A BABEL OF TONGUES—THE GERMAN UMWALZUNGSMÄNNER—THE FRENCH RED
MONTAGNARDS—THE ITALIAN FUORUSCITI IN GENEVA—MAZZINI, GARIBALDI, AND
ORSINI—THE ROMAN AND THE GERMAN TRADITIONS—A TRIP ON ‘THE PRINCE RADETSKY’
There was a time when in a fit of irritation and bitter mirth I thought
of writing a pamphlet in the style of Grandville’s[31] Illustrations:
_Les réfugiés peints par eux-mêmes_. I am glad I did not do it. Now that
I look at it more calmly, I am less moved to laughter and indignation.
Besides, exile both lasts too long and weighs too heavily on men....
Nevertheless, I do say even now that exile, not undertaken with any
definite object, but forced upon men by the triumph of the opposing
party, checks development and draws men away from the activities of life
into the domain of fantasy. Leaving their native land with concealed
anger, with the continual thought of going back to it on the morrow, men
make no advance, but are continually thrown back upon the past; hope
hinders them from settling down and undertaking any permanent work;
irritation and trivial but exasperated disputes prevent their escaping
from the familiar circle of questions, thoughts, and memories which make
up an oppressive binding tradition. Men in general, and especially men
in an exceptional position, have such a passion for formalism, for the
coterie spirit, for looking their part, that they immediately fall into
a groove and acquire a doctrinaire stamp.
All exiles, cut off from the living environment to which they have
belonged, shut their eyes to avoid seeing bitter truths, and grow more
and more used to a narrow, fantastic circle consisting of inert memories
and hopes that will never be realised.
Add to this, aloofness from all who are not exiles and an element of
exasperation, suspicion, exclusiveness, and jealousy, and this new
stiff-necked Israel becomes perfectly comprehensible.
The exiles of 1849 did not yet believe in the permanence of their
enemy’s triumph; the intoxication of their recent successes had not
yet passed off, the applause and songs of the victorious people were
still ringing in their ears. They firmly believed that their defeat was
a momentary reverse, and did not unpack their trunks. Meanwhile Paris
was under police supervision, Rome was falling under the onslaught of
the French, the brother of the Prussian King was brutally triumphing in
Baden,[32] while Paskevitch in the Russian style had outwitted Görgei[33]
in Hungary by bribes and promises. Geneva was full to overflowing with
refugees; it became the Coblenz[34] of the revolution of 1848. There
were Italians from all parts; Frenchmen escaping from the Bauchart[35]
inquiry and from the Versailles trial; Baden insurgents, who entered
Geneva marching in regular formation with their officers and with Gustav
Struve; men who had taken part in the rising of Vienna; Bohemians; Poles
from Posen and Galicia. All these people were crowded together between
the Hôtel de Bergues and the Post Office Café. The more sensible of
them began to suspect that this exile would not soon be over, talked of
America, and went away. It was quite the opposite with the majority, and
especially with the French, who, true to their temperament, were in daily
expectation of the death of Napoleon and the birth of a republic—some
looking for a republic both democratic and socialistic, others for one
that should be democratic and not at all socialistic.
A few days after my arrival, as I was walking in Les Paquis, I met an
elderly gentleman who looked like a Russian village priest, wearing a low
wide-brimmed hat and a _black_ white coat, and walking along with a sort
of priestly unction; beside him stepped a man of terrific proportions,
who looked as though he had been casually put together of immense blocks
of human flesh. F. Kapp,[36] the young writer, was with me.
‘Don’t you know them?’ he asked me.
‘No; but, if I’m not mistaken, it must be Lot or Noah out for a walk
with Adam, who has put on a coat several sizes too large instead of his
fig-leaves.’
‘They are Struve and Heinzen,’ he answered, laughing: ‘would you like to
make their acquaintance?’
‘Very much.’ He introduced me.
The conversation was trivial. Struve was on his way home, and invited us
to come in; we went with him. His small lodging was crowded with exiles
from Baden. A tall woman, from a distance very good-looking, with a mass
of luxuriant hair flowing loose in an original fashion, was sitting in
the midst of them; this was his wife, the celebrated Amalie Struve.
Struve’s face made a strange impression on me from the very first; it
expressed that moral rigidity which superstitious bigotry gives to
fanatics and dissenters. Looking at his strong, narrow forehead, at the
untroubled expression of his eyes, at his uncombed beard, his slightly
grizzled hair, and his whole figure, I could have fancied that this
was either a fanatical pastor of the army of Gustavus Adolphus who
had forgotten to die, or a Taborite[37] preaching repentance and the
sacrament under two aspects. There was a surly coarseness about the
appearance of Heinzen,[38] that Sobakevitch of the German revolution;
full-blooded and clumsy, he kept looking angrily from under his brows,
and was sparing of words. He wrote later on that it would be sufficient
to _massacre_ two millions of the inhabitants of the globe and the cause
of revolution would go swimmingly. Anybody who had once seen him would
not be surprised at his writing this.
I cannot refrain from relating an extremely funny incident which occurred
to me in connection with this cannibalistic project. There was, and
indeed still is, living in Geneva a Dr. R., one of the most good-natured
men in the world and one of the most constant and platonic lovers of the
revolution, the friend of all the refugees; he doctored them gratis as
well as giving them food and drink. However early one might arrive at the
Café de la Poste, the doctor would already be there and already reading
his third or fourth newspaper; he would beckon one mysteriously and
murmur in one’s ear: ‘I fancy it will be a hot day in Paris to-day.’ ‘Why
so?’ ‘I can’t tell you from whom I heard it, but it was a man in close
relations with Ledru-Rollin; he was here on his way through....’ ‘Why,
you were expecting something yesterday and the day before yesterday too,
weren’t you, Doctor?’ ‘Well, what of that? _Stadt Rom war nicht in einem
Tage gebaut._’
So it was to him as a friend of Heinzen’s that I appealed in the very
same café when the latter published his philanthropic programme. ‘Why,’
I said to him, ‘does your friend write such pernicious nonsense? The
reaction is making an outcry, and indeed it has every reason to: he’s a
regular Marat in a German setting! And how can one ask for two million
heads?’
R. was confused, but did not like to give his friend away. ‘Listen,’
he said at last: ‘you have lost sight of one fact, perhaps: Heinzen is
speaking of the whole human race; in that number there would be at least
_two hundred thousand Chinese_.’ ‘Oh, well, that’s a different matter;
why spare them?’ I answered; and for long afterwards I could never think
of this reassuring fact without bursting into laughter.
Two days after our meeting in Les Paquis, the _garçon_ of the Hôtel de
Bergues, where I was staying, ran up to my room and announced with an air
of importance: ‘General Struve and his adjutants.’ I imagined either
that some one had sent the _garçon_ up as a joke, or that he had made
some blunder; but the door opened and—
‘Mit bedächtigem Schritt
Gustav Struve tritt ...’
and with him four gentlemen: two were in the military uniform worn in
those days by German students, and had in addition red armlets adorned
with various emblems. Struve presented his suite to me, democratically
referring to them as ‘brothers in exile.’ I learnt with delight that
one of them, a young man of twenty, who looked like a _Bursch_ who had
recently emerged from the ‘_fuchs_’[39] stage, was now successfully
filling the post of minister of home affairs _per interim_.
Struve at once began instructing me in his theory of the seven scourges,
_die sieben Geissel_—Popes, priests, kings, soldiers, bankers, etc.—and
of the establishment of some new democratic and revolutionary religion.
I observed that if it depended upon us whether to establish a new
religion or not, it would be better not to establish any, but to leave
it to the will of God, as, from the very nature of the case, it was more
His concern. We argued. Struve made some remark about the _Weltseele_;
I observed that in spite of Schelling’s having so clearly defined the
world-soul by calling it _das Schwebende_, I found great difficulty in
grasping it.
He jumped up from his chair and, coming as close to me as possible, with
the words, ‘Excuse me, allow me,’ began tapping my head with his fingers,
and pressing it with them, as though my skull had been composed of the
keys of a concertina. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he commented, addressing his four
brothers in exile, ‘_Bürger Herzen hat kein, aber auch gar kein Organ
der Venerazion!_’ All were satisfied with the lack of the ‘bump of
reverence’ in me, and I was equally so.
