FOOTNOTES:
[1] This and the two following letters deal, it will be seen, with "the Italian question" in 1859, when the peace of Europe was disturbed by the combined action of France and Sardinia against Austria in the cause of Italian independence. Of these three letters the first was written two days after the defeat of the Austrians at Magenta, followed by the entrance into Milan of the French, and the second a few days before the similar victory of the French and Sardinian armies at Solferino.
[2] Few readers need be reminded of the position of Tell in the list of Swiss patriots (pace the "acutest historical investigation," which puts him in the list of mythical personages) in the early part of the fourteenth century; of Arnold von Winkelried who met the heroic death, by which he secured his country's freedom, at Sempach in 1386; or of Ulrich Zuingli, the Swiss Protestant leader of his time, who fell at Cappel, in the war of the Reformed against the Romish cantons, in 1531. At the battle of Morgarten, in 1315, twenty thousand Austrians were defeated by no more than thirteen hundred Swiss, with such valor that the name of the victors' canton was thereupon extended to the whole country, thenceforth called Switzerland.
It may be further noted that Arnold of Sempach is, with Leonidas, Curtius, and Sir Richard Grenville, named amongst the types of "the divinest of sacrifices, that of the patriot for his country," in Mr. Ruskin's Preface, "Bibliotheca Pastorum," Vol. i. p. xxxiii.
[3] The year of the Lombard insurrection, when Radetzky, the Austrian field-marshal, defeated the insurgents at Custozza near Verona. Radetzky died in 1858.
[4] The Prince Frederick William, now Emperor of Germany (having succeeded his brother Frederick William IV. in January, 1861), was at the date of this letter Regent of Prussia, and Commander-in-chief of the Prussian forces.
[From the "Scotsman," July 23, 1859.]
THE ITALIAN QUESTION.
Berlin, June 15.
You would have had this second letter sooner, had I not lost myself, after despatching the first, in farther consideration of the theory of Non-Intervention, or minding one's own business. What, in logical terms, is the theory? If one sees a costermonger wringing his donkey's tail, is it proper to "intervene"? and if one sees an Emperor or a System wringing a nation's neck, is it improper to intervene? Or is the Intervention allowable only in the case of hides, not of souls? for even so, I think you might find among modern Italians many quite as deserving of intervention as the donkey. Or is interference allowable when one person does one wrong to another person, but not when two persons do two wrongs to two, or three to three, or a multitude to a multitude; and is there any algebraic work on these square and cube roots of morality wherein I may find how many coadjutors or commissions any given crooked requires to make it straight? Or is it a geographical question; and may one advisably interfere at Berwick but not at Haddington? Or is there any graduated scale of intervention, practicable according to the longitude? I see my way less clearly, because the illustrations of the theory of Non-intervention are as obscure as its statement. The French are at present happy and prosperous; content with their ruler and themselves; their trade increasing, and their science and art advancing; their feelings towards other nations becoming every day more just. Under which circumstances we English non-interventionalists consider it our duty to use every means in our power of making the ruler suspected by the nation, and the nation unmanageable by the ruler. We call both all manner of names; exhaust every term of impertinence and every method of disturbance; and do our best, in indirect and underhand ways, to bring about revolution, assassination, or any other close of the existing system likely to be satisfactory to Royals[5] in general. This is your non-intervention when a nation is prosperous.
On the other hand, the Italian nation is unhappy and unprosperous; its trade annihilated, its arts and sciences retrograde, its nerve and moral sense prostrated together; it is capable only of calling to you for help, and you will not help it. The man you have been calling names, with his unruly colonels, undertakes to help it, and Christian England, with secret hope that, in order to satisfy her spite against the unruly colonels, the French army may be beaten, and the Papacy fully established over the whole of Italy—Christian England, I say, with this spiteful jealousy for one of her motives, and a dim, stupid, short-sighted, sluggish horror of interruption of business for the other, takes, declaratively and ostensibly, this highly Christian position. "Let who will prosper or perish, die or live—let what will be declared or believed—let whatsoever iniquity be done, whatsoever tyranny be triumphant, how many soever of faithful or fiery soldiery be laid in new embankments of dead bodies along those old embankments of Mincio and Brenta; yet will we English drive our looms, cast up our accounts, and bet on the Derby, in peace and gladness; our business is only therewith; for us there is no book of fate, only ledgers and betting-books; for us there is no call to meddle in far-away business. See ye to it. We wash our hands of it in that sea-foam of ours; surely the English Channel is better than Abana and Pharpar, or than the silver basin which Pilate made use of, and our soap is of the best almond-cake."
