In the meantime the work of Young Italy was to organise and educate; and the only possible organisation was that of the secret society. Mazzini did not see its inherent weaknesses. Young Italy soon became as much the quarry of the spy and police agent as the Carbonari had been; and to the end of life Mazzini was the victim of informers, who won his easy confidence. The society developed an uncontrolled and irresponsible leadership, and its chief, eager as he was and sincerely eager to disclaim any desire to dictate, was too impatient, too self-confident to allow fair play to other men's convictions. As a means of preparing for war, it failed disastrously; and it proved an ill school for the parliamentary politics of later days. But in a country, where any open expression of liberal sentiment meant prison or exile, if not the scaffold, there was no alternative; and as an educating influence it came to be the greatest of the forces that made Italy. Its writings, smuggled into every corner of the land, moved many a young thinker to a passionate resolve, that bore its fruit in after times. At this stage, however, Mazzini was hardly looking to the slow results of political education. The hour of insurrection, he confidently believed, was near; the European revolution was threatening, and Italy must not be behind the sister nations. He was certain of success. Whatever difficulties might come to a nationalist movement without a backing from the native governments, however much Italians might distrust their own unaided strength, there was "no real obstacle for twenty-six millions of men, who wished to rise and fight for their country." Austria, he calculated, could at the best put two hundred thousand men into the field; he fondly counted on four million Italian volunteers. A people, that even under the leading of the Carbonari had made three revolutions in ten years, would rise again more readily and more victoriously at the inspiration of a nobler faith.
At Marseilles—Spread of Young Italy—Letter to Charles Albert—The Army Plot in Piedmont—At Geneva—The Savoy Raid.
When Mazzini arrived at Lyons, he found an unhopeful plan in preparation for raiding Savoy. Some 2000 Italian refugees, many of them Piedmontese who had fled through Genoa ten years before and stirred his boyish enthusiasm, were ready to march under the hardly concealed protection of the French government. It was still in the early days of the July monarchy, when it had yet not quite forgotten its revolutionary origin. But before the expedition could start, Louis Philippe's swift lapse into conservatism, which had already made him break his promises to the Romagnuols, abruptly ended the patronage of the authorities. The would-be raiders were scattered, and Mazzini joined a small party of republicans, who were starting for Corsica, on their way to join the insurgents in Romagna. The Corsicans were still Italian in sentiment as well as race, and the Carbonaro influence was strong in the island. Two thousand men offered themselves for service with the insurgents, but no funds were forthcoming to pay their passage, and before arrangements could be made the news arrived that the rising had collapsed.
Mazzini returned to Marseilles, and found himself among the refugees who had escaped from Central Italy. He recruited a few young patriots among them, and with their help he began to give body to his schemes. In a small room at Marseilles the young Titans started, with nothing but their own sincerity and daring, to revolutionise Italy. "We had no office, no helpers," he wrote of them in after years. "All day, and a great part of the night, we were buried in our work, writing articles and letters, getting information from travellers, enlisting seamen, folding papers, fastening envelopes, dividing our time between literary and manual work. La Cecilia was compositor; Lamberti corrected the proofs; another of us made himself literally porter, to save the expense of distributing the papers. We lived as equals and brothers; we had but one thought, one hope, one ideal to reverence. The foreign republicans loved and admired us for our tenacity and unflagging industry; we were often in real want, but we were light-hearted in a way, and smiling because we believed in the future."
In later life Mazzini looked back longingly to the freshness and enthusiasm of those days, before failure had disillusioned him or misunderstanding estranged him from his friends. When he was well and happy, all the charm of his nature—his radiant idealism, his warm-hearted friendship, his contagious unselfishness—made him the beloved inspirer of the little band that worked under his orders. "He was," said an Italian of him at this time, "about 5 feet 8 inches high and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large "republican" hat; his long, curling black hair, which fell upon his shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the chiselled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his very youthful look and sweetness and openness of expression, would have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his dark eyes and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with his small and beautiful moustachios and beard. Altogether he was at that time the most beautiful being, male or female, that I had ever seen, and I have not since seen his equal."[4] But sometimes even now overwork and impatience told on him, and he felt ill and exhausted. In such moods he must have been a trying man to be much with—irritable, exacting, requiring absolute submission from his fellow-workers, angry if they thought well of men whom he disliked.
For two years the little band worked on, sowing the seeds of revolution. It was a heroic enterprise. A few young men, without birth or wealth to help them, and, except for their leader, of no great ability, were planning to change the future of their country and preparing for war with a great military empire. To an outsider it must have seemed a madman's dream. But their masterful chief had taught them his own faith; and they, and thousands of their countrymen after them, found in it the power, to which few things are impossible. They worked with remorseless energy, month after month, corresponding with sympathisers all over the peninsula, planting lodges of Young Italy wherever a chance opened, drawing together the threads of conspiracy. They found abundant backing in Italy. Mazzini appealed to his followers there to work among the people by every road that the despotism left open, to bring children to school and teach them, to hold classes for men in the country districts, to circulate pictures and pamphlets and almanacs, which would insinuate patriotic ideas without exciting the suspicions of the police, to carry the cross of fire from town to town and village to village. "Climb the hills," he asked of them, "sit at the farmer's table, visit the workshops and the artisans, whom you now neglect. Tell them of their rightful liberties, their ancient traditions and glories, the old commercial greatness which has gone; talk to them of the thousand forms of oppression, which they ignore, because no one points them out." His appeal found a ready response. Hundreds of young Italians, fired by his own passion, gave themselves to the dangers and toils and the thousand small annoyances of a conspirator's life. It was no light call. "I know of no existence," said one of them in later life, "which requires such continual self-abnegation and endurance. A conspirator has to listen to all sorts of gossip, to soothe every variety of vanity, discuss nonsense seriously, feel sick and stifling under the pressure of empty talk, idle boasting, and vulgarity, and yet maintain an unmoved and complacent countenance. A conspirator ceases to belong to himself, and becomes the toy of anyone he may meet; he must go out when he would rather stay at home, and stay at home when he would rather go out; he has to talk when he would be silent, and to hold vigils when he would rather be in bed." And behind these petty vexations, which meant more to the Italians of that day than to a generation trained in strenuousness, lay the knowledge that discovery meant prison or exile, perhaps death. But they faced it with the courage of men who believed that the "wear and tear was smoothing the way, inch by inch, towards a noble and holy end," who looked to the day when through their labours their country would be lifted from the slough of misgovernment and low ideals. Life and everything they were ready to give for that. "Here are we," said Jacopo Ruffini to his fellow-conspirators at Genoa, "five young, very young men, with but limited means, and we are called on to do nothing less than overthrow an established government. I have a presentiment that few of us will live to see the final results of our labours, but the seed we have sown will shoot forth after us, and the bread we have cast upon the waters will be found again."
