Part 11

While the report of General Lamarmora shows that no disparity of force, not even ninety thousand to four hundred, is sufficient to deal with the Neapolitan Brigandage, it affects to explain why. In fact, the report is one insinuated accusation of the French, who by their occupation of Rome supply arms and money to the reactionists, and feed a movement which, if left to its own resources, must perish of inanition. The report shrinks from the avowal that the whole inhabitants of two great provinces are friends and sympathisers with the brigands; that however little political reasons enter into the issue, the priests have contrived to give a political colouring to the struggle, and by contrasting the immunities of the past with the severities of the present, have made the peasant believe that the rule of the Bourbon was more favourable to him than that of the House of Savoy. It is not merely in the conscription for the regular army that the pressure is felt, but in the very enrolment for the National Guard, which, liable as it is to being “mobilised,” exacts all the services and all the privations of soldiering. So much as 3000 francs have been paid for a substitute, rather than serve in a force which compels the shopkeeper to desert his business or the farmer his fields for eight or ten months of the year!

If we have heard much of the personal unpopularity of the Piedmontese in Southern Italy, it is a theme which cannot be exaggerated. There is not, perhaps, throughout Europe a people who have less in common than the sub-Alpine and the South Italian. If Garibaldi and his followers came as liberators, the Piedmontese entered Naples as conquerors. The Garibaldians won all the suffrages of a people who loved their free-and-easy manners, their indiscipline, that “disinvoltura” so dear to the Italian heart;—their very rags had a charm for them. The rigid, stiff, unbending Piedmontese, almost unintelligible in speech and repulsive in look, were the very reverse of all this. Naples was gay, animated, and happy under the sway of the same lawless band of red-shirted adventurers, but she felt crushed and trampled down by the regular legions of the King.

In the great offices of the State, and in the Prefectures, it was easy enough for the Piedmontese to appoint their own partisans; but how do this throughout the rural districts, the small towns, and the villages? In these the choice lay between a Royalist—that is, a Bourbonist—and a Mazzinian. If you would not accept a follower of the late King, you must take one who disowned sympathies with all royalty. The Syndics and “Maires” of the smaller cities have been almost to a man the enemies of the Northern Italian. It is through these all the difficulties of propagating “union” sentiments have been experienced. It is by their lukewarmness, if not something worse, that Brigandage is able still to hold its ground, not so much because they are well affected to the Bourbons, or that they cherish sentiments of Mazzinianism, but simply that they disliked Northern Italy, nor could any rule be so distasteful to them as that which came from that quarter. That the French occupation of Rome has tended to maintain and support Brigandage cannot for a moment be disputed. The policy of France, from the very hour of the treaty of Villafranca, has been to perpetuate the difficulties of Italian rule—to exhibit the country in a state of permanent disorder, and the people unquiet, dissatisfied, and unruly—to reduce the peninsula to that condition, in fact, in which not only would the occupation of Rome be treated as a measure of security to Europe at large, but the graver question urged whether a more extended occupation of territory might not be practicable and possible.

If Garibaldi’s expedition had not terminated so abruptly at Aspromonte, it is well known the French would have occupied Naples. When they would have left it again, it is not so easy to say. It is clear enough then to see, how little soever the French may like that Brigandage that now devastates the South, they are not averse to the distress and trouble it occasions to the Italian Government, all whose ambitions have been assumed as so many menaces against France. Had you been content with the territory we won for you—had you remained satisfied with a kingdom of six millions, who spoke your own language, inherited your own traditions, and enjoyed your own sympathies, you might have had peace and prosperity, say the oracles of the Tuileries; but you would be a great nation, and you are paying the penalty. “This comes of listening to England, who never aided you, instead of trusting to us who shed our blood in your cause.”

France never has consented to a united Italy; whether she may yet do so is, however improbable, still possible; one thing is, however, clear—until she does give this consent, not in mere diplomatic correspondence, but in heart and wish, the southern provinces of the peninsula will remain unconquered territories, requiring the presence of a large force, and even with that defying the power of the Government to reduce them to obedience.

Brigandage is but the open expression of a discontent which exists in every class and every condition in the districts it pervades. It is the assertion of the Catholic for the Pope, of the Royalist for the Bourbon, of the Revolutionist against a discipline, and last of all, of the Southern Italian against being ruled by that Northern race whose intelligence he despises, and for whose real qualities of manliness he has neither a measure nor a respect.

