Part 10

Gradually the troubled situation cleared, Cavour returned to power, and by temporizing held both the French support and the enthusiasm of the native troops. Mazzini still advocated immediate warfare, Cavour waited, and in the end the latter's policy was proved correct. In the interval the disheartened Mazzini had gone back to England, and again, on hearing that Garibaldi and his famous legion had started for Sicily, returned in haste to Genoa. There followed Garibaldi's victories, then the Piedmontese declaration of war against the Pope, then only Rome and Venice were lacking to the cause. Mazzini went to Naples to be nearer the heart of the struggle; he urged the Neapolitans to demand a constitution, and they, filled with the one thought of unity, berated him as a republican. His friends urged him to leave the city. "Even against your wish," said one of them, "you divide us." He could not leave Italy at that hour of her fate, but he felt that he was cruelly misunderstood. He wrote, "I am worn out morally and physically; for myself the only really good thing would be to have unity achieved quickly through Garibaldi, and one year, before dying, of Walham Green or Eastbourne, long silences, a few affectionate words to smooth the ways, plenty of sea-gulls, and sad dozing."

Some of those things he was to know, for during the next few years he lived again in England, writing and reading, and continually engaged in plans for the final capture of Venetia and Rome. Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi, and Mazzini were each devising means to gain this long-hoped-for end, but the position and peculiar characteristics of each made co-operation almost impossible. The wise Cavour had been succeeded by vacillating ministers who were a continual drag upon the King, Garibaldi would not consent to adopting any of Mazzini's suggestions (the latter once said that "if Garibaldi has to choose between two proposals, he is sure to accept the one that isn't mine"), and Mazzini found it ever difficult to sacrifice his republican ideals to the needs of the moment. Ultimately, however, the Italian troops, this time with the aid of Prussia, recommenced war with Austria to win Venetia, Istria, and the Tyrol. The spirit of 1866 was not the spirit of 1860, the mythical valor of the Garibaldian army seemed to have evaporated in the passes of the Tyrol. Prussia won, but Italy met defeat at Custozza. Again Napoleon took a hand in the country's destiny. To the surprise of Europe, he intervened and stated that Austria had offered to cede Venetia to him, and that he would give it to Italy if the latter would come to an immediate agreement for peace. There seemed little else to be done, and Mazzini saw the campaign, that had begun in the highest hopes of complete national independence, end in the acceptance of the gift of a single province from the foreigner.

Thenceforth Mazzini's work lost all accord with that of the monarchy. He had not lost his faith in the great destiny of Italy, but he despaired of seeing that destiny fulfilled as he might wish within his lifetime. Forty thousand persons signed the petition for his amnesty, he was elected again and again by Messina as its deputy, but the party of the Moderates would not have him in the Chamber. Continued opposition made his fame only the greater among the people, he assumed the proportions of a national myth, to many he had become an actual demi-god. Secretly he traveled about Italy, working, with an energy altogether disproportionate to his strength, in the cause of a republic. He had many followers in Genoa, and one of them has left a picture of Mazzini's entrance to a meeting. "A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was in body and soul, the great magician, who struck the fancy of the people like a mythical hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently to meet that great soul. He advanced with a child's frank courtesy and a divine smile, shaking hands like an Englishman, and addressing each of us by name, as if our names were written on our foreheads. He was not disguised; he wore cloth shoes, and a capote, and with his middle, upright stature, he looked like a philosopher straight from his study, who never dreamed of troubling any police in the world."

He found time to write his remarkable treatise on religion, "From the Council to God," while he prepared plans for a new revolution. This time he intended to land in Sicily. The attempt was foolhardy, he was arrested at Palermo, and confined at Gaeta, where the Bourbons had not long before made their last stand. Almost forty years before, at the outset of his career, he had watched the Mediterranean from his prison at Savona, now he watched the same deep blue sea from Gaeta. He wrote here, "The nights are very beautiful; the stars shine with a luster one sees only in Italy. I love them like sisters, and link them to the future in a thousand ways. If I could choose I should like to live in almost absolute solitude, working at my historical book or at some other, just from a feeling of duty, and only wishing to see for a moment, now and then, some one I did not know, some poor woman that I could help, some workingmen I could advise, the doves of Zurich, and nothing else."

Rome fell, and Mazzini's captivity came to an end. He passed through the city where twenty-one years before he had been Triumvir, and, seeking to avoid all popular demonstrations, went to Genoa. There he fell ill, and his failing strength made successive attacks more and more frequent. He traveled a little more, and then in March, 1872, died at a friend's house in Pisa. He had lived to see Italy united, but in a very different manner from that of which he had dreamed.

