THE BIRTH OF GARIBALDI

9

while the other army of invaders, the English 'milords,' swelling with the pride of Waterloo, each with his carriage, family, footman and 'Quarterly Review' complete, looked with an indifferent contempt on Austrians and Italians, priests and patriots, and with hostile inquisitiveness at the rebel poets of their own race and caste. In such a world, Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour grew up, each among his fellows.

Giuseppe Garibaldi was born at Nice, in a house by the sea shore, on July 4, 1807, as a subject of the great Emperor. On Napoleon's fall he became, as did Mazzini in Genoa, a subject of the restored royal house of Piedmont, which afterwards condemned him to death for treason in 1834, was obliged to hand over his native province to France in 1860, and in the same year received Sicily and Naples at his hands. The inhabitants of Nice were in part French and in part Italian by race. But Garibaldi's family was pure Italian,' having come from Chiavari beyond Genoa, about thirty years before he was born. During his boyhood, Nice had not yet been completely captured by the invalids and the wealthy of all countries, but still belonged to the natives, and Giuseppe's father, Domenico, an honest and simple merchant captain, owning the little vessel in which he traded, was typical of the best sort of native, though himself an immigrant from Chiavari. Like Hans Luther, Domenico Garibaldi gave his son a better education than his slender means could well afford. But he was buying costly seed for a stony soil, and it was with difficulty that Giuseppe's parents and masters managed, until he was fifteen, to keep him intermittently at his desk. For there were the mountains behind the town, where he roamed truant,

always put in my opinion of the German and Austrian scoundrels: there is not an Italian who loathes them more than I do.'-(Byron, v. 245.)

'If, as the name is held to indicate, one of his remote ancestors was sprung from the Teuton conquerors in the dark ages, he was none the less an Italian than a man of the name of Beauchamp is, for that, less an Englishman. For details about his family see Guerzoni, i. 5-10; Mario, Supp. 2-8.

2 Mem. 9.

prospect of an unadventurous life. And there was yet a third party in the family disputes, the sea, always present, with voice and look encouraging the rebel.

At the age of fifteen Garibaldi took the decisive step. Let him tell the story in his own most characteristic fashion:

'Tired of school, and unable to endure a sedentary life, I propounded one day to some companions of my own age, to run away to Genoa, without any definite plan, but meaning in effect to seek our fortune. No sooner said than done, we seized a boat, embarked some provisions and fishing-tackle, and sailed eastward. We were already off Monaco, when a vessel sent by my good father overhauled us and brought us back deeply humiliated. An Abbé had revealed our flight. See what a coincidence! An Abbé, the embryo of a priest, perhaps saved me, and I am so ungrateful as to persecute these poor priests! All the same, a priest is an impostor, and I devote myself to the sacred cult of truth.

'My comrades in the adventure, whom I recall, were Cesare Parodi, Raffaele Deandreis ; I have forgotten the others.

'Here it gives me joy to bring to mind the young men of Nice agile, strong, brave, splendid social and military material, but unfortunately led on the wrong path, first by the priests, then by depravity brought in from foreign parts, which has turned the beautiful Cimele of the Romans into the cosmopolitan seat of all that is corrupt.' '

But the foiled revolt had taken effect as a demonstration, the paternal government surrendered, and Giuseppe was sent to sea with all proper constitutional formalities, apparently in the year 1822. The last voyage of Shelley was in the same year and on the same coast as the first of Garibaldi.

From the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-five he worked his way up from cabin-boy to captain in the merchant craft of Nice. He applied himself strenuously to all the learning that is useful to one who commands a ship

1 Mem. 9. I generally quote Werner's translation of the Memorie, though not in this case. The references in the notes are always to the authorised Italian edition (1888).

reading and writing, and a little mathematics, and conceived a devotion at least to the idea of the great Italian history and literature of the past. Since it did not require much application for a Nizzardo to read French almost as well as Italian, he was enabled to taste Voltaire and to commit some of his verses to memory. But he loved better those of Ugo Foscolo, the liberal poet of his own race and epoch, whose glorious lines were often on his lips from the beginning to the end of his career, and whose melody often soothed him in hours of pain. Garibaldi's companions in South America observed that 'music and poetry had a magical power over him.' ' He himself often expressed his own emotions in verse. In short he had acquired just enough book learning to feed his naturally freedom-loving, romantic and poetical disposition, but not enough to chasten it, or to train his mind to wide understanding and deep reflection. It was largely owing to this, that his native hue of resolution' was never, either for good or evil, 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,' and that his enterprises of great pith and moment' were never known to lose the name of action." "

1

Such was the boy whom his parents, fearful of the dangers of the sea, strove to bring up as a solid landsman. But they had entered on an unequal contest, for not only had they no moral case (the father being himself a sailor), but they had to contend against a character which, when roused, was the most obstinate in Europe, and a nature whereof every part was united in rebellion against the

It is to be remembered that he was principally conversant with two classes of our countrymen, the sea-going population and the active sympathisers with Italy.

