VICTOR EMMANUEL

BUILDERS OF
UNITED ITALY

BY
RUPERT SARGENT HOLLAND

WITH EIGHT PORTRAITS

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1908

Copyright, 1908,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published, August, 1908

THE QUINN & BODEN CO. PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.

To
That Spirit of Italy
Which Calls to Men in All Lands
Like the Charmed Voice of
Their Own History

There is no history more alternately desperate and hopeful than that of the scattered Italian states in their efforts to form a united nation. Many forces fuse in the progress of such a popular movement, and each force has its own particular spokesman or leader. The prophet and the soldier, the poet and the statesman, each gives his share of genius. Those men who seemed to represent the most potent forces in this history are included here.

[CONTENTS]

ALFIERI

[ALFIERI, THE POET]

Alfieri was more than a great poet, he was the discoverer of a new national life in the scattered states of Italy. Putting aside consideration of his tragedies as literature, no student of the eighteenth century can fail to appreciate his influence over Italian thought. It was as though a people who had forgotten their nationality suddenly heard anew the stories of their common folk-lore. The race of Dante, of Petrarch, and of Tasso spoke again in the words of Alfieri.

It was high time that disunited Italy should find a poet’s voice. There was no vigor, no resolution, no originality from Turin to Naples, people of all classes were sunk in apathy. No wonder that foreign lovers of mediæval Italy turned their eyes away from the seats of so much former glory; there seemed little hope in a people given over to trivial personal enjoyment. There was no liberty of speech or action—sentiment, reason, passion were all measured by the grand-ducal yard-stick.

At about the middle of this artificial eighteenth century, in 1749, Vittorio Alfieri was born at Asti, in Piedmont. His parents were of the upper rank in the close social order of the small kingdom, his father Antonio Alfieri, a man of independent means, who, as one biographer has it, “had never soiled his mind with ambition or his hands with labor.” His mother was the widow of the Marquis of Cacherano, and had two daughters and a son before she married Antonio Alfieri. After the latter’s death, which occurred when Vittorio was scarcely a year old, she married again, and it was this stepfather, the Chevalier Giacinto Alfieri di Magliano, who stood in place of father to Vittorio and his sister, as well as to their older half-brother and sisters. Although these other children were near his own age the boy Vittorio seems to have passed a lonely childhood, driven into unusual solitude by the waywardness of his nature.

While still a child, Alfieri was sent away to the Academy of Turin, the first of those journeys in which he was later to take such delight. He cared little for books or study of any sort, he was over-critical, and yet without the ambition to perfect himself. He spent his time, as he says, in his famous memoirs, in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever he was meant to learn; and he left the Academy not only with no knowledge of what were termed the humanities, but with no interest in any language, speaking a mixed jargon of French and Piedmontese, and reading practically nothing. Knowledge was held in small esteem by all classes at that particular time, and the priests, who formed the teaching class, were at small pains to spread a zeal for learning which they did not share. Alfieri says, “We translated the Lives of Cornelius Nepos; but none of us, perhaps not even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated, nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under what government, nor what any government was!”

In spite of the extraordinary incapacity of his teachers, Alfieri did succeed in learning something, although he was always at great pains to decry his early education. He learned sufficient Latin to translate the Georgics of Virgil into his Italian dialect, and he was fond of reading Goldoni and Metastasio. A little later he passed into a more advanced grade, where he met many foreign youths who had been sent to Turin to study, and where he was allowed some liberty in choosing his own course. He found as much fault with these new conditions as with the old. “The reading of many French romances,” he says, “the constant association with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric.” In place of it he learned and read much French, then the language of polite society.

In such aimless desultory fashion Alfieri passed his boyhood. He hated all restraint, and was continually getting into difficulties with the officers of the Academy. He had more money than was good for him, and spent it in the wildest extravagances whenever the opportunity offered. He bade fair to become a more or less typical member of the Piedmont nobility, perhaps a little more of a free-thinker than most, and considerably more restive. He chafed at the lack of freedom allowed him at the Academy, and on the marriage of his sister to the Count Giacinto Cumiana besought her and the Count to use their influence to have his scholar’s bonds loosened. They succeeded, and Alfieri promptly took advantage of his liberty to join in all the dissipations of the capital, and to gratify his passion for riding. In about a year he became the owner of a stable of eight horses. When his older friends cautioned the boy against his extravagance he answered that he was his own master and intended to do as he chose.

While still at the Academy the youth had sought a position in the army, but very short service as ensign in a militia regiment proved to him that he was as little fond of military restraint as of scholastic. He traveled to Genoa with two boy friends and fell in love with their sister-in-law, a vivacious brunette. He worshiped her from a distance, becoming, as he writes in his ardent Italian, “a victim to all the feelings which Petrarch has so inimitably depicted ... feelings which few can comprehend, and which fewer still ever experienced.” On his return from Genoa he considered himself a great traveler, and spoke as such, only to be laughed at by the English, French, and German boys who had been his classmates. Immediately he was seized with a passion for travel. He was only seventeen years old, and knew that he would not be permitted to travel alone. Fortunately an English teacher was about to set out with two scholars on a journey through Italy, and was willing to have Alfieri join his party. So strict was the court of that day that the King’s consent had to be obtained before the youth could leave the country. Through his brother-in-law’s influence Alfieri obtained the royal permission to go abroad.

The travels had been looked forward to with the greatest excitement. When they were begun Alfieri professed himself utterly bored by almost everything he saw. As one of his biographers says, “He was driven from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness.” Whether this desire to surprise his readers is really the keynote of the first years in his memoirs or not, it would appear that the youth was about as restless and turbulent-minded a creature as could be met with. The further he traveled in Italy the less he liked it; he would not speak the language or read the literature, he looked at an autograph manuscript of Petrarch with supreme indifference, and wished to be mistaken for a Frenchman. Yet this boy was to become, in time, the real reviver of Italian letters.

After a fortnight in Milan the party traveled to Florence by way of Parma, Modena, and Bologna. Neither people, buildings, views, pictures, nor sculpture interested Vittorio; he no sooner reached a city than he was eager to be posting on. Even Florence, later to be his home, did not attract him; the only object he found to admire in the city was Michael Angelo’s tomb at Santa Croce. He must have been the worst traveling companion possible; he hurried his friends from Florence to Rome, and finding nothing there to interest him except St. Peter’s, went on to Naples. Naples was in the midst of a carnival, and Alfieri plunged into its extravagances as though to distract his thoughts from some brooding melancholy. He was presented to the King, went to all the balls and operas, rode, gamed, made one of the fastest set, and yet in the midst of it all was discontented. He wanted to be alone, and finally applied to the King of Piedmont through his minister at Naples for permission to travel by himself. His request was granted, and at nineteen he set out to make what was then the fashionable grand tour. He traveled in state, with plenty of money, and a body servant, and with letters of introduction to the various courts.

It so happened that Alfieri had met certain French actors during a summer holiday, and from talking with them he felt a desire to see something of the French stage. He had no wish to try his own skill at dramatic compositions—indeed his only thought of an occupation at this time was that he should some day enter the diplomatic service—but he was anxious to see something different from the absurdly conventional Italian plays produced by the school which took its name from Metastasio. He went first to Marseilles, where he spent his time between the theater and solitary musing on the seashore. Thence, after a short stay, he journeyed to Paris, full of the keenest anticipations of finding pleasure in that famous city. His memoirs tell us his feelings there. He writes: “The mean and wretched buildings, the contemptible ostentation displayed in a few houses dignified with the pompous appellation of hotels and palaces, the filthiness of the Gothic churches, the truly vandal-like construction of the public theaters at that time, besides innumerable other disagreeable objects, of which not the least disgusting to me was the painted countenances of many very ugly women, far outweighed in my mind the beauty and elegance of the public walks and gardens, the infinite variety of the carriages, the lofty façade of the Louvre, as well as the number of spectacles and entertainments of every kind.” Verily the young Alfieri was either the hardest of all travelers to suit, or the older man, looking back, wished to emphasize the perverseness of his youth.

The Piedmontese Minister presented the young traveler to Louis XV., concerning whom Alfieri wrote, “He received with a cold and supercilious air those who were presented to him, surveying them from head to foot. It seemed as if on presenting a dwarf to a giant he should view him smiling, or perhaps say, ‘Ah! the little animal!’ or if he remained silent his air and manner would express the same derision.” He was not at all attracted by the French court, which he considered very pompous, and was anxious to be out on the highroads again, driving his post-horses. In January, 1768, he crossed the channel and landed at Dover.

England delighted him, he found London far more to his taste than Paris, he was charmed with the country, the large estates, the inns, the roads, the horses, the people, all pleased him. He was particularly struck with the absence of poverty. For a time he even thought of settling there permanently, and years afterwards when he had seen much of all the European countries he said that Italy and England were the two he infinitely preferred as residences.

But of the pleasures of London’s fashionable life the young wanderer soon tired, and for variety turned coachman, and drove a friend with whom he was staying through all the city streets, leaving him wherever he wished, and waiting patiently on the box for his return. “My amusements through the course of the winter,” he wrote, “consisted in being on horseback during five or six hours every morning, and in being seated on the coach-box for two or three hours every evening, whatever might be the state of the weather.” His tastes at this time were closely akin to those of many of his English friends.

Finally he left London and went to Holland. There he met Don Joseph d’Acunha, the Portuguese Ambassador, a man of considerable literary taste, who induced him to read Machiavelli, and first led him to think of trying his literary skill. At The Hague he also fell deeply in love, and, quite according to the fashionable custom of the time, with a young married woman. For the moment his fits of morbidness and continual unrest left him, he contrived constantly to be with the woman he loved, and even followed her and her husband to Spa. A short time afterwards the husband started for Switzerland, and the young wife returned to The Hague. For ten days Alfieri was constantly in her society, then came a message from her husband bidding her follow him. She wrote Alfieri a note saying farewell and sent it to him through D’Acunha after she had left the city. The youth was prostrated and with the violence of his nature planned to kill himself. He complained of illness and had himself bled. When he was alone he tore off the bandages with the idea of bleeding to death. His faithful valet, however, knew the peculiar nature of his master, and entered Alfieri’s room. The bandages were replaced, and the incident ended, although it was long before the young man could recover from the parting with his fair lady. He passed through Belgium to Switzerland, and so on back to Piedmont, still wrapped in recollections, and unable to awaken any lasting interest.

Living with his sister, first in the country, and later in Turin, a short term of peace succeeded in Alfieri’s life. He set himself to reading, and studied with considerable care the popular French authors, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Plutarch, however, became his chief companion. In one of the most characteristic pages of his memoirs we find him writing, “The book of all others which gave me most delight and beguiled many of the tedious hours of winter, was Plutarch. I perused five or six times the lives of Timoleon, Cæsar, Brutus, Pelopidas, and some others. I wept, raved, and fell into such a transport of fury, that if any one had been in the adjoining chamber they must have pronounced me out of my senses. Every time I came to any of the great actions of those celebrated individuals, my agitation was so extreme that I could not remain seated. I was like one beside himself, and shed tears of mingled grief and rage at having been born in Piedmont and at a period and under a government where it was impossible to conceive or execute any great design.” Plutarch first set before him vividly the contrast between the Italy of the past and of his own day. As a result he became dissatisfied with his own inability to win any high distinction.

The winter of his twentieth year found Alfieri still without any definite plans, now studying astronomy, now considering a diplomatic career. With spring he determined again to travel, and in May set off for Vienna. The spirit of unrest had given place to a brooding melancholy. In this sense of the times being out of joint and himself without work to do was born the gradual desire to write something different from and in a more heroic strain than the rigorously conservative dramas of the day. He traveled with Montaigne’s Essays in his pockets, and Montaigne, he says, first taught him to think. He still found difficulty in reading Italian and much preferred foreign authors to those of his own land.

In Vienna Alfieri had a chance to meet the most eminent of then living Italian authors, a man much admired in his generation. The opportunity he declined. “I had seen Metastasio,” he says, “in the gardens of Schönbrunn, perform the customary genuflection to Maria Theresa in such a servile and adulatory manner, that I, who had my head stuffed with Plutarch, and who embellished every theory, could not think of binding myself, either by the ties of familiarity or friendship, with a poet who had sold himself to a despotism which I so cordially detested.” In Berlin he was presented to Frederick the Great, and as he writes “mentally thanked Heaven I was not born his slave. Towards the middle of November I departed from this Prussian encampment, which I regarded with detestation and horror.”

From Berlin the young man went to Denmark, thence to Sweden, thence to Russia. He says, “I approached Petersburg with a mind wound up to an extraordinary pitch of anxiety and expectation. But alas! no sooner had I reached this Asiatic assemblage of wooden huts, than Rome, Genoa, Venice, and Florence rose to my recollections, and I could not refrain from laughing. What I afterwards saw of this country tended still more strongly to confirm my first impression that it merited not to be seen. Everything but their beards and their horses disgusted me so much, that during the six weeks I remained among these savages I wished not to become acquainted with any one, nor even to see the two or three youths with whom I had associated at Turin, and who were descended from the first families of the country. I took no measure to be presented to the celebrated Autocratrix Catherine II., nor did I even behold the countenance of a sovereign who in our days has out-stripped fame.”

A little later he was back in England, and now again he fell in love, this time also with a married woman of rank. With a truly Byronic audacity he defied all the conventions, accompanied the woman everywhere, and became a subject of town scandal. Finally confronted by the husband, he fought a duel with swords in a field near St. James’s Park, his left arm being in a sling at the time as the result of a bit of too daring horsemanship. Alfieri was slightly wounded, and the husband declared himself satisfied. Shortly after the latter sued for divorce, bringing the Italian’s name into the case. The newspapers took up the scandal, and the matter became a cause celèbre. Alfieri was on the point of proposing marriage, when the woman, by her own confessions, told him that such a result was impossible. With his ardor completely cooled and his mind given to the bitterest thoughts he left London, and after short stays in The Hague and Paris journeyed into Spain.

In Paris he had bought the best known Italian authors and at this time commenced to read them, although it was not until much later that he began to appreciate them at their real worth. He did, however, carry them with him on his travels, and gradually learned something at first hand of that great galaxy, Dante, Tasso, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, and Machiavelli. His mind was not yet ripe for any study, even as he traveled in Spain he was still subject to those wild outbreaks of despondency and passion which alternately seemed to seize upon him. He became a creature of chance whims, now he was ready to yield to the quiet contentment of a suitable marriage, now burning with rage against all the customs of society. Morbid ideas continually pressed his footsteps. The atmosphere of a malevolent passion seems almost always surrounding the great tragedies he later penned, and that atmosphere was generated by a nature which from earliest youth had been extraordinarily violent. His temper was wholly ungovernable. One evening in Madrid, as Alfieri’s faithful valet, the companion of all his travels, was curling his hair, he accidentally pulled it so sharply with the tongs that Alfieri winced. Instantly he sprang from his chair, and seizing a heavy candlestick, hurled it at the servant. It struck the man on the temple, and instantly his face was covered with blood. He rushed at his master, but fortunately a young Spaniard who was present came to the rescue, and separated them. Immediately Alfieri was covered with shame. “Had you killed me,” he said to the man, “you would have acted rightly. If you wish, kill me while I sleep to-night, for I deserve it.” The valet took no such reprisal, he had been with his young master long enough to understand the sudden outbursts of his temper, and was content to keep the two blood-stained handkerchiefs that had bandaged his head and show them occasionally to Alfieri as a reminder.

In Lisbon the traveler formed a close friendship with the Abbot of Caluso, whom he called a “true, living Montaigne.” The Abbot tried to interest the young man in literature, induced him to write some verses, and gave him the benefit of his criticism. For a short time the interest in poetry lasted, then it flagged, and again Alfieri felt himself without any purpose. He decided to return home, and in May, 1772, arrived at Turin.

Now he took a house for himself, furnished it elaborately, and made it the headquarters of a youthful society that sought amusement in various forms. Some of them wrote, and Alfieri tried his pen for their amusement, but soon tired of writing as a sport, and gave himself up to other occupations. Continually searching for something to still his restlessness he again fell in love, this time with a woman of rank, some ten years his senior, and of a most unenviable reputation. He became absolutely her slave, worked himself into frenzies on her account, would consider nothing but the happiness of being with her. He fell very ill, but when he recovered found himself as much in love as ever. For two years he lived in this state of obsession, tormented by self-reproach, but unable to rid himself of his own yoke.

Finally he decided to quit Turin and break his fetters. When he was only a short distance on the road to Rome his resolution failed and he returned. Again he resolved to leave the city for a year. The year lasted eight days. He was thoroughly ashamed, disliked being seen in Turin, but could not keep away. He felt finally that he must take one last stand or lose all self-respect and control forever. He had his hair cut so short that he dared not appear in society, and shut himself into his house to read. He could not keep his thoughts on the books, and tried composition. He wrote a sonnet, and sent it to a friend, and received a reply highly praising it. Then he remembered that a year before as he sat watching by the sick bed of the woman who had so charmed him he had lightly outlined a tragedy on the life of Cleopatra, taking his subject from tapestries that hung in the room. He threw himself into the work of writing that tragedy now, and found that interest in it drove all other thoughts away. He wrote rapidly, continually, only stopping when he was completely tired. When those times came, still frightened with the possibility of leaving the house, he had himself tied into a chair. He only allowed himself freedom when he knew he had won self-control. By that time he had finished his tragedy in blank verse called “Cleopatra,” and a short farce called “The Poets,” the latter ridiculing the former. He sent them to a theater in Turin, where they were produced on June 16, 1775, and met with success. The author did not value either play highly himself, and sought to have them withdrawn. He wrote later, comparing these works with those of his contemporaries, “The sole difference which existed between their pieces and mine was that the former were productions of learned incapacity, whereas mine was the premature offspring of ignorance, which promised one day to become something.”

His battle against what he considered a highly unworthy infatuation had restored Alfieri’s self-respect and health, and out of this curious struggle sprang his first real and lasting ambition. “A devouring fire took possession of my soul,” he says, “I thirsted one day to become a deserving candidate for theatrical fame.” The date of that first performance marked a turning point, not only for Alfieri, but for his country’s literature. It was, said the Italian critic, Paravia, “a day and a year of eternal memory not only for the Turinese, but for all Italians; because it was, so to speak, the dawn of the magnificent day which, thanks to Alfieri, was to rise upon Italian tragedy.”

The restless energy which had driven Alfieri across the various European countries now concentrated in an all-pervading determination to become a tragic poet. He launched into that effort with the same unbounded ardor with which he had so frequently before launched into love. He was twenty-seven years of age when he seriously set himself to work to acquire command of Italian so that he might think in the language of his native land rather than in that of France. He described his resources as “a resolute, obstinate, and ungovernable character, susceptible of the warmest affections, among which, by an odd kind of a combination, predominated the most ardent love, and hatred approaching to madness against every species of tyranny; an imperfect and vague recollection of several French tragedies which I had seen represented several years before, but which I had then neither read nor studied; a total ignorance of dramatic rules, and an incapability of expressing myself with elegance and precision in my own language.”

To accomplish his purpose Alfieri now began at the very beginning and took up the study of Italian grammar, and thence made a first-hand acquaintance with all the best of the early Italian writers. He would not allow himself any longer to read French, and tried to break himself of the habit of thinking in that tongue. He moved from town into a small country village in order that nothing might distract him. There he re-wrote for the third time his tragedy of “Cleopatra,” and practised turning into Italian verses the outlines of two tragedies which he had recently written in French. He pored over Tasso, Ariosto, Petrarch, and Dante until he felt that he at last really caught the full spirit of each author’s style, then he tried writing poetry of his own.

