Part 5 — Chapter 37 A Babel of Tongues—The German Umwalzungsmänner—The French Red Montagnards—The Italian Fuorusciti in Geneva—Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Orsini—The Roman and the German Traditions—A Trip on ‘The Prince Radetsky’

There was a time when in a fit of irritation and bitter mirth I thought of writing a pamphlet in the style of Grandville’s⁠[31] Illustrations: Les réfugiés peints par eux-mêmes. I am glad I did not do it. Now that I look at it more calmly, I am less moved to laughter and indignation. Besides, exile both lasts too long and weighs too heavily on men....

Nevertheless, I do say even now that exile, not undertaken with any definite object, but forced upon men by the triumph of the opposing party, checks development and draws men away from the activities of life into the domain of fantasy. Leaving their native land with concealed anger, with the continual thought of going back to it on the morrow, men make no advance, but are continually thrown back upon the past; hope hinders them from settling down and undertaking any permanent work; irritation and trivial but exasperated disputes prevent their escaping from the familiar circle of questions, thoughts, and memories which make up an oppressive binding tradition. Men in general, and especially men in an exceptional position, have such a passion for formalism, for the coterie spirit, for looking their part, that they immediately fall into a groove and acquire a doctrinaire stamp.

All exiles, cut off from the living environment to which they have belonged, shut their eyes to avoid seeing bitter truths, and grow more and more used to a narrow, fantastic circle consisting of inert memories and hopes that will never be realised.

Add to this, aloofness from all who are not exiles and an element of exasperation, suspicion, exclusiveness, and jealousy, and this new stiff-necked Israel becomes perfectly comprehensible.

The exiles of 1849 did not yet believe in the permanence of their enemy’s triumph; the intoxication of their recent successes had not yet passed off, the applause and songs of the victorious people were still ringing in their ears. They firmly believed that their defeat was a momentary reverse, and did not unpack their trunks. Meanwhile Paris was under police supervision, Rome was falling under the onslaught of the French, the brother of the Prussian King was brutally triumphing in Baden,⁠[32] while Paskevitch in the Russian style had outwitted Görgei⁠[33] in Hungary by bribes and promises. Geneva was full to overflowing with refugees; it became the Coblenz⁠[34] of the revolution of 1848. There were Italians from all parts; Frenchmen escaping from the Bauchart⁠[35] inquiry and from the Versailles trial; Baden insurgents, who entered Geneva marching in regular formation with their officers and with Gustav Struve; men who had taken part in the rising of Vienna; Bohemians; Poles from Posen and Galicia. All these people were crowded together between the Hôtel de Bergues and the Post Office Café. The more sensible of them began to suspect that this exile would not soon be over, talked of America, and went away. It was quite the opposite with the majority, and especially with the French, who, true to their temperament, were in daily expectation of the death of Napoleon and the birth of a republic—some looking for a republic both democratic and socialistic, others for one that should be democratic and not at all socialistic.

A few days after my arrival, as I was walking in Les Paquis, I met an elderly gentleman who looked like a Russian village priest, wearing a low wide-brimmed hat and a black white coat, and walking along with a sort of priestly unction; beside him stepped a man of terrific proportions, who looked as though he had been casually put together of immense blocks of human flesh. F. Kapp,⁠[36] the young writer, was with me.

‘Don’t you know them?’ he asked me.

‘No; but, if I’m not mistaken, it must be Lot or Noah out for a walk with Adam, who has put on a coat several sizes too large instead of his fig-leaves.’

‘They are Struve and Heinzen,’ he answered, laughing: ‘would you like to make their acquaintance?’

‘Very much.’ He introduced me.

The conversation was trivial. Struve was on his way home, and invited us to come in; we went with him. His small lodging was crowded with exiles from Baden. A tall woman, from a distance very good-looking, with a mass of luxuriant hair flowing loose in an original fashion, was sitting in the midst of them; this was his wife, the celebrated Amalie Struve.

Struve’s face made a strange impression on me from the very first; it expressed that moral rigidity which superstitious bigotry gives to fanatics and dissenters. Looking at his strong, narrow forehead, at the untroubled expression of his eyes, at his uncombed beard, his slightly grizzled hair, and his whole figure, I could have fancied that this was either a fanatical pastor of the army of Gustavus Adolphus who had forgotten to die, or a Taborite⁠[37] preaching repentance and the sacrament under two aspects. There was a surly coarseness about the appearance of Heinzen,⁠[38] that Sobakevitch of the German revolution; full-blooded and clumsy, he kept looking angrily from under his brows, and was sparing of words. He wrote later on that it would be sufficient to massacre two millions of the inhabitants of the globe and the cause of revolution would go swimmingly. Anybody who had once seen him would not be surprised at his writing this.

I cannot refrain from relating an extremely funny incident which occurred to me in connection with this cannibalistic project. There was, and indeed still is, living in Geneva a Dr. R., one of the most good-natured men in the world and one of the most constant and platonic lovers of the revolution, the friend of all the refugees; he doctored them gratis as well as giving them food and drink. However early one might arrive at the Café de la Poste, the doctor would already be there and already reading his third or fourth newspaper; he would beckon one mysteriously and murmur in one’s ear: ‘I fancy it will be a hot day in Paris to-day.’ ‘Why so?’ ‘I can’t tell you from whom I heard it, but it was a man in close relations with Ledru-Rollin; he was here on his way through....’ ‘Why, you were expecting something yesterday and the day before yesterday too, weren’t you, Doctor?’ ‘Well, what of that? Stadt Rom war nicht in einem Tage gebaut.’

So it was to him as a friend of Heinzen’s that I appealed in the very same café when the latter published his philanthropic programme. ‘Why,’ I said to him, ‘does your friend write such pernicious nonsense? The reaction is making an outcry, and indeed it has every reason to: he’s a regular Marat in a German setting! And how can one ask for two million heads?’

R. was confused, but did not like to give his friend away. ‘Listen,’ he said at last: ‘you have lost sight of one fact, perhaps: Heinzen is speaking of the whole human race; in that number there would be at least two hundred thousand Chinese.’ ‘Oh, well, that’s a different matter; why spare them?’ I answered; and for long afterwards I could never think of this reassuring fact without bursting into laughter.

Two days after our meeting in Les Paquis, the garçon of the Hôtel de Bergues, where I was staying, ran up to my room and announced with an air of importance: ‘General Struve and his adjutants.’ I imagined either that some one had sent the garçon up as a joke, or that he had made some blunder; but the door opened and—

and with him four gentlemen: two were in the military uniform worn in those days by German students, and had in addition red armlets adorned with various emblems. Struve presented his suite to me, democratically referring to them as ‘brothers in exile.’ I learnt with delight that one of them, a young man of twenty, who looked like a Bursch who had recently emerged from the ‘fuchs’⁠[39] stage, was now successfully filling the post of minister of home affairs per interim.

Struve at once began instructing me in his theory of the seven scourges, die sieben Geissel—Popes, priests, kings, soldiers, bankers, etc.—and of the establishment of some new democratic and revolutionary religion. I observed that if it depended upon us whether to establish a new religion or not, it would be better not to establish any, but to leave it to the will of God, as, from the very nature of the case, it was more His concern. We argued. Struve made some remark about the Weltseele; I observed that in spite of Schelling’s having so clearly defined the world-soul by calling it das Schwebende, I found great difficulty in grasping it.

He jumped up from his chair and, coming as close to me as possible, with the words, ‘Excuse me, allow me,’ began tapping my head with his fingers, and pressing it with them, as though my skull had been composed of the keys of a concertina. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he commented, addressing his four brothers in exile, ‘Bürger Herzen hat kein, aber auch gar kein Organ der Venerazion!’ All were satisfied with the lack of the ‘bump of reverence’ in me, and I was equally so.

