Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

to conjure with From this time forwards all Mazzini's Republican Apostolate was so much hinderance and damage to the national cause. The constitutional monarchy was there; it had done good service in the crisis of 1848; and it remained true, in failure and defeat, to the liberal policy it had professed at its origin. It continued more and more to attract the sympathies of the liberal party throughout Europe. Turin, as has been well said, became the capital of the Italians long before it became the capital of Italy. The Republican ideal lost its attraction for many of those who had at first believed in it. Mazzini's writings are full of laments over such backsliders. But Mazzini himself remained unconvinced. Each new success of the hated monarchy drove him into fiercer denunciations of it, and into more doleful prophecies of some awful judgment which was to befall Italy for trusting to it. All this part of Mazzini's Apostolate must be held to have been futile in itself and mischievous to his country.

The events of the revolutionary years, which practically secured the future for the monarchists, at the same time greatly increased Mazzini's notoriety. Before that time he had been known in Italy as the proscribed exile and patriot, whose writings were with difficulty smuggled into his native country, and as one of the leaders of the abortive expedition of Savoy. But a wide and popular reputation, such a reputation as is a power in political life, he did not possess at that time, though later on, too late for the success of his own aims, he did acquire it. His name was doubtless known, but it was not he, as has been pretended, who created the popular feeling which made the revolution possible. Prior to 1848 he contributed, I believe, comparatively little to that result. In 1821, when Mazzini was sixteen years old, and again ten years later, there were serious insurrections against the standing order of things in Italy. The king of Sardinia, Charles Albert, was himself when Prince of Carignano, an earlier conspirator than Mazzini; and so dangerous was the revolutionary spirit held to be before Mazzini had any chance of influencing it, that the Cabinet of Vienna was strongly disposed to bring about the exclusion of the Liberal

Prince from the throne of Sardinia.

Gioberti in his 'Primato, Balbo in his Speranze d'Italia' (to say nothing of Azeglio, and others) had been, I believe, far more successful than Mazzini, in fixing the attention of the Italian people. I have examined some three or four hundred political songs, addresses and broad-sheets published at Genoa-Mazzini's native town, where more than anywhere he was personally known-in the spring and summer of 1848. At that time Mazzini had returned to Italy. Genoa and Leghorn, it should be remembered, were the two cities where Mazzini always found most adherents. Such documents have no literary merit; but they are of some historical value as evidence of what the common people were thinking about at the time. In all the three or four hundred I could find Mazzini's name mentioned at most three or four times, and then chiefly as a sower of discord in the national party. The heroes of most of them were the Pope and Charles Albert, and, next to them, though at a long interval, Gioberti. Gioberti had been like Mazzini, an exile; and his quiet and studious life, passed aloof from conspiracies and secret political propogandism, had not prepared the way for any popular triumphs on his return. Yet he undoubtedly at this time filled a much larger place in the thoughts of the people in Mazzini's native city than did Mazzini himself. The truth is that no one can monopolise the credit of this preparatory work; many shared in it; but it was so far a natural historical development that no single individual was necessary to it. The man who gave the greatest impulse of all to the Liberal cause in Italy, was probably the man who afterwards became its chief stumbling-block-the Pope Pius IX. His policy of reform, meagre as it was, and short-lived as it proved to be, gave an impetus to the national cause which it never lost, though it soon passed altogether beyond his control. Mazzini himself, who afterwards reviled others for believing that a Pope could ever be really a reformer, was at this time no wiser than his neighbours. 'God,' he writes, and the People have created Pius IX.'

