The Last Years
1866-1872. AETAT 61-66
The Republican Alliance--Life at Lugano--Mentana--Republican
movement in 1868-70--Intrigue with Bismarck--Imprisonment at
Gaeta, and release--Attack on the International--Death.
In his ignorance of the facts, he charged it all to the monarchy. The
nation had been sacrificed to the interests of a dynasty. Defeat and
dishonour came of the equivocations, that sprang from the "primal
falsehood" of royalty. The bad government and coercion (which, in
fact, was mild enough), the huge army and civil service and police,
the consequent financial chaos--all were its fruit. He disclaimed that
it was the republic for its own sake that he wanted now, for its
advent was only the question of a few years more or less, and its
triumph might be left to time. But dishonour was the "gangrene of a
nation," and only the republic could cure that. Only the republic
could win Rome, gather Istria and the Tyrol to the fold, and stretch a
hand to the struggling nationalities of the East. But, if the republic
came, it must be as a great "moralising education, to change men from
serfs to citizens, and make them conscious of their mission, their
strength and dignity." The republic must not mean revenge, or
spoliation, or repudiation of debt, or violent anti-clericalism; and
he was already beginning his crusade against Bakounine and the rough
socialism, which was making some headway in the country.
He had promised that if he resumed his republican agitation, he would
announce it frankly beforehand, and he did so now. Henceforth he gave
it all his failing strength. Hopeless as their cause probably was at
the best, the republicans had a strength now, which they had not had
for fifteen years. The shame of Custozza and Lissa lay heavy on the
nation, and the disillusioning had shaken faith in men and
institutions. The sense of national dishonour maddened; civil war was
often on men's lips; the King's prestige was foundering under the load
of private vice and military failure. There was a mass of sullen,
unformulated discontent, ready to find its way into socialist or
republican channels. And though men were slow to follow Mazzini into
his conspiracies, his long years of self-sacrificing labour, the
mystery that wrapped the exile and conspirator, had given him a vast,
almost mythical fascination for his countrymen. Forty thousand persons
had signed the petition for his amnesty. Messina elected him time
after time for its deputy, to have the election quashed as often by
the Moderates in the Chamber. There was an angry feeling everywhere at
the senseless intolerance, and the deputies of the Left did their best
to bring the majority to reason. "While you are still in time," said a
recent premier of Italy, "prevent Mazzini from having to close his
eyes in a foreign land."
When at last he was amnestied at the beginning of the war, he refused
to accept it as an act of grace or take his seat as deputy, and
returned to Lugano. Much of his time henceforth was spent there with
his friends, Giuseppe Nathan and his wife Sarah, "the best Italian
friend I have, one of the best women I know," who nursed him in the
attacks of illness, which came with ever greater frequency. Here he
would watch "the beautiful calm-lulling lake, the beautiful, solemn,
hopeful-death-teaching sunsets." When he was well, he kept to the
habits of his English life, writing all day, delighting his friends in
the evening with his brilliant talk. His conspiracies often took him
to Genoa, where he lived in hiding in the house of a working family,
from whose windows in the Salita di Oregina he had a superb view of
the city and the Riviera. He nearly betrayed himself once by shouting
from his window at a boy who was torturing a grasshopper. He kept in
close touch with his English friends and English life. At Lugano he
regularly read "the good, dry Spectator and the would-be wicked, never
concluding Saturday Review." He made a custom of always returning to
England to spend New Year's Day with the Stansfelds or others of their
family, crossing the Alps in mid-winter at the peril of his health. He
had painfully aged. His face had sunk and wore a deathly pallor; the
thick, black hair was thin and grey. William Lloyd Garrison, seeing
him after an interval of twenty-one years, sadly noted the change,
though "the same dark, lustrous eyes" remained, "the same classical
features, the same grand intellect, the same lofty and indomitable
spirit, the same combination of true modesty and heroic assertion, of
exceeding benignity and inspirational power." Work told heavily upon
him now. Writing made him giddy, and his characters begin to lose
their firmness. He was "living as if in a whirlwind, something like
Paolo without Francesca, tired, worn out, longing for rest." But he
would not slacken. "I am bound to those, whom I have organised for a
purpose. I must, before I die, proclaim the republic in Italy."