Mazzini might well be sanguine, with men like these behind him. He looked to his literature to do the rest. The journal of Young Italy was, as he described it, "a collection of political pamphlets," each of the infrequent and irregular numbers consisting of a hundred to two hundred pages, badly printed on bad paper. Later on, it was set up by French compositors, who knew no Italian, and whose misprints gave him infinite concern. He himself did most of the writing. It was terribly diffusive often and wanting in precision, but his articles redeem their literary defects by the glow of noble purpose, that made them thrill their readers, and gave them a potency, that perhaps no other political writings of the century attained to. Most of the remaining articles came from his fellow-workers. Mazzini tried to persuade Sismondi to contribute, but the historian, though sympathetic, was too opposed to some of his teaching to respond. Louis Napoleon, drawn by a fellow-feeling for conspiracy and scenting a chance to preach Bonapartism, sent an essay on Military Honour, with the thesis that soldiers are not bound by their oath to act against a revolution. Mazzini consented to insert it with many emendations, which apparently left little of its Bonapartist intention; but for some reason that does not appear, it was not published. The journal had a small circulation, and only reached a limited number of young educated men; it was indeed too literary for popular consumption. There seems to have been a larger demand for rules and instructions and popular tracts written by Gustavo Modena, afterwards to become one of the most famous Italian tragedians of his day. At all events there was a considerable contraband of printed matter, smuggled to Genoa or Leghorn or across the passes into Piedmont, inside barrels of pitch and pumice stone or bales of drapery or packages of sausages. So great became the demand, that secret presses were set up in Italy and the Ticino to supplement the output from Marseilles.
The results surpassed even Mazzini's sanguine hopes. The first lodges of Young Italy were planted at Genoa and Leghorn, and they spread thence to a good many towns of North and Central Italy. The chief strength of the society lay at Genoa, where the nationalist and anti-Piedmontese parties made common cause, and men of every class came in—nobles and commoners, lawyers and civil servants and priests, seamen and artisans. Outside Genoa the working men seem to have kept aloof as a rule; years had yet to pass before Mazzini's social teaching reached them. The recruits came chiefly from the young men of the middle classes, sons of the men who had had their importance under the French rule and had been cribbed and kept under since the restoration. Here and there a young noble joined; in Piedmont and at Genoa at all events there was a sprinkling of older professional and business men; a few priests welcomed a movement, which bore so strong a religious imprint. Everywhere the scattered remnants of the Carbonari enrolled themselves. Buonarrotti, doyen of the conspirators, descendant of Michelangelo, friend of Robespierre and Babœuf and Napoleon, attached his society of the Veri Italiani. Early in 1833 Mazzini, it is impossible to say with what accuracy, put the number of affiliates at fifty or sixty thousand. Many a man, who came to the front in the later nationalist movement or in the first Italian parliaments, began his political life as a member of Young Italy. Garibaldi, a young sailor who wrote verses, just promoted to be captain in the Genoese mercantile marine, whose fearlessness and charm of manner made him the idol of the men under him, and who had already learnt from Foscolo a belief in the destinies of Italy as ardent as Mazzini's own, met the chief at Marseilles and joined the society. Gioberti, who was teaching a transcendental and literary patriotism to the novices in the Archbishop's seminary at Vercelli, sent warm words of encouragement to the cause of God and the People.
All Mazzini's preparations centred round Piedmont and Genoa. He realised, with the bulk of patriots of whatever school, that though the other provinces might play a secondary part, Piedmont must take the lead. It was the only state that possessed the military training and traditions, essential in a war; it was the natural base for an invasion of Lombardy; Alessandria and Genoa were two all-important strategic points, and if the Italians were defeated in the plains, they could fall back on the Alps and Apennines. There were few republicans among the Piedmontese, but they were nationalists with all their race's tenacity of purpose. The Genoese were zealots for the cause, all the more if it were under a republican flag; in Savoy there was a strong strain of liberalism, and its position made it a connecting link with sympathisers in France. Mazzini's first public act—some three or four months after he left Italy—was to write an open letter to the king. Charles Albert had just ascended the throne of Piedmont; and expectation ran high, as it had run ten years before, that he would lead the nationalists. This time there was small bottom for the hope. Charles Albert had had his phase of liberalism; in his youth he had relations with the Carbonari, and encouraged the Piedmontese conspirators of 1821 to look to him to lead the army to a war for Lombard independence. Had he had the courage, he would have stood by his word. But as he was then, so was he now, a moral coward, buffeted by irreconcilable ambitions. He was still a nationalist, but no liberal. Liberalism had come to loom before him as a spectre of Revolution, to be fought and crushed without pity. But priest-ridden absolutist as he was, he never quite forgot his patriotic faith, he always had some vision, faint though it often was, of an Italy untrodden by the foreign soldier. It is probable that even now, in his worst years, he was waiting dubiously for the distant day, when he would measure himself with the enemy. But he knew that as yet this was impossible. He had a saner view than Mazzini of the possibilities of the time, when France—on the high road to the juste-milieu—would give no help, and a single-handed fight with Austria was foredoomed to defeat. He would have scorned an offer of Mazzini's guerilla bands; but had he been as ready to welcome the volunteers, as his son was twenty-eight years later, they had little prospect of existence at this time outside Mazzini's visionary hopes.
Such was Charles Albert, when Mazzini appealed to him to lead the nationalist movement. What was the exact purpose of the letter, will probably never be known. In after life Mazzini denied that there was any serious intention in it; he pleaded that he expressed the hopes of others rather than his own, and wrote it in the certainty that its appeal would not be heard. At the time he disclaimed, though not so emphatically, any hope of a response, and suggested that its object was to disillusion the Piedmontese of any belief in their king. There is some reason for thinking that the disclaimers must not be taken quite literally. When he wrote twenty years and more afterwards, he was anxious to prove that he had never lapsed from his republican faith. His earlier commentary was in a letter to a man, whom he did not know, and to whom he was not likely to express himself unreservedly. There are indications that he had not quite escaped the glamour that Charles Albert threw over the liberals, had not entirely abandoned all hope of winning him. The secret instructions of Young Italy, written a few months later, accepted the possibility of a monarchy as a "system of transition"; and in the subsequent army plot Mazzini intended to offer the King the leadership of the revolution. One would fain believe that his own interpretations do him injustice, that he did not write his glowing prose in utter insincerity. Were it otherwise, we must bow the head and sadly own a stain upon that noble life.
The letter, it must be confessed, was hardly calculated to make a convert. Threats alternate with overdone praise; the assumption of political omniscience, the claim of the young exile to speak for Italy, the magniloquent parade of the obvious, must have, like much else of his earlier writings, offended Italian common-sense and been extremely irritating. Much of it reads like a declamatory school essay on the duties of a constitutional king. But the lesson was true enough on its negative side. Charles Albert could find no safe foothold outside popular government; coercion, administrative reform, the support of Austria or France—none would permanently content or overawe his people. And if Charles Albert had retorted that to grant a constitution meant war with Austria, Mazzini would have welcomed the corollary. The King was right and Mazzini was wrong as to the inopportuneness of a national rising at the moment. But for the policy of another day, the letter has passages that speak like a trumpet call. "Sire, there is another road, leading to true power and a glorious immortality; another ally, safer and more strong than Austria or France. There is a crown more brilliant and sublime than that of Piedmont, a crown that waits the man, who dares to think of it, who dedicates his life to winning it, and scorns to dull its splendour with thoughts of petty tyranny. Sire, have you never cast an eagle glance upon this Italy, so fair with nature's smile, crowned by twenty centuries of noble memory, the land of genius, strong in the infinite resources that only want a common purpose, girt round with barriers so impregnable, that it needs but a firm will and a few brave breasts to shelter it from foreign insult? Place yourself at the head of the nation, write on your flag, 'Union, Liberty, Independence.' Free Italy from the barbarian, build up the future, be the Napoleon of Italian freedom. Do this and we will gather round you, we will give our lives for you, we will bring the little states of Italy under your flag. Your safety lies on the sword's point; draw it and throw away the scabbard. But remember, if you do it not, others will do it without you and against you."
