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The Moral Law and the State--Duties of the State: Liberty, Association, Education--Sovereignty is in God--Democracy--The Ideal Government--The Republic--The Ideal State 267-282

SOCIAL THEORIES

Importance of Social Questions--Their Moral Basis-- Attack on Socialism--Contrast between Mazzini's and its Theories and Work--Social Programme--Cooperation 283-295

NATIONALITY

Country and Humanity--The Marks of Nationality: the Will of the People; the Sense of National Mission-- Patriotism--International Solidarity--Ethics of Foreign Policy; Non-Intervention; War; the Special Missions of each Country--The Future of Europe--The Slavs--The United States of Europe--Italy's International Function 296-311

LITERARY CRITICISM

The Function of the Critic--The Function of the Poet--Art must avoid 'Art for the sake of Art' and Realism--It must be Human, Social, Didactic--Poetry of Modern Life--The Historical Drama--Music--'Objective' and 'Subjective' Poets--Dante--Shakespeare--Goethe-- Byron 312-328

THE MAN

Poetic Temperament--Defects as a Thinker--Greatness as a Moral Teacher--Strength and Weakness as a Politician--The Man 329-341

Some Unpublished Letters and Papers, written by Mazzini 343-367

Bibliography of Mazzini's Writings 367-373

INDEX 374

"Where there is no vision, the people perish."

The Home at Genoa

Boyhood and Youth--University Life--Literary Studies--Classicism and Romanticism--Joins the Carbonari--Arrest and Exile.

Joseph Mazzini was born in the Via Lomellina at Genoa on June 22, 1805. His father was a doctor of some repute and Professor of Anatomy at the University, a democrat in creed and life, who gave much of his time to unpaid service of the poor; at home affectionate and loved, though sometimes hard and imperious. His mother, to whom in after life he bore a strong resemblance, was a capable and devoted woman, who had little of the weakness of an Italian mother, and brought up her children to bear the brunt of life; with strong interest in the mighty movements that were remoulding Europe at the time, a mordant critic of governors and governments inside the four walls of her house. It was a happy home, and "Pippo" grew up the darling of his parents and three sisters, a delicate, sensitive, gentle child, quick and insistent to learn despite his father's fears for his health, and giving precocious proof of brilliant talents. He was nearly nine years old, when the Napoleonic system was shattered, and the Emperor went to Elba. Doubtless, Mazzini heard from his father that Napoleon was Italian born and was going to exile in an Italian island. The shock of the downfall was felt at Genoa, for the proud city, to which Lord William Bentinck had promised in the name of England its ancient independence, learnt that "republics were no longer fashionable," and saw itself helplessly made over to the alien rule of Piedmont. Bitterly the Genoese chafed at the traffic of their liberties, and we may be sure that there was republican talk in Mazzini's home, which sank into the mind of the thoughtful child. He himself mentions four influences that turned his boyish mind to democracy: his parents' uniform courtesy to every rank of life; the reminiscences of the French republican wars in the talk at home; some numbers of an old Girondist paper, which his father kept half hidden, for fear of the police, behind his medical books; and--more than all these, probably--the classics that he read under his Latin tutor. "The history of Greece and Rome," wrote a fellow-student, "the only thing taught us with any care at school, was little else than a constant libel upon monarchy, and a panegyric upon the democratic form of government." Like many another boy of his time who had for school exercises to declaim the praises of Cato and the Bruti, he came to regard republics as the appointed homes of virtue. It was the unintended fruit of the classical training, which the despotic governments of the time fostered to keep their youth innocent of any itch for innovation.

In time he recovered his balance, and went back to his books with the old zest. He was now studying medicine, intending to follow his father's profession; but at his first attendance in the operation room he fainted, and it was clear that he could never be a surgeon. To his father it must have been a sore disappointment, but he seems to have at once recognised the inevitable, and allowed the lad to read law. Mazzini had little heart in his new studies, for the arid, perfunctory teaching of law current at the time had small attraction for one who wanted to know the reason of things; but he persevered, and did well in his examinations, though it is probable that he always gave a big slice of his time to reading poetry and history. He was now at the University. Probably he went to school, though there is some doubt about it; at all events he seems to have escaped the brutality and bad pedagogy, which generally made school life then one long misery for a high-principled or sensitive lad. University life began at an early age in Italy, and Mazzini had matriculated at Genoa, when he was fourteen. So far as his fellow-students were concerned, he was in happy surroundings. But he was a troublesome scholar, always ready to rebel against the formalities that made a big part of University life. To the last he refused to attend the compulsory religious observances, not because he disliked them, but because they were compulsory; and the authorities, tolerant for once, shut their eyes to his insubordination. The University of Genoa did not possess a high name for scholarship; and at this time it had its special drawbacks, for the government was scared by the recent revolution, and fearful that a few hundred lads might shake the pillars of the state. No one could matriculate without a certificate that he had regularly attended church and confession. Those whose parents did not possess a certain quantity of landed property, had to pass a stiffer examination, though at the worst, it is probable, not a very prohibitive one. Lecturers, beadles, porters, all had the cue from government to make life unpleasant for the students, and the better professors dared not be detected in any leniency or considerateness. Moustaches were forbidden, as a mark of the revolutionary mind, and if any student, greatly daring, grew them, he was carried off between two carabineers to a barber's shop.

