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Builders of United Italy

by Rupert Sargent Holland · English · Gutenberg #43607 · 480,687 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Builders of United Italy

Author: Rupert Sargent Holland


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BUILDERS OF UNITED ITALY ***

[Illustration: VICTOR EMMANUEL]




                              BUILDERS OF
                              UNITED ITALY


                                   BY
                         RUPERT SARGENT HOLLAND


                          WITH EIGHT PORTRAITS


                    [Illustration printer's imprint]


                                NEW YORK
                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
                                  1908




                            Copyright, 1908,
                                   BY
                         HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

                        Published, August, 1908


                      THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
                             RAHWAY, N. J.




                                  _To
                          That Spirit of Italy
                    Which Calls to Men in All Lands
                       Like the Charmed Voice of
                           Their Own History_




There is no history more alternately desperate and hopeful than that of
the scattered Italian states in their efforts to form a united nation.
Many forces fuse in the progress of such a popular movement, and each
force has its own particular spokesman or leader. The prophet and the
soldier, the poet and the statesman, each gives his share of genius.
Those men who seemed to represent the most potent forces in this history
are included here.




CONTENTS


                                       PAGE

  ALFIERI, THE POET                       1

  MANZONI, THE MAN OF LETTERS            40

  GIOBERTI, THE PHILOSOPHER              63

  MANIN, THE "FATHER OF VENICE"          87

  MAZZINI, THE PROPHET                  125

  CAVOUR, THE STATESMAN                 165

  GARIBALDI, THE CRUSADER               223

  VICTOR EMMANUEL, THE KING             283




[Illustration: ALFIERI]




ALFIERI, THE POET


Alfieri was more than a great poet, he was the discoverer of a
new national life in the scattered states of Italy. Putting aside
consideration of his tragedies as literature, no student of the
eighteenth century can fail to appreciate his influence over Italian
thought. It was as though a people who had forgotten their nationality
suddenly heard anew the stories of their common folk-lore. The race of
Dante, of Petrarch, and of Tasso spoke again in the words of Alfieri.

It was high time that disunited Italy should find a poet's voice. There
was no vigor, no resolution, no originality from Turin to Naples, people
of all classes were sunk in apathy. No wonder that foreign lovers of
mediæval Italy turned their eyes away from the seats of so much former
glory; there seemed little hope in a people given over to trivial
personal enjoyment. There was no liberty of speech or action--sentiment,
reason, passion were all measured by the grand-ducal yard-stick.

At about the middle of this artificial eighteenth century, in 1749,
Vittorio Alfieri was born at Asti, in Piedmont. His parents were of the
upper rank in the close social order of the small kingdom, his father
Antonio Alfieri, a man of independent means, who, as one biographer
has it, "had never soiled his mind with ambition or his hands with
labor." His mother was the widow of the Marquis of Cacherano, and had
two daughters and a son before she married Antonio Alfieri. After the
latter's death, which occurred when Vittorio was scarcely a year old,
she married again, and it was this stepfather, the Chevalier Giacinto
Alfieri di Magliano, who stood in place of father to Vittorio and his
sister, as well as to their older half-brother and sisters. Although
these other children were near his own age the boy Vittorio seems to
have passed a lonely childhood, driven into unusual solitude by the
waywardness of his nature.

While still a child, Alfieri was sent away to the Academy of Turin, the
first of those journeys in which he was later to take such delight.
He cared little for books or study of any sort, he was over-critical,
and yet without the ambition to perfect himself. He spent his time, as
he says, in his famous memoirs, in acquiring a profound ignorance of
whatever he was meant to learn; and he left the Academy not only with
no knowledge of what were termed the humanities, but with no interest
in any language, speaking a mixed jargon of French and Piedmontese,
and reading practically nothing. Knowledge was held in small esteem by
all classes at that particular time, and the priests, who formed the
teaching class, were at small pains to spread a zeal for learning which
they did not share. Alfieri says, "We translated the Lives of Cornelius
Nepos; but none of us, perhaps not even the masters, knew who these men
were whose lives we translated, nor where was their country, nor in what
times they lived, nor under what government, nor what any government
was!"

In spite of the extraordinary incapacity of his teachers, Alfieri did
succeed in learning something, although he was always at great pains to
decry his early education. He learned sufficient Latin to translate the
Georgics of Virgil into his Italian dialect, and he was fond of reading
Goldoni and Metastasio. A little later he passed into a more advanced
grade, where he met many foreign youths who had been sent to Turin to
study, and where he was allowed some liberty in choosing his own course.
He found as much fault with these new conditions as with the old. "The
reading of many French romances," he says, "the constant association
with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or
to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched
Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of
burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric." In place of it
he learned and read much French, then the language of polite society.

In such aimless desultory fashion Alfieri passed his boyhood. He hated
all restraint, and was continually getting into difficulties with the
officers of the Academy. He had more money than was good for him, and
spent it in the wildest extravagances whenever the opportunity offered.
He bade fair to become a more or less typical member of the Piedmont
nobility, perhaps a little more of a free-thinker than most, and
considerably more restive. He chafed at the lack of freedom allowed him
at the Academy, and on the marriage of his sister to the Count Giacinto
Cumiana besought her and the Count to use their influence to have his
scholar's bonds loosened. They succeeded, and Alfieri promptly took
advantage of his liberty to join in all the dissipations of the capital,
and to gratify his passion for riding. In about a year he became the
owner of a stable of eight horses. When his older friends cautioned the
boy against his extravagance he answered that he was his own master and
intended to do as he chose.

While still at the Academy the youth had sought a position in the
army, but very short service as ensign in a militia regiment proved to
him that he was as little fond of military restraint as of scholastic.
He traveled to Genoa with two boy friends and fell in love with their
sister-in-law, a vivacious brunette. He worshiped her from a distance,
becoming, as he writes in his ardent Italian, "a victim to all the
feelings which Petrarch has so inimitably depicted ... feelings which
few can comprehend, and which fewer still ever experienced." On his
return from Genoa he considered himself a great traveler, and spoke as
such, only to be laughed at by the English, French, and German boys who
had been his classmates. Immediately he was seized with a passion for
travel. He was only seventeen years old, and knew that he would not be
permitted to travel alone. Fortunately an English teacher was about to
set out with two scholars on a journey through Italy, and was willing to
have Alfieri join his party. So strict was the court of that day that
the King's consent had to be obtained before the youth could leave the
country. Through his brother-in-law's influence Alfieri obtained the
royal permission to go abroad.

The travels had been looked forward to with the greatest excitement.
When they were begun Alfieri professed himself utterly bored by almost
everything he saw. As one of his biographers says, "He was driven
from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned,
after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He
gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that
can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness." Whether
this desire to surprise his readers is really the keynote of the first
years in his memoirs or not, it would appear that the youth was about
as restless and turbulent-minded a creature as could be met with.
The further he traveled in Italy the less he liked it; he would not
speak the language or read the literature, he looked at an autograph
manuscript of Petrarch with supreme indifference, and wished to be
mistaken for a Frenchman. Yet this boy was to become, in time, the real
reviver of Italian letters.

After a fortnight in Milan the party traveled to Florence by way of
Parma, Modena, and Bologna. Neither people, buildings, views, pictures,
nor sculpture interested Vittorio; he no sooner reached a city than he
was eager to be posting on. Even Florence, later to be his home, did not
attract him; the only object he found to admire in the city was Michael
Angelo's tomb at Santa Croce. He must have been the worst traveling
companion possible; he hurried his friends from Florence to Rome, and
finding nothing there to interest him except St. Peter's, went on to
Naples. Naples was in the midst of a carnival, and Alfieri plunged into
its extravagances as though to distract his thoughts from some brooding
melancholy. He was presented to the King, went to all the balls and
operas, rode, gamed, made one of the fastest set, and yet in the midst
of it all was discontented. He wanted to be alone, and finally applied
to the King of Piedmont through his minister at Naples for permission
to travel by himself. His request was granted, and at nineteen he set
out to make what was then the fashionable grand tour. He traveled in
state, with plenty of money, and a body servant, and with letters of
introduction to the various courts.

It so happened that Alfieri had met certain French actors during a
summer holiday, and from talking with them he felt a desire to see
something of the French stage. He had no wish to try his own skill
at dramatic compositions--indeed his only thought of an occupation
at this time was that he should some day enter the diplomatic
service--but he was anxious to see something different from the
absurdly conventional Italian plays produced by the school which took
its name from Metastasio. He went first to Marseilles, where he spent
his time between the theater and solitary musing on the seashore.
Thence, after a short stay, he journeyed to Paris, full of the keenest
anticipations of finding pleasure in that famous city. His memoirs tell
us his feelings there. He writes: "The mean and wretched buildings, the
contemptible ostentation displayed in a few houses dignified with the
pompous appellation of hotels and palaces, the filthiness of the Gothic
churches, the truly vandal-like construction of the public theaters at
that time, besides innumerable other disagreeable objects, of which not
the least disgusting to me was the painted countenances of many very
ugly women, far outweighed in my mind the beauty and elegance of the
public walks and gardens, the infinite variety of the carriages, the
lofty façade of the Louvre, as well as the number of spectacles and
entertainments of every kind." Verily the young Alfieri was either the
hardest of all travelers to suit, or the older man, looking back, wished
to emphasize the perverseness of his youth.

The Piedmontese Minister presented the young traveler to Louis XV.,
concerning whom Alfieri wrote, "He received with a cold and supercilious
air those who were presented to him, surveying them from head to foot.
It seemed as if on presenting a dwarf to a giant he should view him
smiling, or perhaps say, 'Ah! the little animal!' or if he remained
silent his air and manner would express the same derision." He was
not at all attracted by the French court, which he considered very
pompous, and was anxious to be out on the highroads again, driving his
post-horses. In January, 1768, he crossed the channel and landed at
Dover.

England delighted him, he found London far more to his taste than Paris,
he was charmed with the country, the large estates, the inns, the roads,
the horses, the people, all pleased him. He was particularly struck
with the absence of poverty. For a time he even thought of settling
there permanently, and years afterwards when he had seen much of all
the European countries he said that Italy and England were the two he
infinitely preferred as residences.

But of the pleasures of London's fashionable life the young wanderer
soon tired, and for variety turned coachman, and drove a friend with
whom he was staying through all the city streets, leaving him wherever
he wished, and waiting patiently on the box for his return. "My
amusements through the course of the winter," he wrote, "consisted in
being on horseback during five or six hours every morning, and in being
seated on the coach-box for two or three hours every evening, whatever
might be the state of the weather." His tastes at this time were
closely akin to those of many of his English friends.

Finally he left London and went to Holland. There he met Don Joseph
d'Acunha, the Portuguese Ambassador, a man of considerable literary
taste, who induced him to read Machiavelli, and first led him to think
of trying his literary skill. At The Hague he also fell deeply in love,
and, quite according to the fashionable custom of the time, with a young
married woman. For the moment his fits of morbidness and continual
unrest left him, he contrived constantly to be with the woman he loved,
and even followed her and her husband to Spa. A short time afterwards
the husband started for Switzerland, and the young wife returned to The
Hague. For ten days Alfieri was constantly in her society, then came
a message from her husband bidding her follow him. She wrote Alfieri
a note saying farewell and sent it to him through D'Acunha after she
had left the city. The youth was prostrated and with the violence of
his nature planned to kill himself. He complained of illness and had
himself bled. When he was alone he tore off the bandages with the idea
of bleeding to death. His faithful valet, however, knew the peculiar
nature of his master, and entered Alfieri's room. The bandages were
replaced, and the incident ended, although it was long before the young
man could recover from the parting with his fair lady. He passed through
Belgium to Switzerland, and so on back to Piedmont, still wrapped in
recollections, and unable to awaken any lasting interest.

Living with his sister, first in the country, and later in Turin, a
short term of peace succeeded in Alfieri's life. He set himself to
reading, and studied with considerable care the popular French authors,
Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Plutarch, however, became his chief
companion. In one of the most characteristic pages of his memoirs we
find him writing, "The book of all others which gave me most delight and
beguiled many of the tedious hours of winter, was Plutarch. I perused
five or six times the lives of Timoleon, Cæsar, Brutus, Pelopidas, and
some others. I wept, raved, and fell into such a transport of fury, that
if any one had been in the adjoining chamber they must have pronounced
me out of my senses. Every time I came to any of the great actions of
those celebrated individuals, my agitation was so extreme that I could
not remain seated. I was like one beside himself, and shed tears of
mingled grief and rage at having been born in Piedmont and at a period
and under a government where it was impossible to conceive or execute
any great design." Plutarch first set before him vividly the contrast
between the Italy of the past and of his own day. As a result he became
dissatisfied with his own inability to win any high distinction.

The winter of his twentieth year found Alfieri still without any
definite plans, now studying astronomy, now considering a diplomatic
career. With spring he determined again to travel, and in May set
off for Vienna. The spirit of unrest had given place to a brooding
melancholy. In this sense of the times being out of joint and himself
without work to do was born the gradual desire to write something
different from and in a more heroic strain than the rigorously
conservative dramas of the day. He traveled with Montaigne's Essays in
his pockets, and Montaigne, he says, first taught him to think. He still
found difficulty in reading Italian and much preferred foreign authors
to those of his own land.

In Vienna Alfieri had a chance to meet the most eminent of then living
Italian authors, a man much admired in his generation. The opportunity
he declined. "I had seen Metastasio," he says, "in the gardens of
Schönbrunn, perform the customary genuflection to Maria Theresa in such
a servile and adulatory manner, that I, who had my head stuffed with
Plutarch, and who embellished every theory, could not think of binding
myself, either by the ties of familiarity or friendship, with a poet
who had sold himself to a despotism which I so cordially detested."
In Berlin he was presented to Frederick the Great, and as he writes
"mentally thanked Heaven I was not born his slave. Towards the middle of
November I departed from this Prussian encampment, which I regarded with
detestation and horror."

From Berlin the young man went to Denmark, thence to Sweden, thence to
Russia. He says, "I approached Petersburg with a mind wound up to an
extraordinary pitch of anxiety and expectation. But alas! no sooner had
I reached this Asiatic assemblage of wooden huts, than Rome, Genoa,
Venice, and Florence rose to my recollections, and I could not refrain
from laughing. What I afterwards saw of this country tended still more
strongly to confirm my first impression that it merited not to be seen.
Everything but their beards and their horses disgusted me so much, that
during the six weeks I remained among these savages I wished not to
become acquainted with any one, nor even to see the two or three youths
with whom I had associated at Turin, and who were descended from the
first families of the country. I took no measure to be presented to
the celebrated Autocratrix Catherine II., nor did I even behold the
countenance of a sovereign who in our days has out-stripped fame."

A little later he was back in England, and now again he fell in
love, this time also with a married woman of rank. With a truly
Byronic audacity he defied all the conventions, accompanied the woman
everywhere, and became a subject of town scandal. Finally confronted by
the husband, he fought a duel with swords in a field near St. James's
Park, his left arm being in a sling at the time as the result of a
bit of too daring horsemanship. Alfieri was slightly wounded, and the
husband declared himself satisfied. Shortly after the latter sued for
divorce, bringing the Italian's name into the case. The newspapers took
up the scandal, and the matter became a cause celèbre. Alfieri was on
the point of proposing marriage, when the woman, by her own confessions,
told him that such a result was impossible. With his ardor completely
cooled and his mind given to the bitterest thoughts he left London, and
after short stays in The Hague and Paris journeyed into Spain.

In Paris he had bought the best known Italian authors and at this time
commenced to read them, although it was not until much later that he
began to appreciate them at their real worth. He did, however, carry
them with him on his travels, and gradually learned something at first
hand of that great galaxy, Dante, Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio,
and Machiavelli. His mind was not yet ripe for any study, even as he
traveled in Spain he was still subject to those wild outbreaks of
despondency and passion which alternately seemed to seize upon him.
He became a creature of chance whims, now he was ready to yield to
the quiet contentment of a suitable marriage, now burning with rage
against all the customs of society. Morbid ideas continually pressed his
footsteps. The atmosphere of a malevolent passion seems almost always
surrounding the great tragedies he later penned, and that atmosphere was
generated by a nature which from earliest youth had been extraordinarily
violent. His temper was wholly ungovernable. One evening in Madrid, as
Alfieri's faithful valet, the companion of all his travels, was curling
his hair, he accidentally pulled it so sharply with the tongs that
Alfieri winced. Instantly he sprang from his chair, and seizing a heavy
candlestick, hurled it at the servant. It struck the man on the temple,
and instantly his face was covered with blood. He rushed at his master,
but fortunately a young Spaniard who was present came to the rescue,
and separated them. Immediately Alfieri was covered with shame. "Had
you killed me," he said to the man, "you would have acted rightly. If
you wish, kill me while I sleep to-night, for I deserve it." The valet
took no such reprisal, he had been with his young master long enough to
understand the sudden outbursts of his temper, and was content to keep
the two blood-stained handkerchiefs that had bandaged his head and show
them occasionally to Alfieri as a reminder.

In Lisbon the traveler formed a close friendship with the Abbot of
Caluso, whom he called a "true, living Montaigne." The Abbot tried to
interest the young man in literature, induced him to write some verses,
and gave him the benefit of his criticism. For a short time the interest
in poetry lasted, then it flagged, and again Alfieri felt himself
without any purpose. He decided to return home, and in May, 1772,
arrived at Turin.

Now he took a house for himself, furnished it elaborately, and made
it the headquarters of a youthful society that sought amusement in
various forms. Some of them wrote, and Alfieri tried his pen for their
amusement, but soon tired of writing as a sport, and gave himself up
to other occupations. Continually searching for something to still
his restlessness he again fell in love, this time with a woman of
rank, some ten years his senior, and of a most unenviable reputation.
He became absolutely her slave, worked himself into frenzies on her
account, would consider nothing but the happiness of being with her. He
fell very ill, but when he recovered found himself as much in love as
ever. For two years he lived in this state of obsession, tormented by
self-reproach, but unable to rid himself of his own yoke.

Finally he decided to quit Turin and break his fetters. When he was
only a short distance on the road to Rome his resolution failed and
he returned. Again he resolved to leave the city for a year. The year
lasted eight days. He was thoroughly ashamed, disliked being seen in
Turin, but could not keep away. He felt finally that he must take
one last stand or lose all self-respect and control forever. He had
his hair cut so short that he dared not appear in society, and shut
himself into his house to read. He could not keep his thoughts on the
books, and tried composition. He wrote a sonnet, and sent it to a
friend, and received a reply highly praising it. Then he remembered
that a year before as he sat watching by the sick bed of the woman who
had so charmed him he had lightly outlined a tragedy on the life of
Cleopatra, taking his subject from tapestries that hung in the room.
He threw himself into the work of writing that tragedy now, and found
that interest in it drove all other thoughts away. He wrote rapidly,
continually, only stopping when he was completely tired. When those
times came, still frightened with the possibility of leaving the house,
he had himself tied into a chair. He only allowed himself freedom when
he knew he had won self-control. By that time he had finished his
tragedy in blank verse called "Cleopatra," and a short farce called "The
Poets," the latter ridiculing the former. He sent them to a theater in
Turin, where they were produced on June 16, 1775, and met with success.
The author did not value either play highly himself, and sought to have
them withdrawn. He wrote later, comparing these works with those of his
contemporaries, "The sole difference which existed between their pieces
and mine was that the former were productions of learned incapacity,
whereas mine was the premature offspring of ignorance, which promised
one day to become something."

