Gioberti accomplished infinitely more for the national cause by his great book, Il Primato d’Italia (1845), which dissuaded Italy from abortive conspiracies, and preached spiritual as a preparation for political unity. It also, by its own merits and the reputation which the author had already gained as a thinker, compelled men of intellect to look into her case. Unfortunately, Gioberti had not grasped the necessity of absolute administrative concentration, and advocated confederacy among the various Italian states; an idea irreconcilable with that of unity, and moreover utterly impracticable on account of the centrifugalism of the sovereigns concerned. This made it possible for Gioberti, when at length he had himself become minister at Turin, to propose that Piedmont should anticipate the inevitable restoration of the sovereigns of Central Italy by Austria or France by restoring them herself; a step which would have ruined the house of Savoy in public opinion, and consequently have destroyed all hope of an united Italy. Gioberti soon retired to Paris, where he died suddenly in 1852, just as a new chapter of events was opening, in which, taught by experience, he would probably have performed a more efficient part.
It would have been well for the political, though not the literary reputation of Mazzini if he had died about the same time in the good odour of the courage and capacity he had shown in the defence of Rome against the French. Although he had a great advantage over Gioberti in his perception of the need of national unity, he was unable to conceive of this otherwise than under Republican forms. He was hence almost as ready to thwart the Piedmontese as to expel the Austrian; he opposed every practical scheme for the redemption of Italy, from the Crimean expedition downwards; and his public career down to his death in 1872 is a series of lamentable mistakes. He could not see that his mission was performed when he had once breathed life into the dry bones, and he had no appreciation of the practical genius of a man like Cavour, fully as indispensable to the common cause as his own ideal enthusiasm. Happily there was another and more extensive field in which this enthusiasm was perfectly in place. Mazzini was much more than a conspirator, more even than a patriot. As a man of letters, he concerned himself with German, English, and Slavonic literature, and opened up new horizons to Italian thought. Polish literature was especially congenial to him, for at that period its inspiration came from worlds beyond mortal ken, and Mazzini, recoiling from the prosaic common-sense of the eighteenth century, possessed the vein of mysticism common to contemporaries otherwise so dissimilar as Lamennais, Balzac, George Sand, Newman, Mickiewicz. This gave a singular elevation to his ethical thought. A severe thinker, he meditated much on human rights and human duties, and assigned precedence to the latter. “Think less of your rights and more of your duties” is the burden of much ethical admonition addressed, especially during his later years, to the working classes, and containing some of the noblest and most dignified teaching to be found in the world. Mazzini had little sympathy with some of the more recent developments of democracy; his life had been one of disinterested privation for great ends, and he thought little, perhaps too little, of merely material ameliorations. His mysticism, his austere magnanimity, and his deeply religious feeling find their most perfect expression in his noble epistle to the members of the Œcumenical Council of 1869, which, along with President Lincoln’s oration on the battlefield of Gettysburg, crowns the public eloquence of our time; nor needs the age which has produced two such deliverances to envy in this respect the age of Pericles.
Time has worked and is working for Mazzini; the fanaticism and unreason of one side of his character, having produced no permanent ill effect, fall more and more into oblivion, or are recognised as the necessary conditions of his unique gifts. His failings were the failings of a prophet: little as he was qualified to guide the movement he had evoked, none but such an one as he could have brought about the national resurrection truly described by Mr. Swinburne in the poem where he as truly hails in Mazzini the third Italian prophet after Dante and Michael Angelo:
And the third prophet standing by her grave,
Stretched forth his hand and touched her, and her eyes
Opened as sudden suns in heaven might rise,
And her soul caught from his the faith to save:
Faith above creeds, faith beyond records, born
Of the pure, naked, fruitful, awful morn.
There is an ancient story of a princess carried off by a dragon and confined on a desert island in the most remote recesses of the ocean, who owed her deliverance to the joint exertions of three most eminent brothers, none of whom could have accomplished anything without the other two. One, an astrologer, discovered the place of her captivity; the second, a mechanician, made a winged horse; upon which the third, a soldier, proceeded to the spot and slew the dragon. In the liberation of Italy the part of the astrologer fell to Mazzini, that of the mechanician to Cavour, and that of the soldier to Garibaldi.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] There is a lively portrait of him in Ruffini’s Lorenzo Benoni, where he is introduced as “Fantasio.”