Из книги: ITALIAN FANTASIES
’Twas a farrago of fine confused painting, horses asprawl over the dead and wounded, men in armour driving their daggers home in the prostrate huddled forms, galloping chargers viciously spurred by helmeted knights with swirling swords, in brief an orgie of wild and whirling devilry. The pity of it, I thought, Verona and Venice, those two fairy sisters, each magically enthroned on beauty, members of the same Venetia, peopled with the same stock, speaking almost the same dialect, why must they be at each other’s throat? And this revelry of devilry might, I knew, equally serve for Venice’s conquest of any other of her neighbours in that wonderful fighting fifteenth century of hers, when she must needs set up her winged lion in every market place.
And these rivalries of Venice and her neighbour-towns, I recalled, were only part of the universal urban warfare—Genoa against Pisa, Siena against Florence, Gubbio against Perugia; these again breaking into smaller circles of contention, or intersected with larger, party against party, faction against faction, guild against guild, Guelph against Ghibelline, Montague against Capulet, Oddi against Baglioni, _popolani_ against _grandi_, provinces against invaders, blood-feuds horrific, innumerable, the Guelph-Ghibelline contest alone involving 7200 revolutions and 700 massacres in its three centuries! And yet there is a reverse to the shield, and a iewelled scabbard to the sword.
I stood later in the Palazzo Malaspina of Pavia where, tradition says, the imprisoned Boëthius composed “The Consolations of Philosophy,” and here in a vestibule my eye was caught by a fragment of gilded gate hung aloft, and running to read the explanatory inscription, I found it—in translation—as follows:
“These Remnants of the Old Gates of Pavia Thrice Trophies in Civil Wars By a Magnanimous Thought Restored by Ravenna Are To-day an Occasion for Rejoicing Betwixt the Two Cities Desirous Of Changing the Vestiges of the Old Discords Into Pledges of Union & Patriotic Love The XIII day of September MDCCCLXXVIII”
_Un magnanimo pensiero_, indeed! And—like the chains of Pisa’s ancient harbour restored by Genoa—a pleasant sequel to the noble common struggle for Italian independence. And yet—the _advocatus diaboli_ whispered me, or was it the shade of Boëthius in quest of “The Consolations of Phlebotomy”?—“What has become of Pavia, what of Ravenna, since they ceased to let each other’s blood? Where is the Pavia of a hundred towers, where is the Castello reared and enriched by generations of Visconti Dukes, and its University, once the finest in Italy, at which Petrarch held a chair; where is the opulence of life that flowed over into the Certosa, now arid in its mausolean magnificence? Where is the Ravenna whose lawyers were as proverbial in the eleventh century as Philadelphia’s are to-day, where is that hotbed of heresy which nourished the great anti-Pope Guibert? Where is even the Ravenna of Guido da Polenta, protector of Dante? Apt indeed to hold only Dante’s tomb. And its young men who bawl out choruses of a Sunday night till the small hours—do they even deserve the shrine of the poet of Christendom? And Venice? And Verona? And the Rimini of the sixty galleys? What have they gained from their colourless absorption into a United Italy, compared with what they have lost—had indeed already lost—of peculiar and passionate existence? Are there two gentlemen of Verona now in whom we take a scintilla of interest? Is there a merchant of Venice whose ventures concern us a jot? Is there a single Antonio with argosies bound for Tripolis and the Indies?” “Your Ben Jonson,” and by his wide posthumous reading I knew ’twas Boëthius speaking now, “said ‘in short measures life may perfect be.’ He should have said ‘in small circles’ and, perhaps, ‘_only_ in small circles.’ All America—with its vasty breadths—stands to-day without a single man of the first order.”
“’Tis not even”—put in the _advocatus diaboli_, betrayed by his unphilosophic chuckle—“as if the destruction of small patriotisms meant the destruction of war. Pavia and Ravenna,” he pointed out mischievously, “must continue to fight—as part of the totality, Italy. And behold,” quoth he, drawing my eyes towards the Piazza Castello, “the significance of that old castle’s metamorphosis into a barrack—the poetry of war turned to prose, the frescoes of the old Pavian and Cremonese painters faded, perhaps even whitewashed over, and rough Government soldiers drilling where the Dukes played pall-mall. Gone is that rich concreteness of local strife, attenuated by its expansion into a national animosity; not insubstantial indeed under stress of invasion, but shadowy and unreal when the _casus belli_ is remote, and by the manœuvres of my friends, the international diplomatists, the Pavian or Ravennese finds himself fighting on behalf of peoples with whom alliance is transitory and artificial.”
