Chapter XIX: The Man (1)

Poetic temperament--Defects as a thinker--Greatness as a
moral teacher--Strength and weakness as a politician--The
man.

Carlyle said that Mazzini was "by nature a little lyrical poet." The implication was contemptuous, but it had a bottom of truth. Mazzini, indeed, save for his early aspirations to the drama, never dreamed of being a poet. His conception of the poet's function was so high, the qualities he demanded of him so exacting, that, if he ever felt the call, he put it away, no doubt, as something to which he could not reach. It is doubtful even whether he wrote more than one poem when a youth. He aspired only to be critic, to do something to prepare the way for the poet of the future. But he had qualities, that would have made of him a poet of no mean order. There are many passages in his writings, which show his deep communion with nature. When he writes of "the vast ocean, dashing, like a wave of eternal poetry, against the barren rocks of Brittany," or describes a sunrise from the Alps,--"the first ray of light trembling on the horizon, vague and pale, like a timid, uncertain hope; then the long line of fire cutting the blue heaven, firm and decided as a promise,"--truly the consecration and the poet's dream are his. His critical essays prove with what spiritual insight he would have touched the poetry of man and society. We have seen how marvellous for an outsider was his presentiment of the future of music. And his whole intellectual make, alike in strength and weakness, is that of the artist,--of the artist, that is, as he conceived him, God's messenger to the heart of man. He had little power of scientific thought, of accurate reasoning or careful arrangement and analysis of facts. It led to a curious misconception of scientific method. "Science," he says,--"the true, great, fruitful science,--is as much intuition as experiment." He generalises with a hazardous confidence. Sometimes he uses words, that are no more than words, to push difficulties into a corner and stand in front of them. In spite of his allegiance to "tradition," he generally prefers deductive to inductive reasoning. "Principles prevail over facts," as he says; but he often does not see, in spite of his own cautions, how, without a supreme respect for facts, a principle may hang not on the eternal truths, but on the fancy of a solitary brain. His own scientific studies were small; save for some acquaintance with astronomy and geography,--the former to feed his sense of the infinite, the latter for its relationship to nationality,--he seems to have given no attention to any branch of science. He accepted without question the Genesis story of the creation of man. At a time when Darwinism was bringing a sword into the intellectual world, he lived apparently uninterested and untouched by it.

The same defect of method appears in his other studies. Keen as was his interest in social questions, he evidently had no grasp of economic science; beyond Adam Smith, it is doubtful whether he read any of the great economists, and at a later date he entirely failed to understand the economic side of Karl Marx. His theories of history, again, so subordinate everything to his desire to make it didactic, that he regarded research and accuracy as comparatively unimportant. He thought,--rash man,--that facts had already been accumulated in sufficient abundance and certainty. Greatly indeed he conceived the historian's ultimate function--to discover the laws of human progress, and be "prophet of a higher social end"; but he slurred over the difficulty of reading facts aright, and was ever prone to let fancy take their place. He would have made the historian's method deductive to a dangerous degree, and had him fill the gaps of history from an abstract study of human nature; he apparently approved the Thucydidean method of invented speeches.

Here and everywhere he was apt to look down on erudition. He believed that Genius,--a kind of mystic, God-inspired faculty, that lived on intuition and not on painfully acquired knowledge,--discovers at a glance the secrets of nature and ethics and history. "Where we see only the confused light of the Milky Way, they see stars." Though he would have himself disclaimed the title to genius, he had a supreme confidence in his own thought. It was difficult for him to own an error, and hence he never learnt from his mistakes. It was true of him, as Renan said of Lamennais, that "when a man believes that he possesses all truth, he naturally disdains the painful, humble path of research, and regards the investigation of details as a pure dilettante fancy." This was no doubt the chief cause why his mind so soon stopped growing. We find in his early writings, when he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, the germ, and generally the developed form of every doctrine that he preached. His character developed normally, but not his intellect. Religion, ethics, politics, social theories, literary canons,--all issued forth at once from his early-ripened brain, and fixed themselves once for all. He was always reluctant to enquire for or admit new knowledge. It is strange, lover of books though he was, how restricted sometimes was his range of reading. His poets were the poets of his youth and early manhood, and he read few that wrote after 1840. Closely as he studied the Gospels, he seems to have given little or no attention to exegesis. In spite of his keen interest in Utilitarianism, there is no trace that he read the later writers of the school. Though so long in intimate touch with English political thought, he does not seem to have known Burke or Ricardo or the Mills or Herbert Spencer.