The letter was published in May or June 1831, and a few copies found their way into Italy. Mazzini thought he had evidence that the King read it. At all events his police did, and ordered the writer whose anonymity did not conceal him, to be seized, if he crossed the frontier. Whatever Mazzini's hopes may have been, this proved that the letter had failed in its ostensible object, and he threw himself feverishly into his preparations for a revolt in Piedmont. His detailed scheme shows that he had not yet planned or had abandoned for the time the strategy of guerilla fighting, and intended to rely on the Piedmontese army. Charles Albert was, if possible, to be persuaded to lead the revolution, and the army was to be mobilised for an immediate advance on Lombardy. Should the King decline the offer, a provisional directorate at Genoa would assume the government. Mazzini had better ground for his hopes than often afterwards. The army had not forgotten that it had led the constitutional and nationalist movement ten years before. Many a soldier, who had served in the Grande Armée, cherished the democratic sentiment that clung to it all through, and was eager to avenge himself on the enemy, whom he had routed in old days. These feelings were especially strong among the non-commissioned officers. Many of them were men of the middle classes of good standing and education, for in many, if not all, of the regiments commissions could be held only by those of noble birth, and no bourgeois, whatever his capacities, could rise above the ranks. A few officers joined the society, and a general or two promised to throw in his lot, if the movement proved successful. At Alessandria and Genoa, the two chief garrison towns, the society had a considerable strength. The government, though quietly tracking the civilian conspirators, seems to have had no suspicion of the army plot; and had the revolt broken out early in 1833, it would have had its chance of success at home, though the inevitable disaster must have come, when the little army faced the Austrians.
But the conspirators waited too long, and late in the spring an accident led to the discovery of the plot. The government cautiously followed up the clue, till it possessed itself of every detail of the conspiracy. Then it threw itself on its prey with a savage vengeance, that outside the Austrian provinces has had no parallel in Italy since the days of Fra Diavolo. Charles Albert, pitiless with fright, surrendered himself to the reactionary court party and fed their thirst for blood. Moral, sometimes physical, torture was inflicted on the victims to extort confession of their own or their confederates' guilt. Jacopo Ruffini, given the choice between execution and the betrayal of his friends, committed suicide in prison. Ten soldiers and two civilians were shot; fourteen more only escaped by flight; numbers were sent to longer or shorter imprisonment. Italy still execrates those courts-martial. Not all Charles Albert's later patriotism has purged his memory from their indelible shame; and while yet he reigned, the Genoese erased from their city every record of the brutal general who was his worst instrument. The humble lawyers and sergeants whom he shot, have a deathless homage from their country. "Ideas ripen quickly," said Mazzini, "when nourished by the blood of martyrs." It was the memory of these and other victims of tyranny, that helped to nerve Italian arms and send Italians to die in the battles that won their country's liberty.
Meanwhile, since the previous August, Mazzini had been driven into hiding at Marseilles. The French government decreed his banishment and broke up his press. Mazzini eluded both blows. He started a secret press and got French compositors to work it. He himself found refuge in the house of a French sympathiser, Démosthène Ollivier, father of Louis Napoleon's last premier, under whose roof he remained "a voluntary prisoner." Twice only in the year he passed its threshold, and then only at night, disguised as a woman or a garde national. It was at this time that the French government, whether maliciously or itself deceived, brought against him a false charge of encouraging assassination, for repeating which in after years Sir James Graham wore sackcloth.[5] Mazzini was still at Marseilles, when the news of the Genoese executions came; and so terrible was his anguish, for in Jacopo Ruffini he had lost his dearest friend, that his health and mind nearly broke down. The devotion of a noble woman, whom he loved,[6] saved him from insanity or death.
About the beginning of July 1833 he moved to Geneva. He came there to be on the spot for a new plan of insurrection. The failure of the army plot only impelled him more feverishly into his fixed idea of a rising in Piedmont. He wished no doubt to punish Charles Albert, and well may he have been maddened by the savagery, which had sickened Europe. He wanted to "moralise" his party by proving that the terrorism had no fears for him and striking back at the victorious and brutal enemy. He thought that, if he was to keep his following together, he must make his cast now or never. Once allow the fire to slack down, and it would be beyond his power to rekindle it. He believed that half Europe was on the brink of revolution, that a republican movement in Italy would be the signal for republican risings in France and Spain and Germany. It was probably a fantastic dream; but he had surer ground for thinking that a revolt would fire the tinder throughout Italy. Exaggerated as his hopes were even here, the revolutionary spirit, that Young Italy created, had sunk deep. In the Genovesate and Savoy, in the Papal States and parts of Naples there was a good deal of material ready for an insurrection; and Mazzini had assured himself that on the appointed day guerilla bands would take to the mountains in several districts. The chances of success, indeed, were not bright at the best; but the raid was not quite the unpardonable playing with brave lives, that it seems at first sight. Mazzini, taking up a plan of the Carbonari at Paris, chose Savoy for the starting-point of the insurrection. He expected that the troops there would join the insurgents, and the revolutionary army would cross the Alps into Piedmont, while another band would land in the Riviera and rouse the Genoese country.[7]
By the autumn of 1833 several hundred exiles had been enrolled in Switzerland. Many of them were Poles and Germans, a few were French; and Mazzini welcomed assistance, which he hoped might cement an international alliance of democrats, and develop into a "Young Europe," which would do elsewhere what Young Italy was doing for his own country. He had the help of several officers, Bianco di San Jorioz, author of a clever book on guerilla warfare, which had much influenced him, and Manfredo Fanti, the future organiser of the Italian army. They saw the importance of giving the command to an experienced officer, and the Savoyard conspirators insisted that the choice should fall on a certain General Ramorino, a cosmopolitan adventurer of Savoyard birth, who had fought under Napoleon, and had an undistinguished command in the Polish rising of 1831. Mazzini's slender preparations were completed by October, and about eight hundred men were armed and ready to march. There were plans of simultaneous risings at Genoa and Naples, in the Marches and the Abruzzi; and Garibaldi enlisted in the Piedmontese navy in the quixotic hope of bringing it over to the revolution. But what chance there was of success was spoilt by Ramorino. He had no real interest in the expedition; perhaps he was paid by the French government to wreck it. At all events he lingered at Paris, squandering much of the war-fund, that Mazzini had collected with infinite labour. Every week added to the difficulties. The foreign governments put pressure on the Swiss to break up the volunteers. Buonarrotti, suspicious of the whole design, did his best to discredit Mazzini among his own men. When Mazzini at last insisted that the volunteers must wait no longer, the conspirators in Savoy refused to cooperate unless Ramorino came. Mazzini worked desperately to undo the mischief, and at last, in January, Ramorino arrived. It was too late. The Swiss authorities harassed the volunteers, and on February 1 only a small body of the raiders could gather on the frontier near St Julien. Ramorino marched them aimlessly about. Probably he saw from the first how desperate were the chances, and wished to spare a useless loss of life. On the 4th, before hardly a shot had been exchanged, he disbanded his men, and the insurrection was still-born.
