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MAZZINI:
A DISCOURSE GIVEN IN SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL,
FINSBURY, MARCH 17, 1872.
-X
BY
MONCUBE D. CONWAY.
PRINTED FOR THE AUTHOR.
1872.
�ï
�MAZZINI.
I shall make no apology for postponing the sub
ject which I had announced for this morning. Death
has assigned another theme—bade me stand aside,
and let the life of the great heart whose pulses it had
stilled utter our lesson for to-day.
Mazzini is dead—the bravest and the purest man that
■walked in Europe ! Still now is the brain ever busy
with the interests of Humanity ; the hands so warm
to the friends, so terrible to the enemies of mankind,
are folded on the breast. The white column that
stood amid the intrigues and corruptions of Europe—
a landmark in the desert—has—shall I say fallen ?
Nay, only the remnant of the physical scaffolding
amid which it rose has fallen ; the life there built up
•rises above the spot where he fell, beside Pisa’s lean
ing tower, more straight and shining than before—a
tower that did not lean, but amid 'the bending and
cringing stood erect and true to the last.
I claim, with a satisfaction which I hope is not
undue, that there is no place in which this man may
be more fitly honoured than that in which we are
gathered. Mazzini was a believer in the one supreme
�4
MAZZINI.
Father of Mankind, Inspirer of the Universe—in
the inviolable order of nature—in an ideal Humanity,
whose witness and martyr he beheld in the crucified
prophet of Nazareth, on whom he looked from a cross
of his own. His religious reason was as a glowing
sky, under which he habitually lived and adored. It
has been my high privilege to meet him often, but
never without reflecting, “ This is the most religious
man I ever knew I” The belief in God, which, under
its new name, Theism, has begun already to signify
a dogmatic distinction, with him was a conviction too
profound to be expressed in anything less than a con
secrated life ; and his life was Duty organised. It is
easy to utter praises and prayers to God, who does
not need them : not so easy to serve Humanity, which
needs service. He whose sublimely simple creed was,
“ God and the People,” did not transfer it from the
living heart to a dead symbol; he pressed it to his
breast till it became the essence of his nature, flowed
in his blood, expressed itself in every thought, word,
act—nay, moulded itself into the very eye-beam, voice,
and physiognomy of the man. If I say this is a fit
place to do homage to him, it is not because of any
pride in our attainments ; it is because from the day
that the foundations of this Society were laid it has
aimed to uphold and aspire to that ideal of a creed
expressed in character—a faith written in fidelity, of
which Mazzini’s life was the type and is the monument.
I am aware that this which I have stated is not the
general theory of the man. There is a police theory
of him, which is perhaps more universal. Happily
�MAZZINI.
5
but few English papers have uttered over the patriot’s
grave the exploded inventions of tyrants and their tools
—tyrants and tools who have either sunk into dis
honoured graves, or who move amid the detestation of
honest men. Shall we disprove the charge that Mazzini
was an assassin ? I might as well stop to prove that a
lily is not nightshade. Time has shown in their true
character those who made such charges. Miserable
self-seeking Kings of Italy, their hands reeking with
the best blood of their country, have accused him of
murder. The shameless assassin of liberty and of
peoples, who mounted his country’s throne as a mur
derer, and escaped from the ruin he had brought on it
as a coward, propagated such slanders in this country,
which his presence now pollutes. The King of Italy
lives to hear his own Assembly answer his calumnies
by a tribute to the friend of the People. The de
graded oppressor of France has read in the organs of
the party which chiefly sustained him in England
honourable estimates of the man he most dreaded.
Time has shown who were the assassins. And yet,
after particular falsehoods have perished, theories
based on them sometimes linger. Unhappily it be
came necessary, twice in the life of this man, that
eminent politicians of this country should try and
blacken his name for personal and political objects.
Once, twenty-eight years ago, when a Government
had lent itself to be the police-agent of the Continent
in opening Mazzini’s letters, it could only meet honest
English indignation by repeating charges it had to
retract, but which still influenced certain minds.
�6
MAZZINI.
Again, eight years ago, when a statesman was hunted
by partisans from a Government he now adorns, at
the bidding of the French Emperor, simply be
cause of his friendship for the great Italian, the
tyrant’s opinion of the patriot was echoed again, and
another page of English history sullied.