His battle against what he considered a highly unworthy infatuation had
restored Alfieri's self-respect and health, and out of this curious
struggle sprang his first real and lasting ambition. "A devouring fire
took possession of my soul," he says, "I thirsted one day to become
a deserving candidate for theatrical fame." The date of that first
performance marked a turning point, not only for Alfieri, but for his
country's literature. It was, said the Italian critic, Paravia, "a day
and a year of eternal memory not only for the Turinese, but for all
Italians; because it was, so to speak, the dawn of the magnificent day
which, thanks to Alfieri, was to rise upon Italian tragedy."

The restless energy which had driven Alfieri across the various European
countries now concentrated in an all-pervading determination to become
a tragic poet. He launched into that effort with the same unbounded
ardor with which he had so frequently before launched into love. He
was twenty-seven years of age when he seriously set himself to work to
acquire command of Italian so that he might think in the language of his
native land rather than in that of France. He described his resources
as "a resolute, obstinate, and ungovernable character, susceptible of
the warmest affections, among which, by an odd kind of a combination,
predominated the most ardent love, and hatred approaching to madness
against every species of tyranny; an imperfect and vague recollection
of several French tragedies which I had seen represented several years
before, but which I had then neither read nor studied; a total ignorance
of dramatic rules, and an incapability of expressing myself with
elegance and precision in my own language."

To accomplish his purpose Alfieri now began at the very beginning and
took up the study of Italian grammar, and thence made a first-hand
acquaintance with all the best of the early Italian writers. He would
not allow himself any longer to read French, and tried to break himself
of the habit of thinking in that tongue. He moved from town into a small
country village in order that nothing might distract him. There he
re-wrote for the third time his tragedy of "Cleopatra," and practised
turning into Italian verses the outlines of two tragedies which he had
recently written in French. He pored over Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, and
Dante until he felt that he at last really caught the full spirit of
each author's style, then he tried writing poetry of his own.

His ignorance of Latin continually vexed him, and now he employed a
teacher to begin over those lessons he had so thoroughly disliked at
school. It was very hard work at first, but he would learn what he now
considered essential to his purpose, and after three months' study of
Horace he found that he could read Latin. He took up the other classics
and translated some of them into modern Italian for practice in their
varied styles.

Turin was too near France to satisfy his new passion for only the purest
Italian and so he went to Pisa, and thence to Florence. In the latter
city he found that his ideas were at last shaping themselves in the
rich and clear Italian he was seeking, he wrote verses which critical
friends pronounced at last worthy of the name of poetry, and planned
several poetic tragedies. He had worked hard and felt that he needed a
little rest. For this purpose he returned to Turin and had the pleasure
of entertaining his old friend the Abbot of Caluso there. He, as well as
other friends, urged Alfieri to make literature his field. He decided
that it was best for him to live in Tuscany, and as he hated to have
to ask royal permission each year to allow him to remain away from
Piedmont--as was the custom with the nobility--he gave his estates at
Asti to his sister, and contented himself with half his former income.
Then he moved to Florence, which, except for intervals spent at Rome and
Naples, was for a considerable time to be his home.

On his way to Florence Alfieri was obliged to stop at Sarzana, where
he chanced upon a copy of Livy, and was so impressed with the story
of Virginia and Icilius that he immediately planned a tragedy on the
subject. Soon after he reached Pisa, but there he did not dare stay,
fearful that he might be involved in a marriage with a young girl whom
he had met there before and with whom he says that he had almost fallen
in love. He himself contrasts his feelings at that time with those he
had entertained when he had first thought of marriage. "Eight years
afterwards, my travels through Europe, the love of glory, a passion for
study, the necessity for preserving my freedom, in order to speak and
write the truth without restraint--all these reasons powerfully warned
me that under a despotic government it is sufficiently difficult even to
live single, and that no one who reflects deeply will either become a
husband or a father; thus I crossed the Arno and arrived at Siena."

In Siena he met a company of strongly intellectual people, and from one
of these, a friend who became a close confidant, he gained the idea of
writing a tragedy founded upon the conspiracy of the Pazzi. Here he also
wrote the first two books of an essay upon Tyranny, which was printed
several years later. Thoroughly absorbed in his literary work Alfieri
moved to Florence at the beginning of the winter, and took up his
residence there.

At that time there were living in Florence, under the titles of Count
and Countess of Albany, Charles Edward, "the Young Pretender" to the
English throne, and his wife. The latter, who had been Louisa, Princess
of Stolbergh, had been married when nineteen to the Stuart prince, who
was considerably her elder. Charles Edward had an unsavory reputation
and knew more drunk than sober moments. As a result the young Countess,
who was very beautiful and extremely fond of the fine arts and of
society, was the object of much romantic pity. When Alfieri came to
Florence he found the entire city at the feet of the Countess. Every
one condemned the Count's quarrelsome, tyrannical, libertine nature,
every one praised the Countess's sweet and sunny disposition. Friends
offered to introduce Alfieri to the star of Florence, but he declined
on the ground that he always shunned women who were the most beautiful
and most admired. He could not avoid, however, seeing her in the park
and at the theater, and the first sight of her was destined never to be
effaced. Thus he writes of her: "The first impression she made on me
was infinitely agreeable. Large black eyes full of fire and gentleness,
joined to a fair complexion and flaxen hair, gave to her beauty a
brilliancy difficult to withstand. Twenty-five years of age, possessing
a taste for letters and the fine arts, an amiable character, an immense
fortune, and placed in domestic circumstances of a very painful nature,
how was it possible to escape where so many reasons existed for loving?"

De Stendhal gives an account of their first meeting, which if inaccurate
(it does not appear in Alfieri's memoirs) is at least characteristic of
the man. According to this story Alfieri was presented to the Countess
in one of the galleries of Florence, and noticed at the time that the
lady was much interested in a portrait on the walls of Charles XII. She
told the poet that she admired the costume exceedingly. Two days later
Alfieri appeared in Florence dressed exactly like the portrait of the
Swedish King, and so presented himself before the Countess. The act was
quite in keeping with the poet's nature.

Alfieri made a determined effort to fight against the passion he had
cause to fear, and made a hurried journey to Rome. He could not stay
there, and returned to Florence, stopping at Siena to see his friend
Gandellini, to whom he spoke of the Countess, and who did not counsel
him against giving way to the fascination.

On his return to Florence he acknowledged that he was deeply in love.
This love, however, he felt ennobled him, and instead of causing him
to give up his work, continually inspired him to new literary heights.
He wrote, "I soon perceived that the object of my present attachment,
far from impeding my progress in the pursuit of useful knowledge, or
deranging my studies, like the frivolous woman with whom I was formerly
enamoured, urged me on by her example to everything dignified and
praiseworthy. Having once learned to know and appreciate so rare and
valuable a friend, I yielded myself up entirely to her influence." From
the commencement of this new affection, the best and most lasting of his
life, date the finest works of his genius.

There had been long delays in settling Alfieri's estate in Piedmont,
and arranging that he might live in Tuscany, but the presence of the
Countess urged him imperatively to remain in Florence. When the business
arrangements were finally at an end he found it would be necessary
for him to curtail his former expensive style of living. This he did,
giving up his horses, all his servants, except a valet and cook, and
most of his personal luxuries. Books were the only expense he indulged
in, he acquired gradually a very large and choice library. He took a
small house, and devoted himself to his dramas, seeing as much as he
could in leisure moments of the beautiful Countess. During these three
quiet years he wrote his tragedies "Virginia," "Agemennone," "Don
Garzia," "Maria Stuarda," and "Oreste," a poem on the death of Duke
Alexander, killed by Lorenzino de' Medici, had rewritten his drama of
"Filippo," and partly prepared the tragedies "Timoleone," "Ottavia,"
and "Rosmunda." All of these works are built on the classic Grecian
model, and flame with hatred of tyranny, and burn with civic virtue.
In that they show their kinship to the author's times. De Sanctis,
always a brilliant critic, says: "The situations that Alfieri has chosen
in his tragedies have a visible relation to the social state, to the
fears, and to the hopes of his own time. It is always resistance to
oppression, of man against man, of people against tyrant.... In the
classicism of Alfieri there is no positive side. It is an ideal Rome and
Greece, outside of time and space, floating in the vague ... which his
contemporaries filled up with their own life."

At about the end of the dramatist's third year of residence in Florence,
the ill-treatment of the Countess of Albany by her husband caused her
friends, and chief among them Alfieri, to plan for her release from such
servitude. To this end they secured her entrance first into a convent at
Florence, and then, with the consent of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and
the Count's own brother the Cardinal of York, her removal to Rome. So
afraid were her friends lest the Count should effect a rescue that they
surrounded her carriage with a body of horsemen as she left Florence,
and Alfieri rode on the coach box until she was well on her road.

While the Countess had been in Florence, Alfieri had worked assiduously
there; now that she was gone he found composition impossible, and after
a very short interval went to Naples, planning to wait there until
he should learn what the Countess would do. It was not long before
it became apparent that the courts of Europe had taken up the wife's
cause against her husband. The Pope gave her a pension and approved of
her taking apartments in the house of her brother-in-law. The court of
France gave her the pension which the Count had previously indignantly
declined as being insufficient for his position. Alfieri learned at last
that the Countess was living in entire independence of her husband, and
after a further stay of a month in Naples in order to avoid possible
scandal he moved to Rome, and took up his residence there.

With this new settled existence he began to write again, and produced
at this time "Saul," his fourteenth tragedy, and one of his finest
works. He took infinite pains with all his dramas, planned them again
and again, wrote version after version, and then selected the forms he
preferred after careful judgment, polished them line by line and word
by word until he was satisfied. He wished to try the effect of his
characters upon an audience, and had himself acted, together with some
of his friends, his play of "Antigone." He found he had not mistaken his
ability as a dramatist. At about the same time he published part of his
works, sending four dramas to the printer. Their publication excited
immediate and flattering attention. His life in Rome was the most
delightful he had yet known. His house was a pleasant villa near the
Baths of Diocletian. Here he wrote and studied in the morning. Later in
the day he went for long rides through the neighboring country, and the
evenings he spent with the woman who had become his chief inspiration.

In time, however, the poet's visits to the Countess became the subject
of unfavorable comment, and the Cardinal, her brother-in-law, brought
the matter to the attention of the Papal Court. Realizing the delicacy
of the situation, Alfieri reluctantly decided that he must quit Rome,
and in May, 1783, he set out again as a wanderer, his ambition lost, his
life offering him no further interests.

As in early youth he now took to rapid traveling for solace, carrying on
at the same time a continual correspondence with the Countess. He wrote
a few sonnets, but found that his mind was too unsettled to allow him
to engage in any more lengthy labors. He went to France, and then to
England, and in each country visited scenes which the impetuosity of his
youth had neglected. Horses again made their appeal to him in London,
and he bought fourteen, "as many horses as he had written tragedies,"
he states. With these horses he soon returned to Turin, and made a short
visit to his mother, whom he had not seen for a long time. When he left
her he went to Piacenza, and here he heard that the Countess had at last
been released from the restraint under which she had lived at Rome, and
that as her health was delicate she had gone to Baden. He was in two
minds as to his course, the thought of possible calumny to her bade him
refrain from going to Baden at once, and he tried to content himself
in Siena with his old friend Gandellini. The continual interchange of
letters gradually wore away his resolution, and at last the time came
when he could keep from her no longer. August 4, 1784, he set out to
join her and within a fortnight felt his old joy return. Immediately his
thoughts grew fertile, he began to write again as he had not done since
he had quitted her in Rome. There was no question but that her presence
acted as a continual inspiration to his genius.

To this period of new happiness belonged the dramas of "Agide,"
"Sofonisba," and "Mirra." The plot of the latter came to him as he was
reading the speech of Mirra to her nurse in the "Metamorphoses" of Ovid,
and was written in the first heat of his emotion at the woman's words.
He was somewhat in doubt as to the success of a play written on such
a subject, but it was hailed as a triumph at its first presentation
some years later, and made a remarkable impression on Byron and on
Madame de Staël, and was considered by most critics as Ristori's finest
impersonation.

After two months the Countess had to return to Italy, and Alfieri's
gloom at the separation was further increased by the news of the death
of his friend Gandellini. He went to Siena, but found that city lonely
without his friend, and passed the winter in Pisa. He did a great amount
of reading, repolished his later dramas, and prepared new volumes of
them for the press. When winter ended he spent another two months of
summer with the Countess at Colmar, and then again they separated. This
time he resolved to work unremittingly, and did so until his health
failed and he had to rest. At about the same time the Countess decided
to leave Italy permanently, and at length Alfieri, towards the close of
1786, joined her and went with her to Paris. He writes in his memoirs
of this journey into France, "This country which had always proved
extremely disagreeable to me, as much on account of my own character,
as the manners of the people, now appeared a perfect elysium." There
are many glimpses to be had of this new life in the French capital.
Montanari recounts how the Marquis Pindemonte, himself a dramatist,
used each evening to take an omelette soufflé in the Countess's room,
while Alfieri sat in the chimney corner sipping his chocolate. Under
such peaceful auspices the poet spent many months in a critical
preparation of all his works for new publication.

In February, 1788, word reached the Countess that her husband had died
in Rome, and it would appear that she was soon afterwards married to
Alfieri, although in the will of the latter she is referred to as the
Countess of Albany and not as his wife. His memoirs do not once speak
of her as his wife, but from the date of her husband's death their life
together was uninterrupted. It is now generally assumed that they were
privately married about this time.

For three years the two lived quietly in Paris, spending their summers
and autumns at a new home Alfieri had acquired in Alsace. During these
years he printed two editions of his works, supervised their sales, and
wrote his remarkably entertaining memoirs, which were finished up to
May, 1790. The end of the three years found Paris on the brink of the
great Revolution.

Alfieri saw the black clouds gathering on the French horizon, but
stayed on in the desire to complete the printing of his works. He was
in turn amazed, alarmed, and disgusted at the succeeding events in
the establishment of a republic. The principles proclaimed by these
so-called destroyers of tyrants were not the principles of his own
freedom-loving heart, nor those of any of his heroic characters. He
writes, "My heart was torn asunder on beholding the holy and sublime
cause of liberty betrayed by self-called philosophers,--so much did I
revolt at witnessing their ignorance, their folly, and their crimes;
at beholding the military power, and the insolence and licentiousness
of the civilians stupidly made the basis of what they termed political
liberty, that I henceforth desired nothing more ardently than to leave
a country which, like a lunatic hospital, contained only fools or
incurables."

Circumstances, however, conspired to keep them in Paris, the Countess
was dependent upon France for two-thirds of her income, Alfieri was
finishing the printing of his dramas. The hour came when Alfieri
determined that further delay would be more than foolhardy, and so, on
August 18, 1792, having obtained passports with great difficulty, he
drove with the Countess to the city barrier. A dramatic scene followed.
The National Guards found the passports correct, and would have let the
travelers pass, but at the same moment a crowd of drunken revelers broke
from a neighboring cabaret, and attracted by the well-laden carriage,
proceeded to stop its passage, while they debated whether they should
stone it or set it on fire. The Guards remonstrated, but the revelers
complained bitterly that people of wealth should leave the city. Alfieri
lost all prudence, and jumping from his carriage, seized the passports
from the man who held them and, as he himself tells the incident, "Full
of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my passion
despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook my passport
in my hand and shouted at the top of my voice, 'Look! Listen! Alfieri
is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale, red hair; I am
he; look at me; I have my passport, and I have had it legitimately from
those who could give it; we wish to pass, and by Heaven, we _will_
pass!'"

The crowd was surprised, and before they had recovered Alfieri and the
Countess had driven past the barriers and were safely on their way. They
had left Paris none too soon. Two days later the same authorities that
had granted the passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books
that Alfieri had left behind in Paris and declared both the Countess and
Alfieri refugee aristocrats. The fact that they were both foreigners
appeared to be of no importance. It was well that they had gone. The
Countess was too illustrious a personage to have escaped for long the
fury of the fast-gathering mob, and had she been lost Alfieri would
have shared her fate.

Florence thenceforth became the home of the Countess and of Alfieri.
He wrote desultorily, commenting upon what he had seen in France,
but for the most part devoted himself to a study of the classics. In
1795, when he was forty-six years of age, he started to learn Greek,
and was so fired with the desire that in a short time he had added an
intimate knowledge of Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to that
he already had of the Latin authors. He was so much interested in the
"Alcestis" of Euripides that he wrote an original drama based on the
same theme. He was described at this time as of a tall and commanding
figure, with a face of intelligence, and the look of one born to
command, rather than obey. His forehead was broad and lofty; his red
hair fell in thick masses around it.

The restless youth had changed to a methodical, studious man, he
arranged his day by rule, and followed that rule exactly. Only one
event disturbed him, and that was the occupation of Florence by French
troops. He had distrusted the French while he lived among them, now when
they came to hold Florence in subjection his hatred of tyranny bade him
despise them. He refused to receive the call of the French general who,
having read his works, was anxious to meet him. On the correspondence
which passed between them in reference to this matter Alfieri wrote,
"Dialogue between a lion in a cage, and his crocodile guardian."

When he had fled from France he had been compelled to leave some
of his printed works behind him, and he was now in fear lest their
appearance and eager appeal for liberty should seem to ally him with
the Revolutionary cause. Above all things he condemned the French
Revolution. To avoid this possibility he now advertised in the Italian
papers a disclaimer, warning the public against any edition of his
writings except such as he himself issued. With this formal announcement
he had to be content.

Alfieri had determined to write no more tragedies, and turned to
composition of comedies, of which he had six nearly completed when his
health failed. He rested for a time and then resumed his methodical life
of study and work. He was advised to give himself more recreation, but
was too obstinate to adopt any plan but his own. His health gave way
again, and neglecting the physician's advice, he tried to minister to
his own illness. Gradually he grew weaker, and on October 3, 1803, he
died. He was buried in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, and his
monument, carved by Canova, rises between the tombs of Michael Angelo
and Machiavelli. An inscription states by whom the memorial was erected.
"Louisa, Princess of Stolbergh, Countess of Albany, to Vittorio Alfieri
of Asti, 1810." In 1824 she was buried in Santa Croce.

In his will Alfieri left everything to the Countess. Their love had
grown deeper with time. She wrote to a friend, "You know, by experience,
what it is to lose a person with whom we have lived for twenty-six
years, who has never given us a moment of displeasure, whom we have
always adored, respected, and venerated." Each, tormented alone, had
found happiness finally in their united life.

