Priests look backward, not forward. They think that there were once men better and wiser than those who now live, therefore priests distrust the living and insist that we shall be governed by the dead. I believe this is an error, and hence I set myself against the Church and insist that men shall have the right to work out their lives in their own way, always allowing to others the right to work out their lives in their own way, too. ---Garibaldi
The writer who tells the simple facts in the life of Garibaldi lays himself open to the charge of evolving melodrama, wild and riotous.
Garibaldi's personal friends and admirers always referred to him in such words as these: patriot, savior, father-noble, generous, pure- hearted, unselfish, devoted, philanthropic.
They transferred the infallibility of Pope Pius the Ninth to his enemy, Garibaldi.
The Pope was not much given to rhetorical lyddite, so when the name of Garibaldi was mentioned he simply stopped his ears and hissed. He acknowledged that in all the bright lexicon of words there was not a symbol strong enough to express his contempt for Joseph Garibaldi.
The actual fact was that Pio Nono, for whom Garibaldi named his favorite donkey, had very much in common with Garibaldi. Had they met as strangers on sea or plain, they would have delighted in each other's society. They were both kind, courteous, considerate, highly intelligent men. They were lovers of their kind.
Garibaldi's passion was to benefit men by giving them freedom. The Pope's prayer was to benefit men by giving them religion.
But freedom without responsibility leads to license, and license unrestrained means slavery, and religion not safeguarded by freedom is superstition; and what is superstition but slavery?
Before Garibaldi was twenty he began to read Mazzini, whom Margaret Fuller called the Emerson of Italy--and Margaret Fuller knew both Emerson and Mazzini intimately and well. She lived for one and died for the other.
Mazzini, the delicate, the esthetic, the spiritual, the subtle, was a candle whose beams burned bright for all Italy. His dream of a free and united Italy caught Garibaldi, the rugged, daring son of the sea, and fired his heart. Mazzini was a thinker; Garibaldi a fighter.
Italy had twice been queen of the world: first, when Julius Caesar ushered in an age of light; and second, when Columbus, child of Genoa, the same city that mothered Mazzini, sailed the seas. The first Italian Renaissance we call the Age of Augustus; the second, the Age of Michelangelo.
The third great tidal wave of reason, Garibaldi said, would live as the Age of Mazzini.
But there be those in Italy now, wise and influential, who call it the Age of Garibaldi.
Without Mazzini, there would have been no Garibaldi. Italy would today probably be where she was when these young men conceived their patriotic dream: the Pope supreme temporal ruler of Rome, and the rest of Italy divided up into a dozen cringing provinces, each presided over by a princeling, who, on favor of some patron, Austria, Germany or France, the favor duly viseed by the Pope, was allowed to call himself king. The final authority of the Pope was undisputed in things both temporal and spiritual, and he who questioned or expressed his doubts was guilty of two crimes: heresy and treason, the two artificial papier-mache offenses which made the Dark Ages very dark.
The hope of Mazzini was to make Italy a republic. But the time was not yet ripe. They ousted the Pope, but Fate compromised with Destiny, and Victor Emmanuel, a republican monarchist from Sicily, was made king in name, but with a safety-brake in way of a ministry that could annul his edicts.
And so Mazzini and Garibaldi, each individually a failure, won-- although success came not in the way they expected, nor was it their heart's desire.
That bold and magnificent equestrian statue of Garibaldi crowns the heights of Rome, looking down upon the Eternal City; the dust of Mazzini rests in a village churchyard; but both live in the hearts of humanity as men who gave their lives to make men free.
* * * * *
Garibaldi was born in the city of Nice in Eighteen Hundred Seven, being one of the advance-guard of a brigade of genius, for great men come in groups. His parents were poor, and being well under the heel of the priest, were only fairly honest. The father was a waterman who plied the Riviera in a leaky schooner--poling, rowing, or sailing, as Providence provided. Once the good man was returning home after a cruise where ill luck was at the helm. The priest had blessed him when he started, and would be on hand when he came back to receive his share of the loot, for business was then, and is yet, in Italy, a kind of legalized freebooting. Then it was that the honest fisherman lapsed and lifted the nets of another between the dawn and the day.
The son, then only twelve years of age, scorned the act and declared he would steal a ship or nothing. The boy was duly punished in the interests of piety and also to relieve the pent-up emotions of the parents.