Therefore, one is hardly surprised that absurd esti
mates should still exist concerning Mazzini. We
have heard it alleged that he was a conspirator. He
was a conspirator : he and his brave comrades con
spired day and night how they might foil the foes of
their country, how they might defeat the enemies of
mankind. While others slept, ate, drank, made merry,
these aching brows took counsel together how they
might bring back peace, justice, religion, to their
broken and bleeding country. Tyrants have an evil
name for such conspiring of true-hearted men, but in
the end truth triumphs over words. A hundred years
ago, when America was still chained, the people of
Boston used to meet by night in their shipyards to
consult for their liberation; the agents of the king
called them meetings of caulkers,—that is, the caulkers
of ships,—and the word became equivalent to con
spirators. But now when the Americans assemble
for any national purpose, the convention is called a
“ Caucus.” The day will come when the conspirator
of to-day will be named with equal honour as one who
through the weary night watched and toiled for his
country’s dayspring.
TheD, Mazzini is called a revolutionist. This too he
was in the same sense. It is difficult for American and
�MAZZINI.
English people of the present day to weigh justly the
revolutionist of Italy. Our revolutions have passed.
Our Charles Alberts, and Victor Emmanuels, and
Napoleons belong to ancient history. England killed
them, overthrew them, built her freedom on the ruins
of their thrones. The English people—l’ejoicing in
charters of liberty whose every line is written in
blood—may now complacently rebuke those who are
passing through that old phase for following their
example. But our Saxon testimony stands—“Re
sistance to tyrants is service to God and stand it
will till the last throne of wrong shall fall.
These charges, urged against the man whom for
nearly half a century oppressors most dreaded, need
only be looked at steadfastly to be recognised as thin
veils which the ignoble have tried to draw over his
nobility. It is just such accusations that point us to
his truth and his devotion. The keenness and per
tinacity of the pursuit attested the patient devotion of
the man. He could not be bribed, he could not be
turned aside. Prisons could not change him. But
what did all this mean for him who has found repose
for the first time in the grave ? It meant that this
life was one continued offering to the Ideal which
had called it.
Behold him as a boy, of high social position, well
educated, with every fair prospect opening before
him. His father proud of his son’s gifts, his mother
full of high hopes, have never trained him to consider
the woes and wrongs of his country. But one day
his higher mother meets him ; it is mourning Italy
�8
MAZZINI.
who points to the poor soldiers of her cause who have
been beaten back, choked with dust and blood. Silent,
wondering, stricken to the heart, the boy gazes at the
men as they wander about the streets of Genoa, and
thenceforth all the bright prospects of a brilliant
career fade away. The young eyes can see only the
sorrow and the hope of Italy. He had already developed
a fine literary taste, he was by nature a philosophical
thinker ; but on these, and all the many worldly
interests which beckoned him, he turned his back, and
took the appealing hand of Liberty, who for her dower
could only offer him hatred, poverty, the prison.
And now behold him torn from his parents by
night, hurried he knows not whither, doomed to pass
weary days in a prison looking forth upon the sea and
the sky, at that period of life when youth is fullest of
eagerness to enter into life. Why is he treated thus
as a felon ? The Governor of Genoa told his father
why it was. He said, “ He is a young man of talent,
very fond of solitary walks by night, and habitually
silent as to the subject of his meditations; and the
Government is not fond of young men of talent, the
subject of whose musings is unknown to it.” That
is a sufficient justification of Mazzini’s life. The
Italy which he confronted was one which had nothing
better to do for its young thinkers than to imprison
them.
To sacrifice the prospect of a brilliant forensic
career—being, as he was, a born orator—to abandon
the still more alluring attractions of literature, in
which he had already gained successes, were not the
�3IAZZINI.
9
severest sacrifices to which he was called. Only those
who knew him can. estimate how much more severe it
was to so tender a nature to give pain to those who
loved him, to untwine the arms of affection which
would have withheld him from his task ; to see the
companions of his earliest years turn back with
averted faces ; to see friend after friend fall away.