What was Alfieri's part in the growth of that spirit which was preparing
to set Italy free? Why did Mazzini later point him out as one of the
great sources of inspiration for his "Young Italy"? We must remember
that literature and the drama are more closely related to Italian public
opinion than they are with us, that the appearance of a new book or play
is often a vital subject to a ministry. What the people read they felt,
and it was Alfieri who first showed them the immorality of national
servitude. One of his best critics has said that when Alfieri first
turned his glance toward the Italian stage, it presented anything but a
hopeful aspect. "The degradation of a people enslaved under a foreign
yoke, and without political life, could not fail to make itself felt
in the theater as in the more extended arena of public affairs. No high
effort of mind could be born amid such circumstances. A stage without
authors soon ceases to have actors. When actors and authors both are
wanting an audience will not easily be found. Thus it was, thus it had
been in Italy through many troubled years. The opera,--the seductive,
but enervating opera,--carried to great perfection by Metastasio, was
almost alone in possession of the popular taste.... Alfieri's first
thought was to improve the taste of his countrymen, by blending the
amusement they were accustomed to with something better.... Instead of
attempting reform by easy stages, he determined to attempt everything at
once.... It was something more than an improvement of the stage that he
attempted; it was the improvement of his countrymen; the regeneration of
his country!... Throughout nearly all his tragedies and his prose works,
the leading idea by which he was animated stood plainly out. Several
pieces he specially calls tragedies of liberty. They well deserve the
name. He never tired in his denunciations of tyranny, in his invectives
against oppression. These were themes upon which the more he spoke, the
more eloquent he became."

The dramas themselves, built in strict accordance with the three
unities of classic taste, may seem strangely stiff and unemotional
to us, but they carried an immense appeal to the Italian of the last
century. They spoke a new voice and stirred a new spirit in their
hearers. The voice once heard, the spirit once born, the new idea grew
rapidly. Within a few years after Alfieri's death eighteen editions of
his works had passed through the press. Two great theaters, one at Milan
and one at Bologna, were built by men eager to present his tragedies.
The influence of his writings was tremendous; the minds of Italians from
Piedmont to Sicily were stirred to a higher pitch than they had been for
many centuries.

Alfieri's character had many defects, at best his life was unmoral,
but having regard to the society into which he was born and the
early training he received, more was scarcely to be looked for. He
was passionate, reckless, and untutored in all self-control, yet he
harnessed himself to a work which possessed his fancy and in its service
became the devotee of study and control. Like his life his writings
lack peace and broad philosophy, but on the other hand they gain from
his peculiar nature a certain domineering force. Giuseppe Arnaud in his
criticism on the patriotic poets of Italy says, "Whoever should say that
Alfieri's tragedies, in spite of many eminent merits, were constructed
on a theory opposed to grand scenic effects and to one of the two bases
of tragedy, namely, compassion, would certainly not say what was far
from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain the
dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasmas with which the
Italian air was infected. He will still remain that poet who aroused
his country from its dishonorable slumber, and inspired its heart with
intolerance of servile conditions and with regard for its dignity. Up to
this time we had bleated and he roared."

Let me only add the striking words of his fellow countryman, the gifted
poet-statesman Massimo d'Azeglio. "In fact," he wrote, "one of the
merits of that proud heart was to have found Italy Metastasian and left
it Alfierian; and his first and greatest merit was, to my thinking, that
he discovered Italy, so to speak, as Columbus discovered America, and
initiated the idea of Italy as a nation. I place this merit far beyond
that of his verses and his tragedies."

Alfieri reminded Italians that they had a native voice.




[Illustration: MANZONI]




MANZONI, THE MAN OF LETTERS


The position of Manzoni in modern Italian life and literature is
doubly interesting, both because his work in poetry and the drama
marks the vital turning point in the historic battle of Classicism
with Romanticism, and because his romance "I Promessi Sposi" is the
greatest achievement in all Italian letters in the field of the novel.
Walter Scott gave the country north of Tweed a history in the "Waverley
Novels," and Alessandro Manzoni's writing a little later, at a time
when Scott's work was a great factor in European literature, gave Italy
a history in the same sense. The inestimable service that the Waverley
Novels did Scotland "I Promessi Sposi" did the disrupted states of Italy.

The spirit of the French Revolution was all-engrossing, as subversive of
the old religions, philosophies, and literatures, as it was of the old
politics. It represented the actual thoughts of the men of that era, but
it developed so rapidly and fell into such excesses that its downfall
was sudden and complete. Then the reaction set in, which, as De Sanctis
in his history of the movement says, was "as rapid and violent as the
revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red."

The same critic goes on to show that there were at this period two
great philosophic principles, materialism and skepticism, and that
in opposition to them there rose a spirituality which was carried to
the heights of idealism. This spirituality approached the mysticism
of mediæval days. "To the right of nature," he says, "was opposed the
divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual rights
the State, to liberty authority and order. The middle ages returned in
triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the target of all offense, became the
center of every philosophical investigation, the banner of all social
and religious progress.... The criterions of art were changed. There was
a pagan art and a Christian art, where highest expression was sought in
the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the vague, the indefinite,
in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an inspiration towards the
infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore melancholy.... To Voltaire
and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De Staël, Lamartine, Victor Hugo,
Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the Sacred Hymns of the young Manzoni."

This spirit of idealism became the incentive for the new school
of Romance in literature and the drama, in contrast to the drab
materialism of the Revolutionary age. This school of Romance is not,
however, to be considered as diametrically opposed to the Classical
School, for they had much in common, and the contrast between them
lay not so much in the spirit which animated them as in the strict
regard of Classicism for the time-hallowed unities of time, place, and
action, and the willingness of the Romantic School to sacrifice all
these for freedom of movement and effect. The new school wished to find
its poems in the experiences of men of that day, to write its dramas
about any comedy or tragedy without regard to their classic form, it
wished freedom to grow as its own spirit might dictate. In Germany and
England great Romanticists were ripening into power, Goethe and Burger,
Scott and Byron were being widely read in Italy, and the dramas of both
Schiller and Shakespeare were continually translated and reproduced
in Italian verse. The restoration of the Austrians and Bourbons after
the Napoleonic downfall made any chance to speak political truths
impossible, even in the half-veiled militant form used earlier by
Alfieri. The Romantic School therefore, confined in its modern scope,
turned backward, became retrospective, and sought its outlet in the
glories of that mediæval world which had been so nearly akin in spirit
to the modern sentiment. It turned from recent atheistic tendencies to
a mood of great devotion, from lax morality to a high degree of upright
conduct, from the regard of liberty as the greatest good to that of
responsibility to mankind as the goal. Only distantly and secondarily
political, this Romantic movement was first of all moral, and taught
Italians that in order to be good citizens they must be good men first.
As in all literary history the movement had a deep philosophic meaning,
and this sense of moral responsibility was at the base of all Manzoni's
great creative efforts.

First of all, then, the literary movement which succeeded the
Revolutionary era in Italy was idealistic as compared with the
materialism of the days of the Napoleonic occupation, and secondly,
it was Romantic in contradistinction to the Classicism of the earlier
times. Greek and Roman themes for artistic expression were abandoned
for the stories of national mediævalism, the Papacy became the center
of its poetic aspiration, and its spirit, though highly ardent, was far
more truly modern than that of Classicism had been. Our former critic,
De Sanctis, says that in this new movement religion "is no longer a
creed, it is an artistic motive.... It is not enough that there are
saints, they must be beautiful: the Christian idea returns as art....
Providence comes back to the world, the miracle reappears in story,
hope and prayer revive, the heart softens, it opens itself to gentle
influences.... Manzoni reconstructs the ideal of the Christian Paradise
and reconciles it with the modern spirit. Mythology goes, the classic
remains; the eighteenth century is denied, its ideas prevail."

Manzoni stood first for that new movement which opposed morality to
license in national development, secondly for the temper which derided
the classic limits of the three unities and held that a purely national
event was as suitable for the purpose of artistic representation as
the stories of classic history. In addition to this he first adopted
that form of the Romantic spirit which was rising so rapidly into use
in England in the novels of Walter Scott, in France in the writings
of Victor Hugo and Lamennais, and in Germany in those of Goethe and
Schiller, and gave Italy the result in his great novel of Italian life
and history. For each of these reasons Manzoni represents a force potent
in upbuilding Italian character and strengthening it at the time of its
great crisis. Though he drew suggestions from abroad, he made his work
Italian, and thoroughly Italian. "If," says De Sanctis, "the Romantic
School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied
to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian
in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes
palpitating under the mediæval robe; the least allusion, the remotest
meanings, were caught by the public, which was in the closest accord
with the writers. The middle ages were no longer treated with historical
and positive intention; they became the garments of our ideals, the
transparent expression of our hopes."

Alessandro Manzoni was born in Milan, March 7, 1785, at about the time
when Alfieri was accomplishing his greatest work. His father, Pietro
Manzoni, belonged to the nobility, and bore the title of Count, a title
which Alessandro, when he inherited it at an early age, refused to
adopt, and continued to refuse to use during his whole life. His mother
was the daughter of Beccaria, a man well known throughout Europe for
his studies of political economy and criminology, and whose treatise
entitled "Crimes and Punishments" was greatly admired in the Voltairean
circles of France. Alessandro's mother was a remarkably intelligent
woman, with a fineness of nature which was inherited by her son, and
which kept him unspoiled and simple through a life unusually acclaimed
and applauded.

His earliest youth was spent among the hills of Galbiate, according to
the custom of wealthy Lombard families, to send their children to the
mountains in order to give them rugged health. The boy was in care of
a woman who was successively his nurse and governess, and who taught
him to read and stirred his interest in the legends and history of the
neighboring countryside. When still a small boy he was sent to the
church college of the Frati Lomaschi, education being then entirely
in charge of ecclesiastics. He seems to have been in no wise an apt
student, the close confinement, the strict discipline, and the dry
manner of teaching subjects which were all of an eminently classical
nature combining to dull his spirits and interest. Stories are current
in Milan of Manzoni's inability to learn, almost bordering on stupidity,
but such stories are popular of men who have later shown great ability,
and deserve little credence. Suffice it that he showed no great aptitude
for learning at the school of the Frati Lomaschi, nor even later at
the Collegio dei Nobili. At the latter he did, however, meet the poet
Vincenzo Monti, a man well known throughout Italy, who had had for
patrons the Cardinals Borghese and Braschi, a poet and dramatist whose
pen was too apt to serve the political party in power, but who had
achieved wide popularity, and whose poems were praised by critics as
diverse-minded as Byron and Napoleon Bonaparte. Monti met the young
Manzoni when he was on a visit to the college, and took an interest in
him. Alessandro admired the poet, and it was perhaps this acquaintance
which first actively interested him in literature as a pursuit. The
meeting of the boy Walter Scott with Robert Burns is a parallel in
Scottish literary annals.

In 1805, when he was twenty, Alessandro's father died and the youth
left the Collegio dei Nobili, and returned for a time to his mother.
After a period of home life he was sent to the University of Pavia,
the best-known of Lombard universities. His stay here was short. His
mother, now a widow for several years, was advised to go to France for
her health, and the close bonds which united mother and son would not
allow of such a distant separation. Alessandro left the University and
went with his mother to Auteuil, which was then a fashionable watering
place where the _beau monde_ of French art and letters gathered. Here
and at Paris he met the leading thinkers of the time, Volney, Cabanis,
De Tracy, Fauriel, and Condorcet, all of whom were interested in the
young man as the grandson of Beccaria and because of his own originality
of thought. These men called themselves idealogues, and claimed to
have shaken off all the conventions of the previous centuries. As a
student Manzoni had been an extremely liberal Catholic, and was usually
considered by strict critics a follower of Voltaire. At Paris and
Auteuil, however, he met so many men of the then prevalent atheistic
mode of thought that his own interest in his family religion was
quickened and he emerged from his friendship with such men as Cabanis
and Condorcet a more pronounced churchman than he had been before. It
was characteristic of him to cling tenaciously to those precedents and
standards which had so long survived in his own country. His religion,
however, was soon to become more to him than a field for philosophic
speculation, for in 1810 he married Louise Henriette Blondel, daughter
of a banker of Geneva, who, herself a convert from Protestantism to the
Church of Rome, became most ardent in the church of her adoption. She
soon brought Alessandro to her own enthusiastic view, and from the date
of his marriage his philosophy never varied. Henriette Manzoni possessed
rare beauty, and was long remembered in Milan "for her fresh blond head,
and her blue eyes, her lovely eyes," and the young husband was ideally
happy with his bride. He had by now determined to try his skill at
composition, and set himself as models the three men whose fame was then
at its height in Italy, Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo.

His bride had brought Manzoni a country seat as well as considerable
property, and so he settled in the country and studied to perfect his
style in writing. His first works were a series of Sacred Hymns, written
directly under the influence of the renewed religious faith attendant
on his marriage. These were published in 1815, and were at once noticed
as poems alike remarkable for deep religious feeling and great beauty
of expression. Appearing as they did at a time when religion was being
bitterly assailed, churchmen looked upon the young poet as a distinct
acquisition to their forces. Manzoni was not, however, even then a
believer in the temporal power of the Pope. He said to Madame Colet, the
author of "L'Italie des Italiens," "I bow humbly to the Pope, and the
Church has no more respectful son; but why confound the interests of
earth and those of heaven? The Roman people are right in asking their
freedom--there are hours for nations, as for governments, in which they
must occupy themselves, not with what is convenient, but with what is
just. Let us lay hands boldly upon the temporal power, but let us not
touch the doctrine of the Church. The one is as distinct from the other
as the immortal soul from the frail and mortal body. To believe that
the Church is attacked in taking away its earthly possessions is a real
heresy to every true Christian."

This was the same view which Manzoni held throughout his life, and
which, stated in his quoted words, gives the position taken by the most
enlightened men of the Nationalist party in those later days when the
question of the temporal power of the Pope became vital for Italy. What
the Sacred Hymns showed was that Manzoni looked to the Church as the
center of all true aspiration and religion rather than to philosophic
theories as the safeguard of morals.

His next production carried him a step further in advance of his
contemporaries, and marked him as the leader of the Romantic School.
In 1819 he wrote his first tragedy, published the following year under
the title "Il Conte di Carmagnola." The subject-matter was the career
of Carmagnola, a celebrated condottiere of the Middle Ages, and the
dramatic form was entirely distinct from that classic construction which
had so long tyrannized over the drama. In an introduction he explains
his departure from the classic unities of time, place, and action, and
gives his reasons for believing that the dramatist should be free to
choose his own subject and to treat it in such fashion as shall seem to
him best to express his idea. The Elizabethan dramatists had long before
discarded the law of the unities in England, and had carried their plots
over such courses of time and place as they pleased, and so had Schiller
in Germany, but in Italy the law had been absolute from the time of
Tasso to that of Alfieri. Eight years after Manzoni's "Carmagnola"
appeared, Victor Hugo brought on the great dramatic war in France with
his "Cromwell," and from the date of his ultimate triumph in Paris dates
the downfall of the Classicists and the full glory of the Romanticists.

In Italy Manzoni's step was violently attacked and defended.
Conservatives opposed him, but the younger element immediately acclaimed
him as their leader. The following year, 1821, he wrote his great ode on
the death of Napoleon, which had occurred on May 5th, at St. Helena, and
the news of which had greatly affected all Europe. The ode, entitled "Il
Cinque Maggio," was remarkable for great dignity, a deep and profound
estimate of Napoleon's genius, and a tribute to his colossal fame which
even the French recognized as the fittest expression of poetic power.
The ode was at once translated into German by Goethe, and into English
by Gladstone and the Earl of Derby. It immediately placed him at the
head of the new school of continental poets.

Very soon afterwards, in 1822, Manzoni wrote his second tragedy,
"Adelchi," a drama of the war between the Lombards and Charlemagne. It
followed the lines of the Carmagnola, repeating the break from classical
precedents, and establishing the value of the Romantic School. Both
dramas were acted, but without success. The Carmagnola, when it was
given at Florence in 1828, had the open support of the court to offset
the attacks of the old school, and yet did not win even a mildly
enthusiastic hearing. The Adelchi was tried with a similar result at
Turin.

In spite of their ill reception on the stage, both of Manzoni's dramas
were immensely popular with readers, and, although based on incidents
remote in point of time, both thrilled with a patriotism that stirred
the hearts of all Italians. Mr. Howells says of the tragedies in his
"Modern Italian Poets," "The time of the Carmagnola is the fifteenth
century; that of the Adelchi the eighth century; and however strongly
marked are the characters,--and they are very strongly marked, and
differ widely from most persons of Italian classic tragedy in this
respect,--one still feels that they are subordinate to the great
contests of elements and principles for which the tragedy furnishes a
scene. In the Carmagnola the pathos is chiefly in the feeling embodied
by the magnificent chorus lamenting the slaughter of Italians by
Italians at the battle of Maclodio; in the Adelchi we are conscious of
no emotion so strong as that we experience when we hear the wail of the
Italian people, to whom the overthrow of their Longobard oppressors by
the Franks is but the signal of a new enslavement. This chorus is almost
as fine as the more famous one in the Carmagnola, both are incomparably
finer than anything else in the tragedies and are much more dramatic
than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our
own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the
poet shows his dramatic strength, and whenever he speaks abstractly for
country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits no doubt of his
greatness."

Manzoni's greatest work, however, was yet to appear, for admirable as
were his poems and inspiring as were his heroic dramas it was as a
novelist that he was to reach his pinnacle of fame. It was also as a
novelist that he was to become one of the men who directly created that
national spirit which made modern Italy. Italy had had many poets, but
no great novelist since Boccaccio. Fortunately Manzoni had not been
confined to the literature of his own land, but had studied Goethe,
Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Scott, and drew his inspiration largely from
them. He owed much to the English novel, and especially to the author
of "Waverley," a man whom he much admired, and who fully returned his
admiration.

"I Promessi Sposi" appeared in 1825 and created a tremendous
impression. Scott said that it was the greatest historical novel ever
written, and Goethe said, "It satisfies us like perfectly ripe fruit."
It was the first and greatest Italian romance, and it awakened an
interest throughout Europe in Italian history. The scene is laid in
Milan under the harsh Spanish rule of the Seventeenth Century, and
the reader is carried through the story of war and famine, and the
great plague. Its merits are hard to exaggerate, the beauty of its
descriptions and the accuracy of its history, the intense interest of
its characters, a galaxy that embraces every walk of life, the truth
of its philosophy are equally remarkable. The universal feelings of
humanity pulse through its pages; as Dr. Garnett says of it, "as a
picture of human nature the book is above criticism; it is just the
fact, neither more nor less."

Victor Hugo in "Les Miserables" wrote a book which appealed to the
innate democracy of man, but Manzoni in "I Promessi Sposi" made the same
appeal without having recourse to the Frenchman's use of the grotesque
and gigantic. Through the whole of the latter novel runs the note of
a profound sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, a note which
is perhaps stronger in this book than in any romance ever written. It
is the work of a great mind, fully alive to every sensibility and
sympathy, accurate in its judgments, and to which, in the ancient words,
nothing human is foreign.

Cardinal and priest, brigand and simple hero, grande dame and the lovely
girl whose hand promised in marriage gives part title to the book, are
each perfect in their way, and bring the characteristics of a past
century vividly before the present. Goethe pointed out the too great
prominence of the historical element, but the very careful attention
paid by Manzoni to the accuracy of his setting must add to the sense of
reality which he so completely gains. The novel was rapidly translated
into all modern languages, and at once created a school of historical
novelists in Italy.

To us who have seen the romantic movement give place in turn to that of
realism, it is difficult to understand what Scott and Hugo, Goethe and
Manzoni did for the men of the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century.
They made people feel as they had not felt before the wide scope of
existence and the importance of the individual. Literature had been a
matter of form and convention, of classic model, of purely aristocratic
vision. The new movement was part of that same impulse which was
demanding constitutions of kings and bringing the middle classes into
political prominence. It was an awakening of public spirit which had
slept soundly through several centuries. Voltaire and Rousseau,
Alfieri and Foscolo had sounded the first notes of a new intellectual
renaissance, and now Hugo and Manzoni went further and stepped boldly
out from all classic restraints.

