Part 7

The Russian invasion being assured, the Magyar government held a council of war, at which it was proposed to consolidate the various armies, and to defeat first the Austrians coming from the west and then the Russians coming from the north and east,--a sensible plan, frustrated, however, by delays, some of which were unavoidable. The Austrian army, strengthened by reinforcements from Italy, and commanded by Marshal Haynau, who came red-handed from Brescia, advanced into Hungary, and defeated Görgei on the river Waag (June 20-21). The Magyar government and Diet departed for the second time, in melancholy procession, from their capital. By the middle of July one hundred and fifty thousand Russians--eighty thousand of whom were led by the wolfish Paskevitch--had penetrated into the heart of the country. Inevitably, the Magyar forces would be driven in and caught between the victorious enemies: nevertheless, they would not yet submit.

Internal discord alone tarnished the record of the last days of the Hungarian Republic. On July 1, Kossuth removed Görgei for insubordination, but Görgei’s officers and men protested so loudly that Kossuth thought it discreet to reinstate him. Three weeks later, a fraction of the Diet, assembled at Szegedin, declared the equality of all the races in Hungary, emancipated the Jews, and then, warned by the rumble of hostile cannon, it dissolved forever.

For yet a few weeks we have news of Kossuth hurrying hither and thither to proclaim hope where no hope was; conferring with nonplussed but still resolute generals; dragging after him, like his shadow, those printing-presses for bank-notes, now worth no more than blank paper. Finally, at Arád, he resigned the presidency, and appointed Görgei dictator with full powers. At Világos, on August 13, Görgei surrendered his exhausted army of twenty-three thousand men to Rüdiger, the Russian general. Thus was consummated what the Magyars, frenzied by defeat, branded as Görgei’s treason, but what, to an impartial observer, appears an inevitable act. Görgei’s course throughout the war cannot be commended: inordinate personal ambition, not treason, was its motive; he may have thought to play the part of Monk, but more likely he had taken Napoleon for his model; one thing alone is certain,--he did not intend that Kossuth should reap the glory of victory, if victory came. In surrendering at Világos he did what every commander is justified in doing, when further resistance could only entail fresh losses without any hope of altering the result.

Learning the capitulation of the main army, the other generals one by one submitted. Klapka alone maintained an heroic defense at Comorn until September 27, when hunger and an empty magazine forced him to surrender. With the hauling down of the red-white-and-green flag from the citadel of Comorn vanished the last symbol of that revolution which, bursting forth at Palermo in January, 1848, had spread through Europe, shaking the thrones of monarchs, and kindling in down-trodden people the belief that a new epoch, a Golden Age of Liberty, had come. Hopes as splendid as men ever cherished had now been shattered, and in their stead only the bitterest memories remained; for as each people pondered in sorrow and oppression the events of those twenty months, it was tormented by the reflection that its own dissensions, not less than the might of its enemies, had wrought its ruin.

Austria, careful by a deceitful silence to encourage the stray bodies of Magyar troops to give themselves up, proceeded to punish Hungary with a severity which matched the persecutions of the French Reign of Terror. In every city Marshal Haynau set up his shambles; in every parish he plied his scourge. Imprisonment, torture, confiscation, overtook the lowly defenders of the Magyar cause; death awaited the leaders. On October 6, at Arád, fourteen generals were hanged or shot, and that same day Count Louis Batthyányi was shot at Pesth. Görgei was spared, thanks to the personal intervention of Czar Nicholas.

Kossuth and several thousand Magyars took refuge in Turkey. The Sultan protected him, in spite of the threats of Russia and Austria,--protected him because the Turkish religion forbade the betrayal of a refugee,--but kept him for nearly two years in half bondage. Then the Magyar hero, at the instance of the American Congress, was permitted to embark on an American man-of-war. He came to the United States, where he was greeted with an enthusiasm which no other foreigner except Lafayette had stirred. He got boundless sympathy, and no inconsiderable sum of money for prosecuting the emancipation of Hungary; but the times were unfavorable, and the lot of the Magyars concerned very little the rulers of European diplomacy after 1850. Returning to Europe, Kossuth made agitation his sole aim. He strove to interest the great powers in Hungary’s fate; he strove, through secret emissaries, to provoke the Magyars themselves to rebel. The former were deaf; the latter, taught by terrible experience, deemed it folly to attack Austria again in the field. Through the persistent and judicious political agitation led by the sagacious Francis Deák, they achieved, in 1867, a recognition of their constitutional rights, and a full measure of home rule.

