London
1837-1843. AETAT 31-38
Life in London--Spiritual condition--English friends--The
Carlyles--Lamennais and George Sand--Literary work--Decay of
Young Italy--The Italian School at Hatton Garden--Appeal to
working men.
Early in 1837 Mazzini and the Ruffinis came to London. The determining
cause was the inability of the latter to bear the privations of a life
of hiding. They travelled by slow diligence stages through France, the
French government, which was only glad to get them out of Switzerland,
giving them every facility for the journey. In London at all events
they were free men, able to live under their own names and move where
they liked, untroubled by the police. But the change from the snows
and sunsets and silences of Switzerland to the squalor and noise of a
back street in London added to Mazzini's desolation. In this "sunless
and musicless island," with the dreary stretches of houses and the
wearing din, he pined for the peace of the Alps, where nature had
brought him an occasional respite from his heart-ache. "We have lost,"
he writes, "even the sky, which the veriest wretch on the Continent
can look at"; and in time the desolate walls across the street worried
him, till he would not go to the window. The one thing in London that
appealed to him was the fog. "When you look up, the eye loses itself
in a reddish, bell-shaped vault, which always gives me, I don't know
why, an idea of the phosphorescent light of the Inferno.[9] The whole
city 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
half-glimpses of the buildings, harmonising with their sombre
colouring, gave him a sense of mystery and indefiniteness, that
redeemed London of "the positive and finite" of a Southern town, and
responded to his growing faith in the poetic and unseen.
For a few weeks he lived at 24 Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road,
with the Ruffinis and two other exiles, who had helped him in the
Marseilles days. In March the quintet moved to 9 George Street, near
the Euston Road, where they suffered many things from the
maid-of-all-work, who no doubt did much as she liked with the five
inexperienced males, only two of whom could speak English at all well.
Here they lived for three years, on the whole a very miserable
household. Mazzini himself was "an angel of kindness and good-temper
and enthusiasm," ever ready to sacrifice himself to others' whims and
comforts. But the unhappy mystic was no cheerful companion, he was
unpractical and dogmatic, probably sometimes peevish, half-lost in the
empyrean of his ideals, beyond the ken or sympathy of the others.
Agostino Ruffini's petty selfishness and ungovernable tongue were the
source of frequent scenes, which one day brought Mazzini to tears,
"tears which nothing else could have drawn from him," as he writes
plaintively to Agostino's mother. At bottom young Ruffini recognized
Mazzini's worth and devotedness, and swore himself on paper to keep
his temper, with other salutary resolutions, to be read over three
times a week; but he was quite incapable of reaching to Mazzini's
mind, and he longed to enjoy himself in a freer life, where the gospel
of duty was never heard. Giovanni was more equable, and knew Mazzini
better, but he too had small belief in the gospel, and there was
little except old associations and the common love of his mother to
bind him to his transcendental friend. The general irresponsiveness at
home bitterly hurt and saddened Mazzini. "I love no one and want to
love no one," he writes of his English surroundings; and in his
letters to his friends in Italy and Switzerland, he returns again and
again to the lack of sympathy around him, as the heaviest trial of
those unhappy days.
There was nothing to distract him from the sordidness of the bickering
household in George Street. He seldom went out of doors, except to the
British Museum. He had no money to buy books and complains that nobody
would lend them. He saw few besides a few exiles, as poor and perhaps
as unhappy as himself. He was "lost in a vast crowd of strangers, in a
country where want, especially in a foreigner, is a reason for a
distrust, which is often unjust and sometimes cruel." In common with
his companions, he was miserably poor, often living on potatoes or
rice. His father advanced him money to speculate in olive oil;
naturally he lost it, and after an angry letter from the hard old man,
refused for several years to accept help from home. He tried to find
employment as a proof-reader, but in vain. He had an offer of work at
Edinburgh, but the Ruffinis would not leave London, and he felt
himself tied to them. Literary work came in very slowly, and for a
year or two his articles in the English reviews brought in little
profit, when the translator had been paid. The income of the rest of
the household was not much larger, and the bad house-keepers found
that in England "francs were little better than sous." Mazzini, as
ever, could not shut his purse to the needy exiles, who importuned him
and, as Agostino grumbled, "in the name of this chimera of human
brotherhood thought they had a right to make themselves at home in his
house." His few possessions soon found their way to the pawn-shop. He
pledged his mother's ring, his watch and books and maps; his cloak
went to buy cigars, "the one thing I don't think I can do without." On
one black Saturday he pawned a pair of boots and an old waistcoat to
find food for the Sunday. One winter he risked his health by giving
away his only overcoat. His mother, finding that good clothes got sold
at once to buy suits for his friends, thought it better to send
several suits of cheaper garments, so that he could keep one at least
for himself. Sometimes his wardrobe was so depleted, that he had to
stay at home, and could not go to the British Museum to carry on his