“But he will not find himself fighting so often,” I rejoined. “Countries do not join battle as recklessly as cities. The larger the bulk the slower the turning to bite.” “And meantime,” interposed the philosophic shade, “the war-tax in peace is heavier than anciently in war. And neither in war nor in peace can there be the joy of fighting that comes from personal keenness in the issue. The wars of town with town, of sect with sect, of neighbour with neighbour, so far from being fratricidal and unnatural, are the only human forms of war. ’Tis only neighbours that can feel what they are fighting for, ’tis only brothers that can fight with unction. The very likeness of brothers, their intimate acquaintance with the points of community, gives them an acute sense of the points of difference, and provides their combat with a solid standing-ground at the bar of reason. Least irrational of all internecion were the fratricide of twins. Save the war of self-defence, civil war is the only legitimate form of war. Military war—how monstrous the sound, what a clanking of mailed battalions! Your Bacon betrays but a shallow and conventional sense of ‘The True Greatness of Kingdoms,’ when he compares civil war to the heat of a fever, and foreign war to the heat of exercise which serves to keep the body in health. For what is foreign war but an arrogance of evil life, an inhuman sport, a fiendish trial of skill? Why should a home-born Briton ever fight a Russian? His boundaries are nowhere contiguous with the Russian’s, his very notion of a Russ is mythical. ’Tis a cold-blooded war-game into which he is thrust from above. What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba? Other is it with warfare that is personal, profoundly felt. Civil war—how sacred, how close to men’s bosoms! When Greek meets Greek, _then_ comes the tug of war.”
“In religious wars, too,” eagerly interrupted the _advocatus diaboli_, “’tis nearness that is the justification—Homoousian versus Homoiousian. Why in heaven’s name,” he added with a spice of malice, “should a Mussulman cry haro against a Parsee, or a Shintoist against a Mormon? Here, too, the boundaries are not contiguous; ’twere the duel of whale and elephant. ’Tis the Christian sects that must naturally torture and murder one another,” he wound up triumphantly.
“Ay indeed,” serenely assented the shade of Boëthius. “If fighting is to be done at all, let it be between brothers and not between strangers. Where ‘a hair perhaps divides the False and True’ ’tis of paramount importance to determine on which side of the hair we should stand. This rigid accuracy is the glory of Science—why should not our decimal be correct to nine places even in Religion? Why wave aside these sharp differences for which the men of my day were willing to pay with their lives? When your Alfred the Great translated my _magnum opus_, or even as late as when your Chaucer honoured me with a modern version, these questions could vie in holy intensity, almost with your latter-day questions of Free Trade and Tariff Reform.”
“Ah, the palmy days of martyrdom,” sighed the _advocatus diaboli_, “when men were literally aflame for _filioque_ or Immaculate Conception. O for the fiery Arians, Gnostics, Marcionites, Valentinians, Socinians, Montanists, Donatists, Iconoclasts, Arnoldites, Pelagians, Monophysites, Calixtines, Paulicians, Hussites, Cathari, Albigenses, Waldenses, Bogomilians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Baptists, Anabaptists——”
“Surely you would not call Baptists fiery?” I interjected feebly. He had apparently no sense of humour, this _advocatus_, for he went on coldly: “How tame and disappointing these latter-day sectarians: these Methodists, Plymouth Brethren, Christian Scientists, Irvingites, Christadelphians, ‘et hoc genus omne.’ I did have a flash of hope when your Methodists began to split up into Wesleyans, Protestant Methodists, Reformers, Primitives, Bryanites and the like, whose bitter brotherly differences seemed to show the old sacrosanct concern for the minutiæ of Truth and Practice. But no! no one believes nowadays, for nobody burns his fellow-Christian. Even the burning words of your King’s Declaration——!”
“August shade,” I interrupted, pointedly addressing myself to the last of the Roman philosophers, “I concede that when Christianity founded itself on texts, an infinite perspective of homicidal homiletics lay open to the ingenuous and the ingenious. And so long as Heaven and Hell turned on dogma and ritual, an infinite significance attached to the difference between the theological tweedledum and the theological tweedledee, so that it is just dimly conceivable one might murder one’s neighbour for his own good or the greater glory of God. But do not tell me that to-day, too, the test of belief is bloodshed.”
