And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets,
pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records
of _plébiscites_ anent annexations, _loggias_ whence Garibaldi orated;
in addition to all the Piazze Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the
Corsi Cavour and Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September
and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the Risorgimento
from which no tiniest town is immune. To see one is practically to see
all. With the same piety with which their ancestors collected the relics
of the saints, the modern Italians have collected the relics of their
heroes and the war—swords, sticks, photographs, crude paintings and
engravings, old hats, letters, tricolour scarves, medals, pictures,
patriotic money, helmets, epaulettes, broken bombs, cannon-balls,
cartoons, caricatures, faded wreaths, autographs, sculptures, crosses,
proclamations, prayer-books, pictures of steamers conveying insurgents!
And Garibaldi! What town has not some shred of the “Genius of Liberty,”
as the tablet in the old castle of Ferrara styles him—his flask, his
sword, his shirt, his gun, his letters, his telegrams! Peculiarly sacred
is the red shirt which he wore at Aspromonte, though it recalls the
ironic fact that when the charmed, invincible hero was at last wounded
and captured, it was by soldiers of the king he had created and of the
Italy whose triumph he was seeking to consummate. Something Miltonic
seems to emanate from that red shirt:
“That flaming shirt which Garibaldi wore
At Aspromonte.”
But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of the
saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in reality, with their
record of sacrifice and patriotism in one of the most wonderful chapters
of history, infinitely touching as is every yellow letter or worn glove,
when imagination has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly
depressing to the last degree—a warning to the Realist, and a proof
that Art in expressing the soul of a phenomenon is infinitely truer in
its beauty than Nature unselected and unadorned. The wooden-legged
curator of Bologna, who lost his leg at Solferino, is a mere stumping
old bore; the little photograph of twenty-four Garibaldians minus arms
or with crutches is simply discomforting. Even the story of the modern
mother of the Gracchi, Adelaide Cairoli, who gave four sons to her
country, exhales but tepidly from the picture at Pavia of a middle-aged
lady in a bonnet surrounded by young soldiers in variegated costumes.
“Leonessa d’Italia,” cried Carducci to Brescia, and the one word of the
poet wipes out all the crude photographs and grandiose inscriptions by
which that seemingly prosaic town asserts its heroism; one ceases even
to smile at the tablet at the foot of the castle hill, veiling a defeat
in the guise of ferocious Austrian charges, “frequently” repulsed. From
a mock passport of Radetsky in the Vicenza Museum I got a more vivid
sense of the racial hatred than from all the relics and tablets: “Birth:
Bastard of the seven deadly sins. Age: Eighty-two, sixty-five of which
have been passed in robbing Austria of the money she stole. Eyes: Of a
bird of prey. Nose: Of a Jew. Mouth: Open for the swallowing of divorce!
Beard: Nothing. Hair: Enough. Visage: Not human. Occupation: Projector
of Conquests. On the field of battle always at the tail; in the
destruction of unarmed cities always at the head. Country: No country
will own him. Signature: The last five days of his stay in Milan have
paralysed him and he cannot sign. _Visé_: Good for nowhere.” And my most
lively realisation of the transformation wrought in Europe since 1820
came, not from a Risorgimento museum nor from an official history, but
from a black-and-white engraving of Raphael’s _Sposalizio_ “dedicated
humbly” by Giuseppe Longhi in 1820 “to the Imperial Royal Apostolical
Majesty of Francesco I, Emperor of Austria, King of Jerusalem, Hungary,
Bohemia, Lombardy, Venice, Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Galicia, Laodomiria,
Illyria, &c. &c.”