Part 10

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.

CAVOUR, THE STATESMAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not have long to wait. The people of Genoa announced that they were preparing to send a committee to the capital to ask for the expulsion of the Jesuits and the organization of a national guard. The principal editors of Turin met to consider what stand they should take in reference to these demands. The suggestion to support the Genoese petitions was meeting with general approval when Cavour rose to speak. His words fell like a bomb, he said that the demands were far too small, that the only prudence lay in asking for much more. The statement was the keynote to all his later statecraft. "Of what use," he asked, "are reforms which have nothing definite, and lead to nothing? Where is the good of asking for that which, whether granted or not, equally disturbs the State, and weakens the moral authority of the government? Since the government can no longer be maintained on its former basis, let us ask for a constitution, and substitute for that basis another more conformable to the spirit of the times, and to the progress of civilization. Let us do this before it is too late, and before the authority which keeps society together is dissolved by popular clamor."

Cavour's proposal precipitated a violent contest. Both moderates and liberals thought that he was asking far too much; Valerio, the leader of the better element, declared that in asking for a constitution the meeting went far beyond the wishes of the people. The meeting broke up without reaching a decision, but the reports of it scattered with lightning-like rapidity. Valerio ridiculed the proposal to his friends and called Cavour an aper of English customs. He said, "Don't you know my Lord Camille?--the greatest reactionist of the kingdom; the greatest enemy of the revolution, an Anglomane of the purest breed." Cavour was nicknamed "Milord Camillo" and "Milord Risorgimento," he was continually asked if he desired to erect an English House of Lords.

The ridicule passed, but the suggestion remained. Charles Albert heard of Cavour's speech to the editors, and he had already lived through the first two months of that electrifying year of 1848. Constitution-making was in the air, Louis Philippe was falling, the little Italian Princes were throwing promises to their waking people. He hesitated, he was under a secret pledge to continue the government of his country in the same form in which it had come to him, he thought seriously of abdicating, but his son, Victor Emmanuel, opposed the idea vigorously. Finally, after much anxious thought and many family consultations, he decided to grant a constitution, and the famous Statute was given to the Sardinian kingdom. It is interesting to note that fifty years later the King's grandson celebrated the date of the promulgation of what was to become the charter of Italian independence.

Raised temporarily to a pinnacle of popular applause, the fickle gusts of an excitable public opinion soon blew Cavour down to his former standing. No one really agreed with his opinions, to the moderates he was still alarmingly audacious, to the liberals too deeply imbued with the spirit of English aristocracy. He stood for election under the new constitution at Turin, and was defeated; shortly afterwards, however, he was elected to fill an unexpected vacancy. Count Balbo, the first Prime Minister under the constitution, and Cavour's co-editor of the _Risorgimento_, did not ask him to join the cabinet, and openly expressed his disapproval of his fellow-journalist's ideas. The truth of the matter was that men were afraid of Cavour, they distrusted him partly because they did not understand him, and partly because it was only too evident that if he were given the chance he would drive the car of state to suit himself.

The new cabinet had no sooner assumed office than Milan revolted against the Austrians. Charles Albert hesitated, he was heart and soul with the Milanese, but England and Russia both warned him against war with Austria. His cabinet was divided, half feared to stake too much, half were for wagering all. Cavour printed hot words in the _Risorgimento_: "We, men of calm minds, accustomed to listen more to the dictates of reason than to the impulses of the heart, after deliberately weighing each word we utter, are bound in conscience to declare that only one path is open to the nation, the government, the King: war, immediate war!" The evening of the day of publication the King decided on war, and Piedmont rushed to the aid of newly-arisen Lombardy.

The story of that campaign is briefly told, great confidence, heroic sacrifices, a few victorious battles, and then the re-enforcement of Radetsky's army and the retreat to Milan. Sardinia had brave soldiers, but no great generals, the victories were not followed up as Napoleon had done on the same fields. At the battle of Goito Cavour's nephew, Augusto di Cavour, a boy of twenty, was killed. On his body was found a last letter from his uncle encouraging him to do his duty; the blow was a terrible one for Cavour; he had predicted the noblest future for Augusto. It is said that he ever afterward kept the shot-riddled uniform of the boy in a glass case in his bedroom, a relic and reminder of heroism.

The war soon came to the tragic climax of Novara, the ministers were perpetually undecided, men were thinking more of the possible results of independence than of the fact itself. There were a thousand theorists, a thousand phrase-makers, and in the midst of them all the King, alternately hopeful and despairing, heroic in his devotion, but confident that he should never weld Italy together. Cavour had not been re-elected to the Parliament of this crucial time, he was outside the battle proper, striving to direct public sentiment through his paper, and watching and studying the strength and weakness of the cause. The battle of Novara ended the war, Charles Albert abdicated, and Victor Emmanuel came to the Sardinian throne. The natures of father and son were almost diametrically opposed, the new King was the born leader, his people could not doubt the temper of his resolution, and it was upon that implicit trust that Cavour, determined on one and only one adviser, was to build a state that should be firm and enduring. In a sense failure had cleared the field for greater achievement as success could never have done.