“_Immo vero_,” cried the Roman shade emphatically. “Was I not clubbed to death because I believed in Justice and combated the extortions of the Goths? A belief for which we would not die or kill, what is it?”
“A bloodless belief,” chuckled the _advocatus diaboli_, who, I suddenly remembered, was more legitimately entitled the _defensor fidei_.
RISORGIMENTO: WITH SOME REMARKS ON SAN MARINO AND THE MILLENNIUM
“Il Calavrese abate Giovacchino Di spirito profetico dotato.” DANTE: _Paradiso_, Canto xii.
“Pater imposuit laborem legis, qui timor est; filius imposuit laborem disciplinæ, qui sapientia est; spiritus sanctus exhibet libertatem, quæ amor est.”
JOACHIM OF FLORA: _Liber Concordiæ_, ii.
I
“Italy is too long,” said the Italian. We were coming into Turin in the dawn, amid burning mountains of rosy snow, and the train was moving slowly, in hesitation, with pauses for reflection. “The line is single in places,” he explained. “Italy is too narrow, too cramped by mountain-chains, and above all too long. It is the trouble behind all our politics. There are three Italies, three horizontal strata, that do not interfuse—the industrial and intelligent North, the stagnant and superstitious South, and the centre with Rome which is betwixt and between.”
“But there is far more clericalism in the North than the South,” I said. “The Church party is a political force.”
“Precisely what proves my case. In the North everything is more efficient, even to the forces of reaction. The clericals are better organised, and are, moreover, supported by the propertied atheists in the interests of order. But the North is Europe—Germany, if you will—the South is already Africa.” The train stopped again. He groaned. “No unity possible.”
“No unity?” I exclaimed. “And what about Garibaldi and Mazzini and United Italy?”
“It is a phrase. Italy is too long.”
I pondered over his words, and in imagination I saw again all the Risorgimento museums, all the tablets in all the _loggias_ and town halls recording those who had died for the Union of Italy, all the statues of all the heroes, all the streets and piazzas dedicated to them, while in my ears resounded all the artillery of applause booming at that very moment throughout the length and narrowness of Italy in celebration of the Jubilee of the Departure of the Thousand from Quarto.
II
Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find the Risorgimento a discordant obsession; flaunting itself as it does in brand new statues and monuments whose incongruity of colour or form destroys the mellow unity of old Cathedral-Piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or unobtrusive tablets, and Venice with her abundance of _Campi_ has stowed it out of sight, though Victor Emmanuel ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge of Sighs, and “three youths who died for their country” intrude among the tombs of the Doges. The essence of Pisa is preserved by its isolation from life, leaving Mazzini to dominate the city of his death. But the majority of the old towns are devastated by the new national heroes—admirable and vigorous as the sculpture sometimes is—even as the old historic landmarks are obliterated by the new street names. And in addition to the pervasive quartette—Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Mazzini—local heroes aggravate the ruin of antiquity. Daniele Manin thrones in Venice over a winged lion sprawling beneath a triton; Ricasoli, “the iron Baron,” rules in Tuscany; Pavia is sacred to the Cairoli; Minghetti runs through the Romagna; Crispi through the South; Genoa devotes a street, a square, and a bronze statue to Bixio, the Boanerges of the epic; Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand; even Rubattino—patriot in his own despite—has his statue in Genoa harbour, on the false ground that he put his shipping line at Garibaldi’s disposal. ’Tis a very shower of stones, falling on the just and the unjust alike. And sometimes—as at Asti—all the Heroes are United beneath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions.
And even the ubiquitous heroes have peculiar glory in their peculiar haunts. Cavour is gigantic at Ancona (probably because the town was freed by Piedmontese troops); he stands in the castle of Verona, over-brooded by snow mountains: at Turin, his birthplace, Fame wildly clasps him to her breast in a mammoth monument, crying, “Audace, prudente, libero Italia.”
A Vanity Fair without a hero I have never chanced on. Little Chiavari has its grandiose angel-strewn monument to Victor Emmanuel, whom Parma likewise exhibits flourishing his sword; Pesaro breaks out in tablets to those who died fighting “the hirelings of the Theocracy”; Rimini has a Piazza Cavour; priest-ridden Vicenza shelters a statue of Mazzini; Assisi itself, waking from its saintly slumber, consecrates a Piazzetta to Garibaldi, and a street to the Twentieth of September on which Italian troops broke into Rome!