Kossuth, however, refused to the last to be reconciled. He lived in exile at Turin, a forlorn old man, forlorn but inflexible, amid the memories of exploits which once had amazed the world. There he died on March 20, 1894, having survived all his contemporaries, friends and foes alike, who had beheld the rise and splendor and eclipse of his astonishing career. To be the mouthpiece of a haughty and valiant people at one of the heroic crises of their history was his mission. His genius, his defects, mirror the genius and defects of his countrymen; his glory, being a part of the glory of a whole race, is secure. That race, which Arpád led into the heart of Europe, showed, at Kossuth’s summons, a thousand years later, that it had not lost the traits which had once distinguished it on the shores of Lake Baikal and along the upper waters of the Yenisei.

GARIBALDI

When men look back, two or three hundred years hence, upon the nineteenth century, it may well be that they will discern its salient characteristic to have been, not scientific, not inventive, as we popularly suppose, but _romantic_. Science will soon bury our present heaps of facts under larger accumulations, from the summit of which broader theories may be scanned; to-morrow will make to-day’s wonderful invention old-fashioned and insufficient: but the romance with which this later time has been charged will exercise an increasing fascination over poets and novelists and historians, as the years roll on. Oblivion swallows up material achievements, but great deeds never grow old. That many of our writers should not have heard this note of the age argues that they, rather than the age, are prosaic and commonplace. For to what other period shall we turn for a richer store of those vicissitudes and contrasts in fortune which make up the real romance, the profound tragedy, of life? Everywhere the dissolution of a society rooted in mediæval traditions is accompanied by confusion and struggle,--the birth-pangs of a new order. Classes whose separation seemed permanent are thrown together, and antagonistic elements are strangely mixed; there is strife, and doubt, and excess; sudden combinations are suddenly rent by discords; anachronisms flourish side by side with innovations; new institutions wear old names, and old abuses mask in new disguises.

In such a crisis, two facts are prominent: the unusual range of activity offered to the individual--may he not traverse the whole scale of experience?--and the dependence of the individual upon himself. He rises, or he falls, by his own motion. The privileges of caste avail nothing; for the very confusion produces a certain wild equality, whereby all start at the line, and the swiftest wins. Napoleon’s maxim, _La carrière ouverte aux talents_, is the motto of the century. Napoleon himself is an epochal illustration of the power of the individual to make the momentum of circumstances work for him. The Revolution, it is true, had harnessed the steeds; but Napoleon dared to mount the chariot, grasped the reins, and drove over Europe, upsetting thrones and princedoms and hierarchies. The haughty descendants of immemorial lineage gave place to the brothers and comrades of the “Corsican upstart.” Murat, the son of a tavern-keeper; Ney, a briefless law-student; Lannes, a dyer; Soult, Masséna, Berthier, Junot, soldiers of fortune; and how many other children of the Third Estate,--laughed at the pretensions of humbled Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Hohenzollerns! Frequent reactions between revolution and restoration serve to emphasize the stress of this crisis; and these contrasts in the conditions of men, revealing human character under the most diverse phases, show how inextricably the romantic and the tragic are interwoven in the average lot.

Nor in Europe only has this spectacle been going forward. The United States also have witnessed similarly rapid transmutations, partly due to other causes. Within a generation we have seen a gigantic national upheaval: three millions of artisans, clerks, merchants, and lawyers were transformed by the magic of a drum-beat into soldiers; and then, the conflict over, soldiers and uniforms vanished, and the labors of peace were resumed.

Follow Abraham Lincoln from his Illinois log-cabin to the White House; follow Grant from his tanyard to Appomattox,--and you can compute the sweep of Fortune’s wheel. These careers were lived so near us that they hardly astonish us; they seem as natural as daylight; and in truth they are as natural as that or any other every-day miracle. As if forgetful of these, we ransack the past, or fiction, or melodramas, for heroes to admire. To weak imaginations, distance still lends enchantment.

Our age has produced one romantic man, however, who had not to wait for the mellowing effects of time to be recognized as romantic. He enjoyed, almost from the outset of his career, the fame of a legendary hero, and he will, we cannot doubt, be a hero to posterity. Some future Tasso will find in his life a theme nobler than Godfrey’s, too romantic in fact for either invention or myth to enhance it. He lived dramas as naturally as Shakespeare wrote them; the commonplace could not befall him. Looking at him from one side we might say, “Here is a Homeric hero, strangely transplanted from the _Iliad_ into an era of railroads and telegraphs!” But if we fix our attention on other qualities, we discover in him a typical democrat, fit product of a democratic age. This man was Joseph Garibaldi, whose career alone would suffice to redeem the nineteenth century from the stigma of egotism and the rebuke of commonplaceness.