Mazzini soon became a leader among the clean-living, affectionate, impetuous undergraduates. His appearance was now, as always, very striking; he had a high and prominent forehead, black, flashing eyes, fine olive features, set in a mass of thick black hair, a grave, serious face, that could look hard at times, but readily melted in the kindliest of smiles. He led a studious, retiring life, fond of gymnastics and fencing, but with small taste for amusements, his cigars and coffee his only indulgences; his days spent among his books, his evenings with his mother, or in long solitary walks that defied the weather, or in rare and stolen visits to the theatre, which he had to leave after the first act, for the home was rigorously shut at ten. But, though he was slow to make close friendships, he was no misanthrope. He played much on the guitar and sang well to it; and his musical talents and clever reciting made him in demand among his middle-class and patrician friends. There was none yet of the half-bitter sadness of after life; he had a shrewd sense of humour, perhaps inherited from his mother; when warmed by enthusiasm or indignation, he could speak with a fiery eloquence, that was remarkable even among those declamatory Italian youths. "My soul," he wrote afterwards, "was then a smile for all created things, life showed to my virgin fancy as a dream of love, my warmest thoughts were for nature's loveliness and the ideal woman of my youth." He revelled in generous actions, sharing books and money, even clothes, with his poorer friends. But it was sheer force of character that gave him his ascendancy over them--the loyal, justice-loving nature that made him champion of every victim of undergraduate or professorial spite, the purity of thought, that checked each loose or coarse word from those about him. That clear, high soul, untouched by self, not knowing fear, passionate for righteousness, gave him even when a lad the power that belongs only to the saints of God.

Now and for long after, literature was the call that spoke sweetest to Mazzini. Politics and conspiracy were constraining but unwelcomed duties; he gave his love to literature. To be a dramatist or write historical novels was at this time his plan of life. Many a time in later years he was still looking for the day, when Italy would be united and free, and, his political task accomplished, he could give himself to the literary schemes he still cherished,--a history of religious ideas, a popular history of Italy, and the editing of a series of the great dramas of the world. But the burden of his country's woe lay too heavily on him to be long forgotten. It was no time now for Dante studies or play-writing. Sadly and unwillingly he convinced himself that at such a time pure literature was no patriot's first task, that the writer, who would not shirk his duty, must make his work political. Not but what the literary critic still appears on every page; but the whole gist of his teaching is that the value of a book is in proportion to its power to inform the reader's soul to love of country and mankind, and impel him to serve his fellows by political action in the sight of God. He held it wasted effort to do, what Manzoni had tried to do,--to school the individual to a smug life of cloistered virtue, a life which in a vicious or torpid society was impossible to the many. No religion, no morality, he taught, is worth the writer's labours, unless it dedicates men to be workers in the public cause, to hold comfort, and, if need be, home and life itself as cheap, while oppression and wrong are stunting other lives, and men and women round are crying to be freed.

Meanwhile he was practising at the bar in a desultory fashion. Sometimes he pleaded in the lower courts as an "advocate of the poor," and was much in demand for his attention and skill. According to the etiquette of the profession, he read in the rooms of a barrister, who limited his interest to seeing that his pupils sat with a book in front of them. The vacations were generally spent in a little country villa at San Secondo, in the Bisagno valley, within sight of a house which the Ruffinis occupied; and he shared in attentions to the Ruffinis' mother, who was now his spiritual guide and dearest friend, or went on botanical walks or shooting expeditions in the lovely hill country. He did not do much of the shooting himself, and when he was more than fifty, he remembered with remorse a thrush that he had mangled when sixteen.

