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Title: The Life of Mazzini
Author: King, Bolton
Language: English
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EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY
EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS
BIOGRAPHY
THE LIFE OF MAZZINI
BY BOLTON KING, M.A.
THIS IS NO. 562 OF _EVERYMAN'S
LIBRARY_. THE PUBLISHERS WILL
BE PLEASED TO SEND FREELY TO ALL
APPLICANTS A LIST OF THE PUBLISHED
AND PROJECTED VOLUMES ARRANGED
UNDER THE FOLLOWING SECTIONS:
TRAVEL · SCIENCE · FICTION
THEOLOGY & PHILOSOPHY
HISTORY · CLASSICAL
FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
ESSAYS · ORATORY
POETRY & DRAMA
BIOGRAPHY
REFERENCE
ROMANCE
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A GOOD
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LIFE-BLOOD OF
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EMBALMED &
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UPON PURPOSE
TO A LIFE
BEYOND LIFE
MILTON
THE LIFE
_of_ MAZZINI
_by_ BOLTON
KING·M·A·
EVERY
MAN
WILL
GO
WITH
THEE &
BE THY
GUIDE
IN THY
MOST
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BY
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SIDE
LONDON & TORONTO
PUBLISHED BY J·M·DENT
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BY E·P·DUTTON & CO
FIRST PUBLISHED IN THIS EDITION 1912
REPRINTED 1914, 1919, 1929
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
Preface
This volume contains a life of Mazzini and a study of his thought. It
can hardly be said that any serious attempt has been made either in
England or Italy to deal with either. Hence the present volume,
however unequal to the subject, may have its use. The thirty years,
which have passed since Mazzini's death, make it possible now to place
him in his true perspective; and the author trusts that the supreme
admiration, which he feels for Mazzini as a man, has not prevented him
from viewing the politician with impartiality. There exists abundant
matter to allow us to judge Mazzini's political work, and it is
unlikely that anything yet to be published will seriously affect our
estimate of it. For the personal side of Mazzini's life, the moment is
not a very opportune one. Ten years ago it would have been possible to
glean reminiscences from many, who are now silent. It has been the
author's privilege, however, to obtain invaluable information from two
of the very few persons now living, who knew Mazzini intimately. While
it is nearly too late for personal reminiscences, it is too early to
avail oneself fully of Mazzini's correspondence. A good many of his
letters have indeed been published, and I have been able to use a
good many unpublished ones, especially his correspondence with Mr and
Mrs Peter Taylor, which I have found of the greatest value. But
unfortunately only one volume has as yet appeared of the collected
edition of his correspondence, and there are still probably many of
his letters, which have yet to come to light in Italy.
With regard to the study, which occupies the second part of this
volume, the author is very sensible of his limitations in dealing with
so vast and complex a system as Mazzini's ethical and political
thought. It is his hope that he may do something to stimulate more
competent writers to labour in a very fruitful field. He believes that
the more Mazzini's thought is disentangled, the more its essential
importance will appear.
I have to acknowledge gratefully the kindness of those who have helped
me in writing this book. Above all I am indebted to Mr and Mrs W. T.
Malleson, to whom I owe the loan of the Peter Taylor correspondence
and other invaluable help; to Miss Shaen for letting me see Mazzini's
letters to her father, Mr W. Shaen, and the MS. of the "Prayer for the
Planters," now first published; to Mr Milner-Gibson Cullum, Miss
Dorothea Hickson, Mr Mazzini Stuart, Mr P. S. King, and Miss Galeer
for the loan of unpublished letters from Mazzini. I have also to
acknowledge my grateful thanks to many others, who have assisted me,
among whom I would especially mention Miss Ashurst Biggs, Signor
Mario Borsa, Mr James Bryce, M.P., Mr W. Burnley, Signora Giuditta
Casali-Benvenuti (to whom I owe the portrait of her grandmother,
Giuditta Sidoli), Mr T. Chambers, Signor Felice Dagnino, Signor G.
Gallavresi, Mrs Goodwin, Miss Edith Harvey, Mr H. M. Hyndman, Dr
Courtney Kenny, Miss Lucy Martineau, Professor Masson, Mr C. E.
Maurice, Mademoiselle Dora Melegari, Mr D. Nathan, Mr T. Okey, Mr
Chas. Roberts, Mr J. J. Stansfeld, the Società Editrice Sonzogno (for
permission to reproduce some illustrations from Madame White Mario's
life of Mazzini), Mr W. R. Thayer, and Mr Remsen Whitehouse.
BOLTON KING.
_October 1902._
A reissue of the book has allowed me to revise it in the light of
recent publications referring to Mazzini. A good many more of his
letters have been printed since 1902 (including a second volume of the
_Epistolario_), but with the exception of Mademoiselle Melegari's
collection of his letters to her father, they are not important. Nor,
with the exception of Signor Cantimori's illuminating _Saggio_, have I
found any useful recent studies of his thought. I still adhere to the
view that subsequent research will add little to our knowledge of him.
I am glad, however, to be able now to take a different view of his
connection with the publication of Kossuth's manifesto in 1853, and of
Madame Sidoli's mission to Florence in 1833 (see pp. 68 and 169).
BOLTON KING.
WARWICK, _November 1911_.
_A complete Bibliography of Mazzini will be found on page 367._
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
THE HOME AT GENOA
1805-1831. Aetat 0-25
PAGE
Boyhood and Youth--University Life--Literary Studies--
Classicism and Romanticism--Joins the Carbonari--Arrest
and Exile 1-19
CHAPTER II
YOUNG ITALY
1831-1833. Aetat 25-27
Condition of Italy--The Revolution of 1831--Young
Italy--Its Principles: Belief in Italy; Inspiration of
Duty; Social Reform--Its Political System: Republicanism;
Italian Unity; War with Austria--Secret Societies 20-34
CHAPTER III
MARSEILLES
1831-1834. Aetat 25-28
At Marseilles--Spread of Young Italy--Letter to Charles
Albert--The Army Plot in Piedmont--At Geneva--The Savoy
Raid 35-50
CHAPTER IV
SWITZERLAND
1834-1836. Aetat 28-31
Life in Exile--Mental Crisis--Principles of the
Revolution--Young Switzerland--Young Europe--Literary
Work--Women Friends: Giuditta Sidoli; Madeleine de
Mandrot 51-72
CHAPTER V
LONDON
1837-1843. Aetat 31-38
Life in London--Spiritual Condition--English Friends--
The Carlyles--Lamennais and George Sand--Literary Work--
Decay of Young Italy--The Italian School at Hatton
Garden--Appeal to Working Men 73-99
CHAPTER VI
THE REVOLUTION
1843-1848. Aetat 38-43
Politics in Italy--The Bandieras--The Post-Office
Scandal--The People's International League--Life in
1845-47--Letter to Pio Nono--Attitude towards the
Royalists--The Revolution of 1848--At Milan 100-122
CHAPTER VII
THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
1848-1849. Aetat 43-44
The Collapse of the War--The People's War--At
Florence--The Mission of Rome--The Roman Republic--The
Triumvirate--Attitude to the Church--The French Attack 123-138
CHAPTER VIII
LONDON AGAIN
1849-1859. Aetat 44-54
In Switzerland--Life in London--English Friends--
English Politics and Literature--The "Friends of Italy" 139-153
CHAPTER IX
MAZZINI AND CAVOUR
1850-1857. Aetat 45-52
The Piedmontese School--Mazzini and Cavour--The French
Alliance--Mazzini and Manin--The Theory of the Dagger--
Conspiracies--The Genoese plot of 1857 154-175
CHAPTER X
UNITY HALF WON
1858-1860. Aetat 53-55
The War of 1859--At Florence--Plans for the South--
Garibaldi's Expedition--Projected Raid into Umbria--
At Naples 176-188
CHAPTER XI
FOR VENICE
1861-1866. Aetat 56-61
Policy after 1860--Disappointment in Italy--Rome and
Venice--Attitude towards the Monarchy--Life in England--
The Greco Plot--American and Irish Politics--Mazzini
and Garibaldi--Overtures from Victor Emmanuel--The War
of 1866 189-207
CHAPTER XII
THE LAST YEARS
1866-1872. Aetat 61-66
The Republican Alliance--Life at Lugano--Mentana--
Republican Movement in 1868-70--Intrigue with Bismarck
--Imprisonment at Gaeta, and Release--Attack on the
International--Death 208-221
CHAPTER XIII
RELIGION
Religion Essential to Society--Paramountcy of the
Spiritual--Criticism of Christianity; Catholicism;
Protestantism--Christ's Teaching: its Truths and
Imperfections--The Doctrines of the New Faith: God;
Progress; Immortality--The Criteria of Truth: the
Conscience; Tradition--Humanity--The Need of Unity;
Authority; Church and State; the New Church 222-248
CHAPTER XIV
DUTY
Morality Depends on an Ideal--Criticism of the Theory
of Rights and Utilitarianism--Happiness not the End of
Life--Life is a Mission--Work for the Sake of
Duty--Thought Useless without Action--Power of the
Principle of Duty--Duties to Self; Family; Country 249-266
CHAPTER XV
THE STATE
The Moral Law and the State--Duties of the State:
Liberty, Association, Education--Sovereignty is in
God--Democracy--The Ideal Government--The Republic--The
Ideal State 267-282
CHAPTER XVI
SOCIAL THEORIES
Importance of Social Questions--Their Moral Basis--
Attack on Socialism--Contrast between Mazzini's and its
Theories and Work--Social Programme--Cooperation 283-295
CHAPTER XVII
NATIONALITY
Country and Humanity--The Marks of Nationality: the
Will of the People; the Sense of National Mission--
Patriotism--International Solidarity--Ethics of Foreign
Policy; Non-Intervention; War; the Special Missions of
each Country--The Future of Europe--The Slavs--The
United States of Europe--Italy's International Function 296-311
CHAPTER XVIII
LITERARY CRITICISM
The Function of the Critic--The Function of the
Poet--Art must avoid 'Art for the sake of Art' and
Realism--It must be Human, Social, Didactic--Poetry of
Modern Life--The Historical Drama--Music--'Objective'
and 'Subjective' Poets--Dante--Shakespeare--Goethe--
Byron 312-328
CHAPTER XIX
THE MAN
Poetic Temperament--Defects as a Thinker--Greatness as a
Moral Teacher--Strength and Weakness as a Politician--The
Man 329-341
APPENDIX A
Some Unpublished (in one case privately published)
Letters and Papers, written by Mazzini 343-367
APPENDIX B
Bibliography of Mazzini's Writings 367-373
INDEX 374
"Where there is no vision, the people perish."
Chapter I
The Home at Genoa
1805-1831. AETAT 0-25
Boyhood and Youth--University Life--Literary
Studies--Classicism and Romanticism--Joins the
Carbonari--Arrest and Exile.
Joseph Mazzini was born in the Via Lomellina at Genoa on June 22,
1805. His father was a doctor of some repute and Professor of Anatomy
at the University, a democrat in creed and life, who gave much of his
time to unpaid service of the poor; at home affectionate and loved,
though sometimes hard and imperious. His mother, to whom in after life
he bore a strong resemblance, was a capable and devoted woman, who had
little of the weakness of an Italian mother, and brought up her
children to bear the brunt of life; with strong interest in the mighty
movements that were remoulding Europe at the time, a mordant critic of
governors and governments inside the four walls of her house. It was a
happy home, and "Pippo" grew up the darling of his parents and three
sisters, a delicate, sensitive, gentle child, quick and insistent to
learn despite his father's fears for his health, and giving precocious
proof of brilliant talents. He was nearly nine years old, when the
Napoleonic system was shattered, and the Emperor went to Elba.
Doubtless, Mazzini heard from his father that Napoleon was Italian
born and was going to exile in an Italian island. The shock of the
downfall was felt at Genoa, for the proud city, to which Lord William
Bentinck had promised in the name of England its ancient independence,
learnt that "republics were no longer fashionable," and saw itself
helplessly made over to the alien rule of Piedmont. Bitterly the
Genoese chafed at the traffic of their liberties, and we may be sure
that there was republican talk in Mazzini's home, which sank into the
mind of the thoughtful child. He himself mentions four influences that
turned his boyish mind to democracy: his parents' uniform courtesy to
every rank of life; the reminiscences of the French republican wars in
the talk at home; some numbers of an old Girondist paper, which his
father kept half hidden, for fear of the police, behind his medical
books; and--more than all these, probably--the classics that he read
under his Latin tutor. "The history of Greece and Rome," wrote a
fellow-student, "the only thing taught us with any care at school, was
little else than a constant libel upon monarchy, and a panegyric upon
the democratic form of government." Like many another boy of his time
who had for school exercises to declaim the praises of Cato and the
Bruti, he came to regard republics as the appointed homes of virtue.
It was the unintended fruit of the classical training, which the
despotic governments of the time fostered to keep their youth innocent
of any itch for innovation.
So he lived his quiet, studious home-life, till an incident one day,
when he was nearly sixteen, suddenly changed its tenor. The Carbonaro
revolutions of 1820 and 1821 had ended in deserved collapse; and the
Piedmontese Liberals, abandoned and defeated, crowded to Genoa and
Sampierdarena, while yet there was time to escape to Spain. Some had
fled penniless, and Mazzini, walking with his mother, noted their
despairing faces, and watched while a collection was made for them in
the streets. Their memory haunted him, and with a boy's enthusiasm for
his heroes, he longed to follow them. He neglected his lessons, and
sat moody and absorbed, interested only in gleaning news of the exiles
and learning the history of their defeat. In his boyish impatience,
which came near the truth, he felt "they might have won, if all had
done their duty," and the thought puzzled and obsessed him. He
insisted on dressing in black, and kept the habit to the end of life.
He brooded over Foscolo's _Jacopo Ortis_, till the morbid pessimism of
the book wrought on him, and his mother, apparently with good reason,
feared suicide.
In time he recovered his balance, and went back to his books with the
old zest. He was now studying medicine, intending to follow his
father's profession; but at his first attendance in the operation room
he fainted, and it was clear that he could never be a surgeon.[1] To
his father it must have been a sore disappointment, but he seems to
have at once recognised the inevitable, and allowed the lad to read
law. Mazzini had little heart in his new studies, for the arid,
perfunctory teaching of law current at the time had small attraction
for one who wanted to know the reason of things; but he persevered,
and did well in his examinations, though it is probable that he always
gave a big slice of his time to reading poetry and history. He was now
at the University. Probably he went to school, though there is some
doubt about it; at all events he seems to have escaped the brutality
and bad pedagogy, which generally made school life then one long
misery for a high-principled or sensitive lad. University life began
at an early age in Italy, and Mazzini had matriculated at Genoa, when
he was fourteen. So far as his fellow-students were concerned, he was
in happy surroundings. But he was a troublesome scholar, always ready
to rebel against the formalities that made a big part of University
life. To the last he refused to attend the compulsory religious
observances, not because he disliked them, but because they were
compulsory; and the authorities, tolerant for once, shut their eyes to
his insubordination. The University of Genoa did not possess a high
name for scholarship; and at this time it had its special drawbacks,
for the government was scared by the recent revolution, and fearful
that a few hundred lads might shake the pillars of the state. No one
could matriculate without a certificate that he had regularly attended
church and confession. Those whose parents did not possess a certain
quantity of landed property, had to pass a stiffer examination, though
at the worst, it is probable, not a very prohibitive one. Lecturers,
beadles, porters, all had the cue from government to make life
unpleasant for the students, and the better professors dared not be
detected in any leniency or considerateness. Moustaches were
forbidden, as a mark of the revolutionary mind, and if any student,
greatly daring, grew them, he was carried off between two carabineers
to a barber's shop.
[Illustration: HOUSE at GENOA in which MAZZINI Was BORN]
Mazzini soon became a leader among the clean-living, affectionate,
impetuous undergraduates. His appearance was now, as always, very
striking; he had a high and prominent forehead, black, flashing eyes,
fine olive features, set in a mass of thick black hair, a grave,
serious face, that could look hard at times, but readily melted in the
kindliest of smiles. He led a studious, retiring life, fond of
gymnastics and fencing, but with small taste for amusements, his
cigars and coffee his only indulgences; his days spent among his
books, his evenings with his mother, or in long solitary walks that
defied the weather, or in rare and stolen visits to the theatre, which
he had to leave after the first act, for the home was rigorously shut
at ten. But, though he was slow to make close friendships, he was no
misanthrope. He played much on the guitar and sang well to it; and his
musical talents and clever reciting made him in demand among his
middle-class and patrician friends. There was none yet of the
half-bitter sadness of after life; he had a shrewd sense of humour,
perhaps inherited from his mother; when warmed by enthusiasm or
indignation, he could speak with a fiery eloquence, that was
remarkable even among those declamatory Italian youths. "My soul," he
wrote afterwards, "was then a smile for all created things, life
showed to my virgin fancy as a dream of love, my warmest thoughts were
for nature's loveliness and the ideal woman of my youth." He revelled
in generous actions, sharing books and money, even clothes, with his
poorer friends. But it was sheer force of character that gave him his
ascendancy over them--the loyal, justice-loving nature that made him
champion of every victim of undergraduate or professorial spite, the
purity of thought, that checked each loose or coarse word from those
about him. That clear, high soul, untouched by self, not knowing fear,
passionate for righteousness, gave him even when a lad the power that
belongs only to the saints of God.
His closest friends were three brothers, Jacopo, Giovanni, and
Agostino Ruffini. Jacopo, the eldest of the three, had perhaps more
influence on Mazzini's life than any other man. They were born on the
same day; and Jacopo's fine, sensitive, enthusiastic nature matched
well with Mazzini's own. The tragic fate, that afterwards brought his
life to an early close, only strengthened the influence; and the
memory of one so dear, who gave his life for their common cause,
remained a perennial inspiration to keep his faith alive in years of
weariness and failure. The other brothers had little of Jacopo's
temperament. Giovanni at this time was an even-tempered, humourous,
brilliant lad; Agostino was impressionable, impulsive, shallow, of
quick and artistic nature. Mazzini's closest companions for some
years, they proved how little they could rise to his high level, and
they repaid his devotion by a want of sympathy and an ingratitude,
which, in Agostino's case at all events, was gross. In later life both
attained in their small way; both were deputies in the Piedmontese
parliament, and Giovanni was minister at Paris. They long moved in
English society and had some reputation there. Agostino, who was for a
time a teacher at Edinburgh, is the "Signor Sperano" who tells the
story of _The Poor Clare_, in Mrs Gaskell's _Round the Sofa_.
Giovanni, who became as proficient in English as in his mother tongue,
wrote two notable but now half-forgotten tales, _Lorenzo Benoni_ and
_Doctor Antonio_, which stand among the best second-rate novels of his
time.
Under Mazzini's lead the group of friends at Genoa formed a society to
study literature and politics and smuggle in forbidden books. Half the
masterpieces of contemporary European literature came at this time
under the censor's ban; no foreign papers were admitted except two
ultra-monarchical French journals; and contraband was a necessity of
literary study. Mazzini's strongest interests took him to literature.
He read omnivorously in Italian and French and English and
translations from the German.[2] His favourite books, he tells us,
were the Bible and Dante, Shakespeare and Byron. His close knowledge
of the Gospels comes out in everything he wrote. He shed his orthodoxy
indeed as soon as he began to think; he went sometimes to mass, when a
lad, and read Condorcet's _Esquisse_ disguised as a missal; but he
refused to go to confession as soon as he understood its meaning,--the
one thing, apparently, in all his life which pained his mother. For a
short time he went through a phase of scepticism, but the Ruffinis'
mother soon rescued him from this, and a deep religious faith came to
him, to remain the spring of all his life. The poets he loved best
were Dante and Byron, and he always remained true to them. From Dante
he learnt many of the master-ideas of his mind, the conception of the
unity of man and unity of law, the fervid patriotism, the belief in
Italy and Rome predestined to be teachers of the world, the faith in
Italian Unity, the moral strength that makes life one long fight for
good. When only some twenty years old, he wrote an essay on Dante's
patriotism, which, however boyish in style, proves his close knowledge
of the master. Byron was then at the height of his fame, and then, as
always afterwards, Mazzini thought him the greatest of modern English,
perhaps of modern European poets. He was "completely fascinated" by
Goethe, and would often say that "to pass a day with him or a genius
like him would be the fairest day of life." How his admiration for
Goethe waned, while that for Byron grew, will be told in another
chapter.[3] He read Shakespeare, but always, apparently, with more
respect than enjoyment, and Shakespeare too came under the same ban as
Goethe. He thought very highly of Schiller, and placed him with
Æschylus and Shakespeare, as the third great dramatist of the world.
He read a good deal of English literature; at this time he was a
fervent admirer of Scott, but he seems afterwards to have lost his
interest in him; he knew something at least of Wordsworth and Shelley,
Burns and Crabbe. Modern French literature, except de Vigny's and some
of Victor Hugo's writings, did not now (nor, with the exception of
George Sand and Lamennais, at any time), appeal to him, for he
disliked the tendencies of French Romanticism, and already there were
the beginnings of his life-long prejudice against most things French.
Among his modern fellow-countrymen Alfieri and Foscolo were his
favourites; he read Manzoni and Guerrazzi, but largely to criticise
them, though he was ready to do justice to the strength of both. He
thought Mickiewicz, the Polish national poet, "the most powerful
poetic nature of the time." The classics he no doubt read pretty
widely, as every educated lad was then bound to do, but none seem to
have made much impression on him, except Æschylus, for whom his
veneration was unbounded, and Tacitus. Both now and later he gave much
time to metaphysical and political writers. He read something of
Hegel, whom he detested for his political fatalism, of Kant and
Fichte; but the German who influenced him most was the now-forgotten
Herder. From him he learned or confirmed his spiritual conception of
life, his belief in immortality, his theory of the progress of
humanity and man's co-operation in the work of Providence. Among
Italian philosophers he studied Giordano Bruno and Vico; he rated the
latter at his real worth, and regarded him as the great luminary of an
Italian school of thought whose continuity he professed to trace from
Pythagoras. Among political writers Macchiavelli certainly impressed
him most, as a great Italian patriot, and he excused his morality as a
product of his time. He seems to have known a good deal of Voltaire
and Rousseau. Of recent political writers, he and his circle most read
Guizot and Victor Cousin, whose lectures at this time made them the
mentors of young liberalism; he records how the group at Genoa handed
on to one another manuscript copies of the lectures, and found their
inspiration in the men whom they were soon to regard as traitors.
Now and for long after, literature was the call that spoke sweetest
to Mazzini. Politics and conspiracy were constraining but unwelcomed
duties; he gave his love to literature. To be a dramatist or write
historical novels was at this time his plan of life. Many a time in
later years he was still looking for the day, when Italy would be
united and free, and, his political task accomplished, he could give
himself to the literary schemes he still cherished,--a history of
religious ideas, a popular history of Italy, and the editing of a
series of the great dramas of the world. But the burden of his
country's woe lay too heavily on him to be long forgotten. It was no
time now for Dante studies or play-writing. Sadly and unwillingly he
convinced himself that at such a time pure literature was no patriot's
first task, that the writer, who would not shirk his duty, must make
his work political. Not but what the literary critic still appears on
every page; but the whole gist of his teaching is that the value of a
book is in proportion to its power to inform the reader's soul to love
of country and mankind, and impel him to serve his fellows by
political action in the sight of God. He held it wasted effort to do,
what Manzoni had tried to do,--to school the individual to a smug life
of cloistered virtue, a life which in a vicious or torpid society was
impossible to the many. No religion, no morality, he taught, is worth
the writer's labours, unless it dedicates men to be workers in the
public cause, to hold comfort, and, if need be, home and life itself
as cheap, while oppression and wrong are stunting other lives, and men
and women round are crying to be freed.
He found his opportunity in the controversy between Romanticists and
Classicists, which then divided the literary world of Italy into hot
factions. Not that he held Romanticism to be any final or faultless
form of literature. But when a theory of literary servitude, like
Classicism, lent itself to political oppression and depressed the
vital and spiritual forces of the country, when a young and vigorous
movement was making literature free and stood for liberty all round,
he necessarily took his stand for the latter. There could be no
political or social regeneration for Italy, till she had a literature
that made for freedom and progress. "These literary disputes," he
urged, "are bound up with all that is important in social and civil
life"; "the legislation and literature of a people always advance on
parallel lines," and "the progress of intellectual culture stands in
intimate relationship with the political life of the country." It was
the aim of the Romanticists "to give Italians an original national
literature, not one that is as a sound of passing music to tickle the
ear and die, but one that will interpret to them their aspirations,
their ideas, their needs, their social movement." And thus, while
generously recognising Manzoni's worth, he looked rather to Alfieri
and Foscolo, who had scourged political wrong-doing and preached
resistance to tyranny; he praised the writers of the _Conciliatore_,
the short-lived Milanese journal of Silvio Pellico and Confalonieri,
which, like himself, had turned Romanticism to political purposes.
Here and there in his writings of this time a more or less direct
political allusion manages to escape the censor's eye. He speaks for
the first time of "Young Italy," a name soon to ring through Europe;
he pays his tribute to the political exiles; he slips in a remark
that the spirit of a state cannot be changed without recasting its
institutions. More than this he could not do in a censor-ridden press;
perhaps literature was struggling still with politics to command his
mind.
As it was, he had trouble enough with the censors. His first published
articles appeared in the _Indicatore Genovese_, a commercial paper
issuing at Genoa, whose editor was persuaded to admit short notices of
recent books, which gradually swelled into literary essays. Among his
later contributions were an article on the historical novel and
reviews of Friedrich Schlegel's History of Literature and Guerrazzi's
Battle of Benevento. They do not read very well. They are juvenile and
exaggerated, and it is amusing to find the twenty-three years' old
author telling his coeval Guerrazzi, the young Leghorn novelist, that
he had not drunk enough of the cup of life to be a pessimist. The
_Indicatore_ gradually became a literary paper, and for a few months
the censorship did not see what it was tending to. At the end of 1828,
however, about a year after Mazzini began to write in it, it was
suppressed. Mazzini easily transferred his energies. Guerrazzi had
founded another paper at Leghorn much on the same lines, the
_Indicatore Livornese_, and asked Mazzini to send contributions.
Mazzini readily responded; he wrote, besides minor papers, an article
on Faust, and attacked the defects of the Romanticist School in an
essay on _Some Tendencies of European Literature_. His writing is
still effusive, and generally dogmatic and sententious, but the style
has improved. The censorship was comparatively lenient in Tuscany,
and though the young writers were barred from direct reference to
politics, they were able to make the political allusions sufficiently
transparent. But the paper grew too daring even for the somnolent
Tuscan censors, and, like its predecessor, it was snuffed out after a
year of life. Mazzini and Guerrazzi parted, to go on very different
ways, and meet again nineteen years later when both were famous.
In the meantime Mazzini had with some difficulty got a footing on the
_Antologia_, the one Italian review of the time that ranked among the
great European periodicals. It had been founded some ten years before,
in the hope that it might become an Italian Edinburgh Review, by Gino
Capponi, the blind Florentine noble who traced his race from the
Capponi who bearded Charles VIII., and Vieusseux, a Swiss bookseller
who had settled at Florence and opened the one circulating library of
any note in Italy. Most of the leading Italian writers of the day
contributed to it; and though its aim was avowedly nationalist, and in
a sense Liberal, it had succeeded so far, thanks probably to its
influential patrons, in eluding the censor's ban. Mazzini wrote for it
three articles _On the Historical Drama_ and another _On a European
Literature_. His work had rapidly matured, and there is no trace now
of the juvenilities of his earlier efforts. Every page has the mark of
the strong, original thought, which made him one of the greatest
critics of the century.
Meanwhile he was practising at the bar in a desultory fashion.
Sometimes he pleaded in the lower courts as an "advocate of the poor,"
and was much in demand for his attention and skill. According to the
etiquette of the profession, he read in the rooms of a barrister, who
limited his interest to seeing that his pupils sat with a book in
front of them. The vacations were generally spent in a little country
villa at San Secondo, in the Bisagno valley, within sight of a house
which the Ruffinis occupied; and he shared in attentions to the
Ruffinis' mother, who was now his spiritual guide and dearest friend,
or went on botanical walks or shooting expeditions in the lovely hill
country. He did not do much of the shooting himself, and when he was
more than fifty, he remembered with remorse a thrush that he had
mangled when sixteen.
His interests became more and more absorbed by politics. His Genoese
home no doubt encouraged this, for the nobles and the working-classes
were still unreconciled to Piedmontese rule, while the liberals of the
middle classes looked on the annexation only as a step to some wider
Italian state. But the local environment was only a minor influence,
and Mazzini would doubtless have become a conspirator, had he lived in
any other town of Italy. About the time that he began to write in the
_Indicatore Genovese_, he was admitted into the Society of the
Carbonari. The Carbonari were at this time suffering from the
decadence, which sooner or later palsies every secret society. They
had grown out of Neapolitan Freemasonry in the days of the French
rule, and when, after Napoleon's fall, reaction came and the old
dynasties returned, they swept into their ranks the mass of
discontented men, who, with very varying political ideals, were at one
in resenting the small tyrannies, the bigotry and obscurantism of the
princes, who had come back from exile to misgovern and sometimes to
oppress. The high level of their tenets, their appeals to religion and
morality, the esoteric symbolism of their rites, the vague democratic
sentiment that was often only skin-deep, had made them a vast Liberal
organisation. Since they had made and wrecked the revolutions of
Naples and Piedmont seven years before, they had kept the skeleton of
their party together with considerable skill and persistency. But the
conspiracy had changed its character. It was no longer a purely
Italian society, for the exiles had carried it into France and Spain,
and the headquarters were now at Paris, where Lafayette and the
Orleanist conspirators were using it to upset the Legitimist monarchy
and dreamed of a league of Latin countries to balance the Holy
Alliance. In Italy the democratic sentimentalism had left it, it had
lost touch with the masses, and its leaders were mostly middle-aged
men of the professional classes, who discouraged young recruits, and
had no wish to step outside their meaningless small formalisms and
barren talk of liberty.
Mazzini had little stomach for their ritualism and lack of purpose,
their love of royal and noble leaders; and probably the subordinate
position, that as a young man he necessarily took, sat uncomfortably
on him. But at all events they were the only revolutionary
organisation in the country, and he admired the bravery of men, who
risked prison or exile for however inadequate an end. Though fitfully
in practice, he had a theoretic belief in subordination, which
prepared him for the moment to act under orders. But as soon as he
joined the Carbonari and swore the usual oath of initiation over a
bared dagger, he began to see the futility of it all. He found that
he was sworn only to obey his unknown chiefs, and he was allowed to
know the names of two or three only of his fellow-conspirators. He
suspected that their political programme, if they had any, was but a
thin one. All the Italian in him revolted against men, who talked
lightly of their country, and preached that salvation could only come
from France. The subscription to the Society's funds, of which,
needless to say, no account was rendered, was sufficiently heavy to
bear hardly on his slender purse. He was so sickened by a melodramatic
announcement, perhaps in bluff, that a member was to be assassinated
for criticising the chiefs, that he threatened to withdraw. His
unknown superiors, however, apparently thought well of him, and he was
commissioned to go on propagandist work to Tuscany, where he made a
few recruits. He seems to have returned in better spirits as to the
future of the Society; and if we may believe Giovanni Ruffini, he
began with a few young co-affiliates to organise on his own account,
nominally in the name of the Carbonari, but really to substitute a
more vigorous association. His plan was apparently to bring the
Carbonari of Tuscany and Bologna into closer touch with those of Genoa
and Piedmont. He asked for a passport for Bologna on the pretext that
he wanted to examine a Dante manuscript, but was told by the police,
that if he had no more important business, he could wait. Baffled in
this, he returned to his semi-independent conspiracy at home. The July
Revolution in France had raised the hopes of liberals everywhere; and
he and his friends enrolled affiliates, discarding the Carbonaro
lumber of oaths and secret signs, and simply pledging them to act, if
an insurrection proved possible. Bullets were cast, and other juvenile
preparations made. How far he succeeded in enlisting followers, we do
not know, for he himself has left hardly any record of the plan.
At all events, it was abruptly nipped. The government had its secret
agents among the Carbonari, and Mazzini was arrested on the charge of
initiating one of them. It is probable that the authorities had
suspected him for some time. He was, as the governor of Genoa told his
father, "gifted with some talent, and too fond of walking by himself
at night absorbed in thought. What on earth," asked the offended
officer, "has he at his age to think about? We don't like young people
thinking without our knowing the subject of their thoughts." Mazzini
was taken to the fortress of Savona, where he consoled himself by
watching the sea and sky, which made all the prospect from his cell
windows, and taming a serin finch, which would fly in through the
gratings, and to which he "became exceedingly attached." His case came
before the Senate of Turin, the highest court in the country. In the
eyes of the law he was supremely guilty; but, with an adroitness that
he afterwards recalled with pride, he managed to destroy all
compromising papers, and there was only one witness of the initiation,
whereas the law required two. Mazzini stoutly denied the fact. The
denial was more than a plea of not guilty in an English court; perhaps
he thought that a conspirator is bound to put his government outside
the pale of moral obligation. But whatever we may allow for his
position, the plain man will count his action as one of the
disingenuous lapses, that rarely, now and again, stain the clear
honour of his life.
The court had to acquit him, but the authorities had too much evidence
of his activity to leave him unmolested. They gave him the choice
between internment in a small town or exile. Contemporary events
decided him. The revolution had just broken out in Central Italy; the
French government had encouraged the Carbonari to expect direct or
indirect assistance, and Mazzini thought that he would serve the cause
best at Paris, whence, he confidently hoped, he would soon return to a
liberated Italy. In February 1831 he said his good-byes to his family,
who had hastened to Savona, and crossed the Apennines and, for the
first time, the Alps, afterwards so familiar and beloved. He watched
the sunrise from Mont Cenis, and has left a memorable description of
it, drawn with all the wealth of his artistic imagery. At Geneva he
made the acquaintance of Sismondi and his Scotch wife. While there, he
was advised to join the Italian exiles at Lyons, and, giving up the
projected journey to Paris, he made his way to them.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] So Madame Mario, who probably had it from Mazzini's mother, and
Madame Venturi on the authority of a college friend. The memoir by
another fellow-student in _Epistolario di G. Mazzini_, I. xxix. says
that he thought that a doctor was not free to express his opinions for
fear of offending his patients, and that he therefore never studied
medicine; so too Donaver, _Uomini e libri_, 70. But see his _Vita di
G. Mazzini_, 13, on apparently good evidence.
[2] He seems never to have learnt to read German easily; at all events
he could not do so till comparatively late in life.
[3] See pp. 325-327.
Chapter II
Young Italy
1831-1833. AETAT 25-27
Condition of Italy--The Revolution of 1831--Young Italy--Its
principles: belief in Italy; inspiration of duty; social
reform--Its political system: Republicanism; Italian Unity;
war with Austria--Secret societies.
The governor of the prison at Savona had allowed him to read the
Bible, Byron, and Tacitus, innocently thinking that they contained no
revolutionary material. Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy.
Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The
country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites
had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages
for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian
republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and
Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope,
the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca
divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for
unity. History and character sundered North and South; the great
medieval cities still cherished their independence too dearly to wish
to sink it in a common country. Napoleon, while he ruled, had gone far
to unite the land both in form and substance; and the aspirations he
did so much to create survived him. Weak though they still were,
practical grievances were ever enforcing the argument for unity; and
Italians were chafing more and more against the artificial barriers,
which stopped the circulation of the nation's life. The customs-lines,
that met the trader on the confines of each state, strangled commerce.
Literature circulated with difficulty, and the Genoese could hardly
get access to books published at Florence or Leghorn, a hundred miles
away. In the smaller states at all events, the area was too small to
offer any field for enterprise, and every lawyer and engineer and
civil servant was cribbed by the restrictions, that confined his
activities to a handful of towns. Through all the peninsula there was
a more or less intolerable misrule. Political disabilities allowed no
voice in legislation, no control of taxation or the executive, no
rights of public meeting or association, small liberty of speech or
writing. There were more present grievances in the discouragement of
education, in the clerical tyranny, in the obsolete and partial legal
system. And the misgovernment had its yet more evil and intimate
aspect in the power of the police, which threatened each man's home
and honour and career. Governments, that breathed and moved in chronic
dread of revolution, sought safety in a system of covert terrorism.
The police had their spies everywhere,--in the streets, in men's
households, in the churches, in the universities,--to scrape up any
idle word or act, that seemed to mark a possible critic of government.
There were mitigations of the misrule in Piedmont, Tuscany, and the
Austrian territories. But in the Pope's states and Naples there was
little or nothing to relieve the crying corruption and incompetency;
and everywhere there was more or less a vexatious intolerance and
oppression, that showed the blacker after the relative liberty and
progress of Napoleon's rule.
The Carbonari had voiced somewhat fitfully the national protest. And
just at this time they made their final attempt at revolution. Early
in February 1831,--just before Mazzini was released from Savona,--the
insurrection broke out in Modena, and spread at once to Parma and the
Papal province of Romagna. In three weeks the greater part of the
Pope's dominions were free, and the insurgent army was marching
towards Rome. The leaders knew that, however easy it was to upset the
rule of the Pope and Dukes, they could make no effective resistance to
an Austrian attack; but they counted on the promised backing of France
to ward off invasion. "Non-intervention,"--the European equivalent of
the Monroe Doctrine,--was one of the formulas of the July Monarchy,
and by it Austria had no right to interfere in the domestic concerns
of an Italian state. The French government had assured the Carbonari,
that, if she violated the principle, it would declare war against her.
But only a section of the ministry was sincere in the promise, and
Louis Philippe saw that a war in the name of nationality might easily
slide into a revolutionary movement, which would shake his own unsure
throne. His government let Metternich know that non-intervention was a
phrase that stopped at words. By the end of March, despite some fine
fighting by the Italian levies, the Austrians had stamped out the
ephemeral insurrection. Its feebleness courted failure. Not that the
programme of the leaders wanted breadth and boldness. Mazzini's after
criticism that it was neither nationalist nor democratic was
exaggerated and unjust. During their few weeks of rule, the chiefs had
showered projects of social reform. Some of them at all events wished
to make Romagna the centre of a great national rising, and aimed at an
independent federation of all Italy with Rome for its capital. But
they made two irreparable mistakes. They did not face the facts; they
failed to win the people. They were for the most part, like the rest
of the Carbonaro leaders, middle-aged professional men, out of touch
with the masses, possessed by the dread that popular imprudences might
scare the diplomatists, on whom they built their hopes. Under an
inspiring chief, the people would have fought perhaps, as they fought
seventeen years later, when they drove the Austrians in confusion from
Bologna. But the leaders were not the men to touch their enthusiasm.
They had, in fact, miscalculated what the movement meant. These
comfortable men of peace flinched from the fact that Austria must be
fought and beaten. They had no stuff for a desperate guerilla fight,
that meant the wasting of the country, privation and disease and
death, for an uncertain hope that France might come eventually to the
rescue. Still less were they prepared to launch on a forlorn
enterprise, where friends were none and immediate disaster certain,
that they might be precursors of their children's victories.
Their failure, so consonant with all the later Carbonaro policy,
confirmed Mazzini in his belief that a new organisation was needed and
new men to lead it. As usual, he saw only one set of facts. He
exaggerated the mistakes of the revolutionary governments, and left
out of his reckoning the unreadiness of the people. The insurrections
had failed, he convinced himself, simply because they had been badly
led. In the main, indeed, he was right. The revolution had been in the
wrong hands. The Carbonaro chiefs kept at arm's-length younger men,
whose energy might have made up for their own unforwardness. If the
next revolution was to fare better, it must have these younger men to
captain it, men of confidence and enthusiasm and fresh ideas, men with
a message that would nerve "those artisans of insurrection, the people
and the young." Mazzini had at this time a supreme faith in his
generation; he had already written in the _Antologia_ of "this young
Italy of ours," so vigorous and cultured and warm-hearted, that no new
movement, however bold and difficult, was beyond its powers. "Place,"
he said now, "the young at the head of the insurgent masses; you do
not know what strength is latent in those young bands, what magic
influence the voice of the young has on the crowd; you will find in
them a host of apostles for the new religion. But youth lives on
movement, grows great in enthusiasm and faith. Consecrate them with a
lofty mission; inflame them with emulation and praise; spread through
their ranks the word of fire, the word of inspiration; speak to them
of country, of glory, of power, of great memories." They had been
muzzled in the past; they must not be again. So rigidly did he insist
on this, that the rules of Young Italy excluded from membership,
except in special cases, all who were over forty years. Mazzini had no
diffidence to curb the magnificent egotism of a design, in which he
consciously destined for himself the leading part. As one of his
closest friends of those days said, "his confidence in men was great
and in himself unlimited." "All great national movements," he wrote in
later years, "begin with unknown men of the people, without influence
except for the faith and will, that counts not time or difficulties."
It is worth noting that Camillo Cavour, five years younger still, was
at this same time writing to a friend that "he would one fine morning
wake up Prime Minister of Italy."
When we disentangle Mazzini's ideas from the superfluous verbiage that
sometimes wraps them, two leading principles are found to
differentiate them from those of earlier movements,--the principles,
that, with his trick of making watchwords, he summed up in the phrase,
"God and the People." The new movement must have the inspiration and
power of a religion. Italy needed something that would shake her from
the hopelessness of disillusion and defeat, something that would prove
she "had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier
than destiny itself." Action must be roused by action, energy by
energy, faith by faith,--the faith that made Rome great and inspired
Christianity and sent forth the armies of the Convention, the faith
that makes the weak strong in the knowledge they are carrying out
God's will. Mazzini had two arguments to persuade his countrymen to
this believing and conquering patriotism. He hoped to fire them with
his own superb faith in Italy and her destinies. He called up "that
old name of Italy, hung round with memories and glory and majestic
griefs, that centuries of mute servitude could not destroy." Twice had
she been queen of the world; many times had she, the land of Dante and
Vico, of the Papacy and the Renaissance, inspired European thought.
"Italy," he said, "has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard
peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with
living weaklings and braggarts." Her task was not yet done; she had
still to speak to the nations "the gospel of the new age, the gospel
of humanity." He pointed Italians to "the vision of their country,
radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the
nations that thought her dead." Rightly he judged that men, who shared
his faith, would never despair of their country. But he had a more
sounding note to strike. He had the genius to see that he who would
have men rise to high endeavour, must appeal to their unselfish
motives, that only when some great principle calls, will they lift
themselves to heroism and sacrifice of all that makes life dear. The
effort to make Italy meant the loss of thousands of lives, meant exile
and imprisonment and poverty, the blighting of homes and the misery of
dear ones; and men would only face it at the call of duty. The
Carbonari had no call; they came of a school that appealed to
interested motives, and the appeal inevitably broke down in the day of
disappointment and defeat. Mazzini offered his countrymen "a national
religion"; Young Italy was no mere political party, but "a creed and
an apostolate"; it taught that victory came "by reverence for
principles, reverence for the just and true, by sacrifice and
constancy in sacrifice." As individuals and as a nation, they had a
mission given them by God. God's law of duty bade them follow it;
God's law of progress promised them accomplishment.
The other principle of Young Italy was social reform. Earlier liberal
movements had thought or attempted little for the masses, though at
all events the recent rising in Romagna aimed higher than Mazzini gave
it credit for, and had more of a democratic tendency than contemporary
movements in France and England. Mazzini exaggerated the revolutionary
impatience of the masses in 1821 and 1831; but it was true that such
enthusiasm as they had, had been cooled by the disappointment of their
hopes. Revolutions, as he said, had been Dead Sea apples to them. They
would be slow to stir again, till they saw that the liberation of
their country had tangible social results in store. The gospel of duty
would rouse the cultured middle classes, but at this time he seems to
have thought that the uneducated, down-trodden, priest and
official-ridden masses could not respond to the higher call, and must
be won by some visible prospect of relief from present evils. Pope
Julius' cry of "Out with the barbarian" would not touch men, who did
not see how every social injustice leant in the last resort on
Austria, how dear food, conscription, all the petty tyranny, were
fruits of the foreign domination, that sheltered the princes who
misgoverned them. Till the masses felt this, there was no hope of a
successful war of liberation. "Revolutions," he said, "must be made
for the people and by the people, and so long as revolutions are, as
now, the inheritance and monopoly of a single class, and lead only to
the substitution of one aristocracy for another, we shall never find
salvation." The cry of the poor, unheard by most Italian statesmen
from his time, down to yesterday, was ever with him. "I see the people
pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political
subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that
wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the
intoxication of a brutish, angry, savage joy; and I remember that
those brutalised faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the
same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and
behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one
bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows
in beauty and might; the people of the future, unspoilt by luxury,
ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and
duties. And in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish
for the present and glorying for the future." That they would rise in
insurrection, he had no doubt. Once make them see whence sprang their
wretchedness, where stood its remedies, once make them feel that "God
is on the side of the down-trodden," the people of Italy would be
again what they had been in the days of the Lombard League and the
Sicilian Vespers.
Out of these principles,--social reform as the immediate end of
revolution and duty as its inspiration,--Mazzini built up an elaborate
political programme. He loved system-making and hardly apologised for
it. You cannot have unity or harmony without it, he urged, and to a
certain extent he had practical justification. It were better, as he
said and as subsequent events proved, that the nationalists should
argue out their differences before the time for action came, and not
paralyse themselves by quarrels in front of the enemy. It was this
want of a positive programme, that was, he thought, largely
responsible for the failure of the Carbonari. Their policy had hardly
gone beyond the overthrow of the existing governments; and they had
mustered under their flag royalists and republicans, conservatives and
liberals, with the inevitable result that after their first successes
they split their ranks and fell an easy prey. It were wiser, so
Mazzini pleaded, to be few but united. "The strength of an association
depends not on its numbers but on its homogeneity." But the principle
was necessarily an intolerant one. It barred many a true patriot, who
could not swear to the whole Mazzinian doctrine. For such he had no
pity. In his view it was only fear, "the Almighty God of most
politicians," that prevented the Moderates from accepting his
position. "There can be no moderation," he said at a later date,
"between good and evil, truth and error, progress and reaction."
Unluckily truth to him too often meant adhesion to his own theories;
and he could never forgive men, who, starting from his premisses,
could not follow his logic to the end, though, like most men who pride
themselves on being logical, he was often singularly incapable of
accurate reasoning. It was this intolerance that wrecked so much of
his after life, that made him waste his splendid powers in fighting
men, by whose side he ought to have been working.
However, for better or worse, Mazzini required from his
fellow-workers implicit acceptance of his theories,--theories which
embraced every sphere of national life, religion and politics,
literature and art. His chief political doctrines were republicanism
and Italian Unity. How he pieced republicanism on his general theory
of things, is the subject of another chapter. It is sufficient here to
note that he was a republican, chiefly because he thought that
democratic legislation was impossible under any form of monarchy. The
belief was natural enough at the time. Few had been the popular
reforms under any European crown, while the one genuine series of
democratic laws had been passed by the French Republic or while the
French monarchy was tottering to its fall. Mazzini may be pardoned, if
at that time he sharply sundered monarchies and republics, and failed
to see how imperfect was the classification. In Italy, Mazzini saw
special circumstances that made for a republic. Her great memories
were republican, though even he must have recognised how little the
republics of medieval Italy had in common with his ideal polity. At
Venice and his own Genoa the republican tradition was still dear.
Italian republicanism was free from any recent memory of outrage and
proscription, such as tarnished the name in France. And above all, he
urged, there was no possible king for a united Italy. Each prince was
pledged to Austria, each had proved his sympathy with reaction.
Monarchy in Italy had "no splendid annals, no venerable traditions,"
no powerful nobility to buttress it. Two princes only had an army,
which could help in the war of liberation; and neither the King of
Piedmont nor the King of Naples would submit to the other without a
bitter civil struggle. And the antipathies of North and South, though
they might bow to the principle of a common republic, would never
allow the Neapolitan to take a king from Piedmont. History has proved
how wrong was his diagnosis, and temporarily and reluctantly he had
glimpses of his error. More than once in after life, as we shall see,
he alternated his republicanism with fits of half-belief in the
Piedmontese monarchy.
His advocacy of Italian Unity rests on a surer bottom. That the
country was fated to stagnate till the foreigner had gone, was common
ground with every school of patriots. But when the Austrians had been
driven out, was Italy to be a federation of states or one united
country? Mazzini pleaded that the point at issue between him and the
federalists was mainly one of practicability. This hardly took
sufficient account of the school, which looked to Switzerland and
America for its types, and preferred a federation on its own merits.
But on the whole his contention was right. Every argument that told
for federation, told yet more forcibly for unity. The strength of the
federalist movement lay in the belief that unity was impossible. As
yet, though Napoleon had foretold that unity must come, only a handful
of Italians had dared to speak of it as a possible ideal. The great
majority doubted whether Italy even wished to be united, whether, if
she did, the facts of the European polity made it possible, whether
unity could permanently stand the strain of the old provincial
animosities. It was easy for them to adduce a host of facts,--the
differences of race and temperament and tradition, the various habits
formed by dissimilar systems of law and land tenure and education,
the jealousies, still far from dead, that sundered province from
province and city from city. Mazzini himself had felt the force of
their arguments, and there was a moment, when even he had been shaken
in his faith. He had little tangible reasoning to back his confidence.
But he had the prophetic assurance of a great possibility, and his
contagious faith made it a reality. He saw, when hardly another of his
contemporaries saw it, that Italian Unity was a practicable ideal; his
teaching informed the national resolve, that changed the seemingly
impossible into a fact. To few men has it been given to create a great
political idea; to fewer still to be not only the creator, but the
chief instrument in realising it. Mazzini was both, and it gives him
title to rank among the makers of modern Europe.
But there could be no unity, no republic, no political advance of any
kind, till the inevitable war with Austria had been fought and won.
She would not surrender her Italian provinces, unless by force of
arms. She could not tolerate free institutions side by side with her
own despotic rule. She had crushed the Neapolitan and Piedmontese
risings ten years before; she had done the same in Modena and Romagna
yesterday. "She robs us," said Mazzini, "of life and country, name,
glory, culture, material well-being." As Giusti said more pointedly a
few years later, the Italians "ate Austria in their bread." Mazzini
and many another patriot knew that any peaceful solution was utopian.
"The destinies of Italy," he preached, "have to be decided on the
plains of Lombardy, and peace must be signed beyond the Alps."
Mazzini rather welcomed war in a just cause. It would redeem the
torpid, disillusioned Italian, who was brave enough, as Napoleon's
campaigns had proved, but required much to nerve him to effort. It
would give Italy again her national self-respect, her claim to the
esteem of other peoples. "War," he said, "is the eternal law, that
stands between the master and the slave who breaks his chains." But
Mazzini in his saner moods saw the futility of any local or
ill-prepared rising. In words, that condemn only too eloquently much
of his after action, he declared that only victory could justify a
rising against Austria. It was only when the great mass of the people
had been won to the nationalist cause, that the patriots "might
stretch their hand to Lombardy and say, 'There are the men who
perpetuate your servitude,' towards the Alps and say, 'There stand
your confines.'" Mazzini's plan of campaign was guerilla fighting. It
was, as he said, the natural resource of an insurgent people, that had
to win its freedom against disciplined armies,--the method chosen by
the Dutch against Philip II., by the American colonists against
England, by the Spaniards and Greeks in more recent times. Had he
lived now, he might have added another illustrious example. Italy,
with her long chain of mountains that no enemy could hold in force,
had special fitness for the strategy. "Italians," he cried, "look to
your mountains, there stand strength and infallible victory."
In the meantime the work of Young Italy was to organise and educate;
and the only possible organisation was that of the secret society.
Mazzini did not see its inherent weaknesses. Young Italy soon became
as much the quarry of the spy and police agent as the Carbonari had
been; and to the end of life Mazzini was the victim of informers, who
won his easy confidence. The society developed an uncontrolled and
irresponsible leadership, and its chief, eager as he was and sincerely
eager to disclaim any desire to dictate, was too impatient, too
self-confident to allow fair play to other men's convictions. As a
means of preparing for war, it failed disastrously; and it proved an
ill school for the parliamentary politics of later days. But in a
country, where any open expression of liberal sentiment meant prison
or exile, if not the scaffold, there was no alternative; and as an
educating influence it came to be the greatest of the forces that made
Italy. Its writings, smuggled into every corner of the land, moved
many a young thinker to a passionate resolve, that bore its fruit in
after times. At this stage, however, Mazzini was hardly looking to the
slow results of political education. The hour of insurrection, he
confidently believed, was near; the European revolution was
threatening, and Italy must not be behind the sister nations. He was
certain of success. Whatever difficulties might come to a nationalist
movement without a backing from the native governments, however much
Italians might distrust their own unaided strength, there was "no real
obstacle for twenty-six millions of men, who wished to rise and fight
for their country." Austria, he calculated, could at the best put two
hundred thousand men into the field; he fondly counted on four million
Italian volunteers. A people, that even under the leading of the
Carbonari had made three revolutions in ten years, would rise again
more readily and more victoriously at the inspiration of a nobler
faith.
Chapter III
Marseilles
1831-1834. AETAT 25-28
At Marseilles--Spread of Young Italy--Letter to Charles
Albert--The Army Plot in Piedmont--At Geneva--The Savoy
Raid.
When Mazzini arrived at Lyons, he found an unhopeful plan in
preparation for raiding Savoy. Some 2000 Italian refugees, many of
them Piedmontese who had fled through Genoa ten years before and
stirred his boyish enthusiasm, were ready to march under the hardly
concealed protection of the French government. It was still in the
early days of the July monarchy, when it had yet not quite forgotten
its revolutionary origin. But before the expedition could start, Louis
Philippe's swift lapse into conservatism, which had already made him
break his promises to the Romagnuols, abruptly ended the patronage of
the authorities. The would-be raiders were scattered, and Mazzini
joined a small party of republicans, who were starting for Corsica, on
their way to join the insurgents in Romagna. The Corsicans were still
Italian in sentiment as well as race, and the Carbonaro influence was
strong in the island. Two thousand men offered themselves for service
with the insurgents, but no funds were forthcoming to pay their
passage, and before arrangements could be made the news arrived that
the rising had collapsed.
Mazzini returned to Marseilles, and found himself among the refugees
who had escaped from Central Italy. He recruited a few young patriots
among them, and with their help he began to give body to his schemes.
In a small room at Marseilles the young Titans started, with nothing
but their own sincerity and daring, to revolutionise Italy. "We had no
office, no helpers," he wrote of them in after years. "All day, and a
great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles
and letters, getting information from travellers, enlisting seamen,
folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between
literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti
corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to
save the expense of distributing the papers. We lived as equals and
brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence.
The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and
unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were
light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the
future."
In later life Mazzini looked back longingly to the freshness and
enthusiasm of those days, before failure had disillusioned him or
misunderstanding estranged him from his friends. When he was well and
happy, all the charm of his nature--his radiant idealism, his
warm-hearted friendship, his contagious unselfishness--made him the
beloved inspirer of the little band that worked under his orders. "He
was," said an Italian of him at this time, "about 5 feet 8 inches high
and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large
"republican" hat; his long, curling black hair, which fell upon his
shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the
chiselled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his
very youthful look and sweetness and openness of expression, would
have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for
his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was
mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his
dark eyes and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with
his small and beautiful moustachios and beard. Altogether he was at
that time the most beautiful being, male or female, that I had ever
seen, and I have not since seen his equal."[4] But sometimes even now
overwork and impatience told on him, and he felt ill and exhausted. In
such moods he must have been a trying man to be much with--irritable,
exacting, requiring absolute submission from his fellow-workers, angry
if they thought well of men whom he disliked.
For two years the little band worked on, sowing the seeds of
revolution. It was a heroic enterprise. A few young men, without birth
or wealth to help them, and, except for their leader, of no great
ability, were planning to change the future of their country and
preparing for war with a great military empire. To an outsider it must
have seemed a madman's dream. But their masterful chief had taught
them his own faith; and they, and thousands of their countrymen after
them, found in it the power, to which few things are impossible. They
worked with remorseless energy, month after month, corresponding with
sympathisers all over the peninsula, planting lodges of Young Italy
wherever a chance opened, drawing together the threads of conspiracy.
They found abundant backing in Italy. Mazzini appealed to his
followers there to work among the people by every road that the
despotism left open, to bring children to school and teach them, to
hold classes for men in the country districts, to circulate pictures
and pamphlets and almanacs, which would insinuate patriotic ideas
without exciting the suspicions of the police, to carry the cross of
fire from town to town and village to village. "Climb the hills," he
asked of them, "sit at the farmer's table, visit the workshops and the
artisans, whom you now neglect. Tell them of their rightful liberties,
their ancient traditions and glories, the old commercial greatness
which has gone; talk to them of the thousand forms of oppression,
which they ignore, because no one points them out." His appeal found a
ready response. Hundreds of young Italians, fired by his own passion,
gave themselves to the dangers and toils and the thousand small
annoyances of a conspirator's life. It was no light call. "I know of
no existence," said one of them in later life, "which requires such
continual self-abnegation and endurance. A conspirator has to listen
to all sorts of gossip, to soothe every variety of vanity, discuss
nonsense seriously, feel sick and stifling under the pressure of empty
talk, idle boasting, and vulgarity, and yet maintain an unmoved and
complacent countenance. A conspirator ceases to belong to himself, and
becomes the toy of anyone he may meet; he must go out when he would
rather stay at home, and stay at home when he would rather go out; he
has to talk when he would be silent, and to hold vigils when he would
rather be in bed." And behind these petty vexations, which meant more
to the Italians of that day than to a generation trained in
strenuousness, lay the knowledge that discovery meant prison or exile,
perhaps death. But they faced it with the courage of men who believed
that the "wear and tear was smoothing the way, inch by inch, towards a
noble and holy end," who looked to the day when through their labours
their country would be lifted from the slough of misgovernment and low
ideals. Life and everything they were ready to give for that. "Here
are we," said Jacopo Ruffini to his fellow-conspirators at Genoa,
"five young, very young men, with but limited means, and we are called
on to do nothing less than overthrow an established government. I have
a presentiment that few of us will live to see the final results of
our labours, but the seed we have sown will shoot forth after us, and
the bread we have cast upon the waters will be found again."
Mazzini might well be sanguine, with men like these behind him. He
looked to his literature to do the rest. The journal of Young Italy
was, as he described it, "a collection of political pamphlets," each
of the infrequent and irregular numbers consisting of a hundred to two
hundred pages, badly printed on bad paper. Later on, it was set up by
French compositors, who knew no Italian, and whose misprints gave him
infinite concern. He himself did most of the writing. It was terribly
diffusive often and wanting in precision, but his articles redeem
their literary defects by the glow of noble purpose, that made them
thrill their readers, and gave them a potency, that perhaps no other
political writings of the century attained to. Most of the remaining
articles came from his fellow-workers. Mazzini tried to persuade
Sismondi to contribute, but the historian, though sympathetic, was too
opposed to some of his teaching to respond. Louis Napoleon, drawn by a
fellow-feeling for conspiracy and scenting a chance to preach
Bonapartism, sent an essay on Military Honour, with the thesis that
soldiers are not bound by their oath to act against a revolution.
Mazzini consented to insert it with many emendations, which apparently
left little of its Bonapartist intention; but for some reason that
does not appear, it was not published. The journal had a small
circulation, and only reached a limited number of young educated men;
it was indeed too literary for popular consumption. There seems to
have been a larger demand for rules and instructions and popular
tracts written by Gustavo Modena, afterwards to become one of the most
famous Italian tragedians of his day. At all events there was a
considerable contraband of printed matter, smuggled to Genoa or
Leghorn or across the passes into Piedmont, inside barrels of pitch
and pumice stone or bales of drapery or packages of sausages. So great
became the demand, that secret presses were set up in Italy and the
Ticino to supplement the output from Marseilles.
The results surpassed even Mazzini's sanguine hopes. The first lodges
of Young Italy were planted at Genoa and Leghorn, and they spread
thence to a good many towns of North and Central Italy. The chief
strength of the society lay at Genoa, where the nationalist and
anti-Piedmontese parties made common cause, and men of every class
came in--nobles and commoners, lawyers and civil servants and priests,
seamen and artisans. Outside Genoa the working men seem to have kept
aloof as a rule; years had yet to pass before Mazzini's social
teaching reached them. The recruits came chiefly from the young men of
the middle classes, sons of the men who had had their importance under
the French rule and had been cribbed and kept under since the
restoration. Here and there a young noble joined; in Piedmont and at
Genoa at all events there was a sprinkling of older professional and
business men; a few priests welcomed a movement, which bore so strong
a religious imprint. Everywhere the scattered remnants of the
Carbonari enrolled themselves. Buonarrotti, _doyen_ of the
conspirators, descendant of Michelangelo, friend of Robespierre and
Baboeuf and Napoleon, attached his society of the _Veri Italiani_.
Early in 1833 Mazzini, it is impossible to say with what accuracy, put
the number of affiliates at fifty or sixty thousand. Many a man, who
came to the front in the later nationalist movement or in the first
Italian parliaments, began his political life as a member of Young
Italy. Garibaldi, a young sailor who wrote verses, just promoted to be
captain in the Genoese mercantile marine, whose fearlessness and charm
of manner made him the idol of the men under him, and who had already
learnt from Foscolo a belief in the destinies of Italy as ardent as
Mazzini's own, met the chief at Marseilles and joined the society.
Gioberti, who was teaching a transcendental and literary patriotism to
the novices in the Archbishop's seminary at Vercelli, sent warm words
of encouragement to the cause of God and the People.
All Mazzini's preparations centred round Piedmont and Genoa. He
realised, with the bulk of patriots of whatever school, that though
the other provinces might play a secondary part, Piedmont must take
the lead. It was the only state that possessed the military training
and traditions, essential in a war; it was the natural base for an
invasion of Lombardy; Alessandria and Genoa were two all-important
strategic points, and if the Italians were defeated in the plains,
they could fall back on the Alps and Apennines. There were few
republicans among the Piedmontese, but they were nationalists with all
their race's tenacity of purpose. The Genoese were zealots for the
cause, all the more if it were under a republican flag; in Savoy there
was a strong strain of liberalism, and its position made it a
connecting link with sympathisers in France. Mazzini's first public
act--some three or four months after he left Italy--was to write an
open letter to the king. Charles Albert had just ascended the throne
of Piedmont; and expectation ran high, as it had run ten years before,
that he would lead the nationalists. This time there was small bottom
for the hope. Charles Albert had had his phase of liberalism; in his
youth he had relations with the Carbonari, and encouraged the
Piedmontese conspirators of 1821 to look to him to lead the army to a
war for Lombard independence. Had he had the courage, he would have
stood by his word. But as he was then, so was he now, a moral coward,
buffeted by irreconcilable ambitions. He was still a nationalist, but
no liberal. Liberalism had come to loom before him as a spectre of
Revolution, to be fought and crushed without pity. But priest-ridden
absolutist as he was, he never quite forgot his patriotic faith, he
always had some vision, faint though it often was, of an Italy
untrodden by the foreign soldier. It is probable that even now, in his
worst years, he was waiting dubiously for the distant day, when he
would measure himself with the enemy. But he knew that as yet this was
impossible. He had a saner view than Mazzini of the possibilities of
the time, when France--on the high road to the _juste-milieu_--would
give no help, and a single-handed fight with Austria was foredoomed to
defeat. He would have scorned an offer of Mazzini's guerilla bands;
but had he been as ready to welcome the volunteers, as his son was
twenty-eight years later, they had little prospect of existence at
this time outside Mazzini's visionary hopes.
Such was Charles Albert, when Mazzini appealed to him to lead the
nationalist movement. What was the exact purpose of the letter, will
probably never be known. In after life Mazzini denied that there was
any serious intention in it; he pleaded that he expressed the hopes of
others rather than his own, and wrote it in the certainty that its
appeal would not be heard. At the time he disclaimed, though not so
emphatically, any hope of a response, and suggested that its object
was to disillusion the Piedmontese of any belief in their king. There
is some reason for thinking that the disclaimers must not be taken
quite literally. When he wrote twenty years and more afterwards, he
was anxious to prove that he had never lapsed from his republican
faith. His earlier commentary was in a letter to a man, whom he did
not know, and to whom he was not likely to express himself
unreservedly. There are indications that he had not quite escaped the
glamour that Charles Albert threw over the liberals, had not entirely
abandoned all hope of winning him. The secret instructions of Young
Italy, written a few months later, accepted the possibility of a
monarchy as a "system of transition"; and in the subsequent army plot
Mazzini intended to offer the King the leadership of the revolution.
One would fain believe that his own interpretations do him injustice,
that he did not write his glowing prose in utter insincerity. Were it
otherwise, we must bow the head and sadly own a stain upon that noble
life.
The letter, it must be confessed, was hardly calculated to make a
convert. Threats alternate with overdone praise; the assumption of
political omniscience, the claim of the young exile to speak for
Italy, the magniloquent parade of the obvious, must have, like much
else of his earlier writings, offended Italian common-sense and been
extremely irritating. Much of it reads like a declamatory school essay
on the duties of a constitutional king. But the lesson was true enough
on its negative side. Charles Albert could find no safe foothold
outside popular government; coercion, administrative reform, the
support of Austria or France--none would permanently content or
overawe his people. And if Charles Albert had retorted that to grant a
constitution meant war with Austria, Mazzini would have welcomed the
corollary. The King was right and Mazzini was wrong as to the
inopportuneness of a national rising at the moment. But for the policy
of another day, the letter has passages that speak like a trumpet
call. "Sire, there is another road, leading to true power and a
glorious immortality; another ally, safer and more strong than
Austria or France. There is a crown more brilliant and sublime than
that of Piedmont, a crown that waits the man, who dares to think of
it, who dedicates his life to winning it, and scorns to dull its
splendour with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have you never cast an
eagle glance upon this Italy, so fair with nature's smile, crowned by
twenty centuries of noble memory, the land of genius, strong in the
infinite resources that only want a common purpose, girt round with
barriers so impregnable, that it needs but a firm will and a few brave
breasts to shelter it from foreign insult? Place yourself at the head
of the nation, write on your flag, 'Union, Liberty, Independence.'
Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of
Italian freedom. Do this and we will gather round you, we will give
our lives for you, we will bring the little states of Italy under your
flag. Your safety lies on the sword's point; draw it and throw away
the scabbard. But remember, if you do it not, others will do it
without you and against you."