The heroic spirit of Garibaldi was not a legacy from either his father or his mother. However, they dowered him with health and great bodily strength, and this physical superiority had much, no doubt, to do in shaping his life's course.
Men fall victims to their facility. Musicians, for instance, often become intoxicated by their own sweet sounds, and are lured on to unseemliness, making much discord in life's symphony.
The late-lamented Brann had a felicity and a facility in the use of words that finally cost him his life. Men with pistol facility and word felicity die by the pistol. The brain of the prizefighter does not convolve: he relies more on his "jabs" than on thoughts that burn --and those who live by the hammer die by the hammer.
There is no doubt that Garibaldi's romantic career in a lifelong fight for freedom was born of a liking for the fray, to express it bluntly, with freedom as a convenient excuse. This sounds unkind, but it is not. Garibaldi loved peace so much that he was willing to fight for it any day.
While yet a youth he became captain of his father's craft, and Garibaldi Senior took the wheel and obeyed orders.
Then we hear that Garibaldi was an expert swimmer, a rather unusual accomplishment for a sailor. He was always on the lookout for an opportunity to dive overboard, disrobing in the air, and rescuing the perishing. There is even a legend of his having saved a washer-woman from drowning when he was but eight years old. A captious critic has remarked that probably the old lady fell into her washtub. Thereupon, a kinsman of the great man comes forward to give the facts, which are that the woman was doing laundry-work by the riverside, and stooping over, fell into the damp and was rescued by the boy. But it also seems on the word of Garibaldi himself that the woman would not have fallen in had not the boy suddenly appeared behind her playing bear, thus bringing about the catastrophe which he averted.
When Garibaldi was twenty-one he was in command of a small schooner bound for the Black Sea on a trading expedition. The intent of the expedition was twofold: to sell the merchandise which the ship carried, and also if possible to capture certain bands of pirates that were infesting the dank, dark waters. It is perhaps quite needless to say that pirates are often men who are engaged in the laudable undertaking of protecting the shipping from pirates, just as admission to the bar is a sort of commercial letter of marque and reprisal.
That Garibaldi was a pirate, only his enemies said. But anyway, Garibaldi and a band of twenty boys, all younger than himself, sailed away to victory or to death.
It proved to be neither; for they were captured by pirates, who took their arms, provisions, merchandise, and even their compasses and clothing, leaving only their ship and the sky overhead and the water beneath.
Garibaldi took the capture as coolly as did Caesar under similar conditions, and talked poetry and philosophy with the pirates, and the gentlemen gave back a few provisions, with apologies and regrets for having troubled so fine a gentleman.
The next day, our friends, innocent of clothing, fell in with an English ship that ministered to their wants. Captain Taylor of the English ship was so impressed with the young captain that he wrote home about him, describing his courtesy, intelligence, and poetic fervor, all made manifest as Garibaldi stood on the deck of his schooner clad only in a doormat.
At this time Garibaldi had read the history of his country; in imagination he saw the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. And better still, he had figured out in his own mind why sleep and death, and moth and dust, and rust and ruin had settled down upon the race, and mankind had endured a thousand years of theological nightmare.
He knew that save in freedom alone does the intellect flower and blossom; that joy is the legal tender of the soul; that only through liberty can men progress and grow; and that great and beautiful work can be done only by a free and happy people.
The torch that fired his intellect was Mazzini, who was publishing a little periodical of protest that voiced what its editor felt, who wrote right out of his heart, and whose cry was, "Freedom and United Italy--an Italy free from the rule of the Pope."
Mazzini, the son of a doctor, expressed what many thought and felt, but dare not say. He had stated in no mincing phrase that the rule of the priest meant mental subjugation and a gradual, creeping, insidious return of the Dark Ages. He printed it on slips of paper and passed them out upon the street when but a youth in the High School.
Thereupon, Mazzini had been duly cautioned, and on repeating his offense his little folder of ideas was suppressed, and the precious fonts and presses thrown into the sea with the street-sweepings of the town.
The next month Mazzini's magazine appeared just the same, printed by night at the office of a friend, and then its author was safely placed behind prison-bars. The authorities dare not kill him--besides, what is the use?--but they proposed to teach him a wholesome lesson and break his fiery spirit if possible, this being the policy that had continued from the time of Socrates. To hold truth secure by putting down the man of initiation--the man of insight who could see a better condition--all who were filled with a discontent that challenged the perfection of the present order--this to the many meant safety; the men in power simply taking their cue from the rabble--"Away with him!"
