I am sorry for the country, whose first awakening I saw with my own eyes
and which now I see outraged and dishonoured. I am sorry for the Mazeppa,
who was untied from the tail of one empire to be tied to the tail of
another.
I am sorry that I am right. I am, as it were, connected with the fact
from having in outline foreseen it. I am angry with myself as a child is
angry with the barometer that predicts a storm and spoils his picnic.
Italy is like a family in which some black crime has lately been
committed, some horrible calamity that has betrayed ugly secrets has
come to pass; a family which has been touched by the hangman’s hand, or
from which some one has been carried off to the galleys..... All are
exasperated, the innocent are ashamed and ready for insolent defiance.
All are tortured by an impotent desire of revenge, poisoned, weakened by
a passive hatred.
Perhaps there are means of escape close at hand, but they cannot be found
by reason; they lie in chance happenings, in external circumstances, they
lie outside the frontiers. Italy’s fate is not in her own hands, that is
in itself one of the most insufferable humiliations; it so rudely recalls
her recent captivity and the feeling of her own weakness and instability
which had begun to be effaced.
And only twenty years!
Twenty years ago at the end of December I finished in Rome the first
article of my _From the Other Side_ and was faithless to it, carried away
by the year ’forty-eight. I was then in the heyday of my powers, and I
watched with eagerness the unfolding of events. In my life there had not
yet been one misfortune which had left one deep, aching scar, not one
reproach of conscience inwardly, not one insulting word outwardly. With
unreasoning light-heartedness, with boundless self-confidence, I floated
lightly dancing on the waves with all sails set, and I have had to take
them in one after another!
* * * * *
I was in Paris at the time of Garibaldi’s first arrest. The French
did not believe in the invasion by their troops.[78] I happened to
meet with people of very different classes in society. The inveterate
reactionaries and clericals desired intervention, clamoured for it, but
yet doubted. At the railway station a distinguished French savant as he
took leave of me said: ‘Your imagination, my dear northern Hamlet, is
so constructed that you see nothing but what is black; that’s why the
impossibility of war with Italy is not obvious to you. The Government
knows too well that war for the Pope would set all thinking people
against it; after all, you know, we are the France of 1789.’
The first news, not that I read but that I saw, was the fleet setting
off from Toulon to Cività. ‘It is only a military manœuvre,’ another
Frenchman said to me. ‘_On ne viendra jamais aux mains_, and besides
there is no need for us to soil our hands in Italian blood.’
It turned out that there _was need_. A few lads from ‘Latium’ protested;
they were clapped in the lock-up, and with that everything ended as far
as France was concerned. Italy, blood-stained and taken unawares, thanks
to the irresolution of the King and the trickery of the Ministers, made
every concession. But the French, rendered savage, intoxicated by every
victory, could not be stopped: to blood, to action, they had to add words
of abuse.
And on these words of abuse being uttered and greeted with the applause
of the Empire, its fiercest foes—the Legitimists in the form of the old
attorney of the Bourbons, Berryer and the Orleanists in the form of the
old Figaro of the days of Louis-Philippe, Thiers—shook hands with it.
I look upon Rouher’s words as an historical revelation. Any one who did
not understand France after that must have been born blind.
Count Bismarck, it is your task now!
And you, Mazzini, Garibaldi, last of the saints, last of the Mohicans,
fold your hands and take your rest. You are not needed now. You have
done your part. Make room now for madness, for the frenzy of blood in
which either Europe will slay herself or the Reaction will. What will
you do with your hundred republicans and your volunteers with two or
three cases of contraband guns? Now there are a million from here and
a million from there with needle-guns and other artifices. Now there
will be lakes of blood, seas of blood, mountains of corpses.... And then
plague, famine, fire and devastation. _Ah, messieurs les conservateurs_,
you would not have even so pale a republic as that of February, you would
not have the mawkish democracy laid at your feet by the confectioner
Lamartine, you would not have Mazzini the Stoic or Garibaldi the hero.
You wanted order.
For that you will have a Seven Years’ war, a Thirty Years’ war....
You were afraid of social reforms, so now you have the Fenians with their
barrel of gunpowder and their lighted match.
Who is the fool?
GENOA, _December 31, 1867_.