Part 1 (2/2)

In one respect Cavour was brought up according to the strictest of old Piedmontese conventions. No one forgot that he was a younger son. Gustave, the elder brother, received a cla.s.sical education, and acquired a strong taste for metaphysics. He became a thinker rather than a man of action, and was one of the first and staunchest friends of the philosopher-theologian Rosmini, whose attempts to reconcile religion and philosophy led him into a bitter struggle with Rome. For Camille another sort of life was planned. It was decided that he must ”do something,” and at the age of ten he was sent to the Military Academy at Turin. He did not like it, but it was better for him than if he had been kept at home. Mathematics were well taught at the Academy, and in this branch he soon outstripped all his schoolfellows.

He himself always spoke of his mathematical studies as having been of great service in forming the habit of precise thought; from the study of triangles, he said, he went on to the study of men and things. On the other hand the boys were taught little Latin and less Greek, and nothing was done to furnish them with the basis of a literary style, a fact always deplored by Cavour, who insisted that the art of writing ought to be acquired when young; otherwise it could not be practised without labour, and never with entire success. He once said that he found it easier to make Italy than a sonnet. In his own case he regretted never having become a ready writer, because he knew that the pen is a force; he held that a man should cultivate every means at his disposal to increase his power.

In 1824, when Charles Albert returned to Piedmont after three years'

exile in consequence of the part he was suspected of having taken in the abortive revolution of 1821, one of his first acts was to obtain a nomination for young Cavour as page in the royal household. The pages were all inmates of the Military Academy, where the expense of their education was borne by the king after they received the appointment.

The Count d'Auzers, a strong Legitimist, was one of the oldest friends of the Prince of Carignano, who was regarded at the Palazzo Cavour as the victim of false accusations of liberalism. Charles Albert always seemed to reflect the opinions of the person to whom he was writing or speaking. Thus it is certain that in his letters to the Count he appeared as a convinced upholder of white flags. Cavour must have heard him often defended from the charge of patriotism. Perhaps this created in his mind a first aversion, which was strengthened by personal contact in the course of his duties at Court. At any rate it is clear that he never liked or trusted him.

When Cavour left the Military Academy in 1826 he came out first in the final examinations. He entered the army with the rank of lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. He began to learn English. In a letter written at this time he speaks of the utility of modern languages and a real knowledge of history, but adds that a man who wishes to make a name should concentrate his faculties rather than disperse them among too many subjects and pursuits. Even then he had an almost definite project of preparing himself to play a part in life. There is not much to show what were his political ideas, except a memorandum written when he was eighteen on the Piedmontese revolution of 1821, in which he adopted the views of Santorre di Santa Rosa, once Charles Albert's friend and later his severest critic, to combat whose indictment the Count d'Auzers had written folios in the French and German newspapers.

At the end of the memorandum Cavour transcribed an extract from Santa Rosa's work, in which he invoked the advent of an Italian Was.h.i.+ngton.

Was that the part which Cavour dreamed of playing? A few years after, he wrote in a fit of despondency, ”There was a time when I should have thought it the most natural thing in the world that I should wake up one morning prime minister of a kingdom of Italy.” The words written in 1832 throw a flood of light on the subjects of his boyish dreams and the goal of his prophetic ambition.

The story repeated by most of Cavour's biographers, that in putting off the page's uniform he uttered some scornful words which, reported to Charles Albert, changed the goodwill of that prince into hostility, rests on doubtful authority; but it seems to be true that Charles Albert, who began by being very well disposed to the son and nephew of his friends, calling him in one letter ”the interesting youth who justifies such great hopes,” and in another, ”ce charmant Camille,”

came to consider his quondam _protege_ a restless spirit, inconvenient in the present and possibly dangerous in the future. Though the schoolboy essay above mentioned was kept a secret, the liberal heresies of the young lieutenant were well enough known. He was told that he would bring father and mother in sorrow to the grave, and he was even threatened with banishment to America. The police watched his movements. He wrote to his Swiss uncle that he had no right to complain as he was liberal and very liberal and desired a complete change in the whole system. On Charles Albert's accession to the throne he was sent to the solitary Alpine fortress of Bard; but it appears that not the king (as he supposed) but his own father suggested the step. Cavour saw in the idleness and apathy of garrison life in this lonely place a type of the disease from which the whole State was suffering. He wrote to the Count de Sellon, the apostle of universal peace, that much as he abhorred bloodshed, he could think of no cure but war. ”The Italians need regeneration; their _moral_, which was completely corrupted under the ign.o.ble dominion of Spaniards and Austrians, regained a little energy under the French _regime_, and the ardent youth of the country sighs for a nationality; but to break entirely with the past, to be born anew to a better state, great efforts are necessary and sacrifices of all kinds must remould the Italian character. An Italian war would be a sure pledge that we were going to become again a nation, that we were rising from the mud in which we have been trampled for so many centuries.”

