Nostalgia

From Britain, a view of Garibaldi

Garibaldi by Arthur R. Reade

This early twentieth century poem is odd in the way that many poems from that age now appear odd. If only in retrospect. They are written — the poems in this style — as if modernity was still forever away. As if the new world was not coming up on them fast. And as if the over-elaboration and nostalgia of much nineteenth century poesy was still current and still clearly apt to survive and grow. Their language is flowery, romantic, ornamental. They are written with an eye so firmly fixed upon the past that there is no room in them, in their grand claims, their bold declarations, for the future.

Or so they seem.

This poem is, for want of a phrase, quite doubly nostalgic. It’s nostalgic for the English liberal conception of the Italian Risorgimento, for a great unifying struggle, undertaken by others, in another land. For the leaders of that struggle. And it is nostalgic again, distantly so, for the Victorian ardour of yet older history. Of gothic romances. Stories of knights errant and courtly love. Victorian tales of King Arthur and the Round Table. Stories corresponding to no reality, to no statement of the world as it ever was. Tales of ruby-cheeked peasants and snow-white maidens. Fanciful things. But stories of great men, emissaries of the good, facing all odds.

Arthur Reade writes of Garibaldi as if he were, not a mere man, a creation and feature of the nineteenth century, but rather a character of the high middle ages. A man of romantic appearance and great, mythic deeds. The maker of a nation as King Arthur may once have been written of as having been. A man of action, of glory, of determination almost bordering upon the delusional. Yet also a fierce-eyed aider of the common man. The saviour and maker of his own land. Perhaps in this, Garibaldi is like Bolivar or Napoleon — men almost out of time, later venerated in a style which seemed, even in their own time, to have travelled far away and out of fashion.

And just as their are famous stories of the generosity of King Arthur and of Bolivar — as there are stories, all of them false, of Abraham Lincoln arriving in the company of slaves in the American South and assisting them in escaping or somehow confounding their masters — Reade suggests the same of Garibaldi. That he was ever where the danger was; that he was a munificent commander, much given to assisting the happiness of his men and all civilians.

These stories are not all apt to be true. But for Reade, so great is his own ideal of Garibaldi, so powerful the image in which he is in thrall, whether these tales pass a test of strict historicity does not matter. It cannot matter much. The greatness of the man is what must be told. All else are details. And historical details do not make fine poetry, as many who wrote in this style may as well have said.

Some of the specific claims made here are interesting and worth a detour. The most famous — and the most repeated in other places — is the idea that Garibaldi could have, had the fancy taken him, declared himself king or emperor. As Napoleon did, as Louis-Napoleon did in turn. He found the crown of all Italia lying in the gutter, after all, and he may have picked it up.

Yet does this accord with reality? Garibaldi had made a deal with Cavour and Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia. The two of them exercised enough control over the former to stop him marching on Rome — then ruled still by Papal power, with French support — from the south. What chance was there really of Garibaldi throwing away this alliance and declaring himself king in another’s stead?

But no matter. It does not matter to Reade. This is a poem a little like the romances written of historical figures like Alexander, or the tales — never accurate, never intended, perhaps, for accuracy — constructed by the native Britons about the deeds of Caesar on their island. Historicity is second fiddle, of almost no account.

And this is a poem of sensation. Of standing before a tomb and thinking of those who fought alongside the man now lost. How they all faced death by musket-ball and cannonade with a smile. How they all stood so cheerfully, with such resolution, together — together as they built their great patria.

Reade dismisses, for instance, with a stanza or two, Garibaldi’s critical comments and interventions after the unification. It does not matter much what he said, Reade summarises. What matters is what a man like Garibaldi did. And in his final years, as he toured the world to rapturous crowds — men and women eager to see before them history — the fire of Garibaldi’s criticism appears, in Reade’s telling, to wane.

And Garibaldi, thinking of legacy, rather than seeing only trouble in his new creation, looks eagerly upon the nation he played his part in making.

It’s tripe, of a kind. But it is romantic tripe. No wonder such a story appealed to the very young, and the very eager, many years ago. Before modernity fell into crisis, a crisis of shattered illusions from which it has not yet emerged.