When men look back, two or three hundred years hence, upon the
nineteenth century, it may well be that they will discern its salient
characteristic to have been, not scientific, not inventive, as we
popularly suppose, but _romantic_. Science will soon bury our present
heaps of facts under larger accumulations, from the summit of which
broader theories may be scanned; to-morrow will make to-day’s wonderful
invention old-fashioned and insufficient: but the romance with
which this later time has been charged will exercise an increasing
fascination over poets and novelists and historians, as the years
roll on. Oblivion swallows up material achievements, but great deeds
never grow old. That many of our writers should not have heard this
note of the age argues that they, rather than the age, are prosaic and
commonplace. For to what other period shall we turn for a richer store
of those vicissitudes and contrasts in fortune which make up the real
romance, the profound tragedy, of life? Everywhere the dissolution of
a society rooted in mediæval traditions is accompanied by confusion
and struggle,--the birth-pangs of a new order. Classes whose separation
seemed permanent are thrown together, and antagonistic elements are
strangely mixed; there is strife, and doubt, and excess; sudden
combinations are suddenly rent by discords; anachronisms flourish side
by side with innovations; new institutions wear old names, and old
abuses mask in new disguises.
In such a crisis, two facts are prominent: the unusual range of
activity offered to the individual--may he not traverse the whole scale
of experience?--and the dependence of the individual upon himself. He
rises, or he falls, by his own motion. The privileges of caste avail
nothing; for the very confusion produces a certain wild equality,
whereby all start at the line, and the swiftest wins. Napoleon’s
maxim, _La carrière ouverte aux talents_, is the motto of the century.
Napoleon himself is an epochal illustration of the power of the
individual to make the momentum of circumstances work for him. The
Revolution, it is true, had harnessed the steeds; but Napoleon dared to
mount the chariot, grasped the reins, and drove over Europe, upsetting
thrones and princedoms and hierarchies. The haughty descendants
of immemorial lineage gave place to the brothers and comrades of
the “Corsican upstart.” Murat, the son of a tavern-keeper; Ney, a
briefless law-student; Lannes, a dyer; Soult, Masséna, Berthier,
Junot, soldiers of fortune; and how many other children of the Third
Estate,--laughed at the pretensions of humbled Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and
Hohenzollerns! Frequent reactions between revolution and restoration
serve to emphasize the stress of this crisis; and these contrasts
in the conditions of men, revealing human character under the most
diverse phases, show how inextricably the romantic and the tragic are
interwoven in the average lot.
Nor in Europe only has this spectacle been going forward. The United
States also have witnessed similarly rapid transmutations, partly due
to other causes. Within a generation we have seen a gigantic national
upheaval: three millions of artisans, clerks, merchants, and lawyers
were transformed by the magic of a drum-beat into soldiers; and then,
the conflict over, soldiers and uniforms vanished, and the labors of
peace were resumed.
Follow Abraham Lincoln from his Illinois log-cabin to the White House;
follow Grant from his tanyard to Appomattox,--and you can compute the
sweep of Fortune’s wheel. These careers were lived so near us that they
hardly astonish us; they seem as natural as daylight; and in truth they
are as natural as that or any other every-day miracle. As if forgetful
of these, we ransack the past, or fiction, or melodramas, for heroes to
admire. To weak imaginations, distance still lends enchantment.
Our age has produced one romantic man, however, who had not to wait for
the mellowing effects of time to be recognized as romantic. He enjoyed,
almost from the outset of his career, the fame of a legendary hero, and
he will, we cannot doubt, be a hero to posterity. Some future Tasso
will find in his life a theme nobler than Godfrey’s, too romantic in
fact for either invention or myth to enhance it. He lived dramas as
naturally as Shakespeare wrote them; the commonplace could not befall
him. Looking at him from one side we might say, “Here is a Homeric
hero, strangely transplanted from the _Iliad_ into an era of railroads
and telegraphs!” But if we fix our attention on other qualities, we
discover in him a typical democrat, fit product of a democratic age.
This man was Joseph Garibaldi, whose career alone would suffice to
redeem the nineteenth century from the stigma of egotism and the rebuke
of commonplaceness.
Among all the political achievements of our century, none has more
of noble charm than the redemption of Italy. Whether we look at the
difficulty of the undertaking, or at the careers of the leaders and
the temper of the people who engaged in it, we are alike allured
and amazed. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy had never been
united under one government; nevertheless, from the time of Dante
on, the aspiration towards national unity was kept burning in every
patriotic Italian heart. During the Middle Age, little republics won
independence by overthrowing their feudal lords; then they quarreled
among themselves; and then they became the prey and appanage of a
few strong families. The Bishop of Rome, forgetful of his spiritual
mission, lusted after worldly power, established himself as a temporal
sovereign, and elevated his cardinals into temporal princes. Foreign
invaders--Normans, Spaniards, Germans, French--swept over the peninsula
in successive waves; bloodshed and pillage signalized their coming,
corruption was the slime they left behind them. One by one, the
refugees of independence were submerged in the flood of servitude;
until at last Venice herself, become merely the mummy of a republic,
crumbled to dust at Napoleon’s touch. Napoleon promised, but did not
give, to Italy the unity or the freedom which she still dreamed of: he
parceled her anew into duchies and kingdoms. By that act he broke down
ancient barriers and opened a new prospect. Italians beheld the old
order, which had so long oppressed them that many believed it must
endure perpetually, suddenly dissolved, and in its stead a change,
although not the change they longed for. Still, any change, in such
circumstances, implies fresh possibilities; and the Italians passed
from a lethargy which had seemed hopelessly enthralling into a restless
wakefulness.
