The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851Various
History
The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3, June, 1851
Various
Art, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- History -- Periodicals
IN ITALY, at Turin and Florence, a great number of valuable works have
been issued, illustrative of the recent revolutions. They do not claim
to be histories, for history is impossible, while events are
contemporary and cannot be contemplated from a universal point of
principle and analysis. But these volumes are what the French with
their happy facility would call studies for history. They are the
material from which the great historic artists must compose their
pictures--they are the diary of the movement--they follow all the
changes of the time, hopeful or despondent, with the fidelity and
closeness of an Indian upon the trail. We have seen several of these
publications, and hope ere many months to see a treatise upon the
republican movement in Europe from a pen well able to sketch it, and
which is fed by ink which is never for a moment red.
The largest and most important of these works is that of M. Gualterio,
just published in Florence, which comprises several letters of the
Austrian lackey, Francis IV., Duke of Modenas, and throws light upon
many of the darkest passages of the dark Austria-Italico policy. Among
other letters, also, one of the most remarkable is that of the
Cardinal Gonsalvi, well known as the able and humane Prime Minister of
Pius VII., and to whose memory there is now upon the walls of St.
Peter's a monument by Thorwaldsen, of which a statue of the Cardinal
is part. This letter speaks of the miserable conduct of the political
trials, and "justice," he says, "charity, the most ordinary decency
demands that all humanity shall not be so trampled under foot. What
will the English and French journals say--not the Austrian, when they
learn of this massacre of the innocents." This was thirty years ago.
But at this moment, were there an able and humane minister at the
Vatican, how truly might he repeat Gonsalvi's words!
It is in works like these, and in the journals and pamphlets published
during the intensity of the struggle, that the still-surviving Italian
genius, which it has been so long the northern policy to smother and
repress, betrayed itself. Nor among these works, as striking another
key, ought we to omit the Souvenirs of the War of Lombardy by M. de
Talleyrand-Perigord. Duke of Dino--and the history of the Revolution
of Rome by Alphonse Balleydier. The Souvenirs are devoted to the glory
of the unhappy King Charles Albert, the dupe of his own vanity and the
victim of his own weakness.
Upon the pages of M. le Duc de Dino, however, he blazes very
brilliantly as a martyr--martyr of a cause hopeless even in the first
flush of success--martyr of an army without enthusiasm, of a
liberalism without freedom or heroism. The English royalists, the
reader will remember, were fond of the same title for the unhappy
Charles I.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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