To their leader those weeks must have been a time of fearful strain. Garibaldi's bad generalship and bad temper shortened a resistance, that was hopeless from the first. The losses were heavy, and Mameli and Manara fell with many another of Mazzini's friends. After the ill-fated revolt of the Mountain on June 13, there was no hope of diversion from the republicans at Paris. At home, though the Assembly loyally supported him, he had to meet the petulant criticism of Garibaldi and the intriguers who made him their tool. To him it was a matter of clear duty that the Republic should fight on to the end. "Monarchies may capitulate, republics die and bear their testimony even to martyrdom." When the last defences broke down, he wished to make a desperate fight from street to street, or retire with the Assembly and the army to the Apennines, throw themselves on the Austrian lines, and keep the republican flag flying in Romagna. The army was prepared for either course; but the Assembly had no stomach for the sacrifice, and Mazzini, bitterly reproaching them, resigned his office on the eve of the city's fall. Sullenly Rome surrendered, and the victors, as they entered the city, hung back before the threatening populace. Garibaldi, with three thousand who disdained surrender, began his great retreat. "Hunger and thirst and vigil," he promised them, "but never terms with the enemy." Mazzini would have been more consistent, had he gone out with them. Perhaps he had no liking for a desperate fragment of his rejected scheme; perhaps the personal tension with Garibaldi was too great. For some days he stayed on in Rome. He was worn out and overstrung; he had not slept on a bed since the siege began, he had fed on coarse and insufficient food. In two short months he had grown old; his beard was grey, his face cadaverous, his manner, so Margaret Fuller noted, "sweet and calm, but full of a more fiery purpose than ever." He wandered defiantly about the streets. It was partly that he wanted, by offering himself to any assassin's knife, to kill the lie of the Catholic press that he had forced a hated tyranny upon the Romans. Besides, he had a desperate hope that he might rouse the people and the remaining troops to one more struggle. His whole soul was possessed by the passion to protest on to the end against the triumph of brute force. It is strange that the French did not arrest him; perhaps they knew too well the temper of the people. At last Gustavo Modena's wife and Margaret Fuller persuaded him to withdraw. He had no passport, but he found the means of sailing to Marseilles; there he succeeded in eluding the French police and travelled on to Geneva.
Chapter VIII
London Again
1849-1859. Aetat 44-54
In Switzerland—Life in London—English friends—English politics and literature—The Friends of Italy.
Mazzini stayed for a few weeks in a quiet hotel near his old quarters at Geneva, then moved to Lausanne, where he and a few more refugees, Saffi, his co-Triumvir, and Pisacane among them, took a small house (the Villa Montallegro) near the town on the hills that overlook the lake. Here he and his friends plunged at once into the old eager work of correspondence and journalism, as if the struggle at Rome had been a holiday. Another ephemeral paper, L'Italia del Popolo, was launched on its short career. His head was full of literary schemes,—an Italian translation of the Gospels with an introduction, a new Encyclopædia, which should do for religious democracy what the old Encyclopædia had done for the thought of the eighteenth century. It was a quiet, not unhappy time, that must have recalled something of the old days at Marseilles. At times indeed he was miserable and pessimistic as of old, brooding over lost friendships, chafing at the triumph of brute force in Italy. But except in these hours of taciturn gloom, when he avoided all companionship, he was serene and genial, sometimes brightening into anecdote and humour, when the party settled down to the evening's talk and chess.
In the spring of 1850 the agitation in France at the proposed revision of the constitution excited vague hopes of a revolution there; and with some fatuous idea that he could help to stop Louis Napoleon's progress to empire, Mazzini went to Paris, only to discover how empty was the expectation. On the journey he lost a note-book, in which for many years he had entered his thoughts on religion. The world would gain more from its discovery than from that of any lost Greek tragedy. He crossed to England for a few months, then returned to Switzerland. But the persecution of 1834 repeated itself. The governments put pressure on the Swiss to expel the refugees, and Mazzini after a month or two of hiding found it necessary to leave. One night in November he and two friends left Geneva, walking along the lake to Nyon, while they discussed Byron and Mickiewicz, and were taken on in a friend's carriage to Lausanne, whence he found the means to escape to England.
Here he made his home with few interruptions till the last years of his life, taking no small part in English society and politics, finding his best friends in English men and women. "Italy is my country, but England is my real home, if I have any," he said. He had come to love England and English ways, and in his brief political journeys to Italy his home thoughts went to England, and he was glad to be back again. His old horror of London changed to a real liking; and its conveniences for his work made it difficult to get him out of town, save for a rare visit to his friends, or for a day or two to recruit his health at St Leonard's or Eastbourne, which he liked, or at Brighton, which he hated. He longed sometimes, indeed, for "some secret nook in the country, to breathe fresh air and gaze on the sky or at the sea"; but when he was urged to take rest in the country, he railed affectionately at his "misled and dreamy friends" for supposing he could attend to his work anywhere out of London. The fogs still had their fascination for him; he wrote once from Italy, "I think very often under these radiant skies of the London fogs and always regretfully. Individually speaking, I was evidently intended for an Englishman."
