of
translation absorbed a large part of the remuneration. It was a
painful effort to trim his pen to the likings of the English public.
"My ideas and style frighten them," he says. "What is old to us is new
to them. One cannot talk to them of mission or humanity or progress or
socialism." One editor refused an article in praise of Byron, "because
Byron was an immoral poet." Kemble, the editor of the _British and
Foreign Review_, politely declined his articles, after some experience
of them, on the ground that the English public were "conceited asses,"
who could only gradually be broken in to listen to generalizations.
Mazzini sometimes promised to do his best, but the effort came
unwillingly, and it was only the pressing need of money and his
resolve to ask no more from home, that made him write in an alien
style on subjects that often had little interest for him. To an English
reader, however, the discipline appears a salutary one; and his
English articles have a precision of thought that his earlier writings
lacked. His literary out-put was considerable. Some of his articles
were more or less pot-boiling; thus he wrote on Fra Paolo Sarpi in the
_Westminster Review_, on Victor Hugo and Lamartine--brilliant and
suggestive essays--in the _British and Foreign Review_, on
contemporary French literature in the _Monthly Chronicle_. He put more
heart into those on English subjects,--his masterly criticisms of
Carlyle in the _British and Foreign Review_ and the _Monthly
Chronicle_, and his papers on Chartism in _Tait's Edinburgh Journal_.
But what he cared for most was to bring Italy or his own religious
faith before English readers. He wrote for the love of it, when he
discoursed on Dante's Minor Works in the _Foreign Quarterly_ and on
Lamennais in the _Monthly Chronicle_, or when he wrote on Italian
politics for the same magazine, and on recent Italian literature, and
probably on Italian art, for the _Westminster Review_. In the
_People's Journal_ under John Saunders' editorship he began the
_Thoughts on Democracy in Europe_, which were afterwards expanded into
_I sistemi e la democrazia_,--a very able criticism of the utilitarian
and earlier socialist schools; in his own _Apostolato Popolare_ he
wrote the first six chapters of the noblest of all his writings, _The
Duties of Man_. He seems to have written a novel, which never saw the
light.
He found one literary task very near his heart. From the days of his
early studies at Genoa, he had had a supreme admiration for Ugo
Foscolo, as the one modern Italian writer, besides Alfieri, who had a
virile political teaching for his countrymen. While in Switzerland, he
had planned to write his life, and made researches for his manuscripts
and rare and scattered publications. His interest strengthened, now
that he was living close to where Foscolo's bones lay in Chiswick
churchyard. He knew that Pickering, one of Foscolo's English
publishers, possessed the manuscript of his unfinished notes on the
_Divina Commedia_, already published, but with many inaccuracies, in
1825; and in a dusty corner of Pickering's shop he found the proof of
part of Foscolo's _Lettera apologetica_, a kind of political
testament, which apparently had not been published. Mazzini undertook
the task of getting both re-published with more zeal than candour.
Pickering would not sell the _Lettera_ apart from the Dante
manuscript, and asked £420 for the two. Mazzini "cursed his bookseller
soul, and would have stolen them without scruple, if he could." A
Tuscan lady, Foscolo's _donna gentile_, lent the money for the proofs;
and Rolandi, the Italian publisher in Berners Street, was disposed to
buy the Dante notes. Mazzini found that the notes were very
incomplete, and feared that Rolandi would not buy, if aware of the
deficiencies. He concealed the fact, and with immense labour completed
the notes and the revision of the text. Rolandi, who, it seems, did
not discover the pious fraud, bought the manuscript, and in 1842
published the edition in four volumes with an anonymous introduction
by Mazzini, who took no pay for his known and unknown labours. The
edition had its value at the time, though its interest now is
historical only. Meanwhile he discovered the remaining manuscript of
the _Lettera apologetica_ in an old trunkful of Foscolo's papers; and
thanks mainly to his friend, Enrico Mayer, the educationalist, this
and others of Foscolo's political writings were published at Lugano in
1844. Mazzini gave much assistance to Le Monnier, the Florentine
publisher, in the complete edition of Foscolo, which he brought out a
few years later. But the life remained undone. For years with the true
student's fever he hunted up every letter and record of Foscolo, to
which he could find a clue. But as time went on, politics and social
work commanded him again, and the biography, on which so many cares
had been spent, was never written.
