Garibaldi Arrives—Venice under Manin—The Dissolution of the Temporal Power—Republics at Rome and Florence.
While the remnant of the Piedmontese army recrossed the bridge over the Ticino at Pavia, crushed, though not though want of valour, outraged in the person of its King, surely the saddest vanquished host that ever retraced in sorrow the path it had traced in the wildest joy, a few thousand volunteers in Lombardy still refused to lay down their arms or to recognise that, after the capitulation of Milan, all was lost. Valueless as a fact, their defiance of Austria had value as a prophecy, and its prophetic aspect comes more clearly into view when it is seen that the leader of the little band was Garibaldi, while its standard-bearer was Mazzini. These two had lately met for the first time since 1833, when Garibaldi, or 'Borel,' as he was called in the ranks of 'Young Italy,' went to Marseilles to make the acquaintance of the head and brain of the society which he had joined, as has been mentioned, on the banks of the Black Sea.
'When I was young and had only aspirations,' said Garibaldi in London in April 1864, 'I sought out a man who could give me counsel and guide my youthful years; I sought him as the thirsty man seeks water. This man I found; he alone kept alive the sacred fire, he alone watched [Pg.121] while all the world slept; he has always remained my friend, full of love for his country, full of devotion for the cause of freedom: this man is Joseph Mazzini.'
The words spoken then—when the younger patriot was the chosen hero of the greatest of free nations, while the elder, still misunderstood by almost all, was shunned and calumniated, and even called 'the worst enemy of Italy'—gave one fresh proof, had one been wanting, that, though there have been more flawless characters than Garibaldi, never in a human breast beat a more generous heart. Politically, there was nearly as much divergence between Mazzini and Garibaldi as between Mazzini and Cavour; the master thought the pupil lacked ideality, the pupil thought the master lacked practicalness; but they were at one in the love of their land and in the desire to serve her.
On parting with Mazzini in 1833, Garibaldi, then captain of a sailing vessel, went to Genoa and enrolled himself as a common sailor in the Royal Piedmontese Navy. The step, strange in appearance, was certainly taken on Mazzini's advice, and the immediate purpose was doubtless to make converts for 'Young Italy' among the marines. Had Garibaldi been caught when the ruthless persecution of all connected with 'Young Italy' set in, he would have been shot offhand, as were all those who were found dabbling with politics in the army and navy. He escaped just in time, and sailed for South America.
The Gazzetta Piemontese of the 17th of June 1834 published the sentence of death passed upon him, with the rider which declared him exposed to public vengeance 'as an enemy of the State, and liable to all the penalties of a brigand of the first category.' He saw the paper; and it was the first time that he or anyone else had seen the [Pg.122] name of Giuseppe Garibaldi in print; a name of which Victor Emmanuel would one day say that 'it filled the furthest ends of the earth.'
Profitable to Italy, over nearly every page of whose recent history might be written 'out of evil cometh forth good,' was the banishment which threw Garibaldi into his romantic career of the next twelve years between the Amazon and the Plata. Soldier of fortune who did not seek to enrich himself; soldier of freedom who never aimed at power, he always meant to turn to account for his own country the experience gained in the art of war in that distant land, where he rapidly became the centre of a legend, almost the origin of a myth. Antique in simplicity, singleness, superabundance of life, and in a sort of naturalism which is not of to-day; unselfconscious, trustful in others, forgiving, incapable of fear, abounding in compassion, Garibaldi's true place is not in the aggregation of facts which we call history, but in the apotheosis of character which we call the Iliad, the Mahabharata, the Edda, the cycles of Arthur and of Roland, and the Romancero del Cid.
In childhood he rescued a drowning washerwoman; in youth he nursed men dying of cholera; as a veteran soldier he passed the night among the rocks of Caprera hunting for a lamb that was lost. No amount of habit could remove the repugnance he felt at uttering the word 'fire.' Yet this gentle warrior, when his career was closed and he lay chained to his bed of pain, endorsed his memoirs with the Spanish motto: 'La guerra es la verdadera vida del hombre.' War was the veritable life of Garibaldi; war, not conspiracy; war, not politics; war, not, alas! model farming, for which the old chief fancied in his later years that he had discovered in himself a vocation.
[ [Pg.123] Riding the wild horses and chasing the wild cattle of the Pampas, his eyes covering the immense spaces untrodden by man, this corsair of five-and-twenty drank deep of the innocent pleasures of untamed nature, when not occupied in fighting by land or sea, with equal fortune; or rather, perhaps, with greater fortune and greater proof of inborn genius as commander of the naval campaign of the Paran[=a] than as defender of Monte Video. No adventures were wanting to him; he was even imprisoned and tortured. In South America he found the one woman worthy to bear his name, the lion-hearted Anita, whom he carried off, she consenting, from her father and the man to whom her father had betrothed her. Garibaldi in after years expressed such deep contrition for the act which bore Anita away from the quiet life in store for her, and plunged her into hardships which only ended when she died, that, misinterpreting his remorse, many supposed the man from whom he took her to have been already her husband. It was not so. Shortly before the Church of San Francisco at Monte Video was burnt down (some twenty years ago), the marriage register of Garibaldi and Anita was found in its archives, and a legal copy was made. In it she is described as 'Doña Ana Maria de Jesus, unmarried daughter of Don Benito Rivevio de Silva, of Laguna, in Brazil.' The bridegroom, who during all his American career had scarcely clothes to cover him, parted with his only possession, an old silver watch, to pay the priest's fees. Head of the Italian Legion, he only took the rations of a common soldier, and as candles were not included in the rations, he sat in the dark. Someone reported this to the Government, who sent him a present of £20, half of which he gave to a poor widow.
[ [Pg.124] When the first rumours that something was preparing in Italy reached Monte Video, Garibaldi wrote a letter offering his services to the Pope, still hailed as Champion of Freedom, and soon embarked himself for the Old World, with eighty-five of his best soldiers, among whom was his beloved friend, Francesco Anzani. Giacomo Medici had been despatched a little in advance to confer with Mazzini. At starting, the Legion knew nothing of the revolution in Milan and Venice, or of Charles Albert having taken the field. Great was their wonder, therefore, on reaching Gibraltar, to see hoisted on a Sardinian ship a perfectly new flag, never beheld by them out of dreams—the Italian tricolor.