Ah, Garibaldi, Garibaldi, how thou didst weigh on my wanderings! From Mantua to Ferrara, from Spoleto to Perugia, Garibaldi, always Garibaldi. I fled to dead Ravenna, lo! thou didst tower in the very Piazza of Byron; to Parma, and rugged, imposing, in thy legendary cap, leaning on thy sword, thou didst obsess the Piazza Garibaldi; to Rome itself, and twenty feet high, thou impendedst in bronze, with battle pieces and allegories around thee; I retreated to the extremest point of the Peninsula, and found myself in the Corso Garibaldi of Reggio; I crossed to Sicily, only to stumble against thy great horse in Palermo and the monument to thy valour in Calatafimi. For of the statesman, the monarch, the prophet and the soldier who combined to redeem Italy, it is naturally the soldier that is stamped most vividly on the popular imagination, the noble freelance whom the mob deemed divine even before his death, whose memory the people has rescued from the anti-climax of his end, selecting away his follies and mistakes and idealising his virtues, under the artistic law of mythopoiesis, till, shaped and perfected for eternal service, the national hero shines immaculate in his sacred niche.
And yet, as the streets show, even the popular imagination has realised that the soldier would not have sufficed. Thrice blessed, indeed, was Italy to possess Cavour and Mazzini at the same hour as Garibaldi. It is a fallacy to suppose that the hour always finds the man, or the man the hour, or that “il n’y a pas d’homme indispensable.” Many an hour passes away without its man, as many a man without his hour. Great men perish, wasted, because there are no forces for them to synthetise: great forces remain inarticulate, unorganised and ineffective, because they have found no leader to be their conduit. All the more marvellous that Italy should have produced simultaneously three indispensable men, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, each of whom had something of the other two, yet something unique of his own. None of the three quite understood the others, and Mazzini, who was much like Ibsen’s Brand, was even more intolerant than Garibaldi of the Machiavellian policies of Cavour, and had to be swept aside as a visionary. For one heroic, impossible moment, indeed, the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human history. But with the disappearance of the Republic, Mazzini might have disappeared too, for all his influence upon the political Risorgimento; did indeed practically disappear by acquiescing in the battle-flag of Monarchy. Garibaldi and Cavour sufficed to create the combination of Force and Fraud by which political history is made. For though, if any sword might ever bear the words I saw on a sword graven by Donatello—“Valore e Giustitia”—that sword was Garibaldi’s, and if ever passion was patriotic it was Cavour’s, nevertheless the liberation of Italy did not escape being achieved by the usual factors of Force and Fraud.
III
And, in addition to all these busts, statues, allegories, tablets, pillars, cairns, lions, bas-reliefs, wreaths, lists of heroes, records of _plébiscites_ anent annexations, _loggias_ whence Garibaldi orated; in addition to all the Piazze Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel, all the Corsi Cavour and Mazzini, all the streets of the Twentieth of September and other heroic dates, there is the specific Museum of the Risorgimento from which no tiniest town is immune. To see one is practically to see all. With the same piety with which their ancestors collected the relics of the saints, the modern Italians have collected the relics of their heroes and the war—swords, sticks, photographs, crude paintings and engravings, old hats, letters, tricolour scarves, medals, pictures, patriotic money, helmets, epaulettes, broken bombs, cannon-balls, cartoons, caricatures, faded wreaths, autographs, sculptures, crosses, proclamations, prayer-books, pictures of steamers conveying insurgents! And Garibaldi! What town has not some shred of the “Genius of Liberty,” as the tablet in the old castle of Ferrara styles him—his flask, his sword, his shirt, his gun, his letters, his telegrams! Peculiarly sacred is the red shirt which he wore at Aspromonte, though it recalls the ironic fact that when the charmed, invincible hero was at last wounded and captured, it was by soldiers of the king he had created and of the Italy whose triumph he was seeking to consummate. Something Miltonic seems to emanate from that red shirt:
“That flaming shirt which Garibaldi wore At Aspromonte.”