* * * * *
Gradually he returned to political work. At first the moral
prostration produced intense lassitude; and he found it as difficult
to settle down to politics as to literature. There were moments indeed
of nervous reaction, when his brain teemed with "daring projects,
titanic presentiments, limitless conceptions." But generally the
struggle with depression used up his strength, and he felt too weary
and discouraged to revive Young Italy. He seems, a few months before
he left Switzerland, to have taken some sort of formal step to
abdicate leadership. But where no actual organization survived, and
there was no one to step into his place, the retirement meant nothing.
Young Italy was so completely himself, that the society was
non-existent, till he took up the reins again. There had been
something of a stampede among its members. In Italy many had made
their peace with the governments; others were nourishing their faith
in silence; few carried on the work, at least in the old spirit.
Conspiracy, it is true, was not quite dead; but the few secret
societies, that still lived on, mostly harked back to Carbonaro
traditions, or turned to an agrarian and free-thinking agitation,
which was as hateful to Mazzini as apostacy itself. It was no better
among the exiles. "There are not two of us," he complained, "who
think the same on any single subject." "You cannot find one Young
Italian among us." Many took advantage of the Lombard and Piedmontese
amnesties to return home. Gioberti was attacking the society. Even
those nearest to Mazzini had little faith in its methods or hopes, and
Mazzini would compromise on no tittle of his creed to win them. In his
high singleness of purpose he could not understand or tolerate the
faintness of men, who had sworn to fight for an idea, but deserted at
the first defeat. If his countrymen had not responded, that was only
an argument for renewed and yet more strenuous effort. It was all so
pitiful to him,--this want of faithfulness unto death. "When I write
in favour of Italy," he says, "I feel myself blush, as if I were
lying." For a time, though, he himself felt powerless to act. He was
tempted to go to Italy, and throw away his life in some desperate act
of protest. But he had too fine a nature to be long content with
inaction or despair. "If you only knew," he writes early in 1839, "how
this absolute uselessness of existence weighs on me." He dreaded dying
with his work undone. Jacopo Ruffini's memory was ever present with
him, and he felt that he was dedicated to the cause for which his
protomartyr had died. He had taken on himself a task "in the face of
God and Italy and himself"; he thought of himself as blasphemer and
hypocrite, if he slackened in it; and though he knew that his
enthusiasm had gone, sometimes too his confidence in Italy and
himself, yet duty still remained, and he could trust in God and the
righteousness of his cause. "I know," he wrote, "that Jacopo is not
dead, that he and we are forerunners, not of a new policy, but of a
new faith, which we perhaps shall see not, but whose advent no human
force can stop."
It was not however till the summer or autumn of 1839,[14] that he
decided to return to active political work "with an almost fierce
resolve." At first he had no definite plan, except to accentuate the
popular side of his programme and appeal more than he had yet done to
the working classes. He had at present little means of reaching those
at home, but he could do something among the Italian population in
London, the shopkeepers and organ-grinders and hawkers of terra-cotta
casts. Hitherto he had been little in contact with his working-class
compatriots; now in the whirl of a foreign city he came to know them.
It began with his intense feeling for suffering, that for the
remainder of his life made him happiest when relieving individual
cases of misery. About this time, going out one winter morning, he
found a young girl on the doorstep worn out with cold and hunger. With
the sympathy for forlorn womanhood, which he had in common with the
greatest of English statesmen, he took her in and put her in his
landlady's charge. When the girl afterwards married, and was deserted
by her husband, he undertook the education of her children, and for
many years devoted to it a large share of his scanty income. The same
charity now drew him to the waifs of his own land. Talking to the
Italian organ-boys, who went about the streets of London with a
barrel-organ and its squirrel or white rat, speaking a patois half
Comasque half English, he learnt the details of the "white-slave
traffic," how a few Italians living in London brought over poor
peasant-boys under contracts, which promised high pay and good living,
but which had no validity in England; how when the boys got there,
they were beaten and half-starved and cowed. He brought the worst
offenders to justice, and did something to frighten the masters into
better treatment of their victims. But he cared more to influence the
boys themselves. In 1841 he opened a school at 5 Hatton Garden
(afterwards removed to 5 Greville Street, Leather Lane), where the
boys came in the late evenings to learn the three Rs and some
elementary science, and on Sundays had lessons in drawing and Italian
history. The school was very dear to Mazzini, and the boys, says an
English observer, "revered him as a god and loved him as a father."
