Giuseppe Pecchio, a Lombard and Milanese, was about the only Italian revolutionist or Liberal that I ever really liked, or with whom I could keep up an uninterrupted intimacy and friendship to the last. He had more wit, more general information, and more genius, than all the rest of the Liberali put together. He was also a fine, spirited, manly little fellow, exceedingly active, enterprising, and full of resources and courage.
Though bred in Italy, and only a civilian, he was fond of athletic exercises, rode boldly, and was first-rate with the rapier. It rejoiced my heart to see the spare little man, for many years nearly constantly a valetudinarian, disarm, in about two seconds, a big, hectoring Frenchman who came to Brighton with the reputation of a grand spadassin.
Then, Pecchio was always outspoken, sincere, and truthful. Most of the Italian refugees gave out in England that they had never done anything to deserve from their several governments either exile or any other pain or penalty; that they had been unjustly condemned on the evidence of suborned, hired witnesses; that they were as innocent as so many bleating lambs, and that eternal infamy would rest on their princes and governments for their condemnation, exile, and hard suffering in a foreign land.
Some of them, again, would shape their tale according to society and
circumstances: if they found “fit
| CHAP. XX] | ITALIAN REFUGEES | 191 |
I have heard one of the most conspicuous of these refugees declare, in one
sort of society, that he and his friend Major —— had originated and
organized plots at such and such places; that they had arranged the means of carrying off
their respective sovereigns to castles on the Apennines, or for cutting their throats, if
need should be; that they had tampered with the troops, and had won over some of the police
and gendarmerie; that they had pretty well all
the professors and students at their beck and call, and that they had conceived and
arranged the beautiful, strategical scheme of bringing over all the barges, boats, and
punts, from the left to the right bank of the Po, so that, when the bridges should be
broken down, the Austrian troops would not be able to cross the river and get at them. In
company of another sort, I have heard this man, and still more his friend and
brother-conspirator, the Major, solemnly protest that they had never been in any plot at
all, that they abhorred conspiracies, that they had been sentenced
| 192 | COUNT PECCHIO | [CHAP. XX |
“Handy dandy! Which is the justice, and which is the thief?” Of the two stories, both could not be true; but with those who knew the men as I did there was not the remotest possibility of a doubt as to which of the two was true.
Giuseppe Pecchio was far above this equivocation and duplicity. He frankly confessed that he had conspired against the Austrian Lombardo-Venetian Government, and had done all that in him lay to overthrow it, though never by recourse either to assassinations or to wild popular insurrections; that if the Austrians had caught him as he was flying out of the country, they would have been justified by the laws of the Empire in hanging him, or in sending him to the dungeons of Olmutz or Spielberg, to keep company with his friends, Count Gonfaloniere and Silvio Pellico.
“In a civil administrative capacity,” said he,
“I served the so-called Regno d’Italia, when under Napoleon and Eugene
Beauharnais. I never liked the French rule, but I disliked the Austrian
more, and not knowing then, as I do now, the weakness of Italian Liberalism, the
conflicting, insane factions, and the frequently selfish views of its chiefs, I
flattered myself with the hope that an independent, national, thoroughly Italian but
constitutional government might be established in Lombardy and throughout northern or
upper Italy. I tried, and I failed; but as I and my friends of the party never intended
to resort to violent or dishonourable means of action, I will never deny that I did
try!” “Dear Pecchio,” said I, more than once, “you had bad tools to work
with.” “But,” said he, “if we had not used them,
we could not have worked at all!” “And would
| CHAP. XX] | LORD KINNAIRD | 193 |
Within a year from the date of this conversation, which took place as we were riding side by side over the downs which lie between Brighton and Lewes, and which was, I think, the last of many of the sort, I drove down from the neighbourhood of London to follow my friend to his grave in Hove churchyard.
Some of the exiles gave out that he was killed by our climate. Nonsense! He died of a chronic and hereditary complaint which would have killed him in Milan quite as soon as at Brighton, and perhaps sooner; for during a good part of the year the climate of that part of Lombardy is more trying than any portion of southern England.
He left several things behind him which his coun-
| 194 | COUNT PECCHIO | [CHAP. XX |
Savage was but a mediocre poet at best; compared as a poet with Foscolo, he sinks into insignificance; and if reference be had to classical learning and varied accomplishments, he becomes, in the comparison, a poor creature indeed!
I have heard Tuscans, Italian purists, and other Delia Cruscan critics, find fault with Pecchio’s style as being not strictly “according to Cocker,” but rather careless. They complained that not only many of his constructions and turns of expression, but also a good many of his words, were not Tuscan, but Lombard; with some deduction this may be true enough; but there was this charm in Pecchio’s writing—it was always lively, animated, unaffected, perfectly natural; and these are qualities rarely to be found in any modern Italian prose writer, and never in a toscaneggiando purist.