Hereupon he informed me that he was a great phrenologist, and had not only written a book on Halle’s system but had even selected his Amalie from it, after first feeling her skull. He assured me that the bump of the passions was completely absent in her, and that the back part of the skull where they are located was almost flat. On these grounds, sufficient for a divorce, he married her.

Struve was a very queer fish: he ate nothing but Lenten food, with the addition of milk, drank no wine, and kept his Amalie on a similar diet. This was not enough for him: he went every day to bathe with her in the Arve, the water of which scarcely reaches the temperature of eight degrees in the middle of summer, as it flows so swiftly from the mountains that it has not time to get warm.

Later on it often happened that we talked of vegetarianism. I raised the usual objections: the formation of the teeth, the great loss of energy in the digestion of vegetable fibre, and the lower development of the brain in herbivorous animals. He listened blandly without losing his temper, but stuck to his opinion. In conclusion, apparently wishing to impress me, he said: ‘Do you know that a man always nourished on vegetarian diet so purifies his body as to be quite free from smell after death?’ ‘That’s very pleasant,’ I replied; ‘but what advantage will that be to me? I won’t be sniffing myself after death.’ Struve did not even smile, but said to me with serene conviction: ‘You will speak very differently one day!’ ‘When my bump of reverence develops,’ I added.

At the end of 1849 Struve sent me the calendar he had newly devised for ‘free’ Germany. The days, the months, everything had been translated into an ancient German jargon difficult to understand; instead of saints’ days, every day was dedicated to the memory of two celebrities—for instance, to Washington and Lafayette; but, on the other hand, every tenth day was devoted to the memory of the enemies of mankind—for instance, Nicholas and Metternich. The holidays were the days when particularly great men such as Luther and Columbus were commemorated. In this calendar Struve had the gallantry to replace Christmas on the twenty-fifth of December by the festival of Amalie!

Meeting me one day in the street, he said among other things that we ought to publish in Geneva a journal common to all the exiles, in three languages, which would carry on the struggle against the ‘seven scourges’ and maintain the ‘sacred fire’ of the peoples, now crushed by the reaction. I answered that it would, of course, be a very good thing. The publishing of papers was at that time an epidemic disease: every two or three weeks new schemes were started, specimen copies appeared, prospectuses were sent about, then two or three numbers would come out—and would all disappear, leaving no trace. People who were incapable of anything considered themselves competent to edit a paper, scraped together a hundred francs or so, and spent them on the first and last number. So I was not in the least surprised at Struve’s intention; but I was very much surprised by his calling upon me at seven o’clock the next morning. I thought some misfortune had happened, but Struve, after calmly settling himself in a chair, brought a sheet of paper out of his pocket and, preparing to read it, said: ‘Bürger, since we agreed yesterday as to the necessity of publishing a journal, I have come to read you the prospectus of it.’

When he had read it he informed me that he was going to Mazzini and many others to invite them to meet at Heinzen’s for deliberation on the subject. I, too, went to Heinzen’s: he was sitting with a ferocious air at the table, holding a manuscript in one gigantic paw; the other he held out to me, muttering thickly, ‘Bürger, platz!’

Some eight persons, French and German, were present. Some ex-representative of the people in the French National Assembly was making an estimate of the cost, and writing something in slanting lines. When Mazzini arrived, Struve proposed reading the prospectus that had been written by Heinzen. Heinzen cleared his throat and began reading it in German, although the only language common to all was French.

Since they had not the faintest shadow of a new idea, the prospectus was only the thousandth variation of those democratic lucubrations which are the same sort of rhetorical exercise on revolutionary texts as church sermons are on those of the Bible. Indirectly guarding himself from a charge of socialism, Heinzen said that the democratic republic would of itself solve the economic question to the general satisfaction. The man who did not flinch at the demand for two million heads was afraid that his organ would be considered communistic.

I urged some objection to this when the reading was finished, but from his abrupt replies, from Struve’s intervention, and from the gestures of the French deputy, I perceived that we had been invited to the council to accept Heinzen’s and Struve’s prospectus, not to deliberate upon it; it was in strict harmony with the theory held by Elpidifor Antiohovitch Zurov, the military governor of Novgorod.⁠[40]⁠

Mazzini listened with a melancholy air, but agreed, and was almost the first to subscribe for two or three shares. ‘Si omnes consentiunt ego non dissentio,’ I thought à la Schufterle in Schiller’s Robbers, and I too subscribed.

But the subscribers appeared to be few in number; however often the French deputy added and subtracted, the sum subscribed was insufficient.

‘Gentlemen,’ said Mazzini, ‘I have thought of a way of getting over the difficulty: publish the journal at first only in French and German; as for the Italian translation, I shall put all articles of interest in my Italia del Popolo—that will save you one-third of the expenditure.’

‘To be sure! what could be better!’ Mazzini’s proposition was accepted by all. He grew a little more cheerful. I was awfully amused, and very eager to show him that I had seen the trick he had played. I went up to him and, watching for a moment when no one was near us, I said: ‘How capitally you got out of the journal!’

‘Well,’ he observed, ‘an Italian part is really superfluous, you know.’

‘So are the two others!’ I added.

A smile glided over his face and vanished as quickly as though it had never been there.

That was the second time of my seeing him. Mazzini, who knew of my stay in Rome, wanted to make my acquaintance. One morning I went with L. Spini to see him in Les Paquis.

When we went in Mazzini was sitting dejectedly at the table listening to what was being said by a rather tall, graceful, and handsome young man with fair hair. This was the daring companion-in-arms of Garibaldi, the defender of Vascello, the leader of the Roman legionaries, Giacomo Medici. Another young man with an expression of melancholy preoccupation sat plunged in thought, paying no attention to what was going forward—this was Mazzini’s colleague in the triumvirate, Marco Aurelio Saffi.

Mazzini got up and, looking me straight in the face with his piercing eyes, held out both hands in a friendly way. Even in Italy a head so severely classical, so elegant in its gravity, is rarely to be met with. At moments the expression of his face was harshly austere, but it quickly grew soft and serene. An active, concentrated intelligence sparkled in his melancholy eyes; there was an infinity of persistence and strength of will in them and in the lines on his brow. All his features showed traces of long years of anxiety, of sleepless nights, of past storms, of powerful passions, or rather of one powerful passion, and also some element of fanaticism—perhaps of asceticism.

Mazzini is very simple and amiable in his manner, but the habit of rule is apparent, especially in argument; he can scarcely conceal his annoyance at contradiction, and sometimes does not conceal it. He knows his strength, and genuinely despises all the external trappings of dictatorial authority. His popularity was at that time immense. In his little room, with the everlasting cigar in his mouth, Mazzini at Geneva, like the Pope in the old days at Avignon, held in his hands the threads that like a spiritual telegraph system brought him into living communication with the whole peninsula. He knew every heart-throb of his party, felt the slightest tremor in it, promptly responded to everything, and with amazing tirelessness gave general guidance to everything and every one.

A fanatic and at the same time an organiser, he covered Italy with a network of secret societies connected together and devoted to one object. These societies branched off into arteries that defied detection, split up, grew smaller and smaller, and vanished in the Apennines and the Alps, in the regal palazzi of aristocrats and the dark alleys of Italian towns into which no police can penetrate. Village priests, diligence conductors, the principe of Lombardy, smugglers, innkeepers, women, bandits, all were made use of, all were links in the chain that was bound to him and that was subject to him. From the times of Menotti⁠[41] and the brothers Bandiera,⁠[42] enthusiastic youths, vigorous men of the people, vigorous aristocrats, sometimes old men, come forward in constant succession ... and follow the lead of Mazzini, consecrated by the elder Buonarotti, the comrade and friend of Gracchus Babeuf,⁠[43] and advance to the unequal combat, disdainful of chains and the block, and sometimes at the point of death adding to the shout of ‘Viva l’Italia!’ that of ‘Viva Mazzini!’