literary work. His generosity was well-known to his better-off
friends, and it is not surprising that their patience in lending him
money was exhausted. He tried a few years later to negotiate a loan on
the security of yet unwritten manuscripts; but the ingenuous scheme
met with no better success. Once some friends at Paris lent him £120;
another by a ruse persuaded him to accept what was practically a
gift;[10] but when towards the end of his first residence in England a
proposal was made at Turin to raise a subscription for him, he
obstinately declined it, partly because, if it reached his mother's
ears, she "would have died of shame." There were thus only two roads
open to him, suicide or the money-lenders. The thought of suicide came
to him again and again, but he put it away as a coward's act and for
his mother's sake. So more and more he fell into the money-lenders'
hands, borrowing at thirty or forty or sometimes nearly one hundred
per cent. from loan societies, that "rob the poor man of his last drop
of blood and sometimes his last rags of self-respect." Year after year
he plunged desperately in the morass, and though £320 seems to have
been the limit of his indebtedness, it was a crushing sum for one so
utterly destitute. It was the common lot of the exiles, and some of
them fared worse. In the midst of wealthy London, with men of means
all round them, who shared their political views and made speeches for
their cause, Karl Stolzmann, the Polish leader, one of Mazzini's
nearest friends, went sometimes literally without food, and Stanislaus
Worcell, born a rich Polish noble, was saved from a pauper's burial by
an English acquaintance.
Apart, however, from money troubles, Mazzini's external life gradually
brightened. In 1840, after a short stay at 26 Clarendon Square, not
far from their George Street house, where happily Agostino left them
for work in Edinburgh, he and Giovanni moved to 4 York Buildings,
which then stood in the angle between King's Road, Chelsea, and Riley
Street. He came there to be near the Carlyles, and escape from London
gloom and noise and importunate visitors. An Italian artisan, an exile
from Perugia, kept house with his English wife, who proved an
excellent housekeeper and saved them from servant-girl worries. In
those days there was a hay-field on one side of the house and
market-gardens on another, some trees in view "of a very sombre green,
but still trees," and not far off the Thames, "equally sombre with its
muddy dirty-yellow water, but beautiful at night, when its colour is
lost in the dark, and the water shines silver in the moonlight, and
the barges go down, black, silent, mysterious as ghosts." After a year
Giovanni left him after a violent quarrel, and went to Paris. They
were never really reconciled again, and Giovanni repaid his friend's
devotion with a coldness and contempt almost as unworthy as his
brother's, though he did something to atone for it by the sympathetic
picture of his old comrade as the Fantasio of his _Lorenzo Benoni_.
Uncomfortable as his relations with them had been, Mazzini felt the
loss of the Ruffinis. With them or without them, the early years of
his English life were, if anything, more utterly forlorn and miserable
than his worst days in Switzerland. His intellect, indeed, was safe
now, though there are indications still of a mental weariness and
strain, that bordered on hallucination. There was no longer any fear
of a spiritual collapse, like that which had threatened a year or two
ago to wreck his moral faith. But he was more wedded to his misery,
more desolate, alone in "the solitude of a damned soul." "A man cannot
live alone," he writes, "and I have nobody who cares to know what I am
thinking of and what I want." His heart sank, when he came home from
the British Museum to his bare, dark room, where there was no friend
or woman to welcome him, and Agostino's querulous temper to add to the
loneliness of it all. More and more the want of response around him
made him seal up his thoughts and aspirations. His friends'
ingratitude, the desertion of his followers added to the "terrors" of
his spiritual solitude. It seemed to him "an age of moral dissolution
and unbelief, an age like that in which Christ died." The sense of
failure still lay heavy on him, a brooding, unhealthy feeling that his
work had been in vain, that it was his doom to bring ill-fortune to
his friends, that he had sacrificed himself and made no one happier by
it. He felt like "one irrevocably condemned, though without fault."
"Pray for me," he writes to one of his best friends, "that, before I
die, I may be good for something."
Two things saved him from despair, perhaps from suicide. In the crisis
in Switzerland he had put away, once for all, any thought of personal
happiness. Sometimes still the natural man rebelled. "Do you think,"
he writes of Madeleine, "that in my hours of desolation I would not,
if I could, seek a breast on which to lay my brow, a loving hand to
place upon my head." But he knew that to look for happiness led
imperceptibly but certainly to selfishness, that "sacrifice was the
one real virtue," that duty "to God, and humanity, and country, and
all men" was the only law of life for the true man. And what he had
worked out once in cold philosophy, now mellowed into religion,
mystical sometimes, but beautiful and saving. Jacopo Ruffini and his
own dead sister were praying for him, watching over him, inspiring him
with strength and love. Life was an expiation, to purify the soul for
another stage, where friends would meet again, and misunderstandings
pass, and love reign over all. And even in this world, though sorrow
might be the portion of the individual man, Humanity, the great
collective being, would go ever forward to new knowledge, and new
hopes, and nobler rules of life.