At all events, it was abruptly nipped. The government had its secret agents among the Carbonari, and Mazzini was arrested on the charge of initiating one of them. It is probable that the authorities had suspected him for some time. He was, as the governor of Genoa told his father, "gifted with some talent, and too fond of walking by himself at night absorbed in thought. What on earth," asked the offended officer, "has he at his age to think about? We don't like young people thinking without our knowing the subject of their thoughts." Mazzini was taken to the fortress of Savona, where he consoled himself by watching the sea and sky, which made all the prospect from his cell windows, and taming a serin finch, which would fly in through the gratings, and to which he "became exceedingly attached." His case came before the Senate of Turin, the highest court in the country. In the eyes of the law he was supremely guilty; but, with an adroitness that he afterwards recalled with pride, he managed to destroy all compromising papers, and there was only one witness of the initiation, whereas the law required two. Mazzini stoutly denied the fact. The denial was more than a plea of not guilty in an English court; perhaps he thought that a conspirator is bound to put his government outside the pale of moral obligation. But whatever we may allow for his position, the plain man will count his action as one of the disingenuous lapses, that rarely, now and again, stain the clear honour of his life.

The court had to acquit him, but the authorities had too much evidence of his activity to leave him unmolested. They gave him the choice between internment in a small town or exile. Contemporary events decided him. The revolution had just broken out in Central Italy; the French government had encouraged the Carbonari to expect direct or indirect assistance, and Mazzini thought that he would serve the cause best at Paris, whence, he confidently hoped, he would soon return to a liberated Italy. In February 1831 he said his good-byes to his family, who had hastened to Savona, and crossed the Apennines and, for the first time, the Alps, afterwards so familiar and beloved. He watched the sunrise from Mont Cenis, and has left a memorable description of it, drawn with all the wealth of his artistic imagery. At Geneva he made the acquaintance of Sismondi and his Scotch wife. While there, he was advised to join the Italian exiles at Lyons, and, giving up the projected journey to Paris, he made his way to them.

FOOTNOTES:

He seems never to have learnt to read German easily; at all events he could not do so till comparatively late in life.

See pp. 325-327.

Young Italy

Condition of Italy--The Revolution of 1831--Young Italy--Its principles: belief in Italy; inspiration of duty; social reform--Its political system: Republicanism; Italian Unity; war with Austria--Secret societies.

The governor of the prison at Savona had allowed him to read the Bible, Byron, and Tacitus, innocently thinking that they contained no revolutionary material. Out of these and Dante sprang Young Italy. Italy was ripe for the teaching of the epoch-making society. The country was "a geographical expression." Conquerors, whose appetites had been tempted by the Southern land, had carved it into appanages for themselves. Austria held Lombardy and the lands of the Venetian republic; the King of Piedmont ruled the North-West, and Sardinia, and Savoy across the Alps; the Bourbons of Naples had the South; the Pope, the grand-duke of Tuscany, the petty dukes of Modena, Parma, and Lucca divided up the Centre. Nor had there been any serious demand for unity. History and character sundered North and South; the great medieval cities still cherished their independence too dearly to wish to sink it in a common country. Napoleon, while he ruled, had gone far to unite the land both in form and substance; and the aspirations he did so much to create survived him. Weak though they still were, practical grievances were ever enforcing the argument for unity; and Italians were chafing more and more against the artificial barriers, which stopped the circulation of the nation's life. The customs-lines, that met the trader on the confines of each state, strangled commerce. Literature circulated with difficulty, and the Genoese could hardly get access to books published at Florence or Leghorn, a hundred miles away. In the smaller states at all events, the area was too small to offer any field for enterprise, and every lawyer and engineer and civil servant was cribbed by the restrictions, that confined his activities to a handful of towns. Through all the peninsula there was a more or less intolerable misrule. Political disabilities allowed no voice in legislation, no control of taxation or the executive, no rights of public meeting or association, small liberty of speech or writing. There were more present grievances in the discouragement of education, in the clerical tyranny, in the obsolete and partial legal system. And the misgovernment had its yet more evil and intimate aspect in the power of the police, which threatened each man's home and honour and career. Governments, that breathed and moved in chronic dread of revolution, sought safety in a system of covert terrorism. The police had their spies everywhere,--in the streets, in men's households, in the churches, in the universities,--to scrape up any idle word or act, that seemed to mark a possible critic of government. There were mitigations of the misrule in Piedmont, Tuscany, and the Austrian territories. But in the Pope's states and Naples there was little or nothing to relieve the crying corruption and incompetency; and everywhere there was more or less a vexatious intolerance and oppression, that showed the blacker after the relative liberty and progress of Napoleon's rule.

