How does he rank as a politician? Our estimate must be a mixed one. As a political thinker he stands high. He has left a theory of the state, that is priceless because informed by a great moral ideal. And apart from this, it has its value from his wide and profound knowledge of modern politics and the practical sense that almost always keeps his idealism in touch with facts. His faith in democracy, the optimism which came of his trust in Providence, his cautious handling of economic tendencies saved him from the mistakes of Carlyle and Ruskin. His conviction that the common-sense of the people was feeling out its way independently of any theory or school, kept him from the short-lived formulas of the individualists. His deeper knowledge of men and deeper reading of history gave him a saner and completer view than that of the collectivists. None of them, not even Ruskin, can match the warmth and inspiration of a conception, that raises politics to be the instrument of the divine plan,—an instrument not only to destroy injustice and poverty, but to redeem the highest part of man and bring the rule of brotherhood and unity and social peace. In the detailed application of his political doctrines he often failed from that same inaccessibility to facts, which marred him otherwise. His republic missed the essential; his theories of democratic government are vague and hardly satisfy. But even here he is the prophet of one great enduring principle. Among the statesmen of the century, he is almost the only one, who understood what nationality meant, saw its essential relationship to democracy, and put it on an unassailable foundation. It was this that made him teacher of Italian Unity, and therefore maker of modern Italy. Whether without him Italy would be united to-day, we cannot tell; but at all events it was he who gave the impulse, his bold vision that saw that the hard consummation was attainable, and gave others too the faith to see it.
As a political thinker, then, he is great; as a practical political worker, he largely failed. True, he had many of a statesman's qualities. He often read character acutely, though his confidence in men sometimes deceived him, and again and again he was the victim of informers. He had rare industry and considerable organising power; though, owing to his solitary work, he had learned to bury himself too much in details,—in the mass of correspondence and the immense labour he put out to scrape together little funds,—and in them he sometimes neglected the survey of the whole. Above all, as he proved at Rome, he had the true statesman's gift of leadership and inspiration. But it is more than doubtful whether, even under happier circumstances, he would have been an effective politician. His knowledge of human nature was more subtle in the abstract than in the concrete; individuals were to him too much wholly good or wholly bad, and he did not recognise how complex are the motives that sway puzzled humanity. He could rarely take a sane, unprejudiced view of a situation. It amazes us that he expected Pio Nono to respond to his appeal in 1847, and thought that, if the republic came at Rome in 1870, it would found a state religion. His misconception of Piedmontese policy throughout the fifties is a yet stronger illustration of distorted vision. This was one of the reasons why he found it so difficult to compromise. He could not distinguish non-essentials from essentials, and it was nearly as hard for him to give way on the one as on the other. Compromise in small or great seemed cowardice, and there was no doubt a strain of egotism in his obstinacy. It humiliated him to surrender any detail of the theories, which he preached with such undiscriminating confidence.
But one would fain close not with the thinker or the moral teacher or the politician, but the man. Mazzini's personal life was one of a very rare purity and beauty, that stands out in his generation noblest and faithfullest and most inspired. Its only serious flaw lies in those few lapses from public candour, which have been noted in these pages. Sometimes he was bitter and intolerant, but the provocation was great. In earlier life he was often querulous and self-absorbed, but it may be counted to him, that, with his sensitive nature, he came through loneliness and poverty with his moral strength unbroken. Except for these, the critic's microscope can find no specks. Brave, earnest, true, without trace of affectation, he bore the stamp of whitest sincerity. Gentle, affectionate, pure as few are pure, he was friend and counsellor and inspirer to those who knew him, gripping and subduing them with that wondrous sympathy of his, that came of burning love of goodness and made the saving of a soul the highest thing in life. That generosity, which made him share purse and clothes with others perhaps less destitute than himself, and give half his scanty income to help a woman and children that he hardly knew, made him lavish out of his busy days time and thought to help struggling souls. Ever intense in his affections, grateful for any act of kindness, yearning for friendship with the yearning of the homeless man, he was one to draw others with bonds of love.