Hereupon he informed me that he was a great phrenologist, and had not
only written a book on Halle’s system but had even selected his Amalie
from it, after first feeling her skull. He assured me that the bump of
the passions was completely absent in her, and that the back part of
the skull where they are located was almost flat. On these grounds,
sufficient for a divorce, he married her.
Struve was a very queer fish: he ate nothing but Lenten food, with
the addition of milk, drank no wine, and kept his Amalie on a similar
diet. This was not enough for him: he went every day to bathe with her
in the Arve, the water of which scarcely reaches the temperature of
eight degrees in the middle of summer, as it flows so swiftly from the
mountains that it has not time to get warm.
Later on it often happened that we talked of vegetarianism. I raised the
usual objections: the formation of the teeth, the great loss of energy in
the digestion of vegetable fibre, and the lower development of the brain
in herbivorous animals. He listened blandly without losing his temper,
but stuck to his opinion. In conclusion, apparently wishing to impress
me, he said: ‘Do you know that a man always nourished on vegetarian diet
so purifies his body as to be quite free from smell after death?’ ‘That’s
very pleasant,’ I replied; ‘but what advantage will that be to me? I
won’t be sniffing myself after death.’ Struve did not even smile, but
said to me with serene conviction: ‘You will speak very differently one
day!’ ‘When my bump of reverence develops,’ I added.
At the end of 1849 Struve sent me the calendar he had newly devised for
‘free’ Germany. The days, the months, everything had been translated into
an ancient German jargon difficult to understand; instead of saints’
days, every day was dedicated to the memory of two celebrities—for
instance, to Washington and Lafayette; but, on the other hand, every
tenth day was devoted to the memory of the enemies of mankind—for
instance, Nicholas and Metternich. The holidays were the days when
particularly great men such as Luther and Columbus were commemorated.
In this calendar Struve had the gallantry to replace Christmas on the
twenty-fifth of December by the festival of Amalie!
Meeting me one day in the street, he said among other things that we
ought to publish in Geneva a journal common to all the exiles, in
three languages, which would carry on the struggle against the ‘seven
scourges’ and maintain the ‘sacred fire’ of the peoples, now crushed by
the reaction. I answered that it would, of course, be a very good thing.
The publishing of papers was at that time an epidemic disease: every
two or three weeks new schemes were started, specimen copies appeared,
prospectuses were sent about, then two or three numbers would come
out—and would all disappear, leaving no trace. People who were incapable
of anything considered themselves competent to edit a paper, scraped
together a hundred francs or so, and spent them on the first and last
number. So I was not in the least surprised at Struve’s intention; but I
was very much surprised by his calling upon me at seven o’clock the next
morning. I thought some misfortune had happened, but Struve, after calmly
settling himself in a chair, brought a sheet of paper out of his pocket
and, preparing to read it, said: ‘_Bürger_, since we agreed yesterday as
to the necessity of publishing a journal, I have come to read you the
prospectus of it.’
When he had read it he informed me that he was going to Mazzini and
many others to invite them to meet at Heinzen’s for deliberation on the
subject. I, too, went to Heinzen’s: he was sitting with a ferocious air
at the table, holding a manuscript in one gigantic paw; the other he
held out to me, muttering thickly, ‘_Bürger, platz!_’
Some eight persons, French and German, were present. Some
ex-representative of the people in the French National Assembly was
making an estimate of the cost, and writing something in slanting lines.
When Mazzini arrived, Struve proposed reading the prospectus that had
been written by Heinzen. Heinzen cleared his throat and began reading it
in German, although the only language common to all was French.
Since they had not the faintest shadow of a new idea, the prospectus was
only the thousandth variation of those democratic lucubrations which are
the same sort of rhetorical exercise on revolutionary texts as church
sermons are on those of the Bible. Indirectly guarding himself from a
charge of socialism, Heinzen said that the democratic republic would of
itself solve the economic question to the general satisfaction. The man
who did not flinch at the demand for two million heads was afraid that
his organ would be considered communistic.
I urged some objection to this when the reading was finished, but from
his abrupt replies, from Struve’s intervention, and from the gestures of
the French deputy, I perceived that we had been invited to the council
to accept Heinzen’s and Struve’s prospectus, not to deliberate upon it;
it was in strict harmony with the theory held by Elpidifor Antiohovitch
Zurov, the military governor of Novgorod.[40]
Mazzini listened with a melancholy air, but agreed, and was almost the
first to subscribe for two or three shares. ‘_Si omnes consentiunt ego
non dissentio_,’ I thought _à la_ Schufterle in Schiller’s _Robbers_, and
I too subscribed.
But the subscribers appeared to be few in number; however often the
French deputy added and subtracted, the sum subscribed was insufficient.
‘Gentlemen,’ said Mazzini, ‘I have thought of a way of getting over the
difficulty: publish the journal at first only in French and German; as
for the Italian translation, I shall put all articles of _interest_ in my
_Italia del Popolo_—that will save you one-third of the expenditure.’
‘To be sure! what could be better!’ Mazzini’s proposition was accepted
by all. He grew a little more cheerful. I was awfully amused, and very
eager to show him that I had seen the trick he had played. I went up to
him and, watching for a moment when no one was near us, I said: ‘How
capitally you got out of the journal!’
‘Well,’ he observed, ‘an Italian part is really superfluous, you know.’
‘So are the two others!’ I added.
A smile glided over his face and vanished as quickly as though it had
never been there.
That was the second time of my seeing him. Mazzini, who knew of my stay
in Rome, wanted to make my acquaintance. One morning I went with L. Spini
to see him in Les Paquis.
When we went in Mazzini was sitting dejectedly at the table listening
to what was being said by a rather tall, graceful, and handsome young
man with fair hair. This was the daring companion-in-arms of Garibaldi,
the defender of Vascello, the leader of the Roman legionaries, Giacomo
Medici. Another young man with an expression of melancholy preoccupation
sat plunged in thought, paying no attention to what was going
forward—this was Mazzini’s colleague in the triumvirate, Marco Aurelio
Saffi.
Mazzini got up and, looking me straight in the face with his piercing
eyes, held out both hands in a friendly way. Even in Italy a head so
severely classical, so elegant in its gravity, is rarely to be met with.
At moments the expression of his face was harshly austere, but it quickly
grew soft and serene. An active, concentrated intelligence sparkled in
his melancholy eyes; there was an infinity of persistence and strength
of will in them and in the lines on his brow. All his features showed
traces of long years of anxiety, of sleepless nights, of past storms,
of powerful passions, or rather of one powerful passion, and also some
element of fanaticism—perhaps of asceticism.
Mazzini is very simple and amiable in his manner, but the habit of
rule is apparent, especially in argument; he can scarcely conceal his
annoyance at contradiction, and sometimes does not conceal it. He
knows his strength, and genuinely despises all the external trappings
of dictatorial authority. His popularity was at that time immense. In
his little room, with the everlasting cigar in his mouth, Mazzini at
Geneva, like the Pope in the old days at Avignon, held in his hands the
threads that like a spiritual telegraph system brought him into living
communication with the whole peninsula. He knew every heart-throb of his
party, felt the slightest tremor in it, promptly responded to everything,
and with amazing tirelessness gave general guidance to everything and
every one.
A fanatic and at the same time an organiser, he covered Italy with a
network of secret societies connected together and devoted to one object.
These societies branched off into arteries that defied detection, split
up, grew smaller and smaller, and vanished in the Apennines and the
Alps, in the regal palazzi of aristocrats and the dark alleys of Italian
towns into which no police can penetrate. Village priests, diligence
conductors, the _principe_ of Lombardy, smugglers, innkeepers, women,
bandits, all were made use of, all were links in the chain that was
bound to him and that was subject to him. From the times of Menotti[41]
and the brothers Bandiera,[42] enthusiastic youths, vigorous men of the
people, vigorous aristocrats, sometimes old men, come forward in constant
succession ... and follow the lead of Mazzini, consecrated by the elder
Buonarotti, the comrade and friend of Gracchus Babeuf,[43] and advance
to the unequal combat, disdainful of chains and the block, and sometimes
at the point of death adding to the shout of ‘_Viva l’Italia!_’ that of
‘_Viva Mazzini!_’
There has never been such a revolutionary organisation anywhere, and it
would hardly be possible anywhere but in Italy, unless in Spain. Now
it has lost its old unity and old strength, it is exhausted by the ten
years of martyrdom, it is worn out by loss of blood and the anguish of
suspense, its thought has grown older; and yet what outbursts, what
heroic examples, there are still: Pianori, Orsini, Pisacane!
