Mr. Thayer's Life of Cavour

THE Italian tree brings forth fruits of the strangest variety of worth at different seasons and on different branches. At this moment it is well that Mr. Thayer’s book should appear, to remind the world that Italy produced the most wise and beneficent of all the European statesmen of the nineteenth century, if not of all time.

Mr. Thayer’s book is a work of the kind of talent required for the purpose, and the purpose fulfilled is great. In spite of some particularly good memoirs and monographs in English, French, and Italian, in spite of an unusually good and complete edition of letters and documents published a generation ago by Chiala, there has hitherto been no book worthy to be called ‘The Life of Cavour.’ Mr. Thayer’s is The Life of Cavour, and is therefore a treasurehouse of wisdom for all who are interested, whether as statesmen or as citizens, in the working of the institutions of free countries, or in the strife to win freedom for countries not yet free. For in both these great departments of human activity Cavour was supreme, faultless in all his aims, and successful in the means he invented to gain them in the face of apparently hopeless odds.

Germany is a greater country than Italy, but Cavour was greater than Bismarck, almost in proportion to the inferiority of the material with which he had to work. He had no short cut to his ends, such as was afforded to Bismarck by the Prussian army. And whereas Italy suffers to-day just in so far as she has failed to understand or refused to imitate the spirit of Cavour’s statesmanship, Germany’s ills derive from too close an imitation of the great man who made her, — his tariffs, his junkerism, his dislike of the power of Parliament, and his belief in the army as the proper factor to dominate in national life. Bismarck used a maximum and Cavour a minimum of force. Cavour thought force bad in itself, and Bismarck thought it good in itself.

As a nation-maker, therefore, Cavour stands with William the Silent and George Washington. Each of these men fought through the agony of a war of liberation, yet never yielded for a moment to the militarist or despotic ideals so liable to be bred in time of crisis; each loved free institutions with his whole heart; each could have said (as one of them did say), ‘I was always on the side of the people’; yet each avoided the special faults of the demagogue as completely as Wellington or Peel; each planted justice and mercy amid the chaos of wrath and revolution; each kept an heroic equanimity of temper toward all their supporters, even toward the foolish and the false who bade fair to ruin their work; finally, each died leaving as his handiwork a nation whose every merit is symbolized in the life of the man who made it, whose every defect is due to the tradition which he started being too lofty for imitation. If Americans can boast that America is more true to the traditions of Washington than Italy is true to the traditions of Cavour, they may be sure that their country is reaping the benefit in due proportion. Measures and policies and constitutions must change with changing time, but the spirit that inspires a just policy is the same in the eighteenth, the nineteenth, and the twentieth centuries.

Mr. Thayer’s labors have stretched over more years than those which sufficed Cavour, as minister of Piedmont, to make Italy. By the references in his footnotes he puts us in a position to judge the broad sweep of his learning and the careful accuracy of his judgments on matters of bare fact. No history is ‘safe,’ but this book is as safe as possible for those seeking the real facts of Cavour’s career. It is very reliable, as I can testify, with regard to those incidents of which I have made a special study for my own purposes.

Passing on from the facts to his interpretation of them, his political judgment is remarkably sound. That is to say, I agree with him, — and what more can a reviewer say? I have no quarrel with him, except on a few points of taste, emphasis, and proportion. His admiration for Cavour is based on all the right things; and, fervid though it is, is not a whit exaggerated. Only it has occasionally caused him to waste more breath on the commination of Cavour’s opponents than is consonant with the dignity of history or the spirit of Cavour himself. Mr. Thayer lives so much in the time of which he writes, that he has called back into too vigorous a life some old quarrels of which the corpses might have been viewed under their decent covering of dust. Requiescant in pace! I am, however, bound to admit that these old quarrels are not the least amusing, though I think they are the least truly artistic part of the book. But in all its parts the book seems to me equally sound and illuminating as a political history.

