London Again
1849-1859. AETAT 44-54
In Switzerland--Life in London--English friends--English
politics and literature--The Friends of Italy.
Mazzini stayed for a few weeks in a quiet hotel near his old quarters
at Geneva, then moved to Lausanne, where he and a few more refugees,
Saffi, his co-Triumvir, and Pisacane among them, took a small house
(the Villa Montallegro) near the town on the hills that overlook the
lake. Here he and his friends plunged at once into the old eager work
of correspondence and journalism, as if the struggle at Rome had been
a holiday. Another ephemeral paper, _L'Italia del Popolo_, was
launched on its short career. His head was full of literary
schemes,--an Italian translation of the Gospels with an introduction,
a new Encyclopædia, which should do for religious democracy what the
old Encyclopædia had done for the thought of the eighteenth century.
It was a quiet, not unhappy time, that must have recalled something of
the old days at Marseilles. At times indeed he was miserable and
pessimistic as of old, brooding over lost friendships, chafing at the
triumph of brute force in Italy. But except in these hours of taciturn
gloom, when he avoided all companionship, he was serene and genial,
sometimes brightening into anecdote and humour, when the party settled
down to the evening's talk and chess.
In the spring of 1850 the agitation in France at the proposed revision
of the constitution excited vague hopes of a revolution there; and
with some fatuous idea that he could help to stop Louis Napoleon's
progress to empire, Mazzini went to Paris, only to discover how empty
was the expectation. On the journey he lost a note-book, in which for
many years he had entered his thoughts on religion. The world would
gain more from its discovery than from that of any lost Greek tragedy.
He crossed to England for a few months, then returned to Switzerland.
But the persecution of 1834 repeated itself. The governments put
pressure on the Swiss to expel the refugees, and Mazzini after a month
or two of hiding found it necessary to leave. One night in November he
and two friends left Geneva, walking along the lake to Nyon, while
they discussed Byron and Mickiewicz, and were taken on in a friend's
carriage to Lausanne, whence he found the means to escape to England.
Here he made his home with few interruptions till the last years of
his life, taking no small part in English society and politics,
finding his best friends in English men and women. "Italy is my
country, but England is my real home, if I have any," he said. He had
come to love England and English ways, and in his brief political
journeys to Italy his home thoughts went to England, and he was glad
to be back again. His old horror of London changed to a real liking;
and its conveniences for his work made it difficult to get him out of
town, save for a rare visit to his friends, or for a day or two to
recruit his health at St Leonard's or Eastbourne, which he liked, or
at Brighton, which he hated. He longed sometimes, indeed, for "some
secret nook in the country, to breathe fresh air and gaze on the sky
or at the sea"; but when he was urged to take rest in the country, he
railed affectionately at his "misled and dreamy friends" for supposing
he could attend to his work anywhere out of London. The fogs still had
their fascination for him; he wrote once from Italy, "I think very
often under these radiant skies of the London fogs and always
regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended for an
Englishman."
At first he lived at Cromwell Lodge, Old Brompton, a little house in
the middle of orchards and gardens at what was then the extreme
western end of London. Building operations drove him thence, and Mrs
Carlyle found him lodgings over a post-office at 15 Radnor Street,
near his old rooms in York Buildings. Here, at first with Saffi and
three other exiles, afterwards alone, he lived the frugallest of
lives. His income indeed was somewhat larger than it had been. At his
mother's death he came into an annuity of £160 a year, which she,
knowing how readily his money flowed to public work and charity, had
wisely invested with obdurate trustees. His friends would gladly have
helped him, but though he frankly asked money of them for his cause
(always scrupulously repaying it, if borrowed on his personal
responsibility), he never, so far as I know, would take from this time
forward money for strictly personal needs. Once only he accepted some
to pay for a private secretary, and once again for cabs, when his
friends suspected that there were plots to assassinate him, and feared
for his walking in London streets, unprotected save by a sword-cane.
Thus, even with casual literary earnings, his income seldom reached
£200, and of this for some years £80 went to the education of the
Tencioni children, and often every other available penny to finance
his plots of insurrection. While his enemies in Italy painted him
living in patrician luxury, he denied himself every comfort (cigars
always excepted), save the modest ones that his friends forced on him.