The letter was published in May or June 1831, and a few copies found
their way into Italy. Mazzini thought he had evidence that the King
read it. At all events his police did, and ordered the writer whose
anonymity did not conceal him, to be seized, if he crossed the
frontier. Whatever Mazzini's hopes may have been, this proved that the
letter had failed in its ostensible object, and he threw himself
feverishly into his preparations for a revolt in Piedmont. His
detailed scheme shows that he had not yet planned or had abandoned for
the time the strategy of guerilla fighting, and intended to rely on
the Piedmontese army. Charles Albert was, if possible, to be
persuaded to lead the revolution, and the army was to be mobilised for
an immediate advance on Lombardy. Should the King decline the offer, a
provisional directorate at Genoa would assume the government. Mazzini
had better ground for his hopes than often afterwards. The army had
not forgotten that it had led the constitutional and nationalist
movement ten years before. Many a soldier, who had served in the
_Grande Armée_, cherished the democratic sentiment that clung to it
all through, and was eager to avenge himself on the enemy, whom he had
routed in old days. These feelings were especially strong among the
non-commissioned officers. Many of them were men of the middle classes
of good standing and education, for in many, if not all, of the
regiments commissions could be held only by those of noble birth, and
no bourgeois, whatever his capacities, could rise above the ranks. A
few officers joined the society, and a general or two promised to
throw in his lot, if the movement proved successful. At Alessandria
and Genoa, the two chief garrison towns, the society had a
considerable strength. The government, though quietly tracking the
civilian conspirators, seems to have had no suspicion of the army
plot; and had the revolt broken out early in 1833, it would have had
its chance of success at home, though the inevitable disaster must
have come, when the little army faced the Austrians.
But the conspirators waited too long, and late in the spring an
accident led to the discovery of the plot. The government cautiously
followed up the clue, till it possessed itself of every detail of the
conspiracy. Then it threw itself on its prey with a savage vengeance,
that outside the Austrian provinces has had no parallel in Italy since
the days of Fra Diavolo. Charles Albert, pitiless with fright,
surrendered himself to the reactionary court party and fed their
thirst for blood. Moral, sometimes physical, torture was inflicted on
the victims to extort confession of their own or their confederates'
guilt. Jacopo Ruffini, given the choice between execution and the
betrayal of his friends, committed suicide in prison. Ten soldiers and
two civilians were shot; fourteen more only escaped by flight; numbers
were sent to longer or shorter imprisonment. Italy still execrates
those courts-martial. Not all Charles Albert's later patriotism has
purged his memory from their indelible shame; and while yet he
reigned, the Genoese erased from their city every record of the brutal
general who was his worst instrument. The humble lawyers and sergeants
whom he shot, have a deathless homage from their country. "Ideas ripen
quickly," said Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." It
was the memory of these and other victims of tyranny, that helped to
nerve Italian arms and send Italians to die in the battles that won
their country's liberty.
* * * * *
Meanwhile, since the previous August, Mazzini had been driven into
hiding at Marseilles. The French government decreed his banishment and
broke up his press. Mazzini eluded both blows. He started a secret
press and got French compositors to work it. He himself found refuge
in the house of a French sympathiser, Démosthène Ollivier, father of
Louis Napoleon's last premier, under whose roof he remained "a
voluntary prisoner." Twice only in the year he passed its threshold,
and then only at night, disguised as a woman or a _garde national_. It
was at this time that the French government, whether maliciously or
itself deceived, brought against him a false charge of encouraging
assassination, for repeating which in after years Sir James Graham
wore sackcloth.[5] Mazzini was still at Marseilles, when the news of
the Genoese executions came; and so terrible was his anguish, for in
Jacopo Ruffini he had lost his dearest friend, that his health and
mind nearly broke down. The devotion of a noble woman, whom he
loved,[6] saved him from insanity or death.
About the beginning of July 1833 he moved to Geneva. He came there to
be on the spot for a new plan of insurrection. The failure of the army
plot only impelled him more feverishly into his fixed idea of a rising
in Piedmont. He wished no doubt to punish Charles Albert, and well may
he have been maddened by the savagery, which had sickened Europe. He
wanted to "moralise" his party by proving that the terrorism had no
fears for him and striking back at the victorious and brutal enemy. He
thought that, if he was to keep his following together, he must make
his cast now or never. Once allow the fire to slack down, and it would
be beyond his power to rekindle it. He believed that half Europe was
on the brink of revolution, that a republican movement in Italy would
be the signal for republican risings in France and Spain and Germany.
It was probably a fantastic dream; but he had surer ground for
thinking that a revolt would fire the tinder throughout Italy.
Exaggerated as his hopes were even here, the revolutionary spirit,
that Young Italy created, had sunk deep. In the Genovesate and Savoy,
in the Papal States and parts of Naples there was a good deal of
material ready for an insurrection; and Mazzini had assured himself
that on the appointed day guerilla bands would take to the mountains
in several districts. The chances of success, indeed, were not bright
at the best; but the raid was not quite the unpardonable playing with
brave lives, that it seems at first sight. Mazzini, taking up a plan
of the Carbonari at Paris, chose Savoy for the starting-point of the
insurrection. He expected that the troops there would join the
insurgents, and the revolutionary army would cross the Alps into
Piedmont, while another band would land in the Riviera and rouse the
Genoese country.[7]
By the autumn of 1833 several hundred exiles had been enrolled in
Switzerland. Many of them were Poles and Germans, a few were French;
and Mazzini welcomed assistance, which he hoped might cement an
international alliance of democrats, and develop into a "Young
Europe," which would do elsewhere what Young Italy was doing for his
own country. He had the help of several officers, Bianco di San
Jorioz, author of a clever book on guerilla warfare, which had much
influenced him, and Manfredo Fanti, the future organiser of the
Italian army. They saw the importance of giving the command to an
experienced officer, and the Savoyard conspirators insisted that the
choice should fall on a certain General Ramorino, a cosmopolitan
adventurer of Savoyard birth, who had fought under Napoleon, and had
an undistinguished command in the Polish rising of 1831. Mazzini's
slender preparations were completed by October, and about eight
hundred men were armed and ready to march. There were plans of
simultaneous risings at Genoa and Naples, in the Marches and the
Abruzzi; and Garibaldi enlisted in the Piedmontese navy in the
quixotic hope of bringing it over to the revolution. But what chance
there was of success was spoilt by Ramorino. He had no real interest
in the expedition; perhaps he was paid by the French government to
wreck it. At all events he lingered at Paris, squandering much of the
war-fund, that Mazzini had collected with infinite labour. Every week
added to the difficulties. The foreign governments put pressure on the
Swiss to break up the volunteers. Buonarrotti, suspicious of the whole
design, did his best to discredit Mazzini among his own men. When
Mazzini at last insisted that the volunteers must wait no longer, the
conspirators in Savoy refused to cooperate unless Ramorino came.
Mazzini worked desperately to undo the mischief, and at last, in
January, Ramorino arrived. It was too late. The Swiss authorities
harassed the volunteers, and on February 1 only a small body of the
raiders could gather on the frontier near St Julien. Ramorino marched
them aimlessly about. Probably he saw from the first how desperate
were the chances, and wished to spare a useless loss of life. On the
4th, before hardly a shot had been exchanged, he disbanded his men,
and the insurrection was still-born.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] This description was given to, and published by Mr W. Shaen. There
is reason for thinking it was written by Enrico Mayer, the Tuscan
educationalist.
[5] See below, p. 104.
[6] See below, p. 68.
[7] For Gallenga's plot to assassinate the King, see below, c. ix.
Chapter IV
Switzerland
1834-1836. AETAT 28-31
Life in exile--Mental crisis--Principles of the
revolution--Young Switzerland--Young Europe--Literary
work--Women friends: Giuditta Sidoli--Madeleine de Mandrot.
During the raid Mazzini's health collapsed. The strain of work and
anxiety might have broken down a stronger man; he had not touched his
bed for a week, and fatigue and cold and the crushing responsibility
brought on fever. There was a false alarm one night, and a patrol
fired; and Mazzini, hurrying up excitedly with his musket, lost
consciousness and did not regain it till the volunteers had recrossed
the frontier. The collapse unstrung him for the time, and perhaps it
was only the letters of the woman he loved, that kept him from a worse
fate. "I have moral convulsions," he writes to her; "there are moments
when I could roll on the ground and bite myself. I have fits of rage
at every human face and voice." When he recovered, he found his
residence in Switzerland threatened. The foreign governments rained
threats on the Federal Diet to make it expel the refugees. The Diet
was easily frightened, but even had it been braver, it could not
tolerate acts contrary to international law, or allow Switzerland to
be a recruiting ground for raids upon a neighbouring power. The Swiss
could not be expected to risk foreign complications for the sake of
men who, from any ordinary standpoint, had abused their hospitality.
After what had happened, it was difficult for the raiders to plead at
once even the traditional right of asylum for political refugees; and
though after a lapse of time a stronger government would have reverted
to the more generous policy, and though some of the cantons were
restive at its continued deference to foreign pressure, it is not easy
to blame the Diet, even at a later date, for its unwillingness to
shelter the raiders.
Many of them were sent at once across the frontier; others succeeded
in hiding themselves. Mazzini was determined not to leave Switzerland.
It was essential to his plans that he should be near Italy, and he
dreaded moving further from the beloved land. He grew fond of
Switzerland, and came to "love the Alps almost as one loves a mother."
England and America were the only other countries open to him, and he
feared that if a Tory government came into power in England, he would
find no shelter even there. "Besides," he said, in words to be
recanted later, "there is no sympathy there, no help, no anything."
For nearly three years he led a more or less hunted life--at Lausanne,
at Berne, at Soleure and Bienne and Grenchen, in the house of a
Protestant pastor at Langnau; sometimes hotly sought by the police,
sometimes with the connivance of the government, but generally a
virtual prisoner in the houses where he found a refuge. For seven
months, at one time, he fled from place to place, living in
apparently untenanted houses, with mats at the windows, never setting
foot outside, except in his fugitive removes by night across the
mountains. Exhausted in body and soul, he had to taste an exile's life
in all its bitterness; "the existence mournful and dull as a stormy
sky or the ashes of a dead fire; the suffering that has no name, that
finds no vent in tears or words, that has no poetry save for the
distant sentimentalist; the suffering that makes a man wan and
hollow-cheeked but kills not, that bows but does not break; while the
weary eyes follow the driven clouds, that the wind wafts away to the
skies of fatherland, beyond the everlasting Alps, those icy cherubim
that guard the gate of the heart's Eden."
There was little interruption to his desolate solitude. Save for
occasional glimpses, he was parted from his old comrades, except the
Ruffinis; and though he found a few sympathetic friends in Switzerland
and caught greedily at their affections, it could not make up for the
loss. He had few books; "I could well live all my life shut up in one
room," he wrote wearily, "if I had all my books at hand, but without
books, or guitar, or view, it is too much." The sedentary life told on
his health, and he obstinately declined the medicines his mother sent
him. Toothache wore him down, though sometimes he welcomed it as a
diversion from his sickness of heart. Money difficulties came, with
their sordid complications. His mother sent what she could spare;
friends helped him with loans. But he could never refuse an exile in
need, and they importuned him, till even he rebelled against their
exigencies. The organisation of Young Italy--such of it as still was
left--and expenses of publishing and postage absorbed most of the
rest, for there were few subscribers to the party funds. He denied
himself all but bare necessities and cigars, even the two small
luxuries he valued--scent and good writing paper. He borrowed what few
books he had. He went short of clothes, and sends his mother lean
inventories of his wardrobe, which she and his old nurse did their
best to replenish. Sometimes he found himself in absolute want, and
writes "with a blush on his face" to the mother who never refused him.
Aching fits of home-sickness came on him, "a physical craving for
home, for Italian clouds and winds and sea." "The other day," he
writes to a little girl friend, "I was looking at the Alps in the
distance--beyond them is my country, my poor country that I love so
much, where my father and mother are, and my two sisters, and another
sister who has been dead many years, and the tomb of the best friend
of my youth, who died for liberty, and meadows and hills and beautiful
lakes like your own, and flowers and oranges and a beautiful sky--all
that one needs to make one die happy, and I thought sadly on it all."
He had more pungent thoughts to trouble him. The disastrous raid
demoralised his party. From Italy came news of discouragement and
desertion. The exiles loaded him with the responsibility of the
fiasco; he found himself the centre of a miserable cross-fire of
recrimination, and he repaid the criticism with scorn and suspicion.
The want of response in Italy made him at times very bitter against
his countrymen. "Oh, how cold those Italians are, and how they hunt
for excuses for their apathy. They will not see that they are slaves,
without a name, accursed by God, and mocked among the nations." The
human sweetness in him was half dried up, and a misanthropy, so new
and alien to him, made him querulous and captious. Friends were cold,
or at all events seemed so to his sick mind. He wrote peevishly to the
best of them; probably he talked more peevishly still. The society,
even of those who were dearest, worried and distressed him, and he
preferred to be left alone with a favourite cat. "I am inclined to
love men at a distance," he writes; "contact makes me hate them." The
sorest pain, one that obsessed him and dragged him to the abyss, was
the thought of his suffering friends, suffering because of him, though
for a cause for which he too had given all. It was the Gethsemane of
every true-hearted man, who calls his fellows forth to sacrifice and
battle. The friends of his youth were in exile. Men who had loved him
and whom he had loved, were laying their misery to his charge. The
Ruffinis' home was desolate--one son the victim of his own hand, two
more in exile, the mother, whom of all women he reverenced most,
sitting in loneliness and mourning. Another woman, to whom he had
given his love, but to whom a fugitive exile could not give a home,
was hunted by the Italian police, worn and desperate. "What gives me
pain and very sad moments," he writes to his mother, "is the past and
present and future of the few beings who love me and whom I really
love, you, and the Ruffinis, their mother, my sisters, and Her. If I
could see you all and my few other friends, I will not say happy, for
that we can never be again, but tranquil, quiet, smiling, and united,
I would die that day with rapture." "I wanted to do good," he writes
to a friend, "but I have always done harm to everybody, and the
thought grows and grows till I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I fancy
I am hated by those I love most." Once, at all events, it made him
doubt of all that he had done. "I think over it from morning to night,
and ask pardon of my God for having been a conspirator; not that I in
the least repent the reasons for it, or recant a single one of my
beliefs, which were, and are, and will be a religion to me, but
because I ought to have seen that there are times, when a believer
should only sacrifice himself to his belief. I have sacrificed
everybody."
The black misery settled on him. "I felt alone in the world, except
for my poor mother, and she too was away and unhappy for my sake, and
I stopped in terror at the void. In that wilderness I met Doubt." The
men whom he had sent to a patriot's death, had they died in vain? Was
it all a frightful error, an empty dream born of ambition and pride of
intellect? Was it for some grandiose, impossible chimera, that he had
taken men from quiet useful lives and the simple round of kindliness?
What authority had he still to preach a creed, which meant the
sacrifice of thousands more, the unhappiness of many another mother?
In his nightly terrors, in his little lonely room, while the wind
howled round, he heard Jacopo Ruffini's voice calling to him. He was
of course verging on insanity, and thoughts of suicide passed through
his mind. His strong moral nature and the influence of two
women--Madame Ruffini and one unknown--saved him. Characteristically,
mental health returned in the shape of a philosophy of life. It was
his theory of Duty, expanded till it penetrated every cranny of the
individual soul. His old enemy, the utilitarian theory, had taken
subtle root in his affections. "I should have thought of them, as of a
blessing from God, to be accepted with thankfulness, not as of
something to be expected and exacted as a right and a reward. Instead
of this, I had made them a condition of fulfilling my duties. I had
not reached the ideal of love, love that has no hope in this life. I
had worshipped not love but the joys of love." And so he put away that
last infirmity of the true man, took to himself not only toil and
danger and opprobrium, but unloved solitude of soul, the desert life
of him who has no friend but God. He, who ached for sympathy and love,
took duty for his hard task-master--duty, "an arid, bare religion,
which does not save my heart a single atom of unhappiness, but still
the only one that can save me from suicide." "There are four lines of
Juvenal," he said, "that sum up all we ought to ask of God, all that
made Rome the mistress and the benefactress of the world:--
'Pray for the soul, that has no fear of death,
That holds life's end among kind nature's gifts,
Brave to endure each pain and labour; nought
Vexes it, nought it covets.'"
"When a man," he writes to a friend, "has once said to himself in all
seriousness of thought and feeling, I believe in liberty and country
and humanity, he is bound to fight for liberty and country and
humanity, fight long as life lasts, fight always, fight with every
weapon, face all from death to ridicule, face hatred and contempt,
work on because it is his duty and for no other reason."
Long indeed before his mental crisis, the light and joy had gone out
of his work. There were times when he felt he had neither strength nor
time nor capacity for it, when his theories became cold, emotionless
abstractions, far other than the passionate beliefs of other days. God
was "a geometrical solution," his own task "a fated mission." All life
seemed drab and purposeless. "There is so much agony in life," he
writes, "that when I see a baby quiet, smiling, at peace, I can only
wish for death for it." Perhaps though such moods were the exception.
"He is almost always good-tempered and sometimes gay," wrote Giovanni
Ruffini. Certainly during these three years he wrote some of his
warmest and humanest pages. At times he was even hopeful of his
immediate political schemes. He was strong in the sense of his
mission. "I know," he said, "there is the future in this life of mine,
little matter if I see it." "We have made," he writes, "the cause of
the people our own, we have voluntarily taken on ourselves the sorrows
of all a generation. We have snatched a spark from the Eternal God,
and placed ourselves between Him and the people; we have taken on
ourselves the part of the emancipator, and God has accepted us."
Alike in hours of insight and of gloom he remained ever constant to
his work. His friends advised him to retire. His father threatened,
his mother entreated. To the latter he "would have yielded, if he
could." He would gladly have withdrawn, at least he thought so, if
anyone else had come forward to take up the work; but this of course
was impossible. He would have liked to fall back on the Manzonian
policy, and devote himself to quiet moral and literary education. But
this seemed an impossible solution in a country, where there was no
freedom of speech or writing. The only way, he thought, to rouse his
countrymen was to give them the example of a life, that no adversity
could turn back, no want of response dishearten, ever labouring and
suffering for their sake and the ideal's. There must be no folding of
the hands, because others were slow to follow.
He set himself to think why the revolutions of the last five years had
failed, why the people, whether in Italy or France or elsewhere, had
been so deaf to the call to liberty. He was always asking himself why
it was that Christianity had succeeded, and why a movement, that had
so much in common with it, the movement for the social and political
redemption of the people, had failed. He found his answer in the fact
that the Revolution had missed the spiritual power, that made
Christianity triumphant. It was the substance of his Marseilles
teaching, but informed with a more mystical, transcendental spirit,
due no doubt to the apocalyptic results of his depression, and partly
too to the influence that Lamennais had over him at this time. The
French Revolution had appealed to men's selfish and personal
interests, their rights, their desire for happiness. It had been a
rebellion against evil, not a mission in search of good. It had had
its use, but now it had done its work. The principle of liberty and
human dignity was accepted everywhere in theory, however much
realisation lagged. The nineteenth century was plagiarising the
eighteenth, and following precedents whose day was past. A new
principle was needed to carry progress one step further, and that
principle must be a spiritual one. "We fell as a political party, we
must rise again as a religious party." The new revolution must find
its strength in "the enthusiasm, which alone begets great things"; it
must appeal to men's sense of duty, it must bid them work not for
themselves but for humanity. Then and not till then, the pettiness and
party feeling and want of earnestness, which had wrecked the movements
of 1831 and his own Italian schemes, would vanish in the light of a
great faith, and that same light would be a beacon, which would draw
the masses after.
He was still, in spite of disappointment and the scepticism of his
friends, convinced that Europe was ripe for revolution, if only one
country showed the way. He was equally convinced that Italy would be
that country. France, he thought, had disqualified herself by her
adherence to the traditions of her Revolution. The strong dislike of
France, which marked him all through life, was now especially
prominent, and he declared that popular progress throughout Europe
depended on emancipation from her political and literary influence.
Why he appropriated for Italy the revolutionary hegemony, he would
have found it difficult to give a convincing reason. At bottom,
probably, with the sublime prophetic confidence that went hand in hand
with all his searchings of heart and absence of personal ambition, he
claimed the primacy for his country, because he hoped to inform her
with his own principles.
His Italian programme remained almost unaltered. He was indeed
prepared, though regretfully, to support a royalist movement, if it
declared for Italian Unity. But he would not countenance a royalist
programme with any lesser goal. He still believed in the Republic,
both for Italy's own sake and for the example it would give to other
democracies. And he still believed in insurrection as the only
possible road to reformation in a country, where there were no
constitutional liberties to make constitutional progress possible.
Gioberti urged to him in vain that unsuccessful insurrections only
discouraged the patriots and intensified the oppression. Mazzini,
though he promised that he would not again encourage an
insurrectionary movement, unless it started inside the country and
independently of the exiles, argued that insurrection was the only
means to rouse the masses. It mattered little if the first risings
failed; they would keep alive the spirit, that one day would lead to
victory. His hopes of the early triumph of the revolution grew slowly
fainter; he began to see that time, perhaps a generation, was needed
to quicken the inertia, that ages of despotism had instilled. But
every effort brought them nearer to the goal; every slackening made it
more remote. He would not believe that sacrifice and struggle could go
unrewarded, or quiet waiting spring from ought but cowardice. He
still, though fitfully--for want of money and the need of secrecy and
his own deepening gloom hampered him at every turn--went on with his
preparations. The sixth number of _Young Italy_ appeared in July 1834;
this was its last issue, but he persevered in the thankless work of
organisation, carrying on a voluminous correspondence, raking in
sympathisers from every quarter, sending agents to Italy, who brought
back the same monotonous tale of discouragement and unreadiness.
He found time meanwhile to interest himself in Swiss politics, and
tried to organise a party to do for Switzerland, what Young Italy had
been doing for his own country. Many of the Swiss naturally resented
the intrusion of a stranger. Mazzini brushed away the objection,
though he would perhaps have been the first to criticise a foreigner,
who had preached to the Italians, as he preached to the Swiss.
Switzerland, he urged, played so important a part in the European
polity, that no one could be indifferent to its destiny. At this time,
certainly, Swiss politics offered abundant scope for a reformer. The
Federal Pact of 1815 had undone Napoleon's comparatively liberal
constitution. The cantons were connected by the loosest of ties; many
of them were governed by small oligarchies; class privileges depressed
the artisans and peasants. The return of the Jesuits stirred a bitter
religious struggle, which from time to time threatened to blaze into
civil war. A vigorous reform movement had indeed recently swept away
the worst abuses inside some of the cantons; but, nothing had been
done to strengthen the bonds between them, and the narrow cantonal
life threatened to smother the country in a "mud-death." It was
impossible for Switzerland to assert her independence or maintain her
traditions, when she had no central authority worthy of the name. To
Mazzini it meant too the absence of any real national life, the
adhesion to a policy of neutrality, which prevented the one republican
state of Europe from throwing its weight into the European balance.
Mazzini's ideal for Switzerland was to include it with the Tyrol and
Savoy in a federation of republics, and substitute for the settlement
of 1815 a true federal authority, representing and responsible to the
whole people and not to the separate cantons. He founded a "Young
Switzerland" society, and published a paper, _La Jeune Suisse_, which
appeared twice a week in French and German, till after a year's
existence (the usual life of Mazzini's journalistic ventures) the Diet
suppressed it and decreed Mazzini's perpetual banishment. In some of
its articles Mazzini appears at his best,--more tolerant, less
dogmatic and theoretical. The movement does not seem to have found any
great measure of success, though it attracted a certain number of the
finer spirits among the younger men and Protestant clergy. But,
whatever may have been the immediate fruits of Mazzini's work, at all
events his ideas triumphed. The Swiss constitution of 1848 embodied
their essentials, and it is worth noting that Druey, one of its two
draughtsmen, was his personal friend.
Italy and Switzerland together were not enough to occupy his energies.
Two months after the collapse of the Savoy raid, seventeen of the
exiles, Italians, Germans, Poles, signed a "pact of Young Europe,"
which was intended to be an alliance on Mazzinian principles of the
republicans of the three countries. When one remembers that its vast
scheme of transformation was the work of a few young exiles, it reads
like pure rhodomontade. Mazzini himself recognised afterwards that the
plan was too embracing to lead to practical results. But at the time
he seems to have expected a good deal from it. It was to be a kind of
"college of intellects," which would watch and give information on
the popular and nationalist movements of the Continent, and at the
same time be an organised propagandism with its machinery of agents
"and countless other means." One thing in particular he hoped from it,
that it would assist towards "the emancipation from France," and
encourage another country, Italy of course by preference, to initiate
the new age of religion and the republic. As a matter of fact, nothing
seems to have been done beyond the despatch of a few agents to France
and Spain, and an attempt to organise meetings in England. But it
loomed large in the public eye, and did something to teach democracy
that its interests are international.
Meanwhile, in addition to his political correspondence and journalism,
he found time for literary writing. It was partly in the vain hope of
earning a little money for himself and his political work. "I think
over schemes day and night, as every man in want does." It was partly
too to encourage "a religious and poetic sentiment" in Italy, and
combat the dominant scepticism and materialism. For literary fame he
cared nothing. Friends, who wished him to retire from political work,
advised him to "honour Italy with his pen." "Excuse me," he answered,
"but this has no meaning for me. I don't know what or where Italy is.
We must try to regenerate and create her, and honour her afterwards."
His articles on _Byron and Goethe_ and _The Philosophy of Music_ date
from this period. He collected materials for the edition of Foscolo's
works, which was so near his heart now as at a later time. He wished
to edit a collection of translated dramas, and wrote introductions to
Werner's _Der vierundzwanzigste Februar_ and De Vigny's _Chatterton_.
"No other critic," says a recent Italian writer, "has written at such
length or so profoundly on Werner as did Mazzini." The essay was
published later at Brussels with Agostino Ruffini's translation,--the
only instalment of the projected series. He planned a _Foreign
Review_, to be published at Genoa, but an indiscreet friend betrayed
his editorship, and the censorship promptly withdrew its sanction.
Another scheme for a _Review of European Literature_, to be issued in
the freer air of Lugano, broke down, apparently for want of funds.
Another venture, which had a brief life, was the _Italiano_, a
literary and scientific magazine, which appeared at Paris for a few
months in 1836, to which he and Tommaseo and some of the best Italian
writers of the day contributed, and where Guerrazzi published the
first chapters of his _Siege of Florence_. Mazzini, who drafted the
prospectus, seems to have been especially anxious to include novels
and poetry. "It must be remembered," he writes, "that fancy and the
affections make up at least four-fifths of man. Poetry is not the gift
and privilege of a few, the masses are full of a living and speaking
poetry." He urged too that women's questions should have adequate
attention.
* * * * *
It is to this period chiefly that belong the only love-episodes of
Mazzini's life. He had a lofty conception of womanhood. "Love and
respect woman," he once wrote. "Look to her not only for comfort, but
for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and
moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you
have none. There is no inequality between man and woman; but as often
is the case between two men, only different tendencies and special
vocations. Woman and man are the two notes, without which the human
chord cannot be struck." "Marriage," he wrote to a young wife many
years afterwards, "is sacred, because it is one of the most potent
means of accomplishing life's mission. It gives the almost superhuman
strength that comes of love, the supreme comfort that makes sacrifice
a joy, the dew that tempers the scorching heat upon the flower." But
"now, as a rule," he says, "we do not love. Love, the most holy thing
that God has given to man, has become a febrile need, a brutish
instinct; the family is perverted into a denial of all vocation and
social duty; male and female have cancelled man and woman." He himself
was a man, not likely to be easily in love. His work absorbed his
vital force, and he had no pity for men who forgot public work in
domestic happiness. And though his unsoiled purity and gentleness,
together with the sympathy that allowed him to understand women as few
men can do, won him the devotion and affection of many women,
especially Englishwomen, the sentiment, on his side at least, was,
save in two cases, one of "intense friendship" only.
He had two or three boyish passions, one for an English girl who lived
near his home at Genoa, another for a Genoese, Adele Zoagli, who
afterwards became the mother of the patriot-poet Mameli. When he went
into exile, the only women who had a place in his heart were his own
mother and Madame Ruffini. His affection for his mother was very
serious and deep, more masculine and less sentimental than in the
common course of Italian filial love. Perhaps after his boyhood she
did not influence him in details, and intellectually there was some
lack of sympathy between them. But her strong pride in him, that made
her "thank God day and night for having given her that son," her faith
in his political, though not in his religious beliefs, the love that
watched year after year over the son she saw not, the courage that
made her bear long years of parting rather than ask him to deny his
call, made the most lasting human inspiration of his life. In time of
deep trouble a man will turn to his mother and his God, and he looked
to her, as to one whose love would never change, to whom he could pour
out, not indeed his spiritual misery, but all the little material
worries which a man tells only to his mother and his wife, certain
that her sympathy would never fail. His love for Madame Ruffini was of
another kind. She was a very noble woman, with intense and unconcealed
sympathies, wise with the experience of age and motherhood and sorrow;
and Mazzini was not the only one in the circle of friends at Genoa,
who loved her with the reverential affection, that an elderly woman of
saintly life and understanding will call forth from young men. It was
she, whose own deep religious faith had saved him in youth from his
short episode of scepticism. Another woman would have reproached him
with Jacopo's death; to her the common memory of one so dear only fed
the affection, that many memories and the same intense religious,
almost mystical, beliefs had already made so strong. He calls her
"mother, friend, and all that is more sacred," "the purest, whitest,
holiest soul he had ever met on earth." As far as we can tell, it was
from no fault of his that their friendship closed afterwards in
misunderstanding and silence.
His devotion to these two women had a deeper and more lasting
influence on him than any lover's passion. There was, however, at
least one other, whom he loved in another way, one to whom he gave his
troth and whom he would have married, had an exile's life allowed it.
Giuditta Sidoli was the daughter of a noble Lombard family, where she
had been brought up in a school of patriotism. Her brother, Carlo
Bellerio, was a follower of Young Italy, and was banished for his
faith. She had been married, when a mere girl, to Giovanni Sidoli, a
wealthy Reggian, a patriot and an exile too; and he swore her on his
death-bed to be true to the cause to which he had given his life. She
was one year older than Mazzini, a quiet-moving, gracious woman,
almost beautiful, with a gentle, blonde Venetian face, warm, golden
hair, and dark, thoughtful eyes; sober and unemotional in her manner,
but with deep springs of enthusiasm and devotion. Mazzini first met
her, a five years' widow, at Marseilles and afterwards in Switzerland;
their liking and common interests soon deepened into love, and he was
engaged to her before he left France. A few months before the Savoy
Expedition, her yearning for her children, who were left at Reggio,
drove her to Florence in the hope that with or without the
Government's consent she might see them. Thanks to the Tuscan police,
who opened and copied Mazzini's letters to her, we have some fragments
of their correspondence. "There are words in your letter," he writes,
"which make me still thrill with joy. In these last days I have
learnt the strength of my love. I have covered your lock with kisses.
Oh, that I could sleep for once with my head resting on your knees."
To a common friend he writes, probably a little later, "I love her
more than she thinks, much more than she loves me. I dream of her day
and night, and it becomes more and more a fixed idea with me; and yet
I know with absolute certainty I shall never live with her, not even
if Italy were free."
Up to a point they doubtless loved; but, especially when one remembers
Mazzini's emotional epistolary style of this time, one is tempted to
question whether their love had very much passion in it. It was the
tender, strong affection of two absolutely good and kindred souls, and
with neighbourhood it might have ripened into more. But long
separation cooled it, and neither was inconsolable. To Giuditta
probably at bottom her children were dearer than her lover, and
Mazzini felt this. She seems to have made no effort to join him
afterwards in England; she went to Parma to be near her children and
importune the ducal brute, who forbade her access to them, at last
going to Reggio in his despite and apparently seeing them for a
moment. Mazzini for his part was wrapped up in his work and the
struggle with exacting poverty. In England he hardly corresponds with
her, partly because his letters might have brought fresh persecution
on her, but partly, one is forced to conclude, because there was no
lover's ardour to find out a way. But he still considered himself as
in honour bound to her, and in a sense no doubt he loved her still. He
writes in the summer of 1838, "Giuditta loves me, I love her, and have
promised to love her," but he speaks as if he feared a rupture rather
for its effects on her than on himself. Two years later he writes as
if his love were dead. But, if love was dead, friendship, and a very
strong and true one, remained to the end. It is probable that they
never ceased entirely to correspond. In the fifties, when she was
living in the Valle dei Salici, near Turin, a grey-haired woman, with
all the gracious gentleness and culture of her earlier days, Mazzini
would come to see her in his secret visits to Piedmont, and she was
still the tolerant but ardent believer in his policy. When she was on
her death-bed, a year before he died himself, he wrote "as an old
friend" to "one of the best spirits he had ever met."
In a sense Giuditta had a rival. During his Swiss wanderings, the
daughter of de Mandrot, a friendly _avocat_ at Lausanne, whom he had
met casually,[8] became strongly attracted to him. And what was at
first a woman's pity and a disciple's adoration, changed to passionate
love. She was a girl of some sixteen years, of rich, emotional nature
and spiritual yearnings, that echoed to his own. When he went to
London, and she saw no more of him and heard of his uncared-for
loneliness, her hopeless love and pity worked on her, till she pined
into melancholy and illness, and her friends begged him to return and
save her by his presence. What response he made to her love, it is not
easy to say. If one may judge from the meagre references in his
letters, he felt at first no more than affectionate gratitude for the
rich gift he could not take. But later, as he learnt more of her
constancy and unhappiness, and his love for Giuditta wore away, and he
ached for a woman's loving hand, his affection ripened into something
that was probably nearer passionate love than anything he felt before
or after. Not that his permanent, reasoning self was disloyal to
Giuditta. "Am I free?" he writes to a friend, who would gladly have
seen him and the girl united; "before society and men, who recognise
only actual bonds, I am; but before my own heart and God, who watches
over promises, I am not." Sometimes indeed he balanced the results to
the two women, and was tempted for the moment to think that "the
imperious duty" of saving the one from death or life-long misery might
justify the breaking of his promise to Giuditta. But he knew that it
would be a cruel blow to the woman to whom he had pledged himself; he
felt he would gladly escape from an attachment, which stained his
loyalty to her; and his common sense told him that his gloomy
companionship and the privations of an exile's life would never make a
young girl permanently happy. And so he never seriously faltered in
crushing down the rising love within him or trying to crush it out in
her. He steadily declines to admit more than a brother-and-sisterly
relationship; he prays she may forget him and begs his friends to do
their best to kill her love by painting him in his defects; he refuses
to correspond with her, and though at last at the earnest prayer of
her friends he promises to come, if he can find the money, it was only
to save her from the pining that was bringing her to her grave. But
though he put her aside as a beautiful and impossible dream, he could
not stop the yearning. "Do you think," he writes, "that I easily give
up having near me one like her, a creature of God, young, pure,
religious, enthusiastic, into whose heart I could pour all the world
of feelings and dreams and beliefs and love that is in me?" He finds
his comfort in the thought that theirs is "a mystical, spiritual
union," that she will meet and make him happy in another world. In
this world he never saw her again, and it seems that her passion soon
fretted her frail life away. Love of wife and love of family were not
for him, and bitterly he felt it. "He, who through fatality of
circumstances," he wrote long after, "cannot live the serene life of
family, has a void in his heart, that nothing fills; and I who write
these pages, well I know it."
FOOTNOTE:
[8] Her niece, Mademoiselle Dora Melegari, tells me that her aunt's
real name was not Madeleine, as given in the _Lettres Intimes_; what
it was, Mademoiselle Melegari does not at present feel justified in
disclosing.
Chapter V
London
1837-1843. AETAT 31-38
Life in London--Spiritual condition--English friends--The
Carlyles--Lamennais and George Sand--Literary work--Decay of
Young Italy--The Italian School at Hatton Garden--Appeal to
working men.
Early in 1837 Mazzini and the Ruffinis came to London. The determining
cause was the inability of the latter to bear the privations of a life
of hiding. They travelled by slow diligence stages through France, the
French government, which was only glad to get them out of Switzerland,
giving them every facility for the journey. In London at all events
they were free men, able to live under their own names and move where
they liked, untroubled by the police. But the change from the snows
and sunsets and silences of Switzerland to the squalor and noise of a
back street in London added to Mazzini's desolation. In this "sunless
and musicless island," with the dreary stretches of houses and the
wearing din, he pined for the peace of the Alps, where nature had
brought him an occasional respite from his heart-ache. "We have lost,"
he writes, "even the sky, which the veriest wretch on the Continent
can look at"; and in time the desolate walls across the street worried
him, till he would not go to the window. The one thing in London that
appealed to him was the fog. "When you look up, the eye loses itself
in a reddish, bell-shaped vault, which always gives me, I don't know
why, an idea of the phosphorescent light of the Inferno.[9] The whole
city seems under a kind of spell, and reminds me of the Witches' Scene
in Macbeth or the Brocksberg or the Witch of Endor. The passers-by
look like ghosts,--one feels almost a ghost oneself." The
half-glimpses of the buildings, harmonising with their sombre
colouring, gave him a sense of mystery and indefiniteness, that
redeemed London of "the positive and finite" of a Southern town, and
responded to his growing faith in the poetic and unseen.
For a few weeks he lived at 24 Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road,
with the Ruffinis and two other exiles, who had helped him in the
Marseilles days. In March the quintet moved to 9 George Street, near
the Euston Road, where they suffered many things from the
maid-of-all-work, who no doubt did much as she liked with the five
inexperienced males, only two of whom could speak English at all well.
Here they lived for three years, on the whole a very miserable
household. Mazzini himself was "an angel of kindness and good-temper
and enthusiasm," ever ready to sacrifice himself to others' whims and
comforts. But the unhappy mystic was no cheerful companion, he was
unpractical and dogmatic, probably sometimes peevish, half-lost in the
empyrean of his ideals, beyond the ken or sympathy of the others.
Agostino Ruffini's petty selfishness and ungovernable tongue were the
source of frequent scenes, which one day brought Mazzini to tears,
"tears which nothing else could have drawn from him," as he writes
plaintively to Agostino's mother. At bottom young Ruffini recognized
Mazzini's worth and devotedness, and swore himself on paper to keep
his temper, with other salutary resolutions, to be read over three
times a week; but he was quite incapable of reaching to Mazzini's
mind, and he longed to enjoy himself in a freer life, where the gospel
of duty was never heard. Giovanni was more equable, and knew Mazzini
better, but he too had small belief in the gospel, and there was
little except old associations and the common love of his mother to
bind him to his transcendental friend. The general irresponsiveness at
home bitterly hurt and saddened Mazzini. "I love no one and want to
love no one," he writes of his English surroundings; and in his
letters to his friends in Italy and Switzerland, he returns again and
again to the lack of sympathy around him, as the heaviest trial of
those unhappy days.
There was nothing to distract him from the sordidness of the bickering
household in George Street. He seldom went out of doors, except to the
British Museum. He had no money to buy books and complains that nobody
would lend them. He saw few besides a few exiles, as poor and perhaps
as unhappy as himself. He was "lost in a vast crowd of strangers, in a
country where want, especially in a foreigner, is a reason for a
distrust, which is often unjust and sometimes cruel." In common with
his companions, he was miserably poor, often living on potatoes or
rice. His father advanced him money to speculate in olive oil;
naturally he lost it, and after an angry letter from the hard old man,
refused for several years to accept help from home. He tried to find
employment as a proof-reader, but in vain. He had an offer of work at
Edinburgh, but the Ruffinis would not leave London, and he felt
himself tied to them. Literary work came in very slowly, and for a
year or two his articles in the English reviews brought in little
profit, when the translator had been paid. The income of the rest of
the household was not much larger, and the bad house-keepers found
that in England "francs were little better than sous." Mazzini, as
ever, could not shut his purse to the needy exiles, who importuned him
and, as Agostino grumbled, "in the name of this chimera of human
brotherhood thought they had a right to make themselves at home in his
house." His few possessions soon found their way to the pawn-shop. He
pledged his mother's ring, his watch and books and maps; his cloak
went to buy cigars, "the one thing I don't think I can do without." On
one black Saturday he pawned a pair of boots and an old waistcoat to
find food for the Sunday. One winter he risked his health by giving
away his only overcoat. His mother, finding that good clothes got sold
at once to buy suits for his friends, thought it better to send
several suits of cheaper garments, so that he could keep one at least
for himself. Sometimes his wardrobe was so depleted, that he had to
stay at home, and could not go to the British Museum to carry on his
literary work. His generosity was well-known to his better-off
friends, and it is not surprising that their patience in lending him
money was exhausted. He tried a few years later to negotiate a loan on
the security of yet unwritten manuscripts; but the ingenuous scheme
met with no better success. Once some friends at Paris lent him £120;
another by a ruse persuaded him to accept what was practically a
gift;[10] but when towards the end of his first residence in England a
proposal was made at Turin to raise a subscription for him, he
obstinately declined it, partly because, if it reached his mother's
ears, she "would have died of shame." There were thus only two roads
open to him, suicide or the money-lenders. The thought of suicide came
to him again and again, but he put it away as a coward's act and for
his mother's sake. So more and more he fell into the money-lenders'
hands, borrowing at thirty or forty or sometimes nearly one hundred
per cent. from loan societies, that "rob the poor man of his last drop
of blood and sometimes his last rags of self-respect." Year after year
he plunged desperately in the morass, and though £320 seems to have
been the limit of his indebtedness, it was a crushing sum for one so
utterly destitute. It was the common lot of the exiles, and some of
them fared worse. In the midst of wealthy London, with men of means
all round them, who shared their political views and made speeches for
their cause, Karl Stolzmann, the Polish leader, one of Mazzini's
nearest friends, went sometimes literally without food, and Stanislaus
Worcell, born a rich Polish noble, was saved from a pauper's burial by
an English acquaintance.
Apart, however, from money troubles, Mazzini's external life gradually
brightened. In 1840, after a short stay at 26 Clarendon Square, not
far from their George Street house, where happily Agostino left them
for work in Edinburgh, he and Giovanni moved to 4 York Buildings,
which then stood in the angle between King's Road, Chelsea, and Riley
Street. He came there to be near the Carlyles, and escape from London
gloom and noise and importunate visitors. An Italian artisan, an exile
from Perugia, kept house with his English wife, who proved an
excellent housekeeper and saved them from servant-girl worries. In
those days there was a hay-field on one side of the house and
market-gardens on another, some trees in view "of a very sombre green,
but still trees," and not far off the Thames, "equally sombre with its
muddy dirty-yellow water, but beautiful at night, when its colour is
lost in the dark, and the water shines silver in the moonlight, and
the barges go down, black, silent, mysterious as ghosts." After a year
Giovanni left him after a violent quarrel, and went to Paris. They
were never really reconciled again, and Giovanni repaid his friend's
devotion with a coldness and contempt almost as unworthy as his
brother's, though he did something to atone for it by the sympathetic
picture of his old comrade as the Fantasio of his _Lorenzo Benoni_.
Uncomfortable as his relations with them had been, Mazzini felt the
loss of the Ruffinis. With them or without them, the early years of
his English life were, if anything, more utterly forlorn and miserable
than his worst days in Switzerland. His intellect, indeed, was safe
now, though there are indications still of a mental weariness and
strain, that bordered on hallucination. There was no longer any fear
of a spiritual collapse, like that which had threatened a year or two
ago to wreck his moral faith. But he was more wedded to his misery,
more desolate, alone in "the solitude of a damned soul." "A man cannot
live alone," he writes, "and I have nobody who cares to know what I am
thinking of and what I want." His heart sank, when he came home from
the British Museum to his bare, dark room, where there was no friend
or woman to welcome him, and Agostino's querulous temper to add to the
loneliness of it all. More and more the want of response around him
made him seal up his thoughts and aspirations. His friends'
ingratitude, the desertion of his followers added to the "terrors" of
his spiritual solitude. It seemed to him "an age of moral dissolution
and unbelief, an age like that in which Christ died." The sense of
failure still lay heavy on him, a brooding, unhealthy feeling that his
work had been in vain, that it was his doom to bring ill-fortune to
his friends, that he had sacrificed himself and made no one happier by
it. He felt like "one irrevocably condemned, though without fault."
"Pray for me," he writes to one of his best friends, "that, before I
die, I may be good for something."
Two things saved him from despair, perhaps from suicide. In the crisis
in Switzerland he had put away, once for all, any thought of personal
happiness. Sometimes still the natural man rebelled. "Do you think,"
he writes of Madeleine, "that in my hours of desolation I would not,
if I could, seek a breast on which to lay my brow, a loving hand to
place upon my head." But he knew that to look for happiness led
imperceptibly but certainly to selfishness, that "sacrifice was the
one real virtue," that duty "to God, and humanity, and country, and
all men" was the only law of life for the true man. And what he had
worked out once in cold philosophy, now mellowed into religion,
mystical sometimes, but beautiful and saving. Jacopo Ruffini and his
own dead sister were praying for him, watching over him, inspiring him
with strength and love. Life was an expiation, to purify the soul for
another stage, where friends would meet again, and misunderstandings
pass, and love reign over all. And even in this world, though sorrow
might be the portion of the individual man, Humanity, the great
collective being, would go ever forward to new knowledge, and new
hopes, and nobler rules of life.
Perhaps, even more than by his faith, he was saved by his intense
affections. True that they centred on ever fewer persons. He had
hardly a real friend left among his old political associates. For the
men and women, whom he was coming to know in England, he felt as yet
gratitude but little more. His love for Giuditta Sidoli was fading
into a sincere but unpassionate esteem. Madeleine was an impossible
dream, that he resolutely shook away. But the dear ones of his
boyhood,--Madame Ruffini, his mother, his unmarried sister, even his
dour father,--were loved with an affection that was pitifully, almost
morbidly sad, but ever more intense. It was the only sunshine in his
clouded life. "I feel God's power and law more every day," he wrote to
Madame Ruffini, "but He cannot weep with me or fill my soul's void
for I am a man still and tied to earth. I worship Him more than I love
Him, but you I love." And he pours out, in words that read extravagant
but came in truth from his inmost being, all that reverential love,
which he felt for her, who had been more than mother, but whose
affection for her devotee was cooling all too quickly. Agostino did
his best to damage his friend in her eyes; there seems to have been
friction between her and Madame Mazzini; and no doubt she sided with
her own sons, when the estrangement with them came. At the beginning
of 1841 Mazzini's correspondence with her appears to have abruptly
ceased.
To his parents he turned yearningly in a new sorrow, that was bowing
them down. His one surviving unmarried sister died. She had been his
favourite, the one of the family who had sympathized most with his
political schemes, and encouraged him in his work, and pleaded for him
with his father. Her death obsessed him with an unhealthy depression;
but he felt most for his parents, left in the solitude of old age,
bereft of the one who had been a needed link between them, for the
father had grown morose, and there was evidently some want of harmony
between the old people. Then the father himself fell very ill and
recovered with difficulty. His son brooded over the thought that he
had not been enough to his parents while he was with them, that the
life he had chosen for himself had been the cause of all their
trouble. Plans for their comfort worked in his mind "like a
never-resting wheel." He would have risked the death-sentence that
still hung over him, and gone to live with them in hiding, but he knew
that the dread of discovery would only have added to their cares. It
seems indeed that in 1844 he paid a visit to them in disguise.[11]
* * * * *
The gloom lifted somewhat, as he began to make friends in England. He
was not yet, it is true, in sympathy with English life. He found
little liking here for his transcendentalisms, his big indeterminate
generalizations; and English love of facts and suspicion of theories
seemed to him "materialism incarnate, pure critical analysis," fatal
to spiritual or philosophic thought. "Here," he writes, "everybody is
a sectarian or a materialist"; and now, as always, he never understood
or valued Protestantism. He had a poor opinion of English statesmen,
especially of the Whigs, who irritated him by the folly of their
attempts to put down Chartism. Nor did he think much better of the
Chartist leaders, who were "Englishmen, which means materialists,
utilitarians, Benthamists _par excellence_, with no principle except
that of the greatest possible happiness." The severance between the
middle and working classes portended, he thought, an imminent and
terrible revolution. But he came by degrees to recognize the better
side of English life. He admired its tolerance, its insistency and
tenacity, the "unity of thought and action, which never rests till it
has carried each new social idea into practice, and when it has taken
a step, never retraces it." He watched the Chartist movement
sympathetically, and contrasted its great following with the scanty
disciples of the French socialists. Though he cared little for its
doctrines, he saw in it something that rose above "the narrow egotism,
which characterizes English politics," and he especially approved,
when the Chartists put aside national prejudices and sent their good
wishes to the Canadian rebels.
Gradually he came to feel more at home in England. "There," he says,
"friendships develop slowly and with difficulty, but nowhere are they
so sincere and lasting." "Never," he wrote in after days, "shall I
forget, never without a throb of gratitude shall I mention the land,
which became a kind of second country to me, where I found friendships
that brought an enduring balm to my weary and unhappy life." After a
year or two his circle widened almost too rapidly, for clothes and bus
fares and the drain upon his time made society an expensive matter to
him. One of the first English persons who took an interest in him, was
Mrs Archibald Fletcher of Edinburgh. A few months after he came to
England, she met him, "a young, slim, dark man of very prepossessing
appearance," who could not speak English and wanted admission to a
public library. So profoundly unhappy he seemed, that the kind old
lady feared suicide and wrote to gently warn him. Mazzini replied that
no one but "a man, who wished only to enjoy and has made that his
chief thought, will destroy his life as a child does its play-thing."
His first close English friendship was with the Carlyles. "They love
me as a brother," he wrote in 1840, "and would like to do me more good
than it is in their power to do." For Carlyle he had for several years
a very sincere liking. "He is good, good, good; and still, I think, in
spite of his great reputation, unhappy." He respected Carlyle's
sincerity, his freedom from insular narrowness, his outspokenness. "He
may preach the merit of 'holding one's tongue';--to those, in truth,
who do not agree with him, are such words addressed,--but 'the talent
of silence' is not his." He welcomed him as one "who served the same
God" as himself, "though with a different worship"; his ally in the
attack on utilitarianism, in the exaltation of the spiritual. "His
motive is the love of his fellow-men, a deep and active feeling of
duty, for he believes this to be the mission of man on earth." Their
common love of Dante, no doubt, too, helped to draw them together. But
in his criticisms of his books he condemned, however gently and
respectfully, his individualism, his hero-worship, his depreciation of
the great common march of the race, his ineffectiveness and timidity,
when he came to practical political applications. And the antagonism
grew on him, till in time they seemed to be "diametrically opposed."
"Why," he said long afterwards to a girl, who had been reading and
admiring Carlyle, "you are fast drifting down the road to materialism.
You are lost. Carlyle worships force, I combat it with all my might.
Carlyle is the sceptic of sceptics. He is grand, when he pulls down,
but incapable of reconstructing something [anything] fresh. If instead
of loving and admiring nations and humanity, you only love, admire,
and reverence individuals, you must end by being an advocate of
despots." Carlyle on his side had little sympathy with Mazzini's
opinions, which to him were "incredible and (at once tragically and
comically) impossible in this world." He was impatient with his
"Republicanisms, his 'Progress' and other Rousseau fanaticisms."[12]
He valued him none the less for "a most valiant, faithful,
considerably gifted and noble soul." Once the Piedmontese minister
spoke lightly of Mazzini in his presence. "Sir, you do not know
Mazzini at all, not at all, not at all," Carlyle angrily replied and
left the house. At the time of the Bandiera episode, though they had
recently been quarrelling, he wrote to the _Times_, "Whatever I may
think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, I can
with great freedom testify to all men, that he, if I have ever seen
such, is a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity,
humanity, and nobleness of mind, one of those rare men, numerable
unfortunately but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called
martyr souls; who in silence, piously in their daily life, understand
and practise what is meant by that." Mazzini, mindful of their late
coolness, was much touched by the defence. "That I call noble," he
said of it to a friend.
For Mrs Carlyle Mazzini had a warmer feeling; and she reciprocated it
not only with an intense personal confidence, but for a time at all
events by sharing his political beliefs. Gradually she came more to
her husband's view of these; and Mazzini and she had "warm
dialogues," when he unfolded some wild design of throwing away his
life in Italy. "Are there not things more important than my head?" he
asked her. "Certainly," she replied, "but the man, who has not sense
enough to keep his head on his shoulders till something is to be
gained by parting from it, has not sense enough to manage any
important matter." But "to the last," says Carlyle, "she had always an
affection for him"; in 1846 she came to him for advice on her troubled
married life, and he appeals to her to "send her ghosts and phantoms
back to nothingness" and make it bearable by communion with her dead
parents and work and love. "Get up and work. When the Evil One wanted
to tempt Jesus, he led Him into a solitude."
Mazzini was a frequent caller at their house; coming in all weathers,
"his doe-skin boots oozing out water in a manner frightful to behold"
upon her carpets. Sometimes he would come with any story that he could
think of to amuse her; sometimes he would discuss Dante with John
Carlyle, who was then writing his translation of the _Divina
Commedia_, till Carlyle grew weary of the talk and reminded both that
the last bus was starting. Margaret Fuller has left a description of
an evening spent with the trio; how Mazzini turned the conversation
"to progress and ideal subjects, and Carlyle was fluent in invectives
on all our 'rose-water imbecilities,'" how his flippancy saddened
Mazzini, and Mrs Carlyle said to Margaret, "these are but opinions to
Carlyle, but to Mazzini, who has given his all and helped bring his
friends to the scaffold in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of
life and death." On another occasion Carlyle, after monopolizing the
talk while he passed in long review the silent great ones of earth,
turned to Mazzini, saying, "You have not succeeded yet, because you
have talked too much." The contests between them became more frequent
and painful. They would argue, so the tradition has been handed down,
the one courteous, deeply moved, pleading with his whole heart,
eloquent in his rather broken English; the other exaggerative,
splenetic, scornful in the wild flow of his language. All the time
Mazzini would sit pale and quiet in his chair, sometimes excited
almost to tears, nervously smoking his small cigar; while Carlyle with
his long clay pipe shifted restlessly, as he stormed out his
sentences.[13] None the less Mazzini's intimacy with them went on
unbroken, at all events as far as Mrs Carlyle was concerned, through
all his first stay in England. When he left for Milan in 1848, he told
her with a kiss to be "strong and good until he returned"; and when he
came back aged and worn, she sadly stroked his grey beard. She found
lodgings for him; she went to comfort him, when prostrated by his
mother's death. But the severance between him and her husband
gradually widened, till two or three years later they completely
parted, to respect each other's character and detest each other's
opinions to the end. Once more they met, years afterwards, and "talked
in a cordial and sincere way with real emotion on both sides."
"Mazzini," Carlyle noted at the time, "is the most _pious_ living man
I now know." Even for his politics he had at last some tolerance. "The
idealist has conquered," he confessed, "and transformed his utopia
into a patent and potent reality."
With the Carlyles, however, even in the days of his closest
acquaintanceship, he was never at home as he came to be in other
English households. His best friends in the forties were the Ashursts
of Muswell Hill. They were, he says, "a dear, good, holy family, who
surrounded me with such loving care as sometimes to make me forget I
was an exile." W. H. Ashurst was a solicitor, who had been a friend of
Robert Owen, and who made Mazzini's acquaintance at the time of the
letter-opening episode. To Mrs Ashurst Mazzini, forgetful of Madame
Ruffini's expired title, gave the name of "second mother." One
daughter married James Stansfeld; the other, at this time "the
favourite of his English sisters," afterwards became Madame Venturi,
and has left the best English memoir of him. Both they and their
brother for long years after gave him much quiet help in his work.
Through the Ashursts he came to know the Stansfelds and Peter Taylors,
but his intimate friendship with them belongs rather to the time of
his second residence in England. Among his other friends were William
Shaen, whom the Italian refugees knew as their _angelo salvatore_,
Joseph Toynbee, the father of Arnold Toynbee, Joseph Cowen, afterwards
member for Newcastle, and George Jacob Holyoake. J. S. Mill wrote of
him as "one of the men he most respected." Margaret Fuller, who had
come to England prepossessed against him, lost her prejudices when she
visited his school for organ-boys, and began the friendship which was
to be renewed in the days of the Roman Republic. "She is," he writes
of her to a friend, "one of the rarest of women in her love and
active sympathy with everything that is great, beautiful, and holy."
He had some intercourse with the two, next to himself, most notable
Italian exiles in London at that time, Gabriel Rossetti and Antonio
Panizzi. Mazzini interested Rossetti in his school, and they had
common acquaintances among the exiles; but they never came into close
touch, and Mazzini tried in vain to persuade him to help in his
patriotic work. At a later date political differences completely
sundered them. Panizzi was already Keeper of Printed Books at the
British Museum. He had been a Carbonaro in his Italian days, and he
and Mazzini had common ground in their cult of Dante and Foscolo. He
backed Mazzini warmly in the incident of the letter-opening a few
years later; but they disagreed on Italian politics, and they saw
little of one another, though they seem to have been never entirely
estranged. Among other foreigners that he met were Prince Napoleon
("Plon-Plon"), then busily conspiring against the Orleanists, and
Conneau, afterwards Louis Napoleon's doctor and a general go-between
for the Emperor and the Italian patriots. But he hated anything that
tasted of fashionable society. The mistress of a famous London salon
once persuaded him to come to her house, but when he found that she
wanted him to adorn her society and not from any interest in his
cause, he refused to go again.
He came at this time much under the influence of Lamennais. They began
to correspond soon after the _Words of a Believer_ were published, and
once at least they met. Mazzini saw a kindred soul in this "priest of
the Church Universal," who "preached God, the people, love, and
liberty"; this man "whom I saw but lately," so he writes in 1839, "so
full of sweetness and love, who weeps like a child at a symphony of
Beethoven, who will give his last franc to the poor, who tends flowers
like a woman, and steps out of his path rather than crush an ant." He
recognised how much Lamennais' teaching had in common with his own in
its reaction against the sceptical, destructive school of the
Revolution, in its belief in tradition and humanity, in its appeal to
duty as the principle of life. In some degree, perhaps, Lamennais'
_Words of a Believer_ inspired his own _Duties of Man_. He had his own
plans for him. He saw in him "a Luther of the nineteenth century"; he
hoped, though not very confidently, that he would come frankly forward
as a teacher of the religion of humanity, and he urged him to "do
something better than write books," and become the missionary of the
new faith. Lamennais replied, that though Christ could preach in the
highways, four persons could not meet now in a field to speak of God
and humanity without being taken up by a policeman. Mazzini was
grievously disappointed at the refusal, and he felt that Lamennais
regarded him with some diffidence, as indeed was natural enough. He
"loved him as a friend and revered him as a saint"; but he felt that
Lamennais returned his love "as it were in spite of himself." "This
good Mazzini, one cannot help loving him," Lamennais once said in his
hearing; and the phrase left an unhappy sense in Mazzini's mind.
Lamennais and "George Sand" were in his judgment "the two first living
writers of France" at this time, and he looked to the latter too as
one of his own faith. At the time of his mental crisis in Switzerland
he read her _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ (he always thought it her best
production), and the book was "sweet to him as is the cradle song to a
weeping child." He corresponded with her, and in 1847 visited her in
the Vallée Noire. She impressed him above all, as she did Matthew
Arnold the year before, by her simplicity. "Madame Sand," he wrote
back to England, "is just as we wanted her to be; good, noble, candid,
simple, calmly suffering, even more than can be seen in her books." He
warmly defended her in England; not that he thought that all her books
were to be lightly put into everybody's hand; but "the evil she has
portrayed is not _her_ evil, it is ours," and her realism was informed
by a passionate moral purpose. Genius, he said, can in the long-run do
nothing but good, and it is bound to make itself heard. "You may sound
your alarm against her in your old _Quarterly_, and forbid your youth
to read her: you will find some day, without well knowing how, the
best places in your library usurped by her volumes." He saw in her "an
apostle of religious democracy"; he responded to her sense of the
Divine, her belief that the decay of the old creeds restored
allegiance to the true Godhead, her faith in a future which should be
built on love. He delighted to repeat her words, "there is but one
virtue, the eternal sacrifice of self." And he saw in her, too, the
voice of down-trodden womanhood; "thank God," he says, "she is a
woman," and her books were a revelation of the "inward life of woman,"
a woman's pleading for justice and equality. At this time few writers
appealed to him more; but her later works and her acceptance of the
Empire alienated him, and afterwards he "sadly and unwillingly"
convinced himself that what he had hailed as the sincere and conscious
"utterance of a high priestess," was but the artist's passive echo of
a faith that was not hers.
* * * * *
Slowly, besides making friends, Mazzini began to find work. The
difficulties were great. He was at first too worn-out and unhappy to
care to write. He could not yet write in English, and the expenses of
translation absorbed a large part of the remuneration. It was a
painful effort to trim his pen to the likings of the English public.
"My ideas and style frighten them," he says. "What is old to us is new
to them. One cannot talk to them of mission or humanity or progress or
socialism." One editor refused an article in praise of Byron, "because
Byron was an immoral poet." Kemble, the editor of the _British and
Foreign Review_, politely declined his articles, after some experience
of them, on the ground that the English public were "conceited asses,"
who could only gradually be broken in to listen to generalizations.
Mazzini sometimes promised to do his best, but the effort came
unwillingly, and it was only the pressing need of money and his
resolve to ask no more from home, that made him write in an alien
style on subjects that often had little interest for him. To an English
reader, however, the discipline appears a salutary one; and his
English articles have a precision of thought that his earlier writings
lacked. His literary out-put was considerable. Some of his articles
were more or less pot-boiling; thus he wrote on Fra Paolo Sarpi in the
_Westminster Review_, on Victor Hugo and Lamartine--brilliant and
suggestive essays--in the _British and Foreign Review_, on
contemporary French literature in the _Monthly Chronicle_. He put more
heart into those on English subjects,--his masterly criticisms of
Carlyle in the _British and Foreign Review_ and the _Monthly
Chronicle_, and his papers on Chartism in _Tait's Edinburgh Journal_.
But what he cared for most was to bring Italy or his own religious
faith before English readers. He wrote for the love of it, when he
discoursed on Dante's Minor Works in the _Foreign Quarterly_ and on
Lamennais in the _Monthly Chronicle_, or when he wrote on Italian
politics for the same magazine, and on recent Italian literature, and
probably on Italian art, for the _Westminster Review_. In the
_People's Journal_ under John Saunders' editorship he began the
_Thoughts on Democracy in Europe_, which were afterwards expanded into
_I sistemi e la democrazia_,--a very able criticism of the utilitarian
and earlier socialist schools; in his own _Apostolato Popolare_ he
wrote the first six chapters of the noblest of all his writings, _The
Duties of Man_. He seems to have written a novel, which never saw the
light.
He found one literary task very near his heart. From the days of his
early studies at Genoa, he had had a supreme admiration for Ugo
Foscolo, as the one modern Italian writer, besides Alfieri, who had a
virile political teaching for his countrymen. While in Switzerland, he
had planned to write his life, and made researches for his manuscripts
and rare and scattered publications. His interest strengthened, now
that he was living close to where Foscolo's bones lay in Chiswick
churchyard. He knew that Pickering, one of Foscolo's English
publishers, possessed the manuscript of his unfinished notes on the
_Divina Commedia_, already published, but with many inaccuracies, in
1825; and in a dusty corner of Pickering's shop he found the proof of
part of Foscolo's _Lettera apologetica_, a kind of political
testament, which apparently had not been published. Mazzini undertook
the task of getting both re-published with more zeal than candour.
Pickering would not sell the _Lettera_ apart from the Dante
manuscript, and asked £420 for the two. Mazzini "cursed his bookseller
soul, and would have stolen them without scruple, if he could." A
Tuscan lady, Foscolo's _donna gentile_, lent the money for the proofs;
and Rolandi, the Italian publisher in Berners Street, was disposed to
buy the Dante notes. Mazzini found that the notes were very
incomplete, and feared that Rolandi would not buy, if aware of the
deficiencies. He concealed the fact, and with immense labour completed
the notes and the revision of the text. Rolandi, who, it seems, did
not discover the pious fraud, bought the manuscript, and in 1842
published the edition in four volumes with an anonymous introduction
by Mazzini, who took no pay for his known and unknown labours. The
edition had its value at the time, though its interest now is
historical only. Meanwhile he discovered the remaining manuscript of
the _Lettera apologetica_ in an old trunkful of Foscolo's papers; and
thanks mainly to his friend, Enrico Mayer, the educationalist, this
and others of Foscolo's political writings were published at Lugano in
1844. Mazzini gave much assistance to Le Monnier, the Florentine
publisher, in the complete edition of Foscolo, which he brought out a
few years later. But the life remained undone. For years with the true
student's fever he hunted up every letter and record of Foscolo, to
which he could find a clue. But as time went on, politics and social
work commanded him again, and the biography, on which so many cares
had been spent, was never written.
* * * * *
Gradually he returned to political work. At first the moral
prostration produced intense lassitude; and he found it as difficult
to settle down to politics as to literature. There were moments indeed
of nervous reaction, when his brain teemed with "daring projects,
titanic presentiments, limitless conceptions." But generally the
struggle with depression used up his strength, and he felt too weary
and discouraged to revive Young Italy. He seems, a few months before
he left Switzerland, to have taken some sort of formal step to
abdicate leadership. But where no actual organization survived, and
there was no one to step into his place, the retirement meant nothing.
Young Italy was so completely himself, that the society was
non-existent, till he took up the reins again. There had been
something of a stampede among its members. In Italy many had made
their peace with the governments; others were nourishing their faith
in silence; few carried on the work, at least in the old spirit.
Conspiracy, it is true, was not quite dead; but the few secret
societies, that still lived on, mostly harked back to Carbonaro
traditions, or turned to an agrarian and free-thinking agitation,
which was as hateful to Mazzini as apostacy itself. It was no better
among the exiles. "There are not two of us," he complained, "who
think the same on any single subject." "You cannot find one Young
Italian among us." Many took advantage of the Lombard and Piedmontese
amnesties to return home. Gioberti was attacking the society. Even
those nearest to Mazzini had little faith in its methods or hopes, and
Mazzini would compromise on no tittle of his creed to win them. In his
high singleness of purpose he could not understand or tolerate the
faintness of men, who had sworn to fight for an idea, but deserted at
the first defeat. If his countrymen had not responded, that was only
an argument for renewed and yet more strenuous effort. It was all so
pitiful to him,--this want of faithfulness unto death. "When I write
in favour of Italy," he says, "I feel myself blush, as if I were
lying." For a time, though, he himself felt powerless to act. He was
tempted to go to Italy, and throw away his life in some desperate act
of protest. But he had too fine a nature to be long content with
inaction or despair. "If you only knew," he writes early in 1839, "how
this absolute uselessness of existence weighs on me." He dreaded dying
with his work undone. Jacopo Ruffini's memory was ever present with
him, and he felt that he was dedicated to the cause for which his
protomartyr had died. He had taken on himself a task "in the face of
God and Italy and himself"; he thought of himself as blasphemer and
hypocrite, if he slackened in it; and though he knew that his
enthusiasm had gone, sometimes too his confidence in Italy and
himself, yet duty still remained, and he could trust in God and the
righteousness of his cause. "I know," he wrote, "that Jacopo is not
dead, that he and we are forerunners, not of a new policy, but of a
new faith, which we perhaps shall see not, but whose advent no human
force can stop."