So much for the matter of the book. But there is another question of vital importance to be asked about every history that appeals, as this does, to a public beyond the scholars. Besides the matter, what about the style? Is the book readable? If not, it will find few readers in the present, and in the future will ‘suffer not thinking on.’ Fortunately Mr. Thayer’s Cavour, although crammed with facts and arguments, names of men and places, is highly readable. It is alive with Mr. Thayer’s own lively mind. His is not always a perfect style, but it is the opposite of a dull one, for he has let his personality loose upon his pages. They have consequently considerable literary qualities and some literary defects. But the defects are not those of dullness, ‘which alone finds no healing physician.’ They are rather the defects of a too impassioned actuality, occasionally falling to the level of the better sort of journalese. I confess I find fault, in a history meant and destined to live, with phrases like ‘give a tip to’ for ‘give a hint to’; ‘coddled wrong notions’; ‘ let-well-alone, don’t-disturbBritish-interests standards.’ Nor do I see why, when Mazzini writes something particularly violent, he should be described as ‘shrieking’ or ‘screaming’ it.

Perhaps my objections to such phrases in permanent literature only arise out of the misfortune of my birth on the wrong side of the Atlantic. Therefore on these matters let Mr. Thayer be judged not by me, but by the orbis terrarum, by the readers of the Atlantic Monthly.

For they must read this book. It is an important addition to American history. History in America, as elsewhere, has recently been accused, with much justice, of ceasing to educate the people, and of producing nothing more than monographs for scholars to read as best they may. This is not Mr. Thayer’s style, or purpose, or achievement. His standard of scholarship is as high as any in any university of the world, but his book is of the open air, of the great world of politics and affairs and people.

I will institute no comparisons, but I will illustrate my meaning by saying that Mr. Thayer’s Cavour is of the same class and type as Mr. James Ford Rhodes’s great work on the American Civil War, which has won him so high a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mr. Thayer begins with a detailed picture of Cavour’s boyhood and youth in the unregenerate Piedmont of the restored ancien régime after Waterloo. He depicts the proud, lonely struggle of a young liberal aristocrat in the trammels of a class and a Court outraged by his rebellious views, the ‘cadet’ of a family uncongenial to him, at least as regards politics. The intellectual influences which formed his lifelong opinions are fully set forth. The most important influence on him was that of English liberal thought and practice in the era of the Reform Bill. Indeed his enemies in Italy used afterwards to call him ‘Milord Risorgimento.’

But one of the formative influences of his youth is startlingly ‘ un-English ’: his devotion to Rousseau is suggestive of the fundamental radicalism of Cavour’s soul. He would stop at no application of principle for reasons of convention, or of conservatism for its own sake, but only for reasons of justice and wisdom. Mr. Thayer says on this subject: —

‘Cavour’s genius was positive, but it was none the less capable of powerful emotions and unquenchable enthusiasms. He, too, came under the spell of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the magician who, having fired the generation of 1789, was inspiring the Romanticists of 1830. “From the time when I read Rousseau’s books for myself,” he writes to Uncle Sellon in 1833, “I have felt the liveliest admiration for him. He is, to my thinking, the man who has striven most to uplift the dignity of the past centuries. His eloquent voice more than anything else contributed to fix me in the path of progress and of social emancipation. Emile, above all, has always pleased me by the justness of its ideas and the force of its logic.”

‘ Whatever the lion eats, turns to lion. Two men more unlike than Cavour and Rousseau in their practical efficiency and in their moral sense it would be hard to name: and yet Cavour drew the best from Rousseau and converted it into force for doing his own work, just as he took their best from Bentham and Adam Smith.’

I would commend that phrase which I have put into italics. It bears quoting.

The liberation of the Italian Peninsula from a number of obscurantist despotisms dependent on foreign soldiers, had been attempted in 1848 before Cavour came to power, and had failed after a few months of apparent success. A dozen years later the forward movement was resumed under Cavour, Victor Emanuel, and Garibaldi, and was carried to swift fruition, mainly owing to the fact that the other states of Italy, from the Alps to Sicily, were able to rely on Piedmont, the little Alpine state in the northwest corner, next to the French frontier.