And Garibaldi hearing of the trouble that had come to Mazzini, whom he admired but had not yet met, hastened home and threw himself into the cause. He got together a little band of foolish youths, and planned a revolution.
He enlisted as a sailor on board the "Eurydice," a government craft, intending to revolt, steal the ship and go to the rescue of Mazzini. But about this time Mazzini was released with a warning, it being thought that a dreamy, penniless lawyer's clerk could not make much trouble anyway.
Mazzini and Garibaldi were totally different in their methods and habits of thought. Garibaldi reverenced Mazzini and called him master, and Mazzini admired the daring of Garibaldi, and no doubt was influenced and encouraged by him to continue sending out his little leaflets of liberty, which were secretly printed and circulated, read and reread, and passed along. Examined by us now, they seem innocent indeed, as harmless as pages lifted from Emerson's essay on "Nature," but actually they were the dynamite that was to rend the rocks of Italy's Gibraltar of orthodoxy.
Matters were now culminating fast. Mazzini and Garibaldi were organizing secret bands of "Young Italy." The arrangement was to secure and hold a certain point on the Swiss frontier as headquarters, and from there make open war upon Austria and the Pope. Like John Brown, these zealous revolutionaries felt sure that, at the call to arms, the subjugated provinces would cast off their shackles and join hands with the liberators. They did not realize that slavery is a condition of mind, and that as a class slaves are quite happy in their serfdom, being as unaware of their true condition as are those caught in the coils of superstition. No one sees the coils but the free man on the outside. The beauty of freedom's fight is that it frees the fighter.
The secret societies known as "Young Italy" failed in their secrecy. No secrets can be kept except for a day. Spies were duly initiated, and the report of the daily doings was handed in to the Pope and his council. To capture Garibaldi and Mazzini and hang them would have been easy; but to do this might bring about the very storm so much feared. So the word was passed that the conspirators were to be arrested; a price was placed upon their heads, and an opportunity was given them to escape.
Mazzini traveled leisurely through France, which offered him safe passage to London. Garibaldi remained on the border, and with a little band engaged in joyous guerrilla warfare, hoping for a general revolt. The time was not yet ripe, and nothing he could then do would gather up the scattered forces of freedom and crystallize them.
Fighting was then going on in South America--when are they not fighting in South America?--and Garibaldi thought he saw an opportunity to strike a blow for freedom, and so he sailed away for the equator, filled with a passion for freedom, desiring only to give himself for the benefit of humanity. Yet his heart was with "Young Italy," and that the time would come when he would return and break the fetters that the Pope had forged for the minds of men, he always knew and prophesied. Such was the firm purpose and unwavering faith of Joseph Garibaldi.
* * * * *
Arriving in South America, Garibaldi took time to investigate conditions. Then he offered his services to Don Gonzales, who had set up a republic on a side street, and was fighting the power of the Emperor of Brazil.
Don Gonzales was delighted with Garibaldi--Garibaldi won every one he desired to win. He had the rare quality which we call "personal charm."
Garibaldi was fitted out with a ship which he manned with sixteen of his countrymen--fighters of his own selection, men of his own intrepid spirit. This crew constituted the navy of the new republic, and Garibaldi was given the title, "Secretary of the Navy." He called his ship the "Mazzini," writing to the prophet and patriot in London for his blessing; but without waiting for it sailed away to victory. The first bout with the enemy secured them a prize in the way of a ship four times the size of their own, well provisioned and carrying one hundred men. Garibaldi at once scuttled his own craft, ran up his flag on board the prize, and calling all hands on deck solemnly christened her the "Mazzini," in loving token of the ship just sent to Davy Jones' locker. Then the question arose, What should be done with the prisoners?
Garibaldi gave them their choice of being sent ashore in safety, with a week's provisions and their side-arms, or re-enlisting under his own glorious banner. The men without parley, one and all cried, "We are yours to do with as you will!" Emerson says, "The work of eloquence is to change the opinions of a lifetime in twenty minutes." This being true, Garibaldi must have been eloquent, and eloquence is personality. The Corsican, in his Little Corporal's uniform, walked out before the legions sent to capture him, and before he had uttered a word, they cried, "Command us!" and threw down their arms.
