Not a man in the crowd at Turin dared to anticipate such a result: yet their joy was frantic. Fifty thousand people, arranged in guilds, defiled before the king, who sat like a statue on his bay horse, upright and impassible. Cavour walked in the company of journalists, and all those who had opposed him a few weeks before were there too, with Valerio at their head. They sang their strophe of Mameli's hymn, "Fratelli d'Italia," very badly. Cavour whispered to his neighbour, "We are so many dogs!"
That neighbour, a Milanese named Giuseppe Torelli, has left an interesting description of Cavour's appearance as it was then. He was fresh-coloured, and his blue eyes had not yet lost their brightness, but they were so changeful in expression that it was difficult to fix their distinctive quality. Though rather stout he was not ungainly, as he tended to become later. He stooped a little, and two narrow lines were visible on either side of a mouth, cold and uneffusive; but these lines, by their trembling or contraction, showed the play of inward emotion which the rest of the face concealed. In after days people used to watch them in order to guess his state of mind. It was his large and solid forehead that chiefly gave the idea of power which every one who saw him carried away, despite of the want of dignity in his person and of strongly-marked features in his face. His manners were simple, but distinguished by an unmistakably aristocratic ease and courtesy. He spoke generally low and without emphasis, and always appeared to pay great attention to what was said to him, even by the least important person.
Nothing, on the face of it, could seem more extraordinary than the exclusion of Cavour from office in the momentous year of 1848. But he had no popular party at his back whose cry could overrule the disinclination which the king certainly felt towards making him his Minister. Moreover, his abilities, though now generally recognised, contributed to keeping him in the background: it was felt instinctively that if he got the reins there would be only one driver. He was known to be indifferent to criticism, and while he listened patiently to advice, he rarely took it. He had mortally offended the conservatives by the liberalism of his means, and the liberals by the conservatism of his ends. Count Balbo, on assuming the office of the first Prime Minister under the Statute, not only retired from the directing council of the Risorgimento, but went out of his way to disavow the policy supported in it by Cavour. "The little rascal," he was heard to say, "will end by ruining the splendid edifice raised by the wisdom and moderation of so many estimable men!" The splendid edifice was on the verge of being nearly ruined, but by timidity—which has lost a score of thrones,—not by audacity. The new Cabinet entered upon their duties on March 16. Two days later occurred an event utterly unforeseen—the rising of Milan against the Austrians. It took them unprepared. They had talked so much about war that perhaps they thought it would happen in the next century. When the "now or never" sounded, which does sound sooner or later in all human affairs, they hesitated or suffered the king to hesitate, which came to the same thing. That Charles Albert stood for one instant in doubt when the hour was come desired by him all his life, as he had often stated, and there is no reason to think untruly, is possibly the most serious stain on his memory. There are moments when to reflect is criminal: a man has no right to reflect when his mother is in a burning house. The reflections which held Charles Albert back were two. He was afraid that the Milan revolution would breed a republic, and he was afraid of England and of Russia. England, which during the previous autumn had sent Lord Minto to urge upon the Italian princes a line of policy rightly described by Prince Metternich as inevitably leading to an attack on Austria, now applied the whole force of her diplomacy to stop the ball she had herself set running. The spectacle of Lord Palmerston trying to save or serve Austria, which he detested, in obedience to the atavistic tendencies of the Foreign Office, is a lesson in history. For English politicians of whatever party or private sentiments, Austria was still what Lord Castlereagh called her: "The great hinge on which the fate of Europe must ultimately depend." Sir Ralph Abercromby assured the king that "the least act of aggression" would place his throne in jeopardy. His throne was already in jeopardy, but from the contrary reason. Each minute that passed while the Milanese were fighting their death struggle and he stood inactive threatened to deprive him and his house of that power of progress on which not only their fortune but their existence depended.
The news from Milan reached Turin on March 19; on the 23rd, the last of the Milan days, king and ministry were still hesitating. On that day Cavour printed in the Risorgimento the most impassioned piece of writing that ever came from his pen. The conservative, the reactionary, once more cried aloud that audacity was prudence, temerity wisdom. The supreme hour of the Savoy dynasty had struck, the hour of strong resolves, on which hangs the fate of empires, the destinies of peoples. Hesitation, doubt, delay, were no more possible: they could only prove fatal. "We, men of calm minds, accustomed to listen more to the dictates of reason than to the impulses of the heart, after deliberately weighing each word we utter, are bound in conscience to declare that only one path is open to the nation, the government, the king: war, immediate war!" It was said, he continued, that Russia and England were on the point of uniting against Italy. In common times such an argument would be conclusive, not now. When Milan was struggling for life, was perhaps getting worsted, at all costs they were bound to fly to the rescue. Duty, brotherhood, policy, commanded it. Woe unto them if they crossed the frontier to find that Milan had fallen.
