MAZZINI A FUTILE IDEALIST.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1648, 30 September 1903, Page 45 (Supplement)

MAZZINI A FUTILE IDEALIST.

Mr Sidney Lowe contributes to “Cornkill” a critical study of Mazzini. While recognising his nobility and strenuous ideals, Mr Lowe describes the great Italian as essentially a visionary. He “started life with a budget of theoretical opinions, largely, though perha-s unconsciously, derived from the brench philosophers .of the eighteenth century, and these remained with him to the end ” He “did not in the least understand the significance of the historic drama enacted under his eyes”: “The development of the new worldempires, of the Great Britain. -Russia, United Germany, the United States, did not appeal to him. His survey seldom travelled beyond Europe, and in his Europe the Mediterranean nations still occupied a disproportionate place. He could not realise how comparatively in-

significant—in the larger world that was opening—ltaly and her troubles, Austria and her policies, had become. “For the most part of his life Mazzini was engaged in spinning ropes of sand. He might have known that Italy could not be liberated by popular emeutes, or by the smuggling or surreptitious muskets. A great military Power, with its grip upon the fortresses and the strategic points, was not to be expelled in this amateurish fashion. Cavour and Victor Emmanuel, the two shrewd statesmen who really made United Italy, quite understood this. They knew that the Austrians could only be overthrown by regular troops in a regular campaign. They relied on bayonets—French bavonets, as well as Piedmontese and Lombard —not on stilletos. “It is tne tragedy of Mazzini’s life that he lived long enough to see Rome become the capital of the Italian nation, and yet regarded this consummation with something akir - despair.”

Mr Lowe quotes a shrewd remark of Mrs Carlyle concerning Mazzini: “Mrs Carlyle'was more tolerant of nis ‘idealisms’ than her husband, though she ‘was out of all patience’ with his dabbling in ill-planned conspiracy, in which valuable lives were recklessly wasted. ‘Are there not things more important than my head r” he asked her. ‘Certainly,’ she answered • ‘but the man who has not sense enough to keep his head on his shoulders till something is to be gained by parting with it, has not sense enough to manage any important matter.’ 55 Mazzini, too, had his romance. He corresponded in very passionate terms with Giuditta Sidoli, the widow of one of the Lombard patriots. The passion cooled down to a steady affection. At Lausanne a girl of seventeen literally died of love for him. His kindness to the outcast and to the lower creatures is thus sympathetically recalled: “A considerable part of his slender income was devoted to Avorks of charitv.

He started a school for hurdy-gurdy boys in London, and took much trouble to improve the condition of these poor little waifs; and for years he supported a destitute Italian woman whom he had found starving on a doorstep. His relaxations, besides the society of his friends, were the guitar, an occasional visit to the opera, and much tobacco. “He had a singular power of taming birds, and in his prison cell at Savona he had found a companion in a thrush which had fluttered through the open loophole and remained with him. To animals and children he was always tender. At one of the many conversations, in which Mazzini and Ledru-Rollin planned the wrecking of thrones and the uprising of the peoples, the two desperate revolutionaries allowed their cigars to go out because they found the smoke was making a dog uncomfortable. Yet this was the man who had gone very far indeed on the way towards justifying, if not abetting, political assassination!”