MAZZINI
[MAZZINI, THE PROPHET]
Some men become legendary during their own lives. Their personalities have a certain detachment from the rest of the world so that common standards have no value as applied to them. They are poets or seers or philosophers, and often their mystic quality is of little use to the great mass of men, and is only to be appreciated by the few. Sometimes the whole world understands them. Mazzini had become a legend to the people of Europe long before his death, but a legend that carried the strongest personal appeal to every republican heart. You have only to dip into letters of the time to realize how close he came to millions of thinkers throughout Europe.
It would be interesting to consider the force of popular legend in a national movement, to weigh sentiment against statesmanship and military prowess. The land of Dante and of Savonarola would be an especially fertile field for such inquiry, among no people has the prophet been held of higher value than with the Italians. To-day we find them turning to their dramatists and novelists for help in the solution of new social problems just as Mazzini and the youth of his day looked to Alfieri for political guidance. There is no doubt that Mazzini believed it was his destiny to be a poet, and that throughout his whole life he looked forward to the day when Italy should be united and free, and he could turn to the work of writing her dramas.
Literary feuds play so little part in Anglo-Saxon history that we find it difficult to understand the importance of their place in Latin countries. Italy a century ago was the battle-ground of the Romanticists and Classicists. The Classicists believed in a certain smug cloistered virtue, a policy of non-resistance, and the contemplation of past glories. It was the ambition of the Romanticists “to give Italians an original national literature, not one that is as a sound of passing music to tickle the ear and die, but one that will interpret to them their aspirations, their ideas, their needs, their social movement.” Alfieri had been preaching resistance to Austrian tyranny through his dramas, the boy Mazzini first looked to him as a political saviour of Italy. He wrote, “these literary disputes are bound up with all that is important in social and civil life,” and again “the legislation and literature of a people always advance on parallel lines.” “Young Italy” first hoped to win freedom through its literature.
The ill-fated Carbonari rebellion of 1821 sent many Piedmontese patriots flying through Genoa to Spain. Giuseppe Mazzini, then sixteen years of age, walking from church one Sunday morning in Genoa in company with his mother, was stopped by a tall, gaunt-featured, black-eyed man who held out his hat asking alms for “the refugees of Italy.” The scene made a tremendous impression on the youth’s mind, for the first time he felt that the cause of freedom was not a scholastic subject, but one demanding the height of sacrifice. He set himself to study the causes of the failure of past uprisings, and at the same time dedicated himself to the work of teaching his countrymen how they might succeed.
The French Revolution had failed because it had taught men only a knowledge of their rights, without any conception of their duties. Men had not learned the law of self-restraint, and their ideal was the greatest personal liberty rather than the greatest personal obligation to their fellow-men. The revolutionists of Europe had a philosophy, but no religion. The first great discovery that Mazzini made was that if Italy were ever to be united, his countrymen must be fired with faith in their own God-given destinies. They must make of their cause a religion, they must learn, in his words, that Italy “had a strength within her, that was arbiter of facts, mightier than destiny itself.” At the start he offered his countrymen two arguments for action, the one that this land of theirs had twice ruled the world, that she who had given Christianity and the Renaissance to Europe had yet to send forth “the gospel of humanity.” He wrote: “Italy has been called a graveyard; but a graveyard peopled by our mighty dead is nearer life than a land that teems with living weaklings and braggarts;” he showed Italians “the vision of their country, radiant, purified by suffering, moving as an angel of light among the nations that thought her dead.” Such words rang like an inspiration, but Mazzini, studying the men with whom he had to work, knew that such inspiration was not enough. They struck the note of glory, but all revolutionists had heard that note; what was needed was the call to self-sacrifice.