These lines, written by a young officer of twenty-one, show how far Cavour had already outstripped the Piedmontese provincialism which had the upper hand in the early years of Charles Albert's reign. He described himself as vegetating, but he was not idle; sustained mental activity was, in fact, a necessity to him whatever were his outward circ.u.mstances. He read Bentham and Adam Smith, and was excited by the events going on in England, then in the throes of the first Reform Bill. It was in the fortress of Bard that he gained a grasp of English politics which he never lost, and which hardly another foreigner ever possessed in a like degree. By chance he became acquainted with an English artist who was engaged in making drawings of the Alpine pa.s.ses. This gave him not only the opportunity of speaking and writing English, but also of expressing his private thoughts without reserve, which was impossible with his fellow-countrymen. Throughout his life he found the same mental relaxation in his intercourse with Englishmen; he felt safe with them.

Cavour was not meant to be a soldier; his tastes did not agree with the routine of military life, and his clear judgment told him that the army is not the natural or correct sphere for a politician--which he knew himself to be even then, in a country where politics may be said not to have existed. Acting on these reflections, he resigned his commission, and his father, perhaps to keep him quiet, bought him a small independent property near the ancestral estate at Leri. The Marquis warned his son that the income would not allow him to keep a valet or a horse; his mother opposed the purchase, as she thought that the young landlord would be tempted to spend more than he had, but to this his father replied that if a man was not a man at twenty-five he would be one never. The Marquis Michele Benso had recently a.s.sumed the post of _Vicario_ of Turin, which his family thought below his dignity, but he apparently took it to oblige the king, with whom the _Vicario_, who was a sort of Prefect of Police, was in daily contact.

As a result, the estate of Leri, which had been neglected before, was now going actually to ruin. Cavour, with the approval of his brother, proposed to undertake the whole management of the property, an offer gladly accepted, as the Marquis was well convinced that his younger son had rather too many than too few abilities. Cavour saw in agriculture the only field at present open to him. When he left the army he scarcely knew a cabbage from a turnip, for he had not been brought up in the country, but in a few years he familiarised himself with everything connected with the subject, from the most homely detail to wide scientific generalisations. With knowledge came interest, which, absent at first, grew strong, and lasted all his life. Little, he said, does the outsider know the charm of planting a field of potatoes or rearing a young heifer! The practical experience which Cavour gained was precious. How many cabinet ministers in different parts of the world would lead to bankruptcy a farm, a factory, a warehouse, even a penny tart shop! As a matter of fact, one Italian minister of finance was legally interdicted, on the application of his family, from managing his own estates.

Leri, which Cavour looked upon henceforth as his true home, lies in one of the ugliest parts of the plains of Piedmont, cold in winter, scorched by a burning sun in summer, and unhealthy from the exhalations of the rice-fields which contribute to its wealth. Except that game was tolerably plentiful, it had none of the attractions of an English country-seat--the smiling hillside, the ancestral elms, the park, the garden. Cavour led the simplest life; the old housekeeper who cooked the dinner also placed it on the table. But the fare, if plain, was abundant, and Cavour was delighted to entertain his friends and neighbours, who found him the most affable of hosts, inexhaustibly good-tempered, a patient listener, a talker abounding in wit and wisdom. He had the art of adapting himself perfectly to the society in which he moved, but in one thing he was always the same: wherever he went he carried his intense vitality--that quality of _entrain_ which persuades more than eloquence or earnestness. He induced others to join him in experiments which were then innovations: steam-mills, factories for artificial manures and the like, while the machinery and new methods introduced at Leri revolutionised farming in Piedmont. One great scheme planned by him, an irrigatory ca.n.a.l between the Ticino and the Po, was only finished after his death, as the most worthy tribute to his memory. He rose at four, went to see his cattle, stood in the broiling harvest fields to overlook the reapers, acted, in short, as his own bailiff, and to these habits he returned in later years, whenever he had time to visit Leri. Cavour's mind was not poetic; we hear of his admiring only one poet, Shakespeare, but in Shakespeare it was probably the deep knowledge of man that attracted him, the apprehension of how men with given pa.s.sions must act under given conditions. He did not, therefore, see country pursuits from a poet's standpoint, but he appreciated their power of calming men's minds, of dissipating the fog of unrealities, of tending towards what Kant called, in a phrase he quoted with approval, ”practical reason.”

