Chapter 3 THE JOURNALIST

In 1846, Cavour was only known at home as the most unpopular man in Piedmont. Most people can scarcely be said to be unpopular before they have occupied any public position, but this, strangely enough, was the case with Cavour. He was simply a private person, but he was hated by all parties. His writings, which had made their mark abroad, were little known in Italy; the reviews in which they appeared could only be obtained by stealth. No one rightly knew what his views were, but every one disliked him.

Solaro de la Margherita, the retrograde prime minister, was detested by the liberals, but he had a strong following among the old Savoyard nobility; Lorenzo Valerio, the radical manufacturer, was harassed by those in power, but he was adored by the people; Cavour was in worse odour with both parties than these two men were with either. Under the porticoes of Turin petty private talk took the place of anything like public discussion. "By good fortune," as the prime minister put it, "the press was not free in Piedmont;" quite the reverse. Gossip, especially spiteful gossip, reigned supreme. Gossip in both spheres of society was all against Cavour. What might be called the Court party (though whether the king belonged to it or it to the king was not clear), with the tenacious memory of small coteries, still recollected Cavour as the self-willed student of the Military Academy. Charles Albert himself made an occasional polite inquiry of the Marquis as to his son's travels and his visits to prisons and hospitals, but, unless report erred, he was speaking of him to others as the most dangerous man in his kingdom. The degree to which Cavour was hated by the conservatives is shown by one small fact: he was treasurer of an Infant Asylum, but it was thought necessary privately to ask him to retire for the good of the charity, his connection with which set all the higher society against it. The case with the radicals was no better. He belonged to an agricultural association in which Valerio was a leading spirit; one day he asked leave to speak, upon which almost all the members present left the building. On this side, no doubt part of the antipathy arose from the popular feeling against Cavour's father, who still occupied the invidious and ill-defined office of Vicario. No particular ferocity was laid at his door, but he was supposed to serve up all the private affairs of the good Turinese to the king, and if any one got into trouble he was thought to be the cause. When the liberals triumphed, the first thing they did was to oblige him to resign. Then Cavour's elder brother, though not retrograde on economic subjects, was a conservative of the old school in politics. In later days Gustavo always voted against Camillo. In politics the brothers were in admirable agreement to differ; in fact, after the first trifling jars, they dwelt to the end in unruffled harmony in the family palace, Via dell' Arcivescovado. At the time when Gustavo was much better known at Turin than Camillo the suspicious radical could not persuade himself that one brother was not as much of an aristocrat as the other. When Mr. Cobden was cordially received by both Marquis and Count, a would-be wit exclaimed, "There goes Free-trade in the charge of Monopoly," which was understood to refer to the false accusation that the Cavours had stored up a quantity of grain in that year of scarcity, 1847, in order to sell it dear, the truth being simply that the improved cultivation introduced at Leri had secured fair crops in a bad season.

The festivities in honour of the English Free-trader were promoted all over Italy by Italians who were soon to become famous. The fact that Cobden was an Englishman, even more than the outwardly harmless object of his campaign, deterred the different governments from interfering with him. Cavour proposed the health of the guest of the evening at the Cobden banquet at Turin, but almost immediately after, he retired to Leri, as he did not wish it to appear that he meant to embark on public life while the existing political dead-lock lasted. There was only room for conspirators or for those who extended toleration to the régime in force. It is doubtful if anything would have driven Cavour to conspiracy against his own king, and he would have considered it a personal disgrace to be mixed up with the men then in power. He thought, therefore, that he could best serve his country by keeping himself in reserve. He realised the futility of small concessions, and the childishness of agitating to obtain them. He was the only strong royalist who understood how far reform must go when it once began-farther towards democracy than his own sympathies would have carried him. If you want to use a mill-stream you must let it flow.

The situation in Piedmont was briefly this: Charles Albert's heart was with the growing cry for independence, but he wished for independence without liberty. This was the "secret of the king" which has been sought for in all kinds of recondite suppositions: this was the key to his apparently vacillating and inconsistent character. Yet he revealed it himself in some words spoken to Roberto d'Azeglio, the elder brother of Massimo. "Marquis d'Azeglio," he said, "I desire as much as you do the enfranchisement of Italy, and it is for that reason, remember well, that I will never give a constitution to my people." While his government was a priestly despotism, he employed his leisure in translating the sublime appeals to national sentiment in the history of the Maccabees, of which, by a curious coincidence, Mazzini once said that it seemed written for Italians. Charles Albert made the mistake of forgetting the age in which he lived. His ancestors fought the stranger without troubling themselves about representative government-why should not he? But his ancestors represented in their own persons the nerve and sinew of the State, its most adventurous spirit, its strongest manhood, whereas Charles Albert represented only the party of reaction which was with him in his absolutism but not in his patriotism. He was accused of having changed sides, but, even allowing his complicity in the movement of 1821 to have been greater than he admitted, it is plain that the one thing which drew him into that movement was its championship of Italian independence. Unlike the Neapolitan revolutionists who disclaimed adventures for the freeing of Italy, at least till they had made sure of their own freedom, the liberals of Piedmont rose with the avowed purpose of rushing into an immediate war with Austria. A madder scheme was never devised, but the madness of one day is often the wisdom of the next. In politics really disinterested acts bear fruit, whatever be their consequences to individuals.

