The student was none the wiser.
This compound nature of patriot and pirate had illumined
Italian history from the beginning, and was no more intelligible
to itself than to a young American who had no experience in
double natures. In the end, if the "Autobiography" tells truth,
Garibaldi saw and said that he had not understood his own acts;
that he had been an instrument; that he had served the purposes
of the class he least wanted to help; yet in 1860 he thought
himself the revolution anarchic, Napoleonic, and his ambition was
unbounded. What should a young Bostonian have made of a character
like this, internally alive with childlike fancies, and
externally quiet, simple, almost innocent; uttering with apparent
conviction the usual commonplaces of popular politics that all
politicians use as the small change of their intercourse with the
public; but never betraying a thought?
Precisely this class of mind was to be the toughest problem of
Adams's practical life, but he could never make anything of it.
The lesson of Garibaldi, as education, seemed to teach the
extreme complexity of extreme simplicity; but one could have
learned this from a glow-worm. One did not need the vivid
recollection of the low-voiced, simple-mannered, seafaring
captain of Genoese adventurers and Sicilian brigands, supping in
the July heat and Sicilian dirt and revolutionary clamor, among
the barricaded streets of insurgent Palermo, merely in order to
remember that simplicity is complex.
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