These men will keep writing in the tone and style of the Tre-Centisti, or the Sei-Centisti; they must cast their sentences into the same moulds, they must employ the same formulas, they must on no account employ a word or a particle except strictly according to the Cruscan Academy and its Dictionary; they will employ hours in turning and furbishing a single period, almost sure to have the curse of pedantry, and to be “very inanimate and very round”; altogether, they bestow more pains and more thought on the way of saying a thing than on the thing itself, or the matter which is to be said.
Hence, chiefly, the weariness and dreariness of most modern Italian prose
works. Except Manzoni,
| CHAP. XX] | HIS LITERARY TASTE | 195 |
Yet never being dogmatical, never solemn for ten minutes at a time, he would often laugh and say that it was their virtù which kept the balance of trade pretty equal.
“We buy your Sheffield hardware and your Manchester goods, and pay the prices; we send you over fiddlers and singers, and get back our money in the salaries you pay to the Paganini, Pasta, Grisi, Malibran, Rubini, and others; and thus the beam of the scales is kept pretty well in a horizontal line.”
Pecchio, Charles Knight, and G. L. Craik were about the only men I could ever patiently listen to for a quarter of an hour while they were discoursing political economy, without feeling weariness, headache, and a mortal ennui.
MacCulloch, Spring-Rice, Senior, and all of that
school, or rather schools, choked one with their eternal “quarter of
wheat,” and their still drier and
| 196 | COUNT PECCHIO | [CHAP. XX |
These philosophers held a dining club, either at Freemasons’ Tavern, or some other house near Covent Garden. Yes, they dined like common mortals, and, like true Englishmen, they imbibed their port and sherry. MacCulloch, the greatest luminary of them all, was a jovial fellow, with a sort of rough, ready, boisterous Lowland Scottish humour, which would flow pretty copiously as he approached his second bottle; but all the rest of that Comitiva were very methodical, slow, formalizing, positive, and positively dull fellows.
In virtue of his standing on the Continent as a writer on political economy—and Pecchio had written and published a good deal in that line—my animated, vivacious, and witty friend was invited by MacCulloch to dine with these economists. Stewart Rose, who had no liking for any of the sect, said: “Well, Pecchio, you are still alive! How did you get through it? Did you make any of your wicked jokes? In the name of figs, what did you talk about?”
“Per dirvi il vero” (“to tell you the truth”), said Pecchio, “we talked, discussed, disputed, jangled, and harangued, from seven o’clock till eleven, to settle the one question, ‘What is Rent?’ and we separated without settling it at all.” “Bel divertimento!” quoth Rose, with a shiver and a groan.
| CHAP. XX] | SYDNEY SMITH | 197 |
Only allow poor Pecchio a little licence and margin for the introduction of a French or Italian word when the English one did not come to his tongue, and he could tell a humorous or witty story, or make jokes and fun, with the best of us. In this way he could even keep pace with Sydney Smith, who had been, in essential matters, his good warm friend, and to whom he was exceedingly attached, as well by gratitude as by his full appreciation and admiration of the parson’s wit and humour, and genial happy temperament. In an evening I have heard Pecchio, in a society where people did not laugh at bad jests, raise quite as many hearty, unmalicious, innocent laughs, as the Rev. Sydney himself. He was the more amusing from his imperfect pronunciation of English.
For a foreigner, he knew our literature uncommonly well; he read our poets from Chaucer to Shakespeare and Spenser, and from them down to Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Tennyson; but not beginning to talk English, nor to reside with English people, until he was somewhat advanced in life, he never got over some of our difficult articulations, and never got rid of his native Italian pronunciation of the vowels. With him, the article “the” was always “de”; the pronoun “this,” “dis” to the end. The vowel “i”was always “ee,” as in Italian. Thus with Pecchio, “ship” was “sheep,” “slip” was “sleep,” and so on. One morning, when we were riding on the Brighton Downs, he said: “To-day dare are many sheeps in de sea.” “Sorry for it,” said Rose, “the poor creatures will get drowned.” But in these particulars there was no correcting our accomplished Lombard.
Through Sydney Smith, Sir James Mackintosh, Lord
Holland, Mr. Hallam, dear Rose, “la Rosa senza
spina,” as he named him, through old Sam Rogers, the
Harleys and others, he knew more or less intimately nearly every man, and woman too,
| 198 | COUNT PECCHIO | [CHAP. XX |
Whenever he made any stay in London, honest, impetuous, peppery old Riego, a great collector of black-letter and of all manner of old books, and a great original in every way, was a good deal with him; and very amusing it was to hear their frequent disputes, and to see their animated gesticulations, which would often bring all eyes upon them at a party or out in the streets, for the old Canon cared not where he held forth, moving his arms like the sails of a windmill.