As to his knowledge of English, it was a late growth. When he was first in North America, in 1850, he tells us he only knew a few words of English.' (Mem. 265.) Dr. Spence Watson says that when he was at Newcastle, a few years later, he spoke English,' but it was still very imperfect.' Sir Charles Seely, his host in the Isle of Wight in 1864, writes that he then spoke English 'sufficiently well to be understood when conversing with one or two people quietly,' but that he often found it difficult to follow a general conversation in English; 'I see him now with a puzzled expression on his face.' My father tells me that he fell readily into English, when he met Englishmen by chance in Italy in 1867.

1 Cuneo, 14; Vecchi's Cabrera, 121. 2 Guerzoni, i. 13-19; Mem. 7-9.

prospect of an unadventurous life. And there was yet a third party in the family disputes, the sea, always present, with voice and look encouraging the rebel.

At the age of fifteen Garibaldi took the decisive step. Let him tell the story in his own most characteristic fashion:

'Tired of school, and unable to endure a sedentary life, I propounded one day to some companions of my own age, to run away to Genoa, without any definite plan, but meaning in effect to seek our fortune. No sooner said than done, we seized a boat, embarked some provisions and fishing-tackle, and sailed eastward. We were already off Monaco, when a vessel sent by my good father overhauled us and brought us back deeply humiliated. An Abbé had revealed our flight. See what a coincidence! An Abbé, the embryo of a priest, perhaps saved me, and I am so ungrateful as to persecute these poor priests! All the same, a priest is an impostor, and I devote myself to the sacred cult of truth.

'My comrades in the adventure, whom I recall, were Cesare Parodi, Raffaele Deandreis; I have forgotten the others.

'Here it gives me joy to bring to mind the young men of Nice agile, strong, brave, splendid social and military material, but unfortunately led on the wrong path, first by the priests, then by depravity brought in from foreign parts, which has turned the beautiful Cimele of the Romans into the cosmopolitan seat of all that is corrupt.' '

But the foiled revolt had taken effect as a demonstration, the paternal government surrendered, and Giuseppe was sent to sea with all proper constitutional formalities, apparently in the year 1822. The last voyage of Shelley was in the same year and on the same coast as the first of Garibaldi.

From the age of fifteen to the age of twenty-five he worked his way up from cabin-boy to captain in the merchant craft of Nice. He applied himself strenuously to all the learning that is useful to one who commands a ship

1 Mem. 9. I generally quote Werner's translation of the Memorie, though not in this case. The references in the notes are always to the authorised Italian edition (1888).

-mastering the necessary mathematics, geography, astronomy and commercial law. I set to work with books by myself, and all my practical knowledge I owe to my first captain, Pesante; the rest came of itself.' 1

1

And so the sea became the real school of Garibaldi; it was there that his body and mind were drilled to endure every hardship, and his qualities as a man of action trained as only the sailor's life can train them. But while his powers were developed in a practical direction, his ideas became more than ever romantic. For on what manner of seas, in what ships was he sailing? Not on the wellpoliced ocean of to-day, more orderly than a London street, but in the Levant during the Greek War of Independence; in the seas of old romance, of pirates, Turks and revengeful Giaours with long guns and knives, and fierce, dark faces; among old historic tyrannies cruel as fate, and new-born hopes of liberty fresh and dear as the morning; among the sunburnt isles and promontories that roused Byron's jaded passions to splendour, that were even at that moment witnessing his self-immolation and apotheosis; in those waters young Garibaldi caught, not from books but from the words, gestures and stories of men in earnest, the only true gospel of Byron, the idea that was constructive of the coming epoch-the belief that it is better to die for freedom than to live a slave.?

Three times on these seas he was captured and robbed by pirates. It was a world of which Scott or Stevenson would love to tell enchanted tales. In outward appearance, too, the crews and the ships with which Garibaldi sailed had about them all the colour, poetry and grace of the old world. From his own loving recollections of the ship in which he made his first voyage, it would seem that she bore little resemblance to the famous paddle-steamers that long afterwards took him and his Thousand to Sicily:

'How beautiful wert thou, O bark "Costanza," whereon Denkwürdigkeiten, i. 13.

Mario, Supp. 10. 2 Cuneo, 16.