While he was organising his "Republican Alliance," losing himself in
the huge work of detail which all came to so little, the impatience in
Italy was breaking down the precautions of the government. Ricasoli
had been driven from office by his own maladroitness and Garibaldi's
wild, aimless opposition. Rattazzi, the intriguer of 1862, came back
to power, and began the double play, that was only too likely to lead
to another Aspromonte. There is no need here to analyse the obscure
and sordid story of his balancings between the Italian democrats and
France. Garibaldi was impatient to win Rome, and cared comparatively
little now whether it were in the name of monarchy or republic. His
plan was to lead a raid, with or without the connivance of the
government, into the small territory that still belonged to the Pope,
meet and defeat the Papal mercenaries, and enter Rome. With Mazzini
the republic was now a more vital thing than Unity. Only from a
republican Rome could Italy perform her civilising mission to the
world. "If Rome is to be annexed like the rest," he wrote, "I would
rather it belonged to the Pope another three years." He disliked
Garibaldi's scheme; he was not sanguine of its success; if it did
succeed, it meant that the monarchy would go to Rome and the Pope stay
there. He wished to see the Romans rise themselves and pronounce for a
republic, confident that, if they did so, Italy would echo the
republican cry, and the Pope would have to go. Sometimes, however,
despairing of his own party, he was willing to compromise; and when at
last Garibaldi started on his raid, and the government backed him,
risking hostilities with France rather than have civil war, he forgot
everything else in the hope of winning Rome, and urged his followers
to join the raiders. Probably, if he had not been prostrated by
illness, he would have gone himself. When Garibaldi's incapacity was
only too apparent, and the French troops landed again for the defence
of Rome, he saw that the volunteers were advancing into a trap, and
implored Garibaldi to retire to Naples, raise the flag of revolution,
and collect forces for another and more hopeful attack. Garibaldi,
marching obstinately to defeat, was in no temper to listen to anybody,
to Mazzini least of all. The mischief-makers had persuaded him that
Mazzini was tampering with his men. There was no particle of truth in
it, but the conviction entered Garibaldi's mind and never left it,
while Mazzini lived.
The volunteers went to their doom at Mentana. Rattazzi, who at the
last rose above himself and would have marched to Rome but for the
King's veto, had resigned some weeks before. Menabrea, who succeeded
him, had been compelled by public opinion to occupy a part of the
Pope's territory; but when the French landed, he withdrew the troops,
rather than face war with France. The country writhed in its rage at
the French insult, and naturally turned its resentment against the
crown. Juries acquitted republican papers; the press lampooned the
King. Some of the deputies gave a secret backing to the republican
movement; the Friendly Societies, which had always kept more or less
in touch with Mazzini, threw themselves into it. Mazzini had a
following among the Freemasons, though not one himself, and among the
ex-volunteers. Most ominous feature of it all, republicanism gained a
large footing in the rank-and-file of the army. Mazzini pushed on
impatiently for Rome and the republic. He knew that the Romans
themselves were powerless to rise, now that the French were there, and
that a volunteer movement had no better chance. The only plan, that
could successfully defy the French and capture Rome, was to seize the
government,--its army and navy and arsenals,--and make a national
crusade with all the resources of the country. The royalists, he
thought, would never break with France or attack the Papacy; and
indeed the criticism was true of the conservative ministry, which now
held office. He was equally hopeless of the middle classes, but he was
confident that the people would respond. Especially he trusted to the
younger generation and the women of Italy; they alone, he thought,
were free from the timid opportunism, which had eaten deep into the
rest.
After Mentana he left London again for Lugano to be nearer his work,
and was constantly passing backwards and forwards between there and
Genoa, finding time among it all to write his great religious apology,
the sum of all his teaching, _From the Council to God_.[31] His
following at Genoa was considerable now. When he came there secretly,
little patrols of working men with concealed arms would watch along
the streets between the station and his lodgings to guard his person
from seizure by the police. The Committee sat waiting for him, each
man armed with his revolver. One of them has described the meeting.
