GARIBALDI'S MEMOIRS.* No greater stir could possibly have been made by any literary event than that which, just now, goes from the plains of Lombardy to the Sicilian shores, in consequence of the publication of the Memoirs of the Founder of Italian Unity. For years past the manuscript had been in the hands of Adriano Lemmi, the Grand Master of the Freemasons of the peninsula. So little, however, was heard of it of late, that a suspicion sometimes arose as to the existence of a design to burke altogether these valuable papers, lest revelations should come to light which might unpleasantly reflect upon, shock, and compromise various exalted personages and parties. At last the book is brought out, and it certainly proves to contain plain-spoken statements, often couched in words of extreme frankness, acerbity-nay, wrath. There are, from beginning to end, outbursts of hatred against the Roman priesthood in terms unheard-of elsewhere. From many a legendary account of historical events the veil is torn; romantic halo, where undeserved, being ruthlessly destroyed. Amongst pages full of enthusiastic love for his fatherland, for the cause of popular freedom in the Democratic sense, and for truly brave companions-in-arms, there are severe taunts against the mass of the Italian peasantry because of their want of patriotism, and angry reproaches against thousands of those who occasionally fought under Garibaldi, because of their despicable cowardice. The "foxy policy" of Cavour, who did all that he could to make the Sicilian expedition of 1860 abortive, though he afterwards appropriated its fruits, is mercilessly exposed. At the same time the kind of rivalry, which those intimately acquainted with the two leaders of the Italian Party of Action knew well to exist between them, finds expression in extraordinary attacks against the adherents of Mazzini. "Garibaldi. Memorie Autobiografiche." Firenze: G. Barbèra. 1888. Altogether, it is a book of a smashing character. It is composed of recollections first noted down in the fall of 1849, after the overthrow of the Roman Republic by the French army, and then continued, after a lapse of twenty-three years, in 1872, with which date the "Autobiographical Memoirs" end. The style, therefore, is an unequal one. There are chapters rising to poetical fervour, in such high-flown Southern language, and with so many points of exclamation, that the Northern reader is apt to be taken aback. There are other pages, in which the experienced sailor who has been tossed about on almost all the seas of the world, the rough-and-ready guerilla leader with his cunning eye and his deep knowledge of men, speaks as one who has penetrated the core of things and understands the worst sides of human nature. Perhaps the true Garibaldi comes out in this very mixture. Not the least so when, athwart some noble and elevated allusion to heroic exploits, he suddenly makes use of an expletive in Spanish, as a reminder of his wild days in Southern America, where he fought in the service of the Republic of Rio Grande against the Empire of Brazil, and otherwise led a freebooting, sea-rover's (corsaro) life, as he himself calls it. He There is a Homeric, or rather a Viking, touch in the manly fondness with which he sings the praise of the good ship in which he first ploughed the Mediterranean, and then the Black Sea. addresses her as "Thou," pointing to her roomy flanks, her finely formed masts, her spacious deck, her high-bosomed woman's bust, which always remained as an imprint on his imagination. His father, a simple and honest mariner, he only blames because he sent him to sea at the age of fifteen, instead of at the age of eight. Of his dear mother he says that she had an angel's heart, and that he idolized her. Though certainly not superstitious, he, in the greatest dangers of his stormy life, on the tumultuous ocean and in the stress of battle, sometimes fancied he saw her bent down in prayer for the safety of her son. Whilst not believing, he yet felt on such occasions deeply moved-happy, or at least less wretched. However, the details of his youth and early manhood we must pass over. also, the story of how he wooed and won Anita, the Creole Amazon, whose beauty, goodness, and prowess in battle he extols ever and anon, and whose loss, during the terrible sufferings of his retreat after the fall of Rome, he deplores in accents of deepest love. So, The fate of nations often hangs on a thread. At this day, the unification of Italy may appear a very simple, natural, historically unavoidable fact. Yet those who know what a heavy task it was, in our time, once more to knead together the Roman stock, and how the personality of Garibaldi alone was able to join South to North, cannot read without a strange feeling his several hairbreadth escapes. What if he had been taken prisoner for that conspiracy, owing to against him by default, On the 5th of February, which a sentence of death was pronounced when he was at the age of twenty-seven? 1834, he fortunately was able to steal out of Genoa, disguised as a peasant-henceforth an exile. A few days afterwards he read his condemnation to death in a paper at Marseilles. "There," he adds, "began my public life." He does not mention that at Marseilles he met Mazzini, the head of "Young Italy." From the works of the latter, however, we know the fact, and also that Garibaldi's secret nom de guerre in the patriotic association was "Borel." In Guerzoni's ample and highly interesting work,† it is well pointed out how the characters of the two men, then both equally young, were evidently too different to "allow of the creation of that electric spark which lights the flame of mutual love, and of a lasting community of thought." Still, curious to say, the first ship which Garibaldi, together with his friend Rossetti, fitted out for the Republic of Rio Grande, being provided with letters of marque, was called the Mazzini-so named, as we also learn from Guerzoni, by Garibaldi himself. Again, what if this man of destiny, as some may say, after having been shot in the neck during his South American campaigns, and for a time lain nearly lifeless, had succumbed to the horrible torture he was afterwards put to at Gualeguay? He was a prisoner on parole. He thought the Government of his captors would itself be glad to get rid of his presence. So he tried to escape, but was overtaken, and put on a horse, with his hands tied back, and his legs even bound together under the animal's belly. On his refusing to betray the persons who had furnished him with the means for flight, he was first brutally beaten with a whip by the commander of Gualeguay, and then hung up, for two hours, by the wrists, on a rope drawn over a beam in the prison. "I, who had devoted my whole life to the relief of the suffering, who had devoted it to war against