Money he only wanted for his political schemes. "I have never felt so
bitterly the curse of not being rich," he wrote once, when wanting
rifles for one of his revolutionary plots. For himself, he was content
with his humble fare and modest lodgings. Here in his small room,
every piece of furniture littered with books and papers, the air thick
with smoke of cheap Swiss cigars (except when friends sent Havannahs),
brightened only by his tame canaries and carefully-tended plants, he
was generally writing at his desk till evening, always with more work
in hand than he could cope with, carrying on the usual mass of
correspondence, writing articles for his Italian papers, raising
public funds with infinite labour, stirring his English friends to
help the cause, finding money and work for the poor refugees, or
organizing concerts in their interest. The school in Greville Street
went on for three years longer, when, except for the Sunday lectures,
it was closed. And amid all the exacting cares of public work he
spared himself no trouble for his English friends, advising in their
family affairs, writing long letters of tenderness and spiritual
wisdom to comfort a bereaved son or lead a young girl from a life of
selfishness to higher things.
He had aged greatly since he left London less than three years ago. He
was worn and thin, his beard was white, and the once dark features
wore "a sort of grey, ashy halo." But it was the same high
"cliff-like" forehead, the regular features, the strong, straight
nose, "the exquisite curve of lips like a woman's in their expression
of spotless purity," the piercing black eyes, whose like none ever
knew who saw them, "of luminous depth, full of sadness, tenderness,
and courage, of purity and fire, readily flashing into indignation or
humour, always with the latent expression of exhaustless resolution";
"the only eyes," says another observer, "I ever saw that looked like
flames." "His face in repose was grave, even sad, but it lit up with a
smile of wonderful sweetness, as he greeted a friend with a pressure,
rather than a shake, from the thin hand."[18] He carried his head a
little forward, and he had a habit of sitting on the edge of a chair,
perhaps, it has been suggested, because in his own room his books left
but narrow margin for sedentary uses. He dressed, as ever, with
perfect neatness, in a worn black frock-coat, a double-breasted velvet
waistcoat buttoned high, despising collars and substituting a silk
handkerchief wound round his neck, wearing a long thin gold watch
chain, which had probably been his father's, and two rings, one at
least no doubt his mother's, now rescued from the pawn-shop.
His personal life was centred almost wholly in his English friends. It
is true, he felt his exile bitterly. "Wish for me," he writes to
friends one Christmas, "that I may die in the country and for the
country, in which I have been forbidden to live." But he had no home
ties in Italy now. His father had died in the winter of 1848, leaving
him to brood over the thought that he had been but a source of pain to
the grim old man, who under all his moroseness and want of sympathy
had never lost his pride and affection for his son. His mother, whom
he had seen once again when at Milan, with whom he had never relaxed
the close, affectionate correspondence, died in the summer of 1852. It
was a very heavy blow. There was no one to replace her; he had lost
"the dream of his individual life,--to see her in the joy of triumph,"
when Italy was free. But he nerved himself, and took her loss as an
incentive to fresh effort. "My mother," he writes, "seems to me to be
present, perhaps nearer than she was in her terrestrial life. I feel
more and more the sacredness of duties, which she recognized, and of a
mission which she approved. I have now no mother on earth except my
country, and I shall be true to her, as my mother has been to me." So
intensely actual was she still to him, that once afterwards, when in
hiding and deep dejection, he thought she came to him in veritable
presence to strengthen and console him. His lonely heart, athirst as
ever for affection, went out to his English friends, the men and still
more the women, who believed in him and in his politics, and tried to
bring some warmth and brightness into his sad life. After a year or
two he saw little more of the Carlyles, but their place was more than
taken by the Ashursts, the Stansfelds, the Peter Taylors, the Shaens,
the Mallesons, the Nathans, the Milner-Gibsons. When the day's work
was over, he would generally spend the evening at one or other of
their houses, most often with the Stansfelds, whose home at Bellevue
Lodge was within an easy walk from his lodgings. Gradually he came to
have a large outside circle of acquaintances. He corresponded with
Grote and Mrs Gaskell; the Brownings, J. S. Mill, Jowett, Swinburne,
Cairnes, Miss Martineau, probably Dickens were among the people he
met.[19]
With these friendships a new light and happiness came to his life.