What were prisons to this ? But he will form new
ties, will find nobler friends—friends of his thought,
brothers of his aim. He will; but alas ! this will only
bring a deeper tragedy. These young men, who
have dared to share his dream of a free and united
Italy, he must see mount the scaffold. He must see
the hope of Italy perish. Nay, more, he must hear
himself accused of hurrying those whom he most loved
to their graves,—he, the gentlest, most loving of men,
to whom the suffering of a bird could give pain, to whom
the suffering of men brought anguish unspeakable 1
There was a dreadful period in the beginning of
Mazzini’s struggle, when all the billows passed over
him and his cause. The little band of brave heartswhich
he had drawn together was shattered, scattered,—some
borne away to execution, some like himself to banish
ment. Then querulous suspicions fell on him ; friends
fell away ; even some whom he had trusted yielded,
turned against him, and against their cause. His own
pen has described, as it alone could, the agony through
which he passed. Let me read it to you.
“ Were I,” he says, “ to live for a century, I could
never forget the close of that year, or the moral tem
pest that passed over me, amid the vortex of which
�10
MAZZINI.
my soul was so nearly overwhelmed. . . . My soul
was overflowing with and greedy of affection ; as fresh
and eager to unfold to joy as in the days when sus
tained by my mother’s smile ; as full of fervid hope,
for others at least, if not for myself. But during
those fatal months there darkened around me such a
hurricane of sorrow, disillusion, and deception, as to
bring before my eyes, in all its ghastly nakedness, a
foreshadowing of the old age of my soul, solitary, in
a desert world, wherein no comfort in the struggle
was vouchsafed to me.
“ It was not only the overthrow for an indefinite
period of every Italian hope—the dispersion of the
best of our party ... it was the falling to pieces of
that moral edifice of faith and love from which alone
I had derived strength for the combat; the scepticism
I saw rising around me on every side ; the failure of
faith in those who had solemnly bound themselves
with me to pursue unshaken the path we had known
at the outset to be choked with sorrows ; the distrust
I detected in those most dear to me as to the motives
and intentions which sustained and urged me onward
in the evidently unequal struggle.
il When I felt that I was indeed alone in the world
—alone but for my poor mother, far away and un
happy also for my sake—I drew back in terror from
the void before me. Then, in that moral desert,
doubt came upon me. Perhaps I was wrong and the
world right ? Perhaps my idea was indeed a dream ?
Perhaps I had been led, not by an idea, but by my
idea—by the pride of my own conception ? The
�MAZZINI.
11
forms of those shot at Alessandria and Chambery rose
up before me like the phantoms of a crime and its
unavailing remorse. I could not recall them to life.
How many mothers had I caused to weep ! How
many more must learn to weep should I persist
in the attempt to arouse the youth of Italy to noble
action ! . . I was driven to the confines of madness.
At times I started from my sleep at night, and ran to
the window in delirium, believing that I heard the
voice of Jacopo Ruffini calling to me. At times I
felt irresistibly impelled to arise and go trembling
into the room next my own, fancying that I should
see there some friend whom I knew to be in prison,
or hundreds of miles away. The slightest incident—
a word, a tone—moved me to tears. Nature covered
with snow, as it then was around Grenchen, appeared
to me to wear a funereal shroud, beneath which it
invited me to sink. . . Whilst I was thus struggling
and sinking beneath my cross, I heard a friend whoso
room was a few doors distant from mine answer a
young girl -who, having some suspicion of my unhappy
condition, was urging him to break in upon my soli
tude, by saying, i Leave him alone ; he is in hi&
element, conspiring and happy.’ Ah, how little can
men guess the state of mind of others, unless they
regard it—and this is rarely done—by the light of a
deep affection ! ”
So sank the great heart into its tremendous sea
of cloud. ' As I have read these burning words I have
remembered another who was overshadowed by a
cloud ; but from its blackness came what though others
�12
MAZZINI.
might call thunder, to him was an angel’s voice, “ This
is my beloved.” I have remembered, too, the brave
words of the leader of a small band, gathered under the
shadow of a cross to serve a faith overhung with terror :
“ All our fathers passed under the cloud and through
the sea, and were baptised in the cloud and in the
sea.” In the long procession of the faithful and true,
here is another pilgrim, sad, wayworn, faint; he too
passed under the cloud—disappeared. But there a
voice whispered, “ This is my beloved !’"' The storm
of doubt passed, and there remained on him only its
baptism. Only fine souls can feel such misgivings ;
to them such pangs mean new birth. So was it with
Mazzini. In that darkness there came to him fresh
recognition of the sanctity of a man’s true life-task ;
how duty to it is duty to the Universe ; how it must be
pursued unfalteringly, whoever, whatever may bend
or break. The tranquil morning came when he could
say, “ Whether the sun shine with the serene splendour
of an Italian morn, or the leaden corpse-like hue of
the northern mist be above us, I cannot see that it
changes our duty. God dwells above the earthly
heaven, and the holy stars of faith and the future
shine within our souls, even though their light con
sume itself unreflected as the sepulchral lamp.”