When we disentangle Mazzini's ideas from the superfluous verbiage that sometimes wraps them, two leading principles are found to differentiate them from those of earlier movements,--the principles, that, with his trick of making watchwords, he summed up in the phrase, "God and the People." The new movement must have the inspiration and power of a religion. Italy needed something that would shake her from the hopelessness of disillusion and defeat, something that would prove she "had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier than destiny itself." Action must be roused by action, energy by energy, faith by faith,--the faith that made Rome great and inspired Christianity and sent forth the armies of the Convention, the faith that makes the weak strong in the knowledge they are carrying out God's will. Mazzini had two arguments to persuade his countrymen to this believing and conquering patriotism. He hoped to fire them with his own superb faith in Italy and her destinies. He called up "that old name of Italy, hung round with memories and glory and majestic griefs, that centuries of mute servitude could not destroy." Twice had she been queen of the world; many times had she, the land of Dante and Vico, of the Papacy and the Renaissance, inspired European thought. "Italy," he said, "has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with living weaklings and braggarts." Her task was not yet done; she had still to speak to the nations "the gospel of the new age, the gospel of humanity." He pointed Italians to "the vision of their country, radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the nations that thought her dead." Rightly he judged that men, who shared his faith, would never despair of their country. But he had a more sounding note to strike. He had the genius to see that he who would have men rise to high endeavour, must appeal to their unselfish motives, that only when some great principle calls, will they lift themselves to heroism and sacrifice of all that makes life dear. The effort to make Italy meant the loss of thousands of lives, meant exile and imprisonment and poverty, the blighting of homes and the misery of dear ones; and men would only face it at the call of duty. The Carbonari had no call; they came of a school that appealed to interested motives, and the appeal inevitably broke down in the day of disappointment and defeat. Mazzini offered his countrymen "a national religion"; Young Italy was no mere political party, but "a creed and an apostolate"; it taught that victory came "by reverence for principles, reverence for the just and true, by sacrifice and constancy in sacrifice." As individuals and as a nation, they had a mission given them by God. God's law of duty bade them follow it; God's law of progress promised them accomplishment.

The other principle of Young Italy was social reform. Earlier liberal movements had thought or attempted little for the masses, though at all events the recent rising in Romagna aimed higher than Mazzini gave it credit for, and had more of a democratic tendency than contemporary movements in France and England. Mazzini exaggerated the revolutionary impatience of the masses in 1821 and 1831; but it was true that such enthusiasm as they had, had been cooled by the disappointment of their hopes. Revolutions, as he said, had been Dead Sea apples to them. They would be slow to stir again, till they saw that the liberation of their country had tangible social results in store. The gospel of duty would rouse the cultured middle classes, but at this time he seems to have thought that the uneducated, down-trodden, priest and official-ridden masses could not respond to the higher call, and must be won by some visible prospect of relief from present evils. Pope Julius' cry of "Out with the barbarian" would not touch men, who did not see how every social injustice leant in the last resort on Austria, how dear food, conscription, all the petty tyranny, were fruits of the foreign domination, that sheltered the princes who misgoverned them. Till the masses felt this, there was no hope of a successful war of liberation. "Revolutions," he said, "must be made for the people and by the people, and so long as revolutions are, as now, the inheritance and monopoly of a single class, and lead only to the substitution of one aristocracy for another, we shall never find salvation." The cry of the poor, unheard by most Italian statesmen from his time, down to yesterday, was ever with him. "I see the people pass before my eyes in the livery of wretchedness and political subjection, ragged and hungry, painfully gathering the crumbs that wealth tosses insultingly to it, or lost and wandering in riot and the intoxication of a brutish, angry, savage joy; and I remember that those brutalised faces bear the finger-print of God, the mark of the same mission as our own. I lift myself to the vision of the future and behold the people rising in its majesty, brothers in one faith, one bond of equality and love, one ideal of citizen virtue that ever grows in beauty and might; the people of the future, unspoilt by luxury, ungoaded by wretchedness, awed by the consciousness of its rights and duties. And in the presence of that vision my heart beats with anguish for the present and glorying for the future." That they would rise in insurrection, he had no doubt. Once make them see whence sprang their wretchedness, where stood its remedies, once make them feel that "God is on the side of the down-trodden," the people of Italy would be again what they had been in the days of the Lombard League and the Sicilian Vespers.