Life in exile—Mental crisis—Principles of the revolution—Young Switzerland—Young Europe—Literary work—Women friends: Giuditta Sidoli—Madeleine de Mandrot.
During the raid Mazzini's health collapsed. The strain of work and anxiety might have broken down a stronger man; he had not touched his bed for a week, and fatigue and cold and the crushing responsibility brought on fever. There was a false alarm one night, and a patrol fired; and Mazzini, hurrying up excitedly with his musket, lost consciousness and did not regain it till the volunteers had recrossed the frontier. The collapse unstrung him for the time, and perhaps it was only the letters of the woman he loved, that kept him from a worse fate. "I have moral convulsions," he writes to her; "there are moments when I could roll on the ground and bite myself. I have fits of rage at every human face and voice." When he recovered, he found his residence in Switzerland threatened. The foreign governments rained threats on the Federal Diet to make it expel the refugees. The Diet was easily frightened, but even had it been braver, it could not tolerate acts contrary to international law, or allow Switzerland to be a recruiting ground for raids upon a neighbouring power. The Swiss could not be expected to risk foreign complications for the sake of men who, from any ordinary standpoint, had abused their hospitality. After what had happened, it was difficult for the raiders to plead at once even the traditional right of asylum for political refugees; and though after a lapse of time a stronger government would have reverted to the more generous policy, and though some of the cantons were restive at its continued deference to foreign pressure, it is not easy to blame the Diet, even at a later date, for its unwillingness to shelter the raiders.
Many of them were sent at once across the frontier; others succeeded in hiding themselves. Mazzini was determined not to leave Switzerland. It was essential to his plans that he should be near Italy, and he dreaded moving further from the beloved land. He grew fond of Switzerland, and came to "love the Alps almost as one loves a mother." England and America were the only other countries open to him, and he feared that if a Tory government came into power in England, he would find no shelter even there. "Besides," he said, in words to be recanted later, "there is no sympathy there, no help, no anything." For nearly three years he led a more or less hunted life—at Lausanne, at Berne, at Soleure and Bienne and Grenchen, in the house of a Protestant pastor at Langnau; sometimes hotly sought by the police, sometimes with the connivance of the government, but generally a virtual prisoner in the houses where he found a refuge. For seven months, at one time, he fled from place to place, living in apparently untenanted houses, with mats at the windows, never setting foot outside, except in his fugitive removes by night across the mountains. Exhausted in body and soul, he had to taste an exile's life in all its bitterness; "the existence mournful and dull as a stormy sky or the ashes of a dead fire; the suffering that has no name, that finds no vent in tears or words, that has no poetry save for the distant sentimentalist; the suffering that makes a man wan and hollow-cheeked but kills not, that bows but does not break; while the weary eyes follow the driven clouds, that the wind wafts away to the skies of fatherland, beyond the everlasting Alps, those icy cherubim that guard the gate of the heart's Eden."
There was little interruption to his desolate solitude. Save for occasional glimpses, he was parted from his old comrades, except the Ruffinis; and though he found a few sympathetic friends in Switzerland and caught greedily at their affections, it could not make up for the loss. He had few books; "I could well live all my life shut up in one room," he wrote wearily, "if I had all my books at hand, but without books, or guitar, or view, it is too much." The sedentary life told on his health, and he obstinately declined the medicines his mother sent him. Toothache wore him down, though sometimes he welcomed it as a diversion from his sickness of heart. Money difficulties came, with their sordid complications. His mother sent what she could spare; friends helped him with loans. But he could never refuse an exile in need, and they importuned him, till even he rebelled against their exigencies. The organisation of Young Italy—such of it as still was left—and expenses of publishing and postage absorbed most of the rest, for there were few subscribers to the party funds. He denied himself all but bare necessities and cigars, even the two small luxuries he valued—scent and good writing paper. He borrowed what few books he had. He went short of clothes, and sends his mother lean inventories of his wardrobe, which she and his old nurse did their best to replenish. Sometimes he found himself in absolute want, and writes "with a blush on his face" to the mother who never refused him. Aching fits of home-sickness came on him, "a physical craving for home, for Italian clouds and winds and sea." "The other day," he writes to a little girl friend, "I was looking at the Alps in the distance—beyond them is my country, my poor country that I love so much, where my father and mother are, and my two sisters, and another sister who has been dead many years, and the tomb of the best friend of my youth, who died for liberty, and meadows and hills and beautiful lakes like your own, and flowers and oranges and a beautiful sky—all that one needs to make one die happy, and I thought sadly on it all."
He had more pungent thoughts to trouble him. The disastrous raid demoralised his party. From Italy came news of discouragement and desertion. The exiles loaded him with the responsibility of the fiasco; he found himself the centre of a miserable cross-fire of recrimination, and he repaid the criticism with scorn and suspicion. The want of response in Italy made him at times very bitter against his countrymen. "Oh, how cold those Italians are, and how they hunt for excuses for their apathy. They will not see that they are slaves, without a name, accursed by God, and mocked among the nations." The human sweetness in him was half dried up, and a misanthropy, so new and alien to him, made him querulous and captious. Friends were cold, or at all events seemed so to his sick mind. He wrote peevishly to the best of them; probably he talked more peevishly still. The society, even of those who were dearest, worried and distressed him, and he preferred to be left alone with a favourite cat. "I am inclined to love men at a distance," he writes; "contact makes me hate them." The sorest pain, one that obsessed him and dragged him to the abyss, was the thought of his suffering friends, suffering because of him, though for a cause for which he too had given all. It was the Gethsemane of every true-hearted man, who calls his fellows forth to sacrifice and battle. The friends of his youth were in exile. Men who had loved him and whom he had loved, were laying their misery to his charge. The Ruffinis' home was desolate—one son the victim of his own hand, two more in exile, the mother, whom of all women he reverenced most, sitting in loneliness and mourning. Another woman, to whom he had given his love, but to whom a fugitive exile could not give a home, was hunted by the Italian police, worn and desperate. "What gives me pain and very sad moments," he writes to his mother, "is the past and present and future of the few beings who love me and whom I really love, you, and the Ruffinis, their mother, my sisters, and Her. If I could see you all and my few other friends, I will not say happy, for that we can never be again, but tranquil, quiet, smiling, and united, I would die that day with rapture." "I wanted to do good," he writes to a friend, "but I have always done harm to everybody, and the thought grows and grows till I think I shall go mad. Sometimes I fancy I am hated by those I love most." Once, at all events, it made him doubt of all that he had done. "I think over it from morning to night, and ask pardon of my God for having been a conspirator; not that I in the least repent the reasons for it, or recant a single one of my beliefs, which were, and are, and will be a religion to me, but because I ought to have seen that there are times, when a believer should only sacrifice himself to his belief. I have sacrificed everybody."