The power of Garibaldi over men was superb. He won through the devotion of his soldiers. When he struck he hit quick and hard, and then he made his victory secure by magnanimity toward the defeated. It was his policy never to put prisoners in irons, or disgrace or humiliate them. He banished hate from their hearts by saying: "You are brave fighters! You are after my own heart. I need you!"
Julius Caesar had a deal of this same temperament, and if the sober, serious, spiritual and priestly quality of Mazzini could have been fused with the fighting spirit of Garibaldi we would have had the Julian soul once more with us. Possibly Rome is not yet dead, Shakespeare to the contrary notwithstanding.
* * * * *
Garibaldi and his gallant crew on board the "Mazzini" kept the enemy speculating. On one occasion when pursued, Garibaldi ran his ship up a narrow bay, one of the winding mouths of the Amazon. The two ships in pursuit were sure they had him in a trap and followed fast, intending to drive him so far inland that when the tide turned he would be held fast on the rocks, and then they could land a force, as they had five times as many men as he, and shoot his ship full of holes at their leisure from the shore. But Garibaldi was a sailor, and he had the true pilot's intuition for finding the channel. Suddenly, as the pursuing ships rounded a bend, from the height of a commanding precipice a deadly stream of shot and shell was poured down through the defenseless decks. And the gunners on the ships could not elevate their cannon to get the range. Garibaldi had taken his best cannon from his ship and masked this battery on shore. For two months he had worked to lure the enemy to their ruin. The scheme worked.
On shore he was equally fertile in resource, and his plan of getting his troops in the neighborhood of the enemy, and lighting long lines of campfires so as to mislead as to the number of his troops, was with him a common form of strategy. Then lo! as his campfires burned brightly, he would circle the foe and stampede them by simultaneous attacks on both flanks, making a mob of what twenty minutes before was an army.
He also had a way of retreating before the enemy, and at last making a seemingly stubborn resistance on some friendly ridge or hilltop. The enemy would then pause, re-form and charge. But a thousand yards before the hilltop would be reached, Garibaldi's men, secreted in sunken roadways or the dry beds of waterways, would rise like sprouting dragons' teeth and scatter their rain of death. His men wore bright red shirts so as to protect themselves from the danger of being shot by their own comrades. Later, the appearance of the red shirt struck terror to the foe. In Italy now, when you see a red-shirted brigade, do not imagine it is a volunteer fire-company out for a holiday--it is merely a company of militia called "The Garibaldians."
Garibaldi became a sort of superstition in South America. His appearance on land or sea, at seemingly the same time, his sudden sallies and miraculous disappearances, carried out the idea that he was the Devil incarnate. The armies sent to capture him came home with the report, "We would have killed or captured him, but alas, God ordained that he should not be found!"
Fighting along the shore with simply a few ships, by co-operating with the land forces, and having that scouted and maligned thing, "horse marines," at his quick command, he wore the enemy to a frazzle. His tactics were those of Quintus Fabius, who supplied us our word "Fabian"--opportunist. Fabius fought the combined hosts of Hannibal for ten years, as one to five, and was never captured and never defeated. When peace was declared he dictated his own terms, and was given royal honors when he rode through the streets of Rome at the head of his tattered troops, just as Christian DeWet, the valiant Boer, was tendered an ovation when he visited London, which he had first festooned with crape.
* * * * *
Garibaldi was operating in a horse country, a country, by the way, in physical features, not unlike that over which DeWet occasionally rode at the rate of one hundred miles from sunset to day-dawn. Garibaldi, although a sailor born, did not ride a horse with face toward the horse's tail, as sailormen are said to do in one of Kipling's merry tales. However, he might have done so, for he was a most daring rider, and in South America filled in the time with many excursions ashore, where he chose his companions from the ship by lot, there always being a great desire among the men to follow close to their beloved leader. He insisted that all of his men should be horsemen as well as soldiers, for no one could tell when they might have to abandon their ships and take to the land.
These wild, free excursions into the sparsely settled interior were not fraught with much danger, for the plainsmen were mostly with the republic, and Garibaldi took great pains to treat with the citizen's family. For instance, although cattle were plentiful and of little value, when he wanted fresh meat he always asked for it. The same with horses. "Treat citizens as friends, informing them that you come to protect, not to destroy," was his injunction.