I do not think that by the death of one man a country could be raised
from such degradation as France has fallen into now.[44]
I do not justify the plan on which Pisacane made his attempt;[45] it
seemed to me as ill-timed as the two previous risings in Milan: but
that is not the point. I only mean to speak here of the way in which it
was actually carried out. These men overwhelm one with the grandeur of
their tragic poetry, their terrible strength, and silence all blame and
criticism. I know no instance of greater heroism, among either the Greeks
or the Romans, among the martyrs of Christianity or of the Reformation!
A handful of vigorous men sail to the luckless shore of Naples, bearing
a challenge, an example, a living witness that all is not yet dead in
the people. The handsome young leader is the first to fall, with the
flag in his hand—and after him the rest fall, or worse still are caught
in the clutches of the Bourbon. The death of Pisacane and the death of
Orsini were like two fearful thunderclaps in a sultry night. Latin Europe
shuddered—the wild boar,[46] terrified, retreated to Caserta and hid
himself in his lair.
Pale with horror, the man who was driving France in her funeral hearse to
the graveyard trembled in his seat.
Pisacane’s attempt might well be described among the people in these
poetical lines:—[47]
...
Sceser con l’armi, e a noi non fecer guerra,
Ma s’inchinaron per bacciar la terra:
Ad uno ad uno li gardai nel viso:
Tutti aveano una lagrima e un sorriso,
Li disser ladri usciti dalle tane,
Ma non portaron via nemmeno un pane;
E li sentii mandare un solo grido:
Siam venuti a morir pel nostro lido—
Eran trecento, eran giovani e forti:
E sono morti!
Con gli occhi azzuri, e coi capelli d’oro
Un giovin camminava innanzi a loro.
Mi feci ardita, e, presol per la mano,
Gli chiesi: Dove vai, bel capitano?
Guardommi e mi rispose: O mia sorella,
Vado a morir per la mia patria bella!
Io mi sentii tremare tutto il core;
Nè potei dirgli: V’ aiuti ’l Signore;
Eran trecento, eran giovani e forti:
E sono morti!
...
(L. Mercantini, _La Spigolatrice di Sapri_.)
In 1849 Mazzini was a power, and it was not for nothing that the
governments feared him; his star was then in its full brilliance—but
it was already setting. It might have maintained itself for long years
yet, growing paler little by little; but after repeated failures and
desperate efforts, it began to decline rapidly.
Some of Mazzini’s friends allied themselves with Piedmont, others with
Napoleon. Mazzini went his revolutionary bypath, the party split up
into factions, the federal character of the Italians showed itself more
conspicuously.
Garibaldi himself, in spite of his own feelings, pronounced a severe
criticism on Mazzini, and, influenced by the enemies of the latter,
published a letter in which he indirectly blamed him.
* * * * *
This is what has turned Mazzini grey and made him old, this is what has
given a look of bitter intolerance, even exasperation, to his face, to
his glance. But such men do not give in, do not yield; the worse things
go with them, the higher they hold the flag. If Mazzini loses friends
and money, and barely escapes one day from chains and the gallows, on
the next he takes his stand more obstinately and resolutely than ever,
collects fresh money, seeks fresh friends, denies himself everything,
even sleep and food, ponders whole nights over new plans and every time
actually creates them, flings himself again into the conflict, and, again
beaten, sets to work once more with feverish ardour.
In this unyielding steadiness, in this faith which runs far ahead of
facts, in this inexhaustible activity which failure only incites and
provokes to fresh effort, there is something of grandeur, and, if you
like, something of madness. Often it is just that grain of madness which
is the essential condition of success. It acts on the people’s nerves and
carries them away. A great man acting directly is bound to be a great
maniac, especially with such enthusiastic people as the Italians, who,
moreover, preserve the religious conception of nationality. Only the
sequel can show whether Mazzini has lost his magnetic power over the
Italian masses through his ill-timed and unsuccessful attempts. It is not
reason, it is not logic that leads nations, but faith, love, and hatred.
The Italian refugees were not superior to the other refugees either in
talent or education. The greater number of them knew nothing, indeed,
but their own poets and their own history. But they were free from the
stereotyped, commonplace stamp of the rank and file of French democrats
(who argue, declaim, and feel exactly the same thing in herds, all going
into ecstasies at once), as well as from the uncouth, coarse, pothouse
character typical of the German refugees. The ordinary French democrat is
a bourgeois _in spe_; the German revolutionary, like the German _Bursch_,
is just the philistine over again in a different stage of development.
The Italians are more original, more individual.
The French are turned out ready-made by thousands on the same pattern.
The present government was not originally responsible for this
curtailment of individuality, but it has grasped the secret of it.
Absolutely in the French spirit, it has organised public education—that
is, all education, for there is no home education in France. In every
town of the empire the same thing is being taught on the same day, at the
same hour, from the same books. At all examinations the same questions
are asked, the same examples set; teachers who make any departure from
the text, or make any change in the syllabus, are promptly removed.
This soulless uniformity of education has only put into a compulsory
hereditary form what existed unformulated in men’s minds already.
It is the conventional democratic notion of equality applied to
intellectual development. There is nothing of the sort in Italy. The
Italian, a federalist and an artist by temperament, flies with horror
from every sort of barrack discipline, uniformity and geometrical
regularity. The Frenchman is innately a soldier; he loves discipline,
command, the uniform; he loves to inspire terror. The Italian, if it
comes to that, is rather a bandit than a soldier, and by that I do not
mean anything at all to his discredit. He prefers at the risk of capital
punishment to kill his enemy at his own impulse rather than to kill
by order; but it is without throwing any responsibility on others. He
prefers a meagre livelihood in the mountains, concealing smugglers, to
honoured service in the gendarmerie, discovering them.
The educated Italian, like us, is developed of his own accord by life,
by his passions, by the books that have happened to come into his hands,
and so attains to understanding of one sort or another. This is why there
are gaps, discords, both in his culture and in ours. Our culture, like
his, is in many respects inferior to the specialised finish of the French
and the theoretical learning of the Germans; but, on the other hand, the
colour is more brilliant both in us and in the Italians.
We even have the same defects as they. The Italian has the same tendency
to laziness as we: he does not think of work as an enjoyment; he does not
like the worry of it, the weariness of it, the lack of leisure. Industry
in Italy is almost as backward as among us; the Italians, like us, have
treasures lying under their feet and they do not dig them up. Manners in
Italy have not been influenced by the modern bourgeois tendency to the
same degree as in France and in England.
The history of the Italian petty-bourgeois is quite unlike the
development of the bourgeoisie in France and in England. The wealthy
bourgeois, the descendants _del popolo grasso_, have more than once
successfully rivalled the feudal aristocracy, have been rulers of cities,
and therefore they have been not further from but nearer to the plebeians
and _contadini_ than the rapidly enriched vulgarians of other lands. The
bourgeoisie in the French sense is represented in Italy by a special
class which has come into existence since the first revolution, and which
might be called, as in geology, the Piedmont strata. It is distinguished
in Italy as in the whole continent of Europe by being invariably
liberal in _many_ questions, though in _all_ afraid of the people and
of indiscreet talk about labour and wages, and, what is more, by always
giving way to the enemy above and never to their followers below.
The Italian exiles were drawn from every possible stratum of society.
