A Discourse on the Life, Character, and Policy of Count Cavour
Delivered in the Hall of the New York Historical Society, February 20, 1862. By , Ph. D., Professor of Italian Literature in the New York University, late Member of the Parliament, and Professor of Philosophy in the Colleges of Sardinia. New York: G. P. Putnam. 8vo. pp. 108.
THIS is a most admirable tribute to one of the greatest men of our age, by a writer singularly well qualified in all respects to do justice to his rich and comprehensive theme. Professor Botta is a native of Northern Italy, in the first place, and thus by inheritance and natural transmission is heir to a great deal of knowledge as to the important movements of which Cavour was the mainspring, which a foreigner could acquire only by diligent study and inquiry. In the next place, he has not been exclusively a secluded student, but he has taken part in the great political drama which he commemorates, and has been brought into personal relations with the illustrious man whose worth he here sets forth with such ample knowledge, such generous devotion, such patriotic fervor. And lastly, he is a man of distinguished literary ability, wielding the language of his adopted country with an ease and grace which hardly leave a suspicion that he was not writing his vernacular tongue. A namesake of his — whether a relation or not, we are not informed — has written “in very choice Italian” a history of the American Revolution; and the work before us, relating in such excellent English the leading events of a glorious Italian revolution, is a partial payment of the debt of gratitude contracted by the publication of that classical production.
But a writer of inferior opportunities and inferior capacity to Professor Botta could hardly have failed to produce an attractive and interesting work, with such a subject. There never was a life which stood less in need of the embellishments of rhetoric, which could rest more confidently and securely upon its plain, unvarnished truth, than that of Count Cavour. He was a man of the highest order of greatness; and when we have said that, we have also said that he was a man of simplicity, directness, and transparency. A man of the first class is always easily interpreted and understood. The biographer of Cavour has nothing to do but to recount simply' and consecutively what he said and what he did, and his task is accomplished : no great statesman has less need of apology or justification ; no one’s name is less associated with doubtful acts or questionable policy. His ends were not more noble than was the path in which he moved towards them direct. Professor Botta has fully comprehended the advantages derived from the nature of his subject, and has confined himself to the task of relating in simple and vigorous English the life and acts of Cavour from his birth to his death. He has given us a rapid and condensed summary, but nothing of importance is emitted, and surely enough is told to vindicate for Cavour the highest rank which the enthusiastic admiration and gratitude of his countrymen have accorded to him. Where can we find a nobler life? And, take him all in all, whom shall we pronounce to have been a greater statesman ? What variety of power he showed, and what wealth of resources he had at command ! Without the pride and coldness of Pitt, the private vices of Fox, the tempestuous and ill-regulated sensibility of Burke, he had the useful and commanding intellectual qualities of all the three, except the splendid and imaginative eloquence of the last.
This life of Cavour, and the incidental sketches of his associates which it includes, will have a tendency to correct some of the erroneous impressions current among us as to the intellectual qualities and temperament of the Italian people. The common, or, at least, a very prevalent, notion concerning them is that they are an impassioned. imaginative, excitable, visionary race, capable of brilliant individual efforts, but deficient in the power of organization and combination, and in patience and practical sagacity. Some of us go, or have gone, farther, and have supposed that the Austrian domination in Italy was the necessary consequence of want of manliness and persistency in the people of Italy, and was perhaps as much for their good as the dangerous boon of independence would have been. All such prejudices will be removed by a candid perusal of this memoir. Cavour himself, as a statesman and a man, was of exactly that stamp which we flatter ourselves to be the exclusive growth of America and England. He was nothing of a visionary, nothing of a political pedant, nothing of a doctrinaire. Franklin himself had not a more practical understanding, or more of large, plain, roundabout sense. He had, too, Franklin’s shrewdness, his love of humor, and his relish for the natural pleasures of life. He had a large amount of patience, the least showy, but perhaps the most important, of the qualifications of a great statesman. And in his glorious career he was warmly and generously sustained, not merely' by the king, and by the favored classes, but by the people, whose efforts and sacrifices have shown how worthy they were of the freedom they have won. We speak here more particularly of the people of the kingdom of Sardinia ; but what we say in praise of them may he extended to the people of Italy' generally. The history of Italy for the last fifteen years is a glorious chapter in the history of the world. Whatever of active courage and passive endurance has in times past made the name of Roman illustrious, the events of these years have proved to belong equally to the name of Italian.
But we are wandering from Count Cavour and Professor Botta. We have to thank the latter for enriching the literature of his adopted country with a memoir which in the lucid beauty and transparent flow of its style reminds the Italian scholar of the charm of Boccaccio’s limpid narrative, and is besides animated with a patriot’s enthusiasm and elevated by a statesman’s comprehension. A more cordial, heart-warming hook we have not for a long time read.