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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41207 ***
+
+Transcriber's Note:
+
+ Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have
+ been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
+
+ Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+
+ On page 29: "premisses" should possibly be "premises".
+ On page 184: "Mr Adam" should possibly be "Mr McAdam".
+ On page 300: "meaning basis" should possibly be "meaningful basis".
+
+
+
+
+ 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
+
+
+ THE ORDINARY EDITION IS BOUND
+ IN CLOTH WITH GILT DESIGN AND
+ COLOURED TOP. THERE IS ALSO A
+ LIBRARY EDITION IN REINFORCED CLOTH
+
+
+ J. M. DENT & SONS LTD.
+ ALDINE HOUSE, BEDFORD STREET, LONDON, W.C.2
+
+ E. P. DUTTON & CO. INC.
+ 286-302 FOURTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
+
+
+
+
+ A GOOD
+ BOOK
+ IS THE
+ PRECIOUS
+ LIFE-BLOOD OF
+ A MASTER
+ SPIRIT
+ EMBALMED &
+ TREASURED
+ 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
+ NEED
+ TO
+ GO
+ BY
+ THY
+ SIDE
+
+
+ LONDON & TORONTO
+ PUBLISHED BY J·M·DENT
+ & SONS LTD & IN NEW YORK
+ 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
+ TEMPLE PRESS LETCHWORTH
+ IN GREAT BRITAIN
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Life of Mazzini, by Bolton King
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41207 ***
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-08-25 14:27:10 +0000