Essays in Rebellion — Key Ideas to Explore

was written in freedom's darkest age, between Waterloo and the appearance of Mazzini, and that grand object was not to be reached for forty years. In the meantime, true to his guiding principle:

"Then battle for freedom whenever you can, And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted,"

Byron had sacrificed himself for Greece as nobly as he was prepared to sacrifice himself for Italy. It was a time of darkness hardly visible. In the very year when Byron witnessed the collapse of the Carbonari rebellion, Leopardi, as Mr. Trevelyan tells us, wrote to his sister on her marriage: "The children you will have must be either cowards or unhappy; choose the unhappy." The hope of freedom appeared extinct. Tyrants, as Byron wrote, could be conquered but by tyrants, and freedom found no champion. The Italians themselves were merged in the slime of despairing satisfaction, and he watched them creeping, "crouching, and crab-like," along their streets. But through that dark gate of unhappiness which Leopardi named as the one choice for all but cowards, led the thin path that freedom must always take. Great as were Mazzini's services to all Europe, his greatest service to his countrymen lay in arousing them from the slough of contentment to a life of hardship, sacrifice, and unhappiness. When, after the loss of Rome in 1849, Garibaldi called for volunteers to accompany his hazardous retreat, he said to them: "I offer neither pay, nor quarters, nor provisions; I offer hunger, thirst, forced marches, battles, and death." Swinburne himself may have had those words in mind when, writing also of Garibaldi, he said of freedom:

"She, without shelter or station, She, beyond limit or bar, Urges to slumberless speed Armies that famish, that bleed, Sowing their lives for her seed, That their dust may rebuild her a nation, That their souls may relight her a star."

"Happy are all they that follow her," he continued, and in a sense we may well deem their fate happiness. But it is in the sense of what Carlyle in a memorable passage called the allurements to action. "It is a calumny on men," he wrote, "to say they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure, reward in this world or the next. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death are the allurements that act on the heart of man." Under the spell and with the reward of those grim allurements the battles of freedom, so visible in the resurrection of Italy, so unrecognised in freedom's recurrent and contemporary conflicts, must invariably be fought. We may justly talk, if we please, of the joy in such conflicts, but Thermopylae was a charnel, though, as Byron said, it was a proud one; and it is always against the wind that the banner of freedom streams.

As he wrote--as he wrote his best, while the shafts of the spirit lightened in his brain--Heine would sometimes feel a mysterious figure standing behind him, muffled in a cloak, and holding, beneath the cloak, something that gleamed now and then like an executioner's axe. For a long while he had not perceived that strange figure, when, on visiting Germany, after fourteen years' exile in Paris, as he crossed the Cathedral Square in Cologne one moonlight night, he became aware that it was following him again. Turning impatiently, he asked who he was, why he followed him, and what he was hiding under his cloak. In reply, the figure, with ironic coolness, urged him not to get excited, nor to give way to eloquent exorcism:

"I am no antiquated ghost," he continued. "I'm quite a practical person, always silent and calm. But I must tell you, the thoughts conceived in your soul--I carry them out, I bring them to pass.

"And though years may go by, I take no rest until I transform your thoughts into reality. You think; I act.

"You are the judge, I am the gaoler, and, like an obedient servant, I fulfil the sentence which you have ordained, even if it is unjust.

"In Rome of ancient days they carried an axe before the Consul. You also have your Lictor, but the axe is carried behind you.

"I am your Lictor, and I walk perpetually with bare executioner's axe behind you--I am the deed of your thought."