There has never been such a revolutionary organisation anywhere, and it would hardly be possible anywhere but in Italy, unless in Spain. Now it has lost its old unity and old strength, it is exhausted by the ten years of martyrdom, it is worn out by loss of blood and the anguish of suspense, its thought has grown older; and yet what outbursts, what heroic examples, there are still: Pianori, Orsini, Pisacane!

I do not think that by the death of one man a country could be raised from such degradation as France has fallen into now.⁠[44]⁠

I do not justify the plan on which Pisacane made his attempt;⁠[45] it seemed to me as ill-timed as the two previous risings in Milan: but that is not the point. I only mean to speak here of the way in which it was actually carried out. These men overwhelm one with the grandeur of their tragic poetry, their terrible strength, and silence all blame and criticism. I know no instance of greater heroism, among either the Greeks or the Romans, among the martyrs of Christianity or of the Reformation!

A handful of vigorous men sail to the luckless shore of Naples, bearing a challenge, an example, a living witness that all is not yet dead in the people. The handsome young leader is the first to fall, with the flag in his hand—and after him the rest fall, or worse still are caught in the clutches of the Bourbon. The death of Pisacane and the death of Orsini were like two fearful thunderclaps in a sultry night. Latin Europe shuddered—the wild boar,⁠[46] terrified, retreated to Caserta and hid himself in his lair.

Pale with horror, the man who was driving France in her funeral hearse to the graveyard trembled in his seat.

Pisacane’s attempt might well be described among the people in these poetical lines:—⁠[47]⁠

In 1849 Mazzini was a power, and it was not for nothing that the governments feared him; his star was then in its full brilliance—but it was already setting. It might have maintained itself for long years yet, growing paler little by little; but after repeated failures and desperate efforts, it began to decline rapidly.

Some of Mazzini’s friends allied themselves with Piedmont, others with Napoleon. Mazzini went his revolutionary bypath, the party split up into factions, the federal character of the Italians showed itself more conspicuously.

Garibaldi himself, in spite of his own feelings, pronounced a severe criticism on Mazzini, and, influenced by the enemies of the latter, published a letter in which he indirectly blamed him.

This is what has turned Mazzini grey and made him old, this is what has given a look of bitter intolerance, even exasperation, to his face, to his glance. But such men do not give in, do not yield; the worse things go with them, the higher they hold the flag. If Mazzini loses friends and money, and barely escapes one day from chains and the gallows, on the next he takes his stand more obstinately and resolutely than ever, collects fresh money, seeks fresh friends, denies himself everything, even sleep and food, ponders whole nights over new plans and every time actually creates them, flings himself again into the conflict, and, again beaten, sets to work once more with feverish ardour.

In this unyielding steadiness, in this faith which runs far ahead of facts, in this inexhaustible activity which failure only incites and provokes to fresh effort, there is something of grandeur, and, if you like, something of madness. Often it is just that grain of madness which is the essential condition of success. It acts on the people’s nerves and carries them away. A great man acting directly is bound to be a great maniac, especially with such enthusiastic people as the Italians, who, moreover, preserve the religious conception of nationality. Only the sequel can show whether Mazzini has lost his magnetic power over the Italian masses through his ill-timed and unsuccessful attempts. It is not reason, it is not logic that leads nations, but faith, love, and hatred.

The Italian refugees were not superior to the other refugees either in talent or education. The greater number of them knew nothing, indeed, but their own poets and their own history. But they were free from the stereotyped, commonplace stamp of the rank and file of French democrats (who argue, declaim, and feel exactly the same thing in herds, all going into ecstasies at once), as well as from the uncouth, coarse, pothouse character typical of the German refugees. The ordinary French democrat is a bourgeois in spe; the German revolutionary, like the German Bursch, is just the philistine over again in a different stage of development. The Italians are more original, more individual.

The French are turned out ready-made by thousands on the same pattern. The present government was not originally responsible for this curtailment of individuality, but it has grasped the secret of it. Absolutely in the French spirit, it has organised public education—that is, all education, for there is no home education in France. In every town of the empire the same thing is being taught on the same day, at the same hour, from the same books. At all examinations the same questions are asked, the same examples set; teachers who make any departure from the text, or make any change in the syllabus, are promptly removed. This soulless uniformity of education has only put into a compulsory hereditary form what existed unformulated in men’s minds already.

It is the conventional democratic notion of equality applied to intellectual development. There is nothing of the sort in Italy. The Italian, a federalist and an artist by temperament, flies with horror from every sort of barrack discipline, uniformity and geometrical regularity. The Frenchman is innately a soldier; he loves discipline, command, the uniform; he loves to inspire terror. The Italian, if it comes to that, is rather a bandit than a soldier, and by that I do not mean anything at all to his discredit. He prefers at the risk of capital punishment to kill his enemy at his own impulse rather than to kill by order; but it is without throwing any responsibility on others. He prefers a meagre livelihood in the mountains, concealing smugglers, to honoured service in the gendarmerie, discovering them.

The educated Italian, like us, is developed of his own accord by life, by his passions, by the books that have happened to come into his hands, and so attains to understanding of one sort or another. This is why there are gaps, discords, both in his culture and in ours. Our culture, like his, is in many respects inferior to the specialised finish of the French and the theoretical learning of the Germans; but, on the other hand, the colour is more brilliant both in us and in the Italians.

We even have the same defects as they. The Italian has the same tendency to laziness as we: he does not think of work as an enjoyment; he does not like the worry of it, the weariness of it, the lack of leisure. Industry in Italy is almost as backward as among us; the Italians, like us, have treasures lying under their feet and they do not dig them up. Manners in Italy have not been influenced by the modern bourgeois tendency to the same degree as in France and in England.

The history of the Italian petty-bourgeois is quite unlike the development of the bourgeoisie in France and in England. The wealthy bourgeois, the descendants del popolo grasso, have more than once successfully rivalled the feudal aristocracy, have been rulers of cities, and therefore they have been not further from but nearer to the plebeians and contadini than the rapidly enriched vulgarians of other lands. The bourgeoisie in the French sense is represented in Italy by a special class which has come into existence since the first revolution, and which might be called, as in geology, the Piedmont strata. It is distinguished in Italy as in the whole continent of Europe by being invariably liberal in many questions, though in all afraid of the people and of indiscreet talk about labour and wages, and, what is more, by always giving way to the enemy above and never to their followers below.

The Italian exiles were drawn from every possible stratum of society. There were all sorts to be found about Mazzini, from the old names that occur in the chronicles of Guicciardini and Muratori to which the people’s ear has been accustomed for centuries, such as Litti, Borromeo, del Verme, Belgiojoso, Nani, Visconti, to some half-savage runaway Romeo from the Abruzzi with his dark olive-coloured face and irrepressible rashness! Here were clericals too, like Sirtori, the heroic priest who, at the first firing in Venice, tucked up his cassock, and all through the siege and defence of Marghera fought, gun in hand, in the foremost ranks under a shower of bullets; here, too, were the brilliant staff of Neapolitan officers, such as Pisacane, Cosenz, and the brothers Mezzocappa. Here, too, were peasants from Trasteverina, faithful and hard as steel in privation, stern, austere, dumb in calamity, modest and indomitable like Pianori; and beside them, Tuscans, effeminate even in pronunciation, but ready for the struggle too. Lastly, there were Garibaldi, a figure taken straight out of Cornelius Nepos, with the simplicity of a child and the daring of a lion; and Felice Orsini, whose beautiful head has so lately rolled from the steps of the scaffold.