I hear the Derby was great this year.[6] I wonder, sometimes, whether anybody has ever calculated, in England, how much taxation the nation pays annually for the maintenance of that great national institution. Observe—what I say of the spirit in which the English bear themselves at present, is founded on what I myself have seen and heard, not on what I read in journals. I read them little at home—here I hardly see them. I have no doubt that in the Liberal papers one might find much mouthing about liberty, as in the Conservative much about order, it being neither liberty nor order which is wanted, but Justice. You may have Freedom of all Abomination, and Order of all Iniquity—if you look for Forms instead of Facts. Look for the facts first—the doing of justice howsoever and by whatsoever forms or informalities. And the forms will come—shapely enough, and sightly enough, afterwards. Yet, perhaps, not till long afterwards. Earnest as I am for the freedom of Italy, no one can hope less from it, for many a year to come. Even those Vaudois, whom you Presbyterians admire so much, have made as yet no great show of fruit out of their religious freedom. I went up from Turin to Torre di Lucerna to look at them last year. I have seldom slept in a dirtier inn, seldom seen peasants' cottages so ill built, and never yet in my life saw anywhere paths so full of nettles. The faces of the people are interesting, and their voices sweet, except in howlings on Sunday evening, which they performed to a very disquieting extent in the street till about half-past ten, waking me afterwards between twelve and one with another "catch," and a dance through the village of the liveliest character. Protestantism is apt sometimes to take a gayer character abroad than with us. Geneva has an especially disreputable look on Sunday evenings, and at Hanover I see the shops are as wide open on Sunday as Saturday; here, however, in Berlin, they shut up as close as you do at Edinburgh. I think the thing that annoyed me most at La Tour, however, was the intense sectarianism of the Protestant dogs. I can make friends generally, fast enough, with any canine or feline creature; but I could make nothing of those evangelical brutes, and there was as much snarling and yelping that afternoon before I got past the farmhouses to the open hill-side, as in any of your Free Church discussions. It contrasted very painfully with the behavior of such Roman Catholic dogs as I happen to know—St. Bernard's and others—who make it their business to entertain strangers. But the hill-side was worth reaching—for though that Lucerna valley is one of the least interesting I ever saw in the Alps, there is a craggy ridge on the north of it which commands a notable view. In about an hour and a half's walking you may get up to the top of a green, saddle-shaped hill, which separates the Lucerna valley from that of Angrogna; if then, turning to the left (westward), you take the steepest way you can find up the hill, another couple of hours will bring you to a cone of stones which the shepherds have built on the ridge, and there you may see all the historical sites of the valley of Angrogna as in a map—and as much of Monte Viso and Piedmont as clouds will let you. I wish I could draw you a map of Piedmont as I saw it that afternoon. The air was half full of white cumulus clouds, lying nearly level about fifteen hundred feet under the ridge; and through every gap of them a piece of Piedmont with a city or two. Turin, twenty-eight miles away as the bird flies, shows through one cloud-opening like a handful of golden sand in a pool of blue sea.
I've no time to write any more to-day, for I've been to Charlottenburg, out of love for Queen Louise.[7] I can't see a good painting of her anywhere, and they show her tomb by blue light, like the nun scene in Robert le Diable. A German woman's face, if beautiful at all, is exquisitely beautiful; but it depends mainly on the thoughtfulness of the eyes, and the bright hair. It rarely depends much upon the nose, which has perhaps a tendency to be—if anything—a little too broadish and flattish—perhaps one might even say in some cases, knobbish. (The Hartz mountains, I see, looking at them from Brunswick, have similar tendencies, less excusably and more decidedly.) So when the eyes are closed—and for the soft hair one has only furrowed marble—and the nose to its natural disadvantages adds that of being seen under blue light, the general effect is disappointing.
Frederick the Great's celebrated statue is at the least ten yards too high[8] from the ground to be of any use; one sees nothing but the edges of the cloak he never wore, the soles of his boots, and, in a redundant manner, his horse's tail. Under which vertically is his Apotheosis. In which process he sits upon the back of an eagle, and waves a palm, with appearance of satisfaction to himself, and it is to be hoped no danger of any damage to three stars in the neighborhood.
Kiss's Amazon makes a good grotesque for the side of the Museum steps; it was seen to disadvantage in London. The interior of the gallery is very beautiful in many ways; and Holbein's portrait of George Gyzen is worth coming all the way from England to see only ten minutes. I never saw so noble a piece of work of its kind in my life.
Believe me, etc.,
J. Ruskin.