As a thinker, therefore, his defects are great. His thought, indeed, always has its value, coming as it does from a man of very great intellectual power and large experience of life, one who fearlessly penetrated to the heart of things, and was therefore in the true sense original. Its range is wonderful for one who led so strenuous a life of action. Faulty as his argument often is, obvious as are the gaps, he wrote comparatively few pages, that are not stamped with great and stimulating thought. But his mind was too loosely organised, too often out of touch with contemporary knowledge. He has left an imposing and suggestive system, and yet perhaps it somehow fails to add greatly to the sum of human knowledge. But it is just the qualities, that depreciate him as a thinker, which make him great as a moral teacher. His want of logic, his loose use of words hurt not here. The involved and rushing language, like a tumbling mountain stream, becomes a strength. That very rigidity, that lifelong iteration of a few dominant ideas, carry force and conviction, that a more agile intellect were powerless to give. His warm and palpitating generalisations, for all the flaws in their reasoning, bear the irrefutable mark of moral reality. He had that union of real intellectual force and spiritual fervour, that gives the insight into moral truth, and learns the secrets of heaven and hell. He was able to be a great moralist, because in a rare degree he had himself the moral sense, because the passion for righteousness had so penetrated all his being, that he could speak and be understood on the deep things of God, had something in his own soul that found its way to other souls. And, above all, he spoke with authority. Absolute confidence in his own beliefs was joined to truest personal humility, and made the prophet. Humblest and least ambitious of men, he felt his call from God; and in God's name he was assertive, dogmatic, sometimes seemingly egotistic. If he spoke authoritatively and intolerantly, it was that a duty was laid upon him, and woe to him if he preached it not. His principles were living and victorious certainties to him. "If a principle is true," he said, "its applications are not only possible but inevitable." And this unquestioning conviction made him as fearless morally as he was intellectually,--fearless with the supreme bravery of one who never shrinks from duty,--fearless not only for himself but others, bridling all the impulsive tenderness within him, and requiring of his fellow-workers the same readiness for sacrifice, which he exacted of himself. And so his words, aflame from a pure and passionate heart, come with the intensity of prophetic power. Beyond the words of any other man of modern times, they bring counsel and comfort to those who have drunk of the misery and stir and hope of the age. They have the greater virtue, that impels their hearers to do likewise. Mazzini is one of the small band, who have the strength as well as the love of Christ, not only the unselfishness that draws, but the conviction and the power that command, who impose their own beliefs and make disciples.

Would he, had he had the opportunity, have done what he held higher than to teach through books, and been the missionary of a religion? Had Italy been freed in 1848, we may be sure he would have left his desk, forsaken politics, and gone about the land, preaching faith in God and Progress and Humanity. Probably no other man, since the Reformation, has had such apostolic power. Would his mission have found an answer or ended in pitiable collapse? He would probably have had no better fate than others, who have tried to found new churches. There may be room for new faiths, but there is little for new churches in the world to-day. But this does not necessarily mean failure. His church might have been empty, his state religion proved a soulless husk; but in the communion of scattered men and women, who are groping for the truth, he might have laid a cornerstone of that church, which is neither in this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem, which without forms or unity of doctrine, spreads the unity of spiritual truth. Something, even as it is, he has done for this. His creed may fail to content the knowledge of to-day, but he stands a convincing witness to the spiritual, to the eternal needs of the soul, to religion as the master fact of life, though creeds may fail and systems perish.

* * * * *

How does he rank as a politician? Our estimate must be a mixed one. As a political thinker he stands high. He has left a theory of the state, that is priceless because informed by a great moral ideal. And apart from this, it has its value from his wide and profound knowledge of modern politics and the practical sense that almost always keeps his idealism in touch with facts. His faith in democracy, the optimism which came of his trust in Providence, his cautious handling of economic tendencies saved him from the mistakes of Carlyle and Ruskin. His conviction that the common-sense of the people was feeling out its way independently of any theory or school, kept him from the short-lived formulas of the individualists. His deeper knowledge of men and deeper reading of history gave him a saner and completer view than that of the collectivists. None of them, not even Ruskin, can match the warmth and inspiration of a conception, that raises politics to be the instrument of the divine plan,--an instrument not only to destroy injustice and poverty, but to redeem the highest part of man and bring the rule of brotherhood and unity and social peace. In the detailed application of his political doctrines he often failed from that same inaccessibility to facts, which marred him otherwise. His republic missed the essential; his theories of democratic government are vague and hardly satisfy. But even here he is the prophet of one great enduring principle. Among the statesmen of the century, he is almost the only one, who understood what nationality meant, saw its essential relationship to democracy, and put it on an unassailable foundation. It was this that made him teacher of Italian Unity, and therefore maker of modern Italy. Whether without him Italy would be united to-day, we cannot tell; but at all events it was he who gave the impulse, his bold vision that saw that the hard consummation was attainable, and gave others too the faith to see it.

As a political thinker, then, he is great; as a practical political worker, he largely failed. True, he had many of a statesman's qualities. He often read character acutely, though his confidence in men sometimes deceived him, and again and again he was the victim of informers. He had rare industry and considerable organising power; though, owing to his solitary work, he had learned to bury himself too much in details,--in the mass of correspondence and the immense labour he put out to scrape together little funds,--and in them he sometimes neglected the survey of the whole. Above all, as he proved at Rome, he had the true statesman's gift of leadership and inspiration. But it is more than doubtful whether, even under happier circumstances, he would have been an effective politician. His knowledge of human nature was more subtle in the abstract than in the concrete; individuals were to him too much wholly good or wholly bad, and he did not recognise how complex are the motives that sway puzzled humanity. He could rarely take a sane, unprejudiced view of a situation. It amazes us that he expected Pio Nono to respond to his appeal in 1847, and thought that, if the republic came at Rome in 1870, it would found a state religion. His misconception of Piedmontese policy throughout the fifties is a yet stronger illustration of distorted vision. This was one of the reasons why he found it so difficult to compromise. He could not distinguish non-essentials from essentials, and it was nearly as hard for him to give way on the one as on the other. Compromise in small or great seemed cowardice, and there was no doubt a strain of egotism in his obstinacy. It humiliated him to surrender any detail of the theories, which he preached with such undiscriminating confidence.