The twenty years of the reign of Force, of which Napoleon was the
embodiment, ended at Waterloo. Europe, exhausted, sank back into
conservatism, and was ruled for thirty years by Craft, of which
Metternich was the symbol.[2] The Congress of Vienna reimposed the
past upon Italy. Monarchs and bureaucrats, like children who amuse
themselves by “making believe” things are not as they are, would have
it appear that the deluge of revolution, with all its mighty wrecks and
subversions, had never been. The Pope was restored in the States of the
Church; the Bourbons ruled again in Naples and Sicily; an Austrian was
Archduke of Tuscany; Parma and Piacenza were assigned to Napoleon’s
wife, Maria Louisa; Venetia and Lombardy went as spoils to Austria;
an absolutist king reigned in Piedmont. Evidently the revolution
had been but a summer thunderstorm, for the sun of despotism was
shining once more. The sun shone; but what of the sultry air? What
of the threatening clouds along the horizon? Were these the fringe
of the dispersing storm, or the portents of another? Mutterings and
rumblings, too, Carbonari plottings, and quickly extinguished flashes
of insurrection,--did not these omens belie Diplomacy’s pretense that
the eighteenth century had been happily resuscitated to exist forever?
[2] After Metternich, we have the period of Sham-Force, under Louis
Napoleon; and finally of Force again, under Bismarck. These four stages
complete the cycle of European politics during the past century.
It was during this interval of reaction and relapse, when hope was
stifled and energy slept; when victorious despotism flattered itself
with the belief that the Napoleonic episode had demonstrated the
absurdity of Liberalism; when Metternich, the spider of Schönbrunn, was
spinning his cobwebs of chicane across the path to liberty,--then it
was that the generation which should live to see Italy free and united
was getting what learning it could in the Jesuit-ridden schools. Of
this generation the most romantic figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Joseph Garibaldi was born at Nice, July 4, 1807. His father was a
fisherman, thrifty enough to have a small vessel of his own. Such
stories as have come down to us of the boy’s childhood show him to
have been plucky, adventurous, and tenderhearted. He cried bitterly
at having broken a grasshopper’s leg; he rescued, when only seven, a
laundress from drowning; he sailed off with some truant companions for
Genoa, and might have vanished forever, had he not been overtaken near
Monaco and brought home. His education was intrusted to two priests,
from whom, he says, he learned nothing; then to a layman, Arena, who
gave him a smattering of reading, arithmetic, and history. As he was
quick at learning, his parents wished to make a lawyer or a priest
of him; but he had the rover’s instinct and could not resist the
enticements of the sea. At length, when he was fourteen, his parents
yielded, and he became a sailor.
Of those early voyages, we need mention only one, which took him to
Rome. Immense the impression the Holy City made on his imagination!
He saw not the Rome of the Cæsars, nor the Rome of the Popes,--the
city whose monuments entomb twenty-five centuries of history; but,
he says, “the Rome of the future, that Rome of which I have never
despaired,--shipwrecked, at the point of death, buried in the depth of
American forests; the Rome of the regenerating idea of a great people;
the dominating idea of whatever Past or Present could inspire in me,
as it has been through all my life. Oh, Rome became then dear to me
above all earthly existences. I adored her with all the fervor of my
soul. In short, Rome for me is Italy, and I see no Italy possible
save in the union, compact or federate, of her scattered members. Rome
is the symbol of united Italy, under whatever form you will. And the
most infernal work of the Papacy was that of keeping her morally and
materially divided.”[3]
[3] This was written in 1849.
Thenceforth the young mariner, who rose rapidly to be mate and master,
could not rest for the thought of the Eternal City, and of the country
his patriotism craved. During these years, he learned to take Fortune’s
buffets: he was captured by pirates, he lay ill and penniless for
months at Constantinople,--adventures which in another career would
demand more than passing notice, but which he deemed unimportant in
comparison with a conversation he had with a young Ligurian, who
unfolded to him the dreams of the Mazzinians. “Columbus did not
experience so great a satisfaction at the discovery of America,” says
Garibaldi, “as I experienced at finding one who busied himself with the
redemption of our fatherland.”
Fatherland! the name seemed a mockery to the Italians of that time.
Italy, as Metternich phrased it, was only a geographical expression.
Seven or eight petty princes, including the Pope, ruled the little
patches into which the Peninsula was cut up. All the north, except
Piedmont, was directly subject to a foreign despot, Austria; while,
indirectly, Austria domineered over Tuscany, Rome, and Naples.
Piedmont had a native king, indeed, but Absolutism throve nowhere
more vigorously than there. The Jesuits controlled the worship and
education of the little kingdom; reactionaries filled the ministerial
offices, the army, and the government bureaux; the sovereign himself,
Charles Albert, believed devoutly in the divine right of kings, and
held that it would be criminal in him, by granting his people more
freedom, to lessen the responsibility imposed on him by God. Throughout
the Peninsula, no one might discuss politics, whether in speech or
writing. It was high treason to suggest representative government; the
sovereign’s will was the only constitution. In some parts of the land,
the very word _Italy_ could not be used by actors on the stage; and
everywhere censors kept watch to prevent the idea of a regenerate Italy
from slipping into print.
By foreigners, the Italians were more often despised than pitied; they
were believed to be pluckless, wordy, deceitful creatures, who at best
had their uses as singers, dancing-masters, and painters’ models. Among
themselves, discord (born of ancestral feuds), envy (born of local
ambitions, a love of haranguing, and a lack of leaders), had thrice
resulted in an abortive revolution. And now, just as the third attempt
had failed, and in its failure had discredited the great organizations
of conspiracy that had been for fifteen years the hope of Italian
patriotism, Joseph Mazzini, a Genoese a year younger than Garibaldi,
banished from Piedmont because he had a suspicious habit of walking
abroad after dark, formed the new secret society of Young Italy which
aimed at not only the political but the social and moral redemption
of his countrymen. Garibaldi, eager to hasten the emancipation of his
country, joined Young Italy; but in the first plot in which he was
engaged his confederates failed to appear at the appointed time, and
he was forced to fly from Genoa for his life. “Here begins my public
career,” he says in his memoirs.
After being twice captured and twice escaping, he made his way on foot,
disguised as a peasant, to Marseilles, where, on opening a newspaper,
the first thing he read was the sentence of death decreed against him
should he ever be caught in Piedmont. This was in February, 1834.
Proscribed but not disheartened, when chance offered he resumed his
seafaring. But mercantile voyages grew monotonous. Should he offer
his services to the Bey of Tunis, who was seeking a European to take
charge of his navy? After hesitation, Garibaldi decided “no.” During a
cholera epidemic, he volunteered as nurse in the Marseilles hospital.
Finally he shipped for South America. Landing at Rio de Janeiro, he
fell in with another exile, Rossetti, and for a while they kept a
shop. Soon, however, more congenial occupation presented itself.
Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost province of Brazil, had revolted
from the Empire and set up a republic, which it was struggling to
maintain. Garibaldi, who could never resist aiding republicans,
equipped a small privateer, on which he and Rossetti, with twelve
companions, set sail for the south. This was the opening of a life
of adventure which lasted twelve years, and which, could we trace it
step by step, would be found a nonpareil of heroic deeds and startling
dangers. The political and social condition of South America then
resembled in lawlessness that period in European history when chivalry
had its rise; when, as a foil to the bullying and craft and greed of
the many, stood out the courage and honor and courtesy of the few.
Garibaldi, whether by sea or land, approved himself a peerless knight.
Following him, we should witness now a battle of gunboats far up the
river Parana, until, his ammunition having given out, he loaded the
cannon with the chain cables; or, again, we should undergo the horrors
of a shipwreck near the mouth of La Plata, or join in a desperate
battle against great odds at some lonely Paraguayan ranch; we should
traverse vast pampas, or thrid the solitude of trackless forests; we
should know hunger, thirst, and cold, and be incessantly attacking or
attacked; and we should realize that although these campaigns seem mere
border forays when compared with the wars of modern Europe and the
United States, yet they settled the fate of territories as large as
France, and required those martial qualities which beget heroism in any
crisis under any sky.
Although we must pass all this, one marking episode in Garibaldi’s
life at that time ought not to be forgotten. His ships had been cast
away in a storm. He succeeded in swimming to shore, but his dearest
comrades perished. He felt lonely, dispirited, and though he was soon
to command another cruiser, the excitements of war could no longer
dissipate his melancholy. “In short,” he says, in a characteristic
passage of his Autobiography, “I had need of a human being to love
me immediately,--to have one near without whom existence was growing
intolerable to me. Although not old, I understood men well enough to
know how hard it is to find a true friend. A woman? Yes, a woman; for I
always deemed her the most perfect of creatures, and--whatever may be
said--amongst women it is infinitely easier to find a loving heart. I
was pacing the quarter-deck, ruminating my dismal thoughts, and, after
reasonings of all kinds, I decided finally to seek a woman, to draw me
out of my tiresome and unbearable condition. I cast a casual glance
towards the Barra: that was the name of a rather high hill at the
entrance of the lagune, toward the south, on which were visible some
simple and picturesque habitations. There, with the aid of the glass,
I discovered a young woman. I had myself set ashore in her direction.
I disembarked, and, going towards the house where was the object of my
expedition, I had not reached her before I met a man of the place, whom
I had known at the beginning of our stay. He asked me to take coffee
in his house. We entered, and the first person who met my gaze was she
whose appearance had caused me to come ashore. It was Anita, the mother
of my sons, the companion of my life in good and evil fortune,--the
woman whose courage I have so often envied. We both remained rapt and
speechless, reciprocally looking at each other, like two persons who do
not meet for the first time, and who seek in the features one of the
other something to assist recollection. At last I greeted her and said,
‘Thou must be mine.’ I spoke but little Portuguese, and uttered these
hardy words in Italian. However, I was magnetic in my presumption. I
had drawn a knot, sealed a compact, which death alone could break.”
A few nights later Garibaldi carried Anita off to his ship,
clandestinely as it appears, and they were wedded when they reached
another port. She was a companion matching his ideal: she shared his
wild fortunes and hardships; she was an indefatigable horsewoman, a
dead-shot, and upon occasion she could touch off a cannon.
After years of fighting, Garibaldi obtained a furlough, gathered a
drove of cattle, and journeyed across Uruguay to Montevideo. There
he was reduced to teach the rudiments of arithmetic in a private
school, picking up whatever other precarious pennies he could, until
civil war broke out in Uruguay, and he enlisted on the side of the
people, struggling to free themselves from a blood-thirsty dictator.
Garibaldi’s exploits as a guerrilla and corsair had made him famous,
and now he repeated at Montevideo his amazing feats. From among his
countrymen he organized an “Italian Legion,” which proved throughout
a long service that Italians could and would fight,--two facts which
scornful Europe was loth then to believe. He also illustrated his
perfect disinterestedness by refusing all rewards beyond a bare means
of subsistence. At a time when he held the fate of Montevideo in his
hand, he had not money to buy candles to light the poor room where he
and his family were dwelling.
Thus, giving his utmost for liberty and the welfare of strangers, he
saw the years pass without bringing the one thing he desired most of
all,--the chance to consecrate himself to the redemption of Italy. That
desire, the ruling passion of his life, had followed him everywhere.
I marvel that any materialists exist; for where, in the material
world, shall we find anything comparable to the tenacity of ideas?
Think not to preserve them by locking them in an iron safe; write
them not on stone, which crumbles, but on the human soul, and they
shall be indestructible. Have we not daily proof that against remorse,
love, hate, ambition, all the powers of the material world--fire or
frost, hunger, disease, persecution--dash as harmless as vapor against
adamant? By the moral precepts, by which Moses awed his people three
thousand years ago, we are awed. They are permanent, being graven on
something more durable than tables of stone; and it matters not how
many times old Nile is renewed, or whether Sinai itself wear in dust
away.
On Garibaldi’s heart of hearts “Italy” was written,--an ideal which
nothing could cancel. At length, in the early autumn of 1846 news came
to Montevideo that a Liberal Pope had been elected at Rome, that the
word “amnesty” had been uttered, and that the Peninsula was throbbing
with splendid hopes. Each succeeding message confirmed the presentiment
that the longed-for day of action was nigh. Garibaldi, subordinating
his hatred of priestcraft to his patriotism, wrote to offer his sword
to the new Pope, to whom all Italians were looking as the leader of
their crusade for freedom, but Pius never acknowledged the offer.
Then Garibaldi and some threescore of the Legion hired a brigantine,
which they named _La Speranza_ (Hope), and on April 15, 1848, bade the
Montevideans farewell. They had to touch at Santa Pola, on the coast of
Spain, for water, where they learned that all Europe was in revolution,
and then they dropped anchor at Nice on June 23. Over Garibaldi’s
head the death-sentence still hung, but he had nothing to fear, as
the events of the past six months had wiped out old memories. Those
six months had had no parallel in modern European history. They had
witnessed the triumph of revolution from the Douro to the Don.