The black misery settled on him. "I felt alone in the world, except for my poor mother, and she too was away and unhappy for my sake, and I stopped in terror at the void. In that wilderness I met Doubt." The men whom he had sent to a patriot's death, had they died in vain? Was it all a frightful error, an empty dream born of ambition and pride of intellect? Was it for some grandiose, impossible chimera, that he had taken men from quiet useful lives and the simple round of kindliness? What authority had he still to preach a creed, which meant the sacrifice of thousands more, the unhappiness of many another mother? In his nightly terrors, in his little lonely room, while the wind howled round, he heard Jacopo Ruffini's voice calling to him. He was of course verging on insanity, and thoughts of suicide passed through his mind. His strong moral nature and the influence of two women—Madame Ruffini and one unknown—saved him. Characteristically, mental health returned in the shape of a philosophy of life. It was his theory of Duty, expanded till it penetrated every cranny of the individual soul. His old enemy, the utilitarian theory, had taken subtle root in his affections. "I should have thought of them, as of a blessing from God, to be accepted with thankfulness, not as of something to be expected and exacted as a right and a reward. Instead of this, I had made them a condition of fulfilling my duties. I had not reached the ideal of love, love that has no hope in this life. I had worshipped not love but the joys of love." And so he put away that last infirmity of the true man, took to himself not only toil and danger and opprobrium, but unloved solitude of soul, the desert life of him who has no friend but God. He, who ached for sympathy and love, took duty for his hard task-master—duty, "an arid, bare religion, which does not save my heart a single atom of unhappiness, but still the only one that can save me from suicide." "There are four lines of Juvenal," he said, "that sum up all we ought to ask of God, all that made Rome the mistress and the benefactress of the world:—
'Pray for the soul, that has no fear of death,
That holds life's end among kind nature's gifts,
Brave to endure each pain and labour; nought
Vexes it, nought it covets.'"
"When a man," he writes to a friend, "has once said to himself in all seriousness of thought and feeling, I believe in liberty and country and humanity, he is bound to fight for liberty and country and humanity, fight long as life lasts, fight always, fight with every weapon, face all from death to ridicule, face hatred and contempt, work on because it is his duty and for no other reason."
Long indeed before his mental crisis, the light and joy had gone out of his work. There were times when he felt he had neither strength nor time nor capacity for it, when his theories became cold, emotionless abstractions, far other than the passionate beliefs of other days. God was "a geometrical solution," his own task "a fated mission." All life seemed drab and purposeless. "There is so much agony in life," he writes, "that when I see a baby quiet, smiling, at peace, I can only wish for death for it." Perhaps though such moods were the exception. "He is almost always good-tempered and sometimes gay," wrote Giovanni Ruffini. Certainly during these three years he wrote some of his warmest and humanest pages. At times he was even hopeful of his immediate political schemes. He was strong in the sense of his mission. "I know," he said, "there is the future in this life of mine, little matter if I see it." "We have made," he writes, "the cause of the people our own, we have voluntarily taken on ourselves the sorrows of all a generation. We have snatched a spark from the Eternal God, and placed ourselves between Him and the people; we have taken on ourselves the part of the emancipator, and God has accepted us."
Alike in hours of insight and of gloom he remained ever constant to his work. His friends advised him to retire. His father threatened, his mother entreated. To the latter he "would have yielded, if he could." He would gladly have withdrawn, at least he thought so, if anyone else had come forward to take up the work; but this of course was impossible. He would have liked to fall back on the Manzonian policy, and devote himself to quiet moral and literary education. But this seemed an impossible solution in a country, where there was no freedom of speech or writing. The only way, he thought, to rouse his countrymen was to give them the example of a life, that no adversity could turn back, no want of response dishearten, ever labouring and suffering for their sake and the ideal's. There must be no folding of the hands, because others were slow to follow.
He set himself to think why the revolutions of the last five years had failed, why the people, whether in Italy or France or elsewhere, had been so deaf to the call to liberty. He was always asking himself why it was that Christianity had succeeded, and why a movement, that had so much in common with it, the movement for the social and political redemption of the people, had failed. He found his answer in the fact that the Revolution had missed the spiritual power, that made Christianity triumphant. It was the substance of his Marseilles teaching, but informed with a more mystical, transcendental spirit, due no doubt to the apocalyptic results of his depression, and partly too to the influence that Lamennais had over him at this time. The French Revolution had appealed to men's selfish and personal interests, their rights, their desire for happiness. It had been a rebellion against evil, not a mission in search of good. It had had its use, but now it had done its work. The principle of liberty and human dignity was accepted everywhere in theory, however much realisation lagged. The nineteenth century was plagiarising the eighteenth, and following precedents whose day was past. A new principle was needed to carry progress one step further, and that principle must be a spiritual one. "We fell as a political party, we must rise again as a religious party." The new revolution must find its strength in "the enthusiasm, which alone begets great things"; it must appeal to men's sense of duty, it must bid them work not for themselves but for humanity. Then and not till then, the pettiness and party feeling and want of earnestness, which had wrecked the movements of 1831 and his own Italian schemes, would vanish in the light of a great faith, and that same light would be a beacon, which would draw the masses after.
He was still, in spite of disappointment and the scepticism of his friends, convinced that Europe was ripe for revolution, if only one country showed the way. He was equally convinced that Italy would be that country. France, he thought, had disqualified herself by her adherence to the traditions of her Revolution. The strong dislike of France, which marked him all through life, was now especially prominent, and he declared that popular progress throughout Europe depended on emancipation from her political and literary influence. Why he appropriated for Italy the revolutionary hegemony, he would have found it difficult to give a convincing reason. At bottom, probably, with the sublime prophetic confidence that went hand in hand with all his searchings of heart and absence of personal ambition, he claimed the primacy for his country, because he hoped to inform her with his own principles.
His Italian programme remained almost unaltered. He was indeed prepared, though regretfully, to support a royalist movement, if it declared for Italian Unity. But he would not countenance a royalist programme with any lesser goal. He still believed in the Republic, both for Italy's own sake and for the example it would give to other democracies. And he still believed in insurrection as the only possible road to reformation in a country, where there were no constitutional liberties to make constitutional progress possible. Gioberti urged to him in vain that unsuccessful insurrections only discouraged the patriots and intensified the oppression. Mazzini, though he promised that he would not again encourage an insurrectionary movement, unless it started inside the country and independently of the exiles, argued that insurrection was the only means to rouse the masses. It mattered little if the first risings failed; they would keep alive the spirit, that one day would lead to victory. His hopes of the early triumph of the revolution grew slowly fainter; he began to see that time, perhaps a generation, was needed to quicken the inertia, that ages of despotism had instilled. But every effort brought them nearer to the goal; every slackening made it more remote. He would not believe that sacrifice and struggle could go unrewarded, or quiet waiting spring from ought but cowardice. He still, though fitfully—for want of money and the need of secrecy and his own deepening gloom hampered him at every turn—went on with his preparations. The sixth number of Young Italy appeared in July 1834; this was its last issue, but he persevered in the thankless work of organisation, carrying on a voluminous correspondence, raking in sympathisers from every quarter, sending agents to Italy, who brought back the same monotonous tale of discouragement and unreadiness.