* * * * *

But one would fain close not with the thinker or the moral teacher or the politician, but the man. Mazzini's personal life was one of a very rare purity and beauty, that stands out in his generation noblest and faithfullest and most inspired. Its only serious flaw lies in those few lapses from public candour, which have been noted in these pages. Sometimes he was bitter and intolerant, but the provocation was great. In earlier life he was often querulous and self-absorbed, but it may be counted to him, that, with his sensitive nature, he came through loneliness and poverty with his moral strength unbroken. Except for these, the critic's microscope can find no specks. Brave, earnest, true, without trace of affectation, he bore the stamp of whitest sincerity. Gentle, affectionate, pure as few are pure, he was friend and counsellor and inspirer to those who knew him, gripping and subduing them with that wondrous sympathy of his, that came of burning love of goodness and made the saving of a soul the highest thing in life. That generosity, which made him share purse and clothes with others perhaps less destitute than himself, and give half his scanty income to help a woman and children that he hardly knew, made him lavish out of his busy days time and thought to help struggling souls. Ever intense in his affections, grateful for any act of kindness, yearning for friendship with the yearning of the homeless man, he was one to draw others with bonds of love.

He had a large and loving view of life. Pettiness and malice and jealousy had very little place in it. Passionate though he was for morality, he was, outside his political work and controversies and an occasional touch of cynicism in his talk, a very tolerant man. No person has, he said, "a right to judge a special case without positive data on the nature of the fact." He was angry and impatient with the "cavilling spirit of mediocrity," that takes pleasure in the lapses of "the mighty-souled." Among his friends he never sermonised, and he had no desire to bend their private life to his own pattern. Ever more or less sad himself, he rejoiced in their happiness. "You are a happy mortal," he writes to one of them on his marriage. "I am, notwithstanding my dislike for _happiness_, truly glad that you are so." Never man had more joy in others' home felicity. It was only among his fellow-revolutionists, whom he thought of as partners in his own high call, that he was exacting and sometimes ungenerous, though he pleaded earnestly with them that public work should leave room for the inner life of love and friendship. In his political controversies, it must be confessed, his equanimity deserted him, and he is often intolerant and unfair. He was too ready to think that bad politics implied bad morals, and his hatred of Louis Napoleon and Cavour made him pen pages, that one would gladly not remember. But even in politics he could sometimes do justice to an opponent, who obviously acted from high convictions; and he was one of the few Italian nationalists, who could appreciate the motives of the Catholic Volunteers.

But his essential greatness lies on the active side. Above all else he shines out white in that consuming love of humanity, that accepted poverty and weariness and danger, that made him forego home and love, comfort and congenial work, and give himself to one long, self-forgetting service for the good of men. Duty was no abstract precept with him, but part of his very being. In adversity and trial he had schooled himself to follow her, till disobedience to her call became almost impossible, and he did not wait for her to speak but sought her out. It was nearly allied to his almost superstitious fear of personal happiness. Those miserable years in Switzerland and London wrought on him, till melancholy grew to a habit. He lost something of it afterwards in the society of his English friends, but it never left him; and it tinted all his life with the gentle sadness, which is near akin to spiritual yearnings and large-hearted love. Sunless and unwholesome as it seems at times, after all, as with the Man of sorrows, it purged him to the same forgetfulness of self. It was no enervating grief; "do not allow yourself to be weakened and self-absorbed by your trouble" was his perennial lesson to friends, who had lost dear ones. His was the "other part of grief, the noble part, which makes the soul great and lifts it up." "By dint of repeating to myself," he once wrote to Mrs Carlyle, "that there is no happiness under the moon, that life is a self-sacrifice meant for some higher and happier thing; that to have a few loving beings, or if none, to have a mother watching you from Italy or from Heaven (it is all the same) ought to be quite enough to preserve us from falling." He, to a degree that few have done, trod self victoriously under; habitually and systematically year by year, untempted by failure or success, by misery or comparative happiness, he denied himself even the little indulgences and relaxations and declensions from the strait hard path, by which most good men make their compromise with the world and flesh. So remorselessly was duty law to him, that sometimes work and sacrifice became ends in themselves; and he laboured painfully on in the path which he had chosen, when it would have served his cause better to have rested or turned to other activities. And the unbending labour had its fruit in that wonderful sum of his life's work, that, beyond all the exacting details of his political organisation, has left its stamp on modern Europe, has left so vast a body of thought in half the provinces of the human mind, has its yet richer legacy in the example of a life given perfectly and wholly to the cause of men.