It was not however till the summer or autumn of 1839,[14] that he
decided to return to active political work "with an almost fierce
resolve." At first he had no definite plan, except to accentuate the
popular side of his programme and appeal more than he had yet done to
the working classes. He had at present little means of reaching those
at home, but he could do something among the Italian population in
London, the shopkeepers and organ-grinders and hawkers of terra-cotta
casts. Hitherto he had been little in contact with his working-class
compatriots; now in the whirl of a foreign city he came to know them.
It began with his intense feeling for suffering, that for the
remainder of his life made him happiest when relieving individual
cases of misery. About this time, going out one winter morning, he
found a young girl on the doorstep worn out with cold and hunger. With
the sympathy for forlorn womanhood, which he had in common with the
greatest of English statesmen, he took her in and put her in his
landlady's charge. When the girl afterwards married, and was deserted
by her husband, he undertook the education of her children, and for
many years devoted to it a large share of his scanty income. The same
charity now drew him to the waifs of his own land. Talking to the
Italian organ-boys, who went about the streets of London with a
barrel-organ and its squirrel or white rat, speaking a patois half
Comasque half English, he learnt the details of the "white-slave
traffic," how a few Italians living in London brought over poor
peasant-boys under contracts, which promised high pay and good living,
but which had no validity in England; how when the boys got there,
they were beaten and half-starved and cowed. He brought the worst
offenders to justice, and did something to frighten the masters into
better treatment of their victims. But he cared more to influence the
boys themselves. In 1841 he opened a school at 5 Hatton Garden
(afterwards removed to 5 Greville Street, Leather Lane), where the
boys came in the late evenings to learn the three Rs and some
elementary science, and on Sundays had lessons in drawing and Italian
history. The school was very dear to Mazzini, and the boys, says an
English observer, "revered him as a god and loved him as a father."
One of them, returning to Italy, travelled to Genoa expressly to tell
Madame Mazzini what her son had done for him. Italian and English
friends (Joseph Toynbee among them) taught gratuitously, and the
annual supper was a great event for him and his circle. Mario and
Grisi sang at concerts to help the school's finances. The school
flourished in spite of the noisy opposition of a neighbouring Italian
priest,--an opposition, which Mazzini repaid by his first angry attack
on the Papacy.
Already, before the school was opened, he had started a political
society for the Italian workmen in London, and was publishing a paper,
the _Apostolato Popolare_, which came out at intervals till 1843. In
it he makes his appeal to the working-men of Italy. He felt more
strongly even than in his Marseilles days that a revolutionary
movement must depend for its main support on the working classes and
have their good for its ultimate goal. English life had brought him
into touch with the social thought of the time, and he felt that
political movements were dwarfing beside the question of the condition
of the masses. He began to speak of the Italy to-be as the "Italy of
the People." It was the people, he wrote, who suffered most from her
dismemberment and misrule. While other classes had their
compensations, there were no distractions for the unknown poor, no
true home life, no intellectual interest. He tried to rouse them from
their provincialism, their self-absorbed indifference to politics. He
appealed to them to be patriots and republicans, proud of their
country's glorious past, working for its future and their children,
and remember that God would judge them not by what wages they earned
but by what they had done for their fellows. But however much he laid
stress on the democratic side of his agitation, on working-class
organization and social reform, he was careful to safeguard Young
Italy from becoming a class movement. It was at this time and in his
papers for working men, that he first began the crusade against
socialism, which he continued, sometimes with less discernment, to the
end of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] For once his knowledge of Dante seems to have failed him. Many
years after he quotes the expression to "Daniel Stern," but owns that
he cannot refer to the verse.
[10] He subsequently discovered that it was a loan, and insisted on
repaying it shortly before his death.
[11] The only evidence for this is contained in Cagnacci, _Giuseppe
Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini_, pp. 287, 290, from which it seems
probable that Mazzini saw Madame Ruffini between June and November,
1844, and therefore, almost certainly, was at Genoa. Signor Donaver
thinks it doubtful whether _la Cugina_ of the Ruffinis' letters refers
to Mazzini, but the internal evidence seems to me to favour the
identification. Signor Cagnacci's note on p. 290 seems to imply that
he has seen a memorandum by Elia Benza to the effect that Benza saw
him at Porto Maurizio about this time disguised as a Capucin.
[12] Carlyle's statement (_Reminiscences_, ii. 182) that he "once or
twice" talked with Mazzini is rather startlingly inaccurate. See
Carlyle's _Life in London_, i. 488.
[13] There are some interesting descriptions of the Carlyles in
Giovanni Ruffini's letters to his mother. See Cagnacci, _op. cit._
[14] Madame Mario says in her _Della vita di Mazzini_, in the middle
of 1838; but I think it is quite clear from _Lettres intimes_, 197 and
205; Giurati, _op. cit._, 11-12; Cagnacci, _op. cit._, 447 that 1839
is the true date.
Chapter VI
The Revolution
1843-1848. AETAT 37-43
Politics in Italy--The Bandieras--The Post-Office
scandal--The People's International League--Life in
1845-47--Letter to Pio Nono--Attitude towards the
royalists--The Revolution of 1848--At Milan.
While Mazzini was watching from England in discouragement, and the
waves seemed to gain no painful inch, in Italy the main came flooding
in. How far exactly the sudden tide of national impulse owed itself to
his teaching, is perhaps an insoluble problem. But when one remembers
how wide had been the influence of Young Italy, how many of the men
who were now coming to the front had been its members, it seems
unlikely that the impetus could have come without him. Young
University men who treasured secretly at home his pamphlets or numbers
of the _Apostolato Popolare_, artisans who had fingermarked his or
Gustavo Modena's tracts, were pondering his teaching and waiting for
the times to ripen. But Mazzini's influence, even if the most
powerful, was not the only one. Traditions still lived on, handed down
from the Carbonaro revolutions; the old belief in Charles Albert was
flickering into life again; the mild Catholic nationalism, that came
from Manzoni and his school, flowed strong; and all the time the daily
witness of oppression and misrule was there to preach against the
Austrians and the native tyrants. And though there were many currents
in the swelling crowd of nationalists, at two points all moved
together. Austria must go, and there must be some guarantee for good
government.
In spite of censors and police, the rising spirit showed itself in
literature. "The shade of Dante, the poet of the regenerated nation,
began to brood above the speech and silence of the land." Students, in
the footsteps of Foscolo and Gabriel Rossetti, drew all the reading
world of Italy to the great national seer, who more than five
centuries before had pleaded for unity. Dramatists and historians and
novel-writers spoke of the ancient glories of their country. Social
reformers came in to swell the liberal movement, founders of schools
and savings banks, agricultural pioneers, builders of railways that
would "stitch the boot." Their interest in politics was a secondary
one, and such political sympathies as they had, were generally with
the Moderate politicians, just rising to a prominence, which was soon
to eclipse Mazzini's waning light. Gioberti had already published his
_Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians_, which, while it echoed
Mazzini's faith in Italy and Rome, banned democracy and unity,
preached federalism and half-hearted liberalism, and looked for
salvation to Charles Albert and a reforming Pope. Cesare Balbo in
Piedmont was pleading for the same mild policy, without its faith in
the Papacy. Theirs was an easy creed beside Mazzini's. They had little
of his religious faith, none of his passionate democracy, his demand
for sacrifice and martyrdom. It was a creed for the doubting and
half-hearted, for the royalist and Catholic, for the courtier and the
rich man and the priest; and also for the level-headed man of the
world, who turned from Mazzini's fancies and idealism, who laughed at
Italy's mission to humanity but cherished a more modest hope for her
own regeneration. But at all events the teaching had two notes in
common with his own. It strove to lift the nation to healthy ambition
and strenuous effort; it cried as earnestly as he did for the
expulsion of the Austrian. And so it made the complement of his work.
Less noble in its spirit, more halting in its patriotism and
uninspiring of great deeds, yet it marshalled for the cause a host,
that would never have swelled the thin ranks of Young Italy. It
supplied the common movement with qualities that Mazzini conspicuously
lacked,--a political sense of the possible, and, among its better
exponents, a patience and tolerance, a comprehensiveness that
prejudged no class and welcomed all, who, gladly or reluctantly,
offered themselves for the great task.
One of the sources of the Moderate movement was the impatience at the
little insurrections, that only led to useless loss of life and an
embittering of the tyranny. One of its postulates laid down that there
should be no revolt against the better native princes, and that the
fight with Austria should be waged by regular armies. But the
traditions of revolt could not die out at once, indeed were all the
stronger for the new spirit of hope that was abroad. All Central Italy
was alive with plots. Mazzini, though he was coming partially to
recognize the futility of these petty risings, still had a standard
of preparation that was pitifully inadequate. He was elaborating a
scheme for a rising in the Papal States, to be followed by movements
in the North and South and supported by the exiles. He was still
persuaded that a few small guerilla bands would draw the people after
them, that daring and a clear programme were the only necessary
conditions of victory. He found few men and less money for his plot.
Among the handful, who put themselves at his disposal, were two young
Venetian nobles, Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, officers in the Austrian
navy, which was chiefly manned by Italians and Dalmatians. They were
high-minded lads, and, one is bound to add, sentimentalists and prigs,
naively self-conscious and immature; but with the supreme virtue that
they were ready to take their lives in their hands. Mazzini wished to
use them for his designs in Central Italy; but there were police
agents of the governments around them, who had their ear and sent them
with a handful of followers, including a man in the pay of the police,
to help an imaginary rising in Calabria. The English government, too,
had opened their correspondence with Mazzini, and put the government
at Naples on its guard. Thus they went, as they foreboded, to their
death. The trap was ready for them; and when they landed near Cosenza,
they were captured easily and shot.
The ignoble action of the English government brought Mazzini into
English political life. He suspected that his correspondence had been
tampered with in the post, and careful experiments proved to him that
his letters had been opened, sealed with new wafers, and the postmark
altered. He put the matter into the hands of Thomas Duncombe, the
member for Finsbury; and the storm of indignation, that followed
Duncombe's disclosures in the House of Commons, showed how angrily the
better English opinion felt it, that the government had violated
elementary ethics and "played the spy" in the interests of continental
tyranny. Shiel and Macaulay denounced it in parliament. Carlyle wrote
to the _Times_ that "it is a question vital to us that sealed letters
in an English post-office be, as we all fancied they were, respected
as things sacred; that opening of men's letters, a practice near of
kin to picking men's pockets, and to other still viler and far fataler
forms of scoundrelism, be not resorted to except in cases of very last
extremity." The government tried to ride out the storm with quibbles
and constructive falsehoods, which proved, as Mazzini said, that they
adopted different standards of honour for their public and their
private lives. Sir James Graham repeated the stale charge that Mazzini
had promoted assassination in France, and honourably withdrew it, when
he knew the facts. But public feeling was too heated to let the matter
rest there; and secret Committees of enquiry were appointed by both
Houses. They reported that letters had been constantly opened at the
Post-Office, at all events since 1806; that even letters of members of
parliament had been tampered with; that in this case the government
had issued a warrant to open Mazzini's letters (his letters had in
fact been opened several months before the date of the warrant), and
had sent information extracted from them to "a Foreign Power." It is
true that this information seems to have been of a general character,
but that did not affect the ignominy of the whole business or the fact
that an English government had sent a warning to the Bourbons, that
helped them to entrap the hapless patriots.
The incident gave Mazzini a welcome opportunity to appeal more
directly to English opinion on behalf of Italy. He had a supreme
contempt for English foreign policy, which "opposes everything that
introduces a new fact in the European polity, and is the first to
recognize it when it shows its strength." It was an unfair criticism,
at least of Canning and Palmerston, tied though the latter's hands
were by court and colleagues. England was still on the whole the
champion of the cause of men. But it was true that the Foreign Office
gave small attention to the great nationalist movements that were
maturing in Europe. The wise policy for England, as he urged, was to
encourage these movements, and win the gratitude of the rising
nationalities, not necessarily by armed intervention (he expressly
disclaimed asking for that), but by her moral backing. Perhaps it was
partly owing to the seeds he sowed at this time, that Palmerston
afterwards did for Italy so much of what he asked for. We may regret
that he never gave a generous recognition to the great Foreign
Secretary's policy.
On individual Englishmen and Americans he knew that he could count for
practical sympathy. He exploited well both the anti-Papal feeling in
the country and the old love of Italian liberty, which had descended
from the days of Byron and Hobhouse. English and American travellers
carried his secret letters and literature into Italy. He had plans
for utilizing the Christian Alliance, an American society for
Protestant propagandism. A year or two later he induced his English
women-friends to organize an Italian bazaar, which was held at Mrs
Milner-Gibson's, nominally for the expenses of his Italian school, but
with the secret intention of devoting any surplus from the Italian
contributions to a National Fund, which he was trying to raise for
political work. In the same year, 1847, he founded a People's
International League to resume the interrupted work of Young Europe,
but mainly with the object of enlisting sympathy for Italy. Stansfeld,
the Ashursts, Peter Taylor, W. Shaen, Thomas Cooper, Henry Vincent the
Chartist, W. J. Fox (the Unitarian orator, afterwards M.P. for
Oldham), served on the Committee. They used to meet once a week at Mr
W. J. Linton's house in Hatton Garden, and Mazzini "with those
wondrous eyes of his lit up with a power that was almost
overwhelming," infected them with his own enthusiasm and faith. Men
among them, like Thomas Cooper and Peter Taylor, who had denounced
physical force remedies in England, demurred at his gospel of
revolution. "You are right about your own country," he passionately
answered. "You have had your grand decisive struggle against tyrannous
power. You need no physical force. But what are my countrymen to do,
who are trodden down under the iron heel of a foreign tyranny? They
have no representation, they have no charters, they have no written
rights. They must fight."
The business of the League brought one of the very few occasions, on
which, so far as is known, he expressed his views on Ireland. Some
Repealers complained to the League that it had omitted Ireland in its
report from the list of the nationalities of the future; and Mazzini
was asked to draft an answer to them. His argument was addressed to
Separatists, but it would apply almost equally to Home Rulers; it
proves how radically he misunderstood the Irish movement, and he seems
to have felt himself on unsafe ground. He regarded the Irish demand as
at bottom one for better government only; and he had every sympathy
with their "just consciousness of human dignity, claiming its long
violated rights," their "wish to have rulers, educators, not masters,"
their protests against "legislation grounded on distrust and
hostility." But he believed that the nationalist movement was not
likely to be permanent, and he refused to see any elements of true
nationality in it, on the grounds that the Irish did not "plead for
any distinct principle of life or system of legislation, derived from
native peculiarities, and contrasting radically with English wants and
wishes," nor claimed for their country any "high special function" to
discharge in the interests of humanity. On which it may be noted that
the first objection shows Mazzini's ill-acquaintance with Irish life
and feeling, and that the second involves a condition, which, save in
his own theories, has not been asked of any nation.
* * * * *
In place of the enforced idleness of a few years before, he was now
only too busy. Political correspondence, literary work, the school,
the bazaar, visiting and being visited crowded on his time. He hardly
left London, except for two visits to France and one perhaps to
Italy, and once for a pilgrimage to Newstead Abbey and other places of
Byronic memory. He had left Chelsea, and moved first to Devonshire
Street, near the British Museum, and afterwards to Cropley Street,
near the New North Road. He was somewhat happier and more hopeful. His
active life left little time for the old broodings. The Post-Office
scandal had brought him new friends, and the desolation of his
solitude had gone. He joined the Whittington Club, largely for the
sake of playing chess, at which he was an adept and did not like being
beaten. He was much perturbed by a proposal to allow no chess on
Sundays, and jokingly threatens a rider that smoking too shall be
forbidden, except to those who undertake to sit silent for an hour in
religious contemplation, and that, as further penance for the members,
one of them shall "read twelve minutes every hour _alta voce e con
declamazione_ a parliamentary speech from Mr Plumpton or Sir Robert
Inglis or a chapter from the second volume of Tancred by D'Israeli."
But when back in his lodgings, he was often depressed and miserable
again. He was "giddy" with writing, worn down with work and want of
proper food and clothes; and for the first time he writes in bad
spirits about his physical condition. The burden of poverty and debt
still "dominated his life." He was now in receipt of a small allowance
from his mother, to find which she stinted herself of every luxury and
more. But he was generous as ever, and probably as bad a housekeeper;
and he found himself powerless to reduce the mountain of debt. His
literary earnings were again very small. The life of Foscolo was still
waiting to be begun, for he thought it better now "to supply new
materials for Italian history than make an inventory of the old." The
better-paying reviews no longer took his articles, and he was "writing
on Switzerland and heaven knows what for a petty Edinburgh magazine."
He fretted because the need of hack-work and his multifarious
occupations left little time for writings that would help the cause,
as they had helped it fifteen years ago. "For the wretched sum of some
8000 francs," he writes, "I am a slave; I am growing old in body, in
soul, in power, and I am not allowed to help my country and fulfil my
mission." And from causes that we can only guess at,--perhaps the
worry and publicity, perhaps the partial lifting of his unhappiness,
perhaps the loss of physical health,--there is a perceptible, though
slight decline from the moral height of a few years before. He is less
the apostle, more the politician, too fond of coming forward as the
practical man--a part that ill became him,--not always straightforward
in his utterances and methods, more reasonable, it is true, and
tolerant, but at the same time sliding into occasional reticences and
equivocation.
The result of the Bandiera episode was to leave Young Italy yet more
friendless than before. Its miserable mismanagement was set down to
Mazzini, unfairly on the whole; and cruel slanders charged him with
egging others to a desperate task, while he stayed safe behind. In
reality, he was more impatient than ever to lead a fight in Italy
"before he grew quite old." But he seems again to have recognized that
any fruitful action was impossible. All his efforts for the National
Fund brought in a poor £100. And he knew that he was losing his hold
on the middle classes, and must wait till he had formed a party among
the working men of the towns. The Rimini revolt of 1845, its poor
programme of local reform and silence on the bigger issues, proved
what influence the Moderate movement in its worst and weakest form had
even in those parts of Italy, from which he had hoped most. A year
later the Moderates leaped into overwhelming prominence with the
accession of Pio Nono to the Papacy. Here was a Pope, the Italians
fondly thought, eager to bless Liberals and Nationalists, while
Charles Albert in the North was threatening to bare his sword for war.
The mass of Italian Liberalism caught at their protection, and was
ready to pay the price. Some no doubt hoped to push on the King, till
he was "moral," if not actual "lord of Italy"; others dreamed that
circumstances might make Pius president of an Italian Republic. But
the majority willingly accepted the limitations of the policy, were
ready to safeguard the Temporal Power, to make Italian union no better
than a loose federation, to stop short at administrative reform or at
the most at middle-class constitutions.
Mazzini was very suspicious of the new development; jealous that the
nationalist movement had passed into other hands, that the credit of
it went to men like Gioberti, who had halted in their faith, while he
alone had held the banner high; sceptical of Charles Albert's and the
Pope's intentions; angry at the tentative, compromising ambitions of
the Moderates, at their repudiation of democracy, their trust in
diplomacy and its pretences and deceptions. He knew Charles Albert's
"rabbit-nature"; he judged Pio Nono much at his own estimate. "They
want," said the Pope, "to make a Napoleon of me, who am only a poor
country parson." "An honest parson but a bad prince," was Mazzini's
verdict. The triumph of the Moderates meant that Unity would be put
indefinitely back, and federalism inflict "perpetual impotence" on
Italy. But he saw the impossibility of standing out against the new
spirit. And he was prepared, as he had been in 1833 and again in 1844,
to waive his republican agitation, if the Moderates for their part
would abandon federalism and declare for unity. "If I thought," he
said, "that Charles Albert would rise to rare ambition and unite Italy
for his own behoof, I would say Amen." "Let the Moderates," he wrote,
"give us, if they like, a Pope, a single king, a dictator; we can
compromise on everything but federalism." And on these lines he was
working through 1847 to bring the exiles at Paris together on a common
programme of Unity, to which both monarchists and republicans could
rally.
It was in this spirit that in September of the same year he wrote his
famous letter to the Pope. As with the parallel letter to Charles
Albert, he was anxious afterwards to explain away in part its implied
belief in the Pope's patriotism and its anxiety to see him leader of
the Italian movement. But his private letters of the time would seem
to show that this was an afterthought, and that he was sincerer than
he gave himself credit for. In one of them, written apparently just
before the letter to Pius, he says in somewhat Carlylean style, "I
consider this as the last agony of popedom authority. And in my own
way of feeling I would not be sorry to see a great institution dying,
for once, in a noble manner; transmitting the watchword of the future
before vanishing, rather than sinking into the Crockford or Tuileries
mud of the English aristocracy and French monarchy. A moral power,
like a great man, ought always to die so; uttering the words of dying
Goethe, 'let more light in.'" In another letter, written in the same
month, he says that he wrote to the Pope "in a moment of expansiveness
and juvenile illusion," as he would have written to his friend
himself. He was excited and sanguine at the great European drama, that
was developing so fast. He still probably had moments, when the old
faith in men broke through his later suspicion and exclusiveness. He
was ever looking for a new religion to issue forth from Rome,[15] and
for the moment dreamed that a nationalist Pope might be its herald.
His appeal, however, was ludicrous in its miscalculation of the facts.
"Be a believer," he said to Pius, "and unite Italy." He told him that
he, the foremost man of the moment in Europe, had duties of
corresponding magnitude. He could guide Italy to her appointed future,
make of her one great state, based on the people and justice and
religion, with "a government unique in Europe, which would end the
absurd divorce between the spiritual and temporal powers." If
Catholicism were capable of revival, he under God might be the
instrument; if it were destined to give place to a new creed, based on
the same Christian principles, he could be the leader, who would guide
the Church securely through its passage. One can imagine the horror
with which Pius read the part so tactlessly suggested to him; and we
know that the only result of the letter was to thoroughly alarm him.
In fact Mazzini's fits of belief in Pope or King were very transitory.
Only five months before he had written in an open letter, that he "did
not believe that from prince or king or pope Italy would now or ever
find salvation." His mind was in a state of flux, wavering between his
old simple, but for the time impracticable, creed and some compromise
with the new order. It would read him wrongly, if we charged him with
downright insincerity; but his whole conduct through this period is a
disingenuous one, too subordinate to unavowed intentions, too much
akin to that "substitution of Macchiavelli for Dante," which he
condemned so unsparingly in the Moderates. While professedly ready to
work with the monarchical nationalists, while abstaining from any
active republican agitation, he was encouraging republican beliefs,
anxious even to keep something together of a republican organization,
that when "the Moderate farce was hissed off the stage," the
republicans would be again in a position to captain the nationalist
cause and lead it to their own goal. He wants to spread the literature
of Young Italy broadcast. He urges that his followers, while nominally
joining the Moderate ranks and "shouting for Pio Nono louder than the
rest," should quietly prepare to seize the movement for themselves. At
the same time, outside Italy they were to depreciate the Pope with
equal vehemency, that when the inevitable disillusioning in Pius came,
they could put in a claim to foresight. Apart from this underhand
diplomacy, his hesitation was largely justified. He had no security
that the Moderates would accept the offered compromise or declare for
Unity. And he feared that the enthusiasm of the masses might
evaporate in noisy demonstrations, that reform would prove an opiate
to lull the nationalist impulses to sleep again. Towards the end of
1847 his chief anxiety, as Cavour's was for different reasons twelve
years later, was to irritate Austria into taking the offensive, and
force the Italians to fight for independence. He was confident that
she would intervene. Sometimes he hoped that the popular pressure
behind would force Charles Albert to head the national defence; at
other moments he welcomed the thought that the native governments
would decline the challenge, and Young Italy be left alone to lead the
war.
For once he underrated the strength of the nationalist feeling. The
new year opened with revolutions in dramatic sequence. Its first day
saw the Tobacco Riots at Milan,--the overture to the maturing Lombard
rising. Two days later the social revolution mildly reared its head at
Leghorn, and Mazzini's old collaborator, Guerrazzi, was master for a
few days of the insurgent city. In another fortnight Sicily, with one
great effort, threw off the Bourbon yoke; and before the month was
out, the Neapolitans had forced a constitution on King Ferdinand. In
the first half of February Tuscany and Piedmont had their
constitutions too; in a few days more the Second Republic was
proclaimed in France, and the face of European politics was changed.
Pio Nono, ever more fearful of liberalism, but carried helplessly
along, gave the Romans a constitution; and, save in the Austrian
provinces and dependant Duchies, all Italy had won its liberties. War
with Austria was now only a question of weeks, and the nation waited
breathlessly till the signal came from Milan or Turin. Charles Albert
was still the "Wobbling King," drifting towards war, thirsting for
national applause and revenge on Austria, but timorous of the
democratic forces that pushed on behind, dreading republican France as
much as the real enemy across the Ticino.
While he paused, the great uprising came. The news of revolution at
Vienna passed the signal through the North. The heroic Milanese after
five days of memorable struggle drove the great garrison out in
flight. Venice, Bergamo, Brescia, Como, well-nigh every city in the
Lombard and Venetian lands, fought for and won their liberty. The
Austrian power crumbled in a week, and save at Ferrara and the
fortresses of the Quadrilateral,--themselves too all but lost,--no
foot of Italian ground remained to Austria. From all Italy the forces
of the nation were hurrying to complete the work. Piedmont and Tuscany
declared war. The Pope and King of Naples let perforce their troops
march to the front. From town and village, from plain and mountain
valley the volunteers poured up. Princes and statesmen, clergy and
nobles, students and artisans,--all were swept along by the great
flood of patriotism, some lightly or with purpose to betray, but the
mass with the enthusiasm of crusaders, glad, for the day at all
events, to give up comfort and home and life. It seemed as if
Mazzini's vision were fulfilled, and Italy, transfigured by a holy
call, had risen in unconquerable might.
Mazzini hurried to Italy at the glad tidings. He was already in
Paris, where he had gone again directly after the Revolution, and had
just founded a National Association to carry out his policy of
bringing royalist and republican exiles together in the cause of
independence and unity. He crossed the St Gotthard with some danger.
"The scene," he wrote back to England, "was sublime, Godlike. No one
knows what poetry is, who has not found himself there, at the highest
point of the route, on the plateau, surrounded by the peaks of the
Alps in the everlasting silence that speaks of God. There is no
atheism possible on the Alps." He stopped to pick the first pansy he
saw, when he left the snows, to send it to an English friend. He
reached Milan on April 7. He could not go to Piedmont or Genoa, for
the sentence of 1833 still hung over him, and, besides, Milan was the
centre of everything at the moment. But the scene of the Five Days did
not bring the sense of exultation he had expected. "As for Italy," he
writes, "I have grown old, and seem only too much to bear the chains
of exile with me." But he "cried like a child" with enthusiasm, when
he saw two thousand Italians, who had deserted from an Austrian
regiment, march through the shouting crowd; and the reception he found
must soon have cheered him. The very customs-officers on the frontier
had known him from his portraits, and repeated his phrases to him. A
procession met him at the gates of Milan, and took him in triumph to
his hotel. His position was in fact a very strong one. He stood before
his countrymen as the prophet once cast out and stoned, who had
preached in the wilderness, what was now a commonplace on every
tongue. His beliefs of yesterday--utopias to other men--were potent
facts to-day. Italy was free or nearly so. Throughout the land
democracy seemed on the eve of triumph. Even the republicans and
unitarians had shown an unexpected strength. And he, who through long
years had preached and suffered, while others fell away or doubted,
had the grateful homage of his countrymen. At this time, probably, his
word was law at Milan.
It remained to be seen if he had the talent for actual political life,
whether he could put away accumulated prejudices, see clear to the
supreme and indispensable end, and waive all secondary things for
that. His professed position was a sound one. While the war lasted, so
he laid down, there must--apart from the postulate of Unity--be a
truce to party struggles. Monarchy or republic must await the decision
of the liberated and united nation; and meanwhile the whole strength
of the country must be given to the war. His earlier actions were true
to this programme. He supported the Provisional Government, and
discouraged the extremer republicans. Probably, as he hinted later, he
was half inclined at first to believe that Charles Albert was the
fittest instrument for the deliverance of Italy. And though he soon
abandoned any hope in the King, he repeated to the end that, while the
war lasted, there should be no republican agitation.
So far as the war itself was concerned, he did his best in the one way
open to him, the encouragement of the volunteers. He exaggerated their
military value, just as he had always exaggerated the possibilities
of guerilla fighting in Italy. But his advice that every available man
should be thrown on the enemy's communications in Venetia was better
strategy and patriotism than the poor jealousies, that made the
regular army and the politicians depreciate the volunteers from fear
lest their influence should be cast for a republic. In a fight, where
the Italians had no single commander of genius, the Moderates had the
folly to reject the services of men, like Garibaldi and Fanti, who
twelve years later were the first generals in Italy. But, sincerely as
Mazzini tried to help the war, he was not equally loyal to his
professions of political neutrality. His refusal to let unity remain
an open question deprived them at once of any seriousness. Even his
ostensible attitude towards the monarchy was no doubt in part a matter
more of necessity than principle. He seems to have gone to Milan
undecided what exact policy to adopt; and as soon as he arrived there,
he wrote that he was occupied in organizing the republicans, and that,
should Charles Albert fail to gain a speedy and brilliant victory, he
had hopes of success for them. But he soon realized that a republican
agitation meant, if not civil war, at all events a fierce dissension
in the face of the enemy, a dissension on no point of vital principle
or honour,--which would have shamed its author. And, though the
republicans were strong at Milan, they were perhaps a minority even
there, and in the rest of Lombardy a handful, while Piedmont and its
army stood solid in their loyalty to the King. And so, whether from
choice or from necessity, he stood in the letter by his promise to
abstain from republican agitation. But the policy of neutrality sat
uneasily on him, and he soon broke from the spirit of his undertaking
by loud professions of republican faith and suggestions quite
inconsistent with the silence he was pledged to.
To some extent the policy of the Provisional Government excused his
change of attitude. At the beginning of the war everybody had accepted
the position, that there should be a truce to politics till the
fighting was over. But as the war dragged on, the position became a
hardly possible one. The government of Lombardy was hopelessly
incapable, and everybody wished to see it superseded. The
conservatives both at Milan and Turin feared to leave an opening for a
possible Lombard republic after the war. Many of the democrats wished
for annexation as a step to Unity. The agitation for "fusion" with
Piedmont grew so strong, that the government, not unwillingly,
capitulated, and ordered a plebiscite to be taken on the question
whether fusion should take place at once. When the voting came, there
was no doubt abundance of intimidation by the fusionists; but the
overwhelming majority that declared for them proved that the desire
for a North Italian Kingdom was predominant in the politics of the
moment.
Almost irresistible as the forces were that made for fusion, Mazzini
was strictly accurate in branding it as a breach of faith. The
fusionists had tried to win him over. The King had sent a message,
that, if he would use his influence with the republicans in favour of
fusion, he should have an interview with himself, and exercise as much
influence as he wished in drafting the constitution on democratic
lines.[16] The offer was a generous and patriotic one, but Mazzini
consented only on condition that the King would publicly declare for
Unity, and sign a bombastic promise to be "the priest-king of the new
age." Naturally no answer came to this, and Mazzini broke into
polemics, that the bad faith of the other side did something to
excuse, but which were none the less opposed to the spirit of his
pledge. Italy, he said, would never be united, till the flag of the
republic flew at Rome. He pleaded that France should adopt a frankly
"republican and revolutionary" diplomacy. Royalty was "a hereditary
lie," and the republic the only government which would put the best
citizens in power. Now and again he shot stinging phrases at his
opponents, that only added to the bitterness of faction; for, as
often, even when Mazzini tried to be tolerant, his pen ran away with
him. He attacked the Turin nobles, forgetting that they and their sons
were at the war, giving their lives for the cause he loved. No doubt
he had provocation, and the baser Moderates were even more intolerant,
but none the less he was playing a hurtful and ungenerous part.
He made, in fact, a grave blunder in staying at Milan. His presence
there did little to help the war; it was, whether he wished it or not,
a standing encouragement to the factiousness, that was not a little
responsible for the ill-fortune of the army. His place was at Rome. At
bottom the Italians were defeated through the feebleness of Charles
Albert's generalship and policy and the defection of the Pope and
King of Naples. Mazzini could do nothing to make a capable commander
of the King; but he might have influenced his policy. Charles Albert,
timid and conventional as he was, had had his hand forced already and
was prepared to have it forced again, as his son's was a few years
later. Mazzini judged the King accurately and not unkindly; but his
attitude towards him was lacking in all tact. Bad-tempered attacks on
the monarchy, melodramatic appeals for a "priest-king," suggestions
that the united nation would proclaim the republic from the Capitol,
could only alarm. But had the popular pressure been sufficient and
well-directed, Charles Albert would, half fearfully but half gladly,
have felt his way to the crown of Italy. He had a deep belief in
nationality; he dearly loved popular applause. Romagna was only
waiting for his signal to come over to him. Piedmontese agents were at
work in Tuscany, and it is hard to believe that he had not approved
their mission. He hesitated long before he declined for his son the
crown that Sicily laid at his feet. Had Mazzini gone to Rome, he would
have given a great impulse to the radicals and unitarians there. It
would almost certainly have decided the Romagnuols; it would not
impossibly have created such a force of opinion in all Central Italy,
as would have overborne the autonomist parties and the King's own
hesitations, and put all the Papal States and Tuscany under his
suzerainty. Nay more, though the counter-revolution had triumphed at
Naples, the nationalist elements were strong throughout the South; and
had Mazzini organized them from Rome, and Garibaldi marched South in
the name of Unity and Charles Albert, the work of 1860 might have been
done twelve years earlier. Even had the bigger consummation failed,
Mazzini could have forced the Pope to choose between a nationalist
policy and deposition from his temporal throne; he would have thrown
all the energies of the Roman government into the war, and given
Charles Albert another ten or twenty thousand men, enough to shift the
scales of victory.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See below, p. 127.
[16] According to Madame Venturi (English Edition of Mazzini, V. 96)
the King offered him the premiership; but neither Mazzini himself,
nor, so far as I know, any of the memoirs of the time mention it. For
other overtures from the government see Donaver in _Rassegna
Nazionale_, Dec. 1, 1898.
Chapter VII
The Roman Republic
1848-1849. AETAT 43-44
The collapse of the war--The People's War--At Florence--The
mission of Rome--The Roman Republic--The
Triumvirate--Attitude to the Church--The French attack.
Had he done this, he might have averted the catastrophe, which
quenched the nation's hopes in swift disaster. In one pitched fight
after another the Italians had won. But courage could not repair bad
generalship and growing inferiority of numbers, and Mazzini foretold
disaster only too accurately. At the end of July the collapse came,
and the army, still fighting doggedly, but starved and outmanoeuvred,
retreated on Milan. For some weeks past Mazzini had urged that a small
committee of defence should be appointed; and when disaster
threatened, he was allowed to nominate his men. He chose Fanti and two
others, who did their best in the short time to organize the defence
of the city. The Milanese rose again to something of the spirit of the
Five Days; but it was too late to turn the tide of victory. The army
made a gallant fight outside the city walls, but were driven back
within the gates. The unhappy king would fain have fought on still,
but he knew there was no hope of victory, and after long hesitation
he surrendered the city. The people, maddened by the desertion,
attacked the palace where he lodged, and it was with difficulty that
his life was saved. Sullenly he and his army withdrew, followed by
thousands of the citizens, intolerant of Austrian rule.
Mazzini left Milan, as soon as the army arrived, shouldering a rifle
that Mrs Ashurst had given him when he left England. He had persuaded
himself that a popular rising might have saved the city, but that the
army could not. He started to join Garibaldi, who was in command of
the volunteers at Bergamo, and met a detachment of them at Monza.
Their flag had "God and the People" for its legend, and the volunteers
chose Mazzini to carry it. Garibaldi's small force of three thousand
men made a difficult retreat, in terrible weather and ever harassed by
the Austrian cavalry. Mazzini, frail and exhausted, won their
admiration by his endurance and intrepidity. He was happy doubtless to
have a simple task, which only asked for physical courage, after the
tangled politics of the last four months.
The volunteers disbanded when they had passed the frontier, for the
national cause seemed desperate. The army had retreated into Piedmont,
and the King had signed an armistice. The Roman and Tuscan forces
hardly existed; Naples was at the mercy of King Ferdinand. The
Austrians had triumphed swiftly and conclusively. They dared not
indeed cross the Ticino for fear of French intervention, they were not
strong enough as yet to advance into Central Italy, and Venice defied
them in her lagunes; but Lombardy and the Venetian mainland seemed
lost past hope. Mazzini refused to own defeat. But he based his hopes
more on partisan illusions than on cool possibilities. The royal war
had ended; the people's war would begin. The Italians, betrayed by
their princes, would rise in their own strength, and crush the
Austrians by force of numbers and enthusiasm. He was working
feverishly at Lugano to create a national organization to this end,
and prepare for a popular rising in Lombardy. Again he wavered whether
or not to raise the republican flag. Providence, he thought, had by
the recent disasters pointed the Italians to a republic. But, at all
events after the fiasco of a mad rising near Como, he recognized the
hopelessness of an unsupported insurrection in the Austrian provinces.
He saw, as cooler heads saw all along, that the Piedmontese army was
indispensable; and, while urging the Romans to declare for a republic
there, he was willing to postpone the political question elsewhere,
and work with any, who would relegate it to the decision of a
Constituent Assembly after the war and throw their strength into a new
fight. He recognized at last that his own best field was in Central
Italy. Various motives drew him there. He could use his influence at
Florence and Rome to push on the military preparations; he could
perhaps secure a union of the two states, which would be a step
towards unity; he might, if circumstances favoured, help to plant the
republican flag. Both in Tuscany and at Rome democracy was triumphant.
The Pope had fled to Ferdinand's fortress at Gaeta, and the Romans,
finding every overture for compromise rejected, and left without a
stable government, were heading irresistibly for a republic. At
Florence the Grand Duke was at the mercy of the democrats, with no
alternative before him but flight or unconditional surrender. Mazzini
left Lugano, and sailing from Marseilles, arrived at Leghorn on
February 8, just when the news had come that the Grand Duke had fled
from Florence. He used his influence to prevent any attack on the
ducalists and dissuade the Livornese from secession. A week later he
was at Florence. Here he saw Giuditta Sidoli, at whose house he met
Gino Capponi, and paid a visit to Giusti. But he had little time for
the society of friends. Guerrazzi was now virtually dictator of
Tuscany. More practical in small things than Mazzini, but with none of
his inspiring confidence or simple loyalty to an idea, he was trying
to steer a middle course and keep clear of a republic. He and Mazzini
had hot words, and Mazzini, backed by a great republican meeting by
Orcagna's Loggia, forced him to a nominal and insincere acceptance of
its programme. After fruitless efforts to promote union with the Roman
states, and make the slow Tuscans prepare for war, Mazzini left for
Rome.
Ever since the Pope's flight in November, he had been appealing to his
friends there to agitate for a republic. The road, he urged, was
plain. The Pope had virtually abdicated, and, without a blow, the
republic was in their grasp,--a republic, which might grow into a
republican Italy. "You have," he wrote, "in your hands the destinies
of Italy, and the destinies of Italy are the destinies of the world."
It was one of the master-ideas of his life, cherished through years of
meditation from the first days of Young Italy. The thought was a
fantastic one; a student's conceit, fed on his early classical
studies, on his later readings in medieval history, above all on
Dante's faith in Rome, the destined seat of Empire; a strange
historical survival, born of what Cesare Balbo called "the importunate
memory of Rome's past greatness," which translated into modern terms
the theories of the Holy Roman Empire. Many an Italian in those days
shared that faith,--a faith that fed their inextinguishable resolve
that Rome should be the capital of Italy. Mazzini and Gioberti went
beyond, and looked to Rome for some new word of truth for all
humanity. But while Gioberti's destined instrument was a reformed
Papacy, Mazzini watched for a Pope-less, republican, Italian Rome to
bring the dawn of that "religious transformation," Christian in spirit
and in origin but with another dogma, which would again unite mankind
in a living, universal faith. Indefinite as his conception was, the
thought of an all-embracing unity, the "word of universal
brotherhood"--the necessary mark of any great religion--runs through
it all. As Imperial Rome had united Europe by force of arms and
majesty of law, as Papal Rome had united it by thought and spiritual
authority, so "Rome of the People" would unite it once again in some
new gospel of social duty and progress, would harmonize the temporal
and the spiritual, the Roman law of justice and the Christian law of
sacrifice. When nationality had remodelled Europe, then would eternal
Rome, destined alone of cities to rise more mighty from each fall, be
hailed its moral centre, seat of a diet of the nations, to teach to
them their common duties to humanity.[17] Who will say that this last
more modest vision may not some day and in some sense be fulfilled?
Partly in consequence of Mazzini's incentives, more from force of
circumstances, the republic was proclaimed at Rome on the day after he
landed at Leghorn. The Assembly, a fairly level-headed body, elected
on manhood suffrage and drawing its members from the larger landed
proprietors and upper middle classes, had voted for it by a great
majority; and the republican Triumvirs had discoursed in true
Mazzinian phrases, and headed their acts with the rubric "God and the
People." On the fourth day of the republic the Assembly unanimously
made Mazzini citizen of Rome, and invited him to come. He started as
soon as he could leave Tuscany, and arrived on the evening of March 5,
slipping into the city unobserved, "awed and like a worshipper,"
feeling, as he passed under the Porta del Popolo, "a spurt of new
life," that for the moment swept away doubtings and disappointments.
His first thought was to organize for the impending war. Piedmont,
unreconciled to defeat and stung by Austrian brutalities in Lombardy,
was about to denounce the armistice; there were formidable
preparations for insurrection in the Lombard cities; Venice was
undaunted and threatening from her lagunes. Republican Rome must not
be behindhand. Mazzini made her anticipate the belated appeal from
Piedmont by offering ten thousand men, and they had started for the
North when the news of Novara came.
Piedmont lay crushed by one staggering blow, and the hope of freeing
Lombardy had gone. The moment's task was to save Central Italy, and in
the imminent danger the Romans turned to the man who had won their
reverence and lifted them to something of his own moral greatness.
Mazzini was made a Triumvir, and henceforth became little less than
dictator. He had probably at heart small hope of saving the Republic,
and to foreigners like Clough and Margaret Fuller did not conceal his
fears. But the cause was not yet desperate. He knew he could
contemptuously disregard the Neapolitans, who were hovering on the
Southern frontier; and at this time he could not foresee how base a
part France was soon to play. The Austrians were the only serious
enemy in sight; and with Hungary still untamed, with the chance that
Piedmont might brace itself to a third effort, a desperate defence
might yet keep them at bay. He intended to treble the Roman forces,
and concentrating them at Terni, swoop down on the long line of
Austrian communications, as they advanced along the Eastern coast.
Meanwhile, among the cares of war, he began to build a government that
should be worthy of his ideal. "Here in Rome," he told the bickering
politicians in the Assembly, "we may not be moral mediocrities." He
hoped to inspire government and people with one great purpose, that
would leave no place for party-spirit or suspicion. He would have no
exclusiveness, no intolerance, no war of classes or attacks on
property or person. "Stiffness in principles, tolerance to
individuals" was the motto of his rule, and to this, through all the
troubled times that followed, he was nobly true. At a time when
national danger might have excused severe precautions, the press was
hardly interfered with; there were few arrests, fewer penalties, for
political offences; conspirators, with barely an exception, were left
in contemptuous tolerance, or merely warned not to let the people know
of their intrigues. It was this very leniency to the men who were
plotting the Republic's downfall, that led to the few outrages that
stained its name. The civil service and police, left full of enemies
and lukewarm friends, lacked vigour to repress the disorderly
elements; and here and there a fanatic or criminal took advantage of
the murmurings at Mazzini's tolerance to assassinate a Papalist. But
save in a few provincial towns, where political murder was endemic,
and for a few isolated outrages at Rome, there was absolute security
alike for friend and foe. Mazzini's mild authority stands out in
luminous contrast with the Papal terrorism, that scourged the unhappy
land before and after.
The Triumvir's attitude to the Catholic Church is a strange commentary
on the myth, that writes him down an anti-clerical fanatic. The man,
who believed Catholicism a spent force, whose whole soul yearned for a
new religion to issue forth from Rome, was yet superlatively careful
not to shake the people's one religious creed. It would have been easy
to do otherwise. There was fierce exasperation at the Pope's obduracy,
at the ferocious fanaticism of men, who would see Rome bombarded
rather than yield one tittle of their temporal power. Churches were
half empty, and, but for the government's precautions, many another
priest would have died the victim of the people's anger. But Mazzini
made it one of his first cares to protect the clergy in their
spiritual work. His deep religious instinct, old memories and
friendships, his respect for men who in their way were witnesses to
the spiritual, made him always tolerant towards them. "In Italy," he
once said, "the priest is powerless for harm but powerful to do good";
and before this time and after he made impassioned appeals to them to
take their part in the national work. He tried to win them now. It was
from no ill-will towards the Church that he did something to repair
the ecclesiastical misrule. Such reforms as he effected were bound to
go to the strengthening of a church, made hateful by clerical
domination; and many were the priests and monks who defied the
threatening cardinals at Gaeta, and gladly rallied to the republic.
The nationalization of church lands, which Mazzini took over from his
predecessors, aimed at improving the stipends of the poorer clergy.
Religious services and processions went on uninterrupted, and his one
act of severity towards the priests was to fine the canons of St
Peter's for refusing to celebrate the usual Easter services. "It is
the duty of the government," the Triumvirs said, "to preserve religion
uncontaminated." "Do not be afraid," he wrote to a nun, who feared the
suppression of her convent; "pray God for our country and for men of
good intentions." Once in the fear of imminent attack upon the city,
the crowd fetched a few confessional boxes from the churches to make
barricades. Mazzini reminded them that from those confessionals had
come at all events words of comfort to their mothers. It is perhaps
the most convincing proof of his grip on the people's hearts, that the
confessionals were taken back. With the Pope himself he was ever ready
to compromise. True, he had postulated his expulsion and the downfall
of his authority as the condition of the new faith, for which he
yearned. But whether it was that the statesman saw that the idealist
must wait, or from his deep respect for the institution round which
hung so much of Christian history, or that he wished to remove the
last pretext for the intervention of foreign Catholics, his attitude
went to the extreme of conciliatoriness. At its first outset the
Republic, while decreeing the fall of the Temporal Power, had promised
all necessary guarantees for the Pope's spiritual authority; and
Mazzini, anticipating Cavour, tried to persuade the Assembly to define
the guarantees, and offer to consider any suggestions for them that
the Catholic Powers chose to make. We must distinguish, he said, the
Pope from the Prince, and claim our rights without doing violence to
religious faith.
Thus noble and thus gentle was the Triumvir's rule, and finely the
people responded to it. At first there had been small enthusiasm for
the Republic. The Romans had accepted it calmly, as the one
alternative to the intolerable rule of priests. But Mazzini touched
them with his own great faith. He appealed to no selfish interests. He
promised social legislation, but it went into the background behind
the national question; and except for a land scheme to create a
peasant proprietary on the church lands, there was no time to project
much for their material well-being. His was a pure spiritual
ascendancy, that made a populace, demoralized by bad government and
charity, rise to something of his own moral height and dare to bear
and die. There were some at all events, to whom Rome, hallowed by a
great ideal and noble rule, had become as the city of God. Greatly
their leader merited their love. The equivocations of the past few
months had gone, and in a clear position of command, untrammelled by
the need to compromise with alien forces, he stood in all the majesty
of his translucent soul. It shone in his face; worn and emaciated, he
seemed to Margaret Fuller "more divine than ever." His personal life,
of which we have grievously few records, was one of democratic
simplicity. Lodged in the Quirinal, he hunted for a room "small enough
to feel at home in." Here he sat unguarded and serene, "sadly [Greek:
adoryphoros] for a [Greek: tyrannos]," wrote Clough (for it was a
country where political assassination was a tradition on both sides),
as accessible to working men and women as to his own officials, with
the same smile and warm hand-shake for all; dining for two francs at a
cheap restaurant, afterwards, during the siege, living on bread and
raisins, his only luxury the flowers that an unknown hand sent every
day, his one relaxation to sing to his guitar when left alone at
night. The Triumvir's slender stipend of £32 a month he spent entirely
on others. As an administrator, he was too gentle to be sufficiently
prompt and stern. He even refused to sign the death-warrant of a
soldier condemned by court-martial. But he made amends by his
unbending energy and the quick and fertile intellect, that helped in
every military detail of the defence and made his diplomatic notes, so
Palmerston is said to have called them, "models of reasoning and
argument." Through all the tangled cares of government he kept his
calmness and serenity, the statesman's right to lift his people to new
visions and new powers.
His hope was to leave a great republican example. Probably he dared
expect no more. Sanguine no doubt he was, but in his cooler moments
he seems to have realized from the first that the powers of evil were
too strong for the noble little republic. The blow came from an
unexpected quarter. This is not the place to dissect the causes, that
led France to the meanest of modern political crimes, that impelled a
state, pledged by its own constitution "never to employ its forces
against the liberties of another people," to destroy an unoffending
sister-republic. France paid at Sedan for the carelessness of honour,
that allowed the Catholics and Louis Napoleon to do a great crime in
her name. When Oudinot's expedition started, and, in spite of falsity
on falsity, it was plain that the French government intended to crush
the Romans, Mazzini's policy was clear. He would not yield to brute,
unrighteous force; Rome, he told the Assembly, must "do its duty and
give a high example to every people and every part of Italy." But to
him the enemy was not France but the French government. The true
republicans at Paris were striving courageously to save the Romans and
their own national honour; and on their efforts depended the one hope
of safety. He would do nothing that would weaken their hands or
unnecessarily hurt French pride. When the Assembly resolved without a
dissentient voice to resist at all cost, and Oudinot's troops were
ingloriously driven back, defeated by the raw Italian levies, he
refused to let Garibaldi make the rout complete. The French prisoners
were released after generous and diplomatic hospitality. A monster
gift of cigars was sent to the enemy's quarters, wrapped in handbills
that appealed to republican fraternity. Perhaps someone remembered
that eighty years before the American Congress had sent the same
ingenuous present to the Hessian mercenaries.
Fraud and force alike had failed to open the gates of Rome, and the
long chapter of deceit went on,--deceit hard to parallel even in the
diplomacy of great nations. Ferdinand de Lesseps, then a budding
attaché, was sent to parley with the Romans, till Oudinot's
reinforcements arrived, and the new elections in France gave a
Catholic majority in the Chamber. It was a mere ruse, but de Lesseps
was Napoleon's dupe and negotiated in all good faith, giving ample
credit to Mazzini's "moderation and loyalty and courage." Had they
been left alone, they would have concluded peace on terms honourable
to both sides, and Mazzini seems to have hoped that the danger from
France was passing. Garibaldi was sent to meet the Neapolitans, who
had advanced as far as Albano, and drove them back in rout across the
frontier. King Ferdinand brevetted Ignatius Loyola field-marshal of
his army, but the very posthumous honour could not exorcise the
superstitious terror, with which the great guerilla-chieftain's name
inspired his men. Had the Triumvirs been free to let Garibaldi
advance, the Bourbon power would perhaps have crumbled, as it crumbled
eleven years later.
But at the moment when Mazzini and de Lesseps had agreed on terms, the
French government threw off the mask, and Oudinot made a treacherous
attack. Then came the memorable siege, when for nearly a month the
badly-armed and badly-generalled Romans kept at bay an army twice
their number and a powerful siege artillery. Heroically they
struggled on against the overwhelming odds. The great majority of the
soldiers were natives of the state; but some had gathered from all
Italy, drawn by the spell of Rome to fight once more for country. It
was a band of heroes, such as never came again together in the Italian
struggle; generals of the future like Medici and Bixio; Manara, the
Lombard leader in the Five Days; Mameli, the war-poet of Italy, son of
the woman who had been Mazzini's boyish love; Ugo Bassi, the
priest-patriot, greatest Italian preacher of his day, nearest of
spiritual kin to Mazzini's self; Bertani, the future organizer of the
Sicilian Thousand and Pisacane their precursor; and the great
protagonists themselves, Mazzini and Garibaldi;--a diverse band,
patricians and plebeians, saints and sinners, royalists and
republicans, all moved by one supreme redeeming love of Italy and
Rome. Within, the city showed a passive heroism as fine. Calmly and
patiently the people bore the destruction of their homes, the growing
scarcity, the hopelessness of victory as the toils drew ever closer
round the fated city. Six thousand women came forward to offer their
service in the hospitals. When the women of the poor Trastevere were
driven from their homes by the French shells, the government lodged
them in the palaces of the fugitive nobles, on their simple promise
that there should be neither theft nor injury, and the promise given
in the name of "God and the People" was scrupulously kept.
To their leader those weeks must have been a time of fearful strain.
Garibaldi's bad generalship and bad temper shortened a resistance,
that was hopeless from the first. The losses were heavy, and Mameli
and Manara fell with many another of Mazzini's friends. After the
ill-fated revolt of the Mountain on June 13, there was no hope of
diversion from the republicans at Paris. At home, though the Assembly
loyally supported him, he had to meet the petulant criticism of
Garibaldi and the intriguers who made him their tool. To him it was a
matter of clear duty that the Republic should fight on to the end.
"Monarchies may capitulate, republics die and bear their testimony
even to martyrdom." When the last defences broke down, he wished to
make a desperate fight from street to street, or retire with the
Assembly and the army to the Apennines, throw themselves on the
Austrian lines, and keep the republican flag flying in Romagna. The
army was prepared for either course; but the Assembly had no stomach
for the sacrifice, and Mazzini, bitterly reproaching them, resigned
his office on the eve of the city's fall. Sullenly Rome surrendered,
and the victors, as they entered the city, hung back before the
threatening populace. Garibaldi, with three thousand who disdained
surrender, began his great retreat. "Hunger and thirst and vigil," he
promised them, "but never terms with the enemy." Mazzini would have
been more consistent, had he gone out with them. Perhaps he had no
liking for a desperate fragment of his rejected scheme; perhaps the
personal tension with Garibaldi was too great. For some days he stayed
on in Rome. He was worn out and overstrung; he had not slept on a bed
since the siege began, he had fed on coarse and insufficient food. In
two short months he had grown old; his beard was grey, his face
cadaverous, his manner, so Margaret Fuller noted, "sweet and calm,
but full of a more fiery purpose than ever." He wandered defiantly
about the streets. It was partly that he wanted, by offering himself
to any assassin's knife, to kill the lie of the Catholic press that he
had forced a hated tyranny upon the Romans. Besides, he had a
desperate hope that he might rouse the people and the remaining troops
to one more struggle. His whole soul was possessed by the passion to
protest on to the end against the triumph of brute force. It is
strange that the French did not arrest him; perhaps they knew too well
the temper of the people. At last Gustavo Modena's wife and Margaret
Fuller persuaded him to withdraw. He had no passport, but he found the
means of sailing to Marseilles; there he succeeded in eluding the
French police and travelled on to Geneva.
FOOTNOTE:
[17] See below, c. xvii.
Chapter VIII
London Again
1849-1859. AETAT 44-54
In Switzerland--Life in London--English friends--English
politics and literature--The Friends of Italy.
Mazzini stayed for a few weeks in a quiet hotel near his old quarters
at Geneva, then moved to Lausanne, where he and a few more refugees,
Saffi, his co-Triumvir, and Pisacane among them, took a small house
(the Villa Montallegro) near the town on the hills that overlook the
lake. Here he and his friends plunged at once into the old eager work
of correspondence and journalism, as if the struggle at Rome had been
a holiday. Another ephemeral paper, _L'Italia del Popolo_, was
launched on its short career. His head was full of literary
schemes,--an Italian translation of the Gospels with an introduction,
a new Encyclopædia, which should do for religious democracy what the
old Encyclopædia had done for the thought of the eighteenth century.
It was a quiet, not unhappy time, that must have recalled something of
the old days at Marseilles. At times indeed he was miserable and
pessimistic as of old, brooding over lost friendships, chafing at the
triumph of brute force in Italy. But except in these hours of taciturn
gloom, when he avoided all companionship, he was serene and genial,
sometimes brightening into anecdote and humour, when the party settled
down to the evening's talk and chess.
In the spring of 1850 the agitation in France at the proposed revision
of the constitution excited vague hopes of a revolution there; and
with some fatuous idea that he could help to stop Louis Napoleon's
progress to empire, Mazzini went to Paris, only to discover how empty
was the expectation. On the journey he lost a note-book, in which for
many years he had entered his thoughts on religion. The world would
gain more from its discovery than from that of any lost Greek tragedy.
He crossed to England for a few months, then returned to Switzerland.
But the persecution of 1834 repeated itself. The governments put
pressure on the Swiss to expel the refugees, and Mazzini after a month
or two of hiding found it necessary to leave. One night in November he
and two friends left Geneva, walking along the lake to Nyon, while
they discussed Byron and Mickiewicz, and were taken on in a friend's
carriage to Lausanne, whence he found the means to escape to England.
Here he made his home with few interruptions till the last years of
his life, taking no small part in English society and politics,
finding his best friends in English men and women. "Italy is my
country, but England is my real home, if I have any," he said. He had
come to love England and English ways, and in his brief political
journeys to Italy his home thoughts went to England, and he was glad
to be back again. His old horror of London changed to a real liking;
and its conveniences for his work made it difficult to get him out of
town, save for a rare visit to his friends, or for a day or two to
recruit his health at St Leonard's or Eastbourne, which he liked, or
at Brighton, which he hated. He longed sometimes, indeed, for "some
secret nook in the country, to breathe fresh air and gaze on the sky
or at the sea"; but when he was urged to take rest in the country, he
railed affectionately at his "misled and dreamy friends" for supposing
he could attend to his work anywhere out of London. The fogs still had
their fascination for him; he wrote once from Italy, "I think very
often under these radiant skies of the London fogs and always
regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended for an
Englishman."
At first he lived at Cromwell Lodge, Old Brompton, a little house in
the middle of orchards and gardens at what was then the extreme
western end of London. Building operations drove him thence, and Mrs
Carlyle found him lodgings over a post-office at 15 Radnor Street,
near his old rooms in York Buildings. Here, at first with Saffi and
three other exiles, afterwards alone, he lived the frugallest of
lives. His income indeed was somewhat larger than it had been. At his
mother's death he came into an annuity of £160 a year, which she,
knowing how readily his money flowed to public work and charity, had
wisely invested with obdurate trustees. His friends would gladly have
helped him, but though he frankly asked money of them for his cause
(always scrupulously repaying it, if borrowed on his personal
responsibility), he never, so far as I know, would take from this time
forward money for strictly personal needs. Once only he accepted some
to pay for a private secretary, and once again for cabs, when his
friends suspected that there were plots to assassinate him, and feared
for his walking in London streets, unprotected save by a sword-cane.
Thus, even with casual literary earnings, his income seldom reached
£200, and of this for some years £80 went to the education of the
Tencioni children, and often every other available penny to finance
his plots of insurrection. While his enemies in Italy painted him
living in patrician luxury, he denied himself every comfort (cigars
always excepted), save the modest ones that his friends forced on him.
Money he only wanted for his political schemes. "I have never felt so
bitterly the curse of not being rich," he wrote once, when wanting
rifles for one of his revolutionary plots. For himself, he was content
with his humble fare and modest lodgings. Here in his small room,
every piece of furniture littered with books and papers, the air thick
with smoke of cheap Swiss cigars (except when friends sent Havannahs),
brightened only by his tame canaries and carefully-tended plants, he
was generally writing at his desk till evening, always with more work
in hand than he could cope with, carrying on the usual mass of
correspondence, writing articles for his Italian papers, raising
public funds with infinite labour, stirring his English friends to
help the cause, finding money and work for the poor refugees, or
organizing concerts in their interest. The school in Greville Street
went on for three years longer, when, except for the Sunday lectures,
it was closed. And amid all the exacting cares of public work he
spared himself no trouble for his English friends, advising in their
family affairs, writing long letters of tenderness and spiritual
wisdom to comfort a bereaved son or lead a young girl from a life of
selfishness to higher things.
He had aged greatly since he left London less than three years ago. He
was worn and thin, his beard was white, and the once dark features
wore "a sort of grey, ashy halo." But it was the same high
"cliff-like" forehead, the regular features, the strong, straight
nose, "the exquisite curve of lips like a woman's in their expression
of spotless purity," the piercing black eyes, whose like none ever
knew who saw them, "of luminous depth, full of sadness, tenderness,
and courage, of purity and fire, readily flashing into indignation or
humour, always with the latent expression of exhaustless resolution";
"the only eyes," says another observer, "I ever saw that looked like
flames." "His face in repose 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, from the thin hand."[18] He carried his head a
little forward, and he had a habit of sitting on the edge of a chair,
perhaps, it has been suggested, because in his own room his books left
but narrow margin for sedentary uses. He dressed, as ever, with
perfect neatness, in a worn black frock-coat, a double-breasted velvet
waistcoat buttoned high, despising collars and substituting a silk
handkerchief wound round his neck, wearing a long thin gold watch
chain, which had probably been his father's, and two rings, one at
least no doubt his mother's, now rescued from the pawn-shop.
His personal life was centred almost wholly in his English friends. It
is true, he felt his exile bitterly. "Wish for me," he writes to
friends one Christmas, "that I may die in the country and for the
country, in which I have been forbidden to live." But he had no home
ties in Italy now. His father had died in the winter of 1848, leaving
him to brood over the thought that he had been but a source of pain to
the grim old man, who under all his moroseness and want of sympathy
had never lost his pride and affection for his son. His mother, whom
he had seen once again when at Milan, with whom he had never relaxed
the close, affectionate correspondence, died in the summer of 1852. It
was a very heavy blow. There was no one to replace her; he had lost
"the dream of his individual life,--to see her in the joy of triumph,"
when Italy was free. But he nerved himself, and took her loss as an
incentive to fresh effort. "My mother," he writes, "seems to me to be
present, perhaps nearer than she was in her terrestrial life. I feel
more and more the sacredness of duties, which she recognized, and of a
mission which she approved. I have now no mother on earth except my
country, and I shall be true to her, as my mother has been to me." So
intensely actual was she still to him, that once afterwards, when in
hiding and deep dejection, he thought she came to him in veritable
presence to strengthen and console him. His lonely heart, athirst as
ever for affection, went out to his English friends, the men and still
more the women, who believed in him and in his politics, and tried to
bring some warmth and brightness into his sad life. After a year or
two he saw little more of the Carlyles, but their place was more than
taken by the Ashursts, the Stansfelds, the Peter Taylors, the Shaens,
the Mallesons, the Nathans, the Milner-Gibsons. When the day's work
was over, he would generally spend the evening at one or other of
their houses, most often with the Stansfelds, whose home at Bellevue
Lodge was within an easy walk from his lodgings. Gradually he came to
have a large outside circle of acquaintances. He corresponded with
Grote and Mrs Gaskell; the Brownings, J. S. Mill, Jowett, Swinburne,
Cairnes, Miss Martineau, probably Dickens were among the people he
met.[19]
With these friendships a new light and happiness came to his life.
Probably, too, the consciousness of having played a great part nobly
added a new touch of dignity and gentleness. "The indescribable look
of suffering for others," noted one who met him now after a ten years'
interval, "has disappeared, and he is now a man full of experience,
patience, and hope." "The Roman revolution," wrote Carlyle to Emerson,
"has made a man of him,--quite brightened up ever since." All the
human sweetness in him blossomed out. His friends provided the home
care, which he had lost, since he left his mother and sisters at Genoa
twenty years ago; and he loved to repay them by many little marks of
affection, never forgetting birthdays, buying presents of books and
jewelry out of his slender purse, taking them to the Opera, where his
acquaintance with the great Italian singers sometimes put boxes at his
disposal. In his evenings at the Stansfelds he was often full of
merry fun; he could tell a story well, all the more piquantly for his
Italicisms. One favourite anecdote (he had told it to Mrs Carlyle) was
how he baffled an undertaker, who brought a coffin by mistake to his
landlady's, and refused to take it away. "My dear," he said, no doubt
with his sweet gravity, "we have not here a dead." Or he would, when
quite alone with the family, sing to his guitar, or finger out on it
the score of some favourite opera. His native gentleness came out in
his kindness to children and animals. He does not seem to have been
naturally very fond of children, but, when among them, he made himself
easily at home. Some French children at a house which he visited, who
got into disgrace when Louis Blanc came to see them, were always good
with Mazzini, "because he was so kind and never failed to enquire
after the dolls." They loved to sit and listen to his talk, not that
they understood him, but because the beautiful voice fascinated them.
With dogs and cats and birds he was always happy. He would make one of
his hostesses angry, because he insisted on feeding her dog at dinner.
"But, my dear," he would say, "I make Bruno happy." Ledru Rollin and
he, once talking, probably, of the European revolution, put out their
cigars, because the smoke made a dog uncomfortable. His most constant
companions were his tame linnets and canaries. He had netting over the
windows, so that they could fly about his room at liberty; and
visitors would generally find a bird or two perched on his head or
shoulders, or hopping among his papers, inured to the thick tobacco
smoke, in which they and he lived.
He was a brilliant talker, because he was in earnest and his thoughts
were clear, at all events to himself. There was no trace of effort or
affectation; he was always just himself and never played a part. He
would speak with a prophet's simplicity and conviction of his
religious faith and the destinies of man, talking vivaciously,
tenaciously, passionately sometimes, with the authority of one who had
no thought of self and had lived and suffered for his creed. Some of
his hosts were the champions of every struggling cause, and the
conversation turned naturally to American slavery or women's rights or
nationality or cooperation. Music and poetry were favourite subjects
with him, and he would contend pugnaciously in mock-earnestness for
the superiority of Meyerbeer over Rossini, or inveigh to his heart's
content against the abominated doctrine of "art for the sake of art."
He once, when dining with Mr and Mrs William Shaen, forgot his dinner
in his eagerness to convert his hostess from the heresy; and when
pressed to eat, pleaded that he had something else to do, for "here is
Mrs Shaen travelling to perdition as fast as she can, and I must save
her soul." He spoke English now well and fluently, but,--unlike his
English writing, which was rarely unidiomatic,--with many little
Italicisms. Among those he seldom met, he was sometimes nervous and
silent; at other times, perhaps from the same nervousness, he would
monopolize the conversation, and was remorseful afterwards. Once, many
years after this time, he met Jowett, and talked uninterruptedly for
two hours, Jowett listening silently. When Jowett went, he observed,
"he made me talk all the time, and I have no notion what he thought
of it." Jowett, made careful notes of what he said, and years
afterwards remarked, in allusion to their meeting, "Mazzini was a man
of genius, but too much under the influence of two abstract ideas, God
and the principle of nationality." He thought, though, very highly of
him. "He was an enthusiast, a visionary," he said, "but he was a very
noble character, and had a genius far beyond that of ordinary
statesmen. Though not a statesman, I think that his reputation will
increase as time goes on, when that of most statesmen disappears."