Not even during the Napoleonic upheaval had modern Europe felt a
convulsion like that of 1848: for government and order were as
necessary to Napoleon as to his victims, and his revolution was the
effort of one lion to devour foxes and wolves,--of one preponderant
tyranny to absorb many smaller tyrannies; but the catastrophe of 1848
seemed, to anxious observers, to endanger civilization itself. Society
was dissolving into its elements. The many-headed beast had risen,
ubiquitous, terrific. Lop off one head, and others grew from the trunk.
What substitute could possibly be found in that chaos for the tottering
system? Nothing seemed certain but anarchy.
That was the year when sovereigns were suddenly made acquainted with
their lackeys’ staircases and the back doors of their palaces. The Pope
escaped from Rome in the livery of a footman. Ferdinand, Emperor of
Austria, fled twice from Vienna. Louis Philippe, the “citizen king” of
the French, put on a disguise, and slipped away to England. Metternich,
rudely interrupted in his diplomatic game of chess, barely escaped with
his life to London. The Crown Prince of Prussia, subsequently Emperor
of Germany, eluded the angry Berliners, a trusty noble driving the
carriage in which he escaped. There was a scampering of petty German
princes, as of prairie-dogs at the sportsman’s approach. Nobility,
whose ambition hitherto had been to display itself, was now wondrously
fond of burrows. And just as the frightened upholders of absolutism
went into hiding, the apostles of democracy emerged from prisons and
exile.
Paper constitutions, grandiloquent manifestoes, patriotic resolutions,
doctrinaire pamphlets, were whirled hither and thither as thick as
autumn leaves. Every man who had a tongue spoke; speaking, so furious
was the din, soon loudened into shouting. But the Old Régime was
encamped in no Jericho whose walls would tumble at mere sound. There
must be deeds as well as words; in truth, more action and less Babel
had been wiser. Committees of national safety, workingmen’s unions,
civic guards, armies of the people, sprang into existence, and it is
wonderful to note with what quickness officers and leaders were found
to command them. Universities were turned into recruiting stations
and barracks; students and professors became soldiers. There were
heroic combats, excesses, reverses bravely borne. Gradually the fatal
lack of centre and organization could not be concealed. The leaders
disputed as to measures; then followed misunderstandings, jealousies,
desertions. Each doctrinaire cared that _his_ plan, rather than the
general cause, should prevail. Each sect, each race, feared that it
would lose should its rival take the lead. But the purpose of monarchy
was everywhere the same,--to recover its footing; and the agents of
monarchy, cautiously creeping out of their retreats, began to profit
by the divisions among their enemies. Within a year the European revolt
was crushed. Nevertheless its lessons abide. It taught that despots
cannot be permanently abolished so long as a large majority of a nation
require despotic government, and the proof that they require it is the
fact that they submit to it; whence it follows that real democracy
cannot conquer until a people be educated up to the capacity of
governing themselves. It taught that without unity among the heads and
obedience among the members no reform can succeed. It taught, finally,
that no society which has once attained a certain level of civilization
can exist in a state of anarchy; for when anarchy is reached, the
opportunity of the strongest man, the tyrant, offers, and the process
of reconstruction from the basis of absolutism begins.
To Liberals, in June, 1848, however, the days of tyranny seemed at
an end; the Golden Age of liberty, constitutional government, and
the brotherhood of nations seemed to have dawned. Garibaldi learned
that Lombardy had expelled the Austrians; that Charles Albert, the
Piedmontese King, had drawn his sword as the champion of Italian
independence; and that the Pope and the other princes, including
even Bomba of Naples, had espoused the national cause. The rapid
victories of the spring had been succeeded by military inertia; frantic
enthusiasm had given place to a chatter of criticism; but not even
those who grumbled loudest believed as yet that the cause was in danger.
Garibaldi hurried to the King’s headquarters, near Mantua. He was no
lover of royalty, but he would support any king honestly fighting in
behalf of Italy. Charles Albert granted him an audience, but avoided
accepting his offered services, telling him that he had better consult
the Minister of War, at Turin. To Turin, accordingly, Garibaldi posted
back, saw that official, received further evasive replies, and departed
angry. To have traveled seven thousand miles over sea to fight for his
country’s redemption, only to be treated in this fashion, might well
astound a blunt soldier who had supposed that every volunteer would be
welcomed. In his own case the rebuff was peculiarly astonishing, for he
was, presumably, an ally whom any commander would be glad to secure.
Europe had rung with the fame of his South American career, and already
regarded him as a legendary hero. Imagine Charlemagne refusing Roland’s
aid in his campaign against the Paynims, or the old Romans turning
coldly away from one of the great Twin Brethren!
Although Garibaldi would have despised reasons of state which deprived
him of the right of volunteering against Austria, yet the King had to
be governed by them. For his excuse in declaring war had been that,
unless he interfered, anarchy, followed by a republic, would prevail in
Lombardy. To be consistent, therefore, he had to keep clear of even an
apparent league with republicanism as embodied in Garibaldi.
Baffled and exasperated, but determined not to be cut off from all
activity, Garibaldi went to Milan, where a provisional government with
republican leanings still ruled. By it he and his legionaries were
hospitably received, and sent out, with a considerable body of raw
recruits, to harass the Austrians along the lakes. In a few weeks,
however, the main Austrian army had reconquered Lombardy, and the
Garibaldians were driven to take refuge across the Swiss frontier.
Garibaldi, like a true knight-errant, now went forth in search of
another chance to do battle for freedom. At Florence the republicans
did him honor, but were wary of asking him to command their troops,
the fact being that each district had leaders of its own, and a host
of zealous aspirants, who were patriotically disinclined to make way
for even the most distinguished knight-errant. At Rome, whence Pius IX
had fled, the revolutionists gave him a warmer greeting, and when, in
February, 1849, they set up a republic,--Garibaldi having made a motion
to that effect in the Roman Assembly,--they made him second in command
of their army. And now, properly speaking, the tale of Garibaldi’s
European exploits begins.
