3988. Jessie Meriton White to EBB
As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 24, 55–58.
22 Sloane St
April 12th ’57/
Why are you sad dear. Who have you again lost?
It is not needful that I should “see things as you see them” for my eyes to be full of tears. It is their normal state. I am hopeless about convincing you[.] You mistake the whole state of the case.
M. [1] sees the people as you see them en masse. He does not regard them couleur de rose. [2] He desires to see them become what you desire to see them become.
But he believes what you do not believe that they, by their own individual efforts & sufferings and sacrifices must achieve their own salvation—while you think that Cavour[,] a mere diplomat or a traitor king[,] the man who betrayed his own father at Novara [3] (this is fact) can pour down on them this salvation de haut en bas. [4] Were these men angels they could not do it. It is not in the nature of things. Please define what Cavour has done or can do for Italy[.] He spoke at the conferences ie preached a sermon from M’s. immortal text. [5] But for the never ceasing ferment kept up by M’s. preaching & M’s practice[,] how could Cavour have pointed to Italy and said “see there, revolution is impending[;] something must be done[.]” [6] It has ever been so[.] Did not Metternich say in 48 that the cry of Guerra ai tedeschi [7] did not arise from hate to the Germans, but from the sentiment of nationality engrafted by young Italy on the nation? [8]
Sooner or later the successful struggle will come, not led by princes[,] not betrayed by kings[,] not deterred from its goal by wily diplomats. Then he will have worshippers & friends enough that “reckless” & “impractical” man; then those will garland the tombstone who would not crown the brow & pay that honour to the ashes which they denied to the spirit–
Even now all too late are human love & human appreciation to gladden him; without bitterness, without despair, without even a reproach in thought for those who have wronged him so utterly & wilfully[,] his habitual state is of unselfish saddens [sic, for sadness], he works because it [is] right to work[,] because he believes his countrymen in the future will enter that promised land he is leading them to, that he himself will never see[;] but the joy in work, the hope[,] the enthusiasm of youth & full life are gone[.] If he were a whit less Christlike than he is he would seek for rest in solitude & separation from political life–
Unpractical is he? Ask J.S. Mill[;] he answers—[“]M. is the most practical man of the age.” [9] Take his whole life it is one unflagging effort to transform thought into action—think how much pleasanter to a man of his literary talents to sit in his study & rail Carlyle-like at the evils of the age. But no. If Italy is to be one & independent[,] we the believers in this idea must live & die to make her so. Do you say he sends others where he will not go himself? Simply you dont know his life. No one runs the risks he runs—never disguised, recognized often, betrayed often, often disarming those sent to betray him by the unconscious intensity of his personal influence[.] I grow bitter as I think of him in his wretched garret room [10] living on 16s/. per week including every personal expense, toiling through his lonely cheerless life for others & those others ungrateful. Could you or I dear live & suffer thus to embody practically each our own pet theories for the amelioration of the peoples? I could not[;] I do not. But I can appreciate him & curse the years of my life in which I stood aloof & presumptuously judged without sufficient data of him & his.
Reckless is he? What do you mean you Napoleons admirer[,] the man who said “tell St Arnaud to do his duty”[;] [11] Napoleons justifier[,] who has just sent here agents provocateur to enlist among his 400 victims the exiles who stand aloof from him in scorn. See Ledru Rollins letter in the Daily News for the 9th to understand what I mean[.] [12] Reckless this man is of his own suffering & privations but not of the sob or sigh of a living human being whose grief he can assuage. How can you blind yourself[?] You have not read his writings. You have not studied his life. Oh when we meet—if ever the time comes when we may talk freely & I may freely prove many things[,] you will see things differently. He has been too indifferent to calumny & to falsehood[;] lies have grown to become truths for even such as you to believe–
I ought not to care. I do not for the narrow creeded Ruskin [13] or for the caluminating world whose blame tells for praise. But you? If you did not justify Napoleon I should now do more. But tonight I am at the saddest.
Remember[,] happen what may[,] let what contingencies arise that will—I believe all M. does to be the truest, highest best thing that can be done for Italy——
If we meet[,] it will be to more utterly disagree on every point than ever[;] yet I love you always more tenderly & more surely.
Kiss Penini & hold me
Your Fiamma [14]
Are you not disgusted with George Sand for Daniella? [15]
Another thing that ought to make you suspend your judgment is that you do not live among the people he does[;] they need not pretend to love what they loathe to him or to affect resignation where they are dying for revenge.
