It was during this interval of reaction and relapse, when hope was stifled and energy slept; when victorious despotism flattered itself with the belief that the Napoleonic episode had demonstrated the absurdity of Liberalism; when Metternich, the spider of Schönbrunn, was spinning his cobwebs of chicane across the path to liberty,—then it was that the generation which should live to see Italy free and united was getting what learning it could in the Jesuit-ridden schools. Of this generation the most romantic figure was Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Joseph Garibaldi was born at Nice, July 4, 1807. His father was a fisherman, thrifty enough to have a small vessel of his own. Such stories as have come down to us of the boy’s childhood show him to have been plucky, adventurous, and tenderhearted. He cried bitterly at having broken a grasshopper’s leg; he rescued, when only seven, a laundress from drowning; he sailed off with some truant companions for Genoa, and might have vanished forever, had he not been overtaken near Monaco and brought home. His education was intrusted to two priests, from whom, he says, he learned nothing; then to a layman, Arena, who gave him a smattering of reading, arithmetic, and history. As he was quick at learning, his parents wished to make a lawyer or a priest of him; but he had the rover’s instinct and could not resist the enticements of the sea. At length, when he was fourteen, his parents yielded, and he became a sailor.
Of those early voyages, we need mention only one, which took him to Rome. Immense the impression the Holy City made on his imagination! He saw not the Rome of the Cæsars, nor the Rome of the Popes,—the city whose monuments entomb twenty-five centuries of history; but, he says, “the Rome of the future, that Rome of which I have never despaired,—shipwrecked, at the point of death, buried in the depth of American forests; the Rome of the regenerating idea of a great people; the dominating idea of whatever Past or Present could inspire in me, as it has been through all my life. Oh, Rome became then dear to me above all earthly existences. I adored her with all the fervor of my soul. In short, Rome for me is Italy, and I see no Italy possible save in the union, compact or federate, of her scattered members. Rome is the symbol of united Italy, under whatever form you will. And the most infernal work of the Papacy was that of keeping her morally and materially divided.”[3]
[3] This was written in 1849.
Thenceforth the young mariner, who rose rapidly to be mate and master, could not rest for the thought of the Eternal City, and of the country his patriotism craved. During these years, he learned to take Fortune’s buffets: he was captured by pirates, he lay ill and penniless for months at Constantinople,—adventures which in another career would demand more than passing notice, but which he deemed unimportant in comparison with a conversation he had with a young Ligurian, who unfolded to him the dreams of the Mazzinians. “Columbus did not experience so great a satisfaction at the discovery of America,” says Garibaldi, “as I experienced at finding one who busied himself with the redemption of our fatherland.”
Fatherland! the name seemed a mockery to the Italians of that time. Italy, as Metternich phrased it, was only a geographical expression. Seven or eight petty princes, including the Pope, ruled the little patches into which the Peninsula was cut up. All the north, except Piedmont, was directly subject to a foreign despot, Austria; while, indirectly, Austria domineered over Tuscany, Rome, and Naples. Piedmont had a native king, indeed, but Absolutism throve nowhere more vigorously than there. The Jesuits controlled the worship and education of the little kingdom; reactionaries filled the ministerial offices, the army, and the government bureaux; the sovereign himself, Charles Albert, believed devoutly in the divine right of kings, and held that it would be criminal in him, by granting his people more freedom, to lessen the responsibility imposed on him by God. Throughout the Peninsula, no one might discuss politics, whether in speech or writing. It was high treason to suggest representative government; the sovereign’s will was the only constitution. In some parts of the land, the very word Italy could not be used by actors on the stage; and everywhere censors kept watch to prevent the idea of a regenerate Italy from slipping into print.
By foreigners, the Italians were more often despised than pitied; they were believed to be pluckless, wordy, deceitful creatures, who at best had their uses as singers, dancing-masters, and painters’ models. Among themselves, discord (born of ancestral feuds), envy (born of local ambitions, a love of haranguing, and a lack of leaders), had thrice resulted in an abortive revolution. And now, just as the third attempt had failed, and in its failure had discredited the great organizations of conspiracy that had been for fifteen years the hope of Italian patriotism, Joseph Mazzini, a Genoese a year younger than Garibaldi, banished from Piedmont because he had a suspicious habit of walking abroad after dark, formed the new secret society of Young Italy which aimed at not only the political but the social and moral redemption of his countrymen. Garibaldi, eager to hasten the emancipation of his country, joined Young Italy; but in the first plot in which he was engaged his confederates failed to appear at the appointed time, and he was forced to fly from Genoa for his life. “Here begins my public career,” he says in his memoirs.