Although "I Promessi Sposi" is more widely known and more highly
regarded than any Italian book, except the Divine Comedy of Dante,
Manzoni's personality impressed itself but little upon his age. He
had not the fighting nature of Victor Hugo, nor the mental unrest of
Byron, two of his great contemporaries. He preferred the retirement of
his farm to the excitements of Milan, and although he was always an
ardent advocate of Italian unity and freedom he took but small part in
the great events that soon delivered Lombardy from Austria. After the
appearance of "I Promessi Sposi" he wrote little more. "Formerly," he
said, "the muse came after me, now I should have to go after her." His
quiet life laid him open to the charge of an indifferent patriotism, but
those who knew him best understood that such an accusation was bitterly
untrue.

When the Austrian government returned to Milan the members of the
Lombard nobility were required to write their names in an official
register or forfeit their titles. Manzoni preferred to lose his claim
as a patrician, and later refused a decoration, saying that he had
made a vow never to wear any order of knighthood. He afterwards offered
the same excuse to Victor Emmanuel when the latter wished to decorate
him. He was elected a Senator in 1860, when the first National Assembly
met, and went to Turin to take his seat, but soon after retired to the
privacy of his own home on Lake Maggiore. Here he entertained many great
guests, among them Cavour and D'Azeglio, to whom he was warmly attached.
His life flowed on an even current, the existence of a philosophic
spirit interested as an observer rather than as an actor.

Henriette Manzoni died in 1833, and in 1837 he married Teresa Borri,
widow of Count Stampa. He saw his children grow up about him and go to
take their places in the world. Gradually he saw the cause of national
freedom win its way, and the King to whom he was so devoted unite the
scattered states under one crown. He saw the fall of the temporal power
of the Pope, and with it the consummation of his hopes. In 1873, at
the age of eighty-eight, he died, universally mourned and revered. A
Milanese journal said: "After the confessor left the room Manzoni called
his friends and said to them, 'When I am dead, do what I did every day;
pray for Italy--pray for the king and his family--so good to me!' His
country was the last thought of this great man dying, as in his whole
long life it had been his most vivid and constant affection."

It was nearly fifty years since his last important work had appeared,
but during that long half century of inactivity Manzoni's fame had
grown steadily. His romance had passed through one hundred and eighteen
editions in Italian alone. Milan decreed him a state funeral, and
representatives of all European countries appeared at the old Lombard
capital with addresses from their sovereigns. It has been said that
Manzoni's death evoked a greater unanimity of sentiment than has been
called forth by that of any other great author of modern times, except
possibly by that of Sir Walter Scott. Even those who had criticised
Manzoni had always spoken their opinions in a spirit of reverence.
He was regarded as the great guiding figure in the course of the new
national literature.

A singularly uneventful life for one of the great builders of a nation,
uneventful even for that of a scholar or poet. Moreover the roll of
his works is small numerically, comprising his Sacred Hymns, the two
dramas, the Ode on Napoleon, the single novel, and in addition only a
few essays, the "Innominata" or Column of Infamy, an historical note to
"I Promessi Sposi," an essay on the Romantic School, called "Letters
on Romanticism," and one entitled "Letters on the Unity of Time and
Place," the purpose of which was to show that the unity of action is the
only unity of importance to the dramatist. The bulk of his work was not
great, but each expression of it was masterful in its way, the Hymns
true poetry as well as deep religious sentiment, the Ode considered
the finest ode in all Italian poetry, the dramas pulsing with life and
feeling, the novel unsurpassed. These were the literary values of his
work, but these in themselves would not account for Manzoni's influence
on his times. He was a moral and political force, showing the men of his
day that nations can only hope for liberty and peace when the citizens
respect the law and virtue. A generation that had lived through the
French Revolution and the Napoleonic era needed some one to lead them
back to moral sanity, and this was the greatest of Manzoni's works.

Like Gioberti, like D'Azeglio, like Victor Emmanuel, Manzoni was a
staunch Catholic as well as a true Italian. A close friend, Signor
Bonghi, said of him: "He had two faiths, one in the future of
Catholicism, another in the future of Italy, and the one, whatever was
said, whatever happened, never disturbed the other. In anxious moments,
when the harmony between the two was least visible, he expected it the
most, and never allowed his faith in one or the other to be shaken. Rome
he wished to be the abode of the King; Rome he wished also to be the
abode of the Pope. Obedient to the Divine Authority of the Pontificate,
no one passed a more correct judgment upon its civil character, or
defended with more firmness, when speaking upon the subject, the right
of the State."

That he was the poet of resignation, as Monnier declared, is disproved
by his dramas and his novel. The martial lyrics of the plays burn with a
spirit only too evidently fired by the contemporary subjection of Italy
to Austria and France. Take for example the first and last verses of one
of the lyrics in the Adelchi, as rendered into English by Miss Ellen
Clarke:

  "From moss-covered ruin of edifice nameless,
  From forests, from furnaces idle and flameless,
    From furrows bedewed with the sweat of the slave,
  A people dispersed doth arouse and awaken,
  With senses all straining and pulses all shaken,
    At a sound of strange clamor that swells like a wave.

  In visages pallid, and eyes dim and shrouded,
  As blinks the pale sun through a welkin beclouded,
    The might of their fathers a moment is seen;
  In eye and in countenance doubtfully blending;
  The shame of the present seems dumbly contending
    With pride in the thought of a past that hath been.

         *       *       *       *       *

  And deem ye, poor fools! that the need and the guerdon
  That lured from afar were to lighten your burden,
    Your wrongs to abolish, your fate to reverse?
  Go! back to the wrecks of your palaces stately,
  To the forges whose glow ye extinguished so lately,
    To the field ye have tilled in the sweat of your curse!

  The victor and vanquished in amity knitted,
  Have doubled the yoke to your shoulders refitted;
    One tyrant had quelled you, and now ye have twain:
  They cast forth the lot for the serf and the cattle,
  They throne on the sods that yet bleed from their battle,
    And the soil and the hind are their servants again."

Could Manzoni have meant such words to speak other than of the Austrians
and Bourbons who were grinding Italians into servitude? Could his
marvelous meter, which has been said in its "plunging" to suggest a
charge of horses, have been meant other than to drive his countrymen
to self assertion? Manzoni was patriot as well as artist, and read
his times with no unskilful eye. When Victor Emmanuel visited Milan
in 1859 he said that he should like to meet the poet, and, when told
that the latter was ill, declared that he would go to him. Manzoni,
however, would not hear of this, and as soon as he was able called
upon the King. The sovereign's marks of regard and respect overwhelmed
the poet. Later he said of the meeting, "I see in the character of the
King the intervention of Providence. He is exactly the sovereign that
circumstances require to accomplish the resurrection of Italy. He has
rectitude, courage, incorruptible honesty, and disinterestedness; he
seeks not glory or fortune for himself, but for his country. He is
so simple, never caring to appear great, that he does not meet the
admiration of those who seek to find in princes and heroes theatrical
actions and grandiloquent words. He is natural because he is true, and
this makes his enemies say that he is wanting in regal majesty. To found
Italian unity he has risked his throne, and his life."

Manzoni's prophecies came true and he himself had no small part in
accomplishing that great end towards which so many men of diverse forces
worked. As well as king and statesman, warrior and prophet, the man of
letters taught his people how to find their independence.




[Illustration: GIOBERTI]




GIOBERTI, THE PHILOSOPHER


Gioberti's signal gift to his countrymen was his great book, "II Primato
d'Italia," a statement of the causes of Italy's early primacy among
European nations, and a philosophic theory for her regeneration. Like
Savonarola he flayed the vices of his time and preached redemption
through Christian living, but, unlike the great Fra, he undertook to
teach that the Church was no less fitted to be the seat of statecraft
than of religion. It was this that gained him the ear of Rome as well as
that of Piedmont, and made it seem for a moment as though he had found
the solution of Italy's troubles.

The effect of the "Primato" was felt from Turin to Naples. "The book,"
said Minghetti, the statesman of a later decade, "seemed to some an
extravagance, to others a revelation. The truth is, that while many of
its ideas were peculiar to the author, and partook of his character,
his studies, and his profession, the substance of it responded to a
sentiment still undefined, but which had been slowly developing in the
minds of Italians. The idea of nationality had, in the previous years,
spread far and wide through many channels, open and secret, and the
desire of a great and free country had taken possession of the majority
of the younger men; but the methods hitherto employed had proved so
inefficient that weariness and disgust had followed. Experience had
proved that conspiracies, secret societies, and partial insurrections
were of no utility--that they made the governments more severe, retarded
civil progress, arrested the increase of public prosperity, plunged many
families into misery, and did not even win the approbation of civilized
nations.

"The rumors of wars and of European insurrections which were circulated
every spring time, the mystic declamations of Mazzini in the name of
God and the people, ... all these things showed that the time had come
to try another method, more serious, more practical, and surer....
Gioberti, a Piedmontese exile for the sake of liberty, had taken part
in the earliest phases of the "Giovine Italia" or had been in relation
with its chiefs, but had wearied of that pompous and impotent society.
His intellect had anticipated that change which had been imperceptibly
operating and now began to appear widely ... but obscurely in the
consciousness of many men. This opportuneness and coincidence of
the ideas of the author with the spirit of the day gave his book
a special importance.... The purpose of the book was to prove that
Italy, although it had lost all political value for the outside world,
contained all the conditions of moral and political revival, and that
to effect this change there was no need of revolutions, invasions, or
imitations of the foreigner, since political revival is limited to three
heads--unity, independence, and liberty--the first two of which might be
obtained by a confederation of the various states under the presidency
of the Pope, and the last by means of internal reforms in each state,
effected by their respective Princes without danger or diminution of
their real power."

Vincenzo Gioberti was born in Turin April 5, 1801, and was the only
child of parents of very moderate means. At an early age it was decided
that he should prepare for the priesthood, and his education was
entrusted to the fathers of the Oratory in Turin. His nature was more
conformable to the teaching of churchmen than was that of Alfieri or
Manzoni, and whereas both the latter had chafed under the discipline
and mental training of the Church schools the young Gioberti became a
thoughtful student. He differed from Mazzini, a contemporary studying
at Genoa, in that although he early learned that the condition of his
country was wretched, his mind could only conceive of improvement by
orderly and temperate steps. He was a brilliant scholar, and during the
years of his training for the priesthood he delved deep into the history
of philosophy, and studied closely the writings of the fathers and
doctors of the Roman Church. In 1825 he was ordained a priest.

The young priest, a man of a serious and reflective mind, turned his
attention to the affairs of his country, and gradually entered upon a
careful study of the literature of the day, and the political theories
that were then agitating men's minds. He took part in scholastic
discussions of religious and political subjects, and in time widened his
acquaintance in Turin so that he came in contact with the leaders of
thought in the Sardinian capital. As he met men and spoke his thoughts
more freely it came to be seen that he was occupied above everything
else with the problem of freeing Italy from the foreign overlords, and
this gradually marked him as a free-thinking priest. At first, however,
he did not incur the enmity of the clerical party, for, although his
conception of Italian freedom consisted in emancipation not alone from
the arms of foreign masters, but from all modes of thought which were
alien to the nation's genius, and detrimental to its national authority,
this authority was always associated in his mind with the idea of Papal
supremacy, but a supremacy intellectual rather than political.

The reign of Charles Albert of Piedmont was a continual battle between
the conservative party and the enlightened liberals. The leaders of the
conservatives were clerics, in large measure Jesuits, who kept in close
touch with the Court of Vienna, realizing to the full that their aims
and those of Austria were to all intents identical, the maintenance of
the _status quo_ in Italy. The young priest Gioberti was not long in
incurring the hostility of the Jesuits, because, although he sought
the ultimate supremacy of the Papal See, he desired it as a moral
rather than as a physical supremacy, and he most ardently hoped for the
expulsion of the Austrians from Lombardy and the absolute independence
of Piedmont from Viennese influence. His was, however, too brilliant a
mind to be denied, and, despite the efforts of the Court party, Charles
Albert, who was always cognizant of the abilities of other men, soon
after his accession to the throne in 1831 nominated the young priest to
be one of the royal chaplains.

As chaplain of the court Gioberti quickly assumed prominence. His nature
was open and frank, he made friends easily, he wrote on ecclesiastical
and political subjects, and his patriotism was known to be unbounded.
He soon had gathered a party about him, and his influence over the
King grew rapidly. Charles Albert's own views on Italian policy were at
that time almost identical with Gioberti's, he would have been glad to
acknowledge a confederation of Italian states under the presidency of
the Pope, provided the foreign princelings could be disposed of without
bloodshed. This, however, the clerical party did not approve of, any
change being to their view revolutionary, and the realization that the
chaplain was gaining the private ear of the King finally compelled them
to mark him for exile.

Aware of this disaffection in the Church party at Turin, Gioberti in
1833 asked permission of Charles Albert to resign his chaplaincy, but,
before his request was granted he was suddenly arrested one day while
walking with a friend in the public gardens of the city, and placed
in prison. The influence of the clerical party was so all-powerful in
the Piedmont of that day that no attempt to secure Gioberti's release
was effective, and no popular demonstration at such an outrage could
take place. He was given no trial, and his case was the subject of
no apparent judicial process. After four months' imprisonment he was
informed that his banishment had been decreed, and he was at once
conducted to the frontier in charge of a carabineer. At the same time
his name was stricken off the roll of the theological doctors of the
College of Turin.

Driven into exile because of his political opinions, even as Mazzini
was exiled as a suspect rather than because of any proof against him,
Gioberti reached Paris in October, 1833. Like so many other great
Italians of that day he was destined to spend many years away from
his beloved country. Without friends, family, or money, his career
apparently ruined, his hopes shattered, Gioberti was to sound the depths
of a courageous man's despair. Mazzini took himself to London to eke
out a meager living as a teacher of Italian, and with the same thought
Gioberti went to Brussels. Here he undertook to teach philosophy, and
finally obtained employment in assisting his friend Gaggia in the
management of a small college. All his leisure time he devoted to
studying and writing on philosophy, rising early, and working the better
part of the night, and producing work after work of great value in
philosophic inquiry, all of which bore especially upon the needs of his
own countrymen.

His stay in Brussels, which lasted from 1834 to 1845, saw the production
of his greatest books, all deeply earnest, and each one causing in
turn the greatest interest and emotion in Italy. The volume of his
work was most remarkable, treatises appearing at short intervals,
each one of which would have sufficed to represent a lifetime's study.
His first work was the result of a friendship formed in Brussels with
a young fellow-exile, Paolo Pallia, who on one occasion expressed
to Gioberti certain doubts as to the reality of revelations and a
future life. Gioberti at once commenced work upon his "La Teorica del
Sovran-naturale," which was finished and published in 1838. This was
followed in 1839 and 1840 by his three volumes called "Introduzione
allo Studio della Filosofia." In all these writings he stands apart
from his contemporary European philosophers. Method of speculation
is with him subjective and psychological. He adopts much from Plato.
Throughout all his writings religion is synonomous with civilization,
and he repeatedly states that religion is the true and only expression
of the _idea_ in this life, and is one with the real civilization of
history. Civilization is the means to perfection, of which religion is
the essence.

These strictly philosophic works were followed by the essays "Del Bello"
and "Del Buono," and after a short interval by a magnificent exposure
of the Jesuit Order, "Il Gesuita Moderno," and his "Del Primato Morale e
Civile degli Italiani," and "Prolegomeni."

It was the "Primato" which gave the exiled Gioberti his place as a
great factor in the struggle for Italian independence. His ideas seem
strangely archaic now, but they were compelling in 1846. He himself
says: "I intend to show ... that Italy alone has the qualities required
to become the chief of nations, and that although to-day she has almost
completely lost that chiefship, it is in her power to recover it, and
I will state the most important conditions of that renovation.... As
infant civilization was born between two rivers, so renewed and adult
civilization arose between two seas; the former in fertile Mesopotamia,
whence it easily spread over Asia, Africa and the west; the latter
in Italy, which divides the Tyrrhene and Adriatic seas, thus forming
the central promontory of Europe and placed in a position to dominate
the rest of the hemisphere.... In the Church there is neither Greek
nor Barbarian, and all nations form a cosmopolitan society, as all
the tribes of Israel a single nation. But as, in the Jewish nation,
genealogy determined the tenure of the hierarchy, and the sons of Levi
received the custody of the Law and the service of the Temple, so in
the Christian commonwealth the division of the nations is in a manner
involved in the order of the Catholic Church. And, the Church having a
supreme head, we must recognize a moral pre-eminence where Heaven has
established its seat, and where nearer, quicker, more immediate and
more uninterrupted are the in-breathings of its voice. This preeminence
certainly does not transgress the natural order of divine intentions,
real and efficient in their working and in the obligations they impose.
So that the Italians, humanly speaking, are the Levites of Christianity,
having been chosen by Providence to keep the Christian Pontificate, and
to protect with love, with veneration, and if necessary by arms, the
ark of the new covenant.... Let the nations, then, turn their eyes to
Italy, their ancient and loving mother, who holds the seeds of their
regeneration. Italy is the organ of the supreme reason and the royal and
ideal word; the fountain, rule and guardian of every other reason and
eloquence; for there resides the Head that rules, the Arm that moves,
the Tongue that commands and the Heart that animates Christianity at
large.... As Rome is the seat of Christian wisdom, Piedmont is to-day
the principal home of Italian military strength. Seated on the slopes of
the Alps, as a wedge between Austria and France, and as a guard to the
peninsula, of which it is the vestibule and peristyle, it is destined
to watch from its mountains, and crush in its ravines, every foreign
aggressor, compelling its powerful neighbors to respect the common
independence of Italy."

Such expression will suffice to show that Gioberti was in no sense a
reliable prophet, but a philosopher of deeply religious strain who was
seeking to reconcile the political freedom of Italy with the suzerainty
of the Pope. He discountenanced all plotting and conspiracy, both of
which were being advocated by Mazzini's appeals to "Young Italy," and
built his country out of a confederation of states. Mazzini, impractical
as he was in many respects, did at least realize that no such loosely
joined federation could stand six months, and insisted above all in
actual political hegemony of the states.

Gioberti's "Primato," deeply suggestive in itself to intellectual
Italy, was given a remarkable impetus by the election at about the
same time as its appearance of a new Pope. Pius IX., elected to the
papal chair in June, 1846, seemed the very man to bring about the
realization of Gioberti's hopes. As Cardinal Mastai Ferreti he had been
immensely popular, and he was known as a man of great amiability, keenly
interested in new ideas, and ardent in the cause of Italian unity of
action. His first act was to proclaim a general amnesty for political
offenses, by which thousands of prisoners who had spent years in Roman
prisons, or abroad in exile, many ignorant of the charges brought
against them, were allowed to return to family and friends. He visited
the poor and superintended the relief of the sick, even working among
the Jewish quarters of Rome. He favored the construction of railroads,
modified the restrictions of the press, and organized an advisory
council of leading citizens. Small wonder that a world which had been
used to the infinitely narrow-minded reactionaries Leo XII. and Gregory
XVI. hailed Pius IX. as the regenerator of both church and state.