Out of these principles,--social reform as the immediate end of revolution and duty as its inspiration,--Mazzini built up an elaborate political programme. He loved system-making and hardly apologised for it. You cannot have unity or harmony without it, he urged, and to a certain extent he had practical justification. It were better, as he said and as subsequent events proved, that the nationalists should argue out their differences before the time for action came, and not paralyse themselves by quarrels in front of the enemy. It was this want of a positive programme, that was, he thought, largely responsible for the failure of the Carbonari. Their policy had hardly gone beyond the overthrow of the existing governments; and they had mustered under their flag royalists and republicans, conservatives and liberals, with the inevitable result that after their first successes they split their ranks and fell an easy prey. It were wiser, so Mazzini pleaded, to be few but united. "The strength of an association depends not on its numbers but on its homogeneity." But the principle was necessarily an intolerant one. It barred many a true patriot, who could not swear to the whole Mazzinian doctrine. For such he had no pity. In his view it was only fear, "the Almighty God of most politicians," that prevented the Moderates from accepting his position. "There can be no moderation," he said at a later date, "between good and evil, truth and error, progress and reaction." Unluckily truth to him too often meant adhesion to his own theories; and he could never forgive men, who, starting from his premisses, could not follow his logic to the end, though, like most men who pride themselves on being logical, he was often singularly incapable of accurate reasoning. It was this intolerance that wrecked so much of his after life, that made him waste his splendid powers in fighting men, by whose side he ought to have been working.

However, for better or worse, Mazzini required from his fellow-workers implicit acceptance of his theories,--theories which embraced every sphere of national life, religion and politics, literature and art. His chief political doctrines were republicanism and Italian Unity. How he pieced republicanism on his general theory of things, is the subject of another chapter. It is sufficient here to note that he was a republican, chiefly because he thought that democratic legislation was impossible under any form of monarchy. The belief was natural enough at the time. Few had been the popular reforms under any European crown, while the one genuine series of democratic laws had been passed by the French Republic or while the French monarchy was tottering to its fall. Mazzini may be pardoned, if at that time he sharply sundered monarchies and republics, and failed to see how imperfect was the classification. In Italy, Mazzini saw special circumstances that made for a republic. Her great memories were republican, though even he must have recognised how little the republics of medieval Italy had in common with his ideal polity. At Venice and his own Genoa the republican tradition was still dear. Italian republicanism was free from any recent memory of outrage and proscription, such as tarnished the name in France. And above all, he urged, there was no possible king for a united Italy. Each prince was pledged to Austria, each had proved his sympathy with reaction. Monarchy in Italy had "no splendid annals, no venerable traditions," no powerful nobility to buttress it. Two princes only had an army, which could help in the war of liberation; and neither the King of Piedmont nor the King of Naples would submit to the other without a bitter civil struggle. And the antipathies of North and South, though they might bow to the principle of a common republic, would never allow the Neapolitan to take a king from Piedmont. History has proved how wrong was his diagnosis, and temporarily and reluctantly he had glimpses of his error. More than once in after life, as we shall see, he alternated his republicanism with fits of half-belief in the Piedmontese monarchy.

His advocacy of Italian Unity rests on a surer bottom. That the country was fated to stagnate till the foreigner had gone, was common ground with every school of patriots. But when the Austrians had been driven out, was Italy to be a federation of states or one united country? Mazzini pleaded that the point at issue between him and the federalists was mainly one of practicability. This hardly took sufficient account of the school, which looked to Switzerland and America for its types, and preferred a federation on its own merits. But on the whole his contention was right. Every argument that told for federation, told yet more forcibly for unity. The strength of the federalist movement lay in the belief that unity was impossible. As yet, though Napoleon had foretold that unity must come, only a handful of Italians had dared to speak of it as a possible ideal. The great majority doubted whether Italy even wished to be united, whether, if she did, the facts of the European polity made it possible, whether unity could permanently stand the strain of the old provincial animosities. It was easy for them to adduce a host of facts,--the differences of race and temperament and tradition, the various habits formed by dissimilar systems of law and land tenure and education, the jealousies, still far from dead, that sundered province from province and city from city. Mazzini himself had felt the force of their arguments, and there was a moment, when even he had been shaken in his faith. He had little tangible reasoning to back his confidence. But he had the prophetic assurance of a great possibility, and his contagious faith made it a reality. He saw, when hardly another of his contemporaries saw it, that Italian Unity was a practicable ideal; his teaching informed the national resolve, that changed the seemingly impossible into a fact. To few men has it been given to create a great political idea; to fewer still to be not only the creator, but the chief instrument in realising it. Mazzini was both, and it gives him title to rank among the makers of modern Europe.