One valuable possession Garibaldi secured in Brazil, however, was taken without legal permission. It seems Garibaldi on one of his journeys inland had halted with six of his band for dinner at the house of a planter and ranchman. The place was fair to look upon, the house situated in a clump of trees that lined the bank of a stream. Near at hand were orange-groves and great banks of azaleas in full bloom. On the hillside were grapes that grew in purple clusters, which made poor Garibaldi think of his far-off Italy, the home from which he was exiled, and to which return meant death.
Garibaldi reined into the yard and sat hatless on his horse, looking at this scene of peace, prosperity, and gentle, smiling beauty. A sense of loneliness swept over him. He thought of himself as a homeless outcast, without love, friendless, fighting an eternal fight for people whom he did not know, and very few of whom indeed knew him even by name.
A barking of the dogs brought several servants to the door. On seeing the red-shirted soldiers, their rifles across the pommels of their saddles, the servants hastily ran back and proceeded to bar the doors and windows. Garibaldi smiled wearily and was inwardly debating whether he would try to show the inmates of the house that he was a friend or ride away.
Just then the door opened and a woman came out on the veranda. She was a young woman, not over twenty--dark, slight, handsome and intelligent. She looked at Garibaldi, and her self-possession made the invincible fighter blush to the roots of his long yellow hair and tawny beard. She was not afraid. She walked down the steps, and in a pleasant voice said, "You are Garibaldi." And Garibaldi was on the point of denying it, for he had not heard a woman's voice in four months, and was all unnerved. His tongue refused to do its bidding, and he only bowed, and then tried to apologize for his intrusion.
"You are Garibaldi, and if you insist on remaining to dinner, I will prepare the meal for you--I can do nothing else."
She spoke in Spanish, and as Garibaldi replied, he was mindful that his Castilian was terribly broken. Then he spoke in Italian, and when she answered in very broken Latin, they both smiled. They were even. When he learned that her husband was not at home, he refused to enter the house, but sat on the veranda, and there the lady served him and his companions with her own fair hands, as the servants stood by and looked on perplexed. Garibaldi did not eat much--his appetite had vanished. He followed the frail and beautiful young woman furtively with his eyes as she moved back and forth heaping the plates of his hungry troopers. He thought she looked sad and preoccupied.
Garibaldi tried to speak, but his Spanish had suddenly taken wing. But when the lady entered the house and returned with one of Mazzini's little pamphlets on liberty, he started and then almost sobbed as he read the well-remembered words, "Do that which is right, and fear no man, for man was made to be free."
He saw that the pamphlet was one of the master's earliest productions, and how it should have preceded him four thousand miles he could only guess, and the lady's command of Italian was not sufficient to explain. But in his joy he held out his hand to her, and she responded to his grasp. There was an understanding. They were both lovers of liberty.
Garibaldi felt that he must not remain--he must hasten away ere he said or did something foolish. "You must not come back, my husband is a royalist," said the lady, "and he will be greatly displeased when he knows you have been here. But you were hungry and I have fed you--now good-by." She held out her hand and then hastily broke away before the soldier could take it. Garibaldi mounted his horse, and followed by the troopers rode slowly down the bed of the stream, and as they disappeared into the thicket of azaleas, Garibaldi looked back. The lady was standing on the veranda leaning against a pillar. She held up the Mazzini pamphlet. Garibaldi removed his hat.
* * * * *
Garibaldi was on a tour of inspection, getting a good idea of the coast-line, and patriotism and duty should have kept him steadily on the march.
But something else was tugging at his heart. He rode ten miles, halted and pitched camp. Early the next morning he rode back alone, leaving his rifle behind, but keeping his pistols in his belt. He wanted to see the husband of the beautiful young lady. The man must be a pretty good kind of man--a royalist by birth probably, but if he could be rightly informed might become a friend of the cause.
When Garibaldi reached the house, the lady was on the veranda--she seemed to be expecting him. She was sad, pale, serious, and dressed in blue. She called her husband out and introduced him, and he and Garibaldi shook hands. Garibaldi tried to talk with him about Mazzini, but as near as Garibaldi could guess the rancher had never heard the name.
The man was fully twenty years older than his wife, and Garibaldi guessed, from his looks, that his wealth was an inheritance, not an accumulation. A little further talk and the facts developed as Garibaldi had suspected--the man was a degenerate scion of Spanish aristocracy. He seemed too stupid or too indifferent to know who his visitor was, or what he stood for. He brought out strong drink and then suggested cards as a diversion.