But at their names I must pause.

I made Garibaldi’s acquaintance in 1854 when he sailed from South America as the captain of a ship and stayed in the West India Docks; I went to see him accompanied by one of his comrades in the Roman war, and by Orsini. Garibaldi, in a thick, light overcoat, with a bright-coloured scarf around his neck and a cap on his head, struck me as more of a genuine sailor than as the glorious leader of the Roman legion, statuettes of whom in fantastic costume were being sold all over the world. The good-natured simplicity of his manner, the absence of all affectation, the cordiality with which he received us, all disposed me in his favour. His crew consisted almost entirely of Italians; he was their head and chief, and I am sure he was a strict one, but they all looked happily and affectionately at him; they were proud of their captain. Garibaldi gave us lunch in his cabin, regaling us with specially prepared oysters from South America, dried fruits, port—when suddenly he leaped up, saying, ‘Wait a bit! We will drink a different wine with you,’ and ran up on deck; then a sailor brought in a bottle; Garibaldi looked at it with a smile and filled our glasses.... One might have expected anything from a man who had crossed the ocean, but it was nothing more nor less than a bottle with the label of his native town Nice, which he had brought with him to London from America.

Meanwhile, in his simple and unceremonious talk one was more and more conscious of the presence of strength; without phrases and commonplaces, the people’s leader, who had amazed all old soldiers by his valour, was revealed, and it was easy to recognise in the ship-captain the wounded lion who, fighting at every step, retreated after the taking of Rome and, as he lost his followers, gathered together again at San Marino, at Ravenna, in Lombardy, in the Tyrol, in Tessino, soldiers, peasants, bandits, any one of any sort to strike back at the foe—and all this beside the body of his wife, who had succumbed to the hardships and privations of the march.

In 1854 his opinions were widely divergent from those of Mazzini, although he was on good terms with him. He told him in my presence that Piedmont ought not to be irritated, that the chief aim now was to shake off the Austrian yoke, and he greatly doubted whether Italy was as ready for union and a republic as Mazzini imagined. He was entirely opposed to all projects and attempts at insurrection.

When he was about to sail for coal to Newcastle-on-Tyne and was from there setting off to the Mediterranean, I told him how immensely I liked his seafaring life, and that of all the exiles he was the one who had chosen the better part.

‘And who forbids them doing the same?’ he replied with warmth. ‘This was my cherished dream; you may laugh at it if you like, but I cherish it still. I am known in America: I could have three or four such boats under my command. I could take all the refugees on them: the sailors, the lieutenants, the workmen, the cooks, might all be exiles. What can they do now in Europe? Grow used to slavery and be false to themselves, or go begging in England. Settling in America is worse still—that’s the end, that’s the country “of forgetting the fatherland”: it is a new fatherland, there are new interests, everything is different; men who have settled in America fall out of the ranks. What is better than my idea?’ (his face beamed): ‘what could be better than gathering together round a few masts and floating over the ocean, hardening ourselves in the rough life of sailors, in conflict with the elements and with danger? A floating revolution, ready to land on any shore, independent and unassailable!’

At that moment he seemed to me a hero of antiquity, a figure out of the Æneid ... who—had he lived in other ages—would have had his legend, his ‘Arma virumque cano!’

Orsini was a man of quite a different type. He showed to the full his wild strength and terrific energy on the 14th of January 1858, in the rue Lepelletier; they won him a great name in history, and brought his head under the knife of the guillotine at thirty-six. I made the acquaintance of Orsini at Nice in 1851; at times we were even very intimate, then drifted apart, came together again, and in the end ‘a grey cat ran between us’ in 1856, and, though we were reconciled, we never felt the same to each other again. Such types as Orsini are only developed in Italy; on the other hand, they appear there at all times, in all ages: they are conspirators and artists, martyrs and adventurers, patriots, condottiere, Teverina and Rienzi, anything you like, but not vulgar, petty, commonplace, bourgeois. Such characters stand out vividly in the chronicles of every Italian city. They amaze us by their goodness, they amaze us by their wickedness, and they impress us by the strength of their passions and by the strength of their will. The yeast of restlessness is fermenting in them from early years—they must have danger, they must have laurels, glory, fame; they are purely southern natures, with hot blood in their veins, with passions almost beyond our understanding, ready for any privation, for any sacrifice, from a sort of thirst of enjoyment. Self-denial and devotion in them go hand in hand with revengefulness and intolerance; they are simple in many ways and cunning in many ways. Reckless as to the means they use, they are reckless, too, of danger; descendants of the Roman patricians and children in Christ of the Jesuit fathers, reared on classic memories and the traditions of mediæval turmoils, a mass of ancient virtues and catholic vices are fermenting in their souls. They set no value on their own lives nor on the lives of others either; their terrific persistence is on a level with Anglo-Saxon obstinacy. On the one hand there is a naïve love of the external, an amour propre bordering on vanity, a voluptuous desire to have their fill of applause, of glory; on the other, all the Roman heroism in face of privation and death.

People of this energy can only be checked by the guillotine. Scarcely do they escape from the gendarmes of Sardinia before they begin hatching plots in the very claws of the Austrian hawk; and the day after a miraculous rescue from the dungeons of Mantua they begin, with hands still bleeding from the leap to freedom, to sketch a plan of grenades, then, face to face with danger, fling them under a carriage. In the hour of failure they rise to titanic heights, and by their death deal a blow more powerful than a bursting grenade....

As a young man Orsini had fallen into the hands of the secret police of Pope Gregory XIV.; he was condemned for taking part in the movement in Rome and sentenced to the galleys, and remained in prison till the amnesty of Pius IX. From this life with smugglers, with bravoes, with survivors of the Carbonari, he gained a temper of iron and an immense knowledge of the national spirit. From these men, who were daily in conflict with the society which oppressed them, he learnt the art of self-control, the art of being silent not only before a judge but even with his friends.

Men of Orsini’s stamp have a great influence on others: people are attracted by their reserved character and at the same time are not at home with them; one looks at them with the nervous pleasure, mingled with uneasiness, with which one admires the graceful movements and velvety gambols of a panther. They are children, but not good children. Not only Dante’s hell is ‘paved’ with them, but all the later centuries nurtured on his sinister poetry and the malignant wisdom of Machiavelli are full of them. Mazzini, too, belongs to their family, in the way that Cosimo Medici did; Orsini, in the way that Giovanni Procida did. One cannot even exclude from them the great ‘adventurer of the sea,’ Columbus, nor the still greater ‘bandit’ of later days, Napoleon Buonaparte.

Orsini was strikingly handsome; his whole appearance, elegant and graceful, could not but attract attention; he was quiet, spoke little, gesticulated less than his fellow-countrymen, and never raised his voice. The long black beard, as he wore it in Italy, made him look like some young Etruscan priest. His whole head was extraordinarily beautiful, only a little marred by the irregular line of the nose.⁠[48] And all the same there was something in Orsini’s features, in his eyes, in his frequent smile and his gentle voice, that checked intimacy. It was evident that he was holding himself in, that he never fully let himself go and was wonderfully self-controlled; it was evident that not one word fell from those smiling lips without intention, that there were depths behind those inwardly shining eyes, that, where we should hesitate and step back, he would smile and without a change of face or tone of voice, would go forward, remorseless and undoubting.

In the spring of 1852 Orsini was expecting very important news in regard to his family affairs: he was worried at not getting a letter; he told me so several times, and I knew in what anxiety he was living. At dinner-time one day, when two or three outsiders were present, the postman came into the entry: Orsini sent to ask if there was a letter for him; it appeared that there was; he glanced at it, put it in his pocket, and went on with the conversation. An hour and a half later, when we were alone with him, Orsini said to us: ‘Well, thank God, at last I have got the answer, and it is all very good news.’ We, knowing that he was expecting a letter, had not guessed that this was it, with so unconcerned an air had he opened it and then put it into his pocket. A man like that is a born conspirator. And he was one, indeed, all his life.