He was not the mere conscientious worker only; he lived in the light of a spiritual vision, and that light radiated in almost every page he wrote, on every man and woman whom he touched. Besides the sense of duty he had faith. "He was," writes a living English statesman, "perhaps the most impressive person I have ever seen, with a fiery intensity of faith in his own principles and in their ultimate triumph, which made him seem inspired; a man to waken sleeping souls, and fill them with his own fervour." He loved to commune with those of his own spiritual kin,--Dante, Savonarola, Cromwell,--men who had the same undoubting faith in the righteousness of their cause and their fellow-work with God,--men, it may be, one-sided and intellectually incomplete, but gifted with the power to do great things and lift up life. And so great principles and nobleness of aim carried him through a series of practical mistakes, and left his life to be a permanent enriching of the race. What if he dreamed dreams, that for generations yet may be no more than dreams? What if his mental ken reached not to all the knowledge of the age? What if he marred his work by mistakes and miscalculations? His errors have passed; his intellectual limitations can be supplied. His was the rarer and the greater part, to lift men out of the low air of common life up to the heights, where thought is larger, and life runs richer, and the great verities are seen, undimmed by self and sophistry. The idealist is still mankind's best friend; and he does most for the race, who purges its spiritual vision, and breathes into cold duty, till it becomes a thing of life and passion and power. Greater still is he, who is not idealist only, but saint and hero, and in his life bears witness to the truth he teaches. Such saint and hero and idealist Mazzini was; and while men and women live, who would be true to themselves and to their call, who value sacrifice and duty above power and success, so long will there be those, who will love him and be taught by him.

Appendix A

SOME UNPUBLISHED (IN ONE CASE PRIVATELY PUBLISHED) LETTERS
AND PAPERS, WRITTEN BY MAZZINI.

1. _Letter to Mr W. E. Hickson, about 1844._
2. _A Prayer for the Planters, 1846._
3. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1847._
4. _Letter to Mr Peter Taylor, February 1854._
5. _Letter to Mr Peter Taylor, October 1854._
6. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1857._
7. _Two Letters to Mrs Milner-Gibson, 1859._
8. _Letter to Mr Peter Taylor, 1860._
9. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1865._
10. _Letter to Mr W. Malleson, 1865._
11. _Rest. A Paper written for the Pen and Pencil Club, 1867._
12. _Letter to Mrs Peter Taylor, 1868._
13. _Letter to Mr William Shaen, 1870._

I

LETTER TO Mr W. E. HICKSON, EDITOR OF THE _Westminster Review_ (probably in 1844).

[This letter gives some details concerning his early life,
which are not mentioned in his works or in any of the
biographies.]

DEAR SIR,--I began to attract the attention of the Government in Italy by my literary writings. I had been pleading warmly the cause of what was then called Romanticism, and was the right of progressive life in Literature. Then, as now, all pleading for literary liberty, independence, progression, were suspected in Italy as educating the mind to forbidden tendencies. I published in 1828 a weekly literary paper the "Indicatore Genovese": it was, at the end of the year, and though published under the double ecclesiastical and temporal censorship, suppressed. I caused the paper to be continued at Leghorn under the title of "Indicatore Livornese";[47] it was, at the end of the year, suppressed again. I wrote one long article on "a European Literature" in the best of our reviews, the "Antologia" of Florence. The review was persecuted and after some time suppressed. In 1830, after the Revolution of July I was arrested. The accusation was the spreading of a secret association tending to the overthrow of the Italian Government. I recollect a fact, well apt to give a summary of our condition in Italy. My father, Professor of Anatomy in the Genoese University, went to the Governor of the town, Venanson, enquiring at the cause of my imprisonment. "Your son," he was told amongst other things, "is fond of walking every night, alone, sadly pensive, on the outskirts of the town. What on earth has he at his age to think about? We don't like young people thinking, without our knowing the subject of their thoughts." A committee of Senators was appointed, in Turin, to try me. They found no proofs, and acquitted both me and some friends who had been arrested with me. Nevertheless I was sent, in solitary confinement, at Savona, in the fortress for five months: and afterwards, sent in exile, without leave of seeing anybody, except my parents. There was no duration determined; but I was told that my subsequent conduct would shorten or prolong the time of my being an exile. I came through Savoy and Switzerland to France, at a time in which the Government of Louis Philippe, not yet acknowledged by the absolutist Governments, was active in exciting all insurrectional schemes, both in Spain and Italy. I merged, of course into them.