But for the rest, all these relics are as ugly as the relics of the saints. Beautiful and exalting as are the Museums in reality, with their record of sacrifice and patriotism in one of the most wonderful chapters of history, infinitely touching as is every yellow letter or worn glove, when imagination has transfused it, these glass cases are outwardly depressing to the last degree—a warning to the Realist, and a proof that Art in expressing the soul of a phenomenon is infinitely truer in its beauty than Nature unselected and unadorned. The wooden-legged curator of Bologna, who lost his leg at Solferino, is a mere stumping old bore; the little photograph of twenty-four Garibaldians minus arms or with crutches is simply discomforting. Even the story of the modern mother of the Gracchi, Adelaide Cairoli, who gave four sons to her country, exhales but tepidly from the picture at Pavia of a middle-aged lady in a bonnet surrounded by young soldiers in variegated costumes.
“Leonessa d’Italia,” cried Carducci to Brescia, and the one word of the poet wipes out all the crude photographs and grandiose inscriptions by which that seemingly prosaic town asserts its heroism; one ceases even to smile at the tablet at the foot of the castle hill, veiling a defeat in the guise of ferocious Austrian charges, “frequently” repulsed. From a mock passport of Radetsky in the Vicenza Museum I got a more vivid sense of the racial hatred than from all the relics and tablets: “Birth: Bastard of the seven deadly sins. Age: Eighty-two, sixty-five of which have been passed in robbing Austria of the money she stole. Eyes: Of a bird of prey. Nose: Of a Jew. Mouth: Open for the swallowing of divorce! Beard: Nothing. Hair: Enough. Visage: Not human. Occupation: Projector of Conquests. On the field of battle always at the tail; in the destruction of unarmed cities always at the head. Country: No country will own him. Signature: The last five days of his stay in Milan have paralysed him and he cannot sign. _Visé_: Good for nowhere.” And my most lively realisation of the transformation wrought in Europe since 1820 came, not from a Risorgimento museum nor from an official history, but from a black-and-white engraving of Raphael’s _Sposalizio_ “dedicated humbly” by Giuseppe Longhi in 1820 “to the Imperial Royal Apostolical Majesty of Francesco I, Emperor of Austria, King of Jerusalem, Hungary, Bohemia, Lombardy, Venice, Dalmatia, Sclavonia, Galicia, Laodomiria, Illyria, &c. &c.”
IV
Even those streets or buildings that are free from the Risorgimento are pitted with records or statues. Padua records with equal pride how Dante had his exile sweetened by the hospitality of Carrara da Giotto, and how Giovanni Prati, the singer of to-day, lived in the Via del Santo. Verona celebrates impartially Catullus and some minor poet whose name I forget, if I ever knew it, “who by making sweet verses obtained a fame more than Italian.” Ferrara has a positive leprosy of white plaques. Bassano is not a great city, but “there is enough celebrity in Bassano,” writes Mr. Howells, “to supply the whole world.” Things were apparently not always thus; for when Childe Harold went on his pilgrimage he demanded to know where Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were buried.
“Are they resolved to dust, And have their country’s marbles naught to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?”
Could her quarries possibly furnish forth one _more_ bust, was the question that came to me on my later pilgrimage. Too much to say have their country’s marbles. No poet could lodge a night at a house but for all time his visit must be graven; every local lawyer or engineer is become a world-wonder; it is recorded where “the inventor of the perpetual electric motor” died; even an assassination must be eternalised in a tablet. As for a room in which conspirators met to smoke and plot, it is for ever glorified and sanctified.
I was relieved, when I did go to Carrara,
“Nei monti di Luni, dove ronca Lo Carrarese,”
to find the supply of marble from its fabular mountains still held out, but the chief occupation of the town seemed to consist in cutting it into slabs with great many-bladed machines. Slowly the grim knives descended, slicing the stone, while a spray moved to and fro to prevent its overheating by friction. And as I watched these plaques gradually grinding into separate existence, I heard them beginning to babble their lapidary language, bursting into eloquent inscriptions to unknown celebrities—chemists, town councillors, hydrographers, economists—nay, commemorating the Risorgimento itself in some village yet ungrown. “Rome or Death,” they cried stonily, and “Italy to her Sons,”and “Ci siamo e ci resteremo.” And the knives sank lower and lower, and the glories rose higher and higher, and the spray, hissing, continued to throw cold water on the enthusiasm, like some cynic observing it was easier to celebrate the old heroism than under its continuous inspiration to create the new. Carrara itself—though one would think it took marbles as a confectioner takes tarts—has its memorials of Garibaldi and Mazzini, besides that more ancient monument to Maria Beatrice overbrooded by the magic mountains.