Destiny made “ United Italy ” the expression of
Mazzini’s ideal, the visible shape of his aim. But
■they would little measure the largeness of the man
who should imagine that his patriotism was narrowed
to the separate interest of a single people. Indeed, the
chief criticism which has been made during these past
�MAZZINI.
13
weeks has been, that though Italy is united—though
Rome is its capital—yet Mazzini was not satisfied,
would not lay aside his armour, was still carrying on
his agitation as if nothing had been accomplished.
Such criticisms are attestations that his aim meant
something more than a territorial scheme. His hope
for Italy was bound up with his hope for Humanity.
More than thirty years ago Robert Browning imagined
a poet who saw typified in the reintegration of Rome
the triumph of mankind ; one who saw Rome emerg
ing from her weeds,
an established point of light whence rays
Traversed the world.
By his side the hermit of that thought sat unrecog
nised—the poet of that vision, the living Sordello for
whom there could be no resuscitated Rome, no risen
Italy, until with them was a risen world. Suffer me
to quote a letter written by Mazzini to myself in
1865 concerning the duty of America, after she had
conquered and expelled the internal foe, Slavery,
which had so long fettered her energies.
He wrote :—“ There are for every great nation
two stages of life. The first may be devoted to self
constitution, to inward organization, to the fitting up,
so to say, of the implements and activities through
which a nation can undertake the work appointed,
and proceed to fulfil the task which has been ordained
for her by God for the good of all mankind. For a
nation is a living task ; her life is not her own, but a
force and a function in the universal Providential
�14
MAZZINI.
scheme. The second begins when, after having secured
and asserted her own self, after having collected and
shown to all the strength and the capability which
breathe in her for the task, the nation enters the-lists
of Humanity, and links herself by noble deeds with
the general aim. . . . You (of America) have be
come a leading nation. You may act as such. In
the great battle which is fought throughout the world
between right and wrong, justice and arbitrary rule,
equality and privilege, duty and egotism, republic
and monarchy, truth and lies, God and idols, your
part is marked : you must accept it.”
Hardly possible, one would say, that one who thus
sees in nationalities a grand distribution of labours,
each separate function a member and organ of Hu
manity,—hardly possible that one who for this had
seen his comrades perish, and for it given himself as
a living, a daily dying sacrifice, should now join in
thoughtless enthusiasm because Italy is united under
one sway of servility, and Rome has exchanged a
weak Pope for a degraded Monarch. The frivolous
may say this indicates perversity and egotism 1 “ He
has no joy in his country’s triumph because it has
not come in the way he prescribed.” But I trust
there are some who will see, in this cessation of the
struggle for a noble Italy only in death, the highest
proof of the loftiness of this man’s aim.
The temptations held out to induce him to take now
the repose he had earned were strong. In London,
where he had lived in an humbler way than his means
warranted, in order that he might aid his needier
�MAZZINI.
15
countrymen and his cause, lie was surrounded by de
voted friends, whose constant affection, whose cultured
society might have given to his last years something
of that beauty which had been denied him through
life. One of these—a Member of Parliament—who
had been as his brother through many years, wrote
three days ago these private words, which I venture
to quote :—“ His friends—I among others—pleaded
with him to leave the fight, and live his few last years
amongst us in peace and literary activity only. We
said, £ You have put your country on the road to pro
gress ; you have gained independence ; the rest is a
work of time, of more time than is yours. Dis
appointment and apparent failure will attend the first
steps.’ We failed because he was no egotist. While
there was anything not achieved, and while he had
power to move, he could not rest. Had he consented
to end his political life before he yielded his mortal
life, he would have received this side the grave the
laurels that now will adorn the cemetery.”
It is a hard thought for those who knew him and
loved him, but it is surely true. A nature only a little
less devout—a spirit very slightly more self-iegaiding
—would be here now, the centre and charm of a lov
ing circle. To him such soft ties were harder to break
through than chains of iron, but not the tenderest
could hold back this devotee. To him the world was
visionary, Duty was the solid and palpable thing.