The liberation of Italy was the extension of the orderly, free, parliamentary government of Piedmont over the whole Peninsula, chiefly in 1859 -60. But if Piedmont had not in the fifties obtained that orderly, free, parliamentary government, the process of expansion could not have taken place. Italy would probably have failed to win freedom, as Russia has hitherto failed, for want of a nucleus of ordered liberty already in being, whence freedom may spread over the whole.

Now, it was Cavour who gave Piedmont its ordered parliamentary government during his great peace ministry between 1852 and 1858. Then in 1859-60, as head of a war ministry, — as ‘minister of revolution,’ if we may create such a post, — he used the small state, which owed its prosperity to him, as the means of freeing the rest of Italy.

This double record, as peace minister on the one hand, and as foreign minister and conductor of war on the other, is almost unparalleled in history. The first Pitt made no reforms at home, and the second failed abroad. Gladstone muddled his foreign and colonial policy, whether we judge him by Liberal or by Conservative standards. Peel’s one great merit in foreign affairs was that he kept out of them. Lincoln himself did not live to reconstruct in peace the country he saved in war; though, but for Booth’s crime, he would probably have equaled the double record of Cavour. Bismarck, many of us think, failed as a peace minister because he succeeded in wrong objects; nor would Cavour have undertaken a struggle with the Church on ground where he could not hope to win.

With Cavour as Minister of Piedmont, the two parts of his policy, the internal and external, were one. Both alike were directed to make Italy. The reform of Piedmontese customs duties and ecclesiastical laws, the instruction of his Piedmontese colleagues in the Chamber and the Cabinet in the arts of free government, were the patient laying of a train of war and revolution which was to free the rest of Italy when the hour had struck.

Much of Mr. Thayer’s first volume deals with this phase of Cavour’s career, — his ministry in Piedmont between 1852 and 1858. It is not his smallest claim to greatness, although it is the least exciting period of his leadership. Mr. Thayer shows the deplorable condition of Piedmont after the great reverse of 1848-49: the factious, untrained, though well-meaning deputies of the Chamber at Turin, taking their first perilous steps in the new art of free government; the rapid changes of ministry; the economic and moral chaos of the little state, suddenly plunged out of the obscurantism of the ancien régime into the full light of an unaccustomed liberty. Cavour, whose lonely youth had been spent in study of administrative, parliamentary, and economic science in England and elsewhere, took his compatriots by the hand and led them into the path of good parliamentary government and economic prosperity. For half a dozen years, solely owing to Cavour, Piedmont was the best governed state in the world. The feat was the more wonderful, because Cavour had no authority except his own power of persuading the Chamber by his speeches and by the good results of his measures. He was personally unpopular with King, aristocracy, and people. But gradually all three came by experience to realize that they could not do without him. And when he died, having made Italy, ‘members of every party wept’ in the Chamber and in the streets.

Cavour’s dealing with the economic problem of Piedmont had two main sides — expenditure on necessary public works, and free trade. His economic views are interesting on both sides of the Atlantic at the present day. Mr. Thayer writes: —

‘Long before, he had perceived that in the great task laid upon the nineteenth century — the diffusion of liberty — economic and industrial reform must be the basis of the new political structure: having now the opportunity to apply his principles, he seized it. Piedmont’s grievous debts called for instant remedy. Cavour’s first plan was to stimulate her commerce by relieving it of the burden of differential duties, navigation acts, and high or prohibitive tariffs. In quick succession he negotiated commercial treaties with France, Belgium, England, Holland, Switzerland, and the German Customs Union. But he found it easier to make terms with them than to persuade the Subalpine Parliament to ratify his treaties: for he had to combat at home not only the general ignorance of economics, but also the convictions of men bred in protectionist doctrines, and the greed of beneficiaries of special privileges that dated from feudal times. The feudal system, only recently abolished by law, still survived in many usages.