He found time meanwhile to interest himself in Swiss politics, and tried to organise a party to do for Switzerland, what Young Italy had been doing for his own country. Many of the Swiss naturally resented the intrusion of a stranger. Mazzini brushed away the objection, though he would perhaps have been the first to criticise a foreigner, who had preached to the Italians, as he preached to the Swiss. Switzerland, he urged, played so important a part in the European polity, that no one could be indifferent to its destiny. At this time, certainly, Swiss politics offered abundant scope for a reformer. The Federal Pact of 1815 had undone Napoleon's comparatively liberal constitution. The cantons were connected by the loosest of ties; many of them were governed by small oligarchies; class privileges depressed the artisans and peasants. The return of the Jesuits stirred a bitter religious struggle, which from time to time threatened to blaze into civil war. A vigorous reform movement had indeed recently swept away the worst abuses inside some of the cantons; but, nothing had been done to strengthen the bonds between them, and the narrow cantonal life threatened to smother the country in a "mud-death." It was impossible for Switzerland to assert her independence or maintain her traditions, when she had no central authority worthy of the name. To Mazzini it meant too the absence of any real national life, the adhesion to a policy of neutrality, which prevented the one republican state of Europe from throwing its weight into the European balance. Mazzini's ideal for Switzerland was to include it with the Tyrol and Savoy in a federation of republics, and substitute for the settlement of 1815 a true federal authority, representing and responsible to the whole people and not to the separate cantons. He founded a "Young Switzerland" society, and published a paper, La Jeune Suisse, which appeared twice a week in French and German, till after a year's existence (the usual life of Mazzini's journalistic ventures) the Diet suppressed it and decreed Mazzini's perpetual banishment. In some of its articles Mazzini appears at his best,—more tolerant, less dogmatic and theoretical. The movement does not seem to have found any great measure of success, though it attracted a certain number of the finer spirits among the younger men and Protestant clergy. But, whatever may have been the immediate fruits of Mazzini's work, at all events his ideas triumphed. The Swiss constitution of 1848 embodied their essentials, and it is worth noting that Druey, one of its two draughtsmen, was his personal friend.
Italy and Switzerland together were not enough to occupy his energies. Two months after the collapse of the Savoy raid, seventeen of the exiles, Italians, Germans, Poles, signed a "pact of Young Europe," which was intended to be an alliance on Mazzinian principles of the republicans of the three countries. When one remembers that its vast scheme of transformation was the work of a few young exiles, it reads like pure rhodomontade. Mazzini himself recognised afterwards that the plan was too embracing to lead to practical results. But at the time he seems to have expected a good deal from it. It was to be a kind of "college of intellects," which would watch and give information on the popular and nationalist movements of the Continent, and at the same time be an organised propagandism with its machinery of agents "and countless other means." One thing in particular he hoped from it, that it would assist towards "the emancipation from France," and encourage another country, Italy of course by preference, to initiate the new age of religion and the republic. As a matter of fact, nothing seems to have been done beyond the despatch of a few agents to France and Spain, and an attempt to organise meetings in England. But it loomed large in the public eye, and did something to teach democracy that its interests are international.
Meanwhile, in addition to his political correspondence and journalism, he found time for literary writing. It was partly in the vain hope of earning a little money for himself and his political work. "I think over schemes day and night, as every man in want does." It was partly too to encourage "a religious and poetic sentiment" in Italy, and combat the dominant scepticism and materialism. For literary fame he cared nothing. Friends, who wished him to retire from political work, advised him to "honour Italy with his pen." "Excuse me," he answered, "but this has no meaning for me. I don't know what or where Italy is. We must try to regenerate and create her, and honour her afterwards." His articles on Byron and Goethe and The Philosophy of Music date from this period. He collected materials for the edition of Foscolo's works, which was so near his heart now as at a later time. He wished to edit a collection of translated dramas, and wrote introductions to Werner's Der vierundzwanzigste Februar and De Vigny's Chatterton. "No other critic," says a recent Italian writer, "has written at such length or so profoundly on Werner as did Mazzini." The essay was published later at Brussels with Agostino Ruffini's translation,—the only instalment of the projected series. He planned a Foreign Review, to be published at Genoa, but an indiscreet friend betrayed his editorship, and the censorship promptly withdrew its sanction. Another scheme for a Review of European Literature, to be issued in the freer air of Lugano, broke down, apparently for want of funds. Another venture, which had a brief life, was the Italiano, a literary and scientific magazine, which appeared at Paris for a few months in 1836, to which he and Tommaseo and some of the best Italian writers of the day contributed, and where Guerrazzi published the first chapters of his Siege of Florence. Mazzini, who drafted the prospectus, seems to have been especially anxious to include novels and poetry. "It must be remembered," he writes, "that fancy and the affections make up at least four-fifths of man. Poetry is not the gift and privilege of a few, the masses are full of a living and speaking poetry." He urged too that women's questions should have adequate attention.
It is to this period chiefly that belong the only love-episodes of Mazzini's life. He had a lofty conception of womanhood. "Love and respect woman," he once wrote. "Look to her not only for comfort, but for strength and inspiration and the doubling of your intellectual and moral powers. Blot out from your mind any idea of superiority; you have none. There is no inequality between man and woman; but as often is the case between two men, only different tendencies and special vocations. Woman and man are the two notes, without which the human chord cannot be struck." "Marriage," he wrote to a young wife many years afterwards, "is sacred, because it is one of the most potent means of accomplishing life's mission. It gives the almost superhuman strength that comes of love, the supreme comfort that makes sacrifice a joy, the dew that tempers the scorching heat upon the flower." But "now, as a rule," he says, "we do not love. Love, the most holy thing that God has given to man, has become a febrile need, a brutish instinct; the family is perverted into a denial of all vocation and social duty; male and female have cancelled man and woman." He himself was a man, not likely to be easily in love. His work absorbed his vital force, and he had no pity for men who forgot public work in domestic happiness. And though his unsoiled purity and gentleness, together with the sympathy that allowed him to understand women as few men can do, won him the devotion and affection of many women, especially Englishwomen, the sentiment, on his side at least, was, save in two cases, one of "intense friendship" only.
He had two or three boyish passions, one for an English girl who lived near his home at Genoa, another for a Genoese, Adele Zoagli, who afterwards became the mother of the patriot-poet Mameli. When he went into exile, the only women who had a place in his heart were his own mother and Madame Ruffini. His affection for his mother was very serious and deep, more masculine and less sentimental than in the common course of Italian filial love. Perhaps after his boyhood she did not influence him in details, and intellectually there was some lack of sympathy between them. But her strong pride in him, that made her "thank God day and night for having given her that son," her faith in his political, though not in his religious beliefs, the love that watched year after year over the son she saw not, the courage that made her bear long years of parting rather than ask him to deny his call, made the most lasting human inspiration of his life. In time of deep trouble a man will turn to his mother and his God, and he looked to her, as to one whose love would never change, to whom he could pour out, not indeed his spiritual misery, but all the little material worries which a man tells only to his mother and his wife, certain that her sympathy would never fail. His love for Madame Ruffini was of another kind. She was a very noble woman, with intense and unconcealed sympathies, wise with the experience of age and motherhood and sorrow; and Mazzini was not the only one in the circle of friends at Genoa, who loved her with the reverential affection, that an elderly woman of saintly life and understanding will call forth from young men. It was she, whose own deep religious faith had saved him in youth from his short episode of scepticism. Another woman would have reproached him with Jacopo's death; to her the common memory of one so dear only fed the affection, that many memories and the same intense religious, almost mystical, beliefs had already made so strong. He calls her "mother, friend, and all that is more sacred," "the purest, whitest, holiest soul he had ever met on earth." As far as we can tell, it was from no fault of his that their friendship closed afterwards in misunderstanding and silence.