At the most you can only see the outside that the people must show to their tyrants. You cannot know what they aspire to or how they are prepared to attain their object. How you would wonder if ..——
Publication: Simonetta Berbeglia, “Il Risorgimento delle figlie adottive: lettere inedite tra Elizabeth Barrett Browning e Jessie White Mario,” Antologia Vieusseux, 16 (2010), pp. 66–68.
Manuscript: Scripps College.
1. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72).
2. “Rose coloured.”
3. The “traitor king” refers to Victor Emmanuel II (1820–78), King of Sardinia (Piedmont), son of Charles Albert (1798–1849). Unable to accept Austria’s terms for an armistice following Piedmont’s defeat at Novara on 23 March 1849, Charles Albert abdicated in favor of his son, who promised to “crush the left wing revolutionary party in the Piedmontese parliament” and agreed to “the reduction of the Piedmontese army to its peacetime strength, the payment of an indemnity of 230,000,000 lire … and the occupation of parts of Piedmont by 20,000 Austrian troops until a formal peace treaty was signed” (Edgar Holt, Risorgimento: The Making of Italy, 1815–1870, 1970, pp. 162–163). One of the first acts of the new king’s reign was the brutal suppression of a Mazzini-inspired revolt at Genoa.
4. “From high to low.”
5. Jessie White may have in mind the oath taken by members of Young Italy, the political brotherhood founded by Mazzini in 1831: “I … swear to dedicate myself wholly and for ever to the endeavour … to constitute Italy one free, independent, republican nation” (Holt, p. 83).
6. According to Denis Mack Smith, during the Paris peace conferences at the end of the Crimean War (see letter 3744, note 3), Camillo di Cavour, prime minister of Piedmont and its representative at the conference table, accomplished little for Italy. In his only public opportunity to voice his country’s concerns, he showed restraint. “In private conversation he was anything but moderate, and to the British he … spoke wildly of planning to fight Austria in the near future and depose King Ferdinando of Naples. He hoped that his friends would thereby realize that if someone as moderate as himself could think of war, Italy must be suffering serious wrongs which other countries should help him redress” (Cavour, New York, 1985, p. 90).
7. “War against the Germans.”
8. While we have been unable to trace Metternich’s exact comment as reported by White, as early as 1833 he was writing warnings against Young Italy and Mazzini in particular (see Charles Edmund Maurice, The Revolutionary Movement of 1848–9 in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany, New York, 1887, p. 71).
9. We have been unable to attribute this remark to John Stuart Mill, who referred to Mazzini after their first meeting in 1837 as “one of the men I most respect” and “one of the most accomplished and in every way superior men among all the foreigners I have known” (Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini, New Haven, Conn., 1994, p. 24). More than twenty years later, Mill wrote of his “highest admiration for Mazzini,” adding: “I do not doubt that to him is mainly owing the unity and freedom of Italy” (p. 189).
10. Mazzini was in London at this time. He returned secretly to Italy in May 1857, stopping in Turin on his way to Genoa, “where he remained in hiding for the next three months” (Mazzini, p. 118).
11. Jacques Leroy de Saint Arnaud (1798–1854), Marshall of France, was Louis Napoleon’s military commander in the coup d’état of 2 December 1851. He later commanded the French forces in the Crimean War until his death from cholera.
12. The letter from Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin (1807–74), resident in London since 1849 (see letter 2729, note 4 and letter 2799, note 7), appeared in The Daily News of 10 April 1857 (p. 5). In it he wrote that he had been implicated in a plot against “M. Bonaparte” (i.e., Napoleon III) through the latter’s fabrication of evidence and the bribing of false witnesses. Consequently, he feared extradition but stated that he had “the proof … true, fair, and undeniable evidence that the pretended plot, to which so many respectable citizens have been immolated, was invented, imagined, worked, and directed in M. Bonaparte’s own cabinet.”
13. We have been unable to trace any public comments by John Ruskin concerning Mazzini up to this time. However, in a 14 November 1853 letter to F. J. Furnivall, Ruskin, in response to reading Mazzini’s Royalty and Republicanism in Italy (1850), referred to him as a “poor, mouthing, good-natured idiot” (Cook, p. 158).
15. George Sand’s latest novel, La Daniella (1857) was appearing in La Presse as a feuilleton. Some of her depictions of Italians and Italy were considered insulting by Italian patriots, such as Daniel Manin (1804–57).
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