With those, who knew him well, constraining was the influence of this
man, who spoke with authority of life and God and duty. Young people
at all events, who came under the spell of those eyes, and heard the
vibrating voice speak with passionate earnestness of the deep things
of God, felt for him an awe and veneration, such as few, if any, of
his generation inspired. Here was one who had given all for his ideal,
who had taken poverty for his bride, yet without self-righteousness,
too sad at the world's sin and struggle to be aught but humble; one
too, who had lived on a great stage, who was helping to remodel
Europe, a great thinker, a great moral teacher, yet with infinite
concern for the trials and temptations of some puzzled soul. "Thou
noble Mazzini," said Clough after brief knowledge of his life at Rome.
Much deeper was the feeling of those, who had the privilege of close
companionship. And, though, perhaps, it would be difficult to prove
it, it is probable that he has left no inconsiderable impress on
English thought. Here and there one finds strong traces of his
influence on men, who have helped to mould the best thought among us
in the last forty years. "Mazzini is the true teacher of our age,"
said Arnold Toynbee. Never, certainly, did age more need his high
idealism to teach a nobler rule in national and private life.
* * * * *
His literary work at this time was not remarkable. He was "still
praying God to grant him, when Italy had become a nation, two years of
hermit life," when he could write his long-cherished book on religion
and a popular history of Italian nationality. But the hope of ever
writing them was gradually fading. He was too absorbed through all
this period by political propagandism, and in his controversial
writings of these years he is generally far from being at his best.
The latter chapters of his _Duties of Man_, however, date from this
decade. He seems, despite his busy life, to have found a good deal of
time for reading. His writings on the Slav question are evidently the
result of careful study. Apart from political reading, English
literature seems to have claimed his interests. Byron was still to him
the greatest of English poets, and he read Byroniana with the zest of
a devotee. He could not forgive England for her neglect of her "only
poet who will live in times to come." "I wish," he once wrote, "I had
time to write before dying a book on Byron, and abuse all England, a
few women excepted, for the way she treats one of her greatest souls
and minds." He was keenly interested in the controversy on Byron's
treatment of his wife, refusing to believe that the husband was the
more in fault, but owning himself too indiscriminating an admirer to
be a fair judge.[20] He would contrast him with Wordsworth and
Coleridge, criticizing the latter as contemplative poets, living
remote from action among their lakes and mountains,--which proves that
he had not read Wordsworth's patriotic sonnets. He liked Chatterton in
a way, drawn doubtless to him by his sad end and de Vigny's drama; "I
have always," he writes, "had a sort of fondness for him, as I have
for crushed flowers." Among contemporary poets Mrs Browning was
probably his favourite. He reads _Aurora Leigh_, "admiring it very
much, only wishing from time to time that she had written it in
beautiful prose than--passages excepted--in neglected poetry."
Browning himself he is said to have read and admired. But perhaps he
alludes to him when he writes, "the form in England begins to be
systematically wrong, I think."
Meanwhile he had resumed his strong interest in English life and
politics, stimulated no doubt by the keen thinkers he moved among, but
always preserving his own original outlook. On the whole, his was not
a very appreciative criticism. Sincerely and increasingly as he
admired the freedom and seriousness of English ways, he keenly felt
the decay of our religious life, and, what he regarded as its
consequence, the selfishness and want of principle in our foreign
policy. His knowledge of Protestantism was never very deep or
sympathetic; but he knew enough of it to apply his own tests of
religious vitality. He condemned it for its soul-killing formalism; he
showed how it sinned against itself, when it ceased to be concerned
with men as citizens; he poured scorn on the Bible Societies, that
tried to proselytize his countrymen, and made no sign, when he and
other Italians had fought at Rome for liberty of conscience. It was to
this want of true religion, that he charged our insular selfishness.
He detested the Cobdenites. "The 'peace-men' have no principle." "Your
Peace Societies," he wrote in an open letter to "the people of
England," "allowing God's law and Godlike human life to be
systematically crushed on the two-thirds of Europe,--your _believers_
in liberty as the only pledge for man's responsibility, allying
themselves with despots,--your Christians fighting for the maintenance
of Mahommedan law on European populations,--seem to me to be the
reverse of religious." If England gave no helping hand to the young
nationalities to which belonged the future, she would find herself in
twenty years shut out from the sympathies and alliances and markets of
the Continent. He vigorously condemned the Crimean War, and took his
stand with the few, who tried to save England from that colossal
blunder. Not that he objected to war with the oppressor of the Poles.
But a war, which might have been a crusade for the downtrodden peoples
of the East, had ranged England, once the champion of liberty, on the
side of Turkey and Austria. The alliance with the tyrant of Italy and
Hungary "took from the war whatever made it sacred in the eyes of God
and man." It pledged English backing for the evilest of Continental
despotisms. It robbed the war of any principle, and "war is the
greatest of crimes, when it is not waged for the benefit of mankind,
for the sake of a great truth to enthrone or of a great lie to
entomb." He "bowed before" the heroism of the army, "the quiet,
silent devotedness, with which the nation accepts all the sacrifices
inseparable from a war"; but "the policy of your war," he said, "is
absolutely immoral, how can you hope for victory?" How different had
it been, had England avoided the dishonouring touch of Austria, and
sought her ally in a Polish revolution.
Mazzini's interest in English society and politics was, like
everything else except his friendships, turned to the use of his own
country. He expected three results from his English propagandism,--to
secure for Italy the moral support of English opinion and the English
press, to influence the foreign policy of the country in her favour,
and to obtain money for his insurrectionary schemes. He worked on the
traditional sympathy for Italy, and tried to turn it from its belief
in Piedmont to his own revolutionary and democratic programme. He
appealed to the anti-Papal feeling of the country, and played on the
theme that a free Italy would allow fair play for Protestant missions.
With men of the Manchester School he argued that free trade would
follow free government; with the working classes he spoke of the
common interests of working men the world over. His own friends he
constantly enlisted in his schemes, and made large levies on their
private purses. "It makes my hair stand on end," said one of them--a
well-known politician--afterwards, "to think of what I did at the
suggestion of that man." Public opinion he hoped to influence through
the Society of the Friends of Italy, founded in the autumn of 1851 by
the men, who had promoted the People's International League four years
before,--James Stansfeld, Peter Taylor, William Ashurst, William
Shaen. Some of the best English Liberals of the day were on the
committee,--William Byles of Bradford, Joseph Cowen, George Dawson,
John Forster, W. E. Forster, J. A. Froude, G. J. Holyoake, William
Howitt, Douglas Jerrold, Walter Savage Landor, G. H. Lewes, W. J.
Linton, David Masson, Edward Miall, Professor Newman. Mazzini
generally, if not always, spoke at their annual meetings,--with
intense nervousness, for he was not yet sufficient master of English
to speak it fluently, and he "could not think without a pen in his
hand." "I cannot understand people," he writes, "who can prepare a
speech or article walking up and down their room or garden. I could
walk about a day without an idea entering my head." His speeches, none
the less, seem to have been eloquent and successful, his manner being,
as the newspapers reported, "most exciting." The Society suspended
work, when the Crimean War broke out, and was re-constituted again at
the end of 1856. As far as money went, Mazzini got less than he hoped
from his English agitation. A few friends gave generously, but there
was little of the response that came to Garibaldi's appeal a few years
later. But the Society did much to win English opinion, if not for
Mazzini's own special schemes, at all events for the bigger question
of Italian liberty. The _Leader_, the _Daily News_, the _Morning
Advertiser_ opened their columns, and did something to counteract the
anti-Italian bias of the _Times_. In 1857 a fairly vigorous agitation,
especially in the North and Scotland, carried on the work that
Kossuth's meetings had begun, and roused a vehement popular feeling
against Austria.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] I owe these particulars to one who knew him well, and to a
contemporary description in a private letter.
[19] It has often been supposed that Browning had Mazzini in mind,
when he wrote _The Italian in England_. I know of no evidence for or
against this; but the poem was written in 1845, when the
letter-opening affair had made Mazzini prominently public. Mazzini is
said to have made a translation of it.
[20] See below, pp. 359-360.
Chapter IX
Mazzini and Cavour
1850-1857. AETAT 45-52.
The Piedmontese School--Mazzini and Cavour--The French
alliance--Mazzini and Manin--The theory of the
dagger--Conspiracies--The Genoese plot of 1857.
It is painful to turn from Mazzini in England, the great-hearted
friend, the prophetic thinker, the generous worker in the cause of
man, to his political action in Italy. Had he yielded to the advice of
some of his friends and left politics at this time for literature, his
fame were brighter and his life more fruitful in pure good. His work
for Italy was done; he had conquered it for more than half his creed.
Half its best men had been nurtured on his writings, had learned from
him to believe in independence and unity, though still they spoke of
unity in whispers, and he himself knew not how far opinion had
advanced. The day of conspiracy had passed; free Piedmont was slowly
marshalling the forces of the nation for another and decisive war. The
republic became impossible on the day, when Victor Emmanuel swore
loyalty to the constitution, and thereby proclaimed himself champion
of Italian aspirations. The one thing needful was to rally every
section of patriots to the one possible flag. To attack the monarchy
now only hurt the bigger issue, lost sight of the great goal in mists
of schism, brought bitterness and dissension where discipline was all
important for the day of trial. No one was more insistent than Mazzini
on the need of discipline, but in practice he conditioned it in these
years by being himself leader. One who found it so difficult to
compromise, could hardly follow.
Had Mazzini thought the republic the more important issue, his action
would at least have been consistent. But he had deliberately set unity
above it, and independence from Austria above either. A saner
politician would have been silent on the minor question. But Mazzini
could never long repress his republican teaching. It was partly that,
save in moments of comparative lucidity, he convinced himself that
Piedmont would never make a cast for unity, that the Austrians could
not be expelled but by a great rising of the people. Had he gauged
Italian sentiment more accurately, he would have spared himself the
error, would have lost his deep distrust in Piedmont and its king, his
bitter animosity to Cavour, his pitiable exaggeration of the strength
of his own party. But an exile lives in necessary half-knowledge. The
government of Piedmont, as exclusive and intolerant as himself, barred
from wholesome activity in his own land the man, who, had he been at
Turin in daily contact with men of other parties, would have been a
mighty force for good; and to them, more than to Mazzini himself,
belongs the pity of his wasted patriotism. Not but what in any
circumstances Mazzini found it hard to recognize new facts. The
prophet is by nature inflexible; and Mazzini's whole creed was a thing
of such passionate intensity, each part had twisted itself so
inextricably round the rest, that it cost a wrench to part with any
detail. "I may, of course, be mistaken," he wrote of his political
creed, "but mine is a matter of deep conviction, and it is impossible
for me to modify or alter it." He was incapable of taking advice; if
men differed from him, he assailed them bitterly instead of examining
the reasons for their dissent. And the partisan, that was always
latent in him, grew till it obscured the statesman. He who was so
insistent that no one had a right to set his own opinions above the
people's common sense, was the last to bow to the popular verdict,
when it declared against himself. Henceforth Mazzini was more foe than
friend to his own ideals. Much he still did to stir his countrymen to
strenuous and high-thinking patriotism. Though he aimed beyond their
ken, he shot more high than all the politicians. But in the great
march he broke the ranks, and made the task more difficult for men,
who, with a patriotism as true and with a saner strategy, had set
their faces for the same high goal.
Retirement was however impossible for a man of Mazzini's temperament.
He was too feverishly impatient for his country's salvation to only
stand and wait. Inaction seemed treachery to the cause of
righteousness. Both in public and private life he insisted that
"thought and action" must go hand in hand, that a man had no right to
confine his energies to literature and decline his part in practical
political work. He criticized intolerantly the men in Italy, who wrote
patriotic literature instead of plotting insurrection. "Actions," he
said, "are the books of the masses," especially in a country where
the majority were illiterate. He in fact, like every other patriot,
was maddened by the savage tyranny, with which the Austrians and the
Pope and the King of Naples were scourging his unhappy country,--"the
insolent triumph of brute force, the exile and death of our brothers
in two-thirds of Europe, the long weeping of their sisters and
mothers, the lying, the espionage, the corruption, the cry of the
oppressed masses, the teaching of those who fight and die in silence,
the shame that makes us blush for those who submit and sell themselves
in despair." "Such a state of things," he wrote to an English friend
after the Mantuan executions, "cannot last, must not last. It is far
better to die in a supreme glorious battle, fought under the eye of
God with our national banner unfurled, than to see the best of our
land falling one by one under the axe of the executioner." It were sin
to wait, and he saw no need for waiting. He was right of course in his
belief that a nation, which had once so nearly won its freedom, would
try for it again. "The dreams of violence," he said, "are brief, and
infallible the triumph of a people, that hopes and fights and suffers
for justice and holy liberty." He had persuaded himself that the
masses were only waiting for a signal to rise and throw themselves on
Austria. As so often in his logic, the thing ought to be and therefore
must be. He knew indeed that he could not count on the middle classes
for insurrection. The men, who had been the strength of Young Italy,
had gone over almost in mass to the Piedmontese School, and he did not
spare them his reproaches. But he hoped in the working men. While the
Moderates hardly noticed them, he saw what stuff lay in the despised
and misunderstood Italian artisans. But he exaggerated his influence
with them. "They are mine, devotedly mine, to blindness." Individuals,
indeed, among them he won, as he won men of every class, by his
simple, noble earnestness. But except in and round Genoa their numbers
at this time were few.
It was an impossible policy. It had nearly succeeded in 1848, when
Europe was in flames, but Mazzini would not see how radically
circumstances had changed. There was no serious hope now that a
general movement of European democracy would divide the forces of
Austria; and his efforts to bring together again the democrats of
different countries, especially of Italy and Hungary, had no results,
at all events till in after years. The resuscitation of Austria, the
evidence of her military strength, the Second Empire in France, the
resignation of Palmerston, the collapse of the German democrats had
killed any early hope of a successful war, even though all the armed
strength of the nation, regular armies and volunteers alike, were put
into it. It was true that the nation could win its freedom even now,
if it sought it at all cost, if it were willing to face the awful
sacrifice,--the mowing down of the undisciplined levies, the wasting
of the country,--and fight through defeat to victory. But Mazzini's
hopes shipwrecked on the fact,--and bitterly he came to recognize
it,--that the Italians, like most other peoples, were not a nation of
martyr-heroes, that the peasants had little active patriotism, that
thousands in other classes cared more for church than country, that
even among the rest there was little of the grim tenacity of
Americans or Dutch or of the fierce unconquerableness of Greeks and
Spaniards.
It was this that gave the Piedmontese party its justification. Timid
and conservative as it often was, it at all events recognized facts.
It saw that this undisciplined enthusiasm was not business, that in
the present condition of Europe another national rising meant another
and more terrible disaster, that each little revolt with its miserable
ending only tightened the tyranny and damped the patriots, that
Piedmont's first duty was to preserve its own liberty,--no light task
in itself,--that its next was to gather round it all the aspirations
of the country, discipline them and husband them, till the chance came
again to fight with a probability of victory. The Piedmontese had
learnt the lessons of 1848-49 very differently from their critic. To
them discipline was the one essential. Never again must dissension
about means paralyze the country in front of the enemy. And in the
interests of union they had small mercy for democratic theories, they
were prepared to be unfair to opponents and crush minorities. Victor
Emmanuel must be the figure-head of the movement and the Piedmontese
statesmen its leaders. Theoretically, of course, their policy was a
smaller one than Mazzini's. It had little of the poetry and idealism
of the movement, which he had helped to inspire. There was no majestic
vision of a people rising in its own spontaneous might and deciding
its destinies in a great national pact. It postulated encroachments on
democratic freedom. It was willing to buy alliances by concessions,
that abated the country's dignity. It veiled the great ideal of
Unity, and sought attainment by slow stages and crooked paths. But,
assuming that independence and unity were the great essentials,--and
on this the best men of the party were at one with Mazzini,--it was on
its main lines the only possible policy. And it was a sense of this,
that rallied the great mass of patriots to the flag of Piedmont, and
left Mazzini to protest almost alone, a leader without followers.
The antagonism of the two schools was typified in Cavour and Mazzini.
They were very different in temperament:--the one an aristocrat by
training, a genial hater of theories, an opportunist content to feel
his way by little steps, to wait patiently year after year rather than
risk failure, making success his object, with small scruple as to
means or personal honour, so his country stood to gain; the other a
man of greater nature and culture but less capacity, democrat of
democrats, distrusting king and nobles and middle classes, passionate
and outspoken in his friendships and his enmities, the uncompromising,
inflexible, restless apostle, who would conquer armies by a principle
of abstract righteousness, too dazzled by the future to see the
mundane obstacles and hard facts about his feet. Cavour had a
supercilious contempt for Mazzini and his doctrines; he probably
regarded him as a nuisance, and would have gladly seen him shot. His
business was to win Italy, if he could do so without risking overmuch;
but he was minister of a crown and would do nothing to endanger it. He
had convinced himself, save at moments of impatient optimism, that
only through a French alliance could Austria be driven out. For this
he was willing to humour Louis Napoleon, to stoop to trickery, to be
brutal to the republicans. He would use the revolutionaries if he
could, but it must be at their own risk and for the greater glory of
the monarchy. Cavour, hiding his ideals and working in mists of
diplomacy, chose to be misunderstood; and it is no wonder that Mazzini
generally read him on the surface, and refused to see how much their
programmes had in common. To him Cavour's slow patient policy came of
mere weakness and inconstancy of purpose. He thought of him as a timid
diplomatist, half-leagued with the despotisms, more careful of
convention than of right, incapable of aspiring to Italy and Rome. It
was only late in life, that he recognised his statesmanship. He hated
him as a truckler to Napoleon; he thought that he favoured Napoleon's
cousin, Lucien Murat, for the throne of Naples, that he held the
Emperor's friendship of more account than Italy. He never realised
that under the careful statesman lay a bold and eager spirit, that at
the fitting moment might be as revolutionary as himself.
Two men of such diverse character could probably have never worked
cordially together. But under other circumstances they might have
helped and supplemented one another. It was a cruel fate that, owing
to Mazzini's exile and the consequent impossibility of mutual
understanding, they should have wasted so much in a bitter and
unnecessary antagonism. Mazzini no doubt had much provocation for his
fixed hostility. He, who had given all for country, was an exile from
the land he loved, seeing it only in rare and secret visits, stealing
to his mother's grave by night "like a man bent on a crime," his
followers persecuted, his apologies suppressed. But he painfully
exaggerated the deficiencies of the rival school. When he asked the
Piedmontese government, "Are you with Austria or against her?" when he
branded the royalists as being, "next to Austria, the great obstacle
to Italian freedom," he showed a partisan's unwillingness or
incapacity to grasp the facts. His watch, in Giusti's phrase, had
stopped at 1848; and he could not see how radically Cavour and the new
King had changed the spirit of Piedmontese policy. Victor Emmanuel, he
confidently asserted, though "better than his ministers," "neither
wishes to be nor can be King of Italy"; it was "an absolute
impossibility" that he would try, unless compelled, to win Italian
freedom. Mazzini was on sounder ground, when he fulminated against the
French alliance. Others besides him foresaw the difficulty of
reconciling Louis Napoleon's timidity with Italian aspirations, the
recurring temptation to duplicity, if Italian statesmen had to quiet
his suspicions and fears. He well said that it stained the name of
Italy to seek salvation from the man who had crushed the Roman
Republic and made the _coup d'état_. But Mazzini never faced the hard
fact, that no otherwise could Austria be driven out. And his blindness
grew partly out of the sheer personal hatred of the Emperor, which he
did not attempt to conceal. Only in later years he came to see at all,
and never fully, that Louis Napoleon, however timidly, wished to
remodel Europe on his own principle of nationality. He never
understood how real was the Emperor's good-will to Italy, how far his
foreign policy outstripped his people's. He thought he had first-hand
information as to Napoleon's schemes, and the first-hand information
was always incomplete and misleading. Nor were his antipathies limited
to the Emperor. "My antagonism to the French," he writes in 1850,
"grows stronger every day." He had a bitter controversy with Louis
Blanc and the French socialists. But, strangely, he had no word of
condemnation for the French Catholics, who had prompted the expedition
to Rome and were ever pulling back Napoleon in his more generous
designs. At a later time, at all events, he quite underrated their
strength.
Was compromise with Piedmont impossible? Daniel Manin, the republican
Triumvir at Venice in 1849, whose rule there stands out with Mazzini's
own at Rome as one of the most brilliant pages in the history of the
century, founded in these years a National Society, with a unitarian
but royalist programme. He recognised with the Piedmontese politicians
the need of discipline, and that discipline could only come by
accepting Victor Emmanuel as nominal leader. But he conditioned his
conversion to royalism by the King's acceptance of Unity. "Make
Italy," he wrote to him, "and we are with you; if not, not." Manin
hoped to win Mazzini to his programme. He, like him, had been a
republican; he was a man of noblest private life, of sincerest
patriotism; he was striving earnestly for Unity; he fretted almost as
much as did Mazzini himself at Cavour's slow manoeuvring. Why should
not Mazzini abandon his impossible dream of the republic, and work
together for the bigger end with a man as democratic as himself?
Mazzini refused. All that he would offer was "the neutral flag" of
1848,--a promise to leave the settlement of the question between
monarchy and republic to a future Constituent of the freed nation. The
position was plausible enough, but there were fatal objections to it.
It encouraged the federalists to agitate; it must necessarily alienate
the King; it would make discipline more difficult than ever. And, when
the country, as Mazzini himself began to recognise, was declaring
unmistakably for the monarchy, to keep the question nominally open was
a homage more to the letter than to the spirit of popular sovereignty.
* * * * *
As a kind of appendix to the controversy, Mazzini had his famous
argument with Manin on "the theory of the dagger." In 1856 Manin wrote
an open letter, attacking the theory as "the great enemy of Italy." He
sent his letter to the _Times_, provoking Mazzini's retort that his
"sense of personal dignity and respect for his country should have
prevented him from writing to such a paper." Manin did not
specifically mention Mazzini, but the reference was understood, and
Mazzini indignantly replied. It is hardly necessary to-day to answer
the charge that Mazzini encouraged political assassination. He held
indeed that there were rare occasions when it was right,--"exceptional
moments in the life and history of nations, not to be judged by normal
rules of human justice, and in which the actors can take their
inspiration only from their conscience and God." Tyrannicide was
justifiable, when it was the only means, and the successful means, of
staying an intolerable oppression. It was a commonplace to glorify
Judith and Brutus and Charlotte Corday; it was hypocrisy, he said,
begging his own postulates, to condemn for the same actions the men
who tried to kill Louis Napoleon or Ferdinand of Naples.[21] In every
other case he "abominated" political assassination. It is, he says, "a
crime, if attempted with the idea of revenge or punishment; a crime
when there are other roads to freedom open; culpable and mistaken,
when directed against a man, whose tyranny does not descend into the
grave with him." When, for instance, Cavour charged him with plotting
to kill Victor Emmanuel, he indignantly replied that the King's life
was "protected, first by the existence of a constitution, next by the
uselessness of the crime." With one exception only, he was loyal to
his profession. Young Italy explicitly abandoned the Carbonaro
tradition of assassinating traitors, and so far as its founder could
control the society, it never sinned against the precept. The forged
charge of the French government in 1833 that he ordered the murder of
some spies at Rodez was amply exposed, when Sir James Graham repeated
it in 1845, though the Paris correspondent of the _Times_ was not
ashamed to drag the libel up again nineteen years afterwards. When
Triumvir at Rome, Mazzini vigorously repressed the assassinations
there and at Ancona. He was absolutely ignorant of Orsini's attempt to
assassinate Louis Napoleon, though he disdained to defend himself from
the suspicion of complicity, partly because he scorned the puny
libellers of the press, partly because "Europe needed a bugbear to
frighten it and his name would do as well as any other." The charges
that he was privy to Tibaldi's and Greco's plots against the Emperor
were certainly in the latter case, and almost as certainly in the
former, inventions of the French police. Late in life, he vigorously
discouraged plots to assassinate the Pope and Victor Emmanuel, and
stopped another to explode six bombs at a ball given at Venice by the
Austrian Viceroy. In one case only--in early life--Mazzini was in some
sense an accomplice in an assassination plot. In the midst of the
preparations for the Savoy raid, a young Corsican, Antonio
Gallenga,[22] who afterwards settled in England and was for some time
special correspondent of the _Times_ in Italy, came to him with a plan
to assassinate Charles Albert in revenge for the Genoese executions.
Mazzini tried to dissuade him, but at last persuaded himself that
Gallenga was an appointed agent of Providence "to teach despots that
their life may depend on the will of a single man." He gave Gallenga
the means of travelling to Turin and sent him a dagger; but he seems
to have given little more thought to the matter, perhaps concluding on
reflection that, as proved to be the case, Gallenga had no stuff in
him for the business.[23]
Manin's indictment aimed equally at the use of the knife in popular
insurrections. Mazzini's answer here was easier but less ingenuous in
its applications. It was cant, he properly replied, to call it no
murder, if a soldier shot an enemy with his rifle, and murder, if an
artisan conspirator stabbed an Austrian soldier with the only weapon
he possessed. Unfortunately he weakened his argument by extending this
theory of "irregular warfare" to cases, like those of Rossi or
Marinovich, where men had been killed treacherously in revolutionary
times for political or private vengeance. Perhaps he was defiantly
exaggerating, for before this he had strongly reprobated Rossi's
murder; probably he did not know the facts of Marinovich's case. It
would at all events be very hard to justify him, when he commissioned
Orsini to find men to surprise and kill the Austrian officers at Milan
as the first step in an insurrection. It was no lower in its ethics
than some established rules of war, but it came sadly below his own
more noble estimate of the sacredness of human life.
* * * * *
While Mazzini's theories kicked against the pricks, his political work
of these years is a pitiable tale of noble effort all in vain, of high
purpose spoilt by obstinacy and incapacity. In the autumn of 1850 he
founded a National Italian Committee, which claimed to be a kind of
legal successor to the Assembly of the Roman Republic. Practically,
though not ostensibly, it was a republican organisation. "The
manifesto is moderate," Mazzini wrote privately to Italy, "but behind
the manifesto am I, which means, I think, the republic." The ambiguity
doomed it from the start. The straiter republicans attacked it as
departing from the faith. The much vaster host of democrats, who were
learning to believe in the Piedmontese monarchy, held carefully aloof.
Others revolted at Mazzini's "intolerable dictatorship"; and the
charge was half a true one. He proudly and sincerely replied to the
taunt of personal ambition, but now, as always, he exacted an
impossible obedience from his fellow-workers. In Italy the society
found a certain following; and Mazzini boasted half-seriously to his
friends that the republican flag would be flying on the Quirinal next
year. But outside some of the Lombard towns the movement had little
real strength; its organisation was too loose to be effective; and one
by one the exiles on the Committee drifted away, till in 1853 it died
a natural death. The same fate befell a "National Loan," which he had
started with the ambitious hope of raising an adequate fund for
insurrection. He issued bonds, which were to be honoured by the future
Italian state. It was to be "the first act of a financial war, which
would prove that the few monarchical or aristocratic possessors of big
capitals can be matched by the collective power of the small capitals
of democracy." Apparently a good many of the bonds were taken up in
Italy, but the money they brought in seems to have been soon exhausted
in the expenses of agitation and conspiracy.
Up to this time Mazzini had been inclined to postpone insurrection,
till, at all events in his own judgment, it had a fair prospect of
success. Unluckily at this moment he was approached by a revolutionary
society among the artisans at Milan. He was hesitating whether to
encourage them to action, when the ruthless execution by the Austrians
of some conspirators at Mantua maddened the men, and they decided on
revolt whether he supported them or not. He was very anxious about the
scheme and far from hopeful, but he was too generous and impatient to
refuse help now. He did what he could to find them money and
sympathisers, and late in 1852 he went in disguise to Locarno to
complete the preparations. The rising was fixed for the Carnival on
February 6, and on the eve of it Mazzini was on the frontier at
Chiasso, ready to go on to Milan, as soon as the call came. Had the
rising been better organized, it had some small chance of success. As
it was, Mazzini learnt at Chiasso that it had smoked itself out in a
confused and bloody scuffle. The business was disastrous to him, and
he came out with reputation badly damaged. The responsibility was
fixed on him, and he accepted it, though he had only been drawn into a
plan that others made. His friends in Italy had published a
two-years-old appeal from Kossuth urging the Hungarian regiments in
the garrison to revolt, and whether or not Kossuth authorized its
publication now, had made unjustifiable alterations in the wording.
Mazzini was responsible, if at all, only in not taking precautions to
prevent the issue, but he did not make matters better, when he pleaded
that men, who were risking their lives for their country, were "not
amenable by strictly punctilious rules of normal times."[24] The
fatuousness and mismanagement of the whole business, the pity of the
wasted lives, a feeling that these ill-judged risings hindered the
cause and damaged it in the eyes of Europe, hastened the stampede from
his own party. He still kept a considerable though reduced hold on
the artisans in a few towns of the North, but among the middle classes
his following shrank to nearly nothing.
Even he almost despaired. He felt himself "accursed by all," the
"scapegoat on whom all the faults of Israel will be heaped with a
curse." The Piedmontese press loaded him with shameful scurrility; and
there seems to have been an attempt to assassinate him. He fretted
with the sense of failure, with something like remorse at the
sufferings of the conspirators under the Austrians' brutal vengeance.
But instead of taking the moral of the failure home, he broke into
invective against the Piedmontese, and only plunged more desperately
into schemes of insurrection. He had been misled into suspecting an
understanding between France and Piedmont to create French
protectorates in the South and Centre; and he was eager to checkmate
it by forcing on the movement for unity and a revolutionary war with
Austria. He had two main plans of operation. For one, the
revolutionising of South Italy, he could, though anxious for immediate
action, at present only sow the seed. The other was to organise
guerilla fighting in the Alps and Northern Apennines and encourage the
Lombard cities to revolt. He had persuaded himself that the
fast-maturing Eastern question gave a favourable chance of attacking
Austria. Her policy of see-saw between the Western Powers and Russia
had won her the ill-will of both sides, and she had been obliged to
denude her Italian garrisons to concentrate troops on the Russian
frontier. Mazzini had vague hopes, too, of help from America.
Kossuth's lecturing tour in the States in 1852 had excited an angry
feeling against Austria. The American government was irritated by the
unfriendly attitude of France and England, and perhaps had its designs
on Cuba; and Mazzini hoped that it would encourage the revolutionary
forces in Europe, in order to keep the Powers occupied at home. George
N. Sanders, the American Consul in London, gave a dinner to him and
Kossuth and Ledru Rollin, and healths were drunk to a future alliance
of America with a federation of the free peoples of Europe.[25]
Mazzini's hopes were high. He studied military maps with Kossuth and
Ledru Rollin at St John's Wood. He went to Paris and Italy in 1854 in
disguise, probably spending most of his time at Genoa, and perhaps on
his way paying a visit to Giuditta Sidoli, now silver-haired, and
sweet and gracious as ever. His movements worried all the police of
Italy and France and Switzerland, and his secret journeys had their
romance of clever disguises and audacious escapes. A popular rhyme of
the time, attributed to Dall'Ongaro, said:--
Where is Mazzini? Ask the pines
Upon the Alps and Apennines.
He is, wherever traitors cower
In terror for their fatal hour;
Where'er men wait impatiently
To give their blood for Italy.
Mazzini wrote home to England that the people were fretting for
action, and would have risen already, "had he not been exceptionally
prudent and calm"; in two months more he hoped to have sapped the
influence of the royalists, and then "the field will be mine." In
August he was in the Engadin, arranging for insurrection in the
Valtellin and the Como hill country. But the Swiss police broke up the
conspirators, and Mazzini narrowly escaped capture as he came by the
Julier diligence to Chur.
His hopes of Austrian isolation were soon dashed. Austria nominally
joined the Western alliance, and Piedmont followed her into it and
sent a contingent to the Crimea. He was bitterly disappointed, and
relieved himself in angry criticisms on English and Piedmontese
policy. Against Piedmont he turned with sheer passionate bitterness.
Cavour's adhesion to the alliance puzzled his own followers; and even
now it is not easy to be sure as to its wisdom, still less as to its
morality. But at all events everyone else recognised that the Crimea
was intended to be "the road to Lombardy." Mazzini, blinded by his
partisanship, saw only proof that Cavour's sympathies were more with
the oppressors than the oppressed.
For the moment all seemed to him a hopeless blank. His soul was
"wasting in a decline," and he longed to find mechanical work to drug
the pain, or break into some desperate action. "I am dreaming of,
raving, raging about action, physical action," he wrote. "I am sick of
the world and all its concerns, and want to _protest_." "Literally,"
he wrote to another friend, "life weighs on me. My feeling towards my
country, right or wrong, is intolerable. If I were younger, I would be
on a mountain to protest, with twenty or thirty more. As I am, I can
only eat myself away, and pretend to smile, to avoid torturing
others." Next year (1856) his hopes suddenly revived. There seemed a
chance that Cavour would secretly assist an insurrection against the
Duke of Modena in the Carrara country. Through this and the two
following years the premier had intermittent plans to foment a rising
there, which would lead to annexation of the borderland, or be twisted
into a _casus belli_ with Austria and force Louis Napoleon to send his
army across the Alps. He allowed Mazzini to visit Genoa, and carried
on communications with him there. What were the details of the plot,
we have no means of knowing; but at all events it was impossible to
come to terms. "The Piedmontese government," Mazzini wrote to England,
"are a plague. I am indirectly in contact with them and trying all
sorts of concessions, but it is of no use. My own position is
extremely delicate and difficult between their party and the extreme
men of our own. I have now sent a sort of ultimatum to them, which
will compromise them, if accepted, or leaves me free, if not." When
the rupture came, he turned to his plans for revolutionising the
South. For two years past he had been industriously connecting the
threads of conspiracy, that Crispi and others had laid in Sicily and
Naples. He had met Garibaldi in London, and discussed plans with him
for an expedition to the island; and Garibaldi had promised to go, if
the Sicilians revolted and Cavour was willing to cooperate. Again
there seemed a hope that the premier would secretly assist. Every
patriot saw the danger of Napoleon's fitful scheme to put his cousin,
Lucien Murat, on the throne of Naples; and Cavour, though he dared not
openly oppose, would gladly see the scheme checkmated, and he had his
own plans for adding Sicily to Victor Emmanuel's kingdom. He seems to
have promised funds for Mazzini's design, but again from some
unexplained cause he drew back. Mazzini refused to give up his
scheme, and indeed the Genoese conspirators were too impatient for
action to desist, whether he wished it or not. He went to England to
raise money for the project, and returned to Genoa to mature it. Carlo
Pisacane, his friend and fellow-exile, a Neapolitan duke with
socialist theories that little accorded with his own, was to seize a
steamer plying between Genoa and Sardinia, and make for Calabria,
there to join hands with the insurgents in the South and raise the
country in the name of Unity. The plot was linked to a more
questionable plan. It was proposed that the conspirators, who stayed
behind, should seize the forts at Genoa and Leghorn and obtain
munitions to send on to Pisacane. Mazzini realised the peril of the
business, the risk of civil war, the certainty that the movement would
be understood as one for the republic rather than for unity. But he
easily allowed himself to be persuaded into it. It would, he thought,
at all events prove the solidarity of North and South, force on a war
with Austria, and prevent the French alliance; and he had a hardly
avowed hope that the movement might after all make for a republic. So,
taking careful precautions to avoid reprisals on the Genoese
conservatives, and prevent if possible a conflict with the troops, he
threw himself into the mad plot. Pisacane seized the _Cagliari_, and
went to his doom. Mazzini, finding that the government had scent of
the design on the forts, tried to stop it at the last moment; but it
was too late, and the fatuous attempt ended in some street fighting
and a little loss of life. The government struck at its
fellow-conspirators of a few months back with a severity, that did
little credit to its honesty. It deliberately misrepresented the
movement as anarchist. Mazzini and five more, who escaped, were
sentenced in contumacy to death; others were sent to long terms of
imprisonment. Mazzini took refuge in the house of the Marquis Ernesto
Pareto, a relative of the minister of 1848, who concealed him
successfully, though the police searched his house and probed the
mattresses and the Marchioness' wardrobes with their swords. The story
went that Mazzini, disguised as a footman, opened the door to the
police-officer who proved to be an old school-fellow and probably
recognised him. Some days after he walked out of the house without
disguise, arm-in-arm with a Genoese lady, asked the sentry for a light
for his cigar, and drove away unsuspected to Quarto, where he remained
in safe hiding, till the news of Pisacane's disaster reached him.
FOOTNOTES:
[21] Walter Savage Landor wrote to one of Mazzini's friends, promising
£95 for the family "of the first patriot, who asserts the dignity and
fulfils the duty of tyrannicide."
[22] _Alias_ Luigi Mariotti, writer of Italian grammar books for
English schools.
[23] For some of the evidence on these cases, I may refer to my
_History of Italian Unity_, II. 385-387. See also Uccellini,
_Memorie_, 209-210; Mazzini, _Lettere ad A. Giannelli_, 301, 437.
Signor Dagnino tells me from his personal knowledge that in 1864
Mazzini stopped a plot to blow up the Austrian Viceroy of Venetia.
[24] Mazzini's and Kossuth's letters on the subject are in the _Daily
News_ of February 19, March 2 and 4, 1853. See also Mazzini,
_Scritti_, VIII. 283-4. He seems to have made a disingenuous use of
another proclamation by Kossuth later in the year: see Bianchi,
_Vicende del Mazzinianismo_, 85. I hardly think that Mr Stillman's
statement in his _Union of Italy_, p. 275, can stand against Kossuth's
plain statement in the _Daily News_. Mr Stillman too is wrong as to
Mazzini's share in the rising. I am inclined on the whole to think
that he was justified in using Agostino's name; see _Daily News_,
February 17 and 20, 1853.
[25] Mr W. R. Thayer has kindly ascertained for me that there is
absolutely nothing in Sanders' correspondence in the U.S.A. Bureau of
Rolls, that relates either to Mazzini or Kossuth; but Saffi, who tells
the story of the dinner, was present at it himself. See Mazzini,
_Scritti_, IX. xciv, 60.
Chapter X
Unity Half Won
1858-1860. AETAT 53-55
The war of 1859--At Florence--Plans for the
South--Garibaldi's Expedition--Projected raid into
Umbria--At Naples.
Mazzini returned to England, weary and sad, but not discouraged, and
convinced that success was only a question of opportunity and
management. He recognised how strongly the tide was setting towards
the royalists, but he still thought he had the working classes with
him. Cavour's double play and the cruel repression of the Genoese plot
left him bitterer than ever against the monarchy and its men. "I have
never loved you," he wrote in an open letter to the premier; "now I
despise you." He attacked more angrily still the fast-cementing
alliance with France. The Emperor was maturing his plans to drive the
Austrians out of Italy. It was not, as Mazzini thought, mere policy
alone that moved him. No doubt, his waning prestige at home, and the
fear that another Orsini might arise, both had their influence; but he
was still true in a way to his nationalist ideals, and since he had
sacrificed Poland to the Russian alliance, he was the more eager to
free Italy and Hungary. Mazzini, through his private channels of
information, was among the first to have an inkling of the compact
between Cavour and the Emperor at Plombières, but, as usual, his
information was inaccurate. He believed, quite wrongly, as we know
now, that they had agreed to leave Venetia to Austria and give Central
Italy to Prince Napoleon, and that Cavour had offered to surrender the
parliamentary liberties of Piedmont as the price of Lombardy; he had
no knowledge that Napoleon had promised that half the Pope's territory
should pass to Victor Emmanuel's crown.
Events moved fast. In the spring of 1859, thanks to Cavour's
unscrupulous but supremely skilful diplomacy, war was imminent, and
all Italy was fretting for it. Cavour was hardy and shrewd enough to
use the revolutionary elements, on whose value Mazzini had laid
insistent stress. The volunteers flocked to Piedmont with Garibaldi
for their general, and, except for Mazzini and Crispi and a stranded
handful, the republicans declared definitely for Victor Emmanuel's
leadership. Even Mazzini was sometimes carried by the tide. He told
his English friends that royalists and republicans were aiming equally
at Unity; he appealed to the Piedmontese statesmen to pronounce for
the greater policy, and if the French alliance broke down, he was
prepared to support them. But he could not reconcile himself to the
hated Emperor's help. Shutting his eyes to the hard facts, he thought
that Piedmont could defeat Austria with no other allies than the
hesitating revolutionaries of Hungary. To ask assistance from a despot
blighted the country's self-respect; to win its freedom, save by its
own unaided strength, dishonoured it at the birth; and it were small
gain to change the tyranny of Austria for the domineering patronage of
France. "I am equally hostile to Austria and to Napoleon," he wrote;
"and my double aim is to get rid, if possible, of both." When war was
declared, Cavour and he both said, "the die is cast"; Cavour added,
"we have made history," Mazzini "we are beaten." But when the fighting
began, when, in spite of his previsions, the enthusiasm swept through
the land, and for a moment Louis Napoleon was, next to the king and
Garibaldi, the hero of his countrymen, he could not hold back. Be it
right or wrong, the best must be made of the war; it might yet, in the
end, make Italy. Modena and Parma, Romagna and Tuscany had driven out
their princes and declared for Victor Emmanuel's rule. While the
armies were winning Lombardy and Venetia, he wished to see the popular
forces overrun all the Centre and make an end of the Temporal Power.
He appealed to his friends at Naples to revolutionise the South,
though he urged that they should not annex themselves to Piedmont,
while the war lasted. After Solferino he was very hopeful. "The
Austrian domination in Italy," he said, "is at an end."
Suddenly came the great betrayal of Villafranca. Louis Napoleon,
afraid of defeat in Venetia, afraid of an attack from Prussia,
repentant of his promises to Cavour, made peace with Austria, and
abandoned Venetia to the enemy and Central Italy to the fugitive
princes. Mazzini took credit for prophesying it; and what came of the
Emperor's timidity and the real difficulties of the situation, he
regarded as the pre-determined treachery of Plombières. Relying again
on his imperfect private information, he thought he had discovered an
understanding between France and Russia to partition Europe into
spheres of influence, and that Villafranca was a prelude to a triple
alliance of the three Empires. He fulminated against "the European
_coup d'état_"; he appealed to English fears, and preached a league of
England, Prussia, and the smaller states in defence of Italian
freedom. At home he urged a truce to party feeling and the completing
of the work in despite of France and Austria. He voiced the feeling of
the country. Cavour had resigned in hot anger at the Emperor's
desertion; but his influence was still very powerful, and he and the
King and the men, who were at the head of affairs at Florence and
Modena, were no less determined than the democrats that at least
Central Italy should be saved. All through the autumn their obstinate
stand baffled the Emperor's half-hearted veto, and pushed on the
feeble men, who now held office at Turin. The key of the position was
at Florence, and Ricasoli, the stark Tuscan baron, who was practically
dictator there, believed with a faith as fearless as Mazzini's own
that Italian Unity, pregnant with mighty issues for the world, was
written in the decrees of God. He too detested Napoleon, and was
determined not to flinch for all his threats.
Mazzini hurried to Florence, and arrived there early in August. The
Piedmontese government, to its shame, had excluded the greatest of
living Italians from the amnesty, which it granted at the beginning of
the war; but Ricasoli allowed Mazzini to remain unmolested, on his
parole that his presence at Florence should not be publicly known.
There was not a little in common between the two men,--both stainless
in their private lives, brave, honest, single-minded patriots. They
were, indeed, too uncompromising to work together; but they sincerely
respected each other, and Ricasoli had none of the narrowness, that
made the Turin statesmen shrink from contact with a democrat.
Mazzini's policy was the same as it had been during the war. The
people must make the movement as far as possible their own. He
addressed to them a rhapsodical appeal to nerve themselves for the
great work. "You are called," he said, "to a task like the tasks of
God, the creation of a people." The free provinces of the Centre must
hold fast to their freedom. Louis Napoleon, he knew, could not enforce
his veto; the Powers would accept accomplished facts; the danger of an
Austrian attack he said little of. At heart, though, he knew that the
perils were thicker than he publicly owned, and he confessed in
private letters that "the position was more than difficult," that, if
the suggested Congress of the Powers met and declared in favour of the
exiled princes, Italy could only make an ineffectual "protest in
action." He almost hoped that Napoleon would use force after all, and
that a war with France would come to simplify the situation.
With a good deal of hesitation, he was prepared to support annexation
to Piedmont. He promised to foment no republican agitation, so long as
the royalists marched towards Unity; and he wrote the King an
irritating but dignified appeal to have done with the subserviency to
France and bid openly for the crown of Italy. "The day you speak this
language," he said, "parties will disappear; there will be only two
living forces in Italy,--the People and yourself." He does not seem
however to have really expected to win him. "The King," he wrote
privately in reference to the letter, "is wavering and weak, but on
him I did not reckon." Victor Emmanuel appears, though, to have read
the appeal and taken it to heart, and perhaps it had its influence on
the events that followed. Mazzini's supreme aim was to spread the
movement for Unity. If the government would not act, the people must
do the work themselves. He wanted to make Tuscany and Romagna the base
for an invasion of the Pope's remaining territory; and then--onward to
Naples and the South. The hope was shared by all the democrats and
many of the moderates; but with Mazzini it meant something even more
than Unity. It meant the triumph of religious liberty at Rome, the
downfall of "the Vicar of the Genius of Evil," the chance that on the
wreck of the Papacy Rome would send forth the gospel of the new
religion. "The liberty of Rome," he wrote, "is the liberty of the
world. If Rome revolts, she must proclaim the victory of God over
Idols, of eternal Truth over Falsehood, the inviolability of the human
conscience." He urged his English and German friends to stir public
opinion against the French occupation of Rome, and put pressure on
Napoleon in the name of the principle of non-intervention.
Meanwhile he sent his agents to prepare a Sicilian rising, and
agitated feverishly for an advance of Garibaldi and the troops of the
Central States into Umbria, which the Papal volunteers had recovered
from the nationalists. He had thoughts of leading the invasion
himself, but he feared that his name "would frighten the mass of the
people," and he humoured Garibaldi by promising to make him the hero
of the movement and "abdicating my own individuality, which is the
easiest part." He won Farini, the dictator of Modena, once a member of
Young Italy, to countenance the raid. He tried to win Ricasoli, but
Ricasoli, though he had threatened to join hands with Mazzini rather
than let Tuscany lose its freedom, knew that the dangers of a forward
movement were too great at present, that if the Pope were attacked,
the outcry of Catholic Europe would compel Napoleon to withdraw his
indispensable, however irritating, patronage, and that Italy would
find herself caught in a hopeless single-handed fight with Austria.
His own strong will and the King's common-sense stopped Garibaldi's
projects. Mazzini, ignorant of the real position, underrated the
difficulties in the way; he never realised the strength of Catholic
opinion, he thought that Austria was not in a position to fight, or
that, if she did, it meant an uprising of all Italy and her eventual
defeat. He charged the King's veto to mere truckling to Napoleon. But
he felt his own powerlessness. He was incensed by the harshness, with
which the government had treated some of his friends, by the
intolerance that drove himself to live in hiding. "To be a prisoner
among our own people is too much to bear." "I have never," he wrote,
"felt so wretched and worn out in mind and soul as at certain moments
now." Ricasoli intimated that he must leave Tuscany, and hopeless of
doing any good there, he left for Lugano and returned to England at
the end of the year.
His ideas had passed to men more competent to execute them. In January
Cavour was again prime minister, resolute to have Unity with Rome for
the capital, prepared, if the Emperor deserted him, to attack Austria,
rouse Hungary in her rear, and, so he hoped in sanguine moments, "go
to Vienna." But he knew how heavy was the stake, and he would keep the
Emperor's protection if he could. When he found that Napoleon would
guarantee the annexation of the free provinces at the price of Nice
and Savoy, he sadly and reluctantly consented to the humiliating
bargain. Mazzini read him by his despatches, and knew nothing of his
real ambitions. He thought that the premier was opposed to Unity, even
to the annexation of Tuscany, that he clung to the French alliance to
safeguard himself from democracy at home. He was indignant at the
cession of Savoy, bartered without reference to the wishes of its
people, still more at the desertion of Italian Nice. He was eager to
drive from office the man, on whom depended the attainment of his
hopes. He was right, however, in thinking that Cavour could not
initiate the revolution in the South, that the government would only
follow up what the free lances began; and he was willing to make the
road easier for it, by promising, when revolution broke out in the
South, to support annexation to Piedmont and leave Rome alone for the
present. He was persuaded that Austria would not attack, and that the
Bourbon army would dissolve or join the insurgents.
The programme seemed so simple, that he hoped to unite all the
democrats upon it. But the saner men among them saw that, as usual,
Mazzini had underrated the danger. They knew that it meant harder
fighting than he supposed, and they dreaded a repetition of his
earlier ill-starred risings. They insisted that, if the volunteers
went to Sicily, Garibaldi must lead them and Cavour's moral support
must be secured. Mazzini was ready to welcome Garibaldi's leadership,
though there was no very cordial feeling between them; but he knew how
reluctant Garibaldi was to go, and he refused to let the movement hang
on any one man's action. Early in March, while Garibaldi was still
hesitating,[26] he sent Rosalino Pilo, a young Sicilian noble, to lead
the insurgents in the island, spending every available shilling of his
own in the preparations. He was terribly overwrought and excited, for
he must have realised something of the tremendous danger and
responsibility; and he travelled to Lugano to be nearer the scene of
action. There he learnt that his long efforts had had their fruit,
that the impatience he had done so much to rouse had borne down
Garibaldi's doubts, and that he and his Thousand had started for
Sicily. "God be praised," he wrote, "Italy is not dead." When the news
came of Garibaldi's victory at Calatafimi, "Sicily saves us," he said,
"Italy will be."
On May 7, two days after Garibaldi started, he arrived at Genoa, still
compelled to live in hiding, and able to see his friends only by
night. Characteristically, he amused himself in leisure moments by
taming sparrows, which came to him at meal-times, followed by two hens
("I have always been fond of hens," he writes), "whom I feed after
dinner, sometimes with bread and wine to strengthen their
constitutions against shocks and adversities." He was not welcomed by
the men who had organised the expedition, and he found himself
regarded as "a self-intruding man," he who was ever ready to take the
risk and give others the honour, who was bracing his frail body only
by sheer sense of duty. "God knows," he wrote, "that morally and
physically exhausted as I am, everything I do is a real effort." But
the suspicion of his motives was inevitable. Absolutely disinterested
as he was, ever ready to spend and be spent, he was again playing an
ill-informed and equivocal part, thrusting in his unwise projects
among the well-laid schemes of shrewder men; and those who had
organised Garibaldi's movement with consummate skill--Bertani and
Medici and Bixio--felt that his independent action might spoil the
game.[27] He clung to his insensate prejudice against Cavour, at a
time when Cavour,--with whatever lapse of political morality,--was
straining every nerve to back Garibaldi and win all Italy. In his
persistent distrust of the government and its connections with the
Emperor, he wanted to act independently of though not in hostility to
the monarchy, and while he urged annexation in Sicily to checkmate the
separatists in the island, he was eager to prevent it on the mainland,
and reserved his freedom to preach his own doctrines there. While
Garibaldi snatched victory after victory against tremendous odds in
Sicily, he was planning a raid into Papal territory, more or less
under his own direction; his volunteers, he hoped, would not only free
the rest of Central Italy and attack the Bourbons from the North, but
would create an influence, independent alike of Cavour and Garibaldi,
which might perhaps in the chapter of accidents upset the monarchy, or
at least compel it to break with France. He did not suspect how
perilous the situation was, that it was still only Louis Napoleon's
protection, that stood between Italy and a terrible conflict with
Austria in the North and Bourbons in the South, with utter disaster as
its almost certain sequel. Ricasoli and, it seems, the King[28] gave
some countenance to the raid, for which Mazzini and Bertani were, with
Garibaldi's approval, completing the preparations. But Cavour knew
that it meant the forfeiture of the Emperor's friendship, and arranged
with Bertani, who was throughout lukewarm for the scheme, terms which
would at all events save his own credit with the Emperor. The force,
which had been destined for the Papal coast, sailed to join Garibaldi
in Sicily. Mazzini either did not know of the agreement or refused to
be bound by it; he went to Florence, where another body of volunteers
was waiting in the neighbourhood ready to cross the frontier, and
intended to lead them to a desperate attack on Perugia. Cavour
insisted that the men should be disbanded, and Ricasoli, tempering
the premier's orders, persuaded them to go to Garibaldi.
Less than a month after, the Piedmontese declared war against the
Pope, and Fanti,--Mazzini's follower once in the days of the Savoy
raid,--overran such of the Pope's remaining territory as was not
occupied by the French. Garibaldi, victoriously advancing from the
South, had entered Naples, and save for Rome and its neighbourhood and
a small district held by the remnants of the Bourbon army, all the
Centre and the South were free. Austria, frightened by Napoleon's
threats, had been a passive spectator, while her allies were crushed.
Italian Unity was nearly won, but the splendid consummation was dashed
by the dread of civil strife. Garibaldi, careless of obstacles, was
impatient to march on to Rome; Cavour knew that that meant war with
France and would have it at no cost. Crispi and Bertani were trying to
organise the South in an opposition to Cavour and his party, that
might easily take a republican colour. Mazzini went to Naples, and
warmly backed them. He urged Garibaldi to go on, though by preference
to Venice rather than to Rome, for he saw now almost as acutely as
Cavour did the danger of a conflict with France. If Garibaldi
advances, he wrote to England, "we shall have Unity within five
months; if he does not, we shall have slumber, then anarchy, then--a
little later--Unity." He appealed to the Neapolitans to save the
principle of popular sovereignty by conditioning their annexation to
Victor Emmanuel's crown with the stipulation that an Italian National
Assembly should meet to draw up a new constitution. The cry was a
futile and dangerous one, for the mass of the people were impatient
for annexation on any terms; and with trouble threatening the young
country on every side, it were madness to throw its future into the
melting-pot of the constitution-mongers. It was easy to paint Mazzini
as an enemy of Unity; and a Neapolitan mob shouted 'death' under the
windows of the man, who had given everything for them. Pallavicino,
the pro-dictator, Manin's old co-worker and Garibaldi's friend,
courteously appealed to him to leave. "Even against your wish," he
said, "you divide us." Mazzini refused to waive an Italian's right to
live on Italian soil; and he was molested no more. Garibaldi
indignantly intervened on his behalf; the King probably protected him.
"Leave Mazzini alone," he had said, "if we make Italy, he is
powerless; if we cannot, let him do it, and I will be _Monsù Savoia_
and clap my hands for him." But Mazzini was bitterly pained and weary
of it all. "I am worn out morally and physically," he wrote; "for
myself the only really good thing would be to have unity achieved
quickly through Garibaldi, and one year before dying of Walham
Green[29] or Eastbourne, long silences, a few affectionate words to
smooth the ways, plenty of sea-gulls, and sad dozing." Early in
November, after a friendly interview with Garibaldi, at which they
laid their schemes for winning Rome and Venice, he left Naples.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] The following letter from Garibaldi has, I believe, not been
published: I have translated it.
CAPRERA, _March 27, '60_.
DEAR MAZZINI,--I am thinking of leaving for Genoa on April 1, from
there I shall go to Nice, where I am summoned by my fellow-citizens,
who are afraid of falling into the wolf's mouth. I enclose two lines
for McAdam [Mr John McAdam of Glasgow]. If you come, let me
know.--Your brother, GIUSEPPE.
_P.S._--Mr Adam of Glasgow will send Mr William Ashurst a sum for the
Million Rifles Fund; please spend it in the purchase of the rifles in
question.--G. GARIBALDI.
[27] Rival funds for Mazzini and Garibaldi were collected in England
and there was some strong feeling between their respective backers.
[28] According to a letter from Mazzini to Brofferio, published in
_Roma e Venezia_, January 15, 1861, (the full text of which I have not
seen), the King seems to have asked for an interview with him, and he
had "no shadow of difficulty in principle" to it.
[29] Where Mr Stansfeld had his brewery and sometimes lived.
Chapter XI
For Venice
1861-1866. AETAT 56-61.
Policy after 1860--Disappointment in Italy--Rome and
Venice--Attitude towards the monarchy--Life in England--the
Greco plot--American and Irish politics--Mazzini and
Garibaldi--Overtures from Victor Emmanuel--The war of 1866.
Mazzini's remaining life is one of melancholy pathos. He could not
rest, till Unity was accomplished. Aged and often very ill and
suffering, longing for quiet and literature, he braced his frail body
and unhappy soul to the fret and weariness and disillusioning of
politics. Could one be sure that it profited country or mankind, one
would rest content, knowing that he had chosen the hard path and never
flinched. But it was--at all events in the near results--a grievous
waste. Those splendid faculties were worn, as he would sometimes own
himself, in rolling the stone of Sisyphus. Had he given these years to
the book on religion, that he ever kept in mind, to building up "the
church of the precursors," he might perhaps have done a thing yet
greater than the making of Italy. His political work henceforth was
mostly thrown away; for, as he said, his star was the Dog, and his
business "to bark, generally without being heard." Gloriously right in
his ideals, he marred it all by ignorance of facts. His nearer vision
failed in blinding partisanship, in his obdurate hatred of Louis
Napoleon and suspicion of the Italian statesmen. He could not see that
the royalists were aiming at Unity almost as seriously and more wisely
than himself, that Louis Napoleon wished to be his country's friend,
and that the Emperor's hesitations and backslidings were concessions
to the relentless pressure of Catholic opinion. He could not escape
from his own past, he had a feverish, unreasoned craving for a single
form of action, he could not see that conspiracy and insurrection,
which had their justification and chance of success twenty years ago,
had neither now. It is perhaps never easy for one man to be both
idealist and statesman,--for Mazzini, with his passion and
inflexibility, least of all. He could not leave it to other men to
achieve his ideals in their own way. He had a dangerous belief that he
had "the instinct of the situation," and would never own in politics
that others might have their fragment of the truth. This obstinate
rebellion--covert or open--against the verdict of his countrymen,--was
it the heroism of the one righteous man, or was it, as one of his old
friends called it, "a huge egotistical presumption?" Or was it rather
the noble error of one, who, with his mind fixed on the highest,
scorns the high? Who shall say, who does best service for humanity, he
who seeks the small attainable, or he who 'heaven's success finds or
earth's failure?'
Mazzini knew that he had failed in the near results. He was a
disappointed man. He had indeed the pride that his utopia had come so
near accomplishment. But it had come by another way than that which
he had marked for it, it had fallen very short of what he looked for.
He had idealised his country in his mighty love, till disillusion was
inevitable. "I saw," he wrote, "a great void in Europe, a void of any
community of belief or of faith, and therefore of initiative and
worship of duty and solemn moral principles, of great ideas and potent
action for the classes which produce most and yet which are most
wretched; and I thought that Italy would rise and save Europe, and,
soon as it breathed its own new life, would say to itself and others,
'I will fill that void.'" "Little it matters to me," he wrote to
"Daniel Stern," "that Italy, a territory of so many square leagues,
eats its corn and cabbages cheaper; little I care for Rome, if a great
European initiative is not to issue from it. What I do care for is
that Italy shall be great and good, moral and virtuous, that she comes
to fulfil a mission in the world." So he had dreamed, and woke to find
it but a dream. In bitter exaggeration he reproached his countrymen
for being "less than their fathers and their destinies." In his
favourite phrase, new Italy had found its inspiration not in Dante but
in Macchiavelli. There was no high principle, no true religion, no
sense of freedom's dignity. His criticism was partly a true one. The
feeble statesmen, who succeeded Cavour and Ricasoli, opportunists
almost all, some of them mere tricksters, may well have roused his
anger and contempt. The country had become the hunting-ground of
office-hunters and speculators, who, as Giuditta Sidoli said, "have
made Italy and now are eating it." The antagonism of North and South,
the jealousy of Piedmont, the brigandage, the financial chaos were
symptoms of a dangerous discontent. Few cared for the great moral
hopes, the "living apostolate" of Italy. But Mazzini did not
understand the value of the sane, wholesome patriotism, that had made
Italy in its own way, or see how great the step had been, that had
brought the country political and social freedom. In his absorption in
the political question, he paid at this time small attention to the
social changes that were going on; he never alludes to the great
cooperative movement, that was beginning in Italy in these years.
But beyond all this, Unity was not complete, and its completion was
the one thing necessary. The triumph of nationality, the cause of
morality and religion, alike in Italy and Europe, depended, he
believed, on the winning of Rome and Venice. "I have to kill myself
with work," he wrote, "for Venice, for Rome, for the republic, in
order to make the instrument." The winning of Rome meant the downfall
of the Papacy, the triumph of liberty of conscience, the dawn of a new
religion. The winning of Venetia meant the break-up of the Austrian
Empire, and a great reconstruction of Central and Eastern Europe, in
which Italy would prove her mission as the "guide of oppressed
nationalities." "Providence," he said, "has written that the function
of initiative is a necessary condition of the life of Italy. We cannot
live without a European life; if we free ourselves, we must free
others. We must be great or perish." For Rome he was willing to wait.
Wiser than Garibaldi, he saw that any attempt to win it by force meant
war at once with France and Austria, and he knew that that meant ruin.
His Roman policy was at bottom that of the Piedmontese statesmen,--to
secure the withdrawal of the French by the force of public opinion.
He urged that there should be "a temperate but weighty remonstrance"
from parliament, backed by half a million Italian signatures. He
prompted petitions in England to ask the government to use its
influence in the same direction,--a spur that Lord John Russell hardly
needed. But he rightly saw that Venice must take precedence. Italy, he
thought, was strong enough to fight Austria alone, and he made
extravagant calculations as to their relative military strength. Only
there must be no French alliance, no more paltering with the false
prophet of nationality. Cavour and his successors, except for brief
backslidings, were at one with him in the resolve never to call in
again the dangerous help of France. But he would not believe this, and
he hoped both to make the French alliance impossible and force the
government into war with Austria, by fomenting a rising in Venetia or
encouraging volunteers under Garibaldi to attack it. Italy's allies
must be the nationalities of the East, which had a common interest
with her in breaking up the Austrian Empire,--an idea which he shared
with the King and Cavour and others of the Italian statesmen. If
Venetia and the Balkan countries rose, Hungary would follow, and "war
with Austria would dissolve the Empire in twenty days." With Austria,
Turkey would go too, for the two despotisms, he held, must stand or
fall together. The Polish rising of 1863 made him still more
impatient. His love of "poor, sacred Poland" was strong as in the days
of Young Europe. Forgetting that a resuscitated Poland was bound to
add its weight to the Catholic and anti-Italian coalition, he
reproached his countrymen for their indifference to the people, which
had sent its sons to fight for Italy; and he tried to charter a
steamer to take a cargo of arms to a Lithuanian port. He industriously
encouraged the pro-Polish movement in England, and talked of
organising a Hyde Park meeting.
At home, he was still for some years yet willing to suspend any open
republican agitation. He indeed attacked the government with
increasing acerbity; he fretted at its delays, he was irritated by the
libels of the royalist press. But though he held the monarchy to be
the source of all the trouble, he would not openly declare against it.
He kept up a secret republican propagandism in view of future
possibilities, but so long as there was any hope that the monarchy
would go to Venice and Rome, he would not harass it by a barren
agitation. He knew in fact, that, so long as that hope remained, the
"ice-wall" of popular timidity made the republic impossible, and he
was angrily attacked by the intransigents for his saner view. He was
anxious for the present even to postpone any agitation for reform,
though he pleaded insistently that, when the work of unity was done, a
Constituent Parliament should meet to draw up a "national pact," which
was apparently to be an ill-defined constitution, temporarily
admitting a democratic monarchy, and defining the social duties of the
country and the respective functions of state and local bodies. He had
a bold domestic programme, whose chief articles were a universal
volunteer system, the nationalisation of railways, mines, church
lands, and "some great industrial undertakings," state encouragement
for productive cooperative societies, and a reorganisation of local
government on a basis of some twelve large "regions" and big,
amalgamated communes.
Meanwhile, save for an occasional visit to Switzerland, he was living
in England, where he returned after leaving Naples at the end of 1860.
Here in new lodgings at 2 Onslow Terrace, Brompton, he returned to the
old life of the fifties. The days were spent in the weary round of
letter-writing, but it was often a physical torture now, and failing
eyesight made it impossible to go on after dark. In the evening he had
two hours' reading, then went to the Stansfelds' neighbouring house in
Thurlow Square, to return home at eleven and read his letters and the
Italian papers. His personal life was more and more a struggle with
failing health. Earlier attacks he had conquered by force of will.
"Make an effort of will and be well; I have often successfully done
so," he wrote once to a friend; and again, "I hear that you are rather
unwell. Don't. It is absurd to be ill, while nations are struggling
for liberty." He had always scorned medicine and doctors, and had an
especial detestation for "that infernal irony of homæopathy, for which
Hahnemann must atone somehow, somewhere." But now he had often to
succumb to an internal trouble, which brought acute pain and sometimes
prostrated him. He no doubt smoked too much, and a few years after
this Lloyd Garrison tried in vain to break him off the habit.
Rheumatism made him "stiff like an English statesman." He could not
eat his landlady's ill-cooked dinners, and hid the untouched food
rather than hurt her feelings. Now and again he would feel he had
"more than ever the ardour of a young man with all the obstinacy of an
old one"; more often he knew that work was killing him, and he had a
recurring presentiment that he would not live through each new year.
He had financial troubles again to worry him. His small annuity was
not enough to meet his heavy doctor's bills, and a royalty, which he
had been receiving for the collected edition of his writings, failed
through the unwillingness or inability to pay of his Milanese
publisher. A subscription was raised for him in Italy, but it was
passed on to his Venetian fund, and probably most of the £500, that
were collected for him in England in 1866, went to public purposes.
Serene and cheerful as ever on the outside, he had moods of great
depression. "I am sick of men and things," he wrote, "and long for a
desperate peace." "Morally," he writes to "Daniel Stern," with whom he
began a steady correspondence at this time, "I am always the same,
given up to work without enthusiasm, from a sense of duty; expecting
nothing, hoping for nothing in the scrap of individual life left me;
loving and recognising those I love,[30] not for the joy but for the
sorrow they can give me; believing, as in early youth, in the future I
have dreamed of for Italy and the world; sick at the present, but
resigned and calm, if people don't talk too much of materialist
pantheism or tactics or happiness or French music." When Lincoln was
assassinated, he contrasted sadly with himself the man who died in the
knowledge that his cause had triumphed.
His literary work at this time was unimportant, for politics and
sickness used up his strength; but his longings went, as ever, to a
life of study. "I should like," he wrote, "to drag myself from library
to library, from one monastic archives to another, to unearth some
lines of a great forgotten thinker, Joachim for instance." Mystical
writers, like Joachim and Eckhart, attracted him more strongly than
ever; and he seems to have joined an esoteric society in Italy, which
had Dante for its spiritual chief. Modern spiritualism, however, only
irritated him; "when men have ceased to believe in God," he said, "God
pays them out by making them believe in Cagliostro or table-turning."
His admiration of English life was stronger than ever. He held up for
Italian imitation its freedom of life and thought, notwithstanding his
suspicions that his letters still ran the risk of being tampered with
in the English Post-Office. He had words of praise even for the
monarchy and aristocracy, but predicted that the growing power of
financial magnates would prove the death of both. It was about this
time that he became again a prominent figure in English politics. A
Calabrian, named Greco, attempted to assassinate Louis Napoleon.