Perhaps, even more than by his faith, he was saved by his intense
affections. True that they centred on ever fewer persons. He had
hardly a real friend left among his old political associates. For the
men and women, whom he was coming to know in England, he felt as yet
gratitude but little more. His love for Giuditta Sidoli was fading
into a sincere but unpassionate esteem. Madeleine was an impossible
dream, that he resolutely shook away. But the dear ones of his
boyhood,--Madame Ruffini, his mother, his unmarried sister, even his
dour father,--were loved with an affection that was pitifully, almost
morbidly sad, but ever more intense. It was the only sunshine in his
clouded life. "I feel God's power and law more every day," he wrote to
Madame Ruffini, "but He cannot weep with me or fill my soul's void
for I am a man still and tied to earth. I worship Him more than I love
Him, but you I love." And he pours out, in words that read extravagant
but came in truth from his inmost being, all that reverential love,
which he felt for her, who had been more than mother, but whose
affection for her devotee was cooling all too quickly. Agostino did
his best to damage his friend in her eyes; there seems to have been
friction between her and Madame Mazzini; and no doubt she sided with
her own sons, when the estrangement with them came. At the beginning
of 1841 Mazzini's correspondence with her appears to have abruptly
ceased.
To his parents he turned yearningly in a new sorrow, that was bowing
them down. His one surviving unmarried sister died. She had been his
favourite, the one of the family who had sympathized most with his
political schemes, and encouraged him in his work, and pleaded for him
with his father. Her death obsessed him with an unhealthy depression;
but he felt most for his parents, left in the solitude of old age,
bereft of the one who had been a needed link between them, for the
father had grown morose, and there was evidently some want of harmony
between the old people. Then the father himself fell very ill and
recovered with difficulty. His son brooded over the thought that he
had not been enough to his parents while he was with them, that the
life he had chosen for himself had been the cause of all their
trouble. Plans for their comfort worked in his mind "like a
never-resting wheel." He would have risked the death-sentence that
still hung over him, and gone to live with them in hiding, but he knew
that the dread of discovery would only have added to their cares. It
seems indeed that in 1844 he paid a visit to them in disguise.[11]
* * * * *
The gloom lifted somewhat, as he began to make friends in England. He
was not yet, it is true, in sympathy with English life. He found
little liking here for his transcendentalisms, his big indeterminate
generalizations; and English love of facts and suspicion of theories
seemed to him "materialism incarnate, pure critical analysis," fatal
to spiritual or philosophic thought. "Here," he writes, "everybody is
a sectarian or a materialist"; and now, as always, he never understood
or valued Protestantism. He had a poor opinion of English statesmen,
especially of the Whigs, who irritated him by the folly of their
attempts to put down Chartism. Nor did he think much better of the
Chartist leaders, who were "Englishmen, which means materialists,
utilitarians, Benthamists _par excellence_, with no principle except
that of the greatest possible happiness." The severance between the
middle and working classes portended, he thought, an imminent and
terrible revolution. But he came by degrees to recognize the better
side of English life. He admired its tolerance, its insistency and
tenacity, the "unity of thought and action, which never rests till it
has carried each new social idea into practice, and when it has taken
a step, never retraces it." He watched the Chartist movement
sympathetically, and contrasted its great following with the scanty
disciples of the French socialists. Though he cared little for its
doctrines, he saw in it something that rose above "the narrow egotism,
which characterizes English politics," and he especially approved,
when the Chartists put aside national prejudices and sent their good
wishes to the Canadian rebels.
Gradually he came to feel more at home in England. "There," he says,
"friendships develop slowly and with difficulty, but nowhere are they
so sincere and lasting." "Never," he wrote in after days, "shall I
forget, never without a throb of gratitude shall I mention the land,
which became a kind of second country to me, where I found friendships
that brought an enduring balm to my weary and unhappy life." After a
year or two his circle widened almost too rapidly, for clothes and bus
fares and the drain upon his time made society an expensive matter to
him. One of the first English persons who took an interest in him, was
Mrs Archibald Fletcher of Edinburgh. A few months after he came to
England, she met him, "a young, slim, dark man of very prepossessing
appearance," who could not speak English and wanted admission to a
public library. So profoundly unhappy he seemed, that the kind old
lady feared suicide and wrote to gently warn him. Mazzini replied that
no one but "a man, who wished only to enjoy and has made that his
chief thought, will destroy his life as a child does its play-thing."