His ignorance of Latin continually vexed him, and now he employed a teacher to begin over those lessons he had so thoroughly disliked at school. It was very hard work at first, but he would learn what he now considered essential to his purpose, and after three months’ study of Horace he found that he could read Latin. He took up the other classics and translated some of them into modern Italian for practice in their varied styles.

Turin was too near France to satisfy his new passion for only the purest Italian and so he went to Pisa, and thence to Florence. In the latter city he found that his ideas were at last shaping themselves in the rich and clear Italian he was seeking, he wrote verses which critical friends pronounced at last worthy of the name of poetry, and planned several poetic tragedies. He had worked hard and felt that he needed a little rest. For this purpose he returned to Turin and had the pleasure of entertaining his old friend the Abbot of Caluso there. He, as well as other friends, urged Alfieri to make literature his field. He decided that it was best for him to live in Tuscany, and as he hated to have to ask royal permission each year to allow him to remain away from Piedmont—as was the custom with the nobility—he gave his estates at Asti to his sister, and contented himself with half his former income. Then he moved to Florence, which, except for intervals spent at Rome and Naples, was for a considerable time to be his home.

On his way to Florence Alfieri was obliged to stop at Sarzana, where he chanced upon a copy of Livy, and was so impressed with the story of Virginia and Icilius that he immediately planned a tragedy on the subject. Soon after he reached Pisa, but there he did not dare stay, fearful that he might be involved in a marriage with a young girl whom he had met there before and with whom he says that he had almost fallen in love. He himself contrasts his feelings at that time with those he had entertained when he had first thought of marriage. “Eight years afterwards, my travels through Europe, the love of glory, a passion for study, the necessity for preserving my freedom, in order to speak and write the truth without restraint—all these reasons powerfully warned me that under a despotic government it is sufficiently difficult even to live single, and that no one who reflects deeply will either become a husband or a father; thus I crossed the Arno and arrived at Siena.”

In Siena he met a company of strongly intellectual people, and from one of these, a friend who became a close confidant, he gained the idea of writing a tragedy founded upon the conspiracy of the Pazzi. Here he also wrote the first two books of an essay upon Tyranny, which was printed several years later. Thoroughly absorbed in his literary work Alfieri moved to Florence at the beginning of the winter, and took up his residence there.

At that time there were living in Florence, under the titles of Count and Countess of Albany, Charles Edward, “the Young Pretender” to the English throne, and his wife. The latter, who had been Louisa, Princess of Stolbergh, had been married when nineteen to the Stuart prince, who was considerably her elder. Charles Edward had an unsavory reputation and knew more drunk than sober moments. As a result the young Countess, who was very beautiful and extremely fond of the fine arts and of society, was the object of much romantic pity. When Alfieri came to Florence he found the entire city at the feet of the Countess. Every one condemned the Count’s quarrelsome, tyrannical, libertine nature, every one praised the Countess’s sweet and sunny disposition. Friends offered to introduce Alfieri to the star of Florence, but he declined on the ground that he always shunned women who were the most beautiful and most admired. He could not avoid, however, seeing her in the park and at the theater, and the first sight of her was destined never to be effaced. Thus he writes of her: “The first impression she made on me was infinitely agreeable. Large black eyes full of fire and gentleness, joined to a fair complexion and flaxen hair, gave to her beauty a brilliancy difficult to withstand. Twenty-five years of age, possessing a taste for letters and the fine arts, an amiable character, an immense fortune, and placed in domestic circumstances of a very painful nature, how was it possible to escape where so many reasons existed for loving?”

De Stendhal gives an account of their first meeting, which if inaccurate (it does not appear in Alfieri’s memoirs) is at least characteristic of the man. According to this story Alfieri was presented to the Countess in one of the galleries of Florence, and noticed at the time that the lady was much interested in a portrait on the walls of Charles XII. She told the poet that she admired the costume exceedingly. Two days later Alfieri appeared in Florence dressed exactly like the portrait of the Swedish King, and so presented himself before the Countess. The act was quite in keeping with the poet’s nature.

Alfieri made a determined effort to fight against the passion he had cause to fear, and made a hurried journey to Rome. He could not stay there, and returned to Florence, stopping at Siena to see his friend Gandellini, to whom he spoke of the Countess, and who did not counsel him against giving way to the fascination.

On his return to Florence he acknowledged that he was deeply in love. This love, however, he felt ennobled him, and instead of causing him to give up his work, continually inspired him to new literary heights. He wrote, “I soon perceived that the object of my present attachment, far from impeding my progress in the pursuit of useful knowledge, or deranging my studies, like the frivolous woman with whom I was formerly enamoured, urged me on by her example to everything dignified and praiseworthy. Having once learned to know and appreciate so rare and valuable a friend, I yielded myself up entirely to her influence.” From the commencement of this new affection, the best and most lasting of his life, date the finest works of his genius.

There had been long delays in settling Alfieri’s estate in Piedmont, and arranging that he might live in Tuscany, but the presence of the Countess urged him imperatively to remain in Florence. When the business arrangements were finally at an end he found it would be necessary for him to curtail his former expensive style of living. This he did, giving up his horses, all his servants, except a valet and cook, and most of his personal luxuries. Books were the only expense he indulged in, he acquired gradually a very large and choice library. He took a small house, and devoted himself to his dramas, seeing as much as he could in leisure moments of the beautiful Countess. During these three quiet years he wrote his tragedies “Virginia,” “Agemennone,” “Don Garzia,” “Maria Stuarda,” and “Oreste,” a poem on the death of Duke Alexander, killed by Lorenzino de’ Medici, had rewritten his drama of “Filippo,” and partly prepared the tragedies “Timoleone,” “Ottavia,” and “Rosmunda.” All of these works are built on the classic Grecian model, and flame with hatred of tyranny, and burn with civic virtue. In that they show their kinship to the author’s times. De Sanctis, always a brilliant critic, says: “The situations that Alfieri has chosen in his tragedies have a visible relation to the social state, to the fears, and to the hopes of his own time. It is always resistance to oppression, of man against man, of people against tyrant.... In the classicism of Alfieri there is no positive side. It is an ideal Rome and Greece, outside of time and space, floating in the vague ... which his contemporaries filled up with their own life.”

At about the end of the dramatist’s third year of residence in Florence, the ill-treatment of the Countess of Albany by her husband caused her friends, and chief among them Alfieri, to plan for her release from such servitude. To this end they secured her entrance first into a convent at Florence, and then, with the consent of the Grand Duke of Tuscany and the Count’s own brother the Cardinal of York, her removal to Rome. So afraid were her friends lest the Count should effect a rescue that they surrounded her carriage with a body of horsemen as she left Florence, and Alfieri rode on the coach box until she was well on her road.

While the Countess had been in Florence, Alfieri had worked assiduously there; now that she was gone he found composition impossible, and after a very short interval went to Naples, planning to wait there until he should learn what the Countess would do. It was not long before it became apparent that the courts of Europe had taken up the wife’s cause against her husband. The Pope gave her a pension and approved of her taking apartments in the house of her brother-in-law. The court of France gave her the pension which the Count had previously indignantly declined as being insufficient for his position. Alfieri learned at last that the Countess was living in entire independence of her husband, and after a further stay of a month in Naples in order to avoid possible scandal he moved to Rome, and took up his residence there.

With this new settled existence he began to write again, and produced at this time “Saul,” his fourteenth tragedy, and one of his finest works. He took infinite pains with all his dramas, planned them again and again, wrote version after version, and then selected the forms he preferred after careful judgment, polished them line by line and word by word until he was satisfied. He wished to try the effect of his characters upon an audience, and had himself acted, together with some of his friends, his play of “Antigone.” He found he had not mistaken his ability as a dramatist. At about the same time he published part of his works, sending four dramas to the printer. Their publication excited immediate and flattering attention. His life in Rome was the most delightful he had yet known. His house was a pleasant villa near the Baths of Diocletian. Here he wrote and studied in the morning. Later in the day he went for long rides through the neighboring country, and the evenings he spent with the woman who had become his chief inspiration.

In time, however, the poet’s visits to the Countess became the subject of unfavorable comment, and the Cardinal, her brother-in-law, brought the matter to the attention of the Papal Court. Realizing the delicacy of the situation, Alfieri reluctantly decided that he must quit Rome, and in May, 1783, he set out again as a wanderer, his ambition lost, his life offering him no further interests.

As in early youth he now took to rapid traveling for solace, carrying on at the same time a continual correspondence with the Countess. He wrote a few sonnets, but found that his mind was too unsettled to allow him to engage in any more lengthy labors. He went to France, and then to England, and in each country visited scenes which the impetuosity of his youth had neglected. Horses again made their appeal to him in London, and he bought fourteen, “as many horses as he had written tragedies,” he states. With these horses he soon returned to Turin, and made a short visit to his mother, whom he had not seen for a long time. When he left her he went to Piacenza, and here he heard that the Countess had at last been released from the restraint under which she had lived at Rome, and that as her health was delicate she had gone to Baden. He was in two minds as to his course, the thought of possible calumny to her bade him refrain from going to Baden at once, and he tried to content himself in Siena with his old friend Gandellini. The continual interchange of letters gradually wore away his resolution, and at last the time came when he could keep from her no longer. August 4, 1784, he set out to join her and within a fortnight felt his old joy return. Immediately his thoughts grew fertile, he began to write again as he had not done since he had quitted her in Rome. There was no question but that her presence acted as a continual inspiration to his genius.

To this period of new happiness belonged the dramas of “Agide,” “Sofonisba,” and “Mirra.” The plot of the latter came to him as he was reading the speech of Mirra to her nurse in the “Metamorphoses” of Ovid, and was written in the first heat of his emotion at the woman’s words. He was somewhat in doubt as to the success of a play written on such a subject, but it was hailed as a triumph at its first presentation some years later, and made a remarkable impression on Byron and on Madame de Staël, and was considered by most critics as Ristori’s finest impersonation.

After two months the Countess had to return to Italy, and Alfieri’s gloom at the separation was further increased by the news of the death of his friend Gandellini. He went to Siena, but found that city lonely without his friend, and passed the winter in Pisa. He did a great amount of reading, repolished his later dramas, and prepared new volumes of them for the press. When winter ended he spent another two months of summer with the Countess at Colmar, and then again they separated. This time he resolved to work unremittingly, and did so until his health failed and he had to rest. At about the same time the Countess decided to leave Italy permanently, and at length Alfieri, towards the close of 1786, joined her and went with her to Paris. He writes in his memoirs of this journey into France, “This country which had always proved extremely disagreeable to me, as much on account of my own character, as the manners of the people, now appeared a perfect elysium.” There are many glimpses to be had of this new life in the French capital. Montanari recounts how the Marquis Pindemonte, himself a dramatist, used each evening to take an omelette soufflé in the Countess’s room, while Alfieri sat in the chimney corner sipping his chocolate. Under such peaceful auspices the poet spent many months in a critical preparation of all his works for new publication.

In February, 1788, word reached the Countess that her husband had died in Rome, and it would appear that she was soon afterwards married to Alfieri, although in the will of the latter she is referred to as the Countess of Albany and not as his wife. His memoirs do not once speak of her as his wife, but from the date of her husband’s death their life together was uninterrupted. It is now generally assumed that they were privately married about this time.

For three years the two lived quietly in Paris, spending their summers and autumns at a new home Alfieri had acquired in Alsace. During these years he printed two editions of his works, supervised their sales, and wrote his remarkably entertaining memoirs, which were finished up to May, 1790. The end of the three years found Paris on the brink of the great Revolution.

Alfieri saw the black clouds gathering on the French horizon, but stayed on in the desire to complete the printing of his works. He was in turn amazed, alarmed, and disgusted at the succeeding events in the establishment of a republic. The principles proclaimed by these so-called destroyers of tyrants were not the principles of his own freedom-loving heart, nor those of any of his heroic characters. He writes, “My heart was torn asunder on beholding the holy and sublime cause of liberty betrayed by self-called philosophers,—so much did I revolt at witnessing their ignorance, their folly, and their crimes; at beholding the military power, and the insolence and licentiousness of the civilians stupidly made the basis of what they termed political liberty, that I henceforth desired nothing more ardently than to leave a country which, like a lunatic hospital, contained only fools or incurables.”

Circumstances, however, conspired to keep them in Paris, the Countess was dependent upon France for two-thirds of her income, Alfieri was finishing the printing of his dramas. The hour came when Alfieri determined that further delay would be more than foolhardy, and so, on August 18, 1792, having obtained passports with great difficulty, he drove with the Countess to the city barrier. A dramatic scene followed. The National Guards found the passports correct, and would have let the travelers pass, but at the same moment a crowd of drunken revelers broke from a neighboring cabaret, and attracted by the well-laden carriage, proceeded to stop its passage, while they debated whether they should stone it or set it on fire. The Guards remonstrated, but the revelers complained bitterly that people of wealth should leave the city. Alfieri lost all prudence, and jumping from his carriage, seized the passports from the man who held them and, as he himself tells the incident, “Full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my passion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook my passport in my hand and shouted at the top of my voice, ‘Look! Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale, red hair; I am he; look at me; I have my passport, and I have had it legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pass, and by Heaven, we will pass!’”

The crowd was surprised, and before they had recovered Alfieri and the Countess had driven past the barriers and were safely on their way. They had left Paris none too soon. Two days later the same authorities that had granted the passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that Alfieri had left behind in Paris and declared both the Countess and Alfieri refugee aristocrats. The fact that they were both foreigners appeared to be of no importance. It was well that they had gone. The Countess was too illustrious a personage to have escaped for long the fury of the fast-gathering mob, and had she been lost Alfieri would have shared her fate.

Florence thenceforth became the home of the Countess and of Alfieri. He wrote desultorily, commenting upon what he had seen in France, but for the most part devoted himself to a study of the classics. In 1795, when he was forty-six years of age, he started to learn Greek, and was so fired with the desire that in a short time he had added an intimate knowledge of Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to that he already had of the Latin authors. He was so much interested in the “Alcestis” of Euripides that he wrote an original drama based on the same theme. He was described at this time as of a tall and commanding figure, with a face of intelligence, and the look of one born to command, rather than obey. His forehead was broad and lofty; his red hair fell in thick masses around it.

The restless youth had changed to a methodical, studious man, he arranged his day by rule, and followed that rule exactly. Only one event disturbed him, and that was the occupation of Florence by French troops. He had distrusted the French while he lived among them, now when they came to hold Florence in subjection his hatred of tyranny bade him despise them. He refused to receive the call of the French general who, having read his works, was anxious to meet him. On the correspondence which passed between them in reference to this matter Alfieri wrote, “Dialogue between a lion in a cage, and his crocodile guardian.”

When he had fled from France he had been compelled to leave some of his printed works behind him, and he was now in fear lest their appearance and eager appeal for liberty should seem to ally him with the Revolutionary cause. Above all things he condemned the French Revolution. To avoid this possibility he now advertised in the Italian papers a disclaimer, warning the public against any edition of his writings except such as he himself issued. With this formal announcement he had to be content.

Alfieri had determined to write no more tragedies, and turned to composition of comedies, of which he had six nearly completed when his health failed. He rested for a time and then resumed his methodical life of study and work. He was advised to give himself more recreation, but was too obstinate to adopt any plan but his own. His health gave way again, and neglecting the physician’s advice, he tried to minister to his own illness. Gradually he grew weaker, and on October 3, 1803, he died. He was buried in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, and his monument, carved by Canova, rises between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli. An inscription states by whom the memorial was erected. “Louisa, Princess of Stolbergh, Countess of Albany, to Vittorio Alfieri of Asti, 1810.” In 1824 she was buried in Santa Croce.

In his will Alfieri left everything to the Countess. Their love had grown deeper with time. She wrote to a friend, “You know, by experience, what it is to lose a person with whom we have lived for twenty-six years, who has never given us a moment of displeasure, whom we have always adored, respected, and venerated.” Each, tormented alone, had found happiness finally in their united life.

What was Alfieri’s part in the growth of that spirit which was preparing to set Italy free? Why did Mazzini later point him out as one of the great sources of inspiration for his “Young Italy”? We must remember that literature and the drama are more closely related to Italian public opinion than they are with us, that the appearance of a new book or play is often a vital subject to a ministry. What the people read they felt, and it was Alfieri who first showed them the immorality of national servitude. One of his best critics has said that when Alfieri first turned his glance toward the Italian stage, it presented anything but a hopeful aspect. “The degradation of a people enslaved under a foreign yoke, and without political life, could not fail to make itself felt in the theater as in the more extended arena of public affairs. No high effort of mind could be born amid such circumstances. A stage without authors soon ceases to have actors. When actors and authors both are wanting an audience will not easily be found. Thus it was, thus it had been in Italy through many troubled years. The opera,—the seductive, but enervating opera,—carried to great perfection by Metastasio, was almost alone in possession of the popular taste.... Alfieri’s first thought was to improve the taste of his countrymen, by blending the amusement they were accustomed to with something better.... Instead of attempting reform by easy stages, he determined to attempt everything at once.... It was something more than an improvement of the stage that he attempted; it was the improvement of his countrymen; the regeneration of his country!... Throughout nearly all his tragedies and his prose works, the leading idea by which he was animated stood plainly out. Several pieces he specially calls tragedies of liberty. They well deserve the name. He never tired in his denunciations of tyranny, in his invectives against oppression. These were themes upon which the more he spoke, the more eloquent he became.”

The dramas themselves, built in strict accordance with the three unities of classic taste, may seem strangely stiff and unemotional to us, but they carried an immense appeal to the Italian of the last century. They spoke a new voice and stirred a new spirit in their hearers. The voice once heard, the spirit once born, the new idea grew rapidly. Within a few years after Alfieri’s death eighteen editions of his works had passed through the press. Two great theaters, one at Milan and one at Bologna, were built by men eager to present his tragedies. The influence of his writings was tremendous; the minds of Italians from Piedmont to Sicily were stirred to a higher pitch than they had been for many centuries.

Alfieri’s character had many defects, at best his life was unmoral, but having regard to the society into which he was born and the early training he received, more was scarcely to be looked for. He was passionate, reckless, and untutored in all self-control, yet he harnessed himself to a work which possessed his fancy and in its service became the devotee of study and control. Like his life his writings lack peace and broad philosophy, but on the other hand they gain from his peculiar nature a certain domineering force. Giuseppe Arnaud in his criticism on the patriotic poets of Italy says, “Whoever should say that Alfieri’s tragedies, in spite of many eminent merits, were constructed on a theory opposed to grand scenic effects and to one of the two bases of tragedy, namely, compassion, would certainly not say what was far from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain the dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasmas with which the Italian air was infected. He will still remain that poet who aroused his country from its dishonorable slumber, and inspired its heart with intolerance of servile conditions and with regard for its dignity. Up to this time we had bleated and he roared.”

Let me only add the striking words of his fellow countryman, the gifted poet-statesman Massimo d’Azeglio. “In fact,” he wrote, “one of the merits of that proud heart was to have found Italy Metastasian and left it Alfierian; and his first and greatest merit was, to my thinking, that he discovered Italy, so to speak, as Columbus discovered America, and initiated the idea of Italy as a nation. I place this merit far beyond that of his verses and his tragedies.”

Alfieri reminded Italians that they had a native voice.