One word as to the Camorra before we conclude: and first of all what is this Camorra of which men talk darkly and in whispers, and whose very syllables are suppressed while the servants are in the room? The Camorra is an organised blackmail, which, extending its exactions to every trade and industry, carries the penalties of resistance to its edicts even to death.

The Camorra has its agents everywhere. On the Mole, where the boatman hands over the tenth of the fare the passenger has just paid him—at the door of the hotel, where the porter counts out his gains and gives over his tithe—at the great restaurant, at the theatre, at the gaming-table—some one is sure to present himself as the emissary of this dreaded society, and in the simple words, “for the Camorra,” indicate a demand that none have courage to resist.

The jails are, however, the great scenes for the exercise of this system. There the Camorra reigns supreme. In the old Bourbon days the whole discipline of the prisons was maintained by the Camorristi, who demanded from each prisoner as he entered the usual fees of the place. The oil for the lamp in honour of the Madonna had to be paid for, then came a sort of fee for initiation, after which came others in the shape of taxes on the income of the prisoner and his supposed means, with imposts upon leave to smoke, to drink, or to gamble. His incomings too were taxed, and a strict account demanded of all his gains, from which the tenth was rigidly subtracted. To resist the imposts was to provoke a quarrel, not unfrequently ending fatally; for the Camorristi ruled by terror, and well knew all the importance of maintaining their “prestige.”

The revenues of the Camorra, amounting to sums almost incredibly large, are each week handed over to the treasurer of the district, and distributed afterwards to the followers of the order by the Capo di Camorra, according to the rank and services of each, any concealment or malversation of funds being punished with death. The society itself not only professes to protect those who belong to it, but to extend its influence over all who obey its edicts; and thus the poor creature who sells his fruit at the corner of the street sees his wares under the safeguard of one of these mysterious figures, who glide about here and there, half in listlessness, and whose dress may vary from the patched rags of almost mendicancy to the fashionable attire of a man of rank and condition.

In the cafés where men sit at chess and dominoes, the Camorrist appears, and with his well-known whisper demands his toll. In vain to declare that the play is not for money; it is for the privilege to play at all that his demand is now made. The newly appointed clerk in a public office, the secretary to the minister, it is said, have been applied to, and have not dared to dispute a claim which would be settled otherwise by the knife.

Recognised by the old police of Naples, tolerated and even employed to track out the crimes of those who did not belong to the order, the Camorrists acquired all the force and consideration of an institution. Men felt no shame at yielding to a terror so widespread; nor would it have been always safe to speak disparagingly of a sect whose followers sometimes lounged in royal antechambers as well as sought shelter under the portico of a church.

It has been more than once asserted that Ferdinand II. was a sworn member of the order, and that he contributed largely to its funds. Certain it is the Camorra in his reign performed all the functions of a secret police, and was the terror of all whose Liberalism made them suspected by the Government. To the Camorra, too, were always intrusted those displays of popular enthusiasm by which the King was wont to reply to the angry remonstrances of French or English envoys. The Camorra could at a moment’s notice organise a demonstration in honour of royalty which would make the monarch appear as the loved and cherished father of his people.

It was, however, by the Liberals themselves the Camorra was first introduced into political life, and Liberio Romano intrusted the defence of the capital to these men as the surest safeguard against the depredations of the disbanded soldiers of the King; and, strange to say, the hazardous experiment was a perfect success, and for several weeks Naples had no other protectors than the members of a league who combined the atrocities of Thuggee with the shameless rapine of the highwayman. The stern discipline of Piedmont would not, however, condescend to deal with such agents; and Lamarmora has waged a war, open and avowed, against the whole system of the Camorra. Hundreds of arrests have been made, and the jails are crowded with Camorrists; but men declare that all these measures are in vain—that the magistracy itself is not free from the taint: and certain it is that the system prevails largely in the army and navy, and has its followers in what is called the world of fashion and society.

The Mezzo Galantuomo is the most terrible ingredient in the constitution of a people. The man who is too bad for society but a little too good for the gallows, is a large element in this land, and it will require something more than mere statecraft to deal with him.

A Parliamentary Commission is at present engaged in the investigation of the whole question of Brigandage, and their “Report” will probably be before the world in a few days. It is very doubtful, however, if that world will be made much the wiser by their labours. There is, in fact, no mystery as to the nature of this pestilence, its source, or its progress.