To a large degree Pius and Gioberti had both felt the same enthusiasms,
and believed in the same principles, the cardinal one being that society
was to be reformed by the Roman Church, and the government of society
vested in the Church as a court of highest appeal. Different desires led
the two men to this conclusion, Gioberti hoping that reform would come
by means of concessions by arbitrary powers to the rights of the people,
and the Pope believing that humanizing the form of church government
would strengthen its actual power and increase the devotion of all
nations to the Holy See. History proved that neither Gioberti nor Pius
IX. was correct, but the seeming coincidence of their views increased
the power of each. Gioberti gained the support of the liberal element
in the Church, and the Pope gained the adhesion of intellectual men
throughout Italy.

The new Pope had read Gioberti's political writings, and had been deeply
influenced by them. The "Primato," issued at Brussels in 1842, had been
prohibited in all the Italian states except Piedmont, and this fact
added immensely to its weight with patriots. Charles Albert read it
and admired it greatly; with the advent of Pius, he as well as men so
diverse as Mazzini, Garibaldi, and D'Azeglio, looked for regeneration.
Under the influence of this new spirit Charles Albert declared an
amnesty for all exiles in 1846, and the philosopher-priest, after
thirteen years of exile, was free to return home.

Long exile had somewhat crushed the ardent nature of the churchman,
and he waited in Brussels until he was assured by friends that his
return to Turin would be popular. Learning that his works, especially
the "Primato" and the "Gesuita Moderno," had made him a hero in the
eyes of patriots, he finally returned to Turin in 1848. His entrance
into the capital on April 29 of that year was the occasion for the
greatest outburst of enthusiasm, a welcome intensified by the thought
that this man had been banished for no other cause than the resentment
of the hated Jesuits. The city was decorated and illuminated in his
honor, deputations waited upon him, the King appointed him a Senator,
but, as he had been elected as deputy by both Turin and Genoa to the
Assembly of Representatives now to meet for the first time under the new
constitution, he chose to sit in the lower house for Turin.

Invitations now poured in upon him from other cities, and before the
Assembly met he made a tour of the states, commencing with Milan, and
finally reaching Rome. He had three interviews with the Pope, and these
meetings led him still further to believe that Pius was the man who
should put his political philosophy into practice. He found the Romans,
who of all Italians had most cause to hate the Jesuits, overjoyed with
his work describing the modern abuses of that order, and anxious at
all hazards that their new Pontiff should follow the new spirit of
liberality.

While he was traveling and speaking publicly to all the peoples the
Assembly met in Turin, and elected him its president. Count Balbo was
Prime Minister, and in the same Parliament sat many of the younger
element, including Cavour, and a large liberal section headed by
D'Azeglio.

Meanwhile there had occurred the memorable battle-days of 1848, when
the February revolution in Paris set fire to the tinder that had been
preparing throughout Europe. The Milanese arose and drove out the
Austrian garrison, Venice proclaimed the republic under Daniel Manin,
and the cry of "a free Italy" rang from the Alps to Sicily. Pius IX.,
who had already made serious protest to Austria when in the preceding
year that Power had garrisoned Ferrara, prepared to place himself
actively at the head of the national movement, and in Piedmont Charles
Albert took the field and went to the aid of Lombardy. At the close
of 1848 Count Balbo resigned, and a new ministry was formed, in which
Gioberti held a seat.

Unfortunately Pius IX. lacked the courage of his convictions, and
when he heard that the Austrians were winning back their lost fields
in Lombardy, his desire to send his troops to the aid of Piedmont
cooled. The conservative elements about him gained his ear, and he
replaced Mamiani, his Prime Minister, a man who wished him to give
Rome a constitution, with Count Rossi, the French Ambassador, a man of
great ability, but ultra conservative. In November, 1848, Rossi was
assassinated, and shortly afterward the violence of the demands of the
people convinced Pius that his best course was temporary flight. Acting
upon this impulse on November 24, 1848, he escaped from Rome to Gaeta.
Italy was beginning to see to what manner of man it had looked for
deliverance.

From Gaeta the self-exiled Pontiff issued a formal protest against
the violence to which he stated his people had subjected him, and by
which means alone his latest enactments had been extorted from him, and
declared all measures passed in Rome during his absence null and void.

In Rome the brief Republic of Mazzini held sway, and at Gaeta France and
Austria sought to cheer the Pope. Charles Albert, his hope of Papal aid
fading rapidly, attempted for a few months to stem the tide of French
and Austrian influence over Pius. He tried to effect a reconciliation
between the Holy Father and the Romans, and Gioberti wrote to the Pope,
saying: "I hope the Court of Gaeta is about to return to sentiments
more evangelical, more worthy of Pius IX. I am sorry to have to say
that the Court of Gaeta, repudiating the doctrine of conciliation, and
adopting that of vengeance and blood, does not seem to know that it
is repudiating the maxims of Christ, and putting in their stead those
of Mahomet." In addition Gioberti did his best to gain the Pope's
concurrence in a plan for the formation of an Italian federation of
princes, but without success. The bolt was shot, Pius had had his day
as popular idol, and having proven that Italy had nothing to hope
politically from the Pope, quickly retroceded to the plane of the
Bourbon Princes and Grand Dukes. To Gioberti, who had hoped so much
from the spiritual and temporal power of Rome, the disillusionment was
terrific.

That he was a theorist rather than a practical statesman he now showed
conclusively by advocating as minister at Turin that Piedmont should
anticipate the inevitable restoration of the rulers of central Italy
by the governments of Austria and France by restoring them itself. Had
this plan been adopted the House of Savoy would have been irretrievably
ruined in the eyes of patriotic Italy, and the country left without any
champion of freedom. Fortunately his proposal met with small favor.

The battle of Novara ended the struggles of Charles Albert, and Victor
Emmanuel, a man of sterner make, came into control. A new ministry was
formed for the new King by General Delaunay, who included Gioberti again
in the cabinet, although he held no portfolio. He was not in touch,
however, with the new elements of government, he could not appreciate a
statecraft that was in essence radical, and after several disagreements
he was appointed on a nominal mission to Paris, which in reality removed
him from any part in the government at Turin. His best work had been
done in the service of Charles Albert, he was not in touch with the
coming policies of the adroit Cavour.

The stirring years of 1848 and 1849 passed, the dream of the Pope's
leadership vanished, and the yoke of the foreigner seemed to have
settled as heavily as ever upon the states of Italy. Again exiles
gathered in London and Paris, Mazzini returned to his English
fogs, and we find Gioberti the confidant in Paris of many banished
fellow-countrymen. The Marquis Pallavicino, friend of Manin and many
other patriots, became his bosom friend. He was offered a pension by
his government, but declined it, and devoted himself to writing. In
1851 he published his great work, the "Rinnovamento Civile d'Italia,"
in which he pointed out the mistakes made by Italians in 1848 and 1849,
acknowledged his own blunders in political sagacity, and designated
Piedmont as the leader of a great national movement, which should
ultimately end in a regenerated Italy, with its capital in a lay and
constitutional Rome. He had met and talked with Cavour in Paris during
the preparation of this book, and he had had the perspicacity to predict
that Cavour was the man who should unite his land. The statesman
was half amused, half impressed by Gioberti's words, he had always
considered him a man who just failed of being a great statesman because
he was a visionary, but he was profoundly impressed by the grasp and
depth of his new work.

The "Rinnovamento" was indeed true prophecy, the philosopher had at
last seen the futility of a political confederation of peoples under a
religious head, he realized that Princes supported by foreign Powers
would never unite for any common end. "Except the young sovereign
who rules Piedmont," he says in the "Rinnovamento," "I see no one in
Italy who could undertake our emancipation. Instead of imitating Pius,
Ferdinand, and Leopold, who violated their sworn compacts, he maintains
his with religious observance--vulgar praise in other times, but to-day
not small, being contrary to example." Victor Emmanuel, reading the
book, was as much impressed by it as Cavour had been, and time and again
repeated, "I will do what Gioberti says."

Pius IX., still amiable, still suave, was kept in Rome by French arms,
and was solely occupied in proving his own insufficiency as a temporal
ruler of any sort whatever. He had retracted all his liberal acts,
made friends with all his old foes, and placed entire charge of state
affairs in the hands of that most unsavory of men, Cardinal Antonelli.
Under him the Jesuits resumed their former activity, and soon had closed
completely about the Pope. Then it was that the works of Gioberti, the
"Primato" and the "Prolegomeni," which had once so greatly delighted the
Pope, were placed upon the Index Expurgatorius and publicly condemned
by the Church. The action had no other effect than to amuse the
world; Italy and all friends of Italy had read and pondered the great
treatises, and drawn their own conclusions from them irrespective of the
wishes of the Roman See.

Gioberti died in Paris October 16, 1852, just as the new era in Italian
affairs which he had predicted in his last book was actually commencing
with the advent of Cavour as Prime Minister of Piedmont.

When we review Gioberti's work we find that it was chiefly important as
a stimulus to Italian patriotic thought, as a threshing out of theories
and principles in preparation for a true realization of national needs
and hopes. That the philosophy, in so far as it was political, of his
"Primato" failed to prove true when attempted in practice, and must
inevitably so have failed as we see now, did not affect his influence
over his own generation. That influence was one which contrasted
sharply with Mazzini's, Gioberti always preaching orderly organization,
Mazzini daring attempts of many sorts, both alike in the ardor of their
enthusiasm.

While Mazzini appealed to the mass, Gioberti appealed to the scholars,
the clergy, the thinking classes, and his appeal was patriotic as well
as intellectual. In his "Primato" he stirs his countrymen to consider
their country's place among the nations. "While to the north," he says,
"there is a people numbering only twenty-four millions who rule the
sea, make Europe tremble, own India, vanquish China and occupy the best
parts of Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, what great things have we
Italians done? What are our manual and intellectual exploits? Where
are our fleets and our colonies? What rank do our legates hold; what
force do they wield; what wise or authoritative influence do they exert
in foreign courts? What weight attaches to the Italian name in the
balance of European power? Foreigners, indeed, know and still visit our
country, but only for the purpose of enjoying the changeless beauty of
our skies and of looking upon the ruins of our past. But what profits
it to speak of glory, riches, and power? Can Italy say she has a place
in the world? Can she boast of a life of her own and of a political
autonomy, when she is awed by the first insolent and ambitious upstart
who tramples her under foot and galls her with his yoke? Who is there
who shudders not when he reflects that, disunited as we are, we must be
the prey of any assailant whatever, and that we owe even that wretched
fraction of independence which charters and protocols still allow us to
the compassion of our neighbors?" Then he concludes, "Although all this
has come upon us through our own fault; nevertheless, by the exercise
of a little strength of will and determination, without upheavals or
revolutions and without perpetrating injustice, we can still be one of
the first races in the world."

With consummate skill he arranged a national program in which the Pope,
the Princes, the people, even Austria, should have a part, and it was
scarcely to be wondered that inasmuch as each interest was flattered
each thought well of the program. The clergy were no less delighted with
the eloquence of one of their own number than with his teaching that
religion and patriotism should go hand in hand, those high in power felt
that their power would be left them under his theory, and the people
were stirred by his eloquence and dreams of what Italy should become. As
a result there arose what was known as the "Neo-Guelph" party, which,
harking back to the Middle Ages, sought to place the Pope at the head of
the national movement. And, by a beautiful coincidence of history, just
at that moment a new Pontiff, one of that clergy which had so greatly
admired Gioberti's writings, ascended St. Peter's throne. In these facts
you have the cause of Gioberti's commanding position in the early years
of the great struggle.

Unfortunately Gioberti's theories were dreams, not even so practical
as the aspirations of Mazzini's "Young Italy." He had failed utterly
to grasp the need of absolute administrative concentration and did not
accurately estimate the jealousies and prides of the petty Princes and
the churchmen. He believed that those forces which had so long destroyed
Italian unity could be made to unite to restore it, he believed that the
Roman Church could exercise a wise temporal authority. He looked back to
the Middle Ages, and spoke with some of Savonarola's words. He appealed
to his people's ancient love of art and letters, to the glories of the
mediæval cities, to the world-wide authority of Rome and St. Peter's.
The appeal stirred the imagination of the intellectual classes, and
drew the attention of other countries to the fallen estate of Italy.
Beyond that it could not be effective; the needs of State and Church, of
Princes and people, had grown too unalterably opposed. Mazzini was far
nearer right, a truer teacher, a surer guide.

The time came when Gioberti recognized that Italy's salvation lay in
the strong hand, and this he acknowledged in his last book. It is the
truest of all his political philosophies because he had then understood
that the future belonged to men of such abilities as were possessed by
Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, and to a well-knit nation rather than to a
confraternity of ill-assorted states.

Yet for all its fallacies Gioberti's "Primato" woke intellectual Italy
from a sleep which had lasted centuries, and made it consider the
problem of its regeneration.




[Illustration: MANIN]




MANIN, THE "FATHER OF VENICE"


The story of Venetian glory seemed closed with the last years of the
Eighteenth Century. The proud Queen of the Adriatic had seen her jewels
stolen one by one, and had finally become the toy of wanton powers.
Venice was no longer self-reliant, no longer coldly virtuous, her
grandeur had sunk into a memory, her civic honor been bedimmed by gross
corruption. "Venice was," said the world, and France, parceling out the
conquests of the young Napoleon, handed Venetia and the City of the
Doges to Austria. There was no opportunity for self-defense, Napoleon
had removed all military stores and confiscated the Venetian fleet, the
citizens buried the lion-banners of Saint Mark beneath their churches,
and silently watched the Austrians enter. The last Doge, aged and bent
with years, fell senseless as he opened his lips to swear allegiance to
the House of Hapsburg. Europe considered the fate of Venice sealed.

Napoleon came and went, and men as well as maps experienced gigantic
changes, but still Venice slept. She had become a part of the Austrian
Empire, a new generation grew up who had never known Venice free, who
only learned their city's history by stealth. Among this new generation
was Daniel Manin, son of a Jew who had embraced Christianity and who
had adopted the surname of his noble patron the last Doge, according to
Venetian custom. So it happened that the last free ruler of Venice and
the man who was to raise her from sleep bore the same name. There was
also transmitted to the boy the ancient hate of Austria.

Born in 1804 Daniel Manin early showed a strong love of learning, which
was eagerly tended by his father, a lawyer of some note. The father
taught his son the history of his city, he brought him up to see the
unjust practices of Napoleon and of Austria, he kindled in him the
passion for liberty. The boy studied jurisprudence and the growth of
Venetian dialects, at fifteen he translated the apocryphal book of
Enoch from the Hebrew, at seventeen he became a Doctor of Laws, and
had translated Pothier's great French work on Roman law before he was
twenty-one. The year he came of age he married, and a little later
settled in the small town of Maestra, which lies at the entrance to the
Lagoons, and started to practise his profession of advocate, which under
Austrian rule allowed him only to act in civil cases, and then merely
in a consulting capacity and never as a pleader in the courts.

Even in early youth his health was poor; although his mind was unusually
active and well-balanced he was subject to frequent visitations of
great physical weariness which at times made it impossible for him to
accomplish anything. Later in life he wrote, "The act of living, in a
healthy person, considered in itself, ought to be a pleasure; but to me
from my very childhood, it has always been a painful effort. I always
feel weary." He was frequently morbid just at the time when his growing
family required all his energy for support.

In person the young lawyer was rather striking, not tall, but spare,
with unusually animated blue eyes, thick chestnut hair, and features
full of changing expression, quick to show the temper of his mind. For
all his underlying weariness and continued depression he often appeared
gay and cheerful on the surface; it was his nature to be unselfish, and
to turn a brave face towards the world.

Working as an advocate Manin gave up his spare hours to studying
Venetian _patois_ and to planning how in time his city might loosen
the bonds of Austrian tyranny. As early as 1830, when he was only
twenty-six, he joined with three close friends in a plot to seize the
Venetian arsenal, and drew up a proclamation intended to excite the
citizens. The movement throughout northern Italy on which the friends
relied failed to materialize, and the plan fell through. Fortunately the
authors of the proclamation were not discovered, and Manin was permitted
to continue his profession. He did not believe in secret societies, and
would not join them; he devoted himself to studying Austria's colonial
weaknesses.

The first step which brought him seriously to the notice of the
government was his work on behalf of the Italian bankers who were
associated with some Germans in building a railway between Venice and
Milan. There had been a disagreement as to the route of the railway, and
the Austrian viceroy had sided with the Germans. Manin was engaged to
represent the Italian bankers, and conducted his side of the case with
great skill. The Austrian government finally concluded the matter by
arbitrarily dissolving the Italian Railways Association. The case had
however shown Manin a possible mode of attacking the foreign despotism,
finding flaws in its laws and concentrating on such weaknesses until
eventually its whole fabric was loosened. He did not believe that
any sudden local revolution could succeed, he saw only the loss of
valuable lives thereby, but he did believe that the way for some later
far-sweeping rising might be paved by consecutive breaches in the
enemy's legal walls. This opinion was the result of his evenly-balanced,
deliberate judgment; he could at times, as he was to show later, throw
himself passionately into a cause, without regard to consequences, but
his nature was not that of the ardent revolutionary; he relied on cool,
sober judgments, and was not readily led from them by illusions. In his
notes we find him writing, "Against disorder I feel a repulsion not
only of reason but of instinct, the same as I feel against everything
contrary to the laws of harmony, a deformed face, a discordant sound."

His advocacy of the Italian bankers brought Manin before the Venetian
public, he was recognized as an able speaker with a deep knowledge
of law. He spoke before the Venetian Athenæum on the obligation of
thinkers to inspire and stimulate men of action. The subject gave him
a chance to draw attention to the present lethargy of Venice and to
urge consideration of new ideas affecting trade and commerce. He hoped
to unite northern Italians through the new principle of free trade.
Fortunately Cobden, the great English advocate of free trade, was
traveling in Italy; he visited Venice and met Manin and some of the
other Venetian leaders of opinion just as he had met Cavour at Turin
and Massimo d'Azeglio at Genoa.

Various small events gave the lawyer a chance to speak publicly to his
fellow-citizens. At the Scientific Congress which met in September,
1847, he was appointed a commissioner to investigate the charitable
institutions of Venice, and in doing this work he came upon the case
of a poor infirm workman who had placed a placard upon a public wall
complaining that the government had left him to starve, and for which
action had been placed in a lunatic asylum. Manin reported the case
and wrote, "The physicians acknowledge the man is sane; but they dare
not set him at liberty, fearing it would be contrary to the views of
the police and government. For my part, I have a better opinion of the
government and the police. I do not admit that they create madmen by
decrees. If Padovini is culpable there are the laws." Count Palffy,
the Governor, was very much vexed. "We must release Padovini from the
madhouse," he said, "and put Manin in his place."

About the same time Count Jablonski, a relation of the Venetian
Governor, wrote a paper urging the Italians to become resigned. In reply
Manin set down his thoughts in a page which seems to sum up his whole
purpose, a wonderful expression of his philosophy. It was not published
at that time, but was later found among his papers. It read:

"It is the fashion to preach resignation.

"I distinguish two kinds of resignation; the one virtuous and manly; the
other cowardly, and worthy only of fools.

"The strong man, when overcome by misfortune, seeks the means of
remedying it. Does he find any? In spite of difficulties, he applies
himself to the task, excited, cheerful, and vigorous, full of energy and
pertinacity. It is only when he is certain that no remedy exists, that
he becomes resigned. This is manly resignation.