Mazzini had had no part in or knowledge of the plot; but he had known
Greco in the past, and letters from him were found on the assassin.
The French police caught at the opportunity to bring odium on him and
inculpate Stansfeld, whose name and address were found in one of his
letters. Without any particle of evidence to connect the letters with
the plot, the French court condemned Mazzini; and the Tories and Irish
in the House of Commons gleefully used the handle given them to
discredit his English friend. Stansfeld, who was a member of the
government, resigned office rather than embarrass his colleagues, but
the insincerity of the attack was as clear as its audacious
shamelessness. The incident had its sequel of comedy, when Disraeli,
who had been foremost in denouncing the imagined sympathy with
assassination, was confronted with a _Revolutionary Epick_ of his own
youthful days, in which he had blessed "the regicidal steel."
Mazzini keenly watched the American Civil War. He had for many years
felt intensely about slavery, and he now gave his sympathy and
subscription to the London Emancipation Society, which was enlisting
English sympathy for the North. "I believe," he wrote to his friend,
Mr W. Malleson, who was its Secretary, "that in these times of ours
there are three things, against which a man ought to protest before
dying, if he wants to die in peace with his own conscience:
slavery--capital punishment--and the actual either narrow or
hypocritical condition of the religious question." "Abolition," he
wrote to Mr Moncure Conway, "is the religious consecration of your
battles." But he was not equally enthusiastic for the Union. In
curious inconsistency with his usual preference for big nations, he
thought that America was "wide enough for two or three eventual
sisterly confederations." When the war was over, he implored the
Americans not to impair their victory by refusing the vote to the
negroes, though they should see that education went hand in hand with
it. Again, as in 1854, he was eager that America should come into
world politics, and help to build up the future Europe of nationality
and the republic. "You," he said, "have become a leading nation. You
may act as such. In the great battle which is fought throughout the
world between right and wrong, justice and arbitrary rule, equality
and privilege, duty and egotism, republic and monarchy, truth and
lies, God and idols, your part is marked; you must accept it." He
hoped that they would upset Napoleon's Mexican scheme, which meant
"Imperialism at their own door"; at the time of the suggested
Anglo-French intervention, when American feeling was bitter against
England, he wrote, "war with England would be a crime and a fault; war
for Mexico a holy thing." Shortly before Lincoln's assassination, he
and Ledru Rollin and Karl Blind wrote to the President, urging the
danger to the Union that threatened from Mexico, and suggesting a
cooperation with the democrats of Europe, that would weaken or upset
Napoleon. Apparently the plan was that the Americans should invade
Mexico, while their unofficial allies stirred a republican movement in
France or organised an attack on Rome. Lincoln seems to have listened
to the suggestion not unfavourably. When the Northern army disbanded
after the war, Mazzini would have liked to see the men go as
volunteers to aid the Mexicans, and the government "whisper" that it
would follow. "It would have done more than anything towards the
fraternisation of North and South, and the negroes would have won
then, undisputed, the right to the suffrage."
A few years later, he was much concerned in the fate of the Fenian
prisoners. "I am feeling," he writes, "between the unhappy and the
furious about the Fenians condemned. To-day, I think, is the Queen's
birthday. Does she read a newspaper? Cannot she find a womanly feeling
in her heart and ask the Cabinet to commute the punishment? In point
of fact, the killing of these men will prove an absolute fault
[mistake]. Burke will be the Robert Emmet of 1867. A feeling of
revenge will rekindle the energy of the discouraged Fenians. The
dream will become, through martyrdom, a sort of religion. But that is
not my ground. It is the legal murder reenacted against a _thought_, a
thought which ought to be refuted, destroyed by thought only. Burke
and others are genuine believers in Irish nationality. I think they
are philosophically and politically wrong; but are we to refute a
philosophical error with hanging?" After their reprieve he wrote, "You
have been spared the infamy of Burke's execution. I am glad of it; I
have a weakness for England, and did not like the shame for her."
* * * * *
Mazzini's active political work in these years was given almost wholly
to the winning of Venetia. Before he left Naples in 1860, he and
Garibaldi had agreed to agitate for an attack on either Venetia or
Rome in the following year. But the jealousy, that was always latent
between the two, prevented any cordial cooperation. The fault was very
little on Mazzini's side. He must have felt it, that Garibaldi, whose
work for the country was so small beside his own, had eclipsed himself
in the nation's imagination; but he was ever ready to let him take the
honour and keep himself in the background. Once get Garibaldi with the
volunteers, he said, "and he may send me to the devil the day after."
But Garibaldi had always some grievance to nurse, and he had not
forgotten the friction at Rome in 1849. Mazzini's theories irritated
him, and he dubbed him "the great doctrinaire." The most easily led of
men, "weak beyond expression," as Mazzini truly said of him, he hated
it to be thought that he was under anybody's influence; and Mazzini
complained with cause that "if Garibaldi has to choose between two
proposals, he is sure to accept the one that isn't mine." The
mischief-makers, who always clustered round the hermit of Caprera, did
their best to feed his prejudices. And though the two men were both
burning to free Venice and Rome, they had radical differences as to
the means. Garibaldi believed in the King; Mazzini's faith in him was
very limited. Garibaldi wanted to have an understanding with the
government; Mazzini generally wished to act independently. He saw that
the patriots must concentrate on the freeing of Venice; Garibaldi was
ever running back to his cherished design of marching to Rome, or, if
he temporarily abandoned it, he leaned to some knight-errant
enterprise in Eastern Europe, where he could attack Austria from the
rear.
Meanwhile Minghetti and the less statesmanlike section of the
Moderates,--a tepid, craven, weak-principled crew,--wanted to stamp
out the democratic agitation; and it was left comparatively
unmolested, thanks only to the bigger outlook of Ricasoli, who had
become premier after Cavour's death. Had Ricasoli remained in office,
he would have amnestied Mazzini from the sentence of 1857; and the
greatest of living Italians would have been no longer a felon in his
own country. But Ricasoli was driven from office by a cabal; and
Rattazzi, who succeeded him, was too much under bond to Louis Napoleon
to pardon the Emperor's enemy. Rattazzi began a double game with
Garibaldi, which ended, as Mazzini had predicted, in "a solemn
mystification" and the catastrophe of Aspromonte. Mazzini was opposed
to the whole foolhardy business, and among his English friends
condemned it in strong language; but apparently he helped to collect
funds for Garibaldi, and when once Garibaldi took up the cry of "Rome
or Death," he thought it his duty to help. The day after the
volunteers crossed from Sicily on the tragi-comic march for Rome, he
left London to join them. He had got as far as Lugano, when he heard
that Italian soldiers had fired on them, and that Garibaldi lay
stricken by an Italian bullet. His anguish at the pity of it all
brought on delirium. The ghosts of martyr-patriots reproached him, as
they had done in 1836; he cried that Garibaldi was dead, and his
friends could not quiet his ravings. He recovered quickly, but broke
into passionate denunciation of the government, scourging the monarchy
as impotent and unwilling to make Italy, and threatening to raise the
republican flag again.
The threat was forgotten, as he regained his calmness, and he returned
to his old plan of a volunteer movement on Venetia, which the
government would be compelled to follow. He was "silently raging at
poor, brave Poland being left alone in the field," and hoped that an
attack on Austria would save her. It was at this juncture,--in the
spring of 1863,--that he received strange overtures for alliance from
the King. The two men had always had a certain fascination for each
other. Victor Emmanuel shared Mazzini's impatience to win Venetia, his
hatred of Austria; he had something of the great agitator's wish to
see the nationalities of Eastern Europe free. Both were irritated by
the feeble Minghetti ministry, which had come into office after
Aspromonte, half-hearted in its nationalist aspirations, dreading the
democratic forces, which Cavour would have taken in hand and guided.
The fellow-conspirators bargained hard, but, after months of tedious
negotiation, they seem to have agreed that Mazzini should foment a
rising in Venetia and waive meanwhile any republican movement, that
the King should make his government supply arms to the insurgents and
eventually declare war, while both would encourage a rising in Hungary
or Galicia. It was impossible, however, to give effect to the
alliance. The fact of the negotiations leaked out more or less. The
Greco plot, though probably few believed that Mazzini was an
accomplice, made it difficult for the King to treat with him. The
ministers, morbidly afraid of any contact with the revolutionaries,
and possibly aware that Mazzini had made their dismissal a condition
of his cooperation, remonstrated; and indeed it shows the King's and
Mazzini's small respect for parliamentary government that the personal
treaty was attempted at all. The King was irritated at Mazzini's
exigencies, and began to transfer his attentions to Garibaldi.
Garibaldi at this moment (April 1864) was paying a long promised visit
to England, where he had a mythical prestige almost as great as in his
own country. As usual he was buffeted by the various influences that
sought to capture him. The English Radicals wanted to use him for a
series of popular demonstrations; Palmerston laid his schemes to keep
him quiet in the hands of hosts, like the Duke of Sutherland and
Charles Seely, the member for Lincoln, who would be responsible for
his discreet behaviour. Victor Emmanuel, while still negotiating
fitfully with Mazzini, sent his agents to persuade him to head a
rising in Galicia; Mazzini wanted him for the Venetian movement. The
worthy, puzzled man tried to please everybody, provided that he
appeared to be managed by nobody. Mazzini wrote to him to begin his
tour in the provinces at once, before he went to London; and met him,
soon after he arrived, at Mr Seely's house in the Isle of Wight. There
was a cordial reconciliation, and Mazzini thought he had won Garibaldi
to his own scheme. At a breakfast given by Alexander Herzen, the one
rich man among the exiles, at his house at Teddington, Garibaldi spoke
of Mazzini as the counsellor of his youth and constant friend. The
incident alarmed the English government, and their contemptible and
dishonorable manoeuvres secured Garibaldi's departure. Mazzini still
supposed that Garibaldi was faithful to his scheme, and went to Lugano
to forward the preparations for the Venetian insurrection.
Garibaldi, however, though he had given Mazzini no hint of his change
of mind, had accepted the King's plan. The Duke of Sutherland's yacht
took him to Ischia, where he was preparing to sail to the East, when
the secret was given to the world; and the King, frightened by the
publicity, hastily broke from the plot. Mazzini, though he tried to
persuade Garibaldi to visit England again and make his abandoned
provincial tour ("Newcastle is the best place"), was justly incensed
at him and the King for their want of candour. He suspected, with good
reason, that the ministry had fallen in with the Galician scheme, for
the sake of getting Garibaldi out of the country and perhaps sending
him to his death. He was "sick at heart of the equivocal position,"
and determined to "go on in a clearer path." Events helped to bring
him back to frank hostility towards the government. The September
Convention, most dishonouring and impolitic of treaties, was
concluded, and it seemed to mark, as in the letter it did, a
renunciation of the claims to Rome. He passionately denounced the
surrender, the "policy of subterfuge and crooked ways," which
threatened to founder Italy. "I prefer half a century of slavery to a
national lie," he wrote. He was hoaxed into believing that the
government had offered France a large slice of Piedmont to buy her
acquiescence in any winning of Venice or Rome. He had a bitter quarrel
with Crispi, who was fast sliding down the decline of respectability.
Crispi had attacked him in the Chamber, as dividing the country by his
republicanism. Mazzini wasted words in retorting on the opportunist,
who yesterday had been most intransigent of republicans, and was now
parading his new-found faith in the monarchy. He was inclined to break
the slender threads, that connected him with the parliamentary Left,
"who had laid aside their old democratic ardour to assume the icy
demeanour of English members of parliament." But he still hesitated at
any complete rupture with the monarchy, so long as any hope remained
that the government would attack Austria.
It was doing better than he knew. The outcry at the September
Convention had wrecked Minghetti's ministry, and under the brave and
honest La Marmora there was some chance of going forward. The
negotiations for the Prussian alliance were pushed on, and early in
April 1866 the treaty was signed. Mazzini had preached co-operation
with Germany in 1851 and 1861, but now he denounced the alliance with
"men who represented despotism," an alliance which, he imagined,
implied the abandonment of the claims to the Tyrol. He had
information, which again was almost certainly inaccurate, as to the
arrangement of Biarritz, and "knew from positive information" that
Italy had promised to cede Sardinia and part of Piedmont to France, as
the price of Napoleon's help. Much, however, as he disliked the
diplomacy, still it was a war for Venice, and he urged his followers
to join the volunteers. If the war ended in victory, they could then
march on to Rome. He had his plan of operations for the war,--to mask
the Quadrilateral, and push on with the main body of the army to
Vienna, while the volunteers landed in Istria and tried to rouse the
Slavs. Whether the plan was original or not, it was almost identical
with one, which had been favoured by Ricasoli, now again premier, by
Cialdini, one of the two Italian commanders, and probably by Bismarck,
and which was rejected, or at least mutilated, only by La Marmora's
opposition.
All the world had expected to see the Italians easily victorious. But
again, as in 1848, their chance was spoilt by incompetent generalship.
The army was defeated at Custozza, the fleet at Lissa; Garibaldi and
the volunteers had little of the spirit of 1860, and were paralysed in
the Tyrol. Equally unexpectedly, the Prussians on their side had
triumphed swiftly and conclusively; and Napoleon, afraid that the
unforeseen events would nip his schemes, stepped in with a message
that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to himself and that he would
hand it over to Italy, if peace were made. It was a bitter and
humiliating end,--to lay down arms under the shadow of defeat, to
abandon the Tyrol and Istria, to have Venetia not by right of conquest
but by the condescension of a detested patron. Mazzini did not know
how unwillingly the government had bowed to a fate, which the military
position made inevitable. To him it seemed mere pusillanimity,
pregnant with "dishonour and ruin." "It is my lot," he sadly wrote,
"to consume my last days in the grief, supreme to one who really
loves, of seeing the thing, one loves most, inferior to its mission."
FOOTNOTE:
[30] _Reconnaissant ceux que j'aime_; one suspects an omission of _à_.
Chapter XII
The Last Years
1866-1872. AETAT 61-66
The Republican Alliance--Life at Lugano--Mentana--Republican
movement in 1868-70--Intrigue with Bismarck--Imprisonment at
Gaeta, and release--Attack on the International--Death.
In his ignorance of the facts, he charged it all to the monarchy. The
nation had been sacrificed to the interests of a dynasty. Defeat and
dishonour came of the equivocations, that sprang from the "primal
falsehood" of royalty. The bad government and coercion (which, in
fact, was mild enough), the huge army and civil service and police,
the consequent financial chaos--all were its fruit. He disclaimed that
it was the republic for its own sake that he wanted now, for its
advent was only the question of a few years more or less, and its
triumph might be left to time. But dishonour was the "gangrene of a
nation," and only the republic could cure that. Only the republic
could win Rome, gather Istria and the Tyrol to the fold, and stretch a
hand to the struggling nationalities of the East. But, if the republic
came, it must be as a great "moralising education, to change men from
serfs to citizens, and make them conscious of their mission, their
strength and dignity." The republic must not mean revenge, or
spoliation, or repudiation of debt, or violent anti-clericalism; and
he was already beginning his crusade against Bakounine and the rough
socialism, which was making some headway in the country.
He had promised that if he resumed his republican agitation, he would
announce it frankly beforehand, and he did so now. Henceforth he gave
it all his failing strength. Hopeless as their cause probably was at
the best, the republicans had a strength now, which they had not had
for fifteen years. The shame of Custozza and Lissa lay heavy on the
nation, and the disillusioning had shaken faith in men and
institutions. The sense of national dishonour maddened; civil war was
often on men's lips; the King's prestige was foundering under the load
of private vice and military failure. There was a mass of sullen,
unformulated discontent, ready to find its way into socialist or
republican channels. And though men were slow to follow Mazzini into
his conspiracies, his long years of self-sacrificing labour, the
mystery that wrapped the exile and conspirator, had given him a vast,
almost mythical fascination for his countrymen. Forty thousand persons
had signed the petition for his amnesty. Messina elected him time
after time for its deputy, to have the election quashed as often by
the Moderates in the Chamber. There was an angry feeling everywhere at
the senseless intolerance, and the deputies of the Left did their best
to bring the majority to reason. "While you are still in time," said a
recent premier of Italy, "prevent Mazzini from having to close his
eyes in a foreign land."
When at last he was amnestied at the beginning of the war, he refused
to accept it as an act of grace or take his seat as deputy, and
returned to Lugano. Much of his time henceforth was spent there with
his friends, Giuseppe Nathan and his wife Sarah, "the best Italian
friend I have, one of the best women I know," who nursed him in the
attacks of illness, which came with ever greater frequency. Here he
would watch "the beautiful calm-lulling lake, the beautiful, solemn,
hopeful-death-teaching sunsets." When he was well, he kept to the
habits of his English life, writing all day, delighting his friends in
the evening with his brilliant talk. His conspiracies often took him
to Genoa, where he lived in hiding in the house of a working family,
from whose windows in the Salita di Oregina he had a superb view of
the city and the Riviera. He nearly betrayed himself once by shouting
from his window at a boy who was torturing a grasshopper. He kept in
close touch with his English friends and English life. At Lugano he
regularly read "the good, dry Spectator and the would-be wicked, never
concluding Saturday Review." He made a custom of always returning to
England to spend New Year's Day with the Stansfelds or others of their
family, crossing the Alps in mid-winter at the peril of his health. He
had painfully aged. His face had sunk and wore a deathly pallor; the
thick, black hair was thin and grey. William Lloyd Garrison, seeing
him after an interval of twenty-one years, sadly noted the change,
though "the same dark, lustrous eyes" remained, "the same classical
features, the same grand intellect, the same lofty and indomitable
spirit, the same combination of true modesty and heroic assertion, of
exceeding benignity and inspirational power." Work told heavily upon
him now. Writing made him giddy, and his characters begin to lose
their firmness. He was "living as if in a whirlwind, something like
Paolo without Francesca, tired, worn out, longing for rest." But he
would not slacken. "I am bound to those, whom I have organised for a
purpose. I must, before I die, proclaim the republic in Italy."
While he was organising his "Republican Alliance," losing himself in
the huge work of detail which all came to so little, the impatience in
Italy was breaking down the precautions of the government. Ricasoli
had been driven from office by his own maladroitness and Garibaldi's
wild, aimless opposition. Rattazzi, the intriguer of 1862, came back
to power, and began the double play, that was only too likely to lead
to another Aspromonte. There is no need here to analyse the obscure
and sordid story of his balancings between the Italian democrats and
France. Garibaldi was impatient to win Rome, and cared comparatively
little now whether it were in the name of monarchy or republic. His
plan was to lead a raid, with or without the connivance of the
government, into the small territory that still belonged to the Pope,
meet and defeat the Papal mercenaries, and enter Rome. With Mazzini
the republic was now a more vital thing than Unity. Only from a
republican Rome could Italy perform her civilising mission to the
world. "If Rome is to be annexed like the rest," he wrote, "I would
rather it belonged to the Pope another three years." He disliked
Garibaldi's scheme; he was not sanguine of its success; if it did
succeed, it meant that the monarchy would go to Rome and the Pope stay
there. He wished to see the Romans rise themselves and pronounce for a
republic, confident that, if they did so, Italy would echo the
republican cry, and the Pope would have to go. Sometimes, however,
despairing of his own party, he was willing to compromise; and when at
last Garibaldi started on his raid, and the government backed him,
risking hostilities with France rather than have civil war, he forgot
everything else in the hope of winning Rome, and urged his followers
to join the raiders. Probably, if he had not been prostrated by
illness, he would have gone himself. When Garibaldi's incapacity was
only too apparent, and the French troops landed again for the defence
of Rome, he saw that the volunteers were advancing into a trap, and
implored Garibaldi to retire to Naples, raise the flag of revolution,
and collect forces for another and more hopeful attack. Garibaldi,
marching obstinately to defeat, was in no temper to listen to anybody,
to Mazzini least of all. The mischief-makers had persuaded him that
Mazzini was tampering with his men. There was no particle of truth in
it, but the conviction entered Garibaldi's mind and never left it,
while Mazzini lived.
The volunteers went to their doom at Mentana. Rattazzi, who at the
last rose above himself and would have marched to Rome but for the
King's veto, had resigned some weeks before. Menabrea, who succeeded
him, had been compelled by public opinion to occupy a part of the
Pope's territory; but when the French landed, he withdrew the troops,
rather than face war with France. The country writhed in its rage at
the French insult, and naturally turned its resentment against the
crown. Juries acquitted republican papers; the press lampooned the
King. Some of the deputies gave a secret backing to the republican
movement; the Friendly Societies, which had always kept more or less
in touch with Mazzini, threw themselves into it. Mazzini had a
following among the Freemasons, though not one himself, and among the
ex-volunteers. Most ominous feature of it all, republicanism gained a
large footing in the rank-and-file of the army. Mazzini pushed on
impatiently for Rome and the republic. He knew that the Romans
themselves were powerless to rise, now that the French were there, and
that a volunteer movement had no better chance. The only plan, that
could successfully defy the French and capture Rome, was to seize the
government,--its army and navy and arsenals,--and make a national
crusade with all the resources of the country. The royalists, he
thought, would never break with France or attack the Papacy; and
indeed the criticism was true of the conservative ministry, which now
held office. He was equally hopeless of the middle classes, but he was
confident that the people would respond. Especially he trusted to the
younger generation and the women of Italy; they alone, he thought,
were free from the timid opportunism, which had eaten deep into the
rest.
After Mentana he left London again for Lugano to be nearer his work,
and was constantly passing backwards and forwards between there and
Genoa, finding time among it all to write his great religious apology,
the sum of all his teaching, _From the Council to God_.[31] His
following at Genoa was considerable now. When he came there secretly,
little patrols of working men with concealed arms would watch along
the streets between the station and his lodgings to guard his person
from seizure by the police. The Committee sat waiting for him, each
man armed with his revolver. One of them has described the meeting.
"A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was in body and soul,
the great magician, who struck the fancy of the people like a mythical
hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently to meet that great
soul. He advanced with a child's frank courtesy and a divine smile,
shaking hands like an Englishman, and addressing each of us by name,
as if our names were written on our foreheads. He was not disguised;
he wore cloth shoes, and a capote, and with his middle, upright
stature, he looked like a philosopher, straight from his study, who
never dreamed of troubling any police in the world." In the spring of
1869 he was eager for action, despite the failure of a plot,
discouraged by himself, among the garrison at Milan. The remonstrances
of the government procured his banishment from Switzerland, but he was
back again in August, going "more sadly than usual, feeling physically
and intellectually weaker and unequal to the task." He was suffering
continuously, and confessed to his friends that he shrank from the
effort. He was obviously going on from sheer inability to stop more
than from any hope of success. "My new plan," he wrote gloomily, "may
prove a dream like many others."
In the spring of 1870 he came again to Genoa to arrange the details.
The plot broke down like the rest, and at the moment everything was
overshadowed by the coming Franco-German war. In common with the great
majority of his countrymen, outside the court and government, his
sympathies were with Germany. A German victory would avenge Mentana
and compel the French to withdraw from Rome. In spite of his
denunciation of the Prussian alliance in 1866, he had been for three
years past carrying on a desultory intrigue with Bismarck. About the
time of Mentana he had sent a note to Bismarck through their
go-between. "I do not in the least," it said, "share Count Bismarck's
political views; his method of unification does not command my
sympathy; but I admire his tenacity and energy and independence
towards the foreigner. I believe in German unity and desire it as much
as that of my own country. I abhor the Empire and the supremacy it
arrogates over Europe." He saw in the intrigue a chance of pushing his
own schemes, and at the same time of preventing a Franco-Italian
alliance against Germany. He asked Bismarck to send him arms and
money, and promised, if he had them, to guarantee him against the
hostile combination. Bismarck parleyed with him for a time, as he had
parleyed with Garibaldi; and when war was imminent, and he knew that
Victor Emmanuel and many of the Italian conservatives were trying
again to commit the country to a French alliance, he promised that the
arms and money should be sent. Mazzini hastened to accept, promising
to attack Rome with the revolutionary forces, and undertaking to
respect the wish of the country, should a future Constituent Assembly
declare for the monarchy. But Bismarck had learnt now that the danger
of the hostile alliance had passed, and the promised help never came.
The intrigue marks the last stage in Mazzini's political decline. That
he had asked a foreign government to assist in what meant civil war,
shows how the long years of conspiracy had distorted his moral
vision.
He had intended to use Bismarck's money for a new plot, this time in
Sicily. It was a fool's errand, and his friends tried in vain to
dissuade him. But the monomania was on him, and he started for the
island in disguise. As so often before, he had a traitor in his
secrets, a man who with strange inconsistency had nursed him tenderly
through an illness, while he was making a living by betraying his
plans to the French police.[32] When Mazzini arrived by the Naples
steamer at Palermo, he was arrested. He was taken to Gaeta and treated
with all possible consideration. The very gaoler took three minutes to
turn the noisy keys silently, that he might soften the sense of
imprisonment. Here through the loopholes of the massive fortress,
where the Bourbons had made their last stand nine years before, he
would watch the sea and sky, as he had done at Savona thirty-nine
years ago. "The nights," he writes, "are very beautiful; the stars
shine with a lustre one only sees in Italy. I love them like sisters,
and link them to the future in a thousand ways. If I could choose, I
should like to live in absolute solitude, working at my historical
book or at some other, just from a feeling of duty, and only wishing
to see--for a moment, now and then,--some one I did not know, some
poor woman that I could help, some working men I could advise, the
doves of Zürich, and nothing else." He smoked indifferent cigars; he
read bad translations of Shakespeare and Byron from the prison
library, and, for want of better, Tasso's _Gerusalemme_. He was
planning again a book on Byron, and asks for Taine's critique of him
in his _Littérature anglaise_. "Taine is a materialist writer, and
certainly won't have an idea that squares with mine; but I am
intellectually half-asleep and I reckon on the stimulus of
contradiction and the irritation which I shall get out of his book. He
has enough perverted intellectual power to wake me up."
He was released a few weeks later, after the capture of Rome, but he
still refused to accept the amnesty, that he might keep his hands
free, "without even the shadow of ungratefulness to anybody--even to a
king." His one anxiety for the moment was to escape the popular
demonstrations of sympathy, and get to a quiet life among his friends.
He passed a restless night at Rome; it was twenty-one years since
Margaret Fuller and Giulia Modena had persuaded the ex-Triumvir to
save himself and fly. He went to Leghorn to his friends the Rossellis;
thence to Genoa, to see his mother's tomb, and fled to escape the
ovations, with his old sickness on him. "The only thing really
touching to me," he wrote to England, "was in the churchyard--it was
late--and the place was quite empty, but a keeper had, it seems,
recognised me, and coming out of the gate, some poor people, a priest
among them, were drawn up in a line, bowing and almost touching the
earth. Not a smile, no attempt at absurd applause, they felt my
sadness, and contrived to show they were sharing it."[33] The popular
welcome had been dust and ashes to him; "even Swinburne's praise," he
wrote from Gaeta, "makes me sad. Who am I, whom he praises?" His ideal
was shattered. Rome had "the profanation of a corrupt and dishonoured
monarchy," and he knew that the monarchy's winning of the capital
meant that the republic would not come in his day. France, not Italy,
had proclaimed the republic, and in a spirit that he hated. His own
party had failed him. "Italy, my Italy," he said, "the Italy that I
have preached, the Italy of our dreams? Italy, the great, the
beautiful, the moral Italy of my heart? This medley of opportunists
and cowards and little Macchiavellis, that let themselves be dragged
behind the suggestion of the foreigner,--I thought to call up the soul
of Italy, and I only see its corpse." "Yes, dear," he writes to Mrs
Stansfeld, "I love more deeply than I thought my poor dreamt-of Italy,
my old vision of Savona. I want to see, before dying, another Italy,
the ideal of my soul and life, start up from her three hundred years'
grave: this is only the phantom, the mockery of Italy. And the thought
haunts me, like the incomplete man in Frankenstein, seeking for a soul
from its maker."
But henceforth he resigns conspiracy. Sometimes he still hoped for
insurrection, still believed that "a month of action transforms a
people more than ten years of being preached to"; but he knew that the
republic was afar off, that all he could do now was quietly to educate
his countrymen, especially the working classes. "Tell the working-men
of Genoa," so he sent his message, "that this is not a time for
demonstrations but self-education. Germany is the only country that
deserves a republic." He helped to organise the Friendly Societies; he
advocated evening classes for workmen, circulating popular libraries,
the collection of a fund to assist societies for co-operative
production; he founded a paper, _Roma del Popolo_, to spread his
ideas. He still hoped to write his popular history on Italy and a book
on national education,--hopes, alas, never fulfilled. He published
_From the Council to God_, and was delighted at the success it met
with in its English translation in the Fortnightly. He was keenly
interested in the English movements for women's suffrage and against
state regulation of vice. But his chief work in these last years was
to fight the immature socialism of the time. He was bitterly chagrined
by the "invasion of barbarians," which was threatening to conquer the
Italian working-classes to socialism or anarchism. The International
had passed out of its first stage as an organiser of trade-unionism,
and was now the battle-ground between the anarchists under Bakounine
and the collectivists, who followed Karl Marx. In its earlier days
Mazzini had had some relations with it and Bakounine; he had advised
his followers to join it, and had a high opinion of its English
leaders, Odger and Cremer, "for their power of intellect and heart and
their sincere devotion to the cause." He had tried to make it a
political, revolutionary society; and when he found himself defeated
by Marx' opposition, he retired. Since then, the International had
turned to far other roads of revolution. Mazzini hardly distinguished
between the two sections that were fighting for mastery in it, and
banned indiscriminately the atheism and anarchism of the one and the
socialism of the other. And in fact both were equally alien from his
spiritual basis of life, his fervid faith in nationality, his more
modest economic programme.[34] But he was careful to show that his
criticism came from no lack of social aspiration. "Those, whom you
call barbarians," he retorted on the Italian conservatives, who had
used the word in a far other sense, "represent an idea,--the
inevitable, destined rise of the men of Labour." The International,
he argued, was the necessary fruit of middle-class indifference to
social reform; and the Assembly at Versailles was more guilty than the
Commune. He had, in fact, small liking for the Third Republic. A
republic, which had only come for lack of an alternative, which had
Thiers for its chief, and made no sign of restoring Nice, was a
republic only in form. When he read Renan's _Réforme intellectuelle et
morale_, it confirmed him in his distrust of France; and, almost on
his death-bed, he reviewed the book in words of acute disappointment
at its spirit.
The long life of fighting was fast closing in weariness and sense of
failure. "This life of a machine, that writes and writes and writes
for thirty-five years, begins to weigh upon me strangely." He had
bitter personal chagrins; his one surviving sister refused to see him,
from religious differences; Garibaldi would not be reconciled. All
through the end of 1871 he was kept alive only by the devoted
attention of Bertani, who looked after his patient as well as he had
organised the Expedition of the Thousand. He still refused to accept
the amnesty, and travelled under an assumed name to Pisa and Genoa and
Florence, where he laid a wreath on Ugo Foscolo's tomb, for the bones
of his hero had been lately brought from Chiswick to rest in Santa
Croce. Giuditta Sidoli, "good, holy, constant Giuditta," died. "Did
she die a Christian?" he enquires; "any faith, even though imperfect
and spoilt by false doctrine, comforts the pillow of the dying better
than the dry, thin, gloomy travesty of Science, which is called
now-a-days Free Thought or Rationalism." He knew his own end was not
far, and he was willing it should come. "Strange," he said, "that I
see all those I loved go one by one, while I remain, I know not why."
His one care was that the work should still go on. "What matter," he
wrote, "how many years or months I still live down here? Shall I love
you less because I go elsewhere to work? Will you love me less, when
you can only love me by working? I often think, that when at last I
leave you, you will all work with more faith and ardour, to prevent my
having lived in vain." In his last words to the working men of Italy
he says, "love and work for this great, unhappy country of ours,
called to high destinies, but stayed upon the road by those who
cannot, will not know the road. This is the best way that you can have
of loving me." One of his last acts was to repay an old loan of half a
lifetime's standing. In the mild spring of 1872 he was living at a
house that belonged to Pellegrino Rosselli, son-in-law of his old
friends, the Nathans of Lugano, in the Via Maddalena at Pisa. People
would watch the white-haired stranger, who went by the name of Brown,
taking his daily walk, with the affectionate eyes and a kind word for
every child. Early in March he was taken very ill and sank rapidly. On
the 10th he died. His last conscious words were--"Believe in God? Yes,
I do believe in God." He was buried, where he had always wished to
lie, beside his mother, in the cemetery of Staglieno outside Genoa.
There, in the words of Carducci's epitaph, rests
L'UOMO
CHE TUTTO SACRIFICÒ
CHE AMÒ TANTO
E MOLTO COMPATÌ E NON ODIÒ MAI.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Otherwise entitled _A Letter to the Oecumenical Council_.
[32] I have some doubts, though, whether this Wolff is identical with
the Wolff of the journey to Sicily. See _Lettere ad A. Giannelli_,
503.
[33] Will not some Italian artist paint the scene?
[34] See below, pp. 288, 289.
Chapter XIII
Religion
Religion essential to society--Paramouncy of the
spiritual--Criticism of Christianity; Catholicism;
Protestantism--Christ's teaching: its truths and
imperfections--The doctrines of the new faith: God;
Progress; Immortality--The criteria of Truth: the
conscience; tradition--Humanity--The need of unity;
authority; church and state; the new church.
Mazzini's life was one piece of almost perfect consistency and
continuity. Save in minor points of policy, it had no turnings, no
conversions, no recantations. Alike in theory and practice, it goes on
its straight, undeviating course from his youthful literary essays to
the full-bodied doctrine of _The Duties of Man_ and _From the Council
to God_, from the first days of Young Italy to those of the Republican
Alliance. And its magnificent unity comes of this, that all was
dominated by a scheme of thought, that controlled and correlated each
sphere of human action. Supremely he achieved the harmony of life,
which he never wearied of extolling. He was politician, philosopher,
religious reformer, literary critic; and every side of life completes
the others in a perfect synthesis. At the centre of it all,
controlling, illuminating, energizing, stands his religious faith. To
him religion was "the eternal, essential, indwelling element of life,"
"the breath of humanity, its soul and life and consciousness and
outward symbol," hallowing men's thoughts and actions, ennobling,
consoling, fortifying, the inspiring principle of brotherhood and
social service. Deep in the conscience of each man, inseparable from
life, lies the religious sense,--the sense of the Infinite and
Imperishable, the aspiration to the Unknown and Invisible, the innate
desire to apprehend God in his intellect and love. "If ever you have,"
he once said, "a strange moment of religious feeling, of supreme
resignation, of quiet love of humanity, of a calm insight of duty,
kneel down thankful, and treasure within yourself the feeling suddenly
arisen. It is the feeling of life." And with the sense of the Divine,
there comes to man the yearning to reach after the divine perfection
and the importunate searching for the way. In every age, men have
asked "to know, or at least to surmise, something of the starting-point
and goal of mundane existence"; and religion comes to teach "the
general principles that rule humanity, to sanction the link that makes
men brothers in the consciousness of that one origin, one mission, one
common aim." Man makes that mission and that aim his guiding star in
all his strivings for the good; and in every branch of his activity he
steers his course by his knowledge of God. "From the general formula,
that men call religion, issues a rule of education, a basis of human
brotherhood, a policy, a social economy, an art." It is impossible to
keep it out of politics. It is there "in all questions of the
franchise, of the condition of the masses, of nationality,"--all
intimately linked with the religious thought of the time, all part of
God's providential scheme for man. "I do not know," he says,
"speaking historically, a single great conquest of the human spirit, a
single important step for the perfecting of human society, which has
not had its roots in a strong religious faith." "No true society
exists without a common faith and common purpose; politics are the
application, religion gives the principle." Where this common faith is
not, the mere will of the majority means permanent instability and the
oppression of the rest; "without God, you can coerce, but you cannot
persuade; you may be tyrants in your turn, but you cannot be educators
or apostles."
Without religion, then,--deep, heartfelt, vitalising religion,--there
can be no true community. Materialism had been tried, and had
failed;--failed because it was "an individualist, cold, calculating
doctrine, that slowly, infallibly extinguished every spark of high
thinking or free life, that first plunged men into the worship of
success, then made them slaves of triumphant violence and the
accomplished fact." It killed enthusiasm in the individual; it killed
true greatness in a nation. Bare ethics had been tried, "but no
morality can endure or bring forth life, without a heaven and a dogma
to support it." "No, man needs more than simple ethics; he craves to
solve his doubts, to slake his thirsting for a future; he wants to
know whence he comes and whither he goes." Men had tried philosophy,
and indeed philosophy, that took humanity and not the individual for
its study, was "the science of the law of life"; but by itself it was
a barren rock, where life could find no resting-place. "Heresy is
sacred," but only as the transient stage between a lower and a higher
faith. Philosophy can "analyse and anatomise and dissect," but it has
no breath of life to "decree duty or push men to deeds by giving
ethics a new strength and grandeur." The needs of the age are less
intellectual than spiritual. "What we want, what the people want, what
the age is crying for, that it may find an issue from this slough of
selfishness and doubt and negation, is a faith, a faith in which our
souls may cease to err in search of individual ends, may march
together in the knowledge of one origin, one law, one goal." And such
a faith, and only such a faith, will give the solid, strong
convictions and the energy and unity, by which alone society can be
healed. "Any strong faith, that rises on the wreck of the old,
exhausted creeds, will transform the existing social order, since
every strong belief must needs apply itself to every branch of human
activity; because always, in every age, earth has sought conformity
with the heaven in which it believed; because all Humanity repeats
under different formulas and in different degrees the words of the
Lord's Prayer of Christendom: Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in
heaven."
Where shall this faith be found,--this living, vitalising faith, for
which the age is groping, for want of which its aspiration and its
efforts are in vain? Does Christianity supply it? Mazzini asked the
question reverently and tenderly. Religion, he says, is above and
independent of creeds, but every creed is sacred, for each has added
to man's knowledge of God and of himself. However incomplete a faith,
so it be a faith indeed, it helps to hallow life. He felt his a
spiritual kinship more with Catholic priest and Protestant pastor, who
lighted earth with broken rays of the divine, than with the sceptic,
who would shut out God and immortality, enthusiasm and love.
Reverently, then, he tested Christianity. For the superstructures,
indeed, that Catholics and Protestants had built upon the Christianity
of Christ, he felt respect and sympathy, but little love. He had his
special grievances against the Papacy for the evil work it had done in
his own country, and he hated it, as only an Italian of his day could
hate it. He held it to be irrevocably doomed: doomed, since the
Reformation took the North from it;--doomed, "because it has betrayed
its mission to protect the weak, because for three centuries and a
half it has committed fornication with the princes of this world,
because at the bidding of every evil and unbelieving government it has
crucified Jesus afresh in the name of egoism,"--doomed, because it
stood apart from the great humanitarian movements of the century, the
freeing of Greece and Italy, the emancipation of the blacks;--doomed
for the root sin, of which these were but consequences, that it had
become "a phantasm of religion," "without faith or power or mission."
It had missed the meaning of Christ's teaching; it had sinned against
the Holy Spirit, and there was no forgiveness for it. "God will
provide for the abominated idolatry, God, who breaks all idols that
were and are and shall be." Sometimes he was confident, that, before
the century was out, the Papacy would be extinct. And yet, in spite of
all, he respected what had been a great fact in the history of
religion. Like every strong belief, it had in its time done high
service for humanity, it had had its share of the noble and sublime
and potent. "I remember it all and bow myself before your past." And
die though it must, he would it should die nobly, "like the sun in
the great ocean," rejoicing that God's great design bade it make place
for a more perfect faith.
For Protestantism his feeling was colder both in its sympathies and
antipathies. His Catholic training, his craving for formal unity, made
it difficult for him to read it sympathetically; and he saw it chiefly
in its defects,--its exaggeration of the individual, its rejection of
tradition, its sectarianism, its "indefinite dismembering of the
common thought." He recognised somewhat, though imperfectly, the
political and social work, which was indissolubly bound up with
Puritanism; "'God and the People,'" he said in one of his letters to
English working men, "were the inspirers of your Cromwell." As
Catholicism had one side of the truth in its respect for tradition, so
Protestantism had the other in its assertion of individual
interpretation, and in this it had apprehended the essence of
Christianity more truly than Catholicism had done. But though
Protestants were slowly learning the value of tradition, the
preeminence of Humanity over man, they still magnified the individual,
till their creed had become a doctrine of material and spiritual
selfishness, which must logically develop into pure materialism. He
charged it with inspiring the inhumanity and anarchy of the
_laissez-faire_ economy. It had made the salvation of the individual
soul the end of life; and thus it had sundered religion from society,
and dwarfed the all-embracing plan of God to the puny borders of a
loveless pietism.
But when Mazzini passes from Catholicism and Protestantism to Christ,
his attitude is one of infinite reverence and love. His close
knowledge of the Gospels, his native kinship with their spirit, had
brought him very near the mind of Christ, and he spoke of Him in
beautiful and tender words. Christ's "was the soul most full of love,
of holiest virtue, most inspired by God and by the Future, that men
have ever hailed upon this earth." He "came for all; he spoke to all
and for all. He lifted up the People and died for it." "I love Jesus,"
he once wrote in a private letter, "as the man who has loved the most
all mankind, servants and masters, rich and poor, Brahmins and Helots
or Parias." "In Jesus," so he wrote to the Oecumenical Council, "we
worship the Founder of an age that freed the individual, the Apostle
of the unity of law,--that law which he understood more fully than did
any of the generations before him,--the Prophet of the equality of
souls: and we bow ourselves before him, as the man who among all we
know of loved the most, whose life, an unexampled harmony between
thought and practice, proclaimed the holy doctrine of sacrifice,
henceforth to be the everlasting foundation of all religion and all
virtue; but we do not cancel the woman-born in God, we do not raise
him where we cannot hope to join him; we would love him as the brother
who was better than us all, not worship him and fear him as pitiless
judge and intolerant tyrant of the future." In Christ's teaching he
found many of the moral and social truths that were dearest to him.
"Does not every word of the Gospel breathe the spirit of liberty and
equality, of that war with evil and injustice and falsehood, that
inspires our work?" The cross was the symbol of "the one true immortal
virtue, the sacrifice of self for others." "Unity of faith, love for
one another, human brotherhood, activity in well-doing, the doctrine
of sacrifice, the doctrine of equality, the abolition of aristocracy,
the perfecting of the individual, liberty,--all are summed up in
Christ's words, 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and thy neighbour as
thyself,' and 'Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your
servant.'" Christ's teaching had inspired each struggle for truth from
the Crusades to Lepanto, had destroyed feudalism, was destroying now
the aristocracy of blood; Poles and Greeks had marched to freedom's
battles under the flag of Jesus and His mother. And, above all, Christ
gave the promise of indefinite religious progress,--a promise, which
closed the mouths of those who would arbitrarily pin men to a fixed
doctrine. 'The Spirit of truth shall abide with you for ever, ... and
shall teach you all things.' "On the eve of his accepted sacrifice,
when his mighty love for his brethren lit up the darkness of the
future, he had sight of the continuous revelation of the Spirit
through humanity." This was the 'eternal gospel' of the mystics of the
middle ages; and Christ's promise stood true to-day. "God forgive
you," he wrote to a Catholic friend, "you do not understand
Christ,--Christ who died that humanity may some day free itself to
rise to God by its own strength."
He paused anxiously before he declared himself no Christian. His
temperament and outlook on life were essentially Christian; he tried
to read new meanings into Christian doctrines; words of Christian
prayer came naturally to his lips; Christmas Day was "sacred" to him.
Several times in early life he cherished schemes of reform within the
church; for some years he doubted how far religious development could
be built on Christian foundations, whether the new church would be "an
application of Christianity" or "a religion to succeed" it. At all
events Christian ethics would remain. "The morality of Christ is
eternal; humanity will add to it, but will not take from it one word."
And for long yet Christianity would abide, the greatest of the creeds.
"This will reach you on Christmas Day," he wrote to an English friend.
"I am not a Christian, I belong to what I believe to be a still purer
and higher Faith; but its time has not yet come; and until that day
the Christian manifestation remains the most sacred revelation of the
ever-onward progressing spirit of mankind."
But that its doctrine and its cult must some day pass, that its ethics
needed supplementing, he had convinced himself, at all events as early
as his Swiss days. He wasted little time in attacking particular
articles of the Christian faith, for analytical criticism was always
hateful to him. But he thought it had certain essential imperfections,
because of which it failed, and was bound to fail to content the
present reach of human knowledge or inspire men's activities. He
charged it, firstly, with not sanctifying the things of earth. The
church taught that the world was evil, life here an expiation, heaven
the soul's true home. At one time he appealed against the church to
Christ's own teaching, to texts that spoke of God's will being done on
earth, of power given to Christ in earth, of the promise that the meek
should inherit the earth. In later life he qualified this reading of
the gospel. Jesus, "a soul blessed with such mighty love and perfect
harmony between thought and action," could not fail to realise the
harmony of earth and heaven. But "while he stood and stands alone,
supreme over all other great religious reformers in everything that
concerns the heart and affections, his intellectual grasp did not
extend beyond the requirements of a single epoch." At the time in
which he lived, he "saw no possible mission for the sake of the
brethren whom he loved, save by moral regeneration, by creating a
country of freemen and equals in heaven. He wished to show mankind how
it could find salvation and redemption in spite of and in opposition
to the world." Great Christian statesmen and thinkers of a later
time,--Gregory VII. and Thomas Aquinas,--had tried to bring the
temporal under the spiritual law. But they had failed, and the normal
Christianity of the day was fatally divorced from religion and
politics and art and science. It left the bigger part of life without
God's law to guide it. It told men to renounce the world, when their
duty was to live in it and battle in it and better it.
Christianity again came short, because it left out of ken the
collective life of the race. The conception was an impossible one at
the time in which Christ lived; and its absence maimed men's knowledge
of God, and shortened their power to attain to the Divine Ideal.
Christianity pointed, indeed, to "salvation, that is perfection"; but
it recognised no instrument beyond "the weak, unequal, isolated,
ineffective strength of the individual." Mazzini's criticism came to
this: Christianity tells each man to perfect himself by his own
strength and God's; but his spiritual growth is conditioned by the
growth of the men around him, and therefore his own perfecting
depends on the progress of the race, the common search for good, that
links all men together and the generations to one another. Mazzini
always regarded the French Revolution as the political expression, the
"daughter" of Christianity, and there the depreciation of the race,
the exaggeration of the individual had borne their necessary fruit of
moral selfishness and social anarchy. Yet again, though Christ had
promised the continuous teaching of his Spirit, ever leading to new
truth, the doctrine of redemption was inconsistent with any theory of
progress. There was no Fall; man had begun at the bottom and had been
tending upwards ever since. Salvation was for men, not from a single,
isolated act, but from the slow, unceasing, inevitable working of the
providential scheme. The individual came nearer the divine, not by
faith in Christ's sacrifice, but by his own works, by sacrifice of
self, by faith in the "ideal that every man is called to incarnate in
himself." And because of these imperfections in its theory of life,
Christianity had ceased to be a vitalising force. For some it had
become an ethical system, for others a philosophy, while men needed a
religion. Politics and art and science had gone their own ways.
Christian morality knew not patriotism. Charity was its only remedy
for social wrongs, and charity was impotent to stop the springs of
poverty. Men gave lip-service to Christ's teaching, but it had no
binding influence on their lives. It offered no solution for their
perplexities; it was no longer a faith that could move mountains or
remould the modern world. Its day had gone, and all the efforts of
neo-Christians or Christian Socialists or Old Catholics to make it
answer to modern needs were bound to fail, as the neo-Platonists had
failed in their day to galvanise paganism. "Jesus warned you, when on
earth," he said to "the Anglo-Saxon Christian Socialists," "that you
cannot put new wine into old bottles."
Such was Mazzini's criticism of Christianity, not always consistent
with itself, sometimes confounding Christ's thought with others'
perversions of it, sometimes failing to recognise how many-sided a
phenomenon is Christianity, sometimes inaccurately tracing its actual
results in history and modern life. His attitude towards it may be
summed up thus. He retained its belief in the omnipotence of the
spiritual; its faith in God and in His providential working; its
supreme veneration for the character and moral teaching of Jesus; its
insistence on moral perfection and not material interest as the end of
life; its call to love and sacrifice of self; its belief in
immortality; its aspiration to the Church Universal. He rejected the
divinity of Christ, the doctrine of a mediator, the antagonism between
matter and spirit and the consequent neglect of the things of earth;
its inability to grasp God's law of progress; its non-acceptance
(though the Church had partially recognised it) of Humanity as the
interpreter of that law.
But the new faith, which was to grow out of and supplement
Christianity, must have its doctrines too, its positive basis of
belief. "There is no life in the void. Life is faith in something, a
system of secure beliefs, grounded on an immutable foundation, which
defines the end, the destiny of man, and embraces all his faculties to
point them to that end." Mankind, he said, is weary of negations, of
the hustling conflict of opinions. "We must prepare for it an abode
for the day of rest,--something on earth, where it may lay its weary
head,--something in heaven on which its eyes may stay,--a tent to
shield it from the storm, a spring to quench its thirst in the vast
unbounded desert where it travels." Dogma is essential; it is ever
"sovereign over practical morality," for "morality is only its
consequence, its application, its translation into practice." By dogma
he meant "a body of ideas, which, starting from a fixed point,
embraces all human faculties and employs them for the conquest of a
positive, practical end, which is for the good of the majority; the
exposition of a principle and its consequences in relation to life's
manifestation and operations in the moral and the industrial world,
both for the individual and for society." The thinker apprehends it,
science and society prepare the medium for its adoption, the best and
wisest incarnate it in their lives, then it "enters the soul of the
many and becomes a religious axiom." In other words it is an ethical
and political system, so based on the eternal verities of life, so
penetrated by the spiritual sense of the race, that it ceases to be a
cold and abstract code, and takes the warmth and colour of religion,
compelling men's souls and pushing them irresistibly to social duty.
What then is the body of doctrine for the Church of the future, as
Mazzini conceived it? First, as the root of all, belief in God, "the
author of all existence, the living, absolute thought, of which our
world is a ray and the universe an incarnation"; "a sphere inviolable,
eternal, supreme over all humanity, independent of chance or error or
blind and interrupted operation." God, then, exists objectively, as
maker and ruler of the universe. Man discovers God; he does not
create Him. In his criticism of Renan, Mazzini attacks any theory of
the subjectivity of the Divine. Pantheism (that is, the "materialist
pantheism" of Spinoza, not the "spiritual pantheism" of St Paul and
Wordsworth and Shelley) confounds subject and object, good and evil,
and leaves no place for Providence or human liberty; it is a
"philosophy of the squirrel in the cage," condemning mankind to go for
ever rotating in a circle. Deism is a "sordid" creed, which relegates
God to heaven and ignores his ever-operating life in creation. Mazzini
gives no clue how he would have reconciled an all-creating
Deity,--author therefore of good and evil,--with a beneficent and
loving Providence.
He finds the proofs of an actual, objective God, first, in man
himself, in the universal intuition of the Divine. "God exists. God
lives in our conscience, in the conscience of Humanity, in the
Universe around us. Our conscience calls to him in our most solemn
moments of sorrow and joy. He who would deny God before a starry
night, before the graves of his dearest ones, before the martyr's
scaffold, is a very wretched or a very guilty man." The fact that we
aspire to the best and infinite proves that there is a best and
infinite, that is God. And, next, the fact of existence bears witness
to an intelligent creator. "God exists because we exist." "Call it God
or what you like," he once said, "there is life which we have not
created, but which is given." "The Universe displays him in its order
and harmony, in the intelligent design shown in its working and its
law." And this law is "one and immutable." "Everything is
preordained"; "God and law are identical terms"; "'chance' has no
meaning, and was only invented to express man's ignorance." "There can
be no miracle, nothing supernatural, no possible violation of the laws
that rule the Universe"; though he realised how big is the unknown of
nature, and his rejection of the supernatural did not prevent him from
being a mystic. But God is not only intellect but love, not only Lord
but Educator. His law embraces Humanity as well as nature, the moral
as well as the physical world. He manifests himself "in the
intelligent design, that regulates the life of Humanity" and leads man
ever upwards towards perfection. "Everything, from the grain of sand
to the plant, from the plant to Man, has its own law; how then can
Humanity be without its law?"
Mazzini seems to have recognised the difficulty of reconciling the
oneness and eternity of law with an ever-active Providence, which
concerned itself, for instance, with present-day problems of democracy
and nationality. He found a solution in making the law consist in an
inevitable tendency to progress, both in the material and, still more,
in the spiritual world. The law of Progress, which perhaps he
developed from Lessing, is "a supreme formula of the creative
activity, eternal, omnipotent, universal as itself." His 'Progress' is
not equivalent to 'evolution.' He formulated it, of course, before
Darwin's day; so far as I know, he never refers to Darwinism, and
probably never studied it. If he had, it would certainly have been to
condemn it. But he would have attacked it, not from the scientific
side, but on _à priori_ grounds. Progress, he would have said, rules
the material world, but it rules it through the spiritual, by virtue
of an inherent God-implanted tendency and the operation of the human
will. He would have rejected as derogatory to the divine idea an
evolution, which results from the struggle of unthinking and non-moral
forces. He condemned unsparingly, as we shall see, the explanation of
social facts by the bare brute struggle of individuals or the
development of material phenomena. Progress is essentially a moral
phenomenon, and postulates the search, not for self, but for
self-sacrifice. It is "the slow, but necessary, inevitable development
of every germ of good, of every holy idea." Sometimes, indeed, he is
trapped by the ambiguity of 'self-realisation,' and speaks of "the
instinct and necessity, which urges every living being to the fuller
development of all the germs, the faculties, the forces, the life
within it." But it is clear that he is always really thinking of the
development of good alone. God's plan "slowly, progressively makes man
divine." Whither Humanity ultimately goes, we know not; but we know
there is no limit to the march; and every age, every religion, each
new philosophy enlarges its apprehension of the end.
He curiously dovetails personal immortality into the doctrine. For the
individual soul the process of perfecting goes on beyond the limits of
this world. Life "here-down" (as he called it in English) is so short,
so full of imperfection, that the soul cannot in its earthly
pilgrimage climb the ladder that leads to God. And yet intuition and
tradition tell us that the ideal will be reached some day, somewhere;
in words, that almost suggest that he had read the parallel passage in
Wordsworth, he speaks of memory as the consciousness of the soul's
progress up from earlier existences; love would be a mockery, if it
did not last beyond the grave; the unity of the race implies a link
between the living and the dead; science teaches there is no death but
only transformation. He held passionately to his faith in immortality,
and he believed that the dear ones he had lost were watching over him
and bringing his best aspirations. The individual soul, he thought,
progresses through a series of re-incarnations, each leading it to a
more perfect development, and the rapidity of its advance depends on
its own purification. And as the individual has his progress through a
series of existences, so collective man progresses ever through the
human generations. "No, God eternal, thy word is not all spoken, thy
thought not yet revealed in all its fulness. It still creates, and
will create through long ages beyond the grasp of human reckoning. The
ages, that are past, have revealed but fragments to us. Our mission is
not finished. We hardly know its source, we do not know its final end;
time and our discoveries only extend its borders. From age to age it
ascends to destinies unknown to us, seeking its own law, of which we
read but a few lines. From initiative to initiative, through the
series of thy progressive incarnations, it purifies and extends the
formula of Sacrifice; it feels for its own way; it learns thy faith,
eternally progressive." If once we recognised this progressive
evolution of religion and morals, there would be no room for pure
scepticism; we should see that an expired form of faith is not wrong
but imperfect, that it needs not destroying but supplementing. "Every
religion instils into the human soul one more drop of the universal
life."
But does not this mean fatalism,--the same fatalism, with which he
charged the Christian doctrine of redemption, the fatalism, with which
he would have charged the evolutionists, had he known them? If the
progress of humanity is preordained, what need for man to use his puny
powers? Mazzini met the difficulty thus. True, evil cannot permanently
triumph, God's progress must go on; but its quicker or slower
realisation is in our hands. "The slow unfolding of history proceeds
under the continuous action of two factors, the work of individuals
and the providential scheme. Time and space are ours; we can quicken
progress or retard it, we cannot stop it." And this, because progress,
being essentially a moral phenomenon, must be realised in the world of
thought and will, before it can be translated into practice. Mazzini
did not seriously concern himself with the metaphysics of determinism;
he took the common-sense position that the will is free; "no
philosophic sophisms," he said, "can cancel the testimony of remorse
and martyrdom." It depends on a man's choice of good or evil, whether
he approaches nearer the ideal in himself, and therefore whether, so
far as his influence lies, progress is realised in society. Thus, in
his strained and inconclusive argument, God's providential working is
reconciled both with human free will and the oneness of law.
Progress, then!--onwards to the great Ideal, the ideal which "stands
in God, outside and independent of ourselves," which as yet we know
but darkly, but which every generation sees more clearly; fixed,
therefore, and "absolute in the Divine Idea," but gradually revealed
to man, "approached" but never "reached" in this life, ever
provisional and shifting for us as knowledge grows. The world is no
mere necessary sequence of material phenomena, but a spiritual stream,
that, swift or sluggish be its course, flows irresistibly to God. The
existing fact is not the law; choice between good and evil, heroism,
sacrifice are not illusions; conscience, the intuition of the ideal,
the power of will, and moral force are ultimate and mastering
spiritual facts. The divine design controls it all, and man has
liberty to help God's plan. And he who knows this, knows that "a
supreme power guards the road, by which believers journey towards
their goal," and he will be "bold with God through God." The
crusaders' cry 'God wills it' is for him, and his are the courage and
consistency and power of sacrifice, that come to those who know they
battle on the side of God. It was this conviction that Mazzini wished
his followers to have, when he pleaded that Young Italy should be as a
religion. For "political parties fall and die; religious parties never
die till they have conquered."
But how shall man search for the ideal, how learn the providential
design? Mazzini has his answer clear: "tradition and conscience,"[35]
or, as we may translate them, experience and intuition, "are the two
wings given to the human soul to reach to truth." First, then, the
individual consciousness and that in a two-fold sense. Truth is truth
only to the individual, when he apprehends it for himself. Sometimes
Mazzini speaks as if he accepted the whole Protestant doctrine of
individual judgment, and in a sense he does. Each man must prove by
his own consciousness every interpretation of God's law, whether it be
true or not. But this gift of judgment only comes by righteousness.
"In moments of holy thought something of the great flood of man's
knowledge of God's law may come to every man." To learn it, he must
"purify himself from low passion, from every guilty inclination, from
every idolatrous superstition"; and truth will come "in the most
secret aspirations of the soul, in the instincts of itself, that hover
round in supreme hours of affection and devotion." But, though Mazzini
does not very clearly distinguish, he seems generally to be thinking
of something more. It is for the consciousness not only to apprehend
and appropriate for the individual truths already known to the race,
but sometimes it is its privilege to spell a new line of God's law.
Glimpses of new truth may come to the collective intuition of a
people. There are times, when "the spirit of God descends upon the
gathered multitudes," and _vox populi_ is _vox Dei_. He would deny the
right of spiritual discovery to a people enslaved by low, material
impulses; but in a nation moved by some great aspiration, when thought
strikes thought, and enthusiasm kindles enthusiasm, there truth will
probably be found. But though in such times of faith and struggle the
people has its "great collective intuitions," though sometimes "the
pale, modest star that God has placed in simple bosoms" comes nearer
truth than genius comes, it is normally for the best and wisest to
discover truth. Only men of holy lives and genius are God's "born
interpreters"; his apostles, those "who love their brethren most and
are ready to suffer for their love, and those on whom God has
bestowed surpassing gifts of intellect, provided that their intellect
is virtuous and desires the good." But even such as these can find
truth only by interrogating the dim silent workings of the people's
mind. Light comes to no man by his own unaided effort; and the
solitary thinker may mistake his own conceit for truth. "Great men can
only spring from a great people, just as an oak, however high it may
tower above every other tree in the forest, depends on the soil whence
it derives its nourishment. The soil must be enriched by countless
decaying leaves."
But the untested intuition, whether of man of genius or people, is by
itself no sufficient criterion of truth. Every heresy has its martyrs.
There is a more unerring interpreter of God's law, known imperfectly
to Catholicism, but neglected by Protestantism and the individualist
schools of the day,--the consciousness of the race, checked and
corrected and perfected by each succeeding generation, the "common
consensus of humanity," "the tradition, not of one school or one
religion or one age, but of all the schools and all religions and all
the ages in their succession," for "no one man or people or school can
presume to discover all the law of God." The seeker after truth will
find it most surely in "the severe study of the universal tradition,
which is life's manifestation in Humanity." Humanity (the conception
of which he seems to have derived from Vico and Herder), "the living
word of God," "the collective and continuous being," is "the only
interpreter of God's law." "Humanity," said a thinker of the last
century,[36] "is a man who is ever learning. Individuals die; but the
truth they thought, the good they wrought, is not lost with them;
Humanity garners it, and the men who walk over their graves, have
their profit from it. Each of us is born to-day in an atmosphere of
ideas and beliefs, that are the work of all Humanity before us; each
of us brings unconsciously some element, more or less valuable, for
the life of Humanity that comes after. The education of Humanity grows
like those Eastern pyramids, to which each passer-by adds his stone.
We pass, the travellers of a day, called away to complete our
individual education elsewhere; the education of Humanity shines by
flashes in each one of us, but unveils its full radiance slowly,
progressively, continuously in Humanity. From one task to another,
from one faith to another, step by step Humanity conquers a clearer
vision of its life, its mission, of God and of his law." And here
again comes strength. "It matters little," he replied to Carlyle,
"that _our_ individual powers be of the smallest amount in relation to
the object to be attained; we know that the powers of millions of men,
our brethren, will succeed to the work after us, in the same
track,--we know that the object attained, be it when it may, will be
the result of _all_ our efforts combined." But he who would have this
strength, must needs respect Humanity's tradition, must recognise that
the race is more likely to be right than his own poor intellect. He
turned angrily on the "barbarian" schools, that would sweep away the
past, and create Humanity anew on some arbitrary plan. Humanity spurns
builders of utopias; and preachers of new principles, the masses
fervent for some new idea, must prove their beliefs by the infallible
test of tradition. Mazzini hardly recognised how difficult and vague
and diverse might be the detailed interpretation of tradition, and he
was never very modest in making his own inductions. He believed that
history proves that there are certain "immortal elements of human
nature,"--education, fatherland, liberty, association, family,
property, religion; and the theorist, who offends any one of these, is
in conflict with God's law. In the conjunction, then, of these two
criteria and no otherwise stands the discovery of the truth. Neither
suffices without the other; and therefore Catholicism and
Protestantism, each of which had apprehended one alone, are
incomplete. Tradition by itself leads to stagnation; intuition alone
to chance and anarchy. But "where you find the general permanent voice
of humanity agreeing with the voice of your conscience, be sure that
you hold in your grasp something with absolute truth,--gained and for
ever yours."
It will be noted that Mazzini parts himself from the intuitive school,
when he admits experience as the surer criterion of truth, when,
again, he says that the intellect is necessary to verify the instincts
of consciousness. On the other hand he is a pure intuitionist in his
conception of the function of genius, for genius meant with him
something other far than 'the infinite capacity of taking pains'; it
was a God-given, almost mystical faculty, that saw truth by its own
natural, unaided light, that possessed her forcibly, not wooed her
timidly. He is an intuitionist again when he holds, as obviously he
does hold, that it is for the pure in heart to see God, that religious
and ethical enquiry depends for its results on the cultivation of the
moral sense, and therefore more on the moral than on the intellectual
development of the enquirer. And, even when he sides with the opposite
school, it does not mean that he trusts to any scientific process of
ratiocination. He has more confidence in the unconscious reasoning, by
which the race has gathered its experience, and which allows no room
for the errors of the solitary thinker. He did not neglect
metaphysics, but he was little influenced by them, and he would have
sided with 'the vulgar' against 'the philosophers.'
* * * * *
Mazzini's conception of Humanity was essentially related to his
craving for religious and moral unity. Fighter though he was ever, and
recognising somewhat the value of "the holy conflict of ideas," he did
not see how much in an imperfect age progress depends upon the clash
of creeds and conflict of opinions. He was so weary of debate, so
confident that others must come to the same truth that he had. As far
as humanity had learnt God's law, all should bow to it; and he looked
to a true national education to generate this unity of faith. As unity
was the law of God's universe, so unity was the condition of
humanity's advance. Without it "there may be movement, but it is not
uniform or concentrated." Therefore "the world thirsts for unity,"
"democracy tends to unity," and every great religion must of necessity
strive to be catholic. But now "discord is everywhere,"--creeds that
curse one another, warring states, class hatreds, party bitterness,
the search for truth itself a source of conflict. It is time to end
this wasteful strife, and march together, "reverently seeking the
future city, a new heaven and a new earth, which may unite in one, in
love of God and man, in faith in a common aim, all those, who tossed
between fears of the present and doubtings of the future, now stray in
intellectual and moral anarchy." "We must found moral unity, the
Catholicism of humanity," "the unity of belief that Christ promised
for all peoples," "a unity which binds the sects in one sole people of
believers, and on the churches and conventicles and chapels raises the
great temple, Humanity's Pantheon to God."
The new faith, like the old, must have its visible embodiment.
"Sacred," he said, "is the church, but not a false church." At the
time of the Roman Republic, a liberal cleric warned the Catholics that
"if the church did not march with the people, the people would march
without the church, aye, outside it and against it." "Against the
church, no!" Mazzini replied; "we will march from the church of the
past to the church of the future, from the dead church to the living,
to the church of freemen and equals. There is room enough for such a
church betwixt the Vatican and Capitol." Sometimes he thought that the
new church would have its cult, a cult "which would gather believers
together in feasts of equality and love," where men of saintly lives
would preach plain truths of duty and inspire enthusiasm. And in some
undefined way the authority of the church was to be supreme in the
state. Gregory VII.'s principles, he says, were right, but erred in
the application.[37] "Religion will be the soul, the thought of the
new state." "Power is one; religion, the law of the spirit, sits in
the seat of government; its interpreters, the temporal power, reduce
it to practice." It is true that till men find a common faith, while
the existing church is a church only in name, the state must protect
itself by the separation of the two. But the Cavourian 'free church in
a free state' means religious indifference and "an atheist law"; and a
higher order will terminate "the absurd divorce between the temporal
and spiritual." In his later years it seems to have been a fixed idea
with him to get some kind of state creed recognised by the Italian
parliament. Some day "a few men, reverenced for their doctrine and
virtue, their intellect and love and sacrifice of self," would form a
"supreme Council" for Europe and America, proclaiming new truths and
the common duties of the nations; while under them would sit national
councils to define the several duties of each people. He seems to have
expected that at first these councils would have a voluntary basis
outside the state, but that eventually they would be recognised by law
as the supreme international and national authorities, and, as such
would be the authoritative exponents of tradition and control
education. And with this reconciliation of the spiritual and temporal
the world would find that real authority, of which it stood in need.