His first close English friendship was with the Carlyles. "They love
me as a brother," he wrote in 1840, "and would like to do me more good
than it is in their power to do." For Carlyle he had for several years
a very sincere liking. "He is good, good, good; and still, I think, in
spite of his great reputation, unhappy." He respected Carlyle's
sincerity, his freedom from insular narrowness, his outspokenness. "He
may preach the merit of 'holding one's tongue';--to those, in truth,
who do not agree with him, are such words addressed,--but 'the talent
of silence' is not his." He welcomed him as one "who served the same
God" as himself, "though with a different worship"; his ally in the
attack on utilitarianism, in the exaltation of the spiritual. "His
motive is the love of his fellow-men, a deep and active feeling of
duty, for he believes this to be the mission of man on earth." Their
common love of Dante, no doubt, too, helped to draw them together. But
in his criticisms of his books he condemned, however gently and
respectfully, his individualism, his hero-worship, his depreciation of
the great common march of the race, his ineffectiveness and timidity,
when he came to practical political applications. And the antagonism
grew on him, till in time they seemed to be "diametrically opposed."
"Why," he said long afterwards to a girl, who had been reading and
admiring Carlyle, "you are fast drifting down the road to materialism.
You are lost. Carlyle worships force, I combat it with all my might.
Carlyle is the sceptic of sceptics. He is grand, when he pulls down,
but incapable of reconstructing something [anything] fresh. If instead
of loving and admiring nations and humanity, you only love, admire,
and reverence individuals, you must end by being an advocate of
despots." Carlyle on his side had little sympathy with Mazzini's
opinions, which to him were "incredible and (at once tragically and
comically) impossible in this world." He was impatient with his
"Republicanisms, his 'Progress' and other Rousseau fanaticisms."[12]
He valued him none the less for "a most valiant, faithful,
considerably gifted and noble soul." Once the Piedmontese minister
spoke lightly of Mazzini in his presence. "Sir, you do not know
Mazzini at all, not at all, not at all," Carlyle angrily replied and
left the house. At the time of the Bandiera episode, though they had
recently been quarrelling, he wrote to the _Times_, "Whatever I may
think of his practical insight and skill in worldly affairs, 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." Mazzini, mindful of their late
coolness, was much touched by the defence. "That I call noble," he
said of it to a friend.
For Mrs Carlyle Mazzini had a warmer feeling; and she reciprocated it
not only with an intense personal confidence, but for a time at all
events by sharing his political beliefs. Gradually she came more to
her husband's view of these; and Mazzini and she had "warm
dialogues," when he unfolded some wild design of throwing away his
life in Italy. "Are there not things more important than my head?" he
asked her. "Certainly," she replied, "but the man, who has not sense
enough to keep his head on his shoulders till something is to be
gained by parting from it, has not sense enough to manage any
important matter." But "to the last," says Carlyle, "she had always an
affection for him"; in 1846 she came to him for advice on her troubled
married life, and he appeals to her to "send her ghosts and phantoms
back to nothingness" and make it bearable by communion with her dead
parents and work and love. "Get up and work. When the Evil One wanted
to tempt Jesus, he led Him into a solitude."
Mazzini was a frequent caller at their house; coming in all weathers,
"his doe-skin boots oozing out water in a manner frightful to behold"
upon her carpets. Sometimes he would come with any story that he could
think of to amuse her; sometimes he would discuss Dante with John
Carlyle, who was then writing his translation of the _Divina
Commedia_, till Carlyle grew weary of the talk and reminded both that
the last bus was starting. Margaret Fuller has left a description of
an evening spent with the trio; how Mazzini turned the conversation
"to progress and ideal subjects, and Carlyle was fluent in invectives
on all our 'rose-water imbecilities,'" how his flippancy saddened
Mazzini, and Mrs Carlyle said to Margaret, "these are but opinions to
Carlyle, but to Mazzini, who has given his all and helped bring his
friends to the scaffold in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of
life and death." On another occasion Carlyle, after monopolizing the
talk while he passed in long review the silent great ones of earth,
turned to Mazzini, saying, "You have not succeeded yet, because you
have talked too much." The contests between them became more frequent
and painful. They would argue, so the tradition has been handed down,
the one courteous, deeply moved, pleading with his whole heart,
eloquent in his rather broken English; the other exaggerative,
splenetic, scornful in the wild flow of his language. All the time
Mazzini would sit pale and quiet in his chair, sometimes excited
almost to tears, nervously smoking his small cigar; while Carlyle with
his long clay pipe shifted restlessly, as he stormed out his
sentences.[13] None the less Mazzini's intimacy with them went on
unbroken, at all events as far as Mrs Carlyle was concerned, through
all his first stay in England. When he left for Milan in 1848, he told
her with a kiss to be "strong and good until he returned"; and when he
came back aged and worn, she sadly stroked his grey beard. She found
lodgings for him; she went to comfort him, when prostrated by his
mother's death. But the severance between him and her husband
gradually widened, till two or three years later they completely
parted, to respect each other's character and detest each other's
opinions to the end. Once more they met, years afterwards, and "talked
in a cordial and sincere way with real emotion on both sides."