One of them, returning to Italy, travelled to Genoa expressly to tell
Madame Mazzini what her son had done for him. Italian and English
friends (Joseph Toynbee among them) taught gratuitously, and the
annual supper was a great event for him and his circle. Mario and
Grisi sang at concerts to help the school's finances. The school
flourished in spite of the noisy opposition of a neighbouring Italian
priest,--an opposition, which Mazzini repaid by his first angry attack
on the Papacy.
Already, before the school was opened, he had started a political
society for the Italian workmen in London, and was publishing a paper,
the _Apostolato Popolare_, which came out at intervals till 1843. In
it he makes his appeal to the working-men of Italy. He felt more
strongly even than in his Marseilles days that a revolutionary
movement must depend for its main support on the working classes and
have their good for its ultimate goal. English life had brought him
into touch with the social thought of the time, and he felt that
political movements were dwarfing beside the question of the condition
of the masses. He began to speak of the Italy to-be as the "Italy of
the People." It was the people, he wrote, who suffered most from her
dismemberment and misrule. While other classes had their
compensations, there were no distractions for the unknown poor, no
true home life, no intellectual interest. He tried to rouse them from
their provincialism, their self-absorbed indifference to politics. He
appealed to them to be patriots and republicans, proud of their
country's glorious past, working for its future and their children,
and remember that God would judge them not by what wages they earned
but by what they had done for their fellows. But however much he laid
stress on the democratic side of his agitation, on working-class
organization and social reform, he was careful to safeguard Young
Italy from becoming a class movement. It was at this time and in his
papers for working men, that he first began the crusade against
socialism, which he continued, sometimes with less discernment, to the
end of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] For once his knowledge of Dante seems to have failed him. Many
years after he quotes the expression to "Daniel Stern," but owns that
he cannot refer to the verse.
[10] He subsequently discovered that it was a loan, and insisted on
repaying it shortly before his death.
[11] The only evidence for this is contained in Cagnacci, _Giuseppe
Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini_, pp. 287, 290, from which it seems
probable that Mazzini saw Madame Ruffini between June and November,
1844, and therefore, almost certainly, was at Genoa. Signor Donaver
thinks it doubtful whether _la Cugina_ of the Ruffinis' letters refers
to Mazzini, but the internal evidence seems to me to favour the
identification. Signor Cagnacci's note on p. 290 seems to imply that
he has seen a memorandum by Elia Benza to the effect that Benza saw
him at Porto Maurizio about this time disguised as a Capucin.
[12] Carlyle's statement (_Reminiscences_, ii. 182) that he "once or
twice" talked with Mazzini is rather startlingly inaccurate. See
Carlyle's _Life in London_, i. 488.
[13] There are some interesting descriptions of the Carlyles in
Giovanni Ruffini's letters to his mother. See Cagnacci, _op. cit._
[14] Madame Mario says in her _Della vita di Mazzini_, in the middle
of 1838; but I think it is quite clear from _Lettres intimes_, 197 and
205; Giurati, _op. cit._, 11-12; Cagnacci, _op. cit._, 447 that 1839
is the true date.
Chapter VI
The Revolution
1843-1848. AETAT 37-43
Politics in Italy--The Bandieras--The Post-Office
scandal--The People's International League--Life in
1845-47--Letter to Pio Nono--Attitude towards the
royalists--The Revolution of 1848--At Milan.