After being twice captured and twice escaping, he made his way on foot, disguised as a peasant, to Marseilles, where, on opening a newspaper, the first thing he read was the sentence of death decreed against him should he ever be caught in Piedmont. This was in February, 1834. Proscribed but not disheartened, when chance offered he resumed his seafaring. But mercantile voyages grew monotonous. Should he offer his services to the Bey of Tunis, who was seeking a European to take charge of his navy? After hesitation, Garibaldi decided “no.” During a cholera epidemic, he volunteered as nurse in the Marseilles hospital. Finally he shipped for South America. Landing at Rio de Janeiro, he fell in with another exile, Rossetti, and for a while they kept a shop. Soon, however, more congenial occupation presented itself.
Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost province of Brazil, had revolted from the Empire and set up a republic, which it was struggling to maintain. Garibaldi, who could never resist aiding republicans, equipped a small privateer, on which he and Rossetti, with twelve companions, set sail for the south. This was the opening of a life of adventure which lasted twelve years, and which, could we trace it step by step, would be found a nonpareil of heroic deeds and startling dangers. The political and social condition of South America then resembled in lawlessness that period in European history when chivalry had its rise; when, as a foil to the bullying and craft and greed of the many, stood out the courage and honor and courtesy of the few. Garibaldi, whether by sea or land, approved himself a peerless knight. Following him, we should witness now a battle of gunboats far up the river Parana, until, his ammunition having given out, he loaded the cannon with the chain cables; or, again, we should undergo the horrors of a shipwreck near the mouth of La Plata, or join in a desperate battle against great odds at some lonely Paraguayan ranch; we should traverse vast pampas, or thrid the solitude of trackless forests; we should know hunger, thirst, and cold, and be incessantly attacking or attacked; and we should realize that although these campaigns seem mere border forays when compared with the wars of modern Europe and the United States, yet they settled the fate of territories as large as France, and required those martial qualities which beget heroism in any crisis under any sky.
Although we must pass all this, one marking episode in Garibaldi’s life at that time ought not to be forgotten. His ships had been cast away in a storm. He succeeded in swimming to shore, but his dearest comrades perished. He felt lonely, dispirited, and though he was soon to command another cruiser, the excitements of war could no longer dissipate his melancholy. “In short,” he says, in a characteristic passage of his Autobiography, “I had need of a human being to love me immediately,—to have one near without whom existence was growing intolerable to me. Although not old, I understood men well enough to know how hard it is to find a true friend. A woman? Yes, a woman; for I always deemed her the most perfect of creatures, and—whatever may be said—amongst women it is infinitely easier to find a loving heart. I was pacing the quarter-deck, ruminating my dismal thoughts, and, after reasonings of all kinds, I decided finally to seek a woman, to draw me out of my tiresome and unbearable condition. I cast a casual glance towards the Barra: that was the name of a rather high hill at the entrance of the lagune, toward the south, on which were visible some simple and picturesque habitations. There, with the aid of the glass, I discovered a young woman. I had myself set ashore in her direction. I disembarked, and, going towards the house where was the object of my expedition, I had not reached her before I met a man of the place, whom I had known at the beginning of our stay. He asked me to take coffee in his house. We entered, and the first person who met my gaze was she whose appearance had caused me to come ashore. It was Anita, the mother of my sons, the companion of my life in good and evil fortune,—the woman whose courage I have so often envied. We both remained rapt and speechless, reciprocally looking at each other, like two persons who do not meet for the first time, and who seek in the features one of the other something to assist recollection. At last I greeted her and said, ‘Thou must be mine.’ I spoke but little Portuguese, and uttered these hardy words in Italian. However, I was magnetic in my presumption. I had drawn a knot, sealed a compact, which death alone could break.”