In the meantime the work of Young Italy was to organise and educate; and the only possible organisation was that of the secret society. Mazzini did not see its inherent weaknesses. Young Italy soon became as much the quarry of the spy and police agent as the Carbonari had been; and to the end of life Mazzini was the victim of informers, who won his easy confidence. The society developed an uncontrolled and irresponsible leadership, and its chief, eager as he was and sincerely eager to disclaim any desire to dictate, was too impatient, too self-confident to allow fair play to other men's convictions. As a means of preparing for war, it failed disastrously; and it proved an ill school for the parliamentary politics of later days. But in a country, where any open expression of liberal sentiment meant prison or exile, if not the scaffold, there was no alternative; and as an educating influence it came to be the greatest of the forces that made Italy. Its writings, smuggled into every corner of the land, moved many a young thinker to a passionate resolve, that bore its fruit in after times. At this stage, however, Mazzini was hardly looking to the slow results of political education. The hour of insurrection, he confidently believed, was near; the European revolution was threatening, and Italy must not be behind the sister nations. He was certain of success. Whatever difficulties might come to a nationalist movement without a backing from the native governments, however much Italians might distrust their own unaided strength, there was "no real obstacle for twenty-six millions of men, who wished to rise and fight for their country." Austria, he calculated, could at the best put two hundred thousand men into the field; he fondly counted on four million Italian volunteers. A people, that even under the leading of the Carbonari had made three revolutions in ten years, would rise again more readily and more victoriously at the inspiration of a nobler faith.

Marseilles

At Marseilles--Spread of Young Italy--Letter to Charles Albert--The Army Plot in Piedmont--At Geneva--The Savoy Raid.

When Mazzini arrived at Lyons, he found an unhopeful plan in preparation for raiding Savoy. Some 2000 Italian refugees, many of them Piedmontese who had fled through Genoa ten years before and stirred his boyish enthusiasm, were ready to march under the hardly concealed protection of the French government. It was still in the early days of the July monarchy, when it had yet not quite forgotten its revolutionary origin. But before the expedition could start, Louis Philippe's swift lapse into conservatism, which had already made him break his promises to the Romagnuols, abruptly ended the patronage of the authorities. The would-be raiders were scattered, and Mazzini joined a small party of republicans, who were starting for Corsica, on their way to join the insurgents in Romagna. The Corsicans were still Italian in sentiment as well as race, and the Carbonaro influence was strong in the island. Two thousand men offered themselves for service with the insurgents, but no funds were forthcoming to pay their passage, and before arrangements could be made the news arrived that the rising had collapsed.

Mazzini returned to Marseilles, and found himself among the refugees who had escaped from Central Italy. He recruited a few young patriots among them, and with their help he began to give body to his schemes. In a small room at Marseilles the young Titans started, with nothing but their own sincerity and daring, to revolutionise Italy. "We had no office, no helpers," he wrote of them in after years. "All day, and a great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles and letters, getting information from travellers, enlisting seamen, folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to save the expense of distributing the papers. We lived as equals and brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence. The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the future."

In later life Mazzini looked back longingly to the freshness and enthusiasm of those days, before failure had disillusioned him or misunderstanding estranged him from his friends. When he was well and happy, all the charm of his nature--his radiant idealism, his warm-hearted friendship, his contagious unselfishness--made him the beloved inspirer of the little band that worked under his orders. "He was," said an Italian of him at this time, "about 5 feet 8 inches high and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large "republican" hat; his long, curling black hair, which fell upon his shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the chiselled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his very youthful look and sweetness and openness of expression, would have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his dark eyes and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with his small and beautiful moustachios and beard. Altogether he was at that time the most beautiful being, male or female, that I had ever seen, and I have not since seen his equal." But sometimes even now overwork and impatience told on him, and he felt ill and exhausted. In such moods he must have been a trying man to be much with--irritable, exacting, requiring absolute submission from his fellow-workers, angry if they thought well of men whom he disliked.