He had a large and loving view of life. Pettiness and malice and jealousy had very little place in it. Passionate though he was for morality, he was, outside his political work and controversies and an occasional touch of cynicism in his talk, a very tolerant man. No person has, he said, "a right to judge a special case without positive data on the nature of the fact." He was angry and impatient with the "cavilling spirit of mediocrity," that takes pleasure in the lapses of "the mighty-souled." Among his friends he never sermonised, and he had no desire to bend their private life to his own pattern. Ever more or less sad himself, he rejoiced in their happiness. "You are a happy mortal," he writes to one of them on his marriage. "I am, notwithstanding my dislike for happiness, truly glad that you are so." Never man had more joy in others' home felicity. It was only among his fellow-revolutionists, whom he thought of as partners in his own high call, that he was exacting and sometimes ungenerous, though he pleaded earnestly with them that public work should leave room for the inner life of love and friendship. In his political controversies, it must be confessed, his equanimity deserted him, and he is often intolerant and unfair. He was too ready to think that bad politics implied bad morals, and his hatred of Louis Napoleon and Cavour made him pen pages, that one would gladly not remember. But even in politics he could sometimes do justice to an opponent, who obviously acted from high convictions; and he was one of the few Italian nationalists, who could appreciate the motives of the Catholic Volunteers.
But his essential greatness lies on the active side. Above all else he shines out white in that consuming love of humanity, that accepted poverty and weariness and danger, that made him forego home and love, comfort and congenial work, and give himself to one long, self-forgetting service for the good of men. Duty was no abstract precept with him, but part of his very being. In adversity and trial he had schooled himself to follow her, till disobedience to her call became almost impossible, and he did not wait for her to speak but sought her out. It was nearly allied to his almost superstitious fear of personal happiness. Those miserable years in Switzerland and London wrought on him, till melancholy grew to a habit. He lost something of it afterwards in the society of his English friends, but it never left him; and it tinted all his life with the gentle sadness, which is near akin to spiritual yearnings and large-hearted love. Sunless and unwholesome as it seems at times, after all, as with the Man of sorrows, it purged him to the same forgetfulness of self. It was no enervating grief; "do not allow yourself to be weakened and self-absorbed by your trouble" was his perennial lesson to friends, who had lost dear ones. His was the "other part of grief, the noble part, which makes the soul great and lifts it up." "By dint of repeating to myself," he once wrote to Mrs Carlyle, "that there is no happiness under the moon, that life is a self-sacrifice meant for some higher and happier thing; that to have a few loving beings, or if none, to have a mother watching you from Italy or from Heaven (it is all the same) ought to be quite enough to preserve us from falling." He, to a degree that few have done, trod self victoriously under; habitually and systematically year by year, untempted by failure or success, by misery or comparative happiness, he denied himself even the little indulgences and relaxations and declensions from the strait hard path, by which most good men make their compromise with the world and flesh. So remorselessly was duty law to him, that sometimes work and sacrifice became ends in themselves; and he laboured painfully on in the path which he had chosen, when it would have served his cause better to have rested or turned to other activities. And the unbending labour had its fruit in that wonderful sum of his life's work, that, beyond all the exacting details of his political organisation, has left its stamp on modern Europe, has left so vast a body of thought in half the provinces of the human mind, has its yet richer legacy in the example of a life given perfectly and wholly to the cause of men.
He was not the mere conscientious worker only; he lived in the light of a spiritual vision, and that light radiated in almost every page he wrote, on every man and woman whom he touched. Besides the sense of duty he had faith. "He was," writes a living English statesman, "perhaps the most impressive person I have ever seen, with a fiery intensity of faith in his own principles and in their ultimate triumph, which made him seem inspired; a man to waken sleeping souls, and fill them with his own fervour." He loved to commune with those of his own spiritual kin,—Dante, Savonarola, Cromwell,—men who had the same undoubting faith in the righteousness of their cause and their fellow-work with God,—men, it may be, one-sided and intellectually incomplete, but gifted with the power to do great things and lift up life. And so great principles and nobleness of aim carried him through a series of practical mistakes, and left his life to be a permanent enriching of the race. What if he dreamed dreams, that for generations yet may be no more than dreams? What if his mental ken reached not to all the knowledge of the age? What if he marred his work by mistakes and miscalculations? His errors have passed; his intellectual limitations can be supplied. His was the rarer and the greater part, to lift men out of the low air of common life up to the heights, where thought is larger, and life runs richer, and the great verities are seen, undimmed by self and sophistry. The idealist is still mankind's best friend; and he does most for the race, who purges its spiritual vision, and breathes into cold duty, till it becomes a thing of life and passion and power. Greater still is he, who is not idealist only, but saint and hero, and in his life bears witness to the truth he teaches. Such saint and hero and idealist Mazzini was; and while men and women live, who would be true to themselves and to their call, who value sacrifice and duty above power and success, so long will there be those, who will love him and be taught by him.
FACSIMILE OF MAZZINI'S HANDWRITING.