There were all sorts to be found about Mazzini, from the old names
that occur in the chronicles of Guicciardini and Muratori to which the
people’s ear has been accustomed for centuries, such as Litti, Borromeo,
del Verme, Belgiojoso, Nani, Visconti, to some half-savage runaway Romeo
from the Abruzzi with his dark olive-coloured face and irrepressible
rashness! Here were clericals too, like Sirtori, the heroic priest who,
at the first firing in Venice, tucked up his cassock, and all through
the siege and defence of Marghera fought, gun in hand, in the foremost
ranks under a shower of bullets; here, too, were the brilliant staff
of Neapolitan officers, such as Pisacane, Cosenz, and the brothers
Mezzocappa. Here, too, were peasants from Trasteverina, faithful and
hard as steel in privation, stern, austere, dumb in calamity, modest
and indomitable like Pianori; and beside them, Tuscans, effeminate even
in pronunciation, but ready for the struggle too. Lastly, there were
Garibaldi, a figure taken straight out of Cornelius Nepos, with the
simplicity of a child and the daring of a lion; and Felice Orsini, whose
beautiful head has so lately rolled from the steps of the scaffold.
But at their names I must pause.
I made Garibaldi’s acquaintance in 1854 when he sailed from South America
as the captain of a ship and stayed in the West India Docks; I went to
see him accompanied by one of his comrades in the Roman war, and by
Orsini. Garibaldi, in a thick, light overcoat, with a bright-coloured
scarf around his neck and a cap on his head, struck me as more of
a genuine sailor than as the glorious leader of the Roman legion,
statuettes of whom in fantastic costume were being sold all over the
world. The good-natured simplicity of his manner, the absence of all
affectation, the cordiality with which he received us, all disposed me in
his favour. His crew consisted almost entirely of Italians; he was their
head and chief, and I am sure he was a strict one, but they all looked
happily and affectionately at him; they were proud of their captain.
Garibaldi gave us lunch in his cabin, regaling us with specially prepared
oysters from South America, dried fruits, port—when suddenly he leaped
up, saying, ‘Wait a bit! We will drink a different wine with you,’ and
ran up on deck; then a sailor brought in a bottle; Garibaldi looked at it
with a smile and filled our glasses.... One might have expected anything
from a man who had crossed the ocean, but it was nothing more nor less
than a bottle with the label of his native town Nice, which he had
brought with him to London from America.
Meanwhile, in his simple and unceremonious talk one was more and more
conscious of the presence of strength; without phrases and commonplaces,
the people’s leader, who had amazed all old soldiers by his valour, was
revealed, and it was easy to recognise in the ship-captain the wounded
lion who, fighting at every step, retreated after the taking of Rome
and, as he lost his followers, gathered together again at San Marino,
at Ravenna, in Lombardy, in the Tyrol, in Tessino, soldiers, peasants,
bandits, any one of any sort to strike back at the foe—and all this
beside the body of his wife, who had succumbed to the hardships and
privations of the march.
In 1854 his opinions were widely divergent from those of Mazzini,
although he was on good terms with him. He told him in my presence that
Piedmont ought not to be irritated, that the chief aim now was to shake
off the Austrian yoke, and he greatly doubted whether Italy was as ready
for union and a republic as Mazzini imagined. He was entirely opposed to
all projects and attempts at insurrection.
When he was about to sail for coal to Newcastle-on-Tyne and was from
there setting off to the Mediterranean, I told him how immensely I liked
his seafaring life, and that of all the exiles he was the one who had
chosen the better part.
‘And who forbids them doing the same?’ he replied with warmth. ‘This
was my cherished dream; you may laugh at it if you like, but I cherish
it still. I am known in America: I could have three or four such boats
under my command. I could take all the refugees on them: the sailors,
the lieutenants, the workmen, the cooks, might all be exiles. What can
they do now in Europe? Grow used to slavery and be false to themselves,
or go begging in England. Settling in America is worse still—that’s the
end, that’s the country “of forgetting the fatherland”: it is a new
fatherland, there are new interests, everything is different; men who
have settled in America fall out of the ranks. What is better than my
idea?’ (his face beamed): ‘what could be better than gathering together
round a few masts and floating over the ocean, hardening ourselves in the
rough life of sailors, in conflict with the elements and with danger?
A floating revolution, ready to land on any shore, independent and
unassailable!’
At that moment he seemed to me a hero of antiquity, a figure out of the
_Æneid_ ... who—had he lived in other ages—would have had his legend, his
‘Arma virumque cano!’
Orsini was a man of quite a different type. He showed to the full his
wild strength and terrific energy on the 14th of January 1858, in the
rue Lepelletier; they won him a great name in history, and brought
his head under the knife of the guillotine at thirty-six. I made the
acquaintance of Orsini at Nice in 1851; at times we were even very
intimate, then drifted apart, came together again, and in the end ‘a
grey cat ran between us’ in 1856, and, though we were reconciled, we
never felt the same to each other again. Such types as Orsini are only
developed in Italy; on the other hand, they appear there at all times,
in all ages: they are conspirators and artists, martyrs and adventurers,
patriots, _condottiere_, Teverina and Rienzi, anything you like, but
not vulgar, petty, commonplace, bourgeois. Such characters stand out
vividly in the chronicles of every Italian city. They amaze us by their
goodness, they amaze us by their wickedness, and they impress us by the
strength of their passions and by the strength of their will. The yeast
of restlessness is fermenting in them from early years—they must have
danger, they must have laurels, glory, fame; they are purely southern
natures, with hot blood in their veins, with passions almost beyond
our understanding, ready for any privation, for any sacrifice, from a
sort of thirst of enjoyment. Self-denial and devotion in them go hand
in hand with revengefulness and intolerance; they are simple in many
ways and cunning in many ways. Reckless as to the means they use, they
are reckless, too, of danger; descendants of the Roman patricians and
children in Christ of the Jesuit fathers, reared on classic memories
and the traditions of mediæval turmoils, a mass of ancient virtues and
catholic vices are fermenting in their souls. They set no value on their
own lives nor on the lives of others either; their terrific persistence
is on a level with Anglo-Saxon obstinacy. On the one hand there is a
naïve love of the external, an _amour propre_ bordering on vanity, a
voluptuous desire to have their fill of applause, of glory; on the other,
all the Roman heroism in face of privation and death.
People of this energy can only be checked by the guillotine. Scarcely do
they escape from the gendarmes of Sardinia before they begin hatching
plots in the very claws of the Austrian hawk; and the day after a
miraculous rescue from the dungeons of Mantua they begin, with hands
still bleeding from the leap to freedom, to sketch a plan of grenades,
then, face to face with danger, fling them under a carriage. In the hour
of failure they rise to titanic heights, and by their death deal a blow
more powerful than a bursting grenade....
As a young man Orsini had fallen into the hands of the secret police
of Pope Gregory XIV.; he was condemned for taking part in the movement
in Rome and sentenced to the galleys, and remained in prison till the
amnesty of Pius IX. From this life with smugglers, with bravoes, with
survivors of the Carbonari, he gained a temper of iron and an immense
knowledge of the national spirit. From these men, who were daily in
conflict with the society which oppressed them, he learnt the art of
self-control, the art of being silent not only before a judge but even
with his friends.
Men of Orsini’s stamp have a great influence on others: people are
attracted by their reserved character and at the same time are not at
home with them; one looks at them with the nervous pleasure, mingled with
uneasiness, with which one admires the graceful movements and velvety
gambols of a panther. They are children, but not good children. Not only
Dante’s hell is ‘paved’ with them, but all the later centuries nurtured
on his sinister poetry and the malignant wisdom of Machiavelli are full
of them. Mazzini, too, belongs to their family, in the way that Cosimo
Medici did; Orsini, in the way that Giovanni Procida did. One cannot even
exclude from them the great ‘adventurer of the sea,’ Columbus, nor the
still greater ‘bandit’ of later days, Napoleon Buonaparte.
Orsini was strikingly handsome; his whole appearance, elegant and
graceful, could not but attract attention; he was quiet, spoke little,
gesticulated less than his fellow-countrymen, and never raised his voice.
The long black beard, as he wore it in Italy, made him look like some
young Etruscan priest. His whole head was extraordinarily beautiful, only
a little marred by the irregular line of the nose.[48] And all the same
there was something in Orsini’s features, in his eyes, in his frequent
smile and his gentle voice, that checked intimacy. It was evident that
he was holding himself in, that he never fully let himself go and was
wonderfully self-controlled; it was evident that not one word fell from
those smiling lips without intention, that there were depths behind those
inwardly shining eyes, that, where we should hesitate and step back,
he would smile and without a change of face or tone of voice, would go
forward, remorseless and undoubting.