To what cause shall we ascribe this hypertrophy of self-consciousness since Childe Harold’s day? Is it due to the Risorgimento, or the pleasure-pilgrims, or is some of it inspired by William Walton, canny British Guglielmo, to whom the municipality of Carrara has erected one of his own tablets for his services in stimulating the industry? Is it William Walton who forces all this glory upon Italy? Is it he who creates all this hero-worship? Perugino is no new discovery, yet not till 1865—341 years after his death—did the Commune of Perugia put up a tablet on that steep street which leads to his modest one-storied house, while Carducci, though not even a native, already looks out from the Carducci Gardens towards the rolling snow-mountains on the horizon. To this same 1865 belongs the imposing Dante Monument in the Piazza Santa Croce of Florence. But the six-hundredth anniversary of a poet is a trifle late for his appearance in his native city. True, it had taken him only two hundred years to force his way into Florence Cathedral, but that was merely as a painting on wood. The statue of Correggio in Parma (of course in the Piazza Garibaldi) was not erected till 1870. Tasso has been “the great unhappy poet” for three centuries. Yet not till 1895 did Urbino think it necessary to record his visit to the city as the guest of Federigo Bonaventura. As for Raphael, Urbino’s own wonder-child, that thirty-six foot monument to him dates only from 1897! All these testimonials to Art would be a little more convincing if the straight iron bridges with which Venice and Verona have insulted their fairy waters, did not prove—like the flamboyant technique of the modern Italian painter—that Italy has left her art period irrevocably behind.
And the great knives of Carrara go grinding on, “ohne Hast, ohne Rast,” inexorably supplying celebrity. Like the Greece of the decadence, Italy has reached its stone age, an age which seems the symptom of spent vigour, the petrifaction of what once was vital. Nor is it easy to recognise Mazzini’s soldiers of humanity in a nation whose prophet is d’Annunzio, whose “smart set” repeats the morals of the Renaissance without its genius, whose masses appear to spend their lives in lounging about the streets smoking long black slow-lighting cigars, or patronising the innumerable pastrycooks. It seems a slight return for all the heroic agony of the Risorgimento that Europe should be supplied with an efficient type of restaurant, and a vividly gesturing waiter, who dissects himself in discussing the carving of the joint.
“Scuola di magnanimi Sensi, Auspicata promessa dell’ Avvenire”
cries a memorial tablet at Brescia, but the ennoblement and the promise of the future are less obvious than the orgy of nationalistic sentiment. And when I read how at the recent meeting in North Italy between their King and the Czar, Italian citizens submitted to being treated like Russians during a royal progress; herded outside the town while within it every door was bolted and every blind drawn, as though ’twas indeed the funeral of freedom, I felt how justified was Mazzini’s unwillingness to resurrect under a monarchy. And when I think of the great equestrian monument to Victor Emmanuel II which is to commemorate in 1911 the jubilee of the dynasty’s sovereignty over United Italy—the monument that will cost a hundred million lire, and in the belly of whose horse a _lunch d’onore_ was recently offered by the proprietor of the foundry to the engineers and artisans, “twenty-six persons in all”—I see how wise was Mazzini’s protest against the narrowing down of a great spiritual movement to the acquisition of more territory by a reigning house. It was a commercial traveller who proudly directed my attention to this equine lunch, and this standard of greatness just suits a commercial nation. In this Gargantuan horse the whole millennial dream of Mazzini may end, and those young heroes of freedom, whose deaths lay so heavy on his conscience in his black moments, may have died but to add another to the family party of monarchs who regard the rest of humanity as a subject-race, transferable from one to the other by conquest or treaty.
However valuable a King may be to Italy as a symbol of Unity, Mazzini was historically accurate when he pointed out that the conception of kingship has no roots in Italy, the one epoch of imperial sway being a mere degeneration of the Roman Republic. It was a fine stroke of tactics to celebrate Mazzini’s centenary in 1905 as a national festival, in which the King himself took part. But these centennial tablets and statues were Italy’s way of stoning its prophet; this festival was Mazzini’s real funeral, burying his aspirations out of sight so effectively that the man in the street has forgotten that for Mazzini the goal of Garibaldi and Cavour was only a starting-point; and a popular British Encyclopædia assures us that Mazzini “lived to see all his dreams realised.”