It may suit the views of a party to endeavour to connect it with Bourbonism, but it would be equally true to assert that the peasant-murderers in Ireland were adherents of the Stuarts! The men who take to the mountains in the Capitanata are not politicians. They have no other “cause” at heart than their own subsistence, for which they would rather provide at the risk of their heads than by the labour of their hands. All that they know of civilisation is taxation and the conscription. In these respects the old _régime_ was less severe than the present; neither the imposts were so heavy, nor the levies so large; not to add that, under the Bourbons, soldiers led lives of lounging indolence, and “no one was ever cruel enough to lead them against the Austrians.”

The Bourbon Government of Naples had many faults, but the Piedmontese rule has had no successes. There is that of ungeniality in the Northern temperament that renders even favours at their hands little better than burdens, and their justice has a smack of severity in it that wonderfully resembles revenge.

What may be the future fate of Southern Italy it is not easy to say; but one thing at least is certain, the influence of Piedmont has not obtained that footing there which promises to make _her_ cause _their_ cause, or _her_ civilisation _their_ civilisation. If the Bourbons governed badly, their successors do not govern at all!

LUDWIG UHLAND.

Incontestably, since the death of Goethe, Ludwig Uhland has been, at least in the hearts of the people, the Laureate of Germany. He is not a poet who took the world by storm with his earliest productions; but he has been gradually growing in favour and general acceptance, until his death is now deplored as a national affliction. He died quietly at Tübingen, the place of his birth, on the 13th of November 1862, in his seventy-sixth year, having been born on the 26th of April 1787. He was said never to have known a day’s illness until his last, which was occasioned by his attending the funeral of a friend and brother poet, Justin Kerner, in inclement weather.

The parents of the poet were Johann Friedrich Uhland, Secretary to the University of Tübingen, and Elizabeth (born) Hoser, daughter of one Hoser who held a similar office. He had a brother, Fritz, who died in his ninth year, and a sister, Luise, who married Meyer, the pastor of Pfullingen, near Reutlingen. His education conduced to bringing out the talent that was latent in him, as it was the custom of Kauffmann, the rector of the Tübingen school, to give free themes to be worked out in prose or verse, according to the inclinations of his scholars; and the young Uhland generally chose the latter, and was early distinguished in his choice. Even at school he was known as an enthusiastic student of German and Scandinavian antiquities. At the age of sixteen and seventeen he produced many compositions of merit, but only two, ‘Der Sterbender Held,’ and ‘Der Blinder König,’ found their way into that collection of his poems which was published in 1815. At this time he was hesitating between the professions of law and medicine. As a youth, though given to long walks alone in the beautiful neighbourhood of Tübingen, he was distinguished by his love of social manly exercises, particularly of skating. Two of his earliest poetical friends were Schröder, who was afterwards drowned in the Baltic, and Harpprecht, who fell in the Russian campaign of Napoleon. This is the friend who is alluded to in the exquisite poem of ‘Die Ueberfahrt’ as “brausend vor uns allen,” while the fatherly friend spoken of there is Uhland’s maternal uncle, Hoser, the pastor of Schmiden. He was also much influenced in his tastes by Haug of Stuttgard, and Gortz, Professor of Ancient Literature in Tübingen. Later he became acquainted with Justin Kerner, whose talent he placed above his own, Oehlenschläger the Danish poet, and Varnhagen von Ense the historian. Goethe he had seen once when a boy in 1797, and he records his impressions in the ‘Münstersage.’ In 1810 Uhland went to Paris, in order to work at the treasures of Romance literature contained in the Imperial Library. On his return he applied himself to practice as an advocate at Stuttgard, without remitting his poetic labours. His tragedy, ‘Herzog Ernst von Schwaben,’ which belongs to this period, elicited the warm admiration of Goethe. In 1819 he was elected a deputy of the Würtemberg States. In 1820 he married Emma Vischer, a daughter, by a former marriage, of a celebrated woman, Frau Emilie Pistorius, to whose memory Rückert dedicated a poem called ‘Rosen auf das Grab einer edlen Frau.’ In 1834 he was made Professor of German Literature at Tübingen. He distinguished himself as a political character in 1848, though without joining the extreme Liberal party, and on one occasion presented an address to the King of Würtemberg, praying for the restoration of the Constitution, the prayer of which was immediately granted, as most prayers of the kind were at that particular time, from prudential motives. He had already resigned, in 1833, his office of deputy, finding it incompatible with his professorship, and had returned to his residence at Tübingen. His marriage with Emma Vischer was in many respects a fortunate one. He appears to have lived with her in great harmony till his death, and the dowry she brought him, though not large, was sufficient to keep from his door the anxieties which usually beset a priest of the Muses. On the other hand, the marriage was not blest by children. There are old pictures extant of Uhland as a child, with a fair honest face and powdered hair. His later face is now familiar to the Germans. Its first impression is decidedly heavy. The upper-lip is long, the cheekbones high, the eyes not large, the forehead broad over the brows, and narrower above—altogether an ordinary honest man’s face, nothing more. A phrenologist in a steamboat, to whom the poet was unknown, once guessed him to be a watchmaker, adding, to console him, that every one could not be a poet. Uhland’s manners appear to have been plain and unpretending—rather those of a man who makes friends than acquaintances. Yet those who knew him, knew him as a hearty and even jovial companion. He was shy, and shunned publicity, and could not bear to be treated as a literary lion. On one occasion, when he was presented with a crown of laurel, he hung it and left it on an oak beside the road. His habits were early and healthy. In summer he lived in his open garden-house, and at ten o’clock every morning used to go out for a long walk, prefaced by a plunge in the Neckar when the weather was genial. At Tübingen, which is a very pretty quaint little university town, lying in that finely-broken country which intervenes between the Black Forest and the Alps, he owned a plain house on the country side of the Neckar bridge, only ornamented by Corinthian pilasters in front; behind it was his garden, arranged in terraces, and his “Weinberg,” from which he made his own ordinary supply of wine. He was of social habits, but, at the same time, fond of musing and solitude. The homely but intellectual society of Tübingen fully sufficed him. He was not a man to care for that of those above him in station, as his sterling independence shrank from patronage in the same way in which his diffidence shrank from general notoriety.

