disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce.
The same with Italy: the pathos of his country’s
lot pierced the youthful soul of Mazzini, because,
like Dante’s, his blood was fraught with the
kinship of Italian greatness, his imagination filled
with a majestic past that wrought itself into a majestic
future. Half a century ago, what was Italy?
An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless
wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance,
dynastic convenience, and the profit of an alien Government.
What were the Italians? No people, no voice in
European counsels, no massive power in European affairs:
a race thought of in English and French society as
chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve
as models for painters; disposed to smile gratefully
at the reception of halfpence; and by the more historical
remembered to be rather polite than truthful, in all
probability a combination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and
Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift
of a memory which inspires the moments with a past,
a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate
existence that raises man above the otherwise more
respectable and innocent brute, all that, or most
of it, is changed.
Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy
in his vigorous insistance on our true ancestry, on
our being the strongly marked heritors in language
and genius of those old English seamen who, beholding
a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came,
doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled
themselves on this or the other side of fertilising
streams, gradually conquering more and more of the
pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of
Odin, and finally making unusually clean work in ridding
themselves of those prior occupants. “Let
us,” he virtually says, “let us know who
were our forefathers, who it was that won the soil
for us, and brought the good seed of those institutions
through which we should not arrogantly but gratefully
feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessors
of long-inherited freedom; let us not keep up an ignorant
kind of naming which disguises our true affinities
of blood and language, but let us see thoroughly what
sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had,
and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic
fragments which breathe forth their fierce bravery
in battle and their trust in fierce gods who helped
them, be treasured with affectionate reverence.
These seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were
the English of old time, and were our fathers who
did rough work by which we are profiting. They
had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome
usages to which we trace our own political blessings.
Let us know and acknowledge our common relationship
to them, and be thankful that over and above the affections
and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the
closer and more constantly guiding duties which belong
to us as Englishmen.”
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