At first he lived at Cromwell Lodge, Old Brompton, a little house in the middle of orchards and gardens at what was then the extreme western end of London. Building operations drove him thence, and Mrs Carlyle found him lodgings over a post-office at 15 Radnor Street, near his old rooms in York Buildings. Here, at first with Saffi and three other exiles, afterwards alone, he lived the frugallest of lives. His income indeed was somewhat larger than it had been. At his mother's death he came into an annuity of £160 a year, which she, knowing how readily his money flowed to public work and charity, had wisely invested with obdurate trustees. His friends would gladly have helped him, but though he frankly asked money of them for his cause (always scrupulously repaying it, if borrowed on his personal responsibility), he never, so far as I know, would take from this time forward money for strictly personal needs. Once only he accepted some to pay for a private secretary, and once again for cabs, when his friends suspected that there were plots to assassinate him, and feared for his walking in London streets, unprotected save by a sword-cane. Thus, even with casual literary earnings, his income seldom reached £200, and of this for some years £80 went to the education of the Tencioni children, and often every other available penny to finance his plots of insurrection. While his enemies in Italy painted him living in patrician luxury, he denied himself every comfort (cigars always excepted), save the modest ones that his friends forced on him. Money he only wanted for his political schemes. "I have never felt so bitterly the curse of not being rich," he wrote once, when wanting rifles for one of his revolutionary plots. For himself, he was content with his humble fare and modest lodgings. Here in his small room, every piece of furniture littered with books and papers, the air thick with smoke of cheap Swiss cigars (except when friends sent Havannahs), brightened only by his tame canaries and carefully-tended plants, he was generally writing at his desk till evening, always with more work in hand than he could cope with, carrying on the usual mass of correspondence, writing articles for his Italian papers, raising public funds with infinite labour, stirring his English friends to help the cause, finding money and work for the poor refugees, or organizing concerts in their interest. The school in Greville Street went on for three years longer, when, except for the Sunday lectures, it was closed. And amid all the exacting cares of public work he spared himself no trouble for his English friends, advising in their family affairs, writing long letters of tenderness and spiritual wisdom to comfort a bereaved son or lead a young girl from a life of selfishness to higher things.
He had aged greatly since he left London less than three years ago. He was worn and thin, his beard was white, and the once dark features wore "a sort of grey, ashy halo." But it was the same high "cliff-like" forehead, the regular features, the strong, straight nose, "the exquisite curve of lips like a woman's in their expression of spotless purity," the piercing black eyes, whose like none ever knew who saw them, "of luminous depth, full of sadness, tenderness, and courage, of purity and fire, readily flashing into indignation or humour, always with the latent expression of exhaustless resolution"; "the only eyes," says another observer, "I ever saw that looked like flames." "His face in repose was grave, even sad, but it lit up with a smile of wonderful sweetness, as he greeted a friend with a pressure, rather than a shake, from the thin hand."[18] He carried his head a little forward, and he had a habit of sitting on the edge of a chair, perhaps, it has been suggested, because in his own room his books left but narrow margin for sedentary uses. He dressed, as ever, with perfect neatness, in a worn black frock-coat, a double-breasted velvet waistcoat buttoned high, despising collars and substituting a silk handkerchief wound round his neck, wearing a long thin gold watch chain, which had probably been his father's, and two rings, one at least no doubt his mother's, now rescued from the pawn-shop.
His personal life was centred almost wholly in his English friends. It is true, he felt his exile bitterly. "Wish for me," he writes to friends one Christmas, "that I may die in the country and for the country, in which I have been forbidden to live." But he had no home ties in Italy now. His father had died in the winter of 1848, leaving him to brood over the thought that he had been but a source of pain to the grim old man, who under all his moroseness and want of sympathy had never lost his pride and affection for his son. His mother, whom he had seen once again when at Milan, with whom he had never relaxed the close, affectionate correspondence, died in the summer of 1852. It was a very heavy blow. There was no one to replace her; he had lost "the dream of his individual life,—to see her in the joy of triumph," when Italy was free. But he nerved himself, and took her loss as an incentive to fresh effort. "My mother," he writes, "seems to me to be present, perhaps nearer than she was in her terrestrial life. I feel more and more the sacredness of duties, which she recognized, and of a mission which she approved. I have now no mother on earth except my country, and I shall be true to her, as my mother has been to me." So intensely actual was she still to him, that once afterwards, when in hiding and deep dejection, he thought she came to him in veritable presence to strengthen and console him. His lonely heart, athirst as ever for affection, went out to his English friends, the men and still more the women, who believed in him and in his politics, and tried to bring some warmth and brightness into his sad life. After a year or two he saw little more of the Carlyles, but their place was more than taken by the Ashursts, the Stansfelds, the Peter Taylors, the Shaens, the Mallesons, the Nathans, the Milner-Gibsons. When the day's work was over, he would generally spend the evening at one or other of their houses, most often with the Stansfelds, whose home at Bellevue Lodge was within an easy walk from his lodgings. Gradually he came to have a large outside circle of acquaintances. He corresponded with Grote and Mrs Gaskell; the Brownings, J. S. Mill, Jowett, Swinburne, Cairnes, Miss Martineau, probably Dickens were among the people he met.[19]