While Mazzini was watching from England in discouragement, and the
waves seemed to gain no painful inch, in Italy the main came flooding
in. How far exactly the sudden tide of national impulse owed itself to
his teaching, is perhaps an insoluble problem. But when one remembers
how wide had been the influence of Young Italy, how many of the men
who were now coming to the front had been its members, it seems
unlikely that the impetus could have come without him. Young
University men who treasured secretly at home his pamphlets or numbers
of the _Apostolato Popolare_, artisans who had fingermarked his or
Gustavo Modena's tracts, were pondering his teaching and waiting for
the times to ripen. But Mazzini's influence, even if the most
powerful, was not the only one. Traditions still lived on, handed down
from the Carbonaro revolutions; the old belief in Charles Albert was
flickering into life again; the mild Catholic nationalism, that came
from Manzoni and his school, flowed strong; and all the time the daily
witness of oppression and misrule was there to preach against the
Austrians and the native tyrants. And though there were many currents
in the swelling crowd of nationalists, at two points all moved
together. Austria must go, and there must be some guarantee for good
government.
In spite of censors and police, the rising spirit showed itself in
literature. "The shade of Dante, the poet of the regenerated nation,
began to brood above the speech and silence of the land." Students, in
the footsteps of Foscolo and Gabriel Rossetti, drew all the reading
world of Italy to the great national seer, who more than five
centuries before had pleaded for unity. Dramatists and historians and
novel-writers spoke of the ancient glories of their country. Social
reformers came in to swell the liberal movement, founders of schools
and savings banks, agricultural pioneers, builders of railways that
would "stitch the boot." Their interest in politics was a secondary
one, and such political sympathies as they had, were generally with
the Moderate politicians, just rising to a prominence, which was soon
to eclipse Mazzini's waning light. Gioberti had already published his
_Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians_, which, while it echoed
Mazzini's faith in Italy and Rome, banned democracy and unity,
preached federalism and half-hearted liberalism, and looked for
salvation to Charles Albert and a reforming Pope. Cesare Balbo in
Piedmont was pleading for the same mild policy, without its faith in
the Papacy. Theirs was an easy creed beside Mazzini's. They had little
of his religious faith, none of his passionate democracy, his demand
for sacrifice and martyrdom. It was a creed for the doubting and
half-hearted, for the royalist and Catholic, for the courtier and the
rich man and the priest; and also for the level-headed man of the
world, who turned from Mazzini's fancies and idealism, who laughed at
Italy's mission to humanity but cherished a more modest hope for her
own regeneration. But at all events the teaching had two notes in
common with his own. It strove to lift the nation to healthy ambition
and strenuous effort; it cried as earnestly as he did for the
expulsion of the Austrian. And so it made the complement of his work.
Less noble in its spirit, more halting in its patriotism and
uninspiring of great deeds, yet it marshalled for the cause a host,
that would never have swelled the thin ranks of Young Italy. It
supplied the common movement with qualities that Mazzini conspicuously
lacked,--a political sense of the possible, and, among its better
exponents, a patience and tolerance, a comprehensiveness that
prejudged no class and welcomed all, who, gladly or reluctantly,
offered themselves for the great task.
One of the sources of the Moderate movement was the impatience at the
little insurrections, that only led to useless loss of life and an
embittering of the tyranny. One of its postulates laid down that there
should be no revolt against the better native princes, and that the
fight with Austria should be waged by regular armies. But the
traditions of revolt could not die out at once, indeed were all the
stronger for the new spirit of hope that was abroad. All Central Italy
was alive with plots. Mazzini, though he was coming partially to
recognize the futility of these petty risings, still had a standard
of preparation that was pitifully inadequate. He was elaborating a
scheme for a rising in the Papal States, to be followed by movements
in the North and South and supported by the exiles. He was still
persuaded that a few small guerilla bands would draw the people after
them, that daring and a clear programme were the only necessary
conditions of victory. He found few men and less money for his plot.
