A HISTORY OF ITALIAN UNITY.*
Ma. BOLTON KING has given us what was long needed, a comprehensive, impartial, and thoroughly readable history of the Italian movement for unity and independence. If at times we are inclined to say that there is a little too much detail, it must be admitted that the error is one on the right side, for it means close attention to the facts. The entire work is founded on original documents, and the diligence of the author in studying them is as clear as is his capacity for • A History of Ita1ian Unity : being a Politteca History of ItaZy from 1814 to 1871. By Bolton Slug, M.A. 2 vols. London : James Nisbet and Co. Dis. net.) understanding them. We like, too, the impartial tone which runs through the entire work. Mr. King has been known as an admirer of the great personality of Mazzini, yet he never fails to point out the mistakes due to the one-sided judgment of that great man. The author admits that he is no friend of the Papacy, yet he does more than justice to the early attempts of Pius IX. to give some help and direction to the Italian movement. Mr. King is, on the whole, the friend and advocate of the general lines of Cavour's policy, yet he never hesitates to reprove the hard, and at times unscrupulous, methods of the great Piedmonteae statesman. In short, there is a breadth of view, a political grasp, a remarkably quick and shrewd judgment, running all through these volumes. While we do not forget the valuable work of Mr. Stillman, we must pronounce this work of Mr. Bolton King to be the history of the Italian movement, so far as English readers are concerned. The work is rendered the more useful because of the methods employed. It is not an easy task to tell such a story, for it is a complex narrative, and there are, in point of fact, many movements going on at the same time which must be co- ordinated, a historic cosmos being shaped out of the chaos of materials. We have to do with a dozen different States, in which the movements were not only often unrelated, but in which there was no sense on the part of the different peoples that any general union was possible or desirable. Mr. King refers, for instance, to liberated Palermo, and reminds us that the mass of Sicilians were chiefly glad to be rid of patent local abuses, and had no conception of that great dream of united Italy which haunted the mind of their liberator. To weave these local movements, these various efforts, into a continuous narrative was not easy, but this Mr. King has done in a series of chapters, of the right length, each broken up into divisions, treating of the different States of Italy, and showing what, apart from the general problem, was the special problem in each. The result is an excellent coup if not brilliant, yet faithful, sound, and just.
We do not, of course, propose to recount a story so recent as that of the war for the liberation of Italy. He who has forgotten, or who has really never known, that story may find what he needs in these pages. Let us here say how that story, told once more with knowledge and skill, strikes the sympathetic reader. In the first place, the magnitude of the task more than ever impresses one. We see more than ever how, at the beginning of the movement, there was that fatal lack of common consciousness which made the term "geographical expression" seem to convey a more potent meaning than if it merely referred to the fact that there were different Sovereigns in Italy. It was not a mere question of the Pope, the Bourbons, Austria, the Tuscan archduchy, and the Modena and Parma duchies. It was the lack of a common national feeling which was the special problem with which the liberators had to contend. And great as were the services of Piedmont, and perhaps impossible as was any other method of securing unity than that through Piedmont, one realises how distasteful that method must have been to a genuine Italian enthusiast. For Piedmont was only half Italian, scarcely half in speech, far less than half in historic feeling and ideas. Piedmont herself, too, needed (as she secured) liberation from one of the narrowest codes and one of the most priest-ridden systems known in Europe. What had the fine, critical Tuscan with his light scepticism, or the Roman with his awful weight of historic tradition, in common with this rude mountain land and its uncouth princes and peasants i) To weld together Tuscany and Naples was hard, but to get these and other States to accept the lead of Piedmont was like getting Athens, Thebes, and Corinth to accept a Thracian hegemony. And yet this task was accomplished !