Where he trod others might see but void : he felt the
granite under- his feet.
So lived, so moved in the eyes of Europe, that
�16
MAZZINI.
apparition of nobleness, Joseph Mazzini ; thus and
so Death found him, with eyes and hands still stretched
forward—with feet still pursuing that aim which had
called him in his boyhood, and which he knew to be
the Divinely-assigned task of his life. He is gone,
and the world is so much the poorer. But the young
men of Italy will plant on his grave the cypress which
he gave them for an emblem,—emblem of mourning,
but of the faith that is evergreen ; they will write
there his and their motto, “Ora e sempre,” “Now
and for ever ; ” they will remember there his words
“ Martyrdom is never barren, . . . because each man
reads on the brow of the martyr a line of his own
duty.”
THE END.
GEORGE LEVEY, PRINTER, WEST HARDING STREET, LONDON.
�
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Mazzini: a discourse given in South Place Chapel, Finsbury, March 17 1872
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Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 16 p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. Printed by George Levey, West Harding Street, London.
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Republicanism
Italy
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Giuseppe Mazzini
Morris Tracts
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Text
I
MEMOIR
OF
JOSEPH MAZZINI.
FROM THE “LONDON REVIEW,”
OF NOVEMBER 17, 186 0.
PRICE ONE PENNY.
LONDON:
FARRAH AND DUNBAR, 47, HOLYWELL STREET,
STRAND; HOLYOAKE & CO., 147, FLEET STREET;
BARKER BROTHERS, M’LEANS BUILDINGS, GREAT
NEW STREET, FLEET STREET.
1861.
�The vital question agitating our age is a question of education. The
point is not to establish a new order of things by violence. An order
established by violence is always tyrannical, even when it is better than
the old. The point is to overthrow by force the brutal force that now
arrays itself against every attempt at improvement; to propose, for the
consent of the nation, set at liberty to express its will, an order which
appears better, and by every possible means to educate men to develope
it, and to act accordingly. Under the theory of rights we can rise in
insurrection and overthrow obstacles, but we cannot strongly and dur
ably found the harmony ot all elements which compose the nation.
Under the theory of happiness, of well-being, set up as the first object of
life, we should make men egotists, worshippers of the material, who
would carry their old passions into the new order of things, and corrupt
it in a few months. We need, therefore, to find a principle of education
superior to such a theory. * * * * This principle is duty. It
behoves us to convince all men that, as all are children of one God, they
have all to be here on earth the executor’s of one Law—that every one
of them ought to live, not for himself, but for others,—that the object of
their life is not to be more or less happy, but to render themselves and
others better,—that to contend against injustice and error, for the benefit
of their brethren, and wherever they may be found, is not only a right,
but a duty—a duty which cannot be neglected without sin—a duty for
the whole of life.
*
*
*
*
Whatever strong faith springs from the ruins of old exhaustion will
transform the existing social order, because every strong faith endeavours
to apply itself to all the branches of human activity; because the earth has
always, in all epochs, endeavoured to conform itself to the Heaven in
which it believed; because the whole history of Humanity repeats under
diverse forms, in stages different with the times, those words registered
in the Sabbath speech of Christendom, “ Thy kingdom come. Thy will
be done on earth as it is in heaven I”
Be this, Brethren! better understood and applied than hitherto, your
confession of faith, your prayer. Repeat it, and act so that it may be
realised.—Mazzini’s Duties of Man,
�JOSEPH MAZZINI.
“ An organised and powerful Italy is henceforth for the interest of
Europe.”—Constitutionnel, Oct., 1860.
To win recognition from the bitterest and most calumnious ofoppo
nents, to have one’s life-work acknowledged by those most interested
in thwarting it and most careful to deny its worth, to be crowned
with oak and laurel by the most reluctant hands: this is the rare
fate of Giuseppe Mazzini. Ceaselessly and recklessly vilified by
the Times, mobbed and threatened even in newly-liberated Naples,
proscribed by the Piedmontese Statesman, and hated by the French
Emperor, the great Italian yet holds his place; is still lovingly and
reverentially owned by victorious Garibaldi as the Father of Italy;
while the Constitutionnel, speaking with authority, gives an Imperial
adhesion to his “dream” of Italian unity; and the Times (Oct.