The question which agitated all minds in 1847 was whether or not Charles Albert could be gained to the liberal cause. Many despaired, for by many even his Italian ambition was denied. Cavour had no favourable opinion of the king, but it was one of his theories that erroneous ideas always yield in the end to facts. He believed that Charles Albert's support could be secured if he were fully persuaded that the interests of his dynasty were not imperilled. He was not afraid, as others were, that even after the first surrender the wavering mind of the king would make retrogression probable; he understood that, if reforms were more difficult to obtain in Piedmont than elsewhere, they would be more durable when obtained. At last a concession of real value was wrung from the king: the censure was revoked. Cavour saw that the press, which till then had been a cipher, would instantly become of vast importance. He left his retirement to found a newspaper, to which he gave the name by which the Italian movement will be known in history-Il Risorgimento. He was not a born journalist, but he set himself with his usual determination to learn the art. In after times he said that the experience gained in a newspaper office was almost as profitable to him as the knowledge of mathematics. Count Cesare Balbo was asked by Cavour to write the prospectus of the new journal, in which its aims were described as Independence, union between the princes and people, and reforms. Cavour's name appeared as acting and responsible editor.

Balbo's work, Le Speranze d'Italia, had lately created an impression, only second to that made by the Primato of Gioberti. Practical men like Cavour preferred the simple programme which Balbo put forward-the liberation of Italy from foreign yoke before all things-to Gioberti's mystical outpourings, much as they pleased the general. Gioberti, once a follower of Mazzini, and afterwards a priest, imagined a United Italy, with the Pope at its head, which, to unthinking souls, seemed to be on the road to miraculous realisation when the amiable and popular Cardinal Mastai Feretti was invested with the tiara. Cavour never had any hope in the Papacy as a political institution.

The Genoese, impatient of the extreme slowness with which reforms were meted out, proposed to send a deputation with a petition for a civic guard, and the expulsion of the Jesuits, to whom the delay was attributed, and who were regarded as the worst enemies of the liberal Pope. The principal editors, with other influential citizens of Turin, met at the H?tel d'Europe to consider how the deputation should be received, and if their demands were to be supported. The list of the journalists present comprises the best names in the country; it would be difficult to find more distinguished or disinterested pressmen than those who were then writing for the Piedmontese newspapers. Valerio was there to represent his new journal, Concordia, in which he carried on war to the knife with Cavour. His high personal character, as well as his talents, made him no inconsiderable opponent. It was at this meeting that Cavour first entirely revealed himself. He showed that faith in the prudence of daring which was the keynote to his great strokes of policy. The demands of the Genoese, he said, were not too large, but too small. They hit wide of the mark, and the second of them was idle, because the king, while he remained an absolute prince, was certain not to consent to it. The government was now neither one thing nor the other; it had lost the authority of an autocracy, and had not gained that of a régime based on the popular will. The situation was intolerable and dangerous; what was wanted was not this or that reform, but a constitution.

Constitutions seem tame to us now, but to speak of a constitution at Turin on January 18, 1848, was almost as audacious as it would be to speak of it at St. Petersburg at the present time. Europe stood at the brink of a precipice, but knew it not. The news had only just spread of the first symptom of revolution-the rising in Sicily. Cavour's speech was a moral bomb-shell. Most politicians begin by asking for more or less than the measure which finally contents them; those who cried for a republic have been known to put up with a limited monarchy; those who preached the most moderate reforms, at a later stage have danced round trees of liberty. Cavour asked at once for what he wanted and all that he wanted as far as the internal organisation of the State was concerned. From first to last he believed that a constitutional monarchy was the only form of government which, in a country like Italy, could combine freedom with order. Under no narrower system would he accept office, and when in office nothing could make him untrue to his constitutional faith; "no state of siege" was the axiom of his political life.