He considered, also, that nothing can so a.s.sure the stability of a nation as an intelligent interest shared by a large portion of its citizens in the cultivation of the soil. The English country gentleman who divided his time between his duties in Parliament and those not less obligatory on his estates was in Cavour's eyes an almost ideal personage. It should be added that Cavour could not understand a country life which did not embrace solicitude for the worker. The true agriculturist gained the confidence of the poor around him; it was, he said, so easy to gain it. He was kindly, thoughtful, and just in his treatment of his dependents, and he always retained his hold on their affections; when Italy was asking what she should do without her great statesman, the sorrowing peasants of Leri asked in tears what they should do without their master?

One pa.s.sage in Cavour's early life was revealed a few years ago, and, whether or not it was right to reveal it, the portrait would be now incomplete which did not touch upon it. The episode belongs to the critical psychological moment in his development: the time immediately after he left the army, and before he found an outlet for his activity, and, what was more essential to him, a purpose and an object not in the distance but straight before him, in the care of his father's acres. His position at home was not happy; his brother's small children were of more importance in the household than himself, and when Cavour once administered a well-merited correction to the much-spoilt eldest born, the Marquis Gustave threw a chair at his head. Between the brothers in after life there prevailed remarkable and unbroken harmony, but it is easy to see that when first grown to manhood Gustave presumed rather selfishly on his _role_ of heir, while Camille took too seriously the supposed discovery that he was ”necessary to no one!” Beyond all this, there was the undeclared clash of the new with the old, the feeling of having moved apart, which produces a moral vacuum until, by and by, it is realised that the value of the first affections and ties depends precisely on their resting on no basis of opinion. Cavour was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation; if he decided ”like Hamlet” (so he writes in his diary) to abstain from suicide, he believed that he wished himself heartily out of the world. To his family he seemed an abnormal and unnatural young man. A conversation is on record which took place between the two childless aunts who lived with the Cavours. The date was just before Cavour's departure on a first visit to Paris. ”Did you remark,” said Mme. Victoire, ”how indifferent Camille seemed when I spoke to him of the Paris theatres? I really do not know what will interest him on his travels; the poor boy is entirely absorbed in revolutions.” ”It is quite true,” replied Mme. Henriette; ”Camille has no curiosity about things, he cares for nothing but politics.” And the two ladies went on to draw melancholy prognostics from their nephew's study of political economy, ”an erroneous and absolutely useless science.”

A charming countess who had made a favourite of Cavour in his boyhood tried to extract a promise from him that he would never again mix himself up in politics; he refused to give it; sooner or later, he writes in his diary, she would have blushed for him had he consented.

But, he adds bitterly, what was the good of demanding such a promise from one for whom politically everything was ended? ”Ah! if I were an Englishman, by this time I should be something and my name would not be wholly unknown!” Here, again, was a source of depression. At the Military Academy he had formed one almost romantic comrades.h.i.+p with a delicate and reserved youth, some years older than himself, Baron Severino Ca.s.sio, to whom he first confided his determination to Italianise himself: to study the language, history, laws, customs of the whole country with a view to preparing for the future. Ca.s.sio presciently marked out for his friend the part of architect, not of destroyer, in that future; architects, he said, were what was most wanted in public affairs, and Italy had always lacked them. There is no reason to think that Ca.s.sio's sympathy had chilled, but Cavour, in his morbid state, thought that it was so; he imagined that what had drawn Ca.s.sio to him ”was not I, but my powerful intellectual organisation”; and with undeserved mistrust he did not turn to him for comfort.

He was at the nadir of his dejection when he received a letter in a well-known handwriting, that of a woman who had strongly attracted him four years before by her beauty, grace, and elevation of mind.

Separation cut short the incipient love-affair, and Cavour never thought of renewing it. With the woman it was otherwise; from her first meeting with the youth of twenty to the day of her death, absent or present, he was the object of an idolatry in which all her faculties united: her being was penetrated by a self-sustaining pa.s.sion which could not cease till it had consumed her. De Stendhal is the only novelist who could have drawn such a character. She was of n.o.ble birth, and from an early age had been eminently unhappy. Cavour, in his private papers, called her ”L'Inconnue,” and so she will be remembered. Her own life-story, and whether she was free to give her heart where she would, the world does not and need not know; on the last point it is enough to say that Cavour's father and mother were aware of his relations with her and saw in them nothing reprehensible.