‘Economic reform involved, therefore, more than a change of percentages: it involved the wrenching away of associations, instincts, traditions, which the unthinking supposed were necessary to their own existence. Nevertheless, Cavour fought his battle without flinching.

‘ Whoever reads his speeches on the commercial treaties and on tariff reform will be struck first of all by their educational quality. Well aware that he was addressing a public little versed in political economy, he took pains to lay down the theory on which his measures rested, to explain its reasonableness and justice, to show how illogical it was to set up Liberty as the guiding principle in law and government and conscience, while denying its application to trade. Nor did he fail to point out how protection, the most insidious modern form of privilege, rendered honest government difficult and equal government impossible; and how industrial selfishness, which did not scruple to beg for special favors from the lawmakers, would go on to demand those favors as a right, nor hesitate at last to keep them by corruption.’

While Cavour built up the economic, administrative, and moral strength of Piedmont, and raised the little state of five millions to be the beacon-light of freedom to all the enslaved provinces of the Peninsula, he never for a moment allowed himself to be the dupe of the notion that Piedmont alone could expel the Austrians from Italy. That idea had perished, for all wise patriots, on the field of Novara. Cavour determined to win the active alliance of France, as the sine qua non of military success. And he knew that the only way to obtain French help was through the Emperor Napoleon III. He knew that Mazzini was so utterly wrong in supposing that Napoleon prevented France from coming to the aid of Italy, that on the contrary in the Emperor’s power alone lay the hope of overcoming French opinion, predominantly hostile to Italian aspirations. And he understood admirably the position and character of Napoleon, and played upon him with the touch of a perfect musician.

Mr. Thayer’s account of the strange Orsini affair, and of what followed it, forms an interesting psychological study in Napoleon, Cavour, and Victor Emanuel. The psychological and diplomatic victory remained with the Italians, who turned Orsini’s attempt to murder the Emperor, which had seemed to ruin Italy’s hopes of help from France, into the means of predisposing Napoleon’s mind toward Cavour’s projects.

The strangest adventure of Cavour’s adventurous career was his secret visit to the Emperor Napoleon at Plombières, the watering place in the Vosges, in July, 1858, when the alliance between the two ‘ conspirators ’ was drawn up.

‘Napoleon’s presence crowded the town with his retinue and with fashionable visitors. Every hotel was full and Cavour was beginning to think he might have to pass the night in the open, when a pitying landlady found quarters for him in a ramshackle old house. After midnight he was roused by General Béville, who, having just learned of his arrival, begged Cavour to go and take his bed. But Cavour declined, and on the following morning, by the Emperor’s arrangement, moved into a decent apartment at a pharmacist’s. Whether or not he slept after Béville left him, we do not know. As on the eve of the Congress of Paris, he felt so intensely the tremendous possibilities almost within grasp that he distrusted his powers. “The drama approaches its solution,” he wrote La Marmora. “Pray heaven so to inspire me that I shall not behave like a blockhead in this supreme moment.”’

He did not ‘behave like a blockhead.’ On that long summer day, the alliance that was destined to effect the liberation of Italy was arranged in detail, before ‘the little Piedmontese returned to his rooms over the apothecary’s shop.’

The long diplomatic struggle of the following months is clearly and fully told by Mr. Thayer. How Napoleon, surrounded by men and women hostile to Italy, began to shrink back from his secret undertaking at Plombières; how Cavour, with infinite effort, manœuvred him into the field at last, by goading Austria to declare war in April, 1859. The danger that Austria would not declare war and that the French alliance would come to nothing was at one moment so great that Cavour very nearly despaired of all his long-laid plans for Italian redemption. There were two or three moments in his life when the passion beneath the crust of his calm and equable temper burst out and betrayed the Italian side — or shall we say the human side? — of his great nature. One of these was when he thought Napoleon was about to desert him.

