The French are turned out ready-made by thousands on the same pattern. The present government did not originate this curtailment of individuality, but it has grasped the secret of it.
Absolutely in the French spirit, it has organised public education-that is all education, for there is no home education in France. In every town in the empire the same thing is being taught on the same day, at the same hour, from the same books.
At all examinations the same questions are asked, the same examples set; teachers who deviate from the text, or alter the syllabus, are promptly removed. This soulless, stereotyped education has only put into a compulsory, inherited form what was fermenting in men's minds before. It is the conventional democratic notion of equality applied to intellectual development.
There is nothing of the sort in Italy. The Italian, a federalist and an artist by temperament, flies with horror from every sort of barrack discipline, uniformity and geometrical regularity. The Frenchman is innately a soldier; he loves discipline, the military detachment, the uniform; he lo\·es to inspire fear. The Italian, if
!!2 The 'wild boar' is. of course, Ferdinand II of Naples, nicknamed Bomba because of the cruel bombardment of 1"\aples and other cities during the suppression of the insurrection. ( Tr.)
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it comes to that, is rather a bandit than a soldier, and by this I do not mean to say anything at all against him. He prefers at the risk of capital punishment to kill hi s enemy at his own desire rather than to kill by order; but it is without throwing any responsibility on others. He is fonder of living penuriously in the mountains, and concealing smugglers, than of discovering them, and serving honourably in the gendarmes.
The educated Italian, like us Russians, has been elaborated spontaneously, by life, by his passions and by the books that have fallen into his hands, and has found his way to understanding of one sort or another. This is why in him and in ourselves there are gaps, discords. He and we are in many respects inferior to the specialised finish of the French and the theoretical learning of the Germans; but to make up for this the colours are more brilliant both in us and in the Italians.
\Ve even have the same defects as they. The Italian has the same tendency to laziness as we: he docs not think of work as pleasure; he does not like the anxiety of it, the weariness, the lack of leisure. Industry in Italy is almost as backward as it i s with u s ; the Italians, like us, have treasures lying under their feet and they do not dig them up. Manners in Italy have not been influenced by the modern bourgeois tendency to the same degree as in France and in England.
The history of the Italian petite bourgeoisie is quite unlike the development of the bourgeoisie in France and in England. The wealthy bourgeois, the descendants del popolo grasso, have more than once successfully rivalled the feudal aristocracy, have been rulers of cities, and therefore they have been not further from but nearer to the plebeians and contadini than the rapidly enriched vulgarians of other lands. The bourgeoisie in the French sense is properly represented in Italy by a special class which has been formed since the first rcvolution,23 and which might be called, as in geology, the Piedmont stratum. It is distinguished in Italy as in the ,..,·hole continent of Europe by being constantly liberal in manr questions, and afraid in all of them of the people and of too indiscreet talk about labour and wages, and also by always giving way to the enemy above and never to its own followers below.
The Italian exiles were drawn from every possible stratum of society. There were all sorts to be found about Mazzini, from the old names that occur in the chronicles of Guicciardini and 23 Presumably the French Revolution of 1 789-94. ( A .S. )
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Muratori, to which the people's ear has been accustomed for centuries, such as the Litti and Borromei, del Verme, Belgiojoso, Nani, Visconti, to some half-savage runaway Romeo from the Abruzzi with his dark, olive-coloured face and indomitable daring! Here were clericals too, like Sirtori, the heroic priest who, at the first shot in Venice, tucked up his cassock, and all through the siege and defence of Marghera fought, rifle in hand, in the foremost ranks under a hail of bullets; and here were the brilliant staff of Neapolitan officers, such as Pisacane, Cosenz, and the brothers Mezzacapo. Here, too, were plebeians from Trastevere, case-hardened in loyalty and privations, rough, surly, dumb in distress, modest and invincible, like Pianori ; and by their side Tuscans, effeminate even in pronunciation, but equally ready for the struggle. Lastly, there were Garibaldi, a figure taken straight out of Cornelius Nepos, with the simplicity of a child and the valour of a lion ; and Felice Orsini, whose beautiful head has so lately rolled from the steps of the scaffold.
But on their names I must dwell awhile.
I myself made Garibaldi's acquaintance in 1 854, when he sailed from South America as the captain of a ship and lay in the West India Dock ; I went to see him accompanied by one of his comrades in the Roman war and by Orsini. Garibaldi, in a thick, light-coloured overcoat, with a bright scarf round his neck and a cap on his head, seemed to me more a genuine sailor than the glorious leader of the Roman militia, statuettes of whom in fantastic costume were being sold all over the world. The goodnatured simplicity of his manner, the absence of all affectation, the cordiality with which he received one, all disposed one in his favour. His crew consisted almost entirely of Italians; he was their chief and their authority, and I am sure he was a strict one, but they all looked gaily and affectionately at him; they were proud of their captain. Garibaldi gave us lunch in his cabin, regaling us with specially prepared oysters from South America, dried fruits, port-when suddenly he leapt up, saying, 'Wait a bit! With you I shall drink a different wine,' and ran up on deck; then a sailor brought in a bottle; Garibaldi looked at it with a smile and filled our glasses . . . . One might have expected anything from a man who had come from across the ocean, but it was nothing more nor less than Bellet from his native town, Nice, which he had brought with him to London from America.
Meanwhile, in his simple and unceremonious talk one was conscious little by little of the presence of strength ; sans phrases, without commonplaces the people's leader, who had amazed old
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soldiers b y his valour, was revealed, and i t was easy t o recognise in the ship's captain the wounded lion who, snarling at every step, retreated after the taking of Rome and, having lost his followers, mustered again at San Marino, at Ravenna, in Lombardy, in the Tyrol, at Tessino, soldiers, peasants, bandits, anyone of any sort to strike once more at the foe-and all this beside the body of his wife,24 who had succumbed to the hardships and privations of the campaign.
In 1 854 his opinions diverged widely from those of Mazzini, although he was on good terms with him. He told him in my presence that Piedmont ought not to be irritated, that the chief aim now was to shake off the Austrian yoke, and he greatly doubted whether Italy was as ready for union and a republic as Mazzini thought. He was entirely opposed to all ventures and experiments in insurrection.