We cannot follow in detail the story of the defense of Rome against
the French troops sent thither by the perfidious Louis Napoleon, and
their allies from Spain and Naples; yet it were well worth our while to
give an hour to deeds so brilliant, so noble, so picturesque,--to pass
from the Assembly Hall, where Mazzini, the indomitable dreamer, was the
dictator, to the fortifications where band after band of volunteers,
speaking many dialects, clothed in many costumes, were resolved to give
their lives for freedom! We should see Lucian Manara, a modern knight,
captain of a legion of brave men; we should see Mameli, the blond
poet-soldier, a mere lad; and the brothers Dandolo, and Medici and Nino
Bixio, and many another doomed to win renown by an early death there,
or there to begin a career which became a necessary strand in Italy’s
regeneration. But, most conspicuous of all, we should see Garibaldi,
for whom the legionaries and their leaders had such a feeling as the
Knights of the Round Table for Arthur their King. Call it loyalty, ’tis
not enough; call it filial affection, something remains unexpressed;
call it fascination, enthusiasm, sorcery,--each term helps the
definition, though none singly suffices. His was, indeed, that eldest
sorcery which binds the hearts of men to their hero,--that power which
reveals itself as an ideal stronger than danger or hardship or disease,
something to worship, to love, to die for.
During her five-and-twenty centuries, Rome had seen many strange
captains, but none more original than this, her latest defender, from
the pampas of South America. In person he was of middle stature; his
hair and beard were of a brown inclining to red; his eyes blue, more
noteworthy for their expression than for their color; his mouth, so
far as it could be seen under the moustache, was firm, but capable of
an irresistible smile. His soldiers, remembering his aspect in battle,
spoke of his face as “leonine;” women, caught perhaps by the charm
rather than the cut of his features, thought him beautiful. And as if
Nature had not done enough to mark her hero, he adopted on his return
to Europe the dress which he had worn in South America,--a small,
plumed cap, the grayish-white cloak or _poncho_ lined with red, the red
flannel shirt, the trousers and boots of the Uruguayan herdsmen and
guerrillas.
During that siege of Rome, Europe came to know Garibaldi and his
red-shirted companions, who were equally bizarre in character and
in costume,--a troop of poets, students, dreamers, vagabonds, and
adventurers,--who, with the nucleus of the Legion from Montevideo, were
capable, under their chieftain’s guidance, of splendid achievements.
Their victories against the Neapolitans at Palestrina and Velletri;
their stubborn defense of Rome against the overwhelming armies of
France; their bravery at the Villa Pamfili; their desperate struggle
to hold the Vascello, where Manara was killed; their unwilling
but inevitable yielding of the outposts, and finally of the inner
breastworks,--made up a tale of heroism which could be matched only at
Venice in that year of waning revolution.
But Europe had declared that there should be no republic at Rome,
and after nine weeks’ gallantry the city capitulated to the French,
who represented the cause of reaction. Garibaldi, however, did not
surrender. On the day when the French made their entry by one gate,
he marched out of another, followed by nearly four thousand soldiers.
He wound across the Campagna, and then for twenty-nine days he led
his troop among the Apennines, evading now the French who pressed on
the rear, now the Austrians, who harassed both flanks and threatened
to bar the advance. The little army dwindled, but Garibaldi held his
purpose to reach Venice, where the Austrian tyrants had not yet forced
their return. At length, however, in the little republic of San Marino
he was surrounded. All but two hundred of his followers disbanded;
with the remainder he eluded the enemy’s cordon, reached the coast
at Cesenatico, seized some fishing-boats, and embarked for Venice.
Mid-voyage, a fleet of Austrian cruisers came upon them and opened
fire. As best they could the fugitives landed, with Austrian pursuers
at their heels. Garibaldi and one companion bore Anita in dying
condition--she had followed the retreat on horseback all the way from
Rome--to a wood-cutter’s hut, where she died. A moment later Garibaldi
had to fly.
Of that retreat, and his subsequent hair-breadth escapes in being
smuggled across Italy, he has left in his memoirs a thrilling account.
For a second time he tasted the bitterness of exile: his first refuge
was Genoa, but the Piedmontese government, timid after defeat, informed
him that he must depart; he was expelled from Turin at the instigation
of the French; England warned him that he must be gone from Gibraltar
within a week. Only in semi-savage Morocco did he at last find shelter;
thence, after a few months, he came to New York. Consider who it was
that Europe thus outlawed, and what was his crime. He was a man whose
life had been a long devotion to human liberty, and whose most recent
guilt was to have attempted to prevent foreign despots from reënslaving
his countrymen. A system is judged by the men it persecutes.
Wifeless, homeless, chagrined by the thought that Italy had waged
her war of independence only to be beaten, Garibaldi began his
second wanderings. A real _Odyssey_ we may call it, with its strange
happenings. For a year the hero of Rome earned a bare livelihood
making candles in Meucci’s factory on Staten Island; then he shipped
for Central and South America; captained a cargo of guano from Lima
to Canton, and a cargo of tea back to Lima; brought a ship laden with
copper, round Cape Horn to Boston; and finally, in May, 1854, he
dropped anchor at Genoa, where the government no longer feared his
presence. With the proceeds of his mercantile ventures, he bought
Caprera,--a mere rock, which juts out of the Tuscan Sea, near the
northern tip of Sardinia. There, “like some tired eagle on a crag
remote,” he dwelt five years, apparently oblivious to the passing
current of events, and wholly intent on coaxing a few vines and
vegetables to grow on his wind-swept rock.
Early in 1859 a messenger summoned Garibaldi from his hermitage to
Turin. This summons was not unexpected. For months the world had
regarded war in Italy as inevitable, and now war was on the point of
breaking out.
How had this come to pass? After her defeat in 1849, Piedmont, the
little northwestern kingdom of four million souls, had sturdily set
about reforming herself. She stood firmly by the constitutional
government adopted in 1848; she strengthened her army and her navy;
she took education out of the hands of the Jesuits; she encouraged
commerce, industry, and agriculture. Thus she proved to Europe that
Italians could govern themselves by as good a political system as
then existed; to all the other Italians, groaning under Austrian, or
Bourbon, or Papal tyranny, she proved that they might look to her to
lead the Italian cause.