How his proposal was received shows the difficulties with which he had to contend from the outset. The more moderate members of the meeting thought that he had taken leave of his senses. This was natural. Less natural was the tooth and nail opposition of Valerio, who declared that a constitution much exceeded the desires of the people, and that a petition for it would only frighten the king. He carried all the radicals with him except Brofferio, an honest patriot and the writer of charming poems in the Piedmontese dialect, which gave him a great popularity. Brofferio was an ultra-democrat, but he was no party man, and he had the courage to walk over to the unpopular editor of the Risorgimento with the remark, "I shall always be with those who ask the most." Valerio made no secret among his private friends of the real reasons of his conduct. What was the good of wasting efforts on some sort of English constitution, perhaps with a House of Lords and other such abominations? Was it likely that anything worth having would be excogitated by Milord Camillo, the greatest reactionary in the kingdom, the sworn foe of revolution, "un Anglomane pur sang?" A constitution could only check the revolution and stifle the legitimate aspirations of the people. The nickname of "Milord Camillo" or "Milord Risorgimento" was in everyone's mouth when speaking of Cavour.

A short time sufficed to show not only the expediency but the necessity of granting a constitution, and that at once. Events never moved so fast as in the first two months of 1848. The throne of Louis Philippe was tottering, and, with the exception of the Duke of Modena, the princelings of Italy snatched the plank of safety of a statute with the alacrity of drowning men. In this crisis Charles Albert thought of abdication. Besides the known causes of his hesitancy, there was one then unknown: the formal engagement, invented by Metternich and forced upon him by his uncle Charles Felix, to govern the country as he found it governed. He called the members of the royal family together and informed them that if there must be a constitution there must, but the decree which bestowed it would be signed by his son. The queen and the Duchess of Savoy, who were both extremely afraid of him, sat in silence; the handsome Duke of Genoa tried to prove that constitutions were not such dreadful things; Victor Emmanuel opposed his intention of abdicating in resolute terms. Then he summoned a high ecclesiastic, who succeeded in convincing him that it would be a greater sin to abandon his people in their need than to break a promise he could no longer maintain. After mortifying the flesh with fasts and vigils, he yielded, and the famous decree bore the signature "C. Alberto" after all,-not written indeed in the king's usually beautiful character, but betraying rather a trembling hand, which nevertheless registered a great because a permanent fact. This was not the prelude to perjury and expulsion. Around the Sardinian statute were united the scattered limbs of Italy, and after fifty years Charles Albert's grandson commemorated its promulgation at the Capitol.

Not a man in the crowd at Turin dared to anticipate such a result: yet their joy was frantic. Fifty thousand people, arranged in guilds, defiled before the king, who sat like a statue on his bay horse, upright and impassible. Cavour walked in the company of journalists, and all those who had opposed him a few weeks before were there too, with Valerio at their head. They sang their strophe of Mameli's hymn, "Fratelli d'Italia," very badly. Cavour whispered to his neighbour, "We are so many dogs!"

That neighbour, a Milanese named Giuseppe Torelli, has left an interesting description of Cavour's appearance as it was then. He was fresh-coloured, and his blue eyes had not yet lost their brightness, but they were so changeful in expression that it was difficult to fix their distinctive quality. Though rather stout he was not ungainly, as he tended to become later. He stooped a little, and two narrow lines were visible on either side of a mouth, cold and uneffusive; but these lines, by their trembling or contraction, showed the play of inward emotion which the rest of the face concealed. In after days people used to watch them in order to guess his state of mind. It was his large and solid forehead that chiefly gave the idea of power which every one who saw him carried away, despite of the want of dignity in his person and of strongly-marked features in his face. His manners were simple, but distinguished by an unmistakably aristocratic ease and courtesy. He spoke generally low and without emphasis, and always appeared to pay great attention to what was said to him, even by the least important person.