When the insurrection of 1831 was quenched in the Estates of the Pope, I established myself at Marseilles, and founded from there the new association "la giovine Italia." Of the distinctions to be made between this and the old Carbonari associations, I have spoken in four letters that have been printed in the "Monthly Chronicle." They--the fourth especially--I would advise you to peruse: I have not a single copy in my possession and cannot even remember the number; but they must have appeared between 1838 and 1839. The rapidity with which the Association spread evinced the justice of the fundamental views. At the beginning of 1832, the organisation was powerful throughout all Italy. As one of the main features of La Giovine Italia was to not content itself as Carbonarism did, with a secret war, but to reach insurrection through the open preaching of its belief, an organ was established at Marseilles expounding all the principles of the Association. La Giovine Italia, a review, or rather a collection of political pamphlets springing from the Association, was under my direction; and, in fact, the two-thirds of each volume were my own. The effect was really electric among our youth. From Marseilles, through the merchant-ships of our country, the captains of which were almost generally volunteering their efforts, the volumes were smuggled into Italy, where they raised the enthusiasm of the patriots to such a pitch that it was evident a general outbreak would ensue. Then, the persecutions began. Applications were made by all the Italian Governments to the French: the policy of Louis Philippe had already changed, and the most active co-operation against the Association and me was promised. Measures were taken at Marseilles against such of our exiles as were living upon the _subsidies_. They were sent away to the interior. But few as we were, we could, by multiplying our activity, front the task. At last, under the pretence of my being likely to be connected with the republican agitation in France, I was ordered to leave France. I protested, and claimed the common justice of a trial; but unsuccessfully. My presence at Marseilles was imperiously required by the interests of the Association; the writing, publishing, and sending to Italy the correspondencies with the country, for which Marseilles was offering every facility, the interviews with Italian patriots who flocked to Marseilles for instructions and communications, were all resting on me. I decided to stop; and concealed myself. During one year I succeeded in baffling all the activity of the French police, and of our own spies. But it was through the most rigorous seclusion you can imagine. During one year, I remember having had only twice, a breath of fresh air in the night, once dressed in woman's garb, the other as a Garde-National. At last things had reached such a point that a general rising was thought of. I left France and went to Geneva: there to await for the event, and prepare an expedition into Savoy, so as to divide the forces of the enemy and establish co-operation between the patriots in Italy and their exiles. How the hopes of an insurrection failed in Italy, the fourth of my letters in the "Monthly Chronicle" will tell you. How we too failed, through our military leader, General Ramorino, in the attempt on Savoy--an attempt I thought it our duty to realise, as a practical teaching to our countrymen, that promises, once given, are to be kept,--would now be too long to say. But a tolerably true account of the enterprise is to be found in one of the volumes of "Histoire de Dix Ans" _par_ Louis Blanc. Meanwhile the attempt, once unsuccessful, drew upon Switzerland and _à fortiori_ upon me, the anger of all Governments. Notes were literally showering upon the poor Swiss Cantons, where we sojourned. The most of us left Switzerland for France or England. I with few others remained. Driven away from Geneva, I went to the Canton de Vaud: driven away from there, to Berne. There, owing to the friendship of some of the members of the Government, I stopped for some time, keeping a very secluded life. At last the insistence of the foreign Embassies prevailed upon the weakness of the Bernese Government, and I was obliged to go to Solothurn. Meanwhile the principles, embodied in our writings and in our associations had awakened the sympathies of the Swiss patriots. A National Association was founded on a ground of brotherhood with our own. The persecutions with which the unwilling but weak Swiss Governments were hunting me, excited almost as much indignation as the opening of the letters here. The weakness of the Cantons had its source in the deficiency of national unity, in the detestable organisation of the Central Power, on the old _Pacte Federal_, forced by the Allies on Switzerland at the overthrow of Napoleon. I was requested to write a periodical advocating and unifying under our political belief, the national feelings. Funds were given. The "Jeune Suisse" was established. It appeared twice a week in French and in German, for the course of one year. Through the German exiles, and working-men, through the Tyrolese working-men, rather numerous in the Canton of Zürich, through the Italian Tessin, and the frequent contact with Italian people travelling to the frontier, the spirit of liberty began to spread again in the countries approaching Switzerland. The terrors of the Governments re-excited the persecution. They threatened Switzerland with war. German troops came to the frontier, M. Thiers was menacing to ruin Swiss commercial resources with a "blocus hermetique." We were sent away. The paper suppressed; the most horrible calumnies spread against us: all exiles left with or without compulsion. I decided to remain as long as necessary to prove to the Swiss people, that they were the slaves of the Foreign Powers, and devoid of all real liberty, of all independence. During seven months, I went from place to place, from house to house, living in places apparently empty, with mats at the windows, without even going beyond the room, except when receiving advices of the house being suspected: then with a guide, I was crossing the mountains in the night, and going to another shelter. While the Governments were raging, I received from all classes of population marks of sympathy that made and still make me consider Switzerland as a second Fatherland. Ministers [of religion] were inviting me to their houses as one of their family. [At] Grenchen, a village of a thousand inhabitants, near Solothurn, when I had spent one year, in an establishment of baths, I was, during the storm, made citizen spontaneously and without expense. The poor people, good souls of the village, believed that as a Swiss citizen, I would be respected; the grant of course, was not admitted. Still had I been alone, I would have, hardened as I was to all privations, kept on resisting; [but I was not alone] so I decided to leave and come to England. It was then that I had a correspondence with the Duke of Montebello, which ended in his sending three passports for us to a place I named; and in January or February 1837 I landed in England.

