GARIBALDI
When men look back, two or three hundred years hence, upon the nineteenth century, it may well be that they will discern its salient characteristic to have been, not scientific, not inventive, as we popularly suppose, but romantic. Science will soon bury our present heaps of facts under larger accumulations, from the summit of which broader theories may be scanned; to-morrow will make to-day’s wonderful invention old-fashioned and insufficient: but the romance with which this later time has been charged will exercise an increasing fascination over poets and novelists and historians, as the years roll on. Oblivion swallows up material achievements, but great deeds never grow old. That many of our writers should not have heard this note of the age argues that they, rather than the age, are prosaic and commonplace. For to what other period shall we turn for a richer store of those vicissitudes and contrasts in fortune which make up the real romance, the profound tragedy, of life? Everywhere the dissolution of a society rooted in mediæval traditions is accompanied by confusion and struggle,—the birth-pangs of a new order. Classes whose separation seemed permanent are thrown together, and antagonistic elements are strangely mixed; there is strife, and doubt, and excess; sudden combinations are suddenly rent by discords; anachronisms flourish side by side with innovations; new institutions wear old names, and old abuses mask in new disguises.
In such a crisis, two facts are prominent: the unusual range of activity offered to the individual—may he not traverse the whole scale of experience?—and the dependence of the individual upon himself. He rises, or he falls, by his own motion. The privileges of caste avail nothing; for the very confusion produces a certain wild equality, whereby all start at the line, and the swiftest wins. Napoleon’s maxim, La carrière ouverte aux talents, is the motto of the century. Napoleon himself is an epochal illustration of the power of the individual to make the momentum of circumstances work for him. The Revolution, it is true, had harnessed the steeds; but Napoleon dared to mount the chariot, grasped the reins, and drove over Europe, upsetting thrones and princedoms and hierarchies. The haughty descendants of immemorial lineage gave place to the brothers and comrades of the “Corsican upstart.” Murat, the son of a tavern-keeper; Ney, a briefless law-student; Lannes, a dyer; Soult, Masséna, Berthier, Junot, soldiers of fortune; and how many other children of the Third Estate,—laughed at the pretensions of humbled Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and Hohenzollerns! Frequent reactions between revolution and restoration serve to emphasize the stress of this crisis; and these contrasts in the conditions of men, revealing human character under the most diverse phases, show how inextricably the romantic and the tragic are interwoven in the average lot.
Nor in Europe only has this spectacle been going forward. The United States also have witnessed similarly rapid transmutations, partly due to other causes. Within a generation we have seen a gigantic national upheaval: three millions of artisans, clerks, merchants, and lawyers were transformed by the magic of a drum-beat into soldiers; and then, the conflict over, soldiers and uniforms vanished, and the labors of peace were resumed.
Follow Abraham Lincoln from his Illinois log-cabin to the White House; follow Grant from his tanyard to Appomattox,—and you can compute the sweep of Fortune’s wheel. These careers were lived so near us that they hardly astonish us; they seem as natural as daylight; and in truth they are as natural as that or any other every-day miracle. As if forgetful of these, we ransack the past, or fiction, or melodramas, for heroes to admire. To weak imaginations, distance still lends enchantment.
Our age has produced one romantic man, however, who had not to wait for the mellowing effects of time to be recognized as romantic. He enjoyed, almost from the outset of his career, the fame of a legendary hero, and he will, we cannot doubt, be a hero to posterity. Some future Tasso will find in his life a theme nobler than Godfrey’s, too romantic in fact for either invention or myth to enhance it. He lived dramas as naturally as Shakespeare wrote them; the commonplace could not befall him. Looking at him from one side we might say, “Here is a Homeric hero, strangely transplanted from the Iliad into an era of railroads and telegraphs!” But if we fix our attention on other qualities, we discover in him a typical democrat, fit product of a democratic age. This man was Joseph Garibaldi, whose career alone would suffice to redeem the nineteenth century from the stigma of egotism and the rebuke of commonplaceness.
Among all the political achievements of our century, none has more of noble charm than the redemption of Italy. Whether we look at the difficulty of the undertaking, or at the careers of the leaders and the temper of the people who engaged in it, we are alike allured and amazed. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Italy had never been united under one government; nevertheless, from the time of Dante on, the aspiration towards national unity was kept burning in every patriotic Italian heart. During the Middle Age, little republics won independence by overthrowing their feudal lords; then they quarreled among themselves; and then they became the prey and appanage of a few strong families. The Bishop of Rome, forgetful of his spiritual mission, lusted after worldly power, established himself as a temporal sovereign, and elevated his cardinals into temporal princes. Foreign invaders—Normans, Spaniards, Germans, French—swept over the peninsula in successive waves; bloodshed and pillage signalized their coming, corruption was the slime they left behind them. One by one, the refugees of independence were submerged in the flood of servitude; until at last Venice herself, become merely the mummy of a republic, crumbled to dust at Napoleon’s touch. Napoleon promised, but did not give, to Italy the unity or the freedom which she still dreamed of: he parceled her anew into duchies and kingdoms. By that act he broke down ancient barriers and opened a new prospect. Italians beheld the old order, which had so long oppressed them that many believed it must endure perpetually, suddenly dissolved, and in its stead a change, although not the change they longed for. Still, any change, in such circumstances, implies fresh possibilities; and the Italians passed from a lethargy which had seemed hopelessly enthralling into a restless wakefulness.
The twenty years of the reign of Force, of which Napoleon was the embodiment, ended at Waterloo. Europe, exhausted, sank back into conservatism, and was ruled for thirty years by Craft, of which Metternich was the symbol.[2] The Congress of Vienna reimposed the past upon Italy. Monarchs and bureaucrats, like children who amuse themselves by “making believe” things are not as they are, would have it appear that the deluge of revolution, with all its mighty wrecks and subversions, had never been. The Pope was restored in the States of the Church; the Bourbons ruled again in Naples and Sicily; an Austrian was Archduke of Tuscany; Parma and Piacenza were assigned to Napoleon’s wife, Maria Louisa; Venetia and Lombardy went as spoils to Austria; an absolutist king reigned in Piedmont. Evidently the revolution had been but a summer thunderstorm, for the sun of despotism was shining once more. The sun shone; but what of the sultry air? What of the threatening clouds along the horizon? Were these the fringe of the dispersing storm, or the portents of another? Mutterings and rumblings, too, Carbonari plottings, and quickly extinguished flashes of insurrection,—did not these omens belie Diplomacy’s pretense that the eighteenth century had been happily resuscitated to exist forever?
[2] After Metternich, we have the period of Sham-Force, under Louis Napoleon; and finally of Force again, under Bismarck. These four stages complete the cycle of European politics during the past century.