Chapter 37 (1)

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.