The "Giovine Italia" had six volumes published at different times. All that I have ever written concerning politics bears my name. Before I established the Association I wrote a long letter to Charles Albert, who had just then come to reign over Piedmont, remembering him of what he had promised and done, when not a king, pointing to him all the dangers of his position, the impossibility of keeping down long the spirit of the nation, the system of blood-shedding reaction to which he would soon be bound, and on the other side, the Possible, the Beautiful, the Grand, the Godlike that there would be in his putting himself at the head of the National party; the letter was printed, and signed only "An Italian." My name was then quite unknown, and would not have added the least weight to the considerations; besides, I did not believe that the "Italian People" would ever spring from under a royal cloak; and I was writing, not my own opinion, but that of many of my countrymen still fond of such a hope. I wanted to have the true intentions of the man on whom they relied, as much as possible unveiled. As soon as the letter reached him, my "signalement" was given to all the authorities of the coast, so as to have me arrested if ever I attempted to cross the frontier again.... I have been in 1833 condemned to be shot _in the back_ by a military commission sitting in Alessandria, as having led from without the agitation. Here in London I have exerted, as I will exert, what influence I possess with my countrymen to endeavour to raise them from the nothingness and worse than nothingness in which now they are; from English affairs I have kept myself entirely separated; nor sought the help of English people even for our Italian affairs. As to all the present agitation, I had nothing to do with it, on the beginning. I did not think that the time was properly chosen. But, when the patriots of the interior _decided_ that they _would_ attempt, nothing of course, was left to me than helping them; and so I did, or rather prepared me to do so, should a rising take place.

It seems to me that the right of an Italian to work out from whatever place he finds himself in, the welfare of his country, ought to be clearly and boldly asserted by an English writer.

Of the hopes I have of the Italian patriots succeeding at a not very remote period, in what they are now struggling for, I cannot now speak here. It would prove too long a subject for a letter; but I am in intention, if I find time for it, of publishing very soon, a Pamphlet on the question, showing how, all weary of slow, legal, national progress being interdicted to us, our only hope must lie in insurrection as the starting-point for a national education. If there are points upon which you want more notions, be so kind as to write, and meanwhile, with sincere thanks for the interest you take in my case, believe me now dear Sir,--

Truly yours,
JOSEPH MAZZINI.

47 Devonshire Street,
Queen Square.

II

A PRAYER TO GOD FOR THE PLANTERS, BY AN EXILE.

[The original is in French. It has probably not been
published before. It was sent in 1846 to Mr William Shaen in
response to a request for a paper on the abolition of
slavery. It was to have appeared in Lady Blessington's
_Keepsake_, presumably in a translation, but was not
published in it. In sending it Mazzini writes: "To write one
or two pages on abolitionism is just the same to me as to
prove that the sun gives light and warmth; or to prove an
axiom. So that I was during one full hour at a loss what to
write, till my soul melted away in prayer."]

God of pity, God of peace and love, forgive, oh forgive the planters. Their sin is great; but thy mercy is infinite. As of old thou didst make refreshing waters gush from the desert rock for the multitude of thy servants, so now make the living spring of charity gush out in the desert of their souls. Let the angel of repentance descend and settle on their dying pillow. And between them and thy justice, at their last hour,--for them and for their country, which they dishonour,--may the prayer rise up of all who suffer for thy holy cause, for thy holy truth, for the freedom of the peoples and of the Soul of man.

* * * * *

Their sin is great. They have sinned, they are sinning still against thee and against Humanity, which is the interpreter of thy law on earth. The Spirit of Evil, which tempted Jesus, thy son so dear to Genius and to Love, by offering him, when he began his divine career, the riches and the thrones of earth, has also tempted them, men bereft of Genius and of Love, by taking the semblance of the idol, which is self-interest. They have yielded. They are the bondsmen of the senses, and have forsworn knowledge and feeling. They have set the slave in the place of man, the fetish of the sugar-cane in the place of thy holy image. But thou, didst thou not hear thy son, so dear to Genius and to Love, when he prayed for those who slew him? Forgive them, Father, forgive the planters too.

* * * * *

Thou hast placed, as symbol of the eye of thy Providence, one sun in heaven for the earth. Thou hast interwoven in one mighty harmony, of which human Music, Religion's eldest child, is but a faint and stammering echo, the worlds, those finite rays of thy infinite Thought, that move around us, like the scattered letters of a heavenly alphabet, which we shall know one day. In this fair physical Universe, which is the garment of the Idea, thou hast everywhere taught Unity, and the bright light of thy teaching shines upon their souls; but they have veiled the eyes of their souls, they have broken in pieces that which is so fair, and on the wreck of thy Unity they have built a warring Dualism: two natures, two laws, two ways of life. Have pity, Lord, forgive, oh forgive the planters.

* * * * *

In History, which is thy life, manifesting itself progressively in time and space, thou hast set in their sight another fount of truth, whence in great waves flows the great thought of Unity, which is thy whole Law. Thou madest all mankind spring from one Adam; at the teaching of thy providence, more clearly seen from day to day, thou hast led man, collective, social man, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to wage-earning; and that nought may be wanting to make the progression clear, thou makest now the nations to desire impatiently that to wage-earning association may succeed. And over these three stages, which are the image of thy triune working, hovers the holy voice of Golgotha, _All ye are brothers, for ye are all one in God_. And they have stopped their ears to the holy voice of Golgotha, they have shut their eyes to the evolution of Thought in History: they have said: _we are not brothers, we are masters and slaves_. They have kept one page alone of the Great Book, the page that tells of Cain and Abel, of Violence and Right; and they have said to themselves: _there are then two races of men, the race that is accursed, and the race that is privileged, and of this last race are we_; they know not that the sign of thy curse is on their own forehead, since it is by Violence alone that they make slaves of men. Have pity, Lord, forgive, oh forgive the planters.

