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What were the creative forces of the Risorgimento? The "Italian people," to which some historians are now tending to attribute an important if not a decisive role in our struggle for national unity and independence, was hardly on the scene at all. The active agency was always an idea become a person it was one or several determined wills which were fixed on determined goals.
Cavour wrote an indignant article in the Risorgimento denouncing the party spite which could cause such cruel anguish under a religious cloak, and the people of Turin became so much excited that if the further indignity of a refusal of Christian burial had been resorted to, as at first seemed probable, the lives of the priests in the city would hardly have been safe.
A shrewd expedient for crippling the most formidable rival of the Franks, it was to be the rock on which ideals then undreamed of were to founder. For it was the temporal power which provoked the last and mortal struggle of the Holy Roman Empire with the Papacy, which presented the most stubborn obstacle to the leaders of the Risorgimento.
And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of the champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great names on their lips. So runs the law of order and right subordination. But if the classics offer the best service to education by inculcating an aristocracy of intellectual distinction, they are equally effective in enforcing the similar lesson of time.
Roman history and antiquities, Italian art, Renaissance sculpture, the personalities and events of the Risorgimento, all these solid connaissances and many more, were to be recognized perpetually as rich elements in the general wealth of Mr. James's mind. That he had read immensely, observed immensely, talked immensely, became once more gradually and delightfully clear on this new field.
Unfortunately, the autonomy of the political thought of Italy, vigorously established in the works of Vico, nobly reclaimed by Vincenzo Cuoco, kept up during the struggles of the Risorgimento in spite of the many foreign influences of that period, seemed to exhaust itself immediately after the unification.
The Master could see her smiling on a monsignore, carrying tea to a cardinal, or listening to the Garibaldian tales of some old veteran of the Risorgimento. "It is an education of its own kind," he thought. "Is it worth more or less than other kinds?"
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!"
And the old women are going and are praying because the man is dead: and the soldiers are going and are taking the arms before the risorgimento, but now the law it is redeemed. Then they arrive into the room of the malade and take the sacramento and up and down and put the holy oil in the foot and pray and went away, and the malade who is not dead would very soonly die."
Too many elements of German, French, and English civilizations had been added to our culture during the first half of the XIX century to make this possible, so much so that perhaps Vico might have remained unknown to the makers of Italian unity if another powerful mind from Southern Italy, Vincenzo Cuoco, had not taken it upon himself to expound the philosophy of Vico in those very days in which the intellectual preparation of the Risorgimento was being carried on.
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