Probably, too, the consciousness of having played a great part nobly
added a new touch of dignity and gentleness. "The indescribable look
of suffering for others," noted one who met him now after a ten years'
interval, "has disappeared, and he is now a man full of experience,
patience, and hope." "The Roman revolution," wrote Carlyle to Emerson,
"has made a man of him,--quite brightened up ever since." All the
human sweetness in him blossomed out. His friends provided the home
care, which he had lost, since he left his mother and sisters at Genoa
twenty years ago; and he loved to repay them by many little marks of
affection, never forgetting birthdays, buying presents of books and
jewelry out of his slender purse, taking them to the Opera, where his
acquaintance with the great Italian singers sometimes put boxes at his
disposal. In his evenings at the Stansfelds he was often full of
merry fun; he could tell a story well, all the more piquantly for his
Italicisms. One favourite anecdote (he had told it to Mrs Carlyle) was
how he baffled an undertaker, who brought a coffin by mistake to his
landlady's, and refused to take it away. "My dear," he said, no doubt
with his sweet gravity, "we have not here a dead." Or he would, when
quite alone with the family, sing to his guitar, or finger out on it
the score of some favourite opera. His native gentleness came out in
his kindness to children and animals. He does not seem to have been
naturally very fond of children, but, when among them, he made himself
easily at home. Some French children at a house which he visited, who
got into disgrace when Louis Blanc came to see them, were always good
with Mazzini, "because he was so kind and never failed to enquire
after the dolls." They loved to sit and listen to his talk, not that
they understood him, but because the beautiful voice fascinated them.
With dogs and cats and birds he was always happy. He would make one of
his hostesses angry, because he insisted on feeding her dog at dinner.
"But, my dear," he would say, "I make Bruno happy." Ledru Rollin and
he, once talking, probably, of the European revolution, put out their
cigars, because the smoke made a dog uncomfortable. His most constant
companions were his tame linnets and canaries. He had netting over the
windows, so that they could fly about his room at liberty; and
visitors would generally find a bird or two perched on his head or
shoulders, or hopping among his papers, inured to the thick tobacco
smoke, in which they and he lived.
He was a brilliant talker, because he was in earnest and his thoughts
were clear, at all events to himself. There was no trace of effort or
affectation; he was always just himself and never played a part. He
would speak with a prophet's simplicity and conviction of his
religious faith and the destinies of man, talking vivaciously,
tenaciously, passionately sometimes, with the authority of one who had
no thought of self and had lived and suffered for his creed. Some of
his hosts were the champions of every struggling cause, and the
conversation turned naturally to American slavery or women's rights or
nationality or cooperation. Music and poetry were favourite subjects
with him, and he would contend pugnaciously in mock-earnestness for
the superiority of Meyerbeer over Rossini, or inveigh to his heart's
content against the abominated doctrine of "art for the sake of art."
He once, when dining with Mr and Mrs William Shaen, forgot his dinner
in his eagerness to convert his hostess from the heresy; and when
pressed to eat, pleaded that he had something else to do, for "here is
Mrs Shaen travelling to perdition as fast as she can, and I must save
her soul." He spoke English now well and fluently, but,--unlike his
English writing, which was rarely unidiomatic,--with many little
Italicisms. Among those he seldom met, he was sometimes nervous and
silent; at other times, perhaps from the same nervousness, he would
monopolize the conversation, and was remorseful afterwards. Once, many
years after this time, he met Jowett, and talked uninterruptedly for
two hours, Jowett listening silently. When Jowett went, he observed,
"he made me talk all the time, and I have no notion what he thought
of it." Jowett, made careful notes of what he said, and years
afterwards remarked, in allusion to their meeting, "Mazzini was a man
of genius, but too much under the influence of two abstract ideas, God
and the principle of nationality." He thought, though, very highly of
him. "He was an enthusiast, a visionary," he said, "but he was a very
noble character, and had a genius far beyond that of ordinary
statesmen. Though not a statesman, I think that his reputation will
increase as time goes on, when that of most statesmen disappears."