MANZONI

[MANZONI, THE MAN OF LETTERS]

The position of Manzoni in modern Italian life and literature is doubly interesting, both because his work in poetry and the drama marks the vital turning point in the historic battle of Classicism with Romanticism, and because his romance “I Promessi Sposi” is the greatest achievement in all Italian letters in the field of the novel. Walter Scott gave the country north of Tweed a history in the “Waverley Novels,” and Alessandro Manzoni’s writing a little later, at a time when Scott’s work was a great factor in European literature, gave Italy a history in the same sense. The inestimable service that the Waverley Novels did Scotland “I Promessi Sposi” did the disrupted states of Italy.

The spirit of the French Revolution was all-engrossing, as subversive of the old religions, philosophies, and literatures, as it was of the old politics. It represented the actual thoughts of the men of that era, but it developed so rapidly and fell into such excesses that its downfall was sudden and complete. Then the reaction set in, which, as De Sanctis in his history of the movement says, was “as rapid and violent as the revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red.”

The same critic goes on to show that there were at this period two great philosophic principles, materialism and skepticism, and that in opposition to them there rose a spirituality which was carried to the heights of idealism. This spirituality approached the mysticism of mediæval days. “To the right of nature,” he says, “was opposed the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual rights the State, to liberty authority and order. The middle ages returned in triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the target of all offense, became the center of every philosophical investigation, the banner of all social and religious progress.... The criterions of art were changed. There was a pagan art and a Christian art, where highest expression was sought in the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the vague, the indefinite, in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an inspiration towards the infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore melancholy.... To Voltaire and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De Staël, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the Sacred Hymns of the young Manzoni.”

This spirit of idealism became the incentive for the new school of Romance in literature and the drama, in contrast to the drab materialism of the Revolutionary age. This school of Romance is not, however, to be considered as diametrically opposed to the Classical School, for they had much in common, and the contrast between them lay not so much in the spirit which animated them as in the strict regard of Classicism for the time-hallowed unities of time, place, and action, and the willingness of the Romantic School to sacrifice all these for freedom of movement and effect. The new school wished to find its poems in the experiences of men of that day, to write its dramas about any comedy or tragedy without regard to their classic form, it wished freedom to grow as its own spirit might dictate. In Germany and England great Romanticists were ripening into power, Goethe and Burger, Scott and Byron were being widely read in Italy, and the dramas of both Schiller and Shakespeare were continually translated and reproduced in Italian verse. The restoration of the Austrians and Bourbons after the Napoleonic downfall made any chance to speak political truths impossible, even in the half-veiled militant form used earlier by Alfieri. The Romantic School therefore, confined in its modern scope, turned backward, became retrospective, and sought its outlet in the glories of that mediæval world which had been so nearly akin in spirit to the modern sentiment. It turned from recent atheistic tendencies to a mood of great devotion, from lax morality to a high degree of upright conduct, from the regard of liberty as the greatest good to that of responsibility to mankind as the goal. Only distantly and secondarily political, this Romantic movement was first of all moral, and taught Italians that in order to be good citizens they must be good men first. As in all literary history the movement had a deep philosophic meaning, and this sense of moral responsibility was at the base of all Manzoni’s great creative efforts.

First of all, then, the literary movement which succeeded the Revolutionary era in Italy was idealistic as compared with the materialism of the days of the Napoleonic occupation, and secondly, it was Romantic in contradistinction to the Classicism of the earlier times. Greek and Roman themes for artistic expression were abandoned for the stories of national mediævalism, the Papacy became the center of its poetic aspiration, and its spirit, though highly ardent, was far more truly modern than that of Classicism had been. Our former critic, De Sanctis, says that in this new movement religion “is no longer a creed, it is an artistic motive.... It is not enough that there are saints, they must be beautiful: the Christian idea returns as art.... Providence comes back to the world, the miracle reappears in story, hope and prayer revive, the heart softens, it opens itself to gentle influences.... Manzoni reconstructs the ideal of the Christian Paradise and reconciles it with the modern spirit. Mythology goes, the classic remains; the eighteenth century is denied, its ideas prevail.”

Manzoni stood first for that new movement which opposed morality to license in national development, secondly for the temper which derided the classic limits of the three unities and held that a purely national event was as suitable for the purpose of artistic representation as the stories of classic history. In addition to this he first adopted that form of the Romantic spirit which was rising so rapidly into use in England in the novels of Walter Scott, in France in the writings of Victor Hugo and Lamennais, and in Germany in those of Goethe and Schiller, and gave Italy the result in his great novel of Italian life and history. For each of these reasons Manzoni represents a force potent in upbuilding Italian character and strengthening it at the time of its great crisis. Though he drew suggestions from abroad, he made his work Italian, and thoroughly Italian. “If,” says De Sanctis, “the Romantic School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes palpitating under the mediæval robe; the least allusion, the remotest meanings, were caught by the public, which was in the closest accord with the writers. The middle ages were no longer treated with historical and positive intention; they became the garments of our ideals, the transparent expression of our hopes.”

Alessandro Manzoni was born in Milan, March 7, 1785, at about the time when Alfieri was accomplishing his greatest work. His father, Pietro Manzoni, belonged to the nobility, and bore the title of Count, a title which Alessandro, when he inherited it at an early age, refused to adopt, and continued to refuse to use during his whole life. His mother was the daughter of Beccaria, a man well known throughout Europe for his studies of political economy and criminology, and whose treatise entitled “Crimes and Punishments” was greatly admired in the Voltairean circles of France. Alessandro’s mother was a remarkably intelligent woman, with a fineness of nature which was inherited by her son, and which kept him unspoiled and simple through a life unusually acclaimed and applauded.

His earliest youth was spent among the hills of Galbiate, according to the custom of wealthy Lombard families, to send their children to the mountains in order to give them rugged health. The boy was in care of a woman who was successively his nurse and governess, and who taught him to read and stirred his interest in the legends and history of the neighboring countryside. When still a small boy he was sent to the church college of the Frati Lomaschi, education being then entirely in charge of ecclesiastics. He seems to have been in no wise an apt student, the close confinement, the strict discipline, and the dry manner of teaching subjects which were all of an eminently classical nature combining to dull his spirits and interest. Stories are current in Milan of Manzoni’s inability to learn, almost bordering on stupidity, but such stories are popular of men who have later shown great ability, and deserve little credence. Suffice it that he showed no great aptitude for learning at the school of the Frati Lomaschi, nor even later at the Collegio dei Nobili. At the latter he did, however, meet the poet Vincenzo Monti, a man well known throughout Italy, who had had for patrons the Cardinals Borghese and Braschi, a poet and dramatist whose pen was too apt to serve the political party in power, but who had achieved wide popularity, and whose poems were praised by critics as diverse-minded as Byron and Napoleon Bonaparte. Monti met the young Manzoni when he was on a visit to the college, and took an interest in him. Alessandro admired the poet, and it was perhaps this acquaintance which first actively interested him in literature as a pursuit. The meeting of the boy Walter Scott with Robert Burns is a parallel in Scottish literary annals.

In 1805, when he was twenty, Alessandro’s father died and the youth left the Collegio dei Nobili, and returned for a time to his mother. After a period of home life he was sent to the University of Pavia, the best-known of Lombard universities. His stay here was short. His mother, now a widow for several years, was advised to go to France for her health, and the close bonds which united mother and son would not allow of such a distant separation. Alessandro left the University and went with his mother to Auteuil, which was then a fashionable watering place where the beau monde of French art and letters gathered. Here and at Paris he met the leading thinkers of the time, Volney, Cabanis, De Tracy, Fauriel, and Condorcet, all of whom were interested in the young man as the grandson of Beccaria and because of his own originality of thought. These men called themselves idealogues, and claimed to have shaken off all the conventions of the previous centuries. As a student Manzoni had been an extremely liberal Catholic, and was usually considered by strict critics a follower of Voltaire. At Paris and Auteuil, however, he met so many men of the then prevalent atheistic mode of thought that his own interest in his family religion was quickened and he emerged from his friendship with such men as Cabanis and Condorcet a more pronounced churchman than he had been before. It was characteristic of him to cling tenaciously to those precedents and standards which had so long survived in his own country. His religion, however, was soon to become more to him than a field for philosophic speculation, for in 1810 he married Louise Henriette Blondel, daughter of a banker of Geneva, who, herself a convert from Protestantism to the Church of Rome, became most ardent in the church of her adoption. She soon brought Alessandro to her own enthusiastic view, and from the date of his marriage his philosophy never varied. Henriette Manzoni possessed rare beauty, and was long remembered in Milan “for her fresh blond head, and her blue eyes, her lovely eyes,” and the young husband was ideally happy with his bride. He had by now determined to try his skill at composition, and set himself as models the three men whose fame was then at its height in Italy, Alfieri, Vincenzo Monti, and Ugo Foscolo.

His bride had brought Manzoni a country seat as well as considerable property, and so he settled in the country and studied to perfect his style in writing. His first works were a series of Sacred Hymns, written directly under the influence of the renewed religious faith attendant on his marriage. These were published in 1815, and were at once noticed as poems alike remarkable for deep religious feeling and great beauty of expression. Appearing as they did at a time when religion was being bitterly assailed, churchmen looked upon the young poet as a distinct acquisition to their forces. Manzoni was not, however, even then a believer in the temporal power of the Pope. He said to Madame Colet, the author of “L’Italie des Italiens,” “I bow humbly to the Pope, and the Church has no more respectful son; but why confound the interests of earth and those of heaven? The Roman people are right in asking their freedom—there are hours for nations, as for governments, in which they must occupy themselves, not with what is convenient, but with what is just. Let us lay hands boldly upon the temporal power, but let us not touch the doctrine of the Church. The one is as distinct from the other as the immortal soul from the frail and mortal body. To believe that the Church is attacked in taking away its earthly possessions is a real heresy to every true Christian.”

This was the same view which Manzoni held throughout his life, and which, stated in his quoted words, gives the position taken by the most enlightened men of the Nationalist party in those later days when the question of the temporal power of the Pope became vital for Italy. What the Sacred Hymns showed was that Manzoni looked to the Church as the center of all true aspiration and religion rather than to philosophic theories as the safeguard of morals.

His next production carried him a step further in advance of his contemporaries, and marked him as the leader of the Romantic School. In 1819 he wrote his first tragedy, published the following year under the title “Il Conte di Carmagnola.” The subject-matter was the career of Carmagnola, a celebrated condottiere of the Middle Ages, and the dramatic form was entirely distinct from that classic construction which had so long tyrannized over the drama. In an introduction he explains his departure from the classic unities of time, place, and action, and gives his reasons for believing that the dramatist should be free to choose his own subject and to treat it in such fashion as shall seem to him best to express his idea. The Elizabethan dramatists had long before discarded the law of the unities in England, and had carried their plots over such courses of time and place as they pleased, and so had Schiller in Germany, but in Italy the law had been absolute from the time of Tasso to that of Alfieri. Eight years after Manzoni’s “Carmagnola” appeared, Victor Hugo brought on the great dramatic war in France with his “Cromwell,” and from the date of his ultimate triumph in Paris dates the downfall of the Classicists and the full glory of the Romanticists.

In Italy Manzoni’s step was violently attacked and defended. Conservatives opposed him, but the younger element immediately acclaimed him as their leader. The following year, 1821, he wrote his great ode on the death of Napoleon, which had occurred on May 5th, at St. Helena, and the news of which had greatly affected all Europe. The ode, entitled “Il Cinque Maggio,” was remarkable for great dignity, a deep and profound estimate of Napoleon’s genius, and a tribute to his colossal fame which even the French recognized as the fittest expression of poetic power. The ode was at once translated into German by Goethe, and into English by Gladstone and the Earl of Derby. It immediately placed him at the head of the new school of continental poets.

Very soon afterwards, in 1822, Manzoni wrote his second tragedy, “Adelchi,” a drama of the war between the Lombards and Charlemagne. It followed the lines of the Carmagnola, repeating the break from classical precedents, and establishing the value of the Romantic School. Both dramas were acted, but without success. The Carmagnola, when it was given at Florence in 1828, had the open support of the court to offset the attacks of the old school, and yet did not win even a mildly enthusiastic hearing. The Adelchi was tried with a similar result at Turin.

In spite of their ill reception on the stage, both of Manzoni’s dramas were immensely popular with readers, and, although based on incidents remote in point of time, both thrilled with a patriotism that stirred the hearts of all Italians. Mr. Howells says of the tragedies in his “Modern Italian Poets,” “The time of the Carmagnola is the fifteenth century; that of the Adelchi the eighth century; and however strongly marked are the characters,—and they are very strongly marked, and differ widely from most persons of Italian classic tragedy in this respect,—one still feels that they are subordinate to the great contests of elements and principles for which the tragedy furnishes a scene. In the Carmagnola the pathos is chiefly in the feeling embodied by the magnificent chorus lamenting the slaughter of Italians by Italians at the battle of Maclodio; in the Adelchi we are conscious of no emotion so strong as that we experience when we hear the wail of the Italian people, to whom the overthrow of their Longobard oppressors by the Franks is but the signal of a new enslavement. This chorus is almost as fine as the more famous one in the Carmagnola, both are incomparably finer than anything else in the tragedies and are much more dramatic than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the poet shows his dramatic strength, and whenever he speaks abstractly for country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits no doubt of his greatness.”

Manzoni’s greatest work, however, was yet to appear, for admirable as were his poems and inspiring as were his heroic dramas it was as a novelist that he was to reach his pinnacle of fame. It was also as a novelist that he was to become one of the men who directly created that national spirit which made modern Italy. Italy had had many poets, but no great novelist since Boccaccio. Fortunately Manzoni had not been confined to the literature of his own land, but had studied Goethe, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and Scott, and drew his inspiration largely from them. He owed much to the English novel, and especially to the author of “Waverley,” a man whom he much admired, and who fully returned his admiration.

“I Promessi Sposi” appeared in 1825 and created a tremendous impression. Scott said that it was the greatest historical novel ever written, and Goethe said, “It satisfies us like perfectly ripe fruit.” It was the first and greatest Italian romance, and it awakened an interest throughout Europe in Italian history. The scene is laid in Milan under the harsh Spanish rule of the Seventeenth Century, and the reader is carried through the story of war and famine, and the great plague. Its merits are hard to exaggerate, the beauty of its descriptions and the accuracy of its history, the intense interest of its characters, a galaxy that embraces every walk of life, the truth of its philosophy are equally remarkable. The universal feelings of humanity pulse through its pages; as Dr. Garnett says of it, “as a picture of human nature the book is above criticism; it is just the fact, neither more nor less.”

Victor Hugo in “Les Miserables” wrote a book which appealed to the innate democracy of man, but Manzoni in “I Promessi Sposi” made the same appeal without having recourse to the Frenchman’s use of the grotesque and gigantic. Through the whole of the latter novel runs the note of a profound sympathy with the poor and the unfortunate, a note which is perhaps stronger in this book than in any romance ever written. It is the work of a great mind, fully alive to every sensibility and sympathy, accurate in its judgments, and to which, in the ancient words, nothing human is foreign.

Cardinal and priest, brigand and simple hero, grande dame and the lovely girl whose hand promised in marriage gives part title to the book, are each perfect in their way, and bring the characteristics of a past century vividly before the present. Goethe pointed out the too great prominence of the historical element, but the very careful attention paid by Manzoni to the accuracy of his setting must add to the sense of reality which he so completely gains. The novel was rapidly translated into all modern languages, and at once created a school of historical novelists in Italy.

To us who have seen the romantic movement give place in turn to that of realism, it is difficult to understand what Scott and Hugo, Goethe and Manzoni did for the men of the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. They made people feel as they had not felt before the wide scope of existence and the importance of the individual. Literature had been a matter of form and convention, of classic model, of purely aristocratic vision. The new movement was part of that same impulse which was demanding constitutions of kings and bringing the middle classes into political prominence. It was an awakening of public spirit which had slept soundly through several centuries. Voltaire and Rousseau, Alfieri and Foscolo had sounded the first notes of a new intellectual renaissance, and now Hugo and Manzoni went further and stepped boldly out from all classic restraints.

Although “I Promessi Sposi” is more widely known and more highly regarded than any Italian book, except the Divine Comedy of Dante, Manzoni’s personality impressed itself but little upon his age. He had not the fighting nature of Victor Hugo, nor the mental unrest of Byron, two of his great contemporaries. He preferred the retirement of his farm to the excitements of Milan, and although he was always an ardent advocate of Italian unity and freedom he took but small part in the great events that soon delivered Lombardy from Austria. After the appearance of “I Promessi Sposi” he wrote little more. “Formerly,” he said, “the muse came after me, now I should have to go after her.” His quiet life laid him open to the charge of an indifferent patriotism, but those who knew him best understood that such an accusation was bitterly untrue.

When the Austrian government returned to Milan the members of the Lombard nobility were required to write their names in an official register or forfeit their titles. Manzoni preferred to lose his claim as a patrician, and later refused a decoration, saying that he had made a vow never to wear any order of knighthood. He afterwards offered the same excuse to Victor Emmanuel when the latter wished to decorate him. He was elected a Senator in 1860, when the first National Assembly met, and went to Turin to take his seat, but soon after retired to the privacy of his own home on Lake Maggiore. Here he entertained many great guests, among them Cavour and D’Azeglio, to whom he was warmly attached. His life flowed on an even current, the existence of a philosophic spirit interested as an observer rather than as an actor.

Henriette Manzoni died in 1833, and in 1837 he married Teresa Borri, widow of Count Stampa. He saw his children grow up about him and go to take their places in the world. Gradually he saw the cause of national freedom win its way, and the King to whom he was so devoted unite the scattered states under one crown. He saw the fall of the temporal power of the Pope, and with it the consummation of his hopes. In 1873, at the age of eighty-eight, he died, universally mourned and revered. A Milanese journal said: “After the confessor left the room Manzoni called his friends and said to them, ‘When I am dead, do what I did every day; pray for Italy—pray for the king and his family—so good to me!’ His country was the last thought of this great man dying, as in his whole long life it had been his most vivid and constant affection.”

It was nearly fifty years since his last important work had appeared, but during that long half century of inactivity Manzoni’s fame had grown steadily. His romance had passed through one hundred and eighteen editions in Italian alone. Milan decreed him a state funeral, and representatives of all European countries appeared at the old Lombard capital with addresses from their sovereigns. It has been said that Manzoni’s death evoked a greater unanimity of sentiment than has been called forth by that of any other great author of modern times, except possibly by that of Sir Walter Scott. Even those who had criticised Manzoni had always spoken their opinions in a spirit of reverence. He was regarded as the great guiding figure in the course of the new national literature.

A singularly uneventful life for one of the great builders of a nation, uneventful even for that of a scholar or poet. Moreover the roll of his works is small numerically, comprising his Sacred Hymns, the two dramas, the Ode on Napoleon, the single novel, and in addition only a few essays, the “Innominata” or Column of Infamy, an historical note to “I Promessi Sposi,” an essay on the Romantic School, called “Letters on Romanticism,” and one entitled “Letters on the Unity of Time and Place,” the purpose of which was to show that the unity of action is the only unity of importance to the dramatist. The bulk of his work was not great, but each expression of it was masterful in its way, the Hymns true poetry as well as deep religious sentiment, the Ode considered the finest ode in all Italian poetry, the dramas pulsing with life and feeling, the novel unsurpassed. These were the literary values of his work, but these in themselves would not account for Manzoni’s influence on his times. He was a moral and political force, showing the men of his day that nations can only hope for liberty and peace when the citizens respect the law and virtue. A generation that had lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era needed some one to lead them back to moral sanity, and this was the greatest of Manzoni’s works.

