Littell's Living Age/Volume 136/Issue 1756/The Death of Victor Emaunel

From The Spectator.

THE DEATH OF VICTOR EMANUEL.

The pope has enjoyed, in his own view at least, an hour of supreme triumph, and it has been a Christian one. He has forgiven, with all the plenitude of authority with which the system of Rome invests him, the dying sinner who in health tore from his hands the last temporal dominion of the Church. In all history we know of no scene more strikingly dramatic than this of the pale old priest, unable to leave his couch, in hourly expectation of death, yet in his prostration asserting superiority to the soldier-king who had dethroned him, and sending his forgiveness and the order for the sacraments of the Church to the daring, dissolute trooper, whose destiny it has been to carry up to their culminating point the fortunes of the oldest reigning house, save one, in Europe, — to remake a State divided for a thousand years, and to reduce or raise the Church of Rome once more to a purely spiritual power in the world. Victor Emanuel, king of Italy, has always seemed to observers outside Piedmont something of an enigma, but in Savoy and Turin he has been, from the second year of his reign, thoroughly comprehended. King of Piedmont or king of Italy, he has been from first to last what every ancestor has been, since, a thousand years ago, the dukes of Maurienne found themselves independent, and the race began to hope that north or south, in Provence or in Italy, it should carve out a sufficient realm. No race in Europe has been more consistent. Open the history of France or Italy where you will, and there is always a duke of Savoy, a prince of Savoy, a king of Piedmont, a king of Sardinia, Philibert or Humbert, Amadeo or Victor — the house is too old for a surname — holding the mountain-gates between the two countries, allying himself with both or either, or betraying either or both, but always, amidst all changes, maintaining a reputation for daring, for adroitness, and for a certain determined persistence, which impressed observers even when the politics of the house became most tortuous, or in appearance vacillating. Neither Bourbon nor Hapsburg could ever destroy the house they hated, and even Napoleon failed. The original type of the race is that of the German robber-knight, the bold, unscrupulous baron, who uses his position to crush all whom he can reach; but it was modified by the geographical position of their possessions, hemmed in as they were between stronger States, without a language or a nationality, until the Savoyard became a hereditary diplomatist whom the subtlest feared, a statesman who conciliated while he tyrannized over his few people, a soldier who waged war rather as a captain of free lances than a sovereign. Brave, dissolute, un-unscrupulous, yet with some statesmanlike insight and extraordinary tenacity, the line from Humbert II. (1078) down to Victor Emanuel, through eight hundred ears of varied fortune, might always have been accurately described as the soldier-dynasty of the Alps, with all the vices and many of the virtues the world attributes to the soldier and the hungry mountaineer. The greatest man of the house till Victor Emanuel appeared, the wonderful general whom our fathers so much admired, and who, by the side of Marlborough, upheld through a long career of victory the cause of Europe against Louis XIV., and who signed himself habitually "Eugenio von Savoye," because he was as much Italian as German, and as much Frenchman as either, appears in his memoirs, under all his court varnish and all his magnanimity, a thorough Savoyard, daring, ambitious, dissolute, luxurious, and persistent as a river. In Victor Emanuel, this last quality, always so perceptible in his house, took a shape that made the fortune alike of his dynasty and of Italy. When after the dark day of Novara he ascended the throne, his subjects expected in the sullenly brave young prince so deeply connected with the Austrian house, an Hapsburg, a thorough reactionary, and in part they were not deceived. No man had more of the feeling of kingship or the pride of birth than Victor Emanuel, and no man more confidence in his own right to rule. He compelled his Parliament to sign the peace which saved Piedmont; he quarrelled in the very crisis of his fate with Cavour, because the great minister made a remark which the king considered derogatory to his house; he refused the throne of the Peninsula, if he were to be called "King of the Italians;" and he would often aver to the last that it was "hard work to guide his political team." He was, in fact, by temperament a king of the old type, but he had acquired, either from some teaching of his father or the circumstances of his own history, an absolute conviction that to carry his father's policy to success, and rear the throne his father had designed, he must be a constitutional king, and from that resolve he never swerved. His Austrian relatives, implored and threatened him to give up the Statuto, the priests, whom he, as a dissolute and superstitious man, greatly feared, menaced him with every spiritual suffering; his closest female kinsfolk declared the incessant deaths in his house a judgment from heaven; but the proud, hot-tempered, bull-headed soldier never swerved from the word he had given. He would keep the Constitution as his father had sworn, and maintain his father's cause, and all Italy in one twelvemonth recognized that he was faithful, and fell at the feet of the only Italian prince who could be trusted. Before he had won a province, every Italian city used periodically to be placarded with "Viva Verdi," the name of the composer containing the initials of "Vittorio Emanuele, Rè d'ltalia," and in every advance his troops had behind them the army of the people.

