The Life of Mazzini Part 4

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 "st.i.tch 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 pa.s.sionate 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.bles, 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 ign.o.ble 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. s.h.i.+el 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 grat.i.tude 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 pa.s.sionately 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 Devons.h.i.+re 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 cla.s.ses, 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 ma.s.s 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 circ.u.mstances 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-cla.s.s const.i.tutions.

Mazzini was very suspicious of the new development; jealous that the nationalist movement had pa.s.sed 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 inst.i.tution dying, for once, in a n.o.ble manner; transmitting the watchword of the future before vanis.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage. 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 "subst.i.tution 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 ma.s.ses 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 const.i.tution on King Ferdinand. In the first half of February Tuscany and Piedmont had their const.i.tutions 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 const.i.tution; 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.bles, students and artisans,--all were swept along by the great flood of patriotism, some lightly or with purpose to betray, but the ma.s.s 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 a.s.sociation 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, G.o.dlike. 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 G.o.d. 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 acc.u.mulated 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 att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude. 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 const.i.tution 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 n.o.bles, 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 generals.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 premiers.h.i.+p; 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 _Ra.s.segna n.a.z.ionale_, 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--Att.i.tude 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 generals.h.i.+p 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 "G.o.d 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 hara.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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 Const.i.tuent a.s.sembly 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Ma.r.s.eilles, 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 cla.s.sical 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 circ.u.mstances, the republic was proclaimed at Rome on the day after he landed at Leghorn. The a.s.sembly, a fairly level-headed body, elected on manhood suffrage and drawing its members from the larger landed proprietors and upper middle cla.s.ses, 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 "G.o.d and the People." On the fourth day of the republic the a.s.sembly 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 un.o.bserved, "awed and like a wors.h.i.+pper,"

feeling, as he pa.s.sed 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 a.s.sembly, "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 cla.s.ses 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 n.o.bly 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 a.s.sa.s.sinate 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 att.i.tude 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 t.i.ttle 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 friends.h.i.+ps, 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 impa.s.sioned 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 G.o.d 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 inst.i.tution round which hung so much of Christian history, or that he wished to remove the last pretext for the intervention of foreign Catholics, his att.i.tude 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, antic.i.p.ating Cavour, tried to persuade the a.s.sembly 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 n.o.ble 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 n.o.ble rule, had become as the city of G.o.d. 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 a.s.sa.s.sination 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 n.o.ble 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 const.i.tution "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 a.s.sembly, 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 a.s.sembly 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.