Introductory material (continued 3)

On his sixty-fifth birthday (July 4, 1872) he drew his own portrait thus: “A tempestuous life, composed of good and of evil, as I believe of the large part of the world. A consciousness of having sought the good always, for me and for my kind. If I have sometimes done wrong, certainly I did it involuntarily. A hater of tyranny and falsehood, with the profound conviction that in them is the principal origin of the ills and of the corruption of the human race. Hence a republican, this being the system of honest folk, the normal system, willed by the majority, and consequently not imposed with violence and with imposture. Tolerant and not exclusive, incapable of imposing my republicanism by force, on the English, for instance, if they are contented with the government of Queen Victoria. And, however contented they may be, their government should be considered republican. A republican, but evermore persuaded of the necessity of an honest and temporary dictatorship at the head of those nations which, like France, Spain, and Italy, are the victims of a most pernicious Byzantinism.... I was copious in praises of the dead, fallen on fields of battle for liberty. I praised less the living, especially my comrades. When I felt myself urged by just rancor against those who wronged me, I strove to placate my resentment before speaking of the offense and of the offender. In every writing of mine, I have always attacked clericalism, more particularly because in it I have always believed that I found the prop of every despotism, of every vice, of every corruption. The priest is the personification of lies, the liar is a thief, the thief is a murderer,—and I could find for the priest a series of infamous corollaries.”

Thus he read his own character, and we need not subject it to a searching analysis. In action lay his strength. He trusted instinct against any argument. Hence the single-minded zeal with which he plunged into every enterprise; hence, too, his inability to weigh other policies than his own, and his distrust, often intensified into unreasoning prejudice, of those who differed from him. If his kindly, generous nature often made him the dupe of schemers, the wonder is that they did not beguile him into irreparable excesses. He was saved partly by a thread of common sense and partly by self-respect akin to vanity, which kept him constantly on the alert against being used as a tool. Although modest, he knew so well the grandeur of the part he was playing that he took no pains to dissemble the childlike delight he felt at demonstrations of his popularity. The lifelong champion of democracy, he behaved, in practice, as autocratically as Cromwell; a believer in dictatorships, never able to work successfully as yoke-fellow or subordinate to any one else. Like the dreamers, he could not comprehend that human society, being a growth and not a manufacture, cannot be suddenly lifted by benevolent manifesto or patriotic resolution. He scorned parliamentary debates, he reviled diplomacy, he underrated counsel.

But what he had, he had superlatively: valor, presence of mind, geniality, unselfishness, magnanimity,—he had all these, the qualities of a popular soldier, to a degree which made whoever fought with him worship him. No other man of his time, nor perhaps of any time, inspired so many human beings with personal affection—as distinguished from that devotion which other favorite captains have inspired—as he did. Every one of his soldiers felt that in Garibaldi he had not merely a commander but a brother; every person who approached him acknowledged his fascination.

Strip off Garibaldi’s eccentricities, look into his heart, contemplate his achievements,—we behold a hero of the Homeric brood. Again we enter the presence of a man of a few elemental traits, whose habit it was to exhibit his passions without that reserve which belongs to our sophisticated age. Like Achilles, he wept when he was moved, he sulked when he was angry. Equally simple was the mainspring of his action. He obeyed two ideals, and those two of the noblest,—love of liberty and love of his fellow-men: nay, more, he obeyed them as quickly when they led into exile, poverty, and danger as when they led him to a conquest unparalleled in modern history, and to fame in which the wonder and the affection of the world blended in equal parts.

In the making of Italy it was his mission to rouse some of his countrymen to a sense of their patriotic duty, and to lead others to fight for a nation under Victor Emanuel instead of for a faction under Mazzini. Through him, the forces of royalism and of revolution formed an alliance which, although it was almost indispensable to the success of the Italian cause, might never, but for him, have been formed.

Such was Garibaldi, his character, his exploits. Shall we not seek also for the meaning of his career? Shall we not ask, “To what attributes of general human nature had his individuality the key?” That conquest of Sicily was but an episode; long anterior to it was built up the temperament which might have liberated twenty Sicilies, and which found a multitude ready to respond to its least signal.

More than half of our nature is emotion. Men may lie sluggish, they may seem sodden in selfishness, or they may fritter their force away on petty things. But let the hero come,—the Garibaldi, the embodied emotion,—and they will know him as light knows light, or lover his beloved. What just now seemed a dead, sordid mass is tinder, is flame. The craven legions, bewitched and transformed by his example, will follow him anywhere, were it to storm the gates of hell! The immense scope of noble emotion,—is not that the significance, if we seek it, of Garibaldi’s marvelous influence? And has it ever been more certainly displayed than in our very century, miscalled prosaic?