"The coward, when misfortune overtakes him, allows himself to be cast
down, and seeks no means of remedying it. However spontaneous and easy
relief may present itself to his mind, he attempts nothing, he wishes
neither to trouble nor expose himself--he is resigned: this is the
resignation of the fool.

"Therefore, resignation is virtuous and manly under evils manifestly
without remedy; it is cowardly and stupid when we can in any way free
ourselves from these evils.

"In the individual, resignation may often be virtuous; in a nation
it is perhaps never so, for the misfortunes of a nation are seldom
irremediable.

"To overcome the misfortunes of a nation, we can employ the whole
intellectual, moral, and physical power of all its citizens; and if
the generation which commences the generous task does not succeed in
accomplishing it, other generations follow, who will attain success; for
nations never die.

"This is the reason why those who advise resignation to nations, advise
cowardice, and the nations which become resigned are cowards."

Therein lies the whole wisdom of Manin's political philosophy, and also
that of many of the earlier Italian patriots. How could Austria hope to
keep such men forever in subjection?

Manin's avowed purpose was to show again and again that the Austrians
were not obeying the laws which they had themselves given to the
subject provinces. One of the methods of Austrian administrative rule
was the use of supposedly representative councils called the Central
and Provincial Congregations, which were designed to communicate the
wishes of the people of Venice and Lombardy in the form of petitions
to the Imperial council, and which had failed lamentably to use even
that meager power. On December 9, 1847, Nazari, a deputy to the Lombard
Congregation, moved that the grievances of the country be represented to
the Imperial government. Not a single Venetian deputy followed his lead,
but Manin, as a private individual, signed a petition to the Venetian
Congregation calling upon them to speak for the people. His comments
were brief but vigorous. "The Congregations," he said, "have never been
the interpreters of our wants or wishes--their silence has arisen from
a fear of displeasing the government; but this fear is unjust, and
injurious: for it is unjust and injurious to suppose that the government
has granted to this kingdom a derisory national representation, that it
deceived, and still deceives, this country and Europe, in making laws
which it does not wish to be observed, and in prosecuting and punishing
those who intend observing them." The Venetians were delighted with
the petition, they were beginning to feel the first thrills of a new
civic life. On December 30, Manin and Tommaseo, a brilliant poet and
public-spirited citizen, drew up another address which in bold terms
denounced the Austrian censorship of the press contrary to a specific
clause in the law of 1815. All the members of the Ateneo, the literary
club of Venice, signed the petition that went with the address.

The Austrians failed to see in the unrest that appeared throughout Italy
at the close of 1847 more than a series of local and widely-separated
disturbances, and made small effort to appease any of the leaders. For
their part in preparing the Venetian petition Manin and Tommaseo were
arrested and thrown into prison on January 18, 1848, charged with high
treason. The temper of the newly-aroused people was uncertain, on the
morning after the arrest the streets of Venice were seen blossoming with
signs ominous to peace and Austrian supremacy, "Viva l'Italia!" "Viva
Manin e Tommaseo!" and "Morte ai Tedeschi!"

From the date of his imprisonment Manin underwent many sufferings, one
of the chief being his inability longer to help in nursing a daughter to
whom he was passionately devoted and who was suffering from a tedious
and most painful nervous disease. At almost the same time his younger
sister, who was ill in Trevisa, died from the shock of hearing of his
imprisonment. He had been able to save very little for dark days, now
that they were come he could do nothing to tide his little household
through them. Outwardly he was calm and strong of will, inwardly he was
tormented by a hundred fears. Yet he could write from prison to his
brave wife, saying, "If you continue to be strong and courageous, these
will be the happiest days of my life.... You will find a few pieces of
gold in one drawer, a little silver in another.... If this affair lasts
long, we must think of providing for you in some way. Love one another,
my angels: be resigned, that is sufficient."

A valiant attempt was made by Teresa Manin to secure her husband's
release on bail, the authorities put her off continually, and finally
the Director-General replied that he did not believe himself authorized
to accede to her request. This final reply caused an outburst of popular
indignation. The Venetians dressed themselves in mourning, and with
heads bared filed slowly before the windows of the prison on the Riva
dei Schiavoni, where Manin and Tommaseo were confined. As long as he
remained in prison the other advocates united in caring for Manin's
legal practice, and high-spirited friends among all classes insisted
on providing his family with all necessities. He himself hoped to
be able to support them by reprinting a small treatise on Venetian
jurisprudence, but permission to advertise its sale was denied him by
the government. A little later, however, Austrian permissions became no
longer necessary, and Manin's family lived on the proceeds of the sale
of this work and on the small legacy left to him by his sister. He had
little time to think of self-support when he became dictator.

The ancient spirit of Venice was slowly rising as day after day news
came that men throughout Italy were turning on their despots. The
Nicoletti and the Castellani, the two historic factions of the people,
the blacks and the reds, renounced their ancient feud and took a common
secret oath to war only with Austria until Venice was free. The young
nobles resigned their Austrian offices and ranks, they had heard what
the nobility of Milan were accomplishing. The examination into the
charges against Manin and Tommaseo continued, although nothing illegal
could be proved against them there was a prospect of their arbitrary
removal out of Venice and to that prison of Spielberg where the careers
of so many gifted Italian patriots had ended. Manin heard that the
French had driven their King from his throne, he wondered what effect
the growing tumult of that revolution year would have on Venice. He did
not have to wait long to learn. The flames of revolt had spread across
Europe even to Vienna, Metternich had fled from the city in peril of
his life, the Austrian throne was tottering. Manin saw what was coming,
and made his plans even while he was in prison to secure Venice against
anarchy.

On the morning of March 17, 1848, the Venetians hastened to the dock
to learn the latest news of Vienna from the Trieste packet. A French
merchant on board called to the gondoliers the news, "A Constitution
at Vienna! The Recognition of Italian Independence! A Free Press! A
National Guard!" The words were sufficient, the people rushed to the
Governor's palace and demanded the immediate release of Manin and
Tommaseo. The Governor wavered, declaimed, finally yielded, saying, "I
do what I ought not to do." The people swept to the prison, and beating
down the doors, discovered the two captives. "You are free!" the leaders
shouted. Manin still chose to follow the usage of law, and asked to see
the warrant for his release. It was produced, and then he and his fellow
captive were led forth from the dreary cells with loud acclaims of joy.
Manin was raised in a chair, and so carried to the great Square of St.
Mark's, the scene of so many triumphs in Venetian history. The yellow
and black flag of Austria had in some mysterious fashion fluttered down
from the ancient flag-staves that guard the square and in its place
floated the red, white, and green emblem. "Speak!" cried the people,
and Manin, pale, infirm, and gaunt from prison life, rose and spoke
with his remarkably persuasive voice. He said he did not know to what
great events he owed his freedom, but could see clearly that nationality
and patriotic fire had grown wonderfully during the past few months.
"But forget not, I beg," he implored, "that true and lasting liberty
can only rest on order, and that you must make yourselves the emulous
guardians of order if you would show that you are worthy to be free." He
paused a moment, then added, "Yet there are times pointed out to us by
Providence when insurrection becomes not only a right, but a duty."

Manin returned home, already intent on plans to regulate the new order
of things. Towards night the great bell in the Ducal Chapel sounded
the warning note, the people rushed to the Piazza to find a battalion
of Croats tearing down the Italian tricolor, the people resisted, the
soldiers cleared the square with a bayonet charge, but the Venetians
had tasted triumph too fully to be dismayed. Some of them went to Manin
and asked him to lead them against the Croats. "This is not the way,"
he answered, "we must have a civic guard." He sent a messenger to the
Governor. "Tell him that to-day his life was in my hands, and that I
preached order, not vengeance; and now, in the interest of his own life
as well as of order, he must at once organize a civic guard."

Again Count Palffy hesitated and put off the demand from day to day. He
sent messengers to the Viceroy at Verona, and the latter telegraphed him
permission to enroll two hundred citizens. Three thousand at once took
arms and called on Manin to give them his commands. "Let all who will
not absolutely obey me depart," he said, but no one left. At last Venice
again had an army of her own.

There was no immediate bloodshed. The leading citizens conferred as to
what course Venice should take if the revolution in Vienna succeeded.
Some were for joining the kingdom of Charles Albert, some for uniting
with Lombardy, some for an Austrian ruler under a constitution. Manin
scattered their diverse views, he told them that their immediate need
was freedom, that their city must actually be in their own charge
before considering her destiny. Rumors came that the city was about
to be bombarded, there was danger both from the arsenal and from the
sea, and on the night of March 21 Manin laid his plans before the chief
patriots and told them that they must seize the arsenal. "The people
of Venice," he said, "can only understand one cry, 'Let the Republic
live!'" Still the others hesitated; one said, "The people are incapable
of sacrifices!" "You do not know them," cried Manin. "I know them; that
is my sole merit, you will see!"

Newcomers arrived, and still Manin, worn with argument, pressed his
opinion. He finished, saying, "We must have the Republic, and join with
it Saint Mark. The Republic and Saint Mark will echo in Dalmatia."

"Viva San Marco!" came an answering cry. "It is the only one, the
rallying cry of Venice!"

The conference agreed; Manin sent for the commander-in-chief of
the civic guard. "The city is threatened with bombardment," he
said. "I wish to take the arsenal at all hazards. You must make me
commander-in-chief for a day. Form the six battalions into two brigades,
and give me their captains for eight hours." The general, astounded
at the advocate's demand, left without making a reply. Manin sent to
the other commanders making the same demand. One by one they refused,
claiming that the project was too wild.

Meanwhile the soldiers at the arsenal were in mutiny and had killed the
second officer in command; there was danger of the spirit of anarchy
spreading. At the same time the last of the commanders, Major Olivieri,
placed his single battalion at Manin's command. The advocate seized
his sword, called his son, a boy of sixteen, to follow him, and put
himself at the head of the two hundred guards. The little band marched
on the arsenal and forced the commander to surrender; almost before the
Austrian officers knew what had happened the Venetians were distributing
the military stores among the people. At the moment of taking the
arsenal Manin had sent word to call the whole people into St. Mark's
Square. He found the ancient banner, the wingéd lion, and raising it
from the dust where it had lain for fifty years he unfurled it before
his company and led them back across the Piazzetta into the great
square. He had told the people he would meet them there at noon; now
he stood before them, bearing the emblem that proclaimed that Venice
had risen from her lengthy slumbers. He spoke to the assembled city.
"Venetians, we are free! And we are so without the shedding of blood,
either our own, or our brothers', for to me all men are brothers. But
when the old government is overturned, the new must take its place; the
best now seems to me to be the Republic which speaks of our past glory
and adds the liberty of modern times. But by this we shall not separate
from our Italian brothers, but rather form one of those centers destined
to aid in fusing our Italy into one people. Live the Republic! Live
liberty! Live Saint Mark!"

The civic guards swore to defend with their lives the new Republic and
its founder, the aged wept, the young embraced, all raised their hands
in gratitude to heaven. The people reveled in noble delirium of joy.
Venice looked upon Manin as its deliverer; the citizens did not know the
physical anguish he had undergone. Pathetic are the words of his little
daughter Emilia as she heard her father proclaimed. "I ought," she
wrote, "to be filled with ineffable gladness, but a weight continually
presses my heart."

Manin had scarcely closed his eyes for five days and nights. As soon as
the people would release him now he went home utterly exhausted: he said
to his friends, "Leave me at least this night to rest, or I shall die."

The Austrian authorities saw that resistance would be of little avail,
their own forces were too small and too much in sympathy with the
people's cause to give them a sense of any real power on which to rely,
and accordingly the Governor acceded to the terms imposed upon him. All
foreign troops were to be removed, the forts and all military stores
surrendered, the government transferred to the charge of a Committee of
Venetian citizens. The demands were sweeping, the Austrian government
later regarded the Venetian capitulation as the most humiliating they
suffered in the revolutionary year of 1848.

That same night the provisional government announced to the people the
terms of the Austrian capitulation, and the citizens were amazed to find
that neither the name of Manin nor of Tommaseo was included in the new
government. They made their dissatisfaction so apparent that friends
went to see Manin to beg him to send some message to the people. He
dictated the following lines from his bed: "Venetians! I know that you
love me, and, in the name of that love, I ask you to conduct yourselves,
during the legitimate manifestation of your joy, with that dignity
which belongs to men worthy of being free. Your friend, Manin."

The people heard the message and quietly dispersed. Next day the
provisional government found that the new Republic would only have the
one man at its head, and so they asked Manin to form a government. He
did so immediately, taking for himself the Presidency of the Council
and Foreign Affairs. He composed his government of men of different
classes and different religions, all Venetians were assured of perfect
equality in their new state. The patriarch blessed the standard of the
Republic, and the commander of the fleet read the list of the ministry
to the people. The reading was broken by constant cries of "Viva Manin!
President of the Republic!"

Thus Venice became free after fifty years of bondage. It was now
Manin's concern to see that she was kept free. He recognized how slight
were her resources, and he became at once an eager adherent of French
intervention in northern Italy. Charles Albert of Piedmont and Mazzini
were both acclaiming an Italy won by the Italians, but Manin foresaw,
what Cavour was later to recognize, that foreign allies were absolutely
essential.

France, however, was in a most unsettled condition, her ministers
did not wish to see a strong state of upper Italy on their southern
borders; they were already longing to annex Savoy, and yet as good
republicans they felt themselves bound to aid the revolted states
against Austrian tyranny. Manin made overtures for an alliance, at first
merely feeling his way, but as the summer progressed, and the need
grew more and more apparent, by definite overtures. The French Consul
at Venice was most hopeful. He said to Manin, "It is well known that
the sympathy of France, when she possesses liberty of action, is never
without results." In reply Manin said that he hoped "that the united
efforts of the different Italian states, the ardor which animates the
people of the Peninsula, will suffice to expel the enemy; if not, we
shall have recourse to the generosity of France. Meanwhile, we should
be glad to see at once some French vessels in the Adriatic, and I beg
that you will lose no time in communicating our wishes to the foreign
ministry."

Manin wished to convene a popular assembly as soon after he assumed
office as possible, and on June 3 such a deliberative body met, its
members having been elected by universal suffrage from Venice and the
free districts of the Dogado. Their first important task was to decide
whether they would join with Lombardy in union under Piedmont's King.
Manin believed that the decision as to such a step ought to be deferred
until the war was ended, but a strong party opposed his opinion. His
partisans entered into a bitter fight with the opposition, for a time
it looked as though the split in the Assembly would lead to civil war.
Manin rose and implored those who were his friends to place no further
obstacles in the path of fusion. Moved by his passionate appeal for
harmony the Assembly passed the act of fusion with few negative votes,
and at the same time resolved that "Daniel Manin had deserved well of
his country." He spoke again, saying, "While the foreigner is still in
Italy, for God's sake let there be no more talk of parties. When we are
rid of him we will discuss these matters among ourselves as brothers.
This is the only recompense I ask of you."

The Assembly elected Manin head of the new ministry, but he declined on
the ground that he had always been a republican and would feel out of
place as a royal minister. In addition his health demanded that he seek
some rest.

The new Venetian ministry lasted until August 7, when the Royal
Commissioners assumed office. Unfortunately Charles Albert was already
being beaten back in Lombardy, and on August 9 signed the armistice of
Salasco, by which all claims to Venice were renounced. When word came
to the city the Venetians were dumbfounded, then mad with indignation.
Finally they rushed to Manin's house, calling for him and denouncing
the Royal Commissioners. Manin told the excited people that he would
stake his head upon the Commissioners' patriotism. He went to see them
and then addressed the citizens again. "The day after tomorrow," he
said, "the Assembly will meet to appoint a new government. For these
forty-eight hours I govern." The people dispersed, satisfied now that
their idol was at their head again. The Assembly when it met wished to
make Manin dictator, but he pleaded his ignorance of military matters,
and a triumvirate was formed, made up of Admiral Graziani, Colonel
Cavedalis, and himself.

Just when it seemed as though France was finally deciding to come to the
aid of northern Italy, England intervened and proposed a plan of joint
mediation. To add to this obstacle Charles Albert declared that Italy
would act for herself, and the chances of Venice winning a foreign ally
were reduced to practically nothing. Italians from Naples to Piedmont
were showing themselves to be individual heroes, but their efforts were
ineffectual without a general leader. The Romans were hampered by the
inaction of the Pope. Pius IX. had promised great things in the cause of
national independence, but when the German Cardinals told him that in
case he declared war against Austria he would forfeit their allegiance
his enthusiasm waned. The Austrian general, Radetzky, was slowly
winning back the fields lost in Lombardy, Vicenza fell, then Milan, and
Austria felt herself strong enough to declare a blockade of Venice. As
the summer of 1848 ended it became clear that Venice would be left to
herself, that the tide of revolution in the other states was already
ebbing, and that Piedmont had shot her bolt. Manin still hoped that some
ally would succor the small city in her war against the great empire,
but whether an ally should come or not he was determined that Venice
should set an example of resistance that would show Europe how well
freedom was deserved.

The city, in its state of siege, stood in the greatest need of money.
Manin had only to ask, and all classes brought forth their savings,
their heirlooms, whatever they had of value, to give to the cause. The
old aristocracy, the boys in the street, every one who loved Venice,
made their sacrifices gladly, reverently. Private citizens clothed many
of the soldiers, palaces were given for public uses, Manin gave all
his family plate and would accept no salary; General Pepe, the aged
commander-in-chief, gave a picture by Leonardo da Vinci that was his
dearest possession. No one thought of his own need, all thought solely
of keeping Venice free. If she returned to bondage they cared little
what became of them.

Ugo Bassi, the heroic priest who was later to fight with Mazzini on
the walls of Rome, and still later to die at the hands of Austrian
executioners, preached daily to the Venetians. There was no lack of
noble spirits who recalled to them the great glories of the past. But
above and beyond all the others the people loved Manin, they had come to
link his name indissolubly with that of their city, he was their father,
they his devoted children. If ever a man merited such devotion it was
Manin. With the cares of his city weighing perpetually on his mind,
planning, advising, encouraging, he fought the ravages of disease that
crippled his resources, and spent the nights watching by the bedside of
his sick child. At one time, in November, there was fear for his life,
and Venice shook with apprehension. He recovered and took up the burden
of government with his marvelous stoic calm.

In spite of the fact that the city was besieged and money scarce, Venice
was characteristically buoyant. The theater, the Fenice, was crowded;
fêtes and carnivals, always patriotically fervent, were of daily
occurrence; processions, music, all that appealed to the eye and the ear
and the imagination fed the Venetian love of glory. Their city was free,
and the people awakened the echoes of that great life which had been
theirs before captivity, they forgot so far as they could that they
had ever slumbered. On the morning of November 17 Mass was celebrated
in memory of all the martyrs to Italian liberty, and that same night
the entire city was thrilled by a wonderful display of the Aurora
Borealis which set the snow-caps of the Alps vividly before their eyes.
They lived on faith, and hope, and trust in Daniel Manin, and found
propitious omens with sea-dwellers' skill.

In December some Roman volunteers left Venice to join their fellow
citizens, and with them went Ugo Bassi. He bade Manin a touching
farewell, foreseeing what lay before both his own city and Venice.
He had venerated the Pope who had held out such noble hopes to all
Italians, but he could do so no more, and in his place put the hero of
Venice. As he left the city he kissed the stone plate on Manin's door,
saying, "Next to God and Italy, before the Pope--Manin."