Like Gioberti, like D’Azeglio, like Victor Emmanuel, Manzoni was a staunch Catholic as well as a true Italian. A close friend, Signor Bonghi, said of him: “He had two faiths, one in the future of Catholicism, another in the future of Italy, and the one, whatever was said, whatever happened, never disturbed the other. In anxious moments, when the harmony between the two was least visible, he expected it the most, and never allowed his faith in one or the other to be shaken. Rome he wished to be the abode of the King; Rome he wished also to be the abode of the Pope. Obedient to the Divine Authority of the Pontificate, no one passed a more correct judgment upon its civil character, or defended with more firmness, when speaking upon the subject, the right of the State.”

That he was the poet of resignation, as Monnier declared, is disproved by his dramas and his novel. The martial lyrics of the plays burn with a spirit only too evidently fired by the contemporary subjection of Italy to Austria and France. Take for example the first and last verses of one of the lyrics in the Adelchi, as rendered into English by Miss Ellen Clarke:

“From moss-covered ruin of edifice nameless,
From forests, from furnaces idle and flameless,
From furrows bedewed with the sweat of the slave,
A people dispersed doth arouse and awaken,
With senses all straining and pulses all shaken,
At a sound of strange clamor that swells like a wave.

In visages pallid, and eyes dim and shrouded,
As blinks the pale sun through a welkin beclouded,
The might of their fathers a moment is seen;
In eye and in countenance doubtfully blending;
The shame of the present seems dumbly contending
With pride in the thought of a past that hath been.

And deem ye, poor fools! that the need and the guerdon
That lured from afar were to lighten your burden,
Your wrongs to abolish, your fate to reverse?
Go! back to the wrecks of your palaces stately,
To the forges whose glow ye extinguished so lately,
To the field ye have tilled in the sweat of your curse!

The victor and vanquished in amity knitted,
Have doubled the yoke to your shoulders refitted;
One tyrant had quelled you, and now ye have twain:
They cast forth the lot for the serf and the cattle,
They throne on the sods that yet bleed from their battle,
And the soil and the hind are their servants again.”

Could Manzoni have meant such words to speak other than of the Austrians and Bourbons who were grinding Italians into servitude? Could his marvelous meter, which has been said in its “plunging” to suggest a charge of horses, have been meant other than to drive his countrymen to self assertion? Manzoni was patriot as well as artist, and read his times with no unskilful eye. When Victor Emmanuel visited Milan in 1859 he said that he should like to meet the poet, and, when told that the latter was ill, declared that he would go to him. Manzoni, however, would not hear of this, and as soon as he was able called upon the King. The sovereign’s marks of regard and respect overwhelmed the poet. Later he said of the meeting, “I see in the character of the King the intervention of Providence. He is exactly the sovereign that circumstances require to accomplish the resurrection of Italy. He has rectitude, courage, incorruptible honesty, and disinterestedness; he seeks not glory or fortune for himself, but for his country. He is so simple, never caring to appear great, that he does not meet the admiration of those who seek to find in princes and heroes theatrical actions and grandiloquent words. He is natural because he is true, and this makes his enemies say that he is wanting in regal majesty. To found Italian unity he has risked his throne, and his life.”

Manzoni’s prophecies came true and he himself had no small part in accomplishing that great end towards which so many men of diverse forces worked. As well as king and statesman, warrior and prophet, the man of letters taught his people how to find their independence.

GIOBERTI

[GIOBERTI, THE PHILOSOPHER]

Gioberti’s signal gift to his countrymen was his great book, “II Primato d’Italia,” a statement of the causes of Italy’s early primacy among European nations, and a philosophic theory for her regeneration. Like Savonarola he flayed the vices of his time and preached redemption through Christian living, but, unlike the great Fra, he undertook to teach that the Church was no less fitted to be the seat of statecraft than of religion. It was this that gained him the ear of Rome as well as that of Piedmont, and made it seem for a moment as though he had found the solution of Italy’s troubles.

The effect of the “Primato” was felt from Turin to Naples. “The book,” said Minghetti, the statesman of a later decade, “seemed to some an extravagance, to others a revelation. The truth is, that while many of its ideas were peculiar to the author, and partook of his character, his studies, and his profession, the substance of it responded to a sentiment still undefined, but which had been slowly developing in the minds of Italians. The idea of nationality had, in the previous years, spread far and wide through many channels, open and secret, and the desire of a great and free country had taken possession of the majority of the younger men; but the methods hitherto employed had proved so inefficient that weariness and disgust had followed. Experience had proved that conspiracies, secret societies, and partial insurrections were of no utility—that they made the governments more severe, retarded civil progress, arrested the increase of public prosperity, plunged many families into misery, and did not even win the approbation of civilized nations.

“The rumors of wars and of European insurrections which were circulated every spring time, the mystic declamations of Mazzini in the name of God and the people, ... all these things showed that the time had come to try another method, more serious, more practical, and surer.... Gioberti, a Piedmontese exile for the sake of liberty, had taken part in the earliest phases of the “Giovine Italia” or had been in relation with its chiefs, but had wearied of that pompous and impotent society. His intellect had anticipated that change which had been imperceptibly operating and now began to appear widely ... but obscurely in the consciousness of many men. This opportuneness and coincidence of the ideas of the author with the spirit of the day gave his book a special importance.... The purpose of the book was to prove that Italy, although it had lost all political value for the outside world, contained all the conditions of moral and political revival, and that to effect this change there was no need of revolutions, invasions, or imitations of the foreigner, since political revival is limited to three heads—unity, independence, and liberty—the first two of which might be obtained by a confederation of the various states under the presidency of the Pope, and the last by means of internal reforms in each state, effected by their respective Princes without danger or diminution of their real power.”

Vincenzo Gioberti was born in Turin April 5, 1801, and was the only child of parents of very moderate means. At an early age it was decided that he should prepare for the priesthood, and his education was entrusted to the fathers of the Oratory in Turin. His nature was more conformable to the teaching of churchmen than was that of Alfieri or Manzoni, and whereas both the latter had chafed under the discipline and mental training of the Church schools the young Gioberti became a thoughtful student. He differed from Mazzini, a contemporary studying at Genoa, in that although he early learned that the condition of his country was wretched, his mind could only conceive of improvement by orderly and temperate steps. He was a brilliant scholar, and during the years of his training for the priesthood he delved deep into the history of philosophy, and studied closely the writings of the fathers and doctors of the Roman Church. In 1825 he was ordained a priest.

The young priest, a man of a serious and reflective mind, turned his attention to the affairs of his country, and gradually entered upon a careful study of the literature of the day, and the political theories that were then agitating men’s minds. He took part in scholastic discussions of religious and political subjects, and in time widened his acquaintance in Turin so that he came in contact with the leaders of thought in the Sardinian capital. As he met men and spoke his thoughts more freely it came to be seen that he was occupied above everything else with the problem of freeing Italy from the foreign overlords, and this gradually marked him as a free-thinking priest. At first, however, he did not incur the enmity of the clerical party, for, although his conception of Italian freedom consisted in emancipation not alone from the arms of foreign masters, but from all modes of thought which were alien to the nation’s genius, and detrimental to its national authority, this authority was always associated in his mind with the idea of Papal supremacy, but a supremacy intellectual rather than political.

The reign of Charles Albert of Piedmont was a continual battle between the conservative party and the enlightened liberals. The leaders of the conservatives were clerics, in large measure Jesuits, who kept in close touch with the Court of Vienna, realizing to the full that their aims and those of Austria were to all intents identical, the maintenance of the status quo in Italy. The young priest Gioberti was not long in incurring the hostility of the Jesuits, because, although he sought the ultimate supremacy of the Papal See, he desired it as a moral rather than as a physical supremacy, and he most ardently hoped for the expulsion of the Austrians from Lombardy and the absolute independence of Piedmont from Viennese influence. His was, however, too brilliant a mind to be denied, and, despite the efforts of the Court party, Charles Albert, who was always cognizant of the abilities of other men, soon after his accession to the throne in 1831 nominated the young priest to be one of the royal chaplains.

As chaplain of the court Gioberti quickly assumed prominence. His nature was open and frank, he made friends easily, he wrote on ecclesiastical and political subjects, and his patriotism was known to be unbounded. He soon had gathered a party about him, and his influence over the King grew rapidly. Charles Albert’s own views on Italian policy were at that time almost identical with Gioberti’s, he would have been glad to acknowledge a confederation of Italian states under the presidency of the Pope, provided the foreign princelings could be disposed of without bloodshed. This, however, the clerical party did not approve of, any change being to their view revolutionary, and the realization that the chaplain was gaining the private ear of the King finally compelled them to mark him for exile.

Aware of this disaffection in the Church party at Turin, Gioberti in 1833 asked permission of Charles Albert to resign his chaplaincy, but, before his request was granted he was suddenly arrested one day while walking with a friend in the public gardens of the city, and placed in prison. The influence of the clerical party was so all-powerful in the Piedmont of that day that no attempt to secure Gioberti’s release was effective, and no popular demonstration at such an outrage could take place. He was given no trial, and his case was the subject of no apparent judicial process. After four months’ imprisonment he was informed that his banishment had been decreed, and he was at once conducted to the frontier in charge of a carabineer. At the same time his name was stricken off the roll of the theological doctors of the College of Turin.

Driven into exile because of his political opinions, even as Mazzini was exiled as a suspect rather than because of any proof against him, Gioberti reached Paris in October, 1833. Like so many other great Italians of that day he was destined to spend many years away from his beloved country. Without friends, family, or money, his career apparently ruined, his hopes shattered, Gioberti was to sound the depths of a courageous man’s despair. Mazzini took himself to London to eke out a meager living as a teacher of Italian, and with the same thought Gioberti went to Brussels. Here he undertook to teach philosophy, and finally obtained employment in assisting his friend Gaggia in the management of a small college. All his leisure time he devoted to studying and writing on philosophy, rising early, and working the better part of the night, and producing work after work of great value in philosophic inquiry, all of which bore especially upon the needs of his own countrymen.

His stay in Brussels, which lasted from 1834 to 1845, saw the production of his greatest books, all deeply earnest, and each one causing in turn the greatest interest and emotion in Italy. The volume of his work was most remarkable, treatises appearing at short intervals, each one of which would have sufficed to represent a lifetime’s study. His first work was the result of a friendship formed in Brussels with a young fellow-exile, Paolo Pallia, who on one occasion expressed to Gioberti certain doubts as to the reality of revelations and a future life. Gioberti at once commenced work upon his “La Teorica del Sovran-naturale,” which was finished and published in 1838. This was followed in 1839 and 1840 by his three volumes called “Introduzione allo Studio della Filosofia.” In all these writings he stands apart from his contemporary European philosophers. Method of speculation is with him subjective and psychological. He adopts much from Plato. Throughout all his writings religion is synonomous with civilization, and he repeatedly states that religion is the true and only expression of the idea in this life, and is one with the real civilization of history. Civilization is the means to perfection, of which religion is the essence.

These strictly philosophic works were followed by the essays “Del Bello” and “Del Buono,” and after a short interval by a magnificent exposure of the Jesuit Order, “Il Gesuita Moderno,” and his “Del Primato Morale e Civile degli Italiani,” and “Prolegomeni.”

It was the “Primato” which gave the exiled Gioberti his place as a great factor in the struggle for Italian independence. His ideas seem strangely archaic now, but they were compelling in 1846. He himself says: “I intend to show ... that Italy alone has the qualities required to become the chief of nations, and that although to-day she has almost completely lost that chiefship, it is in her power to recover it, and I will state the most important conditions of that renovation.... As infant civilization was born between two rivers, so renewed and adult civilization arose between two seas; the former in fertile Mesopotamia, whence it easily spread over Asia, Africa and the west; the latter in Italy, which divides the Tyrrhene and Adriatic seas, thus forming the central promontory of Europe and placed in a position to dominate the rest of the hemisphere.... In the Church there is neither Greek nor Barbarian, and all nations form a cosmopolitan society, as all the tribes of Israel a single nation. But as, in the Jewish nation, genealogy determined the tenure of the hierarchy, and the sons of Levi received the custody of the Law and the service of the Temple, so in the Christian commonwealth the division of the nations is in a manner involved in the order of the Catholic Church. And, the Church having a supreme head, we must recognize a moral pre-eminence where Heaven has established its seat, and where nearer, quicker, more immediate and more uninterrupted are the in-breathings of its voice. This preeminence certainly does not transgress the natural order of divine intentions, real and efficient in their working and in the obligations they impose. So that the Italians, humanly speaking, are the Levites of Christianity, having been chosen by Providence to keep the Christian Pontificate, and to protect with love, with veneration, and if necessary by arms, the ark of the new covenant.... Let the nations, then, turn their eyes to Italy, their ancient and loving mother, who holds the seeds of their regeneration. Italy is the organ of the supreme reason and the royal and ideal word; the fountain, rule and guardian of every other reason and eloquence; for there resides the Head that rules, the Arm that moves, the Tongue that commands and the Heart that animates Christianity at large.... As Rome is the seat of Christian wisdom, Piedmont is to-day the principal home of Italian military strength. Seated on the slopes of the Alps, as a wedge between Austria and France, and as a guard to the peninsula, of which it is the vestibule and peristyle, it is destined to watch from its mountains, and crush in its ravines, every foreign aggressor, compelling its powerful neighbors to respect the common independence of Italy.”

Such expression will suffice to show that Gioberti was in no sense a reliable prophet, but a philosopher of deeply religious strain who was seeking to reconcile the political freedom of Italy with the suzerainty of the Pope. He discountenanced all plotting and conspiracy, both of which were being advocated by Mazzini’s appeals to “Young Italy,” and built his country out of a confederation of states. Mazzini, impractical as he was in many respects, did at least realize that no such loosely joined federation could stand six months, and insisted above all in actual political hegemony of the states.

Gioberti’s “Primato,” deeply suggestive in itself to intellectual Italy, was given a remarkable impetus by the election at about the same time as its appearance of a new Pope. Pius IX., elected to the papal chair in June, 1846, seemed the very man to bring about the realization of Gioberti’s hopes. As Cardinal Mastai Ferreti he had been immensely popular, and he was known as a man of great amiability, keenly interested in new ideas, and ardent in the cause of Italian unity of action. His first act was to proclaim a general amnesty for political offenses, by which thousands of prisoners who had spent years in Roman prisons, or abroad in exile, many ignorant of the charges brought against them, were allowed to return to family and friends. He visited the poor and superintended the relief of the sick, even working among the Jewish quarters of Rome. He favored the construction of railroads, modified the restrictions of the press, and organized an advisory council of leading citizens. Small wonder that a world which had been used to the infinitely narrow-minded reactionaries Leo XII. and Gregory XVI. hailed Pius IX. as the regenerator of both church and state.

To a large degree Pius and Gioberti had both felt the same enthusiasms, and believed in the same principles, the cardinal one being that society was to be reformed by the Roman Church, and the government of society vested in the Church as a court of highest appeal. Different desires led the two men to this conclusion, Gioberti hoping that reform would come by means of concessions by arbitrary powers to the rights of the people, and the Pope believing that humanizing the form of church government would strengthen its actual power and increase the devotion of all nations to the Holy See. History proved that neither Gioberti nor Pius IX. was correct, but the seeming coincidence of their views increased the power of each. Gioberti gained the support of the liberal element in the Church, and the Pope gained the adhesion of intellectual men throughout Italy.

The new Pope had read Gioberti’s political writings, and had been deeply influenced by them. The “Primato,” issued at Brussels in 1842, had been prohibited in all the Italian states except Piedmont, and this fact added immensely to its weight with patriots. Charles Albert read it and admired it greatly; with the advent of Pius, he as well as men so diverse as Mazzini, Garibaldi, and D’Azeglio, looked for regeneration. Under the influence of this new spirit Charles Albert declared an amnesty for all exiles in 1846, and the philosopher-priest, after thirteen years of exile, was free to return home.

Long exile had somewhat crushed the ardent nature of the churchman, and he waited in Brussels until he was assured by friends that his return to Turin would be popular. Learning that his works, especially the “Primato” and the “Gesuita Moderno,” had made him a hero in the eyes of patriots, he finally returned to Turin in 1848. His entrance into the capital on April 29 of that year was the occasion for the greatest outburst of enthusiasm, a welcome intensified by the thought that this man had been banished for no other cause than the resentment of the hated Jesuits. The city was decorated and illuminated in his honor, deputations waited upon him, the King appointed him a Senator, but, as he had been elected as deputy by both Turin and Genoa to the Assembly of Representatives now to meet for the first time under the new constitution, he chose to sit in the lower house for Turin.

Invitations now poured in upon him from other cities, and before the Assembly met he made a tour of the states, commencing with Milan, and finally reaching Rome. He had three interviews with the Pope, and these meetings led him still further to believe that Pius was the man who should put his political philosophy into practice. He found the Romans, who of all Italians had most cause to hate the Jesuits, overjoyed with his work describing the modern abuses of that order, and anxious at all hazards that their new Pontiff should follow the new spirit of liberality.

While he was traveling and speaking publicly to all the peoples the Assembly met in Turin, and elected him its president. Count Balbo was Prime Minister, and in the same Parliament sat many of the younger element, including Cavour, and a large liberal section headed by D’Azeglio.

Meanwhile there had occurred the memorable battle-days of 1848, when the February revolution in Paris set fire to the tinder that had been preparing throughout Europe. The Milanese arose and drove out the Austrian garrison, Venice proclaimed the republic under Daniel Manin, and the cry of “a free Italy” rang from the Alps to Sicily. Pius IX., who had already made serious protest to Austria when in the preceding year that Power had garrisoned Ferrara, prepared to place himself actively at the head of the national movement, and in Piedmont Charles Albert took the field and went to the aid of Lombardy. At the close of 1848 Count Balbo resigned, and a new ministry was formed, in which Gioberti held a seat.

Unfortunately Pius IX. lacked the courage of his convictions, and when he heard that the Austrians were winning back their lost fields in Lombardy, his desire to send his troops to the aid of Piedmont cooled. The conservative elements about him gained his ear, and he replaced Mamiani, his Prime Minister, a man who wished him to give Rome a constitution, with Count Rossi, the French Ambassador, a man of great ability, but ultra conservative. In November, 1848, Rossi was assassinated, and shortly afterward the violence of the demands of the people convinced Pius that his best course was temporary flight. Acting upon this impulse on November 24, 1848, he escaped from Rome to Gaeta. Italy was beginning to see to what manner of man it had looked for deliverance.

From Gaeta the self-exiled Pontiff issued a formal protest against the violence to which he stated his people had subjected him, and by which means alone his latest enactments had been extorted from him, and declared all measures passed in Rome during his absence null and void.

In Rome the brief Republic of Mazzini held sway, and at Gaeta France and Austria sought to cheer the Pope. Charles Albert, his hope of Papal aid fading rapidly, attempted for a few months to stem the tide of French and Austrian influence over Pius. He tried to effect a reconciliation between the Holy Father and the Romans, and Gioberti wrote to the Pope, saying: “I hope the Court of Gaeta is about to return to sentiments more evangelical, more worthy of Pius IX. I am sorry to have to say that the Court of Gaeta, repudiating the doctrine of conciliation, and adopting that of vengeance and blood, does not seem to know that it is repudiating the maxims of Christ, and putting in their stead those of Mahomet.” In addition Gioberti did his best to gain the Pope’s concurrence in a plan for the formation of an Italian federation of princes, but without success. The bolt was shot, Pius had had his day as popular idol, and having proven that Italy had nothing to hope politically from the Pope, quickly retroceded to the plane of the Bourbon Princes and Grand Dukes. To Gioberti, who had hoped so much from the spiritual and temporal power of Rome, the disillusionment was terrific.