His devotion to these two women had a deeper and more lasting influence on him than any lover's passion. There was, however, at least one other, whom he loved in another way, one to whom he gave his troth and whom he would have married, had an exile's life allowed it. Giuditta Sidoli was the daughter of a noble Lombard family, where she had been brought up in a school of patriotism. Her brother, Carlo Bellerio, was a follower of Young Italy, and was banished for his faith. She had been married, when a mere girl, to Giovanni Sidoli, a wealthy Reggian, a patriot and an exile too; and he swore her on his death-bed to be true to the cause to which he had given his life. She was one year older than Mazzini, a quiet-moving, gracious woman, almost beautiful, with a gentle, blonde Venetian face, warm, golden hair, and dark, thoughtful eyes; sober and unemotional in her manner, but with deep springs of enthusiasm and devotion. Mazzini first met her, a five years' widow, at Marseilles and afterwards in Switzerland; their liking and common interests soon deepened into love, and he was engaged to her before he left France. A few months before the Savoy Expedition, her yearning for her children, who were left at Reggio, drove her to Florence in the hope that with or without the Government's consent she might see them. Thanks to the Tuscan police, who opened and copied Mazzini's letters to her, we have some fragments of their correspondence. "There are words in your letter," he writes, "which make me still thrill with joy. In these last days I have learnt the strength of my love. I have covered your lock with kisses. Oh, that I could sleep for once with my head resting on your knees." To a common friend he writes, probably a little later, "I love her more than she thinks, much more than she loves me. I dream of her day and night, and it becomes more and more a fixed idea with me; and yet I know with absolute certainty I shall never live with her, not even if Italy were free."
Up to a point they doubtless loved; but, especially when one remembers Mazzini's emotional epistolary style of this time, one is tempted to question whether their love had very much passion in it. It was the tender, strong affection of two absolutely good and kindred souls, and with neighbourhood it might have ripened into more. But long separation cooled it, and neither was inconsolable. To Giuditta probably at bottom her children were dearer than her lover, and Mazzini felt this. She seems to have made no effort to join him afterwards in England; she went to Parma to be near her children and importune the ducal brute, who forbade her access to them, at last going to Reggio in his despite and apparently seeing them for a moment. Mazzini for his part was wrapped up in his work and the struggle with exacting poverty. In England he hardly corresponds with her, partly because his letters might have brought fresh persecution on her, but partly, one is forced to conclude, because there was no lover's ardour to find out a way. But he still considered himself as in honour bound to her, and in a sense no doubt he loved her still. He writes in the summer of 1838, "Giuditta loves me, I love her, and have promised to love her," but he speaks as if he feared a rupture rather for its effects on her than on himself. Two years later he writes as if his love were dead. But, if love was dead, friendship, and a very strong and true one, remained to the end. It is probable that they never ceased entirely to correspond. In the fifties, when she was living in the Valle dei Salici, near Turin, a grey-haired woman, with all the gracious gentleness and culture of her earlier days, Mazzini would come to see her in his secret visits to Piedmont, and she was still the tolerant but ardent believer in his policy. When she was on her death-bed, a year before he died himself, he wrote "as an old friend" to "one of the best spirits he had ever met."
In a sense Giuditta had a rival. During his Swiss wanderings, the daughter of de Mandrot, a friendly avocat at Lausanne, whom he had met casually,[8] became strongly attracted to him. And what was at first a woman's pity and a disciple's adoration, changed to passionate love. She was a girl of some sixteen years, of rich, emotional nature and spiritual yearnings, that echoed to his own. When he went to London, and she saw no more of him and heard of his uncared-for loneliness, her hopeless love and pity worked on her, till she pined into melancholy and illness, and her friends begged him to return and save her by his presence. What response he made to her love, it is not easy to say. If one may judge from the meagre references in his letters, he felt at first no more than affectionate gratitude for the rich gift he could not take. But later, as he learnt more of her constancy and unhappiness, and his love for Giuditta wore away, and he ached for a woman's loving hand, his affection ripened into something that was probably nearer passionate love than anything he felt before or after. Not that his permanent, reasoning self was disloyal to Giuditta. "Am I free?" he writes to a friend, who would gladly have seen him and the girl united; "before society and men, who recognise only actual bonds, I am; but before my own heart and God, who watches over promises, I am not." Sometimes indeed he balanced the results to the two women, and was tempted for the moment to think that "the imperious duty" of saving the one from death or life-long misery might justify the breaking of his promise to Giuditta. But he knew that it would be a cruel blow to the woman to whom he had pledged himself; he felt he would gladly escape from an attachment, which stained his loyalty to her; and his common sense told him that his gloomy companionship and the privations of an exile's life would never make a young girl permanently happy. And so he never seriously faltered in crushing down the rising love within him or trying to crush it out in her. He steadily declines to admit more than a brother-and-sisterly relationship; he prays she may forget him and begs his friends to do their best to kill her love by painting him in his defects; he refuses to correspond with her, and though at last at the earnest prayer of her friends he promises to come, if he can find the money, it was only to save her from the pining that was bringing her to her grave. But though he put her aside as a beautiful and impossible dream, he could not stop the yearning. "Do you think," he writes, "that I easily give up having near me one like her, a creature of God, young, pure, religious, enthusiastic, into whose heart I could pour all the world of feelings and dreams and beliefs and love that is in me?" He finds his comfort in the thought that theirs is "a mystical, spiritual union," that she will meet and make him happy in another world. In this world he never saw her again, and it seems that her passion soon fretted her frail life away. Love of wife and love of family were not for him, and bitterly he felt it. "He, who through fatality of circumstances," he wrote long after, "cannot live the serene life of family, has a void in his heart, that nothing fills; and I who write these pages, well I know it."
Life in London—Spiritual condition—English friends—The Carlyles—Lamennais and George Sand—Literary work—Decay of Young Italy—The Italian School at Hatton Garden—Appeal to working men.
Early in 1837 Mazzini and the Ruffinis came to London. The determining cause was the inability of the latter to bear the privations of a life of hiding. They travelled by slow diligence stages through France, the French government, which was only glad to get them out of Switzerland, giving them every facility for the journey. In London at all events they were free men, able to live under their own names and move where they liked, untroubled by the police. But the change from the snows and sunsets and silences of Switzerland to the squalor and noise of a back street in London added to Mazzini's desolation. In this "sunless and musicless island," with the dreary stretches of houses and the wearing din, he pined for the peace of the Alps, where nature had brought him an occasional respite from his heart-ache. "We have lost," he writes, "even the sky, which the veriest wretch on the Continent can look at"; and in time the desolate walls across the street worried him, till he would not go to the window. The one thing in London that appealed to him was the fog. "When you look up, the eye loses itself in a reddish, bell-shaped vault, which always gives me, I don't know why, an idea of the phosphorescent light of the Inferno.[9] The whole city seems under a kind of spell, and reminds me of the Witches' Scene in Macbeth or the Brocksberg or the Witch of Endor. The passers-by look like ghosts,—one feels almost a ghost oneself." The half-glimpses of the buildings, harmonising with their sombre colouring, gave him a sense of mystery and indefiniteness, that redeemed London of "the positive and finite" of a Southern town, and responded to his growing faith in the poetic and unseen.