‘Having seen,’ writes Mr. Thayer, ‘even amid his agitation, the step to take, he had taken it resolutely. Now a nervous revulsion swept over him. Givingorders that nobody be admitted, he locked himself in his room. Farini and Audinot, two of his trusted followers, were turned away, and fearing the worst, they hurried to Castelli and begged him to interfere. Cavour had many disciples who would gladly have laid down their lives for him, but there was not one for whom he had so much affection as for Michelangelo Castelli.

‘ “ I got up and without asking more I ran to the Cavour palace,” writes Castelli. “First to meet me was his butler, Martino Tosco, who said with emotion: ‘The Count is in his room, alone; he has already burned many papers, and he forbade us to allow any one to enter, but for Heaven’s sake go in at whatever cost.’ Having entered the chamber, I found him surrounded by heaps of papers which he had torn up, and in the fireplace many others were burning. He looked at me fixedly and did not speak. Then with entire calm I said: ‘I know that nobody was to enter here; but on that very account I have come.’ I felt a wrench at my heart, the danger was evident, and with great effort I added: ‘Must I believe that Count Cavour intends to desert the field before the battle — that he intends to abandon us all?’ And then, overcome by emotion, I burst into sobs. Cavour rose, embraced me convulsively, and, after having paced up and down the room almost beside himself, stopping in front of me, he pronounced slowly these words: ‘ Do not be uneasy, we will face everything, and always all of us together.’ ”

‘ Castelli felt that the danger point was passed, and, leaving Cavour, he hastened to reassure their anxious friends. If ever loyal devotion had its full reward, it was on that day when not cowardice but a terrific nervous tumult threatened to engulf Cavour’s reason.’

The Austrian ultimatum soon came to restore Cavour’s pleasure in life. In the campaign that followed, when the French and Italians together drove the Austrians out of Lombardy, the Italian regular army of 1859 appeared to better advantage than in 1848 or in 1866. The reason was very largely that Cavour was at the head of the administration, and his insatiable appetite for work and organization enabled him to keep the master’s eye on the preparation and working of supply and commissariat.

From the beginning of the war, in April, 1859, down to Cavour’s death in June, 1861, the two years of the making of Italy, the story becomes too rapid and too complicated for any attempt at epitome. The reader can follow in Mr. Thayer’s narrative the turns of craft and fortune by which Cavour used Napoleon’s apparent desertion of the Italian cause at Villafranca as the means of obtaining a more complete union of all Italy than Napoleon had promised at Plombières or ever intended to allow. Cavour made up for the loss of further aid from France by enlisting the help of England under Lord John Russell, and of the Italian democratic parties under Garibaldi.

Mr. Thayer’s treatment of the difficult theme of 1860 seems to me admirable in its seizure of all the important points. Full justice is done to the importance of Garibaldi’s expedition, and Cavour’s relations to Garibaldi are fully and correctly analyzed. The narrative of the expedition of the Thousand, as viewed from an angle appropriate to the biographer, not of Garibaldi, but of Cavour, is vigorously told.

‘Worship of Garibaldi,’ writes Mr. Thayer, ‘was, indeed, the spell that bound that strange multitude [the Thousand] together. Like Scottish clansmen, they would follow their chief blindly: but their devotion, instead of being hereditary, sprang from their own choice. Out of all the world they had chosen Garibaldi, as the lover chooses his mate, to idolize and adore. It is as impossible to conjure back to the printed page the sound of that deep, thrilling voice, as to paint the expression on his face, which men called leonine and women called beautiful. Garibaldi was in fact neither commanding of stature, nor handsome according to the higher types of beauty. He was rather a glorified sea-captain or woodsman, whose features suggested an uncomplex nature, with a hint of shrewdness, perhaps of suspicion, in his near-set grey eyes, which he seldom opened wide. His auburnbrown hair, his deep-tawny beard and abundant moustache, added dignity to the well-shaped head. But his contemporaries saw much more than this — they saw in him the embodiment of their ideals of heroism, of love of country, of chivalry, a Theseus in the flesh, a Roland or a Lancelot. He had that last gift of seeming to be one of themselves, and yet far above them. Historically, he was the final flower of that generous era whose seed-time was the French Revolution and whose harvest was the liberation of the peoples, and the redemption of Italy. Despite its excesses and its follies, its emotions too often merely hysterical, and its enthusiasms too often ineffectual, that era, above all others, brought hope and a vision of perfectibility on earth to heart-sick humanity.

