The Life of Mazzini Part 5

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 attache, 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 pa.s.sing. 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 superst.i.tious 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 Ba.s.si, 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 pa.s.sive 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 sh.e.l.ls, the government lodged them in the palaces of the fugitive n.o.bles, on their simple promise that there should be neither theft nor injury, and the promise given in the name of "G.o.d and the People" was scrupulously kept.

To their leader those weeks must have been a time of fearful strain.

Garibaldi's bad generals.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sembly 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 coa.r.s.e 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 a.s.sa.s.sin'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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sport, but he found the means of sailing to Ma.r.s.eilles; 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 Encyclopaedia, which should do for religious democracy what the old Encyclopaedia 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 Ma.r.s.eilles. At times indeed he was miserable and pessimistic as of old, brooding over lost friends.h.i.+ps, chafing at the triumph of brute force in Italy. But except in these hours of taciturn gloom, when he avoided all companions.h.i.+p, 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 const.i.tution 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 ma.s.s 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 b.u.t.toned high, despising collars and subst.i.tuting 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 p.a.w.n-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 d.i.c.kens were among the people he met.[19]

With these friends.h.i.+ps a new light and happiness came to his life.

Probably, too, the consciousness of having played a great part n.o.bly 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, pa.s.sionately 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, G.o.d 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d and duty. Young people at all events, who came under the spell of those eyes, and heard the vibrating voice speak with pa.s.sionate earnestness of the deep things of G.o.d, 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 n.o.ble Mazzini," said Clough after brief knowledge of his life at Rome.

Much deeper was the feeling of those, who had the privilege of close companions.h.i.+p. 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 n.o.bler rule in national and private life.

His literary work at this time was not remarkable. He was "still praying G.o.d 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 wis.h.i.+ng from time to time that she had written it in beautiful prose than--pa.s.sages 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 G.o.d's law and G.o.dlike 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 G.o.d 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 friends.h.i.+ps, 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 cla.s.ses 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 Ma.s.son, 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-const.i.tuted 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 pa.s.sed; 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 const.i.tution, 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 circ.u.mstances Mazzini found it hard to recognize new facts. The prophet is by nature inflexible; and Mazzini's whole creed was a thing of such pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sailed 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 ma.s.ses," 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 ma.s.ses, 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 G.o.d 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 ma.s.ses 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 cla.s.ses for insurrection. The men, who had been the strength of Young Italy, had gone over almost in ma.s.s 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 cla.s.s, by his simple, n.o.ble 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 circ.u.mstances 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 s.h.i.+pwrecked 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 cla.s.ses 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.