The Assembly which had voted for fusion with Piedmont was dissolved,
and a new one elected. Manin was determined that his government should
have the fullest power over the city. He deemed this essential to any
hopes of ultimate success. Some members of the Assembly disagreed with
him, and advocated restriction. "It is not a question of power," replied
Manin, "but of saving the country. If we are to be hampered on every
turn by forms and limitations, we cannot act with the promptitude and
vigor needful for the preservation of public order (I beg pardon of
whoever the expression may offend), and our defense depends more upon
that than upon the force of arms."

The people got wind of the fact that certain of the Assembly were
jealous of Manin's power, and they marched to the Ducal Palace. Manin
spoke and dispersed them, but again and again they gathered, making
various demonstrations of their trust in him. At length he heard that
they had devised a plan to march into the Council Hall and coerce the
Deputies who wanted to fetter their "caro Manin." Fearful of civic
strife Manin called his son, and standing alone with him, sword in hand,
at the door of the Palace, told the people that they could only enter
after killing father and son. He bade them go quietly home, and they
obeyed. That night he issued a proclamation. "Brothers, you have caused
me great pain to-day. To show your affection for me you have risen in
tumult, yet you know how I hate tumult ... as you say you love me, I
entreat you to show it by your actions.... To-morrow let there be no
shouting, no meetings. Remain at home. Trust in the government and the
Assembly, who regard your welfare as dearer to them than life." He was
always the father speaking to his children.

The Assembly listened to the advice of its wisest members, and
abandoning all dissension, chose Manin as President of the Republic,
giving him complete power both as to internal administration and as
to relations with foreign states. Manin spoke in reply: "In accepting
the charge which this Assembly has entrusted to me, I am conscious of
committing an act of insensate boldness. I accept it. But in order that
my good name, and, what is of more importance, your good name and that
of Venice, may not be tarnished through this transaction, it behooves
that I should be seconded and sustained in my arduous undertaking by
your co-operation, confidence, and affection. We have been strong,
respected, eulogized, up till now, because we have been united. I ask of
you virtues which, if they are not romantic, are at all events of great
practical utility. I ask of you patience, prudence, perseverance. With
these, and with concord, love, and faith, all things are overcome."

Charles Albert again took the field and for a brief interval the
Austrians were repulsed. Brescia made a heroic stand, and the Venetians
heard the news of the little city's courage with shouts of acclamation
and an added determination to fight Austria to the uttermost. The
Venetian fleet was kept in constant readiness, the troops slept with
their arms, there was only the one thought, to keep the lion-flag of St.
Mark flying from the _pili_.

Then on March 28, 1849, came letters from Turin telling of the utter
defeat of Novara and of Charles Albert's abdication in favor of his son.

The first effect of the news on Venice was absolute stupefaction, then
a wild rush to the Square of St. Mark's. A tremendous crowd called,
as usual in its troubles, for its "father, Manin!" Said a foreigner
who was a witness of the scene, "The faith of Venice in this man was
inconceivable, complete, and absolute. He had never deceived, never
abused it. The people seemed to attribute to him omnipotence and
omniscience, and believed him capable of guarding Venice from every
peril, and of rescuing her from every calamity."

The President appeared on the Palace balcony. He said that he had not
yet received official confirmation of the news from Turin, but his sad
expression and his few words showed his belief that the news might prove
only too true. Venice passed a night of bitterest gloom, more hopeless
even than in the later days when Austrian bombs exploded in the streets.
Three similar days followed, and then came official confirmation of the
news. Lombardy was Austrian once more.

The city withstood the shock, and took up its life of outward cheer and
hope. On April 25, St. Mark's Day, there was a grand _festa_, and Manin
spoke. "Who holds out wins," he declared. "We have held out, and we
shall win. Long live St. Mark! This cry, that the seas rang with in old
days, we must raise again. Europe looks on, and will praise. We must, we
ought to win. To the Sea! To the Sea! To the Sea!" There was tremendous
thrill in his magnetic voice, in his deep blue eyes, in the glow of his
pallid face; Venice cried aloud with eager hope.

With this spring of 1849 came the great days. When the Assembly had
voted to resist Austria at all costs, the people adopted a red ribbon
as their emblem. A historian of that time says: "From the top of the
_Campanile_ of St. Mark, far above the domes, the roofs, and the spires
of the palace and the basilica, beside the golden angel that seemed
to watch over the city, they planted a huge red banner, which stood
out like a spot of blood against the azure sky, which was seen by the
enemy's fleet afar off in the Adriatic, and by their army on the distant
mainland. It defied them both, and announced to them that Venice would
fight to the last drop of blood."

Placards were fixed to every wall, at the corner of every street.
They read: "Venice resists! Church plate, women's golden ornaments,
bronze bells, copper cooking utensils, the iron of the enemy's cannon
balls--all will be useful. Anything rather than the Croats!"

Night and day workmen had been building ships, now the little fleet
fought through the lagunes as had the great fleets of the olden days.
The land forces held the shore batteries, and these forces were composed
of all the city. One artillery company, famous as the Bandiera-Moro,
was made up of the patrician youth of Venice, who, with their ancient
love of splendor, wore velvet tunics, gray scarves, and caps with
plumes. When the bitter fight came at Fort Malghera they held their guns
heroically, fresh men leaping to replace the dead, cheering for Venice
as the bombs fell among them, firing and eating and carrying off the
wounded under a devastating fusillade. Venice thirsted for glory, and
she won it; there are no more stirring tales in history than that of the
brief defense of the new-born Republic.

In July came continual bombardment, and with it cholera, and the seeds
of sedition spread by Austrian spies. Manin feared civil dissension, he
heard grumblers in the streets. No one dared accuse the man, whom the
Assembly had chosen absolute dictator, of any wavering or treasonable
thought, but some raised cries beneath his windows in the Piazzetta.
The Dictator appeared suddenly before them. "Venetians," he cried,
"is this worthy of you? You are not the people, you are only an
insignificant faction. Never will I accede to the caprices of a mob!
My acts shall be guided solely by the representatives of the people,
assembled in their Congress. I will always speak the truth to you, even
should muskets be leveled at my breast, and daggers be pointed at my
heart. And now go home, all of you--go home!"

His words swayed even that rebellious crowd, and they cheered him. For
the time sedition was silent, but the people were losing hope. They were
a mere handful battling with the forces of an empire. Manin saw that all
he could do was to insure that his people died as heroes.

The city was the prey of famine, pestilence, and fire when on August
13 she held her last _festa_. The Dictator spoke to the troops in the
Square of St. Mark's. His words rang like a clarion call. "A people that
have done and suffered as our people have done and suffered cannot die.
The day shall come when a splendid destiny will be your guerdon. What
time will bring that day? This rests with God. We have sown the good
seed: it will take root in good soil.... If it be not ours to ward off
these calamities, it is ours to maintain inviolate the honor of the
city.... One single day that sees Venice not worthy of herself, and all
that she has done will be lost and forgotten." He asked them if they had
still their confidence in him, if not he would resign the leadership to
another. The Square shook with the thunder of the soldiers' "Yes!" He
went on: "Your indomitable love saddens me, and makes me feel yet more
how this people suffer! On my mental and bodily faculties you must not
count, but count always on my great, tender, undying affection. And come
what may, say, 'This man was misled:' but do not ever say, 'This man
misled us.' I have deceived no one. I have never spread illusions which
were not my own. I have never said I hoped when I had no hope."

As he finished speaking he staggered, and was barely able to get to
the Council Chamber. There his physical weakness overmastered him.
"Such a people," he cried brokenly, "for such a people to be obliged to
surrender!"

Nevertheless each hour now brought home the conviction that the strength
of Venice was ebbing rapidly. Flames and the plague and the unremitting
Austrian attack were bringing the proud city to her knees. Manin could
only hope that he might at the last make honorable terms of surrender,
he would not sacrifice all their heroic efforts to the desire for
instant peace. On August 18 the people gathered in St. Mark's Square,
begging for some word of their President's plans. He came out before
them. "Venetians," he said, "I have already told you frankly that our
situation is a grave one, but if it be grave it is not desperate to the
degree of reducing us to cowardice ... it is an infamy to suppose that
Venice would ask of me to do what was infamous; and if she should ask it
this one sacrifice I would not make--even for Venice."

Some one in the throng cried, "We are hungry!"

"Let him who is hungry stand forth!" answered Manin.

"None of us," cried the devoted people. "We are Italians! Long live
Manin!"

Five days later the city was torn by conflicting rumors of mutiny and
surrender. Manin had not yet succeeded in winning the terms he wanted
from the Austrians. When the people called for him he came out on the
balcony as he had so often done before. He spoke a few words, and then a
sudden pain seized him and he fell fainting into a chair. A little later
he reappeared and cried to the cheering people, "Let those who are true
Venetians patrol the city to-night with me." Then he took his sword,
and at the head of a great concourse, marched to the section of the
city where the mutineers had gathered. Shots were fired. Manin stepped
forward. "If you wish my life, take it!" he said. The mutineers were
silenced.

The following day, August 24, 1849, the city capitulated, the stock of
provisions having been absolutely exhausted that same day. The terms
were honorable, such Venetian soldiers as had been in the Austrian
service were to leave Venice. Forty civilians, headed by Manin, were
to leave. The powers of government were temporarily lodged in the
municipality.

That same day Manin left the Doge's Palace for his own small house. All
day the people passed before the door, saying, "Here lives our poor
father! How much he has suffered for us!" He was too absolutely worn out
to see any one. At midnight he with his wife and son and invalid small
daughter went on board the French steamer _Pluton_. All but one of them
were taking their last farewell of Venice.

The municipality, knowing that their great leader was penniless, had
gathered a small sum of money and forced him to accept it before he
left. He felt that the other exiles were in as great need of it as he,
and so quietly distributed it among them through friends on the various
ships that were bearing the exiles away. He had thought of the people as
his children for so long a time that he had still to take the care of
them upon himself.

The little family of four felt that it was farewell as they watched the
palaces and churches, towers and pillars of the City of the Lagunes
drop beneath the horizon. The view of Venice from the sea, incomparably
beautiful, must have been unspeakably sad to Manin's eyes.

When they arrived at Marseilles the devoted wife fell ill of cholera,
and, worn out with the long siege, was powerless to resist. She had
written on leaving Venice, "All is over, all is lost save honor! I am
going to a foreign land, where I shall hear a language not my own. My
beautiful language, I shall never hear it again; never more!" She died
soon after reaching Marseilles.

Manin took his two children with him to Paris, and gave himself up to
nursing the little girl, who was the victim of a continual nervous
disorder. The daughter and father were united by a bond of love that was
wonderfully strong and spiritual, they seemed to understand each other
always without words. He kept a little note-book record of her illness
as an aid to the physicians, and after his death the book was found
with the touching inscription on the cover, "Alla mia Santa Martire."
Her desire to comfort her father sustained her for some years, she knew
that she had become to him in a spiritual manner the living image of
his unhappy country. She struggled with all the heroism of a remarkable
character to hide her sufferings from him even as he sought to hide from
her the anguish her illness caused him. Daniel and Emilia Manin were
worthy to be father and daughter, both were heroic souls. In 1854 Emilia
died, her last words, "My darling Venice, I shall never see you again!"

Manin and his son stayed on in the French capital, the father giving
lessons in Italian for support. He had harbored no resentment against
France for her failure to come to the aid of Venice, he felt that
the French people were near kin to his own. He welcomed all Italians
or sympathizers with Italy, he predicted that eventually the entire
peninsula would be one in freedom. He met Cavour in Paris and talked
long about Venice with him, he was gradually becoming convinced that
Piedmont could and would lead the other states to victory. His study
was hung with portraits of the most dissimilar characters, all one in
interest for his country, Charles Albert opposite to Mazzini, Garibaldi
opposite Gioberti, Montanelli near D'Azeglio. He wrote articles on Italy
for the papers and traveled in England to arouse British interest in
his cause. It was a great day when he saw the Italian tri-color flying
beside the French and English flags to show that Piedmont had joined
the allies in the Crimean war. "In serving under the tri-colored flag
of Italian redemption," he wrote, "the soldiers who fight in the Crimea
are not the soldiers of the Piedmontese province, but the soldiers of
Italy." He understood the boldness of Cavour's great diplomatic stroke
and gave Piedmont the credit she deserved in becoming the first envoy of
a great nation.

While his strength lasted Manin worked in the cause, but finally he
was overcome by physical sufferings. He wrote in June, 1857, to his
friend the Marquis Pallavicino, "A month's rest in the country has not
calmed the fever of my poor brain. All work, all meditation, is utterly
impossible to me. Not only cannot I think about serious things, but I
am not able to give my mind to the most unimportant matters. This will
explain my silence. I lose patience and hope. My painful and useless
life becomes intolerable. I ardently desire the end. Farewell." The
physical weariness with which he had battled all his life was at last
overpowering him. He still believed that his principles would ultimately
conquer, but knew that he should not see Venice freed. September 22,
1857, he died, at the age of fifty-three years.

August 30, 1849, Radetzky and the Austrians had entered Venice, replaced
the Lion banner of St. Mark with the yellow and black flag of Austria,
and had expected to see the pleasure-loving city sink back into its
former quiescent indolence. What they expected did not come to pass.
Instead for seventeen years Venice mourned its lost liberty and lived
only in the thought of that day when it should rise again and finally.
There was no shame in this subjection, no happy compromise. This was
Manin's achievement, he had made his people worthy to be free. That was
the purpose of his heroic struggle, the lesson of his life.

July 5, 1866, the yellow and black flag of Austria fell from the _pili_,
and October 18 of that same year the red, white, and green flag of
united Italy greeted a free Venice. There was one wish in the people's
heart, that only their "dear father Manin" might have lived to see that
glorious day.

The remains of Manin, his wife and daughter, lie now close to the Church
of St. Mark, his statue looks down upon the people in the square before
his house even as he so often stood on the Palace balcony to speak to
them in the days of 1849. All through Venice there are reminders of
him, and he has taken his place among the great heroes of that historic
city--himself her greatest hero, her sincerest patriot. The simple
advocate, the great President, the "dear father" of the Venetian people.




[Illustration: MAZZINI]




MAZZINI, THE PROPHET


Some men become legendary during their own lives. Their personalities
have a certain detachment from the rest of the world so that common
standards have no value as applied to them. They are poets or seers or
philosophers, and often their mystic quality is of little use to the
great mass of men, and is only to be appreciated by the few. Sometimes
the whole world understands them. Mazzini had become a legend to the
people of Europe long before his death, but a legend that carried the
strongest personal appeal to every republican heart. You have only to
dip into letters of the time to realize how close he came to millions of
thinkers throughout Europe.

It would be interesting to consider the force of popular legend in a
national movement, to weigh sentiment against statesmanship and military
prowess. The land of Dante and of Savonarola would be an especially
fertile field for such inquiry, among no people has the prophet been
held of higher value than with the Italians. To-day we find them turning
to their dramatists and novelists for help in the solution of new social
problems just as Mazzini and the youth of his day looked to Alfieri
for political guidance. There is no doubt that Mazzini believed it was
his destiny to be a poet, and that throughout his whole life he looked
forward to the day when Italy should be united and free, and he could
turn to the work of writing her dramas.

Literary feuds play so little part in Anglo-Saxon history that we find
it difficult to understand the importance of their place in Latin
countries. Italy a century ago was the battle-ground of the Romanticists
and Classicists. The Classicists believed in a certain smug cloistered
virtue, a policy of non-resistance, and the contemplation of past
glories. It was the ambition 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."
Alfieri had been preaching resistance to Austrian tyranny through his
dramas, the boy Mazzini first looked to him as a political saviour of
Italy. He wrote, "these literary disputes are bound up with all that
is important in social and civil life," and again "the legislation and
literature of a people always advance on parallel lines." "Young Italy"
first hoped to win freedom through its literature.

The ill-fated Carbonari rebellion of 1821 sent many Piedmontese patriots
flying through Genoa to Spain. Giuseppe Mazzini, then sixteen years of
age, walking from church one Sunday morning in Genoa in company with
his mother, was stopped by a tall, gaunt-featured, black-eyed man who
held out his hat asking alms for "the refugees of Italy." The scene
made a tremendous impression on the youth's mind, for the first time he
felt that the cause of freedom was not a scholastic subject, but one
demanding the height of sacrifice. He set himself to study the causes of
the failure of past uprisings, and at the same time dedicated himself to
the work of teaching his countrymen how they might succeed.

The French Revolution had failed because it had taught men only a
knowledge of their rights, without any conception of their duties. Men
had not learned the law of self-restraint, and their ideal was the
greatest personal liberty rather than the greatest personal obligation
to their fellow-men. The revolutionists of Europe had a philosophy,
but no religion. The first great discovery that Mazzini made was that
if Italy were ever to be united, his countrymen must be fired with
faith in their own God-given destinies. They must make of their cause
a religion, they must learn, in his words, that Italy "had a strength
within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier than destiny itself."
At the start he offered his countrymen two arguments for action, the one
that this land of theirs had twice ruled the world, that she who had
given Christianity and the Renaissance to Europe had yet to send forth
"the gospel of humanity." He wrote: "Italy 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;" he showed Italians "the
vision of their country, radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an
angel of light among the nations that thought her dead." Such words rang
like an inspiration, but Mazzini, studying the men with whom he had to
work, knew that such inspiration was not enough. They struck the note of
glory, but all revolutionists had heard that note; what was needed was
the call to self-sacrifice.

With this fundamental need firmly fixed in his mind Mazzini gave what
spare hours fell to the lot of a young Italian lawyer to the work of
writing to the independent journals. At first he leaned to the side of
caution, realizing how strict was the censorship of the Italian press,
but gradually he contrived to slip bolder and more inflammatory messages
into circulation under the censor's nose. He spoke of a new party that
should arise in a short time, and called it "Young Italy," he expressed
deep sympathy with political exiles, he turned his literary criticisms
into studies of national development. Ultimately one of the papers for
which he wrote, the "Indicatore Livornese," became too daring, and was
ended by the authorities. Mazzini then aimed higher, and gained credit
with the "Antologia," the Edinburgh Review of Italy, by a series of
articles on the historical drama.

Meanwhile he was still studying the problem of giving a new religion
to the youth of Italy. He had joined the Society of the Carbonari, and
was learning that the plots and counter-plots of an unwieldy secret
society would accomplish no good end. There was too much ritual, too
little effort. The Carbonari had no definite plan, they were entirely
at the mercy of any chance leader of disaffection, each member only
knew one or two other members. Of a sudden the Revolution of July in
France fired liberals throughout Europe, Mazzini and his young friends
in Genoa immediately began active preparations for a military uprising.
Lead was being cast into bullets when the police of Genoa intervened and
Mazzini was placed under arrest. He had been suspected of revolutionary
sentiments for some time. The Governor of Genoa told Giuseppe's father
that he considered the son "was gifted with some talent, and too fond
of walking by himself at night absorbed in thought. What on earth
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, and there imprisoned
to await his trial. The commander of the fortress allowed the young
prisoner to keep his Bible, Tacitus, and Byron. From these hours of
solitary confinement sprang the youth's passionate regard for the
English poet, a man whose writings he later vehemently held were only to
be classed with Dante as an inspiration to Italians.