This marvelous attainment was due primarily to Count Cavour, the
statesman who, since 1850, had been almost continuously prime minister
of Piedmont; and, in the second place, to Victor Emanuel, the shrewd,
honest, chivalrous King, worthy to be the visible symbol of Italy’s
patriotism. But Cavour had realized from the beginning that, however
strong he might make Piedmont, she would not be able singly to cope
with Austria: four millions against thirty-five millions--the odds were
too great! So he labored to bring Piedmont into the stream of European
life; he allied her to France and England in the Crimean War; and now,
at the beginning of 1859 he had persuaded Napoleon III to march the
armies of France into Italy to join Piedmont in expelling the Austrians.
All this had been brought about against great hindrances, not the least
of which was the keeping in check the Italian conspirators. Since
the days of the Carbonari, a certain number of Italians had hoped to
set up a republic. Mazzini, now the chief leader of conspiracy, was
uncompromisingly republican, holding so little faith in the methods
of Cavour and the Constitutional Monarchists that he never hesitated
to hatch plots against them as well as against the Austrians. Between
these two irreconcilable parties Garibaldi was the link. By preference
a republican, he yet recognized Victor Emanuel as the only practicable
standard-bearer, and he therefore fought loyally under him; but he
distrusted Cavour, scorned diplomacy, and abhorred Napoleon III. In his
exuberant way, he insisted that Italians could, if they would, recover
independence without begging the rogue, who had crushed Rome ten years
before, to succor them.
A volunteer corps, called the Hunters of the Alps, was accordingly
organized, with the double purpose of using Garibaldi’s skill as a
guerrilla chieftain against the Austrians, and his unique popularity
in drawing all sorts of partisans to support the national war. He
suspected that the government was not wholly ingenuous; he complained
that his volunteers had to swallow many snubs from the regulars; he
chafed at being responsible to any superior: but the fact that he
had at last a chance of striking the oppressors of Italy outweighed
everything else.
Despite the shortness of the war of 1859, Garibaldi and his Hunters
proved of real service in it. Varese, Como, remember their valor
still; and had not Napoleon III suspended hostilities after the
great victory of Solferino, the Garibaldians might have redeemed the
Tyrol. But Napoleon’s peace of Villafranca, while it gave Lombardy
to Piedmont, left Venetia in the hands of the Austrians, and stopped
further operations in the north at that time. During the autumn,
however, Garibaldi, with many of his volunteers, went to Tuscany,
where a provisional government was then awaiting the propitious moment
for annexation to Victor Emanuel’s kingdom. The situation was very
ticklish, requiring careful diplomacy: Garibaldi, who shared with
General Fanti the military command, wished to have done with diplomacy,
to call out one hundred thousand volunteers, and to rely on them to
disentangle all complications. Irritated at having his plan overruled,
he resigned his command and withdrew to Caprera.
Within three months, however, he was called from his retreat. Secret
agents brought word that “something could be done” in Sicily, where
for a long time Mazzinians had been preparing a revolt. It needed,
they said, but Garibaldi’s presence to redeem the island from Bourbon
misrule. He could not resist the temptation. Trusty lieutenants of his
had collected arms and ammunition, hired two steamers and enrolled
volunteers. At Genoa, where these preparations were making, nobody,
except the government officials, was ignorant of their purpose. The
government, however, pretended not to see. Cavour could not openly
abet an expedition against a power with which Piedmont was not at war;
neither did he wish to hinder an expedition for whose success he and
all Italian patriots prayed. So he discreetly closed his eyes.
On the night of May 5, 1860, Garibaldi and 1067 followers embarked
on their two steamers near Genoa and vanished into the darkness. For
a week thereafter Europe wondered whither they were bound,--whether
against the Papal States or Naples; then the telegraph reported that
they had landed at Marsala, on the morning of May 11, just in time
to escape two Neapolitan cruisers which had been watching for them.
From that moment, day by day, with increasing astonishment, the world
followed the progress of Garibaldi and his Thousand. No achievement
like theirs has been chronicled in many centuries. They set out, a
thousand filibusters, scantily equipped and undrilled, to free an
island of two and a half million inhabitants, an island guarded by
an army fifty thousand strong, with forts and garrisons in all its
ports, and having quick communication with Naples, where the Bourbon
King had six million more subjects from whom to recruit his forces.
Grant that the Sicilians fervently sympathized with Garibaldi, yet
they were too wary to commit themselves before they had indications
that he would win; grant that the Bourbon troops were half-hearted and
ludicrously superstitious,--many of them believed that the Garibaldians
were wizards, bullet-proof,--yet they had been trained to fight, they
were well-armed, and by their numbers alone were formidable. That they
would run away could not be assumed by the little band of liberators,
any more than Childe Roland could suppose that the grim monsters who
threatened his advance would vanish when he upon his slug-horn blew.
And in truth the Bourbon soldiers did not run. At Calatifimi the
Garibaldians beat them only after a fierce encounter; at Palermo there
was a desperate struggle; at Milazzo, a resistance which might, if
prolonged, have destroyed the expedition. In every instance it seemed
as if the Bourbons might have won had they but displayed a little
more nerve, another half hour’s persistence; but it was always the
Garibaldians who had the precious reserve of pluck and strength to draw
upon, and they always won. Their capture of Palermo, a walled city of
two hundred thousand inhabitants, defended by many regiments on land
and by men-of-war in the harbor, ranks highest among their exploits.
Less than a month after quitting Genoa, they had liberated more than
half the island and had set up a provisional government. By the first
of August only two or three fortresses had not surrendered to them.
And now questions of diplomacy came in to disturb the swift current of
conquest. Garibaldi determined to cross to the mainland, redeem Naples,
march on to Rome, and from the Capitol hail Victor Emanuel King of
Italy. Cavour saw great danger in this plan. At any moment, a defeat
would jeopard the positions already gained; an attack on the Pope’s
domain would bring Louis Napoleon and Austria to his rescue, and might
entail a war in which the just-formed Kingdom of Italy would be broken
up; furthermore, Cavour believed that assimilation ought to keep pace
with annexation. He knew that it would require long training to raise
the Italians of the south, corrupted by ages of hideous misrule, to the
level of their northern kinsmen.