Among all the political achievements of our century, none has more of noble charm than the redemption of Italy. Whether we look at the difficulty of the undertaking, or at the careers of the leaders and the temper of the people who engaged in it, we are alike allured and amazed. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy had never been united under one government; nevertheless, from the time of Dante on, the aspiration towards national unity was kept burning in every patriotic Italian heart. During the Middle Age, little republics won independence by overthrowing their feudal lords; then they quarreled among themselves; and then they became the prey and appanage of a few strong families. The Bishop of Rome, forgetful of his spiritual mission, lusted after worldly power, established himself as a temporal sovereign, and elevated his cardinals into temporal princes. Foreign invaders--Normans, Spaniards, Germans, French--swept over the peninsula in successive waves; bloodshed and pillage signalized their coming, corruption was the slime they left behind them. One by one, the refugees of independence were submerged in the flood of servitude; until at last Venice herself, become merely the mummy of a republic, crumbled to dust at Napoleon’s touch. Napoleon promised, but did not give, to Italy the unity or the freedom which she still dreamed of: he parceled her anew into duchies and kingdoms. By that act he broke down ancient barriers and opened a new prospect. Italians beheld the old order, which had so long oppressed them that many believed it must endure perpetually, suddenly dissolved, and in its stead a change, although not the change they longed for. Still, any change, in such circumstances, implies fresh possibilities; and the Italians passed from a lethargy which had seemed hopelessly enthralling into a restless wakefulness.

The twenty years of the reign of Force, of which Napoleon was the embodiment, ended at Waterloo. Europe, exhausted, sank back into conservatism, and was ruled for thirty years by Craft, of which Metternich was the symbol.[2] The Congress of Vienna reimposed the past upon Italy. Monarchs and bureaucrats, like children who amuse themselves by “making believe” things are not as they are, would have it appear that the deluge of revolution, with all its mighty wrecks and subversions, had never been. The Pope was restored in the States of the Church; the Bourbons ruled again in Naples and Sicily; an Austrian was Archduke of Tuscany; Parma and Piacenza were assigned to Napoleon’s wife, Maria Louisa; Venetia and Lombardy went as spoils to Austria; an absolutist king reigned in Piedmont. Evidently the revolution had been but a summer thunderstorm, for the sun of despotism was shining once more. The sun shone; but what of the sultry air? What of the threatening clouds along the horizon? Were these the fringe of the dispersing storm, or the portents of another? Mutterings and rumblings, too, Carbonari plottings, and quickly extinguished flashes of insurrection,--did not these omens belie Diplomacy’s pretense that the eighteenth century had been happily resuscitated to exist forever?

[2] After Metternich, we have the period of Sham-Force, under Louis Napoleon; and finally of Force again, under Bismarck. These four stages complete the cycle of European politics during the past century.

It was during this interval of reaction and relapse, when hope was stifled and energy slept; when victorious despotism flattered itself with the belief that the Napoleonic episode had demonstrated the absurdity of Liberalism; when Metternich, the spider of Schönbrunn, was spinning his cobwebs of chicane across the path to liberty,--then it was that the generation which should live to see Italy free and united was getting what learning it could in the Jesuit-ridden schools. Of this generation the most romantic figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Joseph Garibaldi was born at Nice, July 4, 1807. His father was a fisherman, thrifty enough to have a small vessel of his own. Such stories as have come down to us of the boy’s childhood show him to have been plucky, adventurous, and tenderhearted. He cried bitterly at having broken a grasshopper’s leg; he rescued, when only seven, a laundress from drowning; he sailed off with some truant companions for Genoa, and might have vanished forever, had he not been overtaken near Monaco and brought home. His education was intrusted to two priests, from whom, he says, he learned nothing; then to a layman, Arena, who gave him a smattering of reading, arithmetic, and history. As he was quick at learning, his parents wished to make a lawyer or a priest of him; but he had the rover’s instinct and could not resist the enticements of the sea. At length, when he was fourteen, his parents yielded, and he became a sailor.

Of those early voyages, we need mention only one, which took him to Rome. Immense the impression the Holy City made on his imagination! He saw not the Rome of the Cæsars, nor the Rome of the Popes,--the city whose monuments entomb twenty-five centuries of history; but, he says, “the Rome of the future, that Rome of which I have never despaired,--shipwrecked, at the point of death, buried in the depth of American forests; the Rome of the regenerating idea of a great people; the dominating idea of whatever Past or Present could inspire in me, as it has been through all my life. Oh, Rome became then dear to me above all earthly existences. I adored her with all the fervor of my soul. In short, Rome for me is Italy, and I see no Italy possible save in the union, compact or federate, of her scattered members. Rome is the symbol of united Italy, under whatever form you will. And the most infernal work of the Papacy was that of keeping her morally and materially divided.”[3]

[3] This was written in 1849.