In the spring of 1852 Orsini was expecting very important news in
regard to his family affairs: he was worried at not getting a letter;
he told me so several times, and I knew in what anxiety he was living.
At dinner-time one day, when two or three outsiders were present, the
postman came into the entry: Orsini sent to ask if there was a letter for
him; it appeared that there was; he glanced at it, put it in his pocket,
and went on with the conversation. An hour and a half later, when we were
alone with him, Orsini said to us: ‘Well, thank God, at last I have
got the answer, and it is all very good news.’ We, knowing that he was
expecting a letter, had not guessed that this was it, with so unconcerned
an air had he opened it and then put it into his pocket. A man like that
is a born conspirator. And he was one, indeed, all his life.
And what was accomplished by him with his energy, by Garibaldi with
his daring, by Pianori with his revolver, by Pisacane and the other
martyrs whose blood is not yet dry? Italy will be delivered from the
Austrians, if at all, by Piedmont; as it was from the Bourbon of
Naples by fat Murat, both under the protection of a Buonaparte. Oh,
_divina Commedia_?—or simply _Commedia_! in the sense in which Pope
Chiaramonti[49] said it to Napoleon in Fontainebleau....
I became very intimate later on with the two men of whom I spoke when
describing my first meeting with Mazzini.
Medici was a Lombard. In his early youth, unhappy at the hopeless
position of Italy, he went to Spain, afterwards to Monte Video and to
Mexico; he served in the ranks of the Cristinos[50]—was, I believe, a
captain—and at last returned to his native place after the election
of Mastai Ferretti.[51] Italy was showing signs of life; Medici threw
himself into the movement. He performed miracles of valour at the head
of the Roman legionaries during the siege; but the French hordes entered
Rome all the same over the bodies of many noble victims—over the dead
body of Laviron, who, as though to atone for the crime of his country,
was fighting against it, and fell, struck down by a French bullet at the
gates of Rome.
One would imagine a tribune and warrior like Medici as a _condottiero_
bronzed by gunpowder and the tropical sun, with bold features, with
abrupt words and vigorous gesticulation. Pale, fair, with soft features,
eyes full of gentleness, and elegant manners, Medici was more like a man
who has spent his whole life in the society of ladies than a guerilla
chieftain and an agitator. A poet, a dreamer, at that time passionately
in love—everything about him was elegant and attractive.
The few weeks spent with him at Geneva did me a great deal of good. It
was the very blackest period for me, in 1852, six weeks after the burial
of my wife. I was utterly shattered: every signpost, every guiding clue
was lost; I do not know whether I was even then like one demented, as
Orsini said in his diary, but I was certainly in a bad way. Medici was
sorry for me; he did not say so, but late in the evening, at twelve
o’clock, he sometimes knocked at my door and came in to talk with me,
sitting on my bed. (Once when we were chatting like this we caught a
scorpion on the quilt.) He would sometimes knock, too, between six
and seven in the morning, saying, ‘It’s a lovely day, let us go to
Albaro’—that was where the Spanish beauty lived with whom he was in love.
He had no hope of a speedy change of circumstances; before him was a
prospect of years of exile, everything was growing worse and gloomier;
but there was something youthful, gay, sometimes naïve, about him. I have
noticed the same thing in almost all characters of that mould.
On the day of my departure several friends came to dine with me—Pisacane,
Mordini, and Cosenz.[52] ... ‘Why is it,’ I asked in jest, ‘that our
friend Medici, with his fair hair and northern aristocratic face, reminds
me more of a Vandyck cavalier than of an Italian?’ ‘That’s natural,’
Pisacane went on, still in jest: ‘Giacomo is a Lombard, he is descended
from some German Ritter.’ ‘Fratelli,’ said Medici, ‘there is not a single
drop of German blood in these veins!’ ‘It’s all very well for you to
talk; no, you must bring proofs, explain why you have the features of
a northerner,’ the former went on. ‘Oh, well,’ said Medici, ‘if I have
the features of a northerner, I suppose one of my ancestresses must have
forgotten herself with a Pole!’
Saffi had the purest and most candid nature that I have met in a man not
Russian. The men of Western Europe are often not very intelligent, and
so seem simple and slow-witted; but gifted natures are rarely simple.
In Germans one meets with the disgusting simplicity of immaturity in
practical life; among the English the simplicity that is due to slowness
of mind, to their always seeming half asleep and not being able to wake
up properly. On the other hand, the French are for ever taken up with
_arrière-pensées_, and absorbed in playing their part. Together with
the lack of simplicity they have another defect: they are all very poor
actors, and do not know how to conceal their little game. Affectation,
boasting, and a habit of fine phrases have so entered into their flesh
and blood that men have perished, have paid with their lives, for the
part they were playing, and yet their sacrifice has been all falsity.
These are terrible things, and many are indignant at their being put
into words, but it is still more terrible to deceive oneself. That is
why it is so comforting, so easy to breathe, when in this jostling
crowd of pretentious mediocrities and insufferable, affected, and
self-glorifying talents one meets a strong man free from the slightest
artificiality, free from pretentiousness, free from the vanity that jars
like a knife scratching on a plate. It is like coming out of a stuffy
theatre-corridor lighted by lamps, after an afternoon performance, into
the sunshine—breathing fresh, wholesome air and seeing real lime trees
after cardboard magnolias and sailcloth palm trees. Saffi is one of these
men. Mazzini, old Armellini, and he were the triumvirate in the time of
the Roman Republic. Saffi was in charge of the ministry of home affairs,
and, up to the end of the struggles with the French, was in a foremost
place, and that meant then under the bullets and cannon-shot.
He returned from exile and once more crossed the Apennines; he made this
sacrifice with no faith in it, from a sense of duty, from a feeling of
great devotion, that he might not wound some, that his absence might
not be a bad example. He spent some weeks in Bologna, where he would
have been shot within twenty-four hours if he had been caught; his task
was not simply to conceal himself—he had to act, to prepare for action,
whilst awaiting news from Milan. I never heard from him about the details
of this part of his life. But I did hear about it, a great deal about
it, from a man who might well be a good judge of deeds of daring, and I
heard it at a time when their personal relations were greatly strained.
Orsini had accompanied him across the Apennines; he used to tell me with
enthusiasm of the even, calm serenity, of the light, almost gay, mood of
Saffi at the time when they were going down the mountains on foot; with
the enemy almost within sight, Saffi would carelessly sing folk-songs and
repeat verses of Dante.... I imagine he would have gone to the stake with
the same verses and the same songs on his lips, with no thought at all of
his heroism.
In London, at Mazzini’s or at his friends’, Saffi was mostly silent; he
rarely took part in argument, sometimes grew eager for a minute and then
subsided again. They did not understand him, that was clear to me, _il
ne savait pas se faire valoir_ ... but I never heard from one of the
Italians who fell away from Mazzini one word, one slightest hint, against
Saffi.
One evening an argument sprang up between Mazzini and me about Leopardi.
There are poems of Leopardi with which I am passionately in sympathy.
Much of his work, like Byron’s, is spoilt by theorising, but sometimes a
line of his, like one of Byron’s, stabs, hurts, wrings the heart. There
are such words, such lines, in Lermontov; there are some in the iambics
of Barbier.[53]
Leopardi was the last book read, looked at before her death, by
Natalie....
To men of action, to agitators who move the masses, these bitter
hesitations, these heartrending doubts are incomprehensible. They see in
them nothing but profitless lamentation, nothing but feeble despondency.
Mazzini could not like Leopardi—that I knew beforehand; but he attacked
him with a sort of exasperation. I felt very much vexed; of course,
he was angry with him for being of no use for propaganda. In the same
way Frederick II. might have been angry with him ... I do not know ...
well, for instance, because he would be of no use as a soldier. It is
the revolting desire to restrict the free play of personality, to force
men into categories and ranks—as though political activity were like
serf-labour to which the bailiffs drive weak and strong, willing and
unwilling alike, without consulting their wishes. Mazzini was angry. Half
in jest and half in earnest, I said to him: ‘I believe you have a grudge
against poor Leopardi for not having taken part in the Roman revolution;
but you know he has an excellent reason to urge in his defence—you keep
forgetting it!’