To the republicans of Europe, Mazzini's voice was that of a great prophet for half the Nineteenth Century, to the Italians he was the voice of Italy itself. He was the precursor of unity, of independence, of courageous self-denial, without him Cavour might have planned in vain, and Garibaldi been no more than an inconspicuous lieutenant. He had the two greatest of gifts, an ideal and the faith that knows no defeat, yet he was not simply the idealist nor the devotee, for he could stir other men to action through his own belief. A friend, comparing him with Kossuth, said: "Now I write of him who seems to my judgment to be, like Saul, above all his fellows ... the one man needed excitement to stir his spirit ... the soul of the other was as an inner lamp shining through him always. The strength of Mazzini's personal influence lay here. You could not doubt his glance."

There was a certain kinship between Mazzini and Lincoln, simplicity and a boundless love of the weak and the oppressed was the keynote of both lives. Both were emancipators, but both were infinitely more, men whose whole lives bore eloquent testimony of their noble spirits. Lincoln loved men as Mazzini loved them, Mazzini and Lincoln both knew the suffering that comes from being continually misunderstood. When Lincoln was assassinated, the great Italian envied the man who had died knowing that his life's cause had been accomplished.

Throughout one of the most tangled and turbulent epochs of history, Mazzini's ideals never changed; the principles of "Young Italy" were the principles of his Triumvirate and of his prison life at Gaeta. He was for a United Italy and a republic. At times he could postpone the latter aim for the former, but never disregard it. And what he was for Italy, he was for the whole world. He insisted on the brotherhood of nations, on the paramount duty of all nations toward humanity. Whosoever, he believed, separates families from families, and nations from nations, divides what God meant to be indissoluble. He looked to Italy to show the other nations how to live in freedom and equality, and to Rome to pronounce a new and greater religion of majestic tolerance. Had Italy been freed early in his career, he must have become a great religious teacher; even as it was, his power was that of an apostle, and his appeal to the soul as well as to the mind. Men who knew him loved him as something finer than themselves, a man closer to God, one of His disciples.

His personal life was one long record of self-sacrifice, his home, his family, his love, his comfort, even the most meager necessities of life were given to the cause, nothing was too much for him to do, nothing too trivial for him to undertake, could he help his country or one of his countrymen an iota thereby. He could appreciate other men's happiness and in a way share it with them; he knew little or nothing of envy, vanity, or malice; he would let any leader have the glory of helping Italy, so long as the result was gained. More than that, he could bear the continual undervaluation of the English among whom he lived, he could read what Carlyle wrote, "Of Italian democracies and Young Italy's sorrows, of extraneous Austrian emperors in Milan, or poor old chimerical Popes in Bologna, I know nothing and desire to know nothing," and yet continue Carlyle's friend; he could bear the sting of having his name coupled with every attempt at assassination, when there were few things he abhorred more than secret violence. His idea of duty was so high, and had so absorbed all the petty spirits of his nature, that he could endure anything for that cause, and indeed embraced eagerly whatever came to him under that banner.

The great authority on heroes says of the hero as prophet: "The great man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame." So the world had waited for Giuseppe Mazzini. Other men bore much and labored much for the sake of a united fatherland, but none other gave such lightning to their world. The prophet may not actually lay the stones of history, but he breathes the spirit of life into the builders. He is mankind's greatest friend and hope, who points out the road human souls would take. Mazzini stands with Dante and Savonarola as the third great prophet of Italian history who spoke with a world voice.

[Illustration: CAVOUR]

CAVOUR, THE STATESMAN

Cavour planned united Italy; his career is a shining example of what may be done by a man with one definite purpose to which he adheres without digression. Just as Disraeli seems from his early manhood to have aimed at becoming Prime Minister of England so Cavour appears to have aimed at the union of Italy under the leadership of Piedmont. There were a thousand and one points at which he could have turned aside, a dozen times when a brilliant temporary success was held before him, but he preferred to sacrifice no atom of energy or influence which might in time help in his fundamental purpose. He preferred obscurity to the danger of being too well known, and the coldness of contemporaries to the burden of relations with them which might tend to shackle his own independence. He read his time and countrymen with extraordinary accuracy, and foresaw that what was left of the old régime was tottering and that to attempt to bolster it up was absurd. He preferred to let the old conventions of a departed feudalism go their way in peace while he prepared himself for the day when the new statecraft should be recognized.