He was nearly always “stiff in opinion, obstinately wrong”; but he was so single-minded, so honest-hearted, so abounding in the sweet charities of human nature. Moreover, he was a wonderful specimen of Spanish sobriety of life and contentment with little; he had nothing but a small English stipend or pension secured to him by the Duke of Wellington; but on this he not only lodged, fed, and clothed himself, but he also contrived to buy many books, and to give away money in alms. In politics, the poor deprived Spanish Canon was as ignorant, passionate, and insane as the rest of them, or as all the Spanish Liberals I have chanced to know, with the exception of Martinez de la Rosa and three or four others.
At Madrid, in 1822, Pecchio had
made the acquaintance of that shallow coxcomb, that dull Neapolitan, that blundering
conspirator and arrant traitor, General Guglielmo
Pepe, and had taken a fair and correct measurement of his intellect and
| CHAP. XX] | GENERAL PEPE | 199 |
“You know the sonorous mode of his country. He always solemnly and loudly started thus: ‘Tre sono le cause per le quale la nostra Rivoluzione non sia riuscita come doveva, umanamente parlando, riuscire.’
“Well,” continued Pecchio, “so long-winded was he, and so rambling, excursive, and disconnected, that he never, in all that time, got over ‘cause one,’ or entered upon ‘cause two.’ Eleven years have passed since then; he has been hammering at his ‘three causes ‘ever since, or whenever he has been able to find listeners; he is discussing them now at Brussels, and yet I would venture to say that he has never got to the end of his ‘third cause.’ Dulness is not a characteristic or national fault with the Neapolitans—sotto quel cielo non nascono sciocchi! In the masses, you find plenty of ignorance, but you don’t find fools or naturals. Pepe is a rarity, quite a curiosity.”
“Pecchio,” said I, “I know him well. I knew him before he headed the secret societies and led the revolution, and when, like another Lafayette, he was perpetually capering about the Chiaja, the camps and the streets of Naples, with his tail of National Guards; but it is not I that would vote for preserving his body in a glass case!”
Returning from his Philhellenic financial mission to revolutionized
Greece—whither he was accompanied by Conte Pietro
Gamba, brother to Lord
Byron’s Contessa Guiccioli,
one of the greatest gourmandizers that ever ate riso, polenta, fricassee, or roast beef,
and where he behaved like a thoroughly honest man among a set of stock-jobbers and thieves,
and like a shrewd, sensible, practical man among a set of madmen or dreamers and donkeys
like Trelawny, or Colonel
the Hon. Leicester Stanhope—poor Pecchio had a dreadful passage, was near being drowned at
| 200 | COUNT PECCHIO | [CHAP. XX |
In Dublin he fell in with Lady Morgan, to whom his revolutionary and anti-Austrian politics were introduction and recommendation enough. He found her little leddyship already surrounded by a troop of Italian, Spanish, and other refugees; gentlemen who had found the London market overstocked with their commodity, and who had come over to the Green Island with a comfortable confidence in Irish credulity, warm-heartedness, and hospitality. I believe that their expectations were not disappointed. Her ladyship, and her husband, the accoucheur, could not do much, at home, in the hospitality line; but then she could take them with her to the dinners, evening parties, and suppers given by other people, and she never went anywhere without being attended by a long train of unfortunate, expatriated patriots.
The French and Austrian consuls used to call them “les pendables de Mi Ledi Morgan”; “and,” said Pecchio, “putting politics out of the question, and speaking the plain truth, I am rather afraid that several of them had deserved hanging, before they fled from their own countries. At all events, every one of them was metaphorically marked with the rope—marcato con la corda—for they had all been sentenced in contumacia.”
I was once at a party at Sablonières, in Leicester Square, with Pecchio and Panizzi; there were eight others, Italians or Spaniards. I made the eleventh, and out of that number I was the only one who had not been condemned to be hanged or to be imprisoned for life.
There was something dramatic or poetical in this; but I did not feel myself much lowered by being an exception.
The Austrians hanged none. If Pecchio had been caught, he could not have survived one winter of
Spielberg. Count Gonfaloniere, a much robuster
| CHAP. XX] | GIUSEPPE MAZZINI | 201 |
Poor Pellico lived many years like a penitent Christian, and then died like a saint, hooted and execrated by all the Liberals of Italy, because he would not attack the Emperor of Austria, the Pope, and all the Princes of the Peninsula, nor enter again into any conspiracy.
In 1848, when I was last at Turin, where he long resided, and which might almost be called his native place, we could not obtain at the booksellers’ a copy of his tragedy “Francesco di Rimini,” or of any of his beautiful verses. It would hardly have been safe to ask for “Le mie Prigioni,” which they were calling “the production of a vile, canting Jesuit.” The ultra-Liberals were then in the ascendant, and they and their potential clubs had laid his works under interdict, and pronounced anathema maranatha upon the best poet Piedmont has ever produced.
It was not in this way that Pellico was judged by Pecchio, who admired his genius, was proud of his friendship, and spoke of him, to the last, with respect, tenderness, and affection.
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