26,1860) endorses that adhesion, though with the grudging—“ This
is a truth, let it come from what quarter it may.” Once before, the very
spirit of falsehood compelled by a stronger power, it had slipped out
between its slanders those few notable words which do homage
at once to his power and to his nobility—“ Mazzini’s hiding-place
is in the heart of every Italian, and there his enemies will one day
find him.”
Just thirty years ago, a young man of five-and-twenty, a law
student, and the son of a physician in Genoa, was arrested in Pied
mont, on suspicion of Carbonarism,—such Carbonarism as the King
of Piedmont himselfhad professed only ten years before. In prison
his thoughts were of the passing revolutions in France and Poland;
and he came out, after some few months, to begin his life of exile and
�4
apostleship, by founding the association of “ La G-iovine Italia,”
starting at the same time, and under the same title, at Marseilles, a
monthly journal, treating of the political, moral, and literary con
dition of Italy,—in a word, a revolutionary journal, aiming at
Italian regeneration. Thirty years of martyrdom, of unflagging
zeal, of marvellous activity, of incessant self-sacrifice, and the boy’s
dream becomes an European necessity: something more than
that—“ henceforth for the interest of Europe.”
So much, at least, must be conceded to Mazzini, however widely
we may differ from his views, and whatever strictures we may be
prone to pass upop his conduct in the several circumstances of his
career. His stem republicanism may yet be pronounced chimeri
cal ; his carelessness of political means and parties, and his distrust
of princes and diplomatists, may seem unwise, and for a while brand
him with the stigma of “ The Impracticablewe may doubt his
policy and disapprove his alliances or his enmities; but, after all, we
must allow that the work he set himself to do.— which for
twenty years was almost only his—is done, and that his pro
phecy is fulfilled. His worst enemies bow down their heads to
that.
And his friends may be content with that. To them, however,
he is indeed the prophet in the completest sense of the word: with
all its holiness, and all its dignity, and all its more than royal claim to
allegiance and to worship. No man ever won more ardent love,
more thorough trust and following. From the noble boy-brothers
Bandiera, who, penetrated by his doctrines, could only—even
against his persuasionf—devote their lives as an example to their
countrymen; to old Foresti—Pellico’s fellow-prisoner at Speilberg—
whose first act upon being liberated was to seek the Apostle,
and offer him his service; and yet more recently to Pisacane,
leading that forlorn hope which was the summoning of Sicily and
the first note of Garibaldi’s triumph; men of all ages and all classes
and conditions have gathered to him, like warriors round a beacon,
ready and determined—a brotherhood of most devoted chivalry.
And not alone by his Italians is he loved and honoured. Carlyle
6poke out for him in England, sixteen years ago, such words of
hearty and well-judging praise as, on the score of personal charac
ter, should have shut the mouth of any honest enemy for ever.
The one noblest Frenchman of them all, good old Lamennais, was
his closest friend and comrade. The Poles loved him as only exiles
love, and esteemed him beyond all men. Those who have known
him intimately, speak of him with more than womanly affection.
For he himself loves and trusts; and love and trust ever command
their like.
Thirty years a conspirator, and yet his trustfulness is almost
child-like. That is the secret of his wonderful escapes from
t But misled and trapped by Austrian spies, to whom an English Home Secretary
gave their unsealed letters.
�5
danger; for his fearlessness and daring‘are not doubted, even by
the Times, whatever the Times' writers say. In Marseilles, the police
of the citizen-king could not for a whole twelvemonth track him,
though his Italian propagandism never halted. In Switzerland
and in England the hired assassin, face to face with him, quailed,
confessed, and asked for pardon. In Paris or in Genoa, under
double sentence of death from Charles Albert, and wanted by the
imperial police, he went and came, as his presence was necessary,
and no man stayed hinu Only he was not so incapable a general,
while he confronted peril, to foolishly give himself up to those who
sought his ruin. Royal Saul never called young David cowardly
for hiding in the caverns of Adullam; and none who ever stood
beside Mazzini ever thought of his being charged with cowardice.
That falsehood may fall back unheeded into the hollow heart of him
who was base enough to utter it. How Garibaldi, the generous,
the brave to very recklessness, would laugh to hear his friend
accused of selfish fear; the friend to whom Garibaldi’s own general,
Medici, a hero too, wrote, in 1849:—“ His conduct has been for
us, who were witnesses of it, a proof that to the great qualities of
the citizen Mazzini joinsthe courage and intrepidity of the soldier.”