The government could prove nothing definite against him, but he was
thought too dangerous a man to be at large, and so was finally given
his choice between nominal imprisonment in a small town and exile.
France was throbbing with a new democracy, Paris was the center of
revolutionary propaganda, and so Mazzini chose exile there. Early in
1831 he parted from his family at Savona and started north. He felt that
he had come to the parting of the ways, and that henceforth his life
was to be absolutely given to the cause. For the first time he saw the
Alps, and his nature, always strongly susceptible to heroic scenery,
was deeply stirred. He watched the sunrise from Mont Cenis and wrote,
"The first ray of light trembling on the horizon, vague and pale, like
a timid, uncertain hope, then the long line of fire cutting the blue
heaven, firm and decided as a promise;" here was the poet soul free at
last to speak its message.

With the date of this first exile begins Mazzini's call to "Young
Italy." He had recognized that his countrymen must waken to a new
religion, that their souls must be touched rather than their ambitions.
The youth of Italy would feel the call more strongly than the
middle-aged. "Place," he said, "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." "All great national
movements," he wrote later, "begin with the unknown men of the people,
without influence except for the faith and will that counts not time or
difficulties." Mazzini was not diffident with regard to his own youthful
powers, nor was Cavour, five years Mazzini's junior, who wrote to a
friend at this time prophesying that he would one morning wake up Prime
Minister of Italy.

The most important feature of "Young Italy" was its religion, the
Carbonari had had none. Men were now told that they had a mission given
them by God, and that what had been before a mere personal right had
become a sacred duty. The second feature was the liberation of the poor,
a need which all former revolutionists had seemed to overlook. The
French Revolution had had no such substructure, the poets and dramatists
had idealized national rather than social liberty, but Mazzini saw that
the time had come for a further step, that Austria was not the only
enemy his people had to fear. He wrote, "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 these brutalized faces bear the
finger-print of God, the mark of the same mission as my 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." Mazzini gave "Young Italy" as its watchword "God and the
People."

There can be no question but that "Young Italy" was strong where the
Carbonari had been weak, but both movements had of necessity many of
the same defects. Government espionage forced the new movement like
its predecessors to choose the devious courses of a secret society.
The restlessness of the age caused the new movement to take each
fitful start as a momentous signal. The strength of Austria was not
underestimated, but the weakness of the disunited Italian states was.
Diplomacy was disregarded; it was only many years later that Mazzini
the prophet learned the value of Cavour the statesman. "Young Italy"
was launched in a troublous sea, destined to encounter many storms, but
fated ultimately to spread abroad the seeds of the hope that was to
awaken republicans throughout all European countries.

Mazzini no sooner arrived in Lyons than he found himself in the center
of plots. The French government, still fresh from the days of July, was
in two minds; first they aided a band of Italian refugees who were
planning a raid into Savoy, then they faced about and scattered the
conspirators. Another plan was for a trip to Corsica, there to gather
arms to aid the insurgents in Romagna, but the funds for this attempt
were lacking. Mazzini gave up immediate action for the moment, and
locating at Marseilles started with a few youthful friends to organize
his great concerted movement. They had nothing but youth and audacity. A
contemporary (probably Enrico Mayer) described Mazzini at this time as
"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 chiseled 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 mustachios 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."

Mazzini was proud of these early days when he looked back upon them
later. He wrote, "We had no office, no helpers. All day, and a great
part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles and
letters, getting information from travelers, 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 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." It was Mazzini's period of boundless hope.

Much of this hope throbbed through the literature that the small
Marseilles press scattered throughout Europe, men were in such a
state of unrest that the burning words became to them a prophetic
writing on the wall. In a hundred ways the contraband pamphlets were
smuggled across frontiers, all classes sent assurances of support
and aid to the young men in Marseilles, everywhere lodges of "Young
Italy" were started, and local editors scattered Mazzini's doctrines
through their immediate territories. Priests, attracted by the strong
religious tenor, professional and business men, many of the nobility
even joined the new movement. Garibaldi, a young officer in the Genoese
merchant service, Gioberti, then a teacher at Vercelli, Ruffini, and
his fellow-conspirators working under the very shadow of destruction
at Genoa, enrolled under the new standard of "God and the People." The
old members of the Carbonari, the followers of Buonarotti and his "veri
Italiani" joined the ranks, within two years "Young Italy" counted
its members by the tens of thousands. Not since the era of the great
Crusades had there been any simultaneous rising to compare with it.

All men who hoped for the coming of a united Italy looked towards
Piedmont as the state by which the first step must be taken. Piedmont
had great military traditions. It supported an efficient army, it was
so situated that it held the key of entrance into Lombardy, and had
the Alps and the Apennines as a base of retreat. In Piedmont there was
moreover an intense national feeling, the House of Savoy was deeply
rooted in the affections of the people, and almost alone among the
Italian sovereignties that House was practically indigenous to the
soil. In Charles Albert Piedmont had just received a king who was an
intense nationalist, to whom the name of "Italia" was sacred, and who,
at certain times, seems to have felt that he was destined to drive the
foreigner beyond the Alps. He was no liberal, both his nature and his
priestly advisers counseled him against revolutionary measures, he
had not the sanguine temper of the leader, he was more the theorist
than the actor. Yet with all his temperamental defects the men of
the new generation looked on him as a possible saviour, he had given
countenance to the Carbonari in his youth, and had led the conspirators
of 1821 to believe that he would side with them in any war for Lombard
independence. He had not given such aid as they expected, but he was
still the one sovereign to whom "Young Italy" could look with any
measure of hope. Mazzini was never an ardent believer in monarchies,
but now, when his new party was growing with tremendous leaps and
bounds, he felt that even the leadership of a king was better than no
leadership at all. He was ready at this time to sacrifice republicanism
for nationalism; how far he would then have followed a monarchy, if
successful, is a difficult question to decide. He was so much in earnest
that he could not always critically balance the means and the end.

Early in 1831 Mazzini published his famous letter to Charles Albert. It
was the cry of a prophet to a later generation. He pointed out that the
King of Piedmont needed no aid from 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 the splendor with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have
you ever 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."

Charles Albert had moments of heroism, but they were only too often
followed by moments of overwhelming caution. If he ever read Mazzini's
letter he must have thrilled at the call to save a country he loved
with the whole ardor of his nature. After that first thrill had passed
he must have realized that the time to take such a supreme step had not
come, or that he had not the will to lead it. Once harboring such a
doubt the King became a battle-ground for advisers, and when the short
fight for control of the King's mind was won, the reactionaries proved
themselves the victors. The unfortunate King allowed others to act
against his better judgment; when the fire of revolt next blazed up in
Piedmont the government turned a savage face towards the conspirators.
The little band of revolutionists was hounded without mercy, terror
reigned in Genoa, and the only choice offered the rebels was between
betrayal of their friends and execution. Jacopo Ruffini, one of
Mazzini's dearest boyhood friends, killed himself in prison when offered
such an alternative. The pendulum swung back, gaining momentum thereby
for its coming flight. "Ideas," wrote Mazzini, "ripen quickly when
nourished by the blood of martyrs."

At twenty-eight Mazzini found himself an outcast, hunted at last
from France as he had been before from Italy, living in the closest
concealment in Switzerland, all his hopes tumbling about him. He
tried to organize a band of raiders who should enter Savoy from the
Swiss frontier; they were disrupted by treachery and distrust before
the first shot was fired. Mazzini's health broke under the endless
strain, there were nights when he never went to bed, days when he had
to lie concealed in a goatherd's hut. At times he seemed to find his
only consolation in the white-capped mountains, them he passionately
worshiped, the Alps were always nearest to him after Italy. He had very
few friends, almost no books; there were no presses now to speak his
words to the young hearts of Europe, only occasionally word came to him
that his great idea was growing in the outer world.

In those dark days in Switzerland Mazzini suffered most from the thought
that he had entailed all his family and friends in his vain sacrifice.
His boyhood confidants were dead or in exile, families he loved were
scattered over many countries, the few women he knew well were left
solitary in their homes. The woman he loved he felt he could not ask to
marry him, he had no home to give her, and scarcely knew whether his
next day's food would be forthcoming. He wrote to a friend, "I wanted to
do good, but I have always done harm to everybody, and the thought grows
and grows until I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I fancy I am hated
by those I love most." In all his letters of this period we catch the
note of a spirit torn between pity for sufferings he thinks himself to
have caused, and the stern sense of a duty given him by God. They are
wonderful letters, the thoughts of a man who could put no limits to his
own self-sacrifice nor value too highly the sacrifices of others. In one
letter he wrote: "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."

A great heroic spirit was trying to justify, not its own aims, but the
sorrows it had brought upon others. Mazzini could never have seemed hard
and cold, but in those dark days in Switzerland, and in those later to
come in London, the gentle, humble spirit of him was pre-eminent. He
loved friendship, home life, the arts; he had met his ideal woman; and
yet each and every joy life had to offer him he gave up on the altar of
his duty. "Duty," he said, "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;" and again he wrote, "When a man 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 while 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."

In 1837 Mazzini gave up the heights of Switzerland for the fogs of
London, moved largely to this change by the fact that in England
he need no longer live in hiding. He did not look forward with any
eagerness to life in England; if the English cared little what political
beliefs refugees brought with them, they were not the people to flame
with interest in a cause. Byron, Mazzini considered more Italian than
English; he could not conceive of poetry as stirring the British blood.
He took cheap lodgings, and set himself to writing for support, finding
time to keep up his correspondence with members of "Young Italy"
scattered over Europe, and also time to look after such Italians in
London as were in greater straits than he. The Ruffini family were with
him for a time, then misunderstandings separated them, and the last
tie that bound him to Genoa was gone. He lived the pathetic life of a
literary hack, spending his days working in the British Museum, and his
nights writing in his own small room. The one charm he found about
London was its fog. "The whole city," he wrote, "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 lack of money oppressed him sorely; he would give to every Italian
who begged of him on the score of universal brotherhood, gradually his
few possessions went their way to the pawnshop. He said that he needed
only a place to write and a few pennies to buy cigars. Then by one of
those curious chances of fate he met the Carlyles, and his life became
a little less cramped and lonely, although perhaps more tempestuous.
There are a score of accounts of evenings Mazzini spent with these new
friends, the one of whom he admired as a great thinker, the other as a
truly noble woman. In time Carlyle tried the gentle Italian sorely; the
story goes that the philosopher would rage at all human institutions
with the violence of a hurricane and then turn to his guest with the
words, "You have not succeeded yet because you have talked too much." We
can picture the boisterous, stormy Englishman thundering at those ideals
which the sensitive, passionate Italian was trying to defend. It speaks
well for Mazzini that he said of Carlyle, "He is good, good, good; and
still, I think in spite of his great reputation, unhappy." Carlyle's
estimate of Mazzini was that he was "by nature a little lyrical poet."
This opposition of ideas did not, however, keep him from defending his
Italian friend when others attacked him. The London _Times_ saw fit to
speak slightingly of Mazzini, and Carlyle wrote the editors in noble
indignation. "Whatever I may think of his practical insight and skill
in worldly affairs," he said, "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." These were glowing
words, and thrilled Mazzini as he read them. They were a tribute to
Carlyle's justice, but it is doubtful if he ever really understood the
Italian. He would have found it difficult to discover a prophet living
in lodgings so near to his own house.

Gradually Mazzini made other English friends, and he worked his way into
the pages of the best reviews. In time also his political efforts were
revived; he never let any temporary interest dim his goal. He started a
society of Italian workmen in London, and edited a paper for them, and
opened an evening school where poor Italian boys were taught to read and
write and learn something of Italian history. This school was very near
his heart, he was always devoted to children.

During Mazzini's exiled years in London, "Young Italy" had spread over
Europe, and through countless secret channels was gradually making its
strength felt. Outside circumstances were needed to bring its forces
to a head, but there was no doubt that Mazzini's words had called a
power into being that must in time inevitably come to a life and death
struggle with the Austrians. It is difficult to point out the exact
minor causes of each fluctuation in Italian opinion, it is certain
that the new popular literature called readers to take account of the
words of Dante, and that the more they read the great poet the more
they longed for liberty from the foreigner. Charles Albert, it was
felt, was again dreaming of heroic measures, and something of the old,
almost legendary faith in the house of Savoy as a national deliverer,
re-awakened. Manzoni and Gioberti were prophesying a great Catholic
revival, and the election of Pius the Ninth seemed for the moment to
justify the hope. The half-pitiful words of Pius, "They want to make a
Napoleon of me who am only a poor country parson," was a more correct
estimate of the Pontiff than the glowing words of his contemporaries; he
was no more in accord with the spirit of his time than was Metternich.
Still his election marked the swing of the pendulum in the liberal
direction, and "Young Italy" was quick to take notice of such a fact.

The year 1848 was remarkable for concerted social movements throughout
Europe. In France the Second Republic overthrew the monarchy, and
throughout the Italian states an electric current shocked the people
into revolution. Leghorn revolted and made Guerrazzi its chief, Milan
fell easy victim to the Tobacco rioters, Sicily sent its Bourbon king
flying, and Naples wrested a popular constitution from the greedy hand
of Ferdinand. Piedmont and Tuscany followed soon, demanded and obtained
constitutions, and the Pope, alarmed at the sudden spread of liberalism,
granted a constitution to Rome. The moment seemed ripe to throw off the
Austrian overlords.

There are few more tangled histories than the record of the next few
months in Italy. It is a drama filled with heroic figures, but one
through which runs the current of continual misunderstandings. Was
Italy to be a kingdom or a republic? Was the Pope a menace or a help?
Was French aid to be courted or rejected? These were only a few of the
questions on which men split. The one glorious fact was the burning
patriotic ardor of Italians in each state from Sicily to Savoy, their
actual belief in the religion of duty Mazzini had been preaching to them.

Word came to Milan that there was revolution in Vienna, and the
Five Days drove the Austrian garrison from their stronghold. Como,
Brescia, Venice, all the northern cities that had so long loathed the
white-coated overlords, won freedom; Metternich's puppet-princes of
Modena and Parma fled. Piedmont declared war, Tuscany declared war,
volunteers of all ranks and ages poured from Umbria to help the northern
armies. Mazzini, hearing the news in London, sped to Milan, and was
received as the prophet of the new day. Italy had its prophet, but the
statesman and the soldier were not yet recognized.

The new provisional government in Milan had no fixed policy, Charles
Albert's advisers still clogged his steps, the volunteers were ready,
but they had neither the arms nor the training to compete with the
war-worn Austrians. While there was discussion and dissension in
Lombardy, the enemy recuperated and returned to besiege the cities they
had lost. By July the Italian army was driven into Milan, there the
spirit of the earlier Five Days revived, but victory appeared hopeless,
and finally Charles Albert, torn and distracted, surrendered the city.
Mazzini passed to Lugano, thence to Leghorn, thence to Florence; in each
city the situation was practically the same, the people were aflame with
devotion to Italy, the leaders had as many plans as there were men.

Rome had driven out the Pope and proclaimed the Republic. The call of
Rome was the call direct to Mazzini's soul, he turned there to find a
solution of all difficulties. Simultaneously the newly formed Roman
Assembly turned to him, and bade him welcome as a citizen of Rome. He
believed that Dante's vision and his own were coming true, and hurried
to the Eternal City. His first work there was to raise ten thousand
troops and send them north. They had scarcely started when the crushing
news of the defeat at Novara stunned all patriots. Rome had to look to
herself, and made Mazzini Triumvir and practically dictator of the city.

The little Roman Republic of 1849 had an inspiring history. Mazzini had
written and spoken, now it became his turn to act. He was set at the
head of a city from which its spiritual as well as its temporal head had
fled. Priests and protesting laymen were all about him, it would have
been easy for him to scorn the power that scoffed at him. He did not,
he himself doubted the strength of the Catholic Church to survive, he
dreamed of a new church which should speak to the world from the seven
hills of Rome, but he would not take a single step to destroy one man's
religion. More than that he made it his special duty to see that the
priests were not disturbed in their work. He wanted the Republic to be
based on the love of God. He hoped that the Church would aid the Italian
cause for the love of man. He would allow the Pope to reign as spiritual
Prince, if he would only be content with his own noble sphere.

Rome won back something of its historic ardor under Mazzini's call. The
Republic was planned on lines of great proportions, steps were actually
taken to make it a republic wherein each man had a worthy share. The
foundations were laid with the greatest patience and zeal, the Triumvir
gave the last ounce of his strength to building truly, he lived as he
had always lived, for others, and took nothing for himself. Margaret
Fuller said that at this time his face, haggard and worn, seemed to her
"more divine than ever." The poorest citizen could find him as readily
as the richest, he was the same to all, he gave away his small salary of
office as entirely as in his London days he had dispersed his earnings.
If ever man's rule was noble, if ever it was spiritual, that of Rome's
Triumvir was, in the weeks when he faced treachery both from without and
within.

It is scarcely possible that Mazzini could have expected his city to
stand against the armies that were marching towards it. At most he could
only hope to show the Romans of what great self-sacrifice they were
capable. He probably hoped that the Republic would convince Italians
that the spirit of "Young Italy" was not a mere prophet's dream. That he
did; he could not fight Austria and France single-handed.

Louis Napoleon had evolved one of his great ideas, he would win both the
French army and the French clergy by a strategic move. He sent Oudinot
into Italy, blinding the Romans with various subtleties, waiting until
the propitious hour to strike. The Romans understood, the Assembly
voted to resist to the end, and Garibaldi led the troops to their first
victory. De Lesseps was appointed peace negotiator for the French, and
he and Mazzini met, and for a time it seemed as though there might be a
reconciliation. Mazzini strove with the greatest tact and patience to
win the French, but De Lesseps was nothing more than Napoleon's dupe,
and as soon as Garibaldi had advanced to meet the Neapolitan king's
army, Napoleon removed his envoy and showed his hand.

The truce had been virtually agreed on when Oudinot suddenly attacked
and placed Rome in a state of siege. For almost a month the citizens
fought with unfailing courage. Mazzini, Garibaldi, Mameli, the martyr
war-poet, Bassi, the great preacher, republicans and royalists, princes
and peasants, all within Rome's walls fought for freedom from the
foreigner. There could be but one end, and it came when starvation and
losses had weakened the defenders so that they could no longer hold
their posts. Mazzini would have fought hand-to-hand in the streets, the
army was with him, but the Assembly voted to surrender. The besiegers
entered, Garibaldi led his Three Thousand in their great retreat,
Mazzini stayed on in Rome uttering such protest as he could, unharmed
by the French troops who dared not touch him, through knowledge of the
people's love for him.

The downfall of the Republic must have been a terrible blow to Mazzini,
probable as it is that he foresaw the city could not long last by
itself. Physical force and treachery had overwhelmed the noblest
concepts of government. Temporary disappointment, however, could not
dull his spirit, the prophet of United Italy proved himself a true
prophet. He went on with his work, at first in Switzerland, then again
driven away by foreign influence, in London.

He took up his life there, much older, much more worn and scarred,
but with the same indomitable spirit. "His face in repose," wrote a
contemporary of this time, "was grave, even sad, but it lit up with a
smile of wonderful sweetness as he greeted a friend with a pressure
rather than a shake of the thin hand," and again his piercing black
eyes were described as "of luminous depth, full of sadness, tenderness
and courage, of purity and fire, readily flashing into indignation or
humor, always with the latent expression of exhaus

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