Part 9

On the night of May 5, 1860, Garibaldi and 1067 followers embarked on their two steamers near Genoa and vanished into the darkness. For a week thereafter Europe wondered whither they were bound,--whether against the Papal States or Naples; then the telegraph reported that they had landed at Marsala, on the morning of May 11, just in time to escape two Neapolitan cruisers which had been watching for them. From that moment, day by day, with increasing astonishment, the world followed the progress of Garibaldi and his Thousand. No achievement like theirs has been chronicled in many centuries. They set out, a thousand filibusters, scantily equipped and undrilled, to free an island of two and a half million inhabitants, an island guarded by an army fifty thousand strong, with forts and garrisons in all its ports, and having quick communication with Naples, where the Bourbon King had six million more subjects from whom to recruit his forces. Grant that the Sicilians fervently sympathized with Garibaldi, yet they were too wary to commit themselves before they had indications that he would win; grant that the Bourbon troops were half-hearted and ludicrously superstitious,--many of them believed that the Garibaldians were wizards, bullet-proof,--yet they had been trained to fight, they were well-armed, and by their numbers alone were formidable. That they would run away could not be assumed by the little band of liberators, any more than Childe Roland could suppose that the grim monsters who threatened his advance would vanish when he upon his slug-horn blew.

And in truth the Bourbon soldiers did not run. At Calatifimi the Garibaldians beat them only after a fierce encounter; at Palermo there was a desperate struggle; at Milazzo, a resistance which might, if prolonged, have destroyed the expedition. In every instance it seemed as if the Bourbons might have won had they but displayed a little more nerve, another half hour’s persistence; but it was always the Garibaldians who had the precious reserve of pluck and strength to draw upon, and they always won. Their capture of Palermo, a walled city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, defended by many regiments on land and by men-of-war in the harbor, ranks highest among their exploits. Less than a month after quitting Genoa, they had liberated more than half the island and had set up a provisional government. By the first of August only two or three fortresses had not surrendered to them.

And now questions of diplomacy came in to disturb the swift current of conquest. Garibaldi determined to cross to the mainland, redeem Naples, march on to Rome, and from the Capitol hail Victor Emanuel King of Italy. Cavour saw great danger in this plan. At any moment, a defeat would jeopard the positions already gained; an attack on the Pope’s domain would bring Louis Napoleon and Austria to his rescue, and might entail a war in which the just-formed Kingdom of Italy would be broken up; furthermore, Cavour believed that assimilation ought to keep pace with annexation. He knew that it would require long training to raise the Italians of the south, corrupted by ages of hideous misrule, to the level of their northern kinsmen.

Such considerations as these could not, however, deter Garibaldi. He grew wroth at the thought that any foreigner--were he even the Emperor of the French--should be consulted by Italians in the achievement of their independence. Eluding both the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese cruisers, he crossed to the mainland and took Reggio after a sharp fight. From that moment his progress towards the capital resembled a triumph. And when, on September 7, accompanied by only a few officers, he entered Naples, though there were still a dozen or more Bourbon regiments in garrison there, the soldiers joined with the civilians and the loud-throathed _lazzaroni_ in acclaiming him their deliverer. Yet only a few hours before their King had sneaked off, too craven to defend himself, too much detested to be defended. Think what it meant that this should happen,--that the sovereign, the source of honor, the fountain of justice, the symbol of the life and integrity of the state, should not find in his own palace one loyal sword unsheathed in his defense, even though the loyalty were hired, like that of the eight hundred Swiss who gave their lives for Louis XVI! By an inevitable penalty, Bourbon misrule in Naples passed vilely away; it had been, as Gladstone declared, the embodied “negation of God:” even in its collapse and ruin there was nothing tragic, portending strength; there was only the negative energy of putrefaction.