tyranny and against priests, the patrons and administrators of torture! My body was burning like a furnace. My stomach dried up the water which I swallowed without interruption, and which was poured into me by a soldier, as if it were a red-hot iron. Such sufferings cannot be described. When they took me down, I no longer moaned; I was in a swoon; I was like a corpse! " What a narrow escape the Italian cause there had! But that is a view which the armchair philosophers of the political CloudCuckoo-land will perhaps not agree to. Yet it is a view which was practically held by two men of such different cast of thought as Garibaldi, the freethinker, and Mazzini, the prophet, whose device was: "God and the People." * "Scritti Editi e Inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini," vol. iii. p. 334. As a patriotic democrat Garibaldi had begun his political life. This is what, at the end of his career, he writes in the preface to his Memoirs : "A stormy life, made up of good and evil, as I believe to be that of the greater number of men. A hater of tyranny and of falsehood—hence a Republican; this being the system of honest people, the normal system when wished for by the majority and not imposed by violence and imposture. Tolerant and not exclusive, I am not capable of obtruding my republicanism by force-say, for instance, upon the English, when they are content with the Government of Queen Victoria. And, content as they are, their Government must pass for being republican. . . . In everything I have written I have always most especially attacked the priestly system, because in it I have always believed I should find the prop of every despotism, of every vice, of every kind of corruption. . . . I may be accused of pessimism; but the patient reader must forgive me : to-day I enter my sixty-fifth year, and, having during the greater part of my life believed in the bettering of mankind, I feel embittered by seeing so much evil and so much corruption in this so-called civilized century. . . . A friend of peace, of right, of justice, I am yet compelled to conclude with the axiom of the Spanish-American General: 'La guerra es la verdadera vida del hombre.' (War is the true life of man)." ... It was in 1849 that Garibaldi wrote the following words, which he gives in the present book : "Rome, which I saw in my youthful mind, was the Rome of the future— Rome of which I have never despaired, not when shipwrecked, not when on the point of death, not when an exile in the depth of American forests. Rome became dear to me above all worldly existence. For me Rome is Italy-the symbol of national union, under whatever form of Government you may wish. And the most infernal work of the Papacy was, to keep the country morally and materially divided." It was with ideas of this kind that he had come over in 1848, with sixty-three of his companions of the Italian Legion he had formed in his South American campaigns, to take part in the War of Deliverance. Leaving on April 15, he only landed at his native town, Nizza, on June 23, when the whole continent of Europe was already ablaze with revolution. Full of sadness is his description of the " "vagabond and unwelcome existence" he and his associates had for a long time to go through. He saw King Charles Albert at his headquarters. He found him mistrustful, irresolute, hesitating; and though he would not throw a stone on that dead man, but rather leave History to judge him, he yet cannot avoid calling him "the principal cause of our ruin." The King declined Garibaldi's service. "I would have served Italy under the orders of that same King as if the nation had been republican; and I would have drawn after me, on the same path of self-abnegation, those youths who had confidence in me. To make Italy one and free from foreign pestilence was my aim; and I believe it was the aim of most men in that epoch." At the present time, it may seem difficult to many to realize the picture of Garibaldi not only repelled by the King, but also looked askance at by provisional governments which had issued from barricades. The very costume then already worn by him and his brothers-in-arms gave offence. The pretext put forward was, that the red shirt was too conspicuous in presence of the enemy. Yet no capotes were furnished to his men. Miserably clad, badly equipped, the 3000 volunteers whom he had, after much delay, been allowed to gather round him, looked at last "more like a caravan of Bedaweens than like men organized for the defence of their country." When battling was suspended, his Legion was quartered now here, now there, throughout the peninsula, in a manner clearly showing how little its presence was relished anywhere. Garibaldi never stints his praise to those who fought well. But with merciless truthfulness, as if to read a wholesome lesson to his countrymen, he brands the cowardice, the demoralization, which repeatedly broke out in the ranks. Once, in the Lombard campaign of 1848, the braver portion of his men were on the point of firing on the rest, who had begun to fly in every direction; and with difficulty could he and the officers prevent a massacre. Certain patriotic tales of victories then gained over the Austrians he dissects with an unsparing hand. Over and over has he to speak of desertions during the night, when guns were found strewn over the fields, and numbers of men had run away, making tracks across the Swiss border. His trustiest men were those of good education, belonging to families of distinction in the various Italian provinces. The peasant element was wholly absent from his camp. Never did a single man of that class enlist as a volunteer for the national cause. Strapping fellows as they were, they only served in the army because forcibly sent into it as recruits. Otherwise, led by the priests with crucifix in hand, they acted as helpmates of reaction, rising against their would-be deliverers and benefactors in Lombardy, in the Duchies, in Tuscany, in the Neapolitan kingdom, and on Roman territory, towards the end of the Republic-always under clerical guidance. "Egged on by the priests, the peasants armed and ever will arm themselves against free government: " so Garibaldi indignantly writes after 1819. Here there is evidence of which history indeed furnishes examples enough—that in a good cause an intelligent and strong minority, striving for the benefit of the masses, has a natural right, under a tyrannical rule, superior to that of an ignorant populace which is systematically kept in a state of mental degradation. No wonder Garibaldi contemptuously dismisses those who, with the parrot-cry of "Freedom for All "-meaning freedom for the sworn enemies of intellectual culture-would render it impossible to draw a population, sunk in superstition, out of the vicious circle in which it is kept im |