THE DAWN OF ITALIAN INDEPENDENCE.* Tan work before us is
a valuable contribution to the study of a somewhat obscure section of recent European history. To trace at once the inward growth of the sentiment of Italian nationality, and the outward fortunes of the movement for unity and independence, through the dark period from the Congress of Vienna to the capture of Venice by Radetzky, —that is the aim which Mr. Thayer steadily follows through the two volumes of his history. It was no easy task to open a path through the dense jungle of secret conspiracies and abortive risings which fill up the chronicle of these years. But by judicious selection and arrangement of the material at his command, Mr. Thayer has succeeded in giving to his narrative unexpected coherence, and has made it easy for * The Down of Italian Independence: Italy from the Congress of Vienna, 1814, to the Fall of Trovioo, 1849. By William It00000 Thayer. Boston aud Now York : Hought7n, Mifti n, and Co. 1893, the reader to grasp the general drift and tendency of the events with which he deals. He has brought to his task great industry and patience, no small degree of political insight, and, as the book shows, an exceptionally wide knowledge of Italian history and literature.
At first sight, a history of the regenerative movement in Italy, which leaves off in the fatal year of Novara, may seem tantalisingly incomplete, the story of a seed-time without the harvest, a prelude without the play. The prospects of Italian nationality never looked so dark as at the close of 1849, when the revolutionary outbursts of the preceding year had been finally extinguished. To Italians, the re-establishment of Austrian and native despotism which followed might well seem the total eclipse of patriotic hopes rather than the dawn of a happier era. But under Mr. Thayer's guidance we soon discover that his subject has a certain unity and completeness of its own. The fine metaphor with which the book concludes justifies its title :—" You have seen dawn paint the clouds along the eastern horizon scarlet and orange, foreboding a beautiful day ; but presently those clouds rise and curtain the east and turn a sombre face towards the earth, till disap- pointment takes the place of your glad expectancy. Such to Italians was the outlook in 1849, after the auroral hopes of the preceding year. But not from its dawn can the day be predicted. What if, when the sun is risen, he burn away those clouds ? " It is recorded that in the retreat from Novara, Victor Em- manuel, then Duke of Savoy, brandished his sword at the pursuing Austrians, and shouted to them, "Ma l'Italia. sarM" On the evening of the battle, Charles Albert, whose life had been one long palsy of indecision between the traditional notions of the divine right of kingship on the one hand, and the claims of Italian nationality on the other, abdicated the throne of Piedmont, and Victor Emmanuel began his reign. The son frankly accepted from the first those constitutional ideas which had been so great a stumbling-block to his father. Austria was soon to lose the strong guidance of Schwarzen- berg, who had crushed the revolution in Hungary and Italy, and to enter on that period of strangely imbecile policy, which contributed so greatly to the making of both Germany and Italy. Within a few years after Novara, Oavour became First Minister of Piedmont, and from that time onward, progress was continuous and steady in the work of drawing Italy together under the shelter of the Piedmontese Throne and Constitution. Thus, in 1849, begins the period when the regenerative move- ment achieved an outward and visible success. The thirty-five years which preceded, and which are covered by the present work, formed the time of preparation through which Italians had to pass before entering on the fruition of their hopes. Throughout those years the national sentiment was gradually gathering strength, and purifying itself from revolutionary illusions. The patriots were learning in the hard school of experience that the making of a nation is a work of construc- tion which needs at once foundations, materials, and an archi- tect; and that it is a work not to be performed by the Mazzinian method of secret societies on:the one hand, or the open insurrection Of an undisciplined populace on the other. Mad outbursts of popular violence and enthusiasm may destroy, but they cannot create.