For my part I find Mr. Thayer right in almost all his judgments, and certainly entitled to the advantage of the doubt if ever I differ from him, on account of the wider range of his knowledge over the whole field of the Risorgimento. But I do venture to regret the amount of space which he has devoted to slaying the slain, to denouncing so often and so bitterly, however justly, the follies of Cavour’s enemies, particularly of Mazzini and Garibaldi. More restraint of language would have been more in keeping with Cavour’s genius, and really more effective. The terribly painful incident of Garibaldi’s injustice to Cavour in the session of 1861 does not demand a whole chapter to itself. Garibaldi deserves a little, at least, of the reverence shown to Noah by two of his sons on a certain occasion. The truth ought to be told, and told as completely in Cavour’s favor as Mr. Thayer tells it, but there was no need thus to prolong the agony with such apparent gusto. A just revenge for Cavour’s wrongs on this occasion is carried so far as almost to beget sympathy for him who did the wrong. At this time of day to attack Garibaldi for wearing a dress which has successfully imposed itself on history, is like laughing at George Fox for objecting to buttons; it is to misunderstand the uniqueness of the man, and to lay one’s self rather than Garibaldi open to the charge of want of humor.

Mr. Thayer also quarrels with Garibaldi for ‘slipping in by a small side door’ into the Assembly, instead of coming in by the main entrance, — a preference in which Mr. Thayer detects a desire for ostentation. When one has just come back from liberating Sicily and Naples, one has a right to come in at a side door if one likes, though certainly not to make the cruel and foolish speech which Garibaldi then proceeded to make. Cavour was so far above Garibaldi in intellect and in political judgment that to defend him so elaborately is positively injurious to him, as if implying that there was any question in the matter at all. And if there are still any people so blind as not to see Cavour’s immeasurable superiority of wisdom, they will not be conciliated by Mr. Thayer’s treatment of the subject.

But I see that I am myself falling into the sin of which I accuse Mr. Thayer, — want of proportion and dwelling on faults. It is the only serious fault I find in the book, and even if I am right about it, it is not a fault of opinion or fact, but of treatment. The concluding chapters are worthy to bring this valuable work to an end. The account of Cavour’s death is most touching, and the summary in the conclusion most adequate.

‘Again and again,’ says Mr. Thayer, ‘it is this naturalness — the simplicity of real greatness — that impresses us. In imagination we join him on his daily walk under the porticoes of Via di Po; we hear his rapid comments; we see him rub his hands together in sign of satisfaction, or to mark a witty sally; we catch his friendly greetings, by word or nod, to half the passers-by: and we ask ourselves whether this little man is indeed the statesman who has turned European Diplomacy from its channels in London, Paris, and Vienna, to wait at Turin upon his word. His play of irony, his frolic spirits — which rarely failed, except in the last overburdened months, to enliven even his hours of business — bridged the gulf between him as prime minister and the humblest who had dealings with him. To strangers, his smile seemed baffling, but his intimates learned to foretell by the quivering of his lips what reply to expect. He had a very rich capacity for friendship. Perhaps generosity was his dominant moral trait—the generosity which impelled him to ask forgiveness of Farini for a petulant word, and saved him from becoming embittered by misunderstandings among his family and by false accusations from political opponents.’

‘To Italians, Cavour will stand for all time as the builder of their state. Many quarried: he took the blocks, of every size and shape and quality, and made United Italy out of them.’

‘ It is because Cavour, by the rare blending of Reason and disciplined Emotion, guided to victory the most marvelous and difficult struggle for freedom recorded in modern times, that his name will be cherished by generations yet unborn and by races yet uncivilized.’