And what was accomplished by him with his energy, by Garibaldi with his daring, by Pianori with his revolver, by Pisacane and the other martyrs whose blood is not yet dry? Italy will be delivered from the Austrians, if at all, by Piedmont; as it was from the Bourbon of Naples by fat Murat, both under the protection of a Buonaparte. Oh, divina Commedia?—or simply Commedia! in the sense in which Pope Chiaramonti⁠[49] said it to Napoleon in Fontainebleau....

I became very intimate later on with the two men of whom I spoke when describing my first meeting with Mazzini.

Medici was a Lombard. In his early youth, unhappy at the hopeless position of Italy, he went to Spain, afterwards to Monte Video and to Mexico; he served in the ranks of the Cristinos⁠[50]⁠—was, I believe, a captain—and at last returned to his native place after the election of Mastai Ferretti.⁠[51] Italy was showing signs of life; Medici threw himself into the movement. He performed miracles of valour at the head of the Roman legionaries during the siege; but the French hordes entered Rome all the same over the bodies of many noble victims—over the dead body of Laviron, who, as though to atone for the crime of his country, was fighting against it, and fell, struck down by a French bullet at the gates of Rome.

One would imagine a tribune and warrior like Medici as a condottiero bronzed by gunpowder and the tropical sun, with bold features, with abrupt words and vigorous gesticulation. Pale, fair, with soft features, eyes full of gentleness, and elegant manners, Medici was more like a man who has spent his whole life in the society of ladies than a guerilla chieftain and an agitator. A poet, a dreamer, at that time passionately in love—everything about him was elegant and attractive.

The few weeks spent with him at Geneva did me a great deal of good. It was the very blackest period for me, in 1852, six weeks after the burial of my wife. I was utterly shattered: every signpost, every guiding clue was lost; I do not know whether I was even then like one demented, as Orsini said in his diary, but I was certainly in a bad way. Medici was sorry for me; he did not say so, but late in the evening, at twelve o’clock, he sometimes knocked at my door and came in to talk with me, sitting on my bed. (Once when we were chatting like this we caught a scorpion on the quilt.) He would sometimes knock, too, between six and seven in the morning, saying, ‘It’s a lovely day, let us go to Albaro’—that was where the Spanish beauty lived with whom he was in love. He had no hope of a speedy change of circumstances; before him was a prospect of years of exile, everything was growing worse and gloomier; but there was something youthful, gay, sometimes naïve, about him. I have noticed the same thing in almost all characters of that mould.

On the day of my departure several friends came to dine with me—Pisacane, Mordini, and Cosenz.⁠[52] ... ‘Why is it,’ I asked in jest, ‘that our friend Medici, with his fair hair and northern aristocratic face, reminds me more of a Vandyck cavalier than of an Italian?’ ‘That’s natural,’ Pisacane went on, still in jest: ‘Giacomo is a Lombard, he is descended from some German Ritter.’ ‘Fratelli,’ said Medici, ‘there is not a single drop of German blood in these veins!’ ‘It’s all very well for you to talk; no, you must bring proofs, explain why you have the features of a northerner,’ the former went on. ‘Oh, well,’ said Medici, ‘if I have the features of a northerner, I suppose one of my ancestresses must have forgotten herself with a Pole!’

Saffi had the purest and most candid nature that I have met in a man not Russian. The men of Western Europe are often not very intelligent, and so seem simple and slow-witted; but gifted natures are rarely simple. In Germans one meets with the disgusting simplicity of immaturity in practical life; among the English the simplicity that is due to slowness of mind, to their always seeming half asleep and not being able to wake up properly. On the other hand, the French are for ever taken up with arrière-pensées, and absorbed in playing their part. Together with the lack of simplicity they have another defect: they are all very poor actors, and do not know how to conceal their little game. Affectation, boasting, and a habit of fine phrases have so entered into their flesh and blood that men have perished, have paid with their lives, for the part they were playing, and yet their sacrifice has been all falsity. These are terrible things, and many are indignant at their being put into words, but it is still more terrible to deceive oneself. That is why it is so comforting, so easy to breathe, when in this jostling crowd of pretentious mediocrities and insufferable, affected, and self-glorifying talents one meets a strong man free from the slightest artificiality, free from pretentiousness, free from the vanity that jars like a knife scratching on a plate. It is like coming out of a stuffy theatre-corridor lighted by lamps, after an afternoon performance, into the sunshine—breathing fresh, wholesome air and seeing real lime trees after cardboard magnolias and sailcloth palm trees. Saffi is one of these men. Mazzini, old Armellini, and he were the triumvirate in the time of the Roman Republic. Saffi was in charge of the ministry of home affairs, and, up to the end of the struggles with the French, was in a foremost place, and that meant then under the bullets and cannon-shot.

He returned from exile and once more crossed the Apennines; he made this sacrifice with no faith in it, from a sense of duty, from a feeling of great devotion, that he might not wound some, that his absence might not be a bad example. He spent some weeks in Bologna, where he would have been shot within twenty-four hours if he had been caught; his task was not simply to conceal himself—he had to act, to prepare for action, whilst awaiting news from Milan. I never heard from him about the details of this part of his life. But I did hear about it, a great deal about it, from a man who might well be a good judge of deeds of daring, and I heard it at a time when their personal relations were greatly strained. Orsini had accompanied him across the Apennines; he used to tell me with enthusiasm of the even, calm serenity, of the light, almost gay, mood of Saffi at the time when they were going down the mountains on foot; with the enemy almost within sight, Saffi would carelessly sing folk-songs and repeat verses of Dante.... I imagine he would have gone to the stake with the same verses and the same songs on his lips, with no thought at all of his heroism.

In London, at Mazzini’s or at his friends’, Saffi was mostly silent; he rarely took part in argument, sometimes grew eager for a minute and then subsided again. They did not understand him, that was clear to me, il ne savait pas se faire valoir ... but I never heard from one of the Italians who fell away from Mazzini one word, one slightest hint, against Saffi.

One evening an argument sprang up between Mazzini and me about Leopardi.

There are poems of Leopardi with which I am passionately in sympathy. Much of his work, like Byron’s, is spoilt by theorising, but sometimes a line of his, like one of Byron’s, stabs, hurts, wrings the heart. There are such words, such lines, in Lermontov; there are some in the iambics of Barbier.⁠[53]⁠

Leopardi was the last book read, looked at before her death, by Natalie....

To men of action, to agitators who move the masses, these bitter hesitations, these heartrending doubts are incomprehensible. They see in them nothing but profitless lamentation, nothing but feeble despondency. Mazzini could not like Leopardi—that I knew beforehand; but he attacked him with a sort of exasperation. I felt very much vexed; of course, he was angry with him for being of no use for propaganda. In the same way Frederick II. might have been angry with him ... I do not know ... well, for instance, because he would be of no use as a soldier. It is the revolting desire to restrict the free play of personality, to force men into categories and ranks—as though political activity were like serf-labour to which the bailiffs drive weak and strong, willing and unwilling alike, without consulting their wishes. Mazzini was angry. Half in jest and half in earnest, I said to him: ‘I believe you have a grudge against poor Leopardi for not having taken part in the Roman revolution; but you know he has an excellent reason to urge in his defence—you keep forgetting it!’

‘What reason?’

‘Why, the fact that he died in 1836.’

Saffi could not resist defending the poet whom he loved even more than I did and of course understood even more deeply: he analysed him with that æsthetic, artistic feeling in which a man rather reveals aspects of his spirit than ‘thinks.’

