190 Chapter IX
A few more words are due to Philip Mazzei, already mentioned. An Italian who
settled in Virginia in 1773, he became active in the revolution there, and was sent
to Europe in 1779 to borrow money for the state of Virginia. He returned with
this mission to his native Tuscany and had many conferences with the Grand
Duke, Leopold. The Grand Duke like all other informed people was very curious
about the American war, but as a Hapsburg he was too skeptical of the Bourbons
to assist their American protégés. Mazzei, his mission unaccomplished, then went
to Paris, met Jefferson again, and wrote his Recherches against Mably and Raynal.
He then took service with the King of Poland. In Poland, too, a kind of revolution
began in 1788, and Mazzei, remaining in Paris, undertook to publicize the benefits
of this revolution as he had done for the American. King Stanislas, who at first
supposed political wisdom to be embodied in the British Constitution, was per-
suaded by his advisers to see virtue also in the new American constitutional doc-
trines, and to put a bust of George Washington in his study.^15
The Depths of Feeling
America was a screen on which Europe projected its own visions. Europe was di-
vided and restless within itself, with both aristocratic and middle- class ways of life
making increasing claims to recognition. It set value both on personal merit and on
inherited family status. A growing demand for equality went along with a more
troubled class consciousness; and a belief that affairs should be conducted by an
elite, either of bureaucratic officials or of constituted bodies that had become largely
hereditary, conflicted with a vague and widespread desire, among people hitherto
outside the political scene, to take part in affairs, to do good for society, to play the
patriot, to act the citizen. Views of America were of every kind, from the enthusi-
astic to the disgusted, from the revolutionary to the conservative, from the mystical
and the moralizing to the sharply political, and from the highly unreal to the con-
cretely realistic. I shall move in the following pages from the unpolitical to the
political, and, though they are by no means the same, from the unreal to the more
realistic.
The unreality of some of the writing on America must be seen to be believed,
and I offer a few exhibits. Their main quality is an indifference to fact, a stylizing of
the picture to suit the author’s feelings.
Sometimes it is à la Watteau, a kind of embarkation for Cythera: “They say that
in Virginia the members chosen to establish the new government assembled in a
peaceful wood, removed from the sight of the people, in an enclosure prepared by
nature with banks of grass; and that in this sylvan spot they deliberated on who
should preside over them.”^16
15 Mazzei’s autobiography has been translated by H. R. Marraro, Memoirs of the Life and Peregri-
nations of the Florentine Philip Mazzei, 1730–1816 (N.Y., 1942). On Mazzei and Grand Duke Leopold
see below, p. 290. On Mazzei and King Stanislas see below, pp. 423–24.
16 M. R. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques et politiqaes sur les Anglo- Américains (Brussels,
1782), II, 119–20.