"A low knock was heard at the door, and there he was in body and soul,
the great magician, who struck the fancy of the people like a mythical
hero. Our hearts leaped, and we went reverently to meet that great
soul. He advanced with a child's frank courtesy and a divine smile,
shaking hands like an Englishman, and addressing each of us by name,
as if our names were written on our foreheads. He was not disguised;
he wore cloth shoes, and a capote, and with his middle, upright
stature, he looked like a philosopher, straight from his study, who
never dreamed of troubling any police in the world." In the spring of
1869 he was eager for action, despite the failure of a plot,
discouraged by himself, among the garrison at Milan. The remonstrances
of the government procured his banishment from Switzerland, but he was
back again in August, going "more sadly than usual, feeling physically
and intellectually weaker and unequal to the task." He was suffering
continuously, and confessed to his friends that he shrank from the
effort. He was obviously going on from sheer inability to stop more
than from any hope of success. "My new plan," he wrote gloomily, "may
prove a dream like many others."
In the spring of 1870 he came again to Genoa to arrange the details.
The plot broke down like the rest, and at the moment everything was
overshadowed by the coming Franco-German war. In common with the great
majority of his countrymen, outside the court and government, his
sympathies were with Germany. A German victory would avenge Mentana
and compel the French to withdraw from Rome. In spite of his
denunciation of the Prussian alliance in 1866, he had been for three
years past carrying on a desultory intrigue with Bismarck. About the
time of Mentana he had sent a note to Bismarck through their
go-between. "I do not in the least," it said, "share Count Bismarck's
political views; his method of unification does not command my
sympathy; but I admire his tenacity and energy and independence
towards the foreigner. I believe in German unity and desire it as much
as that of my own country. I abhor the Empire and the supremacy it
arrogates over Europe." He saw in the intrigue a chance of pushing his
own schemes, and at the same time of preventing a Franco-Italian
alliance against Germany. He asked Bismarck to send him arms and
money, and promised, if he had them, to guarantee him against the
hostile combination. Bismarck parleyed with him for a time, as he had
parleyed with Garibaldi; and when war was imminent, and he knew that
Victor Emmanuel and many of the Italian conservatives were trying
again to commit the country to a French alliance, he promised that the
arms and money should be sent. Mazzini hastened to accept, promising
to attack Rome with the revolutionary forces, and undertaking to
respect the wish of the country, should a future Constituent Assembly
declare for the monarchy. But Bismarck had learnt now that the danger
of the hostile alliance had passed, and the promised help never came.
The intrigue marks the last stage in Mazzini's political decline. That
he had asked a foreign government to assist in what meant civil war,
shows how the long years of conspiracy had distorted his moral
vision.
He had intended to use Bismarck's money for a new plot, this time in
Sicily. It was a fool's errand, and his friends tried in vain to
dissuade him. But the monomania was on him, and he started for the
island in disguise. As so often before, he had a traitor in his
secrets, a man who with strange inconsistency had nursed him tenderly
through an illness, while he was making a living by betraying his
plans to the French police.[32] When Mazzini arrived by the Naples
steamer at Palermo, he was arrested. He was taken to Gaeta and treated
with all possible consideration. The very gaoler took three minutes to
turn the noisy keys silently, that he might soften the sense of
imprisonment. Here through the loopholes of the massive fortress,
where the Bourbons had made their last stand nine years before, he
would watch the sea and sky, as he had done at Savona thirty-nine
years ago. "The nights," he writes, "are very beautiful; the stars
shine with a lustre one only sees in Italy. I love them like sisters,
and link them to the future in a thousand ways. If I could choose, I
should like to live in absolute solitude, working at my historical
book or at some other, just from a feeling of duty, and only wishing
to see--for a moment, now and then,--some one I did not know, some
poor woman that I could help, some working men I could advise, the
doves of Zürich, and nothing else." He smoked indifferent cigars; he
read bad translations of Shakespeare and Byron from the prison
library, and, for want of better, Tasso's _Gerusalemme_. He was
planning again a book on Byron, and asks for Taine's critique of him
in his _Littérature anglaise_. "Taine is a materialist writer, and
certainly won't have an idea that squares with mine; but I am
intellectually half-asleep and I reckon on the stimulus of
contradiction and the irritation which I shall get out of his book. He
has enough perverted intellectual power to wake me up."