Among the handful, who put themselves at his disposal, were two young
Venetian nobles, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, officers in the Austrian
navy, which was chiefly manned by Italians and Dalmatians. They were
high-minded lads, and, one is bound to add, sentimentalists and prigs,
naively self-conscious and immature; but with the supreme virtue that
they were ready to take their lives in their hands. Mazzini wished to
use them for his designs in Central Italy; but there were police
agents of the governments around them, who had their ear and sent them
with a handful of followers, including a man in the pay of the police,
to help an imaginary rising in Calabria. The English government, too,
had opened their correspondence with Mazzini, and put the government
at Naples on its guard. Thus they went, as they foreboded, to their
death. The trap was ready for them; and when they landed near Cosenza,
they were captured easily and shot.
The ignoble action of the English government brought Mazzini into
English political life. He suspected that his correspondence had been
tampered with in the post, and careful experiments proved to him that
his letters had been opened, sealed with new wafers, and the postmark
altered. He put the matter into the hands of Thomas Duncombe, the
member for Finsbury; and the storm of indignation, that followed
Duncombe's disclosures in the House of Commons, showed how angrily the
better English opinion felt it, that the government had violated
elementary ethics and "played the spy" in the interests of continental
tyranny. Shiel and Macaulay denounced it in parliament. Carlyle wrote
to the _Times_ that "it is a question vital to us that sealed letters
in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected
as things sacred; that opening of men's letters, a practice near of
kin to picking men's pockets, and to other still viler and far fataler
forms of scoundrelism, be not resorted to except in cases of very last
extremity." The government tried to ride out the storm with quibbles
and constructive falsehoods, which proved, as Mazzini said, that they
adopted different standards of honour for their public and their
private lives. Sir James Graham repeated the stale charge that Mazzini
had promoted assassination in France, and honourably withdrew it, when
he knew the facts. But public feeling was too heated to let the matter
rest there; and secret Committees of enquiry were appointed by both
Houses. They reported that letters had been constantly opened at the
Post-Office, at all events since 1806; that even letters of members of
parliament had been tampered with; that in this case the government
had issued a warrant to open Mazzini's letters (his letters had in
fact been opened several months before the date of the warrant), and
had sent information extracted from them to "a Foreign Power." It is
true that this information seems to have been of a general character,
but that did not affect the ignominy of the whole business or the fact
that an English government had sent a warning to the Bourbons, that
helped them to entrap the hapless patriots.
The incident gave Mazzini a welcome opportunity to appeal more
directly to English opinion on behalf of Italy. He had a supreme
contempt for English foreign policy, which "opposes everything that
introduces a new fact in the European polity, and is the first to
recognize it when it shows its strength." It was an unfair criticism,
at least of Canning and Palmerston, tied though the latter's hands
were by court and colleagues. England was still on the whole the
champion of the cause of men. But it was true that the Foreign Office
gave small attention to the great nationalist movements that were
maturing in Europe. The wise policy for England, as he urged, was to
encourage these movements, and win the gratitude of the rising
nationalities, not necessarily by armed intervention (he expressly
disclaimed asking for that), but by her moral backing. Perhaps it was
partly owing to the seeds he sowed at this time, that Palmerston
afterwards did for Italy so much of what he asked for. We may regret
that he never gave a generous recognition to the great Foreign
Secretary's policy.
On individual Englishmen and Americans he knew that he could count for
practical sympathy. He exploited well both the anti-Papal feeling in
the country and the old love of Italian liberty, which had descended
from the days of Byron and Hobhouse. English and American travellers
carried his secret letters and literature into Italy. He had plans
for utilizing the Christian Alliance, an American society for
Protestant propagandism. A year or two later he induced his English
women-friends to organize an Italian bazaar, which was held at Mrs
Milner-Gibson's, nominally for the expenses of his Italian school, but
with the secret intention of devoting any surplus from the Italian
contributions to a National Fund, which he was trying to raise for
political work. In the same year, 1847, he founded a People's
International League to resume the interrupted work of Young Europe,
but mainly with the object of enlisting sympathy for Italy. Stansfeld,
the Ashursts, Peter Taylor, W. Shaen, Thomas Cooper, Henry Vincent the
Chartist, W. J. Fox (the Unitarian orator, afterwards M.P. for
Oldham), served on the Committee. They used to meet once a week at Mr
W. J. Linton's house in Hatton Garden, and Mazzini "with those
wondrous eyes of his lit up with a power that was almost
overwhelming," infected them with his own enthusiasm and faith. Men
among them, like Thomas Cooper and Peter Taylor, who had denounced
physical force remedies in England, demurred at his gospel of
revolution. "You are right about your own country," he passionately
answered. "You have had your grand decisive struggle against tyrannous
power. You need no physical force. But what are my countrymen to do,
who are trodden down under the iron heel of a foreign tyranny? They
have no representation, they have no charters, they have no written
rights. They must fight."