"Mazzini," Carlyle noted at the time, "is the most _pious_ living man
I now know." Even for his politics he had at last some tolerance. "The
idealist has conquered," he confessed, "and transformed his utopia
into a patent and potent reality."
With the Carlyles, however, even in the days of his closest
acquaintanceship, he was never at home as he came to be in other
English households. His best friends in the forties were the Ashursts
of Muswell Hill. They were, he says, "a dear, good, holy family, who
surrounded me with such loving care as sometimes to make me forget I
was an exile." W. H. Ashurst was a solicitor, who had been a friend of
Robert Owen, and who made Mazzini's acquaintance at the time of the
letter-opening episode. To Mrs Ashurst Mazzini, forgetful of Madame
Ruffini's expired title, gave the name of "second mother." One
daughter married James Stansfeld; the other, at this time "the
favourite of his English sisters," afterwards became Madame Venturi,
and has left the best English memoir of him. Both they and their
brother for long years after gave him much quiet help in his work.
Through the Ashursts he came to know the Stansfelds and Peter Taylors,
but his intimate friendship with them belongs rather to the time of
his second residence in England. Among his other friends were William
Shaen, whom the Italian refugees knew as their _angelo salvatore_,
Joseph Toynbee, the father of Arnold Toynbee, Joseph Cowen, afterwards
member for Newcastle, and George Jacob Holyoake. J. S. Mill wrote of
him as "one of the men he most respected." Margaret Fuller, who had
come to England prepossessed against him, lost her prejudices when she
visited his school for organ-boys, and began the friendship which was
to be renewed in the days of the Roman Republic. "She is," he writes
of her to a friend, "one of the rarest of women in her love and
active sympathy with everything that is great, beautiful, and holy."
He had some intercourse with the two, next to himself, most notable
Italian exiles in London at that time, Gabriel Rossetti and Antonio
Panizzi. Mazzini interested Rossetti in his school, and they had
common acquaintances among the exiles; but they never came into close
touch, and Mazzini tried in vain to persuade him to help in his
patriotic work. At a later date political differences completely
sundered them. Panizzi was already Keeper of Printed Books at the
British Museum. He had been a Carbonaro in his Italian days, and he
and Mazzini had common ground in their cult of Dante and Foscolo. He
backed Mazzini warmly in the incident of the letter-opening a few
years later; but they disagreed on Italian politics, and they saw
little of one another, though they seem to have been never entirely
estranged. Among other foreigners that he met were Prince Napoleon
("Plon-Plon"), then busily conspiring against the Orleanists, and
Conneau, afterwards Louis Napoleon's doctor and a general go-between
for the Emperor and the Italian patriots. But he hated anything that
tasted of fashionable society. The mistress of a famous London salon
once persuaded him to come to her house, but when he found that she
wanted him to adorn her society and not from any interest in his
cause, he refused to go again.
He came at this time much under the influence of Lamennais. They began
to correspond soon after the _Words of a Believer_ were published, and
once at least they met. Mazzini saw a kindred soul in this "priest of
the Church Universal," who "preached God, the people, love, and
liberty"; this man "whom I saw but lately," so he writes in 1839, "so
full of sweetness and love, who weeps like a child at a symphony of
Beethoven, who will give his last franc to the poor, who tends flowers
like a woman, and steps out of his path rather than crush an ant." He
recognised how much Lamennais' teaching had in common with his own in
its reaction against the sceptical, destructive school of the
Revolution, in its belief in tradition and humanity, in its appeal to
duty as the principle of life. In some degree, perhaps, Lamennais'
_Words of a Believer_ inspired his own _Duties of Man_. He had his own
plans for him. He saw in him "a Luther of the nineteenth century"; he
hoped, though not very confidently, that he would come frankly forward
as a teacher of the religion of humanity, and he urged him to "do
something better than write books," and become the missionary of the
new faith. Lamennais replied, that though Christ could preach in the
highways, four persons could not meet now in a field to speak of God
and humanity without being taken up by a policeman. Mazzini was
grievously disappointed at the refusal, and he felt that Lamennais
regarded him with some diffidence, as indeed was natural enough. He
"loved him as a friend and revered him as a saint"; but he felt that
Lamennais returned his love "as it were in spite of himself." "This
good Mazzini, one cannot help loving him," Lamennais once said in his
hearing; and the phrase left an unhappy sense in Mazzini's mind.
