Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find the Risorgimento
a discordant obsession; flaunting itself as it does in brand new statues
and monuments whose incongruity of colour or form destroys the mellow
unity of old Cathedral-Piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has
managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or unobtrusive
tablets, and Venice with her abundance of _Campi_ has stowed it out of
sight, though Victor Emmanuel ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge
of Sighs, and “three youths who died for their country” intrude among
the tombs of the Doges. The essence of Pisa is preserved by its
isolation from life, leaving Mazzini to dominate the city of his death.
But the majority of the old towns are devastated by the new national
heroes—admirable and vigorous as the sculpture sometimes is—even as
the old historic landmarks are obliterated by the new street names. And
in addition to the pervasive quartette—Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor
Emmanuel, Mazzini—local heroes aggravate the ruin of antiquity. Daniele
Manin thrones in Venice over a winged lion sprawling beneath a triton;
Ricasoli, “the iron Baron,” rules in Tuscany; Pavia is sacred to the
Cairoli; Minghetti runs through the Romagna; Crispi through the South;
Genoa devotes a street, a square, and a bronze statue to Bixio, the
Boanerges of the epic; Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino
Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand; even
Rubattino—patriot in his own despite—has his statue in Genoa harbour,
on the false ground that he put his shipping line at Garibaldi’s
disposal. ’Tis a very shower of stones, falling on the just and the
unjust alike. And sometimes—as at Asti—all the Heroes are United
beneath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions.
And even the ubiquitous heroes have peculiar glory in their peculiar
haunts. Cavour is gigantic at Ancona (probably because the town was
freed by Piedmontese troops); he stands in the castle of Verona,
over-brooded by snow mountains: at Turin, his birthplace, Fame wildly
clasps him to her breast in a mammoth monument, crying, “Audace,
prudente, libero Italia.”
A Vanity Fair without a hero I have never chanced on. Little Chiavari
has its grandiose angel-strewn monument to Victor Emmanuel, whom Parma
likewise exhibits flourishing his sword; Pesaro breaks out in tablets to
those who died fighting “the hirelings of the Theocracy”; Rimini has a
Piazza Cavour; priest-ridden Vicenza shelters a statue of Mazzini;
Assisi itself, waking from its saintly slumber, consecrates a Piazzetta
to Garibaldi, and a street to the Twentieth of September on which
Italian troops broke into Rome!
Ah, Garibaldi, Garibaldi, how thou didst weigh on my wanderings! From
Mantua to Ferrara, from Spoleto to Perugia, Garibaldi, always Garibaldi.
I fled to dead Ravenna, lo! thou didst tower in the very Piazza of
Byron; to Parma, and rugged, imposing, in thy legendary cap, leaning on
thy sword, thou didst obsess the Piazza Garibaldi; to Rome itself, and
twenty feet high, thou impendedst in bronze, with battle pieces and
allegories around thee; I retreated to the extremest point of the
Peninsula, and found myself in the Corso Garibaldi of Reggio; I crossed
to Sicily, only to stumble against thy great horse in Palermo and the
monument to thy valour in Calatafimi. For of the statesman, the monarch,
the prophet and the soldier who combined to redeem Italy, it is
naturally the soldier that is stamped most vividly on the popular
imagination, the noble freelance whom the mob deemed divine even before
his death, whose memory the people has rescued from the anti-climax of
his end, selecting away his follies and mistakes and idealising his
virtues, under the artistic law of mythopoiesis, till, shaped and
perfected for eternal service, the national hero shines immaculate in
his sacred niche.
And yet, as the streets show, even the popular imagination has realised
that the soldier would not have sufficed. Thrice blessed, indeed, was
Italy to possess Cavour and Mazzini at the same hour as Garibaldi. It is
a fallacy to suppose that the hour always finds the man, or the man the
hour, or that “il n’y a pas d’homme indispensable.” Many an hour passes
away without its man, as many a man without his hour. Great men perish,
wasted, because there are no forces for them to synthetise: great forces
remain inarticulate, unorganised and ineffective, because they have
found no leader to be their conduit. All the more marvellous that Italy
should have produced simultaneously three indispensable men, Mazzini,
Cavour, and Garibaldi, each of whom had something of the other two, yet
something unique of his own. None of the three quite understood the
others, and Mazzini, who was much like Ibsen’s Brand, was even more
intolerant than Garibaldi of the Machiavellian policies of Cavour, and
had to be swept aside as a visionary. For one heroic, impossible moment,
indeed, the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and
idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human history. But
with the disappearance of the Republic, Mazzini might have disappeared
too, for all his influence upon the political Risorgimento; did indeed
practically disappear by acquiescing in the battle-flag of Monarchy.
Garibaldi and Cavour sufficed to create the combination of Force and
Fraud by which political history is made. For though, if any sword might
ever bear the words I saw on a sword graven by Donatello—“Valore e
Giustitia”—that sword was Garibaldi’s, and if ever passion was
patriotic it was Cavour’s, nevertheless the liberation of Italy did not
escape being achieved by the usual factors of Force and Fraud.