For authority in itself was a good and not an evil thing; and on the
wreck of the existing phantasms of authority, another would arise,
democratic, based on the common will, loving liberty and progress,
with virtue to initiate and inspire, the unexhausted fountain of
reform, correlating and organising men's various labours for the
commonwealth. For such an authority "the world is ever searching, and
save in it and through it, it has no life or progress."
That the new religion,--one which in its time must pass too,--would
come, he had no doubt. He looked for the day when a Council of the
best and wisest (whether or not identical with the supreme European
council) would define the articles of the new faith. It might be "a
truly Oecumenical Council of virtuous intellects," or it might spring
from one "free people, which had found brotherhood in the worship of
duty and the ideal." It was the dream of his life that this faith
would issue forth from Rome,--Rome, the only city to whose authority
Europe had bowed, Rome, the seat of the old false religion, whose fall
must come ere the new one could arise. But, whatever were the more
impatient hopes of earlier years, he came to see that the dawn was yet
afar. Long missionary labours must come first. Still, the time, he
thought, was ripe at all events for a "church of the precursors," and
gladly he would have led its builders. In younger days, when the
deliverance of Italy seemed near, he prayed that God would let him
give the rest of life to the greater work. Afterwards, when the new
Italy delayed its coming, and age and weakness came ere the first task
was done, the dream of a missionary call faded slowly away, to be
cherished to the end as the great unfulfilled ambition of his life.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] _Conscienza_; in Mazzini's use of the word, it covers both
'consciousness' and 'conscience.' Mazzini himself translated it by
'conscience' (see below, p. 362), where 'consciousness' would be more
accurate.
[36] Pascal.
[37] In the undated letter, quoted by Signor Donaver in the _Rassegna
Nazionale_, Oct. 1, 1890, he speaks of a reformed Catholic church
becoming "the guide of the State and not its servant"; but I think he
says rather more than he really felt in order to conciliate an old
clerical friend, to whom the letter seems to be addressed.
Chapter XIV
Duty
Morality depends on an Ideal--Criticism of the theory of
Rights and Utilitarianism--Happiness not the end of
life--Life is a mission--Work for the sake of Duty--Thought
useless without action--Power of the principle of
Duty--Duties to self; family; country.
On this religious foundation Mazzini constructed his code of
ethics,--Christian, very Christian in its spirit, essentially modern
in its application; the noblest morality that has sought to answer to
the needs of a democratic society. The law of Progress judges all
action by the Ideal, and the sole standard of conduct lies in what a
man does that the Ideal may be better realised in himself and others.
Without the recognition of such a universal law, demanding their
cooperation and conformity, there can be no common rule for men; life
becomes the resultant of clashing interests; its line of advance, if
advance there be, depends upon mere chance. True education is
impossible, because there is no consensus on its aim; we come to value
character, as he complained that Carlyle did, not by its goodness, but
by its energy and persistence, whether it be to good or evil ends.
Everywhere in actual life, the neglect of the Ideal means worship of
brute force, cowardly acquiescence in the existing fact, the absence
of all striving for a better state. But with the apprehension of the
Ideal and of the Divine law, three things follow, incentive to
progress. Every man has a rule to guide his individual actions; men of
good will will associate their efforts for a common end; and they can
appeal to a supreme, positive law against those who break it. "In the
consciousness of your law of life, which is the law of God, stands the
foundation of your morality, the rule of your actions and your duties,
the measure of your responsibility." "If there be no Mind supreme over
all human minds, who can save us from the caprice of our fellows,
should they chance to be stronger than ourselves? If there be no law,
sacred and inviolable, not created by man, what standard can we find
to judge whether an act be just or not? In the name of whom or what
can we protest against oppression and inequality? Without God, we have
no other law but Fact."
Mazzini lived too soon to have to meet a school that denied morality,
as that school is developed to-day. But he found a numerous and
powerful school, that built morality on what he believed to be
radically wrong foundations. The theory of Rights, since the
precursors of the French Revolution popularized it, had dominated
Liberal thought, except for a handful of thinkers,--Lamennais,
Carlyle, Emerson. It had had, he owned, its temporary value, as the
necessary rebellion against fatalism and immobility and privilege. "It
destroyed the empire of necessity"; it finally asserted the dignity of
the individual, so that "God's creature might appear, ready to work,
radiant with power and will." "Only, it stopped short of God," for the
ideal was hidden from it. Its work was to destroy, and it was unfitted
for an age that needed a constructive code of ethics. Mazzini included
Utilitarianism in his condemnation, as a mere variant of the principle.
He knew that Bentham repudiated the connection; but Bentham's
criticism, he thought, was aimed at Blackstone and the theorists of an
imaginary compact, not at a system, which based itself on the _à
priori_ claims of the individual. The spirit and the consequences were
the same in both schools. Bentham and the French alike appealed to the
getting side of man and not the giving; both thought of the individual
in his self-regarding rather than in his social aspect; neither had an
ideal or any imperative binding law for men; both neglected the
strongest impulses to right action,--enthusiasm and love and sense of
duty. They supplied no guide for conduct; they gave no definition of
happiness, nor therefore of what men's rights should be, and left each
individual to interpret them by his own fancy. They gave no answer to
the question, For what are men to use their liberty? though on the
answer depended the whole value of rights. Thus happiness, left
without a theory of life's purpose to define it, slided easily into
the satisfaction of man's lower part. "Any theory of happiness will
make men fall, soon or late, into the suicide of the noblest elements
of human nature, will make them go, like Faust, to seek life's elixir
in the witch's kitchen." Man's material interests must indeed be cared
for, but not for their own sake; they were only instruments to higher
ends; they must be satisfied because, only when men have leisure and
education and a decent home, the moral life has room to grow. If they
became the end and not the means, they led to torpor of the nation's
soul, to the paralysis that comes, when men care for power and money
only, and a country measures its greatness by its riches and brute
strength. The whole position was a false one. No moral theory could
work, that made happiness the end of life. The Utilitarians mistook
the incident of the journey for the end. The spiritual side of
man,--his social instincts, his yearnings after righteousness, the
pure uncalculating love that gives up life for duty,--all were outside
their scheme. "Martyrdom! Your theory has no inheritance in it. Jesus
escapes your logic; Socrates, if you are consistent, must seem to you,
as Plato did to Bentham, a sublime fool." Why should men die for their
fellows, why suffer prison, exile, poverty, if happiness be the end of
life? Why should they toil on, knowing they would not see their
labour's fruits, to make life better for a future generation?
Thus the theory supplied no principle of moral action. You cannot, he
would say, by any theory of rights make men unselfish. He knew that
when a man thinks of happiness, he will not be impartial between his
own happiness and other men's, that directly he balances his rights
against those of his fellows, he will, however unconsciously, weight
the scales in his own favour. It was impossible, he thought, on
utilitarian principles to make men work for the happiness of the many.
The principle at once sets men thinking on the selfish side, and makes
them dole their good deeds with a thrifty hand. "You have taught the
rich man," he said, "that society was constituted only to assure his
rights, and you ask him then to sacrifice them all for the advancement
of a class, with which he has no ties either of affection or custom.
He refuses. Will you call him bad? Why should he consent? He is only
logical." Mazzini often quoted the fate of fellow-revolutionists, who
began life with generous impatience to fight the wrong, but when
failure came and disillusion, could not say farewell to joy, and
balanced self and duty, till "scepticism twined its serpent coils
around them," and he "saw that saddest of all things, the slow death
of a soul." "For God's sake," he wrote to an English friend on the
education of his son, "do not teach him any Benthamite theory about
happiness either individual or collective. A creed of individual
happiness would make him an egotist: a creed of collective happiness
will reach the same result soon or late. He will perhaps dream
Utopias, fight for them, whilst young; then, when he will find that he
cannot realise rapidly the dream of his soul, he will turn back to
himself and try to conquer his own happiness: sink into egotism."
Christ taught another way. "When he came and changed the face of the
world, he did not speak of rights to the rich, who had no need to win
them, nor to the poor, who would perhaps have imitated the rich and
abused them. He did not speak of utility or self-interest to a race
corrupted by self-interest and utility. He spoke of Duty; he spoke of
Love and Sacrifice and Faith; he said that he only should be first,
who had helped all men by his works. And when these words were
whispered in the ear of a dead society, they gave it life, they won
the millions, they won the world, and advanced the education of
mankind one step onward."
And,--as a final criticism,--the theory of rights solved nothing.
Mazzini did not waste argument on the automatic identity of public
and private interests. Rights jostled against rights, the happiness of
one man or one class against another's. The theory could not reconcile
them or make peace between the jarring interests; rather, it made
war,--"war not of blood but of gold and trickery; less manly than the
other kind of war but equally destructive; a ruthless war, in which
the strong inevitably crush the weak and inexperienced." He attacked
the whole economy of free contract, which made the workman's condition
depend not on equity, but on the mere brute conflict of opposing
rights, and resulted, he believed, of necessity in the workman's
defeat. What good were rights to men, who were too poor or ignorant to
use them? "Why do I speak to you of your duties before I speak to you
of your rights?" he said to Italian working men in 1847. Because, he
answered, the theory of rights has triumphed for half a century,
liberty has increased, wealth has multiplied, but the condition of the
people grows steadily worse in almost every country.
Mazzini's criticism was aimed at Bentham; had he read the later
Utilitarians, as apparently he never did, he would no doubt have owned
that some of his arguments had no application to them. Happiness
implies a definition of happiness, and therefore an ideal; and that
ideal may be as high as was Mazzini's own. He made a theoretical
mistake in not distinguishing between the object and the motive of
life; though, apart from this, he would have said that the desire of
others' good must be, not, as in the Utilitarian theory, one of life's
motives, but _the_ motive. But he was always essentially a moralist,
whose business was to find a practical, popular, effective rule of
conduct. He knew that the search for happiness meant the search for
pleasure, and that the search for pleasure ends in "impotence and
nothingness"; that the difficulty is not so much to make men know the
good, as to make them in actual conduct rate the higher good above the
lower; and that they will not do this if happiness is their object,
since the average man will then prefer the immediate and easy
happiness to the remoter and more difficult, still less will sacrifice
his own happiness for that of others. "I should like," he says, "to
look for the answer to the problem in a good mother's advice to her
child. There you would certainly find utility condemned as a basis of
education. Mothers know that, if happiness were made the object of
life down here, life almost always would be only too much a bitter
irony." As for the individual, so for the many; and to bid the masses
seek for pleasure without reference to the higher ends of life, was to
lay up bitterness and vanity for them and evil for the nation. And no
hedonism, no theory of rights, could supply an operating rule for
conduct. Perhaps he underrated the value of the sense of individual
rights, and did not see how in an imperfect society, where nobler
rules are faint or wanting, it may give strength to human dignity and
kill the slave and coward in men. But he knew that it could not make
them live and work for others. He had gone through it all in his own
experience; he had had unsurpassed opportunities for judging the
springs of action in other men, and he knew that there was nothing
here to inspire to steady, strenuous social service.
And so he met the theory with an uncompromising repudiation of it
all. "Man has one right only, to be free from obstacles that prevent
the unimpeded fulfilment of his duties." Life is no search for
happiness, whether "by railway shares, selfishness, contemplation," or
otherwise. "Our aim is not the greatest possible happiness, but, as
Carlyle said, the greatest possible nobleness." "Pain and happiness,
ill fortune and good are incidents of the journey. When the wind blows
and the rain falls, the traveller draws his cloak closer round,
presses his hat on his head, and prepares to fight the storm. Anon the
storm leaves him, the sunshine breaks the clouds, and warms his frozen
limbs; the traveller smiles and blesses God. But do rain or sunshine
change his journey's end?" The end was something other far than
happiness. Mazzini looked for a principle that would rate the moral
above the material, altruism above selfishness, humanity above the
individual; something that would reconcile where Rights divided, that
would make men reach to an ideal, and by it live and die for others.
"We must find an educative principle, to guide men to better things,
to teach them constancy in sacrifice, to bind them to their brothers
without making them dependant on any one man's theory or on the brute
force of the community. This principle is Duty. We must convince men
that they, sons of one God, have here on earth to carry out one
law,--that each of us must live not to himself but others,--that the
end of life is not to have more or less of happiness but to make
ourselves and others better,--that to fight injustice and error,
everywhere, for our brothers' good, is not a right only but a
duty,--duty we may not without sin neglect, duty that lasts long as
life." "Life is a mission," the call that comes to every man to make
the ideal real. "Life was given you by God, that you might use it for
the profit of Humanity; that you might so direct your individual
faculties, that they will develop your brothers' faculties, that by
your work you might add something to the collective work of bettering
men and finding Truth." Life is a war with evil; "we cannot root it
out down here, but we can wage undying battle with it, and
everlastingly weaken its dominion." To such God's Providence has
called us. The divine plan needs our conscious efforts to assist it,
and the law, that rules the Universe, becomes a positive binding law
of conduct. Man's bounden duty is everywhere and in all things to
forward the progress of humanity, which is written in God's law. "The
supreme virtue is sacrifice,--to think, work, fight, suffer, where our
lot lies, not for ourselves but others, for the victory of good over
evil."
God demands the whole of man. Negative, inactive goodness is nothing
by itself. Our duty lies on earth, among our fellow-men, in the busy,
throbbing life around us, not in some vain selfish search for
spiritual satisfaction. "Rest is immoral. There is here-down and there
ought to be no rest." Our business is to make men and their
surroundings better, not live for ourselves in self-absorption or
æsthetic ecstasy or solitary thought and prayer. That is none other
than the search for happiness in subtle shape. "The earth is our
workshop; we may not curse it, we must hallow it." "God has placed you
here on earth; he has set around you millions of beings like
yourselves, whose march keeps pace with yours, whose life finds
sustenance in your life. He willed to save you from the perils of
solitary existence, and therefore gave you needs, which by yourselves
you cannot satisfy,--mastering social instincts, which are only latent
in the brute creation and which distinguish you from it. He has placed
this world around you,--this world, that you call Matter, glorious in
its beauty, teeming with life, life, which, remember, everywhere
displays God's finger, but expects your work upon it and multiplies
its powers according as your activities are multiplied. He has planted
in you inextinguishable sympathies, pity for them that mourn, joy for
them that laugh, wrath against the oppressors of God's creatures, the
importunate searching for the truth. And you," he is addressing the
pietists, "deny and despise those marks of your mission that God has
lavished round you, you lay a curse upon his manifestations, when you
bid us concentrate our strength in a work of inward purification,--a
work imperfect and impossible to the man who is alone." There is no
virtue in the cloistered life. There is "nothing worse than
depression, nothing more enervating than self-contemplation." "We are
here not to contemplate but to transform nature; and self almost
always lies at the bottom of contemplation. The world is not a
spectacle, it is a field of battle, where all, who love the Just, the
Holy, the Beautiful, must bear their part, be they soldiers or
generals, conquerors or martyrs." "Do not analyse," he once wrote; "do
not light Psyche's lamp to examine and anatomise life. Do good around
you: preach what you believe to be the truth and act accordingly; then
go through life, looking forward."
Nor will God's servants take thought for their own salvation. "God
will not ask us, 'What hast thou done for thy own soul?' but 'What
hast thou done for the souls of others, the sister-souls I gave
thee?'" "We cannot rise to God save by our brothers' souls, and we
must make them better and more pure, even though they ask us not."
"When I hear men say, 'There is a just man,' I ask, 'How many souls
are saved by him?'" And again, the mere passive love and apprehension
of the truth are no fulfilling of God's law. Even the preaching of
truth avails not, unless the preacher strive for it in his daily life.
"Thought and action," so he never wearied of insisting, must go hand
in hand. "What good are ideas," he asked, "unless you incarnate them
in deeds?" "It is not enough that thought be grounded on truth; the
thinker's life must visibly express it in his acts; there must be an
ever living harmony between mind and morals, between the idea and its
application." "Every thought, every desire of good, which we do not,
come what may, seek to translate into action, is a sin. God thinks in
working, and we must, at a distance, copy him." The great men of
earth, of whom Jesus was the prototype, were those who wrought as well
as thought,--missionaries, politicians, martyrs, as well as poets and
philosophers;--such men as Aeschylus and Dante, Pythagoras and
Savonarola and Michelangelo,--most of them, he loved to think,
Italians. The great nation was that, whose thought was fruitful in
great action, which to high ideals linked noble deeds and taught its
sons to work and die. "He who sunders faith from works, thought from
action, the moral man from the practical or political man, is not in
truth religious. He breaks the chain that binds earth and heaven."
Therefore are we called to work, work without ceasing and with all our
power, putting behind us fear and thought of self and looking for
results or praise of men; work all the more, when evil is strong
around us and the way of truth is dark; work, if need be, even unto
death. The law of sacrifice, which Christ left us for our heritage,
finds its highest, best expression in martyrdom. "Life and death," he
replied, when attacked for sending young Italians to their doom in
insurrection, "are both sacred: two angels of God, ministering alike
to a higher end, the victory of truth and justice." Men may do more by
their deaths than by their lives, and the memory of those, who die in
the service of their fellows, may inspire generations and win a
country's freedom. "It is not enough to follow the instincts of the
heart," he wrote to an impulsive youth, "not enough to let the
enthusiasm of a good nature impel you to a good deed now and again.
This is the career of 'men of an impulse,' who are one degree lower
than 'men.' The admiration of the Beautiful, the Great, the Divine,
that I ask of you, must be constant in every hour, in every act." We
may work from love, while it is given us; but when love grows cold and
enthusiasm fails and the damp night of doubt and disappointment
settles down, "the simple knowledge of duty" must be there, to bid us
work and for ever work. "You must do good," he told another, "for the
sake of goodness only." Nor may we ask to see our work's results.
Results will come to the race, if not to the individual. Men may see
little fruit of their labours; the individual's struggles may end in
vanity and disappointment. But the race profits from the seeming
waste. The individual, who is left by himself "face to face with
infinity," loses courage, as he complained that Carlyle did, and
slides into "scepticism and misanthropy." But he will not faint, if he
remembers that all Humanity is working to one end; he will know that
it is not success that matters, but effort in the right direction.
"God measures not our strength but our intentions." "Where you cannot
have victory, salute and bless martyrdom. The angels of Martyrdom and
Victory are brothers, and both spread their wings above the cradle of
your future life." "You may succeed or not," he wrote to a
parliamentary candidate;[38] "that is not the vital question. The
question is to work manfully; to stand on the ground of a principle,
whilst almost everybody makes life a thing of tactics and
compromises."
But, when a man has listened to the call of God, and purged his soul
of self, and given himself to duty,--sober, persistent, fearless
duty,--his is the power that nothing else can give. For duty "borrows
from the Divine nature a spark of its omnipotence." Men will not die
for rights; they will for duty. They will not give up all that makes
life pleasant, brave toil and danger and opprobrium, for
self-interest; they will do it for a principle. Only a sense of duty
makes a people fight through all a generation for a freedom, that only
their children can enjoy. Therefore he, who would rouse men to noble
deeds, and lift them to sacrifice and heroism, whether it be in the
small things of commonplace citizenship or in the fiery trial of a
revolution, must call them in the name of duty. Again he appealed to
the great example. "Jesus sought not to save a dying world by
criticism. He did not speak of interests to men whom the worship of
interests had poisoned with selfishness. He asserted in God's holy
name principles unknown before; and those few principles, which we,
eighteen centuries after, are still seeking to translate into facts,
changed the face of the world. One spark of faith accomplished what
all the sophisms of philosophers had had no glimpse of,--a step
forward in the education of mankind."
Mazzini probably never asked himself what was the ultimate sanction of
his code; and, if he had been pushed to it, it is not easy to surmise
what answer he would have given. He could hardly have found the
sanction in the positive commandment of the Deity, for he held that
the will of God was revealed only through humanity, and this transfers
the sanction to another ground. Nor, even had he been familiar with
them, would he have based the principle on evolutionary
arguments,--that altruism is necessary to the race, that that
community will survive, which contains the greatest number of
self-sacrificing individuals. He would have assented to the facts, but
he would probably have said that no theory of heredity or race
selection can explain the origin of altruism, which is a personal,
conscious, self-generated sense, which therefore cannot come from any
'natural,' unconscious source. Nor, again, would he have said, as a
Utilitarian might say, that the life of duty is the highest form of
happiness, that there is a sense in which altruism and egoism are
identical, because he most tastes fruition, who loses himself in love
and work for other men. There is a truth in this, that Mazzini
neglected; he sometimes forgot that Christianity was an Evangel, good
tidings of great joy,--that, so long as love and enthusiasm and the
martyr's passion possess a man, so far as he has attained to the
glorious liberty of the children of God, the life of duty is the
highest happiness. But he knew only too well that gloom and depression
will come, that, when the light fails, duty becomes a stern
taskmaster, and that no principle of happiness (in any acceptation of
the word) will keep a man always faithful to his mission. And so he
would almost certainly have fallen back on the conscience, as the
ultimate moral sanction. "Life," he says, "is a march onwards to Self,
through collective Perfecting to the progressive realisation of an
Ideal." Whether he had called it 'self-realisation' or any less
ambiguous name, he would have come to the position that a man feels
that he owes it to himself to strive for the best he knows, to 'do his
duty for duty's sake,' that he must justify his thoughts and actions
to himself--his unsophisticated self,--that, if not, he will feel
remorse and guilt. The practical value of any system of ethics depends
on whether it appeals to 'the sanction in the mind itself,' to
feelings familiar to the mass of would-be moral men. To such the
direct appeal to conscience has more weight than all the arguments of
theologians or utilitarians.
* * * * *
In his essay on _The Duties of Man_ and elsewhere Mazzini enumerates
the various spheres of duty. A man's duties begin with himself, not
from any self-regarding motive, but because as is a man's own
worthiness, so is his power to help his country or mankind. Never was
one more passionate for personal holiness. 'Be good, be good,' is the
recurring theme that runs through all his writings and political
aspirations. "There is only one end, the _moral_ progress of man and
humanity." "You must labour all your life," he wrote to a young
Italian, "to make your own self a temple to the Ideal, to God." "To
draw near to God, purifying our conscience as a temple, sacrificing
self for love,--this is our mission. To make ourselves better,--this
is the order of the day, which must be the rule and consecration of
our work." All his labours for his country had the supreme end in
view, that Italian men and women should lead godly lives. "Make
yourselves better," he said to Italian working men in words, that show
how little of the demagogue there was in him, "this must be the object
of your life. Preach virtue, sacrifice, and love to the classes above
you; and be yourselves virtuous and prepared for sacrifice and love.
You must educate and perfect yourselves as well as educate and perfect
others."
A man's next duties are to his family. Dear, very dear, to him was the
life of family, which he in his self-forgetfulness had put aside. "The
only pure joys, unmixed with sadness, that it is given men to enjoy on
earth, are the joys of Family." Outside it "men may find brief joys
and comforts, but not the supreme comfort, the calm as of a peaceful
lake, the calm of trustful sleep, the child's sleep on its mother's
breast." The family is an eternal element of human life, more durable
even than country; and the true man will make his family the centre of
his life, never wandering from it, never neglecting it. True love is
"tranquil, resigned, humble," as Dante's love for Beatrice. The wife
will be the equal of her husband, she who is "the reflex for the
individual of the loving Providence that watches over humanity."
Mazzini repudiated any artificial assimilating of the sexes; but their
differing functions were equally sacred and necessary. There must be
therefore no superiority of man over woman, no inequality, domestic or
political. A man must make his wife his comrade, not only in his joys
and sorrows, but in his thoughts and work. He must love his children
with "a true, deep, severe love." "Before Humanity and God children
are the most awful responsibility that a human being can have." "It
depends on us," so he quoted from Lamennais, "whether our children
turn out men or brutes."
But the family, that shuts itself within its own small circle, betrays
its God-appointed function. It was made to be a school of service for
humanity, and teach men to be citizens. The _égoisme à deux_, that
forgets country and mankind, the "blind, nerveless, unreasoning love
of children, that is selfishness in the parents and destruction for
them," betray the family's glorious prerogative. "Few mothers or
fathers, in this irreligious age of ours, and especially among the
well-to-do classes, understand the gravity and sacredness of their
educational duties." Terrible to their country are the fruits of "the
selfishness taught by weak mothers and careless fathers, who let their
children regard life not as a duty and mission, but as a search for
pleasure and a study of their own well-being." The true parent will
teach his children not only to be good, but to be patriots, loving
their country, honouring its great men; will teach them "not hatred of
oppressors but an earnest looking forward to fight oppression," will
make them reverent to true authority, but rebels against false. There
is danger, he says, in Goethe's maxim: 'do the duty that lies nearest
thee.' As him, so it may lead others into a moral solitude, where the
cry of humanity comes not. It is so easy in happy life of family, in
absorption in one's special work, to forget the duties of a citizen,
to avoid the fret and stress, may-be the hardships and the danger, of
politics and social duty. But it is not enough for men to be "kind
towards their friends, affectionate in their families, inoffensive
towards the rest of the world." The true man knows that he may not
decline responsibility for those, whom God has made his
fellow-citizens. And higher still, higher than family or country,
stands Humanity; and no man may do or sanction aught for either, which
will hurt the race. Ever before Mazzini stood the vision of the cross,
Christ dying for all men, not from utilitarian calculation of the
greatest number, but because love embraces all.
FOOTNOTE:
[38] Mr Peter Taylor in the Newcastle election, 1859.
Chapter XV
The State
The moral law and the state--Duties of the state: liberty,
association, education--Sovereignty is in
God--Democracy--The ideal government--The republic--The
ideal state.
In politics, as for the individual, the moral law, so Mazzini taught,
must reign supreme. "The end of politics is to apply the moral law to
the civil organisation of a country." The state exists for the sake of
morality; its one and only final object is to help the moral growth of
the men and women within its borders, help it through all the
countless influences that society exercises on the individual.
Morality is largely determined by environment; and the state must so
fashion the environment, that the moral life may ever flourish more
abundantly in it. "You cannot found the brotherhood of Christ, where
ignorance and misery, servility and corruption on the one side and
culture, riches, power on the other prevent any mutual esteem and
love. Men will not understand the virtue of sacrifice, where money is
the sole foundation of individual security and independence." How can
they train their children to true patriotism, when a debased
conception of it rules, and all around them men and women are thinking
of their private gain and pleasure? How train them to perfect honesty,
"when tyranny and espionage compel men to be false or silent on
two-thirds of their opinions?" How to despise money, "where gold alone
buys honours, influence, respect, nay, is all that stands between them
and the caprice and insults of their masters?" "Take a man, for
instance," he says, writing in the worst days of working-class
depression, "who labours hard from fourteen to sixteen hours a day to
obtain the bare necessities of existence; he eats his bacon and
potatoes (when indeed he can get them) in a place which might rather
be called a den than a house; and then, worn out, lies down and
sleeps; he is brutalised in a moral and physical point of view; he has
not ideas but propensities,--not beliefs but instincts; he does not
read, he cannot read. How can you come at him, how kindle the divine
spark that is torpid in his soul, how give the notion of life, of
sacred life, to him, who knows it only by the material labour that
crushes him and by the wages that abase him? How will you give him
more time and more energy to develop his faculties except by lessening
the number of hours of labour and increasing his profits? How, above
all, will you raise his fallen soul and give him the consciousness of
his duties and his rights, except by his initiation into
citizenship--in other words, the suffrage?" Some day it will be
otherwise. "When there is family life and property, education and
political function for all, when through them men have closer
communion with one another, then family and property and country and
humanity will become more sacred to them all. When Christ's arms,
still stretched upon the martyr's cross, are freed to clasp humanity
in one embrace, when earth has no more brahmins and pariahs, masters
and servants, but only _men_, then shall we worship with far other
faith and other love God's holy name."
There are, in the main, three ways, by which the state can foster the
moral life of the citizens. First of all it must secure liberty; not
that liberty is an end in itself, but because it is the necessary
condition of morality. There can be no morality without
responsibility, no responsibility without liberty to choose between
good and evil, between social service and self-interest. Liberty is
necessary to true progress, for a progress that is imposed from above
and not freely accepted by the people,--the whole programme of
paternal despotism,--works no change in character, and therefore is "a
soulless form," which cannot live. Only the freeman, who owns no lord
but God, can attain to his full spiritual stature. "Where liberty is
not, life is reduced to a simple organic function. The man, who allows
his liberty to be violated, betrays his own nature, and rebels against
God's decrees." Thus there are certain fundamental liberties, which
not even a democracy may legitimately infringe. "No majority, no force
of the community may take from you what makes you men." These
liberties include, save in rare exceptions, "all that is indispensable
to feed life morally and materially,"--personal liberty, religious
liberty, unqualified liberty of speech and press, liberty of
association, liberty of trade,--all of them liberties, without which
men cannot choose their sphere of duty, without which society is
destined to waste or stagnation.
It will be noticed that Mazzini omits not only liberty of immoral
action, however 'self-regarding,' but any liberty that has an
anti-social tendency. He did not admit, for instance, any absolute
right of property, and, as we shall see, limited the right of bequest,
and advocated severe taxation to check great inequalities of fortune.
Theoretically he believed that government should possess very wide
powers. But on the whole, when we come to the details of his social
programme,[39] his position is the Liberal one; and (always excepting
education) he stood against any great extension of state interference.
It was not from any love of individualism and free competition; he
hated them as anarchical,--fatal to spiritual unity and true
citizenship, fatal to the welfare of the masses. But he wished the
higher order to evolve, not from compulsion, which left the moral
sense untouched, not by the force of the majority or of a despotism,
but through a moral growth, which carried the community willingly and
consciously towards a better state. The liberty to do good would
become through education the liberty of doing good. This meant, as we
shall see, that he allowed no liberty in education, for moral
education must be uniform and therefore removed from individual
choice. But this encroachment on liberty once made for the sake of a
common morality, for the sake of that same morality he desired liberty
in most other spheres of civil life.
But liberty is not enough. By itself, it is a mirage for the masses of
mankind. "What is liberty of trade for the man without capital or
credit? What are free opportunities of education for him who has no
time for study?" Only Association can make liberty a reality for the
masses, or allow new elements of progress to assert themselves, or
save the waste that comes of isolated or conflicting labours. Nay
more, association gives the sense of brotherhood, the spiritual
strength, that comes from sharing others' work, from merging
individual action in a bigger cause. "Association multiplies your
strength a hundred fold; it makes the ideas and progress of other men
your own; it raises, betters, hallows your nature with the affections
of the human family and its growing sense of unity." As Progress is
the great intellectual discovery of the modern world, so Association
is its new-found instrument. Thus association must be dear to the
state as individual liberty; and provided that any particular
association is peaceful and public, and respects elementary liberties,
and has no immoral end in view, the state must allow it perfect
freedom.
Thus the second duty of the state is to encourage association and
harmonise it with liberty; to give society the originating power of
the latter, the effective strength of the former. Both are "equally
necessary to the end, which is progress," both "essential to the
orderly development of society." On any sound theory, the two
principles postulate one another. There can be no association except
among free men, since true association implies a conscious recognition
and acceptance of the object. Liberty is meaningless without
association, because the individual, for all his freedom, is powerless
unless he combine with others. Mazzini carefully dissociated himself
alike from the _laissez-faire_ school and a despotic state socialism.
The state must encourage combination, but may do nothing to compel it.
The members of an association must be unfettered as to its nature and
object and methods (always provided that they are legitimate), must
be free to take up or resign their membership. "Sacred to us is the
individual; sacred is society. We do not mean to destroy the former
for the latter and found a collective tyranny; nor do we mean to admit
the rights of the individual independently of society, and consign
ourselves to perpetual anarchy. We want to balance the operations of
liberty and association in a noble harmony." "The republican formula
is 'everything in liberty through association.'"
Mazzini did not seriously concern himself with the abstract relations
of the individual and society; probably it seemed to him a meaningless
dispute. His theory admitted no real antagonism between them. A man's
true individuality lies not in self-assertion but in the recognition
of his duty to his fellows. This recognition necessarily makes
friction impossible between himself and them, and reconciles the
individual and society, liberty and association, in a common national
aim. Liberty then becomes the higher liberty, not the mere power of
refusing evil, but "the power of choosing between the different ways
that lead to good." Association becomes the economical direction of
the country's forces to a known and common end. It is the function of
the state,--a function it alone can execute,--to instil the sense of
duty into all its members and make that sense of duty work towards a
common ideal. This it must do through national education, and
education thus becomes the state's third and weightiest task. In
Mazzini's conception education goes far beyond the imparting of
knowledge or even the drawing out of character. It is the inspiration
of a national faith, the moulding of the soul to great principles of
life and duty. It is, next to religion from which it derives, the
great binding and harmonising element in a nation, merging individual
wills in a common consensus, destroying party friction and class
struggle and sectarian faction, and sweeping a united country onward
to the fulfilment of its destinies. If it had been objected that the
result would be destructive of independence and originality of
thought, he would probably have answered that the same spirit does not
prevent diversities of operations, and that true originality is better
promoted by discipline than by license. Certainly, as his theory of
genius shows, he set a very high value on originality. Let thought, he
would have said, be free and wide as air, but without community of aim
it wastes itself, and the state must prevent that waste. Thus there is
no true country without a national education, compulsory and free.
Voluntary education has its necessity under a political or spiritual
despotism, but it leads to moral anarchy, and religious democracy
cannot tolerate false teaching of its children. The country must have
"the moral direction of the young." "It is ridiculous to allow every
citizen the right to teach his own programme, and refuse the nation
the right to transmit its." Once, when discussing the matter with a
friend, the question was put to him, "If two states had arrived at an
equal stage of education, the one by national and the other by
voluntary schools, which would be the finer nation?" "But, my dear,"
he answered, "that is to be an atheist." The national education must
therefore express the national faith and aim, and give "the moral
unity, which is far more important than material unity." It is not at
all clear how he proposed to ascertain this national faith. For
England, he had a curious proposal; "you ought," he said to Jowett,
"to ascertain the mind of the people by making enquiries of the
clergy and others what they believed, and when you have ascertained
the national mind, you should express it in education." In the future
Italy he sometimes thought that it would be embodied in a national
declaration of principles, drafted by a Constituent Assembly. But more
generally he seems to have distrusted the capacity of the democracy to
voice the full faith, and he probably reserved it to the spiritual
power under the new religion to enunciate its articles.
At all events national education implied above all else moral
education, the moral education which is as "a holy communion with all
our brothers, with all the generations that lived, and therefore
thought and wrought before us."[40] This, he laments, "is anarchy
now." If it is left to the parents, it is often neglected or bad; if
to the teachers, clerical or lay, it too frequently instils either
superstition or materialism, or at all events it has no uniformity.
Mazzini intended to write a book on education; if he had done so, we
should know more of the agencies, through which he proposed to give
moral teaching. Bakounine once asked him, what, if he had got his
republic, he would do to make the people really free. Mazzini replied,
"Establish schools, in which the duties of man, sacrifice, and
devotion would be taught." He had a skeleton programme as a basis of
citizen training,--"a course of nationality, including a summary
picture of the progress of humanity, national history, and a popular
statement of the principles which rule the country's legislation";
but one cannot think that this gave all he wanted. He probably counted
more on the universities, and especially on the courses of philosophy;
and this no doubt explains his strong dislike of professors, whose
teaching seemed to smack of materialism, his indictment of the
eclecticism, which allowed different schools to be represented in the
chairs. He had a particular animus against German professors and
German philosophy. He blamed the appointment of Germans at Oxford; he
was very angry that Hegel was taught at the university of Naples. "One
fine day," he wrote, "we will sweep out all that stuff."
* * * * *
What form of government was best calculated to attain these ends,--to
give full play to liberty, to harmonise it with association, to supply
a true national education? No form, Mazzini replied, is right _per
se_. He held to the full, though probably not recognising it, the
scholastic doctrine of government by grace. "Sovereignty is not in I
nor we but God." "There is no sovereignty of right in any one;
sovereignty is in the aim." A government was legitimate in proportion
as it stood for righteousness. "There is no sovereignty in the
individual or society, except in so far as either conforms itself to
the divine plan and law. An individual is either the best interpreter
of God's law and governs in his name, or he is a usurper to be
overthrown. The simple vote of a majority does not constitute
sovereignty, if it evidently contradicts the supreme moral precepts or
deliberately shuts the road to progress." "The will of the people is
sacred, when it interprets and applies the moral law; null and
impotent, when it dissociates itself from the law, and only represents
caprice."
The theory is of course, as in the days of the schoolmen, a tremendous
instrument for reform. No institution, no branch of legislature, no
church, no prerogative or prescriptive claim has any rights against
the Right. Do they or not make for the country's good? By the answer
they must stand or fall. The theory is supremely true, and on occasion
of highest social value. Its dangers lie in the possibility of
mistaken application, and in its tendency to regard the form rather
than the spirit of an institution,--a danger especially present to
minds like Mazzini's, which are deficient in powers of accurate
analysis. An institution, so runs their reasoning, has failed;
therefore it is wrong; therefore it must be swept away. Reform is
impossible; therefore let there be root-and-branch revolution. It is
strange that Mazzini, with his admiration of English habits and
dislike of French, did not see how here his logic approximated to the
latter. He did not see how plastic institutions are, how it is often
better to save the great expenditure of force, that must go to destroy
a rooted institution, how it is sometimes easier to change the spirit
than the form. In this his political wisdom went astray, and his long
profitless crusade against the monarchy is a melancholy illustration
of the error.
Thus, then, there is no essential sovereignty in any form of
government. But democracy is the form most likely to interpret God's
law aright. We must "reverence the people," not because they are the
majority, "but because they concentrate in themselves all the
faculties of human nature distributed among the several
individuals,--faculties of religion and politics, industry and art."
In other words, the collective wisdom of the many is likely to excel
the wisdom of the few; a democratic state can use the special
knowledge of every citizen, and choose the most capable for its
administrators; and its judgment is likely to be more four-sided and
better informed than that of a state with restricted citizenship. And
just as Humanity is the interpreter of God's law, so a people often
has an inspiration that seldom comes to individuals, glimpses of the
truth that are granted to the multitude in moments of enthusiasm, an
instinct that impels it to give power to its best men. He even,
inconsistently with his general position, justifies democracy on _à
priori_ grounds; it is "a potent, undeniable, European fact," and
therefore must be a part of God's providential design.
But it is impossible not to feel that all through Mazzini's thought
there runs a certain uneasiness about democracy. He accepted it as an
inevitable fact; he recognised that at all events it was superior to
any government based on privilege; it fitted in with his theory of
Humanity and his own passionate sympathies. But he had an intermittent
dread that democracy, like theocracy and monarchy, might forget the
law of God. He feared that the French Revolution had started it on the
wrong road; he had had his disappointments in Italy; in later life he
felt the peril that materialist socialism might deflect it from
spiritual ends. He advocated universal suffrage, not because of any
absolute virtue in it, but as "the starting-point of political
education," and he gravely feared that, till national education had
created a national consensus, it might easily become a tyranny of the
majority. He preferred a system of indirect election. Towards the end
of his life he was a keen advocate of women's suffrage, but he was
anxious that the agitation for it should be equally an agitation for
their own moral growth, a crusade against "their perennial vanity,
their worship of ridiculous fashions, their lightness of parties and
conversation," their husband-hunting. And this mistrust made him turn
to a strong authority, elected and deposable by the people, but with
very extended powers, and charged not only to execute the popular
mandate, but go in advance of it. "The supreme power in a state must
not drag behind the stage of civilisation that informs it; it must
rather take the lead in carrying it higher, and, by anticipating the
social thought, bring the country up to its own level." It is for
republics to make republicans, not republicans republics. He earnestly
repudiated the Whig-American theory of government. Anxiously as he
guarded personal and religious and commercial liberty, he wished to
see the functions of government, at all events in education and as a
stimulating and suggestive influence, as wide and not as narrow as
possible. Distrust of government in itself, the whole system of checks
and balances, he condemned as weakening the power of the state to
promote progress. It is extremely difficult to disentangle with
precision what was his ideal constitution, and it may be doubted
whether he had worked it out himself. Though he probably had no very
strong liking for parliamentary government, he seems to have accepted
it, and to have wished to give it large executive powers. But above
it, and apparently distinct from the executive, was to be the real
"government," the spiritual authority, whose duty it would be to
"point to the national ideal," while parliament and the executive
"directed the forces of the country" in the road it indicated. But
there must be no suspicion of dictatorship, and perfect trust and
mutual inspiration must unite the spiritual and temporal
authorities.[41]
At all events the ideal government, whatever its precise form, could,
he believed, exist only under a republic. The story of his life has
shown how passionately he clung to his republican faith; how for it he
gave or wasted his best days, how his untamable desire for it tangled
his work for Italian Unity. His condemnation of monarchy was partly a
theoretical one. The republic was "the most logical form of
democracy," the only corollary of liberty and equality; monarchy was
founded on inequality, its dynastic interests were not the nation's,
and therefore it could never give a country moral unity. Whether
absolutist or constitutional, it was a sham, because in modern life it
corresponded to no real belief, no essential principle; and because it
was a sham, it was the fruitful parent of dishonesty. Quite late in
life he somewhat changed his point of attack, and condemned it as
possessing no vitality to lead, and therefore impotent to found a
strong government. But his indictment, at least in his early years,
was drawn mainly from the actual evidence of corruption and misrule in
the monarchies of the first half of the century. It may well have
seemed impossible then to reconcile monarchy with any national
well-being. He made little or no exception for constitutional
monarchies. Louis Philippe's rule was small argument for the
principle; and as late as 1862 he condemned constitutional monarchy as
"incompatible with progress," everywhere outside England. For England,
in later years, he made an exception; and his judgment here shows that
he could view the issue more serenely, when he escaped from his
prejudices. "The struggle, which occupies English life," he said in
1870, "is not between the nation and the monarchy, but between the
people and the aristocracy, the latter being the one element of the
past, that retains and communicates its vitality." In Italy the facts
were after 1848 much the same as in England; but here he was blinded
by party feeling, and he could never see that what was the real issue
in the thirties had gone into the background. His fallacy was a
nominalist one. In his early days there had been a vital difference
between monarchy and republic. Afterwards the classification became
unreal; and the true differentiation lay in various species of
parliamentary government, in various relations between parliament and
the executive. In his own Italy to-day the republic becomes
increasingly a factitious and academic issue, as more vital questions
make the true dividing lines in politics.
However mistaken his distinction between republic and monarchy, the
republic, as he conceived it, was no mere form of government. "God is
my witness," he said, "that I pay no tribute to forms." He had little
liking for the republic in the United States, with its weak bond of
union, and its system of checks and balances. He refused his blessing
to the Third Republic in France. "By the Republic," he told the Roman
Assembly in 1849, "we do not mean a mere form of government, a name,
a system imposed by a victorious party on its rivals. We mean a
principle, a new step forward in education taken by the people, a
programme of education to be carried out, a political institution
calculated to produce a moral advance; we mean the system which must
develop liberty, equality, association;--liberty, and consequently
every peaceful development of ideas, even when they differ in part
from our own;--equality, and therefore we cannot allow political
castes to be substituted for the old castes that have passed away;
association, that is a complete consensus of all the vital forces of
the nation, a complete consensus, so far as is possible, of the entire
people." For him the republic meant absolute trust between people and
government, choice of the most capable and best for office, a
veritable national unity, that destroyed party friction and impelled
the undivided forces of the country to social legislation. The
republic, and it alone, will be the ideal state, God's kingdom
realised on earth, "where institutions tend primarily to the bettering
of the most numerous and poorest class, where the principle of
association is best developed, where the road of progress has no end,
as education gradually develops and all elements that make for
stagnation and immobility disappear, where, in fine, the whole
community, strong, tranquil, happy, peaceful, bound in a solemn
concord, stands on earth as in a temple built to virtue and liberty,
to progressive civilisation, to the laws that govern the moral world."
There, in the people "that knows no caste or privilege, save of genius
and virtue, no proletariat or aristocracy of land or finance," in the
people "united by the brotherhood of one sole faith, one sole
tradition, one sole thought of love," the people that worships
principles more than men, that cherishes its past but looks ever
forward to its future, resolute to unlock its destinies,--there stands
the city of God, "the similitude of that divine society, where all are
equal, and there is one love, one happiness for all."
FOOTNOTES:
[39] See below, pp. 292-294.
[40] In the letter referred to on p. 246 note, he calls it "religious
education," but it is clear that he did not intend the expression in
its usual sense.
[41] Mazzini's views are perhaps most clearly stated in his speech to
the Roman Assembly of March 9, 1849 (before he became Triumvir). See
also _Scritti editi e inediti_, XVI. 14. In the second and perhaps the
first of these passages _popolo_ seems used as equivalent to
parliament. In the second, _governo_ is obviously not the executive.
See also above, p. 247.
Chapter XVI
Social Theories
Importance of social questions--Their moral basis--Attack on
socialism--Contrast between Mazzini's and its theories and
work--Social programme--Cooperation.
Mazzini's faith in the republic came largely of his conviction that it
was the only effective instrument for social legislation. He was
sometimes charged with neglecting social for political reform, with
preaching, as Bakounine put it, a "detestable bourgeois patriotism."
The charge was true for no time of his life, least for his later
years. To him the social question was "the most sacred" as it was "the
most hazardous" problem of the age. He was one of the first to insist
that the rise of the working classes was the great social phenomenon
of the century. Political reform, so he told the Carbonari and the
Chartists, had its only sufficiency and justification, when it was the
instrument of social reform. This did not quite represent his thought,
for he was insistent that questions of political liberty and justice
intimately touched man's moral development; but he held with equal
earnestness that the social question had its independent and undying
importance. "There is no such thing," he wrote, "as a purely political
or purely social revolution; every true revolution has its political
and social character alike."
All his passionate sympathy went out to the disinherited. Compassion,
says one who knew him, shone in his face and vibrated in his voice,
when he spoke of the masses and their hardships. He felt intensely for
a lot, which in the '40s and '50s he believed was growing steadily
worse. Indignantly he spoke of the workman's "poverty-stricken,
cribbed, precarious life, closing in infirm and squalid and unassisted
old age." "The workman has no freedom of contract," he replied to the
old economists, "he is a slave; he has no alternative but hunger or
the pay, however small it be, that his employer offers him. And his
pay is a _wage_; a wage often insufficient for his daily needs, almost
always unequal to the value of his work. His hands can multiply the
employer's capital three fold, four fold, but not so his own pay.
Hence his incapacity to save; hence the unrelieved, irreparable misery
of commercial crises." And even without crises, "his life is poisoned
by a sense of uncertainty and constant dread; and old age,--brought on
prematurely by heavy and often unhealthy work,--awaits him,
threatening, implacable." His "destiny is that of accursed races,--to
live and suffer, curse and die." "A life of poverty and a death-bed in
a hospital,--that is what society in this nineteenth century provides
for two-thirds of its members in almost every country, eighteen
hundred years and more since a Holy One, that men hail as divine,
proclaimed that all are equals and brothers and sons of God."
But he was no pessimist, at all events in later years, when he knew
the workman better, and saw that, in spite of all, he was advancing
and gave promise of infinite further advance. The day of deliverance
was near. The workman's emancipation was inevitable, written in the
decrees of Providence. The labour question was the acknowledged
problem of the time, its solution "the social faith of all men now who
love and know." "The upward movement of the artisan classes in our
towns," he wrote towards the end of life, "dates back now for more
than a century; slow but tenacious in its progress, advancing from
decade to decade by a law of increasing momentum, and in these last
twenty years growing, visibly for all, in intensity and expansion, and
acquiring, as it goes, real power and self-consciousness." It all was
"leading up to a great revolution, an impulse given by Providence,
nevermore to recede, till it has reached its end." And he gloried in
it. Whatever fears he may have had for the working of democracy, he
had none for the labour movement. The rise of the working classes was
"as a flowing tide, that the divine breath has stirred"; and he
watched it "not with fear, but with the loving reverence, with which
one watches a great providential fact."
But just because his faith and love were great, he was not afraid to
point "the men of labour" to the heights. It was his familiar precept
of the moral aim. "Material improvements," he told them, "are
essential, and we will fight to win them; not because men have no
other interest than to be well housed and clothed, but because your
moral development is stopped, while you are, as you are to-day,
engaged in a continual fight with poverty." So too in his rather
scanty references to political economy, he insists that its teaching
must always have reference to a moral ideal. Economics must be "the
expression not of the human appetite but of man's industrial mission."
Otherwise, they "substitute the problem of humanity's kitchen for the
problem of humanity," and teach selfishness for individuals and
classes and industrial warfare. It was not only that economic progress
must aim consistently at personal morality, at making better husbands,
fathers, neighbours, that it must be pure of any spirit of bitterness
or revenge or aught that sins against the brotherhood of man. Besides
all this, it must not be allowed to maim the working man's powers and
duties as a citizen, must never be purchased by the sacrifice of
political liberty or manliness. He pointed for his moral to France in
1849 and 1850, when the French artisans sold their political rights to
Louis Napoleon for the promise of a labour policy. 'Bread and
amusements,' he reminded them, were ever the offer of despots. Outside
liberty and strenuous political interest there was no salvation,
economic or other. The true man will think not only of his class but
of his country, and not of his own country only, but of the sufferings
and rights of men the whole world over. If the working classes forgot
their political duties, thought lightly of political reform, connived
at an unjust foreign policy, they sacrificed one of their nature's
noblest functions, and built their own economic progress on the sand.
And he believed that, France notwithstanding, the people always knew
this in their hearts. The Chartists, he pointed out, with their bare,
imperfect political programme, had more followers than all the French
Socialists. "The last of those you call political agitators," he told
the latter, "will always have more influence with the people than all
your utopias; because at the root of every political question the
people has at least a glimpse of something that appeals to its soul,
something that gives it self-consciousness and raises its trampled
dignity." "The working men of Italy fought like heroes at Milan and
Brescia, in Sicily and at Rome, not for a rise of wages, but for the
honour of the Italian name, for the free life of their nation. The
working men of Paris fought and won in 1848, not because of a
financial crisis or their own poverty, but because the monarchy
dragged France's glory and duty in the mud, because it refused French
citizens a free press, and free right of meeting and association."
It was from this standpoint that he attacked Socialism. We need not
concern ourselves with his strictures on the expired schools of the
early French Socialists, or with his very crude criticism of Louis
Blanc,--criticism, which he would hardly have made in later life, and
which is certainly inconsistent with his own social schemes. We can
neglect, too, much of his attack on the economic side of collectivism,
which he never really understood. It is more to the point to assume a
greater knowledge of modern Socialism than he possessed, and see what
is his essential relationship to it. He had not a few ideas in common
with the Marxite school. His own industrial ideal contained, though he
knew it not, the germs of the socialist community. He looked as
earnestly and confidently as they do to the death of capitalism, and
built his hopes on the development of association; he recognised with
them the inevitable historic evolution of the workers, and that it is
the march of the humble, unknown multitude, and not the hero, which
determines the world's progress; he hailed the time, when classes
would be no more, and all be equals in rights and opportunities, and
he believed that this equality could never be reached under a
capitalist system.
But in root principles he differed from the strict Marxites almost as
essentially as he himself supposed. While with him moral and spiritual
phenomena are the fundamental facts, Marx builds his system on
material phenomena. For the collectivist, man is chiefly the product
of his economic surroundings; for Mazzini, the social and industrial
environment is only "the manifestation of the moral and intellectual
condition of humanity at a given period, and above all of its faith."
For the one, history is the sequence of economic cause and effect, and
the growth of mind and morals is the secondary consequence of economic
facts; with the other, the economic facts, though not neglected, are
subordinated, religion is the master principle of human progress, and
religious systems are the milestones that mark the road. The two
schools are absolutely antagonistic in their conception of the ideal.
Marx and his followers would discover it by the right interpretation
of the drift of facts; if indeed we can call it an ideal, what is
accepted merely as a necessary tendency, and when right and wrong are
judged by the fact, not the fact by right and wrong. Mazzini
understood to the full the value of facts as conditioning the ideal,
as pointing out how far it was attainable at the moment, nay, as in
some degree indicating the ideal itself. But to him right and wrong
had no dependance on the existing fact; facts tended to approximate to
the ideal, because the ideal was sovereign, and Providence guided them
towards it; and it was man's free privilege and bounden duty to help
the work of Providence, and be lord of facts. Mazzini did not kick
against the pricks of economic evolution; he took modern
industrialism as it is, and never wished to thwart the natural
tendencies of industrial discovery. But he claimed that man has power
to turn them to good or evil,--a good or evil that has reference not
to them but to a moral end.
Hence their teaching has differed widely in its practical
consequences. Marx deduced from his economic studies a confident and
detailed prophecy of economic development. It was a faith, whose
assurance and optimism gives it a mighty power to sway men, so long as
faith stays unquestioned. But economic dogmas, especially of the
prophetic kind, are apt to be shaken by the rough wind of facts; and
it has been the fate of Marx' system to be line by line explained away
by its commentators. If it still retains its influence,--and, indeed,
it is a potent influence,--it is because it has quieted scepticism by
shedding much of its founder's doctrine, and because it finds and has
more or less always found expression in a political programme, such as
Mazzini preached, aiming at high ends of liberty and justice. Mazzini,
so confident often in his religious and political horoscopes, here
chose a humbler part. He insisted indeed on one broad economic
principle,--association, and he pointed to certain reforms of
immediate practicability. But he resolutely refused to forecast the
economic future. Humanity, he would repeat, goes on its own way, and
laughs at the man, who finds "the secret of the world under his
pillow." "I think," he wrote, "that our problem is not so much to
define the forms of future progress, as to place the individual under
such conditions as make it easy for him to understand and fulfil it."
He created no great party of the proletariat; it was his as useful
function to fertilise the moral soil, to inspire all classes with a
deeper sense of social obligation, and thus to ease the road for
social progress, whatever particular shape the circumstances of the
time might counsel it to take.
The two men differ again radically in their influence on class
relations. To Mazzini 'the struggle of classes,' however peaceful and
legal in its form, would have been a hateful idea. It is true he
sternly rebuked the short-sighted folly of the richer classes, and he
would find excuses for wild acts or theories of proletariat protest.
But he set his face resolutely against class hatred, against dreams of
violence and revenge, against social revolutions which worked hardship
to the individual. Hopeless as he was of enlisting the upper classes,
at least in Italy, on the side of social reform, he set his hopes on
the middle classes; and from the days of the _Apostolato Popolare_
down to the last years of life, he preached insistently that middle
and working classes must stand together in the social movement. The
whole theory of Duty looked to the harmonising of motives, not to the
brute struggle of opposing social forces. The collectivist takes the
social discord for granted, and bids the workers trust to themselves
alone and win their ends by force, however much force may be disguised
behind the vote. Each principle has its time; the socialist mistake
has been to elevate to a principle, what is the sad necessity of an
uninspired age.
* * * * *
It remains to examine Mazzini's own programme of social
reconstruction. He lays down certain economic axioms. First, private
property must remain, however much the State should try to equalise
fortunes through taxation. Mazzini endorses the familiar argument from
expediency,--the necessity of property to stimulate labour and
encourage invention. But his apology for it is in the main an _à
priori_ one. "Property," he says, "when it is the result of labour,
represents the activity of the body, as thought represents the
activity of the soul; it is the visible sign of our part in the
transformation of the material world, as our ideas and our rights to
liberty and inviolability of conscience are the signs of our part in
the transformation of the moral world. The man who works and produces
has a right to the fruits of his own labour; in this resides the right
of property."[42] There is a flavour of Ricardo and Marx in this, and
it is easy to see a socialist application, unintended by the writer.
Next, the new social organisation must not be the work of compulsion.
He saw that voluntary working-class organisation was an essential
preliminary to any lasting social advance; and, as we shall see, his
own schemes pivot on voluntary societies for cooperative production.
And lastly, schemes of economic change must always aim at increasing
productiveness. He knew that there could be no serious improvement in
the workman's condition, unless the national production were
increased; and he seems to have dimly realised that the two things
must mutually react, any rise in the workman's income increasing the
demand for commodities and thereby stimulating production, and this
increase of production in its turn encouraging a further increase of
the workman's pay.
When we come to the particulars of his economic programme, we find
fertility and boldness of suggestion, but small attempt to work out
the details. He was constitutionally unfitted to be an economist; he
lacked the necessary precision of thought and accuracy of analysis. He
rather despised economic study, at all events when it came from books.
A real knowledge of the economic question is to be found, he says, "in
the workshops and the homes of the artisans," rather than in
"statistics and documents, which are sometimes erroneous, always
incomplete, compiled as they are either by officials, whose tendency
is to conceal the evil, or by private individuals, whose tendency is
to exaggerate it." He trusted to a knowledge of the workman's thoughts
and aspirations, gleaned from close and affectionate intercourse, more
than to any inquiry into the outside facts of his life.
His suggestions were many. Among the more commonplace were free trade
in land, legislation to protect tenants, arbitration between capital
and labour, national insurance (apparently to be compulsory), the
regulation by the state of "that den of robbers," the Stock Exchange.
At one time he wished the state to guarantee work for everybody, but
as he does not mention the proposal later than 1849, it may be assumed
that he relinquished it. For Italy, he suggested a great scheme of
home colonisation on her unreclaimed lands; and it is a curious
instance of his want of accurate enquiry, that in his advocacy of it
he took no account of the all-important factor of malaria. It is
curious, too, that, like many Italians at the opposite pole of
thought, he disliked emigration, and would gladly have checked what
has proved to be one of the chief sources of Italian development. All
these, however, were minor suggestions. His programme rested mainly on
two proposals,--a radical reform of taxation, and the gradual
supersession of capitalism by voluntary cooperative societies of
workmen. His canons of taxation are shortly stated and may be shortly
summarised. Economy in collection, free trade, no taxes on food, the
smallest possible incidence on industry were his fiscal maxims; and he
wished to carry them out by abolishing all indirect taxation and,
apparently too, all special taxes on land, and substituting a single
tax on income, to be graduated and, it would seem, severely graduated.
He also proposed that in all cases of persons dying without heirs
within the fourth degree, estates should lapse to the state.
He looked for more radical change to his scheme of cooperative
production, a scheme which appears in its main outlines as early as
1833, but which he worked out in more detail in the last ten years of
his life. It was a special application of the same principle of
Association, which he had carried into other branches of social and
political activity. He proposed that a great national capital should
be accumulated for the purpose. Church lands, railways, mines, and
"some great industrial enterprises," which he never specified, were to
be nationalised, whether or not with compensation does not appear. At
one time he wished to confiscate in Italy the estates of those, who
fought against the nationalist cause,--a proposal strangely out of
harmony with his usual tolerance. The income from these sources, from
the rents of reclaimed lands and existing national and communal
estates, and from properties which lapsed to the state, would form the
"National Fund" or "tax of democracy." At one time he destined part of
the fund to education, another part to assist any European democracy
struggling for its rights. But its main, and perhaps in his later idea
its only purpose was to assist the spread of voluntary societies for
cooperative production, industrial and agricultural. Any such society,
that could prove its members' honesty and capacity, might claim to
have its capital advanced from the Fund. The loans were to be at 1 or
1½ per cent., and were to be made through special banks administered
by the Communal Councils. Nothing is said as to the repayment of the
loans, but as he contemplated the extension of the societies, till
they ultimately covered the whole field of industry, we may assume
that the loans were to be repaid and passed on to new societies. The
societies were apparently to be left absolutely free as to the
management of their business, the sale of produce, and the disposal of
their net income. To assist their credit, they were to have the right
to deposit any unsold produce in national magazines, and receive in
exchange negotiable notes, which, it seems to follow, would have been
legal tender. The societies were also to be admitted on equal terms
with private firms to contract for government work; this latter was
perhaps the first suggestion of a system, which is now working in
Italy with some success.
Such were Mazzini's sketchy but suggestive economic schemes,--schemes
which, he believed, would ultimately destroy both poverty and
capitalism, without hardship to individuals or danger to liberty,
leavening the social morality with the God-given principle of
association. He seems to have never asked himself what would be the
ultimate destiny of his co-operative scheme; had he done so, he must
have seen that, by however different a road, it was bound to end in
collectivism. It will be recognized now that his plan was in all
essentials identical with latter-day socialism, as put out by its best
exponents, and it may be claimed that in the world of ideas Mazzini
more than Marx is its father. That his scheme would soon come into
working, he had little doubt, at all events in Italy. For in his
social plans, as in all else, his own Italy was ever uppermost in
mind. He knew, when few others knew it, the patience and common-sense
and idealism of the Italian artisan, and he proudly counted on him to
let Italy lead the nations in the solution of the labour question.
FOOTNOTE:
[42] He was once arguing with Sir James Stansfeld as to the
possibility of communism. Stansfeld said, "Why should not all property
be vested in society?" Mazzini replied, "Because that is nonsense.
Society abstractedly is nothing, really a collection of individuals.
Individuals do the work, therefore individuals get the property; they
may give it away if they like, but the right to it is in themselves."
The spirit of the argument is curiously inconsistent with his usual
position.
Chapter XVII
Nationality
Country and humanity--The marks of nationality: the will of
the people; the sense of national mission--Patriotism--
International solidarity--Ethics of foreign policy:
non-intervention; war; the special missions of each
country--The future of Europe--The Slavs--The United
States of Europe--Italy's international function.
The law of Duty, man's bounden service to humanity, goes on beyond the
individual and the state to be the rule of international relations.
Man's end, so runs Mazzini's argument, is to serve the progress of
humanity. But the individual, in his isolated impotence, would shrink
from the immensity of the burden. And for most men, humanity excites
no effective sense of obligation; they will give for country what they
will not give for the wider and remoter circle of mankind. The
cosmopolitan, who talks of duty to humanity and neglects the nation,
is as one who bids men climb a ladder and takes away the rungs.
Therefore Providence, once again applying the law of association, has
placed the individual among men of like feelings and aspirations, that
serving his country he may serve humanity, that through the nation and
its common strength he may have power to help the progress of the
world. Thus a nation is a God-appointed instrument for the welfare of
the race, and in this alone its moral essence lies. "Nationality is
sacred to me," he says, "because I see in it the instrument of labour
for the good and progress of all men." "Countries are the workshops of
humanity"; "a nation is a living task, her life is not her own, but a
force and a function in the universal Providential scheme." "Humanity
is a great army, marching to the conquest of unknown lands, against
enemies both strong and cunning. The peoples are its corps, each with
its special operation to carry out, and the common victory depends on
the exactness, with which they execute the different operations."
This "division of European labour" is essential to the progress of
Europe, and, through it, of the world. But each group of humanity's
workmen, if it is to be efficient, must be organised, not by coercion,
but by free acceptance of their obligations; they must be impelled by
duty and the sense of a great common work to do. Each nation must be a
living, homogeneous entity, with its own faith and consciousness of
self. Europe, in Mazzini's lifetime, had little of this. He condemned
its existing divisions as answering to no principle, since for the
most part they were agglomerations of territory, made in the interests
of a royal dynasty or in the name of some artificial principle, as the
balance of power; and therefore they were powerless to inspire a
common national effort for an intelligent and useful end. Factitious
and immoral ends filled up the void; unsatisfied national yearnings
burst imperiously through diplomatic schemes of peace; there was
little of the burning love of independence, that alone safeguarded
from designs of aggressive empire, from France in the past, from
Russia in the present. The map of Europe must be drawn afresh, and
states be made conterminous with nationalities.
What, then, are the inherent, essential marks of nationality? Are race
and geographical features, language and literature, customs and
traditions? None of these, Mazzini replied, are more than secondary
elements, race least of all. Wiser and juster than Bismarck and his
school, he saw that race, even if it were discoverable, has small
connection with the facts of to-day. He did not investigate the dark
problem of race characteristics, he did not even ask whether race
affinities are among the physical causes that create a national
feeling. But, none the less, his argument is indestructible against
the theory that makes race the chief base of nationality. He was saved
from ethnological fancies by his sensible conclusion, that races are
too intimately compounded to be a cause of national character. "There
is not a single spot in Europe," he declared, "where an unmixed race
can be detected." "France, the most powerful nationality of the modern
world, is a mixture of Germans, Celts, and Romans." There is one
aspect however of the race question, that he did not sufficiently
recognise. However imaginary the original ethnological basis of a
country may be and generally is, yet some races have been fixed for
several centuries; and this has generated a belief in a common racial
origin, which, however false historically, may none the less, when
supported by a common language, become an important and sometimes a
dominant factor in creating a sense of nationality.
He gave his fancy play in determining the influence of geography. He
loved geographical study, and as usual sought for a spiritual purpose
underlying the physical facts. "By the courses of the great rivers, by
the lines of the high mountains, and other geographical features God
has marked the natural borders of the nations." "Nationalities," he
said, "appear to me to have been traced long ago by the finger of
Providence on the map of Europe"; and Italy, for instance, had her
"sublime, irrefutable boundary marks." He left this transcendentalism
for safer ground, when he came to language and literature, and
recognised what potent factors they had been in the making of nations.
The importance of language was sufficiently obvious. Literature had
sometimes, as in the case of his own Italy, remained the one surviving
sign of nationality, when all else was lost. He knew how great had
been the influence of Dante in forming the national sense of his own
country; how much the Polish poets of the century had done to feed the
Slav national spirit; how intimate is the power of national melodies;
what the common possession of a great poet may do to knit a people. He
realised too, though perhaps insufficiently, how history has helped to
form nations; how a common government draws a people together in
common loyalty or common revolt; how war may be a welding influence;
how men, living for generations under the same law, acquire from it
common habits and customs and traditions.
All these, however, are but the formative elements of nationality;
they are not its essence. Mazzini's clear democratic faith kept him
from confusing the justification of the fact with its causes.
Nationality was independent of any of them. Centuries of divided
government had not destroyed the national sense of Italy; Switzerland
was a nation for all its diversity of languages; difference of tongues
did not prevent Poland and Lithuania from sharing the same national
aspirations; Alsace belonged to France, however German it might be by
race and history. Nationality is a sentiment, a moral phenomenon,
which may be generated by material causes, but exists by virtue of
moral facts. On any theory of freedom or democracy it can have no
positive, meaning basis but the popular will; and it is a parody of
nationality that unites by coercion. "Nationalities can be founded
only for and upon and by the people"; and it follows that when the
inhabitants of a territory desire to be a nation, provided that behind
their desire there lies a moral purpose, they have the right to be
one. This, despite slight and rare inconsistencies, he made the broad
clear principle of modern, democratic nationality, a principle
"invincible as conscience," whose triumph no hostility of kings or
statesmen, no artificial counterfeits can permanently hinder.
Still, he held, the mere fact of the popular will is not enough.
