Cavour | Page 7

bailiff, and to these habits he returned in later years, whenever he had time to visit Leri. Cavour's mind was not poetic; we hear of his admiring only one poet, Shakespeare, but in Shakespeare it was probably the deep knowledge of man that attracted him, the apprehension of how men with given passions must act under given conditions. He did not, therefore, see country pursuits from a poet's standpoint, but he appreciated their power of calming men's minds, of dissipating the fog of unrealities, of tending towards what Kant called, in a phrase he quoted with approval, "practical reason." He considered, also, that nothing can so assure the stability of a nation as an intelligent interest shared by a large portion of its citizens in the cultivation of the soil. The English country gentleman who divided his time between his duties in Parliament and those not less obligatory on his estates was in Cavour's eyes an almost ideal personage. It should be added that Cavour could not understand a country life which did not embrace solicitude for the worker. The true agriculturist gained the confidence of the poor around him; it was, he said, so easy to gain it. He was kindly, thoughtful, and just in his treatment of his dependents, and he always retained his hold on their affections; when Italy was asking what she should do without her great statesman, the sorrowing peasants of Leri asked in tears what they should do without their master?
One passage in Cavour's early life was revealed a few years ago, and, whether or not it was right to reveal it, the portrait would be now incomplete which did not touch upon it. The episode belongs to the critical psychological moment in his development: the time immediately after he left the army, and before he found an outlet for his activity, and, what was more essential to him, a purpose and an object not in the distance but straight before him, in the care of his father's acres. His position at home was not happy; his brother's small children were of more importance in the household than himself, and when Cavour once administered a well-merited correction to the much-spoilt eldest born, the Marquis Gustave threw a chair at his head. Between the brothers in after life there prevailed remarkable and unbroken harmony, but it is easy to see that when first grown to manhood Gustave presumed rather selfishly on his _r?le_ of heir, while Camille took too seriously the supposed discovery that he was "necessary to no one!" Beyond all this, there was the undeclared clash of the new with the old, the feeling of having moved apart, which produces a moral vacuum until, by and by, it is realised that the value of the first affections and ties depends precisely on their resting on no basis of opinion. Cavour was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation; if he decided "like Hamlet" (so he writes in his diary) to abstain from suicide, he believed that he wished himself heartily out of the world. To his family he seemed an abnormal and unnatural young man. A conversation is on record which took place between the two childless aunts who lived with the Cavours. The date was just before Cavour's departure on a first visit to Paris. "Did you remark," said Mme. Victoire, "how indifferent Camille seemed when I spoke to him of the Paris theatres? I really do not know what will interest him on his travels; the poor boy is entirely absorbed in revolutions." "It is quite true," replied Mme. Henriette; "Camille has no curiosity about things, he cares for nothing but politics." And the two ladies went on to draw melancholy prognostics from their nephew's study of political economy, "an erroneous and absolutely useless science."
A charming countess who had made a favourite of Cavour in his boyhood tried to extract a promise from him that he would never again mix himself up in politics; he refused to give it; sooner or later, he writes in his diary, she would have blushed for him had he consented. But, he adds bitterly, what was the good of demanding such a promise from one for whom politically everything was ended? "Ah! if I were an Englishman, by this time I should be something and my name would not be wholly unknown!" Here, again, was a source of depression. At the Military Academy he had formed one almost romantic comradeship with a delicate and reserved youth, some years older than himself, Baron Severino Cassio, to whom he first confided his determination to Italianise himself: to study the language, history, laws, customs of the whole country with a view to preparing for the future. Cassio presciently marked out for his friend the part of architect, not of