For two years the little band worked on, sowing the seeds of revolution. It was a heroic enterprise. A few young men, without birth or wealth to help them, and, except for their leader, of no great ability, were planning to change the future of their country and preparing for war with a great military empire. To an outsider it must have seemed a madman's dream. But their masterful chief had taught them his own faith; and they, and thousands of their countrymen after them, found in it the power, to which few things are impossible. They worked with remorseless energy, month after month, corresponding with sympathisers all over the peninsula, planting lodges of Young Italy wherever a chance opened, drawing together the threads of conspiracy. They found abundant backing in Italy. Mazzini appealed to his followers there to work among the people by every road that the despotism left open, to bring children to school and teach them, to hold classes for men in the country districts, to circulate pictures and pamphlets and almanacs, which would insinuate patriotic ideas without exciting the suspicions of the police, to carry the cross of fire from town to town and village to village. "Climb the hills," he asked of them, "sit at the farmer's table, visit the workshops and the artisans, whom you now neglect. Tell them of their rightful liberties, their ancient traditions and glories, the old commercial greatness which has gone; talk to them of the thousand forms of oppression, which they ignore, because no one points them out." His appeal found a ready response. Hundreds of young Italians, fired by his own passion, gave themselves to the dangers and toils and the thousand small annoyances of a conspirator's life. It was no light call. "I know of no existence," said one of them in later life, "which requires such continual self-abnegation and endurance. A conspirator has to listen to all sorts of gossip, to soothe every variety of vanity, discuss nonsense seriously, feel sick and stifling under the pressure of empty talk, idle boasting, and vulgarity, and yet maintain an unmoved and complacent countenance. A conspirator ceases to belong to himself, and becomes the toy of anyone he may meet; he must go out when he would rather stay at home, and stay at home when he would rather go out; he has to talk when he would be silent, and to hold vigils when he would rather be in bed." And behind these petty vexations, which meant more to the Italians of that day than to a generation trained in strenuousness, lay the knowledge that discovery meant prison or exile, perhaps death. But they faced it with the courage of men who believed that the "wear and tear was smoothing the way, inch by inch, towards a noble and holy end," who looked to the day when through their labours their country would be lifted from the slough of misgovernment and low ideals. Life and everything they were ready to give for that. "Here are we," said Jacopo Ruffini to his fellow-conspirators at Genoa, "five young, very young men, with but limited means, and we are called on to do nothing less than overthrow an established government. I have a presentiment that few of us will live to see the final results of our labours, but the seed we have sown will shoot forth after us, and the bread we have cast upon the waters will be found again."

Mazzini might well be sanguine, with men like these behind him. He looked to his literature to do the rest. The journal of Young Italy was, as he described it, "a collection of political pamphlets," each of the infrequent and irregular numbers consisting of a hundred to two hundred pages, badly printed on bad paper. Later on, it was set up by French compositors, who knew no Italian, and whose misprints gave him infinite concern. He himself did most of the writing. It was terribly diffusive often and wanting in precision, but his articles redeem their literary defects by the glow of noble purpose, that made them thrill their readers, and gave them a potency, that perhaps no other political writings of the century attained to. Most of the remaining articles came from his fellow-workers. Mazzini tried to persuade Sismondi to contribute, but the historian, though sympathetic, was too opposed to some of his teaching to respond. Louis Napoleon, drawn by a fellow-feeling for conspiracy and scenting a chance to preach Bonapartism, sent an essay on Military Honour, with the thesis that soldiers are not bound by their oath to act against a revolution. Mazzini consented to insert it with many emendations, which apparently left little of its Bonapartist intention; but for some reason that does not appear, it was not published. The journal had a small circulation, and only reached a limited number of young educated men; it was indeed too literary for popular consumption. There seems to have been a larger demand for rules and instructions and popular tracts written by Gustavo Modena, afterwards to become one of the most famous Italian tragedians of his day. At all events there was a considerable contraband of printed matter, smuggled to Genoa or Leghorn or across the passes into Piedmont, inside barrels of pitch and pumice stone or bales of drapery or packages of sausages. So great became the demand, that secret presses were set up in Italy and the Ticino to supplement the output from Marseilles.

Such was Charles Albert, when Mazzini appealed to him to lead the nationalist movement. What was the exact purpose of the letter, will probably never be known. In after life Mazzini denied that there was any serious intention in it; he pleaded that he expressed the hopes of others rather than his own, and wrote it in the certainty that its appeal would not be heard. At the time he disclaimed, though not so emphatically, any hope of a response, and suggested that its object was to disillusion the Piedmontese of any belief in their king. There is some reason for thinking that the disclaimers must not be taken quite literally. When he wrote twenty years and more afterwards, he was anxious to prove that he had never lapsed from his republican faith. His earlier commentary was in a letter to a man, whom he did not know, and to whom he was not likely to express himself unreservedly. There are indications that he had not quite escaped the glamour that Charles Albert threw over the liberals, had not entirely abandoned all hope of winning him. The secret instructions of Young Italy, written a few months later, accepted the possibility of a monarchy as a "system of transition"; and in the subsequent army plot Mazzini intended to offer the King the leadership of the revolution. One would fain believe that his own interpretations do him injustice, that he did not write his glowing prose in utter insincerity. Were it otherwise, we must bow the head and sadly own a stain upon that noble life.