‘What reason?’
‘Why, the fact that he died in 1836.’
Saffi could not resist defending the poet whom he loved even more than I
did and of course understood even more deeply: he analysed him with that
æsthetic, artistic feeling in which a man rather reveals aspects of his
spirit than ‘thinks.’
From this conversation, and from a few more like it, I saw that their
path was not really the same. The thought of one is seeking means,
concentrated on means alone—that is, in a sense running away from doubt;
it thirsts for nothing but practical activity, and that is in a way
indolence. To the other, objective truth is precious and his mind is
working; moreover, to an artistic nature art is precious in itself, apart
from its relation to reality.
Leaving Mazzini, we talked for a long time yet of Leopardi. His poems
were in my pocket; we went into a café and read several of my favourite
ones.
That was sufficient. When men are in sympathy, in the finer shades, they
need not speak of many things—it is clear that they are at one about
vivid colours and deep shadows.
Speaking of Medici, I mentioned a deeply tragic figure, Laviron. My
acquaintance with him was brief; he flashed by me and vanished in a cloud
of blood. Laviron was an engineer and an architect who had completed his
studies at the Polytechnique. I made his acquaintance in the very heyday
of the revolution, between the 24th of February and the 15th of May (he
was then a captain in the National Guard). The vigorous, stern where
necessary, and gay, good-natured Gallo-Frankish blood of the ’nineties
coursed unmixed in his veins. I imagine that the architect Kleber
was of the same stamp when he carried earth in a wheelbarrow with the
young actor Talma clearing a space for the festival of the Federation.
Laviron belonged to the small number of men who were not intoxicated by
the victory of the 24th of February and the proclamation of a republic.
He was at the barricades when they were fighting, and in the Hôtel de
Ville when those who had not fought were electing dictators: when a new
government came into the town-hall like a _deus ex machina_, he loudly
protested against its composition, and, together with a few vigorous men,
asked where it had come from, why it was the government? With perfect
consistency, on the 15th of May Laviron burst with the Parisian populace
into the bourgeois assembly and, with an unsheathed sword in his hand,
forced the president to admit the orators of the people to the tribune.
The cause was lost and Laviron was forced into hiding. He was judged and
condemned _par contumace_. The reaction was drunk with success; it felt
strong for combat and soon strong for conquest—then came the June days,
proscriptions, exiles, the _Blue_ terror. It was just at that period that
I was sitting one evening on the boulevard in front of Tortoni’s in a
crowd of all sorts of people, and, as is always the case in Paris—under
constitutional and unconstitutional monarchy, under the republic and
under the empire—spies were scattered about everywhere amongst them.
Suddenly—I could not believe my eyes—Laviron walked up to me. ‘How are
you?’ he said. ‘What madness is this?’ I answered in an undertone, and
taking him by the arm I walked away from Tortoni’s. ‘How can you expose
yourself like this, and especially just now?’
‘If only you knew how dreary it is to sit shut up in hiding! it’s enough
to drive one crazy.... I sat thinking and thinking, and then went out for
a walk.’
‘But why on the boulevard?’
‘That makes no difference. I am less known here than on the other side
of the Seine, and who would dream of my walking about by Tortoni’s? I am
going away, though....
‘Where?’
‘To Geneva. Everything is so dreary and sickening; we have terrible
calamities ahead of us. Everywhere there is change for the worse, and
pettiness is everywhere and in everything. Well, good-bye—good-bye; and
may our next meeting be a more cheerful one.’
In Geneva Laviron worked as an architect, and was building something when
suddenly war was declared ‘for the Pope’ against Rome. The French made
their treacherous attack on Cività Vecchia, and were approaching Rome.
Laviron threw down his calipers and galloped off to Rome. ‘You need an
engineer, an artilleryman, a soldier. I am a Frenchman. I am ashamed of
France, and go to fight against my countrymen,’ he said to the triumvirs,
and joined the ranks of the Romans as a sacrifice of atonement for his
country. With gloomy daring he headed the advance; when everything was
lost he still fought on, and fell at the gates of Rome, shot down by a
French bullet.
The French newspapers greeted his death with a shower of abuse, claiming
that it was the judgment of God on an infamous traitor to his country!...
When a man who has long been watching black curls and black eyes suddenly
turns to a fair-haired woman with light-coloured eyebrows, pale and
nervous, his eyes always receive a shock and cannot at once get over it.
The difference of which he has not been thinking, which he has forgotten,
produces an involuntary physical effect upon him.
Exactly the same thing happens when one turns quickly from the Italian
circles to the German.
Undoubtedly the Germans are more developed on the theoretical side
than any other people, but they have not gained much by it so far.
From Catholic fanaticism they have passed to the Protestant pietism of
transcendental philosophy and the romance of philology, and are now
gradually making the transition to exact science; the German ‘studies
diligently at all his stages,’ and his whole history is summed up in
that, and he will get marks for it on the Day of Judgment. The common
people of Germany, who have studied less, have suffered a great deal;
they bought the right to Protestantism by the Thirty Years’ War, the
right to an independent existence—that is, to a colourless existence
under the supervision of Russia—by the struggle with Napoleon. The
emancipation in 1814 and 1815 was the complete victory of the reaction;
and when, in place of Jerome Buonaparte, _der Landesvater_ appeared in
a powdered wig and an old-fashioned uniform long laid by, and announced
that next day was fixed, let us say, for the forty-fifth parade (the one
before, the forty-fourth, had taken place before the revolution), then
all the emancipated people felt as though they had suddenly lost touch
with the present and gone back to another age, and every one felt his
head to see if he had grown a pigtail with a ribbon on it. The people
accepted this with simple-hearted foolishness, and sang Körner’s songs.
Science and learning advanced. Greek tragedies were performed in Berlin,
there were dramatic triumphs for Goethe in Weimar.
The most radical men among the Germans remain philistines in their
private life. Bold as they are in logic, they feel no obligation to
be consistent in practice, and fall into glaring contradictions.
The German mind, in matters revolutionary as well as in everything
else, accepts the general idea in its unconditional—of course, that
is, unreal—significance, and is satisfied with working it out
intellectually, imagining that a thing is done when it is understood, and
that the fact as easily follows the thought as the meaning of the fact is
grasped by the consciousness.
The English and the French are full of prejudices, while a German is
free from them; but both French and English are more consistent in their
lives—the rule they follow is perhaps absurd, but it is what they have
accepted. The German accepts nothing except reason and logic, but he is
ruled in many things by _other considerations_—this is selling the soul
for bribes.
The Frenchman is not morally free: though rich in initiative in practical
life, he is poor in abstract thought. He thinks in received conceptions,
in accepted forms; he gives a fashionable cut to commonplace ideas, and
is satisfied with them. It is hard for him to take in anything new,
although he does rush at it. The Frenchman oppresses his family and
believes it is his duty to do so, just as he believes in the ‘Legion
of Honour’ and the authority of the law-courts. The German believes in
nothing, but takes advantage of public prejudices where it suits him. He
is accustomed to trivial comfort, to _Wohlbehagen_, to peace and quiet,
and, as he goes from his study to the _Prunkzimmer_ or his bedroom,
sacrifices his free thought to his dressing-gown, to his peace and
quiet, and to his kitchen. The German is a great Sybarite, though this
characteristic is not noticed in him, because his poor and narrow luxury
and petty mode of life are not very much to look at; but the Eskimo who
is ready to sacrifice everything for fish-fat is as much an epicurean
as Lucullus. Moreover, the German, lymphatic by temperament, soon grows
heavy and sends down a thousand roots into his familiar mode of life;
anything that might disturb him in his habits terrifies his philistine
temper.
All the German revolutionaries are cosmopolitans, _sie haben überwunden
den Standpunkt der Nationalität_, and are filled with the most touchy,
most obstinate patriotism. They are ready to accept an all-world
republic, to abolish the frontiers between states, but Trieste and Danzig
must belong to Germany. The Vienna students were not above setting
off for Lombardy under the command of Radetsky; they even, under the
leadership of some professor, took a cannon, which they presented to
Innsbrück. With this conceited and martial patriotism, Germany has,
from the time of the first revolution and up to this day, looked with
horror to the right and with horror to the left. On this side, France
with standards unfurled is crossing the Rhine; on that side, Russia is
crossing the Niemen, and the people numbering twenty-five millions finds
itself utterly forlorn and deserted, is scolding with terror, full of
hatred from terror, and to comfort itself proving theoretically from
authentic sources that the existence of France is no longer existence,
while the existence of Russia is not yet existence.