6

Yet a mere analysis of Mazzini's opinions will give one an imperfect notion of his character. He was by nature not a politician,

but a preacher. But he lived through a crisis in the history of his country, which forced every patriotic Italian to take an active interest in politics. For a long time-up to the year 1848-there was not much for a patriot to do but to preach and to conspire. Mazzini's exile and suffering intensified that sense of loneliness which was inborn in him, and which he carried with him to his grave. The unbending nature of his convictions cut him off from fellowship with other workers for Italy. What his opinions were

when almost a lad they remained, without change or growth, till his death. The political circumstances of Europe were completely transformed in the interval, but Mazzini's views never altered. What struck others as mere perverse dogmatism was, to Mazzini's own conscience, only that fidelity to truth which is sure to bring down the censure of the wicked world. Those mutual compromises without which politics cannot be carried on at all, seemed to him, at least when asked of himself, to be a mere desertion of his faith. There is undoubtedly a noble side to such a character. Cavour, whom Mazzini never wearied of denouncing, had the fairness to recognise it. 'I admire their abnegation,' he said, speaking of Mazzini and his friends, 'I admire their abnegation, but I detest their fanaticism.' The verdict of history, will, I think, be the same. If we have to dwell rather on his fanaticism than on his virtues, it is because the former comes out far more than the latter in his public conduct and in his views of public affairs. Of his private life, which however, concerns us less here, there is but one opinion. All who knew him are agreed as to his beautiful and winning personal qualities. And as a politician-much as I think he misconceived political questions-he was a patriot in the rare sense that the welfare of his country, as he understood it, was much more value to him than his own. His followers in his own country include few or none, who have known him only by his writings; and this fact, though of bad omen for his political reputation in the future, says much for his personal worth and charm,

GREECE in the 15th & 16th CENTURIES,

BY THE

REV. A. R. VARDY, M.A.

March 28th, 1882.

THE associations connected with the name of Greece and the part which its people have taken in the intellectual history of the world, naturally give an interest to anything that concerns it. The beginnings of almost all our modern civilisation-of our poetry, history, and oratory, of our sculpture and architecture, of our metaphysical, ethical, and physical science, we trace back to the Greeks. Christianity, though not of Greek origin, is inseparably connected with the Greek language; its early literature was Greek; its doctrines were developed and its Churches were organised under the influence of Greek thought and Greek discipline. We look with interest upon the scene of a great event, upon the representatives of a great family; a like interest attaches to the later history of a country and a race to which in the first instance we owe nearly all the characteristic elements of European progress.

But, independently of this, the period of Greek history with which this paper deals is specially important as marking the transition from mediæval to modern times. The society, the politics, the thoughts, which lie on the further side of the fifteenth century belong to the past; those which lie on this side of that century are still living and potent. With the conquest of Constantinople and of Greece by the Ottoman power began that Eastern question which at this hour claims so large a share of public attention. It is well to know something of the time when these changes took

place, of the circumstances that preceded and attended them, and to mark the links in this portion of the chain of universal history.

And this suggests the further consideration, that nowhere, as it seems to me, so well as in Greece, can we learn the lesson on which the first President of this Society has never been tired of insisting -the lesson of the Unity of History. It will be remembered that in his Rede Lecture* when he wishes to show "how truly all European history is one unbroken tale," it is from a single scene on the Acropolis of Athens that Mr. Freeman draws his illustration -from the day of triumph when Basil the Second went up to pay in what had been the Parthenon, and was then a Christian Church, his thank offerings to God for his victory over the Bulgarians. How varied are the events with which in earlier and in later times that same site has been connected, and yet how closely they are linked one with another! Although we cannot claim for the stories of Erechtheus and Theseus that they embody any substantial truth, yet before the Iliad was written the history of Athens had already begun, her scattered demes had been consolidated into a single state, her massive walls had in part been reared, and a temple of Athene already stood conspicuous on the hill and was the centre of reverence and worship for all the country round. The Erechtheum and the Propylaea lead us on through the great struggle between the East and the West when the Persian King saw his fleet shattered in the bay of Salamis, to the proud days of supremacy when Pericles created the Athenian empire and adorned the City with its stateliest buildings. Then come in succession the changing fortunes of the Peloponesian War; the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, and the calm contempt with which the noblest son of Athens set at nought their power; the passionate oratory of Demosthenes swaying the people crowded in the Pnyx, and rousing them to stem the full tide of Philip's conquests. The Roman power enters upon the scene. The legions of Sulla besiege

the city; Cicero lingers among the memories of the past; Horace

p. 48.

† Homer, Iliad, ii. 546, sqq.

« ForrigeFortsett »