Nationality, like every political phenomenon, must have a moral aim to
justify it. A mere momentary reaction against misgovernment, for
instance, gave no sufficient claim to independence. "In questions of
nationality, as in every other question, the end alone is sovereign";
and a true nation must have its moral intention, its clear and
understood mission to accomplish for itself and for humanity, its
conscious part in realising the divine idea on earth. It is only in
its homage to the moral law, that a nation finds its "baptism and
consecration." "A community of men drawn together by a selfish
principle for a purely material purpose is not thereby a nation. To
constitute a nation, its informing principle and purpose and right
must be grounded on eternal bases. The purpose must be essentially a
moral one, since a material interest by itself is by its nature
finite, and can therefore form no basis of perpetual union." "Country
is not a territory; territory is only its base; country is the idea
that rises on that base, the thought of love that draws together all
the sons of that territory."
This love is patriotism. "O my brothers," he says, "love your country.
Country is our house, the house that God has given us, setting therein
a populous family, to love us and be loved by us, to understand us and
be understood by us better and more readily than others are." It was
by such burning patriotism he saved his country and was first to
practise it himself. But he detested the sentimental and emotional
patriot. His patriotism was a silent, manly thing, that hated display
and braggart talk; it was as a steady spiritual flame, that never
roared to heaven and never sank to ashes. He tested it by its fruit in
the individual life. No ill-living man was true patriot. "Let
country," he said, "be incarnated in each one of you; each one of you
feel and make himself responsible for his brothers; each of you so act
that in yourselves men may respect and love your country." "Where the
citizen does not know that he must give lustre to his country, not
borrow lustre from it, that country may be strong but never happy."
Real patriotism will not fear to speak the truth. "Flattery will never
save a country, nor proud words make us less abject." "The honour of
a country depends much more on removing its faults than on boasting of
its qualities." One can imagine what would have been his scorn for the
degenerate imperialism of latter days. The patriot's supreme desire is
that his country's true honour may be untarnished; he thinks more of
duty than of victory. His own Roman Republic, that glorious and
illuminating example of patriotism, had small hope of success, but its
honour stood entire, and therefore morally it triumphed. Success,
empire, military glory may be a country's lot; so may failure and
defeat and poverty; neither this nor that fate touches its real being.
True national dignity and glory lie in right doing, and humiliation
comes only from public dishonour and a mendacious diplomacy. "You must
keep your country pure of selfishness," was his maxim of patriotism
for Italian working men.
Patriotism, then, is intense regard for a country's moral greatness;
and it expresses itself in that sense of national duty, which he held
to be the only justification of a country's national existence. This
duty has two objects, the community itself and all humanity. We have
seen what he conceived to be a nation's duty to its members; there is
no true country, he said, without a national education, or where men
starve for want of work. Here we are more concerned with that
forwardness to serve humanity, which he made the other mark of the
true nation. "National life and international life should be two
manifestations of the same principle, the love of good." Above the
separate nations stands the European brotherhood, the late-born child
of Christianity. Sir Thomas More, he says, first formulated the new
law of peace; literature and trade and travel are ever drawing the
nations together by "a law of moral gravitation"[43]; the French
Revolution echoed through the democracies of Europe; the struggle with
Napoleon renewed the common understanding of the nations. The cause of
the people is the same the whole world over, and the democracies must
join hands to fight the battle of them all, as he had tried to make
them do, when he founded Young Europe. Humanitarian movements,--the
abolition of the slave trade, the cause of Greece and Italy,--were
European. "There exists then in Europe a harmony of needs and wishes,
a common thought, a universal mind, which directs the nations by
convergent paths to the same goal." No country may be isolated,
economically or intellectually; and it is a poor and counterfeit
patriotism, that despises other countries. That way lies destruction.
"A nation's growth depends on the trust that other peoples place in
it"; a country guided by a moral principle "finds everything open
readily to it from markets to political alliances," but one that
stands for an unjust policy has mistrust and jealousy for its portion.
Hence the country, that does injury to another, sins against itself.
"I hate," he said, "the monopolist, usurping nation, that sees its own
strength and greatness only in the weakness and poverty of others."
That is a poor and stunted people, whose foreign policy is "one of
aggrandisement and selfishness, whether it seeks them basely or buys
glory at other men's expense." Countries, that cherish liberty at
home and outrage it abroad, "are fated to expiate their error through
long years of isolation and oppression and anarchy." So far he
preached familiar doctrine, but he carried it into regions of his own.
International duty does not stop at non-aggression. Every country has
its positive duty to humanity; and while evil is enthroned, and right
can hardly hold its own, and the eternal battle rages round, it may
not stand aside in cowardly forgetfulness. Mazzini abhorred the
doctrine of non-intervention--the principle that no country may
interfere in the domestic matters of another,--a doctrine which the
Americans and Canning introduced for the protection of freedom, but
which less hardy statesmen in France and England had perverted to
excuse their own faint-heartedness. If the principle had been
generally accepted, if it had meant for instance that France could not
intervene at Rome or Russia restore despotism in Hungary, it might
have worked successfully. But practically it meant that "intervention
was all on the wrong side," that only England observed the principle,
and therefore the one Great Power, which in some degree stood for
liberty, tied its own hands, while the Powers that stood for despotism
worked "their unhallowed ends when, where, and how they thought fit"
over three-fourths of Europe. As Mazzini pointed out, the theory took
for granted a system based on nationality; and where nationality was
non-existent, as in Italy and South-Eastern Europe, it had no rightful
application. At the best it was a "poor and incomplete" doctrine. A
country has its "bonds of international duty," obligatory in proportion
to its strength. "The absolute doctrine of non-intervention in
politics corresponds to indifference in religion; it is a masked
atheism, a negation of all belief, of every general principle, of any
mission of a nation in humanity's behalf." "Neutrality in a war of
principles is mere passive existence, forgetfulness of all that makes
a people sacred, the negation of the common law of nations, political
atheism. On one side," he was speaking to Englishmen in 1859, "stands
the flag of liberty and right, of the true and good; on the other the
flag of tyranny and ambition, of the false and evil. And you, a free
nation and strong, you who profess belief in truth and justice, would
you say, 'Between evil and good we will remain neutral, impassive
spectators'? It is the word of Cain. No people, that chooses to teach
that policy, may dare to call itself Christian, for it is practically
a people of atheists or cowards. Sooner or later a tremendous
expiation will visit the cowardly desertion of the duty which God lays
on peoples as on individuals." "Can it be that England," he wrote
twelve years earlier, "the England of the Reformation, the England of
Elizabeth and of Cromwell, self-centred in immoral indifference, gives
up Europe to the dictatorship of force?"
Hence he was no believer in peace at any price. Sternly, indeed, he
condemned war, when it was not fought for a right principle; it was
"fratricide," if not imperative in the interests of the race. But it
was "sacred as peace, when the triumph of good is to be its issue." He
attacked the Manchester School for perverting the sense of human
solidarity. "Peace," he wrote to the Geneva Congress of 1867, "cannot
become a law of human society, except by passing through the
struggle, which will ground life and association on foundations of
justice and liberty, on the wreck of every power which exists not for
a principle but for a dynastic interest." Europe, he held, could not
have lasting peace, till Austria and Turkey made way for the
nationalities, which they held down; it would ever be perturbed by
fears of Russian aggression, till Poland was restored to be its
bulwark; and only war could free the Poles and Southern Slavs. "When
you have substituted justice for tyranny, truth for falsehood, duty
for selfish interests, the republic for monarchy, then you will have
peace, but not till then."
Mazzini, unluckily, was not content with the broad human principle
that a country must use its strength for right and freedom everywhere.
He appended a theory, which has its germ of truth, but defies
definition, and is easily twisted to save a special argument. Each
nation had, he thought, some distinct and specialised service to
render to humanity. "God has written one line of his thought on the
cradle of each people." "Special interests, special aptitudes, and
before all special functions, a special mission to fulfil, a special
work to be done in the cause of the advancement of humanity, seem to
me the true, infallible characteristics of nationalities." The theory
escapes any exact precision; but it offers a rich field for poetry,
and Mazzini's imagination was at home in it. England's function was
"industry and colonies," Russia's was the civilisation of Asia,
Poland's "the Slav initiative." Germany's mark was thought, France's
was action, Italy's thought in unison with action. "While the German
walks earth with his sight lost in the depths of heaven, and the
Frenchman's eye rarely looks aloft but scours earth's surface with its
restless penetrating glance, the Genius, that guards the destinies of
Italy, has been ever wont to pass swiftly from the ideal to the real,
seeking from of old how earth and heaven may be joined together." We
have seen what curious use he made of this theory of special missions
to rebut Irish claims.
Such were the principles of nationality, and nations built on them
would make the Europe of the future. Mazzini believed that democracy
would tend towards large nations. He repudiated any love of
administrative centralisation and urged the widest local government;
but the bigger the nation, the more perfect, he thought, would be the
development of association within it, and the greater therefore its
momentum on the road of progress. And, as the larger nations would be
approximately equal in territory or population, a new and natural
balance of power would arise to safeguard peace. This liking for large
countries sometimes nearly led him into inconsistencies with his own
principles, and made him question the national basis of most small
states. He made a confident forecast of the future European
settlement. (He was writing, of course, prior to 1870.) England and
France (apart from Savoy and Nice) were the only countries, whose
territory marched with their natural borders, and they alone would
remain unchanged. Italy would be united, and include the border
districts and islands that spoke the Italian tongue, except,
apparently, the Canton of the Ticino. Germany, including the
German-speaking provinces of Austria, would also achieve its unity,
but be divided into two or three "great administrative sections."
Spain and Portugal would form a single country. Greece would expand
over all territories with a Greek-speaking population. Switzerland
would be the nucleus of an Alpine Federation, embracing Savoy and the
Tyrol. Holland was, apparently, to keep its independence; Belgium, on
the other hand, had no future as a nation, though he does not indicate
its destiny. In early life he seems to have thought that Denmark would
remain a separate state; afterwards he believed that the three
Scandinavian states were inevitably destined to unity.
The most difficult problem, of course, was that of Eastern Europe.
Mazzini evidently thought that, next to the unity of his own country,
the Slav movement was the most important question in European
politics. Here was a mighty people, awakening to life, proving its
power by its literature,--for it, he believed, had produced the only
living poetry since Goethe and Byron,--claiming its rightful place in
the European commonwealth. Nothing could arrest the self-assertion of
the Slavs, but the future of Europe largely depended on the direction
which it took. If the other nations hailed it and guided it, it would
enrich the life of Europe by the new elements it brought into it; if
it went unfriended and undirected, it would be perverted into
"Czarism," and cost Europe twenty years of bloodshed to check
Muscovite ambitions. Two things Europe would do well to keep in mind.
It was as useless as it was immoral to bolster up Austria and Turkey,
for the Slav movement would be inevitably fatal to them both. And
Europe must see that the Slavs became a barrier and not a help to
Russian designs of domination. This could be done, and done only, by
helping the non-Russian Slavs to organise themselves into powerful and
independent nations. Czarism owed its strength not to Panslavist
aspirations, but to the fact that the Czar was the only hope of the
Christian populations of the Balkans. Mazzini's detailed forecast of
the Slav national settlement varied from time to time; but his
favourite plan was that Russians, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs should form
four separate nationalities. In curious and impossible inconsistency
with his own principles, he seems to have thought that Hungary and
Roumania would be annexed to or federated with one or other of these
states; and he looked to a federal union of Serbs and Greeks, with
Constantinople, as a free city, for the centre of the federation.
Out of the nationalities would grow "the United States of Europe, the
republican alliance of the peoples," "that great European federation,
whose task it is to unite in one association all the political
families of the old world, destroy the partitions that dynastic
rivalries have made, and consolidate and respect nationalities."
Mazzini's ken, strange to say, was almost restricted to Europe. He
scarcely mentions in this connection the American United States,
though sometimes he seems perhaps to imply that they would enter the
European commonwealth. He had no inkling that Eastern races might
claim their own independent development. His forecast of European
colonisation hardly extended beyond Asia and North Africa; he believed
that Asia was destined to be "an appendix of Europe," and that the
great stream of European colonisation would set towards it, chiefly
through the agency of Russia and England. Thus he was concerned with
Europe only; and for the Europe of the future, a federation of
harmonious nationalities, he had a splendid prophecy. When nationality
had triumphed, "all cause of war would disappear, and in its place
arise a spirit of brotherhood and peaceful emulation on the road of
progress." Revolutions would be no more, and "the slow, continuous,
normal unfolding of activities and powers" would lead the nations ever
onwards. We come again to his vision of a European authority, sitting
at Rome to give guidance and harmony to the peoples. When the great
day arrived, that brought the victory of liberty and nationality, the
peoples would assemble their "true General Council." No doubt the
Council was the same as that which would define the new religious
faith. It would formulate the common national duties of the peoples,
and secure their freedom to perform those duties, while the separate
national councils defined the special duty of each country.
It would be Italy's glorious function to lead the nations to this
unity. France had lost the opportunity in 1815; England, when she
isolated herself from the life of Europe by her enslavement to
non-intervention; the Slav countries were disqualified by their
rivalries or obsequiousness to Russia. Italy had her unquestioned
titles to the proud hegemony,--her geographical position, her
character, her traditions, the universal looking for some great thing
to come out of her new life. She was "the land destined by God to the
great mission of giving moral unity to Europe, and through Europe to
Humanity." She would be the armed apostle of nationality, the
protectress of oppressed peoples, the instrument to destroy Austria
and Turkey and give freedom to the Slavs. And when this part of her
mission was fulfilled, and through her nationality was victorious,
then the gratitude of the peoples, and the divine appointment of
Providence, and her own essential fitness for the task, would make
Rome the centre of the cause of peace, the seat of the Diet of the
nations, fulfilling Dante's vision, that saw her "helmsman" of
humanity, to steer it to its peace. It was a noble dream, much of it,
it may be, fantastic and impossible, and yet, perhaps, with its seed
of truth. The European Federation tarries behind Mazzini's eager
prophecy, but its coming cannot be delayed for ever. The triumph of
nationality, despite the evil deed of 1870, has advanced with mighty
strides since his day. And though patriotism has often erred into
ignoble paths, and international fraternity gone backward, yet the
evil creates its own remedy, and disarmament becomes an ever more
importunate desire. When the nations learn that arbitration and
disarmament are necessary for their own self-preservation, when the
European federation gradually evolves itself, Rome will be the natural
seat of the High Court of Europe. Italy, which by her plebiscitary
origin has given a rule to the nationalities,--a country practically
without territorial ambitions or colonial empire, the natural mediator
between the two great European alliances, with her ancient prestige
and service to humanity to give her lustre, has paramount claims to
the high prerogative.[44]
FOOTNOTES:
[43] The first address of the People's International League, from
which these words are quoted, was written by W. J. Linton, but was
based on Mazzini's rough draft.
[44] M. Novicow in his _Missione d'Italia_ has recently expressed the
same belief, almost in Mazzini's words. [But the Tripoli business has
changed all this.--1911.]
Chapter XVIII
Literary Criticism
The function of the critic--The function of the poet--Art
must avoid 'art for the sake of art' and realism--It must be
human, social, didactic--Poetry of modern life--The
historical drama--Music--'Objective' and 'subjective'
poets--Dante--Shakespeare--Goethe--Byron.
If Mazzini's busy life could have spared more time for literary study,
he would probably have been among the greatest critics of the century;
perhaps, even as it is, he may rank among them. He misses in his lack
of accurate and detailed study; but he has a rare penetration and
originality and gift of embracing synthesis. It was his ambition at
one time to found an Italian school of criticism, whose mark should be
constructive and sympathetic interpretation. Keenly sensitive though
he was to beauty of expression, he detested mere criticism of form and
the profitless microscopy, that pries for specks in a writer's life or
work. He loved to read a great author reverently, hiding rather than
exposing his blemishes, penetrating below uncouthnesses of form and
casual lapses to the great informing thoughts, that had their lesson
for the world. "At the present day," he wrote in an optimistic moment,
"we neither worship a genius blindly, nor outrage him barbarously; we
set ourselves to understand him, and we learn to love him. We regard
forms as secondary and perishable phenomena; the idea alone is sacred,
as a thing baptised to everlasting life, and we try how we may lift
the veil that hides it." He compared genius to the fabled tree of
Teneriffe, whose branches discharged showers of refreshing water.
"Genius is like this tree, and the mission of criticism should be to
shake the branches. At the present day it more resembles a savage
striving to hew down the noble tree to the roots."
In his scheme of life the poet had a part of supreme importance. He
regarded literature as a "moral priesthood." Poetry would "save the
world in its despite," for it was the poet's prerogative to redeem it
from doubt and base ideals, to "reveal duties and create affections,"
to lift men up above the trivial things of life to the eternal
verities. "We have," he cries in the forties, "exiled poetry from
life, and enthusiasm and faith have gone with it, and love, as I
understand love, and constancy in sacrifice, and the worship of great
deeds and great men." His own Italy had little of the throbbing
national life, in which alone true poetry could flourish; and
everywhere an age of faithlessness robbed the poet of his aliment. The
time was for the critic,--the constructive, "philosophic" critic; he
was the "literary educator," and he could at all events be precursor
of the poet of the future, marking the lines on which a modern
democratic poetry should travel, and preparing a public to understand
him. "The critic," he says, "is unrelated to genius; but he stands as
a link between great writers and the masses; he explores the
conditions and literary needs of the time, and preaches them to the
nations, that they may learn to feel them, and desire and demand them;
in fine, his prophecies prepare a public for the writer:--a more
important matter than some think, for very rarely do writers appear
before their time."
As critic, then, Mazzini points out the deficiencies of contemporary
literature, and the principles which must take it to a higher stage.
True art, he lays down, has two great perils to avoid. First, there is
the "atheist formula" of 'art for the sake of art';--a heresy he
scourged with pontifical anathemas. His attack was not aimed at
perfection of literary form. He loved a correct and classic diction,
and never underrated style, so long as style was not an excuse for
poverty of thought. His criticism went deeper. The artist may not live
his own art-life, divorced from the moving world around and all its
manifold activities, "floating bubble-like without support," finding
his poor inspiration in his own fancies and caprices. There was no
true individuality in that; invented though it was to guard the poet's
independence, in reality it made him but a passive mirror of each
passing impression. Instead of liberty, it brought anarchy and "wild,
arbitrary intellectual display." It robbed art of touch with the great
facts of life, all fruitful relationship to the struggling, ever
learning, ever advancing race. It sent it wandering lawless,
purposeless, like a sick man's dreams. The poet ceased to be a thinker
and a teacher, and sank to a mere empty singer. "What I want," he
said, "is not the Artist but the man-Artist; the High-Priest of the
Ideal, not the worshipper of his own Fetishes." Literature must be
"the minister of something greater and more valuable than itself."
He was almost equally condemnatory of realism, especially of realistic
presentation of nature. It was a criticism that he brought alike
against Monti and Victor Hugo and Wordsworth, that they "depicted but
never transfigured nature," and thus their art was "useless." The real
is the mantle of the true, but not the true; "high poetry is truth,
because you cannot trace out or analyse its source." The poet is a
"miner in the moral world"; his function is to hew beneath the symbol,
beneath the real, to the idea shut in within; questioning nature alike
in her beauties and deformities, to find and teach to men "that
fragment of God's truth that must exist there." "One thing I know," he
says, "that the phenomena of nature on their moral side and the inner
life of man must be the field of modern literature, that physical
nature and man's outer life will have their place only as symbols of
the first." And nature's lessons must have a practical reference to
man's lot and destiny. Even when nature was rightly used and
interpreted, there might be too much of it, and he seems to have
always given natural poetry a secondary place. "Poetry," he says, "is
not in nature but in man."
This brings us to his conception of true art. It must be essentially
human, not realistically so, but usefully, practically, didactically.
He did not mean by this that it must confine itself to the obvious,
outside facts of life. "In every powerful poetic impression the
_vague_ claims a full quarter, and the vague, which must not be
confounded with the obscure, is the soul's own field." But poetry,
however much it may concern itself with the spiritual and unseen, must
have direct application to the problems of life. "Art lives of the
world's life; the world's law is art's law." The poet must gather "the
great voice of the world and God," and so interpret it, that men may
listen and profit. He must contemplate man both in his individuality
and as a social creature, "in his internal and external life, in his
place and with his mission in creation." "Poetry,--great, ceaseless,
eternal poetry,--exists only in the development, the evolution of
life: only there, in life, understood and felt in its universality,
can inexhaustible variety be found."
Thus the poet must find his inspiration, not in his own "incomplete,
mutilated conceptions," not in the isolated individual, but in the
great collective, democratic movements of the people, voicing their
dim thoughts and aspirations, "their latent, slumbering, unconscious
life." There can be no great poetry to-day, unless the poet identify
himself with "the thought fermenting in the breast of the masses and
impelling them to action." Poets are the priesthood of the social and
political movement, which is the very blood of a modern people; and
there is no place for individualist poetry in a social age. "True and
sacred art aims at the perfection of society," and the art of the
future will be "principally religious and political." He hated the
aimless art, that busies itself with the mere picturesque and
sentimental, which idealises ages, whose meaning and moral standard
have passed. He applauded Schlegel's thesis that poetry must be
"national, that is useful and related to the civil and political
situation," no longer heedless of the great movements of to-day, but
"standing in the centre and swaying the heart of the social impulse."
The poet, who went to fight for Greece and died there, typified "the
holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples."
This democratic art must have a practical use by being didactic and
prophetic. It is not enough that its heart should beat with the
people's life; it must help the progress of the race by pointing to
the future. Though it may "grow among the ruins, art is ever coloured
by the rising sun." "There can be no true poetry without a
presentiment of the future"; it is, as said "the extraordinary man,"
who is the poet of all time,
The prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.
"Art either sums up the life of a dying age or heralds one about to
dawn; it is no caprice of this or that individual, but a solemn page
of history or a prophecy; most powerful, when as in Dante, and
occasionally in Byron, it is both." But there is no gift of prophecy
without an ideal, and "literature, like politics, has no secure
foundation without its fixed beliefs and principles,"--those beliefs
which make the future and to which facts must bow. "The true European
writer will be a philosopher, but with the poet's lyre in his hands."
"Nature with her thousand voices cries to the poet, 'Soar, thou art
King of earth.' And if we try to pen him down to realism, and rob him
of his independent lordship over facts, the poets of the past will
answer from their graves, 'We were great, because we created.' It is
for poetry to take the creations of the philosopher and give them life
and colour, to explore the truth that lies below the real and illumine
it with the light of genius, to interpret the universal laws that rule
over human history."
And the poet must not only lift men to his vision, but send them forth
in quest of it. He is not only prophet but apostle. It is not enough
that he should stimulate thought; he must "spur men to translate
thought into action." "Contemplative" poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge
for instance, are "incomplete." "The element of Action is inseparable
from poetry. Poetry," he says, "is for me something like the third
person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which is action." "In order to
be a religious poet," he writes in criticism of Lamartine, "it is not
enough, in my eyes at least to say 'Lord, Lord'; it is necessary to
_feel_ his holy law, and to make others feel it in such sort, as that
they shall constantly and calmly act in obedience to its precepts."
Just as religion gives life and power to philosophy, so it is for art
to grasp ideas, translate them by images and symbols, and make them
passionate beliefs. "Poetry is enthusiasm with wings of fire, the
angel of strong thoughts, the power that raises men to sacrifice,
consumes them, stirs a tumult of ideas within them, puts in their
hands a sword, a pen, a dagger." "Written poetry, like music
performed, should be in some sense a prelude to other poetry, which
the excited soul of the reader composes silently within itself." It
will "teach the young all that is greatest in self-sacrifice,
constancy, silence, the sense of solitude without despair, long years
of torture or delusion unrevealed and dumb, faith in the things that
are to be, the hourly struggle for that faith, though hope of victory
there be none in this life." And therefore art must be ever brave and
full of hope, "teaching man not his weakness but his strength,
inspiring him not with faintheartedness but with energy and vigorous
will." Its song must be always of steadiness and constancy, and
"calmness radiate from the poet's brow, as the spirit of God radiated
from the brow of Moses on the wandering Israelites." "The artist is
either a priest or a more or less practised mountebank." Woe to him,
if he teach spasmodic, evanescent effort, or "revolt and impotent
despair, that dies cursing, ere it tries to fight, that says 'All
things are evil,' because it finds itself unable to create good."
Mazzini has no pity for the poet of pessimism, "whose sense of moral
depression and languor" will, if he pose as a religious poet, make his
readers "reject religion and him together."
Poetry, then, the modern poetry of action, being essentially related
to politics and social life, the poet's themes are in the stir and
passion of contemporary events or in national history. What field for
literature like the mighty, moving pageant of the democratic world? To
watch God's hand guiding the nations to their destinies, to probe the
eager ferment of a modern society, to interpret all the dim,
half-conscious yearning of the masses,--what inspiration for the poet
here! "Popular poetry has invaded everything, the poetry whose epic is
revolution, whose satire is revolt." How strong and living are the
giants of the Revolution beside the nerveless men and women of the
quietist novel. "Poetry has fled from old Europe to give life to the
young, new, beautiful Europe of the peoples. Like the swallow, it has
left a crumbling ruin to seek a purer air and a more verdant world. It
has fled from the King's solitary throne to find its abode in the
great arena of the peoples, in the ranks of martyrs for the
fatherland, on the patriot's scaffold, in the prison of the brave
betrayed." The armies of the Convention, the guerilla-bands of Spain,
the German students chanting the songs of Körner on the march to
battle, the patriot's anguished passion, the dreams of a liberty to
be, the world-mission of European civilisation,--these are the modern
poet's themes. "Think you that poetry, whose birth was ushered by such
deeds as these, can die ere it has lived? Would you set up the poor,
pale, narrow poetry of individuals, a poetry of forms, a poetry that
lives and dies in the small circle of a palace or a chapel or a
castle,--would you set up this against the grand _social_ poetry,
solemn and tranquil and full of hope, which knows none but God in
heaven and the people upon earth?" An age of science and industry is
no enemy to poetry, for the elements of poetry are eternal. "I tell
you, in this Europe there is such life, such poetry in germ, the
poetry of ages, of all the generations, that genius itself has not yet
dared to attempt to develop it." "Here round you," so he speaks to the
poet of the future, "here, before your eyes, there is poetry and
movement and a European people waiting for you."
The poet has another field in history. Mazzini prophesied a great
future for the historical drama. He was inclined to think that drama
would be the accepted form of modern poetry, seeing doubtless that
drama is the true communion between poet and people, the natural
vehicle of the artist, who has a message to deliver. It would be "a
kind of popular pulpit, a chair of the philosophy of humanity"; and he
looked forward to the day when the great dramas, such as those of
"divine Schiller," would be produced on the stage without mutilations
or curtailments to a reverent and patient audience. The function of
the historical dramatist, as indeed he thought it was the function of
the prose historian, was not so much to make minute research of facts,
as to disentangle the lessons hidden under every page of history, to
interpret the law of human duty and the mystery of existence. Like
every other poet, he must start with a philosophy of life, judging all
things by his own law, meting out praise and blame, drawing guidance
for the future from the past. The dramatist "may call up the shadows
of the past, but like the Witch of Endor, in order to constrain them
to reveal the future." His personages must be types, each with its
social significance; he must not, as Victor Hugo did, overload them
with individual traits, till they lose their message for society, but
rather, as Schiller with his Marquis di Posa, so "re-create" them,
that they may illustrate some general law of life. Mazzini did not see
how pale such characters would be; how difficult it was to reconcile
them with biographical accuracy, how likely therefore they were to
falsify any induction of historical laws.
His theory of music was a very similar one. Music, like poetry, he
thought, was nought without a moral intention, without practical
teaching and power to inspire. It should be "the purest and most
general and most sympathetic expression of a social faith." He
pitilessly criticised the music of the thirties, imitative, exhausted,
artificial, clever but without creative power. A faithless and corrupt
generation asked for music to amuse it; and music had listened and
forgotten its mission. There was melody and good instrumentation, but
no soul or thought in it. It was "laughter without peace, weeping
without virtue." Operas had no unity, no great passionate note; they
were ingenious mosaics, much of them mere noise and extravagance,
inferior for all their technique to the chants of the medieval Church,
when music had a religious work to do. Rossini had done something; he
had broken from the old canons and given liberty to music; but he had
the defects of the Romanticist school, he had freed but could not
create; he had prepared the way for the music of the future, but it
was not his to write it. Mazzini however saw indications that the new
music was not far off, and its dawn, he believed, would be in Italy.
But Italian melody must wed itself to German harmony. Italian music
was "lyrical, impassioned, volcanic, artistic," but without unity or
soul. German music knew God, but it was mystical and impersonal, out
of touch with everyday human life. It dulled men's impulses to action;
it stirred them, but to no useful end, left the soul full of great
emotion, but uninspired to perform plain duties.[45] Mazzini was
assured that Italy would produce the master, who would unite the
strength of both schools, keep the religion of the German school, but
point it to practical, human ends. At one time he hoped that perhaps
Donizetti might live to do this; afterwards he thought that Meyerbeer
was "the precursor spirit of the music of the future." He was always
thinking of Opera. When he insists that the music should be in keeping
with the subject and its period, when he pleads for the symbolic use
of the orchestra, for the wider employment of motives, for the
development of the chorus on the model of Greek tragedy, for the large
use of recitative, for the entire disuse of cadences and flourishes,
he is looking to Opera to be the highest form of music, as he looked
to the historical drama to be the highest form of poetry. Apparently
he wished to wed them, and looked for the day, when great poets would
write librettos for great composers.
Mazzini's criticism of music is for its time so fresh, so full of
suggestion and prophecy, that it is matter for regret that his
knowledge of it was not more extensive. He knew opera and little
beyond it; he had some acquaintance with Beethoven, but he does not
seem to have been very strongly attracted by him, or to have made much
study of him. He wasted on Donizetti and Meyerbeer the enthusiasm,
which should have been reserved for greater men. It is unfortunate
that he lived before Wagnerian opera appeared in London. It would be
possible to show in detail to what a remarkable extent he anticipated
Wagner's theories.[46] Wagner, it is true, rejected the historical
drama, because he believed the requirements of art to be incompatible
with historical accuracy. But his main doctrines are the same as
Mazzini's,--the ethical intention of music, the intimate relationship
of art to public life, the belief in the people as the fountain of
true art, the value of the folk-song, the reconciliation of harmony
and melody, the poet and musician stretching hands to one another and
giving 'moral will' to music, by uniting 'word' to 'tone' in Opera. It
is permitted to think that, Wagner's nationality notwithstanding,
Mazzini would have recognised in him the master of the new music,
whose dawn he heralded.
Mazzini had a favourite classification of poets into "objective" and
"subjective." The objective artist sinks his own beliefs, and merely
reflects and transmits external impressions, neither judging them by
his own conception of right and wrong, nor supplying any inspiration
or rule of action for mankind. The subjective artist stamps his themes
with the imprint of his own individuality; he sits in the seat of
judgment and measures out praise and blame; and thus he helps others
to form a moral law, and creates the future. The former series, men
who excite our admiration but not our love, passes from the Greek
poets, all save one, through Shakespeare to Goethe; the latter from
Aeschylus through Dante and Michelangelo to Byron and, apparently,
Schiller. Dante was Mazzini's highest type of the subjective poet.
Something has already been said of his influence on Mazzini's
thought,--an influence far greater than that of any other writer.
There are few, indeed, of Mazzini's doctrines, which are not found in
germ in the _Convito_ or the _De Monarchiâ_. Mazzini revered him as
the strong intellect, which took so little from other men and gave so
much; the hero, whose life was one long fight, who "wrote for country,
conspired for country, held the pen and sword"; the patriot, "neither
Catholic nor Ghibelline nor Guelf, but Christian and Italian," who
believed in 'the holy Roman people,' and foretold for Italy the
spiritual mastery of the world; the thinker who taught the unity and
common task of all mankind; the one true poet of love, to whom the
love of man and woman was a spiritual thing, wherein self entered not.
He contrasted him with Shakespeare "the lord of individuality," the
supreme dramatist who created individuals as no man else has created
them, giving his creatures choice of good and evil, and pursuing the
lesson of their fates, the choice once made, to the end; who in Hamlet
had of pure creative genius made a prophetic type, that belonged to
two centuries after him, and had no contemporary original. But
Shakespeare was a man who took life as he found it, untouched by
strong moral sympathies, without sense of the race or glimpse of duty
or looking to the future; therefore a cynic and a "sceptic," obsessed
by the feeling of life's nothingness, with no illuminating faith in
man's predestined glory.
Mazzini's favourite contrast was between Goethe and Byron. For
Goethe's intellect he had the profoundest admiration; he seems to have
studied Faust carefully, and had some acquaintance at all events with
his other works. "Goethe," he says, "is an intellect, that receives,
elaborates, and reproduces every possible form of human emotion and
aspiration. He dwells aloft, alone, a mighty Watcher in the midst of
creation, scrutinizing with equal penetration and interest the depths
of ocean and the calyx of the flower, ... laying bare in Faust the
problem of the age in all its terrible nakedness, ... the most
representative poet that Europe has produced since Shakespeare." But
great intellect as he is, he misses the highest; for he loses the man
in the artist, he has no moral standard of his own, no sense of the
unity of life; he is the poet of detail and analysis, "feeling
everything but never feeling the whole," living aloof from religion
and politics, a cold spectator of the world-moving deeds around him,
"learning neither to esteem men nor to better them, nor even to suffer
with them," "without need of doing or sacred sorrow or any deep and
ardent love." "The poet of the bourgeoisie, he counsels calm and
contemplation, order and resignation, tells men to fit themselves to
their environment, fulfil their little duties, plant themselves
comfortably, do good around them, always provided that the risks are
not too great, and that they do not disturb the harmony and balance of
the faculties of _sight_."
Turn from Goethe, he says, to Byron; "there is the man himself, who
hopes and strives and suffers for the race, as Dante did, and as
Aeschylus did before Dante." Like Goethe, he too is "a poet of
individuality," "a type of power without an aim"; but, unlike
Goethe's, his verse is no mere reflection of other men's thoughts and
actions. He stamps his portraitures with his own personality,
surveying the world "from a single, comprehensive point of view," and
interpreting and judging it by his own inner light; more deep, as
Goethe is more vast, seeking the sublime rather than the beautiful,
ever a worshipper of force and action. "In Byron the _ego_ is revealed
in all its pride of power, freedom, and desire, in the uncontrolled
plenitude of all its faculties, aspiring to rule the world around him
solely for dominion's sake, to exercise upon it the Titanic force of
his will." It is this power of will, necessarily propelled to seek an
outlet in action, that appealed so strongly to Mazzini. Byron bears
his part in the political and social conflicts round him, "wandering
through the world, sad, gloomy, and unquiet, wounded and bearing the
arrow in his wound"; loving and understanding Italy and Rome, dying
for a nation's cause in Greece. And Mazzini found in his verse a great
social lesson, such as Goethe never tried to teach. Consciously or
unconsciously Byron foretold the doom of individualism and
aristocracy. His characters are moulded on "a single type--the
individual; free, but nothing more than free; iron souls in iron
frames, who climb the alps of the physical world as well as the alps
of thought"; but all bearing in their faces the stamp of failure, "a
gloomy and ineffaceable sadness." "Gifted with a liberty they knew not
how to use; with a power and energy they knew not how to apply; with a
life, whose purpose and aim they comprehend not;--they drag through
their useless and convulsed existences. Byron destroys them one after
the other. The emptiness of the life and death of solitary
individuality has never been summed up so powerfully as in his pages."
But Byron, no more than Goethe, wrote the poetry of Mazzini's ideal.
In a generation without religion or pity or enthusiasm, amid "English
cant and French levity and Italian stagnation," Byron was driven to
passionate, tumultuous cursings of a false society. But it was a note
of rebellion and despair. Neither poet had the sense of the race, of
man redeemed by love and social service, of the new hope and power
that would come, as men learned to work together for the common end.
Mazzini gives no indication that he ever found the art that he looked
for. He seems to have thought that some of the modern Slav poetry came
nearest to it. The new English literature does not appear to have
attracted him; there is no evidence that he read Browning, and if he
had, he would probably have condemned him as "objective." Historical
drama has conspicuously failed to do what he expected of it. The
poetry of social problems is still for the most part analytic and
destructive. The poet of his vision, the constructive, prophetic,
apostolic poet, with his message for humanity, whose songs will reach
the workshop and the cottage and inspire a nation's policy, is yet to
come.
FOOTNOTES:
[45] _Cf._ Richard Wagner's Prose Works (Eng. trans.), pp. 122-123.
[46] Mazzini's _Philosophy of Music_ was written in 1836; Wagner's
_Artwork of the Future_ in 1849.
Chapter XIX
The Man
Poetic temperament--Defects as a thinker--Greatness as a
moral teacher--Strength and weakness as a politician--The
man.
Carlyle said that Mazzini was "by nature a little lyrical poet." The
implication was contemptuous, but it had a bottom of truth. Mazzini,
indeed, save for his early aspirations to the drama, never dreamed of
being a poet. His conception of the poet's function was so high, the
qualities he demanded of him so exacting, that, if he ever felt the
call, he put it away, no doubt, as something to which he could not
reach. It is doubtful even whether he wrote more than one poem when a
youth. He aspired only to be critic, to do something to prepare the
way for the poet of the future. But he had qualities, that would have
made of him a poet of no mean order. There are many passages in his
writings, which show his deep communion with nature. When he writes of
"the vast ocean, dashing, like a wave of eternal poetry, against the
barren rocks of Brittany," or describes a sunrise from the Alps,--"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,"--truly the consecration and
the poet's dream are his. His critical essays prove with what
spiritual insight he would have touched the poetry of man and society.
We have seen how marvellous for an outsider was his presentiment of
the future of music. And his whole intellectual make, alike in
strength and weakness, is that of the artist,--of the artist, that is,
as he conceived him, God's messenger to the heart of man. He had
little power of scientific thought, of accurate reasoning or careful
arrangement and analysis of facts. It led to a curious misconception
of scientific method. "Science," he says,--"the true, great, fruitful
science,--is as much intuition as experiment." He generalises with a
hazardous confidence. Sometimes he uses words, that are no more than
words, to push difficulties into a corner and stand in front of them.
In spite of his allegiance to "tradition," he generally prefers
deductive to inductive reasoning. "Principles prevail over facts," as
he says; but he often does not see, in spite of his own cautions, how,
without a supreme respect for facts, a principle may hang not on the
eternal truths, but on the fancy of a solitary brain. His own
scientific studies were small; save for some acquaintance with
astronomy and geography,--the former to feed his sense of the
infinite, the latter for its relationship to nationality,--he seems to
have given no attention to any branch of science. He accepted without
question the Genesis story of the creation of man. At a time when
Darwinism was bringing a sword into the intellectual world, he lived
apparently uninterested and untouched by it.
The same defect of method appears in his other studies. Keen as was
his interest in social questions, he evidently had no grasp of
economic science; beyond Adam Smith, it is doubtful whether he read
any of the great economists, and at a later date he entirely failed
to understand the economic side of Karl Marx. His theories of history,
again, so subordinate everything to his desire to make it didactic,
that he regarded research and accuracy as comparatively unimportant.
He thought,--rash man,--that facts had already been accumulated in
sufficient abundance and certainty. Greatly indeed he conceived the
historian's ultimate function--to discover the laws of human progress,
and be "prophet of a higher social end"; but he slurred over the
difficulty of reading facts aright, and was ever prone to let fancy
take their place. He would have made the historian's method deductive
to a dangerous degree, and had him fill the gaps of history from an
abstract study of human nature; he apparently approved the Thucydidean
method of invented speeches.
Here and everywhere he was apt to look down on erudition. He believed
that Genius,--a kind of mystic, God-inspired faculty, that lived on
intuition and not on painfully acquired knowledge,--discovers at a
glance the secrets of nature and ethics and history. "Where we see
only the confused light of the Milky Way, they see stars." Though he
would have himself disclaimed the title to genius, he had a supreme
confidence in his own thought. It was difficult for him to own an
error, and hence he never learnt from his mistakes. It was true of
him, as Renan said of Lamennais, that "when a man believes that he
possesses all truth, he naturally disdains the painful, humble path of
research, and regards the investigation of details as a pure
dilettante fancy." This was no doubt the chief cause why his mind so
soon stopped growing. We find in his early writings, when he was
twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the germ, and generally the developed
form of every doctrine that he preached. His character developed
normally, but not his intellect. Religion, ethics, politics, social
theories, literary canons,--all issued forth at once from his
early-ripened brain, and fixed themselves once for all. He was always
reluctant to enquire for or admit new knowledge. It is strange, lover
of books though he was, how restricted sometimes was his range of
reading. His poets were the poets of his youth and early manhood, and
he read few that wrote after 1840. Closely as he studied the Gospels,
he seems to have given little or no attention to exegesis. In spite of
his keen interest in Utilitarianism, there is no trace that he read
the later writers of the school. Though so long in intimate touch with
English political thought, he does not seem to have known Burke or
Ricardo or the Mills or Herbert Spencer.
As a thinker, therefore, his defects are great. His thought, indeed,
always has its value, coming as it does from a man of very great
intellectual power and large experience of life, one who fearlessly
penetrated to the heart of things, and was therefore in the true sense
original. Its range is wonderful for one who led so strenuous a life
of action. Faulty as his argument often is, obvious as are the gaps,
he wrote comparatively few pages, that are not stamped with great and
stimulating thought. But his mind was too loosely organised, too often
out of touch with contemporary knowledge. He has left an imposing and
suggestive system, and yet perhaps it somehow fails to add greatly to
the sum of human knowledge. But it is just the qualities, that
depreciate him as a thinker, which make him great as a moral teacher.
His want of logic, his loose use of words hurt not here. The involved
and rushing language, like a tumbling mountain stream, becomes a
strength. That very rigidity, that lifelong iteration of a few
dominant ideas, carry force and conviction, that a more agile
intellect were powerless to give. His warm and palpitating
generalisations, for all the flaws in their reasoning, bear the
irrefutable mark of moral reality. He had that union of real
intellectual force and spiritual fervour, that gives the insight into
moral truth, and learns the secrets of heaven and hell. He was able to
be a great moralist, because in a rare degree he had himself the moral
sense, because the passion for righteousness had so penetrated all his
being, that he could speak and be understood on the deep things of
God, had something in his own soul that found its way to other souls.
And, above all, he spoke with authority. Absolute confidence in his
own beliefs was joined to truest personal humility, and made the
prophet. Humblest and least ambitious of men, he felt his call from
God; and in God's name he was assertive, dogmatic, sometimes seemingly
egotistic. If he spoke authoritatively and intolerantly, it was that a
duty was laid upon him, and woe to him if he preached it not. His
principles were living and victorious certainties to him. "If a
principle is true," he said, "its applications are not only possible
but inevitable." And this unquestioning conviction made him as
fearless morally as he was intellectually,--fearless with the supreme
bravery of one who never shrinks from duty,--fearless not only for
himself but others, bridling all the impulsive tenderness within him,
and requiring of his fellow-workers the same readiness for sacrifice,
which he exacted of himself. And so his words, aflame from a pure and
passionate heart, come with the intensity of prophetic power. Beyond
the words of any other man of modern times, they bring counsel and
comfort to those who have drunk of the misery and stir and hope of the
age. They have the greater virtue, that impels their hearers to do
likewise. Mazzini is one of the small band, who have the strength as
well as the love of Christ, not only the unselfishness that draws, but
the conviction and the power that command, who impose their own
beliefs and make disciples.
Would he, had he had the opportunity, have done what he held higher
than to teach through books, and been the missionary of a religion?
Had Italy been freed in 1848, we may be sure he would have left his
desk, forsaken politics, and gone about the land, preaching faith in
God and Progress and Humanity. Probably no other man, since the
Reformation, has had such apostolic power. Would his mission have
found an answer or ended in pitiable collapse? He would probably have
had no better fate than others, who have tried to found new churches.
There may be room for new faiths, but there is little for new churches
in the world to-day. But this does not necessarily mean failure. His
church might have been empty, his state religion proved a soulless
husk; but in the communion of scattered men and women, who are groping
for the truth, he might have laid a cornerstone of that church, which
is neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem, which without forms
or unity of doctrine, spreads the unity of spiritual truth.
Something, even as it is, he has done for this. His creed may fail to
content the knowledge of to-day, but he stands a convincing witness to
the spiritual, to the eternal needs of the soul, to religion as the
master fact of life, though creeds may fail and systems perish.
* * * * *
How does he rank as a politician? Our estimate must be a mixed one. As
a political thinker he stands high. He has left a theory of the state,
that is priceless because informed by a great moral ideal. And apart
from this, it has its value from his wide and profound knowledge of
modern politics and the practical sense that almost always keeps his
idealism in touch with facts. His faith in democracy, the optimism
which came of his trust in Providence, his cautious handling of
economic tendencies saved him from the mistakes of Carlyle and Ruskin.
His conviction that the common-sense of the people was feeling out its
way independently of any theory or school, kept him from the
short-lived formulas of the individualists. His deeper knowledge of
men and deeper reading of history gave him a saner and completer view
than that of the collectivists. None of them, not even Ruskin, can
match the warmth and inspiration of a conception, that raises politics
to be the instrument of the divine plan,--an instrument not only to
destroy injustice and poverty, but to redeem the highest part of man
and bring the rule of brotherhood and unity and social peace. In the
detailed application of his political doctrines he often failed from
that same inaccessibility to facts, which marred him otherwise. His
republic missed the essential; his theories of democratic government
are vague and hardly satisfy. But even here he is the prophet of one
great enduring principle. Among the statesmen of the century, he is
almost the only one, who understood what nationality meant, saw its
essential relationship to democracy, and put it on an unassailable
foundation. It was this that made him teacher of Italian Unity, and
therefore maker of modern Italy. Whether without him Italy would be
united to-day, we cannot tell; but at all events it was he who gave
the impulse, his bold vision that saw that the hard consummation was
attainable, and gave others too the faith to see it.
As a political thinker, then, he is great; as a practical political
worker, he largely failed. True, he had many of a statesman's
qualities. He often read character acutely, though his confidence in
men sometimes deceived him, and again and again he was the victim of
informers. He had rare industry and considerable organising power;
though, owing to his solitary work, he had learned to bury himself too
much in details,--in the mass of correspondence and the immense labour
he put out to scrape together little funds,--and in them he sometimes
neglected the survey of the whole. Above all, as he proved at Rome, he
had the true statesman's gift of leadership and inspiration. But it is
more than doubtful whether, even under happier circumstances, he would
have been an effective politician. His knowledge of human nature was
more subtle in the abstract than in the concrete; individuals were to
him too much wholly good or wholly bad, and he did not recognise how
complex are the motives that sway puzzled humanity. He could rarely
take a sane, unprejudiced view of a situation. It amazes us that he
expected Pio Nono to respond to his appeal in 1847, and thought that,
if the republic came at Rome in 1870, it would found a state religion.
His misconception of Piedmontese policy throughout the fifties is a
yet stronger illustration of distorted vision. This was one of the
reasons why he found it so difficult to compromise. He could not
distinguish non-essentials from essentials, and it was nearly as hard
for him to give way on the one as on the other. Compromise in small or
great seemed cowardice, and there was no doubt a strain of egotism in
his obstinacy. It humiliated him to surrender any detail of the
theories, which he preached with such undiscriminating confidence.
* * * * *
But one would fain close not with the thinker or the moral teacher or
the politician, but the man. Mazzini's personal life was one of a very
rare purity and beauty, that stands out in his generation noblest and
faithfullest and most inspired. Its only serious flaw lies in those
few lapses from public candour, which have been noted in these pages.
Sometimes he was bitter and intolerant, but the provocation was great.
In earlier life he was often querulous and self-absorbed, but it may
be counted to him, that, with his sensitive nature, he came through
loneliness and poverty with his moral strength unbroken. Except for
these, the critic's microscope can find no specks. Brave, earnest,
true, without trace of affectation, he bore the stamp of whitest
sincerity. Gentle, affectionate, pure as few are pure, he was friend
and counsellor and inspirer to those who knew him, gripping and
subduing them with that wondrous sympathy of his, that came of
burning love of goodness and made the saving of a soul the highest
thing in life. That generosity, which made him share purse and clothes
with others perhaps less destitute than himself, and give half his
scanty income to help a woman and children that he hardly knew, made
him lavish out of his busy days time and thought to help struggling
souls. Ever intense in his affections, grateful for any act of
kindness, yearning for friendship with the yearning of the homeless
man, he was one to draw others with bonds of love.
He had a large and loving view of life. Pettiness and malice and
jealousy had very little place in it. Passionate though he was for
morality, he was, outside his political work and controversies and an
occasional touch of cynicism in his talk, a very tolerant man. No
person has, he said, "a right to judge a special case without positive
data on the nature of the fact." He was angry and impatient with the
"cavilling spirit of mediocrity," that takes pleasure in the lapses of
"the mighty-souled." Among his friends he never sermonised, and he had
no desire to bend their private life to his own pattern. Ever more or
less sad himself, he rejoiced in their happiness. "You are a happy
mortal," he writes to one of them on his marriage. "I am,
notwithstanding my dislike for _happiness_, truly glad that you are
so." Never man had more joy in others' home felicity. It was only
among his fellow-revolutionists, whom he thought of as partners in his
own high call, that he was exacting and sometimes ungenerous, though
he pleaded earnestly with them that public work should leave room for
the inner life of love and friendship. In his political controversies,
it must be confessed, his equanimity deserted him, and he is often
intolerant and unfair. He was too ready to think that bad politics
implied bad morals, and his hatred of Louis Napoleon and Cavour made
him pen pages, that one would gladly not remember. But even in
politics he could sometimes do justice to an opponent, who obviously
acted from high convictions; and he was one of the few Italian
nationalists, who could appreciate the motives of the Catholic
Volunteers.
But his essential greatness lies on the active side. Above all else he
shines out white in that consuming love of humanity, that accepted
poverty and weariness and danger, that made him forego home and love,
comfort and congenial work, and give himself to one long,
self-forgetting service for the good of men. Duty was no abstract
precept with him, but part of his very being. In adversity and trial
he had schooled himself to follow her, till disobedience to her call
became almost impossible, and he did not wait for her to speak but
sought her out. It was nearly allied to his almost superstitious fear
of personal happiness. Those miserable years in Switzerland and London
wrought on him, till melancholy grew to a habit. He lost something of
it afterwards in the society of his English friends, but it never left
him; and it tinted all his life with the gentle sadness, which is near
akin to spiritual yearnings and large-hearted love. Sunless and
unwholesome as it seems at times, after all, as with the Man of
sorrows, it purged him to the same forgetfulness of self. It was no
enervating grief; "do not allow yourself to be weakened and
self-absorbed by your trouble" was his perennial lesson to friends,
who had lost dear ones. His was the "other part of grief, the noble
part, which makes the soul great and lifts it up." "By dint of
repeating to myself," he once wrote to Mrs Carlyle, "that there is no
happiness under the moon, that life is a self-sacrifice meant for
some higher and happier thing; that to have a few loving beings, or if
none, to have a mother watching you from Italy or from Heaven (it is
all the same) ought to be quite enough to preserve us from falling."
He, to a degree that few have done, trod self victoriously under;
habitually and systematically year by year, untempted by failure or
success, by misery or comparative happiness, he denied himself even
the little indulgences and relaxations and declensions from the strait
hard path, by which most good men make their compromise with the world
and flesh. So remorselessly was duty law to him, that sometimes work
and sacrifice became ends in themselves; and he laboured painfully on
in the path which he had chosen, when it would have served his cause
better to have rested or turned to other activities. And the unbending
labour had its fruit in that wonderful sum of his life's work, that,
beyond all the exacting details of his political organisation, has
left its stamp on modern Europe, has left so vast a body of thought in
half the provinces of the human mind, has its yet richer legacy in the
example of a life given perfectly and wholly to the cause of men.
He was not the mere conscientious worker only; he lived in the light
of a spiritual vision, and that light radiated in almost every page he
wrote, on every man and woman whom he touched. Besides the sense of
duty he had faith. "He was," writes a living English statesman,
"perhaps the most impressive person I have ever seen, with a fiery
intensity of faith in his own principles and in their ultimate
triumph, which made him seem inspired; a man to waken sleeping souls,
and fill them with his own fervour." He loved to commune with those of
his own spiritual kin,--Dante, Savonarola, Cromwell,--men who had the
same undoubting faith in the righteousness of their cause and their
fellow-work with God,--men, it may be, one-sided and intellectually
incomplete, but gifted with the power to do great things and lift up
life. And so great principles and nobleness of aim carried him through
a series of practical mistakes, and left his life to be a permanent
enriching of the race. What if he dreamed dreams, that for generations
yet may be no more than dreams? What if his mental ken reached not to
all the knowledge of the age? What if he marred his work by mistakes
and miscalculations? His errors have passed; his intellectual
limitations can be supplied. His was the rarer and the greater part,
to lift men out of the low air of common life up to the heights, where
thought is larger, and life runs richer, and the great verities are
seen, undimmed by self and sophistry. The idealist is still mankind's
best friend; and he does most for the race, who purges its spiritual
vision, and breathes into cold duty, till it becomes a thing of life
and passion and power. Greater still is he, who is not idealist only,
but saint and hero, and in his life bears witness to the truth he
teaches. Such saint and hero and idealist Mazzini was; and while men
and women live, who would be true to themselves and to their call, who
value sacrifice and duty above power and success, so long will there
be those, who will love him and be taught by him.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MAZZINI'S HANDWRITING.]
Appendix A
SOME UNPUBLISHED (IN ONE CASE PRIVATELY PUBLISHED) LETTERS
AND PAPERS, WRITTEN BY MAZZINI.
1. _Letter to Mr W. E. Hickson, about 1844._
2. _A Prayer for the Planters, 1846._
3. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1847._
4. _Letter to Mr Peter Taylor, February 1854._
5. _Letter to Mr Peter Taylor, October 1854._
6. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1857._
7. _Two Letters to Mrs Milner-Gibson, 1859._
8. _Letter to Mr Peter Taylor, 1860._
9. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1865._
10. _Letter to Mr W. Malleson, 1865._
11. _Rest. A Paper written for the Pen and Pencil Club, 1867._
12. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1868._
13. _Letter to Mr William Shaen, 1870._
I
LETTER TO Mr W. E. HICKSON, EDITOR OF THE _Westminster Review_
(probably in 1844).
[This letter gives some details concerning his early life,
which are not mentioned in his works or in any of the
biographies.]
DEAR SIR,--I began to attract the attention of the Government in Italy
by my literary writings. I had been pleading warmly the cause of what
was then called Romanticism, and was the right of progressive life in
Literature. Then, as now, all pleading for literary liberty,
independence, progression, were suspected in Italy as educating the
mind to forbidden tendencies. I published in 1828 a weekly literary
paper the "Indicatore Genovese": it was, at the end of the year, and
though published under the double ecclesiastical and temporal
censorship, suppressed. I caused the paper to be continued at Leghorn
under the title of "Indicatore Livornese";[47] it was, at the end of
the year, suppressed again. I wrote one long article on "a European
Literature" in the best of our reviews, the "Antologia" of Florence.
The review was persecuted and after some time suppressed. In 1830,
after the Revolution of July I was arrested. The accusation was the
spreading of a secret association tending to the overthrow of the
Italian Government. I recollect a fact, well apt to give a summary of
our condition in Italy. My father, Professor of Anatomy in the Genoese
University, went to the Governor of the town, Venanson, enquiring at
the cause of my imprisonment. "Your son," he was told amongst other
things, "is fond of walking every night, alone, sadly pensive, on the
outskirts of the town. 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." A committee of Senators was appointed, in Turin,
to try me. They found no proofs, and acquitted both me and some
friends who had been arrested with me. Nevertheless I was sent, in
solitary confinement, at Savona, in the fortress for five months: and
afterwards, sent in exile, without leave of seeing anybody, except my
parents. There was no duration determined; but I was told that my
subsequent conduct would shorten or prolong the time of my being an
exile. I came through Savoy and Switzerland to France, at a time in
which the Government of Louis Philippe, not yet acknowledged by the
absolutist Governments, was active in exciting all insurrectional
schemes, both in Spain and Italy. I merged, of course into them.
When the insurrection of 1831 was quenched in the Estates of the Pope,
I established myself at Marseilles, and founded from there the new
association "la giovine Italia." Of the distinctions to be made
between this and the old Carbonari associations, I have spoken in four
letters that have been printed in the "Monthly Chronicle." They--the
fourth especially--I would advise you to peruse: I have not a single
copy in my possession and cannot even remember the number; but they
must have appeared between 1838 and 1839. The rapidity with which the
Association spread evinced the justice of the fundamental views. At
the beginning of 1832, the organisation was powerful throughout all
Italy. As one of the main features of La Giovine Italia was to not
content itself as Carbonarism did, with a secret war, but to reach
insurrection through the open preaching of its belief, an organ was
established at Marseilles expounding all the principles of the
Association. La Giovine Italia, a review, or rather a collection of
political pamphlets springing from the Association, was under my
direction; and, in fact, the two-thirds of each volume were my own.
The effect was really electric among our youth. From Marseilles,
through the merchant-ships of our country, the captains of which were
almost generally volunteering their efforts, the volumes were smuggled
into Italy, where they raised the enthusiasm of the patriots to such a
pitch that it was evident a general outbreak would ensue. Then, the
persecutions began. Applications were made by all the Italian
Governments to the French: the policy of Louis Philippe had already
changed, and the most active co-operation against the Association and
me was promised. Measures were taken at Marseilles against such of our
exiles as were living upon the _subsidies_. They were sent away to the
interior. But few as we were, we could, by multiplying our activity,
front the task. At last, under the pretence of my being likely to be
connected with the republican agitation in France, I was ordered to
leave France. I protested, and claimed the common justice of a trial;
but unsuccessfully. My presence at Marseilles was imperiously required
by the interests of the Association; the writing, publishing, and
sending to Italy the correspondencies with the country, for which
Marseilles was offering every facility, the interviews with Italian
patriots who flocked to Marseilles for instructions and
communications, were all resting on me. I decided to stop; and
concealed myself. During one year I succeeded in baffling all the
activity of the French police, and of our own spies. But it was
through the most rigorous seclusion you can imagine. During one year,
I remember having had only twice, a breath of fresh air in the night,
once dressed in woman's garb, the other as a Garde-National. At last
things had reached such a point that a general rising was thought of.
I left France and went to Geneva: there to await for the event, and
prepare an expedition into Savoy, so as to divide the forces of the
enemy and establish co-operation between the patriots in Italy and
their exiles. How the hopes of an insurrection failed in Italy, the
fourth of my letters in the "Monthly Chronicle" will tell you. How we
too failed, through our military leader, General Ramorino, in the
attempt on Savoy--an attempt I thought it our duty to realise, as a
practical teaching to our countrymen, that promises, once given, are
to be kept,--would now be too long to say. But a tolerably true
account of the enterprise is to be found in one of the volumes of
"Histoire de Dix Ans" _par_ Louis Blanc. Meanwhile the attempt, once
unsuccessful, drew upon Switzerland and _à fortiori_ upon me, the
anger of all Governments. Notes were literally showering upon the poor
Swiss Cantons, where we sojourned. The most of us left Switzerland for
France or England. I with few others remained. Driven away from
Geneva, I went to the Canton de Vaud: driven away from there, to
Berne. There, owing to the friendship of some of the members of the
Government, I stopped for some time, keeping a very secluded life. At
last the insistence of the foreign Embassies prevailed upon the
weakness of the Bernese Government, and I was obliged to go to
Solothurn. Meanwhile the principles, embodied in our writings and in
our associations had awakened the sympathies of the Swiss patriots. A
National Association was founded on a ground of brotherhood with our
own. The persecutions with which the unwilling but weak Swiss
Governments were hunting me, excited almost as much indignation as the
opening of the letters here. The weakness of the Cantons had its
source in the deficiency of national unity, in the detestable
organisation of the Central Power, on the old _Pacte Federal_, forced
by the Allies on Switzerland at the overthrow of Napoleon. I was
requested to write a periodical advocating and unifying under our
political belief, the national feelings. Funds were given. The "Jeune
Suisse" was established. It appeared twice a week in French and in
German, for the course of one year. Through the German exiles, and
working-men, through the Tyrolese working-men, rather numerous in the
Canton of Zürich, through the Italian Tessin, and the frequent contact
with Italian people travelling to the frontier, the spirit of liberty
began to spread again in the countries approaching Switzerland. The
terrors of the Governments re-excited the persecution. They threatened
Switzerland with war. German troops came to the frontier, M. Thiers
was menacing to ruin Swiss commercial resources with a "blocus
hermetique." We were sent away. The paper suppressed; the most
horrible calumnies spread against us: all exiles left with or without
compulsion. I decided to remain as long as necessary to prove to the
Swiss people, that they were the slaves of the Foreign Powers, and
devoid of all real liberty, of all independence. During seven months,
I went from place to place, from house to house, living in places
apparently empty, with mats at the windows, without even going beyond
the room, except when receiving advices of the house being suspected:
then with a guide, I was crossing the mountains in the night, and
going to another shelter. While the Governments were raging, I
received from all classes of population marks of sympathy that made
and still make me consider Switzerland as a second Fatherland.
Ministers [of religion] were inviting me to their houses as one of
their family. [At] Grenchen, a village of a thousand inhabitants, near
Solothurn, when I had spent one year, in an establishment of baths, I
was, during the storm, made citizen spontaneously and without expense.
The poor people, good souls of the village, believed that as a Swiss
citizen, I would be respected; the grant of course, was not admitted.
Still had I been alone, I would have, hardened as I was to all
privations, kept on resisting; [but I was not alone] so I decided to
leave and come to England. It was then that I had a correspondence
with the Duke of Montebello, which ended in his sending three
passports for us to a place I named; and in January or February 1837 I
landed in England.
The "Giovine Italia" had six volumes published at different times. All
that I have ever written concerning politics bears my name. Before I
established the Association I wrote a long letter to Charles Albert,
who had just then come to reign over Piedmont, remembering him of what
he had promised and done, when not a king, pointing to him all the
dangers of his position, the impossibility of keeping down long the
spirit of the nation, the system of blood-shedding reaction to which
he would soon be bound, and on the other side, the Possible, the
Beautiful, the Grand, the Godlike that there would be in his putting
himself at the head of the National party; the letter was printed, and
signed only "An Italian." My name was then quite unknown, and would
not have added the least weight to the considerations; besides, I did
not believe that the "Italian People" would ever spring from under a
royal cloak; and I was writing, not my own opinion, but that of many
of my countrymen still fond of such a hope. I wanted to have the true
intentions of the man on whom they relied, as much as possible
unveiled. As soon as the letter reached him, my "signalement" was
given to all the authorities of the coast, so as to have me arrested
if ever I attempted to cross the frontier again.... I have been in
1833 condemned to be shot _in the back_ by a military commission
sitting in Alessandria, as having led from without the agitation. Here
in London I have exerted, as I will exert, what influence I possess
with my countrymen to endeavour to raise them from the nothingness and
worse than nothingness in which now they are; from English affairs I
have kept myself entirely separated; nor sought the help of English
people even for our Italian affairs. As to all the present agitation,
I had nothing to do with it, on the beginning. I did not think that
the time was properly chosen. But, when the patriots of the interior
_decided_ that they _would_ attempt, nothing of course, was left to me
than helping them; and so I did, or rather prepared me to do so,
should a rising take place.
It seems to me that the right of an Italian to work out from whatever
place he finds himself in, the welfare of his country, ought to be
clearly and boldly asserted by an English writer.
Of the hopes I have of the Italian patriots succeeding at a not very
remote period, in what they are now struggling for, I cannot now speak
here. It would prove too long a subject for a letter; but I am in
intention, if I find time for it, of publishing very soon, a Pamphlet
on the question, showing how, all weary of slow, legal, national
progress being interdicted to us, our only hope must lie in
insurrection as the starting-point for a national education. If there
are points upon which you want more notions, be so kind as to write,
and meanwhile, with sincere thanks for the interest you take in my
case, believe me now dear Sir,--
Truly yours,
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
47 Devonshire Street,
Queen Square.
II
A PRAYER TO GOD FOR THE PLANTERS, BY AN EXILE.
[The original is in French. It has probably not been
published before. It was sent in 1846 to Mr William Shaen in
response to a request for a paper on the abolition of
slavery. It was to have appeared in Lady Blessington's
_Keepsake_, presumably in a translation, but was not
published in it. In sending it Mazzini writes: "To write one
or two pages on abolitionism is just the same to me as to
prove that the sun gives light and warmth; or to prove an
axiom. So that I was during one full hour at a loss what to
write, till my soul melted away in prayer."]
God of pity, God of peace and love, forgive, oh forgive the planters.
Their sin is great; but thy mercy is infinite. As of old thou didst
make refreshing waters gush from the desert rock for the multitude of
thy servants, so now make the living spring of charity gush out in the
desert of their souls. Let the angel of repentance descend and settle
on their dying pillow. And between them and thy justice, at their last
hour,--for them and for their country, which they dishonour,--may the
prayer rise up of all who suffer for thy holy cause, for thy holy
truth, for the freedom of the peoples and of the Soul of man.
* * * * *
Their sin is great. They have sinned, they are sinning still against
thee and against Humanity, which is the interpreter of thy law on
earth. The Spirit of Evil, which tempted Jesus, thy son so dear to
Genius and to Love, by offering him, when he began his divine career,
the riches and the thrones of earth, has also tempted them, men bereft
of Genius and of Love, by taking the semblance of the idol, which is
self-interest. They have yielded. They are the bondsmen of the senses,
and have forsworn knowledge and feeling. They have set the slave in
the place of man, the fetish of the sugar-cane in the place of thy
holy image. But thou, didst thou not hear thy son, so dear to Genius
and to Love, when he prayed for those who slew him? Forgive them,
Father, forgive the planters too.
* * * * *
Thou hast placed, as symbol of the eye of thy Providence, one sun in
heaven for the earth. Thou hast interwoven in one mighty harmony, of
which human Music, Religion's eldest child, is but a faint and
stammering echo, the worlds, those finite rays of thy infinite
Thought, that move around us, like the scattered letters of a heavenly
alphabet, which we shall know one day. In this fair physical Universe,
which is the garment of the Idea, thou hast everywhere taught Unity,
and the bright light of thy teaching shines upon their souls; but they
have veiled the eyes of their souls, they have broken in pieces that
which is so fair, and on the wreck of thy Unity they have built a
warring Dualism: two natures, two laws, two ways of life. Have pity,
Lord, forgive, oh forgive the planters.
* * * * *
In History, which is thy life, manifesting itself progressively in
time and space, thou hast set in their sight another fount of truth,
whence in great waves flows the great thought of Unity, which is thy
whole Law. Thou madest all mankind spring from one Adam; at the
teaching of thy providence, more clearly seen from day to day, thou
hast led man, collective, social man, from slavery to serfdom, from
serfdom to wage-earning; and that nought may be wanting to make the
progression clear, thou makest now the nations to desire impatiently
that to wage-earning association may succeed. And over these three
stages, which are the image of thy triune working, hovers the holy
voice of Golgotha, _All ye are brothers, for ye are all one in God_.