One is also struck by the absence of any clear lead all through this long struggle, and by the grave differences of the various men who in their several ways were sectional leaders. Even after a common sentiment was generated, there was a chaos of opinion and action until the formation of the National Society. Each leader acted on his own initiative, and it was hard to secure any common action. It was not merely that Moderate and Democrat were at strife, but also that economic movements rising out of the poverty of the people were coming athwart the purely political movement, and that while one leader was fighting the foreigner, another was engaged in combat with the foe within. The peasants of Calabria or Campania, who would have welcomed any one prepared to help them rout their landlords, took up arms when the suspected Northerner came to turn out the legitimate rulers of the land. No one voice made itself paramount. Garibaldi was unquestionably the one great national hero, but few heroes of such noble courage and devotion have ever shown so little intellect.
Cavour's diplomatic capacity and his sheer terrific will-power and immense resource are clear. But it is impossible to take Cavour for a national hero, especially for the Italians,— Cavour, with his manifest limitations, his utter philistinism, which prevented him from sharing in the spirit and genius which have conferred immortality on the Italian people, and his lack of scruple, which undoubtedly be shares with not a few Italians, but which prevents him from being an ideal hero. In action we must perhaps place next to Garibaldi the heroic Manin, whose defence of Venice is one of the greatest incidents of modern history, and whose modest and fine character show Italy at her best. Of that strange person, Charles Albert, one knows less than ever what to say. Mr, King is very tender to him, perhaps a little more so than history will allow, for history cannot afford to be fascinated
by a singularly interesting character whom it finds fatally
impossible in action. On the whole, spite of his many mis- takes made when he overstepped the limits of the sphere which Nature had assigned to him, we think that Italy derived more true inspiration for the great task which lay before her from Mazzini than from any other man. It is easy to see the plain thing which the practical man did and the results it produced. But we cannot see into the hearts of men and perceive there the inward and spiritual fruit which ripened from the seeds sown by a great idealist. And a very great idealist Mazzini was. He it was who, in place of the barren conspiracy of the secret societies, taught the Italians to rejoice in suffering and sacrifice. It was that great idea which made Italy.
Mr. Bolton King carries his survey of modern Italy down to 1871, after Rome had become the capital, and when the political evolution of the movement had ended. But he also attempts to sum up the existing situation, and, in a measure, to forecast the future. It is interesting to find that so careful and competent a writer does not share the gloomy views of so many who have been disappointed in Italy. He does not even seem to hold, with Mr. Stillman, that Italy has been too quickly made, for he appears to hold that she could have been made in no other way. We who love the Italian people, and who wish for them a great future, may be permitted to hope that our author is right in his general judgment, even though we may hesitate to make such bold affirmations for ourselves. It is, however, worth while quoting some of the final sentences in which Mr. King records his sense of the chief needs of Italy, since they seem to us to be among the wisest words which have been uttered on the subject :—
" Italy is no longer the land of sentimentalism and decay ; she has become practical, progressive, more or less earnest. But she still bears the marks of the days of misrule. She still has terrible enemies to fight, —her grinding poverty, the unreality of her political life, the spiritual vulture that gnaws at her vitals. If a foreigner may trust his judgment, she lacks religion, lacks the Puritanism of her great Ricasoli, lacks the restraining sense of duty that Mazzini preached. She needs more care for her disin- herited, the courage that is not afraid of liberty, a higher stamp of statesmanship. She needs to forget the generous impatience, which in its revolt against the more apparent evils jeopardises the bigger interests and perhaps makes a monstrous alliance with the abiding enemy. She needs to keep clear of the temptations of a great Power, to renounce charlatanry and adventure and militarism, to forswear showy ambitions that only drain her strength. But Italy has youth, she has calmness and docility and devotion, she has humane ideals, a comparatively generous foreign policy. If her political virtues are less than t.hose of some other nations, she is free from some of their vices. She has perhaps neither the population nor the wealth to play a great part in the European polity. But she stands in it on the whole for a sane and liberal policy at a time when sanity and liberalism are at a discount."
It would, we think, be difficult to diagnose the Italian situa- tion with clearer insight or greater wisdom.
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