Lamennais and "George Sand" were in his judgment "the two first living
writers of France" at this time, and he looked to the latter too as
one of his own faith. At the time of his mental crisis in Switzerland
he read her _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ (he always thought it her best
production), and the book was "sweet to him as is the cradle song to a
weeping child." He corresponded with her, and in 1847 visited her in
the Vallée Noire. She impressed him above all, as she did Matthew
Arnold the year before, by her simplicity. "Madame Sand," he wrote
back to England, "is just as we wanted her to be; good, noble, candid,
simple, calmly suffering, even more than can be seen in her books." He
warmly defended her in England; not that he thought that all her books
were to be lightly put into everybody's hand; but "the evil she has
portrayed is not _her_ evil, it is ours," and her realism was informed
by a passionate moral purpose. Genius, he said, can in the long-run do
nothing but good, and it is bound to make itself heard. "You may sound
your alarm against her in your old _Quarterly_, and forbid your youth
to read her: you will find some day, without well knowing how, the
best places in your library usurped by her volumes." He saw in her "an
apostle of religious democracy"; he responded to her sense of the
Divine, her belief that the decay of the old creeds restored
allegiance to the true Godhead, her faith in a future which should be
built on love. He delighted to repeat her words, "there is but one
virtue, the eternal sacrifice of self." And he saw in her, too, the
voice of down-trodden womanhood; "thank God," he says, "she is a
woman," and her books were a revelation of the "inward life of woman,"
a woman's pleading for justice and equality. At this time few writers
appealed to him more; but her later works and her acceptance of the
Empire alienated him, and afterwards he "sadly and unwillingly"
convinced himself that what he had hailed as the sincere and conscious
"utterance of a high priestess," was but the artist's passive echo of
a faith that was not hers.
* * * * *
Slowly, besides making friends, Mazzini began to find work. The
difficulties were great. He was at first too worn-out and unhappy to
care to write. He could not yet write in English, and the expenses of
translation absorbed a large part of the remuneration. It was a
painful effort to trim his pen to the likings of the English public.
"My ideas and style frighten them," he says. "What is old to us is new
to them. One cannot talk to them of mission or humanity or progress or
socialism." One editor refused an article in praise of Byron, "because
Byron was an immoral poet." Kemble, the editor of the _British and
Foreign Review_, politely declined his articles, after some experience
of them, on the ground that the English public were "conceited asses,"
who could only gradually be broken in to listen to generalizations.
Mazzini sometimes promised to do his best, but the effort came
unwillingly, and it was only the pressing need of money and his
resolve to ask no more from home, that made him write in an alien
style on subjects that often had little interest for him. To an English
reader, however, the discipline appears a salutary one; and his
English articles have a precision of thought that his earlier writings
lacked. His literary out-put was considerable. Some of his articles
were more or less pot-boiling; thus he wrote on Fra Paolo Sarpi in the
_Westminster Review_, on Victor Hugo and Lamartine--brilliant and
suggestive essays--in the _British and Foreign Review_, on
contemporary French literature in the _Monthly Chronicle_. He put more
heart into those on English subjects,--his masterly criticisms of
Carlyle in the _British and Foreign Review_ and the _Monthly
Chronicle_, and his papers on Chartism in _Tait's Edinburgh Journal_.
But what he cared for most was to bring Italy or his own religious
faith before English readers. He wrote for the love of it, when he
discoursed on Dante's Minor Works in the _Foreign Quarterly_ and on
Lamennais in the _Monthly Chronicle_, or when he wrote on Italian
politics for the same magazine, and on recent Italian literature, and
probably on Italian art, for the _Westminster Review_. In the
_People's Journal_ under John Saunders' editorship he began the
_Thoughts on Democracy in Europe_, which were afterwards expanded into
_I sistemi e la democrazia_,--a very able criticism of the utilitarian
and earlier socialist schools; in his own _Apostolato Popolare_ he
wrote the first six chapters of the noblest of all his writings, _The
Duties of Man_. He seems to have written a novel, which never saw the
light.
