Part 7 (1/2)

CHAPTER XIII

ROME VOTED THE CAPITAL--CONCLUSION

The other unsolved question, that of Rome, was the most th.o.r.n.y, the most complicated, that ever a statesman had to grapple with. Though Cavour's death makes it impossible to say what measure of success would have attended his plans for resolving it, it must be always interesting to study his att.i.tude in approaching the greatest crux in modern politics.

Cavour did not think of s.h.i.+rking this question because it was difficult. In fact, he had understood from the beginning that in it lay the essence of the whole problem. Chiefly for that reason he brought the occupations of the Papal States before the Congress of Paris. In 1856, as in 1861, he looked upon the Temporal Power as incompatible with the independence of Italy. It was already a fiction.

”The Pope's domination as sovereign ceased from the day when it was proved that it could not exist save by a double foreign occupation.”

It had become a centre of corruption, which destroyed moral sense and rendered religious sentiment null. Without the Temporal Power, many of the wounds of the Church might be healed. It was useless to cite the old argument of the independence of the head of the Church; in face of a double occupation and the Swiss troops, it would be too bitter a mockery. When Cavour spoke in these terms, Italian Unity seemed far off. Now that it was accomplished, a new and potent motive arose for settling the Roman question once for all. In May 1861 Mr. Disraeli remarked to Count Vitzthum: ”The sooner the inevitable war breaks out the better. The Italian card-house can never last. Without Rome there is no Italy. But that the French will evacuate the Eternal City is highly improbable. On this point the interests of the Conservative party coincide with those of Napoleon.” There is no better judge of the drift of political affairs than an out-and-out opponent. So Prince Metternich always insisted that the Italians did not want reforms--they wanted national existence, unity. Mr. Disraeli probably had in mind a speech delivered in the House of Commons by Lord John Russell, in which the Foreign Secretary recommended as ”the best arrangement” the Pope's retention of Rome with a small surrounding territory. There is no doubt that a large part of the moderate party in Italy would have then endorsed this recommendation. They looked upon _Roma capitale_ as what D'Azeglio called it--a cla.s.sical fantasticality. What was the good of making an old man uncomfortable, upsetting the religious susceptibilities of Europe, forfeiting the complaisance of France, in order to pitch the tent of the nation in a malarious town which was only fit to be a museum? Those who only partly comprehended Cavour's character might have expected to find him favourable to these opinions, which had a certain specious appearance of practical good sense. But Cavour saw through the husk to the kernel; he saw that ”without Rome there was no Italy.”

Without Rome Italian Unity was still only a name. Rome was the symbol, as it was the safeguard of unity. Without it, Italy would remain a conglomeration of provinces, a union, not a unit--not the great nation which Cavour had laboured to create. Even as prime minister of little Piedmont, he had spurned a parochial policy. He had no notion of a humble, semi-neutralised Italy, which should have no voice in the world. Cavour lacked the sense of poetry, of art; he hated fads, and he did not believe in the perfectibility of the human species, but his prose was the prose of the ancient Roman; it was the prose of empire.

United Italy must be a great power or nothing. Cavour was practical and prudent, as he is represented in the portrait commonly drawn of him, but there was a larger side to his character, which has been less often discerned. Nor is it to be conjectured that the direction Italy has taken, and the consequent outlay in armaments and s.h.i.+ps, would have been blamed by him, though he would have blamed the uncontrolled waste of money in all departments, which is answerable for the present state of the finances. Nor, again, would Cavour have disapproved of colonial enterprises, but he would have taken care to have the meat, not the bones: Tunis, not Ma.s.sowah. From the opening to the close of his career, the thought ”I am an Italian citizen” governed all his acts. Those who accused him of provincialism, of regionalism, mistook the tastes of the private individual for the convictions of the statesman. He preferred the flats and fogs of Leri to the scenery of the Bay of Naples; but in politics he did not acquire the feelings of an Italian: he was born with them. It has been said that he aggrandised Piedmont; it would be truer to say that he sacrificed it.

For years he drained its resources; he sent its soldiers to die in the Crimea; he exposed it again and again to the risk of invasion: he tore from it two of its fairest provinces. But there was one thing that he would not do; he would not dethrone Turin to begin a new ”regionalism”

elsewhere. At Rome alone the history of the Italian munic.i.p.alities would become the history of the Italian nation.