From this conversation, and from a few more like it, I saw that their path was not really the same. The thought of one is seeking means, concentrated on means alone—that is, in a sense running away from doubt; it thirsts for nothing but practical activity, and that is in a way indolence. To the other, objective truth is precious and his mind is working; moreover, to an artistic nature art is precious in itself, apart from its relation to reality.

Leaving Mazzini, we talked for a long time yet of Leopardi. His poems were in my pocket; we went into a café and read several of my favourite ones.

That was sufficient. When men are in sympathy, in the finer shades, they need not speak of many things—it is clear that they are at one about vivid colours and deep shadows.

Speaking of Medici, I mentioned a deeply tragic figure, Laviron. My acquaintance with him was brief; he flashed by me and vanished in a cloud of blood. Laviron was an engineer and an architect who had completed his studies at the Polytechnique. I made his acquaintance in the very heyday of the revolution, between the 24th of February and the 15th of May (he was then a captain in the National Guard). The vigorous, stern where necessary, and gay, good-natured Gallo-Frankish blood of the ’nineties coursed unmixed in his veins. I imagine that the architect Kleber was of the same stamp when he carried earth in a wheelbarrow with the young actor Talma clearing a space for the festival of the Federation. Laviron belonged to the small number of men who were not intoxicated by the victory of the 24th of February and the proclamation of a republic. He was at the barricades when they were fighting, and in the Hôtel de Ville when those who had not fought were electing dictators: when a new government came into the town-hall like a deus ex machina, he loudly protested against its composition, and, together with a few vigorous men, asked where it had come from, why it was the government? With perfect consistency, on the 15th of May Laviron burst with the Parisian populace into the bourgeois assembly and, with an unsheathed sword in his hand, forced the president to admit the orators of the people to the tribune. The cause was lost and Laviron was forced into hiding. He was judged and condemned par contumace. The reaction was drunk with success; it felt strong for combat and soon strong for conquest—then came the June days, proscriptions, exiles, the Blue terror. It was just at that period that I was sitting one evening on the boulevard in front of Tortoni’s in a crowd of all sorts of people, and, as is always the case in Paris—under constitutional and unconstitutional monarchy, under the republic and under the empire—spies were scattered about everywhere amongst them. Suddenly—I could not believe my eyes—Laviron walked up to me. ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘What madness is this?’ I answered in an undertone, and taking him by the arm I walked away from Tortoni’s. ‘How can you expose yourself like this, and especially just now?’

‘If only you knew how dreary it is to sit shut up in hiding! it’s enough to drive one crazy.... I sat thinking and thinking, and then went out for a walk.’

‘But why on the boulevard?’

‘That makes no difference. I am less known here than on the other side of the Seine, and who would dream of my walking about by Tortoni’s? I am going away, though....

‘Where?’

‘To Geneva. Everything is so dreary and sickening; we have terrible calamities ahead of us. Everywhere there is change for the worse, and pettiness is everywhere and in everything. Well, good-bye—good-bye; and may our next meeting be a more cheerful one.’

In Geneva Laviron worked as an architect, and was building something when suddenly war was declared ‘for the Pope’ against Rome. The French made their treacherous attack on Cività Vecchia, and were approaching Rome. Laviron threw down his calipers and galloped off to Rome. ‘You need an engineer, an artilleryman, a soldier. I am a Frenchman. I am ashamed of France, and go to fight against my countrymen,’ he said to the triumvirs, and joined the ranks of the Romans as a sacrifice of atonement for his country. With gloomy daring he headed the advance; when everything was lost he still fought on, and fell at the gates of Rome, shot down by a French bullet.

The French newspapers greeted his death with a shower of abuse, claiming that it was the judgment of God on an infamous traitor to his country!...

When a man who has long been watching black curls and black eyes suddenly turns to a fair-haired woman with light-coloured eyebrows, pale and nervous, his eyes always receive a shock and cannot at once get over it. The difference of which he has not been thinking, which he has forgotten, produces an involuntary physical effect upon him.

Exactly the same thing happens when one turns quickly from the Italian circles to the German.

Undoubtedly the Germans are more developed on the theoretical side than any other people, but they have not gained much by it so far. From Catholic fanaticism they have passed to the Protestant pietism of transcendental philosophy and the romance of philology, and are now gradually making the transition to exact science; the German ‘studies diligently at all his stages,’ and his whole history is summed up in that, and he will get marks for it on the Day of Judgment. The common people of Germany, who have studied less, have suffered a great deal; they bought the right to Protestantism by the Thirty Years’ War, the right to an independent existence—that is, to a colourless existence under the supervision of Russia—by the struggle with Napoleon. The emancipation in 1814 and 1815 was the complete victory of the reaction; and when, in place of Jerome Buonaparte, der Landesvater appeared in a powdered wig and an old-fashioned uniform long laid by, and announced that next day was fixed, let us say, for the forty-fifth parade (the one before, the forty-fourth, had taken place before the revolution), then all the emancipated people felt as though they had suddenly lost touch with the present and gone back to another age, and every one felt his head to see if he had grown a pigtail with a ribbon on it. The people accepted this with simple-hearted foolishness, and sang Körner’s songs. Science and learning advanced. Greek tragedies were performed in Berlin, there were dramatic triumphs for Goethe in Weimar.

The most radical men among the Germans remain philistines in their private life. Bold as they are in logic, they feel no obligation to be consistent in practice, and fall into glaring contradictions. The German mind, in matters revolutionary as well as in everything else, accepts the general idea in its unconditional—of course, that is, unreal—significance, and is satisfied with working it out intellectually, imagining that a thing is done when it is understood, and that the fact as easily follows the thought as the meaning of the fact is grasped by the consciousness.

The English and the French are full of prejudices, while a German is free from them; but both French and English are more consistent in their lives—the rule they follow is perhaps absurd, but it is what they have accepted. The German accepts nothing except reason and logic, but he is ruled in many things by other considerations—this is selling the soul for bribes.

The Frenchman is not morally free: though rich in initiative in practical life, he is poor in abstract thought. He thinks in received conceptions, in accepted forms; he gives a fashionable cut to commonplace ideas, and is satisfied with them. It is hard for him to take in anything new, although he does rush at it. The Frenchman oppresses his family and believes it is his duty to do so, just as he believes in the ‘Legion of Honour’ and the authority of the law-courts. The German believes in nothing, but takes advantage of public prejudices where it suits him. He is accustomed to trivial comfort, to Wohlbehagen, to peace and quiet, and, as he goes from his study to the Prunkzimmer or his bedroom, sacrifices his free thought to his dressing-gown, to his peace and quiet, and to his kitchen. The German is a great Sybarite, though this characteristic is not noticed in him, because his poor and narrow luxury and petty mode of life are not very much to look at; but the Eskimo who is ready to sacrifice everything for fish-fat is as much an epicurean as Lucullus. Moreover, the German, lymphatic by temperament, soon grows heavy and sends down a thousand roots into his familiar mode of life; anything that might disturb him in his habits terrifies his philistine temper.

All the German revolutionaries are cosmopolitans, sie haben überwunden den Standpunkt der Nationalität, and are filled with the most touchy, most obstinate patriotism. They are ready to accept an all-world republic, to abolish the frontiers between states, but Trieste and Danzig must belong to Germany. The Vienna students were not above setting off for Lombardy under the command of Radetsky; they even, under the leadership of some professor, took a cannon, which they presented to Innsbrück. With this conceited and martial patriotism, Germany has, from the time of the first revolution and up to this day, looked with horror to the right and with horror to the left. On this side, France with standards unfurled is crossing the Rhine; on that side, Russia is crossing the Niemen, and the people numbering twenty-five millions finds itself utterly forlorn and deserted, is scolding with terror, full of hatred from terror, and to comfort itself proving theoretically from authentic sources that the existence of France is no longer existence, while the existence of Russia is not yet existence.