Garibaldi did not like the looks of the man, and courteously declined his pasteboard suggestions. All the time the young woman stood a little way off and looked wistfully at the red-shirted soldier. Her lips moved in pantomime--she was trying to say something to him. Garibaldi talked about nothing, laughed aloud, and requested his host to mix him a drink. While the man was busy at the sideboard, Garibaldi moved carelessly toward the woman and caught her whispered words, "Do not drink--go at once--he has sent for help--the place will be surrounded in half an hour--go, I implore you!"
And all the time Garibaldi talked garrulously and sauntered around the room. He took up the glass the man handed him, and raising it to his lips, did not drink--but tossed the contents full into the face of the person who had prepared the mixture. The man coughed, sputtered, swore and Garibaldi backed to the door, one hand on a pistol at his belt. He reached the veranda and looked for his horse. The horse was gone! Garibaldi sprang back into the house, covering the royalist with his pistol. "My horse, or you die--order my horse brought to the door!" The man protested, begged, swore he knew nothing about the horse. "I'll fetch your horse!" called the woman, and running around the house brought the horse from a thicket, where it had evidently been led by some servant. Again Garibaldi backed out of the house, requesting the man to follow, which he obediently did at a distance of five paces, his hands high in the air, as if in blessing. With pistol still in hand Garibaldi mounted the horse, and as he did so the little lady moaned, "He may kill me for this, but I would do it again--for you!" Garibaldi kicked his right foot out of the stirrup, and held out his hand. The lady without the slightest hesitation placed her foot in the empty stirrup and leaped lightly up behind. As she did so Garibaldi fired two shots well over the head of the paralyzed husband of his late wife, and gave his horse the spurs. In a minute horse and riders, two, were more than a quarter of a mile away over the plain, the lady seated safely behind, her arms gently but surely enfolding the red shirt. As they passed over a ridge they looked back, and there stood the degenerate scion of royalty, his hands high above his head. He had forgotten to take them down.
* * * * *
But should any prosaic reader imagine that this little story is too melodramatic to be true, I refer him to the monograph, "Garibaldi the Patriot," by Alexandre Dumas, who got his data from the record written by Garibaldi, himself. Moreover, Anita, for it was she, told the tale to Madame Brabante, who in turn gave the facts to Margaret Fuller Ossoli.
We do not know Anita's last name. When she placed her foot in the stirrup of Garibaldi's saddle, she gave herself to him, body, mind and spirit, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, through evil and good report, forever. By that act she left the past behind: even the name "Anita" was a name that Garibaldi gave her, and if he ever knew the story of her life before they met, he never thought it worth while to mention it. Probably he did not care--life for both of them really dated from the day they met. He was thirty-one, she was twenty- two.
When Garibaldi rode into camp, with the lady on the crupper, the six red-shirted ones in waiting were not surprised. They were never surprised at anything their master did. They believed in him as they believed in God--only more so. And so they asked no questions--for Garibaldi was one of the men that common men never interrogated.
"Break camp!" was the order, and in ten minutes they were on the march, two men trailing a mile behind as a rear-guard. At midnight they were safely aboard the good ship "Mazzini."
Anita proved herself a worthy mate for Garibaldi. She was the first woman to wear a Garibaldi waist, although for the most part she wore men's clothes, with two pistols in her belt and a rifle in her hands, and wherever Joseph went, there went Anita. She was his servant, his slave, his comrade, his wife. Read his autobiography and you will find how lasting, loyal and tender his devotion was toward her. He was a fatalist--a man without fear--and many times when surrounded by an overwhelming foe, he simply bided his time and fought his way through to safety. "When other men are ready to surrender, I hold fast," he said. When once cut off by four soldiers of the enemy, and they approached with loaded rifles and bayonets fixed, he drew his sword and shouted, "I am Garibaldi--you are my prisoners!" and down went the rifles.
At another time he and Anita were caught by a band of forty troopers in a log cabin in a clearing. They flung open the door, and standing, one on each side, showed only the long glittering point of a spear across the doorway. The enemy demanded a parley, but finally, not knowing the number of persons inside, and realizing that a charge meant death for two of the company, they withdrew. Silence and the unknown are the only things really terrible.