The business of the League brought one of the very few occasions, on
which, so far as is known, he expressed his views on Ireland. Some
Repealers complained to the League that it had omitted Ireland in its
report from the list of the nationalities of the future; and Mazzini
was asked to draft an answer to them. His argument was addressed to
Separatists, but it would apply almost equally to Home Rulers; it
proves how radically he misunderstood the Irish movement, and he seems
to have felt himself on unsafe ground. He regarded the Irish demand as
at bottom one for better government only; and he had every sympathy
with their "just consciousness of human dignity, claiming its long
violated rights," their "wish to have rulers, educators, not masters,"
their protests against "legislation grounded on distrust and
hostility." But he believed that the nationalist movement was not
likely to be permanent, and he refused to see any elements of true
nationality in it, on the grounds that the Irish did not "plead for
any distinct principle of life or system of legislation, derived from
native peculiarities, and contrasting radically with English wants and
wishes," nor claimed for their country any "high special function" to
discharge in the interests of humanity. On which it may be noted that
the first objection shows Mazzini's ill-acquaintance with Irish life
and feeling, and that the second involves a condition, which, save in
his own theories, has not been asked of any nation.
* * * * *
In place of the enforced idleness of a few years before, he was now
only too busy. Political correspondence, literary work, the school,
the bazaar, visiting and being visited crowded on his time. He hardly
left London, except for two visits to France and one perhaps to
Italy, and once for a pilgrimage to Newstead Abbey and other places of
Byronic memory. He had left Chelsea, and moved first to Devonshire
Street, near the British Museum, and afterwards to Cropley Street,
near the New North Road. He was somewhat happier and more hopeful. His
active life left little time for the old broodings. The Post-Office
scandal had brought him new friends, and the desolation of his
solitude had gone. He joined the Whittington Club, largely for the
sake of playing chess, at which he was an adept and did not like being
beaten. He was much perturbed by a proposal to allow no chess on
Sundays, and jokingly threatens a rider that smoking too shall be
forbidden, except to those who undertake to sit silent for an hour in
religious contemplation, and that, as further penance for the members,
one of them shall "read twelve minutes every hour _alta voce e con
declamazione_ a parliamentary speech from Mr Plumpton or Sir Robert
Inglis or a chapter from the second volume of Tancred by D'Israeli."
But when back in his lodgings, he was often depressed and miserable
again. He was "giddy" with writing, worn down with work and want of
proper food and clothes; and for the first time he writes in bad
spirits about his physical condition. The burden of poverty and debt
still "dominated his life." He was now in receipt of a small allowance
from his mother, to find which she stinted herself of every luxury and
more. But he was generous as ever, and probably as bad a housekeeper;
and he found himself powerless to reduce the mountain of debt. His
literary earnings were again very small. The life of Foscolo was still
waiting to be begun, for he thought it better now "to supply new
materials for Italian history than make an inventory of the old." The
better-paying reviews no longer took his articles, and he was "writing
on Switzerland and heaven knows what for a petty Edinburgh magazine."
He fretted because the need of hack-work and his multifarious
occupations left little time for writings that would help the cause,
as they had helped it fifteen years ago. "For the wretched sum of some
8000 francs," he writes, "I am a slave; I am growing old in body, in
soul, in power, and I am not allowed to help my country and fulfil my
mission." And from causes that we can only guess at,--perhaps the
worry and publicity, perhaps the partial lifting of his unhappiness,
perhaps the loss of physical health,--there is a perceptible, though
slight decline from the moral height of a few years before. He is less
the apostle, more the politician, too fond of coming forward as the
practical man--a part that ill became him,--not always straightforward
in his utterances and methods, more reasonable, it is true, and
tolerant, but at the same time sliding into occasional reticences and
equivocation.