Nothing, on the face of it, could seem more extraordinary than the exclusion of Cavour from office in the momentous year of 1848. But he had no popular party at his back whose cry could overrule the disinclination which the king certainly felt towards making him his Minister. Moreover, his abilities, though now generally recognised, contributed to keeping him in the background: it was felt instinctively that if he got the reins there would be only one driver. He was known to be indifferent to criticism, and while he listened patiently to advice, he rarely took it. He had mortally offended the conservatives by the liberalism of his means, and the liberals by the conservatism of his ends. Count Balbo, on assuming the office of the first Prime Minister under the Statute, not only retired from the directing council of the Risorgimento, but went out of his way to disavow the policy supported in it by Cavour. "The little rascal," he was heard to say, "will end by ruining the splendid edifice raised by the wisdom and moderation of so many estimable men!" The splendid edifice was on the verge of being nearly ruined, but by timidity-which has lost a score of thrones,-not by audacity. The new Cabinet entered upon their duties on March 16. Two days later occurred an event utterly unforeseen-the rising of Milan against the Austrians. It took them unprepared. They had talked so much about war that perhaps they thought it would happen in the next century. When the "now or never" sounded, which does sound sooner or later in all human affairs, they hesitated or suffered the king to hesitate, which came to the same thing. That Charles Albert stood for one instant in doubt when the hour was come desired by him all his life, as he had often stated, and there is no reason to think untruly, is possibly the most serious stain on his memory. There are moments when to reflect is criminal: a man has no right to reflect when his mother is in a burning house. The reflections which held Charles Albert back were two. He was afraid that the Milan revolution would breed a republic, and he was afraid of England and of Russia. England, which during the previous autumn had sent Lord Minto to urge upon the Italian princes a line of policy rightly described by Prince Metternich as inevitably leading to an attack on Austria, now applied the whole force of her diplomacy to stop the ball she had herself set running. The spectacle of Lord Palmerston trying to save or serve Austria, which he detested, in obedience to the atavistic tendencies of the Foreign Office, is a lesson in history. For English politicians of whatever party or private sentiments, Austria was still what Lord Castlereagh called her: "The great hinge on which the fate of Europe must ultimately depend." Sir Ralph Abercromby assured the king that "the least act of aggression" would place his throne in jeopardy. His throne was already in jeopardy, but from the contrary reason. Each minute that passed while the Milanese were fighting their death struggle and he stood inactive threatened to deprive him and his house of that power of progress on which not only their fortune but their existence depended.

The news from Milan reached Turin on March 19; on the 23rd, the last of the Milan days, king and ministry were still hesitating. On that day Cavour printed in the Risorgimento the most impassioned piece of writing that ever came from his pen. The conservative, the reactionary, once more cried aloud that audacity was prudence, temerity wisdom. The supreme hour of the Savoy dynasty had struck, the hour of strong resolves, on which hangs the fate of empires, the destinies of peoples. Hesitation, doubt, delay, were no more possible: they could only prove fatal. "We, men of calm minds, accustomed to listen more to the dictates of reason than to the impulses of the heart, after deliberately weighing each word we utter, are bound in conscience to declare that only one path is open to the nation, the government, the king: war, immediate war!" It was said, he continued, that Russia and England were on the point of uniting against Italy. In common times such an argument would be conclusive, not now. When Milan was struggling for life, was perhaps getting worsted, at all costs they were bound to fly to the rescue. Duty, brotherhood, policy, commanded it. Woe unto them if they crossed the frontier to find that Milan had fallen.

Russia, through her ambassador, intimated that she would regard the crossing of the Ticino as a casus belli. The threat made less impression at Turin than the warnings of Sir Ralph Abercromby; it was the possibility of English intervention, therefore, that Cavour went on to examine. The Anglomane "Milord Risorgimento" was less surprised at the current of English official thought than were his radical critics, but would any English minister, he asked, enter on a European war to prevent the liberation of Italy, which was an object sacred in the eyes of the mass of the English people? He believed it to be impossible, but were it so, so be it! England would have against her a mighty coalition, not of princes, as in former days, but of peoples, in the old world and in the new. Victory in such a matricidal strife would be as fatal to the first-born of liberty as defeat.

Thus Cavour was prepared to fight Austria, Russia, and England. The division of parties at that time was in its essence the division of those who were willing to accept a republican solution and those who were not. It does not follow that all the liberals wished for a republic, but they would all have taken office under it. Of this there is little doubt. Cavour never would have become a republican any more than an absolutist minister. But he saw what the other conservatives failed to see, that the dynasty of Savoy could only live if it led.

On March 22, Charles Albert was still assuring the Austrian Ambassador that his intentions were pacific. Next day Cavour's article appeared, and in the evening the king decided for instant war. Only two of the ministers assented at once; the others gave in after a long discussion. War was declared on the 25th. Time lost cannot be recalled; the happy moment had been let go by; Piedmont went not to Lombardy engaged in a dangerous struggle, but to Lombardy victorious. Cavillers said that the king had come to eat the fruits others had gathered. Confidence in the ultimate result reached the point of madness, but with revolution stalking through the streets of Vienna the Austrian eagle seemed to have lost its talons. In May 1848, in Austria itself, Lombardy was looked upon as completely lost, and with it the Southern Tyrol as far as Meran, for no one at that period thought of separating this Italian district from Italy; the most sanguine Austrians only hoped to save Venetia. Radetsky alone expected to save all, because he knew what he could do, and he had judged Sardinian generalship correctly. Charles Albert's staff seemed to have but one idea-to reverse the tactics which had led the first Napoleon to victory on the same ground.