And so Joseph and Anita lived and loved and fought, and incidentally studied the few books which they possessed, and at odd times wrote poetry. A year after that first ride on the back of the horse that carried double, a son was born to them. A contemporary tells of seeing Anita riding horseback, the chubby babe carried like a papoose, looking out wonderingly at the world, which for him was just six months old. In three years this baby boy was riding behind his mother on the crupper, and another baby had come to do the papoose act.
So passed eight years of adventure by land and sea, in wood and vale, on mountain and plain. Garibaldi had given Brazil all the freedom she deserved--all she knew how to use. He was crowned as "The Hero of Montevideo," and could have taken a place high in the councils of the State. But across the sea he heard the rumble of battle going on in his beloved fatherland, and the dream of a United Italy was still vivid in his mind, and of course, vivid, too, in the mind of Anita. So they sailed away, taking with them a hundred of their loyal, loving men in the red shirts, who refused to be left behind. Arriving in Italy, Garibaldi went at once to the home of his mother, who had mourned him as lost and now received him as one risen from the dead. Anita and the children appealed to the good woman, and her heart went out to them, as if, indeed, they were all her own, loved into life.
When all at once, remembering her son's indifference for the Church, she asked when and where they were married, Joseph looked at Anita, and Anita looked at Joseph, and then they acknowledged that they had only been married by a sailor, who had said the ceremony as he remembered it, adding, "And may God have mercy on your souls." Hastily the mother packed them off to a priest, who administered the right of extreme marital unction, and charged them double fee on account of their carelessness. They paid the fee, laughing inwardly, but glad to relieve the mother of her qualms.
The children were left in the care of the grandmother, and Joseph and Anita went forth to enlist under the banner of Charles Albert of Piedmont and make war on superstition and the Pope.
* * * * *
Charles Albert had been a staunch supporter of the very conditions against which the striplings, Joseph Mazzini and Joseph Garibaldi, had made war twenty years previous. But nations, like men, sometimes have experiences that make them grow by throes and throbs, by leaps and bounds. The writings of Mazzini had been constantly distributed and circulated, and the fact that they were tabued by the government added to the joys of the illicit. A well-defined wave of republicanism swept the land. Those sensitive to ideas awoke, like lilacs sensitive to the breath of May.
King Charles Albert, of all the Italian kinglets, alone guessed the temper of his people, and issued to them a constitution with the right of franchise. This meant war upon the Austrian protectorate and the Pope.
Volunteers from the other provinces flocked to the standard of Piedmont. And about this time it was that Garibaldi and Anita offered their services to the insurgent army. Charles Albert feared his old- time foe, for Garibaldi was of a nature that detested compromise, and the Piedmontese could not understand how he was willing to fight under the banner of a king, even a king who had forsworn tyranny and reform. But other provinces were seceding, and erelong Joseph Garibaldi found himself at the head of a thousand Neapolitans, all clad in red shirts, well armed, carrying banners upon which were sentiments like these: "Man was made to be free!" "Down with priest and Pope!" and "Let us own ourselves!"
The reformer paints things with a broom: exaggeration indeed is a necessary part of his equipment. Garibaldi could not understand that Italy was not ripe for a simple religion of love for wife, child and neighbor, paying one's debts, and earning one's daily bread by honest toil. He could not appreciate that the many really did not care for either political or mental freedom, much preferring mendicancy to work, and quite willing to delegate their thinking to a college of cardinals. And so he waged his earnest fight, with a faith as full and complete as the faith that actuated Old John Brown, whose soul goes marching on.
In Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, some of the provinces had capitulated and joined forces with France and Austria, the insurgent leaders having been promised places in the excise--the compromise hastened no doubt by cold and hunger. Garibaldi's own force was much reduced and he took to the mountains, abandoning his cavalry equipment. Orders were out that he, or any of his band, caught should be shot, without trial, by fours in presence of their companions and the army. Thirty of his men and four of his best officers had been so executed.
He and Anita were surrounded and had taken refuge in a cornfield. Anita was wounded and delirious with thirst and fever. A Garibaldian had volunteered to go for water across an open field. Garibaldi watched the man and saw him shot down by French soldiers in ambush. He remained, knowing the enemy would soon come out of hiding to rob the dead. Garibaldi waited close beside the body of his dead companion, and killed with his own hands the man who had done the deed.
