



Produced by David Widger






RULE OF THE MONK

OR, ROME IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

By General Giuseppe Garibaldi

1870.




INTRODUCTION.

The renowned writer of Caesar's "Commentaries" did not think it
necessary to furnish a preface for those notable compositions, and
nobody has ever yet attempted to supply the deficiency--if it be one. In
truth, the custom is altogether of modern times. The ancient heroes
who became authors and wrote a book, left their work to speak for
itself--"to sink or swim," we had almost said, but that is not exactly
the case. Caesar carried his "Commentaries" between his teeth when he
swam ashore from the sinking galley at Alexandria, but it never occurred
to him to supply posterity with a prefatory flourish. He begins those
famous chapters with a soldierly abruptness and brevity--"Omnia Gallia
in tres partes" etc. The world has been contented to begin there also
for the last two thousand years; and the fact is a great argument
against prefaces--especially since, as a rule, no one ever reads them
till the book itself has been perused.

The great soldier who has here turned author, entering the literary
arena as a novelist, has also given his English translators no preface.
But our custom demands one, and the nature of the present work requires
that a few words should be written explanatory of the original purpose
and character of the Italian MS. from which the subjoined pages are
transcribed. It would be unfair to Garibaldi if the extraordinary
vivacity and grace of his native style should be thought to be here
accurately represented. The renowned champion of freedom possesses an
eloquence as peculiar and real as his military genius, with a gift of
graphic description and creative fancy which are but very imperfectly
presented in this version of his tale, partly from the particular
circumstances under which the version was prepared, and partly from
the impossibility of rendering into English those subtle touches and
personal traits which really make a book, as lines and light shadows
make a countenance. Moreover, the Italian MS. itself, written in the
autograph of the General, was compiled as the solace of heavy hours at
Varignano, where the King of Italy, who owed to Garibaldi's sword the
splendid present of the Two Sicilies, was repaying that magnificent
dotation with a shameful imprisonment. The time will come when these
pages--in their original, at least--will be numbered among the proofs of
the poet's statement that--

     "Stone walls do not a prison make,
     Nor iron bars a cage:
     Minds innocent and quiet take
     These for a hermitage."

If there be many passages in the narrative where the signs are strong
that "the iron has entered into the soul," there are also a hundred
where the spirit of the good and brave chieftain goes forth from his
insulting incarceration to revel in scenes of natural beauty, to recall
incidents of simple human love and kindness, to dwell upon heroic
memories, and to aspire towards glorious developments of humanity made
free, like the apostle's footsteps when the angel of the Lord struck off
his fetters, and he passed forth through the self-opened portals of his
prison.

It would be manifestly unfair, nevertheless, to contrast a work
written under such conditions with those elaborate specimens of modern
novel-writing with which our libraries abound. Probably, had General
Garibaldi ever read these productions, he would have declined to accept
them as a model. He appears to have taken up here the form of the
"novella," which belongs by right of prescription to his language and
his country, simply as a convenient way of imparting to his readers and
to posterity the real condition and inner life of Rome during these last
few eventful years, when the evil power of the Papacy has been declining
to its fall. Whereas, therefore, most novels consist of fiction founded
upon fact, this one may be defined rather as fact founded upon
fiction, in the sense that the form alone and the cast of the story is
fanciful--the rest being all pure truth lightly disguised. Garibaldi
has here recited, with nothing more than a thin veil of incognito thrown
over those names which it would have been painful or perilous to make
known, that of which he himself has been cognizant as matters of fact
in the wicked city of the priests, where the power which has usurped the
gentle name of Christ blasphemes Him with greater audacity of word and
act as the hour of