The result of the Bandiera episode was to leave Young Italy yet more
friendless than before. Its miserable mismanagement was set down to
Mazzini, unfairly on the whole; and cruel slanders charged him with
egging others to a desperate task, while he stayed safe behind. In
reality, he was more impatient than ever to lead a fight in Italy
"before he grew quite old." But he seems again to have recognized that
any fruitful action was impossible. All his efforts for the National
Fund brought in a poor £100. And he knew that he was losing his hold
on the middle classes, and must wait till he had formed a party among
the working men of the towns. The Rimini revolt of 1845, its poor
programme of local reform and silence on the bigger issues, proved
what influence the Moderate movement in its worst and weakest form had
even in those parts of Italy, from which he had hoped most. A year
later the Moderates leaped into overwhelming prominence with the
accession of Pio Nono to the Papacy. Here was a Pope, the Italians
fondly thought, eager to bless Liberals and Nationalists, while
Charles Albert in the North was threatening to bare his sword for war.
The mass of Italian Liberalism caught at their protection, and was
ready to pay the price. Some no doubt hoped to push on the King, till
he was "moral," if not actual "lord of Italy"; others dreamed that
circumstances might make Pius president of an Italian Republic. But
the majority willingly accepted the limitations of the policy, were
ready to safeguard the Temporal Power, to make Italian union no better
than a loose federation, to stop short at administrative reform or at
the most at middle-class constitutions.
Mazzini was very suspicious of the new development; jealous that the
nationalist movement had passed into other hands, that the credit of
it went to men like Gioberti, who had halted in their faith, while he
alone had held the banner high; sceptical of Charles Albert's and the
Pope's intentions; angry at the tentative, compromising ambitions of
the Moderates, at their repudiation of democracy, their trust in
diplomacy and its pretences and deceptions. He knew Charles Albert's
"rabbit-nature"; he judged Pio Nono much at his own estimate. "They
want," said the Pope, "to make a Napoleon of me, who am only a poor
country parson." "An honest parson but a bad prince," was Mazzini's
verdict. The triumph of the Moderates meant that Unity would be put
indefinitely back, and federalism inflict "perpetual impotence" on
Italy. But he saw the impossibility of standing out against the new
spirit. And he was prepared, as he had been in 1833 and again in 1844,
to waive his republican agitation, if the Moderates for their part
would abandon federalism and declare for unity. "If I thought," he
said, "that Charles Albert would rise to rare ambition and unite Italy
for his own behoof, I would say Amen." "Let the Moderates," he wrote,
"give us, if they like, a Pope, a single king, a dictator; we can
compromise on everything but federalism." And on these lines he was
working through 1847 to bring the exiles at Paris together on a common
programme of Unity, to which both monarchists and republicans could
rally.
It was in this spirit that in September of the same year he wrote his
famous letter to the Pope. As with the parallel letter to Charles
Albert, he was anxious afterwards to explain away in part its implied
belief in the Pope's patriotism and its anxiety to see him leader of
the Italian movement. But his private letters of the time would seem
to show that this was an afterthought, and that he was sincerer than
he gave himself credit for. In one of them, written apparently just
before the letter to Pius, he says in somewhat Carlylean style, "I
consider this as the last agony of popedom authority. And in my own
way of feeling I would not be sorry to see a great institution dying,
for once, in a noble manner; transmitting the watchword of the future
before vanishing, rather than sinking into the Crockford or Tuileries
mud of the English aristocracy and French monarchy. A moral power,
like a great man, ought always to die so; uttering the words of dying
Goethe, 'let more light in.'" In another letter, written in the same
month, he says that he wrote to the Pope "in a moment of expansiveness
and juvenile illusion," as he would have written to his friend
himself. He was excited and sanguine at the great European drama, that
was developing so fast. He still probably had moments, when the old
faith in men broke through his later suspicion and exclusiveness. He
was ever looking for a new religion to issue forth from Rome,[15] and
for the moment dreamed that a nationalist Pope might be its herald.