Thenceforth the young mariner, who rose rapidly to be mate and master, could not rest for the thought of the Eternal City, and of the country his patriotism craved. During these years, he learned to take Fortune’s buffets: he was captured by pirates, he lay ill and penniless for months at Constantinople,--adventures which in another career would demand more than passing notice, but which he deemed unimportant in comparison with a conversation he had with a young Ligurian, who unfolded to him the dreams of the Mazzinians. “Columbus did not experience so great a satisfaction at the discovery of America,” says Garibaldi, “as I experienced at finding one who busied himself with the redemption of our fatherland.”

Fatherland! the name seemed a mockery to the Italians of that time. Italy, as Metternich phrased it, was only a geographical expression. Seven or eight petty princes, including the Pope, ruled the little patches into which the Peninsula was cut up. All the north, except Piedmont, was directly subject to a foreign despot, Austria; while, indirectly, Austria domineered over Tuscany, Rome, and Naples. Piedmont had a native king, indeed, but Absolutism throve nowhere more vigorously than there. The Jesuits controlled the worship and education of the little kingdom; reactionaries filled the ministerial offices, the army, and the government bureaux; the sovereign himself, Charles Albert, believed devoutly in the divine right of kings, and held that it would be criminal in him, by granting his people more freedom, to lessen the responsibility imposed on him by God. Throughout the Peninsula, no one might discuss politics, whether in speech or writing. It was high treason to suggest representative government; the sovereign’s will was the only constitution. In some parts of the land, the very word _Italy_ could not be used by actors on the stage; and everywhere censors kept watch to prevent the idea of a regenerate Italy from slipping into print.

By foreigners, the Italians were more often despised than pitied; they were believed to be pluckless, wordy, deceitful creatures, who at best had their uses as singers, dancing-masters, and painters’ models. Among themselves, discord (born of ancestral feuds), envy (born of local ambitions, a love of haranguing, and a lack of leaders), had thrice resulted in an abortive revolution. And now, just as the third attempt had failed, and in its failure had discredited the great organizations of conspiracy that had been for fifteen years the hope of Italian patriotism, Joseph Mazzini, a Genoese a year younger than Garibaldi, banished from Piedmont because he had a suspicious habit of walking abroad after dark, formed the new secret society of Young Italy which aimed at not only the political but the social and moral redemption of his countrymen. Garibaldi, eager to hasten the emancipation of his country, joined Young Italy; but in the first plot in which he was engaged his confederates failed to appear at the appointed time, and he was forced to fly from Genoa for his life. “Here begins my public career,” he says in his memoirs.

After being twice captured and twice escaping, he made his way on foot, disguised as a peasant, to Marseilles, where, on opening a newspaper, the first thing he read was the sentence of death decreed against him should he ever be caught in Piedmont. This was in February, 1834. Proscribed but not disheartened, when chance offered he resumed his seafaring. But mercantile voyages grew monotonous. Should he offer his services to the Bey of Tunis, who was seeking a European to take charge of his navy? After hesitation, Garibaldi decided “no.” During a cholera epidemic, he volunteered as nurse in the Marseilles hospital. Finally he shipped for South America. Landing at Rio de Janeiro, he fell in with another exile, Rossetti, and for a while they kept a shop. Soon, however, more congenial occupation presented itself.

Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost province of Brazil, had revolted from the Empire and set up a republic, which it was struggling to maintain. Garibaldi, who could never resist aiding republicans, equipped a small privateer, on which he and Rossetti, with twelve companions, set sail for the south. This was the opening of a life of adventure which lasted twelve years, and which, could we trace it step by step, would be found a nonpareil of heroic deeds and startling dangers. The political and social condition of South America then resembled in lawlessness that period in European history when chivalry had its rise; when, as a foil to the bullying and craft and greed of the many, stood out the courage and honor and courtesy of the few. Garibaldi, whether by sea or land, approved himself a peerless knight. Following him, we should witness now a battle of gunboats far up the river Parana, until, his ammunition having given out, he loaded the cannon with the chain cables; or, again, we should undergo the horrors of a shipwreck near the mouth of La Plata, or join in a desperate battle against great odds at some lonely Paraguayan ranch; we should traverse vast pampas, or thrid the solitude of trackless forests; we should know hunger, thirst, and cold, and be incessantly attacking or attacked; and we should realize that although these campaigns seem mere border forays when compared with the wars of modern Europe and the United States, yet they settled the fate of territories as large as France, and required those martial qualities which beget heroism in any crisis under any sky.