* * * * *

And for the third witness of thy Truth, thou hast put a voice in each man's heart, an impulse in each man's conscience, which says: _I am free; free because I am responsible, free because I am a man, made in God's image, inherently possessing in myself the powers and aspirations and destinies of all Humanity_. And they have denied that this is the voice of all men. They have shut themselves up in their selfish _Ego_, and have said: _this voice is ours alone_, and they see not, wretched men that they are, that if they put a bound to it, they blot it out from all creation, since God did not create the _planter_ but the _man_. They have sown hate, and they will reap revolt: they have denied the God of love, and they have provoked the God of vengeance. Listen not to their blasphemy, O Lord. Forgive, oh forgive the planters.

* * * * *

O Lord, open their understandings and soften their hearts. Let the angel, that inspires good thoughts, descend upon them in their dreams by night. Let them hear through him the cry of horror that ascends from all Humanity that believes and loves;--the sorrowing cry of all who endure and fight for the Good in Europe, and whose confidence and faith is shaken by their stubborn crime;--the mocking cry of the princes and kings of the earth, who, when their subjects are full of turmoil, point to the proud republicans of America, who alone of men maintain the helotism of pagan ages;--the long anguish of Jesus, who, because of them, still suffers on his cross to-day! And when in the morning they awake, let their children lay their innocent curly heads beside their lips, and whisper, inspired by thee: "Father, father, free our brother, the black man; buy and sell no more the son of man for thirty pennies; see, this black man too has a mother and little children like us; Oh that his old mother could rejoice to see him proud and free! that his children could smile on him, fresh and happy, in the morning, as we smile now on you, father."

* * * * *

God of pity, God of peace and love, forgive, oh forgive the planters. Their sin is great, but thy mercy is infinite. Open in the desert of their souls the living spring of charity. Let the angel of repentance descend and settle on their dying pillow. And between them and thy justice, at their last hour,--for them and for their country, which they dishonour,--may the prayer rise up of all, who, like myself, suffer for thy holy cause, for thy holy truth, for the freedom of the peoples and of the Soul of man.

JOSEPH MAZZINI.

III

LETTER TO MRS PETER TAYLOR [May 15, 1847].

DEAR MRS TAYLOR,--First of all let me tell you that my silence before your note has been owing to my having been most unpoetically ill, with head-ache, sore throat, prostration of forces, fever and other things, till I was thinking that Mr Taylor would perhaps get rid all at once of me and of the League: however Homoeopathy--that is taking nothing--has cured me: then that my silence after the note has been owing to a hope in which I have been indulging both on Friday evening, and on Saturday, to call on you unexpectedly and talk instead of writing. However that hope too--the other is Mr Taylor's hope--has vanished: and I find myself having so much to do that I doubt whether I will find a moment of freedom this week. So, I write, and hope to be forgiven for the past.

* * * * *

And now to Poetry. Alas! After mature consideration, I find no _definition_ at all; by _you_ it is not needed; I am sure you have the _thing_ in your own Soul, and that is better than all definitions one could supply; for Mr Taylor I fear no definition of mine would do. Suppose I gave a definition that seems to me very true, but that I ought to explain in ten pages at least. "Poetry is the feeling of a former and of a future world"[48]: he would find out that it belongs to Byron, and would find himself pledged to refuse it. Suppose that I gave one of mine:

"Poetry is the Religion of the individual Soul."
"Religion is the Poetry of the collective Soul."

I fear that not only he, but perhaps you too, would ask for explanations which would fill up a lecture, not a note. Suppose that I quoted lines like these:

"A Poet's art
Lies in tolerating wholly, and accounting for in part
By his own heart's subtle working, those of every other heart"

he would say that that is charity, and nothing else; _we_ would say that it is incomplete. Suppose that I adopted yours--which, with due comments and interpretations, I am not far from--that "Poetry is the soul of the Universe," it would not avail. You gave it already, I am sure, and it was declared unsatisfactory.

We must one day or other _talk_ about this. I fear vaguely that even _we_ do differ in some way respecting the essence of Poetry. I suspect that you leave out in your own definition the element of _Action_, which seems to me inseparable from it. Poetry is for me something like the third person of Trinity, the Holy Spirit, which _is_ Action. But this amounts to declare incomplete, the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth, Coleridge, etc. Is that a heresy for you? If so, our definitions will not agree.--ever faithfully yours,

JOS. MAZZINI.

IV

LETTER TO MR PETER TAYLOR [February 16, 1854].