And they have stopped their ears to the holy voice of Golgotha, they
have shut their eyes to the evolution of Thought in History: they have
said: _we are not brothers, we are masters and slaves_. They have
kept one page alone of the Great Book, the page that tells of Cain and
Abel, of Violence and Right; and they have said to themselves: _there
are then two races of men, the race that is accursed, and the race
that is privileged, and of this last race are we_; they know not that
the sign of thy curse is on their own forehead, since it is by
Violence alone that they make slaves of men. Have pity, Lord, forgive,
oh forgive the planters.
* * * * *
And for the third witness of thy Truth, thou hast put a voice in each
man's heart, an impulse in each man's conscience, which says: _I am
free; free because I am responsible, free because I am a man, made in
God's image, inherently possessing in myself the powers and
aspirations and destinies of all Humanity_. And they have denied that
this is the voice of all men. They have shut themselves up in their
selfish _Ego_, and have said: _this voice is ours alone_, and they see
not, wretched men that they are, that if they put a bound to it, they
blot it out from all creation, since God did not create the _planter_
but the _man_. They have sown hate, and they will reap revolt: they
have denied the God of love, and they have provoked the God of
vengeance. Listen not to their blasphemy, O Lord. Forgive, oh forgive
the planters.
* * * * *
O Lord, open their understandings and soften their hearts. Let the
angel, that inspires good thoughts, descend upon them in their dreams
by night. Let them hear through him the cry of horror that ascends
from all Humanity that believes and loves;--the sorrowing cry of all
who endure and fight for the Good in Europe, and whose confidence and
faith is shaken by their stubborn crime;--the mocking cry of the
princes and kings of the earth, who, when their subjects are full of
turmoil, point to the proud republicans of America, who alone of men
maintain the helotism of pagan ages;--the long anguish of Jesus, who,
because of them, still suffers on his cross to-day! And when in the
morning they awake, let their children lay their innocent curly heads
beside their lips, and whisper, inspired by thee: "Father, father,
free our brother, the black man; buy and sell no more the son of man
for thirty pennies; see, this black man too has a mother and little
children like us; Oh that his old mother could rejoice to see him
proud and free! that his children could smile on him, fresh and happy,
in the morning, as we smile now on you, father."
* * * * *
God of pity, God of peace and love, forgive, oh forgive the planters.
Their sin is great, but thy mercy is infinite. Open in the desert of
their souls the living spring of charity. Let the angel of repentance
descend and settle on their dying pillow. And between them and thy
justice, at their last hour,--for them and for their country, which
they dishonour,--may the prayer rise up of all, who, like myself,
suffer for thy holy cause, for thy holy truth, for the freedom of the
peoples and of the Soul of man.
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
III
LETTER TO MRS PETER TAYLOR [May 15, 1847].
DEAR MRS TAYLOR,--First of all let me tell you that my silence before
your note has been owing to my having been most unpoetically ill, with
head-ache, sore throat, prostration of forces, fever and other things,
till I was thinking that Mr Taylor would perhaps get rid all at once
of me and of the League: however Homoeopathy--that is taking
nothing--has cured me: then that my silence after the note has been
owing to a hope in which I have been indulging both on Friday evening,
and on Saturday, to call on you unexpectedly and talk instead of
writing. However that hope too--the other is Mr Taylor's hope--has
vanished: and I find myself having so much to do that I doubt whether
I will find a moment of freedom this week. So, I write, and hope to be
forgiven for the past.
* * * * *
And now to Poetry. Alas! After mature consideration, I find no
_definition_ at all; by _you_ it is not needed; I am sure you have the
_thing_ in your own Soul, and that is better than all definitions one
could supply; for Mr Taylor I fear no definition of mine would do.
Suppose I gave a definition that seems to me very true, but that I
ought to explain in ten pages at least. "Poetry is the feeling of a
former and of a future world"[48]: he would find out that it belongs
to Byron, and would find himself pledged to refuse it. Suppose that I
gave one of mine:
"Poetry is the Religion of the individual Soul."
"Religion is the Poetry of the collective Soul."
I fear that not only he, but perhaps you too, would ask for
explanations which would fill up a lecture, not a note. Suppose that I
quoted lines like these:
"A Poet's art
Lies in tolerating wholly, and accounting for in part
By his own heart's subtle working, those of every other heart"
he would say that that is charity, and nothing else; _we_ would say
that it is incomplete. Suppose that I adopted yours--which, with due
comments and interpretations, I am not far from--that "Poetry is the
soul of the Universe," it would not avail. You gave it already, I am
sure, and it was declared unsatisfactory.
We must one day or other _talk_ about this. I fear vaguely that even
_we_ do differ in some way respecting the essence of Poetry. I suspect
that you leave out in your own definition the element of _Action_,
which seems to me inseparable from it. Poetry is for me something like
the third person of Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which _is_ Action. But
this amounts to declare incomplete, the poetry, for instance, of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. Is that a heresy for you? If so, our
definitions will not agree.--ever faithfully yours,
JOS. MAZZINI.
IV
LETTER TO MR PETER TAYLOR [February 16, 1854].
[This letter is inserted, because of its historical importance.
It is, I believe, the earliest existing mention of any scheme
for a French protectorate in Tuscany. It also antedates by a
few weeks the earliest known mention of Garibaldi's scheme for
an expedition to Sicily. Mazzini's information respecting Louis
Napoleon's plans was probably derived from Dr Conneau, but it
was generally inaccurate.]
MY DEAR FRIEND,--I write because I have no time for coming, and I
write, I must avow, to silence conscience, with very little hope.
Do not smile, and say "the man is mad"; but put your head in your two
hands and try to solve this question: "is there any earthly way of
getting one thousand pounds in a very short time, ten days, a
fortnight at the most?"
With you I have no secrets, and I shall state to you summarily the
why.
We _must_ act: as early as possible in March: in fact as soon as the
declaration of war or an action amounting to the same takes place, we
must _act_, because the initiative is everything for us.
The actual schemes of the French Emperor, assented to by your cabinet,
are these:
A Muratist movement in Naples: reinforcements in Rome ready to help,
as Piedmont would object to the establishment of a French dynasty in
the South. France offers to patronise the King of Piedmont to the
North of Italy. Lombardy will be Piedmontese. But Lombardy and the
Venetian territory would together with Piedmont form too large, too
threatening a state. Lombardy and Venice shall therefore be divided.
Venice like Greece will be given up to some foreign prince, or to
Austria again if Austria yields and submits in other respects. Rome
will remain to the Pope. Only as there are provinces so disaffected
that the case is hopeless, from them and Tuscany a central Dukedom or
Princedom will be formed under French patronage. Sicily will be
given--the old scheme of 1848--to the Duke of Genoa, son of the
Piedmontese king.
Thus Italy will have two more divisions, Sicily and Venice; new
foreign dynasties would be settled there, new interests would group
themselves around them: a new partition would begin, with high
sanction, a new phasis, and we should have to begin anew our secret
work, our clandestine printing, our series of martyrdoms, as if
nothing had been done.
To all this I know only of a [one] remedy: to initiate: to give the
leadership to the national party. The multitude will follow the first
who acts; the very elements prepared by all these intrigues will
accrue to us if we move first.
And beyond all, to move in the South. We would thus check the French
scheme before its realisation. As we would, for the present, leave
Rome aside and untouched, we do not damage in the least the actual
position of England with France.
Garibaldi is here: ready to act. Garibaldi's name is all powerful
among the Neapolitans, since the Roman affair of Velletri. I want to
send him to Sicily, where they are ripe for insurrection and wishing
for him as a leader.
Of course another action would simultaneously take place in a point of
the centre, and I would lead a third operation in the North.
For these two, I have, though very little, still enough of money. For
the first, that is for Garibaldi, I have none, and claiming it from
Italy would imply expenses for travellers, risks, the unveiling of the
secret, and _uncertain indefinite_ time.
Are there not to be found in England ten persons willing for the sake
of Italy and for the sake of baffling schemes of French domination
absolutely antagonistic to English interests, to take each £100 of our
National Loan notes?[49]--or twenty ready to take £50 each?
This is the problem.
I know nobody almost. It must be the work of some Englishman. If any
plan could be devised of certain fulfilment, but requiring longer
time, the sum could be perhaps advanced by some person who would keep
all that would come in by degrees.
* * * * *
--ever yours affectionately,
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
To friends whom you can trust, you may, under pledge of honour,
communicate what you think proper.
Feb. 16. 15 Radnor St.
King's Road, Chelsea.
V
LETTER TO MR PETER TAYLOR [October 26, 1854].
MY DEAR FRIEND,--Are you astonished at our inertness? at our talking
so much and doing so little? I often think that you feel so. I could
explain everything in two hours of conversation; but take my word in
spite of all, we are ripe for the aim, and that ere long we shall
reach it. In fact, had I not been exceptionally prudent and calm,
action would have been already initiated. It would be any day, were it
not for Piedmont and the "Western Powers." Piedmont is our curse.
First, on account of its enjoying liberty, it is so much withdrawn
from the field of action; then we have, just as in 1848, a whole world
of courtiers, of ministerial agents, of journalists, and even of
clandestine-press-writers, spreading everywhere that the King will
draw the sword one of these days, that France and England will cause
the revolution to spring up in Naples, that you will quarrel with
Austria about the Principalities, that a better opportunity will come,
must come, if only we have patience for one month, for two months, for
two weeks. There was a whole dream-dispelling work to be done before
thinking of immediate action. This work is, for the two-thirds, done,
the other third will take, perhaps some two months. The field will be
mine then. The people, the working-classes, are admirable: they are
mine, mine devotedly to blindness.
One thing is out of doubt: any _initiative_ will be an Italian one:
one spark will settle the whole on fire, only, the _initiative_ MUST
be a successful one. This is the source of all my delays. I feel too
certain of success after the first blow being struck for my risking
uncautiously the first blow.
The English agitation I am trying to spread would be of real
importance to me, if taking a certain degree of _consistence_, both
from the financial point of view and from the moral one. You have not
an idea of how proud and stronger my working men do feel here, when
they find themselves noticed, encouraged and helped in England. I
trust you will do what is in your power to promote and help.
How are you? How is your wife? Are you ever talking about me? against
me? I am well in health, spite of the forcedly sedentary life I lead.
I think very often, under these radiant skies, of the London fogs, and
always regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended
for an Englishman.
What are you doing at Pinner? What little dogs have you caused to
disappear? How many poor hens kept in a state of bondage, and tied by
the leg somewhere, are awaiting for a revolutionist to untie them?...
What do you read? What do you anticipate for England's politics? Do
you smoke much?... I wish we could have a talk of one hour all
together, with cigars and sherry, and then be back where I am
wanted.... Ever your friend,
JOSEPH.
VI
LETTER TO MRS PETER TAYLOR [March 19, 1857].
Thanks, my dear Friend, for your having remembered my name's day [St
Joseph's Day]. I don't know why, but every anniversary concerning
myself finds me very sad: those friendly whisperings are checking the
tendency.
The box has arrived. You have made out the _only_ point of contact
between Shakespeare and myself, on all the rest we deeply differ. He
was an extraordinary poet: I am not. He was--spite of your
interpretations--calm:[50] I am not. He looked on the world from
above: I look at it from within and want to make a revolution. He
was--if reports are correct--merrily poaching: I have always before my
eyes, like a remorse, the large convulsion with which a poor thrush,
shot by me at the age of sixteen, was twisting with her beak a bit of
grass. He was the Lord of Individuality: all my tendency, if
developed, would have been a generalising one. He was powerful: I am
powerless--and so on, to the end of the chapter.--your friend,
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
VII
TWO LETTERS TO MRS MILNER-GIBSON
(Translated from the French)
[Mrs Milner-Gibson had just lost a little boy. Mazzini was
godfather to a younger brother.]
[April 15, 1859.]
DEAR FRIEND,--What can I say? You believe, as I do, in God and
immortality. It is there that you must find your comfort and strength.
Love your boy as if he were alive, for in that you will have what will
restore him to you in the series of existences, which follows this
one. Become even better than you are by thinking of him, for this
will make a bond of love and mutual influence between you and him.
Think of him when you are doing good. Think of him, when impulses of
selfishness or human frailty assail you. Be good and strong. Give your
other children the love he gave them himself. And count on God. There
is immortality to link the mother and the child, and only
forgetfulness can break it. I have heard of his last words and kisses:
he loved you to his last moment, love him to yours, and believe it,
this will have been but the parting for a journey.
This is all I can say. From me to you such commonplace words of
comfort as the world generally gives would be a kind of sin. I suffer
with your grief. I, who have no home now, know what the sorrows of
home are,--they leave a scar in the heart, which never goes, and that
is sad, but it is well. Cherish this scar, it is a pledge of the
future. Do not give yourself up to the barren, cowardly sorrow, called
despair. There is no death in the world except forgetfulness.
Everything that loves and has loved to death meets again. Good-bye, my
friend. Think of your health for the sake of your other children. God
bless you in them,--your friend,
JOSEPH.
* * * * *
[This letter was succeeded by the following.]
DEAR FRIEND,--I have received your letters, they are more and more
sad. You have been ill and you are unhappy. Your visit to the
Continent will do you good physically, I hope, but as to your moral
health, you must cure that yourself. Rouse your soul, which is in
danger of being benumbed by sorrow; you will find at the bottom of it,
I don't say happiness, I don't say even hope, but duty and faith in
some affections which do count. For God's sake, do not despair: you
have dear children to bring up; you can still do good, and you have
friends who esteem and love you and suffer with your sufferings and
find strength in your own. Ah me, what the devil should I do myself,
if I allowed the little strength, which God has left me, to desert me,
as it often threatens to do.... Good-bye. Yours with all my heart,
JOSEPH.
VIII
LETTER TO MR PETER TAYLOR [September 11, 1860].
DEAR PETER,--
* * * * *
I have yours of the 29th of Aug. written with an improved handwriting,
and the article on Lady Byron. It is according to me, unwise and
unjust: unwise, because to praise Lady Byron for her life's silence
and to abuse the very man about whom she has chosen to be silent, is
inconsistent: unjust, because it grounds a verdict on the wrongs of
one party, without taking into account those of the other. Everybody
seems to forget that Lady Byron did not only leave her husband for
ever, going "à la promenade," but that she did set at him before,
lawyers and doctors to try if she could make him be proved _mad_! I
wish--no, I don't--that your wife should set at you Dr E-- and Mr S--
for such a purpose, only to see what you would do when discovering it,
and I wish I had time to write, before dying, a book on Byron and
abuse all England, a few women excepted, for the way she treats one of
her greatest souls and minds: I shall never write the book nor--it
begins to be clear--any other.
Well, I do not go into particulars about our condition here [at
Naples]. As a party we are going through that sort of method which you
called one day a _suicide_, preparing and attempting things which are
calling on us calumnies, abuse and persecution, but which are taken up
by the other Party as soon as we are put out of the field. After
having been baffled and most shamefully so, in an attempt against the
Pope's dominions,[51] they are now, at a few days' distance, taking up
our plan. We shall have to do the same, soon or late, concerning Rome,
and then Venice. And we _shall_, if life endures. Only, I am worn out,
morally and physically.
Everything is now resting on Garibaldi: will he go on, without
_interruption_, in his invading career, or will he not? That is the
question. If he does, we shall have unity within five months: Austria,
spite of the boasted position, will not hold up, if the proper
means--a coup de main in the Tyrol, an insurrection in the Venetian
mountainous districts, an attack by land, and a landing near
Trieste--are adopted. If he does not, we shall have slumber, then
anarchy--then--a little later--unity. _That_ you may consider as
settled, and so far so good. The rest is all wrong. And as for myself
don't talk of either prosperity or consciousness of having done, etc.
All that is chaff. The only real good thing would be to have unity
atchieved [sic] quickly through Garibaldi, and one year, before dying,
of Walham Green or Eastbourne, long silences, a few affectionate words
to smooth the ways, plenty of sea-gulls, and sad dozing.
Ah! if you had, in England, condescended to see that the _glorious_
declaration of non-interference ought to have begun by taking away the
French interference in Rome! How many troubles and sacrifices you
would have saved us!--ever your truly affectionate and grateful
JOSEPH.
[In another letter to Mr Taylor, dated June 5, 1860, he
says:]
Yes, I heard of Lady Byron's death and her last gift. I wish something
came out, now that she is dead, to explain the separation mystery. I
shall ever regret the burning of the memoirs, which was a crime
towards Byron; and I have ever indulged in the dream that a copy
should be extant in somebody's hands to come out after the
disappearing of the principal actors. I saw Lady Byron twice, and she
looked to me a good sharp positive somewhat dry puritanical woman, sad
from the past, conscious of not having been altogether right and doing
good half for good-doing's sake, half for forgetfulness' sake. But I
am so thoroughly Byronian, so deeply convinced that he has been
wronged by everybody, that my impression cannot be trusted.
IX
LETTER TO MRS PETER TAYLOR [February 9, 1865]
DEAR CLEMENTIA,--
* * * * *
I shall send back the magazine: read the article again: take away all
phrases and periphrases: _squeeze_ every period; and then send to me
the first idea or view which strikes you as new to yourself. I shall
retract.
The whole article amounts to this: repeating fifty times in rather
harmonious words that Art is the reproduction of Beauty, etc., etc.
Many thanks. Only, what is Beauty? How to discern it? Why is Nature
beautiful? Are we to copy, to reproduce Nature? or to add a work of
our own, finding out the idea shut in within every symbol? Is Nature
anything but the symbolic representation of some truth, which we are
to evolve? Or is the drapery of Nature, Nature? Miss C---- says that
the Artist must choose the object which is Beautiful. Is not _every_
object more or less so? Is not the grotesque causing the beautiful to
shine by contrast? Are the grave-diggers to be suppressed in Hamlet?
Without sifting the nature of Beauty, without giving some definition
of it, nobody can attempt to construct a Hierarchy of Art. Miss C. has
not even attempted to do so. Still you have been in raptures.
Something, therefore, must be in the article. I have not been able to
make it out. I beg pardon humbly. That is all I can say.
* * * * *
--ever affectionately yours,
JOSEPH.
Thursday.
X
LETTER TO MR WILLIAM MALLESON [Nov. 11, 1865].
MY DEAR FRIEND,--I feel ashamed, but I have been overwhelmed by work,
not flourishing in health, although better now, and altogether unable
to fulfil what I had promised. Then, and after all, I write to say
that I cannot fulfil it. I said that I would write about the education
of your son. I find that I cannot. I ought to know him, his
tendencies, his capabilities, what he has already learned. To give
general rules is nothing. He _may_ require special ones.
I have mentioned his tendencies. _That_ must be your special object.
Every man is a _speciality_, is capable of some definite thing. You
must try to discover that _special_ tendency, and then frame his
education accordingly. After a general teaching of those branches
which are good for _any_ man, direct his studies towards the
development of that special tendency which you will have discovered.
Education means _drawing out, educere_, what is in the boy: not
creating in him what is not. You cannot create.
But one thing is, must be common to all. You must give him a proper
notion of what Life is, and of what the world in which he has been put
for the fulfilment of a task is.
Life is a duty, a function, a mission. For God's sake, do not teach
him any Benthamite theory about happiness either individual or
collective. A creed of _individual_ happiness would make him an
egotist: a creed of collective happiness will reach the same result
soon or late. He will perhaps dream Utopias, fight for them, whilst
young; then, when he will find that he cannot realise rapidly the
dream of his soul, he will turn back to himself and try to conquer
_his_ own happiness: sink into egotism.
Teach him that Life has no sense unless being a task:--that happiness
may, like sunshine on a traveller, come to him, and he must welcome it
and bless God for it; but that to _look_ for it is destroying both the
moral man and his duty and most likely the possibility of ever
enjoying it:--that to improve himself, morally and intellectually, for
the sake of improving his fellow-creatures, is his task:--that he must
try to get at Truth and then represent it, in words and deeds,
fearlessly and perennially:--that to get at Truth, two _criteria_ have
been given to him, his own conscience and tradition, the conscience of
mankind:--that whenever he will find the inspiration of his own
conscience harmonising with that of mankind, sought for not in the
history of a single period or of a single people, but of all periods
and peoples, then he is sure of having Truth within his grasp:--that
the basis of all Truth is the knowledge of the Law of Life, which is
indefinite Progression:--that to this Law he must be a servant.
This knowledge of the Law of Progression must be your aim in all your
teaching.
Elementary Astronomy, elementary Geology, ought to be taught as soon
as possible. Then, universal History, then Languages.
The difficult thing is to get the proper teaching. When I speak, for
instance, of Astronomy, I mean a survey of the Universe, of which the
Earth is part, grounded on Herschel's theory and tending to prove how
everything is the exponent of a Law of Progression, how the Law is
one, how every part of the Universe accomplishes a function in the
whole. Herschel, Nichol, Guillemin's recently translated "Heavens" are
the guides to be chosen.
Languages are easily learned in boyhood. French, German, and Italian
ought to be taught. Two years of study may put the boy in
communication with three worlds.
I would not teach any _positive_ Religion; but the great fundamental
Trinity, God, the immortality of the soul, the necessity of a religion
as a common link of brotherhood for mankind, grounded on the
acknowledgment of the Law of Progression. At a later period he will
choose.
Geography of course will be taught. But everything taught in a
_general_ way and not applied is easily forgot. The best way is to
have a collection of good maps and to give him the habit of never
reading a historical book or even a tale without following it up on
the map. It is the best and most lasting way.
Avoid novels and tales. Give him a taste for historical books and
scientific descriptive _illustrated_ books of natural history travels,
etc.
In one word, a religious conception of life--then a full notion of the
world he lives in--then the special branch of activity to which he
seems inclined: that is the whole of education for your boy.
Forgive these hurried notes. Apply to me freely for any detail or
special suggestion. I shall be most happy to answer. Give my love to
Mrs Malleson and to Miss K. M. How are they? How is your father? Where
are you all now?--Ever affectionately yours,
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
Saturday.
XI
REST.
[Written for the Pen and Pencil Club in April 1867, and
privately published in 1877, with other papers written by
its members.]
DEAREST FRIEND,--The subject of your meeting of to-morrow is so
suggestive that I would gladly join you all, and write an essay on it,
if I had health and time. I have neither, and, perhaps, better so. My
essay, I candidly avow, would tend to prove that no essay ought to be
written on the subject. It has no reality. A sort of intuitive
instinct led you to couple "Ghosts and Rest" together.
There is, here down,[52] and there ought to be, no Rest. Life is an
_aim_; an aim which can be _approached_, not _reached_, here down.
There is, therefore, no rest. Rest is immoral.
It is not mine now to give a definition of the _aim_; whatever it is,
there is one, there _must_ be one. Without it, Life has no sense. It
is atheistical; and moreover an irony and a deception.
I entertain all possible respect for the members of your Club; but I
venture to say that any contribution on Rest which will not exhibit at
the top a definition of Life will wander sadly between wild arbitrary
intellectual display and commonplaces.
Life is no sinecure, no "_recherche du bonheur_" to be secured, as the
promulgators of the theory had it, by guillotine, or, as their less
energetic followers have it, by railway shares, selfishness, or
contemplation. Life is, as Schiller said, "a battle and a march"; a
battle for Good against Evil, for Justice against arbitrary
privileges, for Liberty against Oppression, for associated Love
against Individualism; a march onwards to Self, through collective
Perfecting to the progressive realisation of an Ideal, which is only
dawning to our mind and soul. Shall the battle be finally won during
life-time? Shall it on Earth? Are we believing in a millennium? Don't
we feel that the spiral curve through which we ascend had its
beginning elsewhere, and has its end, if any, beyond this terrestrial
world of ours. Where is then a possible foundation for your essays and
sketches?
Goethe's "Contemplation" has created a multitude of little sects
aiming at Rest, where is no rest, falsifying art, the element of which
is evolution, not reproduction, transformation, not contemplation, and
enervating the soul in self-abdicating Brahmanic attempts. For God's
sake let not your Club add one little sect to the fatally existing
hundreds!
There is nothing to be looked for in life except the uninterrupted
fulfilment of Duty, and, not Rest, but consolation and strengthening
from Love. There is, not Rest, but a promise, a shadowing forth of
Rest in Love. Only there must be in Love absolute _trust_; and it is
very seldom that this blessing depends [? descends] on us. The child
goes to sleep, a dreamless sleep, with unbounded _trust_, on the
mother's bosom; but _our_ sleep is a restless one, agitated by sad
dreams and alarms.
You will smile at my lugubrious turn of mind; but if I was one of
_your_ Artists, I would sketch a man on the scaffold going to die for
a great Idea, for the cause of Truth, with his eye looking trustfully
on a loving woman, whose finger would trustfully and smilingly point
out to him the unbounded. Under the sketch I would write, not Rest,
but "a Promise of Rest." Addio: tell me one word about the point of
view of your contributors.--Ever affectionately yours,
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
XII
LETTER TO MRS PETER TAYLOR [From Lugano, December 12, 1868.]
DEAR CLEMENTIA,--
* * * * *
I am better, although not so much as my friends here suppose. I feel,
from various little symptoms, as if I could any week have the
complaint back. I may, and hope to be mistaken, however. So, let us
accept what instalment is granted, and not think of the future. I
might give myself an additional chance, if I could keep absolutely
silent and motionless during one month. But I cannot. There is--at
least--a possibility of the Republic being proclaimed in Spain; and if
so, we must try to follow, a preparatory very complex work is
therefore unavoidable. It is useless to tell me: "if you keep quiet
now, you will be able to work better henceforward." The important
thing is to work now.
Your cabinet[53] is a shameful contrivance.... It is an implement good
for the conquest of the Irish measure, and soon after, I think, the
majority will split into two or three fractions. As to your--quite
forgotten--international life, the main thing about which, according
to me, you ought to care, Lord Clarendon's policy will be a French and
Austrian policy. What does Peter say? Is he still enthusiastic about
Gladstone?
* * * * *
Your women-emancipating movement is fairly imitated in Italy. We have
a central committee of ladies in Naples, and sub-committees here and
there, and one or two members of our House pleading for them. All
this is very right, and I hope that next year, European events will
help this movement; but meanwhile, I should wish very much that,
whilst you attack men with their gross injustice, you should teach
women to _deserve_ their emancipation: nothing is conquered unless
_deserved_. The poor working men _have_ deserved; they have for one
century fought, bled, acted for _all_ the good causes in Europe: the
majority of your women still fight almost entirely for a husband to be
won by their personal genuine or artificial appearance; they worship
_fashion_ more than the Ideal. You ought to write one tract to men and
one to them.
Try to be well: give my love to Peter and believe in the deep and
lasting affection of
JOSEPH.
XIII
LETTER TO MR WILLIAM SHAEN [From Gaeta, Oct. 12, 1870].
DEAR SHAEN,--I know that a few words from me and from here will please
you. You do not forget me, and you have never been forgotten: none is
of those whom I loved in England. For many reasons, I cannot write to
all my friends, and they know the general state of things concerning
me from good, faithful, dear Caroline.[54] I am, physically, tolerably
well; for the rest "fata viam invenient."
I know that you have been and are very active in the "Woman's
Emancipation Movement." Every good cause has ever found you ready to
help; and I had no doubt of your coming forward in one which ought to
be a matter of simple duty for anyone believing that there is but one
God--one Life--one Law of progress through Love, Equality and
Association for it. Still, it is comforting to hear of it. The
movement has begun and with some degree of power in Italy too: it
would rapidly and successfully increase had we not to complete, before
all other things, our national edifice.
* * * * *
Ever and most affectionately yours,
JOS. MAZZINI.
28/9/70, GAETA.
This note was written, as you see, long ago: and through some reason
or other, it did not go; and I am able now to add that to-morrow I
shall be free, and the day after I shall leave Gaeta. The _amnesty_,
of course, I shall refuse to avail myself of! I must be free of doing
whatever I think right and without even the shadow of ungratefulness
to any body--even to a King. After a few days I shall therefore leave
Italy again. It may be that during next month I come--for one
month--to see my English friends: I wish and hope so. Meanwhile: live
and prosper.--Yours ever,
JOSEPH.
12/10/70.
FOOTNOTES:
[47] This is inaccurate. See Linaker, _Vita di Enrico Mayer_, I.
124-125.
[48] From Byron's Journal.
[49] See above, p. 168.
[50] Query. The word was illegible in the original.
[51] See above, p. 186.
[52] A favourite expression of Mazzini, as the equivalent of
_quaggiù_.
[53] The Gladstone Ministry of December 1868.
[54] Mrs Stansfeld.
Appendix B
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF MAZZINI'S WRITINGS.
[The following is a list of the materials, which (with few exceptions)
have been used in compiling this volume. It is, I believe, a complete
list of writings of any importance by or concerning Mazzini, except
some, which contain purely political references. For some of the minor
references I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to Signor
Canestrelli's bibliography, published with his translation of von
Schack's _Giuseppe Mazzini e l'unità italiana_ (Rome, 1892).]
WRITINGS.
The bulk of Mazzini's writings have been collected in _Scritti editi e
inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini_, 18 vols. (Milan and Rome, 1861-1891).
There is an excellent selection, edited by Madame Mario, as _Scritti
scelti di Giuseppe Mazzini_ (Florence, 1901).
A good many of Mazzini's less important journalistic articles have not
been included in the _Scritti editi e inediti_. There are several more
notable omissions:--
_Una notte di Rimini_, said to be Mazzini's first strictly political
writing, republished in Madame Mario's life.
_Due adunanze degli accademici pitagorici_, and _Di Vittor Hugo e
dell'Angelo tiranno_, published in _Il Subalpino_, 1839, and reprinted
in Donaver, _Vita di G. Mazzini_.
_Byron e Goethe_ (very important for Mazzini's literary views),
published in _Scritti letterari d'un italiano vivente_ (Lugano, 1847),
republished in Madame Mario's _Scritti scelti_, and badly translated
in the _Life and Writings_, vol. ii.
_Sulla pittura in Italia_, published in _Scritti letterari_.
_Macchiavelli_, published in ditto.
_Victor Hugo_, published in _British and Foreign Review_, 1838, and
republished in _Life and Writings_, vol. ii.
_Lamartine_, published in _British and Foreign Review_, 1839, and
republished in _Life and Writings_, vol. ii.
_Letters on the state and prospects of Italy_, published in _Monthly
Chronicle_, May-Sept. 1839.
_George Sand_, published in _Monthly Chronicle_, July 1839; extracts
republished in _Life and Writings_, vol. vi.
_Thiers_, published in _Monthly Chronicle_, July 1839.
Review of C. Balbo's _Vita di Dante_, published in _The European_,
Jan. 1840, and translated in A. von Schack, Joseph Mazzini und die
italienische Einheit.
_Italian Art_, published in _Westminster Review_, April 1841. [There
is no direct evidence that this was written by Mazzini, but the
internal evidence is rather strong. I believe that it was translated
into or from the _Révue républicaine_.]
Introduction and notes to Foscolo's edition of the _Divina Commedia_
(see above, p. 94).
_Pensieri sulla storia d'Italia_, published in _l'Educatore_ (London,
1843).
_Sull'educazione_, published in ditto, and republished in
_l'Emancipazione_ (Rome), Oct. 5, 1872.
_A prayer for the planters_, published for the first time in this
volume, pp. 349-352.
_Address of the People's International League_, republished in _Life
and Writings_, vol. vi. (see above, note to p. 303).
Notes for an answer to the Irish Repealers, published in _Scottish
Leader_, July, 1888 (see above, p. 107).
_George Sand_, published in _People's Journal_; extracts republished
in _Life and Writings_, vol. vi.
_Non-intervention_, published as a tract by the "Friends of Italy,"
and republished in _Life and Writings_, vol. vi.
_Rest_, published privately by the Pen and Pencil Club, and
republished in this volume, pp. 363-365.
_Italy and the Republic_, published in _Fortnightly Review_, March 1,
1871.
_The Franco-German War and the Commune_, published in _Contemporary
Review_, April and June, 1871.
[Signor Cagnacci in his _Giuseppe Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini_
publishes a rhapsodical _Aux jeunes italiens_ and a short poem _Addio
dalle Alpi_, which he believes to be from Mazzini's pen; he gives,
however, no evidence whatever in support of his theory. For Mazzini's
supposed youthful poetry see Donaver, _Uomini e libri_, 77, 119, and
_Vita di G. Mazzini_, 29 n., 431, and Canestrelli's bibliography, pp.
290, 291, 305, 308-9, 311.]
TRANSLATIONS.
The greater portion of the first seven volumes of the _Scritti editi e
inediti_, with some additional matter, was translated into English as
_Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini_, 6 vols. (London, 1870). The
_Duties of Man_ and _Democracy in Europe_ (_alias The Systems and the
Democracy_, the early chapters of which were written originally in
English) have been translated by Madame Venturi and were published by
H. S. King in 1877 and later by Alexander and Shepherd. FROM THE POPE
TO THE COUNCIL (_alias Letter to the Oecumenical Council_) and
_Lamennais_ have been translated by Mme. Venturi. _Faith and the
Future_ and other essays have been translated by Mr T. Okey and
published by Dent. Together with _From the Council to God_, _The
Duties of Man_, and _To the Italian Working-man_, they have been
published by Dent in "Everyman's Library." Various extracts have been
collected by the Bishop of Truro and published by Fisher Unwin. There
is a volume of translations in the Camelot Classics. Several earlier
translations of separate essays have been published.
There are two volumes of a German translation, published by Hoffmann
u. Campe (Hamburg, 1868). _The Duties of Man_ and _Democracy in Europe_
are published in French by Charpentier (Paris, 1881).
JOURNALISM.
Mazzini's papers were--
_La Giovine Italia._ Marseilles and Switzerland. 1832-1836. [Reprinted
in the _Biblioteca storica del risorgimento italiano_.]
_La Jeune Suisse._ Bienne. 1835-1836.
_L'Apostolato Popolare._ London. 1840-1843.
_L'Italia del Popolo._ Milan, 1848; Rome, 1849; Lausanne and Lugano,
1849-1851.
_Pensiero ed Azione._ London. 1858-1860.
_La Roma del Popolo._ Rome. 1870-1872.
He contributed largely to--
_L'Indicatore Genovese._ Genoa. 1828.
_L'Indicatore Livornese._ Leghorn. 1829.
_L'Italiano._ Paris. 1836. [7 articles, signed "E. J."]
_L'Educatore._ London. 1843.
_Italia e Popolo._ Genoa. 1855-1856.
_L'Unità italiana._ Genoa. 1860-1865.
LETTERS.
The following collections have been published:--
_Giuseppe Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini_, by C. Cagnacci (Porto
Maurizio, 1893). Contains his letters to Madame Ruffini (1837-1841), a
few letters to A. and G. Ruffini, and extracts from his letters to
Elia Benza.
_Lettres intimes de Joseph Mazzini, publiées par D. Melegari_ (Paris,
1895). Contains letters to L. A. Melegari and Madame de Mandrot
(mostly 1836-1843).
_La Giovine Italia e la giovine Europa_ (Milan, 1906). Contains
letters to L. A. Melegari (chiefly 1833).
_Lettere inedite di Giuseppe Mazzini, pubblicate da L. Ordoño de
Rosales_ (Turin, 1898). Contains letters to Gaspare de Rosales (mostly
1834-1836).
_Duecento lettere inedite di Giuseppe Mazzini con proemio e note di D.
Giuriati_ (Turin, 1887). Contains letters to G. Lamberti (mostly
1837-1844).
_Lettere di G. Mazzini ad A. Giannelli_ (Prato and Pistoia, 1888-1892)
(letters of 1859-1870).
_Lettres de Joseph Mazzini à Daniel Stern_ [Vicomtesse d'Agoult]
(Paris, 1873) (letters of 1864-1872).
_Corrispondenza inedita di Giuseppe Mazzini con ..._ (Milan, 1872).
[This is the correspondence in 1863-1864 with Signor Diamilla-Müller,
who was the intermediary between Mazzini and Victor Emmanuel. It has
been republished in _Politica segreta italiana_ (Turin, 1880).]
A very imperfect collection of Mazzini's correspondence is now being
published under the editorship of Signor Ernesto Nathan, as
_Epistolario di Giuseppe Mazzini_ (Florence, 1902). Two volumes only
have as yet appeared; their most important feature is Mazzini's
correspondence with his mother.
Many letters are also published in the introductions to Mazzini's
_Scritti editi e inediti_ and in Madame Mario's _Della Vito di G.
Mazzini_ and _Scritti scelti_; also in Linaker, _La vita e i tempi di
E. Mayer_ (Florence, 1898) [letters to E. Mayer]; _Nuova Antologia_,
Dec. 1, 1884 [letters to Madame Magiotti and E. Mayer]; _Ib._, May 1
and 16, 1890 [letters to F. Le Monnier]; _Ib._, May 1, 1907; Del Cerro
(_pseud._), _Un amore di G. Mazzini_ (Milan, 1895) [correspondence
with Giuditta Sidoli; see above, p. 51]; _Rivista d'Italia_, April,
1902 [letters to N. Fabrizi and others]. Scattered letters may be
found in Ramorino, _Précis des derniers événemens de Savoie_ (Paris,
1834); _Daily News_, 1853 [see above, p. 169]; Orsini, _Memoirs_
(Edinburgh, 1857); _Il risorgimento italiano_, Feb. 11, 1860; _L'Unità
italiana_, Jan. 15 and 21 and June 3, 1861; _Roma e Venezia_, Jan. 15,
1861; Cironi, _La stampa nazionale italiana_ (Prato, 1862); _Lettere
edite ed inedite di F. Orsini, G. Mazzini_, etc. (Milan, 1862); _The
Shield_, Oct. 1, 1870; Uberti, _Poesie_ (Milan, 1871); Moncure Conway,
_Mazzini_ (London, 1872); _La Gazzetta di Milano_, Jan. 22, 1872;
_L'Emancipazione_ (Rome), Jan. 24, 1874; La Cecilia, _Memorie
storico-politiche_ (Rome, 1876); De Monte, _Cronaca del comitato
segreto di Napoli_ (Naples, 1877); _Quattro lettere a P. Mazzoleni_
(Imola, 1881); _Lettera a Filippo Ugoni_ (Rovigo, 1887); Donaver,
_Uomini e libri_ (Genoa, 1888); Carbonelli, _Niccola Mignona_ (Naples,
1889); _Fanfulla della Domenica_, April 21 and 28 and May 12, 1889;
_Rassegna nazionale_, Oct. 1, 1890; _Rivista della massoneria
italiana_, 1890-1891 and 1891-2; _The Century_, Nov. 1891; _Lettere
inedite di G. Mazzini a N. Andreini_ (Imola, 1897); _Rivista storica
del risorgimento italiano_, 1897 and 1900; Saffi, _Ricordi e scritti_,
vol. iii. (Florence, 1898); _Giornale d'Italia_, March 23 and April
10, 1902; Lumbroso, _Scaramucce_, pp. 247, 288; Del Cerro in _Rivista
Moderna_, 1902; _Secolo_, Aug. 13, 1902; Donaver, _Vita di G. Mazzini_
(Florence, 1903); _Corriere della sera_, Aug. 9, 1903, and Aug. 9,
1909; Card. Capecelatro, _Vita della serva di Dio, Paola Frassinetti_;
Mrs Fletcher's _Autobiography_; Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_;
Ireland, _Jane Welsh Carlyle_; Duncombe's _Life and Correspondence_;
De Amicis, _Cuore_ (pages 222 of Ed. 8); Quinet, _Oeuvres
completes_, xi. 32, 423; Luzio, _G. Mazzini_ (Milan, 1905); Gianelli,
_Brevi ricordi Mazziniani_ (Florence, 1905); Essays of Mazzini,
translated by T. Okey; Parliamentary Papers, Correspondence affecting
affairs of Italy, 1846-1849, i. 223 (probably genuine).
I have also been able to see some 350 unpublished letters,--to Mr and
Mrs Peter Taylor (of the greatest value for Mazzini's public and
private life); Mr William Shaen (a large and important collection);
Mrs Milner-Gibson; Mr W. Malleson; Mr W. E. Hickson (when editor of
the _Westminster Review_); Mr Peter Stuart; and Miss Galeer.
BIOGRAPHIES.
Mazzini's autobiographical notes in the earlier volumes of the
_Scritti editi e inediti_ are of course of the highest value. The
completest life is Mario, _Della vita di Giuseppe Mazzini_ (Milan,
1886), containing a mass of valuable material, but partial and
including much extraneous matter. There is a much better study of
Mazzini's early life, prefixed to the same authoress' _Scritti
scelti_. Saffi's introductions to several volumes of the _Scritti
editie e inediti_ are most valuable. Donaver's _Vita di G. Mazzini_ is
useful, especially for the earlier period. There is a short memoir by
Madame Venturi (_née_ Miss Ashurst) prefixed to the English
translation of the Duties of Man. I have seen no other biographies of
any value.
NOTICES AND STUDIES.
There is a life-like portrait of Mazzini and much information about
his early life in G. Ruffini, _Lorenzo Benoni_ (Edinburgh, 1853); a
valuable sketch, largely based on conversations with Madame Mazzini,
by Mr William Shaen in _The Public Good_, 1851; and some useful
information in Donaver, _Uomini e libri_. There are studies of more or
less value in Cantimori, _Saggio sull'idealismo di G. Mazzini_
(Faenza, 1904); Linaker, _La Vita italiana nel risorgimento_
(Florence, 1899); Nencioni, _Saggi critici di letteratura italiana_
(Florence, 1898); Oxilia, _Giuseppe Mazzini, uomo e letterato_
(Florence, 1902); F. Myers in _Fortnightly Review_, 1878; De Sanctis,
_La letteratura italiana nel secola XIX._ (Naples, 1902); D'Ancona e
Bacci, _Manuale della lettaratura italiana_, vol. v. (Florence,
1901); _Mazzini: Conferenze tenute in Genova_ (Genova, 1906). There are
valuable analyses of Mazzini's economic position in Bozzino, _Il
socialismo e la dottrina sociale di Mazzini_ (Genoa, 1895), and
Bertacchi, _Il pensiero sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini_ (Milan, 1900).
Hostile studies in Bianchi, _Vicende del Mazzinianismo_ (Savona, 1854)
and Grüber, _Massoneria e Rivoluzione_ (Rome, 1901), the latter of
small value.
There are notices in Mrs Carlyle's _Letters and Memorials_; Carlyle's
_Reminiscences_; Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_; _Correspondence
of Carlyle and Emerson_; Mrs Fletcher's _Autobiography_; W. J. Linton,
_European Republicans_ and _Memories_; T. S. Cooper, _Autobiography_;
Gabriel Rossetti, _Versified Autobiography_; Clough, _Prose Remains
and Amours de Voyage_; Margaret Fuller Ossoli, _Memoirs_; Fagan, _Life
of Panizzi_; Gustavo Modena, _Epistolario_ (Rome, 1888); Giurati,
_Memorie d'emigrazione_ (Milan, 1897); Badii, _Antologia Mazziniana_
(Pitigliano, 1898); _Pensiero ed azione nel risorgimento italiano_
(Città di Castello, 1898); Faldella, _I fratelli Ruffini_ (Turin,
1900); Lumbroso, _Scaramucce e Avvisaglie_ (Frascati, 1902); Cironi in
_Il Bruscolo_, March 9, 1902; Tracts of the Society of the Friends of
Italy; Saffi, _Ricordi e scritti_, vol. iii.; Felix Moscheles,
_Fragments of an Autobiography_; articles by Matilde Blind in
_Fortnightly_, May, 1891; articles by Karl Blind in _Fraser's_,
August-September, 1882; article by Professor Masson in _Macmillan's_,
1871; article by Madame Venturi in _The Century_, November, 1891; the
privately published Life of Miss Catherine Winkworth; Jowett's
Letters; letter by C. E. Maurice to _The Spectator_, March 6, 1872;
Barbiera, _Figure e figurine_ (Milan, 1899) and _Memorie di un
editore_; Lloyd Garrison's introduction to his edition of some of
Mazzini's Essays; T. S. Cooper, _A Paradise of Martyrs_; G. J.
Holyoake, _Bygones_; Caroline Fox, _Memories_; Madame Adams,
_Memoirs_; De Lesseps, _Ma Mission à Rome_; Rusconi, _Repubblica
Romana_; Diamilla-Müller, _Roma e Venezia_; Stillman, _Union of
Italy_; Zini, _Storia d'Italia_, Documenti I.
Index
Action, need of, 156, 257, 259, 318, 353, 363-365.
Aeschylus, 9, 10, 259, 324.
Alps, love of, 19, 52, 116, 329.
America, friends in, 105, 106, 170, 171;
on policy of, 171, 198, 199, 280, 309.
Amnesty, 179, 201, 209, 217, 367.
_Antologia_, writes in the, 14.
"Art for the sake of Art," 147, 314.
Ashursts, 88, 106, 124, 144, 152, 184, 372.
Asia, Europe and, 309.
Aspromonte, 201, 202.
Assassination, charges of promoting, 48, 104, 164-167, 197;
attempts to assassinate Mazzini, 142, 170.
Association, theory of, 270-272, 281, 295, 296.
Astronomy, interest in, 330, 362.
Authority, need of, 247, 248, 265.
Bakounine, Michel, relations with, 209, 219, 274, 283.
Bandiera, Attilio and Emilio, 103.
Beethoven, 322, 323.
Belgium, future of, 308.
Bentham, see _Utilitarians_.
Bertani, Agostino, 136, 185-187, 220.
Birds, love of, 15, 146, 185, 356.
Bismarck, relations with, 206, 215.
Blanc, Louis, 163, 287.
Browning, Robert and Mrs, 145, 150, 327.
Buonarrotti, Michelangelo, 41, 50.
Byron, 9, 20, 108, 140, 149, 150, 216, 316, 317, 326, 327, 352,
359, 360.
Carbonari, 2, 15-19, 22-24, 29, 35, 41.
Carlyles, friendship with, 78, 84-88, 93, 104, 141, 144, 146, 339;
criticism of Thomas Carlyle, 84, 243, 249.
Catholicism, attitude towards, 98, 111, 112, 127, 131, 132, 181,
192, 226, 227, 245, 246.
Cavour, Camillo, 25, 160-162, 165, 172, 173, 177-179, 183-187.
Charles Albert, 42, 43, 46, 47, 100, 110, 115, 119, 121, 123, 124;
letter to, 43-45, 348.
Chartists, 82, 83, 93, 283, 286.
Christianity, attitude towards, 8, 59, 127, 220, 225-233, 246,
253, 262, 263, 266, 350.
Christian Socialists, 233.
Church, need of a, 246;
relations to the State, 246, 247, 278, 279.
Clergy, attitude towards, 130, 131.
Clough, Arthur Hugh, 129, 133, 148.
Collectivists, criticism of, 219, 287-290.
Conscience (consciousness), a criterion of truth, 240-242, 362.
Constantinople, future of, 309.
Contemplation, selfishness of, 258.
Cooperative Societies, scheme of, 194, 218, 293-295.
Council of best and wisest, 247, 248, 310, 311.
Cremer, W. Randal, 219.
Crimean War, criticism of, 151, 152, 172.
Crispi, Francesco, 173, 187, 205.
Criticism, theory of literary, 312-314.
_Daily News_, 153, 169.
Dante, 8, 9, 20, 74, 93, 101, 127, 197, 299, 317, 324.
Darwinism, relation to, 236, 330.
Death, must be faced for duty, 260.
Deism, criticism of, 235.
Democracy, attitude towards, 274, 276-278;
and poetry, 316, 319, 320.
Denmark, future of, 308.
De Vigny, Alfred Victor, 9, 65.
Disraeli, Benjamin, 108, 197.
Dogma, importance of, 233, 234.
Donizetti, 322.
Drama, love of historical, 11, 320, 321.
Dudevant, Madame de (see _George Sand_).
Duncombe, Thomas, 104.
Duty, theory of, 26, 56, 57, 256-266, 290, 296, 362, 364.
Economic Principles, 254, 285, 286, 292, 330, 331.
Education, theories of, 265, 270, 272-275, 361-363.
England, love for, 83, 140;
life and politics of, 82, 83, 150-152, 197, 198, 210, 219, 280,
332;
foreign policy of, 105, 304, 305, 309, 310, 365;
studies in literature of, 9, 149, 150;
help from for Italy, 106, 152, 153, 193, 194
(see _London_).
Ethics, insufficient without religion, 224, 250;
theories of, 249-263;
sanction of, 263.
Europe, solidarity of, 302, 303, 309, 310;
future of, 307-309
(see _Young Europe_).
Family life, remarks on, 65, 66, 72, 264-266.
Fanti, Manfredo, 49, 118, 123, 187.
Federalists (see _Italian Unity_).
Fenians, 199, 200.
Fletcher, Mrs Archibald, 83.
Florence, visits to, 126, 179-182, 186, 220.
Foreign policy, ethics of, 302-306.
Foscolo, Ugo, 3, 9, 12, 64, 93-95, 101, 108, 220.
France, policy of, 1830, 22, 35;
ditto at Rome (1849), 134, 135;
ditto in 1867, 212;
the Third Republic in, 220;
Mazzini's dislike of, 60, 134, 163, 220;
as a nationality, 298, 300, 307;
character of, 307
(see _Napoleon_).
"Free Church in a Free State," 247.
Freemason, not a, 213.
French Revolution, criticism of, 59, 232, 250.
Friendly Societies, 212, 218.
"Friends of Italy," 152, 153.
Fuller-Ossoli, Margaret, 86, 88, 129, 132, 138.
Gaeta, imprisonment at, 216, 217.
Gallenga, Antonio, 166.
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 41, 118, 124;
at Rome (1849), 134, 136, 137;
in 1859, 181, 182;
and Sicily, 173, 184-186, 355;
wants to march to Rome, 187, 188;
Mazzini's relations with (1861-1867), 200, 201, 203, 204, 212,
220;
in England, 203, 204;
policy in 1867, 211, 212.
Garrison, William Lloyd, 195, 210.
Gaskell, Mrs, 7, 145.
Geneva, life at and visits to, 19, 48, 138-140.
Genius, theory of, 241, 242, 331.
Genoa, early life at, 1-4, 13, 15;
politics at, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47, 50, 65;
visits to, 171, 173-175, 185, 210, 213, 214, 217, 220;
buried at, 221.
Geography, interest in, 299, 330, 363;
as a basis of nationality, 299.
"George Sand," 90-92.
Germany, future of, 215, 307;
character of, 306;
attitude towards alliance with, 205, 214;
dislike of German professors, 275;
German music, 322.
Gioberti, Vincenzo, 41, 61, 96, 101, 127.
God, belief in, 80, 234-236, 250.
Goethe, 9, 13, 324-326, 364.
Government, theory of, 247, 275, 278, 279.
Graham, Sir James, 104.
Greco, Pasquale, 166, 197, 198.
Greece, future of, 308, 309.
Greville Street, school in, 98, 142.
Guerilla fighting, 33.
Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico, 9, 13, 14, 65, 114, 126.
Happiness, not an end of life, 255, 256, 364;
dislike of, 339.
Hegel, 10, 275.
Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 10, 242.
Herzen, Alexander, 204.
History, theories of, 331, 350.
Holland, future of, 308.
Hugo, Victor, 9, 315, 321.
Humanity, theory of, 231, 236, 242, 243, 261, 297.
Hungary, hopes of rising in, 158, 177, 193;
future of, 309.
Ideals, necessity of, 239, 240, 249, 250, 288.
Immortality, belief in personal, 80, 144, 237, 238, 357, 358, 364.
Individualism, 272, 327.
Insurrection, policy of, 33, 45, 48-50, 61, 102, 103, 125, 157,
158, 168, 193, 218, 349.
International, The, attack on, 219.
Intuition, 240-242, 244, 245, 277, 330, 351.
Irish Question, remarks on, 107, 199, 200.
Italy, condition of in 1830, 20-22;
politics in 1845-47, 100-103;
events of 1848-49 in, 114-125, 128;
politics in (1850-1858), 154-164;
politics in (1859-1860), 177-188;
condition of after 1860, 191, 192;
war of 1866, 205-207;
Republican movement in, 209;
Mazzini's belief in mission of, 26, 60, 126-128, 192, 248, 295,
307, 310, 311, 322.
Italian Unity, popular demand for, 20, 21, 31, 121;
Mazzini's advocacy of, 31, 32, 111, 117, 155, 180, 181, 192, 211;
how far his work, 32, 154, 336.
Jowett, Benjamin, 145, 147, 148, 273.
Kossuth, Louis, 153, 169, 170-1.
Lamartine, Alphonse, 318.
Lamennais, 59, 89, 90, 93, 250.
Landor, Walter Savage, 153, 165.
Lausanne, visits to, 52, 70, 138, 140.
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre, 146, 171, 199.
Left, Parliamentary, 205, 209, 212.
Leghorn, 13, 40, 114, 126, 217.
Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 135.
Liberty, theory of, 269, 270, 272, 273, 278, 351.
Lincoln, President, 196, 199.
Linton, W. J., 88, 106, 153.
Literature, principles of, 11, 12, 312-321;
as a basis of nationality, 299;
Mazzini's literary work, 13, 14, 39, 64, 65, 92-94, 108, 109,
139, 149, 196, 197, 213, 312, 329, 330.
Local Government, theories of, 194, 307.
London, life in, 73-98, 140-148, 195, 196, 210;
feelings about, 73, 74, 78, 140, 141.
Lugano, 65, 125, 126, 182, 184, 202, 204, 210, 213.
Malleson, Mr and Mrs W., 144, 198, 361-363, 371.
Mameli, Goffredo, 66, 136, 137.
Mandrot, Madeleine de, 70-72.
Manin, Daniele, 163, 164, 166.
Manzoni, Alessandro, 9, 11, 12, 101.
Marseilles, life at, 36-38, 47, 48;
visit to, 138.
Marx, Karl, see _Collectivists_.
Materialism, attacks on, 59, 224, 285, 288.
Mazzini, Antonia (sister), 220.
Mazzini, Francesca (sister), 80, 81.
Mazzini, Giacomo (father), 1, 58, 76, 81, 144.
Mazzini, Giuseppe, childhood and youth, 1-7;
early literary studies and writings, 8-11;
life in 1827-30, 14, 15, 344, 345;
Joins the Carbonari, 15-18;
imprisoned and exiled, 18, 19;
founds Young Italy, 24-34, 36-41, 345;
at Marseilles, 36-38, 47, 48, 345, 346;
plans a rising in Piedmont, 42, 45-47;
letter to Charles Albert, 42-45, 348;
at Geneva, 48;
Savoy raid, 48-50, 346;
life in Switzerland, 50-56;
mental crisis, 55-57;
political schemes (1834-36), 58-61;
founds Young Switzerland, 62, 63;
and Young Europe, 63, 64;
literary work (1834-36), 64, 65;
his women friends and love, 65-72;
life in London (1837-47), 73-89, 97, 98, 103-109;
literary work (1837-47), 92-94, 109;
political work (1839-45), 95-99, 102, 103;
school for Italian boys, 97, 98, 142;
relations with the Bandieras, 103;
letters opened in English Post-Office, 103-105;
founds People's International League, 106;
attitude towards Moderates, 29, 110, 111, 113, 114, 120;
policy in 1847, 110-114;
at Milan, 116-120, 123;
preaches the People's War, 125;
at Florence, 126;
Triumvir at Rome, 126-138;
in Switzerland, 139, 140;
life in England (1850-1859), 140-148;
literary work (1849-59), 139, 149;
founds Society of Friends of Italy, 152, 153;
attempts to assassinate, 142, 170;
political work (1850-57), 154-164, 167-177, 350-356;
attitude towards Cavour, 160-162, 172, 173, 176, 183;
attitude towards Napoleon III., 140, 162, 163, 177, 179, 190,
193, 199;
Genoese plot of 1857, 174, 175;
policy in 1858-59, 176-182;
policy in 1860, 183-188, 359, 360;
policy in 1861-66, 189-194, 200-207;
disappointment in Italy, 191;
life in England (1860-66), 195-200;
Greco plot, 197, 198;
attitude towards Garibaldi, 200, 201;
intrigue with Victor Emmanuel, 202-204;
meets Garibaldi in England, 203, 204;
failing health, 195, 210;
elected deputy for Messina, 209;
organises Republican Alliance, 211-214;
writes _From the Council to God_, 213, 218;
intrigues with Bismarck, 215;
imprisoned at Gaeta, 216, 217;
policy after 1870, 218;
attacks the International, 219, 220;
illness and death, 220, 221.
---- religious theories, 222-248, see _Catholicism_,
_Christianity_, _Church_, _God_, _Immortality_, _Materialism_,
_Mysticism_, _Pantheism_, _Protestantism_, _Providence_,
_Religion_;
his own religion, 4, 8, 25, 57, 80, 148, 229, 230, 248, 334,
335, 362;
desire to be a religious reformer, 248, 334, 335;
value as a thinker, 222, 330-332, see _Conscience_, _Darwinism_,
_Dogma_, _Genius_, _Humanity_, _Philosophy_, _Progress_,
_Science_, _Tradition_, _Unity_, _Utopias_;
ethical theories, 249-266, see _Duty_, _Happiness_, _Ideals_,
_Intuition_, _Moral law_, _Personal morality_, _Pietism_,
_Rights_, _Utilitarianism_;
value as a moral teacher, 332-334;
political theories, 267-282, see _Association_, _Democracy_,
_Foreign policy_, _Government_, _Individualism_, _Liberty_,
_Patriotism_, _Republicanism_, _Sovereignty_, _Spiritual
Power_, _State_, _Universal Suffrage_, _War_;
position as a politician, 335-337;
theories of education, 265, 270, 272-275, 361-363;
social theories, 283-295, see _Collectivists_, _Cooperative
Societies_, _Economic principles_, _Nationalisation_,
_Property_, _Taxation_, _Social Reform_, _Socialism_;
theory of Nationality, 296-311;
literary theories, 11, 12, 312-328, see _Byron_, _Dante_,
_Drama_, _History_, _Poetry_, _Romanticism_;
writings, 13, 14, 39, 64, 65, 92-94, 108, 109, 139, 149, 196,
197, 213, 312, 329, 330;
theories of music, 321-323, 350.
---- personal appearance, 6, 36, 37, 143, 210;
character, 6, 7, 57, 79-81, 109, 148, 210, 337-341;
sense of mission, 58, 96, 333;
impulse to action, 156, 259, 318, 353, 363-365;
tendency to unhappiness, 55-58, 78-80, 339, 340;
poetic temperament, 329, 330;
love of system-making, 28, 29;
dislike of compromise, 110, 111, 156, 190, 333;
charity, 97, 142, 216;
tolerance, 129-131, 338;
love of nature, 19, 52, 116, 141, 210, 216, 329;
love of children, 146;
love of birds, 15, 146, 185, 356;
interest in women's questions, 65, 91, 219, 265, 278, 365, 366;
love of family life, 65, 66, 72, 264-266;
as a conversationalist, 147;
as a public speaker, 106, 153;
money affairs, 53, 76, 77, 108, 109, 141, 142, 196.
---- belief in Italy and Rome, 26, 60, 126-128, 192, 295, 307,
310, 311, 312;
advocacy of Italian Unity, see _Italian Unity_;
interest in working classes, see _Working Classes_;
views as to assassination, see _Assassination_.
Mazzini, Maria Drago (mother), 1, 53, 58, 67, 81, 108, 144, 162,
340.
Mentana, 212.
Messina, elected deputy for, 209.
Mexico, Napoleon's schemes in, 199.
Meyerbeer, 147, 322.
Mickiewicz, 10, 140.
Middle classes, appeals to, 27, 99;
deserted by, 109, 157, 170;
social reform and, 290.
Milan, 114-120, 123, 124, 168, 169, 214.
Milner-Gibson, Mrs, 106, 144, 357, 371.
Modena, Gustavo and Giulia, 40, 138.
Moderates, attitude towards, 101, 102, 110, 111, 113, 118-120, 125;
see _Piedmontese Party_.
Monarchy, attitude towards, 30, 120, 155, 180, 181, 194, 208, 211,
279, 280.
Moral Law, supremacy of, 249, 267, 285, 300.
Music, love of, 6, 133, 145-147;
theories of, 321-323, 350.
Mysticism, interest in, 197, 236.
Naples, visits to, 187, 188, 216.
Napoleon, Louis (afterwards Napoleon III.), 40, 134, 135, 140, 161,
162, 176-183, 186, 190, 197, 201, 206, 287.
Nathan, Giuseppe and Sarah, 210.
Nationalisation, projects of, 131, 194, 293.
Nationality, moral basis of, 296, 297, 302;
marks of, 298-301;
national missions, 107, 306, 307;
should be large, 198, 307.
Non-intervention, attack on, 151, 304, 305, 360.
Odger, George, 219.
Orsini, Felice, 165, 167.
Pallavicino Trivulzio, Marquis Giorgio, 188.
Palmerston, Viscount, 105, 203.
Panizzi, Antonio, 89.
Pantheism, criticism of, 235.
Papacy, see _Catholicism_.
Patriotism, 232, 265, 267, 301, 302.
People's International League, 106.
People's War, 125.
Personal morality, preaches, 264, 286, 338;
dependant on environment, 267, 268;
essential to patriotism, 301.
Philosophy, studies in, 10;
insufficient without religion, 224, 225.
Piedmont, army plot in, 42, 45-47.
Piedmontese party, 154-156, 159-161, 173.
Pietism, criticism of, 257, 258.
Pilo, Rosalino, 184.
Pisa, death at, 221.
Pisacane, Carlo (Duke di San Giovanni), 136, 139, 174.
Pius IX., 110-112, 114;
Mazzini's letter to, 111, 112.
Plombières, agreement of, 177, 179.
Poetry, theories of, 313-321, 324, 352, 353, 361;
Mazzini's, 329, 330, 369.
Poland, plans to assist, 193, 194, 202;
literature of, 10, 327;
future of, 306, 308, 309.
Post-Office scandal, 103-105;
see 197.
Progress, theory of, 236-239, 257, 362.
Property, rights of, 270, 291.
Protestantism, attitude towards, 150, 152, 227, 240, 244.
Providence, belief in, 125, 233, 235-237, 239, 257, 285, 288, 296,
299, 350.
Race as an element of nationality, 298.
Ramorino, General, 49, 50.
Rattazzi, Urbano, 201, 211, 212.
Realism in literature, 314-315, 361, 364.
Reclamation of waste lands, 292, 293.
Religion, Mazzini's, 4, 8, 25, 57, 80, 148, 229, 230, 248, 334,
335, 362;
essential to society, 222-225, 288;
in politics, 26, 60, 223, 224, 240;
projected book on, 11, 139, 140, 149.
Renan, criticism of, 220, 235.
Republicanism, advocacy of, 30, 31, 44, 60, 61, 111, 113, 117-120,
125, 126, 155, 164, 167, 180, 186, 194, 208, 209, 211, 365;
theory of, 30, 279-281.
Ricasoli, Baron Bettino, 179, 180, 182, 187, 201, 206, 211.
Rights, attack on theory of, 59, 250-256.
Romanticism, criticism of, 9, 12, 13, 320.
Rome, faith in, 126-128, 311;
in 1848, 121, 125, 126;
republic at, 128-138;
policy respecting (1860-1870), 187, 192, 193, 205, 211-213;
passes through in 1870, 217.
Rosselli, Pellegrino and Janet Nathan, 217, 221.
Rossetti, Gabriele, 89.
Rossini, criticism of, 147, 322.
Roumania, future of, 309.
Ruffini, Agostino, 7, 65, 73, 75, 76, 78.
---- Marchesa Eleonora Curlo, 8, 15, 56, 67, 68, 80-82, 370.
---- Giovanni, 7, 8, 73, 75, 76, 78.
---- Jacopo, 7, 39, 47, 56, 80, 96.
Russia, foreign policy of, 306, 308, 309.
Saffi, Count Aurelio, 139, 141.
Savona, imprisonment at, 18.
Savoy, views on, 42, 308;
projected raid into, 49, 50;
cession of, 183.
Scandinavia, future of, 308.
Schiller, 9, 320, 321, 324, 364.
Science, views on, 330.
Secret societies, 33, 34.
Seely, Charles, 203, 204.
September Convention, 204, 205.
Shaen, William and Mrs, 37, 88, 106, 144, 147, 152, 349, 366, 371,
372.
Shakespeare, 9, 317, 324, 325, 357.
Sicily, plans for revolutionising, 170, 173, 181, 183, 186.
Sidoli, Giuditta, 48, 55, 68-71, 126, 171, 191, 220, 371.
Slavery, views on, 198, 349-352.
Slavs, literature of, 10, 299, 308, 327;
future of, 149, 308, 309.
Social reform, advocacy of, 27, 28, 99, 132, 220, 232, 254,
283-285, 350;
plans of, 194, 289-295.
Socialism, criticism of, 99, 271, 287-289, 291, 295.
Sovereignty, theory of, 275, 276.
Spain, future of, 308.
Spinoza, criticism of, 235.
Spiritual power, theories of the, 246-248, 278, 279.
Spiritualism, aversion to, 197.
Stansfeld, Sir James and Mrs, 88, 106, 144, 145, 152, 195, 197,
210, 218, 366.
State, the, moral basis of, 267, 268, 275, 276;
duties of, 269-275;
ideal form of, 281, 282;
relations to the church, 246, 247, 278, 279.
Swinburne, Algernon C., 145, 217.
Switzerland, life in, 51-56, 63;
politics of, 62, 308;
see _Geneva_, _Lausanne_, _Lugano_.
Taine, Hippolyte, 217.
Taxation, principles of, 293.
Taylor, Peter and Mrs, 88, 106, 144, 152, 352-357, 359-361, 365,
371.
Theory of dagger, the, see _Assassination_.
_Times, The_, 104, 153, 164-166.
Toynbee, Joseph, 88, 98.
Tradition: a criterion of truth, 242-244, 362.
Tyrol, 206, 208, 308.
Umbria, projected attacks on, 181, 186.
Unity of life, 8, 236, 245, 350;
of belief, 245, 246, 273, 274.
Universal suffrage, 277, 278.
Utilitarianism, criticism of, 251-256, 362.
Utopias, condemns, 243, 289.
Venice, plans to free, 187, 188, 192, 193, 200.
Vico, 10, 242.
Victor Emmanuel II., attitude towards, 162, 165, 166, 180, 181,
186, 188;
intrigue with, 202-204.
Wagner, Richard, anticipates, 323.
War, views on, 33, 151, 305, 306.
Werner, 65.
Women's questions, interest in, 65, 91, 219, 265, 278, 365, 366.
Wordsworth, 9, 150, 235, 237, 315, 318.
Working classes, belief in, 27, 28, 41, 97-99, 157, 158, 213,
285, 366;
sympathy for, 268, 283, 284;
moral interests of, 285-287.
Young Europe, 46, 63, 64.
Young Italy, first mention of, 13;
principles of, 24-34, 165;
foundation of, 36-41;
subsequent history of, 54, 95-99, 109;
results of, 100.
Young Switzerland, 62, 63.
MADE AT THE
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IN GREAT BRITAIN
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