Cavour deliberately departed from his usual rule of letting events shape themselves when he pledged himself and the monarchy to the policy of making Rome the capital. In October 1860 he said from his place in parliament that it was a grave thing for a minister to p.r.o.nounce his opinion on the great questions of the future, but a statesman worthy of the name ought to have certain fixed points by which he steered his course. For twelve years their continual object had been national independence; henceforth it was ”to make the Eternal City, on which rested twenty-five centuries of glory, the splendid capital of the Italian kingdom.”

On March 25, 1861, Cavour seized a chance opportunity to repeat and emphasise his views. The question of Rome was, he said, the gravest ever placed before the parliament of a free people. It was not only of vital importance to Italy, but also to two hundred thousand Catholics in all parts of the globe; its solution ought to have not only a political influence, but also a moral and religious influence. In the previous year he had deemed it wise to speak with reserve, but now that this question was the princ.i.p.al subject of discussion in all civilised nations, reserve would not be prudence but pusillanimity. He proceeded to lay down as an irrefragable fact that Rome must become the capital of Italy. Only this could end the discords and differences of the various parts of the country. The position of the capital was not decided by reasons of climate or topography, or even of strategy.

The choice of the capital was determined by great moral reasons, by the voice of national sentiment. Cavour rarely introduced his own personality even into his private letters, much less into his speeches; for the last ten years of his life he seemed a living policy, hardly a man. But in this speech there is a touch of personal pathos in the pa.s.sage in which he said that, for himself, it would be a grievous day when he had to leave his native Turin with its straight, formal streets, for Rome and its splendid monuments, for which he was not artist enough to care. He called upon the future Italy, established firmly in the Eternal City, to remember the cradle of her liberties, which had made such great sacrifices for her, and was ready to make this one too!

They must go to Rome, he continued, but on two conditions--the first was, concert with France; the second, that the union of this city with Italy should not be interpreted by the great ma.s.s of Catholics as the signal for the servitude of the Church. They must go to Rome without lessening the Pope's real independence, and without extending the power of the civil authority over the spiritual. History proved that the union of civil and spiritual authority in the same hands was fatal to progress and freedom. The possession of Rome by Italy must put an end to this union, not begin a new phase of it by making the Pope a sort of head chaplain or chief almoner to the Italian state. The Pope's spiritual authority would be safer in the charge of twenty-six millions of free Italians than in that of a foreign garrison. Whether they went to Rome with or without the consent of the Pontiff, as soon as the fall of the Temporal Power was proclaimed, the complete liberty of the Church would be proclaimed also. Might they not hope that the head of the Church would accept the offered terms? Was it impossible to persuade him that the Temporal Power was no longer a guarantee of independence, and that its loss would be compensated by an amount of liberty which the Church had sought in vain for three centuries, only gathering particles of it by concordats which conceded the use of spiritual arms to temporal rulers? They were ready to promise the Holy Father that freedom which he had never obtained from those who called themselves his allies and devoted sons. They were ready to a.s.sert through every portion of the king's dominions the great principle of _a free church in a free state_.

At Cavour's invitation, parliament voted the choice of Rome as capital. From that vote there could be no going back. _Roma capitale_ could never again be put aside as the dream of revolutionists and poets. This was the last great political act of Cavour's life. Though he did not think that his life would be a long one, he thought that he should have time to finish his work himself. One day, when he had been discussing the matter with a friend, who saw nothing but difficulties, he placed the inkstand at the top of the table before which they were sitting, and said, ”I see the straight line to that point; it is this”

(he traced it with his finger). ”Supposing that halfway I encounter an impediment; I do not knock my head against it for the pleasure of breaking it, but neither do I go back. I look to the right and to the left, and not being able to follow the straight line, I make a curve.

I turn the obstacle which I cannot attack in front.”

What Cavour would have called the straight line to Rome was a friendly arrangement with the Pope. He could not have hoped for this, had he been less convinced that the true interests of the Church of Rome would be served, not injured, by the loss of a sovereignty which had become an anachronism. It is, of course, certain that many thought the contrary; Lord Palmerston believed that the religious position of the papacy would suffer, and among the advanced party the wish to weaken the spiritual influence of the priests went along with the wish to abolish their political dominion. Cavour looked upon religion as a great moralising force, and he was well a.s.sured that the only form of it acceptable to the Italian people was the Latin form of Christianity established in Rome. Efforts to spread Protestantism in Italy struck him as childish. Freed from the log of temporalities, he expected that the Church would become constantly better fitted to perform its mission.

