Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)Holyoake, George Jacob
Philosophy
Bygones Worth Remembering, Vol. 1 (of 2)
Holyoake, George Jacob
Holyoake, George Jacob, 1817-1906; Social reformers -- Great Britain -- Biography; Working class -- Great Britain -- Biography
Giuseppe Mazzini, whom Englishmen know as Joseph Mazzini, was born in
Genoa, June 22, 1805, and died in Pisa, March 10, 1872. He spent the
greater part of forty years of his marvellous life in London. * Some
incidents of his English career, known to me, may increase or confirm
the public impression of him.
* First in Devonshire Street, Queen Square; in Chelsea; in
Brompton; in earlier years in penury. Where he had command
of a sitting-room, birds were flying about. Uncaged freedom
was to Mazzini the emblem of Liberty.
Never strong from youth, abstemious, oft from privation, and always
from principle, he was as thin as Dumas describes Richelieu. Arbitrary
imprisonment, which twice befel him, and many years of voluntary
confinement, imposed upon himself by necessity of concealment--living
and working in a small room, whence it was dangerous for him to emerge
by day or by night--were inevitably enervating. When he first came to
London in 1837, he brought with him three exiles, who depended upon his
earnings for subsistence. The slender income supplied him by his mother
might have sufficed for his few wants,* but aid for others and the
ceaseless cost of the propaganda of Italian independence, to which he
devoted himself, had to be provided by writing for reviews. At times
cherished souvenirs had to be pledged, and visits to money-lenders had
to be made.
* Of Mazzini's great abstemiousness it was written later in
life:
"A cheaper world no one can know,
Where he who laughs grows fat;
Man wants but little here below--
Mazzini less than that."
It was the knowledge all his countrymen had that he sought nothing for
himself, never spared himself in toil or peril, that was the source of
his influence. He wrote: "We follow a path strewn with sacrifices and
with sorrows." But all the tragedies of his experience we never knew
until years after his death, when his incomparable "Love Letters" were
published in the _Nineteenth Century_, No. 219, May, 1895.
He appeared to others to have "the complexion of a student," the air
of one who waited and listened. As Meredith said, it was not "until you
meet his large, penetrating, dark eyes, that you were drawn suddenly
among a thousand whirring wheels of a capacious, keen, and vigorous
intellect."
Mr. Bolton King has published a notable book on the great Italian,
containing more incidents in his career than any other English writer
has collected. I confine myself mainly to those within my knowledge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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