Having taken measures for temporarily governing Naples, Garibaldi prepared for a last encounter with the Bourbons. King Francis still commanded an army of forty thousand men along the Volturno, near Capua. There Garibaldi, with hardly a third of that number, fought and won a pitched battle on October 1. A month later he welcomed Victor Emanuel as sovereign of the kingdom which he and his Thousand had liberated. The republicans, instigated by Mazzini, had wished to postpone, if they could not prevent, annexation; but Garibaldi, whose patriotic instinct was truer than their partisanship, insisted that Naples and Sicily should be united to the Kingdom of Italy under the House of Savoy. In all modern history there is no parallel to his bestowal of his conquests on the King, as there is nothing nobler than his complete disinterestedness. He declined all honors, titles, stipends, and offices for himself, and departed, almost secretly, from Naples for Caprera the day after he had consigned the government to its new lord.

Fortune has one gift which she begrudges even to her darlings: she does not allow them to die at the summit of their career. Either too soon for their country’s good, or too late for their personal fame, she sends death to dispatch them. Pericles, Cavour, Lincoln, were snatched away prematurely; Themistocles and Grant should have prayed to be released before they had slipped below their zenith. So, too, Garibaldi lacked nothing but that, after having redeemed a kingdom by one of the most splendid expeditions in history, and after having given it to the unifier of his fatherland, he should have vanished from the earth. Thanks to a kindlier fortune, the old Hebrew prophets were translated, and the Homeric heroes were borne off invisible, at the perfect moment. But while Garibaldi lacked this epic finale to his epic career, the closing decades of his life were as characteristic as any.

In the spring of 1861 he reappeared on the scene at the opening of the first parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, to which he had been chosen deputy by many districts. He came, not jubilant but angry. Nice, his home, had been ceded to France in payment for French aid in the war of 1859: against Cavour, who had consented to this bargain, Garibaldi conceived the most intense hatred, and on the floor of the House he fulminated at the Prime Minister whose “treason had made Garibaldi a foreigner in his native land.” He complained, further, because the officers and soldiers of the Garibaldian army had not been generously treated by the government. The outburst was most deplorable. Many feared that the hero’s testiness might lead to civil war; and though the King arranged a meeting, in the hope of bringing about a reconciliation, Garibaldi went from it with bitterness in his heart. Six weeks later, on June 6, Cavour, stricken by fever, died when his country needed him most. Little did Garibaldi realize that in the great statesman’s death he was losing the man who had been indispensable to his success in Sicily, and whose judgment was needed to direct Garibaldian impulses to a fruitful end.

Only Rome and Venetia now remained ununited to the Kingdom of Italy: in Rome a French garrison propped the Pope’s despised temporal power; in Venetia the Austrian regiments held fast. To rescue the Italians still in bondage, and to complete the unification of Italy, were henceforth Garibaldi’s aims. He paid no heed to the diplomatic embarrassments which his schemes might create; for as usual he regarded diplomacy as a device by which cowards, knaves, and traitors thwarted the desires of patriots.

In the summer of 1862, therefore, he recruited three or four thousand volunteers in Sicily, raised the war-cry, “Rome or death,” crossed to the mainland, and had to be forcibly stopped by royal troops at Aspromonte. In the brief skirmish he was wounded, and for many months was confined at Varignano, whither flocked admirers--men, women, and youths--from all parts of Europe. There is no doubt that Rattazzi, then the premier, had connived at the expedition, hoping to repeat Cavour’s master-stroke; but the conditions were different from those of 1860, and the Premier but illustrated the truth that talent cannot even copy genius judiciously. Moreover, by allowing Garibaldi to go so far and by then arresting him, Rattazzi subjected the government to a dangerous strain; for Garibaldi’s popularity was immense, and even those of his countrymen who insisted that no citizen--however distinguished his services--should be permitted to live above the law, and to wage war when he pleased, were as eager as he that Rome should be emancipated.