Such considerations as these could not, however, deter Garibaldi. He
grew wroth at the thought that any foreigner--were he even the Emperor
of the French--should be consulted by Italians in the achievement of
their independence. Eluding both the Neapolitan and the Piedmontese
cruisers, he crossed to the mainland and took Reggio after a sharp
fight. From that moment his progress towards the capital resembled a
triumph. And when, on September 7, accompanied by only a few officers,
he entered Naples, though there were still a dozen or more Bourbon
regiments in garrison there, the soldiers joined with the civilians
and the loud-throathed _lazzaroni_ in acclaiming him their deliverer.
Yet only a few hours before their King had sneaked off, too craven to
defend himself, too much detested to be defended. Think what it meant
that this should happen,--that the sovereign, the source of honor, the
fountain of justice, the symbol of the life and integrity of the state,
should not find in his own palace one loyal sword unsheathed in his
defense, even though the loyalty were hired, like that of the eight
hundred Swiss who gave their lives for Louis XVI! By an inevitable
penalty, Bourbon misrule in Naples passed vilely away; it had been,
as Gladstone declared, the embodied “negation of God:” even in its
collapse and ruin there was nothing tragic, portending strength; there
was only the negative energy of putrefaction.
Having taken measures for temporarily governing Naples, Garibaldi
prepared for a last encounter with the Bourbons. King Francis still
commanded an army of forty thousand men along the Volturno, near Capua.
There Garibaldi, with hardly a third of that number, fought and won a
pitched battle on October 1. A month later he welcomed Victor Emanuel
as sovereign of the kingdom which he and his Thousand had liberated.
The republicans, instigated by Mazzini, had wished to postpone, if
they could not prevent, annexation; but Garibaldi, whose patriotic
instinct was truer than their partisanship, insisted that Naples and
Sicily should be united to the Kingdom of Italy under the House of
Savoy. In all modern history there is no parallel to his bestowal of
his conquests on the King, as there is nothing nobler than his complete
disinterestedness. He declined all honors, titles, stipends, and
offices for himself, and departed, almost secretly, from Naples for
Caprera the day after he had consigned the government to its new lord.
Fortune has one gift which she begrudges even to her darlings: she
does not allow them to die at the summit of their career. Either too
soon for their country’s good, or too late for their personal fame, she
sends death to dispatch them. Pericles, Cavour, Lincoln, were snatched
away prematurely; Themistocles and Grant should have prayed to be
released before they had slipped below their zenith. So, too, Garibaldi
lacked nothing but that, after having redeemed a kingdom by one of the
most splendid expeditions in history, and after having given it to the
unifier of his fatherland, he should have vanished from the earth.
Thanks to a kindlier fortune, the old Hebrew prophets were translated,
and the Homeric heroes were borne off invisible, at the perfect moment.
But while Garibaldi lacked this epic finale to his epic career, the
closing decades of his life were as characteristic as any.
In the spring of 1861 he reappeared on the scene at the opening of
the first parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, to which he had been
chosen deputy by many districts. He came, not jubilant but angry.
Nice, his home, had been ceded to France in payment for French aid in
the war of 1859: against Cavour, who had consented to this bargain,
Garibaldi conceived the most intense hatred, and on the floor of the
House he fulminated at the Prime Minister whose “treason had made
Garibaldi a foreigner in his native land.” He complained, further,
because the officers and soldiers of the Garibaldian army had not been
generously treated by the government. The outburst was most deplorable.
Many feared that the hero’s testiness might lead to civil war; and
though the King arranged a meeting, in the hope of bringing about a
reconciliation, Garibaldi went from it with bitterness in his heart.
Six weeks later, on June 6, Cavour, stricken by fever, died when his
country needed him most. Little did Garibaldi realize that in the great
statesman’s death he was losing the man who had been indispensable
to his success in Sicily, and whose judgment was needed to direct
Garibaldian impulses to a fruitful end.
Only Rome and Venetia now remained ununited to the Kingdom of Italy: in
Rome a French garrison propped the Pope’s despised temporal power; in
Venetia the Austrian regiments held fast. To rescue the Italians still
in bondage, and to complete the unification of Italy, were henceforth
Garibaldi’s aims. He paid no heed to the diplomatic embarrassments
which his schemes might create; for as usual he regarded diplomacy as a
device by which cowards, knaves, and traitors thwarted the desires of
patriots.
In the summer of 1862, therefore, he recruited three or four thousand
volunteers in Sicily, raised the war-cry, “Rome or death,” crossed
to the mainland, and had to be forcibly stopped by royal troops at
Aspromonte. In the brief skirmish he was wounded, and for many months
was confined at Varignano, whither flocked admirers--men, women, and
youths--from all parts of Europe. There is no doubt that Rattazzi, then
the premier, had connived at the expedition, hoping to repeat Cavour’s
master-stroke; but the conditions were different from those of 1860,
and the Premier but illustrated the truth that talent cannot even copy
genius judiciously. Moreover, by allowing Garibaldi to go so far and by
then arresting him, Rattazzi subjected the government to a dangerous
strain; for Garibaldi’s popularity was immense, and even those of his
countrymen who insisted that no citizen--however distinguished his
services--should be permitted to live above the law, and to wage war
when he pleased, were as eager as he that Rome should be emancipated.
Untaught by experience, Rattazzi connived at a similar expedition five
years later. For several weeks Garibaldi went about openly preaching
another crusade. When the French government asked for explanations,
Rattazzi had Garibaldi arrested and escorted to Caprera. A dozen
men-of-war sailed round and round the rock, forbidding any one to
approach or quit it. But one night Garibaldi escaped in a tiny
wherry, and a few days later he led a band of crusaders across the
Papal frontier. They met the French troops at Mentana, were worsted
and dispersed; and again Garibaldi was locked up in the fortress of
Varignano, while one party denounced the government for ingratitude
towards the beloved hero, and another denounced it for treating him as
a privileged person who might, when the impulse seized him, embroil
the country in war. If we regard the acquirement of the methods of
constitutional government and of respect for law and order as the chief
need of the Italians at that time, we can only regret the agitation
and expeditions which Garibaldi conducted, to the detriment of his
country’s progress.