Politically, Uhland was a people’s man without being a Radical. His love of medieval literature imbued his mind with respect for hereditary rank, station, and honours, while his love of freedom and optimist views of the future of his country and mankind in general, made him a sturdy opponent of any attempt to infringe on what he called “the good old right.” In England he might have been a Tory or Conservative Whig. In Germany, it has pleased the powers that be to count him with the Democratic party; hence the admiration or policy which prompted Louis Napoleon to make a national affair of the funeral of Béranger, was wanting in the case of Uhland, who was buried, as he had lived, in privacy. Although this does not tell well for the temper of the Government of Würtemberg, and fully accounts for the hatred of Englishmen which is said to be dominant at Stuttgard, the deceased poet would probably not have wished it otherwise. No doubt he was, as far as the honours that proceed from the great are concerned, to the end of his life an unacknowledged and unappreciated man. But he had all he wanted—robust health, self-respect, and the respect of those he loved, sufficient worldly means, and that divine gift which Homer himself thought a full compensation even for blindness.

The uneventfulness of Uhland’s life, his unpretending presence, his very look and bearing, his intense love for nature, the simplicity of his habits, his steady domestic character, and unaffected religious feeling, all bring to mind our own Wordsworth; and in his poems, as in those of Wordsworth, the gems are to be sought among the shorter compositions. But Wordsworth made it his business to sit down at the Lakes and paint nature in words, as the pre-Raphaelite or naturalistic school of landscape painters sit down and paint her in colours. Wordsworth wooed the beauty of nature immediately and for itself. His human figures are merely put in roughly to help out the foreground. But Uhland rarely paints nature directly; he rather uses natural scenery as a background to his “genre” pictures, which interest chiefly by presenting the phases of human feeling, and the joys and sorrows of mankind. All his poems are alive with the breath of Spring—fresh, luminous, and joyous; but we are aware of his surroundings rather from the effects they produce upon him than from any actual descriptions. His poems have the ring of the true singer; an internal melody permeates his verse, capricious rather than monotonous, changing its airs and cadences like the voice of a bird, rather than flowing on with the mechanical jingling of a musical box. This is the quality which gives the bardic stamp to the compositions of a Burns, a Béranger, a Tennyson, and a want of which is felt in the glowing rhetoric of Byron, and in

“The beauty for ever unchangingly bright, Like the soft sunny lapse of a summer day’s light,”