The letter, it must be confessed, was hardly calculated to make a convert. Threats alternate with overdone praise; the assumption of political omniscience, the claim of the young exile to speak for Italy, the magniloquent parade of the obvious, must have, like much else of his earlier writings, offended Italian common-sense and been extremely irritating. Much of it reads like a declamatory school essay on the duties of a constitutional king. But the lesson was true enough on its negative side. Charles Albert could find no safe foothold outside popular government; coercion, administrative reform, the support of Austria or France--none would permanently content or overawe his people. And if Charles Albert had retorted that to grant a constitution meant war with Austria, Mazzini would have welcomed the corollary. The King was right and Mazzini was wrong as to the inopportuneness of a national rising at the moment. But for the policy of another day, the letter has passages that speak like a trumpet call. "Sire, there is another road, leading to true power and a glorious immortality; another ally, safer and more strong than Austria or France. There is a crown more brilliant and sublime than that of Piedmont, a crown that waits the man, who dares to think of it, who dedicates his life to winning it, and scorns to dull its splendour with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have you never cast an eagle glance upon this Italy, so fair with nature's smile, crowned by twenty centuries of noble memory, the land of genius, strong in the infinite resources that only want a common purpose, girt round with barriers so impregnable, that it needs but a firm will and a few brave breasts to shelter it from foreign insult? Place yourself at the head of the nation, write on your flag, 'Union, Liberty, Independence.' Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of Italian freedom. Do this and we will gather round you, we will give our lives for you, we will bring the little states of Italy under your flag. Your safety lies on the sword's point; draw it and throw away the scabbard. But remember, if you do it not, others will do it without you and against you."

But the conspirators waited too long, and late in the spring an accident led to the discovery of the plot. The government cautiously followed up the clue, till it possessed itself of every detail of the conspiracy. Then it threw itself on its prey with a savage vengeance, that outside the Austrian provinces has had no parallel in Italy since the days of Fra Diavolo. Charles Albert, pitiless with fright, surrendered himself to the reactionary court party and fed their thirst for blood. Moral, sometimes physical, torture was inflicted on the victims to extort confession of their own or their confederates' guilt. Jacopo Ruffini, given the choice between execution and the betrayal of his friends, committed suicide in prison. Ten soldiers and two civilians were shot; fourteen more only escaped by flight; numbers were sent to longer or shorter imprisonment. Italy still execrates those courts-martial. Not all Charles Albert's later patriotism has purged his memory from their indelible shame; and while yet he reigned, the Genoese erased from their city every record of the brutal general who was his worst instrument. The humble lawyers and sergeants whom he shot, have a deathless homage from their country. "Ideas ripen quickly," said Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." It was the memory of these and other victims of tyranny, that helped to nerve Italian arms and send Italians to die in the battles that won their country's liberty.

About the beginning of July 1833 he moved to Geneva. He came there to be on the spot for a new plan of insurrection. The failure of the army plot only impelled him more feverishly into his fixed idea of a rising in Piedmont. He wished no doubt to punish Charles Albert, and well may he have been maddened by the savagery, which had sickened Europe. He wanted to "moralise" his party by proving that the terrorism had no fears for him and striking back at the victorious and brutal enemy. He thought that, if he was to keep his following together, he must make his cast now or never. Once allow the fire to slack down, and it would be beyond his power to rekindle it. He believed that half Europe was on the brink of revolution, that a republican movement in Italy would be the signal for republican risings in France and Spain and Germany. It was probably a fantastic dream; but he had surer ground for thinking that a revolt would fire the tinder throughout Italy. Exaggerated as his hopes were even here, the revolutionary spirit, that Young Italy created, had sunk deep. In the Genovesate and Savoy, in the Papal States and parts of Naples there was a good deal of material ready for an insurrection; and Mazzini had assured himself that on the appointed day guerilla bands would take to the mountains in several districts. The chances of success, indeed, were not bright at the best; but the raid was not quite the unpardonable playing with brave lives, that it seems at first sight. Mazzini, taking up a plan of the Carbonari at Paris, chose Savoy for the starting-point of the insurrection. He expected that the troops there would join the insurgents, and the revolutionary army would cross the Alps into Piedmont, while another band would land in the Riviera and rouse the Genoese country.

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