Untaught by experience, Rattazzi connived at a similar expedition five years later. For several weeks Garibaldi went about openly preaching another crusade. When the French government asked for explanations, Rattazzi had Garibaldi arrested and escorted to Caprera. A dozen men-of-war sailed round and round the rock, forbidding any one to approach or quit it. But one night Garibaldi escaped in a tiny wherry, and a few days later he led a band of crusaders across the Papal frontier. They met the French troops at Mentana, were worsted and dispersed; and again Garibaldi was locked up in the fortress of Varignano, while one party denounced the government for ingratitude towards the beloved hero, and another denounced it for treating him as a privileged person who might, when the impulse seized him, embroil the country in war. If we regard the acquirement of the methods of constitutional government and of respect for law and order as the chief need of the Italians at that time, we can only regret the agitation and expeditions which Garibaldi conducted, to the detriment of his country’s progress.

Meanwhile, in 1866, Venetia had been restored to her kinsfolk, as the result of the brief conflict in which Italy and Prussia allied themselves against Austria. Garibaldi organized another corps of Hunters of the Alps, but the shortness of the campaign prevented him, as in 1859, from going far. In 1870 the war between France and Prussia enabled the Italians to take possession of Rome as soon as the French garrison was withdrawn; so that Italy owed the completion of her unity, not to her own sword, but to a lucky turn in the quarrels of her neighbors.

No sooner had the French Empire collapsed, and the French Republic was seen to be terribly beset by the Germans, than Garibaldi offered his services to her. He was assigned to the command of the Army of the Vosges, a nondescript corps, which more than once gave proof of bravery, although it could not match the superior numbers and discipline of Moltke’s men. The French gave him scanty thanks for his services, and at the end of the war he returned home.

During the next ten years he was either at Rome, arraigning the government, the fallen Papacy, and the wastefulness of the monarchy; or he was making triumphal progresses through the land, sure everywhere of being treated as an idol; or he stayed in his Caprera hermitage, inditing letters in behalf of political extremists, Nihilists, fanatics. Yet his popularity did not wane; his countrymen regarded him more than ever as a privileged person, whose senile extravagances were not to be taken too seriously. They loved his intentions; they revered him for the achievements of his prime; and when, on June 2, 1882, he fell asleep in his Caprera home, all Italy put on mourning, and the world, conscious that it had lost a hero, grieved.

On his sixty-fifth birthday (July 4, 1872) he drew his own portrait thus: “A tempestuous life, composed of good and of evil, as I believe of the large part of the world. A consciousness of having sought the good always, for me and for my kind. If I have sometimes done wrong, certainly I did it involuntarily. A hater of tyranny and falsehood, with the profound conviction that in them is the principal origin of the ills and of the corruption of the human race. Hence a republican, this being the system of honest folk, the normal system, willed by the majority, and consequently not imposed with violence and with imposture. Tolerant and not exclusive, incapable of imposing my republicanism by force, on the English, for instance, if they are contented with the government of Queen Victoria. And, however contented they may be, their government should be considered republican. A republican, but evermore persuaded of the necessity of an honest and temporary dictatorship at the head of those nations which, like France, Spain, and Italy, are the victims of a most pernicious Byzantinism.... I was copious in praises of the dead, fallen on fields of battle for liberty. I praised less the living, especially my comrades. When I felt myself urged by just rancor against those who wronged me, I strove to placate my resentment before speaking of the offense and of the offender. In every writing of mine, I have always attacked clericalism, more particularly because in it I have always believed that I found the prop of every despotism, of every vice, of every corruption. The priest is the personification of lies, the liar is a thief, the thief is a murderer,--and I could find for the priest a series of infamous corollaries.”