On a page meant for no eyes but his own, Cavour describes the excitement into which he was thrown by the brief letter which announced that the Unknown had arrived at Turin and that she wished to see him. He hastened back to town and sought her at her hotel, and then at the opera where she had gone. After looking all round the house, he recognised her in a box--the sixth to the left on the first row--dressed in deep mourning and showing on her face such evident marks of suffering that he was at once filled with remorse ”and intoxicated by a love so pure, so constant, and so disinterested.”

Never would he forsake this divine woman again!

For a moment he thought of flight to distant sh.o.r.es, but he soon decided that ”imperative duties required that she should remain where she was.” Their intercourse chiefly consisted of letters; his do not seem to exist, hers were found after his death carefully preserved and numbered. In these letters she laid bare her innermost soul; she was ardently patriotic, steeped in the ideas of Mazzini, and far more Italian than Piedmontese, though she wrote in French. She knew English, and Cavour advised her to read Shakespeare. Remarkably gifted, she had the deep humility of many of the best Italian women; ”What have I done, O Camille,” she asks, ”to meet a soul like yours!... To have known you for an instant fills a long existence; how can you love me, weak as I am?” She had an astonis.h.i.+ng instinct of his future greatness: ”Full of force, life, talent, called, perhaps to make a brilliant career, to contribute to the general good,” such expressions as these occur frequently in her letters. The romance ended as it could not help ending. The ”eternal vows” were kept for a year and a few months; then on Cavour's side a love which, though he did not guess it, had only been a reflection, faded into compa.s.sionate interest. The _Inconnue_ uttered no reproaches; after a few unhappy years she died, leaving a last letter to her inconstant lover. ”The woman who loved you is dead ... no one ever loved you as she did, no one! For, O Camille, you never fathomed the extent of her love.” With a broken-hearted pride she declared that ”in the domain of death she surpa.s.sed all rivals.” It remained true; if Cavour was not, strictly speaking, more faithful to the _Inconnue's_ memory than he had been to her while she lived, yet this was the only real love-pa.s.sage in his life. Fatal to her, it was fortunate to him. It found him in despair and it left him self-reliant and matured. The love of such a woman was a liberal education.

CHAPTER II

TRAVEL-YEARS

During the fifteen years which he devoted to agriculture, Cavour made several long and important visits to France and England. In this way he enlarged his experience, while keeping aloof from the governing cla.s.s in his own country, connection with which could, in his opinion, only bring loss of reputation and effacement in the better days that were to come. Cavour knew himself to be ambitious, but he had the self-control never even to contemplate the purchase of what then pa.s.sed for power by the sacrifice of his principles. ”My principles,”

he once wrote, ”are a part of myself.” The best way ”to prepare for the honourable offices of the future” was to keep his independence intact, and to study abroad the working of the inst.i.tutions which he wished to see introduced at home. Through his French relations, he took his place immediately in the best society of the capital of the citizen king, under whose reign, sordid as it was in some respects, Paris attained an intellectual brilliancy the like of which was never equalled in the spectacular glare of the second empire. It was the moment of a short-lived renaissance; literature, art, science, seemed to be starting on new voyages of discovery. New worlds were opened up for conquest; oriental studies for the first time became popular, the great field of unwritten traditions surrendered its virgin soil. Above all, it was a time of fermentation in moral ideas; every one expected the millennium, though there was a lack of agreement as to what it would consist in. Every one, like Lamennais in Beranger's poem, was going ”to save the world.” The Good, the True, the Beautiful, were about to dislodge the Bad, the False, the Ugly. If all these high hopes had some fruition in the region of thought, they had none in the region of facts, but meanwhile they lent a rare charm to Paris in the Thirties. Cavour speaks of elasticity as the ruling quality of French society; he praises the admirable union of science and wit, depth and amiability, substance and form, to be found in certain Parisian salons and nowhere else. He was thinking especially of the salon of Mme. de Circourt, who became his friend through life. For no one else had he quite the same unchanging regard. Attracted as he always was by the conquest of difficulties, he admired the force of mind and will by which this Russian lady, whom a terrible accident had made a hopeless invalid, overcame disabilities that would have reduced most people to a state of living death. In her, spirit annihilated matter. She joined French vivacity to the penetrating sensibility of the Sclavonic races, and she was a keen reader of character. Cavour interested her at once.

<script>