The Life of Mazzini Part 12

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 antic.i.p.ated 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sification 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, pa.s.ses 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 Monarchia_. 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 a.n.a.lysis, "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 wors.h.i.+pper 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 t.i.tanic 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 a.n.a.lytic 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 pa.s.sages in his writings, which show his deep communion with nature. When he writes of "the vast ocean, das.h.i.+ng, 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, G.o.d's messenger to the heart of man. He had little power of scientific thought, of accurate reasoning or careful arrangement and a.n.a.lysis 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 acc.u.mulated 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 p.r.o.ne 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, G.o.d-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 t.i.tle 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 rus.h.i.+ng 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 h.e.l.l. He was able to be a great moralist, because in a rare degree he had himself the moral sense, because the pa.s.sion for righteousness had so penetrated all his being, that he could speak and be understood on the deep things of G.o.d, 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 G.o.d; and in G.o.d's name he was a.s.sertive, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 G.o.d 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 relations.h.i.+p to democracy, and put it on an una.s.sailable 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 ma.s.s of correspondence and the immense labour he put out to sc.r.a.pe 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 leaders.h.i.+p and inspiration. But it is more than doubtful whether, even under happier circ.u.mstances, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 n.o.blest 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 dest.i.tute 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 friends.h.i.+p 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. Pa.s.sionate 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 superst.i.tious 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d,--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 n.o.bleness 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 pa.s.sed; 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 pa.s.sion 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 censors.h.i.+p, suppressed. I caused the paper to be continued at Leghorn under the t.i.tle 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 a.s.sociation 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, and founded from there the new a.s.sociation "la giovine Italia." Of the distinctions to be made between this and the old Carbonari a.s.sociations, 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 a.s.sociation 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 Ma.r.s.eilles expounding all the principles of the a.s.sociation. La Giovine Italia, a review, or rather a collection of political pamphlets springing from the a.s.sociation, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, through the merchant-s.h.i.+ps 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 a.s.sociation and me was promised. Measures were taken at Ma.r.s.eilles 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 Ma.r.s.eilles was imperiously required by the interests of the a.s.sociation; the writing, publis.h.i.+ng, and sending to Italy the correspondencies with the country, for which Ma.r.s.eilles was offering every facility, the interviews with Italian patriots who flocked to Ma.r.s.eilles 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 _a 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 Emba.s.sies 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 a.s.sociations had awakened the sympathies of the Swiss patriots. A National a.s.sociation 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 Zurich, 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 cla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sports for us to a place I named; and in January or February 1837 I landed in England.