Cavour began negotiations with Rome which, at first, he had reason to think, were favourably entertained; afterwards they were abruptly broken off. Nothing is more difficult than to penetrate through the wall of apparent unanimity which surrounds the Vatican. Sometimes, however, a breach is made, to the scandal of the faithful. Thus the biographer of Cardinal Manning revealed the fact that the late Archbishop of Westminster, who began by wis.h.i.+ng the Temporal Power to be erected into an article of faith, ended by ardently desiring some kind of tacitly accepted _modus vivendi_ with the Italian kingdom, such as that which Cavour proposed. Cardinal Manning was sorry to see the Italians being driven to atheism and socialism, and so he had the courage to change his mind. In 1861 he was in the opposite camp, but there was not wanting then a section of learned and patriotic ecclesiastics who desired peace. It was said that their efforts were rendered sterile by the great organisation which a pope once suppressed, and which owed its resurrection to a schismatic emperor and an heretical king. However that may be, the recollection of what befell Clement XIV. is still a living force in Rome.

Having failed to conclude a compact with the Vatican, Cavour turned to France. To make it easier for Napoleon to withdraw his troops, he was willing to allow the Temporal Power to stand for a short time--”for instance, for a year”--after their departure. In the arrangement subsequently arrived at under the name of the September Convention, the underlying intention was to adjourn _Roma capitale_ to the Greek kalends. Cavour had no such intention, nor would he have agreed to the transference of the capital to Florence. His plan was warmly supported by Prince Napoleon, and had he lived it is probable that it would have been carried out. He did not despair of an ultimate reconciliation with the Holy See, though he no longer thought that it would yield to persuasion alone.

While Cavour was applying himself with feverish activity to the Roman question, he was hara.s.sed by the state of the Neapolitan provinces, which showed no improvement. The liquidation of Garibaldi's dictators.h.i.+p was rendered the more difficult by the undiminished dislike of the military chiefs for the volunteers, whom they were disposed to treat less favourably than the Bourbon officers who ran away. Cavour hoped to get substantial justice done in the end, but meantime he had to bear the blame for the illiberality which he had so strenuously opposed. To have told the truth would have been to throw discredit on the army, and this he would not do. The subject was brought before the Chamber of Deputies in a debate opened by Ricasoli, who spoke in favour of the volunteers, but deprecated undue importance being a.s.signed to the work of any private citizen. The true liberator of Italy was the king under whom they had all worked; those whose sphere of action had been widest, as their utility had been greatest, should feel thankful for so precious a privilege--few men could say, ”I have served my country well, I have entirely done my duty.” Cavour, who heard Ricasoli speak for the first time, said with generous approbation, ”I have understood to-day what real eloquence is.” But it was not likely that the debate would continue on this academic plane.

Garibaldi had come to Turin in a fit of intense anger at the treatment of his old comrades, and on rising to defend them he soon lost control over himself, and launched into furious invectives against the man who had made him a foreigner in his native town, and ”who was now driving the country into civil war.” Cavour would have borne patiently anything that Garibaldi could say about Nice, but at the words ”civil war” he became violently excited. The house trembled lest a scene should take place, which would be worse for Italy than the loss of a battle. But Cavour cared too much for Italy to harm her. The sense of his first indignant protests was lost in the general uproar; afterwards, when he rose to reply to Garibaldi, he was perfectly calm; there was not a trace of resentment on his face. Such self-command would have been n.o.ble in a man whose temperament was phlegmatic; in a pa.s.sionate man like Cavour it was heroic. He said that an abyss had been created between himself and General Garibaldi. He had performed what he believed to be a duty, but it was the most cruel duty of his life. What he felt made him able to understand what Garibaldi felt.

With regard to the volunteers, had he not himself inst.i.tuted them in 1859 in the teeth of all kinds of opposition? Was it likely that he wished to treat them ill? A few days later Garibaldi wrote a letter in which he promised Cavour (in effect) plenary absolution if he would proclaim a dictators.h.i.+p. He would then be the first to obey. There was no petty spite or envy in Garibaldi; his wild thrusts had been prompted by ”a general honest thought, and common good to all.” He was ready to give his rival unlimited power.