Medici writes this in telling of Garibaldi’s advance on Monza, just
previous to the capitulation of Milan, in which advance, and after
wards during the retreat to Como, Mazzini served as a private
soldier. “In this march, full of difficulty and danger, in the
midst of continual alarms” (Medici is now speaking of the retreat),
“ the strength of soul, the intrepidity, the decision, which Mazzini
possesses in so remarkable a degree, and of which he afterward
gave so many proofs at Rome, never failed him, and excited the
admiration of the bravest.”
It was during this march that he gave up his cloak to one of the
young volunteers more slightly habited than himself. The same ten
der solicitude for others was evinced at Rome, where he found time
on one occasion to take an English family to the palace-top, and
showed them the city defences, in order to allay their fears. His
firmness and tact in moments of difficulty are equally remarkable.
Once a deputation from some part of Rome demanded of him an
interview, requiring the dismissal of the “ military staff.” “ From
whom did they come?” he asked. “From the people.” “Well,
he was the people’s servant, but not their slave. If the people
trusted him, well and good, he would do his best; if not, they
could withdraw the authority with which they had invested him.
But when they said the people, how many had deputed them ?”
“Some few hundreds only.” “Some few hundreds,” he remarked,
“were not the people; but he would listen even to the few.
Which members of the military staff did they wish dismissed, and
what the complaints against them ?” The complainants did not
even know who constituted the staff; their objections were only
general; they saw their error, and retired. But perhaps the most
striking of all anecdotes concerning him is that of his behaviour
�6
after the French had entered Rome; when, to prove that his power
had not been maintained by terror, and also to observe the bearing
of his Romans, he for several days walked unarmed and unpro
tected through the streets, till his friends told him he was mad. But
no man touched him, or said evil word. Even the French soldiers
were awed by the sublime spectacle of that pale, worn, grey man
(his hair grizzled with the past month’s anxiety and toil) walk
ing amidst them, severe and silent, like the Ghost of the
Republic.
In private life, Mazzini is the perfect gentleman, accomplished,
gracious, and with a ready courtesy and genial warmth of expres
sion that wins regard upon the instant. No orator, as Kossuth is;
but in the midst of a few friends, none is more eloquent, or pours
himself in a conversation more rich and various. At the same
time he is singularly unobtrusive, and averse to anything like show
or notoriety. His mode of life is of the simplest. His lodging
was for many years in London one little room, where he supported
himself by his unpolitical writings. His little patrimony he gave to
the Italian cause. He, to whom thousands have intrusted their
lives and fortunes, whose means only of late were said to be equal
to Garibaldi’s, who was able but recently to fit out two expedi
tions to the Roman States (suppressed by the Piedmontese autho
rities), he knows no luxury or self-indulgence except his
cigar—his one constant companion—his only housemate and con
soler.
In person Mazzini is rather below the middle height, slight, and
spare (in youth, like our own Milton, he is said to have been
exceedingly beautiful), with a small but finely-proportioned head;
eyes like coals of fire; black hair (prematurely grey since the
occupation of Rome by the French) ; a face sad and lofty, not so
stern as Dante’s, but full of heroic gentleness; and a hand that
grasps you with right Saxon heartiness. That is the outward
presentment of the man who has set his stamp upon Europe—a
stamp such as none has set since Loyola; a man whom, if it please
you, you may compare with Loyola, for his will, and for his strength
of character, and for his genius in organizing and commanding
men; but not for the fierce licentiousness of Ignatius’s earlier
years, nor for the perversity of intellect which made the Spaniard
seek his good in that strange raising of the devil so banefully known
to the world as Jesuitism. For Mazzini’s private life has been
always pure—irreproachable in everything; and his public creed,
consistently acted out, has been ever the doing good only by good
means. Our peace friends will except of course his advocacy of
insurrection, and his gallant defence of Orsini, when the admirers
of Brutus and Harmodius (to say nothing of Ehud, who took
God’s message” to King Eglon) fell foul upon that assassin.