The ‘council of war’ assembled in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfort,
and consisting of various worthy doctors, theologians, chemists,
philologists, and professors, _sehr ausgezeichneten in ihrem Fache_,
applauded the Austrian soldiers in Lombardy and oppressed the Poles
in Posen. The very question of Schleswig-Holstein (_stammverwandt!_)
was only a subject of interest to them from the point of view of
‘_Teutschtum_.’ The first free word, uttered after centuries of silence
by the representatives of emancipated Germany, was in opposition to weak
and depressed nationalities. This incapacity for freedom, these awkwardly
revealed inclinations to retain what had been unjustly acquired, provoke
irony: one forgives insolent pretensions only when accompanied by
vigorous actions, and those were absent.
The revolution of 1848 had everywhere the character of hastiness and
precipitate action, but there was scarcely anything absurd about it in
France and in Italy; in Germany, however, everywhere except in Vienna,
it had a farcical character, incomparably more comic than the humour of
Goethe’s wretched farce, _Der Bürgergeneral_.
There was not a town, not a spot in Germany where at the time of the
rising there was not an attempt at a ‘committee of public safety’ with
all its principal characters: with a frigid youth as Saint-Just, with
gloomy terrorists, and a military genius representing Carnot. I knew two
or three Robespierres personally: they always put on clean shirts, washed
their hands, and had clean nails. On the other hand, there were also
dishevelled Collots d’Herbois; and if there happened to be a man in the
club fonder of beer than the rest and more openly given to dangling after
_Stubermädchen_—he was the Danton, _eine schweigende Natur_!
French weaknesses and defects are partly dissipated by their light and
fugitive character. In the German the same defects assume a more solid
and fundamental character, and hence are more striking. One must see for
oneself these German efforts to play _so einen burschikosen Kamin de
Paris_ in politics in order to do them justice. I was always reminded
of the playfulness of a cow when that excellent and respectable animal,
adorned with all the domestic virtues, takes to frisking and galloping in
the meadow, and with a serious face kicks up her two hind legs or gallops
sideways chasing her own tail.
After the Dresden affair, I met in Geneva one of the agitators who had
taken part in it, and began at once questioning him about Bakunin. He
lauded him up to the skies, and began describing how he had himself
commanded a barricade under his instructions. Inflamed by his own
narrative he went on: ‘A revolution is a thunderstorm; in it one must
listen neither to the dictates of the heart nor to considerations of
ordinary justice.... One must oneself have taken part in such events
fully to understand the Montagne of 1794. Only imagine: we suddenly
observe a vague movement in the royalist party, false reports were
intentionally circulated, suspicious-looking men appeared. I reflected
and reflected, and at last resolved to _terrorise_ my street. “_Männer!_”
I said to my company, “under pain of court-martial, which may at once
sentence you to death in case of disobedience, I command you to seize
every one, regardless of sex, age, or calling, who attempts to cross the
barricade, and to bring him under close guard to me.” This was kept up
for more than twenty-four hours. If the _Bürger_ who was brought to me
was a good patriot, I let him go; but if he was a suspicious character,
then I gave the signal to the guard.’
‘And,’ I said with horror, ‘and they?’
‘And they accompanied him home,’ the terrorist replied with pride and
satisfaction.
I will add another anecdote illustrating the character of the German
champions of freedom.
The youth whom I mentioned, when describing my visit to Gustav Struve, as
filling the post of minister of home affairs wrote me a note a few days
later in which he asked me to find him work of some sort. I suggested
that he should copy for the press the manuscript of my _Vom anderen
Ufer_ from the handwriting of Kapp, to whom I had dictated it in German
from the Russian original. The young man accepted the proposal. A few
days later he told me that he was so uncomfortably lodged with several
students that he had neither space nor quiet to work, and asked leave to
copy it in Kapp’s room. Even there the work made little progress. The
minister _per interim_ arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, lay on
the sofa, smoked cigars, drank beer ... and went off in the evenings to
gatherings and consultations at Struve’s. Kapp, a man of the greatest
delicacy, was ashamed of him. A week or more passed in this way. Kapp
and I said nothing, but the ex-minister broke the silence: he wrote me a
note asking me for _a hundred francs in advance_ for the work. I wrote
him that he was working so slowly that I could not give him such a sum in
advance, but that since he was in great need of money I was sending him
twenty francs, although he had not yet done ten francs’ worth of copying.
In the evening the minister appeared at the gathering at Struve’s and
reported on my anti-civic action and my misuse of my fortune. The
worthy minister considered that socialism consisted not in a social
organisation, but in a senseless partition of senselessly acquired
property!
In spite of the amazing chaos prevailing in Struve’s brains, he did,
being an honest man, consider that I was not altogether to blame, and
that it might be better for the _Bürger und Bruder_ to copy more and ask
less money in advance. He persuaded him not to make a great outcry over
the story.
‘Well, then, I shall send him back the money—_mit Verachtung_,’ said the
minister.
‘What nonsense!’ cried a student. ‘If the _Bruder und Bürger_ does not
care to take the money, I suggest that we spend it on beer and send out
for some at once to drink to the perdition _der Besitzenden_.’
‘Do you agree?’
‘Yes, yes, we all agree—bravo!’
‘We will drink,’ cried the orator, ‘and pledge ourselves not to bow to
the Russian aristocrat who has insulted the _Bruder_.’
‘Yes, yes, we must not bow to him.’
And so they drank the beer and gave up bowing to me.
All these absurd failings, together with the peculiar _Plumpheit_ of
the Germans, jar upon the southern nature of the Italians and excite a
physical, racial hatred in them. The worst of it is that the good side
of the Germans, that is, their philosophical culture, is either of no
interest to the Italian or beyond his ken; while the vulgar, ponderous
side is always conspicuous. The Italian often leads the most frivolous
and idle life, but with a certain artistic, rhythmic grace about it, and
that is why he can least put up with the bear-like joking and clumsy
familiarity of the jovial German.
The Anglo-Germanic race is far coarser than the Franco-Roman. There is
no help for that: it is its physical characteristic; it is absurd to
be angry with it. The time has come to accept once for all that the
different races of mankind, like different species of animals, have their
different characteristics and are not to blame for them. No one is angry
with the bull for not having the beauty of the horse or the swiftness of
the stag; no one reproaches the horse because its flesh is not so good to
eat as that of the ox: all that we can ask of them in the name of animal
brotherhood is to graze peaceably in the same field without kicking
or goring each other. In nature, everything attains to whatever it is
capable of attaining to, is formed as chance determines, and so takes
its generic _pli_: training goes some distance, corrects one thing and
develops another; but to expect beef-steaks from horses, or horses’ paces
from bulls, is nevertheless absurd.
To grasp concretely the difference between the two opposite traditions
of the European races, one has but to glance at the street-boys in Paris
and in London; I take them as an example because they are absolutely
spontaneous in their rudeness.
Look how the Parisian _gamins_ jeer at any queer Englishman, and how the
London street-boys mock at a Frenchman; in this little instance the two
opposite types of two European races are sharply defined. The Parisian
_gamin_ is insolent and persistent, he can be insufferable: but, in the
first place, he is witty, his mischief is limited to jests, and he is as
amusing as he is annoying; and, in the second, there are words at which
he blushes and at once desists, there are words which he never uses; it
is difficult to stop him by roughness, and if the victim lifts his stick
I would not answer for the consequences. It must be noted, too, that the
French boys need something to attract their attention: a red waistcoat
with blue stripes, a brick-coloured coat, a strange-looking muffler, a
flunkey carrying a parrot or a dog, things only done by Englishmen and,
take note, only outside England. To be simply a foreigner is not enough
to make them mock and run after you.