The ‘council of war’ assembled in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfort, and consisting of various worthy doctors, theologians, chemists, philologists, and professors, sehr ausgezeichneten in ihrem Fache, applauded the Austrian soldiers in Lombardy and oppressed the Poles in Posen. The very question of Schleswig-Holstein (stammverwandt!) was only a subject of interest to them from the point of view of ‘Teutschtum.’ The first free word, uttered after centuries of silence by the representatives of emancipated Germany, was in opposition to weak and depressed nationalities. This incapacity for freedom, these awkwardly revealed inclinations to retain what had been unjustly acquired, provoke irony: one forgives insolent pretensions only when accompanied by vigorous actions, and those were absent.

The revolution of 1848 had everywhere the character of hastiness and precipitate action, but there was scarcely anything absurd about it in France and in Italy; in Germany, however, everywhere except in Vienna, it had a farcical character, incomparably more comic than the humour of Goethe’s wretched farce, Der Bürgergeneral.

There was not a town, not a spot in Germany where at the time of the rising there was not an attempt at a ‘committee of public safety’ with all its principal characters: with a frigid youth as Saint-Just, with gloomy terrorists, and a military genius representing Carnot. I knew two or three Robespierres personally: they always put on clean shirts, washed their hands, and had clean nails. On the other hand, there were also dishevelled Collots d’Herbois; and if there happened to be a man in the club fonder of beer than the rest and more openly given to dangling after Stubermädchen—he was the Danton, eine schweigende Natur!

French weaknesses and defects are partly dissipated by their light and fugitive character. In the German the same defects assume a more solid and fundamental character, and hence are more striking. One must see for oneself these German efforts to play so einen burschikosen Kamin de Paris in politics in order to do them justice. I was always reminded of the playfulness of a cow when that excellent and respectable animal, adorned with all the domestic virtues, takes to frisking and galloping in the meadow, and with a serious face kicks up her two hind legs or gallops sideways chasing her own tail.

After the Dresden affair, I met in Geneva one of the agitators who had taken part in it, and began at once questioning him about Bakunin. He lauded him up to the skies, and began describing how he had himself commanded a barricade under his instructions. Inflamed by his own narrative he went on: ‘A revolution is a thunderstorm; in it one must listen neither to the dictates of the heart nor to considerations of ordinary justice.... One must oneself have taken part in such events fully to understand the Montagne of 1794. Only imagine: we suddenly observe a vague movement in the royalist party, false reports were intentionally circulated, suspicious-looking men appeared. I reflected and reflected, and at last resolved to terrorise my street. “Männer!” I said to my company, “under pain of court-martial, which may at once sentence you to death in case of disobedience, I command you to seize every one, regardless of sex, age, or calling, who attempts to cross the barricade, and to bring him under close guard to me.” This was kept up for more than twenty-four hours. If the Bürger who was brought to me was a good patriot, I let him go; but if he was a suspicious character, then I gave the signal to the guard.’

‘And,’ I said with horror, ‘and they?’

‘And they accompanied him home,’ the terrorist replied with pride and satisfaction.

I will add another anecdote illustrating the character of the German champions of freedom.

The youth whom I mentioned, when describing my visit to Gustav Struve, as filling the post of minister of home affairs wrote me a note a few days later in which he asked me to find him work of some sort. I suggested that he should copy for the press the manuscript of my Vom anderen Ufer from the handwriting of Kapp, to whom I had dictated it in German from the Russian original. The young man accepted the proposal. A few days later he told me that he was so uncomfortably lodged with several students that he had neither space nor quiet to work, and asked leave to copy it in Kapp’s room. Even there the work made little progress. The minister per interim arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, lay on the sofa, smoked cigars, drank beer ... and went off in the evenings to gatherings and consultations at Struve’s. Kapp, a man of the greatest delicacy, was ashamed of him. A week or more passed in this way. Kapp and I said nothing, but the ex-minister broke the silence: he wrote me a note asking me for a hundred francs in advance for the work. I wrote him that he was working so slowly that I could not give him such a sum in advance, but that since he was in great need of money I was sending him twenty francs, although he had not yet done ten francs’ worth of copying.

In the evening the minister appeared at the gathering at Struve’s and reported on my anti-civic action and my misuse of my fortune. The worthy minister considered that socialism consisted not in a social organisation, but in a senseless partition of senselessly acquired property!

In spite of the amazing chaos prevailing in Struve’s brains, he did, being an honest man, consider that I was not altogether to blame, and that it might be better for the Bürger und Bruder to copy more and ask less money in advance. He persuaded him not to make a great outcry over the story.

‘Well, then, I shall send him back the money—mit Verachtung,’ said the minister.

‘What nonsense!’ cried a student. ‘If the Bruder und Bürger does not care to take the money, I suggest that we spend it on beer and send out for some at once to drink to the perdition der Besitzenden.’

‘Do you agree?’

‘Yes, yes, we all agree—bravo!’

‘We will drink,’ cried the orator, ‘and pledge ourselves not to bow to the Russian aristocrat who has insulted the Bruder.’

‘Yes, yes, we must not bow to him.’

And so they drank the beer and gave up bowing to me.

All these absurd failings, together with the peculiar Plumpheit of the Germans, jar upon the southern nature of the Italians and excite a physical, racial hatred in them. The worst of it is that the good side of the Germans, that is, their philosophical culture, is either of no interest to the Italian or beyond his ken; while the vulgar, ponderous side is always conspicuous. The Italian often leads the most frivolous and idle life, but with a certain artistic, rhythmic grace about it, and that is why he can least put up with the bear-like joking and clumsy familiarity of the jovial German.

The Anglo-Germanic race is far coarser than the Franco-Roman. There is no help for that: it is its physical characteristic; it is absurd to be angry with it. The time has come to accept once for all that the different races of mankind, like different species of animals, have their different characteristics and are not to blame for them. No one is angry with the bull for not having the beauty of the horse or the swiftness of the stag; no one reproaches the horse because its flesh is not so good to eat as that of the ox: all that we can ask of them in the name of animal brotherhood is to graze peaceably in the same field without kicking or goring each other. In nature, everything attains to whatever it is capable of attaining to, is formed as chance determines, and so takes its generic pli: training goes some distance, corrects one thing and develops another; but to expect beef-steaks from horses, or horses’ paces from bulls, is nevertheless absurd.

To grasp concretely the difference between the two opposite traditions of the European races, one has but to glance at the street-boys in Paris and in London; I take them as an example because they are absolutely spontaneous in their rudeness.

Look how the Parisian gamins jeer at any queer Englishman, and how the London street-boys mock at a Frenchman; in this little instance the two opposite types of two European races are sharply defined. The Parisian gamin is insolent and persistent, he can be insufferable: but, in the first place, he is witty, his mischief is limited to jests, and he is as amusing as he is annoying; and, in the second, there are words at which he blushes and at once desists, there are words which he never uses; it is difficult to stop him by roughness, and if the victim lifts his stick I would not answer for the consequences. It must be noted, too, that the French boys need something to attract their attention: a red waistcoat with blue stripes, a brick-coloured coat, a strange-looking muffler, a flunkey carrying a parrot or a dog, things only done by Englishmen and, take note, only outside England. To be simply a foreigner is not enough to make them mock and run after you.