Thus he read his own character, and we need not subject it to a searching analysis. In action lay his strength. He trusted instinct against any argument. Hence the single-minded zeal with which he plunged into every enterprise; hence, too, his inability to weigh other policies than his own, and his distrust, often intensified into unreasoning prejudice, of those who differed from him. If his kindly, generous nature often made him the dupe of schemers, the wonder is that they did not beguile him into irreparable excesses. He was saved partly by a thread of common sense and partly by self-respect akin to vanity, which kept him constantly on the alert against being used as a tool. Although modest, he knew so well the grandeur of the part he was playing that he took no pains to dissemble the childlike delight he felt at demonstrations of his popularity. The lifelong champion of democracy, he behaved, in practice, as autocratically as Cromwell; a believer in dictatorships, never able to work successfully as yoke-fellow or subordinate to any one else. Like the dreamers, he could not comprehend that human society, being a growth and not a manufacture, cannot be suddenly lifted by benevolent manifesto or patriotic resolution. He scorned parliamentary debates, he reviled diplomacy, he underrated counsel.

But what he had, he had superlatively: valor, presence of mind, geniality, unselfishness, magnanimity,--he had all these, the qualities of a popular soldier, to a degree which made whoever fought with him worship him. No other man of his time, nor perhaps of any time, inspired so many human beings with personal affection--as distinguished from that devotion which other favorite captains have inspired--as he did. Every one of his soldiers felt that in Garibaldi he had not merely a commander but a brother; every person who approached him acknowledged his fascination.

Strip off Garibaldi’s eccentricities, look into his heart, contemplate his achievements,--we behold a hero of the Homeric brood. Again we enter the presence of a man of a few elemental traits, whose habit it was to exhibit his passions without that reserve which belongs to our sophisticated age. Like Achilles, he wept when he was moved, he sulked when he was angry. Equally simple was the mainspring of his action. He obeyed two ideals, and those two of the noblest,--love of liberty and love of his fellow-men: nay, more, he obeyed them as quickly when they led into exile, poverty, and danger as when they led him to a conquest unparalleled in modern history, and to fame in which the wonder and the affection of the world blended in equal parts.

In the making of Italy it was his mission to rouse some of his countrymen to a sense of their patriotic duty, and to lead others to fight for a nation under Victor Emanuel instead of for a faction under Mazzini. Through him, the forces of royalism and of revolution formed an alliance which, although it was almost indispensable to the success of the Italian cause, might never, but for him, have been formed.

Such was Garibaldi, his character, his exploits. Shall we not seek also for the meaning of his career? Shall we not ask, “To what attributes of general human nature had his individuality the key?” That conquest of Sicily was but an episode; long anterior to it was built up the temperament which might have liberated twenty Sicilies, and which found a multitude ready to respond to its least signal.

More than half of our nature is emotion. Men may lie sluggish, they may seem sodden in selfishness, or they may fritter their force away on petty things. But let the hero come,--the Garibaldi, the embodied emotion,--and they will know him as light knows light, or lover his beloved. What just now seemed a dead, sordid mass is tinder, is flame. The craven legions, bewitched and transformed by his example, will follow him anywhere, were it to storm the gates of hell! The immense scope of noble emotion,--is not that the significance, if we seek it, of Garibaldi’s marvelous influence? And has it ever been more certainly displayed than in our very century, miscalled prosaic?

PORTRAITS

CARLYLE

Dr. Samuel Johnson, during a long life, cherished an aversion, Platonic rather than militant, for Scotland and the Scotch. Had any one told him that out of the land where oats were fed to men there should issue, soon after his death, a master of romance, an incomparable singer, and a historian without rival, we can well imagine the emphasis with which he would have said, “Tut! tut! sir, that is impossible!” Nevertheless, for the best part of a century Scotland has shed her influence through the world in the genius of Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Thomas Carlyle; and she has taken sweet vengeance on the burly Doctor himself by creating in James Boswell not only the best of British biographers, but one so far the best that no other can be named worthy to stand second to him. We now celebrate the centenary of the last of these great Scotchmen,--Thomas Carlyle,--and it is fitting that we should survey his life and work.[4]

[4] First printed in _The Forum_, New York, December, 1895.

