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reining himself in, that he never fully let himself go and was wonderfully in command of himself; it was evident that not one word fell from those smiling lips without intention, that there were depths behind those inwardly shining eyes, that, where people like us would hesitate and shy away, he would smile and, without changing his expression or raising his voice, go forward remorseless and undoubting.
In the spring of 1 852 Orsini was expecting very important news about his family affairs: he was tormented at not getting a letter; he told me so several times, and I knew i n what anxiety he was living. At dinner-time one day, when two or three outsiders were present, the postman came into the entry: Orsini sent to ask whether there was a letter for him; it appeared that there was; he glanced at it, put it in his pocket, and went on with the conversation. An hour and a half later, when I was alone with him, Orsini said to me: 'Well, thank God, at last I have got an answer, and all is quite well.' I, knowing that he was expecting a letter, had not guessed that this was it, with so unconcerned an air had he opened it and then put it into his pocket. A man like that is a born conspirator; and indeed he was one, all his life.
And what was accomplished by him with his energy, by Garibaldi with his daring, by Pianori with his revolver, by Pisacane and the other martyrs whose blood is not yet dry? Italy will be delivered from the Austrians, if at all, by Piedmont; from the Bourbon of Naples by fat Murat, both under the patronage of Bonaparte. Oh. divina commcdia-or simply commedia! in the sense in which Pope Chiaramonti30 said it to Napoleon at Fontainebleau . . . .
One evening an argument sprang up between Mazzini and me about Leopardi.
There are poems of Leopardi with which I am passionately in sympathy. Much of his work, like Byron's, is spoilt by theorising, but sometimes a line of his, like one of Byron's, stabs, hurts, wrings the heart. There are such words, such lines, in Lermontov.
:Jo Pope Pius VII signed the Concordat of 1 5 th July, 1 801 with Napoleon, was forced by the lattPr to come to Par·is to consecrate him as Em1Jeror in 1 80·�. was l a ter on kept prisonPr at Fontainebleau, and only returned to Home in 1 8 1 4. ( Tr.) In January 1 8 1 3 Napoleon visited Pius VII at Fontainebleau and obtained his consent to a new Concordat. by which the Catholic Church became subject to the authority of the Emperor of the French, ami the secular a uthority of the Pope in Rome was abolished.
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Leopardi was the last book Natalie read, the last she looked at before her death . . . .
To men of action, to agitators vvho move the masses, this venomous irresoluteness, these shattering doubts are incomprehensible. They see in them nothing but profitless lamentation, nothing but feeble despondency. Mazzini could not sympathise with Leopardi, that I knew beforehand ; but he attacked him with bitterness. I was greatly vexed ; of course, he was angry with him fot· being of no use to him for pmpaganda. In the same way Frederick II might have been angry . . . I do not know . . . well, with Mozart, for instance, because he was of no use as a guardsman. This is Lhe shocking restriction of the personality, the subjecting of men to categories and cadres-as though historical development were serf-labour to which the bailiffs drive weak and strong, \Yilling and unwilling alike, without consulting their wish!'s.
Mazzini was angry. I said to him, half in jest and half in earnest:
'I believe you have your knife into poor Leopardi for not having taken part in the Roman revolution ; but you know he has an excellent reason to urge in his defence-you keep forgetting it!'
'What reason?'
'Why, the fact that he died in 1 837.'
Wh!'n a man who has long been watching black curls and black eyes suddenly turns to a fair-haired woman with light eyebrovvs who is pale and nervous, his eyes always receive a shock and cannot at once get over it. The difference, of which he has not been thinking and which he has forgotten, forces itself upon him physically through no desire of his.
Exactly the same thing happens when one turns quickly from Italian emigre circles to German.
Undoubtedly the Ge1·mans are more developed on the theoretical side than any other people, but they have not gained much by it so far. From Catholic fanaticism they have passed to the Protestant pietism of transcendental philosophy and the romance of philology, and are now gradually making the transition to exact science; the German 'studies diligently at all his stages,'
and his whole history is summed up in that, and he will get marks for it on the Day of Judgment. The common people of Germany, who have studied less, have suffered a great dea l ; they bought the right to Protestantism by the Thirty Years' War, the right to an independent existence-that is, to a colourless exis-
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tence under the supervision d Russia-by the struggle with Napoleon. The liberation in 1814-1 5 was a complete victory of the reaction; and when, in place of Jerome Bonaparte, der Landesvatcr appeared in a pO\vdered wig and an old-fashioned uniform long laid by, and announced that next day was fixed, let us say, for the forty-fifth parade (the one before, the forty-fourth, had taken place before the revolution) , then all the liberated people felt as though they had suddenly lost tow::h with the present and gone back to another age, and everyone felt his head to see whether he had not grown a pigtail \vith a ribbon on it.
The people accepted this with simple-hearted stupidity, and sang Korner's songs. Science and learning advanced. Greek tragedies were performed in Berlin, there were dramatic festivals for Goethe-at ·weimar.
The most radical men among the Germans remain philistines in their private life. Bold as they are in logic, they feel no obligation to be consistent in practice, and fall into glaring contradictions. The German mind, in matters revolutionary as
\vell as in everything else, accepts the general idea in its absolute, of course-that is, inoperative-significance, and is satisfied with an ideal construction of it, imagining that a thing is done if it is conceived, and that the fact as easily follows the thought as the n_1eaning of the fact is grasped by the consciousness.
The English and the French are full of prejudices, while a German is free from them; but both French and English are more consistent in their lives-the rule they follo\v is perhaps absurd, but it is what they have accepted. A German accepts nothing except reason and logic, but he is ruled in many things by other considcrations-\vhich means acting against one's conscience in return for bribes.
The Frenchman is not morally free: though rich in initiative in practical life, he is poor in abstract thought. He thinks in received conceptions, in accepted forms; he gives a fashionable cut to commonplace ideas, and is satisfied with them. It is hard for him to take in anything new, although he does rush at it.
The Frenchman oppresses his family and believes it is his duty to do so, just as he believes in the 'Legion of Honour' and the judgments of the lawcourts. The German believes in nothing, but takes advantage of public prejudices \vhere it suits him. He is accustomed to a petty prosperity, to lVohlbehagcn, to peace and quiet and, as he goes from his study to the Pnmkzimmer or his bedroom, sacrifices his freedom of thought to his dressinggown, to his peace and quiet and to his kitchen. The German is a great sybarite, and this is not noticed in him, because his