It is one of the chief merits of Mr. Thayer's book that he is able to look beneath the surface, see the progress which the national movement was making through each successive failure, and elicit from these failures their several lessons. The Napoleonic regime was what first roused Italians from their lethargy, gave them an active part in the larger life of Europe, and excited in them hopes of seeing their country take her place among the nations. From Napoleon the despots learned that secret of centralisation which gave a semblance of increase to their authority, but really undermined the stability of its foundations. The revolutions in Naples and Piedmont of 1820 and 1821 showed how helpless were the local Princes by themselves, but also taught the Italians that behind those Princes was the formidable power of Austria as wielded by Metternich. Again in 1831, there was an outbreak in the Papal States ; the Bourbons had just been driven from Paris, and this time the conspirators hoped to play off France against Austria. The result only demonstrated the inherent weakness of a secret conspiracy, its inability to negotiate on equal terms with a groat European Government, or bind it by treaty as Oavour afterwards bound Louis Napoleon. The general uprising of 1848 at first seemed completely successful, but afterwards ended in disaster ; it taught the Italians how far they still were from having overcome internal weakness and disunion, how far from having enlisted all classes and merged all remnants of sectional rivalry and local patriotism in a national movement. Then, too, the idea of effecting a compromise with the temporal power of the Papacy was finally discredited. This conception had dominated the Italian movement for many years. In 1843, Vincent Gioberti published a book, now forgotten, but which made a great stir at the time. It was entitled The Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, and propounded a scheme for the unification of Italy by forming a federation of the Princes under the Pope as.
President. To the influence of this book, Pius IX. was supposed to have owed his Liberal sympathies, though Mr. Thayer, rightly, we think, takes the view that Pius's Liberalism existed chiefly in the popular imagination, and that the ap- pearances which seemed to justify a belief in it were rather due to the momentary craving of a weak man for popularity, than to any consistent and formulated policy. At any rate, Italy emerged from the year of revolutions with the conviction that nationality and the temporal power of the Papacy were inconsistent ideas. Gioberti, however, did not yet abandon his scheme. He became Charles Albert's Prime Minister for a short time, in the interval between the retreat of the Piedmontese Army from the Quadrilateral and the renewal of the war in 1849; and in this capacity he formed the design of sending troops to Rome to suppress the Republic and re- store Pius, as a step towards the union of Italy against the Austrians. Thiers once spoke of Gioberti as "that idiot of an Abbd ; " and this extraordinary project has been generally thought to justify the expression. It seems to us as mad and impracticable as any policy could be; yet Mr. Thayer strangely enough sees in it " the highest flight of statesmanship to be recorded during that crisis." At all events, Gioberti could not carry with him either his colleagues or the King, and, having been compelled to resign, his scheme was heard of no more.
The following passage from the concluding chapter of the book sums up the progress which had been achieved as the result of thirty-five years of struggle :- " If we cast our glance back over the period of which this book is the history, we shall see the transformation which one genera- tion had wrought. Italy in 1814 was scarcely aroused to a national consciousness ; in 1849 that consciousness was a dominant fact. Out of Carbonari plottings to mitigate the tyranny of local despots, out of the failures of 1620, '21, and '31, out of Mazzini's Young Italy, and the preachings of Gioberti, had developed a strong and abiding desire not only for liberty, not only for in- dependence, but also for unity, without which those could not endure. The idea of nationality had sprung up in Italian hearts. Tho race which had given Christendom a religion, which had expressed itself in literature and in art and in science, and which had once led the world in commerce and industry, this race had at length set itself to win what it had hitherto lacked,—political freedom. Italy was to bo no longer a geographical expression, but a nation. The men of 1814 only dimly apprehended this ; their grandfathers did not dream of it. The descendants of a society which had amused itself by Arcadian inanities gave up. their lives by thousands at Santa Lucia and Custoza and Volta; they defended Rome against the French, they defended Venice against the Austrians, for the sake of that ideal. They had come to love country more than ease or life; they were ashamed of their servitude ; they felt national self-respect and the obligations of patriotism. They were, in brief, thrilled by a regenerating spirit, and they would attain, though the goal lay fax ahead."
This passage is a good specimen of our author's style, though it is not always so satisfactory. Mr. Thayer writes history in a broad and philosophic spirit, and his philosophy is the philosophy of Emerson rather than of Carlyle. He never, like Carlyle, indulges in wild denunciation, but he occasionally adopts a tone of patronising irony and Olym- pian superiority to the wickedness and littleness of man which is suggestive of Chelsea rather than of Concord. Perhaps, however, it would be too much to expect a writer to tell the story of Austrian rule in Italy without allowing him. some outlet for his indignation.
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