For a few weeks he lived at 24 Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, with the Ruffinis and two other exiles, who had helped him in the Marseilles days. In March the quintet moved to 9 George Street, near the Euston Road, where they suffered many things from the maid-of-all-work, who no doubt did much as she liked with the five inexperienced males, only two of whom could speak English at all well. Here they lived for three years, on the whole a very miserable household. Mazzini himself was "an angel of kindness and good-temper and enthusiasm," ever ready to sacrifice himself to others' whims and comforts. But the unhappy mystic was no cheerful companion, he was unpractical and dogmatic, probably sometimes peevish, half-lost in the empyrean of his ideals, beyond the ken or sympathy of the others. Agostino Ruffini's petty selfishness and ungovernable tongue were the source of frequent scenes, which one day brought Mazzini to tears, "tears which nothing else could have drawn from him," as he writes plaintively to Agostino's mother. At bottom young Ruffini recognized Mazzini's worth and devotedness, and swore himself on paper to keep his temper, with other salutary resolutions, to be read over three times a week; but he was quite incapable of reaching to Mazzini's mind, and he longed to enjoy himself in a freer life, where the gospel of duty was never heard. Giovanni was more equable, and knew Mazzini better, but he too had small belief in the gospel, and there was little except old associations and the common love of his mother to bind him to his transcendental friend. The general irresponsiveness at home bitterly hurt and saddened Mazzini. "I love no one and want to love no one," he writes of his English surroundings; and in his letters to his friends in Italy and Switzerland, he returns again and again to the lack of sympathy around him, as the heaviest trial of those unhappy days.
There was nothing to distract him from the sordidness of the bickering household in George Street. He seldom went out of doors, except to the British Museum. He had no money to buy books and complains that nobody would lend them. He saw few besides a few exiles, as poor and perhaps as unhappy as himself. He was "lost in a vast crowd of strangers, in a country where want, especially in a foreigner, is a reason for a distrust, which is often unjust and sometimes cruel." In common with his companions, he was miserably poor, often living on potatoes or rice. His father advanced him money to speculate in olive oil; naturally he lost it, and after an angry letter from the hard old man, refused for several years to accept help from home. He tried to find employment as a proof-reader, but in vain. He had an offer of work at Edinburgh, but the Ruffinis would not leave London, and he felt himself tied to them. Literary work came in very slowly, and for a year or two his articles in the English reviews brought in little profit, when the translator had been paid. The income of the rest of the household was not much larger, and the bad house-keepers found that in England "francs were little better than sous." Mazzini, as ever, could not shut his purse to the needy exiles, who importuned him and, as Agostino grumbled, "in the name of this chimera of human brotherhood thought they had a right to make themselves at home in his house." His few possessions soon found their way to the pawn-shop. He pledged his mother's ring, his watch and books and maps; his cloak went to buy cigars, "the one thing I don't think I can do without." On one black Saturday he pawned a pair of boots and an old waistcoat to find food for the Sunday. One winter he risked his health by giving away his only overcoat. His mother, finding that good clothes got sold at once to buy suits for his friends, thought it better to send several suits of cheaper garments, so that he could keep one at least for himself. Sometimes his wardrobe was so depleted, that he had to stay at home, and could not go to the British Museum to carry on his literary work. His generosity was well-known to his better-off friends, and it is not surprising that their patience in lending him money was exhausted. He tried a few years later to negotiate a loan on the security of yet unwritten manuscripts; but the ingenuous scheme met with no better success. Once some friends at Paris lent him £120; another by a ruse persuaded him to accept what was practically a gift;[10] but when towards the end of his first residence in England a proposal was made at Turin to raise a subscription for him, he obstinately declined it, partly because, if it reached his mother's ears, she "would have died of shame." There were thus only two roads open to him, suicide or the money-lenders. The thought of suicide came to him again and again, but he put it away as a coward's act and for his mother's sake. So more and more he fell into the money-lenders' hands, borrowing at thirty or forty or sometimes nearly one hundred per cent. from loan societies, that "rob the poor man of his last drop of blood and sometimes his last rags of self-respect." Year after year he plunged desperately in the morass, and though £320 seems to have been the limit of his indebtedness, it was a crushing sum for one so utterly destitute. It was the common lot of the exiles, and some of them fared worse. In the midst of wealthy London, with men of means all round them, who shared their political views and made speeches for their cause, Karl Stolzmann, the Polish leader, one of Mazzini's nearest friends, went sometimes literally without food, and Stanislaus Worcell, born a rich Polish noble, was saved from a pauper's burial by an English acquaintance.
Apart, however, from money troubles, Mazzini's external life gradually brightened. In 1840, after a short stay at 26 Clarendon Square, not far from their George Street house, where happily Agostino left them for work in Edinburgh, he and Giovanni moved to 4 York Buildings, which then stood in the angle between King's Road, Chelsea, and Riley Street. He came there to be near the Carlyles, and escape from London gloom and noise and importunate visitors. An Italian artisan, an exile from Perugia, kept house with his English wife, who proved an excellent housekeeper and saved them from servant-girl worries. In those days there was a hay-field on one side of the house and market-gardens on another, some trees in view "of a very sombre green, but still trees," and not far off the Thames, "equally sombre with its muddy dirty-yellow water, but beautiful at night, when its colour is lost in the dark, and the water shines silver in the moonlight, and the barges go down, black, silent, mysterious as ghosts." After a year Giovanni left him after a violent quarrel, and went to Paris. They were never really reconciled again, and Giovanni repaid his friend's devotion with a coldness and contempt almost as unworthy as his brother's, though he did something to atone for it by the sympathetic picture of his old comrade as the Fantasio of his Lorenzo Benoni.
Uncomfortable as his relations with them had been, Mazzini felt the loss of the Ruffinis. With them or without them, the early years of his English life were, if anything, more utterly forlorn and miserable than his worst days in Switzerland. His intellect, indeed, was safe now, though there are indications still of a mental weariness and strain, that bordered on hallucination. There was no longer any fear of a spiritual collapse, like that which had threatened a year or two ago to wreck his moral faith. But he was more wedded to his misery, more desolate, alone in "the solitude of a damned soul." "A man cannot live alone," he writes, "and I have nobody who cares to know what I am thinking of and what I want." His heart sank, when he came home from the British Museum to his bare, dark room, where there was no friend or woman to welcome him, and Agostino's querulous temper to add to the loneliness of it all. More and more the want of response around him made him seal up his thoughts and aspirations. His friends' ingratitude, the desertion of his followers added to the "terrors" of his spiritual solitude. It seemed to him "an age of moral dissolution and unbelief, an age like that in which Christ died." The sense of failure still lay heavy on him, a brooding, unhealthy feeling that his work had been in vain, that it was his doom to bring ill-fortune to his friends, that he had sacrificed himself and made no one happier by it. He felt like "one irrevocably condemned, though without fault." "Pray for me," he writes to one of his best friends, "that, before I die, I may be good for something."