On that question of continual, however hopeless, insurrection
which Mazzini inculcated, two opinions may be held, even as a mere
matter of policy. While Cavour and his constitutional admirers
�represent it as impeding the progress of Italian freedom, Mazzini’s
friends on the other hand insist that it has prepared, and been the
best, and indeed the necessary preparation, for all that has been
accomplished. It is, indeed hard, in a long series of unsuccessful
enterprises in Italy—blamed because unsuccessful—to find one
looking more forlornly hopeless at the outset than that which but a
few months since had its poor beginning upon the coast of Sicily.
That, too, let it be said, was in the Mazzini programme. And is not
the blood of the martyrs the seed of the church ? Verily, as it was
in the beginning, and shall be.
Of Mazzini’s public acts and written works we need not give a
detailed account. It is the old history of apostolic endeavour; his
writings a tissue of protests against present wrong and teachings of a
higher future; his deeds a series of—plots, if you will, conspiracies
and insurrections. In 1831-2 he organized his “Young Italy,”
from Marseilles, flooding Italy with pamphlets, through the aid of
Italian merchant seamen touching at that port. In 1834 he planned
the expedition into Savoy. Immediately after that failure, he, in
conjunction with his Polish friends, founded the “ Association of
Young Europe,” as the nucleus of a new holy alliance of the
peoples. In 1837, hunted out of Italy, France, and Switzerland,
he came to England, and remained here, “conspiring,” till the
revolution of ’48. In February, 1849, he was elected member of
the Tuscan Provisional Government; and on the 29 th of March, 1849,
ascended the Capitol, to stand before the world as Roman Trium
vir. The acts of that triumvirate are matters of history. Worthy
of the most heroic days of the Eternal City, they testify at once to
the greatness and capacity of the statesman, and the magnanimity
of the man. That was his success, a successful culmination, how
ever transient. And yet he oversteps success to the one steep
height beyond. Grander even than triumph, so far as he is
personally concerned, is the self-abnegation of his recent letter to
Victor Emmanuel. As, during the Milanese campaign, he, the
republican, and, for his murdered friend Ruffini’s sake, the
personal foe of Charles Albert, kept his republicanism in leash, and
stood, as faithful henchman might, beside the king while fighting
honestly for Italy, so now, let who will declare to the contrary, he
gives up all for Italian unity, ready in his most patriotic self-sacri
fice, and, let it be said also, in his faith in God’s providence, to
renounce that dearer “dream” of Italian republicanism, as the
price of a really united Italy, an’ Italy strong enough to live her
own life, whatever that may be. How great that sacrifice only
those who have shared his dream can in any wise appreciate.
The great outward deeds of the world shadow and eclipse all
else. Art, science, literature, all are dwarfed before the giant strife
of peoples for their liberties, or that of nation pitted against
nation, albeit in the vulgarest of kingly wars. So far we have spoken
only of the politician. But Mazzini would have been notable
under any circumstances. Master of his own Italian, at the same time
�8
thoroughly conversant with European literature, he is not only the
commentator upon Dante, but also, or rather was before 1848, an
esteemed contributor to the highest and most thoughtful periodi
cals of France and England. He could spare time from politics to
Erovide for the relief and education of poor organ-grinding boys in
iondon; and from political polemics, to write in his Apostolato
Popolare, for the benefit of Italian workmen, a sermon “ On the
Duties of Man,” of which Kingsley or Maurice would be proud.
There is no such masterly exposition of the errors and shortcom
ings of the Economic and the Socialist Schools as that contributed
by him to the columns of the People s Journal; nor any so pro
found criticism on Carlyle as his in the Westminster Review. His
Republique et Royaute en Italie is one of the very few good
histories that exist. In all things, indeed, Mazzini is a man of
mark, a man of notable worth, a man deserving of renown, and
whom to study and to know must be of advantage to us all.
LONDON:
BARKER & CO., PRINTERS, M’LEAN’S BUILDINGS, GREAT
NEW STREET, FLEET STREET.
�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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Title
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Memoir of Joseph Mazzini
Description
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Place of publication: London
Collation: 8 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the 'London Review', November 17 1860. Author not named; possibly Emilie Ashurst Venturi. Printed by Barker & Co.
Publisher
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Farrah and Dunbar; Holyoake & Co.; Barker Brothers
Date
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1861
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G4945
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Republicanism
Italy
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[Unknown]
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Memoir of Joseph Mazzini), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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Text
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English
Giuseppe Mazzini