He found one literary task very near his heart. From the days of his
early studies at Genoa, he had had a supreme admiration for Ugo
Foscolo, as the one modern Italian writer, besides Alfieri, who had a
virile political teaching for his countrymen. While in Switzerland, he
had planned to write his life, and made researches for his manuscripts
and rare and scattered publications. His interest strengthened, now
that he was living close to where Foscolo's bones lay in Chiswick
churchyard. He knew that Pickering, one of Foscolo's English
publishers, possessed the manuscript of his unfinished notes on the
_Divina Commedia_, already published, but with many inaccuracies, in
1825; and in a dusty corner of Pickering's shop he found the proof of
part of Foscolo's _Lettera apologetica_, a kind of political
testament, which apparently had not been published. Mazzini undertook
the task of getting both re-published with more zeal than candour.
Pickering would not sell the _Lettera_ apart from the Dante
manuscript, and asked £420 for the two. Mazzini "cursed his bookseller
soul, and would have stolen them without scruple, if he could." A
Tuscan lady, Foscolo's _donna gentile_, lent the money for the proofs;
and Rolandi, the Italian publisher in Berners Street, was disposed to
buy the Dante notes. Mazzini found that the notes were very
incomplete, and feared that Rolandi would not buy, if aware of the
deficiencies. He concealed the fact, and with immense labour completed
the notes and the revision of the text. Rolandi, who, it seems, did
not discover the pious fraud, bought the manuscript, and in 1842
published the edition in four volumes with an anonymous introduction
by Mazzini, who took no pay for his known and unknown labours. The
edition had its value at the time, though its interest now is
historical only. Meanwhile he discovered the remaining manuscript of
the _Lettera apologetica_ in an old trunkful of Foscolo's papers; and
thanks mainly to his friend, Enrico Mayer, the educationalist, this
and others of Foscolo's political writings were published at Lugano in
1844. Mazzini gave much assistance to Le Monnier, the Florentine
publisher, in the complete edition of Foscolo, which he brought out a
few years later. But the life remained undone. For years with the true
student's fever he hunted up every letter and record of Foscolo, to
which he could find a clue. But as time went on, politics and social
work commanded him again, and the biography, on which so many cares
had been spent, was never written.
* * * * *
Gradually he returned to political work. At first the moral
prostration produced intense lassitude; and he found it as difficult
to settle down to politics as to literature. There were moments indeed
of nervous reaction, when his brain teemed with "daring projects,
titanic presentiments, limitless conceptions." But generally the
struggle with depression used up his strength, and he felt too weary
and discouraged to revive Young Italy. He seems, a few months before
he left Switzerland, to have taken some sort of formal step to
abdicate leadership. But where no actual organization survived, and
there was no one to step into his place, the retirement meant nothing.
Young Italy was so completely himself, that the society was
non-existent, till he took up the reins again. There had been
something of a stampede among its members. In Italy many had made
their peace with the governments; others were nourishing their faith
in silence; few carried on the work, at least in the old spirit.
Conspiracy, it is true, was not quite dead; but the few secret
societies, that still lived on, mostly harked back to Carbonaro
traditions, or turned to an agrarian and free-thinking agitation,
which was as hateful to Mazzini as apostacy itself. It was no better
among the exiles. "There are not two of us," he complained, "who
think the same on any single subject." "You cannot find one Young
Italian among us." Many took advantage of the Lombard and Piedmontese
amnesties to return home. Gioberti was attacking the society. Even
those nearest to Mazzini had little faith in its methods or hopes, and
Mazzini would compromise on no tittle of his creed to win them. In his
high singleness of purpose he could not understand or tolerate the
faintness of men, who had sworn to fight for an idea, but deserted at
the first defeat. If his countrymen had not responded, that was only
an argument for renewed and yet more strenuous effort. It was all so
pitiful to him,--this want of faithfulness unto death. "When I write
in favour of Italy," he says, "I feel myself blush, as if I were
lying." For a time, though, he himself felt powerless to act. He was
tempted to go to Italy, and throw away his life in some desperate act
of protest. But he had too fine a nature to be long content with
inaction or despair. "If you only knew," he writes early in 1839, "how
this absolute uselessness of existence weighs on me." He dreaded dying
with his work undone. Jacopo Ruffini's memory was ever present with
him, and he felt that he was dedicated to the cause for which his
protomartyr had died. He had taken on himself a task "in the face of
God and Italy and himself"; he thought of himself as blasphemer and
hypocrite, if he slackened in it; and though he knew that his
enthusiasm had gone, sometimes too his confidence in Italy and
himself, yet duty still remained, and he could trust in God and the
righteousness of his cause. "I know," he wrote, "that Jacopo is not
dead, that he and we are forerunners, not of a new policy, but of a
new faith, which we perhaps shall see not, but whose advent no human
force can stop."
It was not however till the summer or autumn of 1839,[14] that he
decided to return to active political work "with an almost fierce
resolve." At first he had no definite plan, except to accentuate the
popular side of his programme and appeal more than he had yet done to
the working classes. He had at present little means of reaching those
at home, but he could do something among the Italian population in
London, the shopkeepers and organ-grinders and hawkers of terra-cotta
casts. Hitherto he had been little in contact with his working-class
compatriots; now in the whirl of a foreign city he came to know them.