With those, who knew him well, constraining was the influence of this
man, who spoke with authority of life and God and duty. Young people
at all events, who came under the spell of those eyes, and heard the
vibrating voice speak with passionate earnestness of the deep things
of God, felt for him an awe and veneration, such as few, if any, of
his generation inspired. Here was one who had given all for his ideal,
who had taken poverty for his bride, yet without self-righteousness,
too sad at the world's sin and struggle to be aught but humble; one
too, who had lived on a great stage, who was helping to remodel
Europe, a great thinker, a great moral teacher, yet with infinite
concern for the trials and temptations of some puzzled soul. "Thou
noble Mazzini," said Clough after brief knowledge of his life at Rome.
Much deeper was the feeling of those, who had the privilege of close
companionship. And, though, perhaps, it would be difficult to prove
it, it is probable that he has left no inconsiderable impress on
English thought. Here and there one finds strong traces of his
influence on men, who have helped to mould the best thought among us
in the last forty years. "Mazzini is the true teacher of our age,"
said Arnold Toynbee. Never, certainly, did age more need his high
idealism to teach a nobler rule in national and private life.
* * * * *
His literary work at this time was not remarkable. He was "still
praying God to grant him, when Italy had become a nation, two years of
hermit life," when he could write his long-cherished book on religion
and a popular history of Italian nationality. But the hope of ever
writing them was gradually fading. He was too absorbed through all
this period by political propagandism, and in his controversial
writings of these years he is generally far from being at his best.
The latter chapters of his _Duties of Man_, however, date from this
decade. He seems, despite his busy life, to have found a good deal of
time for reading. His writings on the Slav question are evidently the
result of careful study. Apart from political reading, English
literature seems to have claimed his interests. Byron was still to him
the greatest of English poets, and he read Byroniana with the zest of
a devotee. He could not forgive England for her neglect of her "only
poet who will live in times to come." "I wish," he once wrote, "I had
time to write before dying a book on Byron, and abuse all England, a
few women excepted, for the way she treats one of her greatest souls
and minds." He was keenly interested in the controversy on Byron's
treatment of his wife, refusing to believe that the husband was the
more in fault, but owning himself too indiscriminating an admirer to
be a fair judge.[20] He would contrast him with Wordsworth and
Coleridge, criticizing the latter as contemplative poets, living
remote from action among their lakes and mountains,--which proves that
he had not read Wordsworth's patriotic sonnets. He liked Chatterton in
a way, drawn doubtless to him by his sad end and de Vigny's drama; "I
have always," he writes, "had a sort of fondness for him, as I have
for crushed flowers." Among contemporary poets Mrs Browning was
probably his favourite. He reads _Aurora Leigh_, "admiring it very
much, only wishing from time to time that she had written it in
beautiful prose than--passages excepted--in neglected poetry."
Browning himself he is said to have read and admired. But perhaps he
alludes to him when he writes, "the form in England begins to be
systematically wrong, I think."
Meanwhile he had resumed his strong interest in English life and
politics, stimulated no doubt by the keen thinkers he moved among, but
always preserving his own original outlook. On the whole, his was not
a very appreciative criticism. Sincerely and increasingly as he
admired the freedom and seriousness of English ways, he keenly felt
the decay of our religious life, and, what he regarded as its
consequence, the selfishness and want of principle in our foreign
policy. His knowledge of Protestantism was never very deep or
sympathetic; but he knew enough of it to apply his own tests of
religious vitality. He condemned it for its soul-killing formalism; he
showed how it sinned against itself, when it ceased to be concerned
with men as citizens; he poured scorn on the Bible Societies, that
tried to proselytize his countrymen, and made no sign, when he and
other Italians had fought at Rome for liberty of conscience. It was to
this want of true religion, that he charged our insular selfishness.