Meanwhile, in 1866, Venetia had been restored to her kinsfolk, as
the result of the brief conflict in which Italy and Prussia allied
themselves against Austria. Garibaldi organized another corps of
Hunters of the Alps, but the shortness of the campaign prevented him,
as in 1859, from going far. In 1870 the war between France and Prussia
enabled the Italians to take possession of Rome as soon as the French
garrison was withdrawn; so that Italy owed the completion of her unity,
not to her own sword, but to a lucky turn in the quarrels of her
neighbors.
No sooner had the French Empire collapsed, and the French Republic
was seen to be terribly beset by the Germans, than Garibaldi offered
his services to her. He was assigned to the command of the Army of
the Vosges, a nondescript corps, which more than once gave proof
of bravery, although it could not match the superior numbers and
discipline of Moltke’s men. The French gave him scanty thanks for his
services, and at the end of the war he returned home.
During the next ten years he was either at Rome, arraigning the
government, the fallen Papacy, and the wastefulness of the monarchy; or
he was making triumphal progresses through the land, sure everywhere
of being treated as an idol; or he stayed in his Caprera hermitage,
inditing letters in behalf of political extremists, Nihilists,
fanatics. Yet his popularity did not wane; his countrymen regarded him
more than ever as a privileged person, whose senile extravagances were
not to be taken too seriously. They loved his intentions; they revered
him for the achievements of his prime; and when, on June 2, 1882, he
fell asleep in his Caprera home, all Italy put on mourning, and the
world, conscious that it had lost a hero, grieved.
On his sixty-fifth birthday (July 4, 1872) he drew his own portrait
thus: “A tempestuous life, composed of good and of evil, as I believe
of the large part of the world. A consciousness of having sought the
good always, for me and for my kind. If I have sometimes done wrong,
certainly I did it involuntarily. A hater of tyranny and falsehood,
with the profound conviction that in them is the principal origin of
the ills and of the corruption of the human race. Hence a republican,
this being the system of honest folk, the normal system, willed by
the majority, and consequently not imposed with violence and with
imposture. Tolerant and not exclusive, incapable of imposing my
republicanism by force, on the English, for instance, if they are
contented with the government of Queen Victoria. And, however contented
they may be, their government should be considered republican. A
republican, but evermore persuaded of the necessity of an honest and
temporary dictatorship at the head of those nations which, like France,
Spain, and Italy, are the victims of a most pernicious Byzantinism....
I was copious in praises of the dead, fallen on fields of battle for
liberty. I praised less the living, especially my comrades. When I felt
myself urged by just rancor against those who wronged me, I strove
to placate my resentment before speaking of the offense and of the
offender. In every writing of mine, I have always attacked clericalism,
more particularly because in it I have always believed that I found
the prop of every despotism, of every vice, of every corruption. The
priest is the personification of lies, the liar is a thief, the thief
is a murderer,--and I could find for the priest a series of infamous
corollaries.”
Thus he read his own character, and we need not subject it to a
searching analysis. In action lay his strength. He trusted instinct
against any argument. Hence the single-minded zeal with which he
plunged into every enterprise; hence, too, his inability to weigh
other policies than his own, and his distrust, often intensified into
unreasoning prejudice, of those who differed from him. If his kindly,
generous nature often made him the dupe of schemers, the wonder is
that they did not beguile him into irreparable excesses. He was
saved partly by a thread of common sense and partly by self-respect
akin to vanity, which kept him constantly on the alert against being
used as a tool. Although modest, he knew so well the grandeur of the
part he was playing that he took no pains to dissemble the childlike
delight he felt at demonstrations of his popularity. The lifelong
champion of democracy, he behaved, in practice, as autocratically as
Cromwell; a believer in dictatorships, never able to work successfully
as yoke-fellow or subordinate to any one else. Like the dreamers,
he could not comprehend that human society, being a growth and not
a manufacture, cannot be suddenly lifted by benevolent manifesto or
patriotic resolution. He scorned parliamentary debates, he reviled
diplomacy, he underrated counsel.
But what he had, he had superlatively: valor, presence of mind,
geniality, unselfishness, magnanimity,--he had all these, the qualities
of a popular soldier, to a degree which made whoever fought with
him worship him. No other man of his time, nor perhaps of any time,
inspired so many human beings with personal affection--as distinguished
from that devotion which other favorite captains have inspired--as he
did. Every one of his soldiers felt that in Garibaldi he had not merely
a commander but a brother; every person who approached him acknowledged
his fascination.
Strip off Garibaldi’s eccentricities, look into his heart, contemplate
his achievements,--we behold a hero of the Homeric brood. Again we
enter the presence of a man of a few elemental traits, whose habit it
was to exhibit his passions without that reserve which belongs to our
sophisticated age. Like Achilles, he wept when he was moved, he sulked
when he was angry. Equally simple was the mainspring of his action. He
obeyed two ideals, and those two of the noblest,--love of liberty and
love of his fellow-men: nay, more, he obeyed them as quickly when they
led into exile, poverty, and danger as when they led him to a conquest
unparalleled in modern history, and to fame in which the wonder and the
affection of the world blended in equal parts.
In the making of Italy it was his mission to rouse some of his
countrymen to a sense of their patriotic duty, and to lead others to
fight for a nation under Victor Emanuel instead of for a faction under
Mazzini. Through him, the forces of royalism and of revolution formed
an alliance which, although it was almost indispensable to the success
of the Italian cause, might never, but for him, have been formed.
Such was Garibaldi, his character, his exploits. Shall we not seek also
for the meaning of his career? Shall we not ask, “To what attributes
of general human nature had his individuality the key?” That conquest
of Sicily was but an episode; long anterior to it was built up the
temperament which might have liberated twenty Sicilies, and which found
a multitude ready to respond to its least signal.
More than half of our nature is emotion. Men may lie sluggish, they
may seem sodden in selfishness, or they may fritter their force away
on petty things. But let the hero come,--the Garibaldi, the embodied
emotion,--and they will know him as light knows light, or lover his
beloved. What just now seemed a dead, sordid mass is tinder, is flame.
The craven legions, bewitched and transformed by his example, will
follow him anywhere, were it to storm the gates of hell! The immense
scope of noble emotion,--is not that the significance, if we seek it,
of Garibaldi’s marvelous influence? And has it ever been more certainly
displayed than in our very century, miscalled prosaic?