In a time like our own, when literature on either side of the Atlantic lacks original energy; when the best minds are busy with criticism rather than with creation; when ephemeral story-tellers and spineless disciples of culture pass for masters, and sincere but uninspired scholars have our respect but move us not,--we shall do well to contemplate anew the man who by his personality and his books has nobly swayed two generations of the English-speaking race, and who, as the years recede, looms more and more certainly as the foremost modern British man of letters. Men may look distorted to their contemporaries, like the figures in a Chinese picture; but Time, the wisest of painters, sets them in their true perspective, gives them their just proportions, and reveals their permanent features in light and shade. And sufficient time has now elapsed for us to perceive that Carlyle belongs to that thrice-winnowed class of literary primates whom posterity crowns. He holds in the nineteenth century a position similar to Johnson’s in the eighteenth, and to Milton’s in the seventeenth,--each masterful, but in a different way; each typifying his age without losing his individuality; all brothers in preëminence.

When, for convenience’ sake, we classify Carlyle among men of letters, we fail to describe him adequately. The phrase suggests too little. Charles Lamb, the lovable, is the true type of men of letters, who illuminate, sweeten, delight, and entertain us. Carlyle was far more: he was a mighty moral force, using many forms of literature--criticism, biography, history, pamphlets--as its organs of expression. He had, as the discerning Goethe said of him, “unborrowed principles of conviction,” by which he tested the world. He felt the compulsion of a great message intrusted to him. There rings through most of his utterances the uncompromising “Thus saith the Lord” of the Hebrew prophets,--a tone which, if it do not persuade us, we call arrogant, yet which speaks the voice of conscience to those who give it heed. What, then, was his message?--what those “unborrowed principles of conviction” by which he judged his time?

Born in the poor village of Ecclefechan on December 4, 1795, his childhood and youth were spent amid those stern conditions by which, rather than by affluence, brave, self-reliant, earnest characters are moulded. His parents were Calvinists, to whom religion was the chief concern, and who taught him by example the severe virtues of that grim sect. Next to religion, and its active manifestation in a pious life, they prized education, begrudging themselves no sacrifices by which their son might attend the University of Edinburgh. They wished him to be a minister, but when he came to maturity he recognized his unfitness for that vocation and abandoned it. They acquiesced regretfully, little dreaming that he who refused to be confined in some Annandale pulpit should become the foremost preacher of his age.

Carlyle’s reluctance was rooted in conscientious scruples. He began by questioning the authority of his Church; he went on to sift the authority of the Bible. Little by little the whole wondrous fabric of supernatural Christianity crumbled before him. He could not but be honest with himself; he could not but see how Hebrew legend had overgrown the stern ethical code attributed to Moses; how the glosses of Paul and Augustine and a hundred later religionists had changed or perverted the simple teaching of Christ. Awestruck, he beheld the God of his youth vanish out of the world. He wandered in the wilderness of doubt; he wrestled daily and nightly with despair. And then slowly, painfully, after brooding through long years, he saw the outlines of a larger faith emerge from the gloom. He fortified himself by acknowledging that, since righteousness is eternal, it cannot perish when we reject whatever opinions some Council of Westminster, of Trent, or of Nice may have resolved about it.

Only earnest souls who have experienced the wrench which comes when we first break away from the bondage of an artificial religion, and perceive that the moral law may be something very different from dogmas, know the pang it costs. The dread of losing the truth when errors are thrown over--nay, the apparent hopelessness of being able to decide what is truth--causes many to hesitate, and some to turn back. Carlyle was not, of course, the first in Britain to tread the desolate path from Superstition into Rationalism. In the eighteenth century--to go no farther back--two very eminent minds had preceded him; but in both Hume and Gibbon the intellectual predominated over the moral nature, and to temperaments like theirs the pangs of new birth are always less acute. It is because in Carlyle the moral nature preponderated--intense, fiery, and enduring--that he became the spokesman of myriads who since him have had a similar experience.