He was released a few weeks later, after the capture of Rome, but he
still refused to accept the amnesty, that he might keep his hands
free, "without even the shadow of ungratefulness to anybody--even to a
king." His one anxiety for the moment was to escape the popular
demonstrations of sympathy, and get to a quiet life among his friends.
He passed a restless night at Rome; it was twenty-one years since
Margaret Fuller and Giulia Modena had persuaded the ex-Triumvir to
save himself and fly. He went to Leghorn to his friends the Rossellis;
thence to Genoa, to see his mother's tomb, and fled to escape the
ovations, with his old sickness on him. "The only thing really
touching to me," he wrote to England, "was in the churchyard--it was
late--and the place was quite empty, but a keeper had, it seems,
recognised me, and coming out of the gate, some poor people, a priest
among them, were drawn up in a line, bowing and almost touching the
earth. Not a smile, no attempt at absurd applause, they felt my
sadness, and contrived to show they were sharing it."[33] The popular
welcome had been dust and ashes to him; "even Swinburne's praise," he
wrote from Gaeta, "makes me sad. Who am I, whom he praises?" His ideal
was shattered. Rome had "the profanation of a corrupt and dishonoured
monarchy," and he knew that the monarchy's winning of the capital
meant that the republic would not come in his day. France, not Italy,
had proclaimed the republic, and in a spirit that he hated. His own
party had failed him. "Italy, my Italy," he said, "the Italy that I
have preached, the Italy of our dreams? Italy, the great, the
beautiful, the moral Italy of my heart? This medley of opportunists
and cowards and little Macchiavellis, that let themselves be dragged
behind the suggestion of the foreigner,--I thought to call up the soul
of Italy, and I only see its corpse." "Yes, dear," he writes to Mrs
Stansfeld, "I love more deeply than I thought my poor dreamt-of Italy,
my old vision of Savona. I want to see, before dying, another Italy,
the ideal of my soul and life, start up from her three hundred years'
grave: this is only the phantom, the mockery of Italy. And the thought
haunts me, like the incomplete man in Frankenstein, seeking for a soul
from its maker."
But henceforth he resigns conspiracy. Sometimes he still hoped for
insurrection, still believed that "a month of action transforms a
people more than ten years of being preached to"; but he knew that the
republic was afar off, that all he could do now was quietly to educate
his countrymen, especially the working classes. "Tell the working-men
of Genoa," so he sent his message, "that this is not a time for
demonstrations but self-education. Germany is the only country that
deserves a republic." He helped to organise the Friendly Societies; he
advocated evening classes for workmen, circulating popular libraries,
the collection of a fund to assist societies for co-operative
production; he founded a paper, _Roma del Popolo_, to spread his
ideas. He still hoped to write his popular history on Italy and a book
on national education,--hopes, alas, never fulfilled. He published
_From the Council to God_, and was delighted at the success it met
with in its English translation in the Fortnightly. He was keenly
interested in the English movements for women's suffrage and against
state regulation of vice. But his chief work in these last years was
to fight the immature socialism of the time. He was bitterly chagrined
by the "invasion of barbarians," which was threatening to conquer the
Italian working-classes to socialism or anarchism. The International
had passed out of its first stage as an organiser of trade-unionism,
and was now the battle-ground between the anarchists under Bakounine
and the collectivists, who followed Karl Marx. In its earlier days
Mazzini had had some relations with it and Bakounine; he had advised
his followers to join it, and had a high opinion of its English
leaders, Odger and Cremer, "for their power of intellect and heart and
their sincere devotion to the cause." He had tried to make it a
political, revolutionary society; and when he found himself defeated
by Marx' opposition, he retired. Since then, the International had