It began with his intense feeling for suffering, that for the
remainder of his life made him happiest when relieving individual
cases of misery. About this time, going out one winter morning, he
found a young girl on the doorstep worn out with cold and hunger. With
the sympathy for forlorn womanhood, which he had in common with the
greatest of English statesmen, he took her in and put her in his
landlady's charge. When the girl afterwards married, and was deserted
by her husband, he undertook the education of her children, and for
many years devoted to it a large share of his scanty income. The same
charity now drew him to the waifs of his own land. Talking to the
Italian organ-boys, who went about the streets of London with a
barrel-organ and its squirrel or white rat, speaking a patois half
Comasque half English, he learnt the details of the "white-slave
traffic," how a few Italians living in London brought over poor
peasant-boys under contracts, which promised high pay and good living,
but which had no validity in England; how when the boys got there,
they were beaten and half-starved and cowed. He brought the worst
offenders to justice, and did something to frighten the masters into
better treatment of their victims. But he cared more to influence the
boys themselves. In 1841 he opened a school at 5 Hatton Garden
(afterwards removed to 5 Greville Street, Leather Lane), where the
boys came in the late evenings to learn the three Rs and some
elementary science, and on Sundays had lessons in drawing and Italian
history. The school was very dear to Mazzini, and the boys, says an
English observer, "revered him as a god and loved him as a father."
One of them, returning to Italy, travelled to Genoa expressly to tell
Madame Mazzini what her son had done for him. Italian and English
friends (Joseph Toynbee among them) taught gratuitously, and the
annual supper was a great event for him and his circle. Mario and
Grisi sang at concerts to help the school's finances. The school
flourished in spite of the noisy opposition of a neighbouring Italian
priest,--an opposition, which Mazzini repaid by his first angry attack
on the Papacy.
Already, before the school was opened, he had started a political
society for the Italian workmen in London, and was publishing a paper,
the _Apostolato Popolare_, which came out at intervals till 1843. In
it he makes his appeal to the working-men of Italy. He felt more
strongly even than in his Marseilles days that a revolutionary
movement must depend for its main support on the working classes and
have their good for its ultimate goal. English life had brought him
into touch with the social thought of the time, and he felt that
political movements were dwarfing beside the question of the condition
of the masses. He began to speak of the Italy to-be as the "Italy of
the People." It was the people, he wrote, who suffered most from her
dismemberment and misrule. While other classes had their
compensations, there were no distractions for the unknown poor, no
true home life, no intellectual interest. He tried to rouse them from
their provincialism, their self-absorbed indifference to politics. He
appealed to them to be patriots and republicans, proud of their
country's glorious past, working for its future and their children,
and remember that God would judge them not by what wages they earned
but by what they had done for their fellows. But however much he laid
stress on the democratic side of his agitation, on working-class
organization and social reform, he was careful to safeguard Young
Italy from becoming a class movement. It was at this time and in his
papers for working men, that he first began the crusade against
socialism, which he continued, sometimes with less discernment, to the
end of life.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] For once his knowledge of Dante seems to have failed him. Many
years after he quotes the expression to "Daniel Stern," but owns that
he cannot refer to the verse.
[10] He subsequently discovered that it was a loan, and insisted on
repaying it shortly before his death.
[11] The only evidence for this is contained in Cagnacci, _Giuseppe
Mazzini e i fratelli Ruffini_, pp. 287, 290, from which it seems
probable that Mazzini saw Madame Ruffini between June and November,
1844, and therefore, almost certainly, was at Genoa. Signor Donaver
thinks it doubtful whether _la Cugina_ of the Ruffinis' letters refers
to Mazzini, but the internal evidence seems to me to favour the
identification. Signor Cagnacci's note on p. 290 seems to imply that
he has seen a memorandum by Elia Benza to the effect that Benza saw
him at Porto Maurizio about this time disguised as a Capucin.
[12] Carlyle's statement (_Reminiscences_, ii. 182) that he "once or
twice" talked with Mazzini is rather startlingly inaccurate. See
Carlyle's _Life in London_, i. 488.
[13] There are some interesting descriptions of the Carlyles in
Giovanni Ruffini's letters to his mother. See Cagnacci, _op. cit._
[14] Madame Mario says in her _Della vita di Mazzini_, in the middle
of 1838; but I think it is quite clear from _Lettres intimes_, 197 and
205; Giurati, _op. cit._, 11-12; Cagnacci, _op. cit._, 447 that 1839
is the true date.