The crisis had ancient origins. Its roots sank deep into the inner
spirit of the Italian people.
What were the creative forces of the _Risorgimento_? The "Italian
people," to which some historians are now tending to attribute an
important if not a decisive role in our struggle for national unity
and independence, was hardly on the scene at all. The active agency
was always an idea become a person--it was one or several determined
wills which were fixed on determined goals. There can be no question
that the birth of modern Italy was the work of the few. And it could
not be otherwise. It is always the few who represent the
self-consciousness and the will of an epoch and determine what its
history shall be; for it is they who see the forces at their disposal
and through those forces actuate the one truly active and productive
force--their own will.
That will we find in the song of the poets and the ideas of the
political writers, who know how to use a language harmonious with a
universal sentiment or with a sentiment capable of becoming universal.
In the case of Italy, in all our bards, philosophers and leaders, from
Alfieri to Foscolo, from Leopardi to Manzoni, from Mazzini to
Gioberti, we are able to pick up the threads of a new fabric, which is
a new kind of thought, a new kind of soul, a new kind of Italy. This
new Italy differed from the old Italy in something that was very
simple but yet was of the greatest importance: this new Italy took
life seriously, while the old one did not. People in every age had
dreamed of an Italy and talked of an Italy. The notion of Italy had
been sung in all kinds of music, propounded in all kinds of
philosophy. But it was always an Italy that existed in the brain of
some scholar whose learning was more or less divorced from reality.
Now reality demands that convictions be taken seriously, that ideas
become actions. Accordingly it was necessary that this Italy, which
was an affair of brains only, become also an affair of hearts, become,
that is, something serious, something alive. This, and no other, was
the meaning of Mazzini's great slogan: "Thought and Action." It was
the essence of the great revolution which he preached and which he
accomplished by instilling his doctrine into the hearts of others. Not
many others--a small minority! But they were numerous enough and
powerful enough to raise the question where it could be answered--in
Italian public opinion (taken in conjunction with the political
situation prevailing in the rest of Europe). They were able to
establish the doctrine that life is not a game, but a mission; that,
therefore, the individual has a law and a purpose in obedience to
which and in fulfillment of which he alone attains his true value;
that, accordingly, he must make sacrifices, now of personal comfort,
now of private interest, now of life itself.
No revolution ever possessed more markedly than did the Italian
_Risorgimento_ this characteristic of ideality, of thought preceding
action. Our revolt was not concerned with the material needs of life,
nor did it spring from elementary and widely diffused sentiments
breaking out in popular uprisings and mass disturbances. The movements
of 1847 and 1848 were demonstrations, as we would say today, of
"intellectuals"; they were efforts toward a goal on the part of
a minority of patriots who were standard bearers of an ideal
and were driving governments and peoples toward its attainment.
Idealism--understood as faith in the advent of an ideal reality, as a
manner of conceiving life not as fixed within the limits of existing
fact, but as incessant progress and transformation toward the level of a
higher law which controls men with the very force of the idea--was the
sum and substance of Mazzini's teaching; and it supplied the most
conspicuous characteristic of our great Italian revolution. In this
sense all the patriots who worked for the foundation of the new kingdom
were Mazzinians--Gioberti, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Garibaldi. To be
sure, our writers of the first rank, such as Manzoni and Rosmini, had no
historical connection with Mazzini; but they had the same general
tendency as Mazzini. Working along diverging lines, they all came
together on the essential point: that true life is not the life which
is, but also the life which ought to be. It was a conviction essentially
religious in character, essentially anti-materialistic.