The Life of Mazzini. Bolton King
the human chord cannot be struck." "Marriage," he wrote to a young wife many years afterwards, "is sacred, because it is one of the most potent means of accomplishing life's mission. It gives the almost superhuman strength that comes of love, the supreme comfort that makes sacrifice a joy, the dew that tempers the scorching heat upon the flower." But "now, as a rule," he says, "we do not love. Love, the most holy thing that God has given to man, has become a febrile need, a brutish instinct; the family is perverted into a denial of all vocation and social duty; male and female have cancelled man and woman." He himself was a man, not likely to be easily in love. His work absorbed his vital force, and he had no pity for men who forgot public work in domestic happiness. And though his unsoiled purity and gentleness, together with the sympathy that allowed him to understand women as few men can do, won him the devotion and affection of many women, especially Englishwomen, the sentiment, on his side at least, was, save in two cases, one of "intense friendship" only.
He had two or three boyish passions, one for an English girl who lived near his home at Genoa, another for a Genoese, Adele Zoagli, who afterwards became the mother of the patriot-poet Mameli. When he went into exile, the only women who had a place in his heart were his own mother and Madame Ruffini. His affection for his mother was very serious and deep, more masculine and less sentimental than in the common course of Italian filial love. Perhaps after his boyhood she did not influence him in details, and intellectually there was some lack of sympathy between them. But her strong pride in him, that made her "thank God day and night for having given her that son," her faith in his political, though not in his religious beliefs, the love that watched year after year over the son she saw not, the courage that made her bear long years of parting rather than ask him to deny his call, made the most lasting human inspiration of his life. In time of deep trouble a man will turn to his mother and his God, and he looked to her, as to one whose love would never change, to whom he could pour out, not indeed his spiritual misery, but all the little material worries which a man tells only to his mother and his wife, certain that her sympathy would never fail. His love for Madame Ruffini was of another kind. She was a very noble woman, with intense and unconcealed sympathies, wise with the experience of age and motherhood and sorrow; and Mazzini was not the only one in the circle of friends at Genoa, who loved her with the reverential affection, that an elderly woman of saintly life and understanding will call forth from young men. It was she, whose own deep religious faith had saved him in youth from his short episode of scepticism. Another woman would have reproached him with Jacopo's death; to her the common memory of one so dear only fed the affection, that many memories and the same intense religious, almost mystical, beliefs had already made so strong. He calls her "mother, friend, and all that is more sacred," "the purest, whitest, holiest soul he had ever met on earth." As far as we can tell, it was from no fault of his that their friendship closed afterwards in misunderstanding and silence.
His devotion to these two women had a deeper and more lasting influence on him than any lover's passion. There was, however, at least one other, whom he loved in another way, one to whom he gave his troth and whom he would have married, had an exile's life allowed it. Giuditta Sidoli was the daughter of a noble Lombard family, where she had been brought up in a school of patriotism. Her brother, Carlo Bellerio, was a follower of Young Italy, and was banished for his faith. She had been married, when a mere girl, to Giovanni Sidoli, a wealthy Reggian, a patriot and an exile too; and he swore her on his death-bed to be true to the cause to which he had given his life. She was one year older than Mazzini, a quiet-moving, gracious woman, almost beautiful, with a gentle, blonde Venetian face, warm, golden hair, and dark, thoughtful eyes; sober and unemotional in her manner, but with deep springs of enthusiasm and devotion. Mazzini first met her, a five years' widow, at Marseilles and afterwards in Switzerland; their liking and common interests soon deepened into love, and he was engaged to her before he left France. A few months before the Savoy Expedition, her yearning for her children, who were left at Reggio, drove her to Florence in the hope that with or without the Government's consent she might see them. Thanks to the Tuscan police, who opened and copied Mazzini's letters to her, we have some fragments of their correspondence. "There are words in your letter," he writes, "which make me still thrill with joy. In these last days I have learnt the strength of my love. I have covered your lock with kisses. Oh, that I could sleep for once with my head resting on your knees." To a common friend he writes, probably a little later, "I love her more than she thinks, much more than she loves me. I dream of her day and night, and it becomes more and more a fixed idea with me; and yet I know with absolute certainty I shall never live with her, not even if Italy were free."
Up to a point they doubtless loved; but, especially when one remembers Mazzini's emotional epistolary style of this time, one is tempted to question whether their love had very much passion in it. It was the tender, strong affection of two absolutely good and kindred souls, and with neighbourhood it might have ripened into more. But long separation cooled it, and neither was inconsolable. To Giuditta probably at bottom her children were dearer than her lover, and Mazzini felt this. She seems to have made no effort to join him afterwards in England; she went to Parma to be near her children and importune the ducal brute, who forbade her access to them, at last going to Reggio in his despite and apparently seeing them for a moment. Mazzini for his part was wrapped up in his work and the struggle with exacting poverty. In England he hardly corresponds with her, partly because his letters might have brought fresh persecution on her, but partly, one is forced to conclude, because there was no lover's ardour to find out a way. But he still considered himself as in honour bound to her, and in a sense no doubt he loved her still. He writes in the summer of 1838, "Giuditta loves me, I love her, and have promised to love her," but he speaks as if he feared a rupture rather for its effects on her than on himself. Two years later he writes as if his love were dead. But, if love was dead, friendship, and a very strong and true one, remained to the end. It is probable that they never ceased entirely to correspond. In the fifties, when she was living in the Valle dei Salici, near Turin, a grey-haired woman, with all the gracious gentleness and culture of her earlier days, Mazzini would come to see her in his secret visits to Piedmont, and she was still the tolerant but ardent believer in his policy. When she was on her death-bed, a year before he died himself, he wrote "as an old friend" to "one of the best spirits he had ever met."
In a sense Giuditta had a rival. During his Swiss wanderings, the daughter of de Mandrot, a friendly avocat at Lausanne, whom he had met casually,[8] became strongly attracted to him. And what was at first a woman's pity and a disciple's adoration, changed to passionate love. She was a girl of some sixteen years, of rich, emotional nature and spiritual yearnings, that echoed to his own. When he went to London, and she saw no more of him and heard of his uncared-for loneliness, her hopeless love and pity worked on her, till she pined into melancholy and illness, and her friends begged him to return and save her by his presence. What response he made to her love, it is not easy to say. If one may judge from the meagre references in his letters, he felt at first no more than affectionate gratitude for the rich gift he could not take. But later, as he learnt more of her constancy and unhappiness, and his love for Giuditta wore away, and he ached for a woman's loving hand, his affection ripened into something that was probably nearer passionate love than anything he felt before or after. Not that his permanent, reasoning self was disloyal to Giuditta. "Am I free?" he writes to a friend, who would gladly have seen him and the girl united; "before society and men, who recognise only actual bonds, I am; but before my own heart and God, who watches over promises, I am not." Sometimes indeed he balanced the results to the two women, and was tempted for the moment to think that "the imperious duty" of saving the one from death or life-long misery might justify the breaking of his promise to Giuditta. But he knew that it would be a cruel blow to the woman to whom he had pledged himself; he felt he would gladly escape from an attachment, which stained his loyalty to her; and his common sense told him that his gloomy companionship and the privations of an exile's life would never make a young girl permanently happy. And so he never seriously faltered in crushing down the rising love within him or trying to crush it out in her. He steadily declines to admit more than a brother-and-sisterly relationship; he prays she may forget him and begs his friends to do their best to kill her love by painting him in his defects; he refuses to correspond with her, and though at last at the earnest prayer of her friends he promises to come, if he can find the money, it was only to save her from the pining that was bringing her to her grave. But though he put her aside as a beautiful and impossible dream, he could