He got the water and carried it back to Anita in the cornfield. But she now had no need of it--she was dead. Garibaldi remained by the body until nightfall, and then carried it to the house of a peasant nearby. He made the peasant woman understand that the dead was a woman, a mother, like herself, and must be given decent burial--the woman understood.
The torches of the enemy could be seen near at hand, trailing Garibaldi from the cornfield to the house. He covered the beloved form with his scarf, and giving the peasant woman his purse, hurried forth barely in time to elude the pursuers. He made his way alone to the seashore and found refuge in Venice.
There was a price upon his head, but still there were many throughout Italy from Milan to Sicily who spoke of him as patriot and savior.
As a diplomatic move Rome relented, and Garibaldi was allowed to move to Caprera, a rocky island ten miles from the coast. Here he lived with his mother and children, writing, studying, farming; lived as Victor Hugo lived at Guernsey, only without the wealth, but in touch with Mazzini, exiled in London.
In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-three, Garibaldi came to New York and remained nearly two years. He went into business under an assumed name and accumulated two thousand dollars, so the little business must have prospered.
In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-four Naples was again in revolt, and Garibaldi heard the trumpets of battle from afar. He returned to Italy, and with his two thousand dollars bought the Island of Caprera, that his children might be insured a home, and also, possibly, to convince the government at Rome that he had come to stay.
Twice he left his beloved Caprera to work out his great dream of a United Italy. He fought with troops that had no commissary; battled with superstition; and saw his name belittled by those he sought to serve. Finally he entered Naples at the head of an army and was proclaimed Dictator. But statesmanship is business; and business is to organize and discipline, and use the forces of monotonous peace. Garibaldi expected too much: he wanted to see the Church uprooted, the princes sent on their way, and the people supreme. This was not to be. He did, however, live to see the Pope relinquish his temporal power, and a United Italy, but with Victor Emmanuel, son of Charles Albert, as king. The people still wanted a king, and they wanted their Church, even though an emasculated one.
In Eighteen Hundred Seventy, Garibaldi and his son, the firstborn of Anita, offered their services to Gambetta and enlisted with France to fight against Germany. And yet Garibaldi had nothing against Germany, and had fought France in many a tedious campaign, but he thought that France now stood opposed to papal power, while Germany sympathized with it.
After the war Garibaldi was elected to the Italian Parliament, and performed, at least, one good piece of work: he succeeded in getting an appropriation to erect a statue of Bruno upon the exact spot where this lover of truth and right was burned alive, by order of the Pope, for teaching that the earth revolved.
In September, Nineteen Hundred Four, the World's Free-Thought Convention was held in Rome, and a committee was appointed to decorate the statue of Bruno and hold at its base a memorial meeting. The principal address was by Ernst Haeckel. In the course of his remarks Haeckel said:
We meet in the Eternal City in the cause of liberty and the cause of truth. We need to express, each in his own way, unfettered and unvexed by coercion and fear of suppression, the things we believe are right and just and beautiful, and should be said. We know but little, but in this we are agreed--that there is no final, arbitrary and dogmatic truth. Truth is a point of view; as we know more and comprehend more, we will express more. Man has today freedom to breathe, freedom to study, freedom to grow, such as he never before had since time began. Man has today more faith than he ever had before--more faith in himself, more faith in his fellows. Thinking, like the physical act of walking, is a matter of faith. For the privilege of being here today, in this place, expressing what we think, we are under special obligations to one man, and the entire world of progress is under obligation to this man--and that man is Garibaldi. Garibaldi passed peacefully away at his beloved Caprera in Eighteen Hundred Eighty-two, aged seventy-five, gently ministered to by his children and grandchildren. The insurance-company that might have insured his life when he was twenty would have made money on the transaction regardless of rate. Yet he was the hero of sixty-seven battles on land and sea, and engaged in more than two hundred personal encounters, where rifles, pistols, stilettos, swords or cudgels played their part. Behold the irony of Fate!
No man was ever more detested, hated, feared--no man was ever better loved. That he was a sternly honest, sincere man, singularly pure in motive and abstemious in habit, even his bitterest enemies do not dispute. If Savonarola was God-intoxicated, Garibaldi was freedom- mad.
He refused bribes, declined honors, put aside titles, and died as penniless as he was born, and as he had lived. His life was consecrated to one thing--Liberty.
[The end]
Elbert Hubbard's non-fiction: Garibaldi