[This letter is inserted, because of its historical importance.
It is, I believe, the earliest existing mention of any scheme
for a French protectorate in Tuscany. It also antedates by a
few weeks the earliest known mention of Garibaldi's scheme for
an expedition to Sicily. Mazzini's information respecting Louis
Napoleon's plans was probably derived from Dr Conneau, but it
was generally inaccurate.]

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I write because I have no time for coming, and I write, I must avow, to silence conscience, with very little hope.

Do not smile, and say "the man is mad"; but put your head in your two hands and try to solve this question: "is there any earthly way of getting one thousand pounds in a very short time, ten days, a fortnight at the most?"

With you I have no secrets, and I shall state to you summarily the why.

We _must_ act: as early as possible in March: in fact as soon as the declaration of war or an action amounting to the same takes place, we must _act_, because the initiative is everything for us.

The actual schemes of the French Emperor, assented to by your cabinet, are these:

A Muratist movement in Naples: reinforcements in Rome ready to help, as Piedmont would object to the establishment of a French dynasty in the South. France offers to patronise the King of Piedmont to the North of Italy. Lombardy will be Piedmontese. But Lombardy and the Venetian territory would together with Piedmont form too large, too threatening a state. Lombardy and Venice shall therefore be divided. Venice like Greece will be given up to some foreign prince, or to Austria again if Austria yields and submits in other respects. Rome will remain to the Pope. Only as there are provinces so disaffected that the case is hopeless, from them and Tuscany a central Dukedom or Princedom will be formed under French patronage. Sicily will be given--the old scheme of 1848--to the Duke of Genoa, son of the Piedmontese king.

Thus Italy will have two more divisions, Sicily and Venice; new foreign dynasties would be settled there, new interests would group themselves around them: a new partition would begin, with high sanction, a new phasis, and we should have to begin anew our secret work, our clandestine printing, our series of martyrdoms, as if nothing had been done.

To all this I know only of a [one] remedy: to initiate: to give the leadership to the national party. The multitude will follow the first who acts; the very elements prepared by all these intrigues will accrue to us if we move first.

And beyond all, to move in the South. We would thus check the French scheme before its realisation. As we would, for the present, leave Rome aside and untouched, we do not damage in the least the actual position of England with France.

Garibaldi is here: ready to act. Garibaldi's name is all powerful among the Neapolitans, since the Roman affair of Velletri. I want to send him to Sicily, where they are ripe for insurrection and wishing for him as a leader.

Of course another action would simultaneously take place in a point of the centre, and I would lead a third operation in the North.

For these two, I have, though very little, still enough of money. For the first, that is for Garibaldi, I have none, and claiming it from Italy would imply expenses for travellers, risks, the unveiling of the secret, and _uncertain indefinite_ time.

Are there not to be found in England ten persons willing for the sake of Italy and for the sake of baffling schemes of French domination absolutely antagonistic to English interests, to take each £100 of our National Loan notes?[49]--or twenty ready to take £50 each?

This is the problem.

I know nobody almost. It must be the work of some Englishman. If any plan could be devised of certain fulfilment, but requiring longer time, the sum could be perhaps advanced by some person who would keep all that would come in by degrees.

* * * * *

--ever yours affectionately,

JOSEPH MAZZINI.

To friends whom you can trust, you may, under pledge of honour, communicate what you think proper.

Feb. 16. 15 Radnor St.
King's Road, Chelsea.

V

LETTER TO MR PETER TAYLOR [October 26, 1854].

MY DEAR FRIEND,--Are you astonished at our inertness? at our talking so much and doing so little? I often think that you feel so. I could explain everything in two hours of conversation; but take my word in spite of all, we are ripe for the aim, and that ere long we shall reach it. In fact, had I not been exceptionally prudent and calm, action would have been already initiated. It would be any day, were it not for Piedmont and the "Western Powers." Piedmont is our curse.

First, on account of its enjoying liberty, it is so much withdrawn from the field of action; then we have, just as in 1848, a whole world of courtiers, of ministerial agents, of journalists, and even of clandestine-press-writers, spreading everywhere that the King will draw the sword one of these days, that France and England will cause the revolution to spring up in Naples, that you will quarrel with Austria about the Principalities, that a better opportunity will come, must come, if only we have patience for one month, for two months, for two weeks. There was a whole dream-dispelling work to be done before thinking of immediate action. This work is, for the two-thirds, done, the other third will take, perhaps some two months. The field will be mine then. The people, the working-classes, are admirable: they are mine, mine devotedly to blindness.

One thing is out of doubt: any _initiative_ will be an Italian one: one spark will settle the whole on fire, only, the _initiative_ MUST be a successful one. This is the source of all my delays. I feel too certain of success after the first blow being struck for my risking uncautiously the first blow.

The English agitation I am trying to spread would be of real importance to me, if taking a certain degree of _consistence_, both from the financial point of view and from the moral one. You have not an idea of how proud and stronger my working men do feel here, when they find themselves noticed, encouraged and helped in England. I trust you will do what is in your power to promote and help.

How are you? How is your wife? Are you ever talking about me? against me? I am well in health, spite of the forcedly sedentary life I lead. I think very often, under these radiant skies, of the London fogs, and always regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended for an Englishman.