He detested the Cobdenites. "The 'peace-men' have no principle." "Your
Peace Societies," he wrote in an open letter to "the people of
England," "allowing God's law and Godlike human life to be
systematically crushed on the two-thirds of Europe,--your _believers_
in liberty as the only pledge for man's responsibility, allying
themselves with despots,--your Christians fighting for the maintenance
of Mahommedan law on European populations,--seem to me to be the
reverse of religious." If England gave no helping hand to the young
nationalities to which belonged the future, she would find herself in
twenty years shut out from the sympathies and alliances and markets of
the Continent. He vigorously condemned the Crimean War, and took his
stand with the few, who tried to save England from that colossal
blunder. Not that he objected to war with the oppressor of the Poles.
But a war, which might have been a crusade for the downtrodden peoples
of the East, had ranged England, once the champion of liberty, on the
side of Turkey and Austria. The alliance with the tyrant of Italy and
Hungary "took from the war whatever made it sacred in the eyes of God
and man." It pledged English backing for the evilest of Continental
despotisms. It robbed the war of any principle, and "war is the
greatest of crimes, when it is not waged for the benefit of mankind,
for the sake of a great truth to enthrone or of a great lie to
entomb." He "bowed before" the heroism of the army, "the quiet,
silent devotedness, with which the nation accepts all the sacrifices
inseparable from a war"; but "the policy of your war," he said, "is
absolutely immoral, how can you hope for victory?" How different had
it been, had England avoided the dishonouring touch of Austria, and
sought her ally in a Polish revolution.
Mazzini's interest in English society and politics was, like
everything else except his friendships, turned to the use of his own
country. He expected three results from his English propagandism,--to
secure for Italy the moral support of English opinion and the English
press, to influence the foreign policy of the country in her favour,
and to obtain money for his insurrectionary schemes. He worked on the
traditional sympathy for Italy, and tried to turn it from its belief
in Piedmont to his own revolutionary and democratic programme. He
appealed to the anti-Papal feeling of the country, and played on the
theme that a free Italy would allow fair play for Protestant missions.
With men of the Manchester School he argued that free trade would
follow free government; with the working classes he spoke of the
common interests of working men the world over. His own friends he
constantly enlisted in his schemes, and made large levies on their
private purses. "It makes my hair stand on end," said one of them--a
well-known politician--afterwards, "to think of what I did at the
suggestion of that man." Public opinion he hoped to influence through
the Society of the Friends of Italy, founded in the autumn of 1851 by
the men, who had promoted the People's International League four years
before,--James Stansfeld, Peter Taylor, William Ashurst, William
Shaen. Some of the best English Liberals of the day were on the
committee,--William Byles of Bradford, Joseph Cowen, George Dawson,
John Forster, W. E. Forster, J. A. Froude, G. J. Holyoake, William
Howitt, Douglas Jerrold, Walter Savage Landor, G. H. Lewes, W. J.
Linton, David Masson, Edward Miall, Professor Newman. Mazzini
generally, if not always, spoke at their annual meetings,--with
intense nervousness, for he was not yet sufficient master of English
to speak it fluently, and he "could not think without a pen in his
hand." "I cannot understand people," he writes, "who can prepare a
speech or article walking up and down their room or garden. I could
walk about a day without an idea entering my head." His speeches, none
the less, seem to have been eloquent and successful, his manner being,
as the newspapers reported, "most exciting." The Society suspended
work, when the Crimean War broke out, and was re-constituted again at
the end of 1856. As far as money went, Mazzini got less than he hoped
from his English agitation. A few friends gave generously, but there
was little of the response that came to Garibaldi's appeal a few years
later. But the Society did much to win English opinion, if not for
Mazzini's own special schemes, at all events for the bigger question
of Italian liberty. The _Leader_, the _Daily News_, the _Morning
Advertiser_ opened their columns, and did something to counteract the
anti-Italian bias of the _Times_. In 1857 a fairly vigorous agitation,
especially in the North and Scotland, carried on the work that
Kossuth's meetings had begun, and roused a vehement popular feeling
against Austria.
FOOTNOTES:
[18] I owe these particulars to one who knew him well, and to a
contemporary description in a private letter.
[19] It has often been supposed that Browning had Mazzini in mind,
when he wrote _The Italian in England_. I know of no evidence for or
against this; but the poem was written in 1845, when the
letter-opening affair had made Mazzini prominently public. Mazzini is
said to have made a translation of it.
[20] See below, pp. 359-360.