Russia, through her ambassador, intimated that she would regard the crossing of the Ticino as a casus belli. The threat made less impression at Turin than the warnings of Sir Ralph Abercromby; it was the possibility of English intervention, therefore, that Cavour went on to examine. The Anglomane "Milord Risorgimento" was less surprised at the current of English official thought than were his radical critics, but would any English minister, he asked, enter on a European war to prevent the liberation of Italy, which was an object sacred in the eyes of the mass of the English people? He believed it to be impossible, but were it so, so be it! England would have against her a mighty coalition, not of princes, as in former days, but of peoples, in the old world and in the new. Victory in such a matricidal strife would be as fatal to the first-born of liberty as defeat.
Thus Cavour was prepared to fight Austria, Russia, and England. The division of parties at that time was in its essence the division of those who were willing to accept a republican solution and those who were not. It does not follow that all the liberals wished for a republic, but they would all have taken office under it. Of this there is little doubt. Cavour never would have become a republican any more than an absolutist minister. But he saw what the other conservatives failed to see, that the dynasty of Savoy could only live if it led.
On March 22, Charles Albert was still assuring the Austrian Ambassador that his intentions were pacific. Next day Cavour's article appeared, and in the evening the king decided for instant war. Only two of the ministers assented at once; the others gave in after a long discussion. War was declared on the 25th. Time lost cannot be recalled; the happy moment had been let go by; Piedmont went not to Lombardy engaged in a dangerous struggle, but to Lombardy victorious. Cavillers said that the king had come to eat the fruits others had gathered. Confidence in the ultimate result reached the point of madness, but with revolution stalking through the streets of Vienna the Austrian eagle seemed to have lost its talons. In May 1848, in Austria itself, Lombardy was looked upon as completely lost, and with it the Southern Tyrol as far as Meran, for no one at that period thought of separating this Italian district from Italy; the most sanguine Austrians only hoped to save Venetia. Radetsky alone expected to save all, because he knew what he could do, and he had judged Sardinian generalship correctly. Charles Albert's staff seemed to have but one idea—to reverse the tactics which had led the first Napoleon to victory on the same ground.
The brightest gleam of success which shone on the king of Sardinia's arms was at Goito, in the battle of May 30. It was on that occasion that Cavour's nephew, Augusto di Cavour, was killed. The enfant terrible grew up to be a young man of singular promise, on whom Cavour had fixed all his hopes for the future of his name and house. His uncle's last letter of encouragement to do his duty was found on Augusto's body. The blow unnerved Cavour; he was found lying prostrate in an agony of speechless grief. Through his life he kept the blood-stained uniform in which the young officer received his death-wound in a glass case in his bedroom, a piece of enduring sentiment which shows how unlike Cavour was the coldly calculating egotist whose portrait has passed for his.
The story of the years of revolution in Italy is a story of great things and small, like most human records; but, when all is said, the great predominate, for no blunders could efface the readiness for self-sacrifice displayed by the whole people. The experience of these years was bitter, but possibly necessary. It destroyed illusions. It showed, for instance, that in the nineteenth century a free and independent Italy under the hegemony of the Pope belonged to political mythology. Here was a Pope who was, at heart, patriotic, but who drew back at the crucial moment, precisely as Mazzini (almost alone) had predicted. The first threat of a schism was enough to make him wear dust and ashes for his patriotism. The Bourbons of Naples were ascertained to have learnt nothing and unlearnt nothing; perfidy alone could be expected from them. It was proved that the princes of the other states, Piedmont excepted, must gravitate towards Austria even if they did not wish it. All this was useful, if dearly bought, knowledge.
At the first general elections in Piedmont, Cavour failed to obtain a seat. He told the electors in his address that he had always desired Italia unita e libera, and if "united" did not yet imply "under one king," the phrase was still significant. Two months later he was elected in four divisions; probably the death of his nephew in the interim on the field of battle modified, for the time, his unpopularity. He took his seat for the first college of Turin. He did not make an immediate impression; his short stature, and still more the imperfect accent with which he spoke Italian, were not in his favour. French was allowed in the Sardinian Chamber, but Cavour never opened his lips in it in Parliament. By degrees his speeches became marvels of close reasoning, and they even soared, sometimes, when he was deeply moved, into a kind of eloquence superior to that of rhetoric, but the accent was never such as would satisfy a fastidious ear. The day came, however, when people hung with too much anxiety on the least of his utterances for any one to notice this defect. Cavour sat on the Right, and from the first he horrified his colleagues on the same benches by the enunciation of views which to them were rank heresies. They existed in a state of perpetual uneasiness as to what he might say or do next.