His appeal, however, was ludicrous in its miscalculation of the facts.
"Be a believer," he said to Pius, "and unite Italy." He told him that
he, the foremost man of the moment in Europe, had duties of
corresponding magnitude. He could guide Italy to her appointed future,
make of her one great state, based on the people and justice and
religion, with "a government unique in Europe, which would end the
absurd divorce between the spiritual and temporal powers." If
Catholicism were capable of revival, he under God might be the
instrument; if it were destined to give place to a new creed, based on
the same Christian principles, he could be the leader, who would guide
the Church securely through its passage. One can imagine the horror
with which Pius read the part so tactlessly suggested to him; and we
know that the only result of the letter was to thoroughly alarm him.
In fact Mazzini's fits of belief in Pope or King were very transitory.
Only five months before he had written in an open letter, that he "did
not believe that from prince or king or pope Italy would now or ever
find salvation." His mind was in a state of flux, wavering between his
old simple, but for the time impracticable, creed and some compromise
with the new order. It would read him wrongly, if we charged him with
downright insincerity; but his whole conduct through this period is a
disingenuous one, too subordinate to unavowed intentions, too much
akin to that "substitution of Macchiavelli for Dante," which he
condemned so unsparingly in the Moderates. While professedly ready to
work with the monarchical nationalists, while abstaining from any
active republican agitation, he was encouraging republican beliefs,
anxious even to keep something together of a republican organization,
that when "the Moderate farce was hissed off the stage," the
republicans would be again in a position to captain the nationalist
cause and lead it to their own goal. He wants to spread the literature
of Young Italy broadcast. He urges that his followers, while nominally
joining the Moderate ranks and "shouting for Pio Nono louder than the
rest," should quietly prepare to seize the movement for themselves. At
the same time, outside Italy they were to depreciate the Pope with
equal vehemency, that when the inevitable disillusioning in Pius came,
they could put in a claim to foresight. Apart from this underhand
diplomacy, his hesitation was largely justified. He had no security
that the Moderates would accept the offered compromise or declare for
Unity. And he feared that the enthusiasm of the masses might
evaporate in noisy demonstrations, that reform would prove an opiate
to lull the nationalist impulses to sleep again. Towards the end of
1847 his chief anxiety, as Cavour's was for different reasons twelve
years later, was to irritate Austria into taking the offensive, and
force the Italians to fight for independence. He was confident that
she would intervene. Sometimes he hoped that the popular pressure
behind would force Charles Albert to head the national defence; at
other moments he welcomed the thought that the native governments
would decline the challenge, and Young Italy be left alone to lead the
war.
For once he underrated the strength of the nationalist feeling. The
new year opened with revolutions in dramatic sequence. Its first day
saw the Tobacco Riots at Milan,--the overture to the maturing Lombard
rising. Two days later the social revolution mildly reared its head at
Leghorn, and Mazzini's old collaborator, Guerrazzi, was master for a
few days of the insurgent city. In another fortnight Sicily, with one
great effort, threw off the Bourbon yoke; and before the month was
out, the Neapolitans had forced a constitution on King Ferdinand. In
the first half of February Tuscany and Piedmont had their
constitutions too; in a few days more the Second Republic was
proclaimed in France, and the face of European politics was changed.
Pio Nono, ever more fearful of liberalism, but carried helplessly
along, gave the Romans a constitution; and, save in the Austrian
provinces and dependant Duchies, all Italy had won its liberties. War
with Austria was now only a question of weeks, and the nation waited
breathlessly till the signal came from Milan or Turin. Charles Albert
was still the "Wobbling King," drifting towards war, thirsting for
national applause and revenge on Austria, but timorous of the
democratic forces that pushed on behind, dreading republican France as
much as the real enemy across the Ticino.
While he paused, the great uprisi
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