The wit of the London street-boys is simpler. It begins with guffawing at the sight of a foreigner,⁠[54] if only he has a moustache, a beard, or a wide-brimmed hat; then they shout some twenty times: ‘French pig! French dog!’ If the foreigner turns to them with some reply, the neighings and bleatings are redoubled; if he walks away, the boys run after him—then all that is left is the ultima ratio of lifting a stick, and sometimes bringing it down on one of them. After that the boys run away full speed, dropping oaths and sometimes throwing mud or a stone from a distance.

In France, a grown-up workman, shopman, or woman selling wares in the street never takes part with the gamins in the pranks they play upon foreigners; in London, all the dirty women, all the grown-up shopmen grunt like pigs and abet the boys.

In France there is one shield which at once checks the most persistent boy—that is, poverty. In the country that knows no word more insulting than the word beggar, the foreigner is the more persecuted the poorer and more defenceless he is. One Italian refugee, who had once been an officer in the Austrian cavalry and had left his country after the war, completely destitute, when winter came, wore his greatcoat of a military officer. This excited such a sensation in the market-place through which he had to pass every day, that the shouts of ‘Who’s your tailor?’ roars of laughter, and finally tugging at his collar, forced the Italian at last to give up his greatcoat and, shivering to the marrow of his bones, to go about in his jacket.

This coarseness in street mockery, this lack of delicacy and tact in the common people, helps to explain how it is that women are nowhere beaten so often and so badly as in England,⁠[55] how it is that an English father is ready to cast dishonour on his own daughter and a husband on his wife by taking legal proceedings against them.

The rude manners of the English streets are a great offence at first to the French and the Italians. The German, on the other hand, receives them with laughter and answers with similar rudeness; an interchange of abuse is kept up, end he is very well pleased with it. They both take it as a civility, a pleasant joke. ‘Bloody dog!’ the proud Briton shouts at him, grunting like a pig. ‘Beastly John Bull!’ answers the German, and each goes on his way.

This behaviour is not confined to the streets: one has but to look at the polemics of Marx, Heinzen, Ruge, et consorts, which were unceasing from 1849, have never ceased, and are still kept up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. We are unaccustomed to see in print such expressions, such accusations: nothing is spared, no respect is paid to personal honour, to the privacy of the family or the inviolability of a secret.

Among the English, coarseness disappears as we rise higher in the scale of intelligence or aristocratic breeding; among the Germans it never disappears. The greatest poets of Germany (with the exception of Schiller) fall into the most uncouth vulgarity.

One of the reasons of the mauvais ton of Germans is that breeding in our sense of the word does not exist in Germany at all. Germans are taught, and taught a great deal, but they are not educated at all, even in the aristocracy, in which the manners of the barracks, of the Junker, are predominant. They are completely lacking in the æsthetic sense in daily life. The French have lost it, just as they have lost the elegance of their language; the Frenchman of to-day rarely knows how to write a letter free from legal or commercial expressions—the counter and the barrack-room have distorted their manners.

To conclude this comparison, I will describe an incident in which I saw with my own eyes and face to face the gulf which separates the Italians from the Tedeschi, and which there will be no bridging for years to come by any number of amnesties or manifestoes of the brotherhood of nations.

I was travelling with Tessier du Mothe, in 1852, from Genoa to Lugano. We reached Arona by night, and, inquiring when the steamer started, learned that it was at eight o’clock next morning, and went to bed. At half-past seven the porter came to take our trunks, and by the time we reached the landing-stage they were already on deck. But in spite of that we looked at each other with some perplexity instead of going on board.

A huge white flag with the two-headed eagle on it was fluttering over the hissing and swaying steamer, and on the stern was painted the name, Fürst Radetsky. We had forgotten to ask overnight what steamer was going, whether an Austrian or a Sardinian. Tessier had at the Versailles trial been condemned in contumaciam to deportation. Though Austria had nothing to do with that, yet surely it would seize the opportunity to keep him in prison for six months, at any rate, while making inquiries. The example of Bakunin showed what they were capable of doing with me. By agreement with Piedmont, the Austrians had not the right to demand passports from those who without landing on the Lombard shore went to Mogadino, which belongs to Switzerland; but I imagine they would not, if opportunity arose, disdain so simple a means of seizing Mazzini or Kossuth.

‘Well,’ said Tessier, ‘to go back is absurd!’

‘Well, let’s go ahead, then!’ and we went on deck.

Just before starting, the passengers were surrounded by a detachment of soldiers armed with guns—what for? I do not know. Two small cannon, fastened in a special way, stood on the steamer. When the steamer set off the soldiers were dismissed. On the cabin walls hung regulations: among them was the statement that those passengers who were not going to Lombardy need not show their passports; but it was added that if any one of such persons were guilty of any offence against the K.K. (Kaiserlich Königlichen) police regulations he must be judged according to the laws of Austria. Or donc, wearing a Calabrian hat or a tricolor cockade was a crime against Austria. Only then I fully appreciated what clutches we were caught in. However, I am far from regretting my trip; nothing special happened during our journey, but I gathered a rich store of observations.

Several Italians were sitting on deck; they were smoking cigars in gloomy silence, looking with concealed hatred at the fair-haired officers dressed in white jackets who were bustling about on all sides without the slightest necessity. I must observe that among them were lads of twenty, and they were mostly young men; I can hear now the jarring, guttural, barrack-room voices, the insolent laughter that was like coughing, besides the loathsome Austrian accent in speaking German. I repeat that there was nothing dreadful about it, but I felt that for their manner of standing and turning their backs in our very faces, giving themselves airs and showing off, ‘We are the victors—our side has won,’ they ought to have been flung into the water; and even more, I felt that I should have been delighted to have seen it done, and would eagerly have helped.

Any one who had taken the trouble to look for five minutes at these two groups of men could not fail to understand that there can be no talk of reconciliation, that in the very blood of these people there lies a hatred for each other which it will take centuries to dissipate, to soften and to reduce to an inoffensive racial difference. After midday some of the passengers went down to the cabin, others asked to have lunch on deck. Here the racial difference was still more strikingly apparent. I looked at them with amazement—not a single gesture was the same. The Italians ate little, with the innate natural grace with which they do everything. The officers tore off pieces, chewed them loudly, threw down the bones, shoved their plates; some, bending right down to the table, with peculiar agility and extraordinary rapidity splashed the soup from the spoon into their mouths; others ate butter from a knife—without bread or salt. I looked at these performers and, glancing at an Italian, smiled—he understood me at once, and, responding with a sympathetic smile, betrayed his intense disgust. Another observation: while the Italians asked with a smile and gentle manner for a plate or for wine, every time thanking the waiter with a nod or a glance, the Austrians treated the attendants with revolting rudeness, just as retired Russian cornets and lieutenants treat their serfs in the presence of strangers.

By way of a finishing touch, a lanky young officer with pale yellowish hair called up a soldier, a man of fifty, who looked like a Pole or a Croat, and began abusing him for some negligence: The old man stood at attention and, when the officer had finished, tried to say something; but he had scarcely brought out ‘Your honour,’ when ‘Hold your tongue and be off!’ the pale yellow youth shouted at him in a husky voice. Then, turning to his comrades as though nothing had happened, he fell to drinking beer again. With what object was all this done before us? And was it not all done expressly for our benefit?

When we landed at Mogadino our long-suffering hearts could be restrained no longer, and, turning towards the steamer, which had not moved away, we shouted, ‘Viva la Republica!’—while one Italian, shaking his head, repeated, ‘E brutissimi, brutissimi!’

Is it not premature to talk so rashly of the solidarity and brotherhood of the nations, and will not any artificial covering up of their hostility be a mere hypocritical truce? I believe that national peculiarities will lose their offensive character just so far as they have lost it in cultivated society; but for such breeding to permeate the depths of the masses needs time. When I look at Folkestone and Boulogne, at Dover and Calais, then I feel full of dread and want to say—many centuries.