The wit of the London street-boys is simpler. It begins with guffawing at
the sight of a foreigner,[54] if only he has a moustache, a beard, or a
wide-brimmed hat; then they shout some twenty times: ‘_French pig! French
dog!_’ If the foreigner turns to them with some reply, the neighings and
bleatings are redoubled; if he walks away, the boys run after him—then
all that is left is the _ultima ratio_ of lifting a stick, and sometimes
bringing it down on one of them. After that the boys run away full speed,
dropping oaths and sometimes throwing mud or a stone from a distance.
In France, a grown-up workman, shopman, or woman selling wares in the
street never takes part with the _gamins_ in the pranks they play upon
foreigners; in London, all the dirty women, all the grown-up shopmen
grunt like pigs and abet the boys.
In France there is one shield which at once checks the most persistent
boy—that is, poverty. In the country that knows no word more insulting
than the word _beggar_, the foreigner is the more persecuted the poorer
and more defenceless he is. One Italian refugee, who had once been an
officer in the Austrian cavalry and had left his country after the war,
completely destitute, when winter came, wore his greatcoat of a military
officer. This excited such a sensation in the market-place through which
he had to pass every day, that the shouts of ‘Who’s your tailor?’ roars
of laughter, and finally tugging at his collar, forced the Italian at
last to give up his greatcoat and, shivering to the marrow of his bones,
to go about in his jacket.
This coarseness in street mockery, this lack of delicacy and tact in the
common people, helps to explain how it is that women are nowhere beaten
so often and so badly as in England,[55] how it is that an English father
is ready to cast dishonour on his own daughter and a husband on his wife
by taking legal proceedings against them.
The rude manners of the English streets are a great offence at first to
the French and the Italians. The German, on the other hand, receives them
with laughter and answers with similar rudeness; an interchange of abuse
is kept up, end he is very well pleased with it. They both take it as a
civility, a pleasant joke. ‘Bloody dog!’ the proud Briton shouts at him,
grunting like a pig. ‘Beastly John Bull!’ answers the German, and each
goes on his way.
This behaviour is not confined to the streets: one has but to look at
the polemics of Marx, Heinzen, Ruge, _et consorts_, which were unceasing
from 1849, have never ceased, and are still kept up on the other side of
the Atlantic Ocean. We are unaccustomed to see in print such expressions,
such accusations: nothing is spared, no respect is paid to personal
honour, to the privacy of the family or the inviolability of a secret.
Among the English, coarseness disappears as we rise higher in the
scale of intelligence or aristocratic breeding; among the Germans it
never disappears. The greatest poets of Germany (with the exception of
Schiller) fall into the most uncouth vulgarity.
One of the reasons of the _mauvais ton_ of Germans is that breeding in
our sense of the word does not exist in Germany at all. Germans are
taught, and taught a great deal, but they are not educated at all,
even in the aristocracy, in which the manners of the barracks, of the
_Junker_, are predominant. They are completely lacking in the æsthetic
sense in daily life. The French have lost it, just as they have lost the
elegance of their language; the Frenchman of to-day rarely knows how to
write a letter free from legal or commercial expressions—the counter and
the barrack-room have distorted their manners.
To conclude this comparison, I will describe an incident in which I saw
with my own eyes and face to face the gulf which separates the Italians
from the _Tedeschi_, and which there will be no bridging for years to
come by any number of amnesties or manifestoes of the brotherhood of
nations.
I was travelling with Tessier du Mothe, in 1852, from Genoa to Lugano. We
reached Arona by night, and, inquiring when the steamer started, learned
that it was at eight o’clock next morning, and went to bed. At half-past
seven the porter came to take our trunks, and by the time we reached the
landing-stage they were already on deck. But in spite of that we looked
at each other with some perplexity instead of going on board.
A huge white flag with the two-headed eagle on it was fluttering over
the hissing and swaying steamer, and on the stern was painted the name,
_Fürst Radetsky_. We had forgotten to ask overnight what steamer was
going, whether an Austrian or a Sardinian. Tessier had at the Versailles
trial been condemned _in contumaciam_ to deportation. Though Austria had
nothing to do with that, yet surely it would seize the opportunity to
keep him in prison for six months, at any rate, while making inquiries.
The example of Bakunin showed what they were capable of doing with me.
By agreement with Piedmont, the Austrians had not the right to demand
passports from those who without landing on the Lombard shore went to
Mogadino, which belongs to Switzerland; but I imagine they would not,
if opportunity arose, disdain so simple a means of seizing Mazzini or
Kossuth.
‘Well,’ said Tessier, ‘to go back is absurd!’
‘Well, let’s go ahead, then!’ and we went on deck.
Just before starting, the passengers were surrounded by a detachment
of soldiers armed with guns—what for? I do not know. Two small cannon,
fastened in a special way, stood on the steamer. When the steamer set
off the soldiers were dismissed. On the cabin walls hung regulations:
among them was the statement that those passengers who were not going to
Lombardy need not show their passports; but it was added that if any one
of such persons were guilty of any offence against the K.K. (Kaiserlich
Königlichen) police regulations he must be judged according to the laws
of Austria. _Or donc_, wearing a Calabrian hat or a tricolor cockade was
a crime against Austria. Only then I fully appreciated what clutches
we were caught in. However, I am far from regretting my trip; nothing
special happened during our journey, but I gathered a rich store of
observations.
Several Italians were sitting on deck; they were smoking cigars in gloomy
silence, looking with concealed hatred at the fair-haired officers
dressed in white jackets who were bustling about on all sides without the
slightest necessity. I must observe that among them were lads of twenty,
and they were mostly young men; I can hear now the jarring, guttural,
barrack-room voices, the insolent laughter that was like coughing,
besides the loathsome Austrian accent in speaking German. I repeat that
there was nothing dreadful about it, but I felt that for their manner of
standing and turning their backs in our very faces, giving themselves
airs and showing off, ‘We are the victors—our side has won,’ they ought
to have been flung into the water; and even more, I felt that I should
have been delighted to have seen it done, and would eagerly have helped.
Any one who had taken the trouble to look for five minutes at these two
groups of men could not fail to understand that there can be no talk
of reconciliation, that in the very blood of these people there lies
a hatred for each other which it will take centuries to dissipate, to
soften and to reduce to an inoffensive racial difference. After midday
some of the passengers went down to the cabin, others asked to have lunch
on deck. Here the racial difference was still more strikingly apparent.
I looked at them with amazement—not a single gesture was the same. The
Italians ate little, with the innate natural grace with which they do
everything. The officers tore off pieces, chewed them loudly, threw down
the bones, shoved their plates; some, bending right down to the table,
with peculiar agility and extraordinary rapidity splashed the soup from
the spoon into their mouths; others ate butter _from a knife_—without
bread or salt. I looked at these performers and, glancing at an Italian,
smiled—he understood me at once, and, responding with a sympathetic
smile, betrayed his intense disgust. Another observation: while the
Italians asked with a smile and gentle manner for a plate or for wine,
every time thanking the waiter with a nod or a glance, the Austrians
treated the attendants with revolting rudeness, just as retired Russian
cornets and lieutenants treat their serfs in the presence of strangers.
By way of a finishing touch, a lanky young officer with pale yellowish
hair called up a soldier, a man of fifty, who looked like a Pole or a
Croat, and began abusing him for some negligence: The old man stood at
attention and, when the officer had finished, tried to say something;
but he had scarcely brought out ‘Your honour,’ when ‘Hold your tongue
and be off!’ the pale yellow youth shouted at him in a husky voice.
Then, turning to his comrades as though nothing had happened, he fell to
drinking beer again. With what object was all this done before us? And
was it not all done expressly for our benefit?
When we landed at Mogadino our long-suffering hearts could be restrained
no longer, and, turning towards the steamer, which had not moved away,
we shouted, ‘_Viva la Republica!_’—while one Italian, shaking his head,
repeated, ‘_E brutissimi, brutissimi!_’
Is it not premature to talk so rashly of the solidarity and brotherhood
of the nations, and will not any artificial covering up of their
hostility be a mere hypocritical truce? I believe that national
peculiarities will lose their offensive character just so far as they
have lost it in cultivated society; but for such breeding to permeate the
depths of the masses needs time. When I look at Folkestone and Boulogne,
at Dover and Calais, then I feel full of dread and want to say—many
centuries.