The Piedmont of 1810, the year of Cavour's birth, was singularly mediæval. The militant strength and daring of the small states of the Middle Ages had departed, but the point of view remained. The aristocracy was narrow, bigoted, and overbearing, they were intolerant of the new discoveries of science and the useful arts, they devoted themselves exclusively to the trivial entertainments of the Eighteenth Century. Napoleon spread above them like a storm cloud; they wrapped themselves as well as they could in their ancestral cloaks and waited, confident that the gale could not last long. The majority of them could not believe that the French Revolution was more than an accident, but there were a few, and those almost entirely men and women who had lived abroad, who saw further. One of these latter was Cavour's grandmother, the Marquise Philippine di Cavour, from whom he seems to have inherited his breadth of view.

The family of Benso belonged to the old nobility of Piedmont, and in time came into possession of the fief of Santena and the fastness of Cavour in the province of Pignerolo. A member of the family who became distinguished for military services was made Marquis of Cavour by Charles Emmanuel III., and the eldest son of Marquis Benso di Cavour married Philippine, daughter of the Marquis de Sales, a girl brought up in a château on the Lake of Annecy. The Marquise Philippine immediately became the controlling factor in the Cavour household; she strove to lighten the heavy somberness of her husband's family in Turin, and at the trying time of the French occupation sold much of the family plate and furnishings, and finally certain priceless religious relics, in order to provide for her son, a boy of sixteen, when he was ordered to join General Berthier's corps of the French army. Later she was commanded to become one of the household of the Princess Camillo Borghese, sister of Napoleon, and wife of his governor of Piedmont, who, better known as Pauline Bonaparte, figures as one of the most beautiful as well as one of the liveliest women of that age. The Marquise Philippine acquitted herself so well and so graciously that the Princess became one of her staunchest friends, and with the Prince acted as sponsor at the christening of the Marquise's second grandchild, Camille di Cavour. The Marquise's son, Michele Benso, had married Adèle, daughter of the Count de Sellon of Geneva, and had two sons, Gustave and Camille. Michele Benso had profited greatly by his mother's tact, but he was still the unbending reactionary in nature. So was his eldest son Gustave. It was the younger boy who received the adaptable genius of the Marquise Philippine, and who seems to have been best able to appreciate her. On one occasion he said to her, "Marina" (a Piedmontese term for grandmother), "we get on capitally, you and I; you were always a little bit of a Jacobin." When, as the boy grew older, his family and friends reproached him with being a fanatical liberal, he turned to the Marquise, confident that she understood him. Cavour had few confidants during his whole life, few friends from whom he drew inspiration, but his grandmother had so trained him in the light of her own self-reliant spirit that he rarely seems to have felt the need of any outside aid.

The feudal system had scant respect for younger sons. Gustave was carefully educated for his proud position, Camille was largely left to grow up by chance. He was sent to the Military Academy at Turin, and became a page at the court of Charles Albert. With both the social and military life about him he found himself out of temper, his views were too liberal for the narrowness he met on every hand, he was hoping for events which most of his companions could only have regarded at that time as tragedies. His restlessness was noted, and he was sent to the lonely Alpine fortress of Bard. There the soul-wearying inertia of the military life of a small state grew to typify to him the condition of his land. At the age of twenty-one, he wrote to the Count de Sellon, "The Italians need regeneration; their morale, which was completely corrupted under the ignoble dominion of Spaniards and Austrians, regained a little energy under the French régime, and the ardent youth of the country sighs for a nationality, but to break entirely with the past, to be born anew to a better state, great efforts are necessary and sacrifices of all kinds must remould the Italian character. An Italian war would be a sure pledge that we were going to become again a nation, that we were rising from the mud in which we have been trampled for so many centuries."