By the king's wish, Cavour and Garibaldi met and exchanged a few courteous, if not cordial, words. Cavour ignored the scene in the Chamber; he had already said that for him it had never happened. It was their last meeting. The wear and tear of public life as it was lived by Cavour must have been enormous; it meant the concentration, not only of the mental and physical powers, but also of the nervous and emotional faculties, on a single object. He had not the relaxation of athletic or literary tastes, or the repose of a cheerful domestic life. Latterly he even gave up going to the theatre in order to dose undisturbed. A doctor warned him not to work after dinner, and to take frequent holidays in the mountains; he neglected both rules. He was inclined to despise rest. He used to say: ”When I want a thing to be done quickly, I always go to a busy man: the unoccupied man never has any time.” He, himself, did not know how to be idle; yet he was painfully conscious of overwork and brain-f.a.g. He told his friend Castelli that he was tormented by sleeplessness, but still more by certain ideas which a.s.sailed him at night, and which he could not get rid of. He got up and walked about the room, but all was useless; ”I am no longer master of my head.” When Parliament was open, he never missed a sitting, and he left nothing to subordinates in the several departments in his charge. While his mental processes remained clear and orderly, the brain, when not governed by the will, did its tasks as a tired slave does them; thus he was surrounded by a ma.s.s of confused papers and doc.u.ments, amongst which he sometimes had to seek for days for the one required at the moment.

In the last half of May he was noticed to be unwontedly irritable and impatient of contradiction. The debates bored him; on the last day that he sat in his accustomed place, he said that, when Italy was made, he would bring in a Bill to abolish all the chairs of rhetoric.

That evening he was taken ill with fever; his own physician was absent, and he dictated a treatment to the doctor who was called in, which he thought would make his illness a short one. He was bled five times in four days. On the fourth day he summoned a cabinet council to his bedside; the ministers, sharing his own opinion that he was better, allowed it to be prolonged for several hours. When they went out, an old friend came in and read death in his face. Other doctors were consulted, and the treatment was changed. It was too late. From the first the chance of recovery was small, owing to the mental tension at which Cavour had lived for months; whatever chance there was had been thrown away. He knew people when he first saw them, but then fell back into lethargy or delirium. Suddenly he said: ”The king must be told.”

When the case became evidently desperate, the family sent for a monk, named Fra Giacomo, who had promised Cavour during the cholera epidemic of 1854 that the refusal of the sacraments to Santa Rosa should not be repeated in his own extremity. An excited crowd gathered round the palace. One workman said: ”If the priests refuse, a word and we will finish them all.” But Fra Giacomo kept his promise. ”I know the Count,” he said (for many years he had dispensed his private charities); ”a clasp of the hand will be sufficient.” On the evening of the same day, June 5, the king ascended the secret staircase leading to Cavour's bedroom, which had been so often mounted before dawn by too compromising visitors. Cavour exclaimed on seeing him: ”O Maesta!” but the recognition seemed not to last. ”These Neapolitans, they must be cleansed,” he said, interrupting the sovereign's kind commonplaces of a hope that was not. Then he ordered that his secretary, Artom, should be ready to transact business with him at five next morning; ”there was no time to lose.” Cavour's biographers have repeated statements as to precepts and injunctions spoken by him in his last hours. But he was continually delirious; all that could be understood was that his wandering mind was running on what had been the life of his life, Italy. In the early dawn of the 6th, he imagined that he was making a ministerial statement from his place in the Chamber of Deputies; his voice sounded clear and distinct, but ideas, names, words, were incoherently mixed together. At four o'clock he became silent, and very soon life was p.r.o.nounced to be extinct.

One Sunday in June, a year before, Cavour spent some hours in the ancestral castle at Santena, which he so rarely visited. On that occasion he said to the village syndic: ”Here I wish my bones to rest.” The wish was respected, the king yielding to it his own desire to give his great minister a royal burial at the Superga. Cavour had the old sentiment that it was well for a man to be buried where his fathers were buried, and to die in their faith. At all times it would have been repugnant to him to pose as a sceptic, most of all on his deathbed. Once, when he was reminded in the Campo Santo at Pisa that he was standing on holy earth brought from Palestine, he said, smiling, ”Perhaps they will make a saint of me some day.” He died a Catholic, and, instead of launching its censures against Fra Giacomo, the Church might have written ”ancor questo” among its triumphs. For the rest, with minds such as Cavour's, religion is not the mystical elevation of the soul towards G.o.d, but the intellectual a.s.sent to the ruling of a superior will, and religious forms are, in substance, symbols of that a.s.sent. The essence of Cavour's theology and morality is expressed in two sayings of Epictetus. One is, that as to piety to the G.o.ds, the chief thing is to have right opinions about them; to think that they exist, and that they administer the all well and justly. The other is: For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you.