turned to far other roads of revolution. Mazzini hardly distinguished
between the two sections that were fighting for mastery in it, and
banned indiscriminately the atheism and anarchism of the one and the
socialism of the other. And in fact both were equally alien from his
spiritual basis of life, his fervid faith in nationality, his more
modest economic programme.[34] But he was careful to show that his
criticism came from no lack of social aspiration. "Those, whom you
call barbarians," he retorted on the Italian conservatives, who had
used the word in a far other sense, "represent an idea,--the
inevitable, destined rise of the men of Labour." The International,
he argued, was the necessary fruit of middle-class indifference to
social reform; and the Assembly at Versailles was more guilty than the
Commune. He had, in fact, small liking for the Third Republic. A
republic, which had only come for lack of an alternative, which had
Thiers for its chief, and made no sign of restoring Nice, was a
republic only in form. When he read Renan's _Réforme intellectuelle et
morale_, it confirmed him in his distrust of France; and, almost on
his death-bed, he reviewed the book in words of acute disappointment
at its spirit.
The long life of fighting was fast closing in weariness and sense of
failure. "This life of a machine, that writes and writes and writes
for thirty-five years, begins to weigh upon me strangely." He had
bitter personal chagrins; his one surviving sister refused to see him,
from religious differences; Garibaldi would not be reconciled. All
through the end of 1871 he was kept alive only by the devoted
attention of Bertani, who looked after his patient as well as he had
organised the Expedition of the Thousand. He still refused to accept
the amnesty, and travelled under an assumed name to Pisa and Genoa and
Florence, where he laid a wreath on Ugo Foscolo's tomb, for the bones
of his hero had been lately brought from Chiswick to rest in Santa
Croce. Giuditta Sidoli, "good, holy, constant Giuditta," died. "Did
she die a Christian?" he enquires; "any faith, even though imperfect
and spoilt by false doctrine, comforts the pillow of the dying better
than the dry, thin, gloomy travesty of Science, which is called
now-a-days Free Thought or Rationalism." He knew his own end was not
far, and he was willing it should come. "Strange," he said, "that I
see all those I loved go one by one, while I remain, I know not why."
His one care was that the work should still go on. "What matter," he
wrote, "how many years or months I still live down here? Shall I love
you less because I go elsewhere to work? Will you love me less, when
you can only love me by working? I often think, that when at last I
leave you, you will all work with more faith and ardour, to prevent my
having lived in vain." In his last words to the working men of Italy
he says, "love and work for this great, unhappy country of ours,
called to high destinies, but stayed upon the road by those who
cannot, will not know the road. This is the best way that you can have
of loving me." One of his last acts was to repay an old loan of half a
lifetime's standing. In the mild spring of 1872 he was living at a
house that belonged to Pellegrino Rosselli, son-in-law of his old
friends, the Nathans of Lugano, in the Via Maddalena at Pisa. People
would watch the white-haired stranger, who went by the name of Brown,
taking his daily walk, with the affectionate eyes and a kind word for
every child. Early in March he was taken very ill and sank rapidly. On
the 10th he died. His last conscious words were--"Believe in God? Yes,
I do believe in God." He was buried, where he had always wished to
lie, beside his mother, in the cemetery of Staglieno outside Genoa.
There, in the words of Carducci's epitaph, rests
L'UOMO
CHE TUTTO SACRIFICÒ
CHE AMÒ TANTO
E MOLTO COMPATÌ E NON ODIÒ MAI.
FOOTNOTES:
[31] Otherwise entitled _A Letter to the Oecumenical Council_.
[32] I have some doubts, though, whether this Wolff is identical with
the Wolff of the journey to Sicily. See _Lettere ad A. Giannelli_,
503.
[33] Will not some Italian artist paint the scene?
[34] See below, pp. 288, 289.