The Liberation of Italy, 1815-1870

The old figure of speech 'in the fulness of time' embodies a truth too often forgotten. History knows nothing of spontaneous generation; the chain of cause and effect is unbroken, and however modest be the scale on which an historical work is cast, the reader has a right to ask that it should give him some idea, not only of what happened, but of why it happened. A catalogue of dates and names is as meaningless as the photograph of a crowd. In the following retrospect, I have attempted to trace the principal factors that worked towards Italian unity. The Liberation of Italy is a cycle waiting to be turned into an epic.

In other words, it presents the appearance of a series of detached episodes, but the parts have an intimate connection with the whole, which, as time wears on, will constantly emerge into plainer light. Every year brings with it the issue of documents, letters, memoirs, that help to unravel the tangled threads in which this subject has been enveloped, and which have made it less generally understood than the two other great struggles of the century, the American fight for the Union, and the unification of Germany.

I cannot too strongly state my indebtedness to the voluminous literature which has grown up in Italy round the Risorgimento since its completion; yet it must not be supposed that the witness of contemporaries published from hour to hour, in every European tongue, while the events were going on, has become or will ever become valueless. I have had access to a collection of these older writings, formed with much care between the years 1850-1870, and some authorities that were wanting, I found in the library of Sir James Hudson, given by him to Count Giuseppe Martinengo Cesaresco after he left the British legation at Turin.

There are, of course, many books in which the affairs of Italy figure only incidentally, which ought to be consulted by anyone who wishes to study the inner working of the Italian movement. Of such are Lord Castlereagh's Despatches and Correspondence, and the autobiographies of Prince Metternich and Count Beust.

Perhaps I have been helped in describing the events clearly, by the fact that I am familiar with almost all the places where they occurred, from the heights of Calatafimi to the unhappy rock of Lissa. Wherever the language of the Si sounds, we tread upon the history of the Revolution that achieved what a great English orator once called, 'the noblest work ever undertaken by man.'

The supreme interest of the re-casting of Italy arises from the new spectacle of a nation made one not by conquest but by consent. Above and beyond the other causes that contributed to the conclusion must always be reckoned the gathering of an emotional wave, only comparable to the phenomena displayed by the mediæval religious revivals. Sentiment, it is said, is what makes the real historical miracles. A writer on Italian Liberation would be indeed misleading who failed to take account of the passionate longing which stirred and swayed even the most outwardly cold of those who took part in it, and nerved an entire people to heroic effort.

Salò, Lago di Garda.