The brightest gleam of success which shone on the king of Sardinia's arms was at Goito, in the battle of May 30. It was on that occasion that Cavour's nephew, Augusto di Cavour, was killed. The enfant terrible grew up to be a young man of singular promise, on whom Cavour had fixed all his hopes for the future of his name and house. His uncle's last letter of encouragement to do his duty was found on Augusto's body. The blow unnerved Cavour; he was found lying prostrate in an agony of speechless grief. Through his life he kept the blood-stained uniform in which the young officer received his death-wound in a glass case in his bedroom, a piece of enduring sentiment which shows how unlike Cavour was the coldly calculating egotist whose portrait has passed for his.

The story of the years of revolution in Italy is a story of great things and small, like most human records; but, when all is said, the great predominate, for no blunders could efface the readiness for self-sacrifice displayed by the whole people. The experience of these years was bitter, but possibly necessary. It destroyed illusions. It showed, for instance, that in the nineteenth century a free and independent Italy under the hegemony of the Pope belonged to political mythology. Here was a Pope who was, at heart, patriotic, but who drew back at the crucial moment, precisely as Mazzini (almost alone) had predicted. The first threat of a schism was enough to make him wear dust and ashes for his patriotism. The Bourbons of Naples were ascertained to have learnt nothing and unlearnt nothing; perfidy alone could be expected from them. It was proved that the princes of the other states, Piedmont excepted, must gravitate towards Austria even if they did not wish it. All this was useful, if dearly bought, knowledge.

At the first general elections in Piedmont, Cavour failed to obtain a seat. He told the electors in his address that he had always desired Italia unita e libera, and if "united" did not yet imply "under one king," the phrase was still significant. Two months later he was elected in four divisions; probably the death of his nephew in the interim on the field of battle modified, for the time, his unpopularity. He took his seat for the first college of Turin. He did not make an immediate impression; his short stature, and still more the imperfect accent with which he spoke Italian, were not in his favour. French was allowed in the Sardinian Chamber, but Cavour never opened his lips in it in Parliament. By degrees his speeches became marvels of close reasoning, and they even soared, sometimes, when he was deeply moved, into a kind of eloquence superior to that of rhetoric, but the accent was never such as would satisfy a fastidious ear. The day came, however, when people hung with too much anxiety on the least of his utterances for any one to notice this defect. Cavour sat on the Right, and from the first he horrified his colleagues on the same benches by the enunciation of views which to them were rank heresies. They existed in a state of perpetual uneasiness as to what he might say or do next.

Cavour was not re-elected when Parliament was dissolved in January 1849; he was therefore not in the Chamber during the debates which preceded and followed the last desperate throw of Novara. A letter written by him six days after the battle shows what he thought of those events. The Conservative party, he says, which represented the great majority in the country, had been badly supported by it (an assertion as true now as then). The king threw himself into the arms of demagogues who thought that freedom and independence were to be won by phrases and proclamations. The army had been disheartened, the best officers kept inactive; twelve months' sacrifices of men and money placed them in a worse condition than before the Milan revolution. Self-love might, he concluded, warp his judgment, but he had the intimate conviction that, if he had held the reins of power, he could have saved the country without any effort of genius, and planted the Italian flag on the Styrian Alps. But his friends joined with his foes to keep him out of power, and he had passed his time in deploring faults which it would have been very easy to avoid.

Remembering what Cavour afterwards accomplished, these are words which should not be set lightly aside. Yet it is possible that the complete disaster into which Charles Albert rushed at Novara was the only thing to save the country and to lay the foundations of Italian unity. The king was more eager for war than the most unthinking democrat. Reviled by all parties, he sought the great conciliator, death. "The Italians will never trust me," he exclaimed. "My son, Victor, will be king of Italy, not I." When the death he would have chosen was denied him, he went away, a crownless exile. He could do no more.

It was necessary, as Charles Albert had seen, that the king who was to carry out the destinies of Italy should be trusted. Victor Emmanuel came to the throne with few advantages; he was unpopular, his private friends were said to be reactionaries, his brusque manners offended most people. He had practically no advisers in these critical moments, but the moral courage with which he refused the Austrian offers of lenient terms if he would repudiate the Statute and his father's word, won for him the nation's trust, which he never lost. Cavour, with all his genius, could not have made the kingdom of Italy if the Italians had doubted their king.