The popular confidence in Victor Emanuel never wavered, and it was well deserved. Dissolute in private life, a trooper in bearing, a rude sportsman in taste and habits; with no knowledge of literature, and little taste for art; speaking by preference a dialect as rough as the broadest Yorkshire, and never thoroughly mastering Italian; a second-rate general in all but daring; at once reckless and ignorant of finance — so reckless that his debts were a permanent trouble to the treasury, and so ignorant that he never could understand how his vast nominal income went — the king had three of those great qualities which build up in a favoring cycle of circumstance durable thrones. He never feared, or disliked, or tricked the people. He could take a great risk, as he did when he invaded the Romagna; or exercise a grand self-control, as he did when, almost apoplectic with rage, he agreed to the peace of Villafranca, or when he signed away, on the demand of Napoleon, the cradle of his house. And he could recognize and accept and use great servants. His was probably not the insight which has made of the Hohenzollern the most powerful monarch in the world, the insight which picked out Moltke from among soldiers of fortune and Bismarck from among petty squires; but still, among the statesmen around him the king chose right. He alone after Novara insisted, in the teeth of enormous opposition, on choosing Massimo d'Azeglio. There is reason to believe that he hated Cavour personally, though at a time when he was absolute he had selected him; but he never but once, and then for a moment, deserted his great servant. He chafed under Ricasoli's stern rein, but he never overthrew him. He must have writhed often under recent ministers, especially in ecclesiastical affairs, but he never deserted them, even under pressure which to him, at heart a superstitious Catholic, must have been tremendous. It was not that he simply suffered them. To the last his power over every ministry was considerable, and was exercised freely, especially as regards the army and foreign affairs; but he never violated the Constitution, and never acted without his ministers' knowledge. As he told Gambetta, the last foreign statesman who saw him alive, had he been king of France Gambetta would have been his premier, and would have been supported. The origin of his loyalty was, in part at least, his utter fearlessness, which rescued him from that suspiciousness alike of the people and of personages which besets kings, and in part the result of a feeling that he should be personally happier if all went wrong at last, and he was again the chamois-hunting prince of Piedmont; but he was loyal to the bone, and his loyalty built Italy. No man less trusted, however superior in personal character or in intellectual powers, could have excited the same devotion, or received such adhesion from the determined, suspicious republicans whom Italy, in her long years of suffering, had bred. Mazzini never accepted him, but the Mazzinians ceased to plot. In the land of the dagger he was safer from attempts on his life than Queen Victoria in England, and the grief of his whole people at his death shows at once the confidence he had attracted and their keen political sense, which saw that here, in this rough soldier, was the standard round which all parties and all provinces could rally for the battle of freedom and nationality. That his death endangers the monarchy in Italy we do not believe. Great as the attraction of the example of France is on Italy, the Italians know that the Constitution will secure them all a republic could. They have no Bourbons to destroy, and the new king, though not popular, is free from many of the difficulties which beset his father, especially the hatred borne to him by Ultramontanes, and enjoys the benefit of the deep devotion felt throughout Italy towards his wife, the "Pearl" of the house of Savoy. That the ministry will miss the aid of Victor Emanuel's popularity, of his rough, keen sense in affairs, and of his intimate knowledge of persons, is likely enough; but in Italy genius is endemic, and his place will be supplied. He is not a heroic figure, in our sight, but there are compensations in character; history will pardon the king's vices, as the Church has done, and there will in time, if Italy lasts, gather round the founder of her dynasty that softening halo of distance and indistinctness for which time is now too new. They are all passing, the great figures of our half of the century; and when the old priest has gone, scarcely one of the visible figures present when it began will be still before the world.