Such ideas found no sympathy at the court of Piedmont, and Cavour, confident that the army could offer him no opportunity to use his talents, resigned his commission, and induced his father to buy him a small estate at Leri. There, in the middle of the rice-fields of Piedmont, Cavour settled down to the life of a farmer, experimenting with new steam machinery, canal irrigation, artificial fertilizers, studying books on government and agriculture, seeing something of his country neighbors, waiting for the gradual breakdown of the old régime. His family were quite content to let him vegetate on his far-off estate, he had no position in the family household in Turin, his father and brother were busy with details of court life, and after the death of his grandmother his combined family regarded him as lacking in normal balance. Without becoming actually melancholy the youth was continually dejected, he saw no place waiting to be filled by him, he wished that he had been born into another nation, and sighed, "Ah! if I were an Englishman, by this time I should be something, and my name would not be wholly unknown!" Yet, indifferent as he seemed to comradeship, he had at this time one strong friend, a woman of high birth, "L'Inconnue," as he called her in his journal. She summoned him to her at Turin, and he obeyed her call; she was unhappy and ardently patriotic, with the visions of Mazzini, he admired her and was filled with remorse at the thought of a love so constant and disinterested. They corresponded for over a year, and then Cavour's ardor faded. He had never been in love with her, but she had loved him devotedly. A few years later she died, and left him a last letter ending, "the woman who loved you is dead.... No one ever loved you as she did, no one! For, O Camille, you never fathomed the extent of her love." She had at least succeeded in drawing him out of his lonely despair; platonic as his regard for her seems to have been, it was the nearest approach to love that entered his life.

For fifteen years Cavour lived as a farmer at Leri, breaking the monotony of that existence by occasional visits to England and France. The former country always exerted great influence over him; he considered the life of the English country gentleman the ideal existence; he was a great admirer of Pitt and Sir Robert Peel (and said of Peel that he was "the statesman who more than any other had the instinct of the necessity of the moment," words prophetic of his own career!), and was always a reader of Shakespeare, who among all writers he held had the deepest insight into the human heart. In Paris Cavour saw much of society through the influence of his French relations, and made the most of his opportunity to study the young rising men. He was frequently blamed by the men and women he met for leading such an aimless life, and was urged to enter the fields of literature or diplomacy. For the former he said he had no taste, for the latter he was too much out of sympathy with the government of his own country, and he could not enter the service of any other. He had the reputation of being a man of great wit and intelligence, gifted with gay and winning manners, interested to a certain extent in all concerns of the day, but unwilling to sacrifice himself to a constant devotion to any one pursuit. The women of the leading salons found his light hair, blue eyes, and happy temper charming, the men of the time valued his keen insight into contemporary questions. He played cards frequently for high stakes, but never allowed himself to become an habitual gambler. Later in life it is said that he indulged in playing for high stakes with politicians in order to gain an insight into their characters. His visits to Paris undoubtedly taught him much concerning the men with whom he was later to have so much to do, and his stays in England showed him the strength of Parliamentary government. He took vivid impressions back with him to Leri, and used his mental energy in adapting English ideas on agriculture to the needs of his farm.

With the governing world of Piedmont Cavour was undeniably unpopular. The antiquated leaders of public life considered him perilously liberal, and no party or clique found him really in accord with its views. He had written some articles for foreign newspapers, and had openly advocated the need of railways in Italy, but such of his countrymen as undertook to learn his views held him a dangerous fanatic. Singularly enough, without having made any attempt to place himself before the public, he was an object of popular distrust. He counted this rather an item in his favor, he was in no wise indebted to any man or any cause. He preferred to wait until the day of petty reactionaries should give place to serious popular movements, and by 1847 he saw that such a crisis was not far distant. Charles Albert, by nature always an enigma, was moving forward faster than his government, and was suspected of strong independent tendencies.

Charles Albert would have loomed larger in history if he had been born into either an earlier or a later age. He was not the man to direct a political crisis, he would have done well as the magnanimous sovereign of an Eighteenth Century state or as the intellectual head of a constitutional nation, but it was his misfortune to lack those vigorous robust qualities which Italians later found in his son. He was an ardent patriot, he earnestly desired to free the Italian states from foreign rule, he was zealous that Piedmont should lead in such a cause, but he was continually afraid that independence would lead directly to popular liberty under a constitution. "I desire as much as you do," he said to Roberto d'Azeglio, "the enfranchisement of Italy, and it is for that reason, remember well, that I will never give a constitution to my people." His advisers, who were largely clericals, and almost always reactionaries, lost no chance to impress upon his mind the impossibility of the consummation he desired. Start the new order, they said, and no man knows how far it will go. He was in fear of loosing a spirit which he could never cage. Yet his honest desire for national independence made him hearken at times to more liberal voices. In one of these moments he revoked the censorship of the press.

Cavour, primed with the history of England, saw what a free press meant, and instantly left his retirement at Leri to seize the golden opportunity. He founded a newspaper and gave it a name destined to stand for the whole movement towards nationalism, "_Il Risorgimento_." The prospectus of the paper stated its aims as independence, union between the Princes and the people, and reforms. Cavour was now prepared to speak his mind.