The personal character of Mazzini never needed defence. In private life and state affairs, honour was to him an instinct. He saw the path of right with clear eyes. No advantage induced him to deviate from it. No danger prevented his walking in it.
Carlyle, whom few satisfied, said he "found in him a man of clear intelligence and noble virtues. True as steel, the word, the thought of him pure and limpid as water."
It may be by experience that a nation is governed, but it is by rightness alone that it is kept noble. It was to promote this that Mazzini walked for forty years on the dreary highway between exile and the scaffold. It was from belief in his heroic and unfaltering integrity that men went out at his word, to encounter the dungeon, torture, and death, and that families led all their days alarmed lives, and gave up husbands and sons to enterprises in which they could only triumph by dying. No one save Byron has depicted the self-denial incidental to Mazzini's career, which involved the abnegation of all that makes life worth living to other men.
"Such ties are not
For those who are called to the high destinies
Which purify corrupted commonwealths.
We must forget all feeling save the One We must resign all passions, save our purpose.
We must behold no object, save our country.
And only look on death as beautiful
So that the sacrifice ascend to heaven,
And draw down freedom on her evermore."*
* "Marino Faliero."
Mazzini left a name which has become one of the landmarks, or rather mindmarks, of public thought, and, though a bygone name, there is instruction and inspiration in it yet.
CHAPTER XIX. GARIBALDI—THE SOLDIER OF LIBERTY
Dining one day (June 29, 1896) at Mr. Herbert Spencer's, thirty years after Garibaldi left England, Professor Masson, who was a guest of Mr. Spencer, told me that Garibaldi said to Sir James Stansfeld that "the person whom he was most interested in seeing in England was myself." This Garibaldi said at a reception given by Mr. Stansfeld to meet the General—as we had then begun to call him. I was one of the party; but Mr. Stansfeld did not mention the remark to me, and I never heard of it until Professor Masson told me. Of course I should have been gratified to know it We had met before, but it was years earlier, and Garibaldi had forgotten it. The vicissitudes and battles of his tumultuous career may well have effaced the circumstance from his mind. The first occasion of my meeting Garibaldi was at an evening party at the Swan Brewery, Fulham, when I was asked to accompany him to Regent Street, where he was then residing. My name would be given to him at the time, which he might not distinctly hear, as is often the case when an unfamiliar name is heard by a foreign ear, as occurs when a foreign name is mentioned to an English ear. On our way he asked me "how it was that the English people had accorded such enthusiastic receptions to Kossuth, and yet they appeared to have done nothing on behalf of Hungary?" I explained to him that "our Foreign Office was controlled by a few aristocratic families who had little sympathy with and less respect for the voteless voices of the splendid crowds who greeted Kossuth with generous acclaim. That was why large and enthusiastic concourses of people in the streets produced so little effect upon the English Government" The great Nizzard insurgent had been mystified by the impotence of popular enthusiasm. In such plain, brief and abrupt sentences as I thought would be intelligible, I explained that "he must distinguish between popular sympathy and popular power. He might find himself the subject of the generous enthusiasm of the streets, but he must take it as the voice of the people, not the voice of the Government." Kossuth, who had a better knowledge of English literature and the English press, never made the distinction, which led him into mistakes and caused him needlessly to suffer disappointments. To this day the House of Lords is an alien power in England.