That he was a theorist rather than a practical statesman he now showed conclusively by advocating as minister at Turin that Piedmont should anticipate the inevitable restoration of the rulers of central Italy by the governments of Austria and France by restoring them itself. Had this plan been adopted the House of Savoy would have been irretrievably ruined in the eyes of patriotic Italy, and the country left without any champion of freedom. Fortunately his proposal met with small favor.

The battle of Novara ended the struggles of Charles Albert, and Victor Emmanuel, a man of sterner make, came into control. A new ministry was formed for the new King by General Delaunay, who included Gioberti again in the cabinet, although he held no portfolio. He was not in touch, however, with the new elements of government, he could not appreciate a statecraft that was in essence radical, and after several disagreements he was appointed on a nominal mission to Paris, which in reality removed him from any part in the government at Turin. His best work had been done in the service of Charles Albert, he was not in touch with the coming policies of the adroit Cavour.

The stirring years of 1848 and 1849 passed, the dream of the Pope’s leadership vanished, and the yoke of the foreigner seemed to have settled as heavily as ever upon the states of Italy. Again exiles gathered in London and Paris, Mazzini returned to his English fogs, and we find Gioberti the confidant in Paris of many banished fellow-countrymen. The Marquis Pallavicino, friend of Manin and many other patriots, became his bosom friend. He was offered a pension by his government, but declined it, and devoted himself to writing. In 1851 he published his great work, the “Rinnovamento Civile d’Italia,” in which he pointed out the mistakes made by Italians in 1848 and 1849, acknowledged his own blunders in political sagacity, and designated Piedmont as the leader of a great national movement, which should ultimately end in a regenerated Italy, with its capital in a lay and constitutional Rome. He had met and talked with Cavour in Paris during the preparation of this book, and he had had the perspicacity to predict that Cavour was the man who should unite his land. The statesman was half amused, half impressed by Gioberti’s words, he had always considered him a man who just failed of being a great statesman because he was a visionary, but he was profoundly impressed by the grasp and depth of his new work.

The “Rinnovamento” was indeed true prophecy, the philosopher had at last seen the futility of a political confederation of peoples under a religious head, he realized that Princes supported by foreign Powers would never unite for any common end. “Except the young sovereign who rules Piedmont,” he says in the “Rinnovamento,” “I see no one in Italy who could undertake our emancipation. Instead of imitating Pius, Ferdinand, and Leopold, who violated their sworn compacts, he maintains his with religious observance—vulgar praise in other times, but to-day not small, being contrary to example.” Victor Emmanuel, reading the book, was as much impressed by it as Cavour had been, and time and again repeated, “I will do what Gioberti says.”

Pius IX., still amiable, still suave, was kept in Rome by French arms, and was solely occupied in proving his own insufficiency as a temporal ruler of any sort whatever. He had retracted all his liberal acts, made friends with all his old foes, and placed entire charge of state affairs in the hands of that most unsavory of men, Cardinal Antonelli. Under him the Jesuits resumed their former activity, and soon had closed completely about the Pope. Then it was that the works of Gioberti, the “Primato” and the “Prolegomeni,” which had once so greatly delighted the Pope, were placed upon the Index Expurgatorius and publicly condemned by the Church. The action had no other effect than to amuse the world; Italy and all friends of Italy had read and pondered the great treatises, and drawn their own conclusions from them irrespective of the wishes of the Roman See.

Gioberti died in Paris October 16, 1852, just as the new era in Italian affairs which he had predicted in his last book was actually commencing with the advent of Cavour as Prime Minister of Piedmont.

When we review Gioberti’s work we find that it was chiefly important as a stimulus to Italian patriotic thought, as a threshing out of theories and principles in preparation for a true realization of national needs and hopes. That the philosophy, in so far as it was political, of his “Primato” failed to prove true when attempted in practice, and must inevitably so have failed as we see now, did not affect his influence over his own generation. That influence was one which contrasted sharply with Mazzini’s, Gioberti always preaching orderly organization, Mazzini daring attempts of many sorts, both alike in the ardor of their enthusiasm.

While Mazzini appealed to the mass, Gioberti appealed to the scholars, the clergy, the thinking classes, and his appeal was patriotic as well as intellectual. In his “Primato” he stirs his countrymen to consider their country’s place among the nations. “While to the north,” he says, “there is a people numbering only twenty-four millions who rule the sea, make Europe tremble, own India, vanquish China and occupy the best parts of Asia, Africa, America and Oceania, what great things have we Italians done? What are our manual and intellectual exploits? Where are our fleets and our colonies? What rank do our legates hold; what force do they wield; what wise or authoritative influence do they exert in foreign courts? What weight attaches to the Italian name in the balance of European power? Foreigners, indeed, know and still visit our country, but only for the purpose of enjoying the changeless beauty of our skies and of looking upon the ruins of our past. But what profits it to speak of glory, riches, and power? Can Italy say she has a place in the world? Can she boast of a life of her own and of a political autonomy, when she is awed by the first insolent and ambitious upstart who tramples her under foot and galls her with his yoke? Who is there who shudders not when he reflects that, disunited as we are, we must be the prey of any assailant whatever, and that we owe even that wretched fraction of independence which charters and protocols still allow us to the compassion of our neighbors?” Then he concludes, “Although all this has come upon us through our own fault; nevertheless, by the exercise of a little strength of will and determination, without upheavals or revolutions and without perpetrating injustice, we can still be one of the first races in the world.”

With consummate skill he arranged a national program in which the Pope, the Princes, the people, even Austria, should have a part, and it was scarcely to be wondered that inasmuch as each interest was flattered each thought well of the program. The clergy were no less delighted with the eloquence of one of their own number than with his teaching that religion and patriotism should go hand in hand, those high in power felt that their power would be left them under his theory, and the people were stirred by his eloquence and dreams of what Italy should become. As a result there arose what was known as the “Neo-Guelph” party, which, harking back to the Middle Ages, sought to place the Pope at the head of the national movement. And, by a beautiful coincidence of history, just at that moment a new Pontiff, one of that clergy which had so greatly admired Gioberti’s writings, ascended St. Peter’s throne. In these facts you have the cause of Gioberti’s commanding position in the early years of the great struggle.

Unfortunately Gioberti’s theories were dreams, not even so practical as the aspirations of Mazzini’s “Young Italy.” He had failed utterly to grasp the need of absolute administrative concentration and did not accurately estimate the jealousies and prides of the petty Princes and the churchmen. He believed that those forces which had so long destroyed Italian unity could be made to unite to restore it, he believed that the Roman Church could exercise a wise temporal authority. He looked back to the Middle Ages, and spoke with some of Savonarola’s words. He appealed to his people’s ancient love of art and letters, to the glories of the mediæval cities, to the world-wide authority of Rome and St. Peter’s. The appeal stirred the imagination of the intellectual classes, and drew the attention of other countries to the fallen estate of Italy. Beyond that it could not be effective; the needs of State and Church, of Princes and people, had grown too unalterably opposed. Mazzini was far nearer right, a truer teacher, a surer guide.

The time came when Gioberti recognized that Italy’s salvation lay in the strong hand, and this he acknowledged in his last book. It is the truest of all his political philosophies because he had then understood that the future belonged to men of such abilities as were possessed by Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, and to a well-knit nation rather than to a confraternity of ill-assorted states.

Yet for all its fallacies Gioberti’s “Primato” woke intellectual Italy from a sleep which had lasted centuries, and made it consider the problem of its regeneration.

MANIN

[MANIN, THE “FATHER OF VENICE”]

The story of Venetian glory seemed closed with the last years of the Eighteenth Century. The proud Queen of the Adriatic had seen her jewels stolen one by one, and had finally become the toy of wanton powers. Venice was no longer self-reliant, no longer coldly virtuous, her grandeur had sunk into a memory, her civic honor been bedimmed by gross corruption. “Venice was,” said the world, and France, parceling out the conquests of the young Napoleon, handed Venetia and the City of the Doges to Austria. There was no opportunity for self-defense, Napoleon had removed all military stores and confiscated the Venetian fleet, the citizens buried the lion-banners of Saint Mark beneath their churches, and silently watched the Austrians enter. The last Doge, aged and bent with years, fell senseless as he opened his lips to swear allegiance to the House of Hapsburg. Europe considered the fate of Venice sealed.

Napoleon came and went, and men as well as maps experienced gigantic changes, but still Venice slept. She had become a part of the Austrian Empire, a new generation grew up who had never known Venice free, who only learned their city’s history by stealth. Among this new generation was Daniel Manin, son of a Jew who had embraced Christianity and who had adopted the surname of his noble patron the last Doge, according to Venetian custom. So it happened that the last free ruler of Venice and the man who was to raise her from sleep bore the same name. There was also transmitted to the boy the ancient hate of Austria.

Born in 1804 Daniel Manin early showed a strong love of learning, which was eagerly tended by his father, a lawyer of some note. The father taught his son the history of his city, he brought him up to see the unjust practices of Napoleon and of Austria, he kindled in him the passion for liberty. The boy studied jurisprudence and the growth of Venetian dialects, at fifteen he translated the apocryphal book of Enoch from the Hebrew, at seventeen he became a Doctor of Laws, and had translated Pothier’s great French work on Roman law before he was twenty-one. The year he came of age he married, and a little later settled in the small town of Maestra, which lies at the entrance to the Lagoons, and started to practise his profession of advocate, which under Austrian rule allowed him only to act in civil cases, and then merely in a consulting capacity and never as a pleader in the courts.

Even in early youth his health was poor; although his mind was unusually active and well-balanced he was subject to frequent visitations of great physical weariness which at times made it impossible for him to accomplish anything. Later in life he wrote, “The act of living, in a healthy person, considered in itself, ought to be a pleasure; but to me from my very childhood, it has always been a painful effort. I always feel weary.” He was frequently morbid just at the time when his growing family required all his energy for support.

In person the young lawyer was rather striking, not tall, but spare, with unusually animated blue eyes, thick chestnut hair, and features full of changing expression, quick to show the temper of his mind. For all his underlying weariness and continued depression he often appeared gay and cheerful on the surface; it was his nature to be unselfish, and to turn a brave face towards the world.

Working as an advocate Manin gave up his spare hours to studying Venetian patois and to planning how in time his city might loosen the bonds of Austrian tyranny. As early as 1830, when he was only twenty-six, he joined with three close friends in a plot to seize the Venetian arsenal, and drew up a proclamation intended to excite the citizens. The movement throughout northern Italy on which the friends relied failed to materialize, and the plan fell through. Fortunately the authors of the proclamation were not discovered, and Manin was permitted to continue his profession. He did not believe in secret societies, and would not join them; he devoted himself to studying Austria’s colonial weaknesses.

The first step which brought him seriously to the notice of the government was his work on behalf of the Italian bankers who were associated with some Germans in building a railway between Venice and Milan. There had been a disagreement as to the route of the railway, and the Austrian viceroy had sided with the Germans. Manin was engaged to represent the Italian bankers, and conducted his side of the case with great skill. The Austrian government finally concluded the matter by arbitrarily dissolving the Italian Railways Association. The case had however shown Manin a possible mode of attacking the foreign despotism, finding flaws in its laws and concentrating on such weaknesses until eventually its whole fabric was loosened. He did not believe that any sudden local revolution could succeed, he saw only the loss of valuable lives thereby, but he did believe that the way for some later far-sweeping rising might be paved by consecutive breaches in the enemy’s legal walls. This opinion was the result of his evenly-balanced, deliberate judgment; he could at times, as he was to show later, throw himself passionately into a cause, without regard to consequences, but his nature was not that of the ardent revolutionary; he relied on cool, sober judgments, and was not readily led from them by illusions. In his notes we find him writing, “Against disorder I feel a repulsion not only of reason but of instinct, the same as I feel against everything contrary to the laws of harmony, a deformed face, a discordant sound.”

His advocacy of the Italian bankers brought Manin before the Venetian public, he was recognized as an able speaker with a deep knowledge of law. He spoke before the Venetian Athenæum on the obligation of thinkers to inspire and stimulate men of action. The subject gave him a chance to draw attention to the present lethargy of Venice and to urge consideration of new ideas affecting trade and commerce. He hoped to unite northern Italians through the new principle of free trade. Fortunately Cobden, the great English advocate of free trade, was traveling in Italy; he visited Venice and met Manin and some of the other Venetian leaders of opinion just as he had met Cavour at Turin and Massimo d’Azeglio at Genoa.

Various small events gave the lawyer a chance to speak publicly to his fellow-citizens. At the Scientific Congress which met in September, 1847, he was appointed a commissioner to investigate the charitable institutions of Venice, and in doing this work he came upon the case of a poor infirm workman who had placed a placard upon a public wall complaining that the government had left him to starve, and for which action had been placed in a lunatic asylum. Manin reported the case and wrote, “The physicians acknowledge the man is sane; but they dare not set him at liberty, fearing it would be contrary to the views of the police and government. For my part, I have a better opinion of the government and the police. I do not admit that they create madmen by decrees. If Padovini is culpable there are the laws.” Count Palffy, the Governor, was very much vexed. “We must release Padovini from the madhouse,” he said, “and put Manin in his place.”

About the same time Count Jablonski, a relation of the Venetian Governor, wrote a paper urging the Italians to become resigned. In reply Manin set down his thoughts in a page which seems to sum up his whole purpose, a wonderful expression of his philosophy. It was not published at that time, but was later found among his papers. It read:

“It is the fashion to preach resignation.

“I distinguish two kinds of resignation; the one virtuous and manly; the other cowardly, and worthy only of fools.

“The strong man, when overcome by misfortune, seeks the means of remedying it. Does he find any? In spite of difficulties, he applies himself to the task, excited, cheerful, and vigorous, full of energy and pertinacity. It is only when he is certain that no remedy exists, that he becomes resigned. This is manly resignation.

“The coward, when misfortune overtakes him, allows himself to be cast down, and seeks no means of remedying it. However spontaneous and easy relief may present itself to his mind, he attempts nothing, he wishes neither to trouble nor expose himself—he is resigned: this is the resignation of the fool.

“Therefore, resignation is virtuous and manly under evils manifestly without remedy; it is cowardly and stupid when we can in any way free ourselves from these evils.

“In the individual, resignation may often be virtuous; in a nation it is perhaps never so, for the misfortunes of a nation are seldom irremediable.

“To overcome the misfortunes of a nation, we can employ the whole intellectual, moral, and physical power of all its citizens; and if the generation which commences the generous task does not succeed in accomplishing it, other generations follow, who will attain success; for nations never die.

“This is the reason why those who advise resignation to nations, advise cowardice, and the nations which become resigned are cowards.”

Therein lies the whole wisdom of Manin’s political philosophy, and also that of many of the earlier Italian patriots. How could Austria hope to keep such men forever in subjection?

Manin’s avowed purpose was to show again and again that the Austrians were not obeying the laws which they had themselves given to the subject provinces. One of the methods of Austrian administrative rule was the use of supposedly representative councils called the Central and Provincial Congregations, which were designed to communicate the wishes of the people of Venice and Lombardy in the form of petitions to the Imperial council, and which had failed lamentably to use even that meager power. On December 9, 1847, Nazari, a deputy to the Lombard Congregation, moved that the grievances of the country be represented to the Imperial government. Not a single Venetian deputy followed his lead, but Manin, as a private individual, signed a petition to the Venetian Congregation calling upon them to speak for the people. His comments were brief but vigorous. “The Congregations,” he said, “have never been the interpreters of our wants or wishes—their silence has arisen from a fear of displeasing the government; but this fear is unjust, and injurious: for it is unjust and injurious to suppose that the government has granted to this kingdom a derisory national representation, that it deceived, and still deceives, this country and Europe, in making laws which it does not wish to be observed, and in prosecuting and punishing those who intend observing them.” The Venetians were delighted with the petition, they were beginning to feel the first thrills of a new civic life. On December 30, Manin and Tommaseo, a brilliant poet and public-spirited citizen, drew up another address which in bold terms denounced the Austrian censorship of the press contrary to a specific clause in the law of 1815. All the members of the Ateneo, the literary club of Venice, signed the petition that went with the address.

The Austrians failed to see in the unrest that appeared throughout Italy at the close of 1847 more than a series of local and widely-separated disturbances, and made small effort to appease any of the leaders. For their part in preparing the Venetian petition Manin and Tommaseo were arrested and thrown into prison on January 18, 1848, charged with high treason. The temper of the newly-aroused people was uncertain, on the morning after the arrest the streets of Venice were seen blossoming with signs ominous to peace and Austrian supremacy, “Viva l’Italia!” “Viva Manin e Tommaseo!” and “Morte ai Tedeschi!”

From the date of his imprisonment Manin underwent many sufferings, one of the chief being his inability longer to help in nursing a daughter to whom he was passionately devoted and who was suffering from a tedious and most painful nervous disease. At almost the same time his younger sister, who was ill in Trevisa, died from the shock of hearing of his imprisonment. He had been able to save very little for dark days, now that they were come he could do nothing to tide his little household through them. Outwardly he was calm and strong of will, inwardly he was tormented by a hundred fears. Yet he could write from prison to his brave wife, saying, “If you continue to be strong and courageous, these will be the happiest days of my life.... You will find a few pieces of gold in one drawer, a little silver in another.... If this affair lasts long, we must think of providing for you in some way. Love one another, my angels: be resigned, that is sufficient.”

A valiant attempt was made by Teresa Manin to secure her husband’s release on bail, the authorities put her off continually, and finally the Director-General replied that he did not believe himself authorized to accede to her request. This final reply caused an outburst of popular indignation. The Venetians dressed themselves in mourning, and with heads bared filed slowly before the windows of the prison on the Riva dei Schiavoni, where Manin and Tommaseo were confined. As long as he remained in prison the other advocates united in caring for Manin’s legal practice, and high-spirited friends among all classes insisted on providing his family with all necessities. He himself hoped to be able to support them by reprinting a small treatise on Venetian jurisprudence, but permission to advertise its sale was denied him by the government. A little later, however, Austrian permissions became no longer necessary, and Manin’s family lived on the proceeds of the sale of this work and on the small legacy left to him by his sister. He had little time to think of self-support when he became dictator.

The ancient spirit of Venice was slowly rising as day after day news came that men throughout Italy were turning on their despots. The Nicoletti and the Castellani, the two historic factions of the people, the blacks and the reds, renounced their ancient feud and took a common secret oath to war only with Austria until Venice was free. The young nobles resigned their Austrian offices and ranks, they had heard what the nobility of Milan were accomplishing. The examination into the charges against Manin and Tommaseo continued, although nothing illegal could be proved against them there was a prospect of their arbitrary removal out of Venice and to that prison of Spielberg where the careers of so many gifted Italian patriots had ended. Manin heard that the French had driven their King from his throne, he wondered what effect the growing tumult of that revolution year would have on Venice. He did not have to wait long to learn. The flames of revolt had spread across Europe even to Vienna, Metternich had fled from the city in peril of his life, the Austrian throne was tottering. Manin saw what was coming, and made his plans even while he was in prison to secure Venice against anarchy.

On the morning of March 17, 1848, the Venetians hastened to the dock to learn the latest news of Vienna from the Trieste packet. A French merchant on board called to the gondoliers the news, “A Constitution at Vienna! The Recognition of Italian Independence! A Free Press! A National Guard!” The words were sufficient, the people rushed to the Governor’s palace and demanded the immediate release of Manin and Tommaseo. The Governor wavered, declaimed, finally yielded, saying, “I do what I ought not to do.” The people swept to the prison, and beating down the doors, discovered the two captives. “You are free!” the leaders shouted. Manin still chose to follow the usage of law, and asked to see the warrant for his release. It was produced, and then he and his fellow captive were led forth from the dreary cells with loud acclaims of joy. Manin was raised in a chair, and so carried to the great Square of St. Mark’s, the scene of so many triumphs in Venetian history. The yellow and black flag of Austria had in some mysterious fashion fluttered down from the ancient flag-staves that guard the square and in its place floated the red, white, and green emblem. “Speak!” cried the people, and Manin, pale, infirm, and gaunt from prison life, rose and spoke with his remarkably persuasive voice. He said he did not know to what great events he owed his freedom, but could see clearly that nationality and patriotic fire had grown wonderfully during the past few months. “But forget not, I beg,” he implored, “that true and lasting liberty can only rest on order, and that you must make yourselves the emulous guardians of order if you would show that you are worthy to be free.” He paused a moment, then added, “Yet there are times pointed out to us by Providence when insurrection becomes not only a right, but a duty.”

Manin returned home, already intent on plans to regulate the new order of things. Towards night the great bell in the Ducal Chapel sounded the warning note, the people rushed to the Piazza to find a battalion of Croats tearing down the Italian tricolor, the people resisted, the soldiers cleared the square with a bayonet charge, but the Venetians had tasted triumph too fully to be dismayed. Some of them went to Manin and asked him to lead them against the Croats. “This is not the way,” he answered, “we must have a civic guard.” He sent a messenger to the Governor. “Tell him that to-day his life was in my hands, and that I preached order, not vengeance; and now, in the interest of his own life as well as of order, he must at once organize a civic guard.”

Again Count Palffy hesitated and put off the demand from day to day. He sent messengers to the Viceroy at Verona, and the latter telegraphed him permission to enroll two hundred citizens. Three thousand at once took arms and called on Manin to give them his commands. “Let all who will not absolutely obey me depart,” he said, but no one left. At last Venice again had an army of her own.

There was no immediate bloodshed. The leading citizens conferred as to what course Venice should take if the revolution in Vienna succeeded. Some were for joining the kingdom of Charles Albert, some for uniting with Lombardy, some for an Austrian ruler under a constitution. Manin scattered their diverse views, he told them that their immediate need was freedom, that their city must actually be in their own charge before considering her destiny. Rumors came that the city was about to be bombarded, there was danger both from the arsenal and from the sea, and on the night of March 21 Manin laid his plans before the chief patriots and told them that they must seize the arsenal. “The people of Venice,” he said, “can only understand one cry, ‘Let the Republic live!’” Still the others hesitated; one said, “The people are incapable of sacrifices!” “You do not know them,” cried Manin. “I know them; that is my sole merit, you will see!”

Newcomers arrived, and still Manin, worn with argument, pressed his opinion. He finished, saying, “We must have the Republic, and join with it Saint Mark. The Republic and Saint Mark will echo in Dalmatia.”

“Viva San Marco!” came an answering cry. “It is the only one, the rallying cry of Venice!”

The conference agreed; Manin sent for the commander-in-chief of the civic guard. “The city is threatened with bombardment,” he said. “I wish to take the arsenal at all hazards. You must make me commander-in-chief for a day. Form the six battalions into two brigades, and give me their captains for eight hours.” The general, astounded at the advocate’s demand, left without making a reply. Manin sent to the other commanders making the same demand. One by one they refused, claiming that the project was too wild.

Meanwhile the soldiers at the arsenal were in mutiny and had killed the second officer in command; there was danger of the spirit of anarchy spreading. At the same time the last of the commanders, Major Olivieri, placed his single battalion at Manin’s command. The advocate seized his sword, called his son, a boy of sixteen, to follow him, and put himself at the head of the two hundred guards. The little band marched on the arsenal and forced the commander to surrender; almost before the Austrian officers knew what had happened the Venetians were distributing the military stores among the people. At the moment of taking the arsenal Manin had sent word to call the whole people into St. Mark’s Square. He found the ancient banner, the wingéd lion, and raising it from the dust where it had lain for fifty years he unfurled it before his company and led them back across the Piazzetta into the great square. He had told the people he would meet them there at noon; now he stood before them, bearing the emblem that proclaimed that Venice had risen from her lengthy slumbers. He spoke to the assembled city. “Venetians, we are free! And we are so without the shedding of blood, either our own, or our brothers’, for to me all men are brothers. But when the old government is overturned, the new must take its place; the best now seems to me to be the Republic which speaks of our past glory and adds the liberty of modern times. But by this we shall not separate from our Italian brothers, but rather form one of those centers destined to aid in fusing our Italy into one people. Live the Republic! Live liberty! Live Saint Mark!”

The civic guards swore to defend with their lives the new Republic and its founder, the aged wept, the young embraced, all raised their hands in gratitude to heaven. The people reveled in noble delirium of joy. Venice looked upon Manin as its deliverer; the citizens did not know the physical anguish he had undergone. Pathetic are the words of his little daughter Emilia as she heard her father proclaimed. “I ought,” she wrote, “to be filled with ineffable gladness, but a weight continually presses my heart.”

Manin had scarcely closed his eyes for five days and nights. As soon as the people would release him now he went home utterly exhausted: he said to his friends, “Leave me at least this night to rest, or I shall die.”

The Austrian authorities saw that resistance would be of little avail, their own forces were too small and too much in sympathy with the people’s cause to give them a sense of any real power on which to rely, and accordingly the Governor acceded to the terms imposed upon him. All foreign troops were to be removed, the forts and all military stores surrendered, the government transferred to the charge of a Committee of Venetian citizens. The demands were sweeping, the Austrian government later regarded the Venetian capitulation as the most humiliating they suffered in the revolutionary year of 1848.

That same night the provisional government announced to the people the terms of the Austrian capitulation, and the citizens were amazed to find that neither the name of Manin nor of Tommaseo was included in the new government. They made their dissatisfaction so apparent that friends went to see Manin to beg him to send some message to the people. He dictated the following lines from his bed: “Venetians! I know that you love me, and, in the name of that love, I ask you to conduct yourselves, during the legitimate manifestation of your joy, with that dignity which belongs to men worthy of being free. Your friend, Manin.”

The people heard the message and quietly dispersed. Next day the provisional government found that the new Republic would only have the one man at its head, and so they asked Manin to form a government. He did so immediately, taking for himself the Presidency of the Council and Foreign Affairs. He composed his government of men of different classes and different religions, all Venetians were assured of perfect equality in their new state. The patriarch blessed the standard of the Republic, and the commander of the fleet read the list of the ministry to the people. The reading was broken by constant cries of “Viva Manin! President of the Republic!”

Thus Venice became free after fifty years of bondage. It was now Manin’s concern to see that she was kept free. He recognized how slight were her resources, and he became at once an eager adherent of French intervention in northern Italy. Charles Albert of Piedmont and Mazzini were both acclaiming an Italy won by the Italians, but Manin foresaw, what Cavour was later to recognize, that foreign allies were absolutely essential.

France, however, was in a most unsettled condition, her ministers did not wish to see a strong state of upper Italy on their southern borders; they were already longing to annex Savoy, and yet as good republicans they felt themselves bound to aid the revolted states against Austrian tyranny. Manin made overtures for an alliance, at first merely feeling his way, but as the summer progressed, and the need grew more and more apparent, by definite overtures. The French Consul at Venice was most hopeful. He said to Manin, “It is well known that the sympathy of France, when she possesses liberty of action, is never without results.” In reply Manin said that he hoped “that the united efforts of the different Italian states, the ardor which animates the people of the Peninsula, will suffice to expel the enemy; if not, we shall have recourse to the generosity of France. Meanwhile, we should be glad to see at once some French vessels in the Adriatic, and I beg that you will lose no time in communicating our wishes to the foreign ministry.”

Manin wished to convene a popular assembly as soon after he assumed office as possible, and on June 3 such a deliberative body met, its members having been elected by universal suffrage from Venice and the free districts of the Dogado. Their first important task was to decide whether they would join with Lombardy in union under Piedmont’s King. Manin believed that the decision as to such a step ought to be deferred until the war was ended, but a strong party opposed his opinion. His partisans entered into a bitter fight with the opposition, for a time it looked as though the split in the Assembly would lead to civil war. Manin rose and implored those who were his friends to place no further obstacles in the path of fusion. Moved by his passionate appeal for harmony the Assembly passed the act of fusion with few negative votes, and at the same time resolved that “Daniel Manin had deserved well of his country.” He spoke again, saying, “While the foreigner is still in Italy, for God’s sake let there be no more talk of parties. When we are rid of him we will discuss these matters among ourselves as brothers. This is the only recompense I ask of you.”

The Assembly elected Manin head of the new ministry, but he declined on the ground that he had always been a republican and would feel out of place as a royal minister. In addition his health demanded that he seek some rest.

The new Venetian ministry lasted until August 7, when the Royal Commissioners assumed office. Unfortunately Charles Albert was already being beaten back in Lombardy, and on August 9 signed the armistice of Salasco, by which all claims to Venice were renounced. When word came to the city the Venetians were dumbfounded, then mad with indignation. Finally they rushed to Manin’s house, calling for him and denouncing the Royal Commissioners. Manin told the excited people that he would stake his head upon the Commissioners’ patriotism. He went to see them and then addressed the citizens again. “The day after tomorrow,” he said, “the Assembly will meet to appoint a new government. For these forty-eight hours I govern.” The people dispersed, satisfied now that their idol was at their head again. The Assembly when it met wished to make Manin dictator, but he pleaded his ignorance of military matters, and a triumvirate was formed, made up of Admiral Graziani, Colonel Cavedalis, and himself.

Just when it seemed as though France was finally deciding to come to the aid of northern Italy, England intervened and proposed a plan of joint mediation. To add to this obstacle Charles Albert declared that Italy would act for herself, and the chances of Venice winning a foreign ally were reduced to practically nothing. Italians from Naples to Piedmont were showing themselves to be individual heroes, but their efforts were ineffectual without a general leader. The Romans were hampered by the inaction of the Pope. Pius IX. had promised great things in the cause of national independence, but when the German Cardinals told him that in case he declared war against Austria he would forfeit their allegiance his enthusiasm waned. The Austrian general, Radetzky, was slowly winning back the fields lost in Lombardy, Vicenza fell, then Milan, and Austria felt herself strong enough to declare a blockade of Venice. As the summer of 1848 ended it became clear that Venice would be left to herself, that the tide of revolution in the other states was already ebbing, and that Piedmont had shot her bolt. Manin still hoped that some ally would succor the small city in her war against the great empire, but whether an ally should come or not he was determined that Venice should set an example of resistance that would show Europe how well freedom was deserved.

The city, in its state of siege, stood in the greatest need of money. Manin had only to ask, and all classes brought forth their savings, their heirlooms, whatever they had of value, to give to the cause. The old aristocracy, the boys in the street, every one who loved Venice, made their sacrifices gladly, reverently. Private citizens clothed many of the soldiers, palaces were given for public uses, Manin gave all his family plate and would accept no salary; General Pepe, the aged commander-in-chief, gave a picture by Leonardo da Vinci that was his dearest possession. No one thought of his own need, all thought solely of keeping Venice free. If she returned to bondage they cared little what became of them.

Ugo Bassi, the heroic priest who was later to fight with Mazzini on the walls of Rome, and still later to die at the hands of Austrian executioners, preached daily to the Venetians. There was no lack of noble spirits who recalled to them the great glories of the past. But above and beyond all the others the people loved Manin, they had come to link his name indissolubly with that of their city, he was their father, they his devoted children. If ever a man merited such devotion it was Manin. With the cares of his city weighing perpetually on his mind, planning, advising, encouraging, he fought the ravages of disease that crippled his resources, and spent the nights watching by the bedside of his sick child. At one time, in November, there was fear for his life, and Venice shook with apprehension. He recovered and took up the burden of government with his marvelous stoic calm.

In spite of the fact that the city was besieged and money scarce, Venice was characteristically buoyant. The theater, the Fenice, was crowded; fêtes and carnivals, always patriotically fervent, were of daily occurrence; processions, music, all that appealed to the eye and the ear and the imagination fed the Venetian love of glory. Their city was free, and the people awakened the echoes of that great life which had been theirs before captivity, they forgot so far as they could that they had ever slumbered. On the morning of November 17 Mass was celebrated in memory of all the martyrs to Italian liberty, and that same night the entire city was thrilled by a wonderful display of the Aurora Borealis which set the snow-caps of the Alps vividly before their eyes. They lived on faith, and hope, and trust in Daniel Manin, and found propitious omens with sea-dwellers’ skill.

In December some Roman volunteers left Venice to join their fellow citizens, and with them went Ugo Bassi. He bade Manin a touching farewell, foreseeing what lay before both his own city and Venice. He had venerated the Pope who had held out such noble hopes to all Italians, but he could do so no more, and in his place put the hero of Venice. As he left the city he kissed the stone plate on Manin’s door, saying, “Next to God and Italy, before the Pope—Manin.”

The Assembly which had voted for fusion with Piedmont was dissolved, and a new one elected. Manin was determined that his government should have the fullest power over the city. He deemed this essential to any hopes of ultimate success. Some members of the Assembly disagreed with him, and advocated restriction. “It is not a question of power,” replied Manin, “but of saving the country. If we are to be hampered on every turn by forms and limitations, we cannot act with the promptitude and vigor needful for the preservation of public order (I beg pardon of whoever the expression may offend), and our defense depends more upon that than upon the force of arms.”

The people got wind of the fact that certain of the Assembly were jealous of Manin’s power, and they marched to the Ducal Palace. Manin spoke and dispersed them, but again and again they gathered, making various demonstrations of their trust in him. At length he heard that they had devised a plan to march into the Council Hall and coerce the Deputies who wanted to fetter their “caro Manin.” Fearful of civic strife Manin called his son, and standing alone with him, sword in hand, at the door of the Palace, told the people that they could only enter after killing father and son. He bade them go quietly home, and they obeyed. That night he issued a proclamation. “Brothers, you have caused me great pain to-day. To show your affection for me you have risen in tumult, yet you know how I hate tumult ... as you say you love me, I entreat you to show it by your actions.... To-morrow let there be no shouting, no meetings. Remain at home. Trust in the government and the Assembly, who regard your welfare as dearer to them than life.” He was always the father speaking to his children.

The Assembly listened to the advice of its wisest members, and abandoning all dissension, chose Manin as President of the Republic, giving him complete power both as to internal administration and as to relations with foreign states. Manin spoke in reply: “In accepting the charge which this Assembly has entrusted to me, I am conscious of committing an act of insensate boldness. I accept it. But in order that my good name, and, what is of more importance, your good name and that of Venice, may not be tarnished through this transaction, it behooves that I should be seconded and sustained in my arduous undertaking by your co-operation, confidence, and affection. We have been strong, respected, eulogized, up till now, because we have been united. I ask of you virtues which, if they are not romantic, are at all events of great practical utility. I ask of you patience, prudence, perseverance. With these, and with concord, love, and faith, all things are overcome.”

Charles Albert again took the field and for a brief interval the Austrians were repulsed. Brescia made a heroic stand, and the Venetians heard the news of the little city’s courage with shouts of acclamation and an added determination to fight Austria to the uttermost. The Venetian fleet was kept in constant readiness, the troops slept with their arms, there was only the one thought, to keep the lion-flag of St. Mark flying from the pili.

Then on March 28, 1849, came letters from Turin telling of the utter defeat of Novara and of Charles Albert’s abdication in favor of his son.

The first effect of the news on Venice was absolute stupefaction, then a wild rush to the Square of St. Mark’s. A tremendous crowd called, as usual in its troubles, for its “father, Manin!” Said a foreigner who was a witness of the scene, “The faith of Venice in this man was inconceivable, complete, and absolute. He had never deceived, never abused it. The people seemed to attribute to him omnipotence and omniscience, and believed him capable of guarding Venice from every peril, and of rescuing her from every calamity.”

The President appeared on the Palace balcony. He said that he had not yet received official confirmation of the news from Turin, but his sad expression and his few words showed his belief that the news might prove only too true. Venice passed a night of bitterest gloom, more hopeless even than in the later days when Austrian bombs exploded in the streets. Three similar days followed, and then came official confirmation of the news. Lombardy was Austrian once more.

The city withstood the shock, and took up its life of outward cheer and hope. On April 25, St. Mark’s Day, there was a grand festa, and Manin spoke. “Who holds out wins,” he declared. “We have held out, and we shall win. Long live St. Mark! This cry, that the seas rang with in old days, we must raise again. Europe looks on, and will praise. We must, we ought to win. To the Sea! To the Sea! To the Sea!” There was tremendous thrill in his magnetic voice, in his deep blue eyes, in the glow of his pallid face; Venice cried aloud with eager hope.

With this spring of 1849 came the great days. When the Assembly had voted to resist Austria at all costs, the people adopted a red ribbon as their emblem. A historian of that time says: “From the top of the Campanile of St. Mark, far above the domes, the roofs, and the spires of the palace and the basilica, beside the golden angel that seemed to watch over the city, they planted a huge red banner, which stood out like a spot of blood against the azure sky, which was seen by the enemy’s fleet afar off in the Adriatic, and by their army on the distant mainland. It defied them both, and announced to them that Venice would fight to the last drop of blood.”

Placards were fixed to every wall, at the corner of every street. They read: “Venice resists! Church plate, women’s golden ornaments, bronze bells, copper cooking utensils, the iron of the enemy’s cannon balls—all will be useful. Anything rather than the Croats!”

Night and day workmen had been building ships, now the little fleet fought through the lagunes as had the great fleets of the olden days. The land forces held the shore batteries, and these forces were composed of all the city. One artillery company, famous as the Bandiera-Moro, was made up of the patrician youth of Venice, who, with their ancient love of splendor, wore velvet tunics, gray scarves, and caps with plumes. When the bitter fight came at Fort Malghera they held their guns heroically, fresh men leaping to replace the dead, cheering for Venice as the bombs fell among them, firing and eating and carrying off the wounded under a devastating fusillade. Venice thirsted for glory, and she won it; there are no more stirring tales in history than that of the brief defense of the new-born Republic.

In July came continual bombardment, and with it cholera, and the seeds of sedition spread by Austrian spies. Manin feared civil dissension, he heard grumblers in the streets. No one dared accuse the man, whom the Assembly had chosen absolute dictator, of any wavering or treasonable thought, but some raised cries beneath his windows in the Piazzetta. The Dictator appeared suddenly before them. “Venetians,” he cried, “is this worthy of you? You are not the people, you are only an insignificant faction. Never will I accede to the caprices of a mob! My acts shall be guided solely by the representatives of the people, assembled in their Congress. I will always speak the truth to you, even should muskets be leveled at my breast, and daggers be pointed at my heart. And now go home, all of you—go home!”

His words swayed even that rebellious crowd, and they cheered him. For the time sedition was silent, but the people were losing hope. They were a mere handful battling with the forces of an empire. Manin saw that all he could do was to insure that his people died as heroes.

The city was the prey of famine, pestilence, and fire when on August 13 she held her last festa. The Dictator spoke to the troops in the Square of St. Mark’s. His words rang like a clarion call. “A people that have done and suffered as our people have done and suffered cannot die. The day shall come when a splendid destiny will be your guerdon. What time will bring that day? This rests with God. We have sown the good seed: it will take root in good soil.... If it be not ours to ward off these calamities, it is ours to maintain inviolate the honor of the city.... One single day that sees Venice not worthy of herself, and all that she has done will be lost and forgotten.” He asked them if they had still their confidence in him, if not he would resign the leadership to another. The Square shook with the thunder of the soldiers’ “Yes!” He went on: “Your indomitable love saddens me, and makes me feel yet more how this people suffer! On my mental and bodily faculties you must not count, but count always on my great, tender, undying affection. And come what may, say, ‘This man was misled:’ but do not ever say, ‘This man misled us.’ I have deceived no one. I have never spread illusions which were not my own. I have never said I hoped when I had no hope.”

As he finished speaking he staggered, and was barely able to get to the Council Chamber. There his physical weakness overmastered him. “Such a people,” he cried brokenly, “for such a people to be obliged to surrender!”

Nevertheless each hour now brought home the conviction that the strength of Venice was ebbing rapidly. Flames and the plague and the unremitting Austrian attack were bringing the proud city to her knees. Manin could only hope that he might at the last make honorable terms of surrender, he would not sacrifice all their heroic efforts to the desire for instant peace. On August 18 the people gathered in St. Mark’s Square, begging for some word of their President’s plans. He came out before them. “Venetians,” he said, “I have already told you frankly that our situation is a grave one, but if it be grave it is not desperate to the degree of reducing us to cowardice ... it is an infamy to suppose that Venice would ask of me to do what was infamous; and if she should ask it this one sacrifice I would not make—even for Venice.”

Some one in the throng cried, “We are hungry!”

“Let him who is hungry stand forth!” answered Manin.

“None of us,” cried the devoted people. “We are Italians! Long live Manin!”

Five days later the city was torn by conflicting rumors of mutiny and surrender. Manin had not yet succeeded in winning the terms he wanted from the Austrians. When the people called for him he came out on the balcony as he had so often done before. He spoke a few words, and then a sudden pain seized him and he fell fainting into a chair. A little later he reappeared and cried to the cheering people, “Let those who are true Venetians patrol the city to-night with me.” Then he took his sword, and at the head of a great concourse, marched to the section of the city where the mutineers had gathered. Shots were fired. Manin stepped forward. “If you wish my life, take it!” he said. The mutineers were silenced.

The following day, August 24, 1849, the city capitulated, the stock of provisions having been absolutely exhausted that same day. The terms were honorable, such Venetian soldiers as had been in the Austrian service were to leave Venice. Forty civilians, headed by Manin, were to leave. The powers of government were temporarily lodged in the municipality.

That same day Manin left the Doge’s Palace for his own small house. All day the people passed before the door, saying, “Here lives our poor father! How much he has suffered for us!” He was too absolutely worn out to see any one. At midnight he with his wife and son and invalid small daughter went on board the French steamer Pluton. All but one of them were taking their last farewell of Venice.

The municipality, knowing that their great leader was penniless, had gathered a small sum of money and forced him to accept it before he left. He felt that the other exiles were in as great need of it as he, and so quietly distributed it among them through friends on the various ships that were bearing the exiles away. He had thought of the people as his children for so long a time that he had still to take the care of them upon himself.

The little family of four felt that it was farewell as they watched the palaces and churches, towers and pillars of the City of the Lagunes drop beneath the horizon. The view of Venice from the sea, incomparably beautiful, must have been unspeakably sad to Manin’s eyes.

When they arrived at Marseilles the devoted wife fell ill of cholera, and, worn out with the long siege, was powerless to resist. She had written on leaving Venice, “All is over, all is lost save honor! I am going to a foreign land, where I shall hear a language not my own. My beautiful language, I shall never hear it again; never more!” She died soon after reaching Marseilles.

Manin took his two children with him to Paris, and gave himself up to nursing the little girl, who was the victim of a continual nervous disorder. The daughter and father were united by a bond of love that was wonderfully strong and spiritual, they seemed to understand each other always without words. He kept a little note-book record of her illness as an aid to the physicians, and after his death the book was found with the touching inscription on the cover, “Alla mia Santa Martire.” Her desire to comfort her father sustained her for some years, she knew that she had become to him in a spiritual manner the living image of his unhappy country. She struggled with all the heroism of a remarkable character to hide her sufferings from him even as he sought to hide from her the anguish her illness caused him. Daniel and Emilia Manin were worthy to be father and daughter, both were heroic souls. In 1854 Emilia died, her last words, “My darling Venice, I shall never see you again!”

Manin and his son stayed on in the French capital, the father giving lessons in Italian for support. He had harbored no resentment against France for her failure to come to the aid of Venice, he felt that the French people were near kin to his own. He welcomed all Italians or sympathizers with Italy, he predicted that eventually the entire peninsula would be one in freedom. He met Cavour in Paris and talked long about Venice with him, he was gradually becoming convinced that Piedmont could and would lead the other states to victory. His study was hung with portraits of the most dissimilar characters, all one in interest for his country, Charles Albert opposite to Mazzini, Garibaldi opposite Gioberti, Montanelli near D’Azeglio. He wrote articles on Italy for the papers and traveled in England to arouse British interest in his cause. It was a great day when he saw the Italian tri-color flying beside the French and English flags to show that Piedmont had joined the allies in the Crimean war. “In serving under the tri-colored flag of Italian redemption,” he wrote, “the soldiers who fight in the Crimea are not the soldiers of the Piedmontese province, but the soldiers of Italy.” He understood the boldness of Cavour’s great diplomatic stroke and gave Piedmont the credit she deserved in becoming the first envoy of a great nation.

While his strength lasted Manin worked in the cause, but finally he was overcome by physical sufferings. He wrote in June, 1857, to his friend the Marquis Pallavicino, “A month’s rest in the country has not calmed the fever of my poor brain. All work, all meditation, is utterly impossible to me. Not only cannot I think about serious things, but I am not able to give my mind to the most unimportant matters. This will explain my silence. I lose patience and hope. My painful and useless life becomes intolerable. I ardently desire the end. Farewell.” The physical weariness with which he had battled all his life was at last overpowering him. He still believed that his principles would ultimately conquer, but knew that he should not see Venice freed. September 22, 1857, he died, at the age of fifty-three years.

August 30, 1849, Radetzky and the Austrians had entered Venice, replaced the Lion banner of St. Mark with the yellow and black flag of Austria, and had expected to see the pleasure-loving city sink back into its former quiescent indolence. What they expected did not come to pass. Instead for seventeen years Venice mourned its lost liberty and lived only in the thought of that day when it should rise again and finally. There was no shame in this subjection, no happy compromise. This was Manin’s achievement, he had made his people worthy to be free. That was the purpose of his heroic struggle, the lesson of his life.

July 5, 1866, the yellow and black flag of Austria fell from the pili, and October 18 of that same year the red, white, and green flag of united Italy greeted a free Venice. There was one wish in the people’s heart, that only their “dear father Manin” might have lived to see that glorious day.

The remains of Manin, his wife and daughter, lie now close to the Church of St. Mark, his statue looks down upon the people in the square before his house even as he so often stood on the Palace balcony to speak to them in the days of 1849. All through Venice there are reminders of him, and he has taken his place among the great heroes of that historic city—himself her greatest hero, her sincerest patriot. The simple advocate, the great President, the “dear father” of the Venetian people.

MAZZINI

[MAZZINI, THE PROPHET]

Some men become legendary during their own lives. Their personalities have a certain detachment from the rest of the world so that common standards have no value as applied to them. They are poets or seers or philosophers, and often their mystic quality is of little use to the great mass of men, and is only to be appreciated by the few. Sometimes the whole world understands them. Mazzini had become a legend to the people of Europe long before his death, but a legend that carried the strongest personal appeal to every republican heart. You have only to dip into letters of the time to realize how close he came to millions of thinkers throughout Europe.

It would be interesting to consider the force of popular legend in a national movement, to weigh sentiment against statesmanship and military prowess. The land of Dante and of Savonarola would be an especially fertile field for such inquiry, among no people has the prophet been held of higher value than with the Italians. To-day we find them turning to their dramatists and novelists for help in the solution of new social problems just as Mazzini and the youth of his day looked to Alfieri for political guidance. There is no doubt that Mazzini believed it was his destiny to be a poet, and that throughout his whole life he looked forward to the day when Italy should be united and free, and he could turn to the work of writing her dramas.

Literary feuds play so little part in Anglo-Saxon history that we find it difficult to understand the importance of their place in Latin countries. Italy a century ago was the battle-ground of the Romanticists and Classicists. The Classicists believed in a certain smug cloistered virtue, a policy of non-resistance, and the contemplation of past glories. It was the ambition of the Romanticists “to give Italians an original national literature, not one that is as a sound of passing music to tickle the ear and die, but one that will interpret to them their aspirations, their ideas, their needs, their social movement.” Alfieri had been preaching resistance to Austrian tyranny through his dramas, the boy Mazzini first looked to him as a political saviour of Italy. He wrote, “these literary disputes are bound up with all that is important in social and civil life,” and again “the legislation and literature of a people always advance on parallel lines.” “Young Italy” first hoped to win freedom through its literature.

The ill-fated Carbonari rebellion of 1821 sent many Piedmontese patriots flying through Genoa to Spain. Giuseppe Mazzini, then sixteen years of age, walking from church one Sunday morning in Genoa in company with his mother, was stopped by a tall, gaunt-featured, black-eyed man who held out his hat asking alms for “the refugees of Italy.” The scene made a tremendous impression on the youth’s mind, for the first time he felt that the cause of freedom was not a scholastic subject, but one demanding the height of sacrifice. He set himself to study the causes of the failure of past uprisings, and at the same time dedicated himself to the work of teaching his countrymen how they might succeed.

The French Revolution had failed because it had taught men only a knowledge of their rights, without any conception of their duties. Men had not learned the law of self-restraint, and their ideal was the greatest personal liberty rather than the greatest personal obligation to their fellow-men. The revolutionists of Europe had a philosophy, but no religion. The first great discovery that Mazzini made was that if Italy were ever to be united, his countrymen must be fired with faith in their own God-given destinies. They must make of their cause a religion, they must learn, in his words, that Italy “had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier than destiny itself.” At the start he offered his countrymen two arguments for action, the one that this land of theirs had twice ruled the world, that she who had given Christianity and the Renaissance to Europe had yet to send forth “the gospel of humanity.” He wrote: “Italy has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with living weaklings and braggarts;” he showed Italians “the vision of their country, radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the nations that thought her dead.” Such words rang like an inspiration, but Mazzini, studying the men with whom he had to work, knew that such inspiration was not enough. They struck the note of glory, but all revolutionists had heard that note; what was needed was the call to self-sacrifice.

With this fundamental need firmly fixed in his mind Mazzini gave what spare hours fell to the lot of a young Italian lawyer to the work of writing to the independent journals. At first he leaned to the side of caution, realizing how strict was the censorship of the Italian press, but gradually he contrived to slip bolder and more inflammatory messages into circulation under the censor’s nose. He spoke of a new party that should arise in a short time, and called it “Young Italy,” he expressed deep sympathy with political exiles, he turned his literary criticisms into studies of national development. Ultimately one of the papers for which he wrote, the “Indicatore Livornese,” became too daring, and was ended by the authorities. Mazzini then aimed higher, and gained credit with the “Antologia,” the Edinburgh Review of Italy, by a series of articles on the historical drama.

Meanwhile he was still studying the problem of giving a new religion to the youth of Italy. He had joined the Society of the Carbonari, and was learning that the plots and counter-plots of an unwieldy secret society would accomplish no good end. There was too much ritual, too little effort. The Carbonari had no definite plan, they were entirely at the mercy of any chance leader of disaffection, each member only knew one or two other members. Of a sudden the Revolution of July in France fired liberals throughout Europe, Mazzini and his young friends in Genoa immediately began active preparations for a military uprising. Lead was being cast into bullets when the police of Genoa intervened and Mazzini was placed under arrest. He had been suspected of revolutionary sentiments for some time. The Governor of Genoa told Giuseppe’s father that he considered the son “was gifted with some talent, and too fond of walking by himself at night absorbed in thought. What on earth has he at his age to think about? We don’t like young people thinking without our knowing the subject of their thoughts.”

Mazzini was taken to the fortress of Savona, and there imprisoned to await his trial. The commander of the fortress allowed the young prisoner to keep his Bible, Tacitus, and Byron. From these hours of solitary confinement sprang the youth’s passionate regard for the English poet, a man whose writings he later vehemently held were only to be classed with Dante as an inspiration to Italians.

The government could prove nothing definite against him, but he was thought too dangerous a man to be at large, and so was finally given his choice between nominal imprisonment in a small town and exile. France was throbbing with a new democracy, Paris was the center of revolutionary propaganda, and so Mazzini chose exile there. Early in 1831 he parted from his family at Savona and started north. He felt that he had come to the parting of the ways, and that henceforth his life was to be absolutely given to the cause. For the first time he saw the Alps, and his nature, always strongly susceptible to heroic scenery, was deeply stirred. He watched the sunrise from Mont Cenis and wrote, “The first ray of light trembling on the horizon, vague and pale, like a timid, uncertain hope, then the long line of fire cutting the blue heaven, firm and decided as a promise;” here was the poet soul free at last to speak its message.

With the date of this first exile begins Mazzini’s call to “Young Italy.” He had recognized that his countrymen must waken to a new religion, that their souls must be touched rather than their ambitions. The youth of Italy would feel the call more strongly than the middle-aged. “Place,” he said, “the young at the head of the insurgent masses; you do not know what strength is latent in those young bands, what magic influence the voice of the young has on the crowd; you will find in them a host of apostles for the new religion. But youth lives on movement, grows great in enthusiasm and faith. Consecrate them with a lofty mission, inflame them with emulation and praise; spread through their ranks the word of fire, the word of inspiration; speak to them of country, of glory, of power, of great memories.” “All great national movements,” he wrote later, “begin with the unknown men of the people, without influence except for the faith and will that counts not time or difficulties.” Mazzini was not diffident with regard to his own youthful powers, nor was Cavour, five years Mazzini’s junior, who wrote to a friend at this time prophesying that he would one morning wake up Prime Minister of Italy.

The most important feature of “Young Italy” was its religion, the Carbonari had had none. Men were now told that they had a mission given them by God, and that what had been before a mere personal right had become a sacred duty. The second feature was the liberation of the poor, a need which all former revolutionists had seemed to overlook. The French Revolution had had no such substructure, the poets and dramatists had idealized national rather than social liberty, but Mazzini saw that the time had come for a further step, that Austria was not the only enemy his people had to fear. He wrote, “I see the people pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the intoxication of a brutish, angry, savage joy; and I remember that these brutalized faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the same mission as my own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows in beauty and might; the people of the future, unspoilt by luxury, ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and duties, and in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish for the present and glorying for the future.” Mazzini gave “Young Italy” as its watchword “God and the People.”

There can be no question but that “Young Italy” was strong where the Carbonari had been weak, but both movements had of necessity many of the same defects. Government espionage forced the new movement like its predecessors to choose the devious courses of a secret society. The restlessness of the age caused the new movement to take each fitful start as a momentous signal. The strength of Austria was not underestimated, but the weakness of the disunited Italian states was. Diplomacy was disregarded; it was only many years later that Mazzini the prophet learned the value of Cavour the statesman. “Young Italy” was launched in a troublous sea, destined to encounter many storms, but fated ultimately to spread abroad the seeds of the hope that was to awaken republicans throughout all European countries.

Mazzini no sooner arrived in Lyons than he found himself in the center of plots. The French government, still fresh from the days of July, was in two minds; first they aided a band of Italian refugees who were planning a raid into Savoy, then they faced about and scattered the conspirators. Another plan was for a trip to Corsica, there to gather arms to aid the insurgents in Romagna, but the funds for this attempt were lacking. Mazzini gave up immediate action for the moment, and locating at Marseilles started with a few youthful friends to organize his great concerted movement. They had nothing but youth and audacity. A contemporary (probably Enrico Mayer) described Mazzini at this time as “about 5 feet 8 inches high, and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large ‘republican’ hat; his long, curling black hair, which fell upon his shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the chiseled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his very youthful look and sweetness and openness of expression, would have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his dark eyes and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with his small and beautiful mustachios and beard. Altogether he was at that time the most beautiful being, male or female, that I had ever seen, and I have not since seen his equal.”

Mazzini was proud of these early days when he looked back upon them later. He wrote, “We had no office, no helpers. All day, and a great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles and letters, getting information from travelers, enlisting seamen, folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to save the expense of distributing papers. We lived as equals and brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence. The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the future.” It was Mazzini’s period of boundless hope.

Much of this hope throbbed through the literature that the small Marseilles press scattered throughout Europe, men were in such a state of unrest that the burning words became to them a prophetic writing on the wall. In a hundred ways the contraband pamphlets were smuggled across frontiers, all classes sent assurances of support and aid to the young men in Marseilles, everywhere lodges of “Young Italy” were started, and local editors scattered Mazzini’s doctrines through their immediate territories. Priests, attracted by the strong religious tenor, professional and business men, many of the nobility even joined the new movement. Garibaldi, a young officer in the Genoese merchant service, Gioberti, then a teacher at Vercelli, Ruffini, and his fellow-conspirators working under the very shadow of destruction at Genoa, enrolled under the new standard of “God and the People.” The old members of the Carbonari, the followers of Buonarotti and his “veri Italiani” joined the ranks, within two years “Young Italy” counted its members by the tens of thousands. Not since the era of the great Crusades had there been any simultaneous rising to compare with it.

All men who hoped for the coming of a united Italy looked towards Piedmont as the state by which the first step must be taken. Piedmont had great military traditions. It supported an efficient army, it was so situated that it held the key of entrance into Lombardy, and had the Alps and the Apennines as a base of retreat. In Piedmont there was moreover an intense national feeling, the House of Savoy was deeply rooted in the affections of the people, and almost alone among the Italian sovereignties that House was practically indigenous to the soil. In Charles Albert Piedmont had just received a king who was an intense nationalist, to whom the name of “Italia” was sacred, and who, at certain times, seems to have felt that he was destined to drive the foreigner beyond the Alps. He was no liberal, both his nature and his priestly advisers counseled him against revolutionary measures, he had not the sanguine temper of the leader, he was more the theorist than the actor. Yet with all his temperamental defects the men of the new generation looked on him as a possible saviour, he had given countenance to the Carbonari in his youth, and had led the conspirators of 1821 to believe that he would side with them in any war for Lombard independence. He had not given such aid as they expected, but he was still the one sovereign to whom “Young Italy” could look with any measure of hope. Mazzini was never an ardent believer in monarchies, but now, when his new party was growing with tremendous leaps and bounds, he felt that even the leadership of a king was better than no leadership at all. He was ready at this time to sacrifice republicanism for nationalism; how far he would then have followed a monarchy, if successful, is a difficult question to decide. He was so much in earnest that he could not always critically balance the means and the end.

Early in 1831 Mazzini published his famous letter to Charles Albert. It was the cry of a prophet to a later generation. He pointed out that the King of Piedmont needed no aid from Austria or France. “There is a crown more brilliant and sublime than that of Piedmont, a crown that waits the man who dares to think of it, who dedicates his life to winning it, and scorns to dull the splendor with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have you ever cast an eagle glance upon this Italy, so fair with nature’s smile, crowned by twenty centuries of noble memory, the land of genius, strong in the infinite resources that only want a common purpose, girt round with barriers so impregnable, that it needs but a firm will and a few brave breasts to shelter it from foreign insult? Place yourself at the head of the nation, write on your flag, ‘Union, Liberty, Independence.’ Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of Italian freedom. Do this and we will gather round you, we will give our lives for you, we will bring the little states of Italy under your flag. Your safety lies on the sword’s point, draw it and throw away the scabbard. But remember, if you do it not, others will do it without you and against you.”

Charles Albert had moments of heroism, but they were only too often followed by moments of overwhelming caution. If he ever read Mazzini’s letter he must have thrilled at the call to save a country he loved with the whole ardor of his nature. After that first thrill had passed he must have realized that the time to take such a supreme step had not come, or that he had not the will to lead it. Once harboring such a doubt the King became a battle-ground for advisers, and when the short fight for control of the King’s mind was won, the reactionaries proved themselves the victors. The unfortunate King allowed others to act against his better judgment; when the fire of revolt next blazed up in Piedmont the government turned a savage face towards the conspirators. The little band of revolutionists was hounded without mercy, terror reigned in Genoa, and the only choice offered the rebels was between betrayal of their friends and execution. Jacopo Ruffini, one of Mazzini’s dearest boyhood friends, killed himself in prison when offered such an alternative. The pendulum swung back, gaining momentum thereby for its coming flight. “Ideas,” wrote Mazzini, “ripen quickly when nourished by the blood of martyrs.”

At twenty-eight Mazzini found himself an outcast, hunted at last from France as he had been before from Italy, living in the closest concealment in Switzerland, all his hopes tumbling about him. He tried to organize a band of raiders who should enter Savoy from the Swiss frontier; they were disrupted by treachery and distrust before the first shot was fired. Mazzini’s health broke under the endless strain, there were nights when he never went to bed, days when he had to lie concealed in a goatherd’s hut. At times he seemed to find his only consolation in the white-capped mountains, them he passionately worshiped, the Alps were always nearest to him after Italy. He had very few friends, almost no books; there were no presses now to speak his words to the young hearts of Europe, only occasionally word came to him that his great idea was growing in the outer world.

In those dark days in Switzerland Mazzini suffered most from the thought that he had entailed all his family and friends in his vain sacrifice. His boyhood confidants were dead or in exile, families he loved were scattered over many countries, the few women he knew well were left solitary in their homes. The woman he loved he felt he could not ask to marry him, he had no home to give her, and scarcely knew whether his next day’s food would be forthcoming. He wrote to a friend, “I wanted to do good, but I have always done harm to everybody, and the thought grows and grows until I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I fancy I am hated by those I love most.” In all his letters of this period we catch the note of a spirit torn between pity for sufferings he thinks himself to have caused, and the stern sense of a duty given him by God. They are wonderful letters, the thoughts of a man who could put no limits to his own self-sacrifice nor value too highly the sacrifices of others. In one letter he wrote: “I think over it from morning to night, and ask pardon of my God for having been a conspirator; not that I in the least repent the reasons for it, or recant a single one of my beliefs, which were and are and will be a religion to me, but because I ought to have seen that there are times when a believer should only sacrifice himself to his belief. I have sacrificed everybody.”

A great heroic spirit was trying to justify, not its own aims, but the sorrows it had brought upon others. Mazzini could never have seemed hard and cold, but in those dark days in Switzerland, and in those later to come in London, the gentle, humble spirit of him was pre-eminent. He loved friendship, home life, the arts; he had met his ideal woman; and yet each and every joy life had to offer him he gave up on the altar of his duty. “Duty,” he said, “an arid, bare religion, which does not save my heart a single atom of unhappiness, but still the only one that can save me from suicide;” and again he wrote, “When a man has once said to himself in all seriousness of thought and feeling, I believe in liberty and country and humanity, he is bound to fight for liberty and country and humanity—fight while life lasts, fight always, fight with every weapon, face all from death to ridicule, face hatred and contempt, work on because it is his duty, and for no other reason.”

In 1837 Mazzini gave up the heights of Switzerland for the fogs of London, moved largely to this change by the fact that in England he need no longer live in hiding. He did not look forward with any eagerness to life in England; if the English cared little what political beliefs refugees brought with them, they were not the people to flame with interest in a cause. Byron, Mazzini considered more Italian than English; he could not conceive of poetry as stirring the British blood. He took cheap lodgings, and set himself to writing for support, finding time to keep up his correspondence with members of “Young Italy” scattered over Europe, and also time to look after such Italians in London as were in greater straits than he. The Ruffini family were with him for a time, then misunderstandings separated them, and the last tie that bound him to Genoa was gone. He lived the pathetic life of a literary hack, spending his days working in the British Museum, and his nights writing in his own small room. The one charm he found about London was its fog. “The whole city,” he wrote, “seems under a kind of spell, and reminds me of the witches’ scene in Macbeth or the Brocksberg or the Witch of Endor. The passers-by look like ghosts—one feels almost a ghost oneself.”

The lack of money oppressed him sorely; he would give to every Italian who begged of him on the score of universal brotherhood, gradually his few possessions went their way to the pawnshop. He said that he needed only a place to write and a few pennies to buy cigars. Then by one of those curious chances of fate he met the Carlyles, and his life became a little less cramped and lonely, although perhaps more tempestuous. There are a score of accounts of evenings Mazzini spent with these new friends, the one of whom he admired as a great thinker, the other as a truly noble woman. In time Carlyle tried the gentle Italian sorely; the story goes that the philosopher would rage at all human institutions with the violence of a hurricane and then turn to his guest with the words, “You have not succeeded yet because you have talked too much.” We can picture the boisterous, stormy Englishman thundering at those ideals which the sensitive, passionate Italian was trying to defend. It speaks well for Mazzini that he said of Carlyle, “He is good, good, good; and still, I think in spite of his great reputation, unhappy.” Carlyle’s estimate of Mazzini was that he was “by nature a little lyrical poet.” This opposition of ideas did not, however, keep him from defending his Italian friend when others attacked him. The London Times saw fit to speak slightingly of Mazzini, and Carlyle wrote the editors in noble indignation. “Whatever I may think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs,” he said, “I can with great freedom testify to all men that he, if I have ever seen such, is a man of genius and virtue, a man of sterling veracity, humanity, and nobleness of mind, one of those rare men, numerable, unfortunately, but as units in this world, who are worthy to be called martyr souls; who in silence, piously in their daily life, understand and practise what is meant by that.” These were glowing words, and thrilled Mazzini as he read them. They were a tribute to Carlyle’s justice, but it is doubtful if he ever really understood the Italian. He would have found it difficult to discover a prophet living in lodgings so near to his own house.

Gradually Mazzini made other English friends, and he worked his way into the pages of the best reviews. In time also his political efforts were revived; he never let any temporary interest dim his goal. He started a society of Italian workmen in London, and edited a paper for them, and opened an evening school where poor Italian boys were taught to read and write and learn something of Italian history. This school was very near his heart, he was always devoted to children.

During Mazzini’s exiled years in London, “Young Italy” had spread over Europe, and through countless secret channels was gradually making its strength felt. Outside circumstances were needed to bring its forces to a head, but there was no doubt that Mazzini’s words had called a power into being that must in time inevitably come to a life and death struggle with the Austrians. It is difficult to point out the exact minor causes of each fluctuation in Italian opinion, it is certain that the new popular literature called readers to take account of the words of Dante, and that the more they read the great poet the more they longed for liberty from the foreigner. Charles Albert, it was felt, was again dreaming of heroic measures, and something of the old, almost legendary faith in the house of Savoy as a national deliverer, re-awakened. Manzoni and Gioberti were prophesying a great Catholic revival, and the election of Pius the Ninth seemed for the moment to justify the hope. The half-pitiful words of Pius, “They want to make a Napoleon of me who am only a poor country parson,” was a more correct estimate of the Pontiff than the glowing words of his contemporaries; he was no more in accord with the spirit of his time than was Metternich. Still his election marked the swing of the pendulum in the liberal direction, and “Young Italy” was quick to take notice of such a fact.

The year 1848 was remarkable for concerted social movements throughout Europe. In France the Second Republic overthrew the monarchy, and throughout the Italian states an electric current shocked the people into revolution. Leghorn revolted and made Guerrazzi its chief, Milan fell easy victim to the Tobacco rioters, Sicily sent its Bourbon king flying, and Naples wrested a popular constitution from the greedy hand of Ferdinand. Piedmont and Tuscany followed soon, demanded and obtained constitutions, and the Pope, alarmed at the sudden spread of liberalism, granted a constitution to Rome. The moment seemed ripe to throw off the Austrian overlords.

There are few more tangled histories than the record of the next few months in Italy. It is a drama filled with heroic figures, but one through which runs the current of continual misunderstandings. Was Italy to be a kingdom or a republic? Was the Pope a menace or a help? Was French aid to be courted or rejected? These were only a few of the questions on which men split. The one glorious fact was the burning patriotic ardor of Italians in each state from Sicily to Savoy, their actual belief in the religion of duty Mazzini had been preaching to them.

Word came to Milan that there was revolution in Vienna, and the Five Days drove the Austrian garrison from their stronghold. Como, Brescia, Venice, all the northern cities that had so long loathed the white-coated overlords, won freedom; Metternich’s puppet-princes of Modena and Parma fled. Piedmont declared war, Tuscany declared war, volunteers of all ranks and ages poured from Umbria to help the northern armies. Mazzini, hearing the news in London, sped to Milan, and was received as the prophet of the new day. Italy had its prophet, but the statesman and the soldier were not yet recognized.

The new provisional government in Milan had no fixed policy, Charles Albert’s advisers still clogged his steps, the volunteers were ready, but they had neither the arms nor the training to compete with the war-worn Austrians. While there was discussion and dissension in Lombardy, the enemy recuperated and returned to besiege the cities they had lost. By July the Italian army was driven into Milan, there the spirit of the earlier Five Days revived, but victory appeared hopeless, and finally Charles Albert, torn and distracted, surrendered the city. Mazzini passed to Lugano, thence to Leghorn, thence to Florence; in each city the situation was practically the same, the people were aflame with devotion to Italy, the leaders had as many plans as there were men.

Rome had driven out the Pope and proclaimed the Republic. The call of Rome was the call direct to Mazzini’s soul, he turned there to find a solution of all difficulties. Simultaneously the newly formed Roman Assembly turned to him, and bade him welcome as a citizen of Rome. He believed that Dante’s vision and his own were coming true, and hurried to the Eternal City. His first work there was to raise ten thousand troops and send them north. They had scarcely started when the crushing news of the defeat at Novara stunned all patriots. Rome had to look to herself, and made Mazzini Triumvir and practically dictator of the city.

The little Roman Republic of 1849 had an inspiring history. Mazzini had written and spoken, now it became his turn to act. He was set at the head of a city from which its spiritual as well as its temporal head had fled. Priests and protesting laymen were all about him, it would have been easy for him to scorn the power that scoffed at him. He did not, he himself doubted the strength of the Catholic Church to survive, he dreamed of a new church which should speak to the world from the seven hills of Rome, but he would not take a single step to destroy one man’s religion. More than that he made it his special duty to see that the priests were not disturbed in their work. He wanted the Republic to be based on the love of God. He hoped that the Church would aid the Italian cause for the love of man. He would allow the Pope to reign as spiritual Prince, if he would only be content with his own noble sphere.

Rome won back something of its historic ardor under Mazzini’s call. The Republic was planned on lines of great proportions, steps were actually taken to make it a republic wherein each man had a worthy share. The foundations were laid with the greatest patience and zeal, the Triumvir gave the last ounce of his strength to building truly, he lived as he had always lived, for others, and took nothing for himself. Margaret Fuller said that at this time his face, haggard and worn, seemed to her “more divine than ever.” The poorest citizen could find him as readily as the richest, he was the same to all, he gave away his small salary of office as entirely as in his London days he had dispersed his earnings. If ever man’s rule was noble, if ever it was spiritual, that of Rome’s Triumvir was, in the weeks when he faced treachery both from without and within.

It is scarcely possible that Mazzini could have expected his city to stand against the armies that were marching towards it. At most he could only hope to show the Romans of what great self-sacrifice they were capable. He probably hoped that the Republic would convince Italians that the spirit of “Young Italy” was not a mere prophet’s dream. That he did; he could not fight Austria and France single-handed.

Louis Napoleon had evolved one of his great ideas, he would win both the French army and the French clergy by a strategic move. He sent Oudinot into Italy, blinding the Romans with various subtleties, waiting until the propitious hour to strike. The Romans understood, the Assembly voted to resist to the end, and Garibaldi led the troops to their first victory. De Lesseps was appointed peace negotiator for the French, and he and Mazzini met, and for a time it seemed as though there might be a reconciliation. Mazzini strove with the greatest tact and patience to win the French, but De Lesseps was nothing more than Napoleon’s dupe, and as soon as Garibaldi had advanced to meet the Neapolitan king’s army, Napoleon removed his envoy and showed his hand.

The truce had been virtually agreed on when Oudinot suddenly attacked and placed Rome in a state of siege. For almost a month the citizens fought with unfailing courage. Mazzini, Garibaldi, Mameli, the martyr war-poet, Bassi, the great preacher, republicans and royalists, princes and peasants, all within Rome’s walls fought for freedom from the foreigner. There could be but one end, and it came when starvation and losses had weakened the defenders so that they could no longer hold their posts. Mazzini would have fought hand-to-hand in the streets, the army was with him, but the Assembly voted to surrender. The besiegers entered, Garibaldi led his Three Thousand in their great retreat, Mazzini stayed on in Rome uttering such protest as he could, unharmed by the French troops who dared not touch him, through knowledge of the people’s love for him.

The downfall of the Republic must have been a terrible blow to Mazzini, probable as it is that he foresaw the city could not long last by itself. Physical force and treachery had overwhelmed the noblest concepts of government. Temporary disappointment, however, could not dull his spirit, the prophet of United Italy proved himself a true prophet. He went on with his work, at first in Switzerland, then again driven away by foreign influence, in London.

He took up his life there, much older, much more worn and scarred, but with the same indomitable spirit. “His face in repose,” wrote a contemporary of this time, “was grave, even sad, but it lit up with a smile of wonderful sweetness as he greeted a friend with a pressure rather than a shake of the thin hand,” and again his piercing black eyes were described as “of luminous depth, full of sadness, tenderness and courage, of purity and fire, readily flashing into indignation or humor, always with the latent expression of exhaustless resolution.” His pictures are familiar, the high straight forehead, the strong nose, the curving lips, the scant gray, then almost white, mustache and beard, the high-buttoned frock coat and the silk handkerchief wound like a stock about his throat.

London had grown kinder to him than at first, he had many good friends, and he could understand better the English point of view. He lodged as humbly as before, and again took up his writing, his correspondence, and his ceaseless care for his poor countrymen. One of his best biographers gives us this sketch of him, a picture that portrays the man, “in his small room, every piece of furniture littered with books and papers, the air thick with smoke of cheap Swiss cigars (except when friends sent Havanas), brightened only by his tame canaries and carefully-tended plants, he was generally writing at his desk until evening, always with more work in hand than he could cope with, carrying on the usual mass of correspondence, writing articles for his Italian papers, raising public funds with infinite labor, stirring his English friends to help the cause, finding money and work for the poor refugees, or organizing concerts in their interest.” With what infinite reverence must the men he helped have looked on him!

The prophet is not a statesman; he can show the road, but rarely follow it. Mazzini’s life had reached its climax when as Triumvir he had started to practise his own precepts, his work had been to scatter seed for the crop which other men should reap at harvest. He could not understand the dissimulations of diplomacy, he could not tolerate compromise, he could not now sacrifice his dreams of a republic for liberty and union. These qualities were not in his character; if they had been he could not have led men’s minds by his words and actions; he could not be both a prophet and an opportunist; the need of the former was passing, and that of the latter at hand.

Few men understood the twists and turns of Cavour’s policy as Prime Minister of Piedmont, and Mazzini not at all. After the battle of Novara Charles Albert had abdicated in favor of his son Victor Emmanuel, and a new order had come to pass in Piedmont. Cavour had a definite goal, the unity of Italy under the leadership of his king; and he never forgot that goal. To win it, he realized that he needed more than the raw volunteer forces of 1848, more than mere enthusiasm, no matter how heroic; he needed efficient troops, he needed a foreign ally, he needed a moment when Austria should be at a disadvantage, above all he needed one leader instead of a dozen to determine on any action. To accomplish these ends he gave republicans little sympathy, and centered the national movement about his king, he treated with Louis Napoleon, and did his utmost to win his favor, he discountenanced secret half-prepared revolts against the Austrians, he drilled and multiplied the troops, and harbored the finances. At all these measures Mazzini instinctively revolted; he wanted a republic, he loathed Napoleon as the betrayer of Rome, he was ever eager for any sincere demonstration against Austria. He only learned half-truths in London, but those half-truths did not inspire him to trust Cavour. Neither of these men understood the other; to Cavour Mazzini was the fanatic who would destroy any cause by lack of temperance, to Mazzini Cavour was the aristocrat who would inflict upon the poor of Italy simply a new yoke in place of the old. They could not work together, and so Mazzini publicly denounced Cavour, and the latter declared Mazzini an exile from his home.

Meantime, while Piedmont was playing a wary game, and all the Italian states were making ready for the next great attempt, Mazzini took part in two small insurrections, one near Como, and the other at Genoa, both of which failed disastrously. The latter was the more serious, the government was tired of these perennial conspiracies, and denounced the revolt as anarchistic. Mazzini and five other leaders were sentenced to death, and many to long terms of imprisonment. Mazzini hid in the house of the Marquis Pareto, and was undiscovered, although the police made a prolonged search for him. It is said that Mazzini himself, dressed as a footman, opened the door to the officer, who recognized him as an old schoolmate, and had mercy. Some days later he escaped from the house, undisguised, walking arm-in-arm with a lady of Genoa, and reaching a carriage, was driven to Quarto, and thence went to England. There were many curious turns and twists in this conspiracy in which both conspirators and government were working for the same great end, but with widely different means, and with avowed enmity between them.

It was not long until Cavour and Napoleon met at Plombières and made their famous compact, after that events hastened forward. By the spring of 1859 Cavour had prepared both royalists and republicans for war. With his ally he felt that the Italian cause must now triumph, and at a given signal the conflict began. The Princes were driven from Tuscany, Romagna, Parma, and Modena, and all those states declared for Victor Emmanuel. Much as Mazzini hated Cavour’s French ally, he could no longer stay his enthusiasm. He saw unity at last almost come, after Solferino he declared that the Austrian domination was at an end. Without warning Napoleon met the Emperor Francis Joseph at Villafranca and betrayed the cause. He abandoned Venetia to Austria, and central Italy to the Bourbon Princes. Cavour, wild with indignation, spoke his feelings and resigned, the Italians were again left to their own divided efforts.

Mazzini, his fears of Napoleon now justified, went to Florence and declared that the people of central Italy must stake all for their briefly-won freedom, he gave up his republican protests, and advocated annexation with Piedmont so they might have unity. He wrote to friends in Sicily and Rome, he begged Garibaldi to lead his troops into Umbria. All this time he had to live virtually in hiding, the ban against him had not been raised, and the thought that he, whose every emotion was for Italy, should not be trusted at all among his countrymen galled him to the quick. He wrote: “To be a prisoner among our own people is too much to bear.”

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.