Any one who goes to Italy for the Renaissance will find the Risorgimento a discordant obsession; flaunting itself as it does in brand new statues and monuments whose incongruity of colour or form destroys the mellow unity of old Cathedral-Piazzas or Castello-courtyards. Florence has managed to hush up the Risorgimento in back streets or unobtrusive tablets, and Venice with her abundance of Campi has stowed it out of sight, though Victor Emmanuel ramps on horseback not far from the Bridge of Sighs, and “three youths who died for their country” intrude among the tombs of the Doges. The essence of Pisa is preserved by its isolation from life, leaving Mazzini to dominate the city of his death. But the majority of the old towns are devastated by the new national heroes—admirable and vigorous as the sculpture sometimes is—even as the old historic landmarks are obliterated by the new street names. And in addition to the pervasive quartette—Garibaldi, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, Mazzini—local heroes aggravate the ruin of antiquity. Daniele Manin thrones in Venice over a winged lion sprawling beneath a triton; Ricasoli, “the iron Baron,” rules in Tuscany; Pavia is sacred to the Cairoli; Minghetti runs through the Romagna; Crispi through the South; Genoa devotes a street, a square, and a bronze statue to Bixio, the Boanerges of the epic; Viareggio has just put up a tablet to Rosolino Pilo and Giovanni Corrao, the daring precursors of the Thousand; even Rubattino—patriot in his own despite—has his statue in Genoa harbour, on the false ground that he put his shipping line at Garibaldi’s disposal. ’Tis a very shower of stones, falling on the just and the unjust alike. And sometimes—as at Asti—all the Heroes are United beneath a riot of granite monoliths and marble lions.

And even the ubiquitous heroes have peculiar glory in their peculiar haunts. Cavour is gigantic at Ancona (probably because the town was freed by Piedmontese troops); he stands in the castle of Verona, over-brooded by snow mountains: at Turin, his birthplace, Fame wildly clasps him to her breast in a mammoth monument, crying, “Audace, prudente, libero Italia.”

A Vanity Fair without a hero I have never chanced on. Little Chiavari has its grandiose angel-strewn monument to Victor Emmanuel, whom Parma likewise exhibits flourishing his sword; Pesaro breaks out in tablets to those who died fighting “the hirelings of the Theocracy”; Rimini has a Piazza Cavour; priest-ridden Vicenza shelters a statue of Mazzini; Assisi itself, waking from its saintly slumber, consecrates a Piazzetta to Garibaldi, and a street to the Twentieth of September on which Italian troops broke into Rome!

Ah, Garibaldi, Garibaldi, how thou didst weigh on my wanderings! From Mantua to Ferrara, from Spoleto to Perugia, Garibaldi, always Garibaldi. I fled to dead Ravenna, lo! thou didst tower in the very Piazza of Byron; to Parma, and rugged, imposing, in thy legendary cap, leaning on thy sword, thou didst obsess the Piazza Garibaldi; to Rome itself, and twenty feet high, thou impendedst in bronze, with battle pieces and allegories around thee; I retreated to the extremest point of the Peninsula, and found myself in the Corso Garibaldi of Reggio; I crossed to Sicily, only to stumble against thy great horse in Palermo and the monument to thy valour in Calatafimi. For of the statesman, the monarch, the prophet and the soldier who combined to redeem Italy, it is naturally the soldier that is stamped most vividly on the popular imagination, the noble freelance whom the mob deemed divine even before his death, whose memory the people has rescued from the anti-climax of his end, selecting away his follies and mistakes and idealising his virtues, under the artistic law of mythopoiesis, till, shaped and perfected for eternal service, the national hero shines immaculate in his sacred niche.

And yet, as the streets show, even the popular imagination has realised that the soldier would not have sufficed. Thrice blessed, indeed, was Italy to possess Cavour and Mazzini at the same hour as Garibaldi. It is a fallacy to suppose that the hour always finds the man, or the man the hour, or that “il n’y a pas d’homme indispensable.” Many an hour passes away without its man, as many a man without his hour. Great men perish, wasted, because there are no forces for them to synthetise: great forces remain inarticulate, unorganised and ineffective, because they have found no leader to be their conduit. All the more marvellous that Italy should have produced simultaneously three indispensable men, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi, each of whom had something of the other two, yet something unique of his own. None of the three quite understood the others, and Mazzini, who was much like Ibsen’s Brand, was even more intolerant than Garibaldi of the Machiavellian policies of Cavour, and had to be swept aside as a visionary. For one heroic, impossible moment, indeed, the spirit triumphed, the Republic of Rome was born, and idealism enjoyed perhaps its sole run of power in human history. But with the disappearance of the Republic, Mazzini might have disappeared too, for all his influence upon the political Risorgimento; did indeed practically disappear by acquiescing in the battle-flag of Monarchy. Garibaldi and Cavour sufficed to create the combination of Force and Fraud by which political history is made. For though, if any sword might ever bear the words I saw on a sword graven by Donatello—“Valore e Giustitia”—that sword was Garibaldi’s, and if ever